On Being A Generalist (BA)

A colleague and friend of mine (Anupam) posted an opinion on the virtues of being a generalist Business Analyst (BA) vs being a specialist BA. He seems to be leaning toward saying specialists have an easier life and that being a specialist overall is better.

As a generalist (and coincidentally a BA) myself, I feel compelled to offer a counterpoint! :) Enough to bring me out of my blogging semi-retirement. (Well, more like laziness induced inertia)

First, check out his post here: http://www.upmaan.com/2010/06/15/are-you-a-generalist-business-analyst/ For those too lazy/ unable to do so, rather than quoting him wholesale here, I'll attempt to summarize each of his points and rebut:

From The Darkness, Light

A vast darkness, not empty at all, but full of... things.

Colossal clouds of matter, luminous and dark, constantly in flux, morphing anew into shapes and essences and structures wondrous and complex and astonishingly ephemeral. A superstructure one cannot begin to grasp or visualize, let alone comprehend. A wild dance of chaos and order hurtling, hurtling, and in spite of all the matter and all that energy in eternal conflict, all is eerily silent.

I am falling.

Riotous colors assault me. Blue and yellow, red and green, orange and purple; and yet the inky blackness pervades all; my very soul. Yet I hear nothing, can utter no sound, no screams, no howl of wind; so I imagine one for myself. I am cold; so very cold - yet I am on fire. A remote speck of light in what was a blinding, remote array but a moment ago suddenly surrounds me, as though it were a universe by all by itself, it snatches me from the inky shroud and fills my world with blinding light.

They are dancing.

Globes of fearsome majesty move along in tune to an unheard melody. Strands of light stretch between them, faintly glowing as if they were the trails of their motion from ages past. And yet they last for only an instant in time... their own tiny era... before they dissolve. Dissolution is everywhere now... this cloud is dying. Slowly, and gracefully, but surely. I stifle the inevitable sob, the aching despair, even as I dance myself, to that melody... and the cloud is past me.

And then I see it.

Another cloud, as though a disc, spinning, its tentacles reaching out and whipping back, a whirlpool of light and matter. It is my objective - it ever was. Not its center, no, that place is for the behemoths that will not be denied. A remote corner instead, away from their pull, away from... everything.

Then I hear them. Others. For the first time, others!

The inky black makes way for another yellow globe, and the littler globes around it. I am upon one of the smaller globes now, where I hear them... I really hear them. Screaming, laughing, speaking, crying, moving, shaping, struggling, mating, living, dying. There are billions, here, suddenly, there are billions! I call to them myself, in exhilaration I finally let voice to that vast emptiness I have been lugging around... and they ignore me! ME!

But I will not be denied. I have traveled too far, too long. An explosion then, of heat, and light; a roar to quell their voices for one moment, so they see I am come. I darken the sky they look at with wonder, scarcely knowing what lies beyond; and for that reason their wonder is inadequate. I hasten to show them.

Look! This is your universe, as it is mine. I have seen it, and you have not. See it for yourself - look! You need no names, no comprehension, no words, just to look. To be drawn in and be buffeted by this majesty. To look beneath and beyond the obvious, to the essence of things and thought.

They fall to their feet. Not in wonder, but - to my anguish - in fear. They chant and burn things. They kill and offer. They cajole and rail, and worst of all, they close their eyes and bow their heads. They seem to think I care. They seem to think I know. They seem to... live and die... for me?

For the first time, then, incredulous, I laugh, and they cower some more. So it is, to the moment I depart...

Once again, falling... seeking...

Admit to Complexity

Complexity. Nuance. More grays, less black and white. Please! The popular media, the public conscious, zeitgeist - whatever you call it is so obsessed with reducing things to anecdotes and representative summaries/ cliches that aren't that representative at all.

I know, I know... what's the point in blogging for the first time in six months and wailing on a point that is essentially a corollary of the previous post?

Well... I watched Avatar, that's why. Yes, patient reader, I shall explain. In a longish rant (I feel your chagrin).

To dismiss it as eye candy (or a play on "Dances with Wolves") would only prove the point I'm trying to make and add me to the count of the unwashed masses I decry. It is a phenomenon of computer imagery and sound design and whatnot. But at its core, it is yet another big-ass rip off of Joseph Campbell's mono-myth, with a dash of Gaia-ism, anti-Bush/ war/ Blackwater rhetoric and a big dose of "John Carter of Mars" and "Midnight Tides".

To the uninitiated, John Carter of Mars is a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (he of Tarzan fame) about an American on deathbed who finds himself transported to Mars in the blink of an eye, discovers he has superpowers while there, joins a clan of Martian warriors (Martians come in green or red or yellow skin if memory serves, and call their planet Barsoom), marries a princess, defends against fanatics, tames a six-legged steed (no dragon here) and so on... until one day he is the "warlord of Mars"; sound familiar? Well, these books got written somewhere in the last century.

Midnight Tides is the fifth book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen saga by Steven Erikson. It tells the story of how a capitalist empire (Lether) which has already subsumed many indigenous civilizations by trade-craft and war finally meets it match at the hands of a very war-like if fallen (grey skinned) civilization known as the Tiste Edur. One of the primary characters of the book is a Letherii man responsible for studying/ helping destroy several civilizations in the past who this time around intends to betray Lether and make it eat crow...

Fanboy tangents apart, here's the thing: both Burroughs' Barsoom and Erikson's writing feature a beautiful world with imaginative flora and fauna, and the authors (more so for the latter) in broad strokes paint a narrative that is far more complex and real than Avatar. In other words, they do everything on a page that Avatar does on screen, and then they do a lot more.

Someone said to me, this movie is more of an experience than a story; and I agree completely... it is a superlative experience (as I tweeted the morning after I saw it). But did it also have to be so f**king dumb and derivative?

In the translation from page to screen these days (and hardly anyone would argue that the zeitgeist is now ruled by the screen more than the page) we lose all manner of nuance that would otherwise make things much more worthwhile. For that matter, if you read the scriptment that Cameron had written for Avatar years ago, in its 70 odd pages it had a lot more meat on the bone than what's in the final movie. Where did it go?

Cameron hardly had Hollywood suits breathing down his back asking him to make the movie merchandise or lowest common denominator friendly (one assumes)! He calls himself an auteur (and he is, technically) but seriously - this is an Eragon-esque story that a teenager could belt out in a year or so of effort. This took him a decade and a half?

Movies - science fiction movies - like the Matrix and Blade Runner and The Fountain (and many more) have come out over the last three decades that frankly don't allow people like Cameron the excuse of having to make their work "accessible". Can anyone honestly say Cameron shouldn't have spent another - oh, 5 million - and come up with a better story?

Now all this said, the truth is Avatar and movies like it will remain the gateways, nay the gatekeepers for a vast majority of people to the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature and imagination. That is not a bad thing. If I'd been twelve years old and had never seen a science fiction flick in my life, Avatar would be enough of an excuse to become a fanboy, buy every toy that comes out, devour all spin-off comics and books, and dive deep into SF&F. Hopefully I would still end up discovering the joys of Erikson and Dan Simmons (whose Hyperion Cantos featured the concept of uploading your consciousness to a cosmic network by the way) and others that are devastatingly good.

But guess what? I'm not twelve any more, and I prefer my Oz to be closer to Kansas!

Heed the Ent

In my first year as an I.T. professional, I took pride in being a perfectionist. I was - and in a more conciliatory way, still am - anal-retentive about grammar. Good vocabulary was something I commanded and demanded from those that wrote to me - use the perfect word, or shut up. I was a formatting freak - font sizes, margins, table widths, spreadsheet colours - everything had to meet a standard at once sober and functional. Every document of the many I wrote had footnotes, explications, counter-points, whatnot. If a point was not precisely and accurately made, I thought it better not to make it.

I would pore over the finished draft of each email, each document, each presentation and spreadsheet (you can tell I never wrote a line of code to save my life!) for several minutes; read them over twice/ thrice before sending them out. I would often re-word/ refine/ explicate something in that last minute review leading to much self-congratulation.

And of course after all this, the stuff I sent out always had glaring mistakes I would only notice the next day, week, or month. This is the best cautionary tale I can tell for the point I make below.

This was all before we truly entered the age of Facebook feeds, single paragraph blogs updated with posts every hour, Twitter feeds where 'no post over 130 characters' is supposedly a good thing(!), and 24x7 news where everyone has news and analysis, but where you have to dig through piles upon piles of absolute horseshit to get one long-term, panoramic perspective!

It is fitting that in this "fast-paced" world we are working on constantly increasing the volume and "instantaneousness" of information available for consumption. It certainly fits in with the fast food, fast car, private space, romance by email and Facebook culture we live in. It is also fitting that just as I am working on turning thirty, I should publish this post complaining not that I can't keep up with technology, but that in some instances such as the ones cited, technology and the ways in which the media - both organized and 'web 2.0' - is using it, are a complete disservice to mankind. That I'm doing it online I think shows that I am not a crusty old technophobe - that I'm doing it at all shows I'm not 'with the times'!

Folks, think about this piece of Entish wisdom spouted by Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: "You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say."

It is perilous to constantly reduce the distance between (if not to short circuit) thought and broadcast, emotion and reaction, event and news report; it is prudent to be a little long form, a little elaborate, a little considerate, deliberate, and less prolific in what we say, and do.

I don't fear the 'oops' email where you end a friendship at 3 a.m. with an ill thought jibe; I fear that in this day and age, whether you are a private citizen or (worse) a media person, or (even worse) a public figure, once it's out there, it's out there. And if it is ill-thought out, it will do damage. So my friends:

Fear the tweet, heed the Ent! Out!

On Democracy

Mr Churchill, erstwhile PM of the UK said on the floor of the House of Commons on the 11th of November, 1947 that "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Said quote having been beaten to death from time to time by many a commenter to justify everything from fascism to electronic voting to pornography. The key to (ab)using the quote lies of course in paraphrasing it, emphasizing a word or two to change it's meaning (emphasize "tried" for instance in the last bit and the meaning changes completely, opening the field for the user to propose an entirely new form of government for trying!) or simply going full anon with ; 'Someone once said' and then proceed to cast aspersions on their intellect and/ or intent. That can be done with any good quote, whether actually uttered by a dignitary or made up on the spot (full disclosure: I've often made up quotes for school/ college essays, and mostly attribute them to Bertrand Russell - a man hardly anyone has read and who could plausibly have had an opinion on anything).

But I digress. This here is supposed to be a meditation on Democracy. More specifically Representative Democracy.

The infamous "they" say democracy in general started with ancient Greece of course, and conjure up images of potbellied, half-robed, and flaxen-bearded sophists gathering in yonder agora for a good spot of drunk verbal jousting. They also say the tradition spilled over into Rome where unfortunately some bloke called Julius had other ideas.

This is hogwash, of course... for one thing Greek democracy (particularly in fabled Athens) was participatory, not representative, and although Aristotle did say (and condemn many of us, myself included)" "To take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a god!", what us modern people fail to acknowledge is that Graeco-Roman citizenship was exclusive! Women, 'barbarians', and slaves had no vote, no say. Citizenship was for the privileged few.

This was probably for the best because a) it cut down the number of participants in the debate in yon fabled agora and b) it probably cut out the 'salt of the earth, unwashed masses' types who wouldn't be 'wise' in the Socratic sense anyway.

Of course, beyond early Rome, there were few instances of even semi-democratic republics (unless there were some in Africa that got wiped out by slavers before the historians knew it). In India for instance, the authority and dharma of kings were institutionalized by many means, not least through religion, but also through the works of Chanakya and his ilk.

So let us then fly past the monarchies and the feudalism and imperialism and fascism and communism with scarce concern and arrive at a seminal epoch - Earth circa 1947, post World War II, when Imperialism was in its death throes and the cognoscenti were mostly nodding their heads in acquiescence when Mr. Churchill said what he did. The consensus was, 'Democracy Rocks'.

The consensus also was that we needed a more... acceptable way to keep the unwashed masses in check than slavery or the denial of suffrage to women, both of which the western cognoscenti now considered despicable, although their own Bibles silently (for the former) or actively (for the latter) encouraged the practices. Fear not, for the Brits and Yanks had in the time past come up with practical representative democracy, which they proceeded to prescribe to a world in flux.

Representative democracy is convenient to the cognoscenti. It is power in the hands of a representative who, by definition, will be elected from among 'the best of us'. S/he will be more qualified, better educated, wiser etc. than the people s/he represents. "More qualified" is the new "Powerful"; "Wiser" the new "Manly"; and "Politically connected" the new "Royal". Which is sort of predictable when one frames the descriptions in a post-industrial, faux-egaletarian, more crowded, and income-gap ridden world.

It would be tedious now to walk you through the dense history of the past sixty-two odd years, so instead take a moment to view the rushes: democracy fails (for the most part) in Africa, flounders (for the most part) in Asia and South America, takes on a local, somewhat corrupt but vibrant flavor in India, and finds zealot levels of belief in North America and western Europe. (we will conveniently forget the Middle East and anything west of India for the length of our discussion, where the black gold seems adequate reason for the prescribers to withold prescription from time to time e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan).

Of course, the prescribers do get an anomalous zealot elected to high office in the last 9 years of this period who foolishly starts, well, prescribing zealously... but then his work will (one assumes) be undone in a few years to come.

More pertinently in the here and now, the world's largest democracy is currently in high gear, electing officials to various levels of office. We vote in millions, for reasons as varied as from a bottle of free booze to a high falutin philosophy. Every one of my closet elitist friends is afraid Mayawati will be PM (perhaps not recognizing that maybe Mayawati being PM is the logical next step in the emancipation of the under-privileged). The dance of democracy, that imperfect goddess, is in full flow.

So here's my question: Why hasn't anyone pointed out the obvious? That democracy, in the cosmic scheme of things, is only a recent invention with an at best spotty track record?

Why isn't anyone concerned that in most democracies (India, the US, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan for about ten years of its sixty year lifetime) seems to give the world as many (albeit less potent or long lived) dynasties as any other form of government?

Why isn't anyone concerned, (this is most puzzling for me) that the cognoscenti everywhere seem to be alternately at war with or engaged in manipulating and hoodwinking the very masses they want to serve?

Why aren't we concerned in this age of information and the world wide web that although participatory democracy is actually almost feasible in this day and age, we ('wisely') still stick to the representative variant? Why aren't we concerned about the obvious focussing (and consequent abuse) of power this allows?

Think about it - a voting machine on every street corner, that uses biometrics to establish identity, and on a timebound basis allows you to vote yea or nay on not representatives, but issues, bills, and propositions before local, state, and national governments.

Does that really sound so impractical or unreasonable? Why have elections where we exercise our right every few years? Let the 'unwashed masses' of yore rule, continously. Remove this creamy layer of elected officials. Let the bureaucrats get their instruction directly from the public they serve! Sure, we'll probably see a guillotine or three, and almost certainly have a couple of wars and a disastrous foreign policy for a while... but hey, it will be the people's rule.

Perhaps government will break down and political parties will transmogrify into lobbying groups - people wont vote on issues unless they have their skin in the game somehow. Certainly people like me who wax eloquent about their apathy and agnosticism will not bother to vote every hour or day or week when we don't vote every few years! Perhaps the litany of boredom that is governance will actually put most voters to sleep...

But doesn't all this happen anyway? Wouldn't true technology-enabled participatory democracy be democracy in all her glory?

More to come... out!