Balancing Act

With malice towards none

We live in a strange world. Forget natural causes. There are enough man-made instances that leave us wondering which way we are headed.

Take the case of foodgrains. On one side the government does not know what to do with the massive stock of foodgrains it has accumulated. On the other, people in this country are dying of starvation. On one side, parts of Rajasthan are thirsting for water. On the other, those who are trying to ease the situation by building water-harvesting structures are threatened with legal action.

The scene in IT is no different, particularly when it comes to dealing with the current slowdown. On one side companies are, to use the diplomatic term, right sizing. And on the other, they are recruiting! And not all that long ago, there was something called re-training, something most corporates swore by. Wonder where that one disappeared to so fast.

And apologies to all

There is a personal note that I want to add to this piece.

Last month has been a trying one for us at PCQuest. First, there were the Users’ Choice survey, the counting of the votes and the analysis of the whys and why nots–a mammoth task. Then there were the awards-presentation ceremony to be organized, the trophies to be designed, and the menu for the evening to be set. Hunting for the material for the trophies–black granite, imported optical crystal, and cut glass–itself took longer than expected. On top of that, we took on ourselves another mammoth story–the one on essential IT skills.

In short, we over-stretched ourselves. It’s not as if we did it for the first time. In fact, we’ve comfortably pulled off similar tasks in the past. But the difference this time was that many of us were also coping with major changes on personal fronts at the same time.

You see, PCQuest used to be a team full of bachelors and spinsters, and extra long hours at the office did not really matter. Sometime around the end of last year, all that began to change. One by one, about half the team got married (yes, I too), and has since been learning the hard way to balance the demands of office and home life.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that we’ve slipped in our schedules this month by a week. Shouldn’t have happened, but it has. As a result, you have had to wait longer to get this issue in your hands. My apologies to all of you, our readers, for this delay. And my promise that we will try to ensure that it will not happen again.

Also, my apologies to the husbands and wives and fathers and mothers and little children of Team PCQuest for having made them wait long into the night for their dear ones to come home.

Krishna Kumar