A Corporate Literacy Codebook

Prelude: The Jungle, the Trainer, and the Corporate Baba

Part 1 : "Sahasrabuddhi" the Great!

Sahasrabuddhi believed he could schedule destiny. He had slides for life, color-coded his thoughts, and even his coffee breaks were timed to the second. On a scale of one to confident, he was corporate-level confident: the kind of person who thinks traffic signals exist to applaud his punctuality.

He was running late that day. That itself irritated him, because punctuality was his brand. As a senior corporate trainer, he had delivered hundreds of productivity and time-management sessions to factory workers, middle managers, and leadership teams. His calendar was color-coded. His slides were timed to the minute. He prided himself on control.

“I’m never late, the roads here are pathetic” he announced to his assistant, who had learned long ago that nodding was survival. “Time adjusts itself to me. People… should too.”

He had taken a shortcut to reach a remote factory location where he was scheduled to deliver yet another session as a part of a productivity workshop titled “Time Is Money: Optimizing the Industrial Workforce.” Senior leadership would attend, HR had circulated his profile twice, and the first slide of his presentation gleamed with fonts carefully chosen to reflect Absolute Authority.

Google Maps offered two routes.

“Route A—long, predictable, boring,” he said aloud, pointing.

“Route B—22 minutes shorter and apparently more adventurous. Clearly, Route B.”

One assistant dared to ask, “Sir… are you sure?”

Sahasrabuddhi shot him a look. “Are you sure about breathing?”

The road started normally enough, winding through misty hills. Birds chirped. Trees swayed. Sahasrabuddhi smiled. “Efficiency pays off,” he muttered, patting the dashboard as if congratulating his choice.

Thirty minutes later, the tar road thinned. Branches scratched the car. Mud replaced asphalt. Birds gave up chirping and started judging.

“Sir… maybe we should check—”

“Check?” Sahasrabuddhi interrupted. “I don’t check. I execute. Leadership requires decisiveness.”

The second assistant ventured: “Signal is gone… GPS…”

“Alignment is important,” Sahasrabuddhi said, nodding toward the forest. “Stay aligned here. I’ll handle execution.”

The assistants exchanged glances. Translation: we are on our own.

Branches clawed at his blazer. Mud swallowed polished shoes. Mosquitoes held meetings on his forearms. Sweat arrived unannounced. Thirst followed politely. And then, somewhere ahead, a sound that was low, guttural, and entirely unprofessional and it made his spine tingle.

“Oh no,” he whispered. “Not in the manual…”

A wild boar burst from the undergrowth. Sahasrabuddhi froze. His mind replayed Kantara, which he had watched during a corporate outing and pretended to analyze deeply.

“Ajja… Panjurli…” he muttered, negotiating with the universe.

The boar charged. He screamed so loud that no leadership panel would ever endorse and ran.

Not strategically.

Not efficiently.

Just like a very.. panicked… Human!

Finally, he stumbled, tripped, and collapsed near a neem tree. Smoke rose gently in the distance. A few people sat quietly beneath the tree, barefoot, calm, disturbingly unhurried. Nearby, a man poured water into clay cups, entirely unbothered by the jungle chaos. His presence looked oddly grounded for someone living in the middle of nowhere.

Sahasrabuddhi, coughing, dust-covered, voice trembling, staggered forward.

“I’m… lost,” he gasped. “I need water. And a way out.”

The man looked at him calmly. “You’ll get both. First, sit.”

Something about that unsettled Sahasrabuddhi. Sit first? He wasn’t here for a workshop.

“Who are you?” Sahasrabuddhi asked.

The man smiled. “They call me Samadhi."

Part 2: Samadhi’s Story

Samadhi spoke without drama, the way people do when they are done proving things. His life once looked enviable to anyone on the outside: a respected corporate role, a neatly curated home, a wife with her own career, children who seemed bright and well-provided for, siblings he was proud to support, and parents who relied on him. But beneath that polished exterior, his world was quietly collapsing.

There was a phase when life became a checklist. Wake up early. Be grateful. Drink warm water. Smile at colleagues. Perform productivity. Come home tired. Repeat.
On paper, everything worked. On the inside, nothing rested.

At home, his parents wanted care, while spending entire afternoons debating how the son in a famous mega serial abandoned his parents on the street. Every episode became a cautionary tale. Every dialogue, a prophecy. Baghbaan, they declared, was not a film but a documentary on today’s generation’s selfishness. They drew passionate parallels to struggles that did not exist in their own living room, while the real one sat silently on the sofa, still wearing his office fatigue.

They saw his promotions, never his burnout. To them, exhaustion was not a problem. It was proof of success.

“At least you have a good job,” they would say, as if chronic sleep deprivation were a medal you earn and proudly wear.
His siblings expected support in every sense possible but were mysteriously unreachable when he needed a conversation longer than two minutes. Everyone was “busy.” Everyone was “managing.”

His wife was managing too. She worked long hours, came home later than him some days, and slowly found curated joy elsewhere. Social media posts, weekend brunches, aesthetic routines were her thing. She spoke to him mostly in transactional sentences: bills, upgrades, vacations, EMIs. Love was still there, maybe, but it had been outsourced to comfort and convenience.
The Gen Alpha kids understood screens better than silence. They had filled their hands with tablets, had rooms with ACs, and personalized AI tutors to because, "human teachers are too nosy and prone to errors" his wife once backed their taste. They didn’t need him; they needed bandwidth.

And at work, his calender was filled with meetings where agenda evaporated mid-sentence, Colleagues who nodded in agreement and cut throats in email threads and bosses who praised resilience while reallocating recognition. His effort became invisible the moment it was delivered. He was useful, dependable, yet replaceable. Sometimes all in the same week.

At first, he tried to fix it the only way the herd taught him: by following the latest trends. Self-help books stacked like trophies on his shelf. Mindfulness workshops he attended with Instagram-worthy notebooks open, pens poised, pretending to breathe. Meditation apps pinging reminders every ten minutes—breathe now, be present, don’t forget to breathe! Weekend Rumba sessions to spike his dopamine, because happiness was apparently just a beat away. Keto this, juice that, morning stretches, evening rituals, followers’ posts promising confidence, health, and enlightenment if only he did exactly what they said.

He quoted an influencer with a million followers:
A fit body gives confidence and a happy life.

“It gave me neither,” Samadhi said quietly.

For fleeting moments, he felt a spark of relief, a sense that life could be managed. But the relief was temporary, like putting a fresh bandage on a wound that never stopped bleeding.

Slowly, the exhaustion became a constant companion. His mind raced even in sleep. His body ached. Meals, once shared with family or colleagues, became functional, rushed, lonely. Emotional and mental fatigue seeped into every corner of his life. The very people he loved, and those who relied on him, were often absent when he needed them most. And the office, where he had hoped to be recognized, often felt like a stage set for isolation, comparison, and unnoticed effort.

Eventually, the combination of family pressure, social isolation, professional frustration, and unrelenting self-demand became unbearable. He realized that no workshop, no gadget, no routine, and no corporate accolade could restore what was being silently eroded: his presence, his peace, his sense of self. The world had demanded everything of him but offered little in return.

It was in that realization, painful yet clarifying, that Samadhi decided to step away. He resigned. He sold possessions, let go of identities, and embarked on a journey that took him through cities, towns, and landscapes that asked nothing of him except his awareness. He wandered, he traveled, he observed, he learned. The world became a teacher in subtle ways: seeing life uncurated, unfiltered, and unmeasured by KPIs, metrics, or deadlines.

Eventually, he arrived at the Nilgiri foothills, where the jungle demanded nothing but awareness and gave everything in return. Here, stripped of pretense, Samadhi discovered that peace was not something to be achieved or earned. It was something to be noticed when the noise fell away. The jungle didn’t welcome him. It didn’t motivate him. It didn’t promise growth.

It simply didn’t care!

No Wi-Fi. No validation. No HR. No feedback forms.

Just hunger when you skipped meals. Thirst when you ignored your body. Fear when you were careless. Calm when you paid attention. Simple!

That indifference, finally gave him peace.

Now, he lived simply. Practiced dhyana. Offered food and shelter to lost travelers. Helped them find paths that were sometimes literal and sometimes internal.

“And that,” Samadhi concluded, his voice quiet yet certain, “is how I ended up here."

So when Sahasrabuddhi finally asked him, “Who are you now?”

Samadhi smiled and said, “Someone who got tired of fixing symptoms and decided to listen to the disease.”

Out of angst, Sahasrabuddhi questioned Samadhi’s decision, asking the one practical question every corporate mind asks next.
“Do you miss your family?”
“What about the money you earned in twenty years? How do you manage resources now?”

Samadhi answered without defensiveness.

“Family is remembered with gratitude, not guilt. Money is still serving. Just not me.”
“And resources arrive when intention is clean.”

None of it sounded motivational. It sounded… settled.

The Gurukul of Corporate Codebook

Samadhi gestured toward a small, simple structure nearby, made of bamboo, clay, and thatch. “We can use our kuteera here. Rest. Recover. Eat. Regain your senses.”

Sahasrabuddhi looked at it skeptically. “Kuteera?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper, throat still dry from hours of walking and running through mud.

“Yes,” Samadhi said gently. “Rest. The jungle doesn’t rush, and neither should you.”

Sahasrabuddhi couldn’t argue. Exhaustion weighed on him like a physical force. He had been trekking for hours. The sun was dipping low, brushing the canopy with gold. He nodded and stumbled toward the kuteera, collapsing inside as soon as he entered.

The bamboo walls smelled of earth and smoke, simple mats lay on the floor, and a faint breeze rustled through the open windows. For the first time in many hours, Sahasrabuddhi allowed himself to breathe. He closed his eyes, and within moments, the quiet of the jungle. It's gentle stillness around, pulled him into a deeper nap than he had expected.

When he stirred, the sun had slipped lower, casting long shadows. The first thing he heard was a faint, rhythmic chanting. Curious, he sat up and looked toward the edge of the kuteera. A group of children, seated on the grass, were chanting the Gayatri Mantra softly, their voices blending with the whisper of the trees.

Intrigued, Sahasrabuddhi stepped outside. There, under the neem tree, sat Samadhi—calm, composed, utterly unbothered by the evening chill or the distant calls of the jungle. The serenity of the man made even the exhausted trainer feel small in a way he couldn’t quite name.

“I hope you have taken some rest,” Samadhi said with a gentle smile as Sahasrabuddhi approached.

“I… yes,” he admitted, brushing mud off his blazer and squinting at the horizon.

Samadhi nodded and gestured toward a few young men and women sitting cross-legged in front of him. “We were just discussing some nuances of corporate literacy. Please, feel free to join us.”

Sahasrabuddhi hesitated. He was not interested. Not really. He had never sat in a discussion without slides or timelines. But with nothing else to do until the next day’s dawn. With his ego slightly softened by exhaustion and mud, he settled onto the grass with them.

And so it began. The first story of the ten-part series of corporate enlightenment unfolded, not in a boardroom, not in a presentation, but here, in the quiet of a jungle, under a neem tree, with Samadhi as the guide, and Sahasrabuddhi learning, for the first time, that there was more to corporate life than efficiency, metrics, or control.

Later during the extended banter with a young shishya, Sahasrabuddhi learned that this wasn’t just an ashram. It was a Gurukul. People came here not to escape work, but to understand it. Samadhi didn’t teach frameworks. He told stories. People got connected to him with ease and learned joyfully. They affectionately called him the Corporate Baba.

That evening, he spoke of Neeta.

Of believing “we are family” in offices.
Of four job changes in two years.
Of health collapsing before belief did.
Of real families paying the price of corporate confusion.

Sahasrabuddhi listened differently now.

For the first time, he wasn’t preparing a response.
He wasn’t timing a module.
He wasn’t counting how many sessions he had delivered.

He was learning.

And slowly, painfully, beautifully, he realized something:
All his intelligence had taught people how to work.
But now he will learn how to live while working.

The 10 Commandments of the Codebook

Samadhi told his shishyas, “Corporate life doesn’t fail people all at once. It erodes them issue by issue.”

This Cobebook pages will explore one story, one Commandment, and one insight at a time:

The Myth of “We Are a Family”: Connection Quotient
When life puts you on PIP : Business Quotient
HR friend : The Friendly Quotient
The First Silent Casualty : Adversity Quotient
Communication & Social Quotient
The Upraisal Time : Awareness Quotient
The Strategy Quotient
100% 24/7 : The Productivity Quotient
Upskilling Tools Trends & Trackers: Relevance Quotient
Perception for Success Ladder : The Real Quotient

Each issue will arrive not as advice, but as a story from Samadhi’s Gurukul.

Because literacy in corporate life is not about knowing policies. It is about knowing yourself inside the system.

And Sahasrabuddhi, once proud, now aware, was finally ready to learn that lesson.

*********

The Lexicon of Work