Happy Diwali

Diwali 2016, which was yesterday, is still going on, and it's been great fun. My wife made the occasion a lot more special than what it would have otherwise been if I had driven things, and I am thankful to her for her leadership. We even burst crackers - no bombs, just the rockets, anaars, chakrees and phool-jhhadees. Half of our rockets went into random unintended dangerous trajectories - one even went inside the kitchen of a 2BHK in a building under construction. So we decided not to launch the other half. I wish ISRO made these rockets, which then would have followed the path we wanted them to after leaving the beer bottle. I strongly urge government to introduce ISRO certification for rockets from next year.

I often wonder how foreigners, especially the white ones, must feel if they visit any Indian city during Diwali, particularly in the evenings when so many bombs start exploding together. It must sound like a war-zone to them. There is obviously a lot of risk in playing with fire to this extent, but we Indians do it very well. It's similar to our traffic with all the SUVs, sedans, range rowers, bikes, cycles and pedestrians moving ahead like they are playing some road-race video game, and yet making it safely to their destinations - most of them. I could never play such a video game without crashing all over many times, and the overall degree of safeness of our traffic, in spite of the mess it is, amazes me. That's how Diwali is. It works.

The more beautiful aspect of Diwali is all the lights. The jhhalars hanging from nails - whichever you could find, leverage and move on - pretending you made some logical sine or cos waves, are an essential part of Diwali ever since electricity was discovered. When I was a kid there used to be small filament-wala bulbs in jhhalars which were covered with small plastic covers of different colors. Those covers would melt if the bulb inside got too hot. And if any one bulb in the chain was gone (fused) it was just to be taken out and the wire joined there to continue the circuit. It's as if the bulb didn't exist there. So rude, isn't it? It's like life.

But I always used to wonder how many bulbs could you really take out and have the jhhalar still functioning with the remaining bulbs - as certainly very few bulbs can't take that much electricity. I guess I was sure of that coz I once plugged in a single bulb and it burst. And a few thought experiments followed which led me to believe there must be a minimum number of bulbs in a jhhalar. Anyhow, now we have little LEDs, which are more durable, don't heat up and don't complain. They work for years. They must have some minimum number too per chain, but I don't care about such things any more.

As a kid I used to love firing pistols. Before I started using one, we had a strange looking thing made of iron, a contraption from 2-3 generations back, at home to burst dot capes because of which we got into the habit of always buying the dot variety and not the rolled ones. My friend Hitesh bought the rolls, loaded them into his pistol and shot at everything one after the other until the roll got exhausted. It made me very jealous. Not sure exactly when but as I grew up I expressed that I wanted a pistol too, and I got one. But probably coz I had already got one demand fulfilled, I didn't ask for roll capes too to go along. I was like that. I was stupid. We bought dot capes again, because of which I had to load the gun after every shot. I later did switch to roll capes and had my fun. I guess that's life - some people get and do things sooner than others. Some are late. They say you've got to ask and work for what you want. That's correct, but we are not all equal in our capabilities to ask and work. It's an unequal world. But I won't complain.

Another amazing aspect of Diwali, when I was a kid, used to be distributing sweets and namkeen in the mohalla. It was not optional. If someone gave you a plate of meetha-namkeen, you could not not give anything in return. So everyone had to be ready with their version and stock of meetha-namkeen. Could add some fruits like apple and banana here and there too. And since everyone was distributing to everybody else, one was bound take out stuff from what X gave and put some of that in what they're giving to Y and Z. That was just an optimization everyone silently did, but made sure she was not caught for having passed someone else's stuff. Items like bananas and apples obviously qualified as candidates for the crime. Too generic-looking mixtures and sweets could also be picked up. It was all a big pain and an unnecessary formality, of course. But it was symbolic of sharing happiness. And it was painful.

Kids had the job of going around with plates covered with male-handkerchiefs and delivering the stuff. People who didn't have kids either themselves went around reluctantly, or refilled the plate of whichever kid came to deliver and asked him/her to carry it back home. I once tried to add spice to the delivering activity by entering others' homes with the plate and shouting 'Happy Diwali' in Shah Rukh's voice. I remember doing it in Shiva's home, but don't think anyone noticed. But I do remember.

Nowadays Diwali is also a lot about taking pictures - of happy people, decorations, lights, food - and sharing all over. It's like the meetha-namkeen, except that it is optional. But for most, it is not, in their minds. Anyhow, it's good as long as it is fun.

Happy Diwali to everybody.

Leaders

The walk, the talk, the conduct, the air - by dexterously copying the established stereotypes is how most people fit into their professional roles which are of leadership and managerial nature. To play the part, you should first look the part - it is suggested. And that's where quite a few leadership aspirants start their makeover. Many others selectively copy traits of leaders. Resting on your chair with your feet on the table in front of a prospective investor, for example. Steve Jobs may or may not have really done that, but he's certainly inspired a few to want to do so nonetheless. But when it comes to human interactions, every situation is different. One can copy the behavioral content, but the context is totally outside one's control and it can never ever be same as anything else that has happened before or after - assuming past, present and future are all determined.

The redundant yet powerful leaders in organizations today dominate a lot of corporate effort and suck a lot of the generated value. Their redundancy is because of absence of any tangible inputs from them in the organizational functioning towards its stated goals. At best they indulge in hit-and-trial games, which is largely a mess-manufacturing exercise, until there's the next cleanup cycle called 'restructuring' which is a reset button for all practical purposes, so that the games at the top can continue with players having clean pitches to bat on and spoil. However they do sit on top - and continue to rise further for the rest of their professional lives - to claim the biggest share of the generated value, as being at the top of the organizational pyramid entitles them to it by default. The position is still supposedly full of stress, as there are local pyramids and hierarchies - extremely concentrated and heated up - many participants willing to kill to make a killing. The guy at the ultimate top - the owner of the whole organizational ATM machine - is the creator of all stress, that flows top-down, and in different ways at different levels. Somehow, in all this organizational stress, there is thrill alongside heart disease and excitement alongside hypertension. In the end, it's all about making more money, which is strangely seen as a vicious motive even in the most capitalist of cultures, even the US, perhaps coz they're not doing very well. Probably when people turn poor, the rich do induce jealousy. If everyone is having a decent standard of living, not being rich can often be a pretended choice.

My boss in a job a few years back once told me - as you rise higher, you are responsible for fewer things (read tasks / activities), and you are accountable for more and more (read outcomes). And the positions with the highest accountability are also the most powerful, yet most stressful and risky because of the pressure to deliver. Like Spiderman said, or rather his uncle did - with great power comes great responsibility. Responsibility here means the importance of acting responsibly, wisely and in the best interests. It is therefore important for leaders at all levels to understand and appreciate the importance of their positions and to not assume redundant states until the next restructuring or a new job, but act responsibly, wisely, and in the best interests coz they are accountable for something of value, and the well-being of many depends on their delivering that value collectively with those many. And to match the risk they take by holding the accountability, they are indeed rewarded, often disproportionately. And as for the walk, the talk, the conduct, the air - when the moon is right, who can stop the waves?

Dumb and Dumber

The most ironic thing about social media is that people are reading a lot, and yet are becoming dumber day by day. I feel that about myself too. Enormous and ever increasing volumes of crap is generated every day and fed to us through a bunch of channels. We pick and pass crap, and keep doing that until the crap is thoroughly consumed by everyone. And then we move on to other crap, and keep doing that all the time on our mobile devices. Even if we try to take a break from all this madness, we get extremely restless with the feeling of getting left behind. We can't stay away for long and are internally pushed back towards it. It has deeply screwed our minds and our ability to control them. While the creators of crap do that to get more visits and somehow get more ad revenue or plain attention, the readers are going on reading and getting entertained. It's like a whole new medium of entertainment has emerged for all idle times and when on the go - all situations with no brain usage required and when reflexes are enough to manage the physical activity. If TV was once seen as killer of all productive time, mobile and data now are together the modern-day weapons of mass destruction. (Warren Buffett needs to revise his quote in the changing times, but this one's taken now!) And yet, TV has not been displaced. In fact TV has transformed to become a tool in this whole data game.

There are indeed positive aspects in all this. For example, without doubt, the awareness of people has reached a whole new and advanced level. Information travels fast and wide within no time. And when it matters, it's really useful and exciting to have everybody on the same page. But of late I've started seeing this feature getting abused abundantly. Things on social media have a repetitive nature, and the same detail or info or news gets reinforced in our minds as it keeps appearing in front of our eyes as we scroll screens. It has 2 effects. One - agents who want to spread something - a message, some news, or a perception - even totally false - are smartly manipulating people's minds to achieve targeted outcomes. Two - as most of the stuff is on topics of minor intellectual value, we feed ourselves continuously on shit that neither helps us nor adds to our knowledge of the world. Our brain probably dynamically allocates resources for new shit by freeing up some old shit which is sent to some long-term area of the brain that keeps piling up shit but offers very minimal ability to retrieve or recall. And this long-term shitty area is getting loaded with more and more shit - at the fastest pace ever in the history of human species. So much ever increasing load chokes the brain, slows us down and makes us dumb. All this technology was supposed to make us smart, but it's only turning us into idiot boxes which can't think. And that's the irony.