When I saw, on TV, the news of the death of Prabhakaran and of his diabolical organisation, the first thought that came to my mind was a visual image of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
No man could be more different from Prabhakaran than the Dalai Lama, yet no cause, ab initio, could have been as similar as his. The Dalai Lama, over the last half century, has fought to regain his homeland, and, for his people, respect, equality and honour. The ethnic battle in Sri Lanka had a similar genesis, interestingly enough, much after the Tibetan conquest by the Chinese and the Dalai Lama's flight to India. Therefore, Prabhakaran and his ilk had a number of role models to emulate, and two primary paths - the violent and the non-violent - from which he could choose only one really. He chose the path most travelled.
The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, has traversed a long and lonely path of non-violence and gentility. This hardly guarantees result; however, there is nothing that can claim to consistently do so. I am told that Mahatma Gandhi once said, "I agree that non-violence is a bad idea. The only worse idea is violence."
Many months ago, I sat transfixed outside the Dalai Lama's residence in McLeod Ganj as he walked past the waiting gathering, his warm smile lighting the way to people's hearts. I am not a Buddhist, of course, but with the Dalai Lama this is an immaterial issue. Some months after McLeod Ganj, I met Wangchuk Fargo, a gentleman from Leh, in New Delhi in late February. He told me a story about the Dalai Lama: in the late 1990s, on a trip to a remote village in the mountains, the Dalai Lama reached a village where the population was entirely Muslim and very poor.
"Why is there no mosque in the village?" he asked
"We have no money," a villager replied, adding that the residents prayed in their homes.
Two years later, the Dalai Lama attended the inauguration of a small mosque in the village built from donations made by Tibetans and others he knew well all over the World, whom he had gently prodded to contribute. To repeat, the fact that I am not a Buddhist is, to the Dalai Lama, an irrelevant issue.
The real issue is of the means to an end. If he is a hero, a real hero, it is because he believes that the means are as important as the end and that all humans, the Chinese included, must be respected and treated with honour. If there must be a true definition of success, it must include the quality of the effort, the rectitude of the means as much as the achievement of the Goal. There is much to learn from him.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
A Bag of Tools
Don't we sometimes read something that makes us think? Perhaps a paragraph, a poem, or some prose? Many years ago, I came across a short poem in my father's collection of snippets, by an unknown poet called R.L. Sharpe.
Isn't it strange that princes and kings
And clowns that caper in sawdust rings
And common people like you and me
Are builders for eternity ?
Each is given a bag of tools
A shapeless mass
A book of rules
And each must make ere time has flown
A stumbling block or a stepping stone.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Of Bala Rao and other termites
My first job, after the MBA, was with a company in Kolkata that is in the business of cigarettes - need we say more? Bala Rao, the chap I reported to on the first day of my career, is now thankfully retired, but presumably still a nuisance to someone, somewhere. When I joined this company in 1991, he had already been put out to pasture at a place in one of the company's offices in Tollygunge. This was Bala's private fiefdom; he was the king and the management trainees, all eight of us, were slaves to his wishes.
I was the first to report to work and spent the large part of my initial month doing his personal work for him such as delivering his share certificates to some decrepit building that housed his broker or writing out a precis of a book that he would never read. He had an opinion on everything I did and was particularly nasty in a caustic, British sort of way; he would say something acerbic and laugh in a series of short coughs, much like a leopard with a hernia. Having been a Wodehouse fan myself, I often rehearsed my repartee in my mind, but was too scared to have a go at him - those days jobs weren't exactly easy to come by and my financial condition was far from secure. What remains a million dollar question is just how he had got into IIM Calcutta - he had the intelligence of a cabbage and emotional development of a termite, without unduly seeming to insult the biological spectrum to which they both belong.
But then that was much before I learnt about how organisations, and the rules of political alignment within them, work. Many organisations actually reward fellows like Bala for being loyal, despite widespread proof of their incompetence. Look around you, irrespective of the nature of the organisation you are associated with, and you will see doctors, managers, civil engineers, artistes and sportsmen comfortably snuggled into a corner of the organisation marked "for idiots only".
Let's come back to Bala. He once told me (and he was dead serious), "There are two ways to do things in this place. There's my way and there's the wrong way."
Possibly the only redeeming feature about Bala is that he gave me enough stuff to fill this blog!
Post Script:
In early March, I went back to Kolkata, after 18 years. I was tempted to meet Bala, to tell him what a worm he had been and how, in the many months that I worked for him, I had had a sick feeling in the stomach that I had never felt before. I let a second thought prevail; drinking a chilled beer on my first evening with a dear classmate of mine, one could think of many things that were pleasanter to contemplate. The need for retribution was past.
I was the first to report to work and spent the large part of my initial month doing his personal work for him such as delivering his share certificates to some decrepit building that housed his broker or writing out a precis of a book that he would never read. He had an opinion on everything I did and was particularly nasty in a caustic, British sort of way; he would say something acerbic and laugh in a series of short coughs, much like a leopard with a hernia. Having been a Wodehouse fan myself, I often rehearsed my repartee in my mind, but was too scared to have a go at him - those days jobs weren't exactly easy to come by and my financial condition was far from secure. What remains a million dollar question is just how he had got into IIM Calcutta - he had the intelligence of a cabbage and emotional development of a termite, without unduly seeming to insult the biological spectrum to which they both belong.
But then that was much before I learnt about how organisations, and the rules of political alignment within them, work. Many organisations actually reward fellows like Bala for being loyal, despite widespread proof of their incompetence. Look around you, irrespective of the nature of the organisation you are associated with, and you will see doctors, managers, civil engineers, artistes and sportsmen comfortably snuggled into a corner of the organisation marked "for idiots only".
Let's come back to Bala. He once told me (and he was dead serious), "There are two ways to do things in this place. There's my way and there's the wrong way."
Possibly the only redeeming feature about Bala is that he gave me enough stuff to fill this blog!
Post Script:
In early March, I went back to Kolkata, after 18 years. I was tempted to meet Bala, to tell him what a worm he had been and how, in the many months that I worked for him, I had had a sick feeling in the stomach that I had never felt before. I let a second thought prevail; drinking a chilled beer on my first evening with a dear classmate of mine, one could think of many things that were pleasanter to contemplate. The need for retribution was past.
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