Dilemma – a page from my past

I would like to take you to the time when I was just a twelve year old school boy. It had been hectic for my mother as our maid-servant did not bother to turn up for the last six days. My father had no other choice but to arrange for a new servant and today was her first day at our home. [She was dark, unusually tall, with respect to her cult, and was very strongly built. She had bangles of all the colours in her left hand, while the right hand had the tattoos which added to her a flavour of rawness. Her nose was pierced with a large floral ornament and she had long ear rings that dangled as she walked around our home. She preferred wearing a shabby yellow sari and an equally scruffy purple coloured dress alternately.] Everything seemed fine about her work and it looked as if it would be a smooth experience for us to have her serving us. Alas! We were so wrong. It happened that we came to know something about her that we didn’t notice earlier: the way her long black hair, draped in a pool of coconut oil, smelled. Whenever she entered a room, the air in the room would, as if, stale. I was petrified whenever she would come to clean my room. I was a little kid and I couldn’t say anything to this woman as my parents had taught me that it was impolite of someone, as young as me, to point fingers at an elder lady and talk about her foul body odour. I came to know that women of her society must not apply oil on their hair after bathing, only if they are a widow. So our maid, who was newly married, could never be convinced not to apply the dreaded oil. This was an ethical dilemma to me.

I thought about this for hours, discussed the issue with many of my friends but couldn’t come up with a solution. The only thing that I could do was to complaint to my parents. But sadly enough, my parents did not speak anything related to this with our maid as they feared losing her. I avoided sharing space with that woman and I involuntarily started misbehaving with her, hurting her and ultimately disliking her. This episode started reflecting psychologically on me as well. I even avoided coming back home immediately after school. I wished to let her know the reason for my change in behaviour but I was held back by the ethics of my family. One day one of my cousins sparked an idea in me. I offered our maid a handful of light hair oil to massage her curls with. She liked the oil and I offered her a whole bottle of it saying that she smelled wonderful in it. She took the bottle with her and I was successful in overcoming my dilemma.

The incident might seem very funny (one may say silly), but the learning that it gave me was of immense stature. It taught me that people don’t like truth, if it is harsh. So, one should be careful with their words and try to add butter to it and then say the same thing. People would love this appreciation and you would overcome the dilemma.

One Night Stand – A stand up comedy act

 

There might have been times of despair

Times of remorse & pain beyond repair

There have been days you need a shoulder to cry

Yet you come strong every time with a will to try

 

For all those who have got the guts to say no to sorrow

We bring you an opportunity to giggle tomorrow

 

This one night we will make life a joke

From you, the comedians will need a lot of poke

This night we will hit adversity with laughter

Get ready to applaud for our creative crafters

 

Join us tomorrow and make it a night to remember

 

The Mythology of ‘Pinaki’

–sourced from internet

Being very kind to his devotees, Lord Shiva holds a bow in his hands in order to protect all creatures. That bow is named as Pinaka. Shiva is called Pinaki, as he is holding Pinaka bow.

This Pinaka has a very strange story. Once sage Kanva-Muni was performing severe austerities in dense forest. While performing austerities, he was fixed deep in transcendence and thus he never knew that his body is turned into a mound, being eaten by termites. A beautiful bamboo had also grown upon that mound. Lord Brahma appeared there at the time of completion of penances. With the power of his infallible water Brahma ji made Kanva’s body as bright as gold. He also bestowed many benedictions upon him and while going back, he thought that it can not be an ordinary bamboo which is grown at the Kanva’s head. It must be well utilized. He clipped the bamboo and gave it to Vishwakarma and Vishwakarma made three bows out of it named Pinaka, Sharnga and Gandeeva. Brahma ji offered these bows to Lord Shankar. Being pleased with the austerities of Vishnu, Lord Shankar gave him the Sharnga bow. Gandeeva was given to Arjuna, as Supreme Lord Shiva was highly satisfied by his austerities and penances guided by Krishna. But Pinaka was kept by Shiva for self. The literary meaning of ‘Pi’ पि is Pihit पिहित that means ‘to cover’ and ‘Naka’ नाक means heaven. This bow is called as Pinaka because it covered the heaven by it’s influence. This Pinaka bow is shaped like a serpent with seven hoods. Lord Shankar holds it in his hands for the benefit of the world. Bhaskar Roy also supports the same purport—

नाकोऽपि येन पिहितो मुनिकण्वमूर्ध वल्मीकवेणुजधनुस्त्रितयाग्रजन्मा।
यः सप्तशीर्षफणिरूप उदारकर्मा चापस्तमावहसि नाथ! ततः पिनाकी॥

The holy sound of Omkar is accepted as a bow in spiritual practices, by which Lord Pinaki is captured eternally.

‘It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it’- Lena Horne

When you come across this phrase, what picture comes into your mind? To many, the picture of a donkey pulling a cart with huge pile of inflated sacks atop a steep hill would flash by. The fear is not of the overweight cart nor is it of the steep hill; the fear is of falling down. The fear is about failing. Failure is the heaviest load to carry and how we carry it decides whether we break down and fall into the dark well of gloom and self-pity or whether we rise again and tread the path to glory.

The fear of failure is worse than failure itself. When you say that you have failed, you still have gained the experience of the failure which comes handy in your next venture. But when you fear failure, you cannot focus on your present and hence you won’t learn anything from the journey making it a big disappointment.

This attitude of man is so critical in nature that it decides not only whether he would live a successful life personally but also whether he would be a proficient entrepreneur or a champion manager. Yes, the attitude to learn from the failures is what differentiates between the best and the ‘also exists’ organization. But how many organizations can actually ‘leave’ the path of success and stroll along the path of failure for even a brief moment. Not many, so to say. Unless of course, the organization believes that the synonym for failure isn’t disappointment or any other negative terminology. ‘Indeed, for a generation of managers weaned on the rigors of Six Sigma error-elimination programs, embracing failure is close to blasphemy.’, says Stefan H. Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Granted, not all failures are praiseworthy. Some flops are just that: bad ideas. The eVilla, Sony Corp.’s $500 ‘Internet appliance’, the Pontiac Aztek, General Motors Corp.’s ugly duckling ‘crossover’ SUV.

But intelligent failures - those that happen early and inexpensively and that contribute new insights about your customers - should be more than just tolerable. They should be encouraged. Figuring out how to master this process of failing fast and failing cheap and fumbling toward success is probably the most important thing companies have to get good at.

Organizations need to ‘get good’ at failures. It means designing ways to measure performance that balance accountability with the freedom to make mistakes. People may fear failure, but they fear the consequences of it even more. “The performance culture really is in deep conflict with the learning culture”, says Paul J. H. Schoemaker, CEO of consulting firm, Decision Strategies International Inc.

Some organizations have tried to measure performance in a way that accounts for these opposing pressures. At IBM Research, engineers are evaluated on both one and three-year time frames. The one-year term determines the bonus, while the three-year period decides rank and salary. The longer frame can help neutralize a year of setbacks.

In addition to making sure performance evaluations take a long-term view, managers should also think about celebrating smart failures by throwing ‘failure parties’ to recognize failures to be a part of the creative process. Most companies, however, don’t spend enough time and resources looking backward. That's a mistake. How do we learn if we don't examine the past?

Taking failures in their stride and utilising them as fire-power makes all the difference between ‘a’ man and ‘the’ man. He failed in business in 1931; Defeated for the legislature in 1932; Again failed in business in 1934; Had a nervous breakdown in 1936; Defeated in election in 1938; Defeated for Congress in 1943, ’46 and ’48; Defeated for Senate in 1955. Defeated for Vice President in 1956; Defeated for Senate again in 1958; Elected President in 1960. This man was Abraham Lincoln.

The founder of G.E., the largest conglomerate of the World, Thomas Alva Edison once remarked about one of his experiment which fell apart: ‘I have not failed, I have just found out 10,000 ways that don’t work’.

When the Vice President of Google, Sheryl Sandberg, apologised for an error because of which the company lost a few millions, Larry Page, Google's co-founder and unofficial thought leader remarked, ‘I'm so glad you made this mistake, because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don't have any of these mistakes, we're just not taking enough risk’.

In the 1950s the Jacuzzi brothers invented a whirlpool bath to treat people with arthritis. Although the product worked, it was a sales flop. Very few people in the target market, sufferers from arthritis, could afford the expensive bath. So the idea languished until they tried re-launching the same product for a different market – as a luxury item for the wealthy. It became a big success.

Many costly Microsoft product failures provided the learning and opportunity for development of many of Microsoft's biggest successes. Examples include:

a) Many apparently wasted years working on a failed database called Omega resulted in the development of the most popular desktop database, Microsoft Access.

b) Millions of dollars and countless hours invested in a joint operating system project with IBM that was discontinued led to the operating system Windows NT.

c) A failed multiplan spreadsheet that made little headway against Lotus 1-2-3 provided learning that helped in the development of Microsoft Excel, an advanced graphic spreadsheet that leads the competition.

‘At Dell, innovation is all about taking risks and learning from failure’, writes Michael Dell, the Founder & CEO of Dell Computer Corporation. Back in 1989, the personal computer industry was making the transition to a new type of memory chip, and found ourselves stuck with far too many of the old kind. That was a costly mistake, and it took them about a year to recover, but they learned from it. ‘The failure led us to develop a new way to manage inventory, and we went from being last place in the minor leagues to where we now win the World Series every year.’

Most people naturally seek positive outcomes and set about trying to prove that an experiment works. But designers, inventors, and scientists, all models for companies struggling to be more creative, take the opposite tack. They try to prove themselves wrong. That focus on potential flaws makes failure, and the lessons that come with it, happen earlier. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied how organizations learn from failure, says managers would do well to think more like scientists. “Failure provides more ‘learning’, in a strictly logical or technical sense, than success”, she says. “It’s a principle of the scientific method that you can only disconfirm (never confirm) a hypothesis.”

Failure's capacity to teach is exactly why venture capitalists often look for managers to run start-ups whose resumes include experience with a flop. Gordon McCallum, CEO of Virgin Management Ltd., can point to managers within Virgin who might have been overlooked by other companies because of failures in their careers. He’s also quick to note that errors on the job, as long as they aren’t repeated, are not only supported, but valued.

A company’s reaction in the face of intelligent failures can send tremors or thrills through a culture. If top executives are accepting, people will embrace risk. But if managers react harshly, people will retreat from it.

Failure is crucial without which breakthrough innovation - an imperative in today's globally competitive world - is so extraordinarily hard. It requires well-honed organizations built for efficiency and speed to do what feels unnatural: Explore; Experiment; Foul up, sometimes. Then repeat.

Hobbies, Passion & Faith – a service perspective

This category is quite intriguing at its core. On the first look, one may feel the words hobbies and passion quite closely knit while faith remained wanting. I chose this product category because it, in a way, shows the different levels of association that a man can have with a product or service. When a man starts something new, he has high enthusiasm and he likes what he is doing. But he is reluctant to find more time for this ‘new’ work and he is comfortable in working on this only during his free time. This is done just for the fun part of it and the man expects miniscule learning from this sort of activity.

When we say that a man is passionate about what he is doing, we implicitly mean that this is the second stage of association of the man with his work. He works hard towards achieving his goal and is ready to sacrifice other jobs at hand to give more time on this. The man has clearly made up his mind to pursue this goal seriously. When you are passionate about something, you are ready to take great risk to achieve your goals. The implications are definitive – when the stakes are high, the returns expected are high too.

The third and final stage of association is ‘faith’. Faith (in business) is about the loyalty that one has towards a particular product or service. When a passionate person tries for several times but fails invariably each time, he is truly tested. If he is just passionate without having ‘faith’ in what he is doing, his aspirations might come to an end. But because he has faith, he is able to try even harder till he gets the desired results.

One may claim that there exists just a thin line of difference between the three levels of association. Nonetheless, it is the responsibility and a challenge for the market research analyst to find out the corresponding level of association that one has with a particular product or service. Depending on the accuracy of the research, the promotional campaigns would be designed which would have a direct impact on the sales of a particular product or service.

Unethical Ethics – Experiences from my life

Idealists say that ethics is all about choosing what is good from what is not. The practical individual would argue, ethics is choosing the better of the two evils for the so called ‘greater good’!

Few years back, I had an experience with ‘choosing the better’. I was riding my bike back from my friend’s home and I had to catch a bus to go to my college for my exams. On the way, I heard a cry which made me slow down. I looked back but found nothing except a bicycle fallen into a road side pit filled with rainwater. I could have turned my back to that and got home early to catch my bus. Instead, I parked my bike aside, lifted the bicycle off the road and found a kid, not more than ten years old, in the pit, trying to take a few more breaths, fighting to stick its head out of the muddy water. I was shocked to see the horror in the child’s face. Without losing more time, I pulled him out of the pit. He was crying. I thought he had hurt himself. I scanned his body and found nothing more than a few bruises here and there. I checked with him whether he was able to move his limbs. He could. I finally discovered that he feared the rage of his father if he comes to know that this kid has broken his bicycle. I felt so sorry for this kid that I went with him to his home. Throughout the way, he was sobbing and I was trying to make him feel happy. I was surprised to see that sometimes even chocolates fail to do the trick!

When we reached his house, the kid’s mother was worried seeing a stranger with her son. Once I told her that the kid had met with an accident and I brought him here, the mother, in a flash, came to the boy and with utmost care hugged the kid, lest it would get hurt. She took her time to check for any wounds and disregarded the results of my prior examination. In the mean while his father barged into the room on hearing the word, ‘accident’. He glanced at the boy from distance and I felt was satisfied with the kid standing on his feet. The father then ran out of the house. Immediately the kid started crying. Of course, the father went to check the bicycle. The next moment, we could hear him calling names and swearing by his own son. As he ran back into the room, I prepared myself. Just as he was about to hit the kid, I screamed that I was the reason why the kid fell from his bicycle. The big mouthed man turned towards me and hurled at me slangs and I was feeling happy that I could at least save the kid. Just then I was surprised that the kid again started crying and this time only louder. The kid all of a sudden yelled at his father that I was not involved with his accident and I was trying to help him. The kid shouted not to embarrass him any further and better hit him than use bad words at someone who had helped him. I was completely awestruck. A ten year old speaking out what many grownups can’t – truth. I realized then that age doesn’t rule over ethical behaviours. His father’s anger vanished and I knew that he was feeling ashamed of himself having insulted me without getting to the truth. I decided to leave without causing further embarrassment. I could see the peace in the kid’s eye and the pride in the father’s heart as I left. This was one of my most memorable trysts with ‘goodness’.

We come across newspaper photographs where a man is bleeding to death in a road accident. I always wonder about the photographer. How would he have felt taking a snap when he could have helped the injured person? Every day, we come across articles where news agencies rip apart the personal issues of celebrities and give us topics to gossip about during tea breaks. How many times have we seen pages being devoted to Sachin Tendulkar on how he devoted about fifteen minutes in a cricket coaching club with a few kids and then the next day when he fails to score a century, he is thrashed by the same news agency. They comment on his need for retirement and question his motive to play cricket. Then they blame the audience for making Sachin a God, so powerful that even the selectors are frightened of. Is playing the blame game very ethical? If the news agencies of a country are involved in such unethical activities themselves, how do they expect the rest of the country to behave differently? Corruption is not just accepting bribes; it is influencing people in an illegitimate way. So if the media is influencing the people to believe something that they didn’t want to, the media is participating in active corruption.

What do we think of B schools claiming hundred percent placement each year when the truth is there are always some left overs. How do these left overs feel when they see that the institute continues to cheat more pupil to enroll for their program by claiming that all had got placed? Are such practices ethical? These practices cannot be legal, let alone being ethical. But yet these have become the ‘best practices’ of the educational industry.

You might have read in newspapers how farmers who have drenched themselves in huge loans ultimately kill themselves. Pity to their family members that their Man was ethical, that he didn’t ‘sin’ to feed his family. Did the farmer do the right thing? What would happen to his family now after his death? Will his family be rewarded for his morals and ethics? Will they lead a happy life? No. They would rather be looked down upon. This man with all his ethics could not make his family happy in his whole life and even after his death. Would his own family be pleased with him that he was ethical and therefore he killed himself leaving them to fight the harsh world all alone rather than getting money to feed them?

I know of a boy, Rishab, who had come to attend the funeral of his father. The relatives of the deceased were pouring in and offering white daisies to his grave as a symbol of respect. They are placing garlands and incense sticks around the grave. But would Rishab do the same knowing that his father was allergic to the scent of flowers, especially daisy? He won’t. He, on the other hand, buried a box of ‘Pan’ (Beetle) beside his father’s grave. ‘How unethical he is?’, some thought aloud. People were convinced that he was a mental patient. He would be treated as a sinner. Only Rishab knows how much his father loved ‘Pan’ and what he did was nothing insane. Every son would love to gift his father the things that their father liked. What Rishab did was ethical to him. The ethics of society should not come in between him and his father.

In my family, I saw my grandmother die. She was eighty five and two years back she had fought cancer and emerged victorious. But since then her health had continuously deteriorated. My father is a doctor and he used to take care of his mother the way any son should. She got weaker each day until one day she stopped responding to the food that was served to her. She was admitted again. After about seven long days, my father decided to discontinue medical treatment to her. He brought her back home. She had her last breath on her own bed in her own room after another two days. I saw my father cry like a child when he was informing the other relatives about this mishap. But somewhere beneath his wet eyes, I could feel the happiness that he experienced – the happiness to serve his mother well, by reducing all agonies of her, be it even by giving her a peaceful death. What is ethical to society sometimes can be questionable to an individual. I know what my father did was correct but would the whole society mirror my feelings?

We see advertisements in TV, in newspapers, roadside hoardings and where not. Do we believe them? Of course not. Do we get influenced by these advertisements? Yes, on more than one occasion. So the question is where do we need to draw a line? When brands advertise that by using a particular product you can lose weight by 15kg in one month, they are selling hope. When brands claim that you would get fairer by applying a particular cream, aren’t they discriminating against people who are not fair? Is this not racist? Is this ethical? Brands are selling that what is not theirs – our dreams. Is this fair?

When a man chooses to know the ultimate truth, he renounces everything he has – his society, his home, his job, his parents, his wife and his children. He becomes a hermit. But is he fulfilling his responsibility towards his family? Should we call this ‘a sacrifice for the greater good’? Or should we not argue that this is selfishness ahead of selflessness? Attain self-realization by dumping the very family without which you have no identity?

I would like to conclude this self-appraisal by sharing another of my experience. This is about two years back when I was returning home from Chennai. I saw an old couple board the train from a small station. The train was crowded and there was no place to sit. People were standing in queues, waiting for their turn to take a seat when the co-passengers get down. I saw a young lady coming towards me. She squeezed her way through the crowd and shot a smile at me. I knew she was doing all this to get a seat and I had made up my mind to help the old couple to get a seat and not this girl. So I did not entertain the gestures of this lady and I simply ignored her. I waited for the old couple to reach my seat and I immediately offered them my seat. The couple looked very tired and they slowly seated themselves. I helped them load their luggage into the luggage compartment. They were very pleased with me. They blessed me a thousand times and I felt a joy like never before. I was pleased with myself to have done the right thing. But was that ethical? Had I not gone out of the way to help the couple and had I just helped the young lady who came to my seat first, I would have still done the right thing with respect to the society. I would have helped a young lady travelling in a jam packed compartment get a seat. But did I not chose the better option?

Ultimately, I would say that the longer you make others smile, the happier you get. This peace makes you realize the ultimate reality – goodness in our hearts.