And each man kills the thing he loves,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
(The Valkyries)

What do you think?

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri — I happened to pick up this book when I was in Chennai last weekend and finished it yesterday. Quite an interesting book, I should say.

Talk about identity, allegiance, and what the little things mean…they are all a part of this book… well, it isn’t a complicated story — a simple story about a family. However, there are touching moments, moments of realization, moments of fear….everything you’d find in real life.

I really have no idea why I picked that book – when I bought it, I didn’t know the story, the outline, that it was made into a movie, that the author also wrote ‘Interpreter of Maladies.’

Don’t ask for my heart, because I am tearing it out and breaking it into little bits and throwing it away so I will be heartless but you will not know it because I will be the perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you will receive from me a perfect forgery of love.
So there were two unspoken clauses in the understanding, one regarding the giving of love and the other concerning the withholding of it, codicils that were sharply at odds with each other and impossible to reconcile.

“When you pray for what you want most in the world,” he said, “its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love, and that is surely a thing for which to thank whoever or whatever you like, the goddess, the fate, or just my lucky stars.”

We are always hunting for that elusive success formula, aren’t we? I came across this article, in the McKinsey Quarterly, on how executives search for that success formula for a runaway success.I’ve included a few thoughts here (You can find the full article here – registration required). When I read the article, some of the points made were quite obvious.

For example, success and failure depend not only on a company’s actions but also on those of its rivals. Where did we lose that insight we gain right from kindergarten – your rank doesn’t depend only on the marks you score. I guess, in our quest to find that easy answer to the puzzle, we often fail to realize that there can be a few puzzles that have a different answer each time. Instead we expect the puzzle to end at the same point – which is not the case in a competitive environment.

There were other thoughts that were business-centric – but if you take a closer look, you’d realize they are true in other spheres of life as well. Consider this one: “Suggesting that companies can follow a blueprint and achieve lasting success may be appealing, but is not supported by the evidence.” Like the books that deal with the success formula for business executives, there are umpteen books out there that talk about how to deal with your own life – how to win, how to be successful, how to be a good listener and so on. At the end of the day, these books tend to reduce life into a set of formulas you live by. But, life isn’t about following someone else’s path; life isn’t about living within the safety zone. Life is all about stretching your boundaries, accomplishing what you considered impossible, and, most importantly, living your life your way.

In the business world, success is a result of decisions made under conditions of uncertainty and shaped in part by factors outside our control. In your life, what you do and who you are depend on your decisions in your day-to-day life. You cannot simulate your life and your choices to reflect someone else’s. There is no perfect choice, there is no dead-end – you can always start again and your best attempts may not be good enough. That is life – but then, for all the uncertainty, I won’t want life to be any other way.

Here are some of the very interesting and valid points:

A reliable path to high performance – does not exist.

In the business world, success is a result of decisions made under conditions of uncertainty and shaped in part by factors outside our control.

The task of strategic leadership is not to follow a blueprint but to gather and evaluate relevant information, and make choices that provide the best chance for the company to succeed, all the while recognizing the business uncertainty.

The delusion of absolute performance

Success and failure depend not only on a company’s actions but also on those of its rivals.

High performance com6es from doing things better than rivals can, which means the managers have to take risks.

The delusion of lasting success

Lasting success is largely a delusion, a statistical anomaly. There is a strong tendency for extreme performance to be followed by less extreme performance in the next.

Suggesting that companies can follow a blueprint and achieve lasting success may be appealing, but is not supported by the evidence.

No formula can guarantee a company’s success, at least not in a competitive business environment.

I picked up this heavy book a couple of weeks ago – at my regular book shop in Chennai. Quite an interesting book – yes, a life of someone who escaped prison and was willing to live in Mumbai’s slums and then work for mafia dons…. has to be interesting, right?

One of the few books that have humour and profound thoughts in equal measure – complimenting each other…..

http://www.shantaram.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantaram_(novel)

People started squinting at Nazarébaddoor with that mixture of suspicion and admiration which human beings reserve for those who can foretell the future. The path to her cottage began to be well trodden, by lovers asking if their sweethearts would return their love, by gamblers wondering if they would win at cards, by the curious and the cynical, the gullible and the hard-hearted. More than once there was a campaign against her in the village by people whose reaction to abnormality was to drive it away from their doorstep. She was saved by her discretion, by her refusal to speak if she didn’t know the answer, because the visionary indolence which allowed her to push the future in the required direction could not be conjured up; it came when it pleased, and her own will seemed to have little to do with it. Only when she was sure of her ability to ensure a happy outcome would she gently murmur the good news into a supplicant’s ear.

As she grew into womanhood, her power began to filler her with doubts. The gift of affecting the course of events positively, of being able to change the world, but only for the best, ought to have been a source of joy. Nazarébaddoor was cursed with a philosophical cast of mind, however, and as a result, even her innate good nature could not avoid being infected by a strain of melancholy. Difficult questions began to nag her. Was it always a good thing to make things better? Didn’t human beings need pain and suffering to learn and grow? Would a world in which only good things happened be a good world, a paradise, or would it, in fact, be an intolerable place whose denizens, excused from danger, failure, catastrophe, and misery, turned into insufferably big-headed, overconfident bores? Was she damaging people by helping them? Should she get her big nose out of everyone else’s business and let destiny take whatever course it chose? Yes, happiness was a thing of great, bright value, and she believed herself to be promoting it; but might not unhappiness be as important? Was she doing God’s work or the devil’s? There were no answers to such questions, but the questions themselves felt, from time to time, like answers of a sort.

In spite of her reservations, Nazarébaddoor continued to employ her gifts, unable to believe that she would have been given such powers if it wasn’t okay to use them. But her fears remained. Outwardly, she continued to behave with happy, outspoken, flatulent ease, but the unhappiness inside her grew; slowly, it’s true, but it grew. Her greatest fear, which she shared with nobody, was that all the misfortune she was averting was piling up somewhere \, that she was recklessly pouring out Pachigam’s supply of good luck while the bad luck accumulated like water behind a dam, and one day the floodgates would open and the flood of misery would be unleashed and everyone would drown. This was why the pot war affected her so badly. He worst nightmare had begun to come true.

Have you ever wondered about the need for pain and sorrow? Have you been ‘cursed’ with a philosophical cast of mind? A mind that can’t help but wonder about the greater cause in life, a mind that can’t help but look beyond the obvious…. God’s work or the devil’s? have you thought about all the thoughts that race across your mind?

I read this book and it had quite a few interesting passages. The story itself – one that deals with the repercussion of one’s actions in the lives of people around them – is quite interesting. Yes, there are times when I felt the narration is complicated, but the rest of the book quite easily makes up for it. Here is one such passage, something I found really, really interesting…

And when you’ve made it … you must persuade the skeptical crowd – the envious, impotent crowd! – that you have returned with everything you wanted. If you don’t, you’ll be marked as a failure forever. — this is one of those sentences that quite simply states what life is all about. Have you ever wondered how often everyone needs to convince everyone else around that they are doing what they wanna do, get what they want and so on?

Here is the passage for you:

His bedtime stories, told on those unpredictable occasions when he had been at her childhood bedside, were not stories exactly. They were homilies such as Sun Tzu, the philosopher of war, might have delivered to his offspring. “The palace of power is a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms,” Max once said to his sleepy child. She imagined it into being, walked towards it, half-dreaming, half-awake. “It’s windowless,” Max said, “and there is no visible door. Your first task is to find out how to get in. when you’ve solved that riddle, when you come as a supplicant into the first anteroom of power, you will find in it a man with the head of a jackal, who will try to chase you out again, if you stay, he will try to gobble you up. If you can trick your way past him, you will enter a second room, guarded this time by a man with the head of a rabid dog, and in the room after that you’ll face a man with the head of a hungry bear, and so on. In the last room but one there’s a man with the head of a fox. This man will not try to keep you away from the last room, in which the man of true power sits. Rather, he will try to convince you that you are already in that room and that he himself is that man.”

“If you succeed in seeing through the fox-man’s tricks, and if you get past him, you will find yourself in the room of the power. The room of power is unimpressive and in it the man of power faces you across an empty desk. He looks small, insignificant, fearful; for now that you have penetrated his defenses, he must give you your heart’s desire. That’s the rule. But on the way out, the fox-man, the bear-man, the dog-man, and the jackal-man are no longer there. Instead, the rooms are full of half-human flying monsters, winged men with the heads of birds, eagle-men and vulture-men, man-gannets and hawk-men. They swoop down on you and rip at your treasure. Each of them claws back a little piece of it. How much of it will you manage to bring out of the house of power? You beat at them, you shield the treasure with your body. They rake at your back with gleaming blue-white claws. And when you’ve made it and are outside again, squinting painfully in the bright light and clutching your poor, torn remnant, you must persuade the skeptical crowd – the envious, impotent crowd! – that you have returned with everything you wanted. If you don’t, you’ll be marked as a failure forever.”

“Such is the nature of power,” he told her as she slipped towards sleep, “and these are the questions it asks. The man who chooses to enter its halls does well to escape with his life. The answer to the questions of power, by the way,” he added as an afterthought, “is this: Do not enter that labyrinth as a supplicant. Come with meat and a sword. Give the first guardian the meat he craves, for he is always hungry, and cut off his head while he eats: pof! Then offer the severed head to the guardian in the next room, and when he begins to devour it, behead him too. Baf! Et ainsi de suite. When the man of power agrees to grant your demands, however, you must not cut off his head. Be sure you don’t. The decapitation of rulers is an extreme measure, hardly ever required, never recommended. It sets a bad precedent. Make sure, instead, that you ask not only for what you want but for a sack of meat as well. With the fresh meat supply, you will lure the bird-men to their doom. Off with their head! Snick-snack! Chop, chop, until you’re free. Freedom is not a tea part, India, Freedom is a war.”