ASHOK KURIEN – DYSLEXIC ACHIEVER

The oft-repeated principle, “Failures are stepping stone of success,” gets validated number of times when we look into histories. To further fortify the Universal Principle, we look into a life of man, who endured failures with determination all his young age to taste the sweet of success at later age. His failures which knock down him are listed below,

1. His educated mother was a teacher and the Head of the English Department of Bombay University, but, he was inept to even step up just one step higher from the lowest grade in his class.

2. His neural muscles couldn't understand simple arithmetic and he often made mistakes in simple spellings. He was not able to comprehend complex scientific concepts, principles and remember long numbers.

3. He repeatedly faced corporal punishments in his classes, at home, and even within his peer group leader, perfects. He was criticised dumb, stupid, useless, worthless, waste, etc, which killed his motivation to ashes.

4. Failing in his Seventh and Ninth grade, made him to study with comparatively younger students. Continuous abuses and punishments made him a rebel, aggressive and addict to alcohol and drugs. He was even placed behind bars for his negative social relationship.

5. In college, he was not able clear even single semester without bunch of arrears. So, he was able to graduate only at the age of 27.

6. In professional circles, he was not able to assimilate various marketing strategies discussed by his colleagues. So, they dumped down him as "useless and worthless," killing up his spirits.

With such negative profile, depressive experiences at his back of his definition, Mr. Ashok Kurien, now at the age of Sixties, is the founder of famous Advertising company, Ambience (famous for its Ad campaigns, like Thumps Up “Taste the Thunder”, Lakme, etc.). He was the co-founder India’s first private television entertainment channel, Zee TV. He was the motivating force behind the success of Playwin, India’s first online lottery and soul behind popular DishTV service.

How the phoenix, Mr. Ashok Kurien, was able to surge from the ‘ashes of criticisms’ to the ‘riches of achievements.’ The secret of success was due his attitude to configure his negatives into his strengths, which unfurl successes and riches. His stepping stones of success are listed below,

1. Though termed incompetent in terms of contemporary educational system, he was able to recognise and focus on his strength without caring his criticised weakness. His aggressive nature and acuity in sports made him the Gym captain, the boxing captain and the sports captain within his school sports circle. This sportive attitude helped him to look all failures and criticisms as challenges.

2. Before earning his degree, he performed several mundane jobs which helped him to understand the basic marketing tactics within various strata of consumer levels, from bottom poor households to rich industrial houses.

3. Understanding his impotence in learning complex concepts, he designed strategies to disintegrate complex terms into simple notions. For instance, he developed a strategy of clearing one or two papers in a semester in college examinations rather than facing all papers in a time through his “Break-it-down” strategy. He began to understand slowly his creative or lateral thinking abilities, which rarely endowed in other people. Rather than caught with his negativities, he was able to mull over his strengths.

4. With his knowledge of marketing behaviours, his “Out-of-Box” creative thinking, and “Break-it-down” strategies, he was able to provide solutions to various problematic phenomenons, with simple, creative and original solutions, which were rarely provided by others.

5. He recognised Partnership or Team Work. He never did anything alone, he performed task only with his partners. He believed that “If your partner’s strengths are your weaknesses and if your partner’s weaknesses are your strengths, then you have a team that is extremely powerful because there is no conflict or differences.”

Dare to face his negatives, critics, and failures, Mr. Ashok Kurien, after his unprecedented success, was identified as “Dyslexic” or “Learning Disability” by an expert in ‘Learning Disability.’ Thanked for delayed identification of his weakness, he replied enthusiastically, “All the drive to succeed in my life would have dried up, if I had known about the disability early in my life. Thank God! I owe all my success to my Dyslexia.”

SHORT STORY: GOD’S GUIDANCE PRINCIPLE

A lone man suddenly rose from deep slumber and was shocked to find his house blazing with fire everywhere. He peeped through window for help and found surprisingly, the God standing near his house. He was a stern believer in God and spent all his life in devotion to the Ultimate Saviour. He implored God to save his life from the flaring fire. But, the God was careless of his earnest demand and was engrossed on something. Got Anger on God and felt that it is of no use of depending on God, the man searched for some tools to escape. He found a fire extinguisher lying near him and he used it to escape through an opening. Infuriated with anger for not showing blessing on his ardent devotee, he disrespected the God, “I wasted my whole life on praying and propagating your greatness! How cruel your nature is!” But, the empathetic God replied in calm and benevolence, “Courageous child! Foreseeing the problem, it was I who placed the fire extinguisher in your room a day before.”

Many times, bad experiences perceived from high cognizance turn out to be a perfect protection of the Infinite Potential. Our constrained knowledge and intelligence fails to gain awareness of guidance mechanism of the Omnipotent’s influence on us. The God’s guidance on earthly beings is based on his fundamental intention of holistic growth of his children in their lifetime. The challenges experienced by living organisms on earth can be considered as a basic training or teaching exercise of God. Those, who endure the training or challenges, successfully emerge, exist and succeed in life. The rest, failing organisms, impotent to endure the challenges are wiped out without consideration. In scientific terms, it may be called, “survival of fittest.”

Perfection, Individuality, Autonomy, Confidence, Patience, truth, courage to face life and clarity in thinking are the characteristics the Omniscience tries to imbibe on us and he expects his children to develop into complete enriched beings on earth.

The core concept expressed in the words of Swami Vivekananda: “If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological gods and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you. Have faith in yourselves, and stand up on that faith and be strong; that is what we need.” So, the God guidance intention can be summarised as ‘a phenomenon of gradual development of autonomy in living beings by increasing the faith on their resources and abilities, with Almighty’s protection working background.’

EXPLAINING THE UNEXPLAINED – '3 IDIOTS' PHILOSOPHY

Social Psychology supports that, people, a main component of society, are influenced and influence the social environment. The influence occurs through the forces of relationships, culture, customs, social ethics, etc, and leaves substantial impact over every ingredient of our life. Though, social influence is a life-supporting factor and has positive contribution in our life, astoundingly, they are problematic too, if we are just a passive recipient of such social influence. Negative impact becomes obvious overtly, during selection of our professional career, when it is just based on social imposition of parents, relatives, friends, social factors, attractiveness, etc. This fundamental mistake we make at young age, spew out ill-effects that resurface frequently to disturb us rest of the life. This ‘ignorance’ holds the sole responsibility for the talent-crunch that has engulfed the Employment Sector and various others field in India. This lead to human resource with misgivings like: Workforce with mediocre performance, talents and knowledge; people afflicted with stress and life-style diseases; lack of interdependence (relationship problems); drug dependency and abuse; crimes, etc.

The solution to the problem dwells in proper understanding of human nature. Human Psychology edifies our intellect with ‘wisdom’ which subscribes that our career selection shouldn’t be just a social imposition through parents, relatives, friends, social factors, attractiveness, etc, but one that provides us joy, pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfilment. The appreciation of above concept requires understanding the innate nature of human mind. Basically, humans are satisfaction seekers. They have deep inner ‘urges’ or ‘drives’ or ‘desires’ and they interact with environment to satisfy it. Satisfaction of urges gives him a sense of pleasure or happiness or joy. The people strive to gratify their urges by performing various activities in their lifetime. The important feature is that ‘People differ in wide ways in satisfying their urges, and it is based on the difference existing in their Genes.’ For instance, some people enjoy reading and writing books or blogs, some satiate their urge by playing games or hard exercises, some derive pleasure by working on music or singing, some get mesmerised in their research works or engineering, etc. The action which brings us joy is called ‘Source of Satisfaction.’ Thus, every individual has unique characteristics of satisfying their urges and it differs from individual to individual.

Problem occurs when we select our career which is highly incompatible with our ‘Source of Satisfaction.’ The career, which is incompatible with our Source of Satisfaction, will never act as a source of pleasure or joy and thus, we start to allocate limited time in performing it and get ranked as ‘mediocre performers.’ Following this, majority of young people fail to identify their core ‘Source of Satisfaction’ and develop coping mechanism to derive pleasure through mundane habits or physical sensations. This will lead to talent-crunch in the field they could specialise, that is, their Source of Satisfaction activity. Others, small portion of population, fortunate enough to identify their Core Competence (Source of Satisfaction), divert their career into their Pleasure Source and get ranked as ‘super performers.’

The above philosophy forms the core idea of the 3 Idiots film, one of the best films in Indian film industry, released sometime back. Raju Hirani, the director of 3 Idiots, centres the film with the above “Career Philosophy,” which is engraved spectacularly in every component of the movie. The Career Philosophy is: “Never select your career on basis of social or family imposition. Rather, select the one which ‘you’ find the most suitable, matching and enjoyable. This is the secret behind every super-achiever.”

The above truth is validated, when we interact with star performers in various fields. It will be the source of their success. To quote one instance, a friend of Thomas Alva Edison, once asked Edison, “You must have worked hard day and night for making such a historical invention of Electric Lamp!” Edison replied, “You have mistaken my work. Really, I enjoyed day and night before inventing the Electric Lamp. Because, I love researching and working with materials.” Research was the ‘Source of Satisfaction’ for Edison and selecting properly his career begot success in form of 1,093 US Patents, which remains unchallenged by any other inventor.

PERCEPTION - CONTROLLER OF OUR DESTINY

“We are creator or destroyer of our own destiny,” the common phrase found in most books on Self-Development. It views humans as an active agent of his life and capable of constructing his own experiences out of external real-life experiences. Earthly experiences can be considered as an unprocessed sender of data but humans are active, process-abled recipients of the data. It means that world experiences before reaching us may be either positive or negative, but, once it reaches us, we have ultimate ‘decision making power’ to allow the influence to impinge us positively or negatively. Thus, the phrase “we are the creator or destroyer of our own destiny” validates itself.

This is not a human formulated principle. It is innate, natural, universal phenomenon of human science. Ancient Indian Rishis and Gurus have recognized this super-competence of humans and reflected it in their writings. Recently, Psychologists acknowledging the above concept have described the complex phenomenon in terms of “Perception.” They portray Perception process into various stages as step-wise process.

Human Perceptual Experience can be divided into three stages: 1. Sensation Stage, 2. Attention Stage, and 3. Perception Stage. Each stage performs specific functions and the external experience (data) reaches our consciousness after traversing through the three stages in an orderly manner. The data flowing through ‘mental medium’ is considered as a complex mixture of the basic forms like visual images, sounds, taste, feelings, smell, etc. These basic constituents form a complex aggregation called Gestalt in our consciousness, thus creating complete, real world experience. (E.g. Reading – visual images of letters, Success – sound of appreciation and images as our status in ranking list)

External world experiences (i.e. Data) reaches our sense organs in an uncontrolled manner forming the Sensation Stage Process. The basic sensory receivers represent our sense of vision, smell, taste, sound, etc.

The Attention Stage, second stage of processing, can be compared with “Control Valve” in mechanical terms. Even though, we have the ability to control the valve, the control is partial and many times captivating data easily passes through the control valve to reach third stage. In reality, hundreds of data reach our senses every second, but, attention process limit the number of data to flow to next stage.

The third stage of human perception, the Perception Stage is a complex process, and it is a prerogative of individual. It is the most important stage that distinguishes Humans from other animals. The Perception process invoke our intelligence, our memory, our learning, our motivation, our attitude, values, beliefs, etc, stored in our Brain and act on the incoming data to form “well processed information.” This processed information in our conscious mind represents our understanding of our world.

Since, intelligence, memory, learning and motivation differ in quantity and quality across individuals, the interpretation of incoming data varies across individuals in quantity and quality wise. Because of highly subjective perception process, two individual encountering similar life experiences view it differently. For example, a person with pure knowledge, positive attitude, and purified memory, views even a negative experience in a positive manner.

Thus, our memory, our intelligence, our learning, our motivation, our attitudes, our values, etc, has to be enriched with positive principles based on pure knowledge. For this, initially, we have to control the basic elements of sensual inputs i.e. images, sounds, smell, feelings, etc. Later, our brain can be enriched by reading books with positive outlook on life, avoiding captivating images and sounds, meditation (which helps easier control of senses), relationship with noble people and minds, etc.

With this knowledge, we could assert intelligently that “We are the creator or destroyer of our own destiny. Since the prerogative of selection exist in my mind.”

INDIAN CIVIL SERVICES (ICS) – CAREER FOR FUTURE LEADERS OF INDIA

I recently met my friend, who had selected his career in Civil Services like me and the experiences he shared with me was thought-provoking and motivating for young aspirants of Indian Civil Services.

After my friend chose career in Indian Civil Services (ICS), many of his well-wishers criticised the career with several accusations. The allegations they place before him are: “The ICS, specially, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) is highly competitive and disturbing career. Where political interferences disturb your career prospects in the Civil Services,” “You won’t have peaceful time after you join IAS. You have to keep stake your family’s safety for your career,” “You have to synchronise your decisions will meaningless political decisions of uneducated leaders, where money-power, muscle-power and corruption are highly rooted. You should be a ‘Yes Man’ to their short-sighted decisions,” etc.

Though, the comments he received are from people who neither had a career in Civil Services nor could be considered as people with highly intellectual ability, their concern seem to driven, basically, from manipulated information gained through biased media, films, etc. Leaving aside their short sighted concern, he gave importance to his intellect and wisdom, and he gave answer to his critics which can be considered to have deep social concern and feeds moral strength to the aspiring civil service aspirant. My friend’s answer was impregnated in a small story as follows,

There was a forest-fire engulfing the complete area of a dense forest. All the animals in the forest were running away from the area to escape the fire. But, a small bird living in the forest alone was trying to douse the fire by collecting water from nearby stream through its small cone-like beak. And, it was doing it persistently and diligently. An elephant which was one of the animals running away from fire, looking at the silly action of the bird and criticised its action in humiliation. The bird replied magnanimously to the elephant with courage and maturity, "I knew my actions are silly and it will not succeed. Yet, it will show a way for my future generation to this burning problem."

The idea my friend tries to imply: The forest fire in the story implies problems the Indian Bureaucracy faces at present and we, the young citizens of India, as the small bird in the story, should be torch bearers and beacons to show a way to current flaring problem in our Indian society. This requires young leaders ready to sacrifice ourselves for the welfare of society. For this, we have to utilise our knowledge, character, creativity, initiative, etc, to develop into leaders to lead future generations towards bright future for our nation.

The implication of his answer is that we currently face a “Leadership Crisis” in Indian Governance. At present, there are millions of followers ready to follow a leader but we lack a single leader to lead them (leaving aside some great souls in other fields). In current India, there is an existence of “scarcity of leadership” like scarcity of water, proper air, food, etc. This scarcity can be resolved only through young people getting prepared at present to be future leaders of tomorrow. So, career in Civil Services is the one way towards enriching India with “Stalwart Leadership.”