At the age of nine, he became a permanent resident of the monastery where he received Buddhist teachings, completed by an initiation to traditional arts, including music.

At the age of 20, he followed his first spiritual retreat of three years, three months and three days, necessary to the formation of Lama, at the monastery of Sonada in India of which the director is Kalu Rinpoche. During this retreat, he was given the title of “Oumze” — master of music — by Kalu Rinpoche.

Lama Gyurme has been living in Paris since 1974. His collaborator in Paris is Jean-Philippe Rykiel. Rykiel is blind since birth (though he was not born blind.) I like his arrangements. His lightweight keyboard accompaniment is a perfect counterpoint to Gyurme’s heavy voice. The chants are of course soothing — Buddhist chants always are. But it’s more than that. To me it appears that the voice conveys a realization that is attained after years of meditation on the nature of the universe, and its defining characteristics of impermanence and change.

Here, listen to this song called “Offering Chant” from the CD “Rain of Blessings.” Close your eyes and if possible put on a set of headphones (if your audio is not being routed through a reasonable sound system.)

The words of the Offering Chant are

All forms appearing in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the supreme mudra of body
Please grant the siddhi of unchanging form
All sound, and sources of sound, appearing in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the supreme mudra of speech
Please grant the siddhi of unimpeded speech
All the mind’s discursive thought in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the supreme mudra of mind
Please grant the siddhi of undeluded mind
All happiness and suffering in the vast three thousand worlds
I offer as the mudra of auspiciousness
May all the sky be pervaded by great bliss
If suffering, I bear the suffering of all beings
May the ocean of samsara’s suffering dry up

The words are from another YouTube video of the same song.

Here’s a brief promotional video of Rykiel and Gyurme.

Well, that’s it for now. Leave me a comment, or email me what’s on your mind.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

What is happiness, and how can we achieve it?

Happiness can’t be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world—a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks.

Thus spake Matthieu Ricard in an article on happiness in Yes Magazing. He talks about basic meditation.

It is not difficult to begin. You just have to sit from time to time, turn your mind within, and let your thoughts calm down. Focus your attention on a chosen object. It can be an object in your room, your breath, or your own mind. Inevitably, your mind will wander as you do this. Each time it does, gently bring it back to the object of concentration, like a butterfly that returns again and again to a flower.

In the freshness of the present moment, past is gone, future is not yet born, and—if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom—disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace. That is basic meditation.

Compassion is a by-product of meditation. Which is why compassion is at the core of Indic philosophy. Ricard puts it thus:

But meditation also means to cultivate basic human qualities, such as attention and compassion, and new ways of experiencing the world. What really matters is that a person gradually changes. Over months and years, we become less impatient, less prone to anger, less torn between hopes and fears. It becomes inconceivable to willingly harm another person. We develop a propensity toward altruistic behavior and the cluster of qualities that give us the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life.

Go read the full article.

I am pleased to report that I met Matthieu one evening in Berkeley about ten years ago. I recognized a fellow traveler and a remarkable human being.

Here’s Matthieu at TED taking about “the habits of happiness.”

What I especially like is his sense of humor and his acute sense of the absurd. Pay close attention to that when watching the video. And now stop wasting time and go listen to the man.

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]

. . . When you come to see that you can do nothing, that the play of thought or feeling just goes on by itself as a happening, then you are in a state which we will call mediation. And slowly without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence. That is to say, all the verbal symbolic chatter going on in the skull — don’t try and get rid of it because that will again produce the illusion that there’s a controller. It just goes on and goes on and goes on and finally gets tired of itself, gets bored and stops. And so then there’s a silence. And this is a deeper level of meditation. And in that silence you suddenly begin to see the world as it is.

If therefore we would stop blaming others, it would be very difficult to go about a war with a straight face. And you see if you know that the I — in the sense of the person, the front, the ego — it really doesn’t exist, then it won’t go to your head too badly if you wake up and discover that you’re god.

[END TRANSCRIPT]

[Begin transcript of Alan's talk.]

I’m not really a musician but it just so happens that I have in front of me a fabulous instrument which the Japanese call koto. I suppose it would be best described as a table harp. Long instrument stringed with bridges – horizontal harp.

It was customary among Chinese poets in the old days to read poetry and strum on the lute or table harp at the same time. And I have got here a curious old text called Ts’ai-ken T’an – which means the “Vegetable Root Discourses” – written by Koji Tse (sp?) somewhere around 1624.

I thought I’d like to read some of this to you. And to get into the right mood, I suggest that you try to become a little stupid. That is to say, childlike, as if you hardly knew how to talk and didn’t really know very much about anything that is going on. Just listen . . . as you would listen to the wind.

If the mind is clear
A dark room has its blue sky
If the mind is somber
Broad daylight gives birth to
Demons and evil spirits

Poetry aims at the description
In common language
Of beautiful scenery
The sublime is contained in the ordinary
The hardest in the easiest
What is self-conscious and ulterior
Is far from the truth
What is mindless
Is near

[End transcript of Alan's talk.]

Here’s a bit more about the Vegetable Root Discourses.

Where was I? Oh yes, I was in Berkeley. One of the greatest privileges of being in a great institution of learning is that one gets to attend wonderful lectures. So that’s how I got to meet Matthieu Ricard one evening in early 1999. He and his father, Jean-François Revel, were on a tour following the release of the American edition of their book, “The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life.” Harper’s magazine was sponsoring a panel of speakers at the UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism. Among the panelists were the philosopher (Jean-Francois Revel, the father), the monk (Matthieu Ricard, the son), and the skeptic (Christopher Hitchens, the holy ghost), Amen!

I had had the pleasure of meeting Hitchens some time before at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre during his conversation with Gore Vidal (as I wrote about here before.) Then I had congratulated him on his take on Mother Teresa (the Merciless.) This time around I did not get to chat with him because I was more interested in meeting Matthieu. In any event, the hall was packed way beyond capacity and it was hard to get around in the North Hall where the panel was held.

I had figured that it would be a popular event and had indeed gone there a good half-hour before the scheduled time. But guess what! When I got there, it was already overflowing. Still I pushed on and got to the auditorium. It was standing room only. Yet, way out there in the front row I could see an empty seat. Could it be, I asked myself, that it was not being kept for anyone but everyone assumed that it was reserved? As it turned out, when I went up to there, I was told that the seat was free. So I got myself a front-row middle seat, all eager for the treat.

Here’s the background. Mattheiu, the son of one of the most celebrated French philosophers, Jean-Francois Revel, got himself a PhD in microbiology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He was a rising star in his domain until he went off to India and learnt Buddhism and became a monk. Some years later, he tried to explain to his father, the philosopher from the Western tradition, what it was all about. Father and son spent 10 days in dialog and the transcript of that conversation was the book, TMatP.

It has been many years and so the details are hazy. The moderator was either the dean of the journalism school, Orville Schell, or the editor of Harper’s, Lewis Lapham. I also recall that one of the panelists was some guy from the Graduate Theological Union or something like that. It doesn’t matter. The panel discussion was excellent.

Revel was the first to go. I clearly recall one of his statements. He said in his heavily French-accented English, “The purpose of philosophy is to answer the questions of how should we live, how should we treat others, and how should we govern our society.” The man was as impressive as he was reputed to be. He explained that as a Western philosopher he was not exposed to the thinking of the East.

When it came to Matthieu’s turn, he was as one would expect a Buddhist monk to be: a study in calm and composure. Years of contemplating impermanence and change, of compassion and loving kindness, cannot but affect how one carries oneself. He spoke with a lightness of being that clearly indicated that he was solidly centered in his understanding of what was important. Hitchens tried his best to get a rise out of him but failed. I think that there probably is no polemicist in the world today who can match Hitchens. But in this case, Hitchens looked as if he was a schoolboy trying to pinch an elephant.

I don’t recall now what exactly the debate was about – or even if there was debate on any substantial issue. It was just a book launch after all. But afterwards, I walked up to Matthieu and introduced myself. Meeting him was not just a handshake – he put his arm around my shoulder as we walked towards the exit. As can be expected from someone who has mastered the art of being in the present, he was talking to me now and that was all that mattered.

You can get to meet Matthieu, thanks to the magic of the web. A few weeks ago, he delivered the “Tech Talk” at Google. If you have an hour to spare, I guarantee you that you can do worse than to listen to the talk. “Change your mind, change your brain.” I wish I had the time to transcribe that talk. I bet you dollars to donuts that you will learn more from that talk than from reading huge tomes.

I’ll be back with my commentary on his talk. Maybe.

So there you are: the demands on your attention grows. But the supply of your attention is fairly limited. The price of your attention is naturally going to go up. The question then is whether you can increase your supply of attention, not for the demands of the commercial classes but for your own benefit.

Here’s the good news then. Yes, you can indeed increase the amount of attention that you have. The secret, discovered long ago in the sacred land of India, is meditation. It makes sense considering that India gave yoga to the world. Yoga — yoking of the mundane with the divine — has both mental and physical aspects. Meditation is mental exercise.

Some years ago, I learnt Vipassana[3], or Insight meditation. An American friend of mine, a logger by profession, was (and still is) big time into Vispassana and I took a 10-day course in Fresno, California. It is claimed that the technique goes back 2,500 years all the way to Gautama Buddha. Only now it is being discovered by the hard sciences that Vipassana meditation can actually increase your brain resources–something that was known by the practitioners thousands of years ago. Here’s the abstract of a report from PLoS Biology, a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science titled “Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources” where they studied the efffect of Vipassana meditation. The conclusion was that their “study corroborates the idea that plasticity in brain and mental function exists throughout life, and illustrates the usefulness of systematic mental training in the study of the human mind.”

Here’s the abstract: “Meditation includes the mental training of attention, which involves the selection of goal-relevant information from the array of inputs that bombard our sensory systems. One of the major limitations of the attentional system concerns the ability to process two temporally close, task-relevant stimuli. When the second of two target stimuli is presented within a half second of the first one in a rapid sequence of events, it is often not detected. This so-called “attentional-blink” deficit is thought to result from competition between stimuli for limited attentional resources. We measured the effects of intense meditation on performance and scalp-recorded brain potentials in an attentional-blink task. We found that three months of intensive meditation reduced brain-resource allocation to the first target, enabling practitioners to more often detect the second target with no compromise in their ability to detect the first target. These findings demonstrate that meditative training can improve performance on a novel task that requires the trained attentional abilities.”

I find it astonishing that meditation is not widely taught in schools in India. I suppose that it will be only after American schools have incorporated meditation in their curricula, and after a good 50 years have passed, it will dawn on Macaulay’s children[4] that it is time for Indian children to learn meditation. This intermediate step of meditation first being taught in American schools is necessary because otherwise the so-called “secular” brigade will scream bloody murder saying that Hinduism is being taught in Indian schools. Oh the horror! And Muslims will threaten to not send their children to school if meditation is taught in Indian schools, as happened when some schools tried to incorporate the yoga exercise “Surya namaskar.”

If I ever get to run a school, the first thing I would do is incorporate meditation and yoga.

Links: Newsweek report on “Meditating your way to a better brain.”

The Daily Galaxy article on “Channeling Buddha –New Research Shows Meditation Improves Attention Span.

Notes: [1] “Had we but world enough, and time” is the first line of a metaphysical poem “To his coy mistress” by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).

[2] Alex Iskold writes, ” It is no secret that we live in an information overload age. The explosion of new types of information online is a double-edged sword. We both enjoy and drown in news, blogs, podcasts, photos, videos and cool MySpace pages. And the problem is only going to get worse, as more and more people discover the new web.”

[3] The Vipassana course I took was taught by the institution headquartered in Igatpuri, a small town close to Mumbai. Shri S.N.Goenka is the founder of this school.

[4] See Subhash Kak’s short piece explaining Macaulay’s Children.

You have to agree that Siddhartha Gautama had great timing. His birth was during the full moon in the month of May. He attained enlightenment and became a buddha some years later on a full moon in the month of May. And to round it all off, he attained parinirvana (died) during a full moon of May when he was old.

The full moon is so bright outside my bedroom window this morning that it woke me up at 4 AM. It being the 2nd of May, this month we will have “a blue moon” – a second full moon in the same month. Two “purnima’s,” as a full moon is called in Sanskrit (and many of its daughter languages.) This purnima is called the Buddha Purnima.

So what does one do on the day that the Gautama became the Buddha? Listen to the Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra – the Prefection of Wisdom Heart Sutra! Here is a wonderful recording of the Sanskrit version of the Heart Sutra.

Heart Sutra

While it is loading, let me introduce you to the Heart Sutra. Wikepedia says:

Briefly the sutra introduces the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara, who in this case is representing the faculty of prajña (wisdom). His analysis of phenomena is that there is nothing which lies outside the five aggregates of human existence (skandhas) — form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), volitions (samskārā), perceptions (samjñā), and consciousness (vijñāna).

Avalokiteśvara then addresses Śariputra, who in this text — as with many other Mahāyāna texts — is a representative of the Early Buddhist schools, described in many other sutras as being the Buddha’s foremost disciple in wisdom. Avalokiteśvara famously states that, “form is emptiness (Śūnyatā) and emptiness is form” and declares the other skandhas to be equally empty — that is, without an independent essence. Avalokiteśvara then goes through some of the most fundamental Buddhist teachings such as the Four Noble Truths and explains that in emptiness none of these labels apply. This is traditionally interpreted as saying that Buddhist teachings, while accurate descriptions of conventional truth, are mere statements about reality — they are not reality itself — and that they are therefore not applicable to the ultimate truth that is by definition beyond dualistic description. Thus the bodhisattva, as the archetypal Mahāyāna Buddhist, relies on the perfection of wisdom, defined in the larger Perfection of Wisdom sutras to be the wisdom that perceives reality directly without conceptual attachment. This perfection of wisdom is condensed in the mantra with which the Sutra concludes.

The mantra is :

OM Gate, Gate, Para Gate, Parasam Gate, Bodhi Svaha

which is translated as “OM Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Completely Beyond, Enlightend mind, So be it.” The Buddha is also known as the Tatha-gata — “thus gone” or “one who has gone thus,” one who has crossed the stream and gone to the other shore thus.

I like the Mahayana concept of the bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is someone who postpones attaining nirvana (total and final extinction from existence) and thus continues to be in samsara because of his vow to work ceaselessly till all sentient beings have achieved enlightenment.

One bodhisattva is Avalokiteshvara, the Mahasattva Bodhisattva, the Buddha of Infinite Compassion. In PrajnaParamita Hridaya Sutra, Avalokiteshvara is the one who answers Shariputra who asks “”How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes to practice the profound perfection of wisdom?”

The sutra starts with laying out the scene, the setting.

“Thus have I heard. Once the Blessed One was dwelling in Rajagriha at Vulture Peak mountain, together with a great gathering of the sangha of monks and a great gathering of the sangha of bodhisattvas. At that time the Blessed One entered the samadhi that expresses the dharma called “profound illumination,” and at the same time noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, while practicing the profound prajnaparamita, saw in this way: he saw the five skandhas to be empty of nature.”

Then, through the power of the Buddha, venerable Shariputra said to noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, “How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita?”

Form and Emptiness

In my opinion, the most profound thought that has ever been thought is expressed within the answer that Avalokiteshvara gives: “Form is Emptiness, and Emptiness is Form.” The idea of shunyata and shunya lie at the heart of Indian thought. Buddhism perfected the notion.

Well, anyhow, enough of an introduction. Here is the Sanskrit version with English translation. Listen to the beautiful Sanskrit shlokas. Note around 1:15 (or 3:50 from the end) in the YouTube clip, the words “shunyata” and “rupam” – emptiness and form. And around 3:50 (or 1:15 from the end), hear the “gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha” – totally beautifully done. Follow the words along with the text of the entire Heart Sutra below (source.)

Namah sarvajnaaya
Adoration to the Omniscient!

Aaryaavalokiteshvara-bodhisattvo gambhiiraayaam prajnaapaaramitaayaam caryaam caramaano vyavalokayati sma: panca skandhaah; taamshca svabhaava-shuunyaan pashyati sma.
When Holy Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva performed the deep practice in the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom, he contemplated that there were five aggregates but observed that they were devoid of essential nature.

Iha Shaariputra ruupam shuunyataa shuunyataiva ruupam, ruupaan na prithak shuunyataa, shuunyataayaa na prithag ruupam, yad ruupam saa shuunyataa, yaa shuunyataa tad ruupam.
In this case, Shaariputra, form is voidness and voidness is itself form; voidness is not different from form, and form is not different from voidness; that which is form is voidness, and that which is voidness is form.

Evem eva vedanaa-samjnaa-samskaara-vijnaanaani.
So it is for perception, conception, volition and consciousness.

Iha Shaariputra sarva-dharmaah shuunyataa-lakshanaa, anutpannaa, aniruddhaa, amalaa, na vimalaa, nonaa, na paripuurnaah.
In this case, Shaariputra, all things have the characteristics of voidness; they neither arise nor perish; they are neither defiled nor pure, neither deficient nor complete.

Tasmaac Chaariputra shuunyaayaam na ruupam na vedanaa na samjnaa na samskaaraa na vijnaanaani.
Therefore, Shaariputra, within the voidness, there is no form, no perception, no conception, no volition, nor consciousness.

Na cakshuh-shrotra-ghraana-jihvaa-kaaya-manaamsi.
Neither is there eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind.

Na ruupa-shabda-gandha-rasa-sprashtavya-dharmaah.
Neither is there form, sound, smell, taste, touch nor concepts.

Na cakshurdhaatur yaavan na mano-vijnaana-dhaatuh.
Neither is there realm of sight, etc., until we come to the non-existence of realm of consciousness.

Na vidyaa, naavidyaa, na vidyaa-kshayo, naavidyaa-kshayo, yaavan na jaraa-maranam na jaraamarana-kshayo, na duhkha-samudaya-nirodha-maargaa, na jnaanam, na praaptir apraaptitvena.
Neither is there wisdom, nor ignorance, nor extinction of wisdom, nor extinction of ignorance, etc., until we come to the non-existence of old age and death and the non-extinction of old age and death. Neither is there suffering, cause of suffering, extinction of suffering, nor the path leading to extinction of suffering. Neither is there wisdom nor acquisition because there is no grasping.

Bodhisattvasya prajnaapaaramitaam aashritya viharaty acittaavaranah. Cittaavarana-naastitvaad atrasto, viparyaasaatikraanto nishtha-nirvaanah.
Depending on the bodhisattva’s Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom, one dwells without any mental hindrance. Because of the absence of mental hindrance, one is fearless; freed from delusory thoughts, one will reach Nirvana.

Tryadhva-vyavasthitaah sarvabuddhaah prajnaapaaramitaam aashrityaanuttaraam samyaksambodhim abhisambuddhaah.
All Buddhas dwelling in the three periods realize the highest, perfect enlightenment depending on the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom.

Tasmaaj jnaatavyo prajnaapaaramitaa-mahaamantro mahaavidyaa-mantro ‘nuttara-mantro ’samasama-mantrah, sarvadukha-prashamanah, satyam amithyatvaat, prajnaapaaramitaayaam ukto mantrah.
For this reason, know that the Great Mantra of the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom is the Great Wisdom Mantra, the Unsurpassed Mantra, and the Unequaled Mantra. It extinguishes all suffering, and is true and real because it is not false. It is the Mantra proclaimed in the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom.

Tad yathaa gate gate paaragate paarasamgate bodhi svaaha.
Namely, “Gone, gone, gone to the other shore; Gone completely to the other shore. Svaha.”

Iti prajnaapaaramitaa-hridayam samaaptam.
Thus ends the Essence of the Transcendent Wisdom Sutra.

[Here is an English version of The Heart of Transcendent Wisdom Sutra: Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra. See this for a bit more on key concepts of Buddhism.]

In the early days of my interest in Buddhism and psychology, I was given a particularly vivid demonstration of how difficult it was going to be to forge an integration between the two. Some friends of mine had arranged for an encounter between two prominent visiting Buddhist teachers at the house of a Harvard University psychology professor. These were teachers from two distinctly different Buddhist traditions who had never met and whose traditions had in fact had very little contact over the past thousand years. Before the worlds of Buddhism and Western psychology could come together, the various strands of Buddhism would have to encounter one another. We were to witness the first such dialogue.

The teachers, seventy-year-old Kalu Rinpoche of Tibet, a veteran of years of solitary retreat, and the Zen master Seung Sahn, the first Korean Zen master to teach in the United States, were to test each other’s understanding of the Buddha’s teachings for the benefit of the onlooking Western students. This was to be a high form of what was being called dharma combat (the clashing of great minds sharpened by years of study and meditation), and we were waiting with all the anticipation that such a historic encounter deserved. The two monks entered with swirling robes — maroon and yellow for the Tibetan, austere grey and black for the Korean — and were followed by retinues of younger monks and translators with shaven heads. They settled onto cushions in the familiar cross-legged positions, and the host made it clear that the younger Zen master was to begin. The Tibetan lama sat very still, fingering a wooden rosary ( mala) with one hand while murmuring, “Om mani padme hum” continuously under his breath.

The Zen master, who was already gaining renown for his method of hurling questions at his students until they were forced to admit their ignorance and then bellowing, “Keep that don’t know mind!” at them, reached deep inside his robes and drew out an orange. “What is this?” he demanded of the lama. “What is this?” This was a typical opening question, and we could feel him ready to pounce on whatever response he was given.

The Tibetan sat quietly fingering his mala and made no move to respond.

“What is this?” the Zen master insisted, holding the orange up to the Tibetan’s nose.

Kalu Rinpoche bent very slowly to the Tibetan monk near to him who was serving as the translator, and they whispered back and forth for several minutes. Finally the translator addressed the room: “Rinpoche says, ‘What is the matter with him? Don’t they have oranges where he comes from?”

The dialog progressed no further.

Kalu Rinpoche’s response simply cracks me up.

I think the time has come to speak of little things. Things that add up like little grains of sand and little drops of water. Individually, they seem irrelevant and inconsequential. But they matter very much in the end.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Saturday evening plans included meeting friends for drinks at the Cricket Club of India near the Churchgate station. Karthik said it was so close to the station that anyone would be able to tell me. I asked but there was no address he could give me. I arrived at the Churchgate station well on time. Then for the next 25 minutes I tried to get to the Cricket Club of India.

It was not more than 10 minutes walk from the station. But not having an address, I had to rely on asking people. They generally waved in various, often contradictory, directions. Finally, after a couple of mobile calls to Karthik, I arrived about 10 minutes late at the CCI.

It does not take a genius to figure out that without numbers and addresses, it is difficult to locate a place; that it is wasteful and frustrating. It is not as if addresses and numbers are a modern new-fangled invention that requires all sorts of fancy high-tech equipment and massive amounts of capital spending to put in place. Any idiot with half a brain can figure out that without a proper addressing scheme, people waste time and effort needlessly. Yet, I notice the almost universal lack of a rational street addressing in India.

Sure, in business cards you see addresses printed. But it is not an address but rather a description of the general neighborhood. “In front of this, and behind that, and near to the other, and opposite something else, close to the cinema.” The addresses generally run into 4 or 5 lines. Even then you are not likely to find it in a hurry.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This morning, I thought I would call the Confederation of Indian Industries offices in New Delhi. I am invited to speak at their 6th Social Summit Dec 17-19 “National Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility” in Bhopal. It was supposed to be just a simple call to ask for a list of participants.

After over an hour of my time and significant costs in long distance charges, I still don’t have that information. I had no idea of how difficult it was going to be. I dialed the number, it kept ringing and then the phone system finally timed-out. I called again a few minutes later. It was busy. I tried all four listed numbers; they were either busy, or were not answered. I tried again after a while. This time someone answered. They mumbled something, as if they were answering the phone while asleep.

“Hello, is this CII?”

“Yes.”

“I am trying to reach Ms. xyz.”

Without a word of reply, I find myself listening to muzak. It goes on for few minutes. Finally, someone picks up the phone. I could hear the person talking to someone else in their office with the phone off the hook and I was kept waiting. I hung up after a few minutes. After a while, I re-started the whole process. After another 20 minutes, I was finally speaking to someone. Left a message asking for information.

Later in the afternoon, when I still had not heard back from them, I started the whole thing once again. This time I lost my cool. When the operator answered, I said, “Listen to me carefully, and don’t transfer me before you fully comprehend what I am looking for.” Then I carefully explained her job to her.

To cut a long story short, this was not a 2-bit fly-by-night operation I was trying to reach. It was an industry association representing thousands of firms. One would have expected a little bit of professionalism. They don’t even know how to answer the phone. Their shabbiness is astonishingly blatant. Surely, this is no professionally run organization.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The two anecdotes illustrate a larger point that I would like to make. I submit that for India to develop, there has to be a change in our outlook. We need to think very carefully about what exactly the problems are and then think very deeply about what are the appropriate solutions for them.

Economists like to remind people that learning by doing is a very powerful device. If you are at the fore-front of some technology, the only way to learn is by doing and making mistakes and so on. But I believe that if you are not at the cutting-edge, then learning by imitating is the way to go. It does not require a rocket scientist to keep ones eyes open, note very carefully how others have solved a specific problem, and simply copy that solution if it is applicable. That way you don’t have to pay the price of having to discover the solution and yet you get the benefit of having the solution. This is the advantage that can come of being a late-comer. Among siblings, it is often the case that the second born appears to be sharper than the first born because of this learning by imitation.

Development economists often wonder about the so-called convergence hypothesis, that is, developing countries grow faster than developed countries and eventually catch up. One of the factors that governs the rate of growth of an economy is the level of knowledge. Information internalized leads to knowledge. Now these days information is no longer a really big secret: it speeds around the globe at electromagnetic speeds. Why is it then, one wonders, that the poor countries cannot use the information effectively to increase their growth rates and pull themselves out of poverty?

My contention is that merely having knowledge is not enough. The system has to be attuned to make use of that knowledge for it to be useful. In a very broad sense, it is larger ecology of the society that determines whether a give bit of knowledge or technology will be useful in a society or not. The tranfer of knowledge is a much harder problem than the transfer of technology.

In other words, you could very easily import a million PCs and tons of software from some advanced industrialized country. Or you could import the technology and build them locally. Will that have an effect on the growth rate of the economy? Marginally at best. But for real change, you would also have to the way things are perceived. That is a much harder problem to crack. It is harder because it is a soft issue — it deals with people, their belief systems, their emotions, their understanding of who they are, their ambitions and hopes, their fears and insecurities.

I come back to my original position: ICT merely provides the tools. How to effectively use the tools is not part of the software package. That cannot be imported in a box any more than merely stacking books on quantum physics in your living room makes you a physicist.

We have to change our view. Two and a half millennia ago, the historical Buddha Gautama had outlined an Eight-fold Path as the Fourth Noble Truth. While all of them are important, the most important in my opinion is that of Right View. We have to find the right way to view the problems we face. Only then can we take the first steps to fixing them. My fear is that we are too eager to rush in with technological fixes to problems that are primarily sociological.

It is ironical that we have not learnt a lesson that was taught in this land by the Buddha. He was unhappy about something. So first he decided to fully understand what the problem was and state it unequivocally. That was the First Noble Truth, the truth about dukkha. Then he figured out the cause and called it the Second Noble Truth. Then he did what I would call an existence proof, that is show that a solution does indeed exist. That was the Third Noble Truth. Finally, the Fourth Noble Truth with its Eight-fold Path.

The lesson we should have learnt is that of the systematic application of reason to any problem. First, define the problem, then understand the cause, then show that the cause can be eliminated, and then finally outline the solution.

So my advice to all those who are ICT-trigger-happy, think before you fire up the internet browser. The answer may not be there at all.