Rajesh Ranjan's Weblog

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन्। मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते संगोस्त्वकर्मणि।।

The above ‘shloka’ from Shrimad Bhagavad-Geeta, signifies the sheer importance of desire-less action or the ‘Nishkama Karma’. It means “Human being has control over their activities and not over their outcome. We don’t have to worry about the fruits of the actions and need not get distracted from the same.” It emphasizes that no one can escape from performing karma (action), as even when sleeping or breathing, we are doing something.

Karma is derived from the Sanskrit word ‘karman’, meaning ‘act’. Karma is associated with actions and their results. In the 1^st millennium BCE, Vedic theologian Yajnavalkya expressed a belief: “A man turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad action.” This belief is now commonplace but was considered new and esoteric in his time. This leads mankind to the philosophical pursuit of being and doing good in all its endeavours.

In Physics, Work is defined as the scalar product of the Force and the Displacement. The basic calculation of work is quite simple: W = F.d, where, “W” stands for work, “F” is the force, and “d” represents displacement. It may be seen that for ‘zero’ displacement, the work done is also ‘zero’ even if the Force (effort put in) is significantly large. However, it does not nullify the effort, rather it makes way for a more resolute force and opens opportunities for experiments exploring the alternatives.

In the modern corporate world, when we discuss Karma, it loosely means the output and is simplistically measured as the productivity i.e., work done for the resources consumed. Going by general understanding, we apprehend that there may not be any appreciation if the outcome/ result is unsatisfactory, though the effort put in might be gigantic. It can be understood as: ‘any reasonable reason justifying for a job not done still means the job is not done’.

It is said that people become the judge in the case of others whereas they are advocate when it comes to the self. This leads to uneasiness in accepting/ appreciating viewpoints to the contrary. We see that many times, we do not encourage any explanation of why something cannot be done. Generally, people like to only listen to the ways of ‘How a task can be performed?’ rather than the list of constraints as to ‘Why a task cannot be performed?’.

However, if satisfactorily explained, people (in authority) do provide their ears to understand the gravity of the challenges which need to be overcome to complete the assigned task. Adequate guidance and support are provided too, to tide over the situation. It is possible that they may not show visible signs of accepting the problems underlying in resolving the matter, but they would not just brush aside the concerns. It is worthwhile to note that what we work on is more important than how hard we work i.e., visible efforts put in for moving one mountain will nevertheless be appreciated and rewarded as well, than mere lip service or doing hundred mundane jobs.

The desire-less action may be sometimes result-less. However, that doesn’t mean that efforts were not done and the same shall be appreciated and guided as well to ensure the work gets done. A person engaging in an act without any vested interest shall eventually be successful. We must not get disheartened by failure and should not allow success to get into our heads either. The theory of ‘Karma’ needs to be understood in its entirety. To conclude, desire-less action would ultimately be valued and the fruits will be seen – either in terms of output or the lesson learnt from a renewed effort – a true ‘Karmayogi’ embodies it in all his pursuits.