My country on my planet

I am an Arien … Born in April and my ruling planet is Mars. According to (late) Linda Goodman who popularised Sun signs we Ariens are intrepid being the first sun sign and we are pioneers, risk takers, fun loving, and generally really nice people … With a short fuse and an even shorter memory of it. So overall great people ..anyone disagrees? :):):):):)

Today morning India’s Mangalyaan, Mars Orbiter Mission was successful in getting placed into Mars’ orbit. The fourth country to do this and the only mission to have done it right in the very first attempt – just Wow. So my country reached my planet ! Felt so proud today and super thrilled. The whole thing has been done at a fraction of the cost of the other missions and with indigenous components.

Patience is not a quality that Ariens have … I don’t have much patience either, so am going straight ahead and gush about our PM Mr. Modi. The man never stops inspiring. He is always dressed right, went for the historic moment in a red vest, speaks fluently in English and Hindi and gives a brilliant speech. He might have memorised the English portions of the speech, but it clearly showed his concern for the ISRO scientists many of whom probably don’t understand Hindi. His unique ability to say the right thing is uncanny – he travels to the US tomorrow and says today that our moon mission Chandrayaan cost much less than a Hollywood movie :):). Get our American brothers and sisters on the backfoot a little. I loved a couple of his statements and a specific action.

Apparently the ISRO chairman told ModiJi when he wanted to be with the Mangalyaan team today that the mission may fail, there are no guarantees. I loved ModiJi’s response to him, “I am coming anyway, and I certainly want to be there if the mission fails to let the scientists know that I am behind them, that they have my support to try again”. I had tears in my eyes hearing that, because how many bosses will say that ?? All the bosses out there, please learn from this to have your teams’ backs as they try something new and fail. All the great lessons on taking away the fear of failure summarised in one statement.

The second statement was how the senior scientists had developed the junior scientists who in turn will do the same and the “guru-shishya” tradition continues in ISRO. What a great way of bringing in succession planning :). Now, even if some senior scientist was not developing a junior scientist he/she will start right away ! We really need to learn how to motivate from our PM.

The one action that was awesome was shaking hands with every single scientist who was present there !! How many PM’s have we had who have bothered to do that ? With this action, he clearly told them that they are valued and that he as the CEO of the country has all the time in the world for them. How many leaders are able to do that ?

Am sure many of us were watching the PM’s speech and kept watching till he completed, I did too and as Arun said, can’t remember doing that for any other political leader ever.

Congratulations to all of us, for Mangalyaan and for having the sense to vote this man into the PM’s office.