The new Rama temple in Ayodhya

Why the Ayodhya Ram Mandir Represents a Collective Catharsis for the Indian Mind

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

“There are besides in the city temples pompous with lofty roofs, conspicuous among them the Serapeum, which, though feeble words merely belittle it, yet is so adorned with extensive columned halls, with almost breathing statues, and a great number of other works of art, that next to the Capitolium, with which revered Rome elevates herself to eternity, the whole world beholds nothing more magnificent.”, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, a 4th century Roman historian, about the great Serapeum at Alexandria that housed the Greco-Egyptian God Serapis.

It was one of the first buildings you noticed as you sailed towards Alexandria. While the public memory keeps reminiscing the Colosseum or the Parthenon, very few are aware of the Serapeum. In AD 392, a bishop named Theophilus destroyed the Serapeum and almost all other temples in Alexandria, column by column. Catherine Nixey in her book ‘The Darkening Age’, describes the tragedy vividly – “One day, early in AD 392, a large crowd of Christians started to mass outside the temple with Theophilus at its head. And then, to the distress of watching Alexandrians, the crowd had surged up the steps, into the sacred precinct and burst into the most beautiful building in the world. And then they began to destroy it….”

The destruction of Serapeum (Read more about the Serapeum) marked the final triumph of Christianity in Egypt as well as throughout the Roman empire. Theodosius II (Emperor of the Eastern Roman empire) and Honorius (of the Western Roman empire), in one of their final edicts regarding pagans in AD 423, declared thus, “We now believe there are none.” (CTh. XVI.10.22)

Similar was the fate of almost all the magnificently built so called ‘pagan’ temples, repeated many times in history, by the fanatics of the new ‘religions’, starting with Christianity, and followed by Islam. One of the most well known monuments, Parthenon, which was the temple of the Goddess Athena in Athens and has inspired hundreds of poor imitations across the globe, was converted into a Christian church in the 6th Century AD and then turned into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in the mid-fifteenth century.

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Closer Home

An eerily similar fate was being thrust upon the temples of the so called ‘infidels’, or the Hindus, the Buddhists, and the Jains, or on a whole, of the Indian civilisation. Here was a way of life with an open architecture with enough and ever-expanding space for polytheists, monotheists, agnostics, atheists. The spirit of assimilation and open heartedness embedded in its philosophy and daily life in practice, let the society shape its Gods and Goddesses through history, worship them to their heart’s content and chosen ways, build glorious temples one after the other for their deities as each of the sects desired. Much like the Greek and the Egyptians, here was a race that had made great progress in philosophy, sciences, mathematics, architecture, and almost all the faculties known to humanity at the time. This civilisation that largely engaged itself in the physical as well as the spiritual progress of humanity was ambushed by a brute force of Islamic invasions carrying the mission of creating an Islamic world by the power of sword. People who refused to convert were slayed. Much like Hypatia of Alexandria, the Hindu and Buddhist scholars who tried to protect the existing and far more developed ways of life were murdered on the streets. Queens and princesses who couldn’t commit Jauhar were captured and turned into concubines of the officers of this new cult. Books by millions and libraries were set ablaze and destroyed. The progress of thousands of years was undone within a few hundred years of the Islamic rule.

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What happened to temples of the Indians?

Kashi Vishwanath at Varanasi was demolished by Aurangzeb and a mosque known as Gyanvapi was constructed. The Keshavdeva temple was destroyed by Aurangzeb in 1670 and in its place Shahi Idgah was built in Mathura. The Somnath temple in Gujarat was destroyed several times and was converted into a mosque in the 19th century. Quwwat -al Islam mosque was built by Qutbud-Din Aibak in AD 1191 over a demolished temple built by Prithvi Raj.

DPD/Aug.49, A04a The Idgah, Mathura. This has been built on the ruins of Keshav Deo temple destroyed by Aurangazeb.

Amir Khusrow (1253-1325 AD), the court poet and chronicler of successive rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, and whose secular makeover is overdone in our country, sings glowing accounts of the destruction of several temples in his writings:

From Miftah-ul-Futuh or Key to the Victories, in praise of Jalal-ud-Din Khilji’s victories, 1290 –

Jhain: “Next morning, he (Jalal-ud-Din Khilji) went again to the temples and ordered their destruction. While the soldiers sought every opportunity of plundering, the Shah was engaged in burning the temples and destroying the idols. There were two bronze idols of Brahma, each of which weighed more than a thousand mans. These were broken into pieces and the fragments were distributed among the officers, with orders to throw them down at the gates of the Masjid on their return (to Delhi)”.

Devagiri: “He (Alaud-Din) destroyed the temples of the idolaters and erected pulpits and arches for mosques”.

From Tarikh-i-Alai, or the Treasures of Victories, in praise of Alauddin Khilji, 1296 –

Somanath: “They made the temple prostrate itself towards the Kaaba. You may say that the temple first offered its prayers and then had a bath (i.e. the temple was made to topple and fall into the sea)’ He (Ulugh Khan) destroyed all the idols and temples, but sent one idol, the biggest of all idols, to the court of his Godlike Majesty and on that account in that ancient stronghold of idolatry, the summons to prayers was proclaimed so loudly that they heard it in Misr (Egypt) and Madain (Iraq).”

Ranthambhor: “This strong fort was taken by the slaughter of the stinking Rai. Jhain was also captured, an iron fort, an ancient abode of idolatry, and a new city of the people of the faith arose. The temple of Bahir (Bhairava) Deo and temples of other gods were all razed to the ground”.

The Somanath temple, in fact, was destroyed multiple times by different invaders starting with Mahmud of Ghazni in 1025-26 AD. Al Biruni, who worked in the court of Mahmud, and accompanied Mahmud’s troops between 1017 and 1030 AD on some occasions and chronicled their conquests, described Somnath temple’s destruction in detail:

“In January 1026, Somnath Lingam was smashed, after killing 50,000 devotees, and the loot amounted to 20,000,000 dinars, each containing 64.8 grains of gold. The smashed Shivalingam were carried to Ghazni where some of the fragments were turned steps of the Jama Masjid in the city while the rest were sent to Mecca, Medina, and Baghdad to be desecrated in the same manner.”

The list runs into thousands. There are several such accounts that are so graphic that reproducing them here won’t come without a lot of pain and trauma for the writer and the readers. If nothing else, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in over 25 days by the Talibani forces in Afghanistan should still be fresh in public memory. If not, the story of the Hagia Sophia church built over the foundations of a pagan temple turning into a mosque during the Ottoman conquest followed by its conversion into a museum and back into a mosque by Turkey’s Erdogan in 2020, give enough indication to the magnitude of plunder and horror that must have been orchestrated during the medieval centuries starting from Mecca and Medina, travelling to Jerusalem, across Europe, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and other places where ‘many gods’ were comfortably worshipped without much of a problem before the new religions with ‘one, true God’ came about knocking at the doors.

Kashi Vishwanath/GyanVapi
Oasis.54515, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It became business as usual at one point of time and an act of great honour for the rulers to get temples demolished and have mosques built over them. One such mosque called ‘Babri Masjid’ was built at the birthplace of one of the most well-known and worshipped gods of the Indian civilisation – Shri Ram, at Ayodhya.

Leaving the question of faith and the fact that Hindus have known the place as the birthplace of Ram and have continued to worship the deity there from time immemorial aside, the excavations of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) discovered parts of non-Islamic structures that predate the Babri mosque. Maulana Abdul Hai in his book Hindustan Islami Ahad Mein (Hindustan under Islamic rule) mentions – “This mosque was constructed by Babar at Ayodhya which Hindus call the birth place of Ramchandraji… Sita had a temple here in which she lived and cooked for her husband. On that very site Babar constructed this mosque in H.963”. Further reading – Sitaram Goel’s Hindu Temples: What happened to them.

Almost all the temples revered by the Indians were desecrated and demolished; the idols broken into pieces to be thrown away or scattered on the steps of some mosque. To add salt to the wounds, in most cases, a mosque would be raised right on top of the demolished temples, reusing parts and columns of the older structure.

Perseverance of the Indian spirit

Despite this, the Indian spirit of many gods, many paths, refused to die because of the incessant struggles of our ancestors. We lost multiple generations of our population to genocides and conversions, but the Indian civilisation lived on. If anyone thought it was not so, the all-pervading sounds of the conch shells and the night illumined by billions of lamps across the country on 22nd January 2024, would have laid to rest, all the doubts in the minds of the naysayers.

A few hours before this, the hallowed banks of river Sarayu saw its Ayodhya reclaiming its glory where a magnificent Ram Mandir has arisen after about 500 years at the very spot it is believed to have been demolished by the commanders of Babur to build the Babri masjid.

A few years before that, the Supreme Court of India after examining all the evidences and arguments from all the sides, had granted the ‘Ram Janmabhoomi’ or ‘Ram’s Birthplace’ to its rightful worshippers on 9th November 2019.

A vast majority of the country celebrated the event like it was a long-cherished dream of the Indian spirit. This was a rare event in history, and perhaps the only one at this scale, after the reconstruction of the Somanath temple in the modern times, where a symbol of barbarism, plunder, and a procrustean idea had to surrender to the symbol of a progressive conception. That this has happened in India should not be a surprise for any serious student of history, given the long history of resistance and relentless pursuit of truth our country has mustered through centuries of foreign invasions. Millions of devotees, several legal experts, uncorrupted historians, and multiple organisations have persevered in this pursuit of truth. A name that must be mentioned here is that of Shri KK Muhammad (former Regional Director-North of ASI) who was part of the first excavation team at Ayodhya under Prof. BB Lal in the year 1976. He has been on a mission to restore ancient temples and structures lying in ruins across the country and has prevailed over an army of Irfan Habibs and Romila Thapars.

The temple, its prana-pratishtha, the celebrations, the ocean of devotees assembling in the city, the ochre flags across buildings, streets, and temples, the larger-than-life images of Shri Ram represent a collective catharsis for the Indian soul that has suffered at the hands of foreign invaders for the last 1000 years and the subterfuge of the home-grown communist historians and scholars for more than 75 years. This second homecoming of Shri Ramachandra, who himself used to worship another chief deity of India – Shiva and began the Akal-Bodhan (untimely awakening) of the female deity, Goddess Durga, thereby further promulgating the idea of plurality so entrenched in our culture has unfettered the Indian mind. This Indian mind has been so far known to be an assimilator of ideas, a collector of the best inventions of the world. Hereafter, it will also be known as the great protector and restorer of its own discoveries, inventions and ideas.

आ नो भद्राः क्रतवो यन्तु विश्वतोऽदब्धासो अपरीतास उद्भिदः।
देवा नोयथा सदमिद् वृधे असन्नप्रायुवो रक्षितारो दिवेदिवे॥ (Rigveda, 1.89.1)

May noble thoughts, unsuppressed, unimpeded, and that manifest the unknown come to us from every direction. May the Gods who do not impede advancement and are always ready to protect us, lead us towards progress.

Reverie Under the Bangalore Clouds

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

The clouds have engulfed all of sky. On the horizons, in patches, where clouds have not been able to spread themselves, the sun sends its sometimes golden and at times silver gleams. These linings present hope that when it’s time, they will splatter the entire sky sunny. The birds are having a great time with the sun on leave today. They hop, fly, and race against their siblings under the safety of clouds that won’t precipitate anytime soon. They are tired from a long night of rain and deserve a break and the weakening clouds. The divine photographer has applied some filters on trees. The greens of the world have become richer in all of one night, the poor greys and hays have received some wealth too. Their apex predators – cattle are out too, and coupled with their commensal friends, egrets, walk to break their fasts.

The sweet soft whiff of zephyr landing on the skin feels like the medicine prescribed by the divine doctor. The birds have banded together for a chirpy concert.

Some flowers managed to stay perched on their parents’ shoulders throughout the night. A few that wanted to break free, did so at the first drop of rain, to create their own destiny. The benches in the parks look their best version, empty, and clean. The rains have brought them some rest as well after a full day’s work. At least till the sun is not out, they don’t have to support the weight of humans and dogs, or that of their egos and emotions.

The sun keeps rising meanwhile trying to break open the yokes of clouds. Perhaps it knows its place in the world and must show up no matter what. There are cracks and there is a shower of rays through the clouds. The cosmic drama contains twists, not much unanticipated for now, but reaches unexpected and unimaginable crescendos when you start thinking about a longer period, think millions and billions of years, or even thousands. We will be there to watch it, as we are now, watching events that unfolded billions of years ago. We might take up a different form, become a single cell organism or become the mirror image of the aliens we are so fond of in our movies. The remnant consciousness of life will still observe.

The clouds do not seem to lose any heart and they keep up with the sun, hovering around to desist it from its habit of stealing the show. It’s not yet time for the drama to end. The suspense must be kept under clouds for some more time. The cattle need more time to go back home with a merry belly. The birdlings want to test their strength for a little longer. The benches are not done with their time off yet.

The audience must get some more time to take out their gadgets and record this moment – in images, sounds, or words. The ones without the gadgets must get some more time to register these moments in the collective consciousness of humanity to pass it down to new humans. With these moments, may the spirit of gratitude too pass down from the elders to the young, of all the species, for our cosmos, that has chosen to keep us as its audience when it can choose to dismiss us at any point of time from this stellar show.

A group of people looking into their phones

Why You Should’t Pixel(8) Your Life Any Further?

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

Not everything that can be said should be told. Not everything that can be thought of should be written. Not everything that is possible should be done.

A dancer positions his phone to shoot himself, jumps in the air, picks up his phone, drags himself a couple of extra feet higher in the air.

A group poses for the camera, picks up the phone, finds their expressions didn’t look as expected, edits their expressions.

A father gets clicked tossing his baby in the air, gets the phone, and drags the baby a foot higher on the screen.

That’s how the latest Pixel 8 from Google is trying to woo its potential customers. I happened to watch this ad video recently and it got me immediately thinking about a few other things.

It’s already too late as well as cliched to say that AI is fast changing how we perceive reality but as we keep moving ahead, we will be time and again faced with the question whether its pervasiveness in our lives and the unhinged applications being employed by businesses to lure customers is taking things too far. If we just talk about photography, what was originally a magical tool to capture and relive real moments in life, has shape-shifted with the new AI powered magic erasers and magic editors, creating moments that you haven’t lived, actions you haven’t performed, emotions you haven’t felt, expressions that you haven’t expressed. Of course, this hasn’t begun now or here. What started with seemingly simple filters, has ushered a new world of alternate reality for the consumers, or put more honestly, a parallel universe of falsehood and deceit.

My team at work went for a day excursion last week and one of the chief attractions there was the ATV bike riding. While a few folks rode amazingly well with lots of slo-mo worthy moments, a few who were doing it for the first or the second time, understandably, struggled to complete the circuit. I’m sure they will do better as they try it a few more times. That is, if they don’t have a magic editor on their phone. With it, they don’t have to try again at all. Get yourself clicked, drag the ATV a couple of feet higher in the air on your magic editor, and you end up being on par or even better than the other riders in the group or outside. Well, you know you aren’t really there and that you have completely tragically deprived yourself of the thrill of traversing the circuit of continuous learning and improvement, but who has time for the old-world self-reflection stuff when you have already convinced the world that you’re the best!

While you can think about this from a purely advertisement or brand positioning point of view and that will perhaps also remind you of how the conventional or the mainstream ad-world is based on lies and deceit (remember the popular cosmetics brand that promised to bleach you white?), I would like to approach it from the perspective of a consumer. I checked how viewers had responded to the ad from the Pixel makers on YouTube and no surprises there, people are excited about the new features that authenticate their perceived insecurities and help them create an alternate reality for themselves. When the smartest brains of our time are working to get us dopamine addicted, one doesn’t really need to be as smart as them to foresee that this is not going to end well for a whole generation and a few more in the future.

This is not a one-way street. Our need to portray what we are not, is fuelling the latest tech features on our mobile devices, in the cosmetics world, on the fashion scene, etc. with fake photography, social media, and other AI applications playing the facilitator’s role to perfection. At the same time, the increasing consumption of such make-believe world, and the availability of options that were once limited to perhaps only movie stars (where we knew we were watching a make-believe world), has created an Olympics of deception around us where almost everything needs an edit or enhancement or a magic trick before going to the outside world. It does beg the question then — have we stopped (at least most of us) living our own life the way it came to us and are caught for most part of our days, months, and years of life living for the beholder(s)? All of this, while we have come to forget the fragrance of flowers because we were too busy using them as background. All of this, while our children grow up not knowing what ‘skinned knees (ghutna chhil gaya)’ means. All of this, while we forgot to meet all the new people in all the new places we visited because we wanted to pour photo-dumps on Instagram later, all the taste that we were unable to imprint on our tongue and soul because we wanted to show to the world what we ate last night. All of this, while we no longer know what success drawn from blood and sweat looks like because we are too busy camouflaging our failures. All of this, while the life that was given to us sans all those artificial filters, airbrushes, and magic editors keeps slipping out of our hands! Pixel 8 and the ilk might bring more clarity to your pictures but I’m sure they will further pixelate the lines between the life that’s real and rushing under a fast-forward button and the life that’s nothing more than a collage of self-congratulatory lies created to turn us into digital zombies.

Note: This write-up is not against Google/Pixel 8 but rather an appeal to creators to prioritise better. With all the computing power in the world under their fingers, it is embarrassing to see what businesses choose to solve with every iteration of their products.

Sister Nivedita or the Mother of Indian Reawakening

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“Let me plough my furrow across India just as deep, deep, deep to the very centre of things, as it will go. Let it be either as a hidden voice sending out noiseless things from a cell or as a personality, romping and raging through all the big cities – I don’t care! But God and my own strong right hand grant that I do not have to waste my effervescence in Western futilities. I think I would rather commit suicide! India is the starting point, and the Goal, as far as I am concerned. Let her look after the West if she wishes – and if Sri Ramakrishna approves.”

Those words written in 1903 in a letter to another great woman of her time, Mrs. Josephine McLeod, present in the most precise manner, what Sister Nivedita thought of her role or her work in India. She didn’t live a long life. Born in 1867 and gone away too soon in 1911, much like her Guru Swami Vivekananda, her life, full of the kind of heroism that’s almost impossible to imagine, reads like a mythical lore. It’s not only the scarcity of time that she shared with her Master who was born in 1863 and passed away in 1902 but also a lot in temperament, the unyielding bias towards action, the capacity to devour knowledge with single-mindedness, a life seeped in Vedanta, and the burning love for India and Indians. Sister Nivedita was all the things Swami Vivekananda could have asked for in his spiritual heir as well as the expression of his ideas on the question of Indian freedom, sovereignty, and social reawakening.

One of the first works of importance on Sister Nivedita’s life (after Lizelle Reymond’s French biography) authored by Pravrajika Atmaprana when she was at Sister Nivedita’s Girls’ School in Calcutta in 1961 stands tall as the first book that should be read about Sister’s life and work before moving on to other works dealing with different aspects of her life. The book that has stood the test of time and is still in publication gives an authoritative and lucid account of Sister Nivedita’s life, her mission, and the makings of her mind. The book follows a linear path for most of its content and begins with her early life, her first body of work as a teacher, the meeting with Swami Vivekananda, her contributions to the Ramakrishna movement, wanderings in India, more of her work in India, her contributions for Indian sciences and art (including her support for Sir JC Bose and help in authoring and getting his books published when he was being banished and plagiarised by the academic hegemonies of England as well as her encouragement for Nandalal Bose, Abananindranath Tagore, Anand Coomaraswamy, and others (Sister Nivedita and Indian Art) to rejuvenate and develop the distinctive Indian style of art as opposed aping the west), her interactions with the political currents and figures of the time, partition of Bengal, more work, and her passing into eternity. The book is a simple and short read but packs in a lot of material related to Sister’s life. It helps that for most of the part, the author relies heavily on Sister’s Nivedita’s own speeches, letters, diaries instead of concluding from second-hand sources or interpretations.

It didn’t take me too long to finish reading the book. However, every time I think of the Sister through the pages of this book, the significance of her work keeps getting greater, so much so, that to write about her life and work in a 300 pager, would seem like an insurmountable task. It is then to the credit of the author who has not only been successful in presenting a comprehensive understanding of her life and work but also has provided a strong foundation for all the subsequent works on Sister Nivedita. Pravrajika Atmaprana of the Sri Sarada Math was also instrumental in getting the five volumes of Complete Works of Sister Nivedita published during her tenure as the Head Mistress of Sister Nivedita Girls’ School till 1970.

While the book talks about different realms of Sister’s life, it never flinches its focus from the unique relationship between Sister Nivedita and her Master – Swami Vivekananda. It details all the training and tribulations that Sister Nivedita went through to prepare herself for the work that was to be done by her. While Swami Vivekananda spoke on a range of subjects with Nivedita, he left her free to choose her work and the means to carry them out, with nothing more than an occasional nudge if he felt something needed to be addressed and tendered his whole hearted support for all her initiatives towards girl education and service of the poor or the diseased.

The book might also leave you a tad sad towards the end at the inevitable fact called ‘mortality of life’ and how it most often doesn’t let the whole magic unfold. While Swami Vivekananda left this world in 1902, much before he could see Sister Nivedita carry out his mission with every single bone of her body, Sister Nivedita too passed away at a tender age of 44 with an ocean of dreams in her mind waiting to reach the shores. I have always wondered how differently our nation’s destiny would have shaped, if one of her most dauntless and romantic lovers had lived a couple of more decades and had remained active on the national scene. The shortness of her life though, doesn’t blur the enormity of her work and the fact that she kindled the fire of sacrifice and deshprem in the hearts of millions of Indians. She keeps living then, much like her master, in our hearts, and it wouldn’t be a hyperbole to say that if Swami Vivekananda sowed the seeds of national and spiritual rejuvenation of our peoples, Sister Nivedita watered, nurtured, and made sure the seeds were cared for to grow into healthy saplings even after he was gone.







The Last of Us and Our Stories of Hope

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

Human suffering comes in many shapes and forms. There is one kind that an individual goes through in his life, not because of a particular central external reason but because of his individual choices or due to what we sometimes refer to as ‘fate’. Fate is not a word rational people really like to hear but here is an example – a person who smokes a pack of cigarettes every day is making a choice. If cancer gets to him one day, there isn’t much he can blame the world for. On the other hand, if someone isn’t into any such harmful habit or say, a newborn gets cancer, there isn’t much externally available to blame. You could point at environmental factors, and it could be true. However, there are others living around who are not affected and spend a medically decent life.

What we don’t understand gets thrown into this bucket of ‘fate’. So, there is this suffering attached intrinsically to your life’s journey – some common, some rare. We all have gone through our own share of suffering at different points in life.

Another kind that we have seen very recently, starting from the year 2020, is the suffering that’s common to the entire society – where a whole city, country, or the entire world suffers because of mainly two factors – catastrophes – natural or man-made. An unexpected flood, a Tsunami, an earthquake – we suffer as a single population – some are less impacted than others but there is suffering at every level. The man-made ones – a war, a partition, an exodus, a pandemic – can also cause suffering to an entire population. When it comes to a war or a locally contained natural disaster, there is a world that remains directly untouched, sometimes even unaware for several reasons. However, the recent pandemic, perhaps for the first time in the last two-three generations has caused immeasurable suffering across the world. A virus kept mutating and tormenting the world and all we could do was just sit and watch things happening to us and havoc being wreaked upon our lives. Everyone I know lost someone in these last couple of years. People who otherwise had no reason to leave this world had to go without having a chance to be near their loved ones in their final moments. Infection, symptoms, quarantine, suffering, hospitalization or its denial, oxygen shortage, waiting, more suffering, death – it was a matter of going through the motions – like things had to happen sooner or later, and there wasn’t anything one could do about it except being ‘careful’, as careful you could be, given the circumstances.

People have spoken and written about the lessons from the pandemic at length, many of them already forgotten or lost in the second or 2000th page of the internet and of our own minds. I would however like to recall just one thing, the biggest one perhaps from all of it – that human suffering is alike across the world at a fundamental level – money, power, poverty – all of them – do cause differentiations till a certain point but when the universal suffering endures, the artificial layers peel off, sometimes on the very first hit and sometimes taking a few more hours on the clock. The result – we are all exposed.

The TV Series ‘The Last of Us’ based on a 2013 video game plot wherein a pandemic is caused by a mass fungal infection forcing its hosts to transform into zombies is thankfully not about the zombies. It is about the humans, as they were before they turned into these zombies, or how they survived the next attack. It is about their lives and the hundred thousand ways they have been tormented by the pandemic. The show takes us through a post-apocalyptic world of 2023 with the help of a few characters who either get infected or don’t but suffer all the same, much like what transpired in the last couple of years with the real pandemic. The writers with their characters zoom in on individual suffering as a study of human suffering in general and deliver the message of pain through your screens to your heart. I know someone who lost her child a day before the delivery was due, I also know a 79-80 years old gentleman who was working on a book and editing articles for a magazine and died being concerned about their completion in the hospital ward. I know someone who refused to go to the hospital and died and I know someone who went to the hospital in time and died nevertheless. I know a 20-something who had to take care of his infected parents for about a couple of months while being infected himself. When I watched the show, episode after episode, these faces appeared in front of me through the characters who suffered on screen. So many promises and plans just lying there, floating over the searing funeral air, undelivered, now orphaned, and unclaimed – that your spirit begins to crumble and hope seems to be a pointless concept.

While the show starts with a grim assessment by scientists, the flame of hope doesn’t go out. It was hope, a hope of medicines or a vaccine, a hope of immunity kicking in, a hope that we would be able to survive – that has carried us to where we stand today. I do not know how the show ends at this point in time and maybe we will never know what series of pandemics are still in store for us humans in the real world – but I know an Indian doctor who served without a pause in one of the remotest regions where people could ill-afford quality healthcare during the pandemic and helped thousands of patients at the area hospital as well as over phone calls and WhatsApp. So, we keep the hope alive, at least as long as we have such people walking amongst us. Things may or may not get better but even if they don’t, whenever the last of us tell our story, they will zoom in on our common suffering and the hope we kept lit in our hearts till our last breath.

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The Pleasure of Finding a Feynman Book

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

“Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a …, in Italian a …, in Chinese it’s a …, in Japanese it’s a …, etcetera. Now, you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now, let’s look at the bird.”
Melville Feynman

I began my 2023 with a couple of books – The Rebel by Albert Camus and Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. The Rebel is definitely something that shouldn’t be finished in one sitting. The author is trying to understand and explain the evolution of the political ideas of our world from first principles and provides detailed arguments for his conclusions. I am currently living with that book, which means I carry it to my workplace, to leisure trips, and theatres but haven’t finished reading it. On the other hand, I reached the end of Richard Feynman’s work pretty quick and what a delightful read it was!. The book is a collection of his lectures and interviews over his lifetime and etches out the makings of a great scientist and one of the most eccentric spokespersons of Science.

The book begins with a beautiful foreword by another great theoretical physicist whose name will invariably be mentioned whenever Richard Feynman’s work is invoked. Feynman in his inimitable style takes us through his childhood, his father’s way of kindling curiosity, the future of computing (where several of his predictions have been realized in our time), role of Science, his attempt at a bit of philosophy while describing science and its role in this world, Cargo Cult Science, and his take on the relationship between science and religion. Thanks to the editor, Feynman’s tone and his directness with speech have been left almost untouched and that makes the book much more enjoyable. It is not an easy task to marry a science book with a high entertainment value but when it’s Feynman talking about science, there isn’t really much anyone needs to do. If not for anything else (there is quite a lot of anything else), I would recommend this book to anyone for that single reason.

“One of the things that my father taught me besides physics (laughs) whether it’s correct or not, was a disrespect for respectable … for certain kinds of things. For example, when I was a little boy and a rotogravure – that’s printed pictures in newspapers – first came out in the New York Times, he used to sit me again on his knees and he’d open a picture and there was a picture of the Pope and everybody bowing in front of him. And he’s say, “now look at these humans. Here’s one human standing here and all these others are bowing. Now what is the difference? This one is the Pope.” – He hated the Pope anyway – and he’d say, “the difference is epaulettes” – of course not in the case of the Pope but if he was a general, it was always the uniform, the position, “but this man has the same human problems, he eats dinner like anybody else, he goes to the bathroom, he has the same kind of problems as everybody, he is a human being. Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something special he did, or his honour, or something like that.” He, by the way, was in the uniform businesses, so he knew what the difference was between the man with uniform off and the uniform on: it’s the same man for him.”
Richard Feynman

The first highlight of the book for me is the recounting of his days at Los Alamos when he was all of 24, working on the Manhattan project in a team that consisted of the brightest and the most celebrated scientists of the time. His thoughts before accepting the offer to work there, his time there, and after getting the job done –  make for an interesting read owing to his unique vantage point. You will easily understand when you read these pages that he never missed having fun while doing science. You will read a lot of anecdotes in the book that will make you smile and even laugh out loud at times.

When you think about the methods used to teach science, particularly in schools and colleges, barring a few exceptions, I believe we have come a long way on the wrong path. I believe the only work needed to initiate a child onto the path of developing a scientific outlook is to fuel the natural curiosity a new child come with to this world. Feynman talks about his father’s contribution in what he became in his life. What you read there is a playbook of how science teaching should happen in this world. He also weighs in on the matter with his own ideas on how science teaching should really be done. This marks the second highlight of this book for me. There are a quite a few lessons for the science teachers around the world from one of the greatest teachers ever to have lived on our planet.

This is my first read on or by Feynman and I’m hooked enough to read up a few more. The unravelling of the genius that lived not very far from us in the past is something that can’t be missed. The good thing for us readers is that Feynman loved to talk about science and there are plenty of lectures and interviews to go through. Freeman Dyson once mentioned about him thus: “half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality.” If I may add, physicists, their children, and eventually all of the world that cares to meet him through his talks and books, Feynman keeps everyone amused.

TheSeer Interviews: Author Rajesh Talwar

TheSeer TeamLeave a comment

Rajesh Talwar has written thirty-two books, which include novels, children’s books, plays, self-help books and non-fiction books covering issues in social justice, culture and law. He has practiced law, taught at university, and also worked in senior positions with the United Nations in various countries across three different continents in a career spanning two decades. He is a British Chevening scholar and the recipient of an Honorary Citizenship Certificate from the Mayor of Tulsa (Oklahoma). He has been interviewed by The New York Times on the state of law and justice in India. He has studied for shorter and longer durations at various universities including Delhi University, Nottingham, Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard.

In many of his books he has tried to spread awareness about globally significant issues. For instance, in a children’s story book The Three Greens and a play The Killings in November he has written about environmental issues. He took up the cause of sexual minorities in his book The Third Sex and Human Rights and the play Inside Gayland. He has written about the dangers of a nuclear holocaust in his play A Nuclear Matricide. Crimes against women are discussed in his play The Bride Who Would Not Burn and his book Courting Injustice: The Nirbhaya Case and Its Aftermath.

Within the world of fiction, he has written in different styles and genres. His novel The Sentimental Terrorist is a literary novel that explores the theme of terrorism. On the other hand, An Afghan Winter also based in Afghanistan is written out like a thriller. Most recently Talwar has described his novel How to Kill a Billionaire as a literary thriller that reveals the workings of the Indian justice system. Rajesh works as Deputy Legal Adviser to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. 

TheSeer recently spoke with the author and discussed his childhood, love for books, and his journey so far.

You have had a stellar career and your body of work is still expanding. Do you consider yourself successful?

As I write in my book, for anyone to consider himself successful there should be a merger of the objective and the subjective criteria. Take the case of the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh. Judging by today’s standards he is immensely successful, with each of his paintings being sold for millions of dollars, but while he lived and painted, he was unrecognised and a great failure. It was painful for him then, and it painful for his fans today when they think of how the artist suffered. I do therefore believe that you need a degree of public endorsement, that is to say, objective success in addition to subjective satisfaction.

Success cannot be purely subjective, as the singer and Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan suggests. When I think of myself, yes, I do consider myself successful. It would be ungrateful and falsely modest of me to state otherwise. I also believe that it would have been unfair to pen a book on the meaning and mantra of success if I did not myself have at least a certain level of success. Having said that, you know, for a true artist, which I imagine myself to be, perhaps misguidedly, all his works ultimately fall short of the perfection he aspires to. Rabindranath Tagore said very profoundly, and I believe with great honesty and insight, that although he had written thousands of poems, all his life he had been trying to write just a single poem which always remained elusive. Alas!

What was your childhood like?

I am from a fauji family, an ‘army brat’ so to speak. Dad being in the army, we were transferred every few years. This was both good and bad. It was good for me because I had a sort of mini-Bharat Darshan during my growing up years. There was a downside to it as well though for by the time you made friends at school, it was time to go to another town or city, and change schools. Although we didn’t have any writers in the family as such, I would not say that my family did not have a literary inclination. My mother, for instance, was and remains a great reader and she imbued in me and my two brothers, through very subtle influencing a passion to read. That habit continues till this day. We keep checking what each of us is reading and recommend books to each other. My father was not a great reader, but I believe he may have been reading quite a lot in his younger years, for every now and then at the dinner table he would surprise us with some Urdu shayari or an esoteric Persian couplet.

Why did you decide to write the book – The Mantra and Meaning of Success?

Unfortunately, I believe that very many self-improvement books are fake in nature, and prey on people’s insecurities. Most books on success do not even consider that success can mean different things for different people. They simply assume that everyone knows what success means. I wanted to write an honest book, which asked the reader what it was that he personally wanted out of life before going on to examine the route and methods to achieve success. So, I hope that my book will create some inner questioning in the reader, and there will be readers who will realise what it is that they really want, before chasing a success that may end up as a mirage and not mean much to them even after they attain it. The second thing is that most books on success, barring a few, are written from a Western perspective, giving Western examples. I wanted to write a book keeping the Indian audience at the centre, while it could remain useful to non-Indians as well.

When you define success, how much of it do you think is subjective in nature?

It is difficult to put a percentage on it, but I do agree with Dylan to the extent that the subjective element is possibly the more important. If what you really want to do in life is sing songs or write books, but you end up making soap and selling huge quantities of it, even if you end up as a billionaire, you will find great dissatisfaction gnawing away at you. Selling soaps was not what you were meant to do with your life. On the other hand, if you write books and get only a bit of recognition and little or no money, even if it gives you great creative satisfaction, without a sense of validation from the outside world, you could also end up feeling a great sense of frustration. In my book, I give the example of Mario Puzo who wrote a few critically acclaimed books with one even being described as a minor classic by The New York Times. However, after some years Mario started to feel unhappy at being in a situation where he was always having to be borrowing money from his brother. One day, he told himself: ‘Mario, you need to grow up and sell out!’ In other words, stop with the literary fiction and think mass market. That’s how eventually The Godfather was born.

You have chosen to focus on Fame, Money, and Power while defining success. Why?

Although I focus on fame, money and power, I explain how often when you attain success in one domain you start to thirst for success in another area. Smriti Irani was a famous actress but decided to leave the world of acting to enter politics. She had fame but she wanted something more enduring, let us say. Mr Kapil Sybil is a successful lawyer and politician but decided to write poetry, to gain a different kind of acclaim and popularity – unfortunately his experiment was far less successful than Ms Irani’s. I speak also of IAS officers who have enjoyed status, and a degree of power, but feel bad about not having enough money, compared to their friends in the corporate sector. But yes, fame, money and power are the three magnets that drive most people’s quest for success, and I felt it was logical to focus on them.

You have picked a lot of stories from the pop culture and information that is readily available in the public domain for your book. How did you come to select these stories while writing the book?

I wanted my book to be both relatable and readable. Selecting stories from pop culture was one way of drawing the reader in. The writing of this book had been an idea in my mind for many years, and certain stories concerning celebrities stuck in my mind. Writers do this – they tuck away something that could be useful in a corner of the mind. The other thing is that I believe wisdom can be found all around us. It’s not necessary to go to the top of a mountain in search of a white bearded man who will impart words of wisdom. Insights and lessons can be gleaned from the lives of many people. 

What are your current reads? Who are some of your favourite writers?

I am currently reading three books. I have with me ‘Bastar Dispatches: A Passage Through the Wilds,’ written by Narendra, a friend, which I never found time to read earlier, but which I am now thoroughly enjoying. Narendra actually spent many years living with tribals in Abujhamad and it is great to read about his experiences and what he learnt from living there. The second book was released this year on International Women’s Day by Deepti Mehrotra titled ‘Her-Stories: Indian Women Down the Ages’.  Finally, I have just started reading Gitanjali Shree’s ‘Tomb of Sand’. Perhaps it will inspire me to write my own novel on Partition for there are many painful memories within my own family of what is often referred to as the greatest migration in human history. Our family came from Pakistan in 1947. My mother hailed from Bhaun, and father from Chakwal, both small villages in District Jhelum (at the time) that were fairly close to each other.

My favourite writers? Let me just mention a few at the very top of the list. Among the French, I love Guy de Maupassant and Marcel Proust and among the Russians I love Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Anton Chekov. I also love Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, Manto, James Hadley Chase and Shakespeare.

What’s the next book about?

I like to stretch myself as a writer. Although I have written very many books in multiple genres, including non-fiction, novels, plays and children’s stories, I still don’t have a collection of short stories to my credit, which I hope to remedy next year. Moving in that direction the next book is a collection of two novellas, which I look forward to eventually being reviewed by The Seer and other magazines and newspapers. The first novella is titled How I Became a Taliban Assassin which is based on my time spent in Afghanistan working for the United Nations. The second one is titled The Murder that Wasn’t which is partially based on my time spent in the courts before I joined the United Nations. Both novellas speak of injustice in the world, and in both novellas innocent people die, so there are common themes that justified bringing them together in a collection. The book should be out in early October, which is hardly a few weeks away. Right now the cover is in the process of being finalised and I am very excited about this imminent publication.

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Reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

About a couple of months back, on a flight from Bangalore to Ranchi, after the take-off formalities were completed, I took out my Kindle and began to read. After about 30 minutes of reading, I noticed a fellow passenger coming and sitting on the seat next to me.

Fellow Passenger — “I see you’ve been reading a book for quite some time? It’s rare to see people reading on flights these days. What’s the book about?”
I — “Hi. It’s a book about OKRs.”
FP — “Oh, is it the one by John Doerr?”
I — “Yes, Measure What Matters by John Doerr”
FP — “Oh, great, I read the book when I was trying to implement OKRs for my startup. Are you liking it?”

And thus, a conversation ensued on OKRs on a flight from Bangalore to Ranchi between two strangers. It’s a highly probable event when your flight is taking off from Bangalore. Remember the old joke — “when you throw a stone in Bangalore, chances are, it will hit a dog or a software engineer.”? The new one goes like — “… it will hit a startup founder or a product manager!”

Jokes aside, while there are several resources available to understand and dig through OKRs, there is no better way than to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. To be more precise, straight from the horse’s protégé’s mouth!

About the horse and his protégé?

Andy Grove. The OKR methodology was created by Andy Grove at Intel who was influenced by Peter Drucker’s MBOs (Management by Objectives). Andy became Intel’s President in 1979, CEO in 1987, and Chairman and CEO in 1997. A few lines from Andy Grove straight out from the book — Measure What Matters: OKRs — the Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth is perhaps the most comprehensive explanation of OKRs you will ever read –

“Now, the two key phrases … are objectives and the key results. And they match the two purposes. The objective is the direction: “We want to dominate the mid-range microcomputer component business.” That’s an objective. That’s where we’re going to go. Key results for this quarter: “Win ten new designs for the 8085” is one key result. It’s a milestone. The two are not the same … The key result has to be measurable. But at the end you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgments in it. Now, did we dominate the mid-range microcomputer business? That’s for us to argue in the years to come, but over the next quarter we’ll know whether we’ve won ten new designs or not.”

OKR expands to Objective and Key Results

Source: https://www.whatmatters.com/

Let’s try to understand this by an example most of us can relate to –

Objective: Get nominated for the best outgoing student award at the school.

Key Result 1: Score more than 90% in academics.
Key Result 2: Win the annual debate and quiz competitions.
Key Result 3: Win at least one medal in the annual sports event of the school.

At a first glance, it sounds simple. Objectives are the time-bound objectives that you or team set for yourselves, and Key Results are the time-bound results that will tell you if you have met those objectives. However, as you start to think about applying it to a product team or a company, it begins to get a little complicated. These complications may originate from changing priorities, lack of/ambiguous vision, lack of defined business goals, unwillingness to change, spoon-feeding from top leadership and so on.

John Doerr learnt OKRs from Andy Grove and went on to become its strongest proponent. John convinced Google in 1999 to adopt the OKR method to measure their progress. Interestingly, John also had a set of OKRs for his presentation to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Source: https://www.whatmatters.com/

One after another, John Doerr chronicles the stories of OKR adoption, struggle, and eventual success at several organisations. He hands a few chapters in the book to early OKR adopters and lets them tell their own story of using OKRs for their growth. You will find names you’ve heard about and people who you have admired at some point in your life — YouTube, Google Chrome, Gates Foundation, MyFitnessPal, Intuit and a few more. The author lives by the dictum — “Your user is your greatest brand ambassador” and lets people like Larry Page, Susan Wojcicki, Sundar Pichai, Bill Gates, Atticus Tysen do most of the talking about their journey with OKRs. When others are not talking, the author chips in with his own take on these stories, how he got people onboarded and helped them with OKRs, and attempts to further refine OKRs to make them easily understandable. The book gives a structure to your thoughts on OKR and is a great place to start your journey with OKRs.

Towards the end of the book, there is a touching tribute to “Coach” Bill Campbell who coached Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, and several other leaders from the Silicon Valley. It is a beautifully written dedication and a must read section of the book.

In ‘Measure What Matters’, understanding and articulating ‘what matters’ happens to be the more difficult part. Not knowing what matters can quickly put us on top of a pile of vanity metrics at the end of the quarter. While we may take off nice and easy with OKRs by our side, if we do not know our destination, there is a whole sky available to lose our way. I’m not sure if John Doerr had a set of OKRs while writing the book; nevertheless, I’m sure it is going to help the reader make substantial gains on their understanding of what matters and how to measure things that matter with OKRs.

Helpful Resources
Measure What Matters: https://www.whatmatters.com/
Andy Grove explains OKRs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ht_1VAF6ik
John Doerr on OKRs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiQ3Ofcmo50

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Rajesh Talwar’s The Mantra and Meaning of Success Looks at Success From Multiple Perspectives

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

Over the last one week, I read Rajesh Talwar’s The Mantra and Meaning of Success. Currently working as Deputy Legal Adviser to the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan, the author’s resume is a thing of envy. He has penned 31 books and regularly writes for some of the most popular publications in India and outside, viz. The Economic Times, The Guardian (UK), The Pioneer, The Times of India, The Patriot, Manushi, The Sunday Mail, and The New Indian Express. The book in my hand falls in the Self-Help category and has been published by Bridging Borders publishing house.

There are several reasons to like the book. I love the fact that Mr. Talwar keeps no pretence about the target audience of this book. The author sets a clear context while doing the Introduction and explains the need of such a book for the Indian readers set against an Indian backdrop. The author believes that most of the acclaimed and widely read books in the genre have been written with a western lens and targeted at the western reader. That’s true to a good extent and reading a book that probes the Indian pop-culture and well-known stories from India to cite examples adds to the relatability of the book. It’s not that the book doesn’t have cases from outside India. In fact, the book is heavily reliant on global icons like Bill Gates, Bob Dylan, Mario Puzo and others in order to explain success, failure and related themes. Even if you are a reader from outside India, it shouldn’t be very difficult to connect.

The book is also a far cry from other books in the genre that promise to give you a magic pill of success. More than telling how to become successful, this book tackles the question ‘What is Success?’. The author tries to look at success from multiple perspectives. Success can have diverse colours and so the book begins with those three things people generally relate success with – Fame, Money, and Power.

On a different note, the strength of this book also ends up becoming its disadvantage after a point. Too many simplistic conclusions are drawn from stories that seem to present multiple layers for inspection and rumination. The way these conclusions are drawn may leave readers looking for nuance a bit disappointed. A sense of rush to pack as many tales as possible in one book is palpable throughout and this creates a few problems. Firstly, many of these stories are in public domain and provided that the author doesn’t have an inside view of individuals mentioned in these stories, it’s hard to ascertain the accuracy or correctness of the inferences made. Secondly, page time for author’s own views and thoughts is considerably reduced. Even though we are reading a book about a concept that should draw a lot more from the respected author’s own life and struggles, by the end of the book, we don’t really get to know the author or his ideas well enough. I would have liked the book better if it had more focus and had dug deeper into the subject. Additionally, even though art is subjective, the book cover borders on bland and has scope for improvement to grab more eyeballs.

An individual like Mr. Rajesh Talwar surely knows what success looks like and it is only natural that the book is filled with anecdotes from Mr. Talwar’s surroundings. The book stresses on the importance of balancing between fame, money, power and suggests ways to do it, and narrates several examples to underline the correlation. If you are looking for a quick, crisp read with stories of success and failure that inspire without bothering to get into details, this is definitely a one-time read.

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cover imag of the book

Dan Olsen’s The Lean Product Playbook Answers the ‘How?’ and ‘When?’ of Lean

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – R.M. Rilke

I was reminded of these lines excerpted above when I reached the second chapter of my latest read. German poet R.M. Rilke wrote thus in one of his letters to a young aspiring poet who was looking for writing advice from Rilke. While the lines definitely apply if you are looking to compose poetry but I’m sure they also apply for anyone chasing any creative pursuit. Product Management is as much an art as it is a science. As such, Rilke’s advice also applies to folks who want to compose products — products that are beautiful as well as highly functional, products that are wanted and are used when they are launched, products that can develop a new market if one doesn’t exist, products that keep improving with time and usage, and products that don’t meekly surrender in death but achieve martyrdom in the battlefield aka marketplace when they exit. The second chapter of The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen talks about Problem Space versus Solution Space and underlines the importance of separating the two. With that separation, also comes the criticality of spending enough time in the problem space before getting into the solution space.

Book as a Product

Dan Olsen puts his book through the same rigorous processes and tests that he would like any product to go through. The book is treated as a product itself and at the outset, he pins its objective as neatly as possible. The title happens to be ‘The Lean Product Playbook’ and if you are a little confused about what to expect from the book, the subtitle makes it easier to calibrate your expectations — “How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Product and Rapid Customer Feedback.” At this point, you get to know that this book gives a lot of page-time to MVPs and the process of getting usable customer feedback. The book has been published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey and I read it on Kindle.

Perils of not heeding to Rilke’s advice (https://leanproductplaybook.com/resources/)

From Lean Startup to Lean Playbook

In many ways, this book is a worthy successor of another popular book amongst product people — The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. While ‘The Lean Startup’ explained the foundations of the Lean concept, this book goes deeper into the execution phase and spends more time helping you figure out How-To-Do-Lean. In short, The Lean Startup answers the ‘What? and Why?’, and Dan Olsen’s book answers the ‘How? and When?’. The point is, if you have not read Eric’s book, it’s a good idea to do so before coming to Dan Olsen’s work. In his own words, “I wrote The Lean Product Playbook to fill the knowledge gaps faced by many people who want to create a product using Lean Startup principles.”

The book is divided into 3 parts–

1. Core concepts to understand the concept of Product-Market Fit

Product-Market Fit Pyramid (https://leanproductplaybook.com/book/)

2. Following the Lean Product Process (six steps) to achieve Product-Market Fit.

Highway to Heaven (https://leanproductplaybook.com/resources/)

3. Building/Optimizing your product after establishing Product-Market Fit.

You need Oprah as well as Spock on your product journey (https://leanproductplaybook.com/resources/)

The author describes all these six steps in point 2 in detail with real world examples from his experience at Intuit where he worked on Quicken as well as from his time helping other companies of the world apply Lean principles.

More Observations

There are several scenarios which can be directly lifted from the book and plugged into any product development team’s workstyle with minor modifications to drive better outcomes for their products. For the number of examples, and step-by-step processes this book comes with, it definitely fills a vacuum between the concepts of Lean product development and the execution part of it. Target Market Segmentation, Technology Adoption Life Cycle, Personas, Underserved Customer Needs, Customer Discovery Interviews, Customer Benefit Ladders, Satisfaction Framework, Customer Value, MVP Feature Set Specification, Prototyping, MVP tests, UX Design — the book covers all these and many more arms of Lean product development in detail with practical examples to learn from.

Over the last decade, Lean has become the ‘Meditation’ of the product world. Most people keep talking about its benefits, few practise it, and fewer still practise it right. You truly understand the benefits of Lean only when you practise it effectively. At the same time, you get to understand its use cases better when you keep at it iteratively for a longer duration of time. Keeping that in mind, I’m sure that this book is going to help product folks get better at developing solutions to real problems instead of fishing for problems their self-attested product solves. A lot of startups today are trapped in the loop of solving the same problem over and over. If it’s not by choice to ride the wave for making quick money, this book may help such companies break that loop as well.

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Harry Potter Reunion

‘Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts’ Is the Nostalgia Ride All Potterheads Deserved

Shilpita Biswas1 Comment

“Mysterious thing, Time”– Albus Dumbledore. It really is! And that’s what you realize when you are invited to revisit the wondrous wizarding world you had left behind 10 years ago. That’s how “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts” begins and if there’s one word that could describe the whole 1 hour and 42 minutes retrospective special (streaming on HBO Max and Amazon Prime), it would definitely be “Nostalgia”! It is true that some of the books from J.K. Rowling’s debut novel series had released much earlier than the movies, but it was not till 2001 that most of us, who had been living in different parts of the world, got a chance to experience the amazing and unbelievable Wizarding World of The Boy Who Lived. The movies made the novel popular; they allowed the story to reach out to children even in the remotest corners of the world. And thus, started a journey for every Potterhead out there, which would change their lives forever!

As John Williams’ “Harry’s Wondrous World” plays in the background and the Hogwarts Castle comes into view once again from across the Black Lake, with all its lighted turrets and windows, and Emma Watson opens the doors to the Great Hall, we are ushered into that world once again, which happens to be our “healthy form of escapism” even now, as so rightly quoted by Matthew Lewis aka Neville Longbottom.  I feel the best part of being a 90s kid and a Potterhead simultaneously, is that you sort of grew up with the actors. Seeing them who had brought the young characters alive onscreen, who had given colors to our imaginations, like Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Evanna Lynch, James and Oliver Phelps, Tom Felton, Bonnie Wright and so many others, all grown up and in their late 20s or early 30s now, getting married or having kids just like our friends are, all around us, made me realize how much time has passed. Even then, it feels like yesterday that we were watching the films with utmost awe and wonder in the movie theaters.  

As I delve deeper into the reunion special episode, which has been divided into 4 chapters, each representing two movies at a time, showing glimpses of the shots and the sets and also the actors’ experiences while shooting for each of them, I can’t help but wonder at how beautifully they have recreated the aura of the wizarding world throughout the entire duration of the episode. Starting from the actors receiving their Hogwarts’ letters, addressed to them in their specific locations at the time, like “The Coffee Shop, Chelsea” or “The Black Cab” reminds us of Harry’s shocking expression, when he receives his first Hogwarts Letter with the specific address “The Cupboard Under the Stairs”. It also reminds us strangely of how as children, when we had turned 11 years old, we actually prayed to God for sending us that letter, so that we could journey from our ridiculously boring Muggle world into the amazing world of Harry Potter. It reminds us of the innocence we once had, and how we seem to have lost that along the way.

Each of the four chapters begins with the narrator reading out a line from J.K Rowling’s books and as we move into the first one, The Boy Who Lived, we are reminded of some of the amazing actors who had contributed as much to the series, as the child actors. The twinkling eyes of Richard Harris could not have been more apt for the long-bearded, white-haired Albus Dumbledore, drawn at the back of the first ever book cover of the Harry Potter series. Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall, Robbie Coltrane’s Rubeus Hagrid, Alan Rickman’s Professor Snape and Richard Griffiths’ Uncle Vernon, seemed to have jumped out of the pages of J.K. Rowling’s book. Stuart Craig, who was the Production Designer for the entire Harry Potter movie franchise, had created the impossible world of the wizards with utmost ease and grandeur. Thousands of lighted candles were hung from the end of fishing lines to recreate the floating candles adorning the ceiling of the Great Hall, as mentioned in the books. The scenes where we witness the Burrow for the first time and see how a wizarding family washes their dishes or knits their sweaters, the comparison between good and bad wizarding families so drastically portrayed with the entry of Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, brings the first chapter to an end.

The second chapter, Coming of Age, portrays the third and fourth movies of the series and was indeed the time when we too were in limbo between our childhood and adulthood, just like Harry, Ron and Hermione. These books or movies ushered in the era of crushes, infatuations and the pangs of teenage love along with the introduction of deep and dark concepts of dementors sucking out your joy and happiness, of overcoming your deepest fears and darkness, of standing at the threshold of adulthood. New actors like Gary Oldman, David Thewlis and Timothy Spall were introduced into the series. At the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the entire universe shifts suddenly and the series which was popular as a childrens’ book, soon became something more sinister with the introduction of Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort. The death of Cedric Diggory marks that moment when Harry has his first reality check and so does the audience, as we are prepared to face the perils of adulthood. 

In The Light and Dark Within, Mathew Lewis as Neville and Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood, bring forth the world of “misfits” and “oddbots”, where children who are shy or introvert or different from those around them, children who have been bullied in schools or in playgrounds, relate themselves to popular and famous characters for the first time, and find that they can belong in the society too. The two-dimensional, complex character of Draco Malfoy, torn between what is right and what is not, reflects so many of us who had once made all the wrong choices in the wrong company and had later learnt from our regrets and mistakes. Helena Bonham Carter, who had played the role of the psychopathic, evil, and most devoted Death-Eater, Bellatrix Lestrange, talks about the impact the series has had on generations of children who failed to get good marks in exams, or who weren’t the best when it came to sports. The world of Harry Potter showed with immense humanity, depth, and vulnerability that being different makes us special as we fall in love with the characters of Luna and Neville.

Before they move onto the last and final chapter though, they remind us of the fact that these were the movies in which Harry encounters grief for the first time in his life as he loses Sirius and Dumbledore, the two adults who had been closest to what the orphaned boy could claim as “parents”. As the reunion special takes us inside the pensieve, into the memories of some of the great actors who have passed away in the 10 years since the last movie of the franchise released, we raise our wands along with so many other witches and wizards, all watching the reunion from the comforts of their homes, to remember and honor all those amazing actors like Alan Rickman (Severus Snape), Helena McCrory (Narcissa Malfoy), Richard Harris(Albus Dumbledore in first two movies), John Hurt (Ollivander the wandmaker), Richard Griffiths (Uncle Vernon) and Robert Hardy(Cornelius Fudge).

In the final chapter, Something Worth Fighting For, scenes from the last two movies are reminisced by the actors, as the trio leaves the comfort of their school for the first time and faces the struggles of the real world, as we all do, when we leave school or college. Mathew Lewis talks about the last speech of Neville in front of Lord Voldemort, the speech which sealed Neville’s character forever as one of the bravest Gryffindors we knew and as the true son of his brave Auror parents, and how that speech had impacted him both as a human being and as an actor. For fans like us, who had read all the books by then and already knew how the series would end, held onto these two movies as our last thread of connection to the world we had loved and craved to belong to, the last thread of connection to our childhood which was slowly slipping away. Potterheads would often claim this series to be more than just a children’s book, because the magical world which J.K Rowling wove around Harry Potter had lots of stories within stories, had individual character curves, had concepts so philosophical and deep that it often had a transformative effect on people’s lives!

As the last day of the shoot is shown and the actors are seen crying and hugging each other, we realize that even though they might not live on, the characters they portrayed will do and the legacy of Harry Potter and the masterpiece which J.K.Rowling has created, will continue to inspire generations to come. Emma Watson echoes the very thoughts of my heart and soul when she says, “There’s something about Harry Potter that makes life richer. Like, when things get really dark and times are really hard, stories give us places we can go, where we can rest and feel held”. The wizarding world of Harry Potter has been that story and that place for me, my source of happiness and inspiration in times of grief, loss and desperation. As I therefore, see the last scene of the special episode unfold before my eyes, and Dumbledore looks at Snape’s patronus, uttering one of the most epic dialogues of the series, I realize that every time someone would judge or question my devotion towards Harry Potter and the Wizarding World and ask, “After all this time?”, I would probably utter the same words Snape did – “ALWAYS!”

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Photos of JJ Goodwin and Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda’s Most Faithful Friend Who Rests at India’s Ooty

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

Swami Vivekananda said of J.J. Goodwin, “Those who think they have been helped by any thought of mine, ought to know that almost every word of it was published through the untiring and most unselfish exertions of Mr. Goodwin…a disciple of never-failing devotion, a worker who knew not what tiring was….”

In life as well as in death, some people stay young. These people take up one thing and pour the last drop of blood coursing through their veins over it. Their life becomes a relentless pursuit of that one object. Nothing can distract them. No force can deter them from their chosen path. They keep at it until one day life stops and death gives them their much deserved rest. Irrespective of their age, at work and in rest, they stay young.

I got introduced to Josiah John Goodwin as a child when I was introduced to Ramakrishna-Vivekananda literature. If not for this man, most of Swami Vivekananda’s talks and lectures might have become the food of oblivion. I have known that this man of only 23 was noting down some of the most vital messages ever passed on to humanity. I have known that he refused to take payments in just about a week’s time at work with Swami Vivekananda. I have known all along that Mr. J.J. Goodwin came to India with Swami Vivekananda as the most faithful devotee and friend. He recorded in shorthand, Swamiji’s lectures from Colombo to Almora which became the bedrock of Indian nationalism, socialism, humanism, and most importantly a reinvigorated ignition switch for the Indian freedom struggle. I have known that he was only 28 when he died due to fever in the year 1898 in Ootacamund (Ooty). I have known that his death was perhaps the dearest of losses for Swami Vivekananda. I knew that he rests somewhere in Ooty listening to the poem his Master dedicated to him on learning of his demise.

In the book, The Life of Swami Vivekananda by His Eastern and Western Disciples, a passage on Mr. Goodwin explains, “Mr. Goodwin would take down a lengthy address in the evening, work through the night in typewriting off his stenographic reports, and then hasten towards midnight to the newspaper offices, the conductors of which were anxious to print the Swami’s lectures, and this continued day after day, The Guru loved his disciple with infinite tenderness and initiated him into the practices and ideals of the Vedanta philosophy, so that he became an expert in grasping its contents and faithfully reporting them. It is needless to say that the Swami was grateful beyond words to his disciple. He could not speak too highly of him ; he saw in him a great Karma Yogin, one who could unselfishly perform work for the sake of work and who could live the life of ideals. Mr. Goodwin,  of course, refused any remuneration as soon as he understood the Swami and had been with him for a fortnight. Though he came from the ordinary classes of society and his education was not of a scholarly type, he exhibited remarkable intellectual adaptabilities with reference to the Swami’s work. His youth and his enthusiasm proved valuable stimuli. The Swami often spoke of him, saying, “He is chosen for my work. What would I do without him ! If I have a mission, he is indeed a part of it.””

Goodwin was born on 20 September 1870 at Batheaston, England. His father Josiah Goodwin was a stenographer and an editor of the Birmingham Advertiser, the Wilts Country Mirror and the Exeter Gazette. Goodwin worked as a journalist from the age of fourteen, and had an unsuccessful journalistic venture in Bath in 1893. He left Bath and travelled to Australia, and later on, to America.

As I stood before his memorial in the cemetery of CSI St. Church in Ooty on 3rd March, 2021, I was overwhelmed with emotions not much of surprise or disbelief but of the familiarity of the moment. It was as if I was there to see someone specially dear to me. I felt I was standing before a man whose absence I had been mourning ever since I read about his death at a tender 28. Whether you know it or not, J.J. Goodwin is the guide who is always by your side when you are reading Swami Vivekananda’s words. His words are here for us to read because there was a young British stenographer who was skilled enough to take down those extempore outpourings of the great teacher verbatim when others failed as well as dedicated enough to work tirelessly to produce printable copies night after night and lecture after lecture.

I sat there looking at the tombstone and all the things written on it and I felt that my mourning was complete. It was as if I was preordained to be there to pay my respects to him. I sat there as I would sit for the dearest of my kin and friends. As he rested in a corner in the cemetery, I kept wondering if he died so young only because it was time for him to rest. I don’t know many people who deserve to rest more than he did. I hope that when I and you rest, our rest too will be equally well deserved.

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