Search This Blog

Monday, September 22, 2008

Around Us

This is a story of one my old friends, who’s a veteran & pragmatic social activist called Gopakumaran Nair, who has lots of knowledge and has a very clear mind on helping people voluntarily. We used to spend some time together, every evening. However, of late, the daily schedules of all of us became so hectic that we were finding it difficult to spend some time together. This man with his experience, knowledge & multiple skills set should have been some vice president or CEO cadre in any organization.

Believe me, this wonderful gentleman is amazing as far as any profession you talk about in this earth as he’ll have a clear idea about the subject. More over, if he doesn’t know much about anything, he’ll be very honest to admit and next day he’ll come up with an opinion about the same after researching about it.

He used to help people voluntarily and as a matter of fact, he had helped me also by solving many crisis situations in my personal/ professional life. He has a very clear attitude & principles in his life. He’ll not accept anything for any service he is doing voluntarily and the same way he’ll charge you very professionally as per the market price if he’s doing a service professionally. However, between friends I have seen him waiving off lots of money for the services, he had done taking lots of pain and involvement.

Recently when I met him, I had seen him little upset and I asked him the reason. He told me that he undertook a freelance project for some of his friends, which used to happen in the nights. The project was in the nascent stage and his role was to support the onsite team abroad. As the project was in the very beginning stage, he didn’t have much to do. However, his presence was very much soothing for the individual who was coordinating the project (it was a morale boosting experience for him). After putting in some consistent efforts, the project was brought in to the track. 

However, according to GKN (Short form of Gopakumaran Nair), it required lots of improvement as far as the basic systems and processes are concerned and he sounded this to his friend who’s coordinating the project and also pointed out the flaws in the current system which may hamper the project in the long run. The result was that GKN was kept out of the loop on the developments.

GKN didn’t react much though he understood what is happening around him as he didn’t want to lose the friendship. But it was obvious that the inevitable will happen and one day,  exactly as expected, when the payment date arrived, he was asked to pack up citing the reason that there is no sufficient revenue generated and that there was no or limited contribution by him in the project. GKN was bowled out by the comment as he recollected the same person’s words praising his caliber and exposure exactly a month ago. He was hurt by the other person’s insensitive comments and stopped going there. When he explained this to me, even I felt thoroughly disturbed about the insensitive behaviour of his friend, who’s known to me too. I told GKN that I can intervene in the matter, but GKN is a unique person by himself and his reaction was as given below…

How can I ask him to pay me when I personally know that they have not started making enough out of that project? And more over, when he sincerely feel that my contribution in the project is not sufficient for him to convince his partners, I strongly feel that as a true friend I should not put him in trouble by putting pressure on him.” When he finished these words, there were tears visible in his eyes…even though he gave a feeble try to cover it up….!!

I always had respect for people like him, who had imbibed the values and principles, which will definitely make their life smooth and  satisfying for themselves, though they go through such hard times due to the ignorance of this world towards the integrity, values and principles. But I'm personally lucky to have a group of people who are in great heights in various walks of life and we stand by each other in such rough patches in life.