Beware, as you ascend in Life, in career, in
society, in name and fame, of the Master Feller – Hubris!
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| Tarun Tejpal |
Much
is being written and told of former Tehelka
Editor-in-Chief, Tarun Tejpal’s rise and fall this past week. Almost everyone
who knows him is sure that he was struck by hubris – excessive pride and a
presumption that one is infallible! Because nothing else can explain why
Tejpal, now 50, and one of India’s finest thinkers, editors and writers, would
want to allegedly sexually outrage his much junior colleague, who not only is
his daughter’s age, but is also her best friend? As one commentator, Vijay
Simha, wrote yesterday: “His argument that it
was a fleeting consensual encounter suggests that he may be in a state of
denial. He may be having difficulty processing the consequences of his actions.
Friendly or hostile is not the point. Tejpal simply shouldn’t have been there.
A legal victory, which he seems to think he will have, is a mere footnote. The
only real authority a human being has is moral. All other forms of authority
are fugacious. Tejpal has ceded moral authority.”
Tejpal was once my senior colleague. Indeed I
am saddened by what has happened. But I am not here to preach morality in Life.
I may hardly qualify to be able to do that. But let me warn
you about hubris. Because I too have been felled by hubris.
There was a time when everything about my Life
was just the way I had wanted it to be. I come for a middle-class background.
So, as I grew up, for various reasons, I developed this urge to want to succeed
beyond even the wildest imaginations of my family. I wanted name, fame and
money. To be sure, I got all of that. By the time I was 35, I had it all. I had
built a very successful consulting Firm, I lived in a premium neighborhood, I
was famous in the industry we worked in and I had money. Then I made mistakes
with the way we chose to grow our business. I was warned that this was not the
way to go about growth – by my soulmate and partner, my wife. I was warned by senior
advisors who we had on our Firm’s management council. I was warned by my
colleagues. But hubris always strikes stealthily. You will never know that you
are thinking of yourself as infallible. On the contrary, hubris will wear the
mask of humility and complete down-to-earthiness. It will make you believe that
you can conquer the world. It will make you think that all those who are
offering you sane counsel are wimps. And just when you believe that nothing
ever can go wrong with your Life, everything really will! My decisions blew up
on my face. My Firm’s fortunes came crashing. And in no time we were bankrupt! All
that I had painstakingly built up - from my career to my Firm to my finances –
went up in smoke. Everything that I was attached to was taken away from me.
It was very, very, very difficult to accept
whatever was happening to me. I resisted. I fought. I cried. I sulked. But Life
only got more difficult to face. It hurt me so much that I had failed and
fallen. I desperately wanted to let go of the past and I wanted to know how I
could be peaceful, happy and content.
That’s when, by sheer accident, actually cosmic
design, I stumbled upon my Guru, Eknath Easwaran’s (1910~1999) book Gandhi The Man. Easwaran talks about the
evolution of spirituality in the ordinary mortal – who was pretty much like you
and me – M.K.Gandhi, eventually making him a Mahatma. Easwaran shares a verse, and I reproduce a relevant part
of it below, from the second chapter of
the Bhagavad Gita that Gandhi
meditated on each morning for over 50 years of his Life.
Arjuna asks Krishna: “What are the marks of the
man who lives in wisdom, completely established in himself?” (Himself here
means ‘his true, real, Self’). Krishna replies:
“….He lives in wisdom
Who sees himself
in all and all in him,
Whose love for the
Lord of Love has consumed
Every selfish
desire and sense-craving
Tormenting the
heart. Not agitated
By grief, nor
hankering after pleasure,
He lives free from
lust and fear and anger.
Fettered no more
by selfish attachments,
He is not elated
by good fortune
Nor depressed by
bad. Such is the seer…”
I too have found great value in meditating on this
verse. As I struggled to get over my fall, and my losses, Easwaran’s commentary
on learnings from Gandhi’s Life and this verse helped me immensely. I soon
discovered that what’s more valuable and enduring in Life are not what we
acquire for ourselves in our lifetime but what we will leave behind – by way of
a message, by way of creating something that will continue to be useful for
generations to come, by way of leaving the world better than we found it!
To be wise, to live intelligently, is not
difficult. It is a choice. All of us – you, me, everyone – will be struck by
hubris at some time or the other, in our own unique ways. When you understand
that Life is far more meaningful than satisfying your sensory pleasures and
amassing wealth or seeking fame, you will have built the best armor around you
to protect yourself from that wily predator – hubris. But the interesting irony
about Life is that – in big or small measure – unless you are felled by hubris,
you will never awaken!
