I am an eternal optimist. I published my wish list for the first Modi government when they took office 5 years ago . As you can see for yourself, none of those things happened in any significant manner. And yet, here I am with a new list – and I will append the original wish…

I woke up this morning and saw that the BJP led NDA has won another five year term . Before my attention turns to the upcoming World Cup Cricket, I thought I will share a few thoughts Picture from https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/india-election-live-results-2019-bjp-claims-victory-congress-accepts-defeat-1.1558527353661 What separated BJP and INC ? Granted it is difficult to dislodge incumbents since they…

Late on Wednesday night, I got an email that essentially said we moved from #5 to #1 on a certain important metric . This was a big goal for our team, and we were all working hard for it. So I shared the news with my leadership team right away . Thursday morning, one of…

Promotions are hard for the employee and the employer. Unless its the first couple of levels in the organizational ladder, there is always a lot of subjectivity that goes into the process from both sides. Even when a company says it is all data driven – it is often the case that subjective decisions (…

We – the collective humanity – have always loved the concept of efficiency. “Better, Faster and Cheaper” have always appealed to us. But over the long term, efficiency has not always been in our best interests, perhaps because we never knew when to stop.    It follows a fairly consistent pattern that goes like this…

Almost 7 decades have passed since Alan Turing asked “Can Machines Think?” . It’s hard to define what thinking means – and it continues to be hard today as it was in 1950. So Turing took a pragmatic approach and redefined the problem as “Can a computer behave like a human being?”. It was absolutely…

A client of mine gave me a very nice compliment today in a meeting – he said something like “You very naturally used the word colleagues instead of employees, and that is something very unique to our culture. How do you adapt like this?” . My honest answer was “After a long time spent in…

It’s tax season now and I owe a bunch of documents to my CPA to file my taxes . It’s a pain in the neck to compile all of them . I do all my banking with one single company – and have multiple accounts with them . I can get a view of how…

Yumi, the young flight attendant in Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Chicago, is the closest I have acknowledged anyone to be similar to both my late grand mothers ! I didn’t tell her that though since I was not sure she will take it as a compliment 🙂 I was practically raised by my…

One of the best books I have read in my childhood is Panchatantra . The way it’s structured, the first story ends with one of its characters saying “let me tell you a story” and leads on to the second story and then it perpetuates like that till the end . I have a feeling…