Of Life And Its Contradictions (March 24, 2006)

Life is full of contradictions. As we grow up, we begin to get surrounded by the many contradictions of our professional lives. A school teacher is expected to teach values in the classroom, but the system wants her to give preference for admission to a less deserving child because that child's parents offer a large donation. A manager is expected to be people oriented, but must ask a teammate to leave because of poor performance. A journalist writes exposes on many social issues, but sees skeletons in her own manager's office. Examples abound all around us. The other day, a young engineer walked up to me faced with the issue of working on a project for which the client was a tobacco company. By building a more efficient information system for the client, would he not make more people die of cancer? What is the right way and what is the wrong way of dealing with an issue like this?In every such case, at the end of the day, it is for the individual to do his or her own "sense making". A systemic answer is not always possible. Worse, whenever a systemic view is offered, it is invariably in context, hence open to more questions. Faced with a contradiction, most of us usually look for the truth, instead of dealing with the contradiction itself. The truth is always much more comfortable. The difficult but inevitable thing in life is that the truth always reveals itself in contradictions. The packaging never gets any better.Young managers find this very difficult to deal with. "One day you tell me to do this, another day you tell me to do the opposite?" Should I then become either apathetic, cynical; or became subservient to the system and blindly follow what it asks of me in every given situation? A lot depends on two things -- one, do I hold myself responsible for thinking and making sense of issues, of contexts and the outcome possibilities? Two, how much do I see myself as the "system"? When I am the system, do I think for the system or do I just think along with the system? Or, should I not think at all? In most cases, people find issues to be problematic because they would rather have the comfort of someone else running the department of truth and publish policies on the Intranet that are clear, unambiguous and without multiple possible outcomes.The Bhagavad-Gita provides an interesting perspective on both -- the pervasive nature of contradictions and the central need for the individual to think and make sense for himself. The former is best illustrated in the conflict Arjuna faced when he was at war with his own kith and kin. When the purpose of life is to do good, how can one justify waging war against one's own people? The message lies here. Our tasks in professional life are not about the easy stuff; conflicts are a part of every real profession and we are supposed to deal with them. They are not an aberration, they are the reality.Now comes the second part. Who must guide us in moments of indecision? The concept of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna is symbolic. Essentially, every one is part Krishna and part Arjuna. The Krishna in us is the voice of reason. The Arjuna in us is about the responsibility to act. Without one, the other is incomplete. Action without reason and reason without action are both inherently destructive. So, every time it is not for a higher power in the department of truth to tell us what the truth is. We are responsible to think for ourselves and we must take the responsibility for our consequent actions.Some time back, a very distraught leader came to me with the anguish of dealing with a contradiction. I gave him a simple exercise. I poured some ink on the table and asked him to clean it up. When he had finished, I asked him a simple question. "What did you do?" He replied innocently, "I cleaned up the ink". Showing him the dirty napkin in his hand I asked him, "Did you clean something, or, did you dirty something?" The interesting truth is, when you clean the ink, it is just a transfer of the mess to another surface. In reality, it is impossible to clean anything in the world without making something else dirty in the process. The higher we move in our professional lives, the greater becomes the need to deal with such contradictions. One must make peace with the idea itself, the process inherent, and the multiplicity of potential outcomes in every situation. Because, that is what life wants from us. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html

All Value Migrate (March 31, 2006)

It is late March in Scotland. The drive from Manchester to Dundee through the magical Lake District of England, onto unfolding green landscape dotted with grazing sheep and horses in barns, soothes me. As our car begins to leave all that behind and the beautiful, expansive river Tay carrying molten snow appears alongside, my friend, Gautam Rajkhowa tells me that we have almost reached. The river bends slightly, goes under an ancient railway bridge, and runs a little distance further before merging with the North Sea. “There,’’ says Gautam, “the ship docked alongside the quay is the Discovery; the one Captain Robert Falcon Scott had taken to the South Pole.’’ I get goose bumps as the maritime adventures of a bygone era come alive in my mind. We continue to drive along. Soon a row of river-facing, stone-clad, estate houses appear. “Those,’’ explains Gautam, “are the remnants of the jute industry. Once upon a time, ship loads of jute from India were brought to Dundee, which was the jute capital of the world. The houses here are all that is left to remind people of Dundee’s once thriving economy and global claim to fame.’’My mind drifts to the city of Gothenburg in Sweden where, the previous summer, I was visiting to deliver a talk at a top-management meeting of Volvo executives. Very few people know that the seafaring nation of the Swedes once had its own East India Company, and brought spices and gems and other merchandise that were sold in other European nations. By the last century, the seafaring trade dwindled. Seeing that coming, the Swedes turned their core competence to ship building. The nation became a global player in the ship-building industry for a while until other nations soon soon caught up and took that space away. The nation moved on to building great engineering companies like Volvo that makes trucks, submarines and aircraft engines that ensures Gothenburg is not lost in time. In Gothenburg, alongside the waterfront today, you see a huge ship anchored. Reminiscent of the past, today it is no longer used for its original purpose; the city has converted it into a car-park. From Dundee to Gothenburg, from jute to shipping. I am thinking of how economies of nations get created. And destroyed. Why is it that way? Quite simply, we all fail to realise the interesting truth that, by nature, all value is migratory. The moment something becomes of any value, value moves from one place to another. That is why textile, ship building, steel and the automobile industry have all gone from one place to another. Now, will it be the turn of the services business? Following the line of thought, what will happen to Pune and Hyderabad and Gurgaon and Bangalore in 10 years? Will a visitor in 2020 be shown ghost buildings? Will today’s satellite dishes be used for something like rainwater harvesting in 2020? It is such a scary thought. Yet, individuals, industries, cities and nations must move from one kind of value leadership to another, destroying the past from within, before value migration begins at the behest of someone else. That challenge becomes even greater considering shrinking cycles of value migration today. With services, value can migrate as effortlessly as a fund manager moving a portfolio of investments from the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai to the Nasdaq in New York to the London Stock Exchange; it’s all in a day’s work. Looking at the vestiges of the jute industry in Dundee, I realise how little the subject engages the minds of leaders back home. Where would the world be, and relative to that, how would our cities ensure that they create unusual new value to remain in the centre of global consideration in 2020? It is not enough to build a winning set of industries and create cities around them, we have to make them future-proof. Appreciating this aspect of business is not just an industry issue, it is about sustainable competitiveness of Indian cities that would soon have half the country’s population living in them. Sometimes, the competitive value is inherent to the industry but many times, it is in the eco-system itself. Just as industries must reinvent themselves, so must cities. When people come to do business, they are actually looking to buy-in to the total package. My mind would have strayed some more but Gautam switches off the engine to announce that we have reached home. Getting out of the car, as I struggle in with my carry-on bags, I cannot miss the small poster in his study. It reads, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you have to keep moving.’’ Signed, Albert Einstein. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html

Staff Canteen (April7, 2006)

It is a Sunday morning. I am between flights at the Hyderabad Airport. My connection to Bhubaneswar is a good two hours away. Rather than sit inside the airport listening to the monotonous overhead announcements, I decide to step out and explore. Outside, it is a pleasant 22 degrees. As I look around, I see a sign towards the far right, beyond the alighting point for passengers. It reads “Staff Canteen”. I follow the sign. Barely a minute’s walk from the terminal, a little beyond an unauthorised temple where the only attendant is a white goat, is a big peepul tree. Under its shade, there is a make-shift asbestos roof. Below it, with its two sides half open, is the Staff Canteen. A few overhead fans and sad looking tube lights are the only elements of comfort here. The place has a dirty floor. Everything here is makeshift. The furniture is hammered out of welded steel frames with hard laminated surfaces. There are two counters, one selling biscuits, cigarettes, paan and mints. Next to it, beyond the crates with empty bottles of “cool drink”, is the dosa and coffee counter. In another place, a tap is protruding from a heavily stained wall with the sign “drinking water”. Mercifully, no one seems to be drinking out of it. Next to it is the rusting, retired frame of a bench. Currently the resident “Chhotu” of this place is using it to hang the mopping cloth. There are the blackened gas cylinders and assorted utensils here and there. Lord Hanuman looks down on the place from the dirty wall. Alongside the Lord, a State Bank of India calendar and a clock in working condition remind the staff members to get going as soon as they can. Next to all this is an open dustbin where empty water bottles, discarded cellophane wrappers and associated garbage play host to the local flies.This place is a melting pot. The ill-clad Airport Authority employee, the tired Indian Airlines loader, and a shabby traffic cop contrast the pretty Kingfisher and Jet Air ground crew. They are all sitting together for the breakfast they missed at home this morning because they had to report to work at probably 3 or 4 or 5 AM. A transistor radio is blaring some pleasant Telugu music. Quite unmindful of it, the men and women are busy with their food, occasionally getting up to collect their coffee or tea, coming back again to light a cigarette or to quickly return to their stations. Away from the sophistication of the air-conditioned terminal building and a world of induced polite conversation, professional briskness and glamour associated with air-travel, these people look real. I see them come and go, immersed in their own world; the conversation is centered around flights and cargo and schedules and manifests. The Staff Canteen is the only place, despite its current shape and state, that can give them a few moments of relief from their high-stress work place. Why must this Staff Canteen be the way it is? Why could not these men and women eat at the Airport Restaurant that, though not a fantastic place, is certainly better? If we cared enough, I am sure we could find ways and means of making it happen. To me, the stumbling block is a larger, almost national mindset when it comes to dealing with the needs of our people who run our organisations at the ground level. The workplace perpetuates the East India Company syndrome of making a distinction between the people in power and the natives. While the East India Company is long gone, the syndrome lives on. In many an organisation, there still are separate eating places, toilets and parking lots for different levels. Whatever may be the reason, one thing is certain. Unless we treat our people with sensitivity, respect and care, we cannot expect them to extend the same to our customers. People who are raised in darkness do not lead with light. When I was small, my second brother joined the Indian Air Force as an airman. His annual home coming was a big event. The Air Force used to send him on a second-class train warrant. After many years, he eventually became a junior commissioned officer. This time around, when he came home, he alighted from a first-class compartment. Proudly, he announced, “If you want a guy to do a first-class job, get him a first-class ticket.” At the time, I did not fully understand what he was saying. But now, sitting under the peepul tree’s shade, under the cob-webbed asbestos roof of the Staff Canteen, I wonder why no one is telling that to the bosses at the Airport Authority or to the airlines you and I fly in our jet-set world! Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html

The Castaway( May 2, 2006)

From among the many mails that I receive from readers of Times of Mind, there is one to which I cannot reply: it came by post, without an address and unsigned. The reader wants to ensure that he leaves no traces and remains in the shroud of anonymity. This anonymity is a penumbra that protects him from thousands of years of social stigma. The letter is written in impeccable English; the nice handwriting clearly indicates both good education and cultivated writing skills. The writer says that he is a self-made man, very well placed in life and happily married to someone he found himself. The only issue haunting him is his past, to which he was not a signatory when born into this world. Having lost his parents as a child, he was raised by his relatives in a remote village in a southern state. Being educationally gifted, he earned several scholarships, and eventually left the village and came to a big city. More successes followed and eventually he met his wife, herself a professional. When he left for the big city, he had left his past behind. Suddenly, at the time of taking the most important decision of his life, it returned. Her relatives wanted to know what caste he belonged to. In a moment of helplessness, he suppressed the truth. The truth is that he was born to a man who worked in a cremation ground, because that was what his caste ordained.A cremation ground in India is a very unusual place. It is difficult to conjure the experience to one who has not been there; words cannot describe the ethos. Central to the rites conducted in such places are the men who earn a living there. They set up the pyre; they tend to the body by repeatedly stoking the fire from all sides, poking the burning flesh with the only instrument of their trade, long bamboo sticks. Finally, after all is over, they collect the remaining bones and hand them over to the relatives. They do this under the burning sun and in the dead of the night; they do it in the pouring rain when the smoke from the pyre engulfs everything, emanating the smell of flesh and fire, wind and water. Every dead body takes a good six hours to be fully cremated and, even when relatives go away before that, these men cannot. The pyre has to be cleared afterwards and be kept for the next one who must be given the passage to another world. What happens, though, to the progeny of such men? They can roam in freedom if they embrace their father's profession; if they step out of the perimeter of their caste, the past will haunt them such that they must, as in the case of my reader, live suspended between the world of the living and that of the dead.My reader feels guilty and ashamed. His erudition make his wife's family think he is a brahmin. His wife of many years thinks so too. In the deepest corner of his heart however, when he dialogues with his own soul in silence, the seemingly comfortable shadow of the "don't ask, don't tell" principle, scorches him. The pain follows him everywhere. The more professionally successful he gets, the more life showers its goodness on him and, ironically, the more loved he becomes – the more the pain reminds him that his past is alive. It is like an alien creature that lives inside him and, he knows, will never go away. This man is not the only one in this country of a billion people where "the clear stream of reason" does lose its way, into the "dreary desert sands of dead habits". Every day. It is only a few days ago, newspapers reported that Bihar Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar was aghast that in several police barracks, there are separate kitchens for people of "lower castes". But it's not just Bihar. Even today, I know well that when bureaucrats try to ascertain the credentials of their colleagues, if someone has come through the so-called "reserved quota", that information heads and trails every other byte of data on the individual. Since the nationhood of India, in the intervening six decades, two new generations have been raised who did not have to be shackled to an inglorious past. How much longer, I wonder, before my nameless reader will be able to stand up to say, "Look, I am proud of my father and his profession." To him though, I want to say right now, "Though my brahmin parents gave me birth, it is only in the hands of someone like your father that I will receive my final deliverance. Thank you for what he does for all of us." Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html

contd..What I've learned in my life - Funny Quotes with Image

What I've learned in my life - Funny Quotes with Image

Change Your Thinking

It will take just 37 seconds to read this and change your thinking.. Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room. One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs. His bed was next to the room's only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back. The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation.. Every afternoon, when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window. The man in the other bed began to live for those one hour periods where his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and colour of the world outside. The window overlooked a park with a lovely lake. Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed their model boats. Young lovers walked arm in arm amidst flowers of every colour and a fine view of the city skyline could be seen in the distance. As the man by the window described all this in exquisite details, the man on the other side of the room would close his eyes and imagine this picturesque scene. One warm afternoon, the man by the window described a parade passing by. Although the other man could not hear the band - he could see it in his mind's eye as the gentleman by the window portrayed it with descriptive words. Days, weeks and months passed. One morning, the day nurse arrived to bring water for their baths only to find the lifeless body of the man by the window, who had died peacefully in his sleep. She was saddened and called the hospital attendants to take the body away. As soon as it seemed appropriate, the other man asked if he could be moved next to the window. The nurse was happy to make the switch, and after making sure he was comfortable, she left him alone. 0A Slowly, painfully, he propped himself up on one elbow to take his first look at the real world outside. He strained to slowly turn to look out the window besides the bed. It faced a blank wall. The man asked the nurse what could have compelled his deceased roommate who had described such wonderful things outside this window. The nurse responded that the man was blind and could not even see the wall. She said, 'Perhaps he just wanted to encourage you.' Epilogue: There is tremendous happiness in making others happy, despite our own situations. Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared, is doubled. If you want to feel rich, just count all the things you have that money can't buy. 'Today is a gift, that is why it is called The Present .'