Amlan's Blog

The Corporate Lesson! (May 09) He learnt at school to be an honest kid and thus he became one His mom said, be a good boy, and there he was He father said, work hard and there was a hard working young man Set out to face the world, and make his own living He got into the corporate world and met someone called the Boss The boss said, work hard young man, be honest and good, I will take care of you Wow! Said the young man. He was impressed The learning’s of his lifetime were about to bear fruit With tons of vigour and loads of energy, he set out to toil hard In his field of work, he worked and worked, till the sun set dark With little in his belly he resumed before the sun woke up To see his field lush green with crops grown to his heart’s content Out in the market, he went to sell, happiness knew no bounds Attired in his best, he spoke with pride about his crops in joy But Alas! There was no buyer in the market. They were all gone They had different needs, fine. But why did they ask me ...

Amal’s Farewell (Mar 10) Over the phone, Amal was always at a distance, literally, as well as figuratively. However, when I came to Bangalore, things in store for me were pretty much different. With Amal sitting next to me and Srini just behind, life was quite a paradigm shift from Mamata Banerjee’s Kolkata, and also Amit Mukherjee’s. Amal’s a fast guy; he does everything fast; eating, walking, working. Although, I am not very sure if he has fast production abilities like Easwara, be it the man or the God. His speed and mine were poles apart; by the time I thought and wrote one sentence, he would have written three; and that too, with deletions and corrections. Amal was too good at multitasking, the definition of multitasking being: doing multiple things at the same point in time. You could see him churning data from an excel, handling a call from Kottayam, giving me a tip before I go to Srini’s cabin, and in between everything, do a search in Google and show some details about a moh...

“If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”, goes the old adage. The common understanding here is that peanuts refer to a low salary and monkey to an inefficient employee. I prefer to view the same in slightly different light. Born as equals, all of us have capabilities, have potential; however do have a monkey within. Everybody has one, which is by default in the ‘sleep mode’. Now, the moment you give peanuts to a guy, the monkey in him wakes up; gets into the ‘play mode’. Here again, the peanuts in my opinion would not be just low salary. It could be any benefit lesser than what he deserves; salary, recognition, treatment, support, encouragement, blame, faith, environment etcetera. Adjectives can go on. At this juncture, another maxim tempts me for elucidation; ‘There is no free lunch’. So, if you are expecting 100kgs of performance from a payment of 80kgs of benefits, you are actually expecting a 20kg of free lunch! To make matters worse, if the manager who does this 20kg ‘hera pheri’ i...