Adversary makes you better

Through the battles we encounter, we have the chance to learn, develop resilience, and become better versions of ourselves.

Excellence is Intentional

One thing that has always kept me on the run is excellence. It is never ‘done’, unless you decide intentionally. I am a big fan of the great builders of history, the kings and emperors and explorers.

<p value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">My recent visit to a fort on a raod trip gave me an insight into this fact. I visit the Amer Fort in Jaipur with my family and I was spellbound to see the splendor that still exists after centuries. The guide told us that the whole fort and the palace was built by three different generations. He then showed us which section was built by whom and I was mesmerised by the fact that every generation that build the fort wanted to excel. Even if the 2nd and 3rd kings didn't build the next two sections, they would still have lived in a great place. But they had the intention to excel and they built the new sections within the fort. The third and the final section built by the 3rd generation king is amazing. He built an entire structure with glass. It is called the Glass Palace (Sheesh Mahal). The guide said that the glasses where imported from Belgium. Imagine doing such mammoth task in the 16th century – getting the 'raw material' from so far away. My recent visit to a fort on a raod trip gave me an insight into this fact. I visit the Amer Fort in Jaipur with my family and I was spellbound to see the splendor that still exists after centuries. The guide told us that the whole fort and the palace was built by three different generations. He then showed us which section was built by whom and I was mesmerised by the fact that every generation that build the fort wanted to excel. Even if the 2nd and 3rd kings didn’t build the next two sections, they would still have lived in a great place. But they had the intention to excel and they built the new sections within the fort. The third and the final section built by the 3rd generation king is amazing. He built an entire structure with glass. It is called the Glass Palace (Sheesh Mahal). The guide said that the glasses where imported from Belgium. Imagine doing such mammoth task in the 16th century – getting the ‘raw material’ from so far away.

The second point I saw in this whole thing is leadership. Each leader decided to excel and do better, without the former telling him. Each continued the legacy of excellence and never settled for mediocrity. In any organisation, I think that is the key to excellence. Intentionally you build on what is already great. There’s not a thing your cannot improve. There is always room for improvement. The only requirement is that you have do things intentionally.

I Cannot Let it be!

For the Sara Mathew Memorial lecture this year, my choir presented the song ‘Let it be’ by the Beatles. We started practicing since the 2nd week of July. I had about 25 children in the choir, mostly good singers. We did a lot of improvising with harmony and vocal pads. We also added bass, guitar solo and organ layering with the piano. It sounded great one day before the show and I was quite satisfied.

On the day of the show the chaos began. Two of my solo singers didn’t turn up. It was an early morning event. We had the sound system from a new guy we were using for the first time. We had to get down to the nitty-gritty with him and that took a lot of time so we hardly had any time left for sound check. I managed to line up my choir children somehow, for the sound check and suddenly we discovered that some children had come with wrong footwear. We had to ask them to go get it changed and so the sound check didn’t happen. Some children were not even in the hall 5 minutes before the program began. I was in a state of panic but had to stay calm and keep breathing.

I had to present the song without the sound check. I just said to myself ‘let it be.’ I had to ask the other soloist to fill in for the absent soloist. I had to move a boy to the second line as he was not wearing the right colour trousers, he was one of the front-row singers. The performance was about 80 percent of what I had imagined and everyone seemed to like it. But, a BIG but – I was not satisfied at all. So much of hard work we put into it and on the final day things went south and I just didn’t like it. Everyone said it was nice, but I felt terrible. I have decided, I will be extra cautious next time and I cannot let it be.

Learning never goes waste

Very often we think that some learning that we do are useless. I often think so about a lot of things I have done before. I used to make 3D models and have worked on endless 3D software in the first decade of 2000. I don’t even know how to use them now. But yesterday I used something I had tried my hands on, many years ago.

I was at a house church meeting/fellowship and they had a left-handed guitar. The person who was supposed to lead didn’t have a clue to use this ’cause he is a right-handed like I am. When I reached, he immediately asked me if I know how to play a left-handed guitar. I said I had tried long ago and I could remember playing the D chord and I quickly tried. I took the guitar and tried few other chords that I recalled like G, A and C. Then I asked him to sing songs in these chords, may be I will be able to do it.

So we sang three songs in the key of G and I struggled to play few chords. As I started playing I remembered few other chords as well. It didn’t sound bad at all and I realised what I learnt long ago came handy when it was needed the most. So never stop learning and remember, it will come to use someday.

My First River Cruise

Well well, well, what can I say. It was at St. Petersburg, Russia, and I was on my first boat cruise in a August summer night. The view was surreal – iconic buildings, church domes, naval ships, speed boats cruising along river Neva, live saxophone jazz music, food and wine, and the works.

I had said in the beginning of the year that I would travel, but never thought of Russia. It wasn’t even on my bucket list. But here I was attending a friend’s wedding in Moscow and on the side I had the opportunity to visit St. Petersburg, the ‘fairyland’ city. It was such a beautiful experience, and I am gonna remember it forever. It’s difficult to describe in words.

It was 2 am and the boat was full of life. Conversations, people dancing to Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, going to the deck to enjoy the view, draw bridges opening. It was almost like a spy movie scene 🙂

My new friends from Spain were great company. Our views about many things are similar and that gets the conversation going. All ships assembled at a drawbridge about to open around 2am, a sight everyone was waiting to see. And then the bridge that looks ordinary during the day, opened, as if saluting the beautiful night.

The boat-ride came to an end at 3am and we scuttled out of it. Outside the river bank a band was playing live music. This city never seemed to sleep. People were out all night and without having to worry about anything was so unreal to me.

I am sure I will be talking about this trip for a long long time to come.

Music has no scope

My long-lost college friend messaged me out of nowhere and the message read: “My son wants to do Ph.D in music but I am not allowing him to do that because there’s no scope.” In other words he will not make money and he will not have a life if he studies music. This message came at the time when my own daughter just started college and she’s doing B.A in music.

I have enjoyed music from the 60s, 70s and 80s and I know every generation has. I would like to think that these musicians were not paupers. People doing only music in the last century and before that lived their life. I don’t know how the world would be without music. So every millennia saw gifted musicians. Everywhere I go I hear music – malls, buses, trains, cars, theatre, restaurants. Every video that we see has background music. Every event like wedding, birthday, annual functions, even funeral: there’s music. Somebody is making music and is getting paid for it. I don’t think people are making music and distributing for free, except for few.

Another question that comes to mind is how much money one can make in a lifetime? Well, nobody has the perfect answer to this. In any profession/career there’s no guarantee that you will make loads of money. So the question we should ask ourselves is what is it that you want to do? Everyone is gifted with talent and based on that he/she can choose a career. In fact if you really want to make money in a short time you should be an international sports star, coz sports stars retire at the turn of 40, many even before that.

The real question one should answer is what can you do for 40-50 even 60 years without getting bored or tired. The Japanese have the concept known as ikigai – a passion that gives value and joy to life. Isn’t that important?

What Men Want

My father-in-law left for his eternal home last month and my wife travelled back home to be with the family. My daughter and I have been ‘on our own’ since then.

This piece is not about the death or travel or anything like that. It’s my shocking finding of deeply rooted patriarchy in our society. I got a few calls from my friends and when they knew my wife was away, the one question they asked me was “How are you managing your food.” Is that it? Wives are supposed to make food, that’s the primary role? And these questions are from educated lot (men and women). I know that they genuinely wanted to know how was I managing food. I have been cooking since I was 15 and I have no problem doing that. What shocked me was this single question.

Our society has fed in our mind for centuries that girls/women are meant to do the household work. Even though they are educated and progressive, their main job is cooking. Ask any man and he will say it’s true. I am not sure with all the education and development how much our mindset has progressed. Or are we still thinking of taking back our ‘right to rule’ the female kind. Even if women want to cook for the family (which is absolutely fine) we must be aware in our mind that this world no longer belongs to just men.

Here we don’t go round the mulberry bush!

Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide has been a shocker for everyone and that should be a signpost for everyone to see that we need to teach our children more than to become somebody. Our aim must be to make them a complete human being who is able to cope with failure and adversity as much as with success and abundance.

It starts with our education system. When I was in school the only profession that everybody wanted was medical and engineering. We had no clue what that meant. If you go back to history we had explorers, artists, artisans, court musicians, etc. There’s no mention of doctor or engineer in the history we have studied. In fact universities offered music degrees in 11th century, not an engineering degree. Today children are taught to be someone and achieve something in life and that puts a lot of pressure on them. We need to have holistic approach to teaching where children are given real-life experiences to learn. They need to understand the world around them, that it’s not an ideal world. How to deal when life comes to a standstill. The pressure of commercial success is so much people are going after wealth and power. Whereas living is not about accumulating wealth nor to ‘be someone.’ It’s about being thankful everyday and rejoice in what you have and at the same time hope for better days and work towards it. It’s about dreaming, doing and progressing all along dealing with crisis and adversity.

If you’re not able to attain what you have aimed for it’s ok to accept it. So many people fail in life but they don’t give up living. Instead of asking children what do they want to be we should ask them what do they want to do. Because doing what they want to do will make them happy, even if they don’t make a lot of fortune.

Slow down for a better world.

With Covid19 pandemic came the wave of webinars and I have attended quite a few, especially that cateres to the education sector. Some are great, some are ok but most of the experts are talking about how to educate the children during lockdown, what are the new ways of teaching them, how can they utilise the time optimally, using technology, etc. etc.

In my opinion, the pandemic has pushed us down to the ground and asked us to sit and take notice, Which means we need to slow down. Nobody is talking about slowing down. In the olden days, the golden days, things were slow. We walked to our friends house. On the way from school we used to chase papers, kick and pass pebble stone, talk till the cows came home, and such ‘mundane’ activities that gave us immense pleasure.

I think people are still thinking and planning to rush in life, virtually. Children were told that mobile phone is not good for them but now they’re given the phone to attend online classes. The need to rush to teach from the book is immense. Learning is not just from the books. Children must be allowed to explore, not only virtual, but real. What about walking to the mall, instead of driving there? They get to see things and ask questions. Children can go to the market, buy things they need and learn simple accounts. All the so called Big Economies crumbled in the face of the pandemic. Countries that boast of destroying another cannot feed its own people for mere 3 months. Everyone is in a rush to make more money. They are looking at the loss and not at what life has to offer.

Slowing down is what nature seems to be saying and we’re in a rush to ‘get back.’ Everyone seems to be scrambling to gather like the Israelites scrambled in the desert for manna.

Touch wood!

I have this rare fetish for good furniture and furniture is expensive. So I decided to try my hand at some carpentry myself. I shared the idea with my daughter Jennie and she liked it.

After a short deliberation we planned to make a coffee table. We were in a dilemma whether to have straight legs or an X-shaped leg. It definitely looks better aesthetically, but also difficult to achieve, considering that it was our first attempt. Both of us are discalculic and numbers give us headache. We didn’t want to compromise on the look. YouTube came to our rescue. I had to learn about 45% cutting. I also took expert advice from my nephew, who is a master carpenter in his own right.

I invested little money and ordered a hand saw from Amazon. I also ordered a tool kit including drilling machine, but that was faulty so had to return. I bought a wooden board and few tools from the local shop. Everyday we progressed a little. The sound of cutting wood with hand saw, driving nails into the board, scraping the surface, became familiar to our neighbors.

It took us about 6 days(20 working hours) to complete it. Today we finished the table and it doesn’t look that bad, for the first-time attempt. The wood polish has given it a good look. Our first DIY furniture project has been quite satisfactory.