Lage Raho Munnabhai managed to make Gandhian values relevant afresh for GeNext

We come across people every day in our lives who range from being mendacious to fugacious. You know what I mean by the former — creepy guys who mislead and misinform you to get their Brownie points with the boss. But what, pray, is fugacious? The word itself means ‘fleeting’ or ‘passing away quickly’. When you look at the Latin origin, it whips up side meanings of fugitive and subterfuge.

So basically the same dodgy stuff, right? Why am I starting the day with such obscurities? Only to show that by now you must wonder what’s coming. Or what this obfuscation is all about.

Simply this: there is no substitute for plainspeak. Over the last week, I had a set of refreshingly lucid experiences with people I would term life-enrichers. People who cut out the misinformation. Gurus who cut through one’s muddled values to wade us through more clear streams of reasoning.

The first was a corporate group gathered to listen to Jaya Row, who has been demystifying the principles of Vedanta to groups worldwide through her discourses. It was the simple, yet profound manner in which she talked about uncovering the excellence within us and about how to enhance performance at work that made the cynics sit up and listen. This was no peddling of prattle.

In fact, when a person like her, who has a great academic record in microbiology and a distinguished management career, puts it all away to devote herself to interpreting the Vedanta, it makes the motivational mantras take on a new credibility for an average executive.

We were looking afresh at what we should really know, but don’t care to face up to. When she mentions the “technology transfer from the Bhagavad Gita into our lives”, it means simply that we need the power to confront the “challenges of the roller coaster ride through life”. It was not about closing eyes in meditation, but opening our vision to enjoy success, to apply the knowledge acquired, and a most interesting term — “deficiency motivation”. We create shortages in our minds, when there is abundance. “You struggle and work hard to acquire things of the world. Having acquired them, you make them irrelevant by shifting your focus to something you don’t have!”

The very application of these values to strive for excellence through hard work and clear focus came through the interaction that a group at a bookstore had with Subroto Bagchi, co-founder of MindTree Consulting, who was in town for the promotion of his book Go Kiss the World. The audience got plenty of answers in his down-to-earth solutions and pragmatic approaches. Many doubts that dog working people were cleared. In the book you could understand corporate structuring and relationships, as much as you could find keys to your many unfulfilled queries about life.

It is when someone can convey his/her ideas through anecdotes which are as much about pitfalls as about pinnacles, that you can come to terms with your own set of difficulties. And apply the knowledge, for heaven’s sake, to actual work. Or step up that job application this moment.