A New year begins

My absence from this blog has mostly gone unnoticed. I would like to blame the no blogging bit on the global trend that blogging is on the decline, impacted by face book and twitter. I wish I could say the same things in my case. However, that would not be completely true.Truth be told, I think I have taken a really long time to adjust to change and I don't think I have fully adjusted. And I am still trying to figure out the balance. I don’t seem to have a routine.

One of the biggest sources of discomfort for me has been the change in the work profile. From working in a mostly India time zone with all colleagues in the same time zone, this role change has shifted me to a global role. I work in a global team where my team mates sit in Beijing, Singapore, Dubai, Panama and Cincinnati, i.e. basically all time zones. Earlier when I would shut my laptop in the evening and open it the next day, I would have a few e-mails from colleagues who I would call workaholics. However, when I open my laptop in the morning in Singapore, I have close to twenty emails at the least. I now feel that I am working 24*7. And somewhere this has been playing on my mind.

The ten plus years that I have been away from home, it has been in hostels and later in Mumbai where I have had flat mates etc. Since I moved to Singapore last May, I have been staying alone. Earlier, I would leave for work around 8.30ish and leave office around say 630ish. These timings were co-ordinated with flatmates to share ride back home. Now, I do not have to adjust to other people's timings anymore and hence everything is stretchable, there are no hard stops. This is terrible.

Finally, to me, progress or growth needs to be balanced on all fronts, professional, personal, emotional, spiritual. I am extremely uncomfortable with the fact that in the last few months the balance has been altered. I would now like to bring it back to a position that I feel more comfortable with. The fact that I have not read a new book in the past 4-5 months is appalling.

So, now that issues have been identified, what do I plan to do?

- First, I need a mental shift within myself. If I am to build a career in this company or any global company for that matter, I am going to be working with global teams sitting across time zones. So I first need to acknowledge this new reality and tell myself, to forget the good ol' days. They are at best ideal benchmarks when I could come in at 8.30 and leave at 6ish. In this new world, I need to figure out my own balance, which should not be defined only by in and out timings.

- Second, Emails are like death eaters, they feed on my mental consciousness and take up inordinate time. They can't be wished away and they can only be managed. I take my laptop home daily. Even though I need to answer only emails, if at all, I start working, simply because I have access to laptop. So I have decided to get smart and leverage technology (This is basically me justifying my own actions to myself J ) So as of yesterday, I have requested for a blackberry. So once I have my bb, I will leave my laptop at work and hopefully no working when am at home. Phew!

- Thirdly, I have this bad habit of keeping emails open after reading them and leaving replies half answered. Hence from now on, all emails if read, need to be action-ed - reply, forward, delete, archive etc. No keeping them open and pending.

- Fourthly, There are few things that were shared responsibilities earlier - cleaning, cooking, paying bills, ironing etc, which are now completely mine. Need to outsource some of them - standing instructions for bill payments, hire cook/maid to help clean/iron etc. so that more time can be freed. The second part is going to take some time.

- Finally, I need to get back to things that made me feel that I was making all round progress. Read more. Learn something new. I have started Spanish classes as of Jan 1, 2011. Yayy!

So, given that I consider myself better at identifying issues than necessarily solving them when it comes to myself, lets see how well I do on the above steps.

Now lastly, all the above makes it sound like doom and gloom in my life. It is not necessarily so. More on that later...

Signs

This has been the saddest experience of my life, as I was very close to my mom in spite of the distance. She was a loving and caring woman who loved life and people and it makes me very sad that she no longer will be able to enjoy the life she loved so much. She loved to travel, to eat, to meet friends, to watch movies, to read books and to be with her family and even though she was 80 years old and with poor health for the last couple of weeks, it’s very difficult for me to comprehend that she can no longer inhabit this world she enjoyed so much.

I’m eager and happy to get on with work, knowing that all business problems always have a solution, which is not the case with health and life issues. I’m looking forward to seeing you and talking to you at the soonest occasion

My manager's mother passed away recently and she was away for close to a month. When she came in, she sent a very touching note, a part of which I have pasted here (without her permission). I found the last line very interesting. 'Knowing that all business problems always have a solution, not.....'

I sometimes wonder that our lives are so complex, difficult and for most parts out of our control that may be we yearn for that feeling of control, that certitude which would enable us to say, if we do X, Y will happen and so on. And it is this nature of business i.e. problems can be solved and that most things are causal, that, it is so alluring, that many people give 'business' so much importance, sometimes at the cost of other also important things in life.

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I am turning out to be a big believer in signs. I have noticed that I am in a unclear situation, I have been fortunate to read ‘signs’ that have made me pause, re think, re assess and decide the right course of action. And every single time I have recognized and acted on these signs, I have chosen the 'better option'. I can't call it right decision, but definitely the 'better option'. This signs talk sounds so mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus right? Let me try and explain.

By signs, I don’t mean some sudden writing which appears from nowhere but I think I mean an intuitive feeling. A phenomenon, where I am able to comprehend a situation for more than what it looks at first sight, go behind and beyond and understand what it means in a broader context. I know all this talk of signs sounds like witch craft or something but it is not.

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There is this other article I read - 'How Will you measure your life’ by Prof. Clayton M Christenson in the Harvard Business Review. The article raises interesting points and has drawn diverse reactions. I reproduce one part of it here that I quite liked.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.

That is an astute observation. While we are not all pricks by default, meritocracy which we all swear by as the panacea to all problems in the world, is in my circles at least, defined by certain restrictive cues like the name of school or college, designation on our visiting card, the locality where we have bought houses, vacation destinations, fortune 500 ranking of our employer and so on. And we often compare ourselves with people who are better off or in our perception have accumulated more tick marks on list that invariably has items similar to the ones listed above. And these people become the smart people we want to associate with/ learn from and hence by the nature of limited capacity, energy, time, we don't seem to learn things from the rest. Thus it is not by choice that we ignore or close our minds to others, but just by social conditioning.

Of course, this also begs a larger question. How should we define merit?

Where is the party - Ada Namma uttla party!!!

This space has been neglected for the past couple of weeks. Not necessarily because I was busy, but because somehow I felt I did not have anything to say. (Now don't ask me if whatever I have said here so far is of supreme value or not ;) )

Last month has been different, if I may say so. Three of my friends and I took a 5 day short holiday to Sri Lanka - where we did a road trip across Sri Lanka. We had a great deal on flight tickets which we capitalised really well. 5 days was perfect, not too long, not too short. We did something different, something new each day. From beaches to temples to forts to hikes, it was a lot of fun. 5 days just whizzed by. Sigh!

This Sri Lanka trip was my first 'vacation' vacation in last 3 years. Yes, I have taken breaks but they were always one or two days off whenever I travel to a new place on work or couple of days if I go home. But this time I was in a faraway land where I was incommunicado. And I realised something very simple. Your surroundings influence you and your thoughts profoundly. When in Bombay (oops Mumbai) I can never switch off from routine work/ thoughts. When at home in Bangalore/ Chennai I cannot escape conversations or thoughts which still link back to a lot of memories (good and not so good). However, when I was in SL, I was switched off completely from routine life and conversations. It was refreshing.

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I recognise one aspect of my life - that I am immensely Lucky. I won the genetic lottery. I have great family and friends who can be called upon selfishly at any time for anything. I truly consider myself privileged. I also recognise that luck and good fortune has had a big role in my life as it does on everyone's life. Somehow I never get to articulate my thoughts and feelings to convey why I feel so strongly about this. I guess I am linguistically challenged. Hence I did the next best thing. Found someone who shares similar thoughts but can articulate it much better than I ever could.

I would recommend everyone to spare 20 min of their precious time to listen through this video.

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Two years ago, I was shifted into the team I am currently working in. For the first year or so I was working full time on this team and project and for past year my responsibilities are split between this team and a new project. Being part of this team and project has been an absolute pleasure. I know that I put in tremendous effort for this team, more than any other projects/ teams that I have worked on. And it never felt like hard work.

I remember this one time, December 2007, when I had to travel from Delhi to Ludhiana. There were no day train tickets available, so I was forced to take the night train. It was 1 degree Celsius that night and in second class compartment with the wind chill factor it was close to -1 or -2 degrees. I couldn't sleep one bit that night. I had never before experiences such cold and was ill equipped in terms of warm clothes. I thought I would freeze to death and my body could be used for some cryogenic experiments, all in the interest of science and humanity. I couldn't even sit down as the berths were frigid. I kept walking around the compartment the entire night. It did not help much when I noticed that there were only 2 others in the compartment that night. That moment I realised that if I were to sleep, I would either be frozen on mugged. Sleep deprived, cold, icicled, I walked into my hotel at 5 am, had a hot water bath and went straight to work.

This is just a funny anecdote for me. I knew I had to get the work done and the train journey was a minor irritant that had to be dealt with. But for another person I know, an incident like this, is yet another reason to crib about their job. Disregarding all other parameters and over simplifying everything else, I have come to the conclusion that the only reason, I worked harder, longer and yet did not think that it was such a pain, was because I was having fun. The team members of team A were fabulous and we got on really well. Also, we were doing something for first time in India, so there was almost entrepreneurial like feeling to the team and the work that we were doing.

Over the last year, 2 of the team mates have moved on, things are different now. Having been in this project for close to two and a half years, I have been asking for a change for a while. And I definitely think, it is time to move on for personal growth. The last few months on this project have been dull and hence it had coloured my perception of the entire three year experience.

All that changed on Friday night. Friday was our company's annual meet where we celebrated last year's performance. I won an award for 'Breakthrough Performance' on this project. The cash isn't big - a small gift voucher but the significance of the award hit me much later, when I was contemplating on the last 3 years. Working on this team and this project has equipped me with certain experiences and skill sets that are quite unique and very few people in the Indian FMCG industry have. I loved working on this project and with the team and guess what, over the past 3 years I have been recognized for my performance at various forums internally a record 6 times.

I don't write this here to brag. Yes a few compliments would be welcome :). But intent of my sharing this is that I learnt something very important. It is essential to pause occasionally and introspect. We are so busy in our day to day lives and so obsessed with planning and plotting for the next goal that we forget to recognise how far we have already come. Internalising this simple aspect, can be a source of immense self confidence. The above observation is true for me. I am spending this weekend, in my bed (as I am down with viral Fever :( ), gloating over my achievements. Monday morning is work as usual. The cycle for this year starts. The trophy closet means nothing more than higher expectations and bigger challenges to the outside world. But that is tomorrow. Today I am self indulgent.

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Adho paru - Minnal

I have written over past few years about how I love to travel and meet people and how my work helps me with just that. I have not moved out of Bombay in close to 3 months. This is the longest period since I joined work where I have had no travel

The last time I travelled on work was in early June. I was in Chennai and as part of some project I found myself being ushered into a house in Abhiramapuram area. I was accompanied by my colleague NonStop (NS in short) who in her sheer excitement of being in Chennai, a land where she could find girls who could speak my language, had for reasons beyond my understanding, decided seal my fate with a girl, any girl that day itself. (Yes, it is mission among a select group in office to get me hitched, regardless of the fact that everyone but one in the 'select' group is single). Anyways, her obsession had reached ridiculous levels. She could be spotted nudging me to put a 'looku' whenever she spotted a girl within 100m radius. So what if the girl was only 18. Sigh!

Anyways back to the point. We were sitting in this house in Abhiramapuram talking to the lady of the house. As the conversation skittered between personal topics and others, she (the lady of the house) let it out that she had a daughter who was going to do her MBA. Clearly, 'ting ting ting' happened and NS, shedding all pretensions of professional conduct, stamped my leg. I was quite sure that the lady would have noticed this very minor but obvious infraction of conduct, but I was saved by the telephone. The lady excused herself and this gave me enough time to send a glare back at NS, which I am sure, gave her the message, Vellilai va! neeya naana paathukkalam (come outside I say, let us decide on this today!). NS being NS wasn't willing to let me have the last word, even in the non-verbal communication that we were having and continued to make some contorted facial expressions that I think meant – ‘ K to you’. While we were in the midst of this very engaging conversation, we heard the lady giving out some instructions on the phone. And we both realised that she had a just yelled out her daughter's name and had also dropped in a totally irrelevant piece of information that she had taken the car out and wasn’t expected back for a while.

NS, gave me a sly smile which meant, 'hmm.. that chick drives a car.'. She got was a cold shoulder in return. We soon resumed our conversation with the lady, and both NS and I, were deeply engrossed in our work related aspect of the visit, eager to finish it off quickly. One numbers full-plate meals at Saravana Bhavan was just half an hour away now. 'Trrrring' the door bell rang and in walked a cute girl in an Orangish-yellow sari. She was clearly coming back home from a wedding. She was about to start a conversation with her mom which was stopped midway through the first sentence, when she sensed our presence. She quickly headed for her room. My eyes followed her till she was out of sight. I felt I had seen her earlier somewhere and was running a 'quick search and retrieve function' mentally. It wasn’t too successful.

I was desperately avoiding looking at NS, who I could sense was sporting such a wide grin that I was sure that the edges of her mouth were close to her ears or maybe eyes or maybe both. Anyways we got back to the task at hand and soon forgot about this incident. We were tired, the heat was sapping away our energy and the enticement of Thaair saadam with Vadu manga and mor molaga (Curd rice with pickles) was just too irresistible. We completed our work and were about to leave when S(the girl's name – you think I wouldn’t remember that??) emerges from her room, in a very short split skirt, drinks cold water from the fridge and walks back. Phew! Minnal

I have travelled length of this country and over 3 years met close to 1000 people, visited around 200 odd homes, in Chennai, Bombay, Delhi, Punjab, Chandigarh (land of Priyanka Chopra, at least in the movie Fashion), Bangalore and so on. Visited some of the most affluent people to the poorest, sat through in the most mind numbing sessions and yet never once had a bumped into a girl of nubile age. And finally, in Chennai..

I did not want to leave the house immediately, but didn’t have much of a choice. I was contemplating, whether I should drop my visiting card (but that would be too in your face) or maybe leave my notebook or cell phone behind and use that as an excuse to drop in later. But my better judgement prevailed. I knew the house and her name. I didn’t think I needed anything else. So we quietly left.

The 'select group' congregated at Amethyst coffee shop that evening and subsequently in Bombay where this issue was debated. NS raised a question on how I knew what a split skirt was and how I could identify a split skirt within a split second. The first part was answered by a simple glare that made her retreat and for the second part, I gave her a detailed explanation on how it was possible to figure out whether it was a split skirt or a skirt or shorts. She wasn’t convinced. Here I had to enlist support of another dear colleague Super-SoDi. Super-SoDi hails from South Delhi and hence by default is more knowledgeable in such superficial matters. Super-SoDi ruled in my favour and the conversation then moved to what now? That is when my colleague Punch-mama and I decided to take control. The two of us have loafed the streets of Chennai in our respective heydays and have a reputation for ‘street’ smartness After careful analysis that included parameters like location of her house, her neighbourhood, family profile, the language she spoke (mix of English than Tamil), her dressing sense etc etc we drew up her profile and shortlisted three colleges from which she could’ve graduated. Punch-mama's wife who hails from one of the shortlisted colleges offered all her assistance.

In a few days that topic died its natural death. From making three trips to Chennai in May-June, I don't see any more coming up in the near future. Such is life!

Glossary

NonStop (NS)- She speaks NonStop. Period. Does not even pause to catch some air. I think she isn’t human . Whoever said brevity is the soul of wit was clearly mistaken.

Super SoDi- An absolutely affable person who hails from south Delhi. For the uninitiated it is the land of air kisses and ‘bling’ attire fashionistas. Everything that happens to her is in the superlative. She always has the weird-est of dreams, funny-est of incidents, sad-est of days, embarrassing-est of moments and so on. You get the picture.

Punch-mama Or Punchline mama never fails to deliver the right (and corniest) of punch lines in every presentation to senior management.For e.g. ‘From Now to Wow’ .I am sure he researches and prepares hard and waits for opportune time to deliver the punches.