Saturday, December 24, 2011

தாத்தாவும் கப்பல் ஒட்டிய தமிழர்களும்

வருடம் 1961.
 
ஒரு வழியாக தாத்தாவை சம்மதிக்க வைத்தாகி விட்டது.  அவரும் அதிகம் பயன் படுத்தாத ஒரு சட்டையை மாட்டிக்கொண்டுவிட்டார்.  ரேழியில் செருப்பை மாட்டிக்கொள்ளும்போது கொஞ்சம் யோசிப்பது போல நின்றார்.

வீட்டில் எல்லோருக்கும் மிக ஆச்சர்யமான விஷயம் - தாத்தா சினிமாவிற்கு கிளம்புவது.  சினிமா பற்றி அவருக்கு நல்ல அபிப்ராயம் கிடையாது.   அவர் கடைசீயாக பார்த்த படம் நாகையா நடித்த சக்ரதாரி. சினிமா போய்விட்டு லேட்டாக வீட்டுக்கு வருவது இன்னும் கோபத்தை கொடுக்கும்.  ஒரு முறை மரியாதைக்குரிய மாப்பிள்ளையைக்கூட வெளியே நிறுத்தி வைத்திருக்கிறார்.

அப்படிப்பட்ட தாத்தா பார்க்கக் கிளம்பியது - கப்பலோட்டிய தமிழன் படம் பார்ப்பதற்கு.  அவரை சம்மதிக்க அப்பாவும், சித்தப்பாவும் பகீரத பிரயத்தனம் செய்தார்கள்.  பரம எம்ஜியார் ரசிகரான சித்தப்பா, இதுவரை 5 தடவை ஒரு சிவாஜி படம் பார்த்தது இதுவே முதல் முறை.  ஒவ்வொரு நாளும் பார்த்துவிட்டு, பிழியப்பிழிய அழுது, சிவந்த கண்களுடன் வருவது எல்லாருக்கும் தெரியும்.

கப்பலோட்டிய தமிழன் வ.உ.சிக்கும் தாத்தாவிற்கும் அறிமுகம் உண்டு.  அந்த அனுபவத்தை தாத்தா சொல்ல கேட்டிருக்கிறேன்.

"நான் அப்ப மெடிகல் டிரைனி.  என்னோட சீனியர் வ.உ.சிக்கு செக்-அப் செய்ய என்னை அனுப்பினார் - இன்சூரன்சுக்கு.  நான் போன போது, அவர் இல்லை.  அவர் வீட்டு அம்மா அடுப்பு, பாத்திரம் , அரிசி, காய் கொடுத்தா, நானே சமைச்சு சாப்பிட.  (இது நடந்தது 1920களில்). அடுத்த நாள் காலையில் அவர் வந்தார், நான் செக்-அப் செஞ்சு ரிபோர்ட் எழுதிட்டு வந்துட்டேன்."  இதை சொன்னபின் ரொம்ப நேரம் வ.உ.சியை சந்தித்த அனுபவத்தை அசை போடுவார் போல அமைதியாய் இருப்பார்.

வ.உ.சியில் ஆளுமை தாத்தாவை மிகவும் கவர்ந்திருக்க வேண்டும்.  பின் குடும்பம், பொறுப்பு என்று வந்த பின், காங்கிரசை ஆதரிப்பது, கதர் ஆடை அணிவதை தாண்டி, வ.உ.சி பற்றியோ,  சுதந்திரப்போராட்டம் பற்றியோ அவர் அதிகம் ஈடுபாடு காண்பித்ததில்லை.   சுதந்திரப்போராட்டம் பற்றிய படம் என்பதால் அவர் கொஞ்சம் மனம் மாறி சினிமா பார்க்க ஒத்துக்கொண்டிருக்கலாம்.

மீண்டும் 1961 .  கிளம்ப தயாரான தாத்தா நின்றார்.  "வேணாண்டா.  இந்த படம் பாத்ததுக்கப்புறம் எனக்கு வ.உ.சி முகம் ஞாபகம் இருக்காது, அந்த கூத்தாடி (sic ) முகந்தான் ஞாபகம் இருக்கும்.  Allow me to  retain the memory of Chidambaram Pillai."

சட்டையை கழற்றிவிட்டு வெற்றிலை போட ஆரம்பித்து விட்டார்.  அதற்குப்பிறகு அப்பாவோ, சித்தப்பாவோ அவரை வற்புறுத்தவில்லை.   ஒவ்வொரு தடவையும் சிவாஜி படம் பார்க்கும்போது, இந்த நிகழ்ச்சியை நினைவுகூற சித்தப்பா மறப்பதில்லை.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Why this kolaveri - A practical guide to anger management at workplace

Pardon my urge get SEO brownie points with the title.  I wanted to blog about fear for sometime, had conversations with colleagues on anger, rage, fear etc and finally the blog materialized in my mind and the title came from Dhanush.

I have heard the phrase, "mortally scared" in a few inappropriate contexts.  Once someone used the term to express  her reservation to travel by MTC bus, another person used it to describe the relationship with a business partner.  I'd brush them aside as the effect of Americanized exaggeration.  But coming back to fear, you'd be mortally scared when you are physically in danger.  This is one category of fear to protect you from getting yourself killed.

And there is a psychological fear, the fear of losing your job, position, status in the society etc.

At workplace, either of the two may be used to enhance productivity or simply to get the job done.  In jobs involving pure physical labor, the laborers were often beaten to get the work done.  In more sophisticated jobs,  invoking the psychological fear is considered to yield results.  Abusive language, threat of dismissal come under this category.

In workplaces, the abused and threatened are stressed.  Common psychology defines the response to such situations as fight-or-flight response.  Due to the market conditions, such threats are no more effective in improving the quality of work, instead the stressed worker chooses flight as there is no scope in winning fights.  If someone choose to fight in such scenario, it is usually a guerrilla war using all kinds of media - ranging from rest room graffiti to anonymous posts to mouthshut.

Top executives of today do have a reason for their rage, but targeting the fear of the subordinates hardly achieves the goals of improved productivity and quality of work.  Often the rage is not followed up with a corrective action.  Here is a simple way to handle it.

  • When poor quality of work or lack of progress troubles you, stay with the mood.
  • It would be a very uncomfortable feeling, both physically and psychologically. 
  • Do not reason it out or react.  Do not attempt to wriggle out of the situation by reasoning.
  • The uncomfortable feeling would fade away in a few minutes.
  • You will have an altogether different perspective to the problem.
  • That difference in perspective can throw up a number of options to address the situation - it may range from educating the subordinate to firing him.  But it is sure that the action you take will be a good one for you and the subordinate.  Such an action will be a rational one devoid of any emotional influence.
Try this and let me know if it works.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Shared dreams?

"Where do you want to go, uncle?", asked my three year old nephew.
"M G Road", I said.  His tricycle was the make believe auto-rickshaw.  He took me around in Bangalore and even to Mysore.

He had created an environment and I agreed to stay in that environment.  To us, the blue tricycle was the black auto-rickshaw and the car park was all of Bangalore.

[Small digression: When I narrated this to my son, he corrected me.  It is not the environment we shared, but the experience or a dream.  So, is the title.]

On a larger, real life scale, we have agreed on everything, I mean everything.  Without that agreement, one won't make sense to the other.

Fire is fire for all of us, the experiences are visions of light, sensation of heat etc.  Before  man tamed fire, the agreed interpretation of fire could be that of a dreadful monster that burns.

There are millions of things that we have unconsciously agreed upon to live as a society.  The communication would break if the agreement wasn't there.  Remember the movie - 'The Gods must be crazy' where a bushmen try to interpret a coke bottle.

What if in one fine morning, we stop recognizing an object?  What if we stop sharing the dream? That would be an interesting ... or bizarre?


Saturday, October 08, 2011

Two views

My recent interaction with colleagues and relations of my age pointed at a popular view of their worlds.  My personal experience and a recent interview by writer Jayamohan pointed to another less popular view of the world.  This article is a summary of my observations.  It may not be humanly possible to switch from one view to another.  The view is probably hard-wired in everyone's brain.  I hope that just being aware of the other view might help in relationships.

Three of my recent long conversations were with people in corporate world.  They viewed their role as a fighter in a war.  They strategised, analyzed their own strengths and weaknesses, analyzed their opponents strength and weaknesses.  A victory is well defined for them - "If I have my way, I win; otherwise I lose.". This view is applied in every relationship - between vendor and customer, employer-employee, boss-subordinate, interviewer-interviewee etc.  I don't know enough about their family life to include their relationships with spouses, parents and kids.  The generalization is - they are on a war in every situation; there is an "I" and the "other".  The "I" should work hard to win over the other.

I have a different view of the world.  There is a huge system in which the "I" have a role to play - like a gear in a machinery.  Nothing more.  The system functions as long as the gear performs fine.  There is no victory or defeat.  If the gear fails, the system fails.  It might resume by replacing one gear with another.  There are situations where one as an individual tries to fit in a larger system - say an organization.  An interview or an interaction is just an attempt to fit the gear in the machinery.  There is no personal victory or a loss.  The same holds good in a vendor-customer, employer-employee relationships.  The relationship attempts to be useful by having two mutually beneficial people.

The advantage of my view of the world is - there is no war - more importantly there are no losers.  If a relationship breaks apart, it just means that the two gears do not work together, not that one gear won and the other lost.

I believe good systems survived longer because a larger members shared the gear-view of the world and many organizations failed because of a war view within its people.

I also realized that, it is simply not possible to switch views, especially for intelligent hard-working people.  So, I stop at a blogging about it instead of preaching my view and try to have "my way" accepted by others.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Why Ayn Rand ceases to impress when I am over 40?

It all started with my nephew's post of an extract from Fountainhead on Facebook.  I found it hardly impressive. For the records I'm over 40 now and want to claim that I am worldly wiser.  But the same text was so appealing when I was in college and during my early career.  Though I didn't imagine myself to be Howard, I was arrogant about what I wanted to do.  I came out of a TCS interview that I will never do COBOL, walked out of my first job because of differences with my boss.  Even now I won't do COBOL, but when I walked out of the interview, I had no job, no good grades and had nothing to support my ego.  (Even now, I have a secret fear that I may be forced  to work for India's big "so called" technology companies.  Thank God, it is only a fear.)

It is obvious that my perception changed with age.  And I find it normal for a younger person to align with Ayn Rand just as it is normal for me to value collective work and greater good.  Why is it normal for a young male to be individualistic?

I am limiting my theory to males.  Females have a slightly different system and will keep them out of this post.

The mind has a notion of a physical self and a psychological self.  Physical self starts at about 2-3 years of age when the child starts to feel "I".  Till the onset of adolescence, physical self is enough to take care.  The only constituent of the identity is the physical self.  Academic, athletic and artistic performances play roles in the strength of this identity.

This identity is not enough to fit in a society.  He has to have more strength to his identity to get a partner for procreation.

At about 12, 13, the psychological self starts.  This is when the child begins to have opinions about society, politics, religion, economics etc.  The observation and learnings happen till the boy is about 17-18.  Then, the boys starts identifying himself with his views.  The psychological self takes shape and adds itself to the identity.

This is required for social reasons.  In a very simple scenario, the boy identifies himself with the clan and will be seen as someone to strengthen it.  His chance of finding a partner increases, he will be seen as someone who will have children to strengthen the clan.  Take an Afgan tribal as an example and you will see why aligning with jihad is natural for him.  (Also note that such society wouldn't tolerate an Ayn Rand influenced individual.)

In a plural society, identifying with a caste, religion or race can be counter-productive.  It would diminish the prospect of finding a partner.  Also, having no additional identity would leave the boy in pre-adolescent stage.  This is when boys align with ideologies of communism, capitalism etc.  An example would be the societies in Indian cities between post independence till 1990.

There is a similarity between US in 1940s (Ayn Rand's  Fountainhead days) and post liberalized India.  Communism remained only on paper and in Kolkatta.  Capitalism is established and there is nothing to fight for or against.  That's when individualism appeals.

So, it is natural to be impressed by individualism for a middle/upper-middle class urban boy of age of 18-25 in India after 1990!  The boy can claim to be an individualist and walk with an air of superiority.  Serves the ego and self confidence, might help in finding a girl but not always.

Post 25, when the boy is a man, married and has responsibility of supporting a family, the reality dawns that individualism doesn't bring home the bacon.


Friday, February 11, 2011

Who powers the matrix? - Part III


I would attribute the thoughts that we  broadcast as the source of power for all these smaller matrices.  As long as we process, amplify, invert and broadcast the thoughts, matrices will live.  Their energy comes from your energy, transmitted as your thoughts with energy.

What if you stop transmitting your thoughts?  What if you stop responding to the thoughts that come to you?  It weakens, and might even die.  You can't get thoughts about UFO in the busy streets of Chennai, even if you get to see and hear about them on news channels.  You do not respond as an individual and you do not respond as a society.  The thought doesn't get enough power to live. 

But why would you respond?  The core of a thought is fear.  I'd like to leave it to the readers and get to the core of the thought to validate or invalidate my statement.

Fear is the carrier wave.  The type of fear is a wrapper around this carrier.  This type relates to your social status, location, weather, health, economics etc.  If a type of fear can resonate with you, then you process it and transmit it, to be picked up by more people.  If you do not resonate with any type of fear, including fear of death or total annihilation, no thought leaves you.

Your response to a thought depends upon how you define yourself.  If you define yourself as belonging to a caste, religion or nationality, you will power the thought that relate to the destruction of your caste, religion or nationality.  If your consciousness raises above these differences, you do not transmit any divisive thoughts.  

If your consciousness has absolutely no identity, no thought leaves you.  They don't even bother you.  You are probably the chosen one or one among the chosen ones.


Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Matrix I came to know about - Part II

Read the first part here.

I guess this will be just the second part of a longer series.  Before I continue, here are the disclaimers and acknowledgements.

Disclaimer 1: I can not claim ownership for the views I've presented.  They are derived from a number of sources.  The number is too hard to list, I'll try to acknowledge some of them.  I won't be able to quote like an academic journal, but if there are inconsistencies, I am responsible for them and will try to fix them.
Disclaimer 2:  The above is not the only disclaimer, more to come.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to my masters, Sri Bhgavan (Oneness University), J Krishnamurthy, creators of Matrix, the movie, computer scientists, whose insights into the functioning of the human brain that created modern computers and their software.

I was supposed to write about the lifetime of a thought, but I think history is more important.  Let me narrate the history of the Matrix.

It all started as a simple network.  I believe every species has its own network.  A network in which thoughts - or roughly information, is exchanged.  We haven't totally figured out how other species - from ants to elephants communicate.  So, let's go with an assumption that a network exists for each species where basic emotions (fear - forest fire, predator, earthquake) and information (water hole, sweets nearby) can be exchanged.  This network is used primarily for survival.

Humans too have this network, I call Matrix.  We need a name.  With this network early man could communicate and evolve his tools, before voice communication evolved.  Over a period of time, the information exchanged had enormous growth and matrix had to handle lot of data.  Humans are habitual exploiters.

The matrix had to respond faster, handle more information.  Like any other network, it started caching them, to deliver content locally.  This is nature's way of optimizing.  For someone in Africa, it is enough to access information about wild animals, forest fires and famine.  He doesn't need to prepare for the winter weather in Central Asia.  Let's call this tribal matrix or Matrix 2.0.  Tribal gods and Chieftains were like the System Administrators.  They tightly managed the thoughts - with laws applicable to their society.  The purpose of the tribal matrix is to ensure the welfare of the tribe - an attribute inherited from the simple Matrix 1.0.  A deviant or rebellious thought wasn't encouraged.  This was the beginning of the more powerful, controlling matrix.

Religious matrices must be 1.5.

Humans started communicating to this cache or the sub-network of Matrix.  This sub-network was initially geographic.   But as humans started occupying larger geographies, it  had to divide further into regions and sub-regions and so on.  So, there were village matrices and kingdom matrices, let's call them Matrix 3.

As people started travelling, exposure to different societies and their knowledge occurred.  This gave rise to theories on societies, economics etc.  These are idealogy matrices - Matrix 4.

The complex part is, the earlier versions continued to exist, wielding their powers on humans from time to time.  People could be attached to multiple matrices at the same time.  The problems of which matrix takes precedence in a situation hasn't been figured out by humans, for they have been too dependent on matrices and have given up their will to be on their own.   People's decisions are influenced by the more powerful matrix at that time.

There are Agent Smiths - representatives of the millions of matrices all over the place, controlling what we get to think.

Continues....

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The Matrix I came to know about

The movie has been an all-time favorite of my family.  Trying to comprehend the science behind was interesting one to many.  To me, it is more about drawing parallel's to the mind and its working.

It all started when the question popped up in my mind - "Why do I get a thought, any thought and where does it go?"

A thought is usually triggered by a sensory event. For example, we see a red sign, an association happens in the brain between red and danger.  Then thoughts take over - is it the Sensex/NASDAQ/Nikki dipping sign? is the market down today? What happened to my savings? With these questions, the thoughts would linger for a few minutes.  To summarize, a thought is triggered by a sensory event, but is allowed to run given the set of facts that our brain has stored as association.  Thought survives on the past facts and is about the future.  For some strange reason, the thought doesn't survive the present.  Let's equate a thought to an execution of a software - say playing a song or execution of a program.

But sometimes, there is no need for a sensory trigger.  A thought just like that comes to you.  How do we explain this?  I would equate our brain to a radio or a computer that receives signals.  Like a tuned radio, our brain receives only "some" signals.  This is because of a set of physiological condition of the brain and some psychological conditions.  I would equate it to hardware and firmware.  So, our brain is more like a computer than a radio.

If a signal is received, the brain does some processing - strengthen it, invert it, modify it and transmits again.  The thought signal floats around to be caught by another individual.  The thought is not owned by the individuals but is survived by individuals who power it, modify it and create opposing ones.  If people stop reacting to a thought, it would have died down.

This is the reason, why a tribal like thought doesn't survive the cities, where people do not respond to it.  Thoughts about ghosts were prevalent a few centuries ago.  Popular literature around the world mentioned them often, but not anymore, for people just stopped responding to them.

What is the lifetime of a thought?  How is it born and how does it die?  Does it even die like a weak signal?What is it made of?  More on this in the next one.

Friday, January 07, 2011

The ghost that walks

"Appa, I think there is a ghost in the house.", said my five year old son.  He didn't appear scared, but said it as a matter-of-fact.

The year was 2002, we had just returned from the US and were staying with my parents' at Trichy.  My son, had too much of new things to see - trucks with hair (lorries with hay-stacks), all kinds of animals on streets, pampering grandmas, grand uncles with mustache like the monopoly man, aunts who would ask him to sing in Tamil.  I knew it was a lot for a 5 year old to handle and wanted to give a patient hearing.

I asked, "Why do you think so?"

"Because I go to bed in one room and wake up in another.  Some ghost must be carrying me and dropping me in the other room."

It was amusing.  At my parent's place, the maid servant used to come early in the morning.  In order not to wake up my son so early, one of us would carry him and let him sleep in another cleaned room.  I explained it to my son.  He wasn't impressed, my answer wasn't the cool one that he wanted to hear.  We let it at that.

The next day, when I was in the bathroom, I heard someone closing the bolt from outside.  I knew who it was.  Later, I called out and my mother opened the door.  When I came out my son was away in the living room.  When I entered the living room, he saw me, he was surprised but his face lit up and said "You are THE ghost!"

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