The Reunion

We had split as sixteen year olds, with no idea of what lay ahead of us.  We possibly did not care.  Nor did we ever ask ourselves if we might ever meet again.

A few autographs were exchanged.  Feelings scrawled hastily, hesitantly, to be locked away between the pages of the book.  Forever.  Those were the only hints that we might after all miss each other, having shared a classroom for a whole year.  

The girls, seven of us, sat on the inner half of the classroom.  The twelve boys sat on the half closer to the door, as if to ward off harm that might assail the fairer sex in the classroom.  Knights in shining armour, ready to take on those spirits, should they ever come for the girls.

The school administration made sure that apart from being protector and the protected, the boys and girls had little to do with each other.  

And so my juvenile crush remained unspoken, only to be washed away by the tides of life that swept us all away for 47 years, till we got back together again.  It was just the first in a long string of affairs of the heart that fortunately for everyone concerned, remained unrequited.  The feeble embers of childhood had in the meantime met with an unobtrusive end.

Forty seven years away is a long time, not just in the lives of men, but in the history of mankind.  Not just rulers and emperors but whole dynasties have come and gone in less time.  The history of nations and empires have changed in a span of five decades.

The destinies of individual men and women are far more fragile than those of empires and kingdoms.  Five of us did not even make it to the reunion, as they were lost to their families and to their classmates for ever.    

Braving those fragile destinies were those of us who had assembled, curious to see how each of us looked, to hear the stories of each other's lives during that half century.  

Each one of us was a saga in herself.  Our stories were not that of just one individual, but that of the many that each of us had touched or had been touched by.  

There was so much we would all have liked to talk about - joys, sorrows, people, places, incidents, emotions.  All of the complex package that makes human life what it is.  

And we brought with us so much else we would rather swallow and not speak about ever.  Like the unspoken feelings that we left the school with and never got to spell out.  About our teachers, our classmates, the people who worked for the school and made it what it was. 

There must have been a million such thoughts that rushed through our minds as we got ready for the evening, as we drove up to the school, as we set our first sights on classmates that we had not seen since the last day of school.  A million mutinies, to borrow from Naipaul, inside our heads wiser  and our faces wizened with age, as memories clamoured to sally forth.

And then as we all finally sat down we realised we all had so little to say.  For, when the mind is full words fail in the most uncharitable way.  Leaving us to depart, yet again, with so many things unsaid.  

And hoping that we will all live to see another day, when we muster our reserves to shout out all those stories and sentiments that had remained unspoken.

Nanni.... Namaskaaram....

Drifting off on the printed word

This is yet another of those posts that has been triggered by something I read in The Hindu.  It is a piece on the experiences of a journalist by Ms Soma Basu.  You can read the article here, provided you manage to sneak past a pesky paywall.  https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/legacy-of-the-printed-word/article38073787.ece.

Alternately if you take the print edition, like me, but missed reading it you can read it in The December 31st edition.

Ms Basu talks about the joy of reading the printed word.  The printed word here would mean content that is published on paper and not on some electronic device.  The distinction matters because the tactile and cognitive experience of reading "hard copy", to borrow from the digital world, is different in many ways from reading off a screen. 

I cannot agree more with Ms Basu on this.  But then I must point out I am 62.  And I have this weakness for crunching numbers.  That is my training after all.

According to the Indian census data I must be among the oldest five percent of the population.  You further need to keep in mind that amongst us a non-trivial fraction may have abandoned the printed word in favour of the wailing telly serial or the distilled wisdom that Whatsapp dispenses by the hour.  That should be a non trivial fraction of people who deserted.  

And then there should be those who are not fortunate enough to be able to read any more due to failing eyesight, inability to assimilate thanks to a faltering brain and so on.   

Net net, people savouring the printed word are truly a small fraction of the Indian population - if you leave out the vast majority which is the younger crowd.  How many of the younger crowd would still read the printed word is hard for me to say.  Among all the people below the age of forty that I know I cannot think of anyone who reads print.  Literally no one.  

Considering that as a teacher I come across a large number of them in spite of my reclusive predilections, that is a trend I cannot ignore.

Much as I would want the printed word to live forever, I fear that its end is near.  An end that no one can really stop.  It is just a part of that inexorable march of human progress.  It is ironic in that a space of less than a quarter to half a century mankind will bid goodbye to a truly important invention to which we owe much of contemporary civilisation as we know it.  An invention that took 650 years to diffuse, since it was revealed to the world in 1476 by Caxton.

It does not surprise me though.  To draw on my favourite philosopher, much vilified and ridiculed now at the altar of prosperity, change is the only constant in life. That is okay.

But Ms Basu's piece coincided with another conversation that made me wonder about all this printed word versus the electronic screen debate from a larger perspective.  That conversation did seem to have a few parallels.  

It was - a Whatsapp forward, what else? - that admonished that as humans we spend a full year of our life time in the toilet.  The tone of the message appeared to be to suggest that each of us likely wastes a whole year of life, disgorging waste. 

When this was first read out to me by my wife I was impressed with the analysis.  It sounded almost epiphanic that I would spend such a long period in a place that we feel embarrassed to talk about.  I am a sucker for anything that has a certain numerical precision to it.  You can read more about this weakness of mine here.  https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1587084401918471083/4982182331953715247

But then I realised that I had heard similar analyses pointing to larger fractions of one's life being spent in equally wasteful ways.  People who exhort us to increase the allocation of our time to the contemplation of the Lord tell us how we spend a quarter to a third of our or life sleeping.  

Now, that math is straight forward,  more so than the math underlying the year in toilets.  The math about the year in toilets would be a greater modelling challenge to those of who spend a life building mathematical models as a way of understanding anything in life - from the likelihood that a virus might get to us or that we may eventually find someone to fall in lobe with us, be it the sexual or asexual way.  

Just think about the number of variables involved in figuring out the time in a toilet.  Throw on top of that the biological diversity amongst humans.  You might even need a well configured system to run the simulations.  Let me leave that speculation as exercise for your left brain.

But then here is the larger perspective on the question of how we waste our time.  What is this big deal about how we spend our time that we seems to possess all contemporary conversations?  This thing about productivity.  What are we chasing at the end of the day?

Is that even a part of the larger design in evolution if, like me, you are captivated by Darwin's theory of evolution?  Or, in the way the world began with the word?  If it was so why or how did so many millions of creatures that came to be, spend their lives not caring about the way they spent their lives, or about elusive issues like the purpose of life and so on?

According to the emerging view from anthropology it appears that it was all just an accident that we are all the way we are: Homo Sapiens.  There is no reason why it should not have turned out differently.  A world where there is no word, printed or otherwise.  No God.  Just plain existence, where all of us in the alternate forms that we may have assumed may have spent one day at a time, with nothing to mark one day from another. No joy.  No sorrow.  No anger.  Not even lust.  Just the primitive drive for food and other biological needs.

So if it was all just an anthropological accident that we are where we are, that I type these inconsequential words, does it matter that it is consumed from a hard copy or some electronic screen?  Or, that it was not even produced in the first place, let alone the way it is consumed?

These are difficult questions to answer.  Quite probably irrelevant too.  But as I reflected on Ms Basu's thoughts on the printed word I could not stop my mind from racing in this hyperlinked manner.  

None of that is of course to suggest that I can think of a more refreshing way to start my day than with a cup of filter coffee with 10% chicory, freshly brewed dicoction, mixed with freshly boiled milk, with its foamy head and a copy of The Hindu.  

Here is also hoping that in the years left for me in this world that simple pleasure does not get supplanted by a cup of tea and a copy of a Hindi daily - all in the name of one nation, one drink and one newspape.

Nanni... Namaskaaram...  

 

Tired thoughts...

As dusk dissolves into the night, I count the number of days left for me to cast off a vocation that has definitely been among the most dreadful accidents in any one’s career:  My wandering into academe 

 My mind dithers a lot on how I should spend these remaining days. 

I wake up every morning, determined to make up in the months that remain for all those articles, scholarly and otherwise, that I did not write, but should have, to stake a claim at legitimacy among all my distinguished colleagues. 

And then as the sun moves up, ever so hesitantly, reluctantly these wintry days, realism takes hold.  I remind myself that in the twenty odd years I have been here I have not done anything to dispossess myself of the image of a renegade practitioner.  To be counted among those who are qualified to say a thing or two in my chosen discipline. 

So may be I should really spend my time, however irresponsibly, doing things that give me joy rather than seek an elusive legitimacy.  Where I do not feel accountable in terms of having anything to show for how I spent my time, even as I bask under the glory and glamour of a put on intellectualism that I rent from this institution.

It is in one such moment of irresponsible reading that I read a review of Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything.    It is a telling comment on my ignorance and poor erudition that  I had not heard about Graeber or his book until then. 

One thing led to another as I indulged in even more irresponsible hyperlinked hopping around, like an aimless sparrow.  I read about Graeber himself.  I read that he was an anarchist who had an uncanny knack for not keeping his jobs.  I recalled that Suresh has his book on 5000 years of debt. 

I found a soft copy of his book, Fragments from an Anarchist Anthropology.  It is likely that who ever put it up is a Luddite in the world of intellectual property.   

I was reminded of the few academicians / intellectuals I had read of.  Kolmogorov.  Ramanujan, the mathematician (not the litterateur).  And there are the usual suspects that every student of science is required to have read to be able to claim that his education in sciences is rounded and complete – Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Rutherford, Kekule, Oppenheimer.  Most of all Grisha Perelman. 

As yet another year draws to a close, as families thumb through their android albums of times and members that were there in the past, or how those that are still there looked in their prime as they welcomed a world of expectations, in sharp contrast to their current tired looks, worn down by care, I think of how twenty years ago I walked into academe, head well inside the clouds.  

I think of all of those people I would have liked to be, but could never be.  I think of Mariana Mazzucato’s attempts to bring back the role of the state into the discourse on science and technology with her New School brand of economics.   But then I realise I have a problem.  She is funded by the same forces that she disapproves of.  I think of Harari.  Then I get a feeling he too has been bitten by the bug of academic entrepreneurship. 

I think of what I read about Graeber.  I think about Perelman turning down the Clay Institute award.   People who live or lived life on their terms.  In an undiluted pursuit of what they considered as truly important.  And then I say may be there is still a corner in academe where people are not drawn to the finery of success and fame.  Where people are not judged by the suits they wear to a meeting or a classroom. 

And I hope that there is still hope as my friend Prakhya warns me  often:  If you wanted something badly in this birth, but could not get it, there is always another one that one would have - to have one’s desires to be fulfilled before one can be finally liberated from all desire.

On that note of optimism I start to draw the curtains on yet another year, another forgettable year… 😊

Nanni... Namaskaaram...

Leaving BioNEST

Yesterday was an important day, but not in a happy sense.  I heard that I had been dropped from the BioNEST committee of BIRAC.  I will not explain the acronyms and the terms here.  This post as I have noted in the past for me to record my thoughts and feelings.  It is not an effort in mass communication.  

In fact writing a post at this point is a luxury I can ill afford.  Yet I chose to write it today because well over 24 hours after I gathered the news, the sense of loss continues to rankle me so much that I feel I need to note it for my posterity, for me to remember the feelings on this day.

One of the many strands of thought in my mind has been as to why I feel the loss so much.  And I must be honest in putting the elements of that strand down.

One, it was the only activity I had outside of my life at IIMB.  I have been singularly unsuccessful, unlike my illustrious colleagues at IIMB, in getting invited to Boards, Committees and think tanks.  y lack of popularity in those circles surprises me, given my corporate background, including at a leading international sovereign wealth fund, and therefore my understanding of the world of business at a fairly senior level, the work I have done at NSRCEL where I think I proved beyond doubt that my skills as a manager remained intact in spite of my years in academe.  And while I know am tactless and that my social skills are atrocious I hope I make up for some of all that with my honesty and commitment to whatever I take up.  The latter is something the worst among my critics have acknowledged.

I felt a sense of pride when I updated my profile every year and I could say that I was on this important committee of BIRAC.

Vanity aside, the Committee have me a wonderful perch to remain engaged with the world of incubation.  To get a ringside view of what was going on in the world of academic incubators.  To visit some of them occasionally and see what was going on there.

I got to be at a table with many smart and knowledgeable folks.  That complemented my daily learning as a faculty at IIMB.  It gave me a glimpse into the world of the practice of startups.

At a creature level it gave me the occasional opportunity to travel in the pre pandemic world.  Most of all I got to visit Delhi, a city that I think every Indian has to occasionally be in, however much one might despise it.  Delhi is one of those extremely treacherous cities; but like all political capitals in the world, it is also where destinies and histories are made and destroyed.  So loathe as you might, you simply cannot wish it out of your consciousness.

One must not fail to mention that the folks at BIRAC treated one well - barring of course the incident of dropping me from the committee which changed much of that sense for me. So much so I have second thoughts about staying on in the other committees as I shall note later on.

The money BIRAC paid me was a joke.  For spending a day in meetings and another in preparing for it and getting to Delhi and back they paid me what I would make by singing a coarse song of corporate finance with zero preparation.  Not that I got to sing many of those songs; but certainly I would have made up for my loss of BIRAC revenue.

The other payoffs from the Committee seat that I noted earlier more than made up for the honorarium.   

Without meaning to be self congratulatory I must say that I reciprocated by giving the best of my time and my mind.  I approached it with the true belief that government's work was God's work.  My experience at NSRCEL and as an investment professional in my past life seemed to help me see things in a way different from the other members of the committee. 

Not that what I offered could not be substituted easily.  Anyone who could read and write English could do so as well as I did, probably even better.

The loss of all those professional payoffs bothers me.  But that is not what makes the sense of loss painful.  For, I knew that this would happen one day.  It was not just inevitable but highly desirable for the institution that they shuffled memberships of committees from time to time.  

Apart from infusing fresh thinking shuffling of memberships in committees was also necessary to avoid the growth of vested interests; especially in an institution that handled non trivial sums of money public money.  A public financial institution, although not in the legal sense of the term.  

It is the manner in which the decision was made that pains.  I got to know about it when a member of the committee who remained mentioned to me on a whatsapp message that he missed me in the meetings of the Committee. 

It pained me all the more because I had anticipated this denouement.  I apprehended that my term would come to a similar end that many others in the committee before me had met with, in what I considered an unceremonious manner.  I had gathered that this was not uncommon in the way government managed its committees.  

Out of that apprehension I had spoken with one of the key functionaries at BIRAC that should they ever decide to move me out I would like them to let me know in advance.  And that I should not be moved out like a non performer in a corporate organisation or someone who had indulged in inappropriate behaviour.  

I was assured I would be.  A few days prior to the time I must have been possibly dropped from the Committee I had occasion to talk to the individual concerned about some new activities I was beginning to be engaged in collaboration with a cultural outfit that is also politically powerful.  I had gone on to further explain to the individual that my cultural association could be easily misconstrued as political aspirations, and that I had no such aspirations.

So this development leaves me with a loss of trust that hurts me more than the loss of opportunity.  After all, I know that while I will rue the loss of opportunity for a few days I will grow out of it soon.  I have dealt with more significant losses in my professional life, some voluntary and some thrust upon me.  If there is one strength in my personality it is the ability to gulp down the pain of losing opportunity in my professional life and move on.  

So much so there is no loss in my professional life that can any more make me lose any sleep at all.  For want of a better expression I would say it has toughened me.  It reminds me of an interesting verse I learned in Sanskrit in school:

उदारस्य तृणं वित्तं शूरस्य मरणं तृणं
विरक्तस्य तृणं भार्या निस्पृहस्य तृणं जगत् ;

Udaarasya trunam vittam shoorasya maranam trunam
Viraktasya trunam bhaaryaa nispruhasya trunam jagat.

i.e.   For a generous person money or wealth is insignificant (like a blade of grass), for a  warrior the prospect of facing death is immaterial.  Likewise , a person unattached to family life has no interest in his wife, and for a person having no desires this living Earth is immaterial.

[Source: http://mcjoshi21.blogspot.com/2012/08/to-daus-subhashit.html, accessed by me on July 17, 2021]

The loss of trust was reinforced when another colleague of the individual at BIRAC, whom I have known for longer and whom I called to confirm my movement out of the committee, said that the individual concerned had apparently promised her that he would talk to me before the reconstitution of the Committee.  A few minutes after my phone conversation with the second individual above, she wrote an email with a cc to the first one referred to above.  And the first one did not even write on top expressing any regret over having failed to let me know.

The loss of trust troubles me so much that I am not sure that I can engage with the individual any longer.  Trust is an essential ingredient for me to engage with anyone, be it family, friend or professional acquaintance.  In all my years once that trust is broken I distance myself, no matter what the cost be.  I walked away from promising jobs in the past, unmindful of consequences, when I found my superiors had been lying to me.

That makes me wonder if I should continue on the remaining three committees at BIRAC that are managed by the individual in question.  Would my association with a cultural association be a stigma of any kind, now that I have been foolish enough to talk about it, if it has indeed been a source of worry for anyone?  

Not that it would make me drop the association.  On the contrary I hope to intensify my engagement after I retire.  Possibly even hold an honorary office there, were I to be offered one.

Over the next few days that is a hard call I have to make.  If I had had no association with BioNEST and if these remaining committee positions had been offered I would have gladly accepted them because of my belief that government's work is God's work.  So may be I am being impulsive in reconsidering them?  

But here is the trade off:  Every time I sit in one of those committees I cannot help thinking that I was let down, my trust broken.  And that is not a happy state of mind to be in.  Not to forget the fear that will nag me that I could be dropped from any or all of these other committees without a word of warning, no matter how sincerely I contribute to their working.

In a strange way I suspect that this is also the beginning of the end of my professional life.  All that is left of it now is my years remaining as a teacher at IIMB.  And that is probably the other major source of hurt and anxiety for me.  

Before I close this post I must thank my friend Dr Satya Dash for getting me into those BIRAC Committees.  I sincerely believe I am a below average bloke who lucked out in getting into IIMB.  Hardly anyone other than my family and a small clutch of colleagues at IIMB knows who I am.  Remaining obscure has never been a challenge for me.  I have done nothing remarkable in life to be anything other than obscure.

If only Satya had cast a stone on any of the streets in any city or town in the country there was a 99.9% probability that it would have landed on someone smarter than me, more suited for the BIRAC Committees.  Yet he most graciously piloted my candidature internally and helped me settle down with key words of guidance on what was expected of me once I went on board.

Satya, you got me associated with one of my most fulfilling professional engagements in my life.  Given that I have just three years to retire I am sure I am unlikely to find anything more fulfilling.  I close by letting you know that I will remember your act of kindness with eternal gratitude.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.  

 

The futility of knowledge

This post has been on my mind for many months.  So many months now that I cannot remember how many.  I have been avoiding writing because of the realisation that writing these posts has have been a pissing waste of time.

The trigger for writing this came from a news story that my colleague Professor Jose broadcasted.  For the past five years Professor Jose has been busy disrupting higher education. 

Before you form wrong impressions about him I must say that he has made a nice little business out of disrupting higher education.  If he had done that in a private enterprise it would well have been on the way to becoming a decacorn by now. 

So coming from him the forward is not surprising. 

Here is the link, which I must confess I have not watched fully.  I think it is just another news producer struggling to fill air time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlWgClVeMxs  I would much rather spend time on a Malayalam movie or re-watching any episode of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister.

Now here is the main point.  For some years now I have felt that all this higher education is useless.  And here is why.  

Rolling back in time around the time I was five years old my old man decided that I would be the first IAS officer in the family.  That was a fateful day indeed - for him as well as for me.  It was the day my childhood was taken away from me as my old man got me ready with the three Rs of Thomas Babington Macaulay on my long walk towards getting me ready for Mussoorie.

Destiny had other plans and I will not bore you with how I got to where I am now instead of having retired as a pompous bureaucrat.  The more important story is that I was brought up to believe that reading and knowledge derived from a study of books can make us successful in life and better as human beings.

Therein lies the connection, albeit somewhat tenuous, with the story forwarded by my disruptive colleague.

During the past thirty years or so I have been fully convinced of the futility of such wisdom.  Let me share a few anecdotes to explain my point.

I have been taught that to understand the affairs of a nation one needs to understand history, economics, a smattering of law.  Then one has to be up to date on current affairs.  Read newspapers, in particular editorials.  Early on as a school boy I was forced to read G K Reddy's laborious prose with one watchful hand poised and ready to box my ear if I ever strayed off.

Now, as an old man, I continue that practise religiously in my endeavour to understand the goings on in the nation.  I am grateful to my old man for having set me on that path.  

But there are members in my family who skim through the headlines or watch a shouting match on a TV channel or read a whatsapp forward and then declare confidently, knowledgeably, that the current surge in the pandemic is because we do not have a CEC like TN Seshan!

I try getting in word edgeways saying that the issue may be more complex than that.  That there is a double mutant going around, there is the whole livelihood vs life question and so on.  I am promptly shut up by being told that I think so because I spend too much time reading a left leaning newspaper.  And that I should stop watching BBC World because that is a fading channel that is forever ruing the loss of the jewel in Her Majesty's blighted crown.

This extends to many other aspects of life:  getting vaccinated, getting routine diagnostics done, getting the car serviced, choice of schools for children, undertaking journeys in uncertain environments, career choices, purchase of assets, choice of restaurants, decision to settle outside India.  The list is endless.

I know what you must be thinking.  You might say, "Wait a minute.  They could have all been wrong." 

The irony is they are not.  All of these people who believe that it is a waste of time to read and reflect have trumped me time and again with their choices.  Their decision making technique, which my b school smugness would describe as seat of the pants decision making, has won hands down every single time, against my evaluation of probability weighted expectations. 

The wisdom that we all know already what we need to know and we just need to think and decide to press on with whatever seems right at that point seems to carry the day all the time.  So much so I have now stopped proferring opinions.  I know they will be shot down.  And ex poste I will look foolish.

It is not just the decision makers around me who make choices about their own personal and professional lives who remind me of the futility of my reading driven approach.  I am surrounded by examples of that in the world of business outside.  

The story of nearly every unicorn and decacorn seems to bear the truth that it pays not to waste one time's reading.  Just write the code you can, build the product and go to market.  Somebody will pay for it.  Even if no one does, as long as you can convince M Son, F Lee or some other fat pocketed investor  that someone will buy your product, valuations will soar to 280 times Year 3 forecasted sales.  In a private capital market driven economy that is what matters.  Getting your Series F and hitting decacorn status.  Off you go buying a nice villa.  And your tweets will be featured in ET every now and then.  That is a quick course on value creation for you.

That brings me to two possible explanations as to why I find myself where I am.  One, I think this whole reading business is highly over-rated.   My old man did not merely steal my childhood, but also set me on a path of sheer futility.  The other possibility is that the trouble is not what I read, but what I do with it.  

I do not have the answer as to which one it is.  My sure-footed friends and family will definitely know which one it is.

In any event, at the end of all of this I have only thing to tell the world, like many of the great men in this world that have gone before me:  My life is my message.  With a minor twist.  Just dont do any of what I did.  You are sure to do alright in life.  Be it deciding to go to business school when I should have probably done maths or literature or history, getting into private enterprise when I should have been a babu, be it getting into academics when I should have just been pushing paper at an obscure office desk, getting married when I should have remained single so that the misery of being myself could have been at least contained to one soul and so on.