Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Bleeding heart...
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
The Rat and the Raj
There are a few characters and mannerisms that I would like to explain first before beginning the actual thing. This story involves 4 living things, 3 humans and one animal to be precise. Since the mode is narration, it would be a natural conclusion to all the serious readers that I am one of humans in consideration. The next one is my shadow at home, the person who relentlessly chases me around in the very little time when I am home and not chasing my incessant dreams, my daughter Siddhi. The next one, the protagonist of the story, would be my husband and Siddhi's father, Rajeev, hereafter addressed as the Raj. Leaving very little to your imagination, the animal in the story is a Rat, as the title signifies. Apparently, Raj and Rat rhyme, which is perfect! For any other animal I would have demanded a new husband, like a Drake for a Snake or a Calvin for a Cat
Another major observation that invites a mention here is the attire of the protagonist, the Raj. Its called 'Mundu' in Malayalam, which is nothing but a longer loin cloth, much longer infact. It makes the already attractive men of Kerala even more hot(What was I thinking I wrote this? or was I thinking at all!!!). Anyways, our men are extremely proficient in precariously managing this piece of clothing which more often than not is the only piece of cloth they have on their body, when at home.
So on this pleasant Good Friday morning, I was inevitably given the responsibility of feeding Siddhi, by my sadistic mom, who had a crooked smile on her face which could have meant only one thing, 'let me see how you do it'. For details on 'How to feed Siddhi and kill yourself', please visit my previous blog, 'Our world, being turned around'. To update you, Siddhi had acquired a new-found interest towards her father's car, which is again a very pleasing development, so all that I have to do now is to lock the two of us inside the Punto Emotion, turn on the AC, play the radio and wait for those invaluable moments when she opens her mouth. One of these days, I know that the battery would die and that would be a day when Raj might annihilate his family out of anger. As we stepped down to the courtyard, I saw him for the first time. Oh, not Raj, I see him all the time, I mean the other one, charming, attractive, naughty and nude, the Rat. I usually don't give out that typical girlish shriek when I see a mosquito, cockroach, lizard, house fly, honey bee or an ant. But rats and snakes and the ones in the higher echelons of the food chain do scare me. However, this particular specimen elicited no fear out of me, partially due to the fact that I had a the choice to running back into the house or forward into the car without the rat observing me and partially because the rat had excited Siddhi whose mouth was now open for a blob of Puttu and Pazham to go in. I quietly moved into the car with my girl, closed the door and soon forgot the rat and its nudity.
It was then that Raj materialized from nowhere, well not nowhere exactly, but it was unusual for him to be awake at 8:30AM on a holiday. Raj, as I mentioned earlier, was clad in his mundu and was walking around without a care in the world. It was precisely at this moment that he set his eyes on Rat. The events hereafter can be flavored with some deadly, threatening music. Try something on if you are game!
With or without the music, this is how the events progressed. Raj was doing all sort of funny and fierce acts as I looked at him. He was looking at me too, but I could make no sense of what was happening. It was then that I realized that he was trying to talk to me and the car windows were rolled up. I lowered them. Raj was calling out to me and was asking if Siddhi and I were safe. I passed a cursory glance at the world around me for any imminent threat to our lives, and finding nothing significant, replied that we were indeed safe. Raj slowly moved on, put on his shoes, which clearly was the only footwear he could find. I leave it to the imagination of the readers to visualize how a sleepy, hairy man, wearing just a mundu, adorns himself in a pair woodland shoes, all looking ready to go for a war. The rat was now alert and had realized that the husband of the sweet woman who had looked at it with adoring eyes, was onto him, perhaps for eyeing his pretty wife. It was then that Raj started a series of tap dance steps that made me and Siddhi gape at him for a few seconds before we started laughing out. Raj would tap his feet a few times, look at the rat, challenge it, and the rat, sensing danger would run a few steps before stopping to enjoy the rest of the tap dance. This went on until the rat reached the gate. But he was not one to give up so quickly. The rat turned around, footed himself and stared at Raj. The world stood still at this moment. Raj looked around, made sure no one is watching him(except his wife ofcourse) and stared back at the rat. Two strong living things, in a point of indecision! Raj concentrated, rat concentrated harder, I concentrated the most and Siddhi concentrated on the steering wheel of the car. After those precious moments of concentration, when the man and the animal looked exactly the same with Raj progressing to look just as cute as the rat, when I did not know which side the cheer for and when Siddhi did not know which button would turn off the indicator that she had just managed to turn on, the world lost interest in everything mentioned above. The rat quit and moved out, Raj looked around once again to make sure that he did not leave any witness of his valor behind and Siddhi turned on the wiper of the car. For those who have the music on, you may turn it off now, the story is over.
As I said in the beginning, this is pretty much it, no morals, no lessons to be learned, except that life at times leave events which may not last for more than a few minutes, but which can be recalled in the rest of our lives just to smile :).
Monday, April 2, 2012
I know where I am, but this is not how it should be!
Déjà-vu is among the most popular French words imported to English and means ‘already seen or experienced’. It is a kind of feeling experienced, when you are in a place or situation where you haven’t consciously been before, but you have a strong feel that you have been. Déjà-vu is more a phenomenon of the subconscious mind, usually attributed to dreams and the picture that they leave behind. As opposed to the popularity of Déjà-vu, more so after the Hollywood movie released in 2006, starring Denzel Washington, its literary mirror-image, Vu- jade is much less known, though technically speaking, is a far more common, probable and detrimental phenomenon.
Consider for a moment than you are attending an interview for a marketing job, with a panel well known for its core marketing questions and all of a sudden, the interviewers start throwing questions at you on cosmology or oceanography or some obscure and totally unrelated field, the feeling that you have that point can be described as a mild version of Vu-jade. In layman’s language, one may end up asking himself, ‘What the hell is going on and what do I do now?’ The very fact that you are thrown off the feet would seriously impair your chances of answering those questions, even if you have sufficient knowledge about the topics.
Vu-jade is a feeling of ‘I have never been here before or I know where I am, but this is not how it should be’. This is a trait inherent to the human mind. Humans are more or less seasoned to adapt to various circumstances, any unexpected or unreasonable deviation from this seasoning cannot be easily surmounted by the human mind. When a person is informed about a particular incident, and is given a clear picture of how things should and should not work, it is natural for her to adapt herself to the image she already has in mind. The moment things start working against this presumed interpretation, all senses fall apart. You have no one to turn to, no idea what to do and is in a disastrous state of emotional chaos and self destruction. Celebrated organizational theorist, Karl. E. Weick explains this phenomenon and how detrimental it could be for an organization or an individual, with the example of the Mann Gulch fire disaster. This was published in the Administrative Science Quarterly in 1993 and was widely read and acclaimed. The Mann Gulch fire disaster occurred in the year 1949, when a group of fire fighters were dislodged over the Mann Gulch area, where a lightening had sparked off a forest fire. Things started going wrong from the beginning itself, as the single radio that the team had was pulverized before the operation even started. The fire, which was initially considered to be a 10:00 fire, meaning it could be fixed before 10:00 AM the next morning, was much more aggressive and severe than was estimated. This ultimately turned to a death trap, killing 13 men, who surprisingly had means at hand to save themselves. Weick attributes the failure and the apparent death of the men to collapse of sense making, and the feeling was Vu-Jade was among the major contributors to this. Then men were dysfunctional as firefighters once all their perceptions about the fire ended up being wrong, they could not negotiate with their comprehensions and what they were seeing around and were blind and oblivious to the feasible solutions that could have saved their lives.
The human mind takes more than what we can possibly imagine in adapting to a situation it is not familiar with, particularly when another deeper picture is already embedded in it. Organization breaks, its members no longer trust each other and end up being irrational in their thoughts and actions and all hell breaks loose, thanks to Vu-jade.
In the management field, there is a huge and unlimited scope for Vu-jade. The more the uncertain and complex the environment becomes, the more are the avenues for the ‘Where am I?’ feeling. Resisting this becomes a necessary and sufficient condition for organizational stability and flexibility, both. The knowledge of the possibility of this uncertainty is the first step towards combating this omnipresent abnormality. When one is in a frame of mind to expect and accept beyond what is known, seen or experienced, very few things can surprise him. Wide experience, wisdom and a strong leadership always help. Respect for each other, the willingness to work together and the ability to think out of the box are among the other major contributors to get over or get used to the sense of Vu-jade.
So the next time you find the string of your expectations and assumptions broken, you can safely conclude that you are stepping into the quagmire of Vu-jade, and unlike his distanced brother Déjà-vu, this one is not really friendly or exciting, and if not looked out for, can beat the senses and the sense-making process in you!
Consider for a moment than you are attending an interview for a marketing job, with a panel well known for its core marketing questions and all of a sudden, the interviewers start throwing questions at you on cosmology or oceanography or some obscure and totally unrelated field, the feeling that you have that point can be described as a mild version of Vu-jade. In layman’s language, one may end up asking himself, ‘What the hell is going on and what do I do now?’ The very fact that you are thrown off the feet would seriously impair your chances of answering those questions, even if you have sufficient knowledge about the topics.
Vu-jade is a feeling of ‘I have never been here before or I know where I am, but this is not how it should be’. This is a trait inherent to the human mind. Humans are more or less seasoned to adapt to various circumstances, any unexpected or unreasonable deviation from this seasoning cannot be easily surmounted by the human mind. When a person is informed about a particular incident, and is given a clear picture of how things should and should not work, it is natural for her to adapt herself to the image she already has in mind. The moment things start working against this presumed interpretation, all senses fall apart. You have no one to turn to, no idea what to do and is in a disastrous state of emotional chaos and self destruction. Celebrated organizational theorist, Karl. E. Weick explains this phenomenon and how detrimental it could be for an organization or an individual, with the example of the Mann Gulch fire disaster. This was published in the Administrative Science Quarterly in 1993 and was widely read and acclaimed. The Mann Gulch fire disaster occurred in the year 1949, when a group of fire fighters were dislodged over the Mann Gulch area, where a lightening had sparked off a forest fire. Things started going wrong from the beginning itself, as the single radio that the team had was pulverized before the operation even started. The fire, which was initially considered to be a 10:00 fire, meaning it could be fixed before 10:00 AM the next morning, was much more aggressive and severe than was estimated. This ultimately turned to a death trap, killing 13 men, who surprisingly had means at hand to save themselves. Weick attributes the failure and the apparent death of the men to collapse of sense making, and the feeling was Vu-Jade was among the major contributors to this. Then men were dysfunctional as firefighters once all their perceptions about the fire ended up being wrong, they could not negotiate with their comprehensions and what they were seeing around and were blind and oblivious to the feasible solutions that could have saved their lives.
The human mind takes more than what we can possibly imagine in adapting to a situation it is not familiar with, particularly when another deeper picture is already embedded in it. Organization breaks, its members no longer trust each other and end up being irrational in their thoughts and actions and all hell breaks loose, thanks to Vu-jade.
In the management field, there is a huge and unlimited scope for Vu-jade. The more the uncertain and complex the environment becomes, the more are the avenues for the ‘Where am I?’ feeling. Resisting this becomes a necessary and sufficient condition for organizational stability and flexibility, both. The knowledge of the possibility of this uncertainty is the first step towards combating this omnipresent abnormality. When one is in a frame of mind to expect and accept beyond what is known, seen or experienced, very few things can surprise him. Wide experience, wisdom and a strong leadership always help. Respect for each other, the willingness to work together and the ability to think out of the box are among the other major contributors to get over or get used to the sense of Vu-jade.
So the next time you find the string of your expectations and assumptions broken, you can safely conclude that you are stepping into the quagmire of Vu-jade, and unlike his distanced brother Déjà-vu, this one is not really friendly or exciting, and if not looked out for, can beat the senses and the sense-making process in you!
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