Go Kiss the World

My traveling schedule went into disarray recently, thanks to the inclement weather in the North & as my Flight to Delhi got delayed by a couple of Hours, I headed straight to Crossword in the Mumbai Airport. I have great admiration for Mr.Bagchi & have been following his articles in Magazines and Newspapers quite regularly (Businessworld column - Arbor Mentis - and Times of India column - Times of Mind), so when I saw his book “ Go Kiss the World” in the bestseller category I picked it up immediately.

Subrato Baghchi can be a magician with words, he builds a tapestry of images that provides a rich background to his early life. As someone with similar experiences, my mother was a Govt Doctor & she used to get posted in the Deccan hinterland where I used to spend my vacations & absorb the life away from cities, I could immediately relate to his early life which he describes in verdant & colorful details surrounding those small towns & villages in Orissa where his father, a Govt Employee was posted. Throughout the book he describes situations & instances that are not only captivating but some profound truths on life emerge from his uniquely narrative style.

In the early part of the book he sketches out his childhood days & the growing up years where he explains how he tries cope up with the apparent contradictions & challenges of setting up a career path and choosing what to do in life. He then goes on to describe the trials & tribulations he faced early on in his working career. The Office politics & challenges he describes can be very common and everyone can relate to. His experiences at Wipro, a failed venture in Project 21, a wrong career move with Lucent before he finally hit upon Mindtree makes for interesting reading. It has been one roller coaster ride for Bagchi but throughout all these experiences he has imbibed & drawn a lot of great value laced lessons. By explaining situational issues he also touches upon Management skills that a good manager brings to fore. This makes the book the handy for any budding manager or anyone interested in good biographies.Throughout his narration are small nuggets of wisdom drawn by earthly experiences and relevant to the topic under consideration. Eminently readable & releatable.

Foggy deal: The Conniving ways of Airlines

Delhi & the north was engulfed in a thick blanket of Fog over the year end, the newspaper & channels screamed of the innumerable flight & train delays that had been a result of this . The Fog would descend like a thick white blanket early in the evening & would refuse to budge well into the middle of the day later. And worse, I had a number of scheduled flight tickets between 30th Dec & 3rd Jan in & out of Delhi especially in the early mornings & late evenings. I had to cancel some of them & reschedule the others. So when I approached the airlines reservation staff at Delhi with this problem they were to give me a different picture. They said all flights had departed on time the previous day & that they were non committal on any possible delays the next day. That meant I would either have to forgo the cancellation charges or wait till the last very moment to check on delay status for full refund. And their rule book said that I would be eligible for a full refund on cancellation only if there was a preponement of 20 minutes or postponement of 50 minutes or more.

One look outside was all it required to figure out the situation but the Airline staff kept on repeating the usuals; weather can change anytime, clearances may be given based on ground situation blah blah... The delays of the previous days or the severity of the current situation did not seem to in any way have a bearing on them . While I cancelled one of my trips & took a similar schedule for a different destination the same day did I realize the true picture. My Flight to Lucknow which was scheduled to depart at 9 a.m actually took of at 1:00 pm. But there was technically no delay on behalf of the airlines, because they gave us the boarding passes at 8:45 am saying that the flight would depart on time and made us wait for a full 4 hours subsequently on the bus at the tarmac & inside the aircraft. A good part of 25 minutes were spent in the near freezing conditions in the former, with elderly & small children having to bear the brunt. A similar thing would have surely happened with my cancelled ticket which was to depart at the same time. Yet they refused to acknowledge any delay & made me forgo the base fare charges even after I had cancelled 1 Hr prior to the flight. For the conniving airlines, and a blind & indifferent Airport authorities , this was not a delay since the flights boarded on time.

Why did the airport authorities give clearance for boarding when they knew that visibility was low & flight would be delayed by hours? The flight attendants said that this could possibly be due to accommodation problems at the airport! Now this shows the state of Apathy in the authorities who seem to have more sympathy for airlines than passengers. For the airlines it is a convenient way to skip the cancellation refund clauses by technically boarding the passengers & make them wait for hours on the runway. Now who says the airlines are Bleeding?

Phew! What a Year

2008 has been a defining year for me in many ways, a year that has changed my life in many ways. Numerically speaking (2+0+0+8 =10), my friend Shaz says that the year was of ups & downs showing shades of both, a very turbulent Year. Appears that he was right on spot on this !

The year began on an exciting note, as usual I spent the New year eve with my father & we went to a nearby hills (Panhala Ghats) to mark the vacation. I learnt to my pleasant surprise that dad had also made special arrangements to celebrate this New Year by booking a private farmhouse of his Business friend on the outskirts of the city. And so we heralded the New Year by raising a toast on the Scotch that I had carried for the purpose from Bangalore. Just a week into the year & my world came crashing down, my beloved Dad passed away in near perfect health. His passing away created a chasm in my heart & mind that I found very difficult to cope, especially at a time when I needed his reassuring company the most. Because this was the year when I had taken my fledgling steps to entrepreneurship after years of dilly dallying & Dad who stood by me all these years like a friend and a guide was no more.

Later in the year the Global Melt down & stock market crash that followed later in the year had a sedative effect on my Investment habits ,and in the process burnt a big hole in my Investment portfolio. However that has not fazed me, I have been investing even in these troubled times, maybe be with some forlorn conviction that averaging might kick in. Or so I hope.

The year also brought Terrorism to our doorsteps, first in Bangalore and other cities and finally in Mumbai has been heart wrenching. The sheer statistics of terror attacks over the past year ( 8 strikes & 444 dead ) is frightening, one doesn’t feel safe anymore , the nagging feel creeps up in me whenever I step into a public place and that probably made me to double-up my Insurance amount this year by buying additional policy from Aegon Religare. I could have suggested Thomas Friedman to add another word “Dangerous” to a book that he published this year “Hot Flat & Crowded ” to describe the world we live in current times.

The year also had its sunnier side for me, my 3.5 Year old son took school for the very first time, rather a pre school and it has been wonderful just watching all those lively tiny tots coming out to their parents after the school hours. Also my Niece, Risha stepped into a formal school, the 1st standard, a first again and it was happy news to see her get into a good school. Schooling children in a good place has become a big challenge and a major worry for parents especially in major crowded cities like Bangalore and any happy development on a personal front is always welcome.

The other positive that I have been able to draw from the year has been my exposure to several projects that kept me challenged & engaged. I have found it good to set new benchmarks for myself and attempt things that I only imagined earlier. I express my gratitude & thanks to all those people who made this change possible and supporting me in this endeavour - Lalit Popli, Rajeev Karwal, S Athavale, R Krishna, A Ramana Rao et al.,

De-Mock-Krazy

Two interesting articles on Indian polity appeared in Newspapers recently. Written by two proponents on either sides of the political spectrum, one was by a high heeled NRI turned grass root level & local governance activist (Ramesh Ramanathan) and the other by a seasoned politician who weathered many political storms to be the third successive chief minister of Delhi state (Sheila Dikshit).

The former explains why the middle class is irrelevant in the present polity-- heated & emotive debates on TV , banner & candle demonstration on streets and informed public opinions do not matter as long as they do not carry to ballot boxes. He goes on to write how the polity works on caste & creed lobbying and fits like a multidimensional jig saw puzzle. Here I beg to differ with Mr. Ramanathan’s and my take on this aspect is as follows;

Caste & creed based politics is a form of mass lobbying that is inevitable in democracy, it is an expression of “the will of the people”. In essence what gets elected & represented in the assembly & Parliament are 'special interests' that organize on party lines to influence Govt.

This will of the people , when spread over layers & layers of ethnicity,cultures, dialects & economic strata over a vast geographical area takes a complex hue and is rarely visible as a homogeneous mixture. This probably explains the death of a two party dominance & arrival of coalitions on the Indian political scene. And this represents the masses & not the classes.

In this din of mass based politics what constitutes & represents public good is always debatable. The latter part has been largely under the realm of the media (especially electronic media) and urban middle class. And what happens in debate-o-sphere is largely irrelevant and is akin to shouting in vacuum as it never gets the political momentum because it never translates into votes and even if it does , does not carry any swing factor. This is true as far as small & medium urban and semi-urban electorate is concerned. However large urban electorate is getting organized and Sheila Dikshit’s rise gives a ray of hope and an answer to this dilemma.

She probably represents a unique constituency in the country, a large urban electorate which is young, cosmopolitan, aware (if not fully literate) and upwardly mobile. And it thinks & votes for what have been largely urban issues like development & good governance and less on issues mentioned above. The bijli-sadak- pani kind of issue that makes for citizen movements in cities is something that she has addressed effectively to retain power. With changing demographics and increasing urbanization (which is expected to grow from current 28% to 40% of Population by 2020) this model of polity is likely to be replicated in other constituencies elsewhere as well.