Of Power, Purpose and Achievement

From early on, I have wondered what would constitute success. Also, what would make a good purpose in life. Having wondered as much I have given a deep sort of thought to purpose and have concluded that purpose needs to be manufactured. If you are not capable of doing it for yourself, someone else or something else will do it for you. It is covered in greater details in one of my earlier posts.
Yesterday, I saw a movie - Shootout at lokhandwala. It appears that a lot of people claim to have a lot of power on account of various tools - weapons, connections, intelligence, position and so on. I could not help feeling how neat it would be to be "powerful". And that feeling I guess in its amplified manner is what drives the so called hunger for power. Noone quite knows what power is - though i presume a lot of powerful feel so and that is how they know it! From outside, it might appear like a trivial or at best less relevant thing in the scheme of a higher human society. We are nowhere near a higher human society and here and now, the power is what matters.

Then i remembered the discussion i had had with my brother on the way to nasik few weeks back. We agreed that the meek can only act in groups and a visionary has to either wield power or have leverage with the powerful to be able to put his/her vision into reality. We were of course a little confounded by the obvious concern that in a bid to attain that power or leverage, the visionary stands a very strong chance of losing his/her vision and get into a endless pursuit of power! The visionary needs to stay uncorrupted despite being in the dirt and playing with it - at least as long as is needed to make him powerful enough to be outside it and yet influence it.
The philosophical rumination can of course be if it is fair to the visionary as a sovereign person. What a person desires at a given point of time is his wish! And so if the visionary has turned corrupt, that is because he wanted to and all is well at least on his personal front.
That however, is cheating with the person that he was when he started out. So i guess it a inter-temporal unfairness of the same human being (is it?) which may make a case for the visionary trying to stay so all along. But that apart for the society and civilization it is always better if the visionary stays so - to a large extent that is.

How would the visionary's program look like towards such a goal? ie. getting to a position of power without getting drunk with it. How does one maintain the spartan view of the world while still being the mover and shaker of things big? How does one build a vision strong enough to last a lifetime?