Desire to serve.

I recently happened to visit the Railway reservation counter to get a 'Tatkal' ticket. For people who don't know, 'Tatkal' is a system of ticketing in which tickets can be obtained for a journey just 5 days before the travel by paying a higher premium.The 'normal' railway tickets in India usually get over lot earlier.

The 'Tatkal' system works quite efficiently. The booking starts sharp at 8 AM nationwide at booking counters and normally tickets get over by 8.10/8.15 AM.

My visit was to the booking counter at Alappuzha, a town in central Kerala.Fresh from my US visit and anticipating a huge crowd, I was dot on my timelines. Ireached the counter by 7 AM only to be greeted by closed gates of the building. But as I had guessed, soon about 50 people joined the queue behind those closed gates. I had nothing to worry as I was still standing first in the supposedly FIFO queue.Or so I thought.

The gates opened around 7.50 and before I even got ready to make a move into the building, almost everyone behind me was gone ! Yes, they were all running into the building in what was supposedly the 'next queue' ...this one, the more real one - The one at the booking counter itself. I suddenly realised the heightened necessity to unlearn a lot of my recent learnings in the US. And the need to do that a lot faster.

It was almost sure that I won't get a ticket for my journey this time as almost 30 ppl were in front of me.A processing time of 1 min per person would make it 30 mins.But then I had nothing better to do going back home, so I gave it a try. And stood there 31st in the queue, alert of course at what's happening around me this time around.

The person responsible for issuing those tickets came in at 7.55. A young chap in his early twenties.He went inside , booted up the computer and readied himself for the task that was to start in the next 5 mins.

The clock struck 8 and I saw something very strange happening.The guy's turnaround time for each person was less than 10 seconds.I was getting amazed at the speed , in fact a bit jealous as I was damn sure that I could ne'er manage to operate a computer faster than that.I reached the counter before 8.04 and told my destination, date of journey and handed the booking request slip with my name on it. As I began to take out the cash, he was already asking the next guy his destination. And that's when the whole big idea struck me !

He was not taking money at all. He was just putting a block on the tickets and asking the person to move out of the queue so that he can block tickets for the next guy. You should have seen the sheer speed of his operating the computer, he had done the job even before you could complete telling the date of your journey.

The entire crowd was served in under 10 minutes.That was the need of the hour too as the tickets would have gotten over in another 5 mins anyways.

Then he started slowly calling out each person & started printing tickets one by one after taking cash at leisure. Brilliant ! I couldn't but marvel at his desire to serve and the method with which he optimised the entire process. The 'tatkal' system itself was devised as a process improvement method coupled with the idea of eliminating brokers/middlemen by having a uniform 8 AM reservation system.But needless to say, when sound processes get coupled with efficient people, results can be awesome.

I have to admit here that it's also a little bit of Indian ingenuity. It's very difficult to imagine such a thing happening anywhere else in the world.

Sharing my experiences !

There are few things as humbling as speaking at your own Alma mater.
Here speaking at the same seminar hall where I used to sit and listen to speakers about 5 years ago.A fulfilling experience.

Brilliant use of lathe - 800 years ago !

Lathe carved pillars at the Somnathpura temple, about 30 kms from Mysore. A temple with very different architecture.

A subtle thing about leadership.

There is this strange thing about leadership which I am experiencing first hand over some time now.Whenever someone becomes a leader or assumes a leadership role, he unconsciously moves into an orbit that's one notch higher than that of his followers.

This normally helps the leader in gaining a natural psychological edge over his followers thus helping him/her a lot in creating a dedicated team that seeks to understand & follow the leader. But in the process it also creates a line of separation that gets increasing difficult to erase as days pass by.

You can see this happening almost everywhere. Take the armed forces/police as an example.It almost creates a line of separation between the ranks as a part of the process. It helps in having a strong command over lower ranks but it is highly detrimental when it comes to helping the officer in understanding the problems faced by his juniors.

Take a school/college. The staff seldom use the same facilities as that of the students. Be it buses or washrooms. Most of them even have a staff canteen thus essentially shielding them from the problems that they are supposed to fix.

No better example than politicians. The surface transport minister gets the traffic cleared whenever he moves. He is in a different league & so miseries of normal people on the road becomes increasingly difficult for him to grasp.

A software firm is no exception. Except for the non-routine team meet,you'll seldom find a senior executive dining with his juniors as a practice. Everyone prefers to move around in crowds that's his or her own league. Even if there is that exceptional leader who actually makes a conscious effort to break the routine, it's highly possible that the conversations that takes place in his presence are very different from the ones that would have taken place in his absence.

It's a very fine balancing act.Once you get higher credentials, it's very difficult to maintain your feet at the same level as those of the people you lead. And unless you do that, it might actually be difficult to know their real issues and problems. The saddest thing is that it's actually the leader who is mostly empowered to make a change to fix those issues.More so in a highly hierarchical society like India.

I got a feel of this firsthand when I went to take a short session for my juniors in college recently. The look on their faces told me that they were all highly inquisitive about what actually happens in the Industry. I was just left wondering at the end of the day whether I would have done a better job if I had been just another student amongst them and talked impromptu one fine day.It took me a lot of effort to make them realise that I was just another guy as them and they need not look upto me as a 'Senior' who passed out of the college a while back. Though I did manage to do a decent job at the session, my doubts were best confirmed by the use of 'Sir' to address me by almost all of them till the end of the program :)