The first CD was shipped to Don Yates, Music Director at KEXP 90.3FM. If they like it, they may play it on their Indie music terrestrial radio station. They might even do an album review – something that I am excitedly excited about. I discovered this station fairly recently and am coming to realize there is a lot of good Indie music out there.
First CD off to KEXP 90.3FM
After a long wait that ended with the UPS truck delivering the initial CD shipment outside my doorstep last evening, Tomorrow Will Be Yesterday CDs are finally available for online purchase. Here are your options to buy the CD:
Square
1) If you live in US, place your order on my secure Square site.
2) For my friends in Seattle area, ask me for the discount code for the Square site to eliminate shipping costs and pick up the CD in person whenever we meet next.
CDBaby
3) If you live outside US, you can place your order on CDBaby site between December 1st and 3rd 2014 for 1 cent worldwide shipping. If you miss the discount window, you can either order via CDBaby or follow step 2 above for in-person delivery whenever we meet next.
The offshore IT industry comprises of knowledge workers. Usually companies based at geographies with higher labor costs offshore some of their business processes and functions to lower cost offshore destinations. The need to digitize the planet and make humans more efficient coupled with the explosive growth in Internet connectivity and infrastructure led to the birth of the offshore IT services industry. Given the constant supply-demand mismatch that emanates from well performing economies in customer geographies, attrition is a known and generally accepted characteristic of the industry.
Attrition also remains one of the top concerns of clients and prospects, and rightly so since losing key people from an active engagement hurts irrespective of the backup plans and procedures an organization may have in place. Solid delivery environment management frameworks – Cybage’s ExcelShore® is certainly one of them – ensure relatively prompter replacement of resources by instituting a capability based shadow hierarchy while preemptively computing attrition risk of an individual. Process frameworks like CMMi will ensure sufficient documentation and knowledge sharing activities take place on an ongoing basis. Matured HR policies will protect the business’s and clients’ interest by creating an exciting work culture so employees don’t leave, but requiring a certain notice period by the departing employee to ensure adequate time for knowledge transfer.
Still the term ‘tribal knowledge’ does not exist for no reason. In spite of all frameworks, processes, and policies that a matured and efficient organization may have in place, departure of key individuals from a team leads to domain loss, the degree of which can vary based on various parameters including complexity of the project, knowledge worth of the individual, risk mitigation achieved via team composition to name a few. Whatever a company may do to keep its employees happy, good people will still leave leading to bad attrition. Of course, as part of the natural process, there will be some good attrition taking place as well. While good attrition is obviously good (most of the times), too little of bad attrition is not good and here is why. If none of your best people are leaving the organization in an open market, either they might be overpaid for an equivalent job in the industry, or they are less capable relative to what the industry demands. For the organization, retaining its best talent at an optimized cost becomes a balancing act of economical proportions! In spite of whatever an organization can justifiably do, people will leave and the show will also go on.
Data driven approach to manage continuity of US presidency
Arguably, one of the most complex jobs on the planet is that of the President of the United States. This is a scenario where attrition is mostly predictable – a replacement is generally required every four years or eight years. A shadow hierarchy is in place and protocols are well defined for change of authority in case of an untimely replacement need. When the leader of the free world is so predictably replaceable, do we really need to get bogged down and overly concerned when key people in our little world of projects move on? I believe the answer to this question should be an astounding ‘No’, especially if you believe that your organization is doing the best it can do to prevent as well as mitigate attrition risk.
Not just the barber at the saloon who gives you a haircut, the cab driver who drops you where you need to go, the waiter at the restaurant who gets you your food, but countless others who rely on tips to make ends meet…only because the minimum wages they earn are not adequate. This, I feel, is unfair for the person on the receiving end.
Working for loose change – a waiter collects tip left by a patron
To be clear, the additional financial overage I have to bear with regards to tipping least bothers me personally. I generally tip according to the level of service received in line with the established/expected norms around tipping. However, if I think from the receiver’s perspective who thanks you on receiving the tip – sometimes with a slight bow which actually bothers me – I feel the tipping culture is just not fair if we want to build a classless society. Or at least not let the class divisions make themselves apparent in such transactions. It is like today’s society has acknowledged and is comfortable with the fact that there are have-mores and there are have-nots, and has instituted this workaround. Chances are if you are reading this blog, you have tipped but have never been tipped. Imagine how you would feel if you were on the receiving end and working hard all the time for someone’s loose change.
The alternate argument in favor of tipping is that it acts as an incentive for the service provider to provide good service. In other industries, the incentives for good performance are given out as bonuses by the employer. In the services industry where the service personnel has close contact with the customer, the responsibility for rewarding good service has been passed on to the customer who can be the best judge of the service instance. This may sound fair, but the logic breaks for me because the providers rely on these tips and gratuities to make ends meet, whereas a lousy worker in many other industries can get by in life without the need for any bonuses.
The bottom line is that I strongly believe the tipping culture should be eradicated. Pay scales should be increased, and in turn the pricing of all the services where tipping is expected should be increased as well. Mechanisms used in other industries to to reward good and penalize bad performance can easily be adopted by such services industries as well.
Disclaimer: my views on this subject, though leaning against tipping, are not hard and fast. I would love to hear your views below.
It is the most important day in the history of the Internet, at least so far as I am concerned. www.chiragbindal.com has been launched today. I finally decided to buy the domain name to support online marketing of my upcoming album – Tomorrow will be Yesterday – expected to be launched this Fall. For now I expect the site to continue to house my blog, in addition to providing links and insights into all of my music, and in general acting as my home on the Internet.
I wish my website top rankings in search results and unimaginable count of visits that leave people a little happier than when they arrived. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for www.chiragbindal.com. Thank you!
Fortunate are those who are able to identify their life purpose and true calling, and have the desire and courage to pursue it. “This is what I love to do, and this is what I will excel at in life.” For most others, living comes in the way of life.
Back in 1998 when I was in second year of college, my band Krossbreedz made its second attempt to qualify for the ‘Countdown to Ecstasy’ rock competition at IIT Delhi’s annual cultural festival, Rendezvous. The qualification process involved playing a set of 2-3 songs for an audience that comprised of the other competing bands, and the judges that were usually members of more senior bands. That year it was Anirban (vocalist, Orange Street), Vishal (vocalist, Pentagram) and I do not remember who the third judge was. A lot of bands that could not qualify actually comprised of very good individual musicians who did not sound good as a band. Krossbreedz song list that night included Stairway to Heaven, Thunderstruck and a self composition Insecticide. We were lucky (read prepared) enough to qualify for the finals for the first time that year.
Yasmin the Drummeress banging them skins
This blog post, however, is not about Krossbreedz. Rather it is about Yasmin Claire Kazi, the singer of the Bangalore based band, Angel Dust, which was one of the bands trying to qualify for the coveted finals that night. I vaguely remember their rendition of Black Velvet. After our performance was over, Yasmin, a cheerful, confident and charismatic girl, came to congratulate us for the wonderful show. She said she thought we would qualify, and as we later learnt that morning, we indeed did. We had some good interactions – she told us she had moved to India from the UK, and that I reminded her of her brother (boy, that must have been embarrassing) who was studying in Russia. That was the first and the only occasion I interacted with this girl. She must have certainly left an impression on me given the fact I am writing about her sixteen years later.
Fast forward to today’s digital world of You Tube and Facebook. I had forgotten her name but just remembered the name of her band. Curious as to what the band had been up to, I looked them up on Google to come across a lot of You Tube videos which also reminded me what her name was. I searched for that name on Facebook to see that she is FB friends with Dean and Rahul, Krossbreedz vocalist and drummer respectively, back in the day. Yasmin however has come a long way in the sixteen years I had no contact with her (which, by the way, I still don’t). She transformed from a vocalist to a respected metal drummer (MyndSnare), joined and left various bands (Serotura being one), and seems to have found her true calling – playing drums! She was also invited to give a TED talk and she has posted her speech on her FB page, which really captures the essence of her transformation, and wonderfully illustrates that there is no short cut to success.
She calls herself the drummeress and hers is a very inspiring story for me.
“When you point a finger at someone else, you have three pointing back at you.”
I am coming to realize that there may be some truth in the above statement most of us would have come across at some point or the other. We dislike in others what we unknowingly dislike in ourselves, and merely project it onto others from our own sub-consciousness. If we can be unbiased or neutral enough to accept this possibility, this understanding can really help us identify what we would like to change about ourselves. Sour grapes could actually be a defense-mechanism at work.
July of 2014 – most of us heard the news about the possibly over-enthusiastic Comcast customer service representative who went overboard in trying to retain a departing customer. Some of us probably even subjected ourselves to the amusing 8-minute long audio recording made public by the caller. (On a side note, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the caller disclaimed to the support rep that the call could be recorded for social media sharing purposes! )
There has been enough discussion on the web around this incident. I thought Comcast’s quick reaction to issue an apology on behalf of the employee was well thought of and rapidly executed, though I felt Comcast could have apologized as an organization rather than on behalf of the employee. May be they did that as well. But then asking the employee to personally say sorry was even taking it further and not warranted in my opinion. At the end of the day, the employee was sober, was trying to do his work even if he did not deploy the right approach, and seemingly had best interests of his company in mind. He was likely also acting the way he did to achieve an output that he felt pressurized enough to achieve.
Comcast then went on to fire the employee. That I think was the most disgusting step they could have taken. By doing this did they address the cause of the problem or just the symptom. Was this employee really a problem employee with other warnings issued to him in the past? If so, then the decision to fire him after such an incident would still be understandable. But if not, then is he the only such employee in Comcast’s customer retention department? What about the manager who is supposed to listen into calls and monitor customer feedback for quality assurance purposes? Finally does one bad call made public is all that it takes to fire an employee? I would have preferred a response where Comcast was willing to invest time and effort into training the employee to ensure such mistakes are not repeated in future. And also introspect at department or organization level whether the performance measurement criteria needs to be redefined.
This HBR article is worth reading; it also has the audio clip embedded.
April of 2014 turned out to be a visa application month for me. First I had to get my mother’s US visa renewed, followed by application for my and Rikti’s OCI Card (Overseas Citizen of India), then my parents Canadian visa and topping it all up with renewing Tarana’s US passport. These visa applications require so much paperwork and documentary evidence, that I wish there was a better way to digitize and automate the whole process. When travel industry has been able to develop sophisticated global systems to efficiently manage thousands of domestic and international flight bookings using GDSs and such, why can’t governments move data about passports, visas, identities and travel histories to a secure cloud? I hopefully predict we are a quarter of a century away from seamless international travel from a visa perspective, when I could log on to a global visa website, select the countries I wish to visit and for what purpose, and get issued the visas electronically.
In terms of today’s standards – since I recently had experience of dealing with consulates of three countries (USA, Canada, India) via their consular websites and/or appointed companies for visa processing – I would rate Canadian visa process 9/10, followed by US at 8/10. India unfortunately and expectedly needs to do a lot to clean up its visa game and I would only rate the experience at 3/10. It’s BLS, the appointed agency, causing most of the confusion and user-unfriendliness but at the end of the day, they have been appointed by the Indian government. What could BLS be an acronym for, by the way?
Amnesia is a disease caused by brain damage or psychological trauma. Essentially, it is loss of memory. It is not easy for me to imagine the life of a person suffering with Amnesia. Does it cause inconvenience? Or does it not matter? How would I feel if I kept forgetting things? And how would I feel if I don’t even remember what it is that I was supposed to remember? That should be less of a problem I would guess, and could even make life simpler.
Then sometimes you come across people who suffer from or rather enjoy selective Amnesia. They can choose what they wish to remember, and what they don’t. It is like a superpower which allows you to display an excellent memory for everything that is convenient for you, and your brain chooses to disregard all inconvenient fragments of reality as virtually non-existent. This skill is usually accompanied by a dose of overconfidence as well.
Have you come across anyone like that?
