On Children... Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Media and the duty of care

David Puttnam spent thirty years as an independent producer of films, including The Killing Fieldsa, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, etc. His films have won 10 Oscars, 25 Baftas among many others. He retired from movie making to focus on his work in public policy related to education, environment and communication industries.

In this thoughtful talk (please click on the link), David Puttnam asks a big question about the media: Does it have a moral imperative to create informed citizens, to support democracy?

Source: Sabbah Report

NaMo, RaGa, KeGri....It is the year of the elections in India. It is the diversity in our country, food, language, culture, etc that creates this sound of music that makes our country the largest democracy in the world. And in an election year the decibels go up a few notches higher. The advent of competitive news channels have added to this noise and information overdose.

The right to free media I think is an important pillar of democracy. Ability to deliver the information in this true form is the cruz of good journalism and the duty of a free press. Can this be done without personal bias is in itself is a question. Add to this the competitive news channel dynamics, corporate and political patronage among the many national and regional news channels, is this leading to a trust deficiency?

Debates are essential to drive awareness, and create public opinion. It is here that lies the challenge. To remain neutral and yet help in generating public opinion. With agendas of their own, the various channels are taking aggressive stance on many issues.
What tops it all is this....once the anchor calls for the much needed break pop comes the ad of the politicals parties saying all the good stuff while the debate was all about bashing them.

At the end of everyday, when suddenly all of India wants to know, ladies and gentlemen, I think I start beginning to  lose perspective in all the noise.  

The Gervais Principle of company hirerarchy

This is something that I recently came across, it offers an interesting perspective into how organizations and people in them function. I have re-produced a few paragraphs from the blog ribbonfarm. 

The Office, the TV show, is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.The theory begins with Hugh MacLeod’s well-known cartoon, Company Hierarchy .

Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs.
The Sociopath (capitalized) layer comprises the Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself. The Clueless layer is what Whyte called the “Organization Man,” but the archetype inhabiting the middle has evolved a good deal since Whyte wrote his book (in the fifties). The Losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks.

A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

Based on the MacLeod lifecycle, we can also separate the three layers based on the timing of their entry and exit into organizations. The Sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top. The contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages, where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. They are also the ones capable of equally impersonally exploiting a young idea for growth in the beginning, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies.

The Losers like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players, and enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to the firm than the Sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot.

The Clueless are the ones who lack the competence to circulate freely through the economy (unlike Sociopaths and Losers), and build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even when events make it abundantly clear that the firm is not loyal to them. To sustain themselves, they must be capable of fashioning elaborate delusions based on idealized notions of the firm — the perfectly pathological entities we mentioned. Unless squeezed out by forces they cannot resist, they hang on as long as possible, long after both Sociopaths and Losers have left (in Douglas Adams’ vicious history of our planet, humanity was founded by a spaceship full of the Clueless, sent here by scheming Sociopaths). When cast adrift in the open ocean, they are the ones most likely to be utterly destroyed.

The Gervais Principle is this:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The Gervais principle differs from the Peter Principle, which it superficially resembles. The Peter Principle states that all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It is based on the assumption that future promotions are based on past performance. The Peter Principle is wrong for the simple reason that executives aren’t that stupid, and because there isn’t that much room in an upward-narrowing pyramid. They know what it takes for a promotion candidate to perform at the to level. So if they are promoting people beyond their competence anyway, under conditions of opportunity scarcity, there must be a good reason.

Dastardly as all this sounds, it is actually pretty efficient, given the inevitability of the MacLeod hierarchy and life cycle. The Sociopaths know that the only way to make an organization capable of survival is to buffer the intense chemistry between the producer-Losers and the leader-Sociopaths with enough Clueless padding in the middle to mitigate the risks of business. Without it, the company would explode like a nuclear bomb, rather than generate power steadily like a reactor. On the other hand, the business wouldn’t survive very long without enough people actually thinking in cold, calculating ways. The average-performing , mostly-disengaged Losers can create diminishing-margins profitability, but not sustainable performance or growth. You need a steady supply of Sociopaths for that, and you cannot waste time moving them slowly up the ranks, especially since the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed. The Sociopaths must be freed up as much as possible to actually run the business, with or without official titles.

Wealth of the forest and other stories...

Last weekend was interesting... it was a weekend of the vana's (forests). Allow me to elaborate...Kathaavana (forest of stories) is the annual children literature festival organized by the Azim Premji Foundation. It is focused on bringing the joy of books to the under privileged children of the state. Rohini is a part of the organizing committee and so I got a chance to be there at the event. I visited a few stalls that were showcasing books for children. The books are a far cry from what I have  seen as a child. The graphics, colors and the content would make you want to go back to being a child. The stories are from mythology to fairy tales to books capturing life around today's kids. I was pleasantly surprised to see a few books (comics) on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Some of these publishers like Tulika are doing  magnificent job of bringing out these well thought off books for children with great presentation that helps in generating greater interest for reading in kids. Many of the folks I met there have given up very lucrative carers to do what they believe will make a difference. The joy and happiness they experience and share is tremendously infectious.

Along with my schoolmate Mahadev, I also visited Vanashree (Wealth of the forest). It is an 8 acre farm on the outskirts of Bangalore. It is run by Srikanth and his wife Priti. Srikanth designs processors at Intel and Priti is into Neurophysiology. Theirs is an amazing story. An eight acre barren piece of land with three trees nine years back, is today a self sustained farm with 4,500 trees, fourteen cows and  poultry . The farm is certified to export its organic produce Europe. Srikanth told us how people laughed at him when he started, saying nothing can grow on that particular patch of land. Today Coffee, Vanilla, Banana, Mango, Coconut are among the many flora that grow there. He has even managed to grow a few Litchi trees. Parenting and agriculture are among those few skills that every human being is born with is his take when asked on how did he manage this with absolutely no knowledge of farming when he started. There are a lot of us who are always wanting to do many things but don't find the courage or the conviction to make it happen. In the end as Srikanth says it does not matter what other people have said or done..it all simply boils down to what you want to do.

"Only Nothing" break at Destiny Farm

Oh what fun it is to watch the candy floss clouds sail across green rolling hills…..

It is like the beginning of any holiday planning. Let us go to a place where we can do nothing. Let us just be and leave behind everything for a while. As it then turns out, as soon as we reach a place I am the one scanning what to do next. What are the many sights around, must see places and lo the holiday is over. On the way back it is the same story, the next trip we will make sure it will be all about nothing….

Honeymooning couples, large families with kids all over, a lake, one suicide point and a sunset point, it was these cliché that kept us from not looking at Ooty as a destination to go. But then, hills have a strange way of calling you back, and, the Western Ghats are no exception. So Ooty it was for our Only Nothing trip.

Ooty was a tad disappointing. It is massively crowded, narrow lanes and traffic that makes it even more worse. The weather however, was brilliant. It was touching 10 C at night. It is a different experience to have a fireplace lit in your room. The wood burning slowly, warming up the room and the smell of wood..wow..thats the stuff the I have read in books.



We stayed at Destiny Farm. This is about 28 kms outside of Ooty towards Avalanche. This is where our Only Nothing trip seemed like becoming a reality. You drive the last 500 meters in an army truck. Once you are there, you are just immersed in the beauty of the location and the work that has gone into building the farm. 140 acres of farm nestled between the reservoirs of the Avalanche dam and the Emerald dam.  Potatoes, Letuce, Cabbage, Tea grown on the rolling hills are a sight straight out of book. They have a cattle farm, 25 odd cows, there are about 10 horses running around. No TV, internet and handsets become mere paper weights. It takes us back to a time when things were done I am not sure how, anymore. We spent our time just walking around, a lot of time was spent looking at the clouds sail across the skies. It took a while to muster enough courage to get on a horse for ride. Such beautiful creatures they are.One of them is actually called Destiny.

Actual view out of our window

Just like the many people who have visited the place before us, on the way back during the bumpy ride in the military truck I too made up my mind to set up a farm one day, someday… But one thing became certain to me, that doing nothing is not impossible and it can be great fun too.

Communities will be based on shared values...

Another state being carved out is the big headlines, and as usual there are people of both sides of the argument, if it is the right thing to do or not. I do think it is good to have smaller states. It brings administrative efficiencies, especially in a country like India.
But what got me thinking is the concept of native place.. We are in this massive information age, social networks where there are no physical boundaries. I also believe that we in in an age of travel. I am not talking about the camera holding tourist, but migration of people in their constant pursuit of lively hood, love and peace. I am a Keralite, brought up in Karnataka and spend a good portion of my professional life in Andra Pradesh. I am not sure what my native place is, and I am not too worried about it either. My sense of culture, tradition, etc are very different from that of my parents for example. Mine is a potluck that I have picked up from my experiences from the places I have lived, things I have seen there and a little bit of my own being.
Globally, migrating people form a large chunck and it is increasing at a rapid pace. Communities  soon will be based on shared values. Our sense of home will not necessarily be defined by where we are born but more by where we chose to be. This freedom of choice is not about an isolation or withdrawal from our past, it is about a new integration of shared values born out of man's constant pursuit of finding perfection.

The call of the Himalayas

They say if you ever go to see the Himalayas, the mountains then tend to keep calling you back. I have spent the Sunday morning looks at the pictures from our trip to the great mountains. I  like to look at the hard copies of the photos as against viewing soft copies on the pad. It is not that I have anything against the use of technology, I invest in early stage tech companies as a part of my day job. But then, just call me old fashioned.

Ro and me made the trip in September 2010. Its been a while but the memories are so strong of the town of Leh , the Thiksey Monastery and the little Buddhas running around.

The drive to Nubra valley via the Kardunla pass and the mesmerising Pangong lake. We spent about 10 days there driving around along with Andus our local guide/driver.
Being in the midst of the mountains is an humbling experince. Vast expanses of cold desert, with no sign of human life. One could be this rock star person back home, but here one cannot stop from reflecting, it will dawn on you how insignificant one is in the overall scheme of things.
The people live simple yet happy lives threre holding on to the last straws of their culture under the fast approching roadroller of progress.
The most telling memory of the place is this. Ro and me were looking for the world famous Pashmina. Andus promissed to take us to this place where we were sure to get the most authentic pashmina. In the midlle of nowhere he stopped oneday, stopped the Jeep on the roadside and we went hiking to this small hamlet where there was this old lady doing her work. Brief converstaion between Andus and her, she returned with a basket of pure pashmina wool.
We did'nt need to know the language to see the shock on her face when we said we said we dont know how to make anything out of this wool. She was even more surprised when she learnt that we didnt know where we could get this done back home in the big city. The old woman was smiling and said god bless you folks as we walked back to our Jeep.  
It was an amazing experience for us. It is also a Sunday morning well spent looking at these pictures. The exercise has lifted my spirits and filled my heart with joy. As I close the album I hear that call again, without doubt it is the mountains calling.... time to plan another trip to the great moutains.....