RamGanapathy.com

Category: Musings

  • Tapping on the Floor

    Writing post-lunch, I feel the gravy drowning my gut. I am ready to write soundy words from gleeful images in my mind. The laptop is not on my lap. The monitor trembles as I punch keys. No, my fingers dance around the keys like a 80s pop star, hopping between colourful buttons on a bright floor. My fingers dance on the key floor from years and years of typewriting practice. I remember showing off at university, how good I was, how fast I was, how accurate my typing was – only to be admonished by the fellow computer-lab’ians : stop banging the keyboard. Its not a typewriter for godsake.

    It wasn’t a typewriter. I looked at the blue screen of the booby CRT as I punched a key. It blinked a hazy yellow font back at me. It taught me learnt a lesson. Typing on a computer is not to make it repeat what you say. It is to make it think about what you say. How to make the computer think? Well, that was the day I took baby steps towards programming.

  • A Word To Begin

    Who said you can’t focus after a heavy meal. My eyes roll in slow motion, the hip collapses into the sofa, while a mild breeze from the river below hits my cheek with a gentle praise, my fingers grip a dancing pen whose wild strokes fill the void of my story with a voiceless word.

    I begin.

    This is what my writing has come to. I scratch and stutter and stumble and suffer. I find it easier to stay admiring the bubble inside this fancy pen I hold. It resembles a mini fish tank, with pebbles and fluff but no fish. The dancing bubble at the top stares back. As I shake and scribble, the whole galaxy is stirred, many little planets move around.

    I play God.

  • Who are these Books

    These books are collected, sorted and organised in racks by the librarian lady. She walks with her trolley, pushing it with one hand while holding books on the other. Does she read the books she handles each day?

    Can anyone ever read all the books that look at us from these shelves? Some are sitting tight, pushed by their neighbours, some stand with a slightly slant angle, unable to bear the weight of their companions. A few brave ones face me with their title page crying, “READ ME!”.

    Some say, “Pick me up”, politely. Some stand with stylish poses, while a particularly thick lady there looks weary, perhaps no one touched her for a long time except the librarian.

    In them are wrapped consciousness of authors, living and dead, shut to silence until anyone opens their chapters. They wait for anyone to flick their pages to switch them on.

    One sentence, one word even, can change a person. When he needs it, when he absolutely deserves it, a book appears in his life.

    It never leaves him.

  • Old library, new squiggles

    I am at the Quyeanbean library. Specifically, my hands are on a white table engulfed by a green fortress of a desk partition blocking an old window overlooking an old city. A city they say, is one of Australia’s historic inland cities. The city looks like a country town. I say that even though I never lived in country towns, never visited them much. Perhaps my impression of a country town is from cowboy movies where lean Clint Eastwoods stand in the middle of a mud-dirt road holding a gun, eyes wrenched, with a hat obstructing cold, grimsome looks.

    I take a sip of the flat-white-with-one-sugar. One sugar, I always insist. I never check what or how much the barista adds to the cup. I don’t even know the composition of the so-called flat white. It’s not white. It’s brown. Well, I don’t even know that for sure, I drink with the lid closed. It tastes brown. And it’s not flat by any means. Flat means bland, spineless, tasteless. This coffee is hot and deceitful. This coffee, or the first sip of it, already induced enough neurochemicals in my system, enough to make me write this piece, sitting at the desk, leaning closer and closer to the page, my hands scribbling squiggles of blue ink on a yellow page, my breath bouncing off the page, mixing with the slice of coffee I just ingested. My elbows are squeaking and slipping by the shake and thrust of my writing hand.

    I write a lot these days and I seem to flow on forwards by a stream of consciousness, dwelling on the moment. My face is stiff, lips curled, eyes clasped on the topic that I found or made sense of, from the string of last few words imprinted on the page. My hand isn’t stopping, it suddenly relishes the attention it’s got. It is writing and at the same time being written about.

    Who is writing?

  • Floating on the floor

    It is 1:30 in the afternoon, the radio is on, placed on the table – the only table in the house. Paati(grandmother) has just settled down on the kattil (bed) with a double pillow. I am sitting down, on a mat, opened my geography book. Listening to the violin’s pull and swings (Carnatic music), I was bored. I hated it, but also liked it for some reason. It made me feel sad. The music itself, and the fact that I am alone at home with Paati, not with my “friends” who might be doing more interesting things like playing cricket or climbing trees – things I suck at. The reverberating music caused paati to doze off almost, yet I cannot sleep. I look at the ticking wall clock – it is stuck at 2:20 for a long time. I like watching the second-hand tick tock its way around. The clock has a funny face. It laughs at me. I am offended. I go back to my book. The stomach cries out a few burps. I slightly relax my posture. From sitting straight on the floor, I now lean back to my left using my elbow as the balancing fulcrum of my body – which all of a sudden says fuck it, and goes full horizontal.

    The song diminishes, the literals are repeated – the vocalist says “sa”, and then “re” and very soon switches to “sa” but he doesn’t say “re” – he sticks to “saaaa” and so it goes. The violin stays strong, the percussion instruments – a mridangam and a ganjira – sounded so tiny and diminished that the vocalist must have shushed them to the background. I cannot see them – a TV in the house was still a few years away. But on that Tuesday, on a warm and sultry afternoon, floating on the floor under a twirling ceiling fan that made a hiss at every turn, my mind slipped on the words from the book which was about South American Inca civilisation, its mountains, how arid the conditions for agriculture were, and reading big words like “metamorphosis” and what not.

    The violin was wailing now, and the vocalist had receded to the background. The mridangam and ganjira were talking to each other through their beats. How can they repeat each other so correctly? I dwindled, diminished and descended on a slope that slowed me down, until the music and my mind came to a complete stop.

    Oh I better wake up. I have to finish this lesson before I can ask Paati to let me go play outside. The clock still laughed when it moved its second and minute hands so slowly at me. It keeps at 2:20 still. Is it playing with me? Oh, no it is 3:20 now. But it is still laughing. Paati snoring and I am looking at the hissing ceiling fan and it slowed down suddenly, circling slower and slower until it stopped.

    Power cut.

  • Ray of Reason

    Ray of Reason

    Fifteen years ago, I got promoted to manage a team of twelve. I saw myself as a young, aspirational and enthusiastic manager, guiding these young(er) bunch of men and women on a challenging journey to deliver a critical piece of software in a short period of time. Towards the end of the year, the software was subjected to thorough testing. Around the same time, I too got tested – a 360-degree feedback from my team on my performance.

    The software performed well. I got thrashed. The team basically said, “We don’t like you(r style of managing)”.

    I had a dilemma. Should I switch to being an individual contributor and play to my strengths in technology? Or should I learn from my mistakes, grow as a person and try to connect better with my team?

    It will be several attempts, several years and many such corrective feedback cycles before I did better. On hindsight, I should have…

    We need to think clearly in such situations. That is not easy.

    These days, when I face a complex situation, I try a principle suggested by the billionaire, Ray Dalio. It is deceptively simple, but very effective. The method involves thinking through three questions and filling your answers across three columns on a piece of paper. Every time I fill those columns, I feel better. I feel I have understood, even if not conquered the complex territory I am navigating.

    Here is the principle:

    1. Decide what you want
    2. Find out what is true
    3. Figure out what to do, based on 1 and 2.

    I did warn you, it appears simple.

    Ray Dalio has filled 592 pages of his book with many such principles derived from his life and work. Like a catch surprising the fisherman, this principle popped out of the first few pages, and I have only read fifty or so.

    I stopped after the first catch, because I wanted to taste it first. As I began applying this principle, a key insight was how (1) and (2) are sometimes distinct. Even, mutually exclusive. The trick is to construct a bridge from columns 1 and 2, leading into 3.

    If I had this clarity fifteen years ago, I would have identified my want as, “My team to deliver on the goals on time, on budget, with high quality, not getting burnt along the way, not getting micro-managed”.

    I would have scribbled under the second column, “It is true, however, the team is under pressure; I am under the pump. Also true that the team has not been given a choice, not given a voice, and not clear on why we were doing what we were doing”.

    If I had these three distinct columns, I would have not jumped to the actions. I would have learnt to be a bit more objective, a bit more sensible. Would have learnt to remove “I” from the equation and listen to what the team had to say regarding the goal pursuit.

    On hindsight, I should have…

    As I encounter this principle fifteen years late, I stop. “What is reality telling me? What are the constraints? What am I not thinking about?”

    “What is true?”

    I am still exploring this principle. Do let me know if this works for you.

  • A beautiful mindset

    I have struggled with the word strategy all through my career. No, I haven’t struggled to make a plan or define a logical sequence of activities, but this whole strategising thing is something else that bothered me. How do you successfully get through to the other side of a challenging project to deliver, or an uncertain future for the product and team, or an unexpected change in career? Dealing with, and winning at these require more than grit or luck. Pure logic doesn’t help beyond a point. I have often heard from colleagues that life resembles a chess game, one to be mastered.

    I am bad at chess.

    My other problem is with the word, Art. There is an art for anything these days: “Art of speaking..”, “Art of writing…”, “Art of winning…” and of course, the ultimate “Art of living”. All my life, I was more into science and math, and I was particularly bad at art.

    Bad at art, and worse at chess, I have no hope then.

    I am good with reading books however, and to my pleasant surprise I landed on this book recently that carried both these words in its title: The Art of Strategy, A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life.

    One of the authors of this book is a professor in the US but of Indian origin, which made me think: after all, wasn’t the Indian civilisation that gave birth to Chaturanga, the predecessor of the modern chess game? Even the famous epic Mahabharatha revolves around a game of dice gone wrong for the Pandavas. India is also the place of Chanakya the philosopher-guru who authored Artha-Shastra – a treatise similar to the more famous Art of War.

    The definition of strategic thinking was very helpful: “the art of outdoing an adversary, knowing that the adversary is trying to do the same to you”, “art of convincing others, and even yourself, to do what you say.”, “art of putting yourself in others” shoes so as to predict and influence what they will do.

    Out of the many strategies and approaches, the common theme for me was the element of surprise, as a winning ingredient in any strategy, especially dealing with bullies. The authors explain the best strategy to confront a powerful and intimidating bully at school, at work, or even a dictator: a sudden, visible, unexpected act of defiance by the collective.

    The book as such is hard to finish, but there are some interesting parts not to be missed, especially the stories from world war, movie references (The Beautiful Mind, for example), and other real-life examples. The definitions of various game theory constructs eg. zero sum game, dominant strategy, Nash equilibrium etc. ) are well explained, until they loose you by going deep into the mathematics.

    Yet, there is more to unpack from this book. It says at one point, “All of us are strategists. It is better to be a good one, than a bad one”.

    That sounds to me a practical, if not a beautiful mindset.

  • A page from a book is more than that

    I notice my family, friends and acquaintances, not reading books.

    Some of them don’t have time in their lives right now, to dedicate an afternoon to even begin to read from a book they bought many years ago. This blog is not for them.

    A few don’t like to read books, they tell me. They have apparently lost interest in the written word. I am writing this piece, directly looking at them. Yes, I know who you are.

    I am kidding. I promise, I won’t preach why you should read. Nor would I prescribe a bunch of books on this last day of the year. I am kidding again.

    This is more about two moments from my 2021 trip around the sun. One acted as an anchor, giving me a sense of what I loved doing, and another that brought out the force in me, and gave direction.

    The Greeks again

    In February this year, on a lazy Saturday afternoon, I saw a tweet by a speech consultant @JohnfBowe. His article explained how two thousand years ago, the Greeks figured out that public speaking – the art of rhetoric – is a foundational skill to be acquired by everyone. Yeah, for once, it is not all about philosophy when it comes to the ancients.

    I ended up buying his book. It begins with the story of his cousin whose life takes a dramatic turn after joining Toastmasters. The guy never left basement until he was fifty nine years old, but soon got married, and overcame shyness (not necessarily in that order), helped by the world’s largest organisation devoted to the art of public speaking.

    John’s book made me reflect on the way I do presentations. Content is king, they say. I no longer start my preparations researching for what to include. The recipient(s) of the message take centre stage, more than the message itself. Audience is king.

    I reached out to the nearest club in Canberra. I wasn’t shy, but curious. I was welcomed into the Woden Valley Toastmasters club as a guest, a pivotal moment for me this year. I soon became a member, learning how to talk more clearly, persuasively but mainly, to keep the focus on my audience, what would be valuable to them. And to ramble less.

    Incidentally, around the same time in March, I got an opportunity to present SAP’s product strategy at a customer’s town hall meeting addressing roughly 150 members of their IT team. I remember spending more time on the question: What do I want them to think and feel, when I finish talking.

    A random tweet guided me to the book about ancient Greeks, eventually taking me to the Toastmasters, on my way to a successfully delivered talk.

    Winning is the (only) way

    Later in July, I faced a sudden bout of confusion and uncertainty about the way my role was perceived at work.

    One book brought back the fighter in me. It wasn’t a random tweet this time, but a slice of podcast conversation with the NBA star Chris Bosh talking about a book that shaped his thinking: The way and the power – Secrets of Japanese Strategy. Its about how a samurai master deals with confusion and uncertainty; one who controls his mind. One who would not lose. I ordered it immediately.

    I can’t say much more. But reading a couple of chapters, it felt as if I had flipped a switch in my mind. I woke up one morning and decided to win. Not merely adapt or survive or manage a situation. To win.

    You want the whole meal, not juice

    Why bother with a book these days, if one can acquire such insights through tweets and podcasts? I sense, reading a book – even skimming through a few pages – is way different than trying to grasp ideas distilled by someone else – a secondary process. It is the difference between eating a wholesome meal and drinking a juiced up version.

    A book could change the way you think about this world. Your world.

    Three sixty five days from now, on another new year eve, I will want to hear from you about the pages and words that influenced you.
    For the ones in my cohort too busy to read: One page consumes three minutes out of one thousand four hundred and forty minutes in a day. A typical book has three hundred pages.

    I rest my case.

  • Explore

    Explore

    What if I tell you, Christopher Columbus was not really an explorer.

    Well, I am not asking you to reconsider a historical fact. Am I even qualified to talk about exploration, while real explorers do their wild and uncertain things, I sit on my lazy ass on a quiet and comfy chair in a corner of my house?

    I am only interested in figuring why exploring is a fun pursuit. Exploration, not in the geographical territory per se, rather the “i want to explore more options before i decide” kind; exploring ideas and insights that change the way we think and transform us. Such a skill is a superpower, especially for knowledge workers.

    Suppose, your boss asks you on a Friday evening to come up with a completely fresh approach or an idea by Monday morning (it could be about a product, sales pitch, presentation or a new venture)

    And assume, that for some reason, google is down, internet connectivity is lost for your whole town during the weekend; however you have access to your bookshelf, your local library and can talk to your friends and colleagues in town.

    How will you go about your research? Which book(s) would you look up ? Who amongst your peers would you go to?

    The idea of (re)search or exploration has been key to our thinking and thus, survival. Often we start with building on existing ideas, contacting known people. If we are lucky, we get useful points, connections between those, and once in a while, stumble upon something new – something we never knew it existed when we began the pursuit.

    We all have been using the term, search so loosely. Tamara Munzner’s book on data visualisation has this matrix / table that made me think more clearly about the vagaries of search.

    Lookup: most of the time, we know what we are looking for, and where to find it – like in your neighbourhood grocery store. You know what you are looking for, say milk. You remember where to go and fetch it. Easy and efficient. Why? So much organising has gone behind the scenes. I am not sure if it is even possible to organise and store information/ideas like a grocery shelf.

    Browse: Sometimes we don’t know what we are looking for, but very clear about where to look. Example: in a library, you know there are enough gems buried inside those pages. All you need is time to browse a bit, and with some luck you might find something relevant. You might even stumble upon something new. This is fun – and efficient at the same time. Perhaps more exhilarating compared to fetching milk from your grocery store.

    At the same time, a bit of organising is a pre-requisite to make this work. You should have accumulated related ideas or books in one location that you can go to. Or subscribed to Netflix, where the algorithm does the job for you – to keep you constantly stimulated.

    Locate: this is like searching for your missing car keys. You know what you are searching for, but don’t know where it is. Also, this is where Columbus comes in. You see, in 1492 he set out “to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did”, landed instead on a different continent. He had his target/destination (Asia) known but the location (route) unknown. Thus, as per this matrix’s strict definition he is not an explorer, just a locator. And he failed at that too. There is even this blog that talks about how his GPS failed him big time. In the end, he returned empty-handed, frail, poor and without any recognition.

    Sorry, I am taking a bit of creative liberty here. My point is: when we set out to find new ideas or insights, lot of time and energy is wasted in looking in the wrong direction. One of my simplest life-hacks is to ask for directions: the “right” colleague who might lead me to the “location” of many useful and interesting things. Because, most of the times, we don’t know what we don’t know.

    Who Lucky: Jim Collins, the author of the book Great By Choice, has coined this phrase who lucky. “you get, not just luck in life, but “who” luck….And “who” luck is when you come across somebody who changes your trajectory or invests in you, bets on you, gives you guidance and key points.” (quote from Jeff Hilimire’s blog)

    Finally, explore: The dictionary definition of explore: travel through an unfamiliar area in order to learn about it; inquire into a subject in detail. But as per the matrix above, explore is: we don’t know what exactly we are looking for, and we have no clue where to start searching. That sounds like pain. But imagine, if Columbus convinced his Spanish financiers that he is simply out on a voyage to discover something, no promises. He was better off in not setting any expectation, choosing to ride the vessel of uncertainty, with his mate named luck, and serendipity as his diet.

    That would have been fun. The kind of exploration I am talking about.

    However this pursuit is not trivial; not a reckless exercise, not without any structure. Here are a couple of useful techniques to explore:

    Visual thinking. For me, this is less of a technique, more of trying to be human. Once in a while, get off your device, walk outside and look up, locate the sky and browse the many stars. The change in visual stimulus is all you need sometimes. For a more earthly example, if I need an idea for presentation, I google the topic (eg. Technology Platform) and go “images”, and see the many illustrations. Something clicks in the mind, as this post illustrates how creative ideas emerge out of visual thinking.

    Another useful one is Lateral Thinking, popularised by Edward de Bono. An example is Random Simulation. I use this when I need an opening word or a central theme for a speech or a blog. This is how it works: Choose a random number from 1 to 10, say 7. Open a random page of a random book; find the 7th word in the 7th sentence of that page. Reflecting on that word, its meaning, would evoke a feeling, trigger an idea, shape our thoughts.

    (for this blog, that random word turned up to be destroy; no wonder I have been cynical about Columbus all through this piece)

    The power of exploration is: only direction matters. Your curiosity is the direction. Go where that curiosity takes you, following what appeals to you, not worried about the number of steps taken, points collected, victories or failures; not anxious about reaching any destination.

    In any case, as Yogi Berra said, if you don’t know where you are going, you have a good chance of not reaching there.

    PS: This is the final of a 3-part blog post “How to Think Better”.

    Part 1: “How to Think Better – Externalise”

    Part 2: “Uncategorised” aka How to Think Better – Categorise

  • Uncategorised

    Uncategorised

    I bet you won’t continue reading this blog beyond a point, unless you find something new. Right at this moment, in your brain, a bunch of neurons are firing to figure out what this new is. I wonder if you got some ideas from the title, or some of the pictures below which your eyes cannot help scanning. I suspect you have mentally tagged this blog already – technical, boring, long. Interesting (hopefully).

    Categories

    Our brain is wired to perform instant pattern matching and categorisation. Categories have strict boundaries which help us compare a “this” from a “that”.

    This skill helped us survive as we made quick decisions under uncertainty – by differentiating between a branch of a tree and a snake; between a cold, warm or hot object. All thanks to the much evolved part of our brain: prefrontal cortex.

    Now during the information (delu)age, we need this skill even more, as we distribute every bit of new information to various buckets. Worse, we do pattern matching even when the data doesn’t make any sense. Lets attempt this puzzle:

    Kiki and Bouba are two nonsense words from a non-existing language. Can you suggest a match between the words and the two images below ?

    Analogies

    Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter says categorisation and analogies are the way ALL thinking occurs in our brain. Watch him narrate this (15 minute into this hour long video).

    We have so little control over this process. If our mind always compares and contrasts – as we see, hear, smell, touch and so on – several downsides occur. In a rush to make a quick judgement, we often make the wrong call.

    Prejudice

    I won’t talk about serious topics like racial stereotypes and unconscious bias in this blog. But I share a recent experience at the food court, when a seemingly innocent comment from the lady at the counter made me cringe a bit.

    I sensed her watching me order rice and vegetarian curry with an additional order of papad. The many neurons in her brain didn’t have to perform heavy gymnastics to categorise me, as she suggested “so, you must be a south Indian?” I nodded. She said, feeling settled, “makes sense!”

    She wasn’t wrong this time. No harm done. (maybe my moustache was a give-away). But not all of us are right when we carry out some lazy, sub-conscious thinking. When we assume.

    Cognitive Bias

    Daniel Kahneman is considered the father of behavioural economics. In his work, he underscores the fact that humans are not rational at all while making decisions. The nobel laureatte’s book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow has made me more aware – if not smarter – as I learnt about various cognitive biases. A sample for you: Confirmation Bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. (eg. anti-vaccinators).

    Rob Dobelli’s The Art of Thinking Clearly is another easy-read that I recommend.

    Black Swan

    Being aware of such biases helps us avoid an ontological shock.

    In the 2nd century, a roman poet coined the term black swan describing an imaginary bird – since at that time, all known swans were white. That was until the 17th century, when Europeans landed in Australia, when they spotted a black swan.

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells this story in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Note, the book is not about birds, but how we struggle with things that shock us – outliers.

    I particularly loved the irony – these 17th century travellers declined to categorise that bird as a swan at all. In their mind, a swan had to be white.

    Moral of the story: be aware of how we categorise. And, when we encounter a new idea that cannot be boxed onto an existing bucket, it deserves a new category on its own.

    The Meditating Brain

    I mentioned earlier, how prefrontal cortex helps with categorisation. The picture-book “30-Second Brain”, edited by British professor Anil Seth, illustrates how meditation rewires our brain.

    Just after 4 sessions of meditation, it is found that we use less of the primitive areas of the brain, activating the prefrontal cortext that helps us perform higher orders of cognitive functions and intelligence.

    Kiki or Bouba ?

    Did you associate the word kiki with the sharp edged object? You are like the 95% of participants of a famous experiment “Bouba/Kiki effect“.

    We cannot help ourselves especially when we don’t realise we are making these associations. Are we stupid, are we wrong? Should we stop categorisation altogether ?

    I finish with the simple and slightly modified words of a famous Henry Ford quote:

    “Whether you think you should, or you think you should not – you are right.“

    PS: This is the part 2 of a three-part blog post “How to Think Better”.

    Check out Part 1: “How to Think Better – Externalise”

    Part 3 to be written: “How to Think Better – Explore“