The Bucket list

Watched "The Bucket List" starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. Its a sweet movie about two terminally ill cancer patient Carter Chambers (Freeman) and billionaire hospital magnate Edward Cole (Nicholson) both of whom meet in the hospital after both have been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Carter makes a "Bucket List" of things that he wants to do before he 'kicked the bucket'... This gets Edward Cole interested and he also adds his list of things that he wants to do before he dies... What ensues after that is an exciting trip of adventure and self discovery for both the men which left me half laughing, half crying...

The movie has a lingering effect on the audience in the sense that it compels you to think... 'that if it was your last day and you had umpteenth thing that needs your attention... things you always thought you could do but never could get yourself down to doing it.. the numerous thing that you wanted to say to your loved ones which has been left unsaid till now.. the piece of your mind which you always hoped to give your half sadist half paranoid boss before you kiss your job goodbye... et al et al...

Haven't all of us had such a long list of things which all of us wanted to do?

As for me its definitely a yes... So here goes my "Bucket List' of things that I would like to do (not necessarily in the same order) before providence decides to call it a day for me...

• Go on a world trip to all the scenic beauty I have seen only in pictures and experience them first hand
• Conquer my perennial fear in maths and become a maths genius
• Turn around the clock and be able to express my love to what could have been my 1st love
• To be able to experience just one golden days of my childhood if I could
• Have a villa at the top of the highest point at Mahabaleswar
• Own a black Scorpio with mind blowing music system
• Do my MPH at Johns' Hopkins (not that I can not but only if it is my last few days)
• To be known as a good human being even when I am gone

I know the list is endless but then can any body have a hold on the wishes that one can make... especially if it is your last few days of your human existence on this earth...

The best thing I liked about the movie is the conversation that Carter and Edward Cole has atop a pyramid in Egypt in which Carter says that the Egyptian have a belief that when they die and go to meet their creator they are asked 2 questions before they are admitted in to heaven:

Q.1. "Did you have joy within your life time?"
Q.2. "Did you bring joy to people within your life time?"

What a symbolic way of squeezing the entire life's existence in to 2 such simple yet loaded question... whether you got joy out of what you did and were you instrumental in bringing joys to people around you..

When I think deeply, that's what life entirely is... getting joy and giving joy.. and the foremost thing that ensures that you get joy is by giving joys to others which ensures that what you give away to others comes back to you in manifold...

Go kiss the World !

A brilliant speech delivered by Subroto Bagchi, CEO MindTree, to the Class of 2006 at the IIM, Bangalore on defining success; produced here in toto. Somehow I identify with him coming from a similar background and context....

"I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was, and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep, so the family moved from place to place and without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system, which makes me what I am today and largely, defines what success means to me today. As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government- he reiterated to us that it was not his jeep but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days.. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance, a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do. The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix "dada". whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed, I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' very different from many of their friends who refer to their family driver, as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

To me, the lesson was significant, you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha, an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was neither gas, nor electrical stoves.The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's muffosil edition delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson.

He used to say, 'You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it. That lesson was about showing consideration to others.

Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios, we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios, alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses... His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.

Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom.. She said, 'I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited'. That was my first lesson in success.

It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action.. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

Imagination is everything.. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, 'Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair'.. I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once.

Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, 'No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed'. Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981.. Life took me places, I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him, he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe.

The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, 'Why have you not gone home yet?' Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create.

My father died the next day. He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion.

Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings.

Success is not about building material comforts, the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world..

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said,

'Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.'

Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people.

It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and God's speed. Go! kiss the world."

Malgudi Days

Yesterday I went to one of the shopping mall named City Centre at Banjara Hills, Hyderabad (incidentally the only shopping mall which I have visited the max. till date). The reason for my oft drop at the mall is the "Crossword" shop which has an extensive collection of books, DVDs and C.Ds. Yesterday I went in for the first time with a deliberate intention of not buying any new books coz my list of unread books have gone up in the last few months as I have not been able to do any serious reading...

With such an intention I entered "Crossword" and immediately headed for the DVD et al section... I had planned for buying some cool Hollywood Action movie or some romantic movie which I can watch with my love... However there was not much that could really attract my attention and hold me interested as it was all run of the mill flick which I either have in my small library or can see over the cable... Disinterested I switched to the music category and found some great gazals from the movies by Jagjit Singh which I wanted to buy but alas.... it all turned out to be audio C.Ds whereas I wanted visual treat...

Disheartened, I moved to other Sections... Children Cartoons... devotional music... CDs of Television serials.. et al et al... That's where it caught my attention...

In the corner selves, stacked neatly were the entire collection of my favourite serial "Malgudi days" being brought out by Big Home Video... I just sat down there and then and began to rummage through the piles... Looking at the series and reading the episodes brought back nostalgic memories of how Swami and his friends used to be an integral part of our childhood and how we will all wait for the serial to be broadcast in DD (I think it was on a Friday)... Malgudi Days and the rich haunting melody of its title song still reminds all of us of the good ol' days...

So now I have a whole collection of "Malgudi Days" with me which I will start watching from today and be transported back to the golden era when I was still a child....

Till then the books can wait...

The Power of Choice

The last few days have gone in a tizzy and I have not had the chance to blog for quite sometime. Now that I am back to normalcy, thought would pick up the thread where I left...

Thinking of the many things that I can write on... the happenings of the last few days... the whirlpool of activities going around me for the last few weeks... etc etc... but I thought I will just give it a break and look ahead...Which in my opinion is the best thing to do.... coz looking back only takes you down the memory lane which are best forgotten.. So I decided that its time to look ahead with a fervor and zeal which may and should surpass the previous enthusiasm that I had as regards everything in life...

Of the many things that I have been thinking in the last few days, the one which I thought I will write on is the Power of Choice... the power which all of us have but very few of us realise and still a very few exercise in real life...

As Rousseau, the great Philosopher, exclaimed " man is born free but everywhere he is in chains"... is it really true or is it the figment of our imagination... True we are born in to a certain family, a certain culture and are part of a society which has its own inherent biases... but does that gives us the excuse to behave in a particular way or to function (or not to function) in a given way... As I said in one of my earlier blogs, that everyone has a right to happiness... similarly all of us have a right to and a power to choose the type of life that we have decided to live...

I always tend to look at life from the perspective of a journey and me being the traveller (people who know me closely would immediately recognise this bias coming from Paulo Coelho and his immensely inspirational books especially The Alchemist which has influenced me to a great extent)... In the journey of our life we are often confronted with bi, tri and multiple furcation and division in the road each inviting us to travel on it with promises of things which are blissful as well as fulfilling at the destination.... most traveler takes these roads in the hope that they will get at the end to what they have always cherished for... but has anybody ever thought of the journey on the way... is it going to be equally fulfilling, satiating or even pleasant to make the overall experience of the traveler worthwhile... All our life we struggle in our path and travel circuitous routes to arrive at the Utopia of our dream but alas.... at the end the thought always arises : "Is the chase worth the trophy?"... By the time we reach Utopia either we are too old or too sick to even appreciate the beauty of it.. come to think of it... the cherished destination for which we have been traveling our entire life coming to noughts...

Besides also if we look the Power of choice each of us have, it also gives us the power to be or not to be in a particular situation, condition or context... In this regard I vividly remember the last scene of movie Hellboy in its climax scene when the villain Rasputin captures Hellboy's lady love and telling Hellboy that she will only come back to life only if he complies to becoming evil (that he was originally destined to become from birth).... Hellboy, not wanting to lose his lady love awakens his true power as the devil, causing his devilish power to regrow. He nearly releases the devil, but the injured FBI agent working with him reminds him of who he is and that he has the right to choose his own path. Remembering his true self and what his father brought him up to be, he snaps back to reality and becomes the good self that he was previously and unleashes destruction for the evil forces...

There is 2 great lessons for us here: that is firstly about choosing between which path to undertake one's journey on and also that fact that a given situation,context, your background or the biases (that I was talking about earlier ) will not matter much if you have a strong resolve to exercise your Power of choice...

I always share this with people with whom I interact at a personal level:
"Listen closely to your heart and do its bidding... For when the heart calls its call has to be answered coz mind rationalises but the heart takes an informed decision based on its awareness of the type of person you are... "

So Go on... Exercise your Power of Choice...