When Tipu Sultan got me fired!

One of the best things that happened to us while growing up in India during early 90s was that we were not spoilt for choices. Life was much simpler. We had just one service provider for TV programmes those days called Doordarshan. There used to be two channels, one broadcasting national level programmes mostly in Hindi and the other one with programmes in Malayalam, the local language of Kerala.

Being a boy of primary school age, one of the best series that attracted my attention was an epic portrayal of Tipu Sultan, the fearless warrior king of Mysore who defended the kingdom from British invasion during late 1700s. Episodes after episodes spoke volumes about his valour that I could not watch the programme without having goosebumps.

I was quite intrigued with many battle sequences portrayed in the series. Nevertheless, there was one scene where the Sultan was seen drawing his majestic sword that he used in many of the wars. The music that accompanied was equally brilliant which immersed the viewers into the real battle itself! All of these happened ages before the world had even heard of the term virtual reality.

As many young kids in those days, I loved to imitate everything that a hero did. Right after one of the exciting episodes, I decided I needed to have a sword. Now, the biggest question was, where could I find a sword?! A real sword was obviously out-of-question for a ten-year-old boy and those were the days, as I mentioned earlier, when the choices were quite limited for everything, including toys. The best thing about those constraints were that you would find opportunities around you and did not need anyone to define it for you. And boy! Did I not find the best available sword in the whole neighbourhood? Absolutely!

Ever since I could remember him, my dad was majorly into gardening. With great difficulty, he must have got a plant named Sansevieria Cylindrica, a succulent commonly known as African Spear. It had stems, green in colour which looked quite a lot like a sword with round base and pointed edges. I promptly cut one of those stems and held it high, even with greater pride than Tipu Sultan himself, admiring my newly found weapon of power!

The next question was how I could hang the sword on my ‘royal armour’ which was a pair of shorts. Innovation came quite easily those days. Mom had kept a roll of jute thread in the kitchen for the purpose of tying cardboard boxes for storage. I cut the thread at a length that was enough to go around my shorts and did a perfect knot so that the sword can be placed right through the loop where it could stay without much support. Thus, a true legend was born, the Sword of Tipu Sultan of Kerala!

The sword lasted for a couple of episodes. That was when the local Sultan faced a major challenge. Being a plant, the stem of Sansevieria Cylindrica started getting dried up. After a few weeks, the sword was quite skeletal in shape. I realised with pain that it was neither good enough to fight the British nor even a stray dog that appeared on the streets once a while. Obviously, a Sultan cannot continue his rule without a sword.  

My eyes went back to Sansevieria Cylindrica. Within a few weeks, a portion of the plant started disappearing. Swords were made one after the other. The reign of Sultan continued without much of an issue, till the time my dad figured out what was going on!

What followed was something you will never come across in the recorded history of India. I vaguely remember running around the backyard of our house holding tightly to the last of my ‘sword’ with dad chasing me down without even realizing that he was chasing the Sultan of Kerala!

Strawberry Tales

Kerala, the southernmost state of India, is one place that enjoys tropical climate throughout the year. While I grew up in Kerala in 80s, it was quite normal for the backyard of many houses to have fruits such as pineapple, papaya, mango, jackfruit and even passion fruit. Many years later it was a pleasant surprise to me while travelling to some of the famous beach destinations, people over there referred to these fruits as exotic!

Having said that, one of the fruits that eluded our taste buds was strawberry. In fact, I would assume none of the people in my small town of Changanacherry had even seen one in their lifetime till then, unless they were among the minority who travelled to places across the globe where strawberries grew naturally.

That was when my dad started a business to sell ice creams, the first of its kind and scale in our hometown till then. Among the many flavours we received from Lazza, the ice cream brand produced in Kochi, strawberry was one. While the ice cream had a beautiful baby pink colour, the only connection it had with strawberry was probably the flavour. After a few months of opening of the shop, one day when the new stock of ice creams arrived, we had a surprise!

There was a new flavour called fresh strawberry. Unlike the usual flavour, this one boasted of having actual strawberries in the ice cream. It was true! While not as fresh as you could get, the ice cream indeed had pieces of strawberries in it. It was a moment of truth for all of us in our area that day! History was made where we could see and taste a new fruit for the first time ever in our life! Strawberries! Year 1993.

It took many more years for me to experience a real fresh strawberry. In fact, I had to cross the Atlantic and land in the US soil to gift my tastebuds the real feeling of a fresh strawberry fruit. I was in Atlanta, working for the client SITA. The cafeteria at SITA's office was where I got to see my first real fresh strawberry. Year 2009.

But even with this I was yet to see an actual strawberry plant and pick a strawberry fruit from the plant directly. It was meant to happen many years later. Another decade and a half it took for me to experience something so refreshing as to see strawberries hanging from its plant and plucking them and experience the real taste of strawberry as fresh as it could get. Ruby and I was on our family vacation trip then, along with our little ones. We were on a road trip from London to Scotland and had stopped enroute at a strawberry farm named Cairns. A very special sight awaited us where thousands of strawberries hanging from the stems of the plants in a greenhouse environment, beckoning us to be picked and enjoy the real taste of the fruit. And we did exactly that! Year 2024.

You may ask, what is the big deal about this? It is just another story about someone getting to try some fruit. There is a little more to this than what eyes could fathom. 

We all crave for many things in our life. Some of these will happen as soon as we wish for it but there are others that you may have to wait for the right time. Trust me, when the time comes it will turn out to be exactly how it was meant to be. Anything before that would have been nothing short of an unwanted experience which you may even want to forget in your life. 

So, if something has not happened yet for you, just wait for the right moment, and never lose hope. Good things do happen to good people. 

God bless!

Authority of Love

The other day I happened to hear a story. Quite a funny one, which I am sure most of you would have heard before. Here it is:

One day, a class teacher wanted to help her children understand the difference between authority and absolute authority. Mat, a smart chap raised his hand and said, ‘Authority is when my father tells us children what exactly are we supposed to do.’

The teacher was impressed and said, ‘Very good Mat. Now can you tell us what absolute authority means?’

Without even a bit of hesitation Mat replied, ‘Absolute authority is when my mother tells my father what he should be telling the children on what they are supposed to do!’

While the humour is quite evident, there is a stronger emotion that runs in every family where you see this happening. It is not the position that drives authority, it is the deep respect and love for each other that a father and mother in a family portrays to their children. The kids may or may not understand the nuances of this love while they are small, but eventually they will get this and learn to appreciate the ways of a family.

Come to think of it, the way authority works in the corporate world is not too different. It goes without saying that there is an inherent authority associated to a person’s title or a position in an organization. But what is interesting is the fact that authority alone does not command respect.

I was fortunate to work with some of the leaders who earned tremendous amount of respect from their teams, not just because their title demanded it, but because they decided to showcase their love in the form of empathy above authority. When you have bosses like that, you will give a hundred percent of yourself and at times maybe even more since you just love them for what they are and not what is written against their designation.

I consider myself equally fortunate to have worked with a few managers who belonged to the other side of the fence for whom authority meant absolutely that and nothing else. I remember them, not because I admire their ways of working, but kept that experience close to my heart so that it constantly reminds me of how not to be a leader like them!

If you consider yourself as someone with authority and next time your team agrees to do something for you, ask yourself this question. Are they responding to your authority with love or is it just absolute authority and nothing else?

Never to Fear & Never to Hate

Finished watching a ten-episode series named Imperial Receipts where Dr Shashi Tharoor states facts about British colonialism of India and narrates with absolute passion some of the historical moments including humanly unthinkable atrocities that were unleashed by the British rulers those times. Some of those moments may even be blood-curdling to most of us who live in a civilised modern world.

While it should be a painful reminder of our past, both for the colonised and the coloniser, I loved the way Dr Tharoor ended with a conversation that apparently happened between Nehru and Churchill during 50s, post India's independence. Churchill said, he was surprised that Nehru did not hate them and was able to be civil with them, after all what they did to India. Nehru replied, stating he was taught by a great man, Mahatma Gandhi, never to fear and never to hate.

Whether the above conversation truly happened or not, nothing seemed to be more relevant in the modern world and should serve as a great reminder for leaders across the world, in politics or corporates, to learn from the mistakes of our past and live a better present to create a beautiful future for the coming generations!

Here is the link if you are interested:
https://lnkd.in/dvT4hDTN

An AI nightmare

We were on vacation, a few years back, at our ancestral home in Changanacherry, a small town in Kerala. Our son was still a tiny human being, experimenting with his newfound skill of using vocabulary. Our daughter was yet to be born.

A relative was visiting us that day and as they were leaving, we all came out to the portico to say goodbye. By the time the final chat was done, and they left, it was a good additional ten minutes. My son darted back into the house as soon as the guests left. Before we could even step back into the house, we heard him screaming! 

'Appa! Everything's gone!'

We rushed in and to our utter dismay, we found the house empty! Everything in the house were missing! Furniture, paintings and everything the ancestral property ever had, vanished into thin air. We were dumbstruck for a few moments. In ten minutes a fully furnished house became an empty shell. What in the world just happened? 

While we were still breaking our heads for answers, we saw our son running out to the backyard. Another scream followed, but we quite did not understand what he said this time. 

He ran back in, shouting, 'Aints'! 

We thought he wanted to say 'Ants'. But he repeatedly said 'Aints' and pulled us out into the backyard. What awaited us was nothing short of a scene from a science fiction movie. Millions of ants-like creatures were carrying all the items from our home and were marching towards some pre-defined destination. It was quite evident that those were specialised AI driven mini robots programmed to execute this task, controlled by someone stationed at a remote location. Hence our little one was quite right when he called them 'Aints'!

We were wondering how to react to this unprecedented attack. We decided to try out an idea that occurred to us. Since those 'Aints' were programmed, we attempted a reverse programme logic by hacking into the AI brain of those mini bots. And it worked! We screamed with joy, at the top of our voice, 'Turn! Turn! Turn!'. One by one, the 'Aints' started turning around and replaced all our vanished items where it originally belonged.

It was all over, or so we thought. Time for the proverbial sigh of relief. We had no idea that it was far from being over! We were terrified to see a fresh battalion of 'Aints' appearing out of nowhere and carried out similar operation as if nothing ever happened. We continued with our futile attempts to turn around those fresh set of 'Aints'. Soon we realized that we were not reaching anywhere.

That was when a brilliant idea struck! How much ever they say AI was advanced, human brains were far more superior. So much so that, time and again, we surprise ourselves with our ability to come up with simple solutions for complex challenges!

When all other technology solutions failed, what came to our rescue was a good old water well in our backyard. We swiftly drew some water from the well and splashed across the legion of 'Aints'. That made them defunct instantly. We kept pouring water over those bots and I was about to announce to the whole world how water saved the day over the evil infantry of 'Aints'.

That was when I felt a splash of water on my own face. I opened my eyes and saw my sweetheart holding a bottle of water. We were in our bedroom in Dubai and the clock showed 3 AM as the time! 

My wife looked very worried. Apparently, I kept turning her on the bed and wanted to know why I was shouting at her with the words, ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’. 

 

For the love of God, I had no idea how to convince her about my attempt to save the world through superior reverse AI programming with which I disarmed an entire army of the most advanced bots ever known to the history of mankind. Hence, I did the next best thing I could do.

I turned around and slept again, hoping that one day AI will help me have only sweet dreams…

Dreams do come true!

I do not exactly recollect the year when the dream of doing an MBA got into my mind. What was quite interesting was the fact that, it was not just the course, but even the campus where I should get it done was crystal clear like the waters of a pristine lake where you could see tiny pebbles resting on the lakebed.

During my BCom days, I chanced upon a brochure for the MBA programme offered by Christ College, one of the most prestigious campuses in a city that was then called Bangalore. Was it the course structure or the image of the campus, I still am not sure, that attracted me more, to that magical temple of learning. An opportunity to visit the campus during my BCom final year as part of a college tour added more feathers to my dream.

Growing up in the late 90s in Changanacherry, a small town in Kerala meant, limited aspirations and even lesser exposure to career opportunities. A fact that was contributed by not having enough mentors or resources to guide you on your career path and an equally responsible lack of self-driven initiative. All these manifested for me as just two options for higher studies post my graduation. Either get a master’s degree in management (MBA) or delve into the world of technology with a master’s degree in computer application (MCA).

Not wanting to miss out on either, I did apply for both. Those were the times when colleges had separate entrance exams for professional courses. I applied for MBA admission both at my dream college Christ and at Rajagiri college in Kochi as a backup plan. Meanwhile applications for MCA were also given in a couple of good colleges in Coimbatore. As destiny would have its say, I did not clear the entrance exam for Christ. I had to look at the next best options, with my dream shattered. I sat along with my parents at the MCA admission office of PSG College of Arts and Science in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, the day before entrance results were to be announced at Rajagiri. Little did I know that life was to take me on a twisted roller coaster ride that day.

Though I had good marks to get an admission in merit, the rule those days was that if you were a student from a different state, you had to pay a considerable amount as a non-refundable deposit fees. My dad asked me to choose between MCA admission which would be closed that day or take a chance and wait till the next day for Rajagiri MBA results. I did not have a Plan C, a mistake on hindsight. It was one of the most challenging decisions in my life till then. 

I weighed my options and finally opted to join MCA. A hefty amount was paid as fees, and my fate for next three years was sealed that day. You live with the weight of the choices you made through your life. By noon next day, Rajagiri announced the results. I was selected for their MBA programme. But since the fees paid for MCA at PSG was non-refundable, I burned the feathers of my original dream. 

Life in Coimbatore started. By the end of first year, my struggle with C++, Java and the dreaded Data Structures led me to have a heart-to-heart conversation with my dad again. I told him how I did not really see coding as my cup of tea. Full credits to him, the response he gave me, drives me forward even today, though he is no more physically with me. Such are the powers of genuine love of a parent. He addressed me with all the affection a dad has for his son, 'Da mone, you can study whatever you want, as long as I can support you. Do not worry. I will only suggest you complete what you started, especially since it had a considerable investment involved'. 

I listened to my dad. While I skimmed through my MCA days, I started to stick new feathers back to the wings of my original dream I had burned earlier. By that time, individual entrance exams for management institutions were a thing of the past. I had to compete at the national level with exams such as Management Aptitude Test (MAT). While a bit intimidated, I went ahead with the preparation. Dreams have a unique nature to power you forward, while your reservations may try to pull you back. It is absolutely a mind game where the power of your resolve will determine who wins at the end.

I was in Bangalore for my MCA final year project. It was a Saturday, a few days after I had applied for MBA admission at Christ college again based on my MAT score which was not bad for those days. By noon, I met Father Paul, the Director of MBA programme at Christ then, at his office, to check if I got the admission.

Father checked the list and looked at me. Two pairs of eyes met, one which seemed to have absorbed all the peace of oceans across the world and the other owning up all the tempests that raged across the planet! He told me, 'Jerry, there is one last seat left. It is currently assigned to a girl from Punjab who is expected to confirm her willingness to join by 3 PM today. If you want, there is a church behind the college where you can pray till then. Come back to my office after that. If she does not confirm by then, the seat will be yours!' 

I felt like the only man floating in the middle of Atlantic after a shipwreck, clinging on to a tiny life jacket, the last hope of survival, only to realise with horror that it has a hole which can be mended only by a glue called time! I felt the feathers of my dream starting to burn, again.

Those 180 minutes were one of the most intense experiences of prayer in my life. The church was closed, but I knelt outside on the steps and prayed in whatever form of prayer I knew.

By 3 PM I was back at Fr Paul's door. The only thing that was faster than my legs that took me back to the college from church was my heartbeat. The palpitation was quite high, that I literally had to try hard to keep my heart from getting out of my chest!

Father Paul saw me and asked me to come inside his office. He looked at his watch, checked a paper that appeared to be a list of names and wrote something on it. He then looked up and said, 'Welcome to Christ College, Jerry.'

Dreams do come true!