TM: Birth

On Friday, the first TM session, though informal, was held. Our L&E head was very supportive of the idea when we spoke to him but tried to stymie our initial enthusiasm and urgency by citing the upcoming appraisal season as a reason why things have to slow down. He promised to hold a demo session towards the end of March, when some senior executives may join us. But the proposed course of action would inevitably be blessed by some political dilly dallying which would delay the whole thing further. So we went ahead and continued our preparations, urging people to develop capabilities in their individual roles. On Friday we held our first full session. It was a major success – very well managed and coordinated.
I gave the only prepared speech on that day as the other person wasn’t prepared. The Table Topic session was a laugh riot. ‘AG’ did a commendable job. The topics for impromptu speech included: “If electricity depends on electrons, should morality depend on morons?” and other such gems!

Given below is the text of the speech I delivered on that day:


Money:It’s a crime

Money, it’s a crime.
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re
Giving none away.

Ahh, “Money money money, if I had a little money, in the rich man’s world”.

We are human beings: the smartest animals on the planet. We are born with the mission to improve ourselves/ our conditions. Our lives are like a complex web of emotions, relationships, aspirations, dreams, heartbreaks and well, money.

However vehemently we try to deny it, everywhere we look, there’s the bait of money and there’s corruption, for money. Take the most powerful man on the planet who, as a hobby, attacks a new country everyday for the sake of its rich oil reserves and in the process kills thousands of innocent people.
Look at a poor government official who is corrupt as it’s the only way he can send his child to a good college. Turn on the television and you would be bombarded with thousands of ads asking you to buy this hot looking car or that cool new TV. Take a look by the roadside and all you will see are hoardings advertising your dream home for a huge chunk of money.
Money drives us all!

Or does it? Did Mahatma Gandhi not have enough money to buy a shirt or a pair of trousers? Why did he spend most of his adult life clad in just a dhoti? He promised to his motherland that unless his countrymen have the means to cover their body, he himself wouldn’t do so. What inspired him to lead the life of an ascetic when he had the opportunity to live life king size as a lawyer?
Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Noble laureate, was born in a family richer than that of many kings. His grandfather, prince Dwarkanath Tagore once had lunch with the queen of England. But he spent the later years of his life in a small hut in Shantiniketan among friends and relatives. Much of Tagore's money including (entire Nobel prize money) and time went towards Vishwa Bharati: an experimental school he founded at Shantiniketan, based on his ideals of an enlightened and free-thinking. What inspired him to do that?
Why did innumerable freedom fighters sacrifice their lives to free India – a freedom they themselves could never witness?
So is there any pattern here? While some people sacrifice their all for money, others sacrifice all their money for a cause! This disparity is due to the characteristic of money. Aristotle once remarked, “Apparently money is not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.” Two points to note here:
1) Money is merely useful and
2) Money is for the sake of something else
Money is undoubtedly useful as it allows us to live out our dreams. It gives us the power to buy what we want, to do what we like and more importantly, it allows us not to do what we don’t like. But in all the cases, we are using money FOR something; it is not independently useful. For example, if you were offered a bag full of cash but left stranded in the middle of Kalahari Desert, the offer would surely be an evil one.

Speaking of evil, what about the common refrain, “Money is the root of all evil”? Or as George Bernard Shaw put it, “Lack of money is the root of all evil”. Well, have you ever asked what the root of money is? Money is nothing but a tool of exchange. It is the material shape of the principal that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Man makes money; money doesn’t make man. Money will neither give a downright corrupt person a lofty set of moral values nor will it turn
a saint to a sinner.

But where does the common man stand in all of this? As Woody Allen once said, “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons”. Well, personally speaking, I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something. No, seriously, my bank balance seems to be static at the end of every month! It even decreases sometimes!
Jokes apart, whenever we talk about money, we have to put things into perspective.
We live in a country where nearly 30% of the population lives below the poverty line. I spend Rs. 100 to watch a movie at a multiplex whereas nearly 80% of the population earns less than that amount in a day. Hence the colour of money may not seem identical to all and sundry. Most of the people in this country and the world at large spend their lives in pursuit of money - in pursuit of a better standard of living.

At the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to: pursuit of a better life. Money can only take you so far in that regard. To have a remotely possible chance of a content life, one needs, among other things, professional success, a loving and supportive family, a reasonable, secure society to live in and of course, money. Each of life’s components must be given due weightage for us to be happy. Just like in a symphony, each instrument must independently produce coherent music so as to give meaning to the complete composition; each of life’s components must also independently produce its own sweet notes to allow us to sing the complete song of life. John F Kennedy, in a completely different context, once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!”. I’ll conclude by saying this: Ask not what you can do for your money; ask what your money can do for you!