MBA -Master of Bogus Activities

I am now at an age where I am at  crossroads. Most of my duties as caregiver to my tiny tot, parents and in laws have ebbed off. I can afford 3 or 4 square meals, a roof and a vast of expanse of cloth needed to cover my modesty. So while I make professional appearances and do paid work, I can afford to do pro bono work as well apart from giving to my chosen charity . One such chartiy is in our native place. As any true blooded Indian knows, that is the place your parents or grandparents were born or lived. This village is deep in south India in Tenkasi district of Tamil Nadu.  it is called Sri Sai Subramanya Charity trust and they essentially rum remedial or after school tuition classes for a few hundred kids. The mothers of these students mostly roll Beedis and the fathers are agricultural workers. SOme of the kids also do chores and supplement the meagre family income. The trust gives them books, clothes apart from th classes. they also try to expose them by taking them on excursions to waterfalls, Zoos and dams and such places. Visitors who have are educated and exposed to the outside world are encouraged to interact with the students.

I was one such visitor. The founders of this trust Lakshmi Ramakrishnan and her husband Ramakrishnan ( Who is also the founder of Amar Seve Sangam and a receipient of many national and international awards like CNBC Awaaz's Rea Hero Award)  asked me to talk to about 40 students of Class 9 and 10 and their teachers  about variour career paths in an interactive way. So I asked them to tell me what they wanted to become, what course they would like to do and why were they inspired towards that course,

They talked about wanting to become teachers ( 60% of the girls had that as an aspiration), engineers, police officers, doctors and a couple of lawyers as well. They were encouraged to ask questions and they asked me about my career. i told them that I had done an MBA. They had not heard of this at all. I expanded it and tod them it was a Masters in Business Administration. SO they wanted to know what kind of a skill that was and I gave them some examples. They then wanted to know what inspired me to do MBA. The kids had talked about how they were inspired to see their teachers, how doctors had cured their grandmom and how lawyers would uphold justice etc. MBA seemed a very materialistic choice in comparision. They then interrogated me on my inspiration and I told them that I had met some cool people in my dad's office and I wanted be like them and that is how I found out about this course. Soon enough 2 of the youngsters wanted to do MBA and that did indeed please me.

Many readers of this blog would have heard of Abhijit Bhaduri's book on life as an MBA student, entitled Mediocre But Arrogant where if you are into a management institute , you will surely go out as an MBA. In retrospect basic sciences etc seem so much more scholarly, especially sinceyou will not work under someone who is less qualified than you. Many people who are succcescful do an MBA as a learning. I did as mostly a means of earning. When i started working, the very process of working taught me a lot. So in retrospect, many activities were bogus. and I have almost honed the art of earning through important sounding work and activities.

I an an excellent Master Of Bogus Activities.

Little one''s little love

As anyone who knows me would know, I have a son. He is a big boy now. He was little once. He is not demonstrative, but shows a little hint of affection once in a while.

Between 1997 and 2002 we visited the US quite often , mostly spent the months of April and May there. And it is in this period that mothers' day is celebrated . At first he couldn't understand how my birthday could change. He after all had a mother with a birthday in August. Then he figured that it was a day that mothers are felicitated and gifts are brought for them etc. In the US my son would do small chores and collect quarters and he had a few dollar saved.

A few days before one mothers' day, he made me wait outside Lechters' (one more victim of bad times in US) and he bought me a beautiful set of knives . I was very pleased. It had set him back a good 9 dollars, almost half of what he saved. The day before mothers' day, he spied a magnetic clip withTAZ ( a comic character modelled on the Tasmanian Devil) and I like it and bought it for 3 princely dollars. On our return , my kiddo sidled up to me and said, "You know that the knives cost a lot of money. Will you please buy them for yourselves and accept Taz as my gift.

And that love for us continues. As I already mentioned he is a big boy with the right to vote now and even earns money on summer jobs and internships. And I am expecting nothing but great love in the form of something cheap from him when he visits me in Bangalore from his temporary base in a US university. 

Appreciating my Origins- Where I am from

This is a piece of poetry I wrote in a confluence on "Appreciative Inquiry. Here it goes:

WHERE I AM FROM

I am from my mother's womb
       With my dashing father as the Groom
I am from joyful Kolkata
       And from Koti and from Kota
I was made in Delhi's Patli Gali
       With Ingredients from Bengaluru's Puttenahalli
I am a minx  and a sphinx
I beam with my brother's love
   I came into my own when he carried me to play
In our grandparents. coconut grove
I exist and so I am
  To celebrate I eat cheese and ham
And I cherish the doors that DID not slam.
I came to be a mother and  had to bother,
    and smother and ponder over that little bundle of wonder
I am the earth, wind and the fire
       and The Higgins-Boson whose proof mighty minds desire

I am more than where I came from  and there is more to where I came from
I came from nothingness and I aspire to go back to that  nothingness
In that nothingness await my precious sire and my mother and my brother
All eager to once more with  love drench me and to smother
and strip me of my ego and  show me the vastness of the nothingness

Gayatri







 

My new pre-occupation

I have enrolled in a course which will lead to my being certified as a Professional coach. It is a pre-occupation for 2 reasons. The first reason because it occupies a large part of my day on most days. The second is because I hope to make it part of my occupation from June 2012 onwards.
I have a separate blog on my coaching journey which is still stuck at the starting post.

I have many friends who earn more than just a decent living through coaching. They were serious people with lot of experience in corporates with a few certifications tucked in as well. Moreover, I viewed them as patient people who tolerated fools far more than I did. They were good listeners.
LISTENING is a big monkey on my bag. Chattering is my strength..... However one fine day , in the course of a few hours, I had enrolled in this course, in no small part because of my patient friends who felt I had it in me to coach.

Here I am now, really enjoying my journey. This seems like a honeymoon period. I have mostly got positive feedback . With this new alliance, I am hoping to make this honeymoon last a lot longer than the belated one I tool 18 months into my marriage. My long suffering partner from my first alliance is patiently hearing my chatter as always. This time it is all about coaching.
Join me in my travels and travails.

Stories from my father land

I attended a ceremony which is conducted when a person reaches his/her 60th birthday. My cousin reached that milestone and decided to invite friends and family to one such ritual based ceremony. If the birthday boy or girl is married at this stage, they celebrate it by having a marriage ceremony. To westerners and uninitiated Indians, this is like renewing your marriage vows. I went to cheer the couple and meet assembled family and friends.
I met quite a few of them after more than a decade.

Having described the context and the setting, I will now come to the gist of this narrative. I was pleasantly surprised that people were keen to narrate incidents about my father to illustrate how much he meant to them. Since it is 14 years since my father died, this was a surprise and a pleasant one as they showed my dad in a brilliant light. One long lost cousin's husband recognised me and it seems it was because my walk was exactly like that of my dad. If my intellect was half as sharp as my dad's, I will be thrilled. A few of them said they still followed his advice and one person has even safely kept a 20 year old letter from my dad.

Every now and then I will meet someone who will feel a kinship with me because of what my father did for them. And very few of these were material things. One person talked about his systematic nature. Another about his meticulousness and yet another person about his fairness.

There was one particular narrative which I had not heard before.
My father, Prof Y Satyamurthy was the CEO of a small sick unit which was taken over by Crompton greaves and he was on Crompton Greaves rolls. This was in Pune and those were the days when Mumbai and many pars of Maharashtra was ruled by labour union leaders. In particular people feared Datta Samant. He was one tough cookie. He walked into the office with some other people who I guess were union office bearers. my Dad was on the other side with his management team. Before a word was spoken my Dad handed over a list and said that those were the management demands. Datta Samant was surprised to say the least. He started raving and ranting that he would not tolerate this. Management could not make demands. My dad said that in those pages he just handed over were the details of what was essential to run the company. If those cannot be met, the talks were over. Datta Samant left fuming and furious.
I cannot vouch for this since this is a second hand narrative. Apparently Datta Samant came back to the table two days later and they reached a quick agreement. Then he said that this was the first management which he had met which had honestly and transparently shared all the details of the company and it's position and that he was impressed with the thoroughness with which this was documented. If this had happened in 24/7 news coverage, my dad would have been more famous. However I am what I am because he did not care to dwell on these since he generally believed in humanity and he cared two hoots about visibility.

What I have learnt from him is that I should be true to myself. I should not laze around because others do or work harder to please others. My father worked very hard and enjoyed it. He lived a hundred years in terms of what he achieved though in chronological terms he only lived till he was 66. I know he is one of my guardian angels since life is generally good to me.

Jobs and Palin-Way of the world

Steve Jobs died at the age of 56,  at what can be considered a young age. Almost every life I know has been touched by Apple and at least one if its products. For some it is buying and enjoying the product. For some like me, it is dealing with incessant demand for money to buy those product. For a very close friend , it was the dilemma of how to get her two sons to share the one precious I=Pod their rich NRI uncle presented. My firs brush with Apple technology was way back in 1986 when a colleague fresh from her PhD in BYU in USA came back with a Mac and she had this "Hide the boss is coming " single click feature which instantly transformed any game you were playing or any frivolous other things you did in office time into a businesslike spreadsheet. Nice touch eh!
I have heard that Steve Jobs did not believe in Market research. I am thankful for that. Collecting opinions from random people who can never imagine how things can be better. I heard many people comparing Jobs to Edison. It seems a very apt comparison. To twist Mark H McCormack's words, "If Steve Jobs had gone to Harvard, we would be typing on bigger keyboards and seeing bigger screens. Thank God he didn't finish college. So the world is worse off for losing someone who could show you a better way.

God (now Steve Jobs is up there to guide him)  works in mysterious ways. While he took away a genius, he saved us as well. I heard an announcement that Sarah Palin has decided to drop out of the presidential race. That brngs a bit of cheer back into my life. I don't know why she decided that. I hope she sticks to it.
I prefer watching her fish, trek, hunt and cook etc. Sarah Palin's Alska is where seems at home and hope she stays there.

Chin up...

101 % cut off

Long long ago in what seems like a different galaxy, I did not get admission to VJTI in Mumbai since my mark was half a per cent below the cut off which was a modest 84%. If my dad had been a defense personnel or better still SC/ST , I would have been in. Not having such luck, I joined B.Sc and life went on quite smoothly in spite of this admission hiccup. I had some 10 marks grace for having been in NSS (National Social Service) under whose umbrella for wo years, I read to a brilliant blind person by the name of Ramakrishnan. I used to read Statistical equations to him and he would instantly grasp it. The point is that if I and my fellow NSS mates had maxed our papers in 12th and had grace marks, the cut off could have been 101 % .

I heard that there were 880 eligible students with a cut off of 100%. Not surprising at all. The irony is that if they didn't have that as the cut off , someone who got 100% could be denied admission.

It is high time we had an exam like SAT which would be common for the state boards, CBSE, ICSE , NIOS and the lucky home tutored students. It is a standard test which can be taken any number of times at convenient times. You do not have to worry if you happen to catch the flu or have a hairline fracture in one of your fingers. And you get the same score irrespective of the evaluators. Sounds heavenly.

The least we can do is track these 100% club members and see where they land up after a decade. That would be an interesting read. TOI, DH , Businessline, are you listening?