Book Review | How a CEO Scaled the Summit of Faith
I never thought I’d say this about anything in the self-help genre, but this book? It’s helpful
By now I’m used to my editor’s propensity for booting me out of my reading comfort zones by sending me books I wouldn’t usually choose to read. Even so, when I opened her latest offering, I was dismayed. The book is called The Other Side of the Mountain: A CEO’s Journey through Spirituality. It’s written by Sanjiv Sarin, who, according to the back cover bio, worked in the corporate world for more than 40 years, finally retiring as CEO and MD of Tata Coffee, and it has the vibes of a self-help book for people in management. Meanwhile, I have never worked in a corporate environment, am usually confused by the esoteric word ‘spiritual’, and have never read any self-help book. Was this, I asked my editor, sent to me by mistake?
Nope.
So I turned the cover open, and a few pages down, found to my great relief, that nearly every assumption I had made about the book had been wrong.
For one thing, the author defines his concept of spirituality, removing the mysticism associated with the word by stating clearly what he means: “To me, spirituality is about connecting with oneself — decluttering the mind, clearing away confusion, and being open to experiencing the joy in the little things around us…” he says. For another, he writes in a matter-of-fact manner. There is no jargon and even the description of his experience at the Taj Mahal Hotel on the fateful night of 26/11/08 is less cinematic than it could have been. It was this experience, though, and the journey through the trauma afterwards as he tried to return to a sense of normalcy, that serves as the springboard for this book. “Why,” he asks, “did I survive?”
The ‘why’ in Sarin’s query is never answered (most survivors, I’ve read, cannot answer this existential question); what is addressed, however, is how he survived. Over the following chapters, he describes his path to spirituality and career success via learnings from a sister with special needs, a wife exploring the many routes to faith, the institutions where he studied, and his guru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. While the book has strong self-help vibes, the memoir-ish style of presentation allows the reader to take from it what she chooses, and the lessons Sarin imparts are just as applicable to everyday life as they are to leadership issues. (For example, there’s a chapter on making assumptions — something I was guilty of when I first saw the book. Oops!)
I never thought I’d say this about anything in the self-help genre, but this book? It’s helpful.
The Other Side of the Mountain: A CEO’s Journey through Spirituality
By Sanjiv Sarin
Speaking Tiger
pp. 156; Rs 499