110-Monday Musings - Small Mercies

110- Small mercies

Technology has changed the world around us in ways that would have been unimaginable a few decades back. So much so, that it will be difficult to imagine a few year from now, that there ever existed a world without some of the most ubiquitous symbols of technological invasion. Let me give some examples.

Our children will shudder to think that a world existed without a 100 channel TV, that at one time there was no internet and hence no face book, mails, twitter and so on and so forth. Connectivity meant that a letter would reach in 3-4 weeks. The younger ones will look at us with disbelief that when we tell them that there was a world without gadgets and more importantly, not long ago, there was a life to be lived, without electricity. Lanterns and kerosene lamps were enough to provide with enough illumination to sit down for night long slog over and ‘burning the midnight oil’ was not a phrase but meant literally so.

I have a little over 400 letters neatly packed, that I had  received from my friends as youngster, and think I must have written at least a similar number of those – I am keen to know what my daughter will say when she sees them a decade or so later. Students will recoil in horror to know that not very long ago, Google did not exist, and that one had to, perforce, visit a place called library. Control-Copy-Paste is no longer a sequence of function; it’s a verb – a sublime act of getting things done, without compunction or shackles of ethics. Most, if not all, children will never know what a two night-three day train travel in a second class compartment means, and all the joys it would bring – flights are convenient, but lack character and experience.

But the one thing that I fear the most being lost is the joy of smelling the pages of a new book. Nothing beats that aroma, the feel of crisp pages on a stampede, the thrill of writing your name on the first page and entering the make believe world of characters of a new story. Although I entered the world of books very later by the standards of my generation, I am thankful that I did when I see some who have let an entire life pass by without enjoying the universe of books. I wonder if book reading will survive the onslaught of technology, and even if it does, will the notepad/tablet ever be able to recreate the touch, feel and aroma of fresh pages of a new book, which though not a part of the plot, is intrinsic to the joy of book reading. I wish my daughter has an affair with books, just as I did, only earlier.

I do not have anything against technology, more so when I am convinced that human quest for comfort and convenience will keep fuelling technological advances and this juggernaut will keep rolling. But there are some things from the past which are worthy of being preserved and passed down to the next generation, not because of any material benefit or even meaningless sentimentality, but because they are so simple in construct, so pure in experience, that it aches even to imagine that it will be lost in the deluge of time. It is like a family treasure – priceless to where it belongs.

Guru

109-Monday Musings - "Full joy in half Marathon"

109 -Full joy in half Marathon

I would normally hesitate to talk about any incident that involves any description of my personal exploits, lest I be charged of narcissism, but today I will bite the bullet and risk being described so. Yesterday I ran the Mumbai half marathon and the cup of my joy has been overflowing ever since.

All my life, and which is a considerable number of years, the longest I ran was a 400 meter race way back in class VII, which I had to abandon midway owing severe stress, dehydration and a sinking feeling which made me feel that the sky was descending down to meet the earth. That was the closest encounter with long distance running I ever had. Completely tormented by those memories, I shunned running ever since, allowing much needed 20 years or so to heal the scarred juvenile soul.

Circa 2009 June, I met this funny little thing called a digital weighing machine, placed strategically in the hotel bathroom I was staying in, whose sole purpose was to seduce a middle aged man with a bulging middle wanting to know how much he weighs. The figure that appears on the monitor evokes strange emotions – disbelief, shock, dismay, so on and so forth – but it all boils down to a poignant observation – ‘the machine is faulty’. As it happens in such cases of human misery, the machine was NOT wrong and it displayed a number that, to put it mildly, put more weight on my mind, than it put on the machine.

The long and short of it is that I have been running since. When I did 1 km I was amazed because I had not died. At 2 kms I was jumping with joy. 3, 4 and 5 went off like a dream and when I did 5 kms I felt the same joy that Jonny lever will feel if he ever gets a best actor award. At 6 I bragged to my wife that she had married a man of substance. At 7 and 8 kms I was on cloud nine, also because by this time I had managed to knock off a good 15 kilos off my body and far more off my conscience. Then I moved to Mumbai and someone sold the idea of a half marathon which was 21 kms. Thank you but no thank you, said I. In the last 2 months I did one 10 km and one 12 km, both on the treadmill – and yesterday for the first time in my life I was on the starting line, to attempt 21kms ON ROAD. Did someone say – ‘audacity of hope?’

The experience is heady. The people, the noise, the crowds, the sight of portly, old, young, not-so-thin grand-moms, transports you to another world – where nothing is impossible, where running is the objective and completing it is winning it. After the 15^th km, it’s not the body – it’s the mahaul and your will that pulls you along. I was told of this before, now I know what they meant.

Running and completing the 21 long kms will go down in my own autobiographical account as an important lesson/inspiration for my life from my current not-so-young (another name for middle-aged) and beyond – that we can chose our distances, that we can chose our races and that we can complete it  – sooner or later, faster or slower – but we will.

Guru

108 – History Making mistakes or Mistakes making history

108 – History Making Mistakes or Mistakes making history

I picked up a strange book called ‘100 mistakes that changed history’ by Bill Fanwcett last week. The core premise of the book can be well understood from the following excerpts:

“History- making mistakes,  or perhaps more accurately ‘Mistakes making history’….much of history happened not because of careful planning by great leaders but because of mistakes made by them and others….whether in a war or in the bedroom, the great mistakes of the past are fun to read about…it can be reassuring that so many have blundered so often in the past…..

The book clearly has a bias towards Greco-Roman history with each of those mistakes ending with a rhetorical question – things could have been different had that event not panned out the way it did- had it not been for the mistake, oversight or error in judgement of the protagonist.

Two things cross my mind as I devour page after page of that anthology of mistakes– First, how would a purely Indian list of mistakes look like and second does this theory applies to individual histories (for example one can try to chronicle ‘10 mistakes that shaped my life’). This Musing is dedicated to the pursuit of the first thought and I will talk about the second next week.

I am not a student of Indian history – in the sense that I have not dedicated much time in the pursuit of academic acquisition of it – however I am fascinated by history in general. I wish school had done a better job in fuelling my romance with the subject. It is only through unplanned and sporadic flirting with the subject that I have developed a soft corner for it, particularly in the light of a growing realisation that ‘those who do not study history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past’. As a complete amateur here are some events/mistakes that i believe changed India and left me with the wonder of how would things could have been had those events not happened the way they did.

#1. India has been shaped by two broad influx of people at different times - the Aryans and the Moguls. There are theories and counter theories about the origin, intent, and effects of these two into the subcontinent, but there is complete unanimity in one truth – the civilisation called India, the complexity of races, tribes, kingdoms, lineages, the notion of pure and impure, the concept of who ‘belongs’ and who does not’ is a product of that fact that so many chose to come here – and today it really does not matter who came here as what and when. Who is a ‘native’ of the Indian soil depends upon what is your cut off date. I wonder sometimes, how would India of today look like had no one from outside ever came here? Would we still have its cultural diversity, its linguistic span, its ritualistic rainbow, its architectural splendour, its historical heritage? Would there be an India, the way we know it, at all? Would some of the issues that face us today be present at all?

#2. There are many hypotheses as to why India has been a cradle of so many belief systems, religions or philosophies. Two of them appeal to me the most – First, the very reasons so many diverse set immigrated in search of land, glory or gold (as enumerated above) and then chose to settle down instead of behaving only as mercenary plunderers, led to intermixing of beliefs, cultural nuances and ‘Gods’. The second is a broad set of reformist religions which arose as a response to the dogmatic, ritualistic, brahmnical domination of centuries, which whatever their exalted origin, had deteriorated into oppressive tyrannies in the name of religion. The Indian subcontinent became, in some sense, a breeding ground for an alternative solution, in mans search for salvation. Thus emerged Budhism, Jainism, the entire Bhakti-Sufi lineage like Sikhism so on and so forth. Some even argue, while political and military conquest by the Moguls’ enabled spread of Islam in India, but that in no way alone can explain its subsequent adoption and spread. Surely the social conditions here in India provided good enough reasons and favourable opportunities for the new religions/belief systems to find ready followers who were disillusioned by the prevalent system and hence were willing to experiment with alternatives. I wonder so many times, had our society not been so rigid, or ritualistic, or oppressive in its religious practices then – had God been more accessible to the common man in the context of organised religion – would India be different today? Would there be so many beliefs, so many religions – each promising its adherents the elusive salvation – and most importantly would there be have so many religious fault lines?

#3 I experience complex emotions every time I read or think of the partition of India, but ironical it may sound, I am mostly fascinated by it. Leaving the chronicling and the analysis of the origins or causes(s) or listing the actors who were responsible for the most bloody and gory human displacement, partition of India left its people with memories, sensitivities, world views and attitudes thoroughly changed. The angst that its people on both sides went through has inspired so much literature, so much poetry, so much catharsis in so many ways – and yet the memories or the consequences still refuses to fade. I wonder how the cookie would have crumbled, had partition would not have happened. How would an unified India look like, how much more the human potential would have created (much more than the adolescent fantasy of how great the cricket team would look like) had it not been truncated. Would the polity be different, would our popular discourse be any different, would our geo-political position and situation be different, would our music be different. Would India be different?

The universe of could-have-been is exotic and we all romanticise it. I am no exception. I keep romanticising how this absurd but eminently sweet idea called INDIA could-have-been.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Guru

Monday Musings107 – When events immortalize the year

107 – When events immortalize the year

Every passing year has a theme, a liet motif of its own that stays as its signature. The year is known for it for posterity sake. Once sufficient layers of time have settled, nothing remains of the year. It is buried with a finality only time can produce and centuries can command. One year with so many moments has so many possibilities across the theatre of mankind that at the end of it all, each event at best is reduced to nothing more than a tiny crease on a vast forehead. As the year unravels, each event fights for its rightful place amidst many, almost as if hundreds of advertisements vie for our attention every day – and yet at the end of the day each occupies no more than a few moments of our span. But say a century later, it is the event that gives the year a place in the annals of history. The year which was the cradle of many moments and events has no identity of its own, but the identity given by that one magic occurrence. The year is immortalized because of the event.

While the immortality of a year may be country, community, vocation or geography specific, there are a few events which transcend such boundaries and have achieved universal immortality. Interestingly, individuals too have histories and there are some years that become immortal in our own diaries. They are the milestones that we remember because we got shaped by them.

Let’s look some of the years here in the history of India which are immortal and reasons thereof.

1857 – An otherwise listless years, it’s known in the popular imagination of India, as the year of our first war of independence; although the imperialists still call it the sepoy mutiny. I wonder if independence would have come to us in 1947, had the war of 1857 not have happened.

1983 – The underdogs did it and shifted the epicenter of the cricketing future into the Indian subcontinent. The English and West Indian domination was about to end. The Kapils-Devils fuelled the imagination and aspirations of an entire generation and demonstrated ‘yes-we-can’ much before the phrase was popularised,  and a decade later we were churning champion players and now champion teams.

1991-While liberalization had actually started in the eighties under Rajiv Gandhi, history will remember 1991 as the year which awakened the Elephant called Indian economy. Despite all the gloom that the eighties had left for us with – from terrorism, to mandal, from low growth to mounting debt, from job scarcity to political uncertainty – 1991 has ensured immortality for itself in the history of Independent India. We all are, in small measure or large, children of 1991.

2008 – This is my pick. Although it’s too early to predict if the financial crisis that had its origins in the mindless greed in the financial markets of USA, and which spread like a wild fire across the continents, leading to fallen hero’s, failed organizations and massive job losses – will actually be remembered as the face of the year, my hunch is – it will. My belief is that 2008 will be the year that will be known and remembered as the year that introduced an element of caution to unbridled consumption and taught us the merit of living within our means and saving for the proverbial rainy day.

Each year there are drastic, dramatic, unique, shocking, eye & hair raising, path breaking events – but rarely is the incident so huge in impact, so overwhelming in affect, that it usurps the identity of the year and gives it its own. So while Godhra and Gujrat riots, Singur, Mumbai Blasts (and all other blasts) so on so forth were important events for the year, they may not(and I hope not) have the power of becoming the alter ego for the year itself.

So what will 2010 be remembered for? Is there one such powerful event that has the power to immortalize the year? So which are the usual suspects -The scams, the resurrection of the stock markets, the Bihar election, the innumerable corporate mergers and buyouts? While each of these events are important, does any of them has the ability to transcend its own limitations and become the face of the year itself? Forget the larger imagination of a people, was there something in the year gone by that you will remember it for – or was just another year; one amongst many.

 Guru

Monday Musings 106 - Mystery in Opposites

106- Mystery in Opposites

Much of life is spent in oscillating between opposites. Some swing from one extreme to another in utter helplessness, put into this oscillation through a complex and mostly inexplicable web of circumstances, often described as destiny or luck; and others refuse stubbornly to be a part of extremes and they live on the fence, either out of intellectual lethargy or out intellectual inability to chose or simply because they realize the futility of rigid positions.

 In fact life finds its description only in two ends of the spectrum (good or evil) – meanings gets expressed only through extremes (centripetal force or centrifugal force), emotions are understood through opposites (joy or sorrow, happy or sad, elation or depression), concepts unfold in diametric opposites (hot or cold), human body acts as a physiological entity in harmony only on the taut balance of opposites (hyper-hypo viz.  hypertension-hypotension etc), the world reveals itself to sight between extremes (light-darkness), ideologies are expressed as extremes (socialism or capitalism), consequences are expressed as opposites (hell and heaven, victory and defeat), so on and so forth. One would most likely conclude that life is binary, expressing itself only as the ubiquitous 0 or 1, suspending possibilities of anything else or anything in between.

We make sense of the world within the broad framework of these extremes. Our mind is able to rank in its own peculiar way, our experiences only on this scale between the extremes. Simultaneously dawns the realization that, we all search our balance, our sense of proportion through the construct of these extremes. Some who are able to find that proportion find it easy to deal with the vagaries of life – for they understand that the extremes are cognitive constructs – created only to understand – but reality always lies somewhere in the middle. Life may be understood in the hard colors of black and white, but is always experienced as shades of grey. It is this dilemma that flummoxes some and intrigues others. Those who succumb to the dilemma find it hard to negotiate the huge chasm between the philosophy and practice of life – and those who do, discover poetry in the ambiguity of life, enjoy its multi layered yet nuanced meaning.

Each one of us has our own way of dealing with strife that this pull of extremes puts us through. Kabeer lamented many years ago –

‘Chalti chakki dekh kar, diya kabeera roye

Dui paatan ke beech me, sabut bacha na koye.

(Kabeer cries on seeing a moving flour stone; No one escaped the crush of being in the middle of two)

And so did Ghalib,

‘imaan mujhe roke hai, to kheenche hai mujhe kufr

Kaaba mere peeche hai, to kaleesa mere aage’

(Conscience and crime each pull me towards them; like two different places of worship)

It is amazing to see individuals, teams, societies, communities and nations to desert their ideological positions because the utopia it promised never really materialized – and it is equally amazing to see them flirt with diametrically opposite ideological positions in search of their utopia. It is also not uncommon to see them settling for the amorphous and the so called impure middle.

So as we bid 2010 goodbye, here is toasting to the mystery in opposites and to the human quest of finding its sweet spot.

Guru

105-Searching redemption in the past

105-Searching redemption in the past

There is this eminently memorable sequence in the brilliant Clint Eastwood movie ‘Invictus’, where the white captain of the South African rugby team is trying to motivate his all-white team to go out and give their best and win – inspired also by the newly elected black President, one Nelson Mandela, who wants to showcase this victory as a symbol of hope and victory to a nation trying to come out of the oppressive memory of apartheid. The captain takes his team to the prison where Mandela spent 27 yrs of his life imprisoned – breaking stones, doing odd jobs, undergoing the traumatic experience of a prisoner in his own country, fighting against an autocratic regime and yet keeping his dignity intact and his hopes alive. The sequence is brilliant as the captain tries of imagine the 27 years of Mandela in prison – and in this imagination of that painful past finds inspiration for his present.

In another incident a few months back I was talking to someone from my own faith- Sikhism, in the course of a discussion on the concept of religious identity in a fast homogenizing world. In the course of that discussion, he commented that he would want to witness that historical event when the Khalsa Sect was born, on the Baisakhi of 1699 in Anandpur Sahib, a town few hours from Chandigarh. His desire was to first hand experience the formation and mass baptism of a massive congregation by the tenth Guru of the Sikh’s, Guru Govind Singh–and be a part of the profoundness of that moment.

While these are two isolated examples, I am sure our past has great moments – and each one of us, depending upon our own sensibilities is attracted towards some or other of them. We find the mere thought of being present there as surreal, romantic, thrilling or hair rising – or a strange concoction of feelings that makes us want to be there and witness the action-Live. In wanting to be a part of it we seek either redemption from the mundaneness of everyday living or salvation from the guilt of the past or liberation from the ordinariness of our present.

We have two kinds of occasions/ stories we would want to witness – On one hand we have the stories of struggle, creation and resourcefulness, of gumption, dare-devilry and  foresight, of tenacity and perseverance – that provides us the inspiration to go beyond our limitation. On the other hand we have stories of agony, trails and tribulations, of sheer darkness of human persecution and oppression, of tragedy, ache and melancholy - that provides us catharsis in the recognition of the universality of pain. History is such a great balm – I wish we apply it more often.

So, which are the events in history that you would like to witness the most? Make a list and in making this list revisit what touches/inspires you in them the most. This list will reveal a lot about you.

Here is my top 5 in no particular order.

1. Witnessing Ghalib write verse: I wish I could witness him writing and his expressions. I want to know if words came effortlessly to him or did he struggle for it. I wish I could live in ballimaran – the area in old Delhi and figure out how an iconoclastic like him, in the most tumultuous phase of modern Indian history suffered so much personal tragedy, received so little recognition while he was alive and yet  lives on as the greatest of urdu poet ever.   

2. Partition – Nothing in the modern Indian history has left a more powerful impact than the gut wrenching experience of partition of India, leading to the worlds largest human displacement, that left million bodies homeless and a million souls scarred for life. I did not understand the anguish behind the words when my dying grandfather mumbled in his delirium –‘I want to go to Lahore’ or the longing in the reminiscence in the words of grand parents of a friend of mine (Sahil – hope you read this). Ah! That pain – too much price and yet priceless!

3. The day Gandhi was thrown out of a train compartment in South Africa- I want to enter his heart for those five minutes as he would have picked himself up – What would he have lived in those 5 minutes – that would make an ordinary Mohandas into a formidable Mahatma.

4. Travel with Guru Nanak once. It is said in the Sikh pantheon that Guru Nanak along with his two disciples Mardana and Bala travelled around the world(majorly Asia) four times. I want to travel with him at least once to understand how did he see the world around him, how did he assimilate the social practices that he witnessed and how did he convert this meaning into a new way of life that one day would take the form of a new religion. I want to witness the transformation of an ordinary householder into a revered Guru.

5. One day in the life of Victor Frankel- who wrote a book called ‘Man’s search for Meaning’. Victor wrote this book after and on the basis of his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps for close to five years and he lived to tell the tale. I want to be in his mind and soul as he bore that soul crushing experience but never lost his hope. I want to be with him every time he went through a near death encounter, every time he experienced the agonizing and inhuman treatment and yet hoped to live through it. And he did.

Make twain once said – The trouble with life is it goes on. Sorry Mr Twain,The beauty of life is that it goes on.

Guru

104 Monday Musings

104 Monday Musings The tale is in the telling.

The other day I had the fortune of listening to the maverick and extremely talented film maker Sudhir Mishra. For the un initiated, Sidhir who cut his teeth with a film like ‘ Jaane bhi do yaro“ has in the recent times directed films like Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi and Khoya Khoya Chaand. 

I recount for you two thoughts from what he had to say that day. First – film making is simultaneously an act of arrogance as well as an act of humility. Arrogance in the sense that hundreds have told their stories since decades and one still believes that he can say something more and something better. Humility in the sense that the product speaks to you after it has been made. It tells you how good or bad it has been.

Let me pick up where the last strand thought leaves. Each one of us are creators of something or the other – of performance, of creativity or teams or culture  - irrespective of whether we are film makers or managers. Each day we churn out our ‘produce/product’. We may have a self image of selves in which we might have a certain view of our capabilities, mostly good and sometimes exaggerated, but reality is revealed only once we analyse our product. The soil may believe a thing or two about its fertility but the crop is its ultimate expression.

Our product/produce is our signature, the ultimate expression of our worth. The wise one will compare his self image with the quality of his produce and check for differences, deviations and disparities. What we create talks to us – sometimes softly but mostly it shouts. The strategy we weave, the portrait we draw, the managerial decisions we take, the teams we lead, the culture we have built – talks to us. Do we listen and do we respond?

The second thought that I brought back from that event was when Sudhir said – ‘The tale is in the telling’.  As a training professional in a life insurance company I have always wondered what is that I will add to the universe of life insurance selling – that has not already been said or talked or taught. My friends in other walks of life may be asking similar questions. I guess much of greatness and much of genius will be revealed in telling the tale differently than in telling a new tale. Most of live and work in familiar spaces – which have been walked on by millions before us, worked on by thousands before us, impacted and affected by hundreds before us. Our glory and our redemption lies not in getting burdened by the history of those hundreds, and thousands and millions, but in the audacity of our own abilities to tell the tale differently.

So irrespective of whether you are a film maker or a manager, go ahead and tell it the way you see it – you always had different eyes, now is the time to have a different vision.

Guru