Office Office - I

My juniors and my siblings in their final years of college don't leave an opportunity to ask me about my new life. My life in Tata Steel and my roles, responsibilities and challenges involved. They also seek advices and tips which would help them out once they enter a corporate setting.

I tell them a lot of stories and give them plenty of fundas. What I don't tell them is that on some days,  I get into a similar kind of situation.-

 Or that sometimes, this is all I do-

Not to mention my activities during important meetings-

But jokes apart, there are some fundamental rules and values by which one must conduct oneself at his/her workplace. I am trying, I must admit, with tremendous effort, to regularize some of these in my everyday activities. I have learned some of them the hard way and am listing them down for my peers and juniors; those who are new to a work environment.

Many self-help books and performance-enhancing guides may also have similar articles. But this list is my own; from what I have learnt in the last 12 months. Also, barring a few, I don't have a clue as to how i would be able to pick up these traits.-

• The Fundamental Rule. Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut. Your work should speak about you and not the other way round.  
• Try to learn as much as possible. There are lessons hidden everywhere. 
• Never try to belittle anyone or hurt his/her feelings. Whether it’s your unit head or even the office sweeper. No one forgets an insult. Ever.
• Be careful about whatever you say. Everyone notes those extra As and Bs you are dropping around. 
• Be on time. Its importance can never be over-emphasized
• 'If you have ego and anger on your side you don't need an opponent'. - Harsha Bhogle 
• Never ever lie. Sooner or later, everyone gets to knows everything that is happening.
• For all those manufacturing/process-industry guys, spend lesser time in front of the computer and more time on the shop floor. Your payslip is being processed there.
• Sharp observations. Invest in this skill. Often the game-changer.
• At times, share a joke with your workers. Sit down on the shop floor with them. Offer them a smoke. Have rum with them on their daughters' marriages.
• Be ethical. Life is a fairly long journey.Your unfair/immoral practices are going to catch up with you sooner or later.
• Be the first one to admit a mistake. People forget the mistakes you make, they don't forget that you give shitty excuses for them. 
• Never gossip about others. It is the habit of fragile men.
• Appreciate your subordinates' work even if there are a million flaws. Then politely but elaborately, list down their mistakes. Don't let their shortcomings go unattended.
• At times of crisis, try to stand up and deliver. That's when one earns recognition and respect.

Finally, the most important one-

•  It takes years to build a reputation; just one moment to squander it away.

And if someone can follow all these tenets, he will surely be very productive.-

Credits: Scott Adams

Show Me Your Chin

En-route Morsana camp. Around 6000 ft.
1st row from left: Ashish Singhania, Rupesh Kumar
2nd row: Digvijay Gupta, Subhendu Barik, Vaibhav Misra, Arunima Sinha, Rajender Rawat, Charanjiv Mohanty
Pic taken by: Souvik Chatterjee

Trekking in the mountains at 6000 Feet is tough. Back-breaking in fact. Extremely taxing on the body; and if there are contoural dangers present; strenuous for the mind as well. We weren't entirely prepared for this. And one hour since we started, we felt our morale dropping. The shoulders started sagging, we took frequent rests, and there was a lot of bickering in our 8-membered team.

We stopped again to take a breath. The instructor, Rajendra Singh Rawat, a mountaineer himself, is angry.

"Do you recognise her?" he asks, pointing at a girl of about 24 who had accompanied us since we left our base-camp an hour ago. I stood aside to let her pass by as I took a closer look at her. She was a pleasant-looking girl, had a friendly gleam in her eyes, walked with a limp, walked slower than the others and seemed to have a very strong chin, something that comes from sheer determination. All this I knew, but I couldn't identify her. She wasn't one of the locals either.

The instructor grumbled, "She doesn't have a leg, has a rod inserted in the other, has spinal complications and has recovered from a life-shattering accident last year. She has started training in the mountains since February. Can't you pick up a lesson from her??"

We were stunned to hear this. No one said a word till we reached our camp at Morsona at 7500 Feet .

By then I had recalled all about her. She was in the news last summer. Arunima Sinha, a national-level volleyball and football player who lost her leg when a train ran over her after she was pushed out of a moving train by some robbers near Bareilly on the night of April 11, 2011. She had resisted a robbery attempt on her. Her left leg was amputated twice, her right leg had compound fractures, there were multiple fractures in the spine and in the pelvic region. She was able to stand on her feet after 96 days.

After we had pitched our tents at Morsona, I get an opportunity to interact with he.

She tells me that its not her amputated leg that troubles her, but the right one with a rod inserted in it. She has acute back pain if her rucksack is too heavy, and has to take frequent halts. She wants to conquer Mt. Everest and these treks that she undertakes with Tata Steel Adventure Foundation (a department of Tata Steel that solely looks after adventure sports for Tata Steel's employees) are training sessions for her. If her body permits, she will make an attempt to scale Everest this summer itself. 

She is a sweet girl, gentle. Speaks freely, in an uninhibited manner. Shows no arrogance, pride, complacence that sports persons tend to have. But there is that strong chin. That determination. The obstinacy.

She has only one complaint. It is about the local media. They tend to follow her everywhere, take videos of her, write reports about her. It distracts her. "Abhi to main kuchh ki bhi nahi hoon aur ye log aisa kar rahe hain... Ye sab ye tab karein jab main Everest ke liye chadhungi... Abhi to sirf practice hi hai... "

"I didn't step into mountaineering for money or publicity. I just couldn't have sat idle after that accident. I wanted to pursue my passion in sports, in adventures. I also wanted to prove that disability can be overcome if you have the belief and passion." She adds before leaving for her tent.

Dusk sets in. So does cold; inside the shirt, shoes and under the skin; tries to touch the heart. I try to grasp the fundamentals of what she had said. Life is tough, has always been; whether in the mountains or in the plains. But, the choices one makes, and the way one conducts oneself to go for his choices are what matter in the end.

I go back to my tent and ask my team mates to read my chin. The stubble, a full growth of a week now, hides the determination part. :P

Post Script:

At times one faces 'moments of truth' in life. Situations which are difficult to tackle. Challenges which are insurmountable, so much so, that the heart asks one to back away. It says that this is too difficult. Impossible. Not worth the trouble.

But that is when the mind takes over. The person grits his teeth, hardens his shaking knees, takes a deep breath, closes his eyes; and jumps into the situation. He takes the challenge head-on. He gives a fight.

You have got to give a fight, whatever the situation. This is one of the major learnings I had in this Adventure Programme I paricipated in. Seems easier written than done though. :-)

Below are some attachments about Arunima Singh and her accident in April, 2011.

File pic.- In AIIMS. April, 2011

A video that contains the entire story as well as an interview of hers.

The Journey so Far

First Day First Show. 1st July, 2011. Jamshedpur

So here we are again. Six months into Tata Steel and I am out of probation period. So technically speaking, unless someone in the organization places charges of sexual harassment against me, I feel I can take my position for granted. :P

But things have been strange. And in the last few months, there have been phases of absolute elation to utter despondency. The former a rarer emotion now; I have been forced to ask myself copy-book questions from job-search portals. Questions like- 'Am I really doing what I really wanted to do? Is this the way I had hoped it would turn out'??- to note a few.

Just wondering if all this is super idiotic and that every graduate new into a job does go through some kind of turbulence.
 
But yes, the fact that these questions are rearing their heads at this juncture is something I hadn't anticipated at all. And I have at times wondered whether I made a mistake by not opting for the other company I was placed in.

Don't want to take anything away from Tata Steel though. It's a great organization and administered at all levels by engineers from reputed institutes. Engineers who, just like me, have joined at the Graduate level and have then gone on to make it big. It is a great place to start and learn, and people here emphasize enormously on training and grooming. Tell me an other organization which spends around 13-15 lacs per head on its GETs in the first year of training and does not expect a single paisa in return.

But I have other issues. Submerged Arc Furnaces don't evoke the same kind of passion as Blast Furnaces did. Joda is no match for Jamshedpur. And I hadn't really imagined that I would have to move into a completely different segment of Metallurgy.

So the improvisation.

MBA Entrance Examination sheets are being solved. Parties and happy hours are being skipped. Alcohol consumption has been cut down entirely. 'BC' with friends has been decreased to the least acceptable level.  Instances of money splurging in this month so far: 0.

The trend is pretty similar though.

When I was in my 11th & 12th, all I wanted to do was bunk classes at school and prepare for IIT-JEE. In my engineering days, co-curricular and cultural activities attracted me much more than hard core Metallurgy did. Blast Furnace was a rare exception. Here again, Quant and Verbal Ability seem to have won the fight for the numero uno spot on my priority list. Poor FeMn furnaces have an Asst. Manager to turn to.

When would I have that phase in life when I would solely enjoy my core activity and not look for other 'fringe' interests?

My eccentricities notwithstanding, I do love Tata Steel. I love it very much.





 

Her Town

 

He keeps on calling it 'her town' (uska shehar). Never does he address the town by its name, in private or in public. "It was raining in her town yesterday" or "I was meeting a sales team in her town last month", is what he says. His friends don't consider it eccentric anymore. They know him. They don't blame him.

A major part of his work is associated with 'her town' and he goes there often to attend seminars, training sessions and meetings. He longs to be in her town, where she is a professor at the university and lives alone in a one bedroom flat; having broken off a live-in relationship with one of her colleagues two years back.

She is an old acquaintance of his, a batch mate, from college. They were strongly attracted towards each other then, but nothing concrete came out of it. He blames himself for it. He was too immature then, too moody, indifferent. Life doesn't give you second chances. Ever.

But he isn't entirely disillusioned or disgruntled with life. A small part of him is happy. Happy to be somewhere in the radar of her life. That somewhere, is being able to visit her town a couple of times in a month, being able to breathe the same air that she breathes in, visit shops she probably buys her groceries from.

There are talks that she has gone to Mumbai for a new job. He has mixed emotions about this. The additional physical distance will now hurt him. But now, he knows, he wouldn't have to worry about accidentally meeting her on a bus, at a restaurant or at the university. 

He hopes that one day he might move in permanently to 'her town', maybe work in the same locality where she worked, live in the same housing colony, visit the same parks. These are the only things he expects from her - the air that she took in, water from the same supply, autos that she traveled in, theaters she visited, local news from local dailies.

By having 'her town', he knows; he has her.

Vast Plains

Over the Chhattisgarh plains, the narrow meter-gauge line of railway formed the connecting link with the outside world, the world of motor cars, of aviation and of telephone. Glistening like a steel ribbon ran the line. It passed by little tile-roofed villages, each clustering around its temple, brown and grey villages and remote settlements, where a sandy unpaved street traversed between the fields of rice until it lost itself in the great plain. Habitations only joined to one another by a narrow track meandering through the corn fields, passing around stony hills and running across forests until it would hit a obstruction in the form of a stream.

Often in dark the villages seemed like cluster of bulbs all floating in the air, the appearance produced by numerous lanterns which stood hanging outside their homes keeping the darkness and evil spirits at bay.

The train jogged on passing by Araku, Jaygarh and other little halts, where no one could have possibly got in or out since first the line was laid. These stations had one thing common- a worn out, haggard looking old man who was the station master, the ticket checker, the announcer, the porter who seemed to have no hassles about his work at all. Mostly dogs littered on the platform and slept on the benches made for men. The taps were dropless and ticket counters looked like no ticket had ever passed between their grills. A lone haggard-looking man smoked from chillam.

Such were the stations, mere islands in a sea of green, each one a mere carbon copy of another. I waited for my designated station to come by. My earlier posting at Jagdalpur had not been very daunting but this one at 200 miles further interior in the heartland of naxal activity would surely be nerve wrecking.

It was approaching twilight now. The faces of all the police officers who had been slain by the red brigade flashed in my mind. But I would not give up, I decided. I had always enjoyed adversity and this would be no different. I took a swig from my hip flask.