Independence, Everyday

A few weeks ago I was in Delhi, trying to get on the Metro, and I couldn't.

Why? Because of NEET protests. 

A lot of activists, some students, angry, blocking gates that are usually the most reliable thing in this city. I stood outside Rajiv Chowk for nearly ninety minutes, and I had time to think - which is rare in Delhi, where I am usually too busy avoiding bumping (a real – physical bump) into strangers on public transport.

I haven't written on this blog in nine years. The last time I did, it was also August, also around Independence Day, and I was writing about what makes a civilization call itself a nation. I don't know why I stopped writing. Maybe I got busy being Indian instead of writing about it.

But standing outside that gate, watching protesters, activists, and students who were protesting for the resignation of the federal minister, and a fair exam, I kept thinking about Vikshit Bharat 2047. We have twenty-one years left to arrive somewhere. 

Arrive where, I am not entirely sure anyone has told me clearly.

My father once explained money to me using four letters: R, I, P, E. Rich is when Income is more than Expenditure. I think Vikas might work the same way, except I'm still working out what the Income and Expenditure of a nation really are. GDP, maybe, is just one column. Trust might be another. I don't think we've been keeping a full ledger.

Which brings me to what troubles me most this Independence Day - our fault lines. 

Caste, region, religion, language, class. I don't believe these cracks are proof that something is broken. Every old structure has them; age itself leaves fissures. The oldest civilisation on Earth was bound to. The question is not whether cracks exist, but what we do at the crack.

Those NEET protesters, standing at the gate I couldn't access, were one such crack. Not my enemy. Not, I suspect, of the government's either, even if it felt that way on TV screens around the world.

Democracy is a tool - like a wheel, morally neutral. It can carry a civilization forward, or it can be wedged into a crack and hammered to widen it for short-term gain. I have watched both used, by many hands, over many years. I will not name them here - that is not the point. The method is the problem, not the player. 

A democracy that keeps discovering new wedges is not competing; it is quarrying its own foundation.

What holds a crack shut is not paint, applied fresh each election cycle. It is mortar - something older than any party, older even than 1947. 

Ours is a civilization identity: karma, tolerance, the discipline of questioning our own beliefs before we question anyone else's. Paint can be reapplied by whoever holds the brush. Mortar cannot be so easily replaced.

We often speak of Gen Z inheriting Vikasit Bharat. I want to speak of Gen Y - the Yuva governing, building, and voting today. The Gen Y is not tied to a year of birth.

The test for this generation isn't ideological purity, age, a persona, or a pattern that the market wants to understand. 

It is simpler, and harder: did you leave the civilization more whole than you found it?

Because independence was never meant to be a date on the calendar. It is a daily audit - are we sovereign, today, in our data, our medicine, our thinking? 

Vikas without sovereignty is just borrowed prosperity with better packaging.

2047 should not be the year we arrive. It should be the year we finally set our own coordinates.

I stood at that Metro gate for nearly two hours, and nobody around me stopped being Indian!

15 August 1947 : When a civilisation became a nation

I am born of Sri. and Smt. Jha, both from Bihar.

Both were raised in what I call the ‘Golden India’ - my parents studied in public schools, with the quality of education and integrity of teachers that rivals that of modern Nordic nations. They were trained in handlooms, gardening, science, mysticism, and humanities with equal ease. Moreover, they had kids from all classes and creed share their classroom with a sense of oblivion.

By the time I was ready to go to school, the public schools had started rotting, and my parents got me into convent schools - so that I would learn English, get a stable job, find a wife, raise kids and live normally! If someone would have asked me when I was 10, “Who are you?” - I would have muttered, “Prashant”, “Indian”, “Son of Mr. and Mrs. Jha” or “Boy”. My identity was based on my chosen noun, country, parents or gender.

Now in my mid thirties, at footsteps of mid-age, my identity is smudged!

Am I a resident of this planet, domicile of Delhi, a descendant of Biharies or citizen of India?
Probably all! As I have lived and worked across a dozen countries across Europe, Americas, Orient, Australia and South Asia - the national identity of being Indian is what most of my colleagues identify me with.

Often, it makes me think what is India.
The morning of 71st Independence day of India is probably a great time to meditate on what is India.

To me, India is one of the boldest experiment in the human civilization. Millions of people, with mind-numbing differences, embracing the idea of equality is India. I have traveled to over 100 districts in India (yes, that is off by bucket list) and I have seen more differences than similarities.

I have been intrigued about what do people from Patan and Patna have in common to be identified as Indians. It seems I know now.

Our spirituality - our belief in Good Karma, Cosmic Justice, Tolerance and Openness to Self-doubt, Questioning our beliefs to shape a new one.

Despite different skin tones, diet, deities, we are unified by a common civilization. Not by political parties, leaders, religion, language, wars or common enemies. Yes, they all have played a role in shaping our civilization but none of them have been more profound than our way of thinking and our way of life.

As I meditate more, it appears that 15 August 1947 was a significant day in the history of Mother Earth because one of it's oldest civilisation that embodied a collective way of life of millions of people(and now over a billion) got a new identity - India.

Let us celebrate what is common and enjoy our differences.

Happy Independence Day India!
I am proud to be born in the land of hope, humanism, and spirituality.

Truth, Trust and Technology

We live in a post truth-world where people believe in Facebook and WhatsApp forwards more than their own logic. With the American elections and the Indian public discourse riddled with fake news in last few months, I was wondering if such a thing actually existed. 
My life’s choices expose me to very little un-credible sources of information.
I read news using a set of tools (RSS feeds) that hand picks news for only a specific set of topics that interest me and then creates a custom newspaper for me every morning (and evening, if I wish!). I use Facebook to tell people that I am alive and kicking - not to read opinion shaping news!

But in the course of public interactions some very bizarre things happened over last few weeks:

1. I am a minimalist and hence don’t like owning a car - since I can get a car on demand. Uber and Ola have been my wheels since they arrived. But, increasingly a strange problem has been emerging. Both these providers use google maps as the foundation of their navigation. And if you live in the by lanes of Delhi - and have used Google Maps - you would relate to my problems. Google Maps loves the 100ft + roads. When I ask it to navigate from South Ex 2 to Green Park, it will by default put me on Ring Road!
Hey wait, I know a shortcut, uncontested, uncluttered and that cuts the travel time and distance by half.
But, is my advice of any use to the Uber driver. No! They would retort - Let us use Google Maps, it knows BETTER! A discussion on how google maps consumes our time, battery and data to tell us what to do - only leads to an argument. 
Round I : Trust on Humans loses!


2. I was recently tele-introduced to someone by a family member. 
We were to discuss life, technology, ethics, plans, career, etc. But a spoiler arrived. 
This time it was not a Google Product. It was a software from Scandinavia, known as Truecaller. This is a rather nifty app, useful in my opinion. But most people don’t really seem to understand how it works. When I would call, my name would show up as Apollo Jha! I have neither changed my religion, nor my name. And I haven’t been to moon on a NASA mission, yet! But the confusion this has created is incredible. Am I Apollo, or am I Prashant. Or, Am I someone else ? I looked under the hood of this app and realised that it does a few things without most of the people knowing. It steals all your contacts in the phone book and then uses that crowd-sourced information to alert someone who has the app, but not your name in their contact book.
Funny still, if my friends call me Teddy Bear, and they save my name as Teddy Bear, I will now show up as Teddy Bear calling, when I call a new number. This is ridiculous.
 A better version should be where, Truecaller should seek consent from people if they want to let go of their entire contact book to an unknown server and it should be an opt-in service. If I want my name to be listed in a directory, I should join, if not it is best marked as Spam/Not-spam! Do we really want to know the name of the spammers? I don’t.
This trouble doesn’t seem to have ended. Hours and hours of conversation has lost over a trivial bug. 
Round II: Trust on IT tools trumps.


3. I recently lost a bag at Geneva airport. Last flight in Geneva - and the last train to city was 40 minutes away. As the Q from the luggage belt started to dwindle, I was worried. I was the first one to arrive there. But my bag was not in sight! I waited, and then finally the information board said that the luggage to come next was from a different flight. Disgusted, I headed to the baggage office, to see where my bag was. The executive after a check with my boarding pass told me - your bag has arrived. It is on the belt. I told her my story - I was there since the beginning of time, but to no avail. She said her system says the bag has arrived. She nearly scolded me for being careless as to have missed by bag on the belt and that it would go into quarantine for security reasons. Then she checked if my bag was in quarantine - No, said her system! She looked at my handbag and asked if this was the bag I was looking for? I almost smiled in disgust! What happened to my bag next is immaterial. The trust in a computer screen is more than in a living person - in flesh and blood! 
Round III: Tech trumps over Human Information System.

I usually don’t rumble on my blog, but these three incidents in last few months make me think that if we continue to let search engines or apps shape our beliefs and perception of reality, we would be doing it at the risk of losing who we are - imperfect human beings.

I would rather like to be lost in a city than mechanically commute from point A to B.


While lost, I might discover a Partner, a Saathi, a new Corner or even Myself!

Upgrading the Anti-Defection Law - putting a tube on the neolithic wheel !

Electoral reforms:

One of the most striking inventions that set humanity in motion was a wheel. But we would have been stuck if we chose to stay with the wobbly, donught-shaped discs of stone that jumped & bumped. 

So, how did we move on and gain speed ? By making it smoother, reducing weight by adding spokes and reducing bumpiness by putting a pneumatic tube on the circumference.

When a product was made - it was done by a creative empathiser who operated out of his box of empathy towards the world. But why is that the product did not remain useful forever. If product is an answer to a problem, the product would lose value as the problem itself will change. 

Imagine using the neolithic wheel on a freeway! 

Similarly when rules are made - they are made for a certain time with contextual empathy.

That is a fairly long explanation to come to the point of electoral reforms.

When India became a country and our forefather wrote our constitution, they did a great job with contextual empathy. They foresaw problems, but it would be unfair to expect them to foresee things as they would shape after five or six decades.

Let us look at elections: the party with simple majority gets the invite from the Governor to form the government. That is simple. But it became complicated as fractured mandates started appearing. Then came the ‘fair norm’ of ‘Single Largest Party’. This led to the concept of Common Minimum Program. This has led to another problem - blackmailing by smaller parties to keep the bigger parties in power. Common Minimum Program conveniently shapes as Common Maximum Plunder under disconnected coalitions.

What if the rules of ‘horse trading’ apply on the pre-/post- election coalitions. I know this is not very clear. Let me try to explain. 

Case example: In Goa there 40 MLA. A simple majority means that the government must have the support of 21 candidates. But the common minimum program once enacted would keep the CM on toes as he can face the black-mail by the smaller parties - who could conveniently switch to join a potential Congress government.

Is there a solution to this trouble ? What if the anti-defection law would apply to not a party but the group in power. This would mean that a smaller party can’t evade anti-defection law just because it has three members. Instead the group size must be 1/3 rd of the group of MLAs (i.e. 7). Hence to bring down a coalition government there must be exit of at least a third of MLAs from the coalition.

This would bring down instability in a multi-party system. Any takers ?

I hope we can upgrade the 52nd Amendment, 1985. Using a neolithic wheel on an Expressway ? Maybe put a pneumatic tube on it.

Open letter to Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and other e-commerce platforms!

Dear Jeff, Binny Bansal and Kunal Bahl : Congratulations on boosting consumerism this festival season in India. Congratulations for managing logistics of galactic scales and for spreading joy, promoting happiness and creating jobs.

I must admit that you have changed our world. Over a decade ago it was almost aspirational for a resident of a tier II or III city in India to get the latest laptop/mobile/camera locally. One had to wait for availability in the local shops or worse still had to wait for someone to go to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore.

But, this festive season, I wanted to give Chinese goods a miss!

How can I send a part of my hard earned money to a country that blatantly supports terrorists and Pakistan's attempts to wipe off the planet's oldest civilisation.

Being an online marketplace that has the ability to help buyers make choices - it would be nice if you gave us a choice to know. To know where a product listed on your platform was made.

I request all of you to implement a simple identifier on your platform that helps us (the ordinary buyers) quickly identify the country of origin for a product. I think that is anyway a right for the customer.

I hope you will implement it soon - if not for patriotism but for at least the consumer rights !

Innovator's dilemma: Being or Doing

One of my jobs is to teach innovators and work with them on medical and social innovations. In course of doing that I not only work with my students and colleagues but also with scores of tech innovators.

Here is a dilemma I come across very often. 

When an innovator has conjured an idea for solving an unmet need - they want themselves and the idea to succeed. While there is no harm in that - and it is indeed desirable - I think a real problem arises when the innovator gets confused between the ‘mirage’ of success and the ‘real’ success.

I will keep my examples narrowly focused in the sector of ‘medical technology’ and ‘social innovations’ - the two sectors I work in.

Suppose a team has decided to solve the problem of ‘availability of safe drinking water’ - which is both a social and a medical problem.

Often a team would start with a clever technology which would most likely be a patent (a patent is NOT a product!) or a yet to be scaled & tested technology in some lab! And in most likelihood it would be half a decade before the team would know if they would even be able to assemble the first prototype that works.

But, ideas are cool! And the innovators are cooler!

They would like to be celebrated, give talks on how they hope to (often misunderstood by the rest of world as if they have already) cracked the problem.

This creates three problems:

a) The focus shifts from the rigour of execution to the coolness of the idea!

b) The (often small) teams behind the (yet to be proven) innovation get their shot of adrenaline from writing about their innovations, winning awards, getting press and being celebrated!

c) The attention is often NOT equal for team members - the one who has a position of power (say a seasoned academic who is a Principal Investigator - a scientific term for a Project Manager or Administrator) or someone with excellent oratory skills (who maybe not the one who has contributed much to the idea itself) or maybe even one who networks the most - steals the show! 

Let us analyse the outcomes of these problems:

a) Shift of Focus: Generating and running around with ideas is cool - execution often is NOT! Everyone wants the nicely painted walls of the futuristic office and nobody wants to manage inventory, deal with people, or generate leads - that is often not exciting enough!

b) False sense of success: Speaking at conferences, giving media bytes and attending networking events often gives a sense of moving ahead in life. You feel you are ’somebody’! But as long as your product or service (the real innovation) has not solved the problem it intended to solve - technically you have become the ‘innovation’. Your product/business/service has failed if it did not even solve a minor portion of the problem it aimed to solve.

c) Steal the show - Yes! That often creates a rift as the one who has been putting one’s head down and executing the technology/idea/business feels cheated. That often kills the camaraderie among the team - the X factor that helps a startup punch above its weight.

Meanwhile, the media (whose real business is to sell advertisements by capturing eye-balls with something of interest!) feeds on the innovators/startups. Not that media attention is a bad thing - it surely helps one get traction, raise funding and find evangelists. Unfortunately, in order to make a story even more attractive it misquotes, misleads and misconstructs information. 

Haven’t you heard that there is a pill already for the ill that you have and is going to come soon?

Worse still, we have been hearing that it has been coming soon for almost a decade?!

This is a sticky territory. The feelings of joy and attention (being!) that humans crave for are much easier to obtain than putting one’s head down and working to solve the problem one started to solve. And once you start getting the taste of ‘being’, the real fuel of achieving what you set out to achieve - the doing part - becomes much more tiring and often appears much more unattractive.

In my opinion some of the greatest successes have been built on doing and not being. 

And in this day and age when just registering a company with limited capital (that is technically a startup) - can give you a high by earning a label of a startup guy (or girl). 

Innovators face the dilemma : Being or Doing!

Digital Disease in Devlok !

Observing my fellow human beings in Devlok (isn’t what is at 30,000 feet is Devlok!) is one of my favourite pastimes. 

Thank God there is still solitude at 30,000 feet in most of the airlines.

Cramped in a bus that flies with no internet and limited legroom, it is a fantastic human observatory.

In a Patna-Delhi flight today, I had a charming young woman and mid-aged man sit next to me.

Wearing a very Lakhnawi fragrance the girl (Ms.X) appeared to be an employee of a software MNC. I wonder why people wear their RF-id cards around their next in metro, flights and train (and more on that some other day). The gentle man (Mr.Y) had a hand bag ( which I have traditionally seen babus for carrying a small lunchbox, stationery and other sundry items. I guess he works for government and might have been travelling for work. Or he may be on his visit to Delh for an RTI related case.

After the announcements - and after gaining altitude, as we settled in - I tried striking a conversation with Mr. Y - and see if my differential diagnosis on his career was correct. Bingo! he indeed was visiting Delhi for responding to an RTI case. I even asked him - can’t this be done on Skype ? Or maybe the government should invest in creating a simple, secure app for official communications ?

He shrugged! Ho to salta hai. Sab digital ho gaya hai - pehle ghadi aur ab jindagi. Pata nahi retire karne tak kya hoga!

(It is possible. Everything is digital now. It started form digital watches and now everything appears to be digital! I don’t know what will happen by the time I retire.)

The girl next to me seemed very disinterested in our conversation.

And them came the best silencer on the aircraft - the meal service. So after 25 minutes of chewing deep-fried ‘pakoras’ and semi-cooked paneer - I was ruing the poor match I had. I wish I had more talkative neighbours. A 100 minute flight would have been more bearable.

And then I suddenly realised that while my neighbours were silent - they were actually craving for a conversation.

Before you label me delusional on this - let me explain.

After every 10 minutes both Ms. X & Mr. Y were trying the phones on and clicking on it. And that was a pretty repeatitipve act.

Curious about what apps triggered this - I decided to stretch the boundaries of  gentlemanly behaviour and peep into their screens.

I told myself - I am making and observation and I as long as I don’t look at what is private I am not breaking any ethical code.

So I kept looking at their actions on the disconnected and cold block on glass and metal. 

Ms. X had an iPhone 6 (or 6S) and Mr. Y had a plasticky Galaxy. They both kept opening their WhatsApp. Ms.X kept opening the blue icon of Facebook infrequently. For those 75 minutes it seemed that they both were subconsciously programmed to turn their phone on, swipe and click. I guess both are smart - they know there is no internet, and yet they kept opening these apps - in a clockwork of clicks. I know there must be a name for this disease. I hope it will make to ICD 12 !

That is how Digital Disease is in Devlok.