“Mon Tuley nao” – The arts of managing hurts

whom the arms cannot tear
the fire cannot burn

Enlightenment is the state where you can stop the running stream of thoughts in your mind and attain the absolute inner stillness, to look inward and merge with your own being. Since my first Guru, Sanjay Salooja, had opened the beautiful windows of life for me, I have always been in hot pursuit of the nectar of life, the true enlightenment that provides one with the real and complete enrichment for the soul. In the last eight years, the journey has changed my destiny and everything else. It culminated into leaving my job, industry, profession and career and I am running on the way of true fulfillment. The transformational whirlpool has tied me down the gutter at days, the emotional and financial roller-coaster have drained us on nights, the uncertainty of life without the fat check we got used to has pushed my wife to the brink of the edge at times, but being of the “never surrender” type, I know I have the strength to achieve any impossible and many times in the past, I have literally survived the hurricanes with the strength of will. Insh allah – be it to your wish.

But the journey does not leave aside the relationships, in fact, it solidifies them to a more enriched state that provides the meaning of the nectar itself. And, like for the one-eyed stag, there remains the risk of pain, of being hurt. It calls for a deep personal strategy of defense - of pain management.

While our mind is completely logical and selfish, in it’s truest form, and does not recognize the need for anyone in your life except for the fleeting moments when you need someone for something, our soul lives on the relationships – with yourself and all others. Here lies the real source of the pain, the slights that can emerge from the lovely fountains – often unexpectedly – sometimes so deep that they are almost palpable, you can almost touch them, embrace them, sleep with them – like your lover, or an enemy – that is only a viewpoint. The ultimate test of a lover is not where she stands at the time of glory and comfort, it is where she stands at the time of the challenge, controversy, pains and the sufferings – the bonfire of the hearts, honeymoon of the fire, blood and death. The most severe pains can often emanate from the place from where you get so much of the magic of fulfillment.

Pain is a vague word and doesn’t really mean anything. While we are pained by a shocking picture of a ghostly Ethiopian child skeleton in search of some water to drink, or the news of a small child being crushed by a speeding bus – even without having the verdict of being cruel and heartless - these are truly superficial. They are transient thoughts taking the form of noise over our stream of communications between our mind and the sub-conscious. A very few of them sometimes manage to leave a mark, which too get obliterated with time. The real pain is always personal, a personal hurt that leaves a wound but that needs more than a medicine to cure. A word of encouragement, a hug, a sorry, a gentle stroke on the arm or a charming smile can do wonders in most times when the hurt is small. Sometime even they fail when the hurt is deep, the wound is grievous and coming from the quarters where you forgetfully left your soul the last time you hugged her, we bleed internally and often silently.

The level of attachment and the level of expectations are the key factors for these intense feelings of hurts. The more we attach ourselves to others, the more we expect from others - be it love, be it kindness, understanding, sacrifice – the more we empower others with the power and the force to hurt us, to disturb us. Only when we go for the extreme “self-care”, love ourselves deeply and truly, we can gain the freedom from the external needs - emotional, physical and psychological, that tries to tie us to the external with a strong bond. And once we get that freedom, you will find it much easier to come to a dialogue with their past behaviour.

You must be responsible for your own feelings and hurts, not only the acts. So long you will put the responsibility of your problems and lacking on others, as long as you will blame others for whatever happen to you, you will remain a victim of the victimisation syndrome and get stuck at that point of your life, unable to ascend or move forward. After years of living through the dark tunnels that used to whisper about never getting out of there alive, after a failed teenage affair that turned sour and nasty, I finally accepted that my hurts have nothing to do with the other. It has all to do with myself. You must release yourself from being angry with others. You must be very inside the bloodbath yet without a spot of the sticky red jelly on your soul.

The love of self has a great part to play in our forgiveness journey. For it is only when we truly love ourselves that we can find an inner sanctuary that gives us the strength and stability to engage with the world without being affected by it. On forgiving, the flow of love within us quickens leading to further growth. Unless we flush out the toxin, run away from that sunset boulevard, an act beautifully portrayed in the film “Jab we met”, we do not get back the freedom, joy and peace as we want them.

It is the curse of human that we are constantly carrying our own crosses on our shoulders. We are born tender and fragile, with a crystal –like disposition that allows the cuts and slashes, bruises and gashes. A physical pain is much easier to manage, because of their tangible character, but not an emotional or psychic one. At first, any pain is acute and without the healing touch or bad management, it may become chronic.

Forgiveness helps us emerge whole from our wounded past, and return to the business of our lives with renewed energy, focus, wisdom and peace. It is the bottleneck, the hell’s crossing, through which we must pass. You must heal yourself, you must let go of the past at a certain point, you must cut the rope when there is no meaning anymore. Freedom demands that you also must be free from the dead. “When you hold resentment toward another you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel”. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.

Your hurts have nothing to do with other, they have to do with you. Your poor boundaries and self-esteem can give others a force over you where they can occupy your inordinate mindscape and control your feelings. And when others can hold your strings and make you dance in a puppet show, you are not free, you are a puppet. J Krishnamurti once told a follower that as long as she was capable of being hurt she was not free of the mind. Eckhart Tolle, my another Guru towards enlightenment, has written “Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life – to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering. The moment you truly forgive, you have reclaimed your power from the mind. Non-forgiveness is the very nature of the mind.”

When you will cry for more freedom, when you cannot be your best self with others, the dark forces will multiply in a cancerous growth and the power over you will rise, enough to decide your actions, leading to a complete surrender to the forces. Look at it as the will of the almighty, look at it as another test of Him for your strength. If you can win it, you will be rewarded with even more strength. Accept the act and the person, accept the past. Gain strength of mind through patient exercises and snatch back the control of your mind. Then you can stop that stream of thoughts, which is mostly reactive thinking. Then, you will gain back the peace, with the external losing the power to disturb it. Then you get you’re your complete freedom.

Communicate – with your trusted ones. It can tear the shackles and let go of you the crippling paradigm that is tearing into your heart. Find inspiration in the unconditional love you get from some people, particularly your parents and maybe your siblings, spouse, children, relatives, friends etc. This will enable you to transcend the anger that will inevitably rise in the journey of life. A disciple wrote about Swami Chidananda, “Swamiji Maharaj never, ever judged us or found us lacking; never, ever withheld His love from us. He simply radiated blessings towards all, all the time, everywhere, in all conditions”. This is unconditional love. It provides a strength and stability that is rarely found from other sources.

If you give a dying plant the care, water and the sun, life will flourish into that. Forgiving somebody is nurturing yourself. As we grow and embrace the journey towards enlightenment, the growth in consciousness provides us more freedom from the subconscious stream of crippling thoughts. Life is essentially a process and a dialogue with our own inner consciousness allows us to rise and forgive, to let go. Einstein said one cannot solve a problem at the same level of consciousness which gave rise to the problem itself. The inner strength give us the light.

Do not try to escape the pain. It comes through the natural laws of humanity and is like a lighthouse which you can disobey, to your own peril, but cannot break down with your ship. Running away from suffering is in itself suffering, probably to a higher degree as that will take over the subconscious and will drive you from that point. The wiser course is to experience the hurt and the suffering. Then you detach yourself, “Mon Tula nao”, and become your own Lord.

P.S. : I dedicate this piece to Sanjoy Dutta, a dearest friend for nearly three decades, who showed me the light long ago with a phrase “ Mon tuley nao” (trans – detach your soul), in a letter in reply to an emotionally charged description of my life at that time. It means at that point of time, he was ahead of me by those two decades and a lot of pains that I have taken to truly understand it

Koli .. I mean.. Cattle-Yuga – Survive from the holy politicians

In a republic, public is the most important thing and regard them so highly that you constantly tell lies to them to garner the votes. This is the motto of our beloved leaders. Some prefer to call them jokers, but I will stick to their original status. What sins did we commit to not deserve them?

On a perfect back-handed volley by one of the most colorful characters of our times, a man with exceptional talent and intelligence, on his twitter account is attracting daily fire-smacking and mudslinging by our big leaders, small people of all hues - complainer, bootlicker, saboteur, bully, backstabber, wheeler-dealer, muckraker, mudslinger, swamp dweller, life-hater and what-not ! They are throwing up daily fits in trying to fit in some of their runaway ambitions and in the bargain raised a big question mark over the basic integrity of a whole bloodied nation. All in the indirect blessing of the low-integrity high-command or in a desperate bid to please that ubiquitous and cunning supreme power called Lady.

A bona-fide sharp wit has thrown up the golden half-chance. Sharp knifes are out, cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum, blood-hungry like the Casius dagger. The victim is running around in search of some nook and it is an ex-parte, open field for the very small people to make the goals.

Ipso facto, by the very fact that the remark was made to answer a diabolical question which used the word “cattle class” – which is oh so T R U E by any view and standard, the return volley included the “holy cow” which, to any witty person, is appropriate answer and a respectable wit. But that is being used as the body of crime, Corpus delicti, goes to point to the deep rot in our political system and not a fallacy on the commentator.

In the middle of this macabre theater of the absurd, it’s a cold comfort that The Lady or his even more holy son are silent till now – as no one dare disturb the sound of silence.
("Fools," said I, "you do not know Silence like a cancer grows” – courtesy Paul Simon – “And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made”). This has given even more ammunition to the power-hungry scums to shout louder and suggest more and more punishment ? Punishment ? I am laughing so hard that a health disaster is imminent. This is cattle-yug, Supreme Lord, make me blind, and don’t forget deaf and dumb and do it NOW.

The drama that is being enacted by the ruling party for a long time is diabolical enough, now they have suddenly got a new and potent weapon called “austerity”. To re(lease) the public in the pond of lies, every Tom Dick (and even their Mom !!??) are traveling with the cattle class (quite a revelation – I always though they were the pigs – to be slaughtered). While hundreds of crores being spent on their security alone (and hundereds on other facilities), they are saving “Rs. 8000” and flashing it in all the newspapaers at the expense of crores ? What about the lacs. Crores of Indian black money in the foreign secret accounts (of which I won’t be surprised if our Emperor family has 20000 crores) ? What about the thousands of crores of public (I mean of those pigs – I mean cattles) money that is stolen and siphoned off every year ? What about the lacs of crores that the industrialists have not paid back the banks (our banks !) ? What about the lacs of crores that have been raised from the public on the share market and the companies vanished into the blues – have you ever seen even one of those 2000+ companies being punished ? What about the thousands of crores that are shown and agricultural income every year and not a paisa of tax paid on them ? Simple, you buy a fabulous farm house in Mehrauli with 15 crores, show it as 50 Lacs, and then show that every year it produces tomatos and cabbages of Rs. 14 crores – 100% tax-free as agricultural income. I dare Pranab tax the agricultural income at 0.5% (that too above Rs. 5 Lacs) which will force them to declare the return every year. I am ready to bet my wife and daughter that he can’t. He will be lynched by the politicians of all parties together. The theft and the siphoning of money seems to have been systematic and institutionalized under the 50 year rule of the “Party”. It’s party time, folks.

The issue is that it is not a question of saving Rs. 8000/- or 8 lacs or it’s real benefit (The Telegraph showed a few days that by not using the Government plane, our Foreign Minister is spending much more on the commercial planes). The question is to make a Suggestio falsi, present a vicious lie to the cattles (or they think us as pigs ? ) that is the general public. These scums do not do any pro bono social work, they do their own aggrandizement for which we spend thousands of crores of our money. Philosophers say that “Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful”, then why are we still putting up with these scums ?

Manmohan Singh, the only man among the wolves but who still behaves like a boy in front of the Lady, has spoken that the comment was made as a joke but what was missing was the ruthless finality of a fullstop and that obviously did not make much difference to the wolves on the scent of child blood.

The incident is a landmark in the sense that it is making a wrong precedent in the matters of public dealing and honesty of the rare people like Tharoor. The problem of planting a poison tree is that while some trees may not give fruit, a poison tree will always give fruit, one day or the other. If it doesn’t, men will fly across the heavens!

Survive from the Complex people

Every sacrifice is a gift and of course, every gift is a sacrifice. Some people, however rare and near-extinct, have made this their basic nature, alas, to the consternation of the complex people, who are in an unending search of issues, big or small, to pounce on others.

In the macabre theater of the absurd, even a perfectly innocent joke, even in a surrounding which is traditionally and ritually meant for a light atmosphere, is taken up later to stick the “other side”, which is the basic paradigm of complex people. They always try to draw up the sides, notwithstanding the intent of those people or the long-term needs and views. They will twist and turn, cut and slash, trim and slime – almost any words or issues. The issues and events do not necessarily have to be real, even a hint of content is enough, the gentlemanly intent is not required, Thank you.

The biggest victims are generally the people who are the most protected, because in these cases, they are completely out of tune of how to handle these people, who are hostile without any real reasons, they defy all logic to be so. Giving is also not a solution. The more you give, they will make a momentary pause, and attack from that very angle, saying the things could have been even better. They have an insensible urge to dominate, particularly over all people who are weak and meek, as they do not really possess the real power that can sword even the powerful.

Ignoring them is also not another solution, because they usually choose the preys among the people who cannot do that, as most other people who can afford or have enough power on themselves, do just that and do it rudely enough to be excused thence. They should be kept at a distance though, as far as practicable. Because complex people are not necessarily bad, they are complex and love to act mean. This may happen even in a family full of people who do not care for such acts. They enjoy their meanness and the fact that for some people, this comes as a heart-breaking fact, particularly those who try to go beyond their capacity or limits to make these people happy, for some reason or the other, and make a good relationship with them.

The basic strategy should be to bear, and do it silently. No empire, however mighty and ruthless, has been able to go down the history as unchallenged ever. The wheel of time has not stopped for anyone. They should be own over, with time, or vanquished, also with patience. Even a mad person get back his senses sometimes, these are only complex people.

The only times you should react, keeping the standards of weights and measures, sternly - firmly and forcefully, are the times when the complex tend to turn to devious, that is, those things will be uttered not for an immediate gain and fun of running the knife, but with a long term objective of the scalpel. These things are done to establish a ground, which once established by the absentee vote of yours, can lead to an advantage ground in a larger canvas of shrewd political games. the stake can be anything, proving you a semi-despot to a long pending issue about the property division. Here you must break the point and throw the dish. "Deny the allegation and defy the alligator" (Shall we tell the President ?).

Remembering a lost friend – A case for safety belt and helmet

My heart is profusely bleeding for the last few weeks after the death of a close relative – A boy of 29, a nice sober chap working for my ex-company, Siemens Information Systems Ltd. A guy never used to speeding or rash driving or driving without a helmet, he went to his garage to receive his bike after a service, just a few stops away and just did not care to take his customary helmet. While coming back, while trying to give some space to a overtaking truck, he hit the side culvert wall, thrown off the bike and hit the wall head on before falling off the culvert. The massive head injury led to instant coma and after a few minutes, was “brought dead” in the nearest nursing home, only a kilometer away.

This led to the opening up of another deep wound of mine. Suryanu, a friend who was like a brother, went to South Africa for TCS in 1997-8. Another extremely nice guy, he was a bit adamant on a few odd things, like he never liked to wear the seat belt. In kolkata, you can still get away but in SA ? While coming back from Sun City to Jo’berg, he (was an expert driver) missed an exit and tried to swerve the car. The car was overturned several times, the windshield went off and he was thrown off the car, hit the street on the back of his head. Within a few minutes a police chopper took him away to a hospital but there was nothing to do. For 12 years now, We (my wife was also very fond of him) have carried that deep wound within ourselves, all because he did not wear a seatbelt ? There were 3 more guys on that car (including another friend of mine now in CTS) all wearing belts and nothing happened to them except the shock.

Another good friend, an employee of Airports Authority (they have unlimited medical facility, thank you), who is normally very calculative about any expense but nicely bought a high quality expensive helmet of Studds, met with an accident in his bike in which the helmet got smashed and he spent nearly 3 weeks in Apollo Gleneagles. Can you imagine what would have happened to his head if the helmet was like a mine worker’s hat that many people wear, to avoid and bypass the Police rules ?

Let’s talk about survival. Whom are we cheating when we try to bypass the rules and think everything will be okay ? The Police Commissioner will not be dead in an accident, but you will. While you care to lock up the irrelevant things that you can buy by thousands, lock your life.

Look at the masks and laugh aloud - They are not real

I got the following mail today, a very crude, rude and unprofessionally created one :

--- On Tue, 30/6/09, Yahoo! Member Service wrote:

From: Yahoo! Member Service
Subject: Yahoo Alert: Your Account Information Has Changed
To:
Date: Tuesday, 30 June, 2009, 1:04 AM

Dear Value Member,

Account Alert

Dear Valued Member,

Due to the congestion in all Yahoo, There will be removal of all unused Yahoo Accounts,Yahoo would be shutting down all unused Accounts,You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Info below after clicking the reply bottom, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.

UserName:...........................
Password:............................
Date of Birth:.....................
Country Or Territory:....................

After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Warning code:.................VX2G99AAJ

Account owner that refuses to update his or her account before two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

LETTER END (SUDIP)

NEVER EVER GIVE OUT YOUR LOGINID AND PASSWORD ON ANY MAIL, WHOEVER IT IS. Yahoo is not mad to ask for these information on an unsecured line from it's clients, whose passwords they can access if required or at least reset, in any emergency.

The con-mail and the fishy smell - The glittering diamonds of dumbness

A long mail with the title “Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Please do it - Microsoft Paying you - Not Fake” jerked me out of my unbreakable inner calm and rudely wakened me to a surprise revelation of the basic dumbness of even the so-called educated intelligent people. This is the dumbness that flows out of the fountainhead of greed that chunks out the basic logic and reasoning out of the people and makes them run towards even any remote hazy unjustified promise of easy money.

The basic mail says
“Dear Friends,
Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates is sharing his fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test..

When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period.

For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two week! s, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.”

There is no name of details of the sender or other details but there are some cut-out portions of some people (with no real contact details again except some hazy sketches of company names like Cognizant-TCS-Trident Hilton and a couple of designations like Front Office manager, no wonder, and dates like 15th August, 2005 -31st August, 2005 and 09/02/2005 and January 09, 2007). They have all said that they have got $10002 or $34271 or $9386 or $12545 or $30000 or $12121 etc.

Do I need to say more ? Since 19997, when I first got my internet access in office, I am seeing these kind of mails, usually sent by pranksters out to get a high or just with the good intent of jamming the network. Now the network is too big to be affected but the fun is still there (example are the mails with a picture of Jesus or Ganesh saying you should send it to so many people to get a lot of luck etc. and this and that will happen if you don’t send it etc. etc.). They sometimes play on your religiousness or emotion and sometimes with your greed. The result is that I am seeing many ids associated with the mail senders and many of the recipients are bulk ids (many also associated with the pharma co. raptakos). The height is that this has been forwarded to me by an ex-classmate of mine in IIM-C, a guy who used to do well in class, was good in strategy and was nicknamed “Professor” by us (naming credit to this poor guy). Don’t know if I should write to prof. Ranjan Das to strip him his diploma.

For quite some time I am after the question why and how do we act so dumb that we do not see the obvious? This is one of the case study. The next question is how many sympathy drinks can you get out of, "Well, this mail said I have own a big lottery and asked for my details and with login and password, so I gave it to them"? There's no epic story here, no melodrama, no classic twists and turns.

The con-men are everywhere, some of them are just pranksters, rest are con about whom I have recently written. In any case, the first step would always be to gain your confidence - the "con" in "con man" and to show you the sunrise of a few million dollars in the lottery you own. Some will brazenly ask for your personal details, the innocent ones at first and then the more private ones in a next step. Others will be more tacit and will politely ask if you are willing to accept the prize. They will try to gain your trust and even become your friend through an elaborate set of lies, set like a stepped garden and let you be in on the lifetime chance, something that your friends will beat you if you let it go by, Then finally, with flair and grace, they will turn the knife, rip the heart out and depart, with your money and your trust on mankind.

I repeat - You can cheat anyone, but con only a greedy man.

The lure of easy money - Survive from your own greed

For many yearsnow, I am getting the coveted mails - the ones informing me that I have own a lottery of XX millions of US dollars and whom should I send my so and so information to claim it. My 12 year old daughter saw one and demanded to know why I am not replying to it. I said whmmm.

Have you ever come across a person coming to your house wanting to sell a Gold chain at a throwaway price ? With a story that he came from another place and all his belongings are stolen and so he is trying to gather only the return fare by his last possession this chain and you can buy it at 1/10th the price ? One (otherwise very honest) gentleman I know even went to the extent of going to the local jewelers and tested it for purity before buying it (at double of what the man asked for, because by then he believed the story) and later found that even though he was alert, the man had replaced the gold chain by a steel goldplated one, priced at 1/50th of what he paid and is worthless.

As a principle, I never buy lottery tickets and never ever (except buying one of Rs. 5 long ago, pitying the vendor and throwing the ticket right afterwards) spent any money on the lotteries. I never subscribe to the free gifts of the products (for which you have to send the cutting or the label or sms or anything) or the sms campaigns. I always knew that nobody is there to give you anything for free and it is the conmen only who really understand the value of aggregation and devised all these schemes (and later passed on to the TV channels for devising the reality shows where they could get crores of sms-es at Rs.7 each and then manipulating the whole show so that contestants are from the regions where people will set up booths to do the sms-es in a frenzy so that their guy wins).

All my life, I have carried the view that I will try anything once. Generally I have tried to stick to that and till now failed only in a few areas (Having heroin – never could arrange one, going to a certain kind of women – never could manage the courage, doing bungee jumping – developed cold feet at the last moment in Blackpool pleasure beach many years before just before they tied the 100 mt long steel rope on my feet, going to the horse-races – but this I will definitely do some day, etc. ) . But certain areas are simply taboo. Buying lottery ticket for one. Gambling is another. I always fought the urge of the easy money and still do. It is the money with dignity that you can really enjoy. This is why I have brushed off any suggestion or proposal from different people from different quarters for taking an agency (??!!) of Amway or such other bubble kind of scheme, though I personally know some people doing it (and earning a lot if they went in early) and used some products (got them at 40% discount while they price it generally at 1000% markup scale) which were very good. What I always hated was the concept itself.

I did a project on the Ponzi bubble scheme variations for my Finance specialization and gathered enough knowledge to develop an ingrained hatred for the schemes, while gawking at the ingenuity of the variations spawned later and developing enough wisdom to stay away from all such kind of pyramidal bubbles that gives super profits to the schemers and their associates and sucks in all kind of greedy people, before breaking up like a pack of cards. The concept is that “A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned. The Ponzi scheme usually offers returns that other investments cannot guarantee in order to entice new investors, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going”. Amway, though a slight variant and probably will not go away easily before it starts hurting too many people, is a good example of this scheme. One beautiful example of the scheme’s working is that : in 1979, a Chartered accountant (found out later) from Chennai came to Calcutta and took a room in a slum while he was looking for some small business opportunity. He was amiable and friendly with the slum people and gained their trust in a few months. Then he started a scheme that he will take a loan from anybody of Rs.10 every Friday and will give back Rs.12 the next Friday (but the upper limit of any one person lending was Rs. 100) provided the lender brings two more lenders of the same amount, otherwise he will get back Rs. 9 only. The return was nearly 90% monthly and people got interested. After a couple of months, the initial doubts and inhibitions also went away and every Friday there was a mad rush to give loans to him. After 5 months of running it, the guy disappeared, only to be found out in Chennai by a dogged journalist where the guy had bought a factory for Rs. 40 Lacs. At rough estimates, the guy had made about 70-90 Lacs in those 8 months he stayed out there. While nobody lost more than 100 rupees at a time and was not interested in going to the Police and get harassed.

For some of the best examples of the conmen, read “If tomorrow comes” by Sidney Sheldon where the protagonists, Tracy Whitney and Jeff Stevens shows the con trade in minute details. The main lessons are that “
1) You cannot con an honest person. It needs greed to be sucked into a con
2) But there is no dearth of people for them as most of the people are inherently greedy and is always on the lookout for easy money
3) The conmen are much smarter than the normal people, who, despite trying to be alert, can never stand a chance against a conman
4) Con depends on the innovations. But even the oldest ones like the sunken ship full of Gold, still works
5) Some people are inherently gullible and jump in any scheme that you set up, even selling the Tajmahal

Now, after I have spent so much time on you, best of luck on walking right into the next scheme you can find. Have an example of the mails I get (in the last one month, I received 23 mails).

From: pissa akaba
Subject: I NEED YOUR URGENT REPLY CONFIDENTIAL
To:
Date: Tuesday, 23 June, 2009, 12:55 AM
From Mr Pissa Akaba
Bill & Exchange Manager
Bank of Africa
Ougadougou Burkina Faso
W/Africa.
Dear Friend,
Pls i want you to read this letter very carefully and i must apologize for bringing this message into your mail box without any formal introduction due to the urgency and confidential of this issue and i know that this message will come to you as a surprise,

our customer a crude oil dealer MR.HUS BEN AN AMERICAN who was with the Iraqi oil industries and also an oil supplier to republic of Burkina Faso made a numbered fixed deposit for18 calendar months, with a value of Ten million United State Dollars(US$10m dollars) in our bank,

Upon maturity several notices was sent to him, even during the war which began in 2003. Again after the war another notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later find out that the oil dealer MR HUS BEN along with his wife and only daughter had been killed during the war in a bomb blast that hit their home. You can read more about the bombings on visiting these sites below: http://www.ccmep.org/usbombingwatch/2003.htm#3/19/03

After further investigation it was also discovered that MR.HUS BEN did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the paperwork of his bank deposit,

And he also confided in me the last time he was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in our bank So I need your urgent assistance in transferring the sum of (US$10m dollars millions usd into your bank account within 7working banking days,

What bothers me most is that according to the laws of country A burkinabe cannot come out and claim this fund and I don't want the money to go into our Bank treasure as an abandoned fund,

So this is the reason why i contacted you so that our bank will release this money to you as the next of kin to the deceased customer, Please I would like you to keep this proposal as a top secret and delete it if you are not interesting,

Upon the receipt of your reply and indication of your capability, i will give you full details on how the business will be executed and also note that you will have 35% of the above mentioned sum if you agree to handle this business with me while 55% will be for me and 10% for any expenses that may arise on the process,

And remember i don't want anyone here in our bank to know my involvement until you confirm this fund into your account and ask me to come over for the sharing as indicated, Then after i and my colleagues will visit your contry for disbursement acconding to the percentage indicated,

Therefore to enable the immediate transfer of this fund to you as arranged, you must apply first to the bank as the next of kin of the deceased,
Please, dont entertain any atom of fear because the transaction is 100% risk free. Note that, to be relation with the deceased or not will not impose or prevent you to claim the money,

The fact is that whatever information we will present to the bank should be accurate. Rests assured that I will provide all the necessary information which the bank may require from you during the process to make sure everything goes well and fast.

Referring to the above explanations, await your urgent response,and fill those question below to enable us proceed this business
Your Full Name............................
Your Sex.................................
Your Country..............................
Your Marital Status......................
Your Age.............................
Your Occupation..........................
Your Personal Mobile Number....................
Your Personal Fax Number......................
To enable me locate you once i come over to your country immediately you confirm this US$10m dollars usd, into your nominated bank account, As soon as i receive your postive respond i will send you the text of application which you will use to apply in my bank as next of kin.

Thanks
Mr Pissa Akaba
B.O.A (Bank Of Africa)

A mentor - The Strategic necessity and why I became one

After all these months that people generally thought I am mad, I think the time has come to give an explanation of what I am doing and why. I have become a mentor, after leaving my job, my career and the positions that are quire a dream for most of the people. But the point is that I have done it after I have prepared myself for years on.

I’ve learnt most of the things I know the hard way on the streets of life, by trial and error in my endless personal search for a way of life. It was almost like being a steam engine, scooping up water as it runs. I also ran like that for decades, mostly to survive, in search of an identity, in other times to prove a point to myself or in pursuit of happiness, but sometimes with desire, mostly wild and not definite ones.

Now, after running with all I had for almost 20 years and achieving almost everything I could hope for, I know what I really lacked at the word GO. It was a mentor, a guide who would help to some basic facts of life – secrets which lay in the open yet very few people are aware of them or their importance for the success in all we try to do. Now I know that even while running with all the passions you have, you need a direction, a goal and a definite desire, not a mere one.

Let me go deeper on one point as an example. Talking about goal, have any of you have ever really given a deep thought about how do we decide? What kind of parameters we usually use or how dumb we normally act to take an all-important decision of life? I believe, 99% of the people take at least 95% of all their important decisions on the wrong notions and parameters and with an undue haste. Then they suffer patiently for years and decades as the fallouts of those hasty decisions they refused to delay for a few days to think.

I will give a few examples to make my point. I have seen a friend falling in love in 2 hours and then suffer in that relationship for 2 years. Another guy, a talented painter who wanted to go to the Art College, was pushed by his Businessman father to Commerce. Today, he is a CA, partner of a firm and spends most of his time painting. Another of my friends, a true music-lover, married a complete mismatch of a girl just because she was a Sangeet Prabhakar or something. As far as I know, in the 15 years of their marriage, she only shouted and never sang. Of course, she learned music for marriage, and now she is married.

Young people often try to set their dream career on a feeling of wild wish, say to be a Pilot as that seems the highest thing in the world, or according to parental wish, social respectability & probability of getting a plum job. Neither them nor their parents mostly care about their passion, flair & interest. Nowadays everybody wants to go into IT sector, where I have seen more than half of the people disillusioned, dissatisfied and remorseful but they go on toiling only for the money and for the lack of choice.

I spent most of my life to gather the pieces one by one, sucking up the experiences of a thousand people on the streets. I always learnt from mistakes, at huge costs. I understand now that a mentor could have given me much of these on a platter long ago and in a more structured way, and that too at a very little cost. It’s almost like an MBA from a top B-school being the Marketing manager at a salary of 10 Lacs at the age of 24 and another guy spending 20 years at the field to reach the Asst manager position at 42 at a salary of 6 lacs.

I have no regrets regarding my past. I do not have any more point to prove. I was born a fighter and I have fought well and valiantly, in spite of all odds. I have seen life from many angles and fronts and finally reached a level of contentment and enlightenment that has made my past irrelevant to me any more. It seems to me nowadays like a different birth or just looking at a different man. But now, I want to share my real life and enriched experiences with the next generations, the youngsters. For almost a decade, I am having this definite and strong desire to touch their lives and to transform them. Then at least they will not have to go through the hell that I have gone thro’, not live in the dark tunnels that felt like there was no light ever, not have to suffer the agony and pain that was my life at one time, like many other people, not have to sail without a proper hull or rations as the life will take them in line with the currents and the gales. But even as I decided to act on this definite desire, it took me nearly 8 years of hard work to be prepared., to reach the level of wisdom, to reach this level of control on my being, to reach this state of enlightenment where I have the power to touch someone’s life and transform it.

After I myself got a training somewhat on this line 8 years ago, this has been my passion and obsession. I have spent years studying, thinking, planning, writing, communicating, meditating, practicing, training and above all, being in complete contemplation under the BodhiTree, which is my own being. I have been in touch with many of the few Gurus who are there in the related fields in India, Sanjay Salooja, Shiv Khera, Shree Shree Ravishankar, Dr. Somesh Chaddha and also Richard Saldan in USA. I have trained under them, communicated with them and been blessed by their wisdom and powers. I did not care for the cost, in terms of more career opportunities, money, time or comfort, in search of this true wealth. But I was learning fast and my own attitude was being transformed. I became much more organized, energized, stable, clam, understanding, caring and balanced. I spent much lesser time with my family and friends but the relationships bloomed like they had received the necter. I had a new coat for an attitude and I had finally found the secrets of successful and beautiful relationships and needed very less but quality time with them.

After many hectic but fulfilling years, one morning, I woke up very early and saw the beautiful first light of the breaking dawn coming through the curtains and giving my room a mystic misty shade, I knew I am finally ready, at least to begin the journey. I have the light. I called up my friend Richard over at lunch and told him, he simply said “Yes, I had the same experience”. I resigned my very lucrative job, something that’s a final dream for too many people, and came back. Some people called me mad but I have little use of the opinion of those people who cannot even communicate with their own self that they will do it with my being.

I organized and stitched up a team of people who shared the passion and the desire to help the young people and had the brilliance to be able to do so. I was fortunate to find out experts as advisors in some key areas where I needed help and the areas where we needed more research. The uniqueness of the course was a challenge because nobody else conducts such a course. The few people who are the Gurus in this field, generally take up the seminars for the corporate people, who can pay the astronomical fees and the seminars were more tuned to polish up and fine-tune the middle and senior level employees, mostly by external motivators and techniques to improve their productivity, with the ultimate objective of indirect benefits to the Company. Those are the Personality Development and Soft Skills programs that work on the external characteristics rather than the internal basics of the people, the inner consciousness and the Value system that give rise to true success and happiness. I wanted to take a completely different view towards this all along, to take the deep-rooted value-based principle-centric approach of the older generations, professed by Napoleon Hill before the World war II and Dr. Stephen Covey in the recent decades, but that again had to be customized for the young people.

All these roadblocks had to be surpassed, but I knew I had to do that and so I did and here I am, today. I will not get back the beautiful years that I lost, and I do not need them now any more with the later enrichment, but I will ensure that the pain does not envelop anybody who will seek, who will submit and who will ask for my shelter.

Strategic resource view - Personal viewpoint

Many people have asked me in a titbit how somebody can handle a very bad situation. I have always answered “attack from another flank”. This is a favorite strategy for me all my life, even while driving in Kolkata, I deftly use the underused left flank of the bypass to overtake most of the cars.

But the strategy is deeper than it looks. Attacking from “another” flank is not easy, the first factor is the deeply ingrained beliefs and paradigms about oneself. If someone thinks he is only suitable for any job that someone will “give him” and then he will do it “somehow”, that he is not suitable for any bigger thing, then “attack” become a joke. The paradigm has to be changed first, which takes a lot of mental strength to begin with, and then takes some self-respect, self-worth and confidence, things that the average bengali parents fail to inculcate in their children – evident from the protectionist and patronizing attitude shown from the beginning. These children are also “taught” that the ultimate goal is to “get a job”, totally unlike the Marwari or Gujarati (and not all of them are rich, I must say) people who know from quite early ages that they will do their own business some day, even when many of them do well in the studies and become CAs or other professionals, these are stepping stones for them, a part of their strategy.

In my office and in many other places I have seen people working as office assistants and in other roles at a salary of 2/3 thousand rupees a month. I have watched some of them closely to find out that it is not the lack of intelligence, it is the lack of confidence, the mental strength to fight any piece of shit that is dished out to him. This is the reason why penniless Biharis and some oriyas come to Kolkata and open a paan shop somewhere and often earn many times of that amount. Initially there are some local Dada or police trouble which has to be handled by courage and some money, which is probably the only pre-requisite. These people will always ask “but where do I get the money?” as if money is the only constraint. Alas, they do not know how much those people selling water (& nimbu-water) in the esplanade area earn. In 1983, I and a close friend (has his own CA firm now) chatted with one for quite some time and later calculated that he earns (as per his estimates which we thought was conservative) a net of 3000 in season and about 1800 in off-season.

Bengali people are basically greedy and mostly look for easy money, something that will come from lottery or bribe or by middleman commission etc. and will not entail hard work. They love money but do not know how to give it the respect it deserves. So, any small businessman is “lower-class” in social terms but when he becomes rich, he becomes “established”, he is higher-class. I am obviously not talking about the minuscule upper class educated class who are well-to-do and learn to think big from the childhood itself.

Strategic management says that you have to consider the resource view, which is not necessarily money alone. I will take the competitive advantages like contacts, political connections, personal determination and proper planning regarding the location and type of the business etc. for resources too, even if it is a paan shop (some of them have strategic locations and they mint money). In the BD market, I am watching a guy for the last 6/8 years. He initially started selling chicken in a small pushcart. He was threatened and pushed around by the Bazaar authorities, on cue from the established chicken vendors of the market. He changed places often and looked for strategic places just outside the market boundary. Then the market became too competitive, he switched to this and that and settled for fruits and is doing fine since then. He never gave up and his wife is also involved in the shop. He has not got a shop till now, but he is established, I should say. His major competitors were finally tired of going after him and gave up a small market-share as out of their reach, which was enough for this guy.

Strategic resource view is fine, but the interpretation should consider the person-specific competitive advantages. Have courage, it can be your biggest resource.

Something about the state of Denmark – Tribute to another Gandhi

While trying to remain non-political, I watch all political events very closely as the environmental analysis is vital for survival strategy. Many people have asked me, an irritant actually, which party I vote for. I have a standard answer, “Opposition. Even if The Goat party was there, it would have been the same. To live in a democracy, you must always try to strengthen the opposition”. Freedom, I repeat, is the most important asset in a man’s life.

Any sane person in west Bengal will agree that for the health of the democracy and public interest, the Government should be changed at least once after a long long 32 years. Though I have a deep regard for the Chief Minister personally, in spite of his some arrogant remarks, I understand that he is not his party and definitely not the democracy which should be the supreme. With the arrogant anti-people Mafiosi style highly organized squeeze apparatus that is often run by the middle level leaders controlled at the top end, if the opposition was not fighting along against all odds, by this time we would have to get up in the morning and run to the queue in front of the “local committee” for permission to brush my teeth or to go to the loo.

It’s lovely that a single-point leadership-based and inconsistent Trinamool, which has some deep malady in it’s roots that they have started correcting of late, e.g. the lack of second line and presentable leaders and the lack of voice of all except Didi, whose guts and courage I revere, has own this round of election and has thrown off the Front in a disarray that will surely and eventually pave the way for a complete change. But Trinamool should as well understand that the votes were mostly negative rather than positive and if they try to run in the same demon alley, we will also fight that one day. Their political and unqualified backing of the hawkers and the “Kata tel”-run abusive hellish unlicensed autos are signs of the deeper maladies than is apparent from the politically correct lifestyle of our mercurial Didi. I am not sure that they have to vision or capability as of now to put the rail back in track in the most important areas of education, health, environment and industry.

In this “Oasis of peace”, where we the people have been caught between the devil and the deep sea, I have the deepest reverence for one person, our Governor Shri Gopal K Gandhi. In my experience of the last several years, he is the archetype of attitude that I have ever dreamt to inculcate in my students. Even if they can show a small fraction of it, my job will be considered well done. Gandhi, though the holder of a constitutional post and is as such bound by the protocols and codes of conducts, signifies all that is good, sacred and humane. He has defied protocol several times to open his mouth and protest, has shown remarkable statesmanship in breaking the political deadlocks, has shown the humane face of the state in gory and despicable situations which often forced the Government’s hand into more of restraint, and he has shown remarkable leadership and humility in all these uncertain times. He has avoided conflict and confrontation. He has remained silent against the despicable attacks on him when he has protested even more despicable events. He has waited for reasons to prevail.

He has a simple philosophy of life, it seems. He always looks for harmony, always look for situations that is a win win for everybody. It is the fire – the passion for human values that makes the difference in anything you actually do or want in life. My salute to him. I was never into hero-worshipping, but I am a Value and attitude coach and a strategist too. It’s a recurrent dream for me that one day, one day I will be able to meet the man, a combination of grace and elegance, sitting behind the constitutional wall, and shake hands.

Planning MBA ?? Explore, explore and RUN from the only A+ Institutes

I am seeing an ad of an MBA Institute EIILM in Star Ananda and also in the Print media for quite some time with the claim that they are the only A+ Institute in Kolkata.

I am not sure who gave the rating and how many pegs he had before that, but whenever someone will make a similar claim, do not go away, RUN away – otherwise, meet your own waterloo in the Waterloo street.

The Institute is controlled by a Marwari trust, a purportedly non-profit one but that’s a good laugh if you know how the tax avoidance is done on the huge profit they make. The Institute is on the first floor with very narrow and serpentine passages, small rooms and chambers and lots of students. Teachers are low quality as they were cheapest available and some are fake, just lending their names (and qualifications) for some money so that these people can show that this and this people are attached with us. Infrastructure – I have told enough and about the claims of placements – my advice is not to believe a word.

They have, for good business reasons, opened up another Institute, Bangalore School of Business, in Gokul Boral Street, a dingy lane near Hind Cinema. The connection with Bangalore is a painful understanding, it is just to gain some respectability by the city name. This one is supposed to be the Kolkata campus of the same. I had the good fortune of taking a few classes in the same, and when I was already habituated with lecturing in a real high class Institute like ICFAI. The experience was shocking, but thankfully I lasted only for a couple of days only as they presumed I would agree to the Durwan’s pay for the classes (many other people supposedly accept that) and I simply refused to lower my rates and walked away, feeling utterly relieved.

The Campus was a total of 1500 sft, with 2 classrooms and the miniscule rooms for the center manager, Faculty room (but they use only one greenhorn faculty as full-time, rest are all people whoever will accept the Durwan’s pay) and the accounts and placement officer, beside a Computer room cum library (a few books and 10 PCs placed with 6 inch gaps with each other on two sides of the same table). There were 51 students, sitting cramped in the classroom, after which there was very little place for me to stand and lecture. The AC used to be off while the Faculty (Me!) was not in the class, almost leading to the “Andhakup-Hatya-II). The students, who seemed eager, were mostly B.Com, BA or B.Scs, and would be held sub-standard for top Institutes. Their fees are 3.2 Lacs per annum i.e. a total of Rs.80 Lacs per batch per year. The cost for teaching alone is 15 subjects (of which 12 are taken by guest faculty) in 2 terms are about 2 + 3 + 2*36*500 = 7.16 Lacs (includes salary of the Center Manager who is a non-teacher but is made to teach Computers, soft skills etc.). I calculated their total running cost will be to the tune of hardly Rs. 16 Lacs a year.

Now get my point of the Non-profit nature ? They are non-profit purely cheating organizations. No materials are there nor provided (just one textbook for each subject!!), teachers are sub-standard, infrastructure non-existent, placement forget it (they are for the advertisements), diploma and degrees of low standards and recognition levels. They spend on advertisements, for getting the new “Murgis” (as my friend described it) using all types of false claims and utter lies. I have nothing against them because they did never torture me in the Non-AC rooms, rest were fine with me. But you should be warned. Not only this one, nearly 90% of all the Institutes which advertise a lot of things are of the same type. For example, The Annex School of Management or something in Salt Lake, is another ghastly story. I wanted to provide you with one example, but many other small institutes have mushroomed who are almost of the same level.

Alas, they still get a lot of students, for the people like – or rather love to be cheated, after paying the fees they start looking for information and not before that. If you want to survive, learn to explore anything or anyone whom you are going to pay a lot pf money and even more importantly, two crucial years of your life and the huge opportunity cost of letting go the real good Institutes you could have tried for.

Education sector is booming right now, at least in India, some of which are as replacement of the foreign university needs (e.g. ISB, Hyderabad) and the spirally competition is pushing people to the brink that they will even prefer to go near-bankrupt to give some education to their children that they think everybody else’s son or daughter is getting. This hype has led to the springing up of many sub-standard fake organisations and the effect is big marketing scam by the social net. We are being trapped and devoured in this mega-scam, in the people’s minds.

Insure yourself from the conmen of the Private companies

Thank God that somebody had said “One of the biggest problems of the world is that the stupid ones are damn sure and the intelligent ones are full of doubts!”, for my only claim to fame and the well of my undying self-esteem is that I am perpetually in doubt (about all the finance people) and surmised something about my intelligence.

A known guy from ABN AMRO came over with an appointment “regarding an opportunity” that turned out to be the Aviva Life’s Dhan Briddhi scheme. He eloquently spoke for 5 minutes and then I spoke for 10 minutes and pushed him out before he started crying. After my MBA (Finance) I worked in merchant Banking for 3 years, then worked in IT for more than 10 years, mostly on financial systems and I spent 6 years on Insurance solutions, getting a fellow of the Indian Institute and an associate of the UK Institute on the way. Here you come, nearly 20 years of collective wisdom in 10 minutes.

I always ask people to take their life policies only and only from LIC. I do not get any commission or facility from them but in spite of the lower quality of service and often the lower standard of service from the agents (who are much lower quality than the smart and suave conmen the private insurance companies send to your home), I give this advice for a hundred reasons, chiefly :

1) Insurance is a service for which you make the payment first, only on an assurance that on some event you will get so much money. Private companies can run away. Even in USA, despite so much of regulatory controls, too many companies shut shop every year

2) Private companies (PC hereafter) always give lower returns than LIC. If you want to see the calculations (which I told the guy verbally corroborated with my detailed calculation later and the returns came out to be 3.72%). This guy tried to tell me at first that the returns will be 12-14%. If you want to see the calculation document, call me at 9477202742 or mail at sudipsam67@yahoo.co.in

3) PCs give a much lower cover per thousand rupees you keep with them. This is also true for nearly all policies. They do not want to play with lower middle-class guys, only those who can pay lakhs on the policy. But the cover is not fixed (on base) like LIC, that is generally incremental and comparatively much lower than similar policies of LIC. Actuarially, I have seen, the policies are made in the way that they would not lose much money after the policy runs for just 3 years which factor is about 7 in case of LIC (based on the policies of 15 year term)

4) PC agents often try to push some policy on the throats of the gullible people and then after a couple of years, coax them to surrender the policy and take another one because “the returns of that policy” is low. This is a very common practice. The rate of lapse and surrender are much higher in private companies in spite of much higher per capita income of the clients. One of such agents recently did the trick on a person (who is a businessman himself and a very nice man but gullible all the same) and made him poorer by at least 3 lakhs by way loss, pocketing at least a lakh in commission. The person gives policy to this agent on “sympathy” ground because he “stammers a lot” !!!

5) PC policies always try to suck as much money out of the pocket of the client because that is where the profit is. The cover, I have told already, is disproportionately low.

6) PC policies often and mostly try to tag some equity / unit investments with the policy to blur the calculation of the effective returns. I was shown another pension policy of Aviva that is a fund management type of policy and I calculated that on an average it is charging an arrayt of fees every year ranging between 9-15%. Take my word, the total fees of any fund mgt. policy worth it’s salt, should never be more than 2-4%.

7) PC agents try to promise the moon. They always say that they know the returns will be 15-18% etc. etc. I have seen some people challenge this that you give it to me in writing, they say that they can’t because of IRDA regulations. I have a loose advisory/consulting relation with Kotak life. There, we joke about this.

8) PCs, in the non-life sector, have already become notorious about refusal of claims. The time for the life sector has not come yet and will be there at least after another decade, but take my word, they will be even more notorious in that.

9) The plain truth is that, the first and the last objective of the PCs are to make profits out of you, while LIC does not really care much as it is Govt. owned and by the charter of incorporation, is based on the mutual principle i.e. 95% of the profits (after a judicious allocation to the long-term liability reserves of course) have to be redistributed to the policy-holders by way of bonus, after the Govt. is paid it’s customary 5% dividend.

The fact is that, even after I am trying to tell these things to my friends and relatives, they get overwhelmed seeing the ties and the laptops of the conmen. Invariably they ask me bout it after they have given the cheque, while I was, alas, only a phone call away. Good luck to all.

The contrary view

It’s very trying to be different. Being a born rebel means a standing invitation to others to try to bulldoze you. But the trial by fire also makes one purer and stronger that gives one the supreme confidence with the license to give a damn to what other people say about him. Ironically, it also gives one the humility to understand that the principled positions and simplest but the best wisdoms are not the preserves of the people powerful enough to challenge his positions but inclusive of other people who are miles down below him. This provides the never-say-die attitude that comes from the knowledge that whatever you will face will be difficult and painful, not resistance alone but will include ridicule and checks. This is the attitude that talks of climbing the Everest not just for “it was there” but for “I was there”.

In the complicated Shatranz of living within a people network and the so-called society, my favorite strategy is of non-confrontation. I was a born rebel and have fought against all the people I have known in my whole life, and proportionally more with the more powerful ones. Without branding a T-shirt with a photo of Che in the front, this much I could do without any malice and personal enmity as I always took this as business. Beside my Pop, I have gone down in the history for fighting my Bosses the most in my career and still survived 15 years before I finally buried it with full state honors. I consider myself lucky beyond measures that I was still respected by all of them, if not exactly loved, and some of them kept excellent personal relations with me even while I was at the height of rebellion, probably because my behavior was always issue-based and I always tried to keep absolute and ridiculous standards of integrity, decorum and dignity of character.

When your thinking will be different from other people, it is as much as saying only you are right and all others are wrong. The conviction reflects only to a handful few who, ironically, do not matter in terms of survival strategy for non-existence of threats. This is unacceptable mainly for two types of people, one who have false and often empty prides about themselves and secondly the people who have higher authority over your actions. Strategy for the first type is mostly non-confrontation – ignoring their ridicule, sarcasms, insinuations and quietly waiting for your turn to cut them down with a single stroke of the sword – a masterstroke that they will never even have the time to watch in horror, they will be dead even before they know it. Strategy for the second type is absolute but dignified confrontations – with reasons. Always reason with people and keep an aura of honesty around you to starve them of any chance to challenge your positions on the logic of motives. One of the Bosses under whom I had worked for more than four years and even now has a very good relation with me was one I fought so much but always from a position where I had a very good reason, whatever be it, not only apparent but also concrete. But he was also the guy who never even glanced at the heads or the amounts when I put up with any reimbursement bill, after the initial year of our working, a thing he never did with all others. He knew, I am the type who forgets or misplaces most of the valid bills, or just does not care to put them, and the question of inflating bills does not arise at all.

One position that earns a lot of enemies but as well earns a tremendous respect from them is when you will be humble and friendly yet will absolutely refuse to accept any nonsense from anybody. You just cannot eat every shit life will dish out on a platter. A third type of the people will always come after you when they will think that you are weak. Some bums among them will always misread your aloofness and nonchalance as a sign of it but those people are easy to handle as these people can be cut down at ease, the others being far more dangerous as they will often stumble upon your actual weaknesses and use those even small aspects to make a guided missile hit at your much bigger and important pawn formations. I have never cared what people think about me but at any time I have heard them well and then secretly tried to find any actual holes in my position. If I ever found one, I immediately started on the steps to improve them, because even if you manage to get away the first or a few times, you will eventually be hit through those Achilles’ heels and that will take away the aura of invincibility that is the final objective of this strategy.

But, above all, the best strategy of all to fight the other people is to bear, and silently, till you can make an answer that will close the issue and their bloody mouths at one go. The answer may not be even in so many words, but they can be even better.

Beside the need for honesty, I repeat the importance of humility. I love to speak to all classes and types of people, even rusty farmers, notorious drug-peddlers, unassuming rickshaw-wallas and what not, sometimes to much consternation of my dear wife. But over the life, I have received the kind of simple but brilliant viewpoints of life that they were my almost invincible arms in many situations where I was trying to survive by crossing swords with people who could theoretically kill me in one slash but practically they could never do it. Remember that nobody could kill you unless you let them to. To quote Mike Corleone, "accidents do not happen to people who takes accidents as personal insults". Humility not only endears you to a small but beautiful section of the people who become the most important allies in your battles, they also give you the practical strategies that no book or famed institute can ever teach anybody. They are called philosophies, the ultimate nectar of life.

One last word. The price of living on one's own terms and viewpoints is tremendous. I have practiced all my life and got bruised and wounded for as long, before I got up again and be back for another fight. Being a true survivor and a relentless fighter, I have hanged on to the rear mudguard of the villains car whenever they were on the run after kidnapping my heroin, just the hindi films - never letting go - and I still rose inch by inch, without ever bowing my head to anything or anyone for any reward or any punishment. At the end of it all, I am happy and content. To be as proud and as happy, be ready to sacrifice as much or more.

Be very sympathetic to people. They live with so much of hopes, dreams, nightmares, pains and broken faiths that they need an empathetic listening. Also think how their words can be used to improve your formation on the chessboard, but outside that, really give a damn to what they say about you. Every business is, at the end of the day, personal, very personal.

The price of freedom

Life is an endless battle, it is a half-truth, but truth nevertheless. It is the curse of human that they are born with slavery. Life is really an endless battle, and most of the time it will be with yourself. You just can’t throw the towel, you can only lose when you will accept the defeat. Only one sound rings up in the air, “RUN, it’s your life”. Life is being on a tightrope. Never accept a defeat, there is nothing called a defeat, only at death, you submit to the almighty at the final bell, for the last time. You can never be dead, until you are. I respect death enough to never even talk about it or think about it but I always stay prepared for it to come at the gong. This is the ultimate secret of my fearlessness. I battle with everyone including myself and with everything, even and particularly with my natural tendencies, when I think I’m right. It is really unbelievable what a man can do. They can go on pushing their frontiers, when they really wish to do it. I’ve seen people fight and come back from the verge many times, come back with a bang after everybody wrote him off, just left there for dead. Strength of a real man comes from the indomitable will rather than the biceps. So I try to push myself to the limit, and beyond. I only accept that this is my life. Like Jesus, like all others around me, I have been carrying my cross all my life but have fought continuously not to let them hang me on that. Take heart, even those who were born with those lovely spoons, also fight, maybe in a different way, but they also have the same fate. Only I consider myself better armed and tuned, because there is nothing to lose. Part of the fight is to save that for my children, after a time, everyone lives for them. I fight every day, for myself and my principles, my life, my beloved ones and I fight for this world. The fight is not to lower the head in front of anything that does not truly deserve it. This is one of the hardest battle and the endless one. I have a rule that I simply do not want to do it for any fear or greed and then the war starts, to protect the rule itself. I do make strategic retreat sometimes, but that is only to come back to the battlefield at the crack of dawn with double the ferocity and arms. Being a child of the earth, I stay rooted to the ground and always get up with double the force when I fall. Sometimes you have to wait for your turn. When at war, at every battle with the dark forces, you should try to take the nature in your side. When sailing to the enemy area, your direction should be enforced by the strong wind. Willpower of the nature is the source of strength of the Jedi knights. When you will be a dog, the mother nature will endow you with that biting power and will give you the day to use it. Often, an overnight success is bought by 20 years of toil and blood and pain and trial by the Kafkaesque faceless executioners. I have gone through years of pain, uncertainty and ridicule of people with less than half of the caliber, when I was trying something new. Like the Mexican – I always saw the ten thousand rifles in place of those dumb Gringos, the vision pulled me thro’ countless nights that felt like they will never end. After years of silent bearing, when the results started pouring in, I killed them and only their smiles roamed in the air long after they were gone. One must believe in himself, one must be liberated, one must stay liberated. Freedom is the greatest treasure a man can have. The function of a man is to live, not to exist. A slave is a person who waits for someone else to set him free. A slave is somebody who does not fight for himself. A slave is someone without a respect of his life. So, fight. Fight to break the shackles of slavery – with every tooth and nail, with every breadth, with every bullet you've got. While running for you dreams and your life, fight. Jump every wall, break every barrier, climb every mountain, cross every ocean, fight every war, charge every gun, shoot every man who will dare. When it’s the Light Brigade, their’s not to make reply, not to reason why, just to do and die. Swords drawn, full gallop at the saddle, no hostages taken, no quarters given nor asked - the Crown Prince of the Mohicans must fight till the last man standing. With the red flag’s flutter -it is a fight to the finish. Then, when it will be the jaws of death, the mouth of hell, with one last cut and slash of your dearest samurai sword, ride well in the gentle wind to the glory of a free man.

Ways of Managing

(Unlike many others, I never treat my blog as a place to dump all bullshits I can find elsewhere, but a friend has sent a nice anecdote that really deserves to go in. Enjoy - Sudip)

•MANAGING BY WALKING FASTER THAN THE EMPLOYEES - These managers you will always see in the corridor, ten steps away. "We'll have to talk" you can hear them say, just as they disappear round the corner.

•MANAGING BY STARING OUT OF THE WINDOW - These managers you usually meet with their backside faced to you with their hands in their pockets. When you talk to them, their thoughts keep staring out of the windows.

•MANAGING BY POST-IT'S - Some managers forget everything. They want to impress you with their 'busy'-ness by continuously writing on Post-it's while you are talking.

•MANAGING BY DELEGATION TO THE SECRETARY - These managers just delegate everything to the secretary. If he is good, He knows what she must do.

•MANAGING BY KNOWING NOTHING - These managers don't really know anything at all. They let YOU give answers. Meanwhile they fill the time with nice anecdotes of irrelevant cases.

•MANAGING BY CONCEPTUAL THINKING - These people try to explain the present from a theoretical view of the far future. The idea that this never will work, completely satisfies them: They will always have something to talk about.

•MANAGING BY HIDING INFORMATION - Information hiders are aware of the market value of information kept strictly secret. You must be very thankful to get any information at all. Beware of stimulants from category “Knowing nothing”!

•MANAGING BY DOING EXACTLY WHAT THE BOSS SAYS - These managers prevent their bosses from creative thinking. Else they got more work to do.

•MANAGING BY WALKING ONE FOOT BEHIND THE BOSS - In hierarchical organizations you can watch those groups walking in the corridor. The more equal managers are directly followed by the lesser equal managers, and so on.

•MANAGING BY SMILING AND WEARING NICE SUITS - If you drink beer with them, lunch with them, smile to them and also wear nice suits, nothing can stop your career anymore.

•MANAGING BY MEETINGS - These managers are always seen in the meeting rooms, planning about future, getting irrelevant bullshit lectures and ideas from trusted subordinate managers, and taking them seriously, till next meeting.

Expectation Management - a key to survival

We all have our expectations – from everything and from everyone. When they are not met, we have disappointments and when they are exceeded, we break into ecstacy. Going between these two extremes, we lose the control on our feelings. Have you ever thought of balancing your expectations against what is reality and what you actually deserve, so that you don’t hit the wall on either side ? Do you give a serious thought to what other people expect from you and how to you go about meeting those ?

When I was in College, one day some of us were chatting and the discussion veered to the expectation of one from his spouse. One girl excitedly talked about the nasty attitudes of men in general. I asked her to narrate her expectation or rather wishes about the qualities of her dream man. I made a list, a cameo, in my diary while she went on. It was like this (my comments in the bracket) :
• Tall dark handsome (bullshit, “fo guck” yourself in the mirror)
• Rich (like an industrialist or his son)
• Highly educated (like a scientist)
• Glamorous – optional (like Salman)
• Loves luxury (like corporate Bosses)
• Powerful (like the IASes)
• Kind and considerate (like Mother Teresa)
• Humorous (like Mehmoud or Bhanu)
Rest are all optional, like regularity in life (like a Professor), security (like a Govt. servant), time (like a Govt. clerk), will give me space (like a busy Doctor), will share all (like a henpecked housewife)

Finally I popped the golden question. Even if someone like this exists, what can he expect in her dream lady and do you deserve him ? He will also have fantastic expectations and will ask himself, when married to a geek like you, “Do I deserve her” ? So, why don’t you try to achieve, acquire the virtues that deserve these qualities from a spouse and will even command respect ? This kind of expectation often leads to an unbalanced view of himself/herself and leads to one-sided insecurity that is often the main source of sexual and emotional blackmail.

It is almost like the people (BA fail and salary 5000/-) asking for “forsha Prokrito sundori” (fair and really beautiful) girl. Expectations are often unrealistic and unfair at first, at the lack of any open and honest self-assessment, changing slowly as they grow more mature.

Expectations are powerful as they touch deep emotional chords and affect our personal dreams, agendas, values and most importantly our relationships i.e., they can control us and our feelings altogether. Usually the power of expectation is beneficial but often it can put somebody in such groovy realms of possibilities that can take away the happiness of survival. Our own unrealistic expectations are as much culprits as this is of others.

Expectation, unlike a dream or desire, often has a tendency to run away if not controlled properly. It also varies with Time, place and the Actors. Expectation varies from the same husband on after a year of marriage and after 10 years of marriage, as he has changed and the expectant has changed also. Even their relationship has changed.

Expectations are situation-dependent too. Expectation form the same husband can vary on the same day when he is reading the morning newspaper and when he has come back home after a binge of drinking with the chums.

Expectation also depends upon the state of the relationship. This is because it is also dependent on the level of fulfillment of the expectation of the person from whom the expectation is arising. A husband who is tired of non-fulfillment of his own expectations will react differently than when he had the hopes of fulfillment of them.

The level and magnitude of expectation itself varies, growing with each fulfillment and reducing with each non-fulfillment. It is a good practice in terms of survival to keep the level of expectation low initially and also not to let the expectation about you to be high in the beginning. Disappointment often comes just because of too high or unrealistic expectation. One of my ex-Bosses had been very disappointed one day when I failed to properly execute one job given to me. It was not important that the particular job was very difficult or that I was doing it the first time or that I had sincerely tried it and even probably deserved some credit for what I had done, as his expectation from me went on increasing for a long time and even was converted into a sort of reliance by the time. It was important that however good or bad I was, I failed to match the expectation.

To manage the expectation, one should try to keep some element of surprise about himself and not give away too much of information too early. If on the first day you start blabbering about your singing, the first day itself when she will hear you sing, she will most probably be disappointed as by that time she must have had built up a good level of expectation. While we should try to manage expectation mainly to cover ourselves against other’s disappointments, it is always a very valuable practice to under promise and over deliver that will lead to that WHOW or ecstacy.

It needs an open, considerate and sensitive mind to understand the expectations around him in the first place. Mostly, they remain unsaid and even covered deep down. To delve into somebody’s mind, to understand the opposite party’s need vis a vis his/her expectation, need a mind and even more, a soul. You will have to “walk a mile” or more in his/her shoes to understand the pain of that blister and what he/she thinks you should do.

Managing them is altogether a different ball-game. To manage expectation, the major steps should be to
• Capture expectation
• Monitor expectation
• Influence expectation
• Set expectation
The whole process is iterative and a journey, rather than being a destination.

To manage, one should connect to them and formally keep written dossiers of what he thinks are the expectations on him (the other party seldom talks about them, they are not dreams or desires, remember). But still communication is the key here and you try to be and stay as open and frank and honest as possible under any circumstances. This will probably help him to understand the direction all his well-wishers would want him to take and how he can handle them. For a completely dynamic and abstract substance like expectation, even this will probably help to manage up to 20% of it. best of luck

Myth-yam strategy – The shades of gray

Removed by Sudip as no more relevant

My dear students - experiment with the truth and my ethereal shame

To lend from the oft-repeated Kautilya, “even the devil has to be given his dues”, as otherwise all notions of fairness and credibility go away. So, when I gave away a bewildered face with a bemused surprise and disappointment at my ratings (6.4 & 5.7), I found out the ratings provided. While many have given even 9 or 10 with some objective and some superlative comments, I found out some students have given 1 or 2 in the parameters (well, I just think of the heavenly fun they will have when they will give a marks of 11 /100 or 15/100 if they ever will become Professors, IF) with comments that borders on allegations of unfairness and favoritism, e.g. I used to give lifts to some students in my car to their homes or that I used to smoke cigarettes with some students or drank tea and chatted with them (good thinking, all these, only as a practicing manager for many years I always thought it’s Group-D territory). Logically, the charges of taking bribes or sexual harassments could be the next?

I take a bow to their judgments if they were taken regarding my teaching aspects, and my efforts in the extra mile I always thought I should walk for them. But something tells me that may not be true. Firstly such a completely polarized rating range talk of severe bias and a ridiculously low rating on all parameters show a complete lack of objectivity. When I finished my classes after 7 on one of the days in the week, some students often approached me for a lift (the only people I myself had offered lift at any time were my fellow Professors and a SSD), should have I said No ? And friendly ? That I always was and to everybody (including the rickshaw-pullers, as I had mentioned in the class in a theoretical context) as a rule, till I am reproached in some manner (when I turn brutally aloof and selectively blind).

I took out their marks to double check and found out
1) The top 20% is a random mix of people from all, as we say, caste – creed – race – religion – sex – province – language etc.
2) None of the guys I gave a lift in my car has made to the top 10%
3) The most incorrigibly talkative of them all had still made grade A
4) One of the toppers had a serious fight with me in the class. Another guy had shouted on me regarding the rules and my choice of judges in a Presentation type case study had made grade A
5) One of the guys who got 90+ has never even spoken to me or greeted me or even recognized me outside the class
6) I, as I had decided earlier, have given 10% extra marks to everybody than I thought was due and had to resist, defy and bypass the general marking guideline to do so
7) Attendance, or rather the real snapshot of it, played a factor or a parameter. This is not the old India that the NRSs (Non-resident students) should be the super-class citizens

Unfair ? Vindictive ? Playing favorites ? I bow to the judgment. The tell-tale signs of a tall tale is that there is always more to the tale that you can tell yourself . People can get away with anything when they are paying, but what will happen when they will be paid ? Somebody showing this kind of mindset in a corporate setup will not last a week and the men will be separated from the boys there. However, I have seen the office-assistants and the cleaning people discussing a lot of issues like this in the pantry and other sacred places. We know it all along and never have any special expectation over the Group-D thought processes.

Some people never understand the real issues and why do someone get less marks. I have seen people who may be good but has always tried to remain a part of the paint on the back wall in the class, speaking 0-3 sentences in the 34 classes I took. It is not enough to be good, it must be demonstrated also. I, who is still a student, have felt numerous times in my life that I should have got a bit more marks, but at least I was still not stupid enough to presume that the examiner had something personal against me. I always knew after my schooldays that I am lacking somewhere, in the knowledge or the expression or the technique of delivery – to get any marks lower than the topper. Some students try to oil them, but any good Professor worth his shirt will consciously avoid any bias towards them. Some students always tried to hog the limelight even at the time of the case studies, but at least that shows their intent participation. If somebody remains merely a physical presence, I have no way of knowing he is with the case or is really at Nolbon at that time. The wisdom or rather the religion of Zombiehood do not make any special mark for the impression. Professors are ought to be impressed with some characteristic, and a management student must know it in the strategy class.

In the west and the good institutes like IIM-C, I have seen Professors are very friendly and approachable while elsewhere I have often seen them more aloof and distant. In fact, when I have seen my colleagues and friends (who are Professors in different colleges and Institutes) giving their marks, I have secretly thought them as insensitive. Now I know on which side of the fence they are.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, I know that it‘s my failure. I hang my proud head in ethereal shame that months of my passionate lectures on strategy could not do even the simple job of changing a mindset or the thinking pattern. What sins did I commit to not deserve this?