Do Our Gods Hit the Gym?

Do our Gods hit the Gym?

I am not trying to be an agent provocateur (my friends would say i never had to try hard). Nor am i trying to incur the saffron wrath so fashionably feared by the fashionably liberal. I am not being disrespectful of our Gods, but have you seen them change? I somehow seem to think so. That sounds like blasphemy.

Parameswaran

“Life is bogus!” cried my elderly neighbour who just had his leg amputated owing to a diabetic foot, just the day my father died. His remark shook me up deeply at its unembellished truth and leaving me open mouthed, staring at him. He had also lost all his savings in a bust co-operative bank and was barely eking out his own rations. Yet I marvelled at his wide smile and a grin that betrayed his bad and severally missing teeth each time i knocked his door with trepidation. He would have crawled on the unrepaired floor dragging himself across the room, barely reaching the door latch. “Cheenu there you” are he would beam in his thin underpants and bare chest, plentifully covered by his sacred thread. “Come come, you must have coffee with me” and he would instruct his patient wife who would have been reciting the thousand names of Lalitha to prepare some coffee as i protested guiltily wondering whether i was drinking up the little milk he bought. With the small cup of coffee were also some biscuits or ‘Kozhukottai’ with ‘Moru Kozhumbu’ that i would eat sparingly as he eagerly urged me on.

Mandar

He had a strange knack of calling at the wrong time, sometimes just when i was boarding a bus or train, or sitting on the pot newspaper in hand or when i was knitting my brows with my lawyers at the cases i was saddled with. Moreover there was always a sense of urgency in his call. If i told him i would call back he would plead that i should do so without fail and till he unburdened his mind of what seemed to trouble him he would remain restless. My mother often annoyed at his lack of timing, dismissed him off like many others as crazy. But with the closure of each call he would pronounce his prayers that the good Lord keeps me in good cheer and how indebted he was to my listening to him. Embarrassed and amused i would ask him to reserve them for others. He suffered from Schizophrenia for more than three decades and to my mind was one of the most heroic people i have known. John Nash will be remembered for Game theory but a ‘beautiful mind’ is no euphemism for the state of mind of such a patient. Most of them live in the dark fringes where none notices their furtive movements, plagued by their own demons even at noontide.

In Search of The Guru

The Indian tradition describes the supreme Guru Dakshinamurthy, as seated in front of his pupils in a profound silence that is itself the highest teaching (mouna vyakhya). Yet there are instances when silence is not golden. I was amused to read “Schumpeter’s” column in ‘The Economist’ (whose subscription was gifted by an old student) “Twilight of the gurus” (25^thApril 2015) claiming that ‘the management pundit industry is a shadow of its former self’. Indeed i assent vigorously and also wonder whether it is a good thing. Yet Schumpeter is too dismissive rather than trying to understand the phenomenon. This is a most loquacious industry trying to outshout other gurus quite like competing guru akharas in their grating microphones at the Kumbha Mela. Competing gurus might be in good humour analogous to management gurus in that they are voluble, mystically wooly, elliptical in quotation also economical with the truth of their research and methodology, giving away gyan to the great unwashed willing to buy their cure all snake oil panaceas. Yet not all gurus are quacks.

The Flower Pickers

I used to make fun of my boss and old teacher who would tell me how he woke at 4.00 am and commenced his day with some deep study. Young as i was, i mocked his insomnia and even suggested that he probably begins to plot against his many minions in those wee hours to gain a ‘Competitive Advantage’. Nothing brought me as much amusement as the anecdote that this gentleman who graduated from Harvard once received a call at about 2.00 am claiming that the caller was Prof Michael Porter from HBS wanting to discuss Industry Structure. Obviously the prankster was some student much inebriated and vexed by his assignments or studies at the cheap bar called Raj Palace just outside the college.  Given that sometimes i was found there too, i was viewed with as much suspicion. As i myself age and take refuge in the same strange and ineffable silence that pervades the early morning hours between 3.00 and 4.30 am, I feel guilty at my childish jokes of youth gone by. But the sounds of the summer silence are soon broken by cuckoo calls to mate before the crows unravel their devious designs to mix their eggs with those of crows. I might even chuckle; no wonder cuckoos lend their name to adultery and are not the only ones horny so early in the day. As i sit in the silence i fathom the stirrings and the sounds, which by 5.oo am is a grating ringtone of the gardener trying to wake up and start his day or that of some rickshaw driver asleep with a hangover after drinking a quarter of whiskey whose evidence is just beside his vehicle. Soon the ragpickers would arrive with large Santa Claus plastic sacks, some Tamil speaking women who move furtively scouring the edges of the road picking up bottles and sometimes booty that conferred oblivion to some after a tiring day or quench the thirst of many a scorched soul through the day in plastic bottles. They speak in hushed voices though their harsh tongue betrays them sooner than their feet. Their feet don’t shuffle but move fast and with agility that only calculation and illegality can confer.

An Open Letter to Dr Ranjan Banerjee the New Dean

I am an alumnus of S P Jain Institute of Management and Research. We alumni were sent a message by the institute announcing the new dean, outlining his resume. The new dean joins in early June the alumni newsletter announced. I thought i would share my musings even if they have less value for the effort. Maybe you too could write to the new dean or could add or subtract from the same. 

Dear Dr Ranjan Banerjee,

I write as an alumnus of the school that you are going to lead and we bear with us our best wishes in your new appointment. We from the alumni have been sent your resume in advance, about a month back and are guardedly delighted that it sounds promising. We wish you the very best and pray for success that you lead the place we cherish as our alma mater. 

We stand outside the ring placing our trust that the faculty and student body that you will lead is successful in its entirely new chapter, after a long and fairly successful first innings. An innings that will be also difficult to match given its singular accomplishment of retrieving a mofussil and nondescript institute in a tiny chemistry lab, to a place among the respected institutes among business schools in India. 

One faculty member described the institute more than two decades ago as a fragile ecosystem, a combustible mixture of ideas, ideals, impossible people all of who are learning, improvising and reinventing all that seems worthy of cherishing. That certainly is the vision and often even with the best of leadership is not easy to accomplish. We would be less informed and wise than the faculty body to highlight the institutes pressing concerns but we might certainly ruminate on what we thought made the institute good if not great. I  also humbly state that this might not entirely be what the alumni body think or even agree, so I would not be presumptuous to stake a claim as their voice. This a mere attempt however flawed. I may also accused of having a biased view which in the interests of full disclosure state, that i also served as faculty there. Yet in humility this may be treated as a mere observation that could be viewed as caution at worst or at best unsolicited advice. Your appearance on the stage is a follow up on a great act with a brilliant performance by a masterful player Dr ML Shrikant (though some might stay marred by its extended tenure). All such second acts are difficult to follow as your onlookers may unfairly have a high set of expectations.

The Missed Bus

Missing the bus is an expression commonly used to indicate a failure to capitalise on an opportunity that was available in clear sight. However I believe it more pejoratively seems to blame the person for either being slow or even stupid; it blames the person for not seeing an obvious wave that sweeps everyone who is in its vicinity regardless of their station or competence.

Being a fresh engineer at a business school the world looks humane and years of wrangling with the mechanical at workshops, labs, books filled with equations than English, it is an overpowering humanising experience. Unless of course you gallivanted through college barely attending or studying; and it does seem so to be true for quite a few of my peers (and several students) that i have known. Suddenly your books are written in lucid prose and you don’t knit your brows page after page chasing the tail of some derivation almost entirely written in Greek that even Greeks would fail to fathom (remember heat transfer equations for a thick cylinder or Nyquist diagrams and Fourier transformations). Here the teachers seem to speak the Queen’s tongue with a lyrical lilt, making us feel like urchins at a dinner banquet at Balmoral Hall. We had in our first term an earnest professor S R Ganesh who spoke softly with a string of venerable degrees from MIT and other august portals; who made me awe struck; who taught us an indecipherable subject (which i still wonder what it was meant to convey) called Perspective Management (never mind the obvious oxymoron there). He was a gentleman and was very imaginative and wanted us to read a book a week (which to us engineering students was a quota for a year or even four) and submit an executive summary. Many of my peers just read the introduction and the blurbs and imaginatively reconstructed the summaries and he scarcely noticed the difference, even sagely nodding to some bogus analogies.  He then gave us one day an assignment to write our life story. Yes he meant a short story of our yet chrysalis like life.  The engineers were convinced that it was an exercise in futility and scratched their heads in bewilderment, lamenting that this was what was precisely wrong with business education. The closet liberal minded ones like me were deeply impressed at what seemed like a profound experiment to build an imaginary narrative that would capture our deepest yearning.  I reconstruct from memory those stories from what transpired more than 25 years ago. I am surprised at what seemed prescient and also remember being deeply hurt by that episode.

Narayani

She was always found pottering about the old garden and seemed ancient and changeless. It seemed to me that she was there even before the building was built. So when she decided to sell her house and leave the house for good in 2010 the jack-fruit tree in her garden was so overwhelmed that she yielded 23 jack-fruits in a single season and astonished all the onlookers at the bounty. She distributed all the fruits to people who had been kind to her and left as soon as she gave away her last jack-fruit. The tree itself died from its tip down the middle and few knew what ailed her. It was a strange sight as the lower branches were green though it stopped yielding any fruit. A few years later when we tried to pull down the top half it had to be sawed off as it was tougher than we imagined and the woodcutter threatened to climb down if we did not double his wage as he panted. This year many years later a single fruit was borne all knobbed and strange.  

The Lost Compound

The buildings around which i grew up are being redeveloped (except my own) eclipsing a precious small compound which bore me like my own mother. The developer vacates the buildings and encloses the compound in a wall, the building walls are now punctured gaping holes with balcony windows stripped of glass and grill and bring to my mind personal memories of laughter and joy, little sorrows and the patter of so many children's naked feet on flagstones around the compound, invoking deeply hidden memories stashed away like jewels in a granny's wooden box. This write up is just a recollection of some of those times. Read it if you wish and have the time to revisit the past. A lament if you may.

Coup D' Etat

This article follows up on my previous post “Yuganta” End of an Epoch” for which I received bouquets and brickbats in equal measure with wildly ranging opinions (surprisingly entirely in private) if not considered estimates of the reign of Dr ML Shrikant the former Dean of SP Jain. However I had with my own distance from events and probably prejudice a view of the happenings. Yet not entirely was I aware of the picture from the other side, one of whom I spoke to yesterday, confirming my fears that there seemed something much more than meets the eye. I also write this apologetically and with trepidation at what is an internal matter to the institution. Nor do i delight in being a harbinger of bad news, so shoot not the messenger. However I take shelter in defining the institution not merely as its brick and mortar or function but, like the Church the entire body of the faith wherever they maybe located and thus such privacy is misplaced.