Most of us grew up with one Mahabharata. The Pandavas are the heroes, Duryodhana is the villain, and the story arranges itself neatly around that fact. Anand Neelakantan’s Ajaya takes that arrangement and turns it around. It tells the same events from the Kaurava side, and the Duryodhana you meet there, who calls himself Suyodhana, is not a villain at all. He is a prince who believes he is right.
He believes the throne is his by law. He believes Karna deserves a seat at the table regardless of his birth. He believes Ekalavya was robbed. He believes the Pandavas are favoured because of who their mother is, not because of what they have done. And reading it, you find yourself agreeing with him more often than is comfortable.
That discomfort is the point of the book. Neelakantan is not trying to prove that Duryodhana was the hero. He is showing you that from inside his own head, Duryodhana never once thought of himself as the villain. Nobody does.
What This Means for How We Work
I have never walked into a company and met a villain. I have met a founder who is certain his team is lazy, and a team that is certain the founder is impossible. I have met two brothers who each believe the other is holding the business back. I have met a finance head who thinks the sales team is reckless and a sales team that thinks finance is the reason they lose deals. Every one of them has a version in which they are the reasonable one. Every one of those versions is internally consistent. And most of them have never actually heard the other side told properly.
This is why our workshops do not begin with solutions. They begin with each person telling their version of what is going wrong, in full, while everyone else listens without interrupting. It is a simple exercise and people find it surprisingly hard. But something shifts when the founder hears the operations head’s story from the beginning, not as a complaint but as an account. The other person stops being an obstacle and becomes someone with a reason. That does not resolve the disagreement. It does make it possible to have.
Ajaya is not a business book, and I am glad it is not. But it did more to remind me of the first rule of working with people than most books written for the purpose. Before you decide who is wrong, find out what the story looks like from where they are standing.
What are you reading right now? I’d love to know.