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The bloody diamond

The bloody diamond
This is life

Welcome to the imperfect world

Welcome to the super-real world where survival comes first, much before the high alter preachings of excellence (for others only). So if you are the one who does not have to survive, or does not care - you have a choice not to remain here.

For others, please have a seat and take cover - here anything can happen anytime and you may just become a faceless co-lateral damage. Everything here is related to life and death, pains and agonies, treacheries and conspiracies, cons and deceit, treason and betrayals, despair and darkness - we just do not live in any perfect world.

BUT that is why the blog is here at all - let there be light. It aspires to show the way, to train myself and my friends in the defense against the dark arts. It is also related to hope and courage, renunciation and redemption, indomitable will and lust for life - the immortal battle with the dark side. Red flag fluttering in the gentle wind, all hands on deck, war cries in the air, daggers drawn, no quarters given nor asked, no hostages taken - we must fight till the last man standing

Rest assured, you are in good hands. These hands, with all the talents or the lack of them, with all the liveliness and the inner brooding, with the over-sized ego and the extra-ordinary humility, with all the goodness and the devilish designs - have been war veterans - they have fought for decades in the battle of survival.

Happy surviving




Love in blood

Love in blood

The inescapable war within

It is the curse of the human that we are constantly at wars. War with the Government, society, family, spouse, children, Boss, peer, friends, neighbours. Some of these are overt, some crude, some plain enmity but some are subtle, some barely palpable, some low key and guerilla types, some are cold as razors, some are dry like the funeral pyres.

Most of these cannot be own with force or when you try for winning - sometimes you have to lose to win them. Some are more like trials than wars, they never show the faces, never let you see their pimples, just shadows, the kafkaesque faceless executioners take over.

For all these, we need inner strength, we need strategies. Sometimes the objective is survival, sometimes it's plain escape from the random blades, sometimes the heady delight of beheading the enemy. Sometimes it is sheer joy to be alive, sometimes happiness comes over from a walkover or just a walkaway, without even a careless looking back. Often it is a mixed feeling - the agony, the ecstasy, the brutal orgasm or a complete disenchanted detachment - a shelter in the NOW. They sometimes need courage, need cunning finesse, sometimes ruthless lack of values of a son-of-the-bitch, sometimes daring flamboyant recklessness, maybe even stoic nonchalance. But the best of the best generals in the wars of life, always win without unnecessary bloodshed or even none of it at all.

But the most painful and fearful of all these wars are the ones with oneself. It could be a conflict between mind and heart or even the soul that holds our values dear. And this is one war that always hurts, always wounds, always bleeds one dry, always keeps one awake through the fearful night with the shadows of the beautiful lacey curtains blowing in the gentle wind and making shadows of our most intimate fears within. It is like a nation under seize, and alas, there is no escape. When you will kill yourself softly, no survival strategy ever works.



Saturday, December 18, 2010

Survive from the interview blues and your own attitude purples

I have known the inner shivering, the dark fears and the heartburn that no Eno can heal, when I used to give the interviews. At that time, there was hardly a couple of companies and they used to take a handful of people. I did not have enough confidence on myself, did not have any shining degrees, did not have training in soft skills or more importantly in interview techniques, did not know their ways and did not have any mentors. In those trying times, whenever I went for an interview, most of the time I had it written in the forehead in an invisible ink that I "badly need this job" and in those case, without fail, I failed to secure it. Then I understood that a job must be earned and demanded, not asked. Nowadays, in a completely changed scenarios, when I find the students complaining and shivering, I find it strange and wonder what went wrong.

Interview is a strange animal. It is a game, to say the least and often is a farce. I have seen Samamta, a guy who was an invaluable asset for the company later, being taken for a ride in his interview and Naru, who never did any work except having excellent PR with his Bosses, make a monkey of the interviewers and get a deal better than Samanta, having probably a hundredth of his talent and thousandth of the dedication. This is not a stray case either. It is quite usual that the bagpipers do much better than the real workers at the interview, which is the game of judging 25 years of worth in 25 minutes.

I can remember at least 3 interviews that I failed, each of which could have changed my life forever after. Each of those failures have cost me probably crores along with the saving of untold miseries and agonies. Getting one important interview, in that sense, is a lifetime chance and failing can never be an option. In our time, in the lower middle class background like ours, we were purely dependent on our talents to go through lives. Our fathers never bothered about the scenario planning of WHAT IF we do not score in joint, or WHAT THEN when one scored in joint. The corporate shine was visible to only a few people, like Ani’s father who trained his sons about what to become in life and how. We could not think of spending money on taking a few trainings, never were our parent could understand the associated real cost.

Nowadays the options are more, awareness and desperation have led to more research and techniques, soft skill trainers are dime a dozen, however good or bad standard they are, and even there are guys like me who makes a crusade to avenge his miseries by changing lives of those who will listen. The world is at their feet and they crib, they curse – angry at why the world is so late and still not coming to them with the cushy corner room office of the Director, with very little work so that they can be at the facebook whole day and going out for a binge at the opium, where obviously, money is better spent than some bullshit trainings or classes.

Somehow, we have awfully failed to teach our next generations that some things they are taking for granted are usually hard earned and they must be earned at some point of time. The corner office, you can call the holder a corner man or in short form a conman, does not come cheap unless your father has paid the price to build it up. It is even more difficult to keep that office on the run, as a strategy professor I constantly see how fast the world change, how fast the competition makes rubble out of the empires. If they were taught history properly at school, they would have had these perspectives even better. The stupid teachers teach the dates and the gist of the kings regime, never ever challenge them to think what happened to the King who was vanquished and had to run to survive and how they lived in the jungles with a few loyal men at the most. It is a folly that history writes only about the winners and not the losers, that creates a viewpoint in the students that the world is rosy. They dream to be the King, not really understanding the huge pressures and challenges and risks associated. Not only the teachers, our syllabus makers are no less asses in that sense that they do not even understand the purpose of teaching history. Can anybody shut his eyes and see a scene that Siraj-udowla, the tragic but arrogant brat of a King who even did not wear a nagra by his own hand, was trying to cook something in a small patch of land beside the river (on their way to Munger) for his small daughter Ummat Zohra, when the men sent by Miran (after being informed by danshah Fakir) caught him ? can somebody imagine when a King, whose family was reigning for say 7 generations, could live in the forest after he was vanquished and had to run to save his life and family ?

We do not imagine the dark side of the life and always conclude that those things cannot happen to us. We do not prepare for the dark days, do not get trained in survival techniques, and that is why we cannot face the innumerable kind of problems in our lives. Just look around and see the troubles in the people's lives, the disenchantment, the agony, chipping at the relationships, trouble at the office, fight with the Boss, marital discord - the list is endless. How many people you have seen read the chanakya slokas (in translation, even, which is fine) ? The survival training in life should start from there. Life is not fair, it’s no use hoping that it will be. However cushy is your job, if you rub the Boss’s mistress the wrong way, you are a nobody. The ultimate job security is when you can afford to roam around with your resignation letter in your pocket. Ultimate job security is the knowledge that if you go out of this door, your competitor company people will be waiting to kidnap you at the earliest. Hold your hand on your chest and tell me, how many fathers you have seen who have the vision to try to prepare their children for the dark days or difficult situations ? They harp about studying and studying, never really understanding the need for the other skills that make the difference between life and death.

So, interview is a game and then, they must be beaten at their own game – with a convincing win-win situation and all smiles – click click. It needs a definite and personalized strategy that nobody can give you or train you. But you can be trained to think how you can make this strategy. You can be trained in all other aspects – how to walk in, how to walk the talk, how to lead them rather than follow, how to guide them at your den, how to brainwash with the subtle and gentle winds, how to lay the trap, what to hide and where to do away with the bikini and finally how to negotiate – orgasmically.

It must be understood that they have no time to waste on people they think are of no worth. So, you have been called for an interview, essentially means that they finds you a potential candidate to take, only thing is that you must fit with them and then you must fit their spec. Another issue is that they always try to play on the percentages that means they will always like to interview 10 and take 4, even if all the 10 are good. when they come to the campus, they know that the educational achievement levels are more or less the same, but you must be able to justify why they should take you and not the guy to your right or left. You must show that somehow, you are different from the others in a pleasurable way. That can be anything. One nephew-in-law of mine, a particularly rash and hot-headed chap passing out from Jadavpur univ. last year, faced this question directly and said he has a "inner calmness" that differentiates him. I had trained him to do exactly that and right after the interview, when he called me up to say what happened, I asked him to go have fun because the medal has come home already.

While I try to remain painfully honest in my personal life, interview is a game and remains one and one does not need to be honest in that, I have ruefully learnt that much later but it was too late and too little for me. In an interview, you have to project, an image or a profile that matches their need and expectation – it is out and out a game of seduction. Only thing is that you have to carry it to your grave, to the offer at least and start believing then that it was not an image, it IS the real you and slowly merge into that mystique creature of your projection. They are always a part of the system, which is the all powerful establishment, and are vengeful. Once they will start guessing that you are taking them for a ride, the empire will strike back at the core of you and you may never have a second chance.

The system, always want people who will not rock the boat or try to break the system. That means they do not want Che, remember, they do not want any original thinker or intellectual also. It is not those places where the placement assistant gets all the time to her to read poems (with all due respect, for I was a budding and a rising poet myself at one time) and do nothing else and her Boss coming for the fashion shows now and then, putting the responsibility on some underpaid underdog underboss. The establishment always want mediocre obedient consistent mechanical cowards who can be retained and made to work on Sundays and on maintenance projects and will keep silent if they inadvertently come across the mistresses of the Bosses. So, if you are anything else, start changing your mould. In 0.005% of the jobs, they want brains and balls together in one place, if you think your target meets the spec, congratulations. Just go and sit, recline in your chair, put your legs on the table, order them to get you some coffee and whoa – that’s it. The interview will end and they will only ask the amount they will write on the letter. If you do not match the spec, welcome home, to the nasty slutty world of the interviews.