Sorry for the inconvenient

If I tell you I will sell you a mobile phone with its charger for Rs.10,000 and then I don't give you the promised charger, what would that constitute? That would constitute stealing because you I lied to you and took your money without giving you anything in return. If I felt 10,000 was not enough for me to give you both the phone and the charger, I should have told you that I am going to need extra 2000 for giving you the charger and then you could have had a choice as to whether you want to pay Rs. 2000 extra for the charger. Nothing is stopping me from quoting any price I want for my product . If customers feel my product is not worth its price, they will simply not buy it. All this seems simple enough. Substitute mobile phone & charger with the services offered by a household cook, a car cleaner, a sales representative, a maintenance engineer, Airtel Digital TV,basically your not-so-friendly neighbourhood service provider.

When the product in question is a service, how come we just feel disappointed and not outraged? How come we don't scream "Chor! Chor!". The quality of service across the spectrum is poor and we grudgingly accept it. We crib, complain and the most extreme form of protest we undertake is threatening a poor call-centre executive with consumer court proceedings. (I once asked a poor call-centre executive to spell her name and told her I am suing her and that she can expect summons form the court. She replied saying she was "sorry for the inconvenient" ) and writing a strong letter of complaint to the company ("I am shocked and dismayed to see such poor quality and service from a reputed company like yours") . In case of the cook or the maintenance engineer, we can't even do that lest we displease the moody gods of customer service executives and incur their wrath in the form of a untold resignation by the cook or a compressor-less refrigerator filled with now-rotting food.

If service providers feel that this is the best they can offer in the price we are paying, then its time for differential pricing. When you call customer care, along with "Press 1 for english", the kind and enthusiastic recorded-voice lady should also say " Press 1 for standard, Press 2 for gold and Press 3 for platinum quality experience". Standard would be "sorry for the inconvenient", gold would be "sorry for the inconvenience" and they would try to solve your problem and platinum, well they would agree to come on a sunday at a godly hour, they would fix the problem once and for all and they would compliment you on your glowing skin. When you take on your cook, she could tell you about three packages : rare, medium rare and well-done and you could pick a package based on your taste and pocket.

Maybe if we classify poor service as a form of theft and create strict non-acceptance of such theft, service producers will become more accountable for their product and realize that delivering poor quality service is as objectionable as delivering only one shoe out of a pair. Maybe then we can hope to actually get what we paid for.

P.S. My Airtel-digital TV showed "No signal" last Thursday and I paid a service engineer Rs.100 to come and change the angle of the dish by a quarter of a degree. This is the fourth time this has happened this year. Yesterday I got home and switched on my TV and the poor thing had gone all blue because again it had no signal.

You gotta work it!

People can be divided into two categories based on the role work or professional life plays in their life. One type consists of people who derive their identity from the work they do. Whenever they introduce themselves they start with :Hi, I am so-and-so, I am an Engineer/ Doctor/Teacher/Dancer. They derive their sense of achievement from the recognition they get for their work. A challenging project sets their blood pumping and their heart racing. They love the idea of a task well done. Now these people are not workaholics, because work doesn't seem work to them. They enjoy it. And the most embarrassing thing about them : They don't hate Monday mornings! For such people to be happy, their work needs to be a manifestation of their passion. The work they do has to make a difference in the world they hope to change. Unless this happens, they will burn themselves out slaving away at a job they don't like.

The other kind is not limited by what they do. Work is just one slice of their pizza. Professional life is important but its also just a means to an end.  They live for the weekend, when they get to live out their true life. Vacation Planning gets the attention it deserves. Their goals are not defined by performance appraisals and deadlines. They have hobbies and interests but they prefer to keep their extra-curricular activities and work separate and they are happy with that.  The don't want to turn their pleasure into work. They are fiercely passionate about one thing or another. They have a complex and rich life outside work. They socialize, travel and recreate in non-work related ways. They stop thinking about work the moment they leave office on Friday (or Saturday for the unfortunate ones) and don't start again till Monday morning.

Now I am not passing judgement on whether one type is better. Whether one type is more effective at the work place. Whether one type has a healthier personal life and work-life balance. I am only bringing out the types there are so that you can figure out which one you are. If you are type one, you better find a way to make your passion work for you otherwise you're going to be investing around 70% of your waking hours (and sometimes even your sleeping hours) into something which doesn't bring you joy. And if you are type two, don't get stuck in an unfairly demanding thankless job or under a sadistic boss. And remember having fun is work too and you are obligated to make that effort. Either way you gotta work it! 

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do

It irritates me when I keep checking my favorite blogs for updates, but there is nothing new. And when I get a little busy and lose track, or lose hope and stop checking,  there will be a string of new posts and I would feel left out. I would like to know in advance when a new post is expected, so I wouldn't get my hopes up on the other days nor would I miss out on the new releases. But now I realize, its somewhat difficult to organize your posting schedule like that. You never know when inspiration will hit you. For that matter you never know when a writer's block will hit you. You see,the flow of  ideas is like the flow of susu (pee). You never know when its going to come. And once it comes, you cant stop it! So for better or for worse, I've decided to keep two official posting days : Sundays and Wednesdays. I will try to put up new posts on these days as far as possible. Though I don't promise predictability, I do offer less uncertainty. And yes, the irony that today is neither Sunday nor Wednesday hasn't escaped me. But  a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

P.S. I realize this post assumes I have readers (yes reader-s, plural), but what the hell, I can dream big. Someday there might be people (yes, again, more than one) who would wait eagerly for my next post. So this post is dedicated to that day.

Green is good

I was talking to a friend of mine who has just finished college and is about to start a new job. And she says she'll miss college. And I'm wishing I was at that stage in life, about to start a new glamorous job. Another friend went back to college after working for a while and she says she misses the days when she didn't have to bother with assignments and tests. When you are in college, you cant wait to start working. When you are working, you want to go back to school. When you are single, you just want to meet the right person. And when you are in a relationship, sometimes you miss the single life. You got the spaghetti, but the pizza looks better. You live in Delhi, and dream of shifting to Bombay. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. You want what you can't have. And they want you to believe, the grass only looks super green, but once you get there, its going to be your daily boring medium green, just like before. But is it always so?

One of my favorite quotes is: " Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them". For example, I'm pretty sure I cant become an Olympic swimmer now, but you see I never wanted to. So the only dreams which will come in you head are the ones which are within your reach. (Here I mean true heart-stopping soul-stirring dreams. Wanting to become richer than Warren Buffet and hotter than Brad Pitt do not qualify as heart-stopping soul-stirring dreams. They are just the means to an end). So when you see the other side, and think to yourself, I haven't seen that shade of green in my pasture, and I think I like it, maybe its nature, inciting you, to go ahead and have that dream. Because maybe you were supposed to be on the other side all along.

Karma - The First Law

You may or may not believe in the Hindu concept of Karma. You do good things and good things will happen to you, you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. The traditional Hindu concept goes more like if you do bad deeds you will be born as a lesser creature in your next life (an earthworm maybe). And if you save up enough good deeds, you will be able to escape from the tedious cycle of rebirth and death and your soul will be free. Though the thought is tempting, I think we can safely assume most of us are not going to do enough good deeds to become freely floating souls. So the compact version of the concept works pretty well. What goes around, comes around. Good things happen to good people. Because without this assurance, without this insurance against the cruelties of fate, we would never tread the straight and narrow path of good. You know for every factor in your environment which is in your control, there are 17 which are not. So you do your time, and leave the those 17 to the powers that be, the justice of the universe, god, spirit, whatever you want to call it. You see,when Hindus started talking about karma, they were basically stating the law of conservation of energy. It as provable and as logical as that. Energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form to another. Karmic chips can neither be created nor destroyed, they can only be transformed, from one form to another. At the end of the day, when you do something good ( and by that I don't mean charity or selfless service only, I mean something constructive), you convert the energy of the food you've eaten, the sun you soaked, the water you drank ( the vodka too) into good karma chips, which can be later cashed in ( transformed) into positive results you want. Similarly, when you do some thing destructive, please note, its destructive only if it was done out of malicious intent*, you transform your body-mind energy into bad karma chips and you never know when the universe will want to cash in those. So karma is not a boomerang, its just a practical illustration of the good old First Law.

* If you didn't have bad intentions when you acted, you cant be held responsible for the universe having screwed it up.

P.S. The title of the post reminds of the era in Hindi movies where all titles were single words followed by an English definition- Duad-the run, Zurm-the crime, Mard-the man,Jaal-the trap,etc etc.

After putting up this post, I got similar reactions from two of my friends. Things were not going so well for them at that time and the question was " What did I do do to deserve this? If your theory holds, I must have dome something downright awful for this to happen to me". I know both of them are wonderful people and they wouldn't hurt any one on purpose. So I am telling you what I told them. Sometimes, you get sucked into someone else's karmic cycle. Look at Sita (yes from the Ramayan). She got kidnapped, got false accused of sleeping with the enemy and her husband left her. She didn't do anything bad to deserve this fate. But that is what happened. She got sucked into Ravan's tale of karmic retribution. Shit happens. But don't worry.  I am sure the first law kicked in and she's in a very happy place right now sipping mocktails and enjoying the good life.

Forget me not

I seem to be forgetting everything. I don't mean mundane things like where I put my keys or did i switch off the gas stove. Those I remember sadly. But things like the books I read long back. Ive forgotten the plot, sometimes even the names of the main characters. Ive even picked up a book, read a couple of chapters and then realized its not deja vu, I have read it before. (happened with the book 'The good earth' by pearl S. Buck). I was reading other peoples' blogs and came across several posts where readers admitted to having forgotten much of what they had read. Some were saying blogging is their way of archiving everything about the book so that they can look it up later. It gave me great comfort to see I wasn't alone and I wasn't particularly deficient in mental faculties.

This makes me go off on a tangent. Can I honestly, to the best of my knowledge say I know almost all there is to know about xyz? I realized I couldn't say this about anything. I couldn't say this about books (the authors Ive read), music (the bands I followed) , movies & TV ( the stuff I watched, in some cases repeated viewing of the reruns) and not even about what I studied in school or College. Even with the best of my efforts I cant convince myself that this is so because my interests and inputs are so varied and cover such a vast range that i cannot remember all, its like trying to squeeze 500 GB into a 250 GB hard disk. I know that's not true. Its just that in the period when this particular thing was occupying alot of my mind space I probably did know alot about it, but with time it has faded, and now I seem to remember only the broad outlines along a couple of interesting facts. So maybe I did know all about it, I just forgot.

Maybe its a multi-tasking problem, I am always so busy doing something else at the same time, that none of my activities get full attention, and thus none of them get registered properly. They just glide over the surface without penetrating.

Or maybe its a confidence problem or a humility problem. I cant make myself say I'm good, apparently not even to myself.

Whatever it is, I feel like my interests are defined by a Venn diagram, with multiple circles of different colors, which are fading over time, but the boundaries hold, the diagram is there. So even though i might not remember what Rebecca said to Maxim when he took her to Manderley for the first time, I do remember feeling like Rebecca, entering Manderley with her and feeling the magic. And maybe that's enough.