Sometimes back i appeared for a test of a subject called "Change Management" for my professional purpose. This subject dealt with the mindset change to adapt to the changing environment of a corporate world - be it in the form of requirement change for a software product or the change in process of the internal system of an organization. But have we ever thought of the change management in our lives that we did in the last few years or so? Let me try to elaborate a little more...
The first change that i saw during childhood was the source of entertainment of my family members. When i was a child, my dad used to switch on his big HMV radio set on every Sunday morning for the Binaca Geetmala. My Mom used to listen to Chayachobir Asor almost regularly... That big radio set became smaller and smaller with the advent of time and ultimately got scrapped. Then during the mid-80's, we first experienced a new source of entertainment in the form of a black and white television. There used to be an huge Yagi antenna (please excuse me for this technical term) on the roof top. There used to be device called Booster used in conjunction with the antenna. And the most interesting part was that whenever there was poor signal strength, there used to be talks of increasing the heights of the antenna or changing its direction. However, the impact of the change in the source of entertainment was pretty big. Our beloved radio set went almost into oblivion...
However, the TV programs at that time in my place was pretty simple. There used to be only a single national channel, and the station that used to relay that program in my place usually used to stop relaying after 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm (i am sorry i can't remember the exact timing). But the craze was definitely in the air. People from neighborhood used to gather in our house to see programs like Chitrahhar, or Saturday/Sunday's movies, or Ramayana. People used to curse the electricity board if there was a power cut during those times. We did the necessary change management to adapt from Radio to TV.
With that change another change started taking shapes in rural India. That change is from Football to Cricket. During my childhood it was pretty common to see boys playing football in villages. But with India's victory in the Cricket World Cup and WCC cup, the choice for the favorite game tilted from Football to Cricket. And this change was huge. We started to forget listening to the relay of Mohun Bagan - East Bengal football match in the radio and adapted to cricket relay. Thus the whole new generation of cricket fans became omnipresent. We did another change management...
Then there was another change with the advent of Cable TV in 90's. The antennas from the roof top were pulled down and we started getting familiar with the new source of entertainment. Our National channels gradually gave way to the Star TV. MTv and channel V gradually took the place of the Chitrahaar. The movies of Saturday and Sunday and the Rangolli of the Sunday morning gradually lost their significance with the 24/7 entertainment of the private channels. The 8:30 pm national news lost their shines with the advent of news channels... And we did another change management....
In the 90's there was another change that was taking shape in India. This was the change in the way we communicate. With the advent of advanced telecommunication technologies the old black telephone (POTs) which used to be the status symbol of a family, gave way to the modern telephone. It became a pretty common gadget in the Indian house holds. People then started to communicate over the phone. The appointment with a doctor or getting news for an exam result became dependent on this small device placed in one corner of Indian homes...We did another change management in our lives...
But the real change in the way we communicate was no sooner than late 90's when the mobile phone gradually started invading the Indian minds. With the advent of Mobile technologies, people in the cities first got used to pager... and then they switched over to the Mobile phones... But the phones at that time was brick phones and it is really difficult to match it with today's slick phones...But still mobile phones were a status symbol in the early stage of deployment of the network... But gradually it became omnipresent and now-a-days, probably we can't imagine our lives a mobile phones...We did another change management in our lives...
Then the next change happened in our lives was with the way we get information - the internet...But still in the late 90s or the early 2000, internet was again a status symbol. There used to be point to point protocol (PPP), dial-in networks... The internet was very slow... Yet it started opening up another era to us... But with the advent of Broadband in the late 2000, Internet became a force to beckon with... And now-a-days probably, we have changed ourselves to mix-up with Internet...We did another change management...
And with the advent of 3G and 4G, WiMax, WiFi - probably we are about to see another change management in the Indian households... We are about to see how Mobile Banking would change our lives, how the social networking websites are flooding the internet space... how online radio and youtube are changing the way we entertain ourselves...Probably we will have to do a lot of change management in our lives in the years to come...
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