Tata Interactive Systems

Arigatou Gozaimasu

I have never written a story or an experience of this sort. I have visited Japan once in the past and worked with a lot of Japanese companies like NEC, Fujitsu, and Toshiba, to name a few. I had faint memories (none, to be honest) of my last visit. During this visit to Japan, what touched me was the hospitality and the kindness of the people. I have often heard about the Japanese being tough, difficult negotiators but what I saw of them during this visit was completely contrary. They are professionals in their field, they ask the right questions, and more so, are extremely hard working.

I always thought that Indians work hard, stay late in office, speak to clients at odd hours, etc. And don’t we complain that we spend so much time in the office and hence have less time to spend with our family? The Japanese professionals are out to work when we were having a morning walk at 6 a.m. They were still in office when we were packing our bags to go back to our hotel. Most of the senior guys are in office until midnight and this is their daily routine. Wonder how they can work so hard, every day.

During our consulting assignment we asked what is a normal day for a 4th grade kid is like. This was their response.

• Wake up at 7 a.m.
• Public/private school from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Extra-curricular activities like football, baseball, karate, etc up to 6 p.m.
• Special schools for another 3 hours (Now you know why I qualified the second point). While the public schools are in the same locality where they stay, the kid has to travel to go to a good special school. Sometimes this travel takes about an hour by train one way. By the time the kid gets home it is well past 11 p.m.
• Once they are back home, they would like to play games.

So much pressure on kids from such an early age and we talk about how school education in India puts so much pressure on kids and how there is too much competition.

Another interesting characteristic of the Japanese is the punctuality. Be it trains, be it for dinner, or be it for meetings. You would rarely see anyone walk. They are always running, to catch a train, to go for a meeting.

An interesting statistic to note is the average delay of a Shinkansen (Bullet train) in a year is 0.4 minutes. This includes delays caused by typhoon, rains, earthquakes, snowfall, etc. Punctuality is not by accident but by design and it is taught and ingrained in children right from an early age.

After having visited and stayed in Japan for 2 weeks I think there is a lot to learn from the Japanese.
Arigatou Gozaimasu means “thank you very much” in Japanese.

(Anand Subramanian is Head – Systems Design with Tata Interactive Systems)

Happy Planet

Happy Planet is an animated short film about the beauty of life on earth. The film eliminates dialogue and speaks with its visuals and music. Much like life with its unexpected surprises, the flow of visuals in the film is organic. The interplay among the creatures or between the creatures and the environment in each shot creates the visual room and space for the next interplay. These visuals and the movement within them blend seamlessly alludes to the connected life that all we share. The film ends on a poignant note – a child’s hand appears on screen, requesting us humans to take responsibility for protecting and conserving our environment.

Happy Planet was the outcome of an animation workshop conducted by Dhimant Vyas for our animators, for many of whom it was their first foray into claymation. The concept and storyboard was done by the entire team, under Dhimant’s guidance and direction.

The setting and characters were created by the whole team working together, they are intentionally kept realistic or semi-realistic because the movement of the characters could not be made too exaggerated and cartoonish – considering they were made out of a rigid material. The characters are made out of clay – and are mostly relief work on glass. It was a challenge to give them a three-dimensional look on the screen. The team studied wild life videos for reference in character design, and to get a sense of timing for the character movement.

Each sequence was animated by a different animator. It was a challenge to link different animators’ ideas effectively and make smooth transitions between the sequences.

We hope you enjoy watching Happy Planet. Even more so, we hope the message in it impresses you enough to make you contribute your bit to make our planet happier.

(Happy Planet is a claymation (stop motion) film directed by Dhimant Vyas, Deputy Head – Animation at Tata Interactive Systems.)

To Stay or To Go?

On one of my trips to the U.S., I was in New York and didn’t have much to do, so I decided – even though it was snowing – to walk around Manhattan. Every few blocks my nose and ears would freeze, and I would enter a coffee shop or a Walgreens and hang around till I regained sensation in those organs.

One day around lunch, I entered an Italian pizzeria and ordered a slice of pizza. The person serving me asked, “You stay here?”, and I thought the guy wanted to know if I was from New York. I told him I was from India, and this was my first trip to New York, and blah blah blah... The guy gave me a strange look and asked again very slowly, “You stay here and eat?”, and that’s when it struck me – he wanted to know if I’d be eating my pizza there or taking it away.

So I learned that, “To stay” in an eatery means you’re eventually going to grab a chair / stool and eat, while, “To go” means you will take the food and leave. This bit of knowledge helped me tremendously in Austin and in Miami when I had to order food and, more often than not, it would be Spanish-only Mexicans serving me. However, they did understand, “To go” and, “To stay.” 

Evil Tools or Evil Uses?

I've noticed a slowly growing trend in the marketplace, and I think it's time it's questioned.

It has become quite in vogue to bad-mouth and shun the use of Powerpoint in presentations.

I was first exposed to this stance in a presentation by Edward Tufte (author of several fantastic books on information visualization and communication).  He made a mark for himself by declaring that "Powerpoint is Evil", both in a WIRED article and in a longer whitepaper.

More recently, Elliot Masie dubbed his newly minted "Learning 200X" conferences to be "PPT-free Zones", instructing presenters to leave their slides at home in hopes that it would foster greater discussion and interaction amongst attendees (and this underlying objective may have been accomplished, as the sessions *did* move from being lectures to conversations).

Just last week I spent a terrific day in Washington DC talking about Stories and Conversations at an event hosted by the Smithsonian Associates.  One of the great speakers that presented was Larry Prusak of IBM KM fame.  I really enjoyed his talk, which was PPT-free, but instead of simply quietly adopting that presentation stance and moving ahead, he made a pointed announcement of his disdain of Powerpoint.  He even went so far as to say that he uninstalled the app from the MS Office Suite on his computer.

Finally (and completely serendipitously), this month's 'Big Question' on the Learning Curcuits Blog is precisely on this topic - the What/When/Why of PPT.  The BQ seems to have been prompted by an Austrailian press article that uses Dr. John Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory to explain why most PPTs are so head-droppingly awful (and the link makes terrific sense to me).

In all of these cases (and the dozens I haven't mentioned, some of which are here), I can't help but think that the primary flag-wavers of the Anti-Powerpoint movement are projecting their disgust and anger in the wrong direction.  Powerpoint is simply a tool, like a hammer, or a lawnmower.  In and of itself, it's not really something that can be deemed "evil".  It is the way the tool is leveraged that gives it "value" (good or bad).

Don't get me wrong - I've been the victim (and... umm... the perpetrator) of more than a few AWFUL powerpoint presentations.  You know the ones - where the audience is given a live (often monotone) narration of (text-laden) slides that are linearly displayed.  I am in no way defending this embarrassment of communication - I'm simply pointing out that the fault sits with the *presenter*, not the tool (despite the fact that the tool may make it easy for the lazy to use it in bone-headed ways).

Just because a hammer can be used to both frame a house for the victims of a natural disaster and murder someone, that doesn't make it inherently "evil" or "good".  Those value-laden terms can only be reasonably used to describe the users of the tool based on what they chose to do with it.  When Larry said he had removed Powerpoint from his computer, for its nature of promoting one-way communication, I wanted to ask him if he had also removed Word?  According to the logic of his argument for uninstalling Powerpoint, any word processor should also be shunned - after all, documents are monologues, not dialogs, right?