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Earlier, I focussed on parents and peers for putting pressure. One respondent talked about the professors vacillating between academic probity, their institute’s academic reputation, the professor’s professional reputation of being a hard task master and his personal reputation if blamed for the untoward incident. Someone recommended professors making judgemental call on grades based on potential […]

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/madhuris-death-8th-suicide-at-iit-kanpur-in-5-years-67150 I belong to this august institution. When such an article appears, it creates a furore and a sense of outrage among the alumni. Here is my letter to them. Folks Can I put it differently, at the risk of maybe raising the hackles, or maybe a derisive laugh, out of most of us? I […]

What is concentration? Is it focus? What does focus mean? Is it an action, where the retinal image is sharp? When you are listening to music – ‘concentrating’ on it – your eyes are defocused and closed. Are your ears sharpened? So is it using your senses more acutely? What does concentration during a lecture […]

Take a hypothetical example of a road accident that I am involved in. I am being very careful, driving under the speed limit and being responsible. But the driver of the bus that barrels into me was speeding, had a few drinks and thought he had the right of way. Further, he was trying to […]

I am unhappy when things do not go as I want. The unhappiness is due to unfulfilled desires. It happens when the rest of my world does not have the same view of a perfect world as I have. I think I have done a good job. My boss thinks otherwise and tells me so. […]

The process of sales is to start with the universe of ‘suspects’ who could possibly buy my product (here I can very creative in creating this universe, thinking laterally helps), then based on some criteria narrow it down to ‘prospects’ – these are persons with whom I will have to seek appointments (called approach), then […]

What happens when I give or receive feedback? Why is it that I give feedback with good intentions, but the result is not what we intended. An engineering graduate would say, feedback is provided, based on output, to the input of a process to modify the process. A negative feedback dampens the process, a positive […]

If I say, from a belief point of view, even terrorists have good intentions, there is a sense of discomfort. When I do something ‘wrong’, I do it because of 3 major reasons a.Ignorance: I do not know at that moment that it is ‘wrong’. It is not deliberate. This can happen because: a.I am […]

To learn to make a chair, there are three approaches. I can teach you how to make a chair in theory and tell you a lot more about wood, types of chairs, design etc. This allows me to teach you a lot of things, and you gain knowledge about chairs, its history and how to […]

Emails are one of the worst inventions for interpersonal relationships. I know that it is cheap and fast. But it is impersonal. I are naturally shy and therefore hide behind emails. It allows me to compose at leisure and rewrite my mail, therefore lose all spontaneity. It therefore is not a true picture of who […]