I Think....Therefore....?

"I Think, Therefore I Am", said someone famous.
This oft quoted sentence has been used, rather ab-used by too many self proclaimed thinkers. No, I do not claim to be one among them. IF I was, today I'd not be typing away on my pc, for my own blog, with questionable level of following.
I'd then be in the leagues of Mr. Santosh Desai (Times of India, CITY CITY BANG BANG), churning out text for leading print media.

Incidentally, being a regular reader of his column, I find a great change in Mr. Desai's "stance". Lately. As a matter of fact, this change is visible across the board, not only in TOI, but on many publications. A close scrutiny of the deft transformations, if I may call them so, would reveal, in my opinion, the fact that media is somehow coming to terms with the real India and truth - to some extent!

That's a wonderful change, if continued. Equally abhorring IF a prequel to the polls & completely disgusting IF brought on by the imminent changes in alignments (of all non-user factors that influence most publications).

For example, lately I find one of the country's most read periodical shifting clearly away from their long-held right-wingish leanings! They have actually started singing paens for the other camp! Recently it carried an article where late Rajiv Gandhi has been compared to the likes of Mr. Barack Obama. Well done indeed! After all, the saffron has been cohabiting with green on our national marquee, since independence.....so, why not?

Going back to Mr. Desai's newfound affinity for "straight-talking", yesterday's column (10th Nov 2008) was a bigger revelation. Mr. Desai, a B-School certified product himself, has questioned the worth of such "certifications" in no uncertain words!

If you've been following MINT (the wonderful business daily from HT Media), you may have read how many B-Schools "Manage" their images & rankings, more often than not. It's not really a surprise then, to find that the "products" they have been certifying as AAA+, may be quite incapable of passing the real muster, in a real market!
But then, all "respectable" columns worth their TATA salts have skilfully refrained from focusing their merciless arc-lights on our pride-of-India institutions, like IIMs, IITs etc! For reasons obvious to many.

In Mr. Desai's article, his grandma (presumably 20 years back) asked him a very simple question, when Mr. Desai landed a very well paying job, with his "certificate" adding excellent value. The question was, in retort to his admittance of the salary amount he was about to draw: "What excatly are you expected to do, in return for such a large sum of money?".
By his own admission, the question was & still IS relevant.

Commodity managers like your's truly have been told at many a job interviews that the "stakeholders" would prefer someone "certified by reputed institutions" to head their businesses. Yes, irrespective of their lack real-world experience or unproven capabilities. They ARE the ones with "brains" you see! And one requires significantly more grey-matters, to THINK, about the company, it's future, the BIG picture etc. Those invaluable certificates "guarantee" a thinking mind, I am told!

Well, I second Mr. Desai's pertinent question. I would also like to ask what exactly were these "Quality OK" brains thinking about, while the junta was being led down the garden path?

Though I am not "qualified" to do so, may I turn the title of this article on its head and ask:
Is it then "I Do Not Think, Therefore You Are....?"

Of Nuts...and...Bolts!

Did a wiki on "nuts" & "bolts" this morning. Top result below.
Nut is a general term for the large, dry, oily seeds or fruit of some plants.
While a wide variety of dried seeds and fruits are called nuts, only a certain number of them are considered by biologists to be true nuts.
All nuts are seeds, but not all seeds are nuts.
Nuts are both the seed and the fruit, and cannot be separated.
Nut And Bolt
The nut consists of a small block (usually metal) with a threaded hole in the centre for screwing on to a threaded rod or pin (bolt or screw) and is a very common method of fastening pieces of metal or wood together.
Nuts are almost always used opposite a mating bolt to fasten a stack of parts together.

The two partners are kept together by a combination of their threads' friction, a slight stretch of the bolt, and compression of the parts.
In applications where vibration or rotation may work a nut loose, various locking mechanisms may be employed: Adhesives, safety pins or lockwire, nylon inserts, or slightly oval-shaped threads.

Interesting!

We also know that "nuts & bolts" is used as an expletive for "basics", "bare-necessities in a process", "underpinning" etc., in literature - of interests academic, business & leisure.
I do not think anybody knows who "invented" this almost indispensible little combination. Therefore, it's unlikely that we'd ever get to know what in the surrounding or within "lead" to this innovation!
That's a pity!
Though nuts (of the edible variety) are increasingly becoming popular as part of the modern diet, along with, naturally, fruits, we get to see very few "nuts" (of the mental type) around! Where they hell are they?

Like a bolt from the blue we get struck by mindblowing geo-political developments, most of which are man-made and almost never descend from the heavens. In any case nowadays we have lightning-rods (of the tecnhical variety) on top of most decent buildings, to drain out the damagingly high energy bursts, "safely" bypassing our creations.

Nuts are almost always used opposite a mating bolt - Naturally. No rocket science here, as Mr.Adam & Ms. Eve were caught in the act, while they were being kept together by a combination of their threads' friction, a slight stretch of the bolt, and compression of the parts.....

Now that we have developed a fair understanding of the basics of "nuts & bolts", let me stop beating around the "bush" (Brazil was not an option those days....) and come to the point (no, no pun here!)
We now know that "nuts" are healthy, "bolts" are best kept "fastened" to them or drained out as quickly as possible and we have also learned that "all nuts are seeds, but all seeds are NOT NUTS".

Applying the learning (applied scineces & so on so forth...) to this current economic doldrum, what do we see?
Too many nut-s (nut, funnily, happens to be a 3 letter word, like Cat, Fat, Sad, Mad, MBA, IIT, IIM....) were too damned busy draining out the high-energy bolts from the economy.
All while we, barely literate tenants of this world were oblivious of the thunders hitting our own abodes!
And also while the same nutty professors were "fastening" up with their stretchy bolts across the industry, delighted at the lighning-rods they managed to plant on every building (mortage notwithstanding).

So, now with the rains, the nuts cracked & the bolts over-stretched to offer friction, do get your own bloody basics right.
With energy becoming such a crucial issue, it may well be a good idea to tap the drains set up by our much qualified counterparts, across the high-streets.
Menawhile, many of them have taken looooong flights, off to distant shores.
No, aircrafts are, unfortunately, safe against thunders!
What a nutty, ooops, I mean pity!