Sharma's Dhabha - A home away from home!!!!!

Coming to Hyderabad, specially 40 kms out of town to study in ISHRD ( part of the IBS Hyderabad Campus), one does tend to miss the food one is so used to back home.
The mess does not understand these sentiments of the students a 100% (which is something i should not be saying since I am part of the Mess Committee).
These circumstances bring us to the main part of the point - Sharmaji & Ramdev - The two brothers in charge of the Sharma Dhabha outside the IBS Campus.
This is a place where u get to eat the basic kind of stuff. Parathas (Aloo, Paneer, Mooli, Onion, etc.), Omlettes, Roti, Sabzee, etc. A taste which reminds you of home. In addition to this chicken/fish/mutton is made on weekends.
A place where u can sit and enjoy good food and a decent ambiance.

Over the past few months me and my batchmates (Nishith & Aish) have become pretty familiar with the place. Ramdev and Sharmaji have both become good friends of ours.

If you ever want to see a dark version of Sunny Deol speaking in a Bhojpuri accent, Sharmaji is the man to catch a glimpse of.
Ramdev always thinks that he is a gang lord of some sort. Man if Bollywood producers were on the lookout for the right guy, Vivek Oberoi may not have worked in "Shootout @ Lokhandwala"

The USP of the place is this guy called Neeraj - whose experitse in making parathas is basically running the place.
Now that Neeraj has gone back to his village, it is good to see Ramdev get serious about his work and concentrate on making parathas.

The main inspiration for this post was that my friend Aish wrote about Prajee and his Punjabi Dhabha. Refer http://www.sinhaaish.blogspot.com/ It was just not fair to leave Ramdev and Sharmaji out of this attempt to provide glory.

I suppose the next one to watch out for is Nishith's blog for a similar gloryfying article on Sinu and Ramulu Provision Stores. Keep checking http://www.nishithdev.blogspot.com/.

Management Education: Glorified Nonsense

26th February, 2010
Special acknowledgement for this post: Priyanka Shalini - for giving me the inspiration to write on this one and Prof. Padmashree Radhaswamy inspiring Priyanka to giving a presentation on the same.
Students over the past few years have this dream of becoming a management graduate. In simple words if you ask a student in the final year of graduation,what their future plans are, they would reply that, "I would like to go in for my MBA".
As a result of this we see that huge crowd of prospective students inside the IIM's and others in the same league for the purpose of ruining each others happiness through performances in group discussions and interviews.
Over the past few years a degree in management has come into great demand by corporates. As a result of this we see engineers sacrificing the noble designation of creators and are running after the coveted title we fondly call as "Manangers".
After making it to the 3rd semester @ ISHRD, I have finally figured out one thing.
Some people tend to ask why is a degree in management required?
Let me give you a few examples -

• Management - It is in all business and human organization activity is the act of getting people together and accomplish desired goals and objectives. This is what we learn in business school. Our general orientation towards this concept is very generic, something like "handling people or things"
• Leadership - It is the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the support and aid of others in the accomplishment of a common task. In normal circumstances, we would just wind up on this concept by saying that everyone is a leader - from Mahatma Gandhi to Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
• Cognitive Dissonance - It is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. This is a concept from Individual Behaviour. In normal circumstances we would not give a damn about this concept.

These are just a few examples. There are many more for all of you to find out.

In the end, we have to understand that what we learn in management courses provides us the theoretical aspect of what we are set to encounter in our future (our jobs).

The theories of behaviour, learning and training are useful to make it through to the end of a hard day @ work as a HR professional.

The art of preparing a compensation manual or a performance appraisal system which would help us to prove to the workforce of the organization that a MBA HRM graduate is not just any fart who does not know how to shit.

It's true what Mr. Vikas Sethia said - We have to become HR professionals and not just HR managers.

A professional would be a flexible all rounder. A HR manager may slowly get phased out and might be seen carrying water bottles on the field of play.

Country Club Management!!!!!

25th February, 2010

This is something interesting that I experienced during the Leadership lecture. I was supposed to present the Leadership Grid Styles - a topic assigned to me by our dearest Prof. Pandugala Narendar in class as part of my internal evaluations. I was explaining the Blake & Mouton Grid, which had Country Club Management as a leadership style in addition to team management, task management, middle of the road management and impoverished management.

I had put a question to the class, that apart from team management, to state a style which they find best and to justify the same. One of my classmates, Divya voted for the country club management style. Now to explain this style in detail, the leader only has concern for people and no concern for production. A leader following this style is only concerned with maintaining harmonious relations throughout the organization even at the cost of attaining results.

Divya said that it all has to start with total concern for people. Now this is not a style of leadership which management professionals would prescribe, but it got me thinking.

Being HR students, we are taught about human capital and how investing in the same can reap excellent results for employees as well as organizations. So it would all have to start with a genuine concern for people, by making them feel at home before they move on to the next level.

Team management is a concept which is the best combination of concern for people as well as production, but before moving on to this style of leadership it is of utmost importance to make people feel at home. One cannot be production centered at the beginning and all of a sudden when most of your subordinates hate to look at your face, you start showing a concern for people. It does not work out that way.

I think what Divya was trying to get at was, that you can start off with a country club management style and then move on to the team management style to reap the benefits of a long partnership based on mutual understanding.

A leader is never complete without a group of motivated and loyal followers.

Please note - The line above is not inspired by the Raymond advertisement.

Think about it!!!!!!!

Sachin aala re!!!! Explosion @ Gwalior

24th February, 2010. The Roop Singh Stadium @ Gwalior witnessed one of the spectacles which would be hard to describe in words. The ones who witnessed in at the ground were the luckiest people on earth for this date.
Sachin Tendulkar, who had aldready earned the title of "GOD" in the cricketing circuit many years ago, managed to pull of a feat which many have only come to close to achieving but have never quite made it.
The first double century in one day cricket coming from the blade of one of the icons that India has produced, makes me proud to be an Indian Cricket Fanatic.
Many stars were voted as the best bet to achieve this feat in one dayers.

• Virendar Sehwag
• Chris Gayle
• Brendon McCullum
• Adam Gilchrist
• Mathew Hayden
• Ross Taylor

Many people had come close to achieving this feat before. One can never forget the 194 scored by Saeed Anwar against India @ Chennai. An innings which came to an end, thanks to a spectacular catch by Saurav Ganguly.

Mathew Hayden managed 181 against Bangladesh. He was unbeaten, but never made it to the magic figure.

Sachin had himself come very close to the 200 figure twice. Scoring 186 twice, against the Kiwis, once at Hyderabad and once at Christchurch.

But it was Gwalior which was destined to witness GOD @ work.

25 hits to the boundary and 3 in addition which crossed the ropes.

India winning the match and the series was just the icing on the cake.

Sachin - The person who had a very modest beginning to his career. Getting a bloody nose from a Waqar Younis bouncer in hist first test match and smashing the next ball to the boundary. It was from then he made the news. Career progression happened really fast.

5 world cup appearances.

Mentee under Kapil Dev & Mohammed Azharuddin. Contemporary to Saurav Ganguly & Rahul Dravid and a mentor to Virender Sehwag & Yuvraj Singh. A stunning feat of being part of three different generations of Indian cricket.

A salute to the greatest India and the world has ever seen.

Unfortunately there was no way i could witness all this, for a few reasons

• Afternoon classes (HRM KI & OCD - please note - no choices - it is HRM KI & OCD and not HRK KI or OCD)
• Reading 3 case studies for class the next day ( just a precaution in case the faculty happens to ask you some question or the other related to the same)
• Referring to some notes ( which is necessary, as the concept of a study break becomes obsolete by the time you reach post graduate studies)

By the time i started writing this post, South Africa was all out. Tried catching the match on crictime.com which is known for video streaming, but then i remembered that i use a hostel wifi connection, and there are other desperate souls using the same connection (for whatever purposes that might interest them), so i gave up on that attempt as well.

Sachins achievement today was something that i did not witness myself, but was proud of the fact that it could not happen to a more deserving person. I was passing through phases of euphoria since this evening and now that i sit typing out this post for my blog, in the company of two friends; one who is making futile attempts to search google for the operations strategy of the Reliance Group of Industries for a classroom assignment, and another who has pretty much withdrawn himself from this hallucination called academics and gone off to bed.

This has reminded me of the fact that it is time to get back to some more of what my learned friend (fast asleep from the time of the previous reference to him in this post) would glady refer to (and justify) hallucinations.