Posted by Deevaan on 31 January 2005

someone commented to pakpositive that they notice a lot of our young people spending time chatting on msn than doing anything worthwhile... this is a valid observation and points to a growing trend & disappointing habit in the younger generation...

a long time ago, I read a poem about the best minds of a generation going stark raving mad... a lament perhaps about the loss of brilliant minds to social excesses and drug culture.....this could very well apply to our current generation of young graduates who spend more energy chatting on msn than self improvement & career development...

what i have found from my own experience is that learning the ropes in the market place comes at the expense of hard labor.... for me personally, bouts of depression was also part and parcel of the learning process but with this came valuable experience even if customers were rude, impatient, obnoxious, full of themselves….i had the privilege of working for thorough professionals and taught us all the right things …emphasis must remain on professional conduct…be polite, call the customer even if you have to be the messenger of bad news face, it is not a personal popularity contest, say what is right, keep the conversation tactful yet to the point... no need to be a wise guy, be their advisor not their supplier, invest in your friendship with customers, be in control, mark someone as your role model and when caught in a tight situation think what he/she would do or say….

basic principles come in handy every day as experience has no substitute and money cannot buy it either, like fine wine, it is a product of time

what bothers me is that i no longer find this “old way” of doing things in young interns and trainees, they spend their time infront of the screen on msn, chatting their lives away or they fidget around with their mobile phones and download ringtones all day

when I interview young graduates, I find little content, graduates from leading business school just talk salary expectations.... they have the cocky attitude that is probably inculcated by business schools as an essential quality of a successful manager… but how/what will they manage a business when they do not know the basics that are the foundation of running it

the blood sweat and tears it takes to run a business is not something one can learn at school…. the work place is an extremely dynamic arena of competition... you need your eyes and ears fune tuned to new changes and msn is your enemy if you get addicted to it.... i see the world change infront of young people and they do not notice that time is slipping away from them

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Comments (latest on top)

Ramla A. said:	Ramla A.'s Website
Dr. Enver Sajjad - the al famoso playwright - said the other day in a discussion I was attending: "When the mind is not occupied with a useful thought, it is occupied with a useless thought. A vacuum cannot exist. Hai ke nahi?!" I said, "Hai." Moral of the story: Give the people work to do. They will stop (or at least lessen) doing what-not-to-do.
Khalid said:	-
At the age of 38, I am at the cusp of becoming ancient but somehow feel very comfortable in the company of young blokes / gals. Don't divide people into our generation and your generation crap. Yes you can divide people by ideology and ambitions etc. whenever I sit with my contemporaies I feel they are stuck in phase and judge every thing accordingly. They are just not willing to learn and to adapt. C'mon guys grow up and make room for others and embrace change. Learn new skills , eat different food, chat, sing, dance, read, laugh.....tolerate!!!! Sit with young people and talk. I can bet you, you will not regret. About sitting infont of the computer.. how do you know that they are alway chatting??? they could be on google ..trying to find something interesting.
Guitarian said:	Guitarian's Website
Well my indian friend about the internet to be honest i would like to say that it is not free but very cheap here something around 10 rupees per hour. All those people you see just waste there times in downloading pirated softwares, mp3s etc etc. Nobody or you can say that only .2 or 3 percent Pakistanis take adbvantage of the Internet
san_india said:	-
I write from India. I am surprised at the number of persons from Pakistan in the chatrooms. They are there all through the night. What do (running in thousands at a given time) do there. If you go to the chatroom, they will just be sending best wishes to each other, or raising nationalist slogans etc. Nothing more. I feel its a wastage of time and money. Or if Internet comes for free in Pakistan??
Zeus said:	-
Divided we stand... Our generation and the "next" generation that is. We are behaving no different with the coming generation than our elders did with us. With today's generation it is MSN and chat-rooms and blogs and whatever. When it was us I distinctly remember my mom and dad and aunts and uncles complaining about us wasting time with VCRs, and Top Of The Pops, and comic books, and disco dancing, saying we were into social excesses. And so round and round we go. As time passes each older generation will complain about the younger generation on one pretext or another. Each generation always has new "toys" at its disposal to commit what the older generation considers an "excess". It's the way the cookie simply crumbles. It's an indication of your coming of age. When the time comes and generation-next needs to step up and take the reigns to command their world, they will b/c that's the way the clock ticks. We'll pass into history and oblivion just as our elders have. Time always passes and someone who's a teenager today will be writing these same lines that you write, again, twenty or thirty years from now. That's an essence of our existence.