Global Adjustments Blog

Discover the power of meditation.

An Indian manager was getting exhausted. He had to speak with his Chinese vendors for hardware in the morning and in the afternoon he had to get his Indian team to execute project specs. In the evening, he had to encourage a German team to reduce their changes on a document. By night, he had a conference call to report to the US. “All these avatars and I still have to stay sane, how do I do it?” he asked.

“Success is being comfortable with who you are, please practise centering,” was the advice I gave, and I also gave him a Web site that he could visit for more information on the concept. Three months later, he wrote to say how much better he was doing.

The rest of this article is an elaboration of the advice I gave him….

iPods, iPads, iPhones, there’s a lot of ‘I’ in the gadget-driven world today, isn’t there? But a sense of busy-ness overwhelms everything, including business, and somewhere along the way, the ‘I’ — or the awareness of self — has got lost, I feel. We hear a lot about human doings and less and less about human beings.

As India follows the West in its preoccupation with surging stock market indexes, connectivity and prosperity, perhaps, we can contribute something unique by putting the ‘I’ back into bus-i-ness, not in the sense of selfishness or being self-centred, but in the sense of knowing oneself and others, and being able to use that knowledge to do the best for both oneself and the world.

Know thyself

Our sages of long ago knew the importance of centering, of being one with the Universe and the Godhead, to experience maximum benefits. Like them, Greek philosophers such as Socrates discoursed on the importance of self-knowledge, and the Benedictine and Trappist monks understood the immense worth of silence and meditation.

In the twenty-first century, when Facebook is so in the face, let’s stop a minute and face ourselves. Do we know ourselves? How do we find ourselves, our centre, our core of calmness? Knowing ourselves is mandatory to making the most of our talents and opportunities, and the next step is to know others, and our surroundings, so that we can be in tune with the Big Picture for lasting good.

Today, practices such as Centering Prayer are gaining importance in the West, and the principles of yoga and Pranayama are being re-discovered in India and eagerly picked up by the West.

I have personally found meditation to be of immense help. The group I learn centering with includes diplomats, college students and IT professionals. All of them, like me, say they have deeply benefited.

Indian takeaway

A Finn head of Nokia has told us yoga was truly a takeaway from India for him, a French principal now handles his teen students by practising alternate nostril breathing which helps him calm himself, and I personally saw the benefits of meditation and mantra repetition in an MRI testing room while claustrophobia threatened.

One of the most appealing programmes that is both practical and easy to use is Eknath Easwaran’s Eight Point Program. Shri Easwaran went to California from Kerala as a Fulbright scholar and a teacher of English Literature. He ended up teaching meditation at Berkeley University.

The Blue Mountain Center of Mediation he founded in California and the dozens of books he has written act as a panacea for 21 st century India’s ailments, just as they did for America in the ’70s when the likes of Barbara Streisand followed his work.

The simple programme can be followed by anybody, man or woman, young or old, irrespective of profession and religion.

Meditate for half-an-hour on an inspirational passage (there are many choices on the Web site www.easwaran.org).

It builds one’s memory power as well as trains one’s mind to be still.

Repeat a mantram or holy word -  it could be something connected to your religion, or with special meaning for you — repeat it as many times as you can, even when you’re doing mechanical chores, stuck at a traffic signal, or simply waiting for your computer to respond.

Slow down. Remember, there’s plenty of time, and if you take things slowly, you’ll have time to think about things and get them right the first time.

One-point attention. Give full attention to the person you are speaking to, beginning with home and your co-workers. Multi-tasking is needed in today’s world, but by itself it’s a never-fail ingredient for stress.

Put others first. It helps put things in perspective and it is in giving that we receive.

Train the senses to take in wholesome things – consciously choosing long-term benefit over short-term reward in what we eat, see, listen to, read and so on.

Read from the mystics. Spend a while reading from the mystics. The thoughts you go to sleep with, remain with you.

Be part of a spiritual fellowship group. Support and encouragement from people with a common goal of centering themselves on the real “I” works wonders.

(The author is CEO of www.globaladjustments.com. She can be reached at info@globaladjustments.com)

Make the most of that brief interaction with the visa officer.

“When we ask a question, why does the visa applicant give us long, canned responses?”

“When I ask an Indian team member for a specific piece of information, why does he give me a long lecture?”

“What is the point of the explanation she just gave? I needed a ‘Yes’ or no ‘Reply’.”

These questions have been consistently echoed by expatriates over years of cross-cultural interaction with us.

The other day, 15 visa officers from the US Consulate, Chennai, took a morning off to learn about ‘This India Business’ at Global Adjustments.

If the American official, who could easily be playing God in our lives as we snake our way around consulate buildings to apply for visas, can take the time to understand and adapt, then we should meet them half way, shouldn’t we?

In this column I hope to be able to do just that — prepare visa applicants to use the two minutes they have at the window of the diplomatic officer to their advantage. If you do not happen to need a visa, the pointers could be applied just as well to any interview to win a job or a client too.

Prepare your documents

Prepare your appearance

Prepare your listening skills

Prepare to talk to the point

In short: Prepare to succeed.

How can you succeed? By knowing what you need to. How can you know? By spending time in learning and preparing. What must you prepare? A style of communication and responses to likely questions.

What should you go armed with? Your paperwork, high integrity and a smile.

Now let’s get to the meat of the matter — answering questions

Do wait till the end of a question always

A brief pause will be acceptable if you force yourself to wait to hear out the question to the end but not if you override the question with a reply, thinking you know what is being asked.

For example, the visa officer may begin: “What city in the US…

And you jump in with, “Oh, I am going to South Carolina.”

“I know that, it says so on your ticket,” says the officer, “I was going to ask which city in the US your brother lives in, it says here you have family in the US.”

“I am sorry, he is in San Francisco,” you say, having to eat humble pie.

Don’t ask a question to buy time

“When do you think you will go back again to the US?” the visa officer could ask.

“Do I need to know about the next trip now?” is not the right response. Instead say, “I am not in charge, but my manager mentioned we may need to make quarterly visits.”

Don’t babble, even coherently

“How many of you on this project team will work for Gillette?” could be one question.

“Gillette has been our client for a decade and we have won their best vendor award,” won’t be appreciated for an answer. Say you don’t know the exact number because you had too much to do with your trip to think of the big picture really.

Don’t force-fit company information you came prepared with to sound knowledgeable as it may not be relevant to the question asked.

Answer to the point first, then slip in the data you wanted to supply anyway.

“That is a good question, now let me think…It will surely be more than 16 of us on this project as far as I can remember. It might be more, as they have preferred client status with us, we have held the Gillette Best Vendor award over the past 10 years.”

Do say, “I don’t know.”

“Who else does Gillette use as vendors from India?”

“Actually, I don’t know that answer although I should find out, sorry.” – Perfectly acceptable!

Do expand acronyms and add adjectives to highlight

“Which college are you from?”

REC Trichy is not good enough.

Say instead: “From the prestigious (or well-known, or leading) REC — Regional Engineering College — in Trichy (south of Chennai or a South Indian town, framing the context for the listener).

If your responses are to-the-point and you ask intelligent questions when the opportunity presents itself, if you stay polite and pleasant at all times, then you will land that visa, that job, that client. Or it is money back, New Managers!

(The author is CEO of www.globaladjustments.com. She can be reached at info@globaladjustments.com)



Terminal 3 of the Capital's Indira Gandhi International Airport: A facility to be proud of, but what about maintenance?

Delhi Airport Terminal T3 has to be seen to be believed. It shows India has arrived.

It can handle 34 million passengers and is the world’s third largest completed terminal.

We proudly sprayed water on the first Air India flight to land at the terminal in an act of purification and blessing.

What can we Indians do to hold aloft this pride of India?

This week’s article truly shifts from the sublime to the ridiculous in its train of thought; a poem by Kipling on cross-cultural adaptation and the taboo topic of toilet use in India.

I do this deliberately to show how the unimportant things become the most important things to be got done first.

If we handle the small things with grace and patience, we could virtually move mountains.

I want to share my utter admiration for the insightful bard Rudyard Kipling whose mind was filled with India decades ago:

Father, Mother, and Me

Sister and Auntie say

All the people like us are We,

And everyone else is They.

And They live over the sea,

While We live over the way,

But — would you believe it?

They look upon We

As only a sort of They!

And today I find when I coach expatriates on the subject ‘Working with Indians’ that I interchangeably use “we” and “they” when referring to my own fellow Indians.

I use ‘we’ about Indians when highlighting our strengths or when stating the facts and ‘they’ when describing the challenges to be overcome.

This perspective is taken with utmost respect for our country — highlighting the positives, while downplaying although acknowledging the negatives, is a must in today’s globalised world.

And as Indians who aspire to ‘travel over the sea’ we can help figure out how to handle some of these challenges by beginning in our own country.

Let’s take a simple ‘we’ and ‘they’ principle which affects our daily work and life in this global village. The taboo topic of Indian Toilet Use. Why should we continue to be “like that only”? It is rather upsetting to hear people say that about us.

‘We’ consider water to be the ‘clean all’ element and for us wet means clean. Rural India wakes up to sprinkle water on its front steps, uses the toilet and washes out all areas around it with buckets of water to flush out bacteria. ‘They’ think of ‘dry’ as clean.

Water in toilets or split on the floor is considered messy.

Toilets in the Western world often do not have faucets or taps. Paper replaces water as a source of cleansing.

A stop at the washbasin is mandatory and includes washing with soap and water, as that washes off the millions of bacteria that may well be swarming on palms by that time.

Truth be told, the health faucet or water jets found in toilets today might be the best via media.

So long as they do not leak and are well maintained, they would reduce the use of paper and actually cleanse the body rather well.

Then we must adopt the soap and water routine to wash our hands, shaking off the droplets of water, then wiping dry.

But till this becomes the norm, if we use a public Western-style toilet in the many malls springing up in India, at restaurants, at the wonderful T3 Delhi International Airport we just inaugurated, and indeed even at our work locations, we simply have to play it by the Western rules of “dry” being clean.

The toilet has to be left the way we found it, no spots or stains in toilet BSFAW — Bowl, Seat, Floor, Around Washbasins

Let’s put our cell phones away at least when we flush, and be mentally as well as physically present and attentive.

Then we can run this BSFAW check to leave a clean room behind us.

Tips for baths when travelling abroad

Use the shower curtains that hang inside the bathtubs to prevent the surrounding floor from getting wet.

Shut shower stalls fully if there is a door.

When there is no curtain or door, it is harder, as was the case at an English home I visited recently — crouching with a hand shower then becomes necessary.

Shampooing hair means removing all traces of hair from the bath afterwards.

No one but you cleans toilets and baths — clean — make that your mantra.

And then the amazing last verse by Kipling says poignantly:

All good people agree,

And all good people say,

All nice people, like Us, are We

And everyone else is They:

But if you cross over the sea,

Instead of over the way,

You may end by (think of it!) looking on We

As only a sort of They!

(The writer is CEO of www.globaladjustments.com. She can be reached at info@globaladjustments.com)