Go Kiss the World

Title: Go Kiss the World
Author: Subroto Bagchi
Number of pages: 240
My rating: 3*

The founder of MindTree shares his experiences in life exhorting his readers to pick up the lessons. The book is full of short stories from his life that gives it an allegorical setting. The messages are profound yet his simplistic and laconic writing style makes it a single-sitting book. It's not the first book I have read about ordinary people achieving extraordinary but the story like narration and his calling out of the learning from simple incidents in his life just made me continue reading it from cover to cover. That's not to undermine the learning themselves. They are extremely thought provoking, inspiring at the same time things that stare into our face every now and then. All it takes to grasp them is to keep our senses open.

Here are some excerpts from the book:

When you are continuously displaced, you make friends easily, You have low expectations from the unfamiliar; hence you are more pleasantly surprised than frustrated when faced with life's many ups and downs. You learn to survive on the strength of who you are, just for this day, today. You trust strangers and thence strangers trust you.

The world is not divided between the living and the dead, there is no difference between what is animate and what is inanimate. Shabda is brahma. She knocked on the surface of the dining table. There is brahma in everything. As long as you are willing to knock, even inanimate will respond. Our vision is not always a function of our capability to see, it is our willingness to open up our inner eye to the limitless universe that lights up the path of our existence.

There are the inevitable times in every life when we all must step on a thorn. It is never a pleasurable feeling, it is not meant to be. In that moment of pain, more often than not, we are focused not just on the pain itself but on the anguish of being singled out, asking the inevitable "Why me?" question. That question is as irrelevant as the pain itself. All of us realize that sooner or later. What we do not comprehend is the futility of carrying the baggage of that pain into our future. In life we cannot avoid pain. What we can do is learn from the pain and move on.

In many ways, we are all surrounded by such people all the time - sometimes they are siblings, sometimes friends, teachers, and co-workers. As we get on with the busyness of life, we lose our capacity to receive from people. The capacity to receive asks for humility. Humility makes the mind an empty vessel that then can receive. The capacity to receive expands when there is the willingness to give back - only when we return what we receive, are we blessed to receive even more.

Most people we meet do not have a special reason to remember us, nor are they interested in what we have to say or what we actually do. We live in a world of information overload and attention deficiency. People we meet are often looking at us but thinking about something else. Given that, it is important that in every situation one has to be not only well prepared but razor-sharp to create instant engagement. Be it a job interview, a presentation, or a meeting, we all have a very short window to make the right impression, and unfortunately most of us miss it.

There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.
Our lives are like rivers - the source seldom reveals the confluence. Does a river fret over the long journey and about its end just as it is about to spurt? It simply does not do that, caring instead to flow, to begin its journey, and on its way builds a beneficial relationship with anyone who comes in contact with her.
We all have some talent in us - be it singing, writing, painting or sculpting. It we nurture and cherish it, it makes our life fuller. Yet so many of us choose the uni-dimensionality of a work life, always citing lack of time to pursue a hobby. If we make a small commitment towards keeping our talent alive, one day it becomes a beautiful gift, which nourishes us, makes our lives complete.

All battles should be based on principles. And in a battle based on principles, it is not the size of the adversary that matters. It is the size of the principle.

When we look to hire people, we invariably look for sameness. It is so much more comfortable. But progress requires intelligent friction, push back, points and healthy counterpoints. The job of leaders is to build high personal comfort with contrarians who think differently, create alternative points of view and have the power to question the state of things.

Faced with a crisis, the job of a leader is to take charge and broadcast his of her intent. It is not a time for self-pity, not a time to ask, 'Why me?' In the middle of adversity, a leader must see what can be saved and what must be given up.
Leaders need to view infrastructure at three levels: the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional. What makes a corporation truly memorable and provides it with not just differentiation but defense is its emotional infrastructure. It is a collection of all the emotional assets of an organization; it is the shared consciousness and the soul of the enterprise. It goes beyond just culture.

The Kathopanishad tells us:
You are your deep driving desire
As is your desire, so is your will
As is your will, so is your act
As is your act, so is your destiny.

Sometimes, we hurt people's feelings. In most instances, the hurt caused is unintended. But, nonetheless, for the person who feels the pain, it is real. Once we realize we have hurt someone, we spend an enormous amount of time explaining rationally why the other person should not have felt that way. This is unnecessary; the only reason we get into all that explanation is our ego. The moment calls for just three words: 'I am sorry.' Great leaders are people who can quickly and genuinely say that they are sorry. By saying sorry, you do not become weak. You shorten the path from the head to the heart.