a mARTIAN dIARY

I had volunteered for IYCN a while back and one fine day I got a mail asking for volunteers for a “Delhi Haat” stall that they have put up. The details are below.

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Eco-products stall at Dilli Haat INA

Start: 08/01/2009 11:00

End: 08/15/2009 21:00

Timezone: Asia/Calcutta

The Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) Delhi, in partnership with Conserve and Manzil, and supported by Haathi Chaap, Darpana, Freeplay, and several others, are setting up an eco-product stall to promote alternatives to plastic bags (made of paper, waste cloth, organic cotton, jute bags, and waste vinyl) and to distribute other unique eco-products (solar lanterns, hand-crank torches, elephant dung paper, and lots of waste-based products).

When : Saturday, August 1, 2009- Friday, August 14, 2009
Where: Dilli Haat, Sri Aurobindo Marg, Opp. INA Market,
New Delhi, India 110023.

Timing and duration: 11am-9pm

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So now I can be found at this place most days from 4^th till 14^th between 7 and 9 pm. Please do come along as there are lots of awesome stuff on display!! pics soon

Very exciting stuff and lots of new things to learn. Will share  my learning’s soon

“And it rained”

The status message of a fellow classmate shook him from his sleepy conversation with his laptop.
“It rained?” he thought. When? Now?
“I cant hear anything.” He runs to the nearest window, shakes off the curtain as the dust finds its way  into places he will never think about of his body, but places that will remain with him till the day he dies, he stares at the cold dark night illuminated by light without a celestial origin.
“Well it’s not raining now”
“Obviously, they why would she write ‘it rained’ it should be ‘it is raining’. Did he miss anything? Was he too engrossed in his artificial friend? The irony of the situation struck him, to people, who he cared the most he had not time, but to this thing of plastic he had devoted the best part of his last year.
“Never mind! lemme ask”
His plastic proxy for communication is activated. Magical 1’s and 0’s race with light.

Pop comes something in the right hand corner.

“Oh it’s that buffoon pinging me. What does he want now?”
“Hi”
“Hi there”
“hey one small doubt?”
“sure”
“it rained?”
“???”
“your status…did it rain??”
“are you making fun of me?”
“huh? No? why?”
“well its raining”
“hmm lemme see”.. “nope its not..i cant see anything”
“our hostels are close it cant be not raining at ur place now can it?”
“hmm possible..why not!”
“sabari! ur crazy, I just asked bajaj..he said its raining! And his room is just 2 rooms away from yours!”
“huh!”
“what Huh!”
“lemme ask him”

“Hi Bajji”
“Hi saber!”
“Its raining?”
“yeah”
“??? Where are you??”
“at 2 in the night? Where do you think??? My room!”
“!!! Ok..lemme come there..”
This time the rush in his being is gone as he gets up from his bed and puts a t as he walks towards the door. “I should probably clean my room” “later perhaps”
He take the turn moves towards room no 65. “its locked from outside” “how come?”
Knock knock
Knock know “bajji” bajjiiii”
Retraces his steps.
“Where are you man?”
“I was waiting for you ? where are you?”
“Well your room is locked…from outside”
“Impossible I can see it, its open”
“come on..i just came and saw”
“stop faking u lazy bum, let me come to you then”
Chat silence
“what games are you playing sabari, where are you?”
“what? I was waiting for you”
“room no 59 rt?”
“Yeah”
“Well its open but no one inside”

(No..this is not a reflection of some deep rooted fear of being alone..cuz I already considered it before writing and by the law about the universe it ceases to be the truth…this is just a writing experiment )

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!