Changing my mind for the better.

I am glad that after about half an hour of rummaging through the book shop at the Bangalore airport last Friday, I changed my mind and picked up this book which was incidentally the first book I saw that day but had moved past thinking that there might be just pathetic stories of even worse politicians.

But I am glad I finally picked up this book.

(After all, how can you leave a bookshop without picking up even one book?!) 😉😉

As I finished this book today I realised why I haven’t finished most of the technical books in my library long after I bought them whereas I have finished all the technical books written by Ken Blanchard and Mr. Prakash Iyer: the latter ones were written in a story format.

Either Mr. Blanchard and authors like him are under-rated geniuses or other authors in the field of Human Resources and Learning & Development are yet to learn how to convey any technical topic in an engaging, story-telling format.

Nevertheless, I picked up Mr. Thapar’s book a good four years after it was published and most people would have picked it up to read the juicy details about his experience with Mr. Narendra Modi after that short lived 3 minutes interview in October 2007.

Well, previously unknown pre-interview background and post interview details of that incident are in the last chapter of the book. 

But what I will remember the most, besides Mr. Thapar’s simple writing style, are the two stories of what happened between the late Mr. Rajiv Gandhi and Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee and, Mr. Ashraf Jehangir Qazi - the former Pakistani High Commissioner to India and Mr. LK Advani - the then deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of India.

Those stories are great examples of what Rumi says: “Out beyond the ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is an open field. I will meet you there.”

Finally, as I finished a number of chapters I was also reminded of four things:

• There is more to a person than what you seem to know popularly. So don’t be in a hurry to proclaim that you have figured them out. There are layers and layers that no one person can ever fully fathom.
• ‘An enemy is a person whose story you don’t know yet.’
• ‘We all sin differently.’
• “You do not come to love by finding the perfect person; you come to love by beginning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” - Sam Keen.

In certain cases I couldn’t help but wonder how Mr. Shekhar Gupta would have presented his experiences with the same people or his point of view of those issues. This happened when I read of Mr. Thapar’s experience with the former Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf.

Well I am eagerly awaiting Mr. Gupta’s autobiography.

I hope I can meet Mr. Thapar one day, get his autograph on this book and ask him a few questions since I believe in what my friend Mukesh once shared with me in the second half of 1998 when we were in final year of law college. It’s a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every man I meet is superior to me in some way. In that, I learn of him.”

PS: I got an interesting idea while reading this book today that gave me a way forward to complete the remaining portions of my second book that I had left half way early this year due to a dilemma.