A lot can happen over an honest coffee!

Honest conversations are the best means to grow relationships.

Underline honest. Most of us are in one relationship or the other at any point in time. Parent-Child, Husband-Wife, Boss-Team member, between siblings, Teacher-Student, between companions, whatever. And we love most of the people in those relationships. We may not see it this way all the time, but all these relationships need nurturing. And almost always, we fail to say what's on our mind, because we are worried about hurting the other person with our honesty, transparency and opinions. Yet, we yearn for that other person to understand how we perceive her or him. In all these situations, it is always important to have these honest conversations – perhaps over a coffee. As the Café Coffee Day tagline goes, “A lot can happen over coffee!”

It may also be true, in some cases, that an honest conversation may not necessarily lead the other person to see reason and change himself or herself or their attitude towards you. It doesn’t mean your integrity hasn’t helped. It has. It gives you the opportunity to move on, now that you have shared what you honestly felt and always wanted to.

True love really means saying what you must, when you must without mincing words. Out of this an opportunity emerges for the relationship to get stronger, for the person you are having the conversation with to evolve into a better human being and that really is an important part of serving humanity.

To serve another, you don't need to necessarily get involved in an NGO; all you need to do is to just have honest conversations.

Zen and the Art of Celebrating Life

Don't grieve anything. Celebrate everything. Success. Failure. Defeat. Crisis. Tragedy. Joy. Sorrow. Everything!

Celebrating when we are successful or happy, we all know how to do it and do it very well. But celebrating failure and defeat? Well, you first overcome the initial sense of shock and surprise from each setback in your Life and replace it with celebration. How can we celebrate a loss __ of something, someone __ you may well wonder. Here’s the nub - you don't (have to) celebrate the loss itself. But you can always celebrate the times you had with that something, that someone. You can celebrate the learning that you are now being subjected to through experiencing this loss. You can celebrate the opportunity called this moment.

Harnish Patel, 35, was among the victims of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. A British-Indian, he was on a backpacking trip to India and was at the Leopold Cafe that evening when the terrorists struck. At least three bullets passed through his legs and chest, skimming past his bones and major organs. 7 years ago Harnish was lying in the ICU of Mumbai's Jaslok Hospital with tubes sticking through his legs and chest, not knowing if he would ever walk again. But with determination and grit, Patel, who narrowly escaped death, has not just overcome his injuries but also astounded doctors, family and friends by running in a marathon and joining the British Royal Navy. Just four years after the gruesome attack that left him debilitated, he was the flag-bearer for England in the team-welcome and victory ceremonies for the London 2012 Olympics! Simple learning: do you think Patel would have even gotten out of his hospital bed had he stayed grieving?

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore (1861~1914), has said, “If you cry that the sun has gone out of your Life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.” To grieve is to see Life through a myopic perspective. To celebrate Life is to see it on a 70mm or an IMAX canvas! When you zoom out and see your Life from a higher plane, you see each event as a blessing!

Stay with the truth, sleep well, stay blessed!

In any situation, stay with the truth.

In a workshop session I led yesterday, a young manager asked me if speaking the truth was worth it at all. He said, “I feel most comfortable saying things as they are. I prefer being in-the-face. But I am soon discovering that people don’t like it. I am losing friends and relationships.”

The manager raises an interesting question. We too have been told, or have sometimes experienced, that staying with the truth can be a competitive disadvantage. Sometimes, we wonder if speaking our mind will make others uncomfortable or even hurt them. We desist from speaking the truth also because we want to cover-up. But let me tell you, from my experience, that truth is a liberator. It is a healer. It is a very deadly weapon, a brahmastra, in our arsenal. I believe we fight shy of using it because we are worried about becoming vulnerable in this ‘big, bad, cold and merciless’ world.

Fundamentally, our world view has to change. The world is not made up of hypocrites, cynics, facists, rapists and terrorists alone. They are but a small population from all of humanity. Just like shadows in the dark are amplified by our fears, so are the deeds of a few men and women in the darkness of our minds and hearts. Arise and awaken to the glorious sunshine of the rest of humanity. Making yourself vulnerable by clinging on to the truth, irrespective of the circumstance, alone will fetch you the love, compassion and warmth of like-minded people around you. If someone deserts you because you spoke the truth, then they really were not worth being in your Life. Period. Besides, when you stay with the truth you don’t have to remember what you said! Most importantly, having embraced the truth, you will sleep well. When you can sleep in peace, you are truly blessed. Nothing else, believe me, matters! 

When you flow with Life, you will find peace and joy ‘in’ you

Learn to flow with Life.

Life is like a river. It has a mind of its own. It does not worry about precipice or a fall, nor is it perturbed by the boulders on the path. A crevice is all it needs, to make progress and find its way. The best we can do, as people who have been created without our asking to be born, is to enjoy the scenery as Life flows. When we don't like what we see or experience, we can rave, rant, kick our feet, bury our heads in despair, but Life goes on – the way it wants to, not the way we wish it would! Such is the nature of Life. The only sensible option is to learn to appreciate the reality, accept it and to live with it.

Living is important. When you worry, you stop living. Even those who choose to go to mind-body-soul rejuvenation programs, are worrying. They are worrying about how the world will cope without them. They worry about their ability to 'endure' and 'survive' the program. Look at those words__endure and survive__they too are reflective of an inherent concern. So, when you worry, you have lost yet another moment of peace that was possible. And you begin to hunt for places where you will be peaceful. Temples, churches, mosques, gurudwaras, synagogues...a bar for some perhaps, a joint for others…you are forever seeking a place where you will find peace and joy! The best-kept secret is that when you start living, you will find these in you! The fifteenth century weaver, mystic and Master, Kabir (1440 ~ 1518) says it perfectly: "Do not go to the garden of flowers! O Friend! go not there; In your body is the garden of flowers. Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty."

Flow with Life. And you will find peace and joy overflowing from within you!

Break free from the tyranny of "I can't"

The biggest impediment to living your dreams is the view that whatever you want to do hasn't been done before and/or that you can't do it.

This is what I call 'starting trouble'. In the good old days here in India, we used to have Ambassador cars (we still have some of them on the roads). My family too had one. It was already a pretty old car by the time we bought it. And every once in a while, its ignition switch would fail and so we used to bring out a metal 'handle' from the boot and literally, physically crank the engine up. Or, if there was help available, we would push the vehicle in neutral gear for a while in a bid to start the engine with a jerk as the gears were switched! Almost all of us are like that old Ambassador car. We have trouble getting started on our journeys. We are willing to die, unknown to us, a million times in the few years that we are alive, doing things we don't like or love doing, than live the time we have on this planet fully! To live we need to awaken to the possibility that we too can achieve anything, absolutely anything, that we want.

So, to get started this morning on what can be a turning point in your Life, just consider what Mahatma Gandhi did. His greatest struggle was not about overthrowing the British. It was about 'How do you make an enslaved race think and feel equal to others when all around there is compelling evidence of the enslaving race's 'superiority'?' Porus Munshi, an innovator, thinker and author, says Gandhi found a way, by showing people the power of satyagraha and ahimsa. When people realized that they too could contribute to the freedom movement, they felt equal!

There’s a parallel here for us to delve into. We are all enslaved by our beliefs, our insecurities, our self-doubts. We must change the orbit of our thinking. The 'handle' we must use to crank up our engines is to awaken to the reality that we are all created equal. If you love painting, know that you too can become successful like M F Hussain, if you love writing fiction, you too can be insanely great like J K Rowling, if you love planes and flying, you too can own an airline like Air Asia's Tony Fernandez, if you want to change the world and serve, you too can become the next Gandhi or Mother Teresa. The key operative word here is love. And that love must be present and continuous – as in a verb! You must love whatever you do and your love for it must make you want to do it again, and again, and again – no matter what the impediments are. So, awaken. Break free from the tyranny of "I can't". Know that nothing can come in between you and your dream, unless you allow it to! Take flight, if you love something, go live it! 

In which Nithyanand, a Buddha, teaches me to live with ‘anand’ (inner joy) ‘nithya’ (daily)!!!

When you look for things that you don’t have, you remain incomplete. When you look at what you have, including who you have in your Life, you are complete!

Nithyanand - The Buddha

Yesterday, I spent a transformational hour with a young man called Nithyanand, in his 20s, who is visually special (I hate to call him visually impaired). He lives in Korrukkupet (a Chennai suburb). He commutes every day to Express Avenue Mall, where he works at an exhibition tour company called “Dialogue in the Dark” (Google them – go check them out). Nithya, as he prefers being called, says he doesn’t have any problem when I ask him how he “manages with Life on a day-to-day basis”: “Sir, we work on getting oriented to spaces and with basing all our responses to the velocity of sound around us. I take bus # 18 and get to work pretty much without a hitch. When I do have to cross the road, I just wait for a good, helpful soul. The Universe always has such people around. There are so many good people in this world. Someone always comes by to help me.” There’s a joie de vivre about the way Nithya is. He is happy, content and peaceful with the way he is. Actually he truly, simply is. There is no self-pity. There’s no lament. In fact, there’s so much dignity with which he conducts himself – even you don’t feel pity for the young man. You come away inspired. Now, how many times will you come away inspired after meeting a rank stranger for barely an hour?

Much of our grief and suffering comes from lamenting over what we don't have. This pushes us into a, often subconscious, depressive spiral out of which we rarely climb out. But always, when the focus shifts to what is, the result is magical. The reason why we struggle with making this shift from what isn't to what is, is that the negative is always seductive. Its reasoning power is far more logical. The good in us rarely speaks. It merely states. It does not profess, it doesn't argue, it doesn't convince. Nett Nett, we succumb to the wily designs of scarcity__what we don't have, what isn't__thinking. This results in incompleteness. Whereas, with all our quirks, defects, chinks, blemishes, scars and handicaps, we are complete. There’s so much abundance in our lives. Such is the way we have been created. To recognize this complete state of ours, we need to be in a state of total acceptance, we need to be peaceful.

My learning from Nithyanand: when there is peace within, when there is acceptance of the Life you have, the focus will shift to what is. And then the wholesomeness of your Life will become clear to you! This the way, we__you and me__too, just like Nithya, can become a Buddha – and experience ‘anand’ (inner joy) ‘nithya’ (daily)!

Be your own Master, make your Life count

Don't be a slave of your Life__of this lifetime. Be a Master.

Last week I met a senior manager at a large company, who had given 38 years of his Life to the company, and is serving a post-retirement contract extension presently. He said, “I have been consumed and cooked by my professional focus. It was a journey I did not regret so far. But, suddenly, at 64, I wonder how many more active years I have for me to go see and explore the world; to just stop being a manager and just be myself.”

His “awakening” perspective delivers a big lesson to all of us. This Life has been gifted to us for us to lead it, to live it! Not for us to be enslaved by it. Yet, don't we run this Life as if it were some kind of a race? Some even call it a rat race. When you reach a point, like the manager here has, you will wonder why did you run the race in the first place? What did you race for or against? Liberate yourself. The biggest freedom movement must be taking place within you, not just in some dictatorial regime in the world. So stop running. Pause, introspect and initiate immediate action.

One way to set yourself free is to break away from your routine and look beyond the predictable. This morning, even though it was a Monday, we took a bunch of managers, who we are coaching, through a Life-changing experience called “Dialogue in the Dark”. It is a personalized exhibition tour in which you experience Life for about an hour in total darkness. The experience humbles you, wanting you to count your blessings. It makes you realize that your other senses are as strong as your ability to see, which you believe naively to be your most indispensable sense. It teaches you that you can and will survive when you are put in a situation. And most importantly, doing it on a Monday morning, helps you to break away from the monotony of your pressure-cooker schedule. Mondays need not be manic, need not mean bad traffic and need not end up leaving you imprisoned in meaningless meetings. They can mean something magical and liberating – if you step off the beaten path! Our guide through the entire “Dialogue in the Dark” experience, Nithyanand, a visually special (I hate to say impaired) person, had this to say, “I can’t see. And I manage pretty well using my other senses.” The way he said this, with total acceptance and with ease, made me wonder if we are indeed living our lives to our fullest. With one sense down, he is. But are we? I came away realizing, yet again, that when you know you can be your own Master, you can and will make your Life count!