"...VIP movement aahe, thaamba zara!..."

"...VIP movement aahe, thaamba zara!..."

...said the cop ["There is a VIP movement happening, just wait"].

A friend & I were going somewhere in a car. We were stuck in a long traffic jam leading to a signal. After a few min, just when it seemed we would comfortably cross the dreaded junction (the light was green & we just had a couple of cars ahead of us) a traffic cop came and shot his hand in front of the wind shield, signaling us to stop. The lights were still green, so we were obviously not amused after having crawled till that point and yet being stopped.

My friend rolled the window down and asked the cop "Why are you stopping us when the signal is green? Look at the traffic behind us, we've been stuck in this forever!" That's when the cop said what I quoted above. Apparently, some politician was on his way from the airport. So we waited there as we saw the vehicles from airport street being allowed to move out. This continued for the next 2-3 minutes as we kept waiting impatiently. Finally, we saw a set of cars pass through, many sporting flashing beacon lights.

"All for that entitled brat!" remarked my friend, giving them a dirty look. "How are they going to learn about the struggles of the common man stuck in traffic unless they go through the same as well and then work towards improving circumstances!" I concurred. This friend of mine likes visiting famous temples, so referring to one such visit, he said "The other day we were waiting for darshan at a temple and they wouldn't let us in till this one politician and his family were done offering their prayers. It is so disgusting, as if they have a first right to God..." "By the way," I interrupted his rant, "I have seen you take the VIP darshan queue by paying money once. How is that different?" I quipped.

For those who do not know, VIP Darshan is a separate queue where distinguished people or people who can cough up a "fee/donation/monetary offering" to bypass the usual queue for the general public. And since there are many such people who can do that, there is another, albeit shorter queue for such people. "Arree that's just for darshan yaar, to save some time, it hardly costs money!" he justified. "Wah! A separate queue for senior citizens or differently able is understood, but just because you paid money you get quicker access to God?" I asked. He just waved his hand dismissively and that was the end of the discussion.

If in a public set-up, we are using something that gives us an undue advantage over the public using the same set-up, then it is probably us exercising an entitlement without often knowing it. If we frown down on others doing it while we ourselves indulge in such practices, then that's definitely a red light we fail to spot.

"....I dont need this award..."

"...I don't need this award!..."

...he snapped, continuing to work on his desktop. 

Two colleagues, let's call them Jai & Veeru, started off as freshers in a team. Both had to analyse IT modules to resolve reported issues & also code fresh modules from time to time. 

In the first year, both did well in the work assigned to them. This company had a policy whereby each fresher was evaluated at the end of the first year & each was awarded a confirmation rating - A (top 5%), B (next 40%), C (next 50%) or D (last 5%). A typical bell curve GE would be proud of, which, thankfully, has been abolished by many firms since then. Each engineer would then get a hike commensurate with the rating.

This team only had 2 trainees. The project manager (PM) walked into the confirmation meeting with his peers, trying to get both of his team members rated at B. While all the PMs fought fiercely for their team members, the bell curve was sacrosanct. This PM was only able to secure one B. He had to settle for a C for the other one. Jai got a B. There is a funny line in the movie 3 idiots "𝘋𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘭 𝘩𝘰 𝘫𝘢𝘺𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘩 𝘥𝘶𝘬𝘩 𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘢 𝘩𝘢𝘪 … 𝘓𝘦𝘬𝘪𝘯 𝘥𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘢 𝘫𝘢𝘺𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘩 𝘻𝘺𝘢𝘢𝘥𝘢 𝘥𝘶𝘬𝘩 𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘢 𝘩𝘢𝘪" ["You feel bad if a friend fails, but you feel very bad if they come first"]. Though Jai had not secured an A, the fact remained that Veeru had scored a C while Jai, a B. Veeru was upset. It is not known whether Veeru was upset about not getting a B, or because Jai got a higher rating than him. Maybe he'd not be as upset if they both had got a C. 

So Veeru went to the PM to protest against the perceived injustice. The PM tried to explain his dilemma, but nothing would calm the angry young man down. In the subsequent month, awards were announced and Veeru won an award. The business unit leader and other leaders walked down on the floor to felicitate him. Veeru merrily accepted the award, but after everyone had left, he expressed his displeasure. "The award is just a consolation for not being given a rating B" he snapped at a junior who was sitting next to him. 

Till date, Veeru hasn't forgotten about the incident and somewhere in his mind, he holds this against Jai. Did Jai have any control over the rating he or Veeru got? Probably not. Being Veeru's peer, all Jai could see was that he worked hard equally, if not more, but after all, performance could best be judged by the manager and, given the constraint of having to pick one over the other, it was probably a touch and go decision for him as well. It could even be something else. After all, managers and leaders doling out promotions, hikes and ratings are mere mortals and not algorithm driven machines processing factual data.

Promotions/ratings/earnings/perceived progress often eats into the fibre of friendship and camaraderie if not kept in check. If you are a Jai, be mindful of the Veerus around you. If you are a Veeru, Jai ko maaf kardo yaar, uski bhi kya galti hai....

"...why don't you wear track pants for the morning walks? They are very comfortable..."

"...why don't you wear track pants for the morning walks? They are very comfortable..."

...said the younger of the two ladies, while sipping on the coconut water, as the summer sun blazed down upon the beach with all its glory.

I was sitting on a chair at the coconut vendor's cart after the jog at the beach this morning. I signaled at him to indicate that I needed a coconut after 5 min and not right away. A lady, perhaps somewhere in her 40s, was already sitting on one of the chairs with a coconut in her hand. A minute later, a senior lady (could be in her late 60s I guessed) walked up and took the chair next to her. 

Now there's something very fascinating about some ladies. And this is purely based on my observation and not a gender bias (I hope). They can work up a conversation instantly with any other lady on the globe and chat away to glory, having a good time. I have seen my mom do this a lot throughout my life. When I was a kid and we used to take the local train to go anywhere, she'd effortlessly start a conversation with a lady sitting next to her in the ladies compartment. "How can you just start talking to any unknown lady every time in a public place?" I'd often ask her...I never got a concrete answer to that though. 

Coming back to the scene at the beach,  these two ladies struck up a conversation and in no time they discussed about where they stayed (both had their home near the beach) and what their family members did. I had no intention of eavesdropping on their conversation but they were loud enough so there was no way to ignore the talk. I did not have popcorn to enjoy the conversation, but I figured it was time to ask for that coconut now. While I was sipping on some sweet and cool coconut water, I heard the following:

YL (Younger Lady) : Why don't you wear track pants for the morning walks? They are very comfortable.

OL (Older Lady) : I know they are very comfortable, I do wear them at times when we go on vacation.

YL : So why don't you wear them on these morning walks too?

OL : I can't. My jethji (husband's elder brother) stays with us and it wouldn't look good.

YL : Everyone wears such pants these days. What do your husband and son say about this?

OL: I've never discussed it with them. It is a small thing. Why bother. This Indian wear is fine too.

A couple of min later, all three of us bid goodbyes (the ladies atleast did to each other, while I bid them in my mind) as I pondered over what I had just heard.

We've seen several posts, articles, webinars and other content on empowering women around women's day and women's history month. How about making ourselves aware & encourage/empower our sisters/mothers/grandmothers/aunts to at least cater to their basic needs of comfortable dressing?

C̶h̶a̶r̶i̶t̶y̶ Awareness begins at home.

"...inko paani me daalo, tairna seekh jaate hai..."

"...inko paani me daalo, tairna seekh jaate hai..."

...I overheard a TL tell someone, as I passed her desk in Infosys back in 2006. ["you leave them in the water & they learn to swim by themselves"].

She was talking about us, the new crop of software engineers in the team. We were given a complex piece of code to analyze daily, which seemingly was beyond our capabilities. These were issues reported by our onsite IT team based at the client sites in the US.

The first few weeks were nightmarish. I would sit all day on it, yet could not figure out what was wrong. We usually got 2-3 days to find the issue. If we failed to crack the issue, a senior would pick it up, crack it in an hour & send the analysis to the onsite team. 

It was on one such occasion I was analyzing a code & even on day 2, I was clueless. I went to get some coffee [free coffee from the CCD machines felt like royal luxury back then] & on my way I overheard her & told a friend about it. He smiled & said "The code we are given to analyse is usually something that a senior is working on in parallel. The outcome of our effort hardly matters. The seniors do the RCA [Root Cause Analysis] & share it with the onsite team. Whatever we do is just for our learning.''

A couple of days later, I was given another issue to analyse. So, while I was keen to find the root cause, I was no longer under the same pressure, as I knew the onsite would get the RCA from a senior. I was nowhere close to the solution by day end. The next day, I started off with a fresh mind & by 3 pm, I was finally able to find the bug in the code. It was a superb feeling. Now I knew the issue would already have been sorted by a senior, so I did not inform anyone about my finding. Instead, I kept analyzing the code over & over again out of curiosity. While at it, I found an opportunity to optimize a database query (sorry if all this sounds too technical) in the code that could save a few hours in the program execution. So I wrote a query to replace the existing one & sent the RCA as well as my recommendation to the onsite team, knowing it would probably go unread. 

The next day when I logged in, the 5th unread mail from the bottom was an "Appreciation Mail" from onsite. Apparently, the due date for the code I had analysed was a week later so my senior had not yet worked on it. The database query I had optimized had resulted in quicker resolution of claims, so the client was happy & the appreciation mail was for that.

- So often, one has to be put in a difficult, seemingly impossible situation/challenge to fend for themselves, with minimal intervention, in order for one to learn to overcome such situations. 

- One often performs their best when one feels that nothing significant is expected of them, surprising self & others in the process. 

The TL I quoted here was Asmita Lonkar, who was a great senior to have around. As she had rightly predicted, aakhir mein main tairna seekh hi gaya...[Finally I had learnt to swim].

"...is that how you talk to a nice stranger in real life...?"

"...is that how you talk to a nice stranger in real life...?"

...asked my senior, in the code review meeting. 

It was 2006, I was relatively fresh in the role of a software engineer at Infosys. My job was to analyse production code written for a US based insurance company & find the cause of issue reported & then update the code to fix it. The piece of code I was working on that day needed me to add an end user error message informing the user that they had exceeded their insurance limit.

Every coder would know, most of the code one writes is copied & pasted from some other piece of code. So I found a piece that suited my requirements & pasted it, leaving the error message text about exceeding limits as it was - "You have crossed your limit!".

When my senior read it, she wanted me to think about it. "Make every error message polite & informational. The end user should not feel guilty or offended when they read it. Besides, this is you talking to them. The message you code will be read by thousands of people. Would you want to talk to them in such a dry tone which doesn't even help them?" She asked. We then changed it to "Dear <<user name>>, the amount you are trying to enter in the claim field is higher than the limit of $<<value>> as per your policy. Kindly review the same and reach out to us in case of an issue." 

From then on, I was careful about the error message texts. Even today, when I give requirements to our IT partner, I try to give the possible error messages along with the requirements. If not, then it is during user acceptance testing that I love to check all error messages, because error messages are often critical in guiding the end user. Plus, every interaction the end user has with the technology should be pleasant as your code represents your organization's brand.

The reason this story came to my mind is the error messages shown in the image attached. The first one is an empathetic error message seen on LinkedIn which popped up yesterday when I was trying to perform a search while my network switched. Technically, it wasn't LinkedIn 's code at fault here, yet the coder took the ownership & comforted me with a polite error message. The second one is from an insurance portal. The moment I filled out a form & hit submit, this was the error I got. It almost made me feel like I was caught committing a crime! I shut the webpage after the experience. Bad coding had probably cost them a prospective client. 

This is not limited to just error message language, somewhere the UI of a website, the terms used, the tone of the system generated emails/smses tell a deeper story about the brand - thoroughness, eye for detail & empathy towards their clients. Every page of a website goes through multiple reviews that are done not just by the IT folks but the business folks that own the page, and if all of them are indifferent to the end user, then God save the customer once he/she is acquired.

The devil is in the details.

"...but we came before them..."

"...but we came before them..." 

...said the lady, raising her hands in protest. 

Yesterday evening, we were at a clinic. Our token read "9". "3" was already in with the doctor. Just then, a lady walked in & the assistant gave her an assuring look. "3" came out & the lady was sent in next, as "4" to "11" watched, confused. One of them (she was "5") asked the assistant "What just happened? We've been waiting & you send her out of turn?" The assistant just smiled, but "5" was in no mood to let go, so she demanded an explanation. "That lady has a critical issue that requires an urgent surgery, hence sir had asked me to let her in as soon as she came,'' the assistant said. "But our time is important too..." she retorted, but then backed off, half-convinced.

At that moment, a recent graphic I had seen around "Equality" & "Equity" sprang up in my mind. "Equality" would mean each of us should go in based on our turns. But if the doctor's assessment was right, the lady that barged in probably needed the doctor's time on a higher priority than the rest of us. That was "Equity".

But this graphic I had seen also had 2 more parts labelled "Reality" & "Liberation". So I pondered how I could apply those two to the availability of doctors/hospitals.

"Reality" is probably the fact that good doctors/hospitals that charge high fees are only accessible to the financially well off (easily) & the middle class (on occasions they need them badly). They are practically out of reach for people at the bottom of the pyramid.

"Liberation" is probably a situation where everyone has access to every doctor & every hospital irrespective of their paying capacity. But obviously, such a world would only exist in an episode of Black Mirror, if at all.

On the way back home, as I drove down the flyover, I saw a chauffer driven white Mercedes coming from the other end with a doctor's sign on the wind shield. I turned my head sideways to look at the person sitting in the back seat. He turned out to be someone from my old neighborhood. In the 1990s, the grapevine had it that he had got through a good medical college as he was from a backward caste (he got a reserved seat) and his super rich father had paid a handsome donation (the most abused term in colleges) to secure the admission. And then the very next moment, I thought about a hard-working upper caste Brahmin friend from a lower middle class family who had missed an IIM cut-off by a whisker, as he watched reserved category candidates (some of them from rich affluent families) with much lower percentile go past him.

Perhaps equity should not be about caste but about the economically weaker getting a fair share of the pie (and even then, probably not 50% of the pie, leaving other deserving prospects high & dry), I thought, as I parked my car.

The doctor's visit went well. And no, I wasn't thinking about his caste after this whole incident. Erm, well, definitely not for more than 2 seconds, I swear.

"....its Ok, don't worry, we will go from the shortcut..."

"....its Ok, don't worry, we will go from the shortcut..." 

...said mom, to calm me down. This was on one of the days when I was in primary school and used to take the school bus daily. 

It was morning school for me, so getting up and getting ready on time was always a challenge. There were days when the bus driver (let's call him Uncle Chris) would honk & wait for a while if the kid wasn't ready. But then one day, we found out that Uncle Chris was assigned another route and we had a new driver (lets call him Uncle Will) at his place. Uncle Will would just not wait beyond a few seconds and take off if the kid did not arrive in those few seconds. So in one such instance, while mom & I were rushing down the stairs, he left with the bus. I panicked. That's when mom told me we could still catch the bus by taking the small lane opposite our society. The other end of the lane opened up at a road where the bus would reach after a couple of stops. So we ran through the lane and waited at the other end, sweating. The bus arrived a few moments later and I boarded it. Will gave me the look, as if I were a convicted serial killer walking out of the court room.

Slowly, this started happening every few days. Once a week or so, I'd be late and we'd run through the lane to catch the bus. In the process, I'd sometimes trip or bang my knee against the rods ( the narrow lane had rods in between so that vehicles would not pass through) while we rushed to reach the other end. This continued for a few weeks. Eventually, many parents complained about Will's conduct and the authorities got Chris back. I never had to use that lane again that year.

- None of Uncle Chris or Uncle Will were probably wrong. Perhaps both prioritized a separate set of values. Uncle Chris probably was more empathetic and Uncle Will was more of a disciplinarian.

- Its great to discover a shortcut that helps us sometimes. However, if we start banking on the shortcut too often, knowing about its availability, we might need to be prepared for a sweaty experience & the possibilities of tripping/getting bruised while using it.

The availability of a shortcut is better than not having one. Falling into the trap of getting addicted to some of these shortcuts, however, is what we will struggle with for all of our lives, probably.