The charisma of ZERO

Being Pushed-Forced-shoved-trapped into an educational system which tries in all possible ways to tickle and bolster the mathematical genius within, at same time raising eyebrows and selective pruning of anything that remotely resembles non scientific, I have never ever looked to ZERO with suspicion. I had fully accepted that lots of things that we know now ,are due to fact that ZERO is in place and that, its discovery was Revolutionary. I had also learnt that ZERO and its twin- WHEEL were the greatest gift by India to the scientific world. To add to this ZERO was discovered some 17000 years ago and finds ample references in the Upanishads and Sutras.

But this was alsothe very curse in disguise- the power of being omnipresent was over shadowed by the utilisation of ZERO being taken for granted.Over the years naturally I had completely turned oblivion to the existence of this marvelous whole number (but not a natural number). And as if this usurping of right of ZERO was being watched by the supreme body from some corner in the universe, it decided to program events around me to wake me up to acknowledge the importance of ZERO.

2 long(very long) months of the new avatar as student and that too pursuing a MBA program has taught me that world is also filled with people who are not engineers or who are working in fields like Stocks, Mutual funds and Banks. These guys/ gals belonged to a different galaxy all together( the world of majors from Finance and Banking) and nothing revealed the scholastic dissimilarity among us than when we were in Finance classes. These financial sessions typically saw lots of actions from IT people ( actions included various patterns of nodding and swaying heads.. more to drive the sleep fast catching us than in agreement or disagreement with course contents). The very first financial introspection I derived from these sessions was this: If there is a short break between two consecutive sessions of Finance, then there was a “consumer surplus” for commodities like Tea and Coffee.

The tragedy was torture didn’t die down with classes or group assignments, but proliferated into Quizzes and Re-Tests and Term Exams. The Quizzes is the Rudest out of the lot, coz
a) One is reduced to a position in which his retinas have the liberty to focus only in the area mapped by his laptop screen (sometimes an A4 sheet).
b) All options seem to be equally correct or equally wrong unlike BS or OB where I could spot at least one option which don’t seem right (I just forgot to mention that most of the times this was the right option.)
c) The class average was hijacked by Finance Guys so I could share my score only with very few people in class who had parallel abilities.

But it was this very score in FM which made me special. It was like any other day over these 2 months, woke up to find a rush for wash room, a short trip to it, followed by gathering ourselves for the classes, then boarding the bus, the torture of forcing ourselves to information being pumped from the radio in the Bus and the feeling of being greeted by hot drowsy breeze as soon as I boarded the bus and pounded my way to LC3.

But it was not meant to be an ordinary day, it was supposed to create History right? So we had this second Quiz of FM and I jumped into the mega battle in Black Board. I thought I had honed the abilities of Telepathy and devised the strategy of identifying pattern of answers for given set of questions being bombarded serially. The strategy was simple: The next option I would mark(out of 4) would be – (Number of classmates still writing the exam to my Left / Total number of class mates earlier in the class) * ( Time in minutes now / 60) * 4

This theorem had started paying me huge Dividends, and I had started firmly adhering and preaching this. I finished the Quiz before time and was a very happy man, but then decided to check back my score. I knew judging myself from history that my score would either be a 3 or 2 out of 8,10,20,30… The web page reloaded and I clicked the View Grades section. The sight was special in my life time and though I might have set numerous records; this was something which I never had opportunity to focus upon till now. I had been introduced (rather re-introduced) to concept of ZERO. There lay in my grades section, my score, a big ZERO, so much different from the rest, a limitation in itself, an extreme, a feat less covered by other mortals, a number so fascinating that it can turn even millions to itself when multiplied by it. For some time I was lifeless and the idea of coffee to wake up seemed to vaporize (and with it my other postulate) but then as I was staring blankly at the score, I gained the nirvana – Clairvoyants are god sent to rescue the oppressed. In a world which values the 10z more than 9z, but still neglects and undermines the value of ZERO hanging right to 1 of 10, I would by action and example, salvage this Greatest Discovery made by human kind – the number ZERO.

Moonwalking the thought process

Something happened this week – which were remotely linked to the world, I thought and constructed regarding a B- school, and that too in a one year program. It was holiday for the whole week!

And while I was shuttling myself with detachment and attachment to world around me, a thought occurred to me – I was bothered about the objective which had stirred me to join the business school. And though the clarity had lost its shine over some time, I knew that the primary focus was to learn, teach and learn (in that order) with the people at the school. But what was this learning all about? Are we supposed to mimic thought process of people who changed the world like Strategies devised by Steve Jobs to make an attempt of the unthinkable then – Breaking the monopoly Microsoft, or immortalize Peter Ducker and give him the control to our decisions?

Clearly the idea at B school was not education, but a process which involved reverse learning and looking back at things which have already occurred ( by way of case studies), examining them and dissecting the issues into sub issues and then finding the overall solution for it.

I believe that the B school should be more known for its environment than considering students, faculty, ranking, alumni and dynamicity of curriculum in general. Censoring of ideas or quantifying them would actually mould the way we approach issues. Example whenever we look for marketing – rather than chanting the nice to hear words like CCDS (Create Communicate Deliver Sustain) can we not begin by Communicating then Creating Value or even begin by Analyzing hidden demand for products and then estimate how the product could be sustained, and then Create. Lots of permutation and combination of these parameters, if we even begin start thinking! Or rather moon walking the thought process.