ARJUN SHEKHAR
During my masters from Delhi School of Economics, I wanted to quit and write scripts for films. Unfortunately, I wasn't selected for the mass communications course I applied for. I took it to heart, buried my passion deep inside the wound, settling instead for a profession. I drifted into a postgraduate course in Human Resource Management at XLRI Jamshedpur in 1988. I joined the corporate sector and worked in in HR at factory sites and head office.
I might have got lost to my profession if it weren’t for my wife (who I met as a fellow student at XLRI). We founded a not for profit organization called Pravah to sensitize urban youth, like us, to become active citizens. While she quit the corporate world altogether, I continued to have one foot in there, founding a consulting firm in 1997 called Vyaktitva that unfolds the true elements of people and organizations. I wrote an experimental novel around then to free myself of the shackles imposed by organizational writing but couldn’t complete it. A couple of years back, I withdrew from an active role at Vyaktitva, putting my experiences into a novel set in the corporate world; I also completed the one I’d shelved midway in the early naughties. One of the insights I’ve had while writing the two books has been that passion and profession are together the oars steering my boat, propelling it on its voyages to distant shores. Without the experiences of my ‘career’, the insights I write about would be hollow, my passion a mere toy to amuse myself with. |