‘Home’

I had started this blog almost two years back but I had not posted anything before this. This was mainly because of my apprehension regarding expressing my feelings through a platform and mainly fearing the negative responses which would have broke my spirits. But as it is said, time brings us to a position where we lose that power to reason with ourselves and so I am taking this leap of faith and starting my blog with this very first topic that is titled ‘Home’. This is just my thought process and I am not here to question anybody’s beliefs or emotional thought process, whether someone accepts my thinking or not is totally on the discretion of the reader and I do not expect you to accept or reject it.

So, what do we think when we hear the word home? If you ask me, the definition of home is maybe the place where I first resided. My mind gets flooded with the earliest and the oldest of pictures of the home we used to live in when I was maybe 2-3 years old. I still remember very scantly, pictures and moments spend there followed by the people around there. This is followed by the later stages of my life all in a bundle, mixed and in a bunch as if it was hardly important which is followed at the end by the most recent memories, last two years probably which is again containing a wide variety of incidents, people and feelings associated with those moments.

Why this wide spectrum of emotions based on just one word? Why isn’t there a single specific memory that defines the concept of home as simply as it is described by any english dictionary in the planet. This is because ‘home’ is not just a concept or a place or a situation. It is a bundle of emotions or feelings which has been invested in chunks at a certain stage of our life and in small parts in the other stages. When we think of a ‘home’, it is actually very difficult to clearly establish a meaning in our own mind just like the way I have not been able to explain it from my perspective till now through all these lines.

In contrast to the western society, we do not generally leave home right after we become adults. There is a reluctance among maximum people to leave the shade of our parents and live on our own, and even if we do, we keep a part of ourselves in that ‘house’ which keeps pulling us back until we reach a stage where we do not feel the same connect with the place anymore. The streets, the people, the building, the room, the bed, all of them which were once part of our daily chores becomes just a figment of our imagination. We do make it a point to always be connected to those people through technology, but does that come anywhere close to the physical connect?? Maybe no!

In all these years, I feel that I have met a large number of people and I feel this because I seldom forget people even if it is someone whom I might have met for a brief period of time. So what I could perceive from their thought processes is that the concept of a family and a home is totally different. Some may feel that home is a feeling and it keeps changing like the way our equations with people keeps changing every moment, but in reality the emotions that one associates with a home actually diminishes after a point till it reaches a stage where we do not long to go back and stay in that place anymore.

India being a developing country for a decade now, the opportunities one might get in this country may not be at par to what one might get in any western country. So, there is a growing trend among the youth to move out of the country at the earliest opportunity they get. Sometimes I really want to put myself in their place and go through their emotions while packing the bags before leaving home or while getting up from that bed for one last time or while travelling to the airport and peeping out through the window appreciating the beauty of the city sleeping on its past glories, for probably the very first time over the years, or the feeling of accomplishment one gets while coming back to home once throughout the year during a festival. That whirlwind of emotions might just be too much for me to take but it is not the same for certain people.

The problem does not lie in the fact  that one has to leave their abode and move out into the world, to face everything on their own, but the problem is the lack of appreciation for the things left behind in the course of time. We are gradually moving into a stage where emotions are diminishing. Blame it on technology or the society, but it is actually interesting to see how we felt for people maybe five years back is not the same now. Our thought process is changing( probably evolution of our minds just the way our body evolved). The best example of this can be seen in social media itself. Everyday we see thousands of pictures of war across Syria, Libya, Congo, Afghanistan, Tibet and many other places but our level of compassion is not the same for the victims of the war across all these places. We conveniently choose whom to feel for and whom to not feel for even though the atrocities they face are similar. We choose to spread the propaganda which best suits our ideologies or which suits the side we support.

From a sphere of ‘us’ to a sphere of ‘me’, we are all evolving into smart individuals who think from the brain rather than from the heart. Sophia, the very first humanoid robot who received the citizenship of Saudi Arabia recently is actually like an irony towards the society. Someday we will turn into humanoids without any feeling, with just intelligence just like Sophia, with zero compassion for each other, killing and butchering mentally and physically others who might not have a belief similar to us. This is exactly what is lacking in all of us today and the bad thing is that it keeps increasing everyday, every moment when we grow sick and tired of the things around us.

It takes a moment to appreciate what we have around us so why don’t we try doing it? All of us face problems in life, problems we hardly have anyone to share with, but why don’t we just try finding an alternative without concentrating on ‘our’ problems always. The value of relationships does not reside on how we are connected to people or our equations with people, rather it depends on the length we are ready to go to, to keep in touch with those people, the family which really matters to us. It does not necessarily mean calling them or talking to them everyday, but thinking about them everyday will change our perception of life to a certain extent. Coming out of that ‘me’ bubble and having a bit of compassion towards ‘others’ is extremely necessary for anyone who feels there is a lack in purpose in their life. However successful you might be, if you do not know how to appreciate the beauty of a family, of a home, you would never learn to be at peace with the situations around you.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to battlefields, why being in charge is not what it used to be

Starting with a quote by Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Motors, saying “It’s okay to have your eggs in one basket as long as you can control what happens to the basket”, it is very important to point out how the entire definition of a ‘leader’ has seen a dynamic shift over the past decade. But the title of this particular write up lends itself to a rather proactive implication. We need to understand that power is not coming to an end, but rather it is decreasing with the decreasing strength of traditionally powerful actors and the lessening of the longevity of their power caused by certain external factors that have come into the picture currently or in the recent past.

Power is a sense of authority which a person exercises on others to influence them to behave in a certain manner which they would not have behaved in, in any general situation. If we pick up bits and pieces from the past we can see the authenticity of this definition as the manner in which power had come to coalesce in large democracies, bureaucracies, large organisations and even in our own society. There has always been a preference for a ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ mentality for decades among people, but gradually we are noticing a change which in turn has sent the whole concept of power to a topsy turvy turn.

Now dissecting the quote by Elon Musk, one major point which comes forward is that, Musk’s quote does not actually have any added implication over the eggs whereas he is more concerned about the basket as a whole. This in comparison to the extreme autocratic powers exercised by someone like Hugo Chavez who was there in power just a few years ago, shows the gradual shift in the mentality and the dynamism in the concept of power.

Chavez is one of the leading examples of the modern world where autocratic power has seen a huge wave of change over the years. Someone who came into the picture as a sole leader with maximum support from the Venezuelan lower class, had actually received only 54 percent of the votes in his last contested election in 2012. A leader as powerful and as dynamic as Chavez, might have been more of a Hitler or Mussolini if it was in the early 90’s, but he actually was nowhere close to being a supreme dictator even though he had potential to.

One reason behind this could be the method of dissemination of power among people. Today’s leaders do not depend on instilling fear as a method of influencing masses by taking negative reinforcements, rather they believe in a more friendly and acceptable approach to gain the support of the masses. It is more like the exercise or longevity of power will not take place if the masses are not satisfied. So the whole structure of scaler chain has been reformed and is being reformed so as we speak. Bureaucracies are not what it used to be ten years back. A CEO or MD of a company who used to be more of an invisible figure with a sole power and proprietorship in an organization has now become a manager who maintains an open line of communication with his/her subordinates directly or indirectly through further group leaders assigned to every departments or groups.

There are basically three concepts that are degrading the acquiring and maintaining of power in different organisational structures. These are More, Mobility and Mentality revolutions. Globalisation is practically the basic reason behind the occurrence of these concepts making it less valuable as one cannot accomplish as much with it as before. There is ‘more’ of everything now, creating a condition where there are more things, more factors and more people than one can manage. Along with this, everything is more ‘mobile’ now domestically and internationally resulting in people evading leaders to gain access to resources and finally with time, mentality of individuals is also changing and they are now able to compare their conditions with the condition of other people outside their demography, making them less willing to submit to those who have traditionally exercised power over them.

Revolution of mentality is one of the main reasons behind this whole transitional shift. The most prominent example can be Syrian President Bashar Al Assad who used every possible negative reinforcement to curb any sort of opposition against his regiment and opted for an indirect dictatorship. But his efforts did not bear any fruitful results as there was a huge outcry against his methods and this in turn resulted in one of the biggest civil wars in the recent history of our planet. The change in mentality is exactly what motivated the Syrian people to revolt against the thousands of war crimes and unjust methods adopted by Assad.

Summing it up, it will not be correct to say that autocracy of power or supreme power is totally dead and people do not aspire to have power in recent times. There are still political structures such as in the Republic of China or in North Korea and bureaucratic corporations such as Google, Facebook and Goldman Sachs where supreme power is still concentrated in the hands of a single person or a single group.  But the most important point is that, with time this scope and nature of power has been curtailed due to certain external factors.

No one is supreme now in context to powers as there is someone over everyone and the structure is never ending. Be it a Vishal Sikka or a Cyrus Mistry or Rahul Yadav, there are numerous examples of attritions of CEO’s in modern bureaucracy. This is a clear indication that the structure of power in the world is shifting from Alexander the great to Hitler and Mussolini to Hugo Chavez from Vladimir Putin to Barack Obama from Llyod Blankfein to Zuckerberg.

This is the whole essence of the topic and I would finish it in one sentence saying that power is not dead, but it is not as unlimited as it used to be. Today’s leaders do not look to influence the eggs in the basket to hatch by the use of fear, rather they believe in influencing the structure in which the eggs reside, which is the basket!