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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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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