Contrarian aspects of my life: no-religion, no-job, no-certification

India is a populous country. There is a competition for resources on the road, for buses, for college admission, for jobs, in hospitals, cricket match tickets, temples, and even in crematoriums. A contrarian position helps reduce the fight and eases life to some degree.

I learned driving while in the US, and when I returned to India in Bangalore in 1998, I realized driving here needs a whole set of new skills. For example, taking a right turn onto a main road was a nightmare for me. I kept waiting for someone to let me in, and became a target of serious honking from behind. I was no match for the swiftness and guts of the autowalla who used to become impatient waiting behind me. Soon, I found a trick. I started letting the auto move ahead, and I began following him. That was much easier. But I had a bigger Aha moment a few months later.

I realized the streets are empty when there is a cricket match on TV. I had not followed cricket for almost a decade by then. I started driving the family around during that time. We visited Gangarams, movie theatres, Ulsoor lake, HAL museum, Cubbon Park, etc. I began to learn the benefits of a contrarian position. Now, I haven’t watched cricket for a quarter of a century. Subsequently, I ended up taking contrarian positions much bigger than don’t-follow-cricket position, some by design, many others by circumstances. Here are three of them: No-religion, no-job, and no-certification.

No-religion: By the time I returned to India, I was convinced that the process of becoming is an illusion created and sustained by society and the culture. You must become successful by acquiring name, fame, and wealth – has been the dominant narrative. Hindu religion, with which I had a loose sense of belonging, is no exception. Right from birth to death, a set of rituals is “mandatory” so that “all will be well” for you during this and future births. That is the grand promise. For me, it looked like a crooked game being played by a small community, mostly Brahmins, for millennia. I lost interest in becoming anyone, and as a side effect, the grand promise of the Hindu religion looked meaningless to me.

For the past two decades, I haven’t been participating in any rituals – birth and death included. No idol worship, no temple visit, and no expenditure on anything remotely ritualistic. Over the last ten days, Gauri and I travelled from Dehradun to Ghangaria in Bhyundar valley. We trekked to the Valley of Flowers and to the Hemkund Sahib gurudwara. We have no plans of visiting any of the Char Dhams including Badrinath where most of the crowd is headed. Sometimes, I don’t have a choice, in which case I just chill out nearby. For example, when Gauri visited Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, I went to Mani Karnika ghat nearby and watched the sunrise. At the Puri temple, I looked after her belongings outside. Yesterday, when Gauri visited the oldest temple of Rishikesh, Bharat temple, I managed to strike a conversation with the school-going fourth graders about what they liked in school (they said – playing, except one girl who said she likes studies).

I continue to be a serious student of Upanishads, especially Katha Upanishad (my blog), that of Nagarjuna’s Sunyata as depicted in the 2^nd-3^rd century text Mulamadhyamaka Karika (my blog), and Ramana Maharshi’s UpadesaSaram (my blog), none of it requires me to belong to a religion. I study these texts in Sanskrit. When the Government census guys visited us in 2011, I asked them if they had “no religion” as an option. They didn’t. So, I got counted as a Hindu.

No-job: I have been a big beneficiary of capitalist structures. I worked for a decade after finishing my studies, two years in the US and eight years in Bangalore. I got stock options, and after IPO, I sold them and it helped in partial repayment of the home loan. I have been debt-free for the past fifteen years. However, capitalism demands that every for-profit company keep growing revenue, profits, and shareholder value. Given my disregard for the process of becoming, I realized it is better to step away from the corporate world and make a living independently without any pressure for growth. I quit my job in 2006, and I have been freelancing ever since. I still needed to pay the bills and work around the inflation. Moreover, I had to stand out from the crowd, market myself, create a niche, and deliver value. That’s not easy. I got lucky, got good collaborators, and kept getting assignments from for-profit, not-for-profit, and government organizations.

What’s in a name? One may ask. But the name I ended up giving for my consulting practice – Catalign Innovation Consulting acted as a beacon. It implied three things I would do: One, my primary role would be a catalyst – someone who helps an individual or teams move from intent to impact effectively. The primary role won’t be an activist driving an agenda of my own, won’t be a solution provider, and won’t be a knowledge imparting teacher. Two, I would be helpful in aligning strategy and execution. And three, I would help organizations in their innovation journey.  

Can innovation capacity building become obsolete, making me redundant? Sure, it can. However, if I look around, I see some of the innovation world leaders struggling right now, like Intel, Boeing, even Apple. Indian companies – both startups and established players are under pressure to innovate, especially in deep-tech innovation. I clearly see an opportunity in innovation capacity building in India at least for another decade, perhaps more. I also see myself playing a role in raising awareness on the dark side of innovation – using innovation towards predatory practices allegedly used by big corporates like Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Flipkart, etc. In short, I don’t see any dearth of opportunities right now.

No-certification: Indian society is obsessed with certificates. If you have a certificate from a prestigious institute, good for you, or better still if it is from a foreign institute. The obsession is understandable given the number of applications for any position and the number of bogus certificates floating around. I have been a big beneficiary of two certificates, one a bachelor’s of technology from IIT Bombay and the other, a doctorate from University at Buffalo, USA, both in Computer Science. I got my last certificate in 1996, almost thirty years ago. And then I decided to stop playing the certification game. I let my writing and my work become my credentials. This is a contrarian position, given that the three areas I work in: innovation capacity building, design thinking, and mindfulness have very little to with Computer Science. I have no certificate in any of these areas. My father finds it odd how I make a living by claiming expertise in areas in which I carry no certificate.

One implication of no-certification is that I don’t take an existing framework (or a case study for that matter) and adapt it. For example, I don’t do a certification in executive coaching or I do not do a certification from a foreign product management program and resell it in India. These are great and lucrative business models. But I don’t go there. I only work with my frameworks published through my books and blogs. Of course, these frameworks are created by building on top of existing studies and frameworks, and they are given due credit (each chapter of our innovation book has an average of 35 references).   

All my frameworks have one common assumption that is uncommon. They assume a biased-agent model versus a rational-agent model. If a president, a prince, or a portfolio manager participates in underage sex trafficking, it can happen only under a biased mental model. I was blown away when I heard Daniel Kahneman say, “Rational agent model is a non-starter” more than a decade ago, and it stuck.

To summarize, no-religion, no-job, and no-certification are some of the contrarian positions in my life. They have helped me navigate life relatively smoothly so far.

image source: Gemini AI