Harsha Bogle's speech at IIMA

Harsha Bogle's excellent speech at IIM, Ahmedabad is available on the net.  It's pretty long, but it's worth watching it for the lessons he shares.  One request for those who understand Hindi: can you please translate what Harsha says at around 1 hour 16 minutes into the video?

Some quotes I collected from the speech:

• Great teams become great because they excel in their preparation.
• Take care of the runs, dollars will take care of themselves.
• The moment going wrong falls into your possibility map, then you do go wrong.
• For a purely selfish reason, if not for anything else, always surround yourself with people who are better than you.
• You cannot marry someone who is marrying 22 hundreds.
• Arrogance often comes in the way of excellence.  It's one of the biggest stumbling blocks on the path of excellence.
• I was willing to be a non-striker.
• In the world of excellence if your ego and anger are on your side, you don't need opponents.
• Once you go beyond a certain level, ability or talent is the most useless virtue to possess.  It's what you do with that talent that matters.
• The more mistakes you make, the more you know what not to do.  If you can be outstanding at knowing what not to do, then the road to what to do opens up before you, doesn't it?
• I think excellence is more about humility, actually, even more than luck.  Because unless you are humble you'll never hang around, you'll never be willing to do what it takes for that opportunity to come.
• Some of us never know how good we are.

Embedded video doesn't show up on certain sites like Google Buzz.  Here's a link to the video page: http://goo.gl/1w46V.

What does this mean?

It was an accident.  For the 3rd time in Hyderabad, someone rear-ended my bike.  This time the scene was a little messier.  My bike hit the car ahead of me after it was rear-ended.  A glass piece broke in the car.

The deal here is that I fell on the ground so it was obvious to the car guy that I must have been the one who hit him.  The guy who helped me get up was the one who hit me, it seems.  I knew it only after he told me that.  He helped me get off the road so I'm pretty sure he didn't lose his balance after he hit me.

Now, the car guy says I and the other motorcyclist should pay him for the damage.  He was asking us a few thousand rupees, which neither of us were willing to pay.  So we went to the police, who made me pay him 1500.  (I don't know how much the other guy paid.)
When I handed my share to the car guy, he started arguing with me that I was paying a lot lesser than I owe.  He started telling me how generous he has been: "You both together pay me 4.8k, and I, who doesn't have to take any responsibility whatsoever, will pay the remaining 1k from my pocket."

My opinion is that since this is an accident everyone takes equal responsibility, like grown ups.  So I told him he has as much responsibility as I do.  He didn't like that.  Anyway, I digress.

The other biker told the police officer that he is earning only 6k per month so he cannot pay pretty much anything for the loss.  I thought about it.  What if the biker had decided to take off after the accident?  I would have told this car guy that it wasn't my fault, but being the dumb thing unreasonable man he is he wouldn't have believed me.  I would have thrown the money on his face and walked away.

The biker, like a responsible adult stayed on the accident spot even though he could have simply gone off and no one would have known anything.  He was harassed by the police and he had to pay money for the loss.  Why did he do that?  Police, who should have filed a case and made the insurance companies pay for the loss threatened this guy and made him pay from his pocket.  I didn't have the balls to talk to the police and tell them to involve insurance companies in the scene.

Maybe life is not a courtroom.  Maybe you cannot accuse only one party for what happens.  Maybe there's no point in talking about right and wrong.  But what does the incident today mean?  What am I to write on my notebook about this incident?  Only thing I can say is that it was not very pleasant.

Changes

If every moment is about change, and life is one stream of changes, maybe changing is all that matters.  Maybe I should be a lot more willing to change, ignoring my habits and dogmas.

Someone changed the rules behind my back

At a certain point, how well you do your work ceases to matter.  It's like, you have finished level one and you're ready for level two.  Level two is played with different rules.  What helped you pass first level -- doing your job well -- still remains important, but that's not going to help you pass the second level.  Finding good opportunities is the key in second level.  Engaging yourself in 'critical' assignments is an important thing you should do to keep your place in the game.

Also, no one tells you when you are promoted to the next level.

Teacher

A teacher is blessed because he can influence hundreds, if not thousands of people's lives.  He can inspire them to bring out the best in them.  The same is his curse.  Several students leave their schools hating most of their teachers.  There will be students whom he'd have inspired in a positive way.  But he is oblivious to most, if not all achievements of those students.