என் கவிதைகள்  (My Poems)

This is a blog about my poems. I apologise for those who don't know tamil....

என்னுடைய பழைய நோட்டுப் புத்தகங்களை எல்லாம் புரட்டிக் கொண்டு இருந்தேன். ஸ்கூல், மற்றும் காலேஜ் சமயத்தில் எழுதிய சில கவிதைகள் கண்ணில் பட்டன.

யாம் பெற்ற துன்பம் பெருக இவ்வையகம்!! உங்களுடன் 'ஷேர்' செய்யத் துணிந்து விட்டேன்:

கவிதை 1 : 10th படிக்கும்போது எழுதியது. 'அறுவை போட்டி' ஒன்று நடைபெற்றது. அதில் கலந்து கொண்டு, சில 'கடி' ஜோக்ஸ் சொன்னது மட்டுமில்லாது, இந்தக் கவிதையும் சொன்னது ஞாபகம் வருகிறது. பரிசு எதுவும் கிடைக்கவில்லை. அடியும், எதுவும் கிடைக்கவில்லை:

"அறுத்தலும் குழப்பலும், அறுத்துப் பின் குழப்பலும்,

 அறுப்பாரையும்  அறுத்து, அவரையே குழப்பலும், 

 அறுத்து, அறுத்து,  அறு சுவை காணலும், 

 அறுப்பார் அவர்க்கே அழகு"

மற்ற கவிதைகள் பின்னர்!

Book Review : Echo Burning by Lee Child

I have come to like Lee Child's character, 'Reacher'. The lonely guy who wants to be alone is interesting. Somehow he lands into trouble. Somehow he rescues people. He stands upright. He fights crime. He is very passionate about justice...

This story is not different. It is all of that. Jack Reacher gets a lift just when he was looking for one. And, from smebody he would have least expected it. The woman, who gives him a lift expects him to kill her husband. Reacher investigates and lands up in the middle of loads of trouble. And, the husband gets killed. Apparently by the wife herself. Why is the question. Then the story unfolds itself. 

The first half moves very slowly - unlike the other stories I have read before of Lee child's Reacher stories. But, the second half makes up for it. There are some holes in the logic. For example, why should the Walker guy try to cover up the killing? Why kill only the husband? Why not the wife also and make it look like a scuffle? Who is going to suspect him of all people?

But, with all the holes, it makes up for a good night's read. With diverse characters such as Carmen Greer whom you don't know whether to trust or not, the lady attorney who is a gay, the grandmother Rusty, who hates mexicans and rascist to the hilt, the horses and the ranch, it is rich in detail.

My Take (in a lighter vein) on Management

1. Matrix Management Approach

When I first joined the MBA, I had not fully realized it. But, over the years one tends to become a little wiser. Now I know for sure. All that one has to do really well in MBA and in any kind of presentation, however high one goes up in the organization, is to show a 2 X 2 matrix.

If one wanted to come across somebody who is 'cool' and who is somebody intellectually above all others, all one has to do is to show some 2 X 2 matrix with interesting labels stuck in them.

How does one do it? I will teach you:

Step 1 : Take up a 2 X 2 matrix.
Step 2 : Put a variable on the  x axis and another variable on the y axis.
Step 3 : Now, you have got a box of 4 sections. (this is actually not a step...)
Step 4 : You have to ensure that you have a low vs high on the axis from one side to the other.This has to be done on both the axes.
Step 5 : One should label the boxes. But, if you find it very difficult to do,one can actually leave the labelling of the different boxes to the audience.They will toil hard, label it and think that you are a genius!

Let me take a few 2 X 2 matrices and explain the funda to you:

Example one :

Work	High	Desired by company	Ideal condition
	Low	Current condition	Desired by employee
		Low	High
		Wages

Example 2 : Let us take some other words and see whether we can make some meaning out of them :

Let us take Man & Woman. Can you come up with a matrix here? And explain it away? Try it!! My try is given below!


My attempt:

Man	High	Masculine	Human
	Low	Animal	Feminine
		Low	High
		Woman

See? With more and more practice, it takes almost no effort.

You can come up with a 2 by 2 for almost any 2 variables!

I don't mean to be mean to the management Gurus but I have almost always been fascinated by their ability to come up with a limitless supply of the 2 by 2s as much as their ability to think through complex issues. I have also marveled at the ability of people to make this thing even more complicated by adding a twist and making it a 3 by 3 matrix.

For example, we had that simple BCG matrix - which looked at the business growth rate and one's relative position in the market. We had a simple and peaceful 2 X 2 matrix.

Then came the GE matrix with the same kind of axis (though with slightly different terminologies) but with a twist : now you had to navigate through a 3 X 3 matrix and 9 cells instead of a benign 4!!

I have always marveled at this!!

And then I read Covey. What a way to steal the world with a simple urgent vs important matrix!!

Well. I am truly in love with this matrix approach to management. It looks simple. Whether I am able to understand what I am articulating or not, those who listen to me go with a feeling that I am intelligent and that I know!!

What more do you want?!

You should really try this. When you are in the office and when a power point ppt with some 117 slides are being shown by someone out to impress his hard work, and when you are really unable to stifle your yawns, you should take a notebook and doodle and see which are all the words which you can connect as above in a 2 X 2 matrix.

Try it out and let me know!!

Trend Spotting : 2

India is supposed to be a young nation. more than 50% of the population is below 25 years. It is the youngest nation and it is going to stay that for quite some time. In this being young, we can very conveniently ignore the old. The number of people who are old is not small.

The estimates are like this : in the next 10 years, that is by the year 2020, we will be a 133 crore population country. To my mind, this itself is a lower estimate. However, even if we take this estimate, about 7.6 crores of these people are going to be 65+ years. 37 crores are going to be under 15 years old. 88 crores are going to be in the age group 15 to 64 years. By 2050, about 25% of the population will be 60+ years.

Now, let us focus on the 7.6 crore people who are going to be 65+ All of them are currently 55+ years old. A lot of them are looking at retiring in the next 5 years. A lot of them are already bewildered at the rate of change. A lot of these people are clueless about social networking. Though some of them are savvy, a vast majority of these people don't know what facebook is all about. A vast majority of these have not operated internet. For a vast majority of these, even mobile phones are alien.

All of them are going to be 65+ and are going to be very very lonely.

Just look at the number of news items showing dissent of the young people with their parents.

In TN, there is an actress, (Saranya), who goes missing and her mother files a complaint with police. The actor daughter surfaces and clarifies saying that her mother is torturing her.

Another actor's daughter (Vanitha Vijayakumar) accuses her parents of threatening her with life for the past 15 years.

There is enough and more news in the papers of sons and daughters chasing their parents away.

The number of old age homes is increasing.  

What was a 700 odd number in 1998, by now, must have reached 2000+ mark. In the net, no clear stats are available on the status of number of old age homes in the country.

Another reason why these old age homes are flourishing is very interesting. In the previous generations, people used to have 5 to 6 children at least. In their old age, even if they were not happy with one son and the respective daughter in law, they will move to another son. Even if they were happy somewhere, they still kept on moving around.

I remember my grandma, living with us for a few months and then moving onto living with my uncles for a spell of a few months each. This used to happen in almost every family across India. One lived with the eldest son for a couple of months, then with the next son and then a few days with a daughter and then back with the next son for a few months and so on.

This had the effect of lowering the 'burden' on each of the wards and also ensuring that the old people had someplace to go even if at one place they were not entirely happy or some quarrels happened.

This simply does not happen anymore. Already, the current crop of grandparents are having lesser number of children than their previous generations. The current crop of parents have one or at best 2 children only. Which means that the kind of safety valve which was there earlier is not available anymore.

Suddenly, the grandparents become a burden on their sons and daughters. And, worse, they have nowhere else to go.


The old people end up feeling increasingly lonely, bewildered and lack companionship. Increasingly, the computer at home means that even the children, who would otherwise have given them company, don't anymore.

Even the grand children, who, in the previous generation would have listened to stories from their grandparents, now, play video games or are already on facebook with their friends.

It is going to be frightening to be old in this country. The country, where elders were respected and extended family was the norm, is fast becoming full of nuclear families where the old have no place.

So, it is very simple to see the next trend : No place to be old in India...

It is sad...but that seems to be the situation. If you are wealthy old man, you can at least get into a decent old age home. If you are not so wealthy and cannot afford a good old age home, well then...God help you...

Let us see what this means for different set of stakeholders in India. For entrepreneurs and marketers, it means huge opportunity. They can and I am sure will make a difference in this also. There will be corporate sponsored old age homes soon. There will be pension funds which will enable one to get into a decent old age home in his choice of geography. There will be insurance companies which will help people to settle down with endowments for their old age. There will be home and realty builders who will take your house back on lease back arrangements to enable you to live peacefully in your old age. There will be a host of appliances which will target the old people to live by themselves without any help from anyone during this period of loneliness. There will be laws ensuring specific comfort levels for the older people when they travel, when they commute from one place to another and so on.

There may even be awards for youngsters who regularly go and visit their parents or grandparents in the old age homes...sounds cruel but that would be better than such a thing not happening at all...

Trends we can see : 1

This is going to be one audacious try. But, I guess that is fine. It is going to be lots of fun writing this and watching whether my feel is coming out right or not. OK. What is this about? I am going to try and figure out the underlying trends based on what I am reading / seeing in news / magazines / TV and so on and so forth.

I am not going to pretend these are "Mega trends"

My takes for the first trend spotting are as follows:

1. I was reading the sex survey 2010 in The India Today. More and more boldness is what we see. We also see that women are ready to come more and more out of their marriages. You also see the second and third marriages happening more often.

Sunandha Pushkar marries for the third time and is happy about it.

Shashi Tharoor, on his part, also gets into his third with Sunanda and is also happy and open about it.

Vanita Vijaykumar, the daughter of tamil actor Vijaykumar, has 2 sons from her first marriage and one from her second. While the second and third marriages are seemingly on the raise, there are single mothers who taut their wards.


Sushmita sen has two children and is not even married once. Both are adopted children. The 1994 Miss Universe is quite happy about it.

You look at the other side of this spectrum, you get to see that gays and lesbians are scoring important legal victories.

You also see lots of couples living in and absolutely happy about it.

You see Kareena and Saif living together.

And, so do Bipasha and John Abraham.

So, a very simple first trend : Marriage as an age old institution is in trouble. Deep trouble.

When time is scarce, when you don't know whether you can commit, when you don't know how much you would love a person, when your career is important and is more important to you than anything else, and when the woman is as free as the man in terms of both economic and how open she can be to the world, it seems as if there is no need for marriage. So, will the number of marriages come down? I think it will. Would living in go up? Yes. It will. So, what happens to children? I think they will learn to cope up with the uncertainty of living with a stranger who is the current 'father'. What will this trend lead to? What are the opportunities it will bring to marketing people and the cinema dudes? What problems will it bring to those and all of us? How, as a parent, I would take it? These are questions which require some deliberations, debates and discussions.

Movies I enjoyed : Mouna Raagam

Mouna Raagam (Tamil: மௌன ராகம்; English: can be roughly translated as "Silent Symphony") is a 1986 Tamil film. It was directed by filmmaker Mani Ratnam. To my mind, it is the best film by the director - though a lot of people think "Nayakan" is his best film.

The score and soundtrack are composed by Ilayaraja, and the film's cinematography is by P. C. Sriram.It got nominated for the best film award.

The story is simple : the heroine is a playfull girl. She falls in love with a boy who is as mischevious and playful as she is. The lovely boy confronts and robs from a police officer so that the patient that offier assaulted can be treated. The girl understands the reason behind this 'bad' act and this is the reason why she falls in love. As they are about to be married, the police comes in and apprehends the lover boy. He tries to escape and in the ensuing melee, gets shot at and dies. The girl goes into a deep trauma.

But, the parents look for another boy. There is a "pen parkkum padalam" and a genteleman comes- sees the girl. Falls in love with her and consents to marry her. The girl does not want to be a burden for their parents any more. So, she marries him.

But, the marriage is only in the name. She avoids any physical contact by her husband. So, what does the husband do? She tells him the story so far and why she is avoiding him. And, on top of it, she wants a divorce!

The genteleman goes about absorbing all of this quietly. He understands the trauma and accepts her as she is. He is willing to give her the divorce and the freedom that she wants. But, slowly and steadily, the girl starts falling in love with her husband!

That is the story. How, patience, understanding and acceptance of the other half improves the relationship, how it heals the wounds and gives it the time it requires is beautifully shown. Revathy and Mohan do well in acting. Karthik did a quick, witty, beautiful role.

The dialogues were simply superb.

I watched this movie when I was quite young - when I was in my college. I remember thinking : if I ever get into this kind of a situation, how I would handle it and whether I can be as sensitive and understanding as this film's hero.

To my mind, it was a landmark movie in Tamil films.

Movies I enjoyed  : The Terminal

I Watched this movie recently when I was travelling. Absolutely brilliantly portrayed by Tom hanks. The story is quite simple. The comedy - drama focuses on a person trapped in the airport - neither able to move into the country he has chosen to come to nor being able to go back to his country - because that country has been 'derecognised' by the country he has walked into. A 2004 movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones, it shows the story of a man trapped. in a terminal at JFK International Airport when he is denied entry into the United States and at the same time cannot return to his native country, the fictitious Krakozhia, due to a revolution. This is supposedly inspired by the 18 year stay of the Iranian refugee, Mr. Mehran Karimi Nasseri in the Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Terminal I, Paris, France from 1988 to 2006.

Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski in this film, a man who comes from an Eastern European country to New York. However after he left his country war broke out. This means that Navorski is now a man without a country since US does not recognize his country any more. Hence, he is denied entrance into US. But, since he has arrived legally, he cannot also be deported back.

He cannot speak English well. But he starts to learn and adapt and understand others. This makes the security manager, who wants to expel him, extremely unhappy.

Why Navorski came there, what are his drives, why is he prepared to wait for 9 months in the airport, what does he do to live out there form the rest of the story.

I would say that it is a fantastic story. A story which brings out the idiocy of policies of countries and how they are at cross purposes with human life. How simple rules can become asses quickly. How human will triumps over everything.

Vavorski simply says "I wait". It melts even the toughest of the hearts.

How to take life simply. How to treat everyone - including the one who means harm to you with passion. How to take simple joys in life even though your life itself is not great. All these are lessons from the movie. I enjoyed watching every bit of it. Lovely movie. Worth watching.

Blog Review : Vaaram oru Alayam

It takes stupendous effort to put up a blog like this one. Going to temples; collecting information about the deity, the goddess, the temple tree and so on and giving a commentary also.

This is fantastic. It tells you how to reach out to a particular temple. It tells you when the pooja happens in that temple. Very very good blog for all the religious people and those who love to go to a temple. Serves as a quick compendium for all of those who love to go to temples.

Very good effort. Please keep it up.

Blog Review : Khana Peena

For a guy like me who has interests in restaurants, this is a delicious blog. It reviews all kinds of restaurants across the country though I think I saw a lot more from Mumbai. Photographs of those dishes, what was good and what was bad : all that is put in there. Serves as a good starting point for the foodies!

Very interesting blog.

Blog Review : Think Loud : Carnatic Music Raagas

Another master piece of a blog. He has taken different Raagas and provided film songs and a lot of typical carnitic songs in that raaga. He has given the lakshna of the Raaga also - the aarohan and avarohan of the Raaga also are given.

Simply outstanding. It is a joy to read the blog.

The icing on the cake is the number of song - links that are provided. All the links are from Mediafire so that it is very easy to keep downloading all the songs. It took me a very long time to down load a lot of the songs that I loved.

Keep the good work Sir!!

Blog Review : Raagas in Film Music

I enjoyed this blog. Very informative. Collecting so many songs, categorizing them under the different raagas..it takes fantastic effort. Not just in one language. There are songs from Tamil Films. From Telugu films. From Hindi films. Means that the author is good in these languages and also in spotting the Raagas.


And the collection is also very good.


Recommended for anyone who is interested in Raagas, listening to songs based on raagas and especially old songs!!

The Youtube links makes it even more interesting since we can actually "see" the song!!

Good effort!!

Keep it up!

Engey Brahmanan by : Cho. Ramaswamy

An engaging story by Cho. With lots of questions and answers from Hindu scriptures it explains - or at least tries to explain who is supposed to be a 'brahmin'. The one who lives his life only by taking 'biksha' - that is  by begging for food; the one who does not save anything for tomorrow; the one who studies vedas and scriptures, the one who does homams and yagas, the one who prays for everybody's benefit everytime he prays, the one whose only work is to teach others, who does not expect any material benefit for his teaching, the one who treats all his students equally, the one who imparts all his knowledge to his students - he is the one who can be called as 'brahmin'.

Cho goes onto show that nowhere in vedas or in bagwat gita, it is said that the 4 castes are based on birth.

It is pretty clear that there is none called as a brahmin these days in the true sense of the word!!

Out of Poverty :  What works when traditional approaches fail 

By : Paul Polak

To my mind, this is one of the most important books that I have read on the topic of poverty and how to get rid of the same.

The gist again, is simple : Go where the poverty is and observe it first hand. Live with the people for sometime and see why they are suffering. See what needs to be done to make them earn money for themselves.

No governmental organization and no world level organization - whether it is the gram panchanyats operated from Delhi or the world bank operated from God knows from where - tries to figure out why exactly people are poor.

Written by a man who has the personal experience and expertise on what he is talking about, and who started the International Development Enterprise (IDE), which is helping people around the world, this book is certainly an eye opener in thinking about poverty.

People are poor because they have no work sufficient enough to earn money. They don't have consistent work to get out of poverty. They may own land but they don't know what to sow and what agriculture they should do. They are all rain dependent. They are all people dependent. They also depend on a host of others for their equipment and so on. Can we get those equipments simplified? For example, can the drip irrigation be done at the fraction of the cost of how it is done in Israel? Can agricultural methods be taught to them so that they can get the crops going in a profitable manner? What are the practices which take away from making the profits? What makes agriculture very expensive? Can that be tackled?

Those are the questions the books asks. The author has lived in Napal. In India. In Indonesia. In vietnam. Where it really matters and has observed people in first hand. Has worked with them.

One simple line struck me : Don't give the rural poor people anything free. Teach them how to get work. Teach them how to make money and how to make it profitably. They can take care of themselves from then on.

Very true.

Secrets of a CEO Coach : Your personal training guide to thinking like a leader and acting like a ceo 

by 


D.A.Benton

Interesting book. Most of the points are the usual ones such as know what you are saying, walk the talk etc. But, what I found most useful are the set of questions. There are a number of questions that the author poses for you to think through. Right from your background, who your parents were, how happy were you in school and onwards to your responsibilities in your job. That walk through the entire life history throws wonderful insights into yourself.

I jotted down the points and I started answering them. It reveals lots of insights into the person that I am and why I relate to my job the way I relate to it. It also tells me a few things that I haven't really considered till now. To that extent, a very useful book.

A Bias for Action : How effective managers harness their willpower, achieve results, and stop wasting time


By : Heike Bruch & Sumantra Ghosal

I think I first read this book around 2005. I don't think I understood it fully then. But, I could appreciate the book a lot more when I read it again now.


The gist of the book can be summed up in one sentence : how do we get ourselves into purposesful, goal directed action taking? How do we ensure that our teams do this all the time?

Is it that we don't know what to do? And if we do know what to do, why is it that we don't do things which are critical to us? Which are critical to the organizational well being? What stops us? How can we break these barriers and move towards getting things done?

What is purposeful action? It is defined as consistent, conscious and energetic behaviour. How do we balance these with the experimentation and flexibility which are absolute must in organizations? How do we get deep personal commitment to that goal?

The authors come up with a simple 2 by 2 matrix to explain all the above. On x axis, you have` energy levels : low or high. On y axis, you have the focus. Low or high. You have 4 archtypes now. Those who are the frenzied : high on energy but low on focus. They just keep doing something to occupy themselves. There are the procrastinators who lack both the energy and the focus. These people harm all the teams and mar the organization. There are the detached. These are focused but are lacking in energy levels may be because a personal sense of commitment is missing. And, then there are those who are the purposeful who have high energy and focus levels and who come across as reflective and calm amidst chaos.

What is this energy? For people to be energetic, they must believe that the action to be taken and being taken is subjectively meaningful. They must be able to take proactive action and initiative. Their need to act should also come from whithin. And, only when they have exceptional energy levels, do they make exceptional efforts when tackling heavy levels of workloads.

Here, I remember Jack Welch's credos : Being energetic, Able to energise - are the key traits of a manager. Absolutely that is exactly what the authors are also talking here.

What is focus? It is the energy channeled towards a specific outcome. Focused managers are goal oriented. They keep moving towards achieving that one goal in spite of any obstacle being placed on their path. They ensure that all their activities are towards that goal and ensure that the activities don't clash with each other or detract from each other. Focus also requires phenomenal personal discipline. The focused manager must be able to concentrate on the job on hand, should be able to crystalise the actions that he needs to do and should be able to cull out meaning from the many noises surrounding his job and actions.

The book gives many case studies where people from different quadrants ended up in the high energy - high focus - purposeful quadrant and then pulled their companies out of the woods.

I enjoyed reading this book. I often wonder whether I have the required focus and energy levels to consistently do a great job for my company. And, if I lack either, how do I continuously prod myself to find the right levels of both.

Buy.Ology : Martin Lindstorm

Why do people buy? This is an age old question which smart marketers have been trying to answer. There are endless number of market research techniques which try to answer the same. There are survey methods, there are projective techniques, there are observational methods and so on and so forth. But, nothing gives you a clear cut answer in terms of what excites the consumers and why they end up buying what they buy. Or, for that matter, why they don't buy inspite of having come close to buying you many times.

The new answer that Lindstorm comes up with is the brain imaging technique. This is a medical technique used to look into the the brain for any lesions and so on. But, marketers are now trying to use it to see what brain activity happens when consumers see an ad, when they see an image, when they are excited and so on.

And, Martin Linstorm says that this is the new way to go!

But I guess we need to wait and watch. This has potential but I guess it is just too early to become overjoyed!

Written in Bone : Simon Beckett

A forensic anthropologist (never heard of such a profession before reading this novel!) goes to an island where a body is reported to be in a funny state.

He goes there and finds that its head is torched out. Nothing else is damaged in the hut the body is found. A storm blows across and the island is cut off. And, there are more murders which start happening. The place that Dr.Hunter, the forensic specialist stays in, gets caught in fire. He escapes miraculously. But, a policeman was not so lucky. He dies in a separate fire. A journalist who is pursuing them gets killed, hacked to death and then torched.

So, who is doing it and why?

Made a very interesting read.

Full of twists and turns and you find that there are subplots all over the place.

The only thing is that it makes a very gory reading. But, written very well.

A quick look on the novelist : Simon Beckett

Dumb Witness : Agatha Christie

Interesting story from the queen of crime. An old woman, surrounded by relatives who would like to gain from her, falls from the stairs. It is believed that the terrier, Bob has left the ball that it plays with on the top of the stairs. A few days later, she dies. Her death is believed to be from natural causes. However, she has written a letter to Hercule poirot, which, mysteriously, reaches Poirot only after she dies.

So, what has really happened? Did she die of natural causes? Did Bob, the dog, really was at fault?

That is what Poirot unwields finally!

As in every other Agatha Christie's novel, the build up is slow but surely it picks up pace and the denouement is very good!

For a full account of the plot, check here : Dumb Witness : the complete plot

To know a detailed account on Agatha Christie, check this : Agatha Christie

The Last Frontier : Alstair Maclean

There is no need to talk about the writing powers of Alistair Maclean. This novel is no different. Great writing. Frenetic pace.

The hero, Michael Reynolds is a british agent. He is sent to wintertime Hungary to rescue the nuclear prof. Jennnings who has been captured by the communist government against his wishes. How the mysterious "Count" and the even more mysterious "Jansci" help him is the story.

Fighting against all odds and pulling it off is the theme here also. The story also gets into a lot more in depth study of human nature. It talks about how people who fight war come to hate it and turn pacifists and fight a different kind of war from then on.

Very interestingly put together. It has also been filmed.

A Prisoner of Birth : Jeffrey Archer

A fantastic Jeffrey Archer book. Great plot. A person who is held for the murder of his friend, though he did not commit it, escapes to avenge it. But, he escapes as another person whom he resembles. Did he avenge it? Did he join his sweet heart? How did it all go down?

That is the plot.

But, the usual vintage Archer language throughout. The twists and turns. And, a lovely ending which warms your heart. Good fun.