A Blot on Wiki

I suppose the pyschologists and pyschiatrists – called “shrinks” in popular parlance – have their own code of silence. Once they are certified to practice, they are not supposed to give away the secret tests and techniques about how they figure out if the person lying on the couch is normal or abnormal depending on the response to the tests. To the person being tested this can evoke different feelings eg Awe or Aw (short for awful) and everything in between. So naturally people are anxious – which by itself could tell the shrink stuff about you that you don’t want them to know. Read more

Should You Self Publish

It is truly a magical moment when you read the manuscript and suddenly feel that there is nothing more left to add or to take away. If you add stuff you will feel the need to trim the fat and you cannot take away a single word without leaving gaps in the mind of the reader. It is that moment when you feel the most self-confident. You are ready to take the book to a publisher.

You write to the publisher and give them a taste of the good stuff. They do not seem to share your enthusiasm. Hmmm… maybe it is time to take your manuscript to another publisher. Some of them tell you that your work is not good enough, some find it “interesting” but they have their hands full, some say that it would be a couple of years before they can think of publishing your book. Read more

Who Should Pay for You to Learn

You started as a small fish with dreams of being a biggie. You routinely practiced your moves. You tried to learn new tricks to please those who held power to hand out generous changes in S&B (Salary and Bonus). You regularly preened yourself as you passed the mirror, admiring the lean mean fighting machine that you continued to be … at least for the initial few years. When you met the other alum from your college or B School, you traded notes to see if anyone had learnt a trick that you had no clue about. There were usually a few who always had something clever to share. You read professional journals. The names of those authors were all familiar. Like it was back when the Professors would keep egging you on to read more and more and yet would sneer at your Term Paper before labeling it a B+ at best despite your efforts. That just built in you the grim determination to keep slaving away at sharpening your skills until you could extract an A+ from the hard-to-please faculty. You ran on that learning treadmill and discovered that you were still in the same place. You knew that you had to be better than the best to make a mark in the big bad world. That was then. Read more