Tag: life

“Love people and use things”

   Many a time we tend to fall in love with things rather than people. We tend to love things and use people. Many of us feel this way when someone close to us in our family or friend circle lets us down. I do not know why this happens. But it is an experience many of us would have gone through in life, sometime or the other. 

   Let us try to analyse why this happens and if we could do something to reverse it. I think all of us start our career and grow in life. As we grow in life, we accumulate material wealth and equate our prosperity to the value of wealth assimilated. This is quite natural and evolutionary in life for all of us.

  We then reach a stage in life, where material possessions no longer give us joy. We are possibly saturated with material wealth. This could happen for different people at different stages in life. Then we become spiritual and look for happiness beyond materialistic life.

   At this stage, we start appreciating people around us. We are grateful to people who have made us prosperous in life – materially or otherwise. It could be our parents, teachers, friends, relatives or colleagues at work or in business. 

    We are also grateful to many of such people for what we have become today. But sometimes when we encounter someone who is ungrateful, we start wondering whether human beings are more attached to things than people.  We wonder why they love things and use people. But, we hope that everyone loves people and uses things.

   While easier said than done – this is a revelation for us as an individual. It could be a turning point in our own lives. We may look back and reflect on our own lives. We may have also used people and loved things as we grew up in life. So, life is a cycle and may be we need to make mid course corrections as we go along. We may have to seek forgiveness from people, whom we may have used and not loved in the past. We may have to forgive people, who may have used us and not loved us as we think.

    This awakening in us makes us transcend to the next stage in life. We learn from own mistakes and grow in life. We understand the value of and need to “Love people and use things. ” and not the other way around.

S Ramesh Shankar

Uncertainties of Life


I was travelling back from Seoul to Mumbai after an official meeting last week. I was waiting in the lounge for my next flight for Mumbai.  When I opened my phone, I got a message that our employees’ union president had died.  He was a progressive union leader and a thought leader.  He was physically fit and used to run marathons every year.  He recently retired from our company after working for 40 years.  A rare feat for any employee.  He goes for a morning jog, then gets admitted to a hospital and is declared dead.  Life is so uncertain – you have to experience it to believe it.

If we look back at our own lives, it is no different.  We begin the day with some plans and end the day with something else.  Many a time, we have to manage the change without necessarily creating it.  Such is life.  We have to accept it and move on.  While it is easy to reflect on it,  it is very tough to face it.  Imagine being in the family of my union president.  He was a wonderful human being and physically and mentally fit.  I met him last week and we discussed on how we can further strengthen management and union relationships.  Such was the vision of the man.  Then one fine day after a morning jog, he collapses in a hospital bed.  How can one digest it ? Its unthinkable in anyone’s life.

However, such is uncertainty of life today.  I was reading an article on the flight of a very successful professional in the USA.  He was the envy of all his colleagues.  He had done excellently in his career and had a great family and enviable wealth. One fine day he gets up and gets the news that he has lost his job.  Can we think this was a bad dream ?  It is not so.  It is the reality of his life , that day.  Whether one likes it or not, one has to accept it and move on.

It happens in professional life and it happens in sport and in our personal lives too. We had a captain of our national hockey team.  He is prolific player and a great backbone of our team.  He had some personal issues and lost his captaincy one fine day.  One does not know if the personal issues led to his loss of captaincy but the fact that a successful player loses his recognition at the pinnacle of his career shows how uncertain life is.  An olympic aspirant was dropped from the national team when she had gone home to pack her bags for the trip.

The photo above was Uday Mahale, the president of our union, who was running marathons every year.  But after his morning jog, he collapsed on the jogging track and was declared dear on arrival in the hospital.  Such is the uncertainty of life.

Most of us postpone to live life to the fullest.  We think we can do that in the future.  We think today is not the right time to be happy.  We have a lot of responsibilities in life so our celebrations can wait.  We need to realise that tomorrow is today and today is now.  Lets try to live each day as if a tomorrow does not exist.  Lets try to do all the good we can today without waiting for that elusive tomorrow.  If we postpone for tomorrow what we can accomplish today, we can never be sure if we can make it.  We need to learn to live life as if it exists only for today.

The best time to live life to its fullest is now.

What do you think ?

S Ramesh Shankar

Circle of Life

A circle has no boundaries and all edges are embedded in itself. Our daily life is like a circle. We all have good and bad events embedded seamlessly in a single day. I got up with a great news of a new born child in my family circle. Then this was followed by the information of a terrorist attack in some part of Kashmir, where innocent citizens were killed. Then the news of a colleague winning an award in an international contest was recieved. The day ended with the news of a tragic accident of a professional colleague on the expressway.

Every day is a circle. We get news – good, bad and ugly. Our moods swings from one extreme to the other. While we rejoice on hearing a good news and by the time the joy settles, we are saddened by a sad news. Then we recover with some good news before we are immersed with some tragic news.  

How do we cope with this ? Is life also like a circle ? May be true. If we reflect on life, we realize that it is true. We have moments of joy in life and want those moments to last forever but very soon we are drowned in sorrow. Before we recover, we are again surprised by some joyous events in life. So, it is a cycle and we have to adapt to take the good and bad in our stride.

It may be easy to write about the circle of life rather than experience it. I am not sure if there are many ideas of how to deal with it rather than experience it yourself. One of the ways of dealing with this variance in life is to minimise our expectations from life and living. If we are content with what we have and what we get in life, may be it will help us to deal with what we don’t. It’s a question of managing expectations in life.

The ability to deal with our emotions will determine our success in life. Life is a full circle and we have to learn to celebrate it that way.  Our ability to be equanamous in dealing with all moments of life defines our happiness.

Let us learn to be in the middle of the circle and deal with life with poise all the time.

S Ramesh Shankar