Leaders eat first

It’s that time of the year when everyone starts resolving to make a resolution for the New Year. Most are clichés. Clichés that pretty much puts into perspective a surge in gym memberships after the binge drinking in December. Studies from various parts of the world report 8 out of the 10 people who sign up for gym memberships, stop by the end of January. I stand by the altar of the guilty as well. 

Last year, though, I shied away from a fitness resolution. Instead, I filed away two altogether different resolutions. The first, that I will practice meditation for at least a half hour every day. The second, that I will either meet one new person, or latch onto a new book every week.

I am happy to report that for all practical purposes, my resolutions stand executed. I do not intend to make any this year. Because there is much work to be done on these old ones.

December is as good a time as any to reflect on the learnings and outcomes that have emerged until now. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I know three things.

1. When confronted with silence, the head is a very noisy place.

2. Between listening deeply to people share their stories one-on-one, and reading from the pages of a book, listening beats what is embedded in books.

3. There are no bad people. Only circumstances. It is just that each person responds to fortune and adversity differently. That is what makes each one unique.

A caveat must be filed. The reason I stated upfront that “I think I know" is because these learnings are basis my perceptions so far. As that saying goes: “When the facts change, I change my mind." There is no consensus around who said it first.

Regardless of the mutability of facts, the things I’ve learned in conversations with the people who have earned my respect over the year are these.

The sky is blue

When it came to meditation, one of the first things I was told was to practice sitting in silence, meditate, and focus on just breathing in deeply, and exhaling completely, to the exclusion of everything else. When starting out, I was told to attempt the exercise for no longer than 10 minutes before progressing to longer periods. “Sounds ridiculously simple," a voice in the head suggested.

That this is extremely hard dawned on me only when the practice started. That was also when that phrase, “the mind is like a monkey" started to fall into perspective. It is the kind of creature that can tease, provoke, anger, amuse, infuse thoughts of all kinds—and do it all at once.

Over time, I could begin to see what those who are close to me have always told me—that I am a difficult person to be with. And that the demeanour I put on with those who don’t know me too well of being an easy-going bloke is a façade. In attempting to stay silent and focus on the breath, I could, for the first time, see myself in the third person and witness that I am indeed a difficult person.

My mind is constantly “chattering". It has an opinion about everything. I could hear myself talk and opine all the time—until even “me" started to get infuriated by the voices in my head. Can’t I just shut up?

Some conversations with an experienced practitioner of meditation offered pointers.

Such behaviour, it seems, is difficult for people who cannot deal with ambiguity. People like me need a clear line of sight on what must be done. But life does not offer such luxuries. It plays itself out. The best of plans can go awry. You adapt and go with the flow.

Those who insist on a clear line of sight are plain pig-headed and not cut out to be either chess-players or leaders. They can get cranky and are inevitably difficult to live with. To understand that better, I was asked to look up at the sky. There are days when it is cloudy. Then there are other days when it rains and dark clouds appear. But anyone who has been on an airplane knows that the clouds are only an obfuscation. And that once you cross the turbulence, there is a clear blue sky. Clouds, by its nature are transitory. It comes and goes with the wind.

Getting agitated then is an exercise in petulance if you implicitly understand that the sky is blue. All you need then is the patience to let the clouds pass, and develop a mental muscle memory not to do anything stupid when it gets overcast.

GyShiDo over perfection

I am, so to speak, frequently conflicted. On the one hand, I admire perfection and remain convinced nothing must go out until, as it were, that greatest of artists Michelangelo himself may approve of the perfection in it. Then on the other hand there is the idea of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) embedded in my head.

Personally, I can trace the roots of this conflict to my days when I used to report to a team of editors based out of Munich. When looked at from their West European eyes, they’d cluck their tongues in disapproval at the slightest hint of tardiness and convey their displeasure in no uncertain terms. They wanted perfection down to the last detail before the product could roll out.

Then on the other hand, my training as a business journalist, conversations with entrepreneurs of all kinds who make things happen at scale, getting hands dirty in a newsroom where deadlines are tight, and in attempting to take things off the ground, it suggests GyShiDo—a polite way to say, “Getting your shit done"—is the way to be.

Over the last year on the back of experience and multiple conversations, I now veer towards that view that perfection can wait. GyShido comes first.

By way of example, men like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs are celebrated for their obsession for being perfectionists. But what is not spoken of much in the public domain is that Steve Jobs’ quest to find perfection also made him a jerk. He bullied people, was a control freak, and had no moral qualms about building a monolith by exploiting cheap Chinese labour. I am still to read Walter Issacson’s biography of Leonardo. But there is no taking away from the point that his quest for perfection made him a procrastinator and his worst enemy as well.

When looked at from that perspective, it is possible to argue that the quest for perfectionism is an ideal pursuit, and one that must be a lifelong one at that. But while at it, implement a minimum viable product that gets you off the ground. You iterate and fix things as you go along.

If any evidence of the viability of this process is needed, look no further than what is apparently the most evolved of all businesses: Software. Each time a new version is released, it is touted as an improvement over the previous one. Nobody complains. Instead, everyone complies and upgrades.

There will be naysayers and doomsday predictors of all kinds. Pay heed to their voices for all that it is worth. But at some point, you’ve got to take a call and roll with what you have. Ideologues talk from pulpits. People who make the world go around place a premium on GyShiDo.

There are no bad guys

Contrary to what popular narrative would have us believe, there is no such thing as “us" and “them". Only different ways of looking at the world. The world needs ideologues who stoke debates and the kinds who make things happen. Both are fiercely motivated and believe deeply in what they are invested in. So even if you subscribe to the GyShiDo manifesto, it would be outright stupid to dismiss ideologues.

Because at the end of the day, there is no getting away from the reality that perfection is an ideal state. And one must do all that it takes to get there. It is a journey. The issue on hand is, which path do you take to get there the fastest. That is where decisions must be taken.

But how do you choose? Which path do I take? I asked an entrepreneur who subscribes to GyShiDo even as he keeps track of where may perfection lie, how does he manage.

His answer was a simple one. He does not judge people. He only evaluates the idea. In doing that, he asks himself some questions.

1. If I adopt this suggestion, is the outcome reversible? 

2. If the outcome is reversible, how fast can a new iteration be created?

3. If the suggestion is irreversible, what may the possible outcomes be? 

4. How many people can potentially be impacted by a negative outcome? 

5. Does an option exist to an irreversible suggestion? 

The answers to these questions are ones he cannot obtain by consensus and in a democratic manner. It is his cross to carry. Whatever be the outcome of his decision, it is conveyed and executed. But his decisions have to be made in real time. People look up to him. To that extent, he is a very lonely man.

But to stay the course, he is also aware he must also perform at his peak potential at any given point in time. To do that, he needs some creature comforts. That includes right of way and an implicit mandate to eat before the others do.

This was first published in Mint on Sunday

The economic case for leisure

“What are your hobbies,” Kuldeep Datay asked. He practises at the Mumbai-based Institute of Psychological Health (IPH). I fumbled. He dismissed my intense physical routine as an activity I engage in to accomplish an immediate goal. Indeed. It is aimed to run a half marathon in under two hours. That I enjoy it is another matter altogether. But I enjoy work as well with goals to be met.

“All your waking hours,” he submitted, “are devoted to productive activities so you get better at what you do. What do you do for leisure?” The import of what he was asking wouldn’t be evident until the mind wandered to a conversation with Shankar Maruwada, who co-founded the EkStep Foundation with Nandan and Rohini Nilekani. Maruwada spends his time trying to understand how people learn. “Our obsession with getting better at what we do is making us redundant,” he said.

By way of perspective, once upon a time, medical knowledge doubled every 50 years. Advances in computing have got us to a point where it now doubles every 72 days. Artificial Intelligence is needed to access new knowledge. The human mind cannot cope. That is why, even as medical degrees are conferred, doctors get outdated. Such disruptions are happening across disciplines. How is any professional to stay relevant then?

“We need Adaptive Expertise,” says Maruwada. Individuals must learn, unlearn, and learn again, multiple times, in a single lifetime. But learning can be traumatic. To learn, we must first go through a cycle of incompetence. Remember the time you first got on a bicycle? It was tough. Until, suddenly, it got to be an unconscious act.

Children, he explains, are familiar with this trauma. They learn something new at school every day. Incompetence is not humiliating to them. After formal schooling though, most people forgot how to learn and deal with the trauma that accompanies it. So, we stick to what we know.

Is that why I am not learning to sculpt, for instance, something I know nothing about? Perhaps fear of being perceived as incompetent holds me back. But people in the Renaissance Era, people like Leonardo da Vinci, had no such qualms. While we know of him as an artist, his hobby was studying the human anatomy. People around him thought it morbid. Did he care? He engaged in it when at leisure. Five hundred years later, historians regard him as one of the greatest anatomists of all time.

Ironically, leisure is what all of us crave. But we believe it is time wasted. The import of Datay’s question hit home. If time is not spent on a hobby or leisure, we will be disrupted. Like medical doctors are, 72 days after they graduate.

This piece was first published in in the print edition of Hindustan Times on May 5, 2019. All copyrights vest with HT Media

Learn a new language

Welcome to our Hour of Code™!: The 'Hour of Code' is an initiative by Computer Science Education Week and Code.org to introduce millions of students to one hour of computer science and computer programming.

I think it mandatory everybody in the world takes this up in much the same way all of us learn a to a language. You don't just future proof yourself, you learn to think as well. 

Why hero worship matters

During one of our weekend meet-ups, my psychologist Kuldeep Datay asked of me what I thought was a simple question: Who is your hero?

I have two. Formula 1 racing legend Ayrton Senna and Christiaan Barnard, the South African doctor who conducted the first human heart transplant. From the time I was a boy, between the both of them, they epitomized everything I wanted to be.

Senna’s nickname was Magic. With good reason. He drove like magic. How could any human drive like that? I carried pictures of him everyplace with me. Car magazines that detailed stories of his exploits on the racing track against his rivals Alain Prost and the then upcoming Michael Schumacher filled my rucksack. My laptop had his image plastered as the wallpaper.

I would have given an arm and a leg to watch Senna go head to head against the clinical machine that was Schumacher. In the few races that they did get close, Senna’s driving prowess drove Schumacher’s crazy, and his car oftentimes into the wall.

Then there was Dr Barnard. I don’t think I will ever forget that one night I was up flipping through the pages of Reader’s Digest at my ancestral home in Fort Kochi. I stumbled across the story of how the first human heart transplant was conducted. As stories go, what a story it was. By then, it was clear in my mind when I come of age, I would grow up to be a surgeon in the class of Dr Barnard who worked magic like Senna.

Fate had other plans and led me to a fun pit called the newsroom. Here too, in my head, through all of these years, I tried to write and edit stories imagining myself to be somebody as crazy as Senna and Dr Barnard.

“Then” asked Datay, smiling. “Where is Charles Assisi? Have you found him?”

The question had me stumped. He went on to explain that people often latch on to a single personality or two. They idolize them and gloss over their own frailties. Why? Why not start on a clean sheet instead and find who you really are and what you stand for? Thought embedded, I went home.

It’s been a few weeks now. An exercise has begun. I haven’t concluded it. But I think I get the import of Kuldeep’s question. This exercise will last a lifetime. So, while Senna and Dr Barnard will stay in my head, more people need to be examined and added. Who knows? Some may have to be purged at some point as well as I go along. Senna and Barnard included. Now, there are no holy cows.

What follows is a list in no particular order. It is not a comprehensive one either. Just a few jottings around some people from my diary as I go about compiling traits I would like to cultivate and those that I want to cull out of myself.

Abraham Lincoln

The true measure of Lincoln’s greatness may well be known to most Americans. But to me, the magnitude of what he accomplished and the complexities he had to deal with were first revealed by K. Ram Kumar, who used to sit on the board of directors at ICICI Bank. He chose to give it up to pursue a personal passion.

Lincoln took over as president of the US at a time when the southern belt was opposed to his candidature for presidency. They threatened to secede from the Union and said a civil war would ensue on the back of a promise he had made if he came to office—that he would abolish slavery.

That Lincoln eventually managed to pull it off is one thing. But after he assumed office, he drafted the support of three cabinet ministers. The real story lies there. All of them had run against his candidature. It was political genius at its best and complexity at its peak.

Ram Kumar introduced me to the nuances of these settings through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Team of Rivals. Steven Spielberg made a movie out of it as well. It took Goodwin 10 years to research what could possibly have gone through Lincoln’s mind. How he managed the conflicts and put in place the foundations of what is now a superpower continues to keep me riveted and in awe of the man. While the movie is an outstanding one, may I assure you that the hours and days invested in the book will be time well invested.

Babasaheb Ambedkar

The more I read about him, the more I am convinced what an ungrateful lot us Indians are. Platitudes are mouthed in his name, but what has really come of his vision? Come to think of it, how does a man from the lowest strata of society—the Mahar community (or untouchables)—in 1891 grow up to earn doctorates in economics both from Columbia and the London School of Economics? How did he campaign and negotiate for India’s independence? How did he evolve into the statesman who drafted the Constitution of India in the finest traditions of democracy?

If Ambedkar had his way, India would by now had a uniform civil code in place. Article 370 of the Constitution, which he opposed so vehemently and which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, would never have been a contentious issue.

Way back then, he had the foresight to bluntly tell Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah: “You wish India should protect your borders, she should build roads in your area, she should supply your food grains, and Kashmir should get equal status as India. But the Government of India should have only limited powers and Indian people should have no rights in Kashmir. To give consent to this proposal would be a treacherous thing against the interests of India and I, as the law minister of India, will never do it.”

Sheikh Abdullah circumvented him and approached Nehru, the ball went into the hands of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, and between the both of them, they quietly acquiesced. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Patel, the so-called Iron Man of India, let Ambedkar down.

Worse still, while Nehru could see the merit in the Hindu Code Bill Ambedkar had crafted and that it held the potential to elevate the status of women in Hindu society, when the moment of reckoning came, he caved in to pressure both from the Congress and the emerging Sangh Parivar. Amedkar had the vision to see the fissures all of these issues could cause India. It was glossed over.

Nobody had the spunk then. Nobody among the current lot of India’s elected leaders has the spunk either. If only they had a fraction of what Ambedkar had!

Mohandas Gandhi

I am not a Gandhian. I refuse to be one. And I refuse to address Gandhi as Mahatma either. That out of the way, if my personal interpretation of him is correct, he was among the shrewdest men India has ever seen.

By the time the British had colonized India, Gandhi figured out that if India needed freedom, violent opposition was not an option. The British empire would have crippled the fight even before it started. That is why the non-violent movement. It was, for all practical purposes, guerilla warfare of the kind Sun Tzu would have approved of. The British, with all the arms and monies in their hands, hadn’t encountered opposition in this guise. They didn’t know how to deal with it.

And so, in spite of the ideological differences that existed between Ambedkar and Gandhi, much like Lincoln’s “team of rivals”, in a strange way, they worked towards the same goal. Like I articulated above, what I admire about Gandhi is not his so-called austerity or ahimsa as a principle, but the fact that he deployed it tactically.

Gandhi had the patience to frustrate the bollocks out of any army and the charm to beguile masses of people into following his perverted logic. I suspect, if in his reckoning taking up arms would have been a better way to go about things, he wouldn’t have hesitated to do that either.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris

I know it is terribly unfair to club all three of these intellectual powerhouses into one bucket. But I do it because between the three of them, they challenged all of the notions I was weaned on as a young boy growing up in a traditional Catholic family. They compelled me to question all of the Abrahamic gods I was taught to worship.

One thing led to another until I threw all of the texts I was weaned on. They compelled me to question authority—obnoxiously so if required—and put me on the path to freedom from the oppression that is religion in all its forms.

Elon Musk

I cannot help but watch this man and his crazy ambitions with awe. After a string of failures, including one where he was ousted as co-founder at PayPal, this man thought up Tesla, an electric car that is now part of the mainstream. But what gets my attention, and pardon my expression, is that he has the gumption to put his monies into a projects that can potentially help humans colonize Mars. Incidentally, he happens to be the 83rd richest man now and is a darling in Silicon Valley. His ambitions and audacity are to die for.

***

My list can go on and on.

But it’s time I pause and plant a thought. One of the most compelling lessons I learnt recently is that when somebody makes a point, imagine yourself to be a trial lawyer. Then argue against yourself to demolish your arguments. At the end of the exercise, does your position still stand? If you do, you got something to fight for. Else, go back and rethink.

If I were to do that, a few things emerge right away.

Senna died young. He needn’t have. What Senna fanatics like me think of as magic was actually reckless. Much the same can be said about Damon Hill, who was propelled into the limelight after Senna died and had to take Schumacher head on.

Their rivalry is legendary and I rooted for Hill. He was as crazy as Senna. Schumacher-baiters like me always thought of him as clinical. But it was actually a mind ticking away—learning from each failure. So much so that he thought Schumacher slammed Hill for “purely dangerous driving” while Hill laughed it off and claimed “I only made it hard for him to pass”. “Take that Schumi,” I would high-five with my pals.

In hindsight, there is no taking away that Schumacher is revered as among the greatest drivers that ever lived. A little after his retirement in 2012, a tragic skiing accident in December 2013 sent him into a coma and his fans sobbing with sorrow. And I confess to a lump in my throat now that we will never know if this man will ever walk unaided again. Since his exit, Formula 1 races don’t feel the same. His current condition is shrouded in secrecy.

Dr Barnard was a sex maniac. His personal life was miserable and he often used to taunt his third wife Karin about not being able to keep up with the prowess that Viagra conferred on him. He would go jaunting all over and bed as many women as he possibly could. He loved the limelight and the attention his exploits on the surgical table conferred upon him. He eventually dumped Karin for a 28-year-old Viennese medical student.

Lincoln had a penchant for dirty jokes and took his presidency a little too seriously. What popular history overlooks is that anybody who stood in his way was trampled over. So much so that he holds the record for any American president who shut the most newspapers, arrested political rivals, censored pretty much every mail and executed the most American citizens without trial.

As for Amedkar, in spite of his Dalit origins, he looked down upon Adivasi tribes. He thought them inferior beings. In his writings, his describes them as “the aboriginal tribes of India... Why has no attempt been made to civilize these aborigines to lead them to make a more honorable way of living?” These parts of history have been conveniently airbrushed. Surprisingly, he didn’t see any dichotomy in that.

While on Gandhi, like I said earlier, I refuse to call him Mahatma because he was plain stupid and perverse. He let his wife Kasturba die of bronchial pneumonia and adamantly declined to administer her with penicillin—but treated her with water from the Ganga and said “let god’s will be done”.

I would have forgiven him if he had applied the same principles to himself. But six weeks after she died, he came down with malaria and when wracked by pain, he didn’t let god’s will be done. Instead, he took the doctor’s advice and consumed quinine.

When it came to him, his “bankruptcy of my faith” argument did not hold. And how can we not deplore his shameful experiments when he slept naked with teenage girls to “test his chastity”? For that matter, how about his friendship with Hitler, to whom he wrote letters where he signed off, “Your sincere friend”?

As for the trinity of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, when looked at from a dispassionate prism, how different are they from any religious fanatic? Most recently, for instance, I tuned in to watch a conversation between Dawkins and Deepak Chopra, a New Age spiritual guru whom I personally despise as a charlatan.

I was hoping to watch a demolition. But to Chopra’s credit, for all of Dawkins’ aggressive posturing, he confused Dawkins with mumbo jumbo.

Waking Up, a book by Harris that I am now reading tries to explain why spirituality and religion need not necessarily be tied together. I am still to complete it—but whatever little I have isn’t impressive enough.

The problem with the trio is their posturing and is best exemplified in a tweet Dawkins once put out: “Religion is an organized license to be acceptably stupid.” What comes across as stupid to my mind is that the trio think it stupid that their ideas cannot be challenged. How much more arrogant can any human get?

I cannot speak for Hitchens now that he is dead. But Dawkins and Harris are certainly sexist and have on public forums implicitly stated men are more drawn to atheism than women—in language that is nothing but demeaning of women and their intelligence.

Then there is Musk. Sure, he now wears the crown of the next Steve Jobs. But he is as cranky as Jobs as well. Like most successful people, there are unsubstantiated stories of him leading a rather peculiar personal life. He takes criticism personally. When his stock prices take a hammering on Wall Street, it cuts him deep. He needs to be lavished with praise. When journalists who have test-driven his cars give it bad ratings, he comes out in the open and accuses them of having vested interests to drag his company’s stock prices down. Then there are other quirks that can fill a book.

Now that the trial lawyer in me has argued around the frailties of all these men, do they still stand to scrutiny?

Well, let me put it this way. They are human. They have frailties. I get Kuldeep’s larger point in that it would be rather silly on my part to revere or emulate one or two of them. Instead, what if I were to pick a few traits from each of these people that appeal the most to me and reject everything else they stand for? What if I were to stay at work on those traits and keep adding to my repertoire as I meet new people, and subtract the undesirable as I travel the distance that is life?

Eventually, I may just find the Charles Assisi I want to be. Or maybe I might just die trying. But at least it’s worth giving it a shot.

I know one thing for sure—the day my wife stops reading these pieces I write, at the end of which she shakes her head, looks at me and mutters “dongi” (fraudster), I will stop work on this series.

This piece was originally published in Mint on Sunday. All copy rights vest with Mint and may not be reproduced without permission from the Editor