The Hunter and the Parrots
Sanatana Dharma (SD) is a Sanskrit word that means eternal law. It’s also synonymous with Hinduism. Every Monday for the next few months, I will share some small stories from this ancient tradition of Sanatana Dharma and discuss its implications for our professional lives. I will also share the esoteric meaning of the story so anyone interested can delve deeper into the spiritual significance of the story.
All these stories are now available in the SD Wisdom At Work publication on Medium.
A hunter had imprisoned a few parrots and was on his way to sell them in the market. He carried two cages. The first one had a beautiful parrot with colorful plumage, and the hunter hoped to fetch a good price for it. The second cage had three regular parrots. He passed a saint meditating on a rock. The shrieks emitted by the parrots draw the attention of the saint. The saint stopped the hunter and compassionately requested him to release the parrots from their bondage. He described how the parrots were flapping desperately in the cages and reminded the hunter that every soul deserved freedom. The hunter smiled and told him that these parrots were means for him to feed himself and his family. If he released the parrots, then his family would sleep hungry tonight.
The saint understood his predicament and asked him what he charged for each parrot. The hunter replied that each parrot cost 100 rupees. The saint dug into his robes. He found a single hundred rupee note a devotee had donated a few days ago. He handed that over and took the cage that held the single colorful parrot.
The saint took the parrot out of the cage and placed him on his arm. He then asked the parrot why they were all so blinded. Could they not see that when the hunter puts out grains for them to eat, he has also laid down a net to capture them? How do they get trapped every time? The parrot replied that they were helpless. They could see the net being laid, but the hunger made them desperate and blind.
The saint thought for a few moments and came up with an idea. He instructed the parrot to listen to him carefully and then share this message will all the other parrots.
“The hunter will come. He will put a net. He will tempt us with food. We will not get trapped.”
The parrot stayed with the saint for ten days and repeated this mantra a few thousand times. On the eleventh day, he bowed to the saint and thanked him for sharing the keys to liberation. The parrot soared off into the sky, confident that he and his fellow parrots would no longer be trapped in the web.
He returned to meet his tribe and told them he had discovered the key to infinite freedom. He then shared the mantra with them and got them to chant it a thousand times. All these parrots, in turn, flew around and spread the word. Very soon, all the parrots in the region were chanting this message.
A few weeks later, the hunter returned to the forest and spread a net on the floor. He then scattered food. The hunter’s attempts amused the parrots. They were sure that their manta would protect them from this trap. The hunter hid in the bushes, and all the parrots loudly chanted their mantra and flew straight into the net. They kept pecking the food and chanting their mantra.
“The hunter will come. He will put a net. He will tempt us with food. We will not get trapped.”
The hunter gleefully gathered all of them, put them in cages, and started walking back to the market. He encountered the saint meditating on the same spot and bowed to him. He told the saint how angry he was when he heard the birds all across the area chanting the mantra. He narrated his inner turmoil and fear when he felt the parrots had become too wise to be trapped. He visualized his family spending the next few days in hunger as he searched for a new profession.
Then, the hunter explained how all these parrots kept chanting the mantra as they landed on his net and ate the food. The saint listened silently. He contemplated and then told the hunter that he had hoped that the parrots would internalize the mantra. This would help them work on their tendencies and transform them. However, the parrots focused on chanting the matra mindlessly and fell straight into the same trap.
I heard this story in the Srimad Bhagwat Gita podcast by my guru and spiritual master, Om Swami. I highly recommend this podcast because it helped me understand and internalize the message of this immortal text.
Applying SD Wisdom At Work
Sunder Pichai, the CEO of Google, recently stated that they need to create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, and more customer-focused.
We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.
Google announced that they want to “review headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized staffing requests for the next three months.”
Simply put, they stated they were bloated and needed to figure out how to get to the optimum number again. Since I have spent a long time working in bloated organizations, I have some thoughts to share. While I use Google as an example due to recency bias, it applies to every large company.
At the heart of every organization lies one dark secret. Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs is the most potent factor that dominates any organization. This hierarchy is used to study how humans intrinsically partake in behavioral motivation. It states that humans start by satisfying psychological needs, safety needs, and love/belonging needs. Once these needs are met, they may move to higher needs.
All major organizations were once small and guided by vision and mission statements. These statements then tie into some values used to run the organization.
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Let’s review Google’s mission and vision statements.
Mission: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
Vision: To provide access to the world’s information in one click
Values: Some of the values that Google has are:
The Parroting of Mission and Value Statements
These vision, mission, and values statements are created with the best intentions. However, when organizations grow at a rapid pace, a strange thing happens. Every business leader starts establishing empires. They subconsciously interpret the vision, mission, and needs to suit Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs as it applies to them. They convince themselves that their teams need to grow for the organization to meet its mission and vision. This ties into their Safety and Love/Belonging needs.
I often saw that teams that grew were not the ones that were critical to the organization. They were subsidiary teams that had dynamic leaders.
A typical example is if you have an internal IT team with a visionary leader, the IT organization will double in size. Then, they would start hunting for more work and often compete with the organization’s product team. Another example is the services team for large organizations that would keep developing newer services, plugins, and models.
Internal IT teams are meant to enable product teams not to compete with them. Services teams are meant to rapidly deploy products and move out instead of building complex integrations that need to be supported and maintained.
Business leaders from these teams refer to the vision and mission in every meeting. The team members also learn them by heart and reference them while making every decision. However, deep within them, the decisions are guided by the three tiers of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. They need to feel safe, and they need to feel valued at the organization. This attitude resembles the parrots who keep chanting the mantra without internalizing it.
Sometimes it's in the best interest of the organization for certain teams to be small and impactful. However, I am yet to meet a leader who could say their team was bloated or felt they had exceeded the brief of their charter and needed to rein the team back in. Why is this even important? It’s crucial because leaders know their teams are bloated or redundant far before executive teams figure it out. It's only when the sales start slipping or profitability gets impacted that the executive teams lift the lid, and suddenly you see a very different picture.
I apologize if I have hurt the sentiments of anyone who works in these business units. They are critical businesses, but in my experience often they often grow rapidly and are trimmed back to meet an organization's goals.
The best example of this in the tech industry is when Steve Jobs returned to the helm of Apple as CEO. He axed 70% of the products created by Apple and focused on a few products that would generate a majority of the profit. Apple had the same vision and mission since it started. Steve just ensured everyone followed it instead of parroting it.
Google will have to take a similar journey to rediscover its roots. It may not do something as drastic as Apple. It does not need to do it because it’s still a very profitable organization. However, its executive team will start refocusing on its vision and mission and ensure they grow teams that are critical to them.
According to the latest media reports, Google has already stated that it will slow its hiring for the remaining year but will continue to hire for “critical roles.”
Esoteric Meaning of the Story
Have you ever wondered why more people around you have not achieved the final state of liberation or Moksha? It’s simply because most of us have limited ourselves to becoming spiritual parrots. Everyone seems to read and quote from the scriptures. We know 1008 names of Lord Vishnu or the divine mother and can explain the exact nature of the “Brahman.”
However, we still need that knowledge to sink into the very core of our beings. We are not honest enough to admit how far we must travel and how hard we need to work to eliminate our biases. The ability to see divinity in everyone, including the ones you supposedly despise, is a prerequisite for seekers walking this path. I started this SD for Work series because my spiritual guru stated that his purpose and, by extension, mine is to revive Sanatana Dharma. I parroted the same lines he did and tried to be the best disciple. Gradually as the message deepened, I asked myself, what is the Dharma I am trying to revive? Hence, I started learning more about it.
Then, I asked myself, what is the end state of this revival? When can you say we have revived this Dharma? Sanatana Dharma has only one objective — Moksha or Liberation. You cannot call yourself a Sanatani if you are not working on yourself to liberate yourself from this endless cycle of rebirths. That’s why we can only say this Dharma is revived when every seeker can claim they are working towards their Mukthi. This is crucial because many political parties and organizations in India are working on restoring this glorious tradition, and they have their own definition of the end state. However, we are mere parrots falling into a trap until we internalize that Sanatana Dharma is all about Mukhti, and you can only achieve that by eliminating all differences between yourself and others.
These are my individual views and do not represent my current or any previous organizations.