Launch48
By far, one of my most distracted days at work! Participating in the Launch48 Weekend and wishing I was there for the day-long conference before that, but I’m at work instead. Oh joy.
Keeping in touch through live blog updated regularly by Steve Parks, the most awesome Launch 48 Twitter stream (useful for me, can’t access twitter from work!) and the network group sites.
Notwithstanding this enthusiasm on my part, I am so unprepared for this fairly big opportunity 😦 Hope I deliver results to match my excitement about the event! Looking forward to learning a lot this weekend!
Obama as Nobel Laureate?
In his 1895 will, award founder Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses”
The decision by the Nobel Committee to accord the Nobel Peace Prize is something that has been discussed unto death, argued, defended, attacked, mocked and despaired, in varying degrees by all and sundry. To write another word about this would be to do nothing but repeating something a 1000 others have already said, surely.
But one cynical viewpoint that not many have discussed and which came out of an email conversation with a Nigerian/British friend is this – isn’t it odd? In what can be considered the highest honour laid upon a black man in a while, is there also a backhanded condescension? Are the expectations from a non-white, non-mainstream politician so low that merely speaking well and not pissing people off for a few months (even while deploying troops to wage war in various places) is seen as worthy of an award which normally has to be earned over a lifetime of working towards peace and progress? Is this affirmative action – oh, he hasn’t shot or knifed anyone yet, shall we give him something nice? Patronising, much? Something like when people called Colin Powell so ‘well-spoken’?
But like I said, this is a very cynical way of looking at things – because it encourages the notion of viewing everything in black and white, which is the kind of paradigm which also allows for racism and bigotry. As much I am riled by the premature awarding of the Nobel to Obama, I am heartened to see that it has gone to a man who has done much to reverse the mainstream perception of his race in his country and around the world. May this be an award for all the wonderful things he is yet to do (ah well, one can hope!)
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While it might seem like I’m giving Obama too little credit, please note that it is only because I have high expectations of the man. And, yes, do know I am the original Obama fan; I wished and hoped way back in 2004 that he would run for President in 2008 so there’s no point listing to me his myriad accomplishments, I am well aware.
Header Image…
…is an untouched and cropped portion of a photograph taken earlier this year during the 18km hike from Henley-on-Thames to Pangbourne. It was during the first Bank Holiday of May – worth noting the time of the year if you’re interested in catching open expanses of the English countryside and nature in its full glory in similarly fabulous weather, all within an hour or two of London and a wee budget.
For those relying on the older editions of Lonely Planet guides or internet printouts, please note that many of the local pubs listed in them are either shut down, converted into Curry take-aways or tend to be seasonal and are closed during early summer. Experience speaketh.
JW Waterhouse
My first exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts was the JW Waterhouse exhibition which seemed to have been highly publicised all over London, and considering the lacklustre line-up this summer at the otherwise more interesting National Gallery, this seemed hard to miss. That I got free entry to the exhibition from my employers made it absolutely imperative that I catch the exhibition while I could, even with the knowledge that I was probably not going to like it.
And why such presumption? In early July, as I was getting back from my London 10k run, I struck up conversation with an elderly gentleman sitting next to me in the tube and since he was carrying the Waterhouse exhibition pamphlet, I asked him about it and in a very English and polite manner, conveyed that he didn’t consider it worthy of waking up so early on a Sunday for.
I dragged a completely non-artsy and newbie-to-the-galleries friend to the exhibitions a couple of weeks before its closing, with much trepidation that a bad exhibition would scar him for life. But with a byline of ‘Modern Pre-Raphaelite‘, Waterhouse’s works had to be pretty if nothing else (unlike what can be said for much of Modern Art works – wow, what a mean generalization!).
And well, pretty was what it was. And that is where it ends. Beauty without an underlying philosophy. Reminiscent of many artworks I have seen many friends and acquaintances, in that there’s great command over technique and knowledge of subject matter, but lacking that je ne sais quoi, which separates regular artistic works from art. Initially, I thought I was missing something, but I found that this very feeling is shared by other reviewers – particularly this one (I read reviews after viewing the exhibition, to maintain some degree of original PoV!). And in this review where the artist is exalted, unusually for him, the author mentions a quip by GB Shaw, ‘that he specialised in reminding one of other artists’.
I looked and looked for his works to change my world view a wee bit, for his masterpieces to move something within, to make me realize an ‘aha’ moment or make me feel awed at his talent beyond being able to imitate the masters well. He lived in interesting times for England, he had the honour of being a Royal Academician, he was prolific – surely all of this would have poured into his art, so that it may create a dent in the soul of the viewer. The only thing that created an impression on me was his depiction of ‘sweet doing nothing’ or ‘dolce far niente‘ – this fascination on my part might perhaps be explained by the fact that this is a very unachievable state of being for me. But I am not sure if it is a compliment to ascribe someone with excellence at only depicting ‘nothingness’. The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius (aka Pidgeons of Honorius) was amusing; as an aside, many of his earlier works featured a lot of pigeons, which I noticed only because my newbie friend was fascinated by pigeon presence. Among the rest, I found the composition of ‘Diogenes‘ interesting.
Waterhouse clearly over-did the theme of the depiction of a lone woman – by the end of the exhibition, I found it hard to appreciate the multiple images of women trying too hard to seem mysterious and luscious; all I was thinking was, rather a crass image, what?
Alas, even for someone with low expectations as I had, JW Waterhouse was a tad disappointing. But perhaps to have expected anything beyond what was on offer, from someone who had always been deemed to be commercially successful and not so acclaimed critically, is entirely my fault.
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A good read on the Victorian Summer at the Royal Academy.
Anish Kapoor
As part of the fringe benefits of corporate life-ism, I get preview and special entry tickets to paid exhibitions at museums and galleries my employers sponsor. One recent such event was an Anish Kapoor exhibition, someone whose name I have heard of as the Turner Prize-winner of 1991 and whose two pieces I had seen last year the ‘Blood on Paper‘ exhibition at Victoria & Albert Museum in May 2008. I liked his sense for the dramatic, expressed in a simple but so very elegant style. What I had not realized before the exhibition was that I have also been a fan of his works where I did not know who the artist was.
The Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts is a bold statement; it’s grandeur is expressed in its scale, multiple-room- spanning exhibits, cannons exploding paint on the walls of the Academy and moving masses of blood-red paint. Even for someone like myself, who admits to a certain philistinism when it comes to Modern Art, the exhibition was powerful, in that it was radical, shocking, vibrant and seemed to contain multiple layers of meanings, some more easily deciphered than others.
The most engaging exhibit piece has to be Shooting into the Corner which has captured the imagination of mainstream media unlike other art exhibitions. In a world where the power of the ordinary man is glorified everyday, where crowdsourcing is hailed as the end of the large corporates and where anti-establishmentarianism is more fashionable than ever before, this piece, set in one of the hallowed art venues of London, splattering paint most irreverently on its walls and even on the sculptured ceiling, holds a certain fascination for the ‘common man’, unlike others. Part of being at the exhibition was just looking at the exhibition viewers and how they reacted to the decidedly unconventional art form Kapoor has engaged. There was certainly an element of play as people dashed about in the many rooms, trying to catch the far ends of the train in motion, a blood-red giant mass of wax, paint and vaseline, in the moving piece ‘Svayambh‘, which smeared the venerable archways of the Academy most nonchalantly as it moved along. The gallery with the numerous distorting mirrors obviously kept many of the viewers adequately fascinated. The trumpet-like exhibit was very reminiscent of the famous Marsyas exhibit at the Tate which had brought AK huge media coverage too.
I do believe I’ll be availing of my corporate card again to catch this exhibition once more before it’s over – let me know if you’re interested in joining 🙂
Work
…”start of work means an end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires… How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been, and now never will be.”
– Alain de Botton, The Pleasures & Sorrows of Work
A short commentary by him, here, on the perils of believing too strongly in the idea of love and work bringing happiness.
Ghost of Employees Past
More than anything else, what has always made me most uneasy about large corporate organisations is how quickly they move on after shedding their people, no matter how long they’ve been part of the organization, no matter how big a part the company played in that person’s life.
My first brush with this was in an American investment bank during my summer internship back in my second year. Someone sitting close to my desk had quit and I was a bit taken aback at how quickly that person stopped existing in the memory of the bank and the people he worked with. The very next day, his telephone number was reset, the email address was deleted, his name was never brought up again in conversations since and that was that – almost like he was never part of the team at all.
Then, after a most enjoyable year at a startup firm where things couldn’t be more different in terms of work culture and employee value systems, I joined the investment banking industry full-time. Just in time for one of the most brutal carnages in the industry, how very nice.
Employees were let go off at the drop of a hat, all manner of smokes-and-mirrors techniques were employed by senior management to ensure complete insulation between those who remained in the bank and those who were ‘let go’ (odd term that, like people are fighting to go, which they are, in good times). The ones who are placed on ‘at risk of redundancy’ lists faced varying levels of isolation from BAU, as demanded by their role. Traders & middle office staff disappeared from the scene, deleted from the org like bits of data on the hard-disk of a computer – no farewell emails, no goodbyes, no personal contact details exchanged – decades of worklife and personal connections formed at work had their plugs pulled out in an instant. Disconcerting, to say the least, but the best business practice, all things considered.
Moving onto my third such organisation, I noted on my first day here that there was a particular lady hailing from a minority group who liked to create mini-storms in the office with her outrageously exposing clothes and overt flirting with cute sub-ordinates. It was her birthday a few weeks ago and she’d bought a massive pile of biscuits, chocolates, munchies and what not to treat the few teams sitting close by. A couple of days after this, all of us were trooped into a meeting room to inform us that a particular long-drawnout grievance issue has been settled (dammit, how did I not know about this!? Goss!) and that the abovementioned lady has parted ways with the organisation. Discussing the matter is now deemed an offense in the department and could invite disciplinary action.
So that was that. A person was let go of and I did not even know the story (although I would eventually get to know more later on). But the pile of treats she had brought in for her birthday, the remains of that stayed here long after her. It was strange how the goodies sat in an accusing heap and everyone skirted around the topic of her leaving just as everyone skirted around the desk on which it sat. Nobody seemed to want to risk suggesting throwing away these obviously stale snacks, lest it be seen to be suggestive of their attitude towards the employee who had, one may say, sadly departed.
The weekend when the cleaner finally, at long last, removed the left-over, long-gone cookies, cakes and bakes was, for those who had worked with her, very much like a much-needed exorcism of a ghost of an employee past.
London
When a man is bored of London, he is bored of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
-Samuel Johnson
Indeed.
Minister a-Twitter
Much has been made out of Shashi Tharoor’s Twittering habit. Today, my Dad asked me about Twitter, having heard of numerous references to it in the Indian media, which is over-reacting to Tharoor’s narration of personal viewpoints and observation in a public forum. Most of the arguments put forth have dealt with the technical conflict of interest between revealing details/itinerary on Twitter vs the confidential nature of Tharoor’s work as the Minister of External Affairs, which is a fair question to raise, but even so, there’s a germ of a doubt that rises in my mind.
Perhaps, it is not just the Luddite-tendency among the so very old political crowd in Delhi; one has to wonder, with such accessibility to the world of politics through Tharoor’s words, are the old-world politicians afraid of losing their sense of exclusivity? How very demeaning, that a politician be SO easily approachable by the aam aadmi? No VIP barriers, no red-tape? Now that the hitherto-impervious world of Indian politics is seemingly approachable to the tech-savvy youth, through Tharoor’s humorous anecdotes on colleagues and jibes on bureaucracy, are ministers now insecure about the inspiration it might cause to newbies who might not have otherwise thought of politics and now will be attracted to this decidedly-cooler arena, now that Tharoor’s in it?
Well, one can only hope that little steps such as this and more effective use of technology help demystify the world of politics in a country where the educated elite prefer to keep an arms-length distance from public policy!
Entrepreneurship as a Recurring Theme
The thing with dabbling, even in the slightest manner, with the world of entrepreneurship is that it becomes a recurring theme in your life after that for years to come and then, you miss it forever until you go back to it.
My year-long tryst with tenCube in Singapore, during which I contributed very little (I’m not being modest here, as my CEO would wholeheartedly agree), I observed and savoured the idea, the concept of entrepreneurship while watching close friends navigating the myriad challenges of ownership, accountability, high stakes, financing, product management, client relationships and the media, all the tender age of early-mid twenties right after graduating from college. Due to various reasons, I parted ways with the company to join the big, bad world of the investment banking industry. Then, London happened unexpectedly and I realized with a twinge of regret that the wonderful world of startups, unConferences, E27, Garag3, on-campus incubation centres et al would have to wait a few years while I figured myself out.
Recently, something transpired which might allow myself to re-incarnate in the world of entrepreneurship in Singapore as an ‘Angel Investor’; details to be divulged later once things are clearer.
During the fascinating Literary Weekend at LSE back in March, I ran into a PhD student in the biotech field who is in the midst of launching a bio-technical product aimed at hospitals and pharmacies – I was a bit taken aback at the thought of people planning on tech startups in London. Surely, this expensive, tax-burdened, tech-talent starved city cannot be the cradle of poor techies tinkering in their garages, with dreams of changing the world? I had little idea how much evidence I would see contrary to this naive thought on my part.
A few weeks later, after the Nandan Nilekani talk, I ran into a grad student in LSE who plans to start up an electronic waste-management company in India; I will be meeting him again to be a sounding board for his ideas, after his internship with the UN in Geneva, in the area of environmental policies. (Electronic waste management is clearly becoming a thing in India, considering the funds pumped into this lately.). And most interestingly, in a drinks-do a couple of months ago, I ran into someone whose startup company intrigues me greatly – as a tech startup consultancy, he aims to provide expertise on non-technical matters of running a company and his business model seems rather sustainable, even if it is sure to face some teething issues in the initial few years. I am keen to monitor the progress of this company in the years to come.
Met someone off Twitter recently and found out more about his interesting work in an established technology startup consultancy, particularly in the area of product development and management. I am fascinated by his varied background in technical expertise, the various ventures he has been involved in and the thrill with which he speaks of them. Through him, I became acquainted with another person in the venture capital industry. A recent night of partying put me in touch with a management consultant who was recently made redundant and who has chosen to go back to the world of tech startups, something he had indulged in during his days at Cambridge.
If I did not know any better, I would say the universe is dropping some broad hints my way 🙂
Potpourri 