What do chief executives do all day?

What do chief executives do all day?

It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings.

That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time—and how that affects the performance and management of their firms.

Their study—known as the Executive Time Use Project—incorporates time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, who tracked activities lasting more than 15 minutes during a single week selected by the researchers. The project, which is ongoing, so far has collected data from three different studies of CEOs from around the world.

In one sample of 65 CEOs, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals, on average. Some of the remaining time was spent traveling, in personal activity, such as exercise or lunches with spouses, or in short activities, such as quick calls, that weren't recorded by CEOs' assistants. Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.

The more direct reports a CEO had correlated with more, and longer, internal meetings, the researchers found. Rather than foisting off responsibilities to other managers, CEOs with more direct reports may be more hands-on and involved in internal operations, they said.

But not all direct reports are equal. In companies that incorporated a finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy, the CEOs' time in meetings was reduced by about five-and-a-half hours a week, on average, the researchers found.

 Rachel Emma Silverman in The Wall Street Journal. Here

Rs 32, BPL and a hundred dollor note

A beggar carrying an infant taps on your window at a traffic light and asks for money, gesturing to the baby and to her mouth indicating that she and the child are hungry. What should you do?

On a recent visit to Mumbai, Paris Hilton faced a similar predicament. Ms. Hilton, socialite and hotel heiress, responded by giving a generous gift of a hundred dollar bill to the begging woman.

The woman, confused by the strange looking currency note, approached her brother-in-law for help. He quickly realized that this was a lot of money. Squabbling over the spoils among family members ensued, and her brother-in-law in a fit of rage tore up the note, much to the chagrin of Ms. Hilton, who later tweeted that she would gladly give more money to the beggar in her “own currency.”  

Rupa Subramanya Dehejia on the economics of begging In Wall Street Journal Blogs. Here

The Roots of India's Antigraft Churn

The country has changed in the last 20 years. But neither the government nor civil society gets it.

India is undergoing a political upheaval. Anger over high-level corruption has become widespread in the past year, adding to Indians' frustration with everyday petty corruption. In an environment where no political figure seemed credible, activist Anna Hazare stepped in earlier this year and led a campaign for an anticorruption watchdog. Last month, he used a 13-day hunger strike to get his way for legislation to create this watchdog.

That doesn't mean the tumult has ended. The elites in power are misdiagnosing the situation, throwing up tired answers to graft. But the alternative solutions offered by the likes of Mr. Hazare are out of touch too. Neither side seems to understand the kind of change India has experienced in the last two decades.

In the past, India's government ruled in relative secrecy and was ensconced in a rigid hierarchy. Even though New Delhi was accountable at the end of the day to the electorate, it presumed that the millions of files that documented the minutiae of regulations and ministerial actions would remain hidden from public gaze. It also presumed those affiliated with the central government wouldn't challenge it.

Twenty years ago, moreover, India's middle class was firmly allied with the state. These professionals held positions in the higher bureaucracy or in other state institutions.

The first tectonic movement is where the middle class stands today. They have been the biggest and most immediate beneficiaries of liberalization in the last twenty years. They have no reason today to stick up for the state. In fact, Mr. Hazare is joined by middle-class professionals, who have made the anticorruption movement savvy and media-friendly.

The watchdog Mr. Hazare is asking for would have the ability to go after almost any public official for wrongdoings: essentially one single institution, with a vast bureaucracy at its disposal and with overweening powers. This idea presumes that concentration of power is going to be more effective. But divided power is already generating better incentives for different institutions to hold each other in check. What's worse, Mr. Hazare makes no mention of economic or administrative reform, which would reform the role of the state in problematic sectors like telecom and mining.

This suggests that the battle against corruption is far from over. In fact, the great churning in Indian governance, as people search for better representatives to deliver growth without graft, has just begun. The movement Mr. Hazare galvanized may have erred in the direction in which it moved, but the sentiments underlying it are genuine.

The big risk here is that the likes of both Mr. Singh and Mr. Hazare will not understand the roots of this churning. India now has a government without credibility and a civil society offering non-solutions. At this rate, instead of artful reform, India will get draconian legislation.

Bhanu Pratap Mehta in Wall Street Journal. Here

India's ailing health

Mohammad Arif visited his wife, Ruksana, in the labor ward of Umaid Hospital here on Feb. 13. She was to have a cesarean-section the next day. It would be her first child.

"You're going to deliver on Valentine's Day," Mr. Arif told his wife.

"Everything will be fine, with God's will," she said.

Instead, the young family fell victim to the dysfunction plaguing India's public-health system, an overstretched and underfunded patchwork on which the vast majority of India's 1.2 billion people rely.

On Valentine's Day, 20-year-old Ms. Ruksana gave birth to a baby girl. But the young mother's bleeding couldn't be stopped. Umaid Hospital was about to descend into crisis: Up and down the maternity ward, new mothers were mysteriously starting to die.

A few days later, Ms. Ruksana's doctor, Ranjana Desai, pulled Mr. Arif aside and told him, "Along with medicines, she also needs your prayers."

India supplies doctors to hospitals the world over. Within India itself, a thriving private health-care industry—serving a growing middle class and the wealthy—is a byproduct of the nation's economic ascendancy. By some important measures, India's health is improving: Over two decades, life expectancy has risen to 64 years in 2008 from 58 in 1991. Infant mortality has declined as well.

Amol Sharma, Geeta Anand and Megha Bahree in The Wallstreet Journal. Here

Indian behind the Downgrading of America

Credit rating firm Standard & Poor’s, which stripped the U.S. of its top-notch triple-A credit rating on Friday, is headed by India-born Deven Sharma.

The downgrade has sent jitters across governments and investors around the world as they try to figure out what this means for them and whether the downgrade could trigger a major market downturn. Major European governments, for instance, held an emergency meeting on Sunday to chart their plan of action.

Meanwhile, S&P has received a lot of flak for the downgrade, especially from U.S. Treasury officials  who complained there was no justification for it and noticed a $2 trillion error in S&P’s calculation.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Sunday, Mr. Sharma said the rating cut was in the best interest of investors. “Our ratings are forward-looking. And part of making ratings forward-looking is for the benefit of investors, to give them a view about how we see the future risks of the credit unfolding,” he said.
It remains to be seen what the long-term impact will be but, in the short-term, stock investors have been hurt.

Asian markets were trading lower midday Monday and India’s benchmark Sensex fell to a 14-month low in morning trading, losing 2.7% to touch 16,835.

But who is Mr. Sharma, the president of S&P?  As the company’s president, he also oversees S&P’s analysts in the rating committees. They are the ones who decided to downgrade the U.S.’s credit rating. Mr. Sharma has been at Standard & Poor’s since 2006 as executive vice-president and was promoted to president a year later. Before that, he was an executive vice-president at The McGraw-Hill Companies, S&P’s parent company, for five years.

Shefali Anand in Wall Street Journal. More Here
 Read Q&A With S&P President Deven Sharma here

IT Breaks free

DISTRUPTION: Technology is bursting out from the shackles of its desk-bound past. It has the power to disrupt business like never before.

You might expect a Nokia executive to tell us the mobile industry will change the world. But Rich Green, chief technology officer at Nokia, makes a compelling case. "If you can change Egypt with 140 characters written on a four inch screen," he says, "what can you do with a PC substitute in one out of every four hands?" The revolution in mobile technology is just one form of disruption that will change profoundly the way the world does business in the future. But in all its varying guises, disruption was the number one rated topic by the Tech Leader Group.

Dr. Lynch's proposition is founded on meaning-based computing. "We are about to enter a period of extreme disruption again," he says. "The whole way things are done is going to change. There's always a difference in the technology world between positioning, where someone realizes that something is a good idea, and the reality of being able to do it. Now, technology has caught up with dealing with the real world.

"In social media at the moment, there's a lot of positioning going on. But the reality is to do with the scale of the information and the rate it's growing. You have to use technology that can actually understand meaning, which is very difficult for social media. The word 'wicked', for example, could appear in three different Tweets with a different meaning each time. The simplest way of explaining why this is so important is that all the changes in the history of IT have so far been about the T. What we are talking about is the first change of the I."

Nigel Kendall in Wall Street Journal. More Here

If you are born rich, choose India, if you are born poor, choose China

Though it is generally held that while primary education in India stinks, higher education is brilliant, this is not entirely true. The top elitist institutions are second to none, for sure, but many – in fact the majority – who graduate from mainstream institutions of “higher learning” are considered unemployable.

Growth has allowed the rich to acquire more private gains, but has hampered the poor by neglecting social public goods, including the very basics of health, nutrition, education and shelter.

Pallavi Aiyar, author of “Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China,” wrote that if you are born rich, choose India, if you are born poor, choose China – because of higher levels of basic education in China, there is correspondingly much more social mobility. Indian thought leaders also bemoan the fact that contemporary Indian society suffers from a compassion deficit and widespread insensitivity, especially among the new brash business and finance elites.

The situation is grim; as is the outlook if present trends continue.
 
Jean-Pierre Lehmann in Wall Street Journal. More

Anna Hazare and hunger for undemocratic change

Annasaheb Hazare is an unlikely middle-class hero in India. He wasn't part of the Indian cricket team that won the World Cup earlier this month. He doesn't own one of the teams of the lucrative Indian Premier League cricket tournament currently underway. He isn't a Bollywood star either. He is a septuagenarian self-described Gandhian known for his development work in the western state of Maharashtra.

And yet he recently dominated the news cycle in India. He went on an indefinite fast to force the Indian government to appoint a committee that would examine and propose changes to draft legislation to establish the office of a national ombudsman to tackle corruption. He succeeded in five days' time: On April 9, the government caved in.

Last Saturday, a committee met to begin drafting a bill. This week, the composition of the committee is becoming controversial. Some have assailed the personal integrity of a few of its members who belong to civil society groups, and even questioned why they belong on this committee.

Judging by the way Mr. Hazare's fast drew support from industrialists, Bollywood stars, social reformers, activists and many students and professionals, this was quite a moment for the Indian middle class. For the first time the current generation of 20- or 30-something working Indians—only dimly aware of Mohandas Gandhi through the symbols and landmarks to his memory across the country—had encountered a real activist who, like Gandhi, was willing to sacrifice his life for a larger national cause.

The cause in question, a war against corruption, has resonated in the past year. Thousands of Indians have marched in demonstrations, enraged at various acts of corruption. Two high-profile cases are key: the way contracts were awarded to stage the Commonwealth Games held last October, and the way licenses were issued for the next generation of cellular telephony in 2008.

While these cases of grand corruption are important, Indians face millions of instances of daily, petty corruption. The municipal officer demands a bribe from a hawker; the bureaucrat refuses to register a land title or a marriage; the traffic cop beats the rickshaw-driver who can't afford to pay his weekly installment, known as hafta. These inconveniences at best and affronts to dignity at worst make corruption a rallying cry.

Such corruption also proves corrosive for business. The World Bank ranks India at 134th out of 183 countries for the ease of doing business and Transparency International puts it at 87th among 178 in its corruption perception index. Economists have noted that the way forward to reduce corruption has to be to decrease the discretionary power in the hands of these bureaucrats and politicians, while streamlining and clarifying the laws that empower them.

The irony here is that Mr. Hazare's struggle might hurt the fight against corruption. He wants an anti-corruption ombudsman with sweeping powers to investigate cases, demand prosecutions, and in some cases, deliver verdicts. That works in Hong Kong, through the Independent Commission Against Corruption, but that's because its economy is not micromanaged, and laws are applied fairly by a very competent civil service. In India, which still hasn't fully recovered from its dirigiste past, a new set of rules begets another one, and bureaucracy easily expands.

This expanding bureaucracy and body of rules is anyway hard for the citizenry to keep accountable; this ombudsman will add to these woes. Many constitutionalists and lawyers have expressed concern that the office of the ombudsman—from what we know now, in the preliminary stages of drafting the legislation—would be able to prosecute any public servant, including perhaps members of the independent judiciary, but would neither be elected popularly nor appointed by a popularly elected official. Rather, one proposal is that he would be anointed by a committee that would include Indian Nobel Prize and Magsasay Award winners, as if those Oslo, Stockholm and Manila anoint are worthier than other Indians. All this bypasses democratic norms of checks and balances.

Such details don't deter Mr. Hazare's supporters, some of whom have said that they want the corrupt to be "executed." This is moral enthusiasm from parts of the middle class, thousands of whom have signed Internet petitions and held candlelight vigils in protest. The highly competitive and breathless electronic media in the country have stoked the fire, likening downtown Delhi to Egypt's Tahrir Square.

For one thing, this comparison insults the brave men and women of Egypt. More importantly, the middle-class revolutionaries miss the fundamental point of the revolutions rocking the Arab world: they are against unrepresentative, unelected dictatorships. With all its flaws, India is a democracy that regularly holds elections. The real danger is that this accountability, however limited it might be, might be replaced by the tyranny of an unelected ombudsman. That's curiously welcome to Mr. Hazare's followers who yearn for a perfect messiah and don't trust the democratic process to deliver such an outcome.

To an extent, such disdain is symptomatic of India's middle class who, judging by the voter turnout in the middle-class strongholds of south Delhi and south Mumbai in the past decade, hardly participate in the electoral process. The apathy is partly due to cynicism, that Parliament is irrelevant to their lives, and the laws the state passes are to be ignored, and partly due to snobbery—of not wanting to wait in a long queue to vote, particularly if the queue includes lower-income people the elite don't like to mix with. But the middle class also perceives that its vote simply doesn't matter in an electoral system where voters continue to vote for party candidates with, say, a criminal record—who end up defeating competent, independent ones with a clean record. The recent corruption woes have only heightened this disgust.

This is not to suggest that demonstrations by the middle class are wrong. Democracies are meaningless without them. But when such protests are led by unelected members of society whose only claim to legitimacy is a claim of moral superiority, and when that is combined with essentially blackmail—accept my demands or I will end my life—it changes the nature of democratic debate.

Salil Tripathi in Wall Street Journal. More Here

Siddhartha Mukherjee wins Pulitzer prize

Indian-American Siddhartha Mukherjee’s non-fiction account of cancer won the Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category when the awards were announced in New York City late Monday. A cancer physician and researcher, Dr. Mukherjee’s book drew upon his experience practicing medicine to write “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” which documents the disease from its first appearance thousands of years ago to the medical battles still waged by doctors to combat and control it today.

The Pulitzer Prize citation described the book as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.” The prize comes with $10,000 in award money.
Published in the U.S. by Scribner and in India by HarperCollins Publishers India, the book was inspired by a personal event. One day a patient with stomach cancer asked Dr. Mukherjee a simple question about her prognosis: “Where are we going?” That led the author to think the larger scope of the question in terms of cancer research.

The author, a Rhodes scholar, said in an interview that when he started writing the book in 2005 he thought of cancer as a disease, but as he wrote, he began to start seeing it as something that “envelops our lives so fully that it was like writing about someone, it was like writing about an alter personality, an illness that had a psyche, a behavior, a pattern of existing.”
Before winning the Pulitzer, Dr. Mukherjee has already received critical appreciation for his book, which came out in November 2010.

The British newspaper The Guardian, in its review of the book  said, “It takes some nerve to echo the first line of ‘Anna Karenina’ and infer that the story of a disease is capable of bearing a Tolstoyan treatment. But that is, breathtakingly, what Mukherjee pulls off.”

Perhaps what may differentiate the book from other vast literature on cancer is the way Dr. Mukherjee deals with the subject and its narrative. Laura Landro wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “He has a certain awe for cancer’s victims, for their ability to withstand the ravages of the disease and the sometimes drastic measures taken to treat it. The stories of his patients consume him, and the decisions he makes about their care haunt him.”

“The Emperor of All Maladies” found coveted spots in the New York Times list of “The 10 Best Books of 2010” and in “The Top 10 Non Fiction Books” list by Time Magazine.

A report in Wall Street Journal. More Here

How do get a Real Education?

Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business.

I understand why the top students study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.

If you're having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I've learned along the way.
 
Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It's unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it's easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.
 
Fail Forward. If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you'd be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.
 
Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn't work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.
 
Attract Luck. You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It's not obvious to a teenager.
 
Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.
 
Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.
 
Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

That's my starter list for the sort of classes that would serve B students well. The list is not meant to be complete. Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.
Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn't scare you, it probably should.

Scott Adams in Wall Street Journal. More Here.

Millions of graduates and very few of them employable : Indian nightmare

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.

In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore. "With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."

India's economic expansion was supposed to create opportunities for millions to rise out of poverty, get an education and land good jobs. But as India liberalized its economy starting in 1991 after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its heavily regulated education system.

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.

Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.

But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.

Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.

At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.

The challenge is especially pressing given the country's more youthful population than the U.S., Europe and China. More than half of India's population is under the age of 25, and one million people a month are expected to seek to join the labor force here over the next decade, the Indian government estimates. The fear is that if these young people aren't trained well enough to participate in the country's glittering new economy, they pose a potential threat to India's stability.

"Economic reforms are not about goofy rich guys buying Mercedes cars," says Manish Sabharwal, managing director of Teamlease Services Ltd., an employee recruitment and training firm in Bangalore. "Twenty years of reforms are worth nothing if we can't get our kids into jobs."
.... .... .....

Cheating aside, the Indian education system needs to change its entire orientation to focus on learning, says Saurabh Govil, senior vice president in human resources at Wipro Technologies. Wipro, India's third largest software exporter by sales, says it has struggled to find skilled workers. The problem, says Mr. Govil, is immense: "How are you able to change the mind-set that knowledge is more than a stamp?"
.... .... .....

The average graduate's "ability to comprehend and converse is very low," says Satya Sai Sylada, 24/7 Customer's head of hiring for India. "That's the biggest challenge we face."

This kind of teaching might have helped D.H. Shivanand, 25, the son of farmers from a village outside of Bangalore. He just finished a master's degree in business administration—in English—from one of Bangalore's top colleges. His father borrowed the $4,500 tuition from a small lending agency. Now, almost a year after graduating, Mr. Shivanand is still looking for an entry-level finance job.

Tata and IBM Corp., among dozens of other firms, turned him down, he says, after he repeatedly failed to answer questions correctly in the job interviews. He says he actually knew the answers but froze because he got nervous, so he's now taking a course to improve his confidence, interviewing skills and spoken English. His family is again pitching in, paying 6,000 rupees a month for his rent, or about $130, plus 1,500 rupees for the course, or $33.

"My family has invested so much money in my education, and they don't understand why I am still not finding a job," says Mr. Shivanand. "They are hoping very, very much that I get a job soon, so after all of their investment, I will finally support them."

A report in Wall Street Journal by Geeta Anand. More Here  

சார் போட்டு பேசுவது எந்த அளவுக்கு சரி?

We Tamils are fond of using the word 'Sir' frequently in our conversation.
திருச்சி எம்பி சிவா அவர்கள் மக்களவையில் பல்லாண்டுகளுக்கு முன்னர் பேசியது இன்றும் என் நினைவில் நிற்கிறது. ஏன் தெரியுமா? அவர் வார்த்தைக்கு வார்த்தை சார் சார் என்று சொன்னது தான். சென்ற வாரம் டாக்டர் அப்துல்லாஹ் (பெரியார் தாசன்) அவர்களை சந்தித்துப் பேசிக் கொண்டிருந்த போதும் உடன் வந்திருந்த நண்பர் அவரை சார் சொல்லிப் பேசினார்.
சார் போட்டு பேசுவது எந்த அளவுக்கு சரி?
கிருஷ்ணா The Wallstreet Journal இல் சுவையாக எழுதி இருக்கிறார். விவரம் வருமாறு:

I had turned on the television soon after getting home from work in the hope of wiping out a rough day. 
The FilmFare awards — Bollywood’s tribute to its own - were on. The speaker was Neil Nitin Mukesh, an up and coming heartthrob in Tinseltown. He was addressing superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan, the comperes for the awards ceremony.

The two Khans, in an attempt to inject humor into the proceedings, were posing questions to other actors in the audience. Those questioned, in turn, were expected to respond with creative insults, tongue-in-cheek, to the two Khans — all in good humor.

Shah Rukh is in his mid-forties and Saif, I suspect, just turned 40. Wikipedia tells me Neil Nitin Mukesh is 28. When I heard Neil speak, it made me stop and wonder why a grown man was addressing the two Khans as “Sir.”

My first thought was that it was the sheer inadequacy of the English language. In Spanish there is usted — a respectful form of you. And of course nearly every Indian language has the Hindi equivalent of aap — a pronoun reserved to demonstrate respect to someone senior, elderly or even, at times, a respected colleague. The use of these forms, from Bhojpur to Chettinad, is rarely about status or inequality but largely about courtesy and culture.

But there remained a niggling feeling: What if this is not a linguistic shortcoming but something deeper?

I shared my theory the next morning with my two business partners, who were actually working instead of wondering about Bollywood’s sociological makeup.

Did not most Tamil folks in Chennai use “Sir,” abandoning the more archaic (and potentially feudal) “ayya,” they argued. The Tamil movie industry, too, is rife with Rajni-sir and Kamal-sir, though I wasn’t sure if that bolstered their case or not. By that point anyway they had returned to doing real work.

What is my gripe with “Sir,” you ask? Yes, it is perfectly serviceable for class 8 students to use it when addressing their English or even their Hindi teacher. Possibly it works for the maitre d’ at a fancy Euro restaurant since his snooty attitude does away with any illusion of who’s the master.

Any other time, there’s far too much of the servile tone of a colonial job applicant imbued into “Sir,” which 60-odd years of Babudom have only cemented further.

Spend an afternoon sitting in a bank manager’s office, on a manufacturing shop floor or in a police or income tax commissioner’s office and you are likely to encounter “Sir” enunciated in every imaginable accent. If you have been in a hospital, you can’t but help see the doctors get their share of “Sir,” many a times as “Dr.-Sir.” Even within the information technology industry — despite its global exposure and purported performance-based culture -– deference, at times even subservience, follows the “Sir.”

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