Choices and hypothesis

In a span of one hour I happen to make myself witness an incident (this is how I try to live by each day in my own way :) ). Micro-incident 1: I come across  this article , where Katie Couric, the journalist who had been a television host at all 3 big three television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) and was recently the Global News Anchor at Yahoo had shared some of her experience at a tech giant. Micro-incident 2: One of my close friends shares this  video  on his Facebook wall. Please watch that video since the rest of my article centers around it. And then you may agree or disagree with my summarization here: It is about Bernie Sanders talking about the flaw in the principle which gives US President the supreme command over the military forces, which he proposes to be in hands of Congress. At the beginning he cites the examples of  Yemen war crisis and then at the end emphasizes on the triviality of this particular case, and its the principle on which US goes t...

Statistically talents are rare individuals.  Convincing the above statement You may argue talents are hyped and every person/child is special in his own way. So you may want to discard the notion of some individuals being talents. But please read on: Consider you are trying to hire the best instructor for your child with unlimited budget for expenses. Or your son has met with an accident and you want the best doctor to operate, again with an unlimited budget at your end. Or while looking for a lawyer for your daughter in her marital case. Or while hiring the CFO of your company about to file its IPO. You will look for the most qualified person. You will be biasing towards someone one with a flawless track record, achievements or high profile recommendation under her belt. Suddenly you will respond to phrases like: "He practiced in Harvard Medical School" or "He was VP Finance at Goldman Sachs" etc. etc. as if earning such tags or brands require some quali...

Why is it that despite the best efforts non profits fail? Startups (for profit) fail spectacularly and more often. But there is a profound difference in those two types of failures. One fail in its quest for finding a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem doesn't exist at a primary level even. While the other fails despite having identified a very fundamental problem which often needs urgently to be tackled. Now let's merge this distinction among profits and non profits for sometime and take a more fundamental dig on them. There are already too much of meanings and stereotypes attached with terms like corporate, organization, startup, non profit etc. Fundamentally people, both outsiders and insiders, often don't acknowledge the core components of these entities. This often lead to failures. Well, some do get a certain things right and manage to outshine spectacularly. Having worked with over 15 entities in a span of 5 years, from killed startups to IGOs, I spent ...

In my years and years of growing up I have encountered a curious habit among the people I have interacted with. They have always functioned in a mental framework incorporating their abstract take on the world around them. And all of us in some way do that. These metrics give a sense of rationality to the individual. Now to what degree the rationality holds is altogether a different discussion. But the basic hypothesis still holds: Each one of has a scale. There is another curious observation further on these lines: these metrics often tend to be one dimensional. My parents, my teachers, my friends and even the Bollywood stories around me followed this pattern. For the early years of my life I struggled to put things in this format. As my world got bigger I discovered a vast majority of crowd also religiously follow some version of this model either consciously or sub consciously while interacting or making sense of themselves, the people within and outside their communities, objects an...

I remember opening a brown A4 envelope. It was 1998 and inside there was a subscriber's copy of India Today. Amartya Sen was featuring on the cover page. I kept looking at it for some time. I used to be a quizzer back then, often representing my school and house at various competitions. That piece of news seemed to be quite important, or so I must have thought. Then in the following year I learned that the same man also won Bharat Ratna. And then it stuck me and till today whenever I come across that little pattern I get greatly amused. Let me illustrate that pattern for you by giving you first 5 examples which I can recall: 1: Satyajit Ray - Honorary Oscar 1991, Bharat Ratna 1992 2: Amartya Sen - Nobel Prize 1998, Bharat Ratna 1999 3: Venkatraman Ramankrishnan - Nobel Prize 2009, Padma Vibhushan 2010 4: Gayatri Spivak - Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy 2012, Padma Bhushan 2013 5: Manjul Bhargava - Fields Medal 2014, Padma Bhushan 2015 It's not like they mad...

Ever tried starting something of your own? If no then you may skip reading this piece. Else continue. There are a number of reasons to find a cofounder if you want to start up something. Your initiative will have more than just two hands, your skill set is diversified, investors can trust you better, you can support each other in tough times, blah. blah. This is what the usual blogs bullshit about. One can always overcome these mere things if you are confident about your plan and avoid the pretty useless short cuts. So the question still stands: Does one need a cofounder? The answer is: Yes. The reason lies with absurdism, a school of philosophy lovingly made popular by Albert Camus. Absurdism essentially refers to the conflict existing between the men seeking the meaning of life and the inability of finding any. In early entrepreneurship there exists a similar arrangement. There is a conflict between the founder's idea of the ideal user/market and the inability to achie...

I read a lot of books, all types and sizes. So the first question I am asked is what kind of books I like the most. I take a pause to quickly re evaluate my interests and since last couple of years the answer has been the same: Philosophy. Then, in most occasions, I am asked few FAQs, which I shall be listing here. In the future I can just forward them this post to save some time. 0: I too like philosophy. Especially the structure, logic and meaning of language. You mean linguistics.  1: What do you mean by philosophy? For me it deals with anything which helps me develop and evolve my fundamental framework which I see is comprising of 4 components: 1: Values, helping me in deciding objectives and prioritizing activities in life 2: Ethics (what I consider right and wrong), which determine methods, and reactions to a piece of news or an activity done by a third person 3: Choices, that given absolute freedom what things I choose over others 4: Cushions, ie...