Sreeram Srinivasan

 A little salute to George Floyd Like many, I have been trying to make sense of the horrifying and completely unnecessary death of George Floyd over the last  week. The visuals, first of the victim in his final moments and then of the protests – sometimes peaceful and other times not – have caused anguish as they rightly should. America having been my second home from the mid 80s to mid 90s and that too in my younger years. The emotions am going through right now are, therefore, manifold and mixed. Having lived a good part of those years in the American South (North Carolina and Tennessee) and having been witness to the images on TV of a Rodney King being beaten up by policemen in the early 1990s, my mixed emotions are understandable, at least to me. I rejoiced, incredulously though, when Obama got elected President. This was something I believed was near impossible all through his campaign. I truly believed then that America had turned the corner on race relations and t...

The title may outrage some but read on...... A pandemic like this is a great chance and as the sayings goes, "great opportunities come not when pianos are playing in the Ballroom but bombs are landing in the harbor". How are we going to prepare ourselves and exploit this great chance - by "Intelligence of Thought" or our "Smartness of Being". This is what I mean by IOT and SOB in the title! In these days of the COVID 19 pandemic, see too many companies and people trying to be "smart" or even "smarting". Hear of companies negotiating hard on IPs of life saving products, understand a large company just announced that they will suspend all payments to suppliers invoking some legalese in the contract. We can stop paying the little guy, we can take advantage of the powerless, we can be hard-nosed even with the Government as it has its back to wall with illness and death on its hands. Similarly, we could constantly tweet sitting at home...

The Coronavirus or Covid-19 crisis has thrown up several possibilities. Am seeing several products and companies that were just about surviving or even dying get a sudden lease of life while the traditional businesses are locked down or sulking silently. Images of the mass migrations back to their villages in spite of a "curfew" by the migrants is also heart wrenching. They are braving not only the elements but possibly the risk of spreading the infection to their families and friends back in the villages. It remains to be seen if these migrants indeed migrate back to the cities post this crisis or simply decide to live on MGNREGA and other doles. If I may hazard a guess, the returns may be just about 60% but may take over a whole year if conditions do return to normal. Others may simply decide to "settle down" in their villages and not fight the inertia that would set in invariably. Herein lies our greatest opportunity and the positive fallout of the crisis as ...

Have you ever felt apprehensive about a chore or an assignment or a Project you absolutely need to finish but dreaded it for any number of reasons – starting trouble, the quantum of work involved, fear of the unknown, fear of failure knowing that others before you have, fear of facing uncertainty or unknown faces or a difficult person, physical strain, etc. Worry not for the "No mind" method will work for you! Read on. The insight of No Mind comes from the movie The Last Samurai (2003). In what I feel is the defining moment in the film when the protagonist Capt. Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) comes to understand his Japanese Captors. The scene is Capt. Algren having a "friendly duel" with a young officer in rebel army in the village where he is held captive. He is soundly defeated each time in spite of Capt. Algren's exemplary record as a soldier and a warrior. Unable to understand, he looks for answers only to find it the words of a village child, Nobutada - Too...

Execution for us in India is always a challenge. We come up with the best of plans and designs and conjure up awesome things but fall woefully short, mostly in time to delivery or quality of the work. Oftentimes it is not necessarily for want of resources but of the deep execution DNA - the rigor, the micro detailing and passion for the "checklist" and structured reviews.... Here are a few laws I came up with some years back to illustrate to my colleagues the importance of getting it done and may be nudge them towards better execution. The name Grams' Laws was coined out of gratitude and in dedication to my ex-colleague, Grams. He is a brilliant IT engineer and a great visionary when it came to dreaming up a scheme for a software program/module. He would tirelessly present the minutest of details of how this piece of code would work and what it would do and how it would be the mother of all programs that would solve not only our but even some of world's pr...

Its 100 years since Einstein published his general theory of relativity, truly a path-breaking discovery and postulate regarding this Universe. It is one of the secrets of the universe revealed, in effect. Einstein has been quoted as saying that he stumbled on to the General Theory of Relativity through deep thought and intuition but did not derive it via mathematical logic. The equations and math followed later.  Many of our rishis or great thinkers speak of the same deep meditation and thought that helped them to decipher the secrets of the universe. They probably revealed it to us but in cryptological terms that we fail to fathom. And they shrouded it in rituals, images, structures and even the "mantras" - the holy scripts that we see, hear and even chant without knowing the deep secrets within. In the book, The Da Vinci Code, the secret of Christ's bloodline is deeply encrypted in many ways and unravels ever so slowly through deep meditative thought, intuition and ...