The Many Kinds of Silence and Why They Matter

I have written a few notes on meditation, so tackling silence should be no problem. Or so I thought—until my fingers, poised on the keyboard, began fighting the majestic pull of silence welling up in my mind.

“Why are you doing this?” it chided me even as I managed the first sentence. “Haven’t there been enough books and articles already on the power of silence, its significance in our increasingly noisy lives, and other such?”

The questions gave me pause and I fell silent for a moment. But the answer as to why I must put down my own ode to silence had often hovered in a quietening corner of my mind—in several of those daily meditative sessions that have become an inseparable part of me.

I remember reading and reflecting on the author Vikram Seth’s reply to the question posed to him, besides other intellectuals and celebrities, by an Indian magazine: “What does luxury mean to you?”

You know how Mr. Seth responded?

He said, “A quiet mind.”

Vikram Seth is a highly recommended, prolific author but these are the only three words of his I have read: a quiet mind. And I don’t think I’ll ever need to read another one uttered or written by him to appreciate the depth of meaning this ‘Suitable Boy’ can infuse into his writing (though I’m not saying I won’t :)

Those three words—a quiet mind—have haunted me ever since. And as my experimentation with meditation reached its own gradations of quietude, I knew that this ‘connect’ was real.

There is a constant flicker of movement and noise in human life—and, thanks to humans, in animal life too. If you are stuck, like me and hundreds of millions others, in a messy, nerve-jangling city, there is no long-term solution other than to reverse-migrate to far-off, less-maddening places. That, however, may seem impractical, unviable or, to those currently in their city-addiction phase, downright silly.

Modern tools can of course give you some reprieve: for instance, recall the ad of that specialist glass wall or window showing a woman sitting by its side and peacefully watching the traffic pass by on the other side of the pane, promising to keep the noise out of your home. Or think of those noise-canceling cutesy earplugs. Or some other contraption perhaps.

But what of the noise in your mind?

I think meditation is a time-tested tool that can bring your chattering mind to silence’s soothing shores—and with a bit of nudging, help it drink the nectarine waters of calm. As I have written in my book, Strings of the Soul: “Meditation takes you away from the torrent of oppressive thoughts into the inexplicable joy of stillness.”

The stillness, the silence, the here-and-now nothingness that permeates everything that is or can be.

The quiet that gives you reassurance each time you run into its arms from the ever-chasing loudness. The silence that envelops you in its embrace of joyous wisdom.

Just as there are different types of meditation or meditative techniques, there exist several forms of silence—and their varying levels or intensities. Most of us may instinctively know the different types we practice or encounter in our daily lives, but American novelist, poet and psychotherapist Paul Goodman very eloquently described the nine kinds of silence in his book, Speaking and Language:

“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.”

(The above passage has been reproduced from a post by the curator extraordinaire of all things great, Maria Popova, from BrainPickings.org.)

I’m not sure if there is any sanctity to the number 9 but the idea is that there is a lot of breadth—and, in my experience, depth—to silence.

Meditation, in my humble opinion and experience, allows you to experience, evaluate and elevate all kinds of silence.

There is a constant interplay of speech and silence in the universe. Buddhist monks around the world, as well as mystics and yogis in ancient India, are known to have appreciated it and effectively used this seeming ‘duality’ to enhance their meditation practice.

Where does sound figure in meditation that is usually done with closed eyes in a noiseless environment?

Let us first look at sound from an ancient perspective. There are varying interpretations but, according to Vedic philosophy, there are four stages or levels of sound or speech. Ranging from gross to subtle, speech can be Vaikhari, Madhyama, Pashyanti and Para.

Vaikhari is represented by the spoken language or uttered words. Madhyama is the stage when the thought has formed in the mind and the object of the thought has been associated with it—but it is not yet uttered. Pashyanti represents thought-visualization in the mind’s intrinsic capacity; it is the level at which thinking “begins to happen” universally—regardless of whether the person is a speaker of Chinese, English, Sanskrit, Yoruba or any other language. And Para, which literally means “beyond”, is the highest, subtlest form of sound that is transcendental, bottomless, limitless, boundless…No, there is no contradiction there: highest in terms of its stature and subtlety; bottomless in terms of the depths from where it arises—pure consciousness or pure energy, take your pick.

It is at the Para level that even the best of scribes and the most accomplished of mystics fall short of words—for it is beyond words and can only be understood or experienced in the utmost meditative state. Acknowledging my own failure to describe it (more so perhaps because I’m still a novice meditator), let me dare say: It is silence incarnate.

In this backdrop of subtleties of sound, speech lies somewhere between the two ends of silence. Words, I believe, are conceived in silence and ultimately dissolve into silence: what remains in the interim is meaning—intended or perceived—in a given context and spacetime.

For the most part, we human beings hover between the most gross and the most subtle. Which is fine and has seen humanity through the ages. But this age—the iPhone-Android-Netflix-TrumpKim-Facebook-SUV-Airbnb-Alibaba age—is making mincemeat of our brains.

Take Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, for instance, and his quest for silence amid the urban din. An NYTimes.com piece recounts how he went around New York City looking for quiet nooks and crannies—and, thankfully, he did find some. But that does not surprise me: as a (not-really-idle) flaneur, I have often discovered peaceful little oases ensconced within the chaotic sprawl of Delhi.

The silent sucker-punch for me in the story was the revelation that Erling, who became the first person to ski unassisted to the South Pole in 1993, disconnected the batteries from his emergency radio on the day he reached there—and he was there, alone, for FIFTY days.

How he narrated that quiet time to Steven Kurutz of NYT left on me an impression akin to Vikram Seth’s words. Here I’m reproducing the passage verbatim:

“When you start, you have all the noise in your head,” Mr. Kagge said, adding that by his journey’s end, “You feel your brain is wider than the sky. You’re a guy being part of this bigness, this greatness. To be alone and experience the silence feels very safe, very meaningful.”

In words like these, you see not only the letters of a learned man but you can actually feel the wisdom-soaked spell of silence.

It is my belief that if you try to listen to the sounds of silence, without straining yourself but just attuning to its inner rhythm, it talks back to you like a long lost friend.

Not everyone can bear silence for long, not always. In contrast with Erling, a correspondent of The Economist signed up for a seven-day silent retreat in a monastery in Mingaladon, Yangon, but lasted “a bit less than 70 hours.” Nevertheless, it was quite an experience for that correspondent, who came away wiser and produced a highly readable and insightful commentary on “the power and meaning of silence.”

Today’s connected age has, ironically, lost some of its connections to the essence of human existence and communication: silence.

Maybe it is time to speak up on behalf of silence. And the best way to do that is to be quiet more often.

So just sit down. Take a deep breath. Meditate if you will.

Quiet. Please.

#TeachersDay: Thoughts on Reforming Education

It is another Teachers' Day on Sept. 5th, at least in India. I believe it is celebrated on several different days around the world. Whatever be the date, the idea is similar: celebrate and honor the contribution of teachers in our lives.

But, does the world really value teachers highly today? How have teaching and the teachers around us changed over time -- over years, decades, centuries? And what about the students? Are they really putting their best foot forward and giving it their best shot -- like Arjuna did when he pierced the eye of the revolving fish with his arrow in that famous story from the Indian epic Mahabharata?

In a world getting hotter, more crowded and ever more chaotic with each passing day, these are questions worth pondering -- because the students of today will inherit that world and make it worse or less worse (making it better seems a slippery possibility, but that is for another blog post :)

As far as India is concerned, what I have noticed is that the overall quality of teaching and teachers has been coming down -- ironically, in the midst of an abundance of knowledge available through the greatest library ever created on Earth, the Internet. Barring perhaps a few hundred schools in a country of 1.3 billion people, the quality of teaching -- and consequently, of learning -- is of grave concern, as survey after survey has pointed out in recent times.

On the brighter side, there seems to be a new movement in education that talks about things like blended learning, self-paced learning, life coaching and other progressive ideas. Driven by online lectures, knowledge repositories and the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), new education ventures seem to be sprouting up all over.

However, in the midst of these mushrooming novelties, I think some fundamental things are still missing and we have quite a distance to cover before we can bridge the gap between a child's true potential and helping her realize it to the full or near-full level.

First of all, we need to completely overhaul how we currently build and run schools. We have all heard of that famous quote about not letting our "schooling" interfere with our "education" (the quote is often attributed to the writer Mark Twain but possibly it was Grant Allen who first expressed such sentiments as long back as the 1890s).

Whoever said it, we are still stuck with the dissonance between the two: schooling and education.
I was fortunate to have met or studied under some honest and dedicated teachers. I'm reminded of this definition by one such teacher (with inspiration possibly from the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi): he once told us that true education is the harmonious development of the three H's -- hand, head and heart.

Unfortunately, the schools we so earnestly built became places where hundreds of thousands of students "reluctantly went" to "mug up or cram their lessons" by rote learning. Some of those students developed keen interest in studies and turned out to be the brightest ones, acing the toughest competitive exams (and often going abroad for "higher research or studies" to succeed commercially). But they did so mostly on their own initiative and supported by private coaching/tuition, etc. The typical institution of school had little to do with their success.

In today's knowledge-rich world, (super) specialization is very much required. But I think we need to relook at the stage a child is encouraged or nudged to pursue such a specialization and not take the cookie-cutter approach (10+2 or whatever) we have traditionally been taking.

Rather than build walled classrooms where students are bunched together and given (mostly) insipid, boring "lessons" -- which most teachers now, by the way, are just too keen to "finish off" so that the syllabus is "covered" -- we must make schools into happy, joyous, fun-filled "sanctuaries for children" if you will, where they discover the importance of learning in life, are given multiple chances to identify their interests and pursue those interests with the guidance of teachers genuinely interested in their life-success.

Alas, what we have in most places in India is the spectacle of students ferrying bagfuls of books and notebooks back and forth between home and school. The things they most look forward to when going to school is not the joy of learning but the company of their friends (which is fine as an important add-on).

The curricula, too, need to be totally revamped for New Age learning. The question of why they are learning something and its practical applications (or significance of applications) is as important as what they are learning -- in order for them to show genuine interest and be more curious about the subject at hand.

Chinese philosopher Confucius is said to have remarked, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand," way back around fifth century BCE (that's when he lived, right?) But in India the majority of schools are ill-equipped to show their students how things work or enable them to "understand by doing." Their typical approach? "Here, take these dense texts and just mug them up."

This is not to belittle the role of memory in learning. In fact, India has the oldest (and at its peak the most advanced) tradition of auditory learning -- writing of the texts came much later. But the keyword in all learning is "understanding" -- which goes for a toss when the emphasis is merely on cramming, even in higher grades when students have better grasping and perspective prowess.

The need of the hour is a revolution, not just an evolution, in learning.

Happy Teachers' Day -- nay, change that to Happy Teaching and Learning Age!

(Image: Google.com)

Of Fields Medals, Maths and Mathematicians

Most of the recent headlines about winners of the Fields Medal in Mathematics have centred on how great this “Nobel of Maths” is (which is given every four years), the episode of one of the medals being stolen right there at the awards venue or the Indian origin of another winner (Akshay Venkatesh) -- but the mention of Fields Medal once again transported me into the arcane, intriguing world of Maths and mathematicians.

While I know how frustrating and exhilarating Maths can be at the same time (being a one-time Maths aspirant myself), I first heard of Fields Medal when I happened to watch a YouTube video in which Prannoy Roy of NDTV interviewed an amusingly shy Manjul Bhargava -- one of the four winners in 2014 (the International Mathematical Union or IMU, which awards these medals, has a thing for four, and you can read about it here.)

In that interview, Roy called Bhargava a “bewildering genius”. And when he read out the citation, that Bhargava won the award for “developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves”, he added a twist, “Simple as that, right? You got it? Simple stuff, yaar!”

The audience of students gathered to hear the interview burst out laughing.

The citations of the winners of this year’s Fields Medals are no less bewildering. To continue with our ‘Indian connection’, let’s look at the citation for Venkatesh. “For his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory, which has resolved long-standing problems in areas such as the equidistribution of arithmetic objects,” it says.

Now, that’s what is given as the ‘short citation’ on the Mathunion.org website. There is a long citation as well -- and even that notes that this is “a small sample” of his major achievements. In that, I think the comparison with a Nobel prize (for literature at least) is understandable: the award is to recognise the body of work and, in the case of Fields Medal as stated on the site, “the promise of future achievement”.

Reading the above, I swing my head from left to right on what these young Mathematical geniuses -- Fields Medal winners have to be below 40 -- might unleash by way of achievement in the head-scratching years that lie ahead of them.

As you are still trying to wrap your head around homogeneous dynamics and elliptic curves, let me throw the citations of the other three winners of this year’s awards at you.

Caucher Birkar: “For the proof of the boundedness of Fano varieties and for contributions to the minimal model program.”

Alessio Figalli: “For contributions to the theory of optimal transport and its applications in partial differential equations, metric geometry and probability.”

Peter Scholze: “For transforming arithmetic algebraic geometry over p-adic fields through his introduction of perfectoid spaces, with application to Galois representations, and for the development of new cohomology theories.”

This last one is my favourite, with no disrespect or partiality to the others. If you are someone like me (a non-Maths-genius), you might know why -- just read the citation a couple of times and repeat after me:

p-adic fields.

Perfectoid spaces.

Galois representations.

And, ahem, cohomology theories.

All enmeshed together within the linguistic space of a single, English-sounding sentence.

Wow.

Each one of these cryptic phrases deserves a paragraph of its own, a separate chapter perhaps -- maybe even a book. I don’t know. My own contribution, as you can see, has been the three-letter word: wow.

I mean, in other global awards, even if they are a bit technical in nature, one can somehow translate the achievement in words that a lot of people (if not most people) can understand. But how do you do that for Mathematical complexities that involve p-adic fields, Galois representations and cohomology theories?

Digging deeper, I did some Googling, and came up with some interesting episodes about this “most exact” of sciences and the creatures so absorbed in it — the mathematicians.

I found, for instance, that the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman refused to accept the Fields Medal which was offered to him for solving one of the most intractable problems in Mathematics — the Poincare Conjecture. Not only that, Perelman also refused the sum of $1 million dollars offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI, claymath.org) as part of its offer of the money to anyone who could solve one of the seven most difficult problems that mathematicians have been struggling with at the turn of the millennium. Dubbed the Millennium Prize Problems, one of the seven is Poincare Conjecture; the other six remain unsolved and are known as Yang-Mills and Mass Gap, Riemann Hypothesis, P vs NP Problem, Navier-Stokes Equation, Hodge Conjecture and Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

While I’m no liker of press releases, the one from CMI announcing the award in 2010 to Perelman does a remarkable job of simplifying what Poincare Conjecture is and how its proof in three dimensions eluded mathematicians for over a century. Curiously, two Fields Medals were awarded, one each to Stephen Smale (1966) and Michael Freedman (1986), for proving the Poincare Conjecture in five or more dimensions and in four dimensions respectively. (The branch of Mathematics concerned with the conjecture is called topology; those tenacious enough to go through the press release can view it here.)

But why did Perelman refuse those prizes? The question led me to, how should I put it, “the beautiful enigma” that Perelman turned out to be and, unfortunately, to the saga of an obnoxious battle for power in Mathematical circles (pun intended). For an engrossing account of this, read the longish New Yorker piece here (for an appetiser, know that it is co-authored by Sylvia Nasar, who had earlier written mathematician John Nash’s biography, A Beautiful Mind, that was made into a film starring Russell Crowe).

Ordinary folks might need months or even years to understand some of the most pressing problems of Maths or their significance, let alone solve them.

But then, mathematicians are no run-of-the-mill people.

Take Fermat’s last theorem, as another example, and the guy who cracked it — this one after more than three centuries!

Well, at least the theorem is relatively simpler to state. In number theory, according to Wikipedia, Fermat’s last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b and c satisfy the equation a(to the power n) + b(to the power n) = c(to the power n) for any integer value of n greater than 2.

Most of us (who paid some heed to trigonometry in middle school) can pick out the Pythagoras theorem from the above, for n=2, that is, a squared + b squared = c squared (true for a right angled triangle, where c is the hypotenuse).

I can almost hear some of you chuckle: Now you are talking Maths!

But the guy who really, really talked Maths here — tons of it, in fact — is Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat’s last theorem in the mid-1990s. Too old at that time to be given a Fields Medal (the IMU did give him a silver plaque in recognition), he was awarded an equally distinguishing Maths honour, the Abel Prize, in 2016 (what took the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters so long to award Wiles is something I chose not to dwell on at the moment of writing this.)

When the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat proposed this theorem, he is said to have scribbled a note in the margin of his book that claimed that the proof was “too long” to fit there.

One look at the size of Wiles’s proof and you would think that probably Fermat was right: a New Scientist article notes that Wiles’s version spanned “several hundred pages of cutting-edge 20th century Mathematics.”

The tale of more than three centuries of mathematical quest has been crafted wonderfully well by British author Simon Singh in the book Fermat’s Last Theorem. And oh, by the way, Singh himself happens to be a theoretical and particle physicist (I think I’m going to read that book one day.)

Guys, where are the girls? Don’t tell me there are no ladies of Mathematics, the same old stereotypical thing!

As far as the Fields Medal is concerned, only one woman has thus far been awarded — Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iran-born professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. Sadly, she died of breast cancer in 2017, at the age of 40.

But there is no dearth of “world famous women Mathematicians” as Google helpfully told me through this nicely illustrated scroll of honour. And I was happy to recognise a few names I was familiar with — Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper among them (the latter and more names would appear if you clicked the right arrow in the Google results page).

Mathematics is indeed an enchanting science, mesmerising enough for its most expert practitioners to be termed as Mathemagicians.

Fantastic and complex as its domains, theorems and conjectures may be, the other scientific and technological fields would not have made all those advances — giving us the modern marvels of living such as automobiles, genetic medicine, smartphones and aeroplanes — without progress in the Big M: Mathematics. And of course, without the labour of love of hundreds of mathematical geniuses over millennia of human civilisation.

I’m reminded of this famous quote by German mathematician Leopold Kronecker: “God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”

How to Be Your Own Guru

Image: Pixabay.com

Can you recall a teacher you have studied under or met in your life whom you can call a true guru? One who not only taught a subject - but guided you through the ups and downs of life? Do you know someone who is up there among the highest mortals, imbuing you with their intelligence and helping you grow some of your own?

In the ancient Indian culture, the Sanskrit word 'guru' means one who shows you the light.

Some traditional pictures depict gurus sitting under the banyan or peepul tree, surrounded by ardent disciples listening intently to the often-bearded figures (the Buddha, the Jain Tirthankaras and a few others, however, are usually shown clean-shaven and radiating wisdom).

Such gurus could expound on the science of archery or the dilemmas of a king as easily as the ethical questions arising in the mind of a spiritual seeker.

Alas, in our current age of electricity, smartphones and artificial intelligence, trying to find a true guru sounds like a dumb idea. Why, haven't we already seen too many babas - bearded or otherwise - falling prey to the lure of lust and lucre? And while these 'fake gurus' are often glib-talkers who have mugged up tons of religious literature, listening to them involves more pain than pleasure - forget about spiritual delight.

Rather than radiate wisdom, they exude wealth.

Instead of simplicity, their appearance reveals affectedness.

No thatched huts and long walks for them - but a retinue of confidants officiously commanding the Mercs and the Audis to take them to their mansions often as palatial as their egos.

Enough madness.

Where does that leave you, a seeker in search of a spiritual guru? How on earth are you going to find a divine persona to show you the light and guide you on a path you can proudly call your dharma?

It doesn't look likely in this largely chaotic, greed-infested world where anyone you may repose your faith in today could turn out to be just another impostor tomorrow: there are too many of them in the swindlers list!

(Also read: My Experiments with Sudarshan Kriya, Pranayama and Meditation)

What, then?

Who, where, how, when?

Now, just do as I say. Stand in front of a mirror. Take a deep, penetrative look at the face staring at you. Frown, smile or make faces for a while if that helps. But come back to the gaze. You gazing at you - like never before.

Do it for a few seconds, minutes, hours...length of time does not matter, strength and sincerity of the gaze does. (But hey, don't do it for days or weeks, okay :)

What words come to your mind, what thoughts? How do you regard yourself when seen in the mirror like this perhaps for the first time?

Now do another thing. Sit down in a relaxed pose, close your eyes and think thoughts of yourself.

Both in front of the mirror and while sitting with closed eyes, try and sift through the major attributes of your personality. The defining moments of your life. Your decisions that mattered to you and to those around you who you loved and cared for.

I am reminded of a famous quote of leadership coach and author John Wooden: "The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching."

As you look deep inside yourself and no one but you is watching, you will find a rare clarity emerge. You will know, in hindsight in this 'exercise' - which can gradually turn into here-and-now-wisdom and maybe foresight over time - you will know why those decisions and choices turned out the way they did.

You will know the warts in your thoughts and not just on your face. You will know that perhaps the little things gave you more joy than the big rewards - and the problems that once seemed insurmountable are all but gone now (That there are new problems now is another matter).

More important, you may realize how foolish you were to blame others or fate for your own doing.

Spending more time like this in the honest reflection of your thoughts will help you see the power of your own inner light.

In fact, most of us know - through intuition and traditional wisdom passed down the generations irrespective of religious leanings - the ever-presence of such an inner light in the core of our being.

While our upbringing, the social and economic environment we live in, and the life imperatives we have bound ourselves to, may have some impact on the brilliance and the frequency of 'visibility' of this light, it is my belief that the light itself is integral and essential to us.

I tend to be in agreement with Mark Twain's words: "In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice."

This inner light imparts a keen sense of perception, of what is right and wrong at any given moment, what one should or should not do in certain circumstances. It can indeed prod us to higher, better versions of ourselves - much like the collective wisdom of open source programmers these days can shape a beautiful piece of code.

Guiding yourself by your own inner light is perhaps how you can be your own guru.

So, why not give it a try?

Happy Guru Purnima to You!

How Paytm Uses Tech to Manage 200 Million Users

Key points:

- Paytm processed 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018
- The firm employs 200 product managers and over 700 engineers
- Its data science lab in Toronto, Canada, develops key tech tools
- App analytics and machine learning are used to retain users and for up-selling

Mobile wallets--mobile apps used to pay for recharges, groceries and other daily items--may have come of age in an increasingly digital India, but much goes behind-the-scenes to keep them working well and users hooked.

Paytm, which has 200 million monthly active users and processed close to 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018, is a case in point. It competes with MobiKwik, FreeCharge, PhonePe and several others in this space.

Discussing the tech strategy at the company in a recent interview, Deepak Abbot (pictured), senior vice president of One97 Communications Ltd, which owns and operates Paytm, said, “Though a payments firm, we are a technology company at the core and everyone here, including Vijay, is a hardcore techie--he even calls mid-level engineers sometimes to discuss architecture design.” (Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the chief executive of Paytm.)

Abbot said that most in top positions at the company either have technology background or are “quite comfortable” with tech. “Culturally, we have a tech mindset. That is another reason we have been able to build a very complex product in a flexible way.”

Sharing insights into what goes on ‘under the hood’ as they say in tech, Abbot said that quick decision-making and a product-centric approach drive software development. “In our meetings, once an idea is crystallized, Vijay is very clear about what product to build. As a result, the product managers are also clear how to get it done. And when the engineers are given very specific details, they are able to quickly build it,” he revealed.

The simplicity of the Paytm app belies its complex architecture and the number of people that work on it. For instance, Abbot said that there are as many as 200 product managers and 700-800 engineers working on different aspects of the app.

But how does Paytm define a product? “At Paytm, a product is defined as anything a consumer—be it is an end consumer, a merchant or a marketplace seller--interacts with,” said Abbot. For example, recharge is a product in itself. Paytm’s implementation of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), again, is a product (UPI is an easy, instantaneous payment system built by the National Payments Corporation of India or the NPCI). “And then you build use-cases on top of UPI such as P2P, P2M and B2B payments. Wallet--the most used product of Paytm--is another,” said Abbot. (P2P, P2M and B2B stand for person-to-person, person-to-merchant and business-to-business respectively.)

The idea of keeping all these products within the same Paytm app, according to him, is that users should move from one product to another seamlessly—something that requires “a highly scalable product” to be built.

Integration of multiple products within the same app also helps Paytm cross-sell more easily to customers, who may first use one product before being “nudged towards” others, said Abbot.

Talking about stickiness of the app and up-selling to users, he said, “We have observed that if a customer has only used Paytm for recharge, then the retention rate for such a user is 40% after three months. But if we can upgrade him to send money to others, they become power users of Paytm and the retention improves dramatically to 70%.”

Industry experts forecast bright days ahead for mobile wallets. The number of mobile wallet users is expected to grow from the current 200-250 million to around 500 million in the next couple of years, according to Probir Roy, co-founder of Paymate and an independent director at Nazara Technologies. While he believes that “the next big thing” will be “interoperability” among different wallets, he noted that it is a tough space to operate in and some consolidation is “bound to happen” in the coming years. “My guess is that the top two or three companies will have 80% of the market,” he concluded.

------Paytm Labs: Managing customer lifecycles-----

To make the most of app analytics that capture user behaviour, Paytm’s data science lab, Paytm Labs, in Toronto, Canada, works on developing multiple software tools. One such key tool is CLM or Customer Lifecycle Management.

According to Deepak Abbot, senior vice president of the company who is based at Paytm’s headquarters at Noida near Delhi, what CLM does is “catch every ‘signal’ from the app”. Explaining how it works, he said, “If you use the app for UPI, it segments you as a UPI user; if you do a recharge, it marks you as a recharge user. It also upgrades you automatically based on your behaviour or purchase history. So, for instance, if you make an electricity bill payment or a post-paid bill payment, it upgrades you to a post-paid user.” There is a lot of granularity built into the CLM tool to classify and reward different levels of users at different times.

The tool puts users in different segments and generates actionable triggers accordingly. “For example, if a premium user who earlier made a money transfer of Rs 5,000 has not used the app for a month, he will be shown a cashback offer or an ad on Facebook,” said Abbot. Similarly, alerts are shown for soon-to-expire mobile recharges and other bills. “The CLM tool uses such alerts and offers to get those customers back into the app. And if they are already in the app, it will customise the view for them by showing up frequently used icons upfront and hiding others,” he explained.

The entire user data in the Paytm app goes into a “data lake”, and the team in Canada uses it to formulate the rules of the risk engine and other software. The data lake, Abbot explained further, is a repository of multiple sources of data, including phone usage data, hardware data and address book; then there is transactional data plus the behavioural data (where the users navigate inside the app, how much time they spend shopping, etc). All this data is used through machine learning (ML) algorithms so that the alerts and promotions can be automated and personalized.

The Toronto team comprises 70 data scientists and engineers and, besides the CLM tool, has developed the company’s risk and customer score engines. “We just plug those products here (in India) and start using them,” said Abbot.

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(Note: An edited version of the above post first appeared on www.livemint.com - where I used to work until recently. The interaction with Deepak Abbot took place during my Mint tenure.)

Six Bright Gems to Shine a Light on World Book Day

Image: Pixabay.com

In this age of reality TV, Twitter and Pokemon Go (which seems to have really gone somewhere), one may be tempted to ask the question: Why read? In fact, the late Steve Jobs once famously remarked (while discounting Amazon’s Kindle reader): “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Thankfully, people continue to read—even though there are skirmishes about whether it is the printed books or the digital ones doing better (or worse) than the other. What one hopes, though, is that it is not the same book or set of books that most people end up reading—be it a JK Rowling in the West, or a Chetan Bhagat here in India (no offence to either writer, even though it may make Rowling squirm and Bhagat smirk). The diversity of both the readers and the books they read—and obviously the writers who write them—should grow, I feel. Okay, change that to must.

Having said that, I’m in a difficult position to proceed with this post. Because, out of a few hundred books I have read in my life thus far (should have been in the thousands, I know!), I’m only going to pick up six. (I promise to make a long-list of my favorites someday.)

So, without further ado, let me say something about each of them before the World Book Day gets over--and before some people might be compelled to think it is all right to skip reading books! Here goes (in no particular order):

The Old Man and the Sea: Master storyteller Ernest Hemingway indeed crafted an amazing tale of endurance in which an old fisherman is pitted against the might of the sea and one of its creatures he struggles to catch after a really long patch of bad luck. How he manages this adventure, what he says (I remember him saying something like that the fish he was trying to kill was like his brother in a setting I would never forget; you must read it to know what I mean), and how he behaves after his ‘victory’…The old man is a real-life hero and the book, a rare gem.

A Search in Secret India: Paul Brunton’s classic quest to seek out and meet the real yogis of India in the early part of the nineteenth century is largely credited with introducing Raman Maharishi to the Western audience. What endeared me to this book--besides of course the desire to know more about the Maharishi and his message of ‘Who am I?’—is the honesty of purpose and the integrity of a journalistic writer to get to the bottom of the truth (whether he did get to the truth or not is something I’m still exploring, since I haven’t read his oeuvre and am myself at a ‘seeking’ stage). He met lots of charlatans and frauds but apparently some genuine yoga practitioners as well, before finding his inner peace at the Maharishi’s ashram in southern India.

Autobiography of a Yogi: One of the most widely read books in the spirituality genre, what Paramahansa Yogananda did in this life-changing book was give a first-hand account of some of India’s sages and saints—besides a glimpse of his own tenacity to promote yoga and the teachings of his guru, Yukteshwar Giri. Not to forget the mystical, all-youthful and divine figure of Mahavatar Babaji—Google it to unlock a cornucopia of information. (Ironically, it is one of the books Steve Jobs is said to have read many times over, though we cannot be sure of how much he believed in the book’s divine incidents and miracles.)

Siddhartha (by Hermann Hesse): That this tiny book continues to engage and enchant millions of readers more than 90 years after its publication is testimony to its power and message of spiritual journey and self-discovery. It doesn't matter that it draws from ancient Indian spiritual and Buddhist thought; what matters is that it weaves in a simple narrative the recurrence of everything in our lives, the deceptive nature of our day-to-day rituals, the joys and sorrows of mundane human existence and, ultimately, the "song of the river" that keeps humming forever in our soul. Beautiful, heartfelt, ethereal, simple and profound all at the same time, Siddhartha cannot be recommended highly enough.

Atlas Shrugged: While Ayn Rand’s more famous book is The Fountainhead (which I tremendously like as well), I have picked up this one here for two reasons. One, it is the bulkier of the two and you get to stay with Rand all that bit more (if you are a Rand fan, you’ll know what I mean). Two, I found it more detailed and expressive of her philosophy of objectivism through an even more richly woven tapestry of super-solid characters: Dagny Taggert, Henry ‘Hank’ Reardon (whenever I thought of steel after reading the book, Reardon’s name reared in my head!), Francisco d’Anconia, Hugh Akston (“Contraction does not exist; check your premises”)…and, how can anyone miss it, John Galt! Check it out yourself—who is John Galt to ask you to read it?

The Outsider (also published under the title, The Stranger): This quiet reflection by Albert Camus on life and what matters--through a seemingly simplistic but profound story of a man accused of murdering his mother (the accusation resulting mainly from the observation that he did not follow the norm of crying at her death, if I remember correctly)--is one of those books that touch you gradually but deeply, irrevocably. It is all right not to be too ambitious but lead a joyful and uncomplicated life—that is the message I get again and again from the book, besides revisiting the notions of what it really means to love, be loved and lose those you love to time’s strange ways. Simply superb and highly relevant in our consumerist, gadget-obsessed times.

Like I said before, this is a woefully short list—but I’m happy to have shared it with you for what it is worth. Hope you will find at least one or two of them useful.

Happy reading :)

Digital, AI tools easing up legal work for companies

Image: Pixabay.com

When Vaishali Lotlikar joined Wanbury Ltd’s legal department sometime in 2014, little did she know that locating a particular contract or assembling a legal brief would involve sifting through piles of documents, and wastage of precious hours and money in the process. “There was a lot of employee churn in the legal and marketing departments. Nobody really knew where the contracts were kept and what was there in each for the company to keep an eye on,” she recalls.

To streamline operations, Lotlikar and her team gathered all the contracts, digitized the same and put them into a document management system after tagging them for keywords, so that they could be easily searched when accessed from the firm’s servers by authorized personnel. The tool was purchased from PracticeLeague Legaltech Pvt. Ltd, a specialized provider of software and cloud-based solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments.

“I had used their technology at Glenmark and USV,” says Lotlikar, adding that the familiarity helped her get up to speed. “Today, if our international business head wants to know the particulars of a contract, I can get those details within minutes on my laptop—irrespective of the city I’m in.”

This is simply a case in point. As the volume of compliance and other legal requirements increases for companies across industries, technology tools that can ease the legal burden are in great demand. Khaitan and Co., for instance, has been experimenting with technology for quite some time now, according to its chief operating officer Nilanjan Ghose. “We were the first among law firms in India to use software for accounting. Around 2007, we started working with PracticeLeague to develop our own time and billing solution, which is core to our operations.” Over time, he says, the billing solution morphed into what is now known in legal circles as practice management software (PMS). He likens it to an enterprise resource planning software used for operational management by a majority of companies.

For Khaitan and Co., PMS helps in all kinds of processes, including accounting, billing, collections, administration and human resource functions. The company is now integrating new modules into it—an attendance module, for instance.

Digital tools are also helping law firms expand in size or scope. “Many of our clients acknowledge that it is because of technology that they could grow from a 50-60 person law firm to one employing 500-600,” says Parimal Chanchani, founder and director of PracticeLeague. And while there are several technology providers operating in the legal space—LexisNexis, LegalSoft, Thomson Reuters (ProLaw), Jurisnet and dozens of others—Chanchani says “nearly 60% of the corporate law departments and over 40 top law firms in India” use its software.

“You cannot manage a compliance workflow through Excel sheets; everything is now getting automated,” says Chanchani. “What we have is a complete, cloud-based solution sitting on Microsoft servers (Azure cloud). Customers can simply start using any module by just plugging into the platform.”

Role of artificial intelligence (AI)
PracticeLeague has also begun embedding AI into its software. For this, it has opted for Watson—an AI tool developed by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM). Praveen Kulkarni, who heads technology design and delivery at PracticeLeague, says Watson is implemented if a client wants to analyse a contract sent to it by, say, one of its suppliers.

For instance, if a firm wants to become the supplier of a pharma company, it will be required to submit several documents. Based on these submissions, the pharma company will send it back several documents to sign such as a non-disclosure agreement or a supplier registration agreement. If done manually, a person from the legal department would need to pick up the relevant content (from the submitted documents) and “draft and redraft the agreement that would take several hours”. With PracticeLeague’s Document Assembly, a Web link is sent to the supplier. “Once the required documents are uploaded through the link, the tool starts asking questions such as the category of supplier, payment terms, etc. After these questions are answered, a ready contract is automatically prepared through the system for the legal department to review and approve,” says Kulkarni.

However, if the pharma company wants an analysis or summary of the multiple documents it receives from suppliers themselves--the documents are exchanged by both parties for signing--then PracticeLeague uses Watson. What Watson does, explains Kulkarni, is “extract certain portions” of the agreement—for instance, contract type, liabilities or jurisdiction, or a termination clause. “So instead of manually picking up these details, they appear on the screen in front of the person reviewing them,” he adds.

But what if the system fails to understand any particular detail? For such situations, PracticeLeague has built an interface through which the reviewer can feed additional information back into the system so that the same can be picked up correctly by Watson the next time. “AI gets better with more and more data fed into it,” says Kulkarni.

Wanbury and Khaitan and Co. are yet to start using the AI tool, but acknowledge the role AI can play in further improving efficiencies for them. “While I have not used the AI tool, I believe it can automate repetitive tasks performed by legal professionals and also suggest the possible options to be taken in a legal case,” says Lotlikar of Wanbury. Nevertheless, she adds that while all of that can be done in the legal field, “strategies thought of by human beings are also important and cannot be fed into a system”.

“AI can help us in faster turnaround times for cases and in due diligence on contracts,” concurs Ghose of Khaitan and Co., but adds that human intervention and checking will also be required. “For example, certain words could be misspelt and thus be unreadable by the machine, or certain clauses could be interpreted differently. So you need somebody to go through the clauses manually,” he adds.

Other law firms using AI include Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas which signed up with Canada-based Kira Systems for the latter’s AI technology in January 2017. On its part, PracticeLeague is now working with Google and Amazon to integrate their AI technology into its solution and, after that, plans to work with Microsoft as well.

(Note: The above article first appeared on Livemint.com.)

Why Companies are Cautious about Blockchain

On November 22 last year, Axis Bank became the first financial institution in India to launch instant international payment services using Ripple’s enterprise blockchain solution (http://bit.ly/2Ad0nRs). Prior to that, on November 10, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company introduced blockchain-as-a-service that can help companies “deploy blockchain solutions quickly and easily (http://bit.ly/2iUSyWA)”. And earlier in the same month, Primechain Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates a blockchain community of banks called BankChain, announced that the State Bank of India is working towards a “safer, more secure banking system in India through its implementation of blockchain solutions with BankChain and Intel”.

These are just a few examples in the growing pile of reports about the potential of blockchain--the distributed ledger technology behind crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin. Now, increasingly, blockchain is finding traction among various industries. Research firm Gartner Inc. estimates that blockchain can generate business value worth $176 billion by the year 2025.

Among the big technology companies that have thrown their weight around blockchain are International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. (through investments in blockchain).

In addition, there are specialist companies trying to capitalize on the opportunities emerging out of blockchain. “We realised that different industries—financial, insurance, supply chain and others—wanted to try their hand at blockchain,” said Akash Gaurav, founder and CEO of one such company in India, Auxesis Services and Technologies Pvt. Ltd, in a recent interview.

While the buzz around blockchain is high, according to Gaurav, the technology is still evolving—it is in its second version currently, with development going on for what is called blockchain 3.0—and there are challenges related to its adoption.

“It is true that there are a lot of PoCs (proofs of concept) in different industries, but nothing is moving beyond that stage into production,” he said. The problems, in his view, are industry-specific. “For instance, Indian banks tried blockchain in trade finance in 2016 and then people never talked about it. There were challenges at the production level in terms of maintaining privacy and confidentiality of data,” he averred.

“Blockchain is not as evolved as other mature technologies such as the Java programming language or the Oracle database,” he added. And while mature technologies can be easily deployed in any industry, it is a different situation with blockchain, as it “involves many protocols related to specific industries”.

At the heart of the issue is that blockchain was designed with a peer-to-peer, crypto-currency environment in mind. “Now, what we are doing is taking that blockchain infrastructure and putting business logic on top of it so that it can be used in multiple industries,” Gaurav explained.

The challenges of implementing blockchain for enterprises, according to Gaurav, include companies’ specific requirements, different data standards and the nascent nature of the technology.

For instance, while the banks want to have the benefits of transparency, security and audit trail provided by blockchain, they “do not want their competitors to see their data” (something that blockchain allows in its current or basic form). “So they want to control certain things,” he said.

To address this, Auxesis, on its part, has created a basic blockchain fabric it calls “Auxledger”. “For each industry, we study its regulatory needs, its business processes and its data standards to build a (software) plug-in for that industry,” he added. Using that plug-in, that particular industry can more smoothly implement blockchain. Thus far, Auxesis has developed two plug-ins: one for identity management for the government sector and another for the financial industry.

A blockchain network must follow certain protocols--for instance, the consensus protocol by which a certain proportion of participants in the whole blockchain must agree to the modifications made to the contracts (called smart contracts, as they execute automatically) for those modifications to become functional (http://bit.ly/2im8wXZ).

“For example, in the Ethereum smart contracts, a contract must be executed by every party in the network. This vision was against having private contracts. But in a banking scenario, you have to have private contracts,” said Gaurav. The idea of having private contracts in a blockchain is also referred to as a “permissioned blockchain”. In January 2017, for instance, Bajaj Electricals put in place such a permissioned blockchain to pay its suppliers (http://bit.ly/2mSc0DD).

Gaurav said that there are blockchain frameworks such as R3 Corda that can take care of private or confidential data so that all the transactions of the parties participating in a private blockchain are not visible to each other (www.corda.net).

The growing capabilities of blockchain and the push from companies such as Auxesis and Cateina Technologies (which worked on implementing the Bajaj blockchain) are making organisations open up to experimenting with blockchain.

Talking about his current projects, Gaurav said that Auxesis has partnered with two state governments for implementing the Auxledger identity management software that is “layered on Aadhaar” (the 12-digit unique identity number issued by the Indian government). “We have onboarded 53 million identities on our platform. Using blockchain, the identity data of people can be made even more secure so that others cannot easily access it. This can be done through layered access rights and encryption. The identity management plug-in can also update any changes made to Aadhaar,” he said.

Further, as a pilot, Auxesis is working on a direct benefit programme for one of the two state governments. “It is an end-to-end project which involves writing business logic, capturing data and making the data immutable, sending out communication alerts, etc.,” revealed Gaurav, while declining to name the state.

Another PoC developed by Auxesis for a pharma company involved the use of humidity and temperature sensors on transport vehicles carrying heat-sensitive medicines that could be spoiled en route from the pharma firm’s factory to various retail destinations. “To detect this, we used the sensors connected to a microcontroller, which is a part of the blockchain network. So if the temperature varies from the required range by a certain amount for, say, more than 10 minutes, a smart contract gets executed in the blockchain and the involved parties to the contract get notified,” he explained. The benefit of using blockchain combined with sensors (which would typically be part of an Internet of Things network maintained by another company) is that if the goods are spoiled, it is easy to find out who is responsible and settle the claim with the party that should bear the cost of spoilage—be it an insurance company, the logistics firm, or a distributor of the pharma company.

Not everyone is convinced that blockchain will revolutionize businesses anytime soon. In an article titled ‘The truth about blockchain’, Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani noted, “Although we share the enthusiasm for its potential, we worry about the hype. It’s not just security issues (such as the 2014 collapse of one bitcoin exchange and the more recent hacks of others) that concern us. Our experience studying technological innovation tells us that if there’s to be a blockchain revolution, many barriers—technological, governance, organizational, and even societal—will have to fall. It would be a mistake to rush headlong into blockchain innovation without understanding how it is likely to take hold.” (http://bit.ly/2hqo3FU)

The key question regarding wider and faster adoption of blockchain, according to Gaurav, is for someone in the industry to take the initiative and convince other companies concerned to join the network.

(Note: This post first appeared as an article on www.livemint.com.)