Bounce: An Amazing Book for Parents, Teachers...Anyone!

A quick review of a truly amazing book, Bounce, written by an equally wonderful author, Matthew Syed

After you read this book, you'll think a thousand times before making statements like “How talented that guy is; excellence is in his genes.” Or, “Oh, she's such a gifted child – no wonder she won the figure skating championship.”

Matthew Syed (himself a Commonwealth table tennis champion) bursts several myths and lays down the principles associated with extraordinary achievement: the popular but ill-conceived idea of talent as a mystic, elusive thing; the myth of the child prodigy (Mozart, Tiger Woods, Shakuntala Devi); the workings of a motivational spark; and the most important of them all – relentless practice.

Unlike the schmaltzy self-help books, Bounce reveals in beautiful precision the inspiring examples of world-class performers and players. What's more, the author relates how “purposeful practice” followed by champion sportsmen can be applied to business or society – and what a lot of good it can achieve. This book can indeed change the way we look not only at the wonderkids of sport but also at the defining principles of education and success.

I highly recommend it...

The Essence of Leadership

At a time when our world is suffering from one of its biggest crises – the leadership vacuum – I think it might be worth our while to revisit the idea of leadership and the core qualities of great leaders


Few things move men and women as much as the inspiring words or daring examples of a great leader. Over millennia of human history, a galaxy of leaders have led people all over the world to achieve extraordinary things. Not just in times of war to win battles but in peaceful times as well to establish business empires, create things of beauty or make planet earth a better place to be. Some of the biggest names in leadership that immediately spring to mind: Mahatma Gandhi, George Washington, Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest Shackleton, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr, Winston Churchill, Gloria Steinem, Buddha, Pope John Paul II, Dalai Lama, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs...

Not a comprehensive list for sure, nor does it belong to a particular eon or creed or flavor – but certainly worthy of our aspiration, emulation or, simply, following.

There are some key questions we have always been asking about leadership: What is leadership? What makes the people named above or hundreds of others like them across centuries so different, so influential, so long-lasting despite their limited tenure and many human frailties? What intrinsic or acquired qualities have made them win wars, inspire trust in people, heal their minds and souls, change the way we relate to society, or create organizations and objects that become the envy of the world?

Questions like these have intrigued the best of human minds and the answers still continue to evolve even after relentless honing and refinement. But given that the world is going through multiple crises which, I believe, can be better tackled with effective leadership, it may not be out of place to address its core principles and ideas.

First and foremost, the very term leadership, according to Oxford dictionary, means “the action of leading a group of people or an organization, or the ability to do this.” So the most essential thing about a leader is that he or she gets other people to achieve some goal.

But a mechanical get-things-done-through-people definition is not what leadership is all about. Let's look at what some of the world's best minds have said about leadership.

Dwight D Eisenhower: “The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible...”

Stephen Covey: “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”

John Quincy Adams: “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Our chief want in life is someone who shall make us do what we can.”

Warren Bennis: “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

Tom Peters: “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”

There are thousands of such interesting, inspiring or illuminating viewpoints and opinions. But the critical thing to note is, it is the leaders – whether of a country, a society, an organization or even a function within a firm – who make things move. Who take the initiative to urge people to come together for achieving something. Who are always taking it upon themselves to learn new things, try new ideas and leave a legacy of innovation, creativity, and can-do spirit. They may lean toward certain personality traits, but they are all distinguished by the integrity of their values and the emotional maturity of their actions.

They are all, without doubt, leaders.

We don't seem to have many of them left, do we? So, how can we create, nurture or empower more leaders?

Think about it...

Why the New Coke Ad is More Sad Than Happy

I also like the ad that shows happy kids singing, but there are unhappy truths behind fizzy drinks people should know as well

Before I write any bad things about Coke, Pepsi or any other carbonated beverage company, let me first make an admission. I have had plenty of these drinks in my life and enjoyed them as much as kids still do today.

But then, I was also ignorant like most kids (and though I'm still ignorant to a big extent, I've also learnt a few things along the way).

So, what has changed?

For one, I started drinking fewer fuzzy drinks and began reading more about health issues, water problems and environmental destruction.

But more importantly, I became a father twice over – and began to get worried not only about what I consume but what I allow my kids to have. And when I see my young kids crave for a Pepsi, Fanta or another carbonated drink, and when I relent and let my wife share some with them and see them get aggressive or irritable after that...that's when I realize that a lot has changed, must change, from how things are now.

And that's why when I saw the new Coca-Cola ad in which kids sing a paean of hope while joyous stats are displayed on TV screens, I felt that this is wrong, just so wrong.

It's a great ad and I really like it – I only wish it weren't promoting fizzy drinks in the name of happiness and hope. Not to say it comes from a company that allegedly has double standards and dubious practices in the name of an iconic brand (to throw some light on this, readers may point their browsers to this interview of Michael Blanding, who wrote the book The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink. And if you search “Truth + Coca-Cola” on the Web, you'll be swamped with millions of links, many of them quite revealing).

But unlike me, there are millions of people, many of them impressionable children, who will watch this ad and find happiness in bottles of Coke rather than more health-giving fruits, milk or even water. Few would work for the causes espoused in the Coca-Cola ad; most would just sip a drink and be happier than before. Or at least live in an illusion of happiness. Like I had been doing, for quite a while, unfortunately.

My first eye-opener about our current state of food-and-beverage industry came a few years back when I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. In this book, Schlosser went deep into the working of McDonald's and revealed the smudges behind the golden arches – all in their gory details (the conditions and manner under which cows are killed and processed at a factory that supplies beef, for instance).

But I wouldn't like to single out Coke, Pepsi or McDonald's for the current sorry state of public health – which is increasingly getting riddled with obesity, hypertension, diabetes and scores of other ills. It has much to do with the entire process of looking at what we eat and drink from the profiteering lenses of giant corporations. Corps that are more concerned about economies of scale and the money they make rather than what ingredients are used and what effects the products have on people's health.

Kids in India (as probably in most places before the assembly-lining of food and beverages) used to enjoy home-cooked snacks and occasional indulgences of treacle toffees or aampapad (a locally made sweet of natural mango). Now they are gorging everywhere and all the time on industrially made 'addictive' wafers, fat-inducing burgers and large doses of carbonated sugar water. These and many similar obnoxious things is what you see all around you – in malls, at the local grocery shops, even at remote hill stations.

So dads like me (and moms, who aren't like me at all :) are forced to buy unhealthy things for their children if they ever want to step out of the house.

Some of us are trying to control and minimize the damage – but our little blogs and tweets get drowned in three-billion-dollars-a-year worth of massive advertising unleashed by the likes of Coke. And our tips and messages and efforts are lost in the sheer availability of “junk stuff” and the irresistible pull of the “convenience factor.”

Will someone please make an ad on that and highlight the real thing?

Let's celebrate and be joyous in the new year, but let's do it for the right reasons and for the real heroes – not for some cunning company.

Create Luxury or Remove Misery?

Does it make sense to create luxurious things and artful objects when so much squalor remains to be eliminated?


We live in a world full of ironies and conflicts. The world’s rich fret over how to gratify their palates with a new recipe, while the poor wonder when or whether they are going to have their next meal. People in one part of the world go to bed nestled in comfort, while in another they spend sleepless nights looking for a few inches of space to rest their exhausted bodies. There are some who don’t know what to do with all that cash piling up in their vaults, while there are many who are unsure how they’d support their families if they lose the only jobs they have known for years…

In the midst of acute food deprivation, we keep worrying about exotic cuisine. In the midst of widespread homelessness, we keep building sprawling bungalows. And as we face alarming levels of job cuts, we never tire of devising ways to hike productivity and efficiency.

Why?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to first bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots? Shouldn’t we work at equally distributing wealth, means of production and living space? Why should we cater to the luxurious living of the rich when we can’t take care of the basic needs of the poor?

Our conscience pricks us uncomfortably at these questions. And we are often left speechless when we try to defend our pursuits. But centuries of physical, mental and spiritual evolution has meant that creating creature comforts and continually developing things that please us is something that’s gotten etched into our minds.

We see luxury not merely as production of things that gratify us, but as an aspiring pursuit for enhancing our lives with things which we really value and which prod us to go higher – be it art, literature, music, gadgets or anything else that doesn’t necessarily have to be pursued in order to merely survive.

At times, this aspiration does get bogged down by the misery of fellow human beings around us. But it never dies out. On the contrary, the coexistence of squalid subsistence and luxurious living creates a vivid contrast of how things are and how they should be.

For instance, a landscaped apartment block surrounded by slums does look like an eyesore, but it’s also a very powerful pointer to how we should and should not live. One that blaringly reminds us that well-built homes in a clean and green environment – not dingy slums – is worthy of our emulation. It’s only that the contrast between the two highlights it in a painful way.

But such a contrast also heightens the intensity of our aspiration. Potholed roads make a new, superfast highway all the more valued just as a rag makes a finely tailored suit so much more desirable.

That, however, doesn’t mean undesirable things such as potholed roads or rags or hunger should exist. But the fact of the matter is that they have always existed in human history – and we’ve always been struggling to keep them to the minimum, but with different degrees of success.

We are a race that is forever seeking new pleasures, exploring new frontiers and improving upon our own concepts of beauty. It’s hard to think of how to distinguish between two delicacies on an empty stomach, or go for an adventure trek if we’ve been shivering in cold without shelter for weeks, or create a designer label when our nakedness is a compulsion rather than a choice. But once our basic needs are taken care of, our mind itches to get more, to make better what we already have, and to excel in our chosen field.

We can’t altogether reject this ‘itch’ – it’s an inseparable part of our character, chiseled into our brain over centuries of civilization.

Creation of luxury and of things we consider beautiful is the only way for us humans to exercise and stretch our faculties that make us so different from other animals. That creativity and urge to create is the bulwark upon which we have honed our ceaseless efforts to become more and more civilized. If we stop to evolve in our creativity, we’ll most likely retreat to our uncivilized ways – and perhaps finally become just another species.

That’s why we must keep our creative efforts going – in spite of all the wretchedness surrounding us. We must not see our attempts to live a better life as counter-productive to our intent to create a more equitable and just society. But we should see it as a challenge before us to balance our quest for luxury with the removal of our destitution.

The day we achieve that balance more peacefully and successfully will be the day of a paradigm shift in our rise to the top among fellow animals. It will also be a time when we’ll be free – perhaps for the first time in history – of the collective guilt of inequality we’ve been carrying on on our shoulders for ages.

So we must continually ask ourselves: How far is that day and what can each one of us do to make it happen?

Remembering the Ganesha 'Miracle'

Did the Hindu god Ganesha really drink milk in thousands of temples on this day many years ago?


I can never forget what I saw on that twenty-first day of September when I reached the temple nearest to my home. It changed my whole outlook toward God, life and people in general.

I had paddled fast on my bicycle on that slightly nippy morning and, leaving the bike unlocked against the temple wall, I rushed inside. I had to jostle my way through a motley crowd of devotees to reach the inner sanctum, where Lord Ganesha’s stone sculpture was affixed amongst several other Hindu deities. The idol was thronged on all sides by devotees, who were all falling over themselves to offer spoonfuls of milk to Ganesha.

In Hindu rituals, Lord Ganesha is usually offered a laddoo, a round sweet made of gram flour, but on that particular day of 1995, news had spread that Ganesha was “accepting” milk. On normal days, the faithful would put a laddoo to Ganesha’s mouth and then place it at His feet or in a tray nearby. This act of offering is essentially symbolic and a portion of the sweet remains stuck to the idol’s mouth. But that day, people claimed that Ganesha’s idols everywhere were literally drinking the milk offered to them, spoon by spoon. Within a few hours, the phenomenon was being hailed as a miracle in modern times.

It was this miracle that I had come to witness. I got up a little late that day, and as I was rubbing the early morning sleep out of my eyes, my overly credulous and religious mother told me that Lord Ganesha was drinking milk in temples everywhere and I must go and offer some to the Elephant God.

I was not exactly irreligious but, in my haste to see the impossible happen right before my eyes, I had rushed out of the house without carrying any milk to offer.

Now, as I stood inside the temple, agape, and watched the throng near Ganesha’s idol, I just could not believe it.

Not the miracle but what I really saw.

People were actually tilting their spoons, cups and other dishes full of milk they had brought with them at the stone idol – and the milk that was supposed to be sipped by the deity was spilling down its body and away into the drain that led out of the temple and mingled into the bigger culvert outside.

All of these religious people had come running to the temple hearing that Ganesha was drinking milk, and all without exception were actually pouring milk at the idol. They did it one after the other in quick succession, without stopping for a moment to look at what happened to the milk. Their already devout beliefs needed no confirmation – the idol was indeed drinking milk as far as they were concerned.

I carefully looked at several more acts of milk-offering, hoping to see Ganesha take a single sip of the white liquid - if only to help me form my own faith in miracles. But my eyes saw the same thing over and over again: milk trickling down the sides of the idol without so much as a hint of acceptance by the deity. I even dared to ask the person standing next to me, “Don’t you think these guys are spilling milk instead of feeding it to the idol?” But he only chided me for being an atheist and for making such a sacrilegious comment. “You shouldn’t doubt this miracle, or the gods will punish you. If you can’t offer any milk, at least don’t poison other people’s faith!” he retorted.

With a heavy heart I walked back home, my bicycle beside me. But I kept thinking: How could it be? How could it be? Was I shorn of any devotion whatsoever, that I couldn’t see the miracle? Or were people so blinded by their faith that they could not see what was obvious to me?

By late evening that day, the “news” of the “miracle” was breaking on all TV channels and other media. Not just temples in Delhi and across India, but many places of Hindu worship in several countries of the world, including Britain, Canada and Dubai, reported the same phenomenon being replicated.

Some novice reporters even got carried away by the spectacle and, in addition to the reports they filed, made their own offerings to Lord Ganesha right there on live television – and came away “believers” themselves. At the same time, there were some channels that had rounded up a bunch of rationalists in their studios and were putting up questions to them, demanding either plausible explanations or asking them to surrender their rationality to the televised images of the miracle beaming alongside their somber visages.

I watched as many programs as I could. Among other explanations given by the scientifically inclined, I remember hearing “capillary action and surface tension” as being responsible for milk getting slightly sucked out of the spoon before making its way down the idol in minute trickles. The tiny streams of milk down the idols went mostly unnoticed. Or it didn’t matter to those who had already decided to believe in the miracle.

As for me, I wasn’t really looking for explanations, for I had seen the truth behind the miracle with my own eyes. But it really amazed me how millions of people across the world came to believe in it in such a short time – and that they still carried on with their belief even after many scientists repeated the “miracle” in a laboratory setting, offering their explanations in layman’s terms.

Like I said earlier, not that I was completely irreligious, but from that day on, I vowed not to be blind in my faith. Whenever any other news of such miracles appeared (and many times it did, in fact), my mind played out the images of people spilling milk at Ganesha’s idols as if in a movie flashback – and my sense of reason prevailed over mass mirage.

Today, 16 years on after the incident, my own spirituality and religious beliefs have gone through tremendous changes – and perhaps will continue to evolve till my last moment. But that single incident taught me more about mass hysteria, herd mentality and blind faith than any volumes of literature could. It also acquainted me with the power of telecommunication and electronic media – and what it could wreak together with a little rumor let loose.

Looking back to that incident, I’ve often tried to make sense of many other widely believed miracles – often dating back to times when there was no television or photography. I’ve also tried to make sense of people’s own experiences with worship and prayer and with bringing their loved ones back from the clutches of terminal illness through their religious leanings, especially after the world’s best doctors had given up on them.

Can these personal experiences be called the real miracles? Did Moses really part the sea? Did Jesus Christ really rise from the grave? Did Savitri (in Hindu legend) brought her husband back to life on the strength of her love and devotion to him? Did scores of holy men and women who are said to have healed thousands through their touch over the centuries really perform miracles?

Then what of those whose heartfelt prayers go unanswered and their loved ones are lost forever? What about those who die in a stampede or burn alive in a fire at the very place where they have come to worship God (irrespective of whose God it is)?

And then I look at the mess in the world surrounding us – global warming, terrorism, religious fanaticism, food crisis…and think again: Can anything other than a miracle save us from hurtling toward a collective catastrophe?!

Will somebody perform that miracle? Till when will he or she wait?

The questions keep flooding my mind until they form a deluge and I have to set them aboard an ark so they could float away for a while and allow me to breathe.

Meanwhile, my own search for true spirituality – with or without miracles – goes on…