Thoughts Unleashed

After writing my last post, I'm so glad that I have atleast pursued one thing which apparently is also my favourite hobby. Finding things in Pune can sometimes be quite a struggle but I must say I was really lucky in discovering an art class that perfectly fitted my requirement, thanks to JustDial. So I'm learning painting these days on weekends and it has turned out to be the best stress buster. I have started with acrylic and this is the first landscape that I have painted.

I dont think this is bad considering that I'm just a beginner. Hope I continue to get better on this. At this point in life, this is the only thing which is giving me complete satisfaction..

I have often asked these questions to myself -

What is the higher calling of my life?

What is that one thing which I would love to do?

Which passion can be converted into a full time job?

But conveniently forgotten about them time and again as I had no time to seriously ponder over them or there were other things which seemed more important. There have been innumerable discussions, brainstorming sessionswith my friends/colleagues who have shared the same views and its hard to believe that everyone is on the same boat when it comes down to having clarity or vision of our future.
However, I have all the time to myself now to think of the various options that I can possibly consider. The ones that top my mind are:

1. Get back to my hobbies. Painting will top the list.

2. Join an NGO. At the back of my mind I have always wanted to give back to the society. But I dont know whether I'm selfless enough for such a cause.

3. Think of alternate profession. Maybe a boutique, restaurant, art shop...

I have been reading the book 'Stay Hungry Stay Foolish' and its good to know how people have started with a strong vision of what they wanted in life and could attain it with sheer hardwork and perseverence. Its all the more important if you realize it early. I can see the time flying by but I'm as clueless as ever.

Just hoping that this time I somehow manage to turnaround things and discover my Higher Calling!

If you are sitting in the pantry of an IT Co, this is what you hear most of the times..which might be due to the fact that pantry is flooded mostly with junta who is out of work...In our industry we have lull periods of inactivity where we are simply waiting for clients to freeze and send the requirements or sometimes for new assignments to arrive..this might take a week, a month or month(s) together..So what do most people do during such times?

1. Become champions of all the possible games provided by the company. Most popular being TT, chess and pool.
2. Read all the newspapers kept in the pantry ranging from Times of India to any magazine which you might have never heard of earlier..and mind it, this is read word by word...you can ask the page nos too :D
3. Take a power nap in the afternoon if they stay close by to the office premises..
4. Earn lots of money through online trading. This applies to fewer ppl.
5. Conduct meeting throughout the day to discuss about work which has no timeline. This is a more official and polished way of doing time pass.
6. Play games online. I have seen some real good games in excel sheet for all the poor souls who do no have internet access at work.
7. Form a group of idle people and bitch about the company, people and most importantly managers.
8. Eat the whole day if your company provides a great cafeteria to reduce attrition to some extent.
9. For sincere people, they dont like wasting time. So they go through all the possible training courses online.
10. And last but not the least, sit in the pantry and have coffee, lemon tea, ginger tea and all possible beverages which the coffee machine offers .

Such people are frustrated coz they dont have work whereas there are people who are slogging their a**** out and want to be at this side of the story.
As we all say, "GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE!"

PS: Do let me know if you have any more ideas to pass your time at work :)

I have heard from lot of guys that women think unnecessarily on a lot of senseless things.So I thought of discussing this with my other female friends to know their views on this..I realized that I wasnt alone..After much analysis, we found that our species does not have a single track mind like the male species. We like to think of all possibilities rather than assuming that things will go right in the first shot..

Here are some excerpts from googling:

1. "In particular, the connections between the two cerebral hemispheres are relatively more developed in the woman, compared to the man, while in discrete brain centers of the brain region called hypothalamus, the man possesses larger and more numerous neurons." In general terms whats this means is, it is possible to hypothesize that a man's thinking works through logical schemes based on a rational approach, while a woman is more able to use an intuitive approach in her reasoning or, in other words, that brain circuits are more rigid in men and more plastic in women.
2. A best-selling author and shrink, Brizendine says, our floor plans are different. She's got the bigger "worrywart centre" (the anterior cingulated cortex), and so stress tends to wig her out, as "conflict registers more deeply in the areas of the female brain".
   That riper prefrontal cortex of hers? Makes the ladies more pacifist and patient. Her hippocampus also runs a size larger. Meaning "she never forgets a fight, a romantic encounter or a tender moment - and won't let you forget it, either", says Brizendine, founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood & Hormone Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco.
   
3. Some more observations though not proven:

• Men think about sex every 52 seconds, while a woman does so only once a day.
• Women speak faster on average - 250 words per minute vs 125 for a typical male.
• A woman uses 20 000 words per day, while a man uses only 7 000.
• Boys don't listen to mommy (answer: because "he physically cannot hear the same tone of warning").
• And "a woman knows what people are feeling, while a man can't spot an emotion unless somebody cries or threatens bodily harm".

I feel that sometimes our over thinking does help us as we might be able to figure out better solutions to certain problems but at the cost of increased stress for us and all you male species's patience :)

This time, no more cribbing about IT industry :-) I have been fortunate enough to get work in the 'Investment Banking' domain..considered to be the hottest as far as the industry demands are concerned. With absolutely no prior knowledge of a single finance term I had to start with the basics..It was quite amusing to read about how people can make or break their future in a day..

Derivatives..had heard this term only in Maths till date but didn't know that it can be such a powerful instrument to make money..Its actually a financial contract whose value derives from the value of underlying stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, etc..Derivatives can be either Forwards, Futures or Options..I found Options to be most interesting coz I never knew that we have a choice to go back on our deal if we see that we are not making any profit..but since nothing comes for free you have to pay a small premium for entering into the contract which is ALL that you lose when you want to go back on the trade. When I read this for the first time, the first thing that struck me was, why do people lose money if such a thing exists! Well, all of this is not so simple as it sounds. This is coz there are 2 kinds of people in the market: bearish and bullish..bearish believe that the prices of the underlying asset will fall and bullish think otherwise.

An option is a contract which confers the right, to buy or sell an asset at a given price on or before a given date. Here, the buyer of the option has the right whereas the seller has the obligation which means that the buyer can cancel the contract if he feels that he has not been able to make the expected profit till the due date. But if he wishes to settle the contract on the maturity date then the seller is obliged to respect the contract. Sounds confusing??? Lets consider the most basic example. A farmer expects to harvest wheat in 3 months. He expcts the wheat prices to drop from Rs 10 per kg due to over supply. So he enters into an options contract with a baker to sell wheat to him at Rs 10 per kg in 3 months. Baker expects the wheat prices to rise hence he agrees to buy it. If the wheat prices fall to 6 per kg, farmer benefits and the baker loses the opportunity to buy from the market at lower price. Whereas if the wheat prices rise to Rs 15 per kg , farmer still has the choice to cancel the contract. He has to pay the baker the premium amount though. Hence, the buyer of the option has the choice whereas the seller has the obligation.

Though derivatives are majorly used to hedge risks but there are speculators too, who enter into derivatives to make short term gains. There are many more interesting things about derivatives which had given me a kick when I had read them for the first time. For more information there is an amazing site http://investopedia.com/

I think couple of few more posts will be written by me till the time I take out all frustration of the IT industry :) Last few days I have been observing how the IT industry in India has turned into a huge factory with the workers joining any factory at any time without any training. The only thing which matters, is the
target which has to be achieved by the HR of all the factories to get in
more workers every month.

Here the worker is a monthly wage labourer who is just concerned about the monthly pay packet which he carries home every month.. Whichever factory will offer more, labourer would quit the previous factory (though here a day's notice period is too short a notice) and join the new one as the work is same all across, with no specialized skills needed. The labourers are paid here too for working overtime or on holidays. They have to work in shifts too. So few labourers are lucky to go home and have a good sleep while the next set of labourers comes in to work in night shift.

But I must say, that these factories and labourers are much more sophisticated and well-off. Most of the labourers are from premium engineering and MCA institutes. They are the ones buying most of the flats in all the plush areas and in return being responsible for the skyrocketing property rates. All the malls in the city are full of them every weekend. Loans (specifically home loans) are available on just a phone call. Most of the flight passengers, be it domestic or international will be full of them. They contribute a significant percentage in the 8% growth of India.

But ultimately they are all labourers. Factories are not bothered about the attrition rate. Their only objective is 'labourer recruitment' at the best market price :)

It is said that 'Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another'..My journey with IBM had begun on 3rd Dec '04 and ended on 20th Oct '06. Though I hadnt joined IBM with very high hopes but what was waiting for me here, was even worse. To start of with, I had been given the most unchallenging profile which had left a person like me with oodles of energy, completely drained out and dissatisfied..I could very well represent the 73% population of people who are dissatisfied with their professional lives (as per a recent survey). A 27 percent satisfaction rate is an alarmingly low number considering that job satisfaction impacts productivity levels and society in general as people return to their private lives with the stress and frustrations accumulated during the workday. And for me being from the IT industry, a figure of 27% is still quite good.

So what is it that constitutes job satisfaction? Is it money, brand, rewards , recognition, work culture, work environment, colleagues, boss, HR policies or all of them together? After much pondering, I realized that job satisfaction can be gained to only some extent by the above factors but even if we dont get them, what would matter at the end of the day, would be, whether I can feel proud of the day's accomplishments. We all need a conducive environment which provides a foundation to utilize our skills and talents in every possible way..I need to have a feeling of satisfaction that I have changed the world around me to some extent by today's work..and I dont find myself aloof when I talk about such things.. Most of the lunch and coffee sessions are full of such topics of utter job dissatisfaction and frustation. Most of us believe that we are at the wrong place with the wrong people and doing the wrong work in a wrong manner..There is a huge gap in what we were meant to do and what we have landed up in..

I would partly hold our education system responsible for not making us self aware of our innate talents..We are encouraged to chose promising and well established careers without much thought to our personal capabilities..Secondly, the employers and the HR department in the corporate industry should make sure that employee is matched to a specific job role which would provide the employee an opportunity to learn, be challenged and finally recognized for her/his good work. This would not only result in lesser absenteeism and attrition but also increased productivity..

I tried my best to make the environment conducive around me and enjoy my work, find newer challenges with every passing day and convince myself for being able to do better work tomorrow. It would be wrong if I say that I never got good work but it somehow didnt work the way I wanted it to.. I could see myself totally void of any energy in just 3 years of work ex when I decided to move on..

Though now I find job satisfaction to be increasingly elusive, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for my next venture..Wish me luck :)

'Itni jaldi ghar ja rahe ho?' - this is what you get to hear if you are in the 'IT industry' and leaving for home at 6 pm. Though the official work timings are 9am -6 pm , you are not expected to leave before its late evening or more rightly, before your manager has left. I'm not too sure whether its our indian managers to be blamed or we ourselves to have brought in such a culture where your productivity is measured directly by the time spent at workplace.

Yesterday, when I was chatting with a friend of mine who is working with Amazon, US, I was quite amused to know how his first day at work begun. He was shot at twice, and before he had his heart in mouth, he realized that it was an air gun...The person who was trying his shots was none other than his manager's manager.This is his innovative way of introducing himself to the new joinees...Could there be a better way of breaking the ice with the new joinees? Though I'm sure he must be having better toys for the female joinees :D ..To top it all, can you guess what gift did he get on his birthday by all his juniors? A bow and arrow!!

I guess our problem begins on the day a fresher joins the industry. He is encouraged to stay back late to impress his manager irrespective of the activity he is indulging in, be it surfing, chatting or simply whiling away time. In some cases, when employees have relocated from other cities, they do not have any other activity except for sitting in office. They prefer surfing free internet, having subsidized lunch and avoiding the scorching heat outside.So one who pretends that he is working more by being at work longer, has an upper hand over someone who might be more sincere. Though this kind of impression doesnt last long..

Well, its time for me to leave office and though I'm leaving at 6 pm it seems I have committed a big crime of taking a half day leave!!