With thanks to jury duty waiting hours, I managed to slog through this book. I appreciated the attempt by Deshpande to create a parable, but what this lacked were clear takeaways. What some of the other parable books had was a section once the story closed to recap what the author was trying to convey. It wasn't clear to me when we got to the end of the book what the main character went through and learned. While I won't share here the few points I interpreted to keep this review spoiler-free, it frankly wasn't enough to motivate me to recommend this book to a friend, growing leader, student, etc. 1.5 stars.