In ancient India, the key ritual of society was called the yagna. . It involved setting up of a fire altar into which oblations of ghee were poured to the chanting of hymns. The ritual was meant to benefit the community. The leader of this community was the Yajaman, or the patron. He initiated the yagna and it was he who invested in it. He provided the wood for the fire, the offerings for the flames and it was he who paid the priests their fee. All offerings were made by him and each time the offering was made, he would say, “Svaha”, meaning ‘so I give’. If the yagna was successful, the deity being invoked would appear. This was the Bhagavan and he would offer a boon or blessing. When the Yajaman made his wish known, the Bhagavan would say “Tathastu”, meaning ‘so it shall be’, and leave. The Yajaman was the prime beneficiary of the yagna, and he shared it with the entire community. This sharing with the community made him the leader of the community. The ritual was conducted by a Rishi who had no stake in the process. He was merely an enabler. At the end of the ritual, the Rishi received his fee, the dakshina, and left the yagna-shala or the sacrificial hall.

Yagna is a metaphor for a process where there is an input (Svaha) and an output (Tathastu). As is the Svaha, so is the Tathastu. As one sows, so does one reap! As any data warehousing expert will say: rubbish in leads to rubbish out.

The corporate world is full of processes. Yagnas are taking place in the conference rooms, in the board rooms, in meeting rooms, in town hall meetings, in brain storming sessions, in review meetings, in client interactions. But there is one problem. No one is sure, who is the Rishi, who is the Yajaman and who is the Bhagavan.

The commercial director of a company felt the need for a content management software. He spoke to the IT director and after a whole series of discussions and debates, funds were approved by the MD for the software. The sales director was made responsible for setting it up. And IT department was made responsible for training the executives. That is when the problem began.

No one knew for whom was the program, who would benefit from it, who would have to enter data in it, who would have to work with it and why was it actually needed. Of course, the software firm hired to do the job had a whole set of forms that if filled correctly would answer all these questions but who had the time to fill up those reams and reams of papers. Who knew the answer? The people asking the questions were only doing so to complete their job. “Just put something in every field of all the forms; no one cares what is actually written, expect the quality check department,” they said without actually saying so. So something was written, something was filed, a whole series of meetings took place and, in the stipulated period of time, the content management software was set up. Training was also conducted. Participants had to participate because they were told to do so by the boss. They did not know why they were being trained and how the software would impact their lives, if at all. But the training was conducted in the stipulated period of time.

A few weeks later the CFO had to pay for the software and the training. He wanted to check if the software was serving its purpose. What he found was shocking! Yes, the training had been done, the software had been set up, all the stipulated forms had been filled, but no one actually used it. “Don’t ask me,” said the IT director. “Don’t ask me,” said the software company . “Don’t ask me,” said the IT director. “Don’t ask me,” said the sales director. “Don’t ask me,” said the MD. All eyes fell on the commercial director, and he argued, “Excuse me, did we all not agree that that this software was good for us. We all signed the contract, did we not?”

This is not an uncommon occurrence in many organizations, especially large ones. Processes take place with no one clear who is the benefactor or the beneficiary. Everyone just performs the tasks because process demands it. Yes there are process-owners but this has more to do with accountability than ownership. If there is an audit of the process, the process-owner can be questioned – this seems to be his sole role. He does not consider himself beneficiary or benefactor.

Often meetings are held and projects initiated without clarity about who is the Yajaman and who is the Bhagvan leading to action without output.

Every human interaction has a Yajaman (the beneficiary) and a Bhagvan (the benefactor). Yajaman does the Svaha and the Bhagavan, if pleased, provides the Tathastu. Clarity of this thought enables interactions to have fruitful outcomes. This idea is not new, but cultural terminologies such as these add soul to other wise bland functional words.

On investigation, the MD realized that the content management software was for the benefit of his sales staff but the input had to be provided by the marketing team. The IT team and the software teams were merely enablers – the Rishis, who had no stake in the input or output. Once this clarity emerged, a meeting was called. The Yajaman was clearly identified. He had to take the role, not because the MD said so but because it was important. He had an interesting point, “What is the use of this expensive software? Let us check if knowledge exchange between marketing and sales actually takes place by other methods.” An investigation revealed that this did take place by email and snail mail – but the sales men did not actually read what was given. How was the content management software going to change that? The problem was deeper and one that could not be solved by a software. Once the Yajaman identified the problem, a whole series of solutions were thought of, ones that would impact the balance sheet positively and not one that would indulge the fascination of one director for software toys.

In Greek mythology, a recurrent theme is one where fathers are killed by their sons. Uranus is killed by his son, Cronos, the Titan. Cronus, in turn, is killed by his son, Zeus, the Olympian. The first to lead the gods is Uranus. When he is killed, Cronus takes his place. When Cronus is killed Zeus takes his place. Thus, succession takes place by the death of the father. Fathers are always suspicious of their sons. Sons have to revolt against their father and claim the universe. Sometimes, the revolt and replacement takes place unknowingly. Heroes, abandoned at birth, left to die, manage to survive and return to kill their fathers. This theme is found in the story of Jason, who is left to die by his power-hungry uncle, Pelias. And most famously, in the story of Oedipus, who is rejected by his father, Laius, but who returns and fulfils the terrible prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother. These stories led Freud to develop the famous theory of psychoanalysis known as Oedipus complex, the guilt that rises when the son claims the exclusive love of the mother and sees the father as a rival. What follows is the violent struggle between the older and the younger generation in which the younger generation always wins. But in the process, the wisdom of the past is lost. There is guilt at the death of the father as well as ignorance leading to a recurring pattern. The son ends up doing what the father did and is in turn rejected by his own son.

In Hindu mythology, however, a different recurring theme is seen. Here, it is the father who triumphs and the son loses. And the defeat of the son, often voluntary, is glorified. What scholars have observed in India is the Yayati complex, which is rather the opposite of the Oedipus complex. Yayati was cursed to become old and impotent. To stay young, he begged his sons to suffer the curse on his behalf. The eldest son, Yadu, refused. He believed that the father should respect the march of time. The youngest son agreed and suffered oldage while his father enjoyed youth, like a parasite. Years later, having had his fill of youth, Yayati took back the curse of oldage from his son. He then made a decision: the younger obedient Puru would be his heir, not the elder disobedient Yadu. What Yayati celebrates here is obedience; he completely ignores the march of time. Puru is the ancestor of the Kauravas and the Pandavas; Yadu is the ancestor of the Yadavas, hence Krishna. This theme recurs in the story of Bhisma (descendent of Puru) who gives up all conjugal rights so that his old father, Shantanu, can marry a fisherwoman called Satyavati who he has fallen in love with. Son sacrifices himself for the pleasure of the father and for this he is glorified as a hero. Yayati complex is then about the younger generation submitting to the older generation. It is about the shame that the younger generation feels when it challenges the older generation.

The difference is stark. In the Greek way, the old is defeated by the new. In the Hindu way, the new surrenders to the old. Manish recently returned from the US, after completing his MBA. He comes form an old business family that has been trading in Andhra Pradesh for generations. His father, Pradip, wanted his son to have the best of modern education. So Manish was sent abroad at an early age and he has come back not just with a degree but also with lots of work experience in investment banking firms in the US. Now he is ready to take over the family business. But there is a problem. He finds everything wrong in the way Pradip runs the business. This has led to arguments and fights at home, and sometimes at office. Pradip is taken aback by his son’s attitude. Disagreement between father and son is natural. But in his youth, he never spoke against his father’s method of doing business. He surrendered to it, watched it carefully, learnt a lot from it, and when he took over improved on it. But Manish seems to reacting very differently. He seems to mock the old ways of doing business. Is this the result of a foreign education? Is this the loss of Indian values?

Should Manish follow the Greek way and overpower the father and establish his way in the family business? This will be good as India is getting increasingly globalized and the rules of the game are being determined by the West. Or should Manish, follow the Indian way, and bow to his father and wait until it is time to take over the family business and make adjustments later? He is confused.

But the Indian way is not so simple. In the Ramayana, Ram obeys his father and endures forest-exile for 14 years. When he returns, the father is dead and he is crowned king. What follows is the perfect rule. But in the Mahabharata, that tells the story of Yayati and Shantanu, the rejection of Yadu in favor of Puru, and the great sacrifice of Bhisma, become the root cause of the horrific war in Kurukshetra. In both cases, the sons obey their father. But while in the Ramayana the result is glorious, in the Mahabharata the result is tragedy. Where is the difference stemming from?

In the Ramayana, the son is asked to suffer exile so that the father can keep his word and so uphold the integrity of the royal family. In the Mahabharata, the sons are asked to suffer so that the father can enjoy pleasure. So the point is not obedience. The point is whether this obedience is rooted in the desire to uphold order, or the desire to gratify the self. In Ramayana, the ultimate reference point is order or dharma; in the Mahabharata, the ultimate reference point is pleasure or kama.

Manish needs to decide: Does he want to be Ram or does he want to be Yadu? As Ram, he will establish Ram Rajya and as Yadu, he will be the forefather of Krishna. His decision depends on his reading of his father. Why does Pradip demand obedience: for the good of the company or for his personal aggrandizement? If it is for dharma, then prosperity will follow. If it is for kama, then collapse is inevitable.

The Bible tells the tale of the prophet Nathan who sought justice from his king, David for a poor man who had been wronged by a rich man. Rather than taking one from his own flocks to feed a traveler, the rich man claimed the one lamb that the poor neighbor dearly loved. David was understandably upset when he heard the complaint. He decreed that the rich man should die. No sooner did he take this decision than Nathan revealed that the rich man in his story was none other than David, a king with many wives. The poor neighbor was the Hittite Uriah with whose only wife, Batsheba, the king had had an adulterous affair. By using the parable, Nathan had tricked the king into judging himself. He had made the king realize his own hypocrisy: quick to judge others but not himself.

Why did Nathan not simply tell the king that his actions were wrong? Would the king have heard him? Maybe he would have denied the crime, or simply made excuses for it. Despite being a representative of God, the prophet was wary of the king’s ego and anger. And so he used the Trojan horse method to address the sensitive issue.

The ability to communicate with a king with deference and dexterity is known in Sanskrit as Sabha-chaturya, which literally translated means ‘tactfulness-in-court’. It is trait that ministers and courtiers had to possess if they wished to survive in court and get their jobs done. It is a trait that people who work with leaders must possess. It is a trait that even leaders need to possess if they wish to lead.

The foundation for this skill lies in the observation that people are uncomfortable with the truth, especially when it shows them in a bad light or has consequences that could affect them adversely. When confronted with it, they react negatively – with rage or denial. They may get defensive or simply reject the submission. So the work does not get done. One needs strategic communication. One needs Sabha-chaturya.

Rathodji mastered the art of Sabha-chaturya long ago. He knew his boss, Mr. Khilachand, was a brilliant man with a rags-to-riches story. He also knew his boss had an ego the size of the mountain. He refused to accept or admit a mistake. In fact if a mistake was pointed out, he would do everything in his power to justify it and stick to his guns. Mr. Khilachand was very fond of a distant cousin. So when a candidate presented himself before Mr. Khilachand with the cousin’s recommendation, he was, without much consideration, appointed manager in one of the many oil depots he owned.

The candidate was a good for nothing. He did no work and this caused a great deal of problems in the smooth running of operations. But no one dared tell this to Mr. Khilachand. To do so would mean that Mr. Khilachand was a fool to appoint a candidate purely on recommendation without checking credentials. And Mr. Khilachand did not appreciate being taken for a fool. In rage, just to prove he was right and everyone else who thought he was a fool was wrong, he would simply sack the guy who complained and give the candidate a raise and maybe even a promotion. It was irrational, but that’s the way he was. Rathodji knew this and so when the problem was presented to him, he pondered long and hard on how to give Mr. Khilachand the message without upsetting him and making matters worse.

The next day Mr. Khilachand and Rathodji had a long session gossiping about Mr. Khilachand’s archrival, Mr. Mathias. Rathodji told Mr. Khilachand how Mr. Mathias had foolishly selected a candidate on his sister’s recommendation and how the workers under the candidate were grumbling and planning to leave that firm and join their firm. Just while leaving, Rathodji gave Mr. Khilachand a file containing the new figures on operational efficiency with Mr. Khilachand.

The next day, Mr. Khilachand commented, “I feel it is time to get the new candidate to work in the head office. What do you think?” Rathodji agreed. Sabha-chaturya had worked its magic. The message had been passed. No feathers were ruffled. The dignity of all parties was maintained. A profitable decision was made and all was well.

Imagine this. You are in the meeting room. Your boss has yet to arrive. People you are supposed to have a meeting with are entering one by one. They too are waiting for their boss. It’s a meeting that is very important for the both of you. This is the first meeting of potentially crucial deal. They sit and chat with each other. They know each other. You talk to your colleagues. Both parties glance at each other, waiting to make the first move. There is nervousness, awkwardness.

How do you start the conversation? What is the best way to make a first impression or at least ignite a positive spark that lubricates the entire proceedings? Perhaps a clue can be taken from the Hindu ritual for greeting guests and gods. The offering of Haldi, Kumkum and Chaval – turmeric, red powder and uncooked rice grains. HKC, in short.

Haldi-Kumkum is a function popular amongst married women. During festival time, they gather in a house and anoint each other with turmeric and red dye. The same is done when invitations are made to a marriage. Greeting cards are often smeared with turmeric, then red dye, to render them auspicious. Strings with yellow-red color are tied around the wrist. Haldi-Kumkum is about fertility, about growth, about success, about wealth and auspiciousness.

The point to note here is the order. In rituals, the deity is always offered Haldi first, Kumkum later and finally the rice grains. This practice has been followed meticulously across the land over centuries. Like all rituals it defies logical explanation because the answer, more often than not, is symbolic. Through this ritual, something is being communicated subliminally.

The yellow of turmeric is a virile color, the color of the sun, spreading across the sky and reaching out to the earth. When sprinkled over the deity, the idea is to evoke the deity’s grace and power. Turmeric is antiseptic, destroying germs as the gods destroy demons. Red color is the color of potential energy; virgin-goddesses are draped in red sari. Red evokes the sense of the fertile red earth before the rains, holding the promise of crops. Rice is food, sustaining life, the final output that rises out of the earth and is warmed by the sun. Sun, earth, food symbolically represented by turmeric, red dye, and grains of rice. If HKC is how the devotee connects with the deity and gets divine grace, maybe this can provide a template to help strangers engage with each other.

Just as turmeric removes germs and evokes a warm feeling, the first step of interaction with a stranger is to remove all negative energy that may contaminate the space between the two. So the first step of the conversation is to make the other feel secure, less threatened and extremely comfortable. One CEO has a simple trick. After exchanging visiting cards, he usually cracks a joke, an anecdote that makes everyone laugh and establishes the CEO as a nice guy, a friend, a human being. The head of sales of another company, terrible with jokes, trusts the good old smile. If genuine,  coming from the heart, people relax and conversation starts. His colleague has a habit of saying something self-deprecating, about how he has to run to the toilet before every meeting because he feels nervous or about how the breakfast he had in the morning is making his stomach rumble. It inevitably makes people smile. “I avoid formality because it is frightening. Even if I have wear a suit, I speak in Hindi and this I find calms people down.” Haldi makes strangers seem less menacing and more human.

Then comes the Kumkum. Having removed the negative energy with Haldi, it is time to add positive energy very proactively. The best method, says one very successful marketing manager, is to complement the person before us. “Even the gods like Stuti, or praise,” he says. Sometimes, he complements the people before him for their choice of clothes, their pen, their watch maybe, sometimes he praises the city they came from, or a work their company has done. Praise makes a person feel that people are paying attention to him, that he matters. Kumkum makes a person feel included and appreciated. It charges them to bring value to the table.

Only after the Haldi and Kumkum, comes the Chaval: the main conversation, the reason why the meeting takes place. Haldi and Kumkum create the environment where people feel relaxed, less threatened and fully charged to contribute to the meeting. Then the possibility of a fruitful successful conclusion is higher.

Often, for want of time, people go straight for the kill. Quick introductions are followed by a clarification of the agenda and the meeting starts immediately. Meetings then become a process and not a meeting of hearts and minds.

HKC, as an offering, establishes the human connection, generates energy where people are happy to exchange ideas, thoughts and opinions. The results of a meeting initiated with HKC is always positive.

Agni is the god of fire. His is the first hymn to appear in the Rig Veda. Much adored by Vedic Rishis, he is the mouth of the gods who connected earth with heaven. Rishis placed fire in a specially prepared altar and made offerings of clarified butter while chanting of hymns in order to invoke the gods and moisten their lips, so that they showered blessings on earth.

But one day, Agni grew tired. He felt bloated and sick. “Too much clarified butter,” he realized. He was advised to consume something raw and primal, like a dense forest. And so Agni approached the Pandavas and begged them to let him burn to the ground a dense untamed forest. On Krishna’s advise, the Pandavas offered Agni the forest of Khandavaprastha, their inheritance. When this was done, Agni regained his original splendor. Gratified, he showered both Arjuna and Krishna with many gifts.

The story draws attention to the difference between raw fuel and processed fuel, a recurring theme in mythology. Milk is raw; butter is processed. Forests are raw; fields and gardens are processed. The Goddess Kali, wild and naked and bloodthirsty, embodies the raw untamed aspect of life. When she tamed and domesticated, she is dressed in a sari and appears as the demure and docile Gauri. While everyone is Gauri, there are times when the Goddess wants to break free, become Kali for a day or two, and regain her original splendor. It is kind of a regenerating activity, a catharsis, that is seen in wild bacchanal festivals involving ribald singing and dancing like Holi and Navaratri.

Every leader has his own original forest, where he discovered his flames. He would have been the brilliant designer who rose up the ranks, or the shrewd copywriter, or that master salesman or the brilliant strategist. These were the early days of his career when he was not sure what he was good at. Then one job comes along and his passion is ignited. He realizes he is good at something and goes ballistic. This is the tipping point. It catches the attention of the management who reward him by pulling him up the ranks – from executive to assistant manager to manager to assistant director to director to CEO. The designations vary but the responsibilities keep increasing and with it great span of control and influence. Until one day, the leader is far from the forest and finds himself in the sacrificial altar burning clarified butter. And then he falls sick.

This is what happened to Anish the other day. In the middle of a Board Room brawl, he felt bored and restless and irritated. He just wanted to go home and sleep. Instead, on a whim, soon after the meeting, he called up his local sales manager and decided to do a field trip. He wanted to spend time with the boys in the frontline filling up the pipeline at distributors and encouraging small traders to stock more. This is what Anish did early in his career, twenty years earlier, and he was good at it. He wanted to call the old days, reignite the old passion and nourish himself emotionally.

And so a day was spent in the heat and the dust, talking to the new sales guys, sharing tales of triumph and failure, drinking tea on the street and meeting distributor friends now old and grey. The next day, a rejuvenated Anish, having had his share of Khadandavaprastha returned to the altar called the Board Room ready to accept whatever ghee was offered to him.

The movement away from the forest to the altar, from milk to butter, is without doubt value addition. Domestication of the land brings in wealth. Gauri is the mother who feeds the children. That is the way to go. But from time to time, a reverse movement is required, a picnic, a holiday, a return to the roots, to bring oneself back in touch with nature. Gauri must never forget that she is fundamentally Kali. The raw energy is still lurking beneath the surface. One must never forget the forest that gave birth to us. Wings are good but never at the cost of the roots.

In Hindu mythology, there are three worlds, three Goddesses and three Gods.

The three Gods include Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva who create, sustain and destroy. What is most baffling about this triad is that the sustainer and destroyer are worshipped, never the creator.

The root of this bafflement lies in a template that spellbinds the modern mind. It is the Western template, informed greatly by the Bible, where God is the creator making Devil the destroyer. To understand the Hindu trinity one needs to break free from this Western template.

The world Brahma creates is not the objective world. Hindu seers had scant regard for the objective measurable reality. They believed that the human mind is so prejudiced that it can never ever truly break free from the fetters of bias. They focused their explorations on subjective reality, the virtual image of the world that every individual constructs in his or her mind.

Data for this mental image of the world comes from the five senses. It is then shaped by prejudices, both positive and negative, which in turn is informed by memories and dreams, both pleasurable and painful. This is Brahmanda, Brahma’s world. This makes each and every breathing person a Brahma. Hence the Vedic maxim: aham brahmasmi, I am Brahma.

We are creators of our subjective world. And our behavior is a function of this constructed world of ours. While most of us construct a finite prejudiced worldview, it is theoretically possible to construct an infinite unprejudiced worldview. He who does that becomes one with the brahman, divinity itself. Until then, we remain Brahmas, unworshipped creators. Life is a journey from construction of Brahmanda to its deconstruction, from creation to destruction, from Brahma to Shiva.

Our constructed world has three components, visualized as the three Goddesses: the material component or Lakshmi; the intellectual component or Saraswati; the emotional component or Durga. LSD, in short! As we seek to make sense of our lives, we chase LSD. Though the Goddesses belong to no one, we seek to possess them, control their flow, make them predictable and dependable, though to our dismay they remain independent and whimsical.

Lakshmi matters, because she is wealth and health and fortune. She is critical to our survival. But survival alone is not motivation enough. Besides L we seek Durga, emotional gratification. We yearn for significance; we yearn to feel good about ourselves, we want to believe we matter. That is why we are not content acquiring and securing food, clothing and shelter. We want to feel important in the social order of things, in our family, amongst friends and peers. Hence the desire to enhance our careers, increase our influence in society and expand our business empires.

The pursuit of material and emotional gratification becomes an addiction. Growth is never enough to guarantee survival or satiate significance. One feels as if one is running on a treadmill of unpredictable speed. If you don’t keep up, you will fall. Fear of the fall keeps us running. As Brahmanda expands, it splits into three. This is Tripura, the three worlds, comprising of who we are, what we possess and what we do not possess. In other words: me, mine and others.

Invariably ‘me and mine’ matters more than ‘others’. In our myopic vision of our world, we delude ourselves that ‘others’ exist only to ensure the survival and significance of ‘me and mine’. This delusion is rooted in our scant regard for Saraswati, the S of LSD, who constantly draws attention to the other Vedic maxim: tat tvam asi, you are Brahma too.

In delusion, we forget that others around us are also constructing their own subjective realities, harboring similar ambitions of survival and significance, and having their very own Tripura. And in other peoples’ Brahmanda, our ‘me and mine’ is relegated to the world they address as ‘others’.

When my Brahmanda expands at the cost of your Brahmanda, conflict is inevitable. We end up as beasts fighting over territory. We end up playing the game ‘dog & bone’ and find glory in being the alpha male. At the core of this game is human fear of insignificance. This fear fuels our cupidity. This fear makes us go to war.

With his third eye, Shiva destroys Kama or cupidity, burns the three worlds and smears his forehead with three horizontal lines of ash. That he holds in his hand a trident, three blades united at the staff, is a reminder that the Tripura is a manmade construct born of human fear and imagination, and not a natural construction. That he demands offerings of Bilva sprigs that is constituted of three leaves joined at the base, is a reminder that true happiness comes when we balance our craving for survival and significance with sensitivity for others. Lakshmi and Durga without Saraswati will not work.

Vishnu facilitates this journey from Brahma to Shiva. Peace will come only when we empathize with others, when we realize that everyone is in the same boat, fearful Brahmas grappling with existential angst. From empathy comes dharma, elaborated in the epics, Ramayana and the Mahabharata, where as Ram and Krishna, Vishnu demonstrates the human ability to overpower the animal instinct to dominate, and make room for the helpless and the unfit. Only when we care for the other, will we stop being territorial beasts. Only then will LSD be shared rather than hoarded. Only then will we achieve what is aspired for in the triple chant that concludes all Hindu rituals: shanti, shanti, shanti-hi.

Once upon a time, there was a kingdom and the kingdom had a king and the king had a pair of eyes. And with these eyes, he looked at his subjects and ensured all was well with them.

But then one day, something terrible happened. The king woke up from a sound sleep but found it impossible to open his eyes. As soon as he tried to lift his eyelids, he felt a piercing pain, as if sharp glass splinters were being shoved into his eyeballs. The king screamed and yelled and howled and shut his eyes, firmly. He then waited for some time and tried opening his eyes again. But the pain returned with greater intensity.

So the king decided not to open his eyes all day. Maybe things would be better at night when there is no light. But to his dismay, the pain at night was as bad.

Maybe, the king felt, another night’s rest would solve the problem. But no, as soon as he opened his eyes the next day, the pain was waiting to strike him down once again. There were not enough words in the king’s language to describe the pain but all those who heard him yell could imagine what it could be like.

Finally the royal doctor was called. And then the other doctors of the kingdom. Then doctors from neighboring kingdoms. Then the royal magician, and then the magicians of the kingdom, then magicians from neighboring kingdoms.  Then the hermits who lived within city walls, and finally hermits who lived outside city walls. Everyone said the same thing – “We do not know what’s wrong with the king!” There is no grit in the eye. No infection. No injury. Not even the spell of a witch. Nothing. There was no reason for the king to suffer so. It just did not make sense. Everyone was bewildered, especially the king, who could do nothing but keep his eyes firmly shut.

Then one day, an old sage from across seven hills paid a visit to the palace, having heard of the king’s plight. Though no one felt he could really help, they ushered him respectfully into the king’s private chambers where there the king lay, with eyes shut, miserable as ever.

The old sage touched the king’s eyes, and after some deep meditation, smiled and said. “Oh, I have encountered such a problem before. The king’s eyes have lost the capacity to see color, all except blue. Show him any color – red or yellow or green – and the eyes will protest and the king will feel pain. But show him blue, any shade of blue, and the eyes will not protest and he will be able to see.

To prove his point, the old sage took a blue cloth, spread it before the king and asked the king to open his eyes. With great trepidation, the king obeyed the sage, and to everyone’s delight, he succeeded in doing so without any pain. So long as he stared at the cloth, there was no pain. But the moment his gaze shifted to the sage, the pain returned.

So the sage instructed the queen and the king’s courtiers, “Just make sure the king sees no other color but blue and all will be well.” The queen and the courtiers thanked the sage who simply smiled and walked away to the hills. And the king chuckled with childlike delight, “If it is blue, so let it be. At least I can see. At least I can see.”

A year later, the sage returned to the kingdom and decided to check on the king, to make sure all was well. But when he entered the city, he saw something most bizarre. Everything around him was blue! All the buildings were painted blue. All the trees were painted blue. Every man and every woman in the city wore blue clothes. And all the horses and the cows and the goats, even the parrots and pigeons of the city, were blue. Before the sage could register all the blue, he was picked up by the gatekeepers and dunked in a vat of blue dye. “This is tradition in this land, because our king can only see blue,” they explained very matter-of-factly.

So a blue colored sage entered the blue palace and saw a blue king sitting on a blue throne in a blue hall full of blue courtiers a blue queen dressed in blue finery surrounded by blue servants who held in their hands blue trays containing blue gifts and blue flowers and blue fruits. As soon as he saw the sage, the blue king smiled a very blue smile (his teeth and his tongue were also blue) and rushed to fall at the sage’s blue feet. “Welcome savior,” he said in a voice full of gratitude.

The sage blessed the king and was very happy for him but he could not resist asking, “So why has everyone been painted blue?”

“We are following your instructions very strictly. You did say I could see only blue.”

The sage looked at the king in disbelief. “Are you so stupid?”

The king was stung by the question, “What! What do mean stupid?”

And the sage replied, “You fool, why did you have to color the whole city blue? Would it not have been simpler if you had just worn goggles with blue colored glasses?”

“Well yes, I could….but……,” the king stuttered and stammered. He indeed felt like a fool, a fool who tries to change the whole world to solve his problem, when all he has to do is change his own sight.

In Indian folklore, there are four characters. There is Shekchilli. There is Gangu Teli. There is Mitti ka Madhav (some say Gobar ka Ganesh) and there is Raja Bhoj. They most aptly describe the kind of people we have in our organization.

Shekchilli is a dreamer. One day he gets a pot of milk from his master. He deams of turning the milk into curds then churning it for butter and selling the butter and making some money and using that money to buy more milk and make more butter. And in time making and selling so much butter that he would not have to work. As he dreams of the possibilities, he stumbles and falls on the road. The pot of milk in his hand breaks and out pours all the milk into the ground.

Gangu Teli does not dream at all. He likes to implement things. He calls himself a ‘realist’ and focuses on practical things like doing the task and measuring their effectiveness and efficiency. That’s what the world should be doing. He has a disdain for dreamers. His name Teli suggests that he is an oil presser. Just as an oil presser uses force to push oil out of oilseeds, Gangu Teli uses pressure to get work out of his team. Carrots, he says, are dreams; sticks, he insists, are reality. The story goes that when the wall of the king’s mountain-fort kept collapsing, the astrologer recommended the sacrifice of a woman and her newborn to appease the gods the mountain. The only person whose wife and child were available for sacrifice – either voluntarily or under pressure, we will never know – was that of Gangu Teli. He is the frontline warrior; he knows. When times are bad, he will be called upon to do the ultimate sacrifice. The buck stops with him as he stands in the market. He is therefore most valued in the immediate term. Since he knows that, he often suffers from an inflated self-importance.

Mitti ka Madhav (also known by some as Gobar ka Ganesh) is neither a dreamer like Shekchilli nor an implementer like Gangu Teli. He is what you want to be. On his own, he is neither. He is a reactive member of the team, doing whatever pleases you, with no mind or opinion of his own.

That brings us to Raja Bhoj, the ideal leader, a dreamer as well as implementer. If a 2×2 matrix of dreamers and implementers is created, then Raja Bhoj sits in the top right hand box while Mitti ka Mahav sits on the bottom left hand box. Raja Bhoj knows when it is time to dream and when it is time to implement.

Mr. Pyne realized, to his horror, that his organization is full of Gangu-Telis and Mitti ka Madhavs, when the recession hit. And he had to admit that it was his own fault. For six years the going was good. The demand for the copper pipes he made was greater than the supply. So he hired a number of executives who thought tactically and could sell. “No dreamers for me,” he told his HR department, “I want people who implement.” Mr. Pyne had his experience with dreamers. They sat all day, made presentations to him, never moved out of air-conditioned offices, and imagined the market. He had to pay them a fat salary and there was no output of theirs that he could implement or measure. It was a waste of time. “All this strategy nonsense is good for other companies. Not more me,” he said. So he created an organization where it was all about tasks and measurements. No creativity was celebrated. “Lets just copy what the competitor does,” he said, “Why waste time thinking ourselves?” Things went well for a long time. Growth in quarter after quarter. Bigger offices, more people, more sales, and with good profits. Then came the recession.

All the businesses showed a degrowth suddenly. No one wanted the copper pipes. Pipes sold were being returned. Payments were not being made. The salesmen were frustrated. Everyone shrugged their shoulders helplessly and hung their head in shame. Mr. Pyne looked around and realized there was no idea he could copy to get out of the situation. Everyone was in the same boat. Almost everyone. There was one small company, belonging to one Mr. Raut, that was doing reasonably well. Their salesmen were not complaining and no one in his team feared losing a job. Mr. Pyne called on Mr. Raut and Mr. Raut was kind to share his secret. “You see when the going was good, I imagined a time when things would not be so. Every boom is followed by a bust. So I created a small team to imagine a situation where there is no demand for copper pipes. How would we survive then? They came with many ideas and I invested a small proportion of my profits to experiment with them. Most of them failed. But two ideas that they came up with are proving to be viable in these trying times.”

Mr. Pyne realized that Mr. Raut was a Raja Bhoj who had created a team of Shekchillis. Together they had dreamt of bust even in boom times. And this had enabled them to survive the bust. If only, he had functioned like that. But then, he was no Raja Bhoj. He had taken pride in being Gangu Teli and now that the fort had collapsed, it was time for him to make the dreaded sacrifice of all that he dearly loved.

It is impossible to think of Krishna without thinking of Radha. Theirs is an eternal love story The stuff of romantic songs. And yet, some of the biggest Krishna temples in India do not enshrine the image of Radha. In Puri, Orissa, Krishna is enshrined with his sister, Subhadra, and his brother Balaram. In Udupi, Karnataka, and Guruvayoor, Kerala, and Nathdvara, Rajasthan, Krishna stands alone as a cowherd boy. In Pandharpur, Maharashtra, and Dwarka, Gujarat, he stands alone with the temple of his wife Rukmini nearby.  Even the most sacred book of Krishna, the Bhagavat Puran, does not mention Radha. To understand this, we have to looks at the historical development of Krishna worship in India.

It is difficult for many people to accept that religious ideas have a history of their own. The earliest tales of Krishna, found in the Mahabharat, compiled between 300 BC and 300 AD, only refer to, but do not describe, his early life in the village of cowherds. Later around 400 AD, the Harivamsa was added as an appendix to the Mahabharata. This described in detail Krishna’s life in Gokul including his dalliances with milkmaids. But there was no mention of Radha or any particular milkmaid. The women were a collective with whom Krishna danced and sported. The mood was joyful and carnival like. In the Bhagvata Purana, compiled around 10th century in South India, where the idea of devotion to God visualized as Krishna was elaborated, Krishna disappears when the milkmaids become possessive and seek exclusive attention. The idea that God (Krishna) loves all with equal intensity was visually expressed by making the women dance in a circle, each one equidistant from Krishna who stood playing the flute in the centre.

Around this time Prakrit literature started referring to one Radha who was portrayed as Krishna’s favorite. In Hala’s Gatha Saptasati Krishna removes a dust particle, kicked up by cows, from Radha’s eye thus declaring her exalted position in her heart and humbling the other women. In these songs Krishna is not divine; he is a simple cowherd, a hero of the village folk. The songs lack sensual passion and religious ecstasy. Radha is never wife, and the dominant emotion is one of longing following separation, an emotion that eventually characterizes Radha-Krishna relationship.

In the 5th century, the Tamil epic, Shilapadikaram, refers to one Nal-Pinnai who was beloved of Mal (the local name for Krishna). Scholars believe that she represents an early form of Radha. This idea of a favorite milkmaid gradually spread to the North and reached its climax with the composition of the Gita Govinda, a Sanskrit song written by Jayadeva in the 12th century AD where the passion of the cowherd god and his milkmaid beloved was celebrated in a language and style that took all of India by storm.

Jayadeva was born in a village near Puri, Orissa, which is renowned for the grand temple complex of Jagannath, lord of the world, a local form of Krishna. Research has shown that he was involved with Padmavati, a temple dancer or devadasi and perhaps even married her. His work was inspired by both his personal experience and his religious beliefs. Each of Jayadeva’s song is composed of eight couplets known as Ashtapadis. 24 Ashtapadis make a chapter and 12 chapters make up the entire work. In it Krishna is identified as the supreme divine being – a radical shift from earlier scriptures where Krishna is one of the many incarnations of Vishnu. The book uses extremely ornamented language to describe in intimate details Radha’s passion. As one moves from verse to verse, one is transported from the physical realm into the spiritual realm. The erotic longing becomes the cry of the soul for union with the divine. Such an approach was revolutionary; it fired the imagination of the priests and dancers who made it part of the temple ritual. Being a major Vaishnava religious centre, hundreds of pilgrims from all over India poured into Puri. Day and night, they heard the priests sing Jayadeva’s song of Radha’s love for Krishna and the devadasis depict her yearning for her beloved in graceful dance steps. Before long they were mouthing the lyrics and taking it back to their villages. In less than a century, Gita Govinda transformed from a temporal parochial literary work into a pan-Indian sacred scripture. It completely revitalized the Vaishanvism in the subcontinent and catalyzed the rise of the bhakti or devotional movement in India.

Before Jayadeva, love and eroticism revolved around Kama, god of lust, and his consort Rati, goddess of erotics, who were eulogized by poets such as Kalidasa and scholars such as Vatsyayana. With the rise of monastic orders such as Buddhism and Jainism, Kama was demonized into Mara, who had to be conquered by those seeking enlightenment. In the Puranas, stories were told of how Kama was burnt alive when Shiva, the supreme ascetic, opened his third eye. All things sensual came to be seen as fetters that blocked one’s spiritual growth. But Jayadeva changed all that. Through his song he made sensuality and romantic emotion the vehicle of the highest level of spirituality. His Krishna was a reformed Kama. His Radha was a reformed Rati. He turned kama or lust into prema or romance. Krishna’s love for Radha and Radha’s love for Krishna were expressed in physical terms but they communicated a profound mystical experience.

The centuries before the Gita Govinda had seen the collapse of Buddhist orders and an increased stranglehold of Brahminism based on caste hierarchy and ritualism. God was visualized either as an ascetic (Shiva) or a king (Vishnu). With the arrival of Islam from the 8th centuryAD, the exalted status given to ascetics and kings took a beating. Cities were razed to the ground. Poets and artists took shelter in the rural hinterland and there discovered the simple ideologies of the village folk based on love and devotion. It is in this environment that inspired poets such as Jayadeva to shape God as a simple cowherd, accessible through the simplest of emotions, stripped of complex scholarly erudition.

Inspired by Jayadeva, in the 14th and 15th century, poets such as Vidypati and Chandidas further elaborated the relationship of Radha and Krishna. It was always described as turbulent shifting between separation and union, jealousy and surrender.  In a rather bold move, these poets saw Radha as a married woman who broke all social norms to be with Krishna. Some folk narratives of this period suggested that she was Krishna’s aunt, married to his maternal uncle. Some said she was older, a mature woman while he was a boy. Even in the Gita Govinda, Radha’s union with Krishna always take place in secret. There is constantly reference to the threat of social disgrace. By making the relationship illicit and clandestine, the poets heightened the emotional quotient of the relationship. It was seen as true love that transcended custom and law. Devotees came to realize that Radha was the symbol of all those who were ‘married’ to social responsibilities, seeking liberation and union with their true love, God, who is Krishna.

Many found use of these extra-marital and incestuous metaphors relationship rather scandalous. They moved towards a different theology in which Radha and Krishna were two halves of the whole. She was the material world; he was the spiritual soul. She was the supreme woman, he was the supreme man. They were Goddess and God whose union gave birth to the universe. The world was seen as Radha, born of Krishna’s delight. She was Krishna’s shakti or power, one who could never be separated from him. This was the svakiya (belonging to Krishna) tradition which distinguished itself from the parakiya (belonging to another) tradition. These were expressed in scriptures such as the Brahma-vaivarta-Purana.

Despite this, across India, Radha is always Krishna’s beloved, never his wife. His wives are Rukmini and Satyabhama. Radha’s relationship is different in nature when compared to Sita’s relationship with Ram. While  Ram is the model husband and Sita is the model wife but Krishna and Radha represent the great lovers who were destined never to unite. Perhaps that is why, except in religious orders of the Gangetic planes that follow the svakiya tradition, Radha is never enshrined in a temple.

Scriptures say that worldly responsibilities force Krishna to leave the village of cowherds and go to Mathura and thence to Dwaraka and Kurukshetra. He has to sacrifice the land of pleasure, vilasa bhumi, for the land of duty, karma bhumi. He has to rescue a world which was descending into anarchy – where women such as Draupadi are being gambled away by their husbands. Radha has to be given up. After leaving her, Krishna never plays the flute for Radha was his inspiration. The later Krishna never danced or made music. He is no more the cowherd; he was the charioteer riding into battle.

In time, Radha became a Goddess in her own right. Without her, Krishna was incomplete. She was the medium through which Krishna could be realized. Metaphysically, Radha came to represent the truth of our soul, the unexpressed, unrequited longings of our heart, suppressed by social realities, which cries out to Krishna. Krishna acknowledges this truth of our being, that society denies, each time he dances with Radha at night, outside the village, in secret.