Lost in the illusion - It's a wonderful world

Early on at the onset of the pandemic of our generation, nCovid-19 there was much talk about nature striking back at us as ‘revenge’ for all the harm that we have inflicted on her. It made me very uncomfortable as it seemed not only to misunderstand the nature of human existence on this planet, but also ignore the tremendous improvement in quality of life that we have had in modern societies.  It is not my contention that we are in anyway living in a sustainable manner, but I think we should certainly acknowledge that the human condition has been that for thousands of years we have been at the mercy of nature and only in the last ~ 100 years or so we have won for ourselves a certain amount of respite. For nature is not just cuddly pandas, deer with dewy eyes and radiant sunsets but nature is also smallpox, diphtheria, tuberculosis, famine, cold, floods, poisonous snakes and predators that see us as prey! Two charts that brought home the point for me are shown ab...

I have been a regular user of Ola Cabs and their ilk ever since I have relocated to Mumbai. I make it a point to speak with the drivers as we drive along getting to understand why they have signed up with Ola or what’s it to be an independent agent. Till a few weeks ago the cab drivers that came along were invariably professional drivers – cab drivers or drivers with other people who moved along to Ola because it represented better income and in some cases more independence than being a driver with someone. (stated a family driver who resented having to run errands for the malikin. “I was their driver not their errand boy. They asked me to collect laundry, buy vegetables etc.”). In the recent weeks though I have encountered a completely different phenomenon. First time drivers now taking to driving cabs. They had been driving their new Ola cabs for less than a week or two days in one case when i ran into them.. These are people in other professions who knew driving who have taken...

Marriages and Fantasy Photo Albums There is enormous pressure on Chinese youngster’s to marry. In a society that is still driven by traditional Confucian ethos, despite the enormous cultural discontinuity wrought by Mao, marriage (and children) is a fundamental duty of a person towards his family and society. Given all the changes over the years, with the loss of traditional and informal avenues, many alternate methods have sprung up. Dating events (Shanghai Line 2 Metro users dating event anyone!), ‘Marriage Markets’ – spaces in parks that are taken over by parents seeking a prospective spouse for their (often only) child, on-line sites and top end ‘love hunter’ services… the range of possibilities is enormous. For a society where ‘face’ guides and drives social interactions, China can be downright cruel towards people that are perceived to have failed to secure themselves a mate. Women over 27 that have not found themselves a mate are known as ‘ Sheng Nu ’. Ditto, men are kno...

25th May 2014, Shanghai. It has been a disappointing week, nah, month. Losada number is made up. (Losada line / number is supposed to be this ratio of positive to negative experiences that is necessary for human flourishing). It is well known that human beings are loss averse and 'respond' more strongly to negative experiences than they do to positive experiences. So it seemed logical that over a period of time if you wanted to generate happiness and flourishing around you  it was necessary to give more positive strokes than negative ones - presumably so that the net effect would be positive. It's just that the number is made up. It is still true that human beings are loss averse and in general people do mope when you criticize them. Perhaps it does follow that if you want better results and be happy yourself and create happiness around you, then the carrot and stick need to be balanced - Precisely 2.9013 carrots to one stick. Now that it has been proven that thi...

We are often told that our planet is rapidly loosing languages. As the world becomes flatter and more global  and smaller communities seek to integrate into the larger warp and weft of this planet, an unfortunate consequence is the loss of smaller languages in the world. Of the 7000 odd languages that exist today it is said that by AD 2100, 90 % of them would be lost. I think it is very sad.. It's not just the loss of the language per se but the loss in cultural and intellectual diversity that one feeds sadder about. It's the loss of a way of thinking, expressing thoughts, of a world view that defined a community. Visually it's akin to the 'loss of clothing styles' in the world. From the vibrant, colorful clothes, vibrant patterns that many of our ancestors wore, we move on to the greys and blacks and monotones that are the output of an industrial age where the speed of the mechanical looms killed the patterns and designs and standardized things. A few random w...

Do we really know the people that are around us? Apart from the (narrow) prism of the role in which we interact with them - Do we really know them? Perhaps it is not really practical to know, Do you really care about the life story of the Barista at the coffee shop that you buy your coffee from everyday? Or the person you 'meet' in the subway everyday? Sometimes I cannot but wonder at the miracles of the stories that each of us have and the coincidences, chances in time and space that get us to be or get us together ... First, about a Japanese man i sat next to at an office dinner. We struck a conversation, and i was telling him about how much i loved the movie "Jiro dreams of Sushi' and we started talking about Japan. I told him that I  always wanted to visit Tokyo and Kyoto. He told me about how beautiful Kyoto is and how the Allied forces spared Kyoto during the second world war. It turned out I knew the reason why the Allied forces had spared Kyoto that surprise...

Sunrise, On the Great Wall - June 2009  Drum Tower, Glowing in the dusk light, Xian, May 2010 

Objects not in their natural environment stand out. In the natural environment, things that stand out get eaten. That's why chameleons change colours and monarch butterflies have striations that help them blend against the tree trunks. Last couple of weeks i have encountered unusual objects in a corporate environment. The classic Moleskine notebook. I work in a regular corporate environment - not a design house, not a creative agency .. and I did a double take when a VP for a business whipped out a Moleskine and started quoting market factoids from it. I thought the cachet of the book was all about the creative types that use the book and the creative nuggets that the book allows you to capture to be used later. Not market and business factoids. It was almost like Hitler being decorated with the 'Star of David' by Israel to honor his contributions to the Jewish community. Still these things tend to happen, (Obama got a Nobel, right?) so i let it pass. Today i saw someone el...

"There is heaven in the sky and Hangzhou on earth" - Chinese Saying It is a magical city around the older part of the city - the ancient West lake. A renowned city in China for centuries, an ancient capital, Inhabitants famed for their refined tastes in culture and food. Marco Polo supposedly visited Hangzhou in the late 13th century and was very impressed with it. His book refers to the city as "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." Although he exaggerated that the city was over one hundred miles in diameter and had 12,000 stone bridges, he still presented elegant prose about the country: "The number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of goods that passed through their hands, was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof." (Src. wikipedia reference for Hangzhou) Apparently right after Marco Polo's visit and the good PR and WOM that followed - the population grew to 3.5 mio making it one of the biggest urban...

A consistent thread in my life is the pleasure of books. Buying them in bookstores from Chennai, Mannheim, Mumbai, Kathmandu, Mumbai, Bangkok, Shanghai and Amazon. Reading them in places from the bathroom to those interminable airline check-in queues. But – often, in a quiet moment, examining the conscience i.e. bookshelves, I note several books left unread. Or some carefully flirted with for a single dinner date for a few pages. A few probably bedded with for a few nights for a couple of chapters. A book that always was quiet in its sombriety, yet compelling was Steven Pinker's “How the mind works". Bought on a whim due to it's name and author, it lay ignored for a long time. Yet, it continued to wrestle with my attention until I finally decided to curl up with it a couple of weeks ago. It has been a glued obsession. I love it. I understand it. I feel it. A cloud has parted. So, this it. You can't come to a book. It must come to you. At a time fertile in its myriad ...

Colonialism and humanity perhaps cannot exist in the same sentence. As an Indian when i read colonial accounts of the how the Europeans brought civlisation to the uncivilized masses of India or when i read about how Indian economy, one of the richest in the world in the 16th century with positive balance of payments was plundered systematically by the British, my blood boils. Descendants of a civilisation that contemplated the true nature of reality in glorious hymns of the vedas atleast a couple of thousand years before the mighty Roman empire came to exist did not necessarily need the brand of civlisation that the whiteman brought. The colonisation of India was one of the earliest proactive attempts to set right a trade balance that was heavily tilted in favour of India. In the pre-colonial era balance of trade was very often positive in favour of the Asians especially the large empires of India and China. (The Europeans rammed at the walls of the middle kingdom for over 150 years t...

The Americans exasperate me. All this furore against executive bonuses specifically AIG's executives and Congress' attempts at taxation of individuals in a witchhunt, private executives' homes being targetted and public protests over their bonuses is beginning to look ridiculous. The poor (well not so poor) executives of the financial industry are being made scapegoats by and american public that has no clue how to manage their budgets and a government that abdicated all responsibility in regulating markets and was merrily collecting taxes and taking credit for a boom that was fuelled by easy liquidity - not fiscal and monetary policy genius. Lets look at the American public - a bunch of morons who need a Suzie Orman show to tell them how to manage their finances should not be out blaming others. A typical segment on this show goes like Caller (Linda) : Hi Suzie, I want to buy this new designer Louis Vuitton Scooter to Zip around the city. It costs 15,000 dollars. Suzie: (...

Me: FuQuan Bei Lu. (North FuQuan Road) Taxi Driver: Shenma Lu? (Which Road?) Me: FuQuan Bei Lu, near Xiehe Lu and Beidi Lu (North FuQuan Road, near Xiehe road and Beidi road) Taxi Driver: OK. OK. (Gesticulated to me to get in). Nothing momentous, but for the first time in two months I managed to answer a question that was posed to me in Mandarin. My Mandarin classes of the last 7 weeks seem to be working as i can now catch snatches of phrases, words in others' conversations. I can also reply to simple questions beyond the artificial setting of Chinese classroom comprising me, my wife and a private tutor. Any case it was for me one of many firsts. Never in the years after college have language classes been attended so diligently. German classes didn't last more than 6 weeks though i did pick up reasonable German to get by even after the classes. Nepalese was like a amalgam of Hindi (the syntax), some Bengal...

Shanghai - Pudong, Skyline. Barely 15 - 20 years ago this land was all paddy fields . There is heaven in the sky and Hangzhou on earth goes a Chinese saying. As Chinese sayings go this was fairly straight forward. Otherwise most of the Chinese sayings one hears tend to be full of Confucian wisdom, full of gravitas and make you feel guilty that you have not fully understood the saying despite being from the 'East'. However to get to this heaven on earth early enough for a 10.30 AM consumer group - I had to take the 7.30 AM train from Shanghai south station. It was only a short 20 minute ride early in the morning to get to the station. Coming in to the station I barely recognised it as a railway station. It looked and felt like the access to an airport. Coming from India i am used to two alternate looks in railway stations - grand colonial structures that are Chennai central, Mumbai VT or some of the more picturesque small town railway statio...

As i was sleepily trundling along on the treadmill in a bid to warm up i was watching CNN news and in one of those scrolling bars at the bottom of the screen there was this piece that did bring a sleepy smile to my lips. Apparently the US Porn Industry is seeking a federal bail out. Initialy i sorta baulked at this idea. But then on deeper reflection aided by gentle jogging on the treadmill - I said Why not? The recent spate of depressing news from financial circles and the news of government bail outs world over has been about the consequences of the seven sins (greed) and apparently the innate human ability to generate financial bubbles. So why not bail out one of the others - Lust? I mean there is nothing innately more important about supporting the consequences of greed and ignoring those of lust. Even if one were to look at it from a consumer need perspective - The US Auto industry received a 25 billion dollar bail out for being wrong about and ignoring consumer needs for atleast ...