Ace men­tor, vi­sion­ary and writer Ka­mal Jit Singh Ahluwalia spe­cialises in pre­sent­ing a pic­ture of lives of Gu­rus and other as­pects of Sikh his­tory through his deep knowl­edge, ex­pe­ri­ence and prac­tice of Man­age­ment prin­ci­ples.  In this piece, he por­trays the life of the Tenth Mas­ter with a new per­spec­tive hereto­fore un­ex­plored in this man­ner.  In his inim­itable style, the Lord of the White Hawks -fear­less­ness per­son­i­fied, taught us how to face the mu­sic of the power cen­tres. Guru Gob­ind Singh was clear that forces be­yond your con­trol -the power cen­tres -can take away every­thing you pos­sess ex­cept one thing: your free­dom to choose how you will re­spond to the sit­u­a­tion.  When one is an ex­treme sit­u­a­tion, the life of the Guru, as penned in this piece, should be your side.

GURU GOB­IND SINGH’S LIFE’s re­sponses to the events that he en­coun­tered,  made me won­der, that how on earth can one act so bravely, with­out any re­morse, con­fu­sion, har­bour­ing no hurt, grief, yet kept march­ing stead­fastly, with more re­newed vigour, in the face of mam­moth chal­lenges- those which cer­tainly would have jolted, de­stroyed, an­ni­hi­lated, the strongest of hu­mans. 

A mor­tal be­ing of flesh and blood, with fi­nite en­ergy how on earth, did he pos­sesses the in­fi­nite ca­pac­ity, tenac­ity to make things hap­pen bet­ter, each time, every time on a con­sis­tent ba­sis.

For me his life is a dis­tilled, ex­pan­sive, im­mers­ing me­di­a­tion on the ir­re­ducible gift of one’s own coun­sel, in the face of great suf­fer­ing, as well as a re­minder of the re­spon­si­bil­ity each of us owes in valu­ing the com­mu­nity of our hu­man­ity. There are a few wiser, kinder or more com­fort­ing chal­lenges than what he en­dured- with a sense of grat­i­tude and hu­mil­ity all the way. 

His life for me is in­flu­en­tial and elo­quent that helped me to bet­ter un­der­stand our time. It is an in­spir­ing doc­u­ment of an amaz­ing per­sona who was able to gar­ner an Ever­est of good from an ex­pe­ri­ence that was so abysmally bad, thus is a clas­si­cal trib­ute to HOPE. His life lessons have a pro­foundly hon­est ring, for they rest on ex­pe­ri­ences too deep for de­cep­tion. It’s a gem of the dra­matic nar­ra­tive fo­cused upon the deep­est hu­man prob­lems.

Typ­i­cally a penned life of an in­di­vid­ual has one pas­sage, one idea with the power to change a per­son’s life that alone jus­ti­fies re­vis­it­ing and re-vis­it­ing it. Yet his life is a se­ries of sev­eral such pas­sages. It’s a life of not only sur­vival but how to Think, Act, Change, Sur­vive and Thrive. It was a brand plucked from the fire.

Yet his life is less about his tra­vails, what he en­dured, go­ing head-on with ex­tremes of chal­lenges than it’s about the sources of his strength to sur­vive- live to­day to fight to­mor­row and then mak­ing it hap­pen. 

Re­mem­ber who has WHY to live for can bear al­most any HOW. His life poignantly de­scribes those who sur­ren­dered to fait ac­com­pli –ca­pit­u­lated their self-re­spect, self-es­teem, ones who had lost all hopes to lead a life of ho­n­our and dig­nity were the first to die –first in their be­ings and even­tu­ally phys­i­cally. They died less from lack of food, med­i­cine, than from lack of hope, lack of some­thing to live for. 

Yet his life is less about his tra­vails, what he en­dured, go­ing head-on with ex­tremes of chal­lenges than it’s about the sources of his strength to sur­vive- live to­day to fight to­mor­row and then mak­ing it hap­pen. 

By con­trast, the House of Nanak kept it­self alive and kept hope by sum­mon­ing up thoughts of cre­at­ing an en­rich­ing aware­ness, dig­ni­fied fu­ture for one and all. Clearly, the sup­pressed who des­per­ately wanted to live a dig­ni­fied life did die, some of the dis­ease, some in the cre­ma­to­ria.

 Read Also Learn­ings from Guru Gob­ind Singh's Sa­far-e-Sha­ha­dat

Yet Gu­ru’s con­cern is less with the ques­tion of why most died than it’s with the ques­tion of why any­one at all sur­vived.

Life is­n’t pri­mar­ily a quest from plea­sure – Freud- or a quest for power- Hitler; it’s a quest for mean­ing. The great task for any per­son is to find mean­ing in his or her life. 

The Guru saw three pos­si­ble sources of mean­ing: 

• Do­ing some­thing sig­nif­i­cant in love.
• Car­ing for oth­ers- each time, every time.
• Hav­ing courage in dif­fi­cult times as he be­lieved that courage was the art of liv­ing dan­ger­ously.

Suf­fer­ing in and of it­self is mean­ing­less: we give our suf­fer­ing mean­ing by the way in which we re­spond to it. His life’s mes­sage was clear, un­am­bigu­ous, straight and clear –may one re­main brave, dig­ni­fied and un­selfish, or in the bit­ter fight for self-preser­va­tion, he may for­get his hu­man dig­nity and be­come no more than the an­i­mal.

You can­not con­trol what hap­pens to you in life, yet can al­ways con­trol what you will feel and do about what hap­pens to you.

He con­cedes that only a few of the in­tox­i­cated es­tab­lish­ment –Mughals were able to do the for­mer, but even one such ex­am­ple is suf­fi­cient proof that a man’s in­ner strength may raise him above his out­ward fate.

He was clear that forces be­yond your con­trol -the power cen­tres -can take away every­thing you pos­sess ex­cept one thing: your free­dom to choose how you will re­spond to the sit­u­a­tion. You can­not con­trol what hap­pens to you in life, yet can al­ways con­trol what you will feel and do about what hap­pens to you.

The Gu­ru’s ar­gu­ment cer­tainly is that we are never left with any­thing as long we re­tain the free­dom to choose how we will re­spond.

An in­ter­est­ing in­ci­dent sim­pli­fies this fur­ther in which a rich pro­fes­sional man ap­pears be­fore the Nawab that had oc­cu­pied his town and shown his cre­den­tials, his let­ters of ref­er­ence from promi­nent cit­i­zens and so on.  The Nawab asks him-is that every­thing you have? The man nods, yes. The Nawab then throws it all in the waste­bas­ket and tells him –good, now you have noth­ing. The man, whose self-es­teem had al­ways de­pended on the re­spect of oth­ers, is emo­tion­ally de­stroyed.

The Gu­ru’s ar­gu­ment cer­tainly is that we are never left with any­thing as long we re­tain the free­dom to choose how we will re­spond.

My own pro­fes­sional ex­pe­ri­ence has shown me the ac­tu­al­ity of Gu­ru’s in­sights. I have known suc­cess­ful busi­ness­men who upon re­tire­ment lost all zest for life. Their work had given them their lives’ mean­ing -the only thing and with­out it, they con­sumed days, weeks, months, years, sit­ting at home de­pressed, con­fused, ex­plana­tory, with noth­ing con­struc­tive to do, ex­cept lament­ing on their missed op­por­tu­ni­ties while blam­ing all and sundry.

 Read Also Cel­e­brat­ing Guru Gob­ind Singh’s 42 years of a mean­ing­ful ex­is­tence

I have known peo­ple who rose to the chal­lenge of en­dur­ing most ter­ri­ble of af­flic­tions and sit­u­a­tions; as long as they be­lieved there was a point to their suf­fer­ing and hard­ships. Whether it was a fam­ily mile­stone they wanted to live long enough to wit­ness or the prospect of doc­tors find­ing a cure by study­ing their af­flic­tion. Each hav­ing its dis­tinct clear WHY to live for, en­abled them to bear the HOW.

Re­mem­ber don’t sim­ply aim for suc­cess cause the more you aim at it and make it a tar­get; the more you are go­ing to miss it. 

My own ex­pe­ri­ence echoes Gu­ru’s life in an­other way.  One gains power and cred­i­bil­ity be­cause one is of­fered cir­cum­stances, sit­u­a­tions, chal­lenges that are ex­tremely ad­verse, only to un­der­stand them bet­ter –as per­son­ally for me de­par­ture of my only child- Har­jot Singh -one who tran­sited from a nor­mal to a spe­cial child cause of med­ical neg­li­gence, and made us aware of the fin­ery of life and its man­i­fes­ta­tions, bet­ter.

The Tenth Mas­ter’s doc­trine of cur­ing the soul by lead­ing to find mean­ing in life gained the cred­i­bil­ity for me, against the back­ground and an­guish of one went through. He ex­alted me to be aware that life is mean­ing­ful and that I must learn to see life as mean­ing­ful de­spite my cir­cum­stances. It em­pathizes that there is an ul­ti­mate pur­pose to life.

One of the most re­li­gious sen­tences writ­ten in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury is –our gen­er­a­tion is re­al­is­tic, for we have come to know the man as he re­ally is. Af­ter all, man is that be­ing who in­vented the gas cham­bers, nu­clear de­vices, chem­i­cal war­fare and weapons of mass de­struc­tion on one side; how­ever, he is also that be­ing,  who cen­tered them all up­right, with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips.

Re­mem­ber don’t sim­ply aim for suc­cess cause the more you aim at it and make it a tar­get; the more you are go­ing to miss it. For suc­cess, like hap­pi­ness can­not be pur­sued; it must en­sue, and it only does so as the un­in­tended side-ef­fect of one’s ded­i­ca­tion to a cause, to a per­son other than him­self. Hap­pi­ness must hap­pen, and the same holds for suc­cess; you have to let it hap­pen not by car­ing about it.

Life holds a po­ten­tial mean­ing un­der any con­di­tion, even in the most mis­er­able ones. I thought if the point we demon­strated, in the sit­u­a­tion as ex­treme as that in the life of the Guru, this penned piece, might gain a hear­ing.

I urge you to lis­ten to what your con­science com­mands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowl­edge and abil­ity. Then you will live to see that in the long run –in the long run, I say!- suc­cess will fol­low you pre­cisely be­cause you have for­got­ten about it. 

An im­por­tant in­gre­di­ent for us all in our evo­lu­tion and aware­ness is the piv­otal role of our par­ents –ones who are with you when all oth­ers de­parted -your par­ents- cause they have an un­selfish in­ter­est in you -their vi­sion be­ing that you sur­pass them each time, every time. For them where they fin­ished and ex­ited should be your start­ing point. Thus ho­n­our thy fa­ther and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.

An im­por­tant in­gre­di­ent for us all in our evo­lu­tion and aware­ness is the piv­otal role of our par­ents 

The pur­pose of pen­ning this piece is an ex­pres­sion of the mis­ery plagu­ing our times, and if some of us can reach out, and be aware of the mes­sage, whose very ti­tle promises to deal with the ques­tion of a mean­ing to life, it must be a ques­tion that burns un­der their fin­ger­nails. 

Life holds a po­ten­tial mean­ing un­der any con­di­tion, even in the most mis­er­able ones. I thought if the point we demon­strated, in the sit­u­a­tion as ex­treme as that in the life of the Guru, this penned piece, might gain a hear­ing.

I, there­fore, felt re­spon­si­ble for pen­ning down what I learnt and im­bibed, for I thought it might be help­ful to peo­ple who are prone to de­spair.

For me Gu­ru’s life opens a new vista for me-search­ing for one’s life mean­ing and achiev­ing it in the now with the fol­low­ing take-homes:

• It’s a value com­pass that helps me iden­tify my blind spots.
• Im­bibes the pur­pose ef­fect in me by rec­og­niz­ing my trig­gers.
• Al­ways bloom bet­ter wher­ever you are planted.
• Helps me to iden­tify bet­ter my pas­sion and per­se­ver­ance.
• In­duce clar­ity that I un­der­stand the process clearly how to get there from where I am to where I ought to be.
• Learn­ing to swim with the sharks with­out be­ing eaten alive.
• Be­ing a ra­tio­nal op­ti­mist each time, every time.
• Need to hit re­fresh every time to ex­cel, while un­der pres­sure.

These, my friends, are the vi­tal in­gre­di­ents for me to lead a life of full­ness, aware­ness, to­tal and in to­tal­ity – a life of mean­ing, ex­plo­ration, im­men­sity and of be­ing more hu­man each time, every time.

It helps me to un­cover my biggest bluff –the art of learn­ing to pay at­ten­tion, mas­ter my own self and tri­umph against my val­leys.

It’s the new black swan ef­fect for us all only if we are ready, ea­ger to rewrite our agenda such that we do more great work by caus­ing a quan­tum leap in our think­ing and be­ing. Re­alise your po­ten­tial.

Ka­mal Jit Singh Ahluwalia, pop­u­larly known as K S Ahluwalia de­scribes him­self as a stu­dent of Sikhism, en­deav­our­ing to un­cover, un­der­stand bet­ter the Sikh ethos. For the past two decades and more, he has been shar­ing in­sight­ful thoughts in print, per­sonal in­ter­ac­tions, work­shops and talk shows on Sikh Inc. -man­age­ment prin­ci­ples from the House of Nanak and life-trans­form­ing lead­er­ship skills.  He is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to em­i­nent jour­nals and he has im­pacted the lives of thou­sands of youth with over 5.6 mil­lion man-hours across di­ver­si­fied au­di­ences at more than a hun­dred plus global lo­ca­tions.