It’s dirt everywhere!

Corporate practices, professional propriety, political conduct, sporting spirit, seems nothing is sacred in India, anymore.


From political corruption, nepotism, corporate malpractices, spot-fixing, to sexual misconduct at work place, India is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Ranbaxy & the Singh Brothers

THE SCANDAL: Ranbaxy has been held accountable for falsifying drug data, dangerous manufacturing practices and compromised drug safety. Former promoter Malvinder Singh dismisses the claims of whistleblower Dinesh Thakur as sensational.

Bansal, his Kin & his Fiefdom

THE SCANDAL: Former railway minister PK Bansal had to resign after his nephew was allegedly caught accepting a bribe. Ministry of Corporate Affairs has ordered a probe into the 105 companies Bansal and his extended family are alleged to own.

Phaneesh Murthy & iGate

THE SCANDAL: IT services firm iGate terminated its CEO Murthy's contract for not reporting a relationship with Araceli Roiz, a former head of investor relations. Her lawyers say Roiz is pregnant with his child and that when she refused to have an abortion, he attempted to get her to leave the company. Murthy's defense is that the charge is an attempt at extortion and he denies sexual harassment charges.

S Sreesanth & the Dirty Money Trail

THE SCANDAL: Delhi Police pick up India fast bowler Sreesanth and two of his colleagues from Rajasthan Royals for alleged spot-fixing in IPL-6. The trail gets murkier with the arrest of Gurunath Meiyappan, son-in-law of BCCI president N Srinivasan who also owns Chennai Super Kings.

At global front India is standing at number 90 in ‘World’s least corrupt countries’. [Denmark, Finland, New Zealand at number 1; Sweden at 4, Singapore is at 5; Norway 7, USA 12].

Though we claim India is shining and it’s on path of growth and next decade belongs to India etc; this corruption is certainly pulling us down. It’s like accelerating your car with hands brake on! First question is why this is happening?

This is a tough question to answer and to prevent.

Still, even if the likes of Sreesanth, Murthy and Bansal and the Singhs are forgotten, you can bet your bottom rupee that there will be another sportsperson, corporate executive, politician and business promoter who will be under the arclight of corruption in the days ahead

Do Your Part

Via Robin Sharma:

Big question for you: “what are you doing to help build a new and better world?” Don’t blame the politicians. Don’t blame those around you. Don’t blame your parents or your background. Doing so is playing the victim and this world has far too many people playing the victim when they could be shining and making a profound difference. Mother Teresa said it so much better than I ever could: “if each of us would only sweep their own doorstep, the whole world would be clean.” Nice.


Blaming others is excusing yourself. Telling yourself that you – as an army of one – cannot have an impact is giving away your power. A couple of college kids got their hands on empty school buses and drove them into New Orleans when everybody else said the city was unapproachable. A little man in a loincloth named Mohandas Gandhi freed an entire nation. A college student named Richard Branson took some initiative to start a record label on a shoestring that has since morphed into the Virgin empire. You are no different from them. We are all flesh and bones – cut from the same cloth.

In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Jennifer Aniston said that she gives herself one day to play victim after a challenging event. After that day of feeling sorry for herself and powerless, she wakes up and takes ownership over the way her life looks. And if she doesn’t like a piece of it she sets about to change it. That’s personal leadership.

What don’t you like about your life or the organization you work for or the country you live in? Make a list. Write it down. Shout it out. And then do something to improve things. Anything. Start small or go big. Just do something. Today. Now. The world will be better for it.

Books to Read

A list of books to read compiled by Robin Sharma: great list and will transform lives for sure...

1.Jonathan Livingston Seagull. By Richard Bach.

With lines like: “Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation,” this book will move you deeply. I re-read it in Thailand. Still amazingly good.

2.Think and Grow Rich. By Napoleon Hill.
Fantastic book. Not so much about financial wealth as it is about the making of a rich life. You’ll learn how important it is to have a burning desire (this galvanizes your focus and causes the release of your creativity) + the imperative of setting clear goals + the value of “a mastermind alliance”. This book truly changed my life when I was starting out as a self-published author with nothing but a dream in my hands. Times were tough. This book got me through.

3.The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. By–well, Marcus Aurelius.
Marcus Aurelius was a warrior—who then became a Roman emperor. He wrote his lessons on greatness and a life well lived during a multi-year military campaign. Someone got his notes. And put it into this book. I go back to this book often. It strengthens my character. And resolve to help more people.

4.Steve Jobs. By Walter Isaacson.
One of the best books I’ve ever read. Period.

5.Long Walk To Freedom. By Nelson Mandela.
Nelson Mandela’s one of my heroes. Noble. Courageous. Focused. A visionary. If I could be 1/100 of who he is, I’d be overjoyed. This is his autobiography. You’ll walk with him through his days as a lawyer, his time as a disruptor, his prison years and his period as the positional leader of South Africa.

6.Stop Acting Rich. By Thomas Stanley.
Thomas Stanley became famous for “The Millionaire Next Door”. But this book–not so well known–is exceptional. He explains the concept of “The Glittering Rich”, shares how too many of us live beyond our means and how to create true financial freedom. Like most of the books I read, I listened to it.

7.As You Think. By James Allen.
Maybe 10 times. That’s at least how many times I’ve read this book. And like all great books, it seems better+wiser and deeper every time I read it. Of course, the book hasn’t changed. Just my ability to grasp the information. And understand the concepts. This book is all about the power of your daily thinking. And how it drives your life’s behavior. As you know so well: your behavior shows us your beliefs. And this awesome book will inspire you to build new ones.

8.The Magic of Thinking Big. By David Schwartz.
Uber-practical. Tons of value. Great concepts, like “Go Through Life First-Class.” Every student, teammate and human being should read this book (along with “How To Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie–that work should also be on my list. True.).

9.Talent is Overrated. By Geoff Colvin.
Read this one a few years ago. Changed the way I viewed Genius. Confirms a lot of the work of exceptional performance researchers like the famed Anders Ericsson that talent is less about natural gifts and far more about devotion to a skill, relentless practice and patience. Another superb audiobook.

10.Spark. By John Ratey.
One of the best books I’ve read in years. I’m on my 3rd reading. Shares the latest (and so fascinating) research on how exercise transforms the brain, our performance, our productivity and even builds a new type of brain that is excellent at resisting stress. Please do your life a giant favor. And read this book. Today!

Lessons of Life

One Kannada song has caught me up since last two days, and it is so beautifully written. It has great meaning and lesson for life. Trying to translate it…


Learning can come from any corner!!

enagali munde saagu nee,
bayasiddella sigadu baaLali
nannaaNe nanna maatu suLLalla
----------

whatever happens, you need to go on with this strife
whatever you wish for, seldom you get in life
Swear on me, my words are not mere lies…
----------

[chalisuva kaalavu, kalisuva paaTava
mareyabEDa nee, tumbiko manadali]
[indigo naLego, mundina baaLali
gelluvanta spoorthi daari deepa
ninage aa anubhava]
ninage aa anubhava
--------------

time that moves on and on, and teaches lessons beyond
you don't forget those, fill it in your mind
for today or tomorrow, later on in your life
let the winning spirit be the guiding light
for your experience
---------------

‘Insanely Great’!!

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted

Mr. Isaacson takes his readers back to the time when laptops, desktops and windows were metaphors, not everyday realities. His book ticks off how each of the Apple innovations that we now take for granted first occurred to Mr. Jobs or his creative team. “Steve Jobs” means to be the authoritative book about those achievements, and it also follows Mr. Jobs into the wilderness (and to NeXT and Pixar) after his first stint at Apple, which ended in 1985.

In that respect, Jobs the man is consistent throughout, expressing little regret or dissatisfaction with himself, except for his repeated wish that he had spent more time with his children, who, he says, were his main motivation for cooperating with and encouraging that a biography be written at all. In a world where people and media will pay actual money for one glimpse of a dying and frail CEO, Steve Jobs will not be the final book on the man, but it will be the only one told largely in his words, and the only one in which he had the final say on its cover.

Eleven Minutes: A book review

An international bestseller by the author of The Alchemist tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that "Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer ..." A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune. Instead, she ends up working as a prostitute.

In Geneva, Maria drifts further and further away from love as she develops a fascination with sex. Eventually, Maria's despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness, sexual pleasure for its own sake, or risking everything to find her own "inner light" and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love.

In this gripping and daring novel, Paulo Coelho sensitively explores the sacred nature of sex and love and invites us to confront our own prejudices and demons and embrace our own "inner light."

Coelho elevates his readers to a passionate realm of love, sex and divinity. Through the interaction between Ralf and Maria, the readers are made part of the furious, furtive passion of these young lovers. We are taken on a spiritual journey on the route of love and through the realization of our central characters; Coelho elaborates his ideas of sacred love. He challenges us to question everything that we know about love and life and makes us see something from an alternate perspective.

He adopts an almost fable like approach to tell a story about love and passion. He uses deft brushstrokes like an artist and colors every tiny speck of space on this canvas with myriad hues from his imagination. This is what makes his style of writing so unique and the taste or the essence of his books linger in the reader’s minds. He catapults you to the height of your own imagination and where you will go from there is left to you.

Among the many ideas that I gained from this book, the most poignant of them all was the realization that one must lose oneself completely in order to be found.

So, on this note, I ask myself: do you prefer a life mapped with reason to guide each and every step of your journey or would you rather take a leap of faith into the unknown with nothing but a dash of hope to take you there?

Without so much as blinking

(From Paulo Coelho)

During the civil war in Korea, a certain general and his troops were advancing implacably, taking province after province, destroying everything in their path. The people in one city, hearing that the general was approaching and knowing his cruel reputation, fled to a nearby mountain.


The troops found the houses empty. After much searching, though, they found one Zen monk who had stayed behind. The general ordered that he be brought before him, but the monk refused to go.

Furious, the general went to him instead.

‘You obviously don’t know who I am!’ he bawled. ‘I am capable of stabbing you in the chest with my sword without so much as blinking.’

The Zen master turned and replied calmly:

‘You obviously don’t know who I am either. I am capable of letting myself be stabbed in the chest by a sword without so much as blinking.’

On hearing this, the general bowed low and left.

The concept of work and being proactive

There were two friends who worked for a marketing company. Both of them were hard working smart young guys. Their boss had lot of confidence on them and hence enjoyed working with both of them.

Like in any corporate company, both of them got to work with multiple positions and both of them got opportunities to work with new initiatives.

While all this is happening, John got promotion among both of them. So Pran decided to reach out to boss and asked him directly that both of us were working equally hard and why only John got promotion? Pran simply believes that John is among many ordinary team members.

Rather than answering his question directly, boss told him ‘go to the other side of the market and check if Mango fruit has come to market’.

Pran rushed to the market and came back with an answer yes. Boss then asked about the price, Pran went again to check the price. After return boss asked about what is the quantity of the supply, for which Pran has to return back to market. After 5-6 trips boss got all the answers he was looking for.

Now boss called John and asked him the same question.

John went to the market and came back with the analysis. ‘There are 4 tons of supply of mangoes in the market, there are three vendors selling them. There seems to be a tough competition between them. One of them is selling at competitive price but the quality is not so good. If you want to buy the fruits then we need to buy it from one particular vendor because though the price is high the quality of fruits is good. And since the market is expecting more fruits from other vendors the price is expected to fall down further”.

Pran got his answer.

This is what being proactive means!