power here power there - part 2

That’s the right song to start this second part of the power blog. Nopes, it’s the blog that is powerful but the blog is about power. Seesh. Bad comment.
Why this song? I guess this is the perfect aggression anger anthem. It’s got an expletive at the heart of the chorus, repeating itself again and again. I couldn’t help shouting my throat hoarse while I was listening to this song in the car. Just a few days back I met a respondent in my research in a southern city. A decent corporate sweet guy. He took us out for a coffee in his car and played this song loud. He apologised but said he couldn’t help but like this song. This is the aggression anthem. It is telling the world to go screw yourself. What is it about rock music that is a so dam bloody aggressive release? Is it the screaming, the straining of the guitar strings, the tempo, what? But it does feel like an aggression release. I also think the bhag bhag bhag (run run run) in the song contributes to the effect. The trader we met was an aggressive investor and like all aggressive investors, sitting on a net loss.
Aggression. It never helps. It probably helped man survive and grow from a roaming Neanderthal to a stable farmer and progress as a species. The problem is that these aggressive genes are impossible to control when you are younger. Your brain starts working for the first time in a manner that you think is logical. You see the gross injustice being meted out to you or probably to others. Your natural empathy and reaction takes over and you want to do something. Your brain is not well developed to handle the overflow of emotion and your willingness to do good and pop, aggression becomes physical. You use what you are best at, using your arms and legs.
Also when you are growing up simple things attract you. I always wanted to join the army and ‘serve the nation’. I guess today I believe nation can be better served in many other ways. But why would I want to join the army? I guess there is a simple explanation that I have to offer. It was the uniform and the machinery they have at their disposal. I wanted to join the tank unit. It guess it is no better than the young boy who wants to be an engine driver as the guys seems to be in charge of a large big engine or a fire fighter in charge of a large big red bus. It’s important for the bus to be large big and red. I think the best recruitment drive for the army would be to have these army barracks in the middle of the city which don’t have walls. There they should be doing military drills in shiny uniforms and they have these big tanks roaming around for young kids to touch feel and dream. In the good old days I guess sexy equipment and smart uniforms were only available with the army and hence the young impressionable minds would be inspired by them. Now the sexy equipment is the iphones and the blackberrys and the laptops and the music players and the …. You get the point. And they all wear the uniform to work. They wear their suits and ties and the formals and go to work. Jispa notices when I wear a suit and leave office. She looks at me and wonders something. I guess she is making an impression in her mind. A positive impression I think. These are critical cues that get formed in an impressionable mind. I wanted to join the army and I ended up being firm on it when I got a chance to visit the national defence academy at Khadakvasla while I was around in the fourth or fifth standard.
Two can play the same impression game. Both the books, which I mentioned in the earlier blog (Curfewed Night as well as Hello Bastar) talk about impressionable kids being drawn to the rebel cause. There are mentions of the locals seeing these rebels flashing guns and in uniforms moving with a purpose. It is enough for them to want to enlist with the cause. And I guess that most of these young kids don’t even know what they are really fighting for or don’t really care about it. They just are swayed by the system and they are then drawn into the quagmire in which they possibly perish or possibly grow old and have no other option but to be a continuous part of it.
I think that’s the case even for most of the other rebels from the city. The young aggression which wanes in a few years gives rise to power dependency and these guys might just stay on for their thirst for power. What else will a 30 year old do if he has spent the last 15 years fighting ‘the force’. He has no skills else but the cause and the reason he fights. And then the power game starts. His interest is clearly in maintaining his power equation. He has to survive and this is the only way he can.
While we attract the best talent in office and other places, it is important that we realised that what attracts them here in the first place is not the reason why they should stay on. Dreams change, people change, and if we are able to constantly upgrade skill sets these people will also move with us. But if we let them remain there, forget to upgrade them, worry that if we do upgrade them; they will run away; then they end up being power brokers. They will cling onto their existing equations and become satraps in their own rights, ruling over their dominions. They will naturally be threatened by their status quo and would protect fiercely. The problem when they not only protect fiercely but when they start proactively attacking other dominions in anticipation of their attack. There is a reason why as you grow older and higher in an organisation the attacks increase gets more vicious. It’s a proactive attack by someone who is not increasing his dominion but protecting it.
If we constantly improve these skills the person knows that he can get hired elsewhere, he knows that his status quo is constantly changing; he is busy using his brains productively. He knows he has an option other than where he is present. This option in his mind will free him from his inward circle of control.
Big rebel leaders know that violence is pretty much useless and it will annihilate the very class it seeks to protect. But the wisdom comes after ten years of sloganeering. He can now not eat his ego and say this can’t work. You have to work with the system to change it. You must embrace peace. It is possible to work from inside and given the effort these guys tackle in recruiting friends and putting implants, I can’t believe it’s not possible to do peacefully. Without being the enemy of the people you seek to protect.
Sigh… too much gyan for someone who is basically an arm chair critic. I haven’t been to the jungles and I haven’t been inside their homes, huts and existence. All I know is that they don’t deserve ot die like this and have their livelihood snatched away. Both sides are guilty. The rebel is as much the culprit as the oppressor.
No one is bad to start with; it’s when the situation leads you to become power hungry, when you want to maintain what you earlier stood by, when your ego does not let you admit; that is when the rot sets in. it is easy for me to say all this and extremely difficult for me to understand and see it happen and stop. It needs an amazing ability to constantly see yourself from a few feet away, and ask yourself – what, why where? Are you sure?
Too much philosophy is definitely not the core of my blog and most I know simply get bored by it and move on from my blog. I try and stop writing once I exceed one page – but this blog is not meant for these people. It is meant for me as a father. It is meant for Jispa to once read and understand if something hits her.
Jispa I hope I didn’t bore you too much. You are a sweet imaginative and sensitive kid. I hope you face your share of shit and grow stronger for it. I can’t make you a good or a bad person. But I hope after you read this, you will realise what my belief of a good or a bad thing is. Or if shit hits you and if I am not around, you know what I thought of the shit hitting me. And I sure hope you find your own answers. Your own answers.

power here power there

What’s better than one good book? Simple – two good books. And when they seem to complement each other I truly enjoy the experience. While many times you get to read books that complement each other, very rarely do you get the chance to read them in quick succession. I was lucky recently.
I normally don’t pick Indian non-fiction, but I was lucky to pick two books by Indian authors discussing home grown Indian union issues. One was Curfewed Night by Basharat peer and the other was Hello, Bastar by Rahul Pandita. The first book is about Kashmir and the second is about the Moaist / Naxal movement in India.
I have learnt over many years that India is not the ideal democracy that we grew up believing it to be. The newspapers and the media are not really interested in showing any real side of the truth. The closest I seemed to have gotten to the truth has been thanks to the Tehelka magazine.
These two books, despite all their flaws in writing style are interesting in the fact that according to me they are courageously trying to unmask the government. There is a clear idea of two Indias. One is the urban shining India and the other is the rural India untouched by the growth and modernisation. These books are revealing that there is a third India, the oppressed, raped and pushed under the carpet India. This is the place where the government not only does not care but is actively involved in oppressing and raping its own populace.
When I was much younger I always wanted to join the army. The notion of patriotism had been drilled into my head. Not that it required much drilling by external parties. I managed to drill that into my own head by own will. I wanted to pick up arms and serve the country. That was dream that lasted till very late. Only tons of reading and understanding real stuff later made me realise the false bloated notion of the nation. I refuse to now honour and respect these man made lines.
As regards Kashmir, my first experience with it was as a child with parents visiting the paradise on earth. I don’t remember it being particularly beautiful as much I remember it being arrogant. A people who knew that the world wanted to see them. I then saw it as an adult in the year 2003, and I saw no progress in the intervening 20 years. I saw people shattered, their egos broken, the desperation writ large in their eyes. While I was able to put the two together, only after reading Basharat peer was I able to live the horrors of the people of Kashmir. We could naively say that Kashmir has only itself to blame but the atrocities of the Indian forces and the rape by the powers that be, have also massively contributed to it. While there might have been a fire we managed to really add fuel to it.
Jump to the Naxalite movement in India and you realise that it is nothing but a rebellion against the state that is busy pillaging our resources at the expense of the tribal livelihood. Oh god. It’s horrific on how we manage to do it.
These are also case studies on power. While its clear that for those oppressed the state is the culprit and for those in the comfort of modern air-conditioning the rebels are to blame, to my mind both are completely totalitarian regimes corrupted by power. It is both that extract their meat from the populace. The rebels who pick the gun are reluctant to drop when they realise the power they wield. Power corrupts and is an addiction like no other. And it works at all levels. Even I look at the grass root, as a father the power I wield corrupts my thinking. Sometimes Jispa get the unnecessary brunt of rage which is nothing but a power equation. Surely I think I do it far less (I think, I hope) that what I might have faced; but hand on heart, the power is what manifests on my child.
This power equation is crazy and it is this that makes us cling on to our status quo. We are afraid of change, we forget the reason and the power itself becomes the motive. Like the book on social entrepreneurs I was reading, one do gooder realised that he could not go into get into Maoist bastions and uplift the people. The Maoists have a vested interest in keep the area underdeveloped.
I see this in offices as well. I see too many bosses having a vested interests in keeping their employees only happy enough. How much should I pay him, for him not to go? WTF? They actively supress any learnings and actively ensure stagnancy. As growth inevitably is followed by demands and market forces that put a price on the persons head which the organisation does not want to pay. Why should it? Why should I develop a person only to lose him or her? I have only in the past learnt one thing. Keep pushing the person to grow and learn. The bigger he gets the more the space he pushes around him. The wider his span of vision gets. This only benefits the organistaion, and if he leaves, be happy that he has created a big enough void, so that the new person will have to first fill that void and then try to do some more. I don’t know why the organistaions can’t see this, why the bosses can’t see this, why we can’t this?
Power lies in letting go. Yet we hold on. I so want to let go. I will try at every opportunity but dam it. I don’t see it. I only see it in hindsight. Dam.

think right

I was talking to Jispa the other day and we were talking about the flat that we bought. So I was explaining to her that to buy the flat I had to take a loan. That set off a series of questions which culminated in me explaining to her the concept of how a bank works. I explained how the bank borrows money and pays interest and how it lends money and charges interest and the spread between the two. It was good fun. She seemed to have grasped the same. It is always an interesting conversation when I have to explain to her stuff. I kind of love taking complicated stuff and translating it to her knowledge and understanding. I yearn for the day she will be studying her rocket science and explaining it to me in a language I understand.
I have always taken pride in being able to understand complex stuff as its basic level. Like I still remember my statistics class and being able to correctly remember and apply some of its core principals. Especially the concept of the bell shaped curve. In office when we do our rating we are supposed to follow the standard distribution pattern while rating teams. It is pretty stupid and ananl in the way we implement this stuff. I have a team of around 14 heads. Now the idiots will make me rate them and expect me to rate them while following the curve. So not more than an x percentage must be rated outstanding and a y be rated below that and a z must be rated adversely. It’s stupid. A simple error of taking what is true at macro and expecting it to work in a micro environment. The first rule that most students of statistics will tell you is that standard normal curves tend to be formed at minimum sample size of 40. And that too at that level you only have 80percent confidence in the sample. Lower numbers do not throw the curve distribution. Good HR practice would have dictated that at the time of appraisal the organisation must follow a standard normal pattern for grading. So the corporate duds have mandated that every team must follow the pattern. So even my 14 head team would need to follow a statistical model while statistically it does not hold good.
Duh. Also this would be true in an environment that does not have external stimulus and bias. My team is lean and small. It enables me to focus on the lower level and manage them. I constantly attempt to attack and weed out non performance. I do not let non performance be tolerated and linger. Hence as a whole I would have a bias that ensures a larger than normal head. My variance would necessarily be less and hence the model itself designed to paint the complete picture of the organisation would fail. But it is difficult to explain this to corporate India. We are adept at making the stupid error of taking the macro picture and expecting it to work at the micro level. It’s like saying that every branch of the mango tree must produce a variation in fruit that is consistent with the variance in the tree as a whole.
This shit happens when you sleep in statistic class. I loved my professor. He used to try and make a sincere attempt to get the stuff into our brains. I remember trying to sit at the first one or two rows else the lecture risked getting lost on you. In the break we used to run to the wada pav guy and get some wadas to eat along with the spicy chutney. That also was designed to keep you alert. He tried his best and I tried my best to understand him. It was a sincere attempt.
So after all these years while I forgot most of my statistics I have been fortunate to know some of the basic stuff and as I grow older I meet people and understand further application of the stuff I learnt. I might forget what the chi square test really is but I know enough to know that mere correlation is not equal to causation. The basics like mean median and mode is something that I remember and I think at some level it helps. Especially when the quanti researchers come in to pitch some of their products. It fries my brain when they talk but at least after the deep frying some thing interesting comes out from it.
So with Jispa I try and get the basic thinking right. It’s important that the thought process works correctly. A broad and correct understanding of the concept is at times more than adequate than a detailed analysis. Sure there will be several opportunities to dive deeper into a subject matter but for most occasions an understanding that helps you talk and direct the subject matter experts would be more than useful. This is not an excuse to be a generalist. In fact one of the biggest regrets of my training is that I have not taken the opportunity to be an expert in any one field. I have been a stupid generalist. I wish I would have taken a science or an arts stream that would have helped me direct my energies towards a specialised field. Even if I would have done my management afterwards, I still wish I would have done at the least an engineering. In fact today I wish I would have followed my dad and done my graduation in civil engineering. I would have gotten great pleasure to be able to construct a building or something. Even I might have hardly ever gotten chance to build one, the knowledge of being able to build one would have been lovely.
Talking about Jispa knowing about interest. Once while we were giving her pocket money because she played her guitar I got a brain wave. While she should know and experience the joy of getting and spending money she must also experience the joy of saving money and getting interest on it. so if she spends her money she know that she will not only part with her money but also the future interest on it. So we decided to give her interest. For sake of calculation her interest is set at 10percent per month. Oh dam what a high rate of interest. She is a pathaan. But it’s ok I guess. The other day Jasmine decided to give Jispa the money we got from selling old newspapers. On hearing this I jumped up. “what are you doing? I am paying ten percent on that every month.” Jasmine had a good laugh. “who told you to pay interest to your daughter?” she asked.
Oh dam. My wise ideas will come back to give me a bite on my bum.
For the record, in the middle her Nanaji gave her some 750 bucks for helping him in some origami class. So today while I was paying her interest, I was like wow...she had calculated interest at 98.7 rupees. Jasmine later told me that she calculated interest herself. She figured out how much the amount should be ... all jasmine told her was you will get 10 bucks per hundred. Cool. next time around she will understand for herself the benefits of compounding.
Jispa is also prone to asking some really simple questions. One question she asked Jasmine. “Mom, if you knew John Abraham in college itself (he studied in the same college, one year older), why didn’t you take his autograph then itself?”

Another one that I was super impressed by - she called me while I was travelling. She asked me “dad, I was reading about Jesus Christ (amar chitra katha) and I was wondering if BC is before Christa and AD is after death, then what is the period between?” Dam cool. My history teacher, Mrs. Annie Mathews had taught us this in the fifth standard. AD is not after Death. It’s Anno Domini. I remember that class very well. I told Jispa that it’s not after death, it stands for Anno Domini. But somehow she remembers me teaching her in some museum that AD stood for after death. I wouldn’t normally teach her, as this is my favourite GK question, but if Jispa was so sure, then I let it rest. “sorry, if taught wrong, but here is the truth.” I then went online and explained to her what Anno Domini stood for (the year of the lord) and that in all probability there is a miscalculation and Jesus was not born in 0 BC.

room for improvement

Learning never stops and it comes from all quarters. These days I have had the good fortune of eating my ego and having it punctured. There is this lovely lady in office, a colleague who has this disarming style of talking and puncturing my ego. Normally I don’t take too kindly to advise. Most don’t know what they are talking about or don’t understand you or are too shallow to really help. The vast majority don’t even care too much about you to really help you. This lady is able to influence by her unique style of not really advising but by merely pointing what she sees and putting in a way that hits me hard. I have been advised by a few friends to go for Vipassana and meditation. But I find that impossible to go for giving my high ego and general intolerance for saintliness. I hate those self help books and discourses designed to help you see light. Instead I love it when people talk about their experience and what they saw in real life and what they interpret out of them. This chick is able to make me see light by merely questioning what I do. No one has so far been able to tell me how to talk or behave with Jasmine. Once while overhearing a phone conversation she was able to ask some basic questions which made me realise my mistake and helped me immediately improve my behaviour. Not that it was too much of a change. It wasn’t like a change from negative to positive, but a small subtle shift that I am sure would go a long way. After being in love for 22 odd years with Jasmine, it does come as a rude jolt that I need to improve, in whatever way possible. Sigh... there is always room for improvement. People change if they want to. They change when they want to. It doesn’t make sense to force or attempt to change them. One only needs to question and ask correctly. That is all that is required. The rest flows. I take credit for wanting to change, recognising the need to change but she takes a whole host of credit for showing me how to.
It’s nice to be around 35/36. You can have good adult conversations with those even 6 years younger to you. That improves your scope for conversation tremendously. You have so many mature people to choose from.
Speaking about gurus... I can’t handle the gurus and the books they write. Keeping in line with my ego status, I really don’t understand how such apparent commonsense crap is being sold. Today I just happened to catch a Deepak Chopra book and he seems to be in the same market as Robin Shrama. ‘You are a good person and you need to harness your goodness to become great’ genre. The writing is extremely simple and full of promoting self goodness. I think it is meant for people who have forgotten their souls or have sold their souls, and need to be reminded that their souls are meant for greatness and this soulless period is just a temporary phenomenon. I think these books seek to address a vacuum in the same way porn does. Pornography for the soul. You are a great guy with a foot long organ and you just don’t know it yet. Everyone can have a foot long. Yikes... that line sounds like a Subway ad.

ask and you shall know

This post was written in Igatpuri but uploaded from Vizag.
I am trying to catch a couple of days of rest and relaxation in the midst of all the chaos around me. The chaos is my doing and I love every moment of it. within a short span of a couple of months I am doing an all India research trip meeting customers, business partners and employees across India in an attempt to find out the soul of the broking market and the findings are amazing, startling at times and at times I want to kick myself for not seeing it before. So many times when we sit in Mumbai and hypothesise about the kind of customers we might have, we like most others take references from our immediate surroundings and create marketing insights out of these which we action. I feel like an idiot. In the past when we were drafting emailers for our customers I relied too much on long copy and the play on the English language. One big insight is that most of our customers dont really understand or know too much English. I haven’t had more than a couple of interviews in English as I understand it. Those who understand it are also comfortable not talking in it. Beyond Mumbai, they seem to be thinking, talking and interacting in their mother tongue. Even in places such as Pune and Nashik the clientele is largely happy in vernacular.
If I looked carefully enough and seen the signs I would have noticed this long time back. All one has to do is look at the comments and forums and check the language. People are conversing in the English they are comfortable in and it’s not the English I know. It’s full of grammar and typos and with a good mix of local words. English is purely the language of writing it is not the language of conversation. The qwerty key board has ensured we write in it but has not ensured we think in it. India is conversing in its own language. What does this mean for advertising and communication? The new brief for my agencies is to write from my daughter’s English text book. You may not use any word not found in that.
There are these and many more insights that can be had by talking to people across the country. This has been an extremely enlightening period for me. My day typically starts at 7 am nd ends by around 12 midnight. The whole day consists of meeting people, talking, thinking, ratifying and junking theories. No matter how different people are the core of what they are is the same. We can look for differences across the spectrum of clients and that’s the easiest thing to do, but it does not take much to see that at a particular level they are the same. A few threads run through them and that define them as my customers. Thanks to my teaching in the colleges I have constantly reinforced to my class and hence to myself as well. The best way to put basics in your head is to try and drill it to 60 kids every year. I am so thankful to them. Almost as thankful as I am to Dharen Chaddha.
These days he comes so often to me in my mind. I see the rubbish being thrown about and remember his lessons, his methodologies and his clarity of thought. One of his biggest contributions to my thought process is to belive in my research and not to theorise outside of it. Hence what I see I say, and what I don’t see, I refrain from commenting. Some basics that I remember clearing with him years ago come back to help me again and again. To use relationship with the category as opposed to segmentation, which is contrary to what most marketing text books preach.
The power of doing research yourself while understanding the market cannot be underestimated. I find it funny to see marketing managers relying on the research presentation instead of their own eyes and ears. Getting out of your comfort zone and meeting clients at their own liars contributes tremendously to our understanding. And those seeking to contribute without the effort come across so shallow. Yesterday was an interim presentation in which we had two senior resources who were trying to understand from the presentation on the state of the market. they came across as tremendously shallow and surprised, while those who have had the good fortune to be in the market were able to put the presentation in better context. Of course it did not help that while the two extremely talented ladies in research did a great job in researching but an absolute bummer of a job in putting the presentation together. I guess they were too used to putting together different segments, plenty of stupid insights and were unable to string a line together. I guess most companies want that. Give me differences, not what is common. They want to take apart every small segment and niche. I really don’t understand it as a base for a broad over arching marketing thought. But forget it. Let me not get too critical. I too know little and what little I know is also open for debate, discussion and plenty of learning.
What I do know is that too many people fart too much knowing too little. And too many people base their strategy by superficially knowing too little of those in and around themselves. I am happy and proud that I have forced, coerced and ensured that my team gets into the market themselves and see what the truth is. As I keep telling them, the company is dumb. They will be happy with whatever we give them, but it is up to us to know what we are doing, why we are doing and base our strategies and thought process on something we have found out. Even at the end of it all if we get five immediate action points, most research would have paid off.