awareness – A New Beginning

Winning in a Disruptive World

Sometime back, at a ‘Learning & Development’ elective course I was running at Indian Institute of Management Kashipur, one of the participants came to me for a discussion.

“ Sir, you have been emphasizing again and again about the need to have a lifelong Learning mindset. You have also been mentioning about the criticality of the L & D template to remain relevant during unpredictable and disruptive situations in terms of one’s problem solving ability and initiatives. Don’t you think these two aspects are contradictory to each other? “, he said.

This intrigued me. I asked, “How so? Could you clarify some more?”

The participant explained, “In my MBA program, we are learning concepts and tools which allow us to make sense of a business situation and solve problems. They have stood the test of time. But what you have been advocating is to seek completely new way of looking at things to solve problems in uncertain, fast changing environments. So whatever we are learning in our MBA Course would no longer work. To me, that is both scary and disheartening”.

“Well, It is YES and NO”, I replied. “ Your domain knowledge would always continue to play a role. It would be something like a searchlight which will show up a situation in a particular manner, highlighting certain aspects but hiding others. However, the L & D funnel which you would master in our course should allow you to do a Learning Needs analysis in terms of desired outcomes within a shifting environment and spot the needed L&D strategy. In other words, the superstructure that you would need to build on top of your domain expertise would be your new learning need tactics”.

***

We remain dis-satisfied and uncertain about how to face emerging situations and challenges. Be it on the professional front or may be in our personal life.

“Winning in a disruptive world” would mean succeeding in a business environment that is constantly changing and being disrupted. By new technologies, new competitors, or other factors that can disrupt traditional business models. So, what does one do to win?

The human mind loves continuity and certainty. These allow us to make sense of what we see as stuff we are familiar with. This is why we, our sense making brains, detest change and disruption. For the latter take us into uncertain and unfamiliar territory. We thus like to lull ourselves into believing we are living in a stable world, a world which we understand. We handle new and unfamiliar aspects by distorting and force fitting them into the mental model we hold of the world.

If you have seen the movie, Matrix. It is like living in a never changing, make believe world as the protagonist Neo was doing even though the real world was totally different with its own equations and challenges.

Neo’s real world….

So if we are to draw some lessons from the story of Neo in the matrix, ‘Winning in a disruptive world’ would require a mindset to embrace change and adapt quickly to new circumstances, as well as a focus on innovation, creativity, and agility.

I invite you to dwell on the following questions.

What are the questions we need to answer in the exploration ‘making sense’ stage of our Learning & Development cycle?
How do we align the outputs of the ‘making sense’ stage with our critical analysis of the emerging situation?
How do we carry out a decentering exercise between our domain expertise and the gaps thrown up by our critical analysis?

In Learning…….. Shakti Ghosal

Control versus letting-go: A Leadership tale

Sometime back, at a two-day Leadership Development program that I was running for Larsen and Toubro Ltd (a heavy engineering and multi-business conglomerate in India), a participant came to me during one of the breaks and said:

“All these techniques which we are learning seem to be of little value to me. I am faced with a different kind of problem. My boss has a strong controlling impulse. It is usually his way or the highway. It seems to me he believes this mindset is what has helped him reach his current position. So even if I try, there is never a win/win situation for my boss vis a vis me. What should I do?”

@ L & T Workshop

As I stood there listening to him, several thoughts came to mind. I asked him whether he was okay to delve into the issue some more.

We need to start exploring. We need to ask, ‘What is that which our ‘controlling boss’ would really like to control and change?’ And even more important, ‘What is that we ourselves are willing to let go?’ For ‘letting go’ could be the start of getting back in control.

Could we try and meet the ‘control freak’ half away down? For instance, certain relationships and one to one interactions could still be kept under our control. This realization itself can give us a sense of empowerment.

Could we ‘let go’ by avoiding reacting when we are being pushed to accept the controller’s point of view? Acknowledge what we have been told and then explain what we plan to do, why we have decided so and that we are willing to take full responsibility of the outcome.

The above exploration would allow us to create our action steps in the matter, thus elevating our own control of the situation.

‘Becoming a leader’ does not arise from knowing techniques or aping what we see great leaders do as they exercise leadership effectively in varied situations. Leadership and Performance is very little about what we know, it is almost all about how we see. ‘How we see’ comes from our ability to shift our perception through developing a contextual framework for our own selves.

http://www.empathinko.in

Konark- Spiritualism versus Eroticism

“Language of Man here is defeated by the language of stone.” – Rabindranath Tagore

A visit to Puri in Odisha can never be complete without a trip to the Konark Sun temple. Having paid our homage to Lord Jagannath in that iconic Puri temple in the morning hours, we had the afternoon available for going to Konark.

A surprisingly good infrastructure exists in terms of road access from Puri as well as the upkeep of the Konark Sun temple complex. Getting down from the car in front of the long walkway, I had my first glimpse of the famous temple in the distance. The tiled pathway, overlooking gardens and the Konark temple information Centre (which incidentally has a wonderful audio-visual show about the temple and its origins) lead to the temple.

Standing there, as I looked at the ruined structure, my mind’s eye brought in the vision of an enormous chariot with its giant wheels and horses, a resplendent Sun seated as the charioteer, taking flight across the sky. The word Konark in Sanskrit is a sandhi, a combination of two words: Koṇa, which signifies a corner and Arka which refers to the Hindu Sun God, Surya. Built out of stone seven and a half centuries back, the temple is an intricately carved, giant chariot of Surya, replete with ornaments, twenty-four giant wheels and pulled by seven horses. Throughout history, different cultures and lands have referred to ‘crossing the seven seas’ for a travel around the world. In India, it is called, ‘Saat Samundar Paar’. Did the seven-horse drawn chariot of the Sun God signify that it had the motive power to circumvent the world?

The temple external walls are sculpted with intricate and jewelry like miniature details. The carvings range from Hindu Gods and Goddesses, nymphlike apsaras, nature inspired motifs, day to day living and cultural activities of people ( Artha and Dharma) , animals, birds and sea creatures along with some depictions of the life and times of the king. Ernst Binfirld Havell, the English art historian and author, writes that the Konark temple is “one of the grandest examples of Indian sculpture extant“, adding that they express “as much fire and passion as the greatest European art” such as that found in Venice.

As I looked at the lengthening shadows of an evening sun, I envisioned the year 1756 AD when Vice Admiral Charles Watson of the East India Company navy accompanied by Robert Clive, was rushing to Calcutta to take back Fort William recently captured by the Bengal Nawab, Siraj Ud Daulah. Spotting the Black Pagoda, as the Konark Sun Temple was known then, along with the White Pagoda, the Jagannath temple near the then coastline ( which has since receded), Watson would surely have been relieved that their destination at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal was near.

History indicates that the Konark Sun temple was destroyed by invasions and natural calamities. Over time it ceased to attract the pious and the faithful. And like the other famous Hindu temple at Angkor Wat in present day Cambodia, the Sun temple too disappeared under dense forests for a long time prior to being rediscovered.

What remains most intriguing however is the highly erotic sculptures interspersed amongst the aforementioned carvings. As I stood there looking at the sculptures, it seemed that eroticism held sway over all else. The carved in stone figurines displayed sexual engagements and coitus in varying positions. I saw several of the chariot wheels depicting different sexual postures. What I found astonishing was the uninhibited depictions of polyandry, polygamy and lesbianism.

As I walked way, I was beset with several thought trains, trying to make sense of such brazen display of sexuality in a temple made to worship the Sun.

Was the displayed eroticism a deliberate attempt to increase sexual activity amongst the population in the 13^th century? I had read somewhere that Buddhism, the prevailing religion in the land of Kalinga, preached abstinence which over the centuries, had led to a declining population. Had the King thus ordered the seductive carvings to stimulate carnal desires in his subjects?

Could it be that the depictions were a result of the sexual longings of the thousands of artisans tasked to work on the temple carvings for twelve long years, away from home and family?

Or were the erotic creations deliberate to strengthen the spiritual and divine belief of the devotees coming to the temple? Was the seemingly random display of eroticism, scattered amongst other displays of Gods, nature and public life motifs, a trigger for the observer to choose his/ her path between ‘dark’ attractions of sensuality and depravity vis a vis the brightness of spirituality?

Finally, could the differing displays be based on the age-old belief that each one of us would attain Moksha (release from the cycle of rebirth), that final desired state, only once we have fulfilled all our earthly duties and participated in the cycles of Dharma viz. spirituality, Artha viz. wealth and Kama viz. sexual pleasures?

Does the Konark Sun temple offer a perspective of our life as ‘lived in the moment’, cycling as we do through Dharma, Artha and Kama without the attachments of what is right or wrong, good or bad?

Postscript:

Back in Puri, I was watching the Sunrise next morning from the balcony of my hotel room.

Sitting there, as I soaked in the solitude, the morphing hues of the sunlight, the occasional bird chirps and their flights, I seemed to sense that all was well with my world.

As the sun rose in the sky, that solitary boat on the calm waters, seemed to be following the light. The sight brought to mind those immortal words of the Beatles:

‘One day you ‘ll find

that I have gone

Tomorrow may rain

So, I’ll follow the Sun….’

In learning……… Shakti Ghosal

Legends

I built me a castle
With dragons and kings
And I’d ride off with them
As I stood by my window
And looked out on those……

I walked leisurely on the pedestrian path.

Walkers and tourists milled around me, like me all moving at a leisurely pace. No one seemed to be in a hurry. A family led by Dad with the son on his shoulders passes me in the opposite direction. Just in front, a group of giggling young women were taking a barrage of selfies. It seemed one or the other was not satisfied with the result, be it one’s expression or the way the long cables and the end tower showed up in the photo. A quick joint review, some more giggles and someone in the group would volunteer to take a new selfie. I watched this microcosm of humanity flowing around me.

It was a beautiful sunny morning which had prompted us to venture out on a spot of sightseeing. I was on the pedestrian walkway of the legendary Brooklyn Bridge. Below me on both sides were the motorways with cars and SUVs moving in either direction between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

One had glorious views of the New York skyline as well as the leisurely flow of the East River below. To the right one could spot Governor’s Island and in the distance the Statue of Liberty. But as I stood looking around, my mind’s eye wandered off to another unforgettable vision involving the Brooklyn bridge. Powerful searchlights frantically flashing, sounds of helicopters, people jumping off the bridge into the waters below as a terrified News Reporter announces that all of us are going to die! One of the most emotional scenes from the blockbuster ‘I am Legend’ in which scientist Robert Neville (Will Smith) tries to evacuate his wife and daughter from pandemic ridden Manhattan, only to see them die as another helicopter crashes into theirs in the chaos. In the background, the Brooklyn Bridge is being blown up by military aircraft to contain the spread of the disease.

An iconic film showing visuals of an iconic bridge.

A hundred and forty years old structure, the Brooklyn Bridge was the world’s first and longest steel-wire suspension bridge at the time of its opening. What further distinguishes the bridge are the pair of gothic towers standing tall on either side, holding the steel wires in place. Legend has it that when the lead engineer and architect Washington Roebling, became sick and bedridden, his wife Emily, who knew nothing about engineering or architecture, took over the project. For the next ten years, till the project got done, she studied Engineering design and project management on her own and became the first person to cross the bridge upon completion. The following was said about Emily and the Brooklyn bridge:

“…an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred.”

A sad reminder of the fact that during Emily’s time, women were not allowed into Engineering institutions in the US.

Having walked the mile long stretch of the Bridge, we stepped onto the roads of Brooklyn. The neighbourhood in which Neil Diamond had grown up six decades back. With his baritone voice and wonderful songwriting capabilities, Neil Diamond has been my favourite pop and country musician and singer since youth. The singer reminisces about his childhood in that wonderful number, ‘Brooklyn Roads’:

‘Two floors above the butcher
First door on the right
Life filled to the brim
As I stood by my window
And I looked out of those
Brooklyn Roads……’

The place we were walking through had the curious name of DUMBO. I was left wondering whether it had anything to do with Disney’s Dumbo the flying elephant. Or was it about some presumed dumb folks who might have resided there in the past?

‘And report cards I was always
Afraid to show

Mama’d come to school
And as I’d sit there softly crying
Teacher’d say, “He’s just not trying
He’s got a good head if he’d apply it”
But you know yourself
It’s always somewhere else’

I learnt that DUMBO was really the short nomenclature for ‘Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass’. Ironically, the neighbourhood today is home to a large number of technology start-up companies with the earlier warehouses on the riverfront converted into quaint eating houses and pubs overlooking the waters.

A bridge, a musician and a neighbourhood came together as legends for me that morning. They came with tales that were anecdotal, possibly unverifiable but nonetheless remain ingrained in my mind.

In musing………… Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgement: ‘Brooklyn Roads’ by Neil Diamond

Absence made Visible

The water cascaded down the black granite sides, flowing as rivulets before disappearing into the small squarish void in the center. As I looked at the flowing water, juxtaposed feelings pulled in different directions. A feeling of melancholy and sadness about the flow of our lives which was perhaps never to return. But also a feeling of peace and acceptance, an emotional cleansing about all that was not right, maybe would never be right.

From the corner of my eyes, I could see the Oculus, that majestic steel ribbed white wings about to soar up into the skies. The reflections on the nearby glass towers seemed to be heralding a brighter, more vibrant tomorrow. A tomorrow in which peace and acceptance might run the winning lap.

I was at the site of the two World Trade Center towers in Manhattan which had gone down in the September eleventh attack more than two decades back. The black granite square pools with flowing, falling water had been built as memorials to that event. The Oculus served as the integrated transportation hub built for the Path and Subway trains.

Oculus Transportation hub at the World Trade Center complex

As I stood there in contemplation, the place was a tranquil and serene island in the midst of high energy Manhattan life. Did the flowing water suggest a life force embryo just below the surface? That somehow brought into our thoughts those who had perished in the attack, their names etched on the sides serving as the only reminder? Or was it that the simplicity of the slow cascades into the void which could never be filled (as per the memorial architect Michael Arad) allowed their ‘absence (from our living world) to be made visible’?

My memory went back to that day decades ago.

It was evening. I was in the office and had called a colleague to discuss an operational issue when he excitedly mentioned about a disaster in which an aircraft had crashed into one of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers in New York. We spoke about the incident for a couple of minutes and wondered about the low probability of an aircraft crashing into a building.

Returning home after office, I switched on the TV only to see the news headlines flashing all over, ‘AMERICA UNDER ATTACK!’ In the interim, a second aircraft also carrying passengers had slammed into a second WTC tower. Burning from the aviation fuel of the colliding aircrafts, both the towers collapsed. A third aircraft had crashed into Pentagon, the US Defence headquarters in Washington DC. Due to the time zone difference, what was evening for me was really morning hours on the US Eastern seaboard where the attacks were taking place. Close to three thousand people died in the attacks.

What seemed at that point in time a senseless act of violence led to a fundamental shift in the way US saw the world and how its foreign policy would come to be defined. Over the next two decades, US would engage in conflicts aimed at crushing terrorism in various parts of the globe. From demolishing Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan to the Iraq invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein to confronting the self-styled Islamic State in Syria.

I think of our world today. The actors have changed, the issues have shifted but the conflicts remain.

A couple of days back, I heard the tragic news of the Texas shooting in which a teenager Salvador Ramos armed with a gun entered an elementary school and senselessly shot and killed nineteen children and two adults. The carnage was a deadly reminder that even the world’s most powerful nation is unable to protect its children in their innocence.

My granddaughter has been going to a play school. She loves going there. For us, the school is a safe haven that nurtures. I agonise when I think of what might be passing through the minds of the parents and grandparents of those children whose lives were so brutally snuffed out even before they got the chance to blossom. Like me they too would have had complete faith in the safety and security of their child in school.

I muse. What is that which leads to some folks inflicting injury and death on others? I sense that this arises from an extreme psychologically aberrant mindset. A mindset which shifts into viciousness from its inability to accept ‘we versus they’ differences. So it was with Osama Bin Laden, so it is with Salvador Ramos.

An all-powerful state like the US does possess the weapons and technology to wage war against the enemy without.

But does it possess the conviction and resolve to change the mindset of the enemy within?

In learning……… Shakti Ghosal

Of Germ Pods and Personal Learning Clouds……… two trends of a post COVID future

It is fascinating to see how technologies originate in response to unmet needs and then go on to transform and impact the world in unfathomable ways.

In this post, I look at two such technology initiatives and then explore how they might evolve and impact us.

The first technology initiative is Germ Pods.

It was early April 2020 and the Covid had just started making initial inroads into India with recorded infections hovering around a couple of thousand. The Government launched an innovative contact tracing and self-assessment mobile App called Aarogya Setu. It became the fastest growing App in the world with more than fifty million downloads in less than two weeks. The App gathered data from positive infection reports on a real time basis and was designed to identify infection hot spots and alert the user about the number of Covid infected people in the vicinity. Government ministries and Indian Airports made it mandatory for all people to register into the App to ensure low risk. Aarogya Setu was subsequently merged with the COWIN portal which was designed to register and update vaccination status at the individual level.

Countries around the world launched similar contact, movement and vaccination status tracing Apps during the pandemic.

As I muse, the import and the transformative potential of the tracing and status app becomes clear. The future would be about a real need to protect and secure the health of oneself and one’s own community. Increasingly, testing for various transmissible diseases, real time tracing and proximity alerts would form the basis of AI based algorithmic analysis to create hierarchies of health risk statuses. In spite of repeated assurances that individual privacy norms would be protected, geographic and digital clusters of such hierarchies would begin to emerge and, in more ways than one, would trample on individual’s privacy and behaviour. These clusters or “Germ pods” would over time become much more than mere health pods. They would morph as digital identifiers of micro-groups displaying differing economic, demographic and social behaviours. Can you imagine what such identifiers would do in the hands of marketing organisations, Government policy makers and politicians?

What thus started off as mere health protecting ‘Germ Pods’ might become somewhat sinister gatekeeping tools allowing individual entry based on constantly tweaked algorithms; they would actually become functionally invisible to folks who do not qualify. Groups would get shielded from public view as well as from one another, as they get into exclusive symbiotic relationships with marketing organisations and the Government. Overall transparency and accountability in a society relating to spreading of resources would take a hit, further exacerbating the ‘have’ and ‘have not’ divide.

My sense is that in the future, the above transformative technology might usher in a societal problem.

The second technology initiative is Personal Learning Clouds.

For some years, I have been engaged in training the next tier Leadership for a large business group in India. While the need for Leadership development programs is acutely felt in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environment, the organisation also senses that traditional class room case study-based programs are no longer working to prepare tomorrow’s leaders for the challenges they would face. The training manager thus finds it hard to justify costs relating to such training programs. Last but not the least, the program does not really get ‘owned’ by the participants’ boss and other team members leading to the program learning not getting the needed support for effective application at the workplace.

The pandemic has fast paced the shift of training programs onto Zoom and other digital platforms. My client organisation has started seeing this as a great alternative, cutting down as it does requirements of logistics and physical infrastructure. The participants are able to virtually join in from their work desks or homes with a much shorter lead time.

As I think of the emerging trend, I visualize the birth of ‘Personal Learning Cloud (PLC)’ in today’s rapidly changing and constrained environment. The PLC would be flexible, allowing 24X7 accessibility to learning modules aligned to the need and behaviour of an individual and his team. Over time the PLC would emerge as a networked learning infrastructure. It would not only allow overall lowering of training costs but would facilitate the organisational leadership to offer ‘just in time’ targeted learning experiences for personnel according to his / her role and immediate organisational needs. Finally, the PLC ‘s real time accessibility, relevance and interactive capability would allow the learner’s immediate superior to become an active stakeholder in the process and provide support and accountability.

I sense that over time the PLC would make learning personalized as well as democratized (in terms of access) and would allow organisations a better gauge to measure return on investment and ensure work place application. Something essential to keep the ‘just in time’ PLC based learning relevant in a fast-changing world.

My hope is that in the future, the above is where significant growth and development opportunity would lie.

In learning………. Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgement:

‘After the Pandemic: What happens next?’ – Document prepared by Ayca Guralp, Instititue of the Future, CA, US.
‘The future of Leadership Development’ – HBR March-April 2019

An encounter with the witnessing tree

I saw this tree standing forlornly in one corner of the Red fort complex in Delhi a couple of days back.

I asked, ‘ So, what have you been witness to?’

The tree replied, ‘ I was born to witness the stars above Shahjahanabad.

Diwan-i-Am (Hall of Audience) at the Red Fort in New Delhi, India.

But what I witnessed was the ebb and flow of the history of this land.

Of the ebbing of the Mughals as the blinded emperor Shah Alam II sat forlornly in his ravaged palace……

Of the ebbing of the Marathas after the defeat in the third battle of Panipat…..

The third battle of Panipat…..

Of the ebbing of the Jats in the late eighteenth-century……

Of the ebbing of the British empire with their departure from India in the twentieth century……

*Indian Flag on the ramparts of Red Fort….*

And with each such ebb, the plunder of this fort’s riches and the conscience of Man.’

The story of the Blue and Red Pill

The Pandemic has been with us now for more than one and a half years. A virulent new strain, the Delta variant, is the new weapon unleashed by the wily COVID 19 virus to negate all that the vaccines have been doing. Conspiracy theories abound. We look on helplessly through a tunnel with no apparent light visible at the other end yet.

The West and its much vaunted ideal of human freedom is on the backfoot. As US retreats, Afghanistan has once again proved to be the graveyard of Empires- earlier the British, then the USSR and now Pax Americana. The swiftness of the Taliban takeover has been shocking as they begin the task of taking the country back into the medieval ages.

More than 600 people inside a C 17 aircraft fleeing Kabul on the Indian Independence Day 15th Aug. 2021

Almost two decades back, US President Bush had declared, “Engendering democracy across the Middle East ‘must be a focus of American policy’ for decades to come”. Today democracy is sputtering like a flame about to go out, with the failure of the much-vaunted Arab Spring and the Middle East in a far worse situation than previously.

We are into an irreversible global warming era, possibly the most serious climate crisis faced by Mankind. July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded on the planet. An extreme heat wave in Canada at a searing high of 49.6 deg. C. was a one-thousand-year weather event. Floods ripped through geographically distant countries like Germany and China. Drought stalked others. It is now being widely claimed in scientific circles that the Arctic would soon be devoid of ice with the resultant rise of sea water levels and low-lying areas going under.

The above are glimpses of a frightening and dystopian future we are headed into.

Now here is the other story.

In the last month alone, one billion people have been vaccinated against COVID 19. By the end of this year more than half the people on the planet would have received the vaccine. Truly a stupendous achievement in terms of swiftness of response and effectiveness.

The COVID-19 crisis has led to a veritable explosion of scientific progress in the tinkering of genetic information flow and the formulation of proteins, the ultimate nano machines. Trials are currently being done for protein-based vaccines for diseases ranging from Cancer to HIV.

As we speak, electricity generation from the clean sources of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear has outstripped that from ‘dirty’ coal. Closer home in India, the wind and solar generating capacity has exceeded the milestone of 100GW output. In more and more countries, low carbon economy valuations are rising rapidly. The reason is economic. The average cost of power generation from clean sources is now half that from fossil fuels.

As investors spot a rising opportunity, more money is getting committed to climate investment funds in a day than used to be raised in years a short time back. Three weeks ago, two global asset managers, TPG and Brookfield, closed a combined $12.4 billion in climate investment funds.

Reforestation and conservation funding is taking place in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Bolivia who are supporting equatorial rain forests to United states and Canada who are focusing on wetlands, grasslands and coastal areas and the regeneration of flora and fauna therein.

These are but a few stories of a Utopian future we seem to be headed into.

So which future, whether the Dystopian or the Utopian, would come true?

As Morpheus says to Neo in the Matrix:

“……This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you…. believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill……. and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more….”

Is our future really like the story of the blue and red pills and the need for us to make a choice of the path?

Or could it be that there is no choice after all? The two futures, dystopian and utopian, would always exist together, like the two sides of a coin. It would all come down to our world view and the context lens we choose to use. If our context was one of dystopia, we would see signals of collapse in every situation we look at. Similarly, if we were to deploy our utopian context, we would notice the signals of renewal and hope all around.

Our story, the shared and evolving narrative that it is, would always contain both dystopia and utopia, both collapse and renewal. It would depend on us which context lens we choose to deploy, which future we would wish to live into.

“What we do makes a difference, and we have to decide what kind of a difference we want to make.” Jane Goodall, English Primatologist & Anthropologist

Acknowledgement: The above piece is inspired by ‘Collapse, Renewal and Rope of History’ written by Angus Hervey, Future Crunch Journal, Aug. 24^th 2021

In Learning

Shakti Ghosal

Robben Island and a perspective shift

“I was made, by the law, a criminal, not because of what I had done, but because of what I stood for, because of what I thought, because of my conscience.”

Nelson Mandela, 1962

We embarked on our tour to Robben Island from the V & A waterfront in Capetown.

The ferry starts from the Nelson Mandela museum and one gets the opportunity to see a range of photographs about the early settlements and the apartheid era of South Africa before one embarks on the ten odd kilometer boat ride.

Nelson Mandela Gateway museum on the V & A Waterfront, Capetown

For me the trip attraction lay in getting a glimpse of the apartheid days and how Nelson Mandela lived eighteen of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment in that place. Interestingly, something I had not been aware of earlier but came to know during the visit was that apart from Mandela, two other post apartheid South African presidents, including the present one, were imprisoned there.

The island trip consists of a guided bus tour of the infamous lime quarry where Nelson Mandela did hard labour and progressively lost his vision, a leper colony which had existed on the island more than a century back and the military fortifications made during the Second World War. The highlight however was clearly the tour of the maximum security prison for which our guide was Henry, an ex-political prisoner who had spent six years in the island prison during the time Mandela was incarcerated there.

The lime quarry where Mandela did hard labour

An interesting insight which Henry offered was about the elaborate cover up the apartheid government resorted to in front of international media and United Nations in those days. To the outside world, the prison administration declared that political prisoners like Nelson Mandela, keeping in mind their educated background, were only assigned ‘skilled’ activities inside the prison complex like construction work etc. While the hard labour of working in the limestone quarry, cutting stones etc. were reserved for prisoners who had been sentenced for criminal charges like murder, robbery etc. While in actual practice it was the other way round! The apartheid thinking was that while there was a chance to teach skills to criminals to enable them get absorbed back into the South African society, there was no such possibility for the political prisoners.

Maximum security zone of the apartheid era

As the tour ended and as we walked back to the quayside to board our ferry, I overheard a conversation between Henry and a tourist.

‘So Henry, as you look back to your days in this prison, what kind of anger or regret do you feel?’

‘Well, when I was first brought here forty years back, I did feel anger and frustration at the sheer injustice of it all. But interestingly, after a while that went away and I became more calm and accepting. This is something which most political prisoners learnt to do when here. This was important for our own well being.’

‘That’s interesting. And what did you learn to be able to do that?’

‘Well what I learnt was to shift my perspective about the situation. My perspective about what made the Government and the administration do what they were doing.’

‘And what perspective was that?’

‘Well I realised that the reason for my being imprisoned on an island like this was not because I had done anything wrong as the authorities would have me believe. Rather they were afraid and insecure about me and the ideas I stood for. So why I was being tormented physically was because I and what I stood for were tormenting them much more mentally. So it was really a quid pro quo and I had nothing to feel angry or upset about.’

Boarding the ferry I looked around to see Henry walking back slowly towards the prison. I understood how that four decade old perspective has allowed him to make peace with his own self and the world. How it keeps pulling him back to Robben Island, the place of his earlier torment, year after year and speak about it to countless visitors like me.

With the ferry speeding back towards the mainland and the Table Mountain visible on the horizon, a thought kept coming back to me.

What stops Henry’s perspective from being created in so many places in the world where anger, torment and fear continue to create violence and unhappiness?

What could each one of us do to spread that perspective?

In Learning…….. Shakti Ghosal

The paradox of Consciousness

Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer [technician] ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.

All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected. But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done. –

From “The Last Question” by Issac Asimov

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

A parable from “Your Sacred Self” by Wayne Dyer

I first read ‘The Last Question’ in an Asimov compilation in the Seventies. It’s haunting and philosophical tenor made me re-visit it several times over the ensuing decades. I had however not read ‘Your Sacred Self’ earlier and only had the opportunity to read the above parable, shared by a friend on WhatsApp, after Dr. Dyer’s death recently.

Why I bring these two pieces together is the common thread I see of both dwelling on Consciousness in truly unique ways. That special quality of thought that somehow transcends beyond us to gain clarity of our own selves as also of what is around. A subjectivity, unexplained by Science, which somehow allows a ‘sense’ of something beyond physical senses and Self .

In ‘The Last Question’, Asimov envisaged a Consciousness divorced from Man, matter, energy and even time. A Consciousness which learnt how to reverse the entropy and chaos of the Universe.

In ‘Your Sacred Self’, Wayne Dyer points to a Consciousness which can sense the existence of something beyond what is perceived by the physical senses.

Which brings us to what I call the paradox of Consciousness.

Could there be Consciousness divorced from the human mind and everything it perceives as Asimov fictionalized? A cosmic consciousness which is all pervasive and self sustaining. Something akin to God.

Or does Consciousness need to necessarily be linked to the human mind even as it senses things beyond what the mind can perceive, as in Wayne Dyer’s parable? A consciousness sustained by the mind and thoughts relating to possibilities beyond human logic. Something akin to an Enlightened Self.

Human mind appears to be a cerebral activity with inputs from some fifty thousand million cells of the human body. Could it be that our consciousness is a summation and assimilation of all these fifty thousand million inputs? Could it be that this assimilation leads to our consciousness becoming the space in which the Universe which includes we ourselves, others, physical and non-physical entities of every kind, their relationships with each other, along with the past, the present, and the future with all its possibilities shows up? English born author Joseph Pearce explains this best when he says, “Man’s mind mirrors a Universe that mirrors man’s mind”.

Science has been startled to find that there exists both intelligence and memory at the level of individual cells. The worldwide research into the human genome and DNA sequencing is testimony to this. Could it be that this intelligence and memory is being carried at the sub-atomic level and goes back to the beginning of time, the primal soup and beyond to the void before matter and energy existed?

Could this be how the human consciousness aligns with the cosmic consciousness and the paradox of Consciousness is resolved?

In Learning ….. Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgements:

1)“The Last Question”– a science fiction short story by Issac Asimov, 1956
2)“Your Sacred Self: Making the decision to be free” by Dr.Wayne W. Dyer,2001

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