Courage

There is so much lusting for loftiness. There are so many convulsions of the ambitions. There are numerous ways to be crooked, deceptive, corrupt, treacherous, perfidious and all this and more for a menial living. Alas! This coarsely malignant greed is misunderstood as courage in this corporate world. The true courage really is, to be out of this rabble, from all those bawlers and scribe-blowflies, from the trader-stench, the ambition-fidgeting, the bad breath. It doesn’t take courage to be successful. It takes courage to be ourselves, to be unambitious, to smile at our defeat, to accept ourselves, to appreciate and acknowledge others, to commit mistakes, to surrender and to move on with an indifference to success and failure. It is fear that creates ambition, success, strength, power, aggression etc.

I am reminded of a beautiful parable.

A sannyasin by the name of Dandani existed in the days when Alexander was invading India. Alexander had be requested by his friends to bring a sannyasin when he returned from India..

They said, “Bring a sannyasin. You will bring many things but don't forget to bring a sannyasin; we would like to see the phenomenon of sannyas, what it is, what exactly a sannyasin is”

Alexander was so engaged in war and struggle and fight that he almost forgot about it, but when he was going back, just on the boundary of India, he suddenly remembered. He was leaving the last village so he asked his soldiers to go into the village and inquire if there was a Sannyasin around there somewhere. By accident Dandani was there in the village, by the riverside.

The villagers told, “You have asked at the right time and you have come at the right time. There are many sannyasins but a real sannyasin is always rare, but he is here now. You can have darshan, you can go and visit him.”

Alexander laughed and said, “I'm not here to have darshan, my soldiers will go and fetch him. I will take him back to my capital, to my country.”

The villagers said, “It won't be so easy.”

Alexander could not believe it -- what difficulty could there be? He had conquered emperors, great kings, so with a beggar, a sannyasin, what difficulty could there be? His soldiers went to see Dandani who was standing naked on the bank of the river.

They said, “Alexander, the Great, invites you to accompany him to his country. All comforts will be provided, whatsoever you need, will be provided. You will be a royal guest.”

The naked fakir laughed and said, “You go and tell your master that a man who calls himself great cannot be great. And nobody can take me anywhere -- a sannyasin moves like a cloud, in total freedom. I am not enslaved to anybody.”

They said. “You must have heard about Alexander, he is a dangerous man. If you say no to him, he won’t listen, he will simply cut your head off.”

The sannyasin said, “You had better bring your master here, maybe he can understand what I am saying”

The soldiers went back and told Alexander, “He is a rare man, luminous; there is something of the unknown around him. He is naked, but you don't feel in his presence that he is naked -- later on you remember. He is so powerful that in his presence you simply forget the whole world. He is magnetic, and a great silence surrounds him and the whole area feels as if it is delighting in the man. He is worth seeing, but there seems to be trouble ahead for him, the poor man, because he says that nobody can take him anywhere, that he is nobody's slave”

Alexander came to see him with a naked sword in his hand.

The sannyasin laughed and said, “Put down your sword, it is useless here. Put it back in the sheath, it is useless here because you can cut only my body, and that I left long ago. Your sword cannot cut me, so put it back, don't be childish.”

And it is said that that was the first time that Alexander followed somebody else's order; just because of the very presence of the man he couldn't remember who he was.

Dandani had actually said, “This is my head, you can cut it off. When the head falls, you will see it falling on the sand and I will also see it falling on the sand, because I am not my body. I am a witness.”

He put his sword back in the sheath and said, “I have never come across such a beautiful man.”

Alexander had to report to his friends saying, “There were sannyasins that I could have brought but they were not sannyasins. Then, I came across a man who was really something rare, and you have heard rightly, this flower is rare, but nobody can force him, because he is not afraid of death. When a person is not afraid of death how can you force him to do anything?”

“It is difficult to kill a man who is ready to die, it is meaningless to kill him. You can kill a person who fights, then there is some meaning in killing, but you can't kill a man who is ready and who is saying: This is my head, you can cut it off.”

Whom do you think is courageous? Alexander or Dandani?

Hear! See!, Only the Auspicious

Mundaka Upanishad has always been considered as a treasure of knowledge. I present here, the following invocation stanza from Mundaka Upanishad that I feel is very significant, profound and beautiful and which represents the entire nectar of this upanishad.

"May we hear the auspicous things

with our ears;

May we see the auspicious things

with our eyes."

You may wonder, what significance this stanza has! I have heard in a discourse, a story that helped me comprehend the stanza. There lived an old king, who wanted to renunciate and enthrone the Prince as the King. Unfortunately, the prince was naughty, irresponsible and callous and hence was not worthy to be a king. The King took the Prince to his Master (Guru) who lived in a hermitage in the forest and told the master, "Master, Make him a good King".

The Master said, " Don't worry my dear King. I'll take care". Then, the King left to his capital.

The master told the Prince, " My dear Prince, Just go and wander around the forest and come to me after one year and then, answer the question, "What is the sound of the forest all about?"

The prince wanders around the forest hearing all sorts of sounds and wondering why he has been asked such a simple question. Exactly after one year, the Prince goes to the hermitage and tells the master, " Master, here is the answer. The sound of the forest is the chirping of the birds, roaring of the elephats and the lions, buzzing of the beetles, creaking of the trees, rustling of dry leaves, splashing of the water falls and so on."

The master says, " My dear prince, you have not found it. Wander around for another year and tell me the sound of the forest. Confused, the prince wanders around the forest, hearing exactly the same set of sounds he had heard the previous year. One year passed and the prinns to the returns to the hermitage and answers the master with the same set of sounds. The master again, asked the prince wander for another year to find the sound of the forest.

The prince started to wander again. The Prince thought that, as long as I keep hearing the same things and tell the same answer, I am just going to wandering around this forest all my life and hence, I should hear something new. One day, tired and exhausted, he lay down on a bed of grass below a tree and went into a state of complete relaxation. His mind was placid, the body was relaxed, eyes closed and was almost in a sleepy, but conscious. Suddenly, he hears the sound of a seed sprouting into a small plant, the sound of a bud blossoming into a flower, the sound a spider projecting and sucking its threads, the sound of a honeybee sucking nectar from a flower and a lot more unheard sounds.

After one year, he goes to the master and says, " Master, I have found the answer, The sound of the forest is, "the sound of a seed sprouting into a small plant, the sound of a bud blossoming into a flower, the sound of spider projecting forth and sucking back its threads, the sound of a honeybee sucking nectar from a flower and so on". The master said, " Prince, now that, you are ready to be a worthy king".

Lessons Learnt -

1. In order to be a leader, it is essential to hear the unheard voices and to listen to the heart of your people.

2. Elevate the art of seeing and listening. I need to mention that, we as human beings have only two faculties to learn. One is seeing and the other is hearing. Speaking cannot be considered as a learning faculty as, the moment we start speaking, the process of learning is blocked.

3. Leadership is in being subtle.

Feel free to add if you have discovered more from the stanza and the story.

Picture : Shot at a garden in Tirumala last month

The Goose is Trapped

Attrition, the greatest challenge faced by the software industry. That too in a small or medium sized organization, it is a curse because of the inability or unwillingness to offer an appealing, alluring and authentic package as supposed to be offered by the biggies. Suddenly projects pour in and hope soars high, but when it comes to execution, there pops up the big question! Where is all these years of experience gone?

It is like placing a just born goose in a bottle and ignoring it with such a callousness that, it grows so big that the bottle could no longer contain the goose. The challenge is to get the grown-up goose out of the glass without breaking the glass and without killing the goose.

There are circumstances when attrition is encouraged by the organization to accommodate change, get rid of obsolete resources (assumed by the employer) and to board fresh minds. The Tide and the ebb, up and down, darkness and light, summer and winter, yin and yen, attrition and recruitment has become the two sides of the same coin in this damn industry.

A friend asked me, “How it feels to be managing a big team?”

I said, “I feel like a pimp”.

His laughter suggested that he was able to understand the whole analogy.

Recently, I an article on the views of Azim Premji, CEO-Wipro on

WHY EMPLOYEES LEAVE ORGANISATIONS?

Every company faces the problem of people leaving the company for better pay or profile. Early this year, Mark, a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer. He had heard a lot about the CEO. The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office, and the very best technology, even a canteen that served superb food.

Twice Mark was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined.

Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Mark walked out of the job.

Why did this talented employee leave?

Arun quit for the same reason that drives many good people away.

The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called "First Break All The Rules". It came up with this surprising finding:

If you're losing good people, look to their immediate boss .Immediate boss is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he’s the reason why people leave. When people leave they take knowledge, experience and contacts with them, straight to the competition. "People leave managers not companies," writes the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Mostly manager drives people away?

HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave, but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he looks for another job.

When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information. Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don’t have your heart and soul in the job."

Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious, too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over a trivial issue. Talented men leave. Dead wood doesn't.

Shiva : If talented men leave, how does an organization grow? I believe that everyone is capable of doing anything. The only difference is the willingness to take up responsibility and stick to commitment. I can never accept the myth that someone is less talented or capable than the other. If a dead wood is someone committed to an organization, what do you call a flip flop as? Managers are no longer authoritative, at least not in my experience though. As a manger, I have never been compelling or authoritative, but a little aggressive on projects to bring the resources upto speed in their learning. But there is always a 60% attrition rate and 40% still sticking to me for the past 3 years. Am I a jerk? I am not questioning the authenticity of the forward, but just wondering where I stand? , Why I have lost the 60% of the people? Am I a dead wood? !!!!!

Work without Objective

There are moments when we are not sure about the path we have taken and all the efforts invested and the future envisioned becomes questionable. Such a situation is more frequent when you have the willingness to risk for a challenging path whose destination is unsubstantial. This has been the way of men from time immemorial. But the recent objective oriented management theories have stripped us of our capability to be natural. Recently, my cousin Arun completed his engineering and sent his resume to be floated across the industry. He has written **** Who Knows**** against Objective. I called him to find the reason and he said that he has written the truth. How many of us are courageous enough to float a resume like this?

When I first prepared my resume, I had to remove the Objective for the difficulty it caused in defining it. If at all, I am able to define one, it is not really going to be in the orbit of the profession I would be applying for. My short term objective would be to complete whatever I am doing now and the long term objective would be to have sound sleep tonight. I don’t call this a myopic attitude and I have been successful by being here and now without having to stick on to a life long goal or vision. Building an objective castle in the air and envisioning a farsighted future has always left me in the company of disappointment and despondency. Initially, I was also fascinated by the fantasies of the objective, vision and goal theories. After gaining some experience in life, I was delivered from this disillusionment by the following verses from Bhagwat Gita and it has remained as my favorite quote since then.

“You have right in respect of action alone;
Not is respect of its fruits.
Let not the fruit of action be your motive;
And, let there be not attachment to inaction either.”

Even if we read through the entire text of Gita, the essence of the books is the above-mentioned verse. Like, love for love sake, you have to work for work sake. I had to meditate over this for a couple of years to comprehend the intricacy of its meaning and the essence of its message. When our actions are driven by the objective, we work more like a slave entangled in the hope of achieving it. Freedom is lost and all our actions and thoughts are imbued in the objective that might be a distant future. We fail to explore new avenues and take up innovative responsibilities as they may not be in sync with our objective – there is always a limitation. We are blind to the present and the beatitude of life that is surrounding us because of our indulgence to the fruit that might be borne. More often, we are more focused on the objective that, we fail to even act now to achieve the same.

Just by walking step by step, we can cover ten thousand miles easily. But, if we start thinking from the very beginning about crossing ten thousand miles, our legs may start trembling; our heart may start wavering. The only way is to walk step by step. No body can even walk two steps at the same time. Why should we think of crossing ten thousand miles now? Just do what is required now and the future will take you to a destination that might be better than what you had envisioned.

Money > Monkey > Monkeys

I have never understood Money and Fast Money is too far from my reason. That’s why, I was not able to understand the share market stuff haunting everyone in the recent time. However, I understand this beautiful story I received from Haroon, the mullah of Sainik. I thought this story would be really an interesting stuff to share, when the market is taking a roller coaster ride.

Once upon a time in a village a man appeared who announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs. 10. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys went out in the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at 10 and as supply started to diminish and villagers started to stop their effort.

He announced that now he would buy at 20 rupees. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching moneys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to 25 and the supply of monkeys became so that it was an effort to even see a monkey let alone catch it.

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at 50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business his assistant would now buy on behalf of the man. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at 35 and when the man comes back you can sell it to him for 50.

The villagers queued up with all their saving to buy the monkeys. After that nobody found that man and that assistant, only Monkeys and Monkeys and monkeys.....

I understand Shakthi, JK, Haroon, ....... are left with lot of monkeys. They say, patience will turn monkeys to money and it's a long term investment. Who Knows!