Faith

I visited a place of pilgrimage called Palani in Tamil Nadu in India yesterday.  It was another day at the Palani Temple - 450,000 devotees coming from across the country. As the chants "Vel Vel Vetrivel, Vel Vel Veeravel" filled the air, the atmosphere was just electric.  It was charged with absolute positive energy. The pilgrims had to wait 4.5 hours in a long queue that snaked around the temple to catch a less than 10 second glimpse of the idol.  As I was talking to few there I heard how they had walked over 50 to 60 kms to visit this temple - and they got a less than a 10 second glimpse of the idol.  Got me wondering...why do so many people do this?  What makes them walk these long distances, get jostled around in the crowd, keep chanting the name of Lord Muruga and finally see the idol for few seconds but walk out feeling absolutely thrilled?  One of them told me that while they may get only few seconds to take a look at the idol, they have only thought of good deeds and thoughts and lived with God for all the hours that they waited to see the idol.  The fact that they all walk out happy is what I call faith.

Faith, like love, is not driven by the brain but by the heart.  They say, both faith and love, are blind.  There is a lot of emotion attached to faith and so, any amount of rationalising does not really change too much of the outcomes.  Could not these devotees who walked for hours and waited for hours to catch a few second glimpse of the idol of God not have done this at home? Could they have not just prayed to a photograph of this idol which I am sure they will have at home? Are they fools to go through this arduous exercise? No, definitely not. This has to do with the emotion in each person...with the feeling of being one with God.  And it is this faith that makes them do these acts.  I saw people of all ages at this temple...from the really young to the really old.  I saw people in wheelchairs.  It was just amazing to see so many people - all looking towards the Almighty.

Faith makes us do such extraordinary acts.  It drives us in many ways.  In the Tamil Movie "Dhill", the director builds a very strong character who defies all physical odds to start walking again after he is beaten up and many of his bones are broken.  The character in that movie displays extraordinary faith in himself to be able to do anything. And when he wills, he finds the way.  As they say, "Where there is a will, there is a way." 

The dark side to this faith is what I see in terrorism.  Just imagine the courage it would take to give up your life for a cause. That is what these terrorists do.  From the suicide bombers to those who kill thousands of innocent people, it is faith in some cause that drives humans to behave like this.

What this shows me is that this faith in a cause or in someone or both results in extraordinary acts.  This is because this faith drives an amazing attitude to make things happen for the cause and/or the person.  This is the faith that leaders in organizations can harness.  A good leader with a clear vision can instill tremendous faith in the people and that translates in to a very positive attitude.  I have experimented with this concept where I have worked on a clear vision with expectations that are easily understood by all.  I have then empowered people to achieve this vision - i.e. put faith in people.  Once people saw me put faith in them, they in turn put full faith in me, the vision and the expectations.  This created positive energy all around.  And this positive energy resulted in a multiplier effect that is not easy to put in words - it has to be experienced...felt inside each one of us - very much like faith!!!

Tolerance

I was discussing with a friend of mine whether the Indian family system of taking care of elderly parents and grandparents at home was better than letting them live on their own or in an old age home.  Whether the Indian system of taking care of their physical, emotional and financial needs by making them stay at home till they passed away was better than letting them live alone and fend for themselves.  Societies in the US and Europe and Australia seem to have got a clear way where each one cares for himself/herself.  Some are less fortunate and so the Government has to pay for part of their bills and so, the condition in which they live are not always the best.  In India, we do not have a social security system and the family takes on that role.  Somehow, I see this as equivalent of self-help and people do not need to depend on the Government to take care of their elderly.

With life expectancy moving up all over the world, elderly care is something that needs thought.  While they may need help on the physical and financial fronts, they will definitely need help on the emotional front.  More so, if they have lost their partner.

We seem to not have tolerance for the lack of speed of reaction of elders.  This causes stress both in us as well as the elders living with us.  While some of the elders come with years of baggage in their heads, I have always found it useful to set clear expectations without hurting the person.  After all, when we were young, these same elders set ground rules for us.  It is now time for them to follow ground rules.  This is where problems arise.  Some see us as children setting ground rules for them and some learn to accomodate and live, though with a lot of disagreements.  So, how do we handle this situation? Is it better to make them live on their own or would it be good to be with them?

These are difficult questions.  The advantage of having our elders live with us include tapping in to their experiences so that we do not re-invent the wheel everytime.  Others include the fact that they enjoy spending time with our children, telling them bed time stories, playing with them, helping them in their studies, talking to them about our culture, teaching them a way of life that is fast disappearing in India.  The problems that come along are that the elders find it difficult to adjust to some of the modern day realities and could become sarcastic, some do not want to do anything but sit and watch TV all through the day, some have physical or mental disabilities that are better looked after in a hospital or through full time care.  Apart from all this, some of us believe that they have become a burden on us.

I have been observing situations that many have faced and come up with my conclusion that it is best to keep them with us if possible or to get them to stay with their age group relatives but keep them close to our homes so that we can spend time with them daily.  We need to spend time daily with our elders, listen to them with patience, not to be judgemental and heed their advice as it comes with years of experience.  For this, we need not only to love them as our own but also have tolerance as their physical and mental abilities are not as quick as they used to be.  This tolerance is absolutely critical in our lives for as we grow up, we need to be tolerant to our next generations.  If we show this tolerance, the Universe will come back and pay us back with the same tolerance that we deserve when we become "the elders".

Spotting Leaders...

My wife never refers to a plant as "it" but as "her".  We had a plant that had been re-potted and was struggling to come back to life.  My wife kept talking to "her" for over a month and kept encouraging her to spring back to life.  She kept telling her, "I want to see your flower."  One sunny day my wife and I returned home and as we stepped through the gate, my wife let out a squeal of joy.  She pointed out to the plant that she had been talking to for over a month..."she" had a bud.  To me, the one month of continuously talking to the plant and showering the love "she" needed is seeing the unseen and hearing the unheard.  This is leadership.

Many a time we pass existing leaders in our teams and bring someone from outside.  This happens for few reasons.  It is like our child who is growing up in front of our eyes. We struggle to imagine our little daughter has become a teenager.  Similarly, we struggle to see the leader that has grown in front of our eyes.  The other reason is that since we have been closely watching the people we work with, we know their strengths and improvement areas.  These improvement areas are familiar to us and they breed contempt.  We do not notice the improvement areas of the new leaders that we interview and realise that, many a time the leader inside the organization was better than the one we just brought in.

Many organizations and leaders in organizations struggle to spot leaders. What has worked for me in spotting leaders have been few qualities that I notice as I begin to work with people - these include "the can do" attitude, negotiation skills, collaborative skills, taking ownership and being accountable, ability to take decisions and more importantly living down wrong decisions, willingness and ability to communicate expectations very clearly, ability to be on the dance floor while bringing in a balcony view and above all, being a human being.

Spotting leaders is an art and it is often the small deeds or acts that bring forth the leaders in us.  As I stated above, the act of talking to the plant to bring "her" back to life and bloom, to me was leadership at its best.

I was talking to this 10 year old child who was the leader of a gang of girls in her school.  This was a small gang of 5 and they all had decided that she should be the leader.  Other gangs were trying to poach members from this gang so that they could grow their gang.  So, in order to protect her gang, she made one of them Vice-Captain of her gang.  She then made another member the Stand-In leader when she was absent and another member the Stand-In Vice Captain when the Vice Captain was absent.  This way, she negotiated positions for each person and they all were so happy that they decided not to leave the gang.  When the time came to go in different directions, she did not think twice to disband the gang.  These are clear signs of leadership of a 10 year old who is ready to take decisions based on the circumstances on hand and not take a stance based on her own position or a decision made earlier.

In my earlier writings, I have discussed what it is to be a human being and what it is to have a "can do" attitude.  I would like to talk today on living down the mistakes that we make as leaders and not beating ourselves up.  In our daily lives, all of us wear the leadership hat.  Many a time we don't know we are wearing the hat but actually do.  We take thousands of decisions.  Many of them do not work the way we thought they would or have un-intended consequences...consequences that we could not imagine when we took those decisions.  As they say, we are always smarter on the hindsight.  Many of us are ashamed of the decisions that we took and beat ourselves up and live with the burdens.  There are others who are willing to accept the errors of judgement made and move on in life.  True leaders don't beat themselves up continuously.  If we are humans, we will make those errors - it is after all human to err.  The leader is not above this maxim.  If we understand this and take the errors that we make in our stride, take accountability for those errors, face the consequences and not let those errors stop us in lives, we are on our way to becoming true leaders.  When President Nixon accepted his errors of judgement, in an interview on television on the Watergate Scandal, he showed what it is to make a mistake and live down that mistake.  He showed courage, grit and leadership.

Money

Jeff Crowther said, "Some one really lazy would have created money".  He was correct.  Money serves a dual purpose of being a unit of value and also a medium of exchange.  Before money was invented the rice dealer would have struggled to exchange his goods to, say, buy clothes or utensils.  Barter would have been a huge issue for society and some lazy person, who had all this time in the world, would have been thinking how to resolve the problem and would have come up with the concept of money.  Once money was created, kings started wondering how to physically make this money without being in a situation where everyone created this money. Hence, gold was used.  Over a period of time, gold gave way to silver, then came alloys of cheaper metals and now paper.

Man tends to over extend everything in life. Our greatest strengths, when over extended, become our greatest weaknesses.  We end up losing whatever we thought we would get out of these strengths.  To reduce problems in society being able to access everything it needed in life, we created money.  Slowly, greed took over and since we wanted everything that this society had to offer, we started trying to make more of this money.  We hoarded money and when we did that, we started robbing from each other.  When we started robbing from each other, we started keeping them in safe locations.  These safe locations, over a period of time, became banks and these trusted people became bankers.  Banking, grew over the years, and used this money to lend to those who needed this money.  So, money started circulating around.  It could do much more than what it was originally created for.  Thousands of years after money was created, in 2008, we saw one of the biggest crisis take place with millions of people being displaced from their homes, lose jobs, commit suicide, etc. and all this happened all across the world.  We called it the Global Financial Crisis.  Our solution to resolve the barter problem landed us in one of the worst crisis that we experienced. 

As Santosh was about to step in to the cab, I asked him, "Santosh, would you be willing to leave Rs.25,000 in this cab and go out shopping for an hour without worrying that it will be stolen either by the cabbie or someone else?"  He said that there is no question of trusting a cabbie who he did not know with Rs.25,000.  I asked him as to how does he trust the cabbie with his life by getting in to it and taking an one hour ride back home?  What if the cabbie drove rashly resulting in a fatal accident?

We go through life without thinking through so many things.  Money, they say, is the reason for most of the ills of mankind.  I have to disagree.  We have only ourselves to blame.  Money has never asked us to over-extend its use.  It has never asked us to become greedy.  We have become greedy.  As the actor Rajnikanth says, "So long as we have adequate quantities of money, it will protect us.  Once we stock excess quantities, we have to protect it."

I read two snippets of news that actually shows the power of money. One was about a very rich businessman selling some of his equity holdings to contribute a significant amount to his foundation that focusses on education.  Education to millions of Indians will result in a stronger India in the future and is clearly the only way out for Indians to come out of poverty.

The other snippet was about a wayward son who had gone in to drugs.  After his parents died, he realised that they had willed away all their money to a charity.  Left without any money, he is now living in a charity home outside of Bangalore.  He now realises that his misuse of money and his disrespect for it is what has resulted in the lousy situation that he finds himself in today.  Money seems to have taught this young man a real tough lesson in life.

In India, we worship the Goddess Lakshmi and many say that we do that so that we can get more wealth.  What our ancestors wanted us was to respect money and so created this Goddess of Wealth, Lakshmi.  This would ensure that we give money the due respect and treat it well so that it helps us.  Clearly, our ancestors seem to have known more than us...wish we learn from the lessons they have taught us and find peace with our lives!!!

True happiness seems to be in sharing the wealth that we have with others than in hoarding it.  There is the story of a very rich farmer in the US who sprayed not only his farm but also the ones of his not so wealthy neighbours.  He did this for 2 years till his neighbours became rich enough to afford spraying themselves.  But, what this did for him was that his farm started yielding more and he made more money because he had rid himself of the problem of insects coming in from the unsprayed neighbouring farms.  This example is true for us in all aspects of life.  The more we share, the more we end up getting!!!

The Airline Industry and Lessons of Life....

I had moved from a job that got me to travel nationally to one that got me around the world.  In those years, my domestic travel was very little and the biggest casualty was my flying status with the domestic airline.  From a Gold Member, I was quickly downgraded to a Silver and then to the lowest membership level.  From all the check-in and lounge priveleges, it was suddenly, nothing.  An amazing transformation in the way the check-in counter staff of the airline looked at you when you checked in.  I watched a movie in which people went to any extent to keep their flying miles up to date - ironically, on a flight - and realised why.

I have been travelling by air for years now and the only thing I have seen happen with absolute regularity is that the size of seats has been decreasing i.e. becoming narrower.  I am sure some industrial engineer would have told them that they could stuff more seats in to a plane and hence make more profits.  I saw the worst of it on a flight to the US last month.  There was this slightly plump lady who was struggling to get in to her seat and as the flight was going full in the economy section, there was no place where two contiguous seats were empty.  Finally, the airline had to upgrade her to business class.  She struggled quite a bit before fitting in to that seat as well.

This made me think...why do I think so poorly of this industry when it is really keeping us honest!!!  We realise that our positions mean nothing when we retire.  We mistakenly identify ourselves with our positions only to realise that our own staff look straight through us when we retire or move on...by downgrading our status if we dont fly regularly, the airline industry is doing the same.  If we experience this few times, we will never get hit with retirement blues. 

Further, with all this belt-tightening (not the seat belts ofcourse!!!) and seats getting narrower, the airline industry is really forcing us to slim down.  Obesity is one of the biggest challenges that we face as a society today as it moves to become an epidemic.  Obesity, like many other problems, does not come alone..it comes with other ailments such as diabetes, back problems, etc.  This unwritten policy of "slim down or dont fly" from the airline industry has done us a huge favour. Call it Airline Social Responsibility!!!

Life has its ups and downs.  Only when we go through the troughs do we appreciate the peaks.  Troughs help us get level headed and keep our feet to the ground.  The airline industry is like these troughs.  We are well and truly grounded!!!

Attitudes and moods...

I was talking to this 9 year old girl, "Tell your friend to go away...she is really irritating me."  She replied, "My friend is not irritating you...you are getting irritated!!!"  The thunderbolt from this 9 year old hit me very hard.  For many years I have been trying not to react negatively to situations and I have succeeded in getting the better of situations many a time when I have stepped back and thought what to do next.

Most of the time our moods depend on our attitude and how we decide to react to a given situation.  Yet we blame our work conditions, our colleagues, our friends or the not so friendly ones, our families and everyone else on this earth for all stress that we have to put up with.

I read the story of a New York Cabbie who would just smile each time someone cut him off on the road.  When someone asked him as to how he could do that, he replied, "Someone is trying to dump junk on me.  It is now left to me to decide whether I am going to accept it or not.  Since I control whether to accept it or not, I have decided not to accept it."  We have heard of so many stories of violence because of road rage.  If only we could adopt the attitude of this New York Cabbie.

Another story that I have heard and think is worth sharing is about this donkey that fell in to a very deep pit.  He could not get out and started screaming.  The villagers could not tolerate the noise and when they saw this donkey in a very deep pit, they decided that the best course of action was to pour mud in to the pit and bury the donkey. So they started bringing in mud from close by and started filling the pit.  As the first few buckets of mud fell on the donkey's back, he started screaming at the villagers and how ungrateful they were for all the good work that he had done for them.  The mud started filling up and he realised that if he could jump on top of each bucket of mud poured down, he was moving up as the pit got filled.  Soon, the pit was filled up and the donkey was on top and he trotted away happily....deciding never to complain when he is stuck in a lousy situation but to figure out what to do next to get out of it.  They say that "attitude decides your altitude"...in this case, for the donkey, his attitude literally decided his altitude - from the bottom of a deep pit to the top of it!!!

Many a time when something goes wrong for us we think, "Why me?".  Instead, if we decide what to do next, life takes a different turn and, definitely, for the positive.  We can decide whether we want our lives to move positively or not.  Let us take time and decide to live a life with a positive attitude.

When mother earth hits back...

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction", said Issac Newton and this is his 3rd law of motion.  In the 1800s we went down to 69 feet to get some oil.  Now, we dig thousands of feet in to our earth and below our ocean beds and we do this across the world.  By drilling for minerals and oil, by blasting the earth for metals, by cutting down mountains and trees in the name of development, we have set in motion a series of actions.  She has been receiving all this over the years and patiently putting up with our deeds that destroys her slowly and steadily.  Once in a way, she gets upset and decides to teach these stupid kids a lesson.

She was tired of all the drilling that had been happening all over Asia and in the Indian Ocean.  She lazily stretched her arms (I guess) and the shift in the tectonic plates (measured 9.1 on the Richter Scale) ripped through 30 kms of water from beneath the oceans and triggered of a tsunami that created waves of up to 30 metres, earthquakes that could be felt in Alaska and destroyed coastlines in 14 different countries.  The 2004 Tsunami killed over 240,000 people.  All done and over in few minutes!!!  Millions of dollars worth of property destroyed.  The death toll was 80 times the size of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September (please don't mistake me to being insensitive to loss of human lives in New York but was just explaining the scale).

We are the only species credited with the power to think...and, yet, our thoughts seem to be so self-centred.  We kill millions of undersea creatures by conducting nuclear tests, we do deep sea trawling and deep freeze fish that gets eaten after few days/weeks/months, we are probably the only species that kills for entertainment, we do not respect lives of other creatures that live on this earth but expect every other creature to respect our lives.  So, why is a human life more valuable than that of the poor fish that swims happily in the oceans? Have you heard of an animal that kills and stores its food for months before eating?  Have you heard of animals that kill for the sake of pleasure? 

We have now slowly started realising that if we live in harmony with this earth, she will give you much more than what you want.  We call this "sustainability".

Our insatiable need for energy is our biggest reason for digging up our world.  If we decide to invest these dollars towards harnessing the power of the Sun, the Wind, the Oceans, our energy sources will not only be enormous but also completely clean and green.  Instead, we spend millions digging up the earth for coal/oil, create coal based power stations to generate electricity.  We believe that we generate power cheaper with coal than these other natural sources like the sun.  However, if we count the cost of displacement of people as we do indiscriminate mining, the cost of air pollution that causes us to spend millions on treating ourselves for asthma and other lung/body disorders and the real cost of waste disposal, we will hopefully understand that this is really not sustainable and far too expensive.  If she gets angry and decides to stretch her arms once again, the cost we will have to pay will be just far too high.

Governments are battling with companies that mine away in the name of creating wealth but are actually causing maximum damage to our mother earth.  Governments want to charge a special tax on their profits and use that money to fund their schemes for re-settling people, restoring other parts of earth, etc. 

We are marauding mother earth in the name of wealth creation and I believe that the cost we will pay for this will be huge in terms of lives.  Years and years of our efforts will be paid back in minutes!!!