I have experienced a fair bit of management high handedness in my limited experiences of working for others. In my case most of these acts of callousness and cruelty were actually committed by normal people not evil monsters or egomaniacs. On reflection I guess apart from work related anxieties, the main cause was an acceptance by people in positions of authority that such acts were a part of corporate life. Also sometimes these incidents had their roots in an unwillingness to go beyond strictly defined corporate guidelines. Subjectivity of any sort is generally discouraged and preset rules and regulations were held sacrosanct.

An incident that typifies such  behaviour seems to have happened to a cousin of mine yesterday. A brilliant student through school and in graduation, her academic record had one striking blot. In class XII she had barely managed passing grades while in the rest of her academic years stood firm among top 3-4 students. One would imagine any half decent HR person to instinctively inquire what lay behind that glaring inconsistency. But in her case that bit of basic courtesy wasn’t to be and she was deemed not fit after having passed the rigorous qualifying tests held earlier.

 What makes it more poignant is that my cousin had a very valid answer to that absent question. Her father, a policemen bravely serving our nation, was killed by millitants days before the exams. It’s a wonder she actually passed in the first place. The biggest surprise for me is that such an oversight ocurred in an organisation oft touted in our media as one of best employers in our country. ‘Think scale’ that’s the blurb in one of Infosys’s recent annual reports that talks with pride about them finally arriving on the global scene. Sadly while reaching there it seems to have lost or scaled back on some of the core values that their founders like talking about so much to the media.