Tempest

Sunday 18 November 2007

He got the whole world in his hands...

Amidst the glitter and sounds of clinking crystals I gazed with admiration at my uncle who had the whole world in his hands. At fifty, he is among the top five men of India’s most successful MNC. He sat at our lunch table at the Hilton, with an ease that spoke of luxury and a humility that could humble a king. He had started out like any other young man with an ambition burning in his heart to lead his life his own way and earn his laurels through his own hard work. This isn’t a tribute to my uncle. He has many more mountains to climb and much more of the world that he still wants to enthrall with his enterprising charm and voracious successes. Someday, given half the chance I’d like to write a book about him.

This post is just about young men and women and ambitions and what success can be defined as. I won’t try to kid us all by saying am going to talk about it as a holistic subject. I am simply going to try and define or rather comprehend what I think success or having lived a successful life is in my mind. It’s all I’ve been thinking of lately. It’s the one question if answered will probably lay down the general structure that my life is going to take.

I love the word passion. I won’t call myself a very vocally passionate person. But I am passionate about certain things that can get my blood to boil and my heartbeat to race and my mind and my body to tremble in indignation with youthful idealism. These are not just words or statements. These are things that mean a lot to me. A dream means a lot to me. If I were to meet a man/woman with a dream to build the largest chain of news cafes, or hosiery mills or even an honest dream of setting up a small dhabha and making it the best in town I would fall sucker to the passion, to the dream, to the desire to make it happen. I am passionate about wanting to make a difference. I am passionate about suddenly taking a year off to go off on an NGO project in some god forsaken town of Orrissa if I could so much as make a difference to the lives of five fellow human beings. I am passionate about passion. Passion for music, passion for dance, passion for sport, any passion that anybody would have for anything. I respect that. Most of all I am passionate about writing. I don’t think a passion or talent should be harnessed or controlled. I think it should be allowed to grow wild to take whatever form it possibly can. It should definitely be honed and nurtured, but never harnessed.

I am also a firm believer of the combination of hard work and passion. I don’t think talent comes easy. It definitely is the first step towards that spectacular career. But I also believe that the path to success via the nurturing and honing of a talent is slow, tedious and sometimes fruitless. There are some rare instances wherein the path to passion is very much on the lines of the path to making money but such is not always the case. I know at this point all this sounds random. Let me exemplify.

I spoke with this composer/singer the other day. I have never met him in my life, yet passion spoke. He talked about his ambition to create a record breaking international album. He spoke about how he had been one of the most successful employees at an advertising firm and how one day at the peak of his career, he decided his heart lied in music...how one day he resigned and gave up all fears of money and security and put all the fight he had in him to creating that music that gave him ultimate joy. Just joy. He lives for the pure exhilaration that composing gives him. He did not take the risk knowing he was good at it. In fact quite the opposite, he didn’t have a clue whether he was good enough to make it. But he decided that he would rather put his sweat and his blood into trying to make a career out of something that gave him pure joy rather than work extremely hard to earn money from a job which was just that. A job. I know his story sounds cliché but it requires immense courage to do what he did. He asked me if I was willing to work my entire life in a firm that would probably give me monetary success or whether I had the guts to let lose and do what I love doing….writing. I didn’t have an answer. But I knew that this carefree spirit had spoken the language of my heart.

That same evening, I met a friend I had recently made. Another mechanical engineer, though not run of the mill. An intelligent, above average man with a different kind of passion. He had dreams, dreams that I am sure with the ambition glittering in his eyes and the hard work he readily puts in, will come true. His decided path is a future MBA leading to a career in consulting. He does not have just the random ambition that most software graduates have in common. He does not just want to make tons of money. He wants to be a consultant because he believes he will be good at it and even if he isn’t he wants to do it because he claims he enjoys it. Yet, he knows for sure he will make money, tons of it, out of this particular passion. It’s a decided path. It has a known future. It is secure, yet it is still a fight for a passion. He asked me if I did not want that kind of success, that kind of sense of achievement from my career. I didn’t have an answer. But I knew that his sense of logic and essence of attainment is something that I connected with.

Both ambitions are pure. Both I understand. Here I have not mentioned the rat race that only works to earn money because it is survival. I have only mentioned the two pure examples. And I am afraid because I want both. No, I am not talking about money here. I know me and I can safely say that it does not hold too much temptation for me. But I am talking about a sense of achievement. And I want both kinds. I want to pursue those passions that make my blood boil. I want to write and I want to do something with it. I want to experience the tumultuous joy from the minor successes of this passion and the heart breaking agony from its many failures. But, I also want the sweet victory of a corporate battle fought and won. I want to know that I can exist in this world of today and hold my ground when facing the challenges in a boardroom that I have studied to encounter and defeat. I know all of you will say do both. But nothing in life comes with half measure. You have to set your soul on it and give it everything you got for otherwise it isn’t worth it. Then giving everything you got to that one passion is success. Without an iota of slack, without an iota of mercy, without an iota of regret…this is success. Where neither success nor failure matter, just giving it your all does because you know this is what you want. Its then that you can say ‘he got the whole world in his hand’…

How does one decide? How does one become fearless? How does one make the choice? How does one do both? How does one have the cake and eat it too?

Labels: confessions of a dangerous mind, sermons

Posted by Pavitra :: 13:27 :: 21 comments