Hi
It has been a while since I last blogged. Work has been keeping me away from some of my personal hobbies and I could not spend any time despite my strong desires.
It has been a while since I last blogged. Work has been keeping me away from some of my personal hobbies and I could not spend any time despite my strong desires.
Of late I have started interacting with the students of Asian School of Business Management, Bhubaneswar (http://www.asbm.ac.in) by sending them some of my thoughts every fortnight. It has been a good experience and I intend continuing the same for some time. Sharing your thoughts make you feel so contended.
I recall the first time I met these students a month and half ago. It was a full hall having some 200 – 300 students and I was to speak on "what they should expect from the industry". The session was slated to last for 1 hour and it lasted for over 2 hrs. The question answer session had to be curtailed for want of time as I had to leave for Dhamra for a meeting.
Towards the end of the session I had shared my email ID to reflect their thoughts and ask any question that they could not during the interaction. By evening my mail box started getting mails after mails after mails with each one of them asking various questions related to the topic. It was then that I decided that I should contribute more and should be able to interact with these youngsters on a regular basis. That is the time when KSF took birth. KSF stands for Knowledge Sharing Forum.
We have had three such e-inetaractions so far and each KSF has evoked good number of newer thoughts from these students.
I hope that I should be able to sustain this keeping in mind my busy travel schedule. Let us hope for the best.
I have been fond of reading and currently I am reading a book titled “now, discover your strengths” by Marcus Buckingham. It is a slightly different breed of books, as it tends to ridicule the popular belief of converting our weaknesses into strengths what has been and probably is the mantra of all OD specialists to improve your weaknesses and convert them into strengths by providing adequate training inputs.
The author based on a study conducted by Gallop suggests that we should not target our weaknesses; instead we should understand our talents and strengths well and make good use of these strengths and talents. It is a rather radical thought and I am not able to deal with this unless I finish the book and understand the thoughts in totality. I would surely blog my thoughts on the same in near future.
Another good thing is happening in the CSR space, where I try and contribute in our group little bit. We are working with a NGO Akanksha for mentoring these wonderful 12 kids who come from slightly lesser privileged backgrounds. A group of 15 - 16 volunteers from our Mumbai office is mentoring these kids one-on-one.
This is a one year commitment wherein we would meet for 40 times over a 1.5 to 2 hrs interaction and work together for helping these kids achieve their agreed goals. We are quite hopeful that these goals (that we are in the process of setting up) would be achieved in due course of time. But all said and done, this is indeed a daunting task as you are dealing with a adolescent who is not coming from the same strata of society that you are familiar with and who has dreams and aspirations as big as any one of our own kids. So to meet these aspirations given the challenges that these kids face is a big big challenge itself.
Hope to do our level best to achieve this uphill task.
Alright, time to close and say Good bye. May God bless all of us.
With love
sandip
I recall the first time I met these students a month and half ago. It was a full hall having some 200 – 300 students and I was to speak on "what they should expect from the industry". The session was slated to last for 1 hour and it lasted for over 2 hrs. The question answer session had to be curtailed for want of time as I had to leave for Dhamra for a meeting.
Towards the end of the session I had shared my email ID to reflect their thoughts and ask any question that they could not during the interaction. By evening my mail box started getting mails after mails after mails with each one of them asking various questions related to the topic. It was then that I decided that I should contribute more and should be able to interact with these youngsters on a regular basis. That is the time when KSF took birth. KSF stands for Knowledge Sharing Forum.
We have had three such e-inetaractions so far and each KSF has evoked good number of newer thoughts from these students.
I hope that I should be able to sustain this keeping in mind my busy travel schedule. Let us hope for the best.
I have been fond of reading and currently I am reading a book titled “now, discover your strengths” by Marcus Buckingham. It is a slightly different breed of books, as it tends to ridicule the popular belief of converting our weaknesses into strengths what has been and probably is the mantra of all OD specialists to improve your weaknesses and convert them into strengths by providing adequate training inputs.
The author based on a study conducted by Gallop suggests that we should not target our weaknesses; instead we should understand our talents and strengths well and make good use of these strengths and talents. It is a rather radical thought and I am not able to deal with this unless I finish the book and understand the thoughts in totality. I would surely blog my thoughts on the same in near future.
Another good thing is happening in the CSR space, where I try and contribute in our group little bit. We are working with a NGO Akanksha for mentoring these wonderful 12 kids who come from slightly lesser privileged backgrounds. A group of 15 - 16 volunteers from our Mumbai office is mentoring these kids one-on-one.
This is a one year commitment wherein we would meet for 40 times over a 1.5 to 2 hrs interaction and work together for helping these kids achieve their agreed goals. We are quite hopeful that these goals (that we are in the process of setting up) would be achieved in due course of time. But all said and done, this is indeed a daunting task as you are dealing with a adolescent who is not coming from the same strata of society that you are familiar with and who has dreams and aspirations as big as any one of our own kids. So to meet these aspirations given the challenges that these kids face is a big big challenge itself.
Hope to do our level best to achieve this uphill task.
Alright, time to close and say Good bye. May God bless all of us.
With love
sandip
dear Sandip,
ReplyDeleteGreetings !
its been great to learn about your interests and initiatives - both at personal and professional level. by personal... i mean... sharing your thoughts with students.
i personally feel, sharing knowledge is the best contribution in building / moulding the society and who else can better be targetted than students. my hearty congratulations to you for this endeavor, interest and selfless efforts.
while you are sharing your experience in dealing with the students, i would like to request you to also blog the input that you share with students and kind of challenges that you face during the course or... if there is any provision for an interested outsiders (like me) to become a member of KSF, count me in.
secondly, the CSR initiative that your organization has undertaken, is perhaps the most challenging one in terms of moulding the thinking pattern of adolescent, especially the ambitious yet unerpriveleged. mentoring youth needs the mentors first of all to get to their level and dealing with them calls for a great deal with self. in other words, the mentors' biggest challenge is to be a role model themselves. but i am sure; the kind of passion and sincerity that the organization exhibits in its initiatives, would certainly make a difference in at least few lives, if not the whole community.
i extend my best wishes for the endeavors and i, being belonging to the same fraternity, would be glad to extend all possible support to such initiatives, especially sharing knowledge with students at personal level and also from the platform of Insight Associates.
with regards,
Sheela Mistry