Linus Fernandes

Posts Tagged ‘mumbai’

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Citibank Complaint

In Management, mumbai, sports on February 2, 2010 at 16:42

Dear Sir/Madam:
This is with respect to the phone conversation I had with your CSR Reshma about the interest charge and late payment charge made on my card xxxxxxxxxxxxx. Though it was resolved to my satisfaction i.e. both the interest payment and late fee was waived , and why shouldn’t that be, since the earlier payment was lost in your system, (for no fault of my own), what I would like to draw your attention is the rudeness of your customer service representatives while dealing with this customer. While your CSR was dealing with me, she was continually interrupted by another of your employees, a gentleman(?), making inane remarks and weird

sounds, interjecting them at pronounced intervals.To my surprise , your CSR was not willing to interrupt the said person and say that she was dealing with a customer and kindly do not disturb. I would request you that you coach your CSRs in politeness and how to deal with abrasive employees who seem to treat the workplace as their personal fiefdom.

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Decided to post this since getting redress from CSRs here, has become an exercise in tolerance and akin to Chinese torture.

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Have received some redress from Citibank;They claim that my check was placed aside because the card no. written on the check was not decipherable. The interest & late charges were later reversed but not completely as next month’s bill showed some minor interest charges. But I was so FED UP that I did not pursue the matter further!

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Vintage Mumbai!

In fun, mumbai, prose on January 29, 2010 at 12:23

http://rydermiles.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/vintage-photos-of-mumbai-india/

Some excellent pictures of vintage Mumbai!

Have a great day!

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Colaba Post!

In fun, mumbai, prose on January 14, 2010 at 17:55

An interesting post about Colaba in Mumbai.

http://richardarunachala.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/in-mumbais-colaba-district/

And the pictures are mouth-watering!

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Good Day!

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Mumbai and Ranji

In cricket, fun, sports on January 14, 2010 at 11:05

Just a thought:

With the Ranji Trophy final  between Mumbai & Karnataka drawing to a close, (what an engrossing finale!), instead of wasting time lauding an Indian cricket team that does not perform in crucial matches, isn’t it time we celebrated the Mumbai cricket team, that has gone on and on , performing as a unit, over the past decade with almost no superstars in their midst?

Surely this team embodies the spirit of Mumbai, more than anything else?

PS: Mumbai completed their 39th Ranji Trophy win. See http://www.cricinfo.com/ranjisuperleague2009/content/current/story/444048.html

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Mumbai – a state to itself?

In mumbai, prose, Thought on November 16, 2009 at 21:18

With the latest controversy erupting with Bal Thackeray’s statement that Sachin Tendulkar should not dabble in politics – Bal Thackeray believes that a statement that says Bombay belongs to Indians is an insult to the Marathi manoos – I would like to ask – Do you think that its time that Mumbai was made a separate state , ala New Delhi?

Will it make Mumbai much more progressive? As an indirect benefit, will it drive the rest of Maharashtra to progress even faster? And set up alternative towns and cities, thus spreading progress and wealth?

What do you think? Is there a case for making our large metros responsible for themselves? More autonomy , more growth?

Your thoughts?

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The Sum Of All Parts

In Professional, Speech, ToastMasters International on April 19, 2009 at 18:20

The Sum
Of All Parts




[Start by
waving hands in the air. Side to side]


How many of you realize
what that is? For those who didn’t , that was a part of a Mexican
wave. A Mexican wave is a movement performed by sports audiences one
tier at a time, by standing and waving and yelling, then sitting
down, with the next tier doing the same, in a sequence. I was once
part of a Mexican Wave , a long time back at Wimbledon in 1997. It
was People’s Sunday, Center Court and I was watching Tim Henman
versus Paul Haarhuis of the Netherlands. The rain kept coming
intermittently and during one of the rain breaks, the tier opposite
me exploded into action waving, standing and yelling. Then the next
tier and then my tier and I were doing the same. But while being part
of the Mexican wave is fun, you do not see the visual effect. Its
just a lot of noise. Later that evening when I caught the highlights
on television, the Mexican wave was exposed in all its glory , with a
birds eye view of the undulating wave movement. It was beautiful!


Fellow Toast Masters and
Guests, the whole can be much more than just the sum of its parts.


The Whole can be much
more Than Just The Mere Sum Of Its Parts! How many of you agree
with this statement? And you are not at all wrong. Indeed, you are
in elite company. You have just hit upon the underlying
principle behind an exciting branch of science called quantum
mechanics. Now , quantum mechanics and its applications is an
interesting and deep topic. I do not profess to be well-versed in its
intricacies and neither do I intend to use this time to strive and
enlighten you. You may be even more in the dark , if I try.


A single
term that would describe the whole being more than the sum of its
parts is holistic. However, the whole being more than the sum
of its parts does not hold just in a branch of physics. We can see
its applicability in our daily lives as well.



To give
you an example, the Indian cricket team is made up of 11 players.
Sehwag, Gambhir, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman, Yuvraj Singh, Dhoni,
Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma and Munaf Patel. Each of
them have an assigned role to play; they each do their part and
contribute to the team’s efforts. On their day, some more than the
others. But without the gelling of the team as a unit, they would
just remain individual achievers and team success would be an elusive
grail. The synergy achieved and the strategy employed makes for a
well-oiled machine. A machine that can beat all-comers.



Another
example of synergy achieved that makes the whole more than the mere
sum of its parts is our ToastMasters meet every Sunday. Each of us
have a role to play ; Can you help me with the various roles? The
sergeant-at-arms, the toastmaster of the day, the table topics
master, the grammarian, the ah-counter, the timer, the prepared
speakers, the general evaluator and the evaluators, the table topic
participants, the guests and last but not the least, Jeetu. Here too
the whole , when the parts fall into place smoothly, make for an
enjoyable , memorable experience. Who , among us, would claim that
just he or she is wholly responsible for the success of the meet?




So, it is
with firms. How many of you are familiar with Michael Porter’s
description of the value chain as a source of competitive advantage?




A
value chain is a chain of activities. Products pass through all
activities of the chain in order and at each activity the product
gains some value. The chain of activities gives the products more
added value than the sum of the values added in each activity.


For
example, with a diamond manufacturer, first you receive the rough
stones, these are cut shaped and polished into diamonds, these are
then stored in warehouses and then sent to distributors, or end-users
such as jewelery makers and finally a product is provided such as a
diamond ring, /earrings  or necklace. At each step in the chain,
value is added but the final value is much more than the intrinsic
value of the stone at the start of the chain. So again the whole is
more than the sum of its parts. The synergy achieved creates much
more value for the customer.


Similarly
with the software development process; the process consists of first
eliciting the requirements, analyzing the requirements, a feasibility
study , an architecture that will meet the requirements, the design
, implementation and coding with unit testing. Finally integration
testing and delivery followed by production deployment and finally
maintenance. Now each activity in the process adds value but the
value created by the whole set of activities is much more than the
value added at each step in the process. So again the whole is more
than the mere sum of its parts.



So what does this teach
us? It teaches us that when we put aside our egos, our pride and
acknowledge that we are all cogs in the machinery called the
universe, that we are insignificant in the face of eternity, only
then can we acknowledge that we need to learn to live with each
other, for each other . And the microcosms where we can achieve this
synergy are 2 fold; At home , it is the family. At work, it is the
immediate team within which we do our part. When each role is played
well, then only can we find things running like clockwork. Teamwork
is the most rudimentary form of people synergy , where we achieve
more than the sum of its parts would. A good team can achieve great
things; a not-so-good team with great people will still fail!


So pull the yoke, shine on
and NEVER, NEVER forget to shine the spotlight on your fellow!

A quick link to Quantum Mechanics

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Now, That’s Incredible!

In Professional, Speech on March 1, 2009 at 22:15



Time
and tide wait for no man; that sounds so trite, doesn’t
it? But what I am more interested in is what awaits the man left on
the shore? What is his reaction to the next tide, the events that
have occurred since his twiddling fingers and playing with sea
shells? Is his reaction so mundane , it matches the non-events that
have happened since? Or is his reaction to the earth-shaking events
since a more exclamation filled one, like say, “Now, That’s
Incredible!”



Fellow
ToastMasters and Guests, so what would you and I term incredible?
Incredible is an overused term; I say overused with no disrespect to
the ad line used by the Tourism Board of India, “Incredible
India!” India is truly incredible and that is wonderful
copy!




The
dictionary defines incredible as too extraordinary and improbable
to be believed. However, it is an accepted axiom that what seems
incredible now is so passe post the event.


For
example, if you had told the Europeans at the beginning of the 20th
century, that there would occur a war between half the European
nations that would last 5 years from 1914 to 1918, with the most
destruction to life and property until then, you would have been
labeled a crackpot, even a warmonger! But the Great War –
The War To End All Wars – did occur , and to compound folly ,
barely 20 years later, another great war on a larger scale, with even
more destruction to life and property, with the only ever explosions
of nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed. They are both
part of world history in the first half of the 20th
century. We now recognize those 2 wars as World Wars 1 and 2. Now,
that’s incredible, if only at the same time, they weren’t so
terrifyingly terrible!



Are
incredible and terrible synonymous? Some would say so! Yet, did
anyone ever imagine that the very nations that bore the brunt of
World War 2 , the losing nations, Japan and Germany would by the end
of the 20th century be among the most economically
prosperous nations in the world? If anyone has seen pictures of the
carnage the war wrought and believe me with some of the
visuals you can actually feel the acrid taste of gunpowder and
shells , you would have to say “Now, That’s Incredible!”




I was
born in an era when the Cold War was at its peak; you could cut
the frigidity with a knife; it was that palpable! The world was
firmly divided into 2 halves, you were either Red or Free.
And for non-aligned nations such as India, navigating the treacherous
diplomatic waters was like treading a path littered with
land-mines! The arms race was at its peak; and yet by the end of
the 20th century , communism was in its death throes. The
Soviet Union no longer exists, not because of any conventional war
but simply because the arms race bankrupted it; Russia now
marches to a different beat; the Berlin wall has fallen and the
European map has reverted back to what it looked like at the
beginning of the 20th century. I cannot even start to name
all the newish old Central and Eastern European nations! Now,
that’s incredible!



I was a
young man of 19 when Dr. Manmohan Singh as finance minister of the
Narasimha Rao government, flung open India’s gates to foreign
investment and jump-started the economic reforms program.
Since then India has grown steadily and at an increasing pace, and
the prosperity we now enjoy is the result of those initially
vilified reforms. Now the changes we’ve made are incredible! So
if you had told me 16 years ago, these changes would have occurred so
quickly and all in my lifetime, I would have said ‘No, that’s
improbable, even impossible!” Today, I say, “What an
incredible journey! Bless the IMF! Now, That’s Incredible!”



The shift
in the priority from being a nuclear superpower to an emphasis on
becoming an economic superpower is the greatest change in the mindset
of developing nations, and this includes India and China. China has
truly become an engine of growth and if India can unshackle itself
even further, then by 2025 , India can truly be pushing to be the
No.1 economy in the world. Now, if you were living 30 years ago,
just when China began its economic reforms, such a scenario would
have been considered inconceivable, improbable, even impossible.
And yet, you and I may still be around to say “Now, That’s
Incredible! The Impossible Has Arrived!”




Nassim
Nicholas Taleb, in his book, The Black Swan, has described such
improbable events as Black Swans. A Black Swan seems highly
improbable to us who have been exposed only to white ones so termed
‘normal’ ones. But a Black Swan event has a dramatic impact both on
history and on people’s lives. The Great Depression of the 1930s, the
Black Friday in 1987 and the current Global Meltdown are all Black
Swan events. They seemed highly unlikely but they did occur. Now
that Taleb wrote a book about such Black Swan events is incredible.
That it is a bestseller is not so incredible.


My
friends, let’s admit that there is nothing that is truly
impossible, or improbable. They are mostly Black Swans waiting to
happen. So when they do, let’s accept them in all their improbability
and say “Now, That’s Incredible!” and thank you
for listening! You are truly incredible!




Over to
you, ToastMaster!



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