Future of Leadership

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey ~ Thornton Wilder

 *The Bridge of San Luis Rey*

*by Thornton Wilder*

By Nandakishore Varma Sir

At 13:39 IST on 12 June 2025, the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner flying from Ahmedabad to London crashed approximately thirty seconds after take-off into the hostel block of B. J. Medical College in the Meghani Nagar neighbourhood of Ahmedabad. All of the 240 people abroad except one was killed. Immediately after the disaster, after the first shock of the news was over, I must confess that the first feeling was one of relief. _Thank God it's not me or my loved ones!_

Then the question popped up: Why? Why were these 239 people wiped out from existence on that frightful day?

Accidents have a way of choosing their victims randomly. _It could happen to anyone,_ we always say. But could it? Is there a pattern behind the apparent randomness? Is there a will at work?

It is this question which plagues Brother Juniper in Thornton Wilder's prizewinning novel. But since this happens at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in colonial Peru, when God and fate had a much greater say in human affairs, the question is very serious.

> On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were always led out to see it. It was a mere ladder of thin slats swung out over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine. Horses and coaches and chairs had to go down hundreds of feet below and pass over the narrow torrent on rafts, but no one, not even the Viceroy, not even the Archbishop of Lima, had descended with the baggage rather than cross by the famous bridge of San Luis Rey. St. Louis of France himself protected it, by his name and by the little mud church on the further side. The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break. The moment a Peruvian heard of the accident he signed himself and made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed by it and how soon he had intended crossing by it again. People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf.

The good brother decides to make a project out of it - investigate the lives of these five people to know why God chose them for death. He is sure it'd help in understanding God's plan, and help him in converting the local Indians. Theology would become an exact science.

For six years, Brother Juniper diligently works at collecting facts about the five people who died, and the result is a voluminous book, a forgotten copy of which exists to this day in the University of San Marco. It is from this book, the author says, that he collected facts for writing this novel. (It isn't true, of course - just an exquisite Wilder touch.)

The people who die in this incident are: (1) Doña María, the Marquesa de Montemayor; (2) Pepita, her servant-cum-protege; (3) Esteban, an orphaned youth; (4) Jaime, the sickly son of Camila Perichole, the once-famous actress and the mistress of the Viceroy; and (5) Uncle Pio, an itinerant traveller and a man of many talents, and the former mentor of Camila. As the author starts analysing the tenuous strands that bind them together, what we get is a kaleidoscope of life.

There is the glamorous world of the stage, as represented by Camila; the aristocracy and the corridors of power, as symbolised by the Viceroy and the Marquesa; and the cloisters of the Convent of Santa María Rosa de las Rosas, ruled over by the redoubtable abbess Madre María del Pilar, where both the orphans Pepita and Esteban were raised. As the lives of these people are put under the lens, we see love, piety, heartbreak, joy and terror mix and meld into one another among their intertwined lives. The fact they were on the bridge when it broke, we can ascribe to chance: but they were inexorably lead to it by the intricate tapestry worn by life.

What is Brother Juniper's ultimate finding?

> I shall spare you Brother Juniper's generalizations. They are always with us. He thought he saw in the same accident, the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven. He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city. 

Yes, of course. We can see the same justifications today, can't we?

Now to come back to accidents in general - as a safety professional, I am sure that the majority of them can be prevented, and fatalism serves no purpose. So instead of searching for God's purpose, we should be analysing the causes and trying to prevent future occurrences. Every incident, or a near miss, is a warning.

But that said, it is true that we all will die one day. So is there any purpose in analysing the deeper meaning of life? Or is it as Madre María del Pilar says to herself?

> But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Maybe, love is what keeps these brief candles burning... and that is the only thing we need to care about.

9 Habits correction for Businesses Success ~ Rajiv Talreja

 Good guy. Running his business for over 7 years.

But.. still struggling with the same issues... staff not performing, cashflow always tight, no time to plan.

And I couldn’t help but say:

“Boss, you're not alone. 90% business owners are stuck because of the same 9 habits.”

And that got me to collate all of it and share the list with all of you!

If you do even 2-3 of these, don’t feel bad.

I’ve done them too (most of us have!)

But now is the time to stop.

​
​1. Doing everything themselves

From sales to delivery to accounting to... wiping the whiteboard(!)

2. Hiring “anyone who’s available”

And then wondering why nothing gets done.

3. Saying “mere team ko samajh hi nahi aata”...

but giving ZERO clarity to them.

4. Running the whole business on WhatsApp.

(Yes, even approvals, vendor payments, and customer follow-ups.)

5. Thinking marketing = hoarding + reference + God’s blessings.

Like seriously?!

6. Taking home whatever’s “left” at the end of the month.

Sometimes ₹7,000. Sometimes... ₹0. 🥲

7. Having one team review every 3 months…

(maybe!)

8. Using Google Sheets like it’s an ERP system.

1 file mein sab kuch. That too, no backup!

9. Saying “ek din sab set ho jayega”...

without changing anything.

--

This list is not to shame you, Meera.

It’s to tell you - to remind you - that

if you want serious results, you can’t run your business with jugaad anymore.

You need 3 things:

Teams. Systems. Strategy.

Structure. SYSTEMS. Strategy 

People.  Process.  Planning. 

H.P.Lovecraft

 

Today's CBC introduced me to H.P. Lovecraft and his works. It started with *Dagon*.

Someone said "It was my introduction to _H.P. Lovecraft's_ works. It's a horror short story that heavily relies on atmospheric horror. The story is basically a few hastily scrawled pages from a sailor who wishes for forgetfulness or death after what he has witnessed on a venture through the deep sea (NB: Trying my best to make it spoiler-free 😭🤌). The story discusses cosmic horror themes with monstrous, sci-fi, and mythological elements, showcasing how insignificant human beings are in the vast, unexplored world we thrive in...

  It's such a short read that it took only a couple of minutes for me to complete the whole story. But the length isn't a hindrance to the quality and effectiveness of the story. An amazing and well written horror short story. Definitely looking forward to reading more Lovecraft works and diving deep into more Lovecraftian mythos, with *The Call of Cthulhu* being my most anticipated one among them... 🤌📈

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/175863126-anaswar-vinod
Goodreads

https://fable.co/anaswar-331583837787
Fable

So  it was suggested to read 'At the Mountains of Madness' and 'The Colour out of Space'.

His world building is incredibly scary. Also Reanimator, The Call of Cthulu....

We discussed Lovecraft long ago in the book club.

I've heard that "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood is such a work... Added it to my tbr list... Planning to read it sometime soon... 🤌
It is a short story that is into a sub-subgenre of its own : wilderness horror.

M. R. James is favourite of Nandakishore Sir, among the old horror masters. Lovecraft's world building is fantastic, but his prose is too melodramatic according to him. 

PHILIP ABRAHAM CBC said Brian Aldiss ,in his great work about SF, The Trillion Year Spree, wrote that H.P.Lovecraft began where William Hope Hodgson ended. And that is high or dark praise , indeed 🙂

Hodgson wrote a very long book called The Night Land. The last remnants of humanity are in a huge pyramid, the Last Redoubt , over 7 miles high, sheltering from the darkness and the horrors that are creeping toward it, slowly but ever so surely.

The book was written for a more leisurely age, where people had far more time to read.
I didn't read the entire book, but chose to read only the chapters concerning the Last Redoubt.

"The Last Redoubt" is a core concept in William Hope Hodgson's novel The Night Land. It refers to the colossal, pyramid-shaped fortress where the last remnants of humanity reside in a distant, post-apocalyptic future. The sun has died, and the Earth is plunged into perpetual night, beset by monstrous creatures and malevolent forces.

 
"The Last Redoubt is humanity's last stand against these overwhelming threats, protected by a powerful energy field."

A short  excerpt which shows the power of his writing:

"And so, searching the road with my gaze, I passed beyond this Silent One, and past the place where the road, sweeping vastly to the South-East, was lit a space, strangely, by the light from the Silver-fire Holes. And thus at last to where it swayed to the South of the Dark Palace, and thence Southward still, until it passed round to the Westward, beyond the mountain bulk of the Watching Thing in the South—the hugest monster in all the visible Night Lands. A living hill of watchfulness, known to us as The Watcher Of The South. It brooded there, squat and tremendous, hunched over the pale radiance of the Glowing Dome.
Much, I know, had been writ concerning this Odd, Vast Watcher; for it had grown out of the blackness of the South Unknown Lands a million years gone;"

Incidentally his biggest fan was an Indian-origin american named Joshi. I've read his book about the life of HP Lovecraft.

Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith got their starts in that wonderful magazine, Weird Tales. So did Frank Belknap Long, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, August Derleth and a host of others. All worth reading if you enjoy atmospheric prose and old school horror.