Excellence is striving for quality or merit in all that we do with awareness and attention. It must be tempered by balance, because when we seek excellence in one area, we risk neglecting our other values and priorities. Excellence does not mean being perfect; it means using our abilities and opportunities to their fullest potential. Excellence is not a skill but a habit with the right attitude.It is a spontaneous performance that one prepares for well before hand. It is an art wrought by sustained training that has evolved into habit. One achieves excellence by paying attention to every detail with a focused awareness. Exellence is simply doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Excellence is a brilliant outstanding quality that is superb in its application and sterling in its finish. Excellence does not fade, it just becomes greater by day. In true excellence the path is continously upward. It means surpassing all others in merit and brilliance.

Excellence in principle is competing against yourself. It is about being better than you were the day before. Excellence is not what you do, but how you do it. It is the best that is in a person. Excellence is not a skill but an attitude. It is clearly habit which builds into a character of excelling. It becomes spontaneous as we progress eventually becoming effective while appearing effortless. It is the demonstration of championship. Excellence is an art perfected by long training, practice, patience, persistence and peseverence . Excellence always excels more in action than in speech. Excellence is unleashing the almost unlimited ability within oneself driven by will power. It raises the quality of every action. Life is like a play, it is not the length but the excellence(as in the quality) of acting that matters. Excellence is always in the details, Excellence is doing even ordinary things in an extraordinary way. It requires the same arduous, patient and painful process of preparation to achieve excellence in all fields. The first sign of excellence is almost always a higher, refined moral sense.

It is the greatest testimony of a life lived well when everyone who has met or spoken to such a soul has been happier for having done so. Such a life of selfless service, of giving without expectation of spreading joy to one and all is what we can call a divine life. Such a life was lived by my teacher, guide and childhood mentor, my godmother, Pathmavathi Senathirajah.

Her soul lives in me, her English, her language flows through my fingers. Her strength moulded in me a resolute desire to be great in whatever I do. Her patience is the basis of what mine has become. Most of all her complete down to earth practicality echoes in what I now think of as common sense. Her greatest gift to me and to the world at large are my three brothers. They are my pillars of strength. She lives in me as she does in them, the four pillars in the house she built ....to shelter the world. Her legacy is in our reason to live. Through us she will continue ...to raise each other to help Mankind.

John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America was responsible for bringing many firsts into the Oval office. He was the first and only Catholic President, the first Irish American to be elected to the highest position, the youngest to be elected at 43 and the only President to have won a Pultizer! More than four decade after his untimely death, he remains a charismatic figure who left an indelible imprint on the world. What he is most admired for till date was his leadership. As a recent book on JKF's leadership legacy proclaims - 'From the day of his death, every President and Presidential candidate has to varying degrees, sought to portray himself as the heir to the Kennedy legacy.'

To me Kennedy is the personification of a man who made leadership seem effortless. But what went into making him the accomplished, charismatic leader the world came to love? The hard work, the pain, the challenges... as I started reading more and more about Kennedy's life and his legacy, five key principles stood out. Five principles that are applicable in any field of endeavour if you aspire to be a leader.

1. Challenge the Status Quo. Organisation against you? Create your own.. - If you find that existing systems are not working for you, then you create a system of your own. You create it from scratch and set the trend that others will follow. There can simply be no excuse for failure.
2. Start early, work late. - Get there before anyone else does. That gives you an advantage over your competition. If you want to sew up support for something, just getting there early enough and drumming up support long before anyone else wakes up to the idea, works to your advantage. Working hard, will always give you a leg up on your competition.
3. Hire Sherpas - Behind every successful man, there is a team that helped him get there. Sir Edmund Hillary scaled the Everest, but it was Sherpa Tenzing, a young sturdy Nepalese guide familiar with the rough terrains, and indispensable for his local knowledge, who helped him get there! Where are your Sherpas?
4. Disarm acrimony with wit. - Learn to see the humour or irony of any situation, even if it involves you and use that to your advantage. You can neutralize a tense situation or a particularly negative opponent with a little wit and self-deprecating humour.
5. Find issues that resonate. Find your greatest weakness and make it an asset. - Identify issues that are of interest to the person you are talking to and stick to them. Draw parallels from your own experience when necessary or use that to your advantage to strike a chord. What you may have considered your weakness could well be your asset in certain situations.

You may not be aiming to become president, but if you are looking to bring about a change in yourself for the better, to improve upon yourself, understanding and applying these five simple lessons from JFK will go a long way.

In my recent readings I came across a beautiful couplet, known as a 'doha' by the mystic poet-saint Kabirdas who lived in India in late 15^th/early 16^th century. Kabir's work is unique and universal because his simple two line couplets carry profound wisdom and are characterised by a free use of the vernacular, and are unfettered by the grammatical bonds of his day. The beauty of Kabir's poetry is that he picks up on situations that surround our daily lives and hence, even today, Kabir's poetry is relevant and helpful in a both social and spiritual context.

The 'Doha' that I came across last week goes like this:

Sadhu Kahaavat Kathin Hai, Lamba Ped Khajur

Chadhe toh Prem Ras Chakhe, gire to Chanachur

Translation

The wise ones say that climbing up a tall date palm tree is very difficult. But if you make it to the top you are rewarded by the sweet date fruit. At the same time you must remember that if you fall down from that height, you'll end up breaking your bones.