The real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs

In a long instructive piece, the biographer of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, tries to draw out the real lessons from his life and his leadership success.

"His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney."

His greatest achievement was making Apple as an enduring company. But what were the real keys to his success?

1. Focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. By getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.” Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions.

2. Simplify

Jobs’s Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. Jobs aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity. Achieving this depth of simplicity, he realized, would produce a machine that felt as if it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than challenging them. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”

3. Take Responsibility End to End

Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated.

4. When Behind, Leapfrog

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. That happened when Jobs built the original iMac. He focused on making it useful for managing a user’s photos and videos, but it was left behind when dealing with music. But instead of merely catching up by upgrading the iMac’s CD drive, he decided to create an integrated system that would transform the music industry. The result was the combination of iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the iPod, which allowed users to buy, share, manage, store, and play music better than they could with any other devices.

5. Put Products Before Profits

When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to make it “insanely great.” He never spoke of profit maximization or cost trade-offs. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” he told the original team leader : Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.

6. Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups

When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained.

7.Bend Reality

Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force.

8. Impute

Jobs’s early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people do judge a book by its cover,” he told me.

9. Push for Perfection

During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it wasn’t perfect. “Real artists sign their work,” he said.

10. Tolerate Only “A” Players

Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around.

11. Engage Face-to-Face

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

12. Know Both the Big Picture and the Details.

Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design.

13.Combine the Humanities with the Sciences

He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.

14. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

 Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel.

 “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

When we are patients

In the past I have written a great deal about sicknesses, doctors and caregivers that help us deal when we are patients. I realize that I have never written a column about the patients point of view in all this, though I did write a book “ Straight from the Heart” that was entirely from the patients point of view! But it is true that I have never written a blog about it. Anyway I have always wondered what sick patients think about as they lie in their hospital beds and doctors move in and out? What are their thoughts after the relatives and friends have left? Do they ponder their past or worry about the future? What do they worry about ? Money? Who will look after the family? Funeral arrangements? A complete recovery?

Even as I was contemplating this, Fate jumped in with a cruel twist, and I was hit with a triple whammy. A Delhi viral fever weakend me sufficiently to fall victim to the Shingle virus, which in turn infected the bladder to require catherization. In a short space of ten days, I went from a reasonably functioning vertical man to a almost completely dysfunctional horizontal man. 

I could now do my own research, I wryly observed to myself as I lay in bed.

The first thing that happens when you are patient is that your entire universe contracts . It actually shrinks rapidly only to your immediate family. World events leave you cold, even though you may have been an avid follower of the daily news. You tend to ignore newspapers and magazines, and unread books pile up beside your bedside. Your mind is fully concentrated on you and your disease, completely impervious to other more world shaking issues. It is a time of complete narcissism. And you rapidly become the most selfish person in the world.

The reason for this retreat to a different self is the pain that most difficult diseases accompany. A little twinge that you would have dismissed when vertical, become of earthshaking importance when you are laid low. Sometimes you lie still in bed hoping that shafts of pain will somehow miss you. Or when you move,  it is with utmost gingerness lest some parts in your body get displaced. Each little path, even to the nearest bathroom becomes a momentous trek requiring great planning and precise movements. Even when in bed, you turn around with great care lest you let loose some unforeseen and unknown pang of pain.

Not only are your thoughts solely about avoiding any pain, they are completely empty. You lie on the sofa in front of a constantly on TV, yet you hear almost none of the programs. You doze in and out but there are no dreams – only blackness and blankness.

Sometimes when the pain becomes too sharp, you do dream of happier days and times. Or at least you try to, if you want to survive. Other times you may just hug yourself to sleep and cry in solitude bemoaning your fate. A creative time it is not.

And then in your wakeful moments you realize that life is running along- there is food on the table (or served on your bed), the house is clean, somebody is doing the shopping. There is someone tending to your every need, even if your answers are in the monosyllabic. She is beside you when the pain becomes overwhelming and she knows when your depression is unusually deep. She will then quietly organize your children to call you to cheer you up; and stretch her hand to hold yours in the middle of the night.

As you gradually recover and become somewhat human, you begin to notice the courage and fortitude, the thoughfullness and love that underlie this. Yet the sheer burden of carrying the entire load – of nurse, cook, provider, cleaner- is clearly evident even as she sits besides you massaging your back while she hides her own pains from you. As I noted her exhaustion, I  ventured to ask her “ Why?”

Her reply: “ I expect you to do the same for me”

The power of friendships

Some months ago I wrote of high powered women in India who seemed to have everything - a brilliant career, immense wealth, high status in society- but were not married. One of the things I had noted then was how all of them spent considerable time and effort in building and maintaining their network of friends. Here is wonderful piece by Emily Rapp, which makes the same point. Here is her story of the "Wrinklies".

"In 1997 I arrived in Geneva to work for a year at the headquarters of a relief organization. Feeling overwhelmed by my job and lonely in a city of overworked expats passing through for two to three year stints at the United Nations or other organizations with the rather nebulous goal of “changing the world,” I made friends with a group of women. I was 22, and all three women — one American, one German, and one Argentinean – were 30 years older than I and had worked for the same organization in various administrative capacities for the length of time I’d been alive. After one lengthy, boozy dinner of fondue and buckets of white wine, they quickly took me into their friendship fold and jokingly referred to themselves as “the Wrinklies.”

All three women (and myself as well) were unmarried, living alone, and working to assist people in real need in countries around the world.  Despite the fact that I immediately felt accepted, supported, challenged and nurtured by each of them, when I first joined their weekly dinner group, I felt sorry for them. They weren’t married, they weren’t mothers – and at this time, and up until very recently, I clung to the belief that this constituted some failure on their part. They found me equally mystifying. Was I really worried about the size of my ass or trying to finagle a recent date with a man they thought (from my description) was boring and slightly odious? (He was.) Was it a good use of my time, they wondered, to hang out in bars getting smashed and looking to score and by doing this (they were rightfully doubtful) find “the love of my life” when I said I wanted to be a writer? Sure, sure, I said, but I dismissed their concerns, and mourned what I interpreted as their missed opportunities to have a real life, which I assumed would only start for me when I was married and a mother. I loved them, but in my mind I was remembering that old phrase I’d heard for most of my life, in hushed and shameful tones: old maid. I was also keen to make my life look “normal” and “acceptable” in some way because I have a disability; if I didn’t get the body part right, I reasoned (irrationally, although it seemed quite rational at the time), I could get the “what your life looks like” part right.

While I was obsessing about how I looked and who would love me, these women were helping to save the world – not in a way that would win them accolades, certainly – but the work they were doing was important and life-giving. And there I sat, foolishly pitying them. What I realized, sitting there, was that these women had been in these kinds of emotionally challenging situations for over 20 years. Together. They understood, together, as friends, and apart, as individuals in the world, the urgency of compassion, and that it often goes unnoticed but that this doesn’t make it any less important or vital or difficult to sustain and cultivate. And they also understood that you could try as hard as you possibly could, and disaster could still strike – mercilessly. Without warning, without fairness, and with fatal consequences. I wasn’t ready to change my man-chasing, embarrassing ways, but a seed was planted on that afternoon. Nearly fifteen years later I get out of bed each morning and am thankful that I wasn’t so myopically committed to old, tried myths about women’s roles that I couldn’t see what was happening in that room between those three women, or what was happening in my own mind…

The Wrinklies weren’t spinsters or old maids and they were not “failures” in any way. They were free. It was I who failed to see them, until later, for who they really were: educated, hugely intelligent, fascinating, financially independent. Women who led rich lives full of meaningful work, deep and lasting friendship, sex when they wanted it, time with the beloved children of their family and friends, conversations about politics and art and literature, culture, travel to remarkable destinations where they did not journey as unconscious tourists but as guests in people’s homes and hearts. Despite these full lives they owned their own time, they owned their days…

The last time I saw the Wrinklies was in 1999 on a return trip to Geneva. The youngest of the three had had a stroke as a result of a brain tumor. These friends she’d worked and traveled and lived and laughed and loved with for over half her life rented a new ground-floor apartment that would accommodate a wheelchair, took shifts taking care of her, all the while holding down jobs that were about saving other people’s friends, other people’s kids, other people’s lives – not directly, no, but on the sidelines, behind the scenes, booking travel and setting up conference space and directing supplies and networking with people on the ground who were face to face with whatever crisis situation needed to be handled. I was nervous as I sat waiting in a pub to see them all again, afraid of seeing my paralyzed friend. Would my face show a reaction that I didn’t intend? Fear? Disgust? The three of them came in together, smiling. The unaffected two had learned to understand the other’s few words; they wiped her face, helped her eat and made her laugh. This was a snapshot of what my own deep friendships could lead to: transformation. I saw, on that afternoon, that it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship. That a friend can take you out of the boxes you’ve made for yourself and burn them up. This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love. When the youngest Wrinklie died, I remember getting the news in my apartment in Berkeley, married, already knowing it wouldn’t last, and thinking she was lucky. And she was.”

In praise of sisters

India has a unique festival – Rakhsa Bandhan – literally knot of protection- where a sister ties a “rakhee” around her brothers hand. The rakhi is a symbol of the purity of a relationship between a sister and brother. By it the brother pledges to protect the sister in every birth. Just as the brother is bound by a promise to protect the sister after getting a string tied onto his wrist, so also the sister prays to God for his protection. Rakhi is basically a sacred thread of protection embellished with the love and affection of a sister for her brother.

This traditional Hindu festival 'Raksha Bandhan'  has its origin about 6000 years back when Aryans created first civilization. And there are many legends which have built around this rather unique festival that celebrates the love that a brother has for his sister.

Among these legends is story of Rani Karnavati and Emperor Humayun. During the medieval era, Rajputs were fighting Muslim invasions. When Rani Karnawati, the widowed queen of the king of Chittor realised that she could in no way defend the invasion of the Sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shah, she sent a rakhi to Emperor Humayun. The Emperor touched by the gesture started off with his troops without wasting any time.

Some claim that this ritual even started earlier with Lord Krishna. In order to protect the good people of Dwarka, Lord Krishna killed the evil King Shishupal but was hurt during the war and left with bleeding finger. Seeing this, Draupathi had torn a strip of cloth from her sari and tied it around his wrist to stop the bleeding. Lord Krishna, realizing her affections and concern about him, declared himself bounded by her sisterly love. He promised her to repay this debt whenever she needed in future and he did when she was being dishonored and he made sure that the saree she wore was endless.

This day epitomizes the love between a sister and her brothers and the sacred thread is proof of this lifelong bond. History is replete with records where women have invoked this rakhee and where men- sometimes even of different religion and origin but who have become “ dharma bhais” or brothers in spirit, have rushed to the help of their sisters.

In modern days, however, the role of the sister has turned – now it is they who have become the protectors of their brothers. While traditionally, sisters adore their older brothers, and remain their lifelong cheerleaders, they dote on their younger brothers. It is to her that younger siblings repair for advice and consolation in times of trouble. She is the first port of call when things become tense in the household and parental pressures mount for when mom and dad don't understand, a sister always will. 
An older sister is a friend and defender - a listener, conspirator, a counsellor and a sharer of delights.  And sorrows too. And when parents are no longer around, it is often she who becomes the glue that holds the family together. She is no longer the one asking for aid and help, instead she has become the dispenser of succor and lifelong affection and support for her brothers.

Some of us are blessed to have such sisters as well as the counterparts of “dharma bhais”, the “ sisters in spirit”. I have come to increasingly appreciate and value the affection that underlie these relationships. A sibling is after all the keeper of one's true identity, the only person with the keys to one's unfettered, more fundamental self.  The pure love and concern that, in ways subtle and unsubtle, tie the siblings together over their lifetimes, is one to be carefully fostered for our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.  She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities.  She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway.  She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark.  She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. It is the most nurturing of relationships but the role of sisters is often left unsung and under appreciated. And it should not.

In recent years, I have been the lucky recipient of this affection from many – from some who chide me when I do not stay with them during my visits to their hometown, to others who provided me a with a safe haven after a tense encounter with the terrorists and made sure it remained peaceful and calm. Or one who regularly scolds me on not staying with her, once irately observing that she would be happy to send me a hotel bill if it would help overcome my old fashioned values of not burdening married younger sisters. Another who constantly sends me clippings of the latest developments in science to cure my various ills, And another who took over my medical support when I fell sick organizing doctors medicines hospitals with a quiet efficiency and loving concern;  to another who cheerfully took leave of her legal practice to massage my aching muscles at a time when my wife was at her wits end in tending to my troubles.

There is a sweetness in these relationships that is hard to capture in simple words. I often ask how do people make it through life without a sister? For sisters are blossoms in the garden of life. There's no other love like their love for a brother. A love that is gentle, calm and full of affection- it is a relationship like none other. It surprises me that this sisterly love has not found a day for it to be honored. Of course, we need not a day but the whole year to properly thank those who provide us with such love and comfort. But a day would at least be a start.

Perhaps a silver rakhee day where brother can tie a gold or silver bracelet around their sisters wrists symbolizing the relationship?

The real battle below- analysing the republicans approach to 2012

In a remarkable piece, Chait analyses the deeper underlying motives of the republican strategies for the election of 2012. A number of disparate actions spread over the past two years begin to make sense when viewed through the prism of a desperate southern white desire to hang on to power despite the changing demographics. It is a battle against history and geography and unveils deep seated fears now swirling around the heads of a party doomed to being a long term minority status.

"Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining to stop permanent nightfall is dwindling away."says Chait.

The Republican Party has increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites. Meanwhile, the Democrats have ­increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point—meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country. These trends favor the democratic coalition, since as a whole the electorate is growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, thus making every successive election less favorable for the GOP.

Faced with this bleak future, the republican leadership , rather than adjust themselves to their slowly weakening position,  have chosen instead to stage a decisive confrontation. If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner, goes their reasoning. This was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves. At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that has driven Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they have concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost.

And what has been the strategy? Total opposition and complete denial of any credit to the sitting president for any achievment.

- The Republicans’ most audacious choice has been the hyperaggressive position they’ve adopted against Obama to sabotage his chances for a second term. There is a devious brilliance at work in the GOP strategy of legislative obstruction as they have very skillfully ground the legislative gears to a halt for months on end, weakening or killing large chunks of Obama’s agenda, and nurturing public discontent with Washington.

- The Koch brother inspired media campaigns against healthcare- Obama's signature achievement, the sponsoring of tea partiers, the negative response to job act

- Republicans have not ignored the rising tide of younger and browner voters that swamped them at the polls in 2008 either. Instead they have just set about keeping as many of them from the polls as possible in the future. The bulk of this campaign has taken the form of throwing up an endless series of tedious bureaucratic impediments to voting in many states—ending same-day voter registration, imposing onerous requirements upon voter-registration drives, and upon voters themselves.

- the outside funding of republican candidate through anonymous donations to swamp democratic candidates

- the deliberate raising of social inflammatory issues to divide the electrolate

Knowing what drives your opponent is an important tool in devising your own strategy. The question is can Obama's team formulate a countervailing strategy to overcome this?

Ethics? What is that ?

A few days ago I was at a dinner party thrown in my honor by some of my long term associates. All of them had done well rising to great heights in their chosen professions. Many had retired and formed their own companies, others had become consultants to rapidly rising business houses seeking to enter the complex area of oil and gas exploration, but all had done well. What struck me during our discussions was the fact that almost no one had any compunctions about working for companies who were in direct conflict with a company they had loved and served for over three decades. While they mourned the gradual decline of their old company that had once bestridden the country, but was now beset with poor leadership and worse decision making, embroiled in one conflict or the other and struggling against the new upstarts, they felt no great urge to return and help their erstwhile colleagues. They had become onlookers - actually they had become silent spectators who applauded and supported the upstarts! That, I was told, was the way of the world.


But perhaps more troubling was the blinkered view of the tactics that they were, tacitly or explicitly, forced to collude in to help the new companies. Many of these upstart companies, though not all, used shady means and corrupt means to attain their ends. Those who were consultants felt that it was not in their charter to blow the whistle, others directly employed defended themselves with the old but discredited view that they were simply following orders.


After all "Just Following Orders" is a justification for morally questionable actions that many  invoke when questioned about the rightness or necessity of such actions. This justification holds that the (bulk of the) responsibility for such actions falls upon those who make such decisions and give such orders within any hierarchy; by extension, those who obey and act upon such orders cannot be held accountable for their actions. 


The ethics dilemmas typical engineers face in their careers are probably not the stuff that sells newspapers. While there have been some widely published accounts of bribery, disregard for safety, and deceit, an engineer is more likely to deal with conflicts of interest, or confidentiality concerns. Engineers can deal with the black and white issues pretty easily but there are gray areas where two ethical principals conflict with each other. For example, the duty to protect the public health and safety sometimes conflicts with the obligation to 
maintain confidential information for a client. Or the desire to curry political favours sometimes leads to make claims about reserves that they know are dubious at best. Or they avert their eyes when their company indulges in corrupt practices to obtain a contract.


Are there no codes of ethics for engineers similar to other professions the most famous
being the Hippocratic Oath that all graduating medical students take?


The Hippocratic Oath in its earliest form is rather simple: "I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug. I will not be ashamed to say "I know not", nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant: I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure. I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.I will remember that I remain a member of society with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.".


Perhaps it is time for engineers to develop their own oath or a code of ethics which is as simple and as direct as the one above? Why should not all engineering courses insist on a program on engineering ethics?

PS I found out that many professional societies of engineers do have a code of ethics- most are about five pages long- but none have the moral force of the Hippocratic oath.And none of our IIT's teach about ethics in their four year programs.

In the face of grief

Many are the times that we sit in the face of grief, tongue tied and at a loss for words. When a tragedy strikes a close friend or relative of the family, our first instinct is to rush to them to offer solace and support. But once we are in their presence, we rarely know what to say or how to articulate the deep love and grief we want to share. So we sit often facing them in silent contemplation of the loss we have suffered and through some osmosis convey what is in our hearts.

I thought of this when in recent times I faced these truths and reflected on what were the different ways the face of grief emerged.

A few years ago we were in Goa and heard that our friend of many years was ailing. So we hired a car and set off to see him in his far off casa. He was asleep so we made small talk with his wife. But when we were about to leave, she insisted that he would never forgive her if he did not come out to greet us. So he was woken and soon emerged. We were shocked to see him- his face had wizened, his gait was slow and uncertain and he looked really frail - a shadow of the energetic lively presence that we had been accustomed to. Of course, that had been at least three decades ago but still the mental image we had of him had not changed. For a while we were at a loss to speak. Perhaps sensing our surprise, he started to talk in a rather strong voice of our past associations, of how he had sat in a helicopter with me when I had taken him and other journalists to see Bombay High offshore installations, how he remembered me dealing with official files during the journey using a golden pen,how he drew cartoons for my wifes magazine. And his memories put us at ease and we spent a lovely lively afternoon with him sipping tea and exchanging remniscienes. He died soon thereafter but our memories of him now mingle with his early days and his last years.

In another case, we had gone to see a friend who had lost his wife of three decades uncertain how we would offer him consolation. But found that he wanted to share his memories and really wanted us to only listen to him talk about her last days and the courage and dignity with which she had faced her pernicious disease and its aftermath. And that is all we did. 


When faced with a grieving person it is often hard to know what you should or should not say to them. You want them to know that it will be okay and eventually get easier. You also want to express your condolences and let them know that you are there for them. Grief is a very personal, raw and vulnerable period of one's life. There are things that you might mean well by saying, but they do not want to hear. People who are in a state of grief are very emotionally vulnerable and trying to work through feelings that they never thought they would be faced with.  

I find that in the face of grief all you really need to do is to be present and to listen to their story if they so want to speak. But if they are silent, you should speak of the happier times that you shared with them. Saying "I am so sorry" or "I am here for you" are the best condolences that you can give. This does not insinuate that you know how they feel, or that things will get better. You are simply offering to be there for them and that is the most important thing.

Pioneers of offshore technology in India

In the last five decades, India has made tremendous economic progress. One of the key pillars of its success has been its ability to harness the power of science and technology for development. In many key areas it has found men of vision and daring who have absorbed the latest technologies of the day and have been able to mobilize the brightest minds in the country to lay the foundations of a modern India. The key to this success has been scientists and technologists with a keen vision and deep commitment, supported by a forward looking political leadership of the day, a bureaucracy in tune with the needs of the country and a population willing to embrace the latest that modern science had to offer in its search for rapid economic development. Thus in the fifties came the dam builders like A N Khosla, followed by Homi Bhabha who harnessed the power of the atom and built the country’s nuclear capability through the Atomic Energy Commission. The country produced Vikram Sarabhai who led the county into the space era, V Krishnamurthy who built the heavy electrical capacity, the Tatas who laid the foundation of modern India’ s steel industry, SMPatil who developed an indigenous capacity for machine tools, MS Swaminathan who developed the seeds that led to the green revolution, MS Pathak who built the engineering consulting capability. These were the true founders of modern India on the basis of which the economic progress of the country was built.

Another of these areas was offshore technology. The creation of an indigenous capability and capacity in offshore technology laid the foundation of an oil industry that by the mid eighties was able to provide self sufficiency to the extent of 70%, created a completely new industry, mobilized the best of scientists and technologists and laid the foundation for both rapid economic growth and a new infrastructure for development.

In 1970, India had no capability for offshore engineering, it had no fabrication yards for building offshore oil platforms, there were no submarine pipelines to carry oil and gas from offshore platforms, indeed there were no offshore process platforms or terminals. No offshore drilling rigs patrolled the oceans, there were neither supply vessels nor fire fighting ships. In short there was nothing.

Yet by 1985- in just fifteen years, India had over 50 offshore platform off the coast of Bombay. It had discovered its largest oil and gas fields offshore and able to develop them within a short space of a decade. It had designed and built not only offshore well platforms, but also the most complicated and complex of process platforms that were able to separate oil and gas offshore and to transmit them to the shore. It had built a large number of major and minor submarine pipelines. It had developed an indigenous capability to design all offshore installations, which by 1985 was responsible for almost 80% of all offshore work. India had been able to convert three shipyards to build the latest offshore platforms and pipelines. It had over 20 offshore drilling rigs operating offshore, many of them owned and operated by Indians. These structures, most designed, fabricated and constructed indigenously enabled oil and gas production of over half a million barrels of oil and by the mid eighties and set the country towards self sufficiency.

This book, "Pioneers of offshore technology", is an attempt to chronicle the story of this latest effort to mobilize science and technology for economic development. It lays out for the reader the strategies and the driving forces that made this success possible and the young pioneers who made it possible. Not only did these young pioneers build and create the offshore technology in India, they also laid the foundation of a completely new industry, they went on to make major contributions to the international oil industry as well. Many of them went on to become chairman of international companies , create an offshore supply services company , design companies, and others became key players in offshore oil and gas companies in Korea, U.S, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore.

The book presents their stories and it is a chapter in our history of science and technology that the nation should be truly proud of.

The richest Indian in America and the energy drink

Manoj Bhargava claims to be the richest Indian in America. And how did he become so rich? By selling a 5 hour energy drink!

Bhargava was born in India in the prosperous northern city of Lucknow. His parents were well-off, with a villa surrounded by lush, award-winning gardens. They left for America in 1967, so his academic publisher father could get a Ph.D. at Wharton. The family landed hard in West Philadelphia in a third-floor, $80-a-month walk-up with threadbare carpets on seedy 47th Street. They went from having servants in India to splitting one Coca-Cola four ways as a treat.

Teenaged Bhargava excelled at math. “It’s like in Good Will Hunting,” he says, raising a hand to mime Matt Damon’s chalkboard scrawl of algebraic equations in the film. “You see stuff or you don’t. I just see it.” He had no tuition money, but connived his way into interviews at competitive Philadelphia schools, offering to take math tests to prove himself.


Bhargava says he spent his 20s traveling between monasteries owned and tended by an ashram called Hanslok. He and his fellow disciples weren’t monks, exactly. “It’s the closest Western word,” he says. “We didn’t have bowler haircuts or robes or bells.” It was more like a commune, he says, but without the drugs. He did his share of chores, helped run a printing press and worked construction for the ashram. Bhargava claims he spent those 12 years trying to master one technique: the stilling of the mind, often through meditation. He still considers himself a member of the Hanslok order and spends an hour a day in his Farmington Hills basement in contemplative silence. But whatever it is, it has made him a billionaire through a drink that most people have not even heard of but which truck drivers in the US swear by!

And what is in that drink: 5-Hour Energy’s ubiquitous bottle is no beauty, with its shrink wrap and crudely silhouetted running man (his name is Steve, by the way). Inside the bottle: 4 calories, zero sugar, “a blend of B-vitamins, amino acids and nutrients,” and “about as much caffeine as a cup of premium coffee,” according to 5-Hour’s website. A 2010 test by independent reviewer ConsumerLab.com found vitamin levels thousands of times higher than recommended daily allowances and 207mg of caffeine—a massive amount per ounce, but less than the 260mg in a Starbucks tall coffee.

The exact formula remains a secret. And so it should. Otherwise Manoj would not be the richest Indian in the US, would he?

Obama explained

As Barack Obama contends for a second term in office, two conflicting narratives of his presidency have emerged. Is he a skillful political player and policy visionary—a chess master who always sees several moves ahead of his opponents (and of the punditocracy)? Or is he politically clumsy and out of his depth—a pawn overwhelmed by events, at the mercy of a second-rate staff and of the Republicans?


James Fallows has a long piece on Obama  where he attempts to unravel the mystery of Obama.


"What I’ve concluded now is that Obama has shown the main trait we can hope for in a president—an ability to grow and adapt—and that the reason to oppose his reelection would be disagreement with his goals, not that he proved unable to rise to the job. As time has gone on, he has given increasing evidence that the skills he displayed in the campaign were not purely a fluke." concludes Fallows.


“Three of the most important things he has done are hardest to appreciate,” says Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and an early supporter of Obama’s presidential campaign.


The first is a negative accomplishment: avoiding an economic catastrophe even worse than the one the United States and the world have been through.


 The second is what Daschle called “the dramatic improvement in the American image abroad.” The daily reports about American problems around the world, the crises in U.S. relations with Pakistan and a few other countries, the ongoing worldwide bull session about whether the U.S. is “in decline”—all of these things mask the broad and dramatic improvement in America’s “soft power” and international standing during Obama’s time.


 And finally, according to Daschle, the health-care bill that passed so narrowly and is so controversial will, especially if Obama is reelected, rank with Medicare in the list of legislative and social achievements by Democratic presidents.


There are many areas where Obama has shown mastery of the job. In foreign policy, where a president can carry out his own strategy, he has shown that he actually has a strategy to execute. And in management of the domestic economy, he has shown increasing command of the tools of office. In political combat, his long term strategy will eventually lead to his reelection.


Chess master or pawn? The evidence is clear.


Andrew Sullivan adds his take on the long term strategy underlying Obama's approach to governing:

On the domestic front: " A depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician."

"On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. Romney accuses the president of apologizing for America, and others all but accuse him of treason and appeasement. Instead, Obama reversed Bush’s policy of ignoring Osama bin Laden, immediately setting a course that eventually led to his capture and death. And when the moment for decision came, the president overruled both his secretary of state and vice president in ordering the riskiest—but most ambitious—plan on the table. He even personally ordered the extra helicopters that saved the mission. It was a triumph, not only in killing America’s primary global enemy, but in getting a massive trove of intelligence to undermine al Qaeda even further. If George Bush had taken out bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda’s leadership, and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence by a daring raid, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. But where Bush talked tough and acted counterproductively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war. Since he took office, al Qaeda’s popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted. Obama’s foreign policy, like Dwight Eisenhower’s or George H.W. Bush’s, eschews short-term political hits for long-term strategic advantage. It is forged by someone interested in advancing American interests—not asserting an ideology and enforcing it regardless of the consequences by force of arms."

What neither the liberals nor the conservatives have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for.


And the fervent hope is that the electorate will understand this come November.

A fresh view on India's experiment in democracy

Ramchandra Guha has a fresh take on India's experiment with democracy.

According to Guha " Democracy and nationhood in India now face six complex challenges."

The first is that in three states of the Union, large sections of the population want independence. In Nagaland, an uneasy ceasefire prevails between secessionists and the government; in the valley of Kashmir, peace is erratically secured by a massive army presence; and in Manipur, rival groups of insurgents fight with each other and with the government.

Second, the territorial unity of India is further challenged by a Maoist insurgency in the centre and east. Maoists have dug deep roots among the tribal communities of the heartland. The opening of the Indian economy has had benign outcomes in cities such as Bangalore and Hyderabad, where the presence of an educated workforce allows for the export of high-end products such as software. In other places, globalisation has meant the increasing exploitation of unprocessed raw materials. In states such as Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, mining companies have dispossessed tribals of the land they owned and cultivated, leading sometimes to their recruitment by the Maoists.

Third, the challenge from religious fundamentalism is receding but by no means vanquished. In 1984, several thousand Sikhs were slaughtered in northern India after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards; in 2002, a comparable number of Muslims were killed by Hindus in Gujarat. Those pogroms bookended two decades of almost continuous religious conflict, fuelled principally by right-wing Hindus and by Islamic fundamentalists based in Pakistan. But since 2002, there has been no serious Hindu-Muslim riot. (The jihadis who attacked Mumbai in 2008 failed to spark retributive violence against Muslims.) The middle class is no longer so enamoured of a Hindu theocratic state, and Indian Muslims are mostly focused on education and job security. What prevails, however, is a sullen peace rather than an even-tempered tranquillity, in which the secular ideals of the constitution are not always reflected in practice.

The corrosion of public institutions is the fourth problem. This has several dimensions, including the conversion of political parties into family firms; the politicisation of the police and bureaucracy, with appointments dependent on patronage rather than competence; billion-dollar corruption scandals at high levels of government, with the state handing over natural resources and other assets to particular capitalists; and everyday corruption faced by ordinary citizens, such as bribes paid to set up electricity connections or admit children to school.

Fifth, massive environmental degradation promotes discord and inequality in the present, while jeopardising economic growth in the future. The depletion of groundwater aquifers, chemical contamination of soil, and the decimation of forests and biodiversity leads to resource scarcity and conflict between different users. The environmental costs of economic growth fall disproportionately on the rural poor, who suffer the most from land grabs, deforestation, and soil and water pollution.

Finally, there are pervasive and growing economic inequalities. Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, is worth over $20bn. His new home in Mumbai is 27 storeys high and measures 400,000 square feet. At the same time, 60 per cent of the city’s population live in crowded slums, five or six to a room, with no running water or sanitation. These disparities extend beyond the city to the whole of India. The super-rich exercise massive influence over politicians of all parties, with policies and laws framed or distorted to suit their interests. The rise of left-wing extremism, and the growth in corruption and environmental degradation are in good part a consequence of this ever-closer nexus between politicians and businessmen."

"One can think of a democracy as a stool with three legs" continues Guha, " the state, the private sector, and civil society. The state is required to frame suitable laws and policies, maintain order, prevent discrimination against individuals or communities, hold regular elections to allow changes of parties and leaders, and be ready to repel attacks from other nations or home-grown insurgents. The private sector’s task is, by one definition, merely to generate goods and services by the most efficient means possible; in a more capacious understanding, to make and sell products and promote philanthropic activity. The role of civil society is to keep both state and private sector on their toes, by highlighting perversions of the law and on the other hand, to foster community organisations that work towards equal access to, among other things, education, health and a clean environment."

The stability of any democracy is dependent on the proper functioning of these three sectors. If one or other sector is negligent or malevolent, the stool of democracy will wobble. If all perform adequately, it will be stable. India has yet to find this stability.

Even funeral directors gotta to eat..

In a rollicking article, the author attends a convention of funeral directors and gives us the lowdown on this burning topic.

It seems that the funeral industry is in the midst of a transition of titanic proportions. America is secularizing at a rapid pace, with almost 25% of the country describing itself as un-church. Americans, embracing a less religious view of the afterlife, are now asking for a "spiritual" funeral instead of a religious one. And cremation numbers are up. Way up. The rate of cremation has skyrocketed as Americans back away from the idea that Jesus will be resurrecting them straight from the grave

Cremation has been touted as the “green” way to depart this coil, and several biodegradable urn choices have become available, their sides ornamented with images of fire, water and earth. To compensate for the relative cheapness of cremation, funeral directors have begun adding a series of value-added services, from a string orchestra, to webcasting for distant family and friends, to a remembrance “rose-petal” ceremony for young attendees. The message attached to all these services seems to be: cremation is green, and if you choose something else, you're a polluter, even in death.

 While cremation is technically “greener” than burial, the burning of the body still releases into the atmosphere whatever you might have embedded in you—dental fillings containing mercury, a hip replacement made of plastic. The newest, greenest thing is called “alkaline hydrolysis,” a process that uses sodium hydroxide (basically, lye) and extremely hot, highly pressurized water to rapidly speed up the process of natural decomposition. The body is placed in a large tube with a square control base (upon seeing a picture, a friend of mine commented that it looked a lot like a bong, and it kind of does), bathed in chemicals and highly pressurized, and in a few hours all that is left is liquid and ash.

At this convention the largest contingent of vendors were hawking cremation-related products: urns with Bible verses on them, urns with dolphins flipping in front of a Lisa Frank-style sunset, rings with diamonds made of ashes, and an iPhone app that lets you know the progress of a cremation. Funeral homes have to invest in the equipment that will guarantee a solvent future and the funerals-peripheral industry, always with its ear to the ground, is entering the cremation game in full-force. For $150 you can have a pendant that can be worn from the neck, filled with the ashes of loved ones trapped in decorative glass.

And you thought living was easy!

The ways of death

A few days ago, I visited an old friend of almost six decades, who had recently lost his wife. By a cruel twist of fate, he had broken his leg a few days after his wife died. As I sat by his bedside in a spanking new hospital, he told us the harrowing tale of the last six months where he had tried all that was known to modern medicine. They had gone through what the medical professionals call " futile care", where the doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, fed through tubes and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it really buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. Yet his wife, a kind, soft spoken, gentle soul had borne all the pain that modern medicine inflicts in the cause of finding a cure and had spent her time in and out of hospitals with cheerful grace. But towards the end the doctors had thrown in the towel, but would not admit it, ( for it is a truism that no doctor ever admits that he cannot cure the patient or that he may have misdiagnosed the disease) leaving the family to face the difficult and agonising choices alone.

I became curious as to how when doctors faced their own end how they prepared themselves. What did they do and when did they give up?  When did they say enough is enough. Ken Murray, a doctor himself, describes how doctors in general face the end and how doctors die?


Of course, like most of us, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right). Then how is it that these same doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. But they are trained to do all they can to preserve human life if the patient so desires.

"To see how patients also play a role" says Ken, "imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not."

The system too plays its part. Unless the patient has specifically asked for certain actions not to be taken, the hospital cannot, for example, take a patient off the ventilator or administer certain medicines lest they be sued by the survivors or become embroiled in some litigation. The safest course then is to do all that is availble irrespecitive of costs or indeed reason.

But it seems that for all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, doctors in general tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But when it is time to go, they tend to go gently.

So can we all. All we need to do is to draft a living will that states "If the time comes when I can no longer take part in decisions for my own future, let this declaration stand as the testament to my wishes. If there is no reasonable prospect of my recovery from physical illness or impairment in which I am suffering continual pain or am incapable of ever again living a rational existence and when I am no longer capable of being consulted regarding my wishes, I request that I be allowed to die with dignity and not be kept alive by artificial means. I request that they administer whatever drugs necessary to keep me comfortable during this period even if it may reduce the length of my life."

If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity.  There need to be no heroics, and we should all be able to go gentle into that good night.