Gill Adarsh Days...

Today I felt like I was taken back in Time as I visited my old apartment and school. I happened to be in the neighbourhood of the apartments where I lived from 1989 through 1995, from my 3rd through 8th grade. And since my apartment was at a stone's throw from the school I studied in, I also visited my school (Gill Adarsh M.H.S.S., Roypettah, Chennai)

Its amazing how fast time passes. Looking at the balcony of my old apartment from the street, it felt like only yesterday I was running around in the balcony as a little kid, trying to fly the kites I made or throwing stones at my neighbors whom I used to hate. The school was even more memorable. I was delighted to see that the tree under which I used to play cricket after school till my mother picked me up was still there. I even managed to sneak into the school (much to the annoyance of the security person who strictly warned me against going in) and see my 6th, 7th and 8th standard classrooms. Since the school was closed, I was able to go into the classrooms and think about those days when I studied there. I was reminded of the time I was asked to kneel down because my classteacher caught me singing and dancing in the class. And also the time the whole class burst out laughing at me because I entered the class after using the restroom with my fly wide open.

Those days will never come back again, yet those memories will last a lifetime. Partly because I secretly wish (well...not a secret anymore!!) I could be a kid again. Those days were delightfully simple. There was no pressure to perform, no board exams..nothing. Life was all about going to school, coming back and playing and yeah..may be doing some homework. I was soo blisfully ingnorantly happy. Not that I am not Happy now, but back then I was Happy in a way that I didn't know what sorrow was...and there is something tremendrously light about that feeling. I know I can never be like that again. My only other regret is since I wasn't planning on the trip, I didn't have a camera handy to snap a few pictures. :-(

btw, Gill Adarsh is the best school ever...I loved every bit of it!!

Information Vs Noise

Everywhere I see, I keep hearing about Information overload and Information explosion powered mainly by what has now come to be called web 2.0. But truth be told, I really question this claim.

I think this is a case where noise has been confused with information. Most of what I find easily available in the internet is noise. Useless pieces of information or one's opinions and thoughts that typically does not come out of data or research. What is worse is that writers typically tend to be polarized and write strongly for or against a cause. Readers typically tend to either strongly agree or disagree with the writer, in any case causing rampant publicity for the writer. It's what I call the "Rush Limbaugh" effect. His listeners either absolutely love him (because they are conservative?) or just can't stand him, yet listen to him just to get enraged (or laugh) by the ridiculous things he has to say. Good solid information is sadly difficult to come by or you have to pay for it.

My claims aren't totally unsubstantiated either. I read (or subscribe) to about 80 blogs in my google reader, in areas ranging from Lean Manufacturing, productivity improvement, management etc., Yet most of the posts have minimal valuable information. Lean Manufacturing blogs are typically a consultant's sales pitch about how successful he/she have been in implementing lean with their clients. Their star lean companies being their clients. There is another lean blog which is apparently famous, but essentially talks about nothing but how bad outsourcing is. Granted outsourcing is not a very lean practice, yet in some cases it makes economic sense and is worth doing. To say all outsourcing is wrong is naive. Then there are some productivity improvement blogs that are really pretty silly. I am not saying all blogs are useless. Certainly there are some blogs that I read without fail.

As far as news goes, new websites like Digg etc., are great start ups but have a long way to go before they mature. Currently its a little community of geeks. Submit a story to Digg with amazing and firefox in the heading and there is a 75% probability that it will appear in the front page. (But then again, may be they are not meant to be what I want them to be...so could be my bad!!)

I have eventually realized that good old published magazines and journals are the best sources of valuable information that can be trusted. They will safely guarantee you know what you need to know without excess information overload. Three months into starting the economist subscription, I have realized why it is the most read magazine on world news and economics by business and political leaders world over. Business Week and Harvard Business Review give you all the happenings in the business world and long term business trends and Management fundamentals you need to know about. Fast Company gives you interesting snippets of information on creativity, design and emerging trends. Men's Health gives you everything you need to know about what, and what not to eat, health info and fashion. Besides there is something about reading from a printed piece of paper that reading of a LCD screen just cannot suffice.

India Trip

Quite a few of my friends often ask me, why I go back to India every year? Many of them visit may be once every 2 or 3 years. Truth be told, going back to India every year has been a major financial drain on me. After all, with as expensive as flight tickets are these days, especially during the peak season and the gifts you buy, you start seeing a significant hole in your savings. What more? considering you want to maximize the time you spend back home, you use your entire vacation on the trip. Atleast for me, my routine goes something like this...January 2 to December 15, work! work! work!...don't take a single day of vacation. December 15 - January 1, go back to India and blow up your entire year's savings and vacation in one trip. (If wasn't for this trip to India, in my home in the place of my old sony boob tube would be a new 50 inch plasma and a few hundred dollars more in my savings)

So again why go every year? I think the answer to that lies in they way you think and the way you have been brought up. To me, no matter how many countries I visit, my number one choice for a vacation destination will be Chennai, India. I grew up in that town and for the most part know the "In's and Out's" of it. Especially in late december (Marghazi Masam) Chennai offers a multitude of things which charms me to no end. The early morning Bhakti music concert played in each street with cheap LOUD speakers, the beautiful sunshine with 80 degrees temperature which is such a great escape from the rain and 45 degrees it is in Detroit right now, the classical music season with various artists performing and the canteens outside the music sabhas serving fresh dosas and coffee and so on. Most importantly the joy of meeting and spending time with my family and old friends, to play home cricket with my 3 year old nephew, to take my mom out to ice creams, to go to my old saloon and get a head massage (Rs 50 for a long 1/2 hour massage - cheap isn't it?), to walk, sit, relax in Marina/Besant nagar beach, to enjoy the Rs 10 Masala Kadalai at the beach. I love to go to Satyam and see young college kids bunk class to watch a matinee, reminds me of time I used to do it and the 4 golden years I spent in college.

Having spent pretty much all of my life in India in Chennai, I think a part of who I am is because of the things I learnt, in and from the city. So nothing relaxes, invigorates and recharges me like my trips back home. And I can't think of a better way to start a new year than to have a cup of filter coffee (Hungover from New year's party??..may be!) and some hot mom cooked breakfast, watching "puthanda sigapu Nizahichi" in Sun/Moon/Mars TV. And all this more than justifies the trip (to me atleast)....

General Thoughts!

Yesterday, my colleague, a fellow Indian and a six sigma master black belt came closest to defining Hinduism in a way that engineers, esp. six sigma trained ones can understand and appreciate. Here is his philosophy, which I totally agree with.

He said "All people are created with a Cp equivalent to two (Indicates Six Sigma capability). Our Ppk (Indication of actual performace level) is much lower though. So essentially Hinduism says if you can raise your Ppk to Cp levels, then you become god". Beautiful eh?
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As an engineer, one of the things that immensely fascinates me are commercial jets. Especially Boeing 747's with the 2 engines on either wing. Seriously, one of the reasons I never get really tired of long layovers is because I could just sit in a coffee shop with a view of the runway and just watch flights take off and land all day.

All this week I was in Chicago. Our facility there is about 10 minutes drive from O'Hare Airport, which is one of the busiest in the world. During general commute I had to drive a bunch of times south on I294, on the part just adjacent to O'Hare. The freeway runs perpendicular to the 2 main runways in O'Hare, about 0.5 miles away from where the runway starts. As a result when you drive south, you can see huge (and small) planes, dip down really low, with its nose tipped up, wheels down and at a very low straight line speed getting ready to land. Its just such a beautiful sight. Infact today, much to the annoyance of my colleague, I almost ran into the car in front of me, gaping at a American Airlines, Boeing 747 touch ground.

To many, planes are annoying noisy necessities of modern life. To me they are generations of ingenuity, engineering excellence and man's (and woman's) persistence to attempt and do what normally seems impossible!
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I can't remember how long it has been since I saw a Hindi or a Tamil movie and came out of the cinema thinking Wow!!, that was a super cool movie. Its kinda sad that the supposedly second biggest movie industry in the world seems to be running out of ideas and creativity to keep its audience captivated. Especially ones like me with very low standards...seriously, I pretty much watch almost every movie unless my friends hit me with a hammer and ask me not to watch that movie.

So despite the warning of my friends (wish I was better at learning from other's mistakes or atleast my own mistakes), I spent $10 today and watched Dhoom II in a theatre. What can I say about the movie?...besides sometime after the interval, I got tired of watching Bipasha Basu and Aishwarya Rai's scantily dressed, tanned breas cleavage bodies. Okay I didn't get tired of watching them, but would have preferred if there was a storyline or something interesting in the movie. On the whole it was a pitiful waste of 10 bucks and 3 hours of my valuable Sunday evening time.

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Creativity - where we get our ass kicked!

Since I haven't been traveling a lot the last 3 months, its given me a chance to do some creative stuff, like cooking, decorating my apartment etc. Now first and foremost, I am by no means any good in either of these, but I'd like to be good and am working towards that. I have gotten a lot better than I was 3 months ago, thanks to watching hours of HGTV and food channel.



In general, I would like to think of myself as being creative. Creative not in the sense that I can cook amazing dishes or paint. But creative in the sense that I often times can think of things to do which are in general different from what others would think of doing. However, after carefully thinking on the topic of creativity, I am convinced that what separates very creative people from the rest is attention to detail. I have to admit, I suck at it. Here is why I think so. If you were to watch any creative program (redoing you home or a cooking show, architectural show..anything) often times its the minute details, things I wouldn't even think about which would make the big difference. In my mind its analogous to the difference in the print quality of a 8X10 picture printed out of a 640X480 image and a 8X10 picture printed out of a 5000X4000 image. They both probably tell the same story and show the same thing, yet the latter does it much better than the former.



I hate gender based generalizations, which say men are like this and women are like that etc., for the same reason I hate it when people say "Men can never understand women". I truly believe every person is different and has a different story to tell. Which is why generalizations typically don't work. Men will never understand women. But I believe if they listen well enough, they can understand "a woman". And when they meet another woman, its a totally different story and they have to start from scratch again. I have not, in my whole life met 2 women who are very similar. But before I digress too much, where I was going with this was that, One safe gender based generalization I think I can make is that, women are much better at paying attention to detail than men are. You put randomly selected, 100 men and 100 women in a room, and I could bet my next paycheck that the cumulative creative genius of the women will be more than that of the men. Sure many would argue that there are more men in creative positions like architecture and cooking etc., than women. However that ignores the fact that only a fraction of women compared to men work, hence I would say that is an invalid argument. Also I am talking about average people here, not professionally educated people.



Another thing that proves my point is that women are much better at remembering anniversaries, birthdays etc., and all finer details men typically tend to forget.



Bottomline...



In a nutshell, I am saying



1) Overall quality of creative genius greatly depends on a person's ability to sense finer details in any form of art. This ability enables the person to adjust and improve the finer details thus creating an overall better experience for people enjoying the art.



2) Women (IMO) tend to be much better at scanning and figuring out the finer details than men.



3) Therefore all other things being equal, women tend to be better at creating, capturing and refining art.



No, I am not sexist. No I am not trying to get Brownie points from women for this post. These are merely my observations based on the experience of working with and having friends, among men and women. Truth be told, I only know a handful of women well and they all exhibit the characteristics I mentioned above. If you disagree with me, let me know.

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