And we thought Dhoom was just a story! Here's a real story 'Dhoom'-related! :D

Way to go, guys!

Today's news..

Its an imperfect world we live in, I agree, but there are some situations where we cannot afford imperfections or errors, specially when a few thousand students' lives, aspirations and careers depend on one exam. Finding three errors in the recently concluded CAT exam, in addition to the leak of the same exam paper a few years ago doesnt say much about the strictness with which this and other national exams are conducted. Give the students atleast something to respect in the educational system, let us begin by restoring national entrance exams to what they are meant for: to select potential candidates for their chosen careers. If we cannot even ensure that students can get a fair chance at appearing for national entrance exams, there is very little faith that an aspiring student has left in the system.

This is an appeal to all those who work to make our educational system better, please ensure that such things do not happen, otherwise it can cause further disillusionment among the student community. Among larger and long term implications of this cynicism could be in terms of the potential impact that erroneous selection procedures (such as leaked exams or typos in exams) have on eventual selection and placement of students in industry.

To begin with,the selection process is inherently fraught with all kinds of biases, both personal and methodological. While we can only use statistics or other methods to minimize biases, we can never totally eliminate the chance of some bias creeping in. And the first step in doing that is ensuring that someone proofread the final exam paper before its sent out for printing. That is the absolute least one can do.

Someone sent the following article to me the other day from fortune.com and its worth sharing with those of us striving at work to improve..:)

What it takes to be great

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large

(Fortune Magazine) -- What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was "wired at birth to allocate capital." It's a one-in-a-million thing. You've got it - or you don't.

Well, folks, it's not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.

Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, "The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts."

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

The irresistible question - the "fundamental challenge" for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

No substitute for hard work

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.

What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He'd had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, "The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average." In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years' experience before hitting their zenith.

So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."
Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The skeptics

Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?
Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.

Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn't do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you'd expect: Ericsson notes, "Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s." The more research that's done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.

Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)

In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.
Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

The business side
The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.

Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.

Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company's strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

Adopting a new mindset

Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.

Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.

Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don't seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won't come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, "it's as if you're bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don't know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don't get any better, and two, you stop caring." In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren't lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call "mental models of your business" - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.

Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft's (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.

That's a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That's the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.

The authors of one study conclude, "We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice." Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why."
The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up.

Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

Tip Sheet: Perfect Practice

1. Approach each critical task with an explicit goal of getting much better at it.
2. As you do the task, focus on what's happening and why you're doing it the way you are.
3. After the task, get feedback on your performance from multiple sources. Make changes in your behavior as necessary.
4. Continually build mental models of your situation - your industry, your company, your career. Enlarge the models to encompass more factors.
5. Do those steps regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work.

MONDAY MORNING..

Well my Monday began with a bit of a sour note, so nothin like a bit of Algerian music (check the Jukebox for more info on this) and news such as this to perk me up! ;)

Another news worthy of the caption: GO INDIA!!

India tops foreign student enrollment in the U.S. Story here

GO INDIA!

I write this in a moment of grim clarity..I was writing a previous post about what life would have looked like if it had turned out differently for me. I was feeling vacant, bored, empty, directionless, inspite of the many deadlines that are a common feature of academic life. I was reminiscing, just dreaming, wondering what if I had achieved everything I had wanted in life.

Then I read this news story. Its one that is all too familiar..academic stress leads a student to take the extreme step. Graduate life has claimed one more casualty. Who is most affected by this? Just the student's immediate family. Do we bat an eyelid to do anything at all as a remedial measure so that we can prevent this from happening to someone we know or work with? Is life really that fragile that one setback or a series of them are enough to throw us off balance and take the extreme step? What can we do as students and as concerned individuals to prevent oneself and others from slipping into a dangerous cycle where we think we have reached the point of no return?

I for one can say that I have had to face my share of setbacks, some of them very severe, and that resulted in a state of depression that lasted many days. But thanks to family and peers, I slowly and surely recovered. I did have dark thoughts about the future, and the very dangerous 'what if..' question. But I never did act on it. Call me chicken, call me whatever you like, whenever there's something negative that threatens to take me over, there's just this small voice, a tiny force that says, 'hang on, fight one more round, see how it goes, its not over yet'..the support of others around you, is valuable, i agree, but there is something that one must look within, dig deep within oneself and draw on our own personal strengths to hang on.

I dont know how the future will turn out, whether it will be good or not. I can control and focus on TODAY, on NOW. And maybe, just maybe, it will all be okay. Graduate life specially when one begins to think deeply about one's research, can be often a lonely experience, one that takes us down the path of rumination, and is not just a cognitive but also an emotional experience, the thrills of discovery, the joy at solving a problem are all too familiar to most of us, as are times of sadness when the problem we are working on just wont develop, ideas just dont come to us, and things are in a lean phase-it is at this stage that one should be careful to do the things one likes to do, talk to people, read, watch movies, listen to music, do anything, but do not allow ureself to fall into the negative mindset. Bullet points would be a good idea at this stage, to offer a brief action plan on what to do to deal with lows as a graduate student (believe me, this is just someone who is a grad student herself, so perhaps, my tips wont be all that fancy, just very simple things that I do to get rid of or deal with the blues..)

1. Sing a song-works for me ALL THE TIME ;)
2. Listen to music-works for me MOST OF THE TIME
3. Talk to friends, family
4. Read your favorite books, authors
5. Write a blog, poem, article, or just a journal
6. Jog, walk, swim, dance, cook, meditate (some of my most focused grad student friends meditate, and the results are there for all of us to see :))
7. Go to the movies
8. Take up a hobby or develop an existing one
9. Invite friends out for a meal, or go visit them
10. Ask for help, reach out
11. Smile, just practise that-develop a sense of humor
12. Develop a step by step (psychologists like to call simple things fancy names, so well, develop a 'problem-focused';)) strategy to deal with the problem at hand
13. Be aware of life outside of work, read extensively-develop a broader outlook to life. REMIND YOURSELF THAT YOU ALWAYS HAVE OPTIONS
14. Be patient, a lot of anxiety is because we are in a hurry to get things done, if something isnt working, set it aside and return to it later
15. Remind yourself of the good things in life, and the people to share it with
16. Also remember that there is nothing embarassing about feeling depressed, or thinking dark thoughts-it might seem like the end of the world, but it really isnt, if u find yourself sinking into a stage where you think you might do something drastic to hurt yourself or others around you, call a friend, talk to someone. DO NOT ACT ON IMPULSE.

I would like to think that each of us is a special person, and no matter who we are, we have a unique contribution to make to those around us, and to the work we do. It perhaps takes time, but we are on earth for a reason, and yes, perhaps for some of us (like me) that reason takes longer to figure out than others, but doesnt matter, I still can persist, if I am good at it, well good for me, if not, I can work on making it better.

I know a lot of us who are working under immense pressure at either academics or at work. And I would thru this post, like to reach out to all of us in similar stages in life, and say, hey I am going thru the same feelings and thoughts..this is just my way of dealing with them.

Breathe deeply. Inhale. Look around, its a beautiful world. :)

Amazing songs from the movie Trishul

Jaaneman tum kamaal karte ho..(kishore and lata)

Mohabbat bade kaam ki cheez hai

Thank you you tube for making the videos available..

the songs are great! enjoy! :)