Live a little: The beauty of blood, tears and sufferings

I sat on the sofa and listened as she reminisced the years at Knowlarity. It has been a few months since I left as CEO. I travelled around the world and am now back in India meeting folks. She wanted to meet.

"What was the best moment?" I asked. A smile played on her face. "Remember April 2016? DoT disconnected our telephone lines. We almost shut down. That was crazy. That was also the best time. I will never forget". I remembered the times. That was a crazy time. We had another "almost death" moment in our otherwise stable company. For almost a month, the whole company of 400+ people came together and fought like I had never seen in my life before.

I was not surprised by the answer though. I had asked this question from other ex-employees and had consistently got the same answer. This is crazy. This was the worst crisis in the company and people remembered as the best times of their lives.

And they missed such a crisis in the careers and companies they went to. Life is too peaceful. Once hooked on that adrenaline rush, a mere 9-6 is not such much fun. There is no pride in doing what you were told to you and doing it right. This is not what they teach you in MBA schools but that seems to be the truth.

We are not meant for peace. Peace is death. Life is short. It must have ups and downs, or else we will freeze and die. It must have shakeups, or else we will wither off. God must have designed us that way.

As Agent Smith describes in the "The Matrix" - "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."

Agent Smith with his menacing tone justifying the morality of our servitude aside, there is some truth to this. We need action. If nothing, to fill the "Existential Vacuum" of Viktor Frankl. In "Man's search for meaning", he describes it: "At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behaviour is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behaviour are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him. what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom"

It is no surprise that she remembered those moments. Those were the best. That brought the sparkle in her eyes. She had tasted life. She is living a 9-6 life today and getting bored. But I am sure fun times will come. When she is punched in the face with what life eventually does, she is not going to back down. She will taste her blood. She will have that sparkle for life again in her eyes. And she will make another moment that she will remember forever. That is living life a little.