Life@Work

Life has changed a lot in the last six weeks since I moved into a new role at work. To be precise, life at work has changed, but work dominates most of life these days, leaving room for little else. Given this, perhaps it isn’t inappropriate to make an exception and write about work.

Organizations are fascinating entities. Most of the time we are too busy, consumed by daily activities, to sit back and think about patterns at work, but if we do so we would find much to think about and wonder at. This change in role has placed me in a context very different from the one I’ve worked in since I started work around seven years ago. In my short stint so far in this new context, some patterns that highlight the contrast between my old and new worlds have emerged.

1) The importance and respect you receive has a lot to do with the perceived value/importance of the group you work in. (If you think it has solely to do with how good you are, think again).

2) Fierce cats at one level, are humble mice at another.

3) The less you know, the more you talk. The more you talk, the more you revolve in the realm of generalities. Apart from being counter-productive, speaking in generalities is plain boring to those listening.

4) The higher you are in the corporate ladder, the more meetings you have. The more meetings you have, the less productive you are (If you think otherwise, you are blessed with colleagues who talk to the point and keep meetings short. Most of us aren’t so lucky). So the ones at the bottom do most of the real work, and get paid the least.

5) Groups within organizations behave a lot like independent entities, trying to further their own interests and to keep themselves strategically positioned. The challenge is to make groups think more often about the organization as a whole than about themselves. (This may seem obvious, but is forgotten – intentionally or otherwise – most of the time).

6) The perceived value of a product among non-users is more important than its actual value seen by the users. The actual value may improve over time (over multiple releases of the product) and be recognized by the users, but the perceived value does not change (for the non-users) unless there is a conscious effort made to change it. And since most decision makers are non-users, this effort is well worth taking.

7) Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful tool.

8) The ability to articulate your thoughts and convince people is probably the most important skill one needs in an organization that relies on collaborative efforts. My university never taught me this.

9) Work-Life balance is a myth.

As I read through these points again, it appears that they are a reflection of my present state of mind than anything else. And like a reflection you see in water, they are neither right nor wrong – they just are.

Winter landscapes

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The first time I contemplated the beauty of a snow-covered landscape was when I read about the painting Hunters in the Snow. As the author of that essay beautifully writes:

What fascinated me initially about Hunters in the Snow is
that it made me feel cold just looking at it. Looking at this painting
is like standing in an open doorway and looking out at a wintery
landscape. You can see your breath when you look at the painting, you
can feel the bitter chill on your cheeks. The colors are harsh – black,
white, blue-grey – the colors of a world that has not seen warmth or
sunlight for a very long time. The sky is as flat and unforgiving as
the sheets of ice covering the rivers and lakes in the valley. The
trees, spidery and bare, jut lifelessly from the frozen ground, and the
wiry brown tendrils of the plant in the foreground are being smothered
by snow.

Such keen observation, I found, was possible only through a picture; standing in the cold I could think of little else but how to get warm. And photographing such landscapes turns out more difficult than I would like it to be.

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I spent fifteen minutes on the terrace of a restaurant we stopped at while on the road in Switzerland last month. The bleak wintery landscape seemed otherworldly. Like Hunters in the Snow.

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The blown fuse

A couple of days back an electric bulb burst in our apartment. We had just finished dinner when I switched on the main light and *pop* – the bulb burst, and threw the apartment into darkness. My first thought was not about what to do next – that would come later – but how lucky we were not to have been anywhere near the bulb. Pieces of shattered glass reflected light that filtered in through the windows; there were probably many more in the darker areas of the room.

Perhaps it was a blown fuse; I looked around to see if the fuses were located inside the apartment. This was a new place, not yet familiar. When the obvious places didn’t reveal anything, I went outside and scanned the common areas of our building – no luck there either. We didn’t know our neighbours yet, so the only alternative was to call the concierge phone number listed on the message board and ask for help.

“Hello, do you speak English?”

“er…just a little..” A woman’s hesitant voice.

“I’m calling from Avenue d’Ouchy 85. We have a small problem in our apartment -”

“Wait minute please – what is your number?”

“It’s the one I’m calling from.”

“Is it xxxxxxxx?”

“That’s right.”

“OK, one person call you soon. Bye.” She hung up.

A few minutes later, a man called and started in French. I interrupted him.

“Excusez-moi – do you speak English?”

“Non”

This was going to be tough. I tried telling him – in English – what had happened, stressing on the words “problem” “electricity”, and after listening to me he started off again in French, but it could as well have been Swahili. We take communication mostly for granted, which makes situations like these – where one doesn’t understand a word of the other – more surprising and disorienting than it should seem.

After struggling for a couple of minutes I gave up. I had his number, and perhaps a friend familiar with French could act as an intermediary. Before hanging up, he said “Bye, Bye” – the only two words that had made any sense to me.

Wife then called D, who called this man and got back to us: the man had reluctantly agreed to come over; he should be at our place in about half an hour. We lit some candles and waited.

The darkness, and the silence it brought along, took me back to childhood days in India where we faced frequent power-cuts in summer. I welcomed them – they gave me an excuse not to complete my homework due next day – but the mosquitoes and the heat would eventually have me cursing the local electricity board. I would rub Odomus – a mosquito repellent cream – over my hands and legs and sit next to candles, listening to the hollow sound of crickets in the dark. Sometimes, while with friends, we would exchange stories and jokes.

The man arrived after a while. He was short, plump and looked typically French – like one of those characters in a film depicting the Victorian era, if you chose to disregard his unkempt appearance. He shook hands in a brisk manner, and said something in French; I nodded, as if in complete understanding, and showed him the socket the burst bulb had occupied. Then he went outside and opened the “fuse room” – apparently each floor had one – and began to look for the blown fuse. I walked back and joined Wife inside our apartment.

“What’s he doing?” she asked.

“Checking for a blown fuse. Typically French, isn’t he?”

“Quite handsome, actually.”

“I thought he looked like Napoleon. To me most Frenchmen look like Napoleon – wonder why.”

“He’s probably the only Frenchman you know.”

“Probably the only Frenchman worth knowing…”

The man returned a few minutes later. Inside, he looked for a fuse and found it above the front door – the problem appeared to be with this one. He disappeared again for a while and returned with another fuse, which worked …. temporarily. The real problem was with the socket of the blown bulb: he unscrewed it, and left the wires hanging from the ceiling. Then, the new fuse worked: light, once again.

Before leaving, he explained something about the socket; we listened and nodded. We expected a bill, but he didn’t come out with any. I tipped him ten Francs, which he gladly accepted and wished us “Bye, Bye”.

Two Lives

In his work On the natural history of destruction, W.G.Sebald offers shocking statistics on the number of lives lost in the aerial bombing of German cities by Allied forces at the end of the second World War, and goes on to discuss how inadequate the German response has been to this calamity (in terms of discussing it openly and through literature). The essay consists mainly of generalizations, and one misses the details of how life in post-war Germany was, how people living among the rubble in the destroyed cities managed with those extreme conditions, both physical and emotional.

This detail emerged, in the form of letters written by people living in both East and West Berlin in the years after the war, in a book I just completed: Vikram Seth’s Two Lives. One West-Berliner writes in early 1946:

What have the Nazi criminals made of Germany? A heap of rubble, ruins and ashes. Destitution everywhere and indescribable hunger and misery… A frequently occuring case: two schoolchildren (brothers) have between them only one pair of shoes (torn, naturally). In the summer, they go barefoot. In the winter they take it in turns to go to school; only one can go, the other must remain at home….

But we are working at it; one hopes that the children will someday build a better, peaceful Germany…

And another:

This morning once again I had cause to be quite unhappy. A very clean little old woman, her face full of wrinkles, came to the door. She could have been your mother or mine. I gave her a small coin and a slice of bread, which one has to do many times a day, because there is great hardship, especially among the old…..What really shocks me is the fact that old people, grown helpless, have to suffer for the guilt of ambitious creatures…

Yet another makes a request to a friend in London:

If I am not abusing your kindness, I would say that Mrs.v.Gliszczynski would thank you very much if you could send her a pair of stockings, used of course, and some underwear (undies) also worn, if you have some. She possesses one single pair of stockings, in an awful state and no means to get any here – We unhappily lost all and everything by the bombs!

These portraits, obtained through the letters of friends of Aunty Henny (Seth’s great-aunt), form one of the many facets that make this double biography both illuminating and enjoyable. Historical relevance aside, Two Lives offers the reader an intimate portrait of two (three, if one counts the bits and pieces of the author’s life that emerge) individuals – Seth’s great-uncle and aunt – whose lives spanned most of the twentieth century. As Seth, reflecting upon images of their lives at the end of the book, says:

Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that cleave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable. Yet seeing through a glass, howevery darkly, is to be less blind.

Seen through the glass crafted by a gifted writer like Seth, even trivial details acquire a quality of significance in the world that surrounds lives it illuminates. Seth combines memoir, biography and history with great skill, distancing himself in some places and bringing himself to focus in others, to add yet another genre to the incredible variety he has explored with his published works. What next, one wonders.

German and French

Among the things that happened during the last weeks of inactivity in this space, an event of note was our getting the German permanent residence permit. We came to Germany on a “Green Card” visa, valid for five years and due to expire at the end of this year. Five years of stay enabled us to apply for what the Germans call “Niederlassungserlaubniss” – the permanent residence permit. The process involved, among other things, a proof of competence in the German language. We initially wondered if this implied some sort of examination, but we were told it was enough if we could converse in German with the authorities while collecting the application form and submitting it. That did not prove difficult, and three weeks after we submitted our papers we received our new visas. I do not know the exact rights this status confers upon us, but for me what’s important is that it allows us to continue living and working in Germany without having to periodically bother about renewing our visas.

My German teacher T, who kindly offered a certificate as additional proof our my language competence, was relieved to note we were spared further bureaucratic hurdles. My lessons with him continue, of course; the objective of learning the language is far from complete. (On a slightly different note: Before he left for his Christmas break, T mentioned he was going to attend a Vipassanna course in an east-German town. He had done it once a couple of years before; it was rigorous but very satisfying. Leela’s experience with Vipassana came to mind).

* * *

An encounter with a new language is one of the many exciting aspects surrounding a move to a new place. Lausanne is in the French part of Switzerland, and the last week here has taken me back to those early days in Germany, when German was as alien to me as French is now. I’ve managed so far with the most basic words – bonjour, merci, au revoir, pardon; some other words have come my way through interesting encounters.

At a restaurant when we asked for the cheque, the waiter said something like “Addition“, and nodded. We later confirmed it meant cheque.

At a local market while paying for a purchase with a hundred Franc note, the lady behind the counter said something in French of which I understood only one word: petit. No I do not have a note smaller than that, I replied, checking the contents of my purse. She then proceeded to give me the change anyway. On another occasion, I was asked if needed the “ticket“; no thanks, I said, I do not need the bill.

A couple of days back when Wife burned her hand while cooking, I decided to go to the nearby pharmacy for a cream. Since I did not have a dictionary (I still haven’t found a bookshop in the vicinity) I logged on to the net and translated “burn” – Brulure – and jotted it on a sticky-note before leaving for the pharmacy. The girl behind the counter understood English, but I showed her what I had written and she nodded in confirmation.

As I was writing the above lines I wondered if there were some online French lessons I could take to pick up a few more phrases, and I ran into this nice BBC site that offers simple tutorials for spoken French. I have a week more to spend in Lausanne, and its time I did something about the current state of my French. Au revoir!

In Lausanne

It is a small apartment – one room and a bathroom. The room is partitioned into two: the kitchen is separated with the rest by a bar counter that runs along its edge; the rest of the room has a bed, a showcase, two single-seater sofas, a small dining table with a couple of chairs, and three bar stools next to the counter. The side facing outside has windows running end-to-end – the room is filled with light during the day. From the balcony one can see lake Geneva in the distance, and, on clear days, the mountains on the far side.

Balconyview

I’m in Wife’s apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland. It sounds strange to me as well, the phrase “Wife’s apartment”; I’ll have to get used to living in two places over the next eleven months, when Wife shall be doing her MBA at IMD.

We got here last Sunday, driving through snow-covered meadows (I still cannot decide if I like Switzerland better in its green outfit or white). Our routine in the last few days has fallen into a pattern: I get out in the morning and walk to the parking lot next to the lake to place a ticket for the day (it is too expensive to park in front of our apartment), and on my walk back I pick up fresh croissants for breakfast. We spend the morning and afternoon indoors – reading, cooking, setting up the apartment – and in the evening we go shopping (the never-ending list containing things needed for the new home) or meet other IMD batchmates who have recently moved in.

It is a mixed batch, with people from various backgrounds and nationalities. Most students are over thirty (the average experience of an IMD MBA candidate is seven years), and have been in middle-management. Conversations so far have revolved around their background and past experiences, why they chose IMD over other schools (with INSEAD topping the list of discarded colleges), what salaries the previous batches received ( $120K per annum seems to be the average), and what they intend to do after their MBA. It appears most people are looking for a change in their line of work – they’re hoping to figure out what they’d like to do as the course progresses. But there are some who wish to get a broader outlook on management (in contrast to the specific area – like Sales – they have been working on so far), and a course with a focus on General Management seems an appropriate choice for such candidates.

Lausanne is a beautiful city. I’ve seen only parts surrounding the lakeside (I had posted some pictures last year) – there is a lot more to explore, and I hope to do that during the weekends I come visiting over the next eleven months.

Kafka on the shore

Last week I spent a lot of time sitting, and waiting. Waiting
outside the operating theatre before, during and after Wife’s surgery; sitting
in the room while Wife slept; sitting in a corridor while Wife
underwent physiotherapy sessions. I spent these periods reading Haruki
Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore.

Kafka
I had read two of Murakami’s short stories before (in The New Yorker)
and on both occasions I was left with a feeling I still cannot put
clearly into words. Both were grounded in reality, and yet they
seemed surreal. The stories had a lightness and simplicity one
rarely encounters in fiction, and I found I could enter that dreamlike
dimension and examine its elements one by one, like a child looking at
the wonders of under-water world in an aquarium.


Kafka On The Shore was different: dense, packed
with action and containing many elements of fantasy. I also found it
lacked the precision of language I had seen in the stories. I
initially thought it to be an issue with translation, but Philip
Gabriel had translated one of the stories as well. On the whole, a
fascinating read (although in some places – some “unreal” scenes – I
did not grasp the underlying metaphor which left me wondering about the
significance of the act).

Next on the list: South Of The Border, West Of The Sun (The strangeness begins with his titles, doesn’t it?)

Book Fair Haiku

A few years ago, before I visited it the first time, I learned that the Frankfurt Book Fair is marketplace where publishers, agents, librarians and others in the book industry gather to conduct business. It is not for consumers like you and me; people like us must remain content with noting down the ISBN of titles we find interesting. Nevertheless, a day at the fair presents a wonderful multicultural experience: with stalls from dozens of countries – displaying colorful titles in unfamiliar scripts, and occupied by men and women seriously negotiating business deals – the experience is not dissimilar to what it may have been walking through a bazaar in a town along the ancient Silk Road, with merchants from Europe, China, Africa and South Asia exchanging their wares.

Bookdeal

In a couple of stalls I eavesdropped on conversations between publishers and agents. A young lady with an American accent was marketing a new author to a foreign publisher: “…and his background makes all that he writes so very unique…and he really is so very funny…”. At an Indian stall an elderly English woman returned a large book on South-Indian architecture to a portly Indian man: “Not this book…perhaps next time.”, to which the Indian replied, without expression, “Okay, no problem.”

For lunch we sat at a table occupied by a middle-aged German who was at the fair because his partner was a librarian. He was curious about India, and upon hearing that Wife was from Kerala he said: “Ah, that is the state which has a lot in common with the West, isn’t it?” I was still trying to figure out the common elements when Wife remarked that there were many Christians in Kerala and Goa which made these states different from most others. That seemed to satisfy him, but when I added that Kerala had a history of success with Communism, he looked a bit bewildered. The conversation shifted to occupations, and he was delighted to learn we worked in the software industry – finally got to meet those Indian software guys the media keeps talking about! – and even more so when he heard the name of the firm we worked for. It turned out he was a yoga instructor offering classes for corporate clients. “Ideal to relieve stress – so common these days at work.” He had been practicing yoga for around 30 years. I checked my seating posture, and straightened my back a little.

While they normally do not sell books at the fair, I’d heard one could – with a bit of persuasion and luck – sometimes convince the publishers to do so. At a Japanese stall a book on Haiku caught my attention. I approached the man nearby and asked if I could purchase it. “Of course you can!” he replied, with a wicked grin. “It costs, let’s say, a hundred Euros!” We both laughed. He then picked a file, looked up the price and prepared a bill for ten Euros. So my only “goodie” – as Rash called it – from the fair was a book titled “Writing and Enjoying Haiku”. I’ve only read a few pages, but I think I know what it’s all about, so here’s my first Haiku:

the Book-Fair

untrue label, inescapable irony

muses eager bibliophile