Product review - Mitsubishi Outlander

If you have owned a Japanese product made in the eighties, chances are you have fond memories of that product. The other day, when packing for a road trip, I was rummaging through my cupboard for the digital camera, when my eyes fell upon the dry pack case where my Nikon F3 has been in storage for the better part of 3 decades. The F3 is not pretty in the new Scandinavian minimalism kind of way. To be honest, it looks dated, ungainly even. But as I coddled it in my hands, it brought a smile to my face.

Here’s the thing you see. Everything about the F3 is designed to do a job and do it well. The shape of the body where your right hand grabs the camera and your finger rests on the shutter trigger is just so, and the rubberized surface where your left hand grabs the focusing ring provides that perfect grip and feel. The bayonet lens mount is gleaming stainless steel and the purposeful ‘click’ you hear when the lens locks into place brings the kind of joy that only quality craftsmanship can bring. The removable viewfinder snaps into place with a precise tactile feel, and as you crank the winder mechanism, your fingertips can feel the precision engineering as the film is being advanced and the focal plane shutter is primed for the next shot.

I could go on about the F3. About the laser etched micro-pores on the mirror that let light through to the CCD array for exposure metering, and about the changeable focusing screens for different applications, and about the High-Point viewfinder designed to allow you to peer through while still wearing your Ray Bans, but this post is not about the F3. This piece is about another piece of Japanese engineering that is now parked outside my home.

The Mitsubishi Outlander is also not pretty in the modern sense either, not in the Alfa Romeo Brera or Jaguar F type kind of way. But everything about this car is just so well made. There is a precision-engineering feel to everything. The perfectly fitted-out leather upholstery and the french stitching on the black leatherette trim of the door pads and glove box provide that feel-good factor. The seats are generous and the electric motors whirr quietly as you adjust to that perfect driving position. Every single item on the interior of the Outlander has been put in place by the boffins in engineering. Not for Mitsubishi, the little plastic buttons that make do for paddle shifters. The paddles shifters on the Outlander are large; large enough to place four fingers behind them when you pull to shift. And they are made of real magnesium alloy, to let you enjoy the 'clink' when your fingernails touch the metal. And the paddles are mounted on the steering column as God intended they be, not on the steering wheel. The audio controls on the steering wheel have been placed so that you can find them there when you want them, but they are never in the way when you are driving. The sound system is discrete. It does not sport a large touch screen nor does it have a sat-nav built it. It sounds great. If you have been to a Bose store and listened to their demo, you will have some idea of what I am talking about.

And then there is the engine. A 2.4 litre MIVEC job with variable cam timing and lift on both the intake and exhaust valves, this unit purrs to the 7000 rpm red-line with a smoothness befitting an inline-six. Nobody makes inline fours like Mitsubishi does – not even the Germans. In this day and age of turbo-charged four cylinder units, it is commonplace for the engine to become gruffly audible at higher revs. Not this mill.

Motoring journos these days evaluate all cars on the track, on their ability to hold a power slide. This is fine when you are in boy-racer mood, but you also want a car that is fun to drive on your daily run to work in the morning and to the club in the evening. This is where the Outlander shines. I used it to drive from Pune to Mumbai on the expressway and I could not think of any other car on this side of 20 lakhs that I would rather be in.

The CVT handles regular driving unobtrusively and when you are in the mood for some spirited driving, a tap on the paddle shifters brings on the sport mode. Driving up the ghat on the return trip from Mumbai to Pune, I found myself smiling as I used the paddles. Keep the rpms between 3000 and 4000 and the Outlander rewards the driver with a glorious driving experience with its high torque and superb handling. The butter-smooth delivery of power from this unit as you shift from 2^nd to 6^th has to be experienced. The 168 bhp 2.4 delivers the goods without making any noise about it, without making any noise really. 

Glimpse the maw of the Outlander in your rear view mirror and you will find yourself struggling to keep your attention on the road ahead. There is not one line on the car that does not serve a purpose. Form follows function. There you have it then, a superb engine, perfect driving position, great road holding, perfect ergonomics and an aggressive stance with that huge grille.

If I have one grouse with the package, it is the noisy Yokohama rubber. The Geolandars might be great for off-road duty, but this car is going to be used mostly on the tarmac. I have had the Outlander fitted out with Yokohama ES501 decibels and these have solved the problem. No more tyre noise.

If you are a car buff, I urge you to take the Outlander for a drive. In a world where the Audi Q5 is Gold and the Honda CRV is Silver, this Mitsubishi is Rearden Metal.

Politicians are more astute than we give them credit for

Most of us in India, and I mean the educated middle class here, often see politicians as greedy thugs, who over promise and under deliver, and wish to grab what is not theirs. We are perhaps justified in holding this view, if their increasing level of arrogance over the last decade, as depicted in the media is anything to go by. A closer scrutiny might be in order though.

Politicians in India have been exceptionally astute in reading the minds of their constituencies. Across most of the time that India has been independent, they have been exceptionally good at making exactly the noises that the voter wanted to hear. The Indian voter is changing; gone are the days of the illiterate farmer who got swayed by empty promises of 'garibi hatao' decade after decade. In the last few years, voters have started to punish the politicians who have not honoured their promises.

Politicians are not blind to this change. Sure, there are some who, refused to wake up to the new reality and by insisting on playing by the old rules, paid the price. The Congress Party, in trying to play the same old Maai-Baap sarkar focused on doling out alms, missed the plot completely in 2014. The crowd before them was not seeking a waiver on their loans, it was comprised of youth who were  concerned with opportunities not alms. The people who won this election are the folks who promised what the electorate wanted to hear.

Gurcharan Das, an avowed India optimist, has been writing in his column for about a decade now, that the face of politics will change in this country when the middle class numbers about half the population. He argued that the literate middle class will hold the electorate accountable like no previous populace has. The days of politicians making empty promises and counting on short public memory are fast fading. The average literacy rates in India is now at 74% and people are keeping track of the promises their representatives made five years ago. The overwhelming anti-incumbency voting that is now becoming the norm is evidence.

This is what gives me hope. Politicians are selfish and self serving. But the free hand of the market is also coming into play at the right time. Unlike the capitalist who became a has been by insisting on producing scooters that need to be tilted every morning, evening and night, the politician today cannot count on the licence raj to cover his rear. He needs to deliver what his customer wants. Or pay the price.

Politicians are more astute than we give them credit for, and therein lies hope for this country.

Ban the bulb

A number of countries have banned the incandescent bulb. Ireland was amongst the first few in 2008, Australia 2010, EU agreed to a progressive phase-out by 2012. Even the US, the US!, closed their last incandescent bulb factory in 2010. The wiki article on phase out of incandescent bulbs mentions China has commenced a stage wise plan, bulbs bigger than 100 W already phased out, 60 W units by October 2014 and all of them to be banned by October 2016.

About India, the article is less enthusiastic. "There was a plan to replace 400 million incandescent bulbs with CFLs by 2012... The states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in India have banned the use of incandescent bulbs in government departments, public sector undertakings, various boards, cooperative institutions, local bodies, and institutions running on government aid."

I have been doing some quick research and some quick math. According to the 2011 census, there are 172 million rural households and 84 million urban households, say 256 million all told. Presuming a very modest 2 bulbs per urban household and 1 per rural home, we are looking at a minimum of 340 million bulbs, though the lamp manufacturing industry estimates that there are about 700 million bulbs in the country. Switching from a 60W incandescent bulb to a 6W LED unit, which will provide equivalent light, could potentially result in an annual savings of  54W x 14 hours x 365 days = 78000 Watt hours. 78000 Watt hours x 340 million bulbs = 26 Tera Watt hours or 26000 MU
With 700 million bulbs the savings would be about 52000 MU

The power shortage in India, as stated on the wiki page for Electricity Sector in India is 1048672-995157=53515 MU.

Anywhere between half and almost all of India's power shortage problem could be solved by enforcing a move from incandescent bulbs to LED lamps.

PM Modi signaled this need when he replaced one bulb in his Delhi office with an LED unit. India's lighting industry has plans for a self-imposed ban on 100 W bulbs starting this year with 60W going out in 2016 and 40W by 2017 according to this article in the Economic Times.

But with the price of LED lamps dropping to the 100 Rupee range, the time for the government to take specific action to ban the bulb might just be now.

The best seats on the plane

I just realized that the best seats on the plane, at least when flying domestic in India are at the two ends of the aircraft. The front is obvious, you are sitting in a wider seat,  being served your plastic meal on real china and you get a free newspaper. Even on a no frills carrier, you have the advantage of getting off the aircraft sooner.

Seating in the middle of the aircraft, especially on the over-wing seats, gives you all the joy of sitting in the middle seat. You cannot enjoy the window, and you have to cross hurdles to get to the washrooms.

The tail end might need some advocacy. On domestic sectors in India, airlines still use the good old stepladder most of the time. If you are in the last few rows, you can disembark sooner than the poor folks in the over-wing seats who are straining their necks fore and aft to try and figure out which line will move sooner. I have even been on flights where even though the aircraft was parked at the aero-bridge, they still had the rear stepladder attached and allowed passengers to disembark from the rear door. I think it was Indigo, trying to get the next flight to depart ahead of schedule.

Sure, there is the obvious downside of being seated close to the lav, but if you can hold your breath for about 60 minutes, the last couple of rows are the best. Because remember, the tail section usually remains intact. They don't locate the flight data recorders in the tail section for no reason.

Anger is something else

I read an article on the internet a few days ago. The author suggested that when we are angry, it is the result of some other unresolved emotion that manifests itself as anger.

I have been thinking about this ever since and I am beginning to agree. For example, I usually find myself getting angry when people blatantly jump traffic lights in our city. If I were to consider this rationally, I am caused no personal loss in any way when the motorcycle ahead of me takes off through a red light. It does not cost me any extra time, nor inconvenience. Why then do I still get angry?

I have concluded that for me, the underlying emotion is helplessness. Helplessness at not being able to do anything about something that is clearly wrong.

At the risk of repeating something I have already said in an earlier post, helplessness combined with denial leads to stress. Stress leads to anger. And to quote Yoda, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

Helplessness is my magma. What's yours?

Of honour and shame - part 2

I attended a meeting of the Pune chapter of my Alma mater alumni association some days ago at the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce hall in Pune. The highlight of the program was a panel discussion on Make in India by the new director of my Alma mater, a once leading industrialist in Pune, a retired head of a large automobile manufacturing company, also an alumnus and a leading economist and professor. 

The program was scheduled for 5 pm, but in true Indian tradition, it started at 5:40 pm. To be expected with traffic in our cities being what it is, you might think. The traffic did not seem to have delayed the audience, who had taken the effort to arrive before 5 pm out of deference for the distinguished panelists.

In any case, traffic was an irrelevant excuse that day. All the panelists were already in the building and had been there since noon that day for other meetings, no doubt discussing the future of our country. The meeting prior to the 5 o’clock event ended at 5 pm. And then of course, the distinguished members of the panel had to repair to the VIP lounge for some tea and biscuits. The plebs could wait.

To add insult to injury, the industrialist spoke about the importance of discipline and of pride of work. He took the opportunity to tell us how the Shinkansen, the Japanese bullet trains always run on time and have not had a single accident in their 60 year history.

The Japanese culture is fueled by honour and disciplined by shame, he said, and advised us that we need to learn to inject that sense of pride in work here in India. The Japanese would much rather commit hara-kiri than be shamed.

Where was your sense of shame, Mr. Industrialist, when you kept the audience waiting while you sipped your tea? And you Hon’ble Director? Was it easier to acquiesce to sloppy time keeping because the other panelists were worthies? 

Of honour and shame - part1

I have been upset for the last couple of days at the lack of respect for good work even at a premier educational institution. As I had mentioned in my post a couple of days ago, these are the same people who worked very hard to get into these schools. If my own memory and example is anything to go by, then most of these kids would be all starry eyed on their first day at B-School, ready to conquer the world. Effort levels are high in the first semester. And then something happens.

As soon as people figure out that they are not in the top so may percent of their class, they switch off. A number of them just roll over and play dead. What causes this binary, all or nothing mindset? Do we as a culture, place too much emphasis on the biggest winners? Clearly, we do. So winning is glorious. But where, along the way, did we lose our sense of pride in quality of work? I have a theory. Again. So bear with me.

I have a notion that we learned to excuse ourselves for our sloppy work when the resources made available to us were clearly insufficient, thanks to the planned economy. In fact, a number of social maladies can be traced back to the planned economy and the constrained environment that a couple of generations of Indian were forced to labour under. When you stand in line for an hour to get your litre of milk and then in line for another hour for a loaf of bread, the only breakfast you have time for is bread dunked in milk. When the milk is half water, you cannot make a good milkshake. When the wheat is the red wheat procured with the begging bowl of the PL-480 program, you cannot make a roomali roti. A few decades of this and we do not even expect to see a good milkshake and generally we learn to excuse ourselves easily when the quality of our output is less than exemplary.

What we need is a kick start to a new way of expecting and delivering quality work. And this process should start in our schools. We might need to reconsider our tolerance of sloppy homework and set the bar high. It is neo-intellectual to proffer the argument that every child has different abilities and needs to be loved.

I agree completely, but we also need to urgently find and enforce a system whereby every child learns that he or she has to do her best all the time. This second part is seriously lacking and we have built a generation of 'Chalta-Hain Jugaadus'. We have perhaps even glorified Jugaad as resourcefulness or improvisation. Then, to compound matters, as these children grow up to become adults, they have the gall to pontificate about what is wrong with our work ethic and about discipline.

To be continued…

Discipline or forgiveness

There was rampant cheating on an assignment I had handed out at this top-10 B-School. Students were required to submit report on a business case. It is not uncommon to have a student or two trying to smuggle someone else’s work in as their own. But this was at another level. As I read the 5^th file in my inbox, I had this feeling of deja-vu. By the 25^th, it was like being caught in an endless loop of reading the same stuff over and over. Groundhog Day came to mind. When I confronted them in class with the evidence, the list of excuses was quite entertaining. 

There is a process at this B-School to handle situations such as this. Visiting faculty is required to forward the offending material to the administration office and withhold the grades for these students. The admin office then sets up a committee to investigate the offence and hands out appropriate punishment, usually involving a make-up assignment in lieu of the one where the work was not honestly done. Seems like a fair process to me. 

Students seem to believe, going by their pleas, that the administration gets vindictive and drags out the investigation, keeping their results in limbo. “Should have thought about that before you tried to hoodwink the prof.,” I thought to retort, but herein lies the quandary. 

Clearly, there are some students who have done the work and others who have been parasites. In sending the case to the disciplinary committee, the honest are also put through the wringer. Worse, it is very likely that in some warped sense of fairness, the same punishment will be meted out to both the honest and the criminal.

 

Even so, I am inclined to follow due process in this case. In today’s world, it is not enough to be good and honest, it is also imperative that we are careful. If we have learned to not keep our baggage unattended at airports and railway stations, then we should have also learned by now, to not leave our work lying around for others to pilfer. In a more innocent age, we would happily agree to do a joint check-in because a stranger’s baggage was over the 20kg limit. It would be unwise to do so today, lest we find ourselves in the Bangkok Hilton, or worse, at Gitmo Bay.

There is another reason for my reluctance to be lenient. There is a pervading malaise in our educational institutions where sloppy work is acceptable, and cheating is considered par for the course. It is almost taken for granted that students today will cheat at every opportunity they can. These same cheats will then be more likely to try and wiggle out of doing their pay’s worth of work at the office, like Wally in ‘Dilbert’.

Do we, the middle class, owe it to our country to do a little something for discipline? As it is we do not try and correct the errant traffic violator, fearing the dreaded, “Aap se kya matlab?” We will shake our heads in disdain at the corruption in public life, at the incompetence all around us and at the Dilbertism at work; but do nothing about it even when there are processes in place to empower us to act. Often, it is because we are afraid of the powerful and their willingness to abuse their power. But what about those situations when we find ourselves in the position of power? Why do we as Indians still find it more convenient to look the other way? Forgiveness is glorified in our culture, for it supposedly makes a good person better.

But here’s the other thing about forgiveness. It also emboldens the wicked by reinforcing their belief that they can get away with anything.

Paradox at a premier school

I am currently teaching a short course at a leading Business school in India.

It would be reasonable to assume that most of the students who are enrolled here have worked hard for their admission. Admissions criteria in recent years have been exceedingly stringent, requiring top class academic performance at Secondary School, Higher Secondary and at Undergraduate levels.
With the Right to Information Act, people can ask what admissions criteria were used for granting admissions and can challenge the result if the process appears to have been circumvented. Consequently, academic institutions have had to build processes that are simpler to explain, resulting in a bigger reliance on published academic scores over other softer measures of performance that might be judged in the Interview process.

With this higher level of stringency in the admissions process, I would have expected to find the students here to be more academically driven than say MBA students of 15 years ago. Quite the contrary, I am beginning to notice a higher level of disinterest in the course material amongst the student fraternity. Other faculty members at many B-Schools share this impression.

I am cognizant of the fact that only yesterday, I wrote a piece about people who complain that they don't make 'em like they used to. I am therefore disinclined to claim that either the student body or the teaching body at B Schools are not made of the same stuff these days.

I do remain flummoxed, by how a number of students who ostensibly worked very hard to make it to an elite institution of higher learning, suddenly switch off once they have made it in.

What gives?

They don't make 'em like they used to?

A lot of people, especially from the previous generation, seem to believe that they don't make things like they used to. And they will not tire of telling you so. I have always had trouble believing this. Across the last thirty-five years, I have only seen things get better.

My first mobile phone was a brick. Talk time was about 30 minutes and the battery had to be recharged overnight. My current phone weighs nothing, has 6 hours of talk time, a week's standby time, alerts me when its battery needs to be recharged, charges in 2 hours, browses the internet at speeds up to 7.2Mbps, takes pictures at night without a flash, has 64 GB of memory, plays high fidelity music though my car stereo, gives me driving directions and can probably drive my car if I could figure out how to tell it to do so. I could tell you about the new LCD TVs with true HD 1080 resolution as against our old SONY with 640 lines of analog display.

Sure, you say, that will always happen in electronics. All right then. My first car in 1984 had a 2 litre engine, produced about 80 hp, went from 0 to 100 in 12 seconds and gave me about 12 kilometers per litre. My latest car also has a 2 litre engine, but produces 184 hp, goes from 0 to 100 in 7 seconds, has anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, airbags, a million watt stereo, will tell me how to get to where I want to go and is capable of giving me 17 kmpl if I drive it in eco mode at a steady speed on the expressway. Cars not a fair example either? Okay, table-fans today are more energy efficient and more elegant that their 20th century counterparts. Even plastic buckets have a better finish these days and their handles don't come off the first time you try to lift them with water in them.

Here is another example, and this one is as low tech as it can get. When we built our house in 1987, we installed GI pipes for our concealed plumbing. Over the last 25 years, the hot water pipes got corroded and the scaling built up to a point that we have had to recently remodel our bathrooms just to replace the pipes. The new C-PVC pipes are corrosion resistant, are easier to join to each other, and a skilled plumber can finish laying all the pipes in the bathroom in a single day. That is for the shower, wash basin, bath tub, the commode, the water heater and a second shower connected to the roof top solar unit. With the metal pipes, it would take more than a day just to cut the threads on the pipe ends so they could screw on the elbow joints.

The plumber, however, was complaining about how the new C-PVC pipes are not quite the same thing as the old metal pipes. I have no clue what he was on about. I asked him how long it took him to re-train himself to work with the new C-PVC pipes. He said the training time was about a week but in the beginning, the chemical solution that is used for joining two sections together was no good and the joints were often not leak proof. He complained about how he had to remove the C-PVC plumbing and had to redo the whole thing in metal the first time he tried it.

I researched this a bit. It appears that 10 years ago, the chemical available in India had a curing time of 24 hours and the new stuff available now has a curing time of 5-10 minutes. I wanted to ask him if he waited 24 hours after gluing the pipes together before he charged the system with water, but decided to pass.

So what is going on? Why are pops and gram-pa complaining about the new stuff so often? I suspect the culprit is our tendency to resist change. And the older we get, the more we begin to resist change. Perhaps we cannot learn new stuff as easily. At the very least we begin to believe that we cannot learn new stuff easily. Show me a person complaining about how they don't make things like they used to, and I will show you a person who is beginning to display the signs of resistance to change.

And the next time you catch yourself complaining about how Microsoft Office or Facebook has changed the User Interface on you again and how the old one was better, take a good hard look in the mirror. You might just notice a face with a few more gray hairs peering back at you.

How short can a story be?

I learned for myself, all over again, that one can't please everybody.

If I write a long post, a friend politely suggests that the language seems 'laboured'. With the really short piece yesterday, I was asked in the office if I was short of time, or getting lazy. I will have you know that it takes more effort to write a small piece than a long one.

So how short can a piece of writing be and still touch the reader?
Six words, if you are Ernest Hemingway.

"For sale : Baby shoes. Never worn."

On meetings - Part 2

One of our managers shared his personal algorithm on meetings a couple of days ago.

Before he calls a meeting he asks himself, "Will this meeting benefit me or will it benefit the team?" If it is likely to benefit the team, he schedules the meeting. If he is the beneficiary, then he figures out another way to get the information he needs. No meeting.

Nice.

Equitable distribution of mediocrity?

In their comments to yesterday's post, Ali and Mohit preempted what I was going to write about today.

Ali said...

...While the intention may have been to assign the teachers who were better at teaching more advanced stuff, I think it was seen as assigning the best teachers. That never goes down well...

Mohit said...

…The system of segregating the "smart" ones out is something the students and parents find unfair…

I would like to echo their thoughts. In an attempt to be seen as fair to the not-so-ambitious, the system started to assign students randomly across the different divisions or classes. I suspect this approach has engendered a strange problem across the last couple of decades.

I need to state here that I am not against this approach at the policy level. I appreciate that there is definite merit to having a classroom with diverse skills and qualities.

My issue is with simplistic approaches to implementation of policy. When we studied Organization Behaviour at B-School, one of the sessions focused on how a team of high performers becomes synergistic, making the overall team performance better than the sum of its parts. I can easily imagine a small class of curious, enthusiastic and driven students working on building a prototype of something at an engineering college feeding off each other’s ideas. I can just as easily imagine a group with one enthusiastic person who finds his or her batteries getting drained by the apathy of the other members in the group.

We need to think long and hard about whether we are being unfair to the Einsteins in the country and dooming them to drudgery. How do we nurture the talent of tomorrow? Who will focus on enabling the best to become even better? 

On classrooms

I read Mohit's comment on yesterday's post and my own situation came back to me. I would like to believe I have always been a very curious person, had a 'why' for everything, and wasn't afraid to ask the teacher. I have also been in Mohit's shoes on being disliked by other students for this trait. In school I was the teacher's pet, in college the show-off, and at B-school the CP king. Looking back, it is easy to see that classmates saw me as a pain in the neck and my questions as counterproductive to the progress of the session. I also see that my questions were clearly unfair to people who had the issue already sorted in their minds. I was perhaps the catalyst to their zoning out.

This is clearly always going to be an issue in the classroom setup with one teacher and fifty students. With each of these fifty students at different points on the learning curve, any pace the teacher chooses to set, will be too slow for some and too fast for others. Too slow and they get bored. Too difficult and there might be despair. Both of these groups will disengage from the discussion. One answer to this dilemma would be to have smaller and smaller classrooms until we have one teacher per student, like at PhD level instruction. At primary school level too, there is some evidence that smaller classrooms allow the teacher to accord more attention to each student. However, while this approach might be effective, it may not be very efficient. A class size of one is surely sub-optimal on multiple counts. Not only would it become a scheduling nightmare in all cases except perhaps home-schooling, but children would also lose the benefit of social interaction with other kids in a learning environment.

Are we doomed to failure then? There might be a solution. One that was implemented for many years in schools of our parents' time but was disbanded later. When children in my parents generation moved from one academic year to the next, they were re-assigned to different classes or 'divisions'. The best students went to division A followed by the next best to division B and so on. Ostensibly the best teachers or rather, teachers who were better at teaching more advanced stuff were also assigned to division A. This made for a more homogenous group that was comfortable with a faster pace in the classroom. Conversely, of course, the students in division D could be taught at a pace that they were comfortable with.

The Singapore education system takes this one step further. The fastest divisions complete school in 10 years while the slowest divisions are given one extra year to complete the curriculum. Problem solved, one would think. But if this system works, why was it disbanded? That is a discussion for tomorrow.

What makes a great student

I have been thinking some more about engagement. Yesterday's post was clearly focused on what a teacher can do to make the sessions more engaging. What about the other party in that equation? If the students are completely disinterested, even the best teachers are eventually doomed to fail.

What then makes a great student? What are the ingredients?

I would start with curiosity. A student who has a genuine 'Why?' for every statement can engage a good teacher in a very interesting conversation. A conversation such as this can actually make the session interesting for the entire class.

The other trait would be drive. A drive to find things out for the joy of learning. A drive to build a working prototype for the joy of work. A drive to do well for the joy of a job well done.

As lamentable as the lack of good teachers in Indian academia is the lack of students with drive. Assignments are always seen as a necessary evil to be endured if one is to get a degree or diploma. It is not often that I meet students who jump into the assignment because it is a cool problem to solve.

We can go back and blame our education system I suppose where the teachers' apathy rubs off on the students early in their life. Where a job well done has no higher merit than a job gotten done with.

While I am not sure if curiosity can be injected into a person from outside, I do believe that drive can be instilled into a student. I have to echo Paul Graham's thoughts on this one. One of the traits of great teachers, he says, is that they had high standards and held their students to high standards. "Like three year olds testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behaviour. They won't respect the teachers who don't call them on it."

How can a teacher make sessions more engaging?

In a response to a previous post about what makes a great teacher, a friend asked this question,
"How do we train a teacher to engage the students? Considering he has the knowledge.. and can communicate reasonably well.."

This one caught me by surprise. I guess I had just assumed that some people are able to engage an audience and some are not. That would be tantamount to admitting that engaging speakers are born, not made. So let me attempt to do here what my Alma mater taught me to do - break down the problem into its component parts.

I looked back at the times I was truly engaged, and tried to identify what had to come together for it to happen. Here are a few things that I have come up with.

1. Relevant Content. The topic was either of inherent interest to me or the speaker managed to make it interesting for the duration of that session. How does one make a topic interesting? By telling a story. There is a reason why parables are sticky. Students do not like teachers who dispense gyan. 

2. Contextual Familiarity. The speaker was able to connect the topic of discussion with examples of something else that I might already be familiar with. Providing examples that the audience can identify with can be the difference between having the audience in rapt attention or suffering the ignominy of watching them zone out, or worse, reach for their phones.

3. Handling questions with respect. Nothing turns off a student audience more that a teacher who avoids a question by saying something like, "You don't need to know. It is not in the syllabus," or "It is too complicated to explain." In case the time required to answer a complicated question is un-affordable, or if such a discussion runs the risk of alienating the rest of the audience, a wise teacher will provide a short answer and welcome the student to follow up after class. Needless to say, "Let us take this off-line," should not become a ploy to avoid difficult questions.

The biggest enemies of engagement are apathy, boredom and disdain. Relevance cures apathy and Contextual Familiarity can cure boredom. Being respectful endears the speaker to the audience.

Fifteen years of entrepreneurship

"How do I start my own business?" is perhaps the most common question I have been asked at B-Schools.

Profit is remuneration for risk, not for effort. A certain minimum appetite for risk is therefore a must-have characteristic. But risk taking ability alone does not an entrepreneur make. A few more ingredients are required for the magic stew. More importantly, these have to come together in the same person at the same time for him / her to seriously consider entrepreneurship.

1. Most entrepreneurs are driven by a sense of ambition. It is crucial that this level of ambition be high. High enough that it cannot be met by employment even in the C-Suite. This ambition need not necessarily be about making money. One entrepreneur I know is driven by creating sustainable employment for thousands of people.

2. A number of entrepreneurs are pained by some facet of the employment paradigm. Some might believe that corporate jobs are paying them way short of what they are worth. Some might find the money quite appealing, but see their work as drudgery. They hate Mondays. Others might find their bosses insufferable. It is crucial, again here, that this level of pain be so high that the person not just considers quitting his or her job - but considers it seriously and plans to do it as early as now.

3. Most entrepreneurs are driven by a desire to change the world in some way.  Bill Gates wanted to make computers simple enough for his grandmother to use. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to make internet search more efficient. Purely the desire to make more money is not enough to make an entrepreneur.

Put all three things together at the same time in the same person, add a dash of risk taking and you might just have the primordial soup. What happens if one of the ingredients is missing?

If the ambition is missing in a person who wishes to change the world and is pained with corporate life, you have the makings of a social worker or an NGO type.

A person with ambition and a desire to change the world who is comfortable in the corporate setting makes for a procrastinator, someone in the 'n+2' mode. "Two hundred thousand dollars more and a couple of years later, I will start my own thing."

Look around you and you will find a number of people are possessed of items 1 and 2. These are the job hoppers.

Fourteen years of teaching

I attended a lecture by one of the eminent professors at one of the premier B-schools in the country some time ago. As I sat there listening to the person read from power-point slides I remembered once again how much drudgery it was to attend 6 years of lectures through undergrad and graduate education in India.

We have all lamented the lack of good teachers in the country. One of the causal parameters is the low pay accorded to the teaching profession. Second is perhaps that fact that bright driven people are not attracted to teaching - hence the old adage, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

Even if we were to magically solve these two problems - paying the best people the equivalent of what they could earn out there in the commercial world and attracting these people back to academia to teach - how do we identify the people who can actually make a difference to students' lives.

I have been thinking about this for some time now and I have even shared these thoughts with people who will listen. Three things need to come together in a person for him or her to be a great teacher.

1. Knowledge about the subject. You cannot teach what you do not know.

2. Communication skills to effectively transfer that knowledge to the students. We have all met teachers, perhaps in our undergrad years where we sat through a lecture of arcane gobbledygook and understood just two things. One, this is difficult stuff. Two, the professor seems to have understood it.

3. The ability to engage the audience. I have always learned best when I was having fun and I was having fun when the teacher managed to engage me in the discussion. I remember two instances distinctly. The first was when I was in 6th grade and our history teacher used to make the classes come alive. We could see those battles unfold before our eyes. Our eyes filled with tears when she walked us through Jallianwala Bagh and our heart swelled with pride at the uprightness of our freedom fighters. The second was more recent, when I attended a 4 day management training program by one of the top ten rated B-school professors in the world. This person made the learning come out of the class participation.

As I sat there I finally realized what B-school education could be like, should be like, and how we are perhaps wasting two years of the prime-est of the primes of the lives of the best minds in the country when we have them attend classes where the professors drone on about something while the students minds zoned out.

Those of who were relatively lucky in school and undergrad often met teachers who possessed two of the three traits. Some had knowledge about the subject and also had the communication skills to transfer the knowledge. These were the respected professors. We did not quite enjoy sitting in their classes, but those with ambition felt a sense of duty that caused them to ay attention in these lectures.

Other teachers were a lot of fun. They cracked jokes and told stories. But there was no meat, no real substance to the content. These sessions were not really education. They were entertainment.

And yet others, admittedly a rare breed, had knowledge about the subject and they also engaged the audience. But strangely, the transfer of knowledge was not happening. Perhaps they invested more time and effort in trying to awe the students about their knowledge. These sessions were not education either. They were a form of satsang. 

It seems that in Indian academia, while some of professors have the knowledge and a somewhat smaller number have the communication skills to transfer that knowledge, almost none have that elusive quality - the ability to engage the students. The sad part is that is that most of them are not even willing to acknowledge the importance of engagement.