I had failed once...

What can be more misleading than the title of this post? The immodest title implies that I have failed only once in my life so far. Nothing is further from truth but I will stick to this as it allows a punchy opening to this post. So unless you have absolutely zero tolerance for lies and poetic liberty, please bear with me.

I was once appointed (another lie, in fact I was elected through a political process which left much to be desired when it came to fairness but may be more on it someday later) the Secretary for the English Debating and Literary Club at IIT Delhi, quite a coveted position I must say. And for those of you who have been spared the agony of moving through IITs here is a quick description of how these clubs worked. So we had nine of them in areas such as Hindi , Quizzing, English Debating, Dramatics etc and each of them had a secretary who was elected through a free and fair election (now I have really run out of my quota of lies for the next 7 births) and every hostel (again 9 in my time) had one representative in each of these clubs So for my club I was the secretary and had 9 reps.

Now there is this nice spot in IIT Delhi which is called wind tunnel. It is a bit like Zoom TV, when you are running out of all options and have no clue what to do you headed towards it. And so there was no place more befitting than Wind-T for my first club meeting. And the approach to the Wind-T was lined by a 2 brick high wall. So raised just about 15 cms above the ground, this wall was a natural dumping ground for people who would walk about a km from their hostel to get here. When I reached there almost all the reps were nicely seated on this wall.

Just a minor detail which was omitted in the beginning - at the end of the academic year they gave out a best secretary trophy.

So back to my seated reps. The moment I got there I opened this small diary which I had bought the day before and had used to pen down all my ideas about how I wish to run the club and what would I do etc etc. And in less than 5 minutes of my arrival a monologue had started and I kept talking, telling people how I saw this club going forward what I thought should be done. All these reps were only a year junior to me at college and in age some of them were as old as me and may be older. The point here is that I should ideally have had no reason to believe that any of them is any less capable than I am. And since they were 9 of them I should have known that together they can come up with better things. But those were college days and I was in a hurry. So I made this monologue not only in this meeting but also in many meetings later on and came up with many ideas by myself and some of them were good but not all (at last I am capable of speaking truth). So we worked and we did some decent things in that one year and then finally when the Best secretary was announced it was not me. I was upset and like really upset (now dont you start dropping your jaws, it did seem like very important at that time). I looked back at it during the rest of my college days and never really felt great about being the secretary and all that until recently. Now when I work in teams and when I see some leaders too obsessed with themselves I turn back to my college experience and say to myself - I have learnt my lesson. If I were to do it again I would start my first meeting at a coffee corner trying to understand each one of my reps. Trying to figure out what is dear to them. Like I had my aspirations of running the club in a certain way what would be theirs. One key thing which I had missed inadvertently was to show respect to everyone. I dont mean I was rude or anything but there is a certain kind of respect which goes beyond polite words and correct titles. This form of respect inherently believes that anyone's life, dream and journey is as important as our own. It believes that they are as much a super hero in their home and in the eyes of their dear one's as I am in my world. So I had failed once and I might fail several times again in future but I will make sure I will not fail to respect anyone. I will not fail to notice the human being behind the face and not only just the person but also the person in his whole world.