Commonalities and
convergences seem to abound much-o-much in the works of renowned corporate honchos Rajat
Gupta and Gurcharan Das.
I guess not much of
literary discussions have come up on this subject!
And hence me thought of venturing with added delight into this post!
And well, I wish to
make it known right here at the outset that, this little post is no way meant to
pick on one author at the expense of another. To each their muse, and to each
their charm!
Still, a comparative
outlook [the likes of which Spivak advocates] helps analyse and evaluate a work
of art a tad better to help ‘the reader’ in ‘we’ to form sound evaluations and
better perspectives to approaching texts and er… um… their authors as well, ain’t
it?
And hence also this
post!
Coming now to the
point of our present ponder!
Well, both Rajat Gupta
and Gurcharan Das were once big shots on the corporate ladder. Both had made it
big in their own vibrant ways on this same ladder towards fame and popularity.
Both have had the Bhagawad Gita as
their inspiration. [You might want to read our past post on Rajat Gupta here]
However, divergences
galore from here on between the two! While to Rajat Gupta, the Gita becomes a delightful shield and a
‘shelter’ in his ‘time of storm’, for Gurcharan Das the Gita is more a source of strength and succour for all of the time!
Gurcharan Das finds in
the Gita various principles of
leadership and management beautifully enshrined and contained within the
temperament and the actions of each of its cast and characters.
And unlike Rajat Gupta
who had to beat a kinda hasty retreat from the corporate world and fade into oblivion,
and ‘become’ a writer, more to defend himself, Gurcharan Das gracefully bowed
out of the corporate world at the age of fifty, to ‘be’ a writer, just to follow
the call of his own sweet heart!
Rajat Gupta, a
corporate honcho, cites mostly from Tagore and a little from Kipling!
On the other hand, in
Gurcharan Das you can see a beautiful literary being inscribed within a nerdy
corporate honcho!
He quotes left, right
and centre on all things literary! Be it on Greek mythology or on British
Literature, be it on dharma or on the cardinal virtues, be it on envy, where he
light-o-lighta attacks Roy - Arundhati Roy on her essay after the 11 September
2001 terrorist attack, which according to him is a sad reflection of an envy,
prompted by America’s success, or be it on his lovely teachers at Harvard, or
on his take on the Jews as being victims of a ‘general envy’, he’s got it all
in his almost 500 page long gripping read of sorts!
And yes, his take on ‘envy’
is super-amazing! I think this part forms the crux and the cream of the cake! And
so startling and shocking that he gives some real insights into envy of the ‘academic
type’, where jealousy, envy and strife are so rife that it’s much more
dangerous and sinister than even the ones they have in the corporate world, he
opines!
Deivameyyy!
;-)
After Arundhati Roy,
his next target is Anil! Anil Ambani! Says he –
In 2007, Anil Ambani
was the fifth richest person in the world according to the Forbes list of
billionaires, but he was consumed with a Duryodhana-like envy for his more
accomplished older brother, Mukesh, who was placed a notch higher on the list.
Says Das, Gurcharan
Das –
I saw in this
corporate and family feud a morality play and I wondered if the Mahabharata could shed some light.
The first scene of the
play opens in Mumbai’s Kabutarkhana in 1964. The Ambani children are growing up
in a single room in a fifth floor walk-up ‘chawl’ along with six members of
their family. Their father, Dhirubhai Ambani, has just set himself up as a
trader in synthetic yarn in the Pydhonie market. The son of a modest
schoolteacher from a village near Porbandar in Gujarat (not far from where
Mahatma Gandhi was born), Dhirubhai has returned form Aden with Rs 15,000 in
capital.
But here I stop dear
folks, to help y’all grab a copy of the book for yourself and plunge sweet into
this amazing read during the weekend!
I just wanted to give
y’all my favourite quotes that I found so yummy from this unputdownable read –
Wait please!
Before you proceed any
further, please promise yourself that you’d get a copy of Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle
Art of Dharma – a copy, as sweet copy, a chella copy exclusively for
yourself! Will you??? ;-)
And the second promise
I expect of you dear reader is that, please read the book, and the quotes that
follow also, in a delightful ambience, with some light music for background
picks, in a quiet, cosy and comfy place, with a cuppa in hand, and nothing else
for company, to relish and to cherish Das the writer! An inspiration for all of
us with a little literary soul deep within!
Over to Das, Gurcharan
Das, dear reader -
The Mahabharata is suspicious of ideology.
It rejects the idealistic, pacifist position of Yudhishthira as well as
Duryodhana’s amoral view. Its own position veers towards the pragmatic
evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world
but do not allow yourself to be exploited.
The last line is
simply amazing, ain’t it!
They say, reiteration
of a phrase or a line is for added emphasis, and so here I go again!
‘Adopt a friendly face
to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited.’
Adds Das, Gurcharan
Das –
Turning the other
cheek sends a wrong signal to cheats. With my background in Western philosophy,
I was tempted to view the ideas of the epic, especially dharma, from a modern
viewpoint.
I sometimes wonder why
a pre-modern text like the Mahabharata ought to matter in our postmodern world.
What sort of meaning does the past hold for us? What is the relationship
between the original historical meaning of the text (assuming we can discover it)
and its meaning to our present times?
Take, for example, the
game of dice. If the episode is merely an enactment of an ancient ritual then
it obviously has limited moral significance. But the Mahabharata seeks other
explanations, for example, in Yudhishthira’s weakness for gambling, which
suggests that the epic believes that the game does have moral meaning.
The point is that we
should not be guilty of reading too much ‘into’ the text, but try to read ‘out’
as much as we can for our lives. There may also be more than one meaning.
Wowww! Endlessly
amazing Das! Gurcharan Das! And Das continues...
When I repeat certain
actions, I accumulate karma of a certain kind, which builds a certain kind of
character and predisposes me to act in a certain way. Karma for me is not
something supernatural but svabhava, ‘an inclination to act in a certain way’
as a result of my habits, which have been formed as a result of my past actions.
So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually human acts do bear fruit,
even though the fruit is invisible, one might interpret ‘fruit’ to mean the
building of character through repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly
aware that repeated actions had a way of changing one’s inclinations to act in
a certain way. That inclination is character.
Nature is full of
examples of dharma-like goodness. Dolphins will help lift an injured companion
for hours to help it survive. Blackbirds and thrushes give warning calls when
they spot a hawk even if it means risking their own lives.
Wowww! Wowww!!
The envy I encountered
in the business world, however, was nothing compared to what I would see later
in the academic world. ‘The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so
little is at stake,’ Henry Kissinger was fond of saying. There is a certain
misery attached to the academic life, no doubt, in which envy plays a
considerable part. As Max Weber noted, ‘Do you think that, year after year, you
will be able to stand to see one mediocrity after another promoted over you,
and still not become embittered and dejected? Of course, the answer is always: “Naturally,
I live only for my calling.” Only in a very few cases have I found [young
academics] able to undergo it without suffering spiritual damage.
The Jews have been
victim to a general envy by the unsuccessful for the successful. Forced out of
their homeland 2,000 years ago by Roman oppression, they spread across Europe
and prospered spectacularly in many places, including Vienna and Berlin, till Hitler
took over. Joseph Epstein tells us that in the ‘Vienna of 1936, a city that was
90 per cent Catholic and 9 per cent Jewish, Jews accounted for 60 per cent of
the city’s lawyers, more than half its physicians, more than 90 per cent of its
advertising executives, and 123 of its 174 newspaper editors. And this is not to
mention the prominent places Jews held in banking, retailing, and intellectual
and artistic life. The numbers four or five years earlier for Berlin are said
to have been roughly similar.’
Is it surprising that
Nazism had its greatest resonance in these two cities? Before killing the Jews,
Germans and Austrians felt the need to humiliate their victims: ‘They had
Jewish women cleaning floors, had Jewish physicians scrubbing the cobblestone streets
of Vienna with toothbrushes as Nazi youth urinated on them and forced elderly
Jews to do hundreds of deep knee bends until they fainted or sometimes died.
All this suggests a vicious evening of the score that has the ugly imprint of envy
on the loose. The Jews in Germany and Austria had succeeded not only beyond
their numbers but also, in the eyes of the envious, beyond their right - and
now they would be made to pay for it. Envy was being acted out, as never
before.’ It led to the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War.
After emerging
victorious from the Kurukshetra War, Yudhishthira feels responsible for the
suffering of so many and is filled with remorse. From remorse is born his
commitment to ahimsa, ‘non-violence’. When the epic says, ‘Great king, you weep
with all creatures’, it announces the next step in Yudhishthira’s moral
journey. When the feeling of having wronged a specific individual is
transformed to a general feeling of anrishamsya, ‘compassion for others’, one
has made the leap. One learns to identify not only with their suffering, but
also their happiness. One begins to ‘rejoice with those who rejoice’. This leads
to acts of benevolence. Both ahimsa and anrishamsya are double negatives, but
obviously they do not have a weak connotation in Sanskrit as double negatives
do in English. They require the acknowledging of the other person as the
Mahabharata reminds us:
Who has in his heart
always the well-being of others, and is wholly given, in acts, thoughts, and in
speech, to the good of others, he alone knows what dharma is.
Yudhishthira has come
to understand the right way to engage with the world.
What a beautiful statement this above line makes, ain’t it folks? And hence i repeat it -
Yudhishthira has come to understand the right way to engage with the world.
And writers like
Gurcharan Das are the right way to engage with the literary world that’s
contained within the beautiful Mahabharata!
May his tribe
increase!
to be continued...
image: amazondotcom
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