The Story of my mentor who messed up my life

It was my first day in B2B Marketing Class. He walked inside carrying two glasses of hot water, bringing an air of intrigue to the noisy classroom we were seated within the precincts of my B-School, far away in the Sahyadri mountains, well suited for steamy romantic episodes of Mills and Boons.

With his pony tail and salt-and-pepper french beard, he was the last person you could imagine reviving the Gods of Marketing from the dead, long after rigor mortis had set in. 

He paused for a while to register the curious bunch of puckered faces who were not knowing what to expect.

" Whom do you think is the world's greatest strategist?"

When he spoke, his words were suffused with a rare effulgence that ordered us to sip them slowly. As slowly as you would sip hot water. It took the question few seconds' worth of distance run to pierce through the placid air of silence.

We slowly warmed up by naming our favorite heroes in the management pantheon- Michael Porter, Peter Drucker, Lao Tzu, Lee Iacocca et al. I remember shouting 'Gengis Khan' that day. I somehow liked the sound of his name. 

After patiently listening to all of us, he spoke in a self-assuring voice, a steady sound wave curve arising from the bottomless depth of his ocean.

"Isn't nature the greatest of all?. After all, it never hurries. Yet everything gets accomplished".

The response was expected from a farmer, the last brave man on Earth to pursue a life-long, intimate romance with the most mysterious woman ever known, yet, it stumped us completely, as we suddenly came to close terms with our limited world-views, tunneled after decades of playing by the rules of the middle-class life-script our parents had imposed on us. 

I have a nagging feeling that the word "mentor" is too fragile to carry the import of what this strange person did to me. I did a casual wiki lookup and found that this term came from a character in Homer's Odyssey who advised a young Telemachus in search of his father. Advised was never in his scheme of things as it undermined the natural intelligence he believed his students had to figure things out.

Throughout my childhood, my education was limited to downloading stuff available from others' minds. What a chaotic, swirling whirlpool of information my mind must have been, full of stuff, downloaded unhealthily without an iota of context?

Naturally, it was discomforting, to say the least, when a professor came in and said,

"In my class, you can't download stuff. We 'll discover things together"

To participate in his class was to join the ceremonious act of inquiry, conducted religiously without the wiles of any agenda. Every view was welcome. Sacred to profane.The thrill of being a part of such an inquiry for the first time in my sixteen years of schooling was something ineffable. It was the first rush of bliss felt by the mind which suddenly realizes,

Holy F****. I too have wings to fly. 

I think he screwed my life, and I say this without an ounce of click-bait overstatement, by completely disrupting the middle-class life-script I was more than willing to play.

If you've grown up in India, you would exactly know what I am talking about. You tacitly agree to play the game as a karmic payback duty for your parents' life time of sweat and hard-work.

Early on, you are taught the Industrial Age's Divine Gospel for success.

"Study Well -->Get Good Grades -> Get Good Jobs -->Live Your Good Life".

Your career choices get appropriated from your Ivy League cousins. Everyone, except you, gets to decide all the important choices of your life. Starting from your LIC Insurance Plan Premium to your promotion cycle to your portfolio of religious after-life insurance plan. Of course, you do get to choose things like, you know, the clothes you wear. 

(Illustration Credits: Grace Witherell from Breaking Smart)

Screwing up therefore becomes an act of liberation, when you wake up from the reveries of borrowed dreams. You become alive to the life canvas waiting to unfold your chef d'oeuvre. 

Soon after I finished the course - which was everything other than B2B marketing, a pedagogical conspiracy between the students and the farmer to explore how the Internet was changing the world, one of my dearest friends, dropped out of MBA. He saw the Matrix for it is and decided it was no longer his game to play.

He became my partner in crime and we celebrated our rites of passage into the new world by making an open-source, remix movie,chronicling the past, present and future of the Internet. We screened it passionately to a motley group of artists, activists, and tired corporate veterans who were equally excited to midwife the unprecedented frontiers Web 2.0 promised. My friend later went on to write a quizzing book best-seller and began to hitch along his energies of passion. The last time I checked, he was busy reawakening the communal ethos of Jaipur.

I chose not to drop out (who said twenty years of middle-classy conformance with the authority was skin-deep?) and started my Social Media consultancy inside my hostel dorm-room. Those were heady days, when my life's energies were deliriously driven to give a giant, upraised middle finger to all forms of authority I once diligently sucked up to.

My MBA, for whatever worth, acquired a new meaning.

I had come to a fork in the road when life unraveled the Myths, Biases and Assumptions I held dearly about the old industrial world shedding its skin to embrace the brave, new, networked world, I would be living in.

Although I knew I was damn good at marketing, I decided to pivot my Career - whatever that word meant - from marketing to Web 2.0. (I narrated that story elsewhere)

The Web - as once dreamed by the cyberpunk hippies fighting the the ideological battles of the sixties in the cyberspace - became my muse. What made me swoon over the Web was the intriguing way the farmer had framed it. 

If nature is everything connected with everything, wouldn't Web follow the rules of nature?  

God only knows what got over me then. I became that feverish child restless to play with everything inside the toy store. I learned that the farmer taught another course on "Science, Technology & Ecology", in another B-School in the same city. I became a "visiting student" of sorts and ravenously gobbled it up. It was my introduction to witness the comatose phase of neo-liberalism screwing up the only planet we call Home.

I started visiting organic farms, learned the nuances of natural pregnancy, attended climate-change conferences, and wrote my MBA thesis on how quantum mechanics can help us re-envision the future of management. Somewhere along the way, the perilous effects of industrial schooling became obvious and I started working towards deschooling myself.

It is a wide-spread belief of our times to think that "You cannot be neutral in a moving train". It doesn't matter even if extreme right is left, and extreme left is right. Look around, and you will see plenty of instances, where people consider it righteous to impose their views on other's minds,gullible,cynical or otherwise. 

Have you ever noticed the futility of cleaning your room while walking around with dirty feet?

That's exactly how I had felt all along, whenever mentors felt it was in their mentees' best interest to enforce their view of the world. How can one learn to see if the glasses which help you see cannot show you the truth as it is?  

In my view of a mentor, what sets apart the best from the rest, is one who is patiently willing to show the mirror, without projecting any of his views. It doesn't matter, even if the mentee doesn't get it the first time. Can you simply stand there and show the mirror, every time, without making a fuss of your authority to do so?

It's rare to see a mentor whose ways of being, more than his words, opens up a kaleidoscopic canvas teeming with possibilities. And I consider myself blessed, having met someone like that. 

A slightly different version of this article was published couple of years ago

Have you met mentors? What has been your experience? I am all ears.