I HAVE FOUND MY visualDNA
You too can know your dna

COMPETITION

In life things are never as obvious as they seem at first. Life has a demented way of letting you know the obvious. When, and not if, you choose to believe the virtual reality you fall flat in your face. All of us are lost in the maze, we believe what life makes us believe, we get scared by the friendliest beings, we chase the lowliest goals, and we fear success and strive for failure.

This is because of our innate misconceptions and pre-conceived notions. But once a while we see the light, we are able to rise above fundamental judgments and see things in their right perspective. Then when it finally strikes you, when after all these time the bells finally start to ring, when you realize that the round about way was the straight way you kick yourself and regret the fact of not having seen the prominent truth more prominently. Now that moment will cause you to look back and absorb the new fact, for if you accept it and correct yourself you make the right beginning all over again.

I recently had such a moment. The curtains were raised and the truth was unfolded. I had my moment .I realized that ‘competition always leads to growth.’

Yes its clichéd, yes I had heard it before, yes people and well wishers have preached so, yes life has in some way or the other made this statement hold true, but before now I did not believe in it completely.

I say ‘not completely’, as given an option of dismissal performance between giants, which will cause loss of false honor but increase of inner strength, and glorification among handicapped dwarfs I many times would have chosen the latter so as to bask in the immediate sun ignoring the storm in the not so distant future. For who doesn’t like attention, who doesn’t want glory, no matter how immediate and short lasting it may be. So I took the bait and was lost in the mist of life.

But life has a weird way or teaching you stuff. I learned it the hard way but learned it none the less. The fact that ‘competition leads to growth’ is an understatement and in no way brings about its true essence.

For anyone to succeed competition is as important as skill, determination and attitude. It keeps us at out toes, prevents complacency, makes us aware of your assets and liabilities and more important than anything else competition leads to failure.

Yes we fail because of our highly skilled peers but actually that’s the beginning of our success. ‘The one who falls can only rise’. Without competition we become stagnant, we think we are growing, actually we are falling.

So fear not competitions, because your competent peers are your gateway to success. Analyze your competition, judge it, fight it, you may loose but one day it will happen, the game of competition will lift you, you will be a winner!

“A competitive world offers two possibilities. You can lose. Or, if you want to win, you can change.”

CHANGE—THE ONLY THING CONSTANT

My world is changing everyday. Changes are occurring at the blink of an eye, after every passing second and in a heartbeat.

Changes were happening a bit too fast. Not just my life, the entire world was changing. So the metamorphosis of dull, long, repetitive ODI cricket into thrilling, nail-biting, unpredictable Twenty20 is well documented. Also the slow but qualified changes as far as India global image is concerned, which includes Vijay Malliya buying F1 team Spykar among other things, where happening at an alarming rate with sensex crossing the 17K mark.

Some of the changes were not pleasant. Like Amitabh Bachchan of ‘Mohabatein’ I too “don’t like changes”. So I repeated this clichéd dialogue of Mr Narayan Shankar and fought against the changes happening around me. Predictably, I failed.

The more I tried to prevent things from changing the more they changed. All my surroundings objects, people, events were getting a face lift. Although I would rather have prevented these ‘changes’, I realized that they were beyond my control.

For, ‘change is the only thing constant.’ ‘Changes’ will happen, one way or the other.

But I learned a great lesson. ‘Change is good when it is done by me. Change is bad when it is done to me.’

Times change, we have to change with changing times. Faces change, we have to change accordingly. Circumstances change, we have to adjust. Life stops for no one. The cycle of change rotates and evolves with every revolution. It can be mesmerizing, it can be heartbreaking, it can lead to miracles, it can cause catastrophes, but one thing that it won’t and can’t do is stop the cycle itself. So instead of trying to stop it initiate it. Change when brought about by you opens the door to limitless possibilities. In a way change makes or breaks you. You have to innovate, change for the better if you wish to survive in the highly competitive world. In a similar way changes initiated by others get the better of you and force you to first decline and finally perish.

So at the end of the day it’s your call, identify your drawbacks, change them and thus prosper else allow your competitors to identify your faults, exploit them and get the best out of you.

So change is not that bad a thing in the first place. It proves a very old saying, ‘If you want to overcome your greatest fears- EMBRACE THEM’.