Santhosh's ramblings

It was yet another day in Delhi. The morning routine at 6:15 AM was to switch on the water pumps, to pull in water to the tank below and then push it up to the tank on the rooftop, during the one hour the water was available.  To make life easier, most houses have an "alarm indicator" which signals when the tanks are full. The best way to do this is to first fill the top tank by pumping up the water and then fill the lower tank by pulling in water, a cycle that repeats every day. But today, something was amiss. From the moment I switched on both pumps (I did it together), the indicator of the tank below was constantly making sounds – like a broken record: "The tank is full, please switch off the motor." (Yes, we have talking indicators – like the railway station announcements). Like Moses who stepped aside to see why the bush was not burning down, I decided to see what the issue was. It was a very encouraging scene. The water was coming under so much pressure that e...

What makes an organization different? I am not talking about successful or great organizations but different. Different means making a difference in the world and transforming lives.   I was sitting in the back of a conference hall listening to the leaders from 19 hospitals reporting on what has happened over the last year. A few observations from what I heard:   1. Leadership with a bigger picture: Leaders who understand why they are doing what they are doing. They have clarity that institutions and organisations are merely platforms to make a difference in the contexts where they are placed. Leaders who prioritise vision and values above  self, people above institution, and larger mandate above money. Their lives open to be transformed and through those changes others are challenged to change too.    2. Leadership in their prime age: One might ask, what is prime age? With our nation having more than 55% of its population under 35 years of age, the average age ...

In a recent conversation with a friend who is an innovator in agri-business, he told a few of us, we do a lot of “body mimicking’ in our innovation. He is trained as a doctor and what he was saying was that they learn from human body in their innovative inventions.   In one sense is this not what we see all around, in human inventions too? Let us look at a few examples.   Look at the Central Nervous System.  20 billion neurones in a 2.5 m 2  surface area packed into small space of the skull, which controls every thought, action and emotion in our lives and the whole body! The fast and the slow memory, the random-access memory, the back-up memory etc.  Is this not what computers and smart phones mimic? Small processors packed into a confined small space which can do much more than what it appears to have the capacity. Mimicking the neuronal networks that was there much before chips were discovered!   The ability of the brain to do self-learning, pi...

Traveling into an economically challenged nation, is a learning experience if you listen beyond what you see and hear.  As you walk into the airport arrival lounge what hits you is the normalcy of the context. Duty free shops as same as ever, people crowding these shops – but mostly foreigners, with shops offering multiple deals. But one you reach the money exchange counter and looks at the rate of exchange, it hits you. For you as a visitor, it is very economical, but one starts realising things are not too ok.   As you drive into the city, everything seems normal as usual. Till you start listening to stories. The taxi driver earns about $ 30/- a day with exchange rate about 300/- per dollar.  Of the 30, a third goes off to the owner. He told me, I am hoping to go off to Europe as a manual labourer. There is no use staying on here.  But then he said, “for some there is much money too sir! He said, last night I picked up three boys in the early 20s a with a...

Travelling alone is a time when phobias are manifested. Last few months of traveling brought up two phobias. Fear of crowds and fear of heights – Enoclophobia and Acrophobia. I always had some of these and other phobias, but never thought much about these. But recent conversations with AI bots advised me, that I might have ‘generational trauma’ or ‘childhood trauma’ as potential underlying causes.  Despite deep reflection, I could not come up with any definite evidence of such past trauma. The only thing I could come up with was, I was not exposed much to crowds or heights in the past! So might be a reason for enoclo and  acro phobias? We live amid an epidemic of mental health issues. One common conversation we come across is, ‘I am like this, fears or anxiety is because of my past, when people treated me not as well as they should or did not give me exposure I should have had.’ Of course there are many who have had past trauma, experiences that might have been traumatic....

I saw this dog today morning, and I was reminded of this quote from the good book: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and, “A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.” Here it was the dog in the mud. We cannot find fault with the dog. It was hot, and this cool water, though muddy, was the best option for him.   It was following its own heart—it was hot, it needed to cool its body, found water, and lay in it. The heart and desire overtook the intellect. What I feel is what I want, and what I want is what I will seek and try to acquire. The potential outcomes of the acquisition can be thought about another day. Instant gratification is what I want.   The follow-your-heart experts tell us, “If you follow your heart, you free yourself to become the person you truly want to be and live the life you want, and it's so worth it.”   I thought I would try it for a day. The problem was I had to give it up within a few hours. I got up feeling extremely lazy and thought I wo...

A friend of mine sent this in a common group. “Pray for our city, especially those with no means and resources to face these terrible days. I am down with a heatstroke. But I am grateful to have my doctor son care for me at home. I feel deeply for the poor and the slum dwellers. May the Good Lord intervene and save us all.”   I have been complaining about how hot the city I live in was, little realising that many of my friends are facing much more challenges. But then I am part of the upper middle class, who can sit in the coolness of an AC and write about heat wave and climate change – the Armchair (AC) blogger!   It is not only heat, the floods in Mizoram and Manipur and Kerala over the last week!  As I thought about this, it dawned on me, that I represent the rest of humanity. My study is glass windowed and becomes quite unbearable in the daytime. Friends who came in all have advised me to put an AC in my Arm Chaired study! I have resisted thus far since I can move int...