The Simple Teachers...

If you are living in Delhi, and you have not been adventurous enough to try commuting in a DTC bus, then my friend you are missing something right out of the books of daredevil Evel Knievel, the DTC is a great teacher, how so? well in the next few lines i shall endeavour to explain how the toughest concepts in HR can be taught by standing in a crowded 778.

When i started MHROD, i was on a daily basis using the metro, which was uncomfortable, full of rash and unruly people, a long ways off from my college and my home, and which in general was a pain in the ass, so one day I decided with information gleaned from Nandini, to use a DTC bus from the Univ. to my home, now this may seem like a mundane change to the ordinary reader but to those who know me shall recognize how this change of routine has affected me. Strangely that day i did not get a single DTC, and let me tell you i'm no novice at negotiating through the blue lines of the world, so into a blue line i went. The journey itself was uneventful, comfortable and uninspiring but it was the beginning of a teaching so profound that i could only recognise it today after having read Organisation Development.

The route from my house to the univ. needs to be traveled in 2 buses, the first one is invariably route no. 778 from Mangla Puri to Inderlok Metro Station, and this is where i have learned some very important lessons.

• Punctuality: You have to take the 8 am bus because the next one that comes at 8:07 am, well to say that you can't put a leg inside will be an understatement, you literally hang on by grabbing hold of the guys shirt, who is barely hanging on to the railing...
• Balance/Dexterity: There is no place for your feet to maintain a low center of gravity and every single DTC driver is convinced that he is Aryton Senna reincarnated...
• Teamwork: With so many people around, you can't move to buy your own ticket, so you hand money to the guy nearest to the conductor with the requisite instructions about the denomination of the ticket, and once your ticket is returned to you with the necessary change, you can see money being sent from all over the bus to the same person, who very patiently gets everyone's tickets.
• Smell: Another thing that i have learnt is that smells have a funny way of sticking to you, you know the conditions, you know the crowd, imagine the smells....

These are just some of my learnings from the DTC bus...but the real profound HR learning is in the following, as Mr. Ranabir Chakraborty of TATA power told us OD is in the simplest things...here is my addition...

In a DTC bus no matter how full it is, more people will enter at new stops and will bring new forces to the bus, and the old passengers of the bus already have their comfort zones setup and feel no need to change just because new forces have entered the bus, now these new forces will affect the old comfort zones. But no one wants to move because that would mean leaving their comfort zone and there is no assurance of the same amount of comfort in the new position, so these old passengers fight vehemently, glare, and even tell off the new passengers, this can continue till the old forces are in majority, but when the new forces become too much, the old ones HAVE to change, me sitting on a seat know that if a certain no. of people move then all the passengers can stand comfortably, but there has to be adequate driving forces for change otherwise the restraining forces will not let the status quo change, and hence my analogy to the OD process, where for the better of the organization (BUS), everyone has to change and that change in position to accommodate the new passengers is the OD intervention...

Wow, I totally sound like a geek, and you know what...m proud to be so....

another post on wisdom gleaned from a bus will be up here soon....

ps: the metro has better looking girls travelling, but wo sukh bhi humse ladies compartment ne chheen liyaa....chalo bus hi sahi....