Thoughts at year's end
Here is something I wrote to a bunch of my friends - thoughts that came to me late December.
I was sitting in my bedroom looking out my window, at the street lights turning on at 3 in the afternoon; not in many places around the world do you see this happening..almost every single day of the year... Memories!
Then there it was, a small train of thought, almost unnoticeable, in my mind as I reminisced over events that occurred over this past year and in the years before, personal, political, climatic, social...
I felt like writing and sharing them with you. The idea of writing to an audience, almost like a combination of soliloquy and narrative, seemed rather exciting, compared to just letting the train go by!
Thought I'd arrange this in a nice little document using an application called Word from this company called Microsoft and attach it herewith.
Some of you might read this (maybe till the end of this line), and do just that, and simply move on to the next email in your inbox.
Well, in any case..here is what came to me on a cold winter afternoon in Hibernia.
Reflections in vociferous silence
The end of a year is always a time of reflection for many. Partly (greatly in part should I say) due to the media but also owing in part to the Christian calendar, we are drawn at some stage before the clock strikes midnight on the 31st of Dec to pause and think. What we think about varies greatly from person to person, of course. We think, and think, and then try and establish relevance to our existence on this planet. 'Justify our existence', as many great authors put it.
I sat thinking about all the events that I have been a part of (or that were part of me), directly or indirectly, over the last 7 years; those being some of my more unpredictable years. Personal tragedies and triumphs interlaced with era-defining global events.
Let me attempt at providing a couple of illustrations here:
a) Of note on a global scale was the 11th of Sep 2001. I was on a plane roughly 8-9 hours before the events unfolded flying from Newark, NJ to San Francisco, CA on a carrier that was only the next biggest compared to United and AA. I was woken up early the next morning. I sat there, watching history unfold, severely jet-lagged, shocked, scared and disoriented.
b) Something that did not sit well in my head: The Head of AIDS research at the NIH admits that commercial pharma companies are unlikely to find a vaccine for AIDS. The reason: not enough incentives (read: financial). UN's Top HIV/AIDS official admits that it is no longer realistic to expect halting and reversing of the AIDS pandemic by 2015. The reason: similar to above.
Actually, the list goes on.
I do not need to describe them all.
Just try to catch some news (from the media) and you will find that there is New Orleans and there's Texas, there are people feeling unsettled over settlements in Gaza, there's gang violence in Guatemala, there’s famine in the 3-million strong Niger and the lamentable genocide in Darfur.
There is AIDS in South Africa and then there is AIDS in India, with the citizens witnessing a literal 'fight-to-the-death' race between these two countries' AIDS population growth. Oh wait, if I have my data correctly, India is ‘winning’ man. Its AIDS patient growth is at a much greater pace than its distant Pangaean cousin. Now there is something to think about when you think who's taking all the IT jobs from the US.
Then, wait, there's bombs exploding like illegal Chinese firecrackers in London, Gaza (again), Madrid and then there's Iraq.
There are Muslims pissed off at Christians in Iraq (again) and France, and Muslims pissed off at the Hindus in Kashmir.
Well, who can forget Cassini blasting off past Saturn's Titan and the International Space station reaching the end of its construction and assembly phase.
Who can forget the ever-present vicissitudes of the rogue regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa (or Tropical Africa, if you will)?
Maybe I should stop. Maybe this (bottoms-up) approach is all too overwhelming to some. So let me do this using something of a top-down approach. What famous yard stick should I use? Well, there is the Copenhagen Consensus and then there are the UN Millennium development goals. (2015 plan). On the economics front, the World Bank talks about Implications of Remittances and Migration whereas the IMF takes a more country-specific approach....
Alright, enough, which one is the yard stick? Let us go with the Danes and the UN. Take a minute to look them up if you don't already know but their goals and the UN’s 'top 10 World problems' are pretty similar.
You will find "improve education, address climate change, prevent communicable diseases, address population migration, reduce conflicts,...".
But wait, notice something? The top down and bottoms-up approaches have both led to the same damn problems. No matter how or which way we look at it, these are the main issues and problems that remain the focus of the media (remember I mentioned them at the start?) and thus, the general public. They were the focus in 1980, 1990, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and yeah, you guessed right, 2006, 2007, and 2150. Makes you wonder. Doesn't it?
Now, here comes the part I (also) mentioned earlier; the 'justify our existence' part.
What are we doing to address all these issues? I think about it, my little sister thinks about it, I know some of you think about it. Assuming all the readers of this email are socially conscious to a certain extent, I ask the question. I remember thinking about whether working toward 'betterment of mankind' is any nobler than say, oh, let's see, investment banking. I remember hearing arguments against it but made a case for the statement being true. 'Thinking beyond personal needs, thinking about who you are 'helping' etc. can be used here.' Having said this, there are people who work for/toward nobler causes as part of their job and there are people who work for them as a complement to their, let's say, 'investment banking' jobs. "As long as you are doing good, it doesn't matter whether you are doing it for personal gain and advancement or purely selfless reasons." I guess so. I will leave it there for fear of fiercer arguments.
(All this is going somewhere I promise)
This has been a particularly unsettling thought for me. I fall into the category of people working on such issues as an aside to their 'day job'. There is so much to do. Yet, here I am, working away on how to help Company X sell a product to improve its profits from $XB to $2XB. I tell you it is great fun working on this stuff, I love it. The problems are many fold and rising up to solve them takes effort etc etc. All fun stuff. All this fits in nicely with my analytical inclinations. But am I contributing to the UN Millennium Development Goals, the Copenhagen Consensus? Am I applying Francois Bourguignon's (come on don't you know who he is? :) Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle to address poverty issues? Don’t think so. But I want to. I really do. How do I do it?
Again, I thought about this ‘how’? My little sister asks me ‘how’? I am sure you wonder how (some of you anyway!)?
So I decided to work in this direction. I started off by sponsoring a little girl from the Dominican Republic. She sends me neat little drawings of her family, her toys along with the regular thank you notes. It is the little things you see!
Then off I went off to work on a proposal for fighting homelessness in urban India. Now I am in the process of putting this into practice in Chennai…ask me in about four months and I will try and get you to speak with the first rehabilitated beggar from Destitution Demolished (yeah, that is what I want to call it!)
Then off I went to go enroll in Engineers without Borders. My plan is to go to Tanzania next year on a rural development project as part of this. (This way I can do my Kilimanjaro climb too, while I’m there, though its another 5 days!)
Why am I telling you this? I see an interesting dynamic being played out here. It’s the symbiotic feedback from my job in multinational corporate America and my aspirations in the lesser developed parts of the world. My effort in one direction feeds off of the success in another.
‘Day job feeds night job’ sorta thing. I actually thought it would make my life more difficult with all the extra time commitments etc. Well, it did. But what is more important is the multi-faceted effort approach. You work on many things and results from them play off in permutations and combinations, providing you with a much richer result than before. Mind you, this is under the premise that you dedicate ‘substantial’ effort to each of your endeavours. That is the hidden catch that you are not forewarned about in many cases.
But if you are stubborn enough to dive in, it is very rewarding, I promise.
Do many things I kept saying to myself. Recently, I met someone who said their motto was ‘do great things’. I quite liked that. So now I modified my mantra to be ‘Do many great things’. Yepp, that sums up many things I want to do!
Try it folks, it is one approach that will leave you physically extended and chronologically scarce but mentally fulfilled, with a great sense of purpose. It is almost addictive, in a good way. (unlike, I’ve heard, Pot:)
Let me leave you with three sayings. One someone else said, one (I think) I managed to come up with and one a combination of mine and someone else’s.
1. “Sleep is a waste of time.”
2. “The least you can do is save the world.”
3. “Do many great things.”
Fin.
(I wonder how many of you actually came to the end. For those who did, hope this has been an entertaining read, at the very least. If it has been more, great:)
Happy new year! Eat, drink and be merry. If you do get a couple of seconds in the middle of that office party or that family gathering or that special moment with your girl / boy- friend, just give the three sayings (above) a little thought.
There, I wanted to start and end this with the concept of Thought (not such a ‘small’ train of thought after all, I guess)
I was sitting in my bedroom looking out my window, at the street lights turning on at 3 in the afternoon; not in many places around the world do you see this happening..almost every single day of the year... Memories!
Then there it was, a small train of thought, almost unnoticeable, in my mind as I reminisced over events that occurred over this past year and in the years before, personal, political, climatic, social...
I felt like writing and sharing them with you. The idea of writing to an audience, almost like a combination of soliloquy and narrative, seemed rather exciting, compared to just letting the train go by!
Thought I'd arrange this in a nice little document using an application called Word from this company called Microsoft and attach it herewith.
Some of you might read this (maybe till the end of this line), and do just that, and simply move on to the next email in your inbox.
Well, in any case..here is what came to me on a cold winter afternoon in Hibernia.
Reflections in vociferous silence
The end of a year is always a time of reflection for many. Partly (greatly in part should I say) due to the media but also owing in part to the Christian calendar, we are drawn at some stage before the clock strikes midnight on the 31st of Dec to pause and think. What we think about varies greatly from person to person, of course. We think, and think, and then try and establish relevance to our existence on this planet. 'Justify our existence', as many great authors put it.
I sat thinking about all the events that I have been a part of (or that were part of me), directly or indirectly, over the last 7 years; those being some of my more unpredictable years. Personal tragedies and triumphs interlaced with era-defining global events.
Let me attempt at providing a couple of illustrations here:
a) Of note on a global scale was the 11th of Sep 2001. I was on a plane roughly 8-9 hours before the events unfolded flying from Newark, NJ to San Francisco, CA on a carrier that was only the next biggest compared to United and AA. I was woken up early the next morning. I sat there, watching history unfold, severely jet-lagged, shocked, scared and disoriented.
b) Something that did not sit well in my head: The Head of AIDS research at the NIH admits that commercial pharma companies are unlikely to find a vaccine for AIDS. The reason: not enough incentives (read: financial). UN's Top HIV/AIDS official admits that it is no longer realistic to expect halting and reversing of the AIDS pandemic by 2015. The reason: similar to above.
Actually, the list goes on.
I do not need to describe them all.
Just try to catch some news (from the media) and you will find that there is New Orleans and there's Texas, there are people feeling unsettled over settlements in Gaza, there's gang violence in Guatemala, there’s famine in the 3-million strong Niger and the lamentable genocide in Darfur.
There is AIDS in South Africa and then there is AIDS in India, with the citizens witnessing a literal 'fight-to-the-death' race between these two countries' AIDS population growth. Oh wait, if I have my data correctly, India is ‘winning’ man. Its AIDS patient growth is at a much greater pace than its distant Pangaean cousin. Now there is something to think about when you think who's taking all the IT jobs from the US.
Then, wait, there's bombs exploding like illegal Chinese firecrackers in London, Gaza (again), Madrid and then there's Iraq.
There are Muslims pissed off at Christians in Iraq (again) and France, and Muslims pissed off at the Hindus in Kashmir.
Well, who can forget Cassini blasting off past Saturn's Titan and the International Space station reaching the end of its construction and assembly phase.
Who can forget the ever-present vicissitudes of the rogue regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa (or Tropical Africa, if you will)?
Maybe I should stop. Maybe this (bottoms-up) approach is all too overwhelming to some. So let me do this using something of a top-down approach. What famous yard stick should I use? Well, there is the Copenhagen Consensus and then there are the UN Millennium development goals. (2015 plan). On the economics front, the World Bank talks about Implications of Remittances and Migration whereas the IMF takes a more country-specific approach....
Alright, enough, which one is the yard stick? Let us go with the Danes and the UN. Take a minute to look them up if you don't already know but their goals and the UN’s 'top 10 World problems' are pretty similar.
You will find "improve education, address climate change, prevent communicable diseases, address population migration, reduce conflicts,...".
But wait, notice something? The top down and bottoms-up approaches have both led to the same damn problems. No matter how or which way we look at it, these are the main issues and problems that remain the focus of the media (remember I mentioned them at the start?) and thus, the general public. They were the focus in 1980, 1990, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and yeah, you guessed right, 2006, 2007, and 2150. Makes you wonder. Doesn't it?
Now, here comes the part I (also) mentioned earlier; the 'justify our existence' part.
What are we doing to address all these issues? I think about it, my little sister thinks about it, I know some of you think about it. Assuming all the readers of this email are socially conscious to a certain extent, I ask the question. I remember thinking about whether working toward 'betterment of mankind' is any nobler than say, oh, let's see, investment banking. I remember hearing arguments against it but made a case for the statement being true. 'Thinking beyond personal needs, thinking about who you are 'helping' etc. can be used here.' Having said this, there are people who work for/toward nobler causes as part of their job and there are people who work for them as a complement to their, let's say, 'investment banking' jobs. "As long as you are doing good, it doesn't matter whether you are doing it for personal gain and advancement or purely selfless reasons." I guess so. I will leave it there for fear of fiercer arguments.
(All this is going somewhere I promise)
This has been a particularly unsettling thought for me. I fall into the category of people working on such issues as an aside to their 'day job'. There is so much to do. Yet, here I am, working away on how to help Company X sell a product to improve its profits from $XB to $2XB. I tell you it is great fun working on this stuff, I love it. The problems are many fold and rising up to solve them takes effort etc etc. All fun stuff. All this fits in nicely with my analytical inclinations. But am I contributing to the UN Millennium Development Goals, the Copenhagen Consensus? Am I applying Francois Bourguignon's (come on don't you know who he is? :) Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle to address poverty issues? Don’t think so. But I want to. I really do. How do I do it?
Again, I thought about this ‘how’? My little sister asks me ‘how’? I am sure you wonder how (some of you anyway!)?
So I decided to work in this direction. I started off by sponsoring a little girl from the Dominican Republic. She sends me neat little drawings of her family, her toys along with the regular thank you notes. It is the little things you see!
Then off I went off to work on a proposal for fighting homelessness in urban India. Now I am in the process of putting this into practice in Chennai…ask me in about four months and I will try and get you to speak with the first rehabilitated beggar from Destitution Demolished (yeah, that is what I want to call it!)
Then off I went to go enroll in Engineers without Borders. My plan is to go to Tanzania next year on a rural development project as part of this. (This way I can do my Kilimanjaro climb too, while I’m there, though its another 5 days!)
Why am I telling you this? I see an interesting dynamic being played out here. It’s the symbiotic feedback from my job in multinational corporate America and my aspirations in the lesser developed parts of the world. My effort in one direction feeds off of the success in another.
‘Day job feeds night job’ sorta thing. I actually thought it would make my life more difficult with all the extra time commitments etc. Well, it did. But what is more important is the multi-faceted effort approach. You work on many things and results from them play off in permutations and combinations, providing you with a much richer result than before. Mind you, this is under the premise that you dedicate ‘substantial’ effort to each of your endeavours. That is the hidden catch that you are not forewarned about in many cases.
But if you are stubborn enough to dive in, it is very rewarding, I promise.
Do many things I kept saying to myself. Recently, I met someone who said their motto was ‘do great things’. I quite liked that. So now I modified my mantra to be ‘Do many great things’. Yepp, that sums up many things I want to do!
Try it folks, it is one approach that will leave you physically extended and chronologically scarce but mentally fulfilled, with a great sense of purpose. It is almost addictive, in a good way. (unlike, I’ve heard, Pot:)
Let me leave you with three sayings. One someone else said, one (I think) I managed to come up with and one a combination of mine and someone else’s.
1. “Sleep is a waste of time.”
2. “The least you can do is save the world.”
3. “Do many great things.”
Fin.
(I wonder how many of you actually came to the end. For those who did, hope this has been an entertaining read, at the very least. If it has been more, great:)
Happy new year! Eat, drink and be merry. If you do get a couple of seconds in the middle of that office party or that family gathering or that special moment with your girl / boy- friend, just give the three sayings (above) a little thought.
There, I wanted to start and end this with the concept of Thought (not such a ‘small’ train of thought after all, I guess)
posted by MC at 3:39 PM
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