Temple Visiting in Rajasthan

1

Constants and Change

As far as I can remember, I have been visiting Jain temples in Rajasthan with family members. So it was that in late November, Bhavana, Abhishek and I made a short 3-day visit to Rajasthan. This one was after a gap of 3 years, on account of the pandemic. Rajasthan is the state where my father grew up and did his undergrad. Many years later, he set up a marble factory in Abu Road, and then an edible oil processing unit in Sheoganj. Many of my vacations were spent in these locations, interspersed with visiting temples. Post-marriage, Bhavana and I made annual visits to Rajasthan.

As I wrote in a previous blog post: “For me, God is a force beyond. It is perhaps an alter-ego, a voice within which ensures I stay on the right track. It is an entity that I can turn to when all else fails. Like I did later in 1995 when I had some significant challenges with IndiaWorld. It was perhaps the first time I went to a temple and asked God for help – to prevent yet another devastating failure in my life. The suggestion had come from Bhavana as I sat numb at home – unable to see a way out of the situation I had found myself in. And – call it God, call it luck, whatever – things turned for the better in a way that I could not have foreseen. My relationship with God has been a selfish one. I invoke his intervention when things are not going well. In recent times, I also say a silent Thanks when things go well. It’s a more conversational relationship. It’s perhaps me talking to myself and attributing the inexplicable to a divine intervention.”

I find these trips very helpful for my thinking. A change of surroundings brings in new stimuli; a break from office creates new experiences. It was in 1997 during the drive from Nakoda to Jodhpur that Bhavana and I came up with the idea of Indian names for websites – and this led to us creating Samachar, Khoj, Khel and Bawarchi. Now, 25 years later, I am thinking about Netcore and how we can accelerate our growth. I find sitting in the temples very conducive to deep contemplation.

In times gone by, what I did not enjoy was the road journey. Many of the temples are off the main highways, so we have to travel on the inner roads. Past travels were literally backbreaking. This time was a much better experience. The other problem I had was with the facilities at the dharamshalas where we stayed. What I call “competitive religion” (combined with liberal donations) has led to a vast improvement in the quality of food and stay.

With each temple visit, memories of my past flash by. Some places have not changed much while others have been transformed. What has remained unchanged are the daily rituals that have been taking place for hundreds of years. But before I get to this trip and my experiences and impressions, a journey down memory lane.

2

Past Visits – 1

I have compiled excerpts from some of my past writings from my Rajasthan visits in 2004, 2005 and 2009. These are from my previous blog at Emergic.org.

February 2004: “Every year for the past eight years, my wife and I have been making trips to Rajasthan to visit various Jain temples. For a few days, we live in a different world. Driving through the land where my parents were born, I invariably think of a life and world which is so very different from the one I was born and brought up in. Besides heritage, there has been a natural affinity to Rajasthan. It is a state I have visited almost annually for the better part of my life for a variety of reasons: holidays in the 1970s, my father’s factories in the 1980s, temple visits in the late 1990s to now… As we travel through the Land of the Kings (for what is what Rajasthan means), I wonder – how have things changed in a generation, and what to expect in the future?”

February 2004: “The roads of Rajasthan are a mixed bag. They are good, bad and really ugly. Some roads were undivided with just a single lane, which means that every time a vehicle comes from the opposite direction, both have to shift a little to the left and off the road. Even some of the proper roads have bad patches in them. I guess one cannot just blame the state government for this. We in India have still not learnt how to build roads that can endure.” More: “Whether we like it or not, the spark has to be lit by the state government. For long, much of the population has remained in the dark about the world outside. Now, this is no longer the case. Economic prosperity and the desire for a better tomorrow is becoming the driver for the New India. The transformation of the Bharat that we have so far forgotten and left behind needs to build on India’s democratic foundation and its entrepreneurial culture.”

September 2005: “Visiting these and other temples transports one to a different world. It is a world where time has almost stood still. The pooja rituals are performed the same way day after day after day. Every day is just like the previous one. Some days have a lot more devotees, other days a little less. But the temples stand there as they have for centuries, accepting one and all. The Rajasthan visits take me back to my roots to the land where my parents grew up, but one with which I now struggle to make a connection.”

September 2005: “For the last nine years, the Rajasthan trip has been pretty much the only time out that I take off during the year. Most of my travels always combine a little bit of pleasure with a lot of business. It also gives me time to think away from a routine of emails, phone calls and meetings. I still remember my first visit in this series in early 1997. Bhavana had suggested we make the trip to Nakodaji. Those were difficult times for my business. I had reluctantly agreed. It was on that trip as we drove back from Nakodaji to Jodhpur that we thought up all the Indian names which later became our portals khoj (search), khel (cricket), samachar (news), bawarchi (food), dhan (finance), manpasand (favourites). Since then, every year, I have always kept a list of things to ask the Gods for!”

3

Past Visits – 2

September 2005: “I always keep a small diary in my pocket and a notebook (the paper variety) with me for making notes. I write down all my thoughts and ideas as they come. Writing helps me think better. As thoughts flit in and out of the mind, I capture them on paper so the mind can move on, uncluttered and not having to worry about remembering the previous thoughts. Vacations are not something I am used to. It takes a day for me to get used to a very different pace of life. Time seems to pass ever so s-l-o-w-l-y. But it is good to experience something different. As I was telling Bhavana towards the end of the trip, I would love to spend a week or so at one of the temples completely cut-off from the world with just a few books and my thoughts for company.”

September 2005: “As I made my way back to Mumbai, I thought once again of Rajasthan’s temples. They withstood invaders and nature. Today, their past is what attracts modern travellers. Do we want India to be known for its past or for its future? That is a choice we have to make.”

October 2009: “I will be going to Rajasthan for a few days. Bhavana and I have been making an annual pilgrimage for more than 12 years. (For various reasons, last year was the only one we missed.) Over a period of 3-4 days, we visit many temples. It is a welcome change from our Mumbai life. This year, Abhishek too will be old enough to start developing his own memories of these visits.”

October 2009: “As I spoke with some of the locals, it became clear that the biggest problem in the future is going to be that of drinking water. With inadequate rains common to many parts of India, the situation has worsened. We should have worked towards solving this problem 10 years ago, but we haven’t done anything. The repercussions will be dire. Two other challenges that are common to much of semi-urban and rural India are the poor equality of education for the young, and the resulting lack of adequate skills for them to get a good first job which could set up a bright future for India to start reaping its ‘demographic dividend.’ We have school and college buildings but little education. Just like there are bridges but no water flowing beneath.”

October 2009: “Rajasthan and its people are part of the other India we like to call ‘Bharat.’ We give it a different name because we want to distance ourselves from it. Traveling through some of the small towns and villages, I could not help but look at the horrific sanitation situation. I should have become immune to it after all these years, but that Bharat is still part of our country – and we cannot give up expecting better so easily. We have been horribly wrong in the 60 years since Independence. Many of us who should be aware of the situation have removed ourselves from the realities of the country and created a happy cocoon around us. We have the resources to bring about a transformation of our nation, but it cannot be done by the class of people who got us there. India needs a revolution by us, its people. We haven’t yet reached that turning point yet, but some of us will reach it soon. And we will decide enough is enough. We will start taking our country back from our rulers. Then, we can start building India right, and claim to be truly an Independent democratic nation.”

4

Temples and History

Back to the present. The Jain temples we visited during our 900-odd kilometre travel over three days late November were the ones at Nakoda ji, Jirawala, Bheru Tarak, Pavapuri and Muchhala Mahavir. Each of the temples has its own unique architecture and backstory, sometimes spanning centuries. Here are some of them.

Nakoda ji: “The ancient name of this Tirth is mentioned as Virampur. Virsen and Nakorsen of the third century of the Vikram era built this temple and His Holiness Jain Acharya Sthulibhadrasuri installed the idol. In course of time, this temple was renovated many times. When Alamshah invaded this place in the year 1280 of the Vikram era (1224 CE), the Jain Sangha kept this idol hidden in a cellar in Kalidrah village for protection. This temple was again renovated in the fifteenth century. 120 idols were brought here from Kalidrah and this beautiful and miraculous idol was installed here as Mulnayak (main idol of the temple) in the year 1429 of the Vikram era (1373 CE). Jain Acharya Kirtiratnasuri installed the idol Bhairav here. Apart from Nakoda Parsvanatha the other Jain temples here are dedicated to Rishabhadeva and Shantinath… The ancient idol of Shri Parshwanath Bhagwan is very attractive and full of magical powers. Shri Bhairavji Maharaj, the adhisthayak dev of this teerth place is magically very powerful and is world famous for amazing miracles.”

Jirawala Mandir: “According to Jain belief, the temple dates back to 2,800 years. Jirawala has been an important Jain centre between 506 CE to 1324 CE and received patronage by multiple Jain acharyas. The iconic idol of Parshvanath, the principal deity of the temple, was found during an excavation. The cow belonging to a Brahmin boy Kadwa used to pour out its milk every day near a cave in Jirawala. Upon hearing about this Brahmin boy, Jain Seth Dhanna Shah dreamt of a Parshvanath idol where the cow went to pour milk. After the search, the idol was found at the same spot and was installed by Acharya Deva Gupta Suri in 894 CE. The temple has an ornate architecture. The temple has a large domical structure as the principal shrine with domical 52 sub-shrine along the axis of the principal shrine. There are a total of 108 idols of Parshvanatha in these shrines each bearing a different name with the central shrine housing the idol of Jirawala Parshvanatha, the principal deity of the temple. There are a total of 60 dhwaja stambha in the temple complex.”

The Jain temple at Muchhala Mahavir was established in the 10th century CE. According to Wikipedia: “According to Jain legends, Rana Raj Singh I of Mewar once visited this temple to offer prayer. He noticed a white hair while putting saffron to the idol. Upon question about the hair, the temple priest replied that the hair was from the moustaches of Lord Mahavira. Following, this Rana insisted to see moustache. The temple priest fasted for three days and pleased with this the protecting deity showed moustache on the face of the idol. When Rana uprooted the moustache, blood oozed out of the spot. Following this Rana became a staunch devotee of the Mahavira and the idol was named Mucchal Mahavir, or the Mahavir who had a moustache. The temple is built in Nagara architecture. The temple is a curvilinear superstructure decorated with multiple turrets and decorated pillars. The entrance of the temple has an intricately carved torana and outside the door of the temple are two large black coloured idols of elephant on each side. The temple is famous for detailed carvings.”

In the temples, even as Bhavana and Abhishek did the pujas, I did the darshan, found myself a chair, and began my thinking and writing. I let the thoughts flow, finding myself in a “flow” that is hard to achieve with the myriad distractions at home and office.

We stayed overnight at our erstwhile factory sites at Abu Road and Sheoganj. (Both have now been transformed into vocational training centres.)

5

Rituals and Economics

Every morning, there is an ‘auction’ (ghee boli) for the first rights to do the various pujas at the temple. This is a way for people to also donate money and the temple to raise funds for its maintenance. While there are large donors who do contribute, the daily auctions ensure that there is money raised daily. The bidding happens in “mann” – where 1 mann is equivalent to five rupees.

As I watched the daily rituals being performed, I realised that I was witnessing a process that has perhaps gone on for centuries. Some of the pujaris working in the temples have been doing so for generations. For those few moments, it is as if  time stood still. The people (devotees) keep changing daily, but the pratha (practice) remains the same. Standing in front of the idols, one gets a sense of the eternity. Kings and commoners have at some point of time stood in the same place.

Nakoda ji is a temple that I have the most memories of among all the ones in Rajasthan. As I sat in the temple, I could almost imagine myself there – 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. With my parents, with other relatives, with Bhavana, and this time with both Bhavana and Abhishek. Everything inside the temple seemed just the same; only the world outside has changed. For the hour that I was inside, it was as if time stood still and multiple decades collapsed into a single moment.

The Jain temples are part of India’s rich civilisational culture. They are a very good example of philanthropy at work. As far as I can tell, there is no government involvement. Trusts manage the temples. Income comes from large donors, daily auctions, and the devotees who contribute smaller amounts in the bhandar. Meals and stays are available at the bhojanshalas and dharamshalas at nominal prices. Imagine a full meal for under Rs 100 and staying in a room for under Rs 500 for a night.

The dharamshalas have improved by leaps and bounds over the years. There was a time when cleanliness was compromised for keeping the prices low. Through the years, this has changed. New construction in most places has added better facilities at higher price points. At places like Nakoda ji, there are options available at various price points. Better roads and temple facilities have also encouraged many more people to travel, bringing in a better connection to one’s roots.

For me, these short visits through the years have always served as a break from the daily hustle-bustle. The perceived proximity to God has, in my life, created its own thinking miracles. With each temple visit and the hours of travel between temples, a certain clarity emerges on the present and future.

6

Roads and Future

There is no doubt that India’s infrastructure is getting better. Travel times have come down, and roads are much better. A journey of about 250 kilometres that took six hours 7-8 years ago took us just under four-and-a-half hours this time. Tolls have been introduced on many roads, and FASTag has reduced wait times. There are still some challenges: many of the state highways make their way through small towns and villages which increase travel times. Cattle randomly squat in the middle of the road, while goats and sheep are herded on the smaller roads. And then there are the speed breakers – don’t we just love them! This is quintessential India: existing simultaneously in multiple decades and perhaps even centuries.

Prosperity still hasn’t touched large swathes of India. Watching some of the women carrying heavy items on their head, seeing youth idling away in the middle of the day, seeing the lack of trucks carrying goods in some of the inside roads, the challenges ahead for India also become apparent. As Tyler Cowen wrote recently: “The real challenge isn’t how to reduce the difference in wealth between the rich and the poor. It’s how to reduce poverty.” Hundreds of millions of Indians have lost futures because of inadequacies in our education and health systems. Governments at all levels still limit economic freedom, a prerequisite for prosperity.

Hopefully, a day will soon come in India where the lottery of birthplace will not determine one’s future. We need ideas like Dhan Vapasi and the Nayi Disha agenda to ensure this happens sooner than later. There are a billion Indians – one-eight of humanity – whose lives are being stunted because of politicians and bureaucrats who do not understand the reasons for poverty and the path to prosperity. This has been Independent India’s bane – for the most part, the colonial mindset of the rulers as masters and the ruled as serfs has continued. India needs new rules – not just a change of rulers – for freeing our billion.

As I wrote recently: “The revolution with the best chance of success is one which can be led by a leader who knows the limitations of what governments can do and has faith in the ability of markets and individuals – and in India’s case, 1.3 billion individuals pursuing their self-interest. Good jobs and upward mobility will be an outcome of the spontaneous order that such a leader’s decisions will unleash. No government official has the knowledge to anticipate or predict the future. All they can do is to create the simple rules that enable mass flourishing. The next-level of decisions – manufacturing or services, domestic consumption or exports-led – will emerge from enterprises and consumers making decisions in a free market. So will creative destruction which will help direct capital to the right opportunities. This is what will solve India’s income problem and put the people on an irreversible path of prosperity.”

The thought that came to me as I sat in one of the temples was this: the religion Indians need is freedom – it is the only one that can unite and not divide, it is the only one that creates futures and not just reveres the past, it is the only one that can make the 21st century an Indian one. And for this, we the people need an enlightenment of our own. We need to understand that our freedom movement is still not done; political independence does not automatically lead to economic freedom. The roads may have improved, but they are still not taking us to the Nayi Disha of irreversible freedom and prosperity.

Thinks 728

Sherlock Holmes: “A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.” [via Shane Parish]

Jacob Riis: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” [via Shane Parish]

Rodolfo Rosini: “I think Google cannot be challenged in their core territory. I mean it’s not my opinion but more a fact; it’s what has happened for 24 years. I think that the advancements in Generative AI present a point of disruption for multiple industries, but specifically they are a way to break Google’s hegemony on search engines. Instead of using a big database and searching on it, we need to use that database as training data, and generate results with a neural network. Instead of searching for something, and then opening the first few results and scanning for the content we want, while fighting millions of popups, ads, and weight loss scams, one needs to be able to generate the answer they are looking for.”

Elliot Hershberg: “The biologization of industry would look and feel very different from the industrialization of biotech. It would represent a radical shift for our global economy, and a major reorganization of the physical world. This distinction is not intended to represent a strict dichotomy. If we look at the structure of the Internet, centralized server farms have proven to be essential for providing cloud services and doing large-scale computation. The rise of edge computing shows how continuous the spectrum between centralized services and distributed computing can be. Similarly, powerful new bio-industrial factories like what Solugen and Ginkgo are building may serve as central nodes in the Bionet. But ultimately, one of the major lessons of biology is that planetary scale distributing manufacturing is possible.”

Read: The Boys of Biloxi, by John Grisham

My Life System #30: Religion and God

I am a Jain by birth, but that doesn’t mean much other than dictating my food choices (no onion, no garlic). And I wasn’t even doing that until I got married – I decided it was much easier to order the same food with Bhavana rather than two different dishes! I do go to temples as needed, but it is not a part of daily life. Which brings me to the key question: do I believe in God? And the answer is, Yes. I don’t have to go to a temple to pray to God; I can do that anytime.

For me, God is a force beyond. It is perhaps an alter-ego, a voice within which ensures I stay on the right track. It is an entity that I can turn to when all else fails. Like I did later in 1995 when I had some significant challenges with IndiaWorld. It was perhaps the first time I went to a temple and asked God for help – to prevent yet another devastating failure in my life. The suggestion had come from Bhavana as I sat numb at home – unable to see a way out of the situation I had found myself in. And – call it God, call it luck, whatever – things turned for the better in a way that I could not have foreseen.

My relationship with God has been a selfish one. I invoke his intervention when things are not going well. In recent times, I also say a silent Thanks when things go well. It’s a more conversational relationship. It’s perhaps me talking to myself and attributing the inexplicable to a divine intervention.

Each of us has our own way to manage extreme situations. In my case, to ensure I stay on level ground in both extrema, I either ask God for help or say Thanks. I think of God as a friend, an ally I can talk to 24×7. I know it sounds weird but I think we all need such a friend. One who speaks to us from within (conscience?), one who keeps us straight, one who we fear when treading down a path we should not. God and religion should be an intensely personal thing for everyone. Most of the world’s problems start when they transcend the self.

I am not a believer in previous birth or future births, even though that is one of the tenets of Jainism. I believe that we have one life, and we must do the best we can while we are alive and while we have the strength and health. For me, entrepreneurship now and philanthropy later are my two ways. And having made these decisions, whether it is luck or God, I know there is a force outside of me that will help in my journey.

Thinks 727

Cato: “Recent trends in manufacturing, remote work, independent work, globalization, and other areas argue for new policies for a New American Worker. Instead of promoting a certain kind of job, promising cradle‐​to‐​grave protection from disruption, or presuming that the employment and lifestyle trends of today will last beyond tomorrow, policymakers should seek to maximize Americans’ autonomy, mobility, and living standards. This book identifies what Cato Institute scholars believe to be the most important market‐​oriented policies to achieve these objectives, on issues like education, labor regulation, licensing, housing, healthcare, childcare, criminal justice, and consumer necessities. Each chapter identifies the problems facing American workers and suggests pro‐​market ways for federal, state, and local officials to better address these challenges.”

Arnold Kling reviews “Paper Belt on Fire” by Michael Gibson: “For Gibson, the key quality is a sort of wily resourcefulness. The great founders are the ones who always find a way. This is their highest virtue. What does it take to “find a way” in the world of tech start-ups? Gibson lists five abilities founders need. First, the ability to confront unknowns and uncertainty without being either too tentative or too overconfident. Gibson calls this “edge control.” Second, the ability to adapt as a company grows from a handful of people in a room to a giant corporation. Third, what Gibson calls “hyperfluency.” The founder must have superior knowledge of a technology/market niche but also must be able to communicate that knowledge to ordinary people unfamiliar with the niche. Fourth, founders of a company have to have the social and emotional intelligence to make hires, work with customers, raise money from investors, and gel with co-founders. Finally, the initial motivation for starting a company is often the excitement of doing something new and risky… but the sustaining motivation to keep going year after year, through all the twists and turns, has to be tied to something deeper, something richer in meaning.”

Ian Bogost: “It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon…To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.”

Paul Graham: “When you look at the lives of people who’ve done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket collector’s obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries…If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.”

WSJ: “Artificial-intelligence software programs that generate text are becoming sophisticated enough that their output often can’t be distinguished from what people write. And a growing number of companies are seeking to make use of this technology to automate the creation of information we might rely on, according to those who build the tools, academics who study the software, and investors backing companies that are expanding the types of content that can be auto-generated…AI content services are thriving. They make content creators more productive, but they also are able to produce content that no one can tell was made by a machine. This is also often true of AI-generated content of other kinds, including images, video, audio, and synthetic customer service representatives…The rise of AI-generated content is made possible by a phenomenon known variously as computational creativity, artificial creativity or generative AI.”

My Life System #29: Luck

All of us have experienced luck in our lives – some good, some bad. It is often hard to tell when luck comes our way whether it is going to be for making things better or worse. Many times, the initial feeling turns out to be wrong.

It is not easy to identify luck. Our belief tends to be that the good things happen because of our efforts while the bad – that is something or someone else’s doing. And so, we assign smartness where it’s not needed, and ascribe luck when it’s our own folly which caused it to happen.

When I was trying to raise money during my IndiaWorld years and all those efforts failed, was it bad luck? Or was it good luck because eventually I got an acquisition offer which perhaps would not have happened had I been successful in raising capital. And then when I think about the eventual deal, was I smart or was I just lucky?

Was it luck that I picked up a copy of “Competing for the Future” (by CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel) in 1994? The book helped crystallise my thinking over the two days I spent reading it and that became the business plan for IndiaWorld. (Coincidentally, I met CK Prahalad a few days later when I had gone to meet Prof. Ramesh Jain in San Diego, with the book in my bag! Was that luck?)

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen offer a good definition of a “luck event” in the context of a business – “one that meets three tests. First, some significant aspect of the event occurs largely or entirely independent of the actions of the enterprise’s main actors. Second, the event has a potentially significant consequence — good or bad. And, third, it has some element of unpredictability.” A similar definition can work well for the individual also: an event that occurs independent of one’s actions, is consequential, and has some unpredictability about it.

At some level, decisions we make cause us to be in situations where we can get lucky. Had my initial efforts at creating a successful business not failed, I would not have started IndiaWorld. When I got an offer to sell Netcore in 2011, was it luck? And when I look back, was it good luck that the buyer backed out at the last minute? What would my life have been had I sold Netcore a decade ago?

Life is all about a stream of events and decisions. What we think of luck are just decisions either we made or someone else did. At times, it is better to ascribe it to an unseen force than take up ownership especially when things are not going right!

We cannot wait for good luck to come our way. We have to chart our path by making decisions we feel are right. And then there are some events which can help accelerate the journey we are on. Think of luck as a tailwind that can propel you forward when you are heading in the right direction. And bad luck? An unexpected headwind that you have to battle and which will create a better you. Either way, you come out ahead.

Thinks 726

Vasant Dhar: “Clearly, the global economy has been a wreck, with declining ad revenues, which is shining a spotlight on the cost side of social media platforms. But the real war is over long-term attention, which is essentially a zero-sum game. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter cornered most of our attention over the last decade because they were early, and “network effects” did the rest, meaning that they became more valuable to people as more people joined the platform. Most of the ad dollars flowed into them, away from conventional media. But Meta/Facebook and Twitter have had a murky mission, and have gradually lost their way. In good times, mission didn’t matter much, as long as their “objective functions” did a decent job of creating engagement, typically measured by time spent or value added on the platform.  In my conversation with Stuart Russell, we considered to what extent the pursuit of such singular objectives – such as time spent, might have led to the unintended side effects we’ve seen, such as political polarization and teen depression. In tough times, murky missions can lead to the wrong objective functions that harm long-term value.”

WSJ on managing superstar employees: “Organizations spend considerable resources recruiting and deploying stars—high performers with greater visibility—in the hopes that they will not only create value through their own contributions, but also elevate the game of those around them. And, yes, working with stars can sometimes inspire colleagues to dream bigger, learn faster, and work harder. But it often doesn’t work out that way, our research shows. In fact, hiring a star can bring just as many negative results as positives…In our research, we’ve examined when star employees inspire their colleagues and when they deflate them, and discovered a number of factors that can make all the difference. Among them: the personality of the stars, the goals and mind-sets of the people they work with, and aspects of the team or workplace culture.”

Dan Shipper: “People think AI is going to replace individuals and create gigantic trillion dollar megacorporations that will upend Google. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that rather than replacing individuals, recent advances in AI will empower them to make an impact on a scale matching some of the biggest businesses, research labs, and creative organizations of today…AI pushes the cost of intelligence toward zero. And as this happens, domains of achievement that were previously unavailable to individuals and small teams—because they required the marshaling and coordination of a large amount of intelligence—suddenly open up.”

WSJ: “The rate of change of the first derivative is called the second derivative. We can keep on calculating further rates of change, but they don’t have names, since we don’t usually think about them. However, they are critical to engineers designing roller coasters. Acceleration can be exciting, but if it changes too abruptly it can cause injury. The rate of change of acceleration is the third derivative, and its technical name is jerk, because it makes rides feel jerky. The next three derivatives are sometimes known as snap, crackle and pop, showing that humor can be involved in mathematical terminology.”

Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz: “Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.”

My Life System #28: Optimism

By nature, I am an optimistic person. As an entrepreneur, one has to be. You have to believe that tomorrow will be better than today – not just for yourself but for the world too. Without optimism, life will be very difficult.

I wasn’t always like this. There was a period in between (1993-1994) where almost everything I did failed. That was perhaps the low point for me. With failure upon failure, I realised that at some point of time my luck will have to change! And it did, thought not before further tests which challenged me.

We tend to go through ups and downs. The problem is when the downs have a deep impact on our psyche. I tell entrepreneurs that when there is a failure, it is not you who have failed, but the idea, the venture. And there can be many reasons for that. You will fail only if you give up and don’t venture out again. Because there is much to look forward to in life.

This positiveness is what has kept me going in many of the difficult periods of life. I have a belief that whatever happens is for good. I know it is too broad a viewpoint to take, but without it, there is a possibility of going down a mental morass, which then feeds onto itself to pull us down for a much longer duration. In the period that there is something not good happening, optimism is what can pull us through. Keeping the spirit high, especially if one is leading a team, is very important. Else, there is no charting a path out of the hole.

When I look back at the worst moments of my life, I also see that a few months later, they resulted in something better. The failure to win the election for School Captain led me to do a public speaking course. The academic downer of my first semester in IIT pushed me to participate in cultural activities. The job offers I did not get after my Columbia Masters led me to NYNEX and a much better experience. The funding I did not get during IndiaWorld led me to a much better outcome with the eventual sale. There are perhaps other words to describe the event and the outcome, but I see it as living life with an optimistic streak that one can prevail over an outcome not of our liking.

On a longer timeframe, optimism is what keeps the smile on our face every morning, the cheerfulness even when something sad happens, the external happiness even though the inside may be hurting so we don’t pull others down with us. The world has a lot to be happy about. Compare our lives today with a generation ago. And the future itself is bringing in a pace of innovation that we could not have imagined. So, be thankful for today, and always look forward to a better future. Every tough time has passed, and even though more will come, we have it in us to rise and climb the next mountain. This quote by Christine Caine sums it up well: “Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted.”

Thinks 725

Larry Summers: “My broad view has been that the 20th century was the century of physics, and that the 21st century is going to be a century of the life sciences. I think we’re going to see more change around healthcare and the implications of biology for doing other things in the years ahead. Here’s a fundamental thing to understand about the economy: All the consumer price indices are normalized to be 100 in 1983. The price index for a television set is now below 5. The price index for a year in college is now measured at 600. What that’s telling you is that a much larger fraction of our economy is going to be away from manufacturing and producing stuff, and is going to be around services, experiences and taking care. That stuff is in many, many ways very ripe for transformation.”

Thomas Sowell: “It is not the source or the ruthlessness of power alone which defines totalitarianism, but the unprecedented scope of the activities subjected to political control.” [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaux adds: “Progressivism is an even graver threat to liberty than is populism, for progressives are far more intent than are populists at subjecting to political control as many activities as possible…Populism is deeply illiberal and much to be feared. It must be fought against and subdued if liberal civilization is to survive. But the enemy of my enemy is not thereby my friend. Progressivism – if only because, compared to populism, the mask it wears is friendlier and the tones in which it speaks are more dulcet – is an even greater threat to liberal civilization than is populism. Embracing, or even tolerating, progressivism as a means of subduing populism – or simply because progressivism is currently the most practical political option to populism – is a foolish move for anyone wishing for a revival of true liberalism.”

Mint: “[India’s] PM GatiShakti National Master Plan launched a year ago and is frequently touted as India’s biggest administrative reform tool. It is like the Google Maps of infrastructure planning and offers a dashboard with a bird’s eye view of bridges, roads, tunnels, pipelines, power transmission cables, forests, water bodies, and airports in any region of the country…As of now, GatiShakti has over 2,000 layers of data, and it is growing every day as more and more state and central government agencies feed the platform with even more data. The tool, in short, aims to solve a complex problem—delay in important projects that often leads to cost overruns. An oil refiner, for instance, can potentially cut the time required to get a mega project off the ground if the company knows for sure the land it needs to acquire between place A and B, the number of railway tracks and highways to be crossed, and other hurdles such as water bodies and habitation.”

Vinod Khosla: “Rushing to meet carbon-reduction targets by 2030 may hinder what can be achieved by 2050…For any technology to scale globally requires risk-adjusted competitive returns for investors. Companies must produce technologies that can succeed without subsidies. They must be profitable at what I call the “Chindia price”. I define this as the price at which clean technology will be adopted in China, India and globally as it outcompetes fossil alternatives. We should not rush to meet targets unthinkingly, but instead invest in superior technologies that may take longer to mature. The reality is that China was the world’s largest investor in clean technologies last year while also increasing its coal consumption by a whopping 10%. India will burn coal in ever-greater quantities for years to come. Let’s plan pragmatically to maximise carbon-cutting by 2050.”

Read: Desert Star by Michael Connelly

My Life System #27: Train Journeys

I had to go to Palitana (in Gujarat) recently for a family religious function. The fastest way to get there is a flight to Bhavnagar (an hour from Mumbai), and then about 2 hours by road. On the way back, since there was no convenient flight, we chose to come back by train, a 13 hour journey. I was excited – it had been many years since I had travelled overnight by train. Modern life and air connectivity is such that the long-distance train ride is the last preference.

Lying down on the upper berth in a three-tier compartment and unable to fall asleep (in part because I was so excited to be in a train once again), my memories went back to past train rides. The earliest long train ride that I could remember was when we had gone to Kashmir in the late 1970s – must have been when I was 11-12 years of age. (To date, that remains my only Kashmir visit.) My parents, younger sister and I took the Jammu Tavi Express – it was just under 30 hours to Jammu. I remember sitting at the window and being fascinated with the changing terrain. I counted the states we travelled through. That was the journey which triggered my love for trains.

Of course, there are plenty of short train rides. But the ones I am most excited about are the long ones. For it is on these journeys that time slows and hours can go by staring at the countryside. My first solo overnight journey was a train to Chennai just after I completed IIT in 1988 – en route to Pondicherry to meet a friend.

The journey that has stayed with me is the one I did from New York to Oakland while I was in the US. This was in 1991. I had to go to San Jose for a meeting. I went to my manager (this was when I was working at NYNEX) and requested an extra day’s leave so I could take Amtrak leaving Thursday evening from Grand Central and reaching Oakland Sunday evening – in time for the Monday morning meeting. He readily agreed. And thus began my 72-hour odyssey. It is a train ride that is still fresh in my memories. The long chats over dinner with strangers sharing personal stories, the beautiful views sitting in the all-glass cabin, the time to myself and my thoughts. It is a journey I hope to do one day with Abhishek.

And now back to my most recent train ride. I ventured out at a couple of the stations to see the buzz of night-time activity. I reminisced about similar journeys in the past. And then I finally fell asleep to the swaying motion and sound of the train speeding along.

I know we are now all plane people, always in a hurry to get from Point A to Point B. I hope we can take some time to relive the magic of the long overnight train journey. There are times when we deliberately need to slow down the pace of our life, so we can take stock and think. There is nothing better than staring at the speeding countryside and letting the thoughts and ideas flow.

Thinks 724

James Broughel: “The real division is not between classical liberals and the New Right, but between those who trust individuals to run their own lives and those who think technocrats know better.”

WSJ: “Now that millennials control the purse strings at many businesses, sales professionals are carving out new ways of closing deals on everything from business software to chemicals and office equipment. Those tactics, some say, involve fewer trips to the golf course and more time corralling large buying teams that include senior managers, finance officials and end users at target companies. Cold calls are ceding ground to millennials’ preference to communicate via text or direct message. And just as they do as consumers, many millennial corporate buyers like to research business products online and on their own before ever talking to a salesperson. For veteran sales leaders like Dale Taormino, the generational shift means much less time working the phones and wooing a few executives at a prospective company—as she did in her early selling days. Instead, she operates like “more of a quarterback,” she says, coordinating large teams of players on both the seller’s and buyer’s sides.”

Tim Martinez on some of the attributes of a “perfect business”: “A defensible niche in the marketplace, voted best place to work… – outcompetes for top talent in the industry, the perfect blend of automation and human touch, evergreen product/service, recurring revenue business model, YoY profitability – requiring the least amount of capital to generate the most amount of profit, YoY increased market share, profitable for everyone involved – shareholders, employees, partners, … over delivers in the Value to Price equation.”

WSJ: “In that triplet [government of the people, by the people, for the people], Lincoln lays out the three fundamental elements of democracy. The first is consent—government of the people. “According to our ancient faith,” Lincoln said in his 1854 speech objecting to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which compromised on slavery, “the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.”…A second distinctive feature of democracy is the people’s voice in the affairs of governing—government by the people. It matters little whether that active voice is the direct participation of individuals, as in ancient Athens, or through their representatives, as in the American Constitution…The third basic element of democracy is a government that serves the interests of the people—government for the people—not those of a monarch, an aristocracy or an angry and contemptuous elite. For that reason, Lincoln wrote, government served to do only those things that need “to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves,” such as roads and bridges, schools and asylums, the enforcement of the laws and the defense of the nation.”

Law & Liberty: “When it comes to the biggest debate of economic policy—whether governments should exercise more or less control over economic life—[James] Otteson’s major assumption is simple: as human beings, we all have an equal worth and an equal moral agency. Thus, interventions into the market economy, whether they be large or small, are presumptively illegitimate because they supersede the judgment of peacefully contracting parties. This is true even when the goal is economic equality itself. Market participants have different talents, training, and goals, so implementing government policy that would force them into an identical status would mean disrespecting their freely chosen life paths.”