How to keep employees happy..

Often managers are boggled when employees leave big known companies and join a small start up or a smaller not so well known company. What does a typical employee look for...

1. A compensation perceived as equitable and fair.

2. A decent management which is fair, equitable. Also, keep the work load challenging but not overburdening

3. Provide a decent place to work and also allow enough flexibility (work from home option, time for doc and dental appts etc)

4. Respect and dignity in all interactions be it face to face, email or phone

So, when will managers get it that all it takes is some simple rules to retain good employees. duh!!

Lunch at Mango Tree-along the river Tunga

Idyllic..facing the river flowing along the rocky boulders..."steppes"..a quiet restaurant. To access, one walks through a banana plantation..at the entrance remove shoes, wash feet and enter this place where bang in the middle is a huge tree with a platform around it...laid back, clean thali with fresh food. Mango Tree. Sipping a cool lassi, while watching the buffalo frolic in the river, an experience only to live for :)

Passion

Everyone has something that they are passionate about..Could be cooking, gardening, knitting, writing, singing...but idling? Can someone be just passionate about doing nothing at all ? just lazing around? Not having the urge to do anything at all?..Perhaps that is an enlightened soul..who knows that anyway life is finite..anyway at the end of the mad rush, its over..so why not just idle.I envy such folk who are able to idle away with no guilt or no sense of rush...Idlers Zindabad.

Truth is black and lies are blacker

सच बोलो लेकिन सच बोलने से दिल दुखते हैं.......सचाई कडवी होती हैं.

Tears and Joy

Bumps, Obstacles, rejections, dissapointments are part of everyone's life..and handling those makes a person who she or he is..All that said and done..even though I have had my share of dissapointments in life, each time I go through a roller coaster of emotions..anger, tears, sadness, quiet, hurt etc...I have learned with age to "hide" the above mentioned emotions very well. An onlooker might not even detect a sign that I had something major happen to me that day...but deep inside its painful. I want to just throw in the towel. I want to yell. I want to cry. I want to break something. I want to go to a pub and drink away my sorrows. I want to just give up...till i go home and see the angelic face of my daughter. I feel refreshed. I feel rejuvenated. I feel motivated. I want to continue on with my struggle and fight further to achieve what I had set out to get.

Ohmie

Thats my 9 month old Golden Retriever OHM who we call Ohmli, Ohmie, Pupplu, Pupplee Googlee...and he responds to all of the above with equal joy and excitement...However, to get him back inside after his frolick in the yard is like pulling teeth...Cajoling, yelling, begging, crying...and finally surrendering that he is the Alpha dog..I give up and resort to a bribe..a buttered toast or a crisp dosa or macadamia nuts...I often wonder..I would love his life.... He has us all under his cool command. When we leave for our respective work and school, he gets to rest in a quiet house with no bother...:) We loved Sheroo and now we love Ohmie :)

Music and emotions

In the middle of the night the phone rings..its my brother's wife informing me that my dad was really sick and the ambulance took him to the hospital...I woke Hari up and quickly got dressed. It was foggy. It was cold. The CD playing the car was A R Rehman's first big success..ROJA. We were listening to "chinni chinni asha..chinnadani asha" as we drove through the fog to the hospital. We enter the ER and I see my mom, brother there with grief stricken pale faces...I go in, and see my dad lying totally motionless on the gurney with all kinds of tubes inserted in him. The cold , isolated, loneliness of death hit me like a ton of bricks. My dad, my best friend, my confidant, was no more...The shock and disbelief of that moment still haunts me. Whenever I hear "chinni chinni asha"...the whole scene replays in front of my eyes...Music and memory. Music and emotion. Music and events...