The Gunas at the Office

Introduction — Three People and One Email

There is a man in every office who arrives before everyone else and leaves after everyone else, and nobody can say exactly what he has finished. There is another who arrives late, opens the same document he opened yesterday, and looks at it until lunch. And there is, if the office is fortunate, a third person: the one who reads the report slowly, asks a single quiet question that exposes the error everybody else missed, and goes home on time.

This book is about those three people, and about the fact that you have been all three, sometimes in the same week. The Bhagavad-gītā names the root of the difference: three modes of material nature, sattva, rajas and tamas. This is not psychology dressed in Sanskrit; it is the most practical account of human conduct I know.