Ate and breathed to fill and live;

Lost did I, in cycle of lives;

Forget did I, if I in Me,

Dreamt or desired of quest, for

Many a thing that victorious do.

Failed did Me, dissatisfied was I;

Ignore did Me, decided was I;

Split should we, Me and I?

Search would I, for new of Me,

Unto stumble do us, upon victory

Rule over Me, undoubtedly I should, for

My to live, with I in me.

I do leave, unto I ain’t Me,

Mercilessly, and what was Me;

Clear the mind do I, with disdain,

I ain’t Me no more and,

What was Me, is now you!

- KC

It was 5am ET. I woke up laughing. I had an exam related dream after quite some time. But, I loved the detail in it. It had a typical me, shouting at others and Naren – who I would always shout at (well, we have a lot of mutual respect for each other I guess) being awake and not being bothered about anything. I also see this chic (I am not able to place who this is – It seemed like someone from my undergrad class actually). Now chics in my country mug their asses off and pretend (miserably that too) that they would surely flunk an exam. Believe me, they never do. All us guys know it, but we tolerate them, as they are absolutely essential to keep us few straight in an otherwise largely  gay (visibily) country (the gender skew).

I first flunked a ‘mid-term’ exam in 5th grade. It was the Kannada (my mother tongue – native language) paper – and a substitute teacher (the actual ‘friendly’ teacher was sick) gave me a 3 on a 100. ‘If not this bitch’, I always secured anywhere between 37 and 42 consistently. But ‘this’ one was being too harsh on me. I had to do some amazing stuff to ‘prolong’ (implies the amazing stuff failed) my dad’s caning for this. That’s for another day.

Then, was another time in PESIT. Discrete mathematics. Everyone told me “dude. Its super simple man”. So, I opened the book 12 hours before the semester exam and after intermittently dozing and reading for about 4 hrs of it, realized that others ought to have read the book already to declare it as easy. Next day was disastrous. Slept during the exam and had to write (yes, write!) a letter in the paper “Dear Sir/Madam, I actually scored a 100/100 in my 12th.. very bright student….but this time… gone wrong…please…give me 35…Thank you..<register number>”. The next two months were the scariest of my life (I still din’t know I would write exams at IIMB later in life).

Incidentally, I also remembered one of my Professors today. His was the happiest exam I have written until now. A multiple choice, +1/-1 scoring pattern paper in Investments. The man was hilarious and made learning fun.

Naren finally said – “dude! we missed it. We don’t want to be consultants know? (in a typical Tamil Iyengar swagger) why do we need the grades then? Lets put egg maggi at the mess. Come dude”

And as in reality, life moved on.

I was 6 I guess, when I watched a play at school and wanted to do theater sometime in my life. As I grew up, I watched theater, performed in a couple of my own and while being groomed into an engineer (then, we were not yet a commodity), we left behind a little legacy for our juniors to take pride in.

But now, when I look around me in 2010, there doesn’t seem to be a desire to create something new anymore. How many of us hear business ideas that don’t have a “low cost” formula which is dipped in a viscous mixture of obviousness & mundaneness? The great ‘NRN strategy’ of reducing the cost of operations, has, if you ask me, no deficiency/ weakness, as long as it is executed well. Put a few well bred – fed, educated, styled executives over it and we have the Accentures and IBMs of the world, not to forget, the latter are already as Indian as they can get. The ones that will get eliminated (taken over, organic death) are the ones in-between; ones that offer no more value than the Indian firms and that originate from structurally inefficient parts of the world (a.k.a Europe). That’s why I had my own reasons of disappointment when Lucent got sold off (they called it ‘merger of equals’ though) to Alcatel in 2006.

But, don’t we all have jobs? Don’t we have great new companies built in Bangalore – which are  incredible achievements by determined engineers. Yes we do. But, one of the earlier selling points of sourcing work from ‘cheaper’ locations in India (lets not deny this for heaven’s sake), was “Mr. American CIO, you can return the saved money to the CFO, who will in-turn give you the bonus you need. The CFO will then use it to grow the top-line of the American company”.

The worry is, this great selling point are speed breakers to the momentum needed for innovation; maybe not very visibly so. But, isn’t sourcing work from cheaper countries an easier way to increase earnings of corporations than growing top-line via creative destruction? Imagine you have been a CEO/ CFO of a corporation post the 1995s. Don’t you always have the cushion to source work from outside the USA. And why would you want to earn money (investors are happy aren’t they?)the hard way? If we agree with the previous few lines, would you be as big a visionary (assuming such swear by creativity) as your predecessors were? Well, I am in the process of seeing if data suggests whether this guesswork has any sense.

But, what is far more threatening is in India. Potentially creative Indians are now happy being straitjacketed into Gen Y servants of the world. Its far more easier to be a dedicated servant than be a master who can show a new path. The master’s life is built on risks, creativity, failures and an unfailing spirit to manage the future better. There are a few exceptions, but a few of us are fighting to become one ourselves. It would be a lot more easier if there were more who did want to be exceptions.

When we climbed mountains in the Western Ghats in Karnataka, we did it for the happiness in seeing what others could only “see by clicking on the Internet”. The early morning mist, the monsoon rain, the green that touches one’s heart, the fresh air filling the lungs, the campfires which when doused – one would learn that ‘starlight’ is not just a mere poetic word.  Din’t we love it when we explored?

We were just about 7 boys in a Christian girls school in Gulbarga when I was in my first grade. Gulbarga has almost nothing to offer to compensate the Energy-Overdose-Syndrome (EOS) I was suffering from. We had a huge school campus – with large open fields to play, cages with foxes and birds, large areas covered with tall grass, large canopied areas etc. I had nothing to do while I was there in that town – apart from winning local marble tournaments with a close friend and visiting the science centre every weekend. I would create imaginary espionage assignments for my 6 other friends and we would sneak into school and reach arbitrary targets – wade through slush and the tall grass, miss imaginary bullets whizzing past our ears and rescue bullet hit friends.

I would create a ‘tree house’ on a huge mango tree in my backyard. That would be my summer assignment – a nice cosy place with pillows, back rests for reading my continuous supply of Archie comics. And I would get this wonderfully delicious thing (a whitish powdery sweet cube) to eat from a shop for 25 paisa – and lots of it. Or making the “cork ball” from the resin from the seeds of a tree, the canopy under which we spent many days during summer vacation – grinding the seeds, rolling the gum into a ball, heating it and dropping it into cold water to harden it, and tempering it by oiling it and drying it in the sun. The ball would invariably break in two days after a five day effort. We would tell one another that we are getting better at making the ultimate cork ball.

We would sit together after a well ‘fought’ cricket match in a roadside drain (the drains used to be very very clean in Bangalore before) every evening. We (guys from the street behind mine) never spoke about studies or school, but there used to be so much to talk about. Occasionally there used to be these girls going in their bicycles (in pink). They were taller than us, but I loved to see them nevertheless. They would look at us and smile too (even if were dirty and brown, with sweat pouring from our foreheads after the game). Between 1900 hours and 1930 hours we would watch an artificial satellite move in the sky and call it the night.

Did I love that part of my life? Every bit of it. Is it just a retrospective bias? Not at all, I loved those moments while they happened. The happiness was genuine and unrelated to anything else. The biggest mystery is to uncover how we derived happiness out of petty things and replicate them now. How difficult is that?

In all the great words said about the importance of data, what we all fail to give enough mind space to the moral issues of data collection and processing. The analysis of data is only as good as the data at hand. I can provide some anecdotal evidences (which offer no scientific/ statistic proof by themselves) of how a new world (which runs on availability of data) can be manipulated by corrupting the source of data.

I have noticed during my B school, several teams manipulating data obtained from surveys just to fit their pre-defined biases. The data collected had to be analysed for its truth, bias had to be removed and a business decision ought to have been made. But what happened was reverse. A decision was made and data was ‘rationalized’ to corroborate the already made decision.

My brother and I went to the cops recently to register an FIR for a petty theft (it was a theft after all). The cops refused to file an FIR and used means to dissuade us from it. When we walked out of the the place, I realized the reason they refused to file an FIR. In the police database, if we were an ‘open item’, then there is an additional effort that needs to be put in. So, why create the record in the first place?

Then comes the much talked about ‘bell curves’ at work places. How many of you have been normalized into getting a lower ratings at your workplace? Fundamentals of statistics says normalization of a set of random numbers (performance scores in this case) does not make sense if there are lesser than approximately 30 such scores. But, how many Indian companies ‘normalize’ the performance of 3, 5 or 10 peers?

So data is only as good as what the guy who writes into the database. If the guy is corrupt/ under the influence of the corrupt, the data is corrupted and hence no amount of analysis of such corrupted data, can really solve any potential problem. Now the biggest need in the Indian context is to sensitize the ethics involved in collecting data. Every entity that uses data to make decisions needs to ensure that this critical part of the ‘data game’ is well protected. The world in future will be as good as the systems which capture its attributes.

When I was three (No jokes.. three), I remember a night when we were living in a rented home in the first floor in Malleshwaram (Northern area of Bangalore). We (our family) had this practice of sitting outside our house at nights and talk (Bangalore was much much quieter then). I would never let go of my mum when I was young (its changed a bit now). I remember I was just about to sleep when mum went in for a minute to switch off the stove on which the cooker had ‘whistled’ the three (the magic number when rice cooks) times.

I climbed up the fourth floor of the neighboring building. My friends were following me. I was eager to reach the terrace first, hide and scare the shit out of my friends. I was panting but did not give up. There was this huge adrenaline rush to reach the top. I was scared too, because it was dark and I could be outpaced any moment. What if someone else is already up there waiting to scare me? I could see my friends running up and trying to close in on me. I reached first and hid behind the water tank and waited. I am scared myself too, but am charged up to scare my friends. I hear footsteps, they are nearing and then… its silent, i don’t hear them any more. Its just me on the terrace. I move to the edge of the terrace.. and take the leap.. The microseconds of fall get exaggerated and I can feel me float in the air and soon I know I am going to hit the ground – in 3, 2, 1

I woke up and clung to my mum who had come back there. My heart had skipped a beat. I lay there confused about what had just happened. This was a dream that I continued to have for quite some time after that. Every night it would be the same.

Well, that’s the first ever dream I remember witnessing. There have been hundreds more since then. All in good time.

Before that, I checked what my mom was upto. She goes to More – almost everyday and buys something or the other. Two reasons – proximity to our home, More has inculcated consumerism into the minds of the Indian home-makers (Though not to the extent that the Americans have been influenced by the ‘capitalistic religion’). I open the door of my refrigerator, there are More plastic bags wrapping the vegetables and fruits kept inside. I look in the dustbin – there is ‘More’ plastic bag. It does a fair job holding garbage.

With all due respect to my capable friends who have joined Aditya Birla Group, I hate the latter. The reason is two fold -
1. Being such a large business house, is it so irresponsible that it ignores its adverse impact on the environment in its yearning for growth?
2. I hate it for being a form of retail that mimics existing kirana (term for the mom and pop stores of India) shops to say the least.

Brands like ‘More’, for just the fact that it has scant respect for society, need to be boycotted. They could play a very effective role in educating its customers (housewives) to stop using plastic bags to carry items from their store. They could also provide paper bags and encourage its customers to bring their own bags.

This is a hasty post as I desperately wanted to decry More and its plastic bags!!

If we look at ancient India – we had the caste system (bucketing people into different [if I can call it] verticals, which stuck to a person from birth till death – An endogamous group. Each of these verticals could have been created based on the occupation/ economic & social class that a family belonged to. The ‘learned’ may decry this definition) that has split us wide open as a society. We called ourselves ‘Northies’ and ‘Southies’ (grammatically it could have been Northerlies and Southerlies, but since our average adeptness at the language is low, we have accepted it) based on which part of India we hail from.

I remember when I was a kid, there were ‘non-vegetarians’ and ‘vegetarians’ and ‘pure vegetarians (ones who don’t even feast on eggs)’. There was also the ‘state-syllabus’ and ‘central syllabus’ classification of us kids who went to school. As if it was not enough, I was also a ‘Brahman kid’ – caste hit me early, but thankfully it was from the society rather than my own family.

I grew up to become a ‘comsci grad (one who is an engineer in Computer sciences)’ from ‘VTU (from colleges associated to a roughly 50000 student strong University in Karnataka).

Over time, when on campus in IIMB, we celebrated the fact that we were ‘bongs(Bengali)’, ‘Tams (Tamils), ‘Mallu (Keralites), ‘Digs (Kannadigas)’, ‘Gults (from Andhra)’, ‘Punjabi’, ‘Dig-Tam (a compromise that occurred between a Kannadiga and a Tamil), ‘Gult-Dig’, ‘Gult-Tam’ and ‘Northies (from all remaining North India captained by Delhi, UP and Bihar). This was a very new concept for me (I have been ignorant). We as a nation believe in ‘Unity in Diversity’ while ironically, we first divide ourselves. We love to mask it as ‘an evolved society who identify that there are inherent differences, yet tolerate each other’. What is true in this mask is that we are inherently different.

After touching a slightly emotional issue of regionalism (we have different levels of fanaticism about this issue), lets move to professions. To be 1 of 180 merit seats who made it to IIMB in 2007, one had to beat .2 million (roughly) in India (Don’t we love that stat?). But, even before the famed summer placements arrived, we were bucketed as ‘IIT (an undergrad from the IITs – even if it is textile engineering)’, ‘NIT (even if it is the one where an ancient, mythical battle was once fought), ‘IT guy (if one worked in Technology before coming into B school)’, ‘fresher’, ‘fin guy’ etc. Post summer placements (which is a ridiculous process of selection as interns by companies), guys picked by a marketing firm become ‘marketing gurus’ (the selection process is actually based on trivial things like which was the last movie one watched) and those by banks – ‘bankers’ (I will resist saying what guys picked by a top management consulting firm are called).

The matter doesn’t end here – after we finish our B school education from the best schools in India, and when we join our jobs, we are again ‘typecasted’ as ‘process consultants’, ‘IT’, ‘banker’, ‘strategy consultants’, ‘deck makers’, ‘soap sellers’ etc. I agree expertise in a job function is a function of your past experience to an extent. There is also this concept of ‘India consultant (meaning lower price/hour for his services because he/she is specialized in India)’. Maybe this categorization is extreme in India because of the excess supply we have of individuals of average competence. Wasn’t an MBA program from a B school just meant to change the way one thinks about business problems? Where is the incentive for alternate thinking if all one is bothered about is whether you are a ‘DML (guys who make it to the Director’s Meritorious List in an IIM)’ or because you ‘did BA in psychology’ or that ‘you studied in a Dubai school’ which gives you a ‘uniqueness’ factor. It is ridiculous, but true.

So, I for one have been bucketed all my life and so will you, if you are in India. So it doesn’t matter if you are passionate about something here – you must fall into the right buckets to reach your destination.

On a lighter note – I am a ‘brahman’, ‘vegetarian born’, ‘state-syllabus’, ‘Southie/ Madrasi’, ‘Dig’, ‘bank summer (lets make it a new noun)’, ‘B2B consultative sales guy’, ‘non-IIT (ooo i am such a handicap), ‘VTU’, ‘non-DML’, ‘Indian MBA’ – I am so ruined.

Now..What buckets are you in?

Two quick examples.

Accenture (Anderson Consulting) and IBM did business in the US for more than 50 years, held price for their services until came the Indians. The Global Delivery Model – most work can be sourced from cheaper locations, keeping only the critical part at the client location. This resulted in lower total cost of the service being outsourced. Indian companies built up capabilities to offshore work of their clients and focussed on quality. The way business was done was disrupted permanently. Effect is common knowledge.

Airtel, the largest Telecom operator in India by market share (25%) and several others believed India is the place to be – provide connectivity, continuity and quality of service and reap the benefits of the volume market. In, comes Tata Docomo – a JV between Tata and NTT Docomo. Disrupts the price game with a pay/second tariff. Now which consumer does not want it? Airtel, after several statements that it does not affect they are currently doing business – offer the pay/second tariff to its customers. Do they have a choice?

Most of us who is in business roles in our organizations are in similar situations now. Most of our alumni have shown us corresponding paths – in which we could progress and do well in our future. But I asked my close friend recently – How does one make it big? You know. really big? It is obvious that one needs to disrupt the way we have been pursuing our careers.

The larger the disruption, the larger the return. But, what does one require to do to create a disruption? Again, its obvious that one has to think out of the box, but is it really so cryptic that there aren’t too many disruptions? Or is it that most of us are too comfortable working for a employer and making those easy bucks at the end of the month?