Race to the top

The heart of the free enterprise system is competition between different entities - commercial and financial- that vie for customers on a level playing field under a set of agreed upon rules and conditions and a watchful regulator in those areas where the competition is not sufficient. This approach has given the western world its economic growth and development over the last few decades and it is held up as model for the developing world as they embark on their growth path.

The same concept has been applied in other walks of life with great degree of success. A few years ago, the Obama administration initiated a $ 4 billion program called the "Race to the top" for the states in the US. “America will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better job of educating our sons and daughters… And the race starts today. I am issuing a challenge to our nation’s
governors and school boards, principals and teachers, businesses and non-profits, parents and
students: if you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put
outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools – your state
can win a Race to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the
world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential.” (President Barack Obama July 24, 2009 )

 The underlying structure was that the state would submit proposals to the federal government for improvement of the state educational system according to a defined plan and the federal government would fund them to achieve the stated targets. While the design of these programs was left to the states, they had to comply with certain minimum targets of achievement for their students. Through the Race to the Top, the States were asked to advance reforms around four specific areas:

• Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;
• Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;
• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and
• Turning around the lowest-achieving schools.

Awards in Race to the Top went to States that were leading the way with ambitious yet achievable plans for implementing coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform. Thus Race to the Top winners  helped trail-blaze effective reforms and provide examples for States and local school districts throughout the country to follow as they too were hard at work on reforms that can transform schools for decades to come. The program has been an unqualified success and has led the various states to experiment with innovative approaches to educational reform. 

The Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative has shown that competitive grant 

programs can be a powerful spur to innovation in education. Most of the 12 states that were 

awarded grants this year — and the more than 30 states that changed education policies in hopes 

of winning grants — would never have attempted reform on this scale without the promise of 

federal help. 

A similar approach is visible in other fields - say basketball. During the  month of March, the entire country is agog with various colleges vying for the national basketball trophy. To reach the final four is considered to the be peak of achievement for a college. The key again is the same - a free participation of teams irrespective of geography, size or endowment. The ivy league schools compete on equal terms with the smallest of schools. And during the month the real joy is to see the most prominent schools be toppled by the tiniest of schools and the emergence of talent that few even knew existed.

Application of this concept in various fields may well fetch rewards that we are not even aware of. Some of these are already visible - in a sense the "American Idol" follows the same principle. A countrywide search of fresh voices leads to a group of singers who vie for the title of American Idol and in the process, it identifies talent that few knew existed. And these singers can go on to get contracts with recording companies, who issue their CDs to the already waiting customers.

Many other countries have gone on to expand these concepts - to dramas, comedians, ghazals, classical music. And all of these have provided a ready built platform for fresh talent to emerge and for commercial companies to expand their customer base and profits. This approach could even be extended to develop "pointy headed bureaucrats". A program could select- through a merit based system- a few among them to proceed to International Schools like Harvard, Stanford etc for two year programs. On return they would become what their name implies "civil servants".

Another area that may be worth exploring are those where there is a paucity of talent in the country. Let us say India needs top quality geologists- they can design a program similar to the race to the top inviting students from around the country to submit programs and plans for their future studies. Based on the quality of their submissions, the selected few can be given scholarships to go abroad to a top notch university in the world with a provision that they will return and serve in the country for a number of years. You could design similar programs for young professors working in universities in India and abroad thus finding out talent for our country's development. 

Clearly the outlay for these programs will be minimal but the results can be resounding.

The unlikely crusader

In every country, independence movements begin with an individual burning with passion and commitment who is able to mobilize the many with his charisma.

In India it was Nehru who left a promising legal career to plunge into the freedom movement. In s Africa Nelson Mandela mobilized thousands from his prison cell.. Lech salsa was another one of those charismTic individuals who led his country.s freedom movement.

It was bobby Kennedy who said...“[There is] the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills-against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's greatest movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.

"Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. ... Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Today the voices – the ‘ripples’ – are from Tibet, from Libya, from Syria, and from thousands of other spots around the globe where people find themselves unfairly subjected to the power of others including India today.

It is true that ".Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation".

We never know from whence thse individuals will emerge and she. Yes there will be false messiahs who will crash and burn in short order. But we do owe it to ourselves to look out for these individual in our lifetime.

In recent months there is one very promising. Young man who has given up a comfortable career to plunge into the maelstrom of Indian politics to try and make a difference. Will he be able to even make a small dent in the corrupt environment of India or fight the pores that today control the levers of power?

But we do need to give this emerging charismatic young man  look and mobilize support for his efforts.

Arvind kejriwal sprang out of nowhere to electrify the country. ..
If you’ve been following the news, you’re unlikely to have missed the  passionate voice of Arvind Kejriwal, the 42-year-old Haryana-born activist, who is determined to tackle corruption and help change the way India is governed.

An IIT-trained mechanical engineer, Kejriwal joined the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) in 1995 but resigned after five years there. While he was an Additional Commissioner of Income Tax in Delhi, Kejriwal quietly started Parivartan, an organization that has never been officially registered. It is run by a few young volunteers who have helped thousands of citizens get everyday benefits—like a ration card or an electricity connection—without paying bribes to government officials. Parivartan [which means change] is also spearheading research into the right to information (RTI) and governance issues. Kejriwal, a 2006 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, was also instrumental in campaigning to have the Central RTI Act passed.

Kejriwal lives just outside of Delhi, with his wife Sunita of the IRS (she is a former colleague), and their two children with whom the busy activist sometimes wishes he could spend more time.

It was Kejriwal who, dejected with the long-delayed official Lokpal Bill, was instrumental in drafting the Jan Lokpal Bill, much of it deriving from his experience with Parivartan. Before going to press, we asked Kejriwal if he expected that kind of national, in fact global, response from Indians to something for which he’s been the little-known prime mover.

In a short campaign he won enough seats in Delhi to become its chief minister, a post he resigned when his anti corruption bill was rejected in the Delhi assembaly.

His aam party has now decided to fight the national elections with his party putting up over 300 candidates nationwide. Maybe he will win enough seats to make a differce! But he merits our support.

The national elections begin in April and final counting will be on May 16.

So go this site and donate to his party's  campaign.


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The elevators

We often pay little heed to the everyday objects and mechanisms that make our daily life simpler and easier. We take them for granted and think not of the idea that originated them or the inventor who created them. One of my favorites is the ubiquitous elevator. It is a mechanisms that we use daily and yet never spend any time wondering about its origins. Did you know that the elevator is over two thousand years old and that it was invented by Archimedes?

Actually the first reference to an elevator is in the works of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who reported that Archimedes (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) built his first elevator probably in 236 BC. In some literary sources of later historical periods, elevators were mentioned as cabs on a hemp rope and powered by hand or by animals. In 1000, the Book of Secrets by al-Muradi in Islamic Spain described the use of an elevator-like lifting device, in order to raise a large battering ram to destroy a fortress. In the 17th century the prototypes of elevators were located in the palace buildings of England and France.

While most ancient and medieval elevators used drive systems based on hoists or winders, it was the discovery of a system based on the screw drive which was perhaps the most important step in elevator technology since ancient times. The first screw drive elevator was built by Ivan Kulibin and installed in Winter Palace in 1793. It was this invention that led to the creation of modern passenger elevators. .

The development of elevators was led by the need for movement of raw materials including coal and lumber from hillsides. The technology developed by these industries and the introduction of steel beam construction worked together to provide the passenger and freight elevators in use today. Starting in the coal mines, by the mid-19th century elevators were operated with steam power and were used for moving goods in bulk in mines and factories. These steam driven devices were soon being applied to a diverse set of purposes - in 1823, two architects working in London, Burton and Hormer, built and operated a novel tourist attraction, which they called the "ascending room". It elevated paying customers to a considerable height in the centre of London, allowing them a magnificent panoramic view of the city centre.

For most city-dwellers, the elevator is an unremarkable machine that inspires none of the passion or interest that Americans afford trains, jets, and even bicycles. Without the elevator, there could be no downtown skyscrapers or residential high-rises, and city life as we know it would be impossible. In that sense, the elevator’s role in American history has been no less profound or transformative than that of the automobile. In fact, the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns.

If we tend to ignore the significance of elevators, it might be because riding in them tends to be such a brief, boring, and even awkward experience—one that can involve unplanned encounters between people with whom we have nothing in common, internal turmoil over where to stare, and a vaguely unpleasant awareness of the fact that we’re hanging from a cable in a long, invisible shaft.

In a new book, “Lifted,” German journalist and cultural studies professor Andreas Bernard zeroes in on this experience, tracing mankind’s relationship to the elevator back to its origins and finding that it has never been a totally comfortable one. “After 150 years, we are still not used to it,” Bernard said. “We still have not exactly learned to cope with this...mixture of intimacy and anonymity.” 

Today, as the world’s urban population explodes, and cities become denser, taller, and more crowded, America’s arsenal of elevators—900,000 at last count, according to Elevator World magazine’s 2012 Vertical Transportation Industry Profile—are a force that’s becoming more important than ever. 

Even less appreciated these days than their transformative effects on American cities are the effects that elevators have had on Americans themselves when they stepped inside of them. At first this was a central concern: As late as the 1900s, doctors worried about a nausea-inducing condition known as “elevator sickness,” caused by the sudden movement of one’s organs inside the body when an elevator came to a halting stop. Public health advocates, meanwhile, warned that the shared conveyances would spread disease among neighbors and co-workers. Other worries were psychological: As Bernard points out in his book, the concept of claustrophobia emerged in the psychiatric literature at the same time as the elevator, and the experience of being inside one was listed from the start as a primary instigator of symptoms.

Elevators also raised new questions of etiquette. One big issue was whether a man in an elevator ought to remove his hat in the presence of a woman, as he would in someone’s home or a restaurant, or keep it on, as he would on a train or a streetcar. The question reflected a basic uncertainty about what this space really was—a mode of transportation, or some kind of tiny moving room.

That was only one of the peculiar uncertainties that came with riding elevators. Another was that they felt simultaneously public and private, taking people out of the broader world while locking them into a narrow, self-contained one alongside a random assortment of colleagues, neighbors, and strangers. By bringing together people who often only kind of knew each other, elevators created vague expectations of interaction—a smile, a nod, even a bit of small talk to acknowledge that everyone on board lived or worked in the same building. Put another way, the experience of riding elevators is still marked by awkwardness and serendipity—who will I see? How long do I have to stand like this?—and as Bernard points out in his book, those qualities have made it a staple of romantic comedies, office dramas, and crime stories in which the plot requires two people to be suddenly and unexpectedly thrust together.

Its uniqueness as an environment also has allowed social scientists to use it as a fruitful laboratory for experiments on behavior. One study tested the effect of smiling on people’s willingness to stand near strangers, for instance, while another looked at how men and women choose to situate themselves in relation to each other upon boarding.

The distinctiveness of elevators as social spaces is also the reason we speak of an “elevator pitch”—so named after the one place the company CEO might spend 60 seconds as captive audience to an ambitious intern. It is this mixing of worlds that makes elevators so important. And the more opportunities modern life gives us to separate ourselves from others—by getting into our cars and escaping into our suburban homes, by hiding in our cubicles and burying our heads in our social networks—the more the elevator matters as a place that squeezes us together for a moment and forces us to grapple with one another’s existence.

Sadly, there is cause to worry about the future of these moments. The next big leap in elevator technology, already active in large new office towers, is something called “destination dispatch,” which groups people who are going to similar floors together in order to get them where they’re going more quickly. Such a system is more efficient in terms of both time and energy, but it also makes it so that people who work on far-flung floors are less likely ever to run into each other. More specifically, it may reduce the chance that someone high up in a company’s hierarchy would share an elevator ride with someone who works down below. Serendipity, in this scenario, begins to recede.

Of course, the elevator has been through changes before. Trained operators armed with cranks and levers have been replaced with buttons; motion sensors have made holding the door less of a heroic act. Through it all, it has never quite lost the strangeness that makes it so different from anything else we experience in our daily lives. 

For all the association with modernity and all the large-scale changes it has enabled, the elevator ride itself—this small, enduring moment of sharing a box with semi-strangers—has been reminding us, for 150 years, of a crucial fact about what it means to be part of a society: that even when they’re standing still, everyone around us is on their way to somewhere.

India's crony capitalists

Sambuddha Mustafi, a journalist and a Fulbright scholar analyses the crony capitalism prevalent in India today and how it sustains the country's corrupt political and economic infrastructure in this brilliant article.

"Fresh from shaking up the business community with audits of Delhi’s power firms and an FIR against the country’s biggest industrialist (he who must not be named), Arvind Kejriwal addressed the Confederation of Indian Industries. He took many attendees by surprise.

“Dhanda to zaroori hai (business is essential),” said the Aam Aadmi Party leader, reminding all that he comes from a family of small-time businessmen. “If government gets into business, there is too much corruption,” continued the former bureaucrat who has sometimes been labelled a neo-nationaliser, “only the private sector can create jobs for India’s youth.” His problem, he said, was not with capitalism, but crony capitalism.

But how much of a crony country are we compared to others? Is our industry ready to change and embrace clean capitalism? What policy carrots-and-sticks does it need?

While evaluating cronyism, a good question to ask is how much of the country’s wealth is owned by its richest people. And here, the numbers prove we are a country where too much is held by too few. And they are helped generously by government patronage. According to the Forbes rich list (2011), the 55 dollar-billionaires in India controlled over 17 per cent of its GDP; compare that to China, whose 115 billionaires controlled a mere 4 per cent. Among medium-sized economies, only in Russia (29 per cent) and Malaysia (20 per cent) did dollar-billionaires control more wealth than in India. Both Russia and Malaysia are known for large oligopolies, with cronies of political rulers controlling vast reserves of natural resources. India is in dubious company.

In the 2014 Forbes list, three Indians were richer than China’s richest man, though China’s economy is over four times larger. In 2013, India’s richest man was worth almost double of China’s richest man. This is a cause for worry, not a reason to rejoice at the brilliance of our billionaires. “If a country is generating too many billionaires relative to the size of its economy, then it is off-balance,” wrote Ruchir Sharma, emerging markets head of Morgan Stanley, in his book Breakout Nations. “If a country’s average billionaire has amassed tens of billions, not merely billions, the lack of balance could lead to stagnation (of the economy).”

At the heart of capitalism is a constant churn of ideas and businesses, what the economist Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction. But disproportionately powerful crony billionaires collude with policymakers to marginalise the competition: this deters innovation, and hurts the creative destruction process. So, India’s crony billionaires are actually the biggest enemies of capitalism.

Imagine Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a crony capitalist: he realises that WhatsApp is a competitor taking away much of his younger audience, and business. So, he colludes with powerful friends on Capitol Hill to tweak policy to ban instant messaging over smartphones. The reason given is “national security”. Instead of coughing up $19 billion to WhatsApp’s founders, as Zuckerberg did last month, he could have gotten away by paying $1 billion each to some of the Republicans and Democrats on the Hill. But the fact that Zuckerberg had to write WhatsApp a fat cheque is incentive for other innovators to create products that threaten the big capitalist. Then, Zuckerberg gets caught in a game of whack-a-mole: every time a competitor comes up, he has to dole out big cash, or risk defeat. This keeps him in check; eventually one competitor holds out and creates a company bigger than Facebook. That, in effect, is the cycle of creative destruction: what is bad for the big capitalist is often good for the entire capitalist system.

If you track the rich lists of the US, China or European nations over a period of time, you will see a constant churn of names — newcomers entering and incumbents dropping out. In India, you will mostly see the same families over decades, occasionally disturbed by a new software billionaire.

So where is India going wrong in creating a clean capitalist system? Let’s start with the preamble to the Constitution: “We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic…”

If our leaders are serious about promoting clean capitalism, they can start by removing the word “socialist” from the preamble. Clinging to an economic system (if only on paper) that has failed the world over, we display a damaging hypocrisy and unwillingness to learn from mistakes.

Further, it is this socialist consensus at the time of independence that attached a stigma to doing business, gave birth to the vile license raj, embedded cronyism, prevented mass entrepreneurship and kept India a poor nation. The best brains moved to foreign shores, where they found a free market for their ideas.

We were left with the lees. As the socialist State licensed and harassed legitimate entrepreneurs, it was the unscrupulous cronies who thrived; over time they made lots of money, with which they bought social status and became role models. A vicious cycle of cronyism was created.

To promote clean capitalism, India has to embrace and celebrate capitalism with all its imperfections, rather than treating it as a necessary evil in a constitutionally socialist State.

One can argue that China is a communist State, but has taken to capitalism with aplomb. So why does India need a constitutional amendment? Because India is a democracy that derives its spirit from the Constitution; China derives its spirit from the consensus within the Party and the vision of its leaders. No Indian leader will ever have the overarching authority of Deng Xiaoping, whose vision turned around his country’s economic direction. A visionary Indian leader will still need constitutional backing.

Beyond the Constitution, India’s competition laws need to be strengthened and implemented seriously. While The Competition Act of 2002 is a big improvement from earlier legislations, it took seven more years for it to come into force and replace the obsolete Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act.

Experts have pointed out that the new act still leaves too many legal ambiguities, thus favouring lawyers and large firms that can hire them. For example, a large firm or cartel may get away with abusing the competition laws if its lawyers can prove their client’s “contribution to the (sic) economic development”. But the big story also lies in the seven-year delay before The Competition Act came into force: both the NDA and UPA governments went slow, unwilling to upset the big corporates that bankrolled their 2004 and 2009 election campaigns.

This brings us to the most crucial hurdle to clean capitalism in India: the crony financing of political parties, which is the backbone of corruption. Research by the Association for Democratic Reforms shows alarming opacity in funding: 75 per cent of party funds come from ‘unknown sources’, going by the Income Tax Return with the Election Commission. The Congress and the BJP are the biggest offenders, with ₹3,000 crore between them totally unaccounted for. On this issue there is broad consensus among parties: they see themselves above scrutiny. They hide behind the 19th century argument that their donor base is too large, and the donations too small for them to maintain proper accounts.

Kejriwal’s party can rightfully claim the moral high ground on this issue: its crowd-sourced funding model has left the old school stunned. Going into the Lok Sabha elections, corrupt political funding is set to become Kejriwal’s big pitch to show that Congress and BJP are the same: Mukesh Ambani is the popular symbol he uses to create this equivalence....

But is Indian business ready for the clean capitalism challenge? If politics threw up Aam Aadmi Party, does Indian business have its own insurgents ready to take on the old guard? From the lukewarm reception to Kejriwal’s speech, it seems they are still nervous of this new, unknown element over which they don’t have much control. Modi and the BJP are the safe, old school bet for India Inc. It’s busy filling the coffers of the potential winning horse, hoping for returns if he comes to power. Small wonder then, that corporates also joined political parties in demanding that funding remains opaque: they fear political vendetta if they backed the wrong horse.

But ultimately, it’s this myopic view of Indian corporates that holds them back from greatness. The corrupt, crony system dissuades good people from joining both politics and business: professions that create entry barriers for talented, honest individuals can only remain mediocre. By not taking up the clean capitalism challenge, by continuing to put its faith in the old school idea of mutual back-scratching with politicians, India Inc has only decided to wallow in its own mediocrity.

Capitalism’s image problem in India is compounded by the parsimony of its capitalists. India ranks 133 in the World Giving Index, even below Bangladesh (109) and Nepal (115). Private charity contributions as a percentage of GDP are only 0.4 per cent here, compared with 1.3 in the UK and 2.2 in the US. In 2011, corporate philanthropy was only $1.5 billion dollars in India according to Bain, though its 46 richest people had a net worth of $176 billion.

But there is hope yet: the 2012 Bain report showed that younger high-net-worth Indians, especially those below the age of 30, stand out in their commitment to ‘give back’. Education is the most favoured cause, followed by food and shelter. There’s reason to believe India’s next generation of capitalists and billionaires will be of a better stock: they will be more involved in causes and demand cleaner systems for political donations, even if the current crop are happy with the status quo."

The science of older and wiser

Here is a brilliant article by on the science of older and wiser. 

I have given a briefer version below but encourage you to read the original piece.

" Since ancient times, the elusive concept of wisdom has figured prominently in philosophical and religious texts. The question remains compelling: What is wisdom, and how does it play out in individual lives? Most psychologists agree that if you define wisdom as maintaining positive well-being and kindness in the face of challenges, it is one of the most important qualities one can possess to age successfully — and to face physical decline and death.

Vivian Clayton, a geriatric neuropsychologist in Orinda, Calif., developed a definition of wisdom in the 1970s, when she was a graduate student, that has served as a foundation for research on the subject ever since. After scouring ancient texts for evocations of wisdom, she found that most people described as wise were decision makers. So she asked a group of law students, law professors and retired judges to name the characteristics of a wise person. Based on an analysis of their answers, she determined that wisdom consists of three key components: cognition, reflection and compassion.

Unfortunately, research shows that cognitive functioning slows as people age. But speed isn’t everything. A recent study in Topics in Cognitive Science pointed out that older people have much more information in their brains than younger ones, so retrieving it naturally takes longer. And the quality of the information in the older brain is more nuanced. While younger people were faster in tests of cognitive performance, older people showed “greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences,” the study found. It stands to reason that the more information people have in their brains, the more they can detect familiar patterns. Elkhonon Goldberg, a neuroscientist in New York and author of “The Wisdom Paradox,” says that “cognitive templates” develop in the older brain based on pattern recognition, and that these can form the basis for wise behavior and decisions.

According to Dr. Clayton, one must take time to gain insights and perspectives from one’s cognitive knowledge to be wise (the reflective dimension). Then one can use those insights to understand and help others (the compassionate dimension). Working from Dr. Clayton’s framework, Monika Ardelt, an associate sociology professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, felt a need to expand on studies of old age because of research showing that satisfaction late in life consists of things like maintaining physical and mental health, volunteering and having positive relationships with others. But this isn’t always possible if the body breaks down, if social roles are diminished and if people suffer major losses. “So these people cannot age successfully? They have to give up?” she recalled asking herself. Wisdom, she has found, is the ace in the hole that can help even severely impaired people find meaning, contentment and acceptance in later life.

An impediment to wisdom is thinking, “I can’t stand who I am now because I’m not who I used to be,” said Isabella S. Bick, a psychotherapist who, at 81, still practices part time out of her home in Sharon, Conn. She has aging clients who are upset by a perceived worsening of their looks, their sexual performance, their physical abilities, their memory. For them, as for herself, an acceptance of aging is necessary for growth, but “it’s not a resigned acceptance; it’s an embracing acceptance,” she said.

 “Wise people are able to accept reality as it is, with equanimity,” Professor Ardelt said. Her research shows that when people in nursing homes or with a terminal illness score high on her wisdom scale, they also report a greater sense of well-being. “If things are really bad, it’s good to be wise,” she said.

The Berlin Wisdom Project, a research effort begun in the 1980s that sought to define wisdom by studying ancient and modern texts, called it “an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.” A co-founder of the project, Ursula M. Staudinger, went on to distinguish between general wisdom, the kind that involves understanding life from an observer’s point of view (for example, as an advice giver), and personal wisdom, which involves deep insight into one’s own life.

True personal wisdom involves five elements, said Professor Staudinger. They are self-insight; the ability to demonstrate personal growth; self-awareness in terms of your historical era and your family history; understanding that priorities and values, including your own, are not absolute; and an awareness of life’s ambiguities. Wisdom in this sense is extremely rare and research has shown that it actually declines in the final decades. As a coping strategy, it is better to be positive about life when you are older, she said, and the older people skew that way. They are more likely to look back on their lives and say that the events that occurred were for the best; a wise person would fully acknowledge mistakes and losses, and still try to improve. True wisdom involves recognizing the negative both within and outside ourselves and trying to learn from it, she said.

Modern definitions of wisdom tend to stress kindness — even if it’s not on the order of Buddha, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. Wisdom is characterized by a “reduction in self-centeredness,” Professor Ardelt said. Wise people try to understand situations from multiple perspectives, not just their own, and they show tolerance as a result.

Daniel Goleman, author of “Focus” and “Emotional Intelligence,” said, “One aspect of wisdom is having a very wide horizon which doesn’t center on ourselves,” or even on our group or organization.

He said an important sign of wisdom was “generativity,” a term used by the psychologist Erik Erikson, who developed an influential theory on stages of the human life span. Generativity means giving back without needing anything in return. The form of giving back could be creative, social, personal or financial, and “the wisest people do that in a way that doesn’t see their lifetime as limiting when this might happen,” he said.

Erikson’s theory of human development had initially included eight stages, from infancy to old age. When the Eriksons themselves reached old age, though, they found a need to add a ninth stage of development, one in which wisdom plays a crucial role. “They depict an old age in which one has enough conviction in one’s own completeness to ward off the despair that gradual physical disintegration can too easily bring". In the final years of life, “Even the simple activities of daily living may present difficulty and conflict,” Joan Erikson wrote in an expanded version of her husband’s book, “The Life Cycle Completed.” “No wonder elders become tired and often depressed.” The book adds: “To face down despair with faith and appropriate humility is perhaps the wisest course.”

“One must join in the process of adaptation. With whatever tact and wisdom we can muster, disabilities must be accepted with lightness and humor.”

Whatever the nature of one’s limitations, simplifying one’s life is also a sign of wisdom, by giving your things away while you are still alive. Some people have trouble with the idea of settling for less — “they’ve gotten so used to the game of acquiring more,” she said. Settling for less and simplifying is not the same as giving up. In fact, when older people lack challenges, self-absorption and stagnation may take over, the Eriksons said. The key is to set goals that match one’s current capacities.

There’s a point in life when a fundamental shift occurs, and people start thinking about how much time they have left rather than how long they have lived. Reflecting on the meaning and structure of their lives can help people thrive after the balance shifts and there is much less time left than has gone before.

The experiment that failed- part 2

I have just returned from the hospital, weak as a kitten having lost ten pounds and most of my abilities to ambulate. I can barely walk and even sitting down is a painful exercise. All this were the after effects of my brave experiment to rapidly get off dialysis through what the doctors called "cold turkey". I was cold all right but not in a very nice way. 

The experiment had started on jan 5. Two weeks later- on jan 24- my son's family arrived for a joyous three weeks stay with us. During this whirlwind period, we were busy with my grandson and there was little time to worry about anything else. The family left for Vietnam on February 14 and our life started returning to normal. 

It was around the end of the month that I started noting little tell tale signs in my body's slowdown-the appetite dwindled, there was weakness in the legs and energy levels seemed to have dropped rather sharply. Of course, I attributed these changes to the fact that we had led a hectic life for a couple of weeks and were now slowing down along, with the depression that inevitably comes when your family leaves behind an empty house. 

But two weeks ago a few lab readings showed that slowdown was much more than that. The bun and creatine levels, the two major indicators for the level of toxicity in the blood, had climbed back to risky levels. Indeed the latest reading on March 1 indicated a return to the hospital. On March 10, Dr Burka, my nephrologist, decided that these levels were too high and the experiment had to be curtailed. There was no choice but to resume dialysis. The catheter was reinstalled and dialysis restarted on the same day. Thus the experiment came to an unsuccessful, inglorious end.

"Did we learn anything from this experiment? " I asked Dr Burka.

"Yes"he replied sadly," We learnt that your body cannot do without dialysis".

"Do you think we can try again after the body has recovered sufficiently?"

He was noncommittal but his body language spoke that that was an unlikely event. But I was not likely to give up. It was true that I was in depression after this failure and happiness or joy seemed to be an elusive quality for me then.

But happiness isn't the opposite of depression -- resilience is. Most people didn’t get where they are just by sailing through life without any negative experiences or failures, I reasoned. But rather most of them distinguished themselves by their ability to get right back up every time they fall, a truism reflected in countless inspirational quotations on the power of perseverance (In the words of Winston Churchill, "It is the courage to continue that counts."). 

So how do resilient people differ from those who become paralyzed by every failure and setback? I asked?

Now building resilience isn't about blind optimism, I learnt, but rather than looking only on the bright side and pushing away negative emotions, resilient people let themselves experience what they're feeling in any given situation, whether it's good or bad. The resilient person isn’t papering over the negative emotions, but instead letting them sit side by side with other feelings. So at the same time they’re feeling ‘I’m sad about that,’ they’re also prone to thinking, ‘but I’m grateful about this.'

They're generally realistically optimistic.  A recent Taiwan National University study found that adopting an attitude of "realistic optimism," which combines the positive outlook of optimists with the critical thinking of pessimists, can boost happiness and resilience. "Every time realistic optimists face an issue or a challenge or a problem, they won't say 'I have no choice and this is the only thing I can do,'They will be creative, they will have a plan A, plan B and plan C."

They "reject rejection."  Rejection chips away at our self-esteem and confidence, making us fall harder with each subsequent setback or failure. "Rejection also steals our joy." But rejection is inevitable, and coping with it effectively is essential to becoming resilient. 

They build strong support systems.  When you get knocked down hard, it's important to have the resources to help you get back up again, which includes having people to lean on. A 2007 study found that social support can actually boost resilience to stress.

They notice (and appreciate) the little, positive things.  Resilient people are good at tapping into their "positivity ratio,”. This means that they notice and appreciate the little joys and victories -- which keeps them from feeling like "everything" is going wrong. Research has shown that a three-to-one ratio of positive to negative experiences is ideal for building resilience and boosting happiness. 

They seek out opportunities for growth and learning. Resilient people seek out growth experiences that boost self-reliance and individual decision-making skills, which gives them confidence in their ability to bounce back from failure. "As a sense of competence increases, individuals are better able to respond effectively in unfamiliar or challenging situations and persevere in the face of failures and challenges," 

They're endlessly grateful. Gratitude is known to boost health and well-being -- and those who are thankful may enjoy better physical health and mood than those who focus on hassles and complaints.

So there we are, back to the future and I am left pondering, redesigning my life once again.

I am now learning to walk, step by step, with the help of a walker. Once again I have to learn how to navigate around the house and to get in and out of the car without tripping. It is a fascinating period when my body refuses to obey my mind. And each step has to be carefully plotted and then faithfully executed. Long term planning becomes essential for any but the most minor movements. It is truly beginning life anew at least physically.

Rejection is rough, no matter how you slice it. But it's also an inescapable fact of life, and our ability to deal with failure and rejection has a hand in determining how successful and happy we are.

I am keeping count of how long it takes me to come back to normal!

Coping with grief

Rituals of mourning in the face of loss—from the death of loved ones to the end of meaningful relationships to losses in wars and competitions—are ubiquitous across time and cultures. So common is this instinct to devise rituals in the face of negative events that the wide variety of known mourning rituals can even be contradictory: Crying near the dying is viewed as disruptive by Tibetan Buddhists but as a sign of respect by Catholic Latinos; Hindu rituals stress the removal of hair when mourning, while growing hair (a beard) is the preferred ritual for Jewish males.

Why are rituals so ubiquitous, and, given that they are unlikely to be effective in producing some desired outcomes (such as actually influencing the production of rain) why might they improve coping after loss? Various studies show that a common psychological mechanism underlies their effectiveness: a restoration of feelings of control that losses impair. Indeed, people who suffer losses often report feeling out of control and actively try to regain control when they feel it slipping away. The use of rituals serves as a compensatory mechanism designed to restore feelings of control after losses and that this increased feeling of control contributes to reduced grief.

People turn to rituals after diverse kinds of losses in order to reestablish their feelings of control and mitigate their general negative feelings, such that the feelings of control brought about by rituals mediate the relationship between ritual use and reduced grief. Despite the many differences in the specific rituals that people perform after experiencing losses, and the diversity of emotions that accompany different types of losses,  a common psychological mechanism—perceived control— underlies the effectiveness of rituals in alleviating grief.

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” writes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. “We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.”

We cannot know, she says, when we lose the person we love—as she lost her husband John Gregory Dunne 11 years ago—“the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” The tragedy of such grief is that the loss of a loved one is irreversible. It is total and final.

Even so, while some of the grief-stricken remain depressed for long periods of time—developing what’s called “complicated grief”—most people move on. They eventually settle into their old routines or develop new ones. Their lives recover a semblance of order. Sad though they may continue to be, they are no longer held hostage by the chaos of their emotions. They are resilient.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University and author of The Other Side of Sadness, has studied grief for over 20 years. Among his most provocative findings is that 50 to 60 percent of mourners show no symptoms of grief one month following the loss. Some even overcome the grief within days.

What drives these people forward? What holds the others back? And why do some mourners recover from grief quickly—much more quickly—than others?

Psychologists who study these questions note that there is no single factor that predicts who copes well and who does not. Many variables, from your personality to your social world to your levels of stress before the loss, play distinct roles. A new study, though, hints at an answer. There is a specific way many people can, no matter what their circumstances may be, transcend despair and distress.

Researchers Michael I. Norton and Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School wanted to know how people cope with extreme loss. In the study, published in February in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, they found that some mourners are more emotionally resilient than others, and those who overcome their grief more quickly all have something very important in common. Following the loss, they performed what the researchers refer to as “rituals” in the study.

 By far, most of the rituals people did were personal and performed alone.These private rituals are very sad. One would expect that performing them—and writing about them—would make mourners more depressed by reminding them of who and what they have lost. But that’s not what happens, as the researchers discovered in a follow-up study.

Public mourning rituals, too, have a clear purpose. By gathering people together around the bereaved, they help mourners strengthen their bonds and reenter the social world after a major loss.

One of the most common responses to loss is feeling like the world is out of control. Day to day, most people go about their lives thinking they are in command. They decide what they do, whom they see, and where they go. And death—a familiar part of life in the past, when diseases were untreatable and public parks were cemeteries—is now remote, for the most part unseen, and often unthought of. So the sudden death of a loved one can shock and stun. The bereaved can be overcome by a helplessness that is otherwise foreign to their lives. As Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking: “Everything’s going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.”

When Norton and Gino probed deeper into the emotional and mental lives of their research subjects, they found that rituals help people overcome grief by counteracting the turbulence and chaos that follows loss. Rituals, which are deliberately-controlled gestures, trigger a very specific feeling in mourners—the feeling of being in control of their lives. After people did a ritual or wrote about doing one, they were more likely to report thinking that “things were in check” and less likely to feel “helpless,” “powerless,” and “out of control.”

Dr. Johnson points out that “for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.”

Those who are grieving cannot raise the dead or change the laws of nature. But by performing their own private rituals, the bereaved can regain their footing in a world that has become a little emptier than it was before.

The experiment that failed

Some weeks ago I had written about an experiment- a risky one at that - that I had undertaken to try and get off dialysis. I had been on dialysis for almost three months and the toxic levels in my blood seemed to have come down sufficiently to venture on this experiment. I had written about this decision in my blog "rocking the boat".

But in the last two weeks , my weight had dropped 10 lbs, the nausea had returned with a vengence, my appetite had all but disappeared and I was growing weaker by the day. Dr b was concerned and ordered me to a a nearby hospital for a round the clock monitoring. In three days they hoped to pump  in necessary fluids into my body so that I would be strong enough to undertake dialysis. Yes that is how weak I had become

Two weeks ago, I had been elated with the prospect of returning to a more normal life, but this elation has now been cut short. Alas that was not to be. Yesterday the new numbers showed that the toxics were back and the continuing the experiment would have been both dangerous and foolhardy. So we curtailed the experiment and I am now back on my old regime of dialysis three times a week.

So was this experiment worth the risk. Well, we did learn a great deal from this brief experiment: one, that getting off dialysis did not adversely affect the heart, two, that the rate of build up of the toxins was not excessive and three that this experiment could be repeated in the future when the body was sufficiently strong and robust.

But I am now going home and to dialysis

I am now readjusting once again to the new routine. But there is a sense of loss that we did not succeed. I can now understand how experimenters felt when one of their theories did not pan out.

I understand that every now and then a person has to feel like a failure in order to turn it around. Sometimes you have to have a break down before it can turn into a break through Several years ago I started noticing that I wasn't happy. I was ill more often than was O.K. with me and I seemed to only find pleasure in writing. I began asking, "Whatever happened to my joy? I must have had some joy in my life at some point. But where has it gone? Even during my engineering career my laugh was so infectious and wonderful that one of the my managers used to comment about it often. He loved my laugh. But even that laugh gone for awhile. So where had it gone? When and why did my joy leave? And more  important how would I get back that joy, that laugh again?