Wishing away 2012

2012 has been an extremely stressful year. I am really looking forward for the year to end with the hope that 2013 will be better.
The biggest high was, I started my Diploma course in Strategy and Innovation from Said Business School, University of Oxford. Given a higher education was on my list of to dos for a long time, this was more that what I ever imagined I would do. Going to Oxford for my classes, meeting a completely diverse set of class mates was all a great experience. Studying and getting past the rituals of a closed book, Oxford style examination 3 times was definitely stressful but on each passing exams brought some kind of a thrill and sense of achievement too.
At work, after a long time I found myself totally engaged and entrenched in my project thanks to a great team and a very interesting project. We had a very ambitious timeline - to deliver a product in just 8 months. We did it. That too with a pretty happy customer. For the first time in four years in Germany, I finally was meeting customers across Europe.

With such a high engagement project at work and the executive education, there was not much time for anything else.

2012 was definitely low on getting a some quality time for myself and for just me and my husband.
We had one real vacation to Northern Fance with friends along with some short weekend trips to Oxford, Norderney (German north sea islands).

We watched:
Dream Theatre, Bruce Springsteen, Soundgarden, cold play, Nickelback

Finally as the year was coming to an end and we were running out of steam came a surprising new health situation for me. A mystery problem with my kidneys. Stumbled upon it totally by accident but something that has disrupted my schedule a lot.

Yet to find out what's really wrong, what caused it...

In the midst of it, trying to complete the (thesis) project of my Oxford course.

Usually the coming of a new year for me is not something very significant...it's just a continuation of time. But this year the new year seems to be like a new beginning...am laying a lot of hopes on it and hoping it won't disappoint.

Wishing myself and everyone a happy 2013

Prioritize...reprioritized

Whats it like to do an executive education with a full time job?
- It is completely crazy. I now know and understand exactly what people mean when they say, studying with a full time job is not easy.
Here's how I'm coping with it so far:

1. I have not spent enough time caring for my lovely plants in the balcony. 
2. The people who used to think I'm being 'frivolous' with my life (because I was traveling around all the time, I was not pregnant) turn around and start telling me, 'hey, go get some fun in life. stop being so serious. give yourself a break.'
3. I have a bored spouse who is really bored of me being buried in my course materials, doing my assignments, preparing for my exams...and also laying traces of my course materials all over the house :P 
4. I have not cleaned the windows this whole year
5. My college assignment deadlines and my bad planning capabilities screwed up a vacation opportunity to celebrate my birthday
6. Apart from one real vacation to Northern France, V and I have not gone on any long vacations this year. I haven't spent time scanning Google Maps to plan vacations. 
7. The washed laundry lie there for days before I pick up something to wear from the pile.
8. I have not been proactive for a few things at work, given my schedule

I have one final thesis to get started on and submit by mid Jan 2013. Meanwhile, we would also like to travel to India. I will try my best to manage all of this better. But its really not something I do well. My mood, the weather, people...there are too many things that can affect me and put all the planning off on a tizzy.

Lets see how it goes! :) 

Preventive maintenance versus reactive repairs

Preventive maintenance: Works on the principle of prevention is better than cure. Fair enough. But what one needs to know is, in this school of thought, each time you take your car to a workshop for check up and service...in the quest for keeping all it's systems near perfect...to avoid any big breakdown issue, almost every time there will be some thing discovered that isn't working quite right - something that needs to be repaired.
It would be extremely rare to come out of such a check up with a clear result that everything is working just fine.
From a finance perspective, this potentially involves small, frequent expenses. 

Reactive repairs: In this school of thought, you go to a car workshop when you as the owner of the car notice something strange and want to get it checked.
In this mode, you remain indifferent to all the small things that keep cropping up and only take action when you believe that the problem is not really going away and you make a decision on seeking expert check up.
From a finance perspective, this potentially involves larger infrequent expenses.

What would you pick?

This is the basic difference between a scenario where there is public health and there is no 'real, mainstream' public health system involved.
In Germany, having a public health insurance works on the preventive maintenance model. Since the money involved is a pool of tax payer's money, the aging population to look after etc. The public health system really tries to identify health issues in people early on - when treatment from this pool is relatively cheaper and lesser. They discourage waiting for the last minute because that will mean potentially higher costs.
But how can one live peacefully with the FYI given to you by the doctor about a list of things that are wrong in your body? Knowing is the first part - taking action on this is a loooooong drawn process that can span many years until some real actionable insight is arrived. This is how the public health insurance system works here.
It's a painful process, but at a macro level, it works on ensuring a certain standard of healthcare for all people regardless of their ability to pay etc.

In India, we do not visit a doctor unless we feel something is really wrong with us...unless all home remedies have failed. Recently, in the IT industry, our employers made it mandatory to do check ups annually. But this is a small segment of the population. Most of us do not think of a doctor unless we feel we need to. Most often we pay money directly to the doctors for our treatment. General, mainstream health issues are still relatively cheap for the middle class.
In this case, the longer we wait, the more the doctors and medical institutions benefit. Sometimes waiting becomes quite an expensive affair for the patients too (even middle class) because one has to pay for it completely out of one's savings.

I am not sure I know which model I prefer. From a peace of mind perspective, I prefer the Indian - reactive approach. I believe the body is capable of healing itself. I am sure there are some things that are not working optimally. But as long as they do not impact my day-to-day life, I do not bother. However, who knows when something potentially small can turn into something big? Should I be thankful of things that are identified?

I don't know. Do you? What would you prefer?

Business travel by train

For the first time, I travelled by train on a business trip to Amsterdam. I just loved it. Although it made me wake up at ungodly hours, I was immediately on the go to my destination - unlike all that wasted time spent getting to the airport, being there a couple of hours before, queing up for baggage drop off, queuing up again for security checks, get everything out of the bags only to put them back in, wait at the boarding gate, then wait on the runway...

In the ICE (inter-city express) on the other hand, there's a little cafe on board to grab breakfast, I looked out of the window at the lovely countryside along the way and best of all, I got off the train, in the center of the city of Cologne and walked in to the beautiful Cathedral before the next train to Amsterdam.

I noticed there were many other business travelers in the train. On my way back, they were a majority. When two american backpacking girls next to me got in, confused about their seating, their huge, overused backpacks banging against everyone around, they caused quite a ruckus amongst the suit clad business folks :)

I will choose train travel any day over flights or driving for such short distance business trips.

The Art of Living

While in Bangalore, many of my friends and colleagues had talked very positively about the Art of Living courses offered at the Ashram of Sri Sri Ravishanker. V and I had contemplated doing this for a long long time given all the stress in our lives. We never got down to doing it. Even after our move to Germany, we kept thinking we should do it during one of our trips to India. But never did so.
Finally, sometime back we learnt about a beginners course in our very own company. It couldn't get more convenient than this. So we signed up to it.

The beginner's course consists of breathing exercises, learning to meditate, learning the Sudarshana Kriya and some knowledge points. The regiment of Sudarshana Kriya was the biggest surprise for me.

Practically speaking, the things that will stick to me from this session are the method to meditate and knowledge points.
We learnt many knowledge points, but the course trainer wanted to pick the 5 most important ones. 

1. Opposite values are complimentary
2. Accept people as they are
3. Don't be a football to others opinions
4. Don't see intentions behind others mistakes
5. Present moment is inevitable

Others that I found interesting:

• Expectations reduce joy
• Saying, 'try' causes stress
• Human tendencies: Not to be in the 'now', to cling on to the negative
• Whatever you resist, persists
• Responsibility is intertwined to belonging-ness, stress is higher when belonging-ness is low

The trainer asked 1 thing – which I really appreciated. "We all seek peace of mind. But are we willing to ruffle some feathers in order to get this peace of mind?"
In the Indian context of things, a lot of these knowledge points if followed are not going to be received very well. E.g. People will appreciate hearing the word, 'try' than a direct yes/no.
I have always believed that the 'dont rock the boat' approach causes more stress than confrontations. But this again is not an approach appreciated by many Indians. We like to drown ourselves in politeness and hypocrisy instead.

Recently, a friend of mine was going through a lot of mental conflict with respect to making a decision to stay in Germany longer versus returning back to India. For an Indian woman, living in a country like Germany is very liberating in unexplainable ways. When pushed to a corner and this woman needs to justify and explain this FEELING, it is very hard and often just addresses surface level things like freedom to wear what she wants etc as these are most tangible. (It's the same with me.)

The counter force she received, is all the positives about India. Given that every country has it's plus  and minus points. It made me think of the first knowledge point - 'opposite values are complimentary.'
So like one need a black to appreciate a white, is it not fair to think, one needs the exposure to a different culture to appreciate/not appreciate your own culture?  Whether the exposure results in someone appreciating something or not is up to an individual But surely, a new experience always has some consequence. 

I saw an immediate applicability of this knowledge point in the situation my friend was facing.  

The belonging aspect was also something that I could instantly relate to. The follow up questions would be, 'how does one define belonging?' and 'what factors create a sense of belonging?'

Ironies of being a woman

My design thinking expertise brought me to attend a Business Women's Network get together. I with some of my peers conducted a design thinking workshop for a bunch of women in network. We moderated the participants to brainstorm on several topics related to women in business (or the lack of em).

While I have been a member of this network for a while, I had never attended their events. I always meant to, but my intentions never resulted in actions.

Here in Germany and many other parts of the world, there is a big ongoing debate and discussion about having too few women in leadership positions and in some industries, a pure lack of women in the workforce. IT being one of them as 'engineering' traditionally is a male dominated field.

Given where I come from, it is really strange to see how big a deal this is in the so called 'developed' world. This is the world where the society is supposed to have evolved. These are the countries where women's liberation movements happened. These a countries where women enjoy a much better position in the society than in many other parts of the world (my country included).
Yet, ironically, even here there are systemic issues that hamper women from achieving their potential.

Despite plenty of benefits provided by the German government to it's citizens to encourage them to have kids, it is still not making much of an impact. The support system needed for a woman to go back to work and have her child be taken care of is not very efficient and is not very accessible to many. Besides, I learnt about a social stigma working mothers need to overcome too...
This in a developed world is not very encouraging.

In India, given it's 'developing' status, my impression is slowly but steadily more women are joining the workforce. Relatively speaking, women in leadership positions are fairly okay in the private sector and quite good in the world of Politics. We have a support system that works - the parents/ in-laws usually are more than willing to take care of their grandkids (that's often the preferred option). Additionally there are plenty of kinder gardens and domestic help available. So working women do get back to their jobs. The government of India has also given some benefits to encourage women to work.

The irony here however, is, given the population we are, the number of women who do make it to the workforce is still relatively small. Those who belong to this group are still a privileged few who have been blessed with encouraging parents and a supportive ecosystem to get there. Our issues are more upstream. We struggle with social issues like female foeticide, not providing education to the girl child and many other typical issues of a patriarchal society, which somehow seems to take pride in itself - even in it's ills.

Some might say this is the Yin-Yan. To me, I still prefer to have some basic human rights and the ability to make my own choices. 

Relativity

'We have lived our life. It's over. It's now your time to live." - a statement the likes of me hear a lot from the older generation (50+) Indians.

Last night over dinner @ Jaimie's Italian, Oxford a fellow Indian student from my class, aged 33, said, "my own life is over. From now on whatever I do would be for the sake of my children (has 1 daughter aged 5)."

I was almost shocked. What would it be next? A 26 year old, parents of a new born repeating this statement?

It made me think. On one hand this degree of a sacrificial mindset is commendable (even though I don't understand it); on the other I wonder, why do people put so much obligatory pressures on the children - a build up of inherent expectations as they get older.

If having a child is not an irreversible, life changing event anyway, why does it have become a life ending scenario? Sure lifestyles will get modified but do parents have to give up all their personal interests, dreams and aspirations to be a parent?

In many parts of the world, people are still working at the age of 60; 30-40 is considered the prime age. How come in this time of cultural influences, changes there seem to be no impact on some things for some people?
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My quest to learn

After many years of yearning to get a higher education, I finally started the process. I started my Post Grad Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from Said Business School, University of Oxford in February this year.

I'm not talking much about this, mainly because I am superstitious and I am taking each module and exam one step at a time - I'd rather talk about it more once I successfully complete the course. 

It is posing to be quite a challenge to manage a demanding job and a course that has 3 real exams, 1 assignment and 1 thesis project to get through before I get my hands on the PG Diploma. Hence, I'm really keeping a low profile about the whole thing. 

Being in Oxford for the course modules with a class of 65 extremely diverse students is an amazing experience. Surprisingly, I am the only student with an IT industry experience and not-surprisingly, I am the only designer in this class of B-School. 

One exam down, with reasonably good scores, I am feeling encouraged and anxious (about the next exam) at the same time. 

Needless to say, I've been asked by almost everyone, "why are you doing this course? Do you want to become a manager?" 

I honestly do not have a very convincing answer and I tell myself, I should even if it is fake :P

I wonder, 'whatever happened to learning aspect of education?' Why is that not a good enough answer for anyone anymore? 

As a designer with 15 years of industry experience, I found myself yearning to learn some new things beyond what my job teaches me; beyond what I have been doing all along - things I know I am good at. I felt I need to get some additional, complimentary learning and skills to add value to myself. 

Right now, I do not know if I want to be a manager bla bla...right now, I do not know how I will leverage this education. 

What matters to me is, I am learning a lot of new, very interesting things; I am meeting some very nice fellow students; I am getting out of my comfort zone and challenging myself and I'm focussed on maximizing this opportunity. 

Despite the struggle to balance work, home and studying, I am enjoying it. Who knows what's in store...I am as curious as anyone else around me is :)

Thanks Germany for your policies to encourage higher education by providing tax benefits. This played a huge role in my decision to go ahead and pursue this long pending desire of mine.

Perception about 'difference'

I realized a cultural trait about fellow Indians during my last trip to India. In my view, (many) Indians cannot deal well with 'different' opinions and perspectives to things. They always seek agreement and in the process there is often a lot of conflict. Each person seeks reassurance that their opinion is the right one and in some situations, people can get rather offended when there is a lack of such reassurance.

I bumped into a neighbor of mine. On learning that V and I live in Germany, he broached the topic of the European economic situation and had a rather negative view of Germany's situation. We tried to tell him that Germany was the strongest economy, putting a lot of effort into the whole issue. However, he continued to push his view. Information from two people who live in Germany, who follow the economic situation and are far more updated about this than him were no reasons to even give our information some thought. Getting into a fact based discussion did not seem worth it. To cut the conversation short, V and I started nodding our heads in agreement and we saw a smile on his face. Reassured!


On another occasion, a family friend was extremely skeptical of the services available in UK for someone like himself who has had a knee surgery and had trouble walking. He was full of contempt of the western 'DIY' ways of living. This coming from someone who lives in India where 'accessibility' is a real problem, I tried to tell him, these scenarios are quite well taken care of in countries like UK. Airlines offer help, many public buildings have wheelchair access etc. I could tell my words were falling to deaf ears. 

In such occasions, people in India are often quick to question my nationalistic loyalties if I happen to say something good about the world outside of India :D (I feel sorry for such people)

Holding a different opinion or perspective is perceived as being disrespectful. Within family contexts, it is often hard for family members to fathom a scenario where there are differing opinions since the method of upbringing is supposed to ensure compliance and uniformity.

For me as an Indian, this cultural trait is very difficult to deal with because I see it as an oxymoronic situation - India as a country epitomizes diversity and secularism. One of the essential elements for diversity to survive is, an appreciation/acceptance/tolerance to differences.

Subconsciously, I may have traces of this Indian trait in me as well, however, having lived in different countries, interacting with people from different countries and different states within India, at a conscious level, I believe I am able to handle differences and most importantly, I do not expect everyone to agree to my views, I can respect a different opinion. I'm glad I can.

The year that was (2011)

2011 was a crazier roller coater ride than some recent years. Hence it does not bring up any evident emotions in me. Over the course of the year, I did learn a few things:

• I learnt that there (perhaps) some merit to being superficial and pretentious. I always believed (and in my heart still do) that the only way to be is, straight forward and genuine. But I realized that a large number of people dwell in pretentions. That's the only language they understand. Unfortunately I happen to have many such people around me, so I realized, in order to have any equation with them, I need to speak their language. A tough call for me, but I guess I need to learn a few tricks here.
• I realized I need to learn to keep an ultra straight face that revel no emotions. Again something very hard for me to do but needs to be learnt.

Highlights of the year were largely restricted to the professional sector:

• I got through a hugely inhibiting process of getting admission to study in a reputed university liked Oxford, Said business school. I never really thought I would get through it. A higher education has been on my list of to dos for many many years...
• I got to teach a design thinking class to students in the Hasso Plattner Institute - D school in Potsdam. It was a great experience to be there. Started to build a network with people I met there.

The roller coaster ride:

• Despite these highlights my role and position in my team got redefined almost on a daily basis. The team broke down suddenly and in an unpleasant manner. Was hard to keep the focus and rise above it all, to find motivation to continue to do a good job.
• On a another note, mid year my health got us off the hook - gave us all a scare. It really tested my faith and forced me to open my mind to some realities. November brought some relatively good news so we could breathe a sigh of relief.
• As we took off to India to spend time with our family, it did not end up being as desirable. A throat infection grounded me at home and I was not in a position to be upbeat and enjoy the time with my parents and friends in Bangalore.
• Family scenarios left a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth towards the end of the year :(

 Our travels took us to:

• Hamburg, sylt via hannover
• Dresden and Sächsische Schweiz
• Southern france, along the coast to barcelona and back.
• Croatia
• Another failed attempt to see the northern lights. This time in Tromso, norway.

We entertained ourselves with the following concerts:

• Red Hot Chilli Peppers
• Roxette
• Robbie Williams (couldn't get to see him without the rest of the Take That boys, so saw him with em)
• Anoushka Shanker (enjoy jazz)
• Istanbul Sessions (enjoy jazz)
• Bon Jovi
• Rush
• Animals
• Sting and the philharmonic
• Bergen philharmonic

2012 begins with some big things on my hands. I look forward to it with anxiety.