While I have had opportunity to meet our Prime Minister a few times
while he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, I would desist from claiming
to know him. With the handicap of having limited capability to
understand people, I could make the following inferences – he is a
patriot and wants India to progress. He also seems to care less about
religion, irrespective of what image of his is portrayed in public by
others or himself. That he rammed off all encroachments of public
property by temples in Ahmedabad is one of the three reasons for me to
reach this conclusion. The second reason is his use of the word
‘Kalpana’ (Imagination) of God in his facebook townhall meeting – so he
considers the concept of God as an imagination of humans, not a reality.
Thirdly, he is too thinking a man to be led into vanilla belief. Having
said that it is also evident that he will not be averse to using either
God or religion to achieve the goals he has set. May be, he is an
evolved & smart atheist. One conclusion that I have made with good
degree of certainty is that he is not a status-quoist. He is a change
agent and abhors the socio-cultural & economic stagnancy India has
been into. His disdain of chalta-hai is so gravitational that he makes
it a point to showcase it one way or the other, sometimes in words other
times in silence. Erstwhile Governments and Bureaucracy alike bathed
themselves in the warmth of laissez-faire, misinterpreting
non-interference to be it’s inaction. His dislike of status-quoists is
acerbic, verbal and apparent. He believes, and truly so, that our
leadership of yesteryears let the nation down on many accounts. When
compared to past, like it or not, he represents a change. He is a rebel.
With the benefit of aforementioned assumptions, I would deduce that Kanhaiya and Umar are the people, you are looking for Mr. Prime Minister. They are change agents. Hold them close to your bosom. Convention is conformism, rebellion is change. Intellectual & political obedience is indeed what you need to draw the nation out from, if you are really meaning to make India a great nation. Our polity and convention till date have been laissez-faire. There has been no bid to make the nation leap. If you want this nation to be a thought leader, one that creates pioneering industries, produces great scientists, where innovation is common place, that goes to Mars, is clean and green, economically developed, that is revered and took notice off; then let a million such mutinies thrive. I do believe you need those who will obediently do what you want done – they are your executors. In innovation-led companies we understand that it is critical to have your discovery team and your execution team. You have your execution team in place. Dissidents are your discovery team. They hate status-quo as much as you do. They want change as much as you do. So embrace these children of revolution, because they are you. Having said that what merits mention is that while Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi followed action with oratory, Kanhaiya is still in the verbal domain. He needs to graduate to action to be counted amongst the coveted club of rebels.
It is a sigh of relief that the nation is debating nationalism, we have people ‘for’ certain definition of nationalism and others ‘against’ it, we have some for sedition others against it, we have some for and some against Mahisasur. It is beautiful. The nation is thinking. Unaccompanied by violence or provocation to it, divisions are not worrisome. They are inappropriately being portrayed as a doomsday for the nation by the left, the right, some parts of press and sometimes even by intellectuals. Divisions only show that people are thinking, they are standing for one or the other view. These are the first signs of revival, though not the revival itself. Great nations are not formed by herds of people cowed into thinking alike and even worse – doing alike; they are products of dissent, non-conformism and pluralism. Irrationality is cradle to human progress. It is convention that is rational & logical to human mind, change & novelty seem irrational to begin with. We progress only because we take routes that seem sub-optimal in best case & outright wrong in worse. It is this rebellion and change and irrationality that lets us discover the untraversed paths, the sensible amongst the discoveries later become rational. Reason is born from the womb of knowledge not vice-versa. Change, rebellion, Inquilab, irrationality is so important, that our incapability to comprehend it is one of the two major barriers to development of artificial intelligence better than ours. In my book ‘Transformers’ I have analyzed that barrier to real artificial intelligence are:
(i) our incapability as of now, to code an omnipotent & over-riding sense of survival in machines (which we possess), because we are afraid that would we code this capability, the machines might kill us for their own survival and hence we are happy possessing robotic slaves, not true human-like artificial intelligence. Our own urge of survival is the bottleneck to development of intelligence exceeding ours, by us.
(ii) second is the capability to take irrational and sometimes wrong or even sub-optimal decisions. We humans are irrational beings and this is what differentiates machines borne from our reason & wisdom. We have still not discovered the science of taking & executing wrong or sub-optimal decisions. It is so difficult to choose a wrong way of doing something, as the choice is infinite. This is the only other obstruction to development of human-like machine intellect.
In ‘Transformers’ I have highlighted why we Indians are not innovative, why dis-proportionate levels of conformism weigh so heavy on our socio-cultural and in consequence economic locomotion. Good heavens! at last we have started to grow our own rebels. Thankfully, we now have a Narendra Modi, an Arvind Kejriwal, Kanhaiya and Umar. They are our discovery team.
The inspiration to write this article came from reading an excellent piece by Apoorvanad a professor of Hindi in Delhi University which appeared in Indian Express. Titled “Umar Khalid, my son” – “because to rebel is to affirm and renew one’s humanity”.
I have provided the link to the said article.
With the benefit of aforementioned assumptions, I would deduce that Kanhaiya and Umar are the people, you are looking for Mr. Prime Minister. They are change agents. Hold them close to your bosom. Convention is conformism, rebellion is change. Intellectual & political obedience is indeed what you need to draw the nation out from, if you are really meaning to make India a great nation. Our polity and convention till date have been laissez-faire. There has been no bid to make the nation leap. If you want this nation to be a thought leader, one that creates pioneering industries, produces great scientists, where innovation is common place, that goes to Mars, is clean and green, economically developed, that is revered and took notice off; then let a million such mutinies thrive. I do believe you need those who will obediently do what you want done – they are your executors. In innovation-led companies we understand that it is critical to have your discovery team and your execution team. You have your execution team in place. Dissidents are your discovery team. They hate status-quo as much as you do. They want change as much as you do. So embrace these children of revolution, because they are you. Having said that what merits mention is that while Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi followed action with oratory, Kanhaiya is still in the verbal domain. He needs to graduate to action to be counted amongst the coveted club of rebels.
It is a sigh of relief that the nation is debating nationalism, we have people ‘for’ certain definition of nationalism and others ‘against’ it, we have some for sedition others against it, we have some for and some against Mahisasur. It is beautiful. The nation is thinking. Unaccompanied by violence or provocation to it, divisions are not worrisome. They are inappropriately being portrayed as a doomsday for the nation by the left, the right, some parts of press and sometimes even by intellectuals. Divisions only show that people are thinking, they are standing for one or the other view. These are the first signs of revival, though not the revival itself. Great nations are not formed by herds of people cowed into thinking alike and even worse – doing alike; they are products of dissent, non-conformism and pluralism. Irrationality is cradle to human progress. It is convention that is rational & logical to human mind, change & novelty seem irrational to begin with. We progress only because we take routes that seem sub-optimal in best case & outright wrong in worse. It is this rebellion and change and irrationality that lets us discover the untraversed paths, the sensible amongst the discoveries later become rational. Reason is born from the womb of knowledge not vice-versa. Change, rebellion, Inquilab, irrationality is so important, that our incapability to comprehend it is one of the two major barriers to development of artificial intelligence better than ours. In my book ‘Transformers’ I have analyzed that barrier to real artificial intelligence are:
(i) our incapability as of now, to code an omnipotent & over-riding sense of survival in machines (which we possess), because we are afraid that would we code this capability, the machines might kill us for their own survival and hence we are happy possessing robotic slaves, not true human-like artificial intelligence. Our own urge of survival is the bottleneck to development of intelligence exceeding ours, by us.
(ii) second is the capability to take irrational and sometimes wrong or even sub-optimal decisions. We humans are irrational beings and this is what differentiates machines borne from our reason & wisdom. We have still not discovered the science of taking & executing wrong or sub-optimal decisions. It is so difficult to choose a wrong way of doing something, as the choice is infinite. This is the only other obstruction to development of human-like machine intellect.
In ‘Transformers’ I have highlighted why we Indians are not innovative, why dis-proportionate levels of conformism weigh so heavy on our socio-cultural and in consequence economic locomotion. Good heavens! at last we have started to grow our own rebels. Thankfully, we now have a Narendra Modi, an Arvind Kejriwal, Kanhaiya and Umar. They are our discovery team.
The inspiration to write this article came from reading an excellent piece by Apoorvanad a professor of Hindi in Delhi University which appeared in Indian Express. Titled “Umar Khalid, my son” – “because to rebel is to affirm and renew one’s humanity”.
I have provided the link to the said article.
