Management Musings

One of my favorite essays during school days used to be about Television. I still remember writing about the TV in Hindi. Invented by John L. Baird, if my memory serves me correctly. Looking back in the last 30-40 years, we have moved from no TVs, to TV being a novelty, to CRT TV sets being the norm (who can forget Dyanora?) and nowadays, to LED TVs. What next? Of course, 4K Ultra HD TVs are already here. We will move away from the cable TV or even the need for a satellite Dish enabled TV set in the future. It may sound alarming, but it is going to be the reality sooner or later. No more TV shows, a dime to the dozen, repeated in multiple languages and broadcast over an untold number of channels. Early age TVs used to have 12 channels and a remote control was unheard of. Within a few years now, we have hundreds of these channels all vying for viewership and advertisement revenue. Almost every channel has programs running 24/7. For how long, I wonder? Video can be, after all, transmi...

Over the past couple of decades, the Computer networking industry has seen many trends come and go. Looking at how things stand today, the core skill sets of Routing and Switching look likely to become dated as the number of experts proliferate the market and the task of routing the packets through the Internet has become a commodity for so many deployments. Fundamentally, the core job of routing remains the same, from the perspective of a device. For it, a packet (or data) comes in and it needs to make a decision on where to send it out to. The USP for any device resides in the speed with which it can make this decision and the speed with which the packet can be forwarded out another interface, towards its ultimate destination. As with so many other technology industries that reaped the benefits of Moore's law, it was the same with the High Performance Networking industry. Shrinking space for the transistors used for switching meant that so many more operations could be performed...

One of my hobbies is reading. As long back as I can recall, I have loved reading - started off with the Amar Chitra Kathas of the world, devoured comics such as Batman, Tarzan, Phantom of course and moved on to more comics such as Archies, Tintin, Asterix, etc. Phantom was, and remains, an all-time favorite for me. The various names and the mystique remains a fascination - The Ghost Who Walks, Devil, Walker, Skull Cave and his horse - do not recall that name. The beauty of it was that it transported me to a world where it seemed that anything was possible. Live in the jungles of Africa, fighting the bad guys, move like a Ghost, have a Wolf for a pet and live behind a waterfall, move like lightning, etc. At that age, I could dream of a possibility - maybe even I can become like the Phantom, strong, mysterious, intelligent, fighting injustice and invincible. Books held that power. Then, it was the turn of Amar Chitra Katha and abridged versions of the classics. I am proud of my collec...

Very many people have dealt with loss of a loved one in their lives. Death is inevitable and irrespective of how much anyone may have read about it, when it comes calling on someone close to your heart, confronting the loss square-on and dealing with it, is entirely another matter. Theory is so easy. It is practicals that is more challenging. How much anyone is missed, I think, comes down to each individual. Some cope with it far better than others. We are often quick to judge others on how they are looking and reacting following a loss. Many of us are quick to the draw in being judgmental anyway, regardless of the situation, but I will leave that topic aside for another blog post another time. Is the person crying? Is he looking forlorn? Is he looking the same? Is he/ she able to remain stoic after the event? So many questions and like so many other things, the answers to all these questions is purely dependent on the perspective of the person answering these. The pain and the loss...

News channels and media outlets have been awash with reports of the sad demise of a 8 year old boy inside the school premises in Gurugram. As can be expected, there is an outpouring of indignation and anxiety from many quarters all across the country. Times like these spark a conversation around security in schools. The bigger problem, to me, seems to be that this happened in a private school, which has a majority of students from middle to upper middle-class families only. There may be many such incidents happening throughout our country in schools in the hinterlands. Those go unreported and perhaps, happen to the less privileged, hence the lack of media coverage. As parents, even my wife and I will inquire about the measures that the school that our kid goes to, is taking, in the wake of such an incident. We want our child to be safe. Over the past many years, news of sexual abuse of kids ranging in age between 3 and 16 have become more frequent. The first few times, I was shock...

“When Breath Becomes Air” – it is fair to say that I have not read a book like it in my life. There are multiple reasons that the book resonates so strongly with me, not the least because the protagonist (also the author) was of my present age when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He was a Neuro-surgeon, just completing his residency at Stanford and like his accomplishments speak for themselves, he was all set to be a very, very good one. Paul Kalanithi’s insights into life as a neuro-surgeon and his ability to talk candidly about everything, starting from his childhood, to his medical studies, to his realization of terminal cancer, is simply stunning and though provoking. The parallels in his story line were simply too much for me to take. This was a book that made me stop reading many a time, if only to contemplate what Paul had written and ruminate over it for a bit. He talks of patients suffering from neurological diseases and throws up a multitude of questions tha...

The new day dawned with the sun out in all its glory. Life seemed to be so much happier and I thought we had all recovered very well after the arduous trek the previous day. I had been through the final night of sleeping in a bag and in a tent. 3 nights in that cold is enough. I couldn't wait to get back to sleeping on a bed and being spoilt with the comforts of a modern day city life. We were asked to clean up any and all debris lying on the ground after we had finished rolling up the tents and sleeping bags one final time. We started on the descent at 9:00 a.m. The first 5-6 kms of the descent was fun as everyone was in good spirits and a round of Antakshari duly followed. Post lunch, the group split up into smaller chunks as those that were energetic sped down quickly and reached the point where we had started. I was much slower. I had my knees constantly in my mind and ensured that I walked much slower than the rest. Climbing down is hard on the toes too. I was ensuring ...