Boss as Villain

 If bosses are villains, I plead guilty to being one, around 4-5 times. I was, after all, the head of a few departments/institutions in some capacity, and responsible for the work of a few people- from about 15 to about 100 at different times. Faculty as well as non-teaching staff.

My experience as a boss (think of a less intimidating term if you like) has largely been good, when I had the authority to actually make decisions. Not just financial, but re-allocation of people, choosing people for particular functions, or other policy matters. In general, I believe in giving people a lot of responsibility if they seem capable of doing something, rather than micro-managing. I like people who do things, rather than those who simply crib- unless that cribbing improves matters.

I also believe that the old-world family run companies in India (with a few exceptions) did not grow to compete with global fast enough due to management methods that they followed. Things have improved, but we are still way behind China, in many aspects. Of course, governance and ease of doing things are also responsible, and the role of regulators. In education, there is too much regulation, though it appears to be easing-slowly.

  

We Lead the World ...

People just don't understand. They go by short-sighted things like the GDP and Weapons of Mass Destruction (real ones like those in America or China or Russia) to judge how well a country is doing. Well, I would like to dispel these childish notions about nations and bring to your attention that India leads the world in many things. Such as-

1. No. of potential tourists whom we scare off each year. Amir Khan's trying to rectify that, but it'll be a while.

2. No. of journalists per square inch. This already big number doubles around politicians, criminals, and scamsters. And Rakhi Sawant.

3. Tons of Garbage per capita-uncollected, and spread equitably across the roads.

4. Number of unemployed engineers (we are still not sure if the coding armies of the IT world actually do any real work, so this could be revised upwards soon).

5. Number of suggestions that start with "They should.." or its equivalent. As long as we don't have to do any of the suggested things ourselves. The Japanese luckily did not start suggestion schemes with Indians as their citizens/employees. They wouldn't have known where to begin.

6. Metres of telephone cables per person.

7. Gigametres of roads dug up at any point of time, for reasons ranging from the ridiculous to well,.. ludicrous.

8. Meaningless blogs per square inch of brains.