In Conversation With: Mr. Ratnakumar N., Executive Director of Kaar Technologies

This conversation I had with Mr. Ratnakumar N., Executive Director of Kaar Technologies was a formal meeting as part of a program introduced at my organization called ‘Coffee with Manager’. Although I did meet him as part of this initiative, I didn’t take the usual evening coffee that was offered to me, owing to sticking on to the usual habit. Either way, I did thank and appreciate my organization for such an initiative and urged them not to stop it due to a poor or less than average response as it will at least be of help to people like me who believe that socializing constructively like this was truly what life needed to spell out often. We can’t do anything if ‘Donkeys can’t realize the beautiful smell of camphor’. Indians – we have to change a lot, not just expecting the other to change, but we ourselves, to start off with, not counting the cost or consequences that may follow. Let’s hope for it to happen very soon.

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I have the idiosyncratic habit of analyzing people right from the first sight that I start having into their eyes and let me not be considered haughty in thinking that I am very often accurate, but invariably I do believe that I am barely wrong in how I judge others and myself too of course, given that the sight of my own eyes, in the mirror, have caught me most often. There are of course exceptional cases where I have erred or rather judged incorrectly and I would blame it on my rather empathetic nature in the past which indeed hasn’t disintegrated completely now, though I have been more cautious ever since it backfired so much so that the phrase ‘… bite the hand that feeds …’ turned out to be true against me. 

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Anyway, why am I divulging into such a psychological lesson? Well, there must be a specific reason why I chose Mr. Ratnakumar N. (referred to as Ratna below) to meet first, over the others, and indeed it is because of how I believe that a little bit of eccentricity in life can add a lot of flavors to the same. I too, despite at least being considered someone who is pretty conventional, love the idea of unorthodox behavior because it adds to the spices that a monotonous life wouldn’t otherwise guarantee. There indeed are flipsides to both kinds of behaviors which I myself again with my instinct have observed in myself and other people but we can consider them to be neglectable if the big picture that we see of that person turns out to be good. Not just that which we see but that which is, which we have to somehow try to grasp in its absolute and true sense. In that, Ratna stood out as a person who could go out of the way to stand by your side though I do believe, and have raised this issue with some people too, that such a character could often be misused to get someone else’s personal chores done by the method of influence without the major party knowing it since I am an unbothered victim myself. 

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Either way, my discussions with Ratna was very exciting though I did start off by telling him that the mood I was in when I booked a slot two weeks in prior, exciting and vibrant in that, was not the same as that which I was in when I sat on his sofa trying to garner a few important aspects that I could discuss with him in such a short interval of one hour. Let me be very frank, one hour is a very short span of time for a selectively verbose person like me though my meeting with Ratna did indeed extend by about half an hour more or so than scheduled which both of us agreed as being understandable due to the mutual interests we had in what we discussed. I was telling him how the blues of the rainy or winter season, if I could take the deviated liberty in saying so considering that all Chennai usually offers is different shades of the Sun, that had set in gradually, with days passing by in the month of October, had an indelible impact on my mood thereby potentially impacting my readiness and also on the hour that I was going to spend with him in discussion. I told him about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and how I believe I have become a happy victim of the same, at least with time, so much so that I hope to blog about it soon with the title ‘SAD isn’t as sad as it seems’ owing to the artistic abilities that are triggered in me as such a mood sets into me.

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This unplanned topic of discussion itself went into interesting turns as he told me about how religious rituals in his family were a mandate to be followed as deviating from them would usually bring in trouble as was the case in some of his more recent experiences. In the same line of psychological discussions, he asked me what behavioral sciences meant and though I was not very adept with such terms or knew it with a rather subtly different jargon, I told him that it indeed is a wonderful subset of psychology which is very easy to master and experiment with, until we are in a safe zone of analyzing and not getting carried away with it, especially with quick and unwise judgment calls. He was telling me about how he, despite his entrepreneurial journey which was especially hectic at its origination, had to spend quality time in ensuring that his brother had to be taken care of despite the latter’s schizophrenic episodes. Through my follow-up email to him after the discussion, I appreciated his efforts in doing so because in most cases such people are ostracized. We both realized that we had seen the not very popular but interesting film ‘A Beautiful Mind’, which is a biography about the life of John Nash, the American Mathematician, who was schizophrenic, and how it helped us both realize that such ailments are becoming pretty common in the general public.

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The Executive Director of Kaar Technologies then proceeded to discuss with me as to how he realized, on looking back at his career, very recently during one of his college reunions, that he was doing something unique every few years ranging from sales to software development and management and how he convinced his family in returning to India after spending quite some time working in the United States of America, despite having a Green Card. He was also very interested in aiding people like me and some others in entrepreneurial ventures, especially with directions that could prove to be useful in setting up an establishment of one’s own.

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I indeed did let him know how my interests were slowly inclining away from a desk job and how traveling and meeting new people was something I wanted to do, amidst a career in writing and / or journalism – that too something I do for the love of it and not for anything seriously in return, even if it had very high risks like the life of James Bond. I am indeed happy that he did not take it in the wrong sense and judge me for it given that he will be interested in an employee like me to be devoted to his job for long. On the contrary, to propel me in my line of interest, he told me that a few years of quick money would aid me in settling into such a career and that actually was a good insight as it was something very simple that I was overlooking for long as most of us who have an insight into what we want to do in the future, want it done ASAP. Patience is indeed something that has to be equipped judicially though I believe that impatience isn’t a tool to be completely ignored. When we were discussing on these lines on entrepreneurship, he wasn’t very particular that I strode along the lines of the software industry, but rather on anything that made me independent with a bunch on energetic and like-minded people who could help get the task at hand done.

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I discussed with him about clinical psychologists like Jordan Peterson and Sheldon Solomon who have had little to medium influences on my independent research and analysis on Philosophy and Psychology. With examples of how Peterson’s book, ’12 Rules for Life’, gained popularity despite it’s very conventional and already explored motivations for success and living, we both agreed that success is not always proportional to intelligence or hard work though there should never be a compromise on efforts that are delivered from our side and an always hopeful perspective every day when we wake up in the morning, especially considering the fact that mental health and other social aspects are deteriorating by the day.

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I told him that the American Composer Thomas Newman’s music too had a profound impact on my works and recommended him a few from his kitty and that of Hans Zimmer’s which truly were out of this world. We discussed about the Dark Knight Trilogy and how a semi-independent, rich, affluent, orphaned, highly-educated and asocial Bruce Wayne went against the tide to turn up at nights as Batman and do good for the society, without expecting anything, not even fame or money, in return. Through my email, I did let Ratna know how mental health issues and an acknowledgment and self-awareness of the same can assist in a lot of our intelligent actions in contrast to the popular belief that it is a taboo to deal with such people.

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We did discuss briefly on what each of us thought about God and I had shared with him a video of the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus Christ which helped me through the transition of ‘Christianity – Atheism – Disciple of Christ’ a few years ago, in a potentially fatal turn of events as part of a SAD episode. He did let me know that his beliefs in God were mainly in the lines of needing any serious help and not anything that was too pious. Despite such a difference in our views, we agreed that until each of us make decisions that are for the good and until they help us to do our duties responsibly and with a moral compass that ensures that our directions aren’t highly deviated, we were presumably in the right side of God’s judgment.

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We indeed did discuss the social issues that were plaguing India and he was pointing out how a random approach towards fighting all the issues wouldn’t aid me as it may not be fruitful and hence asked me to be more constructive. I too have been thinking in these lines for quite some time and will hope that such varied ideologies starts setting in me gradually. He did reckon that I had a lot of vigor and anger against many of the societal flaws but realized that many problems are pretty far-fetched for me to solve because ultimately individuals make decisions on subjective lines and debating on that itself will make us realize that some issues, though simple at the bottom line, are complicated due to various reasons like how many people have wrong ideologies and the grounds of such judgment calls such as religion, language and so on.

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The Table Tennis enthusiast then went on to discuss how he started late into reading books and I mentioned to him about my approach of reading a multitude of articles online in varied interests, instead of settling down for a book in a particular aspect due to an assumed judgment made by authors which may prove to be false with time, either from a consensus or when compared with our subjective beliefs. We did agree upon the fact that all we needed were insights and not pre-conceived notions which may prove to finally be a way by which the world tries to thrust their views about the world instead of an objective one that is true.

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While discussing about Kaar Technologies and it’s progress, he did surprise me by letting me know that from start, to date, they never had any funding and that all of the money were internally pooled in. That was actually commendable and such a practice is considered more safe and advantageous in many ways though crunches may sound bad on our reputation, which of course can be ignored because not all reviews matter.

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I still am a little surprised that we discussed so much in such a short span of time and what aided such an effort was indeed our wavelengths, which I believe was adaptable and close enough. He gave me a gift and I too returned one after a few days and followed up on the meeting with an email on many of the aspects mentioned above. Indeed, I am awaiting a reply to my email which he said he would do soon after going through it in detail and am also awaiting more such offbeat topics of discussions that I could have with him in the near future. I told him how I love such meetings in more informal places like parks and beaches as the ambiance adds to the flavor, though it was just a topic that I discussed with him about while stating how fantastic such initiatives were even otherwise as many of the misconceptions that each of us hold can be cleared by all the parties involved.

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Towards the end and when we met casually at a later point of time, he did advise me to meet Mr. Maran N., which I did do just about a week after that because he felt that our ideologies could yield good discussions. 

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Indeed in a follow-up meeting with a couple of HRs, I was echoing what I told Ratna that such initiatives are essential for a holistic growth of an organization and that there is a lot of knowledge transfer that happens in and after such discussions. Let us hope for this to be the beginning – the beginning of something new; unsurprisingly though, mystically yet.

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“The good times that are inevitably going to be a part of our future, must help us get through the bad times that are unfortunately part of our present”