'Corporate' Lesson

I watched the movie Corporate today. The two thoughts which remained with me were:

"When you succeed the credit goes to you and more so to your boss.

When you fail, it is ONLY you who has failed."

"Do not get emotional about the organisation you work for.

For them, you are just a replaceable resource at work."

Work Life Learnings

Four things one should never expect in a professional career:

1. Do not expect your subordinates to know what pains you take in the job

2. Do not expect your subordinates to know what you expect of him

3. Do not expect your boss to know what pains you take in the job

4. Do not expect your boss to know what you expect of him

Highway Share Revisited

In my May 29 post I wrote about a sampling experiement I conducted while coming back from one of my tours. That was on the Nagpur - Hyderabad highway. I re-ran the experiment, but this time on a different highway. I was returning back from a small town Siddipet to Hyderabad. I counted 100 trucks coming from the opposite direction. The numbers had stacked up like this the last time:

Tata Motors 44

Ashok Leyland 48

Eicher 8

This time around, the numbers were slightly different.

Tata Motors 55
Ashok Leyland 41
Eicher 4

I am absolutely sure now, that if we take the sales of trucks over the past decade, we should see a market share of 50% for Tata & 45% of Leyland. Do I want to conduct the same experiment again? Hopefully not. I want to discover more ways to fruitfully timepass in my long car jouneys.

Hyderabad Fish Medicine

Every year between June 6 & 8, lakhs of 'asthma patients' gulp down the famous 'fish prasadam' in Hyderabad. The prasadam / medicine is a 'yellow paste' kept inside the mouth of the murrel fish and forced inside the patients' throat. Is it tough to gulp it down? Think so.

The medicine is being administered by the Bathini Goud Brothers for over 150 years. They do not even charge the patients for that. The only expense is Rs.10 for the fish & Rs.2 for a small box (in which you take back the medicine). VIP passes are issued every year. If you have a VIP pass, you need to wait for around an hour or forty five minutes to get the prasadam. One pass entitles one attendant to go along with the patient. You need to have contacts to get the pass. It is issued by Govt. of Andhra Pradesh.

Process Flow: Buy Rs.10 token for fish -> Queue -> Get the fish -> Fish medicine administered to you -> Collect medicine, leaflet & leave -> Follow the special diet given in the leaflet for 45 days & take the medicine on 3 prescribed days (2 tabs a day) -> Do this for 3 years.

The ingredients of the medicine is unknown to all except the Bathini brothers. Whatever it may contain, it is a purely natural/ayurvedic product. It is debatable whether this therapy cures asthma or not. Allopathic practitioners would call it the 'placebo of faith'. But given its popularity, you bet it would be doing some good for the helpless patients.

Further read:

(1) A patient who claims he got cured

(2) Controvery & Other info: Wikipedia