Occasional Vacation ..

So another term at L came to an end. Term4 ended and before i realised the vacation also ended and here i am in day1 of Term5 ! This term is practically the end of MBA as Term6 am sure would vanish before i even acknowledge its existence.

This post like all other posts these days is about the books i read and the learning i got from them. It is just a quick summary for myself when i look back at this sometime later and a small incentive for someone who is interested in these topics :).

So like i mentioned in the previous post of mine i did finish the book by Guha. I particularly liked the following pieces from the articles on Tagore, Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan.

The Tagore quote:

This piece by tagore from one of his essays somehow appealed a lot to me. This definitely is a problem with some of the indian intellectuals of today. I myself have encountered such line of thought from some folks who believe that old is gold and nothing else is gold but the old :P

That our forefathers, three thousand years ago, had finished extracting all that was of value from the universe, is not a worthy thought. We are not so unfortunate, nor the universe, so poor. Had it been true that all that is to be done has been done in the past once for all then our continued existence could only be a burden to the earth and so would not be possible.

“Village Republics”

I had read about Gandhi’s idea of village republics before. This was more of a revision on that and i dont remember documenting about this on my blog before. So this is his vision for the country in short.. the detailed version ofcourse is far more detailed :P ..

Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus, every village will be a republic or panchayat having full powers. It follows, therefore, that every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world. It will be trained and prepared to perish in the attempt to defend itself against any onslaught from without.

Thus, ultimately, it is the individual who is the unit. This does not exclude dependence on and willing help from neighbours or from the world. It will be free and voluntary play of mutual forces. Such a society is necessarily highly cultured in which every man and woman knows what he or she wants and what is more, knows that no one should want anything that others cannot have with equal labour.

In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever-widening, never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance, but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.

Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan also elaborated further on this idea of self reliant village republics as seen here. I should confess that i didn’t care to read much about JP before reading Guha’s book. In the sense i knew that such and such a character existed and he was very famous during the emergency period etc etc .. but i never really paid a lot of attention to his thought and ideas. Very inspiring personality he is. Somehow i feel our system of education hasn’t put enough focus in terms of sharing the wisdom of these great people with the younger generations.

It is so uncool to talk about all this these days. I know already some of the readers would have slept by now or they would have skipped this section altogether ! .. Guha did do a good thing by writing that book of his. We need constant reminders about our great men .. else there will definitely be a day when we would say .. JP is the Lok Satta chap and forget about the original man himself !

The book by Rajni Bakshi and the one by E.F.Schumacher:

In Sep 2009 i bought this book by Rajni Bakshi titled “Bazaars Conversations and Freedom”. I somehow had a tough time reading it back then as i barely knew any economics beyond the first line of my Class V/VI social studies economics lesson “man’s wants are unlimited” :P .. moreover i was not well versed with all the mba financial jargon related to markets. Now that i am done with 2/3rds of my MBA i can understand this stuff much better. During this term break ( which incidentally is Sep 2011 .. exactly 2yrs after i purchased the book) .. i was generally on the lookout for stuff to read at home and started off with this one. A very well written book. Though i am not sure of how much of the author’s original thought is there behind the book .. full marks to the author for coming up with this volume that covers the basics of everything related to that topic.

I wanted to write a full length post on my learnings from this book. But due to paucity of time ( I am a busy man ! :P ) and also owing to the fact that the book has a very well maintained website i really didnt see any need in writing the same stuff all over again. So for those of you who are interested in reading the book .. please go to this website to know more about the book. Like the title clearly says the book is about a “Market culture beyond greed and fear”. It talks a lot about the good and bad of free market .. this section is particularly a must read for  people who believe in the idea that free market is the be-all and end-all of everything and the markets and the invisible hand can take care of the welfare of the whole society.

So while i was reading this book.. somewhere there was a mention of many good articles,speeches and books. Like i had posted on my fb page .. the speech by Bill Gates and the article by Amitai Etzioni are a must-read. ( I know how exactly you are feeling .. The world is full of so many must-read things ! :P) . So the author also draws heavily here and there from the book “Small is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered ” by E.F.Schumacher. Now this was one book which should have been on my to-read list from a long time but somehow never made it there ;) .. I instantly recollected the fact that this book was referred to multiple times by Prof.Sushil Kumar during his course on Business Sustainability and during the Ethics workshop before that in Year1. So i found this pdf on the internet and finished this book as well in the vacation . The book is there in the IIM-L library as well .. (this is for those of you from L who are reading this post ;) ).

The book is wonderful.. very thought provoking. Though it draws upon a lot from the stuff spoken by people like Gandhi and a lot many others .. it is nevertheless a refreshingly well written book.  And needless to say … the man E.F.Schumacher who wrote the book is legendary and i am all curious to read more of his stuff.

Conclusion on the book reading exercise of term4.. the learning and all that

I am somehow very happy and satisified with all that i read in Term4. And the fact that i could find the inter linkages amongst all the stuff i was trying to read in the last 3-4 months is very satisfying. Some of the questions that have troubled me from a long time and more so after my MBA started have been answered .. atleast partly. If someone asked me which is the term i loved the most in my MBA i would perhaps say Term4 .. i have this genuine feeling of having learnt something this term! .. Ofcourse a lot of this learning is not related to the core MBA curriculum .. but learning is learning no? :P

The things up next on this path are ..

• To get a better understanding of the work of Leopold Kohr ( E.F.Schumacher was his student) ..

• To read more on stuff like Distributism .. I think this is where i would place myself ideologically. Not that i am the president or prime minister or the next karl marx :P .. but i think it is important to have a ideology and a belief system for oneself :D . To give a brief about distributism .. please refer to the pic below. One way of looking at it is Pic1 is the Socialist/Communist model where more often than not power gets concentrated at the State or at one larger than life dictator .. Pic2 is the Capitalist form where we have pockets of private ownership and Pic3 is the Distributist model . Now Pic3 is where i will put all the stuff that E.F.Schumacher talks about in his book or the Self-reliant village republics of  Gandhi, JP etc or Tagore ‘s co-operative dream (i referred to this one in the July post here .. So you see the connection right? :P ).

• To understand the arguments of Neo-Luddites ( Neo-Luddism is a personal world view opposing any modern technology that displaces workers and increases unemployment). I am increasingly getting a feeling that i belong to this group :P .. my thoughts seem to resonate with what the neo-luddite thinkers of our era say (I can hear some moans and groans .. “Halley are you alright ??” .. “Comeon man .. there is a limit for this intellectual showoff ?? ” :P ).  I am mighty impressed with Kirkpatrick Sale and his views on this topic.

There is so much to be read and so little time ! :(

PS1:  I also did finish the book mentioned in the prev. post .. “Learning to pray in the age of technique” by Goncalo M Tavares. Interesting book … though it wasn’t on the lines i expected it to be. I somehow find parallels between this book and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s “Guzaarish” ;). The style is very literary. Some of the philosophical musings on the modern world.. machines etc are very profound.

PS2: Farooq Abdullah says “I am very young and can do all sorts of things that even youngsters cannot do” on the Sports Bill thingie. How Disgusting ! :P.

PS3: “The biggest way to cut the environmental impact of cleaning clothes, however, is to stop using a clothes dryer. Drying laundry outside on a line, Tesco says, will cut the carbon footprint of every load by a whopping 4.4 pounds” .. Indian way of life rox i say! .. Sad a lot of us are taking to washing machines now .. atleast the drying part is taken care of i believe ;) . And more on the Indian way of life ..

PS4: PET Bottles are called pet bottles because of “Polyethylene terephthalate” … Sad it took me 25yrs to know this.. all this while i was thinking they were called so because they can be carried along like you carry your pets :P

PS5: “Potato chips or silicon chips who cares they are both chips” .. What a quote ! .. Google that to know more ;)

PS6: CGSwara – Commendable effort indeed !