Onion Uttapam : India's Leading Satire Daily - Shiv Khera: You can win, but you are likely to lose

MUMBAI - Motivational speaker and author of the best-selling book "You can win" - Shiv Khera was on an altogether different trip from his usual motivational talks filled with punchlines and theories on success when he lectured an audience of youth at a seminar organized by the Rotary club. Khera who usually lectures businessman and managers or conducts personality development programmes for junior and middle level employees in corporations or such usual suckers for his glib talk, couldn't help being brutally honest while facing young graduates and undergraduates from city colleges who had gathered to listen to his talk at the seminar organized by the club to motivate the youth to succeed in the professional journey of their lives.

Here is the text of his speech he gave to the students:

Hello friends, I've been invited by the Rotary club to motivate you to achieve success in everything you choose to pursue in your life and guide you on the path that you will embark as you begin your professional journey. I'm sure many of you have already read my best-seller "You can win" and might be wondering what additional wisdom I will be granting you this evening. Would I be merely rephrasing sentences that I've already spoken? Do I have anything new to offer or would I just play with words that I have already written in my book?

If you are expecting more of the same, then prepare to be surprised. Even shocked. I'm here tonight not to tell you for the umpteenth time that you can win, but to divulge you the hard truth - You can win, but you are most likely to lose. In fact, if you have read my book, you are definitely going to lose. If you had felt the need to read a self-help motivational book to motivate you to succeed in life, it means you are absolutely clueless about what you want from life and have no idea how to move towards your goals. If thats the case, no amount of self-help will help you in winning the game of life, my dears.

If you have read my book, you already know my formula for winning and for achieving success in life. Winners do things differently, I keep saying. They have the habit of doing things that losers don't like to do. But reading a book on how to win or paying 1000 bucks of your hard-earned money to listen to a motivational guru giving you gyan will not help you do things that winners do. Winners put in extra effort even when it hurts, but if you have a low threshold of pain tolerance, a motivational talk wouldn't make you pain resistant enough to put in extra effort.

What is success? Success is a series of positive decisions while failure is a series of negative decisions. This is what you have heard me tell you before. But what you haven't heard me tell you before is that whether a decision is a positive or a negative one can be known only after the results of the decision are seen. If a series of decisions results in success, it means they were positive decisions and vice versa. No guru or book can teach you the formula using which you will be able to differentiate between a positive or a negative decision. If you are lucky, you might end up with more positive decisions than negative and find some success in your life. If you are not, don't be disheartened. You will end up at the place where everyone else is.

You have gathered here expecting me to tell you how great your life can be if you dream big and work hard to fulfill your dreams. You expect me to remind you that you are not inferior to anyone, that everyone of you has a special talent and that if you are determined to achieve your goals, success will be yours for the taking. But friends, let me warn you - sooner or later you will realize that all of this is a lie. I write and talk such crap because it helps sell my books; because this is what people want to listen. Nobody want to hear the truth - and the truth is that you are just an ordinary sod destined to plod through life in a pretty ordinary fashion like everyone else. If all of your life, your parents, teachers or motivators have been telling you the opposite, its because they have been sold the same crap.

In few years, you will come to understand that life is pretty much pointless and that everything you have done in your life or will do in future is just a means of killing time until you drop dead from exhaustion, boredom, lifelong disappointments or heart failure. Unless you strike lucky and win a jackpot, here's what you have to look forward to for the rest of your life: - work, boredom, marriage, initial excitement followed by boredom, children, more boredom, middle age crisis, retirement and finally death. Unlike in movies, there are no happy endings in life. All lives end in boring, painful deaths preceded by long old age, semi-functioning limbs, dementia and overwhelming boredom.

Once you leave your colleges, you will be headed towards the world of work. You will then consign to the bin all your impossible dreams of becoming a rock star, writer of a best-seller or a radio-jockey and sell out your soul to the highest bidder in exchange for a life in the confines of cubicle farm. Within few weeks of joining the workforce, you will find yourself looking blankly at your computer screen starting at the slow death of your dreams. Within few months of becoming a paid-slave you will find yourself sending your resume to everyone who cares to have it, in search of the perfect job but after a few decades you will realize that the term 'perfect job' is an oxymoron and that it is much easier to commit a perfect murder than find a job that is perfect.

In the next few decades of your professional life, you will be asking these set of questions repeatedly - What am I doing here? Why haven't I've been promoted? Why am I skill working at this place? When will my boss kick the bucket? Shouldn't I've retired by now and be vacationing somewhere in Hawaii islands or Phuket?

After five to ten years of trying to adapt yourself to your workplace, next on your list of to-do things will be an extravagant marriage through which you will end up burning all of your savings earned from five to ten years of slavery at all the cubicles you have slaved in so far. In one evening of a grand public spectacle of your new bondage, you will blow up every rupee that you managed to squeeze out from your existing bondage.

Soon after your marriage, you will have children who will create new set of emotional and financial burdens and leave you with no escape routes from your previous two bondages. Having children, of course is a great help, since they will distract attention from all your failures and allow you to mourn in peace about the horrible mess your life has turned out to be.

But you wouldn't have too much time to mourn since you will have to start thinking about buying your own apartment to prevent your wife and mother from killing each other. In the overheated real estate market that we all suffer from, buying your own home will create for you another bondage - bondage of debt between you and your banker, a bondage that like all other bondages will suck the life out of you.

My dear young friends, life is not as much about winning or losing as it is about dispelling the tedium of boredom. Your moments of triumphs will be few and far in between. The sweet smell of success will diffuse within in a short time leaving you yet again in the grip of panoptic ennui. Time and time again you will find yourself tediously enduring the monotony of daily existence, repeating the same day over and over again, pushing the same files, having the same boring conversations, watching the same shows on television and traveling the roads you have traveled a million times. Like the legendary Sisyphus, you will keep rolling the boulder of life meaninglessly to the top of cliff only to find yourself again at the bottom.

And it will all end in death when you will leave the world without even a whimper. Glorious deaths full of sound, action and fury happens only in movies. In reality, you die a slow agonizing death from multiple organ failure in some darned hospital.

And oh...before I forget to mention, my new book is due for release. Its titled - 'Maybe you can't win'. I don't expect to sell any copies, but if any of you are the sort who likes reading unconventional stuff, you might find in it wisdom that will help you in coping with failure and disappointment.

Thank you for inviting me and good luck. Trust me, you will need lot of it. Quote this article on your site

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Shiv Khera: You can win, but you are likely to lose
Wednesday, 04 June 2008
MUMBAI - Motivational speaker and author of the best-selling book "You can win" - Shiv Khera was on an altogether different trip from his usual...

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slk14sgm said:

	after reading this.. maybe u can't Grin :-D
	report abuse vote down vote up

June 04, 2008
Votes: +1

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