I was listening to an old hindi song today evening and it touched my heart. The lyrics says -“ I am not angry with you “Life”, “I am baffled”. As I listened to this song and many incidents of my life mirrored before me and I was reflective in thoughts.

India was always proud of family as a social institution. Our epics taught us to treat Mother as God, Father as God, Teacher as God and Guests as God”. Today we are keen to run away from our parents in search of our goals in life. I would not say anything wrong in finding your own meaning in life. But to forget your living parents and putting them in old age homes may not be the best way to repay our debts to them. Many children think that if they send money and put them in elder care centres they have done their duties.

Imagine as young kids if our parents had put us in boarding pre-schools and led their own lives how our life would have been. They never let us go anywhere. They sacrificed their lives for our welfare. They missed their meals sometimes to keep us well fed and healthy. They sacrificed their families and career to ensure the best of academics and overall growth for us.

Today when I have grown up and am well set in life, I am happy that I am financially independent and can support them. We do not realise that they are not necessarily looking for our financial support. They are looking for love, affection and care. If we are in any trouble even today, they will still be the first to come to our rescue. But in spite of this, we think that they need to take care of themselves and we are happy supporting them only through money or an occasional call. It could be just a video call from a distant land.

I want to share two stories of close friends in my circle. In the first case, the mother of my friend is suffering from a life threatening disease. She is being treated in a hospital in Bangalore and my friend and his sister live in Europe while his parents live in Bangalore. His mother is being treated and taken care by his father. Their son and daughter could not visit them during Covid, which one can understand. But, the fact that they have not visited them even after Covid is not preventing international travel, baffles me.

The second incident is of my friend, who had a kidney failure and was admitted in Mumbai. He had two sons and both are well educated and settled abroad. My friend was being treated and supported by his spouse since 2020. His sons could not visit him due to Covid but did not get leave or time even after that. One of the sons came to visit him this year when this friend was admitted for a by pass surgery and died subsequently. Now his mother is not interested in going with either of her sons as she feels that when they did not have time to take care of their ailing father, they need not waste their time in looking after a healthy mother.

Life comes a full circle. We may think money can buy everything in life . But Covid taught us we cannot. Money cannot buy peace, health or happiness. We may get away by ignoring our parents or elders who gave us everything of their prime lives to make us what we are today but we have forgotten those days. We may be quantifying their contributions in monetary terms and may be trying to pay back.

Tomorrow when we grow old and our children walk away, wisdom may dawn us or it may not. But life will not be same again. Our parents will live only in photo frames and not in flesh and blood. We may not be able to cry for all that we could not do for them. They lived life on their own terms and left us with zero debts in spite of all their struggles of life. We may be affluent in money terms but the emotional debts may go with us to our graves.

I sometimes wonder why life is so cruel on us. It impacts people who are always serving others. A classic example is that of a leading playback singer who was singing songs on demand from those suffering from covid to make them cheerful. The irony is that he was infected with covid and succumbed to it in a hospital. Can life be more cruel than that ?

Let us learn from our epics and remember to respect and care for all elders and friends who made us what we are today. We need to remember that tomorrow becomes an yesterday for all of us and we may get back what we do for others today.

Is it time to reflect ?

S Ramesh Shankar

25th March 2023

We all grow up with some role models in our lives. We dream and aspire for something and most of the time it is driven by the environment around us. I remember I lived in an army campus and then studied in a school located within an Air force station and this made me dream of being an Army officer and then a pilot.

As you grow up these dreams fade away as fast as they first appear in your lives. Although I still admire and salute the Army and Air Force personnel, I moved on to pursue my career as a HR professional. There is nothing right or wrong about these choices in life.

Similarly, we look up to role models in the family and people around us. Sometimes film personalities or even sportspersons inspire us to be like them. We try to make our hairstyle and even dress sense like the role models we admire in life. This is mostly when are transitioning between adolescence and adulthood.

As we become an adult, we realise that there is huge gap between our real world and the illusory world we were dreaming of. Now we suddenly start feeling our feet on the ground and become clearer on what we want to do in life.

Our ability to define our own life becomes more refined. At this stage, we realise that we are fully capable of living our own lives, our own way. However, some of us continue to live in an imaginary world and still try to ape others and want to be like them always.

There may be nothing wrong in admiring the best in class and learning from them in our lives. However there is a subtle difference between learning from the best and just aping their styles. In my view, it is better to live life our way, rather than try to live the life of others.

Our parents, teachers, friends and relatives may help us mould our lives. However, it is for us to cast our own mould and make ourselves fit into that mould. It is perfectly fine to recast the mould from time to time and refine our priorities in life. Nobody else knows us better than ourselves.

However to live and imitate the life of others is a waste of our own time and resources. If we try to imitate others and try to be like them it may be like an illusion. It may be like a mirage, which will disappear sooner than later in our own lives.

Life is like a marathon. We may need to live life one day at a time. Our goals and priorities in life will change with age and our circumstances. This is perfectly human and we need to accept this reality. It is great to look around and learn from the best. But, it may not be a great idea to imitate others.

If we look around the world in any field, the best of people have defined their own lives. They are not bothered of what the world thinks of them, but they make the world think that may want to be like them.

It may be time to live life our way from today.

S Ramesh Shankar

12th March 2023

All of us feel good that we play a significant role in our own lives. We may have great responsibilities at home and also play a vital role at work or our own business. However, at some stage of life we start believing that the world may not have existed before us and may become extinct after we depart.

This may not be true in reality. At home, we start believing that we are the fulcrum of the family and similarly at the work place we think, everything may come to a stand still the day we are not around. Let us examine this and do a reality check through some real life examples.

Let us examine it from the family perspective. As a parent ( mother or father), we may be thinking that we steer the family and shoulder all responsibilities till some day our children grow up and we realise that they do not need our support to lead their lives independently. Now, they may feel the same and believe that without them the family cannot move forward till they get married and have kids who grow up and make them redundant for their survival and growth in life.

Our work life is no different. Many of us may have grown from junior to middle and and senior levels of management and would have shouldered significant responsibilities. The day we start believing that we are indispensable , our learning and growth may come to a standstill. The likelihood of a downfall from this stage is more than any future growth in life or career.

This phenomenon I have referred is a false imagination of one’s importance in life. While I am not saying that each of us do not have a vital role to play in our own lives and work but if we start believing that life did not exist before us or may not be there after us we are living in a fool’s paradise.

We always have to live with humility and be grounded. Life has been there before us and will prosper after we leave this mortal world. Our ability to make ourselves dispensable in life and work will make us more respected. Our ability to delegate and share responsibilities in the family and the workplace will make us more valuable than the other way around.

The more we share, the more we learn. Our value has to be felt in our absence not by our inability to develop our family or team members but our ability to make them self reliant. Learning is a life long journey. The day we start believing that we have arrived and there is no further need to learn, it could be the beginning of our end.

The best leaders are those who leave when people may ask – “ Why now ?” They will not wait for someone to ask – “ Why not now ?”. It is like the world champion players retire when they are at the peak of performance and not when they may get dropped from the team for lack of performance or leadership.

Let us believe life does not begin or end with us.

S Ramesh Shankar

11th March 2023