Back to Whites

Accepted. Dark colours are depressing. I was pretty happy with the last look of my blog. But suddenly, the interest was fading away, may be it was the MBA's gruelling schedule or just something which was bound to happen. But it feels so good to be back in a refreshing white background dotted with greens & blues as well as a couple of cute looking buttons sitting pretty at the start & the end of the blog. Not to forget the latest addition 'be the first one to comment' somehow managing to reduce the embarrassment of seeing '0 comments' for the last five posts.

The social media is everywhere & so it is now on my blog. You can share articles on facebook, tweet it re-tweet it & keep tweeting till that count increases. You can check out the profile on linkedin or follow me on twitter. It is so much in our face & probably is the future's global village. It takes time to put all this stuff on the blog. But I guess, it's worth it. It feels great to work or what some call 'waste time' on something that you so much want to do. For those 3 hours, I forgot what Kotler said & what not. What is the valuation & what is the top headline for today. I was there, working full time & whole heartedly on one of my passions.

I am kind of assured that I will settle with this look of my blog for quite a period. It is clean, it is cool, it is stylish, easy on eyes & pulls me to write. Also, it has pretty much got what I always wanted with my blog. And for all the slow broadband connections out there, it loads faster & smoother. I spent quite a time last time I did this exercise sometime in September, but now I would term that as more of a learning curve. Some stepping stones for this dashing new template.

Thanks to everyone on the cyberspace for their constant support throughout this exercise. And a special thanks to http://www.freethemelayouts.com/ for giving this beautiful template and also to the Google God which enables a mechanical engineer to play with HTML/ XML codes & customize it to my requirement.

Hope the new layout rejuvenates the blogger inside me & also some of the readers I so dearly miss..!!

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Work Life Balance : Why Balance?

This Friday, when most of us at IIM Shillong were really praying the Gods to just end the week & bless us with a weekend, a discussion in the class of Organizational Theory awoke the sleeping giants inside most of the students. It was related to work life 'balance'. The moment the discussion facilitator uttered these words, everyone was out their with most vicious weapons to fight the other side with full ruthlessness. People had very strong views on the subject & the emotions of the class made it very evident. It was touchy for some & a matter of pride for others.

I too jumped in & stood against those supporting that work is what they enjoy & thus it is not justified to make so called 'work-burden' stand as a culprit in the land of the law. I disagree & yes I do. First of all the phrase is flawed, why balance? Why someone never questions whether one requires more of one & less of other. Is work that important? And whatever once says the undercurrent is the money. People may say that their hobby is their work & so they enjoy it. These are very few cases & can be excluded while making a judgement in the present business context.

It is not that I am anti-work. I love doing work & do it well as well as efficiently. As far as work slogging is concerned, I did it when I worked for my last organization. But the problem is not too much work, the problem is normal amount of work allocated to a 'small' amount of productive time. The second reason is the impression management that starts post 5 30 pm in most of Indian organizations. If you love your work, love it the way you can sustain it. Why burn out? If you plan properly, everything can be finished on time & in the best possible manner.

There were discussions on investment banker's lives, BPO/ call centres, problem of foreign clients. These are genuine problems & everyone is aware of them. There is need for innovative job designs to fight these odds which are cropping very fast in our economy. Special situations require special treatments. Also, one of the students said that people have different priorities at different points of times. Young people like to slog & when they get married they find it tough to 'balance' it out. It is so very true!!

In the end, we need to understand that money is not everything. Moments spent with your friends, a small family picnic, dropping your kids to school, narrating them bed time stories, going on date with your wife, taking care of your parents post retirement are far far important things than colouring the columns of spreadsheets. Hope I get such a 'balanced' job...........!!! Amen!

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Voice from the Time-Trap...

The time that never comes back, the times that we miss, the moment that was timed to perfection, the time that flies by, the tough times, the time that went unnoticed, all the very reason that time is such a treasured possession. I might be grossly at error to coin the term 'possess the time' but can we? May be not, time is so intangible yet the most tangible consumption that we continuously make, without stopping, without even thinking of it as a consumption.

Aren't there times we feel the disconnect between two moments? You try to think yourself into a situation or come out of it. What happens in between? Time just vanishes. I know it sounds too philosophical but this very vanishing nature of time amazes me. When it starts, you can mark it, remember it, note it down, click a snapshot of it. Same goes with the end. But the area in between is unknown to anyone, it just disappears. Again, do we possess that time or we are the possession of time for that period. CATCH22.

This brings me to question the concept of past, present & future. Who defined it? How? & when? What purpose does it serve. Only the association with the incidents of our life can be called past or is it something more that that? What is present? a vanishing time? & Future makes things even more complicated, beyond the basic comprehension of the human mind. It is not related or associated with our life, it is not vanishing, what is it? Is it stored, held static by some force in this universe or is it dynamic. Is our future past of someone. If yes, how will it vanish if it becomes present. Tricky, all very tricky!

Why I am saying all this? what is the stimulus? There must be something. But the problem is that I really do not know. I feel very obscured today. I really can't get a sneak peek into the future if at all it is there in a static form. If it is changing every moment, why should I even think about it. It will be a useless exercise. Probably this is the thing that is making me frustrated, making me feel awkward. It doesn't feel nice to be stuck in something. It feels like a time trap. How to get out of it? I think only time knows, but the problem is I don't know the time!!!

I don't think that this article will make sense to most of you. It is a very eccentric article, probably my first. I myself don't know why I wrote this. But knowing that I know something about the situation gives me relief that I am in some kind of control of the things around me!

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