Most of America is riled up by this and most of India is indifferent to it! And apparently the Govt of India is very confused by it!
So what do I think about it?
1. Do you approve of homosexuality? - Its not for me to approve. Its an individual choice of human beings.
2. If today you were to have a family, what would my reaction be if my son declares he is gay? - I would be very baffled but have no choice but to accept it. But would be even more worried as to how he would charter his life going forward. I'm not sure how prejudiced society is about this and how it would affect him.
3. Do you think gays are weirdos? - No. They are normal people. Have a sexual preference I do not agree with. There was a time when I did think they were weirdos. But I did get to know a gay person, during my hostel days. His conduct and attitude changed my world-view towards gay people and,I suspect, also those of a lot of friends of mine.
4. Do you think homosexuality should be decriminalised? - I dunno.
5. Why not? You seemed to have a pretty liberal viewpoint in Q's 1-3? - Bottomline is if homosexuality is made legal, it would open up the avenue of a gay dude hitting on me. That really does creep me out. And worst part is that legally it would be ok for him to do that. The very thought gives me the creeps. So while I'm ok homosexuality being legal I want no part to play in it.
6. Duh, you realise how lousy that statement was? - Yeah. But welcome to the real world. If the majority, has the power over someone's fate, it would exercise it in its favour, no matter how minuscule the logic or flimsy the argument. Why do you think racism has lasted so long?
7. But history would judge you as a bigot. You're ok with that? - Who do you think writes history?
8. Dude we are getting sidetracked. There has to be a way out. You clearly are not a homophobe, yet you are unwittingly aligning yourself to them. What's the compromise?
- Hmmm, well if all gay people promise not to hit on straight people, then homosexuality can be legalised.
9. What??! - Yes they should give God Promise.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Steve Jobs and Inspirational Speeches
This is a speech given by Steve Jobs that has been doing the rounds and has passed me by for 4 years, before enlightening me today. I read it at the busiest part of my day, and was deeply moved by this speech. It meant a lot to me and in some ways liberated me, if only for a day.
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
June 5, 2008
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
June 5, 2008
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Dilbert and My Mind
If my blog is titled, "Enter My Mind", then you should know that Dilbert is never far from it, as I explore the quirks of corporate life. Never does a day pass, without me reflecting on ironies of some random situation at work and how would a Dilbert strip look on the same. So now, have added a Dilbert Widget to the right panel of the blog. So u can read either my random posts or the more funnier Dilbert strips on my blog! [*sigh* the things we do to increase blog traffic!!]
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Messers Ahuja and Dhoni
The past few days have seen the entire country's news media frothing about the exploits [or the lack of it] of these two gentlemen. But surprisingly, Dhoni is being held guilty for lack of exploits.
I will deal with the exploits of Mr. Ahuja first. Rape. Mid-level Bollywood actor, married to a woman he has known and loved for 15 yrs and who has an infant daughter with her, accused of raping an 17/18 yr old maid, who has been in his employment for 45 days. He allegedly found a time window between 3 to 5 pm on that unfortunate day to commit this dastardly act. Story said this way, Mrs Ahuja is right, it smacks of a frame-up. Only one small minor flaw i see in this theory, what has Mr. Ahuja done in his life to make him important enough for a frame-up? Salman, Shahrukh, Aamir framed - i can understand...Mr. Ahuja? Maybe Emraan Hashmi too could be worthy candidate...but Mr. Ahuja?? I honestly don't know. The case could be true for the only reason that it sounds unlikely. Anyways time will tell.
This entire drama reminded me of some psychological theory which i learnt in college, the name of which i am not able to recollect. It basically says that if a person is genetically/ psychologically programmed to be a struggler, that is the area he is most comfortable in life. So even if he does become successful, he wud somehow screw up, to ensure he goes back to that struggling phase, where he has been most comfortable. Same goes for winners and losers. Our Mr. Ahuja goes into the struggler category i guess, if the story we hear is true.
Now for Mr. Dhoni. I'm much more at ease with this case. The last 9 years of Indian cricket has seen a metamorphisis never seen in the history of the game in our country. For almost the entire 20th century our collective cricket community, was busy incubating a Jurassic park-era egg, save for a brief period during 1983. The change which Sourav Ganguly brought, has been ably taken forward by Dhoni. Dravid and Kumble ensured that the flame didn't ebb away. Ganguly, for all his foibles, did resurrect Indian cricket from the ashes of the match-fixing scandal. And Dhoni, instilled in our Men in Blue a swagger that only winners possessed. Maybe the below lines explain his current predicament
The following is a quote from the movie, Patton.
For over a thousand years...Roman conquerors returning from the wars...enjoyed the honor of a triumph,a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals... ...from the conquered territories...together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot...the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes, his children,robed in white...stood with him in the chariot,or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror...holding a golden crown...and whispering in his ear, a warning... that all glory...is fleeting.
Hubris, however, spares none. Not even the greatest of them. A dear friend of mine, once counselled me "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize". That is an advice, i hold as a guiding light in great times and bad. Perhaps, Messers. Dhoni and Ahuja should too.
I will deal with the exploits of Mr. Ahuja first. Rape. Mid-level Bollywood actor, married to a woman he has known and loved for 15 yrs and who has an infant daughter with her, accused of raping an 17/18 yr old maid, who has been in his employment for 45 days. He allegedly found a time window between 3 to 5 pm on that unfortunate day to commit this dastardly act. Story said this way, Mrs Ahuja is right, it smacks of a frame-up. Only one small minor flaw i see in this theory, what has Mr. Ahuja done in his life to make him important enough for a frame-up? Salman, Shahrukh, Aamir framed - i can understand...Mr. Ahuja? Maybe Emraan Hashmi too could be worthy candidate...but Mr. Ahuja?? I honestly don't know. The case could be true for the only reason that it sounds unlikely. Anyways time will tell.
This entire drama reminded me of some psychological theory which i learnt in college, the name of which i am not able to recollect. It basically says that if a person is genetically/ psychologically programmed to be a struggler, that is the area he is most comfortable in life. So even if he does become successful, he wud somehow screw up, to ensure he goes back to that struggling phase, where he has been most comfortable. Same goes for winners and losers. Our Mr. Ahuja goes into the struggler category i guess, if the story we hear is true.
Now for Mr. Dhoni. I'm much more at ease with this case. The last 9 years of Indian cricket has seen a metamorphisis never seen in the history of the game in our country. For almost the entire 20th century our collective cricket community, was busy incubating a Jurassic park-era egg, save for a brief period during 1983. The change which Sourav Ganguly brought, has been ably taken forward by Dhoni. Dravid and Kumble ensured that the flame didn't ebb away. Ganguly, for all his foibles, did resurrect Indian cricket from the ashes of the match-fixing scandal. And Dhoni, instilled in our Men in Blue a swagger that only winners possessed. Maybe the below lines explain his current predicament
The following is a quote from the movie, Patton.
For over a thousand years...Roman conquerors returning from the wars...enjoyed the honor of a triumph,a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals... ...from the conquered territories...together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot...the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes, his children,robed in white...stood with him in the chariot,or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror...holding a golden crown...and whispering in his ear, a warning... that all glory...is fleeting.
Hubris, however, spares none. Not even the greatest of them. A dear friend of mine, once counselled me "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize". That is an advice, i hold as a guiding light in great times and bad. Perhaps, Messers. Dhoni and Ahuja should too.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Now what shall we talk about?
Nothing like a swig of rum and coke to get the bloggy juices flowing! So what shall we talk about?
Well firstly apologies to my friends Yason and Bun. We saw a movie together a few months back, "Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi". I thought it was an average SRK + Yash Raj Bollywood formula movie, designed to appeal to not so good looking men with hot women. But my friends thought, and I quote one of them, "This movie has made me believe in love". Now while I still stand by my opinion, apparently this movie has had such an impact worldwide, that even the Chinese have taken to it. This dude has used it as his audition song for "Chinese Idol"!
If Susan Boyle had chosen this song, probably she would've won Britain's Got Talent. Is it the magic of Bollywood or has the world really dumbed down to such depths? I do not have the pedigree to form a judgment on that one. However, as 2 MBA's, Yason and Bun have got the pulse of the next biggest superpower and largest market in the world. This would hold them in good stead if they get their asses transferred to Guangdong from Gurgaon. Cheers boys! You are Winners!
Now that I had mentioned Susan Boyle, I better document this 2 month phenomenon. Susan Boyle made me believe in reality TV. I have been a skeptic and have not watched even one of them, except probably The Great Indian Laughter Challenge [if u can call that reality tv]. Believe it or not, Ive not watched even 1 minute of MTV Roadies. I have been following Britain's Got Talent on the Internet ever since I saw the video of the Dancing Sardar. For sheer entertainment alone you just have to doff your hats to this duo.
Not to mention the hardwork, creativity and talent that goes with it.
The monsoons have hit Hyderabad today. I had posted a facebook status message to that affect and have got a lot of messages from folks saying congratulations and oh wow etc etc. I do appreciate the drop in temperature but I'm thinking, "Damn flooded roads, need to polish my shoes everyday, mud on the shins, need to protect the laptop from getting wet." etc etc. Is it just me being unromantic or is this how all men really think?
Oh did I also tell you that Ive been a lazy bum around the house and have not gotten around to getting any of the stuff I planned for in my previous blogs and continue to live with bare necessities like a bed and a wifi connection? Yeah, that's me. I love my life! Coz there ain't no one to nag me about it!
Well firstly apologies to my friends Yason and Bun. We saw a movie together a few months back, "Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi". I thought it was an average SRK + Yash Raj Bollywood formula movie, designed to appeal to not so good looking men with hot women. But my friends thought, and I quote one of them, "This movie has made me believe in love". Now while I still stand by my opinion, apparently this movie has had such an impact worldwide, that even the Chinese have taken to it. This dude has used it as his audition song for "Chinese Idol"!
If Susan Boyle had chosen this song, probably she would've won Britain's Got Talent. Is it the magic of Bollywood or has the world really dumbed down to such depths? I do not have the pedigree to form a judgment on that one. However, as 2 MBA's, Yason and Bun have got the pulse of the next biggest superpower and largest market in the world. This would hold them in good stead if they get their asses transferred to Guangdong from Gurgaon. Cheers boys! You are Winners!
Now that I had mentioned Susan Boyle, I better document this 2 month phenomenon. Susan Boyle made me believe in reality TV. I have been a skeptic and have not watched even one of them, except probably The Great Indian Laughter Challenge [if u can call that reality tv]. Believe it or not, Ive not watched even 1 minute of MTV Roadies. I have been following Britain's Got Talent on the Internet ever since I saw the video of the Dancing Sardar. For sheer entertainment alone you just have to doff your hats to this duo.
Not to mention the hardwork, creativity and talent that goes with it.
The monsoons have hit Hyderabad today. I had posted a facebook status message to that affect and have got a lot of messages from folks saying congratulations and oh wow etc etc. I do appreciate the drop in temperature but I'm thinking, "Damn flooded roads, need to polish my shoes everyday, mud on the shins, need to protect the laptop from getting wet." etc etc. Is it just me being unromantic or is this how all men really think?
Oh did I also tell you that Ive been a lazy bum around the house and have not gotten around to getting any of the stuff I planned for in my previous blogs and continue to live with bare necessities like a bed and a wifi connection? Yeah, that's me. I love my life! Coz there ain't no one to nag me about it!
Monday, June 01, 2009
Today Is Ours
Well, last week, the entire top 3 layers of management of the company i work for, were ensconed in a campus called EC4 in a faraway city. I know EC4 sounds as sinister as Area 51, but those few days of freedom from our bosses were a joyous occasion for a lot of my peers. This poem below composed by yours truly is a tribute to that joy.
Today is the day when we conquer
When we are going to ACHIEVE,
What we have set our minds to.
Nothing can hinder nor distract us,
We are lions, we are tigers today.
Boldly setting out to achieve our plan
We shall lead our batallions to success today
Today It is our plan, our fight and our destiny
Today everything in our calendar we will achieve
And fulfill the dreams our teams have strived for
'Coz today all our bosses are locked up in EC4!
Today Is Ours
Today is the day when we conquer
When we are going to ACHIEVE,
What we have set our minds to.
Nothing can hinder nor distract us,
We are lions, we are tigers today.
Boldly setting out to achieve our plan
We shall lead our batallions to success today
Today It is our plan, our fight and our destiny
Today everything in our calendar we will achieve
And fulfill the dreams our teams have strived for
'Coz today all our bosses are locked up in EC4!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Some things only accountants can do!
Like how to insult Shahjahan, like even Aurangzeb himself couldn't!
Check this out
While the sheer eccentricity of it is obvious, I'm just curious about the reason for such a valuation. Is it depreciation? So it takes about 350 yrs for probably what is the world's most expensive tomb to depreciate to Re.1/- .. Damn depreciation doesn't spare anyone does it? Its like a debilitating virus.
And since I'm not an accounting expert [actually I would peg myself lower than an accounting novice], I do have other queries as well. I have done my fair share of travel across India, and have always seen that the Govt of India, through its various branches, owns the bulk of the high value real estate across all of India's cities. Does it mean that we value all of these at Re.1/- In that case, is the Govt of India undervaluing its own assets?
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Elections Are Done
The people of India have spoken and they have shown the world, Democracy Rocks. High Five to all those with the indelible ink on your middle/index fingers!
But some people you can't keep out. They may be out of touch with reality, but with their excellent flair for words, fancy degrees and penchant for covering their asses, they still ply their trade as though nothing happened. No I'm not talking about the MBA's responsible for the recession...I'm talking about the GREAT INDIAN MEDIA
Not one, repeat not one, of this elite, shameless tribe got their prediction right on who would garner how many seats. Thank God the Election Commission cut down those opinion/exit polls. Imagine, the waste of investor money in the hands of these imbeciles in recessionary times. I'm not going to single out any single media person/outlet, as they have all proven to be equally incompetent. Now that we are done with the pre-election incompetency, let's get to the post election, "covering their ass" bit.
Today you have them propounding numerous theories as to why the Congress did so well - Rahul Gandhi, Dr. Manmohan Singh, NREGA etc etc
a] Rahul Gandhi - Ain't these the same tribe who were panning his naivete in trying to send out feelers to Nitish Kumar, Jayalalithaa and the Left. Goes to show, Rahul himself wasn't sure they wud do well but atleast he was game enough to try.
b] Dr. Manmohan Singh - Apparently the press believes that the people of India have learnt to respect his honesty and sincerity and have re-elected him. Errr, it thats so why didn't they know of it before the elections. If somone is so wildly popular amongst the masses, the press should know, right?
c] NREGA - National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Its the pro-poor scheme that has set the Indian countryside on fire, or so it would seem if u read the papers today. Interestingly the Congress party itself didn't think it was any great shakes. They mentioned it only 3 times in their manifesto on the 8th page. If hindsight is 20:20, for our media, it is laser vision!
The Indian General Elections have not only given the Congress a mandate, apparently it was a mandate beyond our shores as well. The Sri Lankan Army took it as a mandate to go ahead and shoot Prabhakaran. Yep..we care more for our free color TV's and one rupee rice, Eelam can go to hell. More on this later..
One of the biggest losers of these elections are the terrorists. Terrorism, by its very concept, is the art of influencing governments with high profile attacks that strike fear into the hearts of the people. When the people, themselves, don't care then of what use is terrorism? People of India, it seems, care for the Govt doing an earnest job or appear to do an earnest job of it. [Congress shud thank Chidambaram for this, flying shoe notwithstanding]. People care more for what the Government does that affects their daily lives. If terror were, to shake this country, it has to be much more widespread. In a country of India's size, that means all out war.
The elections also saw the Left lose a substantial part of their clout. They got whacked by Didi in Bengal and were united in commiting political suicide in Kerala. Post the elections, the Left politburo had a meeting and discovered there is still a place where they have 100% acceptability and had swept the elections. They decided to emigrate en masse to this promised land and applied to the Soviet Union for travel facilitation. The Russian embassy sent a "Sorry we do not exist anymore note" along with a Judo video of Vladimir Putin. Then they applied to the Chinese, who don't respond to losers. Then they tried their luck with Comrade Castro, who sent them a book from Hugo Chavez. By then, the kebabwala at Gol Market informed them that their promised land is in Indian territory and does not require a Visa. So off they went, led by Mr and Mrs Karat, who rival the Obamas as the most handsome first couple, to their promised land where they won 2 out of 2 LS seats - Tripura.
But some people you can't keep out. They may be out of touch with reality, but with their excellent flair for words, fancy degrees and penchant for covering their asses, they still ply their trade as though nothing happened. No I'm not talking about the MBA's responsible for the recession...I'm talking about the GREAT INDIAN MEDIA
Not one, repeat not one, of this elite, shameless tribe got their prediction right on who would garner how many seats. Thank God the Election Commission cut down those opinion/exit polls. Imagine, the waste of investor money in the hands of these imbeciles in recessionary times. I'm not going to single out any single media person/outlet, as they have all proven to be equally incompetent. Now that we are done with the pre-election incompetency, let's get to the post election, "covering their ass" bit.
Today you have them propounding numerous theories as to why the Congress did so well - Rahul Gandhi, Dr. Manmohan Singh, NREGA etc etc
a] Rahul Gandhi - Ain't these the same tribe who were panning his naivete in trying to send out feelers to Nitish Kumar, Jayalalithaa and the Left. Goes to show, Rahul himself wasn't sure they wud do well but atleast he was game enough to try.
b] Dr. Manmohan Singh - Apparently the press believes that the people of India have learnt to respect his honesty and sincerity and have re-elected him. Errr, it thats so why didn't they know of it before the elections. If somone is so wildly popular amongst the masses, the press should know, right?
c] NREGA - National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Its the pro-poor scheme that has set the Indian countryside on fire, or so it would seem if u read the papers today. Interestingly the Congress party itself didn't think it was any great shakes. They mentioned it only 3 times in their manifesto on the 8th page. If hindsight is 20:20, for our media, it is laser vision!
The Indian General Elections have not only given the Congress a mandate, apparently it was a mandate beyond our shores as well. The Sri Lankan Army took it as a mandate to go ahead and shoot Prabhakaran. Yep..we care more for our free color TV's and one rupee rice, Eelam can go to hell. More on this later..
One of the biggest losers of these elections are the terrorists. Terrorism, by its very concept, is the art of influencing governments with high profile attacks that strike fear into the hearts of the people. When the people, themselves, don't care then of what use is terrorism? People of India, it seems, care for the Govt doing an earnest job or appear to do an earnest job of it. [Congress shud thank Chidambaram for this, flying shoe notwithstanding]. People care more for what the Government does that affects their daily lives. If terror were, to shake this country, it has to be much more widespread. In a country of India's size, that means all out war.
The elections also saw the Left lose a substantial part of their clout. They got whacked by Didi in Bengal and were united in commiting political suicide in Kerala. Post the elections, the Left politburo had a meeting and discovered there is still a place where they have 100% acceptability and had swept the elections. They decided to emigrate en masse to this promised land and applied to the Soviet Union for travel facilitation. The Russian embassy sent a "Sorry we do not exist anymore note" along with a Judo video of Vladimir Putin. Then they applied to the Chinese, who don't respond to losers. Then they tried their luck with Comrade Castro, who sent them a book from Hugo Chavez. By then, the kebabwala at Gol Market informed them that their promised land is in Indian territory and does not require a Visa. So off they went, led by Mr and Mrs Karat, who rival the Obamas as the most handsome first couple, to their promised land where they won 2 out of 2 LS seats - Tripura.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
The Glass is Always Full
Is this glass half full or half empty?
Its the favourite cliche amongst Management Practitioners, who are imaginative enough to earn a living out of describing half a glass of water! I've never been convinced by their optimism or pessimism theories and division of people's personalities on the basis of that. But what did I think? Is it half full or half empty.
The answer dawned on me yesterday. The glass is ALWAYS FULL. Half of it is water and the other half is opportunity. Its my choice what i fill it with, more water, vodka, rum, poison, just fruit punch or just plain emptiness.
Life might be a crowded playground, but just go play.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
The Argumentative Indian Siblings
The One : Miss India
The Precious One : And then she wud get into bollywood and become another face in the crowd. If only for once these ppl wud do actual social service/ public service
The One : ur such a pessimist...
The Precious One : Am just goin by what s been happening all these yrs!
The One : beautiful women are not meant for real social work. Its against nature. Name one example to the contrary..
The Precious One : What shit! Chauvinist!!
The One : Dont curse, if u dont have an answer to my point. ur admitting ur own defeat
The Precious One : What kind of a ridiculous notion is that beautiful women are not meant for social work.
The One : darling. counter the point. else zip it. I'm only going by emperical evidence, for generations
The Precious One : What nonsense. Arundhati Roy is socially active. She is pretty. And seriously ur just a chauvinist. Nothing can mask that!
The One : Ahem...go through the mail trail..
u say, "Am just goin by what s been happening all these yrs!"
And i responded
"im only going by emperical evidence, for generations"
pretty much the same response, but i am the chauvinist? look in the mirror...
Arundhati Roy is socially active to sell her books. I dont see her doing any active social/political service
The Precious One : can c ur very jobless
The One : u are speechless so dont make me jobless
The Precious One : Ya right! Ur highly jobless. Ur argument is pointless
The One : ur hopeless...just admit u loss the argument
The Precious One : hopes
The Precious One : And then she wud get into bollywood and become another face in the crowd. If only for once these ppl wud do actual social service/ public service
The One : ur such a pessimist...
The Precious One : Am just goin by what s been happening all these yrs!
The One : beautiful women are not meant for real social work. Its against nature. Name one example to the contrary..
The Precious One : What shit! Chauvinist!!
The One : Dont curse, if u dont have an answer to my point. ur admitting ur own defeat
The Precious One : What kind of a ridiculous notion is that beautiful women are not meant for social work.
The One : darling. counter the point. else zip it. I'm only going by emperical evidence, for generations
The Precious One : What nonsense. Arundhati Roy is socially active. She is pretty. And seriously ur just a chauvinist. Nothing can mask that!
The One : Ahem...go through the mail trail..
u say, "Am just goin by what s been happening all these yrs!"
And i responded
"im only going by emperical evidence, for generations"
pretty much the same response, but i am the chauvinist? look in the mirror...
Arundhati Roy is socially active to sell her books. I dont see her doing any active social/political service
The Precious One : can c ur very jobless
The One : u are speechless so dont make me jobless
The Precious One : Ya right! Ur highly jobless. Ur argument is pointless
The One : ur hopeless...just admit u loss the argument
The Precious One : hopes
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Recession, No Fly Zone Aur Meri Gharibi
I was sitting in a day-long meeting today. You know how Saturday meetings are..they start off interesting but then as the day wears on, your mind revolts and refuses to pay attention.Constantly tugging at your freedom genes and taunting you for sitting through office on a Saturday. Suddenly, I thought I heard the words No Fly Zone. Lost as I was in my own sweet world, it took me 10-15 seconds to re-orient myself. Did I really hear those words? Was I sitting through some National Security Briefing somewhere?
I wanted to ask what was this No Fly Zone. I was looking around hoping someone else would. Sometimes, being a respected manager is about letting someone else ask the dumb question. Bingo! Sales guy, couldn't contain his curiosity and asks the question.
So apparently, this is what it is. Previously our company had a policy of giving us air travel for distances that wud involve train travel of 12 hours or more. Then some hack did an analysis, and decided that if we increase that to 14 hours, then we would save a lot more money. And presto, Hyderabad has become a No-Fly Zone. Earlier we used to fly to Chennai/Bangalore or Mumbai, but now we have to go by train.
And that is not a comfortable experience.
Invariably, we are summoned to Bangalore with less than a week's notice and it is well nigh impossible to get a confirmed ticket with a week's notice on the Indian Railways in the summer months. You would think tatkal booking should take care of the problem? I would too, but then you and I did not account for our centralised ticketing team that can botch things up incredibly [Sorry sir! System crashed!]
I ended up traveling in that train that contributes most to the Legend of Lalu Prasad Yadav. The messiah of the Indian Railways. The man who has made it the most profitable venture in India today. Not since, the British laid the first rail road in India, back in 1854, has the Indian Railways seen a man of this caliber. Ladies and gentlemen, I traveled by the Gharib Rath.
The genius of the train, is the way in which every available crevice has been utilised to put in a berth and charge the customer for the same. There is air-conditioning, but then again from the Seldom-Works factory, somewhere in Bihar. They rent out these blankets and pillows for Rs.25/-, its like a palliative, to make u think the air-conditioning works! Its not all bad, it looks decent. My own first reaction, when I boarded was "Not bad!!"
The worst part is in their endeavor to fit in all these extra people in one standard coach, theyve managed to shave off a few inches from each berth. Mr.Lalu's strategic inch reduction and my own profligate inch surplus, make for one really painful journey!
I wanted to ask what was this No Fly Zone. I was looking around hoping someone else would. Sometimes, being a respected manager is about letting someone else ask the dumb question. Bingo! Sales guy, couldn't contain his curiosity and asks the question.
So apparently, this is what it is. Previously our company had a policy of giving us air travel for distances that wud involve train travel of 12 hours or more. Then some hack did an analysis, and decided that if we increase that to 14 hours, then we would save a lot more money. And presto, Hyderabad has become a No-Fly Zone. Earlier we used to fly to Chennai/Bangalore or Mumbai, but now we have to go by train.
And that is not a comfortable experience.
Invariably, we are summoned to Bangalore with less than a week's notice and it is well nigh impossible to get a confirmed ticket with a week's notice on the Indian Railways in the summer months. You would think tatkal booking should take care of the problem? I would too, but then you and I did not account for our centralised ticketing team that can botch things up incredibly [Sorry sir! System crashed!]
I ended up traveling in that train that contributes most to the Legend of Lalu Prasad Yadav. The messiah of the Indian Railways. The man who has made it the most profitable venture in India today. Not since, the British laid the first rail road in India, back in 1854, has the Indian Railways seen a man of this caliber. Ladies and gentlemen, I traveled by the Gharib Rath.
The genius of the train, is the way in which every available crevice has been utilised to put in a berth and charge the customer for the same. There is air-conditioning, but then again from the Seldom-Works factory, somewhere in Bihar. They rent out these blankets and pillows for Rs.25/-, its like a palliative, to make u think the air-conditioning works! Its not all bad, it looks decent. My own first reaction, when I boarded was "Not bad!!"
The worst part is in their endeavor to fit in all these extra people in one standard coach, theyve managed to shave off a few inches from each berth. Mr.Lalu's strategic inch reduction and my own profligate inch surplus, make for one really painful journey!
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Desperation of An HR Manager
(This post is inspired by a true incident in an IT company I dont work for, but has been shamelessly embellished for blogging and reading pleasure)
Bulbul Sukhija was happy and contended. She had a nice job, HR manager in a muti-national IT company. People thought that hers was the most secure job in the company. They envied her. She thought they envied her Maybelline lipstick, her Estee Lauder nail polish or her fashionable Gucci purses and she liked it.
Then things changed
March 30, 2009 - Bulbul walks into office 5 mins late. She sees her HR colleagues, Rachna and Shweta chatting at the Coffee Machine. She stops to say hi. "Did you see the new SRK movie? He looks so dashing yaar!!"... There was no response from them. None of the usual giggles, screams or hi-fi's. Just a look of gloom and despair. "Whats wrong Rachna? Nitin didnt wanna go shopping over the weekend?" Shweta speaks up - "Did u hear about it? They laid off Gaurav, Rahul, Chetna and Riddhi in Banglore."
Bulbul was shocked. Layoff news should not have shocked her, but this was different. Layoffs in HR?!! That was unheard of. The reality of her world came crashing down on her. "The word is the VP-HR is coming down to our office later this week. Next round could be here.." Bulbul did not hear the rest of her words. Her mind was abuzz with images, sounds, numbers and reports... Reports she never made and numbers she did not know. They were all the preserve of Neha, her sweet but highly pregnant assistant.
Bulbul stumbled to her work station. No one told her she would be fired. But yet why was she feeling like this? Suddenly the room felt very cold and her fingers were shivering. She just froze over. Suddenly her phone rang, it was her VP-HR. He was coming to town on the 3rd of April. He was just checking if she would be in office then. Of course she would! "Sure..see you then. /CLICK/"
No hi's, no bye's, no inane jokes, no agenda, no enquiries on the weather, the cat or other inane things HR people talk about. Bulbul collapsed into her chair. This time she was sweating profusely. She had to do something. Her job was on the line...so was Maybelline/Estee Lauder/Gucci/her brand new Honda City...EVERYTHING WAS ON THE LINE
She called up Neha, who was on leave this week. "Neha how are u feeling?...Could you come into office for a bit this week...I understand your due anytime but this is important... I DONT CARE IF YOUR WATER BREAKS I WANT YOU IN OFFICE NOW!!
After ten more minutes of haggling, Neha agrees to come to office, but only for the 5 hours today. She looked at the last quarter's report. It didnt make any sense to her. What was that formula for attrition again? She called up Neha again.. "How long wud it take to make the Quarter report?... 3 hrs!.. That should be fine. The numbers are already in place?! Wow Great.."
Suddenly Bulbul felt a lot more relaxed. She had 2 hours with Neha to understand the report and then face her VP later this week. This was the kind of stuff she was good at in school, college and MBA.
MBA!! Her classmate Meena . She had worked with this VP-HR. She should call her for some tips. "Hi Meena , how're u doing?...Long time yeah!!...Yes i remember those days...How is Karan ? ... Oh wow! Didnt know that, Im sorry to hear that ... Your doing well right? ... Oh good good... Acha listen, I need a favour...et al.."
She was nice. She told her that the Boss didn't go with just reports. He was hungry for a taste of the action on the ground. What the sales guys were doing. What were the Engineers feeling on the ground. Real info and anectodes. Funny stories, tough stories and the likes... She mumbled her Thank You's all the while wondering how to get all this info.
How would she get all this info at such short notice? She didn't have the time to meet so many people. Just then, Shweta [from the Coffee Machine] walks up to her. She wanted some paper pins. Bulbul asks her, "How do you get info from a group of people, all at once, without meeting them individually?" Shweta looks at her and walks away as if someone asked her what comes after 0 and says over her shoulder, "You meet them in a Group!! Over lunch or something!!"
EUREKA!! BINGO!! That was it WORKING LUNCH!!
She pulls out her manpower report...looks through them and pulls out 30 people she knew.. people who had flirted with her, some she had flirted with, most she had helped out with some issue or the other. Mostly people who would not say no to a hasty lunch meeting.
She shot out an email to these people. It was 10-15 am. Should be enough of advance notice for a 12 pm meeting. Besides gives her about 45 mins before the cafeteria becomes crowded. Enough time to hear the stories of 30 people and give some anectodes to the BOSS no?
To - Bulbul Sukhija
Cc -
Bcc - 30 random guys - 10 Sales/ 10 Techies/ 10 Managers
WORKING LUNCH WITH HR
12 pm at the Cafeteria, today.
Would be great to meet you over lunch to understand how things have been with you and get to plan for the future.
Warm Regards,
Bulbul Sukhija
She called up the admin guy for lunch arrangements. Sorry madam, no budget left. No madam, approvals se nahi chalega. No budget only.../CLICK/ Idiot...
She calls up the cafeteria directly..Can you arrange some food...No admin approval...Im paying for it...Sorry madam only sandwich available. Regular lunch only by 12-45. OK fine.
11.45 am - Bulbul is at the cafeteria.. She paid the cafeteria guy. She sat there at her table doodling in on her notepad, waiting for her pack of story tellers..Slowly the Mark Twains start trickling in one and twos till even that stopped. No more were coming. Final count 13 guys
3 Embarassed Sales guys - [Athos, Porthos, Aramis] Each had thought it was a one to one intimate lunch with Bulbul Sukhija with a promise of many more to come. A reward that was worth postponing their year end hunt to fulfull their sales targets for.
10 Techies - All there for the free lunch.
0 Managers - They didnt read the mail.
Bulbul - Hi, Thanks for coming. So how are things?
Group - Silence, blink, blink.
Sandwiches and Frooti arrive
Bulbul - Please ha...
Group - Grabs at sandwiches and frooti.. *tear*...*gulp*...*slurp*
Bulbul - So how have things been
Techie #1 - That is all?
Bulbul - You can have Frooti too..
Athos thinks "Oh damn, ive done only 90% of my targets, if i get that deal signed today i would meet my nos...I need to get out of here... What was i thinking coming here"
Athos - It has been a great year..we are all very excited.. the company has been great, HR has been very supportive. Can I go now?
Techie #2 - Can i get some sauce pls?
Bulbul - Sure u can get ur sauce. And Athos, we wouldn't take too long. So tell me guys, how has it been going?
Techie #3 - Are we getting laid off?
Bulbul - Ofcourse not. We have an employee friendly HR policy. If you have done well this year, as im sure you have, you have nothing to be worried about. *Smiles*
Porthos' heart flutters. He knows he has done only 15% of his sales targets. He is a sureshot lay-off. He only hopes Bulbul would be the one laying him off .
Techie #4 - The air-conditioning is not working properly on our floor
Bulbul (expectantly) - Does it cause the team discomfort? Any health problems because of that? Team discord due to the increased heat?
Techie #4 - Mumbles something about not being able to find the remote
Bulbul [disappointed] - So what else?
Techie #1 - Can i get more Frooti?
Bulbul - Yes. What else is happening.
Athos - Hi Bulbul, I have to go now, there is a client meeting i have to attend.
Aramis [he has done 95% of his target and doesnt want Altos to beat him] - Bulbul, what is the company policy on timelines? Should we not planning things in advance and not waiting for the last date?
Bulbul - Yes of course. That is there in the second line of the company motto also. "Proactive Delivery"
Aramis - Oh how wonderful. (Smiles at Porthos, who looks daggers at him) Can u tell us more about the organizational principles we have?
Porthos - Yes please (Eagerly awaiting to hear Bulbul's lecture), bites into his 3rd sandwich
Techie #6 - But where is lunch? We only had sandwiches and Frooti
Bulbul (embarassed) - You can all have more sandwiches too
Techie #7 - Only sandwiches?? No bread pakoras?
Techie #9 - Thats exploitation. Just because the job market is dull, you cant treat us like this
Athos (sensing an opening) - Im sorry i have to leave too..moves away quickly without looking back.
Techie #10 - Lets go to Pizza Hut, who is in?
(slight murmer of disinterest in the group) - recession , month-end, bill payment due...
Techie #10 - Yaar its Techie #4's bday treat that is due.
Chairs moving, laughter, feet shuffling.People starting moving out.
Bulbul (relieved its over) - Thanks all for coming. We had a great time. Good luck.
Porthos - Bulbul, You want to come for coffee?
Techie #4 - Bulbul, u want to come for pizza? My treat?
Techie #10 - Bulbul, pizza and coffee after that?
Bulbul - Thanks guys
Friday, 4 April 2009
Bulbul meeting VP-HR
Bulbul - Yes sir, the team is sensitive to the market conditions, but they are working so hard...In fact they know that our team outing budgets are down, but Ive motivated them to pool in and still do their pizza party. The camaraderie is as great as ever, without a single penny from the company. Attrition, is not a challenge sir... (since we lay them off before they resign).
Everyone is so positive sir. They love the company and its values. Even seasoned Sales guys, want me to take up sessions on the company's core vision. The team is so committed, that even on the last day of the financial year, they are gung-ho to go out and meet their nos. Im so proud of the team that we have set up here. All go getters...(and the rest we lay-off)
VP-HR - Good Bulbul. Nice catching up with you. (Gets up to leave)
Rachna and Shweta, from the Coffee Machine, get laid off that evening. Bulbul got transferred to the Branding dept next week.
Bulbul Sukhija was happy and contended. She had a nice job, HR manager in a muti-national IT company. People thought that hers was the most secure job in the company. They envied her. She thought they envied her Maybelline lipstick, her Estee Lauder nail polish or her fashionable Gucci purses and she liked it.
Then things changed
March 30, 2009 - Bulbul walks into office 5 mins late. She sees her HR colleagues, Rachna and Shweta chatting at the Coffee Machine. She stops to say hi. "Did you see the new SRK movie? He looks so dashing yaar!!"... There was no response from them. None of the usual giggles, screams or hi-fi's. Just a look of gloom and despair. "Whats wrong Rachna? Nitin didnt wanna go shopping over the weekend?" Shweta speaks up - "Did u hear about it? They laid off Gaurav, Rahul, Chetna and Riddhi in Banglore."
Bulbul was shocked. Layoff news should not have shocked her, but this was different. Layoffs in HR?!! That was unheard of. The reality of her world came crashing down on her. "The word is the VP-HR is coming down to our office later this week. Next round could be here.." Bulbul did not hear the rest of her words. Her mind was abuzz with images, sounds, numbers and reports... Reports she never made and numbers she did not know. They were all the preserve of Neha, her sweet but highly pregnant assistant.
Bulbul stumbled to her work station. No one told her she would be fired. But yet why was she feeling like this? Suddenly the room felt very cold and her fingers were shivering. She just froze over. Suddenly her phone rang, it was her VP-HR. He was coming to town on the 3rd of April. He was just checking if she would be in office then. Of course she would! "Sure..see you then. /CLICK/"
No hi's, no bye's, no inane jokes, no agenda, no enquiries on the weather, the cat or other inane things HR people talk about. Bulbul collapsed into her chair. This time she was sweating profusely. She had to do something. Her job was on the line...so was Maybelline/Estee Lauder/Gucci/her brand new Honda City...EVERYTHING WAS ON THE LINE
She called up Neha, who was on leave this week. "Neha how are u feeling?...Could you come into office for a bit this week...I understand your due anytime but this is important... I DONT CARE IF YOUR WATER BREAKS I WANT YOU IN OFFICE NOW!!
After ten more minutes of haggling, Neha agrees to come to office, but only for the 5 hours today. She looked at the last quarter's report. It didnt make any sense to her. What was that formula for attrition again? She called up Neha again.. "How long wud it take to make the Quarter report?... 3 hrs!.. That should be fine. The numbers are already in place?! Wow Great.."
Suddenly Bulbul felt a lot more relaxed. She had 2 hours with Neha to understand the report and then face her VP later this week. This was the kind of stuff she was good at in school, college and MBA.
MBA!! Her classmate Meena . She had worked with this VP-HR. She should call her for some tips. "Hi Meena , how're u doing?...Long time yeah!!...Yes i remember those days...How is Karan ? ... Oh wow! Didnt know that, Im sorry to hear that ... Your doing well right? ... Oh good good... Acha listen, I need a favour...et al.."
She was nice. She told her that the Boss didn't go with just reports. He was hungry for a taste of the action on the ground. What the sales guys were doing. What were the Engineers feeling on the ground. Real info and anectodes. Funny stories, tough stories and the likes... She mumbled her Thank You's all the while wondering how to get all this info.
How would she get all this info at such short notice? She didn't have the time to meet so many people. Just then, Shweta [from the Coffee Machine] walks up to her. She wanted some paper pins. Bulbul asks her, "How do you get info from a group of people, all at once, without meeting them individually?" Shweta looks at her and walks away as if someone asked her what comes after 0 and says over her shoulder, "You meet them in a Group!! Over lunch or something!!"
EUREKA!! BINGO!! That was it WORKING LUNCH!!
She pulls out her manpower report...looks through them and pulls out 30 people she knew.. people who had flirted with her, some she had flirted with, most she had helped out with some issue or the other. Mostly people who would not say no to a hasty lunch meeting.
She shot out an email to these people. It was 10-15 am. Should be enough of advance notice for a 12 pm meeting. Besides gives her about 45 mins before the cafeteria becomes crowded. Enough time to hear the stories of 30 people and give some anectodes to the BOSS no?
To - Bulbul Sukhija
Cc -
Bcc - 30 random guys - 10 Sales/ 10 Techies/ 10 Managers
WORKING LUNCH WITH HR
12 pm at the Cafeteria, today.
Would be great to meet you over lunch to understand how things have been with you and get to plan for the future.
Warm Regards,
Bulbul Sukhija
She called up the admin guy for lunch arrangements. Sorry madam, no budget left. No madam, approvals se nahi chalega. No budget only.../CLICK/ Idiot...
She calls up the cafeteria directly..Can you arrange some food...No admin approval...Im paying for it...Sorry madam only sandwich available. Regular lunch only by 12-45. OK fine.
11.45 am - Bulbul is at the cafeteria.. She paid the cafeteria guy. She sat there at her table doodling in on her notepad, waiting for her pack of story tellers..Slowly the Mark Twains start trickling in one and twos till even that stopped. No more were coming. Final count 13 guys
3 Embarassed Sales guys - [Athos, Porthos, Aramis] Each had thought it was a one to one intimate lunch with Bulbul Sukhija with a promise of many more to come. A reward that was worth postponing their year end hunt to fulfull their sales targets for.
10 Techies - All there for the free lunch.
0 Managers - They didnt read the mail.
Bulbul - Hi, Thanks for coming. So how are things?
Group - Silence, blink, blink.
Sandwiches and Frooti arrive
Bulbul - Please ha...
Group - Grabs at sandwiches and frooti.. *tear*...*gulp*...*slurp*
Bulbul - So how have things been
Techie #1 - That is all?
Bulbul - You can have Frooti too..
Athos thinks "Oh damn, ive done only 90% of my targets, if i get that deal signed today i would meet my nos...I need to get out of here... What was i thinking coming here"
Athos - It has been a great year..we are all very excited.. the company has been great, HR has been very supportive. Can I go now?
Techie #2 - Can i get some sauce pls?
Bulbul - Sure u can get ur sauce. And Athos, we wouldn't take too long. So tell me guys, how has it been going?
Techie #3 - Are we getting laid off?
Bulbul - Ofcourse not. We have an employee friendly HR policy. If you have done well this year, as im sure you have, you have nothing to be worried about. *Smiles*
Porthos' heart flutters. He knows he has done only 15% of his sales targets. He is a sureshot lay-off. He only hopes Bulbul would be the one laying him off .
Techie #4 - The air-conditioning is not working properly on our floor
Bulbul (expectantly) - Does it cause the team discomfort? Any health problems because of that? Team discord due to the increased heat?
Techie #4 - Mumbles something about not being able to find the remote
Bulbul [disappointed] - So what else?
Techie #1 - Can i get more Frooti?
Bulbul - Yes. What else is happening.
Athos - Hi Bulbul, I have to go now, there is a client meeting i have to attend.
Aramis [he has done 95% of his target and doesnt want Altos to beat him] - Bulbul, what is the company policy on timelines? Should we not planning things in advance and not waiting for the last date?
Bulbul - Yes of course. That is there in the second line of the company motto also. "Proactive Delivery"
Aramis - Oh how wonderful. (Smiles at Porthos, who looks daggers at him) Can u tell us more about the organizational principles we have?
Porthos - Yes please (Eagerly awaiting to hear Bulbul's lecture), bites into his 3rd sandwich
Techie #6 - But where is lunch? We only had sandwiches and Frooti
Bulbul (embarassed) - You can all have more sandwiches too
Techie #7 - Only sandwiches?? No bread pakoras?
Techie #9 - Thats exploitation. Just because the job market is dull, you cant treat us like this
Athos (sensing an opening) - Im sorry i have to leave too..moves away quickly without looking back.
Techie #10 - Lets go to Pizza Hut, who is in?
(slight murmer of disinterest in the group) - recession , month-end, bill payment due...
Techie #10 - Yaar its Techie #4's bday treat that is due.
Chairs moving, laughter, feet shuffling.People starting moving out.
Bulbul (relieved its over) - Thanks all for coming. We had a great time. Good luck.
Porthos - Bulbul, You want to come for coffee?
Techie #4 - Bulbul, u want to come for pizza? My treat?
Techie #10 - Bulbul, pizza and coffee after that?
Bulbul - Thanks guys
Friday, 4 April 2009
Bulbul meeting VP-HR
Bulbul - Yes sir, the team is sensitive to the market conditions, but they are working so hard...In fact they know that our team outing budgets are down, but Ive motivated them to pool in and still do their pizza party. The camaraderie is as great as ever, without a single penny from the company. Attrition, is not a challenge sir... (since we lay them off before they resign).
Everyone is so positive sir. They love the company and its values. Even seasoned Sales guys, want me to take up sessions on the company's core vision. The team is so committed, that even on the last day of the financial year, they are gung-ho to go out and meet their nos. Im so proud of the team that we have set up here. All go getters...(and the rest we lay-off)
VP-HR - Good Bulbul. Nice catching up with you. (Gets up to leave)
Rachna and Shweta, from the Coffee Machine, get laid off that evening. Bulbul got transferred to the Branding dept next week.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Dev D
Ive watched Dev D 3 times now and have loved it for various reasons. The music is fantastic. Refreshingly different from what we see in movies these days. Emosional Atyachaar, was the real show-stealer. But I must say I quite enjoyed the entire album.
The story itself was, well standard, but the way it was weaved into the fabric of today's life in India was engaging. The protagonists had all done justice to their roles. I thought, even Kalki Kochelin, who struggled with her Hindi lines, hit the ball out of the park with her Tamil phone sex!! Her Tamil and French were way better than her Hindi!
Paro, played by Mahi Gill, was a revelation. I thought she looked a bit like Tabu...maybe the eyes. Abhay Deol, continues to impress, if not by his acting, but definitely with his choice of roles. Whoever, did his wardrobe for the movie was good. I loved the t-shirts that he wore through the movie.
By far, my favourite character in the movie was Chunni - if all pimps are this cool, then wonder why more don't take to the profession? My favourite Chunni scene in the movie was actually deleted from the final cut. But take a look. The dude is so cool that I'm gonna name my a/c after him when I get one!!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Refrigerator Times
Did I mention I recently moved into a 2 bedroom apartment in Hyd?...Oh well I did, and this is how events unfurled...
Day 1 4pm - I move in. Considering my worldly belongings consist of 4 suitcases of clothes and books and a bed, there is enough place in my apartment for a TT table, Fussball table and a mini roller-blading rink. Considering I get whacked by most of my friends in TT and have never been into roller blading, the only sane option was a Fussball table. This took 5 hours to decide.
Day 2 12 am - I wake up...its searing hot. I wasn't able to sleep. I drank some water.It didn't help because it was HOT WATER! Now I needed to get an air-conditioner or water-cooler, refrigerator and maybe a microwave. Fussball table - stupid idea!! What was i thinking!! But what do i get first, an ac / fridge/ water cooler/ microwave . This took 5 days to decide
Day 6 - I go to office and tag along with a colleague to get a fridge. There were so many options...single door/double door, Godrej/Samsung/LG and the likes. After a thorough study of which option would be good enough to hold a reasonable number of beer bottles, I finally settled on a Single Door 200 L Godrej Pentacool. The clincher was that the shelf separators were made of metal wiring, giving a natural hold to stack up bottles. The double frosted glass separators were too slippery for the bottles. This took 15 mins to decide.
Day 6 - 2 hours later - Shiny new Refrigerator delivered at home.. My first household consumer durable. I couldn't bear to see it empty. I rushed out to buy milk, apples, oranges, water,an ice cream brick, corn flakes, watermelon, bread, jam...food that involve cooling but no cooking :-D
I come back home, stuff these into my new fridge [i need a name for it btw!]. After admiring it for a couple of minutes, i decided to dig into the watermelon. That's when i realise I have no cutlery. So off I go again, this time to get some plates, cups, glasses, spoons, forks et al
I bring them back home and unpack 'em in the kitchen to realise that I dont have a place to put these! So off I was again, this time to get a dish rack and some dishwasher soap. I hang around the shop for a few more minutes, calling up my mother/sister/friends to check if I need anymore stuff for the kitchen. After getting 15 minutes of counselling, I get a kitchen knife, a vegetable-peeler, a cutting board and 3 stainless steel glasses.
I got back home, a little tired and weary, hoping that no further oversights would come to light. I was quite relaxed when even after an hour, I could not recollect anything amiss.
So, in just reward, I cleaned off the ice-cream and went off to sleep!
PS - Pls do give suggestions for names for the refrigerator and toaster [yes i got one!] I liked the name Rambo, but couldnt decide if that should go to the fridge or the toaster..
Day 1 4pm - I move in. Considering my worldly belongings consist of 4 suitcases of clothes and books and a bed, there is enough place in my apartment for a TT table, Fussball table and a mini roller-blading rink. Considering I get whacked by most of my friends in TT and have never been into roller blading, the only sane option was a Fussball table. This took 5 hours to decide.
Day 2 12 am - I wake up...its searing hot. I wasn't able to sleep. I drank some water.It didn't help because it was HOT WATER! Now I needed to get an air-conditioner or water-cooler, refrigerator and maybe a microwave. Fussball table - stupid idea!! What was i thinking!! But what do i get first, an ac / fridge/ water cooler/ microwave . This took 5 days to decide
Day 6 - I go to office and tag along with a colleague to get a fridge. There were so many options...single door/double door, Godrej/Samsung/LG and the likes. After a thorough study of which option would be good enough to hold a reasonable number of beer bottles, I finally settled on a Single Door 200 L Godrej Pentacool. The clincher was that the shelf separators were made of metal wiring, giving a natural hold to stack up bottles. The double frosted glass separators were too slippery for the bottles. This took 15 mins to decide.
Day 6 - 2 hours later - Shiny new Refrigerator delivered at home.. My first household consumer durable. I couldn't bear to see it empty. I rushed out to buy milk, apples, oranges, water,an ice cream brick, corn flakes, watermelon, bread, jam...food that involve cooling but no cooking :-D
I come back home, stuff these into my new fridge [i need a name for it btw!]. After admiring it for a couple of minutes, i decided to dig into the watermelon. That's when i realise I have no cutlery. So off I go again, this time to get some plates, cups, glasses, spoons, forks et al
I bring them back home and unpack 'em in the kitchen to realise that I dont have a place to put these! So off I was again, this time to get a dish rack and some dishwasher soap. I hang around the shop for a few more minutes, calling up my mother/sister/friends to check if I need anymore stuff for the kitchen. After getting 15 minutes of counselling, I get a kitchen knife, a vegetable-peeler, a cutting board and 3 stainless steel glasses.
I got back home, a little tired and weary, hoping that no further oversights would come to light. I was quite relaxed when even after an hour, I could not recollect anything amiss.
So, in just reward, I cleaned off the ice-cream and went off to sleep!
PS - Pls do give suggestions for names for the refrigerator and toaster [yes i got one!] I liked the name Rambo, but couldnt decide if that should go to the fridge or the toaster..
Monday, March 16, 2009
Hyderabad
Ok folks ive been transferred to Hyderabad. Been here for nearly 3 weeks now and trying to find my way around here.
Professionally, its a promising move. Im one of the few people getting a higher role, instead of getting bad news :-)
Personally, its another chance to hit the restart button! Thats something I love about moving cities. It allows you to redefine life all over again. Reset your priorities, relationships and somehow takes a lot of load off your shoulders. My life changed for the good when I moved to Delhi. Im grateful for that.
Now here is something I know about Hyderabad...so far.
1. Everyone knows where is Paradise Restaurant.
2. If you ask for directions, the stock reply is "Seedha jaao aur Chauraiya se left maaro"..the idea is do that 3 times, come back to where you are and ask the next guy!
3. If people say Parson, they dont mean yesterday! For some weird reason, even things that happened 2 weeks or earlier is referred to as Parson
4. Ive learnt now that even Digital meters of Autowallahs can be tampered
5. The segregation between Hindu and Muslims is not as bad as Delhi or Mumbai
6. It gets bloody hot here in March [apparently Im told Mr. Solar is equally harsh in Delhi these days]
7. No Parking signs are not meant for politicians [Its a cardinal rule in India, but reinforce in Hyd]
8. There was a hoarding put up by Chiranjeevi's party with photos of the MegaStar and Barack Obama. This was right opposite the TDP office. Being Telugu illiterate, I didnt know what it said, but I wonder if it was done to intimidate Mr.Naidu or tickle him silly! I can imagine Naidu's reponse if Chiranjeevi wins, "It was a foreign conpsiracy" better still " It was a CIA plot and Chiranjeevi is an American agent! We have hoardings to prove it!"
9. Food is cheaper than Delhi...20-30% cheaper
10. The street dogs are really puny!
11. The average number of beggars per sqkm must be the highest in India...They are everywhere!!
12. Jubilee Hills and Banjara Hills have the most majestic houses that I have seen anywhere in India.
13. Its possible for a gal walking down the road with a couple of friends at 11 pm in the night and pass a biker gang and not get eveteased/molested/raped.
14. Movie tickets are 25-30% cheaper than Delhi.
15. Its very difficult to get a movie ticket on the weekend unless you do advance booking.Movies that flop in rest of the country would be a hit here. People are just crazy about movies.
Professionally, its a promising move. Im one of the few people getting a higher role, instead of getting bad news :-)
Personally, its another chance to hit the restart button! Thats something I love about moving cities. It allows you to redefine life all over again. Reset your priorities, relationships and somehow takes a lot of load off your shoulders. My life changed for the good when I moved to Delhi. Im grateful for that.
Now here is something I know about Hyderabad...so far.
1. Everyone knows where is Paradise Restaurant.
2. If you ask for directions, the stock reply is "Seedha jaao aur Chauraiya se left maaro"..the idea is do that 3 times, come back to where you are and ask the next guy!
3. If people say Parson, they dont mean yesterday! For some weird reason, even things that happened 2 weeks or earlier is referred to as Parson
4. Ive learnt now that even Digital meters of Autowallahs can be tampered
5. The segregation between Hindu and Muslims is not as bad as Delhi or Mumbai
6. It gets bloody hot here in March [apparently Im told Mr. Solar is equally harsh in Delhi these days]
7. No Parking signs are not meant for politicians [Its a cardinal rule in India, but reinforce in Hyd]
8. There was a hoarding put up by Chiranjeevi's party with photos of the MegaStar and Barack Obama. This was right opposite the TDP office. Being Telugu illiterate, I didnt know what it said, but I wonder if it was done to intimidate Mr.Naidu or tickle him silly! I can imagine Naidu's reponse if Chiranjeevi wins, "It was a foreign conpsiracy" better still " It was a CIA plot and Chiranjeevi is an American agent! We have hoardings to prove it!"
9. Food is cheaper than Delhi...20-30% cheaper
10. The street dogs are really puny!
11. The average number of beggars per sqkm must be the highest in India...They are everywhere!!
12. Jubilee Hills and Banjara Hills have the most majestic houses that I have seen anywhere in India.
13. Its possible for a gal walking down the road with a couple of friends at 11 pm in the night and pass a biker gang and not get eveteased/molested/raped.
14. Movie tickets are 25-30% cheaper than Delhi.
15. Its very difficult to get a movie ticket on the weekend unless you do advance booking.Movies that flop in rest of the country would be a hit here. People are just crazy about movies.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Life Choices
Life is a sum total of the choices we make in life. These choices are like a stack of Dominoes, one leading to another. They come so fast and before you realise life has taken you to an unknown place, and made you a person you cannot quite recognise.
There is nothing good or bad about it. Its just the result of the choices you have made. Remember, life would have been very different if you decided to make a different choice early on. Its very difficult when there is no time and there is a rush of pressure to follow the course. Standing up takes a lot of courage and exacts a heavy toll. All to frequently, we don't even know if we are right or wrong.
But thats ok. Stand by your decision. Thats the only right or wrong. Not what someone else thinks. Its a hard choice to make and life could exact an unforgiving price out of you for it. But at least you take to your grave, the satisfaction that you lived your life on your own terms. And no one can take that away from you, regardless of you being a hero or a villain.
PS : Thanks Nikki for shaming me into writing a post!
There is nothing good or bad about it. Its just the result of the choices you have made. Remember, life would have been very different if you decided to make a different choice early on. Its very difficult when there is no time and there is a rush of pressure to follow the course. Standing up takes a lot of courage and exacts a heavy toll. All to frequently, we don't even know if we are right or wrong.
But thats ok. Stand by your decision. Thats the only right or wrong. Not what someone else thinks. Its a hard choice to make and life could exact an unforgiving price out of you for it. But at least you take to your grave, the satisfaction that you lived your life on your own terms. And no one can take that away from you, regardless of you being a hero or a villain.
PS : Thanks Nikki for shaming me into writing a post!
Friday, January 30, 2009
My Johari Window
Arena(known to self and others) confident, independent, intelligent, mature, proud, self-assertive | Blind Spot(known only to others) able, adaptable, calm, caring, cheerful, clever, complex, dependable, energetic, extroverted, friendly, helpful, idealistic, introverted, knowledgeable, logical, loving, observant, organised, patient, quiet, reflective, responsive, self-conscious, sensible, sentimental, spontaneous, trustworthy, warm, wise, witty |
Façade(known only to self)
| Unknown(known to nobody) accepting, bold, brave, dignified, giving, happy, ingenious, kind, modest, nervous, powerful, relaxed, religious, searching, shy, silly, sympathetic, tense |
Dominant Traits
66% of people agree that Abanith is confident
All Percentages
able (9%) accepting (0%) adaptable (14%) bold (0%) brave (0%) calm (23%) caring (9%) cheerful (4%) clever (9%) complex (14%) confident (66%) dependable (28%) dignified (0%) energetic (4%) extroverted (4%) friendly (14%) giving (0%) happy (0%) helpful (9%) idealistic (9%) independent (23%) ingenious (0%) intelligent (19%) introverted (9%) kind (0%) knowledgeable (23%) logical (28%) loving (4%) mature (23%) modest (0%) nervous (0%) observant (19%) organised (33%) patient (4%) powerful (0%) proud (4%) quiet (14%) reflective (9%) relaxed (0%) religious (0%) responsive (19%) searching (0%) self-assertive (23%) self-conscious (4%) sensible (19%) sentimental (9%) shy (0%) silly (0%) spontaneous (9%) sympathetic (0%) tense (0%) trustworthy (14%) warm (4%) wise (4%) witty (23%)
Created by the Interactive Johari Window on 31.1.2009, using data from 21 respondents.
You can make your own Johari Window, or view Abanith's full data.
You can make your own Johari Window, or view Abanith's full data.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Dead Poet's Society
I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately,
I want to live deep and suck out all the marrow out of life!
To put to rout all that was not life,
And not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
One shouldnt be writing reviews about a movie that released 20 yrs back, but watching Dead Poet's Society again today brought back a lot of memories. The film itself is a touching portrayal of a group of adoloscent school boys coming to terms with what conformity demands out of them and what life demands out of them. Trying to do both together takes a lot of grace. And grace makes goodness out of ugly things!
I thank my parents for never stopping me from sucking the marrow out of life. I wish I did more. Its time for me to stop drifting and feel challenged again!
I want to live deep and suck out all the marrow out of life!
To put to rout all that was not life,
And not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
One shouldnt be writing reviews about a movie that released 20 yrs back, but watching Dead Poet's Society again today brought back a lot of memories. The film itself is a touching portrayal of a group of adoloscent school boys coming to terms with what conformity demands out of them and what life demands out of them. Trying to do both together takes a lot of grace. And grace makes goodness out of ugly things!
I thank my parents for never stopping me from sucking the marrow out of life. I wish I did more. Its time for me to stop drifting and feel challenged again!
Friday, December 26, 2008
A Letter From Azim Premji
Dear Wiproite
Recently I had the opportunity to talk to a very large group of entrepreneurs - about 1700 of them. They wanted me to share my experiences of leading Wipro, for the past 40 years - during which period our organization has grown from $4 million to over $5 billion - from absolute obscurity to being a globally known leader in IT.
I always look at the future, and am hardly prone to reminiscing, but this opportunity did spur me to think about the past of Wipro, and what I have learnt from the privilege of leading this wonderful organization.
I thought it might be worthwhile for me to share these thoughts with all of you – who have actually shaped and defined Wipro.
What follows are a few passages from my speech.
________________________________________________________________
My experience tells me that we learn a lot more from difficulties and failures than from successes. In fact, hidden behind each success is a trail of difficulties and failures. So as I describe my experience as an intrapreneur, I will focus more on the difficulties, than on the successes.....because the successes of Wipro are reasonably well known.
In 1966, at the age of 21, I was practically overnight thrust in to the role of the CEO of the company that we know today as Wipro, and was then called Western India Vegetable Products Limited. The company was about USD 4 million in sales then, and was not in the best of shape. We used to make vegetable oil.
To take over that responsibility, and with that suddenness, I had to leave my education two quarters incomplete. The circumstances demanded it. My father had passed away at the age of 51, and I absolutely had to take care of the company.
It was not easy. Actually it was very difficult. I was dealing with a personal loss, and I was also trying to take charge of a role for which I had no training, no experience, no preparation and no demonstrated strengths.
I learnt a lot. I learnt not to look back. I learnt that pining for what could have been, is neither a path to happiness nor to success. I learnt that the most important thing is to deal with the here and now. And I learnt that, that can happen only through personal action.
It has stayed with me forever. There is no substitute to action. That to me is the starting point and the ending point of being an entrepreneur.
__________________________
Let me stay with those early days.
In the very first AGM, there was a shareholder, who said that he didn’t trust my ability to run the company. He said that if I were running the company, I could only run it to the ground.
In hindsight, perhaps he had good reason to say what he did, because indeed I was very young and with no experience in business. (At that time, my need was to dye my hair white to look older).
But for me at that point in time, his statement was a challenge. A challenge that consumed me in many senses. I made up my mind that I will prove him wrong, and with each passing day my resolve only increased. With each difficulty that I faced, my determination only grew.
As I look back, I can only thank that man.
Thanks to this man and to this episode I also learnt a crucial lesson. To be successful you have to be challenged by something, and then have the resolve to deal with it. This is the surest way forward. I learnt that challenges, determination and passion is what propel a person. Eventually I have also learnt that, often you have to go out seeking challenges, because challenges may not come seeking you.
There is another interesting insight that I got over time. Rarely have I come across a successful entrepreneur, who became an entrepreneur only to make money. In practically all cases, people become entrepreneurs because there is a challenge that excites them....a challenge to change the world, a challenge to invent something, a challenge to create something etc.....some deeply captivating challenge that appeals to them personally – but rarely is the desire to make money the prime driver.
________________________________________________________________
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Azim Premji
Recently I had the opportunity to talk to a very large group of entrepreneurs - about 1700 of them. They wanted me to share my experiences of leading Wipro, for the past 40 years - during which period our organization has grown from $4 million to over $5 billion - from absolute obscurity to being a globally known leader in IT.
I always look at the future, and am hardly prone to reminiscing, but this opportunity did spur me to think about the past of Wipro, and what I have learnt from the privilege of leading this wonderful organization.
I thought it might be worthwhile for me to share these thoughts with all of you – who have actually shaped and defined Wipro.
What follows are a few passages from my speech.
________________________________________________________________
My experience tells me that we learn a lot more from difficulties and failures than from successes. In fact, hidden behind each success is a trail of difficulties and failures. So as I describe my experience as an intrapreneur, I will focus more on the difficulties, than on the successes.....because the successes of Wipro are reasonably well known.
In 1966, at the age of 21, I was practically overnight thrust in to the role of the CEO of the company that we know today as Wipro, and was then called Western India Vegetable Products Limited. The company was about USD 4 million in sales then, and was not in the best of shape. We used to make vegetable oil.
To take over that responsibility, and with that suddenness, I had to leave my education two quarters incomplete. The circumstances demanded it. My father had passed away at the age of 51, and I absolutely had to take care of the company.
It was not easy. Actually it was very difficult. I was dealing with a personal loss, and I was also trying to take charge of a role for which I had no training, no experience, no preparation and no demonstrated strengths.
I learnt a lot. I learnt not to look back. I learnt that pining for what could have been, is neither a path to happiness nor to success. I learnt that the most important thing is to deal with the here and now. And I learnt that, that can happen only through personal action.
It has stayed with me forever. There is no substitute to action. That to me is the starting point and the ending point of being an entrepreneur.
__________________________
Let me stay with those early days.
In the very first AGM, there was a shareholder, who said that he didn’t trust my ability to run the company. He said that if I were running the company, I could only run it to the ground.
In hindsight, perhaps he had good reason to say what he did, because indeed I was very young and with no experience in business. (At that time, my need was to dye my hair white to look older).
But for me at that point in time, his statement was a challenge. A challenge that consumed me in many senses. I made up my mind that I will prove him wrong, and with each passing day my resolve only increased. With each difficulty that I faced, my determination only grew.
As I look back, I can only thank that man.
Thanks to this man and to this episode I also learnt a crucial lesson. To be successful you have to be challenged by something, and then have the resolve to deal with it. This is the surest way forward. I learnt that challenges, determination and passion is what propel a person. Eventually I have also learnt that, often you have to go out seeking challenges, because challenges may not come seeking you.
There is another interesting insight that I got over time. Rarely have I come across a successful entrepreneur, who became an entrepreneur only to make money. In practically all cases, people become entrepreneurs because there is a challenge that excites them....a challenge to change the world, a challenge to invent something, a challenge to create something etc.....some deeply captivating challenge that appeals to them personally – but rarely is the desire to make money the prime driver.
________________________________________________________________
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Azim Premji
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