Magic of Motherhood

Motherhood is…soaking in the sun.

                                                                           Artist: Iman Maleki, http://imanmaleki.com

Motherhood is…an empty nest

 Children have flown the nest as they must. Couples have separated, divorced or one spouse is no longer alive.
Picture shared courtesy: ‘Spiritual Nature’

Motherhood is…being loved and protected by your kids.

There are many, many kids who love, nurture and look after their parents though there are also elders who suffer great neglect. I’d like this to be a tribute to caring kids who make great sacrifices for their parents.These posts are dedicated to my twins. ‘Somewhere in my youth or childhood/I must have done something good!’

Narayan Murthy: In God we trust

...everybody else bring data to the table.” This is one of Narayan Murthy’s favorite one liners. What exactly does he mean?  Is he saying that clients and staff can’t be trusted?  Murthy has said many times that trust is critical in business because it reduces the cost of transactions.

•   As Murthy sees it, Infy (as Infosys is referred to) is an ‘enlightened democracy’ i.e. a meritocracy ‘powered by intellect and driven by values’ committed to Murthy’s brand of ‘compassionate capitalism.’ He feels that what people really need are opportunities, incentives and healthy competition.  According to Murthy,  there is a hierarchy at Infy, but it is a hierarchy of ideas, not people. Decisions are based on data, not emotions. The best and most innovative ideas are selected in every case.  Murthy  says he runs Infy on the conviction that "Performance leads to recognition. Recognition brings respect.  Respect enhances power. Humility and grace in one's moments of power enhances the dignity of the organization."  Infy has given away stocks worth Rs. 50,000 crores to staff creating two thousand salaried millionaires in the US and twenty thousand in India. It has done this because it wants to ‘attract, enable, empower and retain’ ‘happy, enthusiastic, energetic, satisfied, aspirational minds.’ According to Murthy, the rest is elementary and follows as a matter of course. How far Murthy's vision is a ground reality at Infy is a matter of debate.

 Murthy’s life and work are the stuff of legend.  He is a frugal man who lives an austere life rooted in conservative middle class values. For example, he doesn't drive and takes the company bus instead. In fact buses have played a critical role in his life.  Years ago, the beautiful and brilliant Sudha Kulkarni got hired as the first woman engineer at Telco in Pune. Narayan Murthy was working for Patni Computers. Omkar Goswami of NDTV interviewed Narayan and Sudha Murthy in 2011. She spoke of how they met on the bus both took to work.  She noticed that he got on the bus with a different book every day. Intrigued, she took a peek. One day the front page said ‘Narayan Murthy: Istanbul,’ the next day it was, ‘Narayan Murthy: Paris’, the third, ‘Narayan Murthy: Peshawar. ’Always direct, she asked him: “Who is this Narayan Murthy? He’s an international conductor.” He replied “He’s a young person from Karnataka who was in Paris for three years. Every time I visit a place, I buy a book to remember it by.” The next day he got on the bus and told her: “Narayan Murthy wants to meet you.”  Sudha Murty is from Karnataka too and they had a common friend, Prasanna. This marked the start of their courtship.

Sudha Murty (She spells her last name without the ‘h’) speaks very candidly and endearingly about the early years. Murthy invited a few friends and insisted that she join them. She was quite surprised and refused because she was the only girl in the group. He was insistent. She says she had to pick up some clothes from a tailor nearby so she got there at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30. Murthy was already standing outside. He insists that she got there early to meet him. She says it was the tailor. They’re still arguing about it. During their courtship, Murthy was always broke. He’d say; “I don’t have money with me, you pay my share, I will return it to you later.” For three years, she kept an account. When they married in 1978, Murthy owed her a little over four thousand rupees. He never returned the money. The man who couldn't pay for his dinner was worth US $ 1.4 billion in 2012!

By 1980, Murthy was working on a blue print for Infosys. His habit of borrowing from his wife continued. In 1981, Murthy set up Infy with six other professional in a 10 ft x 10 ft room with no telephone or computer. He borrowed Rs. 10,000/ (Us $ 250 at the then rate of exchange) from her. This was their seed capital. She also gifted him a three year sabbatical to follow his dream.  She promised to take care of the financial and other needs of the household and also look after their son.It took over nine years for Infosys to break even. It’s incredible that in 2012-13, Infy had a market cap of approximately US $31 billion and 155,000 employees!

Initially, Infy found it very hard to get a foothold in the international market as no one trusted Indian business practices and products. It worked hard. It worked smart. It was transparent.  It worked to deadlines and guaranteed quality control.  It developed cutting edge technology with a very fast delivery cycle.It introduced the PSPD model (i.e. predictability, sustainability, profitability, de-risking). In a business unfriendly India, it battled with massive corruption and red tape. It refused to compromise on open, honest business practices. Its Global Delivery Model for IT services outsourcing from India led to an international footprint for Infy.

 Murthy shared life lessons with the students of the Stern School of Business in New York in 2007.  He said: “we often run into chance events and unplanned encounters. We have to turn these events into opportunities by combining them with intentional choices;"  “In a time of change, it is the learners who inherit the future.” He spoke of how the founders got an offer of US $1 million for Infy after struggling for nine years. This was the first time they’d seen money. Five of the founders met in Bangalore to consider the sale. For four hours Murthy listened to his colleagues without a word. Then he got up and spoke of why they should hold on. If they still insisted, he’d buy out their shares. He didn't have a penny in his pocket! Somehow, he managed to persuade them. Today Infy is a US $ 7.5 billion company.

 Murthy has never deviated from a path of corporate responsibility towards society in his long career:

“I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will shoulder in time.”

 Infy has run into problems over the last few years. It’s been overtaken by Cognizant.  Its revenues have fallen well below TCS. Employees satisfaction and morale are low. It is no longer a company people are willing to kill to work for.   On June 1, 2013, Murthy returned to Infy for five years to restore the company to its eminent position in the market.  At the AGM on June 15, he told shareholders that it would take him three years to turn the company around; ‘…improvements require change and the quest for perfection requires us to change as often as necessary.’ Infy 3.0 starategy of focussing on the lucrative consulting business has been put on the back burner for now. In the short run, Infy will concentrate on its bread and butter business. In the current recessionary environment, clients are not willing to pay high prices. Buying is limited to essentials so Infy is trimming its profit margins.

Is Murthy right in crossing the retirement age and bringing his son Rohan in as PA? Can one man turn the fortunes of a huge company? Open questions.  They say character is destiny…

Nirbhaya: Killing us un-softly

I had decided to hold my peace about Nirbhaya but I can’t. I just read a statement by a politician that Nirbhaya should be accorded a state funeral! Sorry, that’s not what she died for.  She doesn’t need a grand funeral. She fought for a radical change in archaic laws and in law enforcement. I watched a wonderful panel discussion led by Arnab Goswami on ‘Times Now’ last night.  The great thing about the debate was the focus on action rather than platitudes, committees of inquiry etc. Among other things the recommendations included a demand that:

<1.  No politician who is facing charges of offences against women should be given a party ticket.

<2.  No woman should be subjected to the humiliation of going through a medical examination twice.

<3. The judicial process should be time bound.

 All these are essential.  Bachi Karkaria, pragmatic and down to earth as always, added that all offences against women such as eve teasing, groping etc should be included.

 I've done a bit of work with women’s organisations, mostly in Canada but also in India. Going to a police station with a victim to report a rape can be a horrifying experience for the woman. I’m not trying to suggest that the police or judicial officers are always insensitive but it happens often enough to form an unacceptable pattern. For starters, there is an utter lack of respect for the woman: What kind of clothes were you wearing? How did you behave? Did you make a pass at the man? Are you a woman of easy virtue?  How many boy friends have you had? Where did you pick him up?  These are questions that may not always be asked, but they are implied. It’s always defamation first and then rape. The tables are turned. The victim becomes the offender and the rapist is the decent guy at the receiving end of a regrettable lack of propriety.  Poor chap. It was just a moment of weakness buckling under grave provocation. Why should you be stupid enough to take a bus in the evening with the guy you are dating? Lock your door, wear a nun’s habit and sit at home.

It’s a question of values and mindsets. Granted chastity and fidelity are important, more so for a woman.  There has to be a limit. Sita gets abducted and goes through the fire to prove her chastity. A dhobi questions her morality and she is sent into exile for the rest of her life. Sri Ram is ‘Maryada Purshottam.’ He remains faithful to one woman all His life, going to the extent of using a statue of Sita during a yagna.   No one questions His character or expects Him to go through the fire or go into exile again.

 A man can have affairs, one night stands or whatever. It’s macho, isn't it?  However, the same guy will breathe fire and brimstone if his wife or girl friend cheats on him. That’s not all. She’s dead if she so much as thinks of another man. Worse, if he imagines that she’s into someone else or has been ‘easy.’  The Othello clan is alive and kicking. A man may not go to the extent of killing his innocent wife but he will dump her like yesterday’s garbage and feel completely justified.

Any defenseless woman becomes a soft target for violence and exploitation.  There are cases where a woman who has property becomes the victim of ruthless greed- she may be up against unscrupulous family members, neighbors or others. Here again the pattern repeats itself.  She is made out to be a woman of low character: We are not out to swallow her property. We are trying to get rid of an immoral woman.

Change is always subjective. We need to change our values. Let me end with a wonderful quote from Swami Vivekananda:

“All nations have attained greatness by paying proper respect to woman. That country and that nation which do not respect women have never become great, nor ever will be in the future...Manu says, ‘Where women are respected, there the gods delight and where they are not, there all works and efforts come to naught.”[i]

I hope, wish and pray that we take these words to heart in the New Year which also happens to be the 150^th birth year of Swami Vivekananda.

January 4, 2013: I'd like to add a postscript to this blog. Nirbhaya's friend gave an interview today in which he mentioned the key reason for the high incidence of rape and offences against women in our country: The public bus in which the horrific gang rape took place circled the city for two and a half hours. After the rape, Nirbhaya and her friend were pushed out of the bus, unclothed. She was badly wounded and bleeding profusely. He had been beaten up with a rod and was in a bad state. They shouted for help. People stopped to gawk and moved on. No one had the decency to take them to the hospital. No one was decent enough to cover them with a sheet. They lay on the street for two hours in the midst of  heavy traffic. When the police finally arrived, they stood there arguing about jurisdiction for half an hour. At the hospital the wait for clothes and treatment continued. Nirbhaya had to record her statement to the SDM twice in that terrible state. Her friend lay on a stretcher for four days before any one bothered to attend to him - that at his own expense!

Do we have the right to call ourselves a civilized society? There is such a high incidence of rape in our country because we are a people without a social conscience. All we care about is me, my family, friends and myself.

<1.   Collected Works of Swami Vivekananda, 7, 214-15.   

Pic: www.newsprint.in                

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Carl Jung: A Near Death Experience

There’s a fascinating body of work dealing with past life regression and NDEs (near death experiences). The trend started with Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychoanalyst. Jung was born into a family of priests. Perhaps because of his religious background, and a mother who took part in seances,  Jung kept an open mind about extra sensory perception and mystical experiences which could not be explained scientifically. There is in Jung a fierce and fearless commitment to truth and direct perception, even when it seems absurd and irrational. He was influenced by Indian religious traditions, especially Buddhism. Jung records his mystical experiences as unverified personal experience and leaves it to his readers to accept or reject their validity.

In 1944 Jung had a heart attack and a near death experience:

‘It seemed to me that I was high up in space...A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space...An entrance led into a small ante-chamber.  To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus position upon a stone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me...As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance in the rock, a strange thing happened. I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence fell away or was stripped from me – an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything that I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it...I consisted of my own history and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. ‘I am this bundle of what has been and what has been accomplished.’

‘There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away. On the contrary: I had everything that I was and that was everything. Something else engaged my attention: as I approached the temple I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would there meet those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand-- this too was a certainty-- what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being and where my life was flowing. My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that had no beginning or end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all these questions as soon as I entered the rock temple...

(Then) an image floated up. It was my doctor Dr. H. -- or, rather, his likeness-- framed by a golden chain...A mute exchange of thought took place between us. Dr. H. had been delegated by the earth to deliver a message to me, to tell me that there was a protest against my going away. I had no right to leave the earth and must return.’

The vision ends. Jung is angry and disappointed at being dragged down to earth. He has not been able to enter the temple or meet the people to whom he truly belonged. Jung was seriously sick for three more weeks. In a strange coincidence, Jung’s doctor, Dr. H. took ill on the day Jung sat up, April 4, 1944. Jung was concerned about him because Dr. H. had appeared to him in his ‘primal form.’ Shortly afterwards, the doctor died of septicemia.

The ‘black Hindu’ in the temple is symbolic because for Jung, this was the moment of truth, the most significant event of his life.

Many of us have experienced similar events. If you or someone in your circle of family and friends has had a dream, vision, out of body experience, please share it. How did you interpret it? Do you think Jung was delusional? Or was it a true vision? How can we tell the difference?

Ref: Carl Jung, Memories,Dreams,Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans.  Richard and Clara Winston (New York;Vintage Books,1989),290-2

Pic: www.crystlinks.com

Plato's Cave

There’s a wonderful song in the hit musical ‘Chicago.’  It’s called ‘Mister Cellophane’:        

                                         'Mister Cellophane
                                      Shoulda been my name
                           'Cause you can look right through me
                                           Walk right by me
                                  And never know I'm there'  

 We are connected to, and intensely aware of   a handful of family and friends or ‘significant others’ and to our work. If I may recast a famous image from Sartre, this nest, this egg is the sum total of our reality. The rest of the world is just a smudge, a blob. Of course we can’t ignore ‘others’ completely. They may be a useful or necessary part of our lives. At times they have a nuisance value and need to be disciplined. So we pay enough attention to the crowd so we can push the right buttons and get the required reactions. As we grow, we learn to put insignificant others in behavioral uniforms, straitjackets even.  We create environments where outcomes can be controlled. There is order and a balance of sorts in our lives. Conflict is minimized. 

No one openly subscribes to the ‘live comfortably and let others die’ philosophy but our concern for others is often superficial, if that. We’ve all seen couples who’ve been married for years interacting with each other like trained athletes jumping through the required hoops, including the mouthing of endearments and platitudes. It’s a meeting of masks in a make believe, ‘happy’ environment. Woe to the man who dares to step outside this charmed circle and tell it like it is. He is ostracized, ridiculed, disciplined and finally made to fall in line. If he doesn’t, he ends up as a social outcast. And it’s cold and freezing out there...The bottom line, even for reasonably moral and decent people like us is not what happens, but who it happens to. A wise elder is often around to mollify the victim: ‘Anger is a waste even when you’ve been terribly harmed and hurt.’ Sound advice if you want to survive. The perpetrators of injustice vulgarize victims and cover them with mud so they can stand on pedestals and look down at lesser creatures with disdain. ‘He had it coming....’ It’s almost a law of nature that some benighted soul stands up in the midst of this drama and asks silly questions like: ‘Is this true? Is it just?’ Is it ethical?

Let’s take the trial of Socrates as a case in point. Normally, a court of law is a place where the judge is wise, learned and impartial. The lawyers are far more knowledgeable than the defendant. An impartial jury is in attendance. Justice is done and each man gets his due – in theory. Socrates was tried and condemned by people who had neither his intellect nor his moral integrity. Worse, they were arrogant enough to think that they were qualified to judge a man of his caliber. Men who did not have the brains or knowledge to understand Socratic ideas pronounced them immoral! Socrates, of all people, was accused of ‘corrupting’ the young! Socrates had many disciples but Plato was the brightest star in his firmament. Plato was shocked by the trial and the verdict condemning Socrates to death.

 Plato’s Republic[i] is an inquiry into the nature of truth and justice: What is justice and who will administer it? Plato comes up with the concept of the ‘philosopher king or guardian,’ a seer who rules but is not allowed to own property or accumulate wealth.  Mahatma Gandhi in modern times and king Janak in ancient times are examples of philosopher kings.[ii] The word ‘republic’ is made up of two roots: ‘res’ (welfare) and ‘publica’ (public) meaning a welfare state. The Republic is a blueprint for the setting up of a just state. Swami Vivekananda says somewhere: ‘that society is best where the highest truth becomes possible.’ Plato draws up a plan for a Utopian state. I must mention here that there are many ideas in The Republic which would not be acceptable in a modern state. The underlying philosophy is however as sound as ever.

 Chapter seven of The Republic is the soul of the book. It is set forth as a dialogue between Socrates and his disciple Glaucon. Plato uses poetry rather than polemic as his weapon. The imagery is sublime, the ideas are ethereal. Imagine, says Plato, a dark underground cave or dungeon. The mouth of the cave opens towards the light but no one in the cave can see this light. In the cave are prisoners who have been there since they were children. Their legs and necks are bound by chains in such a way that they can’t turn their heads. They can only look straight ahead. A fire is burning at some distance behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners, high above them is a path which runs along a low wall. People walk across the path, chatting with each other, sometimes carrying wooden or stone statues, animals or other sundry objects.

The prisoners see reflections of their own selves and the people and objects moving across the path on the wall in front of them. They hear echoes of people speaking. All they can see are shadows, and as shadows go, they can’t tell the difference between the shadows of   living human beings and shadows of statues and other objects. The prisoners talk to each other about the shadow figures as if they are living, breathing creatures. Since the echoes come from the shadows, they think it’s the shadows speaking. They play games and become experts at predicting the order in which certain shapes appear. This is empirical, verifiable reality as they experience it day after day. This is truth as they see it. This is their egg, their world, their cocoon. For.For Plato, life in the den is existential life, a life of slumber and shadows. In Vedantic terms, this is the hazy world of Maya. It is an existence that has no substance. There is only one true reality, God.

Supposing, says Plato, one of the prisoners is set free. He stands up with the utmost difficulty. He is asked to turn around and look at the people, animals and objects moving across the path. He hears people speak for the first time. He is shown that the shadows he saw earlier were mere reflections of living human beings and inanimate objects. He is stunned and incredulous. His eyes, long accustomed to a dark, unending, black night are blinded. He is then made to climb out of the cave. At first he sees only shadows, and then slowly, reflections in water, gradually his eyes get used to seeing things by starlight and finally he learns to see clearly on days lit by the blazing sun. He finally understands the difference between flesh and blood people and their shadows, tunes into the cadence of real voices and laughs at the echoes in the den.

At one level, the prison represents external societal constraints and the shadow play of interactions between people that we have touched on earlier. These are external shackles. There is a much deeper, inner component: The darkness of the den signifies tamas or ignorance. The chains are attachment to the five senses and the difficulty we have in breaking free from the prison of physical reality. At the existential level, life is slumber, a dream state and a puppet show of shadow figures.[iii]The journey to light is the destiny of every pilgrim soul without exception. The guru guides the struggling soul to light and freedom.

Plato does not talk of God. He uses the concept of ‘Ideas.’ We live in a twilight world trapped in bodies we can’t walk out of and rooted to the phenomenal world through sense perception. The prison is the sense world. The light of the fire represents the sun. The journey out of the cave is the soul’s odyssey ...its trek to the intellectual world. ‘The eye of the soul’[iv] is normally buried in ‘an outlandish slough.’ When the soul sets out to find the Holy Grail, this eye turns upwards towards the good, towards truth: 

‘...in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort, and then, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the Lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual, and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed.’[v]

Vedanta speaks of a veil of Maya that traps us in a net of illusion or half truth. Through persistent effort we have to cut our way out of Maya to freedom. Plato makes an assertion which is interesting from the Vedantic point of view: You can’t put sight into eyes that are blind. Knowledge is in the soul already[vi]. It’s not put there by some external force. The transition from ‘becoming’ to ‘being’[vii] happens when the eyes are turned away from ‘the lead weight of sense pleasure to the opposite direction.’ The mind is polished until it is free of dross and becomes a perfect reflector for truth.

The allegory does not stop here. It’s not enough that a prisoner breaks free and comes face to face with truth. Plato forces him to go back to the cave and pull others out of the den they are trapped in. This is the philosopher king, the guru. It’s very hard for him to come down from divine consciousness to the ‘evil state of man.’ Once again his eyes are blinded. Plato adds a telling remark here: if he is forced to fight in a court of law while his eyes are adjusting to darkness about shadows of images, of justice with those who’ve never seen ‘absolute justice,’ he would be totally out of his depth. This of course, is what happened to Socrates. He could not explain the truth to people who were rooted to a world of false consciousness.

When the seer returns and tries to tell his mates that what they see are shadows, they laugh at him:

‘Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without the use of his eyes, and that it was better not to think of ascending, and if any one tried to lose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.’[viii]

 The guardian must work in spite of this ridicule. In Plato’s republic, young people are put in the care of guardians who turn their minds towards the right values, towards the good. They are thus trained to be fit administrators in a just state. Education is the key to truth, justice, freedom and felicity. The faculty of sight which was turned in the wrong direction is now focused on the truth. We now have the answer to the question which The Republic set out to answer: what is justice? What is truth? The welfare state is one in which the highest values become practical, where sages like Socrates are celebrated not condemned to death.

Pic: 3quarksdaikly.com                                                                                                                                   

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[i] Plato, The Republic,(2000) trans. Benjamin Jowett(New York: Dover Publications).

[ii] For an academic analysis, please see: Davidson,Pramila,”Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: A Vedantic Reading,” Prabuddha Bharata, Vol.114,No.8,August 2009

[iii] Ibid.,p.196

[iv] Ibid.,p.195

[v] Ibid.,p.179

[vi] Ibid.,p.180

[vii] Ibid.,p.195

[viii] Ibid.,p.179