Saturday, June 19, 2010

Conversation - a real Saviour of life - continued...

The part 1 can be found here..

Most of the opinions mentioned over here are my personal ones and also some of them belong to my colleague.  Readers discretion is very much appreciated when reading this article... :) (Too early to mention this? No?)

At my office a new batch of young graduates (that is how we refer to all the people fresh out of their degree colleges) have joined. They joined in 2 groups - first batch consisted around 50 of them and then 2nd batch consisted around 25 of them. I was asked to train the first batch of students for over a period of 1 month in various MS technologies. I really wanted to take this up, but because of the project work and also strenuous preparation that was required for the training sessions, I decided against it. But I took a half-day session for the 2nd batch students in OOP and basic introduction to the MS .NET technology.

Everywhere fresh minds bring about a change that is always welcome by all even though many wouldn't admit. I like to interact with the fresh minds.. they have so many dreams.. to do this to do that... and to do everything... to get appreciated by their seniors to get good pay-cheque, and at last probably not the least is to buy whatever they ever wanted to buy but couldn't ask others to pay for... Moreover it is also a great relief to get a job as soon as you are out of college and especially during a situation when people from all over the world with lots of  years of experience are being given pink-slips (to say it on the face - being terminated or fired or thrown out of the company). These so called fresh minds have also brought in their own attitude, proud in to the company. Well, I know I am comparing them with the batch of people who had joined the same company along with me almost 5 years back. We were around 150 of us. Always cheering each other, enjoying our days together in the training sessions, participating in competitions etc. etc. But these fresh minds aren't like us at all in many ways... To start with they didn't join together.. the first batch of people consider themselves to be seniors when compared to the second batch even though both the group have passed out in the same academic year or so!

Coming to the point, when we joined the company, whenever we approached somebody who was familiar to us, we wished them good morning or good afternoon or good evening.. used to say 'Hi' when we reached office or used to say 'Bye' when leaving for home... And then we were considered friendly, adjusting type by the seniors.. and the new group of people.... forget about wishing us, they don't even care to look at us even though they know us... Of course the 'us' over here is actually 'me'... because this short story I narrated here is from my own experience. :D

My colleague says that he doesn't like this western culture for many reasons - the main reason being that you may refer your seniors (age-wise or position-wise) by their first names. He particularly explains about one such incident in which a fresh graduate called a very-soon-retiring senior manager of the company by his first name as if he was his class mate. I do accept with my colleague. We do call our seniors by their first names. Even though I didn't like doing it at first, I somehow got adjusted to it as the days passed... I still do call couple of my managers as 'Sir' but its only in front of them.. whenever I am talking about them somewhere else I just use their first names.

I am not really sure if this culture is good or bad. The idea of the western culture is to bring in equality among everybody. But our culture is to give respect to the elders. But should we really follow the western principles in our day-to-day life? This may be a food-for-thought... I wouldn't argue much about this... except to say that yeah.. we are all becoming like them (the westerners) and they are slowly becoming like us...

To be continued... More about Yoga, westerners and other things in the next post.. Until then 'see ya soon' :)

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