Company Secretary. First lesson I have learned in and for an organisation is that the Actual job and the Title of the job are not necessarily identical or connected to one’s own official education.
I lived on the company facility, and was with in personal contact with nearly a thousand people and monitored further two facilities. On the whole, with sales organisation spread all over India and two factories, I have handled issues relating to fifteen hundred people in the field of labour-management, faced strikes, go-slows, internal fights, multiple unions including the Union of Traders and Stockists in Pharmaceutical Trade. I have interacted with nearly 150 managers, observed their behaviour pattern, and internal tensions.
In my working life I came across, Members of Board of Directors, government officials at various levels, government ministers and their contact people, people working with public charitable institutions, full-time workers of NGOs, Trustees and many such categories of people. Those whom I had to deal with, included Managers working in similar positions in other companies.
Thus from 1950 to 2007, for fifty seven years I accumulated varied experience in human behaviour, and interpersonal relations. Reading of books and periodicals was a regular diet. From 1951 I have been reading Vinoba’s thoughts in published form. I did not get into Marxist tangle because of Bhoodan movement. I have drunk deep on Vinoba’s writings and speeches. I was convinced that nobody is a ‘have- not’ and saw it in action as well. I have no personal experience of class- war philosophy. Experiences are always as an individual and class is an intellectual construct. Class, Varna, Caste, Religion, Society, and State are all indirect or academic constructs. They are matters of conjecture and approximations. Initially I was learning about the happenings in the society from newspapers and Marathi literature. My Professor of English, Prof S L Khot had. given me a guru-mantra. He said, “Don’t waste time reading fiction, read only autobiographies. They are full of stranger events than fiction.” Fortunately I was in a position to read those books.
Bertrand Russells book, ‘Power’ has made a tremendous effect on my mind. I could understand a lot of social and human transactions because of that book. He posited that when two or more people come together the power-play comes into operation. Many experiences in life became understandable on that basis. Another important book was that by Edward De Bono entitled Beyond Yes or No: PO : His lateral thinking idea knocked my exclusive reliance on logical thinking. To realize that logical thinking is one of many ways of thinking, not the only one, was a blow that hit me hard. I attended a programme on sensitivity training in 1974. All these changed me a lot.
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