TATA Interactive Systems

TIS Runs The Mumbai Marathon - 2009

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Earth Day 2008!

TATA Interactive Systems Runs The Mumbai Marathon 2008

On January 20, 2008, TATA Interactive Systems (TIS) celebrated team spirit by participating in the fifth annual Mumbai Marathon. TIS has been running the marathon for three consecutive years in support of students with learning disabilities—extending its initiatives beyond schools and the teaching community.

This year the participating TISians were sporting T-shirts promoting the message of the TLDF 2007—Together Let’s Define the Future, and even carried a banner spreading awareness of the cause. Click here for more pics.

English-wallah

For the past year, I have been working at TIS as its first American employee based in India.  It has been a thrilling experience; living in India has not always been easy, but it’s always been interesting. I’ve learned so much at TIS that it’s hard to know where to start, so I thought I’d start with my first day.

On my first day, still jet-lagged and overwhelmed, I was pleased to find that I at least had no problem understanding people’s accents…until lunchtime. At lunch, my new friends took me into the cafeteria, where their work accents, good for conference calls and in-laws, gave way to a fast talking, and, to my ears, nearly incomprehensible banter.  It turns out this is a common phenomenon; people unconsciously talk and write one way for business and another way in their personal lives.  But at that point I could hardly keep track.  People kept weaving in and out of Hindi and using English words in ways I just couldn’t understand.

Indian English is a great language; brash and breezy.  It varies enormously from one person to the next, depending on their education and where their parents are from.  Some people switch v and w, others pronounce both like Americans pronounce w. Some people pronounce th like Americans do, others just stress the t a little more (give it a little spit at the end…you can do it.)  Less educated people speak a functional, pidgin English that lets them communicate across India’s innumerable local languages. Indian English incorporates innumerable Hindi words, such as “wallah,” which basically means a guy. A rickshaw driver is therefore a rickshaw-wallah, a vegetable seller is a subzi-wallah, a newspaper delivery guy is a paper-wallah, and so forth. 

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.” 

The Fun Run

Like all corporate citizens caught up in the daily rush to create and deliver great products and services, TIS-ites are also prone to some amount of social guilt. The ‘I wish I could do something for my country, city, neighbourhood’ thought is something most of us have toyed with. The Kolkata Marathon, held on 25th February, 2007, which invited people to run for their city, provided the opportunity to convert those thoughts into actions. Even then, the process did not begin smoothly, and the reason was this.

“6.30 am on a Sunday morning?? You must be kidding!”
“The last time I ran, there was a mad dog behind me”
“I can run 10-hour programs but running 4.2 kms…no way!”

Amidst all this, somebody said the magic words “Don’t be boring” and that did it. Because ‘boring’ is one of those unforgivable states of being as far as TIS is concerned and one by one the employees rose to the occasion, like crusaders on the march to spread the religion of the interesting. We decided to take this opportunity to increase awareness about Learning Disability in India, LD being a key community that TIS supports. The slogan for the banner read ‘Use Your Feet to Lend a Hand’ and our T-shirts sported the Learning Disability logo. If, at this stage, anyone was still wondering why they had registered, they had their reason and a good one too.

Go Hawks!

When I was asked to go onsite to Iowa City for three months, I was a little hesitant. It was more than just Mumbai to Iowa City – I’m sure you’ll agree that a change of temperature from an average of 30C to one of –20C is not particularly pleasant. However, I agreed. And here I am.

The flight was fairly uneventful, but I did have an interesting conversation at the immigration counter in Chicago (my port of entry).

Sam (the immigration guy with a friendly smile): So this isn’t your first time visit to the U.S.?
Me: No, I’ve been here before.
Sam: Where are you headed?
Me: Iowa City.
Sam: And where did you go the last time?
Me: (suspicious tone) San Francisco.
Sam (grimacing): Yikes! You’re gonna hate it in Iowa City then. It’s in the middle of nowhere. And compared to San Francisco it’s, well, BORING! Alright here you go…go through Gate 7…

As I waited for my connecting flight in O’Hare, I mulled over what Sam said. “Flee” was the first thought that came to my mind, but it was too late; my flight was announced and I needed to rush.

A blast of cold air literally paralyzed me when I stepped out of the airport at Cedar Rapids, IA. I rushed into the first taxi I found and headed to the apartment I was to be sharing with a colleague.

Commuting The Great NY-NJ Divide

“What? You go to Manhattan every day? Ayyayayay!” my New Jersey taxi driver shakes his head in total disbelief.

“You sure you want to commute every day from New Jersey?” My Madison Avenue project manager asks with something bordering on pity.

It’s not an emotional divide that one crosses so nonchalantly every day, you see. It takes a special kind of madness and loser-ishness to choose to go back to NJ after seeing the splendor of Upper East Side everyday.

I do it because I like being part of the commuters’ sub-culture. It’s like a covenant, with arcane rituals, rigid rules, and unspoken demands for conformity.

You pick up the rules by subconscious osmosis—within 24 hours, you know which part of the train you should get in to get down at the most convenient spot at the destination; you pick up that the correct etiquette of traveling in jam packed trains is not to make physical or eye-contact as much as possible; you understand that on the narrow escalator, the right lane is slow and left lane is fast; and you know how to pace yourself so that you don’t run over people or get run over by them.

I also like the drama with which I get delivered into Manhattan. First, the train that has been chugging happily along the tired and slightly depressing suburbs of NJ suddenly gets into a long, dark, and mysterious tunnel. It is so long and deep that your ears pop due to the pressure difference.

Then you are thrown into the utterly chaotic, bewildering, and labyrinthine maze of the NY Penn Station. There, you are borne by the jostling crowd, attacked by competing aromas from different eating joints, startled by the sporadic announcements interspersed with (for some really strange reason) classical instrumental music, and made to climb up/down at least 100 steps (I counted) before finding yourself on the street or on a subway platform.

Then of course there is the quintessential NY experience of subway travel. Filled with the regulation junkies, musicians, sharply dressed professionals, individuals talking to themselves, school kids and tourists, it’s a melting point of everything that you have read and heard about New York.

Finally, I just love the way Manhattan bursts on me as a revelation and a reward after almost 90 minutes of commute. As I walk past the decrepit panhandler, past the old newspaper vendor, past the hot dog cart, past the shop specializing in nylons, and on to Madison Avenue, I always feel like a million dollars. Because as my friend succinctly puts it, “It doesn’t get bigger than this, baby!” At least not in the Milky Way.

(Priya Thiagarajan is Deputy Head – Instructional Design, Products & Skills Training Practice at TIS, and a recently besotted NY fan)

Eternal Gandhi - A Multi-Media Exposition

What does the name Gandhi conjure up for generation Next? 

A faint recollection from faded history books...or perhaps the face on the greenbacks that provides us with spending power...or even India's happy relatives from a certain central European nation? 

I would have voted for one of these before I saw the light at the Eternal Gandhi multi-media exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA). It is a uniquely innovative attempt and "first of its kind" digital take on the Mahatma's life and work. Cutting edge technological magic has been used to weave a vivid tapestry in which you are not a distant observer but are part of the living fabric design. 

From the moment you step into the exposition hall, you are immersed into a fascinating dialogue on the life and times of the Mahatma. That's all very well you may say. How is all this relevant to me as a part of TIS? What will I gain from a visit to this technological marvel? Here is what you will gain: 

• A starting point for innovative presentation of well-known content (Compare a films division documentary with the Eternal Gandhi)
• A peep into the future of learning technology
• An understanding of flow and design that is learner-driven rather than instructor-driven
• The "WOW" factor - Ideas that can be easily interwoven into TIS' eLearning projects 

I am sure you will come up with thousands of other ideas. Go on! Make your day!! Grab a few friends and visit the Eternal Gandhi. 

Venue:

National Gallery of Modern Art
Sir Cowasji Jahangir Public Hall,
Mahatma Gandhi Road,
Near Regal Cinema, Colaba,
Mumbai - 400 032

Timings: 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM

Monday Closed 

(Shardul is an Instructional Design Consultant at Tata Interactive Systems)

The Mumbai Marathon 2006: TIS Runs For Learning Disability

(above:Tadashi Horiuchi, TIS's Head - Japan Operations with his wife at the Mumbai Marathon 2006)

TIS's Tadashi Horiuchi in action at the Mumbai Marathon 2006.

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The Mumbai Marathon 2006: Geetha's Perspective

I was part of the TIS team that took part in the Mumbai Marathon 2006 yesterday (15-Jan-06). While the number of participants, with apparently more than 20,000 people running in the different categories, was overwhelming, what to me was even more amazing was the crowd. There were spectators on all sides, dressed for the occasion, craning necks to get a view of the predominantly amateur runners, and waving handmade placards, flags and the like. Some of them apparently even bought biscuits and water off their own money and provided these to the runners.

What made these people wake up early on a Sunday morning, get on to the train or bus or whatever modes of transport they took (the roads were mostly closed for private vehicles, so that could have been an option for most of these folks), and stand in the middle of the hot roads, cheering people they don’t know from Adam? What’s it in for them?

Is there a lesson we can learn from the marathon, from an e-learning perspective? We keep spending a lot of time and energy trying to build in the “what’s in it for me” element into the design of our products. Is there something here? Or am I just forcing connections where there are none?

(Geetha Krishnan heads Instructional Design at Tata Interactive Systems)

Smelling the Sweat

(Priya Thiagarajan shares her experience of conducting a functional induction training session at Tata Interactive Systems)

I walk into the room. Six eager faces turn to look at me. They are newly hired writers, anticipating an three-hour overview of writing for Simulation-based Learning Objects (SimBLs®). I greet them and without another word, walk around the room, accessing a sample SimBL® in each of their computers. I then look around the room with a grin.

“Here’s your task for the morning. Go through the SimBL® I have provided and deconstruct the design. Tell me what ID considerations and decisions have been taken while making this. You have two hours to do this,” I tell them.

And amidst shocked gasps, I walk out.

All the new hires have English literature background and the SimBL® I have asked them to deconstruct is one on trading patterns, designed for management students. Have I given them too tough an assignment? Perhaps they are not ready yet to do such a high-level task? Perhaps I should’ve hung around to help them?

I brush aside such “mother-hen” anxieties born out of years of writing instruction text and “Help” section. “Believe in the process!” I tell myself, putting my shaky new faith in “Exploratory Learning” and “Constructivist model” to test.

I put my head around the door an hour later and am received by a chorus of distressed appeals: “We don’t know what to do!”. Although my heart sinks, I step in and look around with mock sternness. “I can’t believe that you guys didn’t understand such a simple thing! Ok, tell me what the SimBL® is all about,” I ask them.

Little by little, aided by questions from me, the class constructs the learning objectives, structure, design considerations, rationale behind the interactivities, and concept taught in the SimBL®.

“It worked! It worked!” the refrain jumps around like an excited child in my head. I look around the class with a grin that I can hardly conceal and say, “You guys have cracked it! What are you complaining about? Now, prepare a detailed report. I’ll be back in an hour.” (That is my Behaviorist side showing up!)

That was three weeks ago—I am now all set to meet another batch of new hires. I am looking forward to put them through the same grind.

Oh yes, I'm not only a convert, but an evangelist of "Exploratory Learning" and "Constructivist Model" now.

(Priya Thiagarajan is a Senior Instructional Design consultant)

Happy Holidays From The TIS Team

We are delighted to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year!

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