Who let the dog out?

As terms go, collaborative consumption sounds fancy. As ideas go, it is ridiculously simple. As a premise on which businesses can be built, it is ingenious. And as a system around which our lives can be lived, it is powerful.

The currency that drives this ecosystem is not the money in your bank account. Instead, it is the reputation capital you earn and your willingness to give up on privacy. By way of crude analogy, think the number of likes and shares on your Facebook posts, retweets and followers on Twitter, and connections on LinkedIn.

Rachel Botsman, founder of the Collaborative Lab (cclab.collaborativeconsumption.com) and a thought leader on the theme, calls it the what’s mine is yours economy. The reason it is taking off, she argues, is because we’re wired to share. “We were doing it for thousands of years, whether it’s when we hunted in packs, or farmed in co-operatives, before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created our own little fiefdoms. But things are changing, and one of the reasons why is the digital natives, or Gen Y. They’re growing up sharing—files, videos, games, knowledge. It’s second nature to them.”

So how do these models impact how we live? Botsman thinks it will happen in three ways.

• Markets for redistribution like Title Trader (www.titletrader.com) are emerging. After you’re done with using, say a book or a DVD, swap it with somebody who owns something you need. After all, it’s not the book or DVD you need, but the content it contains.

• The emergence of time banks like TaskRabbit (www.taskrabbit.com). You need some errands run at home, but are busy at work. I have time on hand and offer my services at a time banking marketplace. For every hour of my service, I earn time credits. When I’m busy and need somebody to care for my older parent, I can redeem these credits to avail the services of someone on the marketplace. An Indian equivalent is Timesaverz (www.timesaverz.com). But as things stand, the platform offers services for a payment, not time credits. It is only a matter of time though before time makes its presence felt as a currency in India.

• Then there is the product-service system. You pay for the benefit of the product without owning the product. This model has begun to take off in India. Gurgaon-based Rajat Gandhi, chief executive of Faircent—a peer-to-peer lending platform, and Bengaluru-based David Back, co-founder at Zoomcar, India’s first self-drive car company, are die-hard evangelists who’ve built businesses on the back of this philosophy.

Gandhi’s proposition is one he thinks will “disrupt incumbent banks and financial institutions”. While he admits these are early days, Faircent’s (www.faircent.com) proposition is interesting.

Assume you’re an individual sitting on idle funds in the bank, but would like the money to work harder for you. You register as a potential lender on the Faircent platform and look up potential borrowers. Their profiles, credit-worthiness and reasons for borrowing are listed against their names. Person X may be looking for 20,000 and is willing to pay 10% on it. Person Y may be looking for 50,000 and is willing to pay 13% while person Z may be looking for 1.5 lakh and is willing to pay 15% to access the money.

As a lender, you like all three, but want to spread your risks. So you may choose to lend person X 5,000, person Y 8,000 and person Z 10,000—or any permutation and combination of your choice. “Think of it like building a portfolio on the stock markets,” says Gandhi. “But here, instead of stocks, your investments are a portfolio of borrowers.” And like in the markets where you have blue chips, mid caps and penny stocks, borrowers are categorized into class A, B and C after an assessment by Faircent.

Borrowers have the advantage of seeking only as much as they need. Gandhi points out that often times while they don’t state it explicitly, conventional institutions choose not to lend to “small and medium enterprises (SMEs), doctors who practice Ayurveda, lawyers, policemen and members of certain communities.”

On this platform though, because the market is distributed, and information transparent, these barriers hold no meaning and anybody can bid for loans. By way of example, Ayurveda practitioners who had no access to funding can get it here on average at 20%. The only problem, Gandhi says, is “while we’re finding good lenders, there are not enough borrowers.” That said, over the last one year, Faircent disbursed 12 crore. The platform makes money by charging a listing fee from both lenders and borrowers.

David Back (www.zoomcar.com) has an equally compelling proposition. Why own a car when you can rent it by the hour? “Philosophically, it is an obsession with using resources more efficiently,” he explains. The way it works is simple. Need a car? Use the mobile app to find one close to you. Book a car of your choice from a location closest to you and return it when done.

Back argues the opportunity is huge both as a business and to positively impact the environment. By way of illustration, he argues, India has 12 cars for every 100 people and Indians emit on average three tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). If the numbers of cars on the road go up, Indians will move closer to the global average of 12 tonnes of CO2 and the “consequences can be disastrous”. Which is why, he thinks collaborative consumption is an elegant solution.

After having been rejected by “at least 500 investors”, Zoomcar managed to convince a consortium of angel investors including Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, and professors from Wharton and Harvard Law School to pitch in with $2.9 million. “I am proud to have been an angel investor behind Zoom. In a developing, dense country like India, there is even more benefit from automobile sharing,” Summers said.

After having started out from one location in Bengaluru, it is now present at 40 places including Pune with 250 cars in its fleet. Plans include expanding into Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad. To fund these plans, the company is currently raising $8 million from Sequoia Capital, T.V. Mohandas Pai of Manipal Global Education and Abhay Jain of Manipal University.

Consumption in this universe is a function of sophisticated technology. Gandhi and Back are clear that in the longer term, their operations will have no human intervention at any point. But the way things are, if you need to participate in their models, you need a high credit score. Right now, Faircent relies on theCredit Information Bureau Ltd (Cibil) and Zoomcar on a refundable security deposit of 5,000. Over time though, as all of these models permeate the cloud that is the Internet, the currency will be your reputation.

As Botsman puts it, “In the old consumer system our reputation didn’t matter so much, because our credit history was more important than any kind of peer-to-peer review. But now with the Web, we leave a trail. With every spammer we flag, with every idea we post, comment we share, we’re actually signalling how well we collaborate and whether we can or can’t be trusted.”

If Faircent and Zoomcar are to successfully disrupt the spaces they operate in, they need to keep costs low, which is why their reliance on technology to assess reputation. That engine in place, eventually Faircent may not have to deploy people or rely on Cibil scores to authenticate a lender or borrower’s intentions. Zoomcar may not have to expend time on processing security deposits because they know an individual who borrows a car from their fleet will return it in impeccable condition.

At a time bank, it is possible to imagine high-reputation capital translating into a premium for time credits in your account. And on a re-distribution platform where you’ve earned a reputation for swapping superior content or services, you could swap more for what you have on hand.

The catch here is that reputation is contextual. Just because somebody can care for an older parent does not mean he is necessarily good at housekeeping. That means you need a holistic view of somebody before you decide to collaborate with an individual. “I envision a real time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why,” says Botsman. “They’ll all live together in one place, and this will live in some kind of reputation dashboard that will paint a picture of your reputation capital.”

Trustcloud (www.trustcloud.com) is a good example of what this dashboard could look like. It works much like a credit card, except that the currency embedded into this virtual card on your browser is your reputation.

“Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are versions 1.5 of sharing your life. When version 2.0 goes mainstream and you begin to share your life there, more businesses will evolve and flourish around it,” says Gandhi.

Sure, this means giving up on significant parts of your privacy. But the upside is that as your scores on your reputation index move up, the playing field levels out and people with talents who would otherwise remain undiscovered will move to the top.

Airbnb (www.airbnb.co.in) is one such platform that allows people to rent out their living spaces to travellers from other parts of the world and earn a livelihood. But it isn’t as straightforward as that. Until you’ve gotten enough positive votes as a passionate host, you don’t matter on the platform. Because end of the day, Airbnb is more about people than the spaces they inhabit. So much so that it is now beginning to disrupt the hospitality business.

Then there is Stack Overflow (www.stackoverflow.com), a platform for programmers of all kinds from across the world to showcase their talents and solve problems. Until the time you’ve received enough positive votes from your peers, your reputation doesn’t move up. But when it does, your ability to wrest the most lucrative assignments goes up exponentially.

“In the 20th century, the invention of traditional credit transformed our consumer system, and in many ways controlled who had access to what. In the 21st century, new trust networks, and the reputation capital they generate, will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power and personal identity,” signs off Botsman in her talk at a TEDGlobal conference on the theme.

Moral of the story: To thrive, the only currency you have is reputation. If that means opening up to public scrutiny, so be it. Think your privacy a thing of the past and give it away to the dogs.

This article was published in Mint on November 27, 2014. All copyrights vest with the newspaper and no parts of it may be reproduced without permission from the publisher 

"Jugaad is not a good word"

GV Prasad

G.V. Prasad is co-chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd, India’s largest pharmaceutical company by turnover. The firm he heads has over 16,000 employees across the world, and manufactures 190 medications and 60 drug ingredients, diagnostic kits and other biotechnology products.

Between 27-30 November, Prasad will be a resource leader along with Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons Ltd; Ram Charan, acclaimed CEO coach; and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, who built the Isha Foundation. At the foundation’s campus in Coimbatore, between the four of them, they will lead a residential programme tailored for entrepreneurs called Insight: The DNA of success. The intended outcome is to explore what comprises the mind of an entrepreneur and how do they go about seeking success. Edited excerpts from an interview with Prasad:

How would you describe yourself outside your role as an entrepreneur?

I am not deeply religious or spiritual. I am not drawn to any particular theology or guru. My biggest passion was the organization and how to take it to a level where it is recognized for its work in innovation, people practices and governance. These are three areas I think we want to be distinctive. Beyond that I am the average Joe.

As an entrepreneur, what have your learnings been over the years?

First, to build a business, you need the best talent. You cannot achieve extraordinary results without extraordinary people. You’ve got to surround yourself with great people.

Second, I believe if you do the right thing, success will follow. That includes doing the right thing for your stakeholders, customers and employees. You don’t have to make trade-offs for any one person’s sake. On the contrary, if you choose to pursue success in terms of financial numbers, you will fall. I have seen many entrepreneurs fail because they have not been holistic about what they do.

Third, every business must have a larger purpose. If you know what problem you are solving, you align all your strategies and resources to that problem.

What is the larger purpose for the organization you lead?

It is quite clear. We are trying to improve the health of people. We do it through innovation and affordability by improving on products that exist or finding new products. Or making them more affordable for that matter, especially products that are difficult to make, which have scientific and technological barriers. We focus on those products to reduce the costs there. In fact, we are improving access to affordability.

In the Indian context, innovation and affordability have been a function of ‘jugaad’, or that is what we have come to believe. What is your take on that, particularly in an industry that is as critical as yours?

In our industry, it is difficult to say jugaad will work. We are dealing with human beings, health, potent systems and hence quality becomes important. Jugaad is not a good word in the pharmaceutical industry. It means “make do”.

In our industry, the pursuit of excellence and the highest element of quality is very important. Look at recent problems people have had to face because of drug sterilization issues. You can see how dangerous it can become if you don’t have a mindset of absolutely high quality.

So what does it take to pursue affordability and innovation both at once? Are there some learnings you’ve had in the pursuit of both these objectives simultaneously? Are there learnings that can be exported?

Absolutely. Affordability is a platform. It does not mean we are looking at making things at the lowest cost. When we mean affordability, we think about competition and how will it be difficult for them to replicate it.

We think about scientific innovation. We innovate to make things more affordable, better and efficacious without allowing room for trade-offs. Sometimes if you look at the success stories of India, like that in the automotive industry, just rushing to affordability has not worked. People want better quality and a better product. You can’t trade-off on these things. Innovation lies in doing both simultaneously.

To your mind, what does it take to be an entrepreneur? Can anybody be one? Can you possibly evolve into one? Or can the traits an entrepreneur requires be acquired?

I don’t have a strong thesis on this. All I can say is that entrepreneurship is an intense journey. You have to be highly motivated with what you are doing. It is not about making money. It is about solving an important problem and doing it innovatively to create value. It demands you be innovative, passionate and tenacious. It takes a long time to make a business work, especially in a country like India where the ecosystem is stacked against you.

I don’t know if an individual is born with these traits or they can be acquired. But when all of these traits come together, magic happens. It could be the context in which an individual becomes an entrepreneur, or that by nature he is very curious and is a problem solver.

If you were to step back and look at the Indian landscape, what is it about small and medium enterprises that stands out as opposed to those in other parts of the world? Are there traits that are uniquely Indian?

Every entrepreneur creates magic. To build an enterprise, or to build a successful business one needs to work passionately, with limited resources, and make it work in a time-bound manner to deliver a product or service that meets a real need. This works differently in different parts of the world. If you take the US, it is an intensely competitive environment, but it is also one where failure is tolerated. You can pursue big ideas, fail and there is no stigma. For Indian entrepreneurs, it is a one-way street. If a guy fails, he doesn’t stand a second chance.

I guess that is why a lot of Indian businesses are not built on the back of innovation, but by getting access to resources, access to government and power, access to land, and so on and so forth. Real innovators are not the thriving majority in India. Only in the recent past the IT industry has shown you can build businesses without patronage. It is the only industry in India that has used manpower as an asset.

To that extent, Indian entrepreneurs are more focused on the cost side of the equation than the innovation side. That is a fundamental difference I see between Indian entrepreneurs and global ones.

How much does that bother you?

I think it is changing. I see a new breed of entrepreneurs trying out new things. There are e-commerce companies coming up and scaling rapidly. We are in the early stages of a revolution.

Are there any specific ones that stand out to your mind?

All the companies that are looking at creating value out of Intellectual Property—you can see quite a bit of them in the IT and biotech industries. Even in the old traditional industries people are reinventing themselves. It is too early though to talk specifics. But what we are seeing is positive.

And what about family-managed businesses (FMBs)? Are there peculiarities you see? Is the patriarch still in charge? Are there conflicts that come to mind?

I see people willing to give up control to professionals. What Infosys did was a remarkable thing. We are seeing families willing to step back and behave more like investors and strategic architects as opposed to operating the business. But there is a long way to go.

What kind of pain points should entrepreneurial entities be prepared for as they begin the scaling-up process?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev makes a point that when a trapeze artist is swinging, he is confident that when he lets go, he will find the next swing, latch on to it and move ahead. Unless you have the confidence that there is a swing out there you can latch on to and move ahead, you cannot let go. This is the biggest dilemma I have seen in family businesses. This prevents them from taking important decisions. They are unwilling to let go with the risks of letting people make mistakes, particularly in FMBs.

If you don’t want to grow and want to be in a corner, and are happy, that is perfectly fine. But if you want to grow, scale up and create large impact, there are certain things you have to do. To do that, you need to grow beyond the Founder’s Syndrome.

Personally, how important is scaling up to you?

We are a company that has let go. We wanted to build a global organization that can sustain itself through changing generations, people and technology. For us it was an easy decision. We are a listed company and are not an SMB (small and medium-sized business). We had to do what was right for us.

What are the challenges that accompany the pursuit of growth and how do you decide the pace at which you grow?

The readiness of your people and their capacity and the imagination of the leadership in your enterprise—these are the limiting factors. You need to have a big vision, and the people to execute them. Both of these are like Yin and Yang. Without great people, you cannot execute. And without great vision, you cannot have great people aligned.

How easy or difficult was it to let go and what did it take to come to that point when you took the call that we have to do it now if we are to grow?

You realize it quickly when the organization around you is falling into a rut and are not able to execute fast enough, meet the demands of growth and understand where the constraints are. Often times the constraint is the leader himself. His ability to think, get people on board and get them to deliver. It is not an event. It is a process. You don’t do it suddenly. You do it by preparing your people, organization and gradually change the questions you ask of people. You stop taking all the major decisions

Can you give some sense of what kind of questions you would ask people in this process?

When you are in the operative mode, you look at what problems to solve, identify the problem and offer solutions. As you become bigger and have a better team, you don’t ask what problem to solve, whether your people can see the problem or understand what is coming. You look at people and their capabilities. So the nature of questions you ask are very different.

In the early days when you are trying to survive, you look at the profit and loss statements very closely. Later on, you look at what capabilities are you building and how are you doing things? Are they sustainable? Do you have a pipeline of people? That’s how the kind of questions you ask changes.

What is the point at which an entrepreneur calls it quits or are entrepreneurs the kind of people who have to persist no matter what the odds are?

In an enterprise, there are many phases of growth. In the initial days, the viability of your product and business is essential. There you need a close-knit team and be on top of everything. As you become viable, build and expand, you have to transition your leadership. I am not saying an entrepreneur has to quit, but he has to constantly reinvent himself. And at some point, if he is unable to reinvent, he must move on. The entrepreneur’s role is very context specific. I don’t think he has to quit for an organization to succeed. There are many cases of entrepreneurs leading brilliantly to the end of their lives. They are the ones who are always learning and growing.

From your personal experience, how often have you been compelled to reinvent yourself? Do any instances come to mind when you have had to change yourself dramatically?

I can’t call it dramatic change as much as constant evolution. With each change in the organization, I have had to change myself and the work I do. Initially I used to be running a business and used to know everything that is happening everywhere. From there we reached a point where we had to build end-to-end business units for everything. As time passed, I started to look at strategy, talent and culture as opposed to performance. At each stage in the organization’s evolution, one has to adapt.

When it comes to intrapreneurs within an organization, what differentiates them from entrepreneurs?

They are the same. These are people who see the same issue and think up different ways to do things that can add greater value. They look at the same set of resources and make the organization more productive or solve a significant problem.

Are the two interchangeable?

I would think so. If an organization allows space for people, they should be the same.

You mentioned you are not a particularly spiritual person. But assume for a moment there is conflict in an entrepreneur’s life when he has to straddle the domain of spirituality and pragmatism. How does he do it?

I don’t know what the meaning of spirituality is. I have never understood that fully. But do I reflect on things, do I have a strong value system, would I do anything that goes against my value system of what I believe in? On these, I am clear I will not do anything that goes against my value system. I wouldn’t call it pragmatism. I would call it the wrong thing to do. Those are convictions we carry. I don’t know if that is spirituality. But if it is, then we won’t compromise.

What if you were faced with a situation where you have to stand up for your value system on the one hand and growth on the other hand? Do situations arise when both of these are mutually exclusive and are there ways to resolve it when they are?

I have one answer for this. If you look at the long term and not the immediate or short term, in the long term it is always more attractive to follow your values.

Can you think up an instance when you were compelled to take a call and stay put on the long term and give up on growth in the short term?

Right now we are spending 11% on research and development. It is a lot of money. I could cut these costs down and increase both my profitability and share price. But the long term would be compromised. Similarly, I could cut back on investments in quality, safety and environmental protection. But that is not sustainable. The answer to all these ethical dilemmas is to look at the long term 10 years down the line, or even 30 years, and you won’t trade-off for the short term.

How do you explain that to shareholders who want immediate returns?

Shareholders understand if you tell them. But you have to be performance-oriented. You cannot always hide behind the shield of long term. Show them progress and give them enough, so they trust you are investing in the long term. It is difficult, but not impossible.

Most of us tend to be one-dimensional and focus only on one part of our lives as humans, which takes precedence over the other parts. What has your personal experience been like?

In the initial days of my career, I was also one-dimensional. I realized that as a result, I was not a complete package as a leader. So it became important to seek out people with contrarian points of view because they guard you against biases. They shine a light on your lack of perspective and expand it.

I sought out experiences, friends and advisers to become more complete. I found inspiration from speakers at conferences, books, and over the long term, developed more interests that have helped me become a better businessman.

For example, I like wildlife. My visits to forests made me more environmentally sensitive. I use what I’ve gained there to make the organization more effective in formulating environment-friendly policies.

If I go to an event, for instance the F1 Race where I ran into Sadhguru, watching the pit stops and the wheels change, you understand that you can reach impossible levels of performance if you focus down and set yourself targets. Something like that can help an organization do work that is time-sensitive in a very effective way. And all these experiences are portable across various contexts.

What is the one belief that you used to hold close to your heart that you have now changed?

I don’t know if I have changed any fundamental belief. I think I have become a better and more effective leader. But I can’t think of any belief that I have had to discard.

This interview was published in Mint on November 25, 2014. All copyrights belong to the newspaper & it may not be reproduced without permission from the publishers

A whiff of fresh air

Blog RSS

Yesterday, sometime during the day, I got a received a call from a Mumbai-based called centre. The lady at the other end said she was from Policybazaar and that she was following up because I had visited their site a few days ago. I told her I haven't and hung up. But I was outraged, thought this a spam call and tweeted about it. A few friends latched on to it and re-tweeted.

A few minutes later, a gentleman called Naveen Kukreja latched on to my timeline, texted, said he is from the company, and when can he call. We agreed to speak the next day. I looked him up and turned out he is chief marketing officer and a director at the company. 

That I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. Earlier today morning, he called me up as promised. We had a brief chat during which he first apologized for the intrusion. He then told me the call hadn't originated from his call centre. All of their calls, he told me, originate only from Gurgaon near Delhi. Not just that, he had the courtesy and honesty to tell me that until June 2014, they used to share details of people who'd visited their site with insurance companies. But following customer complaints of spam calls, they discontinued the practice. And that in hindsight, they thought it was the wrong thing to do. He was also honest enough to admit they perhaps ought not to have. Naveen added it is entirely possible somebody from some insurance company who'd gotten my details from PolicyBazaar.com in the past may be responsible and how they behave now is outside his control.

Be that as it may, I was impressed because I can't think of too many companies that would have behaved as promptly, acknowledged a mistake, apologize, and tell the truth without mincing words. They could have chosen to ignore a few tweets. But taking it up seriously and addressing it just earned PolicyBazaar.com goodwill on my part and a promise that in the future for all of my insurance needs, I'll look them up first.

Thou shalt (not?) commit adultery

Imagine a world where sex does not exist. For the sake of this argument, take procreation out of sex and consider it nothing but an act of pleasure. Almost instantly, it is then possible to imagine a world where large parts of the global economy have collapsed and businesses cease to exist.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider the Swiss British philosopher and writerAlain de Botton’s take on this imagined world in his superbly written treatise:How to think more about sex.

“There would be so much less to do without sex. No one would bother to open jewelry stores, embroider lace, serve food on silver platters or hoist hotel rooms onto pontoons over tropical lagoons. The greater part of our economy would be meaningless without sex as a driving force or organizing principle. The mad energy of the trading floors, the padded gold-leaf dressing rooms of Dior on Bond Street, the gatherings at the Museum of Modern Art, the black cod served at the top of Japanese restaurants—what are all these for if not to help along the sort of processes whereby two people will eventually end up making love in a darkened room while sirens wail in the streets below?”

It is, therefore, in everybody’s longer-term interests to think more about sex. But the problem with great sex, Botton argues, is that like happiness, it is an exception than the rule. If some evidence were needed, consider the responses to sex surveys by India Today and Outlook magazines. Their findings report the very act of sex, as the years progress, is viewed more a monotonous obligation than an act of joy.

The question then is how do you really think about sex? Because at the end of the day, it is not just around whether economics work and businesses flourish, but how do we live our lives.

Botton’s packed itinerary did not permit a detailed interview. But between his book and many conversations with Kuldeep Datay, a Mumbai-based practising clinical psychologist who is affiliated with the Institute of Psychological Health (IPH), startlingly similar, and shockingly counter-intuitive insights emerged.

Modern marriages are built on the back of three necessities, and not necessarily in the following order:

1. The desire to have sex

2. A need to be loved romantically

3. The evolutionary urge to raise a family

These necessities are the beginning of a problem as well. “It is unfair to place all of these demands on one person and expect to feel fulfilled. It is not the natural order of things,” says Datay in a matter-of-fact tone.

But it is and when they are imposed on frameworks created by contemporary morality, room emerges for conflict. “The person who wants love but gets just sex feels used. The person who is really after sex but who must pretend to want love in order to get it feels, if forced into a relationship, trapped or, if able to flee one, corrupt and dishonorable,” writes Botton.

In ancient times though, most societies did not place a premium on sexual fidelity. This was true both in the East and the West as documented by various texts—both historical and mythological.

But by the beginning of the mid-18th century, as prosperity and urbanization started to seep into Europe, for various reasons, the notion of an ideal marriage, or a relationship, started to take root. This ideal demanded that all of the three necessities articulated above be embedded in one individual, with a huge premium on sexual fidelity. And if these ideals, particularly the ones to do with sex, don’t stand to scrutiny, individuals are scorned as immoral.

But the problem with this Victorian framework is that when placed in the context of a marriage, it involves one spouse taking on the onus of running the home. “Tasks that often feel akin to the administration of a small business and that draws the same bureaucratic and procedural skills, including time management, self discipline, the exercising of authority, and the imposition of rules upon recalcitrant others,” argues Botton.

When viewed at from a man’s perspective, Datay puts it bluntly. Child-rearing later, unless worked upon very hard, a woman’s body goes through significant changes. While it satisfies her man’s need to raise a family, it runs the risk of derailing his sexual appetite for her.

Botton is unambiguous in that this dichotomy isn’t gender specific. “…women recognize the theoretical appeal of warm, nurturing and communicative males, but are at the same time unable to deny the superior sexual attraction of those cruel bandits who will take off for another continent the moment the lovemaking is finished.”

That said, Datay has witnessed many interesting cases. “I’ve seen couples,” he says, “where if 21 boxes need to be checked on what needs to be done to makes a marriage work, 20 are ticked, but the marriage is sexless,” where sexless is defined as one where a couple has sex no more than 10 times a year.

Then there are other cases where he’s had to intervene, where couples converge on nothing else but lovemaking. While most couples think both of these are grounds for divorce, the courts often don’t agree and refer the warring parties to counselling.

Botton contends this is tragic. “We don’t choose whom we want to sleep with; science and psychoanalysis have by now made it clear that there are hidden forces that make the choice for us long before our conscious mind can have a say in the matter.”

But both are unambiguous in their assessment that this is fertile ground for adultery. They are equally unambiguous in their assessments as psychologists that viewing adulterous relationships as “sinful” is rather naïve as well. “There is no right and wrong in this,” says Datay.

That said, there is a flip side to adultery. What starts off as a relationship on the side intended to satisfy one or more needs missing from a marriage, is that both are seeped in idealism. Botton suggests it is impossible to sleep with someone outside of marriage and not spoil the things we care about inside it. Ironically, “just as it is impossible to remain faithful in marriage and not miss out on some of life’s greatest and most important sensory pleasures along the way”.

For all practical purposes, this is what is classical Catch 22. When in love, sex may be unnecessary. A secret tryst with someone you think attractive but aren’t in love with can mean the death knell to your partner in love. And in raising a family, both love and sex between couples stands to be compromised because all of the attention is on the children. Not focusing on the children to set love and sex in place can threaten the future of the next generation.

Are there ways out?

Hack #1: The first on Datay’s list is among the oldest tools in the book—fantasize. Try to imagine, he advises, as often as possible, what it was like when you laid your eyes on your partner for the first time and wanted to make love. And then there are times when you just have to get on with it, even if you don’t want to. Because if you don’t and advances made by your spouse are rejected, the consequences are humiliating to the one who initiated the advance.

Hack #2: Then there is the fact that couples live in an unchanging environment. “We can blame the stable presence of the carpet and the living room chairs for our failure to have more sex,” writes Botton. “The physical backdrop becomes permanently coloured by the activities it hosts—vacuuming, bottle feeding, laundry hanging, the filling out of tax forms—and reflects the mood back at us, thereby subtly preventing us from evolving. The furniture insists that we can’t change because it never does. Hence, the metaphysical importance of hotels….there is no limit to what a shared dip in an alien bath tub may help us achieve.”

Hack #3: The pursuit of art in some form can have beneficial consequences to how we view sex. Consider what Edouard Manet, the celebrated French painter could do to something as lowly as a bunch of asparagus. He infused this still life painting that goes by the same name with “tumultuousness” and “turbulence”—adjectives used to describe this work by the curator of the museum where it is now housed. The point here is trying to locate the good and the beautiful beneath the layers of habit and routine.

Hack #4: Above all else, Botton suggests we rethink the platitudes used in marriage vows and make it a lot more downbeat than the swaggering optimism that accompanies it now: “I promise to be disappointed by you and you alone. I promise to make you the sole repository of my regrets, rather than to distribute them widely through multiple affairs and a life of sexual Don Juanism. I have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is you I have chosen to commit myself to.”

This piece was first published in Mint on November 21, 2014. All copyrights belong to the newspaper and no parts of this article may be reproduced without the publisher's permission

The Art of Stillness

When will you die?

That you will age and die is a given. The questions are when and whether it will be miserable or graceful. Short answer: expect to live to be 100. And if you are like most urban Indians in their late 30s and early 40s who maintain an awful lifestyle, expect to die miserable. That is, unless you mimic the 38-year-old Vikram Sheel Kumar—physician, researcher and entrepreneur—who shuttles between Boston and Delhi.

Until three years ago, he was willing to punt he’d live to be 120. For various reasons, he has since lowered the bar: “I am older and wiser now, and would be happy with 100 healthy years. To get there I take some pills, like a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D and glucosamine. I don’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, and exercise daily. Nothing too exciting, but I don’t really think excitement gets you a century in this game.”

Then there are optimistic extremists in the life expectancy camp, like Aubrey de Gray. A British gerontologist, he vociferously argued that ageing is a disease, it can be cured, and that somebody living right now could live to be a 1,000.

Michael Rose, among the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists researching ageing at the University of California, Irvine, thinks de Gray’s argument is bunkum. “I don’t think ageing is a disease by any reasonable definition of the term disease,” he argues. “I don’t think it is possible to simply cure it. But I do expect that this century will see biomedical research tame it to the point that it is no longer devastating. People born after 2050, I predict, will start to live two or more centuries. People born after 2000, I predict, will frequently live to 100 or more,” he said in an email interview.

Be that as it may, all camps converge on the point that biological immortality is possible—a stage in a person’s life when they stop ageing. This is not to say you won’t die. But crudely put, this is the point when it is impossible to tell your age by physical appearances. For instance, in most cases, you cannot tell the difference between an 85-year-old and somebody who is 90.

By way of example, Kumar points to the 75-year-old Ramesh Chauhan, chairman of Bisleri International. “He is a really smart person. He controls his destiny to an extent, at least as far as work goes. So he is not retiring anytime soon. He just launched a new energy drink and is having the time of his life. He has kept his mind and body young by taking an interest in the little things in life. Sure, some would say that is micro-managing. But caring about the details means always being on. I don’t believe we age by doing too much. It is when we stop to do, or turn off that we age,” said Kumar.

But scientists like Rose are hard at work in trying to lower the age at which people hit biological immortality. “I think that dietary and activity changes, better tissue repair, and genomically-informed pharmaceutical development can be combined in our lifetimes to make the rate of increase in mortality and age-associated diseases less dramatic,” he says.

“The kinds of experiments we have done with Drosophila (a small fruit fly used in genetic research) have been emulated on a smaller scale by scientists working with other insects and mice… There are already clinicians and biotech companies interested in using my ideas. However, they have not yet achieved enough impact to affect the lives of many people this decade. Maybe next decade will be better. We’ll see.”

To put it mildly, Rose is understating the significance of his work. As early as 2004, David Sinclair and Christoph Westphal co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. The company’s stated mission was to develop drugs that harness the body’s immune systems to fight ageing. Some breakthroughs with yeast (a microscopic fungus) later, the management at drug maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) reckoned the breakthroughs could potentially be deployed to arrest the debilitating consequences of ageing. In what was seen as a contentious acquisition, GSK paid the founders $720 million way back in 2007. Pharmaceutical industry analysts thought this was too high a price to pay for a nascent, untested technology. But if anything, it highlighted the kind of money Big Pharma is willing to bet on backing anti-ageing research, or the elixir of youth if you will. Then last year, under equally contentious circumstances, GSK shut Sirtris down. The official line was, “integrating into the larger company will grant the programme better access to GSK’s chemistry, biology and pharmacology teams”.

Coming back to the point, when Chauhan’s lifestyle is extrapolated with Rose’s work, Kumar reckons, on average, urban Indians now in the 40s will live to 80. Statistically, this means that the probability that most people reading this newspaper will live to be 100 is high. And that is where the problems begin. Because living to be 100 is one thing. Living healthy until then is another thing altogether. As acclaimed author and physician Atul Gawande points out poignantly in his most recent book Being Mortal: “Old age is a continuous series of losses… Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

Add to this the mindset most of our policymakers and we are weaned on. That we ought to retire at 60, or 65 on the outside. Rose dismisses the idea outright. “I think universal mandatory retirement ages are now of little value,” he says. He’s got a point. Because if life expectancy goes up 40 years from the time you retire, how are you to fend for yourself for the rest of your life?

Much has been written as well about India’s demographics and how it will be the youngest country in the world by 2020. What isn’t spoken of is that 15 years from now, India will have at least 120 million senior citizens. This number doesn’t include those in the late 30s and early 40s. Bunch them and estimates reckon there will be 330 million seniors (the entire population of the US in 2012) slugging with an impatient next-gen to earn a livelihood. But most people don’t get it. “People cannot fathom their increasing lifespan in the same way as it is hard for a child to see how tall he is becoming,” points out Kumar. The question then is what are we to do?

If anything, Chauhan is a pointer. You’ve got to keep reinventing yourself. Second and third careers will be par for course. That means you don’t stop at investing for your child’s future education; you also invest in reskilling yourself. It is entirely possible that the skills you possess now will be redundant when you’re past a certain age. Because “…specific high-risk occupations that require high levels of stamina might require regulation with respect to measurable physiological competence”, points out Rose.

That said, not all is morbid. Gawande writes, “If we shift as we age towards appreciating everyday pleasures and relationships rather than achieving, having, and getting, and if we find this more fulfilling, then why do we take so long to do it? Why do we wait until we’re old? The common view was that these lessons are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.” In other words, with some discretion, it is possible to age gracefully. More importantly, as life expectancy increases, the life skills that Gawande alludes to and come with age can be enjoyed for much longer than people do now. That is a pretty damn good reason to live to be a centenarian.

This article was first published in Mint on November 14, 2014. All copyrights vest with the newspaper and it cannot be reproduced without permission from the publisher