Cannot imagine celebrating Teachers’ Day in any better way than by savoring this LinkedIn message that I received soon after my What is Business? lecture to incoming MBA students during their orientation a couple of weeks back:
Apparently, one lecture was enough to make an innocent person incapable of looking at aluminum, resin plants, helium—or geopolitics in the Middle East—without seeing a supply-chain network.
You are welcome.
Teaching, when it works, ruins you. You can no longer see the world quite the way you did before.
Which made me think about the people who ruined me.
Physics at HPS Begumpet. Operations Research at IIT Madras. Inventory, queueing and operations management at Cornell. Different subjects, different teachers, but the same irreversible effect: once someone teaches you a way of seeing, it becomes difficult to unsee.
September 5 is Teachers’ Day in India because it was Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s birthday. He was an academic, philosopher, Vice President and President. I had previously committed a small act of intellectual vandalism by repurposing his An Idealist View of Life as An Academic Capitalist View of Life.
Labor gets a day. Teachers get a day. There is, as far as I know, no Capitalist Day.
Perhaps because every day is one.
Growing up, ABBA had already supplied the appropriate economic theory: Money, Money, Money.
In my dreams I have a plan
If I got to be a wealthy man
I wouldn’t have to work at all, I’d fool around and have a ball
Aha
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
There is also a coincidence here. My nickname at IIT-Madras was Abba—not because I loved the band, but because during orientation ragging (in the US, hazing), I apparently displayed my displeasure with the irritated grunt “abba.”
Now that I do have a little money—thanks to Academic Capitalism, especially SmartOps—I created RAGS Foundation. I am delighted to announce my latest gift: It is to Tasveer Film Festival and Market.
So here I am, decades later, apparently living my own revised ABBA lyric:
I wouldn’t have to stress at all,
I’d tool around and have a ball.
“Tooling around,” for me, is doing research and teaching on the Second Quantum Revolution, attending film festivals, and occasionally still thinking about the future of global supply chains.
On September 17, I will be at Johns Hopkins (thanks Tinglong Dai for inviting me). So looking forward to ruining another perfectly innocent person who walks in, listens to me, and…
