Dilip Ramachandran has learnt to swim with his failures. So much so that if his talk today on Life Lessons from Failure at GK’s swanky new co-working space, Whizdom Club (WC), fails, “it will just add to the whole aura of ‘failure’,” he chuckles.
While the 45-year-old has nailed the corporate panache – from Creative Director for CNN-IBN and UTV to now Consultant - Creative Strategy for ad agency McCann – he retains his rockstar swag from his drummer days with Parikrama.
Evident how he creatively describes failure in many instances as ‘not the end of the world but will be if you cannot see that failure does spark success’, ‘not all failures need to be a blockbuster Friday first show failure’, ‘things are not going to be perfect, things will fall apart as that is the nature of things’.
Point that these sound like his mantras to combat failure and he’s quick to dismiss the term.
“Mantra is only given by pundits who believe they have the answers to everything. I don’t. The fact here is that being a musician with Parikrama and then creative director with leading TV channels, people think I only had a series of successes. But I’ve failed spectacularly at many things and in hindsight, I feel it was best that things failed.”
There’s, however, some semblance of structure to Ramachandran’s talk. He plans to disclose three case studies from his own life “where failure reared its ugly head and what I made out of it”.
For the failure that happened when the recession hit and the company he worked for folded up, he blames complacency.
“At times, we fall in love with our fancy glass cabins, and the important emails we’re sending and in turn fail to do some basic goal setting in our life. Happened to me, when I had not thought of Plan B. But that pushed me to a completely new vista, like being responsible for getting Guns N’ Guns on a three-city tour to India in 2012. So celebrate failure.”
| When: November 8 Where: Whizdom Club, GK, New Delhi Time: 6.00-8.00 pm |