When the Troubleshooter got into Trouble!

Image source: http://www.frikipix.com/...

I vividly remember my high-school science teacher telling us - when teaching us about electricity - "Don't try to be a good samaritan if you see a wire lying on the road. It might just be live!".

I was a live and mute (dumbfounded, actually!) witness this morning to exactly this. Except that a sense of guilt and embarrassment far overshadowed my amusement.

I was easing my car into the parking slot this morning in Panaji and inadvertently rolled into a ditch that ran between the road shoulder and the footpath. I had seen it before parking but didn't realize it would create trouble; and was in fact trying to do my own bit by making sure the car wasn't obstructing traffic. The ditch was about 8 inches wide and about 4 inches deep. Even then it would still have been a non-issue except that for some weird reason the front tires that were in the ditch kept spinning and the car wouldn't budge (I realized but only later, that there was in fact a very simple explanation for this).

While there was no damage whatsoever to the car, it was perched awkwardly enough to attract attention. Nothing like a little excitement on a Monday morning - and that too for Goans - so in 30 seconds flat even though it was before 9AM on a Monday, there were at least 3-5 friendly onlookers who came to "supervise", "advise", "oversee" and "guide" the rescue operation.

After about a minute of futile rubber-burning, a onlooker about 20 feet away who had been thoughtfully watching this until now stepped forward because he saw something I hadn't and gave me some meaningful advice. And stood bang in front of the car to make sure I did it right. All I had to do was turn the tires a bit to help the tire get better traction on the edge of the road so the car would move without the tires spinning.

Under CC license from Flickr

I took his advice.

I turned the steering.

And hit the accelerator.

It would been a brilliant idea. If only I had turned the steering a little more.

The net - or rather, wet - result was that the onlooker got splattered with fresh mud! On his white shirt and black trousers! On a Monday morning!

As I rushed out of the car to apologize, the poor Samaritan gave me a weak I-know-it-was-not-your-fault-but-dude-wtf smile and walked away shaking his head in disbelief.

Mr. Good Samaritan, my apologies. Thank you for your help this morning and may God bless you. I hope you had a good day after this and have a wonderful week ahead!

Thank You!

Gagan Narang, Saina Nehwal, MC Mary Kom, Vijay Kumar, Yogeshwar Dutt and Sushil Kumar: take a bow as we salute you.

You excelled in the face of every odd - paltry training infrastructure, dysfunctional political environment, stepchild treatment to every sport other than cricket and in the shadow of meritocracy's death.

THANK YOU!

The Circle of Life

Image Source: http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/The_Lion_King

My memories of my childhood evoke only emotions of joy and happiness. And the nostalgia that goes with it. I had the privilege of a happy childhood thanks to my parents, grandparents and uncles.

An integral part of those  memories are mental images of full-of-life, vibrant grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, neighbour’s neighbours and who-have-you. All in their prime of life.

The insatiable and inscrutable desire to "grow big" was also an integral part of childhood for all my friends and me – in whatever terms the notion of "big" was defined in our teeny brains back then.

So grow big, we did. My cousins, friends and me. And then off we went to college, for post-graduation, for our jobs. Chasing our dreams and aspirations.

In my case, my dreams and aspirations brought me back home.

I returned to join the family business after a 14-year stint away from home. Needless to say, it was – is – a H.U.G.E transition for me – I switched not just my "job" and my industry, but I also transported myself across timezones, geographies, economies, cultures and pretty much darn near everything that defined my world.

As I settled in, I was thrown off-guard by something I always knew and was always conscious of, but never prepared myself for.

The circle of life.

I was prepared for culture change, for generation gaps, for differences in mindsets, for unaligned perspectives and priorities. But the circle of life, I was not prepared for.

Pretty much all those full-of-life, vibrant grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbours, neighbour’s neighbours and who-have-you had moved on in age. Many of them had even moved on from this world. And why wouldn’t they? From being a little toddler myself back then, I have my own toddler now, so it’s only natural that time has moved on for everyone else too.

Yet, it’s not as if I visited home for the first time in 14 years – I’ve been meeting these folks almost every year. But somehow, my mind’s eye was not seeing what my physical eye was transmitting.

Until now.

Just as I was struggling to settle into my new environs, the realization hit me that the circle of life was in full play. Even before I could attempt to take that in my stride, I was knocked back even more when I accidentally ran into the funeral procession of a friend’s father.

I had grown up, but apparently, wasn’t ready to grow up.

Of course, much of my immediate circle is still full of energy, but the signs are beginning to show.

What brought me to the brink of this emotional churn though, was the passing of my maternal grandmother this morning. At the ripe old age of 88, my maternal grandmother breathed her last.

All my student life and almost through to graduation, I had this rather uncommon privilege of having all my 4 grandparents alive – their individual and collective influence was the lynchpin of my value system and character over & above everything my parents taught me.

As I reflect upon the lives my grandparents led, I feel like a dwarf - whatever I may have achieved, I don't think I can make the kind of sacrifices they have made all through their lives. In particular, my grandmothers - both of them. While my paternal grandmother was compassion in its purest form, my maternal grandmother consistently and unflinchingly subjugated herself, her wishes and her interests for the greater good of her family.

Today, with her passing, it dawned on me that life was beckoning me to prepare for the journey ahead.

To traverse the circle of life.

Spiritual Intelligence: International Religion of the 21st Century?

Prelude

Religion it would seem, has failed us.

Prayer was to have helped us find salvation and good karma was to have paved the way for a promising destiny. Evil should have vanquished at the hands of good and the villains should have long-rotted in hell. Peace, love and discipline – preached by all religions – should have prevailed.

Instead, we find thugs leading the good life while honest citizens languish and terrible fates seem to befall the best of people we know. Religious figureheads seem as scam-prone as politicians and even temple trusts are not immune to embezzlement. Ethnic strife is, ironically, fuelled – not quelled - by religious beliefs and views.

In contrast, the long-decried materialistic ways of the West that focus on instant gratification seem to offer a more predictable and higher standard of living than our spiritual ways that promise a pathway to a future paradise.

The scientific method has empowered us with so much information that the fabric and credibility of religion have been impacted.

But has it really?

Have we truly been empowered by information or are the dangers of applying half-knowledge lurking round the corner?



Genesis

Indians are by nature heavily influenced by culture and tradition and in a sense, fairly possessive about them too. And that's not bad at all. Except that when the culture and tradition are not “scientifically-grounded”, it's easy for us to get confused.

Needless to say, our culture and traditions are heavily influenced by our religion and compounded by regional variations. Given that we have no dearth of regions or religions in India, the resulting mix of culture and tradition based on religion is both, strong and fragile, widespread and localized.

FasTrak Fool or Foolish FasTrak?

There's this guy - or gal - who seems to be making a habit of it. Either evading the toll or wrongly getting into the FasTrak lane.

Same car, same place. White Nissan hatchback/truck bearing plate number 3POH888 (number changed, of course). Bay Bridge. Twice  in 5 months. A white-colored Nissan, mind you, a white-colored Nissan.

Why do I care?

Because the blokes at FasTrak want to be "in the wrong lane" too. They keeping sending the violation notices to me. Because my car bears the number 3PQH888. The first time I dismissed it because there was clearly a human error caused by the "O" resembling the "Q" and all other numbers/alphabets being an exact match.

That they made the same mistake again is surprising enough, but what really gets me is that the Toll Notices contained the description of my car too: a Black Not-Nissan Sedan. Accompanied by the picture of the white Nissan.

Somebody, please slow down and look before you rush.

Occupational Hazards

Used under CCL from kuminiac's album

Like the fire eater pictured here, EVERY profession - without exception - has its own occupational hazards. Some are just more visible and some have a greater element of physical danger, but it's always there. 

Often, some professions are romanticized by society and the media (e.g., software engineering in India) or are vilified by its own circumstances, actions and then some more by society and the media (e.g., police forces). To a point that its occupational hazards are completely obfuscated.

Over the years, I have been struck by a different perspective of "occupational hazard" - viz., how the core soft skills (separate from the job-related competencies) exercised in one's profession tend to unwittingly and inadvertently define the individual.

The following are examples (in no particular order) that I have encountered in my personal life - examples where I have seen professionals excel at their core skills and outperform their colleagues and then seen that very skill reflecting in their personal lives in ways that they may not have always wanted and in ways they may not even realize. 

Profession	Key soft skills	Observed Impact
Doctors	Fine blend of compassion and detachment: Compassion to connect with the patient's pain, illness and suffering; detachment to ensure that the doctor can be part of the solution and not become part of the problem. This helps them deal with misery - and often, death - that they must bravely come face-to-face with every single day.	Convey an image of being hardened when  they talk about pain, misery and death (and the circumstances that bring these on) with  detachment. The very detachment that makes them excel at their profession.
Sales*	- Eloquence & Confidence - Optimism without being foolish - Zero fear of rejection without being shameless	Elan even in the absence of sufficient data and greater tolerance for white lies.
Accounts & Finance	- Drive "accountability" down to the penny(/cent/paisa) - Draw confidence and comfort from a balanced ledger - Keen financial impact analysis ability	Tendency to seek greater comfort in arithmetic than in math - i.e., have trouble seeing the larger picture and putting things in perspective.
Software Engineers*	- Syntactic and computational precision - Top-down, divide & conquer problem-solving approach	Have a black & white perspective of life - often ignoring or failing to comprehend the hues & colors of the human touch. Often sacrificing semantic appreciation for syntactic precision*

* I am a software engineer by profession and my "recent" transition to a technical pre-sales role required a little bit of transformation. Kind of an "upgrade to color". I must admit therefore that I am called upon to practice a combination of skills of these two professions and consequently, am equally prone to a combination of their impact.


Of course, the foregoing is not intended to ridicule any profession or professional - true professionals are ones to be saluted and admired in any field. Like I have pointed out before, the emphasis is on "ways that they may not have always wanted" and "ways they may not even realize.".

The foregoing is just a conclusion I have drawn that leaves me bemused. It has made me realize that there are more occupational "hazards" and more perspectives to these "hazards" than meet the eye. And most importantly, it has served as an eye-opener for me and led me to some serious introspection. 

Naming Ceremony: What's in a Name?

"A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet"
                                                              - William Shakespeare


"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"*
                              - Gertrude Stein


Last week, I got involved in helping someone find a name for his new venture. For reasons of confidentiality, I cannot talk about the venture nor the name that we closed out on, but the process was an interesting and intriguing one.

My last - and perhaps, my only other - really serious project at identifying a name was when my wife was carrying our baby. While my wife and I sifted through many names, the "framework" was simple and the decision-making straightforward. The framework/parameters were that we both wanted a name that was easy to pronounce and easy across cultures, had a meaning that we would be proud to have our child live up to and was not a “retro” name. The decision-making was simple: we had to both like it.

With the business venture, though I had not expected it to be all too easy, it was a trifle more challenging than I had imagined. Whatever the approach to coming up with a list of names, it had to have a corresponding or phonetically similar domain name available, should not already have been trademarked/copyrighted and had to be "culturally scalable".

While my friend went with right-brain gut, I resorted to left-brain structure to compensate for my handicap in creativity. I came up with a table that looked roughly like this:

	Descriptive	Suggestive	Arbitrary	Fanciful
Color-coding	·         Domain not available ·         Domain parked – may be available ·         Domain available
One word
Two words
Multi-Syllable
Alliteration-style

Within the table, all names considered were listed and color-coded to indicate availability of the corresponding domain name. The X-axis helped profile the name based on its meaning – or lack of it – while the Y-axis helped identify names of different compositions.   

I originally started out with just "Descriptive" and "Non-descriptive" on the X-axis but the Wikipedia page on "Product Naming" helped me put more structure around it.

Eventually, we went with a name that my friend pulled out of his hat, but the table above did help me "brainstorm with myself" and generate a bunch of names.

Like I said, I found the process very interesting and am wondering how one would come up with a name if you didn't want to engage a pricey branding/marketing organization and if your creative juices weren’t flowing. Would be happy to get inputs from my readers.

Of course, once you build the brand even “fanciful" and "arbitrary" names will sound nice and even logical – Google, Twitter, Cisco, Apple are all excellent examples. These are neither descriptive nor associated with the founder’s name – e.g., Tata, Ferrari, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, etc. – and yet, have built a powerful image and perception around the brand.

Last but not the least – and the real motivation for this post – is that I began reflecting upon a few Indian logos/brand names that we grew up with as children. I marvel at how these brands acquired mindshare without the benefit of extensive market research, without mass marketing and without social media. All of these brands are brands that were descriptive as well as suggestive as well as fanciful as well as rich in the meaning they conveyed. All but one – at least in my eyes – were also rich in the quality they delivered (and there will be no prizes for guessing which one I think, did not deliver that quality).

The next time I see or hear a name that makes me wonder what it means or why someone chose that name, I am sure I will spare a little empathy for the person who had to make the decision.

After all, even though I Google for something I want to find and tweet something I want to announce, and Like something I like and even though I grew up reading Amar Chitra Katha and drinking Rasna, left to me, I would never have come up with these names. Names that resonate in so many hearts and minds across the world.

Even though a rose would smell as sweet by any name called, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose*.

*I have of course, twisted the interpretation of this slightly, for effect