In the sleepy academic corner of Lalgudi, where the college buildings wore moss like old scholars wear shawls, Dr. R. Sahadevan taught Management to a class of restless MBA students. Most of them were working professionals—accountants, engineers, bank officers—who attended evening lectures with tired eyes and files under their arms. Dr. Sahadevan, a quiet man with spectacles that always slid down his nose, watched them and wondered why they looked so burdened even when they spoke of bright futures.
One Tuesday evening, instead of lecturing on balance sheets, the professor conducted a small survey. “Tell me,” he said, “why does work feel heavy these days?”
The answers poured out like water from a freshly opened coconut.
“Targets, sir. Always targets,” said a marketing executive.
“Promotion, sales figures, boss’s mood,” added another.
“Everything depends on results that I cannot fully control.”
Dr. Sahadevan nodded and wrote on the blackboard in his neat hand: Results Orientation. “The workplace,” he said gently, “demands outcomes. But outcomes live outside us—like the weather or the behaviour of the market. Chasing them is like trying to catch the Ganges river in a small pot. No wonder we feel stressed.”
Then he asked a deeper question: “What does success mean to you in the next five or ten years?”
The students spoke eagerly: “General Manager post.” “Own house in the new layout.” “Fat bank balance.” “Big car.” Possessions and positions danced in the air like fireflies.
The professor smiled and asked another question: “And when you finally hang up your boots, at the end of your career—what will success mean then?”
There was a pause. A finance officer said quietly, “That I helped my team grow.” An HR lady added, “That people remember me kindly.” Another murmured, “That I gave back something useful.”
Dr. Sahadevan looked at the two lists on the board. Short-term dreams and long-term dreams stood far apart, like relatives who had quarrelled. “Here is the second problem,” he said. “We run in one direction while our heart secretly wishes for another. No wonder the mind feels pulled in two ways.”
That evening, after class, a few students walked with the professor towards the river. Among them was Gopal, a bright but perpetually anxious branch manager at the local bank.
“Sir, you have diagnosed the disease,” Gopal said. “But what is the medicine? In today’s world, if we don’t chase targets, we will be left behind.”
Dr. Sahadevan stopped near the banyan tree where the evening light filtered through the leaves. “The Gita has an old answer—Karma Yoga. Do your work with full heart, but without desperate clinging to the fruit. You are entitled to the action, not the outcome.”
Gopal looked doubtful. “Easy to say, sir. Competition is fierce.”
“True,” the professor agreed. “That is why the wise Eknath Easwaran gave us a practical way. Bring complete attention to the job in front of you—whether filing papers or meeting clients—with a sense of detachment. Like a musician lost in his raga, not worrying about applause. One-pointed focus on the task, without anxiety about results. That is Karma Yoga in daily life.”
He tapped his worn copy of the Gita. “And for this kind of attention, a little meditation helps. Train the mind to stay in the present moment instead of running after future outcomes or past regrets.”
Gopal walked home slowly that night. The next day at the bank, instead of constantly checking the end-of-month targets, he tried something new. He gave his full mind to each customer—listening properly, solving their problems neatly, treating the files as work worth doing well for its own sake. When anxious thoughts about promotion arose, he gently set them aside, like moving a chair to the corner of the room.
The work did not become less. The targets did not vanish. Yet strangely, the heaviness lightened. He felt more like a craftsman at his bench and less like a bullock pulling someone else’s cart.
Weeks later, during another class, Dr. Sahadevan quoted the Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “Some things are up to us, and some things are not.” He looked at his students with quiet amusement. “The Romans and the sages of Kurukshetra seem to have reached the same river by different ghats.”
Gopal, sitting in the back row, smiled for the first time in many months. Outside the classroom window, the neem trees swayed gently in the evening breeze, unconcerned with quarterly results. Lalgudi carried on as usual—busy, noisy, and somehow timeless—while a few more souls learned, slowly and imperfectly, the art of working without being crushed by the weight of outcomes.