Sunday Posts

Last week, voice recording of an HR executive firing an employee at Tech Mahindra, a big Indian IT company, went viral (as above). The employee was told that he is being fired not because of any performance issues, but because of 'cost optimisation'. He was told to resign by the end of the day, failing which he would be terminated the next day, and lose all his exit benefits and wouldn't even get a reference. When the employee pleaded it was too short a notice, he was told that the company can fire him summarily. When he sought an option to appeal, he told there was none. After this went viral, many weighed in, converging on the consensus that while the company might have the rights to fire the employee, it was all too harsh. As for me, I thought it was coercive, and therefore, illegal: I can't see how a company can fire an employee on disciplinary grounds because he failed to resign as told. In America, this, aggregating the claims of all employees fired in th...

We are often told that knowledge has become abundant, available, and commoditised : In short, it is not important anymore. Some of these claims are rested on the idea that Google has changed everything. The skills of memorising, retrieving and reproducing information, a task which we took as synonymous to knowing, can be done by computers and smartphones easily, quickly and cheaply. Progressively, the machines can translate, contextualise and correlate better, and it is fair to expect this process nearing perfection over our lifetime.  I am currently reading Tom Standage's ' Writing On the Wall' , a history of social media, where he described Cicero, when he was made the Governor of Cilicia, a province in today's Southeast Turkey, requesting his friend Marcus Caelius Rufus to keep him in the loop by sending the political news of Rome. Caelius, the ever faithful friend, therefore sent him copies of the daily 'acta' ( 'acta diruna populi Romani' , or...

Wikileaks.org has done it again: This time a set of US diplomatic cables talking about countries and their leaders without mincing the words. I picked up from the BBC website some of its content. It says things like : " US officials are said to have described Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as feckless, vain and ineffective, sharing a close relationship with "alpha dog" Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is said to be thin-skinned and authoritarian, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel is described as risk-averse. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is referred to as "extremely weak" and susceptible to conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya always travels with a "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse, according to one of the cables. Concerns aired include the security of Pakistani nuclear material that could be used to make an atomic weapon, while the widespread use of computer hacki...