Month: April 2011

Offer Of Employment.

I am very pleased to advise my readers that one of India’s most respected companies, the largest car seller in India, has selected me for employment at a very attractive remuneration package. The automobile shown above is their “Swift:”, which my son Ranjan uses and occasionally allows me to borrow.

I received this mail last Saturday and I am so overwhelmed that I wish to share the offer with all of you, my well wishers. Please however go right till the end to read the punchline of this post.

“MARUTI SUZUKI INDIA LTD (MSIL)
Head Office Maruti Suzuki,
India Limited Nelson Mandela Road,
Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070.

REF: “MARUTI SUZUKI” DIRECT RECRUITMENTS OFFER.

Your Resume has been selected from MONSTER.COM and other Jobs Site for our new plant.The Company selected 45 candidates list for Senior Engineer IT,Administration,Production,marketing and general service Departments, It is our pleasure to inform you that your Resume was selected as one of the 45 candidates shortlisted for the interview. The Company SUZUKI is the best Manufacturing Car Company in India, The Company is recruiting the candidates for our new Plants in Delhi, Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai.Your interview will be held at The Company Corporate office in New Delhi on the 7th of April 20011,at 11.30 AM, you will be pleased to know that the 45 candidates selected 34 candidates will be giving appointment,Meaning that your Application can progress to final stage. You will have to come to the Company corporate office in New Delhi,your offer letter with Air Ticket will be sent to you by courier before date of interview. The Company can offer you a salary with benefits fo r this post 62, 000/- to 200
, 000/-P.M. + (HRA + D.A + Conveyance and other Company benefits.The designation and Job Location will be fixing by Company HRD. At time of final process.You have to come with photo-copies of all required documents.

REQUIRED DOCUMENTS BY THE COMPANY HRD.
======================================
1) Photo-copies of Qualification Documents.
2) Photo-copies of Experience Certificates (If any)
3) Photo-copies of Address Proof
4) Two Passport Size Photographs.

You have to deposit the (Cash) as an initial amount in favor of our company accountant name in charges to collect your payment department for Rs.12,200/- ( Twelve Thousand two hundred rupees ) through any [STATE BANK OF INDIA] OR [ICICI BANK] Branch from your Home City to our Company accountant name in charges. Account NO:,which will be sent to you upon your response. This is a refundable interview security. Your offer letter with Air tickets will be sent to your Home Address by courier after receiving the confirmation of interview security deposited in any of the STATE BANK OF INDIA OR ICICI BANK. This Company will pay all the expenditure to you at the time of face-to-face meeting with you in Company. The Job profile, salary offer, and date -time of interview will be mentioned in your offer letter. Your offer letter will dispatched very shortly after receiving your confirmation of cash deposited in STATE BANK OF INDIA OR ICICI BANK.
We wish you the best of luck for the subsequent and remaining stage. The last date of security deposits in bank is 4th of April, 2011. You have to give the information after deposited the security amount in bank to the Company HRD -direct recruitment via email.Your Letter with supporting document will be dispatched same time by courier to your postal address after receipt of security deposited confirmation in bank. The interview process and arrangement expenditure will be paid by SUZUKI COMPANY.Lodging, traveling and local conveyance actual will be paid by SUZUKI COMPANY as per bills. The candidate has to deposit the initial refundable security as mentioned by HRD.
NB: You are advice to reconfirm your mailing address and phone number in your reply.And 12,200/- (Twelve Thousand two hundred rupees) will be the refundable amount,as 200 rupees will be deducted as bank charges for funds deposit and if you are been selected or not, still the amount will be refunded to you,as the amount is just to prove that you will be coming for the interview in order for us not to run at lost after sending you the air ticket and you don’t show up on the day of interview.
Wishing you the bestof luck.

Regards,
Shinzo Nakanishi
Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director,
MARUTI SUZUKI INDIA LTD (MSIL)

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Fleetguard Filters Private Limited, Pune, India”

Unfortunately, I am unable to reconcile the contents of this letter of offer with the fact that my resume is not up in Monster.com and what this page says and I quote – “Please note that Maruti Suzuki India ltd. does not require any payment to be made by any candidate to Maruti Suzuki or to any individual/agency for any part of our recruitment process (No Payment is to be made to any requests/demands made either directly by any person, or phone call or through any mail).”

Politics – II

Subsequent to my writing my post Politics, I have received an email which apparently points to something that really happened. To the best of my knowledge, we have not shot abortionists and called it justifiable, but I may be wrong on that. Instead of shooting, we have other methods and call them ‘Honour Killings’.

True or not, accurate or not, I cannot help hoping that the prayer is answered in my country.

It gives me great pleasure to reproduce it here.

A Pastor with GUTS!

“Thought you might enjoy this interesting prayer given in Kansas at the opening session of their Senate. It seems prayer still upsets some people.. When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard:

Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we
have done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare..
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem….
We have abused power and called it politics.
We have coveted our neighbour’s possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honoured values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Amen!

The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest. In 6 short weeks, Central Christian Church, where Rev. Wright is pastor, logged more than 5,000 phone calls with only 47 of those calls responding negatively. The church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India , Africa and Korea .

Commentator Paul Harvey aired this prayer on his radio program, ‘The Rest of the Story,’ and received a larger response to this program than any other he has ever aired.

With the Lord’s help, may this prayer sweep over our nation and wholeheartedly become our desire so that we again can be called ‘one nation under God.”

The Coolidge Effect.


I am reading a fascinating book “The Tell-Tale Brain – Unlocking The Mystery Of Human Nature” by V.S. Ramachandran.

Here is an extract from it, which is too good not to be shared with my readers.

“There’s a well-known psychological phenomenon called the Coolidge effect, named after President Calvin Coolidge. It’s based on a little-known experiment performed by rat psychologists’ decades ago. Start with a sex-deprived male rat in a cage. Put a female rat in the cage. The male mounts the female, consummating the relationship several times until he collapses from sheer sexual exhaustion. Or so it would seem. The fun begins if you now introduce a new female into the cage. He gets going again and performs several times until he is once again thoroughly exhausted. Now introduce a third female rat, and our apparently exhausted male rat starts all over again. This voyeuristic experiment is a striking demonstration of the potent effect of novelty on sexual attraction and performance. I have often wondered whether the effect is also true for female rats courting males. But to my knowledge that hasn’t been tried – probably because, for many years most psychologists were men.

“The story is told that President Coolidge and his wife were on a state visit to Oklahoma, and they were invited to a chicken coop – apparently one of their major tourist attractions. The President had to first give a speech, but since Mrs. Coolidge had already heard the speech many times she decided to go to the coop an hour earlier. She was being shown around by the farmer. She was surprised to see that the coop had dozens of hens but only one majestic rooster. When she asked the guide about this, he replied, “Well he is a fine rooster. He goes on and on all night and day servicing the hens.”

“All night?” said Mrs. Coolidge. “Will you do me a big favor? When the president gets here, tell him in exactly the same words- what you just told me.”

“An hour later when the president showed up, the farmer repeated the story.

“The president asked, “Tell me something: Does the rooster go on all night with the same hen or different hens?”

“Why, different hens of course,” replied the farmer.

“Well, do me a favor,” said the president. “Tell the First Lady what you just told me.”

“This story may be apocryphal, but it does raise a fascinating question. Would a patient with Capgrass syndrome never get bored with his wife? Would she remain perpetually novel and attractive? If the syndrome could somehow be evoked temporarily with transcranial magnetic stimulation….one could make a fortune.”

Risk.

Welcome to the Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where Anu, Ashok, Conrad, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Padmum and I write on the same topic. Please do visit the linked blogs to get five different flavours of the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by Grannymar.

Communication being the difficult thing that it is, the topic chosen by Grannymar offers me a chance to be a bit different than I usually am. Had I rung up Grannymar to find out the topic, instead of reading it in Conrad’s blog, I would have ended up writing about “Risque” instead of “Risk”.

I am normally risk averse but, I have taken a risk now in trusting that Grannymar’s sense of humour will prevail over her despair or indignation. But the risk is there nevertheless, that I may face some music from her. Let us wait and see. She knows that I am not risque averse!

As is the case often in my life synchronicity came up again when I read Cheerful Monk’s blog post “Optimist Or Pessimist” earlier this week when this post was on the drawing board. CM, this is my response to your question. I hope that it amuses you.

I am Panglossian in my belief that I already have the best of everything possible in my life and do not wish to take risks to jeopardize that status quo. Despite that however, I also accept that I cannot live a normal life without taking some risks. I know that every time I step out of my home, I risk being hit by one of the millions of two wheeler riding maniacs , who is quite capable of mounting a footpath to do the job. Every time I step into my very cozy shower, I risk slipping and falling and having to be rescued and perhaps hospitalized.

I am also practical in the sense that when I predict something in the future, the expectation will be strongly influenced by my present experience or value or emotion or whatever. This understanding enables me to minimize risks in day to day living by being realistic about the results that will follow taking such risks.

I have already written about the big risks that I took in my eventful past in my post “Taking Risks” and my views on the subject are, I hope, by now well known to my readers. Apart from those risks, I also took the big risk that almost all of us take without considering all the consequences – getting married! That is one risk that all married people take, based on a presentism projected to the future and discover that we have to make a lot of adjustments to a completely different set of parameters, nowhere near to the euphoric pre-marriage stages. Now that I am a widower, will I take that risk again? I don’t know. I would like to experience the pre-marriage euphoria first, which in turn will entail taking risks with new relationships and my panglossism may well kick in and warn me to be wary!

Let us now take a different view of risk. Here is my house guest Jay, all the way from California, USA in our native dress of a dhoti and a half sleeved kurta. Very comfortable to wear in our climate.


Now, don’t you think that Jay is taking a big risk wearing that combination? Unless you are quite used to wearing it there is always the possibility of the dhoti coming undone at unexpected times. So, the local lasses will hope that Jay takes a stroll in our park and hope for the best. Very risque is it not?

Now let me take another huge risk and be risque. Imagine Grannymar in a sari!