Scores and scores of Tata Teleservices employees anxiously wait for the newspaper-wallah every morning. Getting their hands on the pink sheet, they pore through it with an alacrity of a cat sitting on hot cinders. Most of them have even taken up to surfing business portals on their mobile phones, even while brushing their teeth. And if that’s not enough, they would invariably be watching a business channel as they sip on their morning cuppa of tea.
The reason all these folks from Tata Tele have suddenly become so “news aware” is 
because their future are jeopardised. The company has been undergoing crisis for the past many months, and big changes are in the offing. Thousands of jobs at stake, so many careers hang in balance. But instead of providing hope, succor or reassurance to the hapless employees, the top management at the company seemed to have clammed up. They just went incommunicado. There was no clarity, or statement from the internal stakeholders. Except possibly for all the speculative analysis that was being discussed and deliberated in the newspapers and the portals. As one senior employee confessed to me wryly:
“ We get to know things from newspapers, not from our people.”
So this week when the employees received an email about a town hall by the MD Srinath Narasimhan, the signs were pretty ominous. The workforce was sure that some big decision would be announced, and the rumor mills went into an overdrive. The unsure people were clutching to any info tidbit as a clue to what will be the future course for the company.
The town hall was scheduled for Friday (the 13th) at 3 pm. And then a day prior, the news broke up on business channels and news portals. Tata Teleservices had decided to sell off it’s mobile business to Bharti Teleservices (Airtel), merge it’s enterprise business with Tata Communications (TCL). And apparently, the broadband part, the landline and photon will become a part of the Tata Sky. The newsbreak played through the day, with even the Group Chairman N Chandra talking about the decisions taken by the embattled Telco.
The floodgates had opened up for the employees.
Around 5 pm, a mail arrives in the official account of the employees, with the subject line “Employee Communication”. It’s a note from the MD’s desk, talking about all the things that’s already playing on TV. The mail talks about the impact on business and the reason for taking such a call, but oddly, it misses upon the most important point– reassuring the employees about their future. The email talks about business continuity but not employee continuity. There’s just nothing there to provide succor to an anxious heart or a worried mind.
And that brings us to the crucial contention, “Do Employers owe it to their employees to reveal firsthand any such wide impact occurrence?” Or to put it plainly, shouldn’t the management speak to their own first, before announcing it to the world?
Clearly, there’s no convention that states that an employer is obliged in any or whatsoever way to it’s employees. For instance, when a company I was working with went belly up, the MD didn’t even bother to tell me that the salary won’t be arriving in my account that month, and neither will all those that were pending for a few months. Finding a new job quickly became a priority, even at the cost of compromises on the salary. The EMIs went into a toss, the savings went dry, the PF piggy broken. It was a mind-numbing traumatic time, like someone had punched in a Ctrl Z.
But then, my ex-employer did not come with a Tata tag. Neither did it come with a legacy of over a 100 years. Of course the Telco business had been disrupted badly by the arrival of a new player on the scene and botched up by shaky government policies. But then for an employee, the Tata name is like a travelers check from American Express, it won’t let you down, it is not supposed to.
Without dwelling on the business side, let’s just say that there are many lessons that can be drawn from Tata Teleservices saga. Lessons on how NOT to communicate with your employees. Here’s a quick summary of it:
Communicate regularly
Doing business is not everyone’s cup of tea. Even the biggest fail and the smallest succeed. The woes faced by the Indian Telco sector is pretty obvious. The people employed in the sector are well aware of the challenges. But yet, communication is always a must. Good companies tend to regularly engage their employees through newsletters, intranet, or even internal social media tools like Yammer. Communication should be a regular affair, irrespective of crisis or not. Continue reading
“One-third of Indians don’t have access to regular power or water, yet we splurge money on fancy space missions. Let’s concentrate on the basics, and leave such things for the Americans and their NASA. Kya zaroorat hain yaar!”
economy, it generates employment, helps businesses, etc. And finally, don’t forget, Bullet Trains are not a social project, they will run like a business, charge a premium, etc. Given the favorable terms of lending, the overall cost is quite justifiable. The big worry is not the initial assessment but rather the cost overruns. Almost all infrastructure projects in India are delayed and exceed the projections if the Bullet Train go through the same rigmarole, then it will turn unfeasible and costly. The best (or rather the worst) instance of this is how India acquired INS Vikramaditya, or aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov, from Russia. The initial cost was some ₹6000 crore, but instead ballooned to ₹ 16,750. For a decommissioned aircraft, this was a much higher cost to pay.
Search of Shiva. Basically, over the years Haroon has been writing on issues related to the minority communities in Pakistan, namely the Hindus and the Sikh. He is a sort of wandering chronicler who talks about the status and the current state of monuments related to Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan.
named Mardana, who was a Muslim man from his village. Mardana would accompany him and play rubab on which Guru Nanak would sing his poems. The bond between that of Guru Nanak and Mardana is that of a murshid (guide) and mureed (follower). Haroon too travels to all the sites accompanied by his murshid, Iqbal Qaiser, whom he considers to be his mentor (and much more). Being a scholar (self-taught) on Sikhism, conversations with Iqbal provide an interesting insight on what has been the religious state of affairs post partition.
And also tackling the contentious history of the relation between the Mughals and the Sikh Gurus. In a strange karmic way, the destiny of the Mughals seemed to be entwined with Sikh Gurus. For instance, the first Mughal king Babur had an encounter with Guru Nanak, whom he jailed for a few days in 1519. Post that in 1606, the 5th Guru Arjan Das was executed and Guru Hargobind was incarcerated on the orders of Emperor Jahangir. Then in 1675, the 9th Guru Tegbahadur was killed on the orders of Emperor Aurangzeb. And then in 1707, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb died, and the empire when into decline, the last living guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobindsingh was murdered by Pathan horsemen in 1708. Haroon deals with this history at length, chronicling the transition of the Sikh Gurus as a religious head to that of a military one, like the formation of the Khalsa by Guru Tegh Bahadur. He also touches upon the fratricidal conflicts like the one with Prith Chand on the selection of his younger brother Arjan as the Guru. Or even the objection by Guru Nanak’s elder son and wife to the appointment of his disciple as a successor. 
claimed himself to be a fan of Hindus, an admirer of Modi, not to mention his takes in Indian real estate market, all these pointed to a rosy future.
denying a place in the security council, to imposing economic sanctions after the nuclear tests; caught between the love of Islamabad and the scepticism of Beijing, New Delhi seemed to have mattered very less. In fact, between the years of 1978-2000, there was not a single US presidential visit to India, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton.
times, almost equally in casualties as that of Gyaneshwari Express in which some 150 had died in 2010, when the train had been derailed by Maoists in West Bengal. The scale of deaths and injuries makes the current accident, one of the worst in the history of Indian Railways. Sadly, going by the things as they are, this accident won’t certainly be the last “major one” in India’s transport sector.
railways have a network of more than 
to come. Indian Railways (IR) is right now like a patient that is afflicted with tuberculosis, the symptoms are all there. But if we only concentrate on the manifestation and ignore the ailment, the patient is going to eventually die. The prognosis for IR is similarly dour. And here’s why:
dour looking PM then in the 20 mins made an announcement that sent the whole country in a tizzy. He announced a war on black money with almost immediate demonetization of 500 & 1000 Rupee notes. “The arrangement of buying and selling through existing 500 and 1000 notes will not be available. These will be just worthless piece of paper”.
word spread, the exchange stalled. No one was ready to touch the currency with a barge pole. Shopkeeperrs would smile indulgently on being offered these notes. Outside ATMs, there was a huge queue of people, withdrawing 400 bucks at a time. Ditto, long queues at petrol pumps, as people tried to use the notes to tank up their vehicles. Even on the television, you could all these people standing outside ATMs and petrol pumps trying to lay their hands on whatever 100 or 50 they could lay their hands on. People across the board were confused, irritated, and even angry at the way their Tuesday night had been laid waste. But yet, almost all were in agreement that it was a bold, necessary and welcome move by the government. There was hardly a soul on the road, who did not support or complement PM Modi on this move.
quite a simple book talking about the state of affairs of the world, especially in connection with globalization. The book speaks of how the world is coming together as one big place from Denver to Dalian to Bangalore. It was meant to be a chronicle of our times, and a sort of prognosis of the things that are yet to come. Friedman reaped rich rewards from his book, traveling across the globe, giving talks and discussing the subject.
and Mexico for the “greatest jobs theft” in the history of the world. According to him, Indians and other nationals were gobbling up American jobs. Indians were no more a threat, but rather scheming thieves that stole and cheated. Now how could that narrative change so quickly? What happened to that ‘flat world’ that was meant to be equal for all 
preventive custody, and even warning Uddhav Thackeray of dire repercussions. The battle lines were drawn, a defiant SRK refused to apologise, whereas the Shiv Sena would have nothing less than it. As the battle progressed, the saffron party seemed to lose steam and was looking for a way out of the imbroglio, with its leader talking about a “public apology” as an acceptable truce. That did not come though, and the film was released among heightened tensions. As is the case with quite a few SRK movies, MNIK earned its crores, got all the awards, and was declared a hit.
diplomatic mumbo-jumbo, here and there, but these were largely from the smaller actors, the ones people call character artists. The big shots of Bollywood were dumb-founded, much like their likeness that represents them at Madame Tussauds and elsewhere. The Khans, the Kapoors and even the Bachchans, kept mum. Bollywood, the big family of superstars, was more like a petrified herd of goats. The kind that will retreat into the barnyard at the sign of first trouble.
Astha TV, all would have been rather fine. But instead, these points were thrown up at the prestigious annual science congress event that took place in Mysore this year. The event is an annual jamboree that travels from one Indian city to another, apparently to promote scientific temperament within the country. Yet, the only thing that this event seems to doing is promote psuedo-relegiousness of the worst kind. Science, the empirical discipline, has taken a back seat to mythology and religion, which has no relation whatsoever with empiricism.
then, Indian-born Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan dubbed the event as “
The reason that Mark Zuckerberg is going ballistic this time in India, is because of the manner in why Facebook had been splattered with a cake on its face, the last time round. In fact, it had been just some 6 odd months back when Free Basics in its earlier avatar as Internet.org faced immense resistance by the public at large, and thus was stalled by the Telecom Regulators. At that time, Facebook was taken aback by the power of the collective, by the sheer virality of things. So this time, it kind of came prepared, it repackaged the offering (giving it a kinder overtone), gave the offering an emotional spiel, had the creatives in place, and even Zuckerberg, who is on a paternity leave, is now writing blogs defending the offering. 