Life lesson from my dad’s passing

Its been a month since my dad’s passing and as mom and I continue to reminisce about his life and reconcile with his loss, I am realizing that life has taught me an important lesson.

Both Dad and his younger brother were tall and heavy and both had acid reflux issues (thanks to their maternal genes). But how their health unraveled took two contrasting roads.

1. Extreme acid reflux can simulate cardiac issues and this happened for both. Cardiologists did angioplasty on uncle but treating arterial blocks do not stop acid reflux. Uncle lost faith in treatment. Bypass surgery was recommended for dad after 20 days so I figured if he can survive for 20 days, his health can be managed without surgery.

2. Both developed swelling on their hands and feet. Uncle’s condition was apparently not treated. Dad’s cardiologist kept asking about his bypass surgery and ignoring the swelling. So I googled to find out why the swelling was happening. Any issue that affects the working of the heart reduces blood flow to other parts of the body. When kidneys receive lesser amount of blood the body assumes there is not enough water so kidneys start accumulating water, first on the feet and then on the hands. The condition is called edema. Finally when water enters the lungs it becomes pulmonary edema. Then the only treatment left is bypass surgery. Dad’s cardiologist was trying to force bypass surgery on him by leaving the swelling untreated. I immediately changed the cardiologist and consulted a nephrologist who prescribed a diuretic which forces water in the swelled up areas to be released from the body through urination. Uncle refused bypass surgery, water had to be pulled out of his lungs, he developed paralytic stroke and eventually passed away.

3. Dad reduced salt intake drastically after misunderstanding cardiologist’s instruction. I was unfamiliar with the ensuing condition but realized something was wrong with him. Took him to hospital for checkup and found his sodium level freefalling. In another two days he would have had ended up in coma.

4. Dad’s new cardiologist advised me to treat acid reflux at home and not to take him to hospital as acid reflux bouts can seem like cardiac issue and he would end up in the hands of cardiologists.

For the past 10 years, I have been mostly at home and especially in the last 6 years, largely due to market conditions. This gave me the opportunity to try doing different things which led to starting a home based cloud kitchen and in a way fulfill dad’s lifelong ambition to start a restaurant. I forced dad to go to the gym which improved his health drastically. When he suffered stroke like symptoms I chose to take him to a physician nearby who checked him and told me his nerve functions were fine and he was suffering from weakness due to muscle loss caused by protein deficiency. Though he fell a couple of times nothing happened to him and mom and I ensured he never fell down again especially in the bathroom. Broken bones never heal completely in old age, restrict movements which reduces immunity and makes body vulnerable to other diseases. Dad had normal blood sugar and I ensured all his body organs were working well and his blood pressure, essential elements like sodium, potassium and magnesium and vitamin levels were normal. Circumstances prevented me from pursuing a career in medicine but my fundamentals in biology and human anatomy are strong and I read a lot on both.

I did not earn a lot of money in the past 10 years but I was able to save a lot of money on dad’s treatment. If I hadn’t been at home. he may have underwent bypass surgery which could have ruined his health. Most importantly, he was able to live a disease free life, eat and do everything he wanted to and go peacefully. I could not have bought him this with all the money in the world. Is it possible to become successful without having a lot of money and everything that comes with it? I guess it is.

Fame, alcohol and a tragic end to a great man

All greatness in this world has come at a cost and most of it has been hidden cost. Many among us drool over and criticize rock stars for their drugs, sex and rock and roll lifestyle. But what we don’t do is to find out how they end up living such lives. Climbing up the ladder of life is one thing but staying on top is a different beast. Well, there is no course in the world that teaches fame management. If we are striving for success without knowing what to do with it when we achieve it, we are in for a lot of trouble. The first objective is to know when we have peaked in life and then accept that we are no longer going up so we need to rechart our lives. I learnt this lesson from the life of Mark Knopfler. He broke up Dire Straits when the band was at it’s peak and was topping every music chart in the world. Why? Because Brothers in Arms is a phenomenal album which he may have realized he could not better. His decision was justified when he returned in 1991 with a new album which did not match up to the dizzying heights of Brothers in Arms as was expected. He achieved the fame he wanted to but was smart enough to chart a new course for his life. He still makes music but the music he wants to make and not what people expect him to make under the label of Dire Straits. But I guess most people who achieve greatness do not understand the need to scale down and stay consistently successful. They bask in the glory of their success and let life slip out of their hands. I know two people whose lives peaked and ended in identical fashion but in very different ways.

Someone who was like a father figure to me passed away yesterday after a prolonged battle with liver cirrhosis. He was affectionately called ND by everyone. Born into abject poverty, he rampaged his way through school on scholarship and then finished his engineering degree on scholarship as well. A truly remarkable achievement by the highest standards. When all his friends went for lucrative jobs in the marine industry, he went to Dubai and found his feet. He worked in one company for 25 long years, got married, got his sisters married, got his wife’s sisters married, got jobs for his cousins in Dubai, got them married and settled, built his own house, got his kids educated, saved money for the family and most important of all, took absolute care of his mother. He surpassed expectations so much that he managed to do things beyond one man’s capabilities in a lifetime. When I was growing up, I was always told to look up to him and see how he takes care of his responsibilities. His life was similar to my grandfather’s in many ways. With no job and no money, grandpa left for Calcutta during the peak of World War II and found his life there. He worked his way into Dunlop and had an cracker of a professional life there.

Both dragged their life downhill in similar ways as well. When they thought they were finished with their responsibilities, both decided to return to their hometown, the same place they had to leave and go in search of a good life elsewhere. They returned without any specific objectives, hoping to live a calm and retired life. Both didn’t realize that after living high profile lives in cities for so long, life in a town would eat away their minds. My grandpa spent his last years with a slipping mind, the only reason for him to hold on was me. ND veered down into a road of self destruction. He tried his hand at business and failed badly. Then a monotonous life of doing nothing took over his mind terribly. He was a normal drinker and he took to alcohol to drown out his mind without peace. He was neither an alcoholic nor depressed. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. His path crossed with my grandpa once again during this time. Out of nowhere, his friends called him to Singapore to work. Without any responsibilities left, it was his passport to freedom, to start life again and end it in a blaze of glory. I begged him to take it up but sadly he didn’t. Dunlop had given my grandpa a two year contract to work in the UK when he took retirement and he had also refused.

From then on, it was only a matter of when it would all end. When I met ND recently after his liver had given upon him, he told me that all his responsibilities were over and there was no need for him to be alive anymore. That will always be one of the saddest moments of my life. All I could ask him was that he has left everyone a legacy of how one man can shape the lives of so many people around him. Does he want to leave behind a legacy of such a death as well? I saw his eyes welling up with tears and he asked me to leave. I knew he had realised it was all too late.

What I would really miss about him is the way he would question me with stern eyes and then melt down and give me a sly smile with a sparkle in his eyes. The prospect of facing his wrath was one of the reasons why I could never take the risk of slipping in my life. People may say that he drunk himself to his death and that he is not a good example to follow, but those people are either short sighted or never knew him for who he was. He just made one mistake in his life. He didn’t take a moment out of his life to look what is around him and ask himself “What is it that I really want to do?”. Did he want to explore the world? Take photographs? Paint? Create music? Make food? We will never know. He was unwavering in his focus towards his family but he was totally blind about himself. He just went with the flow and thought he was enjoying life, but he wasn’t. No one can truly appreciate life unless we know what our true capabilities and interests are and how we will truly fit in this world. He may only be remembered as the one who was born to rescue his family and that will give no justice to the man he was and the immense skills and attitude he had to face life. He leaves a huge lesson for everyone to learn and a huge hole in my heart. For a man who achieved so much in so less time, this was not the way to go. He deserved a much better farewell. If his soul has awakened, I am sure he is not going to be at peace for such an inglorious end.

ND, respect and honour. Your life will continue to inspire me and keep me focused on my family and friends. I will see you in the plains of afterlife. Till then, au revoir.

Defining success

It has to be the most misused, misunderstood, misinterpreted and misquoted word in English. It is the buzzword that drives the urban world now. It has become the synonym for many other words such as high flying corporate jobs, ever burgeoning paychecks, snazzy gizmos, high rise apartments, top of the line fashion, imported cars, the list goes on and on. It has caused expectations to rise to such dizzying heights that men’s worth is calculated in terms of their bank balance and the number of credit cards they have. Success.

I am amazed at how easily human beings can get distracted, lose sight of reality and lose their way in life for one reason. In the animal world, every moment of survival is a moment of success. They live every moment on the edge of death, their lives hanging in the balance. Every time they find food is a moment of success. Pride of female lions chase zebras, deers and buffaloes, fully knowing how capable these animals are of kicking with their hind legs. One kick could end up with the lion getting a broken jaw, death by starvation and it’s cubs also perishing. Still they take the risk, to beat hunger and to feed their cubs, because higher the risks higher the rewards. We were like this when we were cave dwellers and still are in many ways. We brave the rough sea and risk our lives to fish and we till the land, sow the seeds and wait for the crops at the risk of flood.

What I am driving at is, success can be explained just like Jackie Chan explains the concept of Kung Fu to Jaden Smith in the movie The Karate Kid. Success is in everything we do in our daily lives. But our priorities have changed with time. In the mad rush for that high flying corporate job, bank balance and everything associated with them, we have chosen to ignore our success in everything we do from the beginning of each day, right from brushing our teeth without hurting the gums. I am amazed at how many things we take for granted in life when our lives themselves are so uncertain.

There are two extreme schools of thoughts about living life. On one side is the “I am going to die anyway some day, so I want to live it up every moment with a booze-sex-drugs-rock and roll life. At the other end of the spectrum is the Shaolin Temple and it’s inhabitants. Most of us live somewhere in between these two extremes. Through the time of humanity, we have had the most diverse and weirdest ways of defining success. If bringing home food by hunting or fishing was a success for our procreation, dying in battle was the successful way of finding heaven in the netherworld for the Vikings.

So what drives this mad rush in search of success? One-upmanship, our insatiable urge and hunger to outdo competition, be it from our own kind or from the animal world. We have made life into a gladiator’s arena and unknowingly we are fighting pitched battles with one another. Success has two more synonyms in our perception. Leadership and domination. By being successful consistently over a period of time, we can become good leaders. But great leaders need only one opportunity. When normal people give up and accept the life before them, great leaders see the opportunity to make a difference. They can seize a big opportunity and also see a small one from far off. Great leaders do not project themselves as leaders and seek to dominate people. They get accepted as leaders by the people and also as one among them. This is how some of us like Gautam Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela have become great leaders and this is what makes their success stand out.

The value system of success has evolved and changed with the passage of time. Success for us is no longer ‘in the moment’. There is no greater success than procreation for any living being and in the first 3 years of our children’s lives, every moment with them is unbridled happiness. But we are not there with them in those moments, because we are out there seeking what we believe is success and glory. When we see our paychecks every month, the feeling is not of working successfully for the month but rather that of relief, to pay our loans and bills. We no longer understand or enjoy the worth of our accomplishments because we are constantly looking for success in the wrong places and in the wrong things. The advertisement of Mastercard is so relevant here. There are some things in life which are priceless and can never be bought or obtained with the material comforts that comes with what we perceive as a successful life.

I have always believed that our souls are in the midst of a journey. We may not know where we have come from and we may not know where we are going. Birth and death are like two consecutive bus or train stations and life is the journey in between. In the vast expanse of the cosmos, time is immeasurable and our lives are simple dots in the fabric of space and time. When we truly realize who and what we are in the realm of the Universe and when we start finding joy and satisfaction in everything around us, that’s when we will truly find success in life. To top it off, there are and have been people among us who have proved that we do not even need all our abilities to be truly successful in life. Even though Stephen Hawking is immobile and can barely move his fingers, it didn’t stop him from becoming one the greatest scientists mankind has known. The best example of it all, a man called Ludwig van Beethoven did not even need his auditory abilities to create music that has been enthralling us for centuries and will continue to do so till mankind exists. These examples demonstrate something very subtle and unique. Truly successful people are neither looking for glory nor to prove themselves. They do what they truly have want to do and there is one word that defines the secret of their success and helped them defy all the odds life threw in their paths. Passion.

Conquering the ladder of glory

I am an avid fan of the game of cricket and I have been watching many great players of the game take a call on their time in the past one year. The print, television and social media are all effuse in their praise for these retiring giants and in calling them the greats of the game. Today, I watched the captain of the South African team lead his team out for one final time and leave the field to a standing applause from the crowd. This ticked off a question floating in my mind for a long time. What is our ultimate quest in life? What will bring us enlightenment?

Everyone strives for the broad, high level category called success in life. As we step into it, we start climbing the ladder of success and each rung has it’s own meaning and objective. The first few rungs will earn us recognition, recognition will take us to fortune and the combined effect of fortune and recognition will give us fame. But then there is the factor of intelligence in the mix as well. So I believe in a simple analysis to see where people stand on the ladder of success. A mature woman will usually fall for the combination of intelligence and recognition or the combination of fortune and recognition.

Now, how do we start off? The most easiest choice to make in life is to choose our own path by discovering our innate talents. The most difficult way to start off is if we let someone else choose our path for us. If we choose to be the master of our own destiny, we will be more inclined to choose to be a sportsperson, a musician or any other profession where our dependency is more on our own dedication, skill and temperament than anything else. Fortune converges with fame rapidly, in no time. The road of intelligence and knowledge is usually a dreary one. Intelligence and fortune seldom goes hand in hand. All intelligent people are considered as mavericks in the society even though they are revered. Intelligence usually overshadows everything else, including fortune.

When we attain fame, we will have earned enough fortune to not worry about it anymore. What is left to conquer? Glory or greatness, which is completely misconstrued. We have been taught since long ago that true glory is getting our names etched in history, in the minds of people for generations to come. When Bon Jovi croons “I am going down in a blaze of glory”, it is a reminder of the western cowboys going down in a hail of bullets. People used to believe that we had to die in a battle to attain ultimate glory and Vikings would vouch for that. Hardly a way to find glory. Why is it that just being in people’s memories is the mantra to perpetual greatness?

What we must actually strive for is self gratification. And how do we know we have reached there? When we will truly feel humbled when the whole world is at our feet. It is the point of zen, the point of perfection, the point where a self SWOT analysis would fail. We will have found the balance of our strengths and weaknesses and accepted both, we are no longer craving for opportunities and are willing to step aside for someone else and we are no longer intimidated by threats to our fame. The world will truly remember us if we keep challenging ourselves, achieve our goals with the true intent and spirit and most importantly, never desire for the world to remember us. It was a very poignant moment for me to see the captain of the South African team taking his last walk back from the field today. A decade back, he was just 22 years old when the leadership of the team was thrust on his young shoulders, at a time when it’s credibility was in shambles due to betting scandals. He is leaving the team now after taking it to the pinnacle of glory. The whole fraternity of the game will remember him for a long time to come and he will be spoken about whenever the conversation is about true grit and leadership in the game. Ladder of glory successfully conquered.

Corporate lessons from the game of cricket

Those who follow the game of cricket will know that the Ashes series played between England and Australia has been the most watched and engrossing series of the game. The just concluded series resulted in a comprehensive victory for the Aussies. What is remarkable is that, England had won the series on their own soil only less than a year back and the Australian team was battered and broken. This astonishing turnaround has huge ramifications, not only for the cricketing world but for the corporate world as well.

The Aussie team was a wreck in the 1980s and their captain had relinquished his title in tears. Then started the rebuilding process when the cricket administration made the domestic cricket league stronger, started blooding youngsters and gave them ample exposure at the international level. Small win became bigger and that turned to domination and domination into might, the might with which they ruled for the game for more than a decade. The team evolved into a bunch of greats, many of them tagged as one-in-a-generation players. But nothing lasts forever. The greats started leaving the arena one by one. New players supposedly ready to take their places didn’t succeed as expected and Aussie cricket started losing it’s way. World titles were lost and their world rankings fell by the wayside. The English team blossomed after a considerable passage of time, when they wrenched the Ashes series from the Aussies. Slowly, their players also blossomed into consistent performers. So after three straight Ashes series losses, the last one less than a year back, how did the Aussies script this remarkable turnaround?

The rebuilding started with the appointment of a new team coach and a change in the environment of the players’ room. Meetings were made more relaxed and enjoyable and opinions of everyone were heard. The coach, an ex-Australian player had built a reputation of extracting the best out of players in his previous coaching assignments. But the most important thing they did was, they brought back players who had lost their place in the team because of inconsistent performance in the past and who were burning in their desire to prove themselves. Everyone involved in managing the team had their own strategies and the captain was given free rein to be innovative with his team. And to top it off, they stuck with the same team through the series. Injuries were taken care of, adequate rest was given to the players but they were firmly told that they were there for the long haul and aches and pains had to be treated as part of the game. It clicked, phenomenally. What differentiated this team from the dominating Aussie team of the past was, that was a team comprised of great players who could single handedly turn the game in their team’s favour on any given day. The present team is a motley crew compared to them, but these guys have famously united as a team and someone or the other have put their hand up and delivered when it mattered the most.

What are the lessons for the corporate world from all of this? Leadership issues plague the corporate world everywhere and most of time, changes are made after a lot is lost. An environment where employees feel belonged makes an ocean of difference. It is said that employees quit jobs to change their managers which clearly indicates leadership woes. Most important of it all is people management. It is ultimately the people who define success and failure, so retaining and having people with the right attitude in the organization is the key. Keeping them enthused and motivated, laying down clear paths for professional growth, handling their professional differences, egos and personal issues tactfully and providing the right environment for them to work are the factors that define good leadership. Employees all thrive as individual contributors, but the onus is on the leadership to drive home the fact every time that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Goal setting is another key factor. If everyone from the top management to employees at the base of the corporate pyramid knows what their roles and contributions are towards the growth of the organization, the whole environment will get into sync in no time.

The most important factor holding back continuous growth is complacency. We are prone to taking things for granted easily in life. It is imperative that we keep reminding ourselves that nothing lasts forever, least of all success. Staying focussed and hungry to learn more and at the same time accepting mistakes gracefully by seeing them as opportunities to improve ourselves are the key ingredients for continued success. This should apply across all levels of the corporate pyramid for the growth of the organization. The Australian team renews it’s quest for glory and I am waiting to see how long their hunger for success lasts before complacency sets in again.