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”
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