Given the stark decline in substantiative content that I dump here (we do know that it really doesn't matter...much anyway) this is an attempt to rectify it by attempting personal rambling (along the lines of "I ate an omelet for lunch, and drank a glass of absinthine, er, orange juice").

First, I looked at the free concert schedule over at Emory, and realized that because of a telephone conference call scheduled between 7.00-8.30 PM tonight (during which I will have to sound intelligent discussing finance: net present value, internal rate of return, equity, risk etc- alas all relating to money, and not to free lurve and world peace), I will have to miss Vega String Quartet's performance of Bach's Cello Suite no. 1 in G major. I may however run over and take in Bach's Violin Sonata no. 1 in G minor and Bartók's String Quartet no. 1. after intermission.

Second, tomorrow night if I manage to finish buying all the stuff* I need for a three week trip starting next Friday, I plan to go to a Javanese Gamelan & Puppetry performance. I like music that is made by vigorous banging of metal plates, pans, bells, gongs etc as it propels a shadow puppet show depicting episodes from the Great Indian Epics (the last time I went, it was Hanuman-ji going to Lanka to hunt for Sita-ma) with a Javanese twist.

Third, I like N.R. Narayana Murthy, the Infosys papaji, mainly because he is not ashamed to claim that he is a lapsed socialist (something I will become if I am not already one), and keeps talking about (even if in a very halu fashion) ethical issues in business. So today he held forth thusly in the pages of Wall Street Journal:

Once a company has set its values in place, it goes to the market. Our experience has shown there are five elements of success in today's global marketplace:

-- Listen to other people's ideas, especially those of the younger generations. Devise ways of management to tap the brilliance of young minds. Some of our best ideas grew from monthly "Ideation Days," brainstorming sessions led by employees under 30. Keep doors open. Let young workers walk into senior managers' offices to present their ideas without going through "proper channels." Retire early enough to give younger people a chance to take responsibility while still enthusiastic.

-- Maintain meritocracy. Build a company where people of different nationalities, genders and religions compete in an environment of intense competition and total courtesy. Do this by using data to decide which ideas are adopted. Our motto: "In God we trust. Everyone else brings data to the table."

-- Benchmark yourself against internal and external competitors to make sure you are doing everything faster today than you did yesterday, or last quarter.

-- Continue to develop better ideas. Build something great, and then break it to build something better. Never fear being insufficiently focused on a single core business. As long as your most brilliant people are continuously experimenting with the best services to provide to customers, the results will turn out right in the end.

-- Maintain pressure to implement the best ideas with ever-higher levels of excellence.

Elements 1 and 2 are okay, and the rest are boiler plate management-guru speak. Is Murthy garu seeking to become one? If he is, I as a minor student of the English language and poetry would urge him to avoid ending his speils thusly:

The only guarantee a company has each day is the opportunity to live by its values and to innovate. If a company puts its values into practice daily, it can remain vibrant even 100 years from now. But the day a company forgets its values, it will disappear like dew on a sunny morning.

*You would think buying stuff in Consumer Land would be easy. But it is not, if this is your visit to a commercial establishment (sans vists to places required to feed yourself: grocery stores, eateries and bookstores) such as a mall or a department store after a hitaus of two years.