As I saw it

The way most of the grandmothers of my generation used to make their own beetle leaf (Paan) and spend their spare time in Kerala. Those days are numbered now. But nostalgic with the conversations and gup-shup I used to have with my own paternal grandmother when we used to visit Kerala every two years during our summer vacation in the 1980s and till January 2001 when I last met her.

Back in my childhood the only pirates I had read about were the ones in Asterix & Obelix and the ones called so by Captain Haddock in his adventures with Tintin. Even then it never occurred to me that I could see myself as a pirate like Captain Jack Sparrow on a ship 100 times the size of what you see in this one. My brother, our cousins and I were more than content in building these small paper boats and paper house boats and watch them drift away in the tiny rivulets near my grand parents’ home in Trivandrum. We’d watch them get stuck on tiny pebbles and other such things in the water and then see the gentle current unhinge them and take them away some more distance before we lost sight of them and went back to building some more of them without any attachment or sadness in our hearts of having lost our boat. We’d build small dams on these rivulets using rocks, mud, dirt, leaves and whatever else we could find around us. We’d then watch these boats twirl around the small pool tha...

I often caution about the Gestalt effect in my sessions. It’s the tendency of the human brain to jump to conclusions simply because it can’t tolerate gaps. And this gets further accentuated because the human brain can think faster than it can listen. Well, I was proven wrong with every conclusion that my mind was racing ahead with this story as it unfolded till it was hit with an anti-climax that I least expected. I least expected it because I had never heard of such a story and my mind hadn't thought of or imagined such a possibility. Awesome story!! Thanks a lot for this Shruti. Question: Can we all consciously work on delaying the circuit closure in our heads? Can we slow down enough to be therefore open to more possibilities such that our lives become better?  

I know that it's quite late for me to add this here but I happened to watch #Home last week and what an amazing movie!! There were moments when I began feeling restless at what seemed like a dead slow pace but then in the end, everything comes together and you are left completely teary eyed and a lighter heart. There are moments in the film which I would have written and executed differently and maybe would have also edited it a bit more tightly but it's a great film to watch. Though I don't agree with many of her film reviews where she substitutes her own opinions and prejudice for that of the scriptwriter and director and she believes that only her (subjective) worldview is objective, I would still recommend you watching Anupama Chopra's review of it. The reason? She has been able to capture the essence of the film's premise quite well, without leaking the whole plot and the big surprise of a climax the movie moves towards the end of the film. And that saves me ...

I have a confession to make. I am addicted. What started off 22 years ago as a random experiment of a wanton youth that I was has now become a full fledged addiction. Not that I am complaining. As is the case with any addiction, it starts with one act and then it soon becomes a self-fueling, self-fulfilling cycle. And I am not interested in breaking the cycle. In fact I am looking forward to increasing the frequency of such episodes since it is not a vicious cycle. While my friends will remain un-named here; I have only sat back in amazement in the recent months, when they shared their stories with me. These stories left me gaping in wonder, surprised, inspired, knowledgeable and hopeful. In our obsession with ourselves, we under-rate people, the stories they carry and the stories they are. In my listening sessions, I ask them 8 - 11 carefully curated questions over an hour's time on Zoom. To borrow a term from Ms. Barbara Minto - the first lady MBA that McKinsey hired in the 1960s...

This is a rough mind map one of the young participants created quickly on the mind mapping software he uses, at the end of a session on listening skills that I facilitated this week for a client. What all do you find interesting and insightful in what he has captured on the broad mind map framework that I gave them?  

Thanks a lot for this info graphic, Himanshu Arora. We can also add Truth and Compassion as well as Justice and Mercy to the list. Authors Gary Hammel and Michele Zanini also talk about the importance of resolving and holding paradoxes in their seminal book: Humanocracy: Creating Organizations As Amazing As The People Inside Them (2020). Mr. Bosco D’mello did an interesting session on this, a couple of months ago at The Trainers Forum, called Polarity Management. There’s a process in NLP called Parts-Integration through which also we are able to do this and feel empowered with better perspectives and choices.

While the movies on screen kept me captivated, what I could also never get over was my curiosity around the large number of Campa Cola, Goldspot and Thumbs Up bottles near the projector. I used to wonder if they were being used to lubricate the projector machine. I know it sounds ridiculous but for 6 - 8 year old me, I couldn’t fathom how could someone drink so much of soft  drinks. While I was lost in those Malayalam movies, it never struck me that the operators would be thirsty and needed something to keep them from the boredom of playing those reels again and again in different locations. Of course the reams and reams of film reel that used to be loaded on the projector and it’s whirring sound also used to catch my attention and trigger my curiosity and fascination about movies that continue till date. Nevertheless, I feel lucky to have been part of a generation that grew up watching movies under a warm starlit sky with hundreds of people around in that park in Pushp Vihar Secto...

If you are open to the incredulous, what happens to you could be incredible. Well, that's exactly what and how I felt as I was listening to Dr. Kaustubh Dhargalkar as he shared the example of applied Design Thinking at Mahindra Finance in what was a simple and profound way of designing and presenting a session on Design Thinking that Arun Vishwanath - CPF, CPC, PCC and team at the Trainers Forum organised today as part of the monthly Learning Over Breakfast session. One may wonder: How can an innocuous motorcycle form an important lynchpin in your designing a learning and training programme for more than 12,000 field agents of Mahindra Finance? After all, won't the learning and development in-charges of any company know more than others? Aren't they supposed to know more than others? But there's a lot you could learn from ethnography, shadowing and a 'day in the life of...' methods. Well that's what we learnt from Dr. Dhargalkar's Mahindra Finance sto...