The paradox of knowledge is that one creates cutting edge ideas as lone entity, and the digital era has enabled that completely but decision making power lies with the ‘structures’, the power elites who have the authority to execute, often to propel the status quo.

Bharat, has Clean India

But, people who clear the sewers are dying

We can send satellites to space

Win spelling bee

Have billionaires

Dream of Smart Cities

But can’t remove manual scavenging

Bezwada gets Magsayay

But, still sanitation workers choke to death

What happens to the Clean India Tax?

The conundrum of caste does not make their living days

Any easier

Innovation can be inoculated by a diversity of experiences gained by travel, interacting with interesting people and reading extensively. The operative keyword is ‘diversity’. Even Times of India is encouraging reading with its latest campaign.

The various, multifarious manifestations of the universe of the Digital, with the capital D, indicating privilege is surprisingly not changing anything fundamental. Livelihoods access, public health and political power remains unchanged. Oxygen would have saved seventy kids earlier this week. Smart phones cannot change that, although sensors could have helped. Train travel in India still is unsafe. IRCTC App can buy you the ticket, but can’t make your life safer.

Main Street retail and banks are transformed by aggregator economics, giving cashless a sense of everyday comfort. The fundamentals of Digital Modernity are still underwritten by old school choices, of life, of survival.

Googling food can give you the nearest eatery, the direction and the menu, but is the digital economy creating more jobs or taking it away? If so, can the majority buy the meal on Swiggy?

Complex Adaptive Systems and Ecosystem Thinking have synergies. Sustainability needs them as it is as complex as ever. Linear thinking is for kindergarten.

Yesterday, an initiative about encouraging reading in Muscat was kicked off by a non profit group, and the event focused on why people read and what motivates them to do so. The responses ranged from reading as understanding other people’s perspectives to improving attention spans. While all of them scratched on the surface, reading is an urgent response to the post truth, alternative facts era that we reside. Reading against the grain of the text as a mode of critique is popular with the social sciences fraternity is a vital pivot in separating the wheat from the chaff, and in honing ones one thought in a distracted mind. Information through digital means may have become democratic, though the ability to analyse, digest and articulate is still a task, Siri cannot help with yet.

In an AI driven future of work world, reading the correct curriculum may actually immunise communities against the next wave of technology led disruption. Out of the box is certainly obsolete in a complex adaptive systems dynamics space, where stochastic is norm rather than the normative.

The future of content is video, but the ability to distill, distinguish and disseminate complex ideas and make sense of them, in order to apply them has reading as a critical core in a learning tool box.

Reading to make sense and meaning is the fulcrum of the ability to discuss various sources of data and skim through to the central argument. Time or the pack of it is a lazy excuse to not read. Wait till the better read, colleague takes the better pay hike in front of you as reading diversely helps one develop an innovative tool box. It helps unlock imagination.

So what are you reading currently?

We all have our own journeys
The terrain of narratives is a flux
Some collide, some negate
All stories need a ear
Some need to be spoken to be heard

On this Independence Day eve
I have a prayer
Let's not make a media spectacle out of it
Let's respect the 'peripheral' rather than the centre
National identity is a mosaic
Rather than a monolith
Save new born babies
Not cows
India, a tapestry of colors
Can do better then 'Gerua'
Gerua suits a SRK song better
And in Iceland not Imphal
The Kerala Beef Fry is tasty
As the Jalebi in Benaras
Work towards creating better support structures for our sena folks
Than pellets to blind our children in Islamkot
More jobs for laid off IT folks
Than debates on nationalism on Republic
Is a humble prayer
Happy I Day Bharat, BKMJ

Airports are interstitial spaces
Structured as Malls
Positioned as institutional valves
The Passport Control line is a terrific equaliser
The labor and the C Suite
Every one rushing towards the departure gate
For work or leisure
This act, is more deeper than it seems
A privileged terrain
More accessible as time passes
Has a un necessary snob value to it
After all, it's just a glorified global bus interchange

The Cooperatives were the original social enterprises before the basket of fancy conceptual categories were conceived. Think Amul and Seva. Why are today's social enterprises not able to scale? It's about founder vanity rather than community at the heart of the business models. Servant Leadership is an alien concept.