“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?