35 things you should NOT do at your job interview

Two days ago I provided a link to a Mint article on a book that offered tips on how to answer frequently asked job interview questions.

Today I read in DNA a feature on "the things you must avoid at your job interview". This article, which has been reproduced from the Business School Edge website, provides helpful advice on such aspects as (not) paying enough attention to your appearance, (not) acting too familiar with your interviewers, (not) giving too many personal details, (not) turning in a messy application, (not) keeping your cellphone on during the interview, and (not) showing up late for the interview.

Read the feature in detail here: "35 things to avoid at your job interview".

Plagiarism is okay, says DNA executive editor in an apology for a column

R. Jagannathan, executive editor of DNA, writing in the newspaper today on the Edit Page, has the temerity to suggest that there is an upside to plagiarism.

First, he feels sorry for Aroon Purie, who copied two paragraphs from an article in Slate and used them in his "Letter from the Editor" column in India Today. Jagannathan writes: "I'm sure Aroon Purie, editor-in-chief of India Today, is embarrassed that his lines on Rajinikanth were 'lifted' from Grady Hendrix's article in Slate.com."

Aroon Purie? Embarrassed? How is Jagannathan "sure" about this? And is embarrassment all Purie should feel as the editor-in-chief of the country's biggest magazine-publishing group who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar?

Second, and this is where I almost lost it, Jagannathan writes: "Grady [the author of the Slate article] protests too much. He is the one true beneficiary in all this, for plagiarism is the ultimate form of flattery. When you quote somebody's work and attribute it, you are merely acknowledging the source. But when you lift a passage out of someone's myriad outpourings and pass it off as your own, you are paying him the ultimate tribute. You find the lines so good that you wished you had written it yourself."

I couldn't believe what I was reading. Was this DNA's idea of a joke? Surely, this is a sarcastic piece, I thought. But no, as I continued reading I realised Jagannathan is serious.

Though he has the good sense to begin the very next paragraph, the third, by asserting that "this is not an invitation to Indians to copy someone else's intellectual output with a clear conscience. We Indians have to learn to respect copyright, as we are too blasé about stealing", he ruins it all by writing in the same paragraph that "plagiarism does have real (positive) spinoffs: it speeds up the spread of knowledge at the cost of slightly retarding innovation".

Huh?

After the paid news and private treaties programmes initiated by the country's largest media company, plagiarism is the biggest danger to the future of journalism, especially in India where, as Jagannathan admits, "we are too blasé about stealing".

So do we want young journalists and would-be journalists to think that plagiarism is okay because it is "the ultimate form of flattery" and it has "real (positive) spinoffs"?

Shame on you, Jagannathan, for trying to suggest that stealing is okay and then making things worse by telling readers that that is how "our pharma and software prowess was established". I am no expert on our pharma or software prowess, but as a journalist with more than 25 years in the profession, I am appalled that a columnist with a national newspaper is hinting that plagiarism is the way to go if we want better journalists and newspapers.

Shame on DNA, too, for publishing this drivel.

• Contrast Jagannathan's article with the one written by Aditya Sinha, the editor-in-chief of The New Indian Express, who was the first media honcho to comment on the Purie scandal. An excerpt:

The buck stops at the top... and it will take time for Purie to live down this stupid-mistake-by-stupider-underlings. But that’s good, in a way, if it occasions some introspection and forces some self-regulation. India Today has been charged with plagiarism too many times lately; just ask Canada-based blogger Niranjana Iyer or Anshuman Rane of the UK digiterati. It’s not a coincidence that these victims were foreign-based and that their work appeared online. It seems Indian journalists think that they are immune given a blogger’s distance from an Indian court and the fact the cyber-universe is so vast that the readership of a particular online article is often limited. No apologies have ever been offered to either of these two, by the way, and the culprits roam free to plagiarise again. Similarly, the Times of India film critic, Nikhat Kazmi, lifted from the legendary Roger Ebert for her review of Shark Tale, yet she remains at work for India’s largest media company.

Read the no-punches-pulled column here: "Plagiarise and be damned".

• DNA readers have also pilloried Jagannathan for this particular column. Here are two comments from the newspaper's website:

padma srihari from Bangalore

Mr.J,
I am appalled by your moral ambivalence. Aroon Purie STOLE. You are supporting him because you do the same. Filthy little cheats!

Posted on: Nov 4, 2010 7:42 IST

Bubloo Mookerjee from Ahmedabad

Hilarious, isn't it? At the end of an article extolling the virtues of copying is a line saying copyright permission mandatory to republish this article!

Posted on: Nov 5, 2010 22:26 IST

• EXTERNAL READING: Outlook editor Krishna Prasad has also published a blog post on Jagannathan's column: ‘Plagiarists speed up the spread of knowledge’.

On SRK's birthday, a tribute by a well-known entertainment journalist

Yesterday was Shah Rukh Khan's 45th birthday. To mark the occasion, ToI published a feature on the superstar by noted entertainment journalist S. Ramachandran, who also happens to be the ex-boss of Commitscion Noyon Jyoti Parasara (Class of 2007), who sent me the link.

Noyon writes:

"What's striking is how Rama enriches the piece with information about which we have no knowledge despite our knowing so much about SRK. Also, don't miss Rama's trademark humour."

I must agree with Noyon. There are some facts in the article that I was unaware of and I had to grin when I read some of Rama's quips.

Read the article here: "Simply SRK: Know him more on his birthday".

• SRK fans (I can think of two Commitscions in particular): You probably know more about your idol than anyone else — I am certain you know more than I do, for sure — so if you don't find anything new here, please don't send me flame-mail. :-)

How journalism guru Roy Peter Clark helped to turn a classified ad into a heartwarming newspaper story

"Bird — Cockatiel, grey with white face. St. Pete Beach area. Whistles at toes!  Heartbroken. [Phone number]..."

This was the classified ad that senior journalist and columnist Roy Peter Clark of Poynter Online saw in Florida's St. Petersburg Times (now renamed Tampa Bay Times). But why was Clark looking at the classifieds in the first place? And how did this ad then become a news story?

First, the answer to the first question: Clark is writing a new book titled Help! For Writers. "The book will list 25 of the most common writing problems, with 10 suggested solutions for each," he writes on his Poynter blog. "The problem in question was 'I am out of story ideas.' "

Clark continues:

...what better place to find [stories] than in the news.

Begin with the small stories, the ones that play inside the paper. Look for announcements of events you might write about. Scour the classified ads, in the paper and online.

He says he realised then that he needed a real-life example and he rushed downstairs to grab a copy of that day's St. Petersburg Times.

And now comes the story about the story:

Then I wrote: "It took exactly 30 seconds to find the telephone number of a person who lives on the beach and is heartbroken because her cockatiel — who whistles at toes — is missing. So what are you waiting for? Get to work. Dial that number."

A little later it occurred to me that the bird story deserved more than a mention in a book that might not be published for more than a year. So I sent a message to editor Kelley Benham at the Times. I had confidence that Kelley, who once wrote an epic story about a rogue rooster named Rockadoodle Two, would give it a good look. Not only did we have a lost bird and a heartbroken owner, but the bird apparently had a foot fetish.

Kelley messaged me back that reporter Stephanie Hayes was "all over" the story. And she was, producing a piece that got good play in the paper, and told the sad tale of an old man living on St. Pete Beach, whose beloved bird, named Shadow for its gray feathers, had flown away.

All novice reporters and aspiring journalists and college students working on the editorial desk of their newspaper should read Clark's post to learn what happened next. And to learn how to originate and develop local stories. Because that is the big challenge, isn't it? How do you find stories every day? And how do you write them so that they are good enough for your publication?

Read Roy Peter Clark's post in its entirety: "Need a Story Idea? Check Lost and Found". And then read Clark's superlative column on how to tighten up your writing.

• For some practical tips on finding stories, read "100 places to shop for stories", by Gregg McLachlan, on the News College website.

• And also check out this Reading Room post: "Point your mouse to Poynter" (Poynter Online claims it has "everything you need to be a better journalist". I believe it.).

• Photo courtesy:  St. Petersburg Times/ TampaBay.com

So you want help with job interviews...

Who doesn't?

That is why Matthew J. DeLuca and Nanette F. DeLuca have written Best Answers to the Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions.

And that's why Mint has, helpfully, published edited excerpts — questions and answers — from the book.

Here are a few questions featured in the book:

• What is the reason you left/are planning to leave your organisation?

• Do you instant-message? Do you twitter? Do you like to use emails? Do you have a BlackBerry or iPhone?

• Have you ever worked for or with a difficult person?

• What do you like the most about this position? What do you like the least about this position?

• What is your current salary?

Want to know the "best" answers? Go to "An ace up your sleeve".

• Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions: By Matthew J. and Nanette F. DeLuca,Tata McGrawHill, 217 pages, Rs. 250.'

UPDATE (October 1, 2013): Read these two posts before you head out for that job interview:

1.  Five Things You Must Not Do in an Interview and Five Things You Must

2. What Interviewers Wish They Could Tell Every Job Candidate 

UPDATE (April 24, 2014): Richard A. Moran, CEO of an American company, offers a thought-provoking riff on what he calls The #1 Interview Trap Question. You'll be surprised, as I was, to learn what that question is.

What makes us tick?

If you want to understand what makes India tick, read India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das.

If you want to understand what makes the world tick, read Longitudes and Attitudes, by Thomas L. Friedman.

(Both books are available in the Commits library.)

MARK HADDON

But, surely, we also want to know what makes us tick. In that case, read A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon, to better understand the human condition. Yes, it's a novel, a work of fiction. But it smacks of reality all the same, dealing as it does with the madness of family life.

There's so much we can learn from the book that was hailed by the New York Times as "a fine example of why novels exist".


FROM A SPOT OF BOTHER:

• Aphorisms to live by-1

George chewed this over for a minute or two. When men had problems they wanted someone to give them an answer, but when women had problems they wanted you to say that you understood.

• Aphorisms to live by-2

You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.

• Aphorisms to live by-3

...it occurred to him [Jamie] that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people.The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.

• Aphorisms to live by-4

Perhaps the secret was to stop looking for greener grass. Perhaps the secret was to make the best of what you had.

• Aphorisms to live by-5

And Ray said, "Eventually you realise that other people's problems are other people's problems."

FYI, Mark Haddon is the author of that massive bestseller, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (also available in the Commits library).

• Photo courtesy: The New York Times

"Push us. Push yourself."

In a recent post titled, "What's the point of being educated if you're illiterate?", I criticised our education system and our educators for failing our youngsters. I highlighted the inability of many undergraduate and master's level students to even spell simple words correctly and I wrote:

Neither at the high school level nor at the undergraduate level do teachers bother, I am told, to check and correct spellings in their pupils' written assignments and examination answer sheets. One reason for this may be the inability to deal with, and lack of time for, 40 or 50 or more students. However, I suspect that lack of interest is also a problem.

Yesterday Faye D'Souza (Class of 2004) sent me the link to a brilliant blog post by American entrepreneur and author Seth Godin lambasting "mediocre professors" and the education system in the US. See how much we have in common?

Godin, who popularised the concept of "permission marketing", is highly critical of...

"...professors who spend hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook... professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field, professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. ... And most of all, professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt."

And Godin concludes by coining a slogan after my own heart when he urges students to tell their teachers:

"This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!"

Now, Commitscions, where have you heard that before?

***

Earlier this month, on October 20, Seth Godin made another astute observation on the importance of reading (thanks for this link, too, Faye):

If you're in the idea business, what's going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks.

I am so glad that there are others out there who believe that reading can transform our lives. And who are happy to rant about it.

To read Godin's post in its entirety, go to "Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant]".

• Photo courtesy:  #SethSaid.com

Street artist extraordinaire

Not many may know that an anonymous artist known only as "JR" last week received the 2011 TED Prize, a $100,000 (approx. Rs.44.5 lakh) award given by the non-profit organisation.

TED, or Technology Entertainment and Design, sought someone "who has a track record for changing the world in innovative ways, who hopefully has mobility and charisma, and who works on a global level," TED Prize director Amy Novogratz told the US magazine Fast Company. "And he does all those things."

"THE HILLS HAVE EYES IN THIS INSTALLATION IN A BRAZILIAN FAVELA."

 The article, by David Zax, continues:

JR, who keeps mum on the real name his initials stand for, joins the ranks of Bill Clinton, E.O. Wilson, and U2's Bono, previous prize recipients.

JR's canvas is the world. The Parisian guerrilla artist eschews museums, favoring the crumbling walls of the world's slums to the austere halls of its museums. (Even so, the Tate Modern did give him 100 feet of an external wall, and a 2009 auction of one of his prints fetched over 35 grand). Somewhat in the vein of the British artist Banksy, well known for his politically charged graffiti murals, JR will show up at slum, shantytown, or favela, often braving streets so mean that its children run around in bulletproof jackets. Once there, he enlists a crew of locals and erects enormous black-and-white photographic canvases on the walls, typically human faces or figures that lend a dignified air to a forgotten neighborhood.

You have to take a look at these "enormous black-and-white photographic canvases" to realise that TED has made a wise choice.

Watch the slide show: "Street Artist J R Wins the TED Prize".

• Photo courtesy: Fast Company

Salman Khan gets a glowing video testimonial from Bill Gates

That's because he's a really, really good teacher. No, this is not Sallu bhai we're talking about here but his namesake, a Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager who runs Khan Academy, surely the world's most unusual educational institute, from his home in Silicon Valley, California.

"This guy is amazing," Gates wrote in an email quoted in David Kaplan's article in the September 6 issue of Fortune. "It's awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources."

Kaplan continues:

Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the "mind-blowing misallocation" of resources away from education, Gates touted the "unbelievable" 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials "I've been using with my kids."

So what is Khan Academy?

According to Kaplan:

Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most popular educational site on the web. Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day ... Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide.... Most page views come from the U.S., followed by Canada, England, Australia, and India. In any given month, Khan says, he's reached about 200,000 students. "There's no reason it shouldn't be 20 million."

Isn't that an incredible statistic?

What is also interesting is the way Kaplan structures his feature, which is not only a profile of Khan but also a look at individual achievement and a study of how venture capital companies and entrepreneurs sniff out the next big idea.

Read the article here: "Bill Gates' favourite teacher". You can visit Khan Academy here.

Outlook's peerless issue on the Indian media crisis

If you've an interest in the media (and every right-thinking person in our country should have an interest in the media), if you are a journalist, if you're an aspiring journalist, if you're a media student... rush to the nearest newsstand and grab a copy of Outlook's 312-page 15th anniversary issue.

In a brilliant section of essays, helmed by foreign editor Ajaz Ashraf, the magazine dissects what it refers to as the great Indian media crisis. For old fogeys like me some of the articles may have made for depressing reading but I take heart from the thought that Outlook has done Indian journalism a singular service by highlighting the ills that plague our newspapers, magazines, and television news channels. Younger journalists and would-be journalists, who will now understand better what is wrong with our media, thanks to Outlook, will be inspired to make an effort to put our house back in order. For that I am very grateful.

Here, to give you a flavour of this thought-provoking — and provocative — issue are excerpts from the stand-out essays:

1. The pen points to us, by Ajaz Ashraf

For Outlook’s 15th birthday, instead of cutting cakes, blowing out candles and printing inane power lists, we decided to tweak a popular cliche and say that journalists who live in glass houses must throw stones at others. Heck, we are journalists, taught to blow against the wind, even live dangerously.

The 15th anniversary issue you hold in your hands does precisely that: it throws stones at the giant media houses, their ambitious owners, their flamboyant editors and wily marketing honchos. We have chosen to defy the norm that dog won’t eat dog because the media is palpably in crisis. What’s worse, the deep gashes are all self-inflicted, by those like us in the media itself.

2. Why I quit the media, by Sumir Lal

I reported from Ayodhya in 1990 on a storming of the Babri Masjid, the police firing, the many deaths, the mayhem. After filing my story, I called my wife to let her know I was safe. While BCCL [the publishers of The Times of India] was raking in record profits, the accounts department refused to reimburse me the few rupees for that call. The expense statement went all the way up to the general manager, who did not approve. On another occasion, a colleague covering an election in a sprawling constituency had his taxi bill turned down on the ground that he could have used a rickshaw. That epitomised the contempt for the newsgathering process of a paper that the BBC mysteriously certified as one of the world’s six greatest.

3. Cut-rate democracy, by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

... corruption in the mass media in India and elsewhere is as old as the media itself. If there is corruption in society, it would be unrealistic to expect the media to be free of this affliction. In recent times, however, corruption in the Indian media has gone way beyond individuals and specific media organisations — from ‘planting’ information and spinning views in lieu of favours received in cash or kind — to institutionalised and organised forms of corruption wherein newspapers and TV channels receive funds for publishing or broadcasting information that is sought to be disguised as ‘news’ — but are actually designed to favour particular individuals, corporate entities, representatives of political parties or cash-rich candidates contesting elections.

4. Reading the reader, by Patrick French

Today, the media is in crisis; but that is not unusual, and it may not be a bad thing. The churning marks a moment of creativity. Anxiety about the state of the press indicates that people in India care about what newspapers, magazines, TV channels and websites are doing and thinking, which is not the case in countries with a less vigorous public debate. Now, Indians face further problems — trivialised reporting, predatory press owners and stories that are paid for by politicians and others.

5. "Our paper isn't for our editors. It's for people." Anjali Puri interviews the Times Group CEO, Ravi Dhariwal

Q: It was the Times that taught the Indian media that newspapers must pay for themselves. But readers have also seen walls collapsing between advertising and editorial. One question that comes up time and again is: is there a cap to greed? It seems like everything is on sale — the masthead, the front page, the editorial columns, the headlines....

 

A: Our editorial is priceless; it is never up for sale. I have worked here for 10 years now, not once have we ever influenced editorial decisions. We have no political agenda, our agenda is only reader engagement and relevance. We believe it is because of that that we get great advertising. Our editorial department and advertising department are totally separate. There is a Chinese wall. But if a client wants a particular design on the front page, why not? It does not upset what our editors write. To say that editors own that entire real estate, and nothing else should happen on it, is an old-fashioned formula.

6. What the hack!, by Shashi Tharoor

On the positive side, our newspapers are more readable, better edited and usually better written than they were. Every newspaper looks at the news more critically, with a clearly visible slant on the events it is reporting. Investigative stories are frequent and occasionally expose wrongdoing before any official institution does so. ... On the negative side, newspapers seem more conscious than ever that it is not they, but TV, that sets the pace.

THE OUTLOOK FEATURE ON SUNANDA PUSHKAR. "AN APPALLING PIECE," SAYS THAROOR.

Tharoor does not spare some of the media bigwigs, including Outlook, in his critique, citing the example of the hyper-coverage (most of it, including the Outlook article, was distasteful, in my opinion) given to his soon-to-be wife:

Part of the problem is a genuine disinclination to take the trouble to research a story, and a disregard for the need to verify it. Outlook ran an appalling piece on my wife Sunanda, in which every second statement was provably false or inaccurate, without consulting either her or her friends about their veracity. (To the magazine’s credit, it also ran a flood of letters pillorying it for the piece.) The Times of India got taken in by one of the many fake Facebook sites purporting to be Sunanda’s (she is not on any social networking site) and ran an entire article quoting her supposed views, without ever checking as to whether the site was genuine. Mid-Day placed words and sentiments in the mouth of one of my sons at my wedding that he would never have thought and did not utter. Perhaps it is our country’s weak libel protections that lead publications to feel they can print anything with complete disregard to the fact that it could amount to character assassination. But it is a sad commentary on how low our print standards have fallen that the very notion of what is “fit to print” has ceased to have any meaning in India today (and in India Today as well, but that’s another matter).

7. Pow! Thud! Diss!, by Mark Tully

The most obvious place where the editor is missing from is the Breaking News slot, which usually deteriorates into a desperate struggle to fill airtime. After the BBC’s early encounter with 24-hour radio news during the first Gulf War, an old veteran of the newsroom said to his editor, “I reckon we’ve been broadcasting untreated sewage.” Apart from the lack of content, Breaking News consistently ignores two basic lessons I was taught. It was drummed into my head that film should never be used as wallpaper. But that is exactly what film is, or at least is for most of the time, in Breaking News.

8. Mainland discourse, by Sanjoy Hazarika

It could be argued ... that poor basic services and slothful, insensitive and corrupt administration have aggravated the political crisis both in the Northeast and Kashmir. This is often where the media fails to make the connection — insurgency and bad governance are part of the same coin, the same story — and often misses the point that lack of services exacerbates alienation. These are the kind of stories that must be leadership-driven, by editors of vision and perspective. For that, you need the kind of determined editors represented by the ilk of B.G. Verghese and P. Sainath. There aren’t many of them around.

9. Just bite, don't chew, by Dipankar Gupta

To a large extent, the poor quality of TV debates is largely because our broadcasters have little faith in their viewers. They believe the ordinary person wants to see only blood, gore and spittle. They’re probably right. The masses are like potatoes, true, but in different sacks of potatoes. They are switched on to their favourite channels, but with their minds switched off. Where TV anchors go wrong, very wrong, is when they disrespect their own, quite awesome, talents. Given their backgrounds and training, they should want to be tested by the best worldwide. TRPs are mere fig leaves. Why not go for the whole tree, figs and all?

10. Slips, a silly point, by Peter Roebuck

You can see why it isn’t easy for reporters to keep the BCCI on its toes. N. Srinivasan and company resent the critique provided by Cricinfo so much that they refuse to give them passes to Test matches. It is pettiness on the grand scale. It is also a warning to other scribes. Cricinfo has one million readers and is the second most important institution in cricket behind the BCCI. And still it can be ostracised.

And you must especially read, and try to answer, the questions Outlook editor Krishna Prasad has for readers (and viewers). "This isn’t about us, it’s about you," he writes. "While you, as a consumer, have the power to read, watch and listen to what you like, you, as a citizen, also have a responsibility that goes beyond paying for what you buy. Question is, how often do you exercise that right, since it’s in your name that a multitude of sins are committed?"

Go to "A manifesto for readers". 

There is more, much more to read, absorb, and act upon. This is a veritable collector's issue — why won't you want to own it?