Year of Last-Minute Saves

 

Emiliano Martinez's last-minute wonder save to deny Randal  Muani proved decisive as Argentina went on to win the 2022 World Cup. In a rollercoaster of a World Cup Soccer Final, the France winger had a chance to score the winner and wrap up what could have been the greatest World Cup comeback of all time. However, the Argentina goalkeeper stayed big and made the vital save to take the tensest of finals to a penalty shootout. That save made Lionel Messi’s Dream of a world cup win possible putting him in the league comprising Maradona, Pele, and other players called as the greatest of the Game. It was a world cup marked by behind the scene controversies but also witnessed exciting on-field games and incredible moments. It had to be a world cup in the Year 2022: a year marked by a last-minute save by maybe those in power to avoid a full-blown world war-like crisis arising out of the war in Ukraine. CIA chief Burns said that India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China's President Xi Jinping raising concern over the possibility of a nuke war probably initiated by Putin in Russia has also impacted the latter.  Though there may be many versions of the commentary on actual events, the world was on the brink of nuclear war is not a possibility that we can rule out. But as war prolongs the same vigil and sense should prevail is the hope we have from the year 2023. Ukraine has fought well as a nation against aggressors and had its people as saviors for 2022.   

Britain also hopes for a last-minute save by the new PM Rushi Sunak. The economy of Britain was impacted by Brexit, worldwide trends, and internal political instability. The US is heading to a big recession thanks to the trade war, logistics, war-generated inflation, and fiscal policies. The internal polarization of politics also resulted in some policy paralysis. The democrats were saved in midterms by some last min posturing from the far right on some contentious issues. But the world stills awaits last minute save against climate change. Natural disasters occurred worldwide as a manifestation of climate change. Maybe the world was saved from recession thanks to the economies of India and China. Economic projections about the Indian economy are bullish as it overtook the UK this year in GDP to be the fifth largest economy. India will become the third economic superpower by 2037 and a $ 10 trillion economy by 2035. The pandemic had a particularly devastating effect in absolute terms and India was impacted, yet the economy bounced back. This is thanks to resilience, strong fundamentals, political stability, and fiscal discipline.  India is a hot unicorn destination in 22. India has seen 21 startups entering the unicorn club. With this, the total count of Indian tech startups that have ever entered the unicorn club to date stands at 107. These 107 Indian unicorns have raised more than $94 Bn in funding to date and are valued at around $344 Bn combined. Job market has risen and unemployment has gone down. But we should guard against populist agendas and freebie culture promoted and popularized by certain political segments. Worldwide we saw tech layoffs in Silicon Valley. Indian services companies did well despite issues like attrition, and lower demand. The twitter –Musk saga continues with the politicization of social media.  Social media still continues to find solutions to regulation. Government-Big tech showdown will also result in changing models and disruption  

China and Pakistan continue to offer challenges along the borders. The political instability in Pakistan and Covid related issues faced recently by China have not been helpful to mitigate the challenges as we have seen in Arunachal incursions of china and the political campaign backed by Pakistan on world forums despite India showing significant success on Kashmir internal security. India has played its cards well in international diplomacy. Its initiatives like Quad and tight-walk in the UN during the Ukraine crisis safeguarding its own interests were really commendable. As we welcomed the first-ever lady president from the tribal community and saw India taking up the leadership of the Security Council in its turn we have challenges marked for 2023.  

Maharashtra saw power change due to political turmoil resulting from some strange opportunistic political alliances which were initiated after the fractured 2019 mandate.  The level of politics is dismal and we need a last-minute savior with some old principled political alignments to steer the State Governance out of corruption, divisive politics, and chaos.  Gujarat saw record confirmation for BJP.  HP followed the trend of anti-incumbency. AAP is trying to gain popularity through some populist agendas Congress had its farcical internal elections. It needs a turnaround and new ideas in 2023. Regional parties have relevance at the state level, but they need a unifying actor and factor centrally. We need constructive opposition in Democracy.  

The year started with the Omicron variant and the virus is making news again as we end the year. Vaccine programs like the stupendous effort we saw in India have helped but the mutating nature of the virus, as well as the limitations of healthcare systems, pose few threats. The turmoil in Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, Africa, S America continues to create losses of life and property.   

This year we lost many celebrities including one of the greatest voices ever heard on this planet: Lata Mangeshkar. It was a great loss to our individual lives. It was annus-horribilis for two Indian lifelines: Cricket and Bollywood. Indian cricket team lost vital tests to England and SA, lost the Asia cup, and T20 world cup. The team management has lost a clue in team composition, and strategies. Let’s hope 2023 induces changes starting with management and team leadership. Bollywood lost its connection with the audience as the audience is catered to some good content on OTT and streaming platforms. Bollywood definitely needs a savior.  

2023 poses new challenges for all. Hope we meet them

 

Missing a Spot Kick

 

Imagine you are the Captain of your National Soccer team.  You hold the most contentious job of captaining a team that carries aspirations of a Soccer crazy nation that is craving to reach its past Glory of a World Cup Win. Your team is trailing by a Goal against the arch-rival neighbors who also happen to be incumbent champions and whose fans have lived your Nation’s dream.  This is a high-pressure knock-out quarter-final game. And your team has a golden chance to equalize in the dying minutes of the Game. The match then goes into extra time and possibly penalties giving your team every chance to seize the moment and convert it into a win.  Your team has secured a penalty kick. Penalty kick situation offers more probability of striking a goal for the team taking it against a Goalkeeper who has very less chance to save it.  Statistically, 79% of penalties have been scored in normal time since 1978. You have in past scored many penalties including one in the same game earlier. Imagine the pressure and the tension. And you miss the penalty by a long way. The goalkeeper has got to do nothing to save it. You have kicked it out in the orbit. There is no excuse.  There is no one else to blame or be credited for a save. You are humiliated in front of millions of your fans who now are jeering you having seen them cheer you throughout. You are in a very lonely place then and maybe the rest of your life. Welcome to the World of Harry Kane: English Soccer Captain. 

In life, we are in his shoes many times in our profession, in our academics, in our hobbies, and in our personal life. You are supposed to deliver a certain outcome. You have done your best and are prepared to deliver the results like any other day in the office. But you somehow make a mess out of it. There is no one of nothing to blame. You get a brain freeze or you are pressurized, and someone makes some comments which preoccupy your mind and you miss the moment. It happens to everyone. I myself was on the receiving end during a cultural program. I had rehearsed my part to my satisfaction. During practices, things were so smooth. A totally unrelated incident just prior to the event kind of occupied my attention span but again that was no reason to really impact. And I forgot my lines. This was the first time it happened to me first. There is always a first time to everything as they say. I wished the stage kind of engulfed me into its space below the surface as they say in my native tongue or I could vanish in thin air. Many people panic during exams. Some people fumble their interviews and presentations. There are serious consequences. Lack of study or preparation can be understood but many times there is no lack of effort or preparation. You bungle period. We have seen many contestants on singing shows forget lines. The judges also are seen to console the participants by narrating incidences of legends and great singers making mistakes in live shows. Life moves on. It is equally important to take this in your stride and try to feel the pressure of past mistakes to impact future performances. Incidentally had a performance later which I ensured was not impacted. It’s very important to recover. I remember the Roberto Baggio ad. He also missed a penalty in the 1994 shootout but came back to score in 98. Now we will see how Harry Kane comes out of this 

Having studied many articles to help understand the root cause of missing the spot kicks of our life,  I conclude it is  something called the fear of failure. How to tackle the fear of failure? The first task is to find where you think the fear comes from, and try to understand it as an outsider. Having an all-or-nothing mentality leaves you with nothing sometimes. Have a clear vision for what you’d like to accomplish but include learning something new in your goal. Cultivating a growth mindset where you aim for improvement and learning makes you much less likely to fail. That mindset involves failure, but as long as they achieve their vision of telling great stories, all the stumbling blocks are just opportunities to grow. Our society is obsessed with success, but it’s important to recognize that even the most successful people encounter failure. It’s up to you to notice your negative self-talk and identify triggers. The voice inside your head has a great effect on what you do. Replace negative thoughts with positive facts about yourself and the situation. You’ll be able to create a new mental script that you can reach for when you feel negativity creeping in. Fear of the unknown might keep you from taking a new job. Weigh the pros and cons, and imagine potential successes and failures in making such a life-altering decision. Knowing how things could turn out might help you get unstuck. There are times when the worst case could be absolutely devastating. In many cases, if something bad happens, it won’t be the end of the world. It’s important to define how bad the worst-case scenario is in the grand scheme of your life. Sometimes, we give situations more power than they deserve. In most cases, a failure is not permanent. It never hurts to have a backup plan. The last thing you want to do is scramble for a solution when the worst has happened. Having a backup plan gives you more confidence to move forward and take calculated risks. Finally, even a less-than-ideal situation can be a great opportunity to make changes and grow. Dig deep enough, and you’re bound to find the silver lining. When you’ve learned that “failure” is an opportunity for growth instead of a death sentence, you conquer the fear of failure. 

 

 

Shop Right

 

I have heard that the term Black Friday is used by Marketeers even as far as India to attract consumers. As economies got interlinked these cultural invasions are natural. In the US, many people end up spending more on products they don’t need. Yes, buying is a compulsion as noted by behavioral scientists. How did it all start: Black Friday?

The last Thursday of November is marked as Thanksgiving Day in the US. The history behind this is controversial but from the face value of it, the notion of thanking people around you or those who are part of your existence is wonderful. The Friday after Thanksgiving is marked as Black Friday for shopaholics here. There are discounts, and special merchandise to woo buyers. It’s the number game.  The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping but to the financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk worked together to buy up as much as they could of the nation’s gold, hoping to drive the price sky-high and sell it for astonishing profits. On that Friday in September, the conspiracy finally unraveled, sending the stock market into free fall and bankrupting everyone from Wall Street barons to farmers. The most commonly repeated story behind the Thanksgiving shopping-related Black Friday tradition links it to retailers. As the story goes, after an entire year of operating at a loss (“in the red”) stores would supposedly earn a profit (“went into the black”) on the day after Thanksgiving, because holiday shoppers blew so much money on discounted merchandise.   This is a bit inaccurate story behind the tradition. Actually, back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Not only were Philly cops not able to take the day off, but they had to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic. Shoplifters also took advantage of the bedlam in stores and made off with merchandise, adding to the law enforcement headache. By 1961, “Black Friday” had caught on in Philadelphia.  The term didn’t spread to the rest of the US until the late 1980s. Then retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the “red to black” concept of the holiday mentioned earlier, and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America’s stores finally turned a profit.  

But as I said most of us end up buying things we don’t need. Searching for an explanation for compulsive shopping, We all know that buying more new stuff is bad for the planet—the production and use of household goods and services were found to drive 60% of greenhouse gas emissions—but every time you buy something, you  get a little jolt of happiness that’s hard to give up.  All things being equal, we are predisposed to try to acquire more and more stuff and to try and work less to get it. We are, after all, evolved from blobs that survived because their networks of cells learned to repeat decisions like moving towards a tasty treat or backing away from a predator.  As per researchers, we have some 86 billion neurons, the “action cells” in the brain, that are constantly creating circuits to reinforce rewarding behavior, releasing dopamine as they do so, in order to help us learn how to get a reward. We seek out those releases in dopamine, and at the same time, learn to repeat the actions that lead to them. Our brains especially like the release of more dopamine—when we get an unexpected good reward. The good feeling associated with unexpected rewards is partly why we like shopping. People get addicted to things when the appeal of getting that new, unexpected reward doesn’t fade with time. Some scientists argue that modern society is so addicted to shopping because so many people are stuck in repetitive mind-numbing jobs—buying things is one of the few ways they are able to do something out of the ordinary. All humans are different. Some might have learned in childhood that overspending can lead to poverty, which made them thrifty even if their parents weren’t. We have learned over time that the key to survival is acquiring more resources, but the brain also has a tremendous amount of plasticity. The challenge is that our systems are designed for short-term decision-making, and curtailing our own individual consumption for the long-term health of the planet may not benefit an individual person today.   

The best way to alter the overconsumption habits that have gotten us here is not to stop buying things completely; a better solution may be to substitute new rewards for the old rewards that we know, in the long term, aren’t good.  Buying used items is an elegant substitution that could help fulfill our desire to acquire. You can buy something that’s new to you, and get that same good feeling of an unexpected reward without requiring a company to extract more resources from the earth.  The second-hand economy is developing. Repairing is in vogue. And even companies like Apple, which long resisted calls from consumer groups to allow customers to repair their devices, rather than just buy a new one, now have a Self Service Repair Store that provides repair manuals and genuine Apple parts. Creating social rewards can also help nudge more people toward behavioral change. Already, there are so-called Buy Nothing groups cropping up, forming communities to help people exchange used goods—and there’s a hashtag #BuyNothingDay circulating on social media aimed at discouraging people from shopping unnecessarily on Black Friday. 

  

 

Hosting a Ghost

 

This is a spooky time of Year. Summer has gone past and we enter into the crisp air of the fall season. Fall in New England is famous for its kaleidoscopic exuberance of colors which render a surreal and almost unreal experience. It is also a time to invoke the spirits as we close in on Halloween.  In India, we observed a fortnight dedicated to our deceased ancestors which ended on New moon day famous as “Sarva Pitari Amavasya”. That definitely calls for a discussion on Paranormal or supernatural Phenomena popularly known as Ghosts. That’s a topic very close to the heart of many. Imagine discussing this on a dark night and amidst a spooky ambiance with close-knit friends: Sharing Ghost Stories over a warm cuppa on a cool autumn night. Many of us surely have been there and done that.   

Do you believe in Ghost: How many times we have been asked that? Many of us believe in the positive energy beyond our explanation. They may call it Divinity. Nature or the universe loves to establish a balance. To balance this positive energy there must be a negative one. Some may call it evil. Can ghosts be a small form of that energy? So why not believe in this argument?  We culturally believe the Ghosts to be some form of spirits whose desires are unfulfilled and the souls lie in limbo between life and salvation or rebirth. Different cultures have multiple variations and explanations.  The entertainment industry has used the horror genre to an extent of overkill barring a few exceptions like Omen or some parts of paranormal activity where you really tend to believe in the Ghost, the rest all turn into a gory fest. All Ghost stories have one thing in common very few people claim to be protagonists, whereas most know of someone who went through that. But having assumed the veracity of those few, for me conclusion lies that our minds are the hosts where Ghosts reside. They are figments or part of our imagination and nothing more. Rest all is entertainment.  

Recently on this topic, I studied a psychological paper explaining whether Ghosts exist. Are ghosts real? The paper said that the current science can’t prove that there are spirits walking through walls or screaming below floorboards. Our spooky sightings, however, have certainly felt real. Humans have been spotting specters for as long as we’ve been around, and to some degree, we can explain why. Thanks to campfire tales and multimillion-dollar horror flicks, spooky notions can infiltrate our subconscious even without any real-life supernatural encounters. We have such a tendency because the human mind is highly suggestible. We’ve evolved to take cues from the outside world to escape threats like an animal chasing us, so a well-placed hint can make us see things that aren’t there. Our preconceptions can also cause us to find supernatural evidence in garbled noise or blurred images. If a ghost hunter or psychic instructs you to listen for a certain phrase, then your brain (which loves identifying patterns) tries as hard as it can to create those exact words from various bits of random sound. We are conditioned. According to the experts, there are six reasons that human minds believe that Ghosts exist.  

First of that is: You’d Rather Not Risk It. What if they exist? It’s easy to disregard the notion of paranormal activity in broad daylight, but everything changes when you head into a dark basement. Unfamiliar and threatening environments kick our survival instincts up a notch. Our ancestors had to keep a constant lookout for stealthy hazards like leopards and snakes, and folks with a “better safe than sorry” attitude were more likely to survive and reproduce. When it comes to our habitats, humans tend to think of places as safe when they offer two things: prospect (a clear view of the outside world) and refuge (the opportunity to hide from danger). A poorly lit old house gives us neither of those two accommodations, blocking our ability to see what’s around the corner and providing plenty of shadows in which malicious entities could lurk.   

The second point which makes you believe in Ghost is at the bottom of your subconscious mind you need company. Some occurrences provided “instantaneous relief from painful grief symptoms,” while others strengthened preexisting religious views. Mental Benefits such as a sense of connection to others is something you can derive from believing in their existence  

The third reason is that your brain is unwell. Ghostly occurrences can be the result of larger problems in our gray matter. For some, hearing voices or experiencing a vision can be an early indicator of medical conditions such as schizophrenia. Some evidence even suggests that people with underlying brain disorders tend to have paranormal confrontations that are more intense and negative than the average brush with the beyond.  

The fourth reason is sometimes as simple as Bad Vibrations and Sound. Sometimes people experience an otherworldly encounter simply because something in their environment is making a strange noise that sends their bodies into disarray. Most of us don’t regularly carry around audio gauges, so it’s hard to know how many hauntings might be explained by a buzzing fan or a rumbling fridge.  

Fifth Reason is the Place: A far more troubling circumstantial peculiarity is the notion that mold and other pollutants—often found in old buildings—can mess with people’s minds. Disturbances in the planet’s magnetosphere, which are usually caused by anomalous outer-space events like solar flares, might mess with the inner workings of the brain, scrambling our perceptions in strange ways. So far, the evidence supporting this hypothesis is pretty thin.  

Finally, Your Mind is playing tricks: seizures in the temporal lobe—the area of your noggin that processes visual memory and spoken language—might trigger ghost sightings. Electrical disturbances in this brain area could make us feel connected to otherworldly realms.  

So relax and be entertained but don’t get scared: Ghosts live in your mind.