29 Dec : At The Greens, Thergaon, Pimpri-Chinchwad.
My childhood friend Prasad ( Pranav ) Dasnurkar had been after me for a long time to visit him, and also to use the opportunity to reach out to the people in the neighbourhood. Prasad also lost his sister in a road accident in 2012. His mother has been in touch with us – she understands our grief fully and has been very supportive. I had promised Prasad that we will do a session in 2018, and I am glad that we could do it before the end of the year.
I was extremely pleased to see a few young people in the audience; young Manas led the rest of the folks in reading out the pledge at the end.
One person remarked that it is annoying and distracting when the passenger in the front seat is talking on the phone. My suggestion is that if the driver is getting distracted, the driver should speak up and tell the passenger that it is distracting. I have picked up an interesting perspective from Alan Alda’s interview by Shankar Vedantam on “The Hidden Brain”. Alan says that he makes the first move with the taxi driver and asks “where are you going?” .. the little bit of empathy gets taxi drivers to respond better! Similarly, when talking about a driver who was a bit rough, Alan said “It’s affecting me”. If we try to tell the driver how to do his job, he will take offence. Instead, shift the angle: what’s it doing to me. Others respond better in such situations.
We also met Mr. Jatkar – a resident of Greens who works at Syngenta. He helped us with the audio-video setup. Mr. Jatkar mentioned that Syngenta regularly conducts safety sessions in the company, and these are mandatory for the employees. I was very pleased to hear that some organizations are being proactive in this regard. Mr. Jatkar has requested me for my material for he thinks that he can use it in Syngenta to make a bigger impact. We are very happy to partner with Mr. Jatkar to spread the message.
Another tidbit : my son shared this with me at the end of the session. There were two senior citizens who “strayed” into the presentation. They did not know what it was about, but they said to each other “let’s see if it’s interesting”. And they stayed through the full hour of the presentation. Maybe we are doing something right in how we present, if it is able to hold the attention of a stray participant.
A special thanks to Sandhya and Shirish Bhatawdekar who helped in coordinating the logistics for the event.
