Hidden Charges

This time its regarding two hardworking guys at yet another Railway station. After my previous encounter with the strict rules of the Indian Railways, I found myself at the doors of yet another parcel booking office with my cousin this time. You may consider me unusually brave or a cheat in choosing the Indian Railways to send my cousin’s bike after my first experience with them. But there are times when your hands are tied.

This time we met two guys who promised to help us. They were wearing khaki and looked like permanent staff rather than porters whom I encountered last time. One was tall and lean and the other was fat and resembled a 12 foot grisly bear. They seemed to be the only people around, even passengers were scarce in that railway station. This gave me the impression that we were in for yet another bad experience. These guys were exceptionally quick in instructing us what to do, the quickness you would see in a hungry hyena which has cornered its prey.

This time there was no officer putting his foot down and demanding that the bike should not start once kicked.( I considered ourselves lucky thinking of the last experience with emptying the tank). These guys only wanted to empty the tank and were not interested in making us do the circus acts of going around the station to prove that there was no petrol in the tank. The tall one seemed to be the boss around and he was ordering what to do , the fatso was just following orders like an obedient subordinate.

These guys were quicker in their work but one problem was that , being the only workers around they were a kind of general managers for the station. They left us with our bike and jumped aboard an engine that had arrived and came back only after one hour leaving the station seemingly in our control, they were the ones taking care of the parcels to be sent by train, they were the ones to give signals to trains that passed , they were the ones giving out info about trains and their timings to passengers , they were instructing the sweepers what to do. Thus they proved to be very efficient workers only that they were not much efficient in dealing with human beings , may be their prolonged association with engines and parcels have rendered them with same attitude towards human beings and things that were not supposed to be human beings. Their efficiency portrayal doesn’t end here, they seemed to be the best managers as they were getting work done through other people , even their boss, a feeble fellow with jittery hands and cigarette on his lips( he was the station master , I suppose). This bossy doesn’t seem to know the procedure for filling up the form for the parcel and it was again our guys who came to the rescue of bossy.

This is how they got the bike-packing thing done by me and my poor cousin-. We were sent shopping to near by shops in search of the rope, permanent marker and Aluminium plate to be used in decorating the bike during packing. The moment me and my cousin started explaining to the store owner about our requirements, he swiftly took all the things and kept in front of us and told us “Rs 15 for rope, Rs 20 for Aluminium plate, Rs 15 for permanent marker, as if he has been serving customers like us for over years, We understood that hyenas have been hunting for quite some time now. After we came back after our shopping sojourn they made us wait till their lunch was over. We were kept standing guard for our bike as well as all the parcels that were subjected to these guys’ association. At the end when all the packing was done and our bike was ready for the trip they gave their best shot on us for the day- "We usually keep the petrol because the bottle you used in emptying the tank is ours”. Me and my cousin were intrigued by their shrewdness which made them owners of about less than half a litre of petrol only because thy owned a half litre cola bottle left by some passenger.

I am not telling you the amount they grabbed from us for the packing service,as you may faint. I am not sure whether Lallu ji mentioned efficient workers like these when he gave the much talked about lecture to students who were interested to learn how Indian Railways was lifted from the red. Any way me and my cousin sure would have had a very valid point about “efficiency of workers” if we were to participate in the GD (“ How Indian railways became profitable” ). So this is the story how an organizations success depends on the work of motivated employees like these two that we encountered.

The take away

“Customer is the king”
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Not when there are hidden charges!!!!!!

The kid around here…………..

It’s been too long isn’t it? Any way am back. Lots have happened over these days. There were sad days as well as happy ones. I donno how I overcame those bad days. Anyway one good thing that came up from the bad days is that I learned that life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot and will not match your expectations. But that is life, says everyone. Now I will also say “Life is like this”. I have learned in these days more than I have over the past 24 years. See life is funny isn’t it? You learn much in a short span of time. In fact I have been learning too many things these days that I feel like having been admitted to primary school once again, the difference being that now I was learning the real life. No wonder why every employer was asking me “do u have any experience?” whenever I attended an interview in these days- “u don’t learn unless u experience”. This was true as I understood the implication of experience when I got my first job. Office is not the same place as you read in text books. I understood what professionalism really meant. I still remember games and role plays that we did for a PDP session on professionalism back in college, though we took it as a fun activity, It’s now that I understood how important is it in office. The first two days in office have been an eye opener. Though there was some strain in the first two days I enjoyed it. It was like “till yesterday you had nothing worth to do and suddenly today you are responsible for whatever you do”. For the first two days I felt like the kid around in office, a kid with an MBA. But this is life, you learn when you experience it.

The sports connection

I have always been a sports enthusiast. The reason? There need not be any reason for liking a thing; you just like it that’s it. It’s pretty difficult to explain why you like something like sports. I have always admired the way sports people achieved success through hard work.The publicity that successful sportsmen enjoyed ,the amount of money they earned , and flamboyant life style of atleast some of them also attracted me towards sports.Other reason for I being a sports enthusiast is that sports is full of those nail biting moments which makes life all the more "happening" . I enjoyed watching the happiness ,the pride which showed on th face of a winnner . It is always satisfying to watch a player pulling out an unbelievable win from a situation where he was down 2 sets to 0 in a game of tennis, similarly for any other sports. Perhaps these “All time greats” in the sports arena deserve to be considered as the greatest strategists and tacticians more than those in the field of business or politics because they reac to huge pressure situations(like a last ball in a world cup final where you need one run to win-the whole nation dpending on you for their country to win) . It will be interesting to plot a diagram which traces the happenings in the mind of a rather placid Federer when he is up against Nadal, we cannot go by his face which will be rather calm and serene when he walks across the court.

It will be interesting to see what makes these people very successful. Hard work surely is one reason for anybody’s success. The way these people manage situations and make split second decisions is all because of their practice and hard work. According to me the largest factor here is “Passion”. Most of the great sports personalities whom we call legends reached the zenith because of their passion for their favourite sport. This is something which they recognize early in their life and is nurtured by their parents. These people may be taking a risk by taking the less trodden paths to achieve their dreams in which they have paramount faith; nonetheless they achieve success for working hard to prove themselves. Passion is what produces winners. We can take many lessons from a successful sports person, the hard work, the tactics and strategies that he applies, his ability to strike back from a situation where he is lagging behind the opponent, his quick wit, his consistent quality of performance and above all that, passion for what you do can make you successful. It’s all about tapping this passion for “something” in the early days of children especially by their parents. Western culture supports this theory more than we Indians does. Most children here if asked would say (as trained by their parents) “I want to be a doctor” or “I want to be an engineer” whereas their foreign counterparts will say “I want to be an F1 racer”! We Indians always have a disliking of anything other than doctor and engineer for a job and will pursue our children to become one without asking them their preference. I am not saying that no body needs to study but try to become a sports person or something but there is surely a lot to be gained by pursuing something which you are passionate about. Be it education, job or extra curricular, do what you are interested in and see yourself reaching great heights

Sending the wrong message

The current protest against the controversial chapter in the Social Studies textbook in Kerala is finally sending the wrong message to students. I believe that these protests in the form of burning text books, destroying public property, pelting stones at each other, causing road blocks, causing problems for the public is finally causing much more negative impact on the minds of students than the controversial text in question. In a culture where we respect textbooks equal to God, the scene of burning textbooks is really deplorable. Seeing these violent protests I am forced to believe that none of these people who protest this way are concerned actually about the children and their future but about personal gains.