Chitralekha BSE seminar - Amit Trivedi

Chitralekha and BSE Investor Protection Fund organised an investor seminar at five locations: Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot and Mumbai.

Here is the link to my presentation:

Chitralekha BSE seminar - Amit Trivedi

Skill or discipline – part 2

Skill or discipline – part 2

“Bhupathi and Bopanna axed from Davis Cup” – we wrote a blog starting with the above line. The story is yet fresh and another one breaks out. This one is very similar in spirit, but involving a winner. While Bhupathi and Bopanna carried the nation’s hopes and could not get us a medal, most of us had not heard of Unmukt Chand, the captain of the U-19 world cup winning Indian team. In fact, not many were following the U-19 world cup tournament till our boys reached the semi-finals. The space allotted by media to these cricketers before the world cup paled in comparison to the space allotted to the great Tennis tamasha played off court.

Now suddenly, Unmukt is in news for wrong reasons. He was not allowed to appear for his examination since his attendance was less than what is allowed for sportspersons – 33.33%. Well, for cricketing reasons, Unmukt could not (in fact, did not) attend even 1/3^rd of the classes.

Now the matter has been taken up very seriously and even the Union HRD Minister has jumped to help the young lad. Are we getting our priorities wrong?

While nobody can deny the feat achieved by this guy. His knock in the final was worth more than Dhoni’s 97 in ICC World Cup final in 2011. Unmukt single-handedly played an inning of his life. If we look at India’s victory against Sri Lanka in WC-2011 final, we had a collapse – both Sehwag and Tendulkar got out very early. Gambhir and Kohli’s partnership set a foundation for a late charge by Dhoni. In the junior world cup finals too, India lost two quick wickets. Then, with the help of Baba Aparajith, Unmukt set the foundation and after that in the company of Smit Patel, he charged like Dhoni.

Well, we can write in Chand’s praises, for what he did was an exhibition of focus, determination, execution of a plan … In the end, he lifted the trophy.

But, what has this to do with his studies? All these happened towards the fag end of his academic year. What was he doing for the rest of the year? Well, may be he was preparing hard for the World Cup and his efforts paid off. In that case, he should be conferred Bachelors of Cricket (Honors), but in order to get any other educational qualification, he must study that particular subject.

Allowing him to skip classes in one subject because he is very good at another is not the right thing to do. By the way, the sportspersons are already given a concession – the required attendance for them is only 33.33%.

What needs to be done

Mr. Sibal and other wise men should not press the DU much for allowing Chand to write the exams for any other subjects. Instead, there is a need to introduce courses that add the subject of sports in the curriculum. That will be a great service the sports. Also, there is need to ensure that after studying such courses there are enough employment opportunities to the sportspersons. Sports in our country does not get it’s due since the life of a sportsperson ends by 35 or 40 and then one wonders what to do. The jobs available currently are not glamorous at all. Parents are not comfortable (although the trend is changing) taking the risks of allowing their kids to build career in sports.

A certain Unmukt Chand must finish studying Engineering, Science, Commerce, Arts, Medicine, Architecture, etc. in order to survive after he is no longer able to play cricket – that is the problem that the HRD Minister should try solving. Without that India will not be able to produce world-class players in large numbers.

The other thing the HRD Minister needs to do is to enforce the rules that someone has already been framed. It is important to have sensible rules, but it is equally sensible to follow the rules that exist. Exceptions and discretionary powers lead to corruption. In case a rule is found to be incorrect, the rule may be revised, but not following an existing rule does not make any sense.

Third need is to review the overall system of education. We focus too much on marks in the exam and not so much in knowledge. I have met many friends who want to recruit freshers in their organisations. There are so many fresh graduates, who look for jobs. This gap will continue to exist as long as the employers do not find the fresh graduates employable. Employability and examination marks have no link, it seems. The education system seems to be looking for ways to fail a student. A regular evaluation, already adopted by few schools and colleges, allows the teachers to find out areas where the student is weak and where she is strong. This gives the educational institution an opportunity to work on both the strength and weakness of th student.

We will have a large number of kids in the employment age due to the demographic profile of the country. Ensuring they are employable is a huge responsibility.

These are some areas in which work needs to be done. The future of India is bright.

Skill or discipline?

“Bhupathi and Bopanna axed from Davis Cup” – read a newspaper story’s headline. The story ended with the following paragraph:

The national body left out veteran Bhupathi and big serving Bopanna from the squad to send out a message that any kind of indiscipline will not be tolerated.

What indiscipline is the reporter referring to? Is it the pre-Olympic Games controversy? If that is so, isn’t the AITA acting a little too late?

Is Davis Cup the time to penalize for what happened before the Olympics? The question is important considering the fact that the same “indiscipline” was accommodated for the Olympics medal hope. The AITA bent backwards to do anything for the players.

The current stance does not seem to be a penalty for the indiscipline, but more of a punishment for the disastrous performance at the Games.

And that brings an important question. Between indiscipline and underperformance, what is more acceptable? Sports, or for that matter any individual skill-based competitive activity, has many examples where just for the superior skills, indiscipline is tolerated. People have turned a blind eye.

In the desire to win, very often, the indiscipline is tolerated. However, let us look at the impact it makes on minds of young children. The winners are looked up to as role models. Kids, not able to differentiate between the efforts and skills required to reach the top and the indiscipline or arrogance, assume that such attitude is necessary and socially acceptable to be leaders in various fields.

Those, who are successful in their respective fields, have a greater responsibility to really be and act like role models. Else, the society may be full of brash, arrogant, inconsiderate winners.

Mutual fund and insurance are two different things

Ajay Devgn, in Bol Bachchan, keeps speaking funny English. In one such line, he said something that set me thinking. It is a reflection of poor levels of financial literacy in our country. While talking about "honesty", he said, "Honesty is the best mutual policy." Many would have ignored it, but being what I am, I could not. It hit me very hard.
What he tried to do was to combine the two products "mutual fund" and "insurance policy" to come up with "mutual policy".
Incidentally, I have come across many, who cannot make out the difference between the two - IRDA may think otherwise. It also means that people are sold ULIPs in the name of mutual funds, even today. Mutual fund's reputation got negatively affected thanks in part to the insurance industry's mis-selling.
A mutual fund is an investment vehicle, where instead of managing money ourselves, we trust the same with a fund manager. The fund manager is a professional, who spends full time managing our money. he is also supposed to be more qualified and skilled in this activity than most of us.
An insurance product, on the other hand, protects us (or our surviving family members) financially in case of an unforeseen situation, called risk in insurance language.
However, most of the products sold by the insurance industry are of a hybrid nature, combining investment along with insurance. Most of us have a poor understanding of the whole concept and we want some part of our money back from the insurance company in case we survive through the term.
Insurance company and the agent (or a company or a bank acting as a sales agent of the insurance company) love this fact. They make more money for the same risk cover that the insurance company has to provide us when we buy an investment-linked insurance policy as against a pure term insurance. A pure term insurance pays our family members (the nominees) in case of death of the policy holder during the term of the policy. If the policy holder survives through the term, the insurance company has to pay nothing. However, in case of all the investment linked insurance policies, there is some survival benefit.
We love this survival benefit, as if it is some sort of a benefit. If someone puts the numbers on paper and does the calculations, it is obvious that these investment linked insurance products are not beneficial  for the policy holder.
Investment linked insurance products are all those products other than pure term plan. All these products return some money when the policy matures. These policies come in various avtars - ULIP, endowment plan, money-back plan, children's plan, whole life plan, etc.
If you seriously want insurance cover, go for the term insurance ONLY. Else, whilc "Bol Bachchan" may be a laughter riot, insurance is no laughing matter.

Adarsh Housing Society brings out issues about “adarsh leadership”

If you are following Adarsh Housing Society case, you must be aware of the “passing-the-buck” game being played by the ex-CMs of Maharashtra. Three of them have chose to pass the blame onto someone else, the most popular targets being the bureaucrats.

Let us stay away from the controversy of the case and not judge whether the politicians made mistakes or the bureaucrats. These matters are not for us to judge. We will only look at how some people have behaved.

Well, the leaders exhibit certain behavioral traits that their followers try to copy. That is the normal leader-follower relationship. Leader leads – followers follow. While we started with the discussion of Adarsh Housing Society, the discussion can be applied to most situations in the present context.

The moment the guns were trained on them the politicians have chosen to shift the blame to the Government Officials. How often have you seen the politicians showering praises on the officers? What we have normally observed is that the politicians are very quick to claim the credit and equally quick to pass the blame. This is not inspired leadership. One has often seen similar situations in the corporate world, too. When a fraud happens, top management is often quick to sack a junior employee and then claiming that everything is under control, only to wake up once again to face a similar fraud.

A real leader is one who stands up and takes the brickbats while leaving the bouquets for his team. It is this state of leadership that is India’s biggest problem.

Save paper, save tiger

We live in a hybrid times. We have fusion music, fusion dance, fusion food. Even the philosophy goes fusion now. We had two movements "Save paper" and "Save tiger". We combined the two and are busy in "Saving paper tigers".

Thoughts on communication

A lot has been said about the importance of communication in our life – be it personal or family life, social life or work life. I have worked in fields – sales & marketing and training – where communication is extremely important. Here is an attempt to pen down some of my thoughts on communication.

Whenever we communicate with someone, there are two parts of the message: the content and the emotion – which is nothing but the vehicle to carry the contents of the message.

Most often, we give so much importance to the vehicle that the content becomes secondary. The listener has to learn how to separate the content from the emotions to get the true meaning. Emotion is not so important, focus on the contents. Having separated content from the emotion, pass the content through your own filters – to ensure what comes in is right and appropriate. Be just and open while filtering.

I have come across many situations when the boss has distanced himself away from the colleagues only because one has not taken due care while communicating.

I met one of my friends some time back. He was very upset when we met. While we started to chat, he continued to drift away from the conversation. I asked him what was going on. Incidentally, he was just out of a feedback session with his boss. In the session, his boss had used very offensive language while giving the feedback. When he repeated the actual words spoken, I was quite shocked since I knew the boss also well. Knowing the boss, I had an idea that the feedback may not be completely wrong, but still the language used was so offensive that my friend was not ready to get the true feedback and kept on worrying about the actual words used.

I told my friend not to worry a lot about what was actually said and asked him to concentrate on the incident, which caused the boss to give this kind of feedback. We went over the incident – there were two incidents, in fact – and realized that in one case, while my friend had been a bit careless, the second was a case of misunderstanding between the two. Having probed deeper into the two incidents, the things were now very clear to my friend. The next day, he went to his boss – apologized for his carelessness in the first instance and clarified the misunderstanding in the second.

This made a lot of sense to the boss and he appreciated the fact that my friend took the initiative and looked at the feedback session in quite an objective manner. He also apologized for his use of wrong words.

This was a simple case of separating the content from emotions. The moment one does that, the mind becomes a lot clearer. Issues come out on the surface and one can then address those. This not only helps solve the issues, it also builds better relationships.

The other side of the above story is when you want to convey a message. The vehicle better be strong and powerful enough to imprint the message. In order to convey a message properly various emotions – humor, anger, concern, fear, etc. – may need to be mixed with one’s words. At the same time, the content and the feelings need to be aligned properly – if one wishes to thank someone and send the words “thank you” through the vehicle of boredom – how will the listener take it? There is no genuineness.

This sounds like a contradiction – you need to separate the content from the emotions while listening but you need to mix the two while sending out a message. And it is not like what happens in electronic communication when the transmitter mixes two frequencies for better transmission and the receiver unit separates the two signals on receipt. That happens for better transmission of the signals. In case of the communication we are referring to – the inter-personal communication – we need to behave as I have suggested since we are dealing with humans and generally a normal human being is an emotional person.

Now, someone might feel that I am suggesting you to be artificial and use the feelings just to get your work done even if you may not be feeling that way. Let me assure you that if one is faking the emotions, one may not be successful over longer periods. Abraham Lincoln has very rightly said: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." The feelings you have and the feelings you use to convey a message have to be in line and that will happen only if you strongly believe in what you are saying. Fakes have a very short shelf life.

Another important point to always remember is that God has sent us to this Earth with a manual on communication. He has given us one mouth and two ears - His message is clear: maintain the same ratio in all your communications. Many of us reverse it - we speak double of what we hear.

Petrol price hike - normal reaction

Petrol prices hiked by Rs. 7.50. The headlines looked scary. People reacted to the news in various ways. One of the ways was to fill up the tank before the prices actually went up. On the face of it, that looks like a sensible thing to do. However, once you do a quick calculation, you would realize the cost of filling up one final time before the hike.

In many places, people queued up in front of petrol pumps in the evening after returning from their respective offices. Long, serpentine queues were quite common. In certain places, people had to wait to a couple of hours before their turn at the pump.

Now, let us do quick Math. Assuming someone went with a mid-sized car with the tank (capacity: 40 liters) empty. At Rs. 7.50 per liter, by filling up the tank, our friend saved Rs. 300.

If one had to wait in the queue for an hour and a half, the cost of time would be Rs. 200 per hour, as someone saved Rs. 300 by spending 1.5 hours. If one had to specially go from home to the petrol pump, you have to add the fuel burnt for the travel.

Add to that the mental agony of waiting for what feels like eternity. In the heat of May, some kept the car AC running, burning some precious petrol. It only required burning 4 liters of petrol to spend what was saved through the effort of queuing up.

We often behave in such amazing ways that appear to be very rational, until someone thinks dispassionately. What looked rational was actually the response to a pain caused by the petrol price hike.

The human brain is wired to think rationally and irrationally, simultaneously. Very often, our responses are completely rational; very often, totally irrational. Such inconsistency makes us normal human beings.