Crisis of Leadership…
Read, re-read and think (emphasis added). From the redoubtable (late) C K Prahalad:
The crisis in India is a crisis of leadership.
There is no one who is willing to articulate a view of India and Indianness with clarity and force so that the country can come together and make the sacrifices needed to build a new India that the framers of the Constitution imagined.
Indians are ready to be led again. India is the largest single experiment in democracy and social justice the world has ever seen.
Leaders in India, in fact all Indians, have to ask themselves “what will be the judgment of history? What will be our legacy�
I also believe that people want to be heard more than anything else. They hunger for opportunity more than handouts…
India has more people waiting to be led than any other place on earth. It is time to act and act decisively.
From the concluding paragraph of the Late C K Prahalad‘s Nani A Palkhivala Memorial Lecture delivered in January 2010 (highly readable)
Image courtesy: Wikipedia
Great leaders come rarely. That too when the time is ripe for them. The question is — is the time ripe for a great leader? How deep the sins of selfishness, bigotry, falsehood, cowardice, avarice and inner blindness have reached into our souls and left us capable of following a great leader when he comes!
Leadership is never by chance, its by choice.
Even if a leading dynasties provide us materials, still leadership
comes through hardship, struggle, experience.
P.S. Since the British incursion, Indians by choice have been made to follow.
Let’s start from the beginning of a life in today’ era. When a child is born, he is brought up by his parents who have hardly seen life beyond their families and government jobs. A child joins a school which hardly helps the child to think and act, rather it makes him cram and then charm. The child is never encouraged to perform in sports to increase his overall efficiency. In the college, he finds it difficult to compete and then underperforms. For him, ‘leadership’ is just a theoritical paper at the university for which he uses the method of ‘garbage in garbage out’. Even if he tops the univerisity chart in a subject, he finds it difficult to apply it in real scenario. It hardly teaches him the art of living life on his own. He manages to grab a govt. job jst like his father did and is satisfied with no greater risk. Naturally, he becomes a follower. Follower of his father, his friends, his teachers, his books, his environment, his job.
As the blog said, a leader is trained, crafted, polished. One’s life hardly provides the basic fibre to make him a leader. But still we are dreaming to create one leader in every family!! Difficult. But not impossible. If we start planting seeds now, it will take more than couple of decades to get its dividends.
Thanks for the link, Shantanu.
I think we deceive ourselves when we hunger for a great “leader.” No single person or even a small group of people is going to present utopia to us.
He’s right when he says that India is a great social experiment. And in my opinion given all the things that India is, we’ve done pretty good in 63 years – no one really expected us to even last for this long.
Things will improve – but slowly. Generation by generation. New people must replace old ones, and then must be replaced again. I don’t believe there’s any way to hurry through the progress of a nation. Waiting for a leader to show us the way and take us there is futile.
Agree entirely with him. These lines are indeed motivating. Will also go through the entire speech
At present, nobody has the guts and drive of Narendra Modi.
Flush this Nehru-Gandhi parivar down the nearest toilet and give Narendra Modi his rightful due at the centre.
I found the speech only mildly interesting. In the conclusion, the part about bottom up revolution makes a good reading, but it is followed up with the rather paradoxical line “if we can motivate more of our citizens to act so bravely and selflessly toward a common purpose”. Brave and selfless is what the leaders ask the followers to be – a top down kind of working, not the bottom up stuff.
The speaker claims that there is a crisis of leadership without explaining the idea. In fact, a search on ‘leader’ results in only 4 matches one of them being the last line.
In short, I didn’t find the speech to have any new ideas or any insightful analysis.
Point well taken, but not much use hectoring others. Let him join the Freedom Team of India and debate the kinds of things we need to do and offer direct leadership.
I have given up on these hectoring intellectuals whom I consider a total waste of time and energy. They have themselves NO INTENT to lead but will lecture others.
My recommendation. Ignore Prahalad.
If anyone is actually serious then they can join FTI (http://freedomteam.in/) and work on a genuine and serious path for reform.
India’s tragedy is that on the one hand we have these useless lecturers and on the other we have so-called good people without any ability to work as a team, who wish to run straight into politics without preparation. They are thrashed black and blue by the voters who don’t want such half-baked leadership.
Few, very few, willing to systematically work as a team towards the common goal. One thing we don’t want is idle talkers like Prahalads. I’m keenly looking for young Indians who have not given up on India in their hearts.
Regards
Sanjeev
Sanjeev, CK Prahlad will need to come back from swarglok if he wants to join FTI. 😉
BTW, Sanjeev, going by the information on his wiki page, Prahlad was anything but an idle-talker, though he made his mark in the world of business.