a mARTIAN dIARY

Colorlessness.  The sense of the prefect color. Peace and tranquility as the world moves on… away from him. He looks around and sees the cars and trucks engaged in their purposeful tracks, the zealots in their pursuit for gilt. The colorless gasses, light, voices…thoughts killing you slowly day by day.

His bike’s flirting with the 100s and suddenly he realizes that he has been pushing the self destruct button a lot lately. Not a great realization when you are riding at 100 and are only faintly present in the present.  And your hands and legs are frozen. Anyway no brake is going to stop that routine circle until it collapses in its own gravity. But the silence of this moment is deafening and the darkness blinding.

To the cynic every sense is misplaced, even his sense of cynicism. There is that part of him that wants the brakes to be applied, the one that wants to see a sense devoid of indifference, but the breeding is too ingrained now to be killed by simple wishing. The idea of second chances appeals to him, but after seeing though the mask it’s too hard for him to go back to believing the lies. It’s hard to once again remember god’s face when you have been face to face with the Satan himself. But he is convinced it’s the other way around in his case.

And it is this mask less world that he sees all around.   In shattered glasses lying on the highway, the last signs of the genesis of a lifelong disability. In the stoned gazes from the shaded glasses of the new aged diners, trying to remember (forget?) a night filled with disguised sadness. In the mirror of his own urine falling down creating an unfamiliar face staring back at him.

Is it too late for him to bypass the answering machine culture, filled with urgent conversations but nothing communicated? A world he now sees naked in all its brilliant, disgusting glory.

Today the google alert man dropped home a awesome present!

http://www.mindtree.com/blogs/thinking

A awesome outline post by someone I really admire. I know Kalyan Kumar Banarjee needs no introduction. He is one of the outstanding personalities I have interacted with during my time with Mindtree. The post is a nice collation of the different types of thinking and also a brief intro on why “systematic” is not just a buzz word be it any fiend breathing! to running to thinking . I am going to take  the liberty to copy and paste it for prosperity’s sake

1. Lateral thinking (Edward de Bono) - encourages thinking up multiple alternatives, not just going into depth on one - and suggests techniques to do it.

2. Six Thinking Hats (again, de Bono) - helps separate emotional responses from objective ones or distinguish inspired thinking from critical thinking. It also leads to parallel thinking (rather than adversarial thinking) where all criticize together or seek opportunities in a new idea together.

3. Nine Windows - helps us think of super-systems and sub-systems, and thus broaden our perspective. For example, if we are designing a pen, it tells us to think of people who will use our pen, the shop that displays our pen, or the crates that will ship our pens (all examples of super-systems). Useful when we need to focus on multiple stakeholder perspectives, or to understand the customer’s customer. Using this tool, we also focus on the system in the past, and how it could be in the future. Focusing on the past helps us understand why things are the way they are.

4. Systems Thinking - leads to realizing that we are part of a larger system, and the complex interrelationships between causes and consequences, Often, cause and effect are far removed in time and space, so learning from consequences does not always come naturally.

5. Ideal Final Result - helps us think on the ideal result we must aim for, and how we can get there.

6. Resources - triggers us to look for unused and probably free resources, to achieve our goals.

7. Personal Mastery - spiritual leaders and management gurus, all teach this. Covey dwells in depth on this, so does Senge.

8. Disruptive Innovation (Christensen) - well researched theories from the Harvard professor explain the success factor of innovative ideas; predicts when a startup will succeed with certain ideas, and when the incumbent is more likely to succeed.

9. Learning from Unusual Sources - a MindTree initiative, stemming from the belief we can learn from any situation, from anybody, or from any industry. We need to develop the capability to connect experiences in one situation to another scenario where we are looking for answers.

In terms of all thinking leading to innovation, I feel it depends both on the nature of the problem and how you define innovation and hence to expect magic to happen every time is pointless.

But there is one thing that bothers me about the whole concept which is put in perspective by what Peter Senge talks about a fad. The problem with systematic thinking that I have seen is that for most people already in the industry, there are too stuck in their motion already that its hard for them to stop and change their shoes. When they do come in touch with something like this, its more like someone throwing water to clean the shoes while they are running. It goes back to its old dirty self in time. Its hard for it to stick.

I know this rant can be quite generalized to anything new and put into better words with something like “You cant straighten a dog’s tail” but I think this is particularly important in the case of systematic innovation. The gains that systematic innovation can give in a real life scenario is quite intangible. Unless someone comes with with the next google or twitter during a TRIZ or a 6 Hat session, its possible that the incremental gains wont even get noticed, which brings us to the problem of keeping the interest levels up.

This is something I feel most organizations need to address along with trying to introducing systematic thinking and probably what will decide whether the initiative fails or succeed.

Its been a loooong time since I last blogged. Yes! I *am* stating the obvious but like DA always said, to be redundant is only human and at some level this might just be a clever ploy on my part to trick others into believing that I am human.

While you come to terms with the egotistic insanity of that logic, the fact still remains I haven’t blogged in a while. And now comes the worst part. I just am not able to write any casual blog - Lots of ideas in my head but not the patience or the courage to sit down and blog.

So instead of actually blogging I am going to write a blog about what I want to blog (metablog anyone? ) in the next few day (hopefully!!). Here is what I want to write about…

“CRAP” - A word I have come to love and hate after coming to FMS! (All you ppl who come here with a google alert on FMS or Faculty of Management Studies, hold your horses, the book is not defined by its cover and actually it might turn out to be just the opposite ). **SPOILER WARNING** On a side note but in the same vein, whoever thought “Bridge to Terabithia” would be a movie about childhood loss!! well done marketeers

Aricent - Yeps! maybe something about my fledgling intern-career here (at least what does not come in the NDA! )

And maybe on my new found slightly perverted exhibitionist tendency to twitter (but hey the whole world is doing it!)

And yeah about the title, after escaping gravity sooo long ago, it seems my flight though the space of words has been withheld by the gravity of a near by planet curiously and famously represented by 3 letters. Guess?

Now lets see how much of all this actually gets done by next week!

A girl I knew
The dimpled cheek
An elegant smile
The tiny eyes then hard to find

Breeze trapped in her hair
Moon lit on her face
Each step she took
Pulled me with a hook

A girl with dreams
It was hard not to fly
She held me along
On a heavenly ride

We flew along
Shared a single soul
The music of the hearts
Made them one whole

Looking below
I saw a new world
She taught me to discern
The hell and the good

But all of a sudden
There was pain beyond measure
I searched for the cause
But felt a lost treasure

The hearts ripped off
Shedding blood and a stain
And all left behind
Was a piercing pain

As I watched her vanish ahead
My swollen eyes held a tear
And it rolled down as I realized
It would be there forever

(This is mostly a blatantly egotistic post….so be warned )

Our team “BridNBees” <representing FMS MBA(MS)> (please direct all wisecracks and taunts for this name to amuliee)  , ruddie,amulie and I , just won “Treatise - The International Thought Challenge” an online debating contest for teams from all around the world (well, at least 2 international teams were there for sure in the final rounds ).

It involved around 5 rounds where you had to write for and against different topics related to sustainable development.  In addition to blowing my own trumpet (which I think I have already done here to a nauseating level :P), I also want to write about some of the topics that we debated about in different rounds and express my views on them.

Round 1

We had to write a essay extolling the virtues of sustainable development , which we did in roughly 30 minutes after procrastinating the whole day. Frankly before this debate “Sustainable Development” was just a buzzword for me to use and gain brownie points in a GD. Not claiming that it has changed a lot, but I do think that I look at the word with more respect and also are more attuned to the various trade off’s associated with it.

Round 2

Universal education is the most disintegrating and corroding poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.

Our Stand: Against

Opponents : IIM Lucknow (Hosts)

This is actually something I had started writing looong back (June 07) and saved in my blog drafts. But finally it is going to get a chance to flirt with google bots. Originally a Hitler quote, it had me scrambling to understand what exactly it means, but once I got the meaning , it got easy to defend. Among other core issues with universal education most people have the problem of who actually decides what right and this is what I think was as the one of the pillars of our stand. We felt that it was a problem with the pedagogy than with universal education.

To take an example from science, a teacher teaching the gravitational theory can teach in two different manners the entirely same concept. She/he can present the theory as one that is accepted universally, the explanation embellished with the story about Newton and the apple or she/he can teach the same theory as an example of the scientific methodology of understanding the world around us. One that involves , observing the phenomenon, proposing a hypothesis, trying to validate it with further experiments, modifying or rejecting in case of inconsistency or accepting it as a theory in case of agreement of further observations.  By doing the latter the pupil is free to believe in what he believes at the same time equipping him with a rational way to analyze the universe.

(Irrelevant observation #2,438 about girls : if you have 2 gals as your team mates “he/she” automatically becomes “she/he” after reviews and any change to saner language gets u beaten up :P)

Round 3

‘Survival of the fittest’ is the only sustainable means for development

Our Stand: For

Opponents : IIM Indore

Extremely dicey topic considering its relevance to political and emotional issues like reservation. But we wanted to start right by dispelling the wrong connotations that the team “Survival Of The Fittest” has especially its perverse wrong equivalence to Social Darwinism. Something to sum up our stand would be “In the natural order of things, the fittest are not those that fight well, but those that avoid fighting altogether, and thereby learn to use resources efficiently” Tony Stebbing and Gordon Heath (Renowned  Ecologists from the Sustainable fold, Green Futures, September/October 2002). Our stand was confused as a tautology by the opposition which we dispelled successfully in the closing round.

Round 4

In the name of sustainable development, the environmentalists pretend that strangling industrial civilization would not consign the world to a permanent hell of poverty, starvation and mass death.

Our Stand: Against

Opponents : SPJIMR

A very wrong and weak topic to debate upon in my opinion, and in fact after the first round ouropponents got confused and started supporting us!!!

Round 5 (Final Round)

Sustainable Development can only be fruitful when it grows up from the grassroot level rather than when implemented as a policy decision

Our Stand: For

Opponents :IIFT Kolkata

Very close debate and our moderator Sidin Vadukut royally screwed our stand but thankfully for us  the judges (or at least some of them) thought otherwise. Actually I also think it was too close to call but the fact that the moderator comments for 1st two rounds were uploaded only 3 hours before the 3rd and final round was a bit of a bolt from the blue. But finally we survived

I would be lying if I said I didnt want to win, but this is one contest where I really enjoyed working with the team on coming up with the write up’s, especially the rebuttals which were like triple decker chocolate fudge for me :P. So the prize was like the icing on a cake that was built with a lot of sweat, abuse(yeah thats what we tend to do in debating ;)) and fun.