Sunday Posts

I am still wandering. But I have one dilemma to add to my list of dilemmas. This is about my political belief. I am one of those liberals who feel increasingly homeless. At a time when everyone is choosing sides and all conversations are increasingly ideological, my attempts feel increasingly futile. My biggest trouble is that I don't know what's right or wrong anymore. All 'experts' seem compromised, driven by agendas of their own. After the demise of subscriber-sponsored media, ad-supported news have very little credibility. Some high-value media brands, perhaps they can afford to attract subscribers paying for it (such as The Economist, which I continue to read), are perhaps exempt, but they struggle to escape the Anglo-American neo-imperialism which offends the Indian in me.  Further, I do get questioned whether I am right-wing or left-wing. In the past year, I have been classed as Fascist at least once (though not through an action of my own, but as a matter of col...

The ability to fall in love makes us human. It is a complex feeling, the interplay of hormones and the perfect poise of rationality and the irrational, sitting just beyond our understanding - only just! And, therefore, it's hard to explain. We try poor explanations too often: Something to be, something to possess. And, yet, at the core, this is to give, give away, care for something, or someone, other than ourselves - making us greater than we really are. This feeling sustains our most intimate bonds, nations, humanity, but we neither understand nor control it. And that's perhaps for the better: If we knew where the kill switch was, we would have killed it a long time ago. Contra Darwin, falling in love perhaps serves no evolutionary purpose. At its core, it is about giving away, working against the selfish gene, just enough to keep it in check. However, this gives us poetry, art and all what is beautiful and non-essential in our language. The creative impulse wouldn't exis...

It is common to see the lament about the death of expertise. People don't believe in experts anymore, commentators say, and blame this tendency for the allegedly irrational direction that the Western democracies have taken lately. The trouble with this version, aside from the experts complaining about their own lack of influence, is that it subjects the experts to very little scrutiny.  It's worthwhile to think, therefore, what's the right question to ask. Is it that people have lost faith on experts without any apparent reason? Or, have the experts failed and the lack of popular trust in them is anything but irrational? To answer this, it's instructive to look at what has been happening with expertise over the last decade and a bit. As some commentators have pointed out, these were years of the emergence of an 'ideas industry', dominated by what is euphemistically called 'thought leadership'. If one has to put a date on the birth of thought ...

I can never get used to the concept of wasted time. I know the common way of thinking that one has a sort of fixed lifetime, and if a period, however brief, was spent not pursuing something meaningful, it is a waste. However, if one looks beyond the obvious, there are couple of questions to ask: How do you know how much time you have to live? And, how do you know you have not pursued a meaningful goal unless you tried? If these questions sounded silly, let me try harder. I spent a few minutes this afternoon sitting in Tavistock Square. I did nothing: It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and sunny, the very best British summer could be. Olympics have scared away the tourists, in fact pretty much everyone, from London, so it was quieter and emptier than usual. I did not read, or think of anything. There was the statue of Gandhi, sitting as if in meditation, to look at, but I did not particularly notice him today. I was waiting, indeed, for a phone call, which was to tell me what to do...

I am having loads of fun being subversive. I am a bit of a non-conformist. That bit did not change since my school days. What changed is that I usually kept quiet, kept my head down and accepted the way of the world over mine. No longer: I have lately become aware of my mortality - that I am old and don't have much time left to let the world go by - and now refuse to give up and go quietly. Being a non-conformist has its own problems. You become sensitive to the fact that everyone may have an opinion - a different opinion. Since you expect your opinions to be heard, respected, you start respecting everyone's points of view too. This makes you an indefatigable learner. This opens your mind, stop you from being a bore, forever. However, at the same time, this may drown you down, and crowd you out. I must admit that this has happened in my life quite a few times, particularly in my life in England: It is a masculine world where you must push your views around to be heard. I paid ...

This post refers to the Guest Post made on this blog by Angelita Williams, but also more broadly to the public discourse on generational labelling, in particular Kenneth Gronbach's The Age Curve . I have always thought Generational Labelling to be a bit mindless, particularly as generational wars are being fought around them. Disliking Generation Y, undermining Generation X, admiring Baby Boomers etc are necessary for newspapers to sell copies, but not necessary for us in our family and work lives and friendships that we form. There are three clear problems with generational labelling. First, it stereotypes: How can we assert that someone born on the 1st of January 1985 will be fundamentally different from someone born at some point of time in 1984. Going by Mr Gronbach's categorization, 31st December 1984 will be the dividing line between Generation X and Generation Y. One can indeed argue that the person born on or after a certain date may have a fundamentally different l...

I am not yet in Christmas mode. Really. I still have a very busy six weeks to go. In fact, these last six weeks appear all important - as important as the last few pages of a novel - where a conclusion must be reached. So, I am not in a summary mode yet. However, I have indeed reached a moment of reflection - a point when I can look back a bit and start thinking what I learnt [and what I still haven't] - which may make these final six weeks more meaningful and interesting. Contrary to my previous expectations, 2009 did not turn out to be my worst year yet. Instead, it was, like for many people across the world, a lost year. In my life, if it did not happen, it almost would not have mattered. That is a frank admission - I almost sleepwalked through the year, expecting that things would be worse than it actually turned out to be. So, I gained nothing and am standing, at the end of the year, where I was twelve months back. I can easily project back to a year back - the days before 26/...

While I am back into my crazy travel routine, crisscrossing Asia and trying to give a shape, finally, to our training business, the question whether we live in an age of scarcity or of abundance dominated my thoughts. I have spoken to people about this, and also privately debated the concepts: I even made an earlier post on this blog talking about my anguish for not being able to accept abundance paradigm when I actually see so much misery across the world. Anguish, because I am also mindful of the fact that most of these miseries are created by the scarcity mentality in the first place. While I mocked Chris Anderson's concept of FREE and talked about zero-pricing death, life and time, I am also conscious that unless we can move into the abundance paradigm, we don't really escape our animal selves and the narrow spheres we live in. Unless we feel free from scarcity, we can not really give; unless we feel the abundance, we can not overcome the fears that dominate our lives and r...