In this case the traditional manufacturing frame emphasized such things as cost reduction, profit enhancement, efficiency, etc. Issues like how customers use and store the product were in the shadows of the frame and ended in a disastrous decision.

Years of conditioning and training can lead to a freezing of frames. These frames help us to simplify the world but the danger lies in oversimplification and holding on to frames after they are no longer relevant. Albert Einstein admonished his colleagues, “Make it as simple as possible but no simpler.”

A winning decision maker has the ability to look at something through several frames. Scott Fitzgerald says, ‘The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’

The ability to frame a problem is itself a key to its solution. There is a story about a Franciscan priest and a Jesuit, both being heavy smokers. This troubled them especially since they could not resist smoking while praying to the Lord. The Franciscan decided to see the prefect and asked him, ‘Father, would it be permitted to smoke while I am praying to the Lord?’ The answer was a resounding no. The Jesuit also sought counsel but framed his question somewhat differently. ‘Father, when in moments of weakness I smoke would it be permitted to say a prayer to the lord?’ The answer ‘Yes of course my son.’

This story demonstrates the power of frame control. Decision makers have a responsibility to consciously control their frames rather than being controlled by them.  They should attempt to overcome as far as possible the inherent limitations of any single frame. An approach to becoming a better decision maker in the context of frames is to follow these three rules:

1. Notice what frames you are using
2. Evaluate whether your frame fits the problem. If not then,
3. Find yourself a better frame or build one if necessary. Help others change their frames if you are working with a group.

K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

More than twenty years ago when the washing machine market in India was brimming for the first time with a slew of brands and competition was really hot, one company stood out for its outstanding performance. In this company, the CEO was stupefied at the phenomenal performance of one of his zonal managers who went on to receive a massive hike in emoluments and a promotion to the very top of the marketing department.

It so happened that the CEO happened to read an article in a management journal to the effect that success ought to be analysed at least as seriously as failure and one should always be healthily skeptical–use the power of NO.

He appointed a creativity consultant to look into the reasons for the phenomenal performance of the ‘star’ zonal manger. Unknown to this manager the consultant travelled deep into the territory meeting dealers and end users and thereafter submitted what turned out to be a shocking verdict that lead to the resignation of the ‘star’ manager. It turned out that the end users were using the washing machine to churn lassi! The company quickly realised that this was a health hazard and that the manager was in fact aware of this perverted use of the product.

An oft repeated fault in many organisations, is to automatically attribute success to the brilliance of the manager concerned or the team. Failure conversely is attributed rather automatically to incompetence. This is a serious flaw. In the above instance the CEO could have requested the ‘star’ performer to make a presentation to all the sales staff and share his insights into the strategy and tactics that in fact led to his grand ‘success’. In all cases of good performance it is essential to analyse the success factors with a view not to investigate into a possible fraud as in the lassi case, but in fact to see if the strategy could be replicated across the organization and also to determine if it was sustainable. In the performance assessment systems of most organisations the focus tends to be on successful outcomes of an executive’s efforts. This emphasis is being carried too far in most companies. The result of this overemphasis on outcomes is that little if any attention is paid to the process by which success was achieved.

Consequently good performance based on fortuitous circumstances gets rewarded while a dynamic executive whose performance may not be up to the mark for reasons beyond his control may go unnoticed or even punished. The role of chance factors in successful decision making or business strategy cannot be overlooked.

The decision making process has not received the attention it deserves. In nationalized banks for example it is common for executives to be denied promotion or to be suspended for what the management considers lapses in decision making leading to bad loans. It may benefit these banks to make a study of the correlation between the quality of loans on one side and quality of the decision making process on the other.

Too often for want of adequate awareness of and stress on the process factor, organisations may end up rewarding luck and punishing competence.

In the early stages of the decision process we tend to make a fundamental error, that of not challenging the data available to us. We tend to look at the data and form a viewpoint and then not seek further data. Even in gathering data we tend to look for that which confirms our pre-existing views. We fall into the trap of assuming a certain stance and then seeking evidence that substantiates our stand. This ‘confirmation bias’ is possibly why some of the best thought out and researched decisions often go wrong.

People who say that ‘seeing is believing’ are usually better at believing rather than seeing, said George Santayana. What he referred to is the phenomenon whereby we actually and unconsciously seek evidence that strengthens our pre-existing beliefs. This bias is perhaps one of the most debilitating aspects of human thinking. Allied with this is the mental filtering that we all do whereby we let into our mind information in a selective fashion. This filtering usually lets in only confirmatory information into our thinking process while conveniently keeping out disconfirming evidence.

I had a personal experience recently when a young college student from a South Mumbai college asked my opinion on the quality of college education in Mumbai relative to the rest of the country. I told her that Chennai had some of the best colleges offering quality education, at which point she reacted almost violently. Obviously I had touched a raw nerve. She was not comfortable with evidence that challenged her pre-existing beliefs. She challenged the basis of my conclusion and when I told her that I relied on surveys done by two major national weeklies she retorted ‘Both these magazines have no credibility in Mumbai anyway.’ Of course I assuaged her feelings by honestly stating my reservations about the scientific validity if such surveys. I was aware of the power of NO, the power of healthy scepticism.

While this was a relatively harmless instance, the consequences could be disastrous in the corporate context when decisions are taken with the confirmation bias. It is therefore necessary to be conscious of the working of such a bias and deliberately seek out disconfirming evidence. Some very successful top executives make a fetish, and rightly so, of deliberately encouraging executives who ‘dare’ to differ from them. Thus Sam Goldwyn used to tell his colleagues ‘I do not want yes men in this organization. I want people to speak their minds even if it costs them their job’. What he meant was that he insisted on disconfirming evidence.

Another top executive used to say at the end of a meeting that since all participants were in full agreement with his views he considered the meeting a waste of time and would summon another one on the same subject when some of his colleagues would prove him wrong!

I once advised a top executive friend of mine to recruit those who aggressively differed from him in the interview and challenged his viewpoint. He tried this tactic with trepidation. He now tells me that these dissenting recruits proved to be the most innovative ones he had ever employed. They had helped him avoid falling into the trap of the confirmation bias. Indeed the power of NO is immense. Parallel thinking, pioneered by Dr.Edward de Bono, is one technique that can help keep out the confirmation bias, and summon the power of NO, more so in a group decision making context.

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. – F.Scott Fitzgerald

All behaviour consists of opposites…learn to see things backward, inside out, and upside down. – Lao Tzu

The Green Tortoise bus line operating with about a dozen old vehicles, made scheduled runs up and down the US West Coast and into the interior at about half the price of the Greyhound. Its owner Gardner Kent gave up trying to compete with Greyhound on price in the low fare business. Instead of hopelessly trying to reduce the journey time he did the contrary—he increased the journey duration – six rather than four days! He used the extra two days to build more ‘ fun’ into the trip Рgames, walks in the woods, fishing, etc. His business multiplied and he was able to take over
another bus service. His idea, a product of paradoxical contrarian thinking, produced extraordinary results. His fun trip strategy led him to a new segment, a niche opportunity made possible by the socioeconomic changes that turned travel into a pleasure industry.

Paradoxical thinking involves, among other things, switching to the opposite of what is conventional.

One of the most brilliant displays of paradoxical thinking is by scientist Faraday in the 1830’s. He had observed that a current of electricity passingthrough a wire could have the effect of causing the magnetized needle of a compass to deflect, that is, move in a rotational direction when a compass was located close to the wire. This was the basis of his invention of the electric motor. Faraday did not stop with this. He took a mental leap Рa gigantic one as it turned out. He reasoned that if an electric current could make magnets to move, maybe the reverse could also happen. Could a moving magnet cause electricity to flow? He found that it did. Thus was born the generator.

Typically our NRI relatives buy fancy things including gadgets at duty free shops elsewhere in the world on their way to India. The Government of Philippines had a similar situation at hand. Millions of their countrymen and women work all over the world. Noticing the huge gifts visiting Philippines were seen carrying across the arrival hall at Manila airport, the Government opened duty free shops at that airport so that NRP’s could buy gifts after their arrival home!! At the Manila shop one could buy even tractors. This shop has catapulted that country into the fourth largest seller
of such goods in the world.

The Philippines government reasoned that no matter what the world is doing one may gain enormously by doing the opposite – paradoxical thinking. Opposites are everywhere. Yet we hardly stop to think about these omnipresent opposites. Because opposites are in the background we do not see them. To be creative, we have to pull opposites out of the background and put them in the foreground where they will be clearly visible. It is said that a fish does not know that water exists – because the fish takes water for granted. We are like fish – we see so many opposites that we
take them for granted and do not notice them anymore. If we notice and handle opposites imaginatively we could all become creative.

Let us look at some commonplace ‘opposites’. Is a straight line the opposite of a curve? Of course, one may say. Yet a scientist will tell you that a curve is but an infinite number of straight lines. Is a square the opposite of a circle? ‘Obviously,’ is the answer. Yet it can be proved that both are polygons. If you keep adding sides to a square it turns it into a hexagon, an octagon and so on. The more sides you add the more it comes to resemble a circle!

The two opposite things are deep down the same thing. Can we learn paradoxical thinking? Of course, we can. Here is how.

Be open in your thinking. Openness, courage and curiosity are essential. Be particularly aware of the so-called absurd ideas floating in your mind. Note them down, dwell on them, play with them refine them. Openness also means you are open to learning new subjects unconnected with your profession. Listen, explore, be curious. Pay more attention to things you
have been ignoring or taking for granted. When you look at something, say a gadget, visualize how they would look and function if it were different in shape, size, etc. Ask yourself, can I change this into the exact opposite? Look at the rug on the floor. How would it be if we had rugs designed for the roof? Look at the lights on the roof and ask, how would it be if we had
lights on the floor? Recall that such products exist.

It pays to be sceptical. The more sceptical you are the better a paradox thinker you will be. You do not take for granted what others accept as a matter of routine. Examine customs, practices, rituals, conventions, fashions, etc.

Paradoxical thinking is one of eight skills related to intelligence. The others are memory, logic, judgement, perception, intuition, reason, and imagination. Paradox is perhaps the least used of these skills. It involves the ability to reverse, manipulate, combine, synthesize opposites.

In their path-breaking book Built to last РThe successful habits of visionary companies, authors James Collins and Jerry Poras write that companies that survive are those, among other things, that do not oppress themselves with the ‘tyranny of the or’ Рthe rational view that cannot easily accept paradox, that cannot live with two seemingly contradictory forces at the same time. The ‘tyranny of the or’ pushes people to believe that things must be either A or B, but not both. The authors have demonstrated that organizations that have liberated themselves from this tyranny go on to
grow exponentially and are seen as extremely innovative.

One last example: Is it possible to make a car that is as exquisite as a BMW or Mercedes Benz but does not cost a bomb? Quality and affordability – a paradox is what many thought but not in a Japanese company that came out with the Lexus which was a great example of paradoxical thinking.

KR Ravi is also South Asia’s first Dr. Edward De Bono certified public trainer in Lateral Thinking.

He then told me tales of the astronomical wealth and privileges that this class of aristocrats enjoyed that would put to shame the czars whom the ‘revolution’ overthrew.

The very next day I read this news item in the Indian media on my internet about the Lok Sabha speaker  Somnath Chatterjee refusing to attend a meeting  of the International Parliamentary Union at Geneva. That’s when my computer conked off. I was in ecstasies extolling Chatterjee for deciding not to waste time and tax payers’ money on yet another fruitless talkfest.

‘This guy is a rare guy. We need more politicians like him,’ I told my wife.

‘Why, what happened?” she asked.

‘Wait till you get my computer working,’ I replied.

A minute later my computer expert wife announced that my gadget was fit for operations.

‘Just visit the India Express website and see for yourself what the greatest Bengali after Saurabh Ganguly in the 21st century West Bengal has done.’

She read with avid interest but as she read, her eyes grew red and her looks intense till she burst out in wrath, ‘What the hell is this? Don’t rush to conclusions. Read it yourself.’

She all but threw the computer at me. It was then that I learnt that Chatterjee’s decision had nothing to do with any lofty sentiments but was because of his outrage at the thought that he would be frisked at London Airport! It was then I thought of what my New York cabbie told me Рthe ‘oligarchs’.

But then Chatterjee is a communist and we claim to be a socialist country. So we may not have oligarchs. But with Indian ingenuity we have come up with a new concept – the elected aristocrats!

Our leaders are given many privileges that would make our old Maharajas blush in embarrassment. The privy purses for Maharajas may have been abolished but there is now institutionalized largesse for our netas.

On my last visit to Chennai, I was shocked at the way policeman skewed me out of the Dr. Radhakrishnan Salai onto the dirty sidewalk as the cavalcade of more than a dozen cars escorted the state Chief Minister. Some bushy-moustached, gun-toting men in jeeps appeared to train their AK 47s on me. I felt I was being suspected of being a terrorist.

Even Robert Vadra enjoys rare privileges including exemption from being frisked at airports. Just as Ganshiji is called the father of the nation, maybe Vadra could be officially anointed as the son-in-law of the nation, rashtra damaab in Hindi.

Come to think of it, Somnath Chatterjee is right. How dare a London security man frisk a Lok Sabha Speaker at whose command many an MP shivers in his dhoti and on whose rebuke MPs from Bihar and UP stop rushing to the well of the House and refrain from wrenching microphones and hurling them at other members!

I recollect seeing photographs of Bill Gates being frisked at Congress where he frequently makes an appearance to give testimony on policy issues. But who is Bill Gate compared to our netas? Just a sidelight.

In the grand tradition of Maharajas giving titles of honour to their loyal subjects, an organization in Chennai has recently conferred some interesting titles to three of the Tamil oligarchy.

Karunanidhi has been conferred the ‘Periyar’ award, his son Stalin gets the ‘Karunanidhi’ award and loyalist Minister for Power Veeraswamy the ‘Annadurai’ award! Veeraswamy gushed, ‘This award is better than a Nobel Prize.’ Nothing surpasses this for sheer nobility!

I was reminded of this episode when I read about the recent finding of dinosaur fossils in Tamil Nadu. True to our tradition I waited for a follow up report that would reflect our national ethos of showing scant regard for priceless treasures. The report came in a day’s time with the following line:

“Barely weeks after scientists unearthed a Jurassic age treasure in the form of hundreds of dinosaur eggs in Ariyalur district of Tamil Nadu, local villagers and students are looting and damaging the precious fossils.”

I can only add that it is not correct to blame ordinary people. Even our netas rush to the site of a terrorist bomb blast accompanied by a few dozen minions in tens of cars and stomp all over the scene of the attack pretending to take stock of the situation, even as the whole country knows that nothing will come out of the ‘investigations.’ The terrorists may well be sipping chai at a nearby tea stall and may even garland the beaming neta.

Most countries around the world would cordon off such sites in minutes and even the Prime Minister is not allowed to inspect the site with gay abandon. But not India!

But I have a funny tale to tell. I sent a script that I had written about dinosaurs in India to Steven Spielberg. This was written long before the recent finds in Tamil Nadu. Spielberg refused to even consider my script so I asked and got an appointment with the iconic film director. Unlike Bollywood big wigs he agreed to meet me seeing my enthusiasm.

I began by telling him about the Indian response to his movie Jurassic Park. He was not aware that this film was dubbed into several Indian languages. He asked me if our languages had an appropriate word for dinosaur and I told him about that thrilling scene in his movie when a kid exults when she first sees a dinosaur. The Hollywood original has her screaming: “Gosh There’s a dinosaur!”

The Hindi version, I told him, has her screaming: “Uima chipkali aa gayee!”

When I translated this into English Spielberg exhibited a range of emotions that could have won him an Oscar! He alternately laughed and cried till he was rolling on the floor out of pain and hilarity. Once he regained poise he said that calling a dinosaur a “chipkali” (a lizard) was……!!! Mercifully he left it unsaid.

When peace descended I told him that I had a script for another India-centric dinosaur movie. This time I told him it was about octogenarian and nonagenarian politicians in Tamilnadu itself, not far from the site where fossils were discovered. The highlight of the movie, I told him, was when the egg bursts and a baby dinosaur emerges. He walks to Chennai and encounters some netas with whom he establishes immediate kinship considering the similarity in antiquity.

The rest of my story is about how other netas in India wished to meet this dinosaur only to be told by DMK that some more of its MPs must be inducted into the Union Cabinet as a pre-condition. The adventures of the dinosaur are well chronicled in my script. Spielberg is actively considering the project.

I happened to meet a friend of mine, a successful banker in California who had migrated from India to the US more than a decade ago. He was talking about violence in India and gave that as one reason for his disappointment with his home country.

Let me use this argument as a starting point of a simple insight into thinking skills.

One of the first lessons in thinking skills is:

• Ask/look for reason.
• Ask/look for logic.
• Ask/look for credible evidence.
• Remember that anecdotes do not constitute evidence.

Take my friend’s lament about murders.

I looked up possible sources of evidence regarding incidence of murders in various countries in the world.  I came across THE MURDER MAP which shows graphically the incidence of that crime in most countries. What did I find?

India’s record is more or less the same as that of the USA! I am not saying that we can be smug about our record. All that I am saying is that once you respect and base your thinking on evidence, figures and logic you will become a better thinker.

In looking at figures there are two other points to be remembered:

• When given a figure always ask ‘Is this big or small, significant or not?’

• This figure has to be analysed in relation to what denominator?

Let us take another common lament: How is it that a country of one billion cannot produce a Wimbledon champion?

Let’s look at this statement in the light of the above guidelines.
This lack of tennis champions is sad but is a billion the appropriate denominator?

What is the base, the bucket, of the number of families that have access to tennis courts?

Is the denominator, the figure of one billion or the number of kids who have tennis playing facilities within access? If you feel as I do that very few families can access such facilities and this ought to be the denominator, it is indeed creditable that we produce some very  good players of the likes of the Krishnans, the Amritrajs, Bhoopathy, Paes, and Sania Mirza.

As for the murder rate in the U.S and in India, how does one measure the rates credibly? In terms of the number of murders per 100000 of population per annum? That’ s how  the Murder Map is constructed .

A Bihar based friend of mine boasted about five years ago that the  Bhojpuri film industry was  the fastest growing film industry in India. To which I replied that in the case of Bhojpuri films ANY GROWTH WILL SEEM ASTRONOMICAL! The reason why I said this? The same old little matter of the denominator—in this case zero base.

When I moved to the city of Washington DC three years ago I was looking at various places to rent an apartment in. I knew that every city in the U.S (maybe all over the world) has parts that are unsafe .I looked at the figures for crimes in each part of the city and made an informed decision to move into the locality where I now stay.
Often we tend to go by hearsay. In most cases we tend to form opinions on the basis  of subjective judgments. These tend to be prejudiced.

I have evidence to prove this!

If all this is obvious the question remains: Why do we miss the obvious?

But what I saw on US television one morning made me laugh out loud. There, in the midst of a serious discussion on the dismal state of the economy, an analyst came up with a startling statistic. He said that the sales of premium brand underwear had remained steady but sales of the mass brands had fallen, thereby giving a new insight into economic matters – that the rich are doing well but ordinary folk had to make do with underwear with holes.

What better measure do we need to gauge the plight of ordinary people, he argued.

I agree that this is a case of numerical measures carried too far but it shows us the way to better thinking – what I call numerical thinking. What this means is that wherever we can measure something that is being discussed we ought to do so and then start the process of interpreting data. It is all too easy to form opinions on the basis of “feelings” or intuition etc. These tend to reflect our biases and prejudices.
The more contentious the issue the more we allow emotion to influence our thinking.

Come to think about it, which issue is not contentious?

A case in point was when there was a discussion among young cricket enthusiasts as to who has made a more significant contribution to Indian cricket, Dravid or Sachi. While I have devoted another article showing how to start such a thinking process, I may state here that before the youngsters came to blows I suggested that if one takes into account the number of times these batsmen have saved India or led the team to victory, Dravid comes out better, if statistics and not feelings were to hold sway and accepted as a yardstick. There is a website that has done this calculation!

In the wake of the success of the movie ‘Slumdog Milionaire’ there was a discussion at a party in Washington DC on Mumbai. At one stage, the conversation centred on a comparison between New York and Mumbai. An American friend contended that Mumbai was not only poorer but was more criminalized. My NRI friends joined in and agreed with the American. I was able to stun my friends with the statistic that crime per capita was higher in New York than in Mumbai!

The conversation then veered round to communal riots in India. This is a convenient stick with which India- bashers beat our country. The feeling is that Hindus and Muslims cannot live in peace and have to periodically indulge in blood letting.

Let me do some numerical thinking based on research not feelings. In the period 1960 to 1993 ( according to a research paper ) there were 554 communal incidents. This amounts to less than 18 incidents a year in a country of a billion people. Is this catastrophic? Think numerically about this fact. I do agree however that even one life lost is one too many.

One inexplicable paradox, is how did a country that has made epoch making contributions to mathematics come to devalue numerical thinking? I recall being very disappointed one day when I asked the following question of a class of commerce students : A shopkeeper tells you that a pen that you want to buy is priced Rs .25. He however offers to sell it at Rs. 20. I asked the students what was the discount offered in percentage terms? Fewer than 40 % got it right. I believe the semi-educated shopkeeper was better at such calculations.

I am afraid this devaluation of mathematics has led to numerical thinking taking a back seat. The tragedy is compounded by an indifference to data mining storage and availability. This is shocking in view of the ease with which Indians have taken to Information Technology .

This leads us to another paradox. According to author Pavan Varma, one of the world’s most extensive databases – and a perfectly workable system to access it for mass applications – was in existence more than 3000 years ago! The Bhrigu Samhita, a treatise on astrology first written in Vedic times compiles at least 500,000 horoscopes and claims to have an infinite number of records of people and the events in their lives. Advanced statistical methods were used for this compilation.

I am not commenting on the merits of astrology to which I will devote another article. I refer to the use of mathematics and consequently to numerical thinking that was once our hallmark.

These are issues over which we have to ponder and then launch a plan of action keeping in mind some significant lessons of life.

What many people may not know is that to lead a rich and satisfying life we ought to devote about 70% of our time and effort on our long-term developmental goals. We are so caught up in day-to-day issues which in the final analysis turn out to be of small significance to our lives. We lose sight of our main and meaningful goals.

I once did such an introspection and imagined that I was in an ICU. I heard my doctor telling my family in a whisper, “‘I am sorry the end is not far. You can call your relatives.”

I saw myself looking back at my life Рa sort of final audit Рand was filled with remorse at having wasted my life without any overarching goals, which go beyond making money and acquiring material stuff. It was then that I woke up with a start and reminded myself that “an unexamined life is not worth living.”

I set myself short-term (one-year horizon) medium-term (1 to 3 years) and long-term goals (beyond 3 years). Once the goals were clear I wrote down a concrete plan of action that would take me in direction that I desired.

These goals should not be laid down in money terms but in terms of the level of excellence in your chosen area of activity. As you move in the direction of excellence you will perhaps get the kind of money you deserve and more importantly you will reset your criteria to measure success. At some stage you will opt out of the rat race with the understanding that in a rat race even if you come first you are still a rat!

In moving in the desired direction you will realize that you will have to acquire new habits of thinking and doing. At this stage the rule of 21 comes to your assistance. Let us suppose that you need to create/find time to read up the latest research in your area of interest. You decide that you will cut short your sleeping hours and get up at 5 am. The rule of 21 says that beginning tomorrow you should get up at 5 am and read books for the next 21 days no matter how late you slept at night, no matter how tired or sick you are. If you are unable to do it for any reason then begin the 21-day cycle all over again till you compete one cycle without a break. At the end of a successful 21-day cycle, you will have a new habit.

Do I guarantee success? No one can guarantee success. Do not believe anyone who gives you such assurances. Success is a result of many factors and you have no control over many factors. Hence I advise you to do your best and gracefully accept whatever comes your way. However, when you may lie in an ICU you will have the satisfaction of having gone in the right direction and having done your best.

I can attest to the effectiveness of this strategy. I am ready to write my final audit report if called by my maker to do so. The summary shall read:

“I set out in the right direction, did not necessarily reach the planned destination but totally enjoyed the journey. No regrets.”

K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

Looking at my perplexed expression, my friend paused a while to clarify the situation. “You see I am convinced that the more I hide my bottles of alcohol from my son, the more curious he will become and will surely imbibe the drink surreptitiously in my absence. I decided that the best way to avoid this is to offer him a drink whenever I drank. He tasted whisky once and found it disgusting. I am now sure he will not drink even when offered.”

The CEO of a large company asked me to meet with his HR manager to discuss the possibility of conducting workshops on Lateral Thinking for his colleagues. I sought an appointment with the HR manager only to find the man was not interested in meeting me. I suspected that he did not like the idea of being told whom to meet.

A short time later, I sat opposite the man who leaned against his large desk looking cynically at me.
“So you think you are a latter day Einstein?”
“Sir I am far…..” I began saying but was interrupted rudely.
“I have seen many trainers who think they can transform this company. But they are only after money,” he argued.
“But I never even….”
“I believe we are creative enough and do not need….” His voice trailed off as the intercom rang. He barked some instructions to his secretary and then turned to me.
“See we are a very innovative company and do not need anyone to tell us how to think innovatively,” he said in an authoritative tone.
“Sir please listen to me….” Again I was interrupted mid- sentence.
“I think you are wasting my time,” he stated with an air of finality.
I got up. Before shaking hands I told him, “I hope at least now, when I am about to leave you, I will be permitted to say at least one sentence.”
“Of course go ahead. Why do you stand? Please sit down.”
I obliged and continued the exchange, “I have no doubt that your company is innovative and has won some awards for innovation. I am convinced that you do not need my services AT ALL! On the contrary I would learn from your lateral thinking colleagues. I hope that will happen some day.”
So saying I again stood up and stretched my hands towards him.
“Oh come on. Nobody can claim to have learnt all there is to any subject. We can learn from you. You have a formidable reputation,” said the man looking amiable for the first time. His defences were finally down.

I would go on to conduct a dozen workshops for that company and the HR manager is now one of my close friends!

These are two examples of counterintuitive thinking in which we ask ourselves what is the last thing that one can think of or do in a tight situation? One goes against the grain as it were.

The State of Tamilnadu was rocked by a series of shocking incidents of people imbibing ‘hooch’ and either dying or being blinded. The concoction served by bootleggers, was contaminated by acids and ethyl alcohol that were almost always lethal. The obvious ‘solution’ to this crisis that might come to most of us is to ban hooch, clamp down on bootleggers, swoop down on known sales outlets, and arrest the bootleggers. This not only did not solve the problem but made the trade even more secretive. The drink was now made under even more unhygienic conditions with even more cheap and lethal ingredients (including lizards and rats) which led to even more tragedies.

Surely this called for counterintuitive thinking. The government decided to open dozens of stores where good quality liquor would be available at a fair price. The underground market almost totally ceased to operate.

We all talk of corruption in India but few have offered concrete suggestions to reduce or eliminate it. The Right to Information Act is one step in the right direction. Here is a counterintuitive suggestion:

How about legalising corruption?

Let me give you an example based on a system that is in operation in a country even more corrupt than India. Let’s say that you need a fresh passport urgently since you have an opportunity to travel abroad. The Passport office has a reputation for corruption. Now a new scheme is introduced. Those who need a passport urgently—in a week for example—will have to pay 15% extra service charge; those who can wait till four weeks will pay only half that amount. No service charges will apply for delivery after four weeks.The collections will be distributed among the staff— as happens in a restaurant where the ‘tips’ are shared among all the staff.

In effect this scheme legitimizes what you would have been paying under the table, much like the tipping the waiter at a hotel. I believe most people may not mind paying additional amounts officially as against being extorted.

Witness that way in which people in Chennai do not mind paying a given amount of money to a ‘call taxi’ service where you pay as per the meter. The same people hate paying the same amount for the same journey to an auto rickshaw guy who actually is seen as an ‘extortionist’ since he ‘demands’ more than is considered legitimate. The call taxi amount is deemed legitimate .

The drug menace is one of the many evils of life in many countries including the US. Not many may be aware that terrorists obtain colossal sums of money by selling drugs based on crops that grow in Afghanistan. In effect any American who consumes drugs is financing the acquisition of armaments that are used in acts of terrorism. Drugs are banned but the ban is ineffective and has the unintended effect of making the trade even more secretive and lucrative. Some countries have attempted to implement a counterintuitive solution—Canada for example has made marijuana available legally!

My first encounter with this form of thinking was when I was a fourth standard student in a Mumbai school. I was an enfant terrible and my mischief was the despair of all my teachers, not to speak my classmates some of whom changed to another school just to avoid me. One day, a new teacher joined my class and looking back I could see how she used counterintuitive thinking. With much fanfare, she actually appointed me the class monitor!

In tackling the issue of how to compete with the Coke bottle, Sculley made
what is called a metadecision. He asked himself a few crucial questions. What is the crux of the issue? How should problems like this be
approached? He realized that the heart of the problem was not to compete
directly with Coke’s bottle (Pepsi’s focus in the past) but to nullify its
strengths. He decided to approach the problem by shifting the ground rules
to alter the whole playing field, pulling back and asking what the customer
really wanted.

Realizing that his people did not know enough about consumers to identify
what they really wanted in order to take marketing decisions correctly, he
launched a careful test to study how families actually consumed Pepsi and
other soft drinks in their homes. It became obvious that what the customers
wanted was packaging that made it easier for people to get more soft drinks
into their homes. Then Sculley moved into the first of the four stages in
decision making – framing the issue, which in this case was launching of
new larger and more varied packages. Pepsi began a new intelligence
gathering stage, and then, based on the findings, launched a new group of
larger packages and thereafter continued to refine the packaging. The results
were dramatic and Pepsi’s market share expanded substantially and almost
drove the Coke bottle out to extinction. Coke could not convert its famed
hour-glass silhouette bottle into larger containers.

What Sculley did is of immense significance to decision makers – take time
for an initial assessment, in which you ask yourself how this kind of decision
should be made. This activity of deciding how to decide is called
metadecision.

In the metadecision phase, ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the crux or primary difficulty in this stage? Which of the four
stages in the decision making process will be the most important?
2. In general how should decisions like this be made? Where do my own
strengths and weaknesses lie? Where do I need help?
3. Can I draw on feedback from related decisions and experiences that I
have faced in the past?

The four stages of decision making are:

•    Framing – it determines the viewpoint from which you look at the issue
and set the parameters as to which aspect of the subject  you will
consider important.
•    Gathering intelligence Рgathering knowable facts and options, and
evaluation of unknowables.
•    Coming to conclusions Рa systematic approach to taking a decision.
•    Learning from experience.

Metadecision Vs. ‘Plunging’

Meta decision should take place before you frame the issue. ‘Plunging’ into
the various stages of decision making can lead to disastrous consequences.
Not devoting sufficient time and effort to this phase may lead to you solving
the wrong problem thereby exacerbating the actual problem.

Take the case of a bank branch that was losing market share to its rivals. The
branch management decided that the only wayout was to aggressively
‘plunge’ into a marketing exercise. The officers were asked to jump headlong
into a ‘deposit mobilization’ exercise and virtually three quarters of the
branch staff were in the field all day. At the end of the two-month exercise,
the deposits actually fell further. When I was asked for advice I sat with the
branch officials and initiated a study involving customers who had closed
their accounts during the last year. The study revealed that they were
dissatisfied with the quality of customer service at the branch .The branch
thereafter decided to stop their outdoor marketing exercise and devote their
efforts to improving the level of customer service to existing customers. This
led to a significant growth in deposits.

In another instance a consumer durables maker approached me with his
problem – falling market share. His company was benchmarking against its
nearest competitor on all the major parameters and despite his quality and
other initiatives he could not improve his market share. I asked him to do a
metadecision exercise involving a survey of existing and potential buyers of
his product. This metadecision exercise turned out a new and profound
understanding of the market. The company implemented a plan of action to
solve the many hassles the buyers faced before and after buying the
product. The results were astounding. The company had as a consequence of
the insights from the metadecision, bypassed the competition.

A few insurance marketers approached me with a request to guide them on
how to market their insurance products in the face of growing competition
from the LIC and several other private sector players. They educated me on
the marketing strategy they had been taught and which they had been
following with limited success. It was apparent that they had followed a
strategy of ‘have product will sell’. They had been taught to ‘plunge’ into
action after gathering enough product knowledge, and follow the usual
marketing and selling tactics. I told them to take the metadecision approach.
They interviewed several existing and potential policy holders. This
metadecision stage revealed several insights as to what people expect from
an insurance policy—something that these advisors had not been told about.
The entire strategy had to be revamped and the majority of them have met
with commendable success.

The Union Human Resources minister Kapil Sibal — a man whom I respect and expect much from, announced that he is working on a 3-language formula as a ‘solution to the language problem.’ This formula involves students learning English, Hindi and a regional language implying one’s mother tongue. I am not sure if someone in say, UP will have to learn only 2 languages under this formula. Nehru had suggested that students in the north should learn any one southern language but he received no support. I wonder if Sibal has any such ideas.

However I have always maintained that it is the people in the natural course of daily life who can and have found a way out of this predicament. I have always admired the Indian spirit of adventure and enterprise that has resisted every attempt to repress them. Indians will do anything — migrate to any country on earth, take up any job under any conditions in order to survive and prosper. To an Indian, language is a tool to get going, exploit opportunities, stave off hunger and a leverage to prosperity.

For someone to talk of promoting a language as a tool of national integration — which is the argument for Hindi — is to assume that the average Indian has satisfied the ‘lower order’ needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. It also assumes that those who do not speak Hindi are not fully ‘integrated.’ I do not wish to get into details of the language debate here. Suffice it to say that not just the common man, but the highly educated elite will learn any language if it can help them climb the ladder to a better life. Don’t believe it ? Read the following extract from a news item:

Bridging the cultural gap, the IIM way
Rohit Bhan
Tuesday, October 06, 2009 (Ahmedabad)
China is now inspiring B-schools, as its dialects are centre stage in a new course at IIM Ahmedabad. It’s a 26-session course on Chinese business culture. Murlidhar, a student at IIM Ahmedabad, says, ”No matter where we go: the United States, Singapore, or Hong Kong, there are definitely going to be people from China. So to bridge the cultural gap in the near and short term, we are taking this course. Also, in the long term I see business opportunity could be explored there.”

It’s there for all to see — Indians will take to any language as long as it helps them to get ahead in life.

One more interesting aspect emerges from this news item. I have often been told that Tamil is a difficult language. It is another matter that a Tamilian may find Hindi equally difficult by the same logic. But I make a more important point….the people who say Tamil is ‘difficult’ will find that Chinese is far more difficult but will learn it any way because they know on which side their read is buttered. Ultimately many issues in India are bread and butter issues that surface in other garbs.

A final suggestion — how about some cross cultural training for us on understanding cultures of Indian states other than our own, the mannerisms and how to behave when we are in other Indian states? Anyone listening?

Young Man (YM): Master, how long will it take for me to achieve enlightenment?
Gautama Buddha (GB): It all depends on you.
YM: If I put in ten hours of meditation every day, how long will it take?
GB: Maybe ten years.
YM: What if I put in fifteen hours meditation?
GB: Maybe fifteen years.
YM: (getting irritated) What if I meditate for twenty hours?
GB: Maybe twenty five years.
YM: I cannot understand your logic! The more effort I put in the more time it will take ….this is ridiculous! Please explain.
GB: As long as you are fixated and obsessed about your goal you will not achieve it. Just do spiritual practice without one eye on the goal. Let events take their shape.

I was reminded of this story when I saw a TV interview of Nobel Laureate, V Ramakrishnan, an Indian American. The new laureate was the very epitome of humility and one of his statements was eye opening. He said that he embarked on his research, not out of a desire to win laurels but out of curiosity to solve a scientific problem. He was not working with one eye on the Nobel Prize.

My understanding of life is that the things we desire most: money, power, status etc are best left to shape themselves. What we must keep as our main goal, is best exemplified by what a friend of mine, told his young sons. He told them, “It does not matter what you do in life. I request you to aspire to be the very best in terms of excellence in whatever you do. If you choose to be a janitor, try and become the best janitor in town.”

In other words, excellence ought to be our ideal and everything else ought to be a side effect.

Now that we are talking about outstanding Indians, readers might like to know about another illustrious Indian American who figures among the people of excellence in his chosen field. He is Dr.V Ramachandran, an outstanding neuroscientist. He is respected all over the world on account of his pioneering work in understanding the human mind. What is striking about him, apart from his commitment to excellence, is his humility. He travels frequently to India to meet his aged parents at his humble home in Chennai. My friends tell me that he can be spotted sitting in his verandah sporting a lungi and banian, sipping kaapi (coffee) and reading The Hindu paper. He is known to be accessible to anyone who chooses to meet him.

That raises another point. It is time that our media gives extensive coverage to those among us who have excelled (not necessarily in financial terms) so that they might inspire youngsters to not only aspire for world class efforts but to imbibe the personal qualities that go into the making of a Nobel Laureate namely: curiosity, vision, sustained endeavour, without an eye on the perquisites and of course….humility.

This incident reminded us of the callous manner in which sports is administered. It also brought our attention to the almost total lack of professionalism in all walks of life that is our bane. Moreover it called to attention the country’s lack of readiness to host The Commonwealth Games just around the corner.

But I wish to make a larger and far more critical point after I point out the following comment from a news item:

“What the IPL has succeeded in doing is create a new generation of half-baked players with faulty techniques who strut around like superstars based on their dubious performances in the IPL. This year in South Africa, Manish Pandey became the first Indian player to score a century in the IPL. He is nowhere in the ‘national’ reckoning. But in a recent interview he glibly explained how he has attained celebrity status due to that century — and proudly stated how he now wears tight shirts with buttons open, low-waist jeans, and spikes his hair.”

The contrast between the way we treat our cricketers and the manner in which we treat stars from other sports is glaring enough. But the point I make is this: We cannot but think along caste lines on any subject.

When we think about any person, institution, event, activity, profession, game, dress, style — anything at all — we think along caste lines often without consciously being aware about it. The Usha incident when contrasted with the Manish Pandey attitude demonstrates how cricket is the ‘upper caste’ sport and how athletics is identified as ‘lower caste’ in origins. It is impossible for Pandey to be treated like Usha even though Pandey has yet to establish his credentials at any high level. If the talented Usha had been fair skinned and considered ‘good looking’ along accepted lines, she would have received more respectful treatment! We classify good looking people as ’upper caste.’ In our ethos it is absolutely necessary to be endowed with white or light skin in order to be considered good looking.

Look at the way the much touted India International Film Awards (IIFA) which are held in exotic cities all over the world. If you notice closely, shorn of the glamour, you will find something outrageous — the awards are given only to Bollywood personalities. Why is that so? Here is a guess — Southern stars — to take just one region of India — are too dark skinned to be seen on stage with the ‘good looking’ Bollywood stars irrespective of the talent of ‘Madrassi’ stars.

I was shocked at the response Amitabh Bachhan gave when he was asked to name the 100 best movies made in India since Indian cinema began. He did not name a single southern film! I believe there is more than ignorance at play here. I also cannot believe that he sincerely but erroneously believes that southern films are not good enough. It is no coincidence that he is the Brand Ambassador for IIFA.

Many readers may be executives who read business magazines. I ask this provocative question: Why is it that the front covers of such industry magazines over the decades have been adorned by assorted CEO’s, CTO’s and CFO’s but not project managers, materials or production managers? There is a caste system here too!

Do we treat the Middle East NRI with the same awe and respect as the US or Canada based NRI? Think about this carefully. It is true that people everywhere tend to resort to classification but for the sheer contempt with which we treat those who rank as ‘low’ Indians take the cake.

I have more to say on this topic but I suggest you wait for my new book: CAN INDANS THINK?

(1) I do not recall too many instances when a joint session of Parliament was called for listening to our Prime Minister make a policy statement and outline a strategy to tackle one of the many crises facing the nation. I am not content with the platitudinous speeches made by the Rashtrapathi or Pradhan mantri at the beginning of a Parliament session. These are lofty speeches that do not really address any crisis and in any case these are part of Parliamentary procedure and do not have the nation’s attention. When Obama spoke to the Houses, the entire nation was glued to the TV and I suspect many people elsewhere in the world also watched him tackling a much debated issue in the US, namely health reform.

(2) The very fact that the speech was devoted entirely to a single issue — health — is itself a telling point for us Indians. Let us take just health in India’s context. In the tenure of Anbumani Ramdas as Union Health Minister I do not recall any initiative to attend to the myriad problems in our health sector. Instead Ramdas was engaged in the single minded pursuit of Dr Venugopal. Eventually he managed to oust Dr Venugopal, a renowned surgeon, out of the AIIMS. Other than that, Ramdas tilted against windmills like asking Shah Rukh Khan not to smoke in movies. Surely there are far more critical issues to be attended to? The current Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has been no different but this time there is a difference — the PM has pulled him up for non-performance.

(3) Considering the many areas where the situation is tragic:  education, power, infrastructure, Maoist violence, national security, etc, I would have thought that each minister at state and union levels would address the nation/state, and tell us what he or she intends to do and what results we can expect. Barring one or two, we have only silence as an answer. When did you hear our power minister for instance tell us what he is doing to solve our deepening crisis? How many can tell me who the power minister is?

(4) Now comes a crucial point. In the course of his speech Obama announced that illegal immigrants would not get medical cover. At this juncture Republican Joe Wilson shouted, ‘It is a lie!’  Many Americans were outraged but for a nation like ours this seems almost a term of endearment. I imagine that if Mayawati announces in the UP Assembly that the hundreds of crores she is spending for statues are for public welfare and the only response she gets from the opposition is a lone MLA shouting, ‘Ye sarasat jhoot hai,’ Mayawati will hug him in affection and assume that her idea has unanimous consent!

Over the years we have been seeing deterioration in the conduct of our law makers. Obscene acts like unfurling of dhotis happens more often than unfurling of our national flag. Chappals are hurled, microphones ripped apart, abuses exchanged, lawmakers rush menacingly to the Minister or Speaker…these are daily events that do not shock anyone any more.

If you think that these are the prerogative of rustic goondas who have made it to the legislatures, you may be wrong. To my knowledge all this was started by a scion of India’s royalty, the Gandhi family. It is Sanjay Gandhi and his band of rowdy MP’s who used to engage in shouting down those MP’s who had opposing views. The events of that era have been well discussed and need no elaboration here. Sanjay’s behaviour started a trend that has reached a new low these days.

But the fury of public anger at Wilson’s behaviour has now snowballed into a crisis for himself and his Republican Party. Mid-term elections are a year away and Wilson is in for a drubbing and his political career may well end. His party has asked him to apologize to the President on the floor of the House, which he has refused to do and is content to apologize to Obama directly. This incident — trivial by Indian standards, has made his party look like the BJP. The party looks adrift, leaderless, visionless, ungainly and lost in the woods. It has been said about South Carolina (where Rep Wilson hails from), is a state is that is too small to become a nation and too big to be a lunatic asylum. How would you describe some of our states? I invite readers to send me catchy lines for our states and our country.

Here are the two questions that had tormented me for years.
(1) Why do Indian politicians usually live long, often well past their sell by date?
(2) Why is idol worship — a Hindu practice — wrong?

Let me take up the first question — why do Indian politicians live past their utility value? I recall the papers reporting the sad and tragic demise of the Andhra Chief Minister, Y.S.R Reddy. I had a lukewarm attitude to the man but I was aware that he was very popular among the masses and among his otherwise squabbling party men. I was pained at the manner in which he met his end. Even as I was struggling with my emotions on his sad demise, I saw reports that in the 24 hours after the fatal accident, more than a hundred people either committed suicide or died of shock on hearing of the death of their beloved leader.

Now I believe that one can admire and even love a person dearly but does one have to commit suicide on the beloved person’s death? Why can’t one accept that life is ephemeral and no matter how great or powerful a man might be, he will have to die anyway. Death after all is the great leveller. But there is a streak of insanity in some of us that surfaces in moments of great turmoil that leads to self destructive behavior. I am afraid this phenomenon that was hitherto a Tamil Nadu speciality has now reared its head in Andhra Pradesh.

What was my Eureka moment? The events after Reddy‘s death gave me an answer to my burning question. Indian politicians have tremendous compassion for their supporters and are aware that their demise will trigger several suicides. Politicians obviously do not like others to take their own lives in such a manner. They prefer that this affection be transferred to their son or daughter who will be found standing next to the party chief at the funeral. But our clever leaders are certain that some die hard supporters will commit hara kiri. To postpone this inexorable event our netas live very long !

I had all along been cynical of such politicians but now that I saw them in a better light I can only say, ‘Ayushman bhava’ to people like Arjun Singh, Karunanidhi, Advani, Laloo Yadav, Shekawat, etc.

Now to that other matter about idol worship. I have addressed interfaith meetings in which Muslims and Christians have objected to idol worship. I have said that the Cross that adorns every Christian church, almost every Christian home and most Christian necks is an idol too. I have even talked of the human need to concretize the invisible, but in the Eureka moment I had received a fresh insight into this vexing question about idol worship.

What led to a new insight was a news item. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has now been painted in shades of divinity. A 25-year-old painter has projected Mayawati as a goddess in several paintings on display at Lalit Kala Akademi here. Mahesh Tripathi, who is pursuing post-graduation in fine arts, said: “I feel that she (Mayawati) in the last few years has done a lot for the poor and downtrodden, who in turn would enable her to acquire the status of a ‘devi’ (goddess) in near future.”

In one such painting titled ‘Dalit Devi’, Mayawati has been depicted as a goddess with a halo in her background, her hand held out as if she is blessing the viewer. “Like Guru Nanak and Jesus Christ, she has been devoted to the cause of downtrodden. Considering this fact, I depicted her as a Dalit goddess,” Tripathi, a resident of Siddharthnagar district, said.

Now I am not assessing the UP Chief Minister’s achievements. All I am saying is that once Hinduisim allowed idol worship here was no stopping the idolisation of anyone whom we could elevate into a deity. In the absence of a Pope or other spiritual authority, who can object to my friends erecting my statue as a god of Creativity, considering my status as a trainer, consultant and author in that subject? No one! I can become a god too.

I now have my strongest reason to object to idol worship, an argument that no Christian of Muslim had thought of before! Now before you call me Archimedes ka avatar let me hurry to my bathroom. Who knows what fresh insights I may come out with. But hereafter I shall be more careful when I rush out.

Here is the gist of my talk:
Indian politicians have a habit that is much discussed in the US but is rarely practiced. Several studies by your institute have shown that many ailments are caused during the patient’s stay in a hospital in the US. Paradoxically doctors in this country, far from healing a patient actually cause diseases. If the habit I am referring to is acquired by hospital staff, the savings to the healthcare bill in the US will be at least $100 million a year and I am not counting the loss in terms of leave of absence, fall in productivity loss of morale etc.

At this point the audience got impatient and asked me to please enlighten them about this simple habit! I said that I was alluding to the habit of frequently washing hands! Indian politicians are known to wash their hands almost hourly. For example Laloo Yadav has washed his hands off the fodder scam and the daily allegations of misrule and corruption during his 15 year rule in Bihar. Six months from now Mayawati will wash her hands off the allegation that she had used tax taxpayers’ money for self aggrandizement by building statues of herself on every street corner in Uttar Pradesh. This is why India’s ruling class has remained unaffected by swine flu.

“What else can India teach the west?” I was asked. At this point I drew the audience’s attention to an Indian tradition that the west should aspire to emulate. In the west it is common for people to greet each other by kissing, rubbing cheeks and embracing. I suggested that they abandon such unhealthy practices and adopt the Indian namaste or the Muslim Adab arz hai.

The audience nodded appreciatively and wanted to learn more from India. I told them about the results of some informal research I had been doing in India and the US. In the Tamil Brahmin community it is customary to invite a priest to conduct ceremonies and pay him in cash and kind. The latter usually includes dhotis and towels. I was curious to know what the priest did with the over hundred dhotis and towels he receives every year. He replied that he sold them to a textile shop and received cash! I realized that I may well have bought the same dhotis and towels repeatedly. Recycling indeed!

In Mumbai one sees youngsters selling flowers at street corners. Readers may not know that these flowers are taken from graves where people leave garlands in memory of loved ones. Recycling again!

In the US, Indians customarily offer bottles of wine to the host of a party. These are inexpensive and are easy to pack and carry. I performed a small experiment. I made a small mark at the bottom of a bottle indicating my ownership and date of purchase. Then I found something revealing about Indians. The same bottle kept coming back to me every six weekends — it is on the weekends that parties are held. The interesting thing is that I got back my wine bottle from a totally different person! Indians here recycle the same gift over and over again. Talk of 6 degrees of separation.

How about shaking hands ? I suggested that American bureaucrats can learn several lessons from their Indian counterparts, known as babus. These babus are not as obese as Americans. Why? American bureaucrats consume enormous quantities of high sugar coke. Indian babus are content with chai paani. At the most he will accept bachhon ke liye mithai.

The babu does not like to shake hands since his palms have been greased as a protection — against the scorching Indian sun. This accounts for the absence of swine flu among bureaucrats in India.

Indians are ambitious and will seize any opportunity to go ahead in life. Right now millions of Indians have lined up outside the American Consulates in many cities in India. They refuse to listen to the consular officials shouting, “PLEASE DO NOT APPLY FOR H1N1 BECAUSE IT IS NOT A VISA.”

Now comes the news that there has been a derailment in the Delhi metro although the system is almost new. One can cite thousands of such examples at the end of which we are forced to ask the question — what is really happening here? Is there a fundamental issue here beyond what appears on the surface?

There can be several answers but I shall highlight a few here.

Incidents like collapsing bridges point to not just poor execution and maintenance but to total lack of respect for life. The company that built the metro bridge probably had to pay so much money under the table in getting the contract that in its effort to recoup this ‘investment’ the company compromised on quality even if it meant a human disaster in the future.

I make bold to say that such compromises occur in almost every project in India. For example, contractors are known to compromise on not only on the quality of road construction to ‘recover’ their under-the-table investment but also to get the contract to repair the road after the next monsoon. Such stories lead me to find the underlying cause…the greed to get money even if it means shoddy work costing human lives.

There is a total disrespect for life.

It is sometimes stated that Indians are poor at maintenance of assets. This is true but reduces the issue to a managerial failing. I suggest that this trivializes the issue and diverts attention from the larger more sinister issue of the pursuit of wealth at any cost including human lives.

To return to the more superficial issue — our poor maintenance record — I feel that this indicates the reversing of roles of the trinity of the Hindu pantheon. Thus Brahma the Creator seems to have a small role to play since we create few assets. Vishnu  The Preserver has a marginal role since we are poor at maintenance. It is Shiva the Destroyer who prevails as we destroy assets at will in a riot, or even in a morcha. Apart from this we have no compunction in destroying lives. India is a Shivaite country! The only intriguing issue here is that Shiva stands for creative destruction. We have imbibed ‘destruction’ and ignored the ‘creative’ aspect.

Here’s a joke I read in an Indian newspaper that shows how poor we are at maintenance and how we can be corrupted to ignore maintenance.

A man dies and goes to hell. There he finds that there is a different hell for each country. He goes to the German hell and asks, “What do they do there?” He is told, “First they put you in an electric chair for an hour. Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the German devil comes in and beats you for the rest of the day.”

The man doesn’t like it, so he moves on and checks out the American hell, the Russian hell and hells of other countries. He finds that they’re all more or less the same as the German hell.

Then he comes to the Indian hell and finds that there is a long queue of people waiting to get in. Amazed, he asks, “What do they do here?” He is told, “First they put you in an electric chair for an hour. Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the Indian devil comes in and beats you for the rest of the day.” “But that is exactly the same as all the other hells; so why are so many people waiting to get in here?” wonders the man. He is told, “Because the maintenance here is so bad that the electric chair does not work, someone has stolen all the nails from the bed and the Indian devil is a former government servant, so he just comes in, signs the attendance register and then goes to the canteen.”

Let me explain.

The character of a people can be gleaned in many ways. Thus when people from other countries visit India they form opinions on the basis of what they see and encounter from the moment they visit the Indian embassy in their countries for a visa. Then follows the tourist’s experience on our streets. The results are well known to you.

I can see another way in which we can be judged. I suspect that when educated people meet at a seminar for example they may unconsciously use this yard stick to assess the character of a people. When Indians plan to attend a seminar in a foreign country they are judged from the moment they land up at that country’s embassy in India for a visa. As tourists, Indians are not regarded highly in many countries if surveys are to be believed.

I shall attempt to drive home my point by a recent concrete example which I have experienced. I may add here that I too am guilty of such reactions and I see such reactions in the US as well.

I wrote an article titled: “Why I Am Ashamed To Be An Indian.” I wrote it after reading a moving piece in a renowned journal in the US. I was not aware till I read this article by a celebrated writer of the extent of slavery in the India of the 21 st century. I was shocked to read that:
[1] There are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history.
[2] India has more slaves than the rest of the world.
[3] In India many young underage girl slaves are being exploited for sex.

I wrote this piece hoping that someone higher up — like Rahul Gandhi for example — might take notice and take action to save these unfortunate Indians even as we gloat about our rise to superpower status. I was somewhat taken aback by the reaction from some readers. There were no doubt positive responses. But the barrage of verbal lashings I got was informative of the psychological forces I had unleashed. I list some of the more shrill ones without suggesting that they represented the national ethos.
[1] ‘Rubbish!’
[2]‘There is no slavery in India.’
[3] ‘Slavery is justified.’
[4] ‘You refuse to see India’s development.’
[5] ‘Why are people so negative?’
[6] ‘Did not Dr Kalam tell us to see the positive side of India?’
[7] ‘Ravi should not be allowed to write such things — he is getting cheap publicity.’
[8] ‘The sources of Ravi’s article are dubious.’

I have this theory that applies to individuals and nations. Initially a nation is touchy about criticism. I call this the stage of insecurity or the 3 Monkey Stage. In this stage we feel that any criticism against us is ‘motivated’ and never well meaning and people ought to concentrate on what we think are our achievements. We shut our ears. On our part we refuse to see the many tragedies happening around us — we shut our eyes. We are so fixated on our achievements that we shut our mouths to any self criticism. .

In the second stage which I call the stage of confidence, people are so confident of themselves that they accept that when they see themselves in the mirror, they see many warts. They are prepared to face criticism square on. The US was till recently in this stage. In a lighter vein I feel the Sikh community is in this stage; most ‘sardarji’ jokes show them in poor light and are originated by Sardars.

I can see the US slipping just that little bit as their country falters seriously on every front: economy, foreign policy, crime, corruption, educational standards etc. If things do not improve they may well regress to stage one and join India. Incidentally Indians settled in the US betray this mentality in that they often refuse to accept that their adopted country has serious flaws. The American may well accept these flaws but not our NRI!

In stage three which I call the stage of overconfidence, a nation cares not damn what others think about it and does whatever it deems fit even if it shocks the whole world. China fits the bill. Some may say that the US too is dangerously close to this stage even now.

To return to the reactions to my article on slavery my readers could well have googled for ‘Slavery In India.’ One of the first entries there is: http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1996/India3.htm

It was obvious to me that like any self respecting American, and a Harvard MBA to boot, he wanted a concrete answer. I told him that like any self respecting Indian I needed time to formulate my concrete views — a few weeks I told him. Unusual for an American, he agreed to meet me later on this point. As luck would have it I received an invitation to speak to a diverse audience in Washington DC, as part of the many farewell parties in my honour as I was packing my bags to return to India for good. I spoke on the topic: What Does It Mean To Be An Indian?

Here’s the gist of my speech.
It is always a difficult task to distil from the collective experience of a humungous civilization that single defining aspect of life that constitutes the character of India. I can only try ever so humbly. In trying to piece together my several thoughts on this subject, I was helped by a few incidents of a more recent vintage. These incidents perhaps highlight what it means to be an Indian.

When I saw Ms Susan Boyle winning the hearts of the world with her talent and simple upbringing in the show Britain’s Got Talent, I asked myself whether a similar show in the Indian context might reveal to me what was perhaps hidden in the multiple images that India conjures in any mind. Sure enough I happened to receive an email forward by someone named Mary that stunned me. Here was a group of labourers performing a sensational dance relating to Lord Krishna in the wildly popular show India’s Got Talent. They called themselves The Prince Dance Group and had a physically challenged guy too. The amazing choreography, the use of traditional mythology, the perfect sense of timing and above all, the self confidence to perform before an urban audience — it was truly breathtaking.

The judges were among the best known talents in India: film director Shekhar Kapoor, actress Kiron Kher, and actress Sonali Bendre. As the act came to a close I could see tears in the eyes of the judges. Though there were not many close-ups of the audience I suspect there was hardly a dry eye in the crowd. Even as the dance came to a close I could hear shouts of “BHARATR MATA KI JAI!”

As the dance came to an end Kapoor actually wept and declared, “I have seen performers in the US,UK and Russia but believe me I have never seen anything like this . I am really proud to be an Indian.”The other judges just about managed to control their tears. Kher was ecstatic –“Fantastic, Fantastic!” she shouted .

I really cried for more than one reason.. Not only did I find the talent stunning, I had found the answer to the question I had been asked to answer — What Does It Mean To Be An Indian?

Here was a bunch of Oriya labourers — I have spent a decade in Orissa and am more than familiar with the extensive and degrading poverty there. These labourers live under inhuman conditions and as far as we urbanites can see they may have no hope of ever living a civilized life, even generations from now. Yet these guys had shown that one defining Indian characteristic ….Endurance… a quality that makes us not just put up with great odds but strive with the confidence that one day we will win — that every night is followed by the dawn, that all is never lost, that no matter how the international community jeers at our corruption, our idiotic politicians, our inept bureaucracy, our moribund education system, our abysmal health system, our crumbling infrastructure, our humungous population, we will come up triumphant.

Of course we realize that these are lofty sentiments and unless they are translated into concrete action we will remain as a nation thriving on pious platitudes. Believe me, young India has clearly told the older, fading generation, “We have seen and tasted progress. We will go ahead no matter what. Not all our vile politicians or bumbling bureaucrats or corrupt policeman or judges can hold us down. We will rise despite you guys.” Indians have endured much over thousands of years but have now decided that if you can’t beat them just dexterously move around them.

The evidence of a young India on the move is now seen in the far corners of the country as youngsters from small towns and remote villages display uncanny talent and ambition. I recall seeing a TV journalist asking a young boy in a remote village in Bihar about his role model. “Bill Gates” was the answer coming from a smiling cherubic face, even though it seemed to me that he had not eaten a fulsome meal all his life! He had endured hunger for years and his family had endured hunger for maybe generations but that did not prevent this youngster from aspiring to be the world’s richest man sometime in the future. The extraordinary confidence in that boy’s body language told me that he was aiming for the stars and at worst he may make it to the moon.

My own family is a saga in the endurance that characterizes India. My grandfather was a laborer in a harbor in a small town in south India. He and his large family of 5 sons and a daughter endured a marginal existence. My father joined a private sector company during British rule in India. When the world went to war in 1939 my father lost his job. He told me much later that my mother had, at one stage, only one saree, the traditional Indian women’s wear. She would wash this lone saree at night and cover herself with a towel and quickly wear the saree at break of dawn. The family endured near poverty and yet I am an MBA from an ivy league Indian business school, and a modestly successful guy. My niece was ranked among the highest in GMAT scores in the world. She is a Harvard alumnus and works for the most admired consulting firm in the world at Wall Street. Her siblings are all highly qualified professionals, who in their early years endured a humble middle class existence but are now in the topmost income brackets in the USA — a far cry from their laborer great grand father.

At this point of time I look at India as a genie that has come out of the bottle. The British denuded India over 200 years. Thereafter a rapacious polity and a repressive bureaucracy kept the lid tightly closed. But now a long suppressed people have decided to endure such atrocities no more. India’s time has come. BHARAT MATA KI.’

As I took my seat there were not a few wet eyes in the room. My eyes were wet too. If you believe in what I have said please forward this to your friends.

On some occasions an NRI will come up with something specific and it is one of these that I shall discuss here with the purpose of highlighting an aspect of thinking skills that may go unlearnt.

My NRI friend emailed me a photograph of Mumbai that showed parts of the city in floods, reminiscent of the kind one usually associates with rural Bihar. I checked with my Mumbai friends and ascertained that the photo was an old one and every year it was recycled by NRI’s on the internet to paint a dismal picture of the city. However what is more important here is that the NRI argued that year after year the problem of flooding occurs and the administration acts as if it has been taken by total surprise — this I believe is largely true. He asked me why we could not solve this annual, predictable problem. On being asked what the solution could be, he said, “Why can’t they increase the size of the drainage system or even build a wall along the coast?” (The wall is supposed to keep high tide at bay).

Now it is here that I feel rigorous thinking may be lacking. Let’s look at the ‘increase the size of the drainpipes’ solution. Anyone who has been to Mumbai will tell you that considering the size of the roads, there is little scope to increase the radius of the drain pipes. Moreover the cost will be extraordinarily high — more than Rs 50000 crores for a marginal increase according to one estimate. In any case the critical issue is — can Mumbai or for that matter any city in the world keep on increasing the size of its drainage system to accommodate the needs of an ever increasing population?

The ‘wall along the coast’ solution is on the face of it too costly considering that Mumbai is an island. By far the bigger issue that often goes unrecognized is this — Mumbai has many problems of which the overflowing drains in the monsoons is just one. It is possible to argue that the flooding problem is annual but there are critical problems that affect people daily that need immediate attention.

Going further, Mumbai is just one part of the country and other parts are crying for more urgent attention for far more serious crises — children dying of starvation, farmers committing suicide, lack of basic medical facilities in rural areas, etc. When you look at the larger picture you will realise that our problems are myriad, immense, varied and have varying degrees of urgency and importance but our resources are limited .

I like to cite the parallel experience of a lower middle class father whose three kids make demands on his small salary. One kid wants a new skirt, another wants a drawing book and the third wants to go on a school picnic. Around this time his wife falls ill and needs medical attention that may cost Rs.1000. He himself is a diabetic and needs to buy insulin for himself that costs a small fortune. What can the man do?

That is exactly the situation that India finds itself in.

This may be difficult for an NRI to grasp because he lives in the US where resources are seemingly limitless. Look at the way the Obama administration coughed up close to a trillion dollars for bailing out banks and for a stimulus package and is now readying a healthcare reform package that can cause a dent of another trillion dollars when implemented. Meanwhile the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan swallow millions of dollars every hour, and the country may have no problem finding many more trillions to finance wars in Iran and North Korea etc should the need arise. Contrast this with our lower class man. What is the lesson to be learnt from here? That one has to put oneself into the shoes of the man who faces a problem and look at issues from his perspective. That solutions available to one person or country are not necessarily available to others.

In addition, it is incorrect to assume that India does not know how to solve its many problems.

I do agree that corruption, apathy, inefficiency, inverted priorities — some of these are by-products of poor resources — plague us but it cannot be denied that there is a serious need to appreciate the gravity of the situation and not resort to simplistic thinking. I hasten to add that I am optimistic that India will find solutions to the many problems she faces but this will take time and will call for innovative thinking on our part. Simplistic thinking or cynical criticism will not help.

Like many lower middle class fathers who have managed to get their kids educated enough to find a good job in an IT company that sent them to Silicon Valley, India too will grow. My cynical NRI friend is a son of one such family….

The singer, who had many melodious songs to his credit, then announced, with some regret I thought, that many youngsters did not like old songs. The difference, he argued, was one of rhythm and speed. He also offered to sing songs like Kaun Aya Mare Man Ke Dwaare. At this point there were loud moans of disapproval. He realized and so did I, that your truly was in a minority and the bulk of the audience was not interested in melody, preferring the kind of music that has made Himesh Reshammaya a rage.

The singer sang adhunik songs for the rest of the evening even as I reached for ear plugs and swallowed a headache tablet. I could not leave since I was among the ‘honoured’ guests.

I recall receiving a few rejoinders to my blogs telling me that the youngsters of today are not interested in politics or writings on social issues and to please restrict myself to fun stuff. I replied that if it is true that youngsters are not interested in political or socio-economic issues then the happiest people in the India and everywhere else in the world will be politicians. I can imagine the look of delight on the faces of the likes of Mayawati, Laloo Yadav Karunanidhi etc.

The top 5 religions in Facebook are Christianity, Islam, Atheism, Agnosticism, and Hinduism. It is too early to reach any conclusions but it is interesting to note that a preliminary analysis of the major networking sites reveals that youngsters are not keen to fill up the box item Religion in their profiles. A researcher says that youngsters do not want to be ‘judged’ and would prefer the vague term Spiritual rather than specifically state their religion in the box item.

Talking about my writings I started expressing my views in print in the form of letters to editors of papers and magazines. When I found the space inadequate, I wrote articles in some newspapers. When I found even that inadequate I wrote blogs. When even that did not suffice I started writing books—so far 4 have been published.

Now my young friends tell me that ‘we are the Twitter generation and Ravi will you please restrict yourself to fun stuff and that too in 130 characters?” Ten years from now some  cheeky youngster will tell me to say it in ’5 or fewer’ words. I will then have to do what a young journalist did when his editor advised him to be very brief in his telegrams — those were the days when journalists sent telegrams to their head office. The youngster was on the crime beat and had to report a rape incident involving an insane man who fled from the scene. His brief telegram read: NUT SCREWS AND BOLTS. Will I have to write in this style in the next decade?

Talk to an Indian politician and depending on his party ideology he will eulogize Mahatma Gandhi, or Patel, or Indira Gandhi or Anadurai or Kamaraj or Karl Marx or Chairman Mao or someone else, all the way back to Lord Ram. When I ask my scientist friends who wax eloquent about our ‘great scientific achievements’ of the past, about what is our contribution to the world these days they have little to say.

I ask scientists this question: If you say that India had an advanced scientific culture in the past and many modern inventions like aircraft first existed in our land, can you now predict at least one life altering invention or discovery that the west will come out with in the future and which is already known to India?

Even computer experts in India shock me by telling me that Sanskrit is best suited for programming. I stun them in return by asking if any computer program has been written with this ‘fact’ in mind. I also ask them – will or can you write a programme using Sanskrit in a meaningful way?

When I see how we break rules and laws in daily life casually and with impunity, I ask myself why are we as a nation so indifferent to law and order? Is there something in our DNA that makes us disobedient? During our freedom struggle we were taught by our leaders to disobey rules with a view to making it difficult for the British to govern us — this was called ‘civil disobedience’. But 62 years after Independence we continue to be disobedient. The past holds us in thrall and our old habits die hard.

The World Health Organisation has announced that Indian roads are the most dangerous in the world with 13 fatalities every hour! Why do we disobey traffic rules?

I suspect that we are not only prisoners of the civil disobedience mindset but also of another phenomenon. I refer to our past village life. Many aspects of our daily lives are a vestige of our past rural lives. To be sure a majority of our population still lives in villages. Our town and city dwellers continue to behave like villagers. Thus in a village there is little fear of being run over by a bullock cart. Today the lack of fear of an accident on the part of jaywalkers may be a vestige of this behaviour. As for rash driving this may also be due to the rural attitude of the powerful considering themselves exempt form any law — this is evident to this day. Thus a truck or car driver has a power that can be exactly measured in terms of the horse power of his engine multiplied by his speed multiplied by his connections! How can you expect him to respect a mere pedestrian?

The way Ganeshotsav is celebrated in say Mumbai is proof that ‘India lives in the villages’. Nowhere else in an advanced nation will a ‘celebration’ be permitted to hamper traffic across a city and throw normal life out of gear for almost two weeks. To give one more example, the way some of us celebrate Holi is an instance of pastoral life transplanted into city life. Readers may not know this sensational stuff. There was a case where a Hindu family in a major city in the US celebrated the wedding of their son with 3 ELEPHANTS striding slowly down a road accompanied by band baaja! No doubt the band baaja belted out Bollywood hits accompanied by dancing, inebriated revelers.

You might have also noticed that politicians perceived to have an urban orientation find it difficult to win an election.

To put all this in modern psychological terms Indians are victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. We have begun to enjoy being prisoners or hostages of our past.

This leads us to another phenomenon that I shall discuss in another article. I call this phenomenon the Great Indian Gridlock.

While we all admired the screen villain l begged to disagree with Milind. I asked him if he ever recollected anybody being named Pran even before the villain entered Bollywood? The silence in response to my question told its own tale. ‘Pran’ was a rarest of rare names and the possible fact that few if any had that name may have nothing to do with the actor’s screen deeds. The evidence did not support Milind’s contention.

It may seem obvious but many neglect to remember this simple guideline to good thinking—the need for credible evidence. This form of thinking, called Evidence based Thinking or EBT is now being rigorously being applied in a range of subjects such as medicine, management, sociology etc.

An interesting example of EBT is available in a recent issue of The New York Times where an article sought to discuss what appears to be a curious phenomenon–the trend of reducing crime rates in the USA. The first half of 2009 has seen a sharp fall in crime rates across the country even in cities that have been the hotbeds of crime like New York and Chicago. Even cities hit hard by bank failures and the consequent loss of jobs like Charlotte, are showing reduced crime levels. What is even more surprising is that cities that are known to be traditionally crime free are showing increased crime rates.The writer’s conclusion? Astrologers and tea leaves readers may be better able to predict crime rates than scientists!

Let’s look at the inadequacy of traditional predictors and how EBT proves these to be inadequate:

THE ECONOMY: This seems fundamental but the evidence is stunning–the Depression era had lower crime rate than the Prohibition era!

MORE CONVICTIONS AND IMPRISONMENT: The incarceration rates have been increasing but EBT shows that crime rates have been zigzagging up and down seemingly unconnected to each other.

ABORTION RATES: It is suggested that legalizing abortions has helped in avoiding unwanted births. These unwanted kids go on to become criminals or so the theory suggested. But EBT shows that there are many countries that have legalized abortion but have not seen declines in crime rates.

GUN THEORY: Expanded gun ownership rights have deterred criminals who must now consider whether their victims are armed. Thus, the theory goes, with more and more people possessing guns crime rates can be expected to go down but EBT shows that while New York gun ownership is low, reduction in crime rates is the most significant in that city.

ILLEGAL DRUGS: It is suggested that illegal drug use drives up crime. EBT shows that the percentage of those arrested in New York with illegal drugs in their system has remained more or less flat.

To make a long story short almost all traditional predictors of crime have failed to stand up to careful scrutiny under the rigorous lens of EBT. Even the popular theory that poverty leads to crime, has been belied. Andrew Karmen, a criminologist at the John Lay College of Criminal Justice in New York noted, ‘There are people out there putting up with an awful lot of suffering and they are not complaining all that much’.

In medicine EBT shows that many medicines and surgical procedures including angioplasty and the removal of disk have little or no benefit to a patient and the situation can be managed simply by comparatively inexpensive drugs.

Management gurus who apply EBT say that ESOPs do more harm than good. Wall Street gives enough evidence of this with Merger and Acquisition failures almost 70%.

The summary–we need more rigorous research and must be wary of facile theories.

Two final remarks. When banks in India are the subject of discussion, critics say that government-directed lending is responsible for bad loans. EBT shows that the rate of bad loans is much higher among well-heeled borrowers. Bad loans in microfinance schemes are negligible even though the borrowers are among the poorest of he poor.

EBT also shows that the most attractive cities to live in India are NOT Mumbai, Bangalore, New Delhi. Which are the 3 best cities? Look for evidence on your own please.

The point he was making was that there is no great value addition at Harvard!

I recall writing a letter to a newspaper in response to the boast of a school principal that his college ‘produced’ a particularly renowned cricketer. I argued that my knowledge of that college indicated that that college had contributed precious little to that cricketer’s rise to eminence.

I once met the CEO of a top company as soon as he emerged from the campus of a renowned B-school in eastern India and asked him what was special about the graduates of that B school since he had chosen to ‘place’ a dozen of their students in his organisaion. He replied that the selection process for admissions to that school ensured that the finest youngsters in the country were admitted to the MBA programme. His company wanted some of these fine youngsters who had been ‘pre- selected’ by the B- school. “What they learn at the school has little significance for us because they will have to learn the real world of business after they join us,” he added.

In each of these cases one can see a very insightful form of thinking called ‘counterfactual thinking’. This mode of thinking calls for us to ask the question: what would have happened if the variable under scrutiny did not take place? Thus in the instances cited above a possible conclusion may be (I admit you can have a different viewpoint) that the institutions had little contribution towards the final outcome. Harvard students are already among the best and the brightest and would have reached positions of eminence anyway — Harvard may have little to do with their success in life.

The cricketer who is now a legend would have become a master no matter which college he went to. In recent years boys who never went to college at all have become cricketing heroes.

The B school graduates would have done well in the corporate sector even if they had gone to a humble B school or to no B school at all—barring the status attached to being an alumnus of the well known school. Surveys have shown that graduates from that school are occupying high positions in India’s corporate sector.

A research report from MIT on the working of the much lauded micro-finance concept shows that these institutions may not be making significant contribution to poverty alleviation. Applying counterfactual thinking in a series of ingenious experiments they showed that those who received micro-financing and did well would have prospered in any case, given that they had entrepreneurial qualities anyway and were already on the way out of poverty.

Let me propose a hypothesis:
With a few honorable exceptions the Indian education system fails in imparting even basic skills – both the so called hard and even more so the soft skills. The question arises: If our education is that abysmal how can we account for Indians’ success all over the world in almost any field of human endeavour? Counterfactual thinking suggest that these ‘successful’ Indians would have been successful anyway given their innate intelligence and survival instincts.

Remember the Indian immigrant abroad is — barring exception – -an economic refugee who is running away from an oppressive regime that has stifled his ingenuity and denied him opportunities and actively impeded his growth. Such people do well no matter where they hail from. Education in India may have little to do with their success — that’s the sad news. Where does that leave us as far as education is concerned ? It will be the corporate sector that will have to fill the gap by training their recruits even in the basics. This is happening already — that’s the good news

The other instance is that of Mayawati who brazenly announced that several hundreds of crores of rupees that could help alleviate the many crises  that her state faces will go to install hundreds of statues of  the Dr. Ambedkar, Sri Kanshi Ram and Mayawati herself!

Let me begin by examining Mayawati’s action. In a larger sense what she is practicing  what sociologist MN Srinivas termed ‘sanskritisation’  in which  people of the ‘lower castes’ attempt to imitate the ‘upper castes’ whenever they move up the socio-economic-political  ladder. Thus Mayawati is doing what is essentially  Brahminical — idolization, in this case  herself.

After all a unique feature of Hinduism is the idolization of God or anyone perceived to have  ‘attained’ God or exhibited exemplary qualities associated with divinity. Thus there are any number of idols to what are essentially human beings in almost any Hindu temple.

My observation about idolatrous thinking is as follows: This line of thinking can and almost always does lead to cult formation, hero worship, personality cult,  to people surrendering their own ability and right to think for themselves. Just look at India’s political parties. In most parties the leader is idolized to such an extent that there is no second line of leadership outside  the ruling family, there is no inner party democracy, no fresh ideas emerge over decades.  The difference between most of these leaders and the ‘Dear Leader’ of North Korea is marginal.

This goes to extreme  lengths when roads, bridges, stations, airports, are named after these cult leaders. I find it difficult to name a single city where there are ONLY three structures named after say Rajeev Gandhi.

In a recent  discussion in a US paper about the prospects of India emerging as a superpower, an analyst pointed out that the hierarchical nature of Indian society and institutions  prevents creativity and no country that merely copies what others have discovered or invented can ever  become a superpower. Our idolatrous thinking in relation to those perceived as ‘higher’ than us  prevents free thinking and therefore stifles creativity.

Those ‘higher’ than us includes parents, teachers, ministers; those ‘higher’ than us in the office hierarchy; those  ‘higher’ in the caste system; those richer than us; those who dress better than us; those who are better looking than us and those whose skin is ‘fairer’ than ours.

In one survey conducted by a Mumbai tabloid it was revealed that people living in the tony localities of south Mumbai  considered people living in modest suburbs to be ‘genetically inferior’! The list of ‘ higher’ people who need to be therefore idolized ensures that most of us end up with an inferiority complex.

I may add that the US also exhibits some form of idolatrous thinking in the tendency to make larger than life heroes of its achievers.  Many readers may know that Thomas Alva Edison is rated the greatest inventor of all time — he has the largest number of patents to  his  credit. But few may know that Edison was more a leader, a motivator than an inventor.  The credit for his inventions ought to go to the many scientists who toiled in his laboratory at New Jersey. That has not happened and in typical Hollywood fashion, it is Edison who emerges as a ‘sole’ hero.

This is also the case with the many corporate heroes one reads about in business books. The CEO gets almost all the credit though it is always  team work that lifts a company to great heights — this is something that American business books will admit in their more sober moments.

The excessive television coverage of US presidents can be disconcerting. Television stations will tell  you which restaurant Obama went to, which dress Michelle Obama  wore, and  even what the White House dog had for breakfast! Not unlike the bad old days in India when Doordarshan, the only TV channel at that time, seemed to have its cameras attached to ministers’ behinds  trailing them everywhere bar the bar and the washroom.

A paradox in all this is that in India  atheists indulge in more of idolization than the devout Hindu. Thus the DMK that officially is a party which upholds atheism and ‘rational’ thinking is among the most idolatrous and irrational of political parties in India. They have set up more statues in Tamilnadu than even the RSS or VHP  would have done if they had come into power! The manner in which their top leadership, the ruling family, is treated with obeisance with people falling at their feet, is more reminiscent of the much reviled (by the DMK)  Brahmin touching the feet of ‘saints’. Jayalalitha carries this idolization to great horizontal lengths  when even her cabinet colleagues (when she was the Chief Minister) were mandated to prostrate at her feet at the start of every cabinet meeting.

It  is no surprise that  in the Tamil film world, we see the worst kind of idolization — after all politics and films are closely intertwined in that state. Bollywood has its own watered down version of idolization. Just Ask Amitabh !

Outside of politics one can see idolatrous  thinking and behaviour in religion and business. I have seen at a Mumbai meeting many people idolizing and literally worshipping Dhirubhai Ambani. The  man would ‘bless’  prostrate people sometimes without  even looking at them. He would talk to someone else perhaps striking a  lucrative deal,  even as he waved his ‘divine’ hands  over the supplicant! I imagined the possibility that that deal may have been at the expense of the man pitifully lying at Dhirubhai’s ‘lotus feet’.

In religion, essentially  in Hinduism, one sees the power wielded by gurujis and matajis. I have seen respected scientists suspending their scientific thinking  when talking about their favourite guruji. One  ‘scientist’ told me that she had seen one of India’s most popular babas make the sun rise in the west! The many miracles attributed to these gurujis and  blindly believed by masses of idolatrous people attest to the dangers that befall us when we allow idolatrous thinking to jettison even common sense. What does Indian society need urgently?
ICONOCLASTS!

There is a counter voice that is worth considering seriously that has been voiced by people who are as concerned with social disparities as anyone  else. These voices suggest that  people who are said to be victims of an unjust caste system do not want the caste system to go away.

Think about this. Why would they say so even after being at the receiving end of a violent, iniquitous discriminatory system? Before we try to unravel the sources of such a counterintuitive line of thinking let’s look at a similar world view but in a different context.

A friend of mine who is a  top official in a multilateral institution in Washington DC,  went on a visit to his home town of Lucknow. Out of sheer nostalgia he visited his old school after a lapse of over 3 decades.
According to him,” ‚ÄòDuring my time and even till recently I had always considered my school as one of the best schools in India. This time I was shocked to find that my school had been transformed into a Hindi medium school. I met the principal ¬†and he explained, ‚ÄúAn English medium education is in our opinion elitist. Only the better off sections used to get the benefit of our education which has always been among the best in India. But we felt that we owe it to the underprivileged sections to be inclusive so as to give them a chance to move up the socio- economic ladder. Hence we converted ourselves into a Hindi medium school. Earlier children of I.A.S officers, top executives, doctors used to dominate our school. Now the cobbler‚Äôs son, the barber‚Äôs daughter, the domestic help‚Äôs kid study here.‚Äù

To be honest ¬†I was shocked at this¬† ‘inclusive method’. ‚Ä®Readers may rant me for being elitist — that to overthrow English language almost completely as this school had done — was to ensure¬† that the underprivileged remained underprivileged. ‚ÄúI am afraid,‚Äù I said,¬† ‚ÄòThat the school management had become victims of the Law Of Unintended Consequences. Their heart is in the right place but their minds are not.”

My contention is that in our desire to¬† ‘help‚Äô people we often sometimes end up doing the opposite. In this case an English language medium based education¬† would be the best guarantee of upward mobility for the kids.
“After all have you not prospered in your career due to your proficiency in English language?” I asked my¬† friend.

Sure enough I came across a few articles by Dalit writers in the English press in India that asserted that Hindi or regional language medium is another tactic by upper castes to deprive lower castes of the fruits of development. Take the caste  system  itself. Let us do some against- the- grain- thinking. Is it possible that many people whom we sympathize with for being  victims of an unjust system  actually do not want the caste system to be eradicated? Could it be that they dread the transformation of India into a casteless society?

Some writers contend that caste bonds, links and identity  are often the only source of identity and support that many people have. In an uncaring hostile world, with uncontrollable vagaries, many people find in their caste kin the only source of   emotional, financial, vocational, and identity- giving succour. Societies evolve their support systems for the distressed in the context of their own experiences. Thus my friend Atif who is an IT professor in the US found it ‘odd’ that many IT companies in India did not downsize their staff when there were no projects for them  to work on. He explained, “In the U.S these guys would have been sent home.”
I told him that the Indian practice of not sacking people the minute there was no project on the horizon was an enlightened policy in the light of conditions in India  where there is no social security net unlike in the US.

Thus in India where there is no social security net, where few people really reach out to others of a different caste — as a matter of¬† course many find in their caste brethren the only source of succour. Just ask yourself one question ‚Äì How often do we attend the funeral of our domestic help‚Äôs husband or child ? How often do we pay salaries to our maidservant for long absence due to illness? How does our attitude compare with our own demands of our employer for medical leave, reimbursement of ¬†medical expenses etc?

I have a suspicion that our politicians’ passion for overthrowing English language and insistence on Hindi or regional language instruction is motivated not by love of the language. There is something less edifying in operation here.

Karl Marx did some against the grain thinking when he wrote: ‘Give a man fish and he will expect  you to give  him fish everyday. Teach him how to fish  and you will lose a business opportunity.’

Is it any wonder that the CPM led government in West Bengal stubbornly kept English language away for  3 decades – a period that remarkably coincides with the decline of that state on almost any parameter?
Is it surprising that  so many politicians are after the jugular of  English language? Who can be more business minded than  our politicians? I do not deny that ultimately a child learns best in the mother tongue and that we must evolve  into a more equitable society. But that will call for more thinking against the grain.

This incident brought home to me another lesson on the differences between the East and the West in the way people think; in fact this is the subject of my next book titled, Can Indians Think?

Let me cite some other instances. A Japanese company entered into a contract with an Australian company to buy millions of tonnes of a commodity, let’s say sugar. Within days of the contract the international market and price for sugar fell precipitously. The Japanese called for a re–negotiation of the contract. The Australians refused saying in effect ‘a deal is a deal.’ The Japanese felt this was unfair. The Australians felt it was business after all. What are the chances that the Japanese will do business thereafter with that Australian company?

At a discussion on the violent incidents in connection with the Nano car project at Singur, some people argued that the farmers were being unreasonable – they had been offered financial compensation, their sons were promised a job in the factory but was it logical that the farmers should let their land be acquired? Is logic all there is to life?

I have often written articles and books on thinking skills and have emphasized the importance of logic. Some readers have protested that I seem to be laying too much stress on logic and ignoring emotions. If I have given this impression then I need to improve my communication skills. I believe not only in logic but also in intuition, emotions and more importantly in non-logical creative thinking that I teach to corporate executives. My website tells you more about this. It has been conclusively proven that a person whose emotional centres are damaged due to trauma and only his logic centres are functional, CANNOT TAKE DECISIONS!

Eastern thinking tells us that it is more important to be reasonable than to use logic and reason. In the Singur case my stand is as follows: Try suggesting to a Mumbai-based executive to shift to — say Chennai, in his own company on a promotion with better salary and perks. The executive will leave the company rather than shift to Chennai (until recently at least). When asked for the reason he will shower a torrent of criticisms at Chennai without the benefit of having ever visited the city! I agree this is not universally true but you would be surprised at the response. My point is that even people in cities have their attachments to their city, locality, friends, way of life and will resist if they are asked to move to another location .

In Mumbai people are even attached to the specific train they travel in everyday. My friend Ashok will commit suicide rather than NOT travel by the 8,37 Andheri fast to Churchgate. Why blame the farmer whose family has been attached to the piece of land for thousands of generations. To say that money and a job in the factory ought to be sufficient may sound logical to the urban planner but is not reasonable to the farmer.

There is a story about a school boy who used to walk from home to school every day. One day some illiterate ruffians decide to check if education makes a boy smart. They offered the boy a choice of coins: a fifty paise coin or one rupee coin. The boy selected the fifty paise coin, bought a chocolate and enjoyed himself. This exercise continued for several days to the continuing amusement of the ruffians who firmly concluded that education did not make one smart.

An elderly observer decided to question the boy,”I think you are a smart boy,” he remarked.
“I think so too,” said the boy.
“Then are you not a fool for choosing the coin of lesser value?”
“Not at all. Those guys are fools.”
“How so?”
“The day I chose the one rupee coin the game will stop.”
Western logic would tell the kid to take the one rupee coin. Eastern wisdom tells him otherwise.

What would you say if you found such a breaking news item in NDTV ?
I sent this headline to fifty of my friends in India and the US and a few in the Middle East—all Indians mind you. Here are some responses I received:
– India has no hope.
– This is why India is and will remain a third world country.
– Let us stop dreaming of becoming a superpower.
– This cannot happen in the USA.
– It is such idiotic things that made me migrate to the US.
– I am glad I left India to live in a civilized country like the US.
And so on.

But wait a minute, I told them all.

I then sent another email to all these guys pointing out that this headline is related to the US and appeared in the May 25th, 2009, edition of The Washington Post.

I wish all my buddies had installed webcams and let me see their faces when they read my clarification email.

As I come to the end of my three year stay in the US and will be returning to India soon, I can say that the US is not as great as we might believe and India is not that bad as we may believe. The situation is more nuanced than one might realize. This is not to say that India is as good as the US. On the contrary, we have much to learn from the US and much that we need not learn from them.

There is a simple ‘trick’ we need to take note of and learn from the US. Some of the things about India that we fret about do not exist in the US simply because the US has legalized them. What we call influence peddling and money power in India, the kind of power broking that we say is ruining India, has been legalized in the US. It is called lobbying.

My NRI friends protest that lobbying is not the same as corruption since it is open to anyone. But then considering the kind of money that one needs to influence policy is humungous, only the very rich can afford to influence policy. Thus Microsoft spent $5 billion dollars to influence tax laws that benefitted the company $55 billion in tax savings over a 5 year period. Had an Indian company done anything remotely resembling this, a thousand Indians might have migrated to the US and sent me an email about the corrupt Indian system.

Now comes another example of how things that are considered objectionable in India are perfectly acceptable as legal or constitutional in the US. The US constitution allows the President to appoint to the Supreme Court, a judge who is ideologically aligned with the President. Obama like his predecessors, has done exactly that by appointing Ms Sotomayor as a judge. The right wing media is up in arms against this appointment for many reasons.

I recall the furore that shook India when Ms Indira Gandhi appointed to India’s Supreme Court, judges with a leftist ideology in tune with her leanings. She was castigated for ‘packing’ the court. In the US ‘packing’ is constitutional!

I understand that in the recent general elections, much money was spent by candidates that was illegal by Election Commission norms. Experts say that these norms are unrealistic and need serious updating in tune with current times. By not doing so, we are unnecessarily creating ‘corrupt practices.’ There ought to be a law against outdated laws!

A general observation: wherever there are serious demand/supply imbalances, there will be corrupt practices. If this imbalance is combined with poverty, widespread corruption is inevitable. There is nothing ‘Indian’ or ‘third world’ or ‘uncivilized’ about this. It is only human. Laws can only marginally mitigate this situation.
Don’t let Americans or NRI’s tell you otherwise.

The US too went through this phase for over a century after declaring its independence. These days there is not much scarcity in most goods and services of general interest. But there is another reason for corruption — greed. This persists everywhere, including in the USA. This also is part of human nature. America has abundant examples of greed-motivated frauds, corruption, murder and so on. This sometimes inspires even mortal fear among law enforcers. Don’t believe me? Ask American judges and prosecutors .

Each of us has a different model of reality which is constructed with the words we use—these are called mental maps. Different languages represent concepts in different ways and the structural differences in languages impose unavoidable differences on our mental models of reality.

Even when we speak the same language we have different meanings for the same words. Meanings are not in the words but in our minds. I go one step further — the words we use to describe something, will influence our thinking about that subject without us being consciously aware of this influence.

We may believe that we think before we use a word but in reality the words we use determine our thinking—this is one of life’s many paradoxes. .

This last point was brought home to me when at a round table discussion in Washington DC, someone made the remark, “How can anyone condone gay marriages? This relationship is unnatural.” I requested the speaker to clarify what she meant by ‘unnatural.’
“Against nature,” she said.
I persisted, “Who determines what is for or against nature, and how does one determine what is against nature? Why should ‘unnatural’ mean ‘bad’? ”
‘”Look,” she said, “Most marriages from time immemorial have been between man and women. So gay marriage is unnatural.”
I continued, “Ninety three percent of people on the earth are right handed. Are the remaining seven percent left handers unnatural and therefore wrong?”
There was silence.

I am not taking any stand on gay marriages but merely drawing your attention to how the words we use, in this case the word ‘unnatural’, influence our thought processes. If she had said that gay marriages are uncommon as of now, then it would have been a cold statistical fact and the discussion might have been less emotional.

Recently some Hindus represented to Muslim leaders to consider not using the term ‘kafir’ to describe Hindus. This word immediately conjures up in the minds of many Muslims, negative stereotypes and emotions that cause conflict. I believe this is another instance of a word influencing the thinking process.

I have observed that the mainstream English language media in India such as the Mumbai/Delhi magazines, newspapers and television channels use the word ‘conservative’ in all references to Chennai. In my personal experience I have seen that there is hardly any consensus on the definition of the word ‘conservative.’ The definitions range from the disparaging to the appreciative! This is a classic case of a concept existing not in a dictionary but in the minds of people.

According Alfred Korzybski: “No two brains contain exactly the same ‘meaning’ for any word, expression, or concept and therefore there can be no universal true-for-everybody meaning of any verbal map.”

Reckless use of emotionally charged language can lead to wars, riots and ethnic conflict.

Use of words like ‘Untouchable’, for example can lead one down the path of degrading behaviour. The word ‘kafir’ can and does lead to another emotionally charged word ‘jehad’, and this leads to war.

The ongoing economic crisis in the US and other countries has led to a verbal skirmish. There was serious resistance to using the word “Depression” and every attempt was made to bring the word “Recession” into currency. Even the latter was used hesitatingly with subtle references to the ‘R’ word! It was as if using a word could in fact usher in a severe economic crisis. That is really an acknowledgement of the power of a word to influence thinking and behaviour.

Korzybski believes that language expresses our thoughts and also creates our thoughts.

The phenomenon of some cities in India changing their names: Madras to Chennai, Calcutta to Kolkatta, Bombay to Mumbai etc, is an attempt to assert local identity .

The power of words to attract or repel people can be seen in another phenomenon. Who would care to see a movie that had as its hero, a man named Thomas Mapother? But when he changed his name to Tom Cruise, it made a difference. Another unknown actor born as Goswami, when rechristened as Manoj Kumar was welcomed with open arms.

Whenever I hear someone referring disparagingly to a member of another community as ‘idiotic’ or ‘stupid’ – which is common in India, I suggest that he use the word ‘different.’ Often, this has the effect of changing the nature of the conversation to less emotional terms.

A wise man suggested that we treat life not as a ‘puzzle’ to be solved but as a ‘mystery’ to be lived. What he meant was that puzzles have a solution, perhaps only one solution. Life offers mysteries that can sometimes have no solution. Our desperate search for the answer to many of our dilemmas may in fact add to our miseries. Such is the hidden power of words.

My friend Ali, suggests that some mullahs need to use the term ‘Galatpheimi’ rather than ‘blasphemy’ when dealing with supposed insults to Islam. That way mullahs may actually present Islam as a religion of compassion – as it is usually viewed from their perspective. Again the power of a word.

Recent trends in the US and Australia have brought home a fundamental aspect of human nature. In times of trouble the atavistic tendencies that are inherent in us come to the surface. The veneer of civilization vanishes once we see a threat that is perceived as existential.

Let me explain.

I need hardly remind readers of the many incidents of violence against Indians in the US. Now as if to remind us all of what human beings can be, we hear of reports of brutal attacks against Indian students—one such student is at this very moment fighting for his life in Australia. There have been reports of several such attacks in the last fortnight. Indians at home have reacted with understandable rage calling them “racist.”

The evidence of racism, a charge that the Australians predictably deny, is that at least on one occasion the assailants shouted at the victim, “Don’t touch me!” Racist people consider the ‘others’ to be unclean. It is interesting to note that the dalit leaders in India have also demanded that the United Nations declare our caste system as ‘racist’ since forward caste people often dislike being touched by dalits.

The point I seek to make here is this: in times of existential threat like the recession in the US, Australia and elsewhere, human nature regresses to its pre-civilized state and all norms of humanity and pretensions of tolerance are jettisoned in favour of the rule of the jungle.

Ordinarily calm people turn violent.

This may at least partly explain the assault on Indians in Australia where the ongoing recession has naturally led to the locals to perceive Indians as foreigners who are taking away their livelihood.

That brings me to the next point: If during times of distress, Americans and Australians can behave in a violent manner, is it any surprise that there is violence and the Shiv Sena type of chauvinism in India? I may even go as far as saying that considering the extent of deprivation, Indians are admirably non-violent.

Believe it or not, the number of Americans in prison for every thousand of population is more than the proportionate number in Indians in jail .

And India has been on permanent recession.

I asked her what really transpired at her final meeting with the CEO and other officials. She said, “They tell me that as an auditor I had the benefit of hindsight and could therefore pronounce my verdict on what should have been done. But they, the executives, had to take quick decisions with limited time, insufficient information and other constraining factors.”

This brings me to an important point, the working of the mind after the event. Wisdom in hindsight is well known.

What is less well known is shown by an experiment conducted by psychologists that was conducted as follows: The subjects were divided into two groups. One group was given (a) a precise description of an event that did happen (example the collapse of a company) and (b) a series of relevant pieces of information available before the event. The other group was given the same data but was given a totally opposite end (say the huge profits of the company).

Both the groups were told that they were given the facts of an actual situation.

Both groups then confidently asserted that given the information presented to them, they could have predicted the result! Remember the two groups were given the same facts but opposite outcomes !

Psychologists found that there was no difference at all in the confidence levels of the two groups.
Once we are told the outcome it has the power to produce hindsight wisdom. You can read more details about this experiment in the book ‘Inevitable Illusions’ by Massimo Palmarini.

The implications of this tendency are serious. Careers can be destroyed by blaming someone for a wrong decision that appears wrong in hindsight but could not have been seen as wrong by the executive when he made the decision. Finding scapegoats relies on this tendency to find wisdom in hindsight.

What is unfortunate is that the auditor or commission of enquiry will be able to convince the scapegoat that he seriously erred and could have ‘easily’ anticipated the disastrous consequences of his decisions and actions.

This sad tendency is found among people of every area of human activity – science, management, politics, religion, history and so on.

In my workshops on Decision Making, I bring out the idea that the wisdom or judgement of a decision maker cannot be judged purely by the outcome of a course of action. It is possible that a good outcome may be the result of plain good luck and a bad outcome may be the result of plain bad luck, unforeseen changes in the environment etc.

What is critical is to examine the decision making process rather than the outcome.

I also suggest that a good decision or course of action may have to be audited with seriousness too.

Let me suggest a real life instance. The Indian Railways have been cited as a great turnaround story. Management gurus have written about this ‘phenomenon.’ The media has whispered that one factor significantly contributing to rising profits is as follows: The railways have been in the past illegally permitting overloading of wagons. The railway officials have been overlooking this and may be even been illegally rewarded for it even as the railways did not earn any revenue on the illegal business. Along comes a new dispensation that reasons as follows – why not permit the overloading of wagons and earn revenues? As for the danger of accidents due to weakening of tracks on account of overloading, we can assume that since such accidents have not happened in the past they will not happen in future!

Now let me ask you, what if accidents take place for precisely this reason of weakened tracks due to overloading? Right now we are all congratulating the Railways for the ‘phenomenal’ success. But what if the scenario I have painted comes true ?

I can predict the following: A commission of enquiry will either fix the blame on some unfortunate scapegoat or some other reason will be found for the accidents.

If we are to heed my suggestion that ‘good’ outcomes and decisions ought to be seriously audited seriously as well, the Railways may have to change tactics on this front. But I am sure nothing of that sort will happen. Why am I confident? Benefit of hindsight, after several such past experiences .

Now for a funny phenomenon I have witnessed. Once the results of a selection procedure are announced, I try to ask a successful candidate what accounted for his success against keen competition. In most cases I hear the candidate waxing eloquent on how he gave a ‘brilliant’ answer to a question in the final interview.
I suspect that had I asked my question before the results were announced he would not have been even able to recollect that question for which he had given the ‘brilliant’ answer.

The report indicated that the golden tower of the goddess Sri Meenakshi was plated with 30 kilograms of gold. A Hundred and eight pots containing sacred waters from the holy rivers in were brought to the temple towers.

Now let me introduce you to some interesting statistics.

According to the Census of India there are 2.4 million places of worship in India as against only 1.5 million schools and 0.75 million hospitals and dispensaries!

Do you see something odd about our priorities ?

We as a nation have a tendency to blame our politicians for every ill in our society. When this explanation does not suffice we blame it on fate. Rarely have I heard anyone blaming the people for our crisis. As for taking personal responsibility, perish the thought. This is as close to blasphemy as an Indian can get.

There are some who would argue that more countries and people should adopt the much-discussed Protestant work ethic which is supposedly one of the factors responsible for driving the great and prosperous nations of the world. Protestants were taught that hard work and accepting personal responsibility were the secrets to success.

Some countries however like our own, tend to place too much responsibility for our future on other worldly forces like God.

In our beloved country, there is also an amazing ability to live with two contradictory thoughts without any sense of unease, guilt or discomfort. That may account for the proliferation of temples – for the huge sums spent on Kumbabhshekham and the acquisition of pots of gold even as orphans die of starvation, the poor do not get medical treatment and millions remain illiterate.

We say that children are like God but….maybe we feel that only our children are like God.

I am afraid we blame our politicians but we behave exactly the way they do – irresponsible and callous. Our leaders are a mirror image of ourselves. The current elections seem to have stirred up feelings of ‘enough is enough’ and middle class rage is evident. But I expect that once the elections are over the same class will ‘pai lagu’ to these netas asking for favours and inviting them to functions even if it is a housing colony pooja! Any slum kids trying to enter the pooja pandal will of course be shooed away while our kids partake of a sumptuous meal.

A caveat is in order; despite this obnoxious behavior a section of our country will prosper. This is the section that donates money and gold to temples and prostrates before politicians after criticizing them in drawing rooms and in the media. After all it is this class that influences policy. How else does one explain the proliferation of IIT’s, IIM’s malls and corporate hospitals rather than elementary schools, primary dispensaries and ITI’s?

The class that is debarred from entering temples will continue to suffer from lack of food, schools and medical aid. None of this makes any sense.

Let’s make a start to rearrange our priorities as educated and spiritually evolving people.

Here are some of my suggestions:
Each one us donates money and time periodically to an orphanage or geriatric home.
We reduce our scale of celebrating festivals and observance of rituals and donate the money saved to noble causes.
Ensure that our domestic help sends her kid to school and volunteer to pay the fees.
Encourage our domestic help to sit on a chair while we speak to her.
When we place some money in the ‘hundi’ of a temple, place the same amount in the hands of the leper or maimed beggar sitting outside the temple.
Resolve not to ever offer or accept bribes or illegitimate favours.

Resist the temptation to tell others:
That beggars are beggars by choice and work can be found if they tried hard enough.
That orphanages and geriatric homes are run by dishonest people.
That servants need to be treated as servants and their place is down on the floor.
That one cannot afford to reduce the scale of the rituals because God will be angry.

In conclusion, I agree that some of these faults are universal and not confined to India. That is perhaps why the anchorperson of a TV programme on NATGEO said that the hyena is the second most aggressive animal on earth – after man .

Some countries have banned yoga since this is considered a Hindu, or worse still, a pagan practice. Some girls object to sporting the bindi on their forehead for the same reason.

I accompanied my friend Kartik to a movie. Even as I made snide remarks about the movie, he maintained a total silence and at one stage asked me to shut up.

What was going on in these instances ?

In the first case I asked Megha to look at the purpose of wearing a pavadai melaku also known as a half- saree. I told her that this dress is worn by girls who have come of age. Secondly, every community or society has some norms about what girls can and cannot do. Thus in Tamil society, it is not considered graceful for a girl to walk with large strides or to spread her thighs beyond a certain limit. The half-saree evolved with that in mind. Things have changed now .
“But this dress looks bad,” Megha persisted. I then showed her a photo of Aishwarya Rai dressed in a half-saree in a Tamil film.

The next week Megha asked for a pavadai. “Don’t ride a horse with it,” I advised her.

My Muslim and Christian friends are even more enthusiastic than I am of yoga . “This is good for my health,” they argue. Yoga as a fitness regimen – that is the extracted purpose.

As for the bindi, many Christian girls sport it as a beauty aid!

Kartik was a budding film director. His purpose in viewing a film was to learn the art of film direction. I asked, “But what can you learn from this silly film?

“I was learning how not to direct a film,” he explained as we streamed out of the cinema hall.

Food can be eaten for many reasons. In thinking about food, one school of thought seeks to facilitate calmness of mind through food. For example, satvik food is recommended for those who wish to improve their thinking skills.

A good thinker attempts to understand what the purpose may be behind any action, event or phenomenon under contemplation. Once the purpose focused thinking exercise is initiated you can see how your thought process changes for the better.

Of course you may still not change your mind but at least you would have done your homework. Megha might still not like the half saree, Muslims may still not practice yoga and I may still not understand how Kartik could sit through the movie. But the debate is now on more sensible terrain.

A week later he returned, dropped by my home and gave me a wrist watch. I was pleased. After we shared some coffee and snacks, he got up to leave but not before asking me to pay him Rs 129.75. Yes Rs 129.75 !

I was taken aback but I paid him .

My neighbor once asked me to drop by at his office to give a talk on “Lateral Thinking” to his colleagues. I did so and enjoyed the tea and snacks that he offered me at the end of my one hour talk. I enjoyed the opportunity to talk on a subject that I am passionate about. A month later he again requested me to give a full day’s talk on the same subject but this time it was the senior management team that would my audience.
I again agreed and at the end of a grueling day my friend again offered me tea and snacks.

I came home furious.

In an experiment, psychologist Ariely divided a group of people into three subgroups. One sub-group was offered five dollars to participate in a task, another was offered fifty cents for identical tasks and the last was requested to do it for free. To the surprise of Ariely those who received 5 dollars completed 159 tasks, those who received 50 cents did 101 tasks, and those who did it free of charge performed 168 tasks !

What was happening in these cases ?

Let’s take the watch incident.
I was emotionally forced to request that my friend get me a watch. This, as far as I was concerned, was a ‘social’ transaction – I thought he was giving me a gift. Thus when he asked me to pay Rs.129.75, the exact amount it cost him, I realised that as far as he was concerned it was a ‘market’ transaction,

In the second instance I did the one hour talk as a social transaction. My friend also treated it as such, offering me tea and snacks. But the one day programme was to me a market transaction, after all I was a professional trainer and this was my only means of earning money. But he treated it as a social transaction .

In the experiment referred to, those who did it free of charge, (social norms) did it with more enthusiasm than those who were paid (market norms) .

Now look at another instance .

In our judiciary, there is a provision for free legal aid to be provided to these who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. I am told that some lawyers who are pressurized to take up such cases do so half-heartedly and in the process the poor litigant does not always get justice. Why? The lawyer – there are honorable exceptions – expect market norms to apply but the situation calls for social norms.

It seems that wherever the parties to a transaction are in actual or tacit agreement about the norms to be applied, there is no tension. But where the norms clash there is likelihood of a misunderstanding, to say the least.

There are instances where lawyers who are offered a small sum to take up a case show a reluctance to do so. But when they are asked to do so free of charge, out of compassion say, for a poor battered woman, they have done so enthusiastically. Apparently when money is offered, it brings market norms into play and if the money offered is small then the lawyer feels offended .

The case of gifts is interesting. Ariely writes that small gifts are treated by the recipient as part of social norms, hence the popularity of ‘honorarium’ in India . Psychologists say that even thinking about money can make a person apply market norms. This probably happened in the case of my traveling friend. Perhaps he was talking about money with his wife as he dressed up to visit me!

In business and even in government many people work for social and not necessarily market norms. The best motivators for many employees are often social norms.

Money cannot extract loyalty and creativity from an employee.

Doubt it ? Ask the poor parents of a soldier who died in the Kargil war.
When television journalists visited them at their hut somewhere in North India, the aged father, now with no able bodied person in the family told them, “I wish I had many more sons. I would have asked all of them to die for India.”

As the situation escalated, Conrad Hunte, the West Indian opener, climbed up the steep slopes of the stadium roof to rescue the national flags of the two contending countries risking injury to himself.

There was much praise in the media the next day for this brave action.

I however have a different take on Hunte’s action. It seems as if people are guided by more than personal material pursuits. People can exhibit a range of behaviors apart from rationality namely: the irrational, the animal instincts, the emotional, the noble, the savage, the primordial, the creative….it is a long list.

I have heard people say that “it is all about money” as if there can be no motive other than money. This may be true for some people some of the time, but one has to be aware of other motivations that may drive people. In thinking and decision making, we tend to overlook a simple aspect of human behavior – that the other people affected by our thinking and decision-making may not have the same priorities and value systems as ours.

Conrad Hunte could well have raced to the safety of the pavilion to be protected by the police. One saw such scenes in the recent terrorist attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team in Lahore when helicopters landed on the cricket field to carry the team away to safety. No one would have criticized Hunte or for that matter the Sri Lankan team for putting their lives ahead of any other consideration.

But the Hunte action brought home to me the tendency of human beings to be motivated by considerations beyond self interest and material gains. It opened my eyes even then, as a school student, to the many facets of human behavior.

The incidents in Nandigram leading to the Tata Nano car project being shifted from that location to Gujerat reminded me again of our inability to understand what motivates others involved in our decisions.
I was discussing the Nandigram incident with some people at a gathering in the US and later in Mumbai. The recurring opinion was that the Nandigram people do not know what is good for them. How can they spurn job opportunities? This was their chance to escape poverty, for their youngsters to get modern jobs. Look at the pragmatic and sensible Gujeratis. Is it any wonder that Gujerat is a prosperous state, while West Bengal is about as bad as Bihar. It is all about politics. Mamta has misled the people.

It is perhaps true that Mamta scored political points and provoked violence to consolidate her vote bank with an eye on the elections. However it would be simplistic to reduce the issue to this deduction.

What is missing is multidimensional thinking in which we make a creative effort to uncover what motivates others affected by our actions and being willing to accept that what motivates us may not tally with what motivates others.
In Nandigram it is easy for us, middle and upper classes, to say that the people are foolish not to see what is good for them. The assumption is that jobs and money are what is good for them simply because these are good for us. Multiple dimensional thinking might have led them to reason as follows:
No doubt they are poor but maybe they need a way out that is not restricted to offering jobs.
Maybe they are threatened by change in much the same way as are most human beings.
Maybe they are attached to the land since this has been their home for thousands of years.

After all, changes in laws, technology, competition etc unnerve even the Tatas, who however are in a position to adapt to these changes. The poor however are not similarly mentally and emotionally equipped.
There is need for a mechanism to help impoverished people to handle change. To them it is heart breaking, threatening their millennia-old lifestyles and values. Maybe we ought to involve rural leaders, anthropologists, psychologists in understanding how people are affected in this way.
In India more than in any other country, we have seen over thousands of years that anyone entering our scene has had to adapt to us to make himself acceptable. Christianity and Islam have adapted in varying degrees – witness the way Sufism has taken roots in comparison to Salafi Islam. The former is very much in tune with our ethos. Notice how McDonald’s succumbed to the lure of India’s culinary traditions by introducing the McAloo Tikki !

The Tatas had missed these lessons.

I do not deny that material gains are strong motivators even for our rural poor but our approach ought to have been less brazen and more humane. How do we account for the beast and the best in people?
As for the beast in us here is an extract from a recent article on the Gujerat Riots.
“Not content with instigating a mob that burnt down Muslim shops, homes and any Muslims they could get at hand, they inserted a live wire (rod) into the pucca house where 33 Muslim labourers (including women and children) had huddled to escape being burnt to death. Patels in the village said the 2,000 strong mob “knew” BJP legislator Naresh would come later to throw water on the house – which he did- electrocuting its inmates to a pre-planned ghastly end.”

As for the best in us here is an example from my family.
My ten year old niece told her friends that she enjoyed going to bookshops in Chennai, only in my company. When asked why she insisted on my accompanying her she said, “My uncle is an author of three books. He gets a lot of respect in the bookshops. I like that!”
A ten year old kid placing value on respect !
Would we have factored this in any decision involving a ten year old ?

There is no doubt food for thought in this statement about the way we have divided ourselves on the basis of religion, community, linguistic group, region etc. But I have another viewpoint. An Indian’s sense of identity is like an onion with many layers. He has multiple identities.

Thus when there was a discussion on minorities in India, Infosys Chief Mentor, Narayamoorthy said that he was a minority too. As a Kannadiga he was a minority in India; as a literate man he was a minority in a country of illiterates; as an I.T man he was a minority among professionals; as a man who spoke proper English he was a linguistic minority.

He did not add that as a rich man he was a minority in a land of poverty – and as an honest man he was in a minority in public life!

Commenting on the problems faced by minorities, Dr Asghar Ali Engineer, Muslim scholar, engineer and rights activist, remarked that poverty, discrimination and unemployment were faced by people of all communities, not just Muslims .

That to my mind was constructive engagement with a problem.

Another instance of an enlightened approach to such issues can be cited in sports.
I refer to the selection of the Indian cricket team. Years ago when the team was announced there were scathing remarks from experts -in India everybody is an expert in cricket. The allegation was that players from one particular state were favoured. Sandip Patil, former Test player remarked that he did not care if all the players were selected from one state – as long as we won the matches.

That sums up what our attitude ought to be.

It has often happened that way even if we did not notice it.
After the cricket selection controversy abated the team went on to win the series. The people who leveled the allegation of regional favouritism – the experts – were the first to say that this was the ‘best Indian test side in a decade’!
As for the visiting American his forefathers might have found another type of Indian closer home who might have shown total ignorance of India – the Native American Indian.

Later that day when Imzamam-ul-Huq was interviewed by television journalists he prefaced every statement with references to Allah! Katyal’s information is that the Pakistani cricketers spent more time in prayers than in planning the moves to be done on field.

He met one cricketer in person who told him in confidence that he envied Indians,”You guys can walk down a street in Mumbai with a beer bottle in one hand and a girl friend in the other. If I try his is my country I will probably escape if a maulvi sees me doing this, but the girl will be flogged. You Indians are a lucky people.”

Readers may recall that one Pakistani cricketer who was a key player with ambitions to become captain of his team. He was told that “a team that prays together plays together.” If he ever wanted to be made captain he would have to embrace Islam. Sure enough some weeks later this man, Yusuf, sported a long beard , embraced Islam and was made captain.

None less than Imran Khan, considered more modern than many other players, used to exhort his players to treat every match with India as a jehad ! There is a story, considered by many to be true, that when Imran met his then girlfriend Jemima’s father and asked for her hand, the flabbergasted father asked Imran if he wanted her hand because she had shoplifted ! He was thinking about the kind of punishment conservative Islamic countries reserve for even minor offences. Contrary to his liberal image, Imran recently supported the Taliban.

The Taliban launched three suicide attacks in 24 hours inside Pakistan. The US told Pakistan that serious steps would have to be launched to stem that country’s slide to anarchy. Tragically Pakistani spokesmen tell us that the people of that country consider India to be their biggest enemy followed by the US.

The Taliban does not figure in their list.

Contrast this with what cricket means to Indians. Sociologist Ashish Nandy says that there are only 3 sectors in India where meritocracy prevails: Bollywood, the underworld and cricket.
I sent a questionnaire to 75 youngsters in India to find out what cricket meant to them. According to these respondents, the great game stands for: merit, talent, small guys can make it big, religion and caste do not play a significant role, fun and music, celebrations, mela and world class India.

Not one talked of religion.

I once visited my nephew in a Mumbai college hostel. I expected to see in his room what could be found in any teenager’s pad namely dirty laundry, posters of girls, film stars, models and cricketers. What I actually saw amused me. There was a Ganesha photo and beside it was – hold your breath – a poster of Irfan Pathan. Looking at my quizzical face, he smiled and said, “Ganesha is my religous God and Irfan is my secular god.”

Ten or more years later and he is still waiting.

Trying to help others in India is almost impossible he sighed.

I recall that about four years ago I contacted several organizations including charities, orphanages and lepers’ homes and suggested that they send someone over to collect used clothes, vessels, books etc which I wanted to donate. These Mumbai based institutions had one standard answer – it is up to the donor to send the articles because they cannot collect them!

Even a Christian missionary organization from which I expected a better response, rebuffed me in the same manner.

I recently read in a book by a French author who he happened to meet economist, Amiya Bagchi at his modest flat for an interview. At the end, the author, impressed by Bagchi’s excellent collection of books, asked him what he intended to do with the books. He was thinking about the economist’s advancing age and the lack of space in the modest flat.

Bagchi’s response stunned me.
‘University libraries are being devoured by mice. I keep them at home so that I can preserve the culture of India.”

Let me tell you a secret. I spend three days a week at one of the large bookshops in the Washington DC area reading the latest, finest books in my areas of interest. I am writing two books on the basis of what I have learned in these stores. I spend about 7 hours sitting in the coffee house inside the book store paying $6 for two cups of coffee. I have read over a thousand books each costing over 40 dollars apiece.. The staff are courteous and help me locate books, even ringing up other branches to acquire the book I want to read – knowing that I have no intention of purchasing any book.

Readers may recall that Sachin Tendulkar once received the rare gift of a Ferrari car from an F1 champion. The cricket whiz was asked to pay Rs 80 lacs as customs duty. What did presumably India’s richest sporting star do? He did some influence peddling, the good old Indian way. Tendulkar used the good offices of late Pramod Mahajan to influence the NDA government to waive the customs duty. This was granted.

A day later I read a letter in the media from a man who ran an orphanage. He was disappointed to report that he had received an offer of toys from donors in the US for the benefit of the orphans. He was slapped with a hefty customs duty which he obviously could not afford. His appeal was turned down by the government with a curt letter citing the reason for declining his request -a shortage of revenue.

Come on Bharat, you are a great country, ranked as one of the most promising emerging nations in the world. With a little more effort and concern, many of these age-old red tape hurdles can be overcome to facilitate a quicker and more equitable distribution of available resources in the interest of every Indian citizen.

Which scourge affecting India is a bigger killer – terrorism or kids dying of starvation?

They both replied, “It is obviously terrorism. Look at the way almost 170 people have been killed just last week….and we cannot forget the deaths of innocent people in other acts of terrorism.”

In one of my classes on creativity, a youngster insisted, in the face of my submissions to the contrary, that air travel was the most dangerous form of travel. I explained statistical data to prove my point which included a slide showing that riding a two wheeler was probably the most dangerous form of transport. I repeatedly tried to explain some basics of probability theory and showed the basis for my contention about two wheelers but he refused to budge from his stand that air travel was the most risky form of travel. At the lunch break another trainee took me aside and told me that the ‘recalcitrant’ young man had lost his brother in a recent air disaster.

My Indian friends with an interest in the USA, often speak to me of the horrific incidents of violence in that country that they read about or see on Indian television. One seriously discussed tragedy was the Virginia Tech killings. My friends believe that the US is a dangerous place to live, especially for students from abroad. The Indian media has even speculated that there “will be a drop” in the number of Indian students seeking admission to US colleges.

In each of these incidents we can see a psychological phenomenon in action.
It is called the AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC.

What is happening is that a recent or vivid incident dominates our thinking disproportionately. We tend to ignore the totality of data on a subject simply because a recent piece of information, more readily available to us, has overwhelmed us and skewed our thinking.

In the instance of my political friends, it was apparent that the shocking Mumbai massacre with its gruesome deaths had disproportionately affected their judgment. Statistics will bear me out that more kids in India die from starvation every year than the number of deaths attributable to acts of terrorism. I am not suggesting that terrorism need not concern us. Even in the Mumbai case I observed that although more people died at the CST station than at the south Mumbai five star hotels, most people I know talk about the massacre in terms of what happened at the hotels and the Jewish house, simply because the television images of these incidents are vivid in their minds. Our most recent and vivid images of that incident are the south Mumbai ones.

As far as the our young trainee is concerned, the recent tragic death of a close relative was vividly etched in his mind thus blinding him to cold overall statistics indicating that riding a two wheeler was far more risky than traveling by air.

As for my friends who observe the US, the shocking images of dead students – including one Indian student and an Indian professor, no doubt remained vividly etched in their minds. Television coverage, like Hollywood films, presents slick images of such incidents which serve to create a vivid impression in our minds, thus blinding us to the overview of a situation. It is a fact that more people die of road accidents in Mumbai in a year than the number of students who are murdered on American university campuses. I told my Mumbai friends to watch out as they walk on Mumbai roads chatting with others on their mobile phones about violence in the US!

Incidentally, the number of Indians seeking admissions to US campuses touched record levels in the months after reports of violence. These young students have made allowance for the recency and vividness effects!
I also advise my executive friends to work hard, meet their bosses daily and do a great job in the three months leading up to their appraisals.

The boss as well is vulnerable to the vividness and recency effects. He or she will appraise employees based largely on their performance in the most recent 3 months that remain vivid in his/her memory!
It pays to be aware of this phenomenon. To keep track of the actual facts while thinking or deciding, just take a few moments to look at the overall statistics or data before forming judgments.

‘You   charge a fraction of this amount for your public  speaking courses.  Why are you charging so much for your lateral thinking workshop?” was  the common  refrain. I realized that a certain psychological phenomenon was  at work. I reacted creatively.  I lowered my fees for my public speaking  workshops and even accepted a small honorarium and sometimes did  it free. I then raised my fees for my lateral thinking  working again in keeping  with my expertise  in that subject and its possible beneficial impact on my trainees.

It worked.

What was happening here ? Here I was,  lowering my fees in one workshop and starting  to get  higher fees for my other  offering! 

Our mind is susceptible to anchoring .The initial impression or opinion or experience influences  later developments even  though  the latter  may  be  unconnected with what happened in the past. 

Let me give you another example. In a class on lateral thinking I asked my trainees to write down on paper the first 3 digits   of their mobile phone number.  Then I placed before them a bottle of perfume and asked them what according to them was the price of the bottle. I found that all of them had suggested a price that was not very different from the  3 digit  numbers they  had jotted down . The actual price was in fact in double digits !  The telephone numbers had obviously no  relationship to the perfume bottle price .

The minds of my trainees were  anchored by the 3 digits. 

To add to the fun when I showed them other perfume bottles  and found that   they were willing to pay prices not very different from their offer for the first bottle irrespective of the actual price of the product. The later bottles were of much better quality and much  higher prices. This reminded me of my predicament when I quoted much higher fees for my lateral thinking workshops.  

You may have noticed in negotiations with  unions –or even your domestic help—that they start with what you may feel is an absurd amount .The latter also  knows that the demand is very high.  Their  intention is to anchor your mind to the figure quoted . Your tendency is to negotiate a figure in relation to that figure on a plus minus basis usually the latter!

When a creative enterpreneur decided to start a chain of coffee shops in Chennai that would sell coffee at more than  double the price at the adjacent Udipi hotel he was considered stupid. After all , the reasoning went , the Udipi price   would serve as an anchor and who in that conservative cost conscious city would pay twice that amount for a cup of coffee. But the entrepreneur  had other ideas. He created a teenage friendly ambience ,with rock music , exotic coffee flavours, unmatched by Udipi hotels. What he  did was   to ‘shift’ the anchor. He succeeded [KWIKY’S] . Thereafter  his  prices became an anchor for other chains.

Have you considered that the first job you accepted influenced your entire career thereafter ? If you took up your first job  without much thinking –say you got carried away by the salary  –you may have found that you were stuck with a boring demotivating situation . You are now at your wit’s end . I had that experience.You find it almost  impossible to change careers and had to suffer in silence for the rest of your active life– bored and fed up.

How can one  avoid  anchored thinking?

Before you buy anything  expensive ask yourself if you have been anchored by anyone or by any advertisement.

Even  a  little thinking on this score will alert you and save you a loss. Examine all your  past decisions for their  long term effect . Resist the temptation to grab the first  thing that comes along. Wait and ponder.

Contemplate the anchors in your life.  Re- examine them and ask if they are relevant today and in the future .

This will open your mind to new avenues.  Many years ago I went to a cinema hall in Mumbai determined to see the film Poonam Ki Raat  a  1960’s  suspense thriller . My thoughts on what price to pay to the blackmarketer—I was aware that the tickets were being sold in black—were anchored by  my  allowance which I knew  was a fraction of the going rate at the blackmarket . I bargained smartly and got the ticket at my anchor rate. I was about to congratulate myself when the ticket seller played spoilsport.

‘Saab Kishore Sahu murderer  hai’ he said .It was like your car tyres had been intentionally deflated .

Here is the experiment.

Find out the odd one out in the following:
A cow, a stack of hay and a pig.

Most people point out that the pig is the odd one.

Westerners tend to point out the stack of hay instead. Why this difference?

Americans tend to be analytical and seek to fit things into slots and classifications. Thus the cow and the pig are animals while the hay is not. Hence the hay is the odd one out.

Indians as well as other Asians tend to see relationships and then find a relationship between the cow and the hay which it eats. Hence the pig is the odd one.

In another experiment it was found that when shown a picture westerners tend to focus on the item that is prominently seen while Asians tend to see much more of the background.

Thus it may be said with some exaggeration that Asians tend to see holistically.

However these findings need to be further researched. I have observed that Indians are not really thinking contextually especially in matters that involve some degree of emotion or where there is some ignorance or arrogance. In such instances I notice that many of us think that what I do not know may not be important. Alternately what I see is the whole situation. Also what is good for me ought to be good for others. 

Take for example the annual India International Film Awards. Notice that this seeks to acknowledge Indian films. This event has been held for some years now in various locales all over the world. Amitabh Bachchan is the brand ambassador.

I have written letters in the media pointing out one serious error in these awards. Not once in all these years has cinema other than Bollywood been even considered for recognition.

This is an instance of what I do not know (cinema other than Bollywood) is not worth knowing. This is arrogance and insensitivity. Surely we need to either call it the Bollywood International Film awards or acknowledge the other cinemas in India.

Contextual thinking is an art that needs to be deliberately cultivated. This calls for empathy that is somewhat rare.

I help trainees to try and see any event, phenomenon, behaviour in CONTEXT. This yields rich perspectives.

On one occasion a friend remarked that he found it silly and absurd that some communities in south India actually seem to celebrate with dance and song the death of a loved one. This he felt was contrary to the norm.

I challenged him to try and seek a paradigm shift in thinking – this after all was the hallmark of creative thinking.

Let us see how we can not only challenge our own thinking but can also try contextual thinking.

The caste groups that ‘celebrate’ death are among the poorest of the poor in India – scavengers and those who carry night soil for example. For such people death is in fact a deliverance from a horrifying life—hence a celebration is called for. This is contextual thinking.

Secondly who are we to lay down norms and call any other behaviour as contrary? I remember a scene in the film Madhumati in which the hero Dilip Kumar is shown walking past a tree in a forest when he notices Johnny Walker hanging upside down from a tree. When asked why he was upside down Johnny Walker remarks ‘As far as I am concerned you are upside down.’

Thus it is we who feel that one ‘ought’ to grieve when someone dies. The castes referred to may well reply as Johnny Walker did ‘How is it that you guys cry when someone dies?”

My friend Jean found it strange that Hindus wear white apparel when in mourning. She suggested that white dress was the ‘right’ colour for a wedding—this being the practice in her community of Catholics. Surely being normative has its hazards—you may put off people.

I believe the time has come for all of us to try and understand ‘others’, their thinking, lifestyles, their beliefs and their world view in the light of contextual thinking.

Perspectives can vary enormously. My friend Kavita narrates an interesting experience she had in Oakland in California. Kavita happened to befriend a girl – an Afghan – who was working in a small shop. They got talking.  At one stage Kavita asked her Afghan friend how she found life in Oakland. The reply almost shocked Kavita:

‘Oh, Oakland is a happening place—like Lahore and some cities in Afghanistan!’

Take AR Rehman’s  statement at the Oscar ceremony and at Chennai on his arrival. I reproduce here what he said at Chennai:

“It’s a starting point in my career and will indeed make a difference in fans’ approach towards good music.”

“My award’s message was said clearly in my acceptance speech. In my life, I always had a choice between love and hate and I chose love. That is my philosophy in life and in music.”

“I chose to live a life overriding differences between people, states, language and religion. My fans should do the same.”

As fans congregated outside his home in the south western suburb of Kodambakkam, Rahman was keen to ensure that neighbours were not disturbed in the dead of night.

It is clear that Rehman thinks deeply and has a message for all of us. His message carries authenticity because he is known to practice what he preaches. Thus his modesty is touching when he said “It’s a starting point in my career.”

This is all the more surprising in the context of Bollywood where giant size egos are the norm. His decision to choose love over hate is directed at all those who choose the opposite –these people are too well known to bear enumeration here. Rehman show us all the way to managing multiple identities – Tamilian, bollywood/tollywood star, muslim, Indian, international – all wrapped in one seamless fashion. His music can switch from Carnatic to Sufi to Lebanese to Salsa – all in one song! He himself can switch from talking about Allah to speaking about Iraiavan—the Tamil Hindu word for God. In the face of some consternation among orthodox muslims, Rehman sang –with added gusto I thought – Vande Matram.

Not many may have noticed that he has introduced maybe a hundred new young singers to the Tamil and Hindi screens – his faith in the youth of India is evident in his statement that he would like youngsters to take a different view of music after his winning the Oscar.

His request that his fans ought not to disturb his neighbours in the dead of night attracts attention to a long forgotten quality in India—consideration for others.

As for Resool Pookutty what he said has gone less noticed maybe because sound mixing is too esoteric for the layman. He said that he considered his Oscar award as God’s gift on the occasion of Shivratri. He made another profound statement – there was one ‘sound’ before which there was no sound and after which also there will be no sound. He was referring to the Hindu concept of the cosmic sound OM. The significance of these statements lies in what to me is a rare instance of a Hindu not being shy of his Hindu identity in public. In our perverted understanding of secularism it had become unfashionable for a Hindu to be so in public. I am an atheist by the way.

Both these  achievers together convey anther message to all of us especially the young—humble origins need  not prevent you from aspiring for and achieving great success.
How do these guys covey their message?
Dil se.

At one point the conversation veered round to the reports of several Indians being killed in cities across the US. In the last 15 months, 8 engineers from Andhra have been killed.

The headline that prompted the emotional discussion was as follows:

Andhra engineer found dead in Spain
HYDERABAD: An aeronautical engineer from Nizamabad district of Andhra Pradesh was found dead under suspicious circumstances at his house in Madrid in spain.
 

One major regret of mine-among many others – has been my phobia towards mathematics. Over the last few years I have been devoting much time and effort to the study of the working of the mind and have written three books on this subject. This research led me to a study of mathematics since probabilities are an integral part of our lives and thinking process.

One insight that I gained is about superstition and the other was our tendency to see patterns even when events occur in a random fashion.
          `
Thus one of my guests suggested that Telugu youngsters were being ‘targeted’ for murder in the US and maybe even Spain. He felt that 8 murders “is too much to be random.”

I told him that most people all over the world find it difficult to grasp the concept of randomness and have a tendency to see a pattern—some pattern in every series of events. We are probably programmed to seek an explanation that makes ‘sense’.

I tried to reason that the criminal in the US cities will not know the difference between a Telugu and say a Tamilian. Even someone from north India does not know this! It is also possible that the criminal  may not  even think about the nationality of the person whom he is attacking. He sees a man in a deserted  locality who seems to be  unarmed and better off than he himself is and a moment later he shoots his quarry down. It is we who realize later that the man killed is a Telugu guy.

Moreover  some of these guys killed are students , relatively new to the country and city  and are not aware that most US cities have ‘dangerous’ localities and need to be avoided. Anyone seen in these places risks being harmed irrespective of nationality.

In any case Telugus form the largest segment of immigrant Indians and even if a criminal decides to target an Indian there is at least a 40/50% probability that he will end up hurting a Telugu.
 
Thus these acts of violence are random and while one shares the grief of their families the fact is that Telugu people are not being ‘targeted’.

I believe that when one falls into such a state of mind there is a danger of developing a victim complex. I recall a Christian friend of mine telling me that her niece had applied for  a scholarship in a Pune-based college but was turned down. The niece and aunt attributed this to ‘discrimination’ against Christians.
They told me that there were 2000 applicants for ten scholarships.

I drew their attention to a mathematical way of looking at this event. There were two thousand applicants for 10 scholarships. So obviously 1990 applications HAD TO BE REJECTED. So your niece was one among these rejected applicants majority of whom were Hindus! So Hindus can also claim to be rejected unfairly. The probability of her being selected was a low 1 in 200!

Thus I suggested that her rejection may be due to the odds being heavily against her and not necessarily due to discrimination. I do not totally rule out discrimination though  but one must have  better evidence  to make such an accusation.
     
I believe most superstitions are the product of our tendency to seek ‘explanations’ for everything that happens around us. We see event ‘A’  followed by event ‘B’  and we cannot but say that ‘A’ led to ‘B’. This is the familiar cause-effect relationship that may be untrue. Many miracles attributed to God or saints fall in this category.

At one point in the party, my friend Rakesh Sinha suggested that in view of the Satyam scandal he concluded that Telugu people are frauds. This accusation has appeared in the net often. Before there could be an exchange of blows I told my guests that in case there is pandemonium the probability of all of us being arrested was high!

A correspondent for the Financial Times of London wrote about the movie and how it had brought India into the limelight with heightened interest among Americans in particular and the west in general. People in remote US cities—remote from Hollywood that is—are asking how they can know more about India and visit the country. Americans are learning about the frenetic economic development in India.

Dharavi itself can show us the way to a development model.

Traditionally India has followed a top down model of development in which government and administrators decide what is good for the people. This has not been very effective. I have more than once written about the weakness in this approach. Governments, advised by administrators, tend to think in an urban way. In a discussion about developments in Singrur, Nandigram and parts of Orissa, I pointed out that the urban psyche is different from that of farmers and rural poor. Thus an urban dweller might consider it a lucrative deal if he is given financial compensation for his property taken over for a project. In addition if he or his son is offered a job he will jump with joy. But such an approach has not worked in places in West Bengal and Orissa for example. I have suggested that anthropologists, psychologists and NGO’s working among the rural poor are involved in helping rural poor to cope with a modern world. I am a mere observer of human thinking but I can hypothesize that our approach to rural poor is flawed in the sense that their psychological needs, have not been addressed, their fears about losing their moorings have not been looked at, their sense of sacred places have been ignored their sense of bonding with a community and a place have not even been understood. It is easy and true to say that in West Bengal politicians have deliberately played a negative role. My response is that had the factors I have enumerated been addressed these politicians might not have been able to play as much mischief as they have done.

You may not know that HIV, war, riots, terrorism are not as critical to the poor as you may imagine—these are typical urban myths. Here is what a UN report says, “No act of terrorism generates economic devastation on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation.” To my mind the scene in which the slumboy dives into a tank of human refuse was probably conceived with this insight in mind.

Slumdog Millionaire draws our attention to the down-up model I talk about. How residents of Dharavi have picked themselves up NOT by state handouts but by taking advantage of accessibility to the market and tapping their own entrepreneur zeal. I surmise that if the state facilitates earning of income then development will take off.

Development experts who have worked at grassroots level in many countries especially India say that the main request of the poor is a means to earn a better income. Dharavi provides that. With the higher income a demand for education, medicines, etc will take off and will facilitate viable delivery of these services. In short empowering the poor to help themselves and to devolve decision making to them may hold the key to development. Bangladesh has done better than India in this respect. 

If Slumdog Millionaire serves to stir up discussion on how to tap the entrepreneurial energies of Indians it will serve a higher purpose.
By the way, some tour operators in the US have come up with tour packages for American tourists to travel to India. The highlight of the tour—a visit to Dharavi. I spoke to one such operator. He told me that he was approached by a resident of Dharavi who has agreed to take tourists around the shanty town for a fee.

‘You guys are smart’ he added.

–

K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

 I would then ask each trainees to tell me another three number series based on the rule he had identified. I would merely nod ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on whether the new series was consistent or not with the rule.

I found myself answering ‘yes’ almost all the time.

What I observed was that once trainees were confident with their answers they would formulate the rule.

I would surprise them finally by telling them that the rule I had in mind was ‘numbers in an ascending order!’

Rarely did any trainee discover my rule. Why? Because in order to discover my rule one of them had to offer a series in descending order that I would say ‘no’ to.

What comes out of this exercise is this—trainees had a rule in mind and gave me examples to confirm it. They almost never supplied a series that was inconsistent with their hypothesis. They tended to confirm the rules they had made up.

This is widely noticed in our daily lives—this tendency to seek confirmatory evidence and overlook disconfirming evidence.

Thus my friend Ashok asked me if I believed in astrology. I replied in the negative. He cited his experience two years go when his astrologer had predicted that he would be promoted in his company. It turned out that Ashok did in fact get an out of turn promotion.
“How can you explain this prediction when I was not even eligible for a promotion since I had not completed the required service in my current position?” he asked.
 
I told him to recall the other predictions that his astrologer had made at that time. He remained silent but his wife blurted out the truth—he had made seven other predictions none of which had come true.             

Ashok remembered the one prediction that had come true – by sheer chance – and forgotten or conveniently overlooked the many that did not come out true.

Our prejudices  against members of a particular community are almost always based on this tendency to seek confirmatory evidence. Our prejudiced mind tells us that people of that community behave or even dress in a particular way. When we meet someone from that community we unconsciously seek evidence that confirms our prejudiced thinking. Is it any wonder that we will end up noticing only that kind of behaviour?

I recall my experience at Newark Airport   when I first  landed in the U.S. I was received by a friend, a Tamilian. As we were waiting for some clearances we saw a man, his wife and a small child, with a lot of luggage. I noticed that the luggage included a wet grinder – the sort very popular in south Indian homes, to make idlis, dosas. etc.

Seeing the rather unpretentious clothes worn by the threesome we guessed that the man was running an Udidi hotel somewhere in the U.S. My friend decided to find out the truth. He casually walked up to the man, made polite conversation and at one  stage delicately asked “Are you running a hotel?”

“No, I am a post-doctoral researcher in nuclear physics,” he said.
 
We retreated to our base no doubt looking foolish. Little did we notice that the man was carrying under his arm the book ‘Proceedings of the International Conference on New Nuclear Physics with  Advanced Techniques.’

–

K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

I recall conducting a workshop on lateral thinking for executives of an information technology company in India. The task I gave them was to come up with out-of-the-box ideas to improve the company’s success rate in bidding for large contracts. Not to my surprise the most innovative ideas came from the group that consisted of auditors and accountants, the back office guys!

A manufacturing company faced a serious issue about how to ensure that cigarette cartons that went out of the factory did not go out empty.  Such instances had been occurring and caused embarrassment. Even as engineers tried applying their technical wizardry, a humble worker came up with a low tech but effective solution, viz, place electric fans near the assembly line at the point of packing. The gush of air would simply blow away empty cartons.

The problems that were evident at Nandigram are proof of expertise gone wrong. Urban educated administrators, bureaucrats, economists, development planners ran into a critical problem. Farmers refused to buy the argument that they stood to benefit by industrialization. Urban experts argued that the farmers would be financially compensated, their sons would be given training and jobs – prosperity on a platter, they were told. But in the face of resistance that turned violent the Tata Nano car project had to be abandoned. The experts had failed to understand rural psychology. I can write much about this but that will have to await another blog. But I invite readers to comment below how they would have tackled the Nandigram situation.

In a case of a cobbler being smarter than a Holy man, an incident took place about two thousand years ago. A cobbler, an old extremely poor man, looked up to the heavens and prayed, “Oh God, in case you need a pair of slippers I will make one for you. In case your footwear pinches you I will repair it for you.”

Moses was watching all this. He, being an expert on Godly matters, was aghast at the cobbler’s    ridiculous prayer. He interrupted the cobbler and taught him the right way to pray. Moses then triumphantly turned to the heavens and asked if he had not done the right thing.

“No,” thundered God. “All that is required in prayer is sincerity. The cobbler had that in plenty and I was pleased. You have now taught him a ritual and spoilt his innocence. You have erred.”

NASA scientists faced a crisis. The spacecraft refused to take off. The whole world was watching this fiasco. The U.S. President was fuming. The scientists repaired to the cafeteria in an emergency session to try and get the craft to take off. An Indian worker at the cafeteria offered to solve the crisis. Shocked,  the unbelieving scientists demurred but nevertheless let him have his say.

“Just tilt the spacecraft sideways for a few minutes. Then try your usual procedures for a take-off.”

The idea worked. When the scientists asked our India friend to explain how his idea worked he said, “In India when a scooter does not start, we tilt it to one side. Presto the scooter invariably starts.”

Back pain affects millions of people all over the world. Often costly surgery is recommended which does not solve the problem. An experiment was carried out in the U.S. The MRI reports of healthy people with NO back problems was given to a panel of MRI experts, These experts advised emergency surgery for a majority of these patients.

The medical fraternity admits that before MRI technology was available the only cure for back pain was simple rest for a few weeks. That still remains the best remedy, expert MRI specialists notwithstanding.   

Experts have their limitations. It is called narrow perception.

They also have another problem. They are hi-tech guys but often problems need low tech or no- tech solutions.
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K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

They had the answer.

They then set about diversifying into a new line – a move that made the company into a worldwide success and the CEO into a business legend. The move from memory chips to microprocessors made INTEL a world leader – a position it still occupies.

In my workshops in creativity I tease trainees and put them into a situation that takes them out of their conventional patterns of thinking. The results are almost always surprising and rewarding.

In the INTEL case the CEO put himself into the shoes of his imaginary and far more successful and enterprising successor.

In one session for executives of a company I asked trainees to write down the name of the ONE person whom they considered their role model. Then I asked them to take up ONE issue of critical importance to their company. Each trainee had to imagine that their role model had taken over as the CEO. They had to write down the answer to the question “What would the new CEO – the role model – do to make my company a market leader?”

I assisted them to make this exercise more meaningful by asking them to be specific about their role model. Thus when someone said that Amitabh Bachchan was his role model, I asked him which film role of the actor he liked most. He replied that the Amitabh of ‘Deewaar’ was his role model. I told him to imagine the Amitabh of ‘Deewaar’ taking over as his CEO. What would he do different?
It was really surprising the number of ideas that came up in the class for the same problem.

The only difference was that each participant had a different role model. What was striking was not just the number of ideas but the different directions in which the minds of the trainees went. This led to a rich repertoire of ideas most of them out of the box.

In another instance I was told that the company had almost finalized a major diversification and this caused much excitement but also many fears. Some trainees wondered if the plan would in fact add to the crisis rather than help matters. I devised an exercise – called pre-mortem – in which the trainees were asked to imagine that three years down the line the diversification plan had in fact led to a disaster and the company was floundering. Fast forward to that day three years down and try to write down the reasons why the plans did not work. In less than half an hour a list of over 3 dozen ‘reasons’ for the disaster had emerged. This list of ‘reasons’ was  critical in  strengthening the plans, in anticipating  possible pitfalls and in keeping plan ‘B’ ready.

At an individual level I provoke executives attending to think creatively by telling them to picture in their mind the following scenario.

You have been given the pink slip for poor performance. Two years later you get some reliable inside information on some remarkable changes and innovations that your successor introduced sitting in the same chair that you once occupied.

Ask yourself – what did he do that you never did?

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K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

I believe the matter is no longer to be brushed aside with derision. It   needs to be viewed as a serious sociological issue.

I don’t have statistics but I suspect that this is something that is peculiar to that state. All states in India have a plethora of problems but self immolation that borders on insanity is unique to T.N.

At the symposium someone asked if what the youngster did —killing himself—was religiously motivated. The suggestion was that the LTTE had specialized in suicide bombers. I believe Hinduism or Buddhism  or Islam had nothing to do with it. Whatever their faults the LTTE had never based its war on religion. Theirs was purely a political issue based on ethnic Tamil rights – Tamils of any religion.

I shocked the audience by telling them that the LTTE chief Prabhakaran is a Christian!

Thus the Tamilnadu man who committed self immolation in all probability had no religious motivation. When it comes to religion a substantial proportion of people in Tamilnadu are in a state of confusion. On one hand people are deeply religious but the Dravidian movement has made atheism a cornerstone of its ideology. This to my mind has driven their followers to a schizophrenic state. It is possible that this dichotomy may well motivate the bizarre phenomenon of people taking their lives.

Someone suggested that there was a tendency in Tamilnadu to hero worship their heroes/heroines beyond any reason. This has some basis as evidenced by the mass frenzy that Rajnikant and some others command. It’s over the top and bizarre. Maybe the comfort that worship of God provides has been diluted or eliminated and is now sought in the worship of Tamil politicians, Tamil film stars and Tamil language and Tamil ‘causes’. Remember the temple to actress Khushboo who incidentally is a Muslim?

The state’s politicians have created a frenzy about love for Tamil language – again bordering on madness. One sees a tendency to overdo things – whether it is politics, language, films or anything else.  It is not unusual to hear die-hard  or die-easy  Tamil chauvinists to  talk in extremely emotional tones of Tamilthai (mother Tamil), of Goddess Tamil and for kids being named Tamilarasan or Tamilselvi. This excessive emotion too may account for the bizarre behaviour.

Poverty may be another reason. After all  the people who have committed such acts in the past have been poor people who in any  case have little to live for and  their  families  may receive some money from the CM’s relief fund. But the question arises—poverty is seen all over India. How is it that nobody in say Bihar sacrifice his life for Laloo Prasad Yadav?

Sociologists and psychiatrists—your insights awaited.

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K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

This happens almost daily on many of our arterial roads. The traffic authorities rope in a consultant, a problem analyst, who proceeds to study the “problem” from all angles. He then comes up with recommendations along these lines. Pedestrians to be fined for crossing the road, a fine on drivers who cross lanes, posting of policemen at various points in the road etc. Does this solve the problem? No way. The driver, for example, can hardly be blamed for swiftly changing lanes – after all his is only a reflex reaction to the pedestrians crossing the road. Besides there could be even stray animals, or dug up roads that could cause a driver to take evasive action.

It is in such situations that we need what is called a “solutions focus” which does not dwell on analyzing the problem but proceeds to solution finding through other means. In this case the creative approach would be to observe the periods when there is no traffic jam. This ‘no-problem’ situation happens when drivers have enough time and space to react to other road users, by braking or maneuvering without forcing the vehicle behind to take evasive action and precipitating a jam. This happens when the roads are quiet or when traffic is moving slower and drivers have more time to react. The solution to the problem is to bring in lower speed limits at busy times which paradoxically allows more traffic along the road than faster speed limits!

Traditionally executives are trained to solve problems by analyzing the problem – identifying the root cause and then proceeding to eliminate the root cause – much like the way a doctor diagnosis the disease of a patient. This approach – called the reductionist approach – is necessary and works quite well in many matters. Thus if a computer is down it makes sense to ascertain why it is not working and having identified the source of the problem we could then repair or replace a part for example and thus solve the problem.

However it does not quite work efficiently when we deal with systems, especially involving human beings.

If we are to approach a problem involving people, typically such an analytical approach to problem solving would mean that we would talk to the people and

• Get them to tell us more about the problem
• Say what they feel is causing it
• Identify who is responsible
• Initiate steps to solve the problem

The analysis along these lines takes the form of an inquisition, a commission of enquiry and ends up in blame fixing – counterproductive at the best of times.

The tacit assumption about such an approach is that if we knew more about the problem we would be better placed to fix it. My suggestion is exactly the opposite – if we know more about where it is going wrong we shall know more about what is going wrong, period. What is critical is to know more about what is going right. The more you talk about problems the more difficult the issue becomes, leading to the well known phenomenon of “analysis paralysis”. A new and creative approach to problem solution is to adopt a solutions focus rather than a problem focus.

I was approached by a bank manager to help him solve the problem of customers closing their accounts in his branch. He showed me a questionnaire based study across one hundred people who had closed their accounts and sought my advice on how to initiate action to stop the flight of business. I told him that the uncreative mind can spot wrong answers but it takes a creative mind to spot the wrong questions. I talked about the futility of studying the problem and advised him to conduct a study on what was it that the existing customers found satisfying in the branch that made them continue banking with him despite several options available. This study revealed several strengths in the branch. Building on these strengths was the strategy I recommended and to the amazement of the bank, business actually grew significantly! The existing customers marketed the bank on behalf of the branch staff! The moral of the story – identify what works and do more of it.

A school headmaster approached me with a problem – he tried his best but failed to get parents and teachers together to from an association. I studied the issue and found that the ‘problem’ was the headmaster himself. Parents perceived him to be a person who communicated very well with children but could not do so with adults. Clearly the communications skills of the headmaster were the ‘problem’, the ‘underlying cause’, and the solution lay in training him in that skill. I adopted the ‘solutions focus’ approach and sidestepped the problem. I advised the PT master to informally involve the parents in the conduct of the annual sports meet. The music teacher was roped in to involve parents in holding a cultural event. In two months a parent-teacher association came innocuously into existence! The moral of the story – sidestep the search for causes of problems and head straight to the solution.

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K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.

Let me start with India.

Amitabh started it all with his blog in which he despaired at the film showing the dark underbelly of India, a tradition  that goes back to Satyajit Ray. The star said that in contrast to this ‘poverty porn’ [my words not his] he found much admiration for the Bollywood fare that is often derided as ‘masala’.  He writes  that crowds throng the cinema halls in many parts of the world where typical Bollywood films are premiered and shown. Hence he took exception to films like Slumdog Millionaire which  draw attention to our poverty.

The star’s comments were followed by an avalanche of responses  for and against his views. Those who did not agree with him said that poverty was a reality in India and one cannot deny this. Some slum dwellers took exception to being called ‘dogs’.

I have always felt that in order to form a considered opinion there are a few requirements of which the following are critical:

•    delay forming opinions till emotions have run their full course
•    obtain full facts on the topic
•    seek the opinions of all the affected parties.

I did just that and waited for the dust to settle, for sanity to prevail and for the director’s sake I also waited to see what Americans had to say since the Oscars – which many of us are eagerly waiting  for – are based in  the U.S.

‘Time’ magazine which to some extent reflects American public opinion has a few interesting things to say about the film.

The director Boyle says that the title of the film was not a reference to the canine species at all. It was not a derogatory reference to slum people. It was simply  a combination of  ‘slum’ and ‘underdog’. Hence came the word ‘slumdog’!

As for poverty American audiences see the story as one of a small guy making it big, of the underdog [again no canine implications] fighting great odds, of the rags to riches phenomena – these  are all values dear to and at the heart of the great American dream. Hence the audiences saw their dreams being played by a slum dweller from India. At this time of serious economic crisis the theme struck a chord. It is not that American audiences saw the film like voyeurs to poverty in India, as some have alleged – they know  enough about it without having to pay hard earned  dollars for it.

Film critics in the U. S have for years expressed dismay that a country as talented as India does not make movies that have a universal appeal. Shockingly countries like Turkey, Iran, and Poland – which we in India do not have in our periphery of consideration, cinematically speaking, have won critical acclaim in the west simply because they dealt with human experiences that anyone can relate to. I believe this is a fair view.

Some of my Indian friends say that audiences in the West must learn to accept Indian films at our terms – meaning that the west must accept the song and dance escapist movies that we make. I ask them why do not the Bollywood audiences accept a Tamil or Malayalam film [with subtitles] at THEIR terms? My understanding is that Bollywood audiences want to see films with a North Indian cultural ambience. I have no complaints with this because most of us cannot empathise with people with different cultural sensibilities. All I ask is that we ought to agree that western audiences are even more understanding of Indian cinema than Bollywood audiences are of South Indian cinema. The west does not say that Indians ought to make films with American or western sensibilities in mind. They simply ask that if we aspire to win an Oscar we stand a better chance of winning one if we make films with a UNIVERSAL APPEAL not necessarily with a western appeal. Like Turkey and Iran!

What is universal about Slumdog Millionaire?

Today Americans appreciate India better than ever before. They respect us and marvel at our development, at our love of democracy, of our secularism, and  our innate genius. However flawed we may be we are a better bet for the future than many of our neighbours.

Slumdog Millionaire is our answer to the west that we also want the underdog to become the top dog. It stands to reason that people everywhere have sympathy for the underdog and are in awe of the small guy who makes it big.

Incidentally director Boyle has made two films earlier with the same theme – of the small guy making it big. He loves the small guy. This shows in his forays into a slum in Juhu in Mumbai and to Dharavi where he spent many months researching for the film.

He says that when he asked many youngsters if they would,  given a chance to act in his film, try to copy Amitabh or Shahrukh Khan, they replied “We will act the way you want us to.” He adds that he was touched by the innocence of these kids when many of us would any day model ourselves and imitate these stars.

As for  poverty the TIME  correspondent asked a slum dweller if he felt embarrassed at poverty being shown in the film. The poor man replied “It is the rich who are embarrassed at showcasing poverty. For us it is a reality and we have no objection to its portrayal.”

Are we, the middle class,  behaving like ostriches fooling ourselves into believing that something that we do not see does not exist?

By the way I wonder how many of you have noticed  that many people north of the Vindhyas seem to think that Indian cinema is the same as Bollywood. Talk of the west ignoring Indian mainstream cinema!

Ironically Boyle himself was an underdog. There were no takers for Slumdog Millionaire. He, out of despair, almost decided to distribute it in DVD format since no distributor wanted to ‘risk’ taking it up. By sheer luck Warner took it up with fears about the fate of the film. The rest is history. Boyle the underdog is now the toast of the cinema world.

My friend Alphonso says that his pet dog Fifi is upset at the way Bollywood insults dogs. Fifi does not like the villain being compared to a dog.

“The day is not far,” barks  Fifi, “when we dogs will make a film in which the hero dog will tell the villain dog – insaan kameene main tera khoon pee jaoonga!”

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K.R. Ravi is South Asia’s first Dr.Edward De Bono certified public trainer in lateral thinking, and a pioneer in spreading lateral thinking in the Indian corporate sector. For more details, visit http://www.krravi.com or contact him at createravi@hotmail.com.