Inspiration from Sergei Aleynikov

It was only Lewis' third book that I was reading.  Given how semi literate I am not competent to admire his writing, especially when Malcolm Gladwell is supposed to have remarked, "I read Michael Lewis for the same reasons I watch Tiger Woods. I'll never play like that."

Lewis researches his subject very well.  Reading his books therefore leaves you with a good sense of the domain that he deals with. 

What I find more engaging though is the human side of enterprise that he brings out very well.  

I read Liar's Poker during the early years of my career in the investment industry.   I learned a fair bit about the investment banking industry and the trading room in the USA.  Lewis describes the origins of the securitisation of mortgages very well in that book.  In some sense that securitisation was the genesis of what eventually led to the crisis of 2008. 

Little did I anticipate as I read it then that securitisation would end up being the nemesis of the financial services industry one day.

Far more engaging was the story of John Gutfreund who backstabbed his own mentor to whom he owed his meteoric rise in a board room intrigue, to take the CEO's job from the latter.  The story leaves you with pure disgust for the man.  It made his excesses with the expense account of Salomon Brothers to please his wife look like a minor peccadillo in comparison. 

Ironically, not long after I read this, I had the occasion to host Gutfreund and humour him to see if he would invest in the venture fund that my employer was trying to put together.  His visit and my interaction with him has to be the subject of another exclusive blog post.

The investment banking industry has changed a great deal since Liar's Poker was written.  But I think the human element of the industry, with the naked pursuit of power and money and the greed and lust that motivated the professionals remains pretty much unchanged even today.

Lewis's other book, The New New Thing is pretty much the story of James Clark's life in Silicon Graphics and thereafter his engagement with Netscape and its founder Marc Andreessen.  Again, Lewis' portrayal of Clark's character is one of the main draws of that book, that I recall of what read nearly nineteen years ago.

Clark was totally self built, coming from a somewhat troubled family in a small agricultural town.  He was almost entirely brought up by his mother.  He believed in the centrality of the engineer to a technology enterprise.  His approach to managing an enterprise was based on that core belief.

His fight against the then predatory Microsoft is a tribute to Clark's feistiness, although he does end up having to sell Netscape to AOL to escape falling into the hands of MS. 

Lewis' cleverness lies in how got me to buy into Clark's belief in the importance of the engineer.  Though not an engineer myself I believe to this date that in the world of technology entrepreneurship, both in India and elsewhere in the world, thanks to short sighted venture capitalists, the engineer who builds the core of the enterprise does not get the place he deserves.

Flashboys was the third book and the motivation for this post. 

Of the three books I must confess that it was the book I appreciated the least.  All that I learned from that book can be summarised in three or four sentences.   And I will spare you the agony of that too.

That is more of a comment on comprehending capacity than on Lewis' narrative capability.  Over the years I am sure I must have lost the ability to distill the many ideas that are scattered all across the 276 odd pages of that book.

Lewis however works his people magic in this book too.  To my mind the most memorable character is not Brad Katsuyama, the main protagonist.  It is Sergei Aleynikov, who is not even a supporting character in the plot.  I think Lewis brings in the story of Sergei just to bring out the persistent ruthlessness and brutality that has prevailed in the world of managing money for decades. 

The title of the chapter in which he narrates Sergei's story, sums it up.  It is "The spider and the fly", the spider being Goldman Sachs and the law and enforcement agency in the USA.

Sergei was a Russian Jew who had emigrated to the USA.  He was a software developer whom Goldman Sachs wooed and pampered - till one day when he decided to leave them they thought that he was about to harm them.  And they unleashed legal action which pretty much ruined Sergei's life for many years thereafter.  And thus the metaphor of a spider and a fly.

Till this experience, Sergei was like any other young and upwardly mobile professional.  He enjoyed all the good things in life, except for being vegetarian by choice, married a trophy wife in the form of a Russian model and traded up the fancy home in which he lived.  Until of course the spider decided to crush him like a fly, when everything vanished!

By the time that he was first sent to jail his wife had left him, taking their three young daughters with her.  He had no money or no one to turn to.  Out of a sense of solidarity with a fellow Russian and a sense of pity Masha Leder who was his lawyer had to step up to be his power of attorney.

So that is a fairly straightforward story of a dream gone bad.  If you scour the streets of corporate India with the alertness of one of our millions of rag pickers you will find plenty of them.  I can fill you with them even from my limited experience over a whole night.

The victims of Corporate India may not have ended up jail only because it takes many years for anyone in India to go to jail - unless they have been caught having in their hand the knife that they stuck into someone else's anatomy.  Or unless they are poor people whom the local sub inspector throw them into jail on trumped up charges to exonerate some wealthy or influential criminal. 

The bit that captures one's attention though is how Sergei responds to the tragedy.

At the trial, one of the jurors asked Sergei why he was not angry.  He responds, "But what does craziness give you?  What does negative demeanour give you as a person?  If you know that you are innocent you know it.  But at the same time you know you are in trouble and this is how it's going to be.  To some extent I am glad that this happened to me.  I think it strengthened my understanding of what living is all about."

He tells his lawyer later,  "When I was arrested I could not sleep.  When I saw articles in the newspaper I would tremble at the fear of losing my reputation.  Now I just smile.  I no longer panic.  Or have panic ideas that something that could go wrong."

Lewis closes the chapter with an excerpt from Sergei's memoir, which begins like this:  "If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears.  You begin to realise that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end at any day at any time.  So why worry?  You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system.  The prisons are filled by (sic) people who crossed the law, as well as those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by someone else's agenda.  On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze."  (Emphasis mine)

Sergei Aleynikov was no saint in the normal sense of that word.  He was a man of the world.  In his reaction to his circumstances in life though he demonstrated a stoicism that may not be common even among saints.  His sense of resignation resembled spiritualism in many ways.  It seemed to accept the sheer inevitability of the flow of events in a man's life, no matter how pleasant or otherwise.

As I reflected on his story  I felt that this was the best of whatever little that I had read of Lewis' writing.  Hence the title to this post, which gives no indication that this post is about Lewis' books.

As I write this post, the thought that comes to my mind is a prayer to the Lord to give me the same sense of resignation that Sergei had.  Life has this habit of throwing lemons at us. Sometimes these are lemons that we court, one of which I did recently, and as I have on two or three occasions in the past.

Fortunately, I have not been thrown into jail.  My wife has not deserted me, taking my children with her.  I am not penniless or friendless.  God has been munificent to me on those counts. 

But the pain I suffer is not trivial, even if it be of my own making, even if I have been the spider and the fly all rolled into one.  As I write this post my prayer to the Lord is to give the sense of resignation that He seemed to have blessed Sergei with.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

A day of many events

I met Parvathy, who is all set to marry Karthik, my nephew.  She is a sweet girl - homely, yet a girl of grits and determination who has fought odds in life to achieve what she has.  Between her and Karthik I think they will achieve a fair bit by God's Grace.

This will be the first wedding in the next generation.  Hence its significance.  Long awaited and the result of much sweat, toil and frustration as poor Karthik suffered the consequences of an ante diluvian approach to matrimony on the part of my family and the decadent attitude of Tam Bram girls and their demented parents towards arranged matrimony.

I came to conclude that the Tam Bram community is going through what I call its Yadava moment from the Bhagavata puranam.

Early in the morning I agreed to be Chairperson of the Committee to Review Work Norms.  This will by far be the most important responsibility that I have shouldered so far.  It is a sensitive assignment because the output of what we come up with may impact nearly every colleague directly.

It would be inappropriate for me to speak of the assignment beyond that at this stage.  Suffice it to say that it is an important development in my life.  I prayed to the Lord before I accepted it that I may not be punching beyond my weight.

I also got chastised by my sister for how I had robbed Lakshmi of the verve, ebullience and joi de vivre that she had in abundance when we got married.  I cannot deny that.  She did like the good things in life, in moderation and within the lifts of thrift for the first few years of our marriage in spite of my miserable attitude.

In these past years though she seems to have lost interest in most of it.  I have to take the rap for most of it.  Some of it is directly due to the disease that has afflicted me all these years.  Some of it indirectly because of the innumerable demands that various members of the family have made on her, denying her the time and space to engage in things that are dear to her.

Am I responsible for that too?  I guess I am. That is a guilt that will stay with me forever.  And then I am guilty of many other wrongdoings too, some of which are unspeakable shall have to remain just with me.

Finally it also occurred to me that my second investment is not working out either.  I have known about the impossibility of it from the beginning.  My experience with the first failed investment played out in my mind even as I started committing myself to the second.

There was the rational side of me that kept warning me that this was not going to work out either.  There just was not enough reciprocation from the other side to make it work.  The paternal or avuncular role that I wished to play just did not figure in the kid's calculus.

Yet I kept hoping against hope that it would.

Yesterday, through the day, as I thought about it I realised, as I had been realising slowly in all these past weeks that this one was not going to work out as I hoped and desired.

It was painful to acknowledge.  I cannot blame the kid.  The fault lay in my nurturing unrealistic desires, however genuine my motives.

I know, as in the past, I will keep giving in to my urge to try and make it work for some more time, even as I know that none of it will work.

It seems to be some sort of a curse that I will have to deal with.  It appears that I have been ordained to suffer this pain.  It seems to be my lot in life.  And I say that without any sense of self-pity.

I do not know how long I will have to suffer this pain.  I do not even know if I will ever get over it.  

This time around I cannot even share it with anyone.  I think I have exhausted the share of goodwill, sympathy and understanding that I may have enjoyed with all of those good friends of mine, lamenting about my earlier failed investment.  The only person I can share it with is Lakshmi.

Nanni....Namaskaaram.

Judgment versus Being Judgmental

The motivation for this piece occurred to me from a somewhat remote sphere of our social life that I was reminded of when I heard a TED talk by Radhanath Swami, a senior monk of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).  

As a nineteen year old wandering sadhu the Swami was once aggressively surrounded by a group of leprosy affected people, demanding that he give them "bhakshish".  

When they finally realised that the sadhu was penniless and let him go, he saw an elderly woman. She was just as badly affected by the disease as all the rest who had accosted him.  

The sadhu's interaction with her, which he describes in his talk as well as in his book The Journey Home, will melt the heart of anyone.  In those few minutes of his interaction he came to looks upon her as a mother because of the stream of kindness that she washed him with.   

It was a fine example of exercising sound judgement.  That was possible because the young sadhu had an open mind that was not being judgmental.  These are two important ideas that are often thought to be so different, but in reality are so related, that crossed my mind as I read about this incident.

Reading about it also brought to my mind yet another incident from Swami Rama's book, Living with the Himalayan Masters.  The young Swami Rama once approached a woman who made a living on the banks of the Holy Ganges by selling her body.  She mistook the Swami for a prospective client since many young sadhus consorted with her.

The Swami being an enlightened soul saw divinity in this woman and initiated her into mantra deeksha.  The poor woman took to it in all earnestness. Within fifty days she shed her mortal coils and attained salvation.  She had achieved in a relative jiffy what many spiritual aspirants take several lifetimes to attain, if ever.

Clearly, it must have been the result of her many good deeds of several births in the past.  That makes the incident even more striking and illustrative:  It took the vision of the Swami to see such virtue and spiritual ripeness in a woman who would have been despised by most of society.

So what is this business about judgement and being judgemental? 

The Oxford English Mini Dictionary defines judgement simply as the ability to make sound decisions. The idea of exercising judgement has also come to connote choices that are consistent with one's call of duty, social standing and so on.  

For example, a public official would be said to have exercised poor judgement when he accepts illegal gratification for doing an out of turn favour.  Similarly, an immoral act would be seen as an act of bad judgement even if it be an action within one's personal space. 

Choice pervades every aspect of our life, from the trivial to the sublime, to use a cliche.  As long as we have a choice to make there is need for judgement. 

Now take the case of being judgemental.  The Oxford English Mini Dictionary describes being judgmental as being excessively critical of others.  As with judgement, the idea of being judgemental also connotes that the criticism is unwarrantedly harsh, or worse misplaced.

So a forming negative opinion about a person's professional competence based on his attire is probably being judgemental.  Or, when we making a sweeping inference about the probity of an individual because of a careless inaccuracy that he articulated in a public statement would be a case of being judgemental.

Now comes the trickiest part.  Exercising judgement, which we argued is so central to the conduct of modern life, can often run into the zone of being judgemental.  Let me explain how.

One of the key areas where we are required to exercise our judgement is in terms of who we engage with in our personal and professional lives.  

For example, we are expected to choose people who have shared values and interests as our friends.  Similarly, when we choose a job we are increasingly being counselled to ensure that we share an organisational ethos and a sense of ethics with the superiors we will work for and others that we will work with.

In forming these judgements the line that divides sound judgement from being judgemental becomes extremely fine.  Thus, we may draw unwarranted references about an individual's character based on a misjudged view of some personality trait.  

For example, we may easily mistake someone’s frugality which is a virtue for parsimony or even greed.  Similarly, we do often run the risk of mistaking a person's economy in usage of words for superciliousness.

In both the examples above we may imagine that we are exercising sound judgement when we are actually being judgemental, to start with, and are applying poor judgement.

As I reflected on these two incidents over the past week, I reminded myself how often I must have been judgmental people about and as a result must have exercised poor judgement.

That risk is even more pronounced in matters of religious and spiritual pursuits.  Our family upbringing and social circumstances influence our notions of right and wrong.  They lock us up in a little chamber of virtue that we seem to create for ourselves. 

We tend to look upon anything less "virtuous" as depraved.  We may look upon anything that claims to be more virtuous as impractical or hypocritical.

What is required perhaps is for us to say is that every individual may after all be the seat of virtues that we simply fail to see.  All that we need to do is to expand the walls and pillars of that chamber of virtues that we have built to ensconce ourselves, so that we allow more people to occupy it - well expand just enough so that we will not include deeds that run afoul of the law or that are indecent to other fellow humans.

I do not write this as a homily.  On the contrary, as someone who has lived a life of countless vices and is still counting them, my constant prayer to the Lord is to help me to be careful not to be judgemental about people because of the boundary walls of my chamber. 

In short, I pray to Him to help me exercise sound judgement that I may not be judgemental after all.  But to be able to do that I also pray to Him to give me the requisite compassion.  For the fountainhead of good judgement is compassion.  It helps us not to be judgemental to begin with.

Hare Krishna....Jai Gopijanavallabha...

  

The Journey Home by Radhanath Swami

I started reading this book after I heard the Swami's Ted talk.  Another personal motivation was that I also wanted to gift my personal copy of the book to someone dear.  And I said what better way to give than to read it and have all my customary markings on the next.  It was also love's labour in that sense - love of a paternal or avuncular kind to dispel any doubts.

The net has tons of stuff on the book and the Swami himself.  He is clearly an extraordinary individual.  There is nothing that a semi literate man like me can write about the man or the book that one may not find on the net or that is more profound or informative.

The purpose of this blog is to note my personal thoughts on the book.

This book can be approached at two levels.  To a faith-neutral reader I would  commend the book for the sheer language, the compactness of the style of narration and the magical realism kind of plot that runs through the entire narrative that is spread mainly over a two year period. 

The compactness loses out marginally as the Swami talks about life in Vrindavan.  But that is forgivable given that the Swami's journey was all about seeking Vrindaban, a desire that seem to lay deeply embedded in him without his even being aware of it.

For those who love mysticism and the supernaturals in their stories there is plenty - a yogi carrying a whole tree as a log of wood, saints going into night long trances, a cobra slithering up the Swami's foot and then choosing to retreat, a saint swallowing three pure LSD tablets and its effect not picked up by any of the diagnostic instruments as part of a scientific experiment run by none less than a Harvard professor who had at one time been advocating the use of LSD for enhanced consciousness and finally a yogi going into a clinically dead state in a public demo for exactly 30 minutes to cock a snook at all clinicians.  And here is the rub - he gets up from that state in precisely 30 minutes to the second!

So if you are one of those incurable rationalists who cannot suspend disbelief there is still an interesting narrative in this book.

And then if you are like me, more on the side of belief but not completely sure what this is all for; or, even better if you are completely convinced that this is all part of the Divine Drama, this is a book not to be missed.

It is a 350 page account and packed with detail.  It would not make sense for me to reproduce any of it here.  Here are some things that struck me.

Richard Slavin was barely nineteen when he set out on this quest. Even if one were to overlook some early indications in his life of an above average inclination towards matters religious, one cannot help accepting that for someone who tried LSD and joined the counterculture it is remarkable that he sensed an inner call, while meditating at Crete, that he should continue his eastward journey to India.
 
It is even more so interesting when he tells you that the impression that he had of India at that time it was that it was a land of poverty and snake charmers.  Mind you this is set in 1969-70, the era of the cold war and the Vietnam War was on.

There are many things that one reads about the path that the Swami chooses that are interesting for readers of similar biographies or autobiographies.  Before I note a couple of them I must say that all of that aside, the Swami's sincerity of purpose, honesty and above all the spirit of complete surrender that come through the many incidents he narrates and the metaphors that he chooses are unmistakable.  In many places he simply melts you heart.

Equally interesting and informative are the guided peek he offers into the Himalayan world of the quest for the Lord.  I was fortunate to have a glimpse of this through Swami Rama's evergreen classic, Living with the Himalayan Masters.  Thereafter I got an idea of the challenges of settling down in a world of spiritual pursuits in Swami Virajeshwara's book A Scientist's Quest for Truth. 

The important message that all the three - Swami Rama, Swami Virajeshwara and Radhanath Swami - converge on independently is this:  Sadly the common man, including many among the educated in our society think that siddhi or spiritual realisation is about acquiring and wielding powers such as calling the future, working miracles and so on. 

As the Swami puts it nicely, the greatest of all miracles is the magic of life that we see around us - the beautiful nature in all its breathtaking beauty and diversity and that everything - the birds, the beasts, the bees, the hills, the rivers, the oceans and the trees - are all in their respective place in this world and that we are all blessed to be able to enjoy them with the faculties that the good Lord has blessed us with.  This message is conveyed to Swami and various other devotees by a cheerful yogi, Balashiva Yogi, who materialises a hill of vibhuti to cover a shivalinga which also he had materialised.  After the materialisation the yogi says to his audience, "I can produce ashes, the Lord can produce universes!"

The Swami makes many critical choices in that space of less than two years.  The avenue he chooses for realisation, of an ascetic sadhu, and of the various paths he chooses within that broad avenue, are even more striking.  The Swami claims that he had little knowledge of many of the things that he saw or followed while he wandered in the Himalayas.  For a nineteen year old to make those choices without any prior initiation would call for either great sagacity or an unerring intuition.

I am inclined to give the Swami the benefit of intuition more than sagacity.  And that makes the narrative even more compelling because what better explanation can you think of for intuition other than a karmic vasana?

The other thing that strikes you about the journey is his willingness to assume significant risks on the journey.  Was that a carefully considered choice, having overcome the fear of the unknown, I wondered.  Or, was it just the result of a deep urge to pursue his objective, with the faith that the Lord in whose search he had embarked would look after him?  In many places the Swami gives you the sense that it was more of the latter.

Yet when he walks away from Irene in Italy or when he politely declines the offer from many of the realised souls to initiate him into sannyasa , he seems to display a deep seated sense of awareness of the moment that he wants to choose for his initiation.  It is almost four years after he "offers" his "life" to Srila Prabhupada at Vrindaban that he receives his deeksha, suggesting that he was no overenthusiastic kid waiting to rush to fall at the feet of the first guru who offered to show him the path.

As a senior Swami of a powerful global organisation like ISKCON I do not know what sort of a monk the Swami is today.  He is bound to be different from the wandering mendicant renunciant, who had nothing more more than two unstitched pieces of white cloth, one each to cover the upper and lower parts of is body, a loin cloth and a begging bowl. 

As he notes in his afterword, the honor and stature associated with being a Swami is a "distraction" from the continued pursuit of spiritual self realisation.  It is possible that the Swami has instead consciously chosen a path of serving and loving humanity in humility as the path to realising the Lord.  There are strong pointers to that when he extols the virtue of Ghanashyam who chose to please Radha and Krishna by serving selflessly those who love Lord Krishna and Radha in the book.

In the narrative, his sincerity, his willingness to surrender to the path that the Lord led him on to, his preparedness to see the Lord's will in everything that happened are all seriously touching.  To read about a nineteen year old laying so much on the line in the pursuit of his burning spiritual aspiration is not just touching, but in places heart rending.  The metaphor of a leaf careening in the wind that the Swami uses in three different places captures it beautifully.

In short I consider it the Lord's prasadam to me - to borrow a metaphor that I heard from Swami Dayananda Saraswati - that He made me read this book.

Hare Krishna...Radhey Radhey...

Three Books and a Thread

I have been living in another world for the past two and a half days.  I have been wondering about the reasons for this alternate world experience.   And it appears that there could be more than one, as it often happens with confused me. 

It all started with Radhanath Swami's TED Talk that I stumbled upon.  That led me to read his book The Journey Home that I had bought a while back.  Over the past three days I have been reading up the book.  It is for the first time in many years that I got to read a book at a stretch. 

And what a book it has been! In my limited engagement with the world of letters I have been moved only by two other books as much as I have been by this book. 

The first time that I was moved by a book was when I read the story of Abhimanyu in Rajaji's Mahabharata. I was all of ten years and some months then.  I sobbed inconsolably as the brave, young Abhimanyu, fought on and fell in the battlefield like a warrior worthy of his father, even though he knew that he did not know the technique to get out of the battle formation that he had broken through. 

I was too young to know if it was the sheer tragedy of the way he was killed, or the cruelty of the injustice meted out to him or the courage that the sixteen year old displayed in battle that made me weep so much for Abhimanyu. 

Or if it had anything to do my state of the mind at that time.  Our family of four had just been uprooted from the secure comfort of a large joint family in Trivandrum to a nuclear setup in an utterly strange town Ernakulam thanks to the government of India's policy for transferring officials like my Dad.  We had been moved to Ernakulam, a city that appeared to be in a permanent state of melancholy because of the always overcast skies and incessant rains.  (My older brother stayed on with my grandparents.)

The next time I was cast into such a mournful state was after I completed reading Maugham's Razor's Edge.  It was a monsoon weekend in Mumbai.  It rained incessantly as I read right through the tragic end of Sophie after she had been tempted back into drinking and Larry took to driving a cab in New York after having been a fighter pilot in World War II. 

I was much older by then, having started life as a banker in Bombay.  If anything the experience said to me that there was a part of me that just had not grown up.  Again I cannot say if it was the monsoon gloom in general or my specific state of forlorn in this huge and impersonal city of Mumbai as a nearly friendless paying guest or the sheer pathos of the story that got me into that state.

And the third time I shed silent tears while reading a book and could not bring myself to discuss it, after I had read it, without breaking down was over these last two days when I read The Journey Home.  Here again I cannot say if I felt the way I did because of the rather enervating  attack of dengue that I was suffering from, or whether it was because of a preoccupation with an individual that I had been missing lately or it was the Swami's story itself or some combination of all or some of these.

I am much older now, pushing 58.  I am no longer a stranger to grief, of major or minor magnitude.  Yet I realised that I had not grown out of being affected by the joys and sorrows of the dramatis personae in the books I read.  I felt sad for the young Richard Slavin or Little Monk as he underwent enormous physical hardship, intellectual confusion and emotional turmoil in his quest for his destiny in life.
  
This is one book that I will take a while to come out of.  And this is one book I hope to read at least once again before my faculties shut down for good.

While in the spirit of that book....Hare Krishna..Gopi Jana Vallabha...