Why MANY smart people are not social? | Rajesh Setty

Why MANY smart people are not social? | Rajesh Setty.

The following is the copy of my comment to this blog:

 

 

A – Statically speaking – normal person is generally considered a Social Animal. These people bend over backwards to be social, possibly, to fill up the sense of lacking as well as to insulate against the vagaries of the [unknown] acts that may happen in the areas of their known and perceived weaknesses. The relationships may be bilateral or multilateral or, sometimes, unilateral too. The ephemeral relations are established if these are unilateral, but bilateral or multilateral relationships are relatively for longer duration. The usual common bond is expectation that the relationship will make good one’s shortcoming. If this implicit or explicit need is bilateral, then relationship also takes bilateral dimension. The relationship stabilizes only when each participating party shares the same wavelength.

 

The ‘normal’ ‘social’ types redress their ’higher-level’ non-material problems at meta –physical level – by visiting temples or reading philosophical scriptures or seeking blessings of ‘sages’.

 

One of the oldest forms of relationship – family – is axiomatic because it is natural. This used to be bonded with more of non-material needs like love and affection. However, increasing dominance of material needs and considerations have weakened this, otherwise, strong relationship.

 

There are some very striking ‘exceptions’ to these ‘normal’ relational behaviour. There exists a small tribe of people who are ether gifted with or have assiduously cultivated vast reservoir of self-confidence. The self-confidence is the result of person’s [inner] strength of character to face any and all challenges. Since these persons are able or shall want to source the solution from within, they seem to need the support of external relationships. Their personalities are too unique to make them compatible with others, easily. Their network does happen, but is not akin to a social relationship. Ayn Rand, the famous author of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and ‘Fountainhead’ [among several others] has called these as ‘first-raters.

 

In other words, the ‘normal’ ‘social’ persons tend to ‘escape’ from the efforts and responsibility to seek solution to the one’s own problem by instantaneously seeking external help as opposed to ‘non-social’ type who would have the requisite internal source to seek the remedial solution. [If not available, these people are creative enough to develop these strengths on their own.]

 

Shri Pravin Shah, my friend of 1963-1965 period recognised me….

Toady’s morning walk had a very pleasant surprise in store!

Our friend, Shri Pravin K Shah of our GLS School days in H / L  colony, a 1963-1965 period recognized me and called me up.

Hats off to Pravin. He could recognize me after this huge gap…..

We recalled to Chandurbhan [Motwani].

I also recall Naresh Patel from that batch.

And so too Piyush Shah who was the only one to get admission in I I T in those days.

Sorry, Strivers – Talent Matters – NYTimes.com

Sorry, Strivers – Talent Matters – NYTimes.com.

“It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.”

The Seven-step Path to Sustaining Success

You take care of the people.

The people take care of the service.

The service takes care of the customer.

The customer takes care of the profit.

The profit takes care of the re-investment.

The re-investment takes care of the re-invention.

The re-invention takes care of the future.

(And at every step the only measure is EXCELLENCE.)

Q.E.D.

—Tom Peters

Paradise is no heaven : Devdutt Pattanaik

Paradise is no heaven : Devdutt Pattanaik.

The lower realm of pleasures are material pleasures, which in Indian Mythology is the stage that deities could reach. [That’s why they had to go for help from God (Vishnu or Mahadev or Brahma – The Trinity of Gods) or Supreme Power (शक्ति)(Durga, Kaali or Ambaa) when they failed to overpower some of the very strong demons]. This is known as Paradise.

Whereas Heaven is where material pleasures have no significance. One raises a few notches to renounce all material (sensory)pleasures(माया) and reach the stage of ब्रह्म.

The article has differentiated both with the help of a telling example.

Corruption and India’s 1%

The only important question in the West right now is how to restart stalled economic growth.

So it is easy to be dazzled by India, where a 7% rise in gross domestic product is the nightmare scenario, and optimists are shooting for 9%. But Indians themselves are starting to worry about how that growth is being achieved – and who is benefiting.

The headline complaint is corruption. That is nothing new here, of course. But the country now has a middle class self-confident enough to feel humiliated by paying quotidian bribes and resentful of the rise of baksheesh billionaires. Anna Hazare’s hunger strike became a national political event because it tapped into this anger of the urban bourgeoisie.

“India has been overwhelmed by corruption scams,” Kiran Bedi, the first Indian woman officer and one of Hazare’s chief lieutenants, told me in one of a series of interviews in Mumbai. “While it has been apparent that India is shining, India has also been declining in many ways as there has been rampant exposure of corruption.”

“Corruption is endemic,” said Rajiv Lall, chief executive of Infrastructure Development Finance Co, a partly state-owned financial institution. “I don’t think anybody here is pretending that there’s no corruption in India.

And corruption can take on a new dimension, especially in time of great transformation.”

Graft is just part of the story. One of the reasons to celebrate India’s astonishing economic rise is that the subcontinent desperately needed to get richer. In 1991, when Manmohan Singh, then the finance minister and now the prime minister, began the liberalization program that underpins the country’s transformation, India’s 854 mn citizens had an average annual per capita income of only $1,300. The problem, said Arun Maira, a former industrialist – member of the country’s influential planning commission, is that India’s economic rise has had the least impact on people who need it most.

“My thesis is that most people are not feeling included in the growth,” Maira said.

“This has become a very loud voice which is saying ‘Come on guys, the economy is growing very fast now. You’re celebrating this 8, 9, 10% growth, but what about us?”

As Maira points out, one of the most powerful advantages of the wealthiest 1% is “access to people in power.” But there is a more subtle reason the game is most effectively played by those who are already winning it. S. Gopalakrishnan of Infosys, said that “The tendency is that people who have access to power and access to governments, etc., tend to get a better deal. “The policies, the roots, are framed because they are people who give inputs to those policies,” he said.

This is the Indian version of what Willem Buiter, the former London School of Economics professor who is now chief economist at Citigroup, calls “cognitive capture,” and which he blames in part for the regulatory and legislative lapses that created the 2008 crisis.

Ashutosh Varshney, a professor of international studies at Brown University, likens India’s thriving and dirty capitalism to the United States’ Gilded Age. That apt comparison suggests that India watchers should be on the lookout for a Hindu version of the Roosevelts – a Teddy to break the grip of the robber barons and an FDR to offer the 99% a New Deal.

There is, however, one important difference. India’s robber barons have emerged in the age of globalisation and at a time when the US, still the world’s dominant economy, is  experiencing its own second Gilded Age. The wealthiest 1% is a global class, and cognitive capture is an international phenomenon. The world may need its own global Roosevelts, too.

Courtesy: SmartInvestor.in 18-11-2011

See Seven types of persons here

1. Those who create complications but do not themselves know what they have done!?!?!?
2. Those who are at least aware that they have created complications, but do nothing for the solution.
3. Those who are at least aware that they have created complications, and then transfer these complications by informing others.
4. Those who are at least aware that they have created complications, and then ‘inform’ others by ‘sticky-notes’ [now by e-mail or SMS].
5. Those who are at least aware that they have created complications, and ensure self-awareness not to permit the repetition [We invite them for the jobs here.]
6. Those who are at least aware that they have created complications, and ensure that others are aware not to permit the repetition. [We have open doors for jobs for them, always]
7. Those who are at least aware that they have created complications, search for the solutions and also ensure own and others’ awareness for avoiding the repetition. [We are on the constant look out for such leaders.]

[[Observed at the hardboard at the Reception counter of an Engineering Company]]

Courtesy: http://nilenekinarethi.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/seven-kinds-of-people/

Seth’s Blog: After you’ve done your best

Seth’s Blog: After you’ve done your best.

One certainly can learn from the failures only, only if you know – why,how and what.
That is why failing the right way would remain an art.   

The King of Good Times is now the pauper of bad times.

The growth of airlines industry in India seems to have happened quite unplanned.
Before, any meaningful comment can be offered, one needs to study the market share , the patterns of traffic, the cost structure, infrastructure management practices etc. of of each airline.
However,  few observations can be recorded at this stage:
1. Airlines seems to find competition uncomfortable. It is time that they are able to work out strategy of differentiating on factors other than price. As a customer, I have not preferred price alone. I would be necessarily guided by the preferred time slot for my travel, the experience of on-time travel. However, the airlines do not seem to have been able monetize their such USPs.
2. Certainly, [only] some routes may be profitable! but is it only the average, day-in-day-out load factor the only parameter driving that routes profitability?
3. The airlines are facing the monopoly in several other areas, like airport charges, fuel cost etc. But, this is not very much new for the industry as a whole. There are many industries  which have many customers [ meaning difficult to achieve segmentation and loyalty]; many players [Classic application of ‘Rule of 3’ – relatively fragmented supply side] and few [oligopolistic] structure of input suppliers [meaning that not much control on your input cost and /or quality performance parameters].

Certainly, the industry is in unenviable situation. But do they have not landed themselves in that condition themselves? If so, why, someone else should help them out?

[This is copy of my Comment to the original blog-post on BlogAdda’s Spicy Saturday Picks – Nov. 12, ’11]

BBC News – India’s undying love affair with Tintin

BBC News – India’s undying love affair with Tintin.

Two suprises: First one that Tin Tin has been translated in Hindi  and Bengali and Second, Tin Tin is so popular in India that the new Steven Spielberg animation movie is released in India first.

Here is the small news item in BBC Hindi <http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/entertainment/2011/11/111111_tintin_india_dk.shtml>