In 1985, when I was studying at the IIM Ahmedabad, our Professor of Organization Behaviour (OB) Area was Prof. Pulin Garg. One day he told us a very interesting story which has remained in my mind all these decades. He told us that some years earlier Ford Foundation, the American NGO, did a project to help village farmers to enhance crop yields by using metal plowshares instead of their traditional wooden ones. …

The idea of meeting old friends after decades of having been out of touch is romantic indeed but one that is in reality fraught with danger. Old friends are a mirror in whom you see your own face and the experience is always moving, sometimes frightening. Old friends are markers in the journey of life, voices from your past, which speak of what you were and could have become. It is an experience that leaves you with feelings of thankfulness both for what happened and what didn’t; for what you became and what you didn’t despite the seeds for both having been sown in the soil of your childhood. Some germinated in your story; others in your friend’s story. Some germinated but were not nurtured. Others grew and reached fruition. …

I am going on a long journey and want to remind myself and you of the three critical lessons that I learnt from my life. I call them my Three Fundamental Laws. I hope they will help you as they helped me all my life. …

Leadership is not playacting. It is not pretension. It is not a game. It is authenticity, integrity, putting your money and yourself where your mouth is. We learned to walk our talk and the perils of not doing so, long before we knew that there was such a term. Credibility falls through the gap between walk and talk. We learned that there is only one way of living, and that is by our values. And that was a good way. It helped us to sleep soundly at night and to hold our heads high, during the day. …

Our present methods of teaching which are inflicted on by far the vast majority of children the world over are the single biggest cause for killing the imagination that every child is born with and making them into square blocks which fit our own frightened, constrained and slavish worldview. Those who comply we ‘pass’ and those who challenge it and refuse to succumb, we ‘fail’. The occasional among those we ‘fail’, go on to great fortune. The vast majority disappear, never to be heard from again. Destroyed by the education system they didn’t deserve or ask for.

First the words;
Eulogy: a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, especially a tribute to someone who has just died.

Elegy: An elegy is a sad poem, usually written to praise and express sorrow for someone who is dead. 
But eulogies, Wikipedia assures me, can also be delivered at retirement functions and other such events when a person is leaving you but not for the next world. I assume that it is not a crime to deliver a eulogy, so to speak, by simply expressing appreciation and thanks to someone who has been good to you in different ways, without any formal function or speechmaking. …