Courage Under Fire

My stint here at IIFT is almost done. Nowadays I have so much free time that I am jobless enough to do some soul searching. I am a manager now, a leader who would be leading people, organizations in the near future but have I been able to fathom what leadership is all about? Some people are born leaders, some achieve leadership and some have leadership thrust upon them. Where do I fit in? Or do I prefer to be led?

In this span of twenty five years I have had the opportunity to lead as well as be led. I have come across exceptional awe-inspiring leaders as well as pompous supercilious men and both these kinds have brought me face to face with one important truth. Leadership is not about ability, it’s about responsibility. Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone. He or she must have the will and courage to make the decisions. Most often these decisions not only affect the leaders’ fate but also those being led and hence he or she has to shoulder the responsibility on behalf of all concerned. Life’s all hunky dory as long as the decision wins the favor of all the stake holders but most often life chooses to be more prosaic. A true leader would follow the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number even if that means making the shitty calls. That’s why he is the leader!

I have noticed that people who have been winners all their life, who always excel at what they do, don’t usually make inspiring leaders. Call it the winners curse if you so wish. Fact remains that they are so used to winning all the time that they can’t handle failure of any kind; losing isn’t an option for them. When you are responsible for people other than yourself, sacrifices and compromises have to be made. Battles must be lost to win the war. You are never a leader until you’ve lost.

It takes a lot of courage to step up to the job, to be unattached to everything else. Knowing that fingers would be pointed, enemies would be strengthened, friends would be lost along the way. I call it courage under fire. A leader does what has to be done, no questions asked. He isn't gifted with the luxury of being confused about his prerogatives. His decisions might prove to be unproductive eventually but the fact that he was the one who had the stomach to do what nobody else around could makes him stand out as the leader. You do it a few times and people would follow you.

The leader must know, must know that he knows, and must be able to make it abundantly clear to those around him that he knows. History stands witness to the fact that no one in the right frame of mind would ever follow a man who doesn’t know where he is going or if he wishes to do everything all by himself and/or take all the credit for himself too. He is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they would say: we did it ourselves!

The questions I have been asking myself are would I be able to stand up to the challenge? Would I be able to take the responsibility of my failures with as much bravado as my successes? Perhaps only time would tell. Until then I just wish I get to learn along the way what stuff true leaders are made of!

The MotorCycle Diary

There are definitely far less painful and lot easier means of committing suicide. Not that I could fathom why Amartya wishes to get himself killed in the first place. Perhaps on that particular fateful night he just felt divinely possessed and invincible or, this with greater probability, he was playing downright daft. If ever there was a didactic of WHAT NOT TO DO while riding a bike, Amartya would have made an excellent case study! The good thing is that he is still a LIVE case study even though his excellent intentions might have been otherwise. Whoever said that miracles do not happen had no idea that Amartya is still around to prove him wrong.

There are two types of people in this world, those who know how to ride a bike and those who don't. Amartya unfortunately doesn't fit into any of those two categories. Those of you with dirty minds are trying to find a double meaning in that statement, please carry on. You see when you've ridden a bike for all of six times with a guy sitting behind you all the time - holding on for his sorry life, not knowing what to pray for, his life or his bike and by the time he has decided it might be too late for both - you can't really aspire to be counted in the coveted first category and we can discount Amartya out of the second just for the sake of feel-good-factor, albeit his feel-good-factor.

Precariously dangling between the two categories that he is, it is but natural that he would wish to elevate his position. The intent was right, the execution went horribly wrong. The best of the bikers to scorch the roads would tell you that safety comes first. By ‘safety’ they mean, carry your license, always wear a helmet, have the headlights turned on at night, preferably don’t exceed the speed limits and if you are a rookie then swap ‘preferably’ with ‘definitely’; if the roads are wet and there’s smog around then swap ‘definitely’ with ‘imperatively’. Even a half-wit nut case with the minimum instinct of self-preservation would tell you that in the above conditions, with visibility not more than 10 feet, on a road infested with potholes unless you are drunk, doped, suicidal or homicidal you do not rave your bike over 70 kmph. Even though his mental and emotional states were to be debated for long after this incident, I would vouch for his sobriety though the difference between the worst of the sober Amartya and the best of the comatose Amartya is purely academic.

“I feel the need, the need for speed!” That’s what must be going through his head when he vroomed out of the college gate. Lately he had become a biking aficionado with an overdose of bike stunts from youtube but the life-altering fact that those stunts are performed by experts and under controlled conditions somehow slipped his mind. Neither was he an expert nor were the conditions in anyway controlled. I’ve already expatiated what a safe biker should be doing, well our beloved Amartya just callously forgot all of them and I mean every single one of them. When he hit the pothole - he says it was a pothole, not that he could see it - he was blazing 70 plus. He did what any other biker would do when he hits some obstacle at that kind of speed; he fell. The bike fell on top of him which dragged him a few meters before coming to rest. When you are catapulted off a running vehicle at that kind of velocity you don’t really roll around, get up, and dust off your clothes, pick up your bike and ride away coolly to glory. If you are still alive and conscious even after that bone-jarring crash, you lay there, oblivious of the pain - that would come later - your heart beating as fast as it could, adrenalin rushing through the blood stream, every muscle in your body taut, every limb trembling vigorously, wondering whether you have succeeded in making the transition into the next world. Amartya lay there doing just the same; ok, he might have wished that he had a bottle of whisky and a pack of Kings as well, I guess we’ll never know!

I could never appreciate the masochistic pleasure he got from such reckless, downright asinine activities but he did have the heart to actually extricate himself from under the bike. Bleeding as he was, he also had the mood to actually go hunting for his lost slippers! He could consider himself the luckiest bloke alive – the stress mind you is on ‘alive’ – to be able to stand albeit with difficulty. He always had his ways with ladies and not surprisingly Lady Luck was still smiling at him – discount the fact that she wasn’t so amused with him when he had the accident; what could she do if Amartya decided to play TopGun – the bike still purred and it must have been sweet music to his ears ‘coz if it hadn’t, Amartya at least was in no physical condition to haul it back to the campus.

Looking back in retrospect, I think Amartya might as well have enjoyed the after-effects of the accident apart from the excruciating pain. He had a valid and legal reason to bunk classes, internal tests and perhaps end terms too. Was that what he was trying to do? Comeon! Wouldn’t that be too much? Knowing Amartya, when did he ever require a reason for doing all those things? When I later confronted him with the same , he flashed his best smile – that’s some feat considering he hadn’t brushed his teeth for the last two days ‘coz of the numerous bandages - and there was a twinkle in his eye as if saying, “You can only wonder dude, I know!”

When in Deep Shit, Keep Your Mouth Shut

It's been quite sometime since my last blog. Life's been so fast and furious for the last couple of weeks that living on the edge would be an understatement of sorts. When you hit the deck at five in the morning and your alarm drags you out of the darkest caverns of slumber at six forty sharp (otherwise Shastriji would facilitate your first DGP) you don't just get out of bed, stretch n say 'morning to your roomies. Firstly you don't register where you are and more alarmingly you don't realize who you are! When realization does hit you, you have lost five precious minutes which would mean that you got to skip the loo. At least that way you would have an excuse for not going through the pains of the sacred Kapal Bhathi. That's how a normal day at IIFT commences. The hours fly by at an excruciating pace, which could be too fast or too slow depending on the situation you find yourself in, with you always trying to outsmart and outrun yourself. Everyday exposes you to a plethora of experiences. So varied are they that the mind often fails to register them later. Few of them would be so colourful that they'll manage to paint your memory bright and vivid forever.

We, at IIFT, are an innovative lot. So much so that we often tend to carry it a bit too far. So sleep deprived we are that it almost becomes our birthright to sleep during lectures. The art is that we can't afford to get caught; you know that fine line between a hero and a zero, but as Murphy's law goes, anything that can go wrong, definitely will, we often find ourselves on the wrong side of the line, with the wrong kind of people around. Such was the case with our dearest Mr. Anuj Jain. Now Mr. Jain is one of the most diligent folks of our batch. His motto seems to be, "Tension leneka aur deneka bhi!" Though he prefers to call it precaution for some obscure reason. As a result the gentleman doesn't get enough sleep in the night. The poor chap doesn't get to blink an eyelid in class as his permanent seat's right under the nose of the lecturer but as the saying goes every dog has its day and so did our beloved Anuj.

Our Economics lecturer, Miss Pushpa Kumari, allows us to sit as we please. That fateful morning Anuj managed to grab a seat in a strategic position; bang in the middle of the class! Geographically speaking it was a disaster in the making. The professor was through with almost an hour of the class. The class duration vs intensity of sleep graph is always exponential and there I was, really fighting a losing battle against myself to keep awake. Primarily because I din't wish to keep awake in the first place. My only aspiration at that moment was to fade away into the realms of the oblivion without Pushpa Kumari noticing the divine transition. An Economics class early in the morning can be a stronger opiate than most of its kind ever experienced by any drug abuser.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. Many of us usually are so far gone beyond the realms of consciousness that we couldn't care less if the professor's watching or not. So the virtues of courage and judgement are quite irrelevant here. Nevertheless for people as diligent as Anuj, sleeping in class is an academic evil, precariously hanging on the verge of being a social taboo but that morning history was to be made 'coz Anuj Jain was about to doze off and more disastrously he was also going to get caught. You can't really blame the poor chap. He was no expert in the art of cognition faking. You sit in the middle of the class with no frontal cover, which is another way of saying that you are a sitting duck, and more importantly you also try to concentrate; buddy you could have as well stretched out on Pushpa Kumari's table!

Hey wait guys! This is not the end of the fiasco. In fact it's just the beginning. Anuj probably had never ever found himself in such an embarrassing situation in his ever so serious, no non-sense life. He perhaps was already elevating himself to the status of a martyr, albeit without a cause, when he thought better of it and decided that drastic situations call for drastic measures. But my dear friend not when you have just come out of a nice little nap. "Mam, I wasn't sleeping. I was actually thinking about what you said with my eyes closed!" No more, no less. Anuj Jain at his innovative or inventive best (I leave it for you to decide) made this statement in all due earnest, with a perfectly straight face, in the middle of the class. There was pin drop silence for all of five seconds. Even I was sitting wide awake trying to figure out if what I had just heard was due to some post-nap effect or figment of my imagination when I ran out of time. The roar of laughter that thundered in the room for the next two minutes had said it all. I mean people were like, "DUDE, WHAT WERE U THINKING?" A perfect copy book example of thinking on the feet, or perhaps thinking with the feet would be more appropriate! I am sure Anuj would rate this very 'thoughtful' incident as one of his most embarrassing moments but he inadvertantly also taught everyone of us present there a very important lesson - when in deep shit, keep your mouth shut!

Indian Insitute of Foreign Trade
Our Very Own Gas Master

Life at IIFT was never going to be easy and neither was I expecting it to be. I've been through the so called Hostel Life during my engineering years and I've been there, seen this and done that. Life can be very monotonous if it isn't for the awe inspiring and colourful characters who you'll invariably bump against in a hostel. IIFT has been no exception. I was thinking about starting off my blogging career and what better way to start than to talk of our very own Gas Master. You'll come to appreciate the entire concept and importance of gas here at IIFT once I'm through with this blog.

It's been only three weeks here and already we've been able to categorize our mates here in accordance to their forte. I, for one, am unparallel at sleeping almost anywhere imaginable and perhaps unimaginable but that is not the topic of discussion today. Like in any classroom you will definitely find a group of eager students pretty desperate to impress the lecturer or perhaps someone else. It's no different here. Here at IIFT we've some bajuwords (read buzzwords). These enthusiasm personified characters are tagged for their ACP (Arbitrary Class Participation) and DCP (Desperate Class Participation). Incidentally our DCP king is also our Gas Master; apna very own Naval Goel!

Why exactly Naval has the dubious distinction of being crowned the Gas kingpin will be evident in a little while. Just keep reading. It was just another soporific, innocuous statistics class. I wouldn't have been able to recall the class today if it wasn't for the antics of Mr. Naval Goel. The topic of discussion in class was probability and the lecturer was using that historical cliche of the two die. He had just finished saying that obtaining a 3 and a 4 are two different cases and was about to proceed with a more complex example when entered the scene the Gas Master. "I've a question sir," he said with curiosity blazing in his eyes. "Sir, in that case if we get a 4 and a 4 then they should be considered as two different cases, right?" Though no one will ever doubt Naval Goel's IQ level (he's a very intelligent chap) but whether that was a genuine doubt or he did it on purpose, no matter how obscure that purpose may be, I'll never know. It's gas at its very best. I don't know about the lecturers but to the students Naval has been catapulted to an iconic status in no time. He has mastered the art of opening his mouth at the wrong time and at the wrong place. Strangely he invariably gets away with it. Probably it's his all-thirty-two-out face or maybe the lecturers just consider it below their dignity to react to his stupidity. Attribute it to his ever smiling countenance or his friendly know-all nature, you actually end up thanking him for his foolhardiness. If not for him and his likes classes would have been a painful drudgery.

Naval's escapades can fill up a diary as thick as our Kotler perhaps. Ask him why he does this and you will a grave reply, "Arrey yaar kisiko tho responsibility lena padega na thum sleepy boys ko jagake rakhne ka." In a way he is right. I can't fault his impeccable logic. Never mind the fact that the gas emitting from him can be very often downright asphyxiating. As if he's permanently afflicted with acute acidity but he's not perturbed and we are slowly getting used to this very arbitrary gassing. If you guys want to know more about gassing and the intrigues of the Gas King please feel free to let me know. After all he sits right next to me in class. I have often considered wearing a gas mask. Okay, I admit, that was a sad one but then so much of gas is bound to have its effects, isn't it?