The Weight of Greed!

When Michael Douglas immortalised Wall Street kingpin Gordon Gekko in the late 80s, the shrewd player blatantly professed that ‘greed, for lack of a better word, is good’. A powerful anti-hero corporate raider, Gekko possessed the very skills needed to survive in a cut-throat market. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street went on to become an overnight sensation, while personifying the raw emotion governing the financial sector.

Some may argue that Gekko was ruthless and his morals questionable. I beg to differ – are we so different? Deep down, we all have a little ‘Gekko’ in us and, ladies and gentlemen, that is what makes the world go round. We save money every step of our average lives, only to buy a bigger house and a faster car. Perhaps even a yacht, if we could save some more! What could possibly go wrong?

‘greed, for lack of a better word, is good’

In the quest for our materialistic ventures, it is the creation of sub-primes and credit swaps that fill our pockets with money – that doesn’t exist! We create our bubble, and then shred it to pieces not once, but twice (read: double dip), on most occasions.

But then again, where lies the moral hazard?

Is there a guarantee that we will not make the same mistake again? Why should we not buy another property if the market picks up? Perhaps the little ‘Gekko’ in us has consumed our mortality. But have we learnt our lesson – is greed good?

 

Creating a Masterpiece!

Every artist pines for the moment when he painfully scripts that masterpiece. A work of art so elegant, surreal and reflecting of the artists’ true nature, that he feels his purpose is now complete. Anything else he was to create would be but a lacklustre combination of words or musical notes, incomparable to his finest creation, into which the very aura of his existence were materialistically personified.

His original masterpiece!

Hypothetically speaking, each setting sun grows us more desperate and fraught with the sheer thought of departing unfulfilled. Frantic at first, we soon recognise the faults in our stars are but the inability and naivety of our peripheral visions. Cocooned in the security of our lives, we rarely realise our true calling, for only in the fields of uncertainty and our innate expertise could we dare to create our masterpiece. Ill-fated as it may sound, we wait years, decades and sometimes until the bottom of our nest egg before we dare to do something different!

If it has to be the perfect symphony and is didactically appealing to the senses, why wait until the grave beckons? A few gutted efforts in the early years would not just tap into our passionate faculties, but exploit enough, to present us with an opportunity to nurture.

A few hours a week is all we would take to realise that the mechanical corporate jobs we are submersed in, is not what we were born for. The power of the mind and its volatile imaginative fury can certainly not be encompassed in a 4 x 4 cubicle, or on the Cambrian fonts of paper. Our post-evolutionary cognitive designs were genuinely fabricated to think, foresee and imagine and yet as we celebrate liberalisation and free will, we remain confined to the assembly lines of Henry Ford.

I dream of creating my masterpiece and spending hours at coffee shops with my laptop. Spending all my money on latte’s and satchels is the ideal life I would dare to imagine for myself. And maybe you’d never get to read anything I write, and in all likelihood, you may never pay me for my lexical capabilities.

But at least I dared!

And someday, I believe, I’ll create my original masterpiece!

Dare to Change – The Flipped Classroom

Back in the stone age, I used an abacus to perform complex calculations at school. Not really, but that’s the era my students associate me with! As part of the older generation, I’ve been through the traditional schooling system complete with a morning assembly, pages and pages of theory explained in class and long hours reserved for after-school homework. Teachers were pretty much the same, except for their distinctive accents and personality types. But their delivery methods were similar. At the risk of almost sounding ungrateful, there was never any ‘change’.

But at some point in between those classes, we silently told ourselves that if we ever joined the noble profession and became teachers, things would be different – we will never torture our students. Learners today should not be burdened with much homework; rather they should be allowed to express themselves. No doubt, karma is the devil that notes down our wishes, only to hand it back to us. As a lecturer today, I often wonder if my students hate me for burdening them. The age-old quip ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ has a few assumptions and limitations. Nobody told me that! But I wasn’t really excited about ‘traditional learning’. Luckily for me, neither was my boss.

The innovative pedagogical concept of Flipping the Class was introduced in its pilot Middle Eastern venture. Instead of piling students with homework, we decided to bring the after-hours ‘nightmare’ into the classroom where the eager young minds were made to solve equations and constantly look for ‘x’ under my watchful eye. Never again would they be ‘blank’ when they sat down at a worksheet in the comfort of their home. Hands-on application made sure they not only understand what ‘x’ and ‘y’ were all about, but they even understood why John bought 72 watermelons! With students unsurprisingly bunking or sleeping through lectures, instead of forcing them with mandatory attendance, why not place the PowerPoint’s at their favourite hangout spot – the Internet. This provides them the freedom to revisit concepts and replay videos over and over again – at their own time – until they grasp the concept. Parents, if your kid says he’s on YouTube checking out videos on mathematical concepts, don’t beat him within an inch of his death!

Sure, some might argue this method is just a lazy teacher’s way out. But as Bill Gates rightly said, if you want something done in the simplest way, give it to the laziest employee. And when students explain theories and concepts to their peers, the frequency of yawns certainly dropped!

So have the number of post-graduation Burger King applications!

The Joy of Books

Nothing is more powerful, yet vulnerable, than the infinite permutations and combinations of words scripted on paper. With the monumental thought process that goes into authoring a novel, when the writer believes he has exhaustively portrayed his imaginative world, as readers all we get is but a peephole into the realms of his fictitious world.

And through the carefully crafted spyhole, we look into a magical world that serves as the canvas for our imaginative faculties and real-life experiences. The greatest thing about books is that they subconsciously challenge us beyond our comfort zone to think beyond ourselves. As Carl Sagan said, “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere” symbolizing us precariously setting foot into a surreal world of possibilities.

Just as we don the role of an influential movie character, the same plays upon us in a book. Only this time, the reader is more susceptible with the continued existence of his individual personality in parallel with that of the lead character. Which is why the protagonist of a best-selling page-turner could be the hero for some readers, but the antagonist for others. That, coupled with our degree of disconnection from the real world, it is only a matter of time before we are resurrected from the abyss of our mundane lives.

On lazy afternoons, when I pick up a novel to read, my social connectivity goes into ‘silent mode’ as I embark on a voyage dans le temps to another era. What dimension that would be, or the era to which I have been teleported, perhaps only Jeffrey Archer would know.

But then again, maybe only I would know … deep inside my imagination!