Turning Failure to Good Account

Turning Failure to Good Account

1990 8 August 14-15 Turning Failure to Good Account (621) Zahiruddin Muhammad Babar (1483-1530) was born in Farghana, a principality which lay to the north of the Hindu Kush mountain range in the region of Uzbekistan (now a part of the Soviet Unian) Farghana at that time was ruled over by Babar’s father, Umar Sheikh Mirza. On his father’s side, Babar was descended from Timur Lang and on his mother’s side was connected with Chengiz Kshan.

In the neighbourhood of Farghana was Samarkand, the ancient capital of Timur, then under the rule of Mohd Shaibani Khan, a member of the Chengiz Khan dynasty. Babar’s father had constantly striven to conquer Samarkand in order to include it in his empire, but he failed in his attempts. At his death in 1494, his son Babar became the ruler of Farghana, when he was just eleven years of age. Following in his father’s foot steps, he too attacked Samarkand several times in an attempt to take possession of it, but he met with a decisive defeat in 1501, after which he even lost his own ancestral kingdom of Farghana. A historian writes:

As a boy king he lost Farghana and passed through a period of adversity, having to fight his own paternal and maternal uncles. During 20 years of adversity and warfare Babur trained himself by adopting the military tactics and modes of warfare of his adversaries – Turks, Mongols, Persians, and Afghans, and he made a scientific synthesis of these systems. He became a good general through a career of many defeats and through years of homeless wanderings, privations and hardships … Foiled in his design of recovering his ancestral domain in Central Asia, Babur turned his attention to India. (1)

Babur attacked India for the first time in 1519. He pushed onwards until he had captured Delhi and Agra in 1526, whereupon he laid the foundations of the Mughal empire in India. He had left Farghana, his home, as a defeated man, but on December 26, 1530, when he died in Agra, history had recorded him in its pages as a conqueror.

Babar’s success came about because he had the courage to turn failure into success. In his own failure, he discovered which factors could bring him success.

When Babar was defeated by his rivals, he did not start complaining about them. He did not compile any lists of the conspiracies of his enemies or the plans they had drawn up for his destruction. Nor did he start making vituperative speeches against his attackers.

Instead, Babur began to work out how his rivals had managed to win. What was the cause of his defeat and their victory? Babur’s thinking led him to the conclusion that his opponents’ military tactics were superior. Their strategy in warfare was more effective than his.

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1984, Vol. 9, p. 378

Now Babar began to adopt the tactics of his rivals, and by giving much thought to them and carrying out experiments with them, he even managed to improve upon them. Equipped with better resources and better military strategy, he now set himself to conquering the new and vaster fields of the entire subcontinent. With the success of his new approach, he made himself the master of much more than he had ever possessed in his ancestral domain.

The present world is no less a world of competition than it was in the days of Babar. People still come into conflict with each other all over the, world. There is sometimes just no avoiding failure and defeat. But the successful man is one who can experience the worst of failures, yet derive sustenance and inspiration from it, and who can forge ahead, acting upon whatever ray of hope he sees, no matter how small and faint.