People who influenced me: St. Augustine

St Augustine is an unlikely candidate for people who influenced me, but the accidental introduction to a book of his called 'Confessions' changed my course.

I was astonished at the moderness of the book though it was written in the fourth century, but then it came about that christianity / catholicism and therefore western culture itself was shaped by the works of people like Augustine and later Thomas Acquinas.

Later on the fact that the modern world is in very broad terms in a paradigm of Greco- Roman one carried on by the Catholic church which inherited the Roman Empire, including the jurisprudence of most of the modern western world and its former colonies would suffice to say that the influence of such people are far from appreciated.

However my liking of St. Augustine is captured in his saying,
'Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee', in that it both captures the ubiquitous restlessness of man but deliberately directed it towards the Lord which is a happy compromiseof the basic condition of man and its positive solution in the Christian quest.

People who influenced me: Richard Bach

Why is a small book called Jonathan Livingstone seagull so attractive. It only writes about a bird who flies and flies up and up against the howls of his own kind and enjoys the process.It is reminiscent of the Old man and the sea which went so existential. But why is this more in management than in existential literature?

This is interesting. Perhaps it has no pretentions as to existential rather it comes about as a neat little book that can be read at a single stretch.

Nevertheless it falls into the positive thinking genre without telling as much. Instead of Peale's examples such as a famous psychologist told which smacks of non varifiability, this book is fictional so much that even an extraction of positive meaning could be disputed. Perhaps more so like Ayn Rand also writing of struggles and struggles and not giving up.

Well, not giving up becomes second nature given exposure to such books and hence the influence on me of Richard Bach.

People who influenced me: Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker is the most influential of the modern management gurus. His style is at times a little roundabout due to its heavy loading of meaning, but there is one book that he has written in a more lucid form, 'The Adventures of a bystander' which is autobiographical. The title of my own blog owes a great deal to the title of this book as also it does to books such as The adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Drucker is interesting even from a non management point of view. This is due to his uncanny anticipation of the times in which he lived in Europe and his own precocious decision to leave Europe at a very early stage.

Drucker's perceptions are sociological and true to the times. He is the one who gave the Corporation an existence as a modern sociological unit much like the feudalism of yore. The difference is that instead of interpreting what is there he gave an anticipatory value to it in his contention that the twin realities of the modern world are the existence of Corporations and the ubiquitous natue of technology.

From here there is only an extrapolation to a naive career guidance that the two things that man should learn these days are how to live in a world in which Corporations influence so much of life and the necessity of learning technology. One might even say that given no particular genius to any domain all children should aim for an Engineering degree and an MBA.

Once again indirectly we are talking of a New Industrial Society another of his books.The world of the executive comes so vivid in the books of Drucker not as a commentary in what he should be doing. Rather, Drucker is perhaps the only other one with so much of a sociological view of the manager apart fom William Whyte who talked of the organisation man. The fact of his sociological leaning and imagination is not obvious to the one who reads his works as a management past time until they care to inform themselves with the 'Adventures of a bystander'.

People who influenced me:Norman Vincen Peale

Peale's famous quotations are given in bracket under. In spite of the criticisms of Peale as 'the confidence man, that self hypnosis is the method that he adopts', the positive thinking strain of self development has a certain place in the self help world. Many of the concepts of keeping mind positive do have results in that the mind tends to believe whatever it is made to believe and therefore whatever the mind is set to achieve it tends to achieve. This has been known to individuals and later corroborated by evidence including the changes that happen in the brain.

How religion heals is the kind of technique that falls into the same category as Peale's Power of positive thinking. A certain amount of optimism has developed in me in spite of the many tribulations and part of it is due to the influence of people like Peale.

In a world beset with two world wars and a diminishing in the belief in mankind's capacity to maintain itself any sort of solution however temporary it is if it leads to survival for another day and so on should be the minimum value atached to the works of people like Peale.

It is also necesary to mention that in Psychology there is the development of a new strain of thought called positive psychology which is not to be confused with positive thinking.

Positive psychology is a recognition of the deficiency psychology and a movement away from it into eupsychy which looks at what is normal and what works rather than looking at how we can correct the disease with its underlying assumption of pathology which was the paradigm psychology for a long time found itself in. Evidence of this is the negative connotation attached to psychiatry or psychiatric treatment as in such appellations of the practitioner as 'shrink'.

[When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. Don't take yourself so seriously.Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities. It is of practical value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship. Joy increases as you give it, and diminishes as you try to keep it for yourself. In giving it, you will accumulate a deposit of joy greater than you ever believed possible.
Believe it is possible to solve your problem. Tremendous things happen to the believer. So believe the answer will come. It will.Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory. Watch your manner of speech if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful. The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. A positive mental attitude is a belief that things are going to turn out well, and that you can overcome any kind of trouble or difficulty. The tests of life are not meant to break you, but to make you. Live your life and forget your age. ]

People who influenced me: Pearl S Buck

Pearl S Buck leaves one hoping that there would be more men and women writing about other cultures like she did so vividly in her 'The good Earth'. It is essentially a Chinese saga written by a non Chinese and therfore leaves a window to the rest of the world.

I have always wondered how it would have been if there was none like Pearl to expose the Chinese mind and culture to the world. In doing so she has left us less tribal and less of an island and taken us one step more towards a universal view of the world without taking anything away from the original culture.

The picture of the Chinese woman who goes behind the bushes to give birth to the baby and comes back to the field to continue her work is poignant as much as it captures the reality and even a possibility. At once she has painted the naturalness of childbirth and humbled us in our anxieties of an event so uneventful in its original.

The other is the picture of the Chinese peasant Wang who takes the services of a barber to clean up on the eve of his wedding. The Chinese peasant woman's and the man's relentless struggle in the farm without even an awarenss that theirs is a struggles captures the original condition of man who in his progress is becoming ever more anxious day by day.

People who influenced me: William Golding

William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies', captures the essence of the moralily in the world in a clever story that leaves a few children on an island without any authority figures.

The children develop their own norms in the absense of controlling parent figures.Unfortunately in an imitation of the real world, it is not the voice of reason and intellect that works in that world but the authoritarian immoral, usurper of power who invents rules of the game of power to suit himself that triumphs and the group invariably moves towards atavism.

This transition of a group of children representative of the civilised class into atavistic savages is an allegory of man shorn of the accumulated civilisational norms and authority and control figures. It reminds us of the precariousness of the moral world. As in the real world glimpses of greatness and moral courage are but glimpses and man in this world is inevitably in a predicalment of slipping into evil even if he wishes otherwise.

While that sums up man's predicament the story is also an exhortation to uphold our civilisation that has so painstakingly reached some semblance of order, justice and hope of further emancipation in a world rife with evil at every corner.

I am especially fond of Golding because I happened to listen to Golding in person at the British Council in Madras in 1987 or 88 in which I still remember his words 'good and evil are the two sides of the same coin' that our world without one is unimaginable and an implicit goading of humankind to preserve the good against all odds.

People who influenced me:Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez books 'One hundred years of solitude' , 'Love in the time of cholera, 'Chronicle of a death foretold', 'Colonel in his labyrith', 'No one writes to the colonel', 'Leaf storm' among others grip the human imagination so much that one is transported to a different world. Especially one gets a flavour of Latin America. It is so powerful with its continent sized plot and surreal people who almost always are lonely and the visitations of dictatorship ever present in the storyline all gives an uncertainty to life that one back home is never worried about.

Marquez' blessing is in the narrative powers that grips the reader until he is transported to the magical world through a special technique called magical realism and then throws the reader back into reality a changed and different man.

Anyone who has read Marquez is never the same man and this unlike Dickens for instance who takes one to a real yester world, Marquez does to a surreal world pregnant with the mercilessness of the reality yet all of them surviving characters even in their deaths who just are in a world that does not allow anyone weak to go past.

The narrative of blood that travels through floors , through the corners up the walls and into the yards in a poignat recollection of the murder is at once so real and yet so surreal, one gets almost to see the line of blood.

My own view of the world changed to an objective reality amidst the innumerable subjectivities and the objectivity thus achieved is almost a rite of passage to adulthood that sheds the childhood innocence, like a snake sheds its old skin and takes on a new one, an approximating to reality.

People who influenced me: Napoleon Hill

It is difficult to say whether Hill influenced me or his book 'Think and grow rich'. His book is the result of a long stretch of interviews that he was commissioned to do by Andrew Carnegie. Hill himself was later advisor to two American Presidents.

Although the title of the book smacks of extreme materialism and indeed it is about making money, it goes into esoteric discussions on the power of the brain, subconscious mind, sex transmutation and imagination among others it is unlike the other book on the same topic 'Rich dad, poor dad' discussed elsewhere in my series of people who influenced me.

It is my feeling that the book should be read only after or around forty and any sort of precociousness that this book or any other, takes away from an innocence. HIll himself says men are seldom successful before forty for the reason of 'sowing of the wild oats' and I believe men are entitled to a certain amount of innocence in their early years.

Transmutation of the sexual energy occurs only after forty by Hill's own version and implies it is meant to be so by nature. So reading Hill at an early age without considering your own age may be detrimental on yourself.

Nevertheless the bringing down of achievement to formulae is an achievement by itself and has been taken up by many others as well but the legitimacy of Hill is the backing by Andrew Carnegie himself an achiever. Perhaps the merit is greater in its quintessential Americanism, in an obsession with Achievement.

People who influenced me: Mark Twain

Mark Twain has an immediate appeal especially to children as in 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. I am sure that all young children and men who retain their childhood would want to be Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer. Tom represents the civilised self and Huck, the raw superstitious one. Both enjoy the free life and refuses to meddle with hierarchies.

Mark Twain is thus a reminder of the paradise that every secure child feels the world to be and the world should be, but spoiled by the hierarchy which man has created albeit from a practical point of view, yet destroys the charm of life when over time we forget that hierarchy is our servant and not the master as with many other aspects in the process of civilisation.

Man finds himself in chains everywhere for this reason that every one of his inventions both material and social eventually takes away from his freedom when forgotten and shorn of the original purpose which is serving humanity and humanness.

All great men remind of this yet we dont seem to learn.

People who influenced me: Le comte du Nouy

My introduction to du Nouy is from an obscure book that was gifted to me while in Loyola. For a long time, almost 20 years I did not know who the author was and then came to know that the author was a French philosopher and scientist.The wikipedia says "Du Noüy believed that mankind should have confidence in science, but be aware that we know less about the material world than is commonly believed".

Human destiny combines very elaborately the material sciences with the themes of Christianity in that both evolutionary theory and the Christian view of humanity are combined so beautifully. One almost is convinced that science and religion are compatible. Or perhaps I was already convinced that science and religion go hand in hand that du Nouy had an immediate appeal to me.

At times he sounds like Arthur Koestler, but Koestler's answers to human problems are more pragmatic and scientific whereas du Nouy holds religion above science and considers the immersedness of humans in an ongoing evolution on a spiritual plane in enlightening us.

Koestler I believe cannot wait for the spiritual evolution to save us because he thinks if we wait for that slow process to save us we would not be left at all to be saved. Also Koestler never seems to have considered the postulate that evolution is still continuing on a spiritual plane. He considers the fault in the construction of the human brain as the dead end in evolution. Assuming Koestler is right in the postulate of the muddled hierarchy of the human brain, the last answer may still be Koestler's.

People who influenced me: E M Forster

E M Forster had an Indian background. His

'Passage to India' captures the Indian mind of the colonial times or perhaps the English mind of the colonial times. It deviates from the historical in that it shows the good relations that existed between the English and the Indians although the unexplained twist at the end is variedly interpreted as the inscrutability of the Indian mind among other things. Other things include that 'the east is east and the west is west'.

People who influenced me: Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey's self help books are rooted in Principles as he himself distinguishes the two genres based on the Personality ethic and the Character ethic.

Also there is a progressive nature in his theories in that they proceed from the mastery of the self first and then the mastery of other things. Perhaps the most important and the least understood are the paradigms of dependence, independence and interdependence in ascending order. Many are still rooted in a paradigm of independence whereas a paradigm of interdependence is a solution to many of the problems that afflict humanity today. Above all his is a philosophy that advocates reform from within than a sham outward improvement of the personality for personal ends.

People who influenced me: Charles Dickens

I did a term paper in my undergraduate years on the theme 'Children in Dickens'. England comes personal rather than historical in Dickens. The book Oliver Twist is the one that was prescribed in our tenth standard. Great Expectations captured both the mind of the child and the aspirations of the times. There is also the surrealness of Miss Havisham who remained in her wedding dress in defiance of her love lost. The other novel David Copperfield has the character Mr. Micawber whose ideas of management of money is so profound as it is fundamental.

On the moral plane though most of his novels have a moral tone none simplifies it than 'A Christmas Carol'. The influence of Dickens is more in the kindling of interest in Literature and in hindsight a capturing of the times of which he wrote. The drawings in many of his novels captures in vivid detail the rustic English life.

People who influenced me: Miguel de Cervantez

Cervantez captured the medieval times perhaps almost as much as Walter Scott did. The greatness of Cervantez in 'The Adventures of don Quixote' is at once its many facetedness in the exposition so much so that it lends itself to many interpretations.

At times it is an expose of the folly of chivalry, an exultation of romantic values, the conflict between the rational and the visionary part of life in its portrayal of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and above all its timelessness although set in medieval times.

In modern Management the organisation man is juxtaposed with the gentleman of the victorian era and the knight of the medieval times. No wonder don quixote is recommended reading in courses such as "Leadership: Competence, Vision and Mission" with immense insights to the student.

People who influenced me: Bertrand Russel

Russel's thinking is a lineage in a link that begins with the Age of Reason of Bacon and captures the pragmatic issues of the era. Although it is difficult to say which of the works has influenced me his 'Why I am not a Christian' had such a clarity about it so much so that Christ's greatness becomes even more clearer in his critique of Christianity. I believe it is the organised Christianity that he criticises rather than Christ the man. He was one among others who defined the essential characteristic of the twentieth century as one that exposed the nature of Man and one who warns of not using the rational part of Man in solving his problems.

People who influenced me: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett's definitive place as one among the theatre of the absurds in capturing the essense of the 20th century is exemplified in the play 'Waiting for Godot' which has a lasting impression upon me. Waiting as the metaphor for life and the two characters Lucky and Pozzo as representing the humanity with its hierarchy of oppression by one on the other, captures the essense of a world which still does not lose an opportunity in chaining and subjugating the other.

In defiance of the conventions, Beckett answered to the question why there are only two chapters, 'because one would be too less and three would be too much' and to the question who is godot? he said ' if I knew I would have said it in the play' for me indicates the very sentiment of the man against any kind of oppression as the theme of the play.

People who influenced me; Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler wrote novels but more memorably non fiction. His 'Darkness at noon' is the most famous of his novels, but I would remember him for his non fiction trilogy ; The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation and The ghost in the machine. The fist one speaks about the non liniarity of scientific discoveries; such as that the heliocentric view of the world preceded the actual by about a century and a half and was left forgotten until Copernicus' theory was accepted lately.

The Act of creation intertwines evolution with human advancement and a whole lot of subjects in between. The ghost in the machine speaks about the delusional streak in the human mind where the hierarchical control of the new brain and the old brain are muddled leading to the psychotic streak in human history. He even considers it an evolutionary mistake to have a neo cortex that many times cannot override the limbic system which is the old brain. He also suggests that mankind should develop drugs to correct this mistake and administer them in the same way public water supply is dosed with iodine in certain iodine deficient countries.

Koestler himself was given to mental imbalances but I believe he has not been given his due among the intellectuals judging by the low citation elsewhere. I went all the way to Calcutta to purchase the three books.

People who influenced me: Amos Oz

Amos Oz is a Jewish writer. His 'A tale of Love and Darkness' influenced me immensely. I have not read any other of his novels but the simplicity and profoundness of his writing shakes me even now. Writing about the times post formation of Israel he vividly captures the idiosyncracies of the immigrant Jew mostly with European manners trying to come to terms with the lack of standards back in their own HOME country although it is their dream come true. His love of books goes with the fact of his father being a librarian. I admire him for being so capable of getting outside the Jewish self and examining his own people, but more importantly his complaints to his mother who committed suicide. The passage is so memorable of a child who has not reconciled to his mother leaving him forever... in such a way.

Defence pre submission

There was one more pre-submission defence at the SMS CUSAT yesterday. The presenter Siby Zacharia was as much confused about the topic as I was but I pretended I was listening. It occured to me initially that I was the only one not getting anything because all the others were apparently learned.

Then came the water up the boat. One by one there were questions and there were attempts by the others to quell saying we will ask the questions later and so on. It turned out that the very same doubts that I had was shared by the others as well.

For instance the question of what is consumer based brand equity as distinct from mere brand equity. The cluster based sampling technique was questioned. The quasi experimental design which it claimed was questioned and answered childishly. The use of terms like price, promotion etc were questioned.The classification of hedonistic, FMCG, utilitarian were not in marketing literature.

Then came the bombshell that one of them threw not at the presenter but at the guide that he being the doctoral committee member was not informed. Then how did he sign the presubmission form. He merely signed it.

Then another said there were instances where PhD was awarded without presubmission and none need claim sainthood etc. Also that inspite of these comments the scholar was still defending and not listening. That even after so much the scholar is not saying he would correct the mistakes.

The scholar tried to say politely that it was very difficult to get the questionnaires filled which was besides the technical points raised.

A saner one among them said there is some standard to which the university adheres and clearing it would tarnish if later on rejected.

The questions that remain for me are; Why did the guide not correct the scholar beforehand. What was the scholar doing all these years. Should not the faculty members show a united front at least during an auspicious occassion like this one so the observers get some respect for the university. Finally if post graduate teachers behave so what needs to be said of ordinary citizens. Has there been so much of erosion in our society's overworld. Then what would the underworld be?

Well springs of strength

Well springs of strength


And there was this fiery storm
That swept away all as suspected
The darkness that nearly consumed all
Then gave way to a fresh beaten path

Though none was in sight
And the path remained lonesome
The wellsprings opened and cleared
And showed the depths

That would have remained clogged.
The storm looked every way
The cleansing red that He shed long ago
And divided time in two

Long back at the crib
He did smile and smile
That banked the well springs
For this one big storm to bless the meek

......................