Measuring Distraction

I knew I would write this post right after I scanned this piece of paper. And yet, what did I do? I opened an email which led me to open another link before I reminded myself that since I had scanned the format, I should write this post.

If your mobile phone and laptop suck up your time and leave you tired without any feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day, you might just want to do this exercise for a few days and measure your DISTRACTION QUOTIENT.

If you look at the sheet, you'll see 4 columns. You'll also see some symbols and words highlighted in green.

The first 2 columns are sort of 'purposeful'. Obviously, we use mobile phones and laptops for purposeful activities. So the first 2 columns give you the space to record what you consciously decide to do using these gadgets. They are marked with 'right tick' on top. You can fill these columns well in advance.

The 3rd and 4th columns are meant to record the instances of 'unintentional' or 'undetermined' use of these gadgets. The kind of thing I did (narrated right at the start of this post) before I started writing this post. You would fill these columns only after you've distracted yourself and done something which wasn't quite consciously determined in advance.

The ratio of the number of items in the first two and the number of items in the last two should give your DISTRACTION QUOTIENT. I hope you would know how to interpret that ratio :).

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.

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.

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. 

Tangentially Applied Principles of Economics

The law of diminishing marginal returns applies to India's 24x7 reproductive machinery too. 

I will fail to list a great source which corroborates this claim but if our feelings are any measure of the phenomenon, then we've been witnessing negative returns for decades and decades together.

Let's say there's a subject called Tangentially Applied Principles of Economics (let me give a sexy sounding glamorous abbreviation too: TAPE. If this isn't sexy, please contribute :{). If our entire education system gets dedicated somehow, directly or indirectly, to teach just this one subject and make ourselves understand just this one single point and act upon it, it would take care of a hell lot of troubles.

Am happy

From a student at T.I.M.E. Ahmedabad:

Thank you Sir,
Your concept of creativity
helped me a lot to convert
#$$#^%$^ call. Regards
to you Sir. Thank you so
much.

* Institute name in the above message obscured by me

* Center aligned by me. Division of message-lines, courtesy my BB screen