Blogosphere and Troposphere

I'm for keeping the blogging world separate from the physical world. My position stems from my discomfort when someone walks up and says, "Hey, I read what you wrote last night! Pretty deep hanh! What's up?"

Having spilled my innards in a cathartic fit on blogosphere, I'm not ready to face those who witnessed it! I need to quietly slip back to reality. I need my cocoon of serenity. I need my mask of normalcy.

Being accosted about your post is like being pulled over by a traffic policeman for speeding in the Playzone video game! Its like your teacher shouting, "Get out of the class!" because you were having naughty thoughts in your mind!

side bar: Its funny how you are real in the virtual world and make-believe in the real world - well that's for another post :-)

Lets make conversation via comments. Lets be as forthcoming or inquisitive as we want to be. But please don't walk up tomorrow and say, "Hey, I didn't know that talking about your blog bothered you so much!"

Masks

Sometimes a fake smile, sometimes a forced grin
Yesterday I had to put on a face that looked grim
Just now, am supposed to lock my brow - show interest
Tomorrow, I'll have to pull them up - in mock jest

Big room, big egos - a face that's pliable
Small room, eager eyes - a face that looks reliable
Talked down, don't agree - but face shows agreement
Asked anew, don't know - but face looks omniscient

Today I want to rip the layers of pretence
and search for my real face
I take off one mask and another and so on it goes
till I'm staring at nothing but empty space.

Winning..............not captivating enough

When it comes to reading, the burden of sustaining my interest is with the book.

There are books, too many to innumerate here, that are un-put-downable. From the first line to the last page, they consume everything around you. Any conversation is time away from your dialogue with the author. Meals are series of morsels punctuated by stolen paragraphs. Office seems time away from what you should really be doing. Turning the last page is equal measure relief and regret.

Then there are others. They seem interesting in title and cover. You start with great expectations. And then the plodding begins. One page a day, a paragraph another time. Before you know, a month has elapsed and the book is still waiting with a bookmark wedged in its body.

What makes some books page turners and others bookmark holders? I don't intend to delve into the answer (assuming there's one) but just say that Winning by Jack Welch fell in the 2nd category for me. It begins nicely, is pacy, full of insight and real examples by Jack. But then it became an effort. I struggled to get back to it at the end of each day till finally I abondoned it with a bookmark still wedged. Nothing particularly wrong with the book - you might even like it if you hold Jack Welch in awe. But for me, Winning was just not captivating enough.

Am now on to Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner. Lets see how that fares........

Equality - the wrong end of the barrel

The current fixation on conspicuous consumption among rich in India is laughable, if not pitiable.

Rather than fixing the root cause of inequality, Manmohan Singh is deflecting responsibility by drawing attention to CEO salaries and conspicuous consumption.

First, there can never by equality in society. Equality in opportunity - maybe but equality in economic status - never! The latter runs against the principle of natural selection. The strong, the smart and the spirited will always win. The weak, the mediocre, the diffident will always be left behind.

Setting a goal of economic equality is a recipe for disaster as communists all over the world have realised (except in Kerala and W Bengal!)

What government should gun for is Equality in Opportunity. This means giving everyone access to 3 basic things -
Quality Education
Quality Healthcare
Quality Nutrition

After this, let the abilities and efforts of individual determine the distance they cover.

Politicians however, in their pursuit of short-term populism, have little time for what's right. They'll earn cheap applause by targeting the rich and deflecting attention from their own shortcomings. This is a recipe for social unrest that they could avoid if only they focused on the causes. That, I'm afraid, is too much to ask from 5 year term deposits.

Pls leave your thoughts on what are the best ways in making the 3 basic things mentioned above, available to people.......

Will you do it even if you aren't paid?

Anonymous mentioned that the true test of loving what you do is : Will you do it even without getting paid? Interesting, albeit a trifle utopian.

Here's another ponder: Is Job Love like Value Rating? (Avoided using Job satisfaction since its much abused like that other favorite - Work Life Balance!)

Value rating is Benefit over Price. Value can be high if the benefit you get is a lot more than the price you pay. Or, for a given benefit if you end up paying a low price. (This last bit was for the poets :-). Is Job Love: Return over Effort?

If it is, what drives Return higher? I think
Return = f(money, appreciation, ego fulfillment). For the poets, this means Return could be any or all or some of monetary remuneration, appreciation / respect and a feeling within you that you have made a difference.

What drives effort lower?
Most people believe that they put their maximum effort into their work. Few would get up and say, "Today, I'll only give my 60%". Haven't come across many. So in a sense, effort is a constant.

Another school of thought says that effort can 'seem to be' less if the work is enjoyable. Hmmmm......now its getting circular. Lets consider this a bit more.....

Maybe, Return is only about money. Maybe Job Love = Money/Effort. Maybe appreciation and ego fulfillment make the Effort seem lower rather than making the Return higher. They reduce the denominator, thereby increasing Job love........ you see where this is going??

Net, Job Love is not loving your job in isolation. It seems to be 'how much money you make and is that worth given the effort you seem to put. The money is real, the effort is a perception. What goes in the numerator or denominator is up for discussion........

Whatsay????

Doing what you love - how much is enough?

Visual DNA was nice but lets get back to the thread of doing what you love. Got comments from both Type 1 and Type 2 - those who took the plunge early and those who are thinking of embarking on doing what they love. This post is for Type 2s ..........

Someone said, 'My dad was a soldier so I could be a farmer. And I'm a farmer so my son can be a poet'.

Doing what you love is easy if unencumbered by the need for earning a livelihood. It's also easy if the definition of livelihood is kept at a basic level.

Very often, this is not the case.

Most of us are from middle class backgrounds with no big inheritance to fall upon. Also, we have our ideas of a good life that include a house, a car, holidays, parties - enjoying life without a care for the wallet.

This necessitates building up a buffer to insure your lifestyle before you embark on doing what you love (unless, as wattman says, you love making money ;-)

So, how much is enough for that buffer??

A bit of financial modelling will tell you that in Singapore, you can get by comfortably with S$7000 a month. In India, the figure is about INR 100,000 a month. I guess, it'll be US$5000 in the US??

For simplicity, I'll stick to Singapore. Assuming, doing what you love will fetch you $2000 a month, you need to get $5000 from investments - translates to $60,000 a year. If you manage your investments well, you can get a return of 6% in Singapore. So you need to build a buffer of $1 million for financial independence.

That's what you gun for. The day you get to $1 million, Stop. This is the day you can start doing what you love, without any worry.

Of course, you can model different scenarios, different rate of returns, different lifestyle needs. The point is that if you're Type 2 and start today, there is a way to doing what you love.

The biggest challenge is stopping when you've made that $1million. Human desires have a way of creeping up on you and money has a way of making the resolve go weak :-).

Thoughts???

See yourself - Visual DNA

Found this on Ganji's blog. Interesting....

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

Finding what you really love to do

Finding what you love to do is not easy. Lets admit this much. Often the answer gets confused with our hobbies or our interests. At other times, it gets buried under sheer inertia. Sometimes, the enormity of choices out there causes inaction.

Now, there is a minority who just knows what it loves. As early as school or Uni, these people know where their hearts lie. They are blessed. I envy them.

For the rest of us, its hard work.

We get into our 1st job without really knowing what we are getting into. Often, our choice is driven by Prestige or (mis)Perception. And before we know, we are stuck in the daily rut - hate going to work every morning, spend the day cribbing about our boss and return home jaded. However, the paycheck at the end of 30 days makes all this worth it - its the carrot that keeps us going.

For a lot of us, this is life. We do this routine for 20-30 years and the money we make keeps the questions in our head at bay. Again, these people are blessed. I envy them.

But there are some rebels, some mavericks who continue to be haunted by the pursuit of what they really love to do. This minority has 3 choices -

One, Leave the drudgery, take the plunge and start doing what you think you'd love to do. After all, there's nothing like actually doing it. But this is risky. What if you're wrong? What if 2 months into your new attempt, you realise that's not it? And how will you sustain your lifestyle while you're learning this?

Two, Make the best use of your evenings, weekends and breaks. Even better, take a sabbatical. Net, keep trying your hand at activities you gravitate towards. Always, try to ask yourself if you'd love to do this for an extended period of time. After, a while, you'll detect a pattern.

And you can find out what you love to do while keeping your day job and earning the money needed for your lifestyle. But this is a long, patient and draining process. You have to keep your resolve against Newton's 1st law - inertia.

Three, take one of those tests that help profile you. These give you a broad domain to operate in - a kind of filter to sort through all the choices. www.tickle.com has some and www.strengthsfinder.com can also help.

Any other that you've come across???

What is work?

What is work?

I obviously don't intend to explain the definition of work as per ICSE Std IX Physics textbooks.

For most of us, work is something we do to make a living. Obviously, we all aspire to a certain lifestyle. And to realize that lifestyle, we need money. And we work to earn that money. Its quite simple, really.

The problem happens when you don't really love your work. But you still have to do it because you need to earn your living.

This gives rise to 2 questions:

1. Do we really know what we love?
2. Why does work and earning a living have to be linked?

Over the next few days, I'd love to engage in a conversation with you to answer these questions.

Strength Finder 2.0: My Results

Got hold of this interesting book: Strengths Finder 2.0. Based on Gallup Organization's research into people's innate talents, the book talks about 34 themes that map the different talents that we have.

The book points you to a website http://www.strengthsfinder.com/ where you can take a test (using a unique code provided in the book) that tells your top 5 themes.

Mine were (in order):

Strategic
Intellection

Input

Futuristic

Ideation

If any of you have taken this test, do mention your Top 5 strengths. It'll be great to engage with people with similar strengths to share our experiences. It'll be even better to find people with complementary strengths (I, for one, can do with an association with someone who has Activator, Focus, Discipline or Analytical strengths!)

Looking forward to building a Strengths Network.

The Great Indian Novel

Often, the best ideas deserve their acclaim because of their improbability. Shashi Tharoor's 'Great Indian Novel' is one such idea. It just seems miraculous for someone to conjure up a parallel between the great Indian epic and the great Indian freedom struggle.

Ofcourse, there are creative liberties and we should indulge the author with them. Ofcourse, there are times when the parallels are stretched but fiction by definition has a long rope. Ofcourse, umpteenth characters from epic and history are ignored but a tome of 418 pages can only accomodate so many.

The beauty of the story is in its idea and credit to Tharoor for sustaining its purity from start to finish. When reality offered no recourse, he resorts to dreaming, to extend the comparisons. When prose falters, he switches on his poetic abilities to carry the narrative further.

Often, the very act of printing a rumor gives it credence and when people repeat it in other forms and publications, they only serve to burnish its veracity. The book does it bit in furthering rumors surrounding the leaders of India by weaving them in its storyline. Whether it is Nehru's dalliance with Edwina, Gandhi's 'experiments with truth' or Morarji Desai's flirtations with urine - its all there.

The Great Indian Novel is great because it emanates from a moment of brilliance. A moment when Shashi thought that the Indian Freedom Struggle and its proponents share similarities with the heroes of the Great Indian Epic. The reader is richer for it.

Grand Trunk Road - Becoming Grander

Yesterday's road journey from Jalandhar to Pathankot swelled my heart with pride and gave me renewed hope about India's future.

Four laning of NH 1 had started 4-5 years back and the 30 odd km section from Jalandhar to Bhogpur was finished 3 years back. Work in the remaining section had been progressing slowly.

Now after 1 year, I saw significant progress. Most of the piling and earthing work is completed. Bridge foundations have been laid and only small sections remain to be acquired and prepared. From Jammu, 4 laning has been finished till Samba. There's a flyover coming up that'll bypass Pathankot and meet NH1 near Malikpur.

In 2-3 years time, the time taken for a road journey from Jammu to Delhi will take 6 - 7 hours instead of the 12 - 14 hours it took 5 years back. This should have a multiplier effect and the end result is only limited by our imagination!

Delhi - improving

Walked out of Indira Gandhi airport last night into an oppressive atmosphere of heat and dust. However, as the taxi pulled out of the airport, I was heartened to see wide roads, neatly marked and with paved footpaths running along. This was a marked difference from Mumbai where you drive out into a narrow lane, lined with slums and garbage.

Traffic was another thing though. People were taking to the wide road with gay abandon with scant regard to lanes. But I guess, that'll improve too with increasing education levels and a bit more effort on driving civility among Delhites.

Overall, Delhi seems like a much more agreeable place to live in than 5 years back and definitely more palatable than Mumbai. Safety - esp. for women - remains a concern and it'll be interesting to watch the trend on that front.

Virginia Kilings & Gun Ownership

This might sound blithely ahuman. But from a macro point of view, there are a lot more crimes that are averted due to gun ownership than are commited because of it. The issue is very much in the nature of the problem.

When things go wrong they make news. When they are going right, they are seldom newsworthy.

How often do we hear of a person preventing a burglary, a rape, a kidnapping with the power accorded to him by a gun?? But when once in 365 days, an incident like Virginia takes place, it makes big news.

Even if we ban guns, criminals will still get them. Look at the situation in India or Latin America - countries where gun ownership is restricted. People with mal-intent still get their hands on guns. The cost of a fool-proof method to control and monitor gun ownership is impossibly high and the endeavor might even be foolishly impossible.

The question is should we equip our people with the tools to protect themselves or not? The positives of doing this far outweigh the negatives of a stray incident like Virginia Tech.

Financial Education for Kids

I came across an interesting article by Keane Lee in Fundsupermart - the quaterly magazine issued by iFast Financial Pte Ltd., an investment administrator in Singapore. It talks about wealth accumulation and the different vectors that drive it.

It said , there are 4 things that determine your wealth accumulation ability:
1. Wage, W
2. Savings Rate %, S
3. Return on Investment, R
4. Time, T

Simple, isn't it?

Reading that article, I realised that financial education among kids in India is not that prevalent. Most kids learn this if they are lucky to be born into a Marwari or Sindhi or Baniya family.

Equipping kids with this powerful tool should be an important objective of education. Making it into an entertaining game should get it off the ground with them.

Working hours over a lifetime

My theory is that every person is born to work for a FIXED no. of hours. You can choose to cover them over 32 years (as my dad did) or the way its going, cover them off in 10 years and be done with it all!

Incidentally there's also the theory that every person is born with a FIXED no. of breaths allotted to him/her. Thats why deep breaths and yoga increase your life span.

Schools in the new world

Information is free and out there.
No one owns it. Its not stored in bound up books.

We need to point our kids to where this information is - Wikipedia?? Google??
We need to ask them the right questions to help with their search - Why?? How??
We need to ask these questions in an interesting manner - Projects?? Contests?? Games??

Does that sound like a new kinda school?

The right kind of questions

Too often in schools the questions that are asked are:
Who?
When?
Where?

All the time I think that the questions that should be asked are:
Why?
How?

The first set relies on memory, the 2nd on reason. I'll anyday pick a person who can think to a person who remembers.

How to make money in India, long term

India as a consumer market of 1.1 billion people is an attractive proposition for any Commercial Enterprise. Earning even $1 from each person is worth $1.1Bn. A lot of MNCs have bought this math and entered the country, expecting to make money with their existing models. Their assumptions are flawed at 2 levels.

One, the size of the 'consuming' population is not 1.1Bn but 800mn - the remaining 300mn live below the poverty line.

Second, the GDP per capita, even on purchasing power parity is $3700 - at best 1/12th that of the US.

Given these 2 factors, the expected size of prize of a business in India is at best 1/5th of that in the US. The math is 800/(300X12) ; 300 being the population of the US.

So, in order for an enterprise to make money in India at the levels that its huge population warrants, it should focus on improving the Purchasing power of Individuals. The single biggest known way of improving people's purchasing power is to improve their skills, i.e. through education.

Hence my plea: If you want to make money in India, invest for the long term, invest in educating its population. They'll grow up to earn more, consume more and by extension, put more money back into your pockets.

Hope some corporations embrace this long term business plan. I'm sure they'll see the returns in their shareholder value.

Sydney - why and why not

Just came back from Sydney yesterday. I love the place - brilliant weather, great food. The only thing that stops me from moving there are the high taxes and high cost of living. A taxi anywhere outside of the main city will set you back by about 25 Aussie dollars. Parking and road tolls are excessive. And the taxes are insane.

If only Singapore could get Sydney weather - I yearn for 4 seasons in a year! And a harbour bridge. And some fabulous beaches. Mountains at our doorstep. Being able to look up and see clear, blue sky. Drive for 40 kms and still be in the same city.

But then, I'm not willing to give 40% of what I earn to the government for weather and views.