Sunday Posts

My current mood was best displayed on my car's windscreen this morning: frozen on both sides. I am okay with cold, but this extreme winter is somehow playing havoc on my mind; this became amplified when I realized that I not only have to clear the snow that covers the outside of the windscreen, but inside it is frost too, frozen vapour, if that expression is valid. So started my day, struggling to get the car going after a cleanup, while my hand was feeling the freezing cold from inside the gloves. Work life has, however, began at all earnestness. While my email is still down, and this gives me a feeling of emptiness of some kind, I realized that there are two kinds of feelings all around me: Those who are giving up and those who are starting fresh. There are lots of people who are in the process of giving up: They somehow survived till Christmas in the hope of a turnaround in the fourth quarter and can not go on any more. I received calls from two close friends, coincidentally on...

I had a slow and late start of my 100 day project. I have this psychological rule that any day I get up late, I end up wasting. Today was one such day. The weather was sunny and bright, but very cold, easily below freezing, and I, despite warning myself many times that the holidays are over and setting up the alarm at my usual 5am time, felt too lazy to leave the comfort of the bed till about 7:30. And, that nailed it - this late start meant that I regretted it all day and did not do much. I had a full diary, complete with urgent issues. There were emails to be sorted out, reports to be sent, customers to be contacted, contracts to be written. But, it was one of those days, when everything runs into a road block. A simple task like making my travel plans and tickets to India took me much longer than anticipated. Somehow, the Emirates system was slow, and my calls to the Skywards call centre repeatedly got lost. I finally managed it by calling the number meant to be called if I am calli...

I am doing the usual - making a plan for 100 days starting tomorrow. That will take me through to 13 th of April. In the past, such 100 day projects helped me to transform my life. I am hoping to achieve the same again. This time, my agenda is similar: To be able to live a life in line with my own dreams and aspirations. I have tried that before, but I think this time I have a clearer view of what I want. More importantly, this time, I am more confident on clearly communicating my goals, less tolerant to adjustments and just more hungry. I hope I can start living a new life if I achieve all the goals I am setting myself up with. So, what are the goals? I know that you don't talk about goals openly lest you prove to be a failure, but then I don't fear failure or think they are a particularly bad thing. In fact, absence of failure may be worse, because that indicates that one never tried. So, if I sound a bit pompous here, forgive me - my habit is to try more than I can do witho...

Well, yes, that's me. I thought I shall start with myself this year. As I make a fresh start, in almost everything and make an attempt to adopt a new way of looking at things. To start with, I had to give this blog a character. Over last year, I made 276 posts, mostly original bits and pieces, to keep practising my writing. But, it has come to a point that I should make it more professional, well, because I have started getting comments and contributions. It is not about being vain about myself, but respecting other people's seriousness, and becoming serious myself. The first thing, then, I had to decide what this blog is about. I have been writing about everything that came to my mind. I have quite varied interest, which can be summarized as State Of The World, but that is like making a short story out of an Encyclopedia . I have been reading and posting things about economics, psychology, education, India, politics and generally my life and work. This was fun, writing withou...

I found Paul Krugman's The Big Zero - how the first decade of the twenty-first century eroded value rather than creating - interesting. This article is deservedly having an impact and references to the Big Zero are springing up everywhere, at least in the liberal press. Many people may actually disagree, particularly in India, which has gained significantly over the last decade, and thousands, if not millions, have their lives transformed by the emergent opportunities in various industries. So, it may be worthwhile to look at Krugman's assessment on balance, and see whether it is fair to write off this decade as a time when nothing happened. In all fairness, Krugman was writing about America. As most American commentators tend to do, he treated the American economic universe as his primary field of observation. And, no doubt, for all the talk of recovery, the mood is particularly gloomy in America. America lost, over all, during the last ten years. It is not just about the e...

Shashi Tharoor's tweets have been extremely popular, candid and humorous . But somehow the government manages to make itself embarrassed on these, and the recent statement by S M Krishna, Tharoor's boss and the Foreign Minister, that he should discuss his 'perceptions' within the 'Four Walls' of the government and not tweet is a clear reflection how uncomfortable the powers that be are. I am little surprised that we talk about the 'Four Walls' of the government. Where are those walls, really? This sounds too Kremlin- ish : That's not surprising because some of our Senior Ministers and bureaucrats cut their teeth in the old days of Indo -Soviet friendship and refuse to let go the old ways of life. The other two walls I know of - one is in China and the other was in Berlin - are not the right symbols for our government to choose. So, what is Mr. Krishna talking about? What did Mr. Tharoor say on Twitter? He said that the dilemma we have is whethe...

I found this article by Paul Krugman and ended up agreeing to most of what it says. I reproduce the article in full below. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn’t begin until 2001. Do we really care?) But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true. It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first de...