Thoughts. Stories. Ideas. Poor narration!

For the first time in twenty two years, I have come around to set a new year’s resolution for myself. Not many would know that I’m a very clumsy reader. My attention span, when it comes to reading, is worse than that of a kid. And resilience more fragile than India’s batting order. The worst part about it all is that I enjoy reading. I could do it on most days without batting an eyelid. But like most others of my generation, I’ve never really been able to incentivize/discipline/get myself to read. And it is time to slice through this big ball of lethargy.

Taking inspiration from Prasad Sawant’s post, I resolve to read 25 books in 2012. If I were a sales guy, I would have set my target as 25000 and then fabricated books, stories and excuses to justify meeting 0.01% of my target. But I do not believe too much in inflated targets or futuristic projections. 25 it will be then! An honest attempt. It’d be really nice if I could somehow overshoot this target. And I’m hoping I will. After all, setting modest targets has always been my forte (much to my dismay, I may add). I’ll maintain the list of books on my sidebar and update it after every read.

25 books in 2012 has to happen! A start this is.

Wish me luck!

On a quick glance through the posts I’ve made over the last year or so – a glaring theme emerges. Almost all of my latest posts are on “Education” – one way or the other. How loser can a blogger be to have “Education” as one of his categories? Well, ask me. My previous post, which was three months ago during my first break from XL rigour spoke about method in academics, then there is a entry on the menacingly vocational nature of education, and this post on the proof of concept was conceived during one of my numerous disillusioned run-ins with education.

Education as a topic is worse than a lullaby, more potent than pills. To write about education is as dull as Rahul Dravid’s ODI batting strike rate in the mid/late nineties. But with Dravid’s renewed eloquence in 2011, education can take heart. There is hope, still! Random thoughts of a confused/convoluted/demented mind make for good blog posts, you then graduate to love sagas, abstruse lines of poetry, armchair commentary on sport and so on. All make for good reads. Yet, I ended up sticking to prose on education. There is a reason to it.

My father is a education consultant/educator/tutor. And education in the 1990s was orthodox to a great extent. All throughout my schooling, there was tremendous focus on paper and pen education. About solving, erasing, drawing lines, resolving, rewriting, better presentation, practicing, reading text. You get the drift, don’t you? And tuition was encouraged. I must have spent half my life sitting in institution/classes/tuition. School classes, math classes, science classes, competitive exams, Bombay Talent Searches, National Talent Searches, language sessions, lab sessions, Sanskrit classes, computer science courses, C++, Java to list down a few. The best bit is that I was never too enthusiastic about any of them. I am pretty convinced that if I had spent half the hours I have spent in tuition in my life, in practicing (say) water polo or fencing, I would have made the fringes of the Indian national squad, for sure!

Kids in Mumbai waste a quarter of their childhood travelling to tuition. In sweltering heat, with sweat under their armpits and fifty rupees in pocket, most kids travel on about an hour to reach their college/tuition. I used to travel 2 hours a day (1 hour each way) bearing the full brunt of local trains just to “reach” my junior college. And, let me assure you that it is a very difficult task to motivate yourself to pay attention in class/tuition after one hour of ruthless travel. Like most others in my city, I have sat through hours and hours and hours of tuition, listless and confused – most importantly physically and mentally tired. Add t0 that the randomness of engineering in Mumbai where I was sitting in class six hours a day, travelling for another two hours per day with just 40 days of proper holiday per year, and what you get is more education and some more. Add to that the tuition I took for ghastly horrors like engineering drawing and you have some more education. Then education for MBA entrance exams. And then MBA itself.

All throughout my childhood, I was told that tuition was essential for academic and professional development and thattuition was academia itself. (By tuition, I mean the act of an educator/coach delivering concepts/knowledge/gyaan in classroom environment to students). And hence I held all classrooms in very high regard, as if it was my moral duty to absorb all “tuition” that was being delivered. Naive and young, I had no reason to believe that tuition was a farce. As time passed, and I developed some ounce of critical thinking, it slowly crept to me that tuition was not as sacrosanct as it was made out to be. I started finding faults in tuition methodologies. At times, it became very glaring that the educator was simply not putting enough effort into delivering tuition, and here I was on the other end, writhing in frustration because someone else was not doing his job (for what he was being paid for) perfectly. Sometime in the middle of my engineering curriculum, I suffered a total breakdown in faith. I came to the conclusion that, as a student I could do no more. I was trying my level best to be a attentive student, but thetuition and methodologies were failing me over and over again. I sensed no improvement. And from then onwards, a huge part of me resigned to the fact that I would have to make up for this inefficiency in tuition by working on my own, behind closed doors, not only trying to consolidate my understanding, but also make up for the fallacies in tuition and its methods.

According to me, the gaps in a course emerge out of the following themes:

1. Interest: Lack of awareness and understanding of why one is taking the course.

2. Planning: Lack of a solid course structure which would have otherwise allowed the students to plan their way across its duration.

3. Communication: Educators not working on their communication are like batsmen refusing to work on their fielding. Unfortunately, there is no place for either in the modern world.

4. Ambiguity: Some educators, even at this day and age, prefer to thrive on ambiguity and information asymmetry. I thought that these themes vanished back in the 19th century.

5. Relevance: What is taught in class vs what appears in exams vs what is required/relevant in the real world.

6. Trepidation: A feeling of constant fear that if I don’t lick your boots, I will fail in the course.

7. Mindset: Educators need to move from a Theory X mindset to a Theory Y mindset. Students want to learn. And if you can put in honest, quality effort; they will reciprocate with honest, quality work. But it is not easy to put in honest effort being an educator perhaps. Because it entails generating interest, structuring the course, mesmerizing the students with classy communication, reducing ambiguity to zero, bringing in relevance and not abstraction and alleviating any fear in the minds of the students. Clearly, an uphill ask.

In my honest (and worthless) opinion, good schools are those which work systematically towards eliminating all these gaps which agitate student lives. I don’t know what schools these are, and where you find them, but an ideal institution needs to have a publicly available mandate describing its measures/efforts made to tackle and eliminate the above gaps. There are other minor themes to talk about as well, but that would drag this post on forever, so i’ll cease to flirt with them.

In the middle of all the chaos, I ended up securing a University Rank and some obscene scores in my engineering degree. How and more importantly why, I do not know. But a lot of it has to be attributed to this web I had gotten myself into. I would put a lot of effort into every course, not because I wanted to excel badly at it, but because I felt that the tuition and its methods were inadequate and insufficient. I have spent hours and hours inside my study room, contemplating on “How should this have been taught?” , “Say if I were to teach this, how could I do this better?” and thus wasted a whole lot of productive time reworking and reinventing the wheel, to cover up for the foibles of poor tuition. All this in the hope that somewhere down the line the educators would perhaps work a bit harder to deliver quality content, and somewhere down the line I could just go back to my room, put my feet up and relax, knowing that the content had been ably delivered in the classrooms.

When I look back at it, I do not feel bad about the grind as much. On the positive side, it helped me make a lot of friends – for almost always I was the one explaining, elucidating concepts before exams. But it has cost me a fortune. For the last three to four years, I have sacrificed all my interests and desires, for getting entangled in this web, I have never really managed to find time to indulge myself in things that I want to do. I have not attended/enjoyed/pursued as many quizzes as I would have wanted to, never found the peace to prepare for prestigious quiz events. I have given up on cricket totally, and almost all other sports other than football. There have been numerous occasions where I wanted to begin something entrepreneurial, which of course I had to shelve. Regurgitating classroom concepts meant lesser movies, lesser parties, lesser sporting events, lesser life. Compensating for the lack of proper tuition has made me unhappy, unhealthy and grumpy beyond repair. It should not surprise you when I tell you that I’ve not had a proper holiday/vacation/sojourn for four years now. For, I have spent all my vacations doing mundane activities which I wanted to but could not pursue because of the ambiguity, irrelevance and futility of tuition and courses.

But very recently, I have made peace with the fact that the education and tuition is never going to improve drastically. And it is an individual choice that one has to make whether to bother oneself with the clumsy and regressive methods of tuition or just let this phase go, expecting no real value out of the whole deal. What good has come out of this million hours of fruitless labour, is that I now have (very?) sound perspectives about tuition – methods, frameworks, responsibilities of the educators and students, planning, delivery, execution and grades/rewards.  Sometimes, I desperately want to don the hat of an educator for I genuinely feel that I could structure/deliver courses gazillion times better than they are done today. And then I write posts on education, hoping against hope, that someone in the wind would catch the sentiment and tuition would improve in the coming periods. I am a wiser man now. People talk about market research, prospecting to find undervalued stocks, emerging themes and what not –  education for me is the theme of the next decade. There is so much to do in education (as with insurance, bond markets, infrastructure, healthcare and microfinance) that somewhere down the line these ideas about tuition would no doubt bear some fruit. With international schools (as are health/wellness centres) mushrooming all over the country, education presents itself as a lucrative/meaningful opportunity. With added competition, institutions would have to shoulder more responsibility, reinvent themselves, work on their tuition and academic structures in order to survive. And I hope that the generation ahead, will have a better sense of tuition and education than what I was fed. The education theme is so strong that Mckinsey and BCG have set up their own education practices in this country in recent years. There is enough work for everyone!

Given this rather verbose disclosure, my intensity of posts on education will wane. You shall be taken out of your misery, not to worry. But not before I have made you read this another post under the category “Education”. Ha! 1-up on you!

There is a sense of betrayal. I have given up far too much in search of education/tuition and have returned empty handed far too often. Perhaps, it is because my ideas are flawed. Or my decisions. I don’t know. But now, as I see things, it is futile to give up life for the cause of education. There are better causes, more pressing needs (both personal and societal)  in this world to channel your attention onto.

A lot of us succeed in day to day life. Success is almost always measured on the basis of results which are often easily quantified and flashed as headlines in one form or the other. What is always left unexplored is the path to success. The more I think about it – there are only two clear routes to success. One Method and two Genius.

Genius is usually defined as an ‘exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability’. The most important deduction is that (as you would say in study of microeconomics) genius is an internal. Genius is the inherent ability of an individual. It can be put to use with the same efficacy at any time of the day.

Method is perhaps what you would call the learning component of an activity. Method is all about skill. Method is about improving your chances by repetitive practice. Method is about locking yourself in a room, giving up things that you like and focusing on the task in hand, by repeatedly (rather monotonously) doing the same thing. Over a longer period of time, method can take various forms and there is always a chance for improvisation. The key takeaway is that method is an external.

Almost every publication in the world refers to Sachin Tendulkar as the best batsman of his generation. But very rarely, perhaps never has his success been attributed to Genius. Sachin Tendulkar is the epitome of Method – a brilliant example of how the power of Method can be harnessed to its optimum. There have been stories of Sachin being asked to practice with a one rupee coin kept on the stumps. If he batted through the entire practice session without getting bowled, he would be allowed to keep the coin. A lot of Sachin’s critics have pointed out his inability to win matches overseas. Throughout his childhood, Method prepared Sachin to play on the tracks of the sub-continent. Methodical approach would take more time (especially as compared to Genius) to adjust to different conditions abroad. Its all but natural.

Genius is the ability to score 40 ball hundreds on green-tops when the rest of the team folds out without scoring. Genius is about making Method looks stupid. Humiliate it at times. Genius is about playing an outrageous shot and getting out on a zero when your team needs you most. And then be shameless enough to smile at the cameras while biting into a Cassata. Genius could be equated to Virender Sehwag.

There have been times when some very enthusiastic (rather delusional?) relatives have termed me a genius. They could not have been farther from the truth. (General gyaan alert. Farther is appropriate when used in terms of distance. Further denotes time span. I had noted this during the CAT preps an year ago.) My life is governed by Method to the tee. I make lists all the time to organize things. Add new items. Cut out items. Duplicate lists. Write them twice. Make new lists. I solve sums. 100 sums of the same variety. If the 101st sum is asked, I won’t be able to answer. I rarely participate in class. For I don’t grasp things intuitively. Only when I go back to my room, and re-read what has happened, I am in a position to comment on the topic. When I’m learning a new topic/skill (say driving a car, economics, appreciation of poetry), I  lag behind to start with as the initial phase is all about Genius. It is internal. Only after a certain period of time, the impact of Method sets in. And I begin to make ground on the Geniuses who have the early advantage. In short, I am a Method person, and I have no hesitation in admitting it. And I am tempted to believe that I understand how Method works and can spot Method in action! Rahul Dravid’s recent batting exploits in England are an apt tribute to Method.

As Genius is intuitive, it saves its bearer a lot of time. What the average John Doe can do in 10 hours, the Genius can do in 5. Let us call the five hours saved by Genius by a rather methodical and an unimaginative name as – Genius Dividend (GD) – on similar lines of the Demographic Dividend (DD).

How the GD is put to use makes or breaks a person. Lionel Messi is a Genius with the ball at his feet. And the entire world knows that. But the 2009 Champions League Final was won by a smashing header by Messi who was incidentally the shortest player on the pitch(http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=445360167242). No footballer I know works harder than Messi. He is Methodical in areas where he knows that his Genius won’t take him through. Messi from what I know has worked very Methodically on his heading and tackling. Same goes with Graeme Swann’s & R Ashwin’s spin bowling. On the other hand is a very talented, natural footballer called Mario Balotelli who in the last twelve months has been involved in dumping his girlfriend on national television, disrupting traffic after being left out of the first eleven, scoring it with hookers, throwing water balloons on cars and partying with the Italian Mafia. No wonder Jose Mourinho was fed up with him in no time.

The problem with Genius is that it almost always errs on the side of arrogance. Method on the other hand prefers to err on the side of caution. Genius needs to realize that it has to do better than Method. That it is a complete failure on Genius’ part if it gets trumped by Method. Our society values Genius a bit too much. A lot of time, effort and bandwidth is expended on discussing Genius – mostly its fads, foibles and fallacies. Genius is pampered to the extent of making it lazy, redundant. Worse, unaccountable. Genius should be made accountable for its GD.  Salivating over unaccountable Genius is a waste of time. Method is a better, more honest prospect. While Genius is not affected by talk or constructive criticism, Method is sure to respond to any attention that it gets. Method makes most of its resources. Genius is perhaps wasteful. But minimizing waste has never been our motive in life, has it? Especially given the amount of food we waste in weddings.

On the 15th of August 2005, about a couple of months after I had passed out of Gokuldham High School, I was called back to school to hoist the national flag. Needless to say, I regard it as one of the proudest moments of my life. My school has a fairly large open area, about the size of two basketball courts. The Independence Day ceremony was held there. A host of dignitaries took to the podium while the students (about 400 of them) were sitting in neatly maintained files on the ground – a large part of which was brown soil while a small patch was covered with cement. White was the flavour of the day. Students, teachers and the non-teaching staff were all dressed in impeccable whites.

Dark clouds were hovering menacingly since morning, and every second person mumbled a silent prayer, trying to delay the advent of any rains. The programme started on time, with groups of students performing gracefully as ever.

(I’ve been to two schools in my life – Pragnya Bodhini High School and Gokuldham High School. One commonality was that both schools were ‘entrenched in culture’, so as to say. I did a lot of culturally significant, socially relevant activities while in these schools. And it made me happy at the end of the day. I never expected any reward. It was just a way of life. Over the last six years, the scenario has changed so badly, that at times, I feel like weeping in a corner)

The prayers were not working, and the weather got more menacing with every passing moment. Within half an hour or so, the heavens opened and it started pouring. Students ran helter-skelter. Some took refuge under trees, some went into the basement. The drizzle stooped within minutes, but it had done a lot of damage. There were puddles of water on the cement. The brown soil had become filthy and gooey. All students came out to the open area and stood looking at each other, waiting for someone to take some initiative. The mumurs got stronger. There was unease in the air.  Neither the students nor the teaching staff wanted to soil their whites and were reluctant to sit in the mud. Our principal, Mrs. Usha Raina, then did something spectacular which still remains fresh in my mind. She caught a whiff of what was happening around her. In no time, she came down from the podium and plonked herself on the ground -  brown slimy dirty patches of mud all over her pristine white sari. After a couple of gasps and shrieks, all the teaching staff and students had gotten back to their positions on the ground and the rest of the programme concluded as planned.

The above for me is the most definitive description of leadership.

I was wondering about ways to define leadership. Say, what makes a good leader? Write five qualities of a leader -

a. Inspiring

b. Forward Thinking

c. Motivating

d…… yada yada

Half way through this method of defining leadership, I realized that one can’t really define leadership. It’s like goodwill or love. Very intangible. Can’t be captured in words. And it’s also very under-rated. When mutual funds/institutions invest in foreign equities, all they see (apart from a certain market cap threshold) is the quality of the senior leadership. Investors who put their faith and money in sound leaderships like Infosys, Unilever, Tata Group, HDFC Bank, Asian Paints have reaped tremendous rewards over the years.

I honestly believe that India has a huge leadership deficit. Not just at the Centre or at the political level, but even in local bodies and communities. And there is a worrying leadership deficit especially in our GenI – impatient, irresponsible and infidel. Although I’ve not done enough to explore different aspects of student life, I still maintain that I’ve really felt sad at the lack of “student leadership” around me for the last six years. More disappointing has been the complete leadership failure of non-students around me – educators, mentors, relatives et cetera. Leadership is not about the number of committees you’ve headed in your life. If it makes you feel any better or worse, I’ve headed none. Leadership is about making a difference.

Can you be taught leadership in college? Can there be a course on “how to lead”? I don’t know. But some colleges and their students have always exhibited better leadership qualities. Perhaps it’s in the air out there. Perhaps it’s in their DNA. Perhaps it’s just a result of focused effort. So, about a week ago, when I was given a chance to join Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) for their MBA course, what I immediately told myself was, “Dude! Its XLRI! The cradle of leadership!”.

To put it in cricketing parlance, if the famed IITs are known for producing Sachin Tendulkars, XLRI gives the world its Mahendra Singh Dhonis. The world identifies with a good leader. Although Dhoni’s batting average might not be amongst the world’s best, there is no questioning his brand equity or the respect he commands from his peers. And a lot of it has got to do with exemplary leadership – Winning captain of the T20 World Cup, Winning Captain of the 2011 World Cup, Captain of the top Test playing Nation – perhaps the best leader Indian cricket has ever had.

Leadership has always been a huge turn on for me. I used to get goosebumps when Leander Paes led India in Davis Cup ties or when Patrick Vieira led out Arsenal or when Steven Gerrard inspired his Liverpool troops. I secretly dreamt of “playing under” such a leader.

If I do end up joining XLRI in a month’s time, it’ll never be about the big money or the big ticket. It’ll be more about understanding, appreciating and imbibing leadership – a quality that is very scarce these days. And as we all know, scarcity creates value! And what better place to put an end to this leadership deficit of six years other than “The Cradle of Leadership” which incidentally happens to be in Mahendra’s home state. Perhaps he’ll be able to teach me a few things during my vacations