The making of vision

In the Times of India of 16 September 2007, I read a column of Swaminathan Aiyar about the reforms in Bollywood. This is a brilliant example of how visions are created or how visions are executed.

Imagine someone in Bollywood having a vision of making 'successful serious cinema' 15 years back, say in 1992. I am talking about making movies like Khosla ka Ghosla or Life in metro. It would have looked like a dream of an exuberant impractical youngster who does not know anything of cinema industry. A empathatic viewer would have even lauded the ability of 'youth' to do the impossible. But a systems thinker would have told us that such a dream required too many things to be done which are way beyond the control of any person.

For instance, it would have needed the deregulation of Indian TV which brought in many actors, directors and producers in the forefront: a critical mass of good youngsters who are willing to experiment and have nothing to lose. It would have required liberalisation in capital markets for the capital market to provide finance to new ideas. It would have required deregulation of cinema halls which allowed 3 lakhs of Hindi speaking population in Karnataka to afford a Hindi movie or 1.21 lakhs population of Bengali in Delhi to enjoy the movie in Bengali. Each of these three different huge systems were required to make Khosla ka Ghosla possible.

Which youth can make such a vision happen? As you would have realised, even money or resources alone, howesover large, cannot influence such large systems. Any amount of hard work, commitment, dedication cannot turn a vision into a reality. When we see some of the individuals achieving their visions over a long time, we could applaud their ability to patiently wait for the 'systems to change', and perhaps bear the hardship for a long time. We could call them committed, hardworking, and passionate individuals. But are these individuals visionaries?

A visionary individual, according to systems thinker, is an individual who can see the interplay of these large systems and can 'plant' the saplings in these systems, and watch them grow. Based on their growth or withering, he then plans the course so as to convert the vision into reality. He has the ability to know which systems require what leverage and then muster the resources to influence those leverage points. Alternatively, he should forsee the choke points in a system and initiate efforts to de-bottleneck them. And above all, like a farmer, he has to wait for the right time to do the right thing and hope things will coalesce to convert the sapling into a fullfledged tree which can bear fruits.