Sunday Posts

Back in Britain, I am struggling to keep my upbeat mood despite the weather. This has been a particularly nasty winter, all over the Northern Hemisphere I am given to understand. Returning from India, which has also enjoyed a 'good' winter this year, the contrast is mind-numbing. One feels happy about winter with 23 degrees in Mumbai , but despises it when it turns to snow, worse, sleet, and minus 3 degrees in Croydon . The immediate casualty was my resolve to resume my morning runs. I started it, and dropped it after I realized all my colleagues in India knew about the schedule and started calling me up at 5am in the morning. It invaded my Sunday mornings too, and made my life rather miserable [and this is also the time when I had a particularly nasty run-in with one of the business associates]. Things are much more settled now, and I was hoping that I can go back to those morning runs and double them up as meditative periods. But this winter has come in the way. I am a mornin...

Next time I need to ship something, I won't use Fedex . This is because of a simple error made by the person who attempted delivery of a package to me yesterday and left a Sorry We Missed You card. The error is that instead of writing the Airway Bill number on the card, he wrote my phone number instead. It did not take me long to recognize it. But, then after a maze of phone calls to different call centres and depots, I realized how de -humanized the system has become, and how this simple error can not be rectified. Now, the package has to be sent back and the original sender has to contact me again. What a waste of energy, time, every resource and disruption even, of businesses and even business relationship. I can think of a whole story plot that can come out of it. Even a possible title, Fedex fails to deliver. But, this isn't funny. I am trying to laugh because I don't have a choice. There was no point being angry with anyone. The Call Centre workers could not do anyt...

I have now discovered the obvious - a positive attitude does help. Though much has not changed, and if anything, world around me has become more complicated rather than easy, I am trying hard to carry around the new year spirit. And, to my surprise, I can see that it is making an enormous difference. I could already see the impact of a different attitude, when, instead of being weighed down by a multitude of problems, I decided to disentangle them and tried solving them one by one. Getting the corporate training business going was one of them. It was on my agenda for a while, and I could see clear opportunities. However, it was me who was unnecessarily complicating things by connecting up various issues together - for example, I thought it is a moral obligation for me to refer any business that I have ever discussed or remotely been involved into to my employers. This stalled everything, as a multitude of executives sitting in a distant countryside needed to take decisions on whether t...

I am back in England, finally. This was a gruelling trip, physically as well as emotionally. In the end, I feel somewhat good though. In a way, less confused. Work that needs to be done appears clearer now, and I seem to have a plan for my life. The search seems to have ended. Let me talk about work today and explain why I seem to be so confused. Those who read my blog know that I go through this unending cycle of optimism and despair all the time. This is because I believe in what I am doing. I do believe that the project at hand - of adapting an international curricula for English Language training and dovetailing with various vocational training programmes for Asian markets - has game-changing potential. It fits just right with what's happening in the world, the emergence of Asian consumers as buyers and European companies as knowledge exporters etc. If I could focus on just one thing for the rest of my life, I would choose this trade all over again. But, the market and the obvi...

My standard refrain to my British friends who say India is poor and ugly is that the Seventeenth century British expats to India used to be told the same things about Britain. What I don't say, however, is that I am developing this belief that history has some sort of circularity. This is not to say progress does not happen. Individual human beings are irrepressibly innovative and they keep pushing the boundaries of thought through their behaviour and action. But, somehow, our social actions are much less progress-prone, as if bound by some sort of gravity or the necessities of collective naivety , and the circularity in our social action occurs in spite of individual innovation and progress. Living in Britain in the twenty-first century, despite the many comforts and possibilities of life, it still seems that the history will re-occur. Not unlike the British visitors in seventeenth century in India, I see a society with great material progress and artistic and cultural achievemen...

I always feel very melancholy in Delhi. It is not like Mumbai , where the world seems to revolve around you all the time, drawing you in it all the time. The feeling in Mumbai is of getting drawn in, getting excited. I always feel an urge to return, to participate, in India's growth story. The opportunities, and better, possibilities, keep popping up everywhere. But, Delhi is different. Here, an outsider like me feels excluded, rather lonely, and is usually left to find ways on one's own. Besides, Delhi makes me feel threatened a bit, the who's-who society of India is in full display here, and being no one is not good here. It is not an insecurity in my heart; in fact, I am no one by choice, by course of my quest to be myself. And, in Delhi, your visiting card must precede you - most of the times an uneasy feeling! But, to be honest, I may have to spend some time in Delhi in the next few months. This is one city I haven't spent time in. May be, I shall become comforta...

It seems that Shiv Sena and RSS are inching towards a full scale ideological battle, as the former is bent on stealing the MNS agenda of ' Mumbai for Maharastrians ' and RSS is scrambling to protect their Hindu nationalist identity. The statement from RSS looks very non- RSS , ' Mumbai is for people from all communities'. BJP is caught in the crossfire - its chief Nitin Gadkari definitely looked lost and short of words and ideas - and does not know how to keep its alliances in Mahastra and Bihar intact at the same time. Despite the chaos, one has to admit that such conflicts are likely to become increasingly common in India. The biggest casualty of such disagreements are going to be the national parties, BJP in this case. However. Maharastra Congress has done itself no favours by stoking up the sentiments in the first place, with a rather naive posturing on taxi drivers requiring to know Marathi, a position from which they had to do a humiliating about-turn...

As I write this, I can't stop measuring how far I have come with regard to my new year agenda. Last day of January, a month wheezed past already, means that I am already done with a third of my 100 day plan period, which is supposed to change my life. Besides, one-twelfth of the year, if I must be reminded, is already over. Reflecting back, I have reasons to be happy. I have achieved a big leap - a freedom from my sense of guilt, the overwhelming sense of responsibility that I felt at my work to get things done. Two reasons: First, I realized that what I am now putting together is the only sensible way to run the business, given the commitment levels of the investors. Second, I also noticed that I am being manipulated for my self-imposed sense of responsibility, a state of affairs I should not tolerate for much longer. Besides, I felt a sense of commitment to my customers, individuals those who invested money on my bidding. One could possibly argue that it was a commercial decisi...

West Bengal Assembly Polls are due next year. This may become a watershed poll, the first one after Jyoti Basu's death, and one that may push CPIM out of power after more than 33 years. In fact, it seems that all of India is waiting to see that happen. There is an expectation in West Bengal building up, because after years of misrule and stagnation, Bengal's moment may just come to join the party in India. But this is still not certain, if newspaper stories have to be believed. There seems to be an ongoing tussle between the temperamental Trinamool Congress chief, Mamta Banerjee , and the Congress party. Ms Banerjee seems to believe that she is doing a favour by aligning with congress, when the truth is the other way round. And, while Ms Banerjee has been a political survivor in her career, no one can credit her with political astuteness. So, the odds are that she will cross the threshold and the TNC -Congress alliance will not last till the election. This will almost ce...

I have been in India for almost two weeks now. This visit has turned out differently from any of the other times, as a clear agenda emerged during the course of the visit which set up my plans for my eventual return to India. This was always on the cards, agreed. But it was always difficult to see, and to reconcile various objectives that competed for my time overall was proving difficult. However, this time, various interactions during this visit gave me rather obvious pathways to achieve both of my objectives - to find a permanent solution to the business I run and to map my next few years into a different role and reality. On those two counts, the visit has gone well so far. I have made some significant progresses on both counts. There were usual surprises, and my optimism was defied. Besides, more than once, the limitations of my own proposals were laid bare in front of my eyes, and I had very little to defend. In my opinion, I did put up a fairly brave front, but, as I know from m...