Mukul Sheopory's Blog

I.

The vassals sipped their kvaasa, and made the vessel for their bossa,

stripping oak and birch from all the forests in the passa.

For three long years, they hunched and chipped to make the mighty Vasa.

Finally it was ready to go and make the Poles all crossah.

But Oh!! The heavy cannons made it burp and go all splosha.

II.

The crowds watched on with mouths aghast

As crew sank down with stern and mast.

The big king shrugged and walked right past.

Wooden carcass sank with glugging blast.

III.

Days turned to months and the chatter died.

Families went on, as they’d never cried.

The wreck got its rest well below the tide.

For years… comfort, kelp did provide.

IV.

Then one fine day, did men of yore

decide they’d wrest it back up shore

– a shining beacon of craft and gore,

Nation’s pride back to the fore.

V.

As I sit in Stockholm, write this paean,

near the fossil raised again,

synthetic replicas of crew so slain,

munching my burger with chips and grain…

Can’t help but think of leaders still

sharing visions, doling swill,

sucking souls, stealing till,

who strut on naked, not feeling chill.

Reference:

Vasa historyReviving the wreckPhoto credit: Lorenzo Liverani on Unsplash

If there were two defining themes of 2023, they were (1) Rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and (2) Layoffs in the Tech sector.

One did not cause the other, but the contagion of each was so tightly interwoven, that it left an impression. I also happened to be touched by both – I was laid off by my employer last spring, started using ChatGPT in my downtime – was startled by the capability of that tool, and took a course on AI last summer. Now that we’re well into 2024, I’ve had a chance to grapple with these strands, and here is my assessment of how these may ripple through the future.

A WATERSHED MOMENT FOR AI

It was through the meteoric growth of ChatGPT that “AI” became tactile, acceptable, and even fashionable; but the technology that constitutes AI covers a much wider swath than what ChatGPT leverages; and has been around for decades. It has just been quietly nurtured in labs, academic centers, and niche startups. But there was a watershed moment in 2016, which went largely unnoticed. It had demonstrated how this technology had the potential to upend the world as we know it.

In March 2016 AlphaGo, a program created by DeepMind (a startup acquired by Google) was set to play Lee Sedol, the reigning world champion of the ancient Chinese board game called ‘Go’. It was an ancient game that until then was considered by experts to be orders of magnitude more difficult for a machine to play than chess. It was played on a much bigger board, and the combination of choices were magnitudes more than those in chess. Computation needs for a machine to play and beat a human in Go were considered prohibitive – AI models that rely solely on the brute strength for logic and computation were assumed to have a negligible chance of defeating a human expert.

Humans are gifted with this thing called “intuition” – the ability to draw on a reservoir of experience in ways that are not straightforward. Intuition was a considered a critical asset in a game as complicated as this. And the human that AlphaGo was facing was not just an ordinary expert, it was a 9-dan player (the highest level a professional Go player could rise to), and the reigning Go champion.

A set of 5 games were planned, and the matches were keenly followed by AI enthusiasts and by fans of the ancient Chinese game. The odds were heavily in the favor or the human. When interviewed before the competition, Lee Sedol stated that he was expecting to sweep the series 5-0; and maybe if something out of the ordinary was to occur that caused him to slip, then the machine may eke out a draw, instead of losing all five games.

The series started with Lee Sedol playing a move and then looking up to see his opponent, as all Go players who play other humans are accustomed to doing. But the person sitting across him was just an employee of AlphaGo, awaiting instructions for the next move from the “machine”. There was a long awkward pause as the machine calculated and the AlphaGo employee waited with servitude. The pause was so long that he started to look concerned – could the program created by his employer have conked out right at the beginning? Was the game of Go so complicated that the AI behind the algorithm is having trouble narrowing down a feasible next step? But then all of a sudden the machine whirred into action and spat out instructions. The game commenced and the next many moves went along much more smoothly. The little black and white pebbles started to crowd the board. The human champion played with practices swiftness for a while, but at some point there were a succession of moves that clearly bothered Lee Sedol. His demeanor started to change gradually from smooth confidence to focused concern. What happened next was brutal and painful. Sedol’s demeanor started to change and one could see him staring at the board with intense concentration for long durations between steps. And it was a matter of time when the champion realized that he had been bested. He lost the very first game in the series. He was down 0-1.

The next game was crucial. He had to win in order to level the field so that he could then take the set back later. But the game progressed similar to the first one. The score at the end was 0-2. He was in deep, deep trouble. Now he had to come back and win the next three games in order to turn the series around. He had to do it for humanity. The weight of the responsibility was apparent at the press interview after that game. The next day was everything.

The next game was another loss. 0-3. It was certainly a one sided competition, but not in a way that Lee Sedol had imagined. He continued playing the remaining games, but the atmosphere in the arena and across the world wherever viewing parties were being hosted had turned from festive to something like a funeral. In the end Lee Sedol did end up winning one game in the series, with the final score being 1-4 in favor of the machine. That spring morning in 2016 was the day the fallacy was blown to smithereens – the notion that humans had an inherent advantage over machines in intuitive fields was vaporized.

It just took a few more years for that notion to go mainstream. What was demonstrated to that niche group in the Spring of 2016, was made clear to the masses in 2023 with the rapid ascent of ChatGPT. AI had arrived. And it was here to stay (and ready to eat everybody’s lunch).

THE TECH LAYOFFS OF 2023

Moving on to the second strand – the tech layoffs. They were not really related to the advent of AI. Various events of the last few years brewed a perfect storm – the war in Ukraine, the embargo on Russian goods, strained supply chains, increase in gas prices, pricing pressure on consumer goods, lower consumer demand, etc. all causing a gradual upward crawl of the inflation millepede. This in turn resulted in central banks raising interest rates to pump the brakes on inflation. Which then resulted in higher borrowing costs for consumers as well as businesses. The higher borrowing costs on the consumer side resulted in consumers tightening their belts and spending less on products and services.

So corporations were hit two ways – reduced demand for their products/services, and higher borrowing costs for business loans used to grow their business as well as for lines of credit used for financing cash flow. This double whammy hit Tech companies even harder because they had expanded rapidly in the past few years when borrowing costs were rosy. But now they were feeling pangs on both sides of the equation – the revenue and expense sides. And many executives in these corporations resorted to the first tool they could find in their trusted toolbelts – Layoffs!

I will not focus on the number of layoffs, or delve how they effected laid off employees, but will focus this post on the impact on the companies that are conducting the layoffs.

There are a few different myths around how layoffs serve the companies that deploy this tactic:

Myth #1 – Layoffs boost stock price: False. According to Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, an analysis of 1,445 downsizing announcements between 1990-1998 showed a negative stock-market returns, with more negative effects associated with larger downsizings. Myth #2 – Layoffs improve productivity: False. A study of ~140,000 U.S. companies using Census data found that companies with the greatest increases in productivity were just as likely to have added workers as they were to have downsized. Myth #3 – Layoffs increase profitability: False. Even after statistically controlling for prior profitability, a study of 122 companies found that downsizing reduced subsequent profitability.Myth #4 – Layoffs reduce costs: False. Layoffs may seem to reduce costs in the medium term (after the cost of conducting the restructuring has been factored in). But according to Professor Sandra Sucher or Harvard Business School, companies often overlook the hidden costs. She says that it can take years for companies to bounce back from setbacks like loss of institutional knowledge, weakened employee engagement, higher turnover, and lower innovation.

These are good data points, however I believe they are symptoms of something deeper at play. I believe the root cause that results in this lower performance is related to a commodity that cannot be quantified on any spreadsheet – a concept called Psychological Safety.

Psychological Safety is what allows employees to trust their employer, and feel empowered to take chances (including chances on things that are not sure shots… chances on initiatives that may not seem like they would succeed at first). Even in my book on business lessons from the life of Alexander the Great, I compare the culture in Alexander’s army with that of the Golden State Warriors (the NBA team lovingly known as “The Dubs” in the Bay area of Northern California). There I demonstrate how the key ingredient for the success of both organizations boils down to the trust fostered between the organizations’ leaders and its individual team members.

If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then a winning culture cannot exist without the prevalence of psychological safety across the rank and file. It takes a long time to build that trust – one thread at a time. And that fabric is the first casualty of a layoff announcement. Once employees (who have been fed stories about the workplace being a “family”) see their colleagues set aside at the first sign of economy difficulty, the realization sets in that they are expendable as well. Once that realization sets in, the blanket of psychological safety goes out the window. Everyone feels afraid to stand apart from the crowd. It seems safer to adhere to the norm. Behavior that is considered ‘Average’ seems safe. That would never get them in trouble. And that mindset is the death of innovation.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LAYOFFS IN THIS ERA

Let us go back to the match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo.

Sedol, the Go champion ended up losing the series 1-4 to the machine. He lost the first three games, but continued to play till the bitter end. He eventually won a game (even if it did not matter for the series), and that was the saving grace for humanity. He was not completely outclassed by the machine. The solitary game that he won had seemed like it was also going the same way, until he played a move called the ‘Wedge’. It was the 78th move of that game, and it completely threw off the machine. After that move AlphaGo’s own moves started getting erratic. Many Go enthusiasts labeled that move by Sedol as “God’s touch”.

The reason that move had thrown off the computer was because it had the probability of 1/10,000 for a human to play. What does that mean? The computer was playing by calculating each and every move by analyzing 30 million moves from 160,000 prior games and optimizing for the next move that would increase its probability to win. It was looking at patterns from that massive dataset of prior games and making its decisions. The reason Sedol was able to throw the machine off was because he played a move that was so out of the norm of prior games, that the AI did not know how to interpret it.  

So what does that tell us about the future? What bearing does that have on the companies that are laying off its employees?

Don’t read on.. Think about this for a few minutes. Step away from the screen. Take a walk. Come back to this post later. In 5 minutes, or an hour, or in a few days. Consider how the solitary game that Sedol won against AlphaGo matters to companies that are considering laying off employees.

Yeah?

In my opinion, companies that lay off employees for short term gains risk losing the one edge humans have over machines. By stripping away psychological safety, they push their employees away from taking chances, and towards conformance. They move the organization from being an empowered entity where employees take chances based on what they feel is right, towards a command-and-control structure where they wait for orders from senior leadership.

And with the advent of AI where machines are getting increasingly capable of efficiently harvesting prior knowledge, conformance is better served by machines. What would drive innovation for the next wave will be the “Lee Sedols” in their organizations who would make the 1/10,000 move based on their gut instinct. Maybe human experts working in combination with AI, but we do need those experts to drive innovation – the humans who have divergent thinking and are not afraid to practice it.

IN CONCLUSION

The late American poet, E.E.Cummings once visited a zoo, and upon seeing the polar exhibit there he observed that penguins possess a double existence. He noted that they possess a terrestrial self that is “awkward, ludicrous, ungainly”. In that self the Penguin “cannot fly, and instead walks about, imitating humanity in general and Charles Spencer Chaplain in particular”.

But then he contrasted that avatar of the Penguin with an alter ego of that animal. He noticed how it changed instantly as it dove and sliced under the surface of water. Cummings was startled at that transformation and remarked:

“For whereas terrestrially the Penguin is angular, restricted and sudden, aquatically he is comparably fluent, completely uninhibited, and (when he makes a dart downward through the water in pursuit of his prey) irrevocable. This astonishing self flies through the water by virtue of those very wings most people consider so pathetic and inadequate.”

To me this analogy perfectly encapsulates the hidden costs of layoffs. Layoffs make the remaining employees feel unsafe, and they nudge them to conform to senior management’s expectations of them. They are pushed into remaining confined to their “terrestrial” selves. And the irony is that in today’s day and age – with the advent of AI, innovation requires them to embrace their “aquatic” alter egos.

I don’t envy corporate execs charged with navigating the crossroads of declining demand and increasing borrowing costs. They are given a difficult choice, and laying off employees seems like an easy choice (“easy” not from a moral perspective, but from an economic lens because laying employees off seems like the quickest way to restore equilibrium between market reality and a corporation’s capacity).

But if you happen to be the said exec, faced with this dilemma, please consider the true cost of layoffs for the long term well-being of your organization. Consider not just the 5%/10%/15%/etc. labor costs that you may apparently be able to reduce, but also the loss of innovation within the remaining 95%/90%/85%/etc. of the workforce that is left behind.

There are other options available to layoffs – they may not be easy and they may require more nuance to orchestrate. But I hope you can gather the courage and make the 1/10,000 move that allows your organization innovating well into the future.  Godspeed!

Notes:

Ongoing tally of layoffs: LinkStudy on long term effects of layoffs on mortality: LinkSources of images: Unsplash and Reddit

I was never good at coding, so when I noticed the underlying beauty of the Gettysburg Address, I appreciated the mastery of Abraham Lincoln not just as an orator, but as a writer in his own right. And what better time to ruminate on this subject, than the anniversary of his speech, a hundred and fifty eight years since he gave it on that muddy, bloody field in Pennsylvania.

My Encounter(s) with Coding

Since high school I had a sense that I was not a good coder – never got good grades, steered mostly clear of programming languages in college. As luck would have it, the first job I landed out of college was that of a coder. There was a tech boom at the time and any college grad who could spell “computer programming” had a job waiting for them. It took me all of two weeks to resign for a variety of reasons. But it was not until business school that it became absolutely clear that I truly sucked at programming.

I had taken a class in Java and one of the assignments had seemed quite straightforward. I wrote down the logic for accomplishing the task, typed it out in a format that the machine would understand, and waited for confetti to fall from the roof of the computer lab. Instead I was greeted by an error message. For some odd reason the code did not run. I poked and prodded it in every which way to debug, but the stubborn mass refused to relent. When the time ran out I submitted the assignment as-is, expecting at least partial credit for the logic displayed and the effort expended. Instead I received a nice round ‘0’. Apparently I had missed a closing bracket in a single line of my code that had messed up one of the nested loops. That was the last time I lied to myself about having any potential to be a coder.

The Gettysburg Address

A little while back I decided to transcribe my favorite speech by President Abraham Lincoln, just to appreciate the wordplay within it. (By the way, it is a fun activity to do with pieces of literature that one admires – copy them down on paper. It is the only art form where one does not need to be a genius to copy the work of legends. Unlike music or painting, where to copy the work of a Mozart or a Van Gogh one needs to actually be skilled in a musical instrument or impressionist brushwork. Copying a Tolstoy or a Dylan just requires a pen and some paper. And the exercise often illuminates hidden structures, or rationale behind their word choice).

And that was exactly what happened here. Upon writing down the Gettysburg Address word-for-word, the structure of the speech started to dawn on me.

It starts off with:

SECTION A:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.“

Harking to the ancestors who brought the country into existence, wresting it out of the grip of the British, and hints at the ideals they aspired to.

Then it goes on to:

SECTION B:

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.“

Refers to the great war they are in the midst of, one that will determine the fate of the nation.

SECTION C:

“We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.“

Now he gets to why they are assembled there that day – not talking about the ambitions of their ancestors, or the objectives of that great war, but to the purpose of their getting together on that day at that place. They are there to dedicate a portion of that field to those who have laid their lives for their country.

So far, President Lincoln has opened up 3 different threads:

SECTION A –> ANCESTORS WHO CREATED THIS COUNTRY

SECTION B –> THE GREAT WAR THEY ARE FIGHTING NOW

SECTION C –> THE REASON THEY ARE ASSEMBLED HERE TODAY

Each successive thread gradually diminishing in ambition, and getting closer to the present moment.

Now see the mastery with which the rest of the speech unfolds, and wraps up every point raised so far with the elegance of an architect. If there is a better masterclass in writing than this speech, I am not sure where it is.

SECTION D:

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. “

Here it provides the answer to the point raised in SECTION C – the reason for why they are assembled there. And the answer is that no matter what they do to that day to honor the martyrs, it will be an act that will ring hollow. At this point, if you were a person in the audience there 158 years ago, you must have been wondering if there was a point in being assembled there? Was there anything at all they could do? President Lincoln gets to it right after.

SECTION E:

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain“

Here he shows that what they need to do is not consecrate the field that day, but finish the war they are fighting. Only by doing so they can honor the thousands who have laid down their lives for the nation.

SECTION F:

“— that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.“

And finally he shows that by doing so – by winning the war, they can ensure that the ideals that their ancestors had in mind when they wrought the nation could be sustained. This final line gives a higher purpose to the war itself.

So if you notice, each section in the latter half of the speech closes the points raised in the former in a perfectly nested order:

SECTION D –> CLOSES LOOP ON CONSECRATING THE BATTLEFIELD (SECTION C)

SECTION E –> CLOSES LOOP ON WHAT WINNING THE GREAT WAR CAN DO (SECTION B)

SECTION F –> CLOSES LOOP ON WHAT CAN HONOR THE IDEALS OF FOREFATHERS (SECTION A)

So it takes someone who really sucks at coding to admire a President who not just helped forge the nation, but also would have aced the Java assignment was he alive today and happened to be going to my class in Boston College. It would have been great to have him here today, not just to see him ace that class, but also see him mend his country that is just as divided today as it was 158 years ago.

Text of Gettysburg Address in its entirety: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm

Photo by Caleb Fisher on Unsplash

A few days ago I was lying down on my living room floor, reading the weekend paper. The afternoon sun streamed through and lit up the gray foam mat. In that quiet moment my thoughts drifted… To someone who had been lying in a similar posture.

What must’ve it felt like? Hands clamped behind the back, shoulders slowly getting yanked out of their sockets, with those whose duty was to protect and serve sitting on top of him… casually applying the full pressure of their bodies. Just the thought made me wince.

I stood up and went to the kitchen sink. As the glass filled up with water I wondered how he must have suffered for those excruciating 8 full minutes and 46 seconds. Gasping for FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX SECONDS.

ONE MISSISSIPPI..

TWO MISSISSIPPI…

…

…

FIVE MISSISSIPPI…

…

…

“During the first half of the 19th century, Mississippi was the top cotton producer in the United States, and owners of large plantations depended on the labor of black slaves.”

THIRTEEN MISSISSIPPI…

…

…

My mother had a number of Hindi phrases, generally deployed when a point was needed to be made succinctly. One was:

“Jis pe beetay, wo hi jaaney”

Which roughly translated to “Only he who suffers, understands the pain”. I teased Mama ji whenever she used it. She would smile back – I assumed she was acquiescing to going a little over the top.

But she was right – I could not.. can not imagine.. what George went through that afternoon, face down on the tar, with that merciless knee on his throat.

THIRTY SIX MISSISSIPPI…

…

…

The most harrowing part of watching his murder was not his soft-spoken cries, or the callousness with which he was strangulated, or that it all transpired in broad daylight with full knowledge of the smartphone recordings taking place, or that the year was over half a century after the Civil Rights Act had passed (and over a hundred and fifty years after President Abraham Lincoln declared all men on United States soil to be free) .

The saddest thing was to see a beautiful 6’6”, broad shouldered, forty six year old man call out for his mother. There on that tar… suffocating in broad daylight, after giving up on pleading with those who had sworn an oath to protect and serve, while getting his life casually squeezed out of him… George Floyd called out for his Mama.

His Mama who had died two years ago.

Thankfully she was not alive to watch that travesty unfold. What she would have had to go through, had she lived to witness her baby’s cold blooded murder, is something I dread not even imagine.

First of all spoiler alert.. If you’ve not caught up with GoT, do so.

Ok.. My favorite scene so far in the series is the one where the mystery behind Hodor’s moniker is revealed.  I found it better than the scene where Cersei plans and extracts her vengeance; even better than the scene where Ramsay finally gets his comeuppance; or anything else.  Why?

George R.R. Martin introduced a back story for a character that could have just been a simple pawn.  For the purposes of moving the story forward all that was required of that character in that scene was someone to hold the door.  Hold it for a little while; let the bigger characters get away, and then die.  That was all that was needed for the arc of the story.  Instead – he introduced a character with a back story.Not only did he add his back story, he nurtured it for six whole seasons.  SIX BLOODY SEASONS!  He nurtured the character for so long that by the time the turn in his tale came around, he had become part of the background.  All he had done until that point was utter a single word over and over and over and over..And when the viewer had been lulled to sleep with this character’s arc, he dropped the bomb with the panache of Frederick Forsyth or Philip K. Dick.  It was revealed that not only had Hodor dedicated his entire existence to a single solitary purpose; his mission had been handed to him through a fracture in the fabric of time.  In that single scene a simple pawn was transformed into someone who was morally superior to the kings, queens, princes, and royalty surrounding him.  And in the manner in which George R.R. Martin unfolded Hodor’s backstory made the viewers ponder upon the mobius strip nature of time.

 

 

It was exciting to see my Golden State Warriors start the NBA playoffs with a straight 4-0 series win over the Trailblazers.  In the next round when they repeated the 4-0 streak it was exhilarating.. Even when they beat Spurs in the first couple of home games, getting a 2-0 lead, it seemed like we’re getting a strong footing for the series.. getting us on a strong footing to meet the Cavs in the finals and avenge last year’s devastating loss.

But when we won the third game at the Spurs home field and got a 3-0 lead something felt off.  We had won 11 games in a row in the finals.  This was not like the regular season where we were playing regular teams.  This was in NBA’s western conference finals.  We were playing the cream of the crop.  And demolishing everyone in our path.  And no one had been able to pick up a single game.  What the hell was going on?

And to top it off, on the other side of the country, our arch nemesis – the Cavs were bulldozing through the titans that were in the eastern conference finals.  They had not dropped a single game on that end.  Most recently they had humiliated the Celtics with a 44-point defeat, while playing in Boston.  I can’t imagine being a Celtics fan watching that game.  From the very first quarter they had an almost 2:1 score against the Bostonians, at one point having a 50 point lead.  You’d have thought this was early in the regular season where a top seeded team was playing an inexperienced crew.  But this was the best team in the eastern conference playing the second best.

The Cavs and the Warriors have not dropped a single game in the playoffs on either side of the country.  I’m excited to see what will happen when they meet.  But it does make me wonder what the hell is going on in the NBA?  How is there such a disparity between the top two teams and the rest?

Is this capitalism at work?  Are the Cavs and the Warriors creating dynasties by simply paying top dollar to accumulate talent.

A quick search showed me that the Cavs were indeed the team that spent the most on their talent (http://hoopshype.com/salaries/).  But they were not paying their players that much higher than the other teams in the top.  E.g. the Trailblazers, the #2 team in terms of compensation, had paid their players 8% less than what the Cavs had paid.  And the #5 team, the Spurs, were paying their players 13% less than what the Cavs were shelling out.  So not that much of a difference between the compensations meted out by the top teams.  Nothing to justify the slaughter that was being observed in the playoffs.

Cleveland Cavs – $128M player salariesPortland Trailblazers – $119MDetroit – $115MLA Clippers – $114MSan Antonio Spurs – $112MMemphis – $110MToronto Raptors – $108MGolden State Warriors – $107MOrlando – $104MCharlotte – $103M

And on the other hand the Warriors were actually not even in the top five (were at #8).  A few of the teams that they had crushed/were crushing in the playoffs were actually paying their players more than the Warriors (i.e. The Trailblazers were paying their players 11% more than the Warriors, and the Spurs were paying 4% more).

So its not capitalism at play.  Something else is at work.  I’m not sure what it is.. But am curious to find out…

Woke up this morning to the news of Bob Dylan getting the Nobel for Literature!  How cool is that.  But of course, some writers were not happy… Rabih Alameddine tweeted: “Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars”

I can see Mr. Alameddine’s concern.. If a musician nabs the prize, what about folks like him.  But to me, and thousands of other Dylan fans, he is not just a musician – he is a poet..  As comfortable with capturing the essence of a moment in a Haiku like song, as with a Homeric ballad that meanders through scenario after scenario – weaving a tapestry better than most authors.

A detailed analysis of why Dylan deserves the Nobel is akin to describing why water quenches thirst.  But I will give a few examples of my favorite Dylan songs.

 

The Minnesota Haiku

‘Went To See The Gypsy‘… The first time I heard it I became a fly on the wall at this big chain hotel.  Brought into the audience of the Gypsy.  Watching his fake smile.  Listening to his false, saccharine pronouncements.  Rooting for the protagonist to escape.  And as he returned to the hotel room, I was hooked – not knowing what lay ahead.  And then, the twist.  The anguish of coming face to face again with the false prophet, transformed into a moment of serenity.   I was there.  Watching the sun come rising from that little Minnesota town.

To me it was a Haiku as beautiful and as tender as any that Basho wrote.

 

The Ballad of the Jack of Hearts

The song starts with a description of the festival.  A normal carnival, as normal as a carnival can be.  And then the Jack of Hearts is introduced.  A quotidian interaction with a passerby.  Then a scene change to a card game, introducing  Lily – the love interest.  And then in quick succession Big Jim – the king of goons, and Rosemary – his lady are brought into focus.

Then a passing interaction between Big Jim and Jack of Hearts.

Then the backstory.  Scratching under the surface of Rosemary & Big Jim’s supposed perfect arrangement.  And then there is shadowy reference to the hangman.  Nothing is described, but the presence of doom looms.

By this time the listener is hooked.. Homer or Scheherazade could not tell a tale better, or keep the reader engaged as well.

If this is not literature, I don’t know what is.
I don’t think this is just a win for Mr. Dylan.  I think it is a win for the Nobel Prize Committee.  Kudos on having the courage to give the prize for literature to a poet (who happens to be a musician).

 

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The first time I saw the State Farm Insurance ad on TV I laughed out loud.. “Khakis” has since become a running joke for me and my wife (and probably for thousands of other folks based in the US – Just do a simple Google search on “Jake from State Farm” and see the memes that pop up).

Recently something I read made me think about the origin of words; how they travel across the globe; and end up in the most non-obvious places.

Word #1:  Khaki

The punchline for the joke in this ad (i.e. “Khakis”) in the United States refer to a type of trousers.  Boring, beige, yawn-inducing trousers that are de rigueur in corporate environments.  Named after the dull brownish-yellow color that this breed of pants conforms to.

How that word came to the American shores is unknown.  What I do suspect is that it came via Britain.

The British had stumbled upon the word sometime in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries when they were ruling over India.  It was based on the Hindi word “खाकी” that referred to that very same dull-brown color in the Indian subcontinent.  It became the color of their military clothing back in their Colonial days.  Khaki uniforms draped the British soldiers in World War II.

Maybe the Americans saw the Brits fight shoulder to shoulder with them in WWII and liked the color of their uniforms.  Maybe they liked the sound of the word, as they heard it pronounced, drenched in the British accent.  How it made the transition from the battlegrounds of Europe to the conference rooms of America is anyone’s guess.

The word is derived from the word “खाक”, which means “dust”.  It has an Urdu sound and a solemn feel.  Reminding us what we are made of, and what we will become.  It probably came to India via the Mughal rulers, a few centuries prior to the Brits.

The Persians brought it to India, the Britishers borrowed it, and as it is used in America one can picture dust storms on vast Indian plains… (Except when Jake from State Farm utters it.. Then we just chuckle).

 

Word #2: “Sicario

Last year one of my favorite movies was this narco drama – Sicario.  It was set on the southwest border of the US and depicted American agencies’ attempts to outsmart Mexican drug rings.  I had written a blog post on it just before the Oscars.

What I had not covered in that post was how the word ‘Sicario’ had sounded like a word from my mother tongue.  It had sounded like “शिकारी” (pronounced ‘Shikaari’), a Hindi word that means ‘Hunter’.  What was interesting was that ‘Sicario’ also meant ‘Assassin’ in Mexican Spanish.

I was astounding that two words that sounded alike in completely different languages, also meant roughly the same thing in each.  Hindi and Mexican Spanish – there was no common thread between the two languages in mind.  Yet, in both the word referred to someone out on a hunt.

In my mind the Mexican region was culturally as far removed from the Indian diaspora as possible.  There were no trade, no immigrations between the two countries, no historic wars or treaties, or any other connection that could have linked the two cultures to each other.  Yet we had somehow used the same word, with the same sounds, with the same meaning to describe something.

Then I came across a book on the origins of Spanish and realized that Spain had once been invaded by the Moors, who came from northwest Africa but had been influenced by the Arabic culture.  These Spaniards had brought their language to Mexico, and with it the Arab influences from the Moors.  In India there had been a Mughal rule for a few centuries prior to the arrival of the British.  During that epoch the Indian languages had been influenced by Persian and Arabic and every other language that had swirled in the middle east.  So there was a possibility that the Arabs and Persians who had influenced Hindi had also influenced Mexican Spanish (via Africa and after a much more arduous crossing of the Atlantic).

Upon arriving in America I had loved the familiarity of Mexican cuisine, as it was very similar to Indian food I had enjoyed growing up.  I was happy to have potentially stumbled on something connecting our languages.

 

Variations Of A Language

I recently read an obituary about a wonderful gentleman, late Dr. Braj Kachru, a friend’s loving grandfather.  Dr. Kachru’s life’s work was proving that Indian English was not an impure varietal of British English, but a separate language in its own right.  In the 1960s he had gone about the scholarly task of proving it, piece by piece.  He showed that Indian English was a different language which had evolved with influences of Sanskrit, Urdu, and Persian among others.  Dr. Kachru went on to become an editor of the Oxford Dictionary and the President of the International Association of World Englishes (IAWE).

He proved that the languages that had blown across the Indian subcontinent over centuries of its existence had made ‘Hinglish’ what it was.  And the erratic and circumlocutous journey of these two words made me yearn for diving deeper into his research.  It would be fascinating to see some of the threads that he had uncovered to prove his hypothesis.  I’m excited to see what else lies in store…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Yank Draymond Green out” whispered Coriolanus Snow..

“But Sir, it was LeBron who walked across a fallen Draymond…” replied Seneca Crane.

Snow became icy.

Seneca gulped.

He gave the orders to his minions to yank Green out of the next game.

With Green sitting out the next game, the Warriors fumed.  Just at the unfairness of it all.  The Cavs pumped their chests and thrashed the off-kilter Warriors down.

Yet the Warriors fought.

Towards the end of the next game, even though trailing by insurmountable odds, they gathered their strength… and they tried to persevere.

It did not look like they would win.  But what if they did?  They had pulled miracles off before…

A bead of sweat ran down Seneca’s temple once more.  Dreading the cup of hemlock.

The gamemakers were given the nod.  Warrior Curry was yanked out.  Lifted in nets with choppers, as the rest of the Warriors looked on with anger.

President Snow got his 7 game series.  The two extra games with ads paid with gold.

Now we stand at the precipice of the historic game.  Cavs frothing at the mouth.  Warriors holding each other – Strength in Numbers!

May the odds ever be in your favor Warriors!

 

 

Recently a few things have come out about Mr. Trump’s track record that don’t augur well for America if he is to become President:

How he ran the Trump casinos :When he was pitching the first casinos to investors, he said “It will be the best”.  (does it sound like “Make America Great again”?)Over time he built three casinos in Atlantic City.  None of them logged a single profitable year (between 1997-2002).During the time when the Trump casinos were making losses, revenues at other casinos in Atlantic City were rising by ~18%.When the casinos eventually went bankrupt, many local small business owners who were suppliers and contractors got the brunt of it.  For example Beth Rosser remembers how her father’s business, Triad Building Specialties, ended up getting 30 cents for every dollar owed to them after protracted “renegotiations”.Between 1996-98 the company posted combined losses of $148 Million.  During those three years of operation, Donald Trump drew a salary and bonus payments amounting to $8 Million. The modus operandi of Trump University :A class action law suit has been leveled against Trump University (established ~2005) by disgruntled people who attended its investment seminars.One of the employees of Trump University, Mr. Ronald Schnackenberg, has testified in the class action law suit.He has testified that “Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”The university organized 3-day seminars where attendees were promised to learn Donald Trump’s investment secrets.“I can turn anyone into a successful real-estate investor, including you.” was a quote by Mr. Trump used in marketing. (Has a ring of “Make America Great Again”, no?)But in fact Mr. Trump “‘never’ reviewed any of Trump University’s curricula or programming.”The material was developed by a 3rd party vendor that develops material for motivational speakers, and.. ahem.. timeshare rental companies.The attendees never heard about his secret sauce for investing from him.  They did however get to take photographs with a life-size cutout of him.  Groovy!There was a sales playbook that was provided to the staff to give them step-by-step instructions to help them master bait-and-switch tactics.An example: “Don’t ask people what they THINK about something you’ve said.  Instead always ask them how they FEEL about it.  People buy emotionally, and justify it logically.”Another example: “If they can afford the Gold Elite, don’t allow them to think about doing anything besides the Gold Elite”… How sweet!  They must really care about the people they’re trying to help.In his testimony Mr. Schnackenberg recounts an experience with a couple.  And the man was on disability insurance,“”After the hard-sell sales presentation, they were considering purchasing the $35,000 Elite program.  I did not feel it was an appropriate program for them because of their precarious financial condition.” Far from being commended by his bosses for his honesty, Schnackenberg said that he was reprimanded.  Another salesperson then talked them into buying the $35,000 program after I refused to sell this program to them.”

 

UPPING THE ANTE:

There seems to be a pattern here.  Finding a downtrodden demographic, selling big dreams, running the game for as long as possible, then making off, leaving others holding the bill.

Now with his imminent G.O.P. nomination he seems to be repeating his process, just at a massively larger stage, and with much more dire consequences.

He has identified his demographic – honest, hard working Americans who are disgruntled with their falling wages, with their jobs being eliminated by technology & outsourcing, and with the status quo.

And he has made an incredible promise to them (“Make America Great Again”).

And he has roused their anger because he wants them to FEEL that he is their answer.  Not THINK about his track record.  Whether he can actually deliver on the problems he is promising to solve.

The cost, of what a Trump presidency will be to an average American, is still unknown.  To be fair, it is also unclear how the other candidates will solve the problems that Mr. Trump has touched upon.  But what is coming to light based on this new information is that if he does come to power, based on his track record, there is a low probability that he would solve these thorny issues out for the American public.  There is a possibility that they will be the ones left holding the bill.

What I am certain about however, is that Mr. Trump will come out on top.  Just like every other time.  If elected President, I think he will definitely make America great again… But mostly for himself.

 

 

Sources:

NY Times Article on his Atlantic City Casinos (by Russ Buettner and Charles V. Bagli):  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyr...New Yorker Article on Trump University (by John Cassidy): http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-ca...Image of Trump’s illustration (by Mark Reeve): http://www.markreeveillustrator.com/c...