Dear Reader,
What would you choose given the below 2 options,
- 100 low-quality fruits that give the health benefits of 10 fruits
- 2 high-quality fruits that give the health benefits of 50 fruits
These blogs are a collection of some work that I did post MBA. They consist of my thoughts, ideas and opinions regarding businesses and emerging businesses.
Dear Reader,
What would you choose given the below 2 options,
Structured thinking was encouraged at my school. We were encouraged to try new things, try different things and let us explore our interests. One such non-academic interesting course we went through was the EREHWON thinking program. It was super interesting at first but the course kinda fizzled out and we didn't actually complete it. I think it was only introductory and not many kids were interested due to the extra work we had to put in to do the exercises in addition to the homework from regular classes. If I remember correctly it also ate into our sports/games time so that was a bummer.
Here is a link to the course contents in 1991. The EREHWON Thinking Programme is a structured way to think in different ways with techniques to solve problems creatively and innovatively. It is still a paid program today. Link to their current paid program. And an online news article about it.
Sports and games were a big part of my school. We had a dedicated 60 mins of sports every day. In my time, sports (or as we used to call them games) were any kind of physical activity. The school was limited in its sporting equipment but there was no limit on space, grounds and classmates to play with. We even invented games to play if we had nothing to play with. And we had fun doing it. We cramped a fun game even between classes, running from post to post to make the most of our spare time.
A sporting highlight of my 6th grade was when we beat the 7th graders in an inter-class middle school football (soccer) tournament. No one expected the 6th graders to beat the 7th graders, it was just not heard of. Even we didn't expect it to happen. It was high for my class and as class captain (leader), it was an honour for me. It just showed that teamwork, skill, and passion sometimes beats everything else. Of course, we lost to the 8th graders in the final but we gave them a tough fight. Pretty much the entire middle school was there watching the finals. There was no pressure as no one expected us to even make it that far. Most competitions are inter-house and this was one time when the school decided to have inter-class competitions.
A big learning from those days is teamwork. A much-emphasized word. At that time, it went without saying, if you were part of a team you played for the team and as a team. There was no individual. It was just a natural way of playing a sport and it came to us naturally as kids. The team worked together with a single-minded intention of scoring a goal. It was just that simple. And if someone fumbled or goofed up, we just moved on, chided each other and pushed forward. No hard feelings.
At that time, we never really paid too much attention to the word teamwork. Now, teamwork becomes centre stage in every organization and is emphasized so much in the corporate world. I'm glad I learned the importance of teamwork early on. And for that, I thank my school.
My school had an active arts, music and social studies culture. We had regular inter-house competitions in these and they contributed the overall points to the house everyone wanted their house to win the cultural and sports shields. It was not all academics.
I loved painting in school. I think the fact that you are given a blank white sheet and asked to paint anything you like; gives your mind the freedom to be as creative as you want. I also won some prizes in painting and below are a few of them from 25 years ago. I never continued my painting skills in later years but it was the foundation of my going digital with tools like GMIP, understanding layers, colours, photos, and videos; all of which I use all the time.
Dear Reader,
Standard coding/computer/programming geeky things... and yes it was a lot of fun. I was most fascinated by how we could draw a circle with just a few lines of code.
I never thought I would get into mainstream software development at that time. But now, it is my bread and butter. I like how Logo made it easy for anyone to learn programming.
Here are some links to Logo interpreters that you can still use today,
Nowadays, thousands of software programming languages are suited to particular applications and use cases. But the fundamentals remain the same and Logo taught a lot of those fundamentals really well.
My interest in programming grew over the years and after my first year of college, I took extra out of college classes at a local computer institute called NIIT. And thanks to my Dad who helped me select the courses that I needed to take. At first, it was hard. The jump from Logo, where one can visualize the output, to Unix and C Programming was not easy. I could not practice outside the classroom of the private institute and the software was not free. The course just become something I had to finish because I enrolled in it. Moreover, the trainer never bothered to show interest in my training or answer questions that I had. I was given course material and asked to go through it and learn by myself. I was probably the only college kid in institute where everyone else was much older and took computer courses only to get a job. No one took me seriously. It just made things more difficult but nonetheless, I endured and became a C and Unix guru. I cleared the final assessment and got my certificates.
Years later, I took an operating system course in college and had a student exam exercise to emulate the Dinning Philosophers problem. I was in a team of 3 and due to time constraints my teammates and I did not have enough time to write the program. So, we did what most students in the class did. We copied it and submitted it. We didn't even change the variable names. There was no time for it and OS stuff was tough to learn back then, so why to bother ;-). And as expected, everyone in IITB is smart so the tutor figured out that the WHOLE CLASS submitted the exact same program for the assignment and threatened to fail everyone if we don't redo it and resubmit it again. And yes, I took the lead, used my training in Unix and C and rewrote the whole program in original and submitted it. We passed with flying colors and thus learned about semaphores and mutexes.
Fun stuff.
Until next time.
Regards,
🐢