a small detour

ok i really should continue with my second life story, but i want to mull over something i heard today.

a young entrepreneur came to see me and every two seconds into his pitch, he was saying : ‘Oh you know nandini,  i’m all heart. so far i have never used my head and it has stood me in good stead’ (sorry i’m sure he didn’t mean it to rhyme, but he did and it does sound like a bad haiku :))

and he looked puffed-up-proud of that.

very puzzled i was. and am. why are heart and head mutually exclusive?and why is the heart person chest-thumping (pun incidental) against head and vice-versa (if he banged his head, that would be a bit extreme :))

seriously guys, the head guy it seems will make it sound like the heart guy is all emotion, not a single logical bone in his body, etc etc. what a wimp!

and the heart guy will make it sound like the head guy is cruel and dodgy and what else but heartless !

and see how this acquires a gender connotation.. when men say women are all heart, what they really mean is that we are batty and we wouldn’t know to find our phone in the mess that we call our handbag.

and when women say men are head-bound, what they mean is that they are cold, unflappable and very matlabi (they worm their way into getting what they want).

i’m sure if our heart and head came to know of how disparagingly we think of them,  they’d gang up against us.

which may not be such a bad thing after all 🙂

 

an act of randomness

i came back to bangalore, a little over four years ago, as my dad has parkinsons and at that time the medical opinion was that he was terminal. as both my parents were getting on in years, i wanted to be around and be of use to them. so going back to a corporate career which meant 25 day travel and 16 hour workdays was meaningless.

a chance encounter with Dr Nagesh Malavalli who was the Principal of M.P.Birla Institute of Management, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan opened up a new conversation for possibility, teaching.

let me clarify, it’s not that i had not thought of teaching as an opportunity at all. in fact when i did my pre-doctoral from d.school, all i wanted to do was teach and research and write. at that time, a corporate career was nowhere on my radar and when it happened out of the blue, i embraced it with a zeal and zest that made my father comment that i had sold myself to mammon!

so when i wanted to sign out of the corner office, even as i was packing my bags, there were four things i had in mind that i wanted to do. teach. learn music. write. do my Ph.d.

i’ve done the first three and lack the drive to do the last 😦

when nagesh invited me to teach, i remember he showed me the curriculum and asked : what subject do you want to teach. 20 years in the corporate sector across continents and domains pretty much equips you to teach anything . i had almost said yes to marketing when he asked me if i’d be interested in entrepreneurship as it was very difficult to get people to teach it.

i’m not exaggerating, but that minute i knew i was embarking on something really exciting. i did not expect it to become as pervasive in my life as it has now, certainly not. but i knew i’d have fun with it. and i said to nagesh, let me give it a shot.

and therein lies the story of my second life.

shareware

just thought i’d share this with you guys… it’s the link to my interview on rediff.com

http://business.rediff.com/special/2009/oct/26/inter-interview-with-prof-nandini-vaidyanathan.htm

from purple cow to purple hibiscus :)

absolutely must see must listen, more than anyone else, we indians know the danger of a single story that chimamanda adichie talks about…..

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

a new journey

i’m gonna start with my own evolution in the last four years:  the morphing from a bottom-line driven corporate executive to a passionate teacher and mentor.

i think i need to record this evolution for my own sake. it has all happened too quickly; too out-of-my-hand-ly and too abruptly. it’s almost as if someone else picked up the pen that i threw away and decided to have fun with it. but boy, am i glad a script that i have fallen in love with has emerged… more soon.