Thoughts. Stories. Ideas. Poor narration!

Sport mirrors life. There’s a lot more to sport, than what the television broadcasters offer us, and I’ve always looked at sports as an invaluable medium to inculcate life lessons. A lot of stories today – all from sporting careers. And a lot to learn. There’s an African, a Brit, a Pakistani and a New Zealand national – no world beaters as such, but winners in a not so usual a contest.

Collins Obuya is your average frail Kenyan who looked like he’d blown away by Shaun Tait’s bouncers in a recent World Cup encounter. Obuya burst onto the scene in the 2003 World Cup and impressed all with his leg spinners. He picked up 13 wickets at an average 28.76 in the 2003 World Cup and took a career best 5 for 24 in Kenya’s win over Sri Lanka at Nairobi. Hailed as the successor to Asif Karim, Obuya was touted as the best young spinner in Africa. His stellar performances earned him a contract with Warwickshire in the English League. In the months to follow, the ball just wouldn’t turn for Obuya. He faced health issues, his bowling deteriorated and he couldn’t buy a wicket.  Obuya has thirty ODI wickets to his name. He had 25 till 2003, which means he’s picked up five wickets in the last seven years, after earning his contract with Warwickshire. To much surprise, Obuya has played in both the 2007 and 2011 World Cups. Not as a leg spinner, but as a specialized middle order batsman. Obuya is Kenya’s highest run-getter in the 2011 World Cup with a healthy average of 48.60, scoring a 98* against the mighty Australians.

James Franklin made his Test debut in 2000 when he played as a seamer against Pakistan. He scored a pair (zero runs in either innings) to kick start his Test Career. For the last three years, he has been a permanent fixture in New Zealand’s batting order. In his first year in international cricket, he had a batting average of 7. He averages 54 in one day internationals played in 2011. Franklin suffered a knee injury in 2006-07 and was never the same bowler. That he switched his core competency from being a bowler to a batsmen given the circumstances, is what still guarantees him a spot in the Kiwi side.

The highest wicket taker in the 2011 World Cup is our very own Shahid Bhai. With twenty one wickets to his name, he’s outperformed stalwarts like Muralidaran and Harbhajan Singh. The problem is that he started his career as an opening batsman, some twelve years ago. Afridi was ferocious with the bat in the late nineties. Aged 16 years and 217 days, Afridi became the youngest player to score an ODI century. In his first international innings, Afridi broke the record for fastest century in ODI cricket, reaching his hundred from 37 balls. The eleven sixes he struck also equalled the record for most in an ODI innings. Batting was his calling or so it seemed. Sometime in the middle of the last decade, he was found out by international bowlers. And runs came to trickle. His technique and approach was not good enough to merit him a spot in the team as a specialized batter. He had to develop his bowling to remain a part of the Pakistan side. As things stand currently, Shahid Afridi is Pakistan’s most successful spinner. His 313 ODI wickets make him Pakistan’s third highest wicket taker behind Wasim and Waqar. Not bad for a Pathan, for whom batting was his ‘true calling’.

Rebecca Romero has two Olympic medals – a Silver in 2004 and a Gold in 2008. What makes it special is that the 2004 medal was won in Rowing and the 2008 triumph was in cycling. A champion rower – she won a silver medal at the Athens 2004 Olympics in the quadruple sculls, and the following year was part of the British crew that won the 2005 World Championships in the quad sculls. In 2006, she quit rowing due to a chronic back problem. But she couldn’t give up her love for sport and the stomach for a fight. She took up cycling and made rapid advances. The individual gold at the Beijing Olympic was her crowning glory.

We have been told a lot of times, stories of companies going out of business as they failed to embrace change, failed to adapt themselves with the need of the markets and the consumers, failed to innovate. A lot of corporate branding has to do with change and dynamism as well. More importantly, a lot of careers hit a roadblock, when the employee fails to reinvent himself in the workspace.

How difficult is it to reinvent yourself professionally? Suppose an employee working at a desk for four years just realises that his core skills are no longer good enough to sustain him in the market. What does he do? Surely, pick up something else. That he can’t afford to given that he is so highly leveraged is another issue altogether.

Why are certain people able to reinvent themselves faster and more peacefully than others? How can Sachin Tendulkar rule over all three versions of cricket, whereas most others invariably restrict themselves to one form? Anurag Behar, in his latest column talks about two extremes in philosophy of education – “the liberal educationist” and “the instrumental educationist”. He says -

The “liberal educationist” believes in education for its own sake: That only learning anchored in deep thoughts and broad perspectives can be called education; that stoking the thirst for knowledge is sufficient to handle life. To him, thinking of how education can prepare someone for a vocation is somewhere between ludicrous and sacrilegious.

The “instrumental educationist” wants the child to prepare for employment— the earlier the better. After all, the real purpose of education is generating livelihood—everything must be aligned to that. Skills and knowledge relevant to employment must be central to the curriculum. In this view, the ability to think critically, perspectives about society and scientific understanding of nature are somewhere between distractions and unaffordable luxuries.

As graduates in India, the focus on instrumental education is very high. Liberal views are not valued by the system, peers or examiners. The current focus of Indian education, especially IT, is on vocation, which aims at transforming lifestyle and eating habits more than anything else. There is no impetus for thought per se, and the confluence of thoughts from various walks of life. And this method of learning perhaps, is what makes most Indian graduates very rigid; very inflexible. Because most students are taught to study for a particular vocation, it becomes difficult to change career tracks at a later stage. Most of us join engineering because a mediocre engineer earns more than a mediocre lawyer or a mediocre artist or a mediocre footballer or a mediocre keyboard player or a mediocre ballet dancer.

Say you are the 256,443 rd best engineer in the country. You’d still be having a six digit annual salary. And a 256,443 rd best physiotherapist in this country would be jobless. The problem is that they day India needs 256,442 skilled engineers, you’ll have nowhere to go, if your education has not been a marriage of the the two extremes mentioned above.

Realising that your core skills which you’ve been nurturing for more than half a decade, are not good enough for the marketplace, can be a very damning experience. But as a lot of sportspersons have showed, it’s not the end of the world. With the right mentality and “soft skills” or “soft attributes”, mastering another domain or vocation, is not really out of reach. Viren Rasquinha captained the Indian hockey team and then studied management and currently heads the operations of the Olympic Gold Quest. So, if you are 21, and totally out of sync with your current vocation/training, all’s not lost. The Governor of the Reserve Bank of this country is a production engineering graduate. Take heart. Have patience. Strengthen your “non-functional” skill base. Vocation training is easy.

Throughout my life, I’ve been told that Gujratis and Marwaris are businessmen, and Maharashtrians are people of the working class. And very conveniently, no one has bothered to explain why. The most ‘convincing’ answer I’ve ever received is , “Don’t argue. It’s supposed to be that way.” Last Saturday, I was fortunate enough to read this piece by Aakar Patel in Mint Lounge. And what a wonderfully refreshing take it had on the geographic divide of India.

I’ve had pretty bad experiences in buying from shops which are ‘Marathi owned‘ – so to say. All along, I’d maintained that the poor customer service meted out to me was a function of a businessman not fully understanding what the business demanded of him, and was not dictated by the language he spoke or the region to which he belonged. But it seems that there is a lot of substance in this theory of a certain section of Indians being ‘inherent businessmen/shopkeepers’ or ‘baniyas‘.

There are two sweetmeat shops in and around my place. One is upmarket, hep, expensive, situated in a prime location, trendy, well-marketed and owned by a Shetty. The other is a small, docile Maharashtrian establishment at not so prime a location. A few months ago, I had to buy pedhas and went to this Maharashtrian establishment. I’d wanted to buy a good three kilos of pedhas but demanded them in packs of four. I was promptly told that such a service was not possible, and that I’d only be given them in boxes which were multiples of 250 grams. I tried arguing my case and tried explaining the owner that he’d be losing a customer for life due to his high-headedness. He did not budge. Five minutes later, I was at the Shetty’s shop. I was asked to taste three kinds of pedhas, choose my kind of packaging, and I got my work done in no more than ten minutes. In plain revenue terms, a loss of Rs.1200 for the challenger and a gain of Rs.1200 for the market leader. Whatever happened to the famous Avis motto – “We try harder”.

Is the average Marathi entrepreneur ‘inherently’ inflexible? Has he never heard of the customer being king? Has enterprise been thrust upon him? Abhijeet Badrike once told of a Maharashtrian selling laddoos outside school. That makes perfect business sense, yes. But the only problem was that he sold them in packets of 10. School kids, attending a municipal school, do not have cash to spare. And no kid, would want to buy the whole packet. All the kid aspires for is a single laddoo. And he has money in his pocket for only a single laddoo as well. Months passed, but never was the packet opened and never were laddoos sold loose on a per piece basis. It was completely okay to alienate customers, to lose business but not cool to innovate or step down from that perch of being a ‘Marathi shopkeeper’. You could very well tell that the poor entrepreneur had never been told of the story of the shampoo sachet.

In traditional Maharashtrian houselholds, ‘dhanda‘ is synonymous with flesh-trade and ‘udyog dhanda‘ is what is very reluctantly acknowledged as ‘business‘. Agreed that most Marathi kids grow up in a household where there is little or no impetus for enterprise. But is it  justification for Maharashtrians being poor entrepreneurs (well, shopkeepers at least) ? A good entrepreneur learns, innovates, learns more and innovates again. He understands that aspirational value of customers is the fodder for his business. He sheds his ego and inhibition, and caters to what the consumer wants. A lot of Maharashtrians do nothing of that. Sadly, for a lot of Marathi-speaking people, business is just a money-making tool, often employed in conjunction with criminals, gangsters and politicians.

Businesses don’t make money. Businesses create wealth. Businesses create goodwill. For both the entrepreneur and his customer.

Dear XAT,

A big thank you for showing me how naive a MBA aspirant I am. I guess you are a bit grumpy as your sub-standard cousin of the feline nature has been hogging the lime-light over the past decade, and you choose this time of the year to strike back at the empire. But I am starting to like you a bit. You comprehensively defeated me today. Not out-witting me with petty constraints like time, or difficulty level, or ambiguity. But, in some way, you defeated my thought process. It just made me realise, that *perhaps* I am a one-trick pony and the way I approach a MBA-type exam is not fool proof. It lacks innovative thinking, and how! Thank you again, for trying indicate that I am still a big ball of sh1t. I will be richer for this experience. If you can spare some time from gloating in your vanity, please do read on.

About a month ago, I took IIFT in the middle of my engineering examinations. Like a brash kid, I woke up from sleep and blindly entered the examination hall without an ounce of any preparation over the week leading into the exam. I got out feeling really happy, because everything in the paper made a lot of sense. A month later, I was attributed a score of 46.06 (which dare I say would have put me in the top 25-50 applicants in the country). A sense of  ”I belong to MBA” started flowing through my veins. And I was pretty much convinced that I had the aptitude for these kind of examinations. That I could walk into an MBA exam and still be on par with people who have slogged their backsides for it.

Mind you, I am not proud of being under-prepared. Far from. Circumstances under which I am working have been very acute over the last two years. And I do not have much room to flex my muscles. I know you are having a wry smirk on your face and are trying to indicate that the situation will get worse once I graduate. But believe me on this one, my case is an outlier. I believe things will get better once I graduate. Not the point.

Similarly, I went in today with little “specialized” preparation, and was found out. Stamping your authority, you bluntly stated that aptitude could not be a substitute for methodical preparation. At least in my case. The reason I feel especially violated is because my “intuitive approach” fell flat on its face today. More often than not, when I see a question which I don’t know how to go about, I innovate, back-substitute, punt and get to the final answer in a way that might not be the most efficient path to reach to the solution. But it works. To cut a long story short, I have a knack of “reaching to an answer” in questions where I ideally shouldn’t. The exact opposite happened today. Forget punting to get to an answer, I couldn’t get to answers that I should have. I felt that my innovativeness was still a couple of notches short. Next time when we meet, I hope to hone my punting skills to a level that you want or better I might just be so well prepared that I won’t need to fall back to street-smartness.

Let me appreciate you specifically on a few questions.

Q.  On 1st March, Timon arrived in a new city and was looking for a place to stay. He met a landlady who offered to rent her apartment at a reasonable price but wanted him to pay rent on a daily basis. Timon had a silver bar of 31 inches, and an inch of the silver bar was equal to one day’s rent. He agreed to pay an inch of the silver bar towards the daily rent. Timon wanted to make the minimum number of pieces of the bar but did not want to pay any advance rent. How many pieces did he make?

5     8     16       20     31

-> I wasted three minutes on this. And gave up. While coming back, within fifteen seconds it all fell into place. Total number of combinations for a n bit binary number = 2^n -1. So 3 bits can represent 0-7. 4 bits 0-15. And hence 5 bits can represent 0-31. So you would just need five pieces of lengths 2^0=1, 2^1=2,2^2=4,2^3=8,2^4=16 and you are done. To make it worse, I am a Computer engineering student and have been doing binary arithmetic for four years now. I know I wasn’t sharp today but again, I love you interpretations of basic systems.

Q. The micromanometer in a certain factory can measure the pressure inside the gas chamber from 1 to 999999 units. Lately, the instrument has not been working properly. The problem is that it always skips the digit 5 and moves directly from 4 to 6. What is the actual pressure inside the gas chamber if the micromanometer shows 3016?

->To be honest, I did not even read this question in the stipulated two hours. After the paper, as I flipped through the pages, it took be fifteen seconds without a pencil in hand:(

Isn’t this a classic case of –

Initially – 0 to 9 all available – base 10 (decimal) system.

Modified case – 0 1 2 3 4 6 7  8 9 – base 9

So you are just asking me- (3016)9  = (?)10. Well it is 3*729+1*9+6=2187+9+6=2202.

Again, good question. Too bad I missed it

Recently, I heard reports that Kapil Sibal is getting anxious at your competency and you might be barred from seducing minds from the next academic year. I pray to God that it does not happen. CAT is of the more docile kind, like the female you would perhaps settle down with. You are the firebrand achiever – one part an intellectual and one part a sultry seductress. Making a choice between the two often proves to be the defining moment of most people’s life. I’m at that crossroads too. But I do hope to meet you again, next year. Otherwise, I’ll be ruing the fact that I botched up the only chance I got at scoring with the most alluring lady in the pack. You can have your bunch of playmates for this year. I’ll be back next year, better prepared for one, sharper too. And I will make an offer that you just won’t be able to resist. Ok. Sorry, I know you hate cliches.

Also, to let you know honey, I always err on the side of caution. And estimate on the dearer side. But to be very frank, I think I’ll miss your criteria by not more than 7-10 marks. And that too when I had a real stinker of a paper. Just imagine what will happen when I am sharp and playing to 80% of my potential. The possibilities are endless

Love,

CGK.

My first attempt at photo-blogging. Inspired by a very random thought. And I scandalized my mom by telling her that I was taking “funny” pics of myself to put on Facebook. The fortunate or unfortunate part was that she believed me and went off to sleep cursing Facebook, the youth and me in that very order.

The good

The bad and the ugly

I have never really handled the camera and it shows, I guess, from the above pics.  The second pic has not come too well with the light reflecting from the surface of the book. But, it was fun nonetheless. Would love to learn from someone who has his/her ways with the lens