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SERVICE STORY: "My LIC days"
by PG.POOCHERY
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Mr. Murali, then our Senior Divisional Manager, gave me all encouragements. "When you attend the interview, you also show them all the work you have done," he told me when I met him before the interview.
Interview for promotion to the post of assistant administrative officer took place at Ernakulam Divisional Office. I had a couple of books to my credit. One was titled 'own your home scheme administration' which the southern zonal office had distributed to all the divisional offices. The other book was 'methods' which included a few work studies and designs for various schemes some of which were demonstrated in a seminar conducted at
Then there were articles published in 'yogakshema', official journal of central office published from Mumbai.
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Interview started at 10 am sharp. I was called in before noon. After the initial questions from members of the interview committee, I sought their permission to show materials I had taken with me.
One of the interview committee members said: "no".
Whereas all the candidates had just gone to the committee room without carrying anything with them, I had carried a brief case with me. Committee members could not guess why I took a brief case with me. They did not ask me. And so I couldn't tell them too.
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It appeared they didn't like my behavior.
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And perhaps for the arrogance of taking the materials to the committee room and seeking their permission to show the materials to them they placed me as the last man in a promotion list of about 249 candidates or so.
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The interview committee at Ernakulam perhaps cannot be blamed. Committee members were on tour. There is a culture with touring officers. They are in a mood to collect whatever is gifted to them from the local office. Second form of bribe is that they forget the purpose of their tour and misuse the occasion to visit places of their interest like temples during office hours (an unholy act!).
A car was waiting for the committee members. They did the 'unholy' act of hurriedly finishing the list of candidates for the whole day in the forenoon session itself and they had left for the holy act of visiting temples in the afternoon. Visit to temples was more important to them. They had little time to examine the claim of an employee in the area of organization improvements.
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In one of my personal visits to the zonal office, I met Mr. Sethi, zonal manager, to handover a copy of my journal 'initiative'. He asked me: "what happened in the interview?" Handing over a copy of 'initiative' to Mr. Sethi, I told him: "Sir, this is my reply!" He looked at the regional marketing manager sitting nearby and meaningfully smiled.
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An year later, I had been to zonal office at Chennai. Interview for promotion was being held there. The chairman of the interview committee was the secretary of m. s. department of central office.
He was the person who had invited me to visit central office. He had then asked me if I was interested in moving to Mumbai to continue my activities from there. When I replied in the negative, he said "whenever you feel like doing so, just give me a ring!"
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Had I attended the interview when he was the chairman of the interview committee, I had little doubt that I would have been number one in the list of candidates selected for promotion.
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Interview committee members at Ernakulam had no time to listen to me. They were in a hurry to finish the whole list by noon and visit the temples in the afternoon.
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So the god must have forgiven the interview committee members for their behavior!
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