Gods Threat!

Had a weird experience yesterday involving an ISKCON salesman (Hare Rama Hare Krishna weirdo/fundamentalist/gods right hand man etc.). The setting (as with most of my experiences & observations) is at Happy, a small restaurant close to my house, at 3.30 PM (for the first time ever in my life i've been to happy in the afternoon) & am reading this book titled White Lotus by Osho. When this procession of Hare Rama Hare Krishna followers makes its way down the road opposite happy, making a racket at 4 PM in the evening, & causing traffic jam just before rush hour. I am not sure but i think a couple of ISKCON salesmen were selling some ISKCON reading materials to the passersby & probably had come into happy for a drink of water, thats when i realised a guy staring at my book. I knew then & there that he'll be making a sales pitch to me but the conversation that followed was amusing:

ISKCON guy: Sir will you take a look at these books about Krishna Consciousness?
Me: No thanks.
ISKCON Guy: (continuing with his pitch & not hearing what i'd said) There this book about science & krishna consciousness.
Me: No thanks, but i've already got a book to read.
ISKCON Guy: What you are reading is trash! (pointing to my Osho Book) You will not gain anything from it.
(pause. This is the time I thought i'd be left alone again, but no)
ISKCON Guy: Do you know who is going to die?
Me: All are going to die eventually, i think.
ISKCON Guy: No, you are going to die, not me , you alone will die, I am amar (eternal) .

And finally he leaves, till then most of the people in the restaurant are stunned with our conversation, someone from the other table who'd half heard the conversation asked whether that guy had threatened to kill me.

All I can make of this conversation is that yes, I was threatened, I was threatened with eternal damnation (probably the way this "disciple" was recruited). I will not say that Osho & his books are good or bad, that is not for me to judge, heck i wouldnt mind reading ISKCON books for that matter , but the point is when i read or want to know about spirituality (or any knowledge for that matter) the first thing that i always do is to keep aside all bias or prejudice & as far as possible keep my mind open to any viewpoints. Knowledge, as far as i can make it, is different from judgements, judgements happen only before or upto the point till "full" knowledge is gained . After you "know" why would you want to judge, since any judgement is immaterial to you at that stage. If he has himself read ISKCON books I wonder what made this guy think that what Osho wrote was different & crappier than what ISKCON publishes?.

I read books coz I just want to know what various people think, thats all. Whether they think right or wrong is not something i am looking for, I am looking for the emotion that the writing evokes, the peacefulness that the authors words & their thoughts evoke. If these guys sell their books in a manner in which vegetables are sold it'll be really difficult for people like me to read such books. To say the least I am off reading any ISKCON stuff.

If i am going to die , theres no point reading about eternal life.

Circus Office

Its really hard to understand what is taught in an MBA programme nowadays. What the security guard understands in our office is hardly understood by any one in our management, if studies are meant to teach you things & not just to decide what pay package you are to get & at what grade are you to be employed, the B-schools arent doing great job of it. The current crisis being alternate saturday offs , which are given in turns to half the staff, so that the office is functioning on all saturdays. This move was meant to make sure that the office does not lose business on saturdays as well as keeping the employees happy.

The first mistake was that the staff stregnth was never measured to see whether half the staff will be able to keep the office functioning on a saturday. Now saturdays have become stressful days for some persons(including me as it means i end up filling up for 3 people & that too across departments, so this work which i generally dont do & am not qualified for, is expected of me every alternate saturday). There goes the employee morale.

The Second Mistake was that, like i've said above, some staff are filling in for off duty employees every fortnight, which means that what has happened in the past 2 weeks they have no clue whatsoever, which also means theat execution of any deal will take more time than average, as the replacement worker has to refer to the past weeks correspondences etc. Late execution means unhappy customers. Which again proves that just keeping the office open 6 days a week means nothing if you are going to make your existing customers unhappy.

There has also been a side effect to this whole episode. Groupism amongst the staff. On one side there are those who want alternate saturdays off & on the other those who dont want saturday offs (or rather they want saturdays off or on to be applicabel to all the staff simultenously). A team in such circumstances cannot develop, which makes the daily functioning across "groups" a challenge now.

Now the last year or so i've been in this employment i have seen alternate saturdays to be off for 3 months, then we'd had 3 months of saturdays working, now we're again planning to have saturdays off. Which goes to prove what a management without a strategy does, it works on trial & error, trying (or hoping) to get it right the next time. When the management thinks that there are some problems which are too trivial to be analysed & then there are only a few problems which are important & which require careful study that is when the mistake occurs. The biggest mistake that i feel any mangement makes is when it tries to analyse & attach importance to the problems. What needs analysis is the future course of action or the solutions.

Keeping alternate saturdays off or on, on the face of it might seem a trivial problem but even without a MBA degree i could point the potential flaws (some have already started to surface). Atleast twice the company has gone through the same mistake. This time i am hoping to make this the last decision i will see taken in the company.