Knowing the Unknown: Part 1 - The unknown

This blog is the first part of a six (or maybe seven) part series on a topic that I have been contemplating for a while now. I initially thought I could cover it in a single post, but as I started jotting down my thoughts, it became clear that it may exceed the standard length of a blog post and hence has been split. Hopefully you'll have the time and patience to read this, as I am curious to get your feedback.

Recently while on a trip in India with my dad, we were getting late to get back home and I wanted to skip a shrine that we had intended to stop at originally due to lack of time. Now the trip itself was back from another temple and hence my rationale was that it was probably not a big deal. My dad, the pious man that he is, thought otherwise. He was quite disappointed at the prospect of not making a stop and told me that I would be damned if I don't.

The comment threw me a bit off-guard. I've known him to be quite religious and spiritual, but never to a point of accusing someone of damnation. It got me into thinking what brought the change in him and more importantly, why he considered it to be so severe a crime, especially since we were just back from other temples.

I noticed that the statements he made were consistent with other utterances from many religious leaders over time on what would happen if we don't take time to stop and pray. This made me feel that there must be some pattern that governs this behavior. What I have written below is an analysis and identification of that pattern.

The unknown

I feel that the root of core most of our thought processes is an awareness of the unknown. Right from the moment we humans gained the ability to think, our thought has been devoted to try to know what we don't know yet and attempt to make it known.

Now, you can go about accepting the unknown in one of two ways - fear it or have a curiosity to understand it. In most cases, our instinct is by default to fear and then, potentially to understand. This behavior can be easily observed in children - when you bring a new object to them, they either fear it or take it apart to see what it is.

Typically, we tend to get over the fear over time and convert it into curiosity. The change could be brought over either by time (tired of being afraid) or by collective effort (enough people sharing the fear band together to overcome the common fear).

So, what do we do with either our fears or our curiosity? That's for the next post.

The plague of plagiarism

Recently, I came across a sad incident. A very good friend of mine had to shut her cooking blog that she loved so much because of the plague of plagiarism. I have known her since she married my friend. Over the years, she had developed a taste for cooking and started her own blog on cooking, complete with recipes she tried along with beautiful pictures of her creations. The blog went on to win quite a few awards and gave her good recognition within her 'cooking blog' peer group. More than awards, I felt she got personal satisfaction out of putting her recipes to print and sharing it with her friends and admirers.

A year or so back, she found out that a popular food website had taken one of her recipes and posted it on its own without a single line of credit. Her polite request to give her proper acknowledgment was met with indifference. Incensed, she posted the conversation on her site, eventually forcing the website to pull that recipe down. This was her first encounter with plagiarism.

I believe the next major encounter (maybe there were others in between that I do not know of) has what has led her to the decision of making her blog private. This time it was another person who had copied many of her recipes and posted on her own blog once again without any acknowledgment of the source. When questioned, the argument the copier posed was interesting - since almost everyone plagiarizes in one form or the other - be it a download or a torrent, what's wrong in her doing so? A good question indeed, but I don't think one that is fair by any means.

I have encountered blatant plagiarism while in college, probably the fertile playground for plagiarism. Couple of my friends in college copied my assignment in one of my favorite subjects and gave it to the professor. Like in most colleges now, my prof had a software to identify potential 'copies' and true enough, he found strong similarities between the three of our assignments. It was a C program where the logic was the same, but the difference was in variable names! The prof pulled us aside and gave all of us an 'F'. He was quite disappointed at me because I was getting consistent A+s in his subject. Probably for that sole reason he gave me a reprieve and told me that I can make up my grades if I did well in the next assignment, which thankfully I did. In this case, I never intended to copy or to be copied. I had given my assignment for 'reference' to my friends, who unfortunately, referred it a bit too much. So, whose fault was it - mine or theirs?

In this day of torrents, downloads, YouTube videos, and pirated CDs, it is very easy for our moral compass to point in the wrong direction. It has become so easy to flick someone else's work that it barely registers in our brain that what we are doing is wrong. Internet has made it so easy to get information that we forget that what we read or download is someone's hard work.

Even before the Internet, we used to do all this. We copied tapes. We photocopied books. Plagiarism was still there, but it was just a lot harder earlier.

As an author of a book, I know how much time and effort it takes to write a book. Unless your book sells like Harry Potter, the amount effort that's put in is highly disproportionate to the return that's obtained in the form of royalty. I spent almost 1 - 2 years intermittent effort (roughly 4-8 hours a week) to get a royalty of around $50!

But getting back to the point, was the person justified in arguing that since we plagiarize in one form or the other, we should not complain when someone plagiarizes our work? I don't think so.

Whether we care to admit or not, we are all hypocrites. We preach something and do something just the opposite. We proclaim that bribery is bad, but if it gets our work done, we are fine with it. We claim that nepotism is bad, but if our relatives get a good job, we are fine with it. We claim that favoritism is evil, but if we get preferred treatment that we don't deserve by merit, we are fine with it. This is not going to change.

However, what we do try is to change our slowly, over generations. While it may be too late for us to correct our mistakes, we try our best to ensure that our children are taught the right morals and hope that they will be better than us. While we may curse, we tell our children not to. That's what makes us human. By nature, we try to make our next generation better.

Thus, if not for the sake of ourselves, we need to start cultivating better habits so that our next generation has something to look forward to and not wallow in the same muddy waters that we are in. That would be my argument to the person who stole my friend's recipes, and more importantly, my friend's sense of trust in others. By setting a bad example, we may still survive, but we are just making the world a little worse down the road.

We cannot change a lot of things about ourselves, but there are some simple things that we can. One is to say "Thank you" to others when they offer a helping hand. The other is to acknowledge someone's work by thanking them for providing inspiration or information. It does not make our contribution any less important, rather it just makes us better humans.

And to my friend, I would say this as well - incidents like this will happen. If we let us be disillusioned by this, we are only robbing our next generation of our courage and our creativity. It is too precious to be robbed. Let's not give those with faulty judgment that pleasure.

A better definition of Learning

Webster and Oxford define learning as "knowledge or skill acquired by instruction or study". Most of our lives are governed by this definition - from pre-school all the way to adulthood, including certifications. While this is a decent definition, it does not exactly cover all aspects of learning, does it? How about learning by mistakes? How about the 'Eureka!' moments that you go through when you are in the bath tub? How about learning from others' learning?

We see glimpses of these types of learning either embedded in the generic definition of learning or as an addendum to the 'taught' learning process, such as team discussions typically done in business schools. However, due to the generally accepted notion of learning, not much emphasis is given on these other forms. This can be an issue because we tend to lose significant opportunities to learn in our child and adulthood by focusing only on rote learning and not the other options of learning.

Can we do better? Yes, we can. In fact, we don't have to look far. A much more precise definition of learning has been given in the Sanskrit literature, which amazed me when I first came across it as part of Prof. B. Mahadevan in his article on Sanskrit and Business Management that I blogged about earlier. Here's the verse, and my visual depiction of the verse.

In English,

Aachaaryaat paadamaadatthe paadam sishyah svamedhayaa
Paadam sabrahmachaaribyo paadam kaalakramena cha

Sounds Sanskrit? Here's the breakdown (thanks to my brother, who can actually understand as opposed to just reading it!):

aacharyaat - from the guru
paadam - quarter
aadatte - receives
paadam - quarter
shishya: - student
sva medhayaa - by his own intelligence
paadam - quarter
sabrahmachaaribhi: - from his fellow students
paadam - quarter
kaala kramena - by time
ca - and

Essentially, learning is defined as one quarter teaching, one quarter self study, one quarter group study, and one quarter done over time. Can you be more precise?!

Taught
If you think a bit, you can see the depth of the meaning that is described so beautifully here. You learn from your teacher. This is the one that is done formally through the education system.

Self-Study
Then you reflect on the thoughts be they coming from the teacher, of your own volition, or from your surroundings. A classic example of this would be the 'Eureka!' moment that Aristotle had when he was sitting in his bath tub. How many times have you had such moments when you were driving or when you were on the shower? Many a times, I have found myself honing my ideas or thoughts better, be it related to my work or personal life when I just sit back and think about it. Maybe emphasis on meditation in Sanskrit was to promote this form of learning.

Group Study
You also learn from your peers, a concept established successfully by the 'Hole in the wall' experiment by Sugata Mitra. While we do this in school most times, there is sadly very little emphasis on the power of such learning. Normally, we are encouraged to do things by ourselves than as a group. On the contrary, you can see most business schools put a lot more emphasis on group discussions, potentially to unlock this form of learning. I remember my college days where a bunch of my friends used to study through the night (in the middle of watching a variety of serials that come late night ;)) weeks before the final exam. It helped me personally and I believe the group in general as well (we all got really good grades!).

Over Time
Lastly, there is the process of learning over time, either by way of experience or by way of history. As the famous quote goes, "those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it" - true words, embedded in this stanza ages ago. Most projects take some time to 'learn' from successes or failures of previous projects.

Years back, computer scientist Peter Naur wrote a paper titled "Programming as theory building" - one of the best articles I've read, and something that holds true even today, even in completely different contexts. Essentially, he argues 'swappable' resources are not a great idea. His argument is that each programmer builds a mental model or theory about his program during the course of development. In most cases, this model is seldom documented or communicated with other resources (primarily due to the difficulty in expressing the model in words). As a result, when the programmer leaves, the theory leaves with him, essentially resulting in another programmer building another theory (or rarely, the same theory) from scratch. How many times have you looked at a piece of code and wondered what the heck the programmer was thinking?!

I found this concept in a completely different setting, in a book called The art of game design by Jesse Schell. In the book, the author describes a concept called Flow Channel identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and they say my name is hard to pronounce!), which is the basis for levels in a game - more on this in another blog.

So, in effect, our education system is really tapping into only 25% of the whole learning process. Imagine how it would be to tap into the whole process?! I wonder when we will learn that the learning provided by our learned ancestors would facilitate better learning for the future generations.

Management in Sanskrit literature

A few weeks back my brother sent me a lecture delivered by Prof. B. Mahadevan who works at IIM Bangalore. The topic is "What constitutes good management - Lessons from ancient Sanskrit scriptures" delivered as part of the "Sanskrit and Science" series. The first couple of paragraphs unfortunately a bit dry (probably due to the transcription of a lecture) and hence I promptly shelved it for a later time. While on a flight today, I came across the article that I had almost forgotten, and I am glad I took the time to go beyond the first page.
In the lecture, Mahadevan lists five primary qualities for a person pursuing management skills, namely

1. Ability to visualize the big picture
2. Systematic approach to problem solving
3. Attitude towards learning as a way of life
4. Managing short-term vs long-term conflicts and
5. Having leadership traits

I think this is a fairly neat and relatively concise way to look at management skills. He goes further to explain how each of these concepts is explained in various Sanskrit scriptures and how they are relevant even in this day and age. Here is a quick rundown.

Ability to visualize the big picture

One of the striking quality of Hindu scriptures is the concept of providing multiple viewpoints to a single idea, thereby providing an option for the reader to pick and choose the idea he sees close to his mental picture, while still achieving the same goal. There are various philosophies within the Hindu system that talk about salvation, although the path taken is completely different. It is interesting that the ancestors have thought of these myriad possibilities and listed them rather than emphasizing on a single idea.

In one classic example, the vishwarupa (literally magnanimous form) of Lord Krishna in Mahabharata is described as "the light shining from a thousand sunrises", an expression that Robert Oppenheimer quoted when witnessing the first atom bomb blast. There are numerous other examples where the vastness of time and space are explored in detail while sitting in a corner of this world.

Such "big picture" thinking is now deemed as an important quality for a good manager.

Systematic approach to problem solving

Mathematics has been embedded in various Sanskrit literatures. Not only have they thought big, they have also taken pains to categorize the vastness and also provide a proper system to calibrate it. Even more amazingly, in Rig Veda, one of the most ancient Sanskrit scriptures, the speed of light has been calculated as 3.020263x10^8 m/s, an extremely close approximation of the current definition!

As Mr. Mahadevan surmises, this systematic approach seems to stem from the spirit of inquiry that is encouraged within the scriptures themselves. Scriptures such as Katha Upanishad and Prashna Upanishad are written in a question-answer format, that promote this idea strongly.
As an example, Mr. Mahadevan quotes a stanza from Lilavati by Bhaskaracharya, where proper nomenclature is given for number systems ranging from 10^0 to 10^17. Remember, this was written hundreds of years ago!

Similarly, in Bhagavatam, another popular Sanskrit scripture, nomenclature has been given for time ranging from 10^-6 seconds to 10^17 years.

Learning as a way of life

Sanskrit and pretty much everything else in the past was taught in Gurukulams, literally meaning the teacher's residence. In the past, learning happened by way of apprenticeship, wherein the students will stay at the teacher's place for a prolonged period of time and learn various skills.

Mr. Mahadevan quotes an amazing verse that defines the idea of learning: Learning is one fourth taught by teacher, one fourth learnt by self-reflection and thinking, one fourth by group study, and one fourth is learnt over time.

This, I feel, is an excellent and probably a very accurate way to think about how we learn. Personally, when I was in college, I used to learn part by reading by myself and part by doing 'group study' with my friends, which I felt greatly enhanced by learning as well. A similar conclusion was reached by Sugata Mitra in his experiment "Hole in the wall" (the idea behind the book Q&A by Vikas Swarup, which was the inspiration for the Oscar winning movie, Slumdog Millionaire). I hope to expand on this in another blog post.

Understanding that learning is something that happens over time and not just in an instant provides a level of humility and also alerts one to be constantly on the lookout for new knowledge.

Managing short-term vs. long-term conflicts

As Mr. Mahadevan states, Hindu philosophy itself is one long conflict between short-term goals and long-term goals. The idea of living the current birth while reincarnating multiple births before reaching salvation provides a great analogy for this concept. The concept of karma accumulating over time and birth and the prospect of managing it well in this life to facilitate future ones is not dissimilar from a manager weighing in short-term gains to long-term gains.

Leadership traits

Finally, every manager needs to have some leadership qualities (which unfortunately, is lacking in most politicians today). As Mr. Mahadevan shows, Sanskrit scriptures explain the idea of leading by example and having an emotional balance in multiple places to highlight this idea.
Over the years, I have wondered why Indians (and Asians in general) tend to be more 'doers' than 'leaders'. While I have thought that it was mainly because of the submissive past (most Asian countries were colonies of the Western world), it looks like the root problem is more because of the educational system that is in place in these countries that focus more on rote learning instead of creativity. While the Western world seems to have rectified this error (after all, the current system is based on British learning system), they seem to now have erred too much towards creativity, thereby creating a void in analytical skills. It looks like what we need in our educational system is a right balance of the two.

So, if the ancient Sanskrit scriptures contain so much wisdom over a wide range of topics that are relevant even today, why aren't people, especially Indians who are close to it, look at them with vigor?

As Mr. Mahadevan states at the end, Sanskrit can nowadays be learnt in two phases of life - one as part of collegiate and graduate studies by students taking special interest in the subject, and two, as an adult who has established a secure future by other means. Since the Indian society largely favors careers oriented towards a secure job (such as IT, medicine, and engineering), it would be very hard for students to make Sanskrit literature as their career.

So, the only other and probably the most viable option is for professionals who have a secure job (the same IT, medicine, or engineering) to take up Sanskrit at least as a hobby and start learning so that they can unlock many more mysteries that it may hold.

On a side note, I have also wondered why the people who have provided so much wisdom preferred an oral mechanism of passing on the information through generations instead of a secure written mechanism. I have an idea why, and hopefully that'll be the topic for another blog!

In the meanwhile, I strongly encourage you to read Mr. Mahadevan's lecture, excusing the spelling mistakes at the end and relatively dry start. It's well worth your time. My only niggle is that the transcript does not explain the verses he quotes in more detail.

Vermont Teddy Bears - not as USA anymore?

After a gap of a few years, my wife and I traveled to the New England area to see the fall colors. I have always enjoyed going to Vermont/New Hampshire area (have been there 4-5 times now). The natural landscape is spectacular, especially during this season, the people are very friendly, and more importantly, the area still carries a lot of rustic charm that seems to be eroding in the urban areas. If anyone wants to visit the 'real' USA, at least as imagined based on past classics that are still popular in India such as Archie comics, this area is a great place to start.

Our trip was quite productive, with lots and lots of fall colors everywhere and the weather cooperated beautifully. We tried to go through as many of the local roads as possible, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fall colors in all its splendor. Ironically, I felt the colors were far more vibrant along the interstates (especially I-89 and I-91) than the local roads. One exception was the loop of Burlington-Hanksville-Waitsfield-Waterbury, which was amazingly beautiful with extremely vibrant colors - I highly recommend the drive.

I have always been pleasantly surprised by the ingenuity and local entrepreneurship in this region, the two most famous being the Ben & Jerry ice cream company and the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. In the face of increasing globalization, these two companies seemed to stand bravely, protecting the American brand proudly. However, during this time, I had a bit of a shock to find both these thoughts shattered somewhat.

Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Founded by two friends a few decades back, B&J was awarded the "Small business persons of the country" award a way back. The guys started the company small and grew fairly big. I was quite disappointed to hear that the company is now owned by Unilever - a fairly huge conglomerate of companies.

While they still seem to do their best to keep the 'local' flavor of the company alive, I cannot but help feel that commercialization has taken over this company as well. Thankfully, the ice cream still tastes the same :)

Vermont Teddy Bear
This is probably my biggest disappointment and the reason for this post. As some of you may or may not know, "teddy bear" got its name from a cartoon depicting "Theodore "teddy" Roosevelt", former American President, an avid game hunter, who could not bear himself to shoot a cub tied to a tree (by his cohorts, as he was not getting any wild animal that day).

Since then, teddy bears became quite popular. One day, a person named John Sortino wanted to get a teddy bear for his son and found that he could not buy one that was made in USA, thereby starting his own company to make some.

The company has prided itself in its small-town values and 'Made in USA' brand. Having been deluged every day with products from Asia, I was happy to do my bit to promote local products and suggested to my wife that she get herself a bear, even though it was slightly over-priced (fair enough, since they don't mass produce stuff and the quality is good).

Here came the shocker. In the "build-a-bear" section of the company, half of the options were 'imported' (read 'made in Vietnam')! The other half were all a new type of bear concept called 'Flattie' - which honestly, looked as if a Teddy Bear was put under a steamroller.

There was absolutely no decent 'made in USA' option that we could buy. As I looked at others around me, including all the children, everyone was making a beeline for the 'imported' options, as they looked more like teddy bears and less like flattened pancakes.

Worse, there was a 'charity' bear (buy 1 and they give another to the local fireman's association or something similar). I was quite impressed and thought I'll get one of those - only to find that they were also not made in USA!

I mean, why promote the company as "made in USA" when half the options are not so and the ones available look nowhere like teddy bears? Calling them 'exchange students' and 'imported' does not make it any better or glorified. It's still not made in USA.

I still pressed forward and picked up a 'flattie' hoping that when stuffed it'll look somewhat like a bear - no dice. It still was as flat (esp. the nose/mouth area) as it was put under a steamroller.

At the end of the day, I walked back with a heavy heart, light wallet (the 'imported' ones were the same price as the 'local' ones), and a flattened bear - not the feeling I was hoping for. I am sad that yet another 'local' company has succumbed to the globalization.

UPDATE: A day after I posted the blog, Wendy from the company was kind enough to respond to the post and clarify some of my statements. As she mentions, the issue I had was mainly with the "friend for life" section of the factory and not the entire store itself. There are definitely a lot of authentic bears to choose from. It also appears that the 'flatties' are available only in the store and not elsewhere. I am definitely very impressed with the courtesy of the staff as well as their professionalism and wish them the very best in future. Oh, did I also mention that all teddy bears have a 'life-time' guarantee (except if you put your teddy in a dryer)?! That's something you don't see anywhere else.