The Score Magazine - Archive February 2009 issue! | Page 28

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The Score Magazine
An afternoon with Jyo
Sunandha Ragunathan
S
he is so not what I expect from an engineer
turned HR who has a passion for words! Dressed
in crisp formals, she has an easy manner and
apologises for being 5 minutes late. Articulate
and disarming! This afternoon chat could prove to
be interesting indeed! I’m already bowled over by her
frank smile; I quickly get my notepad to cover how truly
surprised I am.
Jyothi Menon, Jyo to friends is the VP-HR shared
services. What’s that? She quickly condenses it to “back
office operations for over 90,000 employees of Standard
Chartered Bank”. A vice president who has stellar time
management skills such that she can successfully run a
family, author four non-fiction books and research and
write another one ‘The Angel of God’? My eyebrows
shoot up!
We begin at the beginning. She talks candidly about her
engineering background. “Being the only child, naturally
all my parents’ energies were focused on me being
‘professionally’ educated. But I was clear from the start
I wasn’t going to be a geek.” She clearly isn’t one. Not
envisaging herself sitting in front of the computer and
writing visual basic programs, she quickly moved to HR
and used her education and her background to become
a proficient recruiter. One day a chance meeting with
the Pearson Publishing head made her foray into writing
possible. “He mentioned I should write a book but how
was I going to compete with all the IIM and XLRI educated
professionals?” she wondered
What she was going to write about was never an issue.
Through her work spanning fiction and non-fiction, the
motif that springs at you is the easy conversational
style and the mentor-protégé relationships that crop up
stealthily. “I can only write what I’m familiar with right?
I am in HR, subconsciously I suppose all the mantras
I believe in manifests in my writing too.” The thing to
successful book writing, she later understood, was not
the content per se but how she was going to incorporate
her own personal experiences and her interpretation of
human relations.
The conversation between the grandfather, the managing
director of a software company and his grandson is how
she expresses her ideas in her first book. “It was a success.”
She seems surprised by it and she says, “Soon the second
book was on its way but that was pure chance.”
Our ex-president, Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam was in office
when the book released and upon reading it, he sent her
a personal note commenting on a specific page in the
book which talks about branding and thus ‘Brandwise’
was born. On an aside, is there no end to the number of
people Dr. Kalam has inspired?
Using the same conversational style, Jyo expanded on
branding. Instead of talking about products, she focused
on the branding of people.
“Consciously I used the grandfather speaking to his
grandson motif. In Indian mythology, grandfather
symbolises wisdom and so it was easy to have him teach
his younger generation some of the concepts.” Quickly
another book followed ‘Me, a Winner’ and surprise
surprise, the pubic lapped it up!
Though just about to launch, The Angel of God is her
oldest work chronologically speaking. “We’re all children
of circumstance and I’ve been fascinated by that fact that
we all have what we call an Angel or a devil lurking inside
us and what we unleash is dictated purely by what we
give more importance to.” So what is the novel about?
Her eyes light up and she talks animatedly about how
the canvas spans Dharavi Slums in Bombay, The Libyan
Desert, Saudi Arabia and the Villages of Kerala. All these
are places she has frequented. It is a story about a crime
organisation but it is not about crime. It is a tale of
redemption and inspiration. “Each person has a defining
moment in life, and in Moosa Bhai’s life, his turning point
is actually depicted on the cover of the novel and pushes
his life and the story forward.”
With eyes twinkling she mentions that she draws parallels
between the criminal organisation and other commercial
organisations. She laughs good naturedly about the nil
attrition rates in a crime organisation and how hierarchy
is established and loyalty rewarded mirrors any law-
abiding organisation. She has the first copy of the book in
her bag. Guarding it zealously, she gives it to me almost
hesitantly and the riot of colours and sketching on the
front cover dazzle me. Modernist, almost cubist in form,
the turning point in Moosa Bhai’s life seems a mystery
to these untrained eyes. Her parting words – “In these
troubled times, we all need to look towards one another
to find inspiration, to hear the message each person is
sending out; Moosa finally stops and listens and his life
changes forever.”
Here’s hoping this book inspires you and makes you
change lives, maybe even your own!