Dwapara Yuga - Command and Control Management

The command and control style of management evolved from the battle plans of old fashioned conflicts with a few leaders holding all the levers of command and all the information directing expendable soldiers. The best example would be staff officers ordering thousands of men to run at machine guns in WWI. This style of management is the embodiment of Kali Yuga.

In WWII, great losses forced Britain to use their men more wisely, developing the idea of special forces and new tactics recognizing implicitly the value and capabilities of each soldier. The SAS, Britain's elite special force, used just a few highly trained and well informed men in land rovers to destroy Germany's air power in North Africa on the ground -- a management style reflecting the ideas of today's superstar businesses in investment banking, hitech and biotech.

In some 'modern' companies, the old command and control structures still exist with their modern day machine gun charges of thoughtless layoffs and uncoordinated outsourcing to gain efficiencies that could have been built by addressing basic needs of employees in Dwapara Yuga:

• Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security
• Achievement: To be proud of one's job, accomplishments, and employer
• Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees

The recent, best-selling book - It's Your Ship - describes a US Navy Commander applying these principles in the military by simply valuing and training his crew and outperforming the old command and control methods.

A similar example can be had in the recent movie - Outsourced () - where a US Manager moves to India and is forced to consider the value of employees in the call center business and simultaneously calls into question his Kali style mindset of exploitation and waste.

Dwapara Yuga - quality in music

In the past, popular entertainment was only available at the theater or music hall, unless one happened to have a castle and sponsored artists.

Since the beginning of Dwapara Yuga in 1900, the accessibility and quality of recorded music has steadily increased from wax cylinders to gramophone to LPs to CDs.

Oddly, the last 10 years has seen the rise and rise of even more accessible devices such as the iPod and iPhone but the fall in quality of the reproduction has been little reported. The recent book Appetite for self-destruction admits that the average fan cares less about quality and the driver for MP3 was the single song format in an era where 7" singles were no longer sold and albums deliberately have only one or two good tracks.

A modern CD is sampled at 1141 kbps (the bigger the figure, the better the quality) but the majority of iTunes music is at 128 or at best 192 kbps which means that much of the quality has been sacrificed in order to have fast downloads and store large numbers of songs.

This means that a whole generation are being deprived of the nuance and range of performance, apart from those attending live concerts or a small niche of audiophiles retaining 2-channel hifi setups that were common from the 70s to the 90s. Even at live concerts, the sound reproduction can leave much to be desired depending on the equipment used.

In the same period, video reproduction is going from strength to strength from the terrible NTSC (in the US) broadcast quality to full HD - high definition. Does this imply that we're becoming more and more of a visual and less of an audio culture?

Dwapara Yuga President

The United States has just elected the most international and diverse President ever, the 44th in its history - a true Dwapara Yuga changing point.

Symbolically this black man from a poor background defeated the wealthy son of an Admiral, himself the son of an Admiral, from an old, slave-owning family. His opponent had been held as a special bargaining chip during the Vietnam War much as in the Kali Yuga era nobles such as Saint Francis were held for ransom, if captured.

There are many parallels between the life of Obama and President Lincoln, both being relatively unknown lawyers from Illinois making surprise victories against entrenched oppositions with messages of unity rather than special interests.

Obama will take office on mid-day, January 20th, Dwapara 309. All Americans are uniting behind him to pull the country (and by extension, the world) from what looks like a depression forming the likes of which have not been seen since the 1930s.

George "W", his predecessor, with his New England birth, (now treated) alcoholism, life of privilege and inherited wealth shares more in common with the Kali Yuga figure of King George III of England than other self-made Presidents such as his own father, or Presidents Clinton or Obama.

It was George III's misrule that rather than quieting the American Colonies lead to revolution and their independence. It was "W"s misrule that fueled rather than defeated terrorism through military misadventure, abuse and torture of prisoners.

As Yogananda stated, "The ends do not justify the means, rather the means color the ends."