I am back ...

After a long hiatus, I am back to blogging. Since last time I wrote (blogged), many things happened in my life, most importantly took a long term assignment (LTA) through my company and returned back to India. Though I have multiple excuses, I feel bad for not blogging for a while. I wanted to revive it today. And, here I am (with a generic post)!

Looking back, it was quite a hectic time for past 8 months: my family's India trip (Nov), completed Managing Innovation and Technology MBA course (Dec), Hawaii trip, India trip, my daughter's school admission in India (Jan), US return, acceptance of LTA offer (Feb), R2I preparation (Mar), shipment (Apr), R2I (May), etc.

Now that I am in India, I am experiencing quite a lot of interesting things everyday. Thought I should blog to capture those experiences / memories. Most likely, I would be busy for next few days as I am still trying to settle down, but sure to blog about my experience soon.

Ciao soon!

Schools in Coimbatore

It was mid of October 2009, when my mom called me from India to inform that LKG admission for one of the well-known schools in Coimbatore has closed. I was surprised to hear that admissions are closed 7.5 months before the start date. I learned that getting into admissions for standard higher than LKG is difficult. So, I decided to send my daughter to India to begin her schooling (LKG) as we plan to return back to India (R2I) in near future. My plan was to begin searching during early 2010 for the same admission year. But, the news from my Mom has set fire in me and pushed everything else to lower priority.

I began to search for good schools in Coimbatore through R2I Forums and friends/relatives. I literally spent quite a lot of midnight hours to collect information and coordinate the school hunting with my friends/relatives in India. There was no one place to find a consolidated list of schools, so I thought of compiling one to help me and, perhaps, others who are looking for one. I have compiled a decent list and uploaded to Google docs. I'll update as and when I gather more information. If you have any information, please send it to me. Alternatively, depending on the interest, I plan to give permissions to all to edit the same. The document can be found at Schools in Coimbatore.

Here are my learnings from this exercise:

1. I didn't spend or invest this much time and effort for my undergrad college admission. So, I would encourage to do the research much early on.
2. Many schools admit their preschool student batch to LKG. So, getting into LKG has also become little difficult these days.
3. Get started in August month itself for an admission for subsequent year. August may be too early for some schools, but monitor it twice and once a week in August and September month respectively. Admissions get hot during October month, if not before.
4. If you have a choice, enroll your kid in PreKG itself in the same school. PreKG campus may be far from the main campus. So, you need to make a choice whether to put your kid in a preschool nearby just to avoid travel for initial two years. And, later spend time in hunting for a good school or compromise your kid's education in other school.
5. It's better to make a choice on Matric/CBSE/ICSE schools early on. I decided to go for CBSE, based on feedback from my friends and little research on Internet. There are limited options for ICSE. There are quite a few CBSE schools now. Matric schools are abundant. Based on your selection, you may have to start early. For Matric schools, I believe December end/January would be right time to start the activity.

Conquer your worry - Part 2

Preface

I intended to write the second part of "Conquer your worry" sequel couple of weeks back. However, I got busy with dinner appointments, trip planning and speech preparation. Finally, I wrote the draft version on the flight to Alaska. (Yup! watch out my Travel blog re: my trip to Alaska). Hope you had a chance to read the first part and able to triumph over at least few of your worries, if not all. If you need some tips on living in the present moment then get in touch with me. I can provide some information and help you in however way I can. Well, let's look at the basic techniques in analyzing worry.

Basic techniques in analyzing worry

In chapter 4, Dale Carnegie discusses the steps to analyze the problem(s). Problem analysis is critical, as at least 50% of the time we tend to make "immediate" decision to get rid of the problem without really understanding it. Here are the three steps:

1. Get the facts. As mentioned earlier, half the worry is caused by people trying to make decisions before thay have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision. It's interesting that this simple step knocks of half of our worries.
2. Analyze the facts. Well, this step is obvious.
3. Arrive at the decision based on the facts and then act on that decision. Enough of theory; let's see couple of things we could put into practice.

In the next chapter, Mr. Carnegie provides us 4 questions to ask when we confront a worry. Here are those:

1. What am I worrying about?
2. What can I do about it?
3. Here is what I am going to do about it? (decision)
4. When am I going to start doing it? (act immediately)

You could create a template using the above questions with some space for answers or memorize these questions. Whenever you become aware of a worry, then answer these questions either on paper or in your mind. This exercise should yield more clarity about your worry and aid in making an appropriate decision.

In the last chapter of part 2, Mr. Carnegie recommends to do the following, similar to the one mentioned above, exercise when we worry about a problem. This too comprises of four questions.

1. What is the problem?
2. What is the cause of the problem?
3. What are the possible solutions?
4. What is the best solution?

Now, let me expand on the second question i.e., cause of the problem. Here, you could employ the "Five Whys" process. This process is heavily practiced in Toyota Organization and helps them in address the real cause of the problem and reduces reoccurence of poor quality products. Whenever we encounter a problem we should ask five "why" questions to find out the "root cause" of the problem. If we don't get to the root of the problem, we may address the problem at the superficial level, but in long run the real problem will pop up again. I read about the "Five Whys" process in my Operations course during the MBA program, but you could find more about it by googling.

I must admit that the above-mentioned exercises are similar. I believe, Mr. Carnegie's intention is to repeat it, so that it sticks to our mind. After all "repetition" is one of the techniques to remember things and improve our memory.

"In a day when you don’t come across any problems – you can be sure that you are traveling in a wrong path." – Swami Vivekananda