There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil. – Alfred North Whitehead We, in India, love the feeling of having had our say. In that, we are not special or different. What is special and different is our ability to say the same thing over and over again. With every round of repetition, we think less and less about the whole thing. Our mind is made up. We are right. What else is there to think of? There are people who believe that those who return awards against the perceived rising intolerance in India are creating an issue where none exists. And there are people who believe that those who return awards have highlighted an issue of grave concern. Both sides of course believe that they are right and the other side is wrong! Do we see both sides actually talking with each other? Of course, not. They talk past each other. Each side selects facts most convenient to it and interprets the facts in…
HR – A rousing manifesto
For a thousand years, HR has been eyeing a seat at the business table. We live in times when a business has to be ready for standing orders. But this is lost on HR professionals. Leave aside the seat at the table. It has no power to inspire. Is there anything that can? Can we find something that can make our vision soar and see how we in HR can make a dent in the universe? I propose the words that follow. They move. They inspire. If you feel it in your bones, if you tremble with unbearable excitement at what it means to live these words, you are onto something special. “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Advice Given – Ignore Politics. Guess What. Politics Won’t Ignore You!
I read about an HR head sharing advice he got from a senior leader on the subject of politics. The gist of it was – “Be aware of politics, understand the dynamics. And ignore it while continuing to do the right thing for you and your organization.” As a politics student, I beg to differ. Politicians have given politics a bad name. Our own ineffective participation in the political process as citizens and voters has given politics a bad name. Politics is not a dirty word. If you equate politics with everything negative and refuse to have anything to do with it, you haven’t quite grasped its essence. Politics is an inescapable part of our human condition. You might think you have washed your hands off, but politics impacts you all the time. In other words, you may ignore politics but make no mistake about it, politics is not ignoring you! What is politics? It is the process of resource-allocation in any set-up. How to use any resource – food,wealth, time, material resources, arms, energy, any resource.On what basis is this…
When it rains
When it rains.. I smell new books. I hear the crackle of brown paper-covers; a dress for the new books. I scamper across to hold my own school dress – a crisp white shirt and blue shorts. I see the rain chase away street urchins, and lo behold! The pranksters with no mom and dad to rein them stand their ground and put their face up to the rain, a playfully defiant gaze at the sky, saying, ‘show me what you have got!’ I envy those kids, our vacation is over; they know no school, no regimented life. They know freedom like I have never known! I count my hours of freedom in school, the short recess, the long one, the free periods, the bunked ones! For me and my school friends, the rains bring mixed tidings.. We are thrilled to be back together after the vacation; and stare blankly from our long corridor towards our school ground; our field of dreams submerged under the water. Cricket is out..Damn the rains.. And then our eyes light up!The beautiful game. Football.…
Sylvia Path on Nature, the Sea , The Eternal & The Ephemeral
Written even before she turned 19, this is her diary entry. A visit to the Massachusetts coastline. A gifted writer becomes the sun. And gives light for us to see & experience the beauty of the soul. “On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken…
Beautiful Movie Scenes – The Shawshank Redemption
Andy is destined to live out his life in prison for a crime he did not commit. In the company of inmates being robbed of hope, slowly & steadily ; as their souls are being hollowed out. Andy is useful to prison authorities. He gets to move around the premises in the course of doing his work. One day as a friendly prison official is in the washroom, Andy puts on music. The music casts a spell. This is a scene to experience. “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid.I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last…
The joy of playing
They were playing football but had thrown the rule-books away! There they were. A big group of 5-6 year old boys & girls in a rain-soaked muddy ground. Puddle patches at some places. Goal posts standing to attention. What do these kids do? Ignore the goal-posts. Stay away from the wet but even parts. Search for the muddiest parts. Kick-off there & begin the game. A slightly different one. Imagine a team of runners carrying a flaming torch. Recall the energy,the purpose, & the direction set by their run. Take away the purpose & direction. What you have is pure,unbridled energy. Bubbling energy! These kids were bursting with energy & the ball was at their feet! The football was their flaming torch. There were no two teams. This was ‘one’ team of twenty odd kids running for fun with the ball for company! They were pushing the ball together. There it goes into the mud-pools. Perfect! Time to dig it out & splash about the mud & water! Out of one & head towards the other! The puddles of water…
Quotes & short-burst expressions – Regularly updated
MESSAGE FOR READERS ACCESSING THIS PAGE FOR THE FIRST TIME What is creation? Creation is a lousy word. It’s a lousy word that confuses what you really do to perform a simple little procedure. Creation means create something out of nothing. In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. Okay, only God can do that. We can’t do that: We’re human. So let’s throw creation out, and let’s talk about connectivity. What you are trying to do is connect things together.You’re trying to practice connectivity. – Eugene Schwarz I like reading quotes. I have read many. As Eugene Schwarz would say, I am now practicing connectivity by writing down my own quotes & short-burst expressions. I am very sure what I say has been said before. I believe I become something more in the act of saying things my way. I learn to connect. Something I value. Every now & then, I will be updating this list. To see how I view what I said once upon a time, to feel good about myself & to be inspired to connect…
Being A Follower
A leader has followers. This is the simplest fact about leadership – having followers. Everybody wants to be a leader. Nobody wants to be a follower. This, inspite of being told that to lead, one must learn to follow. I want to learn to follow. Not as a prelude to being a leader. In fact, I am assuming being a leader is beyond me. I want to be focussed on being a follower.Where do I begin? Demand more out of myself than any leader would – I respect my leader and appreciate my leader’s burden. Surely, I can reduce it in my own small way. I can demand more out of myself than any leader does. That frees up my leader. Now, my leader no longer has to worry about me. All the time and energy invested in inspiring and guiding me can be channelised for a higher purpose! Focus on the primary task more than anything else – When we discuss what is going on, I see how my leader has to take care of so many other things…
Leadership and the City Center
Imagine you are designing a road traffic network for a new city. Every city has a city-center, a place that can be called the heart of a city. It stands to reason that you would design the road traffic network in a way that allows every place to be connected with the city center. Would you also want to connect all places in such a way that no matter where you want to go, you have to pass through the city center? Of course, not, right?! Doing so would mean absolutely unnecessary traffic at the city center. Traffic deadlocks would be the order of the day. The city-center would become the bottleneck, the problem. Now, take your organization and its equivalent of the city-center, the heart of the organization. We are talking about it’s core leadership. Consider the workflow of the organization as the road traffic network. Here, we include all the policies, procedures, processes, everything that moves within the organization. You would of course want the workflow to be connected to the leadership. They should know what is happening.…