Brave For Free

I am sure all of you must have experienced this. A team of smart driven people get together in a room, all focused on a project and eager to progress. Two months of meetings later, the project is still drifting along, not quite getting to closure. Have you wondered why this happens? Why seemingly smart people with the best of intentions slip on the banana peel just as they are about to raise the curtain? My theory is that one (or god help us, more) of the following syndromes is in play. 1.  The HYTO or "Have you thought of..." syndrome. This is when, after a decision to act has been finalised, someone pipes up with "but have you thought about ". This of course leads to discussion about whether that has really been thought about, often causing action to be deferred till the thinking about is done. Of course, the next meeting to close has another "have you thought of..." moment and the cycle continues. With each round, the HYTO concerns get increasingly mo...

Two weeks ago, in a journey that brought back memories of hunting down Casio organizers, I trudged the corridoors of Funan Digital Mall in Singapore till I got my hands on an iPhone 6. Here's my impression of it two weeks later. Right off the bat, I must say I love it. Yes, I'm an Apple fanboy who has had an iPhone for many years, (though I've used an Android on and off and before that lived on a Blackberry). I also have a couple of iPads and iPods, though never a Mac. That bias aside, however, the iPhone 6 is a seriously nice phone - lovely build quality, beautiful screen, wonderful to hold in your hand, blazngly fast and as loaded as you can want. Mine is a 128GB, though I'm still wondering what I to do with the 80GB still left after I put in every song and photo I had. As phone goes there is little to quibble about with what it has. First, the size. Yes, Jobs was right in that it is a bit of a stretch - a few things require finger gymnastics. However, he was wrong t...

Walls between work and life have broken down. Companies have not noticed. Work and leisure used to be quite distinct once upon a time (and that wasn't so long ago either). Work was carried out at designated hours in the workplace, with tools that the employer provided; home was spouses, kids and paid vacations. Even where you carried work home, it usually meant a temporary exile to the kitchen table. Once, only artists and rockstars lived without such boundaries. This, of course, is long gone. Laptops and telecommuting started the blurring process a couple of decades ago, but things really went south with the advent of  the smartphone. Uniforms gave way to business formals, yielded to business casuals before finally jumping off the roof entirely when the flip-flopped dotcommers took over. Work texts were shoved between bites of dinner, treadmills served as venues for conference calls, angry birds flirted with corporate emails and social networking finally nailed all those coffins f...

Sitting within view of a three hundred year old pleasure palace, I was part of a lively discussion yesterday on what motivated us into coming back to India. I moved to the USA relatively late, having traveled back and forth for something like a decade before I decided to change residences in 2003, just after 9/11. When I finally did move to New York, I was already an experienced hand at American basic like driving a car and ordering at McDonalds. Most of my friends, on the other hand, had been dunked in cold straight out of college. Returning, for me, was thus somewhat different - I had not grown the same roots that people who had lived there a decade or more had. It was still a very large move nevertheless, not quite like moving back to Mumbai after a few years in Bangalore. America wasn't just another location change, it was the adoption of a different way of life that was very attractive in many ways. Coming back was therefore an event of some consequence, even if you had just l...

Before a death diverted my thoughts, I was planning to write about movements and leaders. I did not want to comment further on either side of the Lokpal debate, but it did get me thinking about how the drive had started in the first place, and why a man without any particular credentials can make us part of his crusade About movements, leadership and what forms them. A couple of weeks ago I came across two TED videos that seemed particularly relevant. In the first, Derek Sivers talks about how movements get started The Anna story brought this to mind. A relatively ordinary, obscure man from well outside the centre of events; he probably started by dancing to his own tune, just on his own. He probably did not start with thoughts of followers or movements. Somewhere down the line, he got his first follower – maybe Arvind Kejriwal - and eventually a movement formed. I found this rather personally interesting too. Of course, I have no intention of starting any movement that leads to fastin...

While the corruption movement rages on, a personal note of sadness intruded yesterday. At breakfast, my mother casually mentioned to me an accident where a coconut tree had fallen on someone, killing him; we dwelled briefly on the freak, tragic nature of it – trees don't usually fall on people in Mumbai, coconut trees even less so – but I didn't think very much of it then. The next morning, a large obituary notice abruptly made the matter more personal. The person in question was Ved Prakash Arya . I have known Ved, on and off, from my early IBM days; he was a customer then. We met again a decade later; him as COO of Pantaloon Retail (Future Group was still in the future) and me as a newly minted CEO of subsidiary company Futurebazaar. I can safely say that I would not have made it through my first year without help, and a key person providing the steadying hand was Ved. He was effectively my boss, but more than formal interaction Ved's off-the-cuff feedback and pointers...

I recently read Annie Zaidi's book about dacoits, dead children and the fear of being groped, and it set me thinking about how easy it is to be brave when nothing is threatening you. I know I present it as an earthshaking revelation that the universe needed me and only me to discover, but it is the start of a blog and I can be forgiven for a small amount of self-importance. After all, blogs are essentially exercises in the unshaken belief that people want to read what you write. Back to the bravery bits. My daily commute to office, strewn with garbage, potholes, oddly designed roads and casual, insouciant encroachment reminds me repeatedly that in India a lot of things need work, but I also realize I live in a world that is not threatened in any way. A complex web of interactions that we never think about keep our lives free of many fears and constraints, things that I and the people around me take for granted. The freedom to speak, the freedom from arbitrary search and seizure,...