Out-of-the-box solutions

often come from outsiders. Or comes when we are outside the box, literally or figuratively.

So 3 possible forms of outsider.

1) I am into jewelry retail. Someone who doesn't do the same is an outsider.
2) I am into jewelry retail. Example, I am showering and I get a cracking thought about jewelry retail.  I myself become the outsider. Literally.
3) I am into jewelry retail. I am thinking about something else sitting at my desk in the shop/office and suddenly I get a cracking thought about jewelry retail. Again I become the outsider. Figuratively.

First definition suggests that consultants, friends, father, brother, brother-in-law, jewelry manufacturer, etc. all these can be called outsiders.

I am more keen on looking at second and third definitions. Because the same person turns out to be an insider as well as an outsider.

In the second definition, I've mentioned 'showering' to suggest outsideness. However, it could just be anything. It could also be bird-watching. Or travelling. Or chilling on a beach. Or it could be working on a project other than jewelry retail.

Focus is important for thinking. So is outsideness. It makes sense to be working on at least two projects in any given time-frame.

Facebook has us all, and grossly under-performs

How much can our eyes see in a given moment? How many moments do we have in any given day? How many moments do we spend on reading and going through the FB updates? On how many such moments we feel 'amazing'?

From how many friends (I've got some 850 odd friends) do you see updates on any given day that you check FB? And so, how many friends you would surely like to check updates from? Who are these friends? Given the number of friends, how adept you've become socially as a result of social media?  Apart from friends, how many groups are you a part of on FB?

I spend a considerable time on FB almost everyday. And yet, on reflection I feel no great on most such days. I itch to get updates from some people and I don't quite know if they've posted anything. Why? Simple, everyone's posting a lot of stuff and that lot of stuff is algorithmically curated and the algorithm is no good. If I have 850 in my friends list, and everyone's posting 4 updates on average, there you go. On any given day I have a total of 3400 updates to go through! It's become a super-market of updates!

Is there a way out? A way that can make browsing the FB timeline marginally better and yet significantly effective?

There must be a cap of, let's say, 5 updates for every user. Don't let the algorithm curate. Let all the updates appear in a sequence on the timeline. Let the user figure which updates are worth posting.

Someone will argue, another platform will emerge that will offer 50 updates for every user. Sure, can emerge. Will that be any good? Will that help you read and go through the updates in any better way?

Capping the quantities is what makes something worthwhile. Otherwise the space is wide open. And you aren't even an atomic organism when placed against that space.

Made in School and Sucks

After birth, how much time does a child spend with parents?

If asked, parents would prefer the child to stay at school for as long as possible. Why? Coz they believe that their child learns and grows in school.

If we look at the quality of adult individuals, I would have doubts about learning and growing in school.

Actually after school, parents send their kids to tuition classes and other classes. There are tuition classes all around our store. I observe kids vigorously copying their homework received at tuition classes right before they enter these classes.

Do we then understand that typically parents are incapable of instructing and teaching their child? And therefore, they banish the child from their sights for a really long time of the day? Or do we understand that parents are unwilling to take responsibility of building their child into a great individual?

Or all my questions are ridiculous. Things are just fine.

Gandhiji and the tragedy of getting my clothes ironed

I thought about this some 5 days back.

In my ways of clothing myself, I thought I had reached a Gandhian simplicity. And on occasions I felt proud of it. Yes, thought of matching Gandhiji in matters of fashion can make anyone proud.

So I reached for my lush navy blue Mufti trousers, pulled them on and buttoned myself. And I let my palms caress my butts and feel the freshness of a ironed and washed pair of trousers.

Tragedy has epic proportions and minute ones too. I felt some burnt ends of the stitches that shaped my beloved trousers. For a little moment I felt the pinch of spending yet again, in spite of my simplified wardrobe, on a pair of blue trousers. Oh my Gandhiji!

Actually, Gandhiji surely had it better than I think. May be coz of the environment, or the lack of options available, or pure (intentional or inadvertent) wisdom.

So what if I wear only two colors - white and blue. So what if my trousers are always blue and my shirts always white. My iron-man has a world of options to contend with. My colors and others' colors. The fabric of my clothes and the fabrics of others' clothes. The content of poly-material in my clothes and the content of poly-material in others' clothes. The styling of my trousers and styling of other people's trousers.

And he has to iron them all in a given time to make sure he gets enough to sleep peacefully somehow. He has to show courage and strength to iron them all and feel music in life.

Let's say I want to feel at ease and peace, and also master my skill in the 100 square feet of space I occupy. I would stick to my drum-set. This man sticks to his coals and bicep-exercising mechanical iron. He masters it. He burns whatever comes in the way. He folds them nice and tight. Thinks he has mastered it all. All day long. And sleeps.

I might have to pay a visit to the mall yet again. Perhaps, before that think whether Gandhiji got his khadi ironed or not.

Pics courtesy: laudafinem.com and paulniederer.com

On Andy-Amelie and Coaching

Headline reads Andy appoints Amelie as his new coach. If you read this, you'll gather that for now it's limited to Wimbledon 2014.

The surprise as projected by the media is 'a male player appointing a female as coach'. If you read the article linked to earlier, you'll see that male players have appointed 'females' as their coaches earlier as well. Besides, female players have so often have had male coaches (if I am not mistaken, most female players do).

I haven't played a sport at any significantly high levels, but I have surely trained under 'coaches'. And while I haven't been a sports-coach, I have coached many a student so far under various guises.

To add, with the realization that help's available nowhere and nobody's helping me surely, I have been a coach to myself, and it has been a painstaking ultra-time-consuming process of coaching myself. It takes immense amount of what sounds like self-criticism. An attitude like this among youngsters is often labelled (mistakenly) as 'lack of confidence' or need for 'personality development'.

Andy's announcement of Amelie as her coach makes one review what 'coaching' is and who can be a 'coach'.

While in professional contexts, especially sports, naming and appointing coaches is explicit, coaches come in all forms. Teacher in a school (Taare Zameen Par style), elder brother at home, unusual friend at school, may be girl-friend, a boss et al. Just that the name 'coach' isn't explicit. We are all aware of the famous 'Eklavya-Dronacharya' coaching relationship. Rancho for his friends in 3 Idiots.

In my mind, I have no doubt that every single person who is sensitive to some area of performance and desires to achieve (as Aamir puts it in 3 Idiots) excellence, needs a coach-figure, if not all the time, surely at certain critical junctures in life and preparation. Having said that, those critical junctures are unidentifiable so very often. Which essentially means that this coach-figure is needed all the time.

I bowled in the nets imitating different bowlers. Sometimes I bowled well, sometimes pathetically. Was prodigious at swing but often went down the leg. Coaches would point out the errors sometimes but none pointed out that my front foot (left leg for a right hand bowler) was landing wrongly. I wonder they knew such nuances. I wonder they observed me closely. I wonder they were inclined to focus on any particular individual, since they had numerous pupils to oversee. Of course, I was always an introvert and 'egoistic' stoical moody affable kind of person. But I was at least 15 or 20 years younger than these coaches. Who would harness the raw energy. The one possessing it or the one watching it? I identified this problem with my bowling action just a couple or 3 years back!

Anyway, to close this, coaching requires an engagement that touches the deepest parts of your being. An engagement similar to a love-relationship in many respects. Great eyes, great observation, great reading of skills (not necessarily 'having' the skills) and temperament, great articulation and a lot more. Ivan Lendl helped Andy win the big title. Females might be different in some ways from males but in coaching 'gender' surely isn't a clinching point, and Amelie might just be more effective. Am watching closely.

Photo courtesy: www.telegraph.co.uk

Ph.D. = Phoolish Doctor?

It's still a 'may' headline but am positive. A lot of places don't consider me suitable in a 'teacher' role simply coz of the Ph.D. requirement.

In the same breath, when I talk with Ph.D.s I am astonished at the (lack of) quality with which a good number of these places make do.

And I can only imagine what's the state of affairs at not-so-known B-schools, and they simply take 2 mighty years away. The folks are reeling under shortages of faculty, and of the grey matter in the heads of their faculty, and then release an ad saying they want 'Ph.D.'. Meanwhile students, when they go out looking for well-paying jobs, brandish an MBA on their CVs, with obnoxious grammar and spelling mistakes haloing that MBA.

Funny Ellipsis-using Boy

Pic taken from Indian National Congress' FB page

This isn't just about one politician. In fact, politics is only about such ramblings. Sometimes the ramblings come to be believed and politicians chance upon a windfall, on others they find critics like me.

Look at those words:

We want to give power to the people.

Since 'you' want to 'give power', of course who is going to hold the power. Because if you don't 'hold' power, how will you 'give'? In the case of your giving power to the people, can you specify how much power? Surely not enough to make them rise against you, right?

Your politics is our politics.

Whose politics? Poor people's? Is their hut your hut?

Your fight is our fight.

'Fight' implies an opponent. Who is that opponent? My proposal is that when we use the word 'fight', it should always be accompanied by the word 'against' and another word that is placed after 'against'.

So assuming it's FIGHT AGAINST ________. What fills the blank? Inflation? Wow! Assuming we can indulge in a 'fight against inflation', how exactly is the fight seen and measured?

What we have done so far is ensured the dumbness of most people in this country. Education hasn't been good enough to make most of us understand the dynamics of 'inflation'. If we can't completely fathom the dynamics of inflation then how do we fathom 'fight against inflation'.

Vote for him because he speaks the stuff that most of us don't understand.

Why 'staying fit' doesn't make sense?

Yes, there was a time when without moving the body and toiling it was difficult to earn one's bread. And most time was consumed by such moving and toiling. This moving, it seemed, made one hungry and this moving consumed all the energy one got from eating the food one earned by moving. The human will, it seemed, was one with the basic human need. Fitness (or perhaps if I can put it better, non-obese body) was a default condition.

But that's no longer the case. Food is available fairly conveniently. Moving the body and toiling for food doesn't apply to majority of human beings. Enduring the inconvenience of moving one's body to earn for food sounds preposterous for so many of us. Unfit bodies, especially the obese kinds, resulting out of minimal movement is common.

So we have a special problem. For a lot of us, the will (to move the body, for that's what is needed to exercise one's body and keep fit) has divorced from the basic need of obtaining food by moving and toiling. If I can say, moving one's body has lost the deep essential meaning it had once upon a time.

The story (oops, sorry the horror) of story-telling

When we watch these movies with insane twists and turns, heart-tearing agony and mind-numbing gore, in spite of the the happy endings, if we ask a question: what if we have to go through stuff like this? Phrase it differently: given any chance, would we have our own stories unfold like this?

Not that we have any more chance of controlling our life than that rock falling off from a cliff one fine day...

Come back to the questions. What if? Would we?

Difficult to nod in the 'yes', no? Mighty difficult. And yet we continue to hear and watch such stories like crazy, making these movies claim 'record breaking collections' in every other ad.

Perhaps thousands of years back, to watch someone else die, to watch someone else brutally torn to pieces meant that you were the one alive. The lucky one. You were the one to whom those things didn't happen. And you were the one wishing for those things never to happen to you.

And indeed, if you witnessed such events, you had to tell them to your village as a precautionary measure. The only way to tell was to act them out in full horror. But even in your wildest of dreams, in spite of the rampant possibility of such events unfolding, you wouldn't wish them to happen to you. Nor would anyone in the village would wish those things to happen to them.

So while you would feel the horror (empathize) judging from the enactment of horror, and feel it necessary to make use of every single chance to watch the horror (information for self-defense), you would never want the story-with-the-happy-ending to unfold in your life.

The security of a job has a similar explanation.

A Bedroom Story

That innocuous looking expression, bedroom, sometimes wreaks havoc in my evolving way of daily working.

Bed and room. Room is space. Bed is the object that occupies that space. I have a problem with occupation of space.

If space is the currency, then the best returns are obtained when it facilitates a range of movements. Putting a bed permanently in that space means now you can move through the space only in certain ways. To the extent of limitation in movements, returns diminish.

When I observe the birds make nests, I realize that they do so, not for their living, but for making sure that their young ones survive a certain amount of time after birth. After that phase, the nest might get destroyed. But birds fly and survive nonetheless.

It isn't a stretch of imagination to understand that houses must have been just a way of defense at one point. We have read about that some time in our life.

To raise a question like where do we sleep if we don't have bed, is to confuse the action of sleeping with the object, (a permanently space-occupying) bed. And that is a mighty confusion.

We will indulge in sleeping regardless of the fact there's a bed or not. When the per capita space is so limited anyway, and when we find ourselves in this weird state of working out like mannequins behind glass-windows of a showroom-like gym, I think it's time rethink the permanence of occupation of space by this thing called bed.

If bed were equal to sleeping, everyone should fall asleep as soon as one lies on the bed, no?

That last rhetorical question leads me to this inference. I sense since bed mightily limits the range of movements you can do in a given space, a lot of us find it difficult to sleep, in spite of the best of beds available to us.

You'll sleep, rest, relax only when the body moves. Body will move only when there's enough space to indulge in movement of all kinds. And in the same breath, body stays fit only when it undergoes a range of movements day after day.

So while moving and sleeping are important for fitness, a permanently space occupying bed might actually be working against both the actions.

Vibrams, the marketing thinking and the invisible style

Just came back from a 5km run in the backwoods in my Vibrams FiveFingers.

A little girl going to school watched the shoes and followed my moving feet with a sleepy curiosity. A taxi-driver followed my feet for a few seconds. A watchman (whom I encountered for the first time) at a neighborhood building followed my feet for a few seconds too. Sometimes even dogs look at my feet with curiosity.

When at Hiranandani Garden in Mumbai, quite a few fellow runners/walkers on the track look on with inquisitive eyes.

Over more than 2 years now, I've rarely encountered another person in my vicinity wearing Vibrams.

None of the people who've talked to me about Vibrams have ever admitted that they love the style. Strangely, it doesn't bother me. My feet feel so right, so very natural, so free.

That's the point. I am sure Vibrams must have been written to or informed by a mighty number of shoe-lovers about the 'ugliness' of the visual design. On the other hand, a mighty number of Vibrams wearers must have shared how amazing they feel on wearing the shoes.

Surely, exclusivity - even that of the weird or the incomprehensible which borders ugliness - is a style statement. But unless there's something substantial, such style statements are difficult to sustain.

In the case of Vibrams, the movement the shoes facilitate and the feeling arising out of that movement in the wearer, far surpass the awkwardness of visual style. In fact, if you video-record the movements/the action of someone wearing Vibrams, you might not find anything extraordinary either. And this someone won't stop wearing Vibrams.

Toyota's Express Maintenance is great strategy

I am not a great believer of the carzy ecosystem. But having bought and owned and maintained a car, this initiative makes perfect sense. In fact, more than perfect sense.

It's the kind of strategic move that was open to all the car brands of the country. But again it takes guts and simple observation of the customers' travails at the service stations to come up with such a move. Coming from a brand that promises Quality Revolution, it looks the right thing. Am sure this must have taken quite a bit of preparation to be able to promise such a thing.

Among those bullet points, look at the last one. Watch your car being serviced. And 60 Minutes Comprehensive Service.

I don't quite like the Toyota's styling department but if I were to buy another car today, this initiative would be enough to switch my mind to a Toyota.

The ad-driven revenue model for content sites

I have no problems with them from this moment. And here are some points.

I understand that advertisements offer a way for content-driven sites to survive and earn. So far it's innocuous.

I used to get disturbed whenever I clicked an ad flashing right beside the article I would be reading, or a promo-link embedded within a piece of text. Imagine rushing out of a meeting that felt like worthy of your time and never returning to the room again. What's the purpose of that publisher who published the text that resides beside the tempting ad?

The problem gets yet more compounded when the writer talks about the nuisance of using cars on the congested Indian roads and there's an ad promoting a long sedan right beside that post. What does a reader believe? What does a reader believe about what the publisher believes in? Is the aim of such publishing to make the reader understand the virtues of believing paradoxes? And does the reader visit such sites to learn the skill of paradox assimilation?

Motorcycle ads on motorcycle blogs seem a great match. Yesterday I visited this blog that I often visit. The post I was reading was cautiously critical of the move of launching Mahindra Centuro. Right beside I noticed an ad promoting that very motorcycle. No problem so far but if I had left the post midway by clicking the ad, guess it would be an incomplete sort of experience. I read the post and then checked out the motorcycle by clicking the ad. Felt appropriate.

And it isn't a stretch of imagination to apply these occurrences to other media like TV or Radio or newspaper/magazines et al. And I have no doubts that the damage to people's understanding of the world is unprecedented even though seemingly unmeasurable.

One thing I can say for such content-driven sites, where conflicts between advertising and their messages are rampant and blatant, is the publishers aren't doing enough to enhance a reader's understanding in spite of the revenues they earn because of the readers visiting their sites. I think that's such a waste of the opportunity that the readers have given them.

Smart phony and dizzy

I feel dizzy when I read on smart phones for slightly more than 2 minutes.

I felt that with the earlier handset too. Feel more with this handset, I sense. The inference that smart phones have become smarter at causing dizziness wouldn't be right though :).

I think quite a few people feel this. A few of my friends definitely do.

If it turns out a mighty serious issue in the times to come, I won't be surprised.

The problem is one of orientation.

Phones of course were largely meant for talking. Since we hear and talk through one-block-piece instrument, the design had to straddle the distance between ear and mouth and so it is the way it is. Vertically oriented.

But we started consuming a hell lot of videos and reading matter and games, all of which require our eyes to look at the screen that's perfect for a squirrel's eyes not ours. Why? Eyes are horizontally oriented.

But then the screens can be oriented horizontally for data consumption. And yet horizontally oriented screens are also very small to fit the eye-span without straining.

There could be other reasons too which strain the eyes (in turn leading to headaches and such issues) that interact with data on screens.

My reading is there will be a significant decline in the usage of smartphones (for data) in their current forms.

Even as I make the above statement I am aware that the penetration of smart phones is still in single digits, at least in India. Unless there's a really really smart solution to this orientation problem, laptops and less smarter mobile phones don't have much to worry.

"What do you want?" asks the shopkeeper

"Mug."

"Steel Mug?"

"No! Beer Mug."

"This one?"

"Yes somewhat like this, but with better design."

"Like this?"

"Ummm, not really. The earlier one was better. But I would like, ummmm, some design in red on the mug."

"Well, then..."

"Can you show me all the mugs you have?"

Words have an inverse relation with specificity! The latter demands micro-detailing. But every detail needs an additional word to be spelled out. The more micro you go, the more words needed to explain the 'micro' point.

Every additional word added to specifications rejects some products. If you want to check out a large array of products to see and feel stuff to help you determine what you want, do not deal with a lot of specifics. If you really really are sure of what you want, if your imagination's that immaculate, prepare for a good adventure.

Return on Formal Education (RFE)

Sharing some stats from this article I read two days back:

• India now produces more engineers and MBAs than the US and China combined. Our annual output of 15 lakh engineers and 3 lakh MBAs is way ahead of the US (1 lakh engineers and 1.25 lakh MBAs) and China (11 lakh engineers and 75,000 MBAs).
• MBAuniverse.com estimates that outside the top 20 MBA colleges only 24% of students are employable.
• Assocham believes that campus placement (in the context of engineering) outside the top 20 colleges is 10%.

The article also has some suggestions which is where it gets really funny. By funny, I mean the quality of suggestions, not really the stats. Stats aren't surprising at all. Have a look:

• They must get 3-5 years of work experience after their engineering or college degree before getting an MBA.
• If most students are not getting campus placements we need to fix our dysfunctional employment exchanges that only gave 3 lakh jobs last year to the 4 crore kids registered. We need to allow foreign universities in.
• We need to raise our 3 lakh formal apprenticeships — Germany has 40 lakh, Japan 1 crore and China has 1.5 crore.
• Most importantly, India must explode job creation because nothing changes a student's life more than their first formal, non-farm job. 

A critique of the article:
While every action or piece of execution benefits from good measurement systems and the stats emerging out of these measurement systems, the recommendations offered in this article reek of naivete at best. Even offering only the stats would've done better justice to the gravity of the situation.

Find the article here. 

"You have to do this."

Or, "This is the task ahead of us."

The first one's a command emerging out of one's superiority complex. It might not evoke a response as much as it demands a report. Therefore, good big hierarchical set ups so often have reporting as a behavior, instead of responding, among their employees.

My sense is, reporting corrodes, responding creates.

47% graduates in India unemployable for any job

From Hindustan Times, Mumbai Edition, 25th June 2013

This little piece appeared in a little column which could easily have been missed (and in fact, would have been missed by plenty of readers, if not majority).

Generations must have passed through years and years of education without leaving a trace of any worthwhile work. Incredible! How does a country change? How does a country choose the right people to rule itself? How does a country make sense of anything important at the macro level? How does a country take constructive collective action at all?

2 ways come to mind promptly: 1) finding some space for such news on the main page so long as people still habitually read newspapers in the morning, and 2) allotting greater space to such news, at least greater than the coaching class ads that boast of top-rankers in this exam or that exam.

Why MBAs so often suck?

Because the guys tried memorizing from the textbooks and then cleared the exams to get the MBA certifications.

Textbooks are like ready-made gourmet platters. The metaphor sounds nice until we realize that gourmet can still find good space in a stomach and be digested. If only one could lick up the words and store them in the memory bin to be digested. Mighty difficult. Digestion in the head takes doing things with hands, legs and heads together and associating the words and concepts neatly explained and organized in the textbook with the sequentially messy things happening in the world outside the textbook. This kind of digestion is painful.

MBAs, by and large, don't remember all of the textbook. Besides, they typically find it difficult to move hands, legs and heads together in any kind of rhythm. Besides lack of rhythm, all want insane amounts in salaries for that very special exhibition of lack of rhythm.

Everyone's watching.

Look what the kids found... p***!

There's this huge ground right beside the building where Mississippi is located. Sometimes, people are seen scavenging for whatever they can extract value/utility out of. A couple of days back, I spotted these two kids picking some papers up. I zoomed and clicked. This is what I found.

Incidents are symptoms. Society doesn't fail when incidents happen. Society fails when it lets such accidents happen. It fails when it doesn't have enough play spaces to offer to its young ones. It fails when it doesn't have enough people with time to spend wondering with its young ones.