Training Tidbits

Today has been an extremely busy day. So busy that I found myself doing two things at a times.

I remember to have told you how boring training could get in one of my earlier blog. The role that I am currently in and the role that I would be in the next company demands that I train people either regularly or when ever need arises. I surely don't want my audience to feel bored during my training. In spite of such a conscious attempt from my side, unfortunately certain topics are such that, the audience end up yawning.

In an attempt to relieve my audience of stress and boredom during my training sessions, I have started collecting what I call "Training Tidbits". It could be literally anything, like a puzzle, a short movie, a joke, cartoon etc, but it should have one of the two qualities, either it should invoke inquisitiveness or should be humorous. I am attaching one for your enjoyment.

I have searched through my personal mail folder and collected more than 500 such pictures, 50 odd short movies. It took two full days for me to search 2000 odd personal mails, view and then save it in a specified folder, Herculean task! If you have any such collection, please forward it to me.

I wish you and your families a very happy and prosperous new year.

Morning Walk

That’s me! For people who don't get to see me on a daily basis. Some of you who haven't seen me for sometime would have trouble relating me to what I was like earlier.

I just wanted to share some details of my morning walk with you today. I getup around 5:30 in the morning and proceed for a 50 minute walk. It makes me happy to recollect that in the past 70 days there were only two occasions in which I missed my morning walk. In the beginning it was such a pain to get up in the morning for the walk, but over a period of time I started to look forward to it.

I generally walk in the jogging track around our apartment complex, a good 11 rounds, each round measuring around 360 meters. If it is a Sunday, I generally go to a far away place called Deeptisreenagar, a calm and serene colony, with a scenic natural lake and a group of temples on a hillock. I at least spend a couple of hours roaming there. I will get you some pictures of that place this Monday.

Morning walk has been judged as one of the best forms of exercises that we can do. If you have any myths about the amount of calories that you spend in an hours brisk walk, please wake up. You generally spend around 3 calories per minute while brisk walking, that would be 180 calories in an hour and if you jog, that would be 5 calories per minute amounting to 300 calories in an hour. You have to spend around 6000 calories to loose a kilogram of weight. People who jog or walk in the morning don't control their eating. Actually, what you spend brisk walking, you gain by eating 3 medium sized apples or 4 spoons of sugar or edible oil.

A Suitable Groom

The second picture you see is that of my sister in law, Zareena Begum. She was here in Hyderabad with us for the past couple of days for two reasons. One is to write her post graduation examinations and two is to meet a young man for marriage purpose.

The first picture that you see is that of the young man, Mr. Mastan Shaik, probable groom of Zareena. I am seriously contemplating to change the name of this gentleman. Muslims have that option of changing the name of the bride and the groom at the time of marriage; incidentally I had to change my name at the time of marrying my wife in the Islam style to Warris Jahangir Khan. If things work out well, this would be the first and the last alliance we would be looking for Zareena.

Mastan has finished his masters in Microbiology and is employed with a pharmaceutical company in Hyderabad in the Quality Control Department. He is a handsome man with very pleasing manners. He spent the last Sunday evening with us. Couple of things that interested me about this guy is his clear vision as to what he wants to do and secondly, his un inhibitive style of telling that he is interested in this marriage and requesting me and my wife to work towards it. Although we don't have any problem as far as the candidate is concerned, the trouble seems to be at the monetary end. Apparently, the groom's parent’s expectations are beyond my reach, while discussions are on and are taking positive turn in this front, I am keeping my fingers crossed until I meet the groom's parents on January 08 2006. Should everything work well, we would marry off Zareena in the month April.

Looks like my dream of posting pictures on a daily basis in my blog has almost come true. The pictures that you see have been taken with my new Nokia 6670.

New Job Offer

On December 21 2005, at around 3:30 P.M., I received a call from a lady by name Savita. It is an STD call from Bangalore. She is an HR executive with aegis, the BPO division of the famous Essar Group. In fact, this company is a joint venture between aegis of US, based out of Texas, a $ 80 million company and Essar group. To know more about aegis, click on the blog header.

After finding out the usual details of my profile, the lady requested me if I could attend an interview in the evening the same day. I promised my wife that I would take her to a movie, "Jai Chirajeeva". I am an ardent fan of Chiranjeevi and on my request she has booked the tickets also. So, I told her that I wouldn't be able to do it that day and requested her if it could be scheduled for the next day. But, Savita insisted that I attend it the same day, as the COO and AVP HR would be flying back to Bangalore the next day. I finally decided to attend and conveyed the same.

I went to their office at 6:30 P.M. after my office hours and after a couple of minutes of wait I was put to the first round of interview. To my surprise, as against the general practice of preliminary HR Round, I technical round, II technical round, Operations interview and the final HR interview for the position of a Manager – Quality, the AVP HR has interviewed me for about 10 minutes and then has put me straight to the COO. When I asked him about this, he told me that, it was to judge whether the candidate would suit their requirement or not in terms communication, mind set, frequency etc in the initial stages itself so as to avoid disappointment at a later time, when the candidate has cleared all other rounds. His statement sounded more relevant and apt after I met the COO

The COO is a young man in his early thirties, worked for GE for around 7 years. He skimmed through my resume and asked me what my areas of expertise are and about the functional skills that I acquired through my previous job responsibilities. He told me that, all through his career he never hired people for a particular position, his strategy has always been to check whether the candidate suits their thought process and then hire him and create positions for him. That’s all, he asked me what my expectation is, when I answered that, we haggled around to arrive at a consensus and the offer letter was rolled out after 15 minutes. That was real quick. Three hours after I entered the building I had an offer letter in my hand.

I haven't decided yet whether to join or not, I am still thinking on it. Most probably, I will join. The role seems to be pretty interesting; of course the money they offered is more interesting! Should I join, my responsibility would be to set up the service quality process for the outbound and inbound call campaigns and setting up the Data analytics team. I would first require to hire my team members; you could refer some of your friends who have experience in working in the service quality team of any outbound contact centers. I could refer them and get them into the company. As far as Data Analytics guys are concerned, I have my team members who reported into me at ICICI Bank.

Apart from all of the above, what I am more interested is whether I would get a laptop at least in this company or not! It has been my dream and it is still a passion that the company I work for should give me a laptop. It hasn't happened in ICICI; it just missed by breadth of my skin and didn't happen in karvy (It missed by the length of my skin :-)). I am positive about aegis!

The Story of a Speed Breaker

The place where we run our Hyderabad House restaurant in KPHB, is a service lane which is 10 meters away from the main road that is the Bombay Highway. It has good visibility excepting some trees that partly obstruct the sight and these have been grown by the Municipal Corporation as a part of the green zone drive.

The service lane is a small cul-de-sac which ends with just a couple of houses after our building and towards the other side there is only one building adjacent to ours. A bar cum restaurant is being carried out in that building. A small flashback episode is that, before we took the building on lease, the bar owner has asked our landlord to rent the premises to run another bar cum restaurant, for which the owner apparently didn't agree. Quite predictably the bar owner is not happy about it and has started looking out ways to trouble our owner.

A servant maid cleans the front portion of our building on a daily basis using water, which flows on to the road and then drifts towards the road in front of the bar. Although, the bar owner never brought this to our attention as an issue, I remember only one instance where he referred to this.

Finally one fine morning around 15 days ago, the bar owner got a barrier/ speed breaker built on the road to avoid water from flowing towards the road facing their building. The water got stagnated in front of our restaurant and formed a puddle making it very inconvenient to our customers to get into the restaurant. Our landlord promptly removed it the next day morning. Couple of days later, once again a similar barrier was built by the bar people which was duly destroyed by our land lord. This time the bar people built a proper speed breaker using cement mortar. This time our owner couldn’t remove it and hence the barrier remained causing inconvenience to the customers and passers by. It was brought to our notice and I duly asked our restaurant manager to report it to the Municipal authorities in KPHB.

Ranjith, the manager of the restaurant went to the municipal authorities and made a verbal complaint, he was told that people would be sent to remove the same. Nothing has happened until the next day. Once again Ranjith went to the municipal office and reminded them, he was scolded and told that he doesn't have to remind them so often and it would be taken care of. However nothing has happened.

When the restaurant was started, a sanitary inspector has come to our place had a sumptuous dinner, took five thousand as bribe and issued us with a certificate about the hygiene conditions in the restaurant. The issue of the speed breaker was brought to his notice; he assured that it would be taken care of. Finally, he came down, saw the speed breaker and told us that it doesn't fall under his preview and has given us the number of another person in the municipality.

We have duly contacted him only to be told that, he cannot come and attend these kinds of small things and advised us to remove it our self.

I am neither surprised nor furious about the apathy of the municipal authorities, at the same time I will not let this happen to us, by remaining silent. I have decided that, I am not going to pay them a single rupee bribe to have this speed breaker removed. I would like to pursue it until the end, following their protocol and would like to see how many more turns it would take and how many more people we would be referred to. Of the entire series of incidents, the funniest thing was nobody in the municipal office knows who is responsible for removing such unauthorized speed breakers. Strangely I don't feel annoyed that I am not getting the service for the municipal taxes that I pay or develop and express anguish that in India things would happen only like this. I am going to act on it. Looks like we have interesting things ahead.

Things to do

My good friend Thakur Amar Singh aka Munnabhai M.D.S has posted a comment about my blog on Suburban Utility Vehicles. It is quite an interesting piece of reading, with his mark of subtle humor and finally a mordant comment on US mindset. Friends of Amar are aware that he loves to hate India but I guess even they would be perplexed now as to from when he started disliking the west.

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=18634797&postID=113463360990379665

Amar Singh was with Tata Motors earlier and looks like he has used his expertise in judging the usability of a SUV, but I fail to understand what aspect of my blog made him feel that I have less empathy.

I have become quite occupied these days. Don't mistake that my boss has inundated me with work. My days are busy doing personal things that I have been procrastinating for over six months, starting from simple things like ordering a cheque book to filing income tax returns. Inactivity for a span of six months has crept so much into me that I started postponing the simplest of simplest things like calling a friend.

One fine morning, a day of revelation, I decided I had to break this circle of inactivity and designed a simple "ToDo" list in excel. As you see it in the picture here, the format is simple, list down the activities that you need to do for the day under the date in a column and start attempting to finish the work. It is important to list down even the simplest things like calling a friend or picking up a brochure, because a more important work might get hampered if we forget to do these things. Although it might look very simple to read, this act of listing down things has benefited me so much. It is every ones experience that at the end of the day we feel helpless that we forgot to do a certain thing which is important. The act of listing down things to do will tune your thought process to remember those little yet important things and the chances to forget are practically nil.

I have also designed a color coding mechanism. If a work is complete, I would block that cell with green color. If a work has been attempted but yet it is not totally complete and needs follow up, I block it in yellow. If I couldn't attempt to do a particular task that day, I would block it in red. Basing on the color coding, that task would get carried on to the "Todo" list for the following day or the follow up date.

Most of my day now is spent reviewing and completing the tasks that are listed in my "ToDo" list. Although, writing this makes me feel like that tele brands guy you see on the television, who keeps repeating like a parrot that a particular product has shown him results, it is true that this activity has given me results. Lot of activities that have been pending are getting done now. Having said that I would like to clarify that, it is surely more important to start doing things rather to simply writing them down and blocking them red at the end of the day. That is all for the day, I have quite a busy day ahead, my "ToDo" list is waiting!

Suburban Utility Vehicles

I have always believed that Guns, bikes, Cars are men's stuff. One important thing among them that determines what kind of a man you are is cars. A few of my age group men have special interest for cars, a fewer have an eye for detail and I am one among them.

My initial thoughts of a car are that of a Maruthi 800. I was studying 3rd or 4th class when this car was released into the market and it was a runaway success. Until then people who have been used to drive ambassadors were more than happy to get into the driving seat of a Maruthi. Liberalization and globalization opened the flood gates for numerous number of car producers to come up with their products and in this process the customer has definitely benefited. Especially the current trend in the automobile market with a growth rate of more than 8 percent looks extremely promising. With each brand designing and producing cars for various segments of customers and banks and financial institutions more than willing to give loans at very decent interest rates, the options before the customer are very tempting.

Although the car aficionados would be familiar with this classification, let me start with the different segments of cars that a company produces to attract a wide range of customers quoting the examples from the Hyundai stable. A small car (Santro base model), A semi luxury small car (Getz), Sedan (Accent, Viva), a higher end luxury sedan (Elantra, Sonata), MUV (Hyundai doesn't have one, but you could consider Qualis, Scorpio, Innova in this segment) and an SUV, the king of the road. (Terracan or a Tucson)

A Suburban or Sports Utility Vehicle or SUV as it is popularly called radiates power, its own and that of its owner. For most of the people who take great interest in cars, it would be a dream to own a car of this segment. I am no exception to it. However, there are a lot of people who mistake an MUV, a Multi Utility Vehicle with that of an SUV. For the benefit of the readers I would like to quote what an engineer from TATA Motors told me as to what essentially differentiates an SUV from an MUV. The four or five essential characters of an SUV are.....

One, Four wheel drive, in a normal car or MUV, the accelerator is only connected to two wheels unlike an SUV where it is connected to all the four wheels giving the vehicle more thrust and power.
Two, Off road capacity, It is the ability of the vehicle to drive through in rough terrain, like gravel, ups and down etc. On any given day an SUV has a better capacity than an MUV, for the simple reason it is designed for such roads.
Three, Ground clearance, it essentially is the space between the body of the vehicle and the ground level, for SUVs it is generally much more than a normal car or MUV.
Glass, The percentage of the portion of the vehicle covered with glass in an SUV is much more than that of an MUV.
Finally, the Engine Capacity, in India we see SUVs that have a maximum capacity of 2.6 liters or 2600 CC and probably a couple of vehicles could be an exception, not very sure of what a Dicor has. Cars generally have anything between 1000 CC to 1900 CC.
The other things are the driving comfort, seating, wheel base etc which on any given parameters are better in an SUV than in a normal car.

Although, there are a couple decent SUVs available in India, a lot more is still desired when compared to international market. I like a couple of SUVs that are available in India, like the Tucson.

It is my dream to own an SUV, but surely not any SUV. My dream vehicle is a Pajero, a Mitsubishi make. It indubitably is the king of SUV world; needless to say it has the lion's share of the market. Click the following site to know more about it.

http://www.pajero.com/english/top.html

Although Land Cruiser of Toyota is considered to be a landmark SUV, another product of Toyota amuses and interests me more, which is a variant of Land Cruiser, it is Toyota Land cruiser PRADO. RAV4 is another good SUV from Toyota. Click on the blog heading to know more about Toyota SUVs.

Finally let us talk about "The Ultimate" in SUV world, the Hummer. It is not without reason that I call this “The Ultimate” in the SUV world and if you want to know the reason, click on the second link.

http://www.hummer.com/

http://www.humvee.net/misc/humfaq.html

One striking difference between Indian SUVs and the international ones is the power of the engine. Generally, the international ones have 3 litre engine and above (a Hummer has 6.6 litre engine) and didn't I tell you that is the most important thing that differentiates Lion from the Cats!!

Travelogues

The first time I ever read a travelogue was in 1990. People who follow Telugu literature would know about Malladi Venkata Krishna Murty, he is a prominent Telugu novelist. Around late eighties, He has traveled to Europe and after he returned, has started writing a novel which is a socio fantasy cum fiction and a travelogue, which is a nothing but his travel diary while he was in Europe, in Andhra Jyoti weekly. My mother who was an avid reader subscribed to that weekly. She had a good collection of novels, she has separated the travelogue and novel pages from the weekly, collected them until they were completely published and got them bound. I still have it with me in my library at home. That is how I got a chance to read that travelogue week after week.

I am a fan of Mr. Malladi for his inimitable style of narrating stories. Needless to say his Europe travelogue has great readability in it. I remember my father commenting that the travelogue is better than the novel Yamayanamaha! However, the sad thing was the weekly did not publish the entire travelogue. I didn't realize it then but now I am sure that it was a strategic decision to make the readers buy the travelogue, which I did, 7 years later. I believe it was the first travelogue written by any modern day Telugu writer.

His next travelogue I guess is about his trip to Singapore, which I never got to read. However, I have read another travelogue which is about his trip to USA. It is a comprehensive, exhaustive and useful travel diary. There is another thing that I have to mention in this context, Mr. Malladi never got his photograph printed in any of the weeklies in which his serials got published, and I always had a longing to see him. Couple of days before my travel to USA in 2000 March, I went to a book shop in Chikkadapally and asked him for this travelogue USA. The shop keeper didn't have a copy of it and instead advised me to go to Mr.Malladi's house where he also runs Lipi Publications. That is how I had an opportunity for the first time to meet him. He is dark in complexion, a tall and medium built man with spectacles. I purchased Travelogue America from him and asked him to autograph the book, which he did. I think on my request he wrote a line on the book which read "a smile a day keeps the doctor away", which is a reflection of his penchant for humor. This trait of his is thoroughly reflected in his books.

After that there are a couple of travel diaries that I read, but nothing interested me more than what Kurma Dasa has written. I have read his travel diaries to South America, UK and other countries. Once again, fantastic reading material.

I think a travelogue is something that you people can expect from me, if not in the near future, definitely sometime later and there are couple of reasons to it. One is I enjoy traveling and the other is I love to write. Secondly, I believe and it is my personal experience that a travelogue would attract more readers than a fictional work, because travel and seeing places appeals to wide variety of people than a novel about one particular topic.

In fact, the very idea of a vacation fills new scores of energy for most of us. I am just waiting for my brother to send the digital camera that he promised, once I get that you probably would get to see if not large volumes of travel diaries, surely small write ups of my weekend travel adventures with some photographs. I guess I would start with my trip to Gandikota, the Indian Grand Canyon.

Jaathasyahi Dhruvo Mruthyuhu......

Me and my wife were woken up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning around 3:40 A.M. by a phone call. The call was from Baroda and the caller is Shilpa. The news was a bad and undesired one. Karthik, Shilpa's brother died because of Respiratory failure. He is just 27 years old and was working as an assistant manager with Bank of America.

Shilpa's parents have helped me and Vaidehi in the real hour of need. They have adopted Vaidehi for the purpose of our marriage and performed the Kanyadan, when couple of people who promised to do that backed out at the moment of need. It is such a plight for the family to loose their son. I decided it is time for me to repay through gestures and we went down to their home immediately.

Apparently, Respiratory failure because of Asthma happens in the rarest of rarest cases, one in a million and unfortunately it was Karthik’s turn this time. Although I don't share a great rapport with Kartik, when ever we met, we shared our opinions on music, movies and politics, especially BJP and their ideology. He is a staunch and ardent supporter of VHP.

The family is swept off by melancholy. His father is a brave man, he resumed to immediate responsibilities hiding his anguish for the lost son. I didn't utter any words of console to them at that moment as I felt it would not serve any real purpose. In such occasions silence speaks much more than what words can do and what they actually need is a weeping shoulder rather to platitudinal philosophies.

One thing that I observed was, there is no dearth of people who suffer from identity crisis and try to quench their recognition thirst even in such sad occasions. We had an old man, a self proclaimed subject matter expert in such matters, who meddled with all people in their work right from the priest to the person who built the bamboo platform to carry the body. He advised the priest on how long the ritual should go on, claimed that he had complete knowledge of the process and could carry out independently. The only person unperturbed by the emotions of the people around him seemed to be the man who constructed the bamboo platform. He was so involved in his work tying the bamboo logs together and gauging if it would be strong enough to carry the body that human emotions, sounds of sob didn't affect him. He sounded as if he had been habituated to occupational disturbances.

Shilpa's family would take time to digest the fact. Her ICICI bank colleagues might want to call her to express their condolences, here is her number 9849990197. Death of a family member doesn’t kill him alone, it would make his/her family members half dead at least for some period of time. Your call would help them to live their life again.

May Kartik's soul rest in peace. Looks like one thing is guaranteed in life, there is no guarantee for anything. I will close this with a sloka from Bhagavatgeetha.....

“Nainam chindanti sastrani

nainam dahati pavakah

na cainam kledayanty apo

na sosayati marutah”

It means, the soul can never be cut into pieces by any weapon, nor can he be burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.

The body is like the clothes we wear and the soul moves from one set of clothes to another. Death is for the body, soul has no death.

Views(News) Papers

The cartoon that you see here appeared in Deccan Chronicle newspaper today. I found it hilarious and relevant for Natwar's stance until yesterday. I hope you are aware that he finally decided to resign from the union cabinet.

Reference to Deccan Chronicle reminds of the topic that I thought of blogging sometime ago. Although the content of today’s blog would make more sense to people who read Telugu newspapers, I am sure what I am going to refer is not an isolated issue relevant to only newspapers in Andhra Pradesh.

Everyday, I eat my breakfast at a guest house located next to my office, where I get to read almost every newspaper published in AP, like Eenadu, Andhra Jyoti, Vaarta, The Hindu, Times of India, Deccan Chronicle. Skimming through these newspapers on a daily basis has made me understand how the newspapers can influence the perspective that you would form about something. I will explain this with an example.

The present Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Y.S.Rajasekhar Reddy was quite famous earlier as a dissident, someone who always had something to complain about the Chief Ministers; even during the Congress rule. He used to write multiple letters to the Chief Ministers on various issues criticizing their stance. Kotla Vijayabhaskar Reddy, Mysoora Reddy(now in TDP), P Janardhan Reddy are some of his arch rivals in congress party. Way back in early nineties, when Kotla was the CM of AP and P.V.Narasimha Rao was the PM, they held a meeting at Cuddapah, which is YSR's bastion. Both the CM and PM were humiliated when footwear was thrown on them during the meeting. Apparently this humiliation was planned by YSR.

Recently, a meeting was held in the state Congress head quarters where all the senior leaders of Congress assembled to discuss release of water from a particular reservoir called "Pothireddypadu" to Rayalaseema area of AP. This issue has been on bone of contention, with leaders of difference areas taking sides whether to release water or not, with lot of exchange of words and huge media coverage. The meeting was arranged to discuss the issue and arrive at a consensus. One of the points that came for discussion was congress leaders calling for press meets to inform their stance about the issue. When this point was raised, P Janardana Reddy, MLA of Khairatabad constituency in Hyderabad retorted by asking what is wrong with that. He didn't stop with that; he asked if it is worse than humiliating CM and PM by throwing footwear at them. He also reminded about how YSR used to write letters to Congress Chief Ministers expressing his discontent.

Ideally, all the newspapers should have given a similar kind of coverage for this news item. I will let you know how this has been covered by different newspapers and how it could influence our thinking.

Eenadu - Reported on the front page as main news with big font and red letters - Heading was "is it worse than arranging to throw chappals.....?” This isn't a surprise; we know Ramoji Rao doesn't like congress.
Andhra Jyoti - Reported on the front page as main news with big font and red letters - Heading was "I know I would be made a scapegoat for saying this...." No wonder, the grapevine says that Chandrababu Naidu funded Rs.20 crores to revive Andhra Jyoti.
Vaarta - Reported in the third page in the state news, with not much importance to the comments made by Janardana Reddy. By the way Girish Sanghi who owns Vaarta is a congress MP.
Deccan Chronicle - Same as above. T Venkatrami Reddy is a congress MP.

Similarly, about the summons issued to Chandrababu Naidu in IMG land allotment case, the reporting pattern was vice versa, that is Vaarta and DC giving more importance while Eenadu and Andhra Jyoti extenuating the same.

Having read so many newspapers about the same news item, I could form my own perspective, trying to strike a balance as to the news item's importance, but for a layman who reads one newspaper and doesn't have access to many this may not be the case. He will get carried away by the way information is thrust upon him, which could result in forming wrong and biased opinions.

Unfortunately, newspaper are not reporting news anymore, they are forcing opinions on us.

Not that I love my ministerial birth..........

Natwar Singh looks like an epitome of a modern day politician in India, a classic example of what a Congress politician could be..... Corrupt, greedy, shamelessly unyielding, blackmailing, nepotic and what not?

Wake up brethren, gone are those days of Lal Bahudur Shastri, who abdicated his ministerial berth as a railway minister when a train met with in accident. Even after repeated requests by Nehru to withdraw his resignation he still stuck to his guns.

These are the days of Laloo and Natwar....... leave alone resigning the post; this moron by name Laloo doesn't even come to visit the accident site where almost hundred people died in Andhra Pradesh when a train was simply washed away because of bad track that was spoiled by the rains. He had more important things to do, fighting elections in Bihar, he simply "prioritized" his actionables and you cannot blame him that visiting the accident site figured last.

Now comes Natwar, the only thing left in his (by the way, it wouldn't be a bad idea for Fevicol to choose him as their brand ambassador) case is asking him to "Get out", looks like nothing lesser than that would work. Check the news item in NDTV website by clicking on the title of the blog. He is so shameless that even after being told to resign, he simply stays back and doesn't mind remaining as a Minister without a portfolio. The worst part is the reason that he gives for staying back, which reminds me of Brutus' logic in killing Julius Caesar, "Not that I loved Caesar any less, but that I loved Rome more."

His contention is......
"It is not because of any love of Office that I am not resigning. To resign now would look, to many people as an admission of guilt. The Opposition will use my resignation to further tarnish the reputation of the Congress Party. I will not let this happen."

Another interesting aspect is the blackmail one. He states that if he resigns, it will not stop with him. If you read between the lines, he actually means that if he is forced to resign he would disclose the names of other people involved in this scandal. Apparently, Aniel Matharani's sudden love for truth and his freedom of speech is to weaken Natwar so that even if he discloses the names of other people involved, the words wouldn't sound credible.

Who said "Politics is the last resort of a scoundrel". Isn't that true?

HR in BPO Industry

My good friend Thakur Amar Singh aka Dr. Munnabhai B.D.S, has posted a comment on my yesterday’s topic.

"Are all distributions of data supposed to be Normal? Or is it that for doing a 'six-sigma' analysis, you need to squeeze every bit of data into a normal distribution."

IIM students undergo a course in statistics and they generally have sound knowledge on the subject. I may not be competent enough to answer his question; however I will attempt to do so.

It is neither required nor supposed for all data distributions to be normal, there are so many other kinds of distributions, geometric, log logarithmic are a couple of examples. Even for doing a Six sigma project, it is not required to squeeze (convert) every bit of data into a normal distribution. There are other techniques and tools one can use to analyze non normal data.

Not very long ago, I had interacted with Progeon (BPO division of Infosys) for a position of Manager - Quality at their Bangalore site. My former boss at ICICI, Ram Mohan K who is an Associate Vice President at Progeon referred me. Although I was selected I didn't join owing to other reasons. Today, I received a mail from their HR co-coordinator asking me to fill out a survey/feedback form on my interaction experience with them. I did fill out and sent it to her.

The interview process with Progeon was a smooth sail; however, I have the following to highlight. My observation is that HR people in BPO industry act funny and different than HR in any other industry. When my cousin who works for Motorola, told me how supportive and wonderful their HR acts in times of need I was surprised why the HR in BPO industry doesn't do that.

In fact, it is my strong opinion that, HR guys in BPO industry generally consider themselves as direct descendents of God or less importantly His messengers. The reason why they are not friendly and why they don't smile is that, when they enter the interview room and sit in front of the interviewee, they suddenly consider themselves as either Marlon Brando or Amitabh Bachchan, listening to a protégé who is in need of a job. They cut a long face which I feel constantly hints the interviewee that the HR guy is not happy hiring him/her. As far as salary negotiations are concerned, the lesser it is talked about, the better it would be. While I understand they have stringent targets, they negotiate as if the company would go bankrupt paying the amount the candidate has asked for; I wonder how they talk while they are negotiating their own salary.

They look perennially unhappy and arrogant mortals. Any clarification that you request is treated as an additional burden to the already existing one (of course you) and hence it is not clarified half of the times. There are so many occasions when my colleagues in the companies that I worked, scorned the HR team for its high handed attitude towards them. Also, I have seen that their attitude and tendency towards senior people in the organizations is different from what they portray to entry level and others.

I had once forwarded a mail to a HR co-coordinator to grant access to the printer room, 15 days have elapsed nothing has happened, then I sent a remainder, even then nothing has happened. In the next mail, I did not ask them to grant the access, I simply asked them what the TAT for such a request is. Needless to say, it was done the same day.

The list is endless, I could go on writing Part I, Part II and so on about HR in BPO industry. When will the HR understand that we are their customers (although internal) and hence they better behave themselves because they are dependent on us. Through this blog of mine I appeal to my BPO brethren that next time you feel your HR is not upto your expectations, remind them that you are thier customer and cane their ass if need be. I will end this with quoting what my feedback about the HR interviewer in Progeon was.

"The HR person who interviewed me behaved like a “typical” HR guy in BPO industry. Somehow, it is rare to find a HR interviewer who sounds friendly and happy. They typically put up a long, serious and unhappy face and generally resonate a feeling that, “you know, but for the operations guys, I wouldn’t want to hire you.”

Being a Black Belt

A Black belt role might look very glamorous for outsiders and something that boosts your esteem for insiders, but in fact it is not all that what it looks to be. I remember one of the statements made by Kartikeyan, head of SIT, (Special Investigation Team) setup to investigate Rajeev Gandhi's assassination case. "Investigation job in reality is actually not even remotely similar to what you see in the movies, it is actually quite boring job." In the similar lines, introducing yourself as someone in a black belt role could actually make others raise their eyebrows, but the work that you do may not be all that interesting as portrayed, especially when you have a bunch of unyielding guys for greenbelts.

If it were not for my tough stance, I would have ended up collecting data, filling up project charters, doing statistical analysis apart from many other things for my Greenbelts. However I will narrate couple of interesting incidents that happened to me while mentoring 11 greenbelt projects. I know this might sound esoteric to some readers, nevertheless please keep reading.

One of the GB had a discrete metric for Y, I asked him to collect data and start analyzing the same. In a bid to know what analysis he would do, I asked him what is the first thing you would do after collecting data. Pat came the reply, "Normality Test". The external trainer seems to be quite successful in impressing his students about normality test, my GB wants to put it to use irrespective of the kind of data.

While reviewing one of the GB projects, I have observed that the candidate hasn't used any statistical analysis, neither in determining the problem nor in arriving at the solution, while he claimed that he has finished the project. I asked him about the same and advised him to use Hypothesis testing. He simply asked me why I wanted to reinvent the wheel when his project is already complete.

One of the Green belts suffers from a delusion of mastering the subject knowledge while completing his project, when in fact his project doesn't even have remote chances to get certified for the simple reason; it is not a six sigma project at all. If you talk to him, you would feel that this guy thinks he would be awarded a doctorate in six sigma very soon or Lockheed or Motorola has hired him as a quality consultant.

Stupid projects (in fact you don’t have to use any DMAIC methodology on them), Insipid discussions, dumb candidates, lack of management drive can make a black belts life miserable.

It is quite funny that you actually pay a consultant to learn your business and then teach you in return. That is what most of the companies which don't have that quality DNA in their setup do.

Finally, do you know that there is a forum that opposes six sigma. Go through this link.
http://www.isixsigma.com/offsite.asp?A=Fr&Url=http://www.thessq.com/