BONDed Learning – All Shaken and Stirred!!!

I have watched and listened, with horrified silence, to innumerable conversations on the motives for learning (in the traditional sense of the term). And on every occasion that a request comes in to facilitate a training program, the motives shared have escalated in their ability to baffle one and all! India Inc. has transformed the learning function into a well-oiled, attention catching machine. Be it for rolling out a policy or a procedure, send out a tough message, to keep people occupied and last but not the least to keep employees away from their desks at “crucial times”  –  and the learning function has most often than not been able to rise up to the occasion. It’s a routine exercise! The customization of the program is primarily dependent NOT on the learner needs but on the client needs; and in this case, the organizational need. Hence, the knowledge acquired is precast, sensitized and censored and all this in a world where knowledge is freely available at the click of the internet button! OR IS IT????

It wasn't much of a surprise to me when a similar request came in today morning. Entertaining the muscle men from India INC has become pretty much a prefrontal cortex game. No surprises there! What started initially as a horrific revelation that we are swimming in a sea of contradictions has now graduated to a quiet and doddering acceptance of abandoning the mind, MY mind! Now, after all, aren't we surrounded by a plethora of such events? 

Guess what?! Learning is now an EVENT and we are all EVENT MANAGERS and I am a Learning Event Manager who hasn’t been able to convince this blockhead I have been speaking with (for the last couple of hours) that the 15 countries that constitute the Gulf is NOT the Middle East for India, but for the Western mind. Bring out the map and attempt to prove it to the logical mind and lo and behold, he reverts to the “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”! Happy Birthday Mr William Shakespeare... I am rewriting my own version of ‘Comedy or Errors’ where I paint myself as a character from Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 1) contemplating ‘to be or not to be’!

No, he doesn't have extended family working in Kuwait or Muscat! No, he doesn't enjoy the Dubai Shopping festival. No, he doesn't refer to any of the malls in or outside India as “Suk”! He is just the average Indian working in a MNC and has been told of the presence of his organisation in APAC (Asia Pacific), Americas, and EMEA (Europe, MIDDLE EAST and Africa). Aha, therein lies MY learning… Not etched on a map, not reflecting in commonsense but in the Induction manual and the site map of an organization.

‘Ok’… I said and decided to move on.

“You disagree?” pat came the reply. He looks at me with absolute bewilderment and a faint look of dismay that is more often than not best captured by our very histrionic Arnab Goswami. Our friend had replicated that look. His look seemed to suggest that I had committed a grievous sin. 

My faint attempt to shoot down our disagreement over the Middle East (just its name and not its existence) was a failure. I had to get out of this situation. There were far more important things to discuss! I was suffering a queer moment of utter ludicrous distress; a Pickwick flash– a moment when a person is panting, lying, sighing, crying, dying all at the same time; and amidst all this, with the fervent hope of displaying the characteristic of an educated mind (ahem) that entertains a thought without accepting it, I quipped “I need to process this bit of Information.”

Clearly, I was on the wrong side of the gun, yet again! “Process?! Whatever for? It says so right here in our manual. Check out the internet. Google refers to it as the Middle East” bellowed our very own version of Arnab. It was a bellow I will never forget. The last I heard it was when I laughed while driving through a fairly long tunnel. I had stopped laughing for a while after. Today I listened to the same sound pitched at a much higher decibel. I won’t laugh again for some time.  I watched his disbelief and listened to him spew the www and the http:// mantra.  He had been poured into his learning clothes and had forgotten to say when.  It was a downpour of education and he had forgotten to say stop either. I needed my escape hatch.

I smiled, batted my eyelids, relaxed my posture, bent ahead, and with all the calm that I could possibly gather went for the one final guillotine! “I so agree. We human beings need to know enough to open our mouth just to eat; but certainly no more. For the rest, I will leave it to Google.” The "I" did the trick. He smiled and relaxed for a moment tasting his sweet victory. 

Having addressed (or not) the issue at hand, we moved on to discussing the more important things in life, his life rather, like the designing of a learning ‘event’ on ‘Innovation at the workplace’… Yes …Innovation!!!!

He spoke, I heard. He interrogated, I responded. He smiled, I grimaced. He leaned back, I leaned in (not the Sheryl Sandberg lean in). He rested, I rusted. He different, me indifferent.  He crossed his arms ….. and I let go!

I am reminded of Wodehouse in Love among the Chickens: “I am not always good and noble. I am the hero(ine) of this story, but I have my off moments” 

“Ripped, Waned and Wrinkled Die-Nasty…."

There is a bizarre semblance detected in the Indian masses, our social media and the character of the fabled Rip Wan Winkle. They all rave, rant and do brouhaha when the water is pretty much under the bridge!!!!

Things are scarcely going good for the Congress Party. The grand old party started off with absolutely no plan or man (ahem woman too, considering it believes in their empowerment), no strategy, and no goal. At best, the bits and pieces of extrapolating their strategy is basis what one can gather from several interviews, headlines and articles staged by a decidedly idiosyncratic and belligerent social media with its own axe to grind. 

The stark absence of senior Congress leaders (the old guard), the deafening silence from the likes of Chidambaram, AK Antony, and Mani Shanker Aiyer, the visible faces of less influential and inexperienced leaders like Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh, the shelving of Pranab Mukherjee, the making of the president, the back door lip-serviced alliance with AAP, the release of “The Accidental PM”, the campaigning of Priyanka Gandhi in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the ho-hum interviews of and with RG, the matte finished lip service rallies .... the list goes on!  There is hardly any effort being made by the party to augment alliances and / or strengthen itself basis any of its past laurels. Last but not the least, the shocking comment from Amarinder Singh of giving ‘a clean chit to Jagdish Tytler is perhaps the last nail that the party needs to assemble its 2014 coffin!  He makes a comment on a televised interview on a Saturday and the distraught masses wake up late Monday morning to protest outside the AICC office which has kept mum since them.  Clearly, feelings like distress, a sense of being thwarted, and resentment take a back seat over the weekend and the weakened!  Am not sure if the Congress party buoyed by the media is arguing its way to prevail by doing the exact opposite of what the BJP expects it to do.

There is a pattern detected here – an insuperable aversion to any kind of rewarding labor that will aid them stay on in power. It doesn't take too long to logically deduce that the efforts put in are insufficient to win a national election. And thus the intriguing speculation – is this a plan good enough with the goal to win a defeat? This conjecture rings true than that of any other.   It’s best to scheme a loss while pretending to be in the game; than to make any efforts to win the 2014 elections!  It is a well couched victory solely spelled as a defeat?

The defeat of Rahul Gandhi at Amethi, and / or of Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareli will perhaps be the signature of a well-orchestrated self-inflicted beating.  

So, what does the party have to gain with this victorious defeat? 

For one, it sews up its role as the key opposition in Parliament – albeit, a weak, slighted and feeble voiced opposition that the BJP and 24 of its disparate allies will have to deal with.  A parliament is a monolithic and (hopefully) homogeneous institution. The role of the opposition is primarily to offer political alternatives, and to articulate & promote interests of the voters. The congress party, in its present shape and structure lacks the IQ to effectively play this role. This inability could only further bolster the ruling party’s forte – its audacious high-brow aptitude!  One can only hope that this aptitude comes with some remnants of a sense of latitude, accommodation and common-sense when debating and deciding on the nation’s most complex and sensitive issues.  

With the BJP leading a NDA government, the country hopes for good governance in the area of Infrastructure, Finance, and perhaps Defense too. There is immense speculation and anxiety on Foreign Policy and Home. It’s best to stay tight-lipped on HRD and education. In a world governed by International Laws, the nation and the opposition will witness duelogues between the largest and the biggest democracies. The BJP’s opinion of our neighbors, its commitment (within the manifesto) to construct the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, and the heavy-duty  influence of the RSS on its governance are all pretty much indicative of round 2 of an accidental PM; albeit in saffron.  ALL this is fodder for the Opposition!!!! The only tool that the opposition will need is a tart temper, a sharp tongue and an edged media – all of which it has aplenty.

The congress party now has a 5 year period to groom its Gen-Y.  The 10 years that Rahul Gandhi spent on learning instead of developing a vision and leading the party towards a victory will now be replaced by a 5-year period of learning for his sibling. It’s time for her to enter the fray.

The Hindustan Times predicted that the 2014 election stands poised to deliver big surprise and observed that the defeat of India's oldest political party and dynasty is a real moment of reckoning. Guess, the prediction and the comment is not true anymore. There will indeed be surprises; however, none of them big. A victory of India’s most feared (for fanatically propagating a Hindutva ideology) and insular party seems to be an absolute. The defeat of India’s oldest political party and dynasty is a given and NOT a moment of reckoning. The aftermath of the defeat is what is reckoning. It remains to be seen if this much speculated Plan B of the Congress party, that suffers from a lack of IQ and the old guard, will be successful. We can only wait and watch. What can guarantee a victory of Plan B is the ruling party’s (BJP's) complete and unmitigated lack of EQ. Narendra Modi’s ability to move the public is not sustainable.  Not every meeting will be a rally and not every decision secluded to the state of Gujarat.

…. Feel Free to Walk A(way)

It’s been over a day since I  witnessed a conversation on the most dialogued theme on Indian TV – POLITICS and India Election 2014; and amidst all the scramble that my brain tried to harness, there was this one bit that got me to shift my focus (literally and figuratively) to a moment from the past. I knew that the conversation reminded me of someone – an individual who I have so loved to hate. I grudgingly pulled out the volume to reread one of my favorite parts from Atlas Shrugged. It’s the scene where Ragnar Danneskjold (a modern day pirate) meets Hank Rearden on a road at night and hands him a bar of gold, returning some of the money that the government has stolen from Rearden over the years.  Ragnar proceeds to explain that he’s not there to ask for money but to return it. The following excerpt pairs nicely with the conversation I witnessed on TV yesterday and to a reference of Mr Modi’s quick exit (3 min 32 secs!!!) from being interviewed by Karan Thapar.

 “I thought that I had seen everything one could see and that there was nothing I could not stand seeing. But when they took Rearden Metal away from you, it was too much, even for me. I know that you don’t need this gold at present. What you need is the justice which it represents, and the knowledge that there are men who care for justice.”

Struggling not to give in to an emotion which he felt rising through his bewilderment, past all his doubts, Rearden tried to study the man’s face, searching for some clue to help him understand. But the face had no expression; it had not changed once while speaking; it looked as if the man had lost the capacity to feel long ago, and what remained of him were only features that seemed implacable and dead. With a shudder of astonishment, Rearden found himself thinking that it was not the face of a man, but of an avenging angel.

“Why did you care?” asked Rearden. “What do I mean to you?”

“Much more than you have reason to suspect….

“Did you say that you’ve spent a long time collecting this money for me?”

“I have collected much more than this.” He pointed at the gold. “I am holding it in your name and I will turn it over to you when the time comes. This is only a sample, as proof that it does exist. And if you reach the day when you find yourself robbed of the last of your fortune, I want you to remember that you have a large bank account waiting for you.”….

 “How did you collect it? Where did this gold come from?”…

 “Who are you?”

“Ragnar Danneskjold.”

Rearden looked at him for a long, still moment, then let the gold fall out of his hands.

Danneskjold’s eyes did not follow it to the ground, but remained fixed on Rearden with no change of expression. “Would you rather I were a law-abiding citizen, Mr. Rearden? If so, which law should I abide by?..

“Ragnar Danneskjold…” said Rearden, as if he were seeing the whole of the past decade, as if he were looking at the enormity of a crime spread through ten years and held within two words.

“Look more carefully, Mr. Rearden. There are only two modes of living left to us today: to be a looter who robs disarmed victims or to be a victim who works for the benefit of his own despoilers. I did not choose to be either.”

“You chose to live by means of force, like the rest of them.”

“Yes—openly. Honestly, if you will. I do not rob men who are tied and gagged, I do not demand that my victims help me, I do not tell them that I am acting for their own good. I stake my life in every encounter with men, and they have a chance to match their guns and their brains against mine in fair battle. Fair? It’s I against the organized strength, the guns, the planes, the battleships of five continents. If it’s a moral judgment that you wish to pronounce, Mr. Rearden, then who is the man of higher morality: I or Wesley Mouch?”

“I have no answer to give you,” said Rearden, his voice low.

“Why should you be shocked, Mr. Rearden? I am merely complying with the system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for. If they believe that the purpose of my life is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed. If they believe that my mind is their property—let them come and get it.”

The world we live in today is not free in any sense of the term. We are born, we live and we die and amidst this cycle are spent countless moments defending and/or championing our stance / view point / opinions to all and sundry.  The only way to deal with an unfree world is perhaps to become so absolutely free that my very existence is reflective of an act of rebellion. Mr Modi’s decision to walk out of that interview was an act of rebellion.

I hate Mr Modi’s authoritarianism, feel repulsed by the fact that he has not taken responsibility for Godra, and cringe at his hate speeches. Nonetheless, I have paused (albeit for a second) to wonder if he is trying to make a statement?! And if he is, guess therein – in that very statement –is exemplified the definition of definitive and decisive politics.

I have taken utmost pride in the fact that we, as a nation, are foremost a Republic and then a democracy. We choose our leader and earnestly hope that he/ she will display wisdom. For that wisdom to be at play in its purest and most sincere form is the prerequisite of freedom of thought for that one man/ woman. Mr Modi, like Ragnar Danneskjold, perhaps in his own abhorrent way was saying to the likes of Karan Thapar.. “If they believe that my mind is their property – let them come and get it”!

Sigh… Shrug… Shrug…… !!!!