Work organisation

Make yourself reduntant to the system - that is what a good manager is supposed to do.

When I become redundant like that I tend to spend time reading up material rather than working on the long term goals and end up being frustrated at the end of day.

What i have done is to devise a system whereby I put in atleast 8 hours a day on business work. That is quite a lot considering the amount I accomplish in a couple of hours hard work. The tougher part is the details.

Well, what I have is 2 hours of work early morning, which is the best part of my day, two hours work in the forenoon, 2 hours work in the afteroon and 2 hours in the evening. By work I mean my individual coding, writing, telephoning work from desk.

The rest of the time I can indulge in reading slashdot, reading tamil blogs and writing my blogs without sense of guilt.

How open should I be in my blogs. Should I be older than 60 to confess to all my errors which no one other than me and God knows?

Mukkalam unarntha gnanai

There are people who can look into the past and the future. Is it logical, scientific?

Take for example, a doctor. The doctor is trained to diagnose diseases. If he/she is good at it and practice for a long time gaining experience, they can diagnose disease just by looking at a person. There is a Chinese story:

A famous Chinese doctor visited the emperor. He looked at the emperor's face and said that you have a serios ailment, which can be cured with medicines now. The emperor does not believe it as he has no discomfort and ignored the warning.

The next time, the doctor says, your disease has gone deeper and can be cured by sustained treatment. He was ignored again. The third time he was saying that a surgery is required to heal the emperor but he is still in curable condition.

The emperor ignored him this time too. After a couple of months, the emperor falls ill, when all other doctors fail to cure him, the emperor recalls the visiting Doctor's words and calls for him. When the messengers reached the doctor's place, he has already left leaving a note that the emperor's case is beyond cure.

If one learns and practices to look at the past and future of a person not just the present, is it not possible to know mukkalam?

Compassion

The closest a person feels is with his/her mother. Child spends a lot of time with the mother and they know each other in more detail than in any other relationship. Same goes with siblings.

The special comfort we feel with college and school mates is also due to their knowing more about us than the front we put up at that moment.

That is why husband/wife relationship also special. The spouses know things about each other which no other relation knows.

Relationship building in business, tricks taught in How to Make Friends all rely on getting to know the personality of the person other than focussing on just the context in which we interact.

In party talk, one tends to enquire about the guests, their work, working times, children, parents, brothers, sisters and other personal details. When you party with a client, boss or co-worker you are coming out of the strictly work mode and get to know about the person more.

In a life or in a railway journey we are forced into closer positions with strangers. People handle it in different manner. In a lift you can smile at your co-passengers and talk about weather, compliment a little girl about her hairstyle, and a big girl about her nice dress so on.

In railway journey some people have the knack of striking up conversation and building good relationships which last till the destination.

The key to all this is understanding that every human being is a complex personality with atleast four dimensions. Instead of only focussing on the 3 dimensions present at this moment, go into the fourth dimension (time) and empathize with his/her past (immediate as well as distant) and possible future.

DB Design

The generic design for an information management system is throwing up a number of surprises. The idea is very simple, all data are to be stored in a hand full of tables with a few columns tracking what type of information the record contains.

This gives many advantages in data handling. Back up, storage, transmission, exchange of information become easier and more efficient.

Client applications can have a neat, small API to send data to be stored in the database. Providing rich client experience and applicaion extension possibilities are limitless with this design.

The flip side is the size of the tables (no of rows might become unmanageable) even in a medium sized application. Data access and integrity checks migh bog down the database engine to a crawl.

To cover this point, we are planning to create report tables which will get updated by triggers as the data is filled in into the underlying tables.

Reducing each set of data in a more traditional db design to this schema is a problem to solve and the solution unravels rather beautifully. If we pull up the necessary energy and implement the whole thing fast, we can see how it measures up in real world usage.

We are planning to release it as a open concept.

Love in in the air

Valentine's Day is tomorrow. Love is overflowing in millions of minds. Or does it?

Like thanksgiving day (or Pongal in Tamil Nadu), it is a good idea to have a day dedicated to expressing one's love to the loved one. After all many soules do not regularly express their love. This can be a catalyst.

In Tamil there are three words for love as used in English. Kadhal is love between husband/wife or lovers. Paasam is between blood relatives (father/son, mother/son, uncle/nephew so on). And finally anbu which is universal.

What could be the equivalents in English? Paasam could be loosely translated as affection and anbu..... let me think, hmmmm.... "empathy", very liberal translation. Any better words?

In hindi it is pyaar all the way, in German it is liebe that rules and in Chinese you have the ai. I am not an authority to rule out other forms, but to my knowledge among these languages Tamil is the only one with a separate word for universal love.

Gandhi bashing

Today an article in The Hindu talks about aversion of intellectuals and chattering classes to identifying with Gandhian thoughts. Gandhi is at best someone to be tolerated with.

During my school days and even today, Gandhi bashing is a fashion statement among my contemporaries. I read blogs proudly proclaiming that they have issues with the way Gandhi handled-------------- (fill anything you want here).

But what the "thinking" class can not understand is how Gandhi was able to move the millions of people. How people identified themselves with the "half naked fakir". You can write treatise on economics, you can use super computers to calculate what is the right way to reduce poverty in the country, but you are still living in your cathedral in New Delhi, Chennai or in a foreign town.

Nothing beats emulating the lives of the meekest and the poorest. That helps to understand what they go through and how they think. With that empathy, whatever decision the leader takes will resonate with the masses, because they would have done the same as a leader.

If you expect to solve starvation deaths by discussing about funding plans with Wold Bank officials at Ashoka Hotel lobbies, it can get you only a little distance.

Politics and leadership

What should a leader have? Administrative capabilities? Intelligence? Courage?

Empathy towards fellow human beings is the most important thing. If that is present the rest can be provided by any number of follwers who will be attracted by the empathy of the leader.

That is why a political party by IIT alumni need not necessarily be a success. Why a Kamaraj, Anna Durai, Indira Gandhi, and MAHATMA GANDHI become leaders? Not because of their admin or intelligence alone. But by connecting the those around them which makes the circle wider and wider.

Every one is stripped down to their bare bodies have near similar physical worries and stripped off their pretentions have near similar psychologicl needs. Recognising this a leader is bereft of hatred, anger and full of understand and love.

Is that not enought to attract human beings?

Name one person in India/ World who is such a leader!

Why India is like this?

There was a revealation during the meal last night. We were all talking about the greatness of Subramanya Bharathi, Ilayaraja and other Tamil greats, lamenting how there are sung, and criticising leaders, government and politics for the ills of government.

I have a theory. Every minute of my life I have in the society is cost to the society. If I do not add value to the society by using those minutes, then it is free loading. When one person free loads, it has a multiplier effect. Say, I work only 2 hours a day and after a bout of consciousness started putting 3 hours a day. The additional 1 hour work will generate some output which will make working and living easier for others and each one so affected might add say half an hour more of contribution to the society, which in turn trigger another round of value addition and so on.

Reverse the above and imagine where I work only 1hour a day. Every one loses. That is why our roads are broken, the garbage is not collected, drinking water is not pure, policemen collect bribes and you name any ill.

If I start putting in 24 hours of life from tomorrow, I would have done as much service to the society as any number of hours of arguing and discussing how to solve the ills of this society. Is it easy? No, it is very hard. Is it doable, very much.

I am going to start and see how it works.

The priorities suck

In India now the political and chattering classes are pre-occupied with the middle and higher-middle class. The communist parties and Congress party to some extent have to keep reminding the government about the vast majority of poor people whose interest are to be taken care of.

That is the beauty of democracy and our elections. You do what you want for 5 years, but at the end of 5 years, you need the stamp of approval from the man in the street, in the slums, in the garbage dumps. How many crores of people in India are homeless? How many do not get 3 meals a day? How many children do not have access to education?

Are these not the priorities for any government?

Say what you will about the Left they are the conscience keepers of the ruling elite. When the rulers and leaders start living like an average citizen of the country, then there will be true democracy.

An eye opener

Seema Mustafa has written a bold article among the chorus of cheer for the rich here is a different voice
The article in DC