Vibhor

I reached my office in Australia & I was swept by the Tea Sapti wave on the very first day.

I am quite comfortable in an alien environment & I can get along with people pretty fast.  But I didn't want to impose myself on the first day. So I was being the silent observer [ not for long ;) ] weighing up everyone in the team, during our tea break.

That is when I noticed a tall guy with an imposing demeanour being brash in his conversation with the guys & they were enjoying his diatribe. Strangely, I started liking it too.

I don't know how long it took for me to feel very comfortable in his presence. All I know is that it was the shortest period in my experience.

Our friendship progressed from strength to strength & my admiration for him grew exponentially. Most of my best memories in Australia would involve him.

I realised his real charm when he left us to join another company. Marsden tribe that was so active and boisterous had suddenly become silent for most parts. Smiles on the team's face were less frequent. People became endlessly busy in work or busy pretending to be busy. :)

Let me be the first to admit that he was the team's lynchpin. People, when around him, seem to have more fun than otherwise. He has mastered the craft of raising us to excited state of energy. I observed that many in the team looked up to him for more than technical inputs.

God has blessed him with charisma and he is making the most of it. :)

Office setting was just a rehearsal studio for his theatrics. If you want to see him at his best, you will have to witness the spectacle he creates in the grand stage, the cricket field. :)

I love him more for his on field persona than his explosive & destuctive batting.

His statements are equivocal. He is equally vocal in praising or criticizing someone.

He is very creative & articulate. His abundant creative energy usually gets channelised in coining nick names. He is a pioneer in that field.  I always end up laughing my guts out when i hear those legendary names.

If he reads this post, he would be extremely dissapointed because his name has appeared only once in the title of this post. And "Ctrl+F" on his name, would have returned blank so far.

So , as a last ditch attempt to make him happy....

Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor, Vibhor , Vibhor

Managers - Useless Relics

I really pity any fresh engineer who joins an Indian IT organization and happens to reports to the most common breed of managers, THE UNINSPIRING ONES.

I pity them because these fresh engineers learn the work way of life observing their manager. For most of the engineers, it leaves a lasting imprint on them. They will start affecting those they will lead in future as well.

If we don't break this chain, we will end up with more uninspiring managers, generation after generation.
I think it might be too late already as we get to see the clear signs of that in our industry.

Attrition is at an all time high and is totally out of control. People keep changing jobs. You see more traffic between the organizations of same level than JFK airport. :)
It looks like only a recession can curb this trend.

Organizations are finding more and more difficult to place the right people for the right job. To top it off, the right people who are already in the right job don't want to continue any more..

Customers of these IT companies don't find any value other than cost benefits. Frustrated with the so called CMMi service of the companies , they start their own development centres. Increasing presence of MNCs in Bangalore's Electronic City & on both sides of IT Highway in Chennai are the testaments to this fact.

What will happen if this trend continues?

Indian IT companies will be reduced to the level of sub contractors who gets to do all low intellect jobs or survive being worker unions..

It is not difficult to figure out how we got here in the first place. All credit should go to our managers, the uninspiring ones.

The uninspiring ones treat every team member, just as a resource and the loss of a team member for them is more to do with loss of billing than anything else. "Giving stick" is a very common phrase in their vocabulary.

The T-rex of this uninspiring breed are the ones who sincerely uphold the notions of profitability that are so very prehistoric.

It was a rude awakening for me when I had to work with such dinosaurs who treat customers & high billing activities as "Cash cows" and for whom "customer value add" means anything that increases the project's profitability.

When you loose the focus on service and look for money in everything, you tend to become defensive, better ideas take back seat and so does the team's attitude towards work.
Value creation becomes a far cry in such teams.

Organization should device ways to identify these uninspiring ones and take away people responsibility from them. They must put these dinosaurs out to pasture.

In their place, we need empathetic leaders who foster the individuality of members and harness the collective energy of the team towards the singularity of project purpose.

In teams, dissent should be regarded in the same breadth as consensus.

After reading this post, if you think I am dreaming, so be it. Such dreams provide welcome escape to me.

It keeps me sane.

Hybrid Ideology : Religion with Objectivism

I am a man of faith. I believe the hand of god in all events that come to pass.
I am also inspired and influenced by Objectivism, a philosophical idea from Ayn Rand.

Objectivism, as an idea, enshrines man's ability to produce, to create and it eulogises mankind's greatness.
According to her, collective ideas, compromises and organised religion are the arch-enemies. Why?
Because their principles  like "Sacrificing an individual for common good", "group consensus on an idea" , "humility" are hurdles for man's greatness.

If I had asked Ayn Rand to choose "Darth Vader of Objective Universe", she would have replied "Religion", without missing a beat.

Having said this, I re-iterate that I love both religion and Objectivism. In fact, I believe that these idea complement each other.

For some it might be difficult to accept my stand. But the same person would have shown high level of maturity on a different debatable topic, "Darwin's Theory vs Genesis on evolution".

Even though we don't have irrefutable proof that universe was created in one big cosmic explosion, we are pretty much confident that the universe was not created in 6 days. :)
We still are mostly religious. But, how did the majority come to this level of acceptance?

The newer generations are taught about Darwin's evolution along with Genesis from their childhood.
Even without theological or scientific explanation, they are able to digest the essence.Why?
Because as kids we don't resist new ideas, we are information sponges at subconscious level.

Only when we attain the so called maturity (so very overrated !) , we become like a dried clay pot, resisting further moulding.

So, for someone with an open mind for new ideas will understand that both objectivism and religion can be embraced without conflict. He can even find interpretation in one, supporting the other.

Only message I get from Genesis is that the whole world was created for mankind and man is god's best creation.
If we don't get into the argument of who created us, Isn't this the core message of Objectivism?

We have to take these two ideologies and form something infinetely better, sort of a hybrid.
This should help us focus on achieving personal goals through strong conviction and introspection.
When events spiral out of one's control, keeping faith on higher power can only help us shore up our resolve to handle the eventualities.

We are living in a world of hybrids now.
A hybrid Ideology can only be good for us and let us push for wider acceptance of it.

My affair with Accidents - Part 1

In my life so far, I have been involved in countless vehicle accidents. There were so many crashes that I lost track of the count. All I remember now are major ones, where I escaped with minor injuries.

I don't think I have had any luck at all when it comes to winning a lottery or even a raffle ticket.
When i think harder, I have been blessed with abundant luck where it matters, with my life.
People say cat has nine lives.I must be related to cats in my earlier birth. And, I have been living on my extra lives from a long time ago.

My mom tells me that even as a kid, I had a habit of tripping on my own legs. I was the last person to be entrusted with anything that can break or spill..and that too, only if no one else is there to do the chore...

My falls started to aggravate as I kept graduating from walking to cylcing, cycling to riding a moped, moped to bike and finally from riding a bike to driving a car.

According to me, a fall from bicycle is not serious at all. So I don't remember specific incidents..
Some might ask, "How can you generalize? What if the altercation had been with some heavy vehicle while riding a bicycle?"

Peculiar as it might sound, in most of my accidents, no one else will be involved. My bike or car will sustain damages  & I will carry injury..Other people normally get involved only to help me out.

This means I can't even blame anyone for my accidents. ( I know..It sucks !) Still i do my best to blame someone or something, usually it will be slippery roads (with a little embellishment along the way). :)

Once, I was riding to office in my brother's Pulsar ( yeah ! the one with disk brakes !) as my bike had some problem.

Normally , both front and back brakes in my bike are very weak. For braking, I apply both front and back brakes at the same time, to squeeze the max from them.

At this juncture, I also have to admit that I have a habit of going to auto-pilot mode from time to time while riding bike, which means i stop focusing on the road and my subconscious rides the bike. :)
Now don't be afraid to hitch a ride with me in future...I can assure you all, that this auto-pilot stuff happens only when I am riding alone.

On that eventful day, I came back from one such auto-pilot mode, I applied both the brakes forgetting that I was in Pulsar.
Laws of physics took over, I was thrown in air and was sliding on the road with my face making contact with road..
Good that i was wearing my helmet and visor was closed. In the end,  I was dragged long enough for the helmet to slip off from my head and I ended up kissing the road just for couple of seconds.
I returned home with twisted bike handle & busted lips, as a souvenir.
At home, when I saw myself on the mirror, I resembeled a desperate vampire who bit his own lips, out of thirst.

Another time, while taking a turn in a busy signal , I slipped from my bike. Just like that!
I quickly picked up my bike and my pride before the signal from the opposite side opened up. I went to office with torn pants..
This time i was in full senses and I didn't know how I could fall in a turn that i normally take every working day of the year.
I was trying to recollect if I was missing a bit. Then it struck me hard!
On that day, I had picked up my bike from service center before coming to office. That's it !

I normally fall within a month of servicing my bike or car. This is also another reality. Don't search for logic..Just deal with it, OK?

So, these two accounts are ample proof to my claim that my affair with accidents is not a complicated love triangle..
It is a love of traditional kind..Accident and I are the only parties involved.

I was lucky in both the cases to escape with a burst lip and torn pants, as they happened at peak office hours in busy highway.

I kept falling at every opportunity I got and I showed no signs of slowing down whatsoever...
I suspected that i was priming myself for bigger things...

Perfection - A Myth

We see more and more people joining the band wagon, trumpeting about perfection or the lack of it.
The real question is , why do we have imperfect systems? Is it deviation or norm ?

I believe that it's the latter. Let me build my case.

Imperfections have helped people to develope tolerance and tolerance is a VIRTUE.

Imperfections bring the element of uncertainity that makes life interesting..

Imperfections NEVER cripple us.
They just build up frustration towards the system that are easily relieved from time to time, through power cycling..


Power cycling/reset is the act of turning a piece of equipment/system and then turning it on again. Mostly, the reason for reset is to recover from an unresponsive state of its mission critical functionality.

In the past , reset was always used as the last step recover from a failure and there was a stigma attached to it. Thanks to Microsoft, people were generously encouraged to take this route.The convenience of power reset caught on the other platforms, devices, equipments.

Nowadays, anything run by software (which is pretty much everything) are subjected to reset. It has become the first step to recover from any crash. This has played into the hands of developers  & creators, for they keep building imperfect systems.

I started cursing Microsoft for standardising "reset culture" and destroying mankind's movement towards perfection (How Naive??).  Then I realized that even the most amazing creator had got the hang of it... :)

Every life created in this universe comes with the creator's gaurantee of vitality. But quite so often it ends up malfunctioning. In the event of non-recovery , the plug is pulled and the life is created again with a bright new set of hardware.

I should have seen the god's hand in imperfections.

Paradigm has shifted.

Now, I started reading "Imperfect" as "I'm Perfect" and I feel great about it!!
 
Embrace Imperfection and you will be at peace with the world and self.

Sacrifice = Love ???

A friend of mine questioned about the importance given to the act of sacrifice towards the manifestation of love.
Is Sacrifice a measure of love? Greater the sacrifice, deeper is the person's love?
His question is not baseless. He quoted many popular love stories in history , "Romeo and Juliet" , "Laila Majnu" have tragic endings.

Normally I ready myself to contradict his statements for the sake of argument. But for once, I was not able to quote a powerful love story that did not involve sacrifice.
Agreed that my knowledge is limited on this subject, but the very fact that I knew about many tragic love stories & not one with a happy ending was in fact troubling me.

Is it how our human brain is built, increasing the longevity of painful memories when compared to happy thoughts?
Is it because we have raised the bar for happiness?
We no longer recognize simple pleasures like reading a good book, enjoying a fine meal as happiness. We expect happiness to storm in and sweep us of our feet.

I still can't shake his question...What is it with Sacrifice & Love?

I can understand "Passion & Love" ,even "immaturity , inexperience and Love", but sacrifice & love looks like a paradox, but literature seems to glorify it.

This topic was a bit touchy to argue about as it was close to my friend's heart. :)
My friend is lucky in love and he is a happier person. It should be THAT simple. You fall in love because you are happier that way.

Some say that there is also enjoyable pain ( seriously??).
They say longing in love is painful, but they enjoy the pain as they know or they believe in its fullfilment.
In that case, I say pain is bearable not enjoyable. People seem to confuse emotions.

No one happily sacrifices, not even for love. It will result in pain.
For me , pain is unwanted and undesirable feeling. The mere mentioning of the word "pain" so many times in this passage will make some readers squirm.

If someone says he has sacrificed for his love and is happy, he is a liar of the worst kind. He lies to himself !!!

Love is to enjoy, not to endure. You don't enjoy sacrifice, you endure it.
Love is to live,  not to exist. You don't live in pain, you exist with it.

Sacrifice = Pain ≠ Love.

Hence proved.

Have I? :)

Lets go for Tea Saapti !

I was making some changes to my blog settings, Ratna Balaji walked across and saw that I was fiddling with a blog. He seemed interested and I obliged by showing my posts. Out of nowhere he suggested that i should blog about tea breaks in our team and walked away.

I dismissed his suggestion right away, but on second thoughts IT WAS something I always wanted to share.

The mere thought of our tea breaks brings fond memories. It might sound silly, but the feeling is justified.
If I have to look back at my stay in Australia, the memories of our tea breaks will always stay fresh.

This twice a day ritual is very important part of my work life. I dare not call it a ritual, at it is an event that is anything but dull. Our tea breaks is actually a ceremony, a celebration.

Vibhor, an eternally super charged soul, invites us for tea break with his trademark "Let's go for Tea Saapti".

I don't know why the mere invitation always brings joy to me as street-side ice cream vendor's bell would sound to a kid.

It is mostly boys club during tea break, where we discuss everything, including work.
It is a stage for us to discuss cricket, mostly about our saturday game. Whether we revel in our victories or sulk in our defeats, the comments that fly across are more eccentric that Sidhu, more cynical than Geoff Boycott and more clinical than Harsha Bogle.

Tea break is the ingenious way we devised to bring weekend into the scheme of weekdays. It ensures that a part of Saturday lives in us everyday till the next Saturday morning.

As far as topics other than cricket goes, I'll leave it up to your imagination. ;)

At the end of the break, I have always left smiling.  The much elusive happiness meets us in our break.
So,I wanted to coin "15 minutes of magic" as title of the post..

But, "Lets go for Tea Saapti " is more fitting..Don't you agree? :)

I am a spinner now !

My mates and I religiously play cricket on every Saturday. Nothing that nature could cook up has been able to dampen our spirits on Saturdays. I am from Christian faith and Saturday has truly become the day of Sabbath. :)

Initially, I found a place in our team as a medium pace bowler. Since then, I have improved my bowling a lot and have been moderately successful at it.

Now I am gradually into wicket keeping. I enjoy keeping the wickets as I am engaged throughout the innings. When chances present themselves, I have to pouch the catches.

So far the difficult catches that I had taken had been important ones. It feels good to be appreciated for the catches. As far as THOSE catches go, it all comes to instinct and being alert.

But I take a lot pride when I anticipate the ball's trajectory or the bowlers guile. I need to be spot on to avert additional runs leaking behind the wicket. A good stumping means more to me than the most ridiculous of catches.

Now that I understand what makes me really happy, I was searching for avenues of increasing my satisfaction level from the game I play. I stopped to look again at my bowling...With my limitations as a medium fast bowler & our playing conditions , I found that fast bowling disciple is very dull for me.

More often, I am reduced to containing role, bowling with tight line and length. That is when I was inspired by my coach who is the lead spinner.

Being a keeper, I am full of admiration for his bowling craft.. The way he lures the batsmen in playing wrong shots and deceives the batsmen with pace and flight , is so pleasing to watch.

When it comes to learning a trade, I am the most dedicated of students.. Ishwar, my coach, my friend,  is a good teacher as well. :)  Maybe I will post a blog sometime as a tribute to my coach.

I have to learn from scratch as a spinner. It will be fun and challenging. I will strive to better myself in the art of spin bowling.

Most importantly , I will be immensely satisfied with my effort as a bowler , irrespective of whether I am successful or not.

At the end of  the day, it is only thing that matters to me! :) 

My Cluttered Mind

MY thoughts are like monkey jumping from one branch to another. I am for once, don't want to rationalise them, edit them any order. I am penning down as I feel. It is a good experience to do so... Hope order emerge out of Chaotic thoughts. Hope is a strong word..Infact, it is a Virtue that I strive to possess.

What is life ?

What keeps two people in a relationship?
I have been brooding on this question for quite some time now. The answer still eludes me.
If it is the basic need to be cared and loved for, then when does it get manifested?
If the sharing & caring happens during good times, do we regard the gesture with value?
If the support is provided during the hardship, do we even recognise such an act among other issues that we perceive to have?

When i seek an answer to a question, all i do is end up with dozen more.

Won't it be nice that options in life present themselves as objective types questions with decisive options to choose from?

I have always heard people grumble how complicated their lives are  or how complicated the choices are.. Will I even meet someone who says that life is so simple and uncomplicated?


Couple of days back , I was brought to standstill by the magnitude of issues before me. Now, everything looks manageable. I would go to the extend of saying that I believe I can handle them on piece meal basis. The issues are still the same as it was couple of days back. Something changed in me that helped me look at things differently.

I have always been a daydreamer, solving issues in minutes in my dreams , where my will is absolute. When will I ever lead my dreams to  the path of reality?

While I am surrounded by problems , I am also surrounded by good hearted people who support me. The degree of support vaires from person to person, but supoort noentheless and I am very grateful for that.