A Consultant's Life - Part IV (Incomplete)

This thread of posts must take the record of being the longest set of chronicles I have written under the same title. Is it that two years of working has taken its toll on my imaginative capabilities? Hope not!

In terms of content, this is a follow-up of the 1st part of the series with the above title: Some things don't change and some things do...

Of the things that do change, especially on the personal front, the most prominent and significant is the change in marital status - tons of my friends, batchmates etc. who were leading single, unattached lives have decided to take the plunge and step over to the grhasta side of life.

The latest bachelor to bite the dust among my friends' circle is Avishek Addy (the PJ king of my batch) - he is getting engaged this May. Guess he hid his PJs well during the time his would-be made the choice :D. A months back, couple of my best friends, Poza and Bhars, also got married. Is it something about the stage of one life? A little introspection leads me to a very consultanty answer...

I figured that people by and large go through a 2x2 matrix of life [my non-consultant friends call this the point of no return, the point where I form 'frameworks' for the heck of it :)] - I call it the JOL framework (nothing bengali about this, though!). In a nutshell, the journey of many people's lives follows a 'Z' pattern through the following matrix

The JOL (Journey of Life) Matrix

Most people start their lives by being single and happy about it and somewhere down the line, that happiness vanishes and a desire to be with a member of the other sex takes over- neatly described by the following masterpiece


JOL-ly Roger Calvin here is in the bottom left quadrant of the matrix and Hobbes is in the top left quadrant. From the "Girls/Boys! Ewwwwww... yuck! I hate girls/boys" phase to the Hobbes phase of "Whom do we smooch?", it is one turbulent journey!

Another natural question which cropped up was: where do you fit "Relationships" in the picture? To that the answer is: Substitute "Marriage" with "Relationships" in the matrix and you get the answer in a more generic way

(Incomplete)

The Second Chapter: The Gita in Brief - Part I

After a brief hiatus, I resume my interpretations and summarization of "Talks on the Gita" by Acharya Vinoba Bhave. What follows is a discussion on the second chapter of the book, which coincides with the second chapter of the Gita.

The Second Chapter of the Gita is said to lay the foundations for the teachings in the rest of the chapters. It establishes three principles which are expounded in different ways later:

• The spirit ("Brahman") is deathless and indivisble - and you are that spirit
• The body is transient
• One's svadharma cannot and should not be thrust aside

I have often heard from my IIT-ian friends that most stuff they learnt during JEE could be built from First Principles. Similarly, these three aspects form the First Principles of Vedantic philosophy, reflected in the Bhagavad Gita. Let us go into each of these in greater detail.

Note: the following paragraphs can get quite boring for the non-philosophical variety of reader. Don't say I didn't warn ya! :)

Vedanta philosophy talks about the Eternal Spirit or "Brahman" or "The Self" that pervades all creation. The spirit is referred to as "That" - formless, timeless, genderless and perfect. One of the most famous quotes from the Vedanta period is one from the Chhandogya Upanishad, viz: "Tat tvam asi" or "That you are". Each form of creation is Brahman and it is said that every one's journey through the cycle of birth and rebirth is to understand this truth.

Brahman cannot be perceived by the five senses, but by pure intellect alone. To perceive Brahman requires the utmost control of one's body and mind. To the economists, Brahman is the 'invisible hand'; To the devout, Brahman is God; To the disbelievers, Brahman is disbelief and to the farmer, Brahman is the daily bread.

Vinoba says:

"The self is impatient to pervade the world. It wants to gobble up all creation. But we shut it up in a cell (our body). We have made a prisoner of it. We do not even remember that it exists. From morning till evening, we are busy minding the body. Day and night we worry about how fat or how thin our bodies have become. One would think that there was no other joy in the world...Even when a man draws a small circle and calls it "his own", the unconsious aim is to taste the joy of growth in the self; for thereby the self bound in the body comes out for a little while.... But it is like the prisoner coming out of his cell into the couryard"

The Gita refers to various ways of seeking perfection, or Brahman, described above. The person who seeks is referred to as the sadhaka. The sadhaka is however, bound by his/her attachment to the body and to preserving it. The Gita seeks to destroy this illusion by laying down the fact that the body is ceaselessly changing. Cells get created and destroyed at every given moment - so much so that the entire body is supposed to get a complete overhaul (in terms of blood, skeletal structure etc.) once every 12 years [I believe the figure is around 10 years for the skeleton itself, and 7 years for the blood in one's body].

In addition, it says that the body is like the cloth that the spirit wears. Once it wears off, the cloth is discarded and a new cloth is put in its place. Understanding this, the sadhaka is supposed to dedicate all action in the pursuit of his/her svadharma. I had already referred to one's svadharma in my earlier post. But the author makes a beautiful comparision which is appropriate to mention here:

"This svadharma comes to one naturally. One does not have to go out in search of one's own dharma... I would compare svadharma to one's mother. It was not left to me to choose my mother in this birth. it had already been determined for me. No matter what sort of person she is , there is no pushing her away. that is precisely the case with svadharma - it is inescapable. Besides, svadharma, we have nothing else in all this world to rely on, to rest in."

Therefore, understanding that the body perishes every moment, and understanding that the Spirit pervades everything everywhere, the author urges the sadhaka to leave the crooked ways of adharma (what is not one's dharma) and paradharma (someone else's dharma) and follow the natural, easy path of svadharma. He should never let go of the motherly security of one's svadharma.

When I re-read what I had written above, I was left thinking "Yeah, yeah, fine - all this preaching is great, but this just addresses the "What should I do" part of it, without ever touching the "How should I do it?" bit.

[Other readers, of course, might be left thinking "Oh boy, what a bore! Who really cares!" - but then, due to my significant interest in the above, topic, I can't help getting a bit detailed :) - which is also why I put the plot summaries in first :)]

The "How to go about it" is going to be part of my next post. So till then, cheers and Happy reading!

The Yoga of Despondency

To put it concisely, the plot outline for the context for the Gita (and the rest of this post) is as follows:

Villains and Heroes ready for battle - hero commander goes to see who all he's going to fight - hero sees his relatives on the villains' side - hero gets the heeby-jeebies - hero questions why he has to fight

To put it as I have just done above is the equivalent of saying a Beethoven MP3 is just a series of 0's and 1's - true, but not quite true enough !

So, in slightly greater detail

7 armies on one side (for the Pandavas) , 11 armies on the other (for the Kauravas) stand armed and ready in Kurukshetra ready to annihilate each other. Arjuna, one of the greatest warriors in the Mahabharata is in the middle of no-man's land, facing the Kaurava army, ready to raze his opponents to the ground...and he raises his eyes to look at the 'enemy'.

There he sees his kinsmen - uncles, cousins, brothers, sons , lined up in row after unending row, ready to do death unto each other. His mind wavers, his body trembles and despondency takes over... "Is the end that I am fighting for (namely, kingdom) , worth killing my kinsmen?"

Following this question is a series of rants against war:

• Those for whose sake we desire kingdom are themselves here, waiting to kill each other - why should I fight?
• How can we kill our own people? They might be overpowered by greed and might be willing to kill us, but we can't do the same because we know that it is wrong to destroy a family like this
• If we kill entire families, their traditions, customs etc. are lost forever. What greater sin could I commit?
• If they should destroy me in battle when I am unresisting and unarmed, that would be better for me, rather than my taking up arms against them

It is worthwhile to note here that Arjuna would not have had any qualms killing the opponents had they NOT been his relatives. He was a warrior and it was in his blood to fight. As much as it is in a businessman's blood to trade or in a good student's blood to learn. He was trapped by the attachment to his relatives, and that prevented him from doing his duty.

The author makes a beautiful point : Arjuna was at odds with his svadharma. If he had really been converted to Non-violence, a la King Ashoka, he would not have been satisfied by Lord Krishna until his real objective was met. He was trying to talk his way out of his dilemma , out of doing his duty. His path to doing his duty was clouded by attachment, by illusion.

This 'attachment' is a common issue faced by people all over the world. And many in the corporate world can especially identify with this:

• Should I dump stocks on a distributor in order to meet the current sales target or should I find ways of creating demand?
• Should I sell this medicine even if the side effects have not been fully tested?
• Should I report higher quarterly earnings by valuing stocks higher and adjust them in time for the annual report?
• Should I recommend the client against what he/she feels is the right course of action, even if it means I won't get future work from them if I disagree with them?

All the above situations arise from an 'attachment' to the results of one's action rather than doing the right action. The right action in this case is set in the context of one's conscience. The purpose of the Gita is to rid us of our illusions and attachment in the pursuit of our svadharma. What is svadharma? Literally, it is "one's own way", determined by our unique DNA! It is what makes us tick, what makes us who we are.

Each person's svadharma is his/her own and holds the greatest attraction to him/her. However attractive/easy another person's dharma seems, you should never follow it. You should follow your true vocation. The path might be strewn with thorns but that path is yours and yours alone. By treading your own path, you never have regrets and grow as a person.

By treading your chosen path with a sense of devotion to duty, you also demonstrate a willingness to live by the consequences of your choice, as it is yours and yours alone. Nobody forced you into it, and nobody can force you out of it. So if it means a change in career paths, do so by all means. But once you have changed, be prepared to live with the consequences.

I chose consulting as a career because I felt it represented the right balance between learning, business and interpersonal interactions. The path I have taken has been tough, yes, but I am proud at sticking to my choice. I have taken the rough with the smooth, and a year and a half after I joined consulting, I am completely at peace with myself. The paths are never easy, but it is your willingness to fight it out and stick to the choices that counts.

That's all fine, the reader might say. "You have got a job that you like. Great! But that is not the same for me... I was forced into a banking job because there was more money there. All I really wanted to do was marketing. I was forced into a job because of the money - I have a family to support". People often say they are 'forced' into doing certain jobs/tasks. Such short term aberrations do occur and are quite common in fact. But then, they are the outcomes of their own desires.

If I desire something and expect it to fall in my lap, it is not going to happen. I have to work to get it. If the path is tough, then I live with it. I work hard at whatever life throws at me, even if it is something that I dislike.

At the same time, if I am forced into something that I 'dislike', I have to ensure that I am always on the lookout for something that my heart lies in, so that, if the opportunity presents itself I am not found napping.

When you do something with your heart and soul, you often end up creating a competitive advantage that none can replicate. Given that 'competitive advantage' is what businesses are endlessly in search of, finding where your heart lies and working that to your employer's advantage is something that will be mutually beneficial in the long run! This feeling of dedication of one's heart and soul is what is called vikarma elsewhere in the Gita. But then, that is the subject matter for another post :) - enough for now!

Talks on the Gita - a precursor

My current project is quite hectic... long nights, high stress and all that. And expectedly, when you come close to 'killing yourself for a living' (as a colleague of mine aptly put it), that is when your interest in philosophy really kicks in! :) - Shubhang Shankar, another of my colleagues at A.T.Kearney, can vouch for this as well!

And what better way to re-visit philosophy than to take up a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita?

"Talks on the Gita" by Acharya Vinoba Bhave is one of the simplest and most beautiful expositions on the Gita that one can ever come across. It is a life changing book in every sense of the word. Just reading it makes one's wandering mind feel at rest. This is going to be the first of a series of nuggets from the wonderful fountainhead of the philosophy of life that is the Gita. I shall start with a small selection of quotes from the book and as time passes, augment it with more experiences/observations.

So here goes:
The Gita is set in the context of the Mahabharata, a truly outstanding work of a 100,000 verses that gives new meaning to the word "epic".

On the Mahabharata, the author says:

"The Mahabharata tells us clearly that none but God is wholly free from blemish ... The Mahabharata describes human life as a fabric woven out of both black and white threads. Himself standing aloof, Bhagavan Vyasa projects on the screen of the world a picture made up of both light and shade, of the universal movement"

On the Gita, the author says:

"The Gita is the Upanishad of the Upanishads...Almost every idea necessary for the flowering of a full life occurs in the Gita"

The first chapter of the Gita, where Arjuna's despondency is pictured, is a fantastic context-setter for the rest of the Gita, because it talks about the fundamental human dilemma that everyone faces in the course of daily life, or the pursuit of svadharma as the Gita calls it. When one follows a choice that one makes and the consequences of the choice lead to seemingly unpleasant situations, how does one respond?

• Does one question the very choice that one took up in the first place?
• Does one flinch in the face of unpleasantness and choose to run away or choose to stand and face the consequences?
• In the face of a choice with an unpleasant consequence, issues of "morality" frequently crop up (note that 'morality' normally never interferes with actions when the choices are pleasant! ) - how do we overcome the barriers we put in front of ourselves and pursue the path of action, and detach our minds from the consequences?

The first chapter, titled the Yoga of Despondency, deals with Arjuna's dilemma in terms of the above questions. I shall discuss this in greater detail in the next post

Of Wodehouse, Vedanta and Long distance runs...Part II

Been ages since I blogged. Need to get back to a more disciplined habit again. Maybe keeping the posts shorter should help!

Nearly 8 months have flown by since the last post, yet the title for the blog seems surprisingly fitting. So many incidents in the past few months can still be attributed to Wodehouse, Vedanta and Long distance runs... though more figuratively than literally.

I have always been an admirer of PG Wodehouse's brilliant style of wit and the way he takes a 'not-too-serious' view of life. I implement it in my own way by cracking "witticisms" (the purists may sneer and say .. "PJ" - but who cares! :P) and taking potshots at normal, day-to-day situations. Am thinking of putting up a collection of my PJs on this blog. Should be up shortly... Life ain't worth taking too seriously.., so don't!

One of my friends (Shubhang) used to love the quote below:

" First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win" - Mahatma Gandhi

The same way, PJs are infectious :-) . It has been over a year to convert some of my colleagues to my way of thinking, but the Force shall prevail :). As for Vedanta, life teaches lessons on detachment all the time... and the essence of Vedanta seems to be "Detachment". The true karmayogi is supposed to be Detached from the consequences yet 'engaged' in action.. that is a remarkable balance to achieve. There have been just a few instances in my life where I could genuinely say I was in that state. But it was a 'divine' feeling to experience!It should be possible to achieve that state more regularly with discipline... need to work that out. And long distance runs! I Completed the Mumbai half marathon in January this year and have been running off and on afterwards.. it is a PHENOMENAL feeling to get.. tired and excited at the same time. Waiting in the queue for nearly an hour and a half immediately after the marathon, to collect my completion certificate was a pain beyond words though... AARGH!! There were a lot of things to learn from the marathon, the primary ones being

• It is not the person who runs fastest that wins the race, it is the one with the greatest average speed!
• It is no use straining yourself in the beginning, to drop out of the race later
• Never go by what other people say! Have complete belief in yourself..
• Warm up (preparation) before a race is crucial!

One of the biggest complaints against consultants as a race is that " They think and say a lot but do very little" - I shall prove them wrong!

Of Wodehouse, Vedanta and Long Distance Runs Part I

Nearly six months after my last post of any note, I revive my rusty literary brain again to think blog for a few minutes. Thanks Tahseen .. you have ensured that my New Year resolution goes unbroken… at least for the time being :)

My first instinct when I start this piece is to give an excel sheet-by-excel sheet description of all the interesting bits of consulting I have done over the past six months, but what the heck… don’t think that my readers will be interested in the intricacies of the Poisson Distribution and Spiked Demand anyway :D

When I chose consulting, my choice was heavily influenced by a nebulous concept of work-life (im?)balance…Oh, and by the way, I have a very Indian, and in fact, very Mumbaiyya concept of work-life balance – as long as I leave at 8.30 AM and am back by 10 PM, I consider it a nice, relaxed day … damn those weekends! :P

Jokes apart, life in consulting has been good. How can I crib when an Optra comes, picks me up and drops me back at home and work five days a week most of the time? And what more proof of adaptability do I need when the client thinks that I am an engineer, completely oblivious to the fact that sine waves, lognormal distributions, Fourier transforms and the nth law of thermodynamics are as obviously intuitive to this Chartered accountant, as Tamil is to an Egyptian?

But then folks, there you have it. Consulting is the ultimate test of adaptability – of the capability to learn new things. And if you have won the trust of the client through your knowledge of the subject and an understanding of the practicalities of his/her situation, you have won a friend for life, and probably a bit of repeat business as well J.

One thing consulting (and I am sure this is true of every job that a WIMWIan lands up as well) makes me really ponder about is ‘the meaning of work’ and ‘the meaning of life’ . Remember Frankl’s “Man search for Meaning”? I am DEFINITELY not saying that today’s corporate life, however striking the resemblance is to a rat-race, comes anywhere close to the horrors of a concentration camp. But it does force us to lead lives where we are forced to run without knowing why we are running. Notice the use of the word ‘why’ instead of ‘where’ (I believe I have answered the ‘where’ part sufficiently for myself. My duty (thanks to the Gita) has been fixed as the search of excellence in my chosen profession. Wherever it leads me I am happy to go!). What do we achieve by doing whatever we do?

Of Lions, Politics and the Gita

It has been a looooooong time since I blogged. But finally, a completely chill weekend and a cup of coffee has made me decide to revive my rusty literary fingers with a small writing session on blogosphere once again.

Quite a bit has happened in my life since I bid adieu to IIMA in my last post… For starters, I got just about a week off before I joined work . Consultancy beckoned… and so did aamchi Mumbai. Shifting from campus was not that big a deal, but getting my parents to shift into the city was an additional responsibility. But thank God, that went off without a hitch.

I have accumulated a lot of thoughts during my three-month old career in consultancy, which I have been itching to put into words. Apart from the substance of these thoughts, I also realized I had spent too much time with Nat Geo and Discovery channel in my formative years J. The similarities between living in the managerial fast lane and the life that many animals live out there in the wild are striking. I now understand the meaning of the phrases ‘rat race’ and ‘dog-eat-dog world’ in their truest sense. Let me draw an analogy.

Take the instance of a male lion’s life in the African Savannah. The male lion’s entire adult life revolves around getting mating rights over the females and defending his ‘harem’ from other adult lions. Territorial disputes are a way of life for our harassed, yet majestic feline. There is no such thing as a harmless male adult in lion society; each is interested in building its genetic pool and thwarting its competitors for survival.

Now consider life in a city like Mumbai, which is renowned for its ‘survivor’ attitude. Not only do the people here have to fend for themselves in order to get ahead in life, they also have to be wary of other individuals encroaching upon their ‘space’ in the race for resources. The same behaviour gets exhibited in different ways in different spheres of economic activity. At the lower levels, the auto-wallahs fight their daily battle by trying to extract that one rupee extra from the unwary customer. In the corporate world, people’s ambitions to get to the higher levels or to protect their current jobs are paramount drivers of their behaviour. This desire makes them aggressive. Power and politics rule the roost and establishing one’s territories as wide as possible is a way of life. I observe these ‘instincts’ at work every day in my project.

But given the phenomenal success of our species in infesting pretty much every part of the planet, I often wonder what is the reason in fighting tooth and nail to establish power hierarchies in corporate circles… does it have any meaning whatsoever? What is it that they want to achieve in life? And will these ‘territorial disputes’ help people achieve whatever they seek to do?

This was the primary question I posed to myself recently. I found something which resembled a satisfactory answer to the question (and not unsurprisingly, it related to animal behaviour J), but surprisingly I realized that it was not so much an interest in these ‘territorial disputes’ as it was a question of that elusive thing called happiness. Will I be happy running the race on a day-to-day basis? It was then that I turned to my source of eternal advice and comfort – The Bhagavad Gita

The Gita talks about the way of action: devoting oneself to the achievement of excellence in one’s chosen sphere of activity without bothering about the results of the process. And to borrow a line from one of my favourite professors in IIMA, ‘you should find joy in the process, and not in the result’. In a way, I also think the Gita talks about choices. People (especially out of B-school campuses and into their jobs) often question the choice they made in taking or not taking a particular company or field, so much so that attrition rates in the first year after leaving campus is often in excess of 60-70%. The Gita on the other hand, I believe, talks about picking a choice based on the available information and not looking back at it to see whether it was the right thing or not but rather, to do that which is needed to make the choice work.

But will doing ‘that which is needed’ entail doing something unethical or immoral or against one’s code of conduct? I for one firmly believe that there is very little role for aggressive conflict in people’s lives. But such conflicts are a reality in everyday corporate life. My sattvik nature rebels against getting into the quicksand of conflict, but then how do I defend myself when being faced with it? My ‘survivor’ instinct tells me that I should become aggressive myself but I somehow believe that this is not the way I want to live my life… but then, having made the choice to be in the field of management, I need to do ‘that which is needed’ to make my choice work. What will it involve? It simply involves defending my territory against ‘encroachment’, clearly demarcating my boundaries and letting people know kindly but firmly that intrusions beyond those boundaries are not permitted.

I have my place in this world; I am a unique individual and nothing which other people say will make me question my abilities or my capacity to learn from others. I am here to do something which I have chosen to do and I will do it within the framework of my morals and my way of life. I will find happiness in doing the thing I have chosen. I WILL NOT have regrets. At the same time I will do what I think is fit to make the world a better place for all of us to live in. If I have to bide my time, so be it.

I now feel a bit sheepish at writing all these on my blog but I believe this is something all of us face as adults in an intensely competitive world waiting outside for us.

Diminishing marginal returns...

We had a marketing class today where the professor talked about the concept of diminishing returns applying to life in general ( I don't remember the context in which he mentioned it anyway, but then, in Marketing I guess it really does not matter :-)). Coming to think of it, the law of diminishing returns is at its punishing best in any performance driven scenario. Take IIMA for example. Here we find most students braving sleepless nights and nightmarish loads in the first year to struggle to be among the top. Beyond a point, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain productivity. Often it is the case that people drop off to sleep while poring over their books. The less sleep we get and the more work we put in,the more difficult it becomes difficult to get proportionately higher grades. There are a blessed few, who manage to extract the best out of their productive time and manage to beat the law of diminishing marginal returns. But for the rest of the people, this law is a poignant reminder of our failings (ironic...me saying failings, when many people would give an eyetooth to be here and think that the privileged ones who make it to IIMA have near divine status).
But then, one of the greatest challenges in our lives is bound to be one of extracting the most of our productive time to achieve the sort of results and fame that we often dream of... But how to go about doing that? I am reminded of Lord Krishna's immortal saying here:
" Karmanyevaadhikarasthe Maaphaleshu Kadachana "
"Do your Best without expecting the fruits of your efforts " and leave the rest to God.

I have never come across a more profound statement...
Now why am I blogging without getting down to studies? Fact is, I am feeling sleeppy after a very nice dinner (They actually serve good food in the mess sometimes :-)) and thought a bit of blogging will wake me up nicely...

In fact, this exercise has been so effective that I lost sleepiness halfway thru this blog and started feeling guilty :(...so that's all for now.

Blogggin' Off
Sitan aka Rangarajan

Philosophy??? naah...just practical lessons I learnt

The last few days have awoken the sleeping philosopher in me. I thought I had done a decent job during my mid term exams. Only now do I realise that I have come up woefully short in meeting the expectations of the teaching assistants who actually correct the mid term papers.

What does this all have in store for a guy who came to the best b-school in asia pacific with a truckload of expectations?

A lot, coming to think of it; and this is probably true for all people who find themselves messing up one exam or another.

Learnings:
1. do not try to jump to the skies with just a pair of sneakers on. You need the ammunition to do it.
2. better take to the skies in a set of small jumps than try to fly. You will most probably land with a thud if you are too ambitious.
3. be realistic in your expectations . You cannot expect to become a genius overnight. But what you can do is to keep plodding away steadily.
4. Never let your efforts slacken. Giving up is simply useless.
5. Have faith in god at all times.