A blog a day (#8)

TYPING SKILL

Year: 1990. 
Place: Somewhere in India.

"Raj, have you completed the report of XYZ company?"

"From my side it is completed. Ms. T is typing the report."

"It has been about 3 weeks. Why hasn't she completed typing the report?"

"She is new to the Personal computer in our office. We bought it only about three months ago. The staff haven't yet got used to the system and the word processing software."

"Who is teaching them how to operate the machine?"

"No one. That is what we wanted to inform you; but you were away and we couldn't get in touch with you. The staff say that no one has taught them how to use the machine and the software for report typing. In fact, they were telling me initially that if they had to do it on the manual typewriter, they may have completed the report by now."

"What were you doing? Couldn't you learn that and help them type the report?"

"???"

The above is probably an apocryphal story about a mythical consultancy organisation, but I am sure it may have happened in any organisation during the time personal computers were being bought in Indian companies and the staff were expected to start using them immediately. The word processing software that was used those days was "Wordstar" or "Word" on most machines. It had a decent suite of editing tools. Though it was not very difficult for us engineers to learn the software, the same cannot be said of most staff members in the organisation. Some may have expected a decent allowance to start using computers; some may have been reluctant to use the system due to a mistaken fear that any problem in the machine may be attributable to them; some may have just felt scared that their importance would be somehow diminished.

When a personal computer landed in the organisation that I worked for and we had a report to bring out in a short time, I volunteered to type out the report myself. Now a staff member, whom I would like to  call Ms. P was surprised to see me type the report using the keyboard like a professional typist would do! Touch typing - using all fingers and thumb to type with certain fingers being used for certain letters.

I didn't learn touch typing in office. I learnt that on a manual typewriter that my father had. While I was in high school, he insisted that my younger sister and I learn touch typing. He taught me the rudimentary lessons (asdfgf, ;lkjhj, etc) and asked me to fill multiple pages. Then came sentences and then copying from newspapers and periodicals. Both my younger sister and I learnt touch typing quite early in our life. Little did we know that the skill acquired during our younger days would come in very handy in our later life, when almost all normal business (and leisure) activity is being done on computers and keyboards have still not been rendered obsolete!

Learning a skill is never out of fashion, even if the machine on which the skill is acquired has become a rarity and is generally only a museum piece.

A blog a day (#7)

VIDEO CALLS 

This pandemic (variously called Covid 19, corona virus, or Wuhan virus) has been a defining period in our lives and we see that in myriad ways. But the most amazing aspect has been the regular video calls that we are having. Being a retired person, I am not referring to the video calls with colleagues, bosses, or clients; what I am referring to are the group video calls that we have with our children and friends. Earlier, we would have called them up over phone, Skype, or Whatsapp and engaged in a one-on-one call; but now we have calls with family members, relatives, friends, and ex-colleagues on a regular basis. These group calls are becoming the norm nowadays.

Zoom seems to be a favourite among the people with whom I interact regularly - school-mates, college friends, and family members. The technology is great and with decent internet speeds, the feeling is that they are not very far. 

Do these video calls offer us a decent substitute for social calls that we would have had prior to the internet era? I am not sure. They are definitely a good substitute in times when moving out is unsafe and mingling with others not very advisable. But they can never replace the face to face meetings with people with whom we are close. What sets the two apart? Is it the shared physical space and its attendant infrastructure that we are part of? Is it the bonhomie that as social animals we are accustomed to? Or is it the "touch and feel" when we meet others responsible for the desire to meet people face to face?

What do you think? What does the future (2022 and beyond) look like?

A blog a day (#6)

GUIDING PRINCIPLES IN LIFE

About nine years ago, my son was selected for a job during campus placement. He felt that it was a "dream company", as the guys say nowadays. While mulling over how I can advise him about his entry into corporate life, I thought telling him anything technical or behavioural may not cut any ice. So I thought to mention something that can stay with him throughout his life. The following "Guiding Principles in Life" came about after a bit of thought. I sent this as an email to him. He said he liked what I had written, but the import of these points did not impact him as much as it did about 5-6 years later after he had worked in that organisation for a few years. I am copy-pasting the content (without editing anything). Do see whether anything applies to you in your individual life!

1. Pursuit of Excellence: Whatever you do, try to do it well. Ensure that you perform the tasks so that the person for whom the task is meant for gets the result of your best efforts. Even if you are making tea, for example, try to make tea so that the person(s) for whom the tea is meant for realize(s) that you have put in your best efforts. If you are performing an analysis, remember to first understand what the customer wants. The customer is not necessarily the person who is going to use the result; it may be a person who needs to perform some other tasks on the process before it reaches the customer. That other person - a part of your team or your organisation - then becomes your customer. Always remember that HOW you do your work is not necessarily the best way to do it. There will always be a BETTER way. Try to think about HOW to perform your task or process in a better way - always. That is the only way to pursue EXCELLENCE.

A blgo a day (#5)

PROOFREADING

I always try to be meticulous in my writing. I try and ensure that my spelling is correct, the punctuation is appropriate, and the grammar is good, not necessarily excellent. With those as my guiding philosophy in writing, it is a natural extension that I check whatever I write and if I find anything that doesn't pass muster (in my own understanding of the language), I try and correct that to the best of my ability. I also have a tendency of pointing out mistakes in others' writing. Now this hasn't always ended well for me. When someone wants to write the way she wants to, why cast a magnifying glass on her writing and point out minor errors? Look for content and meaning in the writing, not the grammar! That is what I have heard people tell me. But habits die hard and I can't help but notice mistakes.

Proofreading means examining your text carefully to find and correct typographical errors and mistakes in grammar, style, and spelling. [1]

That is what experts tell me. Probably the operative word in the quoted sentence is "your", which I need to pay more attention to!

Nowadays, the word processing software tells us when it finds something not appropriate and puts a squiggly line below the word as a reminder to the writer to correct the word. One could also set the software to correct certain typical mistakes as one typed the passage and the software would do the correction for us. Back in the days of writing by hand, one needed to be careful while composing one's sentences to ensure that there weren't many mistakes, else the page would look awful with strikethroughs and asterisks to mark the corrections.

As a natural extension of my penchant for proofreading, I have a habit of fact-checking messages written or shared via email, Facebook, or WhatsApp. I point out the fact-checking results to the person who sent the message, and on occasions have been told that since the message looked fine, what was the harm in sharing the same? Mostly the issue is with wrong attribution of the message like the one below:

The message is appropriate, but in my opinion the attribution is wrong and needs pointing out. Lincoln and Internet? Bah!

By the way did you find anything wrong in the title of my blog? It is wrongly typed as "blgo". If you noticed it, you are my type; if not, don't worry, you may be very polite by nature.

 __________________________________________________ 

[1] https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/grammarpunct/proofreading/

Image from: http://abelincolnhistory.com/quotes/funny-lincoln-memes.htm

A blog a day (#4)

 SUCCESS

I had an interesting experience a few years ago when I was teaching Six Sigma course for MBA students in an institution near Bangalore. The course was for all students in the initial years, but later it was made a core course only for students specializing in Operations Management. This worked fine for me since it would be easier to explain the concepts of Six Sigma for a homogenous group which comprised almost entirely of engineers. So I attempted  a couple of things for the first time in my teaching career. I started by asking the students to write down their expectations (in terms of learning) from the course. Since almost all had a basic idea of Six Sigma, they could write what they expected to learn. I collected their sheets of paper and made an effort to redesign certain elements of the course and my presentation to satisfy most of the expectations that the students had mentioned. The result was satisfactory for me and at the end of the program, I returned the sheets to the individual students and asked them to fill up the course feedback form based on how effectively their individual expectations had been met. I was unanimously rated excellent by all students. Among my "successes"!

The same batch asked some interesting questions on professional life, career choices, corporate life, etc that they would ask me since I had established quite a rapport during the program. Towards the end of the program, there was a query on "Success" and what I thought were some attributes of someone being called "Successful". That was an interesting question and I hadn't been asked such a question earlier in my training career. I had to think on my feet and I came up with a small exercise that I thought could help me in collecting my thoughts and at the same time making the students participate in our "collective definition of success".

I asked the students themselves to write down 3-4 points on what they wanted to be after 10 years or so. I also told them there is no need to be exact here. Just write down what you want to achieve. They took about 15-20 minutes to write down. I asked each of them to read that aloud in class and keep that sheet as a guide for them for the future. I also told them that they are free to expand or edit their goals as they progress.

Having done that, the question of how to know if one is successful, still remained unanswered, though I suspect a few smart guys had already realized where I was going with all this!  I concluded by saying that each person assesses his/her own achievement with respect to the goals they set for themselves. If they find out that they have achieved their goal in the timeline they set for those goals, they can feel that they are "successful". The common meaning is generally what OTHERS THINK OF YOU, not how you assess yourself. My contention was that success should be a self assessment measure rather than a measure of others about us since each person with whom we interact would superimpose their definition of success on us and we would be confused.

A blog a day (#3)

BEDTIME STORIES

How do you put kids to sleep? When they are infants, a softly sung lullaby would do the job. My wife used to invent lyrics for the lullabies and put them to sleep. My children were never difficult and would sleep without much effort, barring the occasions when they were unwell.

My singing abilities are 1 on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the best singer ever! Being so "notes-challenged", I didn't dare frighten my kids with my lullabies.

My work started when my children had learnt to speak and understand sentences. That was the time I showed what my capabilities were. I had a store of good stories that I had read, a good imagination to distort (humorously) some of them to entertain the kids, and a reasonably good vocabulary to put my thoughts to words. So I had a good time regaling my children with bedtime stories.

A favourite of mine was a story titled "Paati and the apple tree" (Paati in tamil is grandmother). It is a story of how an old lady (grandmother) who lived alone in a house with a garden and an apple tree outwitted a fox which would steal apples from her tree. I had told the story to my children from the book/comic book that we had bought and that was nice, but what was funnier was that I used to embellish the tale with my own additions - grandma boiling milk and watching and counting the apples, grandma distributing the fruit to her visitors from the village, etc. There was always something new; and on occasions my children would try and correct my story. The funniest twist to the story that is  remembered by my children till now is the reversal of roles. The story that I told was titled "Apple and the paati tree". So they imagined many grandmas hanging as fruit from the tree and the Apple living in the house. Unfortunately such humorous twists to the story resulted in my kids never sleeping while I told the story. They would be laughing and wanting more of the story! 

My wife had a story too. That was a story of "Atree rishi and his wife Anusuya". Now that story my wife told them in the same way that she had read, except to modify some elements of the story to make them understand the tale. The story was repetitive and to this day my sons say that they don't know how the story ended, since they were asleep by the time half the story had been told. 

Bedtime stories should be repetitive and boring! That puts kids to sleep quickly.

A blog a day (#2)

BACK TO CHENNAI

24-Feb-2020

As we prepare ourselves to shift bag and baggage to our own flat in Chennai tomorrow, I look forward to the stay in Chennai again after a gap of little more than 24 years. I left Chennai for Bangalore in the winter of 1995 after getting a job there. My family joined me in the summer of 1996. Two of my three sons have left the shores of India for studies/work and aren't likely to return to India to settle down. Elder son doesn't want to leave Bangalore and has refused to come to Chennai with us, instead preferring to live alone in Bangalore. My first stint in Bangalore was in 1977 when I was just 20 and came to this city to do my undergraduate studies in IISc. Twenty years later when I came to Bangalore to take up an employment, there were significant changes in the city. Traffic was insane even then, more due to the absence of any peripheral roads, and the lack of any proper and punctual city transport infrastructure. Mekhri circle would be a huge choke point back in the mid 90's and the construction and opening of the grade separator there eased the traffic significantly. The city grew and with it grew the number of relatives from my side as well as my wife's. So we had a few families to visit often, though the distance and traffic made us reduce those visits over the years.

I will be carrying a lot of memories with me and it will take some time to adjust to the new surroundings and neighbours as we settle in. 

UPDATED ON 24-Nov-2020

An update after 9 months (to the date). I wrote that down and after coming over to Chennai forgot all about it. Forgot that I blog, forgot that discipline to do a meaningful task is important, forgot having a schedule and sticking to it!

Within a month of moving in and just as we thought we would start moving around Chennai to visit our relatives and friends, the government imposed a lockdown due to the Covid 19. Getting out of the house was a no-no for the first three to four months and the slowly I started going for my morning walks nearby. Travelling more than a few kilometers has been absent and being stuck within the four walls has been rather a different experience for me and my wife. As I remarked to a few friends of mine, this is probably the longest duration that we (my wife and I) have been stuck in each other's presence!

What are my learnings from the lockdown and "staying-in" will be in a future blog.

But we are in the midst of a cyclonic storm ⛆ that is likely to cross the coast of TN (close to Chennai) within a day as per forecast. Hope the 2015 rainfall is not repeated. 🙏

A blog a day (#1)

DOING NOTHING

My blog writing has never been a regular affair. While doing nothing today, I was thinking why not be disciplined enough for a few minutes a day and create a blog a day for the next 100 days. Guys! That is the target I have set for myself. Inspired by my two nieces who have their own writings and have gone on for many days with great regularity. If they can do it, why not me? That is the thought that assailed me today while doing nothing. Yes, nothing. 

What is doing nothing? Is that even possible? Doing nothing isn't even sitting in front of the TV, meditating or lying down, since all these are acts and by definition, if we are doing any of these, we are actually doing something. Not nothing.

To my limited intelligence, I will define "Doing Nothing" as an act of not doing anything productive. So it could be binge-watching the fifth episode of a web-series, or watching two movies on TV back to back without concentrating on the task.

I may choose some topic, incident, or anything that I think will make some sense and write a few words every day for the next 100 days and if I can do it for a 100 days, my next target may be 250 days! I have never been disciplined in my life and set out to accomplish anything to a target. So this is going to be a first for me.

WISH ME LUCK!

See you tomorrow with one more blog!