The Toyota Way : by Jeffrey K. Liker.

The cover of the book carries a very simple statement, “Toyota is as much a state of mind as it is a car company”. In the foreword to the book Gary Canvis, a President in Toyota Kentucky has written, that the two pillars that support the Toyota Production System are “ Continuous Improvement” and “Respect for People”. Toyota Production System is an utopia that is every manufacturer’s dream, but it is not easy to emulate and implement. If one can understand  and adapt even a part of it, the savings will be enormous.

This book coins fourteen management principles from the world’s greatest manufacturer.

1.      Base your management decisions on a long term philosophy even at the expense of short term fiscal goals.

2.       Create Continuous Process Flow of Bringing Problems to Surface.

3.       Use Pull System to avoid over production.

4.       Leave out the Workload

5.       Build a culture of Stopping to Fix Problems to Get Quality Right the First Time.

6.       Standardize Tasks Are the First Foundation of Continuous Improvement.

7.       Use Visual Controls, so that No Problems are Hidden.

8.       Use on Reliable and Thoroughly Tested Technology.

9.       Grow leaders, who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy and teach it to others,

10.   Develop exceptional people and team who follow your company’s philosophy

11.   Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them to improve.

12.   Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation

13.   Make decisions slowly by consensus and evaluating all options, but once decided implement it very fast.

14.  Become a Learning Organization through Relentless Reflection and Continuous Small Improvements

The last two chapters of the book are most interesting. One discusses the use of Toyota Way to transform technical and service organizations. And the other is on how to build your own learning enterprise, borrowing from the Toyota way.

Toyota follows three categories of activities and monitor them :

Value Added : What is the actual transformation process core to the product or service that the customer is paying for.

Non-Value Added: What is a pure waste ? wait times, walk times, rework time and unused information.

Non-Value Added but required : inspection, control, documentation etc.

The purpose is always to minimize the second category .

The toughest and the basic challenge for companies that want to learn from Toyota is how to create an aligned organization of individuals who each have the DNA of the organization and continuously learning together to add value to the customer.

About changing culture the suggestions are :

1.       Start from the top – this may require executive leadership shakeup

2.       Involve from the bottom up.

3.       Use middle managers as change agents

4.       It takes time to develop people who really understand and live the philosophy.

5.       On a scale of difficulty, it is extremely difficult.

The ultimate object of Toyota Way is to become a lean and learning organization. That simple. !

The rest is in the book for studying yourself.

Digital Dharma by Steven Verdo

If you can read the following, you understand the phenomenal  power of human mind.

’Aoccdrrnieg to rscheerch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy ti deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. The olny iprmoatnt tihng si taht the frist and the lsat ltteer msut be ni the rghit pclae”

Digital Dharma, by Steven Verdo is all about this power. This is a user’s guide to expanding consciousness in the infosphere.

Amit Goswami, the author of  ‘God is not Dead’ says about this book “ Vedro shows parallels between the metaphors of communication, technology and those of spirituality, I am impressed’

He takes us through the seven levels of Chakra, a Hindu concept, are as follows :

1. Root – Security – Radio Telephony
2. Pelvis – Relationships – Basic Telephony
3. Solar Plexus – Personal Power – Broadcasting, Podcasting
4. Heart – Compassion - Television
5. Throat – Communication – Peer to Peer Network
6. Third eye – Deep Seeing, and – Digital Compression, HD TV, MP3, Virtual Reality, signal coding, spread spectrum etc.
7. Divine Connection.- Wi-Fi, Global Positioning, Satellites, Grid intelligence.

He goes on to say, “ In each interaction with the infospace, we have a choice, whether to embrace the big picture and take the full spectrum of data, or to follow the path of limited input and thus limited possibility.”

The book is accordingly divided into seven main chapters:

1. The Telegraph of Aliveness
2. Reach out and Touch Someone
3. Becoming a Clear Channel Broadcaster
4. The Broken Heart of Television
5. Living in Truth on the World Wide Web
6. Seeing Deeper and Seeing Wider
7. Teleconsciousness – The Unity of Self and the Cosmos.

To quote, many see the global internet as the beginning of a true ‘global brain’; a virtual community where people of different cultures find a worldwide common language and develop new mental abilities and spiritual energies. On the other hand there are critics, who claim that television, video games and more recently web surfing have actually cut us off from each other, installed false belief and taught us to worship material goods.

This book takes us through all these, and teaches us the Digital Dharma, where we can go for self actualization for ourselves as well as for everyone else, by correctly following the Digital Dharma.

There are some dramatization and over-speak also. Consider these lines from the book :

“ When you are ready, reverse the zoom, and slowly drop down to the cellular dimension.

Visualize your core program is being held in a CD-ROM, running a few feet above your crown. Ask the light to defragment this code; imagine negative belief-system subroutines being replaced with more positive operating instructions. Imagine a golden light rewriting the code of your life to its most positive outcome.”

The most interesting and fascinating chapter is of course, Teleconsciousness – The Unity of Self and the Cosmos.

To quote, in the seventh state of Digital Consciousness, we are not only I and you, we are also the network that is connecting them. .. We can choose to remain conscious of our role as  God’s nerve system, responsible to create the universe, each time we see the other as reflection of divine.

A plus point of the book is it explains the various technologies in the world of information technology, in very simple lucid English. True to the concept of information ages, a 162 page writing has 60 pages of notes and bibliography attached to it. A reader curious enough can move through these references and notes and try to find them on the net or otherwise and enhance his knowledge.

Gandhi - A Sublime Failure

“Gandhi-  A Sublime Failure” by S S Gill is an engaging, meticulously researched, very fair assessment of Gandhiji , his philosophy and political life. No human being can please every one and no one is infallible. A cover to cover reading of this brings out this truth to me. 

S S Gill, a career civil servant, was a Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and was also the CEO of Prasar Bharati. His other two books “The Dynasty – A Political Biography of the Leading Ruling Family of  Modern India” and “The Pathology of Corruption”  were also in the best sellers list. 

Independence of India was achieved because of a combination of factors, the non-violent movement of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the most prominent  among them, but not the only factor. 

When Gandhi finally returned to India, he was already a celebrity. He had no definite plan for a political career. He wanted to do social work, mainly in Gujarat, under his guru Gokhale. But when he attended the Lucknow Congress session in 1916, Rajkumar Shukla, a Bihari farmer took him away to Champaran, showed  him  the plight farmers, who were forced to  cultivate indigo underBritish Raj. That changed everything.

The results of a quarter century of  Gandhi’s political activity has been summarized by the author in one or two pages. Gandhiji’s first challenge to the authority of the British Raj was with Rowlatt Satyagraha. But he suspended it owing to eruption of violence. Gandhi himself called it as a “Himalayan miscalculation” and thought people needed to be trained more on non-violence. 

Soon thereafter he started his Khilafat-cum-Non-Co-operation movement. Its one of the objectives was to attain swaraj in twelve months, besides supporting the Khilafat, which did not happen. 

[Note The Ali brothers, who started the Khilafat movement criticized Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and severed their ties with them after he suspended all non-cooperation movement after the killing of 23 policemen at Chauri Chaurai in 1922. Although holding talks with the British and continuing their activities, the Khilafat struggle weakened as Muslims were divided between working for the Congress, the Khilafat cause and the Muslim League. The final blow came with the victory of Mustafa Kemal's forces, who overthrew the Ottoman rule in Turkey  to establish a pro-Western,  republic in independent Turkey. ] 

Next Gandhi started his epic Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930 to attain poorna swaraj. He suspenced this great movement after signing the Gandhi-Irwin pact, which did not even refer to the demand of swaraj, and none of his eleven points were conceded by the British.

[Note, in my view still something was achieved. Otherwise Winston Churchill would not have been so furious. He publicly expressed his disgust "at the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor"] 

The Quit India Movement, his last great political agitation, did not bear his stamp, as he was arrested, before it was started. It was crushed within two months, though underground activity continued much longer.

[But to view the movement as a complete failure would also be unfair. One of the achievements of the movement was to keep the Congress party united through all the trials and tribulations that followed.  ]

Gandhi as a Social Reformer has also been aptly discussed in the book.Gandhi believed that the fight for independence and the social reforms must go together. Gandhi’s concept of Ahimsha, which was by far the widest, compared to what is written or understood about the concept from India’s religious scripts, is discussed thoroughly.  His fight for removal of untouchability, his concept of Daridra Narayan,  the concepts of Khadi, and his efforts on Hindu-Muslim unity all find a mention in this book. All these concepts have been clearly discussed and contradiction, wherever relevant, in his ideas have also been fully brought out.

Gandhi was criticized most, not only by outsiders but also his own people and disciple,  for his skewed concept of celibacy, which has been dealt with in the fifth chapter of the book under the heading “Gandhi’s Brahmacharya”. 

In the author’s opinion, Gandhi’s aversion to sex, is traced to a trauma of his father’s death. His father was seriously injured when he was journeying to attend his marriage. Gandhi took great care of his father and nursed him with great care. One night after giving his father a massage, he retired to his bed room, woke up his wife and had sex with her. While still in the act, a servant knocked at the door. On opening the door, he was told by the servant that his father had died. He felt deeply ashamed and miserable. This feeling of guilt was further aggravated, ‘when the poor mite that was born to my wife scarcely breathed for more than three or four days’. Gandhi carried this guilt throughout his life.

But does this explain Gandhi’s many women accompaniment, even along-with his wife, may be for a higher goal or his use of women as walking sticks?

Gandhi’s controversial experiment with brahmacharya and with women in his Ashram, first attracted the attention of public with an article in the Bombay Chronicle.  You can read the full details in the book including quotes from Gandhi's own writing crossing the limits of decency.

Consider the following quoted from C Rajagopalachari “ he was one of the hungriest men I have ever known…. It was said he was born with a natural bent for brahmacharya, but actually he was highly sexed” 

The other most important chapter to read is titled ‘Gandhi and Partition’. This shows where and how the Muslims were alienated, how in spite of being a Nationalist leader, Jinnah ended up being the creator of Pakistan. In spite of Gandhi’s strong views against partition, how some of his actions and ideologies contributed to the division of India, directly or indirectly, including his joining of the Khilafat  movement.

The print is not good, pictures are scarce, but going by the bibliography attached to the book, I am sure it is one of the most well researched books on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

99 Thoughts on Ganesha

99 Thoughts on Ganesha written by Devdutt Pattnaik is a well researched book on Ganesha the elephant headed God loved by millions in India. In the 19^th Century the King of Mysore  ordered the court scholars to make a list of all Hindu gods that are worshipped in his kingdom. In the list finally compiled there is a mention of 32 types of Ganesha that were being worshipped. It starts with Bala Ganapathi, the child like Ganesha and ended with Sankatahara Ganapathi, the problem solving Ganapathi.

Perhaps Ganesha is the only deity, who has seen innumerable forms in the imagination of his devotees. There are similarly many  stories on why and how Ganesha lost his original head and was replaced by the head of an elephant.

A text written in 1751, identified 108 Upanishads in the Hindu Religion, of which there is a Ganesha Upanishad also.

I did not know, for example, when Ganesha’s trunk points to the left, towards the heart, it indicates the more worldly form of Ganesha, while his trunk when pointed to the right, indicates a more ascetic form of Him.

There is a contemporary 5 day celebration on Ganesha between 21^st to 25^th December in the USA every year, that was started by Himalayan Academy based at Hawai, competing with the Christmas.

In Vedic literature, Ganesha is identified as a scholarly man, but there is no mention of his elephant head. It must have been  a later addition. Some would say, it could have been inspired by the Greeks, when they invaded and conquered a part of India. The Greeks had conquered Egypt before they came to India and Egypt was known to have animal headed deities like Horus, Anubis etc.

In the Rig Veda, the word 'Ganapati' is found, which today means 'Ganesha' also.While Rig Veda was composed around 1500 BC, the title Ganesha appears in Puranic texts, which were written about 2000 years after that. ‘Vinayaka’ or ‘Siddhi Vinayaka’ is also synonymous with ‘Ganesha’ these days. But in Manab –Griha- Sutra written in 500 BC, it refers to a group of four trouble making deities. Even in Yagnavalka – Smriti, written in 300 AD there was  one trouble-making Vinayaka.

If you are not a Marathi, you would not perhaps know what is ‘Morya’ in ‘Ganapati Bappa Morya’ that they chant. Morya is because of Morya Gosavi, who was the foremost leader of Ganapati cult  and his tomb is still seen in Chinchwad, not far away from Moregaon, where he was born, after his parents prayed to the Ganesha there known as 'Moreshwar', for a child.

Ganesha is Pillaiyar in Tamilnadu. In Nepal Ganesha is worshipped by the Hindus and Buddhists. There is a tantric Ganesha named Heramba. Ganesha is found in Tibet as Maha-Rakta-Ganapati.. Some images of the Elephant-headed god is found even in Mangolia. He is known as Mahapienne in Burma. In Cambodia, Ganesha has only two arms. In Thailand also two forms of Ganesha are seen, Phra Phikanet and Phra  Phikanesawora.

The book has 221 pages, full of knowledge and information on Ganesha, and the above is only a small summary of the same. The book is written in simple language, nicely divided chapters, and is highly readable. There are many nice and  rare pictures of Ganesha from all across India and Asia. 

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I read a large number of books on management, which I would generally call ‘toy books’, giving you excitement while reading, but do not have anything new or analytic in nature, which can bring about a fundamental change in your life.  

But ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen R Covey is not that at all. You have to read this book again and again, refer to it in times of crisis and it must be a permanent feature in your almanac for all time to come. It has passed through decades of practical use by millions of people.

Unlike other books, which attempt to work on the manifestation side of your personality, this books compels you to think and work on the innermost core of your ‘ self’, which starts with your value system. And surprisingly the core values of all human being start with honesty, sincerity and all those qualities which enhances your own esteem to yourself and help you to make ‘the choice’. The understanding that the entire power of making the choice lies with you, even in the most externally threatening situation, is what powers you most. Once you understand this power you will not allow anyone, however powerful he may be, to influence you to make you week, and to make you deviate from your choice.

The elements of the ‘Character Ethic’ are primary traits while those of the ‘Personality Ethic’ are secondary. While secondary traits may help one to play the game to succeed in some specific circumstances, for long-term success both are necessary. To explain  the difference between primary and secondary traits, Covey offers an example. Suppose you are in Chicago and are using a map to find a particular destination in the city. You may have excellent secondary skills in map reading and navigation, but will never find your destination if you are using a map of Detroit. In this example, getting the right map is a necessary ‘primary element’, the ‘Character Ethic’  before your secondary skills i.e. the ‘Personality Ethic’ can be used effectively.

The Seven Habits move us through the following stages:

Dependence: the paradigm under which we are born, relying upon others to take care of us.

Independence: the paradigm under which we can make our own decisions and take care of ourselves.

Interdependence: the paradigm under which we cooperate to achieve something that cannot be achieved independently. 

Much of the management literature today tends to attribute values to independence, encouraging people to become so called “ liberated ” and do their own thing. The real fact  is that we are interdependent, and the “liberated independent” model is not optimal for use in an interdependent environment that requires both leaders and team players. To make the choice to become interdependent, one first must be independent, since dependent people do not have the ability to develop the character for interdependence. 

Therefore, the first three habits focus on self-mastery, that is, achieving the private victories required to move from dependence to independence. 

The first three habits are:

• (1):  Be Proactive
• (2):  Begin with the End in Mind
• (3):  Put First Things First

Next  three habits address interdependence:

• (4):  Think Win/Win
• (5):  Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
• (6):  Synergize

Finally, the seventh habit is one of renewal and continual improvement, that is, of building one's personal production capability. He has given a nice example of personal capacity (PC) and Production (P) with the story of golden eggs (P) produced by a lucky goose (PC). You have to maintain the goose properly to get one golden egg a day. If in your greed you kill the goose and try to grab all the golden eggs, you in fact loose all the golden eggs, thereafter. I shall particularly endorse for ‘Think Win / Win’ concept. Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases where a "win/win" deal cannot be achieved, accept the fact that agreeing to make "no deal" may be the best alternative.
 
 

Temples of Western India

'Temples of  Western India', by Ambujam Anantharaman is an excellent well researehed book on the temples of  the western provinces of India. This is her second book after 'Temples of South India'.The author has made research on each temple in detail and given a coverage of historical and mythological facts associated with each temple.

The book is divided into (a) Temples of Maharashtra, (b) Temples of Gujarat, (c) Temples of Rajasthan, (d) Temples of Goa and (e) Temples of Jain Shrines.

13 Temples of Maharashtra, 14 temples from Gujarath, 9 temples from Rajssthan, 1 temples of

Goa and three jain temples of western India is covered in this book.

If you are in a 'tirth jatra' the book comes very handy. You hardly need a guide. Many aspects, which you would have otherwise overlooked, would come alive, as you would have visited. 

The begins with Moreshwar, at Morgaon, established by Ganesh Yogindra, who is credited with realizing the Mudgal Purana, the textual foundation of the Ganesha cult in Maharasthra. She has studied the Eliphanta cave only 10 KMs away from Gateway of India into the sea. 

Then there is the Ellora rock temple, which took 150 years to complete. It is estimated that 3 million cubic feet of rock was removed to chisel the temple top down. And the Ajanta temple, in addition to the splendid rock architechture, holds the artistic brilliance of painting.

The three famale deities of the Hindus, Kali, Mahalaxmi and Sarawasti are found side by side in the famous Mahalaxmi temple of Mumbai.

Then there is this Sani (Saturn ) temple at Sani Shinganapur. The idol here stands in a quadrangle and there is no roof on the head of the idol. In this village, it is told there is no robbery or theft because of this deity.

The last temple covered in the book is Mangueshi temple of Goa. The deity was shifted to its present place from a location called Kuthali. It is built in seven stories. Near by is the Shanti Durga temple. Here goddess Durga has in her two hands, two serpants, they say these represent Shiva and Vishnu, whose fight was ended by Shanti Durga.

It also covers the Jain Shrines of Mount Abu, Kharataravasi Temple ( also has the idols of Judhisthir, Bhima and Arjuna, besides all Tirthankaras), and the Girnar Temples.

A very readable book for travellers and believers....

The Truth ( Satyam ) of Satyam

Satyam, meaning the Truth in sanskrit, has become the subject of study of several books, for the wrong reason. Two mostly read books are here. One is written by  Shri Kingshuk Nag and the other by a group of writers, Bhupesh Bhandari, Prashant Reddy, Vandana Gombar, Latha Jishnu, Shyamal Mazumdar and Anand Pandey. The title of the first book is "The Duble Life of Ramlinga Raju" and the second is " The Satyam Saga.". The first book is dedicated to “ the thousands of investors who lost thier fortunes in India's biggest financial fraud.” However, the biggest financial fraud has now been taken over by the 2G scam, if the CAG report is to be believed.

The Double Life of Ramlinga Raju

It has nice photographs, particularly a nice photo of Ramlinga Raju seated in his home surrounded by books, more like a professor or a lawyer, rather than an entrepreneur. Satyam was started with 20 employees with a small office in P&T colony, in Secuderabad on 6th June, 1987.The first big customer of Satyam was John Derry, a well known tractor company of Chicago, USA..In total Raju had floated 327 companies, at 12 addresses in Hyderabad, in the names of his near and distant relatives and employees. Satyam Infoway's ADR listing on 19th October, 1999 on the first day of trading was quoted at twice the issue price. In Raju's own admission he started falsifying books of accounts in 2001. His famous letter admitting the same was written in January 7, 2009 after a gap of nine years. 'Maytas', the reason for his ambition and fall is actually what you see, when you write the letters in 'Satyam' in reverse order. Quote from the book " Raju knew that he could neither match Narayana Murthy nor Ajim Premji, as Satyam procured much of its business by quoting cheaper rates. But Andhraites had made him into an icon and he had to live upto his image.There was no way, Satyam could show annual results which were vastly inferrior to those of Infosys or Satyam." In the initial public offering, of Satyam Computers Limited, the Rajus had only 18.78% of equity to themselves, lower by any standard. And this became further lower and lower as the years passed by. In order to trade in his own shares Rajus had floated 5 investment companies, Elem Investments, High Grace Investments, High Sound Investments, Fincity Investments and Veeyes Investments. Before selling his family shares in the market, to avoid market attention, he transferred those shares to some trusted employees of the company, who treated him like God. By depositing money into the Senior citizens' accounts of the family, he avoided tax queries, because no TDS is made from the interest of Senior Citizens. Satyam shares were pledged by him and family to a host of NBFCs in India, and the proceeds went to various Agri companies floated by him and not to Satyam. Clearly, he was loosing interest in the Infotech business, in which he had very little promoter's equity, and was getting interested in infra business, where the return were manifold. Funds from Satyam were used by him to buy 287 properties in major cities of India, none in the name of the company. Of the 760 crores money raised by ADS, only 397 crores, were brought back to India, and the rest were transferred to some unknown accounts, via Bahrain, which the government is still trying to trace. How was he as a businessman? To quote an acquaintance from the book " He was an epitome of good behaviour, he spoke softly and criticised nobody. We used to wonder, how a person so high in life, can be so humble?" He was very hardworking, A workaholic. 

Even after all the episodes, Satyam definitely still had enterprise value left in terms of its business pipeline and human resources, so that it was sold to Tech Mahindra at 1756 crore rupees, with overall cost of acquisition, including public offers going to as high as rupees 2889 crores.

Now I should quote from the foreward of the second book. The foreward is written by Mr. Kiran Karnik to highlight some positive side of the developments. " One of the special features of the Satyam story has been the coming together of the government, its various agencies and regulators, the corporate sector and individual professionals. Not only was there co-operation and coherence, but also a great deal of synergy was created." Satyam as a company was at least saved. Besides, the ghost employees, a large number of real employees, had to leave the bench, but those who could stay back, have been doing what Satyam was designed to do, providing high quality IT services, and still making India proud in the field of IT, in its new avatar as Mahindra Satyam.

The Satyam Saga

This book is  written in a different style and on a broader canvass. In this book various chapters are written by various authors. If Kingshuk’s book is from the Times of India clan, “The Satyam Saga’ is from the stable of Business Standard. A competition indeed...

From Bhupesh’s writing you get a clear picture of the IT business in India, in just a few lines. “Information Technology is not an easy business, certainly not in India, where most companies offer people-intensive services and very few have their own patented software products. In a way it is like running a commodities business”.

The all pervading nature of what Ramlinga Raju did comes out of the following lines.

“Was it as simple as that? Most of the Satyam units are located in software technology parks in order to avail of tax benefits. Each order there is certified by the Software Technology Park of India, a government body, so as to keep track of business done in the park. Then he got past the banks where the money was shown as deposited and then the government, which was paid income tax……”.

He talks of a survey done by certain experts and points out to the following observations :

“About half of the Indian private firms, of the 370 surveyed report that they regularly evaluate the CEO. One wonders, however, how rigorous these evaluations are, given that zero firms reported that the Board had replaced the CEO. We also asked about the CEO’s succession plan, only 30% had any..”

The book also chronicles various financial scams of independent India starting with Ramkrishna Dalmia ( a dig at TOI, I suppose ). It also covers Haridas Mundra, Dharma Teja, Harsad Mehta, and Ketan Parekh.

The book has also photos of official documents furnished by Satyam to the Auditors.

I am not repeating the other parts of the stories, which you shall find in Kingshuk Nag's book also.

Even after reading cover to cover both the books, one may still wonder, why people with great personality, big image and having philanthrpic values, get into this kind of mud, with full knowledge that we are a democratic country with open society, where no secret can be held on to for the whole life. Not only that, here the goverment servants have a very strong constitutional immunity, and it takes only one honest officer to blemish your entire business or political career, in terms of revealing the truth. 

The Monk As Man

The Monk As Man (The Unknown Life of Swami Vivekananda) is written by Sankar, alias Mani Sankar Mukherjee, who is the most read novelist of recent times in Bengal. He has written this book after a good deal of secondary research on the life of Swami Vivekananda. Away from the religious and institutional life  of a monk, Vivekananda had quite a painful personal life. This book mainly deals with that. After the death of his father Vivekananda's family got into a trap of litigation and ultimately poverty, from which his mother could never really come out in the true sense. Even being a monk, he had maintained a  very intimate family-like relationship with his mother, and always tried to help her come out of the trap of litigation. His benefactor Maharaja Ajit Singh of Khetri had sent monthly stipend  for a long time for the benefit of his mother and the family. Like any other family man Swamaji  had taken her mother to visit religious places, and appeared at witness in his mother's lawsuits. Sometimes, it appears that many of the fellow saints and disciples also worked tirelessly for the peace of mind of his mother. The results and mark sheet of Vivekananda is also available in the book. The pains of living in a joint family structure in the then Bengal also comes out vividly in the book. Vivekananda regarded his mother as the source of his energy and knowledge, and did so publicly in his speeches. Roles of Sister Nivedita, Sara Bull and Josephine McLeod in his life is also briefly touched upon in this book. Vivekananda were the 6th of the 10 issues that his parents had together. Six of them died before Vivekananda  and some even during infancy, and only three of them outlived him, of which one was his elder sister and two were his younger brother.  The books brings out the painful side of the saint's life in the begin, when some days they had to live without any food at all. He overcame everything with his strong will power, which he inherited from his mother. The book also deals with the addictions of Swamiji, which was mainly tea. He even lists all the ailments that Swamiji had to  suffer sequentially, migraines, tonsillitis, asthma, liver disease, typhoid, malaria, gall stones, albuminuria, bloodshot in the right eye, blood sugar, to name a few. This also displays the strength of his mind and his sense of purpose. An interesting part of the book is about Swamiji as a cook, which brings out the fullness of the life in him. Before his death one day Swamiji invited sister Nivedita, and cooked food for her. There is a very a painful chapter with vivid description on the day on which Vivekananda died. This is a very readable book,  showing the great saint in a new light. 

The Great Indian Novel

I have enjoyed every page of "The Great Indian Novel" written by Shashi Tharoor. There are two Indian writers, whose English I admire very much; one is Shashi Tharoor and the other Arundhuti Roy. Apart from the language, I admire his sense of humour and wisdom sprinkled almost everywhere in the book. It is really a Novel of epic proportion, although to some extent a melodrama based on The Mahabharata. It is entertaining and amusing. He has traversed many centuries at his sweet will at the stroke of a pen, in a free flowing imagination. 

Ganapathi or Ganesha is Ganapathi here, but Bhisma is Gangaji, who has many similarities with Gandhiji. "Yes he told us everything, Gangaji, from those gaps in his early years, that the British had been so worried about, to the celibate experiments of his later life, when he got all those young women to take off their clothes, and lie besides him, to test the strength of his adherence to that terrible vow. He told us everything, Ganapathi, yet how little do we remember, how little we understand, how little we care." I am only quoting from his book.

This is what Pandu Said to Kunti in Shashi's Novel: “In Kerala the men of Nair community only learn that their wives are free to receive them by seeing if another man's slippers are not outside her doors." Pandu goes on saying "Our present system of morality is not really Hindu at all; it is a legacy both of the Muslim invasion, and the superimposition of a Victorian prudery on a people already puritanized by purdah."  On a plain reading this is all jumbled up, because Mahabharata was written even before the other two religions came into existence. But you seldom notice this. In a moment you are taken many thousand years away from past to present and vice versa.. Such is his great writing skill, still vibrating some historically relevant facts.

This is when Dhritarashtra is described as the head of the Kurava Party, drafting its press releases and official communication, formulating its position on the foreign policies, and establishing himself as the party's most articulate and attractive spokesman. ( Read Jawaharlal Nehru )

He takes Gangaji to the strike against the Jute Mill owners at Budge Budge, where the Jute Mills were compelled to give a 35% rise in wages, compared to nothing, and later on 20% proposed by them. This was all done because of a fasting unto death stand taken by Gangaji.  ‘Fasting is my business' was uttered by Gangaji, which can be interpreted by many many ways. But this 35% was for a day, reduced to 20% next day, and finally to  27.5% as fixed by the government arbitrators.

The anti salt tax movement is described here as anti-mango tax movement, but with all the ingredients of the same, in tact in a curious way. To quote " But Gangaji's action was the signal for a defiance of the Mango Act. Kaurava Party protestors, across the country took to emulating their leaders, wave after wave of Khadi clad satyagrahis plucked and planted the contraband fruit, openly bought and sold it, an non-violently prevented the government's mango inspectors from continuing with their work" .

Dhrrtarashtra , the de-facto head and poster boy of the Kaurava Party does  not have any son Duryodhan here, but a daughter Priya Duryodhani. And he goes on to write " Dhrrtarashtra  addressed all his letters from prison to Priya Duryodhani well before she was old enough to understand any of them, rather than to the long suffering wife, who had offended by delivering her."

It was definitely not Duswala, the real and only daughter of  Gandhari, but like Jawaharlal Nehru, writing to Indira Gandhi. from the prison. And what about the Kaurava party, deliberately named so perhaps, probably meaning what it meant both in letter and spirit. After all Kaurava Party and the Congress Party, ruled most of the time Delhi and Hastinapur (very close to Delhi).

And then there is Jayaprakash Drona, ( or Jayaprakash Narayan perhaps ) coined after the name of the great teacher, which both the Kauravas and Pandavavs had.

In this book he meets the Pandavas thus. "One day the Pandavas, were playing their favorite sports of cricket, of course, Ganapathi, that most Indians of organized past times, with its bewilderingly complex rules, that are reduced in practice to utter simplicity, its underlying assumptions of social order,... when a mighty swipe by Bhim sent the ball high over the others' heads, soaring out of the ground, and landing with a loud splash in disused well. " And Jayaprakash Drona, in stead of picking up the ball (originally a Musal), by attaching one arrow behind another , picked up the ball with a rope, creating a small loop at one end. This gives Drona the chance of explaining the importance of Sunya, the zero, which was an Indian invention, this was never there is Mahabharata.

And there are many a poems in this book, one I quote here, imposed  on Pandu, meaning probably Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose : " I had such hopes, my dearest one / Of rising to the fore; With the Swastika, and the rising sun / I thought I wound win the war".  And what about Gangaji, when the news of death of Pandu came by.  "The Mahaguru was moved enough to sit in silence and spin for hours, talking to nobody, immersed in reflection".

In the 'Jatu Griha' phase, when there was a conspiracy to burn the pancha pandava alive, Vidur uncle  comes in a government jeep, marked CBI and cautions them about impending danger. We see Jayprakash Drona giving socialistic speech in this phase. " We hear a great deal of socialist talk from New Delhi. The government tells us it is reserving the commanding heights of the economy for the people, for the public sector. Iron and Steel to build the big ships, in which none of us will ever sail, Power to light the home of the rich who have electricity.... But what about land, the earth, the soil, which each of you and the four - fifth of your countrymen till to feed yourselves?"

The Chinese invasion is invasion by Chakars. They tossed our ill-fed, ill-clad ill-shod jawans aside and permanently  erased the MacDonald's line ( Read McMahan Line). Achieving their objectives in a few days, capturing enough territory to create an all-weather line to connect Tibia ( read Tibet) with Drowniang, they declared cease fire unilaterally.

Shishu Pal ( read Lal Bahadur Sashtri ) was a good Prime Minister. And like everyone else Karnistanis ( read Pakistanis ) had underestimated him and attacked Hastinapur. Our Army had learnt from the Chakra ( read Chinese ) humiliation, and hit back so hard that our troops were within just 7 KM of Karnistan's most populous city, when another cease fire intervened. Shishu Pal then sat at the conference table and meticulously gave back everything that our boys had own in the battle-field. "Peace demands compromise" he murmured and  ' tossed  and turned his way into an eternal sleep'.

Here are a few more lines mimicking  Shree Bhagabat Gita " I can not attack them for doing their duty / Duryodhani is Dhritarashtra' daughter. / She may not be a thing of beauty / But she is PM, she's earned her hauteur./ I admit her rule was not always just -  / She betrayed some of us, abused our trust - / But still she is our nation's leader: / India's masses have shown they need her."

Not surprising that Financial Times has said about this book  " A real tour de force only an Indian could write."

Liking Vs. Loving

Recently I found  a speech by Jonathan Franzen delivered at  Kenyon College. Franzen won the 2001 National Book Award for his novel “The Corrections”  and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the same novel. He is also the author of the novels Freedom (2010), Strong Motion (1992), and The Twenty-Seventh City (1988). His nonfiction includes the books The Discomfort Zone (2006) and How to Be Alone (2002), along with contributions to The New Yorker magazine.

I liked this speech so much that I read it again and again.  NY Times published it with the title “ Technology Provides an Alternative to Love.”  But the original title is  “ Liking is for Cowards, Go for what Hurts”.

The speech is very insightful and has gems embedded in almost every line.

He says “ Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to  what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object  and is consigned to a drawer.”

“ To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of  techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be,effectively, a mere extension of the self.”

He says from mobile phone to facebook, everything is evolving through this path. 

This he is describing as techno-consumerism.

Coming to facebook he says

“We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.”

Realize we do not pay the price of friendship for being in the private hall (which is again public ) of fame of so many persons simultaneously. Nor have they paid as such. This is simply a make believe life. We are seeking self flattering in our own mirror.

Finally consider the following coming from Franzen :

“ My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about ‘getting down in the pit and loving somebody.’ She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships.

Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person.

Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly  you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie.

But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every  particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno- consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.

And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific.

Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being.

Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

 The big risk here, of course, is rejection.

We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an  infinitely big pool of potential likers.

But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have  it rejected, can be catastrophically painful.

The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world  of liking” .

So the choice is yours. 

The Trouble with Physics

‘The Trouble with Physics’ by Lee Smolin is a very interesting book. Assuming I am a layman, not an expert in mathematics, and I cannot differentiate between alpha, beta, gamma and theta, and I detest pages full of formula and equations, then this book is for me. I can understand the basics of modern theoretical physics by reading this book.

It starts with the five great problems of theoretical physics, problem of quantum gravity, problem in the foundation of quantum mechanics, problem of unification of the particles and forces, problem to explain how the value of free constants in the standard model of particle physics are chosen in nature and the problem of explaining dark matter and dark energy.

He goes on to explain what he calls “The Beauty Myth”, the desire to explain various forces and phenomenon in the nature and universe through one common theory. It came in baby steps, but each attempt at unification gave rise to bigger and bigger problems for further unification of theories. The author takes us to unified-field theory, general theory of relativity and attempts to unification of gravitational and electromagnetic force. Then he briefly visits Quantum Theory and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). We know briefly of all the discoveries made using particle accelerators. Then we know about the gauge principle, which came into being after a failed attempt to unify gravity and electro-magnetism.  The gauge principle later on led to the model of electroweak force.

Further down this brings us to supersymmetry.  Broadly this is a process in which you can replace one of the fermions ( electron, proton, neutrinos etc.) by a boson ( photon, W and Z particles etc.). Most important discovery of supersymetry is connected with the string theory.  It promised what no other theory had before, a quantum theory of gravity, at the same time a genuine unification of forces and matter. At one stroke it tried to solve at least three of the five problems of theoretical physics mentioned earlier,

The string theorists soon realized that there was now a complicated six-dimensional space and each give rise to a different version of the theory. Also in the revolution of string theories observations played no role, which is not the signature of any great discovery. String theory did not predict dark energy and even the value detected was hard for the string theory to accommodate.

The book also looks at “Physics After String Theory”. One suggestion is we have to find a way to unfreeze time, to represent time without turning it into space.  But in the end we are still searching for conclusive answers to the five problems first mentioned. Has a generation of physicists from 1970 onwards wasted all the time without making any real progress? It is for you to read, understand and come to your own conclusion.

Women and Law in Colonial India

Women and Law in Colonial India is a social history, written by Janaki Nair. This covers the entire period of British rule, till 1947. This shows how during the colonial rule there was more deprivation  for women, within the framework of deprivation faced by Indian population. At the suggestion of Warren Hastings, by whose orders it had been compiled, Halhed  translated the Hindu legal code from a Persian version of the original Sanskrit. And she quotes “ A man, both day and night, must keep his wife in so much subjection that she by no means be mistress of her own action if the wife have her own free will, not withstanding she be sprung from a superior caste.” Though the British administration, in their own reason to govern India, had developed legal structure and judicial system in the whole of India, they were very much aware of the caste systems and hold of the religious masters and priests on the life of the common men in India, and they gave into many concessions, which had a bearing on the women. It took 40 years for the British to outlaw the Sati Pratha ( widow immolation on husband’s death ) from the start of recording it. Between 1815 to 1824, in 10 years 6632 cases were reported, in Bengal, Madras and Bombay (Mumbai), of which 90% occurred in Bengal, even when anti-Sati law was already enacted. The debate over Sati, bought to the foreground the deplorable position of widows in the upper castes particularly, to whom death seemed to be a preferable choice. Quote “ In part, the terrible conditions to which Indian patriarchy condemned the widow betrayed  deep-seated fear of voracious female sexual appetites, unrestrained by marriage.” The prohibition against the remarriage of widows was therefore only observed against upper caste Hindus. Marriage of minor underage girls were very common in India and even with British intervention the law that was passed was laughable. Husbands who consummated marriage with Girls under the age of 8 ( and later changed to under the age of 10 in 1850) were only punishable. Only in 1891 it was raised to 12.  The society was then guided by the famous principle of Manu “ her father protects her in childhood, the husband in youth, and her son protects her in old age, a woman does not deserve independence.” In 1925, 14 was fixed as the age of consent in extra-marital cases and 13 for marital cases. As per record female infanticide was most among certain tribes in northern and western India.  An 1841 report shows that in entire Kathihar in the Jhareja tribe there were 5760 boys against 1370 girls. Only in 1870, a law was passed introduced by Johon Strachey, prohibiting infanticide in North West Province, Punjab and Oudh. But the penal provision of the law was a paltry, fine of Rs 1000/-, six months imprisonment or both. With the advent of science, and availability of means to know the gender much before the birth, the issue is continuing even today, again in much larger scale in North and West India. The book also throws light on various aspects of labor laws, which gave no inadequate support to women. The two council acts, 1892 and 1909 made no mention of female franchise, as two thresholds, property and literary qualification, worked effectively well to keep the women out of the electoral rolls. Madras was the first in 1920 followed by Bombay in 1921 to have granted specifically the women the right to vote, followed over years by other provinces. There was no universal adult suffrage in India, even in the Government of India Act, 1935. Women as well as men got this right only after independence. Coming to situation after independence from the British rule, the book points out the inherent and subtle inconsistency between  Article 15 and Article 25(1) of the Indian constitution. Article 15 ensures , among other things, indiscrimination based on gender. But article 25 gives freedom to freely profess practice and propagate religion. And the discrimination against women are perpetrated in the name of religion. The book is an interesting reading from cover to cover.  

Blink

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is about ‘The Power of Thinking without Thinking’. A part of our brain leaps to fast conclusion, based on observations of a few seconds. Very often, but not always,  such decisions turn out to be right, which is based on a very small and instantaneous sample. This is called the adaptive unconscious   and this is quite a new field in psychology.  And this is not the unconscious as described by Sigmund Freud, which is a dark place filled with desire fantasies and past memories, which are too disturbing for us to think consciously. Adaptive unconscious, which the writer is sometimes naming as ‘thin slicing’ is a very busy subject of research in modern psychology. We make connections much more quickly between pair of ideas that are already related in our minds, than we do between pair of ideas that are unfamiliar to us. On this the psychologists have developed the idea of Implicit Association Test ( IAT). This is not only a measure of attitude but also a powerful predictor on how we shall react in a certain spontaneous environment.

In practice, this snap judgment, can be very helpful, if right, for example,  to a car salesman, if he can measure up a customer and his needs, in the first thirty seconds of his entry into the show room. And this makes the difference between a good salesman and a great salesman.

Consider the well known jargon ‘less is more.’, which basically says you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of  a complex phenomenon. The writer has shown this to happen from experience.

The writer has also partially answered the question, when to blink ( i.e. when to trust our instincts ) and when to thinks ( i.e. do a detailed analysis to come to a conclusion). This book is simply outstanding, with lot of examples, stories and riddle thrown in.

Connect the Dots

"Connect the Dots" by Rashmi Bansal is a fascinating read, having biography and business details of 20 entrepreneurs, who had no formal training in business. They are not MBAs and mostly first time entrepreneurs.

Persons covered include Prem Ganapathy ( Dosa Plaza), Ganesh Ram (Veta), Sunita Ramnathkar ( Fem Care Pharma), Hanmant Gaikwad ( Bharat Vikas Group), R Sriram ( Crossword ), Chetan Maini ( Reva Electric Car Company) etc. Very interesting are Saurabh Vyas and Gaurav Rathore, who run PoliticalEdge, advising politicians and doing research for them. Another inspiring profile is that of Kalyan Varma, a successful professional Wildlife Photographer who left a very rewarding career at Yahoo to persue his dreams.

 The book also serves as an interesting guide on how to scale up business. Absence of right scaling of start up businesses are very often the cause of their early demise.

The core theme is business is not a rocket science, any one can be successful in it with proper observation, experimentation and application of mind.