Subramoney » hindu

Bring on police reforms…

subra — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 05:44:06 +0000

As soon as a bomb goes off…you hear the same news and views. We have 33 channels and one news..so you see the same faces and the same dialogues.

People who deal with the police forces realise that the police force is nowhere near competent to solve the attacks. Forget stopping the new ones – a far, far more difficult task. The Centre has to set up a blueprint of police reforms – from recruiting and training and ask ALL the states to do it IMMEDIATELY. Money spent on this is likely to be far better than creating an alphabet soup of new organisations to tackle terrorism…

The Hindu has similar ideas…read on

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article2439809.ece

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Wealth and ghee…..

subra — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:19:02 +0000

This story was told to me in the Indigo flight from Delhi to Mumbai by one of India’s good trainers – and a super story teller. Surprising that he has not thought of ‘Story telling as a therapy’ as a career. His name is Samir Parekh.

If you are wondering what is the connection, here is a hindu mythological story for you.

Have you ever wondered why ‘ghee’ is offerred as a sacred offerring in the Hindu festivals? Or why your grandmother and mother said ‘you should have some ghee while you eat?’

Well, a brown or black cow eats greeen grass and produces white milk. Now you may like the milk but you cannot really preserve it. To preserve it you need to heat it – and you have made sure that it lasts one day or perhaps two. Well you can turn it into curd and it may last say 3 days, but surely not beyond that.

However you can churn the curd…and churn vigorously and separate the ‘butter’ from the butter milk. Now by converting the milk into butter you have increased its life a little more ….maybe a week or a fortnight. However if you again subject it to heat it changes form..and some black particles come out of it – some are put back, and some are filtered out. However after all the heating, and stirring with a ladle…you are left with GHEE.

This is the essence of life – to build it you need a lot of introspection, outside heat, stirring, putting back, removing the black particles,….and it is the same in the case of creating an equity portfolio. You need to create a portfolio, keep looking at it, churn it (normally people keep the black particles and throw out the ghee!

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Being poor by choice…

subra — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:50:47 +0000

Sounds very funny does it not? Why would anybody choose to be poor? Or unhappy? Or fail? Well if you read Hindu philosophy in detail you realise the following lessons are taught to you through stories:

You are a function of what you chose to be.

If you are happy you make the choices to be happy and successful – so success follows happiness and not necessarily the other way around!

Happiness is a state of mind – money is important but the importance we give to money is just too much. It is not so important as we make it out to be. It is just like health – you need to have it, but those who have health do not jump up and down saying they are healthy. Those who do not have it know how much it means.

I met a taxi driver (If Meru had a frequent user, I could benefit)…and got talking. He said he went to a barber’s shop and paid Rs. 20 for a shave. On probing I found that he normally spent Rs. 10 for a shave and that meant Rs. 100 a month – Rs. 1200 a year. Then I asked him about his food – he said he eats out every day – that meant about Rs. 100 a day ATLEAST – Rs. 36000 a year.

If he choses to buy a Gillette shaving blade (Rs. 20?) and it lasts him 15 days – he would end up spending Rs. 40 a month or Rs. 480 a year. He could of course choose some unknown brand and save still more! If he ate food from a ‘dabba’ packed by his family he could clearly save Rs. 25000 a year and save some stomach aches too!

If you are in HR do you think it is your responsibility to tell people such basic things? No. Because HR (like most other professionals) do not ever get rewarded for avoiding trouble. If there is trouble and you sort it out you get rewarded!

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Salutations to the brave souls!

subra — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 03:35:05 +0000

The last 30 hours have been overwhelming. Sitting in Navi Mumbai, I feel safe at having escaped this dastardly attack. It soon struck me that I am safe but only until the next attack. I was wondering whether we have got so indifferent to pain that we might end up saying “Oh, the terrorists have only entered my front room, my bedroom is safe?
•    I was a kilometer away when the bomb blast shook the BSE. I got calls from all over the world asking about my safety. Yes I was safe, but I lost 20 friends – some who had just married and some whose wives were pregnant. Some with 3 year old kids.
•    I can still vividly remember the picture (captured by Indian Express photographer) of fear on the face of a man escaping the blast at Nariman Point.
•    Many of you reading this may have been in school when this dastardly attack happened.
•    I do not remember the numbers, but I think there were 70+ funerals in Ghatkopar alone. And I would have known most of them – some only faces some only name.

As my thoughts go back to these incidents, and I browse through the list of areas attacked this time around, it struck me that It could have easily been one of us stuck, having gone to VT to catch a train home.

After all, Hemant Karkare was one of us, was he not? When a friend got called to a police station, eons back, it was Hemant Karkare whose sane voice at the other end of the telephone kept the over enthusiastic station inspector’s hand in check.

Yes, it could easily have been one of us who perished in the attack.

The question is this: is there something that we can do about it? Is there something that we can do to ensure that there is no more terror. Whatever we do may not result in immediate overnight results but even for a trip to the coffee machine, you need to take the first step.

Or are we going to say that it is somebody else’s problem to fix? I hope not.

The media will analyse this till they have nothing left to say, there will be references to Hindu fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. Each of us will nod our heads in agreement, depending on which group we belong to.

I ask you to pause reading this mail for a moment, put yourself in that position in one of the locations where the attack happened and imagine it for a couple of minutes. What if you were stuck there, watching the gunmen spray bullets indiscriminately. Will he spare you if you are a Hindu? Or a Muslim? Or will the bullet stop to ask you. In the recent “anti-Bihari” riots in Mumbai, a bus driver was killed. He was a blue blooded Maharashtrian. Unfortunately we forget the Bhagwat Gita. You can control only the action, not the reaction. I should not throw stones – I cannot control whether the stone will hit or not. Breaking heads is the stones dharma. Being nice to fellow human beings is my dharma. I cannot leave my dharma.

We are expecting too much from our infrastructure support – to quote we are expecting a first world reaction from a third world police force. It will stun you to see the infrastructure support with which our police men have to work. They have to look after the traffic, the VIP bandobast, search for missing people, patrol the streets, settle family squabbles, and control terrorism. Toughest of all they have to handle the media. And what they get is being ridiculed by the Hindi movies. This scares me.

If Leadership is leading from the front, let us pay a tribute to Mr. Hemant Karkare, Mr. Vijay Salaskar, and Mr. Ashok Kamte. They were very well qualified – they could have chosen to lead lives of comfort. They chose action. One saw Mr. Karkare walk into the place where he knew he could die. He took precautions – he wore a bullet proof jacket, he wore a helmet – he surely loved his life. But he gave it up. Let us take 2 minutes of our time to thank them, pray for their families, and realise that the police is out there protecting us. They are giving us first world service with third world infrastructure. Salutations Gentlemen.

Let us get out and do something for the police before we talk ill of them.

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