124 - Monday Musings - Go write your book

124 - Monday Musings -  Go write your book

I was invited for by an old colleague Hariharan Iyer on the occasion of his book launch, his maiden dalliance with creative writing. Let me tell you a bit more about Hari as we all fondly call him.

Way back in 2003 when I had just joined as a training manager in Max New York Life Insurance in Mumbai,  I received a call from an acquaintance of mine asking me if I could be of any help in finding a job for a colleague of his. I asked him to send this guy over out of politeness, as I was not sure how somebody at my position could help someone. On a balmy afternoon Hari, who happened to be that guy searching for a breakthrough, came to my office. As one thing led to another, Hari joined Max New York Life as a training manager on my referral a few months later and I made a neat 12000 rupees as a referral bonus, a bounty that Hari never forgets to remind me of. Our careers moved on from there and Hari soon rose into prominence owing to oratorial talent, his ability to create human connect, and his uncanny ability to move people from their stupor and act. Not that it was easy to negotiate with the personality of Hari, as someone who loved the sound of his voice, as someone who quite genuinely believed in his own sense of uniqueness. When excited he could be garrulous and it didn’t take much to excite him. In an industry based on numbers, he would declare his disdain for numbers, something that surely did not earn him approval from his bosses. As I said, he was quite full of himself and his healing abilities, he went on undeterred. He mixed life insurance training with Reiki healing, of which he claimed he was a beneficiary and hence its proponent, with great results. As he kept on growing, his belief in his innate greatness only became stronger, something that, to put it mildly as he might read this sometime, - was not shared with as much enthusiasm as he believed it deserved.

He moved to Kerala from Mumbai and then to Delhi to become the Zone Training Head, a fairly good professional growth story. Then suddenly he quit and returned to Mumbai two years ago. He quoted different reasons at different points of time - that he was suffocated, that people did not understand him, that his leaders just did not inspire him that his frequency was different from the one that had approval, so on and so forth. He had no job at hand and I for surely thought that he had lost it. I was sure that his self love had acquired self delusional proportions. We were in touch and he dabbled with quite a bit in the last two years to keep the fires burning - from free lance insurance training, to training consultancy to Reiki healing to Multi Level Marketing business. His delusions continued because he wanted to heal the world, spread happiness, promote holistic living, and create happy spaces and other mumbo-jumbo that such people are often found quoting.

I may have had huge differences in the philosophy of what he was promoting, partly because I cannot relate to it, and partly because I thought it was too much of risk - but what I just could not disagree with was his passion. When he spoke, he spoke as a man who truly believed in what he was saying. There was no way one could doubt the strength of his belief and he pressed on. A few days earlier he called abruptly and said that he wanted me to write a testimonial for his first book. I quite literally fell off from my chair. The bugger had actually done it. I read the book, wrote the testimonial and today attended his book launch. Well, I do not think that his book is earth-shatteringly original or breathtakingly brilliant. It’s quite an ordinary book by literary standards. But what is extraordinary is the faith in his work that Hari has, that he actually got around writing a book about and getting it launched. This is truly uplifting during times when we do not tire of telling ourselves all the reasons why things cannot be done. He has demonstrated the power of will, conviction and belief in our dreams.

The renowned scholar Asghar Ali Engineer came to launch his book. And I feel like shouting at the top of my voice – Go write your book!

Guru