Category: Excerpts

Read an exclusive except from Wafadari, Imaandari, Zimmedari!

‘Leadership is a journey, not a destination. It is a marathon, not a sprint. It is a process, not an outcome.’

—John Donahoe, CEO, Nike

‘I see what shines in you’—this simple but profound eulogy came my way from a charming lady I met for the first time in my life at a literary seminar in Chandigarh in February 2024. The occasion happened to coincide with the period when I was engaged in preparing the blueprint for my second book, which is this one. I had been invited to this ‘Members only’ literary event, to participate in an interactive session to discuss my first book Kitne Ghazi Aaye, Kitne Ghazi Gaye. I was seated in the front row waiting for my session to begin when a graceful lady walked in, and asked if she could sit in the vacant seat next to mine, after she had ostensibly failed to find any preferred seat in the rest of the hall. I politely gestured that she was welcome to sit there, and in accordance with the customary military civility that comes unbidden to a soldier due to the discipline imbibed after years of being in the army, I rose and wished her, ‘Good morning, Ma’am’, sitting down only after she had settled in her seat. After a while, as a precursor to my session, my photograph in full military uniform was displayed on the screen on stage along with a reading of my biodata. Surprised, the lady seated next to me turned and asked, ‘Is that you?’ I politely replied in the affirmative before moving up to the stage. After the session, some of the attendees complimented me for my services in the army, exchanging pleasantries and requests for some selfies.

I ran into this graceful lady again a few months later at another literary event that was attended by the same audience as the previous one. Instantly recognizing me, she recalled our encounter at the earlier event, which I too remembered vividly. She recounted that she had narrated that incident to her parents, too, telling them that she had instantly guessed my military

antecedents from my gracious behaviour, which was confirmed when I was introduced and invited on stage by the master of ceremonies on that occasion. It is then that she delivered her

potent one-liner that absolutely caught me unawares, ‘I see what shines in you—your gentlemanly mannerisms and upbringing are instantly visible to anyone you come across.’ At that moment, I was too overwhelmed by the compliment to offer a suitable reaction, as I am sure anyone would have been. However, it was only later, as I ran through her words in my mind again, that I realized that the person who had stood up in deference to the lady in the hall was not me, K.J.S. Dhillon, but an officer of the Indian Army whose demeanour and actions had been conditioned by a strict military ethos and rigorous training, which has made such gentlemanly behaviour a way of life for all those who don the military uniform. So, yes, the inner ‘shine’ imparted to me by my four-decade-long service in the army was obvious to any onlooker, especially a clairvoyant lady who could recognize the value of that chivalry.

What Is It That Shines in Me?

The entire process of chiselling, moulding, polishing and buffing the rough edges of a teenager’s personality to create the inner ‘shine’ began over forty-five years ago, on 2 January 1980. The chilly evening when I, as a strapping lad of seventeen years, boarded the popular Punjab Mail train from Ferozepur to reach the hallowed gates of the National Defence Academy (NDA) at Khadakwasla, is still fresh in my memory. Barely out of school, I plunged into the deep waters of army pedagogy, when, after a stringent selection procedure, I was called to join the NDA, widely known as the ‘Cradle for Military Leadership’. The lanky boy, who had just started growing a wisp of a moustache, and who loved to sleep well past sunrise, was suddenly thrown into an alien world that was the complete antithesis of his hitherto easy-going life. However, it was the challenges of this highly regimented and disciplined environment at the NDA and subsequently at the Indian Military Academy (IMA) over the next four years that shaped a raw, scrappy youngster into a refined personality, sowing the seeds for my future leadership roles in different capacities in the army.

I had obviously been selected to join the army on the basis of certain qualities or leadership attributes that the Selection Board must have observed in me. The training at NDA and IMA not only served to extract and hone these dormant qualities but also imparted new ones that went on to define my character as I assumed a range of challenging roles in the course of my army career. Today, as I pen down the vital markers of the military leadership mindset that I have imbibed over forty-three years of my military life, entering it as a naïve seventeen-year old and ending it as a wizened sixty-year old in January 2022, I can say with certainty that the fire in the belly has not dimmed at all, with my immense reverence and love for the profession still intact. During the course of my long innings, I have commanded men and women from diverse backgrounds, following different languages and cultural practices, and served under bosses (not all of whom can be called ‘leaders’) of all shapes, sizes and characters. The environments and physical conditions I have encountered during these decades have ranged from extreme danger to the leisure of peacetime soldiering, both in India as well as during my various assignments abroad. And I daresay that I may have assimilated every possible leadership style delineated across various leadership manuals, practising them in my life as well, mostly obtrusively, others subconsciously and some with eyes wide open.

Leadership Approaches

This rich experience endows me with the ability to understand and share the nuances of some critical leadership theories.

So, here goes—my take on various leadership approaches (theoretical as they may sound). 

The Trait Theory, also called the Dispositional Theory, postulates that successful leadership emerges from certain innate personality traits that produce consistent behaviours across different situations, and only a person who has those traits can be called a leader. However, this theory does not take into account situational and environmental factors, also presuming that leaders are born and cannot be developed as they evolve into thinking adults. Notwithstanding the limitations of this approach, the fact that certain defining traits a person is born with are associated with good leadership across all circumstances is incontestable.

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Get your copy of Wafadari, Imaandari, Zimmedari on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

Read an exclusive excerpt from the book Mahabharata 2025.

Prologue

The Battle of Kurukshetra

Before the first rays of light pierced the cyan sky, my grandfather was already afoot. Putting on a dusty grey coat and looping his favourite maroon muffler around his neck, he crept out of our house on the outskirts of Rishikesh in the very early hours. I was immune to this ritual of his. In the eighteen years that I had been breathing, I had caught him sneaking out of our house at odd hours to meet strangers more than I had heard bedtime stories from him.

There were all sorts of rumours about him. Everybody who had ever been close to my grandfather wasn’t around any more. Grandma was found murdered in their bedroom on the day that I was born. The police never reached the truth about her death, and my stubborn grandfather refused to cooperate. I did hear a great deal about her, but I know for a fact that whatever had happened to her, it scarred my grandfather for life. Locally, she was known as ‘the red witch’. But then, my grandfather was known as a drug smuggler, sometimes a bootlegger, and even a gambling kingpin at one point, which, as adventurous as they sound, were all lies.

Yes, he did brew himself alcohol made out of rice in the crumbling shed behind our house. But he was just a sad, helpless, miserable man who wanted to indulge in vices to numb his pain. Some years later, my parents were gone as well. I was a shy, socially awkward teen when they set off for a pilgrimage to the Kedarnath temple in mid-June. There was a storm brewing at our home with the constant fights between my mother and grandfather. But then the next day, my world changed. A massive cloudburst triggered landslides and flash floods, in what became one of the worst natural disasters in recent Indian history. The popular eighth-century shrine dedicated to Lord Shiva is all that remained, while everything surrounding it was pelted with walls of waves and gigantic rocks. The official death toll raked up to 6000, which wasn’t even half of the real loss, while over 4000 villages were affected. I never saw my parents again. Thousands died. Entire villages were wiped out. Men who had seen a lifetime and infants who had barely been breathing for a few days—all gone. Their pain, anguish and grief silenced by the cold water that swept them away for miles and burnt their lungs till they prayed to their gods for a quick death.

But the temple remained unaffected. A gigantic rock that was swept by the flash floods parked itself right before the shrine and saved it from the calamity. I remember watching the news and hearing the anchors screaming ‘miracle’ at the top of their squeaky voices. It was the evidence of god.

But to my grieving mind, it did not make any sense. Why would god save only himself when he has the power to save everyone? I grieved for a few weeks. But then, when it was my

birthday, I finally stopped. My grandfather brought a cake for me and called a few friends from school so that I could feel normal. ‘What did you wish for?’ My friends inquired as I blew out the candles. ‘To see the bodies of my parents,’ my reply was prompt, which, understandably, ruined the celebrations. I remember having this thought even back then as a kid—wouldn’t it be better if their bodies were found? That way, it would have been certain, a definitive closure.

Pain is temporary. I could always heal. But that sliver of hope is what hurt the most. It was soon after this tragedy that my grandfather somehow found himself meeting these strangers in the

woods at the oddest of hours. But something was different about his walk on the morning of my eighteenth birthday. He didn’t look back cautiously before shutting the door, something that I had seen him always do. So I decided to follow. I saw his distinct shadow piercing the morning mist plaguing the valley and trotting down a path that led to nowhere. There was barely any colour, any liveliness to his walk. He might as well have been in a trance; under a spell of something sinister that was calling him into the wild. He went down that path for some time before suddenly coming to a halt, turning his face to the side for a moment and staring back from the corner of his eye. I hid behind a giant tree and prayed that he didn’t notice me. He never liked it when I followed him out. I was all of ten when I first learnt of my grandfather’s infamous temper. He was out with my father when they spotted me stalking them. The next moment, he was dragging me home and squeezing my fingers between the door as he shut it forcefully, making me promise that I would leave them alone while I poured out salty tears over my broken fingernails.

A year later, he caught me listening in on a conversation he was having with a strange woman whom he met in the woods. They weren’t speaking in Hindi or English but a language I couldn’t pinpoint—something that I still haven’t heard. He burnt my back with a hot iron rod that night, a scar that I still carry as a reward on my body, along with the various marks left behind by his favourite belt, the occasional scissor throws, and that one time he was holding a sharp knife to cut his onions. It was no secret that I didn’t love my family. It was no secret that they didn’t love me either. My father never stopped him. My mother would always leave the room and then refuse to make eye contact with me the next day. My grandfather had his demons—demons that only got worse after the death of my parents. He was an utterly complicated man, who would raise more questions than provide answers. And I had so many questions.

So as he aimlessly trotted past the lush forest cover and stepped into the ice-cold waters of the Ganga, a part of me wished that he would drown.

Little did I know that I would manifest it the very next moment.

I saw him sinking lower and lower—the water drank his bruised knees, the grey hair on his chest and then his balding

head. But just before he disappeared forever, he turned around and looked at me with his old weary dark eyes that had given up long ago.

Then he was gone. I ran as fast as my feet could carry me and plunged into the river while calling out to him. The icy cold waters froze me to my bones. I kept paddling my arms to race ahead to where I had last seen him, but he was never coming back.

The old man gave me the wildest eighteenth birthday present, and in that moment of despair it really hit me—I did not have a family any more. I must have searched for a good thirty minutes, diving in and out, trying to go further with each stretch and hoping to see his scarred face in the darkness of those depths. The current wasn’t as strong but moved with an authority that seemed to swallow everything around it. But just as I was about to give up, something strange

transpired. The waters started dancing around me in circles. The current became distorted. A sudden chaos gripped my surroundings. And right where I swam, the water started

parting, revealing a vortex that amplified in size more quickly than my tired brain could perceive.

With whatever little strength I had left in my arms and legs, I went for it—paddling hard at the disappearing water under my skin, which seemed to be vanishing and getting replaced by cold air.

I remember yelling as loud as I could as the swirling vortex swallowed me whole. For a moment, it all became a flash of vibrant, trippy colours and shapes, and then I woke up in a place I had no business being. The battle cries of the warriors shook my bones as the ground throbbed under the weight of the massive armies that could redefine the word chaos to being a gentle moment of discomfort. I saw animals that didn’t exist any more, giants that pulled apart people like dolls, and warriors who went about head-butting mammoth elephants casually and choking warhorses with a single hand.

The sun pelted down hard but wasn’t hot somehow. Storms of dust enveloped the giant land where hundreds were perishing every minute. A primaeval battle raged before my eyes, and I had absolutely no idea how I was thrown into it.

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Get your copy of Mahabharata 2025 on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

Read an excerpt from This American Woman, a powerful memoir by Zarna Garg that traces her journey from a controlled girlhood in India to a life of self-determination in America.

ONCE UPON A TIME, BEFORE I RAN AWAY, I WAS THE YOUNGEST OF  four happy kids growing up on Nepean Sea Road, the Park Avenue of Mumbai. We lived in a sprawling, 5,000- square- foot apartment in a beautiful limestone building, smack in the middle of bustling shops, big shady trees, and, of course, riotous traffic of every shape and size. We were not the richest of the rich, but we were rich enough to live very, very well in India: servants, drivers, cooks, nice cars, and air- conditioning (the ultimate status symbol). My friends were the children of business moguls and movie stars.

But unlike my friends’ dads, my dad had not been installed as some princely heir to the family business. My father had clawed his way out of the Mumbai chawls, put himself through law school,

and started an innovative— and lucrative— import- export business that took him all over the world. He brought back wild tales and rare objets d’art from exotic locales like Tokyo, Milan, and New Jersey! We, the subjects of my father’s lush new kingdom, were expected to obey his unquestionable worldly authority. In practical terms, this usually just meant staying out of his way. That came naturally. While he never laid a finger on us, my dad’s domineering aura was repellent for servants and children. If he was in the room, no one said anything, because we never knew what might trigger him. Since he always sat in the massive living room, that meant all four of us kids were heaped in one of our tiny bedrooms giggling and talking about movies and food and music.

The servants even fed us our dinners in our bedrooms because they themselves were trying to keep out of his way. My dad was the only member of his family who had finished high school. Afterward, he’d found law professors and begged to attend their lectures. He even offered to clean their homes if he could sleep there at night. And yet it wasn’t my father’s law degree that opened the door to his stunning success. It was something he had that his classmates didn’t: grit.

“All these people with big degrees will sign away their whole life of freedom for an ounce of security,” my dad would say.

“But taking risks— now that is where real money is made.” My dad eventually concluded with disgust that too much education actually ruined people: It made them too proud and too scared to do real work. “Everyone should be a work- alcoholic,” he would say— years before the term “workaholic” became commonplace!

So my dad only educated us to the extent that it would help us thrive in the universe he inhabited. From an early age, we learned “the language of success”— English. And we were to be married off to the heirs of other successful entrepreneurs, ideally before we hit twenty years old.

But even though it was actively discouraged, especially for a girl, I loved to read.

And I couldn’t understand why my dad couldn’t understand, because I thought everything you could read was riveting. Every bit of pocket money I had, I spent on novels, film magazines, comic books. Fortune, Forbes, Inc., Adweek. “How the rich live!” “How the frazzled simplify their lives!” “How film stars fight!” I would even read cookbooks to see what types of dishes were in season. Anything I could get my hands on. I especially adored reading The Times of India first thing in the morning, and I still do to this day. But my dad hated that I would touch it and shuffle the pages around. He wanted the copy to be fresh and crisp when he was ready to read it.

The only way I could get hold of it was if I woke up early, waited in bed until I could hear the newspaper plopped outside our apartment door around 5 a.m., and rush to read through it all as fast as I could. Then I would put the newspaper under the sofa cushions and bounce on it with my bum so that it was neatly pressed back into position. When my dad finally emerged from his room at 6 a.m., the newspaper would be lying outside the apartment front door, perfectly flat.

If there was any suspicion that I had touched the paper, my dad would summon the servants and scream at them, since he knew this exercise was far more excruciating to me than being screamed at myself.

I played this song and dance with him from the age of seven up until the day I ran away. I can only imagine how my mother must have felt, trapped between two iron- willed contrarians with the collective maturity of Bart Simpson. My mother had not been a young bride. The oldest of nine siblings, she had been tasked by her parents to raise her brothers and sisters and marry them off before she could even dream about embarking upon her own life.

Once she finally married my dad, when she was thirty and he was a thirty- seven- year- old widower with three toddlers, she wholeheartedly embraced the role of the self- sacrificing Indian woman. Frankly, it would have been understandable if she went the route of the evil Indian stepmother, trying to wedge her own bloodline into my dad’s wealth and inheritance ahead of his older kids. But my mom had just raised eight people and was now raising three more. She had no interest in generating even more children for the sake of a bloodline. Instead, she threw herself into becoming the perfect stepmother. She doted on my three older half siblings, making sure they had strong relationships with their late biological mother’s family, with plentiful visits back and forth every week. My siblings adored my mom, and she them.

My older sister, Sunita, and my mom were inseparable. Fashion, dinner parties, temple visits, charitable events— they loved it all.

In an effort to be the perfect stepmother, my mom forgot that she was also a mother. By the time I came along ten years later (the proverbial “oops” baby), my mom was tired. Everything I did exhausted her, not least my love of reading and outspoken ambitions. My sister had to intervene sometimes if my mom’s burnout got the upper hand. Like whenever my mom requested from the

hairdresser that I get a very ugly, very low- maintenance haircut called “a boy cut,” so she wouldn’t have to deal with brushing long hair, Sunita would work out a concession for bangs.

The only alone time I got with my mom was when she took me to the pool with her. In India, “swimming” usually just means hanging on to the edge of the pool and enjoying the cold water. My mother would dive. One time she dived so hard she burst her eardrums.

My brothers and sister were teenagers by the time I started walking and talking. This meant I grew up cherished and spoiled, like an American baby— but not by my parents. It was my siblings who doted on me while my parents were generally checked out. My oldest brother, Suresh, was my dad’s favorite, who could do no wrong. I, in turn, was Suresh’s favorite, and that meant I

could get away with anything. “Why are you in the office?” our dad would ask me. “You’re in the way.”

“She’s helping me,” Suresh would say, and our dad would back off. I was four. My office job was to try to draw lines on a piece of paper. I loved working in the office!

“Why are you buying ice cream for Zarna?” our dad would say. “That’s too much ice cream. She’ll catch a cold.” “She’s just holding the ice cream for me,” Suresh would respond.

“I will eat it all.” And I guess my dad was fine with my brother eating two giant cones of ice cream. He would leave us alone, and Suresh and I would eat until we were sick. Just like our dad, Suresh was a workaholic who didn’t want or need friends. As the firstborn son and heir, Suresh started working full- time, eight hours a day, for our dad’s business at age fourteen— and that was after a full day of school. Suresh did need a pet, however, which is how our dad described our relationship when I was little. As a deeply experienced former pet, let me tell you that being a pet is one of the happiest lives you can live on this earth.

Suresh took me with him everywhere, like one of those dogs that fits in a purse— to friends’ parties, cricket games in the park, long drives bopping along to music. I was his “date” to every movie he went to. “Child- appropriate” is not a thing in India. I watched rape movies, slasher flicks, extremely emotional trauma sagas as soon as I opened my eyes. My happiest memory is of Suresh taking me to see Saturday Night Fever over and over when I was three years old. He even bought a disco ball! The four of us kids loved to dance around it in our enormous living room, music blaring, lights off, so my mom’s crystal cabinets would sparkle disco light reflections all over the room.

But this was only if our dad was not home. Whenever our dad’s driver, Thakur Rajendra Prasad Singh (he insisted we call him by his full name), was pulling in from the street, he would give us a warning honk so we could hide the disco ball. He knew that if our dad saw us having fun, or even just out of breath from giggling, it would trigger a fit of rage. Hearing that honk made us scream, half with the goofy adrenaline of kids rushing to hide their mischief and half in real panic of being caught by our dad. I was terrified of my dad, not from anything he’d ever done to me, but because of how scared everyone else was of him. But no matter what fearsome things my dad might start to say to me, Suresh would always invent some nonsense that magically evaporated

my dad’s ire. “Why are you always reading?” my dad would demand, making me shake all over. I was five.

“I asked Zarna to summarize this comic book for me,” Suresh, then eighteen, would say. “I don’t have time to read it.” And just like that, my dad would nod and walk away. To a little kid, an older brother with the superpower to ward off a terrifying adult is no different from a deity. For me, in his hundreds of skillful little deflections and misdirections that kept me protected and safe, Suresh became my true father figure.

WHEN I WAS SEVEN and my sister, Sunita, was nineteen, she was arranged to a young doctor bound for America. My dad had scored big on the groom, Deepak: a gold- medalist resident at the famed KEM Hospital (the Mayo Clinic of India), and from a Gujarati family! From then on, my mother and I would spend summers with Sunita in Ohio. Sunita was pleased with her match and her comfortable new life, and was also full of unbelievable stories about Americana. Every house had its own swing set, an amenity that in India required waiting in line for an hour to get two minutes on it. “You could come here and swing all day!” she told me.

Or bowling alleys: “People just pay money to pick up a ball and roll it over and over again. And it’s not going anywhere. It just keeps coming back.” We used to die laughing imagining our dad trying to go bowling— surely he would yell at his servants to do it for him. Next up to be married off was Suresh, then aged twenty. “I don’t want to get married,” Suresh said. “I’m working all day. How can I have a wife and children?”

“What are you talking about?” said my dad. “You go to work and the wife has the children.”

“No, that’s not how I want to have a family,” said Suresh.

“I’m still making a name for myself. I want to be successful and have more time and money before I become a husband and a father.”

And so my dad nodded gravely at his beloved son, perfectly crafted in his own image, and went back to work. I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to the job Suresh had given me that day— creating an inventory of all the different insects I could find in the office.

That peace was shattered one night when Suresh and Thakur Rajendra Prasad Singh came home severely beaten up. They had blood and bruises all over their faces; their clothes were torn and dirty. Suresh was crying. Then everyone started crying because Suresh was crying— my mom, my seventeen- year- old brother Nimesh, the servants, and me. “What happened?” my mom and I kept trying to ask them. Thakur Rajendra Prasad Singh remained silent.

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Read an exclusive excerpt from Missions, Mantras, Migrants and Microchips!

Perhaps even more important for the generation now in their twenties and thirties is the spread of rap music, spanning America, Canada, the UK and India. South Asian rappers may come from Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi backgrounds, they may or may not feel an intimate link to the subcontinent, they may rap in English, Hindi, Bengali, Hinglish or Banglish, but they exude a diversity and energy that has attracted millions of fans and views to their music. Bhangra, popular music from the Punjab, has become popular in the UK—fused with other musical genres—as well as America. Sandhya Shukla has described the ascent of Apache Indian in the UK. Riz Ahmed and the Swet Shop Boys as well as Nish rose in UK, Raja Kumari in Canada, Anik Khan and Habib in the US, but via the Internet they have crossed seas and continents as part of a global culture, blending their own with the musical genres they draw upon from Africa, the Caribbean and Black America.

Red Baraat is a popular music fusion effort, based in Brooklyn, New York, but touring the nation and world year after year. The Punjabi ‘exuberance of life’, fused with other musical forms, has made its way through Brooklyn into the wider world and is a mark of the new times of India in America. Red Baraat is both one of the creators of world music and a part of this global cultural movement. At a concert performed in Symphony Space, New York City, on 10 March 2020, an exuberant crowd was encouraged to stand, wave and dance in the aisles, while a few joined the band on stage. Red Baraat played the final number prancing through the theatre aisles, mingling with the audience, blending players and listeners into one.

The unique potpourri of Indian and Western music created by Falu poses a contrast to Norah Jones’s blend of popular Western musical forms. Born Falguni Shah in Mumbai… called by some the ‘Devi Diva’, Falu was rigorously trained in Indian classical music… She emigrated to the United States in 2000, and became the vocalist for the Indo-American band Karyshma. Then she began performing with her own band. Her musicians in one concert might be South Asians or Americans, using guitars, piano, drums and harmonium, or they might be more emphatically Indian, playing violin in the Indian manner, and Indian drums.

She moves back and forth between English and Hindi. Once her son was born, and she thought of him as South Asian American, she taught him about his dual heritage through music. This culminated in ‘Falu’s Bazaar’ (2018), which was nominated for a Grammy as best children’s album. As the only South Asian at the 2019 Grammy’s, she said she felt accepted as an American, and was as at home here as she had earlier been in India.

Bursting upon the comedy scene of late in the 2020s is Zarna Garg, born in India, trained as a lawyer, but a stay-at-home mom for sixteen years. Searching for a career path in her forties as her children grew older, her daughter Zoya encouraged her to try stand-up comedy. Almost effortlessly, she began to make an enormous hit in comedy clubs and attracted an immense number of viewers on TikTok.

Unafraid to criticize her family, her culture, herself, Garg now has a comedy special, One in a Billion, on Prime Video, a feature film, and a prospective series. Calling herself ‘a funny brown mom’, Garg is unique and always hilarious.

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Get your copy of Missions, Mantras, Migrants and Microchips on Amazon or wherever books are sold.