As I wait with bated breath for yet another didactic, informative lecture to get over, I wonder what kind of difference spirituality is going to make to a management trainee!? I know, I know....it’s the crux of a sound and well-balanced soul. The professor is throwing light on things like vaasna and swadharma, I wonder why an Electrical Engineer from an Ivy League University is throwing around jargon from Sanskrit Vedas. Maybe he has got all the answers of his life and is trying to help us find ours. Uh-Huh. All this spiritual gyaan sounds good, but it may not necessarily work in the real world. Not atleast for me. Like when the less deserving guy gets a Rs.6 lac p.a. job and u don’t get it, you are dejected, not coz you are greedy for the moolah, but coz that’s the only thing humming in your head when you have to repay a 25 lac loan and the deadline on your house mortgage rings like the death knell of your peace of mind. Can any spiritual guru relieve me of that stress when they talk about breathe-in and breathe-out techniques? I don’t think so! That doesn’t help destress here. Absolutely inapplicable! If it were indeed possible, I would’ve tried it for sure.
They say ‘sex and money is what makes the world go round’ and rightly so. I’ll tell you what spirituality is, in the real world. It’s a rat race and everyone is running to outdo the others, you run and run, but when you are just about to reach the finish line, you realize that it just got extended. You run some more to chase the finish line yet again, and as you near the winning post, it gets further extended. So, you keep chasing unforeseen goals until one day you reach the finale and with one call of collapse, your life ceases to exist. That’s modern day spirituality. Now that’s what I call ‘Welcome to the real world!’ You can’t learn driving unless you get behind the wheel. Likewise, strategic or contextual planning aint subjects that can be verbally taught, they come from the throbbing grind under the wheel of life.
I can’t take at face value the idea of the absence of luck that some spiritual guru is trying to put across when I’ve seen a woman burnt alive in the shanties behind my house for no fault of hers. Or I don’t know what else can explain a 5 year old kid losing his arms whilst playing near a blast site in suburban Mumbai. Did they deserve it? Whoa! I didn’t know it was his karma to be disabled at a tender age of five //speaking in spiritual terms//. It is never the rich kid’s karma to be born to a billionaire or the less fortunate underdog’s to be born to a menial labourer.
So, no matter how many art of living sessions we attend or how many times we flip through the Book of Answers, we can’t deny the fact that life revolves around what we pursue. For as long as we live, we know that once the goal achieved and the milestone accomplished, we’re gonna miss the journey that we trailed.
