A Tribute to the Missile Man of India

Dear Readers,

The news of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s death came as a shock to all of us. Within a few minutes we heard the news, we could see all social media such as Facebook and Whatsapp, flooding with condolences messages and memoirs of the great leader.

It is normal for such messages to be flowing when a great leader of this stature, passes away, but what impressed me most was that, many of the sharings were of personal in nature.  Many had posted the photos they had taken with him; some had posted images of appreciation letters he has send to them and few had posted the autograph they had received from him. It was a true revelation to see that this 83 year old man, has personally touched the lives of so many people in a positive way, right from young students to seasoned academicians.

Something notable about, Dr. Kalam is that he was a multifaceted person. He was a highly intelligent scientist, an honest president, a guest lecturer giving intellectual and inspiring talks to college students, a motivator to school students, a poet who penned a few master pieces and a writer who has written a number of books and most importantly a dreamer who had a dream for India. Through all the above roles he played, he just seemed to have had a single minded focus of making India, a super power. All the efforts he has made, has been in this direction.

His book “Vision 2020”, is a road map for India. He has laid the manifesto for a future India.  This book can be looked up as a ready reckoner for the legislators, when making policy decisions and for the future citizens of this country to work on those lines to realise his dream of a strong India.

Through his many speeches to school children he has sown the seeds of thoughts that has aspired then to become contributing citizen of strong nation.

His contribution to the field of aeronautical science, space research, nuclear tests, has put India in the map of the world, as a strong country. This has really made other countries look up at India, as a fast emerging super power.

Dr. Kalam’s life is  spectacular. From being born in a poor family in a rural hamlet in the southern corner of India to reach the status of president, is not a normal fete. When we come to know of the different incidents that has happened in his life, through his interviews or reading his books, our respect and admiration for him grows, many fold It is a classic example of how hard work, determination and aspiration, can take someone to great heights in life.

Dr. Kalam was a man of values and principles. He is someone who has “walked his talk”.  He is a portrayal of simplicity, integrity and selfless service. He was a true visionary, who consciously stood clear out of all political parties and remained neutral throughout his entire career.

There are so many things we could learn from Dr. Kalam. The most significant of which, I think is his humility. In spite of all the greatness he has achieved, he was a very simple, down to earth person who connected so well with the common man, that he was always looked up as the “People’s President”

In one of his speeches to school students, he says that, though he has invented so many missiles, what he considers as his best invention, is the invention of the light weight callipers, which he created using the composite material used in building missiles. By doing so he was able to reduce the weight of the callipers from 3 kgs to 300gms. This helped the disabled children, to walk with ease. This he says is what brought him the most joy in his life.

In addition to the many doctorates conferred upon him by many leading universities, he has won many of the prestigious Indian awards including the highest civilian award, “Bharath Ratna”. It sounded so apt when our honourable prime minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, tweeted that “Bharath has lost a Ratna”, on hearing the news of his demise. 

Dr. Kalam has written many quotes. The one that impressed me most was “Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended”. I only pray and wish that, the great dream of making India a  super power, by the great dreamer Dr. Kalam be transcended to the future generation. It is only by accepting responsibility to make his dream come true, can we pay a true tribute to this great leader.

Happy Reading

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Sep 2015

SMART WORK CAN NEVER REPLACE HARD WORK

“There is no substitute for hard work.”

Thomas Alva Edison

Dear Readers,

Of late it is becoming a fad to say, “Don’t do hard work, just do smart work”. By the face value of this statement, it sounds justifiable because today there is so much of technological advancement in every field which has cut down the need for hard work.

Right from home automation, office automation, industrial automation to farming automation, we have found easier ways of doing thing, which otherwise was very time and labour consuming.

For example: In a home scenario, a mixer grinder or a washing machine can do the work in minutes which would normally have the house lady working hard on the same for few hours together.

A computer at office, is more efficient than 5 accountants using pen and paper method.

A machinery at the factory can produce millions of pcs within limited time with 100% accuracy, which was not possible when things were handmade,

A tractor in the farm can plough vast areas of land within an hour, which would take days to do, in the days of bullock cart.

So these are smart ways of doing the same work, we did before but in much lesser time and that too without much effort. So every advancement in technology has led people from working hard to work smart. This in turn has given way for ample free time, to engage ourselves more productively.

So let us try to figure out, why then do people emphasize so much on hard work?

With the invention of the calculator, technically there is no need to know any mathematics to do a simple calculation. All a person needs to know is the numerals 0 to 9 and the functional symbols for addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. So, for example, if a person wants to add 2345799988 + 427256560, all he needs to know, is these numerals and plus symbol, printed on the keypad and when he presses these in the right sequence, the answer will automatically come. This is a classic example of smart work. But let us say if the same person, needs to know the logic behind the answer he needs to do the hard work of calculating with pen and paper or counting with fingers or some mind crunching, to understand how the result is arrived. So true knowledge lies in hard work.

Every invention or a discovery is a result of sheer hard work.  Thomas Alva Edison worked very hard to invent a light bulb, and so there is a famous saying by him, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work”. Similarly the great voyagers tried many routes, before they could reach the intended destination. The culmination of all this hard work is the basis for creating all the smart technologies, available in this world today.

This is an evolving continuum. One advancement leads to another. There is a saying, “Don’t re-invent the wheel”, which means you don’t have to start doing anything from scratch. We just need to build up on the existing technology. Every new technology is an upgrade of the existing technology. For example, handwriting became typewriting, type writing became computer typing, and now computer typing has moved to speech recognition typing or predictive typing. So, one technology leads to another. But imagine if someone had not taken the pain to form different types of alphabets, give it phonetics and put strings of letters together to form words and again strings of words to form sentences, then there would not have been any written language in the world. The process of creating such basic structure, upon which all developments are built is the core of hard work. Speaking the language thus created to communicate, is the core of smart work.

So, to simply state, “All creation is hard work and all application is smart work.” The point to understand is that hard work cannot be replaced, because while smart work can accelerate the speed of work, it is hard work that gives substance.

Happy Reading,

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Aug 2015

Why we are late for meetings?

Dear Readers,

Do you notice that it has becoming more and more common for people coming late for meetings?

If you are a member of any social organization, you would fully agree with me. When there is a meeting scheduled at say 6.30pm, we hardly find anyone there at the stipulated time. People start trickling down slowly from 6.45pm onwards and if we are lucky we can start the meeting at 7.00pm or it could extend till 7.30pm. Meetings starting 30 minutes to 1 hour late, than the announced time is becoming more and more common and acceptable.

I, as an organizer of many meetings and events, see this factor of people turning up late, becoming very casual and the worst part is no one seems to be really worried about this. Adding to this, people jokingly comment IST does not mean Indian Standard Time, but it means Indian Stretchable Time. But I think this is not a joke that we should laugh over, rather something we should feel ashamed of.

One of the things, we Indians are extremely bad at managing is TIME or rather being punctual. I think we need to look into this issue seriously, because it gives a very bad image of our country and our work culture. We are good to give excuse as to why we are late, rather than finding ways to be on time.

So, I was just pondering as to why people are late and I could come out with three possible reasons.

1.      Priority

2.      Difficulty

3.      Superiority

Let us look into each factor in a little more detail.

Priority:  Generally a meeting information/ invitation is circulated at least a week in advance and so the concerned person would have blocked that time for the meeting, if he is interested in attending.  However there could be some last minute unexpected happenings which could distort the plan, such as a surprise guest at home or having to take someone to a hospital and so on.

These type of situations are unavoidable. As time management is all about priority management, it is understandable, that at this type of situations, people may get delayed to arrive at the meeting after attending to these emergencies.

Difficulty: Another reason could be few people have difficulty in managing time. This is because they don’t have a proper system in place such as maintaining a calendar, diary or a mobile reminder app etc. So they tend to forget their existing appointments and commit the same time for another appointment too. This leads to turning up late.

Few other people are not just conscious of how much time it would take to get a work done and therefore not good at anticipating the time needed to complete a job. So they may tend to take up an overload of work and later feel that they are not able to finish it on time and therefore one delay would leads to another, ultimately making them late to arrive at the meeting.

This type of situations could be avoided by better planning and learning to use some time management tools.

Superiority: Some people want to give an image of being a very busy person and consider their time value to be superior to that of others and they feel it is OK for other to wait for them. This VIP culture of making people wait is the most unacceptable part. This is common with politicians, bureaucrats and some businessmen too. Let us say they have been invited as the Chief Guest, they tend to think that they need to arrive late, to maintain their pride.  But I think,  true dignity, is when they turn up on time and be a role model to others.

This type of situations can be easily avoided if one starts becoming conscious that others time is equally valuable as their own.

One of the noteworthy things, I have observed while attending meeting abroad is that, most of the participants arrive at least 15 minutes early. Once they arrive they don’t create any commotion. They just choose a comfortable location for them to sit and pick out a book from their bag and start reading it. When it is time for the meeting to start they just put the book back and get to the meeting seamlessly. For them being early is not a waste of time, but it really avoids last minute hurry and panic. Moreover they have also learn the art of using waiting time into productive time.

While some reasons for being late is acceptable, many or not. So, let us take time to analyze, which one of the above factors is stopping us from being on time for meeting and take proactive measures to correct it.

Happy Reading,

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Jul 2015

SWACH BHARATH FOR A CLEAN INDIA

Dear Readers,

The launch of our Prime minister, Narendra Modi pet scheme “Swach Bharath” has created a buzz all over the country and it is really heartening to know that after so many years of tolerance to unclean surroundings, there is someone at the helm who is giving a special impetus to this issue. It is a welcome development and we need to see how to make this dream vision a reality.

Cleanliness of a country, greatly impacts the image of the country. There is a lot to be learnt from the developed nations, when it comes to keeping the environment clean.

Keeping our surrounding clean is a habit that has to be inculcated right from childhood. For this to happen, we will have to be role models to the future generation. Most of our people are so hardwired with their unclean life style that it is difficult for them to break the pattern. The only way to make them change is strict enforcement of law and penalty for non-adherence. Words of advice will not make a big difference. At the meantime, the Govt. needs to create provisions/ infrastructure which will enable the citizens to maintain a clean surrounding.

Let us explore some of the areas, that needs to be taken care of :

Sufficiently placed public dustbins: Dustbins should be placed in all public places, every street corner and also along pathways. The dustbin should be large enough and the approach to the dustbin should be clean. Most of the times, we see dustbins overflowing with garbage that people hesitate to go too near and start throwing the garbage in the peripheral of the dustbin. The idea of waste segregation at source, is still at a conceptual stage. The Corporation or Municipality workers, are not aware of the importance of this waste segregation and therefore don’t follow it up, religiously. If they follow, it will not only keep our environment clean, but it will also keep our environment green.

Cleanly maintained Public toilets: There are public toilets, in a few places but it is maintained very poorly and no one feels comfortable to use the public toilets as the stink keeps away people even from a distance. Water availability is a problem. Government should take steps to maintain public toilets clean, in par with the public toilets maintained in good shopping malls.

Additional cleaning measures for Tourist locations: Tourist locations are prone to more littering as compared to other places because of sale of food items all around the place. Therefore, additional efforts needs to be taken to keep these places clean. As many foreigners come to India to visit the tourist places, this is where they get to judge the cleanliness of India. When these places are dirty then automatically they get the impression that India is unclean and unsafe.

Ban on Street vendors: The street vendors cause lot of waste disposal in public places. They sell eatables, and people who buy and consume it throw the left over or the waste plate/ packets in public places. Paper packets, Plastic packets and Aluminium foils of edible items like Chips, Chat items and other snacks are found all around the place. The only way to stop this is to ban street vendors and enforce the law vigorously.

Ban on Paan and Chewing Tobacco: In Singapore, sale of chewing gum is totally banned, as people tend to spit it or stick it in public places, which is a nuisance to others. I think similarly we should similarly ban the sale of all "Paan items and chewing tobacco" which people spit all around the place and make it dirty. It is really difficult to clear up the mess this type of stain creates on the walls and floors, in public places.

Enforcement of the ban on smoking and drinking in public places:  We are all aware that smoking and drinking in public places is banned, but hardly do we see people adhering to the same. It is probably because there is no strict action taken against violators. Also we could see broken beer bottles thrown in public places which is not just a sore to our eyes, but a health hazard too.

Avoidance of Plastic Bags and Packing material: Plastic bags seems to bring a lot of convenience to the shopper, but the problem is when they just carelessly throw away those plastic bags, which creates a big mess all around the place. Either the Govt. should ban the use of low micron plastic bags or the shopkeepers have to start charging for plastic bags and disposable containers which can to great extent, make people think of carrying their own shopping bags are at least to use the existing plastic bags and not just throw it away.

If the Government takes some proactive measures to address these above issues, I think India is not far from making this ambitions vision of our Prime Minister a reality.

Happy Reading,

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Jun 2015

DON’T PUNISH THE MESSENGER

I had the opportunity to attend one of the programmes of Mr.Marshall Goldsmith, the author of the popular book “What got you here, won’t get you there”.  This book talks about how people who have achieved great level of success become complacent at a point of time, when they become closed to feedback. Having tasted continued success over a considerable period of time, they tend to believe that they have mastered their art and can never go wrong. This is where they get into trouble.   They start to get the feeling that of “I Know it all” and this could cause huge damage to them.  So, he advised that no matter what height you reach in life, be genuinely interested in getting feedback, because feedback is the best and most economical mechanism available to periodically evaluate ourselves and improve upon our work.

Marshall doesn’t stop there. He takes it to the next level and talks about something called FEED FORWARD. While feedback is about looking back at the past and finding out what went right and what went wrong, Feed forward is about asking questions to people, even before an event occurs. It is continuous evaluation of yourself and your work. The feed forward technique is done by following these 8 steps.  Ask – Listen – Think – Thank - Respond -  Involve – Change - Follow up. 

For example: You just randomly go and ask someone in your family, your office or team, “Hi, what do you think I need to improve upon? How do you think, I am progressing in business? Do you foresee or anticipate a problem in my way of doing things? When you ask such proactive questions, there is a possibility of people opening up to you, with their thoughts and opinions and here is where the most challenging part lies. You should be absolutely open to hear what they say, with genuine interest rather than brushing away their comments as inappropriate or that is not for me.

Here is where he introduced a new terminology, which caught my attention. He said “Don’t punish the messenger”. What he meant by this was that when someone makes a negative comment or a criticism, don’t get angry with them, instead be grateful and thank them, because they are the ones who dare to pin point your flaws. By getting into a justification mode or getting defensive, you are not safeguarding yourself rather you are becoming susceptible to impending danger. 

A simple yet powerful example, he shared to describe it, was this: Let us assume you are driving the car with your wife by your side and she keeps telling you watch your speed, it may be irritating to you, but ultimately she is only trying to help you and therefore you need to understand the genuine intention, rather than getting angry. If you brush off, what she says by reciprocating with statements like, “Mind your business, I know what I am doing; “Don’t teach me driving, I am a better driver than you” you are only losing out on a valid input. Moreover, this type of attitude will make people stop pointing out flaws to you, as they don’t want to be shouted back. Instead if you say, “Oh, I am sorry. Thank you for pointing out. I was not aware. I shall slower the speed”, then you are showing them that you genuinely care for their opinion. By doing so you make them feel that you value their opinion and they would be willing to point out your mistakes, without fear of being punished.

Many of us have this tendency to “punish the messenger” because we think they don’t deserve to comment upon what we are doing. These messengers could come in the form of a friend, a spouse, parent, our children, a colleague or even a  floor level employee. No matter who says it, if we always have an eye to see and understand the other person’s point of view, we would gain a new perspective which would be of immense help to us.

Of course, it doesn’t sound pleasant to listen to critical comments. But if we start to look at it as constructive criticism, we would be better prepared to face the challenges, rather than being comfortable in a world of praise and then finally waking up to a day of shock. So let us be open to feedback and make sure that we don’t punish the messenger, because by punishing them we are putting ourselves in a vulnerable position.

Happy Reading,

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated May 2015

STOP ASSUMING, START CLARIFYING

I would like to share an interesting experience that happened recently. Few days back, I was in Chennai and I had to do some local travel. On having seen many newspaper ads and having heard from friends about Ola cab services, I thought I would give it a try. So, I downloaded the app from the Google Play store and installed it on my mobile. As I opened the app, I found it to be a quick and easy way to book a cab. For the sake of those who have not used this app, let me briefly explain how it works. Once we download the app and open it, the app asks for some basic information about ourselves, which we require to fill in, in order to sign up. Once we are done with it, we need to make sure that the GPS is kept on, in our mobile. When we open the app, we will find two icons with options: “Drive Now” or “Drive later”. If we choose drive now, the message request gets delivered to Ola team and Ola tracks our exact location based on GPS. It then searches for all the Ola cabs near our location. Once it identifies them, it sends out the request to all those cab drivers and whichever driver accepts the request is assigned to pick up the passenger. The driver is sent a SMS of the passenger name along with his exact GPS location. So, the vehicle automatically comes to the customer, wherever he is. The passenger is also sent a SMS with the driver name and car Number.

Using this facility, I too made a request and within 3 to 5 minutes a cab arrived. As I was new to Ola, I was not sure of how it works. I did not check my SMS too. I was just amazed to see an Ola cab approaching me, within few minutes of sending a request. I just got into the cab and said Adayar. The car started moving towards the destination. After few minutes of travel, I got a bit curious to know how this system works. So, I initiated a chat with the cab driver, asking how Ola is doing and how is it they are able to reach the customer so quickly.

So he started explaining the process and in the process he said, “just like you would have received a SMS from Ola giving the driver name and car number”. It was here, I got a bit puzzled. I told him, I did not receive any such SMS. He said, that I should have received it. So immediately, I picked up my phone and checked to find that it was there. So I just read out the message loud which had the car number and driver name. The driver was shocked. He said that was not his name and that was not his car number. It was then he figured out, that he has made a wrong pick up and blamed me for not checking out his name, before boarding the car. I from my point of argument said, “I am new to Ola and I don’t know how it works. It is you who should have verified the customer name, before I boarded the vehicle.” After all the finger pointing, I asked him to proceed to my destination. He said that it was possible, as the trip is monitored by the Ola team and he has to drop me back at my pick up point and pick up the right customer. I had only two options. Either I get down right there and board a different vehicle or go back to the point of pick up, where the right cab assigned to me, would be waiting. I chose the latter and so he drove me back to my starting point which was around 3 kms. He then dropped me back, where luckily the car assigned to me was waiting.

It was altogether a funny episode, but it also made me reflect on my flaw of assuming, without seeking clarity. A saying goes, the word ASSUME itself means, don’t make an ‘ASS’ of ‘U’ and ‘ME’. I realized I had just done that, by making one such wrong assumption.

Many times in life, we make some quick assumptions like this and end up in trouble. No doubt we are too busy and we act in a hurried manner, but that should not disturb us being sharp in our day to day activities. We need to pay attention to details.  We need to be more effective in communicating and make sure that the other person has clearly understood what we have told them. Does it not happen, that many a times, we give some instructions to our subordinate, colleague or family member, assuming that they have understood, but end up seeing that they have totally misunderstood and done something totally different.  Later we blame them for doing it wrong.  If we take the little extra effort to clarify our communication, we can avoid ending up in such a messy situation.

Let us stop assuming and start clarifying.

Happy Reading,

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Apr 2015

What is your freedom figure?

I attended a weekend seminar called Achievers Conference, few months back at Bangalore where a number of international authors and speakers, had come and gave talks on the topics of their area of expertise. Notably, most of the topics were related to help participants create a passive income.

For the sake of clarity, let me explain the difference between Active income and Passive income.

Active income is something, whereinyour physical presence, time andskill is needed to create the income. For a job goer it may be salary, for a professional it may be his daily revenue through service and for a small shop keeper it may be his daily earnings through sales.In all the above scenarios the need for the person to be physically present become inevitable in order for the earning to be made.

Now let us say, due to some unforeseen happenings like a serious illness or an accident, the person is not able to go for work for few days together, it affects his earnings. For example, a Corporate employee may face loss of pay, a professional like a doctor or lawyer will not be able to render his service, which would translate to loss of revenue and for a small shop owner he may have to keep the shop closed, till he is back to normal. In all these cases, time loss equates to money loss.

Passive income on the other hand is the income generated, even without you needing to be physically present.Some examples of passive income is interest on deposits from banks, dividend on investment from companies, rental income from house property or commercial property, royalty income from sale of books, MLM,etc. In all these cases, even if the person is not able to be physically present for a substantial period of time, his income will continue to flow in from the respective sources.

Now coming back to the seminar, the seminar I attended had speakers, who talked about earning passive income through investing in house properties, writing book, creating an online membership site, selling e-books, investing in the equity market and commodity market.This programme attracted over 2000 people and it was clearly evident that there is a growing interest from people on creating a passive income. Taking into consideration the inflationary trends, the increasing living cost and in order to secure for a happy retirement, it is essential to think about creating a passive income. Moreover, creating a passive income also helps the family to be financially secure, in the event of death of the bread earning member of the family.

In this context, one of the speaker, talked about ascertaining something called a “Freedom figure”. He said everyone should identify his freedom figure and start working towards creating it. What he meant by freedom figure is the amount of money a person needs to have, in order to live the lifestyle he desires, even without working. Let us say, you need Rs. 1 lakh per month to live the life you desire, it means you have to create an investment portfolio, which will assure that the individual will earn a lakh of Rupees every month. That amount of investment is called the “Freedom figure”. Sounds easy, isn’t it? But if you look at it more deeply, you will understandit is a very complicated question. This is because, thefreedom figure will differ from time to time. What we may think is a good amount of money today, may look like too small an amount in a few years from now. It is because, weare never content with how much ever we earn. There are so many ways to spend money, when it comes to indulging in luxury and we will always end of comparing our lifestyle, with that of others. In this way, we can never be free. We will just end up in a vicious circle.

I think, that this freedom figure is very much of an illusion. The real freedom figure, lies in our contentment. When you know that you can adopt yourself to any lifestyle based on the family’s financial situation or the external economic environment, you have found true freedom.

It is true, that we need to build a sufficient investment base, to take care of our financial security. But that does not mean, we should cease to work or get lazy. Real freedom is in the ability to try out new things, stay innovative, follow our passion, take risks and be willing to face the consequences of our own choice.

Happy Reading,

D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Mar 2015