Imagine you are part of a panel meant to choose astronauts who can fly space missions and land on Mars. An astronaut you have chosen is on a space mission. Things don’t go by the plan and the spacecraft threatens to spiral out of control. Somehow, this astronaut along with his buddy manages to scramble things around and regain control! When back on earth, the astronaut is disappointed with himself. In his own eyes, he has failed in letting things go out of control. A thorough probe rules out human error, but his initial response was to think he goofed up! He wasn’t sure. Would you put him on the first flight to Mars? Let us say, you still do. After all, he did manage to regain control. Fast forward to the Mars landing moment, and on a private line, this astronaut says to Mission control even as he is manoeuvring the craft, that in his estimation, there is a 50-50 chance of the landing being successful. Just 50-50. With so much at stake! How would you as the decision-maker…
Novak Djokovic : Bypassing the Greatness Question!
Changing the usual conversation ” So, who is your favourite – Federer or Nadal?”, asked a student at the end of my session as visiting faculty. I use multiple examples from all fields in order to facilitate learning. So, no question is unexpected. ” Why haven’t you included Djokovic?”, I asked. “Oh, everybody hates him!”, pat came the reply; with a look that said, ” Don’t tell me you…” I did not want my response to get lost in the filter of personal likes & dislikes. ” Anyway you look at it, Roger Federer & Rafael Nadal were acknowledged very early on as icons who will inevitably be called the greatest players to ever play the game. What an impact they had! They already had a fantastic, ongoing rivalry. And they were regularly beating Djokovic in their most important match-ups. There was nothing to suggest, results-wise, that Djokovic was in the same league. Can you imagine the self-belief he would have had to change all of that & gatecrash himself into the conversation?!” The student thought it over and agreed!…
Free Solo – Of Heights & the Abyss
A ‘free solo’ climbs mountains alone without ropes. Only 1% of whose who climb are free soloists. And as there is zero margin for error, there are many who die. Not a life that most of us lead. And yet, the greatest achievement of Free Solo is that we cannot not ask the same questions for ourselves that the documentary asks about Alex Honnold. What does he seek out of life? How does he regard death? And how does living life on the razor’s edge -where he could die any moment- impact his overall life ? And that is what makes ‘Free Solo’ such a compelling watch. You will ask the same questions about your own life, even when his life is so different from yours. We all have our own mountains to climb. Known only to us. As of October 2021, in India, Free Solo is available for viewing here
We DO NOT learn from Experience
A short quote can reveal wisdom that is more invaluable than studying encyclopedias. As a learning and change specialist, here is a gem that sparkles. If this be true, how can we do better in learning? What are the areas we can work on? The simple answer that follows from Dewey is that we can – we can create learning at the level of experience – we can create learning at the level of reflection In simple words, we can encourage people to open up to new experiences and new thinking. Learning at the level of experience In the movie, Swades; Kaveri Amma sends Mohan on an errand to a village. Mohan works at NASA and has a blinkered perspective on how life is meant to be. Kaveri Amma knows that Mohan is going to undergo an upheaval during his journey through impoverished India. And she is right. Mohan realises that even clean water is hard to come by as he seeks drinking water in a train. He sees that people are eking out a living amidst the lack of…
What makes Jane Goodall’s story special
There is a dominant mainstream in any field and when its pioneers and trailblazers succeed, they are not a part of it! This astonishing fact should really upend all our thinking about what it takes to succeed. Instead, it is conveniently ignored! Why? The dominant mainstream enjoys an unparalleled hegemony over the hearts and minds of the numerous faithful. They have invested a lot into creating a collective faith about the field and its tenets for success. Breaking off from it is painful and entails a lot of hard work, struggle and resistance. What does this dominant mainstream do? It specifies the dos and don’t s of the field, the paradigm to use, the approach to take; all of which taken together, becomes an orthodoxy. This orthodoxy prescribes how everything ought to happen. Its word is the last law and field-work follows it like a sacred ritual. When Jane Goodall,the primatologist and anthropologist, began her field work in studying chimpanzees, she had no scientific training! She had studied biology in school, that’s all. She was not aware of what the…
Stanislav Petrov – The Man who Saved the World
Without you knowing about it, Stanislav Petrov has been a part of your life. He has saved the world as we know it by the decisions he made all the way back in 1983. On 26th September, 1983, Petrov was the duty officer at the command-center for a nuclear early warning system near Moscow in Soviet Union. That night, he faced one of the biggest decisions of the 20th century – a decision that could have precipitated an inevitable chain-reaction of events to culminate into the destruction of the whole world. Hard to get what this means into our gut and that is part of our collective challenge – but that’s beside the point. How did a low-ranked duty-officer come to bear such a huge responsibility? After all, we expect this to come to the desks of country leaders & top generals. And what made it such an agonising decision? In the eighties, the then superpowers, the United States & Soviet Union, were in a state of MAD ( Mutually Assured Destruction) This is even now the case. MAD means both superpowers had enough…
Ikiru : A movie for the cinephile
Most people like watching movies that entertain. A few are open to being more patient. These people will strive to engage with the movie on a deeper level, at least to begin with. Later on, it of course, pans out differently for different people. And the few who are in this category, make peace with that. If you are among this select few, you should surely watch Ikiru. And if death and the meaning of life as cinematic themes sit easy with you, you cannot miss Ikiru. It will be a movie you will cherish forever. So, what is Ikiru about? Ikiru means ‘to live’ in Japanese. The story is simple. A lifelong bureaucrat comes to know that he has cancer and has only 6 months or so to live. When death stares him in the face, he realizes he has never truly lived. Caught up in a system that has reduced him to being a cog in the wheel, the man, Kanji Watanabe wonders whether he will ever get a chance to do anything that makes him come alive before…
The Olympics at Rio : Inspiring achievements
The curtains have fallen over the Rio Olympics. The applause is yet to die down. The adrenalin is still surging through my brain. After all, our mind can soak in the glory of sport even when the body is not in the contest. Which is what I experienced when the Brazilian volley ball players were on the gold medal podium. This is Rio. This is their home. And their anthem is being played. Can anything top this?! They are weeping tears of joy. Clutching each other. Hearts beating as one, and stuttering because the moment is one to die for. Who doesn’t know that feeling?! Everyone does. Each one of us who has played team sports has that one electrifying experience of a closely fought game, be it any sport. When we know the contest has chiselled something within us, something deep and lasting, that goes beyond the game. Call it Self-belief or the power of We or by any other name. It is near impossible to define it and no definition is required for those who have experienced it. All we can say is that, it…
The Red Balloon : An enchanting movie experience
The red balloon will stay with you forever. It can make you wrestle with the very idea of what a story is. A great story is incomplete. A story is never complete in itself. A good story becomes complete when the audience or the reader merges into it. A great story transcends the desire for completion. The red balloon ends after 34 minutes but it stays incomplete. ‘ What is the story about’ has ready simplistic answers at hand. ‘What does the story mean’ has no one answer. And that is so beautiful about experiencing it. Searching for the answer leads us onto the familiar conceptual tool-kit of metaphors, allegories. We can bandy about words like narrative and structure and impose some sense. And this movie just like its red ballon floats away from the sense-making world. Which is why it is such a compelling watch for all those who seek to make a living out of story-telling, be they artistes, writers, or trainers. The movie restores mystery and magic to its unassailable place in explaining what makes a great story possible. And…