ThinkSimplicity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aOCDChkXYY

A SENSE OF VALUES

Values are core beliefs which guide and motivate attitudes and behavior. When you value something you want it (or want it to happen). Values are relatively permanent desires. Values are answers to the “why” question. You keep on asking “why” questions until you reach a point where you no longer want something for the sake of something else. At this point you have arrived at a value.

Let’s take an example – I was once talking to Post Graduate student I asked him, “Why are you doing this course?”

“To gain qualifications,” he answered.

“Why do you want to gain qualifications?”

“To succeed in my career.”

“Why do you want to succeed in your career?”

“To reach the top.”

“Why do you want to reach the top?”

“To get power.”

“Why do want do you want power?”

“To control people,” he answered.

“Why do you want to control people?”

“I want to control people.”

“Why?”

“I like to control people.”

“Why?”

“Just for the sake of it – I like controlling people,” he said and further why’s elicited similar responses related to control. [Control for the sake of control!]

I realized that control was one of his values and maybe he was a future megalomaniac in the making!

The same line of questioning of persons undergoing higher education may reveal values like knowledge, money, status, standard of living, ambition, achievement, growth, reputation, excellence, fame.

Values are our subjective reactions to the world around us. They guide and mold our options and behavior. Values are developed early in life and are very resistant to change. Values develop out of our direct experiences with people who are important to us, particularly our parents. Values rise not out of what people tell us, but as a result how they behave toward us and others. Remember, there can’t be any “partial” values; for example: you cannot be 50% honest (half-honest) – either you are honest or you are not.

Are you doing you MBA? Keep asking yourself why you are doing it, and you will ultimately arrive at your value.

“Why are you doing your MBA?”

“To learn management.”

“Why do you want to learn management?”

“To get a good job in a top firm as a manager.”

“Why?”

“To make more money.”

“Why?”

“To have a high standard of living.”

The guy I was talking to re-iterated here since standard of living was his value but you can go on and on till you find your value. In one case I was surprised to find conformance as a prime value in a student of MBA – she was doing MBA because everyone else was doing it!

With the rise and predominance of the utility value of education, the most important criterion for ranking B-Schools is the pay-packet their students get and not other factors like the quality of faculty and infrastructure, academic achievements and ambience etc. That’s why there is a rush towards IT and Computer Science as compared to other more interesting and challenging branches of Engineering and Technology – money seems to be the cardinal value amongst students these days! Some do prefer the civil services even after completing their Engineering from premier institutions as, for them, things like status, service, power may be important values.

Is a high salary important to you?
Is it important for your work to involve interacting with people?
Is it important for your work to make a contribution to society?
Is having a prestigious job important for you?

It is most important for you to find out your own values (by the “why” method) to avoid value mismatch. Value mismatch is at the root cause of dilemmas in your life. A conflict between your personal and organizational values may result in ethical dilemmas, while value mismatch between two persons may sow discord and cause stress and turbulence in a relationship.

Your values are possibly the most important thing to consider when you're choosing an occupation. If you don't take your values into account when planning your career, there's a good chance you'll dislike your work and therefore not succeed in it. For example, someone who needs to have autonomy in his work would not be happy in a job where every action is decided by someone else.

It is important to distinguish between values, interests, personality, and skills:
Values: the things that are important to you, like achievement, status, and autonomy
Interests: what you enjoy doing, like reading, taking long walks, eating good food, hanging out with friends
Personality: a person's individual traits, motivational drives, needs, and attitudes
Skills: the activities you are good at, such as writing, computer programming, teaching
Of these, interests, skills and personality can be developed, but values are intrinsic core beliefs inherent within you which you must endeavor to discover by yourself.

Whether it is your work or relationships, value congruence is of paramount importance – your values must be in harmony for the relationship to tick. Value Dissonance due to mismatch between individual values and organizational values can cause great strain and trauma at the workplace.

Even within yourself, in order to avoid inner conflict there must be no confusion about your true values. Remember the saying of Mahatma Gandhi: Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Dear Reader, sit down in a quiet place all by yourself, introspect, ask yourself the “why” question and find out your own values. First know yourself. Then know others – try to ascertain their values (personal values and organizational values too!). Avoid value-mismatch and value-dissonance to the extent feasible. The mutual harmony in your values should determine your choice of work, activities, relationships, friends and partner.

Is freedom an important value for you? Will the job you are considering (or the person you want to marry) give you enough freedom?

Do you value leisure? Oh, yes! Leisure is not only an important value but also a determinant of character – If you want to know about a man find out how he spends his leisure! It’s true in your case too – If you had a day off what will you do? Read a book, write a story, go hiking outdoors, play your favorite sport, adventure sports, chat with friends, picnic, see a movie, eat your favorite cuisine in a restaurant, or cook it yourself, socialize in your club, spend the day at home with your family, or see TV at home, or just spend the day in glorious solitude enjoying quality time with yourself? Or would you rather not “waste” your leisure time and spend the day doing something “useful” connected with your work, career or advancement towards “achieving” your “goals”? How you spend your leisure reveals your values too!

Do you value humor, fun, pleasure, food, enjoyment, sex, family life, quality of life, status, money, success, fame, power, prestige, security, nature, loyalty, love, affection, independence, privacy, togetherness, tranquility, adventure, leadership, followership, competition, contentment, creativity – find out for yourself, and in others who you want to relate with – match and harmonize your values, and be happy and fulfilled in your work and your relationships.

Remember, at any important milestone in your life, when you have to make a vital decision, whether you are on the verge of selecting a job or a marriage partner – trust your sense of values!

In conclusion here is a quote from the German Philosopher Friedrich Hegel:

“A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life”

When did you become an American

When did you become an American?
Buddy, Dude, Chill, Cool, Wazzup, No Kidding.Words we hear around us resound with Americanisms. The Queen’s English has become the Dude’s. As if, following world politics, English too is becoming unipolar.

Like all things, what was originally discovered by someone else has been appropriated by the Yanks. Earlier, the slogan was ‘Be English, speak English’; now it reads ‘Be a Yankee, speak like one’. Looking through history’s glasses: the redcoats have finally been turned back, from India.

Ever since the flower power generation landed on our shores, the evolution of English in India has been like deferred transmission from the US of A. What started as ghetto-talk in American towns in the ’70s became entries in dictionaries by the ’80s; and was eventually picked up by all Indians by the ’90s.

Reading Wodehouse, the last generation grew up calling each other bloke or chappie. Now, it is: “Hi dude” or “That guy”. ‘Rubbish’ was long thrown into the garbage can, and replaced with ‘crap’ or ‘trash’. Even phrases and quotations are seeing gross seismic changes. People prefer Bogart’s “Play it again, Sam” to Churchill’s quotations on history.

The structure, too, has become a victim of the lingua disease. Sentences like “You don’t know nothing” is commonly used on all television networks. The popularity of English is nothing new. It was sought after even during the Raj. But now the urge to learn English is overwhelming even in small towns and villages. English-teaching colleges are mushrooming all over the country. All advertising Hemingway-like grasp over the lingua franca. And the shift is certainly towards American English.

Queerly, the reasoning for the evolution came from an Englishman way back in 1945. Prophetically, George Orwell stated in his essay Politics and the English Language: “It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Now, as then, it is true everywhere.

The number of call centres popping up in metros demand all employees have average Joe six-pack stage names. What’s more, workers are trained to give them an American twang. There are colleges that readily train aspiring call centre employees in American dialects. Even something as innocuous as Microsoft Word – on which this article was written – offers the user an American dictionary. Naturally, the language gets reflected in lives outside offices. ‘Don’t know’ becomes ‘dunno’; ‘going to’ becomes ‘gonna’; everyone is ‘chilling’. ‘Bucks’ (a word that initially connoted just dollars) now means rupees too.

Still, like chicken tikka pizzas and aloo tikki burgers, language too is experiencing cross-pollination. In the north, one often runs into English-Hindi alliteration. Everywhere, vernacular phrases are literally translated as English expressions. Language, too, is fitted to suit our comfort levels.

What will eventually come out can never be gauged. American English could become as omnipresent as Coca-Cola or Pepsi — quite different from what Oscar Wilde once commented of his country, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” But then, what did old pops know. Right, dude?

American Slang’s Everyone Uses

Booze: The ‘in’ word for the good ol’ hooch, tipple.

Dude: Borrowed from rappers’ dictionary, a sobriquet for the word ‘friend’.

Chill: The frozen (not formal) cousin of the word ‘relax’.

Cool: The sweeping, ubiquitous expression for all occasions just to say good or good idea.

Bucks: Originally meaning dollars, now suggests all kinds of greenbacks


(Source of information : Tehlka )

Script Writers Taking Tution

Imagine script writers taking tution classes WOW that sounds great.Here are few examples of how you can find a teacher like that....

MUMBAI: If a 35-year-old city-bred gentleman were to express surprise in Hindi, he would mostly come up with: "Mein surprised ho gaya ."

But, today, his seven-year-old son has somehow learnt to speak the language differently. He can confidently correct him with a grammar-perfect: " Mujhe ascharya hota hai , Daddy."

Anush Shah of Gujarati-Tamilian parentage is one such child who speaks in a Hindi normally heard in dubbed Hollywood movies. "It's perfect," says Anush's mother Tharini proudly. Strangely, Chembur's Tharini credits the hours Anush spends watching animation channels for his advanced Hindi-speaking skills. This would also explain the translated, textbookish feel to the language that young kids speak these days.

Even as most adults and even older kids like Jia Pandya (12) of Prabhadevi debate about the quality of spoken Hindi on kids channels, half the stuff is not really Hindi. It is tapori Hindi, many parents say it is cartoons that have introduced their toddlers to the language. As unlikely as it sounds, the national language has found a patron in children's television channels.

That's because, ever since animation channels went Hindi some years ago, children started picking up an easy-to-grasp Hindi spoken by lively animation characters such as Noddy, Oswald, Tweety, Bugs and Daffy. Nothing, however, comes without excess baggage. Cartoon characters are such a big influence on these kids that they ape not just their language, but their squeaky, high-pitched voice and mannerisms too. Anush shocked his mother recently by pirouetting and exclaiming, " Aapko mujhpe naaz hoga (You must be proud of me)", when she congratulated him about a school award. A five-year-old Kandivli resident, likewise, always exclaims using the common cartoon expression: " Baba re !" She also uses sentence connectors used by cartoons, like " tyaaki (because)", over the traditional " kyunki (also, because)".

Even schoolteachers agree, if partially, about the channels' prowess. Lakshmi Rao, head of the pre-primary section at Kandivli's Pancholia School, says it is a combination of peer interaction and animation that works for today's children. Her idea finds echo in speech therapist Shubhangi Auluck. "If a child sees a cartoon character knocking on a door and saying kholo , she understands kholo means open. This way she can develop other languages. For kids, cartoons are lively, attractive and even addictive. They help develop concepts." Auluck insists that cartoons definitely play a role in Hindi skills because kiddie channels use simple words and short sentences.

It is natural then that Santa Cruz's Aparajita Agnihotri has been hooked on to cartoons since the age of two, an age when languages start falling into place. Her mother, Tanaya, says it was cartoons that helped her speech become clearer. Aparjita, now four, giggles and says in chaste Hindi: " Mujhe sab cartoons achchhe lagte hain (I like all the cartoons)." But, as children grow, their cartoon quota drops. The space is quickly filled by Hindi news channels.

Hema Shah, mother of 14-year-old Chirag from Sion, says this is when both cartoon and news channels start helping simultaneously. "They learn to speak faster with cartoon characters. With news channels, they read the tickers at the bottom. And they learn to read faster."

Missed Out Learning.

It is known that infants from early stage start instinctively to develop their motor abilities. That is a natural process. The children however receive schooling from the first standard, or even prior to it, which begin with letters and numbers and continue to do so happily ever after. What is missing in the primary and secondary schooling and onwards is the third element of learning, that is, Making Things That Work. This gap has not only covered the creation education, but entire education, therefore, life at large. It has caused tremendous joblessness, exploitation and marginalization of many, alienation of the educated, loss of creativity and loss of respect for the manual labour, therefore, for the fellow human beings, in the nation of a billion people.

This is so in spite of humankind has made millions of objects over past fifty thousand years or more, outside the present style of education prevailing in India. This education is only capable of letters and numbers, and perhaps collaborations to borrow development from the west.

Work, leisure, education and health are four broad aspects functioning of life of man, animal or plant. Fixed borders neither confined to compartments does separate these. In the natural process they flow into each other or overlap. Institutionalised mass education, fitted into compartments of division of labour is the by-product of industrialisation. It not only brought assault on skills, knowledge, traditions and cultures of people, but also tends to create monoculture. It is, also, not without causing the heartburn to the creative and the spontaneous. By and by education has also fallen prey to consumerism. Creation education is not an exception to this trend.

While thinking about restructuring education (general or creation) one tends to think within the prevailing frame or system or mind-set. Institutionalisation is so powerful, that it is spreading and taking charge of every area of public or private or personal life, particularly in the mass type industrial society. Hence, institutional overtake of education. It happens when there is lack of creativity and of leisure in an individual and the society. We are, of course, aware that this education is not universal, and a large section of Indian society yet remains outside its trap.