I/O Time, Core Time, Plug-Out Time

For many years I felt information/stimulus swamped and world-weary. Over the past few months I have discovered a solution.

I have learnt to parcel my waking hours into three kinds of time.

I/O Time is when I consume media or communicate with others.

Core Time is when I switch of all input and output channels and put myself in a ring-fenced processing mode.

Plug-Out Time is when not just all input-output channels but all processing is sought to be shut or at least minimized.

The reason why I used to feel swamped and weary, I now realize, was that by and large all my waking time used to be I/O Time. Watching, Reading, Listening, Browsing, Talking, Meeting, Presenting, Writing and so on.

Now I make sure 30% or so of my time is Core Time. And I find that not only do I now have a better angle of repose but the productivity and effectiveness of my I/O Time has measurably increased.

Plug-Out time is a state of being when you are ‘just hanging out with yourself”.

Many of us take classes to learn to meditate and then practice it hard and long. I now realize that trying is not meditating.

Trying nothing, being nothing, in other words being plugged-out is meditating. Mantras, breathing techniques, solitude etc. help but are not necessary. I know now that one can be plugged out, eyes wide open, waiting in a crowded airport lounge.

And sleep. What kind of time is that? Sleep time I cannot categorize. All I know is that I now sleep better with the three-way balance back in my waking time.

The Prison of Our Perceptions

In that rare film noir product from Bollywood, Kaminey, the protagonist Charlie cannot pronounce the Hindi consonant “sa” and substitutes it with “pha”. In a tense moment he tells a boss man “Main pha ko pha bolta hoon”. The boss man replies “ Abe ga…, pha ko pha nahin bolega to kya bolega!”.

That is a good example of the prison all of us live in. The prison of our perceptions.

Witgenstein a linguist and philosopher of the highest order illuminated this prison in another way. A woman walked up to him and said “ Sir though they say the earth moves around the sun, it sure looks like the sun moves around the earth” Witgenstein replied, “Tell me Madam what should the earth moving around the sun look like?”

The prison of our perception is different from other prisons in that there is just one person in it and the jailors are all missing! Get me? Sometimes I think words are the strong steel bars of this prison.

Just learnt from CNN that a frontrunner for the post of the President of EU is the current Belgian PM who writes haiku like poems. An example from his collection:

Wind blows through my hair
After years the wind still blows
Sadly the hair no longer does

I look forward to hearing more from this guy.

Got any of your own haiku to share with me?

Beyond the Brand: The Meme?

Meme: (me~m) n biology an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means esp. imitation (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
What does a brand that has done that, been there, go next?
In these days of viral communication it seems that becoming an “element of culture or system of behavior…passed on by one individual to another.. by non-genetic means” is well within the grasp of even relatively modest marketing budgets.
The question is why would a brand want to become a meme?
Well, simply because a meme is more powerful than a brand by many orders of magnitude. USA is a meme that still drives pop culture across the world. Milk is a meme, just ask any mom. India used to be a meme in the Middle Ages- fueling dreams of exotic mysteries and fabulous riches in many a buccaneer. Today the increasing soft power of India if husbanded well could give back to India the power of being a meme.
So will brand marketing now move on to aiming for the power of the meme? Well while the use of viral media is on the increase and the marketing chaterrati is talking about changing paradigms etcetera, I don’t think anybody knows how to make a meme happen through marketing. Maybe we need a new to discipline to be invented. Will a new Kotler soon arise?

The Poetry of Ted Hughes

I discovered Ted Hughes when I was trying to cope with difficult times. I loved Ted Hughes then because the poetry of Ted Hughes takes on grief and transforms it into a healer’s vision.
Ted Hughes was England’s Poet Laureate until he passed away in 1998.
Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 called Ted Hughes a voice that was simply “longer and deeper and rougher” than those of his contemporaries.
Today I find in Hughes’s poetry a universal vision transformed by a startling yet rooted perspective. In his poem, reproduced below, titled “The River” from the 1983 collection of poems titled “River”, every Indian will recognize the mythos of the holy river so much a part of Indian culture transformed by an empathy that sunders aside metaphors to grasp the cruel truth of Nature.

The River

Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on
Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils,
It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world.
So the river is a god.

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

Monday Notes

What if Noah had charged the biggest moneybags of his day the BC equivalent of a billion euro a seat on the Ark? And planned to use the money to build the Ark and then leave the moneybags behind anyway. After all who needs moneybags after the Flood? To get the full story watch 2012, the latest catastrophe potboiler from Hollywood. And for a deeper understanding of the perils of being a moneybag read an earlier posting- The Value for Money- on this blog.
I had lunch at the Mysore Café in Matunga today and I recommend that you put savoring their Mysore Masala Dosa on your Bucket List.
Plan to settle down after I post this to watching the highlights of India get out of a hole on a day of good Test cricket. Those of you smirk at Test cricket can go take a walk. Or write me a mail on why you hate it so and I promise to respond.

Musings on a Saturday

This week’s November rains fell like happiness on a sunny day. Once again CNN got the weather forecast right and our weather guys managed, once again, an almost perfect negative correlation with reality. Why do we export some of the best engineering and science talent in the world and still have a woeful level of quality of engineering and science in our public life? At the surface the answers are easy and glib. Our public jobs pay poorly and therefore attract only the incompetent. Corruption is endemic and it kills all desire to perform a job well. However could it be that the nub lies deeper? Is it that the Indian genius is in the abstract and the ephemeral and not in the material world? That is why we can be the world’s best mathematicians and coders? That is why we craft best when we craft in homage to an idea? That is why we do shoddy work when it comes to planning and executing infrastructural projects or running daily humdrum services? Could it be that we can push up the quality of our public infrastructure and services by approaching them from a design context that is different from the way the Western world does? Worth some serious thought I think.
Last night I wrote a short story in my dreams. I dream two kinds of dreams. One kind is where situations and relationships that I have been through are twisted and represented in a manner that emphasizes and ratchets up an emotion that I did not consciously ascribe to them. The result is I wake up refreshed and with a fresh perspective of that situation or relationship. In the other kind of dreams I work. My mind writes furiously and somewhere I watch astounded. Pages of stuff- essays, stories, memoirs, poetry- spill out into the dream state! When I wake up from such dreams I wake up tired. I know my dream wrote something good and worthwhile but there is no way the waking me has access to.
Meanwhile my blog, as regular readers would have noticed, languishes. The novel I started awaits the third chapter as the protagonist, the lewd adept, stews and regularly castigates me. And as Aqumena gathers steam, my professional energies are deeply engaged in paid work and the tap runs dry on downtime professional essays for the blog.
Perhaps one way to populate the blog better is to turn to weekly column type postings like this one.

The Value of Money

Money. I have always had enough to meet all my needs and most of my ‘basic’ wants. But never have I had enough of it to take care of all the numerous fancies that regularly cross my mind and heart.
Until sometime ago I used to believe that the very rich do indeed fulfill all desires and therefore at least in that context must be very happy. After all don’t they say that you can never be too thin or too rich?
And then I met, after a gap of a few years, a couple I had known well. The couple had seen their annual incomes climb from being tens of millions of rupees a year to the stratospheric heights of thousand of millions. Chiefly as a result of the commodities boom that so characterized the period preceding 2008.
As Jyoti and I drove down, for a dinner appointment, to the seven-star hotel they were staying in, I looked forward to seeing the glowing transformation in looks and well-being that I thought immense wealth must bring.
As we drove back home that night I was in a mild state of shock.
We had a met a couple of individuals in despair. They had flown in that morning in their private jet and had shopped all day for diamonds without having the time for lunch. As they gobbled down dinner the worry lines on their rather haggard faces only underscored their talk:
“Of needy relatives who expected them to help out (can you imagine the greed!). Of cars costing thirty million rupees having been driven all of 300 kms in a year (where after all were the roads in this benighted country where one can drive such a car?) Of the armies of servants who ran their various homes across the world and who could not seem to fully conceal their feeling of unwanted intrusion when the masters came in, after a gap of months, for a short stay. And what of the Naxalite threat? Well the police and the security were taking care of that, though can you imagine even the police had to be paid what amounted to a regular salary? Of course, when they travelled, the private jet allowed then to fly over all that danger crawling on the ground though sometimes, one must admit, the weather they flew in seemed just as dangerous.”
What happened? Does really big money always do this? What is money?
At its core money is supposed to represent human effort.
Money represents a day’s physical labor or an hour’s use of skills honed over decades or the complex organizational skills and risk-taking abilities that is required to coordinate the efforts of large numbers of people.
However somewhere along the line (a few seconds after it was invented I suspect) money shed its representative context making it an entity by itself.
Individuals could accumulate it without any reference to the human effort they had exerted and to close the increasingly vicious cycle, they could then use it to distort the value of the efforts of other humans so that they could accumulate more money.
However human effort is an integral part of nature. Centuries of a system that distorts the value of an integral part of the web of life produces negative results. The increased level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and the resultant greenhouse effect are measurable and now much discussed and debated.
The increasing concentration of the value of the efforts of many in the hands of view is just as dangerous.
And just as those of us who have the largest carbon footprint become fat and sick, so also those of us who increasingly hoard and distort the value of the efforts of an increasing number of our fellow human beings become, at the core, miserable.
Not everybody who makes big money is a distorter. There is many a rich individual who treats big money as a reservoir of value to be dammed and converted to power that gives increased value back to others. In doing this, these worthies earn true respect and the happiness of quiet self-esteem.
It is only when money is seen as a possession for personal use that big money distorts not just the human community at large but very visibly the “possessor”.
Money represents a force of nature which when distorted produces disaster.
Pink Floyd, as is their wont, rocked to the true value of money even as they mouthed cynically the twisted role it currently plays in most human activity:
Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and your O.K.
Money it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team
Money get back
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off my stack.
Money it's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the hi-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet
Money it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it's no surprise that they're giving none away