How to run a company and a marathon

work, kept me fit, helped me make friends and build a social community.”

Running is a solitary sport, to keep it going one needs to imbibe discipline, time management, decisiveness, positivity, confidence, set some goals and be committed to them. The sweat, the fatigue, the endorphin rush all give a boost, unleashing a cascade of neurochemicals and physically bolstering the brain's infrastructure. This methodology can be translated into a mindset that will improve performance in other areas of life. Same are the qualities that one has to replicate to thrive as a leader and run a company.

ViRa says, “Being a company that’s into sports nutrition, an industry largely an unorganised, fragmented and unstructured sector, it has its own challenges since nutrition is something that isn't much talked about in India. I have high expectations of my team members. I want them to work hard, keep their skills up-to-date, and show genuine enthusiasm for the job. How can I expect these qualities in my team if I don't set the same expectations for myself ? Being fit offers me all sorts of benefits to be effective at work: high energy, clear head, and low stress in an atmosphere where there are frequently changing demands.”

On his elite-like performances in all the runs he races, ViRa says, "One trick is to chase tough battles and take our time to train is signing up for a few races in the year and train hard for it. All of a sudden time will appear and one will be amazed where it came from. The important thing to remember is that it's not about balance; it's about integration... to really focus on making sure you're integrating all four aspects of your work, your family, your community and yourself."

To become better in all facets of your life, you'll need to find a sense of discipline. Running is a tremendous activity that can enact a level of discipline in all that you do - as it allows you to face nearly all of life's challenges. The writer can be reached at gs.sudhakarrao@gmail.com

The sex scandal tumbling out of the British charity Oxfam, known for its work overseas and its surveys on growing inequalities between the rich and the poor, has severely jeopardised its 32 million pounds a year funding from the UK government. The European Commission could cut its 60 million pound funding too. To retrieve ground and re-establish its place as a compassionate organisation, Oxfam would have to show that actions are in place to avoid cynical behaviour among its staff whose behaviour has been unacceptable.

The charity sector was pushed deeper into trouble after new claims about Save the Children. While Oxfam, Britain’s fourth biggest charity, “quite possibly deliberately” misled governments, police and the public by hiding the scale and nature of sexual exploitation by rogue staff in Haiti, Save the Children apologised to three women who raised concerns about “inappropriate behaviour and comments” by Justin Forsyth when he was chief executive.

Medecins Sans Frontieres, the world’s largest NGO with 40,000 staff, had to deal with 24 cases of sexual harassment or abuse and 19 people were dismissed. Oxfam is discovering more and more shenanigans of sexual capers overseas. The global fallout of all this will be felt as the agencies operate like multinational corporations in several countries. Aid from foreign sources to poorer countries is a two-edged sword as Indian NGOs tell the story of how exploitative some of the conditions can be.

An NGO that educates and feeds 2,000 underprivileged children at its school near Chennai had a bad experience with funding from a German NRI. Sevalaya suspected a takeover bid that stooped to the level of bringing a sexual harassment charge against the chief trustee and the NGO had to fight a legal case for years to clear the name of its principal official.

The cynical exploitation of funding sources from abroad, which are given money either out of the donor’s compassion for India's poverty or from religious motivation, leads to money-making operations in which a margin is kept for the Indian middleman, either abroad or in India. Some of those receiving funding do not generally bother about the source of the funding. Says N Jagannathan of Sevalaya, “It’s not for us to moralise on the source of funding. Money is getting so tight that we have to make several pleas to keep operations going so that the poor can be educated in schools..”

Is there a sense of Schadenfreude in Indian NGOs on Oxfam being caught out like this? Is this not an agency that uses its international prominence to raise funds in India for its Indian operations? Some would not admit it openly but they do point out that while many Indian NGOs are being shackled by all kinds of restrictions on their funding and their accountancy practices, international charities like Oxfam — 2,500 staff and 31,000 volunteers — were thought to be too big to be touched in the donor countries.

The moral righteousness that countries like UK have shown after the scandal erupted, with Hollywood celebrities and socialites withdrawing their public support of Oxfam, is being pointed to by onlookers here who say India does not always react with the same attitude. While some say there is too much of the “holier than thou” attitude in the thinking abroad, they still believe that Indians seem to be more entertained by scandals than affected as a society.

The way Oxfam handled the case of Roland van Hauwermeiren who was allowed to resign from his post in Haiti after admitting that prostitutes had visited his villa there — may have swung opinion even more against Oxfam. The charity may have blundered by not getting the police involved straightaway and it erred again in by making excuses for clear management failures when the seamy details of Hauwermeiren's activities finally came to light.

There is moral outrage over an aid organisation being caught trying to cover up. “It stands to reason that humanitarian organisations must be really clean and totally transparent in order to get funding. They must live up to far greater standards than corporations, which are driven by the profit motive. This is the biggest lesson to learn from all this,” concludes S. Narayanan, a well-known social worker from Chennai who helps poor kids find scholarships to study and homes to stay in.

It is important for organisations like Oxfam to sustain the support for charity in their home base and to rein in sexual abuse among staff. Otherwise, the spontaneous generosity of people responding to natural disasters will be lost and the losers will be the poorest people of the world. Development is an industry, but not compassion and any development built on compassion is what touches the heart - of the receiver as well as the giver. Modern cynicism should not be allowed to kill that compassion.