The Secret - How it worked for me. (Part II)

As narrated in the last post, my first trip to the company’s head office in California was arranged so that I learnt about the product I was going to work on. The goal for me was to come back and build and train my own team back in India. So there was no apparent reason for me to make any more trips to US again - until the product was ready and the engineers were required to make field visits to solve customer issues. But a thought came to the mind - that if ‘the secret’ worked once for me then it has to work again any number of times I want it to. So I wished again that I wanted to go to US although I didn’t know how it was going to happen. And guess what - the QA lead in US decided to quit on a short notice of one week, and I was chosen by our senior management to immediately go & do the KT with her in our San Jose HQ! Actually the ideal person to go there would have been the QA lead in India in this situation; but the universe conspired to complete my wish instead and I was there in US the next day, this time for a longer stay of 2-3 months! And so this time I got ample time to fulfill the rest of my pending wishes like visiting the Disneyland and the Universal studios, and roaming around in California driving on my own And of course I had the royal treatment again this time with business class air travel, limousine ground transport, a nice studio apartment with interesting places to visit in the vicinity, and a nice car for daily commute. I chose a black Kia Optima although I later felt that I should have gone for either a BMW or a Porsche, so that’s gonna be my wish for the next trip So the conclusion I drew from these events is that the secret works. And it works every time!! One might have to wait with a little bit of patience for it to work, but it finally works. And if everything does not happen exactly as per your wish, know that something better awaits you in the days to come.

So I was mostly satisfied with my job at PacketMotion. I loved the kind of work I got to do, I enjoyed my position in the company, was paid extremely well, was residing close to the office (I hate commuting through traffic to work) and got enough time to make visits to ashram whenever Guruji was there. But in recent years I have got one serious issue pertaining to my mind – a pattern that doesn’t allow me to relax even if things sound to be as good as they could get in life – my mind strives for something more – a higher goal. A thinking pattern which make me feel bored do be in the same place, interacting with the same set of people, doing similar kind of work every day. So my mind got engulfed by the thoughts of looking out for change of workplace although everything was going great like a dream. So in the year of 2008 I again started looking out for another employer and used ‘the secret’ one more time. This time I got offers from around half a dozen employers in a span of 6 months and kept rejecting all of them on the pretext of one reason or the other - sometimes work, sometimes location, and pay package at other times. It was an impressive line of product development startups which I kept declining – Juniper networks, Aruba Networks, Stoke Networks, Torres Networks, and so on…
My criteria of the next good job this time was slightly modified this time…
The two basic demands were the same – good pay & interesting work, but this time I aimed for a better workplace, and a more secure one. PacketMotion India office was not exactly the best place to be in, if swanky office space & a loaded cafeteria excited you. So I asked for a beautiful workplace which I could be proud of and the universe responded… I got an offer from a product MNC with its office inside a 5* hotel – The Leela-Kempinsky group owned Leela Palace on Airport road! OH MY GOD! There is no limit to this phenomenon called ‘the secret’! Actually the story of how I landed in Marvell is a bit funny…

I was bored to work in PMI IDC in Bangalore and so wanted to get permanently shifted to their office in San Jose. And I had a feeling that it was a distant possibility as long as cost-cutting was the #1 thing on the mind of PMI bosses. So I devised a kludge plan to make my wish come true. The plan was to put down the papers at PMI with a backup job offer in hand (Marvell’s offer happened to be this backup plan), and if the management still desperately wanted me to stay back (which I knew they would) I would ask them to shift me to their SJC office.

But in the process of achieving this desire I cooked up a lie. I told the PMI management that I wanted to quit because I wanted to shift my base back to Pune. My reasoning behind this was – if I gave some other reasons like work or pay, they could fix it although in reality I had the best of work & pay the industry could offer. And so, as always it happens with me, I got the punished for the lie immediately –As expected, the guys in SJC were desperate to retain me, and hence offered me to work from Pune if moving to Pune was the only reason for my resignation at PMI. Lots of negotiations followed and finally my plan of moving to US office did not work out – but for the good as I was to know later. How? PMI did a round of layoff after I left them and upon hearing this news I was just being infinitely grateful to the divine for giving me the idea of getting out of the company at the right time.

Now, one might raise a point here that ‘the secret’ did not work for me in this case - that my desire to go to US did not get materialized. But the reality is that I was never sure if moving to US was the best decision. Although the head was saying - let’s go and earn lots of money and enjoy the pleasures that life has to offer in the beautiful bay area of California, the heart kept saying no, being in the presence of master is more important than anything else. So this hesitation ensured that I did not end up moving out of Bangalore - because deep inside I was not ready to go away from the heavenly abode of my dearest master.

So as I write this post, I am happily employed at Marvell thanks to the infinite grace of the divine. But I know this situation is quite ephemeral because my mind has already started saying it’s time for a change! Of course the recession has brought in some unfavorable changes this year, but the divine has been ever graceful in such tough times. To quote the latest example, there have been talks of layoffs in Marvell for last month or so and my team seemed to be the most obvious target in India. Even among the team, my position appeared to have the easiest threat of elimination. But I just kept myself immersed in knowledge, sadhana, seva, and celebration without any traces of tension. And miraculously, through a couple of in-house sources I got to know the exact date of layoffs in advance! What’s more, within just a matter of a day I had a backup offer in hand in case something bad happened. Not just that it was a really good offer from a product company in Bangalore which is doing quite well these days. Now tell me how easy it is to secure a new offer in such tough times!!! Anyways the layoffs happened and my team was miraculously spared and so I am able to write this log while being employed in the IT industry!


Thus ends the story of how I used ‘the secret’ to get what I wanted in my profession. There are many other ways in which I have used ‘the secret’ in my life recently, but I’m gonna sign off here… leaving it to the reader to use the secret in their own lives in the days to come to achieve love, peace, happiness and everything else they want in their lives…

Tathaastu!