Growing up in India, one saw the image of Gandhi everywhere. Gandhi was Mahatma (“great soul”), whose aura soared above the martyrs of struggle for Independence. Gandhi’s bespectacled visage is still a universal presence on rural committees, on non-profit logos, in drawing competitions, and in children’s “fancy dress” parades on his birthday celebrations. He is etched on the Indian currency bills and sketched in collective memories, but always with the same imagery: the charkha (the wheel), the round spectacled bald head, the walking stick on which his spindly weight rested, the white khaddar fabric and time-piece, and the ever-present smile. Even as Gandhian lifestyle fades into the distant past, with memories being re-layered in celluloid hues of Kingsley’s face, Gandhi’s round spectacles…
Leave a CommentMonth: January 2018
Earlier last fall, walking in San Francisco, from the Caltrain station to Embarcadero, I came across a scene that is now etched in my memory. It was about 430 pm before the rush for evening dinner began. A group of restaurant workers, most of them Hispanic, stumbled out of a side door and were settling on the pavement of a by-lane, opening up packets of Chinese food that had just been delivered. They were clad in prim white kitchen wear, clean and tidy, which only highlighted the exhaustion on their faces, perhaps in anticipation of a long evening of toil. I continued walking around and came across the inviting doors of a Michelin-starred restaurant, emphasizing a contrast that is shockingly…
Leave a CommentI mentioned the news of the author Ursula Le Guin passing away in an earlier post. Here is a note of appreciation. As an Operations Research person, I love hard science fiction (Clarke, Niven, Reynolds, and others). But, it was astounding to read Le Guin the first time, and the sense of mystery has only deepened over the years. She was distinct from every other literary author that I have read. In her writings, Le Guin brought her unique sensitivity in creating imagined worlds with poetic words corralled with a rational curiosity of science. Much has been written on the internet on the social foresight in her writings: the physical appearance of her protagonists, gender issues, politics of social choice, etc. She…
Leave a CommentI learned that Ursula Le Guin passed away, earlier today. I am a bit surprised how much this news has affected me. Le Guin was one of the best writers that I had the pleasure of reading, first as a teenager, and then through the college years, as the appreciation of her nuanced writing grew unceasingly. Her writing transformed how I thought about Science, Fiction, and the world. She was the SF writer that deserved the Nobel more than anyone. More later, but here is the NYTimes Obit.
Leave a CommentAmazon’s HQ2 selection process has been described as a beauty contest, which misses the point. Amazon is definitely not going to pick a city based on popular opinion or consensus. An excellent theoretical framework to think about Amazon’s choice process for HQ2 is the idea of Innovation Tournaments. A good resource to learn more is the wonderful book Innovation Tournaments by my Wharton colleagues Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, which I highly recommend. Innovation tournament typically involves several contestants going through a series of rounds, as pictured above (under a selection-criterion and pre-announced rules), until a “winner” is chosen. American Idol is a TV-show that typified this idea. Innovation tournaments are a genuinely great method to brainstorm and generate new…
Leave a CommentIn my earlier post on the Brief History of Amazon Prime, I had mentioned about the stickiness of Amazon Annual Prime Pricing. An issue with scaling revenues this way is stickiness of prices. It took a whole nine years for Amazon to go from $79 to a more profitable fee of $99. (I thought the fees would be raised to $108 at $9 a month – closer to NetFlix rates – but the fees were stickier than I had thought). Prime subscription prices vary quite a bit geographically around the world. For instance, the annual subscription is $99 in the U.S., £99 in the U.K. (equivalent to USD 115), $22 in Italy, and about $8 in India. However, within certain geography…
Leave a CommentA Full Life: Reflections at Ninety A successful presidency may be a function of steadfastness, leadership, decency and intellectual acuity, but it is also a resultant of happy accidents of cosmic confluence and contemporary affections of the citizenry. Presidential historians do not rate Carter’s presidency very highly. President Carter is a living testament that being a decent human being is not sufficient to be a successful president. In his book, President Carter reflects on his life at 90, looking back at his idyllic childhood in rural Georgia, his entry into politics, his life in submarines, and finally evaluates his presidential tasks completed and incomplete. Some Notes: President Carter remembers his house being a Sears Roebuck catalog house. In these days…
Leave a Comment