Winds of Destiny

As I was growing up, I was heavily influenced by the western culture. As my elders in the family talked about god, religion, and pre-written destiny, I laughed and dismissed it all. I still don't believe in pre-written destiny of course. But over the last decade, I have realized how little of control we have over our own life. True, there are some people who can evaluate the current situation better than others and take good decisions, but yet even they are not spared by the laws of the universe. I firmly believe that events in his universe are not random, but what’s going to happen next is dependent on what has happened till this moment. Now, even the person with the ability to take the best decisions can’t possibly have access to all the events and fathom the relationships between them all to figure out for sure what's going to happen and what’s the best course of action.

I specifically wanted to talk about this guy whom I referred to as workplace Bachchan three months ago, the tall and lanky fellow who swept us away with his magnetic personality and who was fired by the then project manager. We pitied Bachchan at that time, and when he bent his head to take a bite at his sandwich, we labeled it as a symbol of embarrassment. But, if hindsight is 20-20, foresight can surely be 0-0 or however poor vision is expressed.

Everybody thought that the new product was the future of the company, and that eventually the old product would die its natural death. The best course of action, in this case, would be to switch to the new product as soon as possible. In fact, I have often seen "smart" people licking their bosses' a**es to move into the new team before it got too crowded. But our Bachchan was a man of heart. Simply because he was not happy the way the project was being handler, he happily retreated back to the old project instead of slogging in his existing situation. No pundit or smarty pant would call it a good move. In fact, for several weeks we thought of his actions as totally irrational.

Last December though, the winds of destiny took over the company -- the same winds that brought the Wall Street bulls on their knees and showed the world what can happen if greed and ambition throw things out of balance. The company suffered major setback from their client resulting in an inevitable action -- layoff. Even though the layoff affected the entire company, it affected the new product in a huge way. While Bachchan was safe in hid old cocoon, the same PM that fired Bachchan, earlier that year, was asked to pack his bags. Besides that, the future of the entire effort around the new product looked in trouble. Great amount of money had been spent already on it, and yet it was nowhere close to being ready for production use. And the question still remained whether to still continue developing it or hold it up until company did better financially. In January more people were laid off while Bachchan continued eating his sandwich quietly at the kitchen bar.

Not that Bachchan anticipated this. He just followed his heart and did what he thought was right, and yet he emerged as the winner in the end. The lesson to be learnt, I interpret anyways, is to not try and control your life way too much. You never know what God's big plan is. Again, a balance needs to be struck between planning-and-acting and surrendering to God. The elders back in India always said 'jo hota hai ache ke liye hi hota hai' (whatever happens happens for good). We need to remember that, especially, in these tough economic times