TALENT within talent

In a large group of companies in Sri Lanka - Namely Brandix Lanka Ltd, where more than 42,000 employees are deployed all over the country introduced a concept called Talent Within in their plants a few years ago to encourage their Associates to Discover & Appreciate TALENTS and Skills beyond the scope of normal work related duties of their fellow colleagues.

The process adopted by the company is to put up at a large poster of a Talent Tree. Associates can nominate their colleagues for exceptional talent in non - work related areas like Sports, Arts, Music, Literature, Theater, Singing, and Hobbies & Recreation. Any associate could nominate a colleague from his unit by filling a simple form & submit it to HR and Copies of this form are available at the unit's reception. After verifying the information in the nomination, HR will put up a picture of the nominated employee on the Talent Tree along with a brief note on his / her achievement.

Every six months the Talent Trees at each SBU will be reviewed by a team from Corporate HR. The SBU with the most flourishing talent tree will win a special prize. The ultimate goal of the Company is as follows. “Let's create a culture of Teamwork, Respect, and Fun & Appreciation". The success of this scheme will be an important step towards making Brandix a 'Great Place to Work.'

Something similar, but of course much more advanced to the said concept, I was fortunate enough to watch a different type of reality show (I would from now onwards refrain from using the words "Reality show" as I feel these two particular words will downgrade the excellent status of the programme that I am referring) on February 23 telecast by the Derana TV in the presence of the President of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa. I watched this programme till the end and finally I got up from my seat with joyful of tears in my eyes.

It was so nicely organized and the presentation made by the veteran Jackson Antony added glimmer to the show. Before commenting on the show, I would like to give my fullest gratification to Minister of Higher Education, S B Dissanayake (a better known as SB in this country) for bringing such a valuable concept to the Sri Lankan University culture. My Son and the daughter who were seated next to me watching this show were amazed with the amount of price money offered to the winners of the show. This is nothing but Kavitha Talent show.

This Kavitha Talent contest is a programme created by the Ministry of Higher Education to develop the various artistic talents, to display them, to provide an opportunity to perform them and to appreciate the talents of the clever youth attached to the universities and advanced technological institutes which come under the purview of the Higher Education Ministry of Sri-Lanka.

Goal

"To provide the nation with an educated generation having creative artistic talents"

Objectives

* Create a talented and an educated creative generation who can successfully face the challenges of the 21st century.

* To provide opportunities for the educated generation to develop their numerous artistic talents.

* To provide opportunities to present and display their talents.

* To introduce the talented educated youth to the outer world.

* To evaluate them in order to reward them.

In my last column, I spared my time in describing the importance of Pre-University Student Leadership Programme at length and this column; it is also something about the university students.

In the other part of the world, almost all the universities take an effort to cultivate the innovative and creative talents for the society. No Argument, the cultivation of innovative and creative talents in Universities plays a crucial role not only in economic and social development, but also in personal development. The internal quality of innovative and creative talents includes the spirit of innovation, creativity and innovative personality. What constrains the cultivation of innovative talents includes the quality of students, the policy level, and the educational practice.

On the day of award ceremony, Jackson Antony made a very serious comment in the presence of his Excellency that he feels jealousy of an artist who won a first place in an event. Why he said was during his time there were no such programmes of this nature for them to show their talents.

While making the only speech in the award ceremony, Hon. Minister quoted the same thing differently stating that People like Jackson Antony emerged as stalwarts in their field using their strength of the mind and body and not because of the qualification he obtained from the university. It is very much true that it needs the policy, university leaders and teachers to make more practical efforts to promote the cultivation of innovative and creative talents in the universities.

As everyone accepts, higher education plays a vital role for national economic and social development. It is through the cultivation of innovative and in-born talents that the value of higher education can be showed. There is no doubt of taking human-cultivating as the essence of education, but what kind of talent should be trained has been a contentious issue.

With the realisation of the popularisation of higher education, more and more people began to pay attention to the issue that what kind of talent should be trained. Whether one hold a clear concept of it or not has a significant impact in practice. We believe that it is the sure pursuit for the Colleges and Universities to cultivate the innovative talents for the society. But unfortunately, these schemes were not in existence in our universities. Instead what our universities had was the excessive in-human ragging on new entrants and radical innovative movements trying to destroy the future talents of our educated students.

The system to develop the students’ creativity should be established and be improved.

The principle of creativity is “Everyone has the creativity; the level of creativity can be enhanced by training". Every student has a huge potential of creativity. The university should help the students to release their potential and further improve their creativity. The university should not only make an atmosphere to encourage the students' creativity, so that every student believe in himself and has the ambition for success; but also hold a wide range of activities to mobilize the enthusiasm of students, so that their dream can be a reality. For example, universities can organise innovative and creative competition and setup a research fund to promote innovation and so on.

Back to Kavitha

In my view, although I did not receive an opportunity to view the whole programme apart from what was shown in the TV, I am sure that the recent Kavitha talent contest has shown innate, artistic and literary talents of the university students effectively. The Chief Organiser of this mammoth event University Senior Prof. Sunil Ariyaratna should be commended without any reservations for making such a valuable programme.

This time, the aim of the Kavitha contest was to develop the artistic and literary talents of the degree and diploma students in the universities and the higher education institutions. Prof Ariyathna has commented to the Sunday Observer that Kavitha means artistic and literary talents. He has added that the word Prathiba too carries the same meaning. But I am sure in the coming years; it will be an event to encourage the innovative and creative talents too of the students. University Students follow various streams such as Arts, Commerce, Science, Engineering with latent artistic and literary talents.

There is no doubt; Kavitha has become a vehicle for these students to come forward to show their talents.

Why then our educational reformers failed to identify the importance of such an event to organise until such time Kavitha was emerged.

During the past years, no chances were given to the students to come out and show their artistic and literary activities as they were eclipsed by the veil of politics. The public had no hesitation in identifying the university students as troublemakers or gangsters. In reality, a small set of the university students were represented by these trouble-making striking set of students.

Even the mass media added some points to form a wrong picture about university students. If a programme of Kavitha had been in existence even previously, today our universities would have produced the talented and caring people long time before who are very much needed to our society. That is why I give full credit to the Kavitha programme. Jackson Antony predicted and prayed that year by year this programme would continue with lot of improvements and at least he kept a huge hope in the public that this would go on till year 3012.

This year, Kavitha contest consisted of seven main fields such as literature, stage drama, cinema, music, drawings, photography and electronic media. It was reported that participation was substantially adequate and students from 22 universities and 17 higher education institutions had taken part although winners were emerged from two three universities. This will definitely give a morale booster to the other universities to come up with their talents in the future years.

For the first time in university history, the winner of each contest was awarded a cash prize of LKR 100,000 and a certificate. There were cash prizes of LKR 75,000 and LKR 50,000 for the second and third winners in 54 contests. The cash prizes amounted to over LKR 12 million. All contestants had been awarded certificates. Jackson Antony made another thundering request from His Excellency the president to increase this award money to LKR 120 million.

Big example

There is no argument; the reality television programmes of Superstars, have been influenced by a considerable section of the culture of Sri Lankan youth. I am not strong enough to contradict the reality, underlying the current reality television programmes which notably seem to determine the rhythm, shape and the trends of a sizeable Sri Lankan audience of performing arts. From the day one of these reality programmes emerged, only problem I had in mind is that as to how one could justify a talented star being selected by SMS votes that reflect varied tastes and preferences though the process seems almost irreversible.

Whatever said and done now, it was how it is all planned. Therefore, the SMS voting has become the most popular and irreplaceable way of selecting the best star performer within the popular culture in Sri Lanka.

Now it is almost useless to question whether it is ethically justifiable to use SMS votes as a standard to judge the most talented performer and, even the ‘megastar’ of the already popular stars being selected through SMS voting!

The audience, on the other hand, seems to treat these programmes as a platform to show the varied levels of their critical faculties that remain alert to the magic of music and performing arts. Whether the programmes aim at selecting a Superstar, megastar, or a dancing star, the programmes are distinguished mainly by their largely un-spoilt glamour and limitless openness to the audience who have thus far stayed passive.

But in the Kavitha contest, best performers were elected by a versatile panel of judges and their choices were accepted by each and every one who witnessed the programme. Even the losers accepted the decisions with high sprit and we did not see any one was crying failing to accept the decisions. It is a good trend that should deservedly earn praise and encouragement.

No controversy in selecting Most Popular Artists by SMS as it is the popularity Judges' transparency. As stated above, in the Kavitha programme, we saw the transparency of Judges. But in the other reality programmes such as ‘megastar’ ‘dream star’ or 'superstar', elimination of competitors were done in the first half with poor performance by a panel of judges.

We have seen in numerous occasions, the competitors who were denied further participation by reason of poor performance, showing their deep mistrust of the level of transparency on the part of judges' verdict. Sometimes, it was observed that even the audience reactions towards judges' decisions. In these situations, eliminated participants are failing to make a true estimate of themselves and finally they behave like children before the TV audience. In the Kavitha Show, these types of Dramas, we did not see as the TV audience which showed high standard of the programme.

The most sensational and tense stage emerges when selected competitors with good performance are announced to make their exodus on the SMS ranking. It is probably right to say that this situation has a catastrophic effect on the sensitive viewer's mood and sometimes makes even judges transfixed. This analysis was done not to put the organizers of these reality shows in to embarrassing position but to bring their attention to much more justified judging system.

At this moment, I would like to add one more significant point over the children programs and sometimes these performers bring tears into our eyes when they were eliminated from the contest. Pathetic side of this child performers are blunt future of them. Today they are very popular and this popularity is short lived and in a year or two, they are heard no more.

Again we will turn our attention to the university students of Sri Lanka and If Sri-Lanka is to be converted to a knowledge hub it is mandatory for the university student to be accomplished intellectually. He has to transform into an active member of the society. It is the responsibility of every one of us to convert him to be a sensitive and empathically build human being. Otherwise he will end up of his university career having only a complete theoretical knowledge devoid of practicality. As the honorable Minister of higher Education commented, it should be our objective to produce a perfect graduate accomplished with all these talents equally. A good example to the above is the performance made by the final year medical student of the Jayawardanapura University in the Kavitha Programme in the singing contest. The way he dressed up for the program was excellent and the personality he showed to the viewers remembered that he is a budding medical officer in a year or two. Well done son, you were a true son of Sri Lanka. And the other student who won prestigious award in the same contest amazed our living music god Pandith Aamardewa and I saw Pandith Amaradeva kept his right hand to his chest with plenty of gladness once this boy completed the song which he had originally sung.

Until recently, we were under the impression that the university student is a person who does not have any senses and he stands only to gain academic qualification. Now they have proved without any doubts that if, they were provided with a suitable platform they could bring much more talents apart from their studies. Now the Ministry of Higher Education quite rightly has attempted to bridge this gap for the university students to come forward unconditionally to undertake the task of providing with inborn talents and competencies. If we are to convert a graduate to be an accomplished human resource he should be directed first to become a sensitive citizen. Literature and arts are considered as languages which address the spirituality of the mankind. It is the addressing language to the right-lobe of the brain, the part that is expected to be the more nurtured lobe of the human brain. I would like to mention that Kavitha, the inter-university and higher educational institute award ceremony could be considered as the commencement and the turning point of it.

While disseminating the facts of the university student among the masses, I wish that Kavitha would be able to mark the inauguration of the offering of humanity to the cause of entire mankind.