Subroto Bagchi Blogs

My Mother is an Ugly Woman

2009-11-02T07:09:24Z

My sense of shame in being an Indian in front of foreigners has somewhat changed over time.

When I was younger, I used to be very bothered whenever I saw people begging, pestering a visitor at the traffic intersection and of course, the sight of people defecating in full public view.

These sights do not put me to shame anymore.

I have come to terms with the underlying causes that make my countrymen beg, bother foreigners near touristic places or live in squalor next to heritage sites and five star hotels.

When people do not have a roof above their heads and everyday is a matter of survival for the majority, what use is my shame?

I am deeply aware that every civilization must progress on its own terms, in its own time. There are no short cuts to uplifting more than half of a country with 1.2 billion people into a developed state. I have done my own bit towards that cause, and I will continue to do what I can, but in my lifetime it is very unlikely that there will be no beggars on the street, or that people will stop relieving themselves in public view, or that I will see the vanishing of squalor that co-exists with the sometimes ugly opulence in our cities. So, these days, when I am with a visitor from overseas, I am not ashamed any longer with the sights, smells and sounds of India.

But last week, I held my head in shame–deep shame–and this happened in a small University town in Germany.

I had been invited there to speak at a student. Along with my wife Susmita, I had arrived the day before, and we were touched by the affection and hospitality of the students and the faculty. During the dinner that night, we had told our student hosts Paul and Leo that if ever they came to India, they must stay at our home so that we could return some of their hospitality. Because our two daughters left home a long time back, we live in Bangalore all by ourselves, and love hosting young people from around the world.

That was the night before.

The next day, when the student event actually began, my talk was preceded by one from an Indian gentleman based in Germany; he runs the German operation of a family-owned Indian conglomerate that is a household name in India. The gentleman has been in Europe for a long time, and has evidently done well for himself.

He started his presentation titled “The Indian Mind”. It was a medley of Internet jokes customized for India, a bunch of PowerPoint slides that frequently spam all of us depicting the greatness of ancient India, and a bunch of cartoons that depicted the so-called “the Indian way”. There was also a short movie that contrasted Germans and Indians based on cultural generalization. Finally, he delivered his own take on what Indians are supposedly like.

The presentation opened with the macabre picture of a skull with a dollar sign stuffed inside it.

The narrative to match this dramatic, if disturbing, image went something like this:

An Indian went to see a banker in Manhattan. He wanted a $100 loan; he was willing to pay any amount of interest, and offered his Porsche as collateral. After taking the loan from the flummoxed banker, he went off to India on a month long vacation. When he came back, he promptly returned the $100 along with the interest of $20 and reclaimed his car. When the banker asked him to explain this puzzling behavior, our man proudly said, “Where else in Manhattan could I park my car for an entire month for all of $20?”

WOW!

The two hundred or so young German students laughed at the joke.

Then came slide after slide on the glory that once was India: Aryabhatta to Charaka, he depicted the story of zero to the fact once upon a time, India had invented chess. He told the audience how we had figured out gravity before Newton did, and the concept of inter-Galactic travel before anyone else.

The audience sat in awe.

Then he switched over to a film clip that sought to contrast the past with the present.

His film clip showed Indian legislators break chairs, throw footwear at each other, and not stopping there, break their microphones to hurl missiles at each other until blood flowed from the injured, and finally some law makers were seen taking cover under their tables.

The German students were now bewildered and I started to feel uncomfortable sitting in their midst. But then I told myself, maybe the truth must be told and this is important knowledge about India that the 200 future leaders must know. And why not? As I gulped down my discomfort, more Internet jokes followed.

One was about corruption and inefficiency.

A man supposedly went to Hell only to find that there were regional options available down there. There was this American Hell that offered a hundred lashes. Next to it, he found the German Hell that offered a choice between an electric chair and fifty lashes. The man moved on to check out the Indian Hell and finally settled for it. Why?

In the Indian Hell, there were power-cuts so the electric chair did not work and the person in charge of lashing sinners simply took his salary and never came to work!

The students laughed some. That was indeed funny!

Then he went on to tell the next Internet joke.

Americans had invited international bids to build a fence around the White House. An American and a German firm that submitted bids had taken careful measurements and then they had quoted $700 and $1200 respectively for the work. Then there was the Indian firm that took no measurements and simply quoted $2700. The bewildered decision-maker called in the Indian bidder and asked him to explain. “How can you quote such a high price when you have not even taken measurements?”, he asked. Our man replied with supreme confidence, “I do not need to take measurements. I will pay you a thousand and take a thousand and we will sub-contract the work to the lowest bidder.”

WOW!

Then our presenter showed a short film contrasting how Germans and Indians thought of the idea of forming a queue - the Germans fell into instant orderliness and formed a single file but Indians pushed around, and broke the line as soon as one was formed. Then he showed a German parking a car, and how an Indian does it, and a few other such things including how Indian bureaucracy and politics differ from that of the Germans.

Everyone in the audience was getting the message.

At this point, he returned from the movie to slides.

With dramatic flourish, he showed a picture of a bucket full of crabs.

“This picture was taken on an Indian beach while I was with a friend from Germany. He was curious to know why the crabs were not escaping the bucket. I said, ‘Let us call the fisherman and ask him’. The fisherman listened to the question and told us, ‘These are Indian crabs. When one tries to get out, the others simply pull him down’. ”

Oh well, never mind if you have heard a dozen variations of the same joke.

Now the attention of the students was beginning to wane a little bit. So, he came to the end of his presentation on India.

He had a slide that said Indians liked to receive (and, thankfully, also give) presents.

And then he went on to hold aloft his magnum opus, a slide that prophetically read:

“Indians do not mean what they say
and do not say what they mean”

It required a story to explain.

So, he narrated how a group of Germans were once called home for dinner by an Indian. The Germans being Germans took the invitation seriously and actually showed up only to find an unprepared host who opened the door in his pajamas. The message was clear. Do not take Indians at face value.

My mind turned to the dinnertime conversation the previous night, and I wondered what Paul and Leo were now thinking about our invitation to come stay with us when they visited Bangalore!

Finally, the man gloriously wound up, saying that despite all this, India was one of the fastest growing economies in which if anyone chose to put in his money, it was bound to fetch a great return.

The audience clapped and then everyone took a fifteen minute break.

I headed to the toilet.

There was a long queue.

Suddenly a young German student in the queue, unaware that I was behind him, did a mock drill of breaking the line to form what he called an “Indian Queue”.

I was the only Indian there, and I had only my countryman to thank for the ignominy.

I had to wait until that afternoon for my talk, and when done with that, we returned to our hotel.

The next day, one of the student organizers came over to drive us to Frankfurt in a rental car so that we could leave for the US from there.

While driving on the Autobahn, unfortunately, the car drove over some object and its two left wheels burst. We pulled over, and, after counting our blessings for what did not happen, called for help. After probably an hour, another student organizer reached us and we switched over to his car. The first student had to stay with the damaged car, waiting for a tow-truck to arrive.

Soon we were on our way.

The entire episode had shaken everybody, but thank God, no one was hurt. Nonetheless, many plans had gone haywire. We were all past our lunch time by the time the second car had arrived. So when we finally reached our hotel in Frankfurt, we invited our young friend to join us for lunch since he too had missed his, and was to now drive all the way back to his University town. When Susmita asked him to park his car and come into the hotel to have lunch with us, he responded spontaneously, and without any malice, “The German way or the Indian?”

We tried to laugh off the repartee, but deep inside I felt hurt where once upon a time, I used to feel shame.

Poor Susmita started convincing him that we really wanted him to have lunch before he drove back, and of course, he joined us, but I wonder how on earth we were to change the newfound knowledge on India that was now deeply imprinted in 199 other young minds because an Indian in a position of authority had so convincingly delivered the message that we do not mean what we say and don’t say what we mean.

I can deal with my poor, uneducated, disheveled countrymen back home, begging at traffic intersections, troubling foreigners, living in squalor and defecating in public view, and behaving in a thousand other unacceptable ways.

But I have difficulty when the educated, the well-to-do, the ones who have everything going for them, mentally defecate, trying to impress the world at the cost of their own country.

After lunch, when the young man was finally on his way and Koblenz was behind us, I thought of the idea of motherland.

The word “Motherland” evoked the image of my mother.

In that moment I wondered if there is anyone in the whole world who thinks that his mother is not beautiful.

Worse, is there anyone who actually tells the world that his mother is an ugly woman?

My Mother is an Ugly Woman was first posted on November 2, 2009 at 2:08 am.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

Burial of the Dead

2009-09-29T12:19:11Z

What are the chances that you work in an entry level position or even a middle level job in a hotel, a hospital, a software company, or a government organization? Or, for that matter, you could be a self-employed professional like a doctor, a lawyer, or a journalist. In all probability you are educated, know English, and are working in (or have interacted with) the corporate sector. Perhaps an MBA, or a student at an engineering college? You probably consider yourself a professional, or on the road to becoming one. Definitely your station in life is well above someone whose job is to bury unclaimed corpses from city hospitals.

I want to introduce the idea of who a professional is through a man whose life is dealing with dead bodies. Unclaimed dead bodies. This is not someone who is conventionally associated with the term ‘professional’. His name is Mahadeva. He came to Bangalore as a child when one day his mother simply walked out on her entire village and her own family in a huff. Mother and son lived on the streets; she worked to support him. Until the day she became very unwell. She brought herself and her son to the government run Victoria Hospital. There she was admitted in a state of delirium and her little son, Mahadeva, made the streets outside the hospital his home.

He found many playmates among the urchins there and soon that world engulfed him. It was the first time he had had anyone to play with. For little Mahadeva, it was his first experience of kinship and he lost himself completely in this new world. It was pure happenstance that one day someone told him his mother had died. Where had he been when that happened? Died? What was that? The hospital had been unable to wait for him and had disposed of the body. Now Mahadeva had nowhere to go. No family. A few people in the hospital ward where his mother had been admitted raised some money to help him go back to his village. He refused. Instead, he grew up running errands in the hospital. The hanger-on who had helped with his mother’s admission process and made a living by running errands for patients asked him to move in with him. He was an old man who had no one either. Mahadeva grew up under his tutelage; the hospital became his universe. And then, one day, the cops asked him to bury an unclaimed dead body and paid him Rs 200 for the job. This was when Mahadeva entered his profession and eventually became the go-to guy for burying the city’s unclaimed corpses. Every time the police picked up a dead body that had no claimants, Mahadeva was summoned. He had to do a turnkey job: Pull the stiff body from the morgue, hire a horse-drawn carriage, put the body in it and take it to a burial ground, dig the ground to bury the dead - all by himself, and for only Rs 200. After doing the job, he would hang around in the hospital to be summoned to dispose of the next unclaimed body. Mahadeva did his work with such dedication, focus, care and concern that soon he was very much in demand.

His work grew and he bought his own horse-drawn carriage, and between his horse and himself he was the undertaker to the abandoned.

One day, the horse died. People who had watched Mahadeva all these years came together and bought him an auto-rickshaw. The white auto-rickshaw, his hearse, carries the picture of the horse in memory of the animal who helped him take thousands of people to be laid to rest. It became the logo of his business and appears on his business card today.

Mahadeva has buried more than 42,000 corpses in his lifetime and his dedication has earned him phenomenal public recognition. Local petrol pumps do not charge him when his hearse is topped up and the chief minister of Karnataka felicitated him for his selfless service to the abandoned citizens of Bangalore. Mahadeva is proud of his work and business, and today his son has joined him. Mahadeva: the high performer, and a true professional.

What are the two qualities that Mahadeva has which differentiate a professional from someone who is simply professionally qualified? One is the ability to work unsupervised and, two, the ability to certify the completion of one’s work. Whenever Mahadeva got a call to reach the morgue, day or night, hail or high water, he arrived. Most of the time, it was a gruesome experience dealing with a dead body; there was no telling what had been the cause of death or state of decomposition.

In his business, Mahadeva does not choose his clients. He accepts them in whatever size, shape or state they come. He treats them with respect and care, with due dignity, covering them with a white sheet and placing a garland around their necks before burying them. The day he buried the man who had taken him home after his mother died, he had cried. He was special and Mahadeva had bought a garland as a mark of his respect. That day, it occurred to him that he should be garlanding all the bodies he buried, not just his benefactor’s. Everyone deserves respect and no one should feel ‘unwanted’ in death, even if life had treated them that way.

The cops do not supervise Mahadeva. He is not an employee of the hospital; he is the outsourcing agency the hospital has engaged for the disposal of all unwanted cadavers. He does not have a boss who writes his appraisal, giving him constructive feedback for continuous improvement. In most work environments, people who produce anything of economic value usually need supervision. A person who needs supervision is no professional. He is an amateur, maybe even an apprentice. Whenever Mahadeva picks up a corpse, it goes straight to the burial ground-no place else. He completes the task with the immediacy it demands. And he certifies his own completion of the task: between the dead and the living, there is no one to question him.

- from the book “The Professional” - by Subroto Bagchi

Burial of the Dead was first posted on September 29, 2009 at 7:18 am.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

A Lesson in Humility - Professional’s Quote

2009-09-21T06:45:53Z

While we wait for the release of The Professional, here is a lovely piece from a professional I have never met but like many of you, keeps in touch over the Internet. Dr. Ramana is a neuro-surgeon from Vizag and he has this absolutely humbling story to share.

“The ghat-road passing through deep jungles on the way from Koraput to Visakhapatnam (Vizag) is dotted with hamlets inhabited by tribal people living in harmony with nature. Medical facilities are not easily available unless they travel to the nearest town - sometimes to a primary health centers through forest paths carrying the sick on a make shift stretcher. Usually the literate among them or patients from small towns who have relatives at Vizag come here for specialized treatment. This is how a family of four landed up at our hospital one night.

The father and mother were holding a thin boy of nineteen years in their rough, weather beaten arms. The younger sister was hiding behind the mother’s sari awed by the hospital’s bright lights. The troubled little group radiated innocence, pain and poverty. The boy was shifted to Neuro ICU immediately. He was unconscious for fifteen days and also malnourished due to vomiting and dehydration. Prior to becoming unconscious he was having headache and fever. The boy was diagnosed as having raised intra-cranial pressure. I called aside the boy’s father and spoke to him in Oriya. I told him that his son needed a CT Scan first and later he may require surgery.

The father asked me to go ahead with the treatment and not to worry about expenses, as he had brought five thousand rupees with him.

The answer grounded me. The expenses could run up to more than ten times the amount! I explained this to the father of the boy. We gave him the other option - of shifting him to the government general hospital for continuing treatment. The family members became annoyed at the suggestion and wept. They did not agree and I had to give up persuading them.

Giving up the persuasion trail, I requested the scan center to do free a CT scan of the brain. The scan confirmed hydrocephalus; a condition that required surgery. He needed a shunt tube to be put from the brain to the abdomen.

The hospital administration obliged to treat the patient in the general ward free of cost.

Doctors donated drugs the boy needed; other patient’s attendants and relatives helped them by giving them food and moral support in spite of language barrier.

The boy was operated upon and he made remarkable fast recovery. Even before a week passed, he was eating by himself and walking around the ward. He started gaining weight.

All these happenings gave me a real “feel good” within and appreciation from others.

But the patient’s father was stone-faced with no expression of happiness nor did he offer thanks. This attitude troubled me throughout their stay in the hospital. On the day of discharge I couldn’t resist asking him if he should be thankful to all us for putting his son back on his feet again and almost free of cost in a modern corporate hospital. He was surprised and asked why should he? The purpose of bringing him here was to have him cured - so why the thanks? If that was not the case, “Why would I have taken all the pains to shift him here?”, he asked me.

Then he told me that he had sold all the land he had for five thousandrupees, and for first time entered an unknown place.Other than his hamlet the only place he had ever visited is the weekly “haat” (open air market) near his village to sell the forest products he collected for the whole week. He wanted to save his child and that alone made him venture into a big city.

The halo around me crumbled.

My contribution did not seem too much compared to what he was doing for his son.

After all this I felt some of the elation leaving me, but I still felt like laughing.“

A Lesson in Humility - Professional’s Quote was first posted on September 21, 2009 at 1:41 am.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

The Professional - Book Launch, 30th September 2009

2009-09-18T12:13:57Z

The long wait is over.

Mr. Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Sons, clearly the most iconic professional figure in our midst, will launch the book in Mumbai on September 30th at the Taj Mahal Hotel at 7:00 PM.

For those of you in Bangalore, I will do a book reading at the Crossword on Residency Road at 6:30 PM on Tuesday the 6th October.

And for my readers in the North, I will come by to the India Habitat Center on Thursday the 8th October.

I am looking at a visit to the east later in the year.

Thank you all for your affectionate wishes, your encouragement and I look forward to your critique when the book is in your hands.

Meanwhile, tell your friends not to buy a pirated copy!

The Professional - Book Launch, 30th September 2009 was first posted on September 18, 2009 at 7:13 am.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

Dalai Lama Visits Zen Garden

2009-09-07T10:56:47Z

While we all wait for the launch of The Professional later this month, I have something special to share with you.

I trust that all of you are tracking the Zen Garden in Forbes India magazine in which I have had the rare privilege of hosting some truly remarkable people from Jimmy Wales to Siddhartha, from Anu Aga to Kiran Mazumdar Shaw. In this unusual column, I get to know of their personal space, their ideas about life and work and their life-lessons.

This fortnight, I have the rarest of rare occasions: His Holiness, the Dalai Lama is the visitor to the Zen Garden. He is, to me the CEO of the soul and entrepreneur of the spirit.

On behalf of all of you, I had the opportunity to converse with him recently in Delhi. We talked about today’s business crisis, on leadership and the young professional who loses affective regard for the idea of work while seeking early material success.

Do not miss it, you must pick up the collector’s issue from the news stand in the coming week and let me know your thoughts.

Dalai Lama Visits Zen Garden was first posted on September 7, 2009 at 4:32 am.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

The Professional’s Professional - Professional’s Quote

2009-08-31T11:33:40Z

Pradipt Kapoor is a senior executive in the IT organization at SITA, based out of London. For those who do not know, SITA is the world’s leading provider of communications and information technology solutions. In the airline industry, the computer terminals are often called SITA terminals. Pradipt is a great professional who came into IT from a non-IT background. He has been an entrepreneur is his previous life and he has this story that exemplifies professionalism.

“One of my sales managers in a past company came to me with great concern. He knew he was on the verge of signing a deal but he wasn’t convinced that the solution we were selling to the customer was needed by him. The customer seemed to want a “Rolls Royce” where a bi-cycle would do. It seemed that this was because the CEO of that organization wanted an IT solution without having any knowledge of IT. Even though the commission associated for the deal was big for the salesman, he felt uncomfortable. We went back to the customer seeking a meeting with the CEO. We explained our views to the astounded man. In doing what was the right and not the convenient thing the Sales manager not only won favor of the customer but also built the reputation of the company. He put his personal short term benefit to a side.”

Uplifting stories of professional conduct go beyond the white-collar mould. Here is one from Venkatesh Komarla who heads delivery at MindTree’s Knowledge Services business.

Venkatesh started life at MICO Bosch’s India operations as a graduate engineer right out of college where he picked up his first lesson in commitment and ownership, not from a CEO or from a management classroom but from two workers on the shop floor.

“While I have seen many examples of professional behavior quite a few times, the instance that I remember quite often is my experience at MICO, Bosch. I joined MICO straight from engineering school and immediately after training was placed on the workshop floor as its superintendent. This was the first shop floor started at MICO, in operation for almost 4 decades, and consequently had very experienced employees - most of them with a service record of over 20 plus years.

This workshop was marked for modernization in a different facility. Once the modernization was to be complete, the employees were supposed to move over to other jobs within other workshops. I continue to recollect the dealings of my two foremen - Prakash and Gundanna. Both were in their late forties, had a tremendous understanding of the manufacturing process, had good understanding of the operations, commanded the respect of their teams, and had given their best every single day.

Under any other circumstance, either of them could have easily taken over the stewardship of the entire workshop but here they were - asked to work with and report to a 22 year old workshop superintendent. They did aspire to become superintendents one day but this new reporting structure did not bother them one bit. They went about their work as they had done for decades. They ensured that I was brought up to speed on how things worked and helped me come up to speed on operation. No job was too mundane or no activity trivial. They took the same interest in every single activity. They did have personal concerns but never once let that affect the quality of work. Over a period of 6 months, we built a great relationship and smoothly transitioned off all the employees to other divisions as we closed down the shop. They were consummate professionals.”

Like Pradipt and Venkatesh, another great professional I have come to know is Warren Luedecker. Warren is a lawyer by profession. He is one of the most inclusive, most empathetic legal professionals I have ever met. Warren was corporate counsel at AIG when MindTree was engaged in protracted negotiations to win their business. Here is a touching account of ownership and commitment Warren has to share:

“A colleague was under a tight deadline for submission of a business plan. There was a tragic death in his family. The “professional” who had been a mentor to the colleague attended the services, consoled the colleague over the loss, cancelled a 3 day ski vacation to work with the colleague on the business plan and it was submitted on time without any attribution to the “professional”. However, the colleague had the courage to explain the genesis of the document and the result was a stronger bond in the unit of the organization.”

The Professional’s Professional - Professional’s Quote was first posted on August 31, 2009 at 6:30 am.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

Story about Integrity and Values - Professional’s Quote

2009-09-04T05:02:50Z

In the last blog, I had shared with you how had I reached out to a world-wide group of people I deeply admire for their professionalism while writing The Professional. I had asked them these three questions: what qualities did they admire in a “professional”? What were some of their own uplifting experiences in dealing with other professionals? Three, what were their recollections of unprofessional conduct?

These men and women, from a diverse set of fields, indicated a list of qualities. I collated the feedback to rank the most coveted ones.

The top ten professional attributes that jumped out were:

   1. Integrity
   2. Commitment and ownership
   3. Action orientation and goal seeking
   4. Continuous learning
   5. Professional knowledge/skills
   6. Communication
   7. Planning, organizing and punctuality
   8. Quality of work
   9. A positive attitude, approachability, responsiveness and
   10. Being an inspiring reference to others, thought leadership

It is redeeming that Integrity came right on top because that is the one with which I open “The Professional” which will be on your hands soon.

The Professional contains an expansive conversation on the subject that is often considered prudish but in reality, is the keystone of the arch.

While discussing instances of professional conduct while researching for the book, here is a great lesson from the life of Amit Varma, a man I deeply admire.
Amit got his MBA from Kellogg School of Management and has been with MindTree ever since we started. Today, he heads MindTree’s worldwide consulting practice in IT strategy out of California, USA. Here is a story about integrity and values from his school days that has shaped Amit’s business outlook and I am sure will touch you deeply:

“This is an incidence that goes some time back when I was 14 yrs old and was representing my state (West Bengal) in cricket. We were playing the final game of the qualifiers and the semi finalists would have been decided based on the outcome of this game. We were playing Karnataka and both of us needed to win to qualify - we still had an outside chance of qualifying based on the outcome of another game but Karnataka had to beat us to qualify. It so happened that the weather intervened after the first half of the game and per the rules the points were to get split between the teams. This would have given us the advantage and would have helped us qualify based on the total points and would have knocked the Karnataka team out. We were all rejoicing in our dressing and the high fives had started when our coach walked in and said that he had agreed to play the game again the following day. Needless to say, there was shock, dismay and disbelief on our face when we heard this - why would someone want to do this especially when this outcome had helped us qualify?

Our coach told us that if we really wanted to win the championship, we should do it by winning and not by relying on statistical methods - in his words “you win by playing; if you had to sit and do statistics, you are all better off sitting in school and attending the right classes”.

We lost the game the next day and didn’t make the semi finals! None of us could ever believe that our coach had done this to us.

It so happened that Karnataka went on to win the championship and when the team went to collect their awards, their coach called our entire team on the podium and ensured that we all received the awards with his team. He specifically called out our coach and said that if he had not been professional and agreed to play again, some other team would have been receiving this award and he actually went on to dedicate the award to our coach and us.

We felt extremely humbled - the seeds of professionalism were probably sowed in most of us right then and there but the true understanding of what happened sunk in much later in life. Even today I ask myself - would I have done the same had I been in our coach’s shoes especially with the benefit of knowing that we actually lost the replayed game? As much as I’d like to think I’d have done that, I’m really not sure.”

Some of you have asked me if there are ways to pre-order copies of The Professional.

Well, ask your favorite book store for your copies - I am sure there would be enough copies for everyone.

You could also order your copies soon at:
www.indiaplaza.com

Until the next time, be good and drive safely and stay in touch!

Story about Integrity and Values - Professional’s Quote was first posted on August 24, 2009 at 1:15 pm.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

Go Kiss the World is now in Hindi - “Chum Lo Jahan Ko”

2009-09-11T10:31:08Z

Go Kiss the World is now in Hindi - “Chum Lo Jahan Ko” has just come out as a Penguin publication and is currently on the stands.

The book has been very well translated by Saroj Kumar.

Chum Lo Jahan Ko will take the message of the original to a much wider audience and I am very happy about that. After all, it is written for young people from the other India. Meanwhile, like all of you, I am waiting for “The Professional” to make its debut and I hope all of you will let me know what you think of it.

When I was writing the book, I reached out to a set of professionals whom I deeply admire: doctors, managers, software architects, bankers, journalists. These are people I call “professional’s professional”. I had asked them for three things:

   1. Qualities they think essential to be a called a professional
   2. A positively uplifting anecdote of professional behavior and
   3. One negative anecdote they have come across in their dealings with other professionals

In response to my request, Scott Staples, co-founder of MindTree and currently CEO of our Knowledge Services, had this great story of a rookie salesman:

Ethylene Glycol is widely used in the manufacturing of plastics, but most people are not aware that this is also the key ingredient for manufacturing automotive antifreeze. In the late 1980’s, the U.S. had a number of issues at plants that manufacturer Ethylene Glycol and hence a spike in pricing for automotive antifreeze occurred due to a lack of product in the market. Automotive antifreeze and other automotive after-market products are primarily sold in the market by local distributors. But the manufacturers of these products also sell in a limited direct channel as well through the use of manufacturer’s representatives. Jeff Lang was a direct salesman for one of these manufacturers. Jeff was new to sales, new to the business world, and just 23 years old. Normally, local gasoline (petrol) stations buy their products from the local distributors, but occasionally the manufacturers run direct specials and people like Jeff go and push these across their territories. One summer, Jeff was asked by his boss to push automotive antifreeze to local gasoline stations as the price had skyrocketed and there were fears that it would go much higher. Since antifreeze is typically sold in the fall and winter months, it was a perfect time for local gasoline stations to start stock-piling product. The manufacturer was offering some discounts to entice buyers, but the product had to be bought in bulk (by truckload) and that is a lot of product for a small business owner to invest in. Jeff had convinced a local gasoline station owner to make this purchase before the fall set in and the price went up higher. The man owned three stations and could probably push 1/2 of a truckload in an entire season, plus he needed financing, and a place to store it. Jeff contacted another station owner nearby who was also interested in making this deal but had the same constraints. Being a good salesperson, Jeff got them to split a truckload of antifreeze, found them a small warehouse to store it in, and arranged financing. He made this deal happen and walked away with a signed contract. He had only sold one prior deal (much smaller and not antifreeze) for his new company, so this was big news. His boss was ecstatic and Jeff was happy to finally be making some commission money. He had a signed contract, but had not yet submitted it to the home office as all orders were sent in on Fridays and this was still early in the week. Later in the week, Jeff got some astonishing news. A very large Ethylene Glycol plant was coming back online after being down for a year with damage from a fire. The price of automotive antifreeze would dramatically drop because product would now be available. He immediately thought of his two small business owners who had a huge investment in a product they could now not sell. They had made the deal at absolutely the worst time possible and they would have to sell the product at a loss. This would mean financial ruin for them as they were way over-exposed. Jeff had the contract in-hand and it could not be cancelled, but he had not yet submitted it to the home office. He immediately tore it up and called the two business owners to let them know what happened. He would make no commission and his boss was furious. Jeff made the ultimate professional decision, because a bad deal is not good for anyone. He saw his business on a larger-scale and determined one bad transaction was not worth his reputation in the market and his professionalism. This was not an easy decision for a 23 year old kid looking to make his mark at a new company, but it was a decision that propelled his career because from that point forward he chose to be a professional, not a salesperson.

In the days ahead, I would like to share with you all, a few more such stories from the lives of everyday people who are worthy of being called professionals.

That tag does not come with a degree or a diploma: it comes from the way we conduct ourselves. The Professional, soon to be in your hands, is all about that.

Go Kiss the World is now in Hindi - “Chum Lo Jahan Ko” was first posted on August 18, 2009 at 4:09 am.
©2009 MindTree Ltd.

The Professional

2009-09-09T09:31:06Z

All of you will be glad to know that my next book “The Professional” is ready for release in September as a Penguin Portfolio publication.
After “The High Performance Entrepreneur” and “Go Kiss the World“, this is the third of what I intended to be a trilogy.

All of you who have been part of this blog are in reality the very first people to see the cover of the book. So, here it is:

In this book, I am devoting myself to answering the one seminal question: What does it take to be considered a true professional in any field?
This book delves into the essential qualities, beyond just professional qualifications, that are needed to be called a 21st Century Professional.

“The Professional” has been endorsed by Ram Guha, author of “India After Gandhi” and Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka. I hope that The Professional will appeal to a wide cross-section of readers from those in corporate employment to a cross-section of self-employed professionals who want to stand out.

“The Professional” took me a lot of energy to conceptualize, write, edit, revise and finally to make it ready to go to Press. My editor at Penguin, Sumitra Srinivasan says that I have poured myself out in this book and I believe her.

I hope all of you will soon get a copy of The Professional and one day, let me have your thoughts on it.

Budget 2009

2009-07-13T05:42:55Z

I grew up in the tribal districts of Orissa. In places like Koraput and Keonjhar where my boyhood was spent, the nearest railhead was a day’s journey from home. The tribesmen made a living by cultivating the slopes of the mountain, gathering forest produce and tending their animals. Many who lived high up in the mountains were seasonally disconnected from the district administration during the monsoon and the pigeon mail was the only way to contact the marooned. There was a place called Telkoi in Keonjhar where the lone Public Health Center had only two medicines: one for dysentery and one for constipation. The reason was simple. The tribesmen ate mango and jackfruits in every form - from the time they were small to the time they ripened, they ate the seeds and of course, the mango kernels as well. As a result either they had lose motions or none at all. When the government tried to demonstrate them how to cultivate the Taichung rice, they watched intently until the rice formed milk and then they simply sucked it and did not let the rice wait until harvest. That was forty years ago.

After I grew up, at 25, I visited the Simlipal reserve forest in Mayurbhanj and stayed there for a week. My guide was a forest guard who had brought his bride from the village haat and was living-in with her. He had not been able to save up the bride price to pay the father-in-law yet, so they remained unmarried. They were raising his nephew whose father was serving a life-term for murder he had not committed. The man had simply surrendered to the police and agreed to the allegation because that was a more peaceful thing to do. The alternative would have been exposing the women and the children. Fast forward to 2009. Not much has changed in Koraput and Keonjhar and Lalgarh. The veneer of development has been replaced with that of law and order.

The idea of India is very urban. The idea of progress is very urban. The idea of government is very urban. The idea of civil society is very urban. The places I talk about fall in the penumbra of our urban consciousness even today. When we think of people who live there, we see them through the eyes of a government that has the same empathy that the British rulers felt for the urban populace. They are them, they are not us. That is why Korput to Lalgarh evoke thoughts about insurgency more than they do about development. That is why silently, the patches of ungovernable areas within the country are growing while we are making our cities gated communities.

In the tiny places I lived in, the annual budget exercise of a central or a state government meant nothing to people. It came and went; in the few educated homes the passing item of interest was the excise duty on consumable from cigarettes to cement and later on, it was the personal income tax slab. Decades after, the middle-class mental poverty has expanded just as government receipts, spends and deficits have.

India needs change at the level of her soul.

The people who are in-charge of the budget, those who go spend the money and the rest of us who fill our stomachs with it until the next year, need to believe that the country outside the cities need to be included. That they are us.

Before you think I am a cynic, I must tell you that my staple diet is hope. That is how I have come from where I was to where I am today. There are two things I want to tell you in closing.

When I was in the US for the first time in 1990, I met a grand old man who said he used to be a Peace Corps volunteer teaching people how to raise poultry in Madhya Pradesh in the 1950s. He chuckled while recollecting that the volunteers had to “go” to the fields with lanterns at night. I immediately told him that a lot has changed since then. But after that patriotic refrain, sobriety returned to me with the realization that outside the cities, even today, there is no sewage system. And drinking water does not come out of a tap.

Every policy maker in India, every bureaucrat, every businessman must read a book titled Paraja - this is a novel by Jnanpith winner Gopinath Mohanty. Fortunately, an English translation by Bikram Das is available today. It is the story of a tribal from Koraput whose life is in the clutches of petty government officials, moneylenders and the police. The story is set in the early days of post-independent India. Decades after, his lot has not changed. Only his innocence has been lost.

On that note, goodbye until the next budget.