Is success really a moment ?

 Is Success Really a Moment?

Behind every “sudden success” is a long, unseen climb.

We often assume success happens in a moment.

A young cricketer scores a century, a champion wins another title, a singer starts filling stadiums. And almost immediately the comments begin.

“How lucky.”
“What timing.”
“She was always destined for it.”

From a distance, success can look sudden, but that is only because we usually arrive at the end of the story.

When Virat Kohli walks out to bat, we see control, not the years of failure and rebuilding that came before it. When Roger Federer played, everything looked effortless, though that effortlessness was built through endless repetition. Even outside sport, Adele fills global stages today, though she once performed in small rooms where some nights ended in silence—there was little applause, if any. That is usually how life works.

We see people on the top floor, sometimes even on the helipad, but rarely the journey that took them there. Social media makes this illusion even stronger. We see the achievement, the award, the promotion, the celebration. We rarely see the years that came before.

The truth is that most of life happens there—not at the start, not at the finish, but somewhere in the middle.

It is the place where you keep showing up every day and wonder if any of it is making a difference. Where the work feels repetitive, the progress feels invisible, and the destination seems no closer than it did yesterday.

I know this because I have lived it. In my early thirties, I was already a Headmaster in a large school in Pune, India. The title sounded impressive. The reality felt very different because most days I felt I was learning as fast as I was leading.

I made mistakes. Some could have had serious consequences if I had not adjusted quickly. I learnt from people older and more experienced than me. I watched them closely, listened carefully, and absorbed whatever I could. Looking back, I probably learnt as much from observation as from formal training.

Late evenings became routine, but so did self-doubt.

There were days when I questioned whether I was ready for the responsibility that came with the role. Long before I knew the term “imposter syndrome,” I understood the feeling. Deadlines, expectations, difficult decisions, and the fear of getting things wrong all arrived together.

It wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t glamorous, and it certainly didn’t feel like success in any form. Looking back, that was probably the most difficult stage.

You keep moving forward, but there is no applause, no visible breakthrough, and no reassuring sign that all the effort is leading somewhere meaningful.

That is where frustration creeps in, and disappointment follows close behind. Some days you even wonder whether it is worth continuing.

Most people experience those moments, but few talk about them.

Perhaps that is why comparison can be so misleading. We compare our struggles with someone else’s results. We compare our beginning with someone else’s ending. What looks sudden is usually the result of years of persistence that nobody noticed while it was happening.

As an educator and a father, I have come to believe that encouragement matters most during this stage. We naturally celebrate people when they succeed, and there is nothing wrong with that. But often the greater need is earlier, when confidence is fragile and progress is difficult to see.

That is when a word of encouragement, a helping hand, or a pat on the shoulder matters. Sometimes these are the very things that keep us going.

Then, often when you least expect it, something changes.

What once felt difficult becomes manageable. What once felt unfamiliar becomes second nature.

You do not always notice the change immediately. You notice it later, when you look back and realise you have travelled much further than you thought, and there is a deep satisfaction in that realisation.

Not because you reached the top, but because you kept going when it would have been easier to stop.

The top floor gets noticed—it always does.

But what deserves equal attention are the years before that—the mistakes, the doubts, the late nights, the tiredness, the setbacks, and the moments when people almost gave up but didn’t.

Success is not the moment you arrive at. It quietly takes shape over time, long before anyone else notices, and long after you yourself have stopped wondering if it will ever happen.

When I look back at my own journey, it rarely feels like arrival—just a quiet understanding that those ordinary days were never wasted; they were simply taking me somewhere.

The packet

 

THE PACKET

 

It was an evening in late July

When he saw him sitting under the gnarled banyan tree,

Wizened and apparently gasping-

A maniacal look on his face

Clutching an earthy brown, cloth bag 

Under his sweaty arms.

His rasping cough made him breathe heavily.

 

“Who are you”? asked the young boy- 

Just all of eight- marbles jingling in his pockets.

‘Are you waiting for someone’?

What’s in your bag’?

There were no answers forthcoming,

But the silence was broken with a ‘pechak’

As the old stranger spat his betel juice, into the dust around them.

 

He smiled- a red toothy smile and whispered- 

In almost a threatening growl

‘My boy – don’t ask me those questions- ever again’.

He bowed his head, which sunk deeper

Into the depths, of his seemingly, hollow torso

And gasped aloud.

 

There was a pregnant pause-

And the young lad was terrified.

 

In the distance the ‘kik- kik- kik’ of the ‘Koyal’ could be heard. 

Summer was coming to an end. 

Lines of soft, grey Nimbus clouds 

hung low and spelt rain- later that night.

An eerie stillness prevailed.

 

The old stranger looked crestfallen,

-utterly broken. 

But wait -there was something else-

Were those tears, amidst the wrinkles?

He fumbled with his belongings –

A bell and some beads strung together.

He took out a tattered paper bag,

And laid it on the ground. 

His scaly hands trembled and beads of perspiration- 

Appeared unexpectedly- trickling down,

His seemingly, scrawny neck

Losing themselves in his grimy garments.

 

They both stared at the bag in complete silence.

The ‘kik- kik- kik could be heard, in the distance. 

The echoing voice of his mother calling him home- 

‘ Balaaaaaa’- roused them from the reverie.

 

The stranger hurriedly picked himself up- 

Dusted his garments and shuffled away-

Pulling a ragged shawl 

Tightly over his long, matted hair.

He didn’t look back.

 

The young lad sat mesmerized-

Staring at the abandoned packet for a few, 

Agonizingly long moments.

This couldn’t be his birthday present in advance?

His father and twin brother

Had left for the market early that morning. 

He willed them back, as night 

Was fast approaching.

He had always been petrified of the dark 

 

The tension was palpable and 

He could contain himself no longer.

‘Balaaaaa ’- shouted the mother once again.

It was now or never.

 

Stretching his right hand forward-

He reached gingerly, for the creased packet- 

Pulling it towards himself, hesitatingly. 

Taking a deep breath – he opened it warily.

And took one furtive look

 

Screaming in abject terror 

Bala bolted towards his little thatched hut- 

At the edge of the large paddy field.

He collapsed into his mother’s arms- 

Sobbing inconsolably 

Pointing vaguely to nowhere

Muttering unintelligible sounds- 

hysterical and incoherent.

 

The family rushed out-

Just in time to see an old stranger-

Board the last bus out of the village that night. 

The lad led them to the banyan tree- 

Still sobbing and gesticulating towards the crumpled bag.

The pale crescent moon illuminated the sky-

And bathed them all in a silvery glow.

Then the skies opened and the tempestuous rain

Came down in torrents.

 

Packet in their hands- they walked home

Their sobs mingling with the thunder

On keeping it simple

 ON KEEPING IT SIMPLE 

"Keep it simple."

Anyone who has worked with me has probably heard me say those words more than once. In meetings, in assemblies, in conversations with leadership teams, and sometimes even with students. It is a phrase I come back to often because I have seen how much trouble starts when we move away from it.

We seem to live in an age that rewards complexity.

People speak in jargon. They write in language that sounds impressive but says very little. Tasks that should be straightforward somehow acquire layers of forms, procedures, and explanations. What began as something simple becomes something exhausting.

I have never understood the attraction. Surely beats me!

Some of the most effective people I have met over the decades  were also the simplest. They spoke clearly. They wrote in a way that everyoneunderstood. They knew what they were  trying to achieve and got on with it. 

There was no performance. No unnecessary drama. No effort to sound more important than they were. Today things have changed. 

In this modern day and age , keeping it simple is likely to get you looked down upon . 

It is easy to hide behind complicated language. It is much harder to express an idea so clearly that everyone understands it.

 The same applies to leadership. A leader's role is not to leave people confused by clever words. It is to provide clarity. To make the path ahead easier to see.

The truth is that life is already complicated enough.

People carry pressures we know nothing about. Families, finances, health concerns, deadlines, responsibilities. Most are dealing with far more than they ever show. The last thing they need is someone making their day harder through poor communication or unnecessary complexity.

Over the years, I have found that simplicity rarely lets you down. A simple message. A simple plan. A simple act of kindness. A simple conversation.

These things work.

So I continue to repeat those three words.

Keep it simple.

Not because simplicity is easy, but because it is often the hardest thing to achieve. And when you do achieve it, people understand you, trust you, and follow you.

There is a lesson in that for all of us.

Schools now and then

 When School Was Different: A Memory Across Two Eras

When I look at schools today - especially here in the UAE , I see how much has changed. Schools are structured and have clear policies in place, safety is taken seriously, and supervision is there all the time. As parents and educators, there is real comfort in knowing children are safe and looked after through the day, and that does matter.

What stands out today is the system behind it. Schools are not running on assumption anymore. There are clear rules, processes, and checks, and regulators set expectations that schools follow seriously. Teachers are also responsible for wellbeing, behaviour, and safety. There is more awareness, training, and responsibility, and most carry it out well, even in busy classrooms.

Support systems exist now that did not earlier—counsellors, safeguarding teams, structured pastoral care—and children who need help are noticed and supported. Transport, playgrounds, labs, and sports are also properly planned. Nothing is left to chance. It brings reassurance because you don’t just hope a child is safe—you know there is a system around them. And that is a real shift.

I have lived through a very different kind of school life. First as a student at St Joseph’s Allahabad and Boy’s High School Allahabad, and later as a teacher at Boy’s High School and for nearly 20 years at The Bishop’s School, Pune. I have seen it from both sides and i see the big difference . 

Health, safety, wellbeing, and child support were not part of our vocabulary then, and we did not even think to ask for it. We drank water from round school tanks, and sometimes a light pink disinfectant—potassium permanganate—was added, and that faint colour was considered enough at the time. Broken taps added to ' the experience'.

Vaccinations were done in school too, and I remember the nurse using the same needle after dipping it in disinfectant. No one questioned it then, and it was simply accepted practice in those days.

Cameras in schools did not exist. You were expected to behave, and that was it.

At St Joseph’s, even the school bell stays in my memory—a long iron rod hanging in the play area, struck with another metal piece. It stood where we played, and boys sometimes ran into it and got badly  hurt. It was just part of school life.

Breaks had very little supervision if any. If someone got hurt, we went to the infirmary, but beyond that there was not much structure.

Playgrounds were simple—monkey ladders over cement, swings without safety flooring. We learned by doing things, not being told.

Small things stay with me: cleaning blackboards, clapping the dusters , chalk dust everywhere, white hands, dusty uniforms, and that chalk smell through the day.

Discipline was direct. If you arrived  late, you stood outside or were sent home with no discussion. Standing or kneeling outside the class was normal and accepted. In PE, punishment often meant running rounds until exhausted or being made to hop forward in a seated position. That was horrible! 

Teasing, fights, and bullying were part of growing up, with no labels for it. In craft periods, we worked with saws, hammers, and chisels with very little supervision. Cooking and manual work also happened without much formal safety framing.

We cycled, climbed, ran races, used ropes—freely and competitively. We left school alone or in groups and made our own way home - no phones, no tracking, no check-ins, and we just reached. If something was lost, the answer was simple—you were careless, replace it. If you were caught cheating, consequences were immediate. Detention meant staying back, and parents were not informed and rarely  involved.

Looking back now, it was rough in places, but it also built independence, resilience, and the ability to figure things out without being told every step. Today’s schools are far more aware, structured, and caring, and that is a good thing.

But sometimes I still wonder…

Are we becoming a bit too careful—not in safety, but in how we define childhood?

Are we removing the small scrapes, small failures, and unplanned moments that once quietly taught you and me how to deal with life?

I don’t really know.

Maybe children don’t need less care, just fewer reasons to believe we are watching their every step.

Why Listening May Be the Most Underrated Leadership Skill

 

Across classrooms, workplaces, and leadership spaces, speaking is often mistaken for engagement, while listening is quietly undervalued

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“Pay attention.”
“Listen carefully.”
“Don’t get distracted.”

We hear these instructions so often that we stop truly hearing them.

From childhood onwards, the message is consistent: listen. At home it is “listen to your parents.” At school it is “listen to your teacher.” The settings change, but the expectation does not.

Yet a quieter question rarely enters the conversation: are we actually learning how to listen — or simply being told that we should?

In structured environments, listening is frequently mistaken for silence or polite acknowledgement. Increasingly, it has become performance.

People speak for the sake of speaking, as if every sentence demands a response, correction, or completion. Others feel compelled to contribute to everything — even if it means interrupting a thought mid-air to secure their place in it.

Voices rise over one another — less conversation, more collision. Ideas overlap. Sentences break mid-air. What emerges is often incoherent — fragmented, unstructured, rarely absorbed. Everyone speaks — but very little is understood.

What appears as engagement is often a plausible performance of participation rather than understanding.

But filling silence is not the same as understanding what is being said.

Modern life reinforces this pattern. Speed is rewarded. Silence is uncomfortable. Attention is fragmented across screens, notifications, and constant interruption. In this environment, listening is the first casualty. We become efficient responders, but unreliable interpreters of meaning.

Perhaps it begins earlier than we admit.

In classrooms, listening is often equated with silence. The “good student” is frequently the one who participates, answers quickly, and reproduces expected responses. But whether quiet or vocal, behaviour is mistaken for understanding.

Over time, something shifts. Children are naturally spontaneous — quick to question, quick to imagine, quick to connect ideas without fear of being wrong. But when speed of response becomes the measure of success, listening is reduced to repetition. Curiosity gives way to compliance. Creativity becomes cautious.

That habit does not remain in school. It follows directly into adulthood — and into leadership.

Because leadership is not defined by how much one speaks, but by how deeply one listens.

Real listening is not passive. It is not waiting for a turn to respond. It is the discipline of absorbing what is said — and what is not said. It is noticing hesitation, contradiction, emotion, without rushing to resolve it. It is attention in its most disciplined form.

There is a reason even popular culture returns to this idea. The song “Listen” from Listen is not about voice — it is about awareness. About hearing what lies beneath words, not just the words themselves. A reminder that listening is intentional, not automatic.

As Malcolm Forbes once said, “The art of conversation lies in listening.”

Perhaps the shift required is simple, but uncomfortable: from hearing as reaction… to listening as intention.

Because in too many spaces — conversations, classrooms, and leadership rooms — we are not listening. We are competing. Words overlap, ideas collide, voices rise, and meaning is lost in noise.

And in the end, leadership is not weakened by lack of speech.

It is weakened by lack of listening.

The question remains.

Are we actually listening… or just waiting for our turn to speak?

Oh my God

 OH MY GOD ! 

There we were after church, my wife and I doing the weekly grocery shopping. I must confess — unlike many men who wander through supermarkets looking emotionally exhausted beside trolleys full of detergent and spinach — I actually enjoy it. There’s a strange pleasure in grocery shopping. The order, the routine, the small excitement of buying things you probably already have at home.

And then we saw him.

A hefty, slightly scruffy man with a young boy in tow. Flashy branded shoes. Expensive T-shirt. But somehow carrying the general air of a man who had made several inauspicious life choices.

Now our supermarket has one of those fresh soup stations where you fill a proper container and pay by weight.

The man walks up confidently, picks up one of the large soup containers — not the tiny tasting cups, mind you — the actual fill-it-and-pay-for-it containers.

He fills it generously.

So far, perfectly normal.

Then suddenly, right there beside the soup station, he lifts the container and starts drinking the soup straight from it.

Not tasting.

Not sampling.

Guzzling.

Like a man reunited with civilisation after months at sea.

My wife and I looked at each other in complete shock.

Disgusting behaviour.

He emptied the whole thing and then belched loudly enough to wake the dead.

I nearly rammed my trolley into a display of breakfast cereal.

Then, with astonishing calm, he refilled the container AGAIN, snapped on the lid and walked away with the carefree attitude of someone who believed supermarket rules were merely gentle suggestions.

No embarrassment.

No hesitation.

Not even the faintest attempt to appear guilty.

When push comes to shove, most people at least pretend to have shame. This fellow had gone far beyond that stage.

Naturally my detective instincts took over. I kept an eye on him from a safe distance while pretending to compare cereal brands.

Then came the bananas.

He picks up a bunch, expertly detaches one banana, peels it right there in the aisle and eats it casually while continuing to shop.

His son watched in admiration, like a young apprentice observing a master craftsman at work.

The father even handed him a piece of banana as though this was some kind of wholesome father-son bonding moment, rather than a full-scale public demonstration of supermarket rule-breaking.

You could almost hear the silent lesson unfolding:

“One day, my boy, all this shall be yours.”

The father then calmly placed the remaining bananas into a bag as though nothing remotely unusual had taken place.

And I am almost certain he picked up a few grapes along the way too. The sort of man who treats supermarkets like an all-inclusive brunch does not simply walk past grapes without conducting quality checks.

Then, to complete the performance, they wandered toward a young lady handing out free food samples.

At that point my wife and I nearly lost composure entirely.

By now father and son had probably enjoyed:

Soup starter.

Banana course.

Grape interlude.

Sampled appetisers.

Possibly juice tastings near aisle seven.

It was not even the money that shocked me.

It was the breathtaking audacity.

The complete absence of self-consciousness.

The almost majestic confidence with which this man approached supermarket etiquette under the comforting disguise of grocery shopping.

Men like this do not need loyalty cards. They need a gentle reminder over the loudspeaker: “Sir, aisle five, please remember this is not an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Or perhaps a trolley that beeps loudly every time unpaid produce mysteriously disappears en route to the mouth.

Empathy is missing

 EMPATHY IS THE MISSING LEADERSHIP SKILL.

(Mental health in the workplace)

We talk a lot about leadership—strategy, targets, performance, delivery—and all of it matters. But what often defines leadership in practice is something less visible and far more influential: how people experience the person leading them.@

That’s where empathy comes in.

Not as a soft skill, and not as an optional extra, but as a core part of leadership that shapes culture, behaviour, and performance.

Most leaders don’t set out to be harsh or distant. Many are capable, articulate, and clear about expectations. But in fast-moving environments, leadership can gradually become transactional, focused mainly on output, deadlines, and correction. Without realising it, tone begins to shift.

People become more careful in how they speak. They hesitate before asking questions or sharing ideas, not because they lack either, but because they are unsure how it will be received.

One of the most common blind spots in leadership is assuming silence means alignment, when it often reflects hesitation, uncertainty, or self-protection.

When that happens, clarity is lost. Teams begin to operate with incomplete information, and the gaps only surface later, usually when pressure is already high.

This is not just a workplace issue. Over time, consistently tense or critical environments affect people beyond work. Stress doesn’t stay at the office; it follows people home and shows up in energy, patience, sleep, and often in family life. The link between work and wellbeing is far more direct than we often admit.

Empathy is often misunderstood. It is not about lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations.

Strong leaders who use empathy still demand high performance. They hold people accountable and do not dilute expectations.

The difference is in how they engage.

There is a clear line between being direct and being dismissive, between correcting performance and shutting someone down, and between accountability and making people feel diminished. That line determines whether people grow or slowly withdraw.

Most people do not perform better under pressure that feels personal. They perform better when expectations are clear, feedback is fair, and they are not constantly bracing for reaction. Empathy creates that environment. It allows people to ask questions earlier, address mistakes sooner, and contribute more openly, which strengthens accountability because ownership increases when fear decreases.

At its core, leadership is not only about decisions or direction, but about the environment those decisions create.

Some environments are efficient but tense, where work gets done but people remain guarded. Others are equally demanding but more open, where people speak, challenge, and engage without hesitation.

Both can deliver results in the short term, but only one sustains them over time.

Empathy does not require a change in personality; it requires awareness of tone, timing, and impact, and the discipline to listen before responding or correcting in a way that builds rather than reduces the person.

Often, it is small shifts that make the difference: a calmer response, a clearer explanation, or a moment of pause before reacting.

In the end, leadership is not only about what gets achieved, but about what gets built while achieving it—trust, confidence, and the ability for people to do their best work without fear sitting in the background.

As leaders, we owe it to the workplace to get that right.

The