Egypt Elections & After

So the results of the 1st round of the Egypt Presidential elections are out.  The 2 final contestants for the final run-off round are Ahmad Shafiq and Mohamed Morsy.  Many Egyptians perceive Shafik as linked to the old regime - he has been campaigning on the platform of order and stability. The other candidate Morsi - a Muslim Brotherhood candidate - is expected by many secular minded Egyptians to bring about a religious flavour to the government - thereby possibly putting at risk the secular nature of Egyptian society.

Hence for that reason I could not see too much of happiness on display on Cairo streets - Egyptians will now be forced to choose between the 2 extremes, a situation that could only favour Morsi who has a strong party machine working for him.

For a person coming from a chaotic democracy like India, this still seems like a good situation to be in.  Unlike in India, the Egypt Presidential system will not bring about the kind of paralysis and logjam that characterises Indian democracy.  I am sure whoever wins the elections will follow pragmatic policies and work towards strengthening law and order, and putting Egypt economy back into the growth path.

Fingering Techniques for playing Harmonium

Have uploaded a video on Youtube which is my perspective on how to practise the right fingering technique for playing the harmonium.

This is purely an Amateur's perspective on how to add beauty to the playing of the harmonium by using the correct fingering technique. Beauty can be added by using adjacent keys/tones that are not part of the original Raag - but the fingering has to be light and subtle, otherwise it risks ruining the Raag. 

Needless to say it requires lots of practice before it can be used in front of an audience

Palitana Reeds for my Harmonium

I bought my harmonium a few years ago off-the-shelf  from a music store in Bangalore. I was in a hurry, and selected my harmonium in a matter of 10 minutes.  All I checked was whether the harmonium had a good finish, the wood looked good, the sound came out loud and clear, and the keys worked smoothly.

Later I realised that I had not checked the critical component of a harmonium - the brass reeds.  The reeds in my harmonium were "Punjabi" reeds - and because they were of inferior quality, they started going off-tune quickly, and therefore required frequent tuning.  Tuning harmonium reeds is a specialised skill, and done best by a skilled artisan using his ears as the guide (rather than any instrument) - so this became a problem to me as I had to lug my harmonium to India every time any of the reeds went off-tune.

I later found that the best quality reeds were made in Germany - but that German reeds are no longer available since a few decades as harmoniums have gone out of fashion in the West.  To understand how German reeds sound like, and why German reeds are the best, read these posts Why every Harmonium sounds different - C Sharp Tuning and Custom-Made Triple Reed Harmonium.

Among Indian makes, the reeds made in Palitana - a small town in Gujarat - were supposed to be the best.  I wanted to replace the reeds with Palitana reeds - but the problem is that Palitana reeds are in limited supply, and there is a long waiting list. After a great deal of follow-ups (thanks to my dear wife) the reeds were finally procured from the MohanLal company and installed into my harmonium at the Bombay Harmonium Works, Mangalore.

The results are fantastic - the sound is much more mellow and beautiful, and it is a real pleasure playing it and listening to the sound.  The sound will become even better over time as the new reeds gradually "open up" and lose their stiffness with the frequent playing of the instrument.  And because the reeds are made of better quality material, hopefully the reeds will require less frequent tuning.

To hear how my harmonium sounds like now, watch this
.

I am sure this harmonium now will serve me in good stead for a long time to come

The Challenging 40's

One of the most difficult life-stages is when a person gets into his 40s. Even if that person has maintained himself well, the body starts to creak reminding him that he is a mortal.

On the career front he is typically at the top-most layer that he will ever rise up to - any further rise in the organisational hierarchy will be marginal and merely designation adjustments or role swaps, rather than substantive responsibility changes.

He also realises that he has put behind him more years in his career than he will in the future.

And around him he might also see quite a few fallen heroes within the organisation - heroes he may have worshipped and role-modelled a decade ago, but who suddenly seem to have stagnated and gone to pieces.  These ex-heroes would typically be in their late 40s or 50s - these would have been the high-fliers a few years ago, guys with a lot of promise and possible CEO material - but who mysteriously seem to have lost their way.

And our man will start wondering what went wrong with these ex-heroes, and will dread whether a similar fate will befell him too some day.

In today's fast-track growth era it is very easy for a bright ambitious person to learn all that is there to learn in his industry by the time he is in his 30s.  He then starts picking up various fine-tuning soft-skills - but these skills are acquired gradually.  No measurable step changes - which is pretty disconcerting for our ambitious go-getter.  Since his whole life revolves around this particular industry or skill area he starts feeling a distinct sense of what the French very elegantly call ennui - the result is he loses his sense of purpose.  At this stage that person either takes premature retirement, becomes an entrepreneur and gets into something totally new.  Or he starts going to pieces by passively trying to hold on to his job, and passing his time = fallen hero.

Which is why it is critical that every individual entering this life phase to parallely takes up a "second" passion or career which is totally unrelated to what he does in office.  This could be learning to paint, helping out an NGO over weekends, teaching, learning golf or to play a musical instrument - anything that has a bigger purpose and will challenge the individual to once again exercise his learning skills in a totally new arena.  Most of the best brains in any sphere continued to be productive and useful in their main career, because they consciously developed a 2nd passion which added the required zest and more enduring purpose to their life.

Luck

Very long weekend.  Lots of time to read.  And mull over life.

Nassim Taleb in his book "Fooled By Randomness" talks about the human tendency to credit our own talent and hard-work for our Success, and the tendency to blame the external environment (school/unfairness/ parents/bosses etc) for our Failures. He believes the role of luck is not given due importance by most of us - in fact he goes on to prove that Luck (rather than mere talent) is one of the critical ingredients that shapes a person's destiny - the right turning taken purely by chance in a small fork in the road can be a turning point in one's life.

Luck is never given its due. My 9th standard English teacher (Mrs. Rukmani who alas is no more) used to dwell on it at length while discussing the famous "Elegy written in a country churchyard" written by the poet Thomas Gray where he says:

Full many a gem of the purest ray serene
the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
and waste its sweetness on the desert air.

That poem had a marked impact on me - which is why decades later I can still recollect every word of that poem.

I think we should be all thankful to God for whatever luck he has put in our paths in order to make us the people we are today - whether it be in our families, relationships and careers.  I for one fully acknowledge the role Luck has played in my life, and am really grateful for it.  And for the lots of very talented individuals who believe that they have not had the luck breaks yet : I hope and pray that very soon they will get the lucky breaks they deserve. 

The Ingredients For Career Success

Currently I am reading some HBR articles on Emotional Intelligence and Value systems.  Both these are very current - and relevant -  topics in a world where leaders are increasingly failing due an absence particularly of the latter (Values).

However, the over-riding importance given to Emotional Intelligence and Values in current Management thinking cannot reduce the importance of the 3 BASIC ingredients for career success:

1. Luck - the role played by Luck can never be under-estimated.  Everybody has their share of good and bad luck which tends to impact their career.It could be anything from joining the right organisation at the right time, finding a good mentor early in one's career, and having the luck to be associated with high profile & successful projects.

2. Brilliance - the innate intelligence, also called Talent.  Brilliance tends to be especially important at the beginning of the career in terms of getting noticed, and being fast-tracked by the organisation.

3. Discipline - this is basically a mix of resilience, persistence, ability to face both victory and defeat with equanimity, and systematic application of past learnings.  This of course requires substantial emotional intelligence.

Luck is God given - it is not within the control of the individual.

Brilliance (Talent) is also God given and partly influenced by the environment in which one grew up in one's childhood.  It can be developed to a certain extent over time by  conscious training. But Brilliance is also subject to the environment - a brilliant person in one office environment can turn out to be quite ordinary when he is surrounded by other brilliant individuals.

Luck and Brilliance can never by itself help build a successful, long-sustaining career.  It can take a person up to a certain level, but whether he/she will remain there for long is not certain.

Of the three, Discipline is the only aspect that is within the control of the individual, and the only ingredient that can help sustain an individual over the long term. If you look at all the successful CEOs whether Steve Jobs or Narayana Murthy, it was Discipline which enabled them to remain at the top for a long, long time.  

Fathers & Sons

A posting by my brother on Facebook of some old snaps of my father re-triggered a wave of nostalgia and introspection.

The snaps were of my dad as a young father.  The snaps captured him well.  He had what is called style - his dress style would put James Bond (whose keen fan he was) to shame. And everything about him spelt under-stated elegance.

There is much to admire in my father - his courage, the way he organised his career and life, his focus, his self-confidence, his razor sharp sense of humour, and the young age at which he achieved success .....

I still remember the bed-time stories he used to narrate, and the extremely animated discussions about anything under the sun, we used to have around the dinner table.  The real life lessons that he passed on to me had immense use to me in my own life and career.

Often when I think back about him I get a deep complex - will I ever be as good and as successful as my dad?  Will I be as good a father as he has been to me?

I think deep within, every son carries a certain awe about his father.  This awe only becomes stronger as the son becomes older and approaches different life stages that his father too must have gone through.  All the questions on life's trade-offs and the kinds of compromises he might have had to make for the sake of his family - all this makes better sense to me now.

I am deeply grateful to my father, and I hope I will someday have the same courage and wisdom he showed in the way he lived.

Aarti Nayak - the rising talent on the Indian classical music scene

Thanks to the live web-cast of the Music event coinciding with the Punar Prathista in Mangalore, a lot of us got exposed to the rising talents in the musical field within the community.

What amazed me was the huge number of high quality music talent that was on display - the GSB community is indeed highly gifted in the performing arts.

One talent indeed stood out - and this was Aarti Nayak, the daughter of Pundit Ramrao Nayak  Despite her youth she showed amazing control over her voice, and sang some very difficult compositions such as the opening "Srinivasa.." in Raag Hamsadhwani.  Here is the link to the recording of the program - definitely worth a watch.




She was ably supported on the harmonium by Sudhir Nayak who played some difficult pieces exceptionally well, and on the Tabla by the renowned Pundit Omkar Gulwadi.

I predict Aarti will go a long way. 

The GSB Community

For the past decade the GSB (Gowd Saraswath Brahmin) community has been in a stage of siege and decline. The community (which has Konkani as its mother tongue) is tiny - just about 400,000 - and scattered all over pockets of western and southern India.  So there is no single geography cluster where the community is concentrated - which makes unifying the community - and sustaining its language and unique traditions - very difficult.

Historically, any community which is less than a million strong and is not geographically concentrated tends to gradually lose its identity and gets absorbed into the local dominant mainstream - so there is a real threat of that "Indian homogenisation" happening to the GSBs within this century. Moreover, the turbulence witnessed at the spiritual leadership level in the last decade did not help matters - it sowed dis-harmony, and many GSBs lived up to their (dis)repute of being "Kokkes" or those who cannot bear to see others within the community prosper.

Which is why the recently concluded 16 day Punar Prathistha of the Sri Venkatramana temple in Mangalore was a water-shed event for the community.  It was extremely well-organised - and the unity and the spirit shown by the community was remarkable.  Many of the youth were also involved, and it was wonderful to see some of the youth taking the initiative to do live web-cast of the event for all the 16 days on the GSB community portal - enabling many GSBs from all over the world to participate in the function, and hence witnessing the possible revival of the community feeling.

I for one am now quite happy and optimistic - I feel the negativity that had engulfed the community will disappear, and the community will start displaying the vibrancy, pride and spirit that had always characterised the GSB community.  And it gives me the hope that the GSB community will continue to survive and prosper for many more centuries to come.

On Becoming A Good Manager

It was disaster waiting to happen.  I got over-ambitious and tried to prepare 4 dishes simultaneously today.  Trying to juggle the brinjal subji and the broccoli saute that was on fire, I dropped the mustard seed bottle and spent half an hour cleaning up the kitchen floor.

No doubt cooking teaches best the skill of multi-tasking under severe time pressure - and also helps understand one's own strengths and limits.  Not surprisingly, in my experience, women usually tend to be better managers - their multi-tasking skills tend to be fine-honed due to their greater exposure to cooking at home.  And I mean no disrespect to male managers, some of whom are also very good at cooking.

Which brings me to the other point - it suddenly dawned on me today as to why the worst couple of managers I have ever encountered also happened - paradoxically enough - to be women.  On hind-sight it is easy to explain - I know for a fact that both of them hated cooking.

Prosperity

Rich is when you can afford to buy most things you aspire for, and hence you buy it.

Wealthy is when you can easily afford to buy most things that you once aspired to own - but somehow you are no longer interested in acquiring such stuff.  You are happier with simpler stuff as a matter of choice.

Being Wealthy is more enduring.

Here's wishing all my friends prosperity for 2012.  

Positivity

The world's rarest stuff is not money - and nor is it love.  It is the positivity quotient - whether a person has the ability to impart positivity in any environment or situation.

There is a simple test for positivity.  In any encounter with any individual, figure out whether you are walking away from the engagement with a positive, negative or neutral feeling.  If you walk away from the meeting with that individual usually with a positive feeling, then that person has a high positive quotient.

People with a high positive quotient tend to see - and communicate - the positive aspect in any person or situation.  They are also persons with high self-awareness - who believe that reinforcing positive behavior (rather than criticizing negative behavior) is the key to bringing about change.  They tend to be keenly aware that most people crave for positivity from any engagement and that positivity is the rarest stuff currently.

Watch out for - and stay away from (if you have a choice) - people with a negative quotient.  How often have we encountered a person who normally leaves one feeling drained of energy and enthusiasm and feeling totally inadequate?  If we encounter such people often, then there is the real danger that we too will get sucked into the downward spiral of negative energy and thoughts.

So go ahead with a ready smile, a spring in your step, and a good word for everyone.  In these difficult times be that rare beacon of positive energy.

The Fly

I went out for my usual morning walk today, and a persistent fly attached itself to my head.  All throughout the walk the fly hovered around my head, getting into my eyes, buzzing into my ears.  I stopped several times and tried to fight the fly, waving my arms and trying to either drive it away or kill it - but to no avail.  The fly was very wily, and seemed to taunt me at my helplessness.

I started to walk faster.  The fly kept pace with me.

I was nearing the end of my 5 km walk, and the fly was still hovering around my head.  I started having visions of the fly following me into my house, and tormenting me for the rest of the day in my abode of peace, in my sanctum sanctorum.

I made a run for it.  I just started running fast.  Ran and ran.  Breathless, I stopped.  It was a long time since I had run.

The fly was no longer hovering over my head.  I had managed to outrun it.  I trudged back home, relieved, using a different route - did not want to take any chances.

I guess this was one of those problems that I was simply not equipped to fight.  In such situations it is best to just run and regain my peace.

The Closet Musician

An interesting article in the NYT caught my eye : it mentioned that staff at Goldman Sachs are required to keep a low profile about their extra-curricular activities.  Several Goldman staffers who gave public performances in music during their leisure hours have been "encouraged" to leave the firm as this was not in line with company policies.  "Bankers should behave like Bankers. You are not supposed to be known for anything else or stand out for anything besides your work" was how industry observers interpreted this stance by Goldman Sachs towards what their employees did during their leisure hours.

Several years ago at the beginning of my career in MR, I was in a similar predicament.  I was very keen on learning music during my leisure hours, and I actually enrolled for music classes after office hours.  Unfortunately I did not bother to keep it a secret, and very soon I started getting subtle and not-so-subtle messages that pursuing extra-curricular activities was not in line with what is expected from a junior Market Research executive - unless of course he is not serious about his career and lacks ambition. All serious and ambitious MR executives should be slogging away in the office late into the night as an indication of how seriously they took their career.  I seemed to have unfortunately sent the message that I had the time to pursue a hobby - and was not keen to sharpen my professional skills.

Managing one's career is a lot about managing perceptions - especially during the formative period in the career when a person is expected to be dedicated only to his career.  After the person has made his mark, then of course, one has slightly little more liberty in openly doing what one wants to do in his leisure hours.

I quickly corrected myself therefore - and made my affair with music such a closely guarded secret that not even my close colleagues were aware of it - and all because I was worried about being perceived as "non-serious" and uncommitted to my career.

Much has changed in the MR industry since then - and I am glad to say that the industry has become a lot more relaxed, and does encourage diversity in its talents.  I came out of the closet a few years ago - and am no longer embarrassed about talking about my passion for music and the fact that I play the harmonium.

So, I felt a bit strange reading the NYT article - I had expected the banking industry (especially investment banking) to have evolved a lot more quickly than the MR industry - but then life is always full of surprises.

Janki Nivas

My PG room over-looked the busy Ambedkar Road.  From my balcony I could see Parsi Gymkhana and the beautiful "Five Gardens".  From the window I could see bits of Ruia college.  Dadar TT was a 5 minute walk, and Matunga with its host of South Indian Restaurants and second hand book stalls was a 10 minute walk.  I could not - and still cannot - think of any place more centrally located than this in Mumbai.

My land-lord, Mr Abhyankar, was a kindly old gentleman.  The entire Janki Nivas - comprising of 8 apartments originally belonged to his father - but because of the tenancy act had passed on to various tenants.  Mr. Abhyankar therefore constructed a pent-house atop the building for himself.  None of his 3 sons lived in Mumbai - and hence it was more for the sake of companionship that they decided to rent out the  spare bedroom as a PG accommodation.

On the ground-floor of the building was Savur's X-Ray clinic.  There was always a queue of people with broken arms and legs waiting patiently for the doctor's appointment. One other notable tenant of this building was the very famous musician and music guru Pandit KG Ginde.  Whenever I passed by his door on my way to the 4th floor, I could hear his sonorous voice carrying out riaz.

My land-lord and his wife treated me with love and affection - something rare in Mumbai where people barely have time to speak to others.  There were times when I had fallen ill, and it is my land-lord and his wife who had taken care of me.

However, despite the over-whelming advantages of my new PG, it had one strong disadvantage - and that was the noise of the traffic on Ambedkar road.  It is one of the broadest roads in Mumbai - and one of the busiest.  Throughout night and day, the snarl of traffic will reverberate in my room.  My land-lord and his wife were both hard of hearing - and I suspected this was because of constant exposure to the traffic sound.

The first couple of nights I could not sleep - but then I got used to the sound and started sleeping soundly (forgive the pun).  Or perhaps, I thought, I was going deaf already.