Are You a Leader

1. Are you a leader, born or cultivated or both? How do you characterize your leadership traits based on the leadership profiles presented by Narayana Murthy and Rahul Khosla?

Ans. When I was small, I was a shy boy who always took a back seat. I tried my best to not to take any responsibility. But I had to change myself when my little sister was born. I was entrusted with numerous responsibilities by my mother. This included taking care that she does not spill her milk, she ate on time etc. My mother gave me such tasks so that I could get out of my shell and start taking on the world. This actually helped me and boosted my confidence. Incidentally, I was also the oldest amongst my cousins. So whatever I did, whatever I said automatically became the norm. This gave me authority over them. But, in order to earn their respect, I had to consciously try to do everything with humility and grace.

Hence I believe that I was not a born leader but circumstances and my experiences at home, with my cousins and in school incubated the leader in me.

Information Technology in India would have never been the way it is without one man: N.R. Narayana Murthy. His model of creating a worthy dream and helping people achieve it inspires me. This is because I believe that one of the leader's core jobs is to raise the confidence of the followers and keep it high at all times. Tough times and challenges are essential parts of the life and they will come out better at the end of it. According to me, a leader has to sustain followers' hopes and their energy levels to handle the any circumstances.

According to Mr.Rahul Khosla, a good leader is an optimist who positively influences the stakeholders and helps them achieve great things in life by helping them think big and act in small steps. This is a very powerful ideology because keeping small, and not aiming to be "epic" can actually be incredibly, powerfully effective, one small step at a time. For me it is like a journey of thousand miles with an aim of crossing the Himalayas but can it can only be achieved it you think positively in the proper direction for each and every step.

I have always tried to follow the above leadership traits as described by Mr. N.R. Narayana Murthy and Mr.Rahul Khosla. I have been successful many a times. But the sweetest and the most memorable one was when I lead my cricket team to win cricket championship in my college. Being a class of only 35 students as against an average of 60, we were always considered to be underdogs and constantly looked down upon. Our team had had enough of it for three years. So we decided to take on the mighty teams .I was made the captain of the team and our dream was to be the champions of the college. This dream was big. Once the dream was fixed it was my duty as a leader to make it achievable by dividing into a small but attainable steps .My first and foremost task was