Captive Adaptations

My resolutions for 2006 draw inspiration from the fond rememberence of the few people who have had huge influences in my life.

Life has made me realize that I can’t give solutions to all of life’s problems, doubts or fears.
But I will resolve to listen to people around me more, and may be together we will search for answers.

I also cannot change the past with all of it’s heartache and pain, nor can I change the future with it’s yet to unfold stories,
But I will resolve to be there, when people need me to care.

I can’t keep the feet of my loved-ones from stumbling,
But I will resolve to offer my hand so that they can grasp it and not fall.

The joys, triumphs, successes and happiness of my friends are not mine,
But I will resolve to share their laughter.

The decisions in life of my collegues are not mine to make, nor to judge,
But I will resolve to support them, encourage them, and help them when they ask.

I can’t prevent people from falling away from friendship, from values, and from me,
But I will resolve to talk to them, to pray for them, and will wait for them to turn-around.

I can’t give my younger siblings & subordinates, the boundaries that I have determined for them,
But I will resolve to give them room to grow, room to be themselves, and room to change.

Last but not the least my dear fans, I can’t tell you who you are,
But I will resolve to contribute my little something each day, with my posts here on this blog, and keep your love forever.

If you have not made any resolutions yet, may the above seed some ideas in you. Have a good new year !

As the year end introspections continue, here are some interesting statistics / graphs of the performance of CaptiveAdaptations Blog after it went live in June. The reporting period is between June 2005 and Dec 2005

Summary of Number of Unique Visitors, Number of Hits, etc is below.

Breakup on a month/month basis is below. What is interesting is the steady increase of the number of visitors, although December is the only month which dipped on a month-over-month basis. Understandable, since its holiday season, most people have better things to do

Average duration of all visits is roughly around 319 seconds meaning that the site can hold the attention of people for 5 mins. I reckon that is pretty decent.

For Technical details, people with Windows OS on their computers topped the list with 77% of the visitors having Windows. On the browser front firefox takes the first place - this is exciting - seems like Firefox has overtaken IE as the most popular browser.

Also people from America had the most number of Visits, with India taking second place.

“Paz Vega” was the search phrase that topped the reason for people to visit my site. That is quite interesting in itself. Beauty always seems to beat the brains

Acceptance of time as a linear entity. Sometimes I suspect this has been mankind’s biggest mistake. Based on this model, we evolved everything in terms of a chain or string of events. Why, all our businesses activities were chains too, so all our scheduling and all our algorithms everything was geared towards optimizing these chains.

From SuppyChain to DemandChain to ValueChains, everything was considered linear, but as realization dawned, early-adopters are already moving away from it and now we have SupplyNetworks, DemandNetworks and ValueNetworks. Our business processess and activities are no longer linear, they are multi-dimensional.

But alas, we still forgot, the root cause of it all. We had modelled all our daily activities, everything we do, considering activities/processes as a set of events or tasks to be carried out, mostly one after the other, or linearly, based on our time-model which is linear (also ticks one second at a time). We are today ready to adopt the notion that we live in a Networked world, which is no longer linear, but are stuck with time being linear.

Here are some interesting thoughts that has been puzzling me over a good period of time. “Consumerism” is the concept of consuming “goods” or “services” to derive value. And for 90% of us, this value is worth its money when the “service or good” bought helps us save time. So no matter what we do, we are constantly trying to buy more time for ourselves by buying tools, equipments, services which create the perception of saving time.

So all optimizations, Supply Chain Optimizations, Value Chain Optimizations, Search Engines, News Briefings, nearly everything we consume today comes with one primary ingredient - “The notion of saving time”. And this has been going on for eras now, and my prediction is this will go on for many more eons. Are we in testing times or are we time testing ?

If anybody is thinking of coming up with a next big business idea, hear yey, hear yey…, just give people something that creates a perception of “Saving Time”. But how far can we keep shrinking the accepted linear-model-of-time is for time to tell !

P.S.: I noticed a major shift in the way Hinduism deals with time and concept of “Present Reality“. More, in the follow up posts.

When you have a tsunami nose, a clogged and heavy chest, and are shivering involuntarily, you just know that you are going down…, I hate it.., I hate it…. I just hate falling sick.

Its been a long time (nearly 8 years) when I have actually taken to bed, so I have lost the instincts to stand up against such infections. I remember my Dad many years ago, when he was terrified just because he had fever. His emergency response was so pathetic, that we as kids started to laugh at him, while he was complaining about regular fever as if it was a major disease !.

Yes, I agree, sometimes its good to be normal, and fall sick once a year. But then, I am praying that I don’t get arrested in bed. Yak!, even the thought is so awful, but there is something that I noticed is cheerful, our news-man is back, and our cable operator has also started to beam this channel.

It was August when I had promised that I will followup with a Redux for Making a Difference. Well before the year flips into the next, I want to fulfill atleast some promises.

Below are some links to work of some amazing people, all of whom I have been a secret admirer of.

• http://www.planetread.org/
• http://www.linkageindia.org/
• http://www.suvy.com/
• http://www.vipani.org/
• http://www.deeshaa.org/

All of them have something in common, and if you follow it carefully, you can connect the dots. Well, I don’t want to test your patience. The common thread linking all of them is “Reuters Digital Vision Program“. If any of you have any secret plans of a sabbatical and want to invest your time in something really worthy and interesting I think this is it, supported by Stanford University, and backed by Reuters Foundation, this program provides an opportunity to contribute something significant.

Of course, if you do not know, Atanu Dey’s RISC - Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons evolved from here, and his RISC program has been endorsed and supported by none other than Vinod Khosla himself.

Also, I am an India-phile or Indophil (don’t state the obvious did you say ?) and below are some links to work of some Indians from the same program.

• Vipul Arora
• Aman Deep Singh Grewal
• Avni Jamdar
• Deepti Rohatgi
• Rita Sandhu
• Shachi Shantinath
• Paras Dagli
• Nita Goyal
• Dipak Basu
• Sham Bathija
• Durga Prasad Pandey
• Brij Kothari
• Annamalai Muthiah
• Rajendra Nimje
• Srinivas Sukumar
• Sanjay Bhargava
• Thomas George
• Atanu Dey
• Rajeswari Rao Pingali

Of course hats off to all the fellows-of-the-program from all nationalities who have contributed their time and efforts in this initiative. So what are you waiting for ?

P.S.: If any of you want to brainstorm on ideas to enroll yourself, I would be happy to be the Devil’s advocate on it. So feel free to shoot me your comments either here or through mail to ynmanju4us at gmail dot com

Just a couple of weeks ago I was about to reach a major milestone. A century on an important aspect in my life. Don’t ask me what, I’ll never tell… I was however not brave enough to pursue it. But, today on this blog I am fulfilling that milestone. Yes, this apparently is the 100th CaptiveAdaptation’s post. Cheers! to all of you, my dearest fans , for providing the much needed energy, to rant something or the other, even during nights of some tiring days. One thing I hope to get better on my blog is with my humor. Somewhere in the middle of the intellectual hunt, most of my posts have started to sound a little serious.

But dream I will, knowing that courage to fulfill always follows the dream, and laughter will always remain the best medicine. Last October when I started to blog, little did I imagine that I would continue to blog up until my 100th post, but today’s milestone tells me that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen. I am sure somewhere deep in my heart the desire to blog every day, has blossomed into this tiny but inspiring milestone.

The idea of dreaming also brings to my mind a statement from “The Alchemist” which I am quoting below

“When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true”

Because we dream we do. Dream On, folks, Dream On !!

Introspections are really funny activities. And while I am in the phase of “year-end” introspections, it dawned on me that as a Hindu it is quite but natural to culminate all acts with a philosophical review. Why one might ask ? For eons, Hindus as part of the child rearing activity have ensured that a healthy doze of Vedas or Upanishads are fed to the child. For the un-initiated, Upanishands (philosophical revelations) are usually found in the last section of each Veda (the intellectual scriptures of Hindus) , and therefore the philosophy of Upanishads has come to be called as Vendanta. And while I am a Hindu, and although I am not a brahmin, my upbringing ensured that I be exposed to good amount of Vendanta.

So its quite but natural for me to introspect and conduct a “philosophical review” of events in a given time period, say like a year. Hoping that the output of such an activity will provide all the “Things to be done”, and hence be incorporated as my new-year resolutions.

Interestingly I find a good deal of similarities in the new age “Time Management” ideas and the concept of Vedas. Here, read for youself, why Vyasa Collected, Processed and Organized all Vedas, and made sure that reviews or Upanishads were part of the last section, and interestingly he did so because he noticed that people had less and less time, due to their pre-occupations.

Now compare and contrast that with GTD - Getting Things Done, how striking are these similarities !

As the year ends, people do reflect on the events that passed by, being a quasi-philosophical being that I am, I have started my own introspections. For the past two days, I have been reading about Germany, for a good reason, and also just happened to remember that this is also the centennial of Annus Mirabilis - the miracle year of Einstein.

Yes 1905 it was, exactly a hundred years ago, when this genius changed the laws of science forever. As 2005 comes to an end, its a good time to reflect on his achivements of 1905. Here are some enumerations of what he achieved in 1905 at the young age of 26,

• March 1905: Created the quantum theory of light
• April 1905: Invented a new method of counting and determining the size of the atoms or molecules in a given space
• May 1905: Provides an explanation for the phenomenon of Brownian motion
• June 1905: Completes theory of special relativity
• Latter part of 1905: Extension of special relativity –> E=mc²

For more details of this, check this link out.

Few days ago I read the news article that Rajdeep Sardesai and team are back on Television with CNN-iBN. And one of my new found friend, actually asked me to comment about the declining standards of Television news channels and media in general.

Its a straight forward question, but it highlights one of the fallacies of Democracy, which is the need to cater to the lowest common denominator. Reminds me of Winston Churchill’s statement,

the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with an average voter

This statement holds so true in the context of this post and I think also answers the question for declining standards on our Television channels. As programs and news gets more personal, on a Broadcast medium like television, personalization can happen only at the average joe’s level. So in essence it would really diminish in appeal for the brighter audience.

And since we have all accepted that we have to work within the bounds of democracy, I think we need to have some intellectual enquiry as to how a higher degree of reasoning can be achieved on our daily news channels, while still catering to the average joe. And in a developing country like India, how low is the reasoning capability of the average joe ?

Its certainly not very encouraging, but an effort has to be made. Otherwise this pessimism can serve to “justify” inaction and an abdication of public responsibility by all of us who consider our selves to be audiences who have a heightened awareness on most issues.

Greed, Desire and Aspirations-for-things beyond one’s reach. Are these the ugly side of humans ? Atleast that is what has been consistently taught to most of us, mostly in developing countries like India. All these aspects of human nature are considered so negative that it has been taboo to lust over money, beauty or glory. In the process have we lost/undermined these human qualities and hence are we failing to Excel ?. Lets see some practical examples and then draw some conclusions.

America became a super power on exactly these virtues (or should I say vices). The idea of growth every quarter, no matter how much a company/individual has, he is forced to sustain growth - Is that not Greed ?. America has always been a country with Wants and not Needs. Necessities for basic living were achieved a long time ago, but “Quality of Life” dictates our everyday fight. Is that not Desire ? America is a Credit based society, most of what an individual has or buys is based on loans or credits. Forget individuals, families, corporations, why even Government functions on credit in one form or the other.

Corporations are funded by either investors or by stock markets, which essentially are other people’s money. Governments operate with huge deficits (both Budget deficits as well as Trade deficits, as is the case with US right now). Are these not clearly Living Beyond Means ? And yet we see that this country has been reigning supreme for more than a century. (Although the supremacy is being threatened by various factors and the eventual decline is inenvitable, none-the-less lets not digress, and let us save that for another day)

So are not Greed, Desire and Living beyond means, the characteristics that have driven every Entity in America to grow ?. Does that mean this is the “New Normal” and accepted nature of humans ?. Are Principles only for the UnPreviliged ? Should Indians and Chinese the to-be-recrowned-new-leaders-of-the-world follow these new normals ?

Interesting questions, will try for answers in the follow up posts. In the meantime, shoot your comments on all these interesting topics.