OH MAN!

At the beginning, he was in foetal position, in the cool comfort of the womb of his mother. He was regularly getting the food and water thru the umbilical cord.

Staying within, he started hearing sounds from outside and he would quietly listen to the noises. He then understood that there is a world outside from where he is currently now. And the noises tempted him to get out and reach that world.

In his desire to see the world, he started kicking the wall of the womb. Little did he realise that to his mother, that was the moment of physical pain and positive pleasure.

Days passed and he succeeded in getting out. He was born to the world.

As he opened his eyes, he saw lots of faces looking at him and he cried loud out of fear. Soon he would hear a lovely lullaby, would immerse himself in that and would sleep off peacefully.

He started growing and started learning many things. He learnt from many; first being the mother, also from other connected human beings and of course, from the nature that was around.

Mother helped him a lot. He started crawling, thereafter, trying to walk and fall, then again, walk straight without help ……..

He learnt many things from people and other creatures around. He learnt about the unity of ants and the ability of each ant to carry bodies having hundred times its weight. He understood the saving habit of storing grains by the ants.

He saw the mother hen protecting its chicks, fighting multitude of crows trying to attack them.

The nature taught him the wind, the rain, the heat, the cold and the weather changes.

For someone who started out on pure milk of the mother, he progressed into solid food and then into junk foods that were adultered. His body, mind and thoughts also started getting adultered. As he grew, his hubris also grew along.

As the body grew, he also developed feelings such as love & lust along side.

From boyhood, through student-ship, he advanced into a youth, learning many things in the process. Looking at the world, he understood that money is the single most important thing in life. And, slowly he forgot all the values taught by his mother and the nature. He married and celebrated parenthood.

As he became rich, he realised that his parents are distasteful in comparison with his new friends and relatives he had acquired. He developed a high ‘status’ for himself.

Though in his childhood he loved the hills and backwater, now he destroyed them to make houses, shopping malls & resorts. He illegally annexed land from the poor and shooed away those who approached him with hunger.

Time passed. Standing in front of his imported Belgium mirror, he saw his crumbled face and fast graying hairs and he didn’t feel good. One day, he fainted and collapsed. People brought him to the hospital.

For weeks together his languid body, strapped with equipments, was laid on the ICU bed. Hazily but, he could hear his children around fighting for the wealth created by him. He sadly realised that every one of them wanted him to die.

Then the angel approached him with the coldness to fill his body. He cried out to them to spare him. His begging for extending his life fell on dead ears, for the angel was strictly doing its assigned duty.

As the angel carried him, he tried to shake himself off from its grip. He thought that like he did in the womb, he could jump out to life again. But with no energy, he really felt fatigued and humbled.

His children buried his body and went away. Slowly, it decomposed and the worms started feeding  on it. The seeds that were thrown over his grave germinated into plants and absorbed the manure that his body had become.  

That has been the nature’s course, to give his body away to the plants and the trees that he destroyed while being alive! 

Oh man, the way  the cycle of Karma works

WHEN EDUCATION BOOMERANGS

Education is universally accepted as the means to progress, improved living conditions and better culture. It begets knowledge, skills, better behaviour and social upliftment. 

Any proper investment done in education has always yielded good returns. Can anyone think of the planet without educational infrastructure and services? 

Progress in technology brought about a virtual world where people could meet and communicate without moving. Online delivered content almost as if being offline. Covid 19 and the closure of the world consolidated the online presence, particularly in education. In fact being online helped to ensure that no one lost out their educational years during the pandemic. 

Byju’s (the company is officially known as Think and Learn Private Limited) was in existence even before Covid 19. Byju Ravindran, the promoter, has been an excellent tuition master when it came to entrance coaching for professional courses. He has cashed this reputation to scale up his venture with assistance from technology and that was the formation of Byju’s, the online educational platform. 

Due to his reputation as an excellent entrance coach, Byju was always in news. The success of Khan’s Academy, a pioneer in online classes, motivated venture funds to invest heavily in Byju’s. With such funding, Byju, in his round T shirt & Jeans ( a la Zackerburg), became a poster boy in Indian Start-up scene. 

With the large mass of K12 student in India, the funders thought that Byju’s would succeed. The company recruited from IITs and IIMs and formed a huge workforce, both in content production and marketing. Venture funds received were burned in  marketing blitzkriegs including sponsoring Indian cricket teams for years. Leading actors became Byju’s brand ambassadors. Covid was a blessing in disguise for the company where online education boomed and the pundits predicted the online makeover of education from offline. In all, Byju’s got funded to the tune of USD 8 Billion! The company went into a dizzying market cap of USD 25 Billion. 

Alas, Byju’s aggressive and unethical marketing strategies bombed. It ended up with huge litigations from customers across India. It could never reach its revenue targets. Scandels emerged. To compensate that, the company went into acquiring spree and ended up in buying about 20 companies in online & offline education space. Even that did not help the company improve its revenue expectations. Most of its investments went into black hole. Challenges with its auditing firm came out. Funders started blaming Byju and went after him personally. Good talent jumped out of the company and others got sacked. The protagonist wasn’t seen being in India lately. 

The news appeared on 14/01/24, shows Byju’s market cap being brought down to USD 1 billion by BlackRock. It is really not the end of the news. We could be hearing about Byju’s more, but not positively. It looks as if even a miracle may not be able to save Byju’s. At best, it could end up as a case study in B. Schools.

CONNECTING THE DOTS & TRYING TO MAKE SENSE FROM IT

Let us start with science, about the creation and existence of our universe. 

The Big Bang theory explains how the universe got created from a single point by high density and temperature. The whole thing is believed to have exploded from the single point and thereafter it started expanding ever since. The expansion continues, still. 

NASA describes black hole as a space with such intense gravity that it even it pulls in the light into it. In the black hole, everything is squeezed into such a tiny space, into a single dot. 

The quantum Physics hypothesizes that ALL elementary particles of matter are closed loops of waveform, with intense energy residing in it. By this hypothesis, matter & energy are identified to be two forms of one itself. This is now getting promulgated as ‘unified theory’. The latest experiments on this at CERN & other labs had generated excitement to all science lovers, world over. 

Let us now dwell a while on the Indian spiritual explanation of the situation before the creation: 

Nasadiya Sukta explains the origin of universe (verse 19:129 of Rig Ved). It says;

“There was neither non-existence nor existence then. Neither the realm of space nor the sky beyond. There was neither death nor immortality, neither night nor day, none breathed, for it was windless, and there was absolutely nothing beyond. In to the void, the force of heat came into being”

It then asks, “what stirred, where, in whose protection?”

It doesn’t ascribe the stirring to the Gods, as it says elsewhere that even Gods came after the creation. 

The puranic Hindu cosmology view asserts that the universe is created, destroyed, and re-created in an eternally repetitive series of cycles.

The repeated (cyclic) creation, destruction & re-creation of universes is not asserted by science, yet. How do we explain the big bang theory and the black hole in the context of Hindu cosmology view? Or is it all an illusion (maya) of the mind and the sense organs? 

Isn’t creation, destruction & re-creation similar to birth, death and re-birth?  

Does it help connecting the dots? Aren’t we also part of the cycle? 

Does it confuse us? Or, does it endorses Heinrich Heins, when he says, “sleep is good, death is better of course, the best thing would have been never born at all?

YEAR END MUSING

The year 2023 is about to close. In many ways, it had been a critical year of the century for the Planet so far. 

By late 2019, Wuhan reported an extraordinary respiratory illness akin to SARS and China went about on a war footing to address it but without telling the world.  Spread it did, and took every nation unaware, as we watched how the governments combated it. It came to be legally known as Covid 19 (short form of Corona Virus Disease 2019) & the pandemic did have ‘thandav’ across the planet.  

As per World Health Organisation (WHO), as of date, globally, there have been 77,28,38,745 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 69,88,679 deaths. As I write this,  a total of 13,59,57,21,080 vaccine doses have been administered on the people. This had been one hell of an anti-pandemic endeavour for the world. The way vaccines got formulated underwent sea change, to the extent that the scientists who developed the Covid vaccine unconventionally, are declared as the Nobel Prize winners for the year 2023. 

As I write this, in this part of the world, another variant of Covid, JN.1, is now playing tricks. How far & how destructive this be, will be known only by the beginning quarter of the new year. 

Yes, the year 2020 & 2021 fully belonged to the Pandemic. The year 2022 went this way, that way and only by 2023 that the world relaxed. The new normals of life slowly started receding back but with abundant caution, and now, hybrid life is a gift of Covid 19 to mankind.

Personally, the year 2023 was a year of transition for me. It is when I decided to end my deep association with the  professional and social bodies that I was actively part of. Thus, my TiE Kerala, KMA & Rotary activities fully came to a standstill. What is now left is ISTD where again, my intense involvement had well reduced. Being in the thick of it all for more than a quarter century, I was afraid that I would display ‘withdrawal’ tendencies but the impact wasn’t as heavy and today one is very comfortable with the current state of affairs. My routine acts like teaching at CUSAT, keynote deliveries, mentoring, blogging etc. continued without any hitch in 2023. 

I may want to concentrate on two main things for me for the future; travel and writing. In the year 2023, my reading got doubled and so did my travelling; Hong Kong, Andamans Island, Kolkotta, Jaipur travels figured in the year. The disappointment was not visiting Chola/Pandya edifices in Tamil Nadu, though it was very well in the plans for 2023. One hopes, it should fructify in the year 2024.  

I am also hopeful to finish 2 books during the coming year, first one in English is 99 percent ready and the other already well formed in the mind. Procrastination being what it is, still keeping the fingers crossed 😌

I would like to hear from you about the year that was for you and your plans for the year in the anvil. 

Here is wishing you the very best of the season! You take care.

VRISCHIKOLSAVAM @ POORNATHRAYEESA TEMPLE, TRIPUNITHURA, COCHIN

By late November, each year, festival in temples of Kerala begins, mostly with the Guruvayur temple Ekadashi fest. And for close to 4 months thereafter, thousands of Hindu temples across in the state of Kerala will celebrate the festivities independently.

Tripunuthura Poornathrayeesa temple fest falls in December month of each year. This year, it began on the 9th of December and it will go on till 16th December, for 8 long days. Poornathrayeesa temple festival is one of major temple festivals in Kerala, something which goes on from the morning to the wee hours of the night every day.

On each day, by morning, evening and night; plethora of art, dance and musicals are performed here, Ottan Thullal, Kathakali, Dance, Musical concerts and of course, the Melams. Different types of Melams are performed for long hours within the temple precincts, Panchari melam, Thayamabaka, Nadaswaram and the like.

Poornathrayeesa temple’s main deity is Maha Vishnu, in the form of ‘Santana Gopala Murthy’ and it is one of the patron Gods of the erstwhile Kochi kings. Monarchy is long gone but the reverence and enthusiasm with which people of Tripunuthura conducts the festivities of this temple, even to this day, is something very noteworthy. Tens of thousands of people throng to the temple each day and they stay on the premises for long duration, enjoying firstly the melam, and then, the other art forms performed around.

On the first day itself, my wife and I made our visit to the temple to enjoy the morning ‘Panchari melam’. It was played by the renowned Artist, Padmasri Peruvanam Kuttan Marar and his team. It started at 7.30 hours and went on till noon, such a nonstop performance! All this happens in front of 10 plus caparisoned elephants. It was an enchanting visual. It was reverberating and overwhelming.

We are living in the Internet era with technology playing a huge role on the life of people. It has shrunk the time on planet and its beings. However, the how people had preserved their culture and carry it on, could be well experienced from festivals such as this

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ENTREPRENEURS

On 27/10/2013, I had an opportunity to moderate a conversation with Prof. Stephen Zhang, professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy of Adelaide Business School, Australia, involving invited local entrepreneurs at Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship (XIME), Kalamassery, Kochi.

Prof. Zhang, an electronic engineer and a doctorate in management, is a simple human being, otherwise a brilliant thought leader, who has been adjudged as the top Research Professor of the year by his University for consecutive terms, in addition to being chosen among the top 2% Scientist of the world by Stanford University. He had done deep research in the psychology of entrepreneurs, uncertainty in entrepreneurship, psycho physics and gender balance in entrepreneurship

Speaking about the psychology of entrepreneurs, he said that research had proven that entrepreneurs have more self efficacy to transform increasing perception of uncertainty into exploration & opportunity identification.

He terms psycho physics as an area of significance future research to study the entrepreneurial bias and distortion of perception such as underestimating high probables end overestimating low probables.

In a significant study, his team’s research could identify that gender inclusivity is not just an equity issue but a business case. The finding is that a gender balanced team has much more chances of entrepreneurial success. It is not that one gender scores over the the other but gender balance definitely delivers better entrepreneurial outcomes.

The conversation took place in the presence of invited entrepreneurs from different fields such as technology, skill development, alternate learning, medical devices, forex etc. The audience also included the senior professors of XIME as well as student members of XIME Entrepreneurship club. The entrepreneurs had exchanged their views and shared their experiences with the professor some of which did coincide with the professor’s research findings.

It was a forenoon well spent, high in intellectual content, going deeper into understanding of the entrepreneurial psyche, all that happened in the calm and amiable institutional surrounding of XIME.

POLITICAL LEADERS BLOWING THE TRUMPET

Very often we see full page advertisements published by governments of States in newspapers across the nation, including even the vernacular dailies. The States of Delhi, Rajasthan, UP, Telangana & Punjab are most prominent among them. Staying in Kerala, one doesn’t know if our government publish such ads in newspapers outside Kerala?

It is a clear fact that a genuine reader hates advertisements in the newspaper. In fact he looks at it negatively. At worst, he would give it just a cursory glance, period. Even if some readers have a look at it, she wouldn’t bother. And it is also a fact is that no one reads the advertisement. Surely, an average newspaper reader is not bothered about the tall claims advertised by a State in the country with which he is simply not having any connection with.

All in all, the purpose of the advertisement is never served. Knowing this fully, the States waste so much of money on huge periodic advertisements on newspapers of other States whose readers never find a relevance in it.

The money saved by not blowing the trumpet in other State’s print media could be better utilised for the real welfare of the people of the State. For example, it could have saved a patient from death, it could have helped a family marry off its daughter, it would have helped build a home for homeless, it could have helped fill the empty stomach of the poverty-ridden, it could have helped many geriatrics to live better in old age homes……..

Who is bothered here? Remember, each of these States is spending additionally huge money (and machinery) in a big way in social media campaigns too. What do these political leaders of the State want? Sheer PUBLICITY, nothing else.

And most of the claims in the advertisement would have been just pronouncements with no further actions taken on it. Claims having no substance in it is being advertised by fame seeking political leaders in this ‘post truth’ world. The world had changed a lot, isn’t it ?

Other than helping the news baron’s financial status, these ads do not help any purpose.