The Japanese customer was worried seeing the traffic on the way from Delhi Airport to the development center. He was tensed. He wanted to be in time for a video conferencing with Tokyo. I had asked the driver to take a different route if possible to reach in time. The driver said, ‘‘No problem sir”. Hearing this, the customer looked at me and smiled. We arrived at the center just in time and hurried to the meeting room and started the video conference. When the customer was talking to his boss in Tokyo, something went wrong with the system and we were disconnected. The technician came to set right the issue. The customer was anxious to get connected to his boss again. We asked the technician to hurry up. He said, “No problem sir.”The customer smiled again despite the tense situation. The technician fixed the problem and we got reconnected. During the discussions, the customer came to know that the progress was not as per schedule and worried about a possible delay in deliverables. The project manager said, “No problem sir, we can deliver it on time.” The customer again looked at me and smiled. This customer is a close friend of mine and knows India well. He has a dictionary of words used in India with special meaning. To him, when someone says,” no problem” it means,”take it easy, there will be problems but we can deal with them.” Not all customers can bear with this and still smile. This customer works with India, China and a few other countries and has learnt to deal with all of them.
Later in the evening in a relaxed mood at dinner table he asked me, “Do you have any idea why people say, “No problem” spontaneously even though they know well that there is a problem?" I thought for a while and asked him,"Do you remember the project manager we met today?” He looked at me and said,"I remember him well. Last year when we were in a discussion, he received a message that his father met with an accident and he broke down. It was terrible.”
"How was he today?",I asked.
"He was alright, confident and cheerful" replied the customer.
"His father met with an accident, but he is alright and confident now, why?"
" Are you kidding? This happened last year, why should he cry now?"
So time has an impact on the mind. The culture, practice and history of a country has also so much influence on the mind of an individual. Even most tragic incident like the death of a dear one fades away from memory as time passes. This capacity of the mind can well be employed in a positive way to make our problems as 'no problems'. Whenever some incident happens which we feel as unbearable, we can train our mind to meditate as though the incident happened a long time ago. By doing this, we will have balance of mind to see the problem objectively and solve it without taking it to heart and feel bad about it. In fact time is a concept of relative reality. It is not absolute. The word ‘now’ may mean anything from a micro second to a decade as per the imagination of the speaker and subject. When you clap your hands, even before you utter the word ‘now’ the sound comes and goes. So what we think as now or present is not even micro seconds. Every present becomes past and disappears from memory until called for. Sometimes they are simply wiped off from memory.
In the same way when some plane accident happens in a distant place, we don’t worry much about that. When the same thing happens in our town, we panic and worry. If it happens next door, the impact is intensive. So distance or space also has its influence on our mind. Out of sight is out of mind. We can meditate on this and develop an attitude to distance ourselves mentally from space and time. This will give us strength to face any problematic, unacceptable situation. With this attitude, what appeared to be a problem is no longer a problem but just a situation.
-Arasu Ramanujam
No comments:
Post a Comment