Jeffrey Archer in Gurgaon

I happened to attend a book promotion event at Landmark this Saturday, and the book being promoted was ‘Paths of Glory’ and the author was Jeffrey Archer. Now I must admit that I have not read any book by the author, but I know almost everyone I know has read some works of Lord Archer. Going by what I heard about him, I expected him to be a master storyteller and that is what he exactly turned out to be. I enjoyed myself completely at the event and for the first time saw a book shop full to the brim and people queuing up for taking his autographs.

Post the event I was thinking about what made him such a great storyteller. Like a typical VIP in India, he turned up late for the event, and then started by blaming the traffic for his delay. He started by talking about the book that he was promoting, stating carefully the parts that would excite the audience and make them get up and pick the book from the next aisle and read it as soon as possible. He spoke about himself, about his book, his struggle to get his first novel published, interesting anecdotes and everything sprinkled with a bit of humor. In future tense, he connected with the local audience and said he wanted to be transport minister in India, is writing a story based in India and spoke about R K Narayan and how he became a fan of his after reading his books. He took questions from audience, most of which were well anticipated questions. He answered every question with humor and honesty, when he had to say No, he said No. He took stock of the audience by asking them how many have read what kind of books, by asking how many write already and how many want to write in the future. Perfect communication, know who you are talking to, talk about them and their environment, talk about yourself in a way that they will buy you and your product. All this without being philosophical, without preaching and keeping the audience entertained. He managed to sell not only the book he just released but also the book that would come six months from now.

A master storyteller indeed…

Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity by Sam Miller

This book was launched almost at the time when I shifted my base from my favorite city Bangalore to Gurgaon, which falls under the umbrella of Nation Capital Region (popularly called NCR), and hence considered a part of Delhi. I have always been looking at books that I can recommend to the visitors to India, that they can read to know about the city and country that it is. Being someone who likes to write about my travels, this book was also about traveling within the city that you live in. So I picked up this book, to read about someone’s experience of traveling around this giant city, to re-connect with Delhi that I left behind some 7 yeas ago and to explore another style of travel writing. But what drew me most to this book was the fact that it was written by someone who actually walked around the huge city in a spiral and experienced the city. I always felt that in an ideal city, the distances should be such that the city can be covered on foot by an average walker, beyond that the cities should not expand. Of course in the big cities, it does not even apply to the sub cities or suburbs. During my travels, I like to do some early morning walks in the city to see how the city wakes up. There is no doubt that the best way to know the place is to walk around, stop at anything that catches your attention and talk to people here and there, the kind of people you may never meet otherwise.

This book is as much about the author as it is about Delhi. In fact in lots of places it is about the relationship that the author shares with the city. Sam went around the city, starting at the centre of the city today is CP metro station and then took an anti-clockwise spiral route to explore the city on foot. His complete journey was divided in 12 sub routes, which put together formed the planned spiral. He has just followed his route, and speaks about the places and people that he met on his way. It looks like that he deliberately does not talk about the popular tourist spots of Delhi, but he does mention the places which he think deserve a better mention in the guidebooks of Delhi, but have been neglected all along. He also writes amusingly about the people he met, some by design and some by default. He talks about some strange encounters he had with people during his walks which sometimes make an interesting reading and at times looks like stretching it too much. But probably the difference may be of a local and a non-local eye. Some things that we find very normal are usually not so to a foreign eye.

The book is written in a new way. The twelve chapters are from the 12 walks that the author did to write the book. From the way they are written it looks like that each walk was done in a day, barring a couple of chapters when the author had to break the walk and come back some other day to complete it. Two consecutive chapters are separated by an Intermission, where the author has put down his thoughts in various things about living in Delhi primarily coming from his own experience of living in Delhi. Most of the times these appear as random thoughts that occurred to the author as he was writing the chapters, and included them in the book. There are pictures, most of which have been taken by the author himself during the walks. Each chapter is begins with a map of the route that the author took, depicting the landmarks, topology, author’s route and events mentioned in the chapter. The events actually make author’s journey look quite adventurous. I definitely want to visit some of the parts mentioned and walk around to feel the place. The title of each chapter has been written in third person while the whole book is written in first person, probably required a bit more efficient editing. It may sound frivolous, but the font and the layout of the book do contribute to the overall readability and that is where this book could have been better. The photos are not aligned, the margin on the pages not properly designed, far too many foot notes which could have moved to the back of the book. The book has been written more like a blog with whole lot of research done on Google and references provided. Overall, I think the author could have gone a level deeper, flow could have been a little better, but nonetheless it is a welcome book, as it explores an area not many have dared to explore: Walking a mega city on foot. This also looks at Delhi as it exists today, rather than focusing too much on its glorious and colorful past only.

Weather you live in Delhi, visiting Delhi or simple interested in Delhi as a city, this book can make an interesting reading for you…

Sam, if you read this blog, I would like to go out on a walk with you sometime…:-)

Purpose of Education

Not by design, but for some reasons, since last three months I shifted to reading a lot of business magazines and the common theme of course across magazines had been Slumdog Millionaire, Lok Sabha elections, IPL and ongoing recession. But in not so highlighted way, lot of magazines carried stories on education. There was a story on executive education offered by most leading business schools across the world and how it benefited some of the managers. There are number of stories on how the industry wants the education system to prepare students for employability. Lot of industry leaders come out with the preparedness that they are seeking in their potential employees, as they want them to be productive as soon as possible.

This led me to think about the basic purpose of education in Life. The question I had, and I am sure this would have been discussed earlier many times over, is if employability is the only purpose of education or if it is more than that. I tried to look at my life back from the time I started my formal education to the time I was employed and my continued education on various fronts as I moved forward in life. I also thought about the way our education system is structured and what it imparts us during various stages.

In the initial stages of formal education, say till the primary education, the purpose of education is to impart us with widely accepted conventions of communicating with the world. This includes imparting us the knowledge of languages and basic rules of grammar. We are taught to learn the basics about numbers and how to add, subtract, multiple, divide and a few more operations. We learn the basics of social science, something about the plant and animal kingdom, a bit of poetry and a lot of stories, most of which give us the ability to visualize and dream what we probably can not see with our eyes. Basically we get acquainted with the world around us and learn the basics of communicating with this world. There is mix of knowledge and skills that we receive at this stage of education.

Moving on the senior school levels, we start looking at different subjects and get the basics of them. For example, if we study Botany we understand how the Botanists look at the world and how they classify it? It is still learning the conventions of the world of Botany but a level deeper than what we learnt in primary school. We appreciate the classifications of the world in terms of subjects. We study history to know how the world around us evolved to this stage, how our ancestors lived and how various civilizations evolved. We study geography to know the world as it exists today. We study science to understand the unseen and to probably be able to define the future one day. We study social science to understand the society that we live in, and the way it is structured. We start getting introduced to the literature and the world of various art forms. We study the applications of mathematics and some theory behind it. We play some sports and it’s the only place where we learn to operate in teams. Unfortunately we are not explicitly taught the interlinking of the various subjects at any stage. At this stage we understand the worlds of various subjects.

After the school, we choose our area of interest and go a level deeper into the chosen combination of subjects. We understand the nuances of the subject. Pure students look at the subject from learning perspective, they look at its evolution with an objective to potentially contribute to the evolution. The practitioners look at the subject from its application perspective and try to see how the humankind can use its application for improving the quality of life. E.g. a physicist may study the laws of motion and in the process study motion theories of movement of particles to movements of heavenly bodied in the universe, but an engineer may use these laws of motion to design a vehicle that can be used by people to move from one place to another.

On the sidelines, there is life that keeps teaching its own lessons. We learn from the place, society and company that we live in. The more no of places we live in the more we learn and the more we learn more we are open towards other people, cultures and places. We learn skills based on the events and surroundings in our lives, on the basis of interests that we get to pursue. We learn everyday, almost every moment from everything that we do and from everything that we see, hear, feel or touch. The trick is how much of it is added to our knowledge and how much are we able to convert into our wisdom. Everyone does it to some extent but some people do it more than others.

At any point in time, there are a few industries that are in high growth stage and they require specific skill sets in huge numbers. This is a very transient requirement in ever changing world. There are a lot of people who choose to respond to these transient requirements and equip themselves with the skills required, irrespective of their area of interest. The euphoria in the air says that if you are not equipped with these skills you are probably not prepared for a good future and a good life. In the process, the industry probably manages to the get the quantity of manpower that they need, quality is always a point of argument. But what looses is the subject area where the student would have been interested and might have made his or her best contribution. After a few years most good minds would get a feeling of going back and pursuing what they really want to do, some people manage to do it, some get lost in the rut of life. This is where the real education comes in play, people who would have gathered the wisdom from their education would be able to pursue their professions and their passions and lead a satisfactory life.

There is no undermining the fact that we need employment and hence we need skills that would make us employable. But then should the whole focus of our education be focused upon getting employed, or should it take a part of our time and effort to build our skills that would provide us employment. Should education not focus on providing us with the basic life skills and an open mind which is adaptive to the external changes while developing the inner core? Being employed is necessary for surviving, but living is more important than surviving and education should prepare us for a living a quality life.

A well rounded education gives us or should give us the knowledge, skill, attitude and an ability to be a learner forever. The skills that are in demand today are bound to be obsolete tomorrow, so at the skill level we should be adaptable and ready to learn new things at any point in time, depending on what field we are in and where we want to be. At the knowledge level, we should develop an ability to keep enhancing our knowledge by being open to learning from everything and everyone around us. We should learn from our experiences, be open to new experiments and experiences, while also absorbing from experiences of those around us. Attitude is something that always is a function of our grooming in initial years and in later years our ability to use our observations and experiences to define our behavior towards everything in life. A good education in the initial years can help us with an attitude that helps us in living a full and complete life.

Though they say that education is something that is a lifetime affair, but learning is more of a habit and that too an acquired one most of the times. Learn for no reason or for any reason, but as long as you are learning, without limiting yourself by the employability factor, the returns will also not be limited by the returns that the employment gives.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

This book had been a bestseller for years now. Every other day you hear about the Hollywood movie being made on the book and for some reason or the other the book remains in news. I have met several people who have read the book and while reading (it takes a long time to read this 950 odd pages book), everyone wanted to go and sit in the Leopold café in Mumbai. Couple of years back on a business visit to Mumbai, I actually did go and sit their as a colleague was reading the book and desperately wanted to see the place. I kept looking at this book every time I visited a bookstore, but either because of the size of the book or because of its bestseller tag, I kept avoiding it. But now that I have lots of time on hand, I picked up this book and read it over last couple of weeks.

It is a story that keeps you glued to the book while you are reading it. Brilliantly written, it is a good mix of fact and fiction and all elements of a good story, some revealing facts, some emotions, a bit of romance, a bad guy with a golden heart, a mysterious underworld don, an adopted family and all this in well balanced proportions and spread across the length of the story. Still this story fits within the few years of the protagonist’s life that he spent in Mumbai. It’s a story of grit and determination of a person refusing to give up after all that he goes through, a story of someone who is a ready to learn new things anytime be it the language or be it the ways of doing a new business, story of someone who comes out of nowhere to Mumbai and becomes the face of Mumbai crime and can probably take lessons for the new recruits in business.

The book has many layers or rather stories, the common thread being the protagonist. There is a story of people living in slums and their day to day survival, their interdependence on each other, their ways and means to manage crisis, their trust and faith and their joys and sorrows. There is a story of illegal immigrants to Mumbai, mostly from first world countries, who are escaping from their own countries, usually have criminal backgrounds and find an anonymous existence here, their relationships with each other and with the locals, their lure for drugs, their vulnerability and their courage. There is a story of underworld, the way it operates in a truly global way, how it earns for itself, how it recruits, trains and rewards its people, how it manages everything with perfection and how they actually believe in what they are doing. There is a story of Mumbai city in itself, how it exists and why it is the melting pot for all kinds of people, especially the non conforming ones. Of course it is the story of the protagonist who has escaped from an Australian Jail and landed in Mumbai on a fake passport and with a fake name, who goes and lives in a remote village in Maharashtra for six months, comes back and lives in a slum for years working as a doctor curing slum dwellers and is then discovered by the underworld. He gets entangled in their web in such a way that he eventually becomes a key player in their game plan, runs black market operations in currency exchange, runs forged passport business, experiments in black marketing gold, goes and fights in Afghanistan and loves a woman from first page of the book till the last. Quite a life in one life…

As you read the book, you keep wondering what is fact and what is writer’s imagination. Author has not claimed anything to be true, but a lot of things written, in my opinion can be written only if you have gone through the experience. You may twist and tweak but you have to go through it to be able to so eloquently describe it. Author may have deliberately left out a lot of details, or added a few to fill the gaps hence created, but overall the story does look true. For an average reader, there are quite a few things to learn from this book, particularly about the operations of underworld.

It makes an interesting read, if you have the patience to read a long book. Towards the end you find it a bit dragging when he goes on to describe each and every wound on everyone’s body part, but otherwise it has been written in a way that keeps you interested to know what next, even when you reach the last page. Author is very good at depicting emotions, both his and of others, you would almost feel the feeling the characters are going through but at the same time he keep sit light enough for you to move on.

Read it…

A Curse called IVR

IVR or Interactive Voice Response system is the technology that lets a machine interact with human being either through voice through a series on keyboard inputs, usually on phone. This technology is widely used by consumer based services industry such as banks and telephone service providers. The pre-recorded message that you hear when you call your bank to ask about your bank balance is your first interaction with IVR. Next it takes you through a series of menus and makes you press innumerable keys on your phone pad, and most of the time to leading you nowhere, or to a discovery that there is no menu option available for your particular query. You struggle to figure out how to reach a customer service agent so that you can talk to a real human being, make him or her realize your frustration with the organization and if possible find a solution for your problem or a small answer for your query.

A simple Google search on the net and a bit of common sense tells me that the IVR, also called automatic assistant is used by the organizations that have to handle high call volumes. Having human being to attend the calls is obviously costly. I buy the argument for all the mundane activities, where I really do not care for a real voice to help me out, but for an organization to think that their menu is exhaustive enough and not making available the option of reaching a real agent available is a real pain. I am sure they would have enough data to prove that the IVR is justified as most people call for mundane tasks only (e.g. if it is a bank, people call up to check their balances only, and if it a telecom company, customers call up to check their billing status only). But where I have a big complaint is that they assume that their menu is exhaustive and it can take care of my all possible needs. Having said that, the real customer service agents are not a big help as they also hardly know anything beyond the menu options, but at least you have an opportunity to make an attempt to help them understand your problem, and hope that someone would respond.

Besides these usual cribs, my biggest problem is for services that these companies provided solely through phone and hence leaving you with no option but to be entangled in the web of IVR. Like I recently discovered that if I have to change my address for my credit cards, there is no other way except calling the phone banking and requesting them to change, who would in turn tell me drop a simple application in their drop box somewhere which will be sent to the head office and would take at least 9 working days to change my address. There is no real office for credit cards, so you can never reach a real person for them. There are banks that issue you the credit card, but you can not visit them for any query related to credit card, your one and only savior is the phone banking no. Should it not be mandatory for the service providers to have a physical facility where customers can walk in and have their problems sorted out? Of course it would mean you need to have staff that can understand the business they are in and be able to help the customer with the solution, and that’s again a grey area for most high growth service providers.

The average time to fiddle around and understand the menu can be as high as 20-30 mins, and you may still not be able to find a solution for your problem. I wonder if these organizations have ever done a survey of customer frustration (yes, satisfaction just does not fit the description) from IVR and call centers responses, I would love to see the results. If there is a smart filmmaker I am sure he can carve out s script out of these responses that the customers give out of their frustration, the ones the IVR gives and the ones that are given by the executives by virtue of their lack of knowledge.

If you notice recently all the phone banking numbers have been changed to mobile numbers, and the toll free numbers though are mentioned on the websites (Is this a regulatory requirement for Banks to provide a toll free no?), but they never work. You would hear a welcome message and then your call will be lost in the universe. Is there a revenue sharing business going on to scratch each other’s back at the cost of the customer again?

If the service providers shift a bit of their focus from customer acquisition to customer satisfaction, I am sure this can be a differentiator for them in the long for them, when they would have to shift the focus from acquisition to retention. After an industry reaches its maturity level, the number of customers would not go up at the same rate, but the customer churn would increase based on the quality of service provided. This will become more relevant as the services themselves will become more and more standardized and organizations would struggle to be different. I think its time for the Banks and the telecom companies to start thinking on these lines and focus on customer service and value the time that the customer spends interacting with the organization. If not for the customer’s sake, probably for their own future’s sake…