Artificial Intelligence – A tectonic shift is underway

 

AI – Genie is out of the bottle

I, vividly remember the beautiful day , it was 11^th October, 2017 when Sophia, a humanoid robot, mesmerised the audience with  an interesting interaction with UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed at UN Headquarter in New York. This awe inspiring sight  of Sophia responding to the question raised by Amina J. Mohammed filled me with strange emotions of appreciation and fear. The appreciation was obviously for  the astounding technological progress Homo Sapiens have made over the centuries – their journey from the caves to the dazzling cities is a testimony of the victory of the cognitive intelligence of the smartest race of human beings . The fear, that AI enabled humanoid robots may outsmart their creators quickly rushed into grey cells - though  it stayed there only for a fleeting moment and quickly vanished into nothingness.

The mad rush for an unassailable lead by the companies and countries in the AI technology innovations in last 8 years has led to the unprecedented level of innovations in both AI Enterprise and AI Consumer space. Despite, the huge success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and unparalleled market disruption by Deepseek, I never got perturbed about the potential replacement of human work force by machines.  However the announcement of Nobel Prize for the year 2024 that included the names of John J. Hopfield, Geoffery Hinton  Demmis Hassibis  and John Jumper made me believe that something is changing faster than our imagination. Let us dive into the ocean of the possibilities and explore to find the reality beneath.

AI -Market Size 

 

The market is a master story teller that tells the compelling stories of the possible impact unleashed by the disruptive technologies on the corporate organisations, human work force and overall society at large. According to Mckinsey report, organizations have already started re-wiring the ways to run the company  with the focussed approach on generating values from AI. According to Statista, the market size for AI is expected to growth an annual growth rate (CAGR 2025-2031) of 26.60%, resulting in a market volume of US$1.01tn by 2031. Another report outlines that market valuation  of AI in HR in 2025 is US$ 8.16bn which is growing at CAGR of 15%. Not only that , it is has been assessed that in 2025, AI will evolve from a tool for work and home to an integral part of both. In the last year alone, generative AI usage jumped from 55% to 75% among business leaders and AI decision makers. Very recently Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc. created waves by stating “AI is bigger than internet”. We cannot afford to ignore  the reverberation of likely tectonic shift in the world of technology, impacting all sectors and touching human lives, directly, indirectly, positively or negatively.

AI - Path ahead on a road less travelled 

The revered, “AI”,  is already transforming the world we are living in myriad ways. “Agentic AI”, with their supercharged reasoning and execution capabilities, promises to transform many aspects of human-machine collaboration such as proactively managing complex IT system, dynamically re-configuring supply chains in response to geopolitical or weather disruptions etc. AI Models with the ability to predict the protein structure and create new designs is revolutionising the drug development process . The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the military domain is radically changing the art of war and a nation's ability to anticipate, plan, and execute actions. It is already playing pivotal role in target detection, coordination of cyber defence operations, or real-time massive data analysis. Health and diagnostics is another area where lot of processes will be substituted by AI enabled tools. There is also debate going on  about the role of agentic AI in providing Patient Care services. Collaborative Robots (Co-Bots) are no more the species found only in sci-fi movies , they have started  operating in buddy environments along with their fellow human colleagues in various plants and offices. Going forward the collaborative robots will have the better ability to understand their surroundings. Multimodal AI will revolutionize communication by enabling more intuitive human-computer interaction. For example, in financial services, this could involve analysing market commentary videos and considering non-verbal cues, like tone of voice and facial expressions, alongside the spoken words for a more nuanced understanding of market sentiment. It is difficult to fathom the extent , AI will invade or enter our daily routine -Keep gazing the crystal ball.

AI - Walking on thin ice 

 

Every new technology brings the abundance of freshly minted challenges, nicely packed in the goody bag of benefits for the people and society. Only difference in the case of AI is the scale and impact – social and political consequences of this technology is deep and far reaching.Yuval Noha Harrai expressed his deep concern about this  in his book “Nexus” by stating that  “ AI  could tilt the technological balance of power in favour of Totalitarianism”. It will be interesting to review and  delve deep into some of the challenges that are already staring at us in the face. 

• Job Losses - Future of work will be hugely impacted by AI. New jobs will also be created however its difficult to measure the exact impact. Estimates suggest that AI could potentially replace whopping 800 million jobs worldwide by 2030.
• Deepfakes – The increasing threat of deepfakes is  not strange to us. There are umpteen horrifying examples of deepfakes. In March 2022, shortly after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian public was surprised to see a video of their president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, urging the military to lay down their weapons and surrender to the invading forces. As the video spread on social media and gained traction in the news, Zelenskyy’s office quickly disavowed its authenticity. 
• Environmental Impact –The computational power required to train generative AI models that often have billions of parameters, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, can demand a staggering amount of electricity, which leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressures on the electric grid. By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centres is expected to approach 1,050 terawatts (which would bump data centres up to fifth place on the global list, between Japan and Russia).
• Geo -Political Impact - AI's revolutionary potential is altering the global power equations. The strategic use of AI technologies affect the surveillance technology, information warfare, and military capabilities among many others. In the future clashes between countries , AI would become an actor, not just a factor.  There is a mind boggling race going between US led companies and Chinese for the control of AI Space. 
• Recursive Learning - In the pursuit of AGI, one of the most critical challenge is creating machines that can improve themselves without human intervention. Currently, AI systems are limited to learning from human-provided data and tasks. Organistions are working overtime off course with some success to enhance its abilities autonomously, through recursive self-improvement. Many experts believe that AI  systems may start to think for themselves, and even seek to take over or eliminate human civilization. 
• Rogue Agents –Yoshua Bengio” (Founder of LawZero),  argues that  "Currently, AI is developed to maximize profit. Agency can easily be used for malicious purposes such as disinformation, bioweapons, and cyberattacks”. Many such cases have been reported in recent past – According to a BBC report “Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic says testing of its new system revealed it is sometimes willing to pursue "extremely harmful actions" such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.
• Future Work Culture – The organistions are yet to experience the impact  of AGI on their cultural DNA. It will  be quite interesting to observe the human behaviour while working with humanoid robot as a supervisor  or reportee.
• Ethical Concerns -Many of us may not be aware but our data  is being used for  training without necessary consent violating the premise of data privacy. The concerns are being raised by the informed citizens about the possible  biases and opacity in decisions taken by AI enabled decision makers.
• AI is making homo sapiens dumb – The study by MIT and other organisations have revealed that reliance on AI might impact the cognitive abilities of the sapiens.

 

AI - Reality and Responsibility  

 

The scale and speed of AI revolution does have the potential to alter the course of progress of mankind. The experts are talking about both AI Utopia and AI Apocalypse in the same breadth, some technology heavyweights are even advising to slowdown the progress of AI but the stakes in the game are too high- these mellifluous sane voices will be lost in the din.

 

Beyond the cogent arguments and never ending scholarly debates about the tangible benefits and real threats we must understand  that AI is a reality and has already made its way into machines in our hand. We do not have a choice but to accept and adopt it with greater responsibility that involves, the consideration of a broader societal impact of AI systems and the measures required to align these technologies with stakeholder values, legal standards and ethical principles.

 

It is believed that AI will touch human lives in an unprecedented way in the course of time – some will reap the benefits, some may bear the burnt.  The million dollar question that worries me is not about the power of technology but the readiness of mankind to deal with it.

References 

• https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/30/robots-may-replace-up-to-800-million-workers-by-2030.html
•  https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/deepfake-footage-purports-show-ukrainian-president-capitulating-2022-03-16/
• https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/113843909440021824#:~:text=%22By%202026%2C%20the%20electricity%20consumption,met%20in%20a%20sustainable%20way.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zF1mkBpyf4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vd3lDAo6m8
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqc8PWYq9Hw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqc8PWYq9Hw

The Art of Managing Disgruntled Customers

 The Japanese phrase, “okyakusama wa kamisama desu”,  loosely translated into English as “Customer is God”, was perhaps coined to emphasize the centricity of the customer’s role in Business Organisation’s quest for an invincible strategy to drive growth and expansion. It is indeed an open secret that the organisations cannot sail through the choppy water of market uncertainties without the safe boat of compelling value proposition for its customers.

In the strenuous journey of corporate world experiences, it is not a surprise to meet a few hot headed customers who believe in the  above mentioned phrase rather literally. Their prophetic proclamation seems like the word of God revealed to them in the darkness of the mysterious night. At times I wonder , why this phrase which is meant to respect the esteemed customer’s point of view, at times used by them to evince/establish their supremacy over their service providers. Under the aegis of this assumed Godly power, their style changes from collaborating to dictating which brings the avoidable elements of aggression in the interactions that ultimately ends up spoiling the recipe of the meaningful engagement.

Etiquettes of responses

 

The question of the appropriateness of the responses to these unwanted situations may be baffling and bothering to many of us who are committed to provide Best in Class services to their customers. For managers, dealing with this quagmire of confusion gets more difficult when the tone and tenor of the customer’s communication crosses the boundaries of the generally agreed professional etiquettes. They feel like having a sort of Hobson’s choice between the risk of losing customer and the possible danger of losing their own self-esteem under constant hammering.

It is important to understand and underline that at times the customer’s frustration may be absolutely genuine despite the inappropriateness of the ways of  voicing the concerns.

Perhaps, there is no standard answer and “One-Size-Fir-All” solution available to manage the unpleasantries that might crop up,  however organisations can create the principle values based framework for the managers to deal with these complexities of the engagement. 

Every individual has its own style of responding to the pleasant and unpleasant situations of the lives.  Below is the some of the nuggets of learning that I collected over a period of time from the labyrinth of corporate corridors that might help to deescalate and sort the concerns in more realistic ways. 

• Defining the boundaries  - For any professional engagement, boundaries in terms of the behavioural expectations based on the ethics and values should be clearly defined. A line must be drawn for both sides and breach of the same should be avoided under any circumstances.
• Listen and Understand- Give a patient listening to customer and understand their perspectives even if it is based on the perception not the hard facts.
• Clarity and Transparency – Clarity and transparency in communication is critical while responding to the conflicting issues. Most of the time customers do have the tendency to make the big, generic statement to assert their opinion while expressing their displeasure. As a service provider, presenting the specifics with the contextual and objective point of view is critical. A good number of managers, deliberately keep the conversation ambiguous and hide the key information hoping that it would save the relationship. Dare to call spade a spade. 
• Don’t beat around the bushes - Accepting your mistake without any string attached to it and agreeing on the corrective action is a right way to address the discordance. The verbal skullduggery  and smart tricks to cover mistakes is a bad choice that would erode the trust further.
• Build long term relationship– It is much easier to manage the customer’s concerns and address the complicated situations, if the long term trust based relationship exists with the them. It requires leadership connect from both sides at periodic interval to create and review long term vision and roadmap of the engagement. This can only happen if services providers can create compelling  value proposition for customers. 
• Cost of Bad Relationship  - Service providers must evaluate the cost of bad engagement vis-à-vis good and no engagement. Though the endeavour should always be to provide the Best in Class services but there can be situations where cost of bad engagement is much higher than revenue generated from the project and the possibility of reversing the trend is very slim. Exiting from such engagements in such unfortunate situations even though it does not sound nice,  is a wise thing to do.  

Managing customer expectation is challenging but it is critical for any business to thrive in a competitive environment. The above mentioned difficulty, gets more nuanced and knotty in the "Professional Services" Industry as the contours of expectations often does not fit in the boundaries of the agreed framework. I often believe that the philosophy of  “Customer is God” is a bit exaggerated specially  in the context of the professional services.  

In my view, cornerstone of the customer relationship is empathy and value creation for the customers – perhaps that’s only way to create win-win situation for both parties to sustain and thrive.

The Tyranny of Silence

 

In the stillness of the sultry night, while negotiating the cluttered and noisy lanes of the digital communication , I stumbled upon a bizarre notification flashing on my phone announcing the removal of an esteemed gentlemen from a digital social group for his refusal to kowtow before the edifice of a scared ordinance promulgated by a tribe of democratically elected representatives.

Is there anything bizarre and unusual about the act of removal of individual from a any digital association, many mortals may ask this question, challenging  the premise of the  argument mentioned above 

The answer to the above mentioned hypothetical concern may vary depending upon the code of conduct one believes in, but for me it is resounding “Yes”  - it is indeed unusual. We all understand that every democratic group, federation or association is blessed with the right to add and remove the members based on the defined, documented and agreed policies and procedures. However,  any unfair assertion and action by the select group on the basis of “predilection for” or “prejudice against” the individual is at best unethical and unjust. This specific case stands out as a brazen act of injustice by the authorities at the helm of affairs  to send an unambiguous warning message to the large populace to comply and concur with the edicts cast in stone silently. 

Unfortunately, there is nothing new about this undesirable overreaction by the emperor of the day, the annal of history is filled with the similar stories of “arrogance of power” from  the time immemorial . In the recent past with the emergence of powerful democratic leaders across the geographical boundaries, the space for  liberty and freedom is continuously shrinking and is under unprecedented threat. The malaise is not limited to the large political enterprises but has spread to the lowest level of political and social institutions like an incurable disease of cancer . How can behaviour of RWAs be  different – the same arrogance of power has corroded the “structure of the ability” of many representatives to patiently manage the dissenting voices. Taking inspiration from the political leadership, they are trying assiduously to master the  art of bullying the residents into submission. 

Going back to the issue of expulsion, it is not the act but the meek acceptance of the act by the populace that has worried me most. It reminds  me of a famous statement by Martin Luther King Jr  - “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

 

It is true that the sprinkling of the fellow residents, raised their concerns and demanded reinstatement of the membership but it is also a sad reality that the larger cluster chose the comfortable silence over inconvenient truth. In my limited view,  the act of silence have always emboldened the authorities to impose their will without the formal due diligence process. 

 

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

 

At times, there can be valid justification for the decisions taken by RWA, but the same has to be ratified as per the provisions of the law. Occasionally, there can also be unreasonable resistance to the specific clauses of the provisions promulgated by the esteemed RWA with a good and positive intent. Let us not forget that the democratic governance framework is chaotic and stifling the voice is not the best of approach to address the concern raised by one, a few or many.

 

The history of the world is filled with the instances of disgraceful silence, when the world demanded the sane voices to standup. The most recent example before our eyes is the carefully calculated silence of the Arab world when the naked dance of death is going on in the ruins of Ghaza. In the words of Iqbal -

 

Yeh Misra Likh Diya Kis Shokh Ne Mehraab-e-Masjid Par

Naadan Gir Gaye Sajde mein Jab Vaqt-e-Qayaam Aaya 

                                                                                

                                                                        

 

The act of raising voice against injustice is important – the voice may be feeble , the incidence of injustice may be small in scale and scope.

Lack of Accountability- An invisible elephant in the room

 

“It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one's acts.”

(Mahatama Gandhi)

 

 

The dark grey sky was littered with glittering starts of all sizes, the faded  half- moon was hanging like a pale adornment from the horizon. While promenading within the secure wall of the residential campus I was  engrossed in a serious conversation with my fellow companion. He was a bit miffed with his trusted distant cousin for the non-completion of a critical task that led to some serious complication and trouble for him. Apparently, he seemed  deeply annoyed with the gentlemen he chose to trust. He concluded with the loud whining about the  lack of ownership  and accountability among the people in general.

 

I deal with the issues of responsibility and accountability on  a routine basis in my professional milieu, I quipped when his temper watered down a bit. I told him that despite investing years in the business organisations, I am still trying to discover the hormones that are responsible for inducing  sense of  accountability and ownership in the Individuals.

 

The cognitive revolution of the human beings  started  almost 70000 years back  but even today in the digital world of 21^st Century, a good number of the people around us in all walks of life have the innate tendency to avoid the ownership of the tasks befallen on their shoulders.

 

I came across an interesting study by Darren Overfield and Rob Kaiser published in Forbes magazine with the subject line “One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability” that sums up the story of  corporate workplaces. The  study  of 5,400 upper-level managers revealed that the accountability was their single most neglected behaviour . It  also made a startling revelation stating, that a whopping 46% of the managers under study failed to demonstrate the mentioned behaviour during business transactions.

 

The crisis of the accountability at workplace is real, it’s like a big elephant dancing in the meeting rooms, invisible to the intelligent minds sitting over there to discover the reasons of failure and decline.

 

Culture of Accountability : What and Why ?

 

According to Cambridge dictionary, Accountability is  the fact of being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it, or the degree to which this happens.

 

For me accountability refers to the ownership of the personal or organisational responsibility one has inherited or agreed to perform,  it encompasses the graceful acceptance of the setbacks and fiascos one may encounter in the mundane transactions of lives and of course,  it also includes the sharing of successes and accolades with fellow stakeholders.

 

According to the authors of the book” The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability”, True accountability is the “personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results.

The organisation’s performance and growth is inextricably linked with the culture of accountability permeating across the hierarchies of  work force.  The sense of accountability instils a feeling of belonging within the employee group leading to positive outcome and successful result. It creates a conducive environment where instances of failure is taken as an opportunity to own, reflect, learn and move forward with a positive intent. For start-ups, the accountability of the employees is the springboard to succeed and sustain by building a relationship of trust with the customers.

Developing the culture of accountability

It is no wonder that the corporate organisations are spending the huge sum of money and time to develop the culture of accountability within the organisation through various methods of training and employee engagement framework. Despite the continuous efforts of cultural transformation by the corporate office, the results are not very encouraging. The complexity of the issues  gets compounded for the start-ups as they may not have the luxury of necessary funds and time span required to implement a sustainable framework of employee engagement that may yield great result in the long term.  I strongly believe that the sense of responsibility and accountability is inculcated in the child from the pre-school stage itself, that may be further enhanced, fine-tuned  and reinforced with the aid of trainings, techniques and frameworks. The radical transformation in the attitude of the individual towards work and life  is a dauting task to accomplish for the harbingers of the initiatives within  a short tenure of the employee within the organisation.

 

It is not only  important to recruit the  “Best fit Talent”, it is equally important to create and implement the process of assessing the fitness for the role by measuring the performance of the individual against the core values  within 60 days from the date of joining. If the employees has failed to demonstrate the expected behaviours and is not aligned  with the organisation culture, s/he should be replaced immediately even if the process of replacement is painstaking and pricy. The impetus of driving the culture of accountability through open communication and environment of trust  lies squarely in the hands of leadership team.

 

Accountability is the glue that ties commitment to the result.

(Bob Proctor – Author, You Were Born Rich)

                                                                             

Reference :

https://hbr.org/2012/11/one-out-of-every-two-managers-is-terrible-at-accountability

The Dilemma of Friendship

 

               “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life"

(Mark Twain)

                                                                                                          

Adrian was sitting alone in his dimly lit, small reading room  staring at the books he has collected over a protracted pattern of diverse seasons. In front of him, there were books  he has never read, he smelled, scanned, settled them smoothly on the wooden shelf for the future purposes. On the left corner, there were a few, he has abruptly left, after reading a few pages due to abundance of boredom and drabness effusing from the long prosaic paragraphs. He had his own likings for the books and authors, he read, relished and referred then again and again to explore and understand the various complexities of human lives and umpteen shades of human behaviour and emotions captured in the white pages. These books were like an old wine to him, he will pour, drink till he gets inebriated.

 

While turning the pages of the of one his favourite books randomly, he discovered a  handwritten note, he has referred this book on multiple occasions, but he could neither recall the timing of the scribbling nor could he correlate it with any purpose he might have thought about ,while putting it safe and secure within the pages of the book “The Difficult of Being Good”. The crumbed old note read as follows :

 

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's best-known work on ethics, he described that friendship itself is a virtue, or involves virtue. It is not only important for living well, as a means, but is also a noble or beautiful end in itself that receives praise in its own right, and being a good friend is sometimes thought to be linked to being a good person. He differentiated into various categories based on the motives :

·      The pursuit of good

·      Utility or usefulness

·      Pleasure

According to him utility or pleasure are the inferior motives of the friendship. True friendship will be rare. When it does occur, it will only occur after a long period of time

 

His eyes got glued to the note, for him friendship was a conundrum that he could not resolve despite investing mammoth efforts and time. He was feeling betrayed by the recent events of his life, he thought that perhaps his gesture of friendship is being considered a sign of emotional weakness by the people around him. He wondered, not a long back he started his journey of friendship with Ashley with high hope and immense enthusiasm.  He remembered the cloudy winter evening, while sipping hot coffee they got into an accidental conversation about an uninteresting issue pertaining to collective behaviour of the society.During the prolonged conversation thanks to the continuous drizzle outside, they did discover a bit of commonalities in their thinking process that paved the way for them to meet again for the bitter caffeine and pleasant conversation.

 

He picked the paper in his hand and murmured, “perhaps Aristotle’ long time is longer than human life”. He needed an instant friendship that can make him cheerful and happy, needed a friend he can share his weird thoughts with. He wished to engage with someone to enjoy coffee and confabulation about mundane matters without irking other individual.

 

Ah, its not the right time for friendship!

 

In the “Dog eat Dog” world where all and sundry are racing against time, ultimately and ironically, only to be defeated by it – Aristotle’s long time needs to be recalibrated against the time keeper of the modern times. Adrian’s experience and expectations are not unique, it is much easier to find a friend in school with shared interest. You can find acquaintance, companion, colleague, comrade in the corporate corridors and happening cafes, but not necessarily a trusted friend driven by the “Pursuit of Goodness”.

 

The friends are lost during the journey from school to corporate world. Trace back your own path- you might have had many close and trusted buddies and besties in school and college, after spending a few critical years in the glittering corporate cosmos, perhaps you are left with a few that too if you have the luck of the Irish? It is indeed true that friendship is the first casualty after the watershed event of marriage as it changes the contours of relationship between couple and their friends upside down. The innocence of informality existing between friends fades with every passing day, paving the way for a decorated, formal, decent, perhaps a “nicely fit designer friendship” with rigidly defined boundaries.

 

 

Digitisation of  friendship

 

No one can disagree with the impact of digital connectivity to get into quick, crisp and cordial conversation leading to the strengthening of the bond of friendship. Digital revolution has changed the paradigm of friendship in many good and bad ways. It has significantly reduced the in-person interactions - the understanding of unspoken feelings, the warmth of the meetings, empathetic considerations, impatient wait to greet,  the innate giggle and guffaw seems to have lost the meaning in the world of meaningful discussions. In the upgraded version of friendship, we feel pleased to share the moments of glory and but feel hesitant to share the instances of pain. There is an invisible curtain between best of the friends that only allows the visibility of happy events and occurrences. Mostly, the meeting is between personalities, the persons are well hidden  behind their smartly crafted façade.

 

 

Friends are blessings

 

The Indian Telecom Giant “Airtel” ran an advertisement  campaign a few years back with a tagline “Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai”, to target the young and exuberant college going students. I believe that friends are crucial for all age groups to keep the spirit of vivacity and liveliness alive. You must have one true friend who can stand with you when the chips are down.

   It is indeed true that unlike Adrian, many of the aspiring professionals ready with parachute to jump into  the galaxy of excellence and exclusivity may not have necessary bandwidth  and even temperament to understand and accommodate the need for a true friend in life.

    The success requires blood, sweat and tears but once you get taste of it,  it induces many unique dilemmas. The person who accedes the summit always gets the advices he/she wishes to hear from the medley of acquaintances circling around him/her. This necessitates the need for a true friend who can share his /her displeasure and disapproval  without any fear of repercussion or  hope of favour. It reminds me of Oprah Winfrey’s interesting line  - “Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.” 

 

 

Sustaining friendship

 

It is not easy to sustain a friendship, even if it has been nurtured and nourished over a long period of time due to plenty of  reasons emanating from the complexities of life.  More importantly if the value of true friendship in life  is not known,  once celebrated friendship  will reduce to functional association of strangers.

The discussion started with a silent conversation between Andrian and his books and  strayed desultorily into the strange territories of friendship. Let me invoke this beautiful couplet of Ghalib to close the chapter.

 

ye kahaa.n kii dostii hai ki bane hai.n dost naaseh

ko.ii chaarasaaz hotaa ko.ii Gam-gusaar hotaa

                                                            (Ghalib)

 

 

(Woe betide, my friendship, that the friends give pious advice and sermons they deliver.
I need someone on whose shoulders could I weep, who could allay my grief and my fears)

Ghazal

Naved-e-Aamad-e-Yaaan Se Mausam Khuubsurat Hai

Gulon ke Raqs-e-Paiham Ka Nazaara  Khuubsurat Hai

Hayaa, ki Ot se Shokhi Nigahon mein Utar Aayee

Kaha Dheere se Jab Maine, Muhabbat Khuubsurat Hai

Dil-e-Naadan pe Kya Guzri,Jo Usne Haal-e-Jaan Poocha

Adab se keh diya, Pyare, Yeh Duniya Khuubsurat Hai

Hui Muddat Likhe Jisko, Usii Khat Ka Jawab Aaya

Likha Usne Wahi Usmein, Kahani Khubsuurat Hai

Ajab hai kaifiyat Dil ki Na Jaaane Kaisi Uljan Hai                                               

Na Dilkash Ab Rehi Furqat, Na Qurbat Khubsurat Hai 

Kisi Be-noor Zindaan mein Koi Be-Baak Sa Shaaer

Humak ke gaa Reha tha kal Andhera Khuubsurat Hai

Kisi Benaam Manzil ka Safar Pur-KHaar  Raste Se

Kabhi Dushwar Lagta Hai, Kabhi yeh Khubsurat hai

Utho Tausif Dekho Ab, Subah hone ko Aaaye Hai

Gulon ki Makhmali Chadar pe Shabnam Khuubsurat Hai 

Zindagi Ka Safar

Zeest ka Sail-e-Rawaan, Pahuchega Jab Us Mod Par

Jab Khvaab ke Sheeshe se Saara  Aks  Gum Ho Jayega

Lab ki Sab Shola-Fashani, Dil kaa Sab Josh-o-Junoon 

Waqt Ke Dhundle Safhon mein Chupke se Kho Jayega  

Sust- Rau Qadmon mein hogaa Bojh Guzre  Saal Kaa

Bazuoon Mein Zor Bhi Kam Kam Bacha Reh Jayega

Jism ke Ajzaa mein Kab Baaqi Rehega  Eitadaal

Dhadkanon ka Ghatta Badhta Silsila Reh Jayega

Haan Faraaghat to Rehegi Roz-o-Shab mein Waqt  Ki                   

Milne Waalon ki Kamii Se Dil Bujhaa Reh Jaayega

Hogi Maana Sab Suhulat, Honge Khidmatgaar Bhii 

Guftaguu Karne ko Shayad Chaaragar Reh Jaayega 

Yaad ki Dahleez par  Guzre Dinon Ka  Kaarvan

Kuch Dinon tak to Rahega, Phir Judaa Ho  Jayega

Jab Karoge Zindagi ke Beete Lamhon Ka Hisaab 

Waqt ki Barabadiyon ka Phir Yaqeen Ho Jaayega 

Zindagi ke Is Safar kii Kya Shikayat, Kya Gilaa

Raah mein Kaante na ho, to kya maza Reh Jayega 

Yeh Anaa ke Taaj-o-Zevar, Yeh Takabbur ka Mahal

Jab Safar yeh Khatm hoga, Kya Bacha Reh Jayegi 

Glossary :

Zeest Life

Saile-e-Ravaan Flowing Stream  

Lab `        Lips

Shola-Fashaani Fiery Speeches  

Sust -Rau Slow moving 

Ajzaa Elements 

Eitadaal Balance 

Faraghat         Availability 

Roz-o-Shab Day and Night 

Khidmatgaar Support Staff

Charagar Doctor

Gilaa Complaint 

Anaa Ego

Takabbur         Haughtiness