Our Life

7th Oct’2010

Every morning over my regular cup of tea, my wife and I discuss our daily work schedule. As my wife is more addicted to sleep, I often read her the headlines of Bangalore Mirror. As I turned over to today’s newspaper, it brought back the memories I have of the IT industry. When I started around 2004, BPOs were the major attractions for young breed of men and women. Even though I was not working in a BPO, somehow my lifestyle mapped to BPOs’ lifestyle. Starting my work around evening; coming back home the next day; having dinner in night-canteen or dingy food-courts, etc... One of the only benefits with this lifestyle was to get away from the bad traffic we all are accustomed in Bangalore. While the whole city, tired and frustrated, returned to the comfort of their home, we start our journey to office and while the same tired faces starts with wet hair and hot head towards office, we are yawning and heading home in the yellow-plated vehicles.

Yellow-plated vehicle, the cabs provided by our organization for picking us and dropping us back. A few hours of journey, few laughs with our buddies and lot of calls with our Managers on the missing reports, this is what we remember of the time we all spent together in the cab. Sometime even comparing like a kid who has got a better cab for this week or this month.

And today when I looked Pratibha Murthy murder case conviction report by the fast track court, we all know how it has changed our mindset. Earlier even though most of my female colleagues were cautious about when and with whom we are traveling back, yet we all were naïve of problems we could have faced. Sleeping on the way back home, talking over the cell-phone with our loved ones and not knowing which path the cabbie has taken are some of the common mistakes we all did. Our company enforced us to have the cab driver number, but most of us didn’t have the hotline number our company had published number of times. To add to the pile of mistakes, the guys always used to think it is a problem for the women and they should be more responsible. As friends we failed number of times to make sure they aren’t the last to be dropped. Time and again such incident shows us the real value of life. But we fail to learn, “Someone has to die in order for the rest of us should value life more”. Kids are piled in taxis and they go to school, yet we are waiting for a time some accident claiming an innocent child’s life. Every day I see the Volvo bus leaving Whitefield overloaded beyond capacity, yet we are waiting… Our life deserve more attention, it is precious!

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Our company has organized a Creating Writing Contest where the participants have to come up with a story based on the QUOTES provided by the organizing committee. The QUOTE I have picked is marked in BOLD and this is my first entry in the competition. I might just send more... let see how much creativity flows when pen-paper unites.

The essence of victory!!!

Though I have kept cricket out of my blog as much as possible, it is hard to not talk about the learnings I have earned after watching yesterday India's thrilling 1-wicket win against Australia. To start with I have to honestly accept that after watching cricket for 20 great years the game still gives me goosebumps and the tension like I had when I watched the HERO CUP semi-final against South Africa. Somethings doesn't change and similarly the passion of cricket has lived all these years in my heart.

But yesterday's match brought out a array of emotions about life. To start with is self-belief. In time of pain, in time of anguish some of us start to doubt once ability. Even though our abilities are still the same, we have the same range of shots, a small pain can bring doubts in our mind. Laxman demonstrate just how to over come physical shortcomings to play to his true potential.

What was more interesting was Laxman's approach. Things were much relax for India when they required 90-odd runs with the last 2 wickets remaining. Relax because no one expected to win, the opponents were smelling victory and hence the pressure on Laxman and Ishant was really less. Laxman grabbed this slim opportunity and injected slowly confidence into Ishant by giving him all the strike. When we, mortals, sitting on our computer were fuming why Laxman is giving all the strike to Ishant, it was somewhat a calculated plan to make Ishant get his confidence. And as India reached closer, it was not harder for Ishant to play the bowl but for Aussies to dislodge him.

Even though it is just Cricket jibber-jabber, I learned the true value of trust. Irrespective of a player having an ability to perform certain activity, if he or she is part of the team, TRUST is of the utmost importance. Also from any team-players point of view, earning this TRUST is very important. We go about doing our duties every single day as an individual, but at the end we impact a team. Team can be our family, our friends, our colleagues.

At the end, when things were hanging to a thin-thread, Laxman had a low moment in an otherwise great innings. Losing his temper and an otherwise cool head Laxman gave viewers a moment of laughter. We all (especially myself) should at all time keep in mind that everyone are not the same, we all think differently, we all function differently.

We can take away so many things from yesterday's match. We can sit back and read so many articles on this victory...somehow somewhere while reading all these articles, I felt there is more than what meets the eye. The real essence of victory...our learnings!