Drishti - the vision

Those of you who drive will agree with me, that in most uncertain situations 2 nd gear is the best to drive your car in. It gives you an opportunity to quickly slow down and if you have the luxury of a few extra unclaimed yards then you can quickly seize those too by accelerating just a little bit more. No real hassles, not much risk involved, a sense of complete control (just a sense) and smooth ride. OK! before a speed lover points out let me accept that indeed the ride is devoid of any thrill. So what? It is much safer, risk-free and with a higher probability of getting to where I am headed to. So unless you put me in a Volvo with at least six air bags, ABS, obstruction sensors and parachutes I will not speed -up on roads. But what about life? Are we also living our lives in second gear? Trying to exercise that sense of control and making it hassle-free? Are we forfeiting the right to thrilling successes just because we do not wish to run the risk of painful failures. Are we settli...

I am a strategist. I like to think of interesting strategies. Pulling things together, understanding trends, making predictions, optimizing activities etc. etc. Sometimes I look at different people around me and try to think of what i would do in their positions. For example how would I launch a car in the market or as a doctor how would i maximise benefit for my patients etc. The most recent role to which I played an imaginary understudy was that of a terrorist. I sat thinking what should be the best strategy for people who wish to destroy India. After lot of deliberation I reached to a conclusion that inaction is perhaps the best action. As an Indian, every morning I get up to the threat of meeting with an accident on the road. Even if I manage to reach office safely I am not sure if I can still be sure of a job. Some whimisical investment bankers up there on the East coast of America can create havoc in the lives of me and my friends just because the idiots thought that they can mak...

Everybody likes to be successful. And since most of us do not have the courage to go out there and create something for ourselves we conspire to get successful at somebody else's expense. One of the most frequented paths in this pursuit is the Corporate ladder. Anyways, this blog is not meant to take a critical view of this path. I am more interested in sharing with my readers (I hope there are a few) the dilemma that I face everyday at my office. I call it the Corporate Pendulum. For those of you who never bothered much about the science of simple harmonic motion (and also for those who never bothered about science itself) during your +2 classes here is the shortest course in Pendulum Physics. A pendulum oscillates around a mean position and it does so because there is some stupid force acting on it all the time trying to settle it at that mean position. Off course the pendulum, everytime it reaches that mean position, has some momentum and instead of settling down it overshoots t...

We are all familiar with the not-so-rare situation when our computer goes berserk. Nothing behaves the way it should. All the programs either suddenly freeze in time or manage to shed the chains of slavery that tie them to their algorithms. Our brain generally perceives it with a tag-line: "fir hang ho gaya ". And in these moments I profusely thank the person who has put that small button on the machine, the most powerful button in my opinion, even more powerful than the start button - the restart button. As in computer so also in life, we are bestowed with the ability to restart (and if you wish to thank anyone for that then in this case you are not struggling against anonymity - just thank god). I have a special place in my heart for people who have dared to restart their lives - Amitabh Bachchan, Sourav Ganguly, Abraham Lincoln, Maharana Pratap, Napolean Bonaparte. These are all people who struggled to reach formidable heights in their lives, slipped from the peaks and the...

My current role gives me an opportunity to learn a lot about management tools. Those sophisticated diagrams, matrices, maps, charts and tables that have supposedly been devised over a long period of time after intense and deep research. Many of you must have heard about things like 2 by 2 matrices. These are used by many management professionals, consultants, business leaders to segment markets, characterise products, define customers, assess economies etc. These are very simple to use, we can put any two parameters on the X-axis and any two on the Y-axis and then (as ardent fans of these matrices would want us to believe) we can aspire to fit the entire world in one of those four boxes. Some innovative professionals in their spare time have devised the next generation matrices which also allow for a conitnuous gradation within any particular box or even across the whole matrix. Then there is Michael Porter's famous five competitive forces analysis. This is a neat tool for industry...

This has been my email adress for a very long time. If I look at it now it comes across as bit of a propaganda, even a bit immature. It has a history. It was created sometime in 2001. I was not in IIT then. I was preparing for JEE. And in those days I used to go about with a different email id: mrfair320@rediffmail.com , even more propaganda and even more immature. I would not go into the history of this last one and my only defence is that I was only 16 years of age when I registered this one. Anyways coming back to kunaliit2002. I registered this while I was still preparing for JEE with a condition that I would use it only if I manage to get through IIT JEE to join the 2002 session. It was quite logical too because under any other scenario this email id would have only been misplaced. And it also explains why it is not kunaliit d 2002 for at that time I did not know which of the seven IITs I would end up in. I used to go to the cyber cafe every so often, check my mrfair id, and take ...

Those of you who have lived in Bangalore would know Blossoms. The famous three storeyed bookshop in Churchstreet. I had been there once about three months ago and had failed to discover the 3rd floor (may be I was in hurry or something). I went there again yesterday. In fact it was not a planned visit, it was just that we were looking for a decent place to dine and stumbled at Mainland China (it is a nice chinese restaurant by the way -especially their lunch buffet is value for money) and Blossoms is within a flower throw distance from Mainland China. This time I managed to discover the third floor. Second hand treasure or should I call it Treasure - second hand, anyways I am only referring to a vast collection of second hand books that was buried in this floor. I found a second hand copy of Porter's famous "Competitive Advantage of Nations" - hard bound, in good condition and only 500 rupees - a real bargain I would say. Then I found something interesting on World War-I,...