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I first heard this buzz phrase, 'Out-of-the Box Thinking' (OBT) from the smacking lips of Mushy when he was advising the Indians at Agra Summit to do some OBT on the Kashmir 'Ishoo' as he called it.
Of course the blustering General-cum-President meant that Indians should think like him on the Kashmir Ishoo and surrender it gracefully.
The Kashmir Ishoo and I are coeval. We passed our lives through thick and thin and got nowhere. Mush too got nowhere now although he makes occasional noises like me no one takes seriously.
The trouble with the Kashmir Ishoo is that it has become a prestige Ishoo between the sundered twins...a game in which the residents of Kashmir are mere pawns though they bluff and bluster and bomb once in a while. Every ruler of Pak after Jinnah wants the credit of having annexed Kashmir by wile or guile or bile. And he knows that he would then become bigger than the Quaid-i-Azam and his birthday would be a national holiday.
On the other hand every successive PM of India, in their dreams, wants to resolve the Ishoo peacefully (since they can't do it otherwise with all those nukes) once for all and go down in Indian History as the One that Did It..."everlasting peace in our time"...no national holidays though for the wooly-headed.
The two came very close at Agra but India is a working democracy and so the deal was sabotaged by insiders...that was truly OBT of the first waters. In 2001 when this drama was going live on TV, I was at a loose end at KGP with my wife and son away at Hyderabad, and so was following the tamasha closely.
My OBT says that the Ishoo will never be resolved and will stay as a stalemate unless one or both of the 'two-nations' becomes failed state(s).
There is nothing like OBT in the true sense...it is just a Management Jargon.
The Bible has this to say about OBT:
The earliest OBT of mankind is the thought that we are going round the sun and not the other way round, attributed to Copernicus. But listen to Arthur Koestler in his Sleepwalkers:
I mean, the idea was not wholly new when it took over.
I guess the same is the case with the other great OBT...Darwin's Theory of Evolution. It evolved out of quite a few of its predecessors like Lamarck's.
And the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom that possessed me for quite a while when I was a student was aptly called the Planetary Model.
French Revolution that is widely known for beheading Kings was nothing new...the English beheaded their Kings much earlier.
The American Revolution was sponsored by the French who gifted them the Statue of Liberty.
The Bolshevik Revolution was spirited by Marx and Engels whose doctrine was not entirely OBT...Jesus is often credited with it in his Sermon on the Mount.
Gandhiji's successful recipe for driving out the powerful British not by an armed struggle but by wile and guile called Truth and Nonviolence was not claimed by him as his OBT. He admits:
and quotes the Upanishads.
But in a wee way every one of us has a little OBT within us since everyone is different and is in different perils.
I was lucky to have worked with my Guide SDM who had his own OBT in everything he did in his subject. He never followed the beaten track. And I hailed him Genius and wrote a 17-page Homage thirty-two good years after we parted.
And me....I have shown a li'l OBT in formulating the recipe of Daily Blogging as an antidepressant.
georgetowntales.blogspot.com
*************************************************************************************************************
I first heard this buzz phrase, 'Out-of-the Box Thinking' (OBT) from the smacking lips of Mushy when he was advising the Indians at Agra Summit to do some OBT on the Kashmir 'Ishoo' as he called it.
Of course the blustering General-cum-President meant that Indians should think like him on the Kashmir Ishoo and surrender it gracefully.
The Kashmir Ishoo and I are coeval. We passed our lives through thick and thin and got nowhere. Mush too got nowhere now although he makes occasional noises like me no one takes seriously.
The trouble with the Kashmir Ishoo is that it has become a prestige Ishoo between the sundered twins...a game in which the residents of Kashmir are mere pawns though they bluff and bluster and bomb once in a while. Every ruler of Pak after Jinnah wants the credit of having annexed Kashmir by wile or guile or bile. And he knows that he would then become bigger than the Quaid-i-Azam and his birthday would be a national holiday.
On the other hand every successive PM of India, in their dreams, wants to resolve the Ishoo peacefully (since they can't do it otherwise with all those nukes) once for all and go down in Indian History as the One that Did It..."everlasting peace in our time"...no national holidays though for the wooly-headed.
The two came very close at Agra but India is a working democracy and so the deal was sabotaged by insiders...that was truly OBT of the first waters. In 2001 when this drama was going live on TV, I was at a loose end at KGP with my wife and son away at Hyderabad, and so was following the tamasha closely.
My OBT says that the Ishoo will never be resolved and will stay as a stalemate unless one or both of the 'two-nations' becomes failed state(s).
There is nothing like OBT in the true sense...it is just a Management Jargon.
The Bible has this to say about OBT:
Ecclesiastes 1:9
New King James Version (NKJV)
That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
The earliest OBT of mankind is the thought that we are going round the sun and not the other way round, attributed to Copernicus. But listen to Arthur Koestler in his Sleepwalkers:
The conclusion he puts forward at the end of the book is that modern
science is trying too hard to be rational. Scientists have been at their
best when they allowed themselves to behave as "sleepwalkers," instead
of trying too earnestly to ratiocinate.
...wiki
I mean, the idea was not wholly new when it took over.
I guess the same is the case with the other great OBT...Darwin's Theory of Evolution. It evolved out of quite a few of its predecessors like Lamarck's.
And the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom that possessed me for quite a while when I was a student was aptly called the Planetary Model.
French Revolution that is widely known for beheading Kings was nothing new...the English beheaded their Kings much earlier.
The American Revolution was sponsored by the French who gifted them the Statue of Liberty.
The Bolshevik Revolution was spirited by Marx and Engels whose doctrine was not entirely OBT...Jesus is often credited with it in his Sermon on the Mount.
Gandhiji's successful recipe for driving out the powerful British not by an armed struggle but by wile and guile called Truth and Nonviolence was not claimed by him as his OBT. He admits:
"Truth and Nonviolence are as old as the hills"
and quotes the Upanishads.
But in a wee way every one of us has a little OBT within us since everyone is different and is in different perils.
I was lucky to have worked with my Guide SDM who had his own OBT in everything he did in his subject. He never followed the beaten track. And I hailed him Genius and wrote a 17-page Homage thirty-two good years after we parted.
And me....I have shown a li'l OBT in formulating the recipe of Daily Blogging as an antidepressant.
georgetowntales.blogspot.com
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1 comment:
Dear GPS,
The cartoon at the end reminds me of this: http://www.theonion.com/video/fda-approves-depressant-drug-for-the-annoyingly-ch,14310/
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