Stray Dog

Seventeen-year-old Anand was strolling around the premises of his two-storey bungalow. Listening to his i-pod and sipping juice from an elegant glass in hand, Anand seemed happy, content and free of worry, trouble and care. It's been hardly a few minutes since the sky stopped pouring, so the distinctive smell of soil was still fresh and sweet all around. Anand has been relishing the random melodies on his i-pod and surely was having a great time - making occasional foot moments and gentle dance gestures, playfully swinging his arms around and humming along.

Moments later, a brownish stray dog squeaked through the huge and beautiful entry gate into the bangalow premises. The dog appeared sickly, exhausted and seemed as though it was about to pass out in a moment. The ugly grey patches all over its body disappointed and intimidated Anand. The sudden appearance of the dog was displeasing to his senses and scared him away. Now in a snit and thoroughly upset, Anand picked up a sharp piece of stone lying beside the orchid and simulated throwing at the dog. The poor dog couldn't run away. It surely was exhausted, worn out and starving to death. Alas, Anand couldn't appreciate the dog's state. The helpless dog gave a pause for thought, as sadly all its life it had been only running away from people who always either threw stones at it or whacked it away. Anand simulated throwing yet another time. The dog couldn’t budge. A nervous and confused Anand released stone the second time and it narrowly escaped the dog's eyes. With sad and disheartened eyes, the dog looked at him for a moment and slowly turned around to squeeze through the same gate and gradually faded from his view.

Anand was still strolling around, enjoying music and the pleasant weather. Moments later he saw a lean dark man in tainted khakhi shirt and pants passing by the gate. Following him was a seven-foot dirty rope with a dead brown dog strangled at the end. Curled up now and eyes half open, it was being mercilessly dragged behind by the dark man all along the rough tar surface. The lifeless dog with frozen tears and painful eyes, kept staring into Anand's eyes - the same way it looked at him when he threw the stone at it. The man with the rope was waltzing off to a municipal vehicle parked only a few meters away.

Picture Courtesy: Google firstthings.com

True Weakness

January 2002

My team (Swami, Ramu and I) was one of the 6 finalist teams onstage during an annual inter-collegiate quiz. That's part of an annual student festival we eagerly looked forward to each year – right from intermediate to our final year of graduation. We couldn’t do well that day and remained at the 5th position all the way. The scores were announced after the audio round (last but one round). Throughout the quiz, I was closely observing this team at the top position, one of its members, in particular, who was incredibly sharp, literally cracking all questions – direct or pass. The other two members of his team contributed hardly any. I was so amazed at his agility and confidence. He single-handedly managed to keep up the first position right from the first round through the audio round, trailed by yet another strong team following them too closely. The next ie the final round concluded and the final scores were announced. This agile quizzer couldn’t attempt even a single question from the final round, which was an all-visuals. Sadly, his team ended up only being the runners up.

For one unfortunate reason - the agile quizzer was congenitally blind.

Dutifulness

This morning Victor was filling up his coffee cup at the pantry. A security guard, in a neatly pressed stiff cotton shirt was already there, with an evidently impatient gesture and was waiting as though something was about to happen in the next few seconds. In the next few seconds, the guard’s colleague came up to him, handed over a stapler and hurried back. This guard quickly started stapling his shirt’s right cuff from the inside, for it seemed to be missing cuff buttons. After stapling, he stood there for a minute and triumphantly convinced himself that the cuff looked natural from the outside. Afterall, cuffs were part of his uniform too. Knowing that Victor was observing him, he threw a look at him, gave a sheepish smile and disappeared from the spot......

Victor was soundly skeptical about his own dutifulness right from Day-one of his stepping into the corporate world. Many occurrents neatly proved to him by distinctly pointing out instances of his under-committedness, during which time he was nevertheless cognizant, but all the same, nonchalant. Victor never took further action but had some or the other off-key defenses to break away. Though he can’t lay them here one by one, he is now glad that he knows and thoroughly understands how those little defenses collectively colloborate and conspire into making his under-committedness an eternal feature – an inadvisable and morally contemptible follow through.

Just to put things in perspective, Victor can proudly exclaim his loyalty on personal and formal counts, yet, honestly, not to that degree which could motivate him to sacrifice an opportunity at hand for the sake of organisational welfare. Perhaps, that would not make his employer feel boastfully luckier about him, but would surely make sense to most of those already successful. He reluctantly declares that only a negligible part of employers might have experienced that ‘boastfully luckier’ thingie.

Let alone organisational welfare, Victor has been comfortably won over by a feeling of guilt that he couldn’t contribute that ‘extra’ thing for drawing gratification through a discharge of his functionary responsibilities to the brim. Realisation dawns upon him that ‘contribution-to-the-brim’ is ironically not an ‘extra’ thing but merely a part his original responsibility bundle. Victor feels, in retrospect, history couldn’t be indemnified, although there is always something called a second chance – but only if he is willing to exploit.

Victor hopes that one day he would be able to put things in a better perspective, without a crave for a second ‘second chance’

A Retail Tale

Peruse any news paper, magazine or journal of any frequency, perhaps that’s the only term grabbing your attention the most number of times these days. That’s no strange phenomenon, atleast according to what the theme of these articles convey. For a while let’s run-off from the contenders - Walmart, Carrefour, Tesco, Reliance, Tatas, Birlas, Godrej Agrovet, to name a few under the limelight - and their launch plans, strategic initiatives, investment monies, who’s who and their job-hops leveraging on the sector’s boom.

Enough of raised eye-brows after knowing the heights of campus placements into this sector these days. Yet it’s time to raise them back for a new reason; school placements have just begun. Yes, the sector has just started pre-placing 10 and 10+2 students to populate their shop-floors. May be that’s news for you and me, but not for the head-hunters minting through this would-be organized sector.

Let’s get on to the actual business, now.

Atleast in my case, being a serious and a keen listener helped me know the reactions of one of the victims of such retail bang. I then understood there’s something really serious about Soniaji’s letter to the PM regarding the ‘trans-national super markets’

I happened to go for a top-up at this pharma retailer and casually enquired about his diversified nature of business. Pharma, cell-phone recharge, rental flats and what not - Common, now that was not his business strategy or model. That’s just a linear resort to make his livelihood
Here’s a verbatim (yes, he speaks fluent English) of the reactions from this medium-built, fair, elegant and well-read family man in his late thirties who runs the above businesses. Overall, he is definitely unhappy.

Straight from the horse’s mouth...

“These stupid people give permissions to all those stupids who wish to enter India. Now India is again going back to the same old “ rule by foreigners” – difference being, till 1947 it was ruled by the British people, but now ruled by different-different countries together. They talk about independence and all but what is the use??(he was very serious on this line) We are still depending upon foreign people to develop. For example, Walmart is there. It is a very big mall. You also know Big Bazaar no?. These big-big malls sell medicines at discounts because they buy them directly from manufacturers. So all customers run to big malls. Middle-class and high-class public go there to buy medicines. The same medicines are supplied by me and retailers like me but we cannot give the same discounts. The reason is we can’t buy directly from the manufacturers. The stockists and super-stockists (these are the intermediaries, as I understand) come in between. The business is very down these days sir. Very tightly managing…
Also, the big-big hospitals (corporate hospitals) are also a big problem for us. They establish their own medical stores inside the hospital and the patients buy all medicines with good margin from there itself. People come to shops like this for cheap medicines like Vicks action 500, paracetmol, excetra. I established this shop in 1989. At that time the road (seriously pointing to the main road behind me) had only one lane. Now it has a divider, with roads on both the two sides. At that time, I expected that within 10-15 years this area will develop, and I will have many customers due to the development. Even the fly over was not there at that time. Many big apartments are constructed. But no doctor is establishing his clinic here. They are working for corporate hospitals because they are paying nice salaries..(After a 3-second pause)….

Mtchhh… don’t know what to do. All stupid things are happening in India only”
(We could have continued further, but a senior citizen approached us and interrupted his flow by asking him for a cough syrup….“Chalo let’s continue sometime later” I said to the retailer waving my hand with an ironic smile and rushed to fill this space here)

Cost To The Company - At Your Cost

ET triggered it for me. “MNCs pretty well know the youth has a special weakness for money……MNC’s compromise their hiring standards to lure talent…blah…blah...”

Nevertheless, this has what caught my attention “a Delhi-based firm includes the EMIs it pays for the laptop (provided to the employee) in the CTC..”

The victims won’t find it strange atleast.

I was first introduced to the concept of CTC (the well used but most abused HR term) when I got my first offer letter which included the PF contribution by the employer in my gross salary. In a way it seems reasonable, for whatever the employer contributes, is subject to our control. I am not fully convinced about it though. I could never imagine the extrapolation of this inclusion. There are several other inclusions which I know, you may don’t and vice versa. Interest subsidies for the loans availed, premium on life insurance/mediclaim policies, fees for club memberships, telephone, internet, blackberry bill reimbursements, credit cards, servants, gardeners, chaffeur, electcitity, gas, water et al. These are ofcourse, luxury, if we are given free of cost (read: without inclusion in CTC).

Those days are not far where you would find included in your so-called CTC the company’s monthly electricity bill, stationery cost (eraser included), tea/coffee/mineral water (don’t forget those extra sugar cubes) all those toileteries (including those toilet rolls which you seldom use), salaries of security guards (they are protecting you, right) and the maintainance staff. Also, if you are a techie, you won’t realise that you might have developed a software, sometime ago, for the company which it has now wisely used to allocate those shared expenses (like electcrity bill, etc) to the employees on a pro-rata basis. And if you are into testing, you might probably be testing the same software and fixing bugs. A faultless highway-robbery

Why MNCs rate themselves and popularise these as ‘benefits’ extended to the employees despite their inclusion in the employees’ CTC, and fuelling the fire by labelling themselves as employee-centric is a question still to be answered properly. ….

Realise that you are funding for yourself by working your own a** out.

Empirical or Stastical ?

I seriously mean a debate between them – Empirical Vs Statistical Proficiency – after I ran across some hot news about the meltdown of the reputable hedge fund called Amaranth LLC - the 9 and a half Billion ($) fund - owing to an unfavourable swing. This appears to be a throwback to the fund Long Term Capital Mgmt which matched the same description in 1998.

The culprit – a well known trader by name Brian Hunter (believed to be one of the highly paid traders in the investment bank circuit). Popular, well read, qualified and ‘reasonably’ experienced who was hired from Deutche Bank and notoriously in charge for orchestrating the poor bet which hit the papers all over. This guy is a physics major from the University of Connecticut and is very well known for his statistical ‘skills’.

See, he is now found guilty of using ‘Statistics’ instead of ‘Experience’!

Statistics Versus Experience - which one would you go with?