A Violin & A Relationship

It is like a harp; a violin; a cello; a beautiful music instrument to produce music designed by the mind reflecting the desires of the heart.

It requires a design, pre-determination and yet flexibility; it requires careful maneuvering; a string is tightened and the other loosened, all with the careful turning and tuning of the tuning-pegs and with a turn or two on the fine-tuners…

… the strings are nothing on its own, but it is in your touch that it creates the sounds that intoxicate the ears and seduce the hearts…

You listen closely, with your ears close to the belly or the fingerboard, to hear the sound that resonates your touch, and immersed in the sound of its vibration, you tune the next string, and the next, and the next to it…eyes closed and fully connected to the sound of which the one end is rooted in your heart! Soft, fast or slow…moves the bow; you play with deceiving ease, and yet through a designed path, and at times you tease, with a pluck on the string adding fun to the moment of glory! Not all the strings are played all the time; not a single string is left alone for long time; together, it respond to your touch, giving you in return the music of your heart, the tune of your mind, the beauty of seasons and an eternal feeling of life!

Relationship, is like a harp; a violin; a cello; a beautiful music instrument to produce music designed by the mind reflecting the desires of the heart.

… the instrument is nothing on its own, and it is in your touch that it creates the sounds that intoxicate the ears and seduce the hearts…

…and offer you the beauty of seasons and an eternal feeling of life.

Shahir

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Knowledge & Wisdom

Knowledge has taken away from us the wisdom to express; when as a child I hugged and pulled and pushed and rolled over with my friends, now I must wait for her to fall sick or die so that I can stand beside her bed or coffin to hold her hands and cry.

Knowledge has taken away from us the wisdom to express; when it was easier as a child with fewer words in my vocabulary to pronounce how much I liked him, with the reading of many words and learning of many thoughts, I hardly can summon me to say that anymore!

I have the knowledge to write essays, but not the wisdom to put together these words when needed, that is, “thank you” and “I am sorry”, or even “I love you” with the meaning its intended to carry.

Knowledge has taken away from us the wisdom to express!


Shahir

Family That Prays Together...Stays Together

The family that prays together, stays together.

Empty chairs around dining tables ain’t a strange sight in many of the houses I know. During lunch time, while everyone is busy with their engagements outside, dinner time is something that doesn’t bring the family together anymore; dining has become an independent event and the only thing that stays together during dinner are the utensils and cutleries.

So has the living room absorbed the silence of the members of the family, and offered space to the scripted loudness of the television screen. At homes where all the rooms does not have a television, by virtue of the position of television the family members are forced to come together and are at times united in watching a TV program, however, the focus is on a script and shot of the program than the script and layout of their own life.

More often, these programs are watched with our own individual ‘imaginations’ running havoc in our mind, associated with the characters being watched, everyone having our own associations and its own pleasurable imaginations, at times virtually making the room stinging if those thoughts were to send out a foul odor!!

Gone are the days where constructive evaluation of daily events took place around the dining table or in the warmth of the hearth. Parents discuss about the ‘things’ in life and house, what happened to that or this, or succumb to a deadly silences brought forward as a bye-product of the pressure carried from the business – a business that was initially set up to have a great family and a secured life; parents and children discuss about the ‘studies’ at a more surface level than focusing on values and principles of their doings, and they all become discussions in monosyllables.

There are houses where the only metaphor I can think of to represent its man and woman living as husband and wife is a rail track that never meets at one point but stays together parallel throughout the length. They share a bed; but their minds and hearts are miles apart! Their discussions are material, they have subtly concluded to themselves that there are only these much we can do together and therefore you live and let me live, leading to having different identities in different internet platforms and social clubs that facilitates parallel relationships that fills the gap.

Prayer brings a family together; praying together makes the family stay together; not just because of the prayer, and prayer here is not intended to mean as ‘asking for something’; it’s to reflect and thank, and to seek guidance. It is beautiful when we all sit in one place, together, and do the same thing, connected to one point – the true north, if you would like to put it in corporate language – and then get up from that revered state of mind. It brings in us a sense of belongingness, togetherness, and a sense to stay together. We are still human beings and we will still err, however, with that error comes a feeling of guilt and that by itself is an indicator of success, because it is when you err without guilt that you transform that error to a norm and follow that path.I haven’t graduated in this yet; but I know, every time I do this together, it has given me a comfortable feeling and a great hope of a different and bright future.

Shahir

Managing Performance in Organizations

A workshop on Performance Management was delivered at Deccan Plaza on 22nd January 2010 on behalf of Madras Management Association. This experiential learning event was attended by senior managers from different industries.

If at all Performance Management is something that need to be fixed ‘still’ in many of the organizations, it is only because of the angle in which we look at them. In most cases, the view we have begins from the score-cards and illuminating dashboards flashing green and red on the screen, the various metrics that we use and the various charts and graphics that we post on the corridors and staff canteens. When we walk backward from these metrics and graphics, our focus turns to ‘implement’ the Performance Management rather than ‘manage’ performance.

Implementing Performance Management is something different than ‘managing’ performance.

‘Implementing’ only requires rules and guidelines sent along with memo’s and emails and lectures and seminars and training. “Managing” performance is to live the performance management components, and by that what I mean is to make the competencies – the indicators and contra-indicators – your conversational language in your operation briefings, meetings, and your discussions.

Performance Management can only be successful when our day – to – day activities are bridged with the core competencies of our system. For example, how many of our managers links a team members performance of previous day to one of the competencies and highlight it in their meeting (ex.: David, I understand you worked hard till late night yesterday to fix that problem with the customer and that is indeed remarkable; that’s what “drive for result” is – that being one of the competency of the organization!) Discussions like these and plucking a piece of live examples as these will have no match to those case studies and metaphors you bring through the mouths of consultants who designed your competencies.

Performance Management is a daily thingy. Period. How many of our CEOs and Managing Directors are concerned of Performance Management as concerned they are when the financial performance indicators shows a drop? Performance Management process are more or less a ‘tick-box’ event for many middle managers, or a ‘procedure’ that lead to the tabulation of salary increment etc., whereas this has to come to that level – in par – with the concern the management will demonstrate when the financial performance is down, because the driving force behind that financial performance are the people, and Performance Management is about People Management.

Performance Management need to be brought to its basic levels and intentions; that is, regardless of the size of the organization, it is about a team leader managing his or her ten or odd staff, and similarly many more team leaders managing their ten or odd staff, and therefore the entire organization managing their staff in a uniform format.

Everything else is to me caviar on the bread: a luxury that we can live without.



Shahir

My Virtual Letters: Roller Coaster

Dear Sheryl,

Isn’t life a rollercoaster for almost everyone around us? Perhaps the only differences I see in that roller coaster ride is in the speed of it, Renee, or at times the length of the track, at times the complexity of the ride – the acute degree of turns and the number of high rises and the steep falls.

Even in that ride, I am glad that you are in relative control, because only then will you be able to apply logic in the many aspects of living and have a calculative approach to problem solving. The mundane things are mundane, aren’t they, and it deserves only that much attention, right? The task in life to achieve, I think, is to get the big things right, and how delighted you must be feeling that you ‘are’ getting them right. The small ones, the mundane ones, are the little grains that will anyway fall in its place and are the ones that may not require much focus. More often than not, I struggle with the application of logic to the undercurrents of life, and recently, the arithmetic of my equations had to be erased and re-written in an attempt of correcting several wrongs.

My dear one, your words reflects your intention; the simplicity in being kind and the greatness of that virtue. I hope you will succeed in spreading that kindness, exposing to the light the disillusioned, bringing to the open ground the ones who are confined to their chambers of dark thoughts chained with their disempowering emotions.

Comprehending the struggles of lives around us is indeed a way to count our blessings; glad it is a cause you have chosen to travel for…with people around you in your neighbor-hood or church or in this virtual world.

Do well, and do them with a smile.

Shahir


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Lessons from bicycle race in childhood

When we were small children, we use to hire bicycles – they come in different sizes; quarter, half for boys of our age, three-quarter for boys of my brother and his friends' age, and full size that my uncles ride. Renting it for half n hour was just 30 paise! But that’s not what I wanted to share with you.

We friends then use to have cycle race in the ground that is used to play football in the morning and graze cattles during the day! The race was about who will cross the finishing lane first.

At times, we also had it reversed. The last to reach the finishing line was the winner! Now imagine the struggle to keep the cycle going without you touching your feet on the ground, wrestling with the pedal and the handle, twisting and turning our buttocks on the hard cycle seat balancing it from falling to either side or crashing on to the other!

Who was once a very close friend and my well-wisher asked me yesterday out of the blues “What did you achieve, really?”

There were times I was engaged in the first kind of 'cycle race' in my life. The race was to reach the finishing line first. For years in a row, in every ‘race of life’ that I participated I have achieved just that. Finished either as first or one among the first, in my life in general and in my career in particular.

I am through a time now where the race has changed, for a while. It’s now the slower race, the second kind of cycle race. It’s not about reaching there first. It’s about struggling with the pedals and handle of life’s dynamics to balance without falling and to still reach the finishing line. The paradigm is shifted from being first to being in control and completing the race. To experience the challenges without putting your feet to slow down or quit, or not wishing to race through the lane and 'finish the life off'; to experience the challenges - designed and default - in grace is itself winning, in this kind of race.

The answer to what have I achieved is this:

“I have developed the taste buds to celebrate the sweetness of success, and the ability to understand the darkness of nights as just a turn of a day in the length of ones life which might still turn darker for a while just before the dawn will break.”

Why do we have movies and articles and whitepapers of people who has won the fast race and has had their episodes of slow race too?

Life is bigger than a person. Life is stronger than an event. Life is, in its simplest form, execution of simplest ideas closer to perfection with the noblest of intention.

That understanding is my achievement.

And I am not editing this, nor reviewing to re-write!

Shahir

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