Friday, July 27, 2007


Handling People

As a member of the placement co-ordination committee, one of the primary functions that I must perform involves handling people. All kinds of them. The students, the visiting executives from companies, my colleagues in the committee and scores of others that are directly and indirectly party to the process. It truly is an exercise in crisis management. In the sense that not only is one expected to manoeuvre through crises that crop up, but take pre-emptive and preventive action against ones that we cannot afford.

People drive the placement procedure. Across the globe, as organizations look to hire talent, they design strategies to get the best people to work for them. The Placement Co-ordination office is the singular point-of-contact between the recruiters and their prospective employees. There's people involved on both sides and when you're the medium of exchange, you'd better be good at handling them.

An oft-repeated but seldom comprehended fact is that no two individuals are the same. As a natural consequence of this, you certainly can't hope to have a single interaction strategy for everyone. It is something that must be done on a case-by-case basis, which is what makes the task all the more exciting, albeit challenging. To add to that you must multi-task. You are constrained for time and resources and yet you must employ both equitably to achieve an optimum level of satisfaction for both the students and the companies.

Right since the time I entered junior school, my father has impressed upon me the importance of judging people. If you're able to judge an individual accurately within a narrow margin of error, on first impression, more than half your job is done. When you begin to appreciate what a person needs and how he may behave in a given situation, you have the advantage. This is when you know you can handle the man. After all most people are predictable. When you've identified and accounted for definite patterns in their behaviour, you're in the zone.

As most of the important things in life, people management is a never-ending lesson that must be updated on a continuous and regular basis. In the dynamic world that we live in, change is the only constant. Situations change and as a natural sympathetic reaction, people change. As a sincere learner one must adapt to and embrace change.

If I must point out the single most important thing I've learnt during the past week, it's got to be the imortance of the smile. Cliched as it sounds, the smile is one of the most potent weapons at one's disposal. It's a weapon of mass placation. Someone once rightly said, "I thought I'd never make it through the tough times. Then you smiled, and I smiled.... and all the rest was easy"

Thursday, July 26, 2007


The power of the individual

It periodically strikes me how much an individual can achieve. The power of one. They say the Pareto Principle applies equally well to humans. 20% humans do 80% of the work that needs to be done. What this essentially means is that there are certain driven individuals who move the human race forward. They are the ones who carry on their shoulders the burden of the laggards, the second-raters and parasites who feed on the achievements and contributions of those who achieve the tangibles.

Milton was of the opinion that they also serve who only stand and wait. If nothing, the non-performers only increase economic consumption in cases where they are rewarded for gross incompetence which is either unrecognized or intentionally ignored. The fact remains that it is the individual that drives the community, the nation and the globe. These are the giants that tower above the rest and achieve much more in a matter of days than some people would in their lifetimes.

Such is the power of the individual, the monstrosity of human capability. If the inspired individual sets his sights on the goal and unflinchingly advances towards the consummation of his efforts, the world must move aside as for a man whose time has come. You see such people all the time. They are islands of excellence in their respective fields. The ones that stand out as near-perfect. The invincible Sultans of their trades, the ones who never say die and maintain a constancy of purpose that may get scary for the average underachiever.

As individuals we are all answerable to ourselves. No self-respecting human would err to believe that he can live his life vicariously through the praise and deification received from another. If he does, he lives in the proverbial fool's paradise and must needs be jolted out of a dangerous and rancid inertia.

They say we do not utilize more than 10% of the capacity of the human brain. Great ones are the few and far between souls who strive to constantly utilize the complex entity that the mind is. The ones that do, the ones that attempt to remain truthful to themselves in effort and thought are the ones who reach the pinnacles of our world. It's lonely up there, but company would mar that special feeling anyway.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Uncertainty





As imperfect beings living in an imperfect world, all of us face uncertainty. The degree of uncertainty faced by individuals has a large variation in magnitude. But no one escapes the Heisenberg rule. Some of us do our best to attain a state where the uncertainty in life is minimized, but it's never diminutive enough to be neglected. What this essentially means that
there are things which happen to us through our lives which we cannot hope to control. And there are even more such events which we can never never anticipate. The unknown component. Things you cannot predict.

All this implies that there are parts of our lives which we cannot control as hard as we may try to. That there are parts of us which are governed, albeit to a minimal extent, by the acts of other individuals or the nature of circumstances. To some, this uncertainty is acceptable, and there are still others who cannot stand it. These are the souls who cannot come to terms with the fact that there are some things which are beyond the control of the majestic beings that humans are. It's simply too hard and degrading for humans to learn that things are beyond control. Is their anxiety justified? Or are these people just too irked by the insignificant?

The larger question that emerges from this seemingly vague conception is: How do humans deal with uncertainty? Is it ok to worry about the future? To try and predict the outcomes of events which depend on factors other than individual endeavour?
This is a question that I think I must answer as I learn while I move through life. Is uncertainty something to be left unto itself or is it something worth processing in the human brain?

Thursday, July 12, 2007

The Shawshank Redemption

One of my all-time favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption. I love the way the movie sends a strong message about something that's really important-hope. Hope is the central theme of the movie's story. The lead character Andrew Dufresne, played by the brilliant Tim Robbins, is the epitome of the same. He is falsely convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover. He is sentenced to serve a life term at Shawshank Prison and faces the ugly face of reality once inside.

Andrew Dufresne is a qualified banker and runs a few financial errands for the staff of Shawshank that earns him respect and approval in a place and situation fit to drive an innocent man mad. Throughout the movie, the audience is kept on the edge of the sofa by the brilliant narrative of the inimitable Morgan Freeman who plays 'Red'. Halfway through the movie, Andy discovers that there is one man who can prove him innocent. What ensues from this point onwards and the spirit with which Andy faces it, is best left to the movie to narrate.

To me, the message that the movie seeks to convey is profound in its simplicity. Hope is what makes the world go round. We all hope for a better tomorrow. A good life. That's what motivates us. The question is, faced with dire circumstances and difficult times, are we gullible enough to lose this hope. Or are we strong enough in spirit to fight it out to see the light of a better tomorrow? If hope is what we let die inside of us, betrayed by destiny and challenged by fate, then what is it that we live for? Is it order? Or routine( as signified by the drab monotony of prison or parole life) ?

There are, as the movie goes on to say, people.....individuals who are like birds whose feathers are so bright that you know it was a sin to lock them up in the first place. You know it's for the better that they are gone and free, but the place you live in is all the more empty and devoid of life now that they're not around. It's a tribute to the strength and resilience of the human spirit that does not bend or break when put to the test. The Shawshank Redemption is a legend in its own right.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Friday, July 06, 2007

Short term memory

One of the greatest flaws of human nature is short term memory, both voluntary and involuntary. What is voluntary short term memory? It's the short term memory we cause oursleves to suffer by imposing it on ourselves sub-consciously. Involuntary short term memory, by that definition then, is something really rare, because you really forget something because, deep down somewhere you actually wanted to forget it. Not in a way that may seem obvious to you or others, but unconscious to even yourself.

Voluntary short term memory is also a case of not being able to get yourself to want to remember something badly enough. Because, again, deep down inside you may not want to. It's a question of tendencies then. If you're able to fight the tendency to relegate any part of your memory to the short-term component, you'll never forget it. But it's not easy. Because if you're able to fight the natural tendencies that have set into your system with uncanny regularity and ease, you're super-human and you'll, as a rule, be super-successful.

Bad experiences and mistakes are almost always relegated to short term memory. Why? Shouldn't we want ourselves to keep that in long-term memory so that one can reflect upon these in order to prevent repetition of the same? The question really is how badly you want yourself to not repeat that mistake? Individuals who are hellbent upon learning from mistakes and bad experiences make sure at all costs that these are ingrained in their long term memories. Others who don't have a desire to do so that's strong enough are doomed to repeat these unpleasant unwanted mistakes.

Truly successful and great people never repeat mistakes, not only because they recognize their follies and admit the same, but also because they have these experiences and adjunct lessons engraved in red letters on their brains. Short term memory is more dangerous than we shall have ourselves believe. 50 first dates was romantic enough, but that's the stuff movies are made of. You're never supposed to try it at home anyway.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Maintaining Objectivity

As I 'grow up' I realize that one of the most important things that an individual must learn to do as a mature, discerning adult is to mainatain objectivity. It sounds real easy when I say it like that, but believe me it's as complicated as getting yourself to use one part of your brain over the other. By default, emotions tend to predominate. But then again, could it not be argued that in certain situations, one must let emotions guide us? Well, maybe. But the empirical rule seems to be( at least for me): think hard and think objectively.


Thinking rationally is a talent. It's something that may not come naturally to most people. Not that people don't have the inherent ability. It's a matter of practice....and tendencies. Some people take 'gut decisions' so often that the rational thinking component of their brains has been suppressed into perennial dormancy. Consequently, they may find it difficult to summon that faculty at will. Everything takes practice. So does objectivity.

So can you maintain objectivity in say interpersonal relationships? I couldn't say for sure. I need to practice harder to find out. But having learnt what I have, I shall go ahead and claim that objective thinking has its upsides everywhere. I'll stick my head out and proclaim that on a personal level I have benefited greatly at times by keeping it 'objective', by checking knee-jerk emotional responses to difficult situations. Maybe, just maybe, I haven't yet encountered a large enough sample space of situations to generalize just yet. But then so far so good. Keep it simple.

'Dam'med if you do, damned if you don't

I recently watched a news programme on TV that sought to convey the plight of those who are about to lose their homes, thanks to dam-building activity on the Narmada river. The journalist intervewed a number of residents of a certain temple-town that was about to get submerged once an adjacent, recently built dam became operational. The town was seeped in tradition. Deeply religious, with a number of temple-ghats on the banks of the Narmada river, in the remote hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh, it seemed the perfect poster-boy for the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

The plight of the residents was bemourned by a local author who blamed the corporation that had constructed the dam, for the mess that they'd been making in the town. As a gesture of goodwill, the corporation had tried to contribute to the local community by restoring a section of the crumbling ghat-temples. What displeased the author-historian is the manner in which the restoration work was carried out. He claimed that since the corporation was into the hospitality industry, all they knew was building hotel lobbies and that is exactly what,he said, they had renovated the temples into: glorified hotel lobbies.

There were people in the town who were afraid that the local heritage was disappearing into oblivion thanks to dam-building and token temple renovations that did more to obliterate local tradition than restore it. There were a group of nomadic-weavers who complained that they couldn't receive any compensation from the government like other residents had, because they had no permanent dwellings. They depended entirely on the local economy which was about to vanish thanks to the dam devouring the town. Everyone who depended on the erstwhile local economy should receive compensation, they said. A local boatman who ferried on the waters of the un-harnessed river supported the argument.

All through the programme, the construction company that built the dam and the state government came across as villains....terminating the life of a heritage town and depriving people of their livelihood. And the same case is made at every town that's part of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Now, as an uninvolved, yet concerned outsider, I often find myself asking questions as to which is more important: allowing locals to live their lives in harmony and tradition or providing power and irrigation to the millions of rain-dependent farmers of the country? Can a balance be striked? Or is this an impossibly one-sided situation where you're either for one side or against it...no middle grounds and sitting on the fence?

Can India move forward without sacrificing local closed economies and traditions on the altar of economic and infrastructural growth? It's a question that haunts me very often. One that I have no answers to. After the news programme ended,the channel aired an advertisement for the same construction company.