Three Faces

"Look Around you…
What do those faces tell you…
Faces faces everywhere…
Faces all around
Different faces I see…"

One of the first ever dance music band… '2 Unlimited' had sung this song titled 'Faces'. 

I had heard this song on MTV in the early 90s when MTV used to air for 2 hours in the afternoons. This song left a permanent mark in my life where I actually sat up to notice how in the 7 billion population of the world, you actually see 7 billion unique faces. How can human beings have so many variations of the face. After that thought the way I looked at the world completely altered.

Out of those 7 billion we have come across thousands but there are a few who leave us breathless and inspired. I would like to illuminate 3 such faces that we may all know… Faces with characters who have created profiles of themselves as they walked, talked, played, acted, mesmerised the entire world, yearning for them, looking up to them, starry eyed as if they were descendants of God. These 3 faces, I'm not sure how they may have impacted all of you, but for me, as a sailor looking to sail the seas of life, they became my compass permanently.

First Face:
I was born… short. To a Brahmin family in Mumbai, India. My mother was working in the Insurance industry and my father was a novelist. I was named after a music director who was my father’s favourite. I attended school at Sharadashram Vidya Mandir and I was as normal as any other kid you would have seen. I loved to play… but there was only one game that I could learn and it was cricket. I wanted to become a fast bowler and even joined the MRF Pace foundation but I was outright rejected as I was unimpressive. I was instead asked to focus on my batting. I learnt the game same way as any normal kid learnt but what I learnt a little different than the others is to be challenged and not be afraid of failure. To believe in me.

The fact that I was able to score a century in every game I played in 1988, did not matter, the fact that I had made 326 runs in a single inning when I was just 13, did not matter, The fact that when I became 14 I used to be the ball boy for the Indian cricket team, did not matter, The fact that I scored my 100th century that no man has ever achieved, did not matter. But 25 years on when 11 of my team members got the ever eluding world cup to the country, made me, who I'm, what I'm.

My Name is Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar.

Second Face:
Knock Knock… woke me up, I was staring at my computer screen but the screen was blank. I was very sure that my computer was actually speaking to me trying to tell me something… but all I remembered was it had asked me to follow the “White Rabbit” and I did. I meet Trinity who takes me to Morpheus who tells me what I have believed till now is not true and there is something beyond it. He asks me to make a choice, Red Pill or the Blue Pill and I learnt that my world is always made of choices and its left to me to make the right choice every time  all the time. I took the Red Pill and there I was freed from my make believe world that I was living in to the Real World. It wasn't a fancy place but it will remain the only place where I learned to breathe for the first time the feeling of Freedom, freeing my mind.

I was Thomas A Anderson a software engineer, with a respectable software company in the so called make believe world called the 'Matrix' and transformed to Neo, a character who had only one power "belief".
To make the whole world know that all vices of fear, anger, frustration that happen are part of a make
believe world called the Matrix and you have the choice to rise above it by knowing your "real world".

Free Your Mind.

Third Face:
I studied law in London and became a Barrister. Not knowing that when I was born in Gujarat to a Diwan serving the government which was ruled by the British, one day I will be instrumental in leading a 350 million strong nation to oust such a government and provide Freedom to the people. I was born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and later knew to be fondly called as 'Bapu'. While I witnessed the oppression that my fellow citizens of the country were experiencing I was not concerned about what they are going to do about it but yes I couldn't bear to see the pain that they were going through physically and mentally getting treated as slaves. If a human being can suffer so much of pain when inflicted by someone he will never learn the pain he would cause if he was to hit back in the form
of revenge. 

I put my belief in Ahimsa and I vowed that I will not let another human being harm any
other human being. I preached Non-violence and the entire nation agreed and abided. When my
mother taught me the story of Harischandra I promised myself to abstain from lying and I have acted
Harischandra to myself over a million times.

Truth prevailed and my country got its Freedom, August 15th 1947.

My fellow human beings, its a start. I have now 3 faces to begin with. I learnt that there is one power that all of them have possessed which is the lifeline of their characters; common to all of them - Belief. I have now 3 faces to believe, to be inspired, in living my life completely. 

Do You?

(Written adaptation of my speeches from Toastmasters)

There is no spoon

It's interesting to observe how various lessons about life comes from different sources which may be from anywhere. For me it was from a movie... well who am I kidding! for me mostly its from a movie :-). So here is one such lesson which I would like to share and illustrate. 

"There is no spoon" - is a famous phrase from the movie 'Matrix'. The script goes like this;

Spoon Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon; that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon Boy: There is no spoon
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon Boy: Then you will see, it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

(You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXtO5dMqEI)

The above conversation if seen in the movie and undertsood a little more you can actually relate to your everyday happenings of life which we see like that of the 'spoon'. A spoon is made of metal and its rigid and it does not change, like the happenings/situations of your life. For you to bend it, it will be you who has to change the way you see it and adapt yourself to deal with it.

Here is that lesson which I 'manipulated' a bit to drive the message across to a group of audience :-)

Illustration: I handed over some common objects (Pen, Pencil, Bag, Book) to 4 random people in the audience (without the knowledge of the others) and I went and stood facing myself to the wall, blindfolded.

While still facing the wall I started speaking,

"I see that A has something with him... please hold it up for others to see... it's a Pen... right?

I hear "yes"


I see that B has something with him... please hold it up for others to see... it's a Pencil... right?

I hear "yes"

I did the same with C and D

The I turned around and said "Wow!! I was right...! Can you do that?" I heard no's from the audience. 

"No You can’t, only I know this trick."

"What you witnessed here is my trick which I have designed and only I know the outcomes of it."

"However what I have demonstrated today is no trick but the greatness of who we all are… men and women and the power that is innate within us. We have these powers for us to use every day, every moment, every second and I want to make you realize, persuade and feel this power today."

"What did I do? I knew I was going to come here today and stand here and tell you what you guys were
holding after giving them to you. I had thought of this when I started preparing for this meeting and
started penning it down as this flow of idea came to me."

"But this right here is my future to the past that I had already thought… imagined."

"I was able to see this future happen as of yesterday and I have made it happen right in front of you
today!!"

"We all have that kind of power to see the future and make it happen as we wish to. Isn't that awesome!"

The above was an illustration to prove how we have the capacity to see beyond us and understand that "preparation" is nothing but already knowing the "future".

You change the way you look at things and you will see that every occurrence has multiple dimensions to it and in those dimensions you will see various new set of actions that you can take. 

Let me illustrate more with 2 more examples;

Do you know that your eye has physical muscles to completely change the way you look? 

If you remember, there used to be this picture game which used to come in various magazines before. There is a colourful picture design in front of you and the instructions would say that you need to stare at the picture for sometime and slowly move you face away from the picture and voila!! You see an image of a beautiful horse or a flower or a car emerging in front of you, in 3D view. Such pictures are called Stereograms. 

You look beyond the design and you can see beautiful images appearing in front of you, such are the experience that lies in little changes that you can do to look at things differently. 

Another simple example; 

Just raise one of you hand in front of you so that you can see the back of your palm. You will see the hand and 5 fingers. Now as you keep the hand in front of you try seeing beyond the hand at any object… now you will see as if more fingers have been added on the palm. A visual illusion yes, but still a compelling point that drives the message that you can see things differently by just altering the way you see it.

So, what we see may not be what we see and we just have to see it in a different view', you may
come to realize, as I did, that you may actually end up seeing only the best things in life.

“There is no spoon”.

(Written adaptation of my speeches from Toastmasters)