Flight to Freedom (Leisure)

I was always a water person. As a child, I enjoyed swimming. I moved on to rowing and then I learnt the joy of windsailing in Jakarta. Then I experimented with to scuba diving. When I moved to Mumbai my passion for the sea still persisted and Colaba sailing club enabled me to pursue this. An early morning sail out into the deep blue sea, (I can’t vouch for the blueness of Mumbai sea!) with the sea princess caressing every inch of my body with her wet and salty embrace, still fills me with an exhilaration that is difficult to express in words.


After that I shifted to Delhi; a city far far away from the sea. I could no longer manage my morning sail out into the sea before getting busy with the daily grind.

I met Rahul who became a good friend within a very short time. May be some connection from our previous incarnation: - ). I shared with him my frustration of not being able to indulge in something that connected me wuth the nature and tickled my adrenal glands.

He offered to find me a solution. He asked me to join him on a Saturday early morrning. Both of us got into my car. Rahul took the driver’s seat. I was all excited and my heart was filled with anticipation. I was looking forward to any surprise. From the highway we turned into a side lane. The road was narrow and deserted. It was luscious green all around. We reached the destination in few minutes.

What a sight. All those beauties standing out in the field, enjoying the early rays of sun. I could not take my eyes off them. Rahul asked me to choose one and mount her.

“Don’t worry. I have selected a gentle one for you. She will be nice to you. Once you mount her and she is on the go, you should start your up-and-down motion with her rhythm” He explained to me the basics of dealing with them.

Before this, I had sat on a horse only at those touristy places where the groom held the reins and the horse walked along placidly. In the club the groom helped me to mount the horse and then handed me the reins and a whip. I was filled with trepidation. Rahul rode up to me.

“Koshy start trotting” He suggested.

“How?”

“Rub your heels against the girth of the horse” He explained.

I did what he asked me to and the horse (her name was jungle baby) started trotting.

Oh My god, I was bouncing up and down and my back hurt.

“Koshy you have to move up and down, kind of like sit ups, along with the rhythm of the trot” Rahul started his lesson.

As I proceeded with my riding for couple of days I realized that it was not going to be easy to be a good rider. A lot to learn! The moment a person mounts, the horse realizes how good a rider he is. When it realizes that you are a novice, it decides what to do. Each horse has his /her own personality. Some are gentle and well behaved. Some are lazy and just won’t move, while others are rascals and will try to throw you off.

A few days into my riding, one morning as I was mounting a horse some fellow riders invited me to join them for a hack in the forest behind the club. I decided it was worth a try. As we trotted into the wild, the horse picked up speed and I was both scared and ecstatic. Rahul was behind me. Suddenly the rider in front shifted to a canter. Meenakshi, my horse followed suit. I did not know that when a horse started cantering I had to stop sit-ups and just sit. So I continued to do sit-ups and I was getting thrown up and down. I thought that I was going to fall off.

“Koshy stop the up-down motions and sit steady” Rahul yelled.

I pulled at the reins and Meenakhi slowed down.

I was hooked. But I had to pay the price to get some level of mastery on these animals. Only then could I take him where I wanted and not the other way! For the first few days my back and hip joints hurt, and I could not walk normally. May be it raised a few eyebrows and some of my friends asked me to my face what my latest pastime was. I experienced what we mean by "a pain in the butt"  However all these are nothing but minor irritants in comparison to the feeling of exhilaration I had when a horse zipped along the tracks.

I knew that horse riding could be a good exercise for the horse; but I never knew that it could be an exercise for the rider too. That is because I had only sat on a horse that walked slowly. But as I graduated to a trot, a canter and a gallop and when I learned to balance on my toes in the stirrup and do continuous sit ups I realized that the rider does get some exercise too.

Whenever I am in Delhi I try not to miss my early morning rides. Some days I stay back in the arena, some days I go for hack rides in the forest behind the club and on some days I practice my jumps over the hurdles. Now I know what Shakespeare meant when he worte  “When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.”

Tail Piece: When I moved over to Delhi from Mumbai, there was no more sailing. When I moved over to consulting from industry it was like a metamorphosis from being mother to a nanny or from a builder to an architect; life had changed 180 degree .I was out of my comfort zone. I had two options; either to look behind with fondness and regret or to look ahead for new adventures. I chose the latter and I am having fun!

“I hate the word success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s goal in life. It is like the male spider that gets eaten up when it succeeds in its courtship. I like the stage of continuous becoming, with a goal in front and not behind” Bernard Shaw.

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"Musing of my Partner in Sin"

Customer is the King (You must be joking !)

On a hot Monday morning I reached the branch of a reputed private sector bank at Connaught Place, New Delhi at about 10 minutes to 10. The bank branch opens at 930 for the employees to enter; but the bank counter for public opens at 10 am. As I was on the way to a formal meeting I was attired in my suit. By the time I had reached the bank branch from the parking lot I was sweating. The security at the gate in a quite rude manner told me that the service starts only at 10 and I should wait out in the sun till then. I requested that I may be allowed to enter the branch and wait at the customer waiting area till the service starts. But he was un- relenting. He in his most authoritative tone and manner told me that it is the rule! I could see the pleasure in his face at this opportunity to show his power and authority at that moment. After few minutes, one of the officers of the bank came out. I explained to him my plight and he was kind enough to let me in. (See the paradox; even I feel that I received a favor!)

Is this an isolated instance? No. This is a kind of standard experience we get to face when we deal with most of the service desks of most of the service providers in India. The man (women) behind the desk often believes that he is doing a favour to the client who has approached him. In some of the industries like hospitality we see conscious effort to treat the customer with respect. The management has appreciated how this service orientation is critical to their business success and continuously tries to build in incentives to this dimension of service. However the level of treatment deteriorates with the extent of monopoly/ market  power of the service providers. When the service provider becomes a government entity; especially with some enforcement responsibility, it reaches its nadir. Although we euphemistically call a government employee ‘public servant’ in his heart he is the king dispensing favours. If you demand for what is due to you, then you are considered arrogant and if you raise a complaint to the senior he takes this as a personal affront. Then he will go out of the way to see that you are harassed and you suffer. You can hear his boasting. “You don’t know whom you are dealing with. I will teach you a lesson. I will see to it that you keep climbing the stairs to this office for quite some time". Often the seniors do nothing.

Compare this to the service expectation explained to me by one of my friends from New Zealand. He is a doctor and works in a public health center where lots of people from not-so-affluent strata of society visit for medical consultation. He was explaining to me the extent of service quality expected from him and I found it absolutely amazing. Imagine that a patient comes to his clinic and he a suffering from an ailment which requires certain procedure to be performed on him and a time and is fixed for this procedure. If the patient does not come and get the procedure done then it is the responsibility of the doctor to find out why and  follow up with the patient. The doctor is even expected to take the help of local social worker to address his concerns.

Why is service orientation so poor? There are many reasons for this.

(i) It appears that we have a feudal mindset. We love to exert and exhibit our power over others than be of help. Even when we do our duty in providing a service we like to feel that we are doing a favour.

(ii) The job description seldom includes service quality and how the clients are treated as  key parameters. Even when service quality is attempted to be built-in it seldom addresses the way the customer is treated.

(iii) Most of the service providers do not have an exception handling mechanism. Grievance handling is often an attempt to justify the failure and not an attempt solve a problem.

(iv) There are no measures instituted to see how the clients are treated. In many cases it is difficult to actually measure this in an easy fashion and we need innovative ideas to do this

(v) There is no incentive/ dis-incentive (either financial or in terms of career progression) built-in for the quality of service that is provided either to the servicing officer or to his boss.

(vi) We live in an environment of shortage. There are no sufficient hospitals or schools or colleges or transport service to meet the demand. Such an environment naturally encourages rent seeking behavior and we attempt to replicate this behavior in all walks of life.

May be it is time that we encourage every service organization to undertake independent customer satisfaction audits periodically and publish the same. It could be made mandatory requirement in the annual report for private companies. In case of government entities this could be made a key component of the performance appraisal which will affect the career progression of the officers responsible. This may be the invisible hand that drives changes the way the customer is serviced.

"We cannot always oblige but we can always speak obligingly." – Voltaire

Related Readings

Bureaucracy – Nature or Nurture ?

Service with a smile

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Riding a Tiger

“It was like riding a tiger; not knowing how to get off without being eaten” This is how Raju, former chief of Satyam, described his cover up of the poor quarterly performance he started few years ago that grew to a multi-billion dollar accounting scam that finally engulfed him and his company.

I don’t claim to be privy to what happened nor do I know the complete details of the scam. But I don’t think that he is the only one who is into managing the books in some fashion to achieve or over achieve the targets. I am sure most of us would agree with me. May be he took it to the extreme; or maybe he just got caught?

See what happens when the year-end approaches. The extra effort and extra push to generate more sales is of course a great idea and desirable. But it doesn’t end there. Each industry has its own bag of tricks. Arm twist the distributer to take an extra consignment which he may not be able to sell in the coming quarter. An accommodating purchase manager could be asked to book an order which he can cancel in the next month. A conditional loan conformation from the client. Create a fictitious company to book an order that will one day be written off. This is not just a private sector phenomenon. Ask the tax-collector what tricks he has to reach the target. Anything goes for the sake of ‘numbers’; especially when the numbers lead to fat bonusus and or promotions. One of the primary reasons for the 2008 meltdown in financial markets was also this mad scramble.

The degree of accommodation may vary. Some will do a bit of arm twisting. Some will shift the next quarter sale to this quarter. (A short fall in the first quarter is understandable!) The degree of dishonesty varies from coercion to manipulation to absolute fraud. This is not just the handiwork of the sales manager. This is the culture we are inculcating and encouraging. This culture of deceit then becomes a part of the organisational DNA.Sometimes somebody gets carried away and goes all the way and occasionally a Raju gets caught. Just hard luck!

May be we should take the spirit of the “General Anti-Avoidance Rules” in taxation where admissibility of an item of expenditure is supposed to be based on whether it is a truly value adding transaction or a transaction just for the sake of tax avoidance. In the same fashion the top management could insist that only a true sale or true collection that brings revenue for the period under consideration is booked as the income. That could be the first step towards recognizing and encouraging honesty.

The problem is not just about managing the book for achieving target. It is about the culture of honesty in our business dealing or even governance. As Laurie Calhoun noted in his article The Problem of “Dirty Hands” and Corrupt Leadership “In thinking about this issue, it is important to distinguish self-serving opportunists from those who suffer corruption through their sincere efforts to govern well. Self-serving opportunists often rationalize their dubious measures to themselves through self-deceptive references to ‘the good of the whole,’ claiming that group loyalty demands moral sacrifice or that ‘the end justifies the means.’”

But we live in Kaliyuga when it is all about managing “The art and ethics of lying” (Read on Part 1 and Part 2)

The truth is never dangerous. Except when told. PHILIP MOELLER

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Some People All the Time.. Humour

Major Desai retired from the army and returned to his hometown. Many people wondered with the kind of network he claimed to have and the heroism in the wars that he boasted about why he did not go further up at least to be a brigadier. As per him he had got bored of being in the army and hence he decided to quit and be back where he belonged. Of course there are few skeptics who raise their eyebrows on this claim. Maybe they are just jealous of his charm and popularity; especially with the Municipal commissioner and the local Sub Inspector who are his drinking buddies.

In the second month after he returned home, his neighbor came and asked him whether he had any way to find out the results of the soldier selection in Indian Army, Neighbor’s son had appeared for the selection. Major Desai remembered that one of his old buddies Havildar Sharma from the army may be able to find out about the results. Havildar Sharma helped him and gave him list of all the five young lads who qualified from Major Desai’s home town. Major promptly informed all the five families and they were all impressed by the ‘connects’ Major Desai had. Now for the whole town Desai became Major Saab.

In the next selection season many parents approached Major Saab in advance to seek help for their lads. He offered to help on two conditions. He will first evaluate these lads as he would not like to recommend nincompoops to the Army. He should be given Rs 1 lac in advance for each lad who passes his evaluation. The money was not for him; but to make some in the selection committee happy! But he promised that he would return the money of those who do not get selected.

He interviewed about 30 lads and agreed to recommend for 10. When the selection team came to town he was there at the ground where physical examination was being held. He walked up to Captain who was the team leader shook hands and introduced himself. They had few army jokes to share. Major Saab of course knew by name many a colonels and brigadier’s who were his ‘batch mates’. Capt was impressed. The lads from his town saw Major Saab pointing his hands in their direction and were convinced that he had put in a word to the captain. Actually, Major Saab was describing the story about the temple that was behind the ground in the same direction as the prospective soldiers were standing. After these pleasantries Major Saab returned home.

When the selection process was completed, Havildar Sharma informed Major Saab in advance, before the results were announced, about the outcome. Seven lads from his town were selected. Out of these, five were from the lot who paid him. He met the parents of the other two and told them that they would not be selected unless some action is taken immediately. He asked for Rs 2 lac for each with the promise that he would return the money if they were not selected. Of course they were selected Five out of the original 10 who had paid him were also selected. Major Saab was a gentleman. He returned 1 lac to all the five who did not get selected. He made sure that every other person in the town knew about what he did for the lads of the town. Municipal commissioner arranged a felicitation ceremony in his honor.

Major Saab is not an exception.We come across some in all walks of life. When the stakes are high very often Major Saabs appear to manage a lead. Most of us have a small Major Saab hiding in us too, though we feel ashamed to let him loose. But then it is for us to choose! 


Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. SALMAN RUSHDIE,

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