It really was not about the bike...

Lance Armstrong influenced me in ways more than one.

I came across him, as many of us did in India- more through his books than his bikes. I read 'Its not about the bike' many years back. I read a lot of books, hundreds every year by my reckoning. There is so much written wealth out there, and so it is extremely rare that I re-read a book. Books I have gone back to a second time, I can count on my fingers: some PGW, Hitchhikers Guide, English August, Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, Karunatilaka's Chinaman and Lance Armstrong's 'Its not about the bike'. Impressed, I alsowent on to read a couple of other books he had written.

And he became my hero.

Cycling was a small part of it, though it was a vital part. I have never claimed to be an athlete: I am an ungainly and unsuccessful runner, I cannot swim to save my life (literally!), and most sports leave me cold. I have always dwelt in the world of books and knowledge, leaping from genre to genre, engaging in world class verbal gymnastics, wrestling with fascinating litrerary concepts, diving enthusiastically into the whole ocean of knowledge if  you will...

However, there was one physical activity I could always do. And that was cycling. There is something about two wheels, a paddle, and sitting atop them which liberates my athleticaly-atrophied muscles. I love to cycle, have done so since I was in my teens well into my college days.

Lance Armstrong did two things for me - he convinced me that cycling was possible at any age,and joy, oh, joy - he made it into an actual sport! Not just any sport, but the toughest, meanest, highest-endurance sport of them all. And, I the most ungifted athlete of all time, could do it!

While Mr. Armstrong did manage to get me to go buy a bicycle and start cycling around town (and between towns) in my middle age, what made him the real hero for me was his battle against cancer.

Cancer always has been a personal nightmare for me - ever since I lost a string of relatives to its unremitting clutches. Above all, it claimed my mother - in a cruel, remorseless, relentless and debilitating way which only cancer can. I saw thousands of people with the curse, hundreds dying to it, tens which died in front of my eyes - as I spent my last days with her in hospital. I saw very few who beat it temperorily, and almost none who claimed lasting victory.

And here was this man, who got Stage Four cancer when he was 22, which metasised through his body, who not only fought it and beat it, but lived to become a champion many times over in the toughest race known to man! And, how, since then, he set up perhaps the world's best organisation to fight the dread, and gave hope to millions of the afflicted worldwide.

He gave hope to my mother too - 'Its not about the bike' was the only book she read in her hospital bed, as she fought the disease. And if I remember right, she read it twice too...

So, Armstrong became my hero. I read all his books. Bought his bright yellow bracelets. Bought a bike, became a bit healthier as I used it. My Nike shoes are black and yellow and support his foundation. My presentations at work alluded to his quotes and his struggle and his wins.

I resolutely refused to believe that he ever took any performance enhancers. For someone who had conquered Death, what were a few mountains on the French countryside? Though now it seems very clear that he messed up; the evidence seems overwhelming. But will it change what I think of him? I am sure he is as good a cyclist that he ever was, though I am pretty sure that he would not have won the Toure seven times - he would still have won it twice or maybe thrice.

But he still would have gotten cancer, he would still have fought it, he would still beat it, and he would still help others beat it with Livestrong.

So will I go and buy his black and yellow Livestrong jacket, and wear it proudly? You bet I would. Will I still cycle around town in those shoes? Definitely. Is he still a hero to me? He most certainly is.

Because, you see, it really was not about the bike...

Demosthenes, without the stones

Usually, this blog does not stray into political territory; politics has enough noise and din already, without one more voice adding to the cacophony. Also, I have noted, especially with my countrymen, that politics is a very divisive discussion - almost as contentious as Sachin Tendulkar's retirement plans, or the relative unlivability of Mumbai and Delhi. So, I usually steer clear of matters political.

Once in a while, however, an event happens which forces me to stray from my stated intent - something so disturbing or awe-inspiring, that it compels me to talk about it.

The tour de force, which inspires my philosophical betrayal this time, is Bill Clinton's speech at the US Democratic Convention. By now, I am pretty sure that every one of you has heard about it, most of you have read reams about it, and some of you have trawled YouTube and gone ahead and seen 49 minutes of the most eloquent political address in modern times. I saw it too, all 49 minutes and 35 seconds of it - twice. And if I was an American citizen - of any hue, Red or Blue - by now I would be out there hunting for the first polling booth to open up, or at least crossing off the days till it does: to go vote for Obama.

Political leaders, since the era of the Greeks, the Athenians, the British, and even us Indians, were great orators first. They needed to be - the power to move thousands of people by their mere words was the basic requirement for a leader. It started with Demosthenes, who famously put stones in his mouth to teach himself to overcome his natural stutter and speak eloquently. The Greeks were not short of them - with Aeschynis and Isocrates among others. The Romans gave us Cicero, Marcus Antonius, Pericles, and, famously, Julius Ceaser. Hitler and Mussolini's speaking skills sent millions of their country men to their victories and their deaths, and ignited the gas chambers to wipe out an entire race. The British, ever so economical with their words, paradoxicaly gifted us with the greatest orator of the 20th century - Winston Churchill who, famously, "mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle", and out-orated and routed the Germans.  The Americans, on the other hand, never know for their brevity, gave us great speakers like Lincoln and King and Kennedy and, then, Obama.

But a new king got crowned this week - William Jefferson Clinton. There is not much I can say about his speech, which has not been written  or heard or seen. Suffice to say, it was one of those efforts which move masses of people and communities and nations. It was a masterpiece - combining deep policy facts, numbers and emotions. Complex economic and political situations were made ever so simple and easy to understand, the choices made so stark and easy. He castigated the Republicans, but with such finesse` and statesmanship, that he butchered them without drawing any unseemly blood.

If you have not yet, carve out 50 minutes from your life and see it here:

However incongruous it sounds, it also reminded me of.... Manmohan Singh. If there is one man who needed to see the speech twice a day for the rest of his life, it is the statue in human form, who is also our Prime Minister. I do not expect him to become another Bill Clinton in the next dozen lifetimes, or even become half a percent of that, but hopefully, after he has seen it a couple of thousand times, he will realise that leaders need to communicate with their people, to inspire them, to leave them with hope and faith and misted eyes...

It is too much to hope for, and each country deserves its own leaders. But there is always hope - perhaps Mr. Singh will learn from Demosthenes, if not Clinton, and start practicing with stones in his mouth starting tomorrow. Or, instead of stones, it might be lumps of coal - I believe there is a lot of them around Lutyens Delhi right now....

A Lazy Blog on Punctuation - Part 2

My last blog was a 'lazy' one - on punctuation. Lazy, because, I reproduced this excellent piece on exclamation marks that I found. The last blog, if you recall, was Part 1. So, naturally, there needs to be a Part 2. I got reminded of it, when I saw a Facebook post from my friend Ramesh Natarajan : "The Tata Photon digital ad starts with the copy "No if's. No but's". But did they ask themselves, why apostrophes? Yes, I agonise on the minutiae, but too many apostrophe catastrophes, I say!"

So here goes another one, this on punctuation in general and the comma in particular, written by perhaps the finest living essayist in the English Language - Pico Iyer. Note how he uses punctuation, including the commas, so very brilliantly:


In Praise of the Humble Comma -  Pico Iyer

The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said, could it not, of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma, unless it be breath itself? 

Punctuation, one is taught, has a point: to keep up law and order. Punctuation marks are the road signs placed along the highway of our communication, to control speeds, provide directions and prevent head-on collisions. A period has the unblinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semicolon is a stop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again.  

By establishing the relations between words, punctuation establishes the relations between the people using words. That may be one reason why schoolteachers exalt it and lovers defy it ("we love each other and belong to each other let's don't ever hurt each other Nicole let's don't ever hurt each other," wrote Gary Gilmore to his girlfriend). A comma, he must have known, "separates inseparables," in the clinching words of H.W. Fowler, King of English Usage. 

Punctuation, then, is a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.) Small wonder, then, that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E. E. Cummings first felt free to commit "God" to the lower case. 

Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("a Caramba! Quien sabe"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity, and divinity of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, SubCommittees and Secretariats. 

Yet punctuation is something more than a culture's birthmark: it scores the music in our minds, gets our thoughts moving to the rhythm of our hearts. Punctuation is the notation in the sheet music of our words, telling us when to rest, or when to raise our voices; it acknowledges that the meaning of our discourse, as of any symphonic composition, lies not in the units but in the pauses, the pacing and the phrasing. Punctuation is the way one bats one's eyes, lowers one's voice or blushes demurely Punctuation adjusts the tone and color and volume till the feeling comes into perfect focus: not disgust exactly, but distaste; not lust, or like, but love. 

Punctuation, in short, gives us the human voice, and all the meanings that lie between the words. "You aren't young, are you?" loses its innocence when it loses the question mark. Every child knows the menace of a dropped apostrophe (the parent's "Don't do that" shifting into the more slowly enunciated "Do not do that"), and every believer, the ignominy of having his faith reduced to "faith." Add an exclamation point to "To be or not to be . . ." and the gloomy Dane has all the resolve he needs; add a comma, and the noble sobriety of "God save the Queen" becomes a cry of desperation bordering on double sacrilege. 

Sometimes, of course, our markings may be simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle agedness, but something else. 

Thus all these tiny scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table. 

Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between "Jane (whom I adore)" and "Jane, whom I adore," and the difference between them both and "Jane, whom I adore," marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place," in Isaac Babel's lovely words: a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart.

Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods...

,,.?/:;_-!!!! - Part 1

This one is going to be a lazy blog - the kind where someone else has done most of the the writing for you...

The very few people who bother to go through my random thoughts would know that words fascinate me. The very power of a right word at the right time has won hearts and wars. Note what was said of Winston Churchill, who won the Second World War for Britain against overwhelming odds just by the power of words: "Churchill mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle" !

Equally fascinating as words, are the pauses which punctuate them. We have known and read about so many sentences which mean something totally different when punctuation marks are used differently, most fascinatingly dealt with in Lynn Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Do Make a Difference.

I came across this article today by Steve Macone, which talks about 'exclamation points' and is absolutely brilliant. So, read on!!! :


Too many exclamation points!!!

                        

HEY STEVE!” someone recently emailed me. Both my name and “Hey” were in caps, and all five sentences in the message ended with exclamation points. At first glance I assumed the message was a loved one writing from a plane that was going down. It turned out to be someone I barely knew, discussing minor logistics and thanking me for something that had taken no effort on my part.
I’m not the first to point out that we’re in a punctuation arms race in emails and texts. “Thank you!!” people reply, like you just sent them a kidney instead of an invoice.
“See you at 1:00 for the meeting,” I type, and then hesitate: If I don’t add an exclamation point it sounds like I plan to kill the person when I get there. And yet when someone emails me about a meeting with an exclamation point, I think, “Listen, it’s a meeting. The best it could go is that there are bagels. If you are really that excited about it, you’re a psycho.”
But I admit: I do it too. I’ll drop an exclamation point or nine in an email or text to smooth the transaction. I do it not because I’m nice but because I’m lazy: Instead of finding the right words I find the “Shift” and the “1″ keys. Synthetic excitement explodes out of my cursor, unearned. And I can sound friendly without all the effort of actually being friendly.
But I’ve also come to hate it. I hate that I’m trapped by it, that if I don’t put six exclamation points in an email or text I sound like a jaded ex-bullfighter or a 13-year-old goth girl.
We communicate electronically now, and that has its own art form: How long to wait before answering our boss to convey that we’re on top of things yet also busy. Whether to use emoticons or not. Whether to use proper capitalization or not. Deciding whether or not to reply all by scrolling through the list of recipients and making snap judgments about them. Those people who reply to your emails by typing their responses within the email you sent, their answers ripping through your email with a different shade of text like they’re the Voice of God. The sweet, definitive clack of hitting send on a nice 10:30 a.m. burn to a college buddy in a chain of email banter, picturing faces curling into smirks at the desks of jobs that keep them serious otherwise. The sting of your buddy’s reply. The snug buzzing of a text against your thigh, with the quick calculation of who it probably is based on recent response time patterns.

Exclamation points are part of all this. They set the tone of these transactions that are intimate, beamed into our pockets, flicked into our inboxes, and yet still not face-to-face. And when used too much they come off like punctuation with a motive, a little plea to be liked. Or like tiny specks of implanted networking. If it were all a party, the periods would be by the bar, drinking whiskeys and politely discussing the price of daycare, the commas chiming in at just the right moment, while the exclamation points pretend to dance, nodding furiously at anything anyone says, smiling so hard their eyes look crazy, taking way too many photos, teetering on their impractical shoes — tiny dots under those tall frames, fitting: excitement’s such an unsteady emotion compared to the loyalty of regret or the militia-like reliability of anger— spilling their Red Bull and vodkas, and claiming to have the time of their lives.
The problem is that life is not a party. Have you looked at life lately? It’s not that exciting. It consists mostly of showering and trying not to trip. The period is calibrated to suffice most of the time. So I’m left wondering why we’re typing so breathlessly, like we’re all skydiving into prom.
The answer, of course, is because we want life to be exciting. And we want to be friendly.
But exclamation points give it all away too soon. They short some social circuit. They make us seem needy and insecure, which of course we all are. That’s why we communicate to begin with, right? We need that invoice, please, need to follow up and confirm that meeting for 1 o’clock, need to check with a friend that they’re going to the awesome party! — the party we’re actually nervous about attending, where we’ll try to fit in by half-dancing and nodding and drinking a fun energy drink cocktail, and smiling harder than normal in the hopes that people like us.
I realized I was sprinkling exclamation points in emails and texts as a kind of hedge against the chance that the person on the other end wouldn’t like me. I realized I was being annoying: When the macro seeps into the micro — when our hopes and dreams start showing up in emails about sponges in the break room — it’s called melodrama. So lately I’ll type an exclamation point, pause, and then delete it. And just hope that when I do get to the meeting they’ll be pleasantly surprised that I don’t plan to kill them, that they just might like me, period.

Time. Please.

They are called Kanwarias. Every year around this time, you can see them - determinely plodding, with their heads down, along the highways of Delhi and Gurgaon. They go to Hardwar I am told, to the holy Ganges. Dressed in saffron, with a strange contraption slung on their shoulders. When I first saw them, they intrigued me - an unending stream of saffron in single file, like ants marching on. Now, however, what intrigues me is the fact that they seem to be doing this march more often, and with increasing frequency.

The same is true of my weekly magazine buying: every Saturday, I go over to this guy in Delhi to buy our vast and varied quota of weeklies, fortnightlies and monthlies. There was a time I looked forward to it. Now I do not need to - Saturday is upon me, before I know. The same is true of my monthly visit to the Gurudwara every 16th of the month, to bow my head to God and to the person I loved the most in life. The 16th of every month comes up very rapidly now - like a giant prayerwheel with dates written on it, but just spinning faster and faster...

I thought it was just me who felt that way - this quickening frequency of events, the shortening of hours and days between occurences. But I find I am not alone - everyone I talk to feels that way. They feel that stuff is happening faster, the duration between events of all kinds is shortening every year they live, the hands of the clock have hastened.

Time, if it may, is accelerating.

And that is what I have come to strongly believe - time is accelerating. While a day is still 24 hours, and not 23, the 24 just happen faster. The hour is still 60 minutes, and the minute is still 60 seconds. But just that each second is ticking just infinitesimaly faster, every time it ticks. And, again as if to validate me, everyone I tell this to agrees with me - first a little hesitantly, but then with complete conviction. Of course, they say, that is it, that explains everything - time is accelerating.

But, can time do that? Perhaps it can. What is time, after all? It started for us a millionth of a nano second after the Big Bang. And the Big Bang was the event where a single point, or Singularity, exploded out to form the known universe. Imagine that explosion - a trillion planets pushing out from that point, accelerating as they go outwards and onwards, creating our universe. And the universe is still expanding, and perhaps at an accelerating rate - in the bargain, it accelerates time..

Or perhaps the explanation is more prosaic. Every day we live, there are more and more things created to fill up our day. Even in my lifetime, my day 20 years back had only so many things to fill it - three meals, 1 hour of television, 7 hours of school, 1 hour of reading, perhaps an hour of playing and friends. Think of the day now - 10 hours of work, 2 hours of commuting, 2 hours of making things work at home, 24x7x500 hours of television, a billion online videos, 200 real friends, 500 friends on Facebook,  1500 colleagues on linkedin, 150 mails, 50 SMSes, 400 tweets... the list is endless. And before, we can deal with even a tenth of them, the day is over!

Or is it something else? Are our cells aging faster, perhaps? Or perhaps the Higgs Boson explains this - little massless particles of time hurtling away, faster and faster. Or is our planet on its final accleration - like the last gasp sprint of a long distance runner -, as it rushes to hurtle off the cliff its denizens are rapidly and relentlessly pushing it off?

If I was a physicist, I would have loved to model this - create an elegant little equation which explains this whole concept of acceleration of time. Perhaps it would win me the Nobel. Talking of which, I believe that the results of this years Nobels are going to be out very soon. Had they not just given last year's awards?

Addition: Thanks Rajnish. This is a great video to accompany the blog

Questionable Characters

Questionable Characters. That is what I called our quiz team yesterday evening.

Every fortnight a post from The Living Room (TLR) would tickle my curiosity. It spoke of the long forgotten concept of quizzing, and sexed it up by describing how it was actually done in this trendy pub in uber-trendy Hauz Khas Village (HKV for the uninitiated). So, after many months of active procrastination, I dragged a trusting MH there yesterday. The idea was to sit in the audience and figure out what the whole thing was all about, while simultaneously downing copious amounts of sangria.

What we discovered, however, was that this quiz had a key differentiator - there was no audience. So, unless you were asking the questions or serving drinks and food, you were a team! There were eight of them in all, and included amongs them were the Questionable Characters - M and I...

I would rather not dwell on the one hour that passed by, ever so slowly, after the quiz begin. For those who insist - the sangria was decent, if too fruity, the food was quite good, the airconditioning worked reasonably well. And those comet like things whooshing above our head were all the unanswered questions. All unanswered. All of them. We emerged after that hour with zero points, and since there were no negative points, we ranked eight on eight. After we struggled outside through the deluge of admirers and the torrent of congratulatory messages, I got reminded of the quizzes of yore...

Thankfully, and thoughtfully, I had neglected to tell people there about my quizzing days when I was a callow youth. Those days at IIFT, when Croak and I would rumble around Delhi's campuses in Croak's broken down scooter, with his helmet askew and our clothes stinking, looking for a college which had a quiz on and where we could inveigle our way in... Or the 72 hour festival at IMT (called Passion, what else?) where for three days and three nights we competed in one kind of quiz after another; where we were participating in so many contests that they had to change the schedule to let us participate in all of them and win everything in sight... Or my first Brand Equity win, when I was with Titan, and won my first ever trip abroad - to Bangkok and HK.... Or the second win in 1997 held in front of three thousand people and televised live, where Pratap and I decimated the competition and were awarded tickets to London to watch the Spice Girls (ugh!). And those many many qualifiers, one where I answered the winning question* just before Notts (Ramesh Natarajan) could, and I can still here is unique voice croaking out "Shit. Shit. Shit". Or when I won my third Brand Equity, in 2005, when I was 35, much after the age that quizzers have faded away and given way to the young bright sparks from the IT companies...

And then there were the little quizzes. The ones at Mount Carmel in Bangalore, where the girls would actually let this bunch of super-geeky boys in to the girls college every fortnight , and then cluster around silently listening to the mumbo-jumbo flying around from their mouths, with the boys eyes hardly noticing them... Or the Indian Meterological Quiz, which I won in my 12th standard, out of faraway Ahmedabad and actually won a microscope (to watch cloud formations closely, I guess). And how I did not buy a single TV or washing machine or microwave oven for the first 5 years of my working life; I won all of them at various quizzes...

It was a great time. Now, perhaps it is different. Brand Equity is  a soap opera. Printed quizzes are dead, effectively dismembered by Google and its ilk. Retained knowledge is no longer a competitive advantage, when there a profusion of screens with abundant search apps dumbing us down ever further.

But in TLR I saw hope, despite the drubbing. There was still an excitement around quizzing, partially fueled by the alcohol I guess, but still very much there. And the questions were great, the quiz master was super and the people were enthusiastic.

We will go there again definitely since it happens every fortnight. Oh, next time we will certainly have more ammunition with us. Perhaps persuade Croak to come along. And Nuts. And Suharsh. And maybe Notts, if he is traveling northwords. All those quizzers of yore... Perhaps call ourselves Forty Plus. It will be fun to see how we fare. We might still be last, futilely trying to grab at the questions whooshing above us, and coax our grey cells to think so laterally as they used to. We know one thing - even if we are a fifth of what we were years before, we will win those little books they give us prizes. All of them.

And if not, so what? There is always the alcohol. The food is good. The sangria is better. HKV is uber-trendy. And quizzing will win. Again.



*Question: "What in finance is the 3-6-3 principle?"
  Answer: "Borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, golf by 3PM" - from Liars Poker by Michael Lewis

No Man is an Island....

"No man is an island" is how John Donne started one of his most famous verses, centuries ago. But then he had not lived in the Millenium City.

As I spend more and more days in Gurgaon, I continue to get amazed by how the city functions - in fact even how it exists. There is no electricity: where I live electricity switches between the mains and generator power about 25 times a day, and for more than half the day we are on the 'backup'. There are no roads worth speaking of, except the highway which too continues to kill an average of at least one person a day! There is no water - the water table chart of India shows Gurgaon to be among the deepest red. The landscape reminds me of some of the old Western movies, or of some of those sci fi fantasies - deep red sun, dust clouds swirling around carrying with them the flotsam of human existence, a permanent dusty haze with not a tree in sight. Corpses of stray dogs and other animals brought down by speeding vehicles and their manic drivers following no rules litter the streets. And dotting this soul less landscape you see two signs of human existence - hundreds of tall, monolithic buildings, punctuated every now and then by a ramshackle liquor shop.

It is these buildings which interest me, and the vehicles. Because what is happening in Gurgaon is the exact reverse of what is happening in every other city in the world. Every large city is all about 'distributed facilities'. It is much like what is happening in computing. Earlier there used to be these big heavy computers, with all the processing power and intelligence lying in that box. The internet and the high speed fibre networks changed all that. Now computing power is distributed all across the world - in every intelligent device and in the vast data centres dotting the globe. What we have in every office and home is a node, connected to the vast web of intelligence  or the World Wide Web.

The same thing is happening in infrastructure. Before Edison came along, each building and factory had its own powerplant - its own source of power. Edison changed all that, and created the first grid. So there were centralised power plants, and houses and offices and factories connected to them as nodes to draw their energy from. Power utilities were born, Edison's being the first (now we know it as GE). The same was true of water - each village or cluster had its own pond, until piped water came along. The same for cooking gas. And ad infintum

This is how even traffic runs now. Earlier each vehicle was on its own - no street lighting, non-existent roads, no signals. Today in most busy roads in city centres, car lights are a safety feature more for others to see you rather than for you to see others. The street lighting is so good that night transforms to day, and the traffic signals, rules and processes guide your cars so well that an algorithm can drive them (as Google has demonstrated).

But the reverse is happening in the Millenium City. Each house and each cluster of houses runs its own power, there are mini power plants running in every 'gated community'. 'Backup' power (though now the state electricity grid, such that it may, is the backup power; the generator are the mains) is a must for a house to be bought. Each house - gated or otherwise - now needs its own 'pond' or water  storage. Pesky little five thousand litre tankers (mobile ponds) rumble along the unpaved roads from house to house, selling a commodity for which citizens have already paid taxes for. And now most gated complexes, including mine, have cooking gas storage too.

The same thing is happening to traffic. Each car has become an island, generating its own illumination, responsible for its own safety and for finding the best path it can drive on. Street lights exist only as road dividing pillars, for vehicles with no lights to crash into. Each car is a fortress, with its own illumination, alarm, baseball bat and lumpen driver.

And yet the city continues to thrive - property prices double every 3 years while all other facilities halve in the same time. What worries me is how long this can continue. How long will we continue going in the path opposite to what every other city has chosen - not by choice, but by necessity. The bell is tolling, and as John Donne closes  the same poem:

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.      

"Words are all I have..."

I think that among all the inanimate things this world, what I love most are words. I love the way different words in the English language can actually be synonyms, but mean subtly different things.

I love what great authors can do with words. PG Wodehouse, obviously, is the master of that art. Jeeves does not enter a room, he 'shimmers' in. Aunts do not shout at each other, they 'bellow' like 'mastadons calling out to each other across a swamp' or something to that effect. A scared gentleman is 'white and shaken, like a dry martini'. And obviously, 'I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled'.

I keep on searching for the perfect use of the English language, for words used just so. The right word at the right time is a miracle.

So, yesterday, when I saw this absolutely beautiful peice of art of a letter from copywriter-turned-screenwriter, Robert Pirosh, it gave me enough happiness to last me till the weekend.

Read on, not once but many times, and see what I mean:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-like-words.html

Reproducing the letter below:

When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of. The approach worked, and after securing three interviews he took a job as a junior writer with MGM.

Pirosh went on to write for the Marx Brothers, and in 1949 won an Academy Award for his Battleground script.

(Source: Dear Wit.)

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave "V" words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land's-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh
385 Madison Avenue
Room 610
New York
Eldorado 5-6024

Naked women on my door

 

I guess you have reached somewhere in life, if your office is bigger than the sum total of all the offices and cubicles you have sat in ever? And that it is a three room ‘suite’ – main room + a decent anteroom + a loo? And that it has a table big enough for an average Mumbai family to happily build their 1BHK on? And a couch, bigger than the one I have at home? And, to top it all,  it is guarded by half a dozen naked women!

Well, welcome to my office at Genesis Colors. For people who have ploughed through my earlier post, you would know that this is where I am spending a bulk of my time these days. It is quite a cool office, though the broadband pipe resembles a soft drink straw, and no one knows what a calendar invite means. And since my palatial digs are a part of the studio, I am surrounded by Macs. The people are super nice, and there is beautiful fabric all over… And an innocuous door near my room surprisingly opens out to a large, cavernous hall where about 30 workmen are busy making sarees!!! A bit different from Microsoft, I guess

I have just been here for 12 hours totally, and have been very busy doing nothing productive (guess one has developed that to an art form). As I know more, and meet more people, I will update those interested here.

And for the (mostly) male readers of the blog, here are the naked women :

Doing What's Next - Life After Microsoft

Moving on from Microsoft has been interesting. To start with, I have realised that there is a world out there beyond the soft cocoon I was enveloped in for the last six years. I have also realised that I have been as busy being jobless, as I was when I held a job. I have been places, met many people, immersed myself in so many ideas, wandered cyberspace quite a bit, and I have seen the inside of my gym a lot more than I did before. Admittedly, I have missed my office, my team the routine, the stress, the frustration and the laughter. 

I must say that a lot of people have been enquiring of me, whether I intend to spend the rest of my life in idle worthlessness, or take up a worthy vocation sometime. Some have been curious, some have really been worried about me, and some have come to the firm conclusion that no one really wants to give me a job.

While I would like nothing more than spending the rest of my life in langurous lethargy, I have finally roused myself to go take up a worthy vocation - actually, take up several of them.

So to satisfy your morbid curiosity, and to set your worried minds to rest, here is what I intend to do:

At the outset, it is not conventional. As I hinted at earlier, I am not joining a single company in some executive position, nor am I doing this one startup that I have been talking about. Instead, over the next few months, I am going to be associated with a few things simultaneously. In a sense, I am putting my fingers in a few pies.

Certainly the largest pie, where I spend most of my time, is my association with Genesis Colors Pvt Limited as their Group Advisor and an Independent Director on the Board. Genesis Colors is India’s largest luxury retail company: it owns some iconic Indian fashion brands like Satya Paul, and runs the operations of global brands like Armani, Jimmy Choo, Bottega, Paul Smith, Canali, etc. in India. Besides that, it has a JV with Burberry. Genesis was started 15 years back by a couple of dynamic entrepreneurs, and is now the market leader  in its category in India. A bunch of private equity funds – Sequoia Capital, L Capital (LVMH’s PE Fund), Mayfield Fund, Henderson Global Investors, etc. – have invested in the company recently. My mandate will be to work closely with the GCPL team to help strengthen and transform the core business, set up internal processes and systems, build a team, and work towards growing the business to new customer segments and international marketing. Additionally, I will be responsible for building and growing the ecommerce opportunity for all their brands. I start on May 01. 

Besides that, I have decided to focus on investing-in and mentoring tech and ecommerce start-ups. To that effect, I am going on the Board of three to four VC-funded startups  in the ecommerce and tech services space, and will mentor them through their growth and fund-raising activities. The ones I can disclose currently are ETechies and Skoolshop. In addition, I will also be involved a little more deeply with a stealth startup in the Internet product space, in an investing and Director capacity.

So, I have decided to follow my heart and do a few things concurrently; perhaps, after a few months I will settle down with one of them full time. And if and when I do so, I do hope I make the right decision, unlike our friend below :-) :

Last day in Microsoft - my farewell mail and post...

Memories, declaims PG Wodehouse, are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.  

Disregarding this very sound advice, and go back six years, when I joined this company as a wide-eyed young(er) man to lead our Online Business in India. Things were a little different then – Bill Gates was still around, Ballmer still danced on stage, and Apple was half our size. As Douglas Adams puts it in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.” I joined our Bangalore Office at Signature Building, and sat on the ground floor without any sun lights or openings (‘Microsoft Office without Windows’ was my first WL IM update). I had the usual first year of a new Microsoftie – flowers on day one, deadlines on all others; countless acronyms; multiple conference calls; reams of .ppts;  innumerable trips to Seattle; and vague, guilty thoughts about our end consumers. And a super, passionate, committed team of the then OSG team to help me through. 

I coped through all the multiple re-orgs and the ordered chaos,  as we all do, and after the first year, things seemed a little more coherent. Deadlines became  manageable   (“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Our partners and customers became a little more real, WHIs and NSATs started to mean something, and some of our products and technologies revealed a magic hitherto unnoticed. Seattle was beautiful, when sunny. Every single Microsoft employee in every single office was the most intelligent, passionate and caring human being I had ever encountered. The parties were awesome; MGX was a revelation. And I started to fall in love with the company… 

Six years have passed in the blink of an eye. Somewhere, in the middle of some quarter between an MYR and an MSPoll, I moved jobs to lead our E&D Business ( later called Retail, now called RSM, watch this space for the next name change!). And, unbeknownst to me, I landed my best job ever! We built a great team of Retail superstars, turned around our business, completely redefined its purpose and vision, went after our budgets and growth targets with a vengeance, and had amazing fun doing so. We challenged the status quo, and went after a New Normal (“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” – Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt). All of this was possible because of all the amazing leaders, managers and colleagues I worked with, who are too numerous to mention, but they know who they are; I thank them with all my heart and humility, and hope to be in touch with them always. 

But now it is time to go.  

I have had the privilege of working with one of the best companies on earth, but it is time to go do other things. There is a very strong urge inside me to do something very different, perhaps create something, to bring technology and the Internet to another business and business model, and participate in transforming an industry. Perhaps the urge is a foolish one, and “…if I ever meet myself, as Adams remarks in ‘Mostly Harmless’, ‘I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me”. But then, I would far rather be happy than right any day. 

And today is my last day in this wonderful company, working with all of you wonderful people, and I have the immeasurably sad task ahead of walking out my cabin for the very last time today. I will continue to stay on in Gurgaon though, hold on to my phone number (and my Windows Phone), and will certainly be found all over cyberspace*. I will take some time off in April, and start my next adventure in May. A lot of you have asked me what it will be,  but “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer” (Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish). 

A few of you poor unsuspecting souls have also asked me for my advice, my parting words of wisdom if you may… All I would say is that you, like me, have had the honour and the privilege of working with the greatest company on earth, with fantastically brilliant people and some mind-blowing technology. What I tried to do  was to work hard and smart, give my best, and have loads of fun along the way. I never forgot that this company was created by two very smart guys dropping out and taking big huge risks. So I took some calculated risks of my own: some of them worked, and I got a nice Rolex watch along the way; some of them bombed, and I nearly lost my job for that. All through it,  I learnt how to beg for forgiveness, rather than ask for permission. As Mr. Adams advises in Mostly Harmless: “You live and learn. At any rate you live”.  I enjoyed every waking and jetlagged moment of it; and when I stopped doing so, I moved on to do other things…  

And so here I am now, on the verge of doing those other things, bidding you goodbye once again. And I agree one final time with Douglas Adams, as he says in The Dark Teatime of the Soul: 

“…I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

So, thanks for everything, especially for reading the nostalgic ramblings above, and please keep in touch with me at do@mailjaspreet.com

Ruining Mothers and Mosquitoes...

The Principle Sin of Gin,
Among Others,
Is, Among Others,
Ruining Mothers.

'Mothers Ruin'

This popular ditty from late 19th Century London makes it quite clear that people then did not share my passion for Gin (although always accompanied with Tonic, as far as I am concerned). In fact, it was not very affectionately called, among other things - 'Mother's Ruin', 'Slappy Bonita', and 'The Makeshift'. Considering the circumstances, one cannot blame them. The widespread use of gin, through more than 8000 'establishments' in London alone, was the cause of a widespread drinking epidemic among women and even children.

I started thinking about this, sitting in my family home in Ahmedabad, Gujarat last week. Sitting in Gujarat does tend to make one think of gin and its other alcoholic friends quite often. Gujarat is a 'dry' state - maybe that has something to do with it...

Gin is not a popular drink in India, and is just becoming fashionable in other parts of the world. Its antecendents, however, are far from fashionable. The word used would, in fact, be disreputable. Gin became famous, or notorious in London, as the ditty above indicates. Londoners used to drink a lot of wine, and all of that came from France. Now we know that even much before the time of Sarkozy and Bruni, the British have not looked very kindly on the French. In the 18th century, in fact, they were at war. The first thing that the Brits did to punish the French was to impose a very heavy customs duty on all foreign spirits, and simultaneously greatly incentivise and delicense the production of local swill, which mostly turned out to be gin. Sodden with patriotic spirit, the British citizenry responded enthusiastically to their government's moves and started imbibing gin as if it was going out of fashion. Thousands of ginneries came up, all using inferior grain and polluted water, which the beer brewers had rejected. Londones started dying like flies, and the government was forced to clamp down on the industry it had itself evangelised. Duties were raised, gin pottages destroyed, thousands arrested, riots ensued; in fact, the war on gin is often seen as a model for the the war on drugs these days.

Gin came back into fashion again, however. And again the British had a hand in it; but this time in far off India, the jewel in their crown. Hardy Scotsmen and Britishers and their memsahibs could tolerate everything that India threw at them, but they could not stand the mosquitoes and the malaria it inflicted on their unacquainted bodies. Quinine or Jesuit's Bark as they called it was their salvation - the only known cure for the shivering death. But while quinine had to be had every day, it was very bitter and almost un-swallowable, even diluted in water to be had as tonic. Until a particularly afflicted Britisher discovered that the solution was to mix a little bit of gin in it. And gin and tonic was born.

The tonic available today is frankly an apology of what used to be - a hint of quinine and a lot of sugar. But it still does have the Jesuit's Bark - look at a bottle of good tonic water next you have it, and read the label to make sure that the medicine is there.

Next time when you hold a glass of perfect Bombay Sapphire and Schweppes Tonic Water in your hand, and hold the liquid to the light, think of this story behind it. You might want to feel bad about the 'mothers it ruined'. But, on the other hand, you can choose to feel good that what you are drinking is truly medicinal :-)

The Moving Finger wonders: Is E-Tail India's Organised Retail?

A close friend of mine, who has turned entreprenuer to start a ecommerce play targeted at school students had a startling comment to make to me. His strong view, which he even put up in his investor pitch deck, was that ecommerce will be India's orgainsed retail.
This was a few months back, and I soundly rubbished his claim when I heard it. But now, as the months have gone by, and I think more about it, I agree with him!
India has a consistent history and pattern of leapfrogging industries. The most well known example is mobile telephony, of course: wired phones remained stuck at 5% (and now declining) penetration, while mobile telephony leapfrogged it and exploded to the 65% penetration that we have today. It seems quite clear that mobiles, and now tabs, will leapfrog PCs. The Indian PC market refuses to grow out of its teens (at 12-13mn) now, while smartphones are already selling at half that volume and almost doubling every year. In fact, the total value of smartphones sold in India at $6bn is the same as the value of consumer PCs sold in India! And the tablets are just about coming in. In a few other places, this has happened or is happening - deal sites leapfrogging catalogues, for example.
Ebay gives a very precise estimate of  3311 ecommerce hubs in India, selling an  estimated 10 billion dollars worth of goods and services. Granted that 70-80% of it is travel, but it is still digital and replaces a travel agent's shop somewhere. More importantly, the industry is growing at 2-3% every month, or by 50% every year. By 2015 it is estimated that 40mn people will be buying stuff online, and the stuff will be worth $ 50bn, if the same growth rates continue. And with all the growth finally happening in internet access, and low cost devices, and with Mr. Ambani threatening to roll out his pan-India 4G network, it will happen.

Now lets look at conventional organised retail in India; what we call LFRs (or large format retail). The industry, across all categories, is estimated to be at $10bn today and growing at 30-35% to $60bn by 2015. But this takes into account one very important assumption: that somewhere along the way, if not already, FDI in retail opens out. And all of us know where that assumption is currently.

Think about the macro trends and consumer scenarios: Digital infrastructure in this country is improving at a much faster rate than physical infrastructure. Every day it is more and more painful to travel to a large store or a large mall. Land prices are not decreasing, and are not going to in the foreseeable future. High real estate prices imply that they contribute to 20-40% of a retailers cost, and implies that he keeps limited inventory. An etailer on the other hand has  infinite inventory; and his real estate costs (bandwidth, storage space, hosting) are actually decreasing year by year, in inverse correlation to Moore's law. Yes there are issues - payments, for example, and therefore the scourge of cash on delivery. But I can bet that the payments issues will be solved faster and better than new roads and public transport coming up in every city.

In developed countries, retail evolved sequentially and in an orderly manner. There were neighbourhood stores, and then high streets, and then big box retailers and malls,who started killing off the mom-and-pops. Cataloguing emerged somewhere along the way parallely, and then came the etailers with Amazon leading the charge. And now the etailers are slowly killing off the big box guys, especially the category killers. Take a look at book chains, all gone except a scrambling, teetering Barnes and Nobles. The electronics guys - all gone again, except Best Buy, but omnious clouds are already hovering around it. In fact, strangely and much to the exulatation of the independents, the speciality mom-and-pop stores are back, as they do not compete with the big etail behemoths, but sit comfortably and symbiotically with the long-tail speciality guys on the web.

What makes us believe that India will follow the same logical progression? As web access becomes universal (1bn data enabled mobile phones, anyone?) and cheap (Mr. Ambani.), as logistics and delivery systems become better and tailored to the chaos in India (Flipkart!), and as the payment problems are solved by a brilliant young entreprenuer sitting in Udupi, more and more Indians will gravitate to buying (and selling) stuff from the comfort of their homes, rather than wading through merciless traffic and crumbling roads to the nearest Reliance Trends (where the power would have gone off, presumably)

Big retail and etail will coexist for a long while yet. But etail will grow faster, and will be a more dominant player. My bet is that we, as consumers, will leapfrog big retail sooner than anyone expects.

And organised retail in India will really be etail...

(Rants welcome:-))

The Moving Finger writes....about the things I enjoy

Most people have a book buried inside them. I do not, at least not yet. There are some random thoughts, some of which, I believe people will enjoy knowing about.

Funnily, there are a whole bunch of people who claim that I write well, when I get around to doing it. They urge me to start doing that; coincidentally, most of these suggestions come usually at the fag end of drunken evenings. Perhaps it is time, therefore, to go a little beyond my Facebook status messages, to words which go beyond 160 characters or thereabouts...

The biggest question in my mind, having gone past the above decision, then is: What do I write about? After many manhours of thinking about it (funnily, either on a treadmill or after three quarters of a gin and tonic), the easy answer was: things I enjoy.

And that brings me to the topic of my inaugural post - here are the things I enjoy most, fairly random and in no pecking order:

• Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat (in honour of whom I name my futile effort). Also PG Wodehouse, the greatest explorer of English who ever lived. And myriad other lesser authors, whose books I have devoured or sampled in the 30+ years of my reading life.
• Words - in poetry or prose or lyrics, their origin, and their meaning. And how they can be weaved and strung to express humankind's best and worst feelings
• Gin and Tonic - preferably Bombay Saphirre and certainly Schweppes
• Books, predictably. About travel, historical fiction, biographies, food, everything. Music and movies - just a little bit.
• The Internet. The companies which make and rule it. The people who inhabit it. Ecommerce, social commerce, online exchanges and aggregators. And the entreprenuers who chink away at it, discovering whole new business models.
• Food, certainly. Reading about great foods, and unsavoury chefs. And, obviously, eating it.
• Completely trivial and arcane facts - primarily about businesses and organisations, but also many other things.

And, so I will attempt to write about and around the fairly comprehensive, and frightening, list above. And as I do so, I am aware that my words and thoughts will not be private. In this day and age, as a certain Mr. Zuckerberg has effectively taught us, nothing will be. There are things I will say which I will enjoy reading about a year later; there are things which I will deeply regret perhaps even an hour from dong so.

I know, however, that whatever it is, I will not be able to erase anything I write. It will be already out there, unchangeable and immutable, inscribed in the vast encyclopaedia of cyberspace. If Khayyam had lived a few centuries longer, his words below would have rung with a truth which he perhaps never knew when he wrote them:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.....