Are we learning from our mistakes?

It was one of the rainy days, I and my son, Sidhaarth where going on the car. I was in the driver’s seat and he was seated beside . As we all know,  the condition of our roads during the rainy season is horrible with pot holes here and there, allowing for stagnation of rain water. As I was driving , my car glided through a puddle of water and the water happened to splash upon one of the pedestrian walking by the side. I did not take much notice of it, but my son called out to my attention and said: “Dad, you just splashed the dirty water on a pedestrian”. By his voice I could understand that he was unhappy of what just happened. So, I took a defying stance by telling him, “What am I to do? The roads are like that”.  My son responded, “No dad, if you slow down the car where the water is stagnated you can avoid splashing water, on others”. It was a invisible slap on my cheeks. I realized it was my mistake. I felt bad for being insensitive to the pedestrians. I resolved within myself, I will be more concerned about the pedestrians hereafter.

There are many instances in our life, when people bring to our attention our mistakes, but most of the time, we just try to defy it, with our justification. Though later we realize that we were actually wrong. It is our ego, our sense of superiority that does not allow us to take it on the face.

Our natural instinct when somebody pinpoints our mistakes is to question, does that person deserve to comment on us. If we keep looking at things that way, nothing good is ever going to happen in our life. Let us say, you go to a doctor and he tells you that you have to stop smoking to save your lungs or stop drinking to save your liver and the same evening you see the same doctor, having a nice smoke and drink in a bar, you may tend to ask, “he does not practice what he preaches, then why does he advice”. But is that a wise question to ask? No!  You take his advice for his competency, as a doctor and not for his character as an individual person.

When some of my close circle of friends, pinpoint my mistakes, though at the first instance it makes me a little worried or upset, after a few minutes it makes me realize where I am wrong. It deepens my awareness. People who see us from far, may think we are extra ordinary, but it is those close set of people who see us at close quarters, who can pinpoint our mistakes. It is the special right we ourselves have endowed upon them.

My friend from the training fraternity, Mr.Angappan often uses this phrase in his training sessions. “Be happy, when your wife pinpoints your mistakes. Be happy when your boss finds fault with your work. Be happy when your close friends, tell you are wrong. If not for them , who has got the right to pinpoint our mistakes. And if there is no one to make us aware of our mistakes, how do we learn and how do we grow”. I think, it is a very valuable point. God has blessed us with wonderful relationships, not just to pamper us with nice pleasing words, but to give some constructive criticism which helps us change for the better.

In the name of pinpointing the mistakes of our close ones, let us not develop a nagging tendency and make ourselves hostile to them. There is a subtle difference between nagging and pinpointing. For the purpose of clarity, let me add, pinpointing is saying once and leaving it there. It just brings awareness to the other person and the change has to happen from within. Nagging is stressing on the same mistakes again and again, till the other person has changed. But most of the times, nagging leads a person to repeat the mistake again and again rather than change. Or at the very best, the person may pretend, as if he has changed, but real change may not  happen.

I received a nice thought provoking SMS, which read , “Every one says, we learn by mistakes. But the learning happens only when we take steps to correct our mistakes.”  I think it is very true. We often admit, we were wrong, but we do not do much to correct our mistakes.

As we reach the end of 2009, and about to start the new year 2010, let us resolve to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them.

Happy Reading,

D.Senthil Kannan

Article dated Dec'09

A Tribute to Kamal Hassan

With a lot of media hype going on, about Kamal Hassan celebrating 50 years of filmdom, I feel a compulsion within myself to express my admiration for this great versatile actor, of whom I have been a great fan since my childhood. I think it is just my way of paying my tribute.

It is such a delight to see so many people, from different walks of life, showering praises on him, at this milestone year of his career. This handsome, dynamic and ever youthful actor,  has always deserved a Oscar, but has not even one to his credit, till date. Yet he is not demotivated. He keeps trying. He is innovative. He works on new ideas. He wants to bring the latest in world cinema to the tamil audience. His movie “Vikram”, was the nearest to James Bond movie in tamil film industry, those days. A man of bold attempts, who does not get bogged down by criticism and does not fly too high on praise. He knows the balance. He is a man, who is so passionate about his choosen career – cinema. It would not be high sounding if I say, he eats cinema, sleeps cinema, breathes cinema.

Cinema has been a very powerful medium, for ages, much before television crept in. His movies have influenced people greatly, not only by the different hair styles he keeps or the fashionable dresses he wears, but by the variety of roles he plays.

Kamal has not been just a role model to many, but many roles he has played in his films are worth being  modelled. I personally, have been greatly influenced by his films. I would not hesitate to say that my life, has been greatly moulded by this silver screen hero. To start with, I aspired to do a MBA abroad, after seeing his movie “Thoongaathe Thambi Thoongaathae”, wherein he plays the role of a foreign return. His movie “Unnal Mudiyum Thambi” triggered the natural instinct in me to do something good for my society. “Thevar Magan” was yet another film, which reinforced my beliefs of living and doing good for my home town. “Anbae Sivam” was a classic portrayal of good human relationship. There are many such films, but these movies in particular have created a real life impact, on me.  Some of the values that are deeply rooted in me, has got to do something with the morals, I imbibed from his films.

In real life too, there are so many qualities I have admired in him. He was the first person in the cinema industry, who had all his fan clubs converted into service clubs. No matter how good these clubs serve, I am sure his intentions were good. He propogates the cause of blood donation and organ donation, by being a living example. He is a full body donor. He practices what he preaches.

He is a perfectionist. You can see perfection, in the role he plays. I have heard that he spends a lot of time, observing people, whose role he is about to play. Like, if he has to play the role of a mentally handicapped person, he spends several days watching mentally ill people, their actions, re-actions, physical movement etc. Many a times, he criticizes himself, for his own flaws , which I think is a  great quality, that has taken him so close to be a perfectionist.

Inspite of all his greatness, he is so humble. I had the opportunity of meeting him in a cinema shooting, when I was in my college days. He was shooting for the movie, “Sathya”.  I shook hands with him, but I had no words to say. I was just spell bound when I saw the shadow image in reality. It is the awe feeling, anyone of us feel when we meet someone, who we have  admired from a far distance.

I don’t know whether it is befitting to call him a “Universal Hero”, as he is fondly called by his fans. But undoubtedly, he is a hero Tamil Cinema can be proud of in this century, not just for his acting skills, but also for the technological innovations, by which he has taken Tamil Cinema to global standards.

Happy Birthday, Kamal. I wish you live many more years and keep giving more meaningful movies, to tamil cinema.

Happy Reading

D.Senthil Kannan

Article dated Nov'09

The Joy of Finding New Relationships

In the last 3 months, we had 3 weddings in our family. Two of my nephews and one of my nieces got married. It was a pleasant experience as all the family members got involved in organizing the function and making a lot of preparations. It was a bonding time for all of us in the family. I personally felt happy about the new relationships these weddings brought into my life. Our family looked a little bigger than it ever was, with so many new faces joining us. As it is said, marriage is not just a joining of two persons, but two families. For sure, I know at least a 50 people more who I did not know before. It was a time, I reflected a little deeply on the evolving nature of relationships.

Just looking at the way family relationships are evolving, I feel that the families are shrinking in size, with most of the new generation not preferring to have more than two kids. Gone are the days, when we saw large families of 8 to 12 children and so on. Those days, we had so many uncles and so many aunts, so many cousins, whose name even we were not sure of.  But with the current trend, the number of relations we will have in the next few years will automatically get greatly reduced. Already, most of us are finding ourselves in a situation where we have more friends as compared to the number of family relations.

Try out this small exercise. Take a piece of paper and write down the names of all the people who you know, people whose names you can recognize by seeing their face, and the people who in turn know you, by your name ( Not like, I know Manmohan Singh, but he does not know me. Ha! Ha! ). You will be surprised that you cannot write more than 2000 names, no matter your age,  your memory capability or your networking skills. 2000 people in a world of over 6 billion people is such a tiny figure. Is it not?

The need to relate with people, to share and care is one of our primary need. We as human beings crave for social belonging and acceptance. The feeling of being as a crowd gives a sense of well being and security. In order to achieve this we need to re-learn the art of relating with people. We can no more take our relationships for granted. We need to nurture them in order to sustain them. No one is going to come talk with some one who always has a long face, who always shows anger, who has a criticizing approach, who gives a sly look, who gets tensed and causes tension to others, who is harsh with his words and tone, who does not respects other feelings, who tries to unduly dominate in a group. Infact, by doing so they are losing out on relationships, day by day and there will be a day when they will be all alone. Even then, they will keep blaming the people for deserting them and never realize where they went wrong.

Let us not close the door of our heart to new relationship. Let us always have a welcome smile, so that anyone feels comfortable coming and talking to us. Every new acquaintance is a opportunity for a wonderful relationship to blossom. What we are going to do with the acquaintance is totally in our hands. We can maintain a “hi, bye” relationship or take it a little further and try to understand them, share their interest and relate with them, know more about their children, remember their special occasions and give gifts, visit them when they are sick or hospitalized,  and develop a little intimacy. These little acts of kindness will go a long way in building great relationships.

Friendliness is not a terminology meant only for friends. It is common to all relationships. What we need to understand is that, in the future relationship will greatly depend upon how friendly we are with people and not by the relationship. Let us be a friend to our relations, be it our spouse, our children, our parents, our sister or brother, our cousins, our uncles and aunts, our in-laws. In due course, you will find you are not alone, but you have a great team to back you up.

Happy Reading,

D.Senthil Kannan

Article dated Oct'09

Not Bureacracy, But Attitude Is What that Matters

A few weeks  back, I went on a business trip to Malaysia and Indonesia. Now that Air Asia operates very economical flights from Trichy to Kualalumpur, and moreover Trichy being quiet closer to my place, I chose to use the Trichy airport. The new Trichy airport has been beautifully done up.  It has now got an international feel, and as I start to feel proud of this, I happened to encounter as stinking incident with the officer at the airport immigration counter, which I would like to share.

I was accompanied by one of my staff and as it was his first time trip, outside the country he was a bit nervous about the various formalities like the baggage scanning, immigration, customs clearance and security checks.  His fears went right. The immigration officer who called him into his counter to process his passport, started asking a number of irrelevant and meaningless questions, like do you have enough money to travel abroad, have you made currency declaration in your passport and he also started to demean my staff by saying, “you have not even gone to a neighboring Indian state, but you wish to visit a foreign country”.  I was watching all this and at some point of time, I got so irritated by his attitude that I stepped into the counter to the rescue of my staff. I told the immigration officer, that he is my staff and I can clarify all his doubts. It is only after I could show some personal affluence, the immigration officer decided to keep his mouth shut and  clear his immigration.

Now in contrast, to what happened in Trichy I saw something very pleasant and innovative at the Kualalumpur Airport, which is worth mentioning and appreciating. On our return from Kualalumpur to Trichy, we were passing through the Malaysian immigration clearance. At each immigration counter, there was a small board along with 3 push type buttons of different colours. The message on the board read, if you are satisfied with the service of this immigration officer, press ‘green’, if not satisfactory press ‘yellow’ and if you had a problem with the officer press ‘red’.

The lady who processed my immigration, did not ask me a single question. She saw my immigration form, my passport, did her work in less than 2 minutes and returned back my passport with a smile. I was so pleased by her service that in return, I simply expressed my thanks by pressing the ‘green’ button. Perhaps, if there was something like  a ‘pink’  button for excellent service,  I would have pressed that.

Just see the contrast. The work done by the immigration officer in Indian airport and Malaysian airport was the same. They both belong to the same bureaucratic tribe, yet one was able to give a heartwarming happy experience and another a heart aching miserable experience.

 ‘Bureaucracy’  is not so much a dirty word as it sounds. The dictionary meaning of bureaucrat  just says ‘a non elected government official’.  I appreciate that, bureaucrats are keen on following rules and procedures and doing their best to keep the systems in place. But in the first place they should realize that all rules and procedures were formed to ease the handling of people and issues, and not to create untoward hardship to them.

As compared to a politician who is “a elected government official”, a bureaucrat certainly scores higher in my scale. The only issue here is the bureaucrat does more than what is expected of him and the politician does less than what is expected of him. The general public gets irritated, when these bureaucrats make use of the powers bestowed upon them to cause hardship to a common man.

Bureaucrats have got a key role to play in the execution mechanism of the government. If only they could do their work with a proper understanding of their work, with thorough knowledge of the process and with a  positive attitude, they can create a visible difference in the country.

IT IS NOT BUREACRACY THAT MATTERS , BUT IT IS THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEIR WORK AND PEOPLE THAT MATTERS.

Happy Reading,

D.Senthil Kannan

Article dated Sep'09

The New Generation Homemaker

The days of living in palatial bungalows, with a dozen servants doing the household chores is of no much relevance today. In other words, it is too much a luxury that anyone can afford.  Today people prefer to small houses and manage all the household chores all by themselves.

Why? The simple reason is that, you don’t find servant maids to work on your terms anymore. This type of workers are slowly vanishing  and it is high time, all of us wake up to the reality.

Look at the advanced countries. Do you find servant maids? No. The housework is done by the inmates of the family itself. They use vacuum cleaners to clean the house and washing machines to wash their clothes.

Let me share a real life observation. When I was a team member of the Rotary GSE to Finland, I was staying as  a guest in one of the Rotarians house in a town called Rovaniemi. This Rotarian, is a well to do businessman in that town. He has a big beautiful house. His wife is a home maker and they have two small sons.

On a Sunday morning, as I woke up and was spending some time with these kids, I saw the there was another lady in the house, who was working along with the Rotarian’s wife. They were cleaning up the house, changing linens and doing a multitude of household tasks. It was a marathon work of over two hours. At the end of all tidying up, they both sat together in the dining table and had their breakfast together. I guessed, it was one of her relatives.

After some time the Rotarian’s wife, introduced me to her by her name and said she has come to assist her with household work. I did not get a clue. I gently asked her, whether she was her relative. She replied again, that she had come to assist her. I thought she did not understand my question and left it there.

After sometime, the strange visitor left the house in her nice new car.  The Rotarian’s wife, then came up to me and told, “Actually, she is our servant maid. But you see, people here don’t like to be called servant maid, and that is why I told you that she had come to assist me”.

I was in for a cultural shock. The house owner and servant maid having breakfast together. Is this OK with you? If you are not, be ready for it.  Whatever happened in the Western countries a decade back is happening in India, today and surely this too is bound to happen.

There is another choice. Get into automating your household, as much you automated your office or your factory. These are the days of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, microwaves ovens, motorized wet grinders and dishwashers.

Well, most of the city dwellers have got into this lifestyle. People living in small towns, still prefer the comfort of servant maids to do these odd tasks. I have heard people saying, the rice batter for making idlis is softer only when hand ground; the dirt in the shirt collars go away only with hand washing; the dirt in the wall corners, does not come away in the vaccum cleaner; microwave is only good for heating, it is not good for cooking; the dish washer is not good to clean indian style stainless steel utensils.

If it does not work to your expectation, my suggestion would be to write a letter to all these companies from who you bought these modern home appliances and inform the limitations of the gadgets they have sold and ask them to improve upon the technology. They will certainly work on it. Just like how all these inventions came about owing to human necessity, similarly, pinpointing the problems would give scope for improvement of the product design.

Perhaps all of us bought a vacuum cleaner, when the Eureka Forbes salesman convinced us buy one, but then it was put in the rack of useless things. It is time to take it out and get it working. Using of equipment is a skill we need to learn. It is just because we did not take time to learn to use it, that we are experiencing so much inconvenience. Like a saying goes, “a bad works men often blames his tools”. Just like how, sweeping the floor with a broom is a skill, cleaning the house with a vacuum cleaner is also a skill.

Also practice the habit of doing small things by yourself, rather than depend on a servant for each and everything. To start with, teach your children to clear up the mess they created. Ask your children to clean their food plates, before and after a meal. These small habit formations, will go a long way in helping them in the future.

Well, it is entirely your choice. A choice of convenience over convention. Well, it is better to accept it by choice rather than having to forcefully adapt to this lifestyle, in a later stage.

Happy Reading,

D.Senthil Kannan

Article dated Aug'09

Expectation Vs Reality

Disappointment, Frustration, Anger and all such related feelings, stem out of the same root cause. The root cause being, that many a time the reality does not match expectation or in other words the reality falls short of our expectations.

Let us examine the truth of the above statement in light of a few illustrations.

Your child is very intelligent, but somehow he does not score good marks when it comes to his academics. Every time, you hope he would score better next time, but the marks never seem to improve. In spite of your constant advice stressing the importance of marks, you do not see any visible result. You are disappointed.

You start a business venture, trusting one of your good old school day friends, who you have known for years. You have been pally pally all through your life. At some point of time during the course of business dealings, there is a misunderstanding between you and your friend.  He behaves very differently. You are shocked. His careless behavior leads you to a big financial loss.. You feel cheated. You feel betrayed. You experience disappointment.

One of your newly appointed manager, is able to show tremendous improvement in your sales volume. Your business starts to boom. You feel like a lucky star and start building so much faith on him, that you delegate most of your work to him and move into your comfort zone. All of a sudden, he hands over a resignation letter, because he is got a better package somewhere in a foreign country. You feel helpless. You sense a fear of your business future. You never thought, he would quit all of a sudden. You are disappointed.

Does any of this situation , sound similar to your experience. Well many of us would have had some unpleasant experience of this sort.

The expectation was we wanted our child to score good marks, our friend to be trustworthy, our staffs to be faithful, but in reality things did not happen the way we wanted it to happen. Repeated disappointments leads to frustration and this frustration leads to anger. Is it not? At the end of the day, we are either angry with others or angry with ourselves.

All external anger, when given a deep reflection will boil down to internal anger. We will realize that it was our mistake to trust someone or expect someone to behave in a way that according to our perception is right. But they were their own selves. And as always they will have their own side of the story for the purpose of justification.

The truth is, it is difficult for anyone to match our expectations. Expectations often lead to disappointment at work place, at family and amidst friends.  We expect our close friend to remember our birthday, but he may not call up. We expect our staff to be self motivated, but very often find ourselves pushing them to do the work. We expect our home to be always clean and tidy, but our kids throw up their things, all over the place. As an end result we end up with so many day to day disappointments, that life gets really frustrating at times

I am not advocating that we should not have trust, faith or expectations on anyone. But what we need to look at is the limitations of the people, from who we expect and manage our expectations accordingly. Your trust in people should be based on the tried and tested method. We need to assess their ability, their interest and their integrity before we could set our expectations on them.

Expectations are like a seed planted on soil. Before we plant the seed we should know whether that particular soil has the potential for the seed to grow into a tree. Once we are convinced and sow the seed of expectation, we need to water it with words of motivation and appreciation, and provide the sunlight of affirmation and confidence. Eventually, we will realize that more and more of our expectations, start to turn into reality.

In short, people management is nothing but expectation management.

Happy Reading

D. Senthil Kannan

Article dated July 2009

The Silver Linings

There is a beautiful English phrase, “look for the silver lining in the clouds”. I am actually witnessing a number of such silver linings, recently.

An unfortunate road accident, in Madurai ring road highway, had left my wife’s right arm fractured. The first silver lining was that, the accident did not kill any of us, nor any one in the car in which we collided with. As my wife was whining with pain, at the moment of the accident and I was trying to reach out to my relatives  through my mobile to get her transported to the hospital, one passer-by – a young gentleman cared to stop his car and volunteered to take us to the hospital. We took his help and made a quick exit from the accident spot. Here, was one more silver lining.

In just a day after the accident, my wife got operated and had a steel plate fixed in her arm to reconstitute the bone structure. With many relatives and friends visiting us at the hospital, we found a lot of solace. The feeling of being cared for and being important was another silver lining.

We mentally got prepared for a month long rest and healing time. There were just two issues which created a lot of unrest to us. One was the PALMS Summer Camp which was scheduled in the first week of May and the other one was the proposed family cum friends overseas trip to Thailand and Malaysia, which was in Mid May. After some contemplation, we decided to postpone the PALM Summer Camp to the last week of May. The holiday tour we had promised our kids, was the only concern left, unaddressed. With little worry, we told the doctor about our foreign travel plan. We had no clue that the doctor would give us a green signal. He said, that she will be perfectly alright in 10 days and she can travel anywhere, provided she takes a little precaution.  It was now a matter of our own choice. It was a great mental dilemma, whether to go or not to go.  Normally, any one would opt to cancel the trip and stay back. With mixed feelings we took a bold decision, to go ahead with the tour.  The decision turned out to be good. We enjoyed a great holiday abroad and came back recharged with a great feeling of accomplishment.  If we would have stayed back, we would have undergone more mental agony and depression. The tour created a positive mindset. The focus on pleasant experience made the painful experience minor. This again was a silver lining,  I should say.

It has always been me, telling my wife to do this and that. Now that she was unable to do many things, I not only had to do all my work by myself, but also had to assist her to do her work. However, I felt it was a great opportunity for me to serve her and pay back a little of her care. I realized how much, I have taken her for granted. We never realize the importance of electricity until there is a power cut. Similar, was my situation. This realization, I feel is one more silver lining.

I have read these words quite often - every experience has got something to teach us. This experience indeed taught us a lot. It helped us to realize the value of each other and the value of  our own life. This I think is the greatest silver lining of all.

Every one experiences difficult moments in life. It is the ability to bounce back fast that really matters.  We were able to bounce back fast, not only because of the miracle of modern medicine, but also owing to the love, care, support, motivation and prayers of our family members and our close set of friends and relatives.

Happy Reading,

D.Senthil Kannan

Article dated June 2009