Operation Camouflage Page 6

  One of the distinguishing aspects of the menu was the puree and paste style of cooking. In the process of separation of calories many of the ingredients had to be converted to their minutest form. But this process instead of diminishing the taste actually gave a distinctive and integrated flavour to the dish.

  So instead of the usual way of preparing a paratha which had the stuffing filled in the dough, here was a puree and paste paratha where the stuffing in its puree form was actually blended with the dough. So while in a stuffed paratha the stuffing could be separated from the outer crust or the borders lacked flavour as compared to the core, this style of cooking ensured a uniform taste of the paratha. The salad paratha which one would have perceived to not be able to titillate the taste buds, actually proved to be a hot favourite. The blend of carrot, radish, beet root, tomatoes, spring onions, mint and lots of lime, gave it a tangy flavour and became an instant hit with the guests.

  In a similar fashion was cooked the mix veg tandoori tikki that comprised of potatoes, green peas, cauliflower, cabbage, carrot and tamarind. Yes, tamarind. The tikki was bursting with flavour of tamarind and did not require a separate sauce or dip. Even the rock salt used in the preparation had enhanced the taste a notch above.

  But the winner in the main course was the buttered broccoli rice. As it is butter enhances the flavour, but excess quantity is always restricted at homes due to health reasons and in restaurants due to cost. But when there is no fear of piling on calories, the chefs aka the robots can use butter as generously as water in the cooking. With the overabundance of butter no other ingredient was required for flavouring.

  Show stopper dessert was wild berries ice cream. The multi coloured sweet and sour berries which included a few unknown wild berries in addition to cranberries, raspberries and strawberries, gave the ice-cream its distinctive taste.

  At the end, the stomachs were full but hearts were not. The guests had already fallen in love with the place and now with this delicious meal, started hoping that they do not have to leave this place anytime soon. They moved towards their respective rooms, accompanied by their family members.

  Chapter 8

  THE RESIDENTIAL APARTMENTS

  8th May’ 2015, 8:30 pm

  Aadi guided Ritu and Dhara to his apartment. Both of them had many questions to ask. But Aadi had even more important work to complete before he could call it a day. Asking them to freshen up and relax till he could join them back, Aadi wanted to take leave but at the same time he knew that his family too needed him at this hour. With a slight hesitation and a question mark in his eyes Aadi asked Ritu, ‘May I?’

  After having not just witnessed but experienced a lifetime equivalent of developments in the last few hours, Ritu knew the severity of the situation. She reassuringly looked into his eyes and holding his hands said ‘I understand and I am with you. Do not worry about us. We are fine. Our questions can wait for some more time. Your mission needs you more than us now. Go. I will put Dhara to sleep and try to take some rest myself.’

  Though not expected but this is exactly the assurance that Aadi wanted at that moment from his family. Giving both of them a hug, he quickly left out of the room. After the spiritual sanitising bath, though a couple of hours ago, Ritu still felt extremely fresh and without a need to freshen up. Even the clothes were extremely comfortable and she did not feel the need for a change. She decided to put Dhara to sleep. Dhara did not need a bedtime story that day. Because of the long day, she should have fallen asleep by then. But Dhara too had many questions. Ritu tried answering them but found that for most of them she did not have an answer and ended up saying ‘I don’t know princess. We will ask Papa when he comes.’ After similar answers for most of her questions, she finally asked, ‘When will Papa Come?’ and to this also Ritu had no answer. Was it a few more minutes, few hours or the entire night?

  Dhara finally fell asleep and Ritu started recalling the history of events. Now she could connect the dots, Why Aadi was content inspite of being behind in his career? Why his boss would say he would be the first person to leave office and why he reached home so late? Why his boss said he hardly travelled and why he was actually out for so many days in a month? The revealing’s during the day had answered some such questions while opening up many more.

  It had been a long day indeed but she was not tired. Maybe it was the atmosphere or the refreshing bath or the divine prayer experience or a combination of all. More importantly she wanted to be awake when Aadi came back. She decided to spend her time exploring the apartment. It was a spacious suite neither too big nor too small. It had a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. The living room had a six-seater sofa, a six seater table which could have been used as a discussion table or a dining table. Next to it was a huge screen which she believed could have served both purposes – viewing presentations as well as television channels or net streaming. The bedroom had a comfortable king size double bed with a medium size television screen opposite to it. There were no switches in the entire room. Motion sensors controlled the lighting in the suite and with a command could also be switched off with the wrist band. Similarly all other electronic gadgets were controlled through the wrist band.

  The room looked like a normal hotel suite. There was nothing peculiar about it. But Ritu felt that could not be the case. Recalling the day’s experiences, the spiritual sanitizing bath, the Prayer room, the dining experience she felt something amiss. Her mind had started thinking that the room could not be as simple as it looked like. On a detailed second look, she found a painting on one of the walls of the bedroom. She knew Aadi did not have much interest into Arts. So what could be the reason behind the painting in his personal room? She went to have a closer look at it. And that’s when she realized, it had a very fine joint in between. Could the two halves be sliding doors? And where did they lead to? Could it be a hideout or a secret passage? Her curiosity level was increasing. She asked the wrist band, ‘What’s behind this painting?’

  Chapter 9

  THE NEXT STEPS

  8th May’ 2015, 8:40 pm

  Leaving Ritu and Dhara, Aadi went back to the conference room.

  ‘What are the latest developments, Samir?’ asked Aadi.

  ‘It’s confirmed. Hrishabh Veer, the MD and Founder of geNxt Telecom and Shekhar Sathey, MD and Founder of Scarletwave Telecom and son of Minister NK Sathey, both of whom had been handling our broadband businesses in different markets, are behind this. Both businesses started with our funding and today are over INR 35000 Crores in valuation, almost half of their telecom businesses. Seems their plan was to acquire it completely by eliminating us. Hrishabh had already left country two days ago and is now in New Zealand probably because he considers it safe there as India does not have an extradition treaty with New Zealand. Pretty optimistic! And Shekhar is underground. He was in his office today morning but left as soon as the news of the failed attack was out. We are still tracing him.’ Said Samir.

  ‘Hmmm…’ Was Aadi’s response, ‘If we must prevent others from considering us weak and turning hostile, we have to send out a strong message. So FIND them and ELIMINATE them. QUICK.’

  ‘Sure, Chief. One of our teams is already on the way to New Zealand and our entire machinery is behind tracing Shekhar. Just give me a day’s time’ said a confident Avanish.

  ‘What do we do about our families now?’ asked Aakash.

  ‘The security robots are ready,’ replied Avanish immediately ‘We can let the family members go tomorrow morning each equipped with an individual and invisible security robot. But, the people themselves might not yet be ready. This is a big revelation to them. Let them hang out with their family members for some more time. Let them get used to the newly found reality and once they are comfortable, once they have all the answers to their questions, they can go.’

  ‘Makes sense’ said Aadi ‘The untimely revelation puts new challenges in front of us and requires drastic changes to our plans. People support now becomes even more crit
ical. Whatever we do henceforth should have one more objective – connecting people with us, with our mission. Whether it be customers, employees, channel partners, beneficiaries from our initiatives, NGO’s, media, social media influencers, we need them all standing firmly by us whenever situation demands.’

  Aakash was quick to reply, ‘Sure Chief. We start the process of taking control over our businesses from tomorrow. I assure you, within three months we will have unparalleled support from our employees.’

  Everyone knew their responsibilities well. No one had to be told what to do and when to do? From the time Aadi had taken over the role of Head of GALAXY, he had focused on aligning the thinking process of the team.

  For this he would conduct mock exercises where he would throw up a dummy situation in front of the team and ask them to come up with the best possible solution for the same. Initially there would be a lot of debates, arguments and counter arguments like it would have happened in any team till the time Aadi made them realize that it was important to win but that WIN had to be for the team and not for the individual.

  If an individual pushed his point aggressively, without letting anybody else speak did not mean he had won. He would have won the debate but in the process the team would have lost the challenge they were working on, effectively making him a loser as well. It was important to win the challenge faced by the team. And this was possible only when the entire team whole heartedly agreed and executed the solution.

  So, the first thing Aadi made them understand was that more important than the idea was arriving at a consensus and for that to happen it was important to throw out the individual EGO’s in the dustbin. Though easier said than done, the team did it. All of them working towards a common but much larger purpose helped them in doing this. Their bond as a team was very strong.

  What also encouraged this behaviour was success was always celebrated as a team and not for any individual contribution within the team. There was no ‘man of the match.’ There was only team victory. By devaluing individual contributions against team spirit, Aadi had run a calculated risk of turning the performers, the leaders into followers. This risk had a high probability in the corporate world, where individuals were externally motivated with factors like increments, bonuses, promotions; where individuals worked for themselves, for their growth for their career progression. But here the situation was different. Aadi knew he was working with internally motivated individuals who were working for a purpose much larger than their individual aspirations.

  The risk Aadi had taken had worked. The approach had helped get rid of individual ego’s without turning the performers, the leaders into followers. Everyone came up with their views with same energy and passion as before but at the same time were equally open not only to listen but even accept better and alternate solutions.

  The harmony and consensus was developed but Aadi was not completely satisfied. With freedom of expression had come freedom of thought which at many a time brought out irrelevant solutions. They would eventually get discarded with mutual acceptance, but valuable time would be lost in the process.

  To address this issue Aadi decided on yet another unconventional approach. It’s said that diverse views in the team bring out the best solution and hence the leader should create an environment that encourages individuals to freely come up with diverse views. A normal human mind would be content with this approach. But Aadi’s thinking would always be at a different level. His starting point would be where a normal human mind stopped thinking. And in this case, he thought instead of arriving at a best solution from amongst the diverse thoughts why shouldn’t the entire team arrive at that best thought in the first place.

  To make this happen, he decided to align the team’s thinking in a particular manner.

  For this everyone had to ask themselves the following questions and go on building consensus on the same.

  1. What is the goal?

  If there was a difference of opinion on this then the final solution identified by different individuals was bound to be different. So it was important to start building consensus from the first step itself.

  2. What are the principles to be followed?

  3. What are the possible solutions to reach the goal within the frame of principles?

  4. If there is more than one solution, then which solution addresses the most important factor the best? Like, for a particular situation there could be two solutions one, which is quick fix, solves the problem quickly and satisfactorily but not the best solution and second which is the best solution but time consuming. Depending on the most important factor, the ideal solution for that situation had to be selected. In case of conflict individual discretion had to be exercised.

  5. If differences existed in opinions, the parties had to justify their solutions with the other party listening with an open mind and constructively questioning. This discussion would go on till a consensus was arrived.

  Following this process, the team was aligned to think in a particular way. Excluding highly strategic decisions, they most often started arriving at a common solution even when thinking individually. Aadi wanted this for not one but two reasons. One, obviously to save time. Second, in situations when a person on behalf of someone else had to arrive at a solution and take a decision he should be able to take the same decision as would have been taken by the original owner of the situation. Considering their small team size, Aadi had anticipated occurrence of such situations many times and hence it was extremely important. To an outsider this would look as killing the individual thinking process but if in most of the cases they were reaching the best possible solutions and in the fastest possible way, it was a small price that Aadi was willing to pay.

  And it actually worked, the way Aadi wanted it. Out of a 100 situations, the team would arrive at a single best solution in 90 cases, in 9 cases there would be a difference of opinion which would get sorted out as per defined process. In 1 situation they could end up being wrong, but it wasn’t something that could not be corrected later. The benefit incurred in the other 99 cases was significantly higher than the losses in that one case.

  With all the immediate tasks, a successful operation reveal; identifying and tracing the perpetrators behind the attack, action plan on taking control over the businesses, next steps on the security of family members decided Aadi said, ‘Let’s call of for the day and take some rest.’

  Everyone went back to their rooms with the thought that while day was over on the work front, they still had to answer few more questions from their families. The day was not yet over for them.

  Chapter 10

  BACK AT THE APARTMENT

  8th May 2015, 10:30 pm

  Ritu was anxiously waiting for an answer from the wrist band. Would it give away the secret? The wrist band spoke ‘It’s a chute to some of the important places here.’

  ‘Ohh’ said Ritu to herself, ‘If at all there had been a secret passage, it wouldn’t be so easy to find.’

  But one thing she realized, it was just another way to save time during emergencies. Feeling somewhat victorious about having found out at least something peculiar about the room, she started scanning the entire room again but without any success.

  Finally she gave up and fell on the bed. As she was not getting any sleep, she decided to watch some TV and that is when she hit pay dirt. She came across feed specific to the organization. She found videos that showed the history of the organization, described the facility, then there was one repository having the recordings of the veterinary treatment and surgeries carried out, another showed the happy patients or animals benefitted from the treatment.

  She decided to watch this one, parking aside the one about the facility for later. The feed started playing and she saw a lioness brutally injured being air lifted from the dense forests and being brought to the operation theatre. Cut to a scene where the lioness was being brought out of the operation theatre and into a private room, with all her wounds dressed. Cut to another scen
e showing the lioness opening her eyes for the first time after the operation, searching for her cubs and on seeing them sitting next to her closing her eyes again, cut to a scene showing her recovering day by day and starting to play with her cubs, cut to a scene where she had completely recovered, all her dressings gone and she was having a majestic walk with her cubs in the room itself and finally a shot where she jumps on Aadi when he enters the room and starts hugging him and licking his face. The cubs surrounding both of them and jumping with joy. The gratitude was clearly visible in their eyes and behaviour. Ritu was touched, tears started rolling her eyes. The video ended with the lioness and her cubs being dropped back into the jungle from where they had been picked.

  ‘But, wait a minute,’ thought Ritu ‘There were few other people in the video but why was the affection towards Aadi so high?’

  She checked the date and time of the lioness being brought to the veterinary centre. Went to the other repository with videos of surgeries and searched for the same date and time and Surprise!!! Aadi was the vet who had performed the surgery on this lioness. Her mind went back few hours to recollect what Aadi had mentioned during Operation Reveal about the veterinary centre. She clearly remembered Aadi had mentioned ‘Our team of veterinarians…’ Not even once had he mentioned about he himself being one of the vets. Yet another revelation for her.

  Ritu fast forwarded some feed and saw different animals including tigers, leopards, elephants, giraffes, zebras, rhinos, hippos, whales, sharks being brought in, in different conditions of ailment, being treated and returning back to their habitat healthy and hearty, on recovery. In each one of the videos there was a special bond being formed between the animals and their rescuers and vets. This she felt was what kept the team going, kept them motivated in doing whatever they were doing. The joy and satisfaction on their faces was unparalleled.