This one I wrote while reading Dilbert (continuous for 5 hours)one day in my Britannia office. Loosely inspired from Dilbert. This was sometime in 2002.


Its my gut feel that organizational code of conduct is designed to check and restrict employee morale. A happy employee is a dangerous situation for any company, which in today's competitive world we can ill afford. With this in view, we also underwent to design a code of conduct for our company - basic assumption - our employees were found too happy. There are many ways in which employee morale could be kept in check, some of which that I could dream of yesterday in my sleep are: -

1 salary
2 Bonus
3 Health Plan
4 Inflated travel reimbursement claims
5 Stolen office supplies
6 Airline frequent flyer programs
7 Coffee/Tea
8 Personal phone calls
9 Office Sex (okie okie, am just getting progressive)
10 Illegitimate sick days
11 personal email
12 Use of laser printer for your resume
13 Free photocopies
14 Training for your next job

It was a tough job to dream about all the 14 points in one shot sleep, that's much I love you so you just wont have to bother about any point missing all willy nilly. You can debate till the cows come home and you start milking and they dont yield and you swear in the name of God and things like that, but after the corporate biggy wiggies having discovered what all can keep an employee happy (am assuming that this mail would land up in the mailbox of one CEO one hot sunny day) they would try and tie down all the damn 14 points so as not to leave any loop hole behind.

I tried to sleep again and foresee the future to relate what the Big Daddys (hereafter called Giraffes - cause Giraffes are big, and also being in the evolution chain, they are entitled to become Daddys as well) would do with each of them-

SALARY & BONUS
From now on, and ever after Bonuses will depend upon how the organization performs (say to the extent of 50%) and your own performance parameters would be so designed that they are in direct conflict with the organizational performance parameters. The organization is not going anywhere, performance or no performance - but this will help reduce employee cost, an inflated CTC and a good slotting in the B school campuses.

HEALTH PLAN
Employees will have to wear lycra masks all the time. This would keep their noses away from other fragrant, pointy objects that are also covered with lycra, without giving them the feeling of depravement. This in turn would boost employee morale. This will also help reduce inflated Viagra sales in India. Any non performance would entitle the Boss to unmask the culprit and let him die in depravity and desire. This will however inflate employee reimbursement in case of deaths occuring on duty. Subsequently, it will help Insurance companies charge a higher premium and help the economy to grow.

Also, all employees should wear a tagatroot (its a kind of device that ties both your feet in one direction - yeah, the word was coined by me). This would help align employee's feet in one direction - thereby negating any aimless wanderings - and the organization, depending upon the geographical location can choose right wings or left wings. Two left feet would discourage Giraffes to hit the dance floor often where most of the time they break their hips after two drinks and a tango.

TRAVEL REIMBURSEMENT CLAIMS
Oops, this is quite touchy. Travel today has become costly, thanks to Indian Railways. Its the patronising efforts of the Biharis & Jharkhandis who stop trains in there and try and redistribute resources (journalistically condemned as robbery) and hence subisidize travel. Unfortunately, we have only one Bihar in India. Fortunately the model could be replicated with the help of local self help groups (like what HLL is doing with Project Shakti and women, but thats a different story). Travel subsidy thus availed from Indian Railways would be equitably distributed between the Organization and the self help groups (like Ranvir Sena, MCC etc). More so, we can actually try and be a little Machiavellian by reimbursing them in kind. This would not only help you sell expired stocks, but would also give you increased penetration (limited only to sales scenario) and distribution width. Nationally we would contribute to GDP and per capita consumption.

STOLEN OFFICE SUPPLIES
There was a case in one of the companies sometime back that an employee took VRS and opened a stationery shop out of the supplies that he took back home in the 23 years of his illustrous service. Most of the employees do believe that they can carry their work back home, but end up only carrying the supplies. This could be a fatal situation. in 1992, Real Madrid saw most its team getting converted into FC Barcelona before they could say Carlos Menem. So you see the point. This could be easily tackled by the rationing system introduced by JLN (Nehru) as Fair Price Shops in 1952. Ideally every employee shouldn't be given more than
1 Pencil
2 Drawing Clips
1 Pen refill
per month. This would tantamount to 4 km of writing from an employee (way above even the American national average) and the clips would hold all those papers together. Things like Stapler, Gum bottle, Files etc can be shared between the entire department. This develops team spirit.

AIRLINE FREQUENT FLYER PROGRAMS
This is one of the most tangible happy moments that you can ever see an employee with. 80% of the buggers who fly in those shiny metal objects where they serve soft drinks and peanuts are the ones who would rather fly than walk on company money. Ask them to shell out the money and they'd rather walk for 2 days to get to their home. The organization has every right to every mile that the employee flies. Taking the logic forward, the organization also has the right over any mile that your wife flies, your daughter elopes and your son fritters.
Hence employees should now after be booked as cargo. The frequent flyer points thus accumulated could be cashed in for flying cows and goats from New Zealand and utilizing them for animal husbandry and then again shipping them out. Foreign jaunts could be subsidised by Cargo space available in those planes. This would enable another dairy revolution in the country and help reduce road accidents due to unsatisfied bulls running amock people in the cities looking for cows.

PHONE CALLS
Communication, taunted as the buzz word by the IT gooks has almost single handedly inflated overhead costs by 30%. Hence, organizations would now take the help of ESP. A sales manager trying to communicate loss of sales in his region to his superiors would do so by pinching his bottom with a prick. This medium of communication has to be developed to such an extent that his superior jumps of his seat (and not itch over his crotch) at the same time. This would take some time. In the meanwhile, responses should be tested on pricking on any other place. I am very sure that a correlation could be obtained for all possible messages.

OFFICE SEX
I blame sex and paper for most of our current problems. Here's my logic. Only one person in a million is smart enough to invent a printing press (take that - it took 1600 years since Christ for a Guttenberg to invent it !). So, when society consisted of only a few hundred apelike people living in caves, the odds of them being a genius were fairly low. But people kept having sex and with every moron added to the population, the odds of a devious smarty pants slipping through the genetic net got higher and higher. When you have got several million people running around having sex all willy nilly, the odds are fairly good that some preggy ape-mom is going to squat in a field someday and pinch out a printing press making deviant. Once done, it was a slippery slope after that. we were pretty much doomed. Two blinks later and we are switching batteries in our laptop computers while streaking through the sky in shiny metal objects in which soft drinks and peanuts are served.
Thus offices should tread this territory with an abdomen guard. Any space permitting seating for more than one should be banned. Women should be given designer burqas complete with oxygen cylinders, pepsi bottles and even night vision binoculars. men should be provided digitally controlled abdomen guards that locks them depending on the time they swipe their cards in and out of the office premises. enhanced R&D should be encouraged to control temperature and humidity in those zones.
Every cubicle should be equipped with its own chastity belts and iron maidens. Women visitors should only be allowed in the morning hours (when men are typically either drunk or too exhausted by the fight back home).

To be continued... am getting bored now..

My St. Gallen Essay

This is an essay I wrote for the touring students of St. Gallens University, when they stayed with us @ IIMB, somewhere in 2001


India – It is just not the oldest of the landmasses on the planet Earth. Nor is it a story of the oldest (Aravalli) or the youngest (Himalayas) mountains in this world. It is not a story of the most sacred river (the Ganges) in this world, neither is it an infamous fable of numbers (the fastest growing population across the country states). It is an experience. It is also a mean to the end Moksha (or Salvation) which people across the globe desire to obtain.

We as every Indian would tell you, are more intangible than tangible. We are incorrigible, yet flexible. We might scoff at others, but were always the first to adapt to the positives of different cultures. We are equal number of Aryans as we are of Dravidians, and we have numbers which have lost the identity of any race and are just Indians. We are old, we are new; we have embraced change since time immemorial, but we never compromised our values. We were ruled, we were smashed, but we always maintained what we were, despite countless oddities that paved our way with thorns. Yes, this is what we represent – a constant called change, the real spice of life.

We have been accused of living in the past; we have been blamed for being trapped in what we were and not what we are. Let me assure you that it has always been a myth, never a reality. As I had mentioned, we are an experience. Have you ever experienced a gathering of 60 million people in a celebration for peace of mind, that is what we have been practising since the first civilizations came into existence. We are an experience, so much so that the Hindu scriptures tell you that it takes no less than 84,000 life spans to get to know India in its entirety. India as an experience, where no less than 846 official dialects are spoken; where a local adage goes that “the language changes every 5 miles and the water tastes different every 20 miles”. It is the Indian experience that we portray, and experiences do not have an age, they are immortal.

But, we have a tradition of change, which seamlessly blends the old with the new. We have temples, old (Shravanbelagola – remember!!) and new (the Infosys office). We were known for tolerance (even the savage Mongols admit that) and we are still known for tolerance (ask Mr. Bush Sr.). We stood for values and even today we adopt those that leave a positive influence on our value system. Yes, we have moments of frustration, of torment when we see child marriages, widow abuses, dowry deaths, and political chimera. But you would appreciate that life won’t be worth living if you did not have certain challenges to devote as a cause.

During your weeklong stay in India, we had tried to showcase the Indian experience to you as realistically as possible (within the geographical and chronological constraints of available resources). Even if that meant, hours of tumultuous drives on especially made Indian roads, it would be a journey you would never forget! We could have brushed more with the fascination India possesses had we had more time. But I am quite confident of one thing. If ever you feel like experiencing a novel adventure, where nature coupled with mankind provides a soul stirring moment, you would always think of India.

Calculus & the art of Calculating

Word Count: 1337
Content: Inflammatory

I have to talk about Newtonian Mathematics here !

Tried applying Calculus to everyday life and the results were very exciting (Its like the statement sceintists make when trying a new poison on guinea pigs and they still dont die - in medico language, its called the Alpha test).

For those ignorant of differential & integral calculus, this would atleast enable them some appreciation of what Newton did when he was born in 1642 (the year Galileo died) till he died in 1689. When you differentiate something with something (assume the 1st something as X and the other something as Y) - something like comparing Y with X, with Y in the numerator and X in the denominator- like saying how much financially sound I would be - then I would be Y and you are trying to differentiate me with money, which would be X - the result of Me divided by X would give you a factor (am trying really to simplify things,actually its much much more complicated than this) which would enable you to approve/disapprove my credit worthiness!

Newton invented this method because he suffered from myopia. He couldn't see things that were distant and hidden - am talking metaphysically also, so keep that window open. Things which were warped, which gave 3 answers to one question(something like the equation Y = X^3) made him very nervous. He couldn't take what should be the right answer - quite difficult no, what to accept as the answer. So he tried to divide the problem that life posed into very small time intervals, say break it down to every single second, keeping other things constant - so that he could understand what caused the anomaly that gave rise to 3 bloody different answers. He thus gave us logical thinking, and things have been straight since 1642. Not a single day was problem. Yeah we still have 3 answers to so many situations - but now you have the weapon to decide which answer to choose. Like say how would a girl choose from say 5 different prospective bride grooms (this stat was published in the TOI - about the average number of optionsgirls have). In this case, simply keep every candidate's baldness and waistline constant (assume) and see how much one earns, then keep earnings constant and differentiate between them on looks, then keep looks constant and decide who could be the best coverup for the boyfriend you just ditched. This way you go on and presto - you choose the perfect bride groom - Courtesy Issac Newton - and this process is called partial differentiation - just in case anybody asked you what it means. You can go on adding any thing you want, and you can differentiate anything on any parameter - from as pertinent a question like Atal Behari Vajapyee's speech differentiated with the color of Dhoti he wears on a day to the most ludicrous question of preferring personal interests above commitments.

Newton realised that this process would be mostly used by women. men didn't have the intellect to go into such details. They just looked at a girl's face before saying yeah or neah. Statistics go beyond and show us that guys seldom ask girls about their previous love life before getting into one. You all know about girls. So, the point was that Newton realised that 'mankind' needed some relief from women who were ready to tear apart their life into every abominable second of humiliation. They needed some salvation from womankind. He invented integration.

History confirms the importance of integration. Every political statement, realignment, unification, even music concerts (remember spirit of unity concerts on DD I on sundays - when we were really really small) would talk of integration. now you understand.

It is how it goes. You integrate a variable, call it X, w.r.t Y. Like the earlier example, assume I am X and say again that Y is any other parameter with which you would like to integrate me - say say job satisfaction ! (topical, ain't it)

Now basically, what integration does is that it gathers all that small small seconds that differentiating women have split your life into, arrange it into a meaningful pattern. Just quite the opposite of what women do to you. Newton believed that doing so adds lot of value in your life, it creates meaning out of your 60 second existences between woman to woman or moments thereof. In a sense, it adds a constant to your life, irrespective of the tearing apart that differentiation does to you. This is quite a metaphysical process. Mathematically it is called indefinite integration. Not much of use for career orientation, but great value add when you try and judge the value of love, marriage, wife, parents and friends in your life


The biggest gain comes when you try to integrate your life between two bounds. I shall explain it using the job satisfaction as parameter. This process, is called Definite Integration (assume I am X and job satisfaction is Y and that my present job is in Britannia and say I aspire to join Lehman Brothers, Cayman Islands - yeah know they are not based there, but what the heck its just an example).

The process would look like

(jetsam-floatsam)d(job satisfaction)Lehman - (jetsam-floatsam)d(job satisfaction)Britannia

woof, anyways lets make it a bit more grammatical

XdYLehman - XdYBritanniaAs you can clearly see, there are obvious comparisons between Britannia & Lehman. You can get more mundane and try and compare financial status, social life, good looking wife etc as well. On a deeper note, it would help you get over previous girl friend and into present girl friend, and it would also help you evaluate whether you got a good or bad deal with your girlfriend. In case you got PPCD (as someone had memorised it, Its Post Purchase Cognitive Dissonance - applicable in many real life situations) then you could opt for PPCDR (Post Purchase Cognitive Dissonance Reduction) through Indefinite integration - caution - it might through up options like VRS, settling in the Himalayas etc. Make sure you have enough warm clothes. Else try definite integral and another girl friend .

Newton died 313 years ago. As mathematicians worldwide would concur (again no doubting Thomasses, its been statistically proven so as not to give your brains the pain to think) differentiation is much more easier than integration. Not demeaning womankind, but its very simple to tear apart anyone's life, by comparing this with that, by trying and measuring immeasurable things, yes it would give you answers but wont tell you whether its good or bad for you. sometimes it defies common sense. It says that you can straighten a curvaceous thing into a straight line, just by cutting it into smaller and smaller fragments - it doesnt read that you are questioning the existence of that curve and its meaning. Its like twisting something too much. As all engineering students would tell you of the disastrous results when the sheer modulus is very high. It causes things to break down. It can be anyday applied to life.

We are in this world to integrate. We have a short life span. You would be cursing yourself if you live beyond 65. Its too short to try and create dissonance, in anyone's life. we are here to make a mark, to leave behind something that people to come will appreciate, something that would stand for you even when you are not there. May be if you are reborn you would be happy only to see people talking about you in a positive note. Its easy to say that people's opinion do not matter, Its fashionable to say that I dont give it a shit anymore, but is that actually true. I hope am talking to people who have this conscience which doesn't let them sleep over a wrongdoing. Its a short life, and we do not live long. Lets not differentiate, lets try and integrate.

Time is running out on you.