Happy Friendship Day

I like the way the young ones celebrate their friendships. They really love their friends.

On their Happy Friendship Day

And then there are some 'best friend days'.

What have my friends taught me? To laugh, to have fun, to feel supported, to be there when I reach behind, to pick up the phone when I need to talk, to land up unannounced for a night of listening to music, to give a big, bear hug that washes all the troubles away, to somehow know and understand the deepest, unsaid feelings I harbour inside, to fully appreciate my madnesses and remember things I have forgotten about myself.

If anything, they do light the twinkle in the dull eye. Can't you see it?

The Lost Hyderabadi Ways

I miss this particular trait of the Hyderabadis of my young days. Whenever any excess was being committed on the road - auto drivers misbehaving, young boys teasing girls, boys fighting, women being harassed, bus drivers acting funny - the good old Hyderabadi would in a leisurely manner stop the offending person and put the context right.

With a few choice abuses and a tight slap or two thrown in the errant auto driver, young lad, bus driver, car driver or whoever, would instantly understand the folly of his ways and move on, a chastised soul. I have witnessed this so many times, this leisurely setting right of the world where the ignorant commit mistakes, in what can only be the Hyderabadi version of Kangaroo courts.

For example, I remember an incident near Adarsh Nagar where a young lady carrying some luggage stopped an empty auto rickshaw. The driver  asked her where she wants to go, quoted some price and let the matter rest. The poor lady was stuck there with her luggage. Enter the Hyderabadi heroes on a motorcycle. They stopped the auto and asked him what the matter was. He said it was too close or something like that. Before he finished his sentence he was clutching his cheek, a stinging slap having ensued. He did not need much coercion after that. Justice well delivered.

I am really missing this wonderful trait now, of people who could see right from wrong, and who would use their muscle to back the right and punish the wrong. Now everyone watches impotently as the wrong doer openly commits his crime, and in some cases even join him.

Ah, for some of those Hyderabadi souls. There is so much good work to be done.

Blood Simple - Movie Review

This one thanks to Sagar who has reappeared in my life with more movies to share. It's a 1984 neo-noir film, whatever that is.

Film opens with a married woman Abby going off with her bar owner husband's employee. Not surprisingly, the employee, who has offered his shoulder to the wife, ends up offering much more. However they are trailed by a private detective unknown to them and even before they wake up from their night of passion, the husband calls in with details.

Anyway, Ray, the employee is not one to get cowed down by the husband and he turns up at work and offers to resign, and also asks for his balance payment. Marty, husband and boss, refuses. After Ray leaves, he tells the private detective to kill the new couple, and offers a large sum. Private Dick tells boss man to quit town for a few days - job will be done.

Private Dick steals the woman's revolver and makes a fake picture of the seemingly dead couple. He gets the money based on the picture and then he kills the boss (why?). Also, chances of the boss knowing the two are alive are high because they all seem to be walking in and out of his bar. Anyway detective forgets his lighter and one fake picture and leaves a bleeding bar owner with one bullet inside him. (Why assume he is dead?)

In walks Ray for his money and sees a bleeding boss. For some reason he assumes his new love has killed her husband for his love and decides to be a bigger hero. He takes boss's body someplace, finds that he is still alive, and buries him dead. When he tells the wife, she clears the misunderstanding - she did not kill her husband. Ray, the foolish lover, seems to have got a murder on his hands, for nothing.

Meanwhile the private detective is hunting down the couple to get his lighter back. He shoots Ray down sniper style and is all set to kill the girl too. But she turns out a bit too smart and kills him. Movie ends with a smart line from the dying detective's lips.

Too many questions unanswered for me? If detective was such a trigger happy person he could have killed the couple and pocketed the money legitimately couldn't he? If he wanted to rob Marty he could have done that too. Ray's first reactions to a bleeding Marty are rather odd as well, as he tries to clean up the mess for a woman no one is sure he loves. Why the detective wants to kill these two when they sure as hell don't know who he is - is another dumb angle.

There is a sense of danger, bodies, blood, illicit relationships - but the plot is not so simple as it looks. It's an enjoyable watch because there is something in the way the story is told that is interesting. I don't know what though. And you must stop asking dumb questions if you wish to enjoy the movie too.

Interesting aside, film heroine Frances McDormand married one of the film directors, the Coen Brothers, Joel Coen. She looked very familiar and then I realised that she appeared in Fargo and Streetcar Named Desire.

Django Unchained - Movie Review

Good Dr. Schultz (Christopher Waltz, incredibly smooth) is a bounty hunter in the 1958 times, and a man of amazing persuasive ability. Smooth talking his way through extremely hopeless situations Dr. Schultz, the German doctor, does not care much for slavery either. He enters the scene in style, frees Django (Jamie Foxx) who is chained and being led away by slave traders. Schultz needs Django to identify some bounty and promises to free Django after he gets his bounty. He does better - he makes him a partner and his trainee through the winter as well.

Django has to save his wife who is now in the captivity of another slave trader Calvin Candi (Leonardo DiCaprio, suave and temperamental), notorious for his blood sports and rather casual treatment of slaves and humans, and he enlists the help of the good Dr. Schultz. How the two go ahead with the plan, suffer some collateral damage, yet accomplish the goal is what Django Unchained is about.

Heavily inspired by Rajnikanth I'd say, glasses and all, save the style. The style goes to Dr. Shultz which makes it clear that one cannot do all that Rajni does, we need two. But Django can do anything and he does. Tarantino is at his best, making scenes grow bigger, using visual effects of bodies and blood spilling like geysers, but capturing the audience by the collar because you still want to know how they get away from it all, or die. Django is full of such scenes. Interestingly I saw Tarantino's name in the movie credits too.

Slavery and its full impact depicted in the backdrop. White supremacy and the arrogance of owning people glowers from up above. Christopher Waltz takes the show to another level, sophistication and danger blended exquisitely. I loved the scenes where he finally squares off with Leonardo Di Caprio in the end, adrenalin busting stuff. Jamie Foxx is Django all the way, but hey, Rajni is still the man to have in that role. Too much blood and gore for me, and too many things that looked like a Bollywood flick. But Django don't bore anyway so it's all ok. With Tanatino sometimes you get the feeling that he is making a huge joke of the whole thing, but thankfully, you are involved in the joke.

The America-Returned Father

On Chennai Express (whole new overtones now) the other day. A large family travelling from Chennai to Hyderabad. Young NRI couple at the centre of all the attention - more prosperous looking, clothes that are clearly belonging to the travelling America-returned couple - accents and all. Both seemed to be techies, or software engineers, as we know them. They had two kids with them, one barely over a year old, just walking, and the other, about four or five years old. Other kids, desi, were presumably their cousins.

Pic of a hand held close against a camera

I saw the two American kids come over near our cubicle (their accents and clothes gave them away). The younger one was looking for something to play. The older one decided to give her a rubber chappal, some adult's surely, and it looked like a perfectly good thing for the young one to play. They were both quite happy. Also, the fact that they had now distanced themselves from their parents and other restricting adults by about two cubicles length, made the younger one pretty excited and she started crawling further away.

This is when the drama began. The older one disappeared noticing her father's arrival. The father blew in like a hurricane and yelled at the crawling young one. 'You are crawling! You put your hands on the floor? Your hands on the floor?' Slap. Not a gentle one mind you, a sharp, stinging slap that could make you and I cry. And not one. For good measure he gave the child two or three really sharp ones and hauled the child off roughly.

I had the misfortune of seeing that child's face change as she turned to see her father. From sheer bliss one moment of playing and of freedom, it encountered rebuke, shame, pain, bewilderment and perhaps even betrayal. I saw the face change as she cowered under the abuse. So loud were the slaps that everyone was shocked. And then for the next ten minutes, we could hear the mother and father yell and scream and threaten the young ones in their accented English that they better stay put etc etc.

It's not the first time that I saw something like this. Most times the parents are too busy doing something else and when the child wanders away or falls down because of their negligence, they punish the child. What does the poor child know? In fact if anyone has a right to get offended it's the child be cause the parent has not fulfilled his/her responsibility well.

I was even more surprised to see that this gentleman who has been exposed to a society where such behaviors are not tolerated, went to an extreme. Ramaraju who lived in the US for a while told me - they take away the kids in the US if they do things like this there. The sting of the slap was not normal mind you, it was vicious and meant to hurt. It will continue this pattern, of the child being punished for the negligence of the parents, and it will continue this punishment-guilt drama for a lifetime.

It's nice to see that children don't normally get beaten up these days as they were in the olden days. In fact parents are far more expressive in their love for the children these days. But we do see the exception to the rule once in a while. Take it easy parents. It's never the child's fault. If there is someone you feel like punishing, look in the mirror.

Short film - The Viva

This is a short film by Sabarish Kandregula that I really enjoyed. If you've done your engineering and know your Telugu, you will too (even if you don't know Telugu, there are English sub titles).
Have fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojy_UgBZbxo

Good show fellows.

Team Building Workshop - Using The Game of Cricket

Get 18 young guns together. Get them to play cricket for an hour or two. Let them ponder over what they learned and voila, all the learning in the world that one can learn about team work is thrown up. What was that quote - you can learn more about a man in an hour of play than a whole lifetime of knowing. Here, you learn about yourself, about others and also you in relation to others.

18 of the young associates of Mars took the stage at Leonia resorts on August 1, 2 and 3 to play a few games of cricket and decipher what makes successful teams tick. The rules were modified so no player has an unfair advantage and what one may consider a strength could become a weakness and vice versa.

There was Anuj, Rahul, Ganapathi, Hemanth, Zeena, Sreelatha, Rajeshwari, Reeta, Shravan, Piyush, Nishanth, Ramprasad, Onkar, Sreenivas, Naga Praveen, Pavan, Gopi and Jayaprakash - executives from various functions and eager to learn about teams. Amar and I facilitated the games and were beneficiaries of the learning that the young ones put before us.

After 5 games I'd say the learnings were about (randomly):

• Having a common purpose (unites the team and gives it a purpose)
• Knowing and assigning roles (figuring out how best to achieve the purpose using resources at hand, each resource to give 100% to the role assigned as the entire structure depends on it)
• Empowering fringe players (huge impact as they can make a big difference with their improved contributions, leaders ought also look at growing them by providing opportunities appropriately)
• Dangers of overburdening  the better players (they tend to take the extra burden and do not deliver under pressure, need to defuse the pressure for them)
• Getting the team together (knowing and addressing the aspirations and anxieties of the team members and creating a bond
• Knowing and articulating the process (sharing the process of growth and how it will be measured, rewarded and judged so everyone knows what it expected of them and how to go about it, leaving no space for assumptions)
• Leadership (crucial to pick the right leader, once picked to back her fully, to empathise with leader's situation as well and support her)
• Communication (to express, share, plan etc, it's the secret energy that connects teams)
• Putting team before self (the basic rule of all team play, all who put self before team to be told and explained and if behaviour continues, to be dropped)
• Being supportive of one another (at all times for the good of the team and the individual, not that constructive criticism is disallowed because even that is being supportive)
• Enjoying the process (teams that smile and laugh seem to have a higher energy, a feeling that they can do it, identify the fun guys)
• Creation of belief (through word and deed, through steely resolve, its in the head and all one needs is one person in the team, even the weakest player to demonstrate this resolve)
• Creating interest among team members (again a process of constantly challenging their limits, abilities and making them reach for more)
• Sharing ownership (absolute necessity)
• Using strengths and weaknesses (knowing ones strengths and using them, even weaknesses sometimes can be strengths)
• Killer instinct or competitive edge (something anyone can bring to the table, just a feeling)
• Preparation (good preparation is half the battle won)
• Willingness to step up for team's cause (need more such players in the team, a behavior to be encouraged and rewarded)
• Celebrating small successes (a must to keep morale high)

Though this might not be an exhaustive list (top of mind for me) but it has enough to start with.

Behaviors That Have an Adverse Impact
There were incidents that also showed us how unconsciously we carry certain behaviours that could affect the team adversely. These behaviors included giving up the fight early (conceding), questioning the leader's capabilities, not following strategy as planned, defeatist attitudes, squabbling unnecessarily among team and with authority, cohesion issues, not participating wholeheartedly, not defining roles, blaming and criticizing etc.

Leadership issues
The leaders experienced issues of handling dissent, challenge of authority, motivation, participation, alienation (of team members who felt they were no being heard), lack of ownership among team, getting the unit together, holding team energies together among others. Learnings include - use authority vested with the leader appropriately for team good, to provide space to express and to convince and carry team members along in the best interests of the team, to be sympathetic to team members anxieties and dreams and at the same time being strict with the work ethic and the deliverables, to understand reasons for non-delivery and explain the process to team members including the rewards and repercussions so effort is more purposeful, to lead through example, to invest time with team members to understand their motives and aspirations

All in all, learnings that were well-received as I could garner form their discussions and questions. Some learnings do settle down a while later but certainly its an exercise that opens up one's thinking about team building. The participants threw themselves into the games with much vigour, braved injuries, dived, ran through aches and pains, and I am sure learned enough to know what makes successful teams and how best to contribute to team success.

From the sidelines one could watch the effect people have on others with their talk and mannerisms, their intent, their enthusiasm versus their negativism, hope versus hopelessness, a learning attitude versus a defeatist attitude, a responsible attitude versus a blame and criticise attitude, a unifying attitude versus a disruptive attitude, a patient attitude  versus an impatient attitude and so on and so forth. There were those who took the back seat in the team's interests, who carried more responsibility, who brought a joy and enjoyment to the process, who were competitive within the framework of the game and it was wonderful to see some rise above their weight, disregard their limitations and grow, and at the same time to see the burden of responsibility weighing down on some and affecting their normal perofrmances. All learnings, all valid.

I enjoyed it thoroughly fellows. Thanks for teaching me much. Hopefully you have all learned a few things too. And as always, feel free to drop in your queries.