Friday, July 27, 2018

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!

Monday, July 16, 2018

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.)