Reflections

I finally managed to see the movie Lage Raho Munna Bhai. A great movie with an excellent mix of humour and sentiment. On top of all this the film has a message! In fact it has been a long time since I last watched a Hindi movie till the climax. Munna’s transition from Dadagiri in the first movie to Gandhigiri in the sequel has been handled very well by the director. Some Innovative ideas like Munna sending flowers to Lucky have been combined with some interesting sequences where Munna advices the common people on Gandhigiri through FM radio. The movie has a message that Gandhism still is relevant and works magic. The movie has infact caught the attention of so many people all over the world. There have been several Munna style protests all over the world and so much talks on Gandhigiri. The Prime Minister of India , Dr. Manmohan Singh , has said, "I was heartened to see recently that back home in India the most popular movie this festival season is a film about a young man's d...

Logging into Blogger after quite some time though I did reflect on a lot of things during the time in between :-) I was over to one of my relatives house accompanying my wife (as a chaffeur) for Navarathiri. I happened to see the Dasvatharam Bommais (Mini Idols of the ten incarnations of Vishnu). I was gazing at them for quite some time and to me the ten incarnations seemed to have a deeper meaning. Though the Gita says that Vishnu takes an avatar whenever there is a threat to dharma, to me they seem to have a close link with several stages in the evolution of the universe, the evolution of mankind. What a nice way of building stories around each stage and carrying it forward over generations? Our ancestors seem to have been way ahead scientifically when other races were roaming around as savages. We seem to have lost our way somewhere and wasted time and money in pompousness, thanks to some foolish kings in between. Here are the Ten avatars Matsya - Lord Vishnu as a fish Koorma - Lor...

Another translation. This one is the song "Achamillai Achamillai" by Subramanya Bharathy We have no fear, We have no fear We know not of that thing called fear We might be against the whole world We might be cast like dust and dismissed We might be made to beg for food We might be losing everything we cherish but We have no fear, We have no fear We know not of that thing called fear The heavens above might crash The heavens above might crash and Crush us in all their fury but We would still have no fear We have no fear, We have no fear We know not of that thing called fear!

I am sure you must have seen the movie or read about “ The Titanic ”. Did you notice the role of the music band in the titanic towards the end of the movie? I lead a big Programme as part of my work. A programme consisting of multiple components but all working towards a common goal (atleast they are supposed to). Quite often I find my teams totally lost in day to day delivery pressures and myself struggling to bring them out of that. There is absolute chaos all over the place. The major problem I face is that there is not enough collaboration between teams as required, people left to themselves are happy operating in individual silos and view the other teams as competitors. My major worry is that people are not ready to look at the bigger picture, pressurised by and used to traditional working models and are finally not focused on the value delivered collectively. I am not blaming my team. I understand what they are going through and I myself am struggling to find out of ways of gett...

I have found that I am at my creative best on Saturdays and Sundays. Now don’t ask me how creative I am. That is definitely a debatable topic and we can take that up sometime later. That is why I chose my words carefully. I have observed over the past year or so that I get most of my new ideas during the weekends. I am talking about ideas related to my work. I take necessary action through emails immediately but I get lost in mundane affairs (thanks to official pressures) during the week and by the time I am reminded of my ideas I find myself in the next weekend again. Maybe it’s the relaxed and informal environment at home which helps unleash my creativity. I really feel that I do a lot more productive work from home over the weekends even if I spend a few hours compared to what I do in office in a whole week. All enterprises today talk a lot about innovation and drive their employees to innovate but based on my experience I have never seen anything materialize. Is talking about innov...

Hutch is now Vodafone! I am not sure if you have seen the ad. What a wonderful depiction of change! This is an ad that has been picturised beautifully. The first ad that I remember announcing a change in name is that of Binaca becoming Cibaca. Most of you might not even know about Cibaca. I am not sure if the company or the toothpaste it used to sell exists today. It was a simple ad announcing a change in name but I still remember listening to it over a small Philips radio and seeing it in a black and white TV nearly two decades ago (as a small boy!). The ad did make an impact those days and there were many jokes and discussions around that. We live in a technologically advanced age now and the Vodafone ad is definitely on a different plane. In short the new Vodafone ad is about a dog leaving its kennel briefly and coming back to see a new Kennel totally different in design and color, struggling to get in terms with the reality in front of it. I don’t know how they made the dog act so ...

“I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere” said Jawaharlal Nehru . I find myself in a similar situation, atleast partly. Thanks to the Western culture that has crept in majorly into our country, a lot of questions arise in the name of scientific thinking! Nehru felt out of place 60 years back because he was ahead of time but today I think this is common and atleast I don’t feel out of place now. My daughter participated in a Bhagavad Gita recital competition recently and this turned my attention towards the Bhagavad Gita. The most important thing is that she won a prize and it was a pleasure watching the gleam in her eyes when she shared this news with me. Coming back to the Bhagavad gita, after some struggle going through some translations on the net, I finally managed to come across a simple translation in Tamil by Subramanya Bharathi . I really wonder why translations of great works are so complicated, whether it is the Gita or...