Read more responses here

Most disagree and say “Most  popular games  don’t require analytical thinking or planning or creativity…  MW2 (Modern Warfare for the uninitiated), probably the most popular game in recent history was just basically a rail shooter. Even the competitive component favors twitch reflexes over actual planning and tactics. WoW (World of Warcraft), the most successful game to date does not require analytical thinking or analysis.”

I have always been interested in exploring what Corporations can learn from Video Games.  Here is what are top reasons:

1. How to design the work content/ an activity that people willingly come back to regularly.

2. How to design the skill level of the task such that it is tough and yet people strive to improve their skills by working at it regularly.

3. How to design a task that is so engaging that people are motivated to sneak back to give it a shot one more time with the hope of improving their odds of success – even when they have come back home  REALLY tired.

4. How to create reward systems that are intangible and yet meaningful enough to motivate people to excel even as the tasks become harder and harder. Any game designers reading this? I would really like to get your insights.

5. How to effortless teach people to collaborate and compete with people across the world (think online games) and raise each others skill level.

The biggest insight I had was when I read that a focus on remaining (vs. completed) actions increases the motivation to move up to a more advanced level.

But the focus on completed (vs. remaining) actions increases the satisfaction derived from the present level.

The organizations would do well to perhaps motivate the high potential employees by pointing them to what remains to be achieved. This could be the approach the coach takes to motivate the high achievers as well. The feedback should focus on what hey could have done better. What are some of the opportunities they should utilize in future to go to the next level.

The rest of the steady achievers that form the majority in any group would get motivated by having them celebrate the results they have achieved rather than on the tasks that they did not complete. Their managers should take time to celebrate the current achievements much more. Their coaching would be more by looking back in time over what they have done to come to the level they have.

Does that mean that high achievers look ahead while the rest of the people revel in nostalgia? What is your take? If you know game designers who have worked on one of the top 10 games, I want to talk to them. Mail me at abhijitbhaduri@live.com

Natha (played by Omkar Das Manikpuri) and Budhia (Raghubir Yadav) are two brothers who are impoverished farmers who cannot repay their loans. The Govt has announced a “relief” of about $2000 to the family of every farmer who commits suicide. Budhia comes up with this idea of encouraging his brother to commit suicide. In a weak moment Natha succumbs to that passing thought.

The reaction of the media, the politicians, the society all provide food for satire.  Will Natha commit suicide and will the government pay up if he does – that is a question you have to see the film to find the answer.  The stakes are high. Every media channel is camping in front of Natha’s house. The politician’s want to play every card there is to get the votes needed for the upcoming election. The media is running out of patience and sound bytes. Even Natha’s son nudges him up from sleep to check how much more they all have to wait before he dies. Natha as a mute spectator to the drama and hype surrounding his own death is brilliantly conveyed right through. I have to make a special mention of Farookh Zafar who is absolutely hilarious as “Amma” – the bedridden abuse-spewing mother of the brothers.

The film is clearly resonating with audience everywhere. In its opening weekend Peepli earned Rs 21 crore in the box office at home. With 109 overseas prints it grossed another $6,40,000 ( 2.88 crore) abroad, more than some bigger recent films like Once Upon a Time in Mumbai. Peepli received one of the highest openings for a non cast film in overseas markets. So the belief that the Non Resident Indians only go for the Karan Johar variety of films is also a myth. It only proves that there are stories that are engaging and those that are not. Peepli is certainly in the first category. The film’s promos caught my attention because of the Aamir Khan brand. Since he is the producer, the film is likely to be good. Having seen the film, all I can say is that it will do well because it is a fantastic satire. It is difficult to find witty films in Bollywood of the caliber of Pushpak, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron etc. This film will certainly feature in that category.

The story is compelling. Anusha Rizvi does a superb job as the director and it is hard to believe that it is her first film. The humor and satire are brilliant and insightful. I loved the use of folk songs – Mehengai Dayan performed as only Raghubir Yadav can. The film ends with the thought provoking statistic of 8 million farmers having moved to urban areas in search of employment. That shakes the frivolous mood back to the grim reality that the film seeks to get you to take back home. Very few films can do that. This is a film that is funny and yet grim. In some strange manner it reminded me of a movie I had watched years ago – Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. The humor of Peepli Live is of the same class. The subtext shines right through. Go see it.

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Check out the official website of the film here

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971. He shared his insight on poets and poetry in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He said …

“From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”

When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the President Salvador Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

My serendipitous discovery of Neruda was through his poem  If You Forget Me. It is lyrical in the way it sways from one mood to another. I love the way it begins. When I first read this, I was in college. I saw his book of poems while browsing through books of poetry in a bookshop in Delhi.  I picked a page at random and that was this poem.

I opened this page and read the first few words. They had a sense of urgency. ” I want you to know one thing…” it began. It was conversational. How eloquently it summarizes the complexity of love when he says, “you know how this is…” I read the poem again and again. It was visual. I could see the poem flash before me long after I went back home dazed by its impact. I was even tempted to memorize the poem and then resisted that temptation. That is the worst thing to do to a poem.

I never memorize poems. When you memorize a poem, it is like putting a bird in a cage. You can see whenever you want to, but you can never see it fly.

When I wrote my second novel Married But Available, I rediscovered this poem when Keya wrote these lines for Abbey. Just the way she would. On a sheet of blue kite-paper. Who else could have introduced Abbey to this shade of love?

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Madonna reads out this poem from her song Frozen

Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines is another gem by Neruda. Watch this version recited beautifully by the Cuban American actor Andy Garcia – most remembered for his role in the film The Godfather Part III

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Pramita Bose of Asian Age newspaper spoke to me about my love for this poem Here is the interview

Also featured in the newspaper Deccan Chronicle dated 18 Aug 2010

The Wikipedia told me about the “Chinese water torture”. This was a torture that was supposed to drive its victim insane with the stress of water dripping on a part of the forehead for a very long time. It was characterized by the inconsistent pattern of water drips. Supposedly, the desire for the human brain to make a pattern of the timing between the drops will also eventually cause insanity to set in. That was then. Today that method is replaced by subjecting unsuspecting colleagues to horrible presentations that makes the water torture look almost benign. There are many reasons why presentations go haywire. You have probably suffered through many sessions where the speaker reads through what really looks like the pages of a book – except that all 5000 pages including the graphs and tables of research data – all put into one slide. The font is small enough to inspire people not delay any more the decision whether to wear specs or not. Worse still many presenters feel that the slide is like a teleprompter. They read it out line by line and imagine that the audience is either illiterate or so lazy that they will not read stuff even if it is in front of them.

Here is the big secret -

1. If you have sentences to share with your audience, use a Word document
2. If you have data and graphs to show – use Excel. Give them a printout that they can either read ahead of the meeting or can deliberate upon out after you have gone home
3. If have a conclusion to share or an idea you want them to remember use PowerPoint

The Slide Rule (pun intended): Have a single point on a slide – preferably with a visual. The visual should be about the story that goes with the slide. The slides are for the audience to remember as key take aways. Slides are not speaker notes. It is not about the slides anyway.

There are some people make presentations that makes the audience ask for more. Here is what I have learnt. There are three elements which are needed to make great presentations. Make sure your arguments have Clarity, know the audience ie Concern and present with Confidence.

CLARITY: If you could make only three slides – each slide with three words – what would they be? Till you have those three key slides don’t add any more. It could be 3 key ideas the audience should take away, 3 reasons why your idea deserves funding etc.  More than three ideas is wasted on the audience. Try asking people immediately after the presentation what they recall. You will be surprised how widespread amnesia is. So keep it simple. Here is a fascinating talk by Steve Jobs given to students at Stanford for their commencement address. Notice the title: How to Live Before Your Die

Ways to Build Clarity in Your Presentation

i)   Structure the talk around some questions.

ii)  Three most popular questions that help structure your presentation : Whats the big idea I am suggesting; What data or evidence led me to that idea; How will it improve your life?

iii) Use three four words that builds a mnemonic for the audience to remember your slide.

iv) Clearly think through what you want the audience to do after you have done the presentation.  What is the objective of giving this info to the audience? Is it to inform, convince or entertain? Hence what information or anecdotes will prove that point.

v)  One slide for every 2 minutes of talk time is a good thumbrule. Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule is a good guide. Here is what he says.

CONCERN: Become Persuasive, Insightful and Inspiring – not pedantic. You can do this only if you understand the audience and tailor the message. Ask yourself if it was a different audience you were presenting to, how would you structure your presentation differently? What do they know about the subject that you can build upon or challenge? How about starting with three startling and unknown facts about your topic.

1. Encourage participation by asking some opinions. Questions initially should not be to “test” the audience level of knowledge. You are the expert and the audience knows it. That’s why you are a speaker. Get them excited about your idea.
2. The whole presentation is like a story. Make it memorable. Adult learning is more when they feel they will use the information to become better. Share how that could benefit them. Tell them how to do it in easy steps.
3. Learn to use multiple media – maybe a short film clip? A screenshot of blogs that they could read later?

CONFIDENCE : It is not about the slides. It is just your turn to tell a story. Begin with interesting/ fascinating factoids. Here is Professor Clay Shirky talking about What is Cognitive Surplus? If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. That’s why you should listen to him. Watch him present like a master storyteller. His first words are the first lines of a story. That’s how he explains this stuff in a manner even someone like me can understand

Did you notice how he began with “The story starts in Kenya…” He proves the point that skillful presenters can make a complex concept easy to understand. They just use stories to feed their audience with their idea – a morsel at a time. That’s why I am a big fan of the TED.com site. It is a collection of stories that explain interesting ideas. Each speaker gets 18 minutes to engage the audience with their story.

I love the talk given by author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor on The Soft power of India. Notice how he connects the TED elements of Technology Entertainment and Design to what India is about to make his a very compelling presentation. Remember the old saying, “Tell them what you will tell them (intro), tell them what you have to tell them (your main idea) and tell them what you just told them (recap of key ideas).”

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Some related stuff

Download my cartoon. Click Here … ok… CLICK HERE instead

Why do TED talks last for 18 minutes? You must watch the video for some good insights Click here

My talk at TEDxGurgaon on What Makes People Happy. Click Here

Guy Kawasaki lists making a good PowerPoint as one of the ten things you must learn (in school).

Malavika Velayanikal of  DNA newspaper spoke to couple of us on the question “Do Indians Have a Sense of Humor?” Here is the interview reproduced with her permission.

Let’s admit it. As Indians, we aren’t really famous for our sense of humor. It is a rather serious business, which, alas, we haven’t mastered. Not yet, at least. We reserve our peals of laughter for the jokes on ‘them’. And the ‘them’, obviously is Tamilian if you are Punjabi, Sikh if you are Malayali, or Nepali if you are Bengali. The pot of trouble is on high flame if the joke’s on ‘us’. For us Indians, humor is a vexing issue.

It could be because we are a very religious country. At least, Osho thought so: “For centuries sad people have dominated religion. They have expelled laughter – from the churches, from the mosques, from the temples….” To him, seriousness was a disease that has been praised, respected and honored; and Indians, “are serious people” – very religious, very holy.
Forbidden and dangerous territory as it is, a few brave men and women do test the waters. The ambitious ones tread on toes, and are quickly slain. The less smart ones are flayed. The perfect ones, survive.
Comedies are galore on television. Many are ghastly, but the pleasing TRP ratings have ensured more converts. Filmmakers are on to it too. So are stand-up comedians.

Author of bestseller Mediocre But Arrogant, Abhijit Bhaduri, feels we have learned to laugh at ourselves, as Indians have become more confident. “Only someone who is secure within can laugh at himself. Self deprecating humor is reflective of a self-assured person. I believe economic prosperity and exposure to a global environment has expanded the variety of jokes we laugh at today. So as a country we are discovering the joys of a global fare.”

While some believe humor has just arrived there are many who have been dabbling with it for years.
Of course, we have a sense of humor and a resilient one, argues Mahesh Ramchandani, a freelance writer for television, who has scripted several of the Movers and Shakers episodes. “In spite of all that the politicians have done to us and to this country, we still manage to laugh. I think everyone has a sense of humor, including Suresh Kalmadi, although you won’t see him laughing too much these days,” he says.

Swedish writer Zac O’Yeah, whose latest book, Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan, an international bestseller, has always peppered his crime thrillers with humor. After living in India for over a decade, he sometimes feels there’s more humor in India than in most other countries in the world. “I think perhaps the unique thing is that we who live in India often straddle multiple cultures at the same time. Somebody can be Bengali by birth, but grow up and live their life in Bangalore, and also be completely fluent in English. My belief is that the more complex your own cultural situation is, with a variety of influences from different sources, the easier it is for you to appreciate the comedy of life.”
We obviously knew how to laugh at ourselves in the past, says Reena I Puri, editor of the Amar Chitra Katha series. “Indian folktales are full of amazing humour. Look at Tenali Raman, Gopal Bhand or Birbal.” She believes that Indian television humour has a long way to go, but “if I think of some of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s movies with Amol Palekar or Utpal Dutt, they were simply great.”

For O’Yeah, the classic humor exemplified by RK Narayan or the naughty humor in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Kamalakanta are the highest ideals – both quite advanced for their time. He enjoys an occasional standup comedy performance “by intelligent comedians like Aporup Acharya, for instance”.

But playing with wit, and escaping unscathed is rather tricky. Shashi Tharoor tweaked Mahabharata – almost as holy as it could get – married it to history, recast it with politics and won worldwide applause. But one stray tweet on holy cows and cattle-class had him reprimanded instantly, and retreating in haste. So writers like Ramchandani are doubly careful. How far one can push the envelope is a tough call.

“One has to weigh one’s words all the time because what is permissible today was offensive yesterday and what is taboo today will become permissible tomorrow,” he says. No television producer wants to lose a TV show and so they keep a close watch on their writers and keep showing us pictures of starving people in poor countries; this motivates us to self-censor, he says, jokingly.

The moral police used to be the only police to watch out for earlier, but now we also have the politically correct (PC) police watching over us, Ramchandani says. “While the moral police gets offended if we take a potshot at their sacred cows such as god, religion, and so on, the PC has their own sacred cows and so, for example, at one time you couldn’t get a pro-gay piece into the media, now you can’t get a non-pro-gay piece in because the ‘liberal’ Taliban is watching. Some will say that is a good thing, which is exactly how the moral police defends itself,” he says.

“My humor is a survival kind of one,” says writer Shinie Antony. “I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up – partly because my report cards were a joke.” All her books and writings are humourous, but her wit, she says is very self deprecatory. “There is a thin line between offending someone and being funny, which I have never crossed,” she says.
So says O’Yeah: “Even if as a novelist I prefer a comic genre, my writing isn’t about having fun at some particular person’s [or a community's] expense.” He enjoys “a fairly gentle type of generic humour and which is mostly actually targeting myself [if it targets anything at all] or my own preconceived notions, or my own stupidity. In fact, I would like to claim that my humour is almost of the philosophical kind, but if I said that probably the community of philosophers would burn my effigy.” That was a joke, by the way, he quickly adds.
Politics seems like the favourite fodder of television humour. There is much entertainment in it, and on live Parliament debates, our politicians perform better than most comedians do. Laloo Yadav, Mayawati, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, and Mamata Banerjee top the charts for chiding comedians. But political sensibilities are also quick to hurt, and the ‘party’ often cracks down on the artiste as well as his subjects.

Once, a television show that Ramchandani was working on made some nasty jokes about gangsters. He recalls receiving anonymous calls telling them to take it easy. “We’re particularly careful not to offend the feelings of gangsters and terrorists, because they are very sensitive people and also own guns, certain politicians who will remain unnamed and George Bush – because a channel, which will remain unnamed, that was airing one of our shows had given us clear instructions that we were not to make any jokes about George Bush. No kidding!” he says.

Bhaduri too has ruffled several feathers with his wit. If you are a good humor writer, you would most certainly offend someone who is the butt of the jokes, he says. “One of the Professors of Mathematics at XLRI had told me I had caricatured him unfairly in Mediocre But Arrogant. A short story about the futility of New Year’s resolutions drew the flak of an erstwhile colleague who claimed that the work-shirking, scheming person in the story was modeled on him. At the alumni meet of XLRI last December, a classmate came up and said that the character of Ayesha in Married But Available was modeled on her and that she didn’t quite like that.”

The cultural elite of the country, after chuckling through hours of Seinfield, Monty Python and Woody Allen, are now sampling the slew of stand-up comedy shows live in the city. Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi often get to enjoy live performances by American, British and Australian comedians. The recent Russell Peters’ show in the city was sold out every day. Local comedians like Vir Das and Ruby Chakraborty are popular as well.

We could argue on the cultural divide of humor in India for hours, and get nowhere. A sense of humor is, after all, a very personal thing. “That’s why it’s called ‘a sense’, I suppose,” says O’Yeah. It will differ between different people depending on social class, cultural background and so on, he adds.

Everybody has a sense of humour. Only the degree of it varies, feels Shinie Antony. To her, humour is an essential defence mechanism of the mind. “How you cope with a situation without losing your sanity.” And laughter is addictive. “It is like applause,” she says. “But humorists must learn where to stop with the jokes.”
In their quest for chuckles, comics could get carried away. After all, only blurred lines demarcate the boundaries between humor, flippancy and offence. So, funnymen, beware, when you go searching for that funny bone.

What do you think? Do economically prosperous nations produce more variety of humor? Do people who laugh at themselves make better colleagues?

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Download my cartoon from here and feel free to use it.