Like Mosaic Tiles

Shards of glass,
Scratchy and unsmooth
Fragmented into asymmetrical shapes
Smashed without an obvious purpose
Lying still on the ground
A huge array of varying materials
Diverse hues in all possible colours
Small, large, long, thin,
Like broken marble and uncut diamonds
They stay silently, unaware
What a mess it seems, no direction
No reason, meaningless
Individually insignificant like a pile of broken parts
Yet one of the most
Beautiful types of art
Found in the museums, palaces and sky ceilings
Are precisely made with these
Fractions of a whole
Taken from everywhere
Incomplete and fractured
Randomly chosen and found in the same situation
Somehow placed side by side
In the large canvas
Unsure of how they fit in
Yet they all do somehow
Because there is no single spotlight
But a common theme spun with a single thread
Of unity and delicate homogeneity of differences
Curious angles different sizes
Wavering degrees of positioning
Placed adjacent, one next to the other
Whole in their incompleteness
Fitting in where otherwise they did not
Like broken bits of a jigsaw
Overlapping where the other lacks
Up close it makes hard work
To understand their meaning
Their purpose uncertain in the myopia
Of short-lived vision
Yet tilted back
Pushed a little further away
Viewed like the earth from the moon
The sum of the parts
Make an equation fall into place
The sea of fabricated materials
Follow a pattern
Of their own
Their beauty lies in their imperfections
Breathtakingly captivating
The ultimate result is theirs to own

No reservations

Watching her cry, I feel the weight of her family on her shoulders. A daughter’s anguish from watching her mother’s pain, manifested in a body connected to countless tubes in the Intensive Care Unit.

“Love one another,” she says, because you never know when they will not be there anymore. It is true, so true, and in a flashback of what happened two years ago, I remember so vividly the fear of not being able to say the things we have always felt but kept in our hearts, the traumatic thoughts of not having the chance to see those you love before they fall into unconsciousness, the fact the they do not have the knowledge that you love them so. Suddenly, the importance of work crumbles in the face of such adversity, worries about other people’s impressions and a façade to upkeep seem ridiculously silly, and all you hope for is to be able to hold their hands and tell them you love them.

Each week passes by, an oblivious rollercoaster ride of deadlines that fade into nothingness. Some days you look back at the past few months and wonder what happened during that period of time; the days seemed to have started and ended without any meaningful memories created in between. We spend hours hunched at our desk in the office, worrying about the wording of an email, which may not even be looked at for more than 10 seconds, and we stress over the promotion that might skip us by. Home becomes just a place for bed and breakfast and we don’t even realize how much has changed in the life of our loved ones. We count the pennies but miss the big bucks; we fight many wars and win them, but we lose the battle. Myopia seems to have overtaken many of us, literally and metaphorically, and short-sightedness has led to many forgetting the most important bigger picture of life, the things that matter more than those that don’t.

A conversation at the Cheesecake café with a great friend of mine kept me thinking, a thread of thoughts started not only recently. Decisions we make on a daily basis, based out of fear? Or boldness to try something new, just because we desire to? A year off work seems like a huge decision to make, just to pursue a dream, or longing, when that is the same amount of time since the start of my working life. Yet experience for me enlarges the spectrum of my understanding, makes me rooted but gives me the power to believe, and shorter-term gains diminish in light of these. Encouragement from friends who have always chased their dreams, persistent in their beliefs as well as mine, that makes me feel so much lighter.

It’s like that with so many things. Planning is great, it helps you have an idea of where you want to go; but the magic is in the boldness, of creation of doing, and of trying even if you don’t know if you might succeed. Baby steps make the journey, and building a foundation in our relationships doesn’t take place overnight on occasional birthday parties; the pretty card in the mail once every half a year doesn’t suffice if you want to be a part of their lives as much as they are a part of yours. I realize that making the effort consistently, not only when you feel like it, nor only when things crop up, is what builds the unshakable base which holds us even as we shake.

Tell them you love them, say it as often as you feel the need and want to, do it unabashedly, boldly, without reservation. Get up and do things you want to do, now, not tomorrow, not next year. Don’t hesitate anymore. In Nike’s famous household slogan – Just do it.

Chennai – Old yet new

Sifting through my old emails, I found one forwarded by my ex-boss just before my maiden journey to Chennai, once called Madras and where British Influence in South Asia made its baby steps.

This is written by a lady from Chennai, who loves it for what it was, is and is becoming. Reading it now, it strikes a chord; India has changed my idea of so many things.
_______________________________________________________
Subject: The New Chennai by Shoba Narayan

The new, edgier Chennai hasn’t lost its past
Chennai is now edgier, sexier, grittier but tradition
has not given away completely in this traverse of time

By Shoba Narayan, Mint, July 24, 2009

What can I tell you about my beloved Chennai? People from other metros
will argue that Chennai has little to recommend it. They complain
about the heat and the orthodoxy. They complain about the nightlife or
lack thereof. They complain about wily, rude autorickshaw drivers who
fleece unsuspecting tourists. Yes, I know.

But what can I tell you in defence? Abnormal as it seems, I am
happiest in Chennai. This irrational love that most of us have for one
place has mostly to do with childhood. I know several people—my
husband included—who have no ties to any one city, having grown up in
several.

My friend, Arun, for instance, who now lives in Berlin, can
objectively take Indian cities apart, sifting them into pros and cons
that say everything but mean nothing. Mumbai for enterprise, Delhi for
power, Kolkata for Bongs who aspire only to get out of Kolkata,
Bangalore for the weather and entrepreneurship and Chennai for its
culture.

All true, but it does little to capture the essence of this coastal
city that welcomed St Thomas and does the jalsa (illicit
gratification, for example, liquor) and jilpa (gratuitous holding
forth on topics that one knows nothing about), as blogger Krish Ashok
says.

Chennai is waking up at 4am to have lunch at 7. It is going to tiny
Murphy Electronics in Adyar and having the proprietor dig out from the
dark recesses every gadget and20gizmo that you never thought to have.
It is drinking “Kumbakonam degree coffee” at, well, Kumbakonam Degree
Coffee in Anna Nagar. It is eating chop suey and hakka noodles at
Waldorf with the IIT guy you have a crush on.

It is watching grizzled old men cover themselves in monkey caps when
the temperature drops from unbelievable to bearable. It is watching
pretty maidens with turmeric yellow faces and dripping wet hair walk
to the temples in the month that is called Margazhi in Tamil. It is
describing yourself as a “thayir saadam” (curd rice) or a “Mylapore
girl” and knowing instantly what it means; about every nuance of that
person. It is knowing that music connoisseurs go to Mylapore Fine Arts
or the TriplicaneAcademy during the December season, while the people
who want to see and be seen go to the Music Academy.

Chennai is Grand Sweets, Ambika Appalam and Saravana Bhavan. It is the
pleasure of speaking in Tamil using a shorthand that only other
Chennai-ites will understand and relish: swear words such as savu
gracki, or the disdainful “veetila sollittu vandirukaya?”, which is
what an auto driver will yell when you cut him off, causing him to
nearly bang into you. Your fault, lady. Have you told people at home
(that you are going to die)? That’s what it means but like most
translations, this does little to capture the pithy essence of that
insult.

Change comes slowly to Chennai. Go there today, and you will still see
the vendors on the beach selling “thenga, manga, pattani, sundal” or
coconut, mango, and a variety of fried lentils. Couples still sit in
the moonlight at Elliot’s Beach, looking around furtively for known
faces. Mamis (matrons) still duck into Nalli’s or G.R. Thanga Maligai
(GRT) for silk saris and gold, respectively, and haggle hard for the
“compliment” or a Rs5 purse that is given free after they spend a few
lakhs. The free purse seems to give them more pleasure than their
purchases.

Chennai is going to Pondy Bazaar and finding everything except your
mother and father. It is parties where people still quote the “Manjal
Araithayaa” speech from the Tamil movie Veera Pandiya Katta Bhomman
after sufficient quantities of liquor have been quaffed. It is eating
spongy idlis at Murugan Idli Shop and wondering if ordering every type
of dosa on the menu is gluttony or good taste. It is the scent of
jasmine at sunset.

Chennai is steeped in Tamil culture. “No ifs, ands and buts about it”,
as a Madrasi would say, and no, please don’t use that word to describe
anyone south of the Vindhyas. M.S. Subbulakshmi epitomized what, for
many women, is Tamil culture. She was deferential to her husband who
managed all her affairs; almost childlike in her simplicity; had
regular oil baths and then scented her hair with sambrani (a type of
incense for sweet-smelling hair); circled the tulsi plant for the
well-being of her family; and inspired thoughts of the divine.

Today’s Chennai is edgier, sexier, grittier. Radio announcers (many of
them female) regale listeners with a snappy Tamil that is equal parts
slang and slander. Girls in Chennai no longer wear salwar kameez like
I used to. They ride motorbikes in tight jeans and halter tops. Few
oil their hair but many still wear the bindi. They prefer lattes to
filter coffee and pizzas to pongal. And you know what? That’s fine.
Because Chennai hasn’t lost its essence.

The same babe who speaks in Tanglish (Tamil-English) will go home and
address her grandmother as “Paati”. The same boy who sports spiky hair
and sunglasses will submit to a Ganga Snanam with loads of hot sesame
oil come Deepavali day.

Chennai—my Chennai, the city that I love—still exists. You just need
to know where to find it. Come with me. I’ll show you.

When in Chennai, Shoba Narayan dines at Karpagambal Mess in Mylapore
and Beyond Indus at the Taj Mount Road.

To never forget

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”
-Arundhati Roy

One of the signature quotes at the end of email messages, one of the quotes that always stun me in an absolutely refreshing way.

It is so easy to become immune to the violence and distress that once so thoroughly disturbed us during our daily news reading. It is so easy to frown and wrinkle our noses in disgust at the dirt-filled rat-infested conditions which the beggars live in, and then to walk on buy into the comfort of the five-star hotel, and out of sight, the poverty temporarily goes out of mind. It is so difficult to imagine and witness the pure joy on the faces of the little ones who spend their whole days playing with a simple ball, a game we take for granted, a game we are bored with, and it strikes us so hard to see these young children with more joy than us with all our expensive ostentatious goods. It is increasingly hard to appreciate beauty in what we do and have, when we have become shaped to complain without batting an eyelid, and to shout at what is not going well. We have became what we eat, and in this world of fast food, fast service, we have lost our patience for even the simplest things, we do not see anymore than we do not get nourished. It shocks us to see a woman with cancer encouraging her loved ones not to be upset, when really it should have been the other way round. We have become so accustomed to the grind of life which tells us money and status rule the world, that people high up on their pedestals should be treated like gods while poor people and those junior staff should be disregarded, ill-respected and not worthy of our time. We forget that sometimes certain things are just as they seem, and we spend precious amounts of time complicating two-dimensional matters when we should be spending more time solving and analyzing the world we live in. We become masks of insecurity mingling at events for the sake of networking, when actually we just want to spend some solitary time to gather our thoughts. What are we rushing to, where are we colliding headlong into? Why do we look away from that which is not pretty, nice or even just normal? Why do we forget so soon the things which have taken place? Why are we shocked when things which have been building up ages suddenly happen? What do we need before we can remember?

Letter from a Shared Services Centre

The FSSC used to seem to be a generic mailbox with the teams they supported the only forms of distinction. Although there were many people supporting the finance function, it felt more like we were dealing with a faceless crowd, who got in to work at a different time schedule from us, who was just a phone call away but with whom emails were the preferred mode of communication, and who were an extended part of the team that we never really felt any connection to.

I had imagined them (an unknown number) of colleagues working furiously away at their excel spreadsheets, opening, closing and editing those cellular sheets by pure expert navigation of the keyboard, without ever needing to lift their hands to use the mouse. I had envisioned an overworked, tired crowd filled with endless demands of reports to be churned out and delivered, all working desperately to meet seemingly impossible-to-achieve end-of-day targets. To speak the truth, I had not known what to expect to see at the FSSC, nor if it was going to be a massive report-generating factory that resembled a telemarketing company as shown in Slumdog Millionaire.

On the first day we stepped into the Chennai campus headquarters at Haddows Road, we headed straight to Asia building, 4th floor, and what lay before us astonished me. At least 400 people were seated in the massive office space, and since the dividing wall between FSSC and HRSSC had been recently removed, the space was magnified and almost doubled. It felt like I had entered a library of students busy at work, but instead of the monotonous strained looking faces I had expected, there was chatter and a buzz in the air that I had not previously associated with the FSSC. The huge expanse had an orderliness about it; departments were marked out by desk partitions and pillars showing off clocks representing time across the bank’s footprint. One of the first signs that greeted you was the poster showing the fire escape route, and every few meters you can see arrows hanging from the ceilings to point to designated fire wardens in case of an emergency. The thing which particularly caught my attention was the large electronic notice board in the middle of the floor, which screamed out in bright neon colors “HAPPY BIRTHDAY XXX FROM TEAM YYY”. I was amazed at the effort taken to highlight the employees’ birthdays and remember thinking to myself that maybe even with a few hundred employees on one floor perhaps it is not so impersonal after all.

In the next three weeks that passed, the 2008 finance IGs spent most of our time in the meeting room near the pantry where we sat listening to the management of FSSC go through a wide range of topics. We were brought through the reasoning for business processes outsourcing, the business proposition and shared-service centre model of FSSC, its history and evolution up the value chain, the different teams which form the FSSC and their operational BAU and also the difficulties which the FSSC top team faced in managing a shared services centre. We spent many sessions with the team heads as they presented the teams’ roles in supporting the Finance function, and even worked on a few sample packs to get a flavor of what their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) encompassed. During the third week that we were there, our coordinator KK arranged for us to have “first-hand” days with the teams relevant to our roles and interest.

Interacting with the management team at a more personal level, we were made more aware of some of the reasons for miscommunication between the FSSC and the teams they support, the “one-step-removed” feeling often felt by staff in shared service centers, and the various initiatives being launched to negate these hindrances to a successful working and supportive relationship between FSSC and its stakeholders, and how important it was to engage their staff to create an environment where the staff would want to stay. We were told that with Barclays, Shell and other competitors setting up shop in Chennai recently, the FSSC now had to be more competitive and change their strategy in retaining their valuable employees. With the aim to keep attrition low and Q12 scores high, it is not an easy task for the FSSC management to plan and carry out activities to generate goodwill among the staff and keep them connected and engaged. Aside from that, we were also reminded over and over again of the large risk-mitigating framework that is in place in case of any contingencies, which was rather impressive as I had never known so much preparation and pre-emption was involved behind. We also realized that there is an official voice of customer “C-First” platform through which we could give our feedback on the FSSC directly to its top team.

During our stay there we encountered varying levels of stomach upsets during the initial stages of adapting to the food and countless spices. We also went out and interacted with the FSSC staff and learnt more about their culture, and their warm and sincere hospitality was touching as much as it was surprising. I took away from Chennai a lot more than I had expected, and I think trips like this honestly make a significant difference to the teams we work with. In three short weeks, the FSSC has ceased to be just a 4-letter mailbox title to me, but is now a place where close to 700 staff operating out of Chennai work to meet and partner the Finance function in various changing projects and deadlines through a global array of time differences, and it will remain a part of the bank which will continually grow as the bank evolves.