Proud To Be Indian

I was all of four years old when I first heard Mukesh sing "Jis Desh Me Ganga Behti Hai". Every time the song played I felt an unreasonable amount of joy. But then what is joy if not unreasonable. Since then much water has flown through the Ganges and both India and I have had our ups and downs. But even today when the song plays my spine straightens up and my eyes moisten.The love one feels for one's roots is atavistic and eternal. I celebrate India with all my heart. A note for my non-Indian readers: The song from a 1960 movie celebrates the Indian values of simplicity, open minds and welcoming hearts. As we celebrate our independence day,my thoughts turned to this beautiful, beautiful song. Listen to it. Whatever your language, it will sing to you.

Downshifting

I hereby pledge to slow my life down a gear, for the benefit of my health, my well being, my environment and for those around me whom I dearly love. —Tracy Smith, The Downshifting Manifesto The sixties had the hippies who were but a minority but whose lifestyle and values defined an entire generation. In the nineties and the noughts there was beginning to emerge in the affluent world "Downshifters" another minority whose appeal could have again defined a generation. Then came 2008 and the recession has pushed all other socio-economic and socio-cultural phenomenon firmly into the background as far as media and popular culture are concerned. However "downshifting" quietly continues to gain it adherents. The essential core of downshifting is when you shift to valuing making more time for yourself and your family than making more money. You get off the tread mill, quit the rat race and smell the roses not just the coffee. The necessary condition for one to downshift of course is to be successful in the first place. To give up making money, to paraphrase Swami Vivekananda, you must in the first place be making money. The downshifting culture in India is most evident among returning NRIs. With dollars salted away and an American citizenship to fall back on, they practice the art of downshifting in the heat of dust of India. Some combine it with efforts to reconnect their children with their roots before it is too late. Speaking of roots, the Vedas have recognized downshifting and its role in the evolution of an individual. The Vedas stipulate four asramas or stages of life - Brahmacharya, Grihastha, Vanaprastha and Sannyasa. Brahmaharya: It refers to an educational period of 14–20 years which starts before the age of puberty. It supposes the practice of celibacy Grihastha: Refers to the second phase of an individual's life It is often called 'the householders life' revolving as it does around the duties of maintaining a household and leading a family-centred life and is recommended to cover the age period of 25 to 49 years Vanaprastha: This is a stage when a person gradually withdraws from the world and gives up material desires. Ideally this covers the age period of 50 to 75 years Sannyasa: is the life stage of the renouncer within the scheme of āśramas. It is considered the topmost and final stage of the ashram systems and is traditionally taken by men or women over fifty or by young monks who wish to renounce worldly and materialistic pursuits and dedicate their lives to spiritual pursuits As an aside, why did the Vedas, formulated many thousand of years ago, contemplate life stages that examine a life lasting up to 75 years when life expectancy must have been sub-thirty? Just being visionary or was life expectancy much higher in certain circles in the ancient world than is generally supposed?

Coming back to downshifting, is it a life stage or is it a life style that one can adopt at any age? In an age when everything is on steroids and most boundaries are blurred, life stages can cross age boundaries and everything, even Vanprashta asrama, come early to one's life. According to some downshifting is not just an alternative lifestyle or a natural life stage but a phenomenon that heralds the coming of a new age. Deriving in part from the cult arising from James Redfield's nineties books "The Celestine Prophecy" and "The Tenth Insight", the theory is that more and more people will "downshift" to bring about a more peaceful, prosperous, ecologically sensitive era. Nobody,as far as I am aware, spoke of the hippies in the same vein.Or did Jack Keoruc have a similar theory about the hippies? Must re-read his "On The Road" one of these days.

The Lower Upper Class

An article in the latest Newsweek deftly chronicles the anxious times Americans across class and age barriers are going through (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/05/david-frum-on-high-anxiety-america.html). The article articulates an insight that has been formulating in my mind for quite some time.

The rich are not one uniform economic block. Far from it. The very rich are in a very different place from the ordinary rich. The top 1 % of the top 1% are doing way way better than the rest. In 2010 the top 1% in the US saw their income in 2010 increase merely by 11.6% while for the gain for the top 1% of the 1% was 21.5% - twice as much. And the reasons for this rising "disparity" is that the ordinary rich has the same investment channels open to them as the rest of us do -real estate, stocks and bonds while the very rich have a whole range of very exclusives ones. Hedge Funds. Private Equity. Elections. Counter-revolutions. Arms Supply. To name a few. So here we are. One more sub-division to think about in a rapidly dividing world. The Lower Upper Class (LUC). Where is a man to go with only between US 1 to 10 million of investible surplus to live on? Hard luck old chap. Let me know if you want to join our protest dharna next week. A related point. The world seems to live in a glass house these days. And grinning and bearing it is better strategy that throwing stones at intense scrutiny. But wonder how this intense scrutiny of a smarter planet play out on the timeless stage of class warfare. Any views IBM? PS: Wonder some smart soul somewhere (probably from the top 1% of the 1%) is formulating one more hush-hush high-returns exclusive "investment" scheme for the LUCs. As they say every second for every 100,000 LUCs a Madoff is born.

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. Isn't the chase after more power, more fame, more money to the detriment of all other dimensions of growth 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.

Boredom - The Creativity Engine?

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more/ No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more/ Well, I try my best/ To be just like I am/ But everybody wants you/ To be just like them/ They say sing while you slave and I just get bored/ I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more - From the Bob Dylan song "Maggie's Farm" (album "Bringing It All Back Home") Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW4y-9RoMFU

Today I am bored out of my mind.Funnily in me stress that cannot be resolved triggers boredom. Almost as if I have a third option when faced with danger. Fight or Flight or Get Bored! I have promised myself to put out a blog post today and fighting hard with ennui I have decided to ruminate on the very topic that is preventing me from enjoying the process of writing a post today. The first meme that comes to me as I meditate on boredom is Bob Dylan singing about how he just got bored on the slave farm! So I decide to begin the post with it. I dig around a little more in the recesses of my mind and remember reading Bertrand Russel saying that boredom is a serious disease inflicting modern civilization. A google later I come upon the following Russel quote: Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. Bertrand Russell Could Russel have got it somewhat wrong? Boredom on the streets of Harlem or Dharavi or in the penthouses of Beverly and Pali Hill might produce some rather painful results. But could not boredom also be productive? I started testing the hypothesis and lo and behold I hit pay dirt. Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher well known for his pessimism had an insightful and surprisingly sunny take on boredom. Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. Arthur Schopenhauer Schopenhauer's view on boredom resonate well with Mark Applebaum's views on the power of boredom. Mark known as the mad scientist of music believes that boredom is the key to creativity. Reproduced below is Mark's recent Ted Talk that walks one through the interaction between boredom and creativity. Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_applebaum_the_mad_scientist_of_music.html I believe you will tend to agree with Mark's views if you are creative yourself or have worked extensively with creative people. From my days in advertising I can remember how my creative colleagues would be bored at the drop of a hat. And then they would most often go attack this boredom by behaving strangely or putting out the most outlandish propositions. And of course, once in a while, their attack on boredom would result in truly creative advertising. Would love to hear from my creative readers, who are legion, on their thoughts on this issue.

The Second Education Revolution

I believed the second education revolution will be a technological one. That is why I invested time and money in an e-learning technology start up. I was wrong. Technology does not make for revolutions, people do. The second education revolution is happening because the best teachers are making it happen. Yes they are using e-learning technology to hold massive online classes. But that is only a small part of the revolution. At the core of the revolution is the passion that the best teachers bring to their profession, their insights into the classical processes of education and learning and the skills that they bring to discovering and refining new processes of teaching and learning. To get a up close view of the passion, the insights and the skills take a look at this TED talk by Coursera (www.coursera.org) co-founder Daphne Koller. I visited Coursera. I found a whole lifetime worth of courses. It took me two minutes to register for one on Game Theory and now I await my taste of the second education revolution. See you there. . In case the embedded video does not play on your device here is a link to Daphne's talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html

A Tin Ear and The Clown Prince

What does it take to make a mess of one of the biggest mandates the world can give? Want a clue? Take a gander at the title of this post. My family have been ardent supporters of the Grand Old Party for three generations now and I have held on to the allegiance. But no longer. I have had enough and will not take it any longer. "Come on mother if that boy wants to go and play with other boys and girls in fields foreign, let him. Togging him out in whites to go out in the heat and dust and play games with men will only have him soiling his pyjamas and further besmirching a family reputation built over five generations. India has, over the centuries had enough of crown princes and clown princes. It can do without yet one more. Lady do you really need all this trouble? What? You say are doing what is good for the country? Which country? Okay that was below the belt. But really if you want to do some good, get rid of that tin ear and get yourself a pair that can really listen. To the quiet anguish of good men turned into puppets. To the groaning and guffawing of the people at the antics of your army of sycophants which is sadly what is mostly left of the Grand Old Party. We know your heart is in the right place. You want to give to the people. Information. Dole. Food. Education. But really the people do not need that from you. They can get all that and more for themselves. All they need from you or anyone of your ilk is to force the clowns and the thieves to keep their dirty hands off the till and do a decent day of work everyday. Earn their keep so to speak. The one saving grace is that you don't run a police state. Or do you? Why then have I taken care not mention any names in this post and just allude, allude. allude? Why?"