Wisdom of the hollow tree

THE LEADERSHIP SUTRA
An Indian approach to power
Devdutt Pattanaik
Aleph
399 pages; Rs 149

Good books, movies and, increasingly, television shows, have an amazing ability to connect with a wide mass of audiences with varying tastes; they do so usually by removing the layers around a complex character, emotion or a situation without oversimplifying or dumbing it down. Not an easy task but, then, that is what separates masterpieces from the trash.

The Leadership Sutra: An Indian Approach to Power  (derived from the author’s earlier work, The Business Sutra) attempts to simplify seemingly abstract mythological stories into tangible principles for the world of business. The author is perhaps the best man for the job; mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has numerous books to his credit and is among the most influential speakers on the business circuit in India today.

But the book is no masterpiece. In trying to pigeonhole the rather complex network of stories and metaphors into a set of easy-to-swallow sutras, the author turns the mysterious and interesting into banal and mundane. Both readers and the pantheon of gods and goddesses are reduced to one-dimensional beings. And the book seems more like a publishing trick. Bringing out an excerpt as a new title may be innovative marketing, but it is hardly a fresh read.

There is no doubt that the author is trying to do something difficult. It is said that myths were written for the gods, who preferred the obscure and the abstruse over the simple and lucid, according to one Sanskrit aphorism. Besides myths unlike fables do not come with a lesson or a moral; they are dangerously amoral in many ways. Hence using stories about gods, goddesses, heroes and villains to build a behavioural roadmap for the corporate world is fraught with risk.

Mr Pattanaik makes a valiant attempt, though. He makes an interesting distinction between Durga and Shakti, two forms of the goddess. Shakti, he says, stands for inner power and Durga for external power and then smartly uses this to segregate the corporate world into two kinds of beings, abilities, perceptions and so on. Having done that, however, the book is caught in this binary classification, which prevents the reader from stepping deeper into the narrative.

In a chapter called “Insults Disempower Us”, for instance, the author looks at the practice of devotees abusing a god or a goddess. He calls this ninda-stuti and compares it to gossip sessions in the workplace. Dissing the boss is how we empower our mental image of ourselves, he says. But an abusive devotee is doing more than venting his spleen; the rituals are layered with meaning. On a lighter note, it is only in an ideal world that bosses are gods and employees are comparable to devotees.

The author, perhaps inadvertently, implies that those who do not quite see the world the way he does need to expand their minds. In the “Notes”, where he lays bare the skeleton of the book in a glossary of terms he says, “with new words are created new worlds, as they are vehicles of new ideas. They enable the process of expanding the mind.” But the new terms/metaphors he coins ask for the opposite. For instance, Arjun, the Pandava hero, he says, stands for “one who argues too much, shooting counter-questions like arrows when questioned”. Now that is just one way to look at the hero: when he questions Krishna’s logic on the battlefield, for instance. However, Arjun as the dutiful brother, who took off on a self-imposed year-long exile because he had entered Yudhishthira’s conjugal chambers when he was with Draupadi, is a far cry from the questioning version that the book presents. Arjun, like many other characters from the epics, is a multi-dimensional hero and poorly fits the behavioural archetype into which the book slots him, as is the case with several others.

Still, the book is brief, written simply and is somewhat like a power-point presentation on interesting ideas. For those who wish to use it for management training sessions, it could be a handy tool. However, if you are looking for anything more, the book comes up short. The ideas skim the surface, the characters are cardboard cut-out versions of their original selves and the language is pedantic and even tiresome.

For instance, an interesting story about Ashtavakra, the boy genius who challenged his father’s knowledge when he was still in his mother’s womb becomes a case study in arrogance. There were other issues the author could have explored — challenging the hierarchy, the attitude towards deformities, but he doesn’t. He writes: “Kahoda’s aukaat is threatened by Ashtavakra’s brilliance, which is why Kahoda curses his own son, behaving like a cornered beast.”

Apart from the clunky sentence formation (Kahoda is used twice in the same sentence and “his own son” — is there any other kind?), the simile of a cornered beast is tired and even misleading. Kahoda is not cornered, even if his behaviour is beastly. As the book says, however, the fault may not lie with the writer, but the reader who is unable to expand her mind wide enough to connect the dots.