The karma yogi of consulting | Business Line

The karma yogi of consulting | Business Line



Ask the right questions; listen well; seek out viewpoints; zoom in on the crux of a problem; read people well. These characteristics, he said, define all great leaders.



It’s the serial uncertainty; things are more volatile. Uncertainty has always been there but now there are forces that have accelerated with more frequency and more volatility. But, as human development has taken place (over the years), the coming generations will rise to the challenge and create innovation, productivity and education to deal with that uncertainty. That’s the general one; then you go industry by industry, country by country; there are different degrees of uncertainty, and the successful leader will have to have the competence to deal with it.

Life is beautiful

When you hear a catchy tune, do your feet tap out the rhythm?          ........When you see a beautiful natural scene or a splendid piece of architecture,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, do your spirits soar? Of course! Because our brains can recognise and enjoy beauty in all its forms. We all have the potential to recognise beauty, but we have to CULTIVATE NOURISH skill.......................... We must learn to look for it not only in galleries and museums and from mountain tops but in the streets around us.................................... We must interpret the word beyond the narrow sense of beauty contests! Otherwise we will forever be condemned to what the poets like to call a “brutish existence.”
Life is beautiful

‘There’s no facility in India for lessons learnt’

“Ordinary people quite often do extraordinary things. And that matters to me.”

Our idea was to write a book that is (long pause) embedded in the emotional experience of the attack, but also meticulously rooted in detail and to achieve that goal in the shortest number of pages possible.

The problem with 26/11 is that it has not been talked about enough in the right way, the emotional horror we lived with, just as everyone else did. Afterwards there was a meagre post-mortem.

 Especially at the government level?

The government level was nebulous. What the government did at the state and central level was to bury it as quickly as possible under 3,000 feet of earth. Like I have said many times, there was no post-mortem worth its name.

 Everyone talks about Mumbai’s resilience. But do you feel the offside can be forgetfulness?

The resilience is with the people. And the forgetfulness is with the government. What we say is Mumbai saved itself and of course the government wouldn’t have that debate.

 You are very critical of the RAW and NSG… there is that really sad scene of a cop throwing a plastic chair at a terrorist when his rifle jams..

And that is the reason so many people came forward. It is not just our view, it is the view within the institution because there is no system to reform and no amnesty offered for forthrightness. And no climate created for honest debate.

Which was the toughest part to piece together?

NSG was the toughest part to tell. Because the establishment did everything they could to prevent us from the telling of it. To persuade people to talk was difficult. Pain wise (long pause) I am not going to single out names because it was private things said by different individuals.

But there are people who I sat down with who were still very broken. And the reason is because there is no adequate closure.