Signs

This has been the saddest experience of my life, as I was very close to my mom in spite of the distance. She was a loving and caring woman who loved life and people and it makes me very sad that she no longer will be able to enjoy the life she loved so much. She loved to travel, to eat, to meet friends, to watch movies, to read books and to be with her family and even though she was 80 years old and with poor health for the last couple of weeks, it’s very difficult for me to comprehend that she can no longer inhabit this world she enjoyed so much.

I’m eager and happy to get on with work, knowing that all business problems always have a solution, which is not the case with health and life issues. I’m looking forward to seeing you and talking to you at the soonest occasion

My manager's mother passed away recently and she was away for close to a month. When she came in, she sent a very touching note, a part of which I have pasted here (without her permission). I found the last line very interesting. 'Knowing that all business problems always have a solution, not.....'

I sometimes wonder that our lives are so complex, difficult and for most parts out of our control that may be we yearn for that feeling of control, that certitude which would enable us to say, if we do X, Y will happen and so on. And it is this nature of business i.e. problems can be solved and that most things are causal, that, it is so alluring, that many people give 'business' so much importance, sometimes at the cost of other also important things in life.

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I am turning out to be a big believer in signs. I have noticed that I am in a unclear situation, I have been fortunate to read ‘signs’ that have made me pause, re think, re assess and decide the right course of action. And every single time I have recognized and acted on these signs, I have chosen the 'better option'. I can't call it right decision, but definitely the 'better option'. This signs talk sounds so mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus right? Let me try and explain.

By signs, I don’t mean some sudden writing which appears from nowhere but I think I mean an intuitive feeling. A phenomenon, where I am able to comprehend a situation for more than what it looks at first sight, go behind and beyond and understand what it means in a broader context. I know all this talk of signs sounds like witch craft or something but it is not.

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There is this other article I read - 'How Will you measure your life’ by Prof. Clayton M Christenson in the Harvard Business Review. The article raises interesting points and has drawn diverse reactions. I reproduce one part of it here that I quite liked.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.

That is an astute observation. While we are not all pricks by default, meritocracy which we all swear by as the panacea to all problems in the world, is in my circles at least, defined by certain restrictive cues like the name of school or college, designation on our visiting card, the locality where we have bought houses, vacation destinations, fortune 500 ranking of our employer and so on. And we often compare ourselves with people who are better off or in our perception have accumulated more tick marks on list that invariably has items similar to the ones listed above. And these people become the smart people we want to associate with/ learn from and hence by the nature of limited capacity, energy, time, we don't seem to learn things from the rest. Thus it is not by choice that we ignore or close our minds to others, but just by social conditioning.

Of course, this also begs a larger question. How should we define merit?

Outdoors

Steel, an alloy of Iron and carbon is made from Iron ore, limestone and Coke (coal). Steel mills or plants are gigantic and are located far away from the big cities and in face far away from even small cities. Basically, they are far away from any civilisation. Integrated townships are built around steel plants - with all amenities like schools, hospitals, shopping complexes, club houses etc provided for, to ensure that the needs of the employees and their families are taken care of. These gigantic steel plants and colonies, legacies of the Nehruvian socialistic planning era, came up in erstwhile Bihar and the neighbouring mineral rich areas of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. These colonies grew, thrived and prospered in pre-liberalisation days when the quantity to be produced and consumed both were licensed and regulated by the government thus ensuring a steady flow of work to each of the steel plants. In one such colony, in the midst Central-eastern India, I spent my early childhood.

In those days, every other weekend, my parents, I and a whole lot of friends from our colony, would pile ourselves into cars and would go out on picnics. As kids would long for such days. Waterfalls, reservoirs, dams, lakes, gardens, treks, forest reserves and so on. The place where we stayed was blessed with many natural, non commercial and picturesque spots. There are many pictures of me, as a kid, with a lot of my friends, enjoying these outings. Those were good days! Sigh!

Coming to think of it, I haven't gone back to that city in the past 16 years, since the day I left. I have vivid, graphic memories of all the roads, the houses, the park, my school etc. but they are frozen in time. I have been wanting to go back to see how things have changed. Someday, sooner than later, I will.

This sudden nostalgia trip is because of the pictures below. They reminds me so much of the many weekend trips that I made as a kid.

The above pictures were taken near Nashik on Jan 1, 2010. A bunch of us were sitting here with absolutely no one around, yakking away on life, universe and everything in between as we welcomed the New year.