A dynamic business environment needs people in key positions to be well equipped in terms of skills- functional, managerial as well as personal; to handle high pressure and deliver under any situation. While it is routine for HR professionals to utilize various tools from credential checks to skills assessments and interviews to identify potential performers, employee recruitment and career management decisions require a lot more. It is imperative that an individual’s personality is evaluated before critical decisions can be taken which can harshly impact productivity.

Organizations are now turning to psychometrics for evaluating candidates in terms of their personality characteristics, interpersonal style and job-specific aptitudes to maximize job success and minimize the chances of untoward hiring or promotion decisions. There has been a steady increase in the deployment of psychometric assessments, including various personality, aptitude and vocational interest tests, in addition to traditional screening procedures, to get a 360-degree picture of the individual that is being hired or promoted. Organizations that have integrated effective psychometric assessment procedures into their recruitment processes have come to regard this methodology as an indispensable guard against the potentially expensive outcomes of even a few erroneous hiring or promotion decisions.

Recruitment is not the only area where psychometric assessments are used, although it is the most common and almost certainly where a majority of people first come into contact with this kind of assessment. Other frequent uses are for:

>> Career and management development

>> Team building

>> Internal promotion

>> Training needs analysis

>> Counseling

For the success of any psychometric assessment the tool needs to adhere to certain best practices. Analysis of the score and its usage also form a key part in the success or failure of such a tool. The interpretation of the score has to be done by a certified psychologist and the report generated should be in a friendly format. The report from most personality tools acts as a great interview input which can be used to structure interviews and gauge candidates minutely through focused questioning. It is important to note that personality assessment tools Do Not provide select or reject answers as the measurement is only subjective. Personality assessments are evaluators of the inclination of subjects on defined parameters and select or reject decisions can be taken on the specific requirements of a job role and company.

So how do these psychometric assessments benefit an organisation? By allowing meaningful comparison between candidates on relevant competencies employers can make sure that different backgrounds or experience levels do not overly affect the selection process. Personality is one of the most important elements of individual role fitment and one of the hardest to judge - at an interview people will generally put forward the image that they want you to see. By using well-established measures, employers can gain an extra insight into an individual. These can also provide pertinent issues for conversation in subsequent interviews that are relevant to the specific candidate, rather than being general standard questions.

Undertaking meaningful decisions in most recruitment/promotion situations can be an onerous task and taking calls on the intrinsic personality can often be fraught with danger. But these are calls which managers necessarily have to take and any tool bringing a modicum of insights into the matter will be a huge help to companies.

The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie, 2008, Jonathan Cape, price not stated.

If you are the kind of reader who begins at the end, you will first bump into the six-page-long bibliography appended to The Enchantress of Florence. Despite this, Rushdie’s latest novel remains a rich re-imagining of history with hardly a trace of the scholarly heaviness that one has come to expect of fiction that grapples with historical and political themes. The enchantment, thankfully, is alive and kicking — at least for the most part, and the narrative retains a seductive lightness. But while readers escape the fate of having to plod their way through historical detail, there is another path, the path of mirrors and reflected story lines in Mughal India and Renaissance Florence, that they have to traverse. This then is the trade off, essentially.

While The Enchantress of Florence is a story about many things and a story about story-telling itself, it is anchored, if somewhat insecurely, around the visit of a yellow-haired European, Nicola Vespucci or Mogor dell’Amore, to the court of Akbar. Claiming that he is the son of Akbar’s grand-aunt, the European restores public memory of Qara Koz or the hidden princess who was cast out of Mughal history for choosing her conqueror over her family. The hidden princess becomes the ultimate traveller in this cross-cultural tale, a traveller who shifts allegiance with disloyal ease. When Akbar falls in love with her memory, moving his imagined queen Jodha out of the way, it is a love that smacks of incest and blasphemy.

Probing around the gaps of history, Rushdie delves into the minds of historical characters such as Akbar to string together a multi-themed narrative about time, travel, identity, power, desire and story-telling. The over-arching metaphor that binds these themes together is the mirror: the hidden princess has a slave girl who is her mirror, the Florentine Argalia is, to an extent, the mirror of Mogor dell’Amore, Jodha Akbar has a mirror in the hidden princess, the Mughal artist Dashwanth who paints Qara Koz and the Florentine artist Filipepi who paints the other enchantress in the novel, Simonetta, are mirrors of one another, and so on. On a larger scale, the Mughal empire and Renaissance Florence mirror each other as well. As Mogor dell’Amore tells Akbar, “This may be the curse of the human race…Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.” As the stories twist and turn in front of mirrors, reality becomes a mirage. The lake at Sikri is a mirror too, reflecting the shifting fortunes of the city.

His irreverent self with his usual irreverence, Rushdie transforms Akbar into a fictional character, exploring his psyche at leisurely length. There are insightful if somewhat tongue-in-cheek comments on Akbar’s attempt to switch to the democratic “I” from the royal “we” and the difficult issue of handling power, the ethical burden of being king. On the other hand, Qara Koz’s access to power is of a very different sort. She has to be enchantress in order to rule. The identity of women in the narrative is highly fluid and under constant threat.

There is a downside to reading The Enchantress of Florence which perhaps those who know Rushdie would in any case anticipate: it is overdone in parts and at times the story more than runs away with itself. There is also the curse of the long sentence: perfectly constructed and reasoned out no doubt, but still a bit over the top. Take, for instance, this one: “[Akbar learned] about the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlessness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defences of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility, and good peripheral vision.” The occasional lapse into hyphenated coinage is no less annoying: “‘He must have been mad to bring you,’ Argalia told her when blood-filthy and kill-sick he found her abandoned at the death-heavy end of the day.”

In Rushdie’s universe, there are two kinds of people: those who travel and those who prefer not to. Jodha as the queen who never leaves the palace thinks of travel as something that removes you “from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it.” In this, she is like Ago Vespucci, the Florentine, who believes that it isn’t “necessary to go questing across the world and die among guttural strangers to find your heart’s desire.” Yet, stories travel only because people travel — people like Mogor dell’Amore, Argalia and Qara Koz herself. Connected to travel is the notion of time. Mogor dell’Amore tells Akbar that in the new world, “the ordinary laws of space and time did not apply”, that time had been introduced to this world by the European voyagers. The point of the novel, however, is not that one culture is superior to the other but that both are equally fantastic, that both abound in stories and that travellers ensure that these stories, which are really mirrors of one another, travel back and forth.

One can’t help feeling victimised at times by the mirror itself. Its many reflections, made possible by a Rushdiean cleverness, get a bit tedious and reading the novel begins to feel like work. Fortunately, Rushdie’s humour compensates for much of this. We smile when Rushdie describes Queen Gulbadan: “When Gulbadan started climbing the family tree like an agitated parrot there was no telling how many branches she would need to settle on briefly before she decided to rest.”

The Enchantress of Florence is a book that will work for readers who are okay with getting a bit lost. Like Dashwanth, the artist who disappears into his paintings of the hidden princess, Rushdie demands that we permit ourselves to be sucked into his magic world of mirrors.

This is the Beijing Capital International Airport. It is the world’s largest airport building and the centerpiece of China’s multi-billion-dollar infrastructure boom and provides a glimpse into China’s vision of 21st-century air travel.

The futuristic airport has been built in preparation for the millions who are likely to visit China for the Olympic Games and to meet the country’s booming air traffic.

An airport employee cleans the floor at the new terminal building Terminal Three — T3 — at the Beijing Capital International Airport. This is the world’s largest terminal.

The roof of the swanky new terminal looks like a dragon from the air with its wing spread running 3.25 km. The giant dragon-shaped terminal is 100 hectares in size: that is as big as 170 soccer fields.

This makes the airport larger than the Pentagon and almost 20 per cent bigger than all five terminals of London’s Heathrow put together.

The terminal has walls of glass. The skylights of the terminal building are designed to look like scales on a dragon’s back and to let natural light into the building. The dragon is considered a sign of strength and luck in China.

Almost 50,000 workers toiled round the clock in 8-hour shifts and built the colossal $3.75-billion terminal in only four years. China wanted the airport to be ready before August 8, when the Beijing Olympic Games begin.

However, the construction of the airport involved the demolition of thousands of houses that rendered more than 10,000 Chinese peasants homeless. China’s autocratic Communist regime could thus manage to do something that democratic governments — like India’s — can hardly ever match.

The airport was designed by British architect Norman Foster, who has also designed Hong Kong’s famous Chep Lap Kok airport.

British firm Arup, which has provided engineering and architectural design services for the Hyderabad International Airport, built the airport.

The new terminal will have a capacity of 75 million passengers a year. It features an extremely high-tech passenger baggage system — on 50 km of conveyor belts — that can handle 19,800 bags per hour.

The size of the new Beijing airport can be gauged from the fact that it boasts of 64 restaurants, 80 retail stores, 175 escalators, 173 lifts, 437 travelators or moving footpaths, and 300 check-in counters.

The terminal has a 3-km long concourse, divided into three sections and connected by a shuttle train. The airport’s shuttle train service can ferry passengers around the mammoth airport.

According to Norman Foster, the airport’s architect, the airport is ’so big that under a certain amount of light you can’t see one end of the building from the other.’

Apart from the shuttle, a high-speed commuter train (subway as also elevated) service will carry passengers between the airport and Beijing in 15 minutes. Two Airport Lines, scheduled to open before July, on elevated lines connect the airport with the transport hub of Dongzhimen. The Olympic branch line has four stations, each with a theme.

The airport’s runway is capable of handling the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380.

The airport building has integrated environmental control systems to minimise energy consumption and carbon emissions, report say.

The airlines that will use airport initially include Air China, Sichuan Airlines, Shandong Airlines, Hong Kong’s Dragonair, Singapore Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa, Air Canada, Qatar Airways, Qantas Airways, El Al Israel Airlines, Emirates and other Star Alliance members.

You might not have heard of Tara International or the electric cars and mopeds it plans to launch. But once the company unleashes Tara Tiny and Tara Titu — which will cost about Rs 99,000 — and Tara Shuttle and Tara Carrier, it is quite likely to become a household name.

“While Tara Tiny and Tara Titu are priced at Rs 99,000 (approximately), Tara Shuttle and Tara Carrier are priced at Rs 500,000 (approximately). The company�s electric bikes are priced between Rs 12,000 and Rs 35,000.

The running cost of these cars is about 40 paise per km, while the two-wheelers’ running cost will be as low at 15 paise per km. (100 paise = 1 rupee)

So here are some of vehicles that the company will soon be unleashing and the charming history of the company.

Tara Titu specifications:

No. of seats: 2

Net weight: 940 kg

Wheel base: 1800 mm

Maximum speed: 55 km/hour

Maximum grade ability: 13%

Motor power: 5 kw

Battery voltage: 12V*4

Recharge duration: 8 hours

Driving charge: 130 km

Ground clearance: 110/mm

Running cost: 55 p/km

Battery capacity: 200/Ah

The Tara Titu which will come in 2 variants: 2-seater and 4-seater, and will cost from Rs 99,000 onwards.
The story of Tara Ganguly

At the first meeting, you are sure to take Tara S Ganguly for a retired army man. Once you strike a conversation with him, you understand why: the chairman and chief executive officer of Tara International has the same zeal and fervour of a general. He is a visionary who wants to give back something to the society.

It is this urge in Ganguly that has goaded him to conceive pollution free, battery-driven cars. He visualises in his mind’s eye a pollution free world where green aka electric cars would replace fuel-driven cars.

“With the phenomenon of global warming breathing down our necks every minute, it is high time we switched over to battery-driven vehicles,” he told rediff.com during an informal chat in Kolkata on March 15. During the meeting, he also shared some interesting details about his life, business, electric cars et al. Excerpts:

Ganguly, born in 1942, went to the United States after finishing school at Darjeeling for a degree in engineering and management. He got a bachelor�s degree in industrial engineering from Pennsylvania University, Philadelphia, and a post-graduate degree in management engineering from Columbia University, New York.

After spending 10 years in the US working with DuPont Corporation, Ganguly returned to India to join his family business — Bengal Enamel — as production planning engineer and works manager. He gradually became the company’s managing director.
On the company’s inception

Bengal Enamel was set up in 1921 by Colonel Dwijendra Bhattacharya with nationalist leader Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy as its first chairman. The company soon became a name to reckon with for its enamelled and other ware like plates, mugs and waterbottles for households and the army. Business runs in the blood of colonel’s grandson Ganguly and he decided to carry forward his ancestor’s legacy.
On why the company closed down

In the eighties, Bengal Enamel fell prey to competition from other materials and sank into the red before closing down in 1991. The company ended up before the Board for Industrial & Financial Reconstruction and is still paying off its dues to banks and workers.

The Tara Shuttle, which is a 14-seater and expected to cost about Rs 500,000.

Tara Shuttle specifications:

No. of seats: 14

Net weight: 1300 kg

Wheel base: 2800 mm

Maximum speed: 30 km/hour

Maximum grade ability: 15%

Motor power: 4.5 kw

Battery voltage: 6V*12

Recharge duration: 12 hours

Driving charge: 70 km

Ground clearance: 220/mm

Running cost: 70 p/km

Battery capacity: 180/Ah

This blog has been dedicated to all the lovely, wonderful (I know all moms are wonderful ) mothers of the world!

Happy Mother’s Day!

Mothers Day

A Mother loves right from the start.

She holds her baby close to her heart.

The bond that grows will never falter.

Her love is so strong it will never alter.

A Mother gives never ending Love.

She never feels that she has given enough.

For you she will always do her best.

Constantly working, there’s no time to rest.

A Mother is there when things go wrong.

A hug and a kiss to help us along.

Always there when we need her near.

Gently wipes our eyes when we shed a tear.

So on this day shower your Mother with Love.

Gifts and presents are nice but that is not enough.

Give your Mother a day to have some peace of mind.

Be gentle, be good, be helpful, be kind.

Happy Mothers Day.

~~ Carol Matthews

The cutest poem for Mother’s Day

If I were granted any wish,

I’ll tell you what I’d do,…

I’d wish my kids were small again,

for just a month or two.

To hear their squeals of laughter,

to watch them while they play.

And when they ask me to join in,

I’d NOT say “Not today.”

To hug again their chubby frame,

to kiss away their tears,

and cherish childhood innocence’s

that’s washed away the years.

Then when it’s story time again,

I’d stay a little longer,

to answer questions, sing the songs,

so memories would be stronger.

But time is callous, wishes, myth,

yet God in all his wisdom,

has given me another chance

before I join his kingdom.

The face may not be just the same,

the name is changed, ’tis true,

but yet the smile that radiates,

reminds me so of you.

God must have known that Grandma

would need a chance or two.

For many little happy things

she hadn’t time to do.

So God gave love to Grandmas

to equal that before,

that, in effect embraces

those little lives she bore.

~~ Author Unknown

Mother…

Mother, what to say about her,

She is a friend?

A sister?

Or is she everything to us?

Mom, a loving soul,

Working night and day

Leading us away from foul,

About her, what to say,

She is like the moon,

Cowering from the limelight,

She is like the moon,

Shying away from the light.

She wears specs gilded,

Over often flashing eyes dreaded,

But she lets us have our way,

In spite of much cry and sway.

She does her work quietly,

Like a breeze,

Never does she speak complainingly,

Leading our family without a crease.

A lamp, she is, true and old,

With a heart truly of gold,

Never will her heart waver,

More than the dying soldiers, braver.

A lamp, whose light will never dim,

Even if the sun and the moon perish,

Even if we become dim,

She turns us bright in a flourish.

Love you, O mighty soul,

Who will protect us even from a ghoul,

Carrying on her work,

Without the slightest jerk.

~~ Ayshwarya.R.Vikram

Mother’ Day Poem

Another Mother’s Day is here,

Bringing joy and pleasures new,

On this special day, Mother dear,

I want to remember you

I cannot give you costly gifts,

And I’ve told you this before,

No matter what I give to you,

You give back much, much more

I’m giving you a pure, sweet rose,

Gathered in the early morn,

This rose you planted in my heart,

The day that I was born

In kindly, loving thoughts of you,

And with the faith you still impart,

The rose I give to you today,

Is the love that’s in my heart

~~ Author Unknown

Mother’s Day

Mothers Day Mothers day comes once a year

So I am writing this poem to bring you cheer

My wish for you is happiness and glee

I only wish in return what you have given to me

Thank you so much for all the time that you have spent

Never expecting anything in return from all that you have lent

You’ve done so much for me in my life

You’ve been a great mother and a very devoted wife.

Sometimes we all made you mad

Sometimes we all made you sad

But now that were older we just want to make you glad

Looking back and remembering all the good times we had

On your anniversary cooking all that wonderful food

Setting the table and setting the mood…

Your a mother to many because you’ve been there for them through and through

I thank you and I’m sure if they were here they would thank you too

You’re great mom, I love you and I hope you enjoy this day

I hope you enjoy this poem in the very mounth of may

I love you mom and I have just one more thing to say

I hope you have a great Mothers day!!

~~ Cheryl Whitehurst

Mother’s Love

Her love is like

an island in life’s ocean,

vast and wide

A peaceful, quiet shelter

From the wind, the rain, the tide.

‘Tis bound on the north by Hope,

By Patience on the West,

By tender Counsel on the South

And on the East by Rest.

Above it like a beacon light

Shine Faith, and Truth, and Prayer;

And thro’ the changing scenes of life

I find a haven there.

~~Author Unknown