My last two posts were about great teachers and about life in Calcutta. Rama informed me about the passing away of someone who could be identified with both posts: Fr Beckers. Read Rama’s post, and you can figure out what an impact the man had.

We were really privileged to have been at St Xavier’s. I don’t know what it was about the place, to have attracted so many wonderful teachers, people with genuine gifts and calling, people who gave their lives to the institution. It was the kind of place that made you want to break into school before opening time, even though you had a happy and contented home life. I remember doing just that once, climbing over the metal gates at what used to be the hostel entrance on Short St (it may have been on Wood St, can’t actually remember which one was which). And just as I tried to jump off the top of the gate (it was a solid metal gate with spikes on top) my trouser leg got snared by one of the spikes, along with a teensy bit of leg, and I hung upside down in agony until help arrived. Those gates didn’t open till seven, and I wanted to get in twenty minutes early.

That’s what my schooling was like. It was like that because of the sheer passion and commitment and quality of the teachers I had, from 1963 to 1979. Initially I was at Miss P Hartley’s Private School, in a converted stables in Landsdowne Road, then I moved over to St Xavier’s in what was called Small School in 1966, crossed the road to Big School in 1970, then moved across the quadrangle to College in 1976.

I am sure many of you had similar experiences. One day I will figure out what motivated the Miss P Hartleys of this world, the Fr Goreuxs, the Fr Bouches, the Fr Beckers, the Fr Huarts. One day I will figure out what motivated the Viannas and the Sens and the Bhowmicks and the Samajpatis and the Engineers. They helped make me me.
So here’s to great teachers everywhere. We owe them a lot.

I don’t actually differentiate between the time I spend surfing the web, commenting on other blogs or posting to this one. It’s all one to me. And most of the time the routine’s similar. I realise I have a parcel of time where I can do this, I fix myself a cup of camomile or green tea, switch on my Mac, choose some music to listen to and begin.
When it comes to choosing the music, I have a favourite “random” approach:

• 1. Sort the songs by “time”.
• 2. Scan the list very quickly, going from shortest onwards.
• 3. Somewhere after the 2 minutes 30 seconds point, start looking for an interesting sequence of tracks.
• 4. Such a sequence should be at least five songs long.
• 5. Select a song to start with somewhere close to this sequence.
• 6. Listen away.

Other times I sort the music alphabetically by artist or song, then choose a start point in the list, pick out ten songs I feel like listening to, one at a time. Or I go into Recently Added. Sometimes I just pick an album or an artist.

Well, today was a Pick Ten Out After Sorting Artists Alphabetically kind of day. And some of the songs I picked took me back to some wonderful times in Calcutta.

Memories. Listening to Bertie Da Silva for the first time, after Ian Hassan had introduced me to him, when I was looking for someone to add to the 1976 Folkswagen roster [Folkswagen was a charity concert I was helping to organise]. Hearing Bertie sing Today I Killed A Man and Sugaree. That was the start of a great time with Bertie, as we went to university, Bertie reading English, me reading Economics; we hit most of the intercollege festivals together, I was on the quiz circuit those days, and roadie-ing with Bertie, Mel, Fuzz et al; in fact Bertie, Mel and I even started a poetry magazine, Psalms, which managed to last all of one issue; yes I have a copy. One. [I still have an audio tape of Bertie singing the White Plains song. Talking about White Plains, did you know they were a “manufactured” band coming out of the Flowerpot Men stable? The same Flowerpot Men who sang Let’s Go To San Francisco, an hour or so after Flowers In The Rain got BBC Radio One on the “Move” in September 1967. ]

You know I say all my opensource thoughts were influenced more by Jerry Garcia than by anyone else? Well, it was Bertie who made sure that my head stayed Dead during those tumultuous days. A message to any reader who knows where Bertie is right now: If You See Him, Say Hello. From me. Write to me at [email protected] if you find out.

Incidentally, Bertie used to call himself Wilberforce in those days, and was the catalyst that made me delve deeply into William Wilberforce’s life. What a great man. We should hear a lot more about Wilberforce next year, as the tercentenary of his birth approaches.

Memories. Listening to Gyan singing How Far, to Gyan and Jayashree singing Slip Sliding Away. Again at home. [Disclosure: Jayashree is my cousin, she and Gyan are married, I’ve known Jayashree since 1957 and Gyan since 1972]. They too influenced a great deal of my musical taste, we had some truly fabulous times together as Vir (Lakshman), Viraf (Mehta), Vishnu (Shahaney), and I, sometimes aided by Vineet (Katyal) acted as the travelling crowd for what was then Sugarfoot. And now I hear that Gyan and Jayashree have formed Skinny Alley, and have released an album called Escape The Roar. Sadly I can’t seem to be able to buy it online anywhere. There’s only one thing for it. I have to get to Calcutta soon.

Memories. Listening to Moses Ashkenazy singing Forty Thousand Headmen. To Pete Siller doing a wonderful May You Never. Sadly neither of them are around any more, may their souls rest in peace. I still see Anne Siller occasionally in London and Edinburgh, and Michael Ashkenazy when I visit Michal (nee Silliman) in New York.

Memories. Being with many of the people named as we went to listen to Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd playing Desafinado at the Academy of Fine Arts. [Isn’t it something else, for a small word like Desafinado to pack in the richness of meaning in “slightly out of tune” ?] Getting the Jazz Samba album signed by them. [I wonder what happened to that album? Life was such a haze as I left Calcutta with everything packed into a single suitcase after spending all my life there, six months after my dad died, all of twenty-six years ago].

Seems like such a long time ago, I was walking down a lonely road, getting tired of dreaming alone.

Many of you know that I am a bibliophile. I don’t just read books, I collect them. And, once I’ve built my school, I intend to add book-restorer and bookbinder to my hobby list. I find them fascinating.

One of the genres I collect is Science and Technology. And, wherever and whenever possible, I try and get first editions, signed to me, by the author, usually when I am standing in front of them. Where this is not possible, I look for autographed signed first editions, preferably association copies.

So you can imagine my delight when I came across a pristine copy of Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, with an inlaid autograph of the great man. And what an autograph.

The card said:

I don’t understand why people collect autographs. Could you please write and explain it to me?

Yours, Richard P Feynman.

No wonder the sequel to that book was called What Do You Care What Other People Think?

This unending curiosity, this single-minded passion to question things that they don’t understand, this is what sets apart great teachers from all others. Maybe it sets apart real teachers from all others. I have had the privilege of knowing many such people, and for this I am extremely grateful.

In Business As Unusual, Hugh De Pree says of Einstein “We may take heart in knowing that a part of the genius of Albert Einstein was his inability to understand the obvious”.

And I think this is where blogs are fantastic. They demolish the barriers to entry that are often present in society, barriers that affect curious people. Barriers that are primarily social in nature. Barriers like “I don’t want to appear stupid, but….”.

You see, people like Feynman and Einstein had the single-minded focus and energy to get over the social barriers and keep asking the stupid question. But most of us aren’t Feynmans or Einsteins. With social software and particularly with blogs and wikis, we can all ask stupid questions without feeling stupid about doing the asking. Many times, when I check something out via Google or via Wikipedia, I’m asking a stupid question. I couldn’t do that very easily at school. Actually that’s not quite true, but that’s a different matter.

Blogs are often written by people who are passionate about something, something specific. What Christopher Locke used to call Organic Gardening. Whatever gets your fancy.

Blogs are often written by people who want others to read what they say in order to receive criticism. Constructive criticism.

Blogs, like real learning, represent a two-way process. The teacher learns and the learner teaches.

I’ve said it before. Wisdom of crowds is not a mode thing. It’s a mean thing. Every person is different. And it is in that difference that we learn.

This is not an A-List blog. It never will be. Yet it’s all I want; I get maybe 300 regular readers, all with similar interests, but with different points of view. All prepared to spend time reading stuff, writing stuff, talking about stuff. Which reminds me. Last week I was at the Internet Identity Workshop, wonderfully put together by Phil Windley and Kaliya Hamlin. And sometime during the first evening, a number of us found ourselves in a Starbucks across from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Chris and Tara were there, as was Doc, and Kevin. All bloggers. All readers of each other’s blogs. All commenters on each other’s blogs. Mutual admiration society? Not really. Common interests, not always common views. And an openness and honesty that is the antithesis of the mutual whatchamacallit. And later that night we were joined by John Hagel, who was his usual enlightening and entertaining self.

Blogs are conversations. Two-way. Which is why they are great ways for us to learn.

Some of you have written in or texted me to check that all was well, given my extended period off air. I was tired. Trying to do too much, and needing some time to think a few things over. That’s all. Thank you for asking.

I’ve been reading Global Remix by Richard Scase over the last week or so; it’s one of those books where you can visualise the author speaking out the words. If you’ve met Richard, you’ll know what I mean. It’s a larger-than-life high-speed book concentrated on his vision of the future.

In a chapter headed Global Remix: the new corporate playlist, Richard makes some interesting comments on Generation M:

More young people attend universities and institutions of higher education than ever before. If ever there were a link between talent and qualification, this has been made tenuous by governments’ commitment to expand higher education opportunities. No longer can companies assume that university graduates have employable skills. High-performing companies demand additional qualities. They want potential employees with imagination and ideas that will make up the talent pools for future innovation and growth. Do universities encourage these qualities? Some do, but on the whole it is left to a minority of elite institutions to perform this task. But there is also the bedroom.

Many parents have teenage and younger children who spend quite a lot of time in their bedrooms. They respond to parental commands through text messaging, e-mails and, occasionally, grunts. Parents with children of this kind should be congratulated for bringing up normal, well-adjusted youngsters. But they fear for their children’s futures. Will they ever be employable? But — what is going on in the bedroom?

More often than not, the unleashing of talents far greater than those of their parents when they were of a similar age. Some of them are producing their own music CDs; not simply downloading them but actually creating them. Others are doing the same with DVDs, while even others are playing games on the internet, assembled in global-based virtual teams.

[….]

What this means this that companies will have to change. As discussed earlier, they will need to be cafe corporations. But, more than that, they will have to tolerate non-conformity and individuality in terms of attitudes, behaviour, dress codes and lifestyles. Small businesses are more likely to allow for these personal differences than large companies. That’s why the iPod generation is more attracted to working in small firms; they are given more space and personal autonomy.

I think Richard’s on to something when he talks about what’s going on in the bedroom. Sure, you’ve heard a lot of it before, but I think there’s a subtler point.

In the previous generation of entrepreneurship, all the creativity and talent was in the garage. That’s where the elephant organisations of today were conceived and birthed. In the garage. With all its attendant tools and toolsets and minds and mindsets, never straying far from their DNA of Taylor and Coase and McLuhan.

It’s different for Generation M. This time the creativity and talent has been in the bedroom, not the garage. The DNA is different. Today’s entrepreneurs have no idea who Taylor was, don’t care who Coase was, and don’t like what McLuhan stood for.

And much as I’d like them to, they don’t know who Jerry Garcia was, haven’t heard of Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond or even Linus Torvalds, but they know Linux. They know Skype. They know Open. They know Convenient. They know Simple. And they know Stupid.

They know.

Barry Schwartz understands our generation and why we feel imprisoned by choice. And he articulates, very well, why we feel that way. Now, slowly, I’m beginning to understand why Generation M is different. They’re impervious to McLuhan, so they don’t have the same post-marketing expectations. They’re immune to information overload, so they don’t get stressed out by megachoice. They know what they like and what they don’t like.

So I’m going to continue to study them, continue to help them conquer the challenges I know, and hope they can help me conquer the challenges  they know.