A take on Leaders

A few of my friends [and fellow Interns :)] are running a Summer Camp for 11th and 12th graders at Bagar [soon, I would not need to hyperlink Bagar to the Wiki article, @ Steph :D]. In much of urban India, summer camps are a fad. There are camps for all sort of activities, the funniest I have heard is a Summer Camp to complete summer assignments doled out by schools!

But, here in heart of rural Rajasthan, a summer camp makes a lot of sense. Supplementing the school education, Neeraj, Abhishodh and Antara are introducing the summer camp kids to computers, functional English and trying to inculcate leadership in them. Last week, the Summer Camp team wanted me to talk about Leadership.

Turning up an hour late made me look like the unpunctual lazy sloth that I am. But, the audience I got was way better than any of my expectations. Due to lack of any preparation, I started with polling names of leaders from them. Indira Gandhi (from the Camp’s only girl. Women need to be empowered here. More on that later, some other day), Netaji, Bhagat Singh, Laluji, Saurav Ganguly, Ronaldo (!) and our very own Ashish Gupta. I was surprised to not find any business leaders in the list especially this being in the famed Shekhawati region.

But, when these 17-18 year olds started listing down qualities of these leaders, I realized why we came down to Bagar. For the 8 of us from Pilani, this place has no novelty attached to it. We live in rural India, [albeit with better internet :)] for ten painfully long months each year. Not going home, not interning in India’s leading nuclear reactor at Kalpakkam with Murthy, not working on India’s manned space flight at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center with Pandey… All those regrets vanished for that one hour.

I have had long discussions about leaders with my city friends. Every time, every single time, it is about communication skills, being good at people management, having a great vision yada, yada (and yes at times, when I have had the trademark fights with a certain opinionated individual named Vineet Pandey, I was the one harping on communication skills). But, these kids, they started with honesty. Somebody pointed out the difference to me between honesty and truthfulness too! And they too think leaders should be straightforward. Not very practical as popular opinion might concur, but I finally found somebody who thinks that leaders can be straightforward and don’t need to use guile