Your mom told you so; your teachers preached at you about it; every single movie you saw assured you, and all the fairy tales confirmed it. Heck! The Gods themselves promised ya: when the time is right and the right are wronged, a hero will appear.

Inspired, like every child I wanted to grow up to be a superhero. Or even just a hero. And when I found that real life is short on radioactive cats, spiders or freak accidents and that my parents definitely didn’t have the moolah to support a career choice as a self-made super hero, I figured becoming a Babu was a close second. Life as I envisaged would be lived as a cross between Alexander and Akbar. Conqueror cum empire builder- all in style.

Few months into the system and I am beginning to realise the dangers of an institution which expects to run on heroes. A hero by definition is a selfish creature. He doesn’t care about anything beyond the cause he is championing. Watch any fight scene of any movie and you will agree. To a hero, his losses are tragedies, his opponents’ losses are victories and all else, collateral damage. His is a battle you wouldn’t want to be an innocent bystander in (have you seen the street fight scenes? Or the car chases??). In fact if you are not on his side; the only place to be is on the other side of the screen.

So, in a way, a hero’s world is like a consultant’s: everything is brought down to a two by two matrix. no greys and no shades. The hero is not hassled by thoughts of systemic changes which go deeper than a paper cut or are based on non-personality based transformation.

You must have heard the one about Babu vs Babu. No? There were once two Babus and both held the same post: one after the other. Thanks to the machinations of an inefficient filing clerk, a particular case was brought up to both of them during the course of their office and they both took the exact opposite view. Imagine the judge at the next level- being appealed to by both parties! Deeper analysis showed that a clerk unwittingly (or wittingly) had at different points of time started two files on the same issue and they both reached their judgement point during the reign of different Babus.

You guys should have figured out by now that a system this chaotic cannot survive on heroes alone especially coz heroes are not dime a dozen.  If they were, there would be twelve Avengers instead of however many there were in the movie.

All this reminds me of the time a bunch of us went to this forest looking for tigers. The closest we got were wild cats (No, these are not cats which party hard), some tiger poo and some tiger puke. And therein hangs a tale.

A great leader comes and goes but leaves behind his imprints: a system. Which is so robust that it can run on cats when the tigers run out. After all, the best any recruiter can do is to give out notifications for wild cats and hope really hard that they all turn out to be tigers.

I dream of a world when we hire a bunch of programmers called Mr Anderson and they all turn out to be Neos. Till we get all the Neos, each of us have to learn to lay the paths which can turn the Andresons into The One.