Bundle of Joy

There are events in everybody’s life that come unexpected, but one can still be prepared. And then there are events that are completely expected, so much so that you might know the exact date of occurrence, but you are still not fully prepared. Yeah right; if it was two months back I would have given a high fiver to those of you who said “exams”, but as I recently discovered, there are more things in life than exams that can give you sleepless nights, literally, and the worst part is that you’ll never know whether you’ve passed or failed in your effort until after a couple of decades.

For starters, Junior (let’s call him that for the time being), showed no signs of coming out even after the expected date. My meticulous contingency Plans A, B, C and D would have easily made me eligible for a direct entry to US Secret Services; the 4 different routes from my home to the hospital along with the specific times of the day when each route would be ideal had been finalized after many trial runs. A neighbor’s car was booked as a backup, my in-laws were on standby and colleagues alerted that I would dash out anytime. So, I am not really sure whether I was relieved that we could drive down to the hospital leisurely or utterly dismayed that our trip to the hospital was so devoid of any drama when the doctor said “You guys come in whenever it’s convenient and let’s get it done with”!

I had always thought that being in the presence of beautiful people alleviated any pain and suffering that you were going through. Well, my wife seemed to disagree. The cute junior doctor trying to explain things to the suddenly very attentive, interested and curious husband seemed to have flushed out some never heard off before hormones in her. She gave me her trademark one eyebrow raised stare while she was wheeled inside the OT for delivery and I knew very well what that look meant – “Don’t you dare flirt around with any of the staff, Mister, else don’t even dream of coming anywhere in the vicinity of Junior for a long time”!

To cut a long story short, Junior came into the world, or rather, a swanky labor room to the sounds of his mother screaming at the top of her voice which was further drowned by the metallica belting out of VH1 on the 42 inch plasma. Junior did not cry on arrival, giving us some really anxious moments and unfortunately, we lived in the dark era of primeval medical science where the wonder drug called “All is well” had not been launched. Hence, the doctors had to use traditional methods to make him cry. His first proper recital after a few hours brought in much needed relief, but ever since that, thou shan’t knowth what peace meanth!

I had always felt it to be highly unfair that paternity leave is only for a couple of days while maternity leave extends for a few months and my wife repeatedly points it out to me with a sneer “Its proportional to the effort that you’ve put in the whole process”. Objection overruled. Case closed.

Every day is a discovery. I am in the process of perfecting the most discreet ways of taking ‘power naps’ in office, the only glitch being that I’ve not yet mastered the art of waking up from it. The last time I sat in an aircraft and the engines started was the first time I appreciated the marvel of engineering in making such big pieces of machinery so silent and noiseless. I despised clearing my daily household garbage which I have now volunteered to do in return for, well, let me just say, not being asked to do certain other things. But all that said, nothing compares to the absolute, unadulterated and purest form of happiness that wells up inside when I see that elusive smile, or when he looks into my eyes and tries to express something, or when he grabs my finger. Every materialistic thing ceases to be important in front of him. Above all the bunch of emotions that we go through every day, is the most important one of all - the intimidating responsibility that we have at hand in shaping him up to be a good human being; someone who is adored by his friends, relatives and the society alike. We are keeping our fingers crossed.

Dedicated to my Mom and Dad

A Dil Transplant for Dilli

The Commonwealth Games is just around the corner and the excitement in Delhi is reaching a fever pitch, and why shouldn’t it? After all, Delhi is going to represent the whole nation in playing host to a deluge of dignitaries, athletes, sportsmen, tourists, diplomats and politicians from across the globe. The flyovers are done; work on most of the planned Metro routes is on track; construction of the games village and the various venues are in full swing, however, the high and mighty stakeholders seem to have suddenly woken up to another problem that threatens to tarnish our nation’s image – how to change the attitude of the city’s residents towards their civic responsibilities?

Spearheaded by our Hon Union Home Minister and ably seconded by Delhi’s Chief Minister, the KPIs are as crisp and clear as it could be:
• To make the city’s motorists respect and obey traffic rules, at least basic ones like stopping at red lights and not going on the wrong side of the road, if not more ‘complicated’ ones like over speeding, rash driving and considering the road as their ancestral property.
• To subtly inform the quintessential Delhi driver without hurting his fragile ego that he is neither 007, nor Batman, or for that matter Rajnikanth. His car is not a Ferrari and even if it is, none of Delhi’s roads are German Autobahns. He does not necessarily have to get into fist fights in the middle of the road, leave alone kill fellow motorists at the slightest of provocations.
• To educate the city’s residents to reduce the use of expletives in their everyday lingo, since, not every outsider is intelligent enough to grasp the warmth and affection that emanates from the foul words which add spice to everyday conversation.
• To be self aware of who you are and who your father is rather than shouting “Do you know who I am?” and “Do you know who my father is?” to anyone who dares to stop him from following his free will.

Okay, Okay, the last one is my own, but I swear the rest are from recent newspapers. Obviously, the Home Minister’s comments on trying to make Delhi ‘less rude’ and more friendly has not amused the guy on the street; his instant reaction being “ BC woh kaun hota hai bolne wala ki Dilli rude hai. Hum tax dete hai tho road hamari hai BC; gaadi hum apne paison se khareedte hai tho hum apni marzi se chalayenge !@#$%^ “ ; Very valid point indeed, my friend. I wonder how the Government missed this perspective though!

Before my Delhite friends and colleagues start firing their salvos and before the non Delhite starts poking fun of his Delhi counterpart, let me mention that Delhi just happens to be in the crosshairs because of the upcoming games. I can assure you that we are not dealing with the attitude and behavior of people of one lone geography. Delhi, of all places, is a cultural melting pot and an amazing city which has got the capacity to make a Gujju, a Bong, a Mallu or a Bihari, feel absolutely at home. Delhi’s culture is an amalgamation of cultures from almost every state in the country and the responsibility to maintain its dignity lies on everybody who comes into this wonderful city seeking greener pastures and opportunities and hence, the problem is not about a single city or its residents. Disturbingly, the root cause of the problem lies much closer to home. It lies inside each one of us.
It is my feeling that as a society, we are becoming more and more selfish, impatient and intolerant with scant regard and respect for other human beings around. We have taken the adage “Time is money” too much to heart and are always on the lookout for shortcuts and I am not talking about just the roads here. What we don’t realize is that each time we take a shortcut and feel jubilant about it, we are weakening the moral and civic fabric that we are supposed to hand over to the generations to come. Every time we pay a bribe, break a traffic rule, honk somebody out of the way, abuse and bully people weaker than us, take advantage of helpless fellow beings or refuse to admit and apologize for a mistake of ours because of our inflated egos, just stop for a moment and think - are we acting like a human being who is supposed to be the Supreme Being in this universe thanks to his ability to think and act?

Agreed, most of us are nothing like the people about whom we are talking about, but there might be people whom we know who fit the bill. So, next time they act irresponsibly, do everybody a favor and let it be known to them that as a responsible friend/ relative/ colleague, you do not think highly of their latest exploit. To those of you who do not even have anybody in their social or professional circles who match the description, Congratulations! We need more of your kinds to take our great nation beyond the next threshold of progress, prosperity, mutual respect and harmony.

“If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own . . . how much kinder, how much gentler he would be.”
William Allen White (1868-1944)
Iconic American Newspaper Editor

The Mian at the junction

I see him every working day. He stands there at the same spot. He is regular and punctual and goes about doing his ‘job’ sincerely. I don’t know whether he ‘works’ on weekends because I don’t have to go that way during weekends. I didn’t think much about him when I saw him for the first time. But I saw him the next day, and the next day and the next and I have got so used to seeing him that whenever I reach that junction and someone’s blocking my line of sight, I crane my neck and look around to check whether he’s there or not, much to the irritation of my wife who thinks I am ogling at other girls. Now, before I let your thoughts go wild about my fascination for a ‘he’, let me clarify.

My daily morning trip to office takes me through a few major intersections of the city. I don’t recall the faces of all the traffic policemen who man each one of those junctions, even though, unconsciously, I see them every day. I do remember an old traffic police man who is posted at a junction near to a school and I have seen many a times, the awe with which little kids look at him and gather around him like a flock of ducklings and he keeps checking their count like a worried mother duck. And when he feels that quite a few of them have gathered, the superman police uncle walks into the middle of the road and raises his hands on both sides to stop the inconsiderate traffic and the kids tumble over to the other side. Other than him I don’t recall any other traffic policeman whom I ‘meet’ everyday, except of course, that silly fellow who challaned me for jumping a red light. I can pick him out from a battalion of his species any day.

But ‘he’ is different from all of them. He stands alongside a traffic policeman in the middle of a major intersection and helps manage the traffic. He looks like he would be in his forties and has an obvious paunch. He wears his religious cap and civilian clothes…wait a second…Religious cap and civilian clothes and manages traffic??? That’s what caught my attention about this ‘duty bound’ Miyan. The first day I saw him assisting the policeman while engaging him in a friendly chat and breaking into smiles every now and then, I thought he must be a friend of the cop and they must have met up after a long time. But it happened again the next day, only this time, the cop was a different guy. I guess nobody can blame me now for my interest, or rather, inquisitiveness about this Miyan at the junction. I have always wanted to find out why he was doing what he was doing and many times I have contemplated on walking upto him and asking him who he is. But on second thoughts, reason prevailed over curiosity.

One lazy Saturday evening some train of thought took me to that Miyan. Again the urge rose in me to explore the identity of that Miyan. While I was still thinking about strategies to successfully undertake “Operation Miyan Identification”, a flash of thought struck me. Let’s say for argument sake that I come to know who he is; but what after that. In case the reason for him being there turns out to be less interesting than what I had envisaged it to be, I would be disappointed. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if I involved more minds and came out with myriad possibilities of who he could be and what he could be doing there? And hence began my small project and the results, as expected, were very interesting.

“Koi pagal hoga yaar”; “Must be a cop who hates uniform”; “Maybe he’s from an NGO or a social worker”; “Maybe he lost a near or dear one in that junction”; “Could be some criminal sentenced to a term of social service”

Human thought process is sometimes unpredictable and very fascinating. A simple Miyan in civilian clothes assisting traffic turned out be everything from a lunatic to a convict to a respectable social worker. Even though it was interesting to collect these beads of thought, the social worker possibility struck me as being pretty close to reality because I was reminded of a “Traffic Baba” in Noida. Sector 18 in Noida is where ‘Noidans’ flock whenever they get free time. In the midst of all the snazzy cars and glitzy showrooms, a nondescript old man wearing a white cap, a white flowing robe which has turned brown because of the dust and smoke, can be spotted slowly walking in between the vehicles which have stopped at a signal. He hangs two large placards on his neck with one facing front and one facing back. The placard neatly lists down the most common traffic rules and precautions that we follow, or rather, we don’t. He also has a hand held microphone with a speaker with which he ensures that he gets his message across in case someone wants to look the other way..

People and local media reports say that he is from a well to do family and does this part time because of his heightened sense of responsibility to society. Whoever he may be, I have seen even the toughest and the most rowdy looking motorists relenting to his pleas when he comes beside them and requests once, twice, thrice and as many times as he can, in a tone which comes close to begging, to either buckle up or wear a helmet or stop behind the white line. He is least bothered about the sneers and taunts that some ‘normal’ mortals pass about him. Nothing stops him from doing his rounds of the traffic signal everyday and getting rebuked by many, just to ensure that roads are safer for everybody using it.

Whenever I think of people like the Miyan and the Traffic Baba, I feel a vacuum in my heart. I have read a zillion cases of people starting cancer foundations because they lost a near or dear one to cancer, of people plunging into charities because of some tragedy. Is it necessary that a tragedy has to trigger our sense of responsibility to our society? I don’t subscribe to a general feeling that to be socially responsible has to do with starting an NGO or donating millions to a cause. Putting a piece of waste into a dustbin is social responsibility, switching off computers when not in use is social responsibility, following traffic rules, standing up for a legitimate cause, giving and taking respect and a million other trivial actions such as these amount to us being socially responsible.

As long as we consider the Miyan at the junction and Traffic Baba as lunatics and convicts, I guess we have a long way to go before we can sleep peacefully without any fear of an impending crime or injustice that may victimize us.

My Kaamwali bai's appraisal

A few days back when I went back home from office and opened the door, I was in for a shock! The house seemed to have been ransacked! I braced myself and held my helmet tight in my fist to counter any ruffians still lurking around the corners. But our TV was still there…and so was our DVD player. Then what the hell was missing? Clothes!!! For God sake, who on earth would take pains to break in into a house and steal some clothes? What has this world come to? Wait a moment…I can see my clothes…some of them neatly folded up and some others hanging pretty on the cloth rungs. Somewhere in my head a bell rang that it was no thief or miscreant. It was just my kaamwali bai’s handiwork. A shameless grin escaped my lips when I realized that we were so accustomed to such an unsystematic and disorderly way of living that seeing things in their rightful places seemed like a miracle.

But I was still wondering as to why our maid had undertaken this “Safai Abhiyan” in our house. I mean, nobody’s complaining and this is exactly what she was paid to do as per our initial ‘agreement’, but still, she’s never done it till today on her own unless we’ve specifically told her to do it. So why today? Anyways, my curiosity had to wait for some more time till my roomies came and I couldn’t wait to see the expressions on their faces when they saw their rooms all spic and span. And when they finally came, I had a good laugh seeing their reactions and a greater laugh at their frustration because they, just like me, couldn’t find a dozen items, which, till the same morning used to adorn a place of pride on our beds and every night when we went to sleep we resembled Egyptian mummies with all our worldly possessions placed around us so that we could rest in peace.

All the initial hula bulla over, my roomies dropped the bomb. Our maid had asked for her monthly payment that morning and was also hinting at getting a possible raise from the next month!

Welcome to reality. Its appraisal time!!!

Even though our maid doesn’t have any appraisal forms to fill up, no reporting manager to report to and definitely no reviewer to cross check any discrepancy, the fact still remained that we had to appraise her and believe me, it was going to be tough. An easy way out would be to act as if we didn’t even get the hint and hope that she doesn’t ask for a raise again. But then, in today’s world where getting a good maid is tougher than getting an engineer or an M.B.A, how long can we manage to hold her back. Not that she is an exceptional maid to let go off and neither has she often gone out of her way to conduct ‘Safai Abhiyans’ on her own, but still, she was good enough for us. And more often than not, being good enough is much better than being exceptional. After all, how often do you get maids with whom you felt comfortable enough to leave your house keys with and that too, right in the first month of employment?

I am pretty sure that any sane person in the corporate world would shudder even at the thought of having ‘good enough’ employees and not exceptional employees. I agree that exceptional employees perform exceptionally well, produce exceptional results and become hot property among any top management exceptionally fast. But corporate history has enough instances to show that exceptional employees have exceptional expectations, are exceptionally difficult to satisfy and more often than not, grow much bigger than the organization they work for and ultimately become the proverbial shark in the fish tank. But does that mean that exceptional employees should be discouraged. No! Never! An organization needs all kinds of employees for a healthy working environment. As much as they need a hen that lays golden eggs for a month, they need normal hens that lay normal eggs all their life. So, what am I trying to arrive at? What has it got to do with appraisals? Very rightly asked…

Dear everybody. Deny as much as you want, but appraisal time is comparison time. Employees compare their bosses, bosses compare their employees, bosses compare themselves and employees compare themselves. And as if that all this ‘Intra-Company’ comparison was not enough, there are ‘Inter company’ comparisons galore. I’ve got nothing against comparisons. In fact, I am all for it because that is one of the most important ways of assessing performance, but, comparison can be a double edged sword if done illogically and without proper understanding. Simply put, you can’t compare a donkey with a horse and vice-versa and I beg to differ with anybody who says that a Horse is a much superior animal to a Donkey, because, what each of them do best, can be done only by them. Welcome to that time of the year when most companies do the mistake of under-feeding their normal egg laying hens while over-feeding the golden egg laying ones and ‘good enough’ employees expect to get the same treatment as ‘exceptional’ ones.

Whenever the festival of Holi or Diwali is around the corner, various ‘concerned’ government departments and other organizations come out with the slogan – “Lets celebrate a happy, colorful and safe Holi/Diwali”. Extending that tone of anticipation and apprehension, let me take this opportunity to wish every body a fair and happy appraisal.


*All characters in this article are purely fictitious. Any resemblance to anybody living or dead is purely coincidental ;-)

The big and small of IT

Right from time immemorial, people have had the fascination to be associated with big brand names. Let it be the toothpaste that they use, the cereal that they have for breakfast, the shoes which they wear or the car that they drive around in. The name matters. The age old adage of “What’s in a name” sounds irrelevant in the present context. So why should it be any different when it comes to the company that you work for?

It’s every youngster’s dream that they work in an MNC which has either got a campus bigger than the presidential palace or owns a swanky office, bang in the heart of any metropolitan city. And this is the exact reason why small companies are facing the daunting task of acquiring and retaining young talent. But if being in a big firm was all it took to make a great career, then why do quite a lot of those ‘lucky ones’ have a problem sticking to the big firms, or for that matter, why do quite a lot of the big corporations have a problem retaining their talent? Why do small companies site their ‘small’ status as an impediment to retaining talent and why do big companies, ironically, state their ‘big’ status as a hurdle to being flexible and responding quickly to the needs of the hour?

Hundreds of researches have been done in this area and an equal number of ‘insightful’ results have been published. One of the striking facts that has come out of these researches is that the priorities considered while employees shift companies, change as they mature in their career and add years to their experience. While a major chunk of the churn happening at the lower levels is because of the salary and other monetary benefits, these factors lose importance after a few years in the industry. And this is true not only to the IT industry but every where else.

Some time back I was speaking to a very successful nephrologist. During the course of our conversation, he mentioned something which struck me as very interesting. He was telling me of the earlier years of his life. He had joined AIIMS as a junior doctor and got married. The stipend at AIIMS was peanuts. Whenever he and his wife used to stroll around the campus and spot an ice cream trolley, they would look at each other and then stifle their urge to have an ice cream because they couldn’t afford to ‘waste’ money on it. So he quit AIIMS and went in search of money and as on this day, he’s got enough money to buy an ice cream factory. And that means he should be really happy now, right? Well, not quite. Today he regrets his decision because he feels that if he had stuck on with AIIMS, he would have been the HOD or Director by now and the social status and prestige that comes along with being the HOD or Director, far surpasses the things that he can buy with his money.

The point that I am trying to drive home is that people’s priorities change with the times. And if the employee and the employer can smartly identify what it is that keeps each other going, I think that is the key to high performance and hence a great organization. As an employer, creating a workplace and a work culture where the employee feels motivated to stay and perform is of utmost importance. That does not necessarily come by doling out cash and other monetary incentives because that can only retain an employee for some more time. And after that particular ‘extension’ he is bound to finally leave because right from the beginning his needs were not what was addressed. At the same time if there is sincere effort from the employer to identify with the needs of the employee and empathize with them, then that could go a long way in building long lasting relationships and acquaintances.

But it’s not always the employer’s call when it comes to retaining talent. The employee should also spare some thought about it. Rather than considering the company as a ‘brick and mortar’ structure (or steel and glass, nowadays), if employees can consider their companies to be human beings with flesh and blood and try and build up a relationship, it would be beneficial to both the sides.

I have always felt that the decision to join a company, or, leave one, for that matter, has to be taken with as much care, sensitivity and thought as we do while choosing our life partner, because, even though this particular thought was meant in another context, I feel it is very much relevant in this context too, and it says,
“You are known by the company you keep”