Between 12s and 13s

I gladly accepted two invitations, one each for 12^th and 13^th January 2019. As you may have guessed both were to events in Bangalore. On 12^th January, the Mother Tekhla auditorium on Brunton Road hosted a physicist Arthur Esienkraft from Boston, in India as the guest of the Azim Premji University. His talk was on the Light at the end of the Tunnel. Quite like Carl Sagan, who popularized science through his passion for astrophysics; Arthur took on the task of making the mystery behind light as a phenomenon accessible to citizens at large. 

By the end of his 60 minutes talk, he was not only sure he had primed his audience for their questions; he had also moved from the phenomenon to models and their predictive nature, looping the predictions all the way back to phenomena with the help of the fuzziness of quotations from Archimedes to Asimov.

If Archimedes said Eureka, it gives the science the character of having arrived at truth. Asimov preferred to be stumped on a phenomenal experience and face it with two words “That’s strange”. Between these polar opposites of concrete reality and works of science fiction, the premises of science spread from observation to the quest to explain relationship between objects in the real world.

So what did Arthur begin with? “Only 6 phyla of 21 known to humankind have eyes”. Now, that speaks to something that Nature or ecology represents in evolutionary terms. But it piques our conditioned perceptual anchors to vision and sight. And while our visual cortex are expected to be different from other species, to know that anamorphic art began contemporaneous with understanding of light traveling the shortest distance in a straight line.

When Roemer uncovered an inter-planetary observation in conjunction with earth’s opposition to Jupiter, by timing the eclipses of the Jupiter moon Io, Rømer estimated that light would take about 22 minutes to travel a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. This would give light a velocity of about 220,000 kilometres per second, about 26% lower than the true value of 299,792 km/s. 

Thereon, the evolution of physics itself seems like between the observation of ‘strange’ phenomena, and holding forth models that could predict them. There have been struggles between those who knew math and those who did not even receive formal education. It was news to me that Michael Faraday was a mere book binder who sketched visions of magnetism from reading and reflecting through titles he bound.  It took the math from Maxwell to find relevance to Faraday's concepts of magneto-electric fields. 

There seems at least three axes between electricity, magnetism and direction, for example that several people pursued between precept and observation. The dance between theorists and mathematicians as like Fresnel- Poisson (the Arago white spot), Faraday-Maxwell prompted at least one teacher of Physics to ask the speaker, if history of Physics were taught as an evolution of such ‘seeking’; would not the love for science among students be more wholesome? That’s when Arthur’s recipe of 7 Es sounded right – Engage, Elicit, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Extend.

Well, for one Arthur stressed that time and space are not what we perceive it to be. That reminded me of the recent assertion by behavioral economist Daniel Kanheman “It’s an empirical matter. It’s not amatter of thinking”. The progress of science rested more on how may we know that which we label as ‘strange’ today? Had it not been for Feynman who explained that the blue and orange wavelengths cancel each other out in a straight line, we would be at a loss to explain light’s travel.

A schoolgirl of standard 5 in the audience took her opportunity to ask as to why if light had no mass, would it not be able to travel through a black hole? Her prompt came from the mentions of the speaker, that light may not be as much a particle but a wave. I was instantly reminded of how Leonard Cohen weaved this mind bending phenomenon into his lyric “Show me the place”.

Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can't move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began

“The troubles came I saved what I could save
A thread of light, a particle, a wave
But there were chains, so I hastened to behave
There were chains, so I loved you like a slave”

Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place I've forgotten I don't know
Show me the place where my head is bendin' low
Show me the place where you want your slave to go

My second invitation was to a memorial service on Sunday, January 13, 2019. It was an alumni gathering and remembrance of a man who delighted at a child’s wonder on seeing a light bulb come alive with electricity itself. That was primal joy for him in Chaibasa, Bihar. The man in remembrance was Rev. Richard (Dick) McHugh SJ, who after spirited initiation from Tony D'mello SJ at the Jesuits' Sadhana Institute, Lonavla, went on to study the NLP masters at work before he integrated Vipassana like mindfulness to sensory acuity of the human body. His book Mind with a Heart a touchstone of experientially decoded processes of neuro-linguistic programming, was his start-point of well deserved fame.  

Born in Scranton, PA on 11th March 1930, he passed away 27th June 2018 in Baltimore, USA. This memorial service was at the Ashirwad Jesuit Residence and retreat center off St Mark’s Road. The Rev. Stanislaus D’souza, SJ who conducted the Mass reminded us of his pastoral meaning of the day – the commemoration of John the Baptist ordaining Christ Jesus himself in the river Jordan. That reminded me of John the Baptist surviving on locusts and honey in the wild, and John the apostle. Dick McHugh would quote Richard Rohr of the movement in gender in each of us as between the deep masculine of the wild journeying and the deep feminine caress of the gospel – in keeping with being the message and the messenger too. Dick had much in him that he attributed to his spiritual master Tony D'mello. Might I add here that Tony D'mello was himself a prolific contributor to counseling and therapy. Another life gone swift and brightly. 

Dick was a rebel with a cause in the Jesuit Society himself. His adornment of the Lacoste style T-shirt as unmistakably characteristic chemise with a pajamas strewn from the Jesuit cassock was a strange ensemble. They bore an unlikely raiment for a spiritual grandeur within him. To reframe from experience the Biblical weight on “Love thy neighbor as Thyself” is an uncommon wisdom that priests and nuns would find as a pivot in self-awareness. The psychological significance of his take was – how could a person love another – without loving one’s own self? Even Osho said, that it may be logically possible, but psychologically impossible. To love another without making peace within one’s own self is a sign of poor self-awareness. And an incongruent other awareness often the consequence. That’s when dysfunctionality begins. Mind, body and emotional integrity in the self leads to larger ecological consciousness with others.

In my own sharing at the event, I emphasized that Dick’s life was a testimony to knowledge being an embodiment of this integration, as an inward journeying -a spiritual process in itself. In hindsight, and on return from the event, I recalled another expression that Dick often used.  “If anyone would ask, what’s the goal of awareness? Nothing”. Pithiness in his wit came through in what one of his oldest students in class had to say. Sr Maria recalled her class in 1977 asking Dick to close with a parting statement. “Chew what you eat” is what he said.

For this life well lived, people traveled in from Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai too to celebrate his work with us. In the words of Dr Stephen Titus, Math professor, any transformation should have evidence for “What did you see? What did you hear? What did you feel? How does that make for observation of transformation?” Perhaps, we owe a debt to the evolutionary spirals of NLP too. Robert Dilts built on Bateson's work on levels of learning in systems. And Nora Bateson on her father's and grandfather's!

Perhaps, the evidence of clarity comes through most in Sr Cynthia Gonslaves, FMM and one of Dick McHugh's longest collaborators in NLP process work. "Dick had his flaws too, like any other human being. But he was genuinely uplifting and caring. His parting words after any major interaction would be 'All the Best'. " Leo Lobo revealed how he found nature's metaphor from the farms of his childhood near Mangalore come through in the work of Dick. We were all plants whose seeds were sown to be bright and healthy beings with a potency unique and nourishing to be part of our ecosystem. 

Unlike Eisenkraft’s light at the end of the tunnel, life’s always strange, and not merely when a scientist stumbles upon a dis-confirming pattern. Or a grammarian’s calling out of a violation of speech in language. Never mind that the mathematicians caught up with the visionaries in the physical and metaphysical worlds.

It’s indeed great to have been between twelves and thirteens this January than to be at sixes and sevens. 

What an interesting start to 2019. All the very best to you, dear reader.

Cellphone corollaries - Evolution through formless circumstances in India

On an early morning sky, an elderly adult of 65 was pacing his available place on a cool morning near his ancestral home. He was holidaying among known relatives, taking a break from the Big Apple where his permanent residence is. Looking toward the two steady lights of the sky between clouds of rain and mist, he exclaimed that the two stars had been his companion of the mornings he was on tour. When I mentioned the redness of a planet that looked silvery through the atmosphere, he was all ears. Recognising that they were the planets Venus and Mars or Jupiter, he seemed dwarfed in time and space to acknowledge the need for a telescopic confirmation. In about the early 1980s, when he migrated, it was not an easy decision to meet with an alien culture, where his daughter now teaches math for a living, and his son is on the brink of a doctoral publication in neuroscience. Saged through experiences, he had the discernment to appreciate that it was a tad late to buy his first smartphone, as he expanded his source of information and was more knowledgeable on matters since his first purchase.

It was in 1989 or so, that I had read in a French publication – (le nouvel observatuer or the L’Express Internationale – I do not remember which) of a caption that featured India’s crossroads in time. It was a colour picture of a bovine on an Indian road. “une vache sacrée a la rue” tried to capture India’s contradictions at a time, when the liberalisation of the automobile sector was on the anvil. Today, two and a half decades later, the smartphone indeed has ruled and the automobile has displaced the bullock cart in most places. Why go far? The home care-taker of the resort I was at in Allepey, whose business is younger than the liberalisation of the Indian economy, says that none row their boats with effort now along the Manimala or the Pamba rivers, leave alone the Vembanad lake. All prefer the Japanese motor-powered boat. His attendant adds quickly, none know hunger here anymore.

This week, the Newsweek’s issue carries the burden of the Indian zeitgeist in similar language as the French press. “The French” our attendant proffered, “prefer blander food preparations, even if it is meat; than the British and the American tourists”. The experience of being on the ground was shining forth in just a decade and a half of such flourishing house-boat and holiday home business in Kerala. The holiday-home owner was more forthright in his assessment though. He wondered why the fuss when even the lower castes with whom local politicians were playing coy; would return to sanity after their tempting differentiation in identity. He was certain that they would be side-lined by the higher castes in communal politics. At the crossroads at which India is today, caste is still a potent killer within India, than cow slaughter is. Social psychology still knows no better wisdom of in-group and out-group phenomena, in that the French observed of India in 1989, as clearly and as early as did the Newsweek did of India’s social contradictions in 2015.

Evolutionary biology, history and even philosophy are enriched in interdisciplinary contributions than are religion and politics of everyday living in the age of the hand-held mobile smartphone. Learning at a societal scale is not only mediated through technology and access to information, it is also restricted by inept social learning; like, falling on naked eyes to ‘know’ the planet from the star; when more contemporary lens are available. Bias and overlearning part, activity – and almost any variety - is considered a strategy for life. So popularity is weighed against social media rankings, and political achievements through material manifestations – even at the cost of the earth and the air on its surface. Activity inhibition is considered as sloth, and not as a possibility for inner reflection and contemplative meaningfulness. So hours are lost as minutes are kept; and the fear of not doing anything has the whirr of the modern boat scare away fish and tear away livelihoods impacted by nature’s plunderers. Seldom has the radical nature of groups been so incendiary in grabbing our attention. 

In populous India, the smartphone presents both opportunity and challenge. Rabble-rousers speeden the reach of their dogma faster than the citizens’ capacity to develop their innate intelligence and express themselves in independent critique based on emerging truths that science methodically uncovers for us. Else, may the farce be with you, and the mercy of a timeless zone rescue us from ourselves. Until then, am hoping to embrace the effervescence of formless circumstances!

Compensation in ‘respectability’ – the Doctoral Pursuit

Corporations are competitive places to survive in. They house employees who are perceived to align with corporate objectives. They have been to reward the more aligned, based on what is now bandied about as ‘performance’. There are also those nooks and corners in corporations, where performance is incidental to the employee’s presence. Some of these employees are seen as ‘solid citizens’ and are some of the most procedurally compliant lot. They acquire onerous goodwill due to their dependable character and predictable nature. You don’t mess with these people if you know that they have a place in your heart.

But, they are not as satiated as their top managements may like them to be. So, the guy was given this office near the men’s room corner, and a pay grade lower than the executive cadres - with a title that could at best win the respect of a campus recruit. Denied the status and the merit based promotion cycle he is left wondering what aspect of loyalty failed him the next title and pay-grade.

Compensation in ‘self-worth’ – the ‘elixir’ of philosophy

So he rationalises it to be his pedigree – not the ivy league college degree, or the mother-tongue accented English conversation, or for that matter neglected acts of fine dining when hosting clients or government officials. So he decides to earn a title beyond the workplace. This time its going beyond the evening MBA. It’s a full doctoral program, course-work, and mini-thesis all rolled into an ongoing corporate problem that needs a fresh insight.

Numerous nouveau-riche institutions, make the beeline for retired executives and retiring ones with a noble exterior of respectability. Education plays the great leveller, after all, with knowledge having no favourites among learners. And learning is a virtue, that corporations can live with. Consumptive knowledge brings one closer to monetary value. But learning for learning sake does not necessarily guarantee more money instantly. Yet, it can salvage lost pride, as such is the inherent virtue of the transformations of learning.

Old habits die-hard

And when I saw an online appeal for ‘executive MBA’ students to help in the literature surveys, it was quick to get my attention. The learner in me awakened. To my horror, the posting was on behalf of Research scholars, who wished to outsource their literature survey, design of questionnaire for interviews, and interactions with industry leaders! Wow, some scholars these – even the methods of enquiry are finalised before the literature survey has ended. Rich students paying lesser students in the guise of learning! I can well imagine, how lost both outsourcer and the outsourced would be. To make matters crisp, let me lay out the following.

1.       Outsourcing a research project assumes that the researchers are trained and competent to design the research process, collect data, analyse information and makes inferences that are consistent with the method of science.

2.       Expecting untrained literature surveyors to execute research is like a surgeon expecting a barber to perform surgery for want of resources, including that of time.

3.        A PhD is about the method of science, and not the execution of procedural tasks bereft of the scientific mind-set.

4.       Internalizing the method of science within the researcher is a major differentiator in the research process. Why otherwise would a research scholar attempt trial-and-error research efforts with novices?

5.       A quest for a title cannot be unanchored in principle, purpose or ethics of the discipline. Can an aspiring guitarist ask free hands to tune strings without one’s will to strum it?

Parting Questions : 

1. How is the method of science different from other forms of knowing, for which you truly aspire to be a research scholar?

2. What's even more important to you than your self-worth, and the pleasure of learning for which you are taking up a research question in a scientific process?

Bearings and straits away from the Sea

The Navy Foundation in Bengaluru is perhaps more unique than one may like to hear of at first instance. In the first place, Bengaluru is not a maritime location. However, the Admiral Pereira Lecture series that it has instituted is to do with alumni from the region. Kannur, came up severally in the Naval Chief’s welcoming address. Little did I imagine that Ronnie Pereira was from Kannur where India’s seamen are formally trained. Bengaluru by contrast seems more like the choice for naval officers’ retirement abodes. On asking uniformed men, I realised that not more than 70 officers had secondments or deputations across DRDO or Central Quality Assurance offices. Around 500 retired officers however resided in Bengaluru. This is the city the late Admiral Pereira breathed his last too.

 I was fortunate to be invited to the 2^nd Admiral Pereira lecture by the renowned scientist Prof. Paulraj. Paulraj is the pioneer of a breakthrough wireless technology known as MIMO (multiple input, multiple output). MIMO is now core technology in latest WiFi and LTE systems. The topic for the day on 11th January at the BEL auditorium was regarding security and technology in the new world order. 

Admiral Robin Dhowan, had already assured the audience of indigenous development of equipment for the navy. The speaker in Paulraj represented a continuity in an intellectual voyage for the modern soldier in an asymmetric warfare context. Having spent 25 years in the Navy, he went on to be a respectful academic in Stanford. What I was especially drawn to were the pattern in his laments. None had a technological challenge. They were either social, organisational or merely cognitive or attitudinal. Let me recount a few of his reflections.

1.     Bureaucracy in India needs reform. It currently arrests development.

2.     Narrating the travel embargo during his sonar development, and the ‘good’ men in Raja Ramanna’s time, he elaborated on the rigidity of the ‘system’. He labelled it as the need for organisational reform.

3.     Technology cannot be left merely to the private sector. The gaps in technology requires government support in the order of lakhs of crores of rupees. Indigenous technology does not have that backing even if private capital were to join hands.

4.     Emphasis on quality is missing in higher education. The Chinese government sends hundreds of thousands of students to USA on government grants to access better quality of education. He gets more than 200000 letters of interest from students of Chinese origin annually. India’s scene is desperate and despicable in this respect.

5.     Spectrum for common citizens is blocked by the services in the name of national security. Prof. Paulraj felt some of this spectrum could be freed simply by withholding it in times of national security, than to permanently disallow the spectrum to civilians.

Well, the above notwithstanding, some points I picked up beyond the BEL auditorium were noteworthy too. We took to a table where an elderly veteran sat alone for lunch. He was kind enough to accept our presence. Having introduced himself as a veteran pilot, he went on to share much from his heart. Here's a brief recall from his outpouring.

1.       Commanders in the Navy could ‘separate’ out to pursue intellectual dreams like Paulraj did, and the host Ray D’souza did. The air force and the army on the other hand were short of personnel. The air-force and could hardly recover investments in its pilots for example.

2.       It takes 12 signoffs before a fighter aircraft takes off.  Ground duties are no less. Civilians have no clue to the preparedness of airmen.

3.       He felt that the seeds of indifference came about because Nehru did not feel sovereignty needed technological investments, so much so that the 1962 war saw soldiers on foot and in khakhi braving the Himalayan heights who in their retreat were lucky to be airlifted.  

4.       Bengaluru has been refusing permission for a war memorial. It is symptomatic of the clash between the political class and service officers. Just one officer alone has spent Rs. 26 lakhs since 1986 to fight for this right up to the Supreme Court, so as to create mind-share in forthcoming generations regarding the role of servicemen.

5.       Admiral Ronnie Pereira was lucky to be picked up from the road outside the air-force hospital in Bengaluru. He was riding a scooter in one of the most inglorious deaths a service chief may've had in India. An admiral as he, lived such a simple life as to be riding a scooter in retirement. Imagine!

The worlds of service personnel are quite far from those of the ordinary civilian. Governance has been diluted by serving and retired bureaucrats. No profession however can proceed to excel without a cause. And braving the odds as Paulraj would do to stay on a problem long enough despite the odds placed on him by invested paradigms.

Emergence is to be welcomed with openness - it is an attitude of trusting vulnerability. Expertise is an outcome of devotion, a relentless sacrifice to focus on a few things to exclusion of all else. It is an attitude of 'can do'. Originality comes from an attitude of curiosity and a presence of spontaneous positivity - that is to be authentic - without guarantee or pretence. Naivete of course will come from irreverence, and disregard for others' learning.

I had the opportunity to shake hands with naval aviation specialists, Air Marshalls and Admiral Dhowan himself. Overall, this session experience left me with a profound question. 

What am I bringing forth to this world?

Certainty the deity, Uncertainty the chant - 2014 as a reverse process?

In 2014, several stereotypes were challenged. India’s mission landed on Mars, at a cost unimaginable in developed nations. A teenager won the Nobel Peace Prize. We also saw violent intrusions of physical boundaries and the vagaries of the human mind. Civilian planes were downed, went missing and lives go unaccounted for because of people choosing to fly. Storms like those in the Kashmir Valley worried many. Winter chills from the polar vortex affected Canada and North America.

The rouble crumbled, and the popular representations in geographical zones started to demonstrate momentum in India and the Middle East. Japan’s low electoral turnout may inefficiently hide frustrations of a proud collective. Despite a revolutionary Pope and a rising of e-commerce, there are fewer jobs to go around in 2014, than in 2008. Despite more stringent laws women and children are violated in mindless circumstance.

If this were the context in which we end 2014 what is striking for me?

I feel challenged on account of incomplete inward realisation and the outward means by which we advance our causes. To quote a more articulate view “We know that, for better or worse, humans are incapable of rationally resolving theoretical debates outside of the institutional framework of the sciences. If we’re out on a limb, you guys are clinging to twigs. And now that science is making real inroads across the humanities, that annoying empirical breeze you feel is about to get a lot more gusty.” So wrote R Scott Bakker of the debate between views from Thomas Metzinger and Graham Harman. You will recall my mention of the phenomenal self model earlier.

While the philosophical chatter may appear much like ether or feel like flake to those not invested in critical enquiry, much of what happens around us in the real and physical worlds are now up for scrutiny. Perhaps the language of categories and prejudice may be closer to your preference in understanding how and why people take sides in an argument. So here’s what may make matters explicit. Consider facts reported by Partners Against Hate, who infer that Addressing Youthful Hate Crime is an Imperative.

·         33% of all known hate crime offenders are under 18.

·         31% of all violent crime offenders and 46% of the property offenders are under 18. 

·         29% of all hate crime offenders are 18-24.

·         30% of all victims of bias-motivated aggravated assaults and 34% of the victims of simple assault are under 18.

What do we do, when, in the name of religion, creed, language or race, workplaces are blocked for outcomes and energy? While, I am not in command of facts that parallel those of Partners Against Hate, here are a few probable trends for your consideration.  

·         Of all known injustice due to prejudice, offenders are rarely identified at the workplace.

·         Of all  injustice at the workplace,  voice is most exercised only when monetary reward is lower than expected by the ‘victim’ in the situation. 

·         For most ‘surprises’ during a compensation and benefit revision, expectation setting and goal setting are taken for granted.  

·         Workplaces project the language of diversity. Yet, ‘mind-set’ professions such as Quality Management (QM) and Human Resource Management (HRM) are rarely  experienced as integrators.

·         Of known sources of error and workplace injustice, work design and organization design are rarely seen together as the source.

Which in a rather curious way, brings me back to the role of bias in optimism.

I’m glad I was introduced to the work of Yuval Noah Harari, who as scholar of history, brings to us a  possibility in his book Sapiens. He argues that the greatest myth we’ve lived with for thousands of years is the Agricultural Revolution. The agricultural revolution has not reduced man’s efforts, but only compounded it. Instead, it is crop and cereal like wheat or rice that domesticated homo sapiens. Surviving and flourishing over millennia, they’ve made us dependent on them. They’ve domesticated us on this planet! (what a contrarian appeal to our senses).

We may’ve thought we’ve domesticated cattle. But the cowbell’s new forms like the cellular phone and hand-held devices now aided by the stealth of technological prowess, seem to muddle our thinking. Being is even more majestically challenged than we may readily acknowledge.

We’re hurtling into an age, where spiritual and intellectual honesty may be difficult to reconcile.  I find forms of that reconciliation ruling the roost in organisational debates too.  Let’s just count some of these tensions here.

1.       There’s tall obeisance to ‘uncertainty’, and yet stock markets punish for the lack of ‘certainty’.

2.       There’s much ado in the name of complexity, and yet simplicity is touted even if end effects are about oversimplification.

3.       There’s praise to the intangible yield from human resources, and yet there are perhaps fewer jobs thanks to technology.

Insight of 2014? When fantasy and optimism make heady confluence, it is fueled by inter-subjective beliefs dispersed widely in a society or civilization. That is to say, that socialization enables the stability of beliefs that hold up the myths of our existence. This is fodder to revolutions!

Stereotype to be challenged? Corporate or institutional impact on our belief structures. This is not about Coke as a want and water as a need per se. This is not about ideology, religion, philosophic slant or cult activism as much as it is about relevance of our actions to our wakeful lives.

How may we influence our beliefs such that what we experience at work on a daily basis is a reflection of our faith in each other’sabilities to revere and serve each other? Will such be the accommodation we make for people we may call neighbors, family and community too?