Defeated, a man sat down

Abstract

Vinod Kumar Shukla is a contemporary poet from India, whose write in Hindi, and has won prestigious awards. Organizing as a verb is coming together of people to do together what they cannot do alone. In an elegantly simple and profound way, this short poem describes the coming together of two strangers to walk together, a metaphor for organizing. I have read this poem at the Academy of Management workshops with universal resonance felt by colleagues from around the world, which confirmed my original instinct in translating it from Hindi to English, that the relevance goes beyond the Indian context to be universally applicable.