"Indians Deserve Their Politicians"

Atanu Dey quotes this Financial Times article, and sums up that the Indian people deserve the Congress. An auto walla told me something similar yesterday evening. I was taking an auto rickshaw from Secretariat to Domalguda, hardly 1.5 km distance. Most auto wallas either do not come, or demand Rs 20-30 (way above the usual minimum fare of Rs 12).

This man was an exception, he smiled, and even politely enquired me about the elections. I told him about Loksatta the new party, and how it could win a few seats in Hyderabad. He nodded saying, "Well there are few educated people who will vote for them, especially in the Jubilee Hills constituency". When I suggested most other politicians are crooks, this young man (all of twenty years) concurred but added, "It is the Indian public that is to blame, we vote for them after taking money, we accept their biryani feasts and liquor packets and vote for them. We deserve their rule as we break the rules of civic engagement. We are the bigger thieves!". "Why, the other auto wallas demand Rs 20 for the same ride, isn't that too thievery?", he asked.

I came home feeling good about meeting one man with clarity of thought. He aptly summarised, what took an IIM professor a full book.

"Go Kiss The World"

Two books in a month is fast reading when compared to my regular pace. It also means that my regular  spend on money is actually yielding some returns.The latest book i managed to finish is another biography, written in a friendly and fast pace. In 'Go Kiss the World', Subroto Bagchi writes about his life, what has shaped him and shares several useful nuggets for any young person.

Several things about Subroto and his book immediately struck a chord as i share the same background or context. I too spent most of teen years in Orissa, changed four schools and loved the experience. The open spaces at our township in Paradip, my schooling at Kendriya Vidyalaya, the library that exposed me to great English novels which eventually helped me crack b-school exams with ease. I have sometimes wondered if that was a blessing or a curse since I was not exposed to enough competition that led to spectacular failures in competitive exams right after my Class XII. Fortunately things turned for the better once a stint in big city academia and the ruthless competition there exposed all my weaknesses. I think most people who grow up in small towns indulge in this self doubt.

Bagchi admits that he was not cut out for a military career and though he was selected as the best NCC Cadet in the country, stayed away from it. He was fortunate to get some frank advice from a military person he later calls an angel. Later his first job was as a Lower Division Clerk (LDC) in the Orissa government. If not for some perhaps  misplaced overconfidence, I too would have ended up as an LDC in my first job.  After my own  experimentation with a military career, one of my relatives was keen that I take up some job and sent me several application forms for exams conducted by the government for selection into LDC positions. I promptly said No, though at that time i was not aware of what i would end up doing. I had no angel like Bagchi's when I was teenager and ended up wasting a couple of years of my academic career! But I found my angel later in final year of graduation (one Capt. Parthibhan of Pentafour Software in 1995), and this man who had then just returned from Singapore pointed me in the right direction. The book underscores the need to find good mentors and also be available to others as a mentor.

On a TV interview I happened to see while reading this book, Bagchi answered to a question, that one company that he really admires is Infosys. He calls  Infosys an institution and not just a company. Building a company is not a big deal, but building an institution is! I couldn't agree less having seen this company for quite some time now.

One of the things I liked is the perspective of a career spanning thirty or forty years and not a few years or the current job. I found myself giving similar advice to a group of youngsters couple of days ago! He also debunks the romantic myth several IT professionals hold about early retirement; I take that as a timely advice. I really wish I had read a book like this before I started my career - could have done a few things differently.

Selflessness Vs. Self-Interest

Last Wednesday I jumped on the opportunity of listening to Gurcharan Das in person. Gurcharan is the former CEO of Procter & Gamble India and is a leading thought leader. I make sure I read his bi-weekly column in the Sunday Times. Though the occasion was the eve of the International Telecom Day celebrated by the IEEE at Hyderabad's Viswesvaraya Bhavan, he chose to expand the scope and cover what is bogging India today.

"One is the idea of selflessness and how it does not help making a nation prosperous. The likes of our Communists, Medha Patkars and even Mother Teresa, are at times condescendingly presumptuous that their acts help bring the nation prosperity. Their attitude ridicules people who espouse self-interest as not self-less. Our politicians too romanticise heroic acts of selflessness rather than encourage enilghtened initiative which stems from self-interest.

"Take an example of a carpenter using a cellphone - he is able to take more customer calls and plan his day better and make more money. The cellphone as a technology device increases his productivity and hence adds to the nation's wealth. Neither Nokia, nor Mr Mittal (of Airtel), nor the cellphone dealer, not even the carpenter is engaged in selfless behaviour here - yet their combined actions have resulted in a massive revolution in the nation's productivity and wealth! As Adam Smith said about this more than 200 years ago - 'The invisible hand that transforms self-interested behaviour to the good of society and the prosperity of the nation'.

"Selfishness and Self-interest are two different things with the latter being guided by principles of wealth creation. Perhaps Bhishma was wrong in The Mahabharata, when he took a self-less vow to remain celibate. Had he demonstrated self-interest by growing the clan, the history of India would have taken a different turn!"

Indian Youth Amongst The Happiest

There was an interesting MTV study published in the newspapers last week. It goes.. "Indian Youth are more happier than US, UK or Japanese youth".. based on a poll of youth in various world cities. Argentina seems to be the happiest of the lot based on the study

I guess one can extrapolate this and suggest that folks in the villages are happier than those in cities. So what is the funda going on here? Does more wealth provide more happiness? Or does the pursuit of money puts one in a frame of mind of 'Accumulate now to enjoy later'; only that the latter always comes later and hence there is no happiness now. Some sort of horribly recursive algorithm ensues resulting in less happiness now and later.

Some recent articles on this topic I have stumbled upon are:

• Time of India Ascent - an article by Dr Debhasis Chatterjee, Prof IIM Lucknow:
• www.life2point0.com

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Dr Chatterjee says:

"Reality is an indivisible and integral presence in ‘the here and the now’. The rise and fall of business cycles, plans of succession and quarterly targets are just attempts to fragment one whole into conceptual bits and bytes...

"The richness of life is in the moment. The moment has an information density of a billion bits and bytes of live data. True happiness lies in the very depth of this moment. The moment is always present in our awareness...

"The less the thoughts that take you away from THE MOMENT, the happier you are. The moment has not arrived towards you as a succession of events. The moment is always there in the depth of your awareness. It just awaits your discovery; it simply wants to be born through you!"

Very Powerful!

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The following speech was shared by a senior colleague. One of most inspiring ones I have read of late. Steve is an awesome role model for anyone. His life shows - true success needs neither degree nor pedigree.

The following is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Audio: http://www.wiredatom.com/jobs_stanford_speech/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60cDHb-tvMA