The Arc of leadership

Like Don Quixote, Joan of Arc has inspired numerous creations in the form of plays, movies, stories, paintings, statues and interpretations. For a leader who roused an entire nation from despondency and defeatism, spurred it on to fight and eventually drive away a foreign presence, and united a nation, there are few parallels in history to Joan. She is a pure leader, par excellence.

We have adopted Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece play Saint Joan for our interpretation. In this play, we are taken through the main events of her life: her meeting Charles, the Dauphin (the uncrowned King), leading an army to lift the siege of Orleans, crowning Charles as the King of France, the betrayal of Joan by the King and others, her trial and eventually her being burnt at the stake. There is a delightful epilogue that beautifully sums up many aspects of Joan’s character.

Power of vision

Joan’s tryst with her destiny starts from a very young age, where she witnessed the brutality of English occupiers against the villagers in her village of Domrimi. She combined great pity that gave her passion and conviction, and a great intellect that gave her clarity of reason.

She seems to have had some spiritual experiences that led her to believe that God was communicating to her to lead France, throw out the English and crown the Dauphin as the King. She also wondered why France was always losing, and concluded that they had no cause to fight for, nor did they have a proper, trained, disciplined army. She saw herself as a unifier of all France under one King, and God had chosen her to accomplish this mission.

Passion as an engine of leadership

Joan’s passion is in evidence throughout the play. As a peasant girl, she gains an audience with the commander of a local castle, and then the Dauphin himself, and convinces the latter that it’s possible to lift the siege of Orleans. The Dauphin’s scepticism is brusquely brushed aside by her.

“I will put courage into thee,” she says, and the Dauphin, left with no better choice, decides to back Joan. She is given the overall control of the army, and she infuses the army with a new hope, a new courage and a new confidence.

“Who is for God and His Maid? Who is for Orleans with me?” says Joan, and the entire assembly of knights shout back: “To Orleans!” She lives among the soldiers, dressing as they do, eating what they eat, and always leading from the front, an exemplar par excellence.

When wounded badly by an arrow, she gets the arrow pulled out and is back at the front, leading a newly inspired French army. The English are defeated and the siege of Orleans is lifted. It’s a miracle.

But what is a miracle? Miracles are events that create faith. Joan’s story is an example of what faith in one’s mission, once generated, and an unbridled passion to achieve it against all odds, can accomplish. Like Don Quixote, she has a noble vision, and great discipline. But unlike Quixote, she has her foot firmly on the ground.

Role of faith

Faith, it is said, can move mountains. After all, what Joan accomplished could have technically been accomplished by any of the military commanders. The army was there; so were the weapons. What she put in was faith: faith in one’s cause, confidence in one’s success.

Creating faith is a hallmark of a leader. How does one create it? Writers have attributed this ability to that intangible, indefinable “charisma”. But in reality it may be simpler than that: it may be total conviction of one’s own cause and position.

Confidence and enthusiasm are contagious. Joan could as well have said: “I know who I am”. To herself, and to the Frenchmen at that time, she was the Messenger of God, nothing short of it, and she wouldn’t compromise her position in her trial. The same was the case with Jesus, as so movingly portrayed in the recent movie The Passion of Christ.

If Joan’s success shows one aspect of faith, her trial brings out another aspect. She failed to see the opposition from vested interests she was fuelling: the Church whose authority as the sole interpreter of God, and the feudal chiefs for whom the King was merely the first among equals.

Passion and vision also bring about cataclysmic changes in the established order. That was why she had to burn, and though after death, she could be rehabilitated, “if you could bring her back to life, they would burn her again within six months” — such are the perils of leadership.

There wasn’t any doubt that the trial was an entirely political one, steeped in religious terms. Yet the Church was on the whole fair, given its own articles of faith and gave her a reprieve — by asking her to confess.

Which she did, perhaps hoping that once free, she can complete her mission, only to learn that she wasn’t to be set free, but would remain a prisoner of the Church for life. Now her mission was in danger. She tore up her confession, and virtually forced the Church to burn her. If she had lived, perhaps France wouldn’t have been united.

Her martyrdom shows a leadership dilemma to choose between oneself and one’s ideals. Joan perished, but “her heart would not burn”. Her death infused a fresh spirit among the French, who succeeded in driving out the English. She became “the soul of France”. True leadership sometimes requires sacrifice of oneself so that the ideal may survive.

As is given in the epilogue of the play, what won was always the Maid’s way. The Messenger could never be silenced. True leaders leave behind legacies of ideals and ideas — some accomplished and some not so. But the accomplishment itself is immaterial. “It’s the memory and the salvation that sanctify the cross, not the cross that sanctifies the memory and the salvation.”

(All quotes are from the play Saint Joan)

Starry Starry Nights

Being confronted with the unenviable situation of having to choose between one wrong and another is by no means unfamiliar to leaders.

Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, the leader has to find the delicate line separating a compromise from a sell out. He faces what Joseph Badaracco, a Harvard guru on ethics, calls “defining moments”.

Bertolt Brecht examines this dilemma in his play, The Life of Galileo. Brecht highlights the key aspects of Galileo’s personality: his dedication to his students (he would rather purchase books for his students than pay his milkman), his great faith in the scientific method (“truth is the child of time, not of authority”) and his dedication to research and pursuit of knowledge, if necessary, bending his ethics a little (he claims to have invented the telescope and sells many telescopes, whereas it has already been invented). Finding that the pay he receives at Venice isn’t enough to keep his research going, Galileo moves to Florence, where the pay is better, but gives him less freedom to pursue research.

Florence is also much more under the influence of Rome and the Inquisition than Venice, and he soon reaches the dividing line between new ideas and heresy.

He propounds the theory of a heliocentric universe and infinite heavens and makes it available to not only his peers, but also to the public, by writing in Italian rather than Latin, the language of the Church. “The smell of flesh burning” is pervasive, Galileo is arrested, shown the instruments of torture, and tried by the Inquisition.

His students and society look up to Galileo not merely as a teacher but as a leader pioneering a revolution in the approach to knowledge. They expect him to be true to his own teaching that “he who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal”. But Galileo lets them down — he recants, and loses the respect of his students. “So much is gained when one man stands up and says, “No!” and Galileo misses this opportunity. He is kept a prisoner of the Church for life and permitted to do only “approved research”.

There is a twist in the play in the last scene. After many years, his student Andrea visits Galileo, who is close to death. Galileo tells Andrea that he has been secretly writing his forbidden theories and stashing them away.

He hands over the manuscript to Andrea, requesting him to smuggle the book and publish it outside Italy. Andrea realises that his judgement of Galileo was unfair — in fact, Galileo has served society by recanting and living on.

Galileo had a difficult choice. As an intellectual leader, he could have stood up for his belief in the methods of science and risked death, like Joan of Arc. But he was also a genius who had much to contribute to science (and did) by living on, unlike Joan, who created a blinding halo at her stake.

By being burnt, she left a legacy that was larger than what she could have left had she recanted and stayed in prison. Martyrdom is heroic, but is the only worthwhile outcome in society the production of heroes? Immediately after the recantation, Andrea exclaims within hearing of Galileo: “Unhappy the land that has no heroes!” to which Galileo responds, “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.”

Heroism is the driver of leadership in the Carlylean view, but this view has its limitations, as has the Tolstoyean view of leaders being mere passive products of history.

Can a leader achieve more by refusing martyrdom? Galileo himself is unsparing in his condemnation of himself: “A man who has done what I have done cannot be tolerated in the ranks of science.” He tells Andrea: “You are yourself a teacher now. Can you bring yourself to take a hand such as mine?” Andrea has no hesitation in doing so.

The play also raises the issue of responsibility of science for the consequences of its research. It was written at a time when the atomic bomb had just been exploded and the horrors of the “advancements” of science were brought home. There were raging arguments, on just how much scientists were to be held accountable to society.

Brecht’s view is that knowledge generation and dissemination cannot be separate — science must be available to all. By writing in Italian, Galileo created a wider awareness of the possibilities of science, but this also generated conflict between faith and reason.

Scientific methodology, like “rational” management has its place. But so has emotion-based concepts such as faith and trust. Leadership is about evoking faith, and if reason enables an organisation to advance, faith enables it to do so coherently.

The binding force of organisations (like a society itself) can never be reason; it can only be faith. In the words of Galileo in the play, “The aim of science isn’t to open a door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error”.

Organisations and societies based on faith alone degenerate into superstition and dogmatism. Those that stand on reason alone (where everyone doubts everything) may degenerate into a collection of disparate, self-seeking individuals. Reason can limit infinite error, but cannot bring about wisdom. True leaders understand the distinction between reason and faith and arrive at a balance.

Master of the game

For understanding leadership and decision-making, Gandhi is a very powerful case study. Did he rely entirely on spirituality and morality?

What was the inspiration of his dreams? How did he shape them? He can be understood in terms of multiple images: a hero, a saint, an exemplar, a knight and also as a martyr. People worked for him without fear of punishment or for some reward. They worked for something that was meaningfully related to a chosen set of beliefs and values, which had been made part of their lives.

It’s really remarkable how lying in a small cottage in an isolated village in India, he could communicate silently with millions of people all over India and the world simply by resorting to a fast. It has been reported that on such occasions, people in London walking in the morning from the railway station to their offices would talk about “Mr Gandhi’s body temperature today”.

For studying Gandhi, Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning film is very useful. The book by John Briley: Gandhi — A Screenplay, is also available. Some comments by Alyque Padamsee who played the role of Jinnah in the film are also available in his book: A Double Life.

The film starts with the scene in which Gandhi as a young barrister practising law in South Africa is thrown out of a train compartment, with his baggage, in which only the whites could travel.

Attenborough shows him lying on the railway platform on his knees and elbows like a quadruped looking at the train as it moves out of the platform leaving him behind. This is an event, which proved to be his crucible. As the movie proceeds, Gandhi finally reaches his dream of “Quit India Movement” gradually in stages as shown in it.

Leadership as Playacting

There’s another interesting portrayal in the film. Right in the beginning Gandhi is shown as a western educated barrister in a proper Saville suit.

In contrast, in the end he’s shown in bare loincloth. The film shows how gradually Gandhi managed to change his dress and, with it, his image gradually in stages. Perhaps, it wouldn’t be fair to say that he does it unconsciously. He was a shrewd manager of human feelings and deserves credit for projecting his image so meticulously to suit the changing situation.

Artful communication makes an impact. Alyque Padamsee, who himself has been a successful man in theatre and in the advertising world says: “It’ll seem like heresy if I say that Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest communications guru who ever lived, but it’s true.” Gandhi’s genius was evident in his staging events and through them — to dramatise situations.

He was one of the greatest event marketing man the world has ever seen and personally a great actor in a dramatic sense.

The greatest event staged by him was his salt march to Dandi. It’s really this event which really galvanised India into believing that the British were cruel taskmasters and they had imposed a draconian tax called the salt tax. He didn’t do it instantly. He let it all build up like a Hitchcockian suspense.

Slowly, he sent out a word that on a certain day he would be picking up a handful of salt on the deserted beach at Dandi. In addition to the technique of staging events, he proved to be a brilliant innovator of interaction.

He could easily have taken a train to Dandi, walked a few furlongs and got to the beach. Instead, he announced that he would start from Sabarmati Ashram on foot. He wanted to dramatise the event and interact with people on the way.

It took him several days to reach Dandi, and as he walked from village to village, the word spread that he was coming. Many of the villagers joined him in his march. Representatives from all over India and media persons from all over the world also joined him in his march.

The whole process was one of transformation of an act of defiance by an individual to a participatory movement of the people. As the march continued for days, the suspense kept on building up. Would Gandhi reach Dandi? Or would the government prevent him from reaching the beach? He did reach and proved successful.

Some Critical Comments

When one criticises Gandhi he has to first accept that he was a genius and one of the greatest leaders in world history. His puritanical approach of mahatmahood was his asset as well as his liability. It brought him his great victory: political independence, and, also his worst defeat: partition of India, which completely shattered him in the end.

VS Naipaul in his India: A Wounded Civilisation, has a section titled: Not Ideas, But Obsessions. He writes: Gandhi’s self-absorption was his strength. Without it he would have done nothing and might have been destroyed. But with this self-absorption, there was a kind of blindness.

For him the “outer world matters only in so far as it affects the inner. Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land: his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.”

Leaders have to look beyond family

Leaders have to reconcile between the responsibilities they have to discharge towards multiple constituents: towards themselves; their families; their colleagues and their shareholders.

The Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman, treats shareholders as the only stakeholder group managers are answerable to. In his famous essay, Friedman argued that the sole responsibility of a company’s management is to maximise shareholder profits; nothing else matters, so long as they play by the rules of free competition.

There aren’t ethical or moral issues of relevance to the leader; only economic issues. On the other hand, Joel Bakan, in the new book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” argues that this position leads to corporations being not merely greedy, but downright pathological.

Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons is an examination of the contradictions involved in discharging these multiple responsibilities. Arthur Miller, with his Leftist leanings, has been a long-time critic of what he called the “dog eat dog society” of capitalism, so passionately brought out in his celebrated play, Death of a Salesman.

All My Sons, is based on a real life story involving supply of defective equipment to the US Army during the Second World War, is about a businessman, Joe Keller. He has a junior partner, Steve, and their firm supplies the US Air Force with cylinder heads for the engines of fighter planes.

One night, the cylinder heads coming out of the production in the factory are found to be defective and Steve, who is in the factory, informs Keller about this on phone. Under pressure to keep up supplies, Keller orders the defective heads to be welded, dressed up and despatched.

These defective parts ultimately lead to plane crashes and the firm is hauled up a court, where Keller flatly denies that he instructed Steve to pass on the defective parts. Keller and Steve are found guilty but Keller escapes conviction on appeal, while Steve goes to jail.

Keller protests his innocence before his family and Steve’s and they believe him. Steve’s son George and daughter Ann are so incensed with what their father did that they don’t even visit him in jail.

Keller has two sons, Larry and Chris, both in the armed forces during the war. Larry, who was engaged to Anne, has gone missing in action. The play drives to a climax when George, having just met his father and learnt of what actually transpired, tells the facts — and of Keller’s duplicity.

Keller continues to deny his guilt, until Chris wrenches the truth out of him. But Keller cannot understand why Chris should be worked up: this is how the world works, and besides, “I did it all for you!”

Joe Keller was under great pressure to supply the cylinder heads that the army desperately needed, the sort of pressure that is only too familiar to executives, and failure to supply may have led to cancellation of orders, now and in the future.

“You lay 40 years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take 40 years, let them take my life away?” So he took a shortcut decision, hoping they wouldn’t install the heads so fast, and may be he could replace them with good ones quietly.

Thus his subsequent denial at the trial, shows not so much his villainy as his weakness: he simply couldn’t bear the thought of going to jail.

Ann has a letter from Larry written just before he went on his last mission, saying that he cannot bear to live any longer in light of what his father did. Clearly, Larry has deliberately crashed his own plane.

All My Sons essentially takes the view that business leaders cannot escape the consequences of their actions by taking recourse to legal loopholes. There’s still a distinction between right and wrong that’s relevant in business, as compared to what is legal and illegal.

The play also looks at the linkage between private and public life. “I did it all for you”, sounds like rationalisation, but if Keller had gone to jail, his entire family would have shared in the ignominy.

In this sense he did it for his family, for his sons who would inherit his business. But does that make Keller less guilty? Business leaders may not see their own family getting directly affected by the bad decisions they take in the way Keller does.

But they must realise, as Keller finally does, that those who suffer as a consequence of their decisions are flesh and blood people. Managers need to look at the dichotomies between their public and private life, their value systems at home and at work.

There’s a need for an integral system of ethics and values, for the very word “integrity” has its origin in the word “integral”. To quote Warren Bennis, in his book Managing the Dream, “There is no difference between becoming an effective leader and becoming a fully integrated human being”.

It’s also interesting to ask: why did Larry kill himself? In times of war, an entirely different value system comes into existence. People risk their lives for their fellow soldiers; they are not “practical”.

For Larry, his colleagues were something more than mere colleagues; it made no sense for him to live when his friends were getting killed due to his father’s action. “I can’t face anybody”, says Larry in his letter.

To him, as Joe Keller realises, “they were all my sons”. Thus the point is made by Miller, “There is a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to them, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that was why he died.”

Krishna: the best example of a leader

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are two great masterpieces of ancient Indian literature presenting two philosophies of life.

Valmiki’s Rama represents idealism and Ved Vyas’ Krishna, realism. In 1970, Osho Rajneesh published a book titled Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy, in which he compared Rama and Krishna.

Ram is a character. Krishna is an actor; he involves himself without being involved. He is a catalyst energising others into action.

He refuses to circumscribe his life with ideas and ideals. For him life is larger than all ideas and ideals put together. They are for life; life is not for them. It’s the same mind that gives rise to both good and evil, virtue and vice. Both aspects are different transformations of one and the same energy. Krishna doesn’t deny these dualities.

A mirror reflects everything that appears before it, but unlike a camera, it doesn’t retain impressions.

A man of mirror-like consciousness will relate with people and things, but he won’t enter into relationships involving attachment. Rama is a doer; he acts for his ideals and is therefore called marayada purshottam. Krishna on the other hand, is an incomparable actor; he turns the whole world into his stage.

He plays a friend and a foe without being involved in friendship and enmity. Krishna is called leela-purshottam. He accepts all contradictions and ambiguities of life. He isn’t afraid of them. That is why he’s called complete, or, purnavatar.

Krishna’s mission of life was to uphold dharma. His whole life is like an open book. He wears no mask. Whatever he is, he is.

He doesn’t deny anything; he is transparent. It’s true that life is full of contradictions and absurdities. To Krishna all that doesn’t justify escapism. He does what is situationally appropriate. Since it’s not possible to remain a mere witness, it’s better to act with complete self-knowledge and moral courage.

Creative destruction

There’s one event in Mahabharata, which generally doesn’t catch popular attention: the burning of the Khandava forest. After the plan to kill Pandavas failed, Dhritarashtra was forced to give them a share of the kingdom. Keeping Hastinapur to himself and his sons, he gave a little-known town Khandavaprastha to the Pandavas.

On a hot summer day, younger members of the Pandava family with Krishna’s family went for a picnic to the nearby Khandava forest. There they drank, sang and danced.

Suddenly everyone saw that the forest caught fire and Krishna and Arjuna together guarded all sides so tightly that no creature fleeing from the blaze could escape. Furiously driving their chariots, the two slaughtered everything in sight. Fire consumed almost all vegetation and life.

It’s not known how the fire really started. But, the question remains: why Krishna and Arjuna acted so ruthlessly and so mercilessly?

Of course, the Pandavas were planning to build Indraprastha, a city bigger than Hastinapur, which they did. And, they may also be trying to fulfil the duty of a ruling king to provide more land for cultivation. Forests had to be cleared for human settlement and entire region made rich and fertile.

Swadharma as ordained by swabhava

Krishna makes a distinction between ends and means. Ends can be idealistic. But if means are absolutely pure, they will soon become ends and the distinction between ends and means will disappear. Is a pure end ever fully achieved?

It’s always there as an ideal. Often at times the problem is to choose between greater evil and lesser evil. If it’s found necessary Krishna breaks his own vows. Violating the kshatriya code, he once even ran away from the battlefield because discretion could sometimes be a better part of valour.

His elder brother, Balarama, decided to remain neutral in the battle at Kurukshetra. Krishna knew great issues were at stake.

He was also aware that both sides looked at him as a friend. Neither side was totally right nor totally wrong. The way he divided himself is extraordinary. He told them they had two options: he or his army. It’s obvious if one is anxious for victory he wouldn’t choose Krishna without his army and, more so when he says, he wouldn’t fight.

The Pandavas chose him because they knew he was a great strategist, at one moment a sober statesman, but very often also the shrewd manipulator bent upon achieving his purpose irrespective of means employed.

He manipulated killings of all outstanding warriors of the Kauravas’ army. They knew his presence was more important than his participation.

Krishna is perhaps the best example of a leader as a catalyst available in world literature. He has no interests, no position, and no power.

Yet on almost all important occasions when great events occur in Mahabharata he is present. He does nothing, his presence makes things happen. The word Krishna means centre. He is the centre of attraction.

He stands for certain values of life and wants to destroy all those who make other suffer. Unlike Rama he doesn’t try to walk on a straight line. He deviates when it is situationally appropriate.

Forever Young

A reviewer of children’s books in The Times of India once wrote: “As a child I always valued Anderson’s story of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

I revered the child-hero in the story who, unlike the Emperor’s adult subjects, was not afraid to call a spade a spade.

However, I did think poorly of the adults because none of them had the courage to tell the emperor that he hadn’t a stitch of clothing on his blue-blooded body. Children are the most exciting of all critics. They aren’t inhibited by the protocols of tact or hypocrisy that adults learn to adhere to in society.”

There’s another powerful fable in Hans Anderson’s Fairy Tales, The Ugly Duckling. A swan born amongst ducklings finds itself in trouble because other ducklings find it different and therefore consider it to be ugly.

One day, standing at the edge of a pond, it looks at its own reflection in the clear water and finds that it’s not a duckling but a swan — a beautiful swan! This makes it aware that it’s different from ducklings and that makes the difference. It’s an excellent story conveying the meaning of self-awareness and finding one’s own identity and uniqueness.

In an interview published in a business daily five years ago, Jayant Raj Kochar, then managing director of Lacoste said: “I have made it a point to read The Little Prince written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery once in a year for the last 15 odd years.

As we grow up we tend to retain child-like qualities but lose out on the innocent simplicities of life... It has taught me not to get perplexed by the apparent, that life is simple and we tend to complicate it ourselves.”

Right in the beginning of this fairy tale, the Little Prince draws the picture of a boa constrictor swallowing its prey in one go.

He then shows it to grown-ups and asks them if the drawing frightens them, and feels, grown-ups never understand anything by themselves and it’s tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them. If he talks to them about bridge, golf or politics and neckties, they would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.

Later in the story, the Little Prince goes on a journey through different planets. There he meets different types of people such as a king, a conceited man, a tippler and a businessman and finds them all looking at life in their own biased ways.

On the fifth planet he meets a lamp lighter who is all the time busy lighting a street lamp again and again as day and night follow each other in quick succession and reflects: “It may well be that this man is absurd.

But he isn’t so absurd as the king, the conceited man, the tippler and the businessman, for at least his work has some meaning. Perhaps that’s because he is thinking of something else besides himself.”

The book covers many pathological symptoms of conditioned mind of adults: such as self-centredness, envy, jealousy, prejudice, pride, greed and so on.

The Little Prince says, “Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never ask you what does his voice sound like? What games does he play?

Does he collect butterflies? Instead they demand: How old is he? How many brothers does he have? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father earn?”

The head and the heart

The first part of the fairy tale is focused on the head or the reason, whereas the other half is focused on the heart or the feeling. The latter comes up very clearly when the Little Prince meets the fox and invites it to play with him.

The fox says, “I cannot play with you: I’m not tamed.” The Little Prince asks: “What does that mean: ‘tamed’? The fox replies: “It’s an act too often neglected; it means to establish ties.”

Later the fox says: “My life is monotonous. I hunt chickens, and men hunt me. All the chickens are alike and all men are alike and consequentially I’m a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life.”

The fox later says one only understands the things that one tames; men have no more time to understand anything, they buy things already made at the shops, but there’s no shop anywhere that can sell friendship, and so men have no friends anymore.

The Little Prince asks: “What must I do to tame you?” The fox says: “Sit down at a little distance from me and I shall look at you from the corner of my eye and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.

You will sit a little closer to me everyday and I shall feel happier and happier. It’s only with the heart that one can see rightly; what’s essential is invisible to the eye.”

The more one meditates on this book the more one is likely to experience that its major theme is love and the feeling for others and everything around. This is what can give meaning to life and work: a balance between interests and values.

Crisis of Identity

In the very first article in this series, we introduced Don Quixote, who declared: “I know who I am”.

We now revisit this question of self identity by looking at a contrasting, but remarkable character of Mahabharata, namely Karna. The great character of Karna, who has fascinated many scholars and lay people alike is an example of what happens when one doesn’t establish his self identity and comes to terms with the question

“Who am I?”. When one gets trapped in a quest for self identity, one fails to build on the person one is.

Karna was born to Kunti before her marriage, but was abandoned by her and was raised by a Suta. From childhood, Karna had an inkling that he was a Kshatriya and not a Suta, but he didn’t know who he was, or whose son he was.

Thus he was engaged in a life long and futile search for the answer to the question, “Who am I? Whose son am I? Am I a Kshatriya?”

He had to show that he was in no way inferior to Kshatriyas in general, and the Pandavas in particular, especially Arjuna.

This need to demonstrate his abilities was what led Karna to gatecrash, first into Draupadi’s marriage and then into the graduation ceremony of the Kauravas and Pandavas. These intrusions led to his humiliation, and his hatred towards the Pandavas, fuelled by Duryodhana.

At times he was the picture of nobility, but at others such as during Draupadi’s humiliation, he was mean and unchivalrous (he was the one who suggested her disrobing in the court). He took the lead on killing Arjuna’s boy Abhimanyu when the latter was without a chariot or even weapons.

This contradiction in Karna’s character was due to him being caught in an identity crisis. Not knowing whose son he was, or whether he was a Kshatriya, he had launched an endless effort to prove himself superior to Arjuna.

The trouble with this kind of effort is that it consumes one’s mental energy more than that of the adversary.

Everyone starts life with some advantages and disadvantages, and one has to judge which are the disadvantages one can overcome through one’s own effort, and which are the ones one has to reconcile oneself with.

The supreme example of this reconciliation is Vidura, who was the wisest person in the court, but could never get any status because of his birth. He knew what was possible and what wasn’t. In Things Fall Apart,the remarkable book by Chinua Achebe, the main character, is after the same futile quest to prove himself.

It wasn’t that Karna was a person of no scruples or principles. He was a great donor, a danavir who would never turn away a person requesting him for anything.

He was true to his word of friendship to Duryodhana right to the end; even when Kunti came to him just before the war finally revealing who he was, and asked him to join on the side of his brothers, Karna flatly refused.

He wouldn’t ditch Duryodhana at this supreme moment, but promised to spare all his brothers except Arjuna. But this vow , as also his act of giving away his armour, while enhancing his personal stature as a danavir, undermined the strength of the Kauravas, who depended on Karna greatly.

Karna’s life tells us that narrow principles are no substitute to a firm value system. That is why leadership is as much about developing and inculcating a broad value system as developing specific skills.

Karna might have equalled Kshatriyas in the skills of warfare, but when confronted with the value system of Kshatriyas, he didn’t make the grade, whether it was in the case of the disrobing incident or fleeing the scene when Duryodhana was captured by yakshas in the forest during one of Duryodhana’s hunting-cum-taunt-the-Pandavas trips.

Mere development of skills for the leader himself and for the organisation members without a strong underlying value system leads to an empty shell, with nothing at the core, and it crumbles at the first onslaught. Such leaders cannot cope with defining moments when they come.

Leaders are, as we have pointed out earlier, people who give, not people who take or are only interested in taking.

With passion for a cause that is relevant to their followers, leaders sacrifice and live more and more for the sake of their followers.

But in the process, warns Mahabharata, leaders have to be careful where they are going — the very fact of their being selfless can make them tyrants, accountable to no one. This can fail them in their defining moments.

The character who brings this point up most clearly is Bhishma. Traditionally, Bhishma is viewed with great respect — a grand old man who gave up a lot in his life, was bound by his vows, who always supported Hastinapura, and joined Kauravas because he had lived in their court and eaten their salt.

But the character is immensely more complex. He became Bhishma after the terrible vows he took to enable his aged father to marry a young girl he got infatuated with: to give up his right for the throne, and not to marry.

After the death of his father, Bhishma, though not the king, wielded considerable power.

His subsequent actions were taken conscious of this power, and though done with absolutely no personal motive, these action were taken with complete imperviousness to the sufferings caused to the victims, especially the women characters.

Ambika, Ambalika, Gandhari, Kunti, Madri, all suffered due to Bhishma’s choice of their husbands. Amba’s life was ruined by his impetuous abduction of her. He failed to stop the game of dice, or the humiliation of Draupadi. But he neither felt contrite for his actions, nor was he ever made accountable: largely because he was seen as someone who had sacrificed everything in life, and wanted nothing for himself.

Leaders face the danger of falling into a trap of self righteousness derived from self sacrifice.

Gandhi himself perhaps fell into this trap. He had abjured his possessions; he had given up conjugal life; he had definitely not let his sons grow in his shadow; he was frugal, self denying almost to the point of being an ascetic.

But having given up everything, he could now take actions without any real accountability. No one could question his motives because he had no self-interest.

He rapidly acquired a halo of infallibility and didn’t readily tolerate dissent. The great reliance on his “inner voice” was a prescription to almost a dictatorial behaviour.

True, Gandhi never seemingly imposed his views on any one; he had no formal authority over anyone. Yet, because so many others depended on him and his advice, his words carried a huge weight, and effectively became orders.

And his sacrificing his whole life for the country also led to his actions becoming virtually unaccountable.

As Irawati Karve, the author of Yuganta, a fascinating interpretation of Mahabharata, says: when a man does something for himself, his actions are subject to the jealous scrutiny of others. But when a man sacrifices himself completely, and lives for the sake of others, the normal limits vanish. He can then become completely ruthless in carrying out his objectives.

She says beautifully: “The injustices done by idealists, patriots, saints and crusades are far greater than those done by the worst tyrants.”

Leaders have to be wary of this danger.