As I saw it

This post has been delayed by exactly one year but here goes. Last year same day I saw a man in the back lane of Daryaganj in Delhi, trudging along wearily, wearing a soiled blue t-shirt with the message you see below. While his tired and sad face didn’t reveal what all he had to lose and win, the message hit me home straight away. I knew that I had to lose some weight around my stomach, lose some more of my ego and win some more of my relationships and wisdom. I had to win some more expansiveness around my heart. 😌😌🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

I have failed four times in an entrepreneurial journey that started 13 years ago in London when I was all but 30 years old. I am on my fifth attempt and it has held steady even as I haven’t expanded my firm in any sense of the term. It has in a way held steady through all kinds of Ups and Downs and even through financial crisis so bad that I had to start looking for a job. Hence for all these reasons and more I totally resonate with the article written by Mr. Vivek Wadhwa. Thanks a lot for this Mr. Wadhwa along with the brief snippets from the study your team at the Duke and Harvard universities conducted. Coming back to my own journey, along the way I came across a momentous point when I was finally able to clarify the Vision and Mission of my firm - the Purpose and Essence of why I brought it to life in an already crowded market. And the best part was that I was able to articulate them in a simple, straightforward sentence each. I was also able to clarify and articulate ...

For quite some time now I have been wanting to do a dots-of-gratitude exercise on paper. The idea is simple. I take any incident or experience that I am grateful for in my life and start connecting the dots backward in terms of the people who were the cause of that experience in my life and then the people because of whom I met them and so on. And so the dots keep going backward. Invariably most of the dots have ended up with my father, given some of the decisions he took for and about me. Nevertheless I want to share here something that I did recently and connect the dots to and with some of the people I am eternally grateful to. Responsible hospitality is one of my favourite themes and I love studying the hotel and hospitality industry. I have often quoted examples from the Oberoi, Taj, Lemon Tree, Sayaji, Barbeque Nation and the Arya Niwas hotels in my corporate training sessions. On 26 th February, I was asked to design and conduct a short session on netw...

I am a hard core strengths psychology believer and given my Clifton Strengthsfinder top  5   Signature talent themes, there is no way I wouldn’t have fallen in love with this book. And if I were religious enough then I would have put and worshiped the portrait of Dr. Donald Clifton alongside Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, 2 nd Lt. Arun Khetarpal, PVC, Eric Liddle, Neerja Bhanot and my other role models. Two of the top five talent themes I have are called Maximiser and Responsibility. Maximiser is a theme that comes in the realm of influencing and Responsibility comes in that of execution. Maximiser is to do with excellence – making things better and better; continuous improvement; endless refinement; increased efficiencies and spit and polish till it shines spotlessly outlook. For us, quality matters over quantity. Of course it can at times go overboard to the point of paralysis or pointlessness. Lik...

Being a kid of the 1980s to 1990s, I grew up hearing of the innovation in cricket when the one day matches were introduced in the 1970s. Then came coloured clothing in the Benson & Hedges series down under to day and night matches to stump mikes and cameras to T20s to spider web cams and so much more along with the various controversies from time to time including the infamous exit of Kepler Wessel's South African team from the 1992 semi final thanks to the incomprehensible and irrational Duckworth-Lewis method to the infamous match fixing scandal that came to light in 2000. Of course the early 1990s kids of the sub-continent can never forget their favourite cricket commentators Henry Blofeld and his obsession with those 'earrings' in the audience to Harsha Bhogle and Tony Greig or the favourite of our umpires Dickie Bird and Billy Bowden to Mark Mascarenhas's introduction of his company Worldtel into cricket celebrity management to being bamboozled to see...

I have been doing an early morning prayer meditation called Mangal Maitri. It's the thing with which I start my day as soon as I wake up. I follow it up with another guided track called the 5 Minute Miracle of Love. I do both of them with Nithya Shanti's recorded tracks on the SoundCloud App. I then conclude with his Lotus of Gratitude exercise. As I sat today to do the Mangal Maitri prayer meditation, a few of my ex participants and clients came up in my consciousness as I was coming to the concluding part of the 5 minute meditation. I messaged each one of them and this is what one of them responded with: "Very good morning Sir. It's an amazing feel when you are surrounded by your well wishers  and it also make you responsible to improve day by day ." Now that last line is what truly makes my day and when I see it in people I know that you have one world changer near you. Sohum _/\_ Thank you Kapil Narwal.

Having struggled with my instinctive bipolar view of right and wrong; I tend to get into this explosive anger when I see uncivil things or things that are patently wrong. Only my family and really close friends know of the extremes my temper flares out into during those moments. And after it cools down, I am the one who’s left to pick up my own disintegrated body and spirit together; at times taking weeks and months to recover. As a result, I have tried to stay away from anything that is or can be bi or multi-partisan, such as political and religious ideologies and dogmas. This is one battle I have been waging with myself for years now to get to a level where I get to operate from a space of unconscious compassion. And while I will soon be sharing an instance from late last year which helped me for the first time to drive sanely on the roads of Delhi after years of struggle, I want to share what I experienced yesterday morning. Just as I was about to turn into...

It is believed that walnuts are good for the brain and the image of a walnut kernel resembles the outer surface of the human brain as well. But a couple of weeks back, I had a beautiful experience where half a kernel of walnut became the medium that endearingly connected two hearts between two men who could have been as different from each other as possible in terms of age, ethnicity, mother tongue, profession and personality types though bound by a common trait of avoiding publicity. I cannot share many details given the promise I made him but I would nevertheless like to share the story here. A newly made friend had just invited me home to meet with her husband and at the rendezvous point she requested me to wait for her car which was to be delivered there any moment after its service while she wanted to make a quick dash across the old bus station of that town to grab some groceries. She wanted someone to be there to receive the car when it was to be delivered. ...