The need for ambitious self-teaching

In today's competitive age, millions of young Indians are trying to achieve their life-goals, either through the job market or by pursuing an entrepreneurial dream. More than 10 million new faces join the race each year! Indeed, that makes it a very tough race, and old methods that worked in an age gone by, can neither ensure victory nor any solid destination. And we keep coming across depressing news items in media regarding our degree-holders being unemployable. Many of our colleges and universities, assuming outdated and obsolete methods of imparting education and skills as relevant to the present day tsunamis, are delivering something that has little practical value. No one in particular is responsible, yet everyone actually is! We hear passionate cries promising system-repair, but little turns up on the ground. The youth understands that she/he needs to do something, but is usually clueless regarding the nitty-gritty.

A common refrain is - there are no opportunities, and the markets have little to offer educated people.

All this is having a telling effect on our social and political situation as well. Tensions keep mounting, and immediate solutions elude us. The choice before most of us is clear - either we give us and stop dreaming, or decide to go after it and find a solution. If you are young by age or attitude, then the latter option is always preferable! The good news is that in these difficult and changing times, there are many resources available that can easily impart skills which will not only develop your self-esteem and confidence, but even your market value. Let us try and understand how using simple and easy tools, we can learn something of value each day. These could mean the difference between success and failure. Seen as a whole, these can help our Indian society remain much more optimistic and positive.

First and foremost, we need to understand that the very internet that has revolutionsed most sectors, and has created huge problems for conventional methods, has simultaneously created a wonderful opportunity as well - it has brought the best teachers and learning resources right on your computer screen, available on a click. Many of them will do it free for you (on, say, Youtube), and the rest will do it at a price (on personal teaching sites). Try getting the gist of this argument. If you really want to crack it, then you have an option of getting help from the most skilled professionals in the world on a one-to-one basis, and this can help you deliver more in your job and race forward. Not only this, you can become an internet entrepreneur yourself, without any major investment. Excited? Let's see some milestones you're likely to face in this exciting journey.

First milestone - Make three things a part of your daily life. (a) Read the blogs and articles by experts of your chosen field (on the internet), (b) Keep digging deep into the multiple aspects of emerging technologies (on relevant technology websites and forums), and (c) Keep saving relevant and useful content in a notebook (or a webtool like Evernote). Just keep at this for six months at least, and realise how the techniques of learning and skilling have truly transformed. As an example - many engineering related courses are available for free. Immense resources are available related to technologies being used on the internet to create various tools. Multiple marketplaces abount (like Envato), where skilled graphic and web designers can sell their wares, without even stepping out of their homes. And if you have the teacher-talent in you, then why not start your own course academy to teach others (using platforms like Ruzuku, Kajabi, Udemy etc.), and earn in dollars!

Second milestone - When you will start spending your time (and datapack) on these skill-focussed areas rather than mostly useless chatting and video-watching, then you'll surely face three questions. Whom to follow daily (Google to the rescue, followed by Alexa ranking like tools), which paid programmes are really useful (check out various review and comparison sites), and how to really turn your entrepreneurial dreams into reality (check out teaching, blogging and hosting sites). You'll surely face problems with English. So you'll begin searching the right language teachers. The plethora of options will make your mind spin! I strongly feel that the millions of educated ladies who often utilise their talents only in cooking food for their families - they can (with some effort) become a micro-entrepreneur leveraging the internet and empower themselves and their families. If the family elders happen to be hyper-conservative, they can be told that this would not necessarily entail action outside the home.

Third milestone - To prepare oneself, one's organisation, and the nation too, for the coming decades. It surely is not an exaggeration to say that the internet-enabled storm of easily available yet powerful technologies has totally transformed most sectors. We witness the changes in many areas like taxi services, shopping platforms, medical diagnosis and freelancing. Sadly, the Indian brands are not at the forefront of this unique race (surprising, given the dominance Indians display in services and in running some of these very global leader brands!). I have often spoken of this issue, calling it 'Digital Sovereignty' or 'Digital Independence'. Why has this happened? A simple answer is - we have spent our energies in cramming stuff, and acing exams. We lost the art of learning. The three key skills duly adapted to a new world - ability to read & comprehend fast, expressing ourselves through the written word beautifully, and basic arithmetic - were not developed. Net result? The easy methods by which one can try to cater to a global market despite being a micro-entrepreneur are not in our radar.

The choice is ours - keep cursing the system, and wait for a messiah who will transform the entire scenario. Or begin the journey of our individual success today, and start creating innovative products and services using modern technologies. We may not succeed always, but when we do, it may be spectacular.

My Hindi editorial article on this theme was published recently. Can check here!

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The technology storm is arriving!

We all are accustomed to a regular use of technology instruments. We like it when with the minimum of effort, we are able to extract the maximum amount of output. Try asking the professionals active through the 1980s and 90s about the effort it would take just to make phone calls and receive fax messages! One had to put aside work, and focus and destroy one's energy on contacting people and getting others to prepare documents (and then the copies!). Things very pretty slow. Compared to today, work-efficiencies were not even 10%. Then came the storm called the internet. In just a decade, this storm simplified certain basic complications related to getting work done to such an extent that professionals and entrepreneurs could now focus their energies on more constructive and positive aspects of new work. The quality of life and work rose significantly. Then the arrival of social media made us feel that life without it would not even have been one. We modern humans totally accustomed to smartphones now believe that technology is now at its peak. But, the real storm is yet to arrive. Over the next 10 to 20 years, five major changes will become a part of our lives, which few have even imagined or thought about, today.

Times are changing!

Change 1. Money becoming invisible. The generations to come will wonder about their ancestors who carried physical money (notes, coins) in their wallets. This is now nearing its end. The coming days belong to virtual money. You will be making payments through just one card to anyone - including the vegetable vendor! If all businesses have the type of machines (that take such electronic payments), it would be quite possible. Work already has commenced. India has evolved its own payment system frameworks, and its own payment card too has arrived (the RuPay card). It is obvious that the government will slowly evolve rules and regulations to minimise and eliminate the physical transaction of currency. The benefits are many - instant accounting, a check on black money, procedural ease, ease of transferring subsidies (first to the bank account and then to the cards), etc. Hence, all these things, in an invisible form, will reside inside the card!

The problem with today's problems

Centuries of evolution of the democratic systems and millennia of human evolution is proof enough for someone like me to believe that our system has been set for life, and we can expect a certain degree of predictability and safety from the way the world is run.

But all is not quite right. There are major anomalies.

Let me take an example, and start making myself clearer. I was watching television yesterday afternoon, and happened to glance through all business channels - CNBC, Awaz, NDTV Profit and UTV Bloomberg etc. The free fall of the stock markets due to Euro-panic was splashed across the screen, punctuated by the terror-struck faces of the anchors, and the sagacious tones (most of them artificial ones) and heavy baritones of many of the experts, collected from every nook and cranny of this grand nation. Each one of those experts was waxing eloquent about the reasons for the crash, and the road ahead. All of them sounded sullen and morose, sad and despondent, and "wise" at the same time!

Wait a minute. If you are so wise, and if you can analyse this crisis (this new one, the Euro-panic one) so well, you should make lots of money betting on the bearish trend already? Shouldn't you?
(Maybe you can't in Germany due to the ban on short-selling but everywhere else you can)

So it appears that these wise people are wise only in hindsight. And a surprisingly shortly timed hindsight at that. So are they really wise? My answer - NO. They are charlatans, most of them, struggling to look wise on TV, so we can keep watching their stupid analyses presented through the most slick graphics by some of the most attractively painted and dressed women and men in this country.

And something very interesting happened with me today. I started to philosophically analyse what was happening with my mind. My mind, imagine! So who's analysing whom? My mind is analysing itself! I went blank, stopped hearing anything, and looked into the vacuum of the TV that was in front of my eyes, and started seeing and hearing different things. I totally avoided listening to the economic nonsense of European crisis, and went to the basics.

There are obvious truths around us that we simply choose to ignore. We choose to rationalise.

What's this Euro-crisis anyway? Is it any different than the American crisis that started to happen just around 36 months ago?

Fundamentally, it's the same. At the root of both these crisis (and I suspect most such crisis) lie some simple things

• Greed - more, more, more, more, more...
• Nonsense - 'more' will not lead to collapse
• Leverage - i can always pay back later, let me borrow now
• Irresponsibility - i'm a sovereign, so the crime can be made to look like a veiled virtue

It so turns out that some European governments (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) borrowed so much from markets (international ones) that they are in no position to pay back their debts that fall due. It also turns out that these nations are independent sovereign nations (with their own militaries, elected governments, constitutions and the entire range of paraphernalia that we count as insurance against delinquent behaviour) that have chosen not to control their rapacious greed (in borrowing and then spending the borrowed monies recklessly). Also, it turns out that the Euro currency is so designed that the bad behaviour of these nations will severely dent the currency, and so other 'good' nations must now come in to protect the currency (Read - must now come in to offer loads of monies to these stupid nations to tide over the crisis).

By the way, did you notice the wonderful poetic justice in the acronym derived from the names of these nations? PIGS.

I was wondering - decades and centuries of civilisation's hard-earned wisdom and work, all down the drain so fast? Nobody could stop this from happening?

There are some simple lessons we have to learn from these developments. These are striking, shocking lessons, that make a humble reading.

1. Experts are mostly cheaters. They often tell you things that are untrue. Market experts, Economists and Governments cheat tremendously. Nassim Taleb (of 'The Black Swan' fame) says that the Nobel prize for Economics is one of the biggest frauds!
2. Media does not understand the deep, intricate technicalities of any situation. They perhaps don't need to. What they do need are advertisements - desperately - and hence are forced (by the nature of their business) to present things in a "grossly simplified format" to us. This is creating huge problems of its own, as populations are getting accustomed to reading simple analysis of even extremely complex situations! Most such analyses are shorn of the subtleties and nuances that define the problem.
3. Problems are simply rolled over, never solved. Each government (democratically elected) simply rolls the gargantuan problem (as it can no longer be solved) to the next government! And the next, and the next.
4. Problems are fairly complex, but can have very simple solutions. Refer to the greed, nonsense, leverage and irresponsibility stuff I wrote above.
5. Nothing is predictable at all about the world anymore, and problems - when they arise - will be big in nature, and generally beyond the immediate control of the government on the spot at the time.

Are these things the way these things are supposed to be?

NO. We are supposed to have governments and systems that work. We elect them! We pay every conceivable kind of taxes to them! We follow all rules (speaking for myself - I try to).

For what? Such irresponsible behaviour?

Now just apply this entire analysis to the Naxalite problem that India is facing. And you may find that it applies there as well! A fully-grown nation, with a strong democratically elected government, a strong military, a strong media and a hugely strong willpower is seemingly totally meek in front of those who choose to carve out another nation out of its heartlands. Amazing!

Take this entire analysis and apply it to the recent oil spill off the coast of Mexico and US, by some BP owned oil-rig. The fact that even after a month they are unable to bring it under control, despite massive political pressure from the White House to do so, speaks for itself.

So it turns out that the world's problem are getting nastier, and the solutions more troublesome than our faith in technology and modernity would warrant.

So, let me summarise the problem with today's problems

1. We expect very quick solutions to even complex problems, due to over-simplification of communication in media channels
2. We trust our experts too much, while most of them are relying on data from a past that no longer exists! (in most industries)
3. We expect positive solutions always - while many solutions require a compromise
4. We are magnifying our local problems into problems of a gargantuan scale due to internationalisation of everything

Interesting times we live in!
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