A leader is just a comma

Long-remembered leaders desist from trashing their predecessors

This article is dedicated to the memory of JRD Tata, whose 120th birth anniversary is on July 29.

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Leaders rarely display self-deprecating humour in public. To his credit, Rishi Sunak did so in the British Parliament last week when he spoke about “having achieved, at age 44, a bright future that is behind”. More commonly, we witness the leadership afflictions of charisma, megalomania, and cult. Mercifully, many leaders minimise bad effects through the art of humble leadership; they imagine their tenure as just a comma, though an important one, in the long sentence of history. About a