Masters of War

Back during the Cold War,the people of the West feared nuclear annihilation. These days they worry about the coming loss of affluence and the need to share power with East. Very soon now the powerful and the establishment in the West will arrive at a solution. War. An industry they still dominate. Sooner then we think we might stop talking about the greedy bankers and financial skullduggery and get our focus back on those who really pull the strings. The Masters of War.
To get a get a sample of what you will feel then, pull out this Bob Dylan classic song titiled Masters of War (Bob Dylan, I think, is the poet that eternity will record as the chronicler of hi age even while transceding it)from the Cold War days when the memory of the World Wars still had bite, and give it a spin:

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

Ten Commandments for the Corrupt and the Crooked

1. Thou shall deny meritocracy with every fiber of your being, so that when the time comes to picking the fall guys from among your juniors, every poor sod seems equally deserving
2. Thou shall hate art, music and culture while loudly professing your passion for them. Because if you start really enjoying stuff that does not cost much what will you do with all the millions you are going to stash away? You can’t risk the fading of your amazing appetite for money, can you? At the same time remember the culture scene, the art market and show business are full of your kind and so you must pretend conviviality
3. Thou shall not stint on buying your children a business degree or two from abroad. Helps in creating front companies. And hopefully the nincompoops will learn a thing or two besides finding boring, wasteful ways of spending your ill-gotten wealth
4. Thou shall pretend to be pious. Besides being good for the image among the gullible, religious institutions and seers are, 9 out of 10 times, good and reliable partners for people like you. Moreover there is no evidence yet that God, if he exists, cannot be fooled
5. If you made the mistake of getting a good education thou shall strive to wash away its debilitating effects by dipping into every pool of inequity, crudeness and lasciviousness that you can find. This of course does not mean that you cannot preen at all the alumni gatherings that you can get to in your latest SUV. If you haven’t got an education, congratulations on your good sense. And remember that you can always get a honorary doctorate or two for a quid or a quid pro quo
6. Thou shall kiss-arse the rich and the powerful as often as you can and to compensate for the consequent hurt to your ego, kick-arse every one dependent on you, as often as you can
7. Thou shall banish love and passion (because they are the enemy of greed) from your life and make do with lust and emotional dependencies
8. Thou shall not worry about your inner ugliness showing because money can always buy cosmetic surgery, soft lighting, airbrushing, arm candy and fawning hanger-ons
9. Thou shall cultivate a high-order of stinginess when it comes to charity or spending on others because you know nobody, except perhaps your mother, really loves you, so why should you care?
10. You shall steal the tenth commandment because you are the quintessential 10% guy, aren't you?

Laid Low by Kindle

I live a secret life.
A normal person’s life is lived as a web of relationships with real people. I live a normal life of that sort. But in addition and almost as important to me is my secret life. A secret life lived with an ever-changing cast of fascinating minds and people. A Russian mafia don planning to spill the beans in exchange for a promise of protection and asylum by Britain. ( John Le Carre). Einstein explaining his theory of relativity. A neurotic genius revealing his inner life, no holds barred (Henry Miller ). A Yankee from the nineteenth century transported to King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain). Amartya Sen gently expounding an idea of justice. And so on.
At any given point in time I am at various stages of reading five or six books. I read them at varied pace. Some take me as much as a fortnight to complete. Some spend themselves on me in a one-night stand. And the characters that inhabit these books I am reading and the writers who write them become, for that period of time, an integral part of my life. I have relationships with them and emotions engendered by them which are as real as anything else in my life.
My secret life however had an in-built governor preventing it from overwhelming me. The books and hence the characters and the writers were scattered around various places in my home and office and at any time and place only a couple vied from my attention. Beyond my library of a thousand books or so, if I had to acquaint myself with a new one meant making a trip to the bookshop that could happen about once a week.
Over the past month there has been an upheaval in my secret life. I resisted the Kindle for many months because I sensed in some corner of my mind the danger. But the latest generation Kindle got so many rave reviews that I gave in to the temptation.
It arrived a month ago. Bound in an authentic leather jacket it sat in the palm like an incredibly light well-produced hardbound book. Open the book and a small screen etched with a tasteful picture nods at you. Put it on and the screen changes to the very page you last were reading. It looks 100% like a well printed page using a magical technology called e-ink (it can only handle black-and-white but then who needs color- we shall leave such frills to that darling of the infantile and the philistine- iPad). But that’s where the likeness of the Kindle to the book ends. As you read a book, on hand literally at the flick of a switch are a hundred thousand or more of them. The result is a permanent invitation to promiscuity, a promiscuity of the mind and the soul, immeasurably more inveigling then that of the body. On the positive side I have one more reason to thank the Almighty for not making me filthy rich. Just imagine my troubles if I had an unlimited book budget!
So here I am joining the ranks of those laid low with technology. I empathize now with the couch potatoes, the mobile fries and the Facebook rats.
So why don’t I, you might say just put away my Kindle, give it away and get back to my previous well-ordered existence?
Are you mad!?

Whine and cheese

My social life these days is shot.
Not that it was very hectic at anytime.
That said, I used to socially meet many more people than I do now.
There is one type I remember fondly, mostly because I don’t meet any these days.
The type who wore their commitment to liberal causes on the sleeves of their Fab India kurtas and kurtis.
It was fun listening to them for about fifteen minutes. After which the first signs of gastric trouble would cloud my horizon. Perhaps because my constitution could take only that much whine and cheese. Though, I must admit, some of them served indubitably fine whine.
May I apologize, through this somewhat widely read blog, to all those whose whine, over the years, I have not done justice to. My constitution is sturdier now and they perhaps will give me another chance. After all whines get better with age don’t they? As long as methinks, it is not new whine in old bottle. So please feel free to write or call.
Shall we then move on to Waisty and Soda? Then perhaps I should abstain. Because a pun stretched is no fun at all.

“The least important most important thing there is”

I have worked in advertising for many, many years. However it has been a year or more now since I last worked on a campaign. I do other stuff now, stuff which is deeper, more rounded you could say but I do miss advertising.
I make up by watching Mad Men (for those of you who don’t know, Mad Men is a TV show in the US centered on a Creative Director- Don Draper- on Madison Avenue in the 60’s. Mad Men is among the most acclaimed TV serials of the past few decades. It has won Emmys for consecutive years and is currently running in its fourth season- the 12th episode was telecast last week).
In the latest episode, Don is rattled watching the agency in which he is a partner fall apart. Ruing the fact that he seems to be able not do much his rant to his second in command in creative is: “We are supposed to just sit writing on our typewriters as the walls around us fall down We are after all creative- the least important most important thing there is”
A brilliant piece of self-awareness don't you think? And then Don Draper does a startling thing. His agency is going down because American Tobacco took away Lucky Strike, an account that accounts for more than half on his agency’s billing. Don takes a full page ad in the New York Times headlined “Why I Quit Tobacco” pithily decrying cigarettes as a product, swearing of ever working on a tobacco account again. The cat is now among the pigeons. Don believes this ad will attract new clients to his agency and save it. His partners think he is wrong and are furious at him. Will the agency be rescued? Will Don be proven right? Hold your breath for the next episode (to be telecast in the US on Monday and to be in my hands by Wednesday).
The fictional Don Draper’s fictional full page ad is brilliantly written. The kind of copy that one doesn’t see any more in real life as all the real talent in advertising is now creating television commercials. Advertising in it’s hey days of creative work in the press has seen some of the most effective writing in the world. Forced to be brief, forced to work to a brief, brilliant writers after brilliant writers have produced work that I know will not be celebrated or remembered but, in my belief, should, in all fairness, find a niche in the annals of creative work that lasts. But it was all done by hired hands working as handmaidens to crass commerce, so put it in that trash bin with yesterday’s newspaper. Now let’s move on to the important important things, shall we?

The Morris Theorem, Hard Ceilings and the Dead Cat Bounce

Ian Morris, a Stanford University professor of classics and history, in his path breaking book “Why the West Rules- For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future”, postulates what he, rather immodestly calls the Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer way of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing”
Morris also postulates that every civilization climbs the ladder of progress until it hits a “hard ceiling” of social development. The units of time that underpin Morris’s analysis of the relative rise and fall of the East and the West are in hundreds and thousands of years. Morris’s analysis is in the same league as that put forward by Arnold Toynbee in his “A Study of History” and Paul Kennedy in his more recent book “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers”.
When I think about what Morris is saying I find myself mulling over a couple of points.
The first point is in the context of what regular readers of this blog would have noticed: my disgust at the current state of the Indian establishment and my avid, if armchair bound, search for means to change it.
Does the Morris Theorem provide insights in this regard? Does the establishment continue to flourish because us the “greedy and lazy” people find it easier, more profitable and safer to not just overlook the faults of the establishment but, in most cases, strive to be accepted as a part of it? Are violent revolutions successful when they create conditions when it is no longer safe to be part of the establishment? Is there any other way?
The second point is where in the cycle of ascent and descent is the Indian civilization. Did we hit the hard ceiling around the times the Vedas were created? Is the past century showing signs of an upturn?
Or are we just experiencing a “Dead Cat Bounce”? The “Dead Cat Bounce” is a stock market term. When a share falls precipitously it experiences a tiny resurgence at the bottom of its fall, a resurgence that is known as a “Dead Cat Bounce”. Many a clever stock market operator has profited from a Dead Cat Bounce by recognizing it for what it is. However disaster awaits those who, out of Irrational Exuberance, mistake a Dead Cat Bounce for something else. Irrational Exuberance? That is another story.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Go together,
You precious winners all; your exultation
Partake to everyone. I, an old turtle,
Will wing to some withered bough, and there
My mate, that’s never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.
- Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
A civilization as old as India ought to measure achievement differently from shiny new ones.
Instead we want to strut on the world stage to the rhythm of other people’s drums.
The result can only be the kind of farce that Delhi has been witnessing over the past two months (some would say the past sixty three years). It would be hilarious if it was not so tragic.
What about China you would say. An old civilization that stuns the Western world in most things it does including Beijing 2008.
But China discovered itself again when it started walking, about three decades ago, to its own drums. Going beyond the labels of communism and democracy, it discovered a system and an engine of prosperity that is entirely of its own making.
India’s Westminster style of democracy is a borrowed idea. In sixty three years we have not innovated one bit in the way we govern ourselves. Indian business and the Indian people in the meantime have, with no help from the State, reinvented themselves. Today, I believe, there are extant, Indian business and cultural ethos that are original and rooted in quintessentially Indian values. And this is the principle reason why India has finally found its voice.
It is urgent that we the Indian people, use this new found voice and vigour, to find ways and means to reinvent the Indian State. Otherwise this behemoth, cannibalizing the hard-won prosperity of the Indian people, will continue to strut on the world stage, in garbs that can only disgust. And more menacingly threaten ours and the well being of our children.
The alternative is the escapism of the old, so wonderful captured in the Shakespearean verse reproduced above.

An Artist’s Impression of Garden-Variety Politicians

Many Indians do not like VS Naipaul.
In a country where we are quick to embrace anyone successful with the slightest connection to India, this Nobel Prize winner of Indian descent is by and large ignored. Could be something to do with his field of endeavor- literature does not excite the popular imagination, his nature- acerbic and distant and the fact that he had written a book, An Area of Darkness, that was a brutal portrait of the India of the 70s (no matter that in the nineties he was among the first to catch the flowering of modern day India in his brilliant follow-up book on India – A Million Mutinies Now)
No matter whether you like him or dislike him, VS Naipaul is, I believe, among the two or three most prescient and powerful writers of his generation.
This week I have been reading his The Mimic Men, a novel first published in the mid-sixties. As an exposition and rumination of the psyche of those who grow up in small towns under a colonial yoke it is unmatched. As literature it is outstanding enough to get a special mention in his Nobel citation. Read it if you have the inclination and time for such things.
In this post however I want to offer you a passage from this book. The politician is a mystery to most ordinary people. The passage below, I think, offers the kind of insight on the subject that only great literature can provide. Enjoy.
(Note: The protagonist in first person is describing newly-minted politicians who have come to power in a small Caribbean island on the shoulders of the success of a political party started by his friend. The protagonist himself though a part of the movement is an intellectual and does not see himself as a politician)
“The others we could observe. We could see them in new suits even on the hottest days. We could see the foolish stern faces they prepared for the public to hide their pleasure at their new eminence. We could see them coming out of restaurants with their ‘secretaries”. We could see them shirtsleeved – their coats prominent on hangers- as they were driven in government cars marked with the letter M, on which they had insisted, to proclaim their status as Ministers. The car, the shirtsleeves, the coat on the hangar: the fashion spread rapidly down the motorized section of our civil service and might be considered the sartorial fashion of our revolution. At sports meetings they went to the very front row of the stands and over the months we could see the flesh swelling on the back of their necks, from the good living and the lack of exercise. And always about them, policemen in growing numbers.
They were easily frightened men, these colleagues of ours, they feared the countryside, they feared the dark, they grew to fear the very people on whose suffrage they depended. People who have achieved the trappings of power for no reason they can see are afraid of losing those trappings. They are insecure because they see too many like themselves….”
“…in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside…”
“.. They felt the awe of the ungifted who thought they had, simply through enduring, suddenly discovered, in this response of the ungifted among their people, the source of the power and regeneration they had waited for without hoping to find”
(Emphasis mine)

Unscrambled British Council, Scrambled Rushdie

The past week I went back to two abandoned favorites.
I let my British Council membership lapse years ago as its location in Bombay at Nariman Point became increasingly irrelevant to my life.
I remember having a conversation then with the Librarian about how the centre of gravity of Bombay including the mass of its reading public had shifted northwards to the suburbs.
A couple of months ago they surprised me. The library went the “Netflix” model. Browse the library on the website, queue up the books you want to borrow and they deliver them and pick them up (on request- no deadlines!) from your home (www.mylibrary.britishcouncil.org).
The British Council is back in my life and as I browse the library the presence of a selection of graphic novels assures me that the brand’s relevance-seeking new avatar is more than skin deep.
One of the first books I read through my new membership of the British Council is Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence”. Unlike the rest of Rushdie’s books, I had not bought this book when it came out a couple of years ago.
I was enchanted, like many of my generation, with Midnight’s Children but every subsequent book of his, to my mind, was a milestone on his fall from grace.
With “The Ground beneath Her Feet” I thought the addling of Mr. Rushdie’s talent was complete and thus restrained myself from investing time and money in “The Enchantress of Florence”.
With the resurrection of British Council in my life I thought of giving Mr. Rushdie a go to.
I am sorry to report that I think the addled state continues.
In “Midnight’s Children” Rushdie used the device of magic realism to illuminate reality and multiply relevance. “Midnight’s Children” has a totemic status with the post-independence generation because it managed to in their emotional landscape, light the dry tinder accumulated from recital of the history of the independence struggle and the trauma of partition.
However every subsequent Rushdie novel has moved further and further away from this magic of inciting and exciting emotional relevance. There are passages in “The Enchantress of Florence” of great beauty; there are phrases and metaphors that ignite admiration but alas!, the narrative structure instead of involvement engenders distance.
Mr. Rushdie himself perhaps does not care much for relevance. I am sure he will point out he is an artist of the first order and not a public utility like the British Council. Be that as it may be but I for one will dip into the next Rushdie book with great reluctance.

The Living and the Dead

The recent death of a friend brought home to me the great and perhaps symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead.

Our dead crystallize our lives for us. An immediate and obvious effect is that the life and character of the departed comes into sharp focus. All the trivialities, the irrelevances and the prejudice fall away and the essence is revealed. And inevitably the essence of every human life is pure. The details are juts miasma, the universality of life is that every life, every single one has meaning, the same quintessential meaning, the same search for identity that in itself is the goal.

And then it strikes you. The essential purity that you now perceive in the friend or the loved one who has passed is the same purity that is you. And your life would be much easier and more joyful if you could, every single moment, hold that perception about yourself. Live in the moment present as if you just died in the moment past. Ah that man J. Krishnamurthy, such simple truths he told. Truths that suddenly drench you with meaning like that surprise summer shower.                   

     

From “Coming Home” to “Leaving Home”

I have come a long way.

Or so I realized as I watched “Leaving Home” this weekend.

A two hour plus documentary on the rock group Indian Ocean, “ Leaving Home” gave me the kind of high that happens when you listen to good music for an extended period along with a rich emotional sub-text.

Indian Ocean’s music is ‘sufi rock’ that does not seek that label. Earthy, very Indian and at the same time suffused with the uniquely modern humanitarian spirit of rock.

The music, the emotional connect I felt with the very middle class, the very rooted guys who make up the band Indian Ocean and my admiration for the brilliantly simple and very Indian idiom of its film-making had “Leaving Home” create an impact on me that remided me of a film that left a similar impact on me back in 1980.

“Coming Home” is a Hollywood film that tells the story of a triangle. A women, her fiancé who has come back home from the Vietnam war and a stranger who comes back from the same war, an invalid. “Coming Home” according to me uses classical American rock music from the 60s and the 70s better than any other movie that I know of.

The impact of “Coming Home” on me resulted from the same factors as in the case of “Leaving Home”. Good filmmaking, emotional connect and music that I identified with.

However there are, to my mind, crucial differences too.

The emotional connect I felt with “Coming Home” derived from that shallowest set of human emotions: the self-fancy and self-pity that results from romantic love and my musical appreciation of classical American rock is somewhat derivative to peer groupthink back in my school and undergraduate days.

On the other hand my emotional connect with Leaving Home results not from my personal confusions and miseries but a deeper corner of my being that admires the indomitable nature of the human spirit. On the same note, my connect with Indian Ocean’s music is, on first listening and with no one telling me of its virtues, almost atavistic. The rhythms and melodies of the desert where I was born and the sounds of the sea along which I have spent all of my adult life set to the yearning that is at the core of spirituality.

Am I still capable of responding to Coming Home today? Perhaps yes but on vastly different grounds. Was my 1980s self capable of enjoying and responding to Leaving Home? I don’t know.

What I know is that I have changed and despite the reflexive panegyrics all of us (especially those of us in the business of advertising or marketing) pay to youth, the older me is deeper, more anchored and capable of getting a lot more out of every moment.

Is it just me? As a youth was I exceptionally callow. Is it just a natural evolution that most of us experience? Or is it a change in the larger Indian gestalt that is giving back to us, the chattering classes, our roots.

Probably a bit of all three.

Art and Prejudice

Last weekend I watched Tom Ford's A Single Man. The movie is a masterpiece and even more fascinating when you consider the fact that it comes from a first-time Director who is already a big name in the world of fashion design and therefore presumably expends a lot of his creative energy in that profession.

Based on a Christopher Isherwood book, A Single Man to me was about how loneliness and fulfillment are two sides of that essential coin of existence: love.

Beyond the theme, what bowled me speechless was how A Single Man handles it's context. The central situation is a 20 year old live-in relationship between two men broken by the sudden death of one of them
in a road accident. The movie gazes at the gay context unflinchingly and still performs a miracle.

Let me expalin. I am, I must confess, essentially uncomfortable around gays and any gay context. I am, of course, as adept as the next 'liberal', in disguising this discomfort in my social stance. But in my private moments, and movie watching is a private act, I flinch away from gays and gay contexts. The miracle of A Single Man was that for those 90 odd minutes it freed me of my prejudice!

The art of Tom Ford and Colin Firth, the leading man, enabled and uplifted me to go beyond the cage of my "learned matrix" to participate in the essential and single consciousness that runs through all of us. That
is the function of high art. To free us for some exhilarating moments from learning and prejudices into the wide open spaces of pure consciousness.

In fact to many a practioner of art there is no meaning to life other han the pursuit of these moments of freedom. Like my friend Salim Ghouse, the theatre personality and movie actor, says in reaction to some of my frequent and contorted searching for meaning in science, philosophy and spirituality, "the rest
is a meaningless void'. An extreme view perhaps but then to produce art one must start with prejudice.

“You have all the watches but we have all the time”

“You have all the watches but we have all the time”.
The quote is attributed to the Afghan Taliban with reference to the NATO forces “occupying” their country.

Ignore the essential cowardice of terrorism that harasses and murders innocents wantonly and concentrate on just the phrase. What comes shining through is the “audacity of hope”. The pluck that propelled Obama from the shadows of a broken family and a missing father to the pinnacle of power is the same pluck that drives every human endeavor against the twin irresistible forces of Fate and Nature

In the long run Fate and Nature will outlast all human endeavor and therefore in the literal it is Fate and Nature who have “all the time”. The audacity of hope and with it the essential and defining spirit of humanity lies in ignoring obvious and overwhelming advantage.

Out of these dynamics of the audacity of hope I believe could spring a ‘positioning” strategy that could propel worthy but losing causes like the fight against climate change from the margins to the mainstream. The then mayor of London in a conversation in 2008 put it in stark perspective for me. “ All this talk about saving the Earth from coming environmental disaster is bunkum. The Earth will continue fine, it will be us who will be extinct”. Frame the green fight as a fight for our rights and our life rather than a fight for Nature, in fact a fight against the implacable forces of Nature and it will have all of us intensely involved.

So is NATO human endeavor and the Taliban a force of Nature or is it the other way round? Like in all things political the argument can be made both ways.

The Power of Design

Design defined as the set of organizing principles that result in purposive systems as distinct from random noise, is to my mind the mysterious creative force behind the universe.

Someday when someone cracks the theory of everything, it is possible that at it's ticking heart will be an entity that crystallizes the difference between 'undesign' and design. Simply put design is why anything forms out of the great nothingness of 'undesign'.

The truth of the assertion can come from surprising quarters. You would think that poltical dynasties are accidents of history but dig a little deep and one can hypothesize a startlingly simple design that makes the success of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty inevitable.

In a society caught in a complex net of caste and regional identities, the creation of a famiily that arising from a displaced community shorns itself of all regional and caste identities through two generations of extramural marriage is a masterstroke in the design of enduring dynasty,

At a deeper level add generic traits that promote an easy perception of grace and you have multi-layered design reinforcing resonance, dampening dissonance.

Issac Assimov in his seminal science fiction work - The Foundation Series - invented a science called Psychohistory. Using Psychohistory the founding fathers of an uber advanced civilization called the Foundation predicted moments of civilizational crisis thousands of years into the future and even left recordings of advice on how to tackle each crisis.!

Those guys cracked the design of their universe.

For ordinary folks like us even a peripheral awareness of the importance of design can, I believe, increase the frequency of those terribly satisfying aha moments of intuition.

“Events are in the saddle and ride mankind”

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line have a classically portentous ring to it. One can almost, in the background, hear the award-winning “Return of the King” soundtrack and in the foreground  visions rise that both threaten extinction and promise renewal.

Can you see a perfect storm developing? The euro totters. The time-bomb hidden in America’s credit card debt and borrowings on commercial real estate across the world is ticking its final riff. China’s hundreds of millions of dispossessed are beginning to do the unthinkable- they struck work at a large Honda factory this week. The Naxalite issue in India boils over. Deepwater Horizon leaks into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight. In Guatemala an erupting volcano combines forces with a grade 1 storm threatening to bury cities under a blanket of black cement.

Are events riding mankind to a crossroad or is it just the 24x7 new cycle combining with the angst of modern life? Or are we riding the tiger with our hubris as happy company?

Thinking about these questions I am reminded of the recent “Let’s Build a Smarter Planet” campaign from IBM. One part of the campaign highlights the superior and reassuring knowledge that results from deep supercomputers powered analytics acting on the superwaves of information that modern day societies produce.

Wonder if there is think tank somewhere that can tell us whether events are currently riding humanity to some place specific.

However one can always kick back on a lazy Sunday with the thought that the more things change the more they remain the same.

Here are a few selected laughs to go with the thought.

The Hardware Software Duality

Our age has illuminated the quintessential duality of Mind and Matter in a technology paradigm that is central to modern life.


The modern generation’s experiential grasp of the relationship between Hardware and Software transcends even the most intense philosophical thought on the relationship between Matter and Mind.

Human evolution has up until now coded in the primacy of hardware in our perception. Explore the development of human civilization and you can trace the arc of progress manifested in material progress. The spirit of man, the “software” aspect, if you will, of human evolution has not progressed discernibly. Our faculty for imagination and our capacity for empathy are not any higher than our forefathers. In fact it is argued that the detritus of modern life have put such soft capacities under stress.

However are things changing?

Will the next generation go beyond just realizing that the iTunes and the App Store are way more important determinants of the iPhone experience than the shiny piece of plastic one holds in one’s hand?

Will they extrapolate this realization and explore new paradigms of being based on the premise of the primacy of software?

Just today as I read, fresh off the Amazon Kindle press, Jonathan Alters’ “The Promise”- a scintillating account of Obama’s first fifteen months in office- I realized that perhaps the evolution of man from being a “hardware-oriented” species to a “software-oriented” species is underway. The University of Chicago approached the Obama administration for rights to setting up the Obama Presidential Library and though the administration decided that it was too early to think about such things, Obama did wonder whether there was any need for, as tradition stands, a palatial brick and mortar library. Wouldn’t a site on the Internet do, he averred.

Contrast this with the obsession with campus acreage and square footage of the typical Education Society in India.

Perhaps the evolution of a software-driven species begins with the reaching out of the best of us instead of the tooth-and-claw fight for survival that drives Darwinian evolution.

The Meaning of Meaning

He was twenty three, a medical doctor, conflicted between being an active socialist or a retiring spiritualist.

Last week the choice was made for my nephew. He was killed in a numbing incident of random urban violence.

The way the mind copes with the death of a life in full flight is to retreat into the most ancient of meta-questions: What is the meaning of it all?

Does life in essence have meaning or is it in the ultimate analysis meaningless?

Man's search for meaning underpins the three great human projects:  Philosophy, Religion and Science. Perhaps even the great socio-economic construct that is everyday life is a result of the search for
meaning for those who don't find enough meaning in the life of the mind alone.

But what is Meaning?

To my mind, Meaning is a self-referential frame that morphs at different levels of being.

To a top-order mathematician or a musician, Meaning is  perhaps in the cascading harmony of concepts and notes while to the unrepentant hedonist Meaning might reside in the fight between the fading euphoria of last night's party and an emergent hangover.

When it comes to Death however almost all the frames of reference that supply meaning to everyday life fall away.

To my experience, Vedanta and the doctrine of essential, indestructible oneness of sentience gives us the rare  frame that can withstand the assault of the apparent meaninglessness of death.

Strangely death and mourning serve to re-acquaint us to the liberating wisdom of the Vedanta.
No wonder a Vedantist sect (the Aghoris?) locate their spiritual practice in cremation grounds.

Urgent: Management Needs Its Mojo Back!

In school studying management I believed it was a profession with a societal mission and that was made it worthwhile.


I belonged to the Drucker school which believed that management was about maximizing the good of society and the economy at large while providing reasonable returns to shareholders and investors.

I still believe that management can be a noble calling only if it sticks to the above core viewpoint. Otherwise management becomes the handmaiden of money-making , a secondary and servile profession whose ranks will always be dominated by the greedy, the lazy and the weak.

Why do you need the great new science and art of management if the objective is to help some people make more money. The businessman knows how to make money better than anyone else and sure, if you are willing to subvert your talent to his end, he will throw you some shekels.

For the past decade there has been a great debate raging in the management schools about how to teach the profession better. I think the great debate and soul-searching instead should be not about how to teach but how to “do” the profession better? How to strengthen its backbone and regain its soul? The malaise is not just among those millions-of-dollars-bonus boys. The malaise runs deeper.

The malaise is not about big egos but small and weak egos that are all too ready to kowtow to the capitalists and the capital markets in return for pelf, power and perks.

If management is ever to fulfill the Druckerian potential of becoming one of mankind’s noblest modern professions, management urgently needs to get its mojo back.

Fifty, Fat & Flatulent

There are some questions that open up whole new vistas.


For example , how much money makes you rich?

Some under-employed economist after much resarch  figured that 100 times what you earned last year is the kind of money that makes you feel rich.

Or what would you name a political party in Japan that was formed to combat the growing pusillanimity of the average Japanese man as demonstrated by the fact that he has been brow-beaten by the woman of the house to sit down to pee?

How about “The Stand Up Japan Party”. Not joking. True story.

Methinks the road to happiness lies through a mirror that unflinchingly reflects the truth.

Much tougher than just being yourself is to coming to terms with yourself.

And as we grow older it becomes that much easier.

"I grow old … I grow old …


I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.






Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?


I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach."










( excerpted from TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock)

The Insidiousness of Corruption

What does corruption corrupt ? The system? The perpetrators? The victims? The observers? The whistle blowers? The bystanders?


I believe corruption corrupts everything around it. An accelerating vicious circle.

Ten of thousands of crores in fair value in spectrum given away for hundreds of crores is not about an arithmetically computable loss to the Exchequer. It has distorted political, economic and social forces forever. Add up the distortions that result from the hundreds and thousands of corrupt acts that our system endures everyday and you will realize that corruption is not just one factor shaping our lives but the factor that is most important by an order of magnitude higher than the next one.

So why do we fight corruption so desultorily? A result of unearthing the spectrum scam should not be about whether Raja goes or not. It should result in suspensions of the licenses granted and cases against all the participating companies as the precipitating cause is the willingness of commercial entities to seek unfair advantage through corruption. It is not about whether the PMO knew or not, it is about whether somebody paid somebody off. It is astounding to me that the Opposition that attacks the Government on the scam not once mentions, leave alone target, the companies involved.

The usual reaction of the media and us to any attempt to go even a centimeter below the surface on a scam is to dismiss the attempt with the cliché of “Is hamam mein sab naange hain!” (everybody is butt naked in this communal bath). Well then shouldn’t we then turn-off the water and steam supply to the hamam first? Bring court cases against the companies that bid and won for the spectrum and see how everything becomes much more serious than inane walkouts in Parliament and talking head marathons on NDTV and Times Now. Yes court cases against companies and license suspensions will have the markets howling and protests about the investment climate being vitiated. But more effective an antibiotics or chemotherapy more shock a system is subjected to.

But nothing of the above will happen because corruption is insidious. The simple truth is all of us have been corrupted by corruption if not corrupt our self.

Our battles against corruption have become media-controlled pseudo witch-hunts that produces some heat, very little light and no blood.

Remember Satyam? Are you sure Raju is not recuperating in some far-off island resort as some look alike fall guy inhabits his class B prison cell with Raju winging it back when the trial happens? Are you sure PWC has not gained share in the audit market as guys who ..wink, wink, nudge, nudge. can deliver.

The fight against corruption has to be revolution. It has to be bloody and it will be more painful the more effective it is. It will paralyze the system. There will be crash and burn and there will be need to reframe rules, rebuild institutions

As of now we are trying to talk a mal-functioning Apollo 13 back to Earth with advice and alerts from a Citizen Band radio in the hope that the guys will listen. Well the guys are tuned in to Houston and Houston has no clue.

But hey why all this talk about burning decks? Are we not doing magnificently? Growth rate approaching the double figures. Effective distributive social justice with programs like NREGA and hey even Sachin back on song.

Well go ask the oncologist. When is a good time to attack a known malignancy? When the patient is in good general health or when he is bed-ridden?

A Simple Recipe for Revolution

Seth Godin, the iconoclast marketing expert, asked thinkers that he respects to send him brief notes on what they think we should all think about and do in 2010.


Jessica Hagy the idea cartoonist whose blog “Indexed” puts out a great new ideagram almost every day, submitted a simple formula of what we must try and question.

Apply Jessica’s formula and the mind is forced to unearth the numerous notions that have become part of our mental make-up and which instead of anchoring us in reality might be holding us back to discovering higher truths and better and more efficient ways to live and work. I find it useful to apply the method to motherhood areas like children’s education and leadership as well as everyday pursuits like choosing leisure activities or catalyzing business growth.

The Unthinking Busybodies Business

They started out as people like us. The English-speaking denizens of the news dissemination business on TV. But which one of us would grant them, without trepidition, entry into our homes now? Everyone of them now comes across as insufferable smirks who, forgot examining all sides of any given issue, manage the stupendous task of maximizing both intellectual laziness and vigorous bigotry on every single issue, every single time, financed and supported not just by a philistine phalanx of imagination-challenged, ethically-bankrupt brand managers , media planners and buyers but also increasingly by political and corporate slush funds.
I believe there is an opportunity for people like us to challenge this status quo. We could create a Citizen"s News channel. Financed by a co-operative of people like us with nobody owning more than 5%. The channel could break out of the traditional models of news gathering eschewing expensive OB vans and roving reporters and invest in advanced systems of crowd sourcing, advanced versions of the pioneering i-Report model on CNN and concentrate on honest, intelligent, in-depth analysis. We could side step the stranglehold of traditional cable distribution and build a web-based model which in fact allows us to create concurrent print, radio and TV properties. The web channel will be as ubiquitous as cable, especially among the educated young, within the next five years. I believe this business model can be supported entirely through subscriptions and no-strings-attached endowments.
I am willing to put in a million rupees of my own as seed money to put more flesh on this idea and start building the platformr provided I can find 20 more of us willing to do so. Give me a shout if this has you thinking.

Lying Dream

Zeus, harking back to Lit classes and Homer’s Iliad, sent Agamemnon a Lying Dream to deceive him into attacking Troy with the false promise of victory. Thinking about it today for some reason my mind frames, harking back to the debating societies of school, a debate: Is Lying Dream an Oxymoron?. Life as a adult is less about debates than accepting and giving shut-up calls but then what are blogs for?


Take dreams. The kind that Lalit Modi at the IPL 3 Award Ceremony thanked the world for making come true. Lying Modi or Lying Dreams? Is there an escape from truth an in-built and essential feature of all dreams? Perhaps we should banish the use of the word dream as a signifier of a desired objective or state and confine them to be chimera of the mind, in a class with all the subterfuge the Gods use against us humans.

Can you discern a souring of the times around us? Or is it just me and the after-effect of many weeks of pain. Perhaps not. Take Rajat Gupta. An avid follower of the teaching of Vivekananda and the first Indian to be the global head of McKinsey. What reason could he have to consort with the likes of Rajratnam? Another one bites the dust or is it all of us collectively stumbling?

Pain

Most of us write to communicate . But the ‘writers’- the ones who deserve the description- lay bare themselves in what they write, risking ridicule, not preening for praise.


I strive to be a writer. Once in a while, I do post something intimately personal. So here goes.

The past few weeks I have been spending hours in acute pain. Once in a while, I meditate on the pain.

And sometimes a strange phenomenon takes place.The pain takes over like the other side of a mobius strip.

One such spell produced a few scribbled lines. They are reproduced below. They are fragile. So if you do gone to read them, handle with care.

This pain. This happy, happy pain.


Silence. Sunlight. This mote-speckled air.


What if I leave now? This sticky stubborn, sticky stubborn world.


Leave? You can’t leave. It ends. That’s all.


This pain. This happy, happy pain.


Free. I breathe free. Can’t stop? Not free?


Sun. This sun sets? Soon. Quite soon.


It left? No. Not true. The world turned.


Turn. World turn.


This pain This happy, happy pain.


Dark. Quiet dark . Slithering, smooth, slithering, smooth dark.


Breathe? Don’t. No air. No need.


I……n. O….ut. I…..n. O…..ut.


In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.


Not me. Not me. Who then? Who then?


This pain. This happy, happy pain.

The Calculus of Change

In most post-modern business, economic and social circles ‘growth’ is a holy cow.

However consider what environmentalist Edward Abbey once said “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”.

Could it be that an unconsidered chase after growth has been the cause of dysfunctionality in many of our social, economic and business systems and organizations? Technology has enabled accelerated growth in almost all fields of human endeavor but has this growth been all in the right direction? Take the growing ability to cover long distances with the minimal of physical effort. The direction this growth has taken has produced among other things a sharp spike in lifestyle diseases, road rage, pollution and the corrosive and distorting politics of oil.

Let’s go a tad deeper into the realm of  personal growth. Can the chase after more power, more fame, more money to the detriment of all other dimensions of growth could be viewed as a cancerous affliction of the human spirit?

What we perhaps need to revisit is the calculus of growth. Our growth paradigm today is differentiation. The rate of change towards a mad hurtle towards the ‘more’. Shift to integration in the calculus of change and we get back to the gestalt: the complete view. And then we perceive that there is constant beyond change that sums up to health and happiness.

Easier said than done. Nevertheless, good to remember and revisit, now and then. Like we revisit the child who once were.

The Road to Reality

Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.

That he is one of the world’s greatest scientists, does not stop him from being a skilled writer who has to his credit lucid books that take the lay person into the fascinating realms of high physics and metaphysics.

His book “The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe” lives up to the title while being within the reach of the intelligent and interested lay reader.

His two earlier books:”The Emperor’s New Mind” and “Shadows of the Mind” vividly bring alive the road that Penrose traveled before he could bring himself to write the complete guide to the laws of the universe.

There is a concept in “The Road to Reality” that continues to fascinate me and I go back to it often.

Penrose calls the concept “Three worlds and three deep mysteries”.

The concept is that mathematical existence is different not only from physical existence but also from an existence that is assigned by our mental perceptions.

And yet there are deep and mysterious connections between the three worlds.

Only a small part of mathematics has relevance to the physical world.

The vast preponderance of the activities of mathematicians today has no connection to physics or to any other science.

Implied, I think, in Penrose’s visualization of this connection as reproduced in this post is that the world of mathematics can explain the whole of the physical world.

The second mysterious connection is that the Mental World comes about in certain physical structures that are a small-subset of the physical world (most specifically, healthy, wakeful human brains- and to smaller extent the “brains” of other living things).

Think about the above two mysteries in conjunction with the third mystery which is that the Mathematics World is only a small sub-set of the Mental World and you get a cycle that folds on to itself and gives me, when I meditate on it, a deeper glimpse of reality.

If you don’t hate thinking, take the time to think about it. It could be worth your while.

Our Government and Us

This Republic Day I could not but help meditate between the increasing disconnect between those who run the State- the politicians, the bureaucrats, the judiciary, the police etc – and we the ordinary people.

Is it only because we perceive most everyone in “Government” as corrupt and/or inefficient?

Or does it go deeper and also have to do with what we perceive the government’s role in our lives to be?

I believe the perception of Government of our intelligentsia is shaped by a Western world view.

A view that is shaped by a desired primacy of the individual and hence Government as a necessary evil constantly to be watched and kept in check.

This paranoia results in everybody in government to be seen, by the ordinary man, as ‘alien’- somebody outside and separate from us.

But is this the only possible view of Government?

Consider what Martin Jacques, author and China expert, writes in this week’s Newsweek:
“Government is seen by the Chinese not as an alien presence to be constantly pruned back, as in the West, especially the US, but as the embodiment and guardian of society. Rather than alien, it is seen as an intimate, in the manner of the head of the household. It might seem an extraordinary proposition, but the Chinese state enjoys a remarkable legitimacy among its people, greater than in Western societies. And the reason lies deep in China’s history. China may call itself a nation-state (although only for the past century) but in essence it is a civilization-state dating back at least two millennia. Maintaining the unity of Chinese civilization is regarded as the most important political priority and seen as the sacred task of the state, hence its unique role: there is no Western parallel.”

Is there an Indian parallel? Should there be one?

The Hindutva mantra of BJP has a ‘guardian of civilization’ ring to it but suffers from very poor branding fundamentals that unnecessarily limit the appeal.

We all instinctively know that there is an “Indian” identity that is not defined by religious or ethnic identities. Amartya Sen in his brilliant book “The Argumentative Indian” makes a well-researched case for it.

Is it then possible that India could be the first great society that marries democracy, capitalism with an uniquely Eastern view of the State?

More pertinently is that our only way to achieve the greatest good for all our people?

Do we need a political revolution that begins not with the form or function of our State but in our perception of the role of our State?

Could it be that the rot in our system is because of a counterproductive fusion of the worst of the Western framework of Government and the basest of Eastern instincts of individual and narrow interests?

Questions with no easy or simple answers but worth posing, I would think, as another 26th of January passes by and we wonder what the next 60 years of being a Republic holds for us.

Lost and Found: One Number Happiness Touchstone

I was a happy kid.

People who know me from back then recall a quiet somewhat taciturn boy. My memories are of years filled with wonder and discovery.

Someone said the child is the father of the man. In that sense, I feel born again and have re-discovered the secret.

The secret is in three realizations.

Realization One: Human situations, like time and space, are relative. The same situation can be read very differently by different people and each one of them would be true and right in their reading (the classic Kurosava film “Rashoman” illustrates this meta-truth with breathtaking impact).

Realization Two: In every situation that any person faces, there is framework of perception available to that person that generates and supports the feeling of ‘all is well’.

Realization Three: If you practice perceiving whatever situations you face through the ‘all is well’ framework it gets easier and easier to do so. It is almost as if life itself is responding to and harmonizing with your happiness.

Actually the secret is no secret.

It is just hidden in plain sight as we struggle with ambition, greed, envy and all sorts of other, as my physics professor back in IIT Bombay would have called, ‘inappropriate frameworks’.

Watch the visceral recognition that audiences greet the “all is well” anthem in the movie “Three Idiots” and you will know what I mean.