Appraisal of Life!!!!!!

APPRAISAL : The classification of someone or something with respect to its worth (As defined by WordWeb)

Appraisal is one word which raises lots of inquisitveness in our industry. "Hey dude, whats up man.... By the way what ratings you got". This is a greeting you can expect from your peers even when you are roaming around with one ear. Nobody notices your missing ear or enquires about it. All people care about at that time is whats your rating. Other irrelevant matters can wait until next month. People are ready to talk to some one they abhor just to know his/her performance rating. Thats true !!! people care so much about your performance that it wont be weird if a girl who had slapped you two days earlier comes up to you and talks all sweety.... cutey to get to know your appraisal ratings. Man .... People are curious to know how you perfomed in your professional life.I wonder about this peculiar nature sometimes and its origin but when I see m myself going nowhere, I attribute this to an aspect of human nature. :)

But there is another thing which troubles me a lot and that is how do I perform in life? Who is the one who will be doing the appraisal of my LIFE. Who will decide my worth. Who has the credibility of becoming my PDM(one who appraises). And as you all know before the appraisal we all set objectives. Lets say now if I am being appraised on my performance in life and I want to set my objectives. Obviously I will want them to be relevant and the way to make them relevant is to find out my purpose in life. This is the toughest part to figure out and hence this will take the largest amount of words in this article will be spent to finding the purpose.

After investing time in one of my most favorite activity i.e. SLEEP I am not left with much time for breaking my head on worldly matters of truth and reason or attaining that all important "critical attitude" towards every thing and anything which is oblivious to me. But some times (when I cross all limits of sleep and even my body refuses to relent to my desires) I give credence to the question raised above- "Whats the purpose of man's stint on this earth?". Is it just as simple as to mate with a woman and help producing more men and women so that they produce even more men and women? Or is it to do with mythological angle of man's curse of facing troubles for some thing he does not even know he did some time back? Or is it about earning lotsa money and fame and respect and go back satisfied without anything you earned? Perplexed with all these unconvincing Reasons to live I am nowdays trying to unfold the mystery. Guys dont think otherwise I am not joining any Ashram...... just pandering to my inquisitiveness.

"My Quest has taken me to the physical, metaphysical, delusional and back" - John Nash - Nobel Prize Speech. The line fits here exquisitely. I have tried desperately to know the reason for all this commotion in my mind. But all efforts have gone in vain. All I know is that life is some thing which is a cloak under which are hidden things which you are not aware. Nobody knows "Whats right or wrong for him/her". People think --- "Oh my god, Was this decision good for me or I would have been better off taking the alternative." This opens a totally new angle of destiny and fate but I will better not delve into it for the time being. They say every man's life has a reason. I dont know from where they got such an Enlightenment, but I really face a hard time figuring out my life's reason.

One of the major theory* which is largely endorsed(in India) is that GOD decides what we are supposed to face in life depending on our deeds. It is as if he is appraising all of us depending on his own parameters. In a world where God himself is fighting for few yards of land in court, i wonder from where he gets the time to check out deeds of 6 billion people (and counting). I mean we all know how messy the court fights can become.

So if I go by this theory atleast one of my queries is solved and that is who will appraise me? -- GOD of course. But here in company we have a meeting with our PDM(one who appraises) to decide upon the objectives. With GOD, such a meeting is not possible thats a glitch. But atleast GOD should tell us parameters on which he will appraise me.

I was just wondering as to how the processes which help our HR decide our appraisals can help GOD decide. It will be a sea of good if People Function Team (HR) can help GOD with a trick or two for this. I have some suggestions though:

Just imagine - Wouldnt it be better if we were sent along with a "birth-epitah" on which the reason for our lifes is engraved and we can work towards fulfilling that like we do for our Annual objectives?. May be GOD can bring some sort of accountability and predictability in this process by adopting the above mentioned method.

And after that based on the extent of our achievement, he can decide and give ratings "AE- Above expectations, ME- Met Expectations, BE- Below Expectations SBE- Significantly Below Expectations". Those can then be mapped to each of our graves, burials and pasted there. Guess Nandan's UID will help GOD in this regard (tat is if and when its successfully implemented).

Well another angle to this is that GOD has given us the freedom to choose our own reason and work towards it. But this shows GOD's denial of assigning task and just procrastinating. Well the jobs not easy but after all you are GOD!! you can just flick a finger and get the ink to write the epitah of all the people.

Anyways - my sanity has taken me back to the point I started. Not to ponder in unknown waters unless you wanna really drown.

For now Appraisal @ my company is all I can handle.

My Dadaji - Late Mr. B.P.Singh

They say with great people, there is no difference between the person and principles. This aptly defined my Grandfather. The keystone of our family, my Grandfather, breathed his last on 2nd Dec 2009 after 3 months of intense illness. He was 82. He will always be remembered as a person who stood for integrity and truth. Known for his honesty and revered by all, he left a deep imprint on anyone he met. Its an honour to be associated with his name for life and to proudly say, I am the grandson of Mr.B.P.Singh.

I spent most of my childhood learning from him, playing with him and towards the later part of my life discussing with him some silly and some complex facets of life. For the fact that he was from pre-independence generation, his ideologies were amazingly modern and rational. He always taught me the importance of being true to oneself, living with dignity and fighting for truth. I still remember how he would share with me little space on his side of the bed just to make me comfortable, how he would quote 'slokas' to give me examples of ideal behaviour, how he taught me the complex intransitive verb concept and tenses in English grammar, how he would test my mathematics with creating complex problems from daily chores of life. Well I could go on and on in terms of what all I learned from him and what all he achieved professionally and otherwise, but it would never be all.

It is been exactly two months since he passed away and as I write this, I understand what my friend Umang said - They have left their bodies, their deeds still remain, their memories still remain and their influence still remains. This is how my Grandpa lives along with me - In every thing I do, in everything I think and in everything I will be. Thank you Dadaji!

Mr B.P. Singh

A lousy blogger

Off late I was out of touch with the world. You can understand this happens when people are not working. I had sparse access to net and my Gmail inbox was overflowing with unread mails.

Now as I am in the process of getting to my surfing habits, a long forgotten hobby popped up its head. My blog- singhyvraj.blogspot.com has had a bad bad run till now. In the times when IT majors are coming up with better than expected results, here are some stats about my blog's dismal performance till now.

In almost two years of its existence, my blog has managed just 16 posts. That's like I dont know typing. It comes down to 0.66 post in one month. I have managed 20 subscribers and 996 page views. The stats are presented in a much pleasant form below. A queer observation was that quite a number of came from Brazil where none of my friends went.

When compared to last year average time per isit has decreased by 4% (-) and bounce rates have decreased by 8% (+). Number of visits have increased ny 58%. Other stats of this year as given below.

The feed stats are much more recent as I started it quite late. Here they are.


As they say - You cant improve what you cant measure. This blog post is a step in the right direction.

"The year gone by" : 08- 09

I have chosen deliberately not to write posts about "ME" if they do not signify and help proving a point because I know none of you will be quite interested in that. But this one time, I would like to make an exception for my yearly report. I know that it is four days too late for the report to be published, but better late than never :)

So here goes some major developments over the last year.

Major events professionally:

• Organized the Supply Chain case study event at SIBM Transcend 08. It took awfully long time to design the case study and organize other related things but in the end just few praiseworthy comments from the participants made all the effort worth it.

• Did my summers at Max New York Life Insurance. Got a Pre placement offer from the company. Overall a decent learning experience though could have been much better.
  

• Got Second prize in M&M War Room Business Strategy Competition. Most of the work was rip off from the work done on another case study on related sector

• Knowledge Management case study for HCL. The solution given was directly deploy-able as commented by the Director of Knowledge Management, HCL. The understanding of KMS at MindTree helped a lot in this respect.
  

• Finally wrote an article on "Innovative Marketing" for Forthright - the Research Magazine at SIBM. This was a long due task being rescheduled a million times.

• Completed a course on Innovation and a consulting project for KayaLife through Marico Innovation foundation
  

• Got placed in Cognizant Business Consulting on 11th December 2008 at 1605 hrs. This was the second interview, after a failed telephonic interview and noisy Group discussion. Though not a great achievement per se but given the situation of the job market, it was close to satisfactory. Since a lot of effort went into the preparation for the same, the results were not proportionately adequate. But then its human Psyche not be be happy ever with what you get.

Major developments personally:

• Living in a residential campus has its own advantages. Got to know many more people and created a life long bonding with some of them.
  

• Got a totally new perspective of life because of the prior point. The sense of pragmatism which I was lacking before will probably dawn upon me looking at people around. Personally I don't think I have become any wiser in worldly matters over the last year.
  

• For few months towards the end of the year, I was on cloud number nine but I have come down owing to the bitter reality. It was nice to be there. But I guess everything that goes up comes down. :)

• Definitely improved my informal debating skills as most of the time went in fighting over insignificant and irrelevant issues just for fun. Long discussions which stopped only when both sides would "Agree to disagree".

• Started blogging much more regularly as there is plenty of time to kill. Consequently, I have started thinking about things differently. There is a definite intent to take keep blogging even when there is less time at hand.
  

• Physically, I have become much more active because of all the outdoors - badminton, cricket, football etc. Again thanks to a residential campus, you tend to pander to such desires given the facilities. To beat all records, some days I have even gone for a morning jog :)
  

• The coke intake has risen significantly. Though many have shown their own concerns in this regard, I do not feel its taking any toll on my health. Don't know about the future though.
  

• There was a deliberate attempt to reduce the non-veg intake towards the later half of the year but there is only so much you can do when the tempting dishes are right in front of you. Though definitely the intake has gone down.

• Visited Dehradun, Haridwar, Akansha school, Shirdi, Singhgarh fort, Kashid beach, Nagaon beach, Kihim beach, Murud Zanzeera fort. It was a much needed break from the routine. The highlight was para sailing at Nagaon beach and spending time with children at Akansha school.

• My belief that MBA has no value except from the glamor quotient was further strengthened owing to various experience in and out of the college and corporate world.
  

• I hate my college even more now having spent close to 1.5 years in this college and knowing how ineffective the management of this management college is. (This calls for another post)
  

Though there were many other things over the last year, these seem to be the major developments this year as far as I can recollect. This will be a regular feature every year on my Web log. And by the way if you did not like this post, don't worry too much, it is a head fake (i.e it is meant as a record for me and not for you). The subsequent posts will not be so much about ME.