2023: Looking back, looking forward!

As happens towards the end of a year, and especially as we idle through the holiday times, the mind wanders to think about the 12 months that went by and looks ahead to the new year coming up soon.

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I can say without a doubt, that this has been one of the most significant years of my life. But the way I would like to look back upon it, is more philosophically than anything else.

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While the beginning of the year saw me take part in my very first marathon of any kind – where of course, I did only a 10K portion of the Tata Mumbai Marathon – but the absolute next day after that marathon created an unforeseen turbulence in my life. The next 4-5 months were quite tumultuous, and I am definitely not getting into any major details about the same, here. However, suffice to say that the months gave me time to introspect on life like I have never done before. It also brought me closer to my family and helped me appreciate how lucky I have been to have such a wonderful family. Likewise, I felt deep gratitude for the friends that I have, for my business partners, my team at work, all the senior folks in our organization, all of whom provided such phenomenal support. While I consider myself a gratitude practitioner, if anything, this entire phase of life and my coming out of the stressful situation, only enhanced my faith in the higher one above.

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While all this was going on in my life, there has been one long war going on for many months, and another one also getting into a multi-month situation now. I would have never believed that modern day warfare would involve field battles of the kind we are seeing in both of these places now. I thought modern day warfare would be the economic kind or maybe a cyberwar or perhaps a chemical war. But that, we see today, soldiers on the field, in gear and in their tanks and aircraft, battling away, it only means that the more things change, the more they remain the same!

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Then again, news about the first of the wars, and to an extent even the second one, is slowly slipping off the front-page headlines, even while the wars themselves show no sign of ending anytime soon! That makes one feel that unless you are directly impact in the middle of a war field, everything is a matter of short-term interest and focus to this world. One that you lose interest of, and then you are looking forward to the “next big thing”, whether it is another war, or some other such earth-shattering event! Which obviously is sad, since the world is letting countries fight away, people keep dying or getting injured, children getting orphaned, and we seem to have just “lost interest” in these now!

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That a very large percentage of young population across the globe has grown up spending thousands of hours on video games, and then on social media, has all that made people always looking for the next fantasy, the next headline, the next viral sensation on social media, rather than focus on a few heart wrenching events that continue to sustain in our midst, and perhaps doing something about these??

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Amidst all this stress, would you believe it, that there has been such a significant flood of capital into all kinds of investments – be it the capital markets all over, the startup world, fancy new ideas such as crypto currencies and the like, capital that is going into sports and sportspeople, into entertainment and generally all over! If you see the wealth numbers of the richest folks in the world today, their numbers are in a different sphere all together, from where these were hardly 5-10 years back! The kind of monies being raised by startups, the always-on-fire stock markets of the world and the significant records of market capitalization that these are reaching, the huge numbers being spent and earned by sportspeople, by entertainment stars, etc. etc. are all indicative of the massive capital infusion across the board.

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These seem almost unreal, and momentarily you wonder what kind of fantasy are we in the middle of??

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Meanwhile this has also been the year of the AI upsurge. And while I would like to believe the many others who believe that while AI will cause temporary inflexion across the board, the human being will come back strongly, as he has always done, and move forward and beyond AI, somehow, I have a contrarian disbelief about this thought. There has never been anything like AI before. While enough and more technology driven disruptions have happened earlier, all of those were finite in nature. Never before has any technology assumed significance to the point where whatever a human being can do to move forward, beyond the realms of that technology, this new technology (AI) will continue to learn and learn fast and keep staying a step (or more) ahead! This is definitely a new challenge for mankind, and I am not fully convinced that the human being has the means to take this on. Still, to keep the good and positive spirit on, let me also stay with the larger prevailing thought that ultimately, mankind will prevail. Even if we don’t have the faintest clue how!

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And from the world back to the self, there has been a lot of change that has happened in the working life as well. And while such things happen in corporate MNC life, certainly we are all still coping with the change. And as we hit 2024, it is very clear that more of that change will hit us sooner rather than later. And we will need to keep adapting and keep learning, and which I have no doubt, we will.

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That said, it is with a fair degree of VUCA or volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, that one looks ahead at 2024! Maybe it is this sense of VUCA that challenges a creative mind, that makes life exciting,? one that frees us of boredom, and makes life worth living.

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Maybe..

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With this hope and optimism, I look forward to 2024, and wish you all the very best for the new year!

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P.S. Meanwhile, I will be attempting to do my second 10K at the Tata Mumbai Marathon in Jan 2024! Wish me luck :-)