Veni, vidi, vici ] “I came; I saw; I conquered”) is a Latin phrase popularly attributed to Julius Caesar who used the phrase in a letter to the Roman Senate around 47 BC after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela.[2] The phrase is used to refer to a swift, conclusive victory.
I don’t know Latin and therefore, I am not sure that if this phrase in first person is to be converted into a phrase in third person, how will it sound, but in English, it will be “ He came; he saw; he conquered” and this is what describes best the personality to whom is this blog dedicated!
Like Caesar used this phrase after his quick victory, this person led us to many such quick wins. In fact, he came like a phenomenon, who changed the very way we thought and worked before, till we experienced his influence.
And he didn’t come at the best of the times! Within a few days of his arrival on the scene, he was welcomed with a relatively large sized fraud that we faced! He was just new in the system , but the way he brought all the stakeholders together, delineated clear cut responsibilities and set up a rhythm of deliberations, actually made us beware that this person was indeed a phenomenon and no ordinary mortal. While we were still struggling with the aforesaid fraud, the first signs of pandemic started knocking at the door! Of course, it’s a different story that pandemic gripped India virtually in no time and by the last week of March, it was already there everywhere and even more than 6 months since then, it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime too soon. And here he was, leading from the front, ensuring that our BCP preparation on paper actually effectively got executed on the ground. And what he started in the first week of April, a daily cadence to review all related aspects – critical activities, customer proposition, health of the people working on the ground, work from home et al – it’s a long list, , has all got embedded in our DNAs today and ironically, we have emerged more strong, more enabled, more in control, more smart and more systematic as an outcome of the pandemic rather than anything to the contrary.
A popular story goes about Guru Nanak having blessed a useless, idle, foolish person to stay put wherever he was and a hardworking, intelligent, positively attuned person to be uprooted to be going places. When his disciple asked him about his strange act of blessing a fool and bestowing curse upon a hard worker, Guru replied, I want this intelligent person and doer to go from one place to another to spread his knowledge, positivity and hard work attitude amongst masses, while the other person should remain confined to one place only so that no body picks up his vices.” In English, they say that rolling stone gathers no moss. What else can explain his such a short stay? It just beats the imagination that if instead of 10 months he had stayed for 10 years where could we have been!
All the best NT, as we lovingly call him! Our loss is someone’s gain, but what we gained from you is something that we are going to cherish during our lifetimes and to that extent, it’s been a short time togetherness but an experience of a lifetime!
However, I would not like to elaborate on the title of this write up as I couldn’t think of any other words to sum up this personality.
Arvind Arya blog 