Sexually Transmitted Political Leadership

About a month back, I got an opportunity to listen to a talk given by Manish Sabharwal, the Chairman and Co-founder of Teamlease, an Indian Fortune 500 company, that provides human resources services to its clients and employs more than 125,000 people. Manish is a member of the National Skill Mission chaired by the Prime Minister of India and serves on various state and central government committees on education, employment and employability. I also got a chance to speak with him before and after the talk on themes such as employability, governance, and public policy. He spoke about the need for urbanization and creating new cities with a population of more than a million people. He also said that this could be achieved faster with decentralization – 29 chief ministers are more important than one Prime Minister, but the real solution lies in creating 100 real mayors. One of the anecdotes that I found particularly interesting was this – In 1924, Jawaharlal Nehru was the mayor of Allahabad, Rajendra Prasad was the mayor of Patna, C.R. Das was the mayor of Calcutta, and Sardar Patel was the mayor of Ahmedabad. There are letters from Nehru that talk about street lights and Patel about sanitation because mayoral elections were fought on issues like infrastructure. Then he added with a mischievous smile, “Can you imagine Nehru’s great-grandson writing letters about street lights in Delhi? What that says is that sexually transmitted Prime Minister-ship does not work.”

Dialogue

A couple of months back, as I was driving to work one day, I found my car blocked by a delivery van which had stopped on the road. The driver and his helper were delivering supplies to shops lined against the narrow street, at a leisurely pace. I honked and I hollered, but they seemed impervious to my entreaties. Frustrated, I cursed at them. The next moment I found them beside my car . Well that worked, I said to myself. I will reason with them and help them see that their act of parking a big van on the road, blocking the way for others, was insensitive. I would then graciously apologize for my behavior (the fact that I cursed at them) and drive away. How naive of me! What happened next I hear you ask? Well, there was some shouting and yelling to begin with. Soon I saw them banging their fists against my car window, daring me to get down so that we could settle this with our bare knuckles. I somehow managed to extricate myself from that situation with my teeth and my dignity intact. Just!

Ramayana and Mahabharata

A few years back, I was facilitating a workshop on understanding and appreciating cultural differences with participants from the US, Canada, and India. One of the modules within the workshop required each participant to decorate a table with some personal items that would give the audience a peek into his / her life beyond what they see at work. So we had participants putting up their family pictures, books that had inspired them, baseball bats,. ice hockey helmets, football jerseys, their father’s footwear, images of deities that they worship and so on. It was great to see the enthusiasm of people who had carried this stuff all the way from North America to Bangalore and the eagerness of people in India to showcase their background and heritage.

As the facilitator, even I had set up a table with some of my belongings. Some items that described who I am, what has inspired me, what I’m interested in and what I care about. One of the items on the table was a copy of the Mahabharata. I’ve been deeply interested in the Mahabharata and in my opinion it is the greatest story that has ever been told. I’m not going to go into the intricacies of the epic here, however,. if you are interested, you could read some of my thoughts here.

On Adjectives

So, it has been more than two years that I wrote something on this blog. Long time indeed! Why didn’t I write in the last two years? Honestly, I don’t know. I can rationalize by saying I didn’t get enough time, I had other priorities, I got interested in other things, I didn’t feel ‘inspired’….Hang on! Yeah, it is that last one. At least it sounds fancy and writer-ish. ‘I was experiencing a writer’s block.’ Yeah, that’s it.

I have been thinking about adjectives. Why, I hear you ask. I will tell you in a moment. Well, as it happens, in school, one of the few subjects I was good at was English language. When I say ‘good’ here, I must concede that the word is being used in a relative context. I mean I didn’t score 100 out of 100 in any test or exam. I didn’t score the crazy marks that students get in ICSE exams these days – 97.5%, 98.7%, 99.1%, 99.6%, mind-boggling, isn’t it? However, compared to my performance in and enjoyment of other subjects at school, such as Mathematics and Chemistry, English language was sort of a refuge. An oasis in the desert; light at the end of the tunnel; the first drops of rain on thirsty, parched earth…well you get the idea. I know some of the more pedantic ones among you will point to four grammatical mistakes in this piece already, so I must make this point emphatically – when I say I was good in the English language, I mean it in relative, comparative, terms. English vs Physics. It is just that in my case the gulf was so huge that it was like comparing the taste of chocolate cake with ganache to that of gruel made with gelatinous grains and tree bark.

Doing Nothing!

Doing Nothing!

On Monday morning, a colleague at work asked me, “So, how was your weekend? What did you do?” My answer was instinctive, “Weekend was good. Did nothing! Was at home.” When I thought about it later, I realized that this ‘Nothing’ actually meant a lot. It meant quality time spent with my wife. It meant playing and sharing laughs with my daughter. It meant conversations with my parents. It meant flipping through a good book. It meant watching a great movie on the television. It meant going for walks in the evening. This is just my definition of the ‘Nothing’ that I did over the past weekend. ‘Nothing’ can mean so much more.

‘Nothing’ is actually pregnant with possibilities. It is an open canvas on which you can paint whatever you want. How liberating! There are no limiting factors, when you start out with nothing. You can do whatever you want. It means freedom. Not everyone can handle it. I think a lot of us working in the corporate world would become quite unsettled with it. So much so that we like to keep a ‘To Do’ list for the weekends and even the vacations that we take. 

The Simple Joys of Life

Wow! It has been a long time. A really long time. More than a year actually. An eventful year. I became a father for the first time, and may I add, probably for the only time. Fatherhood! I have always been scared of it. I have always questioned how can a person like me, who likes to call himself ‘an eternal child at heart’, shoulder the responsibility of taking care of a child. To tell the truth, I’m still scared. Will I be able to help my wife bring our daughter up well? Will I be able to provide for her? Will I be able to take care of her? Will I be able to do as much as my wife does for her? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I love her. A lot! My daughter, the light of my life. It is great to go back home and see her welcome me with a big smile, her hands clapping in happiness. It is magical.

That leads me to the topic of this post. When and how do we lose this ability to be happy about the everyday things in life?  Even if we do feel this kind of happiness occasionally, do we express it? Why do we become cynical over time? We keep postponing happiness. “I’ll be truly happy after I retire”, “I’ll be happy after I buy a house”, “I’ll be happy when I become self-employed”, “I’ll be happy when I buy a BMW” or in my case “I’ll be happy when I own a PlayStation 4”. Well, mine’s a weird whim, isn’t it?