Sunday, March 7, 2010

3 Idiots is wonderful effort

After being in the IT Industry for the last 20 years, I have a reputation among my relatives and friends that I am a seasoned and super powerful person in the industry. Many people approached me to get their Kin in to employment. I wanted to help them but not the help that they wanted. For example, one of my relatives came to me and told that in a reputed company walk-in interviews are happening and asked me to help. I agreed with 100% commitment and asked him to meet me at home. I explained him the kind of assessment that may happen to freshers like him. I provided him guidance on how to face the written tests on aptitude, analytical abilities, some technical basics etc. I also mentored him on what kind of typical quesions may come from the interviews and how to address the cases when he doesnt know the answers. Before I was proud about the kind of support extended to him for nearly 4 hours, I realized that it was not what was expected. All the young man asked me was about whether I know someone in the company and ensure the selection. Unfortunatley I am a person who believed in teaching fishing rather than giving Fish. I am also poor in giving fish through unofficianl means as I am not that powerful nor capable to become such powerful person. All the help most of the people wanted was the end goal fulfilled by some one. In my role as a people manager I saw a similar pattern. I tried to help the associates on framing their career attain multiple skills and acquire all skills other than the academics to ensure they are successful in their work. But it was never taken in positive sense. Many associates used to approach me and ask to put them in some Projects so that their jobs are safe. But when I ask whether they are ready to take up the Project assignments and even if I ask them on their awareness of what is required to get in to projects, I used to see blank faces. With out demoralizing I tried to explain what is required to be successful and I tried to explain them in the way they like by correlating these pre-requisites on how can they achieve good ratings in their appraisals. But to my disappointment, I used to see a dirty look by the associates as if they are seeing a worthless creature.It is not that I was completely unsuccessful. There were some people who motivated by responding to the challenges I created. And they were all successful. There were some unconventional results like a couple of management graduates getting to a technical work on content management, a domain experienced person becoming a highly technical integration developer and a few more. All these associates were successful by their sheer brilliance and willingness to perform instead of depending on someone's mercy and instead of tagetting the results some how. My motto was becoming self-sufficient and walk anywhere to perform irrespective of worrying about Lay-offs or other optimizations and about pleasing their managers.3 Idiots is a movie which is quite refreshing and also thought provoking movie. The movie like the other movies by the same director created a big impact in the audience. And this is the power of media which I want to leverage on the positive side. After seeing MunnaBhai MBBS, many people understood the need of respecting all communities that were making our life easy, through their back ground support. A popular MNC employees distributed blankets to the sweepers working on roads in the midnight and the employees openly accepted that it was by inspiration from MunnaBhai. While I hate the bad movies and bad media for wrongly influencing the people, I am very pleased to see some movies like 3 Idiots which is quite entertaining and at the same time passed a nice message.Movies need to be good, commercially successful and reach the people. for passing a message we do not need Shabana Azmi and gloomy film and they dont reach any people other than the award juries.3 Idiots says we need to educate with a direction of understanding the concept and apply the knowledge in our day to day life for better achievements. I also liked the way the conflict between the other and equally strong logic that the world looks at marks, grades and competition. But the reality is like this. Marks are required to get an interview call. But the success in the interview happens when you perform with authority on the subject. Even if you are through in the interview with the help of some influence, you need to perform wherever you work and that needs high intellegence quitient. It looks so simple but people keep searching for short cuts. Let them understand some thing from thie movie.

1 comment:

SAK said...

Interesting point of view. Many friends and relatives hate me for offering fishing instead of giving fish.