Aparna Chandrasekhar has trained tens of thousands of people for IT companies in India.
It's a skill that came to the fore when newly minted Indian companies had to scale rapidly
to meet the new opportunities that opened up in the early 2000s from US outsourcing.
Her linguistic abilities that served her well as a grammar teacher came handy for neutralizing
regional accents and she found her purpose.
She went on to manage client roles and responsibilities for revenue generation.
And then she found that being a coach and helping successive generations is what she
enjoys the most.
Listen to how a career defined by a trend created careers that changed the lives of
thousands in India.
This is episode 16 of My First Job, the podcast that covers engaging career journeys.
And every single one is full of twists, turns and insights.
My name is Venu Gopal Nair, and the host of the podcast and CEO of Ideascape Communications,
an advertising agency into branding, creative and design.
So settle in, sit back and enjoy the conversation.
Aparna, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
I'm sure that as a trainer, as a facilitator and as the number of programs that you've
conducted, you obviously had ways of starting a session which get you into this fray.
So we'll start there.
I think the facilitators trick is to actually arrive way early before anybody but the security
people were around even.
Sometimes they let you into the room so you know what the room is like, but greeting each
one as they come in.
But that's helped because by the time we start the session, there are five or six familiar
faces already.
When you say, hi, I'm from here and they're already nodding.
And then I say, like Pradeep said here, and you can already see the smiles.
So my go to line there when I bring in names is Sholay.
In there, there is a dialogue where Amitabh Bachchan asks Hema Malini, she says,
What is your name, Basanti?
Because she starts every sentence with Basanti does this, Basanti does that.
By the time the program begins, I know Pradeep, Leena, Rajesh, at least five of them.
That's been my trip.
That's a wonderful way of establishing.
They see you one on one and get a chance to interact with you right to the point when
they come in.
So you're putting them at ease.
And I think this is one of those wonderful insights which seemed simple on the face of
it.
But it's not so simple until you actually see the effect that it has on the sessions
that you conduct.
But let's go back to how your career started and evolved to where it is today.
You grew up in Baroda, Bombay and Baroda.
We lived very close to the other railway station in my very, very early years.
I think I shocked my parents by saying I wanted to become an engine driver.
I don't know whether they really took me seriously, but I could see the look of horror on their
faces.
I was nonchalant about it.
I saw this big thing, powerful, and I saw the driver as this person who had power and
capacity to take people to their destination.
I mean, this would change every day.
So it would be a doctor when I saw a doctor in action, an actor when I saw someone, a
trapeze artist.
It just went through the whole gamut until I had a fabulous English teacher.
She was such a kind person in addition to doing her work.
And I suddenly wanted to speak like her, look like her, be an English teacher.
I think my parents breathe the big sigh of relief.
While I had the marks to go into medicine and engineering, I actually happily went into
literature.
So my parents had to come and tell my teachers that I was doing this out of choice.
What are the kinds of things that were then going through your mind where you would go
next?
So completely aimless, had no idea about a career in mind.
I knew I wanted to teach English.
I didn't even know who I wanted to teach English to, whether it was very young kids, whether
it was older adults.
I didn't know what it was.
So I finished my graduation.
I got married, came to Bangalore, studied here.
And then I knew that I wanted to be a college teacher.
I wanted to go on and do a PhD.
I actually did very well and got a gold medalist, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Everybody kind of expected to say, okay, she's going to go on to do her PhD.
But I didn't.
There was a stop gap arrangement.
Somebody had gone on maternity leave.
My MA results were not out.
They said, look, we are desperate for an English teacher.
Can you please fill in for her?
And that's where I went into teaching engineering students and I had to teach them English.
I was three years, maybe four years older than the students.
I tried to wear a bindi, wear heels, look taller, bigger, all of those.
That's where there was a very amusing story.
The person was a cop in a very busy intersection, waved my car and stopped it.
And those days they used to stand on a pedestal kind of a thing.
So he got off the pedestal and I was wondering and what I had done wrong.
I had, but anyway, I stalked out of respect because he flagged me down.
He came in and said, don't you know me?
And I was really upset because I didn't know who he was.
I said, I'm so sorry.
He said, Oh, don't be sorry, madam.
You taught me English.
I just gave the huge sigh of relief.
And as I was driving from there, he just stopped the rest of the traffic.
All eyes were on me.
Literally when he waved his little Maruti car saying you carry on.
So I'll never forget that because sometimes you wonder the rewards of being a teacher
don't really come in the expected places.
They come in the most unexpected of places.
Teachers I've realized are among the most influential people that you didn't know.
They tend to have, especially when they're teaching little classes, their parents are
in positions of power and the teacher is always seen as somebody who makes a big difference
to the lives of people.
You taught there for how long?
Very funny story.
I mean, I literally did two jobs in Bangalore on Palace Road.
There are two colleges opposite each other.
There's Maharani's college and there's home science college.
But I actually taught all substitutes because jobs were not easy to come by.
I had just got my results.
I was not from here.
I didn't speak a word of Kannada.
So all these were loaded against me.
Somehow I just managed.
I did two classes here, crossed the road, went over to the other side and did two other
classes and all for a royal sum of I think 400 rupees in each college.
This was 1986.
But the beautiful part was when you took a bus and came there in majestic, there were
these old booksellers and they sat there and they sold used books.
I lived like a princess because I had, I think I picked up the whole collection of Somerset
mom and everything for some 25 rupees or 50 rupees or something that few hundred rupees
still afforded me.
So it was amazing.
So no complaints there and it was great fun.
Just across the road, the quality of the students and everything was so different.
I had to switch gears later when I went from one place to the other.
Then I found a job and went to Jyothi Nivas College.
This was a girls college and strangely they had their gates locked.
So only women were allowed inside.
I became very popular with my husband's friends who all wanted to pick me up.
So you can imagine why.
So that was good fun because this college had everything from PUC to graduation to post
graduation.
I went in with stars in my eyes.
The big thing was I said, I have to make a difference.
Oh, initially you do all the donkey's work.
You really don't make a difference or don't get to make a difference yet.
I was literally doing what everybody else did not want, which was grammar and all of
the stuff that one has to do.
It's like a visit to the dentist.
So that's what I got.
So I enjoyed myself.
I was just very happy being with students.
Then they introduced a post-graduation course and this was fantastic because they had works
of people like Girish Karnad, Shashi Deshpande.
You didn't find anything on there.
So I suddenly was on my own and again, nobody wanted this because there was no literary
work on them.
I was quite happy to do that, just like an easy flow.
Had fantastic students, did some fantastic stuff there.
Got to meet a lot of people who came in as guests.
I was like a permanent one of the emcees in college.
So my high point there was meeting Rakesh Sharma, astronaut and movie stars and whoever
else they called as an emcee, you get to really hobnob with them and have tea with them.
Those were all the perks of being, I think, a teacher then.
Really strangely, after 12 years of teaching and I wasn't even bored, I was very happy
and suddenly somebody brought this advertisement to me and said, doesn't it look like it's
been written for you?
They wanted somebody with a linguistics literature background who was a language specialist.
And what did they want the person to do?
Take away people's mother tongues and help them understand the American accent.
And I had studied all of these theoretically.
I had no personal experience except for all the movies that I'd watched.
Went in for an interview for a lag.
So this was at a very glamorous place called ITPL.
And in those days, it was like far away, Whitefield.
It was like one of the modern tech parks.
Those days, they were just coming up.
So it had marble corridors, multiple elevators and cafeterias and it looked like a little
bit of mall, fountains, the works.
So I went for the fun of it and I sailed to the interview.
And the next thing I knew was the HR person is asking me, would you like to join us?
What kind of a salary are you expecting?
And that's when I realized that I hadn't even thought about it.
Everything was better than college anyway.
So I went in there and I went in as a training manager.
And when we talk about first job, in the real world, I would say that was my first job.
I would say college was a breeze.
I was a little more than a student just meandering along nicely.
And suddenly there was this whole new world where you had targets.
I had not heard the word appraisal, performance appraisal.
I had not even heard it until I came into first ring, which was the first job that I
had.
And when they said that, I said, I'm sorry, what's that?
And they looked at me very, very strangely to say, where has she come from?
Okay.
So because all the others who were my counterparts and colleagues had come from the corporate
world, I was the only one who was in a mission.
So it was good fun.
What also was fun was the pace at which we worked in college.
When we decide on an idea, we would say, hey, well, let's do it.
And that meant, you know, two months later, six months later, maybe next year, next academic
year here now meant now.
So for me, that was like a moment of reckoning.
Do you remember some of those things that you implemented where now meant now?
Lots of them actually.
So learning, keeping your ears and eyes open.
I would not open my mouth until I was fairly confident of what I was saying because everything
was so new.
Everybody else seemed in comparison so much more with it and knowledgeable.
So I was green behind it.
So I was like this Ustad in college.
Somebody who taught for many years, subject matter expert and all of that.
And in this new place, you were the newbie.
Nobody made me feel that.
I think I felt it myself, but the one big thing I learned, the one life lesson that
I learned there.
So I complained to the HR person about the kind of people that were coming into training.
I think he was a little miffed because I was responsible for training people and making
sure they were ready for the job.
And I complained about that.
So I think he meant it sarcastically.
And at that point, I was completely oblivious to it.
He said, why don't you try hiring them?
And me being me, I said, yeah, sure.
So the next thing I knew I was devising newer tests, getting in better quality people.
In hindsight, I realized that he must have meant that as a challenge to say back off.
And I didn't pick that up at all.
So that was one big thing that I learned to say, hey, if you really want something, go
for it and don't let other people decide what you can or cannot do.
Maybe you don't have the qualifications for it.
I had been doing tests and designing tests forever.
So for me, it was like a logical progression.
Other big thing was working face to face or very, very close proximity to Americans.
I had an American boss.
I would not say no naturally because I came from a large joint family.
I was one of the younger ones.
It was more of a cultural home thing where saying no didn't come naturally.
At the workplace in college, you really didn't get a choice.
It was more hand me down.
People say, hey, this had to be done.
You had to do it.
In this place, almost every Friday evening, my boss would come to me and ask me to do
something additional.
And every time I was just kind of gearing up to go home, there would be additional work.
And every Friday, I ended up extending myself and sitting there.
One day I decided I was designing a course on assertion.
How do you like that?
While I was reading all the course material, I said, it's so easy for me to say all this.
How about practicing it a little bit?
And that Friday, I was gearing up.
I said, okay, now when she comes and asks me, I am going to say no.
So she came truly enough Friday 3.30 or so and said, hey, Aparna, can you do this for
me?
And I said, sorry, no, I won't be able to do it because I'm doing this, this, this.
And I was waiting with bated breath to see what's going to happen.
Is something going to explode?
Is the ceiling going to fall on me?
She turned on her heel and said, okay, and went away.
It was such a let down for me, you know, to say, oh my God, this is it.
This is the consequence.
So I learned to say no and not worry about consequences there.
And I keep thinking about it now to say, had I done that before, so much would have been
different.
Yeah.
It was like a eureka moment for me.
I was worried and terribly, terribly happy at the same time, you know, to say I've discovered
a magic formula and this is right here with me.
Again, this assertion is let's take this between cultures.
You did this to the American boss and you said no, and that worked.
But if you did that in the Indian context, would it have worked as well?
So in college, we didn't really get a chance to say no.
You couldn't say no, because all work came from the higher ups and they were not up for
discussion or negotiation.
But somebody who was senior most really took a stand and said, this is it.
And after that, there was no more revisiting.
So I wonder what it would have been like if I had had an Indian boss.
But I thought of it the other way, you know, I actually thought I was doing fantastically
well.
I didn't even practice on an Indian family member or anything like that and tried it
directly at the big boss.
I was very happy with that.
What about the training itself?
What is the difference that you found when you said you were unhappy with the training
and you came up with a series of tests?
What were some of the things that you changed?
Grammar and all of that.
See, most people can speak well.
The trouble is when they have to write.
Because this was a contact center, they all had to speak.
People were being failed on skills that they were not going to be using at all.
I don't think people need to know whether it's a past participle or a dangling adverb
or anything like that.
I think they really need to be able to use it and they need to be able to figure out.
So there were some hilarious stories from the contact center there.
So we used to teach people to say things in multiple ways, just in case the customer didn't
understand.
So of course, as Indians, we taught them to slow down.
It wasn't necessary to speak in an American accent.
It was more important to highlight the right words, stress on them kind of a thing.
So we had some hilarious experiences.
This was for a credit card company.
So he had to capture the customer's date of birth.
He asked her, ma'am, when were you born?
So this is an elderly person.
And she said, what's that?
And then he said, ma'am, can you give me your date of birth?
He said, sorry, say that again.
He ran out of ideas.
He didn't know what to do.
So he actually hummed happy birthday to you.
And here you are as a trainer, you're listening to those calls for quality and you don't know
whether to laugh or cry.
But he got the job done.
She said, oh, that it's it's fixed or something like that.
She didn't understand what you were saying.
But he hummed it and he held it to you.
And apparently, because she understood.
That's a great one.
It's literally at the spur of the moment that some of these things have to be invented.
How do you train people for this?
And we got people who would speak reasonably good English.
But if you've not tasted some of the food that's American, so they would say, so are
you having pizza for dinner?
What do you do?
You've taught them that that's not how you say it.
But they've not had it.
And then somebody will ask them, do you like it?
And the person will say, no, I don't.
What do you like?
And then they'll ask others for at us.
So this kind of conversation would be, you know, and say, OK, draw the line, small talk.
You know, this is enough.
So it's very, very dicey because you have to have that balance.
But then having said that, they started out like that, you know, but some of them blossomed
so beautifully.
It really wasn't funny.
You just saw them going out of the way and helping.
Of course, they got customer service training and everything.
And you suddenly saw them weaving it all together to say, OK, I'm actually making a difference
to this customer.
So the satisfaction part was great because in college, your students went out and did
very, very well.
You didn't always get to see that here.
You train people on something.
Half an hour later, they're using it on their job.
That was instant gratification and Maggie Noodles.
Like you saw results right there.
Absolutely.
This is so insightful, because in most cases we hear the media stories are all about accent
neutralization, people just coming in and trying to adjust to a different lifestyle.
Whereas the job needed to get done and both cultures, the American and the Indian, were
trying to build those bridges.
And obviously the bridges, not in all cases, would meet halfway.
Sometimes they just be suspended somewhere.
But then you'll have those characters who sing Happy Birthday to you and discover an
continuous link which the person manages to get, crosses cultures and does all of that.
So you never felt it was important to actually cultivate the accent or it was not particularly
required for what these people were doing?
Look, they all had to annihilate their identities.
Every one of them took on an American name.
OK, so Anuradha would become Amy or Annie or something like that.
This is what happened.
It's not like I didn't believe in it.
It was a little bit of a hurdle that their confidence would be up and the job would be
done even if they just spoke clearly.
So I think that itself was a huge climb for them coming from where they were.
They were thinking in their languages and translating.
Every day I would come home and share some joke or the other like that, which was real.
And my daughter would keep saying, he's right about it.
Please write about it.
Yes, you should.
No, that's a phase, Aparna, which is kind of past now.
Today the accents and I think some of the youngsters today will probably tell you which
is the latest, you know, whether it's Breaking Bad or whether it's something else which is
currently in vogue.
They are absolutely up to date.
The net has equalized the entire thing.
You know what people are watching and the fact that Netflix is now across 170 countries.
Culture has now got flattened, at least of a watching kind.
So vice versa also, when they also know that they're talking to someone in India and it's
completely above board now.
Those days it was very surreptitious and we actually had to tell them what is it?
What is the weather like outside?
And you're supposed to say, hey, I'm sitting in New York and it's snowing, which you know
is a blatant lie, but that was part of the job.
The guy hadn't seen, I mean, he was from Salem.
He'd never seen snow in his life and telling him.
So we've had very smart customers say, okay, so tell me what the weather is like outside.
And they will tell you as an AC officer, I can't look out or something like that.
These people would be equally smart in their responses.
I think on both sides there's greater awareness.
This phase lasted how long?
Two and a half years.
Reason for moving on was so strange.
It had nothing to do with the job or anything.
I used to drive 26 kilometers each way.
That became a little bit in those days.
Yes.
Not anymore, I think.
And I had a non AC little car.
I would drive happily and go.
The thing was that extend working hours would keep extending, extending because this was
also working to the US times.
So I wouldn't really get up at six and come back the way I'm supposed to.
Lots of little, little challenges.
You know, I had a growing daughter and then she would say, when you come back, bring back
blue chart paper.
All shops would be closed by the time I got here.
So there were all those kinds of difficulties.
I had a fantastic learning there and I got certified on a few things.
It was very good learning.
So I then took up a job very, very close to home.
The distance criteria being a big one on my mind at that time.
True to my kiss month that office shifted to a larger campus five months from that.
So for five months, I enjoyed myself by, you know, reaching office before I could hit top
gear that this was a place called Phoenix global solutions, which got taken over by
TCS afterwards.
So this is where I really learned the business side of things.
I learned the word ROI literally from there.
Otherwise it was still the first job was more of an extension of college.
So in terms of learning, it was mostly training oriented learning.
I didn't look at it from the business side at all.
So I worked with a bunch of people from GE in Phoenix global solutions.
And suddenly I was sitting at a meeting and wondering whether they were speaking in English
because they talked about FTE, they talked about ROI, they talked about this.
And I said, sorry, gentlemen, but can you just say that in layman's terms?
Because I don't understand a word of what you're saying.
And then I actually got trained on, on became a green belt and all that.
So I suddenly became much, much better at process improve.
So this was an organization that was offering only technical training.
And I brought in this whole soft skills piece.
And as people got promoted, they all went in and said, it was like this whole continuum
that we put in and said, if you need to reach here, you need to do this.
And they had a very beautiful campus, which is built like the Epcot center.
It's like a glass wall.
It cost them the earth to maintain.
My task was to make the money to keep it going.
So I had to get into the business side of things, even though that was not my design.
That's why I said not by design at all.
So there again, I went in as a training manager and grew and start involved in everything
from the time people came in until they got promoted, did night shifts in the previous
one too.
And this one just for a lark and actually had so much fun and learning so much from
watching people in action and all that.
So this was not just contact center.
There was a contact center, but also managerial leadership training that was coming in.
So I progressed in terms of what I was doing, got certified on a couple of psychometric
tools because they were needed.
Learned a lot there.
The biggest learning from there was this whole business aspect of looking at it from the
money lens, not just making it.
You were going to ask me this.
Two questions Aparna.
One is that called for a lot of confidence to be able to sit in a room where you didn't
understand what is going and then say, Hey, I don't understand.
Tell me.
You didn't worry about what people would think.
There is a lot of, you know, around this whole thing of trying to get away.
That fake it till you make it.
There's this whole thing now, which says that just coast, even if you don't understand,
whereas you decided that I will level with people.
I will tell them, I don't care what they think, but they're going to tell me, okay, what it
means.
I'll understand what it means and then figure out.
And then the shift, what changed in your mind when you went from training people to being
responsible for business.
That was a dicey moment, but just that I didn't give it so much thought.
I think today what I'd had quietly done is Googled FTE under the table, you know, on
my phone.
Those days we had phones except that they were largest.
So you couldn't surreptitiously do that.
No, I was going to work very closely with these folks.
These were operations folks and I was going to work very closely with them.
So it wasn't just finding out what all those terminologies meant that day.
It was more about telling them you three are from GE.
I'm not.
So if you're talking when I'm around, please be aware that you need to speak in English
and not just, you know, a strange language.
Believe it or not, I became actually quite proficient because I'm a good learner and
I don't mind asking.
So I had no baggage, right?
If I had had an MBA, HR or an MBA with a specialization in training, I may have thought twice, thrice,
four times before saying, hey, I don't know.
I had no such pretensions.
And the biggest confidence for me was my sister principal in college saying, if ever you decide
to come back, you know, there's always place.
So I felt like that was like the net below a trapeze artist, right?
It's always there.
You may not need it.
You hope you don't use it.
It's like medical insurance or all of those things, but it's there.
So I didn't really worry about image, you know, well, now that you say it, it seems
like a big thing, but at that time it wasn't, it was a question of survival.
I need to do something the next day.
I also learned phenomenal detail orientation from the boss there.
I had a very supportive boss called Vasanth, but big boss was a gentleman by the name of
Satish Bangalore, the kind of detailing that he did.
So I've heard of bespoke.
I've heard of customization.
Those days.
The big question was, does India really have the capability to do the work that we are
giving them?
Right?
He would receive people at the old airport in Bangalore, put them in the Leela, come
into the office and tell us Janice is going to be sitting here in the boardroom and she's
looking for this, this, this.
Peter will be sitting here and he's keen on this.
We were prepped completely.
And then in the evening we got together.
So there was this whole thing of proving our metal and then mingling and becoming the social
people.
I think his way of anticipating all this really helped the business.
For me, this is a completely new ball game.
I mean, I would have gladly gone home instead of going to the Leela in the evening, but
I realized what an important part it was if they were to see you.
So he called me aside and said, look, you seem to know about American culture and all
of that.
I said, yes, I've taught it, but I've never visited the country or anything like that.
So he says, no, just, just have a regular conversation with them because I want them
to see what you can do.
And I think it will do wonders seeing them as social equals in the evening, I think made
a huge difference.
And for me, that was an eye opener to say just hard work and capability is not going
to take you home.
And this whole prep of how he would say who's looking for what it was almost like anticipating
the customer's needs.
And this is something that I use in training today when I'm offering, making a pitch to
a client today.
I'd say you probably may be looking at this.
Is this something you're looking at?
And they always say, yes, yes.
How did you get that?
And I know where I learned this.
And this is fascinating because the IT part of it and India's credentials in IT today,
I think the world over they're established, they're very well known, but marshalling
all these forces and getting people to believe that we can deliver is another set of skill
sets, which I think we invented on the fly with people like you.
You had to figure out in a meeting from a culture that is not familiar in a country
you haven't visited and you still had to make out that this is what that customer is wrestling
with a sales guy in the US meeting them would know the context perfectly.
Absolutely.
But you had to figure out the context.
This is what you're looking at and then imagine that, okay, this is a problem that I'm going
to solve and then move it.
So I think it calls for thinking two steps ahead, which I don't think I've got talked
about in media or the kind of people that you had.
I remember my brother-in-law telling me that people who are interacting with the client,
they were so valuable because the business came because of that interaction and the trust
that was built.
And if that person left, then the next person would not be the next in line.
It would be somebody who would be able to build that whole.
And like you pointed out right now, your boss was looking, Sanjay Bangalore was looking
and he figured out that you were the person who would be able to make those connections,
which is very perceptive.
You've made it a part of your training program.
What are some of the other things that you picked up?
I think also wearing what you can and cannot do proudly.
I had learned to say no before, but also to say, no, this is how far we'll go.
Sorry, client.
So while you're bespoke, you're willing to accommodate.
And it's usually the client really checking and they're hard drivers, right?
Some of them.
So they push you to see how far you'll go.
So will your people do this in the middle of the night?
Will they do this on Sundays?
Will they do this?
So why do you have so many holidays?
And I said, I didn't make them.
They're there and you have to work around it.
You tell me what needs to be done.
So I got more confident and comfortable speaking like that, you know, to say, okay, so we have
this.
So why can't your folks come in on a Sunday?
Why can't they come in on Diwali?
We were in essential services.
You did have a skeletal staff running things, but everybody did not need to come.
And a lot of people came from the north, northeast.
They would take three days to just get home, which is very hard for an American to imagine.
Yeah.
I say, look, but why can't they fly?
They said, I think there are no planes to Uttarakhand.
They will go somewhere and then take a bus and then probably walk the last mile.
Who knows?
So I got a little more comfortable with that kind of a conversation because probably of
that social thing where we were equal footing.
The next day when you met them, there was no hierarchy, right?
The first day when starting out, it must have been, hey, here's somebody to come to give
you business and you have to earn it and woo them.
You didn't have that pressure anymore.
So I definitely learned that.
The other thing I learned was this was the first time I had to let go of people.
And that gave me sleepless nights.
There were people whose performances didn't match.
Expectations were set upfront, you know, to say, if you don't shape up, you have to stale
out.
And yet when it happened, I knew the guy had EMIs.
I knew he had two small kids.
Okay.
And I couldn't sleep that night.
This was a hard transition for me.
I was responsible as an HR person for that.
And the first time I did it, I was in bad shape.
My face would not have shown anything in front of that person.
But when I came back, anybody who knew me well would have known I was shattered.
And I felt like I was messing with somebody's career and all of that.
I became hard headed afterwards.
This happened once, twice, 13 times, 15 times.
There was the sensitivity which never left.
So that's what people would say even when I asked them to leave, you've given me a fair
chance kind of a thing.
So it was to come very gently.
But the message was non-negotiable to say, you can leave now, you can leave in a month.
So I think that's a huge skill for me from my boss that I learned.
And she knew I was uncomfortable.
So she'd say, I want you to fire him.
And I kept thinking, why is she pushing me to the deep end?
She seems to like me.
But this was huge growth for me.
By the time I went into my last corporate job, I was quite seasoned at many aspects
and there it was just a question of skill.
So again, I left Phoenix before because of distances.
So again, I was driving long distances.
I had elderly in-laws at home, little child growing up, husband posted outside.
So it was like a huge responsibility.
And I was straddling all those.
AXA was just sheer scale.
Had to negotiate with the French.
AXA was a company that grew inorganically.
They grew by acquiring other companies.
It was so many different little, little cultures.
So here it was not as easy to read what the need was.
And for a lot of them, we were bringing their jobs to India, literally learning from them
and saying, okay, now once this is done, you don't have a job.
So that was not the easiest of things.
People were not the most cooperative and those kinds of things happen.
Again, I had two very, very supportive bosses and this was fantastic.
So all my worries about not traveling overseas, I had traveled on holiday, but I had never
traveled on work.
All that had changed.
And I think it made a huge difference when you met them face to face.
So they had heard my name.
We had had audio calls.
This was still slightly before video calls.
When you actually met in person and said, this is our capability.
We can do this receiving of it.
The buy-in was very, very different.
And then suddenly I got so drawn into the admin part of it.
I was signing more checks than doing my real job.
And that's when I said, okay, enough is enough.
I moved out, became certified as a coach.
That's where the journey took a little turn.
I wanted to travel the world.
I've been doing that in bits and pieces, but I imagined that I would backpack and go at
one shot.
That didn't happen.
It's amazing how you moved from accent training or training people to business development,
to negotiating contracts, to actually managing cultures and not just people.
So some people make the transition, Aparna, but some don't.
What do you think is the differentiation?
Is it a willingness to change?
Is it capability?
I think it's a mindset, right?
It's more about wanting to learn.
The day you say, look, I know everything.
That day you're a dead duck, right?
Because here I had no such problem.
I didn't know anything.
And I had no qualms in saying that 20 times.
So it was easy for me because I would ask the dumbest of questions.
I would go to someone whose job was at stake and say, hey, tell me more about what you're
doing.
How do you do this?
What are your challenges?
So I realized that my one-on-one connect was better.
And they actually opened up knowing fully well that this could result in a hastened
exit for them.
Yeah.
On my part, it was clearly just curiosity, just wanting to learn.
Now when I look at it as a coach and I see a pattern, is wanting to learn thing is very,
very strong.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there because for a lot of people, this want to
learn something new is a milestone that they passed over 20 years ago.
They're sort of coasting on something that they've learned and then they want to guard
it.
If the skill is taken away from me, I don't know what to do.
As the skill evolves, unless you're trying new things out, where is the learning?
And you don't always choose what you get to learn.
You may need to learn something that may not be appealing to you and that's okay.
You'll still give it a shot.
And if you fail, there are other avenues.
That's all.
So that's fantastic.
That's really the nub of what a whole lot of careers are about.
What you're learning may not be something that you really want to learn.
And you'd have never opted for it yourself.
I know I wouldn't have.
So as a coach, Venu, biggest thing to me was not to answer when you knew the answer.
I've always been a reasonably good listener.
You know, you're dying to say it.
You say, can't you see it?
But you know, as a coach, you hold back and then you learn to convert that into questions
that nudge people.
So I think I've evolved as a person.
I've definitely become calmer.
You know, you were very kind in saying that I was calm when we had technical difficulties.
So I'll come with a lot of working on people, working on things and say, look, this happens.
So you can't become a coach without changing yourself.
And that has been extremely beneficial for me, you know, holding back, not talking about,
hey, I know this, I know it all.
You don't ever say that, right?
Because you don't know it all and you never will.
One lifetime is barely enough, right?
So what are the things you do now as a coach?
I am actually like a little bit of a free bird.
So what I do is I only take up about 10 or 12 days of work.
I give my heart and soul for that, whether it's facilitation or coaching.
I have regular coaching that goes on right through the year, six months, assignments,
things like that.
But facilitation, I only take up 10 or 12 days.
That's because I'm a movie buff.
So I have to sit quietly and, you know, my way of de-stressing after a hard day of talking
and facilitating is sit quietly and not just watch.
Quite often it's re-watch, something old and familiar.
My mother keeps telling me, I watch it like I have an exam the next day.
I think that's the intensity with which I watch it.
That is true.
I also love traveling, you know, every year definitely travel.
It just took us forever to finish India.
There's so much to see here.
So many different things to learn.
That's been a fantastic thing.
And during the COVID times, five friends and I got together, we wrote a book.
This is something that we had been intending to do.
And it just came, it just shaped up beautifully.
You asked me to tell you some amusing stories from training.
May I just add one?
It just suddenly occurred to me.
So there was this person that I was training and those days, you know, I had to test what
I had designed.
So I would train myself.
I had a team.
First, I would always train to see timing okay, instruction okay.
Is it falling well?
Is it being received?
Is it getting the desired results?
And I enjoyed every part of it because I would go back, revise, change it because it's not
falling well, change the instruction.
So there was this concept that I was explaining to somebody.
I explained once and I explained twice and I explained thrice and he hadn't caught on.
It was a very important piece.
And what I saw was the other people getting restless because everybody else was getting
bored.
While I wanted to give this person all the additional support, the other people were
also my audience and I had to keep that in mind at every congress.
I said, why don't you and I catch up at lunch and we can sit and do it.
He was so apologetic and this is where English, I think, you know, plays a big part.
He was so apologetic.
He said, I know you've been very, very patient and kind.
You explained it once, twice, thrice, four times and I haven't picked you up yet.
I was doubled up in laughter.
He had no clue what was happening.
Nobody in the class had any clue what was happening.
I couldn't resist it.
I doubt if that was the intention, but you know, thank you for it.
So people unwittingly say the most hilarious things.
I think what lightens the atmosphere and makes you want to go for more.
And the fact is that all that happened in that one sentence is for that word to be wrongly
played.
I've had CEOs introduce me.
There was a company in which I went in as a coach.
I used to be present there all week.
He said, okay, she has so much experience and you know, she comes with X amount of experience
and all that.
Please take advantage of her.
So this is what makes life easy.
You're looking for all the funny things in different moments.
Intentionally, unintentionally, that makes your day for the rest of the day.
You can't stop smiling.
Yeah.
So we started with the language.
We started with linguistics.
You know, right to the beginning, you're trying to teach people grammar and telling them that
oh, wait, passport is full of hanging from whatever it is.
But even after you know the language, you know, the nuances, which people don't pick
up unless you, you're so steeped that they haven't even figured out what exactly they
were saying.
So if you do a periodic assessment at any time, are you a person who coasted or who
tried to set targets?
Coasted definitely.
But at the same time, I have this discipline of updating my CV every six months.
I'm not even applying for a job in the past 10 years.
I've been on my own, but I update my CV every six months.
This I learned from a friend and look at it because you tend to forget certain things
and off late, we know in the early days I never did, but off late, I'm trying to keep
track of what you're doing.
Is that good for you?
Because clients suddenly ask you, how many hours have you done and you have no clue.
You say I've been using it for the past 20 years.
Okay.
So convert that into hours and you will have no clue.
So I'm now actually looking at it.
But for myself, every January and June, I update my CV and I look at it to say, where
am I going?
What would I like to add?
This is what helps me in adding newer certifications.
So I'm just adding one.
I'm taking an exam next weekend.
And this is something that's not for anybody else.
It just makes me happy that I'm learning something.
Through COVID, I've been doing online certificates.
I think it's a question of this quest, right?
To say, Hey, what more can you bring in?
So I don't mind learning anything from anybody.
I learned how to open the quarter window of a Maruti from a five-year-old boy.
He just used a ruler and slipped it.
He said, can you teach me?
And he taught me.
So I'm saying I'm happy to learn from any quarters.
So I do audit.
At the same time, I don't obsess to say, here's where I want to go.
I just, probably because maybe I achieved more than I actually planned to.
So I'm quite content.
And I'm doing what I really want to do, which is read, write, generally be useful.
While it looks like a very checkered career, the underlying string, if you were to look
at it like a string of pearls, is the fact that you help people to identify their potential
and realize it.
Whether you take teaching, whether you take, you know, being a training manager, whether
you take being a general manager or a vice president of HR, and a coach, of course.
I think that's the underlying part that keeps me going.
The unsaid part in that is all the while, it's something that you're doing with yourself
as well.
Absolutely.
Realizing your potential because you're trying to figure out, okay, how deep do I go?
And that's the point at which you want to push yourself and then say, okay, can I do
this?
And even if you fail, which you said, I'm willing to make those mistakes that happen.
And I've always felt that the stream of consciousness conversation that is, I'm not rehearsing it.
I'm not trying to package it, I'm not coming back to it in a different edit.
I'm trying to understand in the moment.
Maybe there are times we'll go completely off and the conversation may not be interesting,
but that's not the point.
The point is whether are you pushing?
It's a wonderful thing.
Like you said, it's a string of pearls that you assemble.
And when the next pearl gets added, how long does it grow?
All of those things are part of whatever you do.
And also kicking yourself to say, hey, I should have said that my thought is slightly different
and say, okay, the next time I know I should say that, not even bothered about the fact
that I didn't say it.
And that is the fascinating part.
You work with a fair number of young people.
So what are the things you're seeing now?
So people come and ask you Gen Z and all of that, but scratch the surface, we know the
worries are the same.
The pressures are the same.
We box them.
And this is where you started the program by how do you interact with people?
And I said, one-on-one.
So I'm not even seeing them in that box.
I'm not even trying to fix them into any particular category.
To me that person is Prashant or Rekha or whoever.
They come with their own pressures.
So often, and this is the other thing that I've learned, I think as a coach, you apply
your own standards to other people, right?
Whether it's empathy or whatever, you like to view it from your lens.
And I learned all of this the hard way to say that's not true at all.
We're talking about this.
Just last week, a friend of mine was saying for one of her virtual programs, there was
this person who is logging in and what looked like a little better than a hut.
Can we take so much for granted?
And then we say, please turn on your cameras.
So I think empathy is a very big part of what I do because you don't know what the other
person's pressures are.
And you teach that.
Cerebrally, you know it, but it just comes out very easily.
I've become very cognizant of it to say your standards are not everybody else's standards.
So a lot of young people, they may look flippant.
They may dress differently from the way you would like them to, but they're very keen
to learn most of them.
A lot of them are also a little mixed up to say, what am I doing?
Where am I?
Because let's take data sciences, for example.
Not everybody studied that, but they're working in that field.
It's only now that I even courses, right?
Five years ago, they weren't even courses.
So I think a lot of them are still figuring out a lot of things and there is a lot of
pressure on them from maybe their homes, nobody to guide them.
So you said teachers played a very important role.
For some of them, they've had the advantage.
A lot of them haven't.
That makes a big difference.
So I think it's one little nudge in the right direction to say, I see you showing potential
in this direction.
And that's so important.
It's not one big victory, but a series of little ones, which you require from time to
time validation.
You require time to time, from time to time, people telling you that, yeah, it's okay.
You made a mistake.
That doesn't matter.
I've been in a profession where it was very easy to run someone down because creative
is very, very subjective.
When you take an idea across in your early stages, you can have bosses who can trample
on it, twist it, break it into a million pieces.
But I had people who helped me up.
And I think that is a lesson for life.
It never stops.
You treat a whole lot of people the same way that you have been taught and the way you
learn.
Sometimes it's purely luck that you happen to come across the people that you mentioned.
Sometimes you put into the same room as people who have a whole lot of stuff, but that unwillingness
to learn can prevent you from getting there.
That and the other part, which is where the quieter ones, you make it a point to include
them, right?
By extension, they may not of their own open their mouths.
And you say, but I'd love to hear from you Ashok, what do you have to say kind of a thing?
I think that's a consistent thing.
You're so right there.
Just to come back to how many people have you trained?
You had a career in which you've 20, 30 years and you've trained so many people, so many
lives you've impacted.
For a client yesterday, I was actually trying to count.
It would be something between 18 and 20,000.
Easily.
I mean, and that's a conservative figure.
That's because I was training long before this was really my profession.
In a sense, teaching also is in a lot of way giving people not just what's in the textbook,
right?
It was teaching life skills.
It was saying step out of your shadow, move, go out of your comfort zone.
You're so right that a whole lot of these things you never keep track of, which is why
I think it's very difficult to measure learning.
What have you learned in 10 years of, if someone asks me, what have you learned in so many
years of being in the profession?
There are three or four points that you can probably rattle off, but if you are asked
and pushed, I don't know if that's the right thing or the wrong thing, but maybe it's the
way the world is going.
Number of hours.
If you get...
Data, data is needed for everything.
Data is in so many forms and has to be applied in so many places and not necessarily in the
same context.
So my take, at least something that I've been thinking about is data is over.
It's not oil is yet.
It's not reached the point where the channels have been constructed and it flows the petrol
vehicles or diesel vehicles.
It's easy.
So I only have the vehicles that take one of these two things, but if it's oil, it's
got to fit in everywhere.
It doesn't.
True.
I would measure that when people come back and say, look, you've made a difference.
And this may be 15 years after you've done something for them.
They stay in touch.
So the day you run a good program, you know, because you'll get LinkedIn requests.
Okay.
You say, ma'am, can I call you?
And I also make it a point to say, look, this is not a fly by night operation.
It's not a bam bam.
Thank you, ma'am.
Of course we're running.
Right.
So here I am.
You can always reach out and people do reach out.
So that's the beauty of it, I guess.
So wonderful.
How did you develop an interest in making pickles?
Ha, this is maybe adding spice to people's lives.
Actually, having grown up in Gujarat, what you see is jars and jars of pickles in most
homes you'd see.
It's prominently displayed with pride and this is done for the year.
So in the summer, they will have 15 different kinds of mango pickles that are made.
And this lasts a whole year.
So this whole going back to our roots interests me.
So I like cooking and I like making pickles because I think we have so much that's kind
of lost today.
I find that friends love it when you present them things that are homemade.
They probably value it more than anything that's store bought.
Why store bought?
I mean, you can sit here and order and it's going to reach you in half an hour.
That's why I like it.
You know, it just makes me very happy.
And I feel like there's a lot of sun going waste and lovely mangoes going waste.
I don't know where I got it, but this is only about 10 years old.
I never made pickles before that.
So what is the range like?
From orange peel to mango to lemon and red chilies, green chilies, the works, garlic.
So my windowsill is full of beautiful bottles.
In fact, somebody told me you should put that as your display picture because that would
be unusual.
I said, okay, thank you so much.
It's fascinating.
And somewhere I believe that you're boundless curiosity and you're willing to experiment
is really part of what makes you the person you are.
At the end of the day, if you're curious, you're interested.
If you're interested, you put in the effort.
And if you put in the effort, the results come not the way you expect.
If the effort and the journey itself is your pleasure, then the rest of it is all bonus.
I think it's been wonderful.
Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you for the opportunity.
And you're so easy to talk to, Venu.
Thank you so much.
That's because I think the people I talk to themselves have so much to say that it takes
me very little to get them to open up.
It's wonderful when I get to know about, and it's already yours is the 16 stories of careers.
And I'm looking forward to meeting more and more people from completely different professions.
The lovely part of it is how it starts from exactly where you said I had no clue.
And then there is an awareness.
There is a set of learning.
So if it was teaching a classroom and then teaching a whole group of students, and that
was a particularly difficult phase in Indian IT where you suddenly had to scale companies.
I don't think anywhere in the world companies had to grow overnight to 60 and 70,000 people.
And we managed it.
You played a role in it.
You were responsible for shaping some of the careers that happened.
And then stepping back to say, no, personally, I need to do this.
That is wonderful.
I will say, would you exchange it for anything?
Not really.
Thank you so much.
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