The West discovers "floor sitting"

The West has discovered  "floor sitting" as a key to good health. A group of scientists has come out with a finding on how sitting on the floor is a good thing to do. 

The fun starts only now. There will be classes on floor sitting, gym memberships for floor sitting gyms where they will provide a high tech floor and Nike certified floor sitting coaches. 

Twenty ways to floor sit, Harvard floor sitting seminar, and of course  floor sitting therapists. "Dear Agony Aunt", will read queries in the newspaper, "when I sit on the floor, others look at me strangely, and I have developed, as a result, a deep floor sitting phobia. What should I do", will ask one hopeful. "You must visit a floor sitting therapist, but only after consulting your doctor. These kind of traumas are especially stressful" , etc etc .

There will be a sudden plethora  of floor sitting mats and aids, advertised, branded, and promoted as an alternative lifestyle option. 

Someone in the US will patent floor sitting, anyone sitting on the floor will have to pay a royalty, they will say, with official sanction from the US Government. 

The Indian Government will publish a report through the Ayush Ministry on how floor sitting is an ancient practice, which the west stole from India, and hence it is not patentable. The woke liberal lobby led by Balak Buddhu will say the Indian Government is being anti progressive, regressive, unscientific and anti people. 

Meanwhile the furniture lobby will fund research which proves that floor sitting leads to piles and fistula. The Pharma companies will fund further research which will study people who only sit on the floor and only eat junk food, which will find that all these people landed up with deadly ailments, thus proving that floor sitting is the root cause of six hundred different ailments. The Pharma lobby  will put pressure on WHO to ban floor sitting worldwide. 

Caste activists funded by George Soros, will campaign to  ban floor sitting because it is a tool of oppression used by the Brahmin Male Patriarchal exploiters to oppress the lower castes. California, being a progressive liberal state will ban floor sitting. 

And so on and so on. Once the westerners discover something good,  one can always predict the flow of events...

In search of relevance

With the ingress and proliferation of AI, we need to think hard about  career choices that our kids need to make. Actually, why just our kids? We need to stay relevant too, so long as we are alive, so reinventing ourselves constantly is a necessity. 

So instead of calling it a career choice, we can simply call it staying relevant. 

There was a time when becoming an SAP consultant was all the rage. This was in the late 90's, ERP had just been discovered, and "ERP" consultants were in high demand. I was in Hyderabad those days, and I remember this building in Ameerpet, which  had probably twenty or more SAP / ERP "institutes". Not even one of the kids enrolling in those classes could string two words together in English to make a proper sentence, but they all landed up in the US. A visit to Chilkur Balaji temple would virtually guarantee them the visa! 

What does an SAP consultant do? They just "configure" the package, after understanding the "process" of the company and map the software on to the process. Which is pretty low end stuff, but in the late 90's, anyone who claimed they knew SAP was in the next plane to the US, with a hundred thousand dollars salary. You heard me right, that is the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars of today's money, for kids who had nothing much to boast of except imaginative CV's, which by the way is reputed to be a Hyderabad speciality. 

Life is not so simple anymore. In just 25 years, we can't recognise the landscape around us. 

AI can read CAT scans better than most radiologists, draft legal documents better than most lawyers, make music... It sucks at writing poetry, but just wait for a few more years, all the poetasters who fancy themselves as poets are going to give up writing poetry because AI will be doing it better. 

In such a situation, how does one stay relevant? That's the big question. 

There are few different ways you can look at this problem.

If you are absolutely brilliant, or to use a trumpian term, brilliantest, type then dive right into software, programming, AI, etc. and remain on the cutting edge of the field. You will have to reeducate and reinvent yourself every three years or so, probably junking everything you have learnt till then. 

If you are the average middle of the road person with an average intellect and an abysmal attention span, which means if you are like most people, take your chances and join a BPO. The problem is, your job may not last for long. AI will take over most of what you do, and the youngsters coming out of college will elbow you out of whatever jobs are left. 

If both of these options sound scary, choose a field that will not be taken over by AI. 

Before we get into that, the first thing you should not choose isv one of the so called liberal arts courses. It's a fashion being imported here from US universities, and for the life of me I can't figure out how studying some of those courses are teaching anyone anything. 

Study basic maths, basic statistics, basic physics. They will never go out of fashion. 

Get into children's education. Or into the field of geriatric care. Become a primary school teacher or a nurse.  These needs will keep on increasing and AI can't take over. 

Get into a career that involves close interactions with people on a day to day basis, where AI can't threaten you. Become a barber or a cook. 

Become a therapist or a counsellor.  That whole field is a bit of a scam, but more and more people are going to need therapy, either because they can't cope with the pace of change around them, or because they are just lonely, or because going to a therapist is the emerging fashion. 

Please let me know your thoughts, and ideas for further career options, or to put it better, options for staying relevant.

MUSINGS FROM A CORPORATE CAREER... Meetings with HR

Meetings with HR are the worst: 

A) they lead nowhere 

B) you have to be politically correct 

C) you have to  agree with what they say because they are so correct

D) it is only when you come out of the meeting that you realise that nothing happened 

E) even though nothing happened, you are still left with a feeling of a vague inadequacy which can, according to HR, be rectified by following some vague prescriptions.

What HR told me I can  do to improve: 

Be more focused, and at the same time,  be more broad based in my thinking, 

Be more detail oriented, and at the same time be more strategic, 

Be more goal oriented, and at the same time be more people focused, 

Be more empathetic, and at the same time  be more task oriented,

Be more inclusive, and at the same time  encourage performance,

Encourage teamwork, and at the same time foster individual excellence,

Be more meticulous, and of course exhibit  high level thinking,

Be more empathetic, and at the same time  ensure discipline,

Don't use sexist, racist, homophobic, non inclusive language - by the way most words we normally use are sexist, racist or homophobic,  and of course be a better communicator,

Be more communicative and definitely  be more focused, 

Etc etc 

I have recieved a million suggestions from HR in my lifetime, some of them directly told to me by HR; some of them told to me by the India Head as told to him by HR to be told to us; and some of them told to me by my boss in our one on ones as told to him to be told to me by HR. 

All the suggestions sounded great when I heard them. I used to walk out of the meetings totally pumped up. 

But when I sat down to think about how to implement them, I would realise that not even one of those suggestions were actually implementable. 

I guess they were not meant to be

The Samosawala

The samosawala who used to operate at the corner, where our lane meets the main road, disappeared two months back. 

Now hold it! Before you say what's the big deal, samosas are a dime a dozen, etc etc, this fellow used to make the best samosas you ever had. He didn't have a shop, he operated from under a tarpaulin strung on the side of the road. With a  large iron kadhai over a wood fire for the samosas, and a smaller one for jalebis. Very nondescript, very unassuming, but what Samosas, and what jalebis! 

His main customers were the students from Kristu Jayanti college nearby - the more well heeled would obviously prefer to buy their samosas from Anand Sweets which is just 100 meters away. But having eaten from both the  places, I can vouch for his wares; I am willing to wager that no air-conditioned shop selling its samosas at three times the price can come close to the taste! 

For the last two months, everytime we passed by the place, we would sigh a wistful sigh, and say, oh how we miss his samosas and jalebis! My mom in law included, who was a big fan of his jalebis. 

You know what they say, you  don't know how much you miss someone till they go out of your lives! Well, it was the same with us. 

Anyway, to cut the long story short, today the wife came home with our favourite samosas and jalebis! He is back!, she announced; I have never seen that look on her face when I returned from a long absence, that is how I know that she is genuinely thrilled. Apparently, he had never left, he had just gone to his "gaon". 

Well, he is back now and all is right with the world. And from the moment he opened his shop again, it is surrounded by devotees clustering around for their samosas. 

All you techies who are reading this, it is time to introspect. If you disappear from your office to go to your gaon for two months, you will not be recognised when you come back to your office; if your job is still waiting for you that is.

HOBSON'S FARCE

Oh what a farce of an election,

Of a crumbling once great Nation; 

Everyone's racing to choose between, 

Two execrable abominations! 

One is a bull in a China shop,

Swaggering around wearing a cowboy hat; 

The other is a cackling idiot,

Who defines cringe and makes your skin crawl! 

Each half votes against the other, 

No one here is for the Nation; 

An election defined by hate, 

Voting for Captain while the ship is sinking! 

Like fiddlers on the Titanic they play,

Foot tapping music for the masses,

Who dance away oblivious;

It is a tragicomical farce! 

Meanwhile the wrold runs on its own, 

Or it would be seemingly so; 

The real helmsmen are behind the scenes, 

It really does not matter who wins!