On GDP:

.. does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our courage, nor our wisdom, not our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans

-- Robert Kennedy                   

on the campaign trail in '68.

Yet four decades later, it continues to be the most watched number each quarter.

MNS!

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I did some number crunching to try and figure out the MNS effect.
MNS put up a candidate in 11 constituencies - 6 in Bombay District, 3 in Thane District (Thane, Kalyan, Bhivandi) and one each in Pune and Nashik. Other than the Kalyan PC, the NDA (SHS+BJP) couldn't manage any other seat - a fact obviously attributed to the fact that Raj Thackrey had some issues with his cousin.
Some numbers are shown below:


Quick Observations:
The NDA was massively affected in the PCs in which MNS contested.
MNS contested 11. Won 0. Second in 2. Third in 9.
SHS contested 06. Won 1. Second in 3. Third in 2.
BJP contested 05. Won 0. Second in 5.

The margins of defeat for Kirit Somaiya (Mum NE) and Ram Naik (Mum N) [both BJP] were heart wrenching. Infact, in 7 of the 10 seats the NDA lost, the margin of defeat was less than the votes polled for MNS. (Combined voteshare is the 2nd last column). Hence the following questions arise:
Q1. Did the MNS solely eat from the Sena BJP vote bank?
Q2. Would the absence of the MNS candidate have resulted in NDA taking these 7 seats?
Q3. How did the MNS become such a force to reckon with? Is its Son of the Soil movement find takers across the urban landscape?

Fact: In the Municipal Elections in Mumbai, Thane and Pune about an year back MNS showed no dent in the Sena votes. All wards together about 400k votes went the MNS way in BMC polls '08. However this election MNS managed 800k votes in the 6 Mumbai Seats.

Fact: The semi-urban seats of Palghar, Maval, Raigad, Baramati, Shirur and Shirdi (seen above) in the Mumbai-Pune-Nashik triangle, where the MNS had no candidate - were dominated by NDA. (Other than the fiefdom of Baramati, ALL the other 5 were bagged by Sena + 1 Indp)

Q4. Raj Thackrey claims Sena should be satisfied that he didn't have candidates in other parts of the state, else a similar fate awaited them. How true would this claim be?

Remarks:
1. There is little to substitute good work. Priya Dutt, Milind Deora and Eknath Gaikwad were known to have worked well. They romped home clear - MNS or no MNS.
South Mumbai (Lalbaug, Parel, Dadar, Matunga - all supposed Sena / MNS strangleholds - lie in their domain. Though Assembly wise splits aren't available yet, I suspect each Assembly seat has to be favorable to win by wide margins.)

2. I defined a rough metric for a good candidate. I prefer a

• Younger Candidate,
• A more educated candidate and
• One with less Criminal Cases against him.

These were chosen since they were easily available on the affidavits submitted by the candidates. Of the UPA, NDA and MNS candidates the one scoring highest on any metric got 2, the second got 1 and the last one got 0. The net scores (out of a maximum of 6 and sum of 9) are seen in the last column of the above table.

An interesting observation is seen:
In 10 of the 11 constituencies, MNS candidate were atleast as good as the NDA one. In 6 cases the difference was significant (2 or more). Again, in 6 seats the MNS candidate fared better than even the UPA candidate - on this metric.
A lot of people around me voted MNS looking at the individuals.

Raj's choice of candidates, IMO, was a significant reason for votes going to MNS way. Explains the meteoric rise of MNS from the BMC elections an year ago - where Sena and MNS had similar candidates.

3. Although I don't have handy data to prove this, I have a hunch that the NDA + MNS vote share this election is significantly higher than the NDA share in the last election. Which means that people came to the MNS fold from places other than the NDA. Given that, both SP and BSP had a poorer showing in Mah. this time around, it would seem that those votes would fall to UPA. They mostly did - but maybe some voted MNS.

My Conclusion:

• It was a smart choice of candidates that helped Raj more than anything else. Sena giving tickets to equally notorious fellas didn't help them. Both could learn a lesson.
• In atleast 3 places though UPA vote share is far less than their wins reflect. Given that UPA otherwise crumbled in the Pune Nashik Mumbai triangle, they should thank their stars.

Fix-it!

Did ToI know something that Lalit Modi didn't want us to know?!
The time stamp says - 3 Hrs ago, when the match ended some 20 mins back :P :P

But Mumbai Indians lost again :(

Train Spotting

Hey all,

For the past 15 days, we have been trying to get our coding skills polished and shining before we possibly put them away for some time.

The idea is to map the trains in India every minute for an entire day and watch the video :D
A sneak peak video can be found at:


However, we never realized how intricate the railways network in the country was until this threw up locations that Google couldn't locate or wrongly located. In order to improve the video, we require 5 minutes of your time:
1. Here you'll find the trains that have behave erratically (due to a mistake in the raw data) and the corresponding approximate times at which they do so.
2. Pick some random entry that you want to correct.
3. Go here and enter the train number of the corresponding train. A train schedule shows up.
[If it throws an error, blame the government website and try again in a few hrs! Thanks already!!]
4. The train will be between some two stations at that time (Step 1, 2). The data of one of the stations is most likely to be wrong.
5. Open Google Maps. Use common sense and basic knowledge of India's geography to locate the Latitude and Longitude of the stations. This spreadsheet will guide you to current values of the co-ordinates.
(A -1 in the spreadsheet indicates data currently unavailable).
6. In case, you locate an error in the 2nd spreadsheet values of Latitude or Longitude - do kindly mail me at shantanugangal at gmail.

I really hope that this cooperative effort will help us quickly get our data sanitised. You have no idea how thankful I would be, since checking all the error prone entries is tough for a single guy :D

Example:
1, 2. I want to fix the fifth row -- 1007    10    20
3, 4. Train is between Talegaon Station and Khadki Station, at 10h20 for the Train number 1007.
5. The co-ordinates of Khadki (19.88, 75.32) in the second spreadsheet are wrong because they are hardly near the train way from Lonavala to Pune.
6. The correct co-ordinates of Khadki are (18.566527,73.84203). Do mail me such errors in the 2nd spreadsheet.