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61 years of freedom – what changed?

Filed in General Interest, August 16, 2008, 4:50 am by , , ,

India celebrated its 61st Independence Day yesterday. I decided to jog my memory on this great occasion.

18 years ago, I reached the USA for my first stint there. As an Indian, I was almost immediately taken aback by the pride that Americans displayed for their country. The national flag was everywhere including on undergarments!

I observed, with a great deal of incomprehensibility, that when the national anthem was played, Americans placed their hand over their heart. I could even see tears forming in some of their eyes. Wow!

Flashback 29 years ago, while in grade school, we used to take the pledge everyday and sing the national anthem on special days. Teachers used to drill into us nationalistic messages, stories during I-day/R-day events as well as throughout the year.

However, for a 12 year old kid, things got very confusing due to what happened outside the school. There was no pride visible at all. More confusing was the fact that being an Indian meant that we will be scoffed at. Reams of advice was hurled at India – control your population, stop corruption, keep your streets clean, be proud or whatever else caught the fancy of the advisors.

In those days, at the end of a play or a movie, they used to play the national anthem. A shocking thing used to happen – almost everyone would walk out while the anthem was playing to go to their parking spot early or whatever. Myself and my dad (used to work in the Military Engineering Service) used to be amongst the few who were left standing (no pun intended). [Later the government wisely passed a law to stop the national anthem from being played during such occasions].

For me, this was all enough to completely smother the small flickering flame called Indian pride burning in me.

Fast forward to the last 2.5 years that I have been back here. I-days are big – people sport wrist bands and head bands with the tricolor. Many Indians are almost jingoistic. I went to a meeting with a couple of political leaders in it last year. This time when the national anthem was played i was pleasantly surprised to see a few people having their hands placed on their heart!

What changed?

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Creepies, Crawlies Und Ich

Filed in General Interest,Humor, August 8, 2008, 3:56 am by

Our house is full of guests, though not the paying variety. They have horrible hygiene. If the jam jar is open, they help themselves to a bit of marmalade – with their hands. If I finish my cup of tea, they lick & feast on the dregs. Its utterly disgusting. They love having the TV on – the channel is immaterial, they are just mesmerized by its LCD screen. My attempts to boot them out was met with derision. They just invited a few more friends over. They buzz around all day long, partying like mad. Our house has been invaded, its a war zone.

I’m talking about houseflies, of course. And their larger, more annoying cousins – face flies. Resistance is futile. They sneak in thru the balcony – which we are forced to keep open. It serves as our baby’s play pen & she emits unearthly howls if we so much as dream of closing it. She invites the flies in with shouts of glee & they saunter in happily, under the guise of her friends. One of these days, they’ll nod their fugly heads & ask me – “Howzit Hanging, Ms R?”.

Countries with an economic boom create more trash. Rotting piles of garbage adorn every street – major, minor, semi-major, demi-minor & everything in between. India is now a very dirty, smelly country – that makes Wall Street (& Dalal Street!) happy & the denizens of every other street miserable. Add to this squalor a dash of blubbering cretins masquerading as administrators. Et voila! – you get an incendiary dung-heap – prime real estate to breed flies.

So, all I can do now is gnash my teeth impotently & shriek – I’ll get you, you gecko-feed!

While flies & bugs are vomit-worthy, some of the beetles are uber-cool. Many people don’t know the difference – which is kind of sad. Beetles are awesome. I should know – I kept several of them as pets.

Once, a Regal Jewel Beetle owned me. My brother presented it to me during that year’s Summer holidays. “Hey, bat barf – happy birthday” he said lazily & tipped the beetle on my head. The beetle crawled over my forehead, slipped on my eye-glasses & fell on my largish nose. It had a lovely iridescent body & chocolate colored wings. It twirled its antennae & tickled my cheeks.

I eyed my brother with deep suspicion. Elder brothers don’t do random acts of kindness. That, and my birthday wasn’t till November. I turned the beetle over gingerly – ACK! PTBH! It looked like a roach! My brother made a face at me & said “I found it in the orchard, monkey-face! I thought of dropping it in your knickers when you sleep – but it will be a harrowing experience for the poor beetle”.

The beetle was totally adorable. It soon had its own digs – a palm-leaf box. It was used as a receptacle for dried mango – which we irreverently dumped in the garbage. Which event was set to the back-ground score of our grandma cursing us – “Urchins! Rogues!”. We lined the box with our dad’s best hand kerchief & an old tie. We laid the beetle in its abode with great respect.

Assiduous research on our part – as in, I did all the reading while my brother showered dried leaves on my hair singing “Its Raining Men”, not what I’d call an even division of labor – revealed that this particular beetle was partial to Jujuba leaves (Indian Ber Tree). We kept the beetle ensconced in comfort & Jujuba leaves – which we harvested from our back-yard.

All good things must come to an end. Our beloved beetle died during child-birth. To be precise, egg-birth. What can we say, labor is fraught with perils for females of all species. We were devastated. Our father consoled us by saying, “Now why don’t we give your beetle a proper funeral?”.

We dug a shallow grave near a rose bush & laid our sweet beetle to rest there. That’s when we hit a snag. We hadn’t given our pet a name. But, tombstones needed a name. So, we named her “Hot Water” – don’t ask me why. “Here lies Hot Water, Beloved Pet of Priya & Ravi”. My friend Sudha solemnly filled a small glass bottle with Hot Water & laid it beside the beetle. We sobbed uncontrollably & quaked with grief when the grave was closed with a mound of sand. We laid button-roses (since normal roses were too big) on Hot Water’s tombstone.

Even now, I feel a tug in my heart when I remember Hot Water.

As I said, beetles are thigh-slapping wonderful. The other day, my niece Roshni espied a Rhinoceros beetle & ran screaming “Bugs! Bugs!”. The beetle’s little feelings must have been hurt by the pandemonium – for he marched resolutely towards the door. “That’s a beetle, Roshni” I said dully. “They are all the same” she said mulishly. “Do me a favor” I begged. “Promise me you won’t consider a career in Zoology”. “Whatever” she shrugged “but please throw that ugly bug down the garbage chute”.

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Deconstructing Doha

Filed in Uncategorized, August 3, 2008, 11:35 am by

Prolog

The press is agog with articles on the collapse of the Doha round. It is sad indeed that after 7 years of negotiations the agreement collapsed on a single issue. I have been reading the articles and trying to make sense of what exactly has happened. I thought i will share with you what i learnt on this important issue that confronts the world today. Hoping that the rest of the community also has some additional wisdom that can be shared, as always.

Agriculture

The WTO has been quite successful negotiating other popular agreements like the GATT and TRIPS and others. Negotiations around agriculture started in Doha in the year 2000 and hence the name Doha Round. The main negotations have been around creating a framework that opens up agriculture markets both in developed and developing countries which obviously will give a big boost to the world economy as it has done in other areas of global trade, not withstanding what the opponents of global trade have to say.
Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM)

The entire Doha round which reached consensus around 18 of the 20 topics at hand, could not reach agreement on the issue of “Special Safeguard Mechanism” – Issue no. 20 was around Cotton which the negotiators could not yet get around to due to the impasse on issue no. 19. Cotton, apparently, another big issue especially for the African and Latin American countries which wanted to extract some concessions from the US and EU, but that is a separate topic.

The SSM, in lay terms, is a mechanism which is there to help the developing countries raise tariffs on agricultural imports if they find that their internal market prices crash due to imports. The issue is India (with China giving support quietly) wanted to increase the provisions in the SSM for increasing the tariffs by a margin unacceptable to the developed nations (read US, EU).

There is the linked issue of the generous farm subsidies that the developed nations give to their farmers. US made a token concession on this but no where near what the developing nations wanted. Of course, no one wants to talk about this as a contributory factor, but instead choose to pin the blame on India (China has intelligently played the silent role but supported the Indian position).

Why is India Worried?

The point which probably is missed out in the discussion is that 70% 20% of India’s GDP comes from Agriculture with 200 million farmers dependent on it. By contrast the US has just 1 million farmers and the contribution to GDP is very low (< 2%). The average land holding of Indian farmers is less than 5 acres whereas the US farmer farms thousands of acres by using scale farming.

And given that the US and EU generously subsidize their farmers, cheap farm exports from the US and EU can swamp the markets of developing nations and put millions of poor farmers out of business. This is in essence the real threat that India wants to guard against.

The Mexican Example

I wanted to see if this is indeed a threat or is it simply the UPA government’s posturing to pander to the Indian farmer and secure the vote bank. My research turned up the devastation suffered by the Mexican corn farmers – under NAFTA, US farm exports to Mexico increased 18 fold and has put a third of the farmers out of business in 8 years since NAFTA was signed. In another 6 years, the Mexican corn farmer is expected to completely dissappear. Sadly, corn was first grown in Mexico 5000 years ago.

Similar to India, the Mexican farmer’s average landholding is just 5 acres.

Epilog

I think this is a legitimate issue for developing nations which are still very dependent on farming. If the US & EU want to preach free market economics to others, they had better cut their farm subsidies to zero, or let India’s SSM proposal go through.

Additionally, i think India has to adopt scale farming techniques rapidly. The threat of cheap farm exports from the developed nations swamping India is very real, with or without Doha. That is the only way we can cut food prices down in India.

What do you all think?

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The UnLeadership Manifesto – making of the 21st century leader – part 1

Filed in Management, July 26, 2008, 10:49 am by , , ,

Prolog

Leadership of every hue and cry has been covered in over 437, 869 book titles available on Amazon.com alone (Search for Leader). Not to speak of countless blog posts, magazine and newspaper articles on the subject.

Judging from the reams of material that has been written and from personal experience, Leadership is a tough topic and it is clear that we don’t understand it that well.  Therefore, it is seductive to boil leadership down to a set of formulae:

  • It is also inspiring to read about great leaders and insights drawn from their experiences.  Therefore, you get to read the leadership wisdom of people starting from Sun Tzu to Steve Jobs.

It is all about the Leader

The one unifying pattern that emerges from reading the popular leadership press is that it seems to be all about the leader and his/her skills.  There is some wisdom bandied about – on choosing the right people , making sure you eliminate the people who don’t fit your vision, etc.  But for the most part, leadership is about seeking to become the ideal leader with all the N qualities depending on whose N you believe in.  With all this talk about the Leader,  if becoming a leader seems like a Herculean task, you are not alone.

The 21st Century Leader

Having been in leadership roles for the past 18 years, i don’t think it was ever about the leader 100%. Now, in the 21st century, with the latest and greatest communication and management tools, the leader is much much less important. Only those leaders, who grasp this counter-intuitive insignificance of themselves, are going to succeed. John Chambers, The legendary CEO of Cisco recently articulated this shift:

“The CEO role at Cisco going back over the last five to 10 years has been very much ‘command and control’ and I think we do it pretty well, and if we say ‘turn right,’ 65,000 people turn right,” Chambers said.

“That’s very effective when you’re in a couple product areas or one or two major cross-functional initiatives per year. It is not an effective leadership style or organization structure if you’re moving into a lot of market adjacencies and you have a lot of major cross-functional priorities.”

This whole obsession with, who the leader is and what his/her personality is, is a vestige from the command and control era of management.  The 21st century leadership will be marked by a totally different style – which i decided to call UnLeadership.

Developing the UnLeadership Manifesto

I would like to engage the community on this blog in developing this manifesto.  The community has delivered the goods many times before including the mission impossible – can passion be taught?

Here is what i propose we should do – build a set of rules for the UnLeader and in the next pass recommend the tools that will be needed.

That would be my first one on the manifesto – 1. Instill passion in your team.

No Asshole Rule

One of my favorite authors Bob Sutton has written a fantastic book called No Asshole Rule recently.  This is a must read to understand what one should never do as a leader.  This would be my recommendation for the second rule – 2. Never be an Asshole.

Inspiration

In order to inspire you all to the task at hand, i would like you all to spend 1 hour and 16 min watching this video from Professor Randy Pausch, famously known as the Last Lecture. I will guarantee you that this will be one of the best 1 hour and 16 min you have ever spent watching a lecture. [Sadly he passed away yesterday]

Epilog

Now for the community to develop the rest of the rules – decision making, dealing with/developing expertise, empowerment, performance management (vision, goal setting, reviews etc) and any other category you want to add.  Numbered lists are seductive indeed, so let us keep our list to 10.  Most important thing to bear in mind – don’t be held hostage to existing models of leadership, let us rewrite the rules. I am also tagging bloggers that i know are passionate about leadership – Ganesh Vaideeswaran, Arun Sankaranarayanan , Ranjit Nair and Subba Muthurangan .  I am hoping other bloggers will also join in and help create the framework.

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Fellini’s Ghost, Save Me!

Filed in General Interest,Movies,Reviews, July 20, 2008, 10:43 am by ,

I’m a movie fiend. When I watch a movie, I very thirstily & feverishly deconstruct its building blocks – Casting, Screen Play, Background Score, Dialog Delivery, Costumes et al. I’m passionately in love with movies. When I was a kid, I yearned to make movies. I used to stand before a mirror & emote, observing what angles worked & what didn’t. I would sit behind the clump of Frangipani trees in the yard & clinically dissect passers-by. Their body language, diction, their clothes. In retrospect, I must have unnerved & freaked people out with my pitiless ogling.

I never entered Show Business. Instead, I became a Software Engineer. I’m not exactly heart-broken, because I’m a philanderer: Film Making is only 1 of my many loves. In turn, I’ve desperately wanted to be an Architect. Cryptographer. Musician. Physicist. Writer. Chef. Astronaut. And curiously enough, Fighter Pilot. In my first year in the Engineering school, I fell inexorably in love with Computers – it had me from “Hello World”.

Those who can’t make movies, watch them. I sate myself by reading about the craft & by devouring truckloads of movies. A good movie is a story on an acid trip – Vivid images hitherto unseen carve themselves on the brains of the viewers, like a hallucination. A bad movie is like a wet dog – it stinks, its messy, it can be shaken off easily & it never makes a lasting impression. I’m very particular about the kind of movies I watch – After all, you devote 2 to 3 hours of your time to watch a movie. Its an immersive medium, where you have to stay interested. I only watch movies that I think are good, whose Rotten Tomatoes rating is high or whose story-line I think will hit the high notes. The rest are simply not worth my time.

I used to watch TCM (Turner Classic Movies) & AMC (American Movie Classics) regularly when we lived in the US. In India though, good movie channels that carry Subtitles are rare. We rent videos from Cinema Paradiso, a store that has an eclectic collection. I hit the mother-lode this weekend – I laid my hands on a Sinhala movie – Pavuru Valalu, with English subtitles.

Now, About Pavuru Valalu

Loosely translated, “The Walls Within” – is set in the 1960s Galle in Sri Lanka. It has a simple story-line – Lovers separated during WW-II meet after a gap of 25 years. The lady is married, has 2 daughters & her husband has abandoned her. When the movie unwinds, the director’s sympathy for the lead pair’s predicament comes thru with lyrical perfection. Without being judgmental, the movie poignantly captures the society recoiling in horror at this state of affairs.

The protagonists Victor & Violet are essayed admirably al dente by Tony Ranasinghe & Nita Fernando. None of the actors spout reams of dialog – their silences, little gestures & eyes convey much more than mere words could. Luckily for us, the Casting Director gave Miss Sri Lankas & Mister Colombos a pass. Instead, actors have been chosen primarily for their prowess & their suitability for the role. The young women in the movie have wide hips or big butts. Young men don’t flash six-pack Abs. Instead of fixating on their physique, the actors have focused on effectively conveying their turmoil thru nuanced expressions & dialog delivery. It is sheer poetry in celluloid.

The movie will haunt me – because it is so raw, so natural. The entire movie is shot in a typical middle class dwelling, with peeling plaster & green algae in the outer walls. Actors wear rumpled clothes when they are at home – not designer threads. And the women are not painted like street-walkers waiting for their Johns. Not a single actor resorts to histrionic pyro-techniques – for they know that over-acting & bad-acting are synonyms.

Pavuru Valalu is a great movie – an outstanding achievement by director Prasanna Vithanage & his team.

My SOS to Fellini

I asked for Fellini’s ghost, but Ingmar Bergman’s or Akira Kurosawa’s ghosts would do equally fine.

For after watching the movie, a paroxysm of rage hit me. A small country, Sri Lanka, with a population of 20 Million people is able to make a neat movie on a shoe-string budget. It makes a handful of mainstream, yet critically acclaimed movies that receive rave reviews from all corners of the world. We are a nation of 1.2 Billion yokels & counting. Yet, the number of decent movies we make every year won’t run into double digits.

When was the last time you saw an Indian movie, where the lead pair is 50 & 45 years old? We are fixated with youth. I don’t understand why. At least 50% of the people in India are 30+. Oh for movies where the theme isn’t romance, revenge, family feuds or a mix-up between 2 people who look alike. Didn’t Shakespeare do that in The Comedy of Errors Circa 1589 already?

Our movies revolve around love, love & more love. Unfortunately, love-making in Indian movies involves booty shaking, heaving bosoms & shirtless men panting like dogs at their women. When Violet’s daughter Lily sees her beau Ranjith – her face glows softly. We can imagine her adrenaline rush easily – Incidentally, we are not idiots & we appreciate subtlety. A fact lost on most Indian film makers.  They just can’t resist a song & dance sequence to show-case “tender” love at this juncture. They would have Lily & Ranjith cavorting in Switzerland or New Zealand, writhing like snakes in heat.

When will we stop making movies with people dancing around the trees? For that matter, when will we make movies without songs? Must every single movie made in India be an escapist fantasy? Is reality so cumbersome, that we want to edit it out of our art? I’m not saying we don’t make good movies ever. We make too few good movies amid a zillion very bad ones.

We don’t have to make ponderous, pretentious movies where we try to show the world how bright we are. I once watched a movie by Israeli director Amos Gitai. Nuh-uh. Not my cup of tea. I was dazed, confused & totally disinterested after 30 minutes. The movie opens with a guy walking from 1 end of the street to another – and they show this for 10 yawn-worthy minutes. Maybe I’m just a dummy that doesn’t understand Gitai’s art, but sproing! – the next scene has 2 nude people making violent love on a canvas full of wet paint.You call it art, I call it boooooring 😐

Bollywood AKA National Shame. Bollywood, my ass. Where there is more money than talent. Where an over-emoting Shah Rukh Khan thinks he can step into the large shoes of the talented Amitabh Bachchan. Where the much feted Aishwarya Rai – the most visible face of Indian cinema – is one of its worst actors ever. To my utter misery, she gets plum assignments that were once done with elan by the scintillating Meena Kumari & the effervescent Savitri Ganesan. I lose my appetite every time that happens.

And the film-makers in India send 1 clunker after another for the Academy Awards & wait with bated breath for an Oscar. Good grief. For all their shameless plagiarism of Hollywood, their knowledge of World Cinema is very poor.

In the meantime, I wait for the release of the Malayalam epic Pazhassi Raja later this year, from Director Hariharan. With screenplay by M.T.Vasudevan Nair, Music by Ilayaraja and with veteran actors Mammooty, Sarath Kumar, Manoj K Jayan & Thilakan, it can only be good.