The Information Technology

In its earlier days Information Technology was considered a tool for managing the business and it did well to prove its worth. Businesses across the globe embraced the revolution eagerly and were benefited enormously. Overtime, the role of IT has been changed and so is the size of IT. IT departments started from one room with a few technical people and thrived to multiple floors with thousands of staff, not to mention that some have grown out of the geographical boundaries and span across continents. This growth has changed the way businesses were run. A department which started as a support function is now at the centre of every strategic decision and thus impacts everything from budget and planning to operations and finance. IT also happens to be the most daunting of places in any organization where people are used to pressures, unexpected failures, long working hours, job related stress and much more. This partly is because of the nature of work which is understandable. If the daily routine and amount of pressure that any ordinary IT worker has to bear is made known to prospective IT employees I am sure half of them would change their careers. Another factor that adds to the already disgruntled IT is the lack of support from other departments. IT has assumed the role of running the business, which is jeopardizing the very core nature of it. IT has to improve continually for the organization to benefit from it; once it is left with the barren task of running the business it loses its basic instinct, innovation. When normal job descriptions of IT staff include correcting mistakes of other departments, there would be no new work and no productivity. This picture is still incomplete without the confused role of top management, the decision makers. They have their own version and vision of IT. Over the past decade, IT has seen many revolutions resulting in high cost of maintaining a modern and efficient department; both in terms of infrastructure and human resource. In any given large scale organization, the investments (especially inorganic investments which put businesses under a lot of pressure) done on IT outsize the investments done anywhere else. The top managers are forced to believe that IT department is a star department and hence they expect the department to outperform every other department by assuming their roles as well. Another factor is the change impact. Usually any change in the business impacts two departments. First, the department where the actual change will be implemented and second, IT which is going to implement that change; sometimes the change impacts IT more than the actual department and hence the top management expects IT to take control of the change despite lack of proper business knowledge. This again results in miserable lives of IT personnel. Of course, none of the above happens in an organization where IT is the main business, usually in such companies, the top management comprises of technical guys who know about these factors and create an atmosphere where everyone does his own work. The pace at which IT as a field is growing is exhilarating, but it sure comes with its own peculiar problems which can be solved by accepting it as a special field with special requirements.

Sometimes...

Sometimes I feel like throwing myself out of the window beside my seat in my cozy office. It’s not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with me, or that I’ve turned crazy. It’s just that I am fed up of all the machines surrounding me. I am also fed up of money centered life (astonishingly in a year). I see money as a tool to bring comfort and to some extent joy in our lives but here am I, finding myself in a world where our lives have become mere tools to bring in more and more money and earn without ever thinking, why?

My life asks for some meaning, some destination that could bring a sense of achievement, a sense of pride and fulfillment. A close circle of family and friends continuously ask me to get married but they might not know that I am passing through an identity and emotional turbulence and an unstable person has nothing to offer to anyone else. If I am meaningless without a wife, I’ll continue to be so with one. The only possible difference it could bring is a load of responsibility and under the pressure of which I might do the duties, fulfill the commitments but essentially I would continue to be unhappy.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about happiness, what factors count towards it and how can we standardize the process to be happy. After every article I tried using the applicable advices but I ended up being unhappier by trying to be someone else, so I stopped this practice altogether. I later realized it was for good because happiness that comes after an external stimulus is always temporary. A long lasting happiness is a result of some change or feeling that is deeply rooted. A happiness that worldly sorrows cannot deter and apparent losses cannot take away from us. So my quest for eternal happiness continues.

Rebels, happiness and fears

A society is an interdependent community. These interdependencies give rise to relationships that often grow so complicated that the basic building blocks of societies, we the humans, suffer. It’s like a tyrant having norms, regulations and an expectation from all its members to oblige. Thus like every such genus, it also looses control over its people and rebels are born. Out of a whole crop of rebels, some successful ones emerge as leaders for the future societies, the rules are set again and Le jeu recommence (The game starts again).

While each person who challenges the status quo is a rebel, not everyone is able to bring about a change. Most of them fade away into oblivion and even those who bother to remember them, reckon them as failures for e.g. Guy Fawkes. These are the people who wasted their lives and weren’t able to make it big. But deep inside that failure, behind the shadows of oblivion live those rebels, a satisfied and happy life. Their efforts to change the society were futile but in the process they changed themselves and created a world inside them which pleases them. These people are qualified happy souls, the ones who are destined to be happy.

But most of us are driven by the social norms and values. With each and every minute of our life we mould our original selves into someone who is more acceptable for the society putting aside the originality in us. When God has created each one of us differently, why are we so apt to produce a line of mediocre humans? The answer is straightforward, change induces fear, fear to fail, fear to be left behind and fear to be deprived of a relaxed life. These fears alone are enough to make us a loser and thus live an unhappy life.

Nothing has changed

I wrote the following in june last year. Now, when I read it again it feels the same!

"Every morning I go through the headlines of at least five to six newspapers from all over the world. Then I get back to Pakistani newspapers and read two of them in detail. Lately there is no positive news coming out of the country. We are in all sorts of trouble ranging from political upheaval and food crisis to US attacks and rising inflation. Only today I learned that the World Bank has given us the top spot for being the most disturbed country politically in the world; a country where the writ of the government is least visible.

Looking at all of this from the screen of my high-end laptop sitting inside a cold (sometimes too cold) office, living in a country with the highest ecological footprint in the world, makes me feel guilty. It makes me feel as if I’ve left my compatriots to fight the enemy and left the castle from the back door. With each passing day I am finding more and more ground here but at the cost of my lost ground back home. People are coming back from vacations and are advising me not to go right now; they say they went through a lot of difficulties and it’s hard to cope up with all the problems you have to face there. The situation has exacerbated during the last 3 months, the prices have gone up, no one is secure, electricity is just not there and worst of all is that the present government is in no way better than the last one.

But when I think about going back “practically”, I ask myself what would I do there, how would I affect a situation that’s out my control? The answer comes almost immediately from my heart that I don’t want to go back only to change the situation but I also want to suffer with my fellow compatriots, I also want to go though all the difficulties that they are facing so that my conscience doesn’t die, so that I can continue to differentiate between right and wrong with utmost clarity and so that I do not have to look elsewhere each time I face a mirror. I don’t know why it happens that when you find a greener pasture you still miss your barren past."

I am back

So here am I, yet again, writing at 2 am and loving it. I stopped it for a while, and no that wasn't exactly a sabbatical, those aren't for us !

I have been writing on various things lately, but I didn't want everyone to read them and that is why I had to be alot more conservative and cautious while blogging on myspace. It brings a whole lot of extra baggage of contacts with whom you are not exactly linked in a way that you want them to read your blogs, specially when they have a vague idea about you or when they have not witnessed the change in you. So I guess its a lot more safe (read comfortable) here. Atleast I hope so :)