My Musings

It was 1975, at the thick of the Vietnam war.   A US general was baiting Viet Cong guerrilla fighters to come out of their trenches. He was at the fag end of the war. All strategies to gouge them out failed. Days turned to nights and the sun sunk twice over. The four star general was restless to call victory. He pounded the land, rained bullets and pulverized the sky. Still the guerrillas were entrenched and holding the ground. The cat and mouse game went on at an immense cost for America. The NATO army had the best of the equipment, finest of the strategies, deepest of the resources and valorous of the men. The Guerilla’s had only one resource as they sneered at the general “ you may have the clock but we have the time!” . That alone determined Vietcong’s indomitable spirit. In war games often, the only winning move is not to play and time out your opponent. In a parallel world, venture  capitalist rushed in and out of PowerPoint meetings and invested scores of million...

This is a modern take from an old Chinese fable that is appropriate for our times. A young Indian graduate gets his MBA degree and lands a great job abroad. His college mates congratulate him. Professors say he has ‘arrived in life’. The graduate quotes wryly…" good or bad, time will tell" . There is a financial crisis in 2008 and the young man loses his job. His family is shocked at the abrupt turn of events and dismay sets in. The young man quotes wryly…" good or bad, time will tell" . He is forced to pack his bag and come home to his parents as an unemployed adult. He finds the love of his life back in his country. He eventually marries and has a lovely family of his own. His well wishers share his joy and congratulate him. The bridegroom quotes wryly…" good or bad, time will tell" . As he works through the vagaries of life, he slips down the career ladder as peers move up! “So sorry for the lost opportunity” says his concerned wife. ...

The COVID-19 Game-Changer By now it is pretty clear that Covid 19 is a black swan (Or a black bat!) moment. The only person to not recognize this global pandemic is your nitpicking spell checker! An ir-retractable line has been drawn in the annals of world history. We have clearly woken up to our own vulnerability. We will fondly reminisce the good old days of globalization. As long as Chen assembled your computer in Guangzhou and Vijay provided remote tech support from Bangalore, you cherished the global village. Globalization never had to contend to the fact that one’s eating habit in Asia would endanger another in Europe. As long as the virus remained in the omnipresent CPU, it was a technical problem. When it crawled out to our very being, it became an insidious pandemic that was more deadlier than a war and the world was never the same thereafter! The Seen and the unseen To be clear, Corona virus was not the first to have had pan-world impact and it won’t be the l...