Bangalore - A Moon!

"Distance la moonu moonu... moonu colouru white-u", a snippet of the song that went viral on Youtube.

Ah! the moon... in its full white glory has been creating never ending pages of creative comparison to various things on earth, from love... to a woman.. from the writers.. to the poets. 

Look a little closer and you will notice that the white moon is not all that white but it has all these dark patches called the "lunar maria" (basaltic plains) formed from rapid cooling molten rock and so it goes... scientifically speaking. 

Our Bangalore is such a moon, well we don't have rapid cooling rocks but we have our dark patches and that's all the amoeba shaped potholes on the roads. If I were to stand on the moon and look at the Bangalore telescopically I would see the same thing. Only that if I was the citizen of the moon I would be thinking these patches to be craters created by meteor hits on the earth. To come to think of it, it may even look like Earth had a war with the meteors that they really hit themselves so hard on to the earth to make such oddly 
shaped craters and them deep too. 

All of us have been through one of them or all of them during our stay in this Garden city. People have written letters, petitioned, protested or even sued the Govt for this but it has always remained. Me being an ordinary citizen watched to know what the outcome of such flag raising initiatives would be, very well knowing that it has always...remained. 

Everytime when you were over one, you find the shocks of your precious bike taking the brunt or your german engineered suspensions of your car compress to its maximum level, which it may not even have been designed or tested for, figuratively. You felt your bone crunch all the time.

It did for me, and like any other peace loving Indian, I just waited for that patch to be covered by an overnight act of Gods wearing khaki uniform. But with all that crunch I didn't enjoy the bitter feeling I had all the time when I was trying to have a great day either at office or a happy friend's party or a trip to the mall to catch my favourite movie. 

I decided to act, within me. 

All I did was to look at the same things differently. I picked out the best day when I was the best of me and ventured out and passed through all those irritating roads. I went with the belief that I will let go of my misery  and voila! there it was, the wave of positive thoughts which made me see these oddly shaped craters suddenly starting to appear like the countries of the world.

There was Australia, there was China, South Africa, Canada, the 42nd state of the US wow and with my passion to travel, I started travelling on each and every one of them avoiding the mountains and avoiding the deep valleys but picked my plateaus and made sure that my Apollos and my MRFs went through them while I savoured the feel of travelling around the world. Did I hear someone say 80 days? I did that in 30 minutes or 60 minutes! 

My days became brighter, and I had a lot more fun. I was looking forward to see which country I'm going to go through each day and that gave me a simple satisfaction of going through my day with a 'smile'. I may not have figured out a way to change the system but I have surely made a stride in changing me and I will work to make this a habit to make myself 'smile' so that I could spread it to my entire world. 

So let me know which country have you been to today! with a smile! :-)

(Written adaptation of my speeches from Toastmasters)

Who is the Black Sheep?

Who is the Black Sheep?

Yes, even I would like to know this, who is this black sheep? 

That everybody thinks will be responsible for his/her well being, may it be home or at office. Yes, you were a child once upon a time and children generally in their process of thoughtless explorations may not know the obvious dangers and hence require some direction, 'taking care'. But please you don't fall into that category. You are not a momma's boy or daddy's girl anymore, you have learnt to use your radar and you can sense your own dangers. Just start moving forward and quit worrying about a hand-hold all the time.

This may not be true with all the people, but I would like to send this message out to all those people who have their 'expectations' over people and that too at all levels. You have all right to expect, but do not be fooled that things would go the same way as its supposed to. What you have is a wish and not all wishes are destined to come true. I'm writing this not because people haven't understood their expectations, I'm sincerely bothered about the time that they spend on brooding over it before or after and its such a waste of precious human energy. 

If all that energy could be tapped, I don't think we would need the sun anymore and the divine energy of the Sun could be used in some other noble hunt for mankind :-)

Seriously, aren't we surrounded by such people and so many times we end up pacifying them on how their expectations with another person didn't go well and we are saying the same things again and again. I just feel like pouring water on their slumbering self-esteem.

Also me being a member of the HR community stand witness to so many people expecting things from their colleagues, managers or the organisation all the time. Well you have the right to expect and your rights on your expectations are justified but there ends the line that you can cross. How you would want these expectations to work out for you in the way you want it, lies totally on your existence with the groups that you are interacting with. 

Here, lets play a game, I call this 'show me the black sheep' so send me a mail once you know the answers for these questions;

Show me the black sheep...

... who said that its the manager's responsibility to take care of your career?
... who said that your father has the responsibilty to provide for all your needs?
... who said that organisations have to provide for taking care of your economic needs?
... who said that your friend has to take the fall at most situations?
... who said that Sr.Management is only responsible for the company's growth?
... who said that your mother has to defend you at all times?
... who said that your team members should approach you at all times if they are stuck?
... who said that you forward your resume to one person and they should land you in a job?
... who said that your Govt should take care of corruption while you keep giving that extra 10 out?
... who said that you send a mail to one person and they should look at it the minute it lands in their inbox?

The amount of dependencies that you create is the amount of control that you lose. The more you lose control of your surrounding, the more you lose on the control you own. Do begin to realise the structure around you and see how you can create your own destinations to reach. All the people you need are there around, but they will be only till the point that they are interested to provide any help, if you expect things to come on a platter, I wish you all the best for finding the lost Black Sheep - which is YOU!

Inspired By: Ayn Rand - "Who is John Galt?" and Song from Delhi-6 "Kala Bandar"

The Peninsular Boss

The Peninsular Boss

Let me ask you this... if all the working professionals in the world have been given a choice to work with the boss of their choice, how would it be? what do you think will happen.

Well imagine this big land of people, with all the working professionals on one side and their respective bosses on the other. People have been instructed to move around and stand in the same line as the boss they would like to choose and work with.

If you take a aerial view of this event you will almost see a game of human 'Solitaire'. People lining up one behind the other, where the boss himself is choosing to move, under the boss of his choice, huge line on one, little smaller in the other and maybe some of them would choose to pass and go back to the 'deck' waiting for their turn to be part of the line whom they want to work with, boy they might not be able to choose whom to work with but they sure do know whom not to work with :-)

However, I would not want you to look at this event but just rewind your mental thought process and go to that point where people started moving to be part of a particular line. What do you think their prime thoughts were, the moments between the time they were asked to move and the time they moved?

I'm able to see all those people run their entire life experience and reminisce the best instances of all those faces that they saw as their boss, who managed them or maybe still managing them. 

What would these instances be which made them take the decision? If I have to go a little more deeper what did these instances contain?... For me its "emotions".

No matter how unemotional a person can be, at that time, I believe the factors of growth, career, money, future all that came out of emotional impulse from that person.

Now.. wait I'm not here to talk about emotion as a human functionality and how it affects judgement in human beings. But I would want you to focus on the logical flow that specific emotion has created which reached a point of decision for that person.

Being born in a peninsula I guess I had this notion that anything that has a 3 way connection to a entity can be  a peninsula :-). My theory... there are 3 such 'ocean' of factors that draws us 'ships' to the coasts of this 'peninsular' boss that we want to work with.

Ocean 1 - Engage

The boss who knows your true potential and utilises you to the fullest extent of tapping all your interests. He/she will ensure that they have enough task list which will keep you enganged all the time. You may relate to this happening to you now, and may say "whats the big deal, Im buried with work anyway". But I'm drawing your attention to this peninsular boss, who would give you the tasks but you will not know the extent that you are already managing. 

Your work may be transactional, you may be doing mundane things, post man's job, absolutely no time for a breather but in that process you would have come to know the links in the chain and slowly without your knowledge in the pretext of giving "additional responsibilties" you would be handling the responsibilities that they would have been handling, the movement of end-end of that chain. 

You would have learnt how the machine works as you pass through the gears and linking the chains making an entire gigantic process. From then on, any task/project/structure becomes a machine to you and all of you have to do is link them, gear them and create a self-managed overhaul process. 

During this entire journey you would have received your training, you would have handled the unknown, you would now start visioning your next steps, plan, prepare, implement and complete. The best part, at every single stage it would be your signature on the final structure.

Ocean 2 - Nurture

Your working knowledge, your grasping powers, your analytical thoughts, your strengths, your weaknesses all that would have come out during the engagement phase. The peninsular boss maintains his own performance diary, he has made notes (mentally or on a desktop .txt file who cares) all through out and all he/she have to do now is ensure that you are re-charged on all those areas. 

There are so many times when you are attending boring trainings, seminars on topics that are alien to you or endless meetings which are gibberish, but if you would notice the peninsular boss would ask you how it went and spend sometime with you to understand what you have learnt, who you have met, how was the atmosphere and provide you with ideas which you can put back into your work and with every such instance habituate you into putting anything back into your work. 

You will be ready for thinking differently, acting on higher plane which would help the boss place you by his side so that he can create the visibility, the boss ideas will be yours and you would know exactly what to do with them as you know the entire machinery now. 

The process of growth would become automatic, you would be known around the place and what you do. You have been familiarised in the industry... you would have been... nurtured.

Ocean 3 - Enhance

Its time to let go of the hold on your seat as you already have the handle bars straight and you are pedalling away, the road doesn't scare you anymore, you are flying the machine alone and the boss just needs to be on the ground provide you with directions and let you know of the climate.

You get to venture into your own roads or fly into the yonder, by just knowing that there is a line connected and you can always trace back. You have no fear of falling and you know if you do its your own doing. The boss would give you new roads to travel, enhance you to the bike or the car, give you the lats and longs and you would just know where the wind is or how the wind is... to reach there. 

You will be doing things only which interests you and you would get into interesting work even without you asking for it. You remember a song that you heard when you were a child, you might remember a entire movie, but can you tell me one lesson from your 5th grade now. Where your interest is, you would automatically retain it. The enhancement of your interests will be in the peninsular boss's best interest :-)

Even if I had to categroise, in my mind, the enthusiastic natured would fall into Ocean 1, the analytical, cautioned natured will fall into Ocean 2, the mature, independent groups fall into ocean 3 and by groups I mean it could be the boss or employees. Even if one of the above attribute has created an equation between the employee and the boss they would remain inseparable for a long time. These attributes would go to the extent of both groups making all efforts to take care of any kind of factor, may it be in their personal or professional life, not affect this equation and the surroundings would conspire, would crumble for them to stay that way. Retention has been mechanised :-)

So look out for this peninsular boss create the equation. Rest assured, your satisfaction levels on the job will always be recharged, 100%.

Following the White Rabbit!

Like every other child I read Alice in Wonderland too.. like a fable, a story. I enjoyed it every bit as I lived the adventure in my head as I read it. But I never understood the metaphors.

I saw the Matrix and it was instant , the assertive figure of speech of the White Rabbit, the moments of every life, that takes you to the Wonderland, the Life that we live in.

So here I'm following the White Rabbits..'Love'.. my beloved.. tells me I have the gift... 'Reverence'.. her Guru informs me about the path... to illustrate, to write... 'Compassion'... my dearest friends, acquaintances... nudge me to move, to take the step while giving their smiles... 'Affection'... my parents and my family packs me a bindle of their blessings... and I... began with this introduction....

The antipode of my wonderland, My Life.







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