Vendor or Business Partner?

Vendor or Business Partner

So what is it with words communicated to our vendor or business partner, and the finer nuances they proclaim? Try these on for size…
  • I need my order right away ~ vs. ~ When is the earliest you can supply my order?
  • This pricing is ridiculous ~ vs. ~ We are looking at a better pricing
  • I cannot pay you within 30 days ~ vs. ~ We will be pleased to make payment at the end of 30 days.
  • I will reject the order supplied if it does not meet our specification ~ vs. ~ Do ensure that the order supplied meets our agreed specifications, to avoid rejection.
  • Your proposal was not acceptable ~ vs. ~ Regrettably, we were unable to select your proposal.

It is no conundrum, that the statements on the right are the more polite ones. Many of us would like to say that we are active proponents of such communication.

Yet, for those who have been on both sides of the supply chain, the learnings come quicker!

Some organisations believe in calling their ‘Vendors’ their ‘Business (Biz) Partners.’

Yet, in reality, how often do we really consider these biz partners as one of our organisation’s valuable resources?

In the aftermath of Covid-19, many of us have been humbled.

Hoteliers have seen a year of adversity, wage cuts, layoffs, health concerns, tottering businesses & closures, stress, and financial turmoil. The Tourism industry behemoth has been cut hardest at its knees, and it continues to teeter.

The harder hit is the business partner (aka vendor). He does not have a cushion, mostly rotating his cash-flow in a never-ending vortex. Hotel & restaurant inventories have dropped drastically to suit demand, while simultaneously, rates are being squeezed to keep costs low.

Hospitality leaders are in a Catch-22 situation vis-a-vis their biz partners. Sales have dipped drastically, and cash flows are skeletal. Whom do you pay first, your employees or your biz partners?

The answer is a no-brainer.

Statutory & HLP (heat, light, and power) payments must be made; there is no leeway in their payment schedules. The same applies to R&M (repairs and maintenance), wherein parts or services need to be purchased against immediate payment.

So where does the daily supplier normally find himself in the value chain of a hospitality organisation? Truth be told, pretty much at the lower end!

Biz partners want to be acknowledged, feel appreciated, and treated with respect by the management. Then, they are more than pleased to continue, even though other organisations may offer better rates!

Luxury hotels in Goa generally contract serenaders, music bands, and an array of performers, during the high and low season. This has always been a flourishing business for musicians, particularly in this state.

I know of an F&B leader in one such leading luxury hotel, who epitomises the ideal biz partner relationship. He auditions performers, and subsequently finalises contracts meticulously, only after negotiating the least rates amongst five-star hotels in Goa.

Having completed this, he now ensures their comfort, in ensuring their meal arrangements and logistics are suitably taken care of. For the accompanying roadies (if any), he ensures staff cafeteria meal coupons. He ensures that payments are made promptly by the 15th of every month as promised in the contract. Their issues, if any are brought to his notice and he attends to them personally. He checks on their performances oft and on, giving them feedback on the same.

All this has startled the performing artist’s community. For, they have never received this kind of personalised attention at the other hotels.

The result?

Every six months, at the signing of the new contracts, this F&B Leader gets the best rates. He is a hard negotiator and he maintains his costs within levels suited to the hotel’s profitability parameters. The relationship is such that the performers (half a dozen biz partners) never want to leave this gig. I hear that there is a line of new performers, always waiting for an opportunity to enter.

I have seen biz partners being made to wait for hours by Financial Controllers, Hotel Managers, and Owners. These may be potential biz partners seeking entry, or even current biz partners awaiting payments, clarifications, orders, contracts, etc. When these biz partners call, their calls are very often not received, neither returned.

The fact is that we tend to get high on a power trip when we are the client.

In our industry, the bulk of our dealings involve serving guests. Here, we are on the other side of the spectrum, wherein we become the vendor or business partner. In our customer interface, we bend over backward for the guest, in the quest to honour the ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’ code.

The result is that we then get into a mindset that vendors should regularly bend over backward for us too. We demand servicing to an unreasonable level, expecting vendors to feel blessed to have our business.

Why make things difficult for these biz partners? After all, they are necessary to the business. Even as hoteliers and restaurateurs are struggling to remain afloat, so are they. Let’s bring in the element of humanity to these relations, and treat all alike.

Think back to those vendors or business partners who stayed with you even when you may have moved to a smaller organisation. You may discover the reason they did so was the respect, acknowledgement, and appreciation you showed them in the past.

The Ritz Carlton motto – “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen” which we all heartily agree to, may be applied in this context too… right?

This article has appeared in ET HOSPITALITY WORLD.COM February 2020

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The H.R. Manager’s Delight

The Human Resources Manager’s delight lies in a current cup of mixed H.R. challenges consisting of minimal woes and maximum advantages. The current and ongoing pandemic has stressed most businesses, none more so than the services sector. The hospitality and travel sector would never have wished this happenstance upon their worst enemy. Yet, through these times of duress, one department has a lot to thank providence for the Covid-19 phenomenon. That department is Human Resources. By now, they have got over the stress of drastically reducing their organization’s employee count. Post this, the HR department can probably count more positives in the offing, especially for the route ahead.

Employee metrics have dropped drastically. Hotels that were operating at a 1:2.5 ratio (1 room:2.5 employees) have dropped this ratio by up to half. For example, resorts currently experiencing 50-60% occupancies thanks to ‘revenge travel,’ have discovered they can work with much lesser numbers. This was necessitated by a sparse cash flow brought about by the steep drop in the top-line revenue. This is the main reason for the Human Resources Manager’s delight!

A 154 room luxury resort in Goa did an 80% occupancy in Nov 2019 with 353 employees. Currently operating with 180 employees, it has done a 62% occupancy in Nov 2020. While operations are being stretched, the fact is that one can achieve such a performance. This is definitely going to influence promoters and operators to stay with reduced numbers in the future. After all, due to exorbitant labour costs in the west, this has always been the trend. The Indian hospitality sector has been correcting employee metrics gradually over the past decade. The pandemic has now hastened the process and probably made the H.R. manager’s job more interesting.

Let us analyse the HR department’s KPI’s in today’s scenario. Here is a spin doctor’s largely positive analysis of the H.R. Manager’s path for 2021 and ahead.

PROCESS

Employee Multi-Functionality is now the name of the game. Pre-Covid19, Recruitment concentrated mainly on education, skills, personality, and experience. Now, since H.R. has reduced the recruitment count, the HR manager can additionally look for multiple competencies & behavioural skills.

Let me explain this with the same example of the aforesaid luxury hotel in Goa. A year ago, with 353 employees, it ran with an attrition rate of 50% annually. The H.R. department had to recruit to replace 176 employees annually.

In the current depressed job market, attrition is expected to fall significantly by up to half of earlier levels. This means that where earlier 2 employees attrited, now one will leave. With the employee count of this hotel currently at 180, attrition is forecasted to drop significantly (to 25%). The number of replacements in 2021 for this hotel may then be forecasted at only 45 employees. This drop from 176 to 45 employees to be replaced annually, will constitute nearly a 75% decrease in recruitment numbers.

What follows is that H.R. should now be able to perform their processes for a leaner number, much more effectively. A lower Attrition and Absenteeism rate, along with lesser Open Job Requisitions will support a higher Quality of Hire, Quality Interviewing Time, and a higher Job Offer Acceptance Rate. These would be some of the benefits accruing from this serendipitous situation.

The H.R. challenge here, if any, may be in replacing the blue-collar worker. With an enforced lockdown, India has witnessed for the first time, a reverse migration. Migrant Labour has returned to their towns and villages and are using their acquired skills to start their own businesses.

A CDP (chef de partie) who was earning ₹45000 p.m. in a 5-star hotel in Delhi, returned to his village in Uttar Pradesh during a forced retrenchment. He availed of a government scheme to purchase five milch buffaloes. After deducting upkeep and EMI expenses, he today makes a profit of ₹60000 p.m. Why would he come back to the city?

FINANCIAL

The obvious organizational benefit of a lower employee count would be a lower Payroll Cost in real terms. Now, this cost is now being reduced further. Along with reducing employees, most hospitality organizations are also lowering salaries (by lowering existing salaries and recruiting at lower salaries).

Organizations nowadays do not need to spend on recruitment in the manner they used to. Another area of expense reduction then, is the Cost per Hire, as there is now a supply glut.

Generating savings at the cost of the employee may help the P&L in the now, but never in the long run. Encouraging cross and multi-functional positions, (mentioned in the ‘Process’ KPI), will assist in lowering costs through lean employee numbers.

The H.R. Challenge here would be how to motivate employees to be more productive at the same salary.

EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT

To understand how satisfied employees are with the HR department’s services, one measures the NPS (Net Promoter Score) of HR. Using the NPS, one can also measure to what degree, employees recommend the organization to others. In the current context, more concentration can be given by H.R. towards development activities like Onboarding, Training, and Performance Management.

There are several examples of hospitality organizations around the world who have engaged their work-force during the lows. Not only has this helped in the continuous development of the employee, but it has also kept them motivated.

The H.R. Challenge is in staving off inadvertent cost-cutting of L&D measures normally used to motivate high performers. Also, in the drive to reduce costs, the training manager must not be made redundant. As Steve Jobs famously said, “You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.”

STRATEGIC

A certain standalone international luxury hotel in Bangalore truly does standalone. It is the only hotel which has not retrenched its permanent employees and has continued to pay complete salaries. It is a brand deeply ensconced in ethics and compliance, which has stood by its employees. Recently, the hotel’s Director of Sales was approached by an Indian luxury brand. She was offered higher emoluments to join them. She refused, as she appreciated her company’s values. The company’s strategic H.R. decision to support and value their people during tough times certainly paid off in this case. This particular retention was the Human Resources Manager’s delight.

Innovation is often a key driver of business success. A strategic long term goal of an H.R. department is to create an environment of Innovative Employee Behaviour along with increased Employee Engagement. Higher levels of Employee Satisfaction via HR Initiatives will lead to higher Employee Productivity. This, in turn, will increase Employee Value to the organization.

The H.R. Challenge here is in changing employee mindset to accepting the new normal.

Another strategic H.R. challenge I foresee, thanks to lean staffing levels, lies in maintaining a work-life balance for the employees. Confucius said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Hence it is said that if you want creative workers, you must give them enough time to play.

Changing employee mindset to the current scenario, and maintaining a work-life balance will be tasks, easier said than done. It will take some serious application from the H.R. department to achieve them.

In summation, the Human Resources Manager’s delight lies in the fact that through these challenging times, their mug of joy overflows. For, the advantages of the current situation far outweigh their demitasse of woes!

This article has appeared in ET HOSPITALITY WORLD.COM December 2020

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Ethically Speaking

“Wishing you many happy returns on your sixtieth birthday,” so saying, I called my friend, Mahesh. He replied, “Rajan thanks for the greetings, but to be frank, my birthday is on 5th December and not today, on 2nd April. For the purpose of saving one academic year, this date of 02nd April was indicated by my father on my school admission form.”

The above is not an isolated event, it happens frequently.

During the Chemistry lab period in the PUC days, there were experiments on identifying an element defined by sequence; by performing the dry test, wet test, and then the confirmatory tests. The demonstrator used to tell us ‘during exams, don’t waste time on the first two tests; go straight to the confirmatory test, and if you get time, do the previous ones. Bypassing the system with false birth certificates or taking short cuts was the name of the game.

Engineering Drawing was one of the time-consuming subjects in college. Unlike the CAD/ CAM environment today, where designs are made on computers, we had to make elaborate engineering drawings. Each assignment made on an A2/A3 drawing sheet needed an elaborate setup of a drawing board, mini drafter, T-square, compass, divider, set square, etc. It used to take around 2-3 hours to complete an assignment. The practise of GT (Glass Tracing) among hostelites was quite common. The GT procedure was simple. An assignment completed by a sincere student was glass traced by other students. A table lamp was kept in a bucket covered with a glass sheet; the blank sheet was aligned over the completed sheet. The lit lamp helped the student trace the original and the assignment could be completed in no time. The general consensus among the student fraternity was that the guy who took all the effort to complete the drawing in the 1st angle, 3rd angle, and a sectional view, was an idiot, while the people who copied it in one fifth the time were intelligent and smart.

In one humorous instance, Iqbal Singh, from the Civil Engineering batch, was so ‘meticulous’ that apart from tracing the drawing, he copied the name and the roll number of the original student! The scene is no different today, for several agencies offer ready-made projects for engineering students for a fee.

A certain lecturer used to share with his colleagues, his life-long ambition of becoming a Vice-Chancellor (VC) of a university. Over a while, he moved up the hierarchy of senior lecturer, reader, and finally became a professor. A post for a VC was advertised in the papers. He applied but came to know that, more than merit, caste and money played an important role in the recruitment for this position. He managed to raise around Rs 3 crores for this, yet he was shocked to see the post eventually going to the highest bidder. The professor pulled back his application.

Much later, an advertisement appeared for another VCs post. This time, he knew the crucial role of politicians and middlemen. He developed contacts, moved heaven and earth to raise around Rs. 5 crores; despite being questioned by his friends, from an ethics and ROI perspective. The attempt for this second time to the post also eluded him. He committed suicide later.

I used to believe that such respectable positions need not be advertised but were filled by selecting eminent people with exceptional credentials. As Nirad Chowdhury wrote in the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, an Indian’s faith in a bribe is infinite and unshakable. It is an infallible remedy for all workday inconveniences.

Academicians have used the terms ethics and morality interchangeably. Some people think that morality is personal and normative whereas ethics indicates the standards of good and bad as decided by community settings. It can be also looked at from a perspective of means and the ends. People have their own yardsticks in justifying their actions. As Robert Pirsig writes in the Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good – need we ask anyone to tell us these things? The three examples to illustrate the point are:

  1. Ratan Tata used to say, “Why should I spend time with bureaucrats in Delhi? They are supposed to do their work and I am supposed to do mine.” On the other hand, (the late) Dhirubhai Ambani had a different take. “You offer naivedya to God while visiting a temple. Why not deal with bureaucrats on a similar line?”
  2. The Karnataka Vidhana Soudha has an inscription on its façade: ‘Government’s work is God’s Work.’ I overheard a babu saying, “Anyway it is God’s work. Why should I?”
  3. A departmental store was run by two partners for 30 years. The 2nd generation was to take over the business. The first partner’s son who had passed out from an elite management institute asked his father, “We have learned all the aspects of running a business, the one topic I am not clear is about ethics. Can you elaborate on the same? The father explained, “it is quite elementary. Imagine a lady buys a dress for Rs. 1000 and while paying at the billing counter she inadvertently pays Rs, 2000. Now my son, the question of ethics comes, should we tell our partner or not.”

My niece Rupali Patil teaches in an upmarket public school in Whitefield Bengaluru. She narrated some interesting anecdotes while conducting on-line examinations. The students are asked to keep the laptop at a specific angle to ensure they do not look at any material on their lap while writing answers. Parents are requested not to walk around or prompt the students while answering the question papers. Some parents have written papers themselves. One audacious father dared to sit underneath the table and prompt the answers. When asked how it was detected, I gleaned that the student used to normally score 10 out of 50, but scored 40 in that exam; he subsequently boasted to his friends how his father had helped him.

While websites like exam.net are used to ensure that students do not lose their focus on the screen, or use the second browser to get answers, by locking down; ingenious means are used to work around the system.

The school being in Whitefield, Bengaluru the following conjectures were thought of:

  1. Considering the location and the school fees, is it safe to assume that a majority of student’s families belong to the upper middle class, well-educated with Graduate/Post Graduate degrees?
  2. Is it safe to assume that the parents are working in renowned MNCs (Indian or International) with well-established guidelines on Vision, Mission, Values, and Ethics policies? If so, should there be a divergence in behaviour between the professional life of a manager vis-à-vis that of a parent?

Education can be perceived as an end to realize one’s potential, or it can be simply a means to get a job in earning a livelihood. The former makes us holistically look at life, whereas the latter makes it transactional. Philosopher Immanuel Kant says that a rational human being is an end in himself and not a means to achieve something. When our attitude and behaviour are oriented towards means, quality becomes the main casualty.

Abraham Lincoln in his letter to his son’s headmaster wrote:

“Teach him if you can that a dollar earned is of far more value than five found. In school teach him it is far more honourable to fail than to cheat. Teach him to have faith in his own ideas, even if everyone tells him they are wrong!”

On a personal note, now when I call my friends, with trepidation I first ask “Before wishing you birthday greetings, is today your actual or official birthday?”

We set our own standards: “Jahaan hum khade rahtey hain; wahin se kataar shuru hoti hai!” – Wherever I (honorific) stand, the queue starts from there!.

Jai ho ‘Atmanirbhar’ Bharat!

Rajan Parulekar – Director, Hospitality Paradigm

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The 7 deadly Hospitality Marketing P’s

How deadly is the paradigm of the seven P’s of hospitality marketing?

Half a century ago, Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock, was credited with a profound statement. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write. It will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

These onerous times for hospitality providers suggest one silver lining. It gives us time to re-assess our marketing mix and strategies, even as the pandemic continues to rule the roost. The lean time thus forced upon us offers us plenty of scope to alter our marketing course.

Is your mix of products or services compelling enough for your guest?

To answer this, check if your paradigm of the seven P’s of hospitality marketing is effective and deadly enough. To remain competitive, constantly re-evaluate your business activities for Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process, and Physical evidence.

1. Product: The pandemic has forced us to expand our range of products and services, to save our P&L. We have seen overnight adaptations and new entrants in our product range. Socially distanced products, menus, drive-in services, conveyor & robotic services, cloud kitchens, DIY meals, hygiene, office space are some examples. Some will fade away like a house built on sand as the industry is experimenting and grappling in new territories. Hence the need for constant re-evaluation.

Regularly ask yourselves these questions.

  • How best may you evolve your products or services to stay relevant to your guest?
  • From the client’s perspective, is your product or service desirable and differentiated enough from anything else available? If so, what is it?
  • If not, could you develop an area of differentiated superiority?
  • Should you be offering this product or service at all in the current marketplace?

2. Price: An almost non-existent to low demand has collapsed prices like a pack of cards. To feed the cash flow, pricing has been humbled by the drastic tilt in favour of the customer. Market economics flows from the supply-demand curve and the hospitality industry is on the wrong side of this curve. One cannot discount such that you keep losing in this ‘zero-sum game’ with your guest. Yet, discount you must, to claim a stake of the reduced pie.

In this scenario, question yourself:

  • How do I establish a value proposition in the customer’s mind that exceeds the price of the product or service?
  • What is my base value price (aka reservation price) below which I make losses and must therefore avoid?
  • Am I able to identify my customer’s reservation price, i.e. the highest they are ready to spend for my product?
  • How do I maintain my positioning and brand personality against my price?

3. Place: Franchising, locational H.K. services, food delivery, outdoor catering, food trucks, online, mobile, immersive through virtual reality, etc. are some examples. Barring a few exceptions, hotels have traditionally used their own location as the sole place to promote their products.

A popular apothegm states “if the mountain won’t come to you, you must go to the mountain.”

We have learned this lesson robustly during this epidemic. Customers have a morbid fear of infection and avoid coming to you; so, we have adapted by going to the customer!

A most recent example is that of a Michelin-starred Hungarian restaurant Costes in Budapest. It is staging a skyline dining event on the Budapest Eye Ferris wheel to generate sales in a coronavirus-proof environment.

Explore the new paradigm for Place in your marketing strategy:

  • What creative new distribution options are there for customers to experience your product at their convenience?
  • Do these distribution options help overcome the customer’s hygiene concerns?
  • Will these new options help increase your market footprint?
  • How can location and logistics be custom-crafted to suit both sides?

4. Promotion: This includes all the ways you tell your customers about your products or services and how you then market and sell to them. It is a continuous WIP (work-in-progress) and even small changes in your promotion tactics can lead to dramatic results.

Figure out the following:

  • How best can I grab eyeballs and interest my potential customer.
  • What is my message strategy? What and how must I communicate it?
  • Can I identify my optimum promotional mix (choice of relevant media: advertising, PR, direct marketing, digital marketing, and sales promotion)?
  • How to harness the growing power of Digital Media? (Through social media, content marketing, video marketing, influencer marketing, building communities, targeting & retargeting. Also, through contextual messaging to customer cohorts, and hyper-contextualising to segments of your audience)

5. People: In our labour-intensive industry, your employees represent your product. Hence, they impact the customer’s impression of your brand as they represent your company in alignment with broader messaging strategies. This is achievable only when employees feel they are treated fairly and earn wages sufficient to support their daily lives.

Introspect on these:

  • In your updated manning, have you processed the right people off the bus and the right people on it?
  • Have these right people been given the right seats? Are your employees round pegs in round holes, or are they square pegs?
  • What are the skill gaps you need to bridge? Have new skills to service shifting customer expectations and market changes been imparted.
  • Are your associate’s interactions with the guest delightful? Are service breakdowns and complaints handled positively?

6. Process: When I wanted to buy an RO filter, top of mind was the brand ‘Kent’ thanks to its effective marketing. I called the toll-free number, sent emails and after a few days of frustrating follow-up, gave up. Eventually, I landed up buying ‘Zero B by Ion Exchange’- a brand that hardly markets itself in comparison to Kent.

Some hotels ask a telephonic banquet sales enquiry client to send their query on email as a verification process. Only then does their banquet sales respond with an offer to the client. Contemplate, how many bookers would abandon the query right at this initial stage!

The best of marketing strategies are of no use if your processes do not serve the customer effectively.

Your SOPs (standard operating procedures) must live and breathe within your team members. Therefore, its effectiveness must be regularly monitored and tracked.

Check your processes for the following:

  • Do your SOPs and service mechanisms align with best practices & KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)?
  • How practical are your processes? Do they align with guest delight?
  • Are your processes robust, yet flexible enough to empower your people to engineer guest delight?
  • Does the team regularly assess the RCA (root cause analysis) and OFI (opportunities for improvement) of failures?

7. Physical Evidence: In light of the worldwide epidemic, physical evidence takes a premium position. Over 90% travellers today consider hygiene and health safety as one of three considerations before utilizing travel and hospitality services. They look for touch-free, sanitised physical spaces, minimised and socially distanced services, sanitised and sensitised associates, contactless technology, etc.

Understand better, in light of today’s crisis:

  • How do you reassure your customers of the environment/place you provide for them?
  • Is your facility, website, design, spatial layout, signage, and packaging attuned to the current need of the guest?
  • Are the ambient conditions in keeping with the health and hygiene of the guests?
  • Have you been able to minimise physical touch points using technology and simplified processes?

Keep in mind that these seven deadly Hospitality Marketing P’s aka ‘marketing mix’ revolve around your guest. Also, do not lose sight of your core business model, for, in the long-term, it is your fulcrum.

Four teasers are posed for each of the above variables in the mix. Bench-press and challenge yourself for many more, along with your core team. The final marketing mix evolving from this effort must be tweaked constantly, yet principally to the guest psychographic and demographic. This is when the seven P’s of your Hospitality Marketing Mix will remain deadly and competitive.

In summary, the literate marketer always will be one who learns, unlearns, and relearns his marketing mix!

This article has appeared in ET HOSPITALITY WORLD.COM January 2021

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The four noble truths

The first sermon Buddha delivered after enlightenment was on the Four Noble Truths.

  1. The truth of suffering
  2. The truth of the origin of suffering
  3. The truth of the goal
  4. The truth of the path to the goal

Quite often it is felt that Buddha was pessimistic and was against the good things in life when he uttered the first noble truth that ‘Life is Suffering’ (Dukkha). It is not so. The term suffering can be interpreted in terms of day-to-day anxieties, irritations, etc. When we are all by ourselves, the thought of something missing, that we are not our ideal self, the current problems, start troubling us. The truth is: we do not think, the thoughts happen to us by default; without our choice. These random thoughts include the pain of earning a living, keeping the near and dear ones (and also the professional colleagues) happy, job uncertainties, etc. For those going through an existential dilemma, the pain of being me, the purpose of my life, Who Am I maybe also a part of constant irritation. The constant chattering of the mind from past to future is THE first noble truth, the truth of suffering!

How do we address this perennial irritation? We feel by working hard in our existing jobs or business, we may be able to address the uncertain future. Some people feel that the latest mobile or car may make them happy. Those with an intellectual/spiritual disposition of mind may resort to reading self-help books or attend spiritual retreat/personality development programs. People work on these different options hoping to calm their chattering minds. But beyond a superficial feeling of well-being, the pain resurfaces!

Do self-help books really help? In the US alone, self-help is around a $50 Billion industry. Despite being the pioneers in self-help along with the latest objects of desire, the country has an alarming crime and divorce rate, with a pervasive feeling of loneliness. Bhutan, a country without a commercial self-help industry is considered as one of the happiest countries. Incidentally research shows that people who are dependent on self-help books invariably tend to buy another book within the next 18 months! Paradoxically it is only the (fake) Gurus who make money, leaving their subjects poor, and the latter looking out for new techniques all the time! Our constant endeavour to drive away the pain either by acquiring new objects or self-improvement techniques is the root cause of suffering; the second Noble Truth.

After running on this hedonistic/spiritual treadmill for long; somehow the mind gets exhausted. You say to yourself: enough is enough, and stop trying! You accept the way you are; you accept your chattering mind. And lo behold, magic happens! There is a gap between consecutive thoughts. Your thought process slows down. Now you start seeing gaps, the emptiness between two thoughts, and you start arriving at peace with yourself. Your mind shifts from the past/future treadmill to the present moment! This is the third noble truth, the truth of the goal.

But these gaps are intermittent, ephemeral. If you start craving for the gaps, you go back to the first noble truth. The truth of suffering!

The media has conditioned us in making us believe that multitasking is good and that one should try to compress as many activities in the shortest possible time, which can make us productive and in turn lead to happiness. Nothing can be farther from the truth than this view. While watching TV, if a commercial appears, immediately we turn to the remote. We drink coffee while watching TV, we read a newspaper while having breakfast, and we WhatsApp messages during meals. We are trying to keep our minds busy to avoid the pain of the chattering mind. Most of these activities we do are in an auto-pilot mode: fingers on the mobile, with eyes on the TV screen, while sipping tea; but with the mind chattering at the speed of light about an important client meeting!

Let us understand the fourth noble truth, the truth of the path to the goal. Imagine you are making a cup of tea. Pour the water into the kettle, feel the sensation. Watch the water boiling and feel the steam and the warmth. Pour the tea powder into the kettle, smell the aroma of tea leaves in the boiling water. Allow the tea to percolate, watch your mind while pouring the tea slowly in the cup. Sit comfortably in your chair, and start drinking it with mindfulness. Observe the sensations at your lips, the tongue, and the way it travels down your food pipe. While doing this, you are in the present moment all the time and appreciating the tea with all the five senses: the aroma, the taste,  the colour, the warmth of the cup as well as sensation while tea is going down the gullet. When you perform every action in a similar mindful way, you are disconnecting the chattering mind and that is the fourth noble truth: the truth of the path to the goal! Practise even ordinary activities with total awareness and complete attention. Let it be choiceless.

All actions are intrinsically noble: sending a mail to a client or a WhatsApp message to a friend is in no way superior to cleaning the sink or washing the clothes! You do not have to outsource the latter activities to servants thinking them (both the activity as well as the servant) to be inferior! Every activity whether small or big, if done mindfully leads to salvation! And that is the truth of the path to the goal.

When we are multitasking with a chattering mind hovering in the past or the future, we are nowhere; acting like a zombie, no different than a robot – but perennially suffering. A robot in a way is still better, at least it does not suffer!

When we are doing one task at a time with complete awareness, we are in the present moment. That is the journey from nowhere to now and here, a paradigm shift from confusion to enlightenment! Be Happy!

Rajan Parulekar – Director, Hospitality Paradigm

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