Remembering Dr Manesh L Shrikant, the Institution

It is Dr Shrikant's first death anniversary tomorrow. I would like to pay my respects ,to him. I have been wary, given a train of eulogies and obituaries that I have penned over the past year, a prospect that I do not enjoy. I have been uneasy about a note that Dr Shrikant had sent me a few weeks before he died, wanting to discuss it before converting it into an article. Unfortunately we never met after that. It was at first glance undecipherable  (even banal) and people close to the dean to whom it was sent were also unable to make much sense out of it (I presume, as none replied). This is an attempt to incorporate the ideas therein, to weave it into this piece that argues that Dr Shrikant imagined the ideal of Vedanta at the heart of SPJIMR. The original  note stands appended to this article at the end. Fortunately I will not receive an early morning call from him asking me for my first draft, first thing at 8.00 am, hoping bleary eyed that he minimises his edits!The presumptions and errors in this article if any, would be entirely mine.

It was Friday 16^th October 2015, and the tithi, the third of the waxing half of the lunar month Ashwin, with Vishakha as the presiding nakshatra that Dr Manesh L Shrikant, our teacher cast off his mortal coil to be at one with all that exists, liberated from earthly fetters, in the Vedantic sense of his cosmology. It is his first death anniversary and in the traditional sense of shraddh (or barsi) we pay our respects unto him. I hesitate to pen any eulogy or mournfully reminiscence dirge like, notwithstanding the dark shadows that seem to haunt me this year. We thank him for the fruits of his labour that has given us our varied returns of personal fulfilment and economic wellbeing, especially from being part of an institution that has secured us not just a career but helped us possibly think better. I pray that his work which is his flesh embodied in the SP Jain Institute in the quaintly Christian sense be blessed with the success it deserves.

The Foundation Stone

The banyan tree noticed him from afar as he walked towards the temple in the measured pace and calm of a man in his seventies, surprisingly slim and little else but the grey of his hair would even give away his age. The old banyan in the centre of the Bhavan’s campus, standing in the corner acknowledged his familiar presence with a sway of her crown, home to several egrets, herons and water birds that fished in the Bhavan’s pond in that campus, that seemed less green with every passing year. She counted her years not by the locks of hair she let down to support her age but by the number of times women wrapped its girth with a circumambulating thread around on the day of Vata Savitri on Jyeshtha Poornima each year praying for their husband’s longevity. The young girls returning to Pallonji Sadan late evenings from college, imagined the tree to be a haunt of ghosts. The campus then was greener and the banyan hosted many more species of birds than its now manicured look and hodgepodge architecture; held many more secrets in the folds of her green shrubbery of love, learning and laughter. 

Pallandu Pallandu!

On Late Dr ML Shrikant's 80th Birthday on 23rd Jauary 2016

A Vedantin never celebrates his birthday and neither did Dr Shrikant; for reasons I am not sure were entirely Vedantic. We were at times churlish enough to suggest that he shared his birthday with “Bal Thakeray” though we knew that ‘Netaji’ was the better comparison.  We were youthful and loved rebellion even converting the “shabad” of the holy Granth Sahib to say “Jo lade ‘dean’ (deen)  ke het shoora sohi”. That today would have been his 80th birthday is poignant. In the Tamil tradition they might have performed a ritual bathing ‘shatabhishekam” and probably in the spirit of the Alwars sang “Pallandu Pallandu” ...”May you live long” pronouncing the ironic blessing by a younger upon the elder! We cannot greet his corporeal self any longer but offer our prayers to that which we hold in esteem within ourselves that reflects his light.

I must acknowledge with gratitude that I am happy that Dr Bannerjee the new dean has been generous enough to announce on the eve of his birthday some things to honour his memory. I have been tickled by the idea of naming a state of the art auditorium after him. I remember once in exasperation telling him that the initials S and P in SP Jain really stood for Shrikant and Parab protesting their overwhelming oversight. Now I think he would be more at peace if his name graced a place that would lift the evening strains of Raag Marwa as elegantly as he carried himself. A chair position on spirituality and management is also quite in the right spirit as also memorial lectures. To these initiatives I am thankful.

Yet I would also wish that his spirit is vivified in the things that were implicit, unspoken, and wove into the fabric of the institute’s working.  Now that SPJIMR has charted a new research paradigm for the school (which is truly commendable) I would believe that those unarticulated ideas that made his contribution unique form a good subject too (among others) to study. I would hope the senior faculty there, especially who had their longest innings with him to take this study for the future of the institute itself (I worry about the ghost of George Santayana).  As an example I would believe that unlike many schools and its leaders Dr Shrikant held administrative ability as the very heart of management and very rightly so he would assert that it gets relegated into some insipid dusty place within the curriculum. He would make us wade through the tedium of Drucker to glean in the rich pickings of administrative thought and emerge with jewels that only pearl divers understood.  I remember being awestruck when i read “the objective of all control is not to build compliance but commitment”. He elaborated at length on the difference between control and controls and not all of us appreciated what he said. He cared not for the curriculum and its credits but would insert them wherever he thought was feasible. This priority for administration combined with the rather questionable “Competent Manager” research by Boyatzis (later discarded by Case Western) gave birth to that ill formed kid called ADMAP that was often exasperating despite its novelty.  It was this obsession with ‘getting things done’ that marked his leadership and he broke to rebuild even things considered good. There was the joke that would go around that early morning one of us found Dr Shrikant staring at a wall and in panic the jungle message spread that the life of that wall was marked for just a few more hours! He was a lifelong learner and found learning even in the most unexpected places. I remember him driving me down to a slum a Sunday morning to bundle out an old priestly looking elder gentleman into his car and insisting on a lesson on Vedanta (of course what also tickled me that day was the elder teacher admonishing him for placing books on the floor, during the course of his impressive exposition).

To say that we miss him would be an overwhelming understatement. I do know that the institute is trying very hard to keep up the good name of the institute and appreciate them for doing so. Yet i know it is not going to be easy. I believe he must be smiling kindly upon us all (and probably giving nightmares to those who conspired his ungracious exit). Just kidding.....;-)! 

"Pallandu Pallandu....!

pallANdu pallANdu pallAyiraththANdu

May you live countless years of the Brahma himself. May your divine beauty be protected forever!

A Lingering Absence

I haven't been able to bring myself to pen any further since Dr Shrikant's funeral. Probably it matters not any more as I can no longer wrestle with him nor seek his commendation. Yet I thought i must point out something to the people at the institute.

Dr Shrikant I remember would dislike any activity or process that is hinged upon an individual and shares his or her idiosyncrasy. Yet the quest for a process to be institutionalised shorn of all personality was often a guise for wanting to refuse to be hostage to the whims of the individual. But creativity cannot be institutionalised and those activities that can be institutionalised don’t hold the centre for too long- quite like Mullah Nasruddin’s lost key. When i think of the institution he has built I think it betrays this schizophrenia.  There is this assumption that the institution is being independently animated by its processes that have been institutionalised, with its flaws, But yet it is unmistakably in thrall of his ghostly presence.  It is not just that Dr Shrikant died, something deep within the heart of the institution also dies with him and we grieve not just his loss but that which is not nameable. There are those who would point out that he was anyway (un)graciously eased out more than a year ago and that the continuity of the institute it its imitated voices is testimony to its enduring character.  Besides it is not that some of us are unaware of his extremely complicated personality warts and all and in good measure have even been victims of his disquiet. Many (almost all) of his initiatives will continue in their variegated vigour or enervation and few can tell the difference, and some will say that such emulation is his best honour, which time will reveal.