The movie to me in many ways was an “ode to life”; that life is a celebration whose every moment is to be cherished and rejoiced. It contained nuggets of wisdom and knowledge that are invaluable to everyday living, about living more fruitfully and optimally. The movie chronicles the lessons about life that Mitch learns from his professor Morrie Schwartz who was dying from ‘Lou Gehrig’s disease’. Mitch is a successful columnist to the Detroit Free press after failing to become a pianist. After seeing Morrie on ‘Nightline’ Mitch visits Schwarz twenty years after his graduation and this culminates in their Tuesday morning sit-outs. The re-union discussions soon turn out to be a discovery of ‘life’ for Mitch as he relearns the virtues of acceptance, communication, love, values, openness and happiness. He describes to Mitch the importance of forging his own culture, about being his authentic self and that how the drive for pelf, fame and ambition has shorn today’s life of its true essence. Mitch’s character changes as Morrie’s stories soften him. As Morrie Schwartz's condition deteriorates, so does the hibiscus plant atop of Schwartz's study. It acts as a symbol to Schwartz's life as a natural process of life. The movie to me epitomized the importance of ‘self- awareness’ and its leadership insights. The understanding of the self is not only about understanding our physical and psychological states. This goes further down to our deepest levels of consciousness that our true potential and purpose can be realized by understanding our true selves – the quantum level of our existence. The potentiality of our quantum self is analogous to the scientific developments we have witnessed in the past century: science was able to achieve more when scientists were able to understand it at the quantum level. The same principle applies to leadership. We can become effective leaders when we understand our quantum self. Today, we understand leadership as something that is not only about leading a nation, a corporation, or a big entity, but it is about influencing and guiding others. It is about helping others to find their potential and purpose. It is not possible to become an effective leader if the leader does not understand his or her own self, and does not understand his or her own potential and purpose. This teaching, to me, embodies the very essence of thought leadership, which has become so important at this juncture in history, when every ideology and every system has fallen short, in some way or the other in creating a egalitarian society. While capitalism has brought growth and higher standards of living, it has also resulted in increased inequalities. Socialism brought about greater equality and economic security, but lagged greatly in increasing the size of the pie. Authoritarian states have collapsed the world over, but democracy also has not delivered results. We are living today with huge contradictions: the worst of both the worlds. The media in the movie serves as an interesting motif of purveying evil and suffering as all stories either cover homicide, suicide, hatred, violence or depression. Morrie’s lessons to his protégé imbue life with a fragrance that only grows with every interactions. I would like to finally sum up the insights from the movie in this verse from Pablo Neruda’s “ Ode to Life”,
Life waits for us – all of us who cherish the wild perfume of the sea
and the celebration of spearmint nestled between its breasts
