Blog@GraceJunction

Recently I was in Mumbai for a ten day training for Private Banking (a division that handles only ultra High Networth Individuals). This field is very polished and the Relationship Manager’s(RM) meet only the business biggies of that city or state. These RM’s are highly regarded by the company and they themselves have a big inflated ego, “pride value” and all other values we can think of. The training was for both domestic and International RM’s coming from different countries.

These RM’s were very touchy about small small things. Somebody was complaining about the hotel not being a five star and being a three star, somebody about food, somebody about the Air-Conditioner et cetera. But I want to share one incident whick kept me thinking for a long while and prompted me to come up with this blog.

In one of our breaks some of us went to the wash room. On entering the wash room one of the RMs, based at Bahrain, got his shirt pulled off by some sharp obeject, possibily on the door. The right side of the shirt tore off, near the hand, in the size of a “pin hole”. This guy looked at the shirt for a while trying to see if it could be hidden or adjusted in some or the other way. After few minutes he said to us, “I’m going to meet the General Manager of the hotel and take him to task”!! (more…)

“Life-On your Terms”. This is the quote I came across on the cover page of an investment review magazine of one of the biggest banks in the country; for some reasons I’ll keep it unnamed.

The magazine is a research magazine which shows the past performance of all the investment products available in the market. In short the magazine is giving us data to analyze and understand where to put our money so that we can make more money and when we have more money we can live our “Life on our Terms”.

But can we really live “life on our terms”?

If i see it from the material perspective may be “yes”. You see people around us taking control of their life: deciding what to eat, drink, when to drink and with whom to live, what brand, and even pre marital, post marital relations et cetera. These are components that people consider when defining “life on their terms”, doing what they want and when they want without strings and without any moral standards. (more…)

A week ago, people in my organization where busy in discussing only two things. The performance ratings of individuals and the speculations about the amount of increment in the salary. Some people had gone one step further and were planning for a vacation once they got a good bonus and increment. Some intelligent people where busy in data analysis of the trends over the years in pay rise and rankings. You could hear these discussions in the conference room, in the canteen and the tea shop outside the office. Finally when the curtains came down, I was shocked to see that we were running short of bandwith as almost 90% of the people were logged into the HR site for next 2-3 hrs analysing how much increment they got and also comparing how much their colleagues got! (more…)

We have been discussing various social issues in this blog and it has been a good reading. I desire to take on a topic which has not been taken so far and thus I am delving into unchartered area, a different tangent altogether.

Some days ago I came across an article titled “Intermediate Beings”. The title caught my attention because I know we all are “human beings” but what’s this!!! Then I thought it would be related to some mythological character, but read on and find out what’s it all about.

The article cited about Ravana, the demon king who had been granted a boon by Brahma that he would not be killed by any God or Demon or even man! But Rama did kill Ravana, isn’t it?! So technically speaking then, Rama in neither God nor demon nor man! It’s here that the writer brings in the concept of Intermediate beings, and justifies that Vishnu came down to earth and took birth as Rama. Rama was god incarnate in human flesh, which made him neither god nor human being, rather an “Intermediate being”. By doing this, the so called creator Brahma played a ploy with Ravana to have him killed!! (more…)

In today’s Deccan Chronicle’s Chennai edition I read a very sad article about an eight year old girl, who killed herself by setting herself on fire for a meagre reason that her teacher checked her school bag in suspicion of theft. The girl was an excellent student and felt humiliated by the very act of checking her bag in front of the whole class.

For a moment i was thinking that their could have been many such instances which never got reported first and their could have been many such girls and boys who could be doing something very frightening to themselves just ‘coz they have been humiliated by something. The reason could be as small as loosing the first rank by one mark, avoidance by their friends, parents pressure to perform etc. The list will be too long. (more…)

This article in one of the leading dailies of the country has touched my heart and before building into the theme I would like to cite some excerpts from the article.

This is about the life of Kenyans after the election trife in December 2007 wherein more than 1000 people where killed and 3,00,000 people where left homeless which basically took an ethnic turn. I would like to highlight some of the real life conditions this people are living in, which we won’t desire to have even in our worst nightmares.

Clinton Masheti, 8 yrs old and all alone, sits on a wooden bunch rolling snakes out of clay. When the men came and started burning down houses in his villages, his parents ran away- without him! (more…)

Come first week of April and you’ll find it very difficult to get a hotel booking in all the best locations in the country. Reason being almost all sales driven organization will be having their strategy meet or plan for the year 08-09.

They will be planning the entire strategy and targets for the year. The targets is then distributed according to the zone, region and location. Every employee gets their share of target. The meeting goes for two days and at the end of the day there’s a huge party where everybody has a target of how many pegs they’ll gulp down!! (more…)

In today’s Times of India, Nokia the mobile giant has released an ad in the front page for their new handset “6110 Navigator”. The punch line of the ad is “LET’S NEVER GET LOST AGAIN”.

I believe the ad is highlighting two things.
a) The GPS feature of the handset and most importantly
b) Its also highlighting the human being’s vaccum in his heart that says to him sometimes or always that he’s lost in this world and this handset will fill that void and in turn will give the individual a high that says yes, “Now I can never get lost”. (more…)