Stop Mourning, Start Acting and...Act Fast!

I will not mourn the death of the 23 year old rape victim. She was a Brave heart who fought till her breath fell short of her courage. She is the heroine of the nation and would continue to live in our hearts forever. Her soul is alive and would remain so forever! Through the inhumane ordeal that she went through in the last two weeks, all reports & hospital bulletins showed that her will to live had not diminished and she fought her battle alone. Finally she lost her life but her spirit is the winner. I salute her courage and her zest for life in face of excruciating pain & mental trauma. I will not mourn her death...She is alive in our hearts and am sure she is alive in all your hearts as well!

The last two weeks also saw intense public reaction and media outcry over this issue. Issue! hope this does not die as another issue in this busy world! All the public anger, candle light marches are not forgotten by the people who initiated or appreciated the same! I am sceptical because public memory is really short. Bhanwari Devi who was gang-raped 20 years back elicited similar reaction but she is still fighting a lonely battle for justice. Does it take 20 years to decide? In these 20 years thousands of women and girls have been raped, molested and teased.

Will this public outcry change anything? In the last two weeks when the entire nation was in shock, the brutal torture and rape of the 23 year old in Delhi continued to be on media headlines, atleast three more rape incidents were reported...out of which one was a gang-rape, another was an incident involving rape of a minor girl...I mean what kind of society are we living-in?

I have no time to mourn and if you have to mourn then mourn all those millions of women & girls in this country whose modesty has been outraged, who have been humiliated, their bodies have been violently breached and souls have been crushed by blood-thirsty demons. They may be alive but their souls have scars deeper then the dead sea! Unfortunately most of them await justice till now!

Stop Mourning, Start Acting and...Act Fast!


Bust the Myths
Two myths need to busted before we look at possible action steps to tackle the diseased part of the society.

1. Men will protect women! Men can never be saviour for women. 90% of men in this country are not worth trusting. You don't believe me! ask any girl or women, almost each one of them have faced some or other kind of harassment at some or the other time at hands of men. Lewd remarks or lewd looks is something that all girls & women have faced. And come to think about it, in a country of 1 billion people almost half of the population is of women. Only girls & women themselves can protect themselves. The day women stand-up & fight the things will start changing. This is not suggest that no man cares for the safety of women. In the endless protests at India Gate, Raisina hills & Jantar Mantar, thousand of men also participated. But half a billion of girls & women in this country still hold the key

2. Social Change is the harbinger of peace for women! Roots of problem are not ensconced in the society. Poor treatment & harassment of women starts from home. Most Indian homes are unequal for girls & women. Girls are never in as much favour as boys! Boys are seen as investments for future whereas girls are seen as liabilities. Women in homes, especially married women are mostly treated as glorified maids. Education of girls, healthcare of girls always takes a backseat. Girl infanticide is brutally common. And we think change will begin from society. We first need to clean-up our homes.


Action Points
A. Girl & Women Empowerment: A large majority of this country worships goddesses. Each girl and women will have to take the form of Durga or Kali at some or the other time!

1. Young girls must be taught about self-defence in wake of any attack or harassment meted out to them. Martial arts training and not just physical training (PT) must be compulsory & free for every girl.

2. Like other popular social campaigns, an awareness drive must be initiated in every school to educate girls on issues like bad touch and how to prevent & protect themselves from such harassments.

3. Raise alarm - Most harassments happen discreetly in public places. Any girl or women who faces such situation in public transport, public waiting areas and even at social or family gatherings must raise alarm. However key will be if other women raise alarm, even if they find that their neighbour being pinched, lewdly commented or touched. Girls & women have to support each other and these bast###s have to be exposed!

4. Although, it may sound a bit extreme, but women need to given guns. Imagine, if the 23 year rape victim had a gun with her, then probably her fate would have been different. Besides, no matter how much our police force becomes vigilant, it is impossible to police every citizen. And then, there would be some who would say that giving guns to common civilians would increase violence. Forget it! those who commit crimes get weapons some way or the other, mostly illegal. The ones who are left hapless are the common people like you and me. So give guns, at least to women.

B. Institutional Intention: All the organized institutions, like schools, colleges, offices need to strengthen both prevention & protection mechanisms to deal with any such incident.

1. Create awareness drives.

2. Strengthen & secure reporting mechanisms. Make it safe and confidential for girls & women to report.

3. Initiate immediate action and be ruthless against the perpetrators of such crime.

4. Compulsorily have women psychologists & counsellors - permanent or visiting, in all such institutions, for support, counselling or therapy to all the victims in the event of any such unfortunate incident.

5. In schools, recruit drivers, cleaners, office boys with as much care as one recruits the teachers.

C. Judiciary Lead: Lakhs of pending rape cases in court does not help to rein-in the lusty voluptuous vultures on the prowl. People may say that politicians or police would solve the problem. Perhaps they will, but I will put my money on our judiciary system. If our legal system becomes more responsive and acts in time & with more impact then it will be a great ray of hope. Separate fast track courts should be set-up permanently for all rape & molestation cases and all criminals should be brought to justice. Judiciary should also seriously consider revisiting the law governing such cases. Seven years of imprisonment is an insult to the rape victim.

This is not the time to shed tears; instead this is time to act! This would be our true tribute to the Delhi brave heart and all those women who have been tormented by the savages. So, Stop Mourning, Start Acting...and Act Fast! We as a nation cannot afford to disengage the better half of our country's population!

(with inputs from my wife Vandana)

Ceteris Paribus, People make the difference!

Online shopping is really gaining momentum. Citibank recently launched the online shopping festival for its card holders. And now another online shopping festival is underway, with more offers & attractive discounts. I have become an almost consummate online shopper, shopping from books to MP3 downloads, from flowers to groceries, from fruits & vegetables to gifts…


However my online shopping experiences have been mixed. From good to disgusting, from great to disappointing. The reason is not too difficult to comprehend. In online shopping the technology & interfaces are almost similar from seller to seller. However, since there is no physical meeting place for the shopper & marketer, customer support (service) becomes a crucial differentiating factor.

Every such online shopping site has a 24×7 customer care helpline. But then some of these helplines really makes things uncomplicated, while others need help themselves :-) ! Online sellers like Jabong, Flipkart, Bigbasket, Phoolwala have delighted me, some others have been let-downs. Let me tell you two such poor & good experiences.

Poor First

Bad news must always precede good news, if both have to come together, hence the poor experience first. On one such online seller site called home shop….., I selected a gift that I wished to send to a friend in another city. I checked the delivery areas on the site and it was mentioned all over India. To double-check, I called the 24×7 customer care number and the lady on the other side confirmed that the gift could be shipped to the north-eastern city of India, where my friend resided. After spending about an hour on this much touted online seller, when I finally decided to buy the gift, that I had selected, a message flashed that the product could not be shipped to the city of my choice. I was surprised since both the web & phone confirmations earlier had revealed a different result. I again called the helpline. This time it was some other lady who first took a long time to understand my problem and then her response was so casual that it irked me. She told me in hindi – “aisa ho jata hain Sir, kabhi kabhi aap jo product select karte hain woh kuch shaher mein deliver nahin karte”, meaning that ‘it sometime happens that the product that you select, we cannot deliver it to some cities’. Then I asked her that why did they not reflect this on their website and why did the previous customer care executive confirm the possibility of delivering it to the same city? To this she again said very casually – “aisa ho jata hain, Sir”, again meaning ‘this sometime happens, Sir’. I was feeling as if I was an idiot that I could not understand this simple rationale. Idiot I must be, for I should have guessed the ‘chalta hain…’ culture is indigenous! And anyways Katju has stamped it that this country does not have 3 but many more idiots! I abandoned my shopping there itself.

The Jabong Experience

Ok! Now the good, rather the great one! After giving-up on the earlier seller, I entered Jabong for the first time, suggested by a colleague. I followed the similar process, selected a product, confirmed the delivery areas and then tried to purchase the same. I could not successfully place the order at the first-go since I has missed clicking on a small check-box that would segregate my shipping & billing address. I did not realize this till I called their customer care number. My call was answered by a lady who later turned-out to be the most patient & extra-ordinarily helpful customer care executive that I had ever come-across. She patiently listened to my problem and immediately spotted the cause for my payment not going through! Most other customer care executives, at best, would explain the process and then hang-up. But this lady on the other hand explained me the process and then offered to stay on-line till I completed the whole process. That was so helpful that within minutes, I could complete the whole process and successfully place the order. Not for a single minute, did she express any hurry or irritation at my error. On the contrary she was genuinely supportive and very courteous. Very contrastingly, two days back when I had called the bhartiya rail call center, the executive would wait for me to take a pause & without waiting for me to finish my enquiry would thank me & hang-up. I had to call the rail call center 5 times to get the small bit of information that I was seeking! But here at Jabong, it was superb! If I remember correctly, the name of the Jabong executive was Kanika Mehta. When I gave the feedback to her supervisor Ritu, she told me that Kanika was amongst the star performers and my appreciation was her hat-trick for the day!

Why Jabong rocks?

What would make the home shop...... customer care executive respond so nonchalantly and the Jabong executive respond with so much empathy & warmth? While this could be easily dismissed as being encountering two different individuals, the truth may not be so! My previous encounters with home shop...... has not been very good. Besides, there is ample data with me (considering that I am shopping online quite often, additionally I speak to a lot of my acquaintances who are regular online shoppers) to show that certain online sellers just do not get it, while others simply rock! Isn’t the same true with physical sellers as well?

The difference is not the individuals but the culture that prevails in these two organizations. While one is regressive and lacks cohesion & engagement, the other is progressive & engaging. The result - employees start behaving differently. I strongly believe that the ecosystem has a great influence on the behavior. In this case the organizational ecosystem cultures are impacting employee behaviours differently.

The point is…

External engagement (with customers) is a function of the internal engagement (with employees); and the strong determinant of the internal engagement is the organizational ecosystems’ culture.

Need I emphasize more? Anyways I am definitely going back to Jabong, the next time I think online shopping!

Katju & CEAT drive the same car!

Morning radio was buzzing in the car; mad mornings with Shradha on one FM channel & Vodafone Happy Mornings with Prithvi on the other, the RJ’s chit-chat, some good & some not-so-good songs, lots of advertisements, all become my every morning's long-driving company!


Most advertisements (who anyways pay for the radio shows that we tune-in-to) are to be tolerated or skipped. However one such advertisement this morning caught my attention, not for its greatness or novelty but because of something else. Without any further ado let me tell you how the ad went about, that was about some masters diploma in management, offered by a certain college - “...when you are an ordinary employee you receive instructions; when you complete …..Diploma in management from ….. then you give instructions…”

Undoubtedly, the message was one of the crappiest one that I have heard in recent times (Is this the way to advertise for an educational program on offer?); but more than message, it is the mindset that bothered me, the mindset that management is all about giving instructions! This mindset is unfortunately not only of the business college that advertised or of the agency that created the message, but of a large section of people who believe that managing is about controlling people and dishing-out instructions to them.

The command & control structure pervades all societal spheres in countries like ours. At home husband/father is the boss whose wishes must be fulfilled by wife & kids. I have lost count of kids who have told me that they picked engineering or a particular discipline in their graduation because their Dad wanted them to do so! Or girls who can’t take-up a job because their Dad won’t let them be in a particular city! On the home-front for most women, their mother-in-law is the boss. When she sneezes, daughter-in-law freezes! In society, everyone who has some power tries to be the boss! And in organizations manager or supervisor tries to wield the control stick. Giving instructions becomes their sole realization of their existence! Should it come as a surprise that supervisors are amongst the most hated entities in organizations revealed by survey after survey! The control mindset is disengaging and obsolete. Those who try to do it are sub-optimal performers and use it to shield their incompetence.

The point is engagement is largely a design issue. One of such design elements is structure that prevails in an organization. On paper, although, many organizations claim to be ‘flat’ but their people especially the managers & supervisors ensure that structure remain typically hierarchical & pyramidical. Recently a senior leader of an Indian company told me how much difficulty they were having in implementing a truly flat structure, preferred by their European clients, in their organization, largely, because the managers were resistant to the same. The main reason of the opposition was their perceived loss of control!

Such design issues need to be addressed if engagement with its people is anything that an organization is trying to attempt! But then the beginning of structural changes happens from the families & society. Are we getting there? Yes, but we still have a long way to go & the pace is very slow. For now most of us would have to live with our master-blasters & although we refuse to believe Press Council of India (PCI) chairperson Justice Markandey Katju’s assessment of Indians, is the truth very far from that? After all CEAT also said the same thing sometime back in their television promotional campaign! Didn’t we agree then?

How safe is your workplace?

Bangladesh garment factory fire that killed more than 100 people recently has put the workplace safety issue right on the table once again. The factory that was reportedly a supplier to big retail giants had minimal fire safety mechanisms. Locked exit door, fire extinguishers for namesake, no emergency exits – all this meant that the factory was a death-trap waiting to take its toll on the hapless workers.


Such accidents are not uncommon in Asian countries. Not so long ago on April 2012, the roof collapse of a blanket factory in Jalandhar killed several workers. The factory reportedly flouted most of the industrial safety norms. Almost every year before Diwali, one of the firecracker manufacturing units reports an accident. This year was no different. A major fire in a fireworks manufacturing unit in Sivakasi in Virudhunagar district in south Tamil Nadu killed more than 50 people.

Even a year after the infamous AMRI hospital tragedy in which nearly 93 people were smothered to death by smoke from a fire in the basement, smoke management is reportedly still in poor state among developers and enforcement agencies. There have been some patchy attempts to retrofit existing buildings-offices, malls and hospitals-with a fire fighting system that controls and evacuates smoke. And in many cases although there are gadgets in place but there is no system to ensure that they function in an exigency.

These incidents are followed by few arrests, some noise and after some days of finger-pointing, the issue dies down, waiting for the next accident to happen.

Workplace safety norms are freely flouted in many third world countries. Several reasons are cited for the same. The reasons that commonly come to the fore are technical and legal compliance issues. However managerial & behavioral reasons seem to be at the core of such apathy towards workplace safety. Such managerial & leadership behaviour is best described by the enquiry report on the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Fukushima nuclear accident, the worst nuclear disaster after the Chernobyl accident was termed as ‘man-made’! The findings of the commission probing the accident elicited shock and fear amongst people all over the world. The enquiry report reportedly points to typical ‘reflexive obedience’ behavior amongst Japanese behind the accident. Reflexive obedience simply means a lack of questioning emerging out of strong bureaucracy and collusion of selfish interest. The result - People at Tokyo Electric Power put the interest of the organization before that of the consumers and let the safety slip. A culture of ‘reflexive obedience’ meant questioning was blasphemous & conveniently kept people so disengaged that no one cared while the plant condition deteriorated progressively. The leaders and the HR function of the organization were unable and unwilling to change the culture and the rot set-in deeper & deeper. In the end, the cultural tsunami was stronger than the natural tsunami.

But such culture of ‘reflexive obedience’ is not only limited to Japan or Tokyo Electric Power. Six years back, one of my students was doing his internship in a paper mill in the northern part of the country, owned by a prominent industrial group. His project was on workplace safety. The report based on interview of workers, supervisors of the factory revealed gaping safety flouting issues. Despite the fact that he did a remarkable job, before submission, he was asked to water-down his findings by his industry supervisor who was a manager in the same mill.

Workplace safety is more a cultural & behavioral issue. Legal machinery definitely needs to strengthened & tightened and cases fast-tracked to punish the offenders. However such incidents would be prevented only when a cultural transformation happens.