If you are tuned in you will always get “the message”!

Life is very benevolent, very compassionate.

Last evening, Vaani and I wanted to go meet someone. The meeting was not obligatory or confirmed. But we thought we would take a chance. We walked in one direction for a while but at a point where we had to cross an important intersection we found two hurdles – incessant traffic and a huge puddle of water after some heavy showers earlier in the hour. So, we decided to hang a right and walk down the pavement to see if we could cross the road at some point. But a traffic snarl and more water on the road made crossing over difficult. Soon, we found we had walked further away from our intended destination. With a slight drizzle beginning to come down, we thought it best to abandon the plan to visit this person and instead hailed an auto-rickshaw to get back home.

The auto driver was unusually respectful. He didn’t haggle over the fare and offered to drive us home. At one of the traffic lights, as we waited, he turned around and asked us if we could connect him with an institution or individual who can support the payment of his son’s college fees. He showed us documents in evidence of his son’s academic progress. The boy, it was evident, is faring very well. But the fee was overdue by two weeks and he risked being rusticated. We kept talking with the auto driver on the rest of the ride. When we reached our home, while I paid him the fare, Vaani told him not to either worry or feel despondent. She went on to tell him, briefly, the story of our son Aashirwad’s miraculous graduation in 2012 from the University of Chicago (Read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal). After sharing the anecdote with the auto driver, Vaani told him to hang in there. She said, “If he has come this far through college, he will complete it. Whatever is ordained alone happens. So, keep up your efforts, a way will soon be born.” The auto driver thanked her profusely and said that he was very grateful for “the message”.

And that’s what our auto ride last evening was really all about. It was about delivering “the message” of hope and faith to the man based on our own experience. Consider this – we were not even headed in the direction where we eventually met him. We had no plans of returning home around the time that we did. How often does one feel like chatting up with an auto driver in Chennai? Perhaps, his courteousness made Vaani share our experience with him. Over dinner, both Vaani and I concurred that he was just ordained to receive “the message” that Life was giving him – and we were the chosen messengers.

In my Book, Fall Like A Rose Petal, I do share several anecdotes where the Universe, Life, has sent me messages through people, events and things. For instance, I recall that dark day in April 2007 when I was standing in a lane off Haddows Road in Chennai, opposite the bank where we had an account; our first cheque had bounced for lack of funds and with no income stream, I felt it was all over for us. Just then a car moved into the vacant parking spot ahead of me. And four words on a sticker on the car’s rear windscreen delivered me “the message” – the sticker read, “Never Ever Give Up”! I can’t say what would have happened had I not received that message that morning. But see what receiving that message has done to me, to us – it has helped us not just survive, but also grow and evolve through a tumultuous decade, despite our excruciating circumstances!!!

I have understood that the Universe, the Cosmic Design, Life, is very benevolent, very compassionate. You will always get what you need – and that includes messages or signs that reassure you, that clarify, that answer your questions or that which simply point you in a direction that you must take. If you are tuned into Life’s energy, by anchoring in faith and patience, you will pick up those signals, you will receive those messages – at the right time, at the right place, through the most unlikely messengers; and only you will be able to see or sense those messages. Others around you will not be able to understand these signs. And in the event that you fail to see or pick up those signs and messages, they will be served again and again and again. Until, of course, you eventually get it! That’s why I feel that Life is very benevolent, very compassionate.

 

Why you must be an uber cool parent – and your child’s BFF!

A cardinal principle of parenting (especially of adolescents and young adults) is to not come in the way of the passions and dreams of your children.

In a recent story “The lure of foreign education” in Business Standard my former colleague (when I was with BusinessWorld/ABP) Anjuli Bhargava reviews the pros and cons of educating children abroad – especially if parents can afford it. I am not going to analyze her piece here. All I am going to say is that whether it is their education or their relationships or their careers, give your children the power of choice. Offer your insight from an experiential and values-based point of view. But leave the final decision to them. If you can fund their dreams, great. If you can’t afford to fund them, at least don’t stop them from chasing their dreams. Encourage them instead to believe in themselves, to trust the process of Life and that will lead them to find creative ways to fulfil whatever they are setting their sights on.

I talk from personal experience. Vaani and I have followed this principle with both our children – Aashirwad and Aanchal. In fact, the decision to send Aash to the University of Chicago in 2008 in the most improbable of circumstances – when we had no means to even cover living expenses for us in India dealing as we were with a bankruptcy (which we continue to endure) – and the story of his miraculous graduation from there is detailed in my Book Fall Like A Rose Petal (Westland). I always tell Aash that his real education happened over the course of the four years of his undergrad program in the way he learnt to thrive in a multi-cultural environment and in how he conquered the harsh winters of Chicago. The degree that the University offered him is just a piece of paper. But what he learnt from Life on a US campus he will find unputdownable, and invaluable, over time. Aanchal is currently looking to do her Master’s overseas. And she’s working on getting her funding in place – through scholarships and grants. We know that she will find her way. So, what we have learnt, as a family, is to never come in the way of what Life is offering us. We truly appreciate the value of going with the flow.

Vaani and I believe parents must never weigh the aspirations of their children against their own (parents’) insecurities. This is not about education alone. Even in the matter of relationships and career choices, as parents, we must learn to let go. We must understand that our children have unique Life paths. Just because we went through a certain experience it need not be necessary that our children will go through the same. Yes, all of us parents are always wishing that our children must not encounter pain in Life. We want them to lead good, comfortable, prosperous, healthy and happy lives. But do you even see the futility in having this expectation?  No amount of prayer or wishing by you can prevent your child from having to go through her or his unique Life path. To put it bluntly, you cannot live your child’s Life. You cannot prevent your child from experiencing pain. All you can do is to, if you know that art yourself, teach your child how not to suffer in the face of Life’s challenges, when pain strikes. And if you don’t know how to avoid suffering, then just back off. Let your child learn from her or his own unique experience. Also, please, please, don’t see your child’s Life as a financial opportunity, an investment that you must seek to extract a yield out of. Your child is not here to fulfil your dreams either. Nor is your child here to jump at your every whim, obey your every command and fear your every look. Your child’s future – be it education or marriage – is not a duty or responsibility either that needs to be ticked off as having been accomplished in your Things To Do list. Your child is, to quote Khalil Gibran, Life’s longing for itself; your child is born through you and not for you. And certainly, your child didn’t ask to be born. So let your child simply be. And believe me, or look at yourself – haven’t you, despite all your frailties and challenges survived and reached where you have in Life? – your child will be just fine!

Finally, allow me to suggest this. Be your child’s BFF. It’s far more fun than being your child’s parent! So, go get yourself a Snapchat account and an Instagram handle. Be an uber cool parent. For, parenting in today’s world, especially of adolescent and young adult children, can be a joyous opportunity to practice detachment, to let your hair down and to let go! And when you do let go, you will find that your children always turn out more responsible, more caring, more compassionate, more strong and more successful – in that inescapable worldly sense – than you would have ever thought of them to be!

 

Recognize that your Life’s ticking away; go do what’s important for you – NOW!

If you can’t make time for your family, for your children, then you may want to review whatever you are doing in and with your Life. Believe me, nothing else is more important!

Two Facebook posts over the last few days have led me to a reiteration of this point of view.

A friend posted pictures of an ice-cream date with his 10-year-old son. He confessed that he wished he had done more of this while promising that he would make more time to be with his child going forward. Another friend, who has recently taken up an assignment overseas, wished his daughter a happy 16^th birthday this morning. He apologized for not being with her today.

I am not going to opine on the choices my friends are making.

I know from my own experience how it feels when your children have ‘suddenly’ grown up, and have taken off to lead their own lives, while you were busy ‘earning a living’ in the garb of ‘building your career’ and ‘saving up enough for the family’. 8 years ago when our 18-year-old son left for the US, to take up an undergrad program at the University of Chicago, I felt tormented by the realization I had ‘not seen him grow up at all’. That night I was overcome by guilt and grief. I carried a lot of it in me for a long, long time, until I decided to forgive myself. I did make up by being available for my daughter during her years in high school and college. But none of what I did or how I felt could turn back time and help me go back to being a young parent again or get my children to be young enough to have time for me!

An excuse we constantly give ourselves for not being able to devote quality time for the family is that our work is very demanding. Honestly every corporate soldier that is slaving away out there is thinking of, and is keen to attain, work-Life balance. But that’s where it stops and remains – as a thought. The intention never gets actualized. I have learnt, again from hard experience, that Life is not going to make time for you. You have to make time for yourself and your family.

You may want to begin by reviewing your Life along these five factors that suck up your time at/for work:

1. If you are, as a manager, working more than 8 hours daily (that includes checking mail and responding to them or taking conference calls from other time zones) then one or several of these conditions are true:
   • You are a poor decision-maker
   • You are just horribly organized
   • Your boss is inefficient
   • Your subordinates are inefficient
   • All of the above!
2. Don’t take your smartphone to the dining table and don’t wake up looking at it. Put it off or on silent mode and leave it away from you while at home. Designate times while at home when you will check your phone for calls and mails.
3. When with the family, be with the family
4. When at work, work – without distraction, without frittering away your time in ‘wasteful, unplanned stuff’
5. Have the courage to say no to unproductive meetings or attending meetings whose agenda can be completed over mail or at least your contribution/input can be shared over mail!

The truth is that whenever you say you don’t have time, or the choice to do what you want to do – which in this case is to be with your family – you are actually admitting that you don’t know how to live intelligently! Recognize that your Life is ticking away. To be sure, you will die sooner or later. If you don’t live doing what’s more important now you probably will die wondering what all those meaningless hours spent at work__“being frightfully busy, with no time for anyone, even for yourself, yet having achieved nothing great”__were really all about?

Let go and let Life take over!

Please Note: This Blog will continue to feature my daily blogposts. In addition, on Sundays, public holidays and long weekends, I will feature The Happiness Road Series and my #HelpYourselfToHappiness Vlog Series!

Here’s today’s blogpost – not posting a Vlog today, though it is a Sunday!!

Life never lets you down. You always get what you need.

A major part of today was spent in clearing papers and documents that had got accumulated over the last 7~8 years – this is the time that we have been going through a bankruptcy, acute pennilessness at most times. Some of this documentation had to do with our medical records as a family. A substantial chunk also dealt with the under-grad education of our two children Aashirwad and Aanchal. Aash graduated with an Economics degree from the University of Chicago in 2012. And Aanch graduated last year from the University of Madras with a degree in Psychology – today, in fact, was her graduation day ceremony! As Vaani and I worked on the papers, separating them chronologically and subject-wise, we saw a beautiful pattern emerge. We realized that everything that we needed has always come to – perhaps not in the form we were expecting it to come, but it always came, often in the nick of time!

As we organized the papers, we revisited some of the most painful and stressful times we had gone through as a family. The fortnight prior to Aash’s graduation – I have elaborated this story in my Book “Fall Like A Rose Petal” (Westland, 2014); the week of Aanch’s admission to her under-grad program; the repeated times we had defaulted on fee payments; and the number of times our children have come close to being placed under suspension because of their tuition fee accounts being overdue….these scenarios played out vividly in front of our eyes. The replay left us humbled and overwhelmed. We realized that our children have made it through college – not because of us, but despite our grave financial circumstances; because Life willed it so, because of the kindness that people around us have showered on us as a family.

When Vaani and I came together in 1987 – we married in 1989 – we shared a common vision for our family. It was a beautiful dream, that brought alive in our minds the spirit of this song from Tapasya (1976, Anil Ganguly, Parikshit Sahni, Raakhee, Kishore Kumar, Aarti Mukherjee, Ravindra Jain, M.G.Hashmat). 

But when the bankruptcy arrived in December 2007, our dream lay shattered in smithereens. Aash had just then secured admission to the prestigious University of Chicago. Aanch was getting into High School. How would we put them through college? How would we fulfil their aspirations? Where will the money for their fees come from? These and more nerve-wracking questions would consume me and Vaani on a daily basis. To be sure, we came up with no answers. But each question placed us on the horns of a painful dilemma every single time. Should we go the way Life is taking us – in the direction of letting go, and letting Life take over – or should we go our way, humanly trying to solve and control an unsolvable, uncontrollable, money problem? I have no logical, rational explanations to offer why we chose the way we went. But we certainly felt flowing with Life more meaningful. So, we let go, and went with where Life took us. At our dining table this morning, as we sorted those papers, we discovered how compassionately, how beautifully, Life had arranged for the education and graduation of our children. Each time, when we came to the edge of a precipice, with regard to their college dues, a messiah arrived in our Life, a helping hand showed up and we were hoisted up – and Aash and Aanch made it to their next academic terms.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has said: “Whatever it is you are seeking won’t come in the form you are expecting.” I totally agree with him. But there’s something I would like to add, from our experience, to this perspective. Which is, Life may often never give you what you want. Yet it gives you what you need, not the way you think you need it, but the way Life thinks you need it. So, while all our human plans, projections and methods to somehow get Aash and Aanch to graduate existed in theory, on paper, and in our fervent prayer to Life, the way they have got past their individual under-grad programs is purely the way Life has willed it.

Vaani and I believe the best way to live is to live in a let go! Make your plans, put in your efforts. But let go of expectations, let go of wants, and let the magic of Life happen. When you do this, and let Life take over, you too will discover that Life’s indeed compassionate – you always get what you need! 

If you can soak in Seetha maami’s wisdom, you are home!

You come with nothing. And you will go with nothing. Then, as Osho, the Master, asks, “Why all this drama in between?”

Kapoor’s Bean in Chicago and the Karamay imitation Photo Courtesy: The Economist

Our son studied at the University of Chicago. We have visited him on a couple of occasions when he used to live in Chicago. One of the many attractions of downtown Chicago is a sculpture in Millennium Park called “Cloud Gate”, nicknamed the Bean, by celebrated India-born British artist, Anish Kapoor. It’s a fun sculpture, though it is a very serious artistic creation too, for tourists because of its brilliant photo-taking opportunity – given its unique reflective properties. We have also been there in front of the Bean and shot our pictures as a family. So, I was rather intrigued to read in a recent issue of The Economist that a city called Karamay in western China was unveiling a sculpture very similar to Kapoor’s Bean later this month. This has apparently left Kapoor fuming.

Kapoor’s reaction surprised me. The Economist reports: ““In China today it is permissible to steal the creativity of others,” he (Kapoor) said, vowing to take his grievance to the highest level and pursue those responsible in court.  Mr.Kapoor expressed hope that the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, would join him in his crusade for his copyright. Yet Mr.Emanuel took a very different view of the Karamay version of the Bean. “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery,” he (Emanuel) said (and added), “And if you want to see original artwork…you come to Chicago.””

It’s a pity Kapoor is not getting what Emanuel has to say! I agree with Emanuel on this one. Because I come from the Osho school of thought.

This whole lifetime of ours is spent in acquiring – from a name at birth to qualifications to wealth to patents to relationships to assets – only to give up everything when leaving this planet. So, this way, living in a forever-acquiring-mode, we are completely missing the essence of Life – which is to experience everything that comes to us or happens to us in Life.

To be sure, you must never be serious about what you can never hold on to, what you have to lose any which way and what you can never save for use in another lifetime (as far as each of us experientially knows, there isn’t another lifetime; this is it!). There is no point in being so serious about what you own, what is yours and most of what you want to fight for. Even this lifetime is a gift – you didn’t ask to be born, did you? Your birth, as a (well-ordained, in most cases) human, is your biggest, priceless, gift. (And yet, imagine, so many sweat or sulk over material birthday gifts that money can buy!!!) By fighting silly battles with people and over issues that are inconsequential in the longer term of your definite-to-expire lifetime, you are squandering precious time.

Last evening, our close friend Janaki, coincidentally, shared what her mother-in-law, Seetha, has told her in the context of Life. I believe it is pertinent to quote Seetha here: “I have gone to several cremation grounds over a period of time. What I have found is that nobody has been able to take anything with them. You too look around. If you find anyone being able to take anything with them, do let me know.” Seetha’s wisdom is elementary and, therefore, unputdownable.

I think Kapoor (and his fight over the Bean) is but a metaphor. There’s a Kapoor in each of us. We are often clinging on to people, relationships, ideas, opinions, IPRs, property, money and what not. And through each act of clinging on, and with each avoidable battle we fight, we are suffering. The only way to escape all that suffering is this: soak in Seetha’s philosophy. If you can get it into you, and have it stay there, well, you are home! Enjoy your Sunday, meanwhile, this one isn’t ever gonna come back!

Know where your horse is taking you

Whatever you do, do it with total awareness. When you are aware, when you are mindful of what’s going on, you live more intelligently – and peacefully!

I read a Zen story that the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn (a.k.a Thay) shares in a discourse. A man is riding a horse that is galloping very quickly. Another man, his friend, standing by the roadside, yells at him: “Hey you, where are you going in such a hurry?” The man shouts in reply, without looking back, “I don’t know. Ask the horse.” Thay says this is the situation most of us are in – especially those who are running crazy, from one meeting to another, chasing their tails and deadlines, in today’s rushed world. Some of us are even riding more than one horse at the same time. Our lives have become so busy, we don’t know where the horses we ride are going. Worse, we don’t even have time to think, to understand, why we are on those horses or where we may end up going.  

I can relate to Thay’s metaphor of the horse and rushing away not knowing where it is taking you. There was a time, when I ran a reasonably spread out organization. We had operations in six cities in India. And I had 40 people reporting to me. We had institutionalized, what we believed was a best practice, a process of my direct reports writing to me each weekend sharing their experiences, learnings and concerns from the past week. I spent Sundays poring over these reports at length. Even when my children, who were at that time young and needed my time the most, asked for me to take them out to a restaurant or to the beach, I carried these CEO reports with me. Some of these reports had bad news in them – a client was unhappy or a team member accused another of politicking or someone wanted to put in her papers. I was always a man in a hurry. So, when I finished reading these reports, I would be impatient for the weekend to get over. Come Monday and I was keen to address and resolve each of those issues that were escalated to me over the weekend. I don’t think having team members share with you weekly is a bad idea. But the way I followed that process was naïve. I ruined each of my weekends – resultantly, I was always on the edge, irritable and unhappy with things in my Firm and my Life! I simply did not have any time for the family – I don’t remember any meals I had with them or goofing off with my kids. I made no effort myself and whatever time I spent with them was only when my wife insisted or pleaded with me. So, for almost a decade of my Life, the only memory I have of weekends is of dealing with those CEO reports and fighting crisis after crisis during the week. I was just on this horse called work and I did not even know where it was taking me then.

My wake-up call came when my son, then 18, took off to study at the University of Chicago in Fall 2008. When we saw him off at the Chennai airport at midnight, I remember coming home and being unable to catch sleep. My wife and daughter were exhausted but I decided to wait for a text message from my son confirming that he had boarded. I fixed myself a drink and was walking aimlessly around the house. I stopped by a picture of his on one of the shelves and broke into tears. I recall asking his picture: “When did you grow up son? And so fast? I wish I had spent more time with you!”

Thay says each day, each moment gives us the opportunity to live intelligently. That opportunity can be seized only by being totally aware of what we are doing. If we look at our lives, a lot of it, our lifestyles, our way of consuming things, everything is steeped in mindlessness. We are just being driven crazy by the horses we have chosen to ride.

Only with total awareness can you understand the consequences of each of your choices and actions! Monday is a good day, as any, to take a deep breath and, even if you can’t get off a horse immediately, at least know where it’s taking you – and, if required and if you can, rein it in!