Ruskin Bond’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over 500 short stories, novellas, poems and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 and the Padma Shri in 1999. His short stories “The Night Train at Deoli”, “Time Stops at Shamli”, and “Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra” have been part of the school text books in India.

His story A Flight of Pigeons was about the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and was made into a film by Shyam Benegal with the title Junoon. Vishal Bharadwaj made films based on his stories The Blue Umbrella and more recently the film Saat Khoon Maaf was based Ruskin Bond’s short story “Susanna’s Seven Husbands”. Read my review of Saat Khoon Maaf <click here>. I ask him if he is planning to go to the Jaipur Literary Fest 2012 starting the next day? He laughs and says that writers of children’s books are perhaps not invited. Jaipur’s loss is my gain for sure.

Abhijit: You have been a prolific writer. Have you ever experienced the dreaded Writer’s Block?

Ruskin Bond: Yes I have occasionally abandoned a manuscript. I write a story in my head. I see the story like a movie. So writing that out is relatively simple. When I write I just keep a waste paper basket handy in case I am experiencing a block. I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy. When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages. <picks up my novel Mediocre But Arrogant and looks at the page count> Your novel is 261 pages. You just managed to beat me <laughs>. I can’t ever see myself writing something like A Suitable Boy or Mediocre But Arrogant!

Abhijit: Where do you find triggers for your stories?

Ruskin Bond: They could be about people or incidents that have happened to you or to others. A lot of my stories are portraits of people.

Abhijit: Is nostalgia a better trigger for you than the reality of today?

Ruskin Bond: I was nostalgic even as a young man. Preferred listening to Opera not Bing Crossby. I read Hugh Walpole, Jack London, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Jefferies and Louise Imogen Guineyas a young man. I watched a lot of movies. I was deeply influenced by movies. I was in Dehradoon with my mother and step father. Neither had much interest in what I did.

Abhijit Bhaduri: Do you feel unhappy when you see your stories on celluloid?

Ruskin Bond: Film is a different medium. So you have to change settings, characters etc to suit the medium. Sometimes the ending may have to be different. Junoon was very close to what I had in mind. So was Blue Umbrella. Saat Khoon Maaf was a black comedy. Not sure if the comedy through.

Abhijit Bhaduri: Do introverts make better writers than extroverts?

Ruskin Bond: There are two kinds of authors – subjective and objective. Introverts are more inward looking. Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf etc wrote from within themselves. Poets like Keats or Shelley  were introverts. On the other hand John Grisham would be my example of an objective writer. Frederick Forsyth is an example of an objective storyteller. They are extroverts.

Abhijit Bhaduri: How would you describe yourself?

Ruskin Bond: I am a storyteller from a personal viewpoint. When I run out of people I invent ghosts. (chuckles) I don’t believe in ghosts. Never saw one.

Abhijit Bhaduri: How has the Indian literary scene changed over the last few years?

Ruskin Bond: There were no lit fests and launches in India till the eighties when we had the first World Book Fair. In the ’50s and ’60s newspapers also published fiction especially short stories. So I wrote short stories. We did not have many publishers.  But many writers have been forgotten – like Kamala Markandeya, Mulgaonkar or Mulk Raj Anand.

Abhijit Bhaduri: Should a writer experiment with different genres of writing?

Ruskin Bond: Readers want more of the same from you. So stick to one genre. Chetan Bhagat has got five novels of a similar nature. Not sure if would want to write an autobiography or a travel book etc.

Abhijit Bhaduri: Advice for aspiring writers…?

Ruskin Bond: The more you write, the better you will write! So – keep at it!

Bill Fischer is a Professor of Innovation Management at IMD where he focuses his attention on corporate strategy, the practice of successful innovation, and the effective expression of talent in organizations where expertise is the predominant strategic asset. He also authors a regular column for Forbes.com entitled “The Ideas Business,” (http://blogs.forbes.com/billfischer) and has a personal blog entitled “Dispatches from the Front Lines of Executive Education” (http://billunplugged.blogspot.com).

An engineer by training, American by citizenship, Bill has lived much of his life in Asia and Europe. Bill co-founded and now co-directs the IMD program on Driving Strategic Innovation, in cooperation with the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He held a full-professorship and endowed chair on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was the President of the China Europe International Business School, in Shanghai. His two most recent books The Idea Hunter (2011) and Virtuoso Teams (2005) [both coauthored with Andy Boynton] address issues of talent development and expression in a variety of organizational settings.  We got talking about the world of Ideas, India & China

Abhijit Bhaduri: I would like to focus on understanding your view of what is an Idea Hunter?

Bill Fischer: An Idea Hunter is anyone who is consciously seeking out ideas as a source of professional advantage. It’s that colleague who always seems to have better ideas, or the friend who is always recommending things to read for professional growth, or the person across the meeting table who seems to be so well “plugged-in” to the latest professional news, way before anyone else. What they all have in common is that they recognize the power of ideas in building professional expertise and finding that next new idea which can move the organization, and they most likely are all — wittingly or unwittingly — disciplined in how and where (and maybe even when) they hunt for new ideas.

This is not about scientists, or academics, it’s about normal people who have figured-out the power of knowing more and who then have become disciplined in the pursuit of that advantage. In fact, one of the most important lessons of this whole project has been that successful Idea Hunting is not about brains as much as it is about behavior: the smartest guys in the room are often not the most effectively smart. Why? Because the power of their individual intellect does not compare to the disciplined hunt that really accomplished Idea Hunters are able to achieve, which leverages the ideas of many more minds.

Abhijit Bhaduri: Where do you get your ideas from? What are your favorites sources from information – websites, people, books you follow?

Bill Fischer: Good question! My motivation in writing the book was actually to find out how others do it, because I’ve always felt a bit deficient in my own idea-hunting. It’s envy: how come these other people seem to know so much? So fast? I wanted to be in that club as well!

The way I would characterize my own hunt practices, however, is to say that I am a T person. I know something about a lot, rather than a lot about any one particular thing — I have a diverse set of interests. What has helped me greatly, however, is that I have several red-threads that run through my professional life:

• Innovation: as a practicing engineer (before becoming an academic) and as a graduate student in business, I was captivated by innovation, and by the ways that innovation could be performed more successfully. This took me immediately into IdeaHunting, although I didn’t know it quite that way at the time.
• China: In 1980, my family and I moved to Dalian, in Northeastern China, to work with senior Chinese officials in developing the reforms. One of the criteria for being selected by the U.S. government for this opportunity, was that the Chinese government expressly did not want “China experts” involved. I was well-qualified on that dimension, knowing very little about the Peoples’ Republic, but once there, at that time, I became fascinated by all I saw and those I met. In those days, there were few foreigners with as much in-country experience as I was fortunate to have, and I became heavily involved in interpreting the Chinese reform experiences for a wide range of different audiences and communities.
• Talent Utilization: in the early 2000s, my good friend and colleague Andy Boynton and myself were frustrated by working with so many organizations that excelled in turning great talent into average performers. So, we embarked on a search for teams that did just the opposite: teams which had recruited great talent and on the basis of that talent had achieved exceptional results. This led to our book on Virtuoso Teams and really became a third foci for the ideas that I continued to hunt for, well after that book project had finished.

The importance of this these three red-threads is that they have become part of the leitmotif of nearly everything that I do — or my “gig” to use terminology from The Idea Hunter, and that has made my “hunts for new ideas” so much easier. I rely heavily upon the web — New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal – for basic news information. In addition, I read a wide-range of technology journals and magazines, mostly, but not exclusively, on-line. I am also an avid reader of both fiction and non-fiction (iPad and traditional versions –more the latter than the former), and essentially avoid “business books” in my search for new ideas. I am especially drawn to depictions of science and art, where talent and communities combine to move ideas. In addition, Twitter has become a major source of new ideas for me: I am very disciplined in who I follow, and look for links as a way of reaching new sources that would otherwise be invisible to me. I follow you, for example, because you open professional, cultural, and geographic windows for me that I would not be aware of without following you. Twitter is amazingly powerful as an IdeaHunting tool. Finally, I like to think that I have a rich network of professional colleagues, spanning a range of domains, that allows me to both hunt and test new ideas. I find that ideas are hunted most successfully when there is a purpose at hand; either a book project, or a need to curate tweets to a particular community.

Abhijit Bhaduri: What do firms in India and China need to do to move up the value chain to compete globally?

Bill Fischer: This is a question that I’m particularly interested in. I think that the two cases are a different in both their evolutionary paths so far, and in terms of global expectations of what comes next. I really know more about China than India, so let me focus my responses there. China has been remarkably successful in transforming itself from a very backward economy to a global player, in a relatively short period of time. However, a large part of what it has accomplished has been tied directly into the export interests of foreign-invested players, both inside and out of China, who have supplied the designs, the equipment, and the channels of distribution, and have done this all using their own brands, as well. For China to be a full-fledged player on the global stage, it needs to encourage more original innovation among its firms, and to bring these new products to market using its own brands. We are already seeing some firms doing this quite successfully. However,  in order for more Chinese firms to do this, China must alleviate the world’s doubts regarding its global intentions and the integrity of its products. It also must solve the endemic corporate governance problems that regularly embarrass Chinese organizations in the eyes of the world. A key to all of this is the development of sophisticated, cosmopolitan managerial talent, which is the topic of your next question….

Abhijit Bhaduri: What do they need to do to their people processes (esp Org Culture) to be globally relevant given that both are hierarchical societies.

Bill Fischer:The hallmark characteristics of successful contemporary innovation involve: speed, openness, diverse idea-sources, closeness to the customer, value-chain partnerships, and considerable risk-taking. All of these are an anathema in a hierarchical society. Firms that originate in such cultural milieus need to work on “suspending cultural norms” within the business organization in order not to be impeded in the fierce competition that characterizes the modern global marketplace. This is easier to suggest than to accomplish! My experience as president of a 50/50 joint venture in China [CEIBS] suggests that the challenge is a daunting one, but worthwhile. China and India have such abundant talent, that that should be their ultimate competitive advantage, but only if they can find a way to release this talent, at least within the business organization, from the societal constraints that have long diminished it.

This reminds me that in our book Virtuoso Teams, one of the main messages is that: the innovative potential of young people is breathtaking, but only if they are allowed to express their talent. Virtuoso Teams is really a book about “young people changing the world.” This is not only a Chinese and Indian challenge, but a challenge for all of us.

Abhijit Bhaduri: Now that Indian firms are expanding their footprint globally – will the somewhat Western centric model of a global manager get redefined. What is your definition of a global manager in the new world?

Bill Fischer: This is a great question! I think that what sort of managerial type will prove to be most appropriate will depend upon the strategic context of the firm. Where we are most likely, I think, to see a “global managerial model” emerge is those industries where it is imperative to unleash the talent employed in order to compete on the basis of fresh new, innovative, ideas. Here, I suspect, the Western model will remain highly influential, as it is has revealed itself, when applied most effectively, to be respectful of talent, embracing of diversity, and able to relax hierarchical prerogatives in pursuit of new ideas. All of these are central to what any firm needs in order to compete globally with innovation.

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Buy the book The Idea Hunter from Amazon (click here)

Tanvi Azmi & Sachin Khedekar in Bubble Gum

“One beautiful neighbor…One rival in love… Two Paranoid parents…It’s hard to be 14!” says the tagline of  BUBBLE GUM – a coming of age story of Vedant who is 14.  Director Sanjivan Lal wrote the story in 2006 while drawing upon his own experiences of being 14 in the city of Jamshedpur. Just when parents expect their teenagers to focus on studying and prepare for the Board exams, but the hormones take over and the teenagers fall in love.

There are no big stars in Bubble Gum.  The star cast of the film includes Sachin Khedekar & Tanvi Azmi as the parents. Delzad Hiwale plays the character of Vedant, Sohail Lakhani as Vidur & Apoorva Arora.

I spoke to Sanjivan Lal, the director about his debut film Bubble Gum.

Abhijit: How did you think of becoming a film director?

Sanjivan: Middle class families like mine tell you that you are not supposed to think of becoming a film director. I always dreamed about being in movies. Initially it was about being an actor because I was not aware about the other aspects of film making. However one is expected (in a middle class family) to take a techical course after graduation – I took up Chartered accountancy… but six months before qualifying as a Chartered Accountant, I decided to go join a workshop in Delhi that was to teach you how to make documentaries. That was in June 1989. A month later I was at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune doing a three year course in Film Direction

Abhijit: Between ’93 and 2011, did you make other films?

Sanjivan: My ‘Diploma Film” made for my graduation at FTII was  The Second Page. It was screened as part of the Indian Panorama at The International Film Festival of India. I have produced and directed Corporate films, Public Service films and Documentaries for Films Division, Zee Chakra and Public Service Broadcasting Trust [PSBT] besides having done extensive work in fiction on Television. I shot episodes of Rishtey, Star Bestsellers, Suspense Hour, Mujrim Kaun (winner of the prestigious RAPA Award) and Raaz. My documentary Is God Deaf was screened at various festivals including The 35th International Film Festival of India as part of the Indian Panorama.

Abhijit: What is Bubble Gum about? Since your film is also set in the town of Jamshedpur, some people are comparing it with the film Udaan. What do you believe?

Delzad & Apoorva

Sanjivan: Udaan and Bubble gum – both have been shot in Jamshedpur that’s where the similarity ends. Udaan was a dark film while Bubble Gum is a feel-good warm film. It’s about childhood. It is about a time in the ’80s in a small town when the children had no Facebook, mobile phones or even television. It is a film that brings up the insecurities of parents who are learning to deal with teenagers. It is heartening to see that every critic has appreciated this film. CNN-IBN says, “It is an honest effort, worth a watch.” (read review here)

Abhijit: Is it hard to succeed making a film without big stars?

Sanjivan: Yes, it is important for every film to be commercially successful. So stars do matter because that reduces the risk of the producers. Exhibitors are business people – not creative people. So it is but natural for them to focus on getting returns on their investments. This film would be completely out of place if for instance I had say a Salman (Khan) and Katrina playing the parents in this film. To succeed one needs to make a film in a reasonable budget and market the film well…to reach out to the right target audience!

On the other hand, stars keep lamenting the dearth of good scripts and have to makes endless sequels and remakes of the same stories. But when there is a good story, no one invests in it. Isn’t that ironical?

Abhijit: Your top five choices of Bollywood films?

Sanjivan: My all time favorite film is Masoom (1983) directed by Shekhar Kapoor. The others would be Sholay; Dil Chahta Hai; Pyaasa and Lagaan.

Abhijit: Is there any other film that influenced you?

Sanjivan: There are two more films that I have loved the Iranian film Children of Heaven directed by Majid Majidi.  The other film I would mention is the French film Je suis le seigneur du château (Trans: I am the King of The Castle).

And now for the trailer of the movie Bubble Gum.

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If you haven’t watched the film Udaan – here is a link you can go through <click here>

Jean Buridan (circa 1295-1358) the French philosopher and theologian had talked about choice. An ass who is hugely hungry and thirsty and is standing at the crossroad where one roads leads to a stack of hay and the other to a pail of water. The ass dies of starvation and thirst – unable to make a choice! This anecdote is now referred to as Buridan’s Ass. (Sounds pretty personal to me).

Making choices is an integral part of our lives. We like to have the freedom to choose even if that means sub-optimal choices. After making a choice, when someone tells us that our choice was a wise one, we feel reassured. If people whose opinion we care for tell us continually that we made a poor choice, we get uneasy. That may result in us defending our choice or even getting upset about our choice getting questioned. We like to have options and yet when we have a very large number of options we land up feeling less satisfied with what we choose. Baskin-Robbins, the ice cream company has developed more than 1,000 flavors of ice cream to date, 100 of which are rotated through its stores in a typical year. Starbucks has 87,000 drink combinations. How should we choose and then feel happy with what we opted for? Read Sheena Iyengar’s suggestions here on how to shop better.

Prof Sheena Iyengar teaches at the  Columbia Business School, US. Her book The Art of Choosing made Amazon.com’s Top Ten Books in Business & Investing for 2010. Her doctoral work was from Stanford University in the area of  Social Psychology. I interviewed her on her life as an author and also as an expert in making choices.

How did you go about writing the book The Art of Choosing happen? Tell us about the journey from idea to the book?

Sheena Iyengar: When doing research it’s necessary to set clear parameters for your experiments and narrow your focus. So each experiment is like a single dot on the wide canvas of choice, and while those individual dots are important, if you never move back from them you only see one small piece at a time. Writing a book was my way of stepping back and seeing how those dots blend with one another to produce a full—or at least a fuller—picture.

When and where do you write? How has your habit of writing changed over the years?

Sheena Iyengar: My first rule for anything productivity-related is to be choosy about your choices. In writing, that translates into not having too many irrelevant items. For example, I don’t like having any distractions (so I turn off my email and my phone, and I shut the door to my office). To ensure that I will be writing, and not searching, I have all the research organized and easily accessible ahead of time—so I always do pre-writing research and organization. As for location, I like to either write at my desk at home, or in my office.
How did you first get interested in studying about making choices?

Sheena Iyengar: Three factors really influenced my interest in choice. The first is my bi-cultural background as a Sikh and an American. From a young age, I had to reconcile these two different worlds. At home, I was taught to emulate a good Sikh who understood the importance of knowing one’s duties and fulfilling one’s responsibilities. However, at school, I was encouraged to identify and act upon my own personal preferences. The second thing that influenced my interest in choice is the fact that I was born with retinitis pigmentosa, which left me fully blind by the age of fifteen. Growing up, there were lots of questions about what I could do: Would I be able to go to a normal school? Could I study math or science? What was I going to do when I grew up? And that meant that it was very salient to me that while choice was a tool for generating possibilities, it also had its limitations. Lastly, I chose to formally study choice in college and graduate school, because of the interests that emerged from my experiences. Underlying much of my research are questions about how we balance our duties and responsibilities to others with the pursuit of personal preference, and how we reconcile both the possibilities and limitations of choice.
How do you define a choice? Is it just another term for decision making?

Sheena Iyengar: Choice is more than just the exercise of picking X over Y, but the responsibility of separating the meaningful and uplifting from the trivial and disheartening. Choice is the only tool we have to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.

What is the hardest choice we make as humans?

Sheena Iyengar: One of the hardest things we must face every day is trying to figure out the right choice set from which we can exercise choice—that is, we must find the right set of options among which to choose. This requires self awareness, and an understanding of one’s own limits. This process of finding one’s limits was more immediate for me. My blindness brought to the forefront various limitations. Being constantly aware of my limitations helped me understand the gravity of choice.

Do impulsive people make worse choices than those who seek more information and take time weighing options?

Sheena Iyengar: The only question that our emotions can answer accurately is “What do we want right now?” but it doesn’t answer “What do we want tomorrow?” and that’s why it is unreliable. Most of the time, we should use reasoned analysis for making our decisions. The only thing that should be left to whims and emotions is the stuff that is truly uncertain.

Could choice that is logically better leave us feeling unhappy? How should we deal with that?

Sheena Iyengar: Happiness is the one thing you can never predict. What reasoned analysis can give you is information on what ought to make you happy, not what will make you happy. Your best guess in life is to go “What ought to make you happy” and remember that the happy people are not the ones who get what they want, but want what they get.

Do we get better at choosing between options over the years? Does repetition improve our skills?

Sheena Iyengar: The best way to improve your choosing abilities is to cultivate informed intuition. Take a minute and think about someone who is very successful in at least one aspect of his or her life. How do you think this person became so successful? I would argue that he or she is an expert at choosing. When people who are experts in a particular field make snap judgments, they are accurate because they’re based on extensive practice and feedback.  You see, merely doing something over and over again is not sufficient to develop informed intuition. Repetition and practice must be accompanied by consistent feedback about whether or not past judgments matched up with the facts and outcomes. This information can then be used to improve future choices. Informed intuition offers the best of both reason and intuition.

Is it true that the more self aware we are, the more comfortable we are about not regretting what we choose?

Sheena Iyengar: When we’re self aware, we are more conscious of when our regrets are due to our own choices and when they are due to forces outside of our control. In the long run, we can use this knowledge to make better choices. See my explanation above on informed intuition.

What tips would you offer to parents to teach their children to make better choices?

Sheena Iyengar: We have historically not done a good job in teaching our children how to choose because we assume that it’ll either occur to us naturally or that we will simply learn it through personal experience or observing others. Given how complex the choosing world has become, it’s critical today that as parents, we think carefully about how to teach our children the art of choosing. And what’s most important to that art, is the recognition that choice is effortful, that in order to get the most from choice you have to understand it both for its possibilities and its limitations. If we teach our children that a few choices made everyday carefully can transform their lives. That’s what parents should focus on.

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Buy the book Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar by clicking here

My review of Art of Choosing is here

Sheena Iyengar’s CV is here