Category: Life & Living

Nothing is permanent..


I recently came to know of two tragedies. In the first case, a mother lost her grown up son in a fatal accident. In the second, a daughter lost her father in a hospital bed. While the first was a young aspiring student preparing himself for the travails of life in a business school, the second was an aged father who had fought cancer and was healthy and self dependant at 85 till he fractured his leg by falling from his bed and succumbed to his post operative trauma.

If we look at both the incidents the affected people were shattered. A mother in the first case was heart broken to get up one day to know that her son is no more and has met with an accident in front of his college gate. In the second instance, the daughter had nursed her father in the hospital for a week and his fracture was operated successfully and within days of her proceeding to help her daughter in another city, her father breathed his last as he could not fight back from the post operative stress.

I can imagine the state of the mind of the mother and the daughter in both these cases. It would have been like a glass sculpture shattered into pieces. While condolences may pour in from around the world, no word can console you. No assurance can build back the belief in you. It is like you can never put together the shattered pieces of the beautiful glass sculpture even with the best adhesive in the world.

Time is the only healer and it takes time to realise it. I have personally gone through a few tragedies in my life and I have experienced this vacuum. It neither can be explained or can be consoled. It shatters your foundations. It makes you lose faith in yourself and even lose faith in God. No power on earth seems to have any impact on you. You are tempted to give up even before you given in.

Let us try to understand why this happens to all of us, who go through such tragedies. I remember someone told me that when you lose your father at a very young age, it is like someone pulling away the umbrella from your head during a thunderous downpour. It is something like that. Life is good and we are treading along. Suddenly a tragedy of this magnitude engulfs us and we are shattered. It comes like a Tsunami and leaves us homeless. We may not have lost our physical belongings but we become emotionless for some time.

We do not know the difference between laughing and crying. There are no tears left in our eyes. We want to be left alone and feel restless in a crowd. Family, friends and society are no longer a source of solace. We look at the sky with blank eyes and no emotions. Music is no longer soothing to our ears. Our life literally comes to a stand still. Days become longer and nights shorter. We do not want to see or meet anyone.

It takes weeks, months or even years to recover from such a shock. It took me more than year when my father died when I was 25. After a few years, I realised that time is the only healer. I recovered slowly but surely from the slipping ground below me. I started believing in myself and others after a while. I visited a temple after a year to assure God that I was now standing on my own feet.

This is the time one realises that “Nothing is permanent” in life. Neither joy nor sorrow. Everything is ephemeral. It will come and go. We need to have the courage and the patience to weather the storm. We should neither get carried away by the joys of life and float in the air, nor buried by the sorrows of life and sink into the earth below. We will realise that time is the best healer.

Life is like the weather today. Gloomy and rainy in the morning but bright and sunny in the evening. Nothing is permanent. Not even the weather on a single day. 

Let us believe in ourselves and our good deeds and leave the rest for time to heal.

S Ramesh Shankar

Ray of Hope

IMG_0424

There is always light at the end of a tunnel. You realise it every time you drive through a tunnel on a highway. However, it takes a lot of patience and perseverance to go through the darkness in the tunnel before you see the light. Life is no different. Every obstacle in life looks like a boulder in front of us. It overwhelms us and we get bogged down by its magnitude. It takes courage and patience to weather the storm and then look for the light at the end of the tunnel.

I have had many experiences in life, wherein I felt as if the world was coming to end and and I was in the midst of it. When you are going through a crisis in life or at work, you are bogged down by everything around you. You are drained out by the depth of the crisis you are facing. You try out all the options and still the you feel that the dark road in the tunnel is never ending. It is at this time you need to reflect and find a way.

I would like to look back at a few incidents in my personal and work life and share my learnings. I have been a born optimist in life. Hence, looking at life as art of possibilities has been my outlook. But, when you are confronted with a crisis then your optimism fades way giving way to pessimism. I recall the first instance in my personal life. I got an income tax notice for buying a timeshare property. I was shocked and perplexed. I have been a honest salaried tax payer for more than three decades now. But this incident happened way back in 1992.

I went to my tax advisor after spending a few sleepless nights as to “why me ?” . When he explained the process which the income tax department follows to track tax defaulters, I was relieved. He explained that they look at new car buyers at random and sometimes at property buyers and so on and then send them a notice to explain the source of income. When I had been an honest tax payer, I had nothing to worry. I had just to explain the source of my funds and how I have paid them. I had also paid all my instalments by cheques and hence there was nothing for me to explain. But spending a few nights with the notice at home was like a long ride in the tunnel.

The second time it was on the work front. I was made the prosecution nominee ( management representative) in a departmental enquiry against a corrupt union representative in one of my previous organisations. I was shocked. I received threats from this person including possible attacks on my family members. I was again worried as to why I was chosen for this unceremonious role. The enquiry was completed and I could help the management with my presentation skills in establishing the charges and ensuring the corrupt union representative was dismissed from service. Then my manager explained to me that I was selected because I was courageous and honest to face such a dishonest employee in an enquiry in a fair and brave way. But this enquiry took more than four months and it was an arduous journey.

The last incident was when I joined a new organization. I was confronted with a court case filed every month by the unions against the management on frivolous reasons. I was always used to maintaining harmonious and trust worthy relationship with the unions in all my previous assignments. When I took charge, I realised that there was a trust deficit between the management and the unions. It took me almost two years to rebuild that trust and thanks to a great team to work with and a responsive union we not only turned it around but today can proudly state that we have not had any court case filed against us in the last four years. But these two years were like a long dark tunnel ride.

Every situation looked dim at first sight. The more you grapple with it the more you are disappointed. When a problem gets complicated and you do not get adequate support, you tend to lose hope. It is at this juncture, we need to believe in ourselves and our credibility. We need to trust ourselves and hope that there will be light at the end of the tunnel. It is like the streak of sunlight always kindles hope on a otherwise cloudy day as in the photo above. This ray of hope re-ignites the optimism in us and helps us find a way.

Let us look for the ray of hope in life every day.

S Ramesh Shankar

The world is not perfect…

Our life starts with a dream. Whether at work or at home, we have a dream. We then try to realise our dream through our efforts. It is perfectly normal to dream and try our best to convert that dream into reality. Some of our dreams are realised, while others fade away in spite of our best efforts. There is nothing wrong about it. It is fair to expect that all that we dream about in life may not be realised in our life time.

This does not mean that we should stop dreaming. It is like every organization has a vision and then strategies to achieve that vision. What is in control of the organization is within it and there are many factors outside the control of an organization. This is true at the individual level too. We need to have a dream. We then need to evolve our strategy to achieve our personal vision in life. I firmly believe that through stint of hard work, most individuals may be able to attain their personal vision in life.

Some organisations do not achieve their vision in spite of their best efforts. This is not because they did not have the right intent to achieve it. On the contrary, it could be that inspite of their best efforts the environmental factors swayed against them and hence they could not achieve their vision. This is also true for individuals. We need to realise that sometimes our best intent and efforts may not take us where we want to go. We should not lose hope. I would stay we need to press the “Control+Alt+Del” button and reimagine our goals in life.

My lesson in life is that the world is not perfect. Just like we as human beings are not perfect. We need to learn to enjoy the imperfection in the world and in us. We need to learn to adapt and change. We need to learn to redefine our goals and move on. Most of us spend our time analysing why the world is imperfect ? It is like analysing why the formation of the clouds is different each day in the sky.

We have to believe that nature has created imperfections in the world to enable us to learn and change. We need to trust our capabilities rather then worry about the failure of a plan. We are human and the world is not perfect. Hence, the earlier we get used to this fact, the better it is for us. We will learn along the way and change. We have to accept the clouds in the sky as they are and appreciate that every day is a new formation and a wonderful creation of nature to admire.

Life is no different. It is neither perfect nor imperfect. Our ability to deal with life as it is rather as it we want it to be makes all the difference. We have to build the ability to change rather then wait for others or the world to change. We have to remember that it is easier to change thyself than to try to change others. Our success in life is directly correlated to our ability to change.

We need to be able to reconcile in life. We may set a vision for ourselves. We may even define the path to achieve the vision. However, as we go along, the path may change even if the vision remains intact. Sometimes, we may need to restate the vision as the environment around us has changed rapidly. It is frivolous to think that anything is constant in life. The ability to anticipate variability and deal with it effectively makes us a winner in life.

As in the photo above, the peak may be at a distance but we need to continue our journey facing all barriers on the way with focussed commitment to achieve our goal.

I have gone through my own ups and downs in life. Every time, I was about to lose hope, I rekindled my commitment to my goal. I learnt from my mistakes and was willing to redefine my goal and the path. This helped me to be in tune with the times. I realised along the way of life that it is not perfect. I have tried my best to do everything to the best of my ability but accepted imperfection as a way of life and living.

What is your take ?

S Ramesh Shankar