Lifetime lessons and cost - a few thousand Rupees

15/08/2009

I haven’t learnt so much in the past couple of years as much I learnt in the past 4 days.
1) “People are very emotional here. You should be very careful with what you say. It may be professional for you but for them it isn’t that way.”

2) “You can’t simply expect that you state your expectations and they will deliver. Asking for a commitment to deliver on a tight deadline may be taken as something nasty is on the way.”

3) “You have to talk English slowly. Even if they nod, somehow you have to judge if they understood it or not.”

4) “It is not really necessary to come there” can also mean (and in 90% cases means) -> “don’t come along with me.”

5) “Just say in 1 line what do you expect to be done. The longer you talk the complex it gets.”

6) “Why do you spend your energy thinking what (and why) Mr. X is not doing something? Spend your energy in thinking something constructive that we can do in the 10 minutes that we will get today?”

7) Take these 2 lines:
a. “Since you are here, how nice it would be that this work gets executed by your hands.”
b. “Can you do please do this? It will really look nice.”

No doubts, 1st one works really well!


These are few I can recall almost immediately. I am enclosed in my IT office 5 days a week and hardly meet 5 new people in a month. But the fact is the kind of life I have at my workplace is nowhere close to the real world outside.

Just that my last Pondicherry visit, with the focus of popularizing and creating excitement about Hockey amongst the children, has been one of the most enriching visits in the recent times. I just wish there’s more on the way and my head stays open like this!

Someone told me that your skill is not tested when everything is ready for you. It’s tested when you have to work towards to it to make it ready.