Life Lessons From IPL Cricket

Watching IPL is fun; the glory and glamour it brought with it for many eclipses the misery that it caused for a few (thinking of Lalit Modi and Sasi Taroor!!). The revolution it made in the history of cricket made it reach to the masses than ever before. It was packaged so appetizingly for the business houses to embrace, and when looked deeper there are more to experientially learn from what we see at IPL that will not only benefit the corporate houses but an ordinary man alike, as lessons of life!


Lesson 1 : Enjoy the moment: As spectators, life is a game unfolding before you as you watch it from the gallery of time; enjoy each moment of it, regardless of whether your ecstatic face is projected on the big screen for the whole world to see. Be yourself and listen to the feelings and emotions inside you and let them flow as genuine as they are – irrespective of how you are conditioned by your ego and the roles you play, as long as it is synchronized with the social norms; why do we sometimes wait till the camera is zoomed in on us to display our exuberance and smile from ear to ear, and keep a straight face rest of the time! Do it anyway, can’t we? When your performance in life is excelling the ordinary, outstanding from the rest of the pack or become worthy of recognition, the camera of the world will come looking for you and project you, and so will the attention of those who matters most. All you need to do is to perform your best!


Lesson 2: Lead from center-out: Old adage is to lead from front, and in time it is conveniently taken out of context and abused by leaders, by putting their nose in everything assuming it as their responsibilities in spite of having an army of experts who can deliver better. Dhoni or Vettori may be the captains of their teams but for obvious reasons they do not insist that they be the opening batsmen, thinking, who else can be better than the captain to open the game and be the first for the cameramen to zoom on!! Batting positions and bowling orders are determined as a strategy of the game and the strength of individuals; your role as a leader is to facilitate that engagement and provide a direction and purpose, reasons too; the team is bigger than the individual, and it is only wise enough to come as 6th batsman if that’s where you will fit for the best interest of the team.

Lesson 3: Possibilities In Life: The game offers you wide possibilities to play unconventional strokes that you had always been instructed not to play; your imagination is the only limitation to how well you can perform, which is why de Villiers could score a six with a reverse scoop, however unconventional it may have appeared. Before you are the spectators keen to watch you play your best; inventions and innovations you will bring about will rise to become an entertainment for the spectators, and they will celebrate colourfully with our cheer-leaders in our neighbourhood.

Lesson 4: Maintain Integrity: If you had stood your ground with integrity and character, you will always find a space to be around meaningfully, like Anil Kumble, with yet another opportunity to give back to the game of life and bring around a new generation of game players with character and purpose. Should the game and glory get into your head the only way left is to perhaps relax in a luxurious villa beside the backwaters of Cochin and compose music for a music band, or let go the palaces in Rajasthan and muse in the streets of England reminiscing the good old days spent in yachts and chartered flights tweeting life away!


Life is a beautiful game where everyone has a role to play, and the role changes. It’s great to be able to be at the center of the pitch and be in control, and play the game out till the allotted time; play well, every day is your season of IPL – Integrated Power of Living!

Shahir
22 April 2012

Pain or Suffering - An Intelligent Choice

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding / and you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief” wrote Kahlil Gibran in “The Prophet”

We see many around us in pain; we see many around us suffering. What we often fail to see is the difference between the pain they endure as a natural phenomenon of existence and the suffering they chose as a conscious choice in life.

Pain is inevitable; many things we face in life can inflict pain on us – either influenced through a foreign substance disturbing the status-quo of our body or an internal imbalance causing a disturbance to the functioning of our system. A thorn piercing our feet cause pain; on a fine morning as we wake up we might realize our eyes are swollen and it’s causing pain too. These fluctuations in sensation that we call pain are a truth of life – inevitable.

Suffering is a choice; to suffer is to feel or bear with disagreeable effects; dictionary has in it another definition of ‘to allow’; it is an allowance we give ourselves through a decision we make, a choice from a basket of options we have in life, an unnecessary allowance. How a friend treated you a few years back or a loss of share in the stock-market or a twist in your career might have caused ‘pain’ at that moment. That pain is inevitable to the nature of cause – a normal response of our system to an incident of that kind from a person you trust or a possession you held so dear or a dream you kept so high. Thinking about it years after, today, and feeling painful transforms that sensation to a different dimension – that’s suffering. That suffering is a choice. You are oscillating to a dead moment in the past and breathing life to it, inhaling its toxic emotions and becoming intoxicated and derailing from your path that otherwise leads otherwise to success.

Acceptance leads us to the liberation. If you are wearing a suit and it suddenly happened to rain, raindrops falling on your suit, you suffer from the awareness that your suit will be damaged and with the thoughts of how you will get to a shade! The friction causes suffering, and the after-thoughts that follows. A child playing in that rain, or a young couple in the beach walking in the rain ‘accepted’ that moment as inevitable, and they do not go through that friction, but in that acceptance they rather enjoy the pleasantness of that moment. Should you in a flip of time decide to walk in that rain and not allow the thoughts of damaging your suit or possible illness infiltrate your logic, perhaps you too would have enjoyed it the same manner, attain that liberation. In acceptance, we are liberating the friction of battle that take place in our mind caused by the discrepancy of reality and expectations – or our perception of what life should be, than what it is.

Our pain is in this moment – a cut, a bruise, a headache, a heart-break! That’s inevitable. But our sufferings are connected to a glorious moment in the past or a dream of the future, or a dark moment in the yesteryears or a bright hope in an uncertain future. Most of what we suffer is the pain of leaving behind something in the past or the friction of designing the skeleton of an uncertain future – a future that can’t be reached if ‘now’ is not lived to its fullest!

In a world where the powerful and the manipulative minds and hands rule the roost, in a world where the formal mechanisms of governance itself water the roots of terrorism in different disguise, we are offered with reasons in abundance to suffer – the news we watch, the stories that unfold, the helplessness we live with to influence, so on and so forth. It becomes only an intelligent choice before us then to have an awareness of the ‘now’ and accept its inevitability, that, in that acceptance we realize that this is all what it can be, a thought that will fail to disturb the inner peace and the balance.

Shahir

Summer Parenting When The Heat Is On!

Summer Holidays! Most parents are equally puzzled and excited too when faced with engaging their children productively during summer holidays! Sensing the opportunity, the trainers and others alike in the city pull their sleeves to organize various summer camps and parents rush to enroll them in the pretext of character development, though in some cases it’s just an outsourced parenting!

While summer camps are indeed a good platform for children to develop a holistic approach towards life if organized well with an appropriate ratio of facilitators and participants, there are many activities parents can think of and drive at home too, which will also enrich their bonding. Just as in the corporate world you adjust the operation to the climatic changes of the market, it is inevitable that we see this ‘summer holidays’ as a climatic change at home and adjust our parenting style according to its demands.

Who wouldn’t want a bicycle, or a teddy bear, or a ticket to an IPL match? Motivating children to work towards an incentive is perhaps one of the first steps in engaging them in productive activities that will reshape them. Naturally, incentives that ‘you’ offer them may be less valued than the incentives that you agree after a discussion ‘with them’ for what they value most. Making them feel they are the winners is by itself a motivator.

The incentive will turn out to be an investment if the child indeed qualifies and earn his reward, for, in the process of earning that incentive during this period, the child would have registered in his subconscious mind many habits that will at some point in his life serve him good. Once you have set up an incentive that you know the child would jump at, we then set some goals with clear milestones. Imagine a big chart put up on the wall that highlights the different goals in colour, the weekly milestones that you and the child together will discuss on a daily basis! It is an opportunity to celebrate little successes every time they are getting closer to their milestones, and an opportunity to visually coach and guide when he is falling short. The child may not correct immediately, nonetheless, the achievements and shortfalls are inevitably registered in his subconscious mind and it will process on its own over a period of time.

In setting goals, it is important that the children are involved fully, and as parents our role is to guide, and bring to their conscious surface the kind of goals that you are expecting – subtly aimed at the areas you know he needs improvement. Is it discipline, is it time management, is it ability to talk to visitors at home – you decide. It must be clear to the child that this project is not an option and this is how the summer will be, however there could be a basket of options of activities they could choose from, or of their own if you are convinced it could yield results. The discussions on the project should not be sidelined to a marginal conversation over dinner or in between attending your business calls or reading newspaper, and must be a meeting as important as the meeting you chaired your office on the twenty-second floor with the CEO. It has to be a conscious discussion.

These activities doesn’t have to be big and glamorous; it could be a few action metaphors that would imbibe in him certain qualities and values qualifying for a score for each activity, as simple as assigning him duty to fold his blanket every morning, stacking away the newspapers and magazines in its designated areas, so on and so forth. Get them write a Summer Diary – a journal to document their activities in summer, or the least, have them write the qualities they observed in the IPL players they are closely following. Have them learn ‘shloka’s or verses from your holy books connecting with spiritual values and write how it relates to their friends or neighbourhood, as enthusiastic as you were to send him for guitar classes!

While summer camps may teach him to swim well in a pool, these camps that you organize at home will help him swim through the tides of life.