Thursday, March 13, 2008

profound inaction!!!

Finally I happen to decide on my specialisations. The uncertainty principle I have been adopting to decide on my career choices has a classic culmination in specialisation decision. The irony is that I followed the approach I so love to hate:selection by elimination. I find myself to be a big mismatch for marketing; HR and systems are out of question; strategy has too much of CP at stake; and so only option available to me are Fin and Ops. Someone even pointed out that this maynot be the best method, but still God has always given me no choices. Now after deciding on the specialisation, it is time to choose elective: another thing asking for herculean effort from me. With electives I need to decide on concentrations. This chain reaction of interrelated problem seems to have no end. I take an easy road and select what were selected by others and I pray they had a sound reasoning for selecting those courses. For the first time in my life I am dependent on how wise others have been. I want to peep into the future to find out if I am correct but I guess the road to future for me has to be through mysterious journey in the present. Surely, I will get to know the results of my indecision sometime, and it better not be too bad.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

do i dare

Do I Dare or Will I Remain Brave?
"I considered myself brave but today I realise that I would rather face my bitterest enemy in the battlefield than my heart in the closet" – A Brave Man
The above quote so beautifully depicts the cramp which makes most men go weak in their knees and I find myself being testimony to it. The cramp, as can be anyone’s guess is, perhaps the most talked about ‘L’ word. So much has been written about it. Perhaps all of its facets have been explored. Still I find myself talking and writing about it. I wonder, why?
Life is a bouquet of dreams, and everyone possesses a set of them. And, no one knows what life has in store for them when it comes to dreams. Despite any bragging aforesaid, everyone looks for a soul mate that can fill the void in their life. And however hard we deny it, we all fall for someone in life (well some fall twice and some others even more, but believe me they are not to be blamed!). And in this fall changes the whole persona of the brave man where he admits, rather boldly, his weak knees.
We all search for a reason good enough to live for. But suddenly this man finds a reason great enough to die for. The evil angel (Shakespeare thought so) has cast its eyes upon him and there is no escaping it. For the first time in he drops his guards and still feels triumphant (someone rightly said sometimes winning is not everything). The man who used to read LOTR now starts reading Wordsworth (what a pity! He can’t fathom what Wordsworth means by "perfumed garden" and "a dim twilight").
I’ll narrate a small story before I move forward on this piece. Once I went out to trek in a densely forested range of hills. We were a team of twelve men and two stray dogs that joined us at the onset of that forest, maybe for some food or simple companionship of some crazy two-legged beasts like us. We guessed it was our companionship.
The forest was at once dangerous, seductive, adventurous and accommodating. Yes, accommodating. I realized I had till then been living under a falsehood of self-sufficiency.
At one point of time, we were surrounded by around 300 monkeys, at another we came face to face with a stray wolf. One of us almost had a fall while summiting. We were frightened but kept our wits.
After summit, we saw an old ruin of a fort in the middle of the forest. I don’t know what hit me, but I desperately wanted to rendezvous the fort. Some were apprehensive, others frightened, and some were raring. So we decided we would give it a go!
Just imagine, we were in the middle of a national forest, illegally and without permission, without guides, just twelve crazy college blokes armed with a map, a
compass and twelve household knives. But we successfully brought back souvenirs from that fort!!
The exhilaration and the oneness that I felt with the forest cannot be described in words.
I’d have never realized this aspect of my persona had I not undertaken such a journey.
I also realized in retrospect that had we not decided to risk reaching the fort, maybe we would have never done it ever; not with those people, not with such abandon.
Man is but a fleeting flesh if not for our beliefs and convictions. That is precisely what makes us different from other fauna. Ultimately, at the end of the day, what matters is that did we do what we believed in good faith; what we were convinced about?
Did we give it a try? Believe me my friend; what hurts most is not failure but the absence of attempt!
Robert Frost famously quoted,
"There was a divergence once in a wood,
Two separate paths walking their way,
I decided to take one of them,
And that makes me what I’m today."
God gives us endless opportunities and possibilities, but it rests on us whether we are ready to challenge our limits.
A woman is very much similar to that seductive forest and love is such an enamouring feeling that you tend to discover things about yourself which you never knew or thought were incapable of doing.
The comedy of life is that things and people come to you when you are totally unaware and unprepared for it! But the fun part is that you learn on the way. The end would be nothing without the journey; infact, the end is a summation of the journey.
I guess that’s what on-the-job learning is all about!!
When you play a violin, it soothes the souls around. Love is the same music, so howsoever hard you try to cover it up, and it shall reach the person designed for, within seconds. But it also reaches other people of the congregation and they start swaying before you do!!
If you don’t believe me, ask your friends who are over-excited about your love affair than you actually are!!
Maybe someday soon, some crackpot IITian shall come up with the theory that love is an ultrasound! And an IIM graduate (supposedly me) will devise theories on how to manage it.
Relationships are all about you and me!! Now tell me how we are going to move ahead if we get stuck in courage crisis and develop shaky legs. Better to shake them along together!!
If we will something deeply, God sends it to us in his remarkably strange ways. We just need to have faith and conviction. And yes, we’ve to be ready for change and some action.
Now when I look back, I can see the list of crazy things I’ve done, but yes, I can also say that I’ve done what others just dream of!!
So let us dare and do rather than sit back and become a gossip postman.
Don’t be the brave man I was talking about because all he can do is fight enemies and then read Wordsworth to sooth his heart rather than confess his love. Well I won’t be the brave man but I will be the normal man. I hope you all to be the same.
I wrote this article because I saw that flowers bloom even in HeLL .
Someone rightly said" to love is to risk not being loved in return but the greatest mistake is to not risk it". Let us will to love, to dare and to win!
This is not the end, but just the pristine confessions of my journey! Hope to see you again in the next edition.
Amen!!
With love,
Shantanu Parmar