She would have known!

She went much before the pandemic.
She just vanished one fine day.
Our lives were disrupted for years!
Simply shattered all over the place.
But even while arranging her funeral
Complex rituals, without a clue.
We could only think, if she were there,
She’d have known what to do!
 
Dilemmas would drive us crazy
Every day in myriad ways,
How to nurture a new-born baby,
How to deal with a pre-teen’s laze,
How to tame the rude milk lady,
Or to organise some festival days.
We would think and then say, “Maybe,
Let’s just do what Amma says!”
 
Her father didn’t think she’d study,
No degree or diploma she knew.
She had never been in a jazzy office,
Nor climbed a corporate ladder through.
Never went on a course from L&D,
Nor a workshop on EQ.
But if you’re dealing with your toxic boss,
She’d have known what to do!
 
If I need to know when to use Gemini,
Or Gamma, Notebook or Claude
When a picture or a video is real
And when it’s an AI fraud.
When a post is worth replying to
Or when it is just ragebait.
LLMs are just six years old
And she’d have been seventy-eight.
But no matter what the question,
I know this to be true.
It might have taken her time to learn but
She’d have known what to do!

If I watch a movie, find a song
Or look at a lovely scene.
If I read a poem in my native tongue
And want to know what it means.
Or should I reach a big milestone,
And turn around to preen.
I want to tell her just one more time
But she is nowhere to be seen!

My poem is not an epic song
With Eliot’s magical rhymes
It won’t stay in mind as long
As Will’s ‘Eternal Lines’.
But in some minds can it sound a gong,
To remember her one more time?

An uninspired inspiration!

Today, many people told me that I inspired them.
But I am not inspired anymore.

Inspired to do what? My short-term goals include watching the upcoming sports tournaments. My long-term goals … I don’t have any.

In an “assessment” module of a future leadership programme (Why am I in a future leadership programme? Beats me!), I got asked, what I aspire to become. Why anyone would ask a bored, cynical, wizened, indifferent middle-aged person what they want to be when they grow up, is beyond me.

Anyway, I could not tell them truthfully that I aspire to become an eminent couch-potato imminently. So, I made up some stuff about how I want to take my team to the next level by leveraging our core strengths taking advantage of our customer-closeness and extend them to create innovative healthcare solutions following global megatrends for this VUCA world, etc. 

By now, I have a wide assortment of male bovine excreta and a well-honed skill of choosing the correct one from my sizable collection for any given situation.

Milestones are a good point in time to stop and look back on how things have gone so far. This particular milestone of mine is just for turning up. On 1^st July 1996, exactly 30 years ago today, I turned up at the newly awarded building at Trinity Circle to start off my work career. Since then, apart from four days when I changed job, I have turned up every day.

This concept of just turning up has a term in Tamil, which roughly translates as “Throwing garbage”. So yes, I have successfully thrown garbage for 30 full years now. Was it just that then? Throwing garbage?

Ten days before I started my career, two others, one a few days older and another a few months younger than me, started their international careers at the Lord’s cricket ground. They didn’t just turn up. They started with a 131 and a 95 respectively and ended up being legends, changing the way their game was played and excelling to a pinnacle in it. While I have been an also-ran.

That is one way of looking at it.

But, no, I was not uninspired all the time.

I was enthusiastic about learning C++ and German. I diligently attended the classes on SW Engineering. I fervently attended the 4-day workshop on Object Oriented Programming at Atria Hotel – although that could have been a combination of the excellent quality of the butter naan and the good looks of the girl from another company, who sat next to me.

I was eager when I went to Germany and created the entire UI for one of the modules in a month (I know that Claude-Sonnet can do it in minutes, but we are talking about November 1996 here! And I barely hallucinated). I was passionate when I took over another module and handled the entire technical team in 2000. I was keen when I moved to create an application which used the very platform I had written and came up with a patent in 2002.

My career meandered through many roles, projects, people and achievements. I would like to think I contributed to the roles and projects that I was associated with. I would also like to imagine that I positively touched the lives of at least some of the people I worked with in these three decades.

So no, I didn’t just turn up. I might have made a bit of a difference.

So wherefore this imposter syndrome? And wherefore this ennui?

Ashenden, the author and spy, who is the protagonist of a set of short stories by W. S. Maugham, prides himself on the fact that he is incapable of being bored. He says that wherever you put him for hours or even days without company, he can be entertained by only his thoughts. That was a whole century and a bit ago when there were no distractions that we have today. It is the distractions though. I have not read a good book properly in a couple of years. All I need to do is keep the phone away and start reading again.

There, I am inspired again.

But am I inspired enough to trudge through this drudge for another several years?

The Cosmic Disco of Lord Shiva!

In nearly 30 years of working in the corporate world in India, I have come across many characters. Some were close colleagues, some were mentors, some went far, some fell by the wayside. Some of my best lessons were from those who taught me how NOT to be a leader. Some unforgettable lessons in humility were from people who grew from very humble backgrounds to unimaginable levels through pure talent and intelligence.

Some are long associations, others are fleeting memories, and yet others – while being a blip in the memory-radar – are burnt into the hippocampus. They suddenly come to mind with a word, phrase, sight, sound or smell, like an annoying doorbell on a drowsy Saturday afternoon. No matter how you loathe it, you have to leave your vegetative state and walk up to the door.

Last night in a WhatsApp exchange with my nephew, this person popped into the foreground of my conscience. I don’t remember his name but the face is clear in my mind. He was a well-to-do guy from a deep rural area somewhere on the banks of the Godavari, or was it Krishna – one of those at any rate. He was very sharp, high-IQ, technically one of the most brilliant minds, but a veritable simpleton, uninitiated into the vagaries of the cosmopolitan society.

There was a day on which I had asked a few team members to come home. Or was it waiting for people at some location? The others were taking their time but this guy turned up early. I made an effort to tell myself not to be snobbish, and turned to him brightly for conversation. It turned out that he was as curious about me as I was about him. He was not being intrusive, but genuinely interested in how to spend his time in Bangalore.

Of course, I became the paragon of hobby-guidance. I asked him about his interests, spoke about how the drama scene – yes, even Telugu drama – was pretty good in Bangalore, how he could go around and see places in the city, told him to visit Kokkare Bellur with friends, asked him about his interest in ancient architecture, etc.

I realised that I could not gauge whether he was following me. When I stopped and allowed him to speak, he asked me about music. So, I told him about Carnatic concerts in Bangalore, fusion music concerts, rock shows in the Palace Grounds, etc. There was no point mentioning Deep Purple by name.

Then, after a thoughtful pause, he hit me with, “Do you go to discos?”

That threw me right off! Oh, was that what he wanted? He wanted to explore the pub and discotheque scene in Bangalore! He was asking about Guzzler’s Inn and I was telling him about Muthuswamy Dikshitar! I changed direction, spoke about how Bangalore used to have a great discotheque scene, about Zero-G and Spinn and how some illegal activities spoilt it all. I told him about the Cinderella Rule, the 11:15 shut off, etc.

I stopped. He was clearly bewildered. “What exactly are you looking for?”, I asked him.

“I like all discos but usually Shiva discos”, he said. I was stunned. My prejudiced mind had attained Shinkansen speeds and was not slowing down.

I thought maybe they have something like this in their village. Dancing places with various God themes? Maybe they have bhaang in a Shiva disco? How does that work?

“What is that?”, I asked him. “Is that something that happens in your hometown?”

“In my native”, he started. Another huge pet-peeve of mine, bringing out my snob. I could not possibly expect him to say “native place” or “hometown”, but I was as prejudiced as Lady Catherine de Bourgh at a milkmaid's wedding.

“They tell such stories. Sometimes also Ramayana and Mahabharata”, he concluded!

It hit me like the entire set of one lakh bricks lining the dockyard at Lothal.

DISCOURSE!

He had been asking me if I went to discourses! Back to the great Dikshitar then!

I suddenly realised that I was mentally exhausted. I told him that unfortunately, I did not go to discourses. I did very rarely if it was a part of a set of concerts, but not very often. I was then rescued by others arriving. Or perhaps, HE was rescued from me!

I don’t know if I remembered and ever mentioned this incident to anyone, but it suddenly flashed last night after a few dormant decades!

I hope that guy is doing well. And I hope I have learned to be humble and non-judgmental in the intervening years!