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This piece was first published in ForbesLife India, March 30, 2012 edition. All copyrights vest with ForbesLife India
AR Rahman and the art of focus
Soon after I got out of AR Rahman’s North Mumbai home (which also doubles up as his studio), I went online. To look up ‘Munbe Vaa, ’ a song in the Tamil movie, Sillunu Oru Kaadhal, for which Rahman had composed the music.
Now, I don’t understand a word of Tamil. And I can confidently say—without fear of contradiction from my wife—that I’m rarely ‘mushy.’ But the moment the song started to play, I was lost. Lost in words I didn’t understand, and—I hate to say it—falling in love with love all over again.
We had visited Rahman with a clear brief in mind. There’s a section in ForbesLife India , ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’ where we talk to people who are perceptibly happy and ask them one central question: How do they achieve happiness? In earlier issues, as part of this series of dialogues, we’d spoken to people like the absolutely lovely Asha Bhosle, Bollywood’s original charmer Shammi Kapoor, and the redoubtable Leander Paes who’s known to play his tennis with his heart worn loud on his sleeve.
When my colleague Jarshad NK, who has known Rahman now for many years, asked him if he’d spend time with us, I was pleasantly surprised when he agreed; Rahman, to my mind, projected reticence, a deep regard for his privacy, so I’d pretty much taken it for granted he’d politely decline to let us into his head. I was wrong.
And he continued to confound my expectations. There was no name-dropping; he didn’t carry the gravitas of somebody who’s worked with some of the biggest names in the world; there wasn’t the sense of self-importance you’d expect in someone who has won practically every award in the business, including two Oscars and two Grammys.
On the contrary, he made me feel at ease—almost like I was with an old friend, with whom I could share a couple of boy jokes, laugh at a few silly unprintable things, and ponder the world and its machinations. I found myself doing fanboy stuff like telling him how crazy my dad is about his music and he smiled and asked me to thank him for listening to what he composes.
I don’t intend to delve here into our conversation on happiness—that’s covered in ForbesLife India’s Spring edition—but about something else that struck me during our chat.
“I’m never composing in the studio for too long—at best for 20 minutes, 30 on the outside. I don’t spend eight to nine hours on something. It fatigues me. It’s like beating a sick person. There’s this Big Bang moment. It either comes, or it doesn’t. It flows or it doesn’t. But when you sit and things are at ease… that’s when it happens.”
“Twenty minutes!” I spluttered. “That’s all?”
Like most people, I’ve grown up on the idea that geniuses stay up for hours on end, focussed on their goals to the exclusion of everything else. But here was this icon of brilliance telling me it wasn’t worth working for more than 20 minutes. He knows what he’s talking about. I mean, six years after Munbe Vaa first hit the charts and I heard it for the first time, I wanted to fall in love again—which is exactly what Rahman had intended (“…certain songs like ‘Munbe Vaa¸’ when I did it, I wanted it to be a cult song—a legendary piece of music…”).
As he went about articulating how he did it, my mind couldn’t help but veer around to a book that’s hit the shelves very recently, 18 Minutes, by Peter Bregman. Rahman and Bregman were talking the same language. An advisor and consultant to CEOs and leadership teams across the world, the sum and substance of Bregman’s hypothesis is this: By setting out to do what is most important in your life and creating a daily 18 minute ritual spread over an eight-hour working day, you learn to concentrate on things that really matter. I’m sure Rahman hasn’t read 18 Minutes. But his method is remarkably similar to what Bregman recommends as a way to achieve the levels of productivity that only the best in the world—at whatever discipline—manage to do. So what are those common lessons?
Lesson #1: Pause
The big lesson: The ability to pause for a few moments when everything around seems completely out of whack.
I asked him, “Don’t you get pissed off when critics pan your work or somebody you reckon doesn’t understand what you’ve done attempts to deconstruct your body of work?” His answer was prompt: “Never take a decision based on emotion. You need to look at the world in a detached way.
You can look at it either as a romantic film or a horror flick. I choose to look at it as a romantic one. When there’s a sea of negative comments, I put a filter around myself.” It’s a lesson, he said, that was reinforced when he had a chat with Sachin Tendulkar, who does much the same thing.
During the course of Bregman’s research on emotional responses, a neuroscientist at Columbia University told him that the brain has this part called the amygdala, which triggers emotional responses. When something unsettling happens, it provokes an immediate reaction. But pure, unadulterated emotions are not the source of your best decisions.
So Bregman asks, how do you get beyond the emotional to rational thought? The neuroscientist told him, if you take a breath and delay your action, you give the prefrontal cortex time to control the emotional response. And all it takes is a second or two.
And that is precisely the filter Rahman is talking of. Pause! “It requires effort.... it requires sacrifice.”
Lesson #2: Pursue your passion
Roja was Rahman’s debut film as a music director in 1992. Directed by Mani Ratnam, it catapulted Rahman to national acclaim and won him a series of awards, and a mention in Time magazine for creating one among the 10 best sound tracks of all time. Question on my mind was, how did he get there?
“I used to cycle and go all the way to Mount Road [some 10-12 km away] just to find this one British magazine called Music Makers. It was about synthesisers.” Often, after he’d cycled there, the store would say it hadn’t arrived yet. But he’d keep going there every day, “until I got my copy. And when I’d finally get it, I’d go ‘Oh my God!’”
“Then there was this time I used to go to Bangalore to another shop, where they had albums that were not there in Chennai and come back listening to them on the train. That transported me to another world. When I did my music, I wanted to transport other people as well, without compromising on tradition. I guess that’s why Rojaeventually happened.”
Each year, Bregman writes, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts a survey among thousands of Americans. The purpose is to document how people spend their time every minute each day. Most people surveyed by the bureau spend the most part of their day sleeping; 8.68 hours to be precise. They watch television for 3.45 hours and work for 7.78 hours. That is, most people actually spend more time sleeping than they work, which is fine. But what makes the data compelling is people spend almost half the number of hours they work doing something as unproductive as watching television.
Now juxtapose this with what Bonnie Ware came up with in a book Bregman points to, called Top Five Regrets of the Dying. An Australian songwriter, Ware devoted a significant amount of her time to palliative care with people in the last twelve to three weeks of their lives. The themes that recurred in her conversations with dying people were:
I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I didn’t work so hard.
When you see these two regrets together, Bregman says, you realise “What people really regret isn’t simply working so hard, it’s working on things that don’t matter to them. If our work feels like it matters to us, if it represents a life true to us, then we would die without the main regrets that haunt the dying. We would live more fully.” Rahman put it more philosophically. “You can’t be without passion. Passion means the possessiveness to be the best.” And where does work fit in, I asked him? “Work is like nasha (intoxication). When you’re working, you got to be really selfish and get the best out, pushing your people hard. Sometimes you rub them on the wrong side, but work is like medicine: If it is good, everything else is forgiven.”
Lesson #3: Assert your differences
Bregman talks of an interesting change he noticed, back in the ’90s, when he was consulting with American Express. Harvey Golub, CEO and chairman, used to come into work wearing suspenders. Bregman recalls that soon after Golub took over the top job at Amex, people started to wear suspenders as well. It’s an effect Bregman has seen across businesses: People try to fit in. “But fitting in has the opposite effect. It makes you dispensable. If you’re like everyone else, then how critical to the business can you be?”
Bregman points to Susan Boyle. “In a field with a tremendous number of beautiful, sexy, talented people, what are the chances that you’ll be noticed by being even more beautiful, sexy, and talented?” But Susan Boyle was different. She broke the mould. Which is why her YouTube videos received more than 100 million hits. “If she looked like every other aspiring singer, would the world have noticed?”
It’s a lesson Rahman learnt early on in life. “Problem is, people compromise. Until something is not there, people won’t know it is there. So you have to create that wanting.” But getting people to want something they don’t know about isn’t easy. It takes time and patience: “First, you cater to what people need. Once you’ve done that, you compose what you love and believe people will love as well. And you stand by it, even at the risk of being rejected.” And how do you do that? “You can only be what you are. You can only try to maximise what you are. Good-looking or bad-looking, this is my shape; it is there for people to see. There is a beautiful quote that says, ‘I can never change what or how I look. But I can change how the world looks at me.’”
“If you go to Hollywood and say, ‘I can do what John Williams does,’ they’ll say, ‘get out!’ But when I said I have Slumdog Millionaire, they embraced me. Do something on your own. Do something unique. Look at yourself from the other person’s perspective and make yourself unique.”
Lesson#4: Choose the world that supports you
The first thing that struck me about Rahman’s apartment-studio was the all-pervading sense of peace: The unmistakable smell of incense; the all-white walls and floors; thick carpets; unfailingly polite support staff. Perhaps most significant, despite the fact that his apartment was located in a film-crazy city, and even had his name on the door, nobody, not even the watchman, knew that it was the AR Rahman who lived and worked out of the place. It’s the same with his Chennai home. And, Jarshad tells us, he’s got an apartment like this in every major city he works out of, all of which are more or less replicas of each other. He hates to work out of plush hotels that would only be too happy to bend over backwards to accommodate his every whim and fancy. The only quirk, if you want to call it that, is that he likes to work in the night.
I couldn’t help but think of it as a series of rituals. On the face of it, the idea of a ritualistic life sounds terribly boring. He laughs. “I don’t drink. I don’t eat pork. I don’t womanise. I think many people think of me in the same way: He must be a boring guy.”
Bregman has a contrarian take on rituals; he calls them tricks. “We all need a trick,” he writes and cites the late Jack LaLanne, a fitness guru who had the longest running TV show—34 years! —in the US. LaLanne was the kind of man who could swim a mile or more while towing large boats filled with people… while handcuffed. That, Bregman says, wasn’t LaLanne’s ‘trick’. His tricks were in his everyday rituals. Until he died, aged 96, he spent the first two hours of his day exercising: Ninety minutes lifting weights, 30 minutes swimming or walking. He wrote his eleventh book, Live Young Forever, at age 95.
Bregman concludes that rituals are the only way you can focus on a few important things amidst the many other things asking for one’s attention.
Lesson #5: Master distraction
In business, multi-tasking is a much-touted skill. The better you are at it, conventional wisdom goes, the higher your chances of making it to the top.
But when Bregman started to research the phenomenon and the impact it had on productivity, he was stunned. People distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ. The impact is twice as much as it would be if you were smoking marijuana. Bregman figures that in reality, productivity actually drops 40 percent, because human beings aren’t built to multi-task. What we do instead, he says, is switch-task—shift rapidly from one task to another—and lose time in the process. Last year, one of Rahman’s children was seriously unwell and had to be rushed to the ICU, where she was diagnosed with a critical condition that required open heart surgery. Rahman, for whom music is nasha, gave it all up. He knew he couldn’t focus on music, not when his child was unwell, not when she needed him more than anybody else did. For an entire week he was by her side, tending to her, until she was well again and back on her feet.
AR Rahman doesn’t multi-task. When he’s focussed, it is intense, because, as he says, “It is a spiritual thing. Nothing comes without losing something. You can’t have everything.”
Cover Image of ForbesLife India, June 2011 issue, where this piece first appeared. All copyrights vest with ForbesLife India
All that I once held as true
In his award-winning book, The Making of Memory, a copy of which sits on my desk right now, Steven Rose writes, “We know who we are and who other people are in terms of memory. Lose your memory and you as you cease to exist.”
If Rose is right, and I suspect he is, I’ve been dead for over four months now. I say dead because as I begin to write this, we are in the middle of May 2011. I don’t remember a thing of what’s gone on around me over the last… four months. I don’t remember people I’ve met, things I’ve done or places I’ve been to.
It was awfully tough to walk into office last week and not know the names of at least half the people I’ve worked with to launch this publication. Pictures from the launch event that feature me seem surreal; I don’t remember the party. I thought I’d died and didn’t remember the funeral.
Then maybe, I told myself, this is what they call an out-of-body experience. Or maybe it’s just a nightmare that hasn’t ended yet. But my name appears on the imprint line as editor, and there’s a signed note from me in the launch issue, so I guess I’ve played a part in putting this title together. (I must confess I like most of what I see. Do you like it? The nude angel on the cover: Painfully beautiful, isn’t she?)
Truth is, each time my phone rings, more often than not, I can’t put a face to the name flashing on my screen; when I can, I’ve forgotten what my relationship with the person is and I don’t know what I am supposed to talk about. I’m better off not taking the call.
Truth is, my world has shrunk hopelessly. The newspapers I used to devour so voraciously every morning seem intimidating because context has been stripped from everything I read. I feel helpless standing by the side of the road because I’ve forgotten how to cross it on the face of oncoming traffic. My neighbourhood, where I’m reasonably sure I’ve lived for 21 years now, looks alien. This city, that I love so much and where I’ve lived all my life, seems like a foreign country.
Truth is, I, Charles Assisi, adult, journalist, editor, father, perfectionist, can’t get around without help. I guess this is what it must feel like to be dead.
My brother, a neurobiologist, tells me it’s okay, that it’s only a matter of time before my memory begins to come back. Another three, maybe six months and I’ll be ‘me’ again.
Until then though, I will have to make do with props, with notes to myself, with a little help from friends and simply accept that I’ve lost my memory.
It would only be fair if you stopped me right here and asked me, How can you write about what is it like to lose your memory when you have no memory? Sounds a bit illogical, doesn’t it? Brings to mind those lovely lines from ‘Kathy’s Song’ by Simon & Garfunkel:
And a song I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can’t believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme
How do I begin to explain all of this? How do I remember ‘Kathy’s Song’ when I have no memory of so many other things that have passed? Ought I not to have forgotten the English language I write these words in? How do I remember Nayantara, my five-year-old daughter, for whom I write this? Dammit, how can I remember to write when, as Rose says, I’ve ceased to exist, when I am dead?
I’m not qualified to answer these questions because I’m neither a neurologist nor a philosopher.
I’m just a regular guy who had a seizure in the office. (They tell me I was reading the first cut of a mind-bending piece that’s in the issue you’re reading right now. I can only say, smiling, Mr Sinha, I look forward to reading your story for the first time. But I need to unbend my mind first.) I was taken to the hospital by friends at my workplace. There I had several more seizures, so my friends tell me. Doctors diagnosed me with encephalitis — “brain fever” we laypeople call it — which scarred my temporal lobe.
I refuse to get into the minutiae of what all this is about because I’ve figured it doesn’t matter. What matters to me right now is that I don’t know if I’m dead or alive; if I’m awake or dreaming; if I’m in my body or outside it; if I’m writing this or imagining these words. I know…I think I know…that I’m doing this because my friend Peter Griffin asked me to. He tells me I’m not dead; instead, that I’m in a unique place where few people will ever go to.
And that if I don’t write about it while I am here, I won’t remember it later, and I’ll never be able to tell Nayantara what the place is like. Manipulative b*****d.
Truth is, I so wish I didn’t have to write this.
But here I am, in my room, my familiar, well-loved space, enveloped in a fog. Nothing is what it seems.
A few weeks ago…or was it a few hours ago — my sense of time is all distorted — I took a long walk in a park with my dad’s older brother. For as long as I remember, I’ve worshipped him for his intellectual bandwidth. And I’ve loved him because he possesses that rarest of human virtues, compassion, in abundance. We cracked some awfully stupid jokes only the both of us could laugh at. And when it was evening, he insisted on going back to Cochin, because he doesn’t like to stay away from home for too long.
Soon after he left I picked up the phone and called my cousin to tell her how good it was to see Cliffy Uncle after such a long time. She paused, and then quietly told me that Cliffy Uncle died three years ago. I’m not entirely sure now, but I think I went to a corner and cried a while.
I’m not sure now why I cried. Maybe, it was because Cliffy Uncle died. Or maybe it was because that was the time I started to figure not everybody could see the people I could see.
I was seeing ghosts, you might say. I tell you they’re real to me.
In that one moment I knew I was so hopelessly lonely, so full of despair, that even ‘Kathy’s Song’, where I’ve sought refuge so often in the past, felt inadequate. As the song goes:
And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.
As beautiful as those lines are, my truth is more mundane.
It lies in what Dr. P.P. Ashok tells me on my weekly visits to his clinic. The lanky neurologist, who I distinctly remember training with when I was a long distance runner, didn’t frown even once when he was told of the smells I smell that no one around me can detect. He told my dad and Anna, my wife (they’re both with me on every visit), “The perverted sense of smell is a phenomenon commonly associated with damage to the temporal lobe.” He also insists he isn’t a distance runner. I’ll give him this: With the kilos I’ve piled on, nobody, not even me, can imagine I once ran at all. But I have pictures and a bloody certificate to prove I did the Mumbai half-marathon.
The truth I now know is that the good Dr. Ashok looks at me in much the same way I used to look at specimens stored in formaldehyde jars in the zoology labs of St Xavier’s College, where I graduated from. My unreliable memory makes me an interesting object of study. He asks a few quick questions each time we meet: You feel okay today? How did you get here? What did you eat this morning? What about last night? Whom did you last make a phone call to? What did you talk about? And then he turns to Anna and asks her to corroborate my answers. He asks her more questions about how I’ve been. I am but a listener in this conversation about the me-ness of me. I wait with bated breath until he pronounces judgement: Am-I-okay?-will-this-end-now?
The last time we met, he told my wife I’ve gotten much better — that the corners of my mouth don’t droop any more, that my gait seems steadier, that I sounded much surer of myself, that he was comfortable reducing the potency of the drugs he’d put me on and that I’d recover in the timeline he expected. He said all of this without looking me in the eye. It was my dad and Anna he was talking to. They, after all, are the ones with memory. They are the ones who exist. I just listen in from the envelope that now accompanies me everywhere, my personal portable fog, my formaldehyde jar.
It is easy to feel terribly angry. I’ll tell you why.
I’ve lived a full life, I’ve read widely and well, absorbing, learning every day. I’ve made a living thinking on my feet, pulling things out of my memory and synthesising them on the fly.
Now, thanks to a virus that could infect anybody whose immune system is compromised by something as trivial as a common cold, because a few damn neurons are misfiring in my head, because of a bloody seizure that lasted a few seconds, I have lost all that it took me all these years to build.
Add this. I’m an alpha male, and I’m proud of it. I’m in control of myself and my environment. But, in the last few months, Anna tells me, there were times I couldn’t so much as go to the loo without help because I didn’t know how to untie my pyjamas. You want to talk to me about humiliation?
Truth is, I now know intimately that nothing is what it seems it is. I’ve seen people you can’t see, heard sounds you can’t hear and smelt things you can’t smell. I’ve seen a world few of you ever will. And it is terrifying.
As I crawl out, slowly, trying not to lose my footing, all I know is I don’t ever want to go back.
But no, I don’t feel angry. What I feel, instead, is overwhelming gratitude. Walking out of Dr. Ashok’s clinic, my eyes fall on this beautiful, beautiful child. He couldn’t be a day older than five. He’s going through much the same thing that I did in March, only worse. He’s seeing more ghosts than I did and feeling as terrified as I was. Except that unlike me, he doesn’t stand a chance. When I see such heart-breaking beauty, I’m grateful for having another chance at life. Surely, surely, he deserves better.
The nurse told me he’d had four seizures in the one hour he was there. Now he can’t move his limbs, and he doesn’t know where he is. The young couple that cradle him in their arms look exhausted. I guess it’s only a matter of time before he dies.
I don’t know how else to say this, but he is better off dead. I should know.
I don’t know what his name is. But in my head, I call him Aayushman, which means long life. The irony isn’t lost on me. I came awfully close to ending up like he is. I didn’t. I live to tell the tale.
Whom do I thank for that? I don’t know who I owe my life to. ‘Kathy’s Song’ — how do I remember ‘Kathy’s Song’? — continues to play in my head
And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I.
This piece was originally written by me for Forbes India. All copyrights to this article vest with Forbes India
Ankit Fadia Revealed
Dear Ankit Fadia,
First of all, I’d like to place my unconditional apologies on the record. In fact, before I started to write you this letter, I promised my colleagues these pages will be used to crucify and call your bluff before your 16th book on computer security hits the shelves a few months from now.
These apologies come with the awareness that it will cost me friendships I have cultivated for years in the dark corridors of the internet where people like me lurk and are known to each other only by our nicknames.
For a very long time, I’ve despised you as a charlatan. There used to be a time when I thought you a script kiddie, or a skiddie if you will. You know what comprises those types—plagiarists who pass off software programs developed by others as their own. That is why on every forum that matters, I’ve rubbished your credentials as a hacker of any merit. I’ve openly accused you of shameless self promotion. And each time you appeared on television shows or in print as one of the most prominent experts on computing and security in the world, I’ve laughed my backside off. I told everybody who cared to listen you’re nothing but a bag of gas, whose reputation was built by shoddy journalists that eagerly lapped up the tall stories you doled out.
Like I told you the other day, I thought it impossible how the books you’ve authored until now could possibly have managed to sell 25 million copies. I thought it completely ridiculous on your part to claim you were contacted by American “intelligence agencies” for help to decipher an encrypted email sent by Al Qaida operatives post 9/11.
But after an email interview and five hours of talking the other day, all I have to say is mea culpa. You are perhaps one of the smartest 27-year-olds I’ve met in all my years in journalism. And I’m willing to bet every rupee I have you’ll go a very long way because you’re twice as smart as CEOs I know who are twice your age—and that you are exponentially smarter than I am.
My interaction with you taught me a few lessons that I won’t forget and ones I’m sure people in the C-suite will do well to imbibe.
Lesson #1: Brand
If I were to compare myself to where you are, I think I’d be a wretched failure. I mean, at age 40, if I were to go out and advertise something called the Charles Assisi Certified Course in Journalism, I’d be laughed out of the room. But here you are—a strapping 27-year-old, whom people pay Rs 12,000 to get a certificate that proclaims them an Ankit Fadia Certified Ethical Hacker (AFCEH).
Until you told me, I didn’t know there was anything that prevents me from issuing a certificate of any kind. But for the certificate to have any value in anybody’s hands, the name ought to be a brand. That is why you assiduously go about building your personal brand, work longer hours than most people I know, and refuse to lurk in the shadows. Instead, like you told me, you come out into the open, speak a language most people understand, and have even trademarked your name.
I must concede you are an articulate speaker. Your name is perhaps what most lay people now associate with ‘hacker’. This, in spite of you admitting to me, you consider yourself just a decent hacker, not a good or excellent one. There are others, who by your admission are better at it than you. It’s just that they choose to live in obscurity while you refuse to do that. Because end of the day, you need to have money in your pocket to make a decent living for yourself and visit every country in the world before you die.
I get what you’re trying to say. I don’t have a single book to my name, let alone translations of any of the few hundred articles I have written in my years. I don’t get paid by the thousands of rupees for every hour of my time to talk about computing in packed halls. I don’t travel 20 days every month offering my services across 104 countries. You pulled your passport and letters from various companies to prove your credentials. Who am I to question that? No police chief has ever called me to talk to their people on anything, but they lap up everything you say, and you have pictures and certificates to prove your claim.
Lesson #2: Hold
It was sometime last year that I asked one of my former colleagues, Anirvan Ghosh, to connect with you and try to find what makes you tick. You were happy to talk and even posed for some pictures that are published on these pages. You told him you first captured popular imagination when you were just 13 and hacked the website of CHIP , the popular technology magazine, now published by Infomedia18, a subsidiary of Network18, the company I work for.
As your story goes, after you defaced CHIP, you felt guilty and wrote to the editor telling him you were responsible for the act. The gentleman apparently called you up and said somebody as talented as you ought to be working for CHIP. When you confessed you were only 13, the editor asked you to wait until you turn 18 and then sign up with him.
I fell off my chair when Anirvan recounted the anecdote to me. I used to be the editor of CHIP and know the magazine’s website was never defaced. Nor do I remember offering you a job. Like I told you earlier, those were the days I thought you a skiddie.
Just to make sure, I called my predecessor Gourav Jaswal. He was founding editor of CHIP India and is a man I respect enormously. He now runs the not-for-profit Synapse Foundation. Gourav sounded mildly amused and said nothing like this happened during his stint either.
But because you insisted, I called the very amiable Marco D’Souza, who took over at CHIP after I left. He now runs a firm called Spotmygadget.com and blogs for Forbes India. Marco, whom all of us know as the quiet geeky kind, guffawed loudly. He couldn’t believe his ears either. But I didn’t want to give up on you. So I called up my friends Ludwig Blaha and Wolfgang Su, both of whom used to be based out of Munich, CHIP magazine’s international headquarters. The two were once responsible for CHIP’s international editions. They denied knowledge of any such episode.
When I wrote to you the other day with this question, you offered to come over to my office right away and talk about it. As much as I tried to probe you, you held your ground and insisted you had hacked the website.
I like how you did that with a straight face. There is nothing I have on record to prove you didn’t, other than my word and those of others whom I respect. You had no evidence either to prove you actually hacked and our discussion came to an impasse. I gave up and told myself, this is one hellava’ tough nut to crack.
Lesson #3: Exaggerate
Last year, you told Anirvan 25 million copies of your books have been sold. And of these, your first book alone sold eight million copies. I told you what that means is that at age 13, you managed to sell as many copies of your first book as JK Rowling, Dan Brown and Steig Larsson put together sold with their first book in the United Kingdom. I thought it ludicrous and told you that in as many words. But you didn’t blink. Instead, you told me I’m referring only to the UK and that your books are translated into many languages and sold across many countries. You also told me that your books are parcelled as textbooks as well and consumed by students. Technically, textbooks aren’t counted as “sale of books” by any publisher and that I ought to factor that in as well. When pushed harder, you refused to back down. Instead, you told me it is common practice in publishing and television to exaggerate sales or ratings; that publishers often invent ingenious ways to account for sales of a book; and that the numbers “quoted in the media may be marginally exaggerated”. But you didn’t back off. You held your ground and once again, it was impasse.
Lesson #4: Evade
I looked up your claim that has been reported by practically every newspaper, magazine and radio station in the country on how you helped the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to crack an email that came from the Al Qaida. Every security expert I spoke to laughed because nobody could figure how a then 15-year-old could understand what takes clusters of supercomputers to decipher. Nobody even knows which American agency asked you to do a job their best people couldn’t execute. To your credit, you didn’t duck the question. You told me you never claimed the FBI asked you to do it. Your version is that all you said was some “intelligence agencies” from the US contacted you. Journalists threw in their two bits and claimed you were contacted by the FBI. You told yourself, if somebody wants to tell the world that FBI contacted you, why should you go out of your way to deny it if it works to your advantage? You proved to me you ought to know when to shut up.
But you did claim the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) contacted you to help with a case they were having trouble with. When pressed, you didn’t have any evidence to prove your claim. We reached an impasse again.
Lesson #5: Pursue
I told you, you’ve got the devil’s luck. You told me luck comes only to those who pursue it. To give me but one instance, you told me your publisher thought it would be a great idea if a certain prominent television personality (whom you asked me not to name) were to endorse your upcoming book.
Question was who would ask him? You wrote to the gentleman’s publicist and was asked to wait. As luck would have it, you saw him at an airport, being mobbed for autographs. Most people would’ve been intimidated asking him for a favour then. For a few minutes you thought whether it made sense going up to him and asking if he would be kind enough to read your book and endorse it. You told me you did it because you had nothing to lose if he didn’t agree. When you mentioned your name, he instantly got who you are and agreed to read your book. He may or may not endorse it. But nobody can take away from the fact you gave it everything you got.
Lesson #6: Empathise
To understand your methods better, I looked up your talks. I heard with rapt attention on Youtube.com your talk at a college in Calicut, Kerala, on how to bypass network administrators at your college or workplace if they block certain websites. The “hack” you offered I thought was rather quaint in that it is an old one, but there are the young ones who always fall for it.
Go to Anonymizer.com and type in the blocked URL. In a few seconds, the blocked site opens up because Anonymizer works by hiding the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the site you’re looking for. Usually, network administrators are dumb and haven’t heard of this tool. If they’re smart though, they’ll block Anonymizer.com as well. But there’s a “hack” for that as well. Just go to Anonymizer.ru. Most network administrators have no idea that a website with the same address but routed through Russia exists and you can get to where you want to. Because, you say, Russian hackers are the real deal.
I nodded my head in appreciation at how your listeners applauded the “hack”. When I asked you how that constitutes a hack, you told me it isn’t a hack. And that you never claimed it was a hack. Instead, it was part of a series of talks for general audiences not acquainted with computing—as an introduction. It’s just that you put it across in a manner that is accessible to everybody. If people throng to listen to you talk on that, why hang you for that? Damn right you are. You empathise with people and give them what they want. Isn’t that what every business ought to be doing?
Lesson #7: Court
I’ve written this piece in the first person because it’s something I’ve learnt from you. By writing in the first person, there is a good chance your “clients” may consider paying me as well to “train” their employees on network security. When I questioned you hard on whether some of the more respectable names in technology did indeed consult you on basic subjects, you were blunt and told me how surprised I will be at how poor levels of awareness are in many technology companies. And that if they compelled their people to work on their skills, they wouldn’t. But if it came from you, they would listen. Because for all these years, with single-minded persistence, you have gone about building a brand for yourself. It’s come to a point where you cannot be ignored and that you’ve worked very hard to get to where you are.
Most CEOs I know aren’t anywhere close to what you are at building and monetising a brand out of thin air. I’m not trying to mock you here. Instead, I’m awestruck at the genius you’ve deployed in getting to where you are without being anywhere close to the real hackers I know who whine and cringe each time your name is mentioned, but for a good part live in obscurity and penury.
Like I said, I take back everything I’ve said of you in the past. On the contrary, I’d be delighted to engage in more conversations with you and understand better how businesses ought to be run. How you evolve is something I will watch with keen interest.
As for your disarmingly charming question on whether or not you can write a regular column on technology for Forbes India, I promise to check with my editor and get back to you.
Until then, please accept my best wishes and compliments for a job well done.
Why I quit Facebook
Because Facebook was making me dumb.
After much deliberation, I deactivated my account. I must file a caveat here. I’m not a Neo-Luddite; you know, the kind who dislikes technology. I’m the kind most people call a geek. So why quit Facebook?
A little over two years ago, I read a lovely book, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed by Howard Gardner, an American developmental psychologist at Harvard University. The book compelled me to write him a note and ask for an interaction. The man was gracious and offered me his time. Several interactions over email and some face time on one of his visits to India later, I published a piece in Forbes India, where I used to work until very recently.
Gardner’s hypothesis is this. The world we live in is one where it is ridiculously simple to find people who agree with you. But there is a downside to that. Because everybody around seems to agree with you, prejudices that exist in your mind, are reinforced.
As theories go, I thought it compelling. But the implications weren’t evident to me, until very recently when I started to examine my media consumption habits, Facebook included.
Each time I checked my Facebook feed I thought I could see a pattern. On the one hand, I had in excess of 500 “friends” and subscribed to at least a dozen groups. On the other hand, my feed was populated by posts from “friends” that ran into just double digits.
Eventually, I realised this monotony in feeds that populated my timeline was because all of it originated from two kinds of people. Those whose posts I hit the most number of “likes” on; and those who frequently hit “like” on my posts. Other “friends” on my network were invisible entities—unless I chose to actively seek their timelines out. The more I thought of it, the more I was convinced this is a problem. What I “like” is inevitably what I agree with. What about those I disagree with, or whose posts I don’t hit a “like” on? Why should they be invisible?
Interestingly enough, the numbers of people whose feeds I could see also ties in with the Dunbar Number. First proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, he argued, a human being could on average maintain 150 meaningful relationships. By “meaningful” he meant, if all of these people were in the same room, everybody would be comfortable. Implicit to comfort is that everybody shares more or less similar worldviews.
My reading’s suggests social media architects of the kind who work at Facebook deploy this idea in their algorithms to limit interactions and visible ideas to the boundaries imposed by this number. Else, their product may seem chaotic to most humans. While the architects may be right in deploying the wisdom Dunbar’s Number contains, I am convinced these interactions in the digital world contain a fatal flaw.
In the offline world, I live in a space different from the one my elders do, or the one my sibling does. My friends come from backgrounds dramatically different from mine.
That is why when my folks chide me for my lack of spiritual beliefs; my sibling disagrees with me on what constitutes the good life; and my friends vehemently argue over political ideology, there is no acrimony—at best, animated conversations. I can’t hit a “like” button here or “unfriend” them. By the very nature of my relationships, my biases aren’t confirmed. Instead, they are challenged, unlike Facebook, which provides me comfort that comes with homogeneity.
That said Facebook is only a metaphor for a larger problem that terrifies me. Allow me to put that into context.
I recently took to drinking green tea because I was told it is good. To understand why, I punched “Is green tea good for me” into Google. Practically every answer the engine threw up pointed me to resources that argued why it is indeed good.
As a little experiment, I typed “Is green tea bad for me”. The numbers of arguments on why it may not be so good after all, were as many as why it is good.
The answers I was looking for were dependent on the bias built into my question. The algorithms that power the searches were feeding my biases.
To understand what happens if I eliminate the implicit bias in my question, I typed “green tea” into the search bar. This time around, the results were mixed. Some pointed to why it is good and others to why it is bad.
This is where my problem really is. We live in times where the potential to find ways that amplify our biases is unprecedented.
Most of us carry tablets, smartphones, and every kind of always-on device. Every media company, whether established or in start up mode, has latched on to the ubiquity of these devices. That explains the explosion of applications, which offer “personalised news feeds”, the “communities” they seek to build, and “relationships” they hope to forge on their platforms. This includes RSS feeds, bloggers you follow, Twitter, Flipboard, Zite, Storify, and everything else you can think of.
The ability to “personalise” allows you choose filters of all kinds: the media outfits you want to patronise, subjects that interest you, writers and opinion makers you like. You get what you like. Nothing more, nothing less!
This explosion in personalisation is killing diversity and making us dumber.
To draw yet another parallel, think food. Once upon a time, food was at a premium. Human ingenuity took over and agriculture was industrialised. Scarcity gave way to abundance and foraging became a thing of the past. Fast food culture took root. This culture though came with an underside. Humans became sedentary, turned corpulent and acquired lifestyle diseases. To combat these diseases, we are now compelled to make informed choices on the food we consume and proactively avoid sedentary lifestyles.
If this analogy is extrapolated into our world, Clay Johnson’s advice in the The Information Diet resonates loud. “Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.”
In our own interests, therefore, it is incumbent to deliberately decide what information to consume, what communities to be part of, and what relationships to nurture.
The alternative is: Be dumb, stay dumb.
This post was first published by K RamKumar, ED at ICICI Bank on his personal website www.otherview.in
What a wonderful world
As always, Maria Popova on the fantastic Brain Pickings makes a drab day turn into a promising one with something she leaves you to chew over.