Lessons From Death

In the Mahabharatha, the five Pandava princes are forced to flee into the jungles, and remain incognito as part of a punishment/penance essential to their winning back their kingdom. On a day of walking for miles without food or water, the brothers are overjoyed to come across a lake with clean and clear water. Even as their eldest brother Yudhishtir cautions them, they jump in, freshen themselves and take deep gulps of the sweet water.

Within minutes, all the four brothers fall dead by the pond. With a huge thunder, a voice from the skies (Aakashvani) came booming out: “Hey Dharamraj, as the eldest brother, you should have known better. This water body belongs to me. As the owner and a Yaksha, it is my right to put a hex on the lake. Anybody who partakes of the water without my permission will die instantly.”

Recognizing the Dharma of ownership, Yudhishtir immediately apologises profusely to the Yaksha (demi-god), and offers to do whatever may be necessary, to make amends. The Yaksha reels out a series of questions, and thus ensues a masterful dialogue, a definite highlight in the Mahabharatha. One of the more interesting questions asked by the Yaksha: “What among all human behaviours qualifies to be called as most weird and curious?”

The masterful answer from Yudhishtir: “Even as he sees people dying all around him every day, Man behaves and goes about his activities as if he is immortal. Such an attitude is both funny and incomprehensible in its stupidity.”

The story goes that Babur, the first Mughal emperor in India, sat paralysed in grief for days on end, with his ailing son Humayun across his lap. With his young son’s death almost certain, Babur appealed to the Higher Being, and offered his own life in exchange for that of his son’s. His prayers were heard, and the legend ends with the son Humayun coming alive the same moment when Babur falls lifeless. The mystification and faith-cure connotations in this version is more popular and trumps the alternative narrative of Babur’s death attributed to poisoning by Ibrahim Lodhi’s mother.

At the end of the epic War, the Pandavas set up a Camp for all the cousins, nephews, uncles and hundreds of their soldiers who survived the 18-day carnage. Ashwathama, son of the great teacher Dronacharya, was seething with uncontrollable anger over Lord Krishna and Arjuna, for the unjust way in which his father was killed in the War. Seeking revenge, he descended on the Camp in the stealth of the night, and set fire to all the tents. Every sleeping man was brutally charred, none spared.

Krishna was so incensed that he wanted a punishment for Ashwathama that will last over many births. The Pandavas’ wife Draupadi dissuades the Lord because that will perpetuate the enmity between the clans.

Lord Krishna moderates the penalty for Ashwathama and curses him to be immortal. A life of ageing, but no death.

Three stories on Death, three lessons:

    I.       Wrong decisions are being made all the time around us. Products, markets, employees…disasters galore. Rejoicing on the misfortunes of others (especially competitors) is fine, but to believe that our company is immune from such mistakes or disasters, is not.

  II.       Business is not a zero-sum game. Markets never saturate, only our understanding of the market does. It is laziness to believe that we must win market shares only from those who already have it. Something’s gotta go for something else to come is not true.

 III.       Nothing is immortal. Not companies, not processes, not products or people. Things need to adapt and change to simply stay alive. If everything has been the same for long, it is like Ashwathama’s curse.

Shakespeare, in Hamlet, recommends that we chill, because to die is but to sleep:

“To die: —to sleep:

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished.”

Act III, scene 1, line 60.

Ramesh is a Corporate Speaker for Leadership and Strategic Meets. Ramesh’s approach and style are largely to do with interpreting and elaborating the factors that affect organisations, trends in the industry that the companies need to watch out for and the methods that they can use to achieve their goals.