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I watched Okuribito (Departures) yesterday, a movie that follows the life of a mortician, an encoffiner. An encoffiner is a person whose profession is to prepare the body of a deceased person and place it in a coffin, especially in a ceremonial or ritualistic manner. Leonor Magtolis Briones, a movie critic, notes, “the encoffiners’ real task is to bring dignity to death, respect to the deceased and solace to those who grieve, and it is not hard to be moved . . . .”

Okuribito is a 2008 Japanese film by Y?jir? Takita. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2009 Oscars.

It is a beautiful movie, but a very difficult watch initially. You feel confident of your capability to withstand difficult scenes, but in here, something inside you gives away. At first you start despising the profession and feel the same kind of emotions as felt by the wife of the protagonist. But slowly, you are awestruck with the beauty of the process, the incredible art, and the relevance of the ritual. It touches you deep within.

I don’t know what motivated me to watch this movie. Perhaps it was the fact that I had nothing else to do at that time. But I am now incredibly thankful for the impulsive decision. Though the movie is about a man’s journey, it has many underlying tones to it. There are quite a few aspects that are so very relevant to our own lives. There was once a debate at my house on how once people take care of their need for food and shelter, they move on to think about supposedly higher level things. The argument surrounded the relative progress made by different civilizations around the world. But in the face of this movie, all those arguments fall apart. Through this movie you realize that a profession can be cherished for what good does it do to the people around us. You may not be making millions (or even thousands) but can live a very simple, satisfying, and beautiful life. The taste of food does not change with how secure you are financially. Those things take care of themselves once you are connected with yourself. And the fact that death is inevitable. In one line of the movie, the main character says (not verbatim) – “My father left this world leaving behind just a carton full of items”. You see what I mean. The movie also showed one of the best husband-wife relationship I have seen ever. It was just beautiful.

The movie is very well made. I am not too keen to speak about the technicalities of the movie because, at one point, it does not matter. But I would like to highlight its music. Its refreshing. Anyone who is motivated to watch this movie must first read the story (at least the gist). Only if you feel comfortable with the subject, should you venture. And even if you do not subscribe to my enthusiasm or assessment, its not a big deal.

I am currently reading The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity by Nobel Prize winning Economist Dr. Amartya Sen. In there, a chapter is dedicated to Rabindranath Tagore, one of India’s foremost thinkers.  I have always wanted to know more about Tagore – I grew up in Kolkata in the West Bengal state of India where Tagore, his writings, songs, and music is strongly entrenched in the place’s culture. Not coming from a traditional Bengali family, I never had a chance to read or listen to Tagore’s literature much. I was able to lay hands, though, on some of his translated works. But being a teenager and not much fascinated by poetic compositions, I ignored the stalwart. But Dr. Sen has definitely rekindled my curiosity to explore Tagore’s work. Here is a piece from his Nobel prize winning book, Gitanjali:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

All “risks” have some “uncertainties”, but not the other way around. A good example from Wikipedia is:

We can be uncertain about the winner of a contest, but unless we have some personal stake in it, we have no risk. If we bet money on the outcome of the contest, then we have a risk. In both cases there are more than one outcome.

Here is the second list of articles as mentioned by David Brooks as part of his Sydney awards giveaway. Read, enjoy, and get enlightened.

• The Rubber Room (Source: The New Yorker) – Education
• Shock Waves (Source: The American Scholar) – Iraq War
• The Goldstone Illusion (Source: The New Republic) – Israel Gaza conflict
• The Default Power (Source: Foreign Affairs) – Foreign Affairs
• The Decline of the English Department (Source: The American Scholar) – Education
• Keeping America’s Edge (Source: National Affairs) – Economics
• Is Food the New Sex? (Source: Hoover) – Behavioral Psychology
• Offensive Play (Source: The New Yorker) – Sports

David Brooks also mentions the following sources to get a daily dose of good and meaningful articles:

• Arts and Letters Daily
• The Browser
• Book Forum

Hope you enjoy the articles as much as I did.

This year, unlike before, I have decided to take a few new year resolutions and test my tenacity for sticking to them. They are quite modest but if I do succeed in following them I hope to develop a strong discipline and to experience a sense of achievement. These resolutions will be added as a separate page on my blog so that they are not lost in time and space. It is my hope that I will be able to take a quarterly check and monitor my progress. Any bit of encouragement will surely help. So here they are:

1. Practice my Pranayam, Kriya, and Meditation daily – I consider them very important to achieve a calm and serene mind and I am sure regular practice will help me deal with worldly issues in the best possible way.
2. Read at least one book a month – I am not talking about fiction here. There are so many good books out there that even a life time is less to accumulate all the knowledge. Reading good books does help broaden one’s mind and build different perspectives and that is what I seek to achieve. This will also ensure that my education continues even after my MBA is complete.
3. Blog regularly – Blogging has become a great way to share ideas and make good friends all over the world. I wish to build a platform through which I can share meaningful thoughts and learn from others in the process.
4. Start investing in the stock market with a disciplined approach – Soon my formal MBA will end and I will have no reason to avoid money management, one of them through building a robust long term stock portfolio. I have all the necessary tools and the knowledge so I will make the best use of that to invest intelligently. There will soon be a stock tracker on my site that you will see with my positions and related gains or losses.
5. Take photos more often and build a flickr portfolio – There are a few things that I really enjoy one of them being photography. This year I resolve to take more photographs and build a small portfolio of my photographs on flickr to share with all of you.
6. Do “Seva” (service) – As a citizen of this world, I have some duties towards my community. Hence I will try to find opportunities to take up some activities that will help me connect with people and help them in whatever way I can.
7. Use my time productively – 24hrs in a day should be well spent. My assessment of the previous years begs to remind me that I do waste a considerable amount of time doing things that are merely recreational with no productive outcome. I need to minimize that.

So, as you can see, my resolutions are quite simple and nothing extraordinarily out-of-the-box. They also have nothing to do with work or career. The above list consists of those items that I need to do anyways but I always find an excuse of not doing. But these are also the things that I really consider enriching and fulfilling. Surely, I have to do good in my work, build a great career, and I will definitely work towards that. But doing so is just an order qualifier. To be in control and being able to build a discipline to follow the above seven items will constitute, for me, an order winner.

VERY

HAPPY

AND

PROSPEROUS

NEW YEAR

~ 2010 ~

See you all in the new year!

This holiday seems to be zipping by and I haven’t really taken up anything very productive yet. Reading a few magazines here and there, catching up on a little bit of photography, searching for a birthday gift for my wife, looking for jobs, and well…not much. Then I came across an article in the NYtimes.com site – The Sidney Awards – by columnist David Brooks. In here he has given out awards to magazine articles (essays) that he feels have narrative drive and social impact. I decided to make it a project of mine to read all the articles he talks about. The reason is very simple – get acquainted with a few well written articles and built up on my repertoire of good editorials to access. Here are the articles that he has mentioned so far:

• The Cost Conundrum (Source: The New Yorker) – Healthcare
• How American Health Care Killed My Father (Source: The Atlantic) – Healthcare
• Fasten Your Seat Belts — It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Flight (Source: National Journal) – Healthcare
• Trial by Fire (Source: The New Yorker) – Judicial system and death penalty
• A Rake’s Progress (Source: The Weekly Standard) – Biographic portrayal
• Rediscovering Central Asia (Source: The Wilson Quarterly) – History and Geography

He will release a few more articles in the coming week. Let’s see what he has in store for me when he comes up with more award winners.

As I finish my “SDA Application Portfolio” series I think about the utility of the knowledge gained in this class. It was one of those classes where you are not taught how financial instruments work, how brand management is done, nor how profitability is calculated. There were no formulas to memorize, no equations to be remembered. It did not go into the world of marketers or traders, it did not made me analyze a country’s economic growth, it did not teach me how to increase ROI. Yet, it taught me all that and more.

You may ask – What was this course? How does it fit into the MBA curriculum? How will it help you in the long run? Answers will follow.

This course was called “Strategic Decision Analysis”. It was a course that harnessed the power of analysis and thinking in order to take decisions and increase your chances of success. The course introduced many concepts such as Negotiations, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Voting, and Auctions, among others. But more than that, this course provided insight into how a human mind works and what it thinks. You don’t need to be a CFA, a Six Sigma black belt holder, or a Statistics major to understand all this. All you need is common sense thinking and more importantly what the other person is thinking.

It fits well into an MBA curriculum because it is expected of us to go out and take decisions. Difficult decisions. Decisions that will affect companies, people, nations. Decisions that will alter the way you live, you eat, you sleep, and all that in between. How can you take such decisions and maximize your chances to take the right kind of decisions? Note that when you are taking the decisions there is always someone else taking a similar type of decision. You have one goal – to win in this duel of decision making. Because if you don’t win, somebody else takes all the glory or the pain associated with the decision. This course, in part, was about maximizing your chances to win.

With knowledge comes great power. But also comes with it the “curse of knowledge”. It is dangerous and can be applied dangerously. An incomplete assessment of your own understanding of the knowledge can actually lead to disaster. So it becomes important that we become competent in the use of this powerful knowledge and how we apply it.

The reason I am stressing this is because the knowledge is not just limited to the world of business. Your understanding of six sigma will not make you a great husband, a great father. But this knowledge is different. It spans our daily life and our relationships. Thus it becomes more important to understand the subject matter closely and intimately. The most important piece of this knowledge is – knowing what the other person is thinking. Not what you know and think. Bluntly speaking – you need to drop your ego from the equation to apply this knowledge. You have to stop force fitting because there are ample opportunities to do so. One formula to apply this knowledge is this –> First, you need to drop what you know. Second, know what the other person knows. Third, apply what you know and what the other person does not know. What you know is what you have learnt from this course, from your observations, and from the uncommon common sense that has been bestowed upon you.

Final thought – Always remember – Cooperation is better than defection! It will become all too apparent for you to defect with this knowledge. With this toolkit in hand, you will take decisions that go against the grain of this thought, that of cooperation. Recognize such tendencies, observe your thought process, re-evaluate the knowledge, and then apply it again.

There are plenty of apps available for iPod Touch and its bigger more sophisticated brother, the iPhone. I am a fan of many of these apps – all of them free – because they have helped me increase my reach to information and entertainment while increasing my productivity. So here are the apps that I currently use quite frequently:

News apps – serving different purposes – regular, financial, RSS feeds, and etc.

Alternate sources of knowledge and information

Social networking – its becoming increasingly important

Keeping me busy while waiting for my bus, or on the plane

My bank

My school email

A few other helpful ones

Let me know if there are other apps you may have found useful so that I can try. The only catch – it should be free!