The Tricycle we must balance !

The Male Trinity are :

Brahma the Creator, 

Vishnu the Nurturer,

Shiva the Destroyer.

The Female Trinity are their respective consorts :

Saraswati with Knowledge, 

Lakshmi with Wealth, 

Durga with Strength. 

At the Creative stage of any organization - you have ideas i.e. Knowledge is your key asset. 

Later as the organization grows, you need Wealth to keep Nurturing the business. 

And finally, for renewing, reinvention & rejuvenation, you need all the Strength to Destroy your very own -  else the business itself dies.

The Male Trinity represents the actual visible action, the Female Trinity representation is the intangible source that nourishes them. 

Without her, he is completely incomplete. 

The indestructible crucible of the entire Eastern spirituality is "Change" & that is a constant !

For change, you have to destroy the old paradigm.

Thus, Shiva the destroyer is worshipped much more than what the nurturer Vishnu ever will be.

And the creator Brahama is almost not worshipped at all, as is revered for only a fraction of time's tiniest unit. 

Destruction of the feeling of achievement is the essence of human progress. 

It is what the Western management is now beginning to learn.

Now, they claim that eventually, a man reaches the maximum level of hiz incompetent self. 

With each promotion he sought, the man feels incompetent in the higher plane. 

However with his capability, he overcomes that incompetence. But on doing so, he finds himself at once dissatisfied - his lust for that position is instantly destroyed & becomes restless to seeks next higher level. 

This goes on, the cycle of promotion and almost at once resultant shortlived joy of success & instantly followed by the angst arising  from greed to achieve more - till he keeps rising and reaches his level of final incompetence. 

Now when he can't destroy success anymore and begins to enjoy it instead - he feels not incompetent. 

He basks in the past not realizing he's becoming a prisoner of it.

He begins to feel comfortable !

At that stage, begins his own personal destruction. 

The world views the man on the top as most comfortable  and competent !

But the man on top must perpetually wear the uncomfortable crown of incompetence - else his days are numbered.

At some level, the man started at the lower most level of nothingness & ends where he began, as if to discover it for the very first time. 

Then sum total of his life is a brilliant nothing.

About time we cheer the leaders we elect!

The more a prostitute sells her services, the more customers she gets, and the worse her reputation becomes.  

A politician is elected by us. His job is to practice politics. The more he does it, the more he is vilified!

Same difference!

Let's expose our hypocrisy. 

Why Do We Celebrate Some and Mock Others? 

Let's look at a cricketer or a CEO. 

In a match he watches two things at once: the scoreboard and a ball that can swing or spin off an uneven pitch. And he still has to score runs.  

We understand how hard that is. So we reward him with cheerleaders, stadium ads, and million-dollar endorsements. The better he plays, the bigger the rewards.

It’s the same for a CEO. He juggles shareholders, stakeholders, and market dynamics. For that, he gets pay, perks, prestige, and bonuses. More the business, more the goodies.

Now one look at Politics and our hypocrisy is seen. 

The moment voting ends, the winner is sworn in, and we declare our democratic duty “done.”  

Then for the next five years, we start demanding miracles.

But a politician’s job is harder than a cricketer’s or a CEO’s.  

He has to do everything at once:

1. Deliver welfare and stay connected with the public.

  

2. Manage Parliament  because good intentions can be killed by parliamentary arithmetic.

 

3. Make policy that is constitutionally sound, socially acceptable, culturally compatible, economically feasible, technologically viable, parliamentarily passable, legally defensible, and geopolitically prudent. All at the same time!

It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube that never ends. Fix one face, and another gets scrambled.

To make it worse, even the most powerful leader must still depend on the people below him.  

While cameras and criticism stay on the top, it’s the low-level officials who actually run the country’s lifeline, possibly through indifference, bad interpretation, or poor implementation - all that can derail public welfare.

This is the bureaucracy, a hardened block - obstinate, inflexible, powerful, unelected, often selected by the earlier regimes. 

Individually they look ordinary. Collectively, they’re extraordinarily intelligent but often show zero common sense.  

And when things fail, the anger falls on the elected leader, not on them.

So, even as the cricketer or the CEO becomes a demi-god, the politician becomes the devil.

It should bother anyone with a robust sense of fairness:  

A politician stays away from home, works long hours under media glare, operates inside rigid rules, cedes power to career bureaucrats, trades popularity for tough decisions, needs opposition support for national projects, and is still expected to deliver! 

Ouch!

And how do we repay him?  

We lampoon him in cartoons, make him the butt of jokes, roast him in stand-up comedy circuits, and assume he’s guilty until proven innocent.

In the final reckoning, Karma 101 strikes: We get the government we deserve!

The time has come to free our minds.  

Let’s start by giving a free hand to those we ourselves elect.  

Because right now, we only see the power they have but not the weakness of those in public offices.

Wouldn't that be fair?

Modi 1.0 : the Performer-In-Chief !

The oxymoron of the season is that Indian economy was found sputtering in the recent past just before the election & yet India delivered a historic win to Modi - unprecedented pro-incumbency !

So even as almost all Indians go about celebrating, should we worry? More so since Modi did not unleash high intensity reforms and so India's growth rates remained below potential?

Well one can worry in the absolute vacuum, just like the media folk like to - but not in reality.

At the onset, we must understand where India was when Modi got first sworn-in on 26th May 2014.

India's ranking in the World Bank monitored Easy Of Doing Business index was a shameful 140 on 190; now it is 77, huge leapfrogging over a five year period.

India had then also found itself in the disgraced The Fragile Five economies list. Today, in the expanded The Troubled Ten economies list, India's name is absent.

The global rating agencies too have upped India's grade. 

Finally, Indian banking system was on the brink of a collapse due to the all time high non-performing assets, where most loans to corporates were given away in an undeserving & unqualified ad hoc manner, rendering the system to be soaked in corruption. 

Today, because of Modi's strong arm tactics, there's a beeline among the corporate head honchos to return the money or face loss of company ownership. And yes, some have lost their companies.

Sure, Modi did self-impose ( some dubbed it as self-goals) tough measures like a) Demonetisation (rendering 86% of printed circulating cash as trash if earned illegally or to be exchanged for new notes if legitimate ) and b) GST.

Both of these resulted in withdrawal symptoms and so did act as major speed breakers as bulk of India worked in the informal economy. 

But in view of the above two blows, while many lost money, some were grudgingly forced into the formal sector.... & are now learning to pay taxes. 

That also resulted in the obviously unethical coming together of 22 opposition parties - a motley mix of arch rivals under the banner of "Mahagathban" or the great collaboration.

Notwithstanding the hardship & the counter view presented by the army of opposition parties - most Indians understood that the said two measures were good for the economy in the long run.

The world agreed too !

India earned it's highest Foreign Direct Investment & Foreign Portfolio Investment ever, pumping it's reserves to an all time high. At the time of the results coming in, the Indian stocks are found to be at an all time high.

So even when last election quarter showed a big drop in the corporate earnings, the government yet had a windfall tax collection - a clear harbinger of the things to come. The number of new tax payers have also galloped their way in.

Considering the pain, the Indian public has demonstrated an unusual and rare human trait & endowment i.e patience & maturity respectively - missing so much in that "of-for-by the people" system of electioneering.

They actually voted in a guy, that imposed austerity of sorts, took away money from many and imposed tight measures. 

Unlike Venezuela which also tried some things similar & failed, India saw no riots nor strikes - otherwise typical of developing nations in such times. 

Looking outside, in the last 5 years, we see not one country in the world where the animal spirits have been unleashed & economy is running on all cylinders fired up to the max, even when it wasn't suffering as much as India was when Modi ascended to the prime minister's chair.

So let's get it straight - 114 countries were growing at a GDP growth rate of 5% or higher, until the global financial crisis that hit in 2008.

Notwithstanding the promises at G-20, all major countries came up with lose monetary policy to spruce up their economy and covertly began looking inward to protect jobs at home i.e. slow poisoning globalization. 

The IMF's regular downward revision & good natured euphemistic language since the last few years gives us a clue - global economy is definitely crawling it's way closer to a recession.

Today, less than ten nations are growing at 5% or higher growth rates. 

China's GDP growth of about 14% at one time i.e. prior to the global economy collapse in 2008 to now less than half of that over a decades time can always be used as a bell weather as she is, unlike India, largely integrated with the global trade. 

Her forex reserves are down - already lost over a whopping USD 1 trillion from it's peak. 

Every leader in the world wants local manufacturing and for that, the inducements are a plenty - the obvious being lowered taxes. The Trump induced trade war is a manifestation of the reality. 

For most part India has ducked the slowdown trend - that's a huge achievements considering where she started five years ago and what it was suffering from. Modi did not allow the Indian economy to happily slide into the slow but sure IMF's trap and then do things as dictated by the external lenders - he saw it coming and did what he must. 

That's leadership 101 !

Also, Modi delivering a clean corruption free term is a welcome change. Modi 1.0 was in a consolidation phase, Modi 2.0 should do much better, as unlike the first term - in about 24 months he could have a control of the upper house too, allowing him to free the tiger, caged until now.