Leaders eat first

It’s that time of the year when everyone starts resolving to make a resolution for the New Year. Most are clichés. Clichés that pretty much puts into perspective a surge in gym memberships after the binge drinking in December. Studies from various parts of the world report 8 out of the 10 people who sign up for gym memberships, stop by the end of January. I stand by the altar of the guilty as well. 

Last year, though, I shied away from a fitness resolution. Instead, I filed away two altogether different resolutions. The first, that I will practice meditation for at least a half hour every day. The second, that I will either meet one new person, or latch onto a new book every week.

I am happy to report that for all practical purposes, my resolutions stand executed. I do not intend to make any this year. Because there is much work to be done on these old ones.

December is as good a time as any to reflect on the learnings and outcomes that have emerged until now. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I know three things.

1. When confronted with silence, the head is a very noisy place.

2. Between listening deeply to people share their stories one-on-one, and reading from the pages of a book, listening beats what is embedded in books.

3. There are no bad people. Only circumstances. It is just that each person responds to fortune and adversity differently. That is what makes each one unique.

A caveat must be filed. The reason I stated upfront that “I think I know" is because these learnings are basis my perceptions so far. As that saying goes: “When the facts change, I change my mind." There is no consensus around who said it first.

Regardless of the mutability of facts, the things I’ve learned in conversations with the people who have earned my respect over the year are these.

The sky is blue

When it came to meditation, one of the first things I was told was to practice sitting in silence, meditate, and focus on just breathing in deeply, and exhaling completely, to the exclusion of everything else. When starting out, I was told to attempt the exercise for no longer than 10 minutes before progressing to longer periods. “Sounds ridiculously simple," a voice in the head suggested.

That this is extremely hard dawned on me only when the practice started. That was also when that phrase, “the mind is like a monkey" started to fall into perspective. It is the kind of creature that can tease, provoke, anger, amuse, infuse thoughts of all kinds—and do it all at once.

Over time, I could begin to see what those who are close to me have always told me—that I am a difficult person to be with. And that the demeanour I put on with those who don’t know me too well of being an easy-going bloke is a façade. In attempting to stay silent and focus on the breath, I could, for the first time, see myself in the third person and witness that I am indeed a difficult person.

My mind is constantly “chattering". It has an opinion about everything. I could hear myself talk and opine all the time—until even “me" started to get infuriated by the voices in my head. Can’t I just shut up?

Some conversations with an experienced practitioner of meditation offered pointers.

Such behaviour, it seems, is difficult for people who cannot deal with ambiguity. People like me need a clear line of sight on what must be done. But life does not offer such luxuries. It plays itself out. The best of plans can go awry. You adapt and go with the flow.

Those who insist on a clear line of sight are plain pig-headed and not cut out to be either chess-players or leaders. They can get cranky and are inevitably difficult to live with. To understand that better, I was asked to look up at the sky. There are days when it is cloudy. Then there are other days when it rains and dark clouds appear. But anyone who has been on an airplane knows that the clouds are only an obfuscation. And that once you cross the turbulence, there is a clear blue sky. Clouds, by its nature are transitory. It comes and goes with the wind.

Getting agitated then is an exercise in petulance if you implicitly understand that the sky is blue. All you need then is the patience to let the clouds pass, and develop a mental muscle memory not to do anything stupid when it gets overcast.

GyShiDo over perfection

I am, so to speak, frequently conflicted. On the one hand, I admire perfection and remain convinced nothing must go out until, as it were, that greatest of artists Michelangelo himself may approve of the perfection in it. Then on the other hand there is the idea of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) embedded in my head.

Personally, I can trace the roots of this conflict to my days when I used to report to a team of editors based out of Munich. When looked at from their West European eyes, they’d cluck their tongues in disapproval at the slightest hint of tardiness and convey their displeasure in no uncertain terms. They wanted perfection down to the last detail before the product could roll out.

Then on the other hand, my training as a business journalist, conversations with entrepreneurs of all kinds who make things happen at scale, getting hands dirty in a newsroom where deadlines are tight, and in attempting to take things off the ground, it suggests GyShiDo—a polite way to say, “Getting your shit done"—is the way to be.

Over the last year on the back of experience and multiple conversations, I now veer towards that view that perfection can wait. GyShido comes first.

By way of example, men like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs are celebrated for their obsession for being perfectionists. But what is not spoken of much in the public domain is that Steve Jobs’ quest to find perfection also made him a jerk. He bullied people, was a control freak, and had no moral qualms about building a monolith by exploiting cheap Chinese labour. I am still to read Walter Issacson’s biography of Leonardo. But there is no taking away from the point that his quest for perfection made him a procrastinator and his worst enemy as well.

When looked at from that perspective, it is possible to argue that the quest for perfectionism is an ideal pursuit, and one that must be a lifelong one at that. But while at it, implement a minimum viable product that gets you off the ground. You iterate and fix things as you go along.

If any evidence of the viability of this process is needed, look no further than what is apparently the most evolved of all businesses: Software. Each time a new version is released, it is touted as an improvement over the previous one. Nobody complains. Instead, everyone complies and upgrades.

There will be naysayers and doomsday predictors of all kinds. Pay heed to their voices for all that it is worth. But at some point, you’ve got to take a call and roll with what you have. Ideologues talk from pulpits. People who make the world go around place a premium on GyShiDo.

There are no bad guys

Contrary to what popular narrative would have us believe, there is no such thing as “us" and “them". Only different ways of looking at the world. The world needs ideologues who stoke debates and the kinds who make things happen. Both are fiercely motivated and believe deeply in what they are invested in. So even if you subscribe to the GyShiDo manifesto, it would be outright stupid to dismiss ideologues.

Because at the end of the day, there is no getting away from the reality that perfection is an ideal state. And one must do all that it takes to get there. It is a journey. The issue on hand is, which path do you take to get there the fastest. That is where decisions must be taken.

But how do you choose? Which path do I take? I asked an entrepreneur who subscribes to GyShiDo even as he keeps track of where may perfection lie, how does he manage.

His answer was a simple one. He does not judge people. He only evaluates the idea. In doing that, he asks himself some questions.

1. If I adopt this suggestion, is the outcome reversible? 

2. If the outcome is reversible, how fast can a new iteration be created?

3. If the suggestion is irreversible, what may the possible outcomes be? 

4. How many people can potentially be impacted by a negative outcome? 

5. Does an option exist to an irreversible suggestion? 

The answers to these questions are ones he cannot obtain by consensus and in a democratic manner. It is his cross to carry. Whatever be the outcome of his decision, it is conveyed and executed. But his decisions have to be made in real time. People look up to him. To that extent, he is a very lonely man.

But to stay the course, he is also aware he must also perform at his peak potential at any given point in time. To do that, he needs some creature comforts. That includes right of way and an implicit mandate to eat before the others do.

This was first published in Mint on Sunday

Robert Krulwich at Berkeley on Journalism

So, ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2011 –today you’re on the brink, about to cross over….

Last week, you had projects and deadlines and meetings and not a second to spare… And next week? Well, for many of you next week will be luxuriously relaxed with just a touch, or for some of you maybe more than a touch of ”Uh Oh” because your tomorrows may be looking just a bit too relaxed, just a little bit too “I don’t know what’s next-ish” than you’d like and that’swhat I want to talk about today.

I want to talk to you about your tomorrows in journalism….

It is, I know, hard to find a job.

I’m guessing you look at the world of newspapers and magazines and broadcasters and webcasters and Huffposts and Daily Beasts and sometimes the whole bunch of ’em feel like the City of Troy – you know,  this high walled, Fortress of Journalism, occupied by people who somehow got in before you did and now they’re looking down at you… little you, a newbie standing alone on the beachand you’re looking up,  thinking: “Hey! How’d you get in there?… and they’re not telling…

But the question’s still a good one:  How these days does anybody get a good job in journalism, a job where you are surrounded by good people, people you envy and admire, people like the folks you just spent two years with at this school? (I mean not all of them –but I imagine that each of you now have one or two or maybe three friends that you made here that you know are good at what they do, and sometimes better than good… and sometimes better than you. )

So how do you taste more of what you tasted here, which (if I can presume) includes the thrill of occasionally writing a good sentence, of asking exactly the right question at the right moment, of making two pieces of tape fit perfectly together, of getting to meet new people, go new places, see things unfold… these little satisfactions of journalism… how can you have more of that?

That’s all you’re asking, right? That’s all you want. That, and a salary.

And yet it seems so hard right now.

You can send resumes, you can phone friends. You can phone friends of friends, call up people and try to make a quick impression, but does that get you the job? For some of you, yes.  Some of you, not yet.

It took 10 years for those Greeks to figure a way into Troy… ten years on the friggin’ beach until finally the cleverest guy in the group – the “wily’ Ulysses – figured out a way, involving an oversized horse, which makes you wonder: how wily do you have to be to get a job?

What if – and here’s a horrible thought – that because you were born in 1980, or 82, 85, 87, graduating into a job-stricken, wildly changing economy… maybe you’re just doomed.

Some of you must be thinking that—and for you who are, and to your parents, I say: No, no, and no.

I am here to tell you, that you are stepping into a world that is riper, more pregnant with newness, new ideas, new beats, new opportunities than most generations of journalists before you. You are lucky to be you, very lucky, though you may not be feeling it at the moment.

So let me tell you a feel-bad story that should make you feel good.

It’s about a guy who got a job as a correspondent at CBS News, in its day, the best place in the world to work. And he got it at the age of 23. He’d had a short stint at the Charlotte News in North Carolina; he’d written some good pieces and got a call… literally, he got called and was asked to come to the CBS Building, then on Madison Avenue in New York, where he was offered a writing job on the spot. These things actually happened. And because he was fast, a natural stylist with a keen eye, it happened to Charles Kuralt. That was his name, Charles Kuralt.

And he knew how lucky he was…because at that first job interview, as he walked from the elevator to the guy he was supposed to talk to, on his way down the hall, he passed a door – it was closed, but on it, lettered in gold, were the words “Mr. Murrow”, as in Edward R. Murrow, who was at that moment the anchor of the evening newscast. And when he was hired as a writer there, he could looked around at the mailboxes with names on them that in those days, those names, you may not know them now, but those names back then were legends: Eric Serveried, Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet, Daniel Shorr, Robert Trout.  This was friggin unbelievable: to be one of Murrow’s boys – at 23 – when you practically ARE a boy! Oh my god.

And then, not too long after, he had his big break.

As I say, he was a news writer, writing copy off in a corner, sometimes for Murrow, but he’s pretty much an indoors guy, and he’s dreaming of course, of getting outdoors where things are happening and one night – in the middle of the night, on the graveyard shift, two a.m.—the bell on the wire ticker goes off and says an airplane has just fallen short of the runway at LaGuardia Airport and is sinking in the East River, right now.

And Kuralt and the night editor flip a coin for who’s going to go, Charles wins and runs downstairs, jumps into a cab and says “Take me To LaGuardia.” The problem is, no sooner are they out of the midtown tunnel, then the cab gets snarled in some weird pre dawn, fire engines-heading-to-the-airporttraffic jam, so Kuralt leaps out, and starts running through the tangled cars up the highway when he sees a guy on a motorcycle weaving his way through the traffic, so he waves his hands wildly, flags him down, says he’s a news reporter, there’s a plane in the water, he’s on deadline, “take me!” and the motorcycle guy jerks his thumb at the saddle on his bike, says “Hold On’   and then, like a stunt driver, zigzags through the cars to the airport and Kuralt is one of the first on the scene, where he climbs over fences, gets the interviews, and makes it onto the evening news. After which he’s anointed “correspondent”, the youngest ever…at 23.

Charles Kuralt not only could write nicely. He had a voice and a calm and a style that was… well, let’s just say when I got to CBS, I felt about Charles Kuralt they way Kuralt felt about Edward R. Murrow… I thought he was remarkable. There have been few reporters in my lifetime that I admired more.

So fast forward 40 years… to 1990 or so. Now I am on the same floor with Kuralt, right next door. And I liked to wander into his office because, well, because, it felt like a privilege. Every time I walked through his door I felt that I had a hall pass to yak with Zeus, if only I could disguise my… well, my admiration… I liked him so…

So on one particular day, it was a late fall afternoon, near to Thanksgiving, and the sun was low in the sky and when I walked in Charles was at his desk, sitting there, back lit by the sun, like a saint. And at first all I could see was his silhouette… but when my eyes adjusted, it was strange. He was holding what looked like a reefer between his thumb and index finger (which wasn’t a habit I would ever associate with Charles).  It was rolled, like a joint, very tight, but I could tell this bit of paper had been carved out of the front page of a Wall Street Journal that was lying on his desk. He had seen something on that front page, and he had, with his pen, drawn a circle around it so many times – over and over – that the piece had come loose and he’d taken this fragment and twisted it into this skinny little shape… and when I walked in, he put the twisted thing down on his desk top, all alone, then he looked at me, got up, a little unsteadily, he pointed to the paper, and then he left the room.

And I wondered, What is it? What’s he got?  So I looked at the paper, and on the front page there was a story about CBS. This was a while ago, so I may not have all the details right, but it seems that CBS had paid a huge hunk of money to get a new station manager to work at WBBM, their premier Chicago station… and the story of this producer was that he had been hired by a Miami station that was very low rated, nobody watched it, until this guy, who’s name I don’t remember any more, got the idea to hire very buff, very curvey, very news-delicious newscasters, both men and women, and have them deliver many of their reports from the beach, often in beach wear and sometimes, from in the water, where they got kind of wet, showingoff their extra beautiful parts, and the station in a multi-station market had leapt from a, you know 6 percent share to something miraculous, like a 50 percent share. Half the people in Miami who were watching news on television were now watching this guy’s station… and when I opened the little twisted bit of paper, Charlie’s reefer, the paragraph that he had circled over and over, that paragraph said that CBS, Edward R. Murrow’s CBS, Charlie Kuralt’s CBS, had just hired this guy to be the new station manager.

And that’s when Charles came back into the room, and slumped down in his chair and looked at me like a man who had lost a friend. Or like a man betrayed. And the thing is, as I tell you this story now, I’m sure a lot of you are thinking, “Of course. CBS is a business and if a business can get a 50 share of a market, (If any business can get a fifty percent share of any market, if there’s a way to do that….) you’ve gotta know someone’s going to try. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.  Beachwear in Chicago can be a little tricky come October, but come on, this isn’t shocking, this is what businesses do.

But when Charles Kuralt went to CBS, it wasn’t a business. It was a calling. It had saints. It had heroes. It had character. And it protected its own. If you went into battle, in World War 2 or in Korea or in Vietnam, for CBS, and you found yourself under fire, in harm’s way, if you survived, you were honored the way soldiers honor each other. Charles and his cameraman Freddy Deitrich, had been fired on Vietnam. They were caught in an ambush, and a soldier they’d been covering, a Lieutenant Son, from the South Vietnamese Army had come over to see if they were ok and at that moment, a sniper shot Son through the head and he fell right where Kuralt was. Right next to him.

After that, Kuralt knew, because this is how it worked back then… everybody at CBSwould remember his service, would remember what he’d risked to get a story and after that, he pretty much had a lifetime contract. Even if, later, they didn’t like you that much, they wouldn’t fire you. I’m not saying CBS was always honorable. It wasn’t. I’m not saying it was always noble. It wasn’t. But it did offer men like Kuralt a deal: It said to you: “Give us your heart, give us your best years, and we will protect you. We will pay you. We will keep you. And you will part of us. And you will be proud to be part of us.”

And Charles Kuralt bought that deal hook, line and sinker, but then – on the afternoon I’m talking about… in the 1990s, after a bunch of ownership and management shuffles, by the time he read that story in the Wall Street Journal, he knew that the bloom was off his rose, that CBS was becoming, like so many companies before and after, a place where they would go for the quick fix, hire the hottie, then fire the hottie, love you on Monday, leave you on Thursday, or maybe even Wednesday… or Tuesday, and he hadn’t seen it coming. He had believed in Murrow. He just didn’t believe in this.

And I remember saying to him on that day… in that office, me on my side of his desk, and him on his side, in the setting sun… “Here’s the difference, Charles, between my generation and yours. Here’s what my friends will never do, that you and your friends DID do: we will never trust a company that hires us, no matter how good, how proud it is at this moment, to stay loyal to us. To protect us. We will never put our faith in a corporation, even a good one. We can’t. Because everything we know tells us that we will be disappointed. That we are vulnerable. And you, sitting here, are just another example of what my friends already know.”

Though I’ll tell you… thinking of him hitching a ride on a motorcycle, gunning his way down the Grand Central Parkway from a plane crash, clasping the hottest story of the day to his chest and taking it home to Mr. Murrow, a young news gladiator working for the best company on earth… it would be so wonderful to be able to walk into a place and not have to worry again about anything but your work. But that world has vanished. Poof!

Which is only to say that the notion that if you could get yourself into the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, Time, Newsweek, they’d take you in, teach you,  protect you….

Those days – first, didn’t last long…

Maybe one, one and a half generations got that deal.

And for you, the generation after me, I’ll say to you what I said to my hero, Charles:

You can’t trust big companies to keep you safe.

I know most of you don’t and I’m just here to remind you: A job at NBC, ESPN, New York Times, NPR, may look safe today – but things change. They always change. And companies won’t protect you from that change. They can’t. And these days, they don’t even try.

Which brings me back to where I started.

If you want to make a life in this business, if you want to begin, and survive and flourish, how do you do it?

How do you start?

Well I think there’s a way.

There’s always a way, but lately I’ve noticed a pattern emerging. And I’ve seen it work for a number of people who are close to your age… I’ve watched them step from obscurity… to notice… to a little money… and then to a actual salary, following this route.

It isn’t easy.

But here’s what I’ve noticed.

Some people when they look for a job in journalism ask themselves, What do I like to do and Who can take me there? Who can get me to a war zone? To a ballpark? To Wall Street? To politicians, to movie stars? Who’s got the vehicle? And you send them your resume and you say, “I want a seat in your car.” … And you wait.

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

I was one of those people. When I was a teenager I loved political conventions. My mom watched them on TV, she was really into politics, so I watched with her… and there was something about nominating conventions… all those senators and mayors and political bosses in a huge, blazing room with the banners and balloons and funny hats, choosing and bargaining, will it be Kennedy or Stevenson, the cameras, the lights, the drama, I just… when I got a little older… I just wanted to see it for myself.

So at age 20, I think it was, and this is just really kind of crazy behavior, I decided I’d just go. There was a political convention in Chicago in 1967, one year before the riots in 68. It was a political convention for left wing anti-war activists planning to nominate Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Benjamin Spock the world famous baby doctor/pediatrician as President and Vice President… it was called The New Politics Convention. And I thought, I’m going to go and “cover” that convention.

I had no idea what it meant to “cover” anything…except that when you watched real reporters on TV… I noticed they all had “credentials”, something impressive hanging around their necks. So, to prepare, I went to Art Brown’s Art Supply store in New York and got some pre-inked letters, called LettraSet , cause in those days no one hadprinters and fonts at home. All you had was a typewriter, and no one’s going to fall for a credential that’s typed. No. So,  for $2.50, I got myself a sheet of pre-inked Bodoni bold letters, fifty a’s, fifty b’s fifty c’s…and letter by letter, rubbing with a stylus, I forged an I.D. for some reason from the Yale Daily News.

I didn’t go to Yale. I went to Oberlin College. I was on the Oberlin paper. But some sick impulse told me Oberlin wouldn’t be impressive enough, so I painstakingly created a Yale Press card with a Yale logo and made up all these different looking signatures with different colored pens, and I then laminated the thing, twice. I thought lamination was crucial. The more plastic you had around your ID, the more credible the forgery and when I walked into the Hilton Hotel in Chicago I was looking pretty good…except for the fact that the Yale Daily news had actually sent a reporter to this convention, he later became an undersecretary of state, Strobe Talbot, and he was two people behind me on the registration line when we were waiting to get in, so for the next three days,  I had to constantly make sure that Strobe Talbot and I were never, ever in the same room… But the thing is: they let me in. And I just… did it. I learned what reporters do by watching them, and then copying what I saw.  I ran up corridors. I interviewed people. I took frantic notes. I’d rush from ballrooms to the convention pressroom and type like crazy, what exactly I don’t remember, cos nobody had sent me there; I was writing nothing to nobody.  It was a pantomime, the whole thing, but I was in heaven. At one point there was a fight in a corridor, while the fight was still going on – and this was Chicago, people really hit each other – I squirreled on my belly underneath the fightingto get a quote from the first victim, whose name happened to be Maliewsky, or some long Polish name with lots of vowels, not easy to spell but I knew everybody would want to know the right spelling – I’d just learned that – so lying on the floor I say to him, “How do you spell Maliewsky? M, A, L, I or is it E? and with his head pressed to the carpet, he tells me, and I squiggle back out, and ten minutes later I’m standing in the pressroom… once I was sure Strobe Talbot wasn’t there, and I’m spelling Maliewsky and then, generously I’m…. sharing my quote! Oh man.

When I went home, by total chance, I was seated on the plane back to New York (which cost, by the way, in those days, 30 dollars if you were under 22)  next to none other thanDr.Benjamin Spock, the now anointed vice presidential nominee. So I had an exclusive interview with THE GUY! It was an exclusive for nobody… but still… I was so excited, we shared a cab back downtown and I left my clothes in his cab. The next day, my mother called me (cause my parents’ address was on the bag) and she said, “Do you know Dr. Spock? Cause he just left your clothes in our lobby.” And there was no way I could tell my mother what I’d done. No way.

I still have trouble explaining to myself. I just wanted to be there. And, I should tell you I wasn’t, like, planning a career or dreaming dreams of a life in journalism. In fact, I had just seen Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird and I wanted to be him. A trial lawyer, that was my dream. So after college and national service I went to law school.  Journalism wasn’t my first love… or my only love, but the seed was planted. And then later, when I graduated law school and had this deep, haunting feeling that I’d made a mistake, and I’d didn’t have the talent or the character to be Gregory Peck,  then asked myself… well, what can I do? What am I good at? And I thought, well, I’m good at explaining things… I like learning stuff and meeting people and who gets to do that? And I remembered my weekend in Chicago…

And the thing is, at that moment, after law school, I was desperate to be good at something, and Journalism, I thought, might save me from being a nobody.

And, because I’d had that crazy weekend, I had a sly feeling, maybe it could be better than that. Some combination of desire and desperation gave me my next plan: I went to my living room, with a tape recorder and I composed a ten part series about Presidential Impeachments. Richard Nixon was being investigated by Congress at that time… this was the Watergate era, and I just wrote ten questions I thought might be on peoples’ minds:

If a president is impeached does he go right to jail? No. He goes on trial.

Who runs the trial? Who’s the judge?

Who’s the jury?

If Senators are supposed to weigh the evidence like jurors, what if 6 of them are in the bathroom during important testimony. Normal Jurors can’t go to the bathroom, but I bet Senators can?

Who is Nixon’s lawyer?

Who is the prosecutor?

Does the President go to work when he’s being impeached?

And so on…

And I took all these questions, and because I’d gone to law school, I answered them and performed a question and answer 40 minute drama, for some reason, in the style of Howard Cosell, the great ABC sportscaster. Why I did my impeachment lesson as a sportscast, I have no idea. It was not a… uh… big success, But one radio station, a community, underground,  lefty kind of station, found it curiously plausible. And that’s all it took, one. That tape got me my first job…

But the impulse, to explain, to write, to tell, began here… [tapping heart] On my insides.

Journalism doesn’t have to be your first love… or your only love.

You can come to it in desperation, because you can’t think of anything better to do with your life, that it’s this or the abyss.

But once you get going… it helps if you love it. There are different things to love. Some of you, no doubt, have learned to love the spotlight, you want to be the narrator… the on-camera, the presenter, the voice, the big byline.

Others of you may choose producing, designing, managing, staying out of sight, shaping the product.

Some of you like speed. Find something, get it right, get it on, go home. Some of you like it slower:  go somewhere, hang out, mull it over, write a draft… take your time…

What you love can differ, but the love, once it comes, that feeling of waking up with a kind of eagerness, a crazy momentum that pushes you into your day, an excitement you realize you don’t ever want to go way… that’s important.

If you don’t have that feeling, maybe you’re lucky. You can lead a more sane life.  But if you do – I say congratulations. You have what it takes to begin.

What you do next? Well, the obvious option is to go to Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated, MTV.  They’re there. You can go in and pour coffee for the person who sharpens the pencil for the person who writes the copy and work your way all the way to the top. That’s what Charles Kuralt did. And in his day, with his talent, he did it very fast.

But here’s another way.

It’s not easy. It’s not for everybody. Just something to think about.

Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from the New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care, No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again.

Now I understand that if you’re married, or have a kid, you can’t not make money. And I know that it is not fun, it’s the opposite of fun, to juggle rent payments with car payments, to fudge medical bills, to play roulette with your credit cards, to have bills that must be paid month after month after month, that don’t go down, and I know about friends and siblings who didn’t go crazy, who didn’t try to become professional storytellers, who became normal things, like sales people, and doctors and teachersand are now moving into homes, buying real furniture and making you feel like you are slipping backwards in the world for the sin offollowing a dream. I know about that.

But let me tell you what I’ve also seen.

I’ve also seen, in my most recent area, science journalism, I’ve seen people do just what I’ve proposed. I’ve seen people, literally, go home, write a blog about dinosaurs (in one case), neuroscience, biology. Nobody asked them. They just did. On their own. By themselves.

After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!

How they managed, I don’t know. Some of them worked by day and wrote by night.

Some lived with their parents. Some must have struck deals with spouses or with friends.

But I notice, because I talk to them, and now I often work with them… I notice that they get courage from each other. They’ve got a kind of community. At first it was virtual; they wrote each other. Then they met each other. Now they support each other. Watch out for each other. One day, I imagine, they will get and give each other jobs. And they share a sensibility, a generational sense, that this is how “we” do it.

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It’s a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different.  Anderson Cooper, different still. When you grow up in different decades, you laugh at different jokes, hear different machines, (typewriters versus computers, pinball machines versus Mario Brothers), you hear different ads, jingles, songs, sounds.

When you talk or write or film, you work with the music inside you, the music that formed you. Different generations have different musics in them, so whatever they do, it’s going to come out differently and it will speak in beats of their own generation.

The people in charge, of course, don’t want to change. They like the music they’ve got.  To the newcomers, they say, “Wait your turn”.

But in a world like this… rampant with new technologies, and new ways to do things, the newcomers… that means you… you here today, you have to trust your music… It’s how you talk to people your age, your generation. This is how we change.

After all, when it began in the 1930’s, Time, the weekly news magazine, was a radical idea created by young Henry Luce and his college friends. The New Yorker got its beats from young James Thurber and his buddy E.B. White, and their boss Harold Ross, I was at Rolling Stone when Jann Wenner put together his amazing gang of writers, designers, critics, photographers. Then Ira Glass did it again with Gen Xers. Each of these groups have a shared feel; they are expressing something that belongs to their age, their time.

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy.  Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.

And maybe that’s your way into Troy.

There you are, on the beach, with the other newbies, looking up. Maybe somebody inside will throw you a key and let you in… But more likely, most of you will have to find your own Trojan Horse.

And maybe, for your generation, the Trojan Horse is what you’ve got, your talent, backed by a legion of friends. Not friends in high places. This is the era of Friends in Low Places. The ones you meet now, who will notice you, challenge you, work with you, and watch your back. Maybe they will be your strength.

If you choose to go this way, you won’t have Charles Kuralt’s instant success. It will take time. It will probably be very lonely. A living room is not a news room. It doesn’t feel like one. You know you’re alone. And on the way, you might get scarily close to not being able to afford a living room.

But what I’ve noticed is that people who fall in love with journalism, who stay at it, who stay stubborn, very often win. I don’t know why, but I’ve seen it happen over and over.

So, here, for what it’s worth, ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2011, is my graduation advice. Some of you will say, “This is a fantasy. Pay this man no attention,” but hey, you invited me, so here’s what I’ve got:

If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don’t let it go. Whatever kept you here, don’t let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say… that the way you’re saying it – is something new in the world.

And don’t stop. Just hold on… and keep loving what you love… and you’ll see. In the end, they’ll let you stay.

Thank you.

The Spotlight on Incest

That the 2015 movie Spotlight, a taut thriller that recounts the story of an investigation by the reporters of the newspaper The Boston Globe into the sexual abuse of children by clerics of the Catholic Church is a front-runner for the Oscars is secondary. What is primary is the accompanying shame that hits viewers in the gut.

And that is because contrary to what you would imagine, this isn’t a movie about journalism in its finest traditions—but about looking at truth dispassionately, leadership against the odds, the gumption to question fondly held notions, acknowledging frailties and acquiring wisdom to set all of what is wrong, right. These are traits that aren’t acquired easily. That the setting is the newsroom of a popular newspaper is completely incidental. Think of it as a metaphor if you will of how countries, organizations and individuals behave instead.

The film is yet to be released in India but most cinema aficionados perhaps already know the plot. The Boston Globe is a hugely successful and widely respected newspaper in a predominantly Catholic community. The rolls of the newspaper include Spotlight, a team of four reporters who spend all of their time and energies on investigative journalism. They are hugely successful at what they do.

When the editor retires, everybody at the organization takes it for granted somebody from the system will be elevated to take his role. But the management in a moment of epiphany thinks it may just be appropriate to bring an outsider. Marty Baron, a man brought up in the Jewish faith and a rank outsider to Boston, finally gets into the system. Liev Schreiber powerfully and subtly etches the role.

As is the wont in most organizations, when a new leader takes charge, they look at what their predecessors have done, evaluate it, and try to figure if there are better ways to do things. In any which case, that is what good leaders intend to do. And as is often the case, their intent is met with hostility—overt at times, covert at others.

When the new editor gets down to the job on hand, a sparsely reported news item catches his eye. Buried in the pages of the newspaper, he sees sporadic reports of children being sexually abused by priests in the Catholic Church. Why, the “outsider” in the new system wonders, and asks that in as many words to the “insiders”.

The first response is that the newspaper has already reported on it, the concerned authorities at the Church have taken appropriate action—and that these are perhaps one off episodes that don’t need further investigation. He declines to buy the argument.

Some moments of debate and tension later, the argument resonates across the room and the team galvanizes into action. It is pertinent to pause here for a moment and ask why did the new editor turn to a small four-person team to lead change? Why didn’t he mount a frontal attack on the larger system that was in need of an even bigger overhaul?

When looked at from a thoughtful leader’s perspective, it makes sense in the longer term to go after potential areas where the chances of acquiring wins are higher. Most leaders, who come in from the outside, in desperate attempts to make their presence felt, go into slash and burn mode. This is the kind of thing that can backfire dramatically and is very often a point of no return.

That is why, with some convincing, a team most likely to buy into his ideas seemed the wisest thing to do. Months of meticulous investigation later, they blow the lid off one of the Catholic Church’s darkest secrets—that it actively connived to protect the worst kind of offenders.

Boston Globe Tony Fischer  Creative Commons

The story got The Boston Globe many accolades including the much-coveted Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism in 2003, exposed a series of child abuse scandalsin churches across the world, and it eventually took a man like Pope Francis, the current head of the church and an outsider to the system that is the Vatican, to muster the courage to apologize. “Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you. And I humbly ask forgiveness,” he said at a private mass in Vatican City.

That is one among the many reasons why Spotlight is a movie not just every journalist, but everybody in leadership positions ought to put on their list of mandatory viewing. It begs that we ask of ourselves where our moral compass lies.

Let us consider a set of simple questions. Why does pretty much everybody believe Indian media houses are compromised entities? Why does everybody think Indian businesses get to where they are because they are inherently corrupt? Why does every Indian believe business cannot be a force for good?

Spotlight offers an answer: Incest.

When the team at The Boston Globe finally got down to investigating the scandal, what stunned them initially was that their findings weren’t new. The Church knew about it all along. A medieval code of honour though compelled its leaders to deny any wrongdoing. Instead, they went out of their way to not just eliminate traces of incriminating documents, but protect the perpetrators as well. From an editor’s perspective, this was as damning as it gets. It was an astonishing story to be told.

When the publisher got wind of what the editor had in mind, he paused. Perhaps, he was wondering what the consequences could be. After all, 53 percent of the newspaper’s readers were Catholic—just the kind of audience advertisers in the newspaper reached out to. If a story as damning as this were carried, it could antagonize readers and in turn advertisers on whom The Boston Globe depended for sustenance. Marty Baron, though, is one of the rare editors that holds his ground and insists on having his way.

And the only reason he can do that is because he is an outsider who has the advantage of distance to understand a story like this will not alienate the community it caters to. Instead, it addresses the reader’s unstated need that they know the underbelly of the system they blindly believe in.

Turn the gaze now to India. Speaking off-the-record, business tycoons of impeccable pedigree talk disdainfully of the media houses and journalists that feature them. They make no attempt to conceal the contempt they hold journalists in; who are grateful for having gotten a sound byte or an exclusive interview on a good day; and their counterparts on the business side for having wrangled some money in advertising spends. They speak disdainfully of people in the government as well. That said, they have the gall as well to believe they are demi-gods whom the masses worship because of the monies they control.

Those in government think of business people as obliged objects. Behind their backs, they speak disdainfully of their “ill-gotten” wealth that accrued to them on the back of pleas for favours.

As for Indian journalists, when the day’s job is done, often they congregate to exchange notes on how aware they are that they are being used as tools both by the publishers of the title they work in and the folks whom they deal with in desperate attempts to get stories that may please their editors.

Journalist Hartosh Singh Bal in the most recent issue of Caravan magazinebrilliantly captures these incestuous relationships. Writing on the relationship between the current finance and information & broadcasting minister Arun Jaitley and journalist, he recounts an anecdote that sums it all up:

“I can still remember a story he related at one of the evenings I attended. Jaitley was explaining why he felt India Today, under its then editor Prabhu Chawla, was gunning for him. The story, that involved columnist Swapan Dasgupta and Chawla was scurrilous and unprintable. But I do recall being taken aback by the ease with which Jaitley could betray the confidences of even those such as Dasgupta—who continues to be considered close to him—to a complete stranger. Four years later, I met Jaitley again at the BJP office in Ahmedabad where I had gone to cover the 2007 Gujarat Assembly elections. As I spoke to Jaitley, Dasgupta sat at his feet taking dictation for a press release. By then I had spent a few years in Delhi, and nothing that Lutyens’ insiders put themselves through in their need to be close to power could surprise me.”

As much as all of these creatures think of each other as spineless, nobody has the spunk to rock the boat. Because at the end of the day, everybody needs the other. They are all insiders locked in with each other.

Kavi Arasu, a leadership and talent development professional and a professional certified coach with the International Coaching Federation has an interesting hypothesis on the insider versus outsider debate.

“There is a certain rhythm, or cadence, to how we think and how we behave,” he says. So long as the both of these are in synch with each other, it is a comfortable place to be in. For any individual or organization to develop though, this rhythm ought to be challenged. But development in any form is painful because the rhythm they are used to work in comes under scrutiny. The most convenient thing to do then is to turn a blind eye and imagine there is no problem.

But disturbing a rhythm is only one part of the problem.Pretty much everybody gets it that if they are to be better at what they do, they have to seek development out proactively. That explains the clamour to get into programmes that promise to change lives or how an entity works. Having gone through the programme and when the initial euphoria wears out, everybody settles back into the rhythm they are accustomed to.

This is because the psyche of every entity is such that after having gone through a development programme, it compels them to look at the past. When done honestly, often it repudiates all of what was in the past. Almost overnight, you begin to look silly. That becomes one more reason to go back to the familiar cadence.

Pope Benedict by Rvin88 under  Creative Commons license

Then there is wilful blindness. To understand this, consider Pope Benedict XVI, the predecessor to the current Pope Francis. He was the classical insider. Of European descent, when he was known as Cardinal Ratzinger, he issued a secret edict in 2001to all bishops in the Catholic Church, that the interests of the church be put ahead of child safety. When he finally resigned, many were relieved because he was accused of not doing enough to contain the damage. Instead, critics insist he led the charge to protect those who ought to have been prosecuted. As some people put it, “I see it, I know it, but I hope somebody else will manage it.”

This raises another question. If it was so blindingly obvious to everybody Pope Benedict was practicing wilful blindness, why didn’t anybody who believes in the Catholic faith raise a red flag? Sacha Pfeiffer, one of the four persons in the Spotlight team at The Boston Globe, summed it up succinctly: “When you have powerful, beloved institutions, it’s possible it can be too powerful or too beloved for people to want to ask them questions. And I think you have to.”

Into all of this, an insider is impeded by the fact that a large part of their actions are embedded in the past they come from. When challenged, they carry the burden of having to explain why they did things in a certain way. In Spotlight, the brilliant Michael Keaton essays the role of Walter "Robby" Robinson, who heads the Spotlight team. He was part of the system and knew it inside out.

Marty Baron, the outsider, does not have to carry the burden of history. He is inherently oriented to plant new flags and change things. This is not to suggest that insiders cannot do the job. There was this one instance at one of India’s most respected firm’s when a member of the senior team was elevated to the CEO’s role. It was met with much applause internally.

Overnight though his persona and actions changed. It was only a matter of time before all of the insiders in the system rebelled against him. They argued that they were doing things as he had envisioned it would be when he was part of the senior team. Why, then, was he compelling them to change? “Because my role as CEO demands that,” he shot back unapologetically. Such leaders who emerge from the inside are rare.

That said, it is not easy being an outsider either. This is because they see things differently. When insiders to a system see the kind of changes like Baron brings in to the newsroom, it has a bearing on the insider’s past as well. It makes sense to some people. In Spotlight, there are those like the intrepid reporter Michael Rezandes, played by Mark Ruffolo, to whom the changes make sense and are willing to transition.

But to others, like Michael Keaton in the movie, they are willing to play along because they see an end point to the change. They reckon it may last a year or two, the changes will be pointless, and the cadence at which they worked at in the past will come back to normal. So they’re willing to give it a shot.

But when people embedded in the system don’t see an endpoint to the changes on hand, the system they represent and the world they operate in, gets violent. To give but one more instance from an Indian context, a large Indian professional firm got in an American executive with a mandate to create a charter for change. It was made obvious to everybody in the organization that he is here to question assumptions and bring change. Almost immediately, he ran into hostility—not vociferous because everybody knew he had the management’s backing. So each time a meeting was called for, everybody in the room would confer in Hindi just so that they may make the new man in charge uncomfortable.

Manu Joseph, a novelist, columnist and the former editor of Open magazine is another case in point. Journalistic circles have it that his exit from Open was on the back of differences between him and the promoter Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RP Sanjiv Goenka Group. Apparently, Goenka insisted on having his way on a key hire in the editorial team who would report in to the editor Joseph.

Joseph thought it his prerogative to decide who stays on the team and who doesn’t. Goenka had his way eventually and Joseph chose to exit from the magazine. When contacted, Joseph said, “This, is true. This is why I quit. It is an episode I have not spoken about to anybody in detail. Sanjiv and I continue to be friends.”

But Joseph is seen as the consummate outsider in Delhi. “To be fair Delhi was very welcoming, Delhi did reach out. But I could not respond as graciously as I wanted to because I wished to spend all the time I could on my novel, and often chose to miss late nights to wake up early for a run. Also, I wished to have the freedom to write whatever I wanted to, to get involved in toxic stories that are taboo if you wish to be co-opted into Delhi’s networks.”

When probed on why, by way of example he brings up the curious case of Tarun Tejpal. Tejpal has been accused of raping a former colleague in an elevator in Goa.

“The general opinion in Delhi’s media circle was that Tejpal was guilty. I got access to the footage of CCTV cameras in the hotel where the incident occurred. And I believed it was a genuine journalistic story. The contents of the footage disputed some of the things that the young woman had said. Some people thought my story favoured Tejpal. By touching toxic stories like the one on Tarun Tejpal, I became the outsider. By looking at the CCTV footage, it embarrassed the campaign in the media and I became an outsider by doing what I did,” says Joseph.

But, Joseph wrote in his investigation on L’affaire Tejpal: “For most of his adult life, Tejpal was celebrated as a journalist and a writer by a network of Delhi’s influential cultural elite who transmitted that sentiment to the vast public.”

Does being an outsider extract a toll on you?

“Yes, a writer needs the goodwill of his peers and many times I feel I don’t have it,” says Joseph. “But most days I don’t care.”

Being an outsider takes its toll on the soul as well. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an outsider to Delhi. Barack Obama was an outsider when he was first elected to office. “But these men have something brazen about them. They couldn’t care less,” says Kavi Arasu. The moral then is that to be a successful outsider you need one of two things: Either a benign system that is willing to tolerate you or a thick skin.

In a benign system, if the outsider comes in and doesn’t do much to shake things up, the system will stay benign. If the system isn’t benign, a thick skin is essential. But above all else, outsiders have to take the effort to build an ecosystem around them that they can converse with. The headwinds that come with being an outsider isn’t easy to handle. It is only human then to feel fragile. The only way out is to turn to the ecosystem and draw from internal resilience.

Pope Francis by  Alfredo Borba under  Creative Commons

And that brings us back to the Vatican and what is it about the incumbent Pope Francis that makes him different from his predecessors. He comes across as a gentle soul who perhaps doesn’t have it in him to take on a powerful system.

“There has to be means of self-renewal,” offers Arasu by way of explanation. “For renewal to happen, you need a certain degree of self-awareness.”

Pope Francis perhaps doesn’t have a thick skin. But he can do things differently because he is an outsider in more ways than one. All of his predecessors were European. He comes from a South American background and grew up in the slums of Argentina.

Has he encountered opposition? He has.

Among the first things he did was to start work on a complete overhaul of a long-standing hierarchy. He asked that bishops be pastors “who smell of the sheep and not be airport bishops that buzz around the world padding their resumes and develop the psychology of princes.”

He has demanded “A poor church, for the poor!” That also means a huge clean up of the Vatican Bank, the machinations of which are shrouded in mystery to most people. But he wants to overhaul the place and make it accountable. It’s a slog. But somebody’s got to do it.

And if all this weren’t enough, he is the first pope to have taken the issue of climate change head on. “We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental change we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all,” he said in a speech in the US. Conservative Republicans and devout Catholics were horrified. Why is the head of the Catholic Church getting into things he ought not to be meddling in? Isn’t his mandate a spiritual one?

Jeb Bush, a runner in the race to be American President in 2016, dismissed it with: “Put aside Pope Francis on the subject of any political conversation.” But there is nothing the system can do either to keep him out because systems have their own sets of challenges. The machinations of the Vatican can only be speculated upon. But it is entirely possible that after Pope Benedict XVI resigned, there were a few cardinals who wanted to be the pope. It is entirely possible as well that they could not arrive at a consensus on who takes over. The only palatable option then was to settle for an outsider like Pope Francis and wait it out until the stalemate lasts.

That pretty much explains the sequence in Spotlight when the cardinal at Boston calls on Baron to suggest he stay away from the story for the damage it can inflict on believers. Baron goes back to his office and recounts the encounter to the team at work on the investigation. When they vocalize their concerns around the potential fallouts, Baron quietly shoots back: “I am not asking you to do this. I am telling you to do this.” 

This article was first published simultaneously in Mint & Founding Fuel. All copyrights exist with the publishers

Confessions of a recovering junkie

Kuldeep Datay wears the calm of a man who’s been-there-seen-it-all. A Mumbai-based clinical psychologist affiliated to the Institute for Psychological Health (IPH), he often faces worried parents seeking help for their zombie like adolescents who’ve withdrawn from the mainstream. Intelligent, but socially inept, and aggressive, these kids behave much like crack or heroin addicts. There is no evidence though to prove they are on mind-altering substances as conventionally understood.

Conversations and evaluations with these kids later, Datay often times concludes, their behavior is a function of technology addiction. “There is a reason why it is called dope. When deeply engaged with with gadgets, social media, or just the Internet, you get a dopamine kick, much like you do with drugs. So they go back to it again and again. When denied access, they withdraw, or get aggressive,” explains Datay.

The problem isn’t an adolescent phenomenon. At the time of writing this article, RescueTime, a piece of software that resides on my laptop, tells me it’s been a little over 653 hours since I first installed it. What I’ve discovered about myself since then disturbs me.

• Of the 653 hours RescueTime has been around, the dashboard tells me I’ve been actively engaged with my laptop for 309 hours, or a staggering 47 percent of my waking hours.
• Of these 309 hours, 183 hours, just about 60 percent of my time was spent on productive work.
• The 126 hours that remained were spent on mindless, distracting tasks. Mildly put, I spent an obscene 40 percent doing nothing more than reading tweets, posting and arguing on social media, watching videos and everything else RescueTime calls “Uncategorized” stuff. “That’s it?” asks Datay. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it is around 70 percent,” he says. He’s right. If I sere to factor time spent on my smartphone on tablet, I know most of it was on random surfing, texting, following tweets, clicking links, and digging myself deeper into an unproductive rabbit hole.
• Now, if 309 hours were spent on the laptop, technically, I had 344 hours for myself to rest, recuperate, and engage in activities I enjoy.
• But FitBit, an activity tracker I wear on my wrist 24/7 tells me I am not rested. It informs me I slept on average 4:17 hours every night, just a little over half that my body actually needs. Worse, not all of these sleeping hours were deep. The graphs show I slip, on average, four to five times into interrupted or light sleep.
• If that isn’t bad enough, I didn’t use my waking hours to provide my body with at least 30 minutes of physical activity it needs everyday. If I did, FitBit would have logged it.

By every yardstick, I had turned into an Internet junkie, much like cocaine or heroin addicts. If you think that harmless, here’s a fact. The pleasure centers that tickle Internet junkies and drug addicts are the same. We know this because of recent advances in the neurosciences.

Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral psychologist explains in her blog post on Pyschology Today, “With the Internet, Twitter, and texting you now have almost instant gratification of your desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type your request into Google. Want to see what your colleagues are up to? Go to Linked In. It's easy to get in a dopamine-induced loop. Dopamine starts you seeking, then you get rewarded for the seeking, which makes you seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, or stop checking your cell phone to see if you have a message or a new text.”

 “Interestingly brain scan research shows that the brain has more activity when people are anticipating a reward than getting one. Research on rats shows that if you destroy dopamine neurons, rats can walk, chew, and swallow, but will starve to death even when food is right next to them. They have lost the anticipation and desire to go get the food. Although wanting and liking are related, research also shows that the dopamine system doesn't have satiety built in….How many times have you searched for something on Google, found the answer, and yet realize a half hour later that you are still online looking for more information?” she writes.

 This phenomenon has also been described as the Compulsion Loop. It compels you to continually check email on your smartphone in anticipation of receiving good news. When kept away from smartphones, researchers discovered power users experience “phantom smartphone buzzing” which tricks our brains into thinking our phone is vibrating when it isn't. I confess to being a victim to this syndrome.

 The other interesting piece of literature originates from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. They discovered spending two hours in front of a backlit electronic gadget like a tablet or smartphone suppresses production of melatonin by 22 percent. This hormone regulates sleep cycles. Any deficit in its production leads to delayed sleep, interrupted circadian patterns, and early waking times.

In the weeks leading up to writing this piece, I tried a few experiments on myself. I asked myself to watch what happens on days I disconnect from the Internet and all of my devices after 9:30 pm until 7:30 am. A few interesting things showed up right away.

 Without access to the Internet or my phone, anxiety levels, consumption of junk food and smoking cigarettes went up. Higher anxiety levels have to do with a drop in dopamine production. Junk food and nicotine, in cigarettes, incidentally, induces dopamine production. Perhaps, it was my body’s way of making up for the hit it was taking from being denied what it wanted.

That said, FitBit data showed on days I cut access early, I slept deeper, longer and with fewer interruptions. This ties into what I pointed out earlier on melatonin production.

It isn’t easy. But I’m trying. And I’m giving the Sabbath Manifesto  a shot—one day of the week, every week.

1. Avoid technology
2. Connect with loved ones
3. Nurture your health
4. Get outside
5. Avoid Commerce
6. Light candles
7. Drink wine
8. Eat bread
9. Find silence
10. Give back

Manifestoes of this kind, says Datay, can be aided by prescription drugs to control impulsive behavior. 

This piece was originally published in Mint. All copyrights vest with the newspaper and this article may not be reproduced without permission from the Editor.

The Essar Leaks

Since the time Indian Express broke the story on the Essar Leaks, everybody wants to get their hands on the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Prashant Bhushan. This is the document. Feel free to download, read, and make your own judgements. I have nothing else to say

Why froth now at bribed journalists?

I read with great amusement today and watched frothing debates on television of how a BJD Member of Parliament tried to bribe journalists in the temple town of Puri. Ostensibly, with cash in the region of Rs 200-300 tucked away. 

The reason I say amusement is because much of the outrage is misplaced. My mind goes back to 1993 when I was still wet behind the ears and had just stepped into business journalism. Those were the boom days for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). So much so, that there used to be an IPO beat and it was a coveted one. Why it was so coveted soon became obvious to me.

Every single day, on average, there would be at least four to five press conferences that were nothing short of a sham. Promoters of all kinds wanted an IPO to raise funds and conferences would be held at either the Taj Mahal or The Oberoi (now The Trident) in Mumbai. The tardier ones would settle for The President. All within a stones throw of each other.

Reporters on the IPO beat hunted in packs. They went "conference hopping" as a group. So if they were late for a scheduled press meet, the promoters had no choice but to wait until they all of them arrived. And even when they did come in, their harried public relations folks would do their best to stall the meet until a representative from the Economic Times made it. For promoters, the press meet wasn't complete until all of these souls had congregated at one of the fancy rooms in one of these hotels.

The public relations machinery knew their drill. As the journalists trooped in, they'd hand over dockets containing the mandatory IPO prospectus'. Nobody as much as bothered to look through it. The conference would begin, the promoters would belt out some rubbish, and the floor would be opened to questions.

A senior lady journalist whom I shall not name right now would open the Q&A with a dumbass question: Gentlemen, how much of your revenues will come from exports? Answer: Blah blah blah blah.

Second question: Invariably around why the operating margins are high or low--a number you don't need a rocket scientist to figure out.  

Everybody exchanges glances, because there is another conference to go to. And before they do, there is a lavish spread to be tackled. So the lady journalist from South Mumbai in her best faux accent would say loud: Thank you gentlemen, that will be all. And everybody would scramble to the buffet table.

On their way out, the public relations folks would hand out envelopes to all of the assembled journalists. Incidentally, the firm that started the practice of handling these envelopes is now among the biggest in the country and had fine tuned it into an art form. 

It contained "gift vouchers" of various denominations from CitiBank. At the very least, Rs 500. Some in the region of Rs 1,000. And one of the largest giveaways of Rs 1,500 was made by a conglomerate that is now in the news for being close to the prime ministers office. Bounty in place, the booty hunters would head to the next conference to collect the next instalment. When placed in the context of these numbers, the Rs 200-300 being bandied in Puri sound like chicken shit 21 years ago.

These vouchers could be redeemed for practically anything at any major store or restaurant. But for the more ingenious ones, that's not where the fun was. The fun was at the Press Club where journalists and their counterparts from public relations congregated.

So, if you had a gift voucher for Rs 500, it could be exchanged for cash from your friend in the public relations community, but a marginal discount of say 10 percent or so. The journalist walked home with the cash. And the PR professional would go and pass the same voucher on to the next client on his roster at the full price. It was a win win for both sides of the profession and everybody clinked their glasses at the end of the day in appreciation of a hard days work done. The only jokers who got taken for a ride were readers who had no clue how star ratings for IPOs were arrived at by journalists who hadn't even gone through the IPO documents.

There were honorable exceptions. Can't think of too many actually. The one that came to mind, a friend from the PR business just told me only wore a holier than thou attitude. But he was worse than the others. {UPDATE} He'd walk into the press conference and leave a briefcase at the reception desk to the conference hall. Once inside, he'd make a song and dance of what a tough guy he is. The big honcho at whatever PR firm was handling the IPO, would ensure a bigger wad of gift vouchers would be placed inside this briefcase of his. Conference and mandatory silly questions done, everybody would walk, and this said gentleman would walk out after picking his briefcase up from the reception. I must add here, one of my friend from the PR firm who handled him, said the payouts given to him had to be higher than what was on offer to the others.

Then, of course, how can I forget the publisher of this rag that emanated from an office in the back lanes of the Fort area? Many people swore by it for the "tips" it offered. If any clue be needed, it's title was a rip off on the Wall Street Journal. I'll leave you to the wild guesses.  This publisher was the only man who'd walk in dressed all slick in designer suits, fancy watches that he'd keep staring at, and looked rich unlike the poor sods who inhabited the place. But make no mistakes. He wouldn't walk out without his fair share of the goodies. And what constitutes goodies?

As a friend, Sachin Joneja, pointed out on my Facebook wall, "Are you sure you are not "being polite" about the "gifts" involved? Having been on the other side, the numbers in your article make me laugh. Yes maybe the raw cash component was just this. And the fancy gifts including silver glasses etc.? And the fancy booze? And then there was the innovation of taking the whole pack for a "plant visit" perks and all if the plant was say near Pune." {UPDATE ENDS}

If there were some exceptions to the rule, our capital markets and business journalism would have been a much better and stronger today.