Unfinished Projects

A big problem with unfinished projects is that they leave you incomplete. When a project is complete, you get a sense of completion in your mind. Otherwise, it becomes a dangling thread of thoughts in the mind. It keeps taking space and mental cycles (even if it is in the subconcious). And that leaves little room for exploring new ideas and executing them. The mental space starts looking cluttered.

At the same time, there is this problem of when to call a project finished (or completed). As such, everything in this world is ever changing and ever evolving. And that means cal
ling a project complete becomes more of a mental thing than a well defined state of the project itself. For example, if I start working on a movie now, I may feel complete by making the movie, or by making sure that it is seen by as many people as possible, or by creating a sequel that’s even better than the first movie etc etc. In fact, in this example, the project goes through multiple well defined stages but there are projects where there are no well defined stages. Things like blog, business don’t have well defined stages. There is nothing discreet in their progress. There are jumps but it is still a continum which goes on and on and on.

When I look back, I feel biking is one project I finished. I wanted to own a bike and travel around since college days. I bought one when I got into a job. I travelled to many pla
ces. And then during one trip, I felt complete from inside. I felt that I had done as much biking as I wanted to do. I could have done more; in fact, I did travel to more places a
fter that. But there was no urge to hit the highway on bike anymore. Same thing happened with photography. I wanted to do photography. I bought a camera, shot many pictures and th
en eventually, I stopped clicking photographs because I started enjoying the moments better without a camera.

So, while it is important to complete projects, completion itself is a state of mind. Which makes it difficult to complete a project with the “intention to complete it”. Because c
ompletion is not “about the project”, it’s about how “you relate to the project”.

The fallacy of ownership

It’s been a long time for me in the corporate world. Or at least, that’s how it seems to me after all these years. One underlying theme at workplace has been “ownership mentality”. Especially, the startup category.

Though it appealed to me in the early days when the blood was hot and the experience was less, it started feeling shallow as time went by. The first big realization came when I saw my colleagues getting fired in the first startup I worked for. The people who were supposed to have the “ownership mentality” till yesterday had their workstation locked, access cards taken overnight.

And it happened again and again. That’s probably the meaning of the “ownership mentality”: you don’t have the ownership but you need to act as if you are. But it’s significance started fading away for me. I’ve acted professionally for the majority of my corporate life. Which essentially means that I acted to the best of my capabilities and intentions 8 hours a day and 5 days a week. But I stopped thinking about the “ownership mentality”.

When I quit Yahoo! 2 years back and started my own startup, it was different. I “owned” it. After all, it was “my startup”. Of course, it was with 2 partners and there was also an investor. But for majority of time, I would relate to it as “my startup” in a way which is similar to “my phone”, “my laptop”, “my house” etc.

There was nothing like “ownership mentality”. It was like “owning”. They are different. I was not acting as an owner. I believed that I was an owner. Even though I was one of the owners but I’ve been an owner nonetheless.

And now, when I am transitioning out of this startup (oh yes, I am), this whole thing about “owning” and “ownership mentality” came back to me. In this case, nobody asked me to leave (unlike other startups where my colleagues were asked to leave and I was myself asked to leave once). I am leaving of my own accord for my own personal reasons. But I am leaving nonetheless. I am leaving something that I “owned”. Or so I thought till yesterday.

For the first time in last 2 years, me and my partners had a discussion wherein “the percentage of ownership” became more important than the “ownership” itself. There wasn’t a conflict or any heartburns or anything that we disagreed upon. It was just like any other “objective” discussion that we’ve had in last 2 years. And I expect it to be just like any other “objective” decision that we’ve taken in last 2 years. So, there is no juicy “News-Channel” style story here. It’s just that it felt very different to “own” something fully for 2 long years and then talk about quantifying it and dividing it.

It reminded me what Anant Uncle, my spiritual guide, once said to me. It was a time when I wanted to buy a house and was restless in a rented house. I wanted to live in a house that “I owned”. He said one simple thing: “How can you own a house? You don’t even own this body.” It was a forceful realization for me back then and it came back to me today with ever more force.

How can I own a company when I don’t even own this body?

The Missing Links of Communication

When my elder daughter (Aarushi) was growing up, an interesting thing happened that I can never forget. She started reading. It wasn’t the reading itself that was so interesting. It was her excitement at the ability to read that made me take notice. After she learnt to read, wherever we went, be it a restaurant or a shop, she would try to read everything and feel extremely excited about it. Her reaction was of a person whose spectrum of visible things suddenly increased many-folds. She could suddenly know the world around her so much better; she could connect with it better; she could be more than she was.

What really changed with her ability to read? A new communication link got established between her & her environment. Through that link, she could absorb her environment so much better.

And recently, I had some interesting experience which made me reflect on this matter a bit more. For an upcoming project, I was designing the website. And this time around, I decided to approach it as “a designer”. So, I started studying typography, colors and other elements of visual design. And suddenly, I experienced the same excitement that Aarushi had experienced when she learnt to read. I could now read “colors” and “types” in my environment. A new communication link got established.

What do I mean? Let me explain further. For designing the new website, I had to design a color palette whose colors will be used in the website. Now, in order to do that, I studied the technicalities about colors. Something like:

• The technicalities: What are hue, saturation and value? What are shades & tints? What are additive & subtractive colors?
• The emotional aspects: What moods are created by different colors? What emotional response different colors create in people?
• Getting control: How colors influence people’s experience of a website?

I spent about a day or two on this and the learning I got was very valuable. Suddenly, I found that my surroundings were all the time “communicating” with me in the “language of colors”. But it was my lack of knowledge because of which I could never “read” that “communication”. Now, suddenly, everywhere I see, I find a communication encoded in the colors. From my furniture & walls to various shades of green in my balcony plants to grays & blues in the sky to the browns of earth and tree trunks. I can now “read” colors. Not very proficient yet but a world has suddenly opened up.

And this whole experience got me thinking. Is it only about colors? What are the other “mediums” that my environment uses for communication but I have not been trained to understand those mediums very well? What about body language? What about language of the eyes? What about the language of how people walk? What about the language of tonality? What about the language of proportions? What about “Hand-writing”?

There is so much “communication” hidden from me just because I do not know how to read it.

What is Work?

No, seriously, what exactly is work? You’ve been working day in & day out but did you pause for a moment to reflect on what is this thing called work? The thing that you keep doing all the time (or forced to do from time to time)?

I never did but for past couple of days, a few thoughts have been dancing around in my head. Thoughts that I was not able to put off. And finally, when a neighbor sympathized with me for working on a Sunday, the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle started settling in.

The interesting thing about most of these mental jigsaw puzzles is that they complete on their own. Not the ones that you are actively trying to solve. Rather, the ones in which pieces emerge from nowhere and start floating around in your head. You don’t know what picture will finally emerge but you just feel that your mind is trying to tell you something. The destiny has decided that you learn something at this point of time. At a time like this, if you are able to give your mind a little bit of breathing space, you are told what you need to be told. And I guess, I was told something today.

Anyway, that was a digression. So, let’s come back: what is work? And I don’t mean to get to a “definition” of this “word”. What I want to get to is an “understanding” of the same. Whole of my life after I graduated has been revolving around this word and it’s high time that I (and even you) get a grip on this. Otherwise, the risk is to just keep working while the life slips by.

For quite sometime, people have perceived me to be working while I was actually not working. At least, I didn’t think that I was working. It’s happened more & more after I quit my job and got into “the startup thingy”. And it’s suddenly happening all too often in past few days. So, what the heck is going on here?

I am writing code. Does that mean I am working? I am debugging some problem. Does that mean I am working? I am on a call with someone discussing ideas. Does that mean I am working? If yes, why is it that sleeping, eating, playing cricket, cycling, traveling and a whole lot of other stuff that I *do* is not “working”?

For me, the answer became clear when my neighbor sympathized with me when she saw me working on a sunday. Why did she sympathize? Because somewhere, she had a mental model that “given a choice”, I’ll not sit in my study writing code on a sunday evening. “Given a choice”, I’ll do “something else” on a sunday evening. And if “given a choice”, I would do something other than what I am doing right now, what I am doing right now is “work”.

Yes. It’s as simple as it is complicated. Given a choice, if you’d do something other than what you are doing now, what you are doing now is work.

And that’s why there has been a disconnect between my perception of what I do and what other people think I do. Others think that I do what I do because I don’t have a choice. I have to “work” long hours to get things done to be successful. On the other hand, in reality, more often than not, I do what I do (whenever I am doing it) precisely because I have had a choice and I made my choice.

And with time (it’s been about 1.3 years since I left my job), increasingly, the work is ceasing to be. In the initial days of the startup life, I did as much work as I used to do in the job. However, over a period of time, I am getting used to making choices. And as I get more and more used to making choices, I am able to align my activities to my liking.

On the surface, it may seem that I was coding back in the job and I am coding now. But that’s a wrong way to look at the situation. While in job, I was just following the directions given by some people. That’s all. Now, on the other hand, either I am bringing people together around a shared interest (NotJustScore) or working in the direction of people getting better educated in areas that impact their life (an upcoming online training center).

Everything may finally boil down to coding but that’s as good as saying that cutting vegetables and killing people are knifing. That’s like confusing the “tool” with the “intent” and the “end result”.

So, that’s all from my side for today. The next question for me is: can I get rid of “working” altogether?

The Bigger Purpose

A few years back, I had gone to the Badrinath Temple. As I stood in an hour long queue to enter the temple, I observed something interesting.

Just to set the context (for the uninitiated), this temple is either very far or very very far from almost all the places in India. To get there, you have to take up a really long journey. Now, all these people who were standing outside the temple gate waiting to get in should be really focused only on the God, right? Otherwise, what’s the point of taking up such a long journey and going to the Badrinath temple (of all the places). Yea, it has a beautiful setting but then there are other places which are more accessible and no less in beauty.

However, what I observed was something different. Some people had their mind on how they could jump the queue. And 80% of those in the queue were concerned with other people jumping the queue. Now, remember, these people have taken up days of journey to get here. But now that they are here, right at the temple door, what concerns them is not what they came here for. It’s the queue. And some other petty stuff like chattering with person standing next to you or peeping into the nearby shops selling useless stuff.

And I wondered why this purpose-less-ness among these people who took such an arduous journey and now wasting everything away because they can’t remember what they are here for.

And then I wondered if I had not been guilty of the same purpose-less-ness at that moment. I had also traveled a long distance to be at that temple. And now that I was at the temple, my mind was occupied with observing what other people’s mind was occupied with.

It was an Aha! moment for me. One thing I realized was that there is always a bigger purpose regardless of the situation you are in but it is extremely difficult to cut through the immediate environment and remain aligned to that purpose. And another thing that I realized was how we picture ourselves as smarter than others even though we might be doing the same stupid thing as others are doing

Response to “The Acorn – FAQ: Why Anna Hazare is wrong and Lok Pal a bad idea”

There are clearly two camps: one says Lokpal is the right way, another says we should restructure the existing organizations. Whichever way you go, you need structural changes. They both will have pros and cons and no approach is going to be perfect. At the same time, I don’t see how Lok Pal proposal is a bad idea. It just has different pros and cons.

If I get into the specifics of points made by “The Acorn” in its “faq”:

Adding one more, huge, powerful layer to an already complex system will make the system even more complicated. Complexity creates the incentives for corruption; both on art of the bribe giver and the bribe taker.

Anyone who has designed systems knows that complexity arises not because of layers but because of interfaces that you design. It’s upto the design of the Lokpal (or any other layer for that matter) which will determine the efficacy of the same.

In fact, data show that perceptions of corruption are lower in some sectors of the economy, usually those that have been liberalised.

I don’t know the source of this data and how the survey was conducted. Of course, there are areas where things have improved as a result of liberalization but not everything (like land records) is going to be liberalized. You can’t register a property in Bangalore unless you pay 0.5% of property price as bribe. Period.

We have not really demanded them at all, actually. If we did, they are bound to register in the national political agenda. We should persuade politicians that their political future is linked to implementing economic reforms.

This is a fallacy. The current battle started with a demand to remove corruption but it has turned into a battle to be heard by the government.

Easy to say, but how can we do this? By voting.

Another fallacy. This is a variation to the “Everyone should be honest” line of thinking. Moreover, voting requires options. While you & me can vote, what are the options in front of us as of today? There is no data to show that middle class doesn’t vote. Ensuring that a good candidate wins is far more complicated in this country than what can be influenced by a single person.

Does anyone seriously think we can hire tens of thousands of absolutely honest officials who will constitute the Lok Pal? Who will keep watch on them?

The same question holds for other structural changes proposed by the author in the beginning (i.e. make other agencies independent). The way you ensure honesty in those agencies is the way you ensure it here.

Pilots don’t design aircraft. Practicing doctors don’t discover new drugs and treatments. These jobs are usually done by armchair inte

Should I laugh at this? Armchair intellectuals don’t design aircrafts or discover new drugs. There are practitioners and there are designers. And well, there are armchair intellectuals who are neither practitioners nor designers.

The “Everybody should be honest” solution

I keep seeing this “Everybody should be honest” solution being promoted by friends & colleagues to solve the corruption problems in India. My personal assessment is that they have never tried to be honest in India otherwise, they wouldn’t be promoting this solution.

In response to someone, somewhere, I wrote the following which I decided to share here.

There are 3 parts to it:

a) I don’t want any inconvenience for being honest. I have always paid full penalty whenever caught by traffic cops but there were times when I had to fight with the cop to get a receipt for penalty and was finally punished by double the penalty because I dared ask for a receipt. I took the matter upto DCP who asked me to go to the court. Finally, I wasted more money, a lot of time & energy for being honest. And this is one of the many things on a long list of items. And I don’t want that.

b) I want punishment for the guy who is corrupt. “Everybody should be honest” doesn’t mean anything because I am only I and not Everybody. Ultimately, wherever there is corruption, I am paying for it in one form or the other. And I want right systems in place so that the corrupts can be booked.

c) There are some corruptions (like 2G scam, CWG scam) which are not prompted by general public. These are cases of pure abuse of power. It’s my tax money that has gone into making people rich. That same money could have gone in making better roads etc which would make my life better. I need a check on that.

I have seen many people giving this “Everybody should be honest” solution but frankly, I am yet to see anybody providing an execution plan for the same. There has never been a time in the history of mankind when everybody was honest.

Some people are honest and some have honesty thrust upon them.

Disconnected thoughts on Baba Ramdev, Jan Lokpal, Congress, Corruption & Democracy

I have been watching from far all the activities that are happening recently and I have been having a lot of random thoughts on this subject. Since, they are now bursting through my mind, I need to vent them out. So, here are my thoughts in random order…

We are talking about wrong issues. Baba Ramdev is not the issue. He may be a clown or a social reformist, I don’t care. I care about the corruption in the government machinery and that the corruption is open and that nothing is being done about that corruption. Baba Ramdev being opportunist (if he is an opportunist) is inconsequential. Though I would have had more respect for him had he not broken his fast like this but that’s fine. Corruption in government machinery is more important for mind-share.

If you don’t believe in Jan Lokpal and don’t want to support it for that reason, fine. Then support something that you believe in. But don’t say that you don’t believe in anything. Please *do* believe in something and support it. Corruption is at a very high scale, something needs to be done. Different people need to take the route that suits their value system and their way of operating. That’s fine. In freedom struggle, some people went with non-violence and some with violence. They both made an impact. The ones who didn’t do either didn’t make any impact. Please believe in something, do it and make an impact. That’s much more important than finding faults with what others are doing. And by the way, if you believe that bribing traffic cops is the root of all corruption, please stop doing that. At least do your part.

Celebrities are disgusting. And I find them even more disgusting now. Most of the people debating about Janlokpal Bill have not done any social work in their life. They have not stood up with people for the cause of those people. Everybody has a right to debate on this bill but not everybody has a right to try and mould public opinion. If media is not mature enough to bring right set of people on debate like platforms, try self-restraint.

Democracy in India is a failure so far. Let’s accept that. From time & again, people have voted for wrong government. So much so that there is no incentive left for a party to have good intentions. People of India have not created an incentive for the government to be just and uncorrupt. And we are still not doing that. And it’s not just about the masses but also about the classes. Democracy has failed because people have failed to understand the conditions under which Democracy works. Democracy puts a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of people (remember: by the people), however, people in India want to shy away from that responsibility. The government should do this, corporation should do that, a leader should come blah blah.

Congress has failed again & again. Oh wait, I think they have succeeded again & again. They are pretty good at keeping the government stable. BJP had so much problem with the coalition government but Congress seems to be so much at ease. On the other hand, BJP has failed. It has failed to provide an alternative. With so much corruption erupting everywhere, BJP is not able to mobilize people against the incumbents.

JanLokpal is not a long term solution. It cannot be. What we need is a bottom up governance and not top-down governance. Top-down governance can work in a democracy only if there is a bottom-up pressure to make it work. JanLokpal is one more form of top-down governance. However, it’s an urgent need of our times. At this point of time, any bottom-up effort for governance is so easy to suppress (is suppressed) that people need some kind of support. That’s where JanLokpal fits. Over a period of time, it’s likely to get as corrupt as any other institution unless the reasons that have created corruption in the first place are rooted out. However, to root out those reasons, for the time being, something is required to ensure that bottom up movements reach some positive conclusion in a reasonable amount of time.

Democracy is not about electing a government. Or to put it better, Democracy is not only about electing a government. It’s about participating in the governance. Especially when the governance is lacking. If we limit the meaning of democracy to just electing the government, we’ll end up in a mess like this. A mess where all that matters to the political parties is to win election and not providing good governance. And when winning is all that matters, there are many ways to accomplish it. Ways which are probably far easier than showing good governance. In fact, winning always requires manipulation regardless of the quality of work that you have done in the past. Elections today are won by manipulation and that’s not democracy. So, in a way, Democracy has not failed in India, India has failed to truly adopt democracy.

So, where do you think the issue is? Baba Ramdev’s frivolity OR non-democratic nature of JanLokpal Bill OR the shamelessness with which Congress has allowed the propagation of corruption OR our lack of participation in governance? And once you have identified the real issue (as per your evaluation), what’s the first step you are going to take?