Captive Adaptations

Some people are really smart in business. Mostly they learn the tricks of the trade by going to B-schools, or by just getting involved. I have taken the latter route and I just received this email from my COO a few days ago, who indirectly is tutoring me on some tricks in business. This one was the best. The brevity and simplicity of this piece is fabulous. It might not mean much for the academically inclined, but if you are the one in the battlefield, leading the front with very little ammunition, believe me this will ring more than a bell !

Jack, a smart businessman, talks to his son.

Jack: “I want you to marry a girl of my choice”
Son : “I will choose my own bride!”
Jack: “But the girl is Bill Gates’s daughter.”
Son : “Well, in that case…ok”

Next Jack approaches Bill Gates.

Jack: “I have a husband for your daughter.”
Bill Gates: “But my daughter is too young to marry!”
Jack: “But this young man is a vice-president of the World Bank.”
Bill Gates: “Ah, in that case…ok”

Finally Jack goes to see the president of the World Bank.

Jack: “I have a young man to be recommended as a vice-president.”
President: “But I already have more vice- presidents than I need!”
Jack: “But this young man is Bill Gates’s son-in-law.”
President: “Ah, in that case…ok”

This is how business is done !

IITians may have captured the attention of the whole world, including the US Congress, but its a little known fact that 90% of them fall short of their stellar performances when it comes to impressing girls. Blame it on all-brains-no-brawn did you say ?

Well, the administrators might have a found a remedy to that too. I just noticed this news article that IIT Delhi has equipped all hostels with a gym. A couple of my friends including my CEO is from IIT Delhi, so I do have a fair bit of understanding of how their life at IIT was. We can be rest assured, with this move IIT Delhi is sure to churn perfect 10’s in brawns but would that mean fivepointsomeones otherwise ?. Lets wait and watch.

Note: Interestingly, I am reading fivepointsomeone for the past few weeks, will provide my review on it along with Mediocre But Arrogant of the same genre at a later point.

The daunting pile of todo’s, the surprise elements of sporadic activity, and every little ounce of delayed work over December, have started to avalanche down this week. I can hardly squeeze time, and the storm after the lull has kept me captivated, very little time and thought cycles I have to spare for the Blog front. Sometimes I feel work is a little unfair, but after all that I have seen, I should have known better.

Whenever I am in India, day in and day out, I see people with immense hardships just chugging along each day, hiding their pains behind a smile. At the same time, I see lots of psuedo-intellectuals like me just shouting, yelling, getting annoyed and frustrated over small issues. “Empty vessels make more noise not knowing the simple truth, that its all about shoving it down your #@$”. Here read this piece below.

When the husband arrived home, his wife met him at the door sobbing. He asked her what was wrong.

“It’s the pharmacist,” she wailed. “He insulted me something awful on the phone this morning.” Hearing this, the husband immediately headed downtown to confront the pharmacist and demand an apology.

Before he could say more than a word or two, the pharmacist cut him off and said, “Please, just listen to my side of it.”

“This morning my alarm didn’t go off,” the pharmacist began to explain, “so I was late getting up. Going without breakfast, I rushed out to my car only to realize I had locked the house with both my house and car keys inside. I had to break a window to get my keys.

”Then, driving a little too fast, I got pulled over and was given a speeding ticket. Later, about two blocks from the store, I had a flat tire. When I finally arrived at the store there was a bunch of people waiting for me to open up.

”I opened the store and began waiting on these people, and all the while the damn phone was ringing off the hook.”

Taking a breath, he continued, “Then, I had to break a roll of coins against the cash register drawer to make change and they spilled all over the floor. I got down on my hands and knees to pick up the coins, the phone still ringing off the hook. As I stood up, I cracked my head on the open cash drawer. This made me stagger back against a showcase filled with perfume bottles, causing all of them to fall to the floor and break.

”Meanwhile, the phone is still ringing without letting up. When I finally got to answering it, it was your wife. She wanted to know how to use a rectal thermometer. Believe me sir, as God is my witness, all I did was tell her.”

I happened to read this wonderful piece today, had a hearty laugh for a while. If there is one gift that I could get from God, then I think it is Humility.

Over the weekend, I took to visiting this holy place of the Hindus which is around 270 kms from Bangalore. Of course I am not religious, and I hate following rituals. Spirituality is however something I am open to discuss as blogged before. The motivation for me to accompany my parents and sisters was the opportunity to trek 13.5 kms from Tirupathi to Tirumala.

I had good company of a new friend, and together we reached the summit from the foot of the hill in around 2 hours and 20 mins, while spending some good time at most vista points along the way with some videography as well. As per most people I spoke to and also as is recorded in Wikipedia, an average person will need 3 hours to reach the summit, so what is nice to note is that I am doing well above average in my fitness right now.

The trek being the only exciting part of the visit, all else in this divine place is not worth even commenting. The basic qualities of human empathy, restraint, regard, care and above all “value for spirituality in people” is simply non-existent with the stakeholders and administration officials who have chosen to openly demonstrate utter disregard towards its patrons. The place just “stinks” without any virtues or values.

Last March, while I was working at a startup in San Mateo, I learnt some basic truths. Mediocre & Insecure minds, are a big threat to shared accomplishment & can dent your positive spirits significantly. I was acquainted to the people behind that startup for a while, and had quit a very stable & high paying job at a decent company, to help that startup with good intent.

But like all analytical minds, it did not take much time for me to figure out that ideological / cultural differences can never be bridged. I wanted to get otta there, and had started to look for new avenues, in the process I had stumbled upon a novel approach by Paul Graham. The Summer Founder’s Program I thought was a unique opportunity to get involved in. I had also counselled a few friends of mine, and nearly sent out my business idea to them, but then I was strapped in my strides, thanks to the H1-B Visa I had, which the good folks at YCombinator declined to endorse or support due to some limitations, and hence I had to endure the next few months only by venting out my frustrations.

Mostly I forgot about it with all the new beginnings later in 2005 and nearly a year after I first stumbled across YCombinator, I decided to check out how the idea has been performing, and voila, this thrilles me. Not only that, I am glad to see that a similar Winter Founder’s Program has been started by them. If any of your contacts or friends still at school are itching to start a startup, I think this is where they should get involved. At this point let me quote what Confucius the genius once said

“Tell me and I might forget, Show me and I might remember, Involve me and I will understand”.

You can’t tell people how to do business, you can’t show people how to do business, you can only get them involved & they will mean business. The success rate of the Summer Founder’s Program and the performance of YCombinator are proof of the Power that Confucius’s words carry !

The idea of CaptiveAdaptations has been brewing in our minds for some 3 years now, and less than 5 months ago, we had disclosed the CapAdap Methodology ™. Today we apply the CapAdap methodology to the various phases of human life and we will learn more about the central idea behind CaptiveAdaptations itself as it is applied to evolutionary process of each of our lives.

While we strongly believe in our theory, we are realizing the practical applications of our CaptiveAdaptations Methodology ™ by our own “application models” and at a leisurely pace. Here in the pictorial depiction below,

there are some clues about the evolutionary nature of human life. In particular all our voluntary and involuntary responses to external stimulai, at various stages in our life follow the “tive-based-abstraction-level” defined at that age-level ranging between Captive to Adaptive. (the numbers listed for each of the levels in the diagram, are not to be considered absolute or fixed, they are not validated and are just a benchmark for our initial analysis as applied to the life model)

Of particular interest are the directed arrows in the flow diagram, and the color codings of each of the abstraction levels. People who are willing to explore more on the ideas illustrated in the above figure, drop me your invaluable comments.

It happened again !. Well this is the second time in less than 2 months, and has surely beaten my odds. What am I talking about did you say ?. Here’s the story. One of my childhood buddy has bought a new Fiat Palio some 2.5 months back. Now, its the first time he has bought a new car, so he has been extremely excited about his new toy. Most times, my childish pranks on his car, has drawn his ire. So needless to say he is very passionate about his car.

But here is the big joke. Less than 3 weeks after he bought his car, a rat found its way into his car’s hood, then got crushed resulting in a breakdown. Now our muscle-man (yes my-buddy-is-a-monster) is most of the time a gentle being, but this incident, really irked him. For one, he is a mechanical engineer and loves Engineering Design. So, for 2 weeks, we had to hear his rhetoric about how foolish the design was to allow a rat to navigate its way into the engine. As an exaggerated sigh he even remarked to the service men, that their design would allow “elephants” to probably make their way into the engine through the hood of the car !

This incident caused some inconvenience, but we were more or less able to pacify him saying it was a one-off incident, and its very rare that such events happen. Lo and behold, how wrong we were, and the bigger joke, yesterday, it happened again ! The culprit a “Rat” again. Can you imagine that !.

Most of us, who have comfortably learnt to juggle with the “Californian Lifestyle” and the “Bangalore Lifestyle”, have some lessons to learn from this. The concepts of “High Availability”,”5 or 6 Nines Design methodology”, that we so easily expect and speak of, in reality we need to learn tolerance for such unimaginable events ! Rats, amazing test cases for design verification. Again, it happens only in India !.

The start of a new year and serendipity is smiling at me. Just 10 days ago in my aforeblogged Making a Difference - Redux, I had made references to a few wonderful people doing some interesting work and who are really MAD (Making a Difference).

The first on that list was PlanetRead by Brij Kothari about SLS - Same Language Subtitling. Today, I accidentally typed Google.org instead of the usual Google.com and I noticed PlanetRead on that page. A little more digging and I found this on GoogleBlog.

Both Google Foundation and Google Grants program seem very commited to address the Digital Divide issue globally. The vision of Google Foundation is made crystal clear by the words on the right side of the page by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Here let me quote.

“We hope that someday this institution will eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.”

What more can I say ?. Its definitely a shot-in-the-arm for all people who dare to think & act different. The corporate grants and backing for all such programs have had names like Stanford University, Reuters and now Google Foundation is putting their weight behind such efforts. Examples of Atanu Dey backed by Vinod Khosla, and now Brij Kothari backed by Google Foundation are screaming the obvious, all such ideas are becoming serious business, and are more than just philanthropic efforts. Let me reiterate, its time for all you good souls to act and take “The Other Road Ahead“.

CaptiveAdaptations wishes all its dear readers a