The Story Of My Mentor

In this series, professionals thank those who helped them reach where they are today. Read the posts here, then write your own. Use #ThankYourMentor and @mention your mentor when sharing. 

It was my first day in the B2B Marketing Class. He walked inside, carrying two glasses of hot water, bringing in 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 a 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 a while to pierce through the placid air of silence. We 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 know how it plays out. You tacitly agree to play by them as a karmic payback duty for your parents' life time of hard-work. Early on, you are taught the 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)

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

Soon after I finished the course - which was everything other than B2B marketing, a massive conspiracy held between the students and the farmer to explore how the Internet was changing the world, one of my dear friend, my partner in crime, with whom I had just completed filming a movie,chronicling the past, present and future of the Internet, dropped out of the college, wrote a quiz book best-seller, and began to hitch along his energies of passion. I chose to stay in, and started my blogging 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 it was, acquired a new meaning. It became the classic, fork-in-the-road phase where my life unraveled the Myths, Biases and Assumptions I held dearly about the old world that was shedding its skin away to embrace the brave, new, networked world, I would be living in. 

Although I knew I was good at marketing, I decided to pivot my career (whatever that word meant) from marketing to Web 2.0 technology. I chose the Web as my muse, intrigued by the way the farmer framed the Web: 

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

I didn't know what got over me then. I became that feverish child who was restless enough to try out everything inside the candy store. I learned that the farmer took 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 see how neo-liberalistic thinking, coupled with market fundamentalism was screwing up the only planet we call Home. I started visiting organic farms, learned more about natural pregnancy, attended climate-change conferences, and somewhere, along the way, began to understand the perilous effects of industrial schooling.  

It is a common 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 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. 

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Seven Learnings from Seven Years of Blogging

How to get rid your MBA mind of bullshit taught in B-School?

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