3Rs

First up, I must say that I am disappointed that I have not been able to write much since I left college 7 months ago. Not that I have been too busy to write anything or too unimaginative or insipidly and nonchalantly occupied with something more important during these many months. It is  just that I did not get enough positive "force"  to displace my inertia of laziness to write  (rather compile my "story" because essentially that is what this blog is - a historical account of my life). Surely, my experience post MBA of working in an organization under revival post survival could account for a truckload of blog-able content. However, I don't want to belabor about this intervening period, one of bountiful frustration. It will take too much time to compile if I were to do sufficient justice to the magnitude and seriousness of it. So without more digression let me turn right back into the topic that I really wanted to write about.

One fine day, while ruminating over the modalities of arguably the most important "next step" in my journey I realized that I needed to understand what my values really were. It eventually led me to my usual "idea" moment. I came to a quick conclusion that my values can be encapsulated into "3Rs" as I would like to describe them. Yea, they are distinct from the traditional 3Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic while being as important if not more  because of their equally universal appeal  in my opinion. If you are still wondering what the 3Rs are, let me dispel the mystery. They are relevance , reasonableness and responsibility. These 3 best describe the universal values that I would like to identify myself with. I hope that they will guide me through all the moments of indecision that I may face in my life. Let me describe each one of them in brief.

1)"Relevance": Relevance in my opinion is perhaps the most important of human values. Every thing that we do can be examined using a "relevance" lens. For instance, I need to ask myself, is the work I do relevant to myself, my family, my company, my country, the society  and ultimately the world at large? I think every person and organization must ask itself the question: How can I be more relevant to the society or the world at large? Relevance can be more effectively and better understood by examining examples of irrelevance. An instant one  that I can conjure up is that of the likes of "Paris Hilton". With my limited knowledge about her, I would like to know how relevant Paris Hilton is to our society or  to the world at large. If I discount any charities that she might be supporting actively through monetary contribution or otherwise, partying 365 days a year would not account for much relevance in my opinion. Most hedonistic pursuits like drinking, drug abuse etc. would in some way come under  the irrelevant category. More than the  well known faces like those of Paris, I am more concerned about mindless followers of hers and their  ilk. Another classic Indian example would be Rakhi Sawant. I am not for a moment suggesting that people should not enjoy, but majority of the work that we do in our day to day lives and in every major activity of ours we must ask ourselves, where is this all leading to? If I can remotely relate it to the greater  human goal I would continue to pursue that activity. One many now ask quite rightly, what is this "greater human goal". It is difficult at this point of time for me to describe what the "greater human goal" is and what it should be. I am in no position to proclaim what it should be. However, a fair idea of what  could generally be accepted as a greater human goal would be -  "Maintaining evolutionary progress through preservation of overall ecological  balance".( I may be excused for drawing this conclusion from my excessive indulgence in  watching NGC, Discovery and Animal Planet ). There are many examples which I can draw upon. If  our observations of nature were to be taken as a lodestone, "evolutionary progress" emerges as the only ultimate goal. Numerous animal and plant species come together only at the time of mating and never meet again.  Animal and plant species have developed extraordinary adaptations for survival. They have employed strategies that will beat the shit out of all the fancy "blue ocean" strategies of the business world. ( The examples to demonstrate this are simply too many and I would like to write a separate piece to describe them one day).

 2) "Reasonableness": The second most important of human values according to me is "Reasonableness" which  essentially describes the attribute of fairness in dealings. Reasonableness derives itself from the first value which is "Relevance". If I were to accept my hypothesis of evolutionary progress as the ultimate human goal,  then  "social living" could be described as a means to achieve that goal. Whether one chooses to call it "division of labor" as described by Adam Smith, the fact remains that living in a society greatly enhances our chances of survival and evolutionary progress. And it is in this need for social  living that "Reasonableness" finds its "Relevance". In most situations we as individuals are aware of what is fair and what is not. It is to an extent tied into the "social living" concept.  If we consider that man has been gifted with unique gifts by god then the gift of conscience - the ability to judge to oneself " the wrong from the right"  would be the most important of all. I cannot remember a single instance in my life when I did not know what was fair and what was not. (Whether I  tread the fair  path is another matter and one of regret). Thus, "Reasonableness" constitutes the second in the triad of human values. Without reasonableness, there would be anarchy, reflected so vividly from time to time in various coups and revolutions.

3) "Responsibility": Last but not the least, responsibility both personal and for the greater society at large is the third most important of human values. Taking responsibility of one's own actions goes a long way in establishing a sustainable world order. Whether it is parking the bike on central stand in a parking garage or driving in your own lane or avoiding driving while drunk, avoiding wastage of electricity or water etc are some of the examples of responsibility. It is an element of personal responsibility we need to endorse for the collective good of all.

Finally, while, I am convinced that these are necessary to describe my values, I am not certain if they are sufficient. With limited rumination over them and true to my nature of not going too deeply into most philosophical pursuits, I hope they are necessary and sufficient.

Frustrations with some things in life......

internet speed,
no auto/public transport
no internet
no live matches on tv
Even though have the money to spend its frustrating that you cant get what you want sometimes....

7 Years

7 years ago on this very day, I had ventured into an unknown uncharted territory. I started my career in the IT industry not knowing what future lay in store for me. A year earlier, in my 3rd of year engineering, I remember practicing interview questions with my friends. "What do you want to be 5 years down the road, 10 years down the road 15 years down the road?" I must acknowledge these questions have no meaning in today's world, where we are governed by Moor's law and where facebook did not exist 5years ago and google  was just a project 10years ago and yet today they have become part of our lives.. A 3 year horizon is at best the smartest bet today. So, back to the question, I am almost half way down the 15yr journey today, and I am sure I am nothing of what I could have ever imagined back then. It is not often that I look back at such a long period of time. I hope to use this blog to recollect and reflect.
7 years ago, I had no clue of what the "Software" industry was all about. Being a mechanical engineer, I always believed that companies made and sold products. Little did I realize that there was an industry that was many times bigger called the "services" industry. I had no clue what a software "product" meant and looked like.
I would love to look back and think about my learning, achievements and failures. So let me first talk about the learnings.
Year 1 - First few months went into learning the building blocks of software programming. I still was not able to visualize it all together. It was only somewhere down the end of 6-9 months did I first realize that software was all about 3 things, a UI, a database and a logic engine that tied them together. I hadn't spotted the generic misunderstanding I had and only realized it later that I was dealing with Software "Application" programming. It always rankled my mind when my friends who had studied computer engineering were so enamored by operating systems, networks, device drivers and digital signal processors. I had no clue what all these were, and maybe I still don't, and felt as if I was a dimwit in spite of teaching myself how to write a program.
Year 2 -  I was part of a software "product" team. It was the first time I understood how a software product is developed and what went behind creating it. In typical 'IT speak', it was my first experience of a  complete SDLC (software development life cycle). I learned some basics of quality, configuration management, software architecture etc.
Year 3 - For the first time in my life, I was in a foreign country and I spent my first few months at a client location. More than the work environment, I learned a lot about the cultural aspect of work. I learned how to carry myself in a client environment. It was also the first time I was seeing software programs in actual end use. The year was an eye-opener for me both personally and professionally.
Year 4 - Of all the years on the job, this was perhaps the year I must have worked my hardest. It was a pleasure executing my first implementation project and a go-live. It was also a year where I learned a lot about real team-work and leadership. I still rate my client manager as one of the best bosses I have had and needless to say, I learned a whole lot from him.
Year 5 - This was the first year I did a consulting assignment and interacted with the business more than the IT staff. It was an eye opener for me. I realized how useless our code was going to be if it did not solve the problem it was intended to solve in the first place. I spent countless hours raking my brain about the efficacy of software applications for end use. It also led to a disillusionment about the software industry in general. Nevertheless, I realized how important it was to keep in mind who the end customer was and what his needs were.
Year 6 - This was the last year in my job before my MBA and it was a transition from being a business analyst to being a complete solution provider. It also brought me closer to the business of "software services" in its entirety. Now that I look back, my journey had perhaps reached a full circle.
Year 7 - Enrolled for my MBA and joined XL. Learned the background and fundamentals of my 6 previous years of work-ex. I suddenly started finding meaning in many events that had baffled me during my years at work. Had it not been for my work-experience, those lessons would have seemed very much like null variables without context.

If I leave aside the learning from each year and try to think back at the the single biggest aggregate learning experience so far from my job, it has to be team work. All throughout my life I have tread the path as an individual. Whether it is scraping through tough exams or cracking the easy ones, all the risks and rewards were individual. Suddenly, when you are in a job environment, you are part of a team. Even though there are plenty of group projects during school, it is nowhere close to the "On the Job" experience. I passionately feel that we must have more of group projects to prepare young minds for what they encounter in their job lives and beyond, because we are in an industrial era post Adam Smith where division of labor is a reality.

One of my friends, Debasis with whom I did not work directly on projects but became good friends with at office, once said, it was good that we were not working on projects together, else there would to be friction between us affecting our friendship. I thought for a while about it and realized that it was quite true. When two friends come together for a project, their destiny  in some ways becomes a shared destiny, their success intertwined. Both are affected even if one of them screws up. When they were just friends, they sought advice from each other and wished the other well, but their destinies weren't tied to the others performance. It is when they start working together that they hit a roadblock. Therefore, I sometimes feel that people with whom one has had a great experience working together, make better teammates to look out for partnerships in future work than just your old friends from school with whom you spent a good time. It appears counter intuitive, but is something I have started believing in. Having said that, it does not mean that you will not have a good working relationship with a good old friend you played marbles with, either.


It has been an exciting journey so far. I hope I can write about more exciting stuff about my job post M.B.A. This time my horizon is going to be a more appropriate 3 yrs.

Search results! frustrating

Have you every been frustrated with the search results that you get using google or any other search engine? If my guess is right, it would have been more often than not. I should rather ask have you ever been satisfied with the search results? The answer would be a big NO in most cases. The answer is even more obvious if the content is India centric. More often than not, information is simply  not available in the public domain in the electronic form. I had an opportunity to talk to Mr. Vajpayee's speech writer once, and I described him my peeve that corporate communication is a much neglected and underestimated area in Indian context. He pleaded that that was not true. I still stick to my argument even though I was pleasantly surprised by the websites of Thermax and Triveni Engineering recently. Coming back to the search frustration, I wonder if it is because of the choice of words that I typed into the search window that gave me trash. I do not know of the search language syntax if there is any to search effectively. For instance I am not very much familiar with the use of a (+) (||) in searches. Maybe there is a lot to them than I know off. Maybe I am search illiterate.  But then, isn't it google's problem that a dumb person like me cannot use the tool for what I intend to do? It is for this reason I believe that google should not rest on its laurels. A better search engine and google could be history. But not that google isn't trying. Solution to a long long identified need appears to be taking shape. Today I happened to see a new menu bar to the left of my google screen which I found could prove to be useful for context specific search. It has been a long held dream to have something like this as a user option. At last google seems to be working on it. I have similar gripe about gmail. An example is sorting of folders for instance based on names, which I am so familiar doing. Hopefully they will add it one day....

Mind your language!

My language skills are a bit muddled up and although I am quite good at all the 3 languages i.e. Hindi, English and Marathi, I am most comfortable while speaking in Hindi, writing in English and thinking in Marathi. If you are wondering what thinking in Marathi means, it is similar to the funny grammatical construction  you  get when people think in Marathi, "Mazya bapacha kai jatai?" and translate it into English while speaking as "What goes of my father"...

Album art, Apollo 13, Lagaan and banking for the poor

Came across this audiovisual commentary about a chap called Storm Thorgerson who designed many of Pink Floyd's album covers. I have been trying to develop some understanding of art for some time now and need to dig much deeper to figure out what the covers really mean.

In connection with Apollo 13 completing its 40th Anniversary, I happened to see a video of Jim Lovell, the real Tom Hanks.  A couple of his quotes really stand out for me. They exhibit the spirit of  much of human society's evolution as I would like to put it.  It can become a nice opening line for a speech somewhere."I think one of the things that (Apollo 13) showed the people of the world was that even if there is a great catastrophe, good leadership and teamwork, initiative and perseverance - these things make for getting an almost certain catastrophe into a successful recovery,". Smell classic American Hollywood movie fare anyone?  One can argue.. but I will leave it there. Jim Lovell  was most certainly a brave man. He goes on to say, "Our philosophy was: had we not been successful, we would have continued to broadcast our indications of what went wrong, what's happening - either until the last battery had died or the last bit of oxygen was gone." It is such brave commitment to charge forward without the fear of consequence that most of the times leads to progress. And speaking of the scrapping of Nasa's current plan to return to the Moon, Lovell delivers another classic line :"Mankind is meant to explore. There is a certain group of us that live on the edge to do that sort of thing. And I think over the years regardless of budgets up or budgets down I think people will find a way of eventually going to Mars, not in my lifetime probably, but we will set foot on Mars one of these days." India's cryogenic engine technology failed in its first attempt to launch a communications satellite into orbit a few days ago. The team at ISRO can take heart from such powerful words of Jim Lowel and his Apollo 13 team. Hopefully, India will be able to launch its own cryogenic engine next year. It will be a worthy tribute to the people who spent 18 years of their lives for one dream!

One more interesting video that I saw yesterday was the performance of a Miami school based on the popular song "chale chalo" by A.R. Rehman from the movie Lagaan. I think music is one among certain things like sports that can transcend cultural boundaries. The video on Miami school's attempt at the orchestral composition is a great example of that.The other good thing about the song is that can act like a motivational or an inspirational song like the "eye of the tiger" with the only exception that while 'eye of the tiger' is more individualistic in nature while 'chale chalo' is more of a group motivational song. (Ironically, I know I am back to the tiger debate.. quite intuitive isn't it...tiger=individualistic). I liked the treatment to the song  sung in the orchestra performance because orchestral performances also happen to be of interest to me off late. I am not sure if each school in US has a choir  where school kids learn music and participate in an orchestra, but I sure am an advocate of such a thing in Indian schools if it can be done. The song "Chale chalo" also led me to the discovery of a fantastic film on the making of Lagaan. I have been impressed with Lagaan ever since I saw it for the first time, however my appreciation of Aamir, Ashutosh and the film has gone up tremendously after watching the making of Lagaan.

Finally, to conclude, here is something about another interesting little video that I saw on banking for the poor by Andrew Hinton of pilgrimfilms.com. It is an amazing video about how a South Indian bank manager called J S Parthiban has transformed the lives of many poor villagers in Tamil Nadu. It was heartwarming to see the compassion of Mr. Partiban and it reminded me instantly of the TED video I had seen about Aravind Eye Hospital sometime ago. A line from that video by Dr. G. Venkataswamy the founder of Aravind Eye hospital will remain etched in my memory.

"When you grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation. It is ourselves we are helping. It is ourselves we are healing." -Dr.G.Venkataswamy

For me these are very powerful lines and they have a strange appeal which I can't explain. They appear so simple yet so deep in meaning that I can only hope to understand  it completely some day. J S Partiban's voice was as compassionate as that of Dr. Venkat's and I wish him well. Interestingly the video ended with a special thanks to many people including Sarosh J Ghandy. Mr Ghandy taught us Ethical leadership in XLRI and I am not surprised to see his name in the video. Mr Ghandy also happens to be one of the nicest people I have seen in my life.

collage of the year gone by in XL

While I was experimenting with picasa to get the photos of my "new look" uploaded, I had an idea... Why not try a collage of some of the different images taken during the past year @ XL.... Here is the outcome of my first try!