Picture courtsey: http://i.indiafm.com/

Enough is already blogged about “ChakDe India” and how it is a copycat of one of the classical movies by Disney ("Miracle") and Miracle_(film)

This post therefore, certainly won’t be another one of the kind to crib about how Bollywood is incompetent to produce on its own such a magical movie. Every time I watched the Disney Movie “Miracle”, I always thought such a movie, if portrayed for the audience in India, could make a lasting impact. The outstanding factor about “Miracle” movie theme is the perfect blend of “patriotism”, “spirit of the game” and “team work”. Of course, most of the movies made out of even one of these themes enjoyed huge success in the movie industry. To “ChakDe” hence, “failure was not an option”.

The core theme that the movie attempts to showcase is the art of “Team building”. Being part of a team and at several instances, being responsible for building the team, might have given you insights to closely watch how a team that can perform at its optimum is formed or on the contrary, one that is destined for obvious failure is built. There are contrasting differences across both the scenarios.

A team is formed to achieve a task that cannot be achieved by an individual alone. Therefore, the first and the obvious objective why a team is formed for is to achieve a goal that is clearly defined. Team starts to exist when the goal is established and cease to exist when the goal is achieved (unless of course, team takes up a new goal and continue but the context becomes different).

In Miracle, Kurt Russel (actor and coach) has got his cards right in setting the objectives at the inception of the team itself. His one and only objective is to have the US team beat the Soviets to win the championship. Soviets were the reigning champions and therefore, setting the objective to beat the best of the lot makes the job fairly easy. At every instance of team sessions, coach shares this clear objective with the team.

“ChakDe” has failed in this context miserably. Coach has the deepest desire to convert his “Silver” medal to a “Gold” but this is a very personal ambition. It would have been fair enough, if this personal ambition (nothing wrong with the ambition though) was translated to the team objective of winning the world-cup. In the movie, this objective never reached the ears of the Indian team; but the script writer was kind enough to take the team through the victory lane in each of the team’s encounters.

The amazing “Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing” theory of team building process is sketched to a good effect in both the movies. Of course the reality is not always closer to the theory, so Bruce Tuckman’s storming is continued until the climax of the movie in “ChakDe”. Only at the last minutes of their final encounter with Australia, the “forwards” of Indian team comes to realize the importance of team over the individual accolades waiting for them. “Miracle”, however, is following the theory to the closest though. The stages of team formation are pictured closer to perfection as suggested by the theory.

Fortunately, “ChakDe’ is a movie, and hence had the option to bring in a bunch of eve-teasers at the right place and at the right time for the individuals in the team to come together and defeat the opponents. In real life, many coaches are not lucky enough to survive that moment of truth when he / she decide to resign and at that right moment, the team realizes the mistakes and welcomes their coach back.

Many times, 80% of the credit for an optimally performing team should go to the person responsible for the team. The alias for this responsible person could range from a coach or a mentor to a boss, manager or a CXO (let us use the term coach here since the term fits the context of the movie). Both these movies have got it right. But how far?

In real practice, a successful coach is one who finds and eliminates factors or constraints that restrain the team from performing at the optimum level. The constraints could be at the individual level or the way individuals interact with each other when the herd commences to be termed as a “team”. The burning question is “Should Coach help to see through the problems in the personal lives of team members”.

Kurt Russel, in many occasions seems to embrace the fact of going that extra mile to understand in detail the personal life of some of the team members. “ChakDe” director has evaded Shah Rukh Khan from most of these troubles and leaves it to the individual team players to sort out problems in their personal lives. I am not sure how to judge these coaches in this regard; but honestly, I tend to back “Miracle” coach in offering a pat on the back for his team at crucial junctures.

As a movie, “ChakDe India” fares well. It is up to the script writer and director to make the movies to what they feel is right for the audience. However, there is a section of the society that has failed to perceive the movie in the right manner. It is none other than some of the Management Schools that has decided to adopt “ChakDe” to their syllabus. As a classical case for Team Building, I would certainly suggest these esteemed institutes to look at “Miracle” as the alternative. To me “ChakDe India” is a movie and “Miracle” fits the best for a management study curriculum.

With the morning sun, I set off to explore Munich downtown. By this time, I had a fair idea of the S-bahn and Subway train services. The day pass took me to “Sendlinger Tor” on the train going to Feld-moching from Messestadt-Ost. “Sendlinger Tor” is an important station that takes you to the heart of the downtown while coming from “Am Moosfeld”. All the shops on either side of the road were closed on Sunday. These are certain areas where I thought Germany is probably closer to India than US. Especially like Keralalites, Germans preferred to stay at home even if that means loss of decent number of customers. Something else that might irritate you would be the people who keeps staring at you for no real reason. This was never the case in US but much like that in India. I could immediately place German culture somewhere in middle between that of US and India.

Munich city was beautiful. Especially the way buildings were painted. They retained the elegance of the past still with a modern outlook. Mostly, the buildings were painted in mild colors like ivory or bright white with ebony black linings. These monuments showcase the architectural skills and craftsmanship of Germans.

Unlike Americans, Germans do not use powerful air-conditioning, thanks to the decent year-round weather. To survive the winter snow, the buildings had protective double-walls with vacuum in between. Also, most of the rooms had heating systems. There were no sky-scrappers in the city; to uphold the dignity of the Central Church, The building rules of the city banned by law of construction that exceeds the height of the church.

The roads in the city and suburbs seemed to be quite narrow. With the excellent public transportation system, number of private vehicles remained substantially low. Of the available private vehicles, BMW, and Audi seemed to have the major share with Volkswagon, Renault and Mercedes brands not way behind. Many of the cars had manual gear system like in India (unlike in US, where more than 95% have automatic transmission). Contrary to the domination of Honda or Toyota across the world, Japanese cars had a very low profile in the region. Whereas I could hardly see any of the City, Civic or Corolla or even Accord or Lexus for that matter, I noticed a better presence of Suzuki with the Swift, Baleno and even WagonR parked on the streets. The traffic flowed very smoothly. Parking was mostly tricky; at certain places, vehicles were parked with front wheels well over the curb. The lanes and even whole of the road width in California would roughly be more than double of what you could find in Germany.

The city seemed to embrace art and music with a lot of passion. There were at least Twenty-Four different museums in the city with most of them showcasing the paintings or sculptures by various artists. Theatrical performance like Opera and live music bands were integral part of the city life. The Bavarian food is something that you will pay special attention to. The servings had a lot of quantity that would easily overwhelm any one from the sub-continent. Much of the main course would be dominated by red meat with most of the restaurants serving at least one variety of chicken, Turkey or Fish.

Fashion was another thing that Bavarians followed quite close to the heart, probably with the influence from their historically-hostile neighbor, the French. Across the city, number of designer wear outlets clearly dominated the show. At the same time, the degree of greenery in Munich could easily compete with any other city in the world. Bavaria would remain in my memory for a lot more years to come!

Second weekend of my stay in Germany came with a pleasant surprise. It was a long weekend on account of Pentecost (believed to be the 50th day after Easter). Bobby called me up inviting me to Frankfurt. At the same time, I got a mail from Rick by surprise. Rick was coming driving down from Zurich to Dresden. Since Munich was on the way, he was quite happy to come down and meet me. He was driving on the Autobahn, the only free way probably in the world with no blanket speed limit. You could drive as fast as you can with certain exceptions of patches with Speed Limit.

Rick ringed the door bell exactly at 10:00PM on Friday night when I had almost slipped to slumber. He seemed to be a happy and excited and looked smart and lively. After his stint in India and after spending couple of months in Dresden, he was finally being employed at a decent company in Zurich. We went down to the Hotel Restaurant and talked a lot over dinner. At 11:45 PM, we were the only two in the restaurant and had to leave, since we already overstayed for 45 minutes beyond the closure hours.

We continued the talk about Bavarian food, Zurich’s cross-cultural society, Rick’s feelings about his stay in India, Austrian Tourism and Alps, SimManager and MSC, Rick’s new job, Turks in Frankfurt and many more things. It was about 2:30 AM and was time for Rick to start driving again back to Dresden. We said “Tchuz” and hoped to meet again sometime somewhere in this small planet. Rick restarted his rental car and GPS and set off to Dresden.

Got up quite late at around 9:30AM on Saturday and had to quickly sort out my plans for the day. Frankfurt did not seem to be an option any longer. By the time I reached the breakfast floor at the Hotel, it was closed. The lady at the reception said they close by 10. I took a day pass for the train and have her mark the Concentration Camp Memorial Site station. The station was outside the MVV inner ring and I had to take an extra ticket. At Hauptbahnolf (Central Station), while waiting for the second train, I called up Bobby and informed him of the change of plans.

At around 12:30, train reached Dachau station. I had a very bad feeling for the place I was about to go. This was not a place to just enjoy with fun and laughter. It is memorial that reminds humanity of the brutal cruelty by a section of the society on free and educated humankind. From Dachau, for the first time in Munich I got a chance to ride a public transport bus to reach the Memorial site.

Dachau memorial site gripped a sorrowful silence. People were just moving round without much chatter. Memorial site offer two types of tours to the visitors. One is a guided tour by a voluntary organization and the other an audio-guided tour. To learn about the history in a little detail, I opted for the guided tour. Three words welcome you at the entrance or the gate of the Dachau Concentration camp; it reads “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” which translates to “Freedom through Work”.

Dachau was the first concentration camp set up by SS army of Hitler and the only one that was left without any damage after the liberation day in 1945 when Hitler and SS Army was defeated by US and its allies. Other than concentration camps, SS Army formed “extermination camp” located mainly in Poland due to its geographical position at the middle of Europe. Extermination camps, as the name reveals massacred thousands or millions for various reasons known only to SS Army.

Concentraion camps were a result of the extreme patriotism promoted by a group of cruel individuals. They believed that the only way to salvage pride for Germany is by promoting a strong sense of national pride and brutally suppressing even the slightest of opposition. There was no longer freedom of the press; the fundamental human rights were denied for the common man; SS army was quite successful in its initial forming days to spread the terror across breadth and width of the country.

10 years before the SS army was formed, through his book “Mein Kamph”, Hitler openly declared his hostility towards Jews. To Hitler and SS army, anyone who can not work to build arms and ammunitions or who can not be part of the army and fight, were just burden to the nation. Through various “extermination camps” and concentration camps, SS army successfully carried out their mission of mass murder of women, children and weak or sicker population of the society.

Dachau is a reminder to humanity of the state of things that can happen to the world with even a minor section of the society adapting to an extreme and hostile attitude towards the rest of the world. In the modern days, SS army can manifest itself in the form of Al Queda or Bush Administration or Saddam’s regime or LTTE or Parvez Musharaf. It is the need of the hour to identify these uprisings and combat them in a timely fashion. (To be continued...)

My travel to Munich was eventful. With a life-changing moment in week 1 and a life risking event in week 2, I woke up to the rays of this fresh and cool morning sun of Austrian capital city Vienna. The Austrian airliner from Vienna to Munich took less than an hour flying over the lush green European countryside. Munich airport sounded almost deserted on an early Saturday morning. I landed with lot of suspicion in mind; first of course was the immigration formalities. The lady at the information desk told me that it was already over at the Vienna International Airport (no wonder why that old lady at Vienna Airport stared at me for sometime before giving me the passport back..she should have told me it was the European immigration counter and I would have given her some more respect I guess)

The problems were not over yet; I was not quite sure about my hotel reservation at Munich. First thing; call up the destined hotel to find out if I have a reservation for me. Oh, but how do I make the call without any Euro coins. Yet another information desk came to the rescue. This gentleman was kind enough to give me the subway map of Munich. The lady at the Hotel, Verena talked good English and confirmed that I indeed have a confirmed reservation. Thanks to Horst and Munich MSC Reception.

She asked me to take a train from Munich Airport to Englschalking station and from there; someone will pick me up. Buying a ticket was easier. Only thing you need to do is to stamp the ticket at the subway entrance and the ticket becomes valid for whatever duration you have purchased it.

Station names first appeared to be confusing. To make things worse, there are two directions to which the trains were departing. Without thinking much, I got into the first train that came by. Once the train started moving, my mind started to work better. There was an announcement in German and I soon realized that they were announcing the name of the next stop (btw, “Halt” in German means “Stop”). Now I re-opened my Map and found that I was in trouble. In fact, I was traveling on a totally wrong direction. Not much time to rethink; immediately, got down at the next station.

This incident gave me much more insight about German Subway system. They have the destination station tag in front of each train. And, the map is color coded for easier understanding of each type of trains. Before long, the next train came in and I got in. This time, it took me safely to a country-side railway station. The trouble was not over yet.

I got down and started searching for a public telephone to call up the Hotel folks to come pick me up. And the fortune sometimes does not favor a traveler; a young guy told me there was a street where I might find one public phone. I dragged my 20Kg bag and yet another 10kg laptop (Gosh! they should rename Dell Precision series a Desktop rather. It really is heavy!). Finally, after 20 minutes of dragging the luggage on a German village, I found a T-mobile public Telephone booth. The lady at the Hotel said she will come by in 5 minutes and to watch for a white colored car that has Am Moosfeld written on it. I waited and waited, minutes changed to hours and still there was no sign of Mooseld!

I called up the Hotel again. The lady said, she sent someone who came by to the station, found nobody and returned back. I was stunned. “I asked you to come to the Post office and not at the station, right??”. Then she was like, “but there is no Post Office in Englschalking. For God sake lady, I was standing right in front of this post office. So, I started to spell the name of the street which of course was in German. I could hear the lady laugh at the other end hearing how I was struggling to spell out and pronounce the name of this stupid street. Okay, enough is enough, I asked the lady to sent someone again to the back to the station. I had yet another long walk left back to the station.

Here I was, walking back or rather dragging back the 30+Kg luggage to this little known Englschalking station. Adventure got over finally; as a messenger of God, appeared the white SUV with Hotel Am Moosfeld written all over it.

Verena apologized for all the fault; but, I knew it was not quite my day. She had arranged a nice little room for me with a kitchen and a mini-bar. There were so many varieties of alcohols n bottles of different sizes. I took a shower and decided to head for lunch. The incidents in the morning had made me physically tired. Also, I was very sleepy with the late night flight taking away much of my sleep.

The fun continued; the Hotel restaurant was closed by the time I reached there. Verena was no longer at work, the new fat lady told me to take a 15 minutes walk to the other direction so that I can find a Bavarian restaurant. Somehow, I managed to drag my tired legs to further four-five blocks more. I headed to the first restaurant which was a mom-and-pop shop. They were done with the day’s work and cleaning up when I rushed in. So, they told me something in German which I think meant there is no lunch for you today. I went over to the next nice looking pizza restaurant. I was in double mind to enter into yet another Pizza adventure with what happened a week back clearly in memory. The well dressed gentleman ended my confusion telling me that they were closed for the day already.

Those were the only other restaurants in the nearby area. I remembered my Navodaya days for a moment. The days when I had to skip my breakfast when they serve Kanzhi (which is made by adding water to last night’s leftover rice) and there was nothing else around to eat. The countries change, your profile changes but a human can be rendered helpless regardless.

Across the street, there was a chain food store called “Plus”. I desperately went inside and found they had at least some fruits that I can buy. I took some bananas, grapes, a big bottle of sprite, a can of milk, half-dozen eggs which looked brown in shell color (these were the only things I could figure out buy its appearance and what was written on the envelope; everything else was in German).

Back home, ate whatever I could and slept for a long time. Evening, got up little energized and went for a stroll again, this time around the MSC Office direction. Took some pictures of MSC office and got back to the Hotel Restaurant early not to miss the dinner timings.

Oh, I liked the vegetable soup they served. But the main course Turkey in some stupid sauce was disgusting. Anyway, I called it a day with the FA cup highlights of Chelsea winning over ManU, of course with German commentary!!!

...and finally I set off to my second outing in Pune..in last 7 months could manage only the second one..that is fairly bad turnaround per my initial plans...there were fair reasons to the wide gap, mainly attributed to tasking project and of course, no good company...so, if last time it was HariHareshwar and surroundings; the trip being ridiculousely tiring, this time it was a much relaxing hill station...Mahabaleshwar and its surroundings including the one shown in picture..Panchgani...more than the wikipedia fact that it is the second largest plateaeu in Asia, what caught my attention here was something completely different...

The moment I grabbed my camera and ran down to the edge of the plateau, the first thing that came to my mind; was my first view of Grand Canyon...Panchgani view of the world has boundaries...whereas, Grand Canyon has the horizon being its' visual limit...even the slightest similarities ends there...

Grand Canyon is preserved as a National Park by US Govt. The entrance fee charged is made to the full use of the visitors and for keeping the serenity of the place intact for the generations to come...absolutely, no commercialization is allowed...visitors gets decent basic facilities and free ride through this enormous park on echo-friendly vehicles...the dangerous points are well protected...important vista points and landmark spots have detailed descriptions of the history and related scientific therories...

Although, Mahabaleshwar corporation charges the vehicle entry fee, they spare no effort to help the visitors in any way whatsoever...warning: plan your trip very carefully in summer; the days are really hot and there is almost no hiding place; the one and only natural cave is commercialized as a restaurant..for the worst part, they charge you Rs.10/- for photography inside the cave...just think about this; a private person who has absolutely no business here demands money for taking pictures of the nature..pure irony!

Now, have a look at the picutre again...it was one of those poor horse which had to carry me and my four friends..and of course the driver too...the only option to explore the plateau (of course, other than taking a walk, which is almost impossible in summer noon) is to hire a "Goda Gadi"... people are (of course, including me then) mostly merciless to these animals..they want their vehicle to run like that of Rani Lakshmibhai or Shivaji Maharaj...com'mon, give them a break; those legends did not have any other echo-firendly, fuel-efficient hybrid-cars in those days...now, when we claim our culture has grown leaps and bounds, why go back to bother these innocent animals...

Growing demand drives more exploitation and the sad story of these animals just continue on an uphill trend much beyond what the size or stature of this plateau itself is...

But for an optimist like me, there is always a bright side of the story...and at Mahabaleshwar, it was the stunning Maprao...we really enjoyed the evening at Maprao which had a Strawberry festivel on offer during the season...and what is more is that you get to eat and take back Straberries for free...also you get to taste and buy a whole lot varieties of fruit syrups...I especially liked the keysar flavor...and they sell decent icecreams too...

At other view points, we went on an eating frenzy with mulberries (cranberries), corn, strawberries and many other fruits (can not recall the names now)...and then, the water oozing out of the statue at the panchganga temple was ice cold even in the hot sun...and I really felt the godly vibrations at the sanctum sanctoram of Mahabaleshwar temple which is kept continually serene by a natural spring..

On the way back, I felt, Mahabaleswar should rather be named after the strawberries they produce...to me, it is rather a "Strawbereshwar"..:-)

Harshad Oak's this little article was quite thought-provoking. Beside highlighting the important point regarding over-hours slogg, a major point that got my attention and kept me thinking over the dinner and drive back home was his statements about India's "consumeristic" behaviour with regards to the Open-source usage.

Right from the days Indian media begin to spell "computer" and "software" correctly, Indian govt started to talk in terms of "open-surce software". This statement may hurt someone, but to me it seemed like using those abusive words in a language first even before you learn a new language (like my friend who only learned the word "patti" (meaning Dog) in Malayalam when he started learning the language ..and as you would have already guessed, used it first against his teacher...yeah me !). At first, it sounds like govt thinks and talks like the computer "geeks" do, but on contrary, as Terry Prachett rightly puts it, they only looks at free software as a way to save on hefty licensing fees (and that is probably the exact same reason they hate Microsoft).

I will write yet another post about my thoughts on what govt, educational institutions and software firms in India can do salvage some pride in this context.

Apart from all that, what is really disturbing is the "Consumerism" behaviour. Before I could crib about it, I did an introspection on myself. Even if you leave out the real-techy stuff like contribution towards "open-source", there are much simpler areas where we can make a small difference, like answering a beginers query in a tech forum. That counts as a contrinution to the internet too. I realized that I had googled for solutions starting from trivial API method lookup to even looking for specialized solutions on my own problem domain. More oftern than not, I was fortunate to hit exact answers or atleast the pointers to the right direction of thinking to solve these problems. Now, looking again at the way I contributed back...not much surprise...it would sum upto a max of 0.000000x% of my consumeristic behaviour.

On this one time, I was crazy about contributing back (may be I wanted to have my name shown up on the search engines or to boast to my friends about this heroism) and had spent several hours answering questions posted on experts-exchange forum. But, then that was it. I would have helped my friends solve some of their problems too on some instances in the office, but never bothered to document them either for anybody's good. On most of those days, I was working for this corporate who could afford to buy commercial software. Back then, I never had any real intimacy with the so called "open-source" community except that I had a notion about them as "geeks" (and had a good deal of respect for my friends who talked like "real programmers" ...the funniest part about this real programmer story is of them wearing hiking boots to work thinking...just in case a mountain pops-up in their workstation...they can be ready to give a go...lol..).

With my present company being into product development and with its tech-savvy work culture, they rely too much on the open-source softwares. Initially I thought these folks are just pretending to be like real programmers and felt little sad about them of not having the luxury to buy commercial software bundles and blame the vendors for any fault. But, gradually and very convincingly, my perception changed dramatically. I could see the benefits of open-source, everytime a problem surfaced and we wanted to customize it for our own needs. It was very clear that product companies and service companies operate on completely different tech awareness levels.

My recent craziness for quite some time has been blogging (of course during non-working hours ... yeah, non-earthly timings as you can see the timestamps on some of the posts). During the working hrs, the things I most love to do these days is to logon to our development community portal - wiki and jot down whatever I found out on that day. My friend U and folks from Munich are quite active in putting their contributions onto wiki as well. At the end of the day, it gives you a sense of being part of the community that contributes something back. Thanks to wiki, although the payack is not to the open world, atleast, it takes away some part of that guilty feeling...you know what I mean !

Last time I wrote about things that make you smile. This week I had several incidents that make you mad for no real reason of yours. I have seen it in one of the episodes of Apprentice (yeah, the Donald Trump Show) and “Kannadi” (an Asianet program) but in two different contexts. Both of them were cases of isolation of one individual or family by the team or the society. In “Apprentice” the guy finally ended up being the first to be fired by Trump. In Asianet, this family happened to be left in a state of dire distress by the society just for the reason that they were fortunate to be richer than the neighborhood community.

You probably have experienced this at least once in your life. Or if you are really sincere, may be in more than one occasion. Those are the moments when the teams you work with, or the friends you live with ditch you and keep you on spot, bombard you with the most disgusting arguments. The moments when you feel completely rejected and isolated. You feel so much for your stand that you know with all the might in the world that you are right in this context. Why on earth does this bunch of fellows cannot figure out what you are trying to convey? Is it that I am not communicating properly or it is just that these fellows are the dumbest idiots who have ever inhibited planet earth?

The situation could get quite subtle you might even feel sorry for the position some of these folks are holding. Just the kind of moments when you fell that the whole world is against you and God alone can help you come out victorious, winning over the opponents. It is true that life is not fair to some of the unfortunate folks around; somebody who is short, or dark or fatty or clumsy. The world blindly looks at their external appearance and completely ignores their capabilities and skills. The “equal opportunity employer” turns out to be just a fad for the fame.

Being a regular visitor of Kathy Sierra's "Creating Passionate Users" blog, I was particularly amused by this wonderful post that reminded me of this incident and made me smile.

Have a look at this little little animal posing for us with a cute smile all over its face.