Life And Its Lessons

Life has a wonderful and unique way of guiding us and teaching us lessons. I have always been a believer in the saying that “trust begets trust" and have always taken the first step of showing that I can be trusted. It goes a long way in building relationships; be it in your professional life or personal life.

I have a good friend Ramesh (name changed). He is one of the pioneers of the IT industry and has built and sold companies. Over the years many people have worked for and with him. Some of them have stayed with him through many ventures. One such person was Sanjay (name changed). Sanjay always had a blind faith in Ramesh, which never ceased to amaze me.

When I first worked with Ramesh on a deal that he was putting together, some agreements had to signed by Ramesh, Sanjay and four others. Sanjay was never involved in the negotiations. When the time came for signing, the only question he asked was: “Has Ramesh signed the documents?" and then he signed the documents without so much as reading it.

It was a complex transaction involving many layers of payments dependent on various contingencies and events that were not in the control of Sanjay but in Ramesh"s control. Sanjay was signing away five years work in these agreements. Ramesh made sure that Sanjay and all other people who were with him in this venture.

In his next venture, Ramesh asked all of us including Sanjay to join in and we agreed to work together. Ramesh did not want to be actively involved so Sanjay was made the CEO. Ramesh implicitly trusted Sanjay and gave him a lot of freedom and liberty. Sanjay literally backstabbed Ramesh and tried to take control of the company. He tried hard to suppress Ramesh and even reduce his stake in the venture.

Ramesh told me about all of this on 29th January 2008. I went home asking myself “can we trust people and if so much" and “can we continue to trust people at all times?"

The very next day in the morning, I went running in Lalbagh. Somewhere along the way, my car keys fell out of my pocket and I did not realise it. I retraced my footsteps but could not find the keys. I went back home and returned a couple of hours later with the spare keys. I found this gentleman “Annoji Rao"s" visiting card stuck on the car with a number with the message “I have your car keys". “Annoji Rao" (real name) runs “Lakshmi Enterprises" having office at # 84/1, 8th Main Road, LIC Colony, 3rd Block East, Jayanagar. I had neither heard of him nor his business.

He had come out of Lalbagh, beeped for the car and found that my car opened (I drive an Octavia and there were not many Octavias at Lalbagh that day). He waited for an hour to give me the keys. Since I did not turn up he left the note. He mentioned to me that he had waited only because it is not easy to replicate an Ocativa"s key (which I did not know) and that it costs about ten thousand rupees. He also mentioned that his brother had suffered this with his Octavia.

I am now “glad" that I lost the keys and this incident happened. It is remarkable that life did not allow me dwell on what Sanjay had done. There are many lessons to be learnt from this and each of us will learn a different one.

We must be thankful if we are able to spot what life is trying telling us and teaching!