On Christmas

Of all the festivals in the packed Indian calendar, Christmas occupies a somewhat special place in my mind. I mean, I like Diwali - that's usually when one can be at home for long stretches and meet family, and I despise Holi - no offense meant to Bhakt Prahalad, but I just don't do colours and hooliganism, I have started liking Chhath since the whole issue of Heartland sub nationalism has grown up, and other religious holidays for me are simply that only, i.e. holidays. The national holidays, the way we celebrate them in our country, remain, sadly, official occasions only. So, in a land which has around 20 Gazetted Holidays, 40 Restricted Holidays and 5000 years of culture and civilization, I am stuck up on a festival which originated outside of India. I have never fully understood why. The right wing will term me as a westernized RNI (that's resident non-Indian), but I know that is not true. Let me clarify that my own Christmas is not the "canonical Christmas", but the "Santa Claus Christmas". This Christmas has been despised by almost all 'religious' people. The really devout amongst the Christians find it as gross commercialization and trivialization. Closer home, it is seen as the evil effect of 'Westernization'. Yet, this ostensibly unwanted 'commercialized' festival has been spreading across the globe, even into the atheist China despite all the odds. Why? While for others, there might be various reasons, I feel for me, it is a festival that matches me.

I am a winter person. I love almost everything about winters - except, may be, for delayed trains. I mean winter, warts and all - not the bright sunshine alone. I love the cold waves, I love the hail, and the occasional snow. So any festival whose main motifs are associated with the celebration of winter is always going to be good for me. Frosty the snowman, Santa's sleigh, reindeer, conifers - it is all perfect mix of the whole winter deal. Closer home, anything remotely close to a winter festival is Diwali / Chhath - but again, that is hardly related with winter except for the fact that it heralds it. We have festivals that sort of celebrate the ending of winter, in various phases - like the Makar Sankranti, Basant Panchami etc. The only festival that sounds anything like being related to winters is Sharad Poornima, but then, I've never seen it's popular celebration to judge whether it suits my taste or not.

Secondly, in my opinion, it is a festival meant for largely quiet and placid enjoyment. Both 'quiet and placid' and 'enjoyment' are important qualifiers here. As a culture, we lack quiet enjoyment - it is reflected in all facets of our cultural expression - our folklore, our dances, our festivals and our Bollywood. All our enjoyment is supposed to be loud - the Bhangra, the Holi and the Munni Badnaam Hui's. Quiet is meant to be dull, didactic. Our quieter festivals are much more about fasting, staying all chaste and pure and praying devoutly. In fact, much of our life is not meant for enjoyment - even our kiddie books are loaded with 'shikshaa', which is forced down one's gullet with a ram - remember those stories in magazines like Champak and Chandamama etc. (Then they wonder why kids are shunning these didactic works of literature for 'western inputs' like the Harry Potter series!) It suffices to say that most of our culture is not very fond of enjoyment of life as a whole. Our family ties are supposed to be built of respect and authority, which are our society's cherished values, as against love alone. May be all that lack of enjoyment leads to the over the top celebration whenever we get the chance. We do not have our festive equivalents of sitting near a hot fireplace, sipping chocolate or soup and just enjoying the moment, giving small gifts and opening them near the hearth. May be that is one need which is fulfilled by this festival alien to the indigenous culture.

Again, it might simply be all the Enid Blytons I have read in my childhood, and all the Christmas songs I have heard and enjoyed. A line or two about the songs would be necessary here. Many of them are plain worldly songs, about celebration. the religious reference in most has been kept subtle, and the tune is soothing, even in the one's that are about the Christ - 'Silent Night' playing somewhere far away on a cold winter night is just heaven. Last night, near midnight, when I stood in the cool night breeze on my balcony, with the Carpenters' rendition of the song playing from inside, I felt happy, despite all the troubles I have been having all the week. For my Christmas celebration is a thing where no evil eye can cast its glance. It is one spot of light in an otherwise dark world. So, build a nice fire - or turn on that blower. Cozy up in that blanket, with someone, if you have someone - or alone - doesn't matter. Don't forget to brew yourself some hot coffee and chocolate before cozying up. Switch on a new show of "Love Actually", or simply read a warm romance. For 'tis surely a season to be jolly!

The Flotsam of the Raj

Most people like to reminisce about the good old days. It may come naturally to the old fogies, and it is not uncommon among the 'young' too. May be, in a young country, there is this relative age, and hence normal people, who would be termed young in any normal population, are some what old with respect to the population. On the other hand, it may be this culture of ours that expects unquestioned obedience of the elderly that entices people to grey up at an accelerated pace. I am digressing - I just wanted to say that many of my classmates and colleagues review, with rose tinted devices, their school days, and their college days - especially the 'fun' they had when they were ragged (hazed, for my non existent American readers). It may not really matter that it might have been only 10 years at most since they have left school, and 8-9 years since their ragging period - they'd speak about it as if they went to school during the War. I thought I was one of the rationalists, for I remembered how insecure a school student really is. Hood may say,

"But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from heav'n
Than when I was a boy."

However, I'd like to argue with the poet. Losing the heaven on the penthouse might have been a big loss, but that's nothing compared to the joys of adulthood - being able to go and take a leak without an embarrassing 'Miss, may I go to the toilet' and not being worried to death because one has lost one's pencil or eraser. The other thing was 'ragging' - don't even get me started on that one - to those who remember it fondly, I have one word to describe you - sick perverts (wait, that's two words - but then, they are used as one, just like ‘time and tide’). That may be a harsh judgement, but then, if your idea of fun includes holding a person's wee-wee, and having someone hold yours, all the while marching in a file as 'Nagla Express', that's what you are. So, I was thinking I was so much 'in touch' with the feeling of the oppressed categories of young people that I got a shock of my life when I had to relive those feelings and those insecurities once more and I felt so uncomfortable. For no one thing in the world forces one to relive all the bad school memories clubbed with the college ragging trauma the way a particular Programme in the Service does.

Set in the sylvan outskirts of a royal city, the College does not look like a sad place to begin with. In fact, it isn't. Since it is the home for my own cadre, I have spent some really good moments here. The accommodation and the works here are top-notch, especially for some one who has been exposed to the crumbling D-wing of Jwalamukhi hostel. Our sessions are held in a real palace of the erstwhile ruling house of the city. The schedule is hectic, but contained, and after a good class session, one has almost all major sports to choose from - I personally prefer swimming. Hearty meals, and nice strolls around the campus, and one is good for bed - life's good. However, in the midst, periodically, like the floods of Damodar, come things like the Programme. Ostensibly, it is supposed to make raw young recruits into 'gentlemen and lady Officers' - by 'improving their personality' and 'giving multidimensional inputs'. I have no trouble with the latter - these might not be the best classes I have ever attended, but they are generally amongst the better ones. However, I do have serious doubts about the efficacy of, and for that matter, the intention behind a lot of meaningless pageantry we have been witness to. I shall write, at some length, on both, taking up the issue of efficacy first, and giving people the benefit of doubt with regards to intentions. After all, it has been said, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

So, we are to become officers, and to develop (magically sprout) 'officer like qualities' in these 10 weeks. Good. So what is a good Service Officer like? Coming from a Service family, and a Service School, I have seen many Service officers. Barring one or two dandies, no one I have seen was as straitlaced as the ideal that has been set up in front of us. Even the dandies got their comeuppance - I have heared the case where a visiting principal HOD was so enraged to find a new assistant officer in suit that he fired him in front of all, and then made him run around the works for the whole day, till the time the suit met it's untimely demise! This service is field service, and for God's sake, it is not the Army - howsoever much some of our senior officers would like to believe. It does not need the glamour and pomp of the Army Cantonment life. It is good to take pride in being one of the Raj's legacies, but for heaven's sake, let's not actually try to relive the Raj (this one coming from a Raj history enthusiast). As a field service which is not the Army, the organisation needs to develop it's sartorial sense and identity accordingly - which in my opinion, includes sober T-shirts, lycra enmeshed jeans and Woodland shoes. Okay, if the guys want to live their suits and ties fantasies in here, there is a proper place for that - strictly office hours. But dinner? Come on! Are we really expected to go to the fields and the gym, sweat it out and come back and don all those formals again for supper, or one is supposed to remain in the formals till supper, and swim after that? Of the two stupidities, I've chosen the latter, and hence this piece has materialised, after a drought of more than two years. The 'lace and velvet' dinner wardrobe was developed when 'lace and velvet' was the only 'presentable' dress. The rolling wheel of time has given us many acceptable 'dinner wear' options. Let's evolve. The fashion policing has been reminding us of the days when one could get into trouble for losing the school tie or belt. My roommate was asking whether we could stroll in slippers. Really, is this what we are trying to make here - diffident wrecks and overgrown school boys? Apart from this assault on our wardrobes, many other PDP type activities look quite useless to be frank. For most of the skills that we are supposed to develop, the ship has already sailed. The mean age of the group is 28 years - these are not college kids, who can be converted, that too in 10 weeks, into Ivy League's dream students. It's clear to us - crystal clear. It would be a reasonable assumption that it is so clear to the powers that be too. That brings us to the question of intention.

Of all the things that stand out on the basis of sheer oddity, the PT is the most 'outstanding', if I may use the word in an ironic sense. The basic idea peddled here is that one has to be 'fit' in the service of the lifeline of the nation. So noble a motive, you might say. However, barring a few persons, yours truly included, most of the new batch is quite fit, and almost all, again yours truly included (at least till the fashion policing made it difficult), participate in some sort of physical activity, whenever the powers that be are benevolent enough to leave our evenings free. If this is a health and fitness thing, why doesn't the older resident population follow through, since they must be in the need of fitness much more - handling work pressure of elevated posts and battling ageing all at once. Why this insistence on shorts in cold December morning? I think the answer is that it is an exercise simply to show a person 'his place'. Looked at from this angle, it all starts falling into place. I mean, what can show a person that he is worth a piece of festering turd in a more emphatic manner than calling him in half nudity in wee hours of the morning to gyrate his hips at the command of his supposed subordinate. All the other inanities of this Programme, all the useless pageantry that we are supposed to do but others aren't, are, in sum, a big bird flipped in one's face. It's a triumphant, "Yes, We can! (make you do all this, and there isn't a goddamned thing you can do about it, coz we got the Bomb - bless Dennis Leary).” Can the reader notice the similarity between this and the other two experiences of the youth? This is the same life that school kids live - with separate standards for themselves and the grown ups. This is the way ragging in college happens - a bright young person is made to do things against his / her will despite there being no logically arguable reason behind that, except for the presence of absolute power and the need to exercise it with impunity, or may be the fact that the perpetrator was a victim once, as is true in this case too. Let me tell the readers, it wasn't pretty 10 years back, and it isn't pretty now. I hope this blog and this service survives to the day when one is able to have a say in the way the show is conducted, so that one is reminded that the old, romantic days were not so romantic, and one can make the changes that need to be made without being nostalgic. Many who know me know that I never forget any injury inflicted on me by anyone - and they attribute it to some 'hit list' I am keeping for exacting retribution in the future. While that is an interesting idea, it is not true. I just try to keep these negative experiences alive in my mind (unsuccessful, to a large extent I may be) in order to take my own decisions in their light, so that someone else’s life may not contain them. Let’s hope so, because, as Andy Dufresne said to Red in The Shawshank Redemption, “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

LIVE FROM LIFE -THE EARTH HOUR

The lights have gone, as had been said. This is going to be the longest power cut I may have to witness in this 8 month stay at the IIT Delhi – where power cuts mean small 20 seconds flip – flops. The occasion is the celebration of the Earth Hour. A ‘voluntary’ moratorium on the use of electricity for one hour on 28th of March, 2009. Well, the voluntary nature of the drive has been lost somewhere in the translation from I.A.S. - level English to peon - level English, because I heard the mess workers saying that the lights will be shut down, per force, from the main board, for an hour – like the blackouts during an air raid. As they had said, the power has gone, and I am left with an hour with only my laptop as a companion. Luckily its batteries are not under the jurisdiction of the administration of IIT Delhi!

Well, let me make myself very clear – I am not one of those who support indiscriminate exploitation of the Earth for human greed. Yet, I am definitely against the environmentalists and their gimmicks. In fact I am against any sort of gimmick, especially if it is purportedly based on some ‘serious’ issue. I feel the gimmicks make a mockery of the issues involved. I hate the candlelight vigils and candle light vigilantes, I hate human chains, the rallyists, the pamphleteers and I hate the Earth hour. So I intend to justify my hate in the following lines.

First of all, there is the simple cost benefit analysis. How much electricity will they save – if we do turn down our electrical systems for a measly hour in this long period of unabated industrial usage? I am sure more electricity would have been used in the publicity for the event. Quite a lot of trees would have been felled for the pamphlets.

Secondly, would it be wise to suddenly unload all our power plants and power infrastructure? I am not an electrical engineer, but I have read a little bit about power generation turbines, and a sudden 8:30 unloading by the whole population might be too much too quick for the governors and other feedback controlled devices there. Again, I am not crunching the numbers (simply because governors are the toughest things in the Theory of Machines!) but seriously, it is a step that might be regretted later – for a week or two.

Thirdly, how is a power cut of an hour any sort of Earth hour celebration in India? I do not know much about the durations of power cuts, but I would guess 83 % of Indian cities would be celebrating 3 to four hours of Earth Hour every day. The provincial towns might be dedicating half the day to the celebrations, while most villages would do so for about 20 hours. In fact, there are villages in India which have been celebrating Earth since the start of their existence – where people live and die celebrating an Earth lifetime! So, I am really amused when the green-wallahs direct us to celebrate Earth Hour – aren’t you?


[ As I finish typing this, the power returned – not the full hour! May be it was not even about the Earth Hour, but the violent thunderstorm that is raging outside. Still, it felt good writing it, so I am going to post it.]

LIVE FROM LIFE - THE LAWS OF THE LAND

Recently, a discussion on Orkut's IC 370 (India) community touched the topic of corruption in civil administration and police. This made me think a lot on an important point that I have been thinking about for long, but in another case. The point is that we have lot of inconsequential laws and rules. Laws which were useless to begin with and laws which have been rendered useless by the passage of time. Laws that place undue restrictions on people, and give the enforcers the leeway to extract bribes. I will try to keep it short. Let us begin with why do we need rules in this world, when it is assumed that all men are born free (and so are the women, I am no sexist). Of course there are people called anarchists, who believe the best law is no law. Everybody is free to do what they may like. Utopia - did you say? Wait a little - what would happen if some lunatic took to the idea that he would 'like' to run a dagger through your guts? Or for that matter, what if he would like to run his Hummer over you, for fun? We need laws - just to avoid people hurting others while exercising there freedom. As has been said - your freedom to swing your arms ends where the other person's nose begins. This can be extrapolated to past and future as well - that is why we need laws protecting monuments (some one's creation, which the builder might have expected the law to protect) and environment (the green laws are simply lines drawn to help us avoid hurting our future generations - Mother Earth needs no saving, she has already survived 4.5 billion years without our help).

Does that summarize all the laws we need in this world? I think so - laws a re simply the rules so that we do not step on each other's toes as we dance the dance of life. Yet, we have many laws, useless laws, if you would call them that, or at least inconsequential laws - that do not serve the purpose laws are supposed to. There are laws that shackle personal freedom, in domains in which nobody else is involved, or if somebody is involved, it is with consent. Laws that ban alcohol and drugs, laws that decide in the way two consenting adults can form relationship, laws that simply increase the paperwork involved, laws whose enforcement is more costly than their end. Another new set of laws that I think can join this list is the slew of laws against hurting sentiments. Laws that police personal choices are the most ridiculuous, if they still exist. I am no alcoholic, but for the point of argument, let's say I was one. So, what right does the state have to deny me my 'legal' bottle? Or if I were a junkie, why can't I get crack legally. Why does the state decide which forms of relationship are permissible? Curbing these acts does not solve any real problem - but they do increase the work of the police force, and give them the opportunity to take bribes - want to know how? Let's see. Does the common man on the street care if the junkie next door gets his fix or not. (And here I am simply talking about the transaction of the junkie getting his drugs, and we are not discussing the supply chain behind it) No, I don't, and unless you are the moral police type, I'm sure you would not bother. It's the junkie's life - let him 'use' it the way he wants - you got your own life to control. And the policeman knows that - if drugs get to the junkie, the society will not come to an abrupt end. However, the law says it is wrong. Hence, the policeman can take his bribe in lieu of allowing the junkie get his fix. No problem was there to fix, so none got fixed, and money changed hands. However, the law has created the problem in itself. By outlawing the simple junkie getting his fix legally, the law has made the supply chain pass into the black market. The prices shoot. As any economics student worth his salt will tell you - ideally, the price of anything should be equally to the cost of making and delivering it. However, in this black market scenario, the prices are way above the cost. So what happens to the surplus? It gets channeled into guns (illegal ones), and other really dangerous pursuits. It bankrolls the whole underworld - for God's sake - this law has not done an iota of good, but its adverse effects are too many to jot down. Did I mention that the explosive used for the 1993 Mumbai blasts used the same supply chain? The police personnel involved took bribes and winked the other way as the deadly cargo was unloaded, thinking it was some junkie's fix. Think clearly - would they have taken the bribe and looked the other way, had they known this was explosive, and had they been guided by a law to prevent explosives landing on the beach? I do not think so - they would have known that explosives can cause mayhem, unlike drugs, and would have taken due care - they would not have let explosives pass for a few bucks, as explosives are not inconsequential. Again they would not have to deal with decoy drug landing boats, because drugs are in the market - not on the beach. So, we can see how the laws can aid far more heinous crimes than the ones they set out to prevent from happening.

Another problem with the useless laws - laws which are not enforced because imposition is more costly than their violation - is that they give the corrupt officials free hand to victimize those who do not do their biding. Who is a law abiding person? A person who does not break the laws which are clear. Yet, many of us may break laws whose existence was unknown to us - much less their raison d'etre. Can I give an example? Yes, I can. Considering this case is still 'hot', I cannot take the names for the obvious reasons - to avoid rubbing these useless laws the wrong way. Recently, one of the political party's filed slander case against a net user, who had caused some 'uncharitable remarks' about the party to be aired on the net. The 'law' did nothing to prevent the same party and its siblings from unleashing mass terror on a great city on the slightest pretext, but the game is over for the poor blogger. Should I say more??

LIVE FROM LIFE - The Yoke

Many of my readers have commented to me, directly, that my entries are too long. I take notice of it, and hence am trying to be short. Short articles benefit me too – need not ruminate for so long that the idea originally being ruminated on is lost! Today, I will tell you about an interesting phenomenon. Imagine a whole lot of students, weary from a loaded work week, pulled out on some week-end morning, early, on the threat of hefty fines and other sanctions at the extreme and strong social disapproval at the minimum.
Imagine a bunch of wise guys, who are probably more weary from a more loaded work week, pulled out on the same weekend morning, a bit late than the students – on the pain of constant badgering on the phone and the cyberspace, so that putting the whole badgering to rest by acceding to the request for company becomes a necessity. Both groups are sleepy, both groups are weary – neither wanted this to happen, but both are really ‘happy’ – as one group thanks the other for ‘gracing the occasion’ while the other is pleased for the ‘invitation’. Both have a distorted view of each other – the wise guys thinks the students, of a renowned school, must be really learned, and may feel a bit scared. So they try to salvage their pride by speaking stuff which is intelligible neither to themselves nor to the students. The students, meanwhile have to show that they belong to this ‘renowned institution’ and hence, they nod as if they are understanding all of it – and when their turn comes, ask questions that are not in anyway connected with all the proceedings going on – but now it is the turn of the wise guys to nod, as if they understand it all – and such exchanges go on till the week end is wasted. The end result – institution-corporate relationship!
What exactly does the institution corporate relationship achieve? No idea. Some say it increases the job prospects of the student. Well, let’s examine that statement critically. Looking from the business perspective, the students in the job market are trying to sell their services to the businesses – who are ‘business customers’ – hence, a flashy ad campaign will not do much to increase the chance of the sale – corporate buyers want value for money – sadly the value that has to be created in the students is normally lost in the excessive focus on relationship. Agreed it is a marketing driven scenario, but even then operations cannot be ignored totally. Yet, the hard selling of half baked cookies to the new ‘relatives’ might get one or two batches off the roster, but in the end, all has to get back to the basics.
Another problem with this trend is the fact that it starts a round of competitive relations building – if one college goes for wasted weekends, another might try to top it with wasted weeks! I have seen people trying to squeeze three wasted weekends in one month, so that the relationship edge is not lost! So, it starts following the vicious competitive circle that I have talked about at length in the previous post. In the end, all the time of the academic session might be put to relationship building, whereas the building of knowledge and intellect is ignored.
As I have always said, such edifices would not survive for long – built on unbacked promises, unverified claims and pretense. Sadly that is going on across the country – it is one of the worst kept secrets of the Indian education system – ask anybody individually to speak truly, be it student or wise man, and they will tell that it is all a charade. Yet, collectively, we are unable to throw off this yoke of our own making, and it keeps on getting more and more loaded. When is this going to end? I cannot say that, but it is important that somebody high up in the system calls the bluff. For now, it is good bye from a fugitive from the yoke.

LIVE FROM LIFE - The Rat Olympics

In the beginning, there was just the primordial soup bubbling in the prehistoric oceans, in which a few big molecules, in an entirely chance event (or a couple of chance events) combined together to form the first living cells – then came the primaeval eukaryotes and later multicellular plants and animals. The animals had it tough (and so do they do still today) – fighting for survival – for the resources for living and growing – life in the wild was and is an existential struggle. Then, some furry little upstarts took the opportunity given by the death of the rampaging dinosaurs and started developing bigger and bigger brains – compared to their body size. From tiny lemurs, they went to the giant gorilla. One off shoot of this family started walking on two legs, developing a straight, far looking posture, and utilized the opposable thumb to shape the primitive tools, to tame fire, to hunt instead of being hunted. Yes, life kept on becoming more than a struggle for existence – humans (as the members of this off shoot were known as, eventually) found leisure, a meaning to life, a sense of enjoyment. The uncertainty of the next meal was countered by agriculture and husbandry, the uncertainty of the weather was nullified in effect by the dwellings built. In this way, the many uncertainties of life were done way with, and human life was made distinct from the general animal life. The life was now meant for enjoyment.

Or so it was, until some smart Alecs hijacked the whole agenda – and management literature became replete with ‘competitiveness’ – and competitiveness was made the ‘buzzword’ – how to make your organization competitive, how to out compete your competitors and all that. Well, they started by slashing prices, so that they, along with their ‘competitors’ bleed – which was good, as long as the competitor bled more gushingly. They started on a noble venture of giving customers what they asked for, then went for giving them what they had in mind, but did not ask for, and soon, they started pre-empting customer wants! Of course, they had to stay ahead of competition. And, thus through our own smart thinking, in the late twentieth century, we squandered one great thing our forefathers had achieved gradually from the time when they had toiled over flint stones to build the first fire, or shaped the first spear – peace of mind and exclusion from a struggle for existence.

Is competition a good thing – that is a question that should vary with the degree of competition involved – of course, it is good if the aim is to weed out the lethargic and useless. But sadly, once started, competition does not stop on its own, once the unworthy have been weeded out – as is said, everything is fair in love and war – so when you arouse competition, be prepared for anything. So if one starts working for 10 hours a day ( to weed out those useless 9 to 5 good for nothings), one’s competitor might start doing 11 hours a day. Third may respond with 12 hours – soon the hours start piling – you hire two or three sets of employees and start working 24 hours. When all are working 24 hours, and there are no more hours to put in, it may get down to setting up two shops, then three and so on. All very good – but we can see that the original purpose was to maintain a 10 hour working day – the norms might have been achieved in that much – the rest is the price of competition – it is like a fire you lit up to warm your room in the winter, and it ends up consuming your house – not a very good bargain. It becomes what my professor likes to call the ‘Red Queen Effect’ – you have to run very fast to stay at the same place! Is it good? Yeah, some power drunk corporate boss might say – we like to smash the unworthies to smithereens, and to win like a good sport. I object. I object seriously. This is not some bloody sport – this is a question of livelihood for people – and it is not about winning or losing, it is about living with dignity and pleasure. Rampant competition is different from back yard play – there, those incapable of playing generally stay away from play, and let the jocks struggle in the play. But there is no such thing in the business world – if they start the stampede, the small ones will get crushed, whether they like it or not. Human life is a journey, with death as a destination – so in the end, the destination is not what we are after, but the quality of journey. When your company, after all of scheming and aggressive techniques, do put a ‘competitor’ out of business, you are not scoring some Wayne Rooney goal on some cosmic scoreboard, but putting a few people away from their source of income – and do not for once think that you have done the customers a great service by the offering that proved to be the final nail in the coffin. The customer was satisfied (in most cases) good enough with the previous offers made by you and the slain. And do not give me that ‘just good ain’t good enough’. Of course, what do you think; can you rest of your laurels now? No, the others are behind you – ready to kick you out as you did to the dead. Where will it stop – God knows – and do not worry about the customer – his appetite is being whetted continuously, worry about yourself – you started off feeding a poodle and turned it into a rottweiler. If you stop feeding him, he might bite.

Well you might say that competition is good for the society at large – after all, where ever there is innovation, there is competition – well, again this is based on the implicit assumption that innovation is good – well let me clear the air here – airplane was an invention, and ‘Sensational’ journalism is an innovation – are both really good. I doubt so – spreading spicy misinformation does nobody except the owners of India TV any good. And does this innovation start competition – yes, it does – a previously respected news channel Aaj Tak is now giving India TV a run for its money, if not winning. Similarly we have many such ‘design’ innovations, and ‘pricing’ innovations and such many business innovations, accounts of which fill libraries of respected business schools. Well, they do not make life good for anybody – but do make our life more ‘competitive’.

What else can competition do – well, it can make us, and our organizations evolve into mean ‘competing’ machines – so that the prime task is not anything else but competition – in the perfect competitive scenario – we would first compete, then breathe, drink, eat and live in that order. Maruti will specialize in competition and making cars. The local barber would specialize in competition and mushroom cuts. You find that funny – well, if you do not believe me – just go to the Rajasthani city of Kota – here people are schooling in competition – at a time when half of them should be doing their High School education – they are doing that, but that is after they are done schooling in competition – and the result is good enough – kids who know how to solve the most complex numerical problem in thermodynamics, but have absolutely no physical idea of what enthalpy is! They know little, but can compete in the toughest engineering entrance examination. That is the result of a competitive evolution.

Still worse, competition can make us wiling to do anything to survive – be it fudging our resumes – or at least filling it with complete unadulterated ‘bull-business’ like – ‘I have done a certificate course on six sigma’ – which means nothing but what it says – still, that might be better than not having done a certificate course in six-sigma. And the less I say about six-sigma, the better. It can lead to leading business schools fudging the placement data, to inflate the average salary offered on campus placements, to a Ramalinga Raju inflating Satyam profit figures, to boost share prices. Survival is important for all, and if we, as a society make the legitimate survival too ‘competitive’ – we might push some people into doing the illegal.

And after all, this is not for free. Well, one might argue that the per capita income of the world has increased very high in the recent times. Well, are the people more happy today for it – I am not being philosophical here. Old timers may argue they were happier in the time of Auld Lang Syne, while youngster may not imagine a life without the modern day comforts of electronics and service industry. So, we can safely conclude that people are in general as happy now, as they were in the, say, 17^th century. What has changed – the per capita consumption – we are eating our planet out – we are not getting anything from outside, for all our innovations, but simply getting ways to squander all we have got, at an increasing pace. The Earth might have enough for everybody’s need, but not everybody’s greed.

So what is the solution – the way out of this rat race – this rat ‘Olympiad’ if I must say? Well, in the USSR, they stifled it completely – to oversee the ultimate collapse of the economy. So, we cannot so away with competition altogether. Let me take the playground analogy again – we have hard boiled footballers tackling each other hard, and we have badminton novices trying to keep a rally on. The former try hard to defeat the other, the latter get the joy out of effortless play, their joy emanating from the length of the rally – the former try by all means to knock down others, but the latter do not make any attempt to score a point on the other. Well, that is what we need to recreate in the economy – a sort of ‘cartel of the willing lazy’. This cartel has to be large enough to encompass most possible goods and services being offered. The basic idea behind this cartel is that – Look, I want to live my live, in pursuit of small leisures, and so do you. Let’s promise that we will not kill ourselves in a bid to ‘satisfy’ each other – I will work 8 hours a day, at peace, and make enough pots for us both, and you work 8 hours a day, at peace, and make enough bread for us both. It is a sort of Communist economy, with an important difference, the option to opt out and go into competitive world, if you so desire, and under obligation, if you defy the cartel. Let the novices rally, and let the big ones tackle and slide. And what better time to get to this, than the current recession.

LIVE FROM LIFE - Snake Oil

I always used to wonder what sort of losers read the self help books that come out by the dozen every week and are well advertised by the ‘best seller’ columns of newspapers. I am not talking about DIY help books on cookery, gardening, yoga etc. I am talking about the books with names like ‘You can win’, ‘Formulae for success’, ‘Creative thinking’ etc. I mean, don’t people realize that the only winner in question here is the author, who, after being a successful corporate executive and drawing hefty salaries, is adding to his big pile of money through the royalty. The problem does not arise if we read autobiographies or biographies – they are akin to what history is for the civil administration. The problem arises when the retiring luminaries do not write a simple autobiography, but a self help book. To make the common sense truisms presented in their writing marketable, they often write them down in a very abstruse language, and invent new terms. Arguably, their only intention could be just to make their writing lucid and easy to understand – for example, Khushwant Singh’s ‘Operation Colombo’ cut short a lot of writing that would have otherwise been resorted to. However, the management education world makes these plot elements bigger than they were intended to be – these in-book guiding arrows are brought into real life and thrust down people’s throat. I am sure De Bono had thought to tell people to force themselves to think factually, critically, emotionally, positively, creatively and holistically at will – the ‘six hats’ being simply a metaphor to help people visualize adopting a thinking strategy consciously as similar to putting on a different coloured hat at will. Yet, the hats have continued to live beyond the thinking, and have acquired a life of their own. It has become expected of a business student to speak in terms of hats – Hey man, your work is getting monotonous! Time to put on the green hat!!
Not only in these self help books, but in many other management education scenarios we find terms living beyond their utility and hence usurping the space rightfully reserved for a single thing – common sense. Is it that essentially we all realize that management is inherently an un-teachable (new word!) concept, and hence, to justify the two years we spend doing an MBA, we hide behind big words, and reinvent the wheel innumerable times. The management literature is replete with such examples – the whole of organization management, systems thinking, marketing management and all such branches of management in which one finds ‘big words’ are essentially consisting of two things – disguised common sense, or personal opinions being taken as gospel truth. Well, if you do not know how to do a thing to the t, and still, the thing needs to be done – obviously you will go at the work, and learn along as you do the work. Common sense? No, some joker has ‘propounded’ this as a theory of ‘Action Learning’, by masking this very truth behind neat words. If you drive your car and control the wheel, compensating every time the road turns you will reach your destination, and if you simply step on the gas and leave the wheel, you might end up upended in one of the innumerable possible ways. Common sense? No, some leading light has put it as the ‘Law of equifinality of the system in case of negative feedbacks’ in the Systems theory. WTF?? I mean, this ends up being taught in B-schools? Are the people who take some very tough tests and interviews to get in, many after leaving well paying jobs, supposed to be treated to this? Well, this is the ground reality. There are courses on ‘Creative Thinking’ – where people have to cram up the ‘six hats’ and regurgitate in the examination. How creatively are they being made to think? All the flights of fantasy, taken by senile (no doubt great, but definitely senile at the time of writing) managers, are duly taught to people – to emulate their success. Now, do you really think an organization of, say, 100000 employees can be directed like a clockwork to perfection? I do not subscribe to that view. In the end, a good working organization simply is a chance phenomenon, which then survives and outlives competition – much like the first living cells which formed, by sheer coincidence, out of the primordial soup, and then survived well enough to ensure I write this blog today and you read it. Yet, there are innumerable books written by countless CEO’s and MD’s who happened to oversee great working organizations when they retired, all talking about their ‘formulae for success’. I read it once – when in doubt, look intelligent. Is it a manifestation of this dictum? I bet some nosey journalist had gone to, say Jack Welch, and asked him how the hell did he make GE into the behemoth that it is. Trying to look intelligent (I, a mere MBA student, might be committing blasphemy here by commenting on Jack Welch’s intelligence, but then, fair chance he won’t be reading it), Jack might have given an answer, partly coated in high sounding words and lofty ideas. The journalist might have written it all down and put it on the paper the next day, and the academics would have been discussing it the day after – behold, a new theory in management studies was born. Then Jack, and other top level businessmen, seeing what suckers we were for such ‘theories’, and being the shrewd businessmen they are, started giving out more of them, for substantial royalty, of course. I am not speculating here. We have, at our B-School, symposia, where top business leaders are invited, by constant pestering, and an audience of weary students is collected on the pain of hefty fines (remember, it is a Saturday, and no one likes to spend the week end delivering or listening to boring lectures.) Well, they come, deliver something on topics as enigmatic as ‘India poised, but is it? And oh, will InfoTech play a role, or will we melt down before that, and creative ideas to solve this whole thing’. Of course, that is not a real topic, but I have forgotten the real ones, but this one gives a near estimate of what is discussed there. Then some of our classmates ask ‘insightful and intelligent’ questions, to which they gives equally ‘creative’ answers. These answers are duly noted by the faculty and students alike (though I would like to assure you that I am not guilty of this crime), and then, it enters the popular discourse, and ends up being written in term papers, examination scripts and thus legitimized as ‘theory’. I have often asked my very enlightened and intelligent classmates if the things we are studying here are even remotely useful in the field – they give really interesting answers. Some are candid – man, this is BS, and we know it, but still, whatever it takes to get the MBA degree. Some are a bit rebellious, like me, and do not study such things, and concoct their own theories in the examination – if you need BS, it does not matter who the bull was. Interestingly, some do not think it is all BS, and tell me that we need to take our understanding to a higher plane to comprehend it. All I can say, either they are delusional, or they are our future business leaders.
In the end, I repeat the same old question – are we doing the right thing by wasting our time learning made up stuff? Is it a time to call a spade a spade and cut out all this useless stuff from management curriculum? I have no personal grudge against them – after all, writing for ends on systems theory is much easier than trying to solve a capital budgeting numerical, because you cannot go wrong. But, in the end, we end up wasting our time, in the prime of youth, when we would have been better occupied doing actual work. Think again.