Blah….

Ghosts, a favourite topic of mine. Where childhood days gave me quite a fearful look at the concept, age made me more interested in it. The way in which a window creaks in the night or a dress flutters in the night wind where all attributed at first response to a ghost in childhood days. Still vividly remember renting a video casette of a werewolf movie and returning it after 20 mins viewing ( i lied tht the casette was not working ).

Reading and talking with friends gave me a broader look at the entire phenomenon. Once a friend who was studying biotechnology told me : every molecule in the body stores energy and when someone dies abruptly, all the energy is released in one shot and where does all this go ?? will this be what you call a ghost ?? could be..couldn’t be.Mythology and folklore in India gives the concept wings and what flies out from this one concept is one manifestation too many.

All these thoughts chunred through my mind as i was reading William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist, powerfully written and makes an effort to scientifically explain what causes a posession ( if something like that exists that is !!!). Most of my blog posts doesn’t even make sense to me let alone someone else !!!

Leadership

Dictionary.com has about four definitions for leadership listed under it among which one is : an act or instance of leading; guidance; direction. A leader of a group of leaders are ideally what would symbolise  from something as microcosmic as a school to something on the bigger end of the scale as a country. I chose to insert the word ideally in the last sentence almost deliberately for in the real sense of the world, this is rarely the case.

Recently during a conversation with one of my seniors at work, he made a remark that has stuck to the back of my mind for quite some time now. The point he made was very simple in the sense that there is a marked difference between born leaders and self ( or otherwise) made leaders.The old saying goes that leaders are not made and are born. It is a point on which i beg to differ, there are people whom i have seen and met who have risen to leadership with nothing but sheer grit and the will to learn as their arsenal. If for the born leader the traits and underlying nuances of leadership comes in a smooth flow, then for the made leader the flow has to be consciously made to flow in a direction best suited to the situation.

My span of vision on this subject is limited but still its an mazing prospect to look at, one that shows a kaledioscope of possibilities each time it is looked at.

Fish !

Just finished with Fish!, I had my reservations about this book but it served to dis spell all those. Very small a book but still packed with ideas that are known to all and sundry.

The most sensible part of the book lay in one single philosophy “We can choose our attitude at work”, sounds simple and logical but thinking about it makes me wonder if i have put this completely into practice at work.The parable that is weaved into the book is tailor made for this story and the philosophies that it preaches.

How do people manage to write these stuff ??? I need to write more on this but still wanted to make a preface to it….nuff said

Musing !!!

I did my education and pursue my career in two different lanes. My degree equipped me with the very basics of a collection of technical skills while my job ensures that i interact with the very human beings that make this technology tick.

The people outside work whom i meet ask me ” why HR ??” and in my mind i retort “why not HR??” (PS : am too polite ask this to them in  the face).Books,blogs and articles galore adorn the net and bookshops alike with ideas that elevate HR into the higher constellations of organizational power, but in the eyes of the common man HR is back office. Start along the lines of strategic HR to a software engineer and he/she sits dumbstruck and the next question that obviously would follow would be ” strategic what ??”.

Many an article praises HR to be a function wherein partnering with the business goals and lining yourselves to the business objectives forms the crux of the job. My perspective of the job differs from this in many a way,i feel a job well done when some body calls me up or emails me with a simple thanks. A profile that heavily relies on customer service, there could be flowers and hailstones both headed your way. If it’s your lucky day then you could have both in the same day, but still its a thrill.

There is a still a long way to go, the amount and depth of ideas and principles that i come across does baffle me and interest me to the same degree. Learning is a buck that will never stop….

Yes they can…

The new administration in Washington is just days old and it seems to change things by the minute. Barack Obama is moving at a frenetic pace and seemed to take to leadership like a fish does to water. In a matter of minutes and a few exectuive orders, years of governmental red tape came down. The initial days seem to be promise enough.

One of my friends wrote in his blog that after 8 years we have a person for a president at the white house and not a politician, sounds true. The new president moved effortlessly among the common man. For one i never paid too much interest in matters of the US when mr.W ( i like to call him that !!) was in office but there seems to be more than charisma to the man named Obama and it just interests me so much that i read the news updates of the hour. The decision to close down the guantanamo prison and the shift in policies concerning the middle east seem to be steps in the right direction for an administration taking its baby steps.

Its too early to call him a phenomenon but it seems he is on his way to be one.

E Pluribus Unum !!!!

I have a certain trait that i would like to call “blogger’s block”, i seriously doubt if such a word even exists but still this is the closest to what i feel now.There are a bunch of half finished posts lying in my drafts section and it got a bit too much for me today and here i am drafting a post.

Back from work and having tea is probably the only time i watch tv and every single one of the channels that i skipped over today had one topic blaring out  “OBAMA”. Agreed, he is a symbolic figure one who has the burden of history on his shoulders as he steps into the white house. Indian media is all ga ga over the guy who is yet to assume office, all i see is a man who will have to sort and sift through a great big mess thanks to mr.W. A sagging economy, a mess in Iraq and so many other images face him.

One singular usage that i heard about the US president still stays with me. Someone had once referred to POTUS as the world’s most powerful CEO and i sincerely hope Obama lives upto that image. The worlds most powerful office is in a state of shambles and all it takes is one man’s resolve to steer things clear. The road ahead is a difficult one  and one man who has taken a nation by storm has a great deal of hope thrust on him…good luck n godspeed to the president.

A visit to the Zoo

After a gap of almost two years, i went to the trivandrum zoo a few days back. There was a time in my childhood when i almost waited for weekends on which i could get to visit it. The zoo was more or less a very orthodox form then, with the conventional cages and sullen looking animals behind them. Now the entire place has a new look that is more or less aesthetically appealing…

Am a big aficionado of wildlife be it on animal planet or in the flesh in a zoo. One image that left an imprint on my mind was seeing a zebra in an enclosure, the animal looked so distraught and forlorn being the only one in an enclosure built for a herd of them. Right next to it in another enclosure stood a giraffe more or less in the same predicament. An animal in a zoo is a helpless being. Although stray occurrences in which their primal instinct resurface do happen, summing up an animal in a zoo is more or less dependant on humans. Keeping an animal in a cage is torture in itself, i cannot even imagine the plight of an animal which is made to live its life alone in an enclosure.

There was a funny sight here too, an enclosure had a king cobra in it. It was peacefully in slumber in the mid day heat, people were making noises trying to attract its attention ( i wonder how many knew that it has no ears !!!) a friend who was walking with me wondered aloud ” What would have happened if the roles were reversed ??? “, truly something to ponder….

Of studies among other things

Laziness…what a blissful state of being, have been lazy as far back as i can remember and its such a nice thing to be !!! There was indeed a special thrill to being lazy right the day before the exams when in college. The slope of the curve that may symbolise the zest for studies is always one that seems like falling off a cliff. In the tenth std it was at its highest and as i reached 12th the graph started sliding down slowly and during the four years of graduate studies the curve might have went down faster than a roller coaster on a plunge….

Thinking back on the so called “studies” during college brings some endearing pictures to mind. Every engineering student at one point of time or the other goes through an exercise named combined studies ( though its anything but studies !!). A picture that still remains is one where us guys had an overnight stay (one among the many) at Sree’s place, after the customary round of studies we climbed atop the terrace and jus lay there looking at the sky. Am not poetic, not in the sense of the word but it was indeed a beautiful sight to be beneath the starlit sky with the people with whom u spend five days a week. We talked, the time was when we were approaching the final years of studies and most of the talk centred around the jobs that most of us would go to, if (or how) everyone would stay in touch and so on and so forth….the picture is still etched vividly on my memory.

A lot of water has flown under the bridge since then and the inevitable grasp of change has grabbed us all, but in the rare chances that we get to meet up this picture surfaces once a while. All that i see on the faces of my mates is something i could not fathom ( was it nostalgia ??? or was it a sense of warmth ??)

Crichton

Michael Crichton has passed on…through the curtain of time into an allegedly timeless horizon. The writer holds a very special place in my literary pantheon, for he introduced me to the dazzling world of English fiction. Back to the time in school when the only English movie known to us malayali kids was Jurassic Park, we ( about 6 of us of varied ages ) all thronged before a VCR ( a rage then !!) and watched a pirated copy of JP. Even though i could not make much sense of it i was baffled by the dinosaurs. It was then that some wise guy in school made the discovery that this wasin fact from a novel. I managed to procure a copy somehow and wonder of wonders…could not even understand a single thing !!!! But after skipping through a few hundred pages it raced along so fast that i finished it very quickly. That was my first experience with a “grown-up” novel….

I re-read it so many times that i lost count of it and another fact to come out of the reading was that i learned quite a lot of swear words ( well there are first experiences for everything i guess !!!). Things moved on and so did time and among a lot of pages and authors Crichton was somehow lost to me after The Lost World and Congo. It wasrecently that i found the novel Timeline in a dust laden corner of the library and somehow i could remember the thrills and chills of JP ( sounds cheesy !!), somehow the sense of thrills failed to be stirred and i could somehow finish the book. One fine day on November 4, somebody pinged me on chat to tell me he had passed on and all those images came tumbling back to me.

To the author who introduced me to this wonderful world of fiction, peace be with you always !!!!

Banquets !!!!

Been quite a long time since i jotted down ( literally !!) a word, so here goes….

Today happened to be the occassion of the marriage of one of my erstwhile collegemates. All the pomp and gaiety that accompanies a marriage function here in kerala were present, but the most exciting part was yet to come. In trivandrum one of the most common sport items is the sadya (the wedding banquet), dont get me wrong it requires the strategic moves and tactical intelligence of a commando to eat out here.

Needless to say, the most mild mannered of people become utterly ferocious when it comes to eating a sadya. I have been to marriages wherein i had to literally push n heave my way in to eat, one thing to always remember is to never stand by the door when people come down for the food. I made that mistake once and was in effect carried ( albeit unwillingly ) to a great distance inside the hall.

Back to the story…me,naru & jackie were the commando team for the day and our first attempt to infiltrate the hall was snubbed. All seats were packed and we even had people standing behind seats preparing for their chances. We returned a spare ten mintues later and began walking around in the hope of finding a seat, no luck.FInally naru opted for another plan of action and we took our posts behind seats and man…was it embarassing to stand behind people as they ate away to glory.Well, we had to keep our pride aside for the sake of food. No longer had the occupants got up that we took our seats and it began…..one thing to notice is that we get to see people who rush into halls as if they had been starving for weeks altogether and once on the seats they hardly take a fistful ( the irony !!!!)

All that was laid down in the plantain leaf was done and dealt with and no sooner had i gotten up that my seat was taken away……

PS : This happens probably due to one reason that a good share of people in trivandrum are either govt employees or otherwise people who do not have much time at hand…and nobody wants to take an entire day off in the account of a wedding ( if that be the case then people would be on leave 365 days a year !!!)