MyTake

Festivals are the rituals that remind us of our togetherness and  relationships.  These were required for celebrating crops, harvesting and were entangled with religious practices in order to have consistency and discipline. Mind it we are more God fearing tribe than God loving. Trading and business fell as offshoots with the change of time. Till our economy was closed and till we operated in sellers market there was no problem as to export of intangible and import of tangible. However when we became part of larger world and started speaking the language of market we became more susceptible to all kinds of market behavior. We started operating in buyer's market and that is how we started loosing in competition. When we compete we have to follow rules of the game and accept the verdict of the market. When everything gets decided by the market, we can only watch like deaf spectators.  The illusion of tangibility gets faded off when one starts learning crude lessons of li...

Literature reflects society. As society travels and transcends, it's footprints get registered and reflected through contemporary art and writings. What happens in social contexts, how individual behavior changes over time, how experiences are registered in memory, what expectations get framed, how actions are primed, and how outcomes are influenced - all these questions and their responses change over time, depending on context and condition. Blessings and curses stay in the surrounding environment forming vibrations whereby affecting ultimate result. Imagination and creativity get corroborated accordingly. We visited recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival 2019 and experienced the dominance of market forces everywhere. The way JLF has become a prominent brand among literature enthusiasts and market circles, has proven that product content is secondary to advertising, promotion and packaging. Past investments in JLF are reaping fruits that are as per effective business pr...

All my friends in the discipline of commerce know SRCC as the premier commerce college of India. But for Charles Feltman SRCC meant differently. Sincerity, Reliability, Competence and Care are identified as four assessment criterion of trust. In the book titled The Thin Book of Trust , which was published around a decade back, Charles discusses his model of trust and provides practical solutions to avoid the enemies of trust around these four criterion. This model is timeless and helps one to build trust – a primary requisite for effective leadership - and lead a team of trustworthy people. Effective leaders create loyal and smart teams through winning the trust of team members which is duly reciprocated with an intent of concern and achieving organizational goal. Leaders go beyond rules and help making new rules. They cannot just afford to be manipulative and opportunistic and use others as sanitary pads. This may reap fruits for a very short period but otherwise it shall ruin th...

What a day it was, yesterday. Hectic and humid. These youngsters, mostly in their 20s, or millenials as we bracket them, were talking on Camus and Kafka - absurdity and existentialism, Ramayana and Mahabharata - idealism and reality, Buddha and Gandhi - aanand and ahimsa. Trying to explore and revisit meaning of life and meaning of meaningfulness, purpose of existence and evolution, they seem to be in hurry to jump to conclusions as fast as maggie noodles gets cooked.  Totally a different generation more into showing off what they know than what they understand and in the process getting exposed on what they do not know. Their experience and exposure of context and contemplation is away from reality yet they make sense and their intent looks genuine. Though AI and simulations, freewill and fortune, power and prosperity, chaos and criticism allows us to dive into the realms of our 'being', I am not too sure as to whether it would lead towards a thinking on focusing on...

Capability is nothing but the power to do something. The more one has, the better it is, for individuals as well as for organizations they work for. More power provides more choices and the more the choices, the more one enjoys freedom. This is an interesting continuum, whether we consider human beings in global context, citizens in national context, or employees in organizational context. The agency function gets performed by different agencies in different contexts. Whatever the case may be, one thing is sure that one has to improve one’s capabilities in order to enjoy more freedom. And incase of organizations, HR has to actively involve in facilitating the process of building capability so that the employees get empowered and make choices that are compatible with organizational goal. One should not misunderstand the term freedom in the sense that one can do anything in the organization, once one has better capability. Here it is related to one’s choices and expectations. It i...

बारिश की आव्यश्यक्ता सभी को है। प्रकृति का यह उपहार जीवन हेतु अत्यंत महत्वपूर्ण है। बारिश से पानी है, पानी से जीवन। पानी और जीवन का साथ चोली दामन के साथ से भिन्न नहीं है। मिट्टी और पत्थर दोनों बारिश की प्रतीक्षा करते हैं। जहां एक ओर बारिश पत्थर को धोती व चमकाती है, दूसरी ओर मिट्टी बारिश की बूंदों को अपने मे संजोती है। मिट्टी के स्वरूप को परिवर्तित करने में पानी की अहम भूमिका है, और यदि वह बारिश का पानी हो तो चार चांद लग जाते हैं। मिट्टी ही तो पत्थर बनती है, और बिना पानी के ऐसा असंभव है। कुछ पत्थर पानी से मिट्टी बन जाते हैं। कुछ ही, सभी पत्थर नहीं। यह देश, काल व परिस्थिति पर निर्भर करता है। हम मिट्टी हैं, या पत्थर? --- गांव और शहर में मिट्टी और पत्थर का अंतर है| जिस गति से गांव शहर बनते हैं, उसी गति से मिट्टी, पत्थर बनती है। बारिश का पानी पत्थर से टकराता है, पत्थर को चमकाता है; अपने आवेग से पत्थर को मिट्टी बनाता है| लेकिन ऐसा कम ही होता है। पत्थर-वन अपने विस्तार में व्यस्त रहते हैं, बारिश के पानी के थपेड़ों से परे। मिट्टी पानी के साथ खेलती है, अपनी घनिष्टता को प्रदर्...

Roughly around half a century back, Alvin Toffler was thinking and writing on how jobs, people, relationships and society shall change in the 21st century. Jack Ma might have barely started going to school by that time. During the World Economic Forum 2018 session, Jack Ma was talking about the future trend of work and sounding quite relevant when he was warning that automation would eat the kind of jobs that humans are doing today, so we need to have thinking shift and develop different kind of mindset. Ardent follower of Jack Ma, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the man behind Paytm, is the richest billionaire under the age of 40 in 2018 according to a recent report. These people reflect on the call of time as they could think much ahead of times when it comes to market. In this backdrop when we look at the environment today, we find existence of impermanence, dominance of technology, transient social values, changing work schedules, emergence of multitasking, generic work portfolios ...