Monday Musings 251 - Reinventing resolutions

Monday Musings 251: Reinventing resolutions

Almost every year the last musing is dedicated to take stock of the year gone by and what does the change of the year means to me. I went through my end of year blogs for the last few years so that I stay away from repeating the same things even if I attempt to say it in a different manner.

Surely New Year is a stock taking time, resolution time and reflection time.  Surely we must indulge in the serious business of book keeping and closing accounts of knowing what we caught and what we dropped.  However maybe this method is faulty - for why else every year we drop more than we catch. Why do more resolutions get discontinued and meet a premature and unglamorous end?

Why cannot resolutions be a little more creative and meaningful – stuff that really has the potential of making life altering impact. Here are my top 10 recommendations (not sure how soon will I break them.but nevertheless!)

1.       I will not suffer fools easily. I will tell them to buzz off instead of being polite and hold meaningless conversation when all that I am thinking is how to run for my life.

2.       I will not say yes when I want to say no. Enough of being the nice and sensitive guy.  Saying yes when you want to say no only adds to your burden, increases work and makes you feel extremely miserable.

3.       I will not attend get- together’s and parties because it is good for networking even though we hate almost everyone we meet there and know deeply their charade. The few good ones can always be met one on one. In any case what is the point of meeting the same people with the same stories and the same jokes and then end up feeling there is nothing new in life.

4.       I will not eat out. This overpriced, overhyped fancy cuisine thing is plain stupidity. You end up eating things that is bad, overeat in most cases only for the cheap thrill of showing off that you are such an experimental guy when it comes to the palate.

5.       I will not watch TV – particularly news and those stupid serials and dance/singing contests.  If one has to watch comedy one should watch comedy – not news. In any case it’s cacophonous, negative, depressing and will give you the impression that the world is coming to an end.

6.       I will not advise or try to motivate people. It does not work. Its only purpose is to make you better and give an impression that you know things but it has absolutely no impact on any one’s life. If these pearls of wisdom that you dole on unsuspecting chaps had any worth in them, you would not be where you are. People know what is good for them and they don’t need your advice.

7.       I will not haggle or bargain with the rickshawwallah, vegetable vendor and other people who make a living on the street. When I cannot do it in the fancy stores and malls I don’t think we should take revenge by doing it with these folks. Saving a ten and a twenty there and yet spending thousands in the big stores is being penny wise and pound foolish. I will free myself of such cheapness.

8.       I will stay away from technology – as much as I can. This one is really very difficult. It has made us horribly mean, self centred and inward looking. It has solved fewer problems and created more.

9.       I will not fall for brands. They make a fool of me, enticing me to buy stuff that I don’t need, at the price I cannot afford, for functions that I don’t ever use. There is magic in minimalism.

10.   I will not shop. All that I need I have aplenty. Perhaps more than what I need. I will wage a moratorium on all kinds of shopping for the next 1 year. I assure you we all will be still alive and nothing would have gone amiss.

 

Let’s see ow long these resolutions last!! Enjoy the build up for the New Year.

 

Guru

 

 

Monday Musings 250 – The world just is!

Monday Musings 250 – The world just is!

‘’The world is not good or bad. The world is’’

-          From the ‘Narrow road to the deep north’ – by Richard Flanagan

In a wonderful story that is set at the backdrop of the Prisoners of war during the second world war, the author through the despair of its characters in those horrible camps, come to this conclusion. I find it very uplifting.

All of us have a story. Every life had, has and will have. The play of events change, the characters swap places and the vile tide of time plays out the torment in different ways.  There is nothing original in this – it seems all that has happened all along will only repeat itself – like war, separation, love, death, penury and hurt – only the theatre changes. However what it elicits in each is absolutely original – each one has his/her own cross to carry and it does seems quite heavy – heavier than the crosses that others are carrying.

It is magical albeit rare to find a soul unsullied by his tumult. It is not uncommon to arrive at strong opinions about the inherent nature of things – often as unforgiving and cruel. The nature of existence and the world around us - acquires a shade of grey, depressing and dark, heavy and foreboding. Once that is done then conclusion precedes experience – even before things unravel the sense of injustice, betrayal and disappointment is established. The world is certified as bad. This worldview then becomes the bedrock of all future interactions and experiences. Life no longer is given a chance to prove its innately neutral character. Water only acquires what it is mixed with. It is innately without a taste.

The world is. It is not good or bad. It just is! It is perhaps a much evolved way of looking at the world, and one might argue almost a spiritual world-view, but definitely something worthy of being flirted with. I find cognitively at least, the premise very liberating. It offers me the hope of empowerment, freeing me from the vice like grip others, circumstances and events have over my ability to be happy. In the act of recognising the world as just something to be dealt with clinically, without the encumbrance of emotion and expectation, I free myself from the yoke of disappointment – that cancer that eats away life slowly and surely unseen to naked eye. The world has no more any duties towards me – of being fair and nice, of being good and kind, of doing to me what I want and giving me what I desire. The world just is! The world no longer owes me anything in return of my efforts, loyalties and emotions – it does not have to take care of me or get flustered by any quid pro quo. The world just is!

The possibilities of this thought are immense. They are worth exploring.

 

Guru

Monday Musings 249 – Gods can have feet of clay

Monday Musings 249 – Gods can have feet of clay

A few comments with friends cutting across states and the country on the subject of Narendra Modi went to the following effect - “ He is our only hope and India has a future only with him today and the best thing would be to give him charge for the next 20 years and then see what India does’.  Well this is not about Modi as everything unfortunately turns out to be these days but about a question that such hero worship almost to the level of cult raises – and I ask this question not necessarily in the political context but equally organisational or social context – what are the perils of such a phenomena?

Here is my point – the moment a large group of people put all their hopes on one person and start to believe, if not fantasise, that he is the messiah who will pull them out of their current rot and if not for this person we are doomed because no one else has either the vision or the ability or the charisma to lead us through the current malaise – these people either as a voting mass in a polity or a employees in organisation are creating conditions for either disappointment or failure or both.

The same question in an organisation or institution can be framed as – the belief that ONE person, worse still ONE specific person will miraculously change things for the better – be able to provide direction to the lost, provide vision to the blind, energise the sleepy, spark up the mediocre and wave the magic band – and voila the company will start growing, increase market share and become a shining beacon of excellence – then I suspect as argued above we are creating conditions for either disappointment or failure both.  

Such hero worship, romantic as the idea may sound is flawed in multiple ways and often ends in grief. Here are some of my reasons. You can add yours.

One – such obsessive cult often distorts vision. The idea of a messiah or a miracle man is fiction. It sounds great in myths and stories but real people have real abilities. They come with their expertise but also with their handicaps. Such expectations make the journey of improvement led by only one person either too simplistic or worse delusional. This phenomenon takes eyes away from the nuts and bolts of reality and puts disproportionate focus on the personality. It takes away attention from dirty daily work required to be accomplished by many more and focuses on the meaningless ritual of hero worship.

Second – while it is great for the leader who is at the receiving end of such adulation and dependence (who would not like people fawning and drooling over them!), it is damaging to the masses – the very people who are waiting for this messiah. In the act of depending way too much on one person, the masses relinquish their free will, often without being aware of it. They abdicate their own role in the process of progress, almost saying ‘’since I cannot do, let me be unquestionably loyal to someone who in THINK can’’. Loyalty is not a substitute for the spirit of ownership. This leads to a voluntary but corrosive disempowerment.

Third – this creates fertile ground for such messiah becoming a tyrant. One only needs to study history to know that every single dictator began his journey as the ‘ONLY hope to his people/institution during his times’. Not his fault actually – he was given it on a platter by those who believed a messiah is what their system needed. Benevolent dictator is either a myth or a precursor to an absolute dictator.  Megalomaniacs and overblown egos draw their sustenance from flattering masses and adulating employees. The system is handing over the power of collective and concentrating it in one individual in the name of hope and support.

Fourth – Any leader in any context when burdened with unrealistic expectations of creating magic ( eg – only he will solve all problems, under only him there will be prosperity/growth, only he will arrest depleting profitability and bring back glory etc etc) is quite likely to disappoint. It is not a question of the person’s ability, but the odds get stacked against him with such huge burden of expectations. The absoluteness of the hope that gets attached to him makes even a slip look like a fall. He is up against multiple factors - law of averages, bad timing, or it could be an issue of underestimating the changed context (war prime ministers of countries are often a failure in peace time, growth CEOs often struggle during consolidation, or it could be the proverbial Peter’s principle etc etc). Uneasy rests the soul that carries the weight of such expectations.

So whenever in polity or workplace I hear the mention of such a messiah, I become a healthy sceptic. The whole idea that one saviour is on whom my future depends is so bloody demeaning to my idea of individual self respect and free will. So I suggest we question such gods, keep them on their toes, scrutinise their thought process, decision making at all times. Make them feel challenged at all times. It will be healthy for them and good for us.

In any case about gods and messiahs I have come to realise, they often have feet of clay.  

Monday Musing 248 - 'Tamasha' is 'Tare Zameen par - part 2'

Monday Musing 248 - 'Tamasha' is 'Tare Zameen par - part 2'

Those who thought that the Ranbeer- Deepika coming on screen again would be ‘Ye Jawani hai Deewani’ returns would be disappointed. ‘Tamasha’ is more a ‘Tare Zameen Par’ returns.  It is a movie that every parent must watch rather than the young ones in search of romance.

This might sound like a movie review but that is the price one pays for risking a musing that emerges out of the triggers from a movie. Cut to its bones, the movies simple message is – do not mess with the natural talents of your child or else he will turn out to be a mediocre zombie who will mouth platitudes and live a meaningless life of a drone and will have a botched up (love) life.

Tamasha runs more like an allegory than a motion picture – it flows like a sun down grand mom tale. The opening sequence is an ode paid to the ubiquitousness of stories that we all have grown up with – stories of our epics, stories from our religions, love stories and so on an so forth. The grainy images of the school boy’s enactments during plays makes a lovely backdrop that quite literally tells the viewer how deeply entrenched is the culture of storytelling in human society. It serves as the backdrop in which such imagination centric childhood then gets tormented and maimed by the pursuit of employment driven education. I am not surprised that the punching bag is ‘maths’ and ‘engineering’ – for these two represents best the terrorism of this bias on students at least in the last few decades. One could easily add medicine and now MBA to that list of tormentors! There are some brilliant shots in that early part where the story enamoured child is day dreaming and names of all other academic subjects are appearing on the screen like villains distracting him. Not a word said – but don’t they say that a pictures speaks a thousand words!

The way such a child turns into a robot when he joins work is brilliantly essayed. The meeting room scenes are comic only because they are exaggerated versions of reality. The yes-manship, the trite and mouthed-to-death lines in the powerpoint obsessed meeting room scenes bully home the point that for someone whose heart is not in the work that he does and who was meant to do something else will only experience a soul crushing meaninglessness that will corrode his joy. The person becomes a shadow of him and loses his joie de vivre and how such a pauper will only be a drag to people around him and the work that he does.

The melodramatic scene towards the end in the conversation with the now insane old story teller is poignant, particularly when the old man says something to the effect – ‘you must be out of your mind – you are asking me how your story ends – go find your end to your story’.  Do we know what we want our story to look like? Do we have the courage to write it?

Tamasha is not a romantic pot boiler. It is more a parent education initiative. Good job Imtiaz Ali. Clearly you know where the shoe pinches. The love story was just a red herring and it worked quite well.

Monday musings 247- The tuition teacher

Monday musings 247- The tuition teacher

Tuition teachers come in all types. In cities it is organised retail education enterprise. In smaller towns and cities the school teachers double up as tuition teachers to supplement the meagre incomes.

Anyone who has lived in a township of sorts will tell you that it is a unique ecosystem, particularly around tuition's. A township owes its existence to a nearby factory or an establishment viz mills, factories, or railways etc. It is an oasis in almost all ways conceivable in comparison to its surroundings.

Jhinkpani, a small township in the tribal hinterland of Jharkhand is one of the many townships that you may know of – just a little more secluded, underdeveloped and distant that you could imagine, just a bit more removed from contemporary reality or just a wee bit more serene, depending upon the perspective you deploy.

Three decades ago there was this strange professional tuition teacher – I call him strange because that is the only thing he used to do – take tuition's. This guy in that sense was different from all others – he only did tuition's for that terror of almost all school children – maths! Anyone who had a maths problem in the township knew that his was the door to knock.  

For thirty long years or so he kept the fires of his house kindled through offering his services as a maths tuition teacher. He was the only one of his ilk for the entire township and nearby hamlets. He would be seen moving around in his bicycle moving from one road to another, one house to another offering his wares on an hourly basis to terrified souls (what else but maths!). He was so ubiquitous and i would like to hazard the comparison that apart from the village post man i think he toured more houses on a daily basis than anyone else. Despite not having a formal employment as a teacher he was very well regarded, respected and depended upon. This went on for 30 long years. Generations upon generation of students from the township got tutored under his benevolent guidance. Tiny tots who became adolescent had their own tiny tots who were then attended to by him. He was the family maths tuition teacher in a way.

Last fortnight many of us met after 25 years of passing school and on a sudden impulse decided to meet our benevolent tuition teacher and we did. Old, skinny and clearly frail he seemed to be elated to see us. If he had struggle to remember our names which might not be improbable, he did not betray it. It was difficult to fathom if his reticence in expression was a result of a fragility arising out of disease and age or a choking with emotions to be remembered this way after so many years.  A tuition teacher is rarely remembered this way. In the pecking order of teachers they are often below the school teachers – in acknowledgement and remembrances. So when we met him i thought it was validation of sorts. In hindsight i can only imagine what our going to meet him unannounced would have meant for him. Did he draw any meaning out of it – for the three decade of succour and help that he provided to many? Did he feel acknowledged in what we could easily call a pilgrimage of sorts at his doorsteps? Did he feel proud that his creations had returned to express gratitude and thankfulness – and that would be greatest his earning because in monetary terms he struggled all his life to make ends meet and i am told that was the reality even today.

Exactly a week after we met him i got the news he had passed away.  Could we have delivered him the best last gift in our own unintended way – of making him see how fruitful and meaningful his contribution had been.  

Rest in peace sir.

Monday Musings 246 – Twenty five years and counting

Monday Musings 246 – Twenty five years and counting

Reunions are common. Reuniting may not be.  When a reunion also turns out to be reuniting, it can be magical. The class which passed out from the school roughly 25 years back met again and as i would like to believe also reunited.

They passed out as gawky teenagers, with funny hairdo’s and colourful pigtails, an awkwardness that the teens of that age thought was normal. They met as matured adults with receding hairlines, bulging bellies and greying beards, although some of them defied signs of ageing, which evoked the predictable envious ooh’s and aah’s. The girls were ladies and boys tried to be gentlemen. The quality of leg pulling that ensued made all such pretences melt away in a minute. It did not take much for the children to come out from grown bodies! Pure magic! Thank God their own children were too young to notice the inanities of the jokes – but they would know when they will meet their friends after quarter of century and search for comfort in such inanities. There is magic in such authenticity and the soul feels light when it does not have to conform to an image. That luxury is available with only those who have seen you in running noses and bruised knees, and with those in whose company you have giggled endlessly when thrashed together by the same teacher for a mischief which someone else had committed.

Everyone took a different path and each journey was meaningful – perfect in most ways and imperfect in its own ways – and that is what made it meaningful perhaps. I received a whatsapp wisdom the next day which said “Everything that you fret about today will be meaningless in a year’s time’’. I wonder what we used to fret over 25 years ago and how meaningless it appears today. The only thing that mattered to each one of them was to meet, mingle and reunite. Each found his/her own way of mingling and reuniting and it was not difficult to see that they were happy. The warmth was palpable.

Memories can be fickle – they have a mind of their own. Sometimes they remain embedded in a dark abyss and then with the appropriate triggers and appropriate company they start gushing out in the open. They talked of what they remembered of each other and irrespective of what the nature of the memory, they gushed together. The mush lurked beneath the humour and leg pulling. They realise that the good and the bad is not in the act but in the intent. Since all that happened so long ago was pure, naughty but free of malice, that its recollection releases only an warm ache.

Each will follow his/her own destiny yet will be united in the most powerful way that perhaps even the strongest adult bond will not be able to compete with – that it had no objective. It is the bond that develops when you share a childhood, that precious thing that can only be remembered but never recreated. I just hope they do not take another 25 years to meet again.

 

Monday Musings 245 -The road trip

Monday Musings 245 -The road trip

On a sudden whim, which most termed as a mild case insanity, I undertook a 2000km odd drive from Mumbai to the place of my birth in Jharkhand. The journey meandered on the east west corridor of the network of national highway, what folks of the road know as the Mumbai – Kolkata NH6. It went past Nasik on its eastern sojourn, met the dying place of Emperor Aurangzeb, now christened as Aurangabad, moved to the fort town of Akola where I took the first halt for the night at the end of 630 kms. Day 2 zipped past on the slippery four laned high way from Amravati, via the capital of vidharba Nagpur to enter the young state of Chhattisgarh via the two cousins Bhilai known for the earliest steel plant of India and then Raipur, its capital. This stretch had world class road although it was not uncommon to see a lazy dog and his master taking a stroll on the highway unmindful of my beast whizzing past.  The bruised body and the vagabond soul began Day 3 by entering western part of Orissa and crossing the fairly abandoned forest areas, although mesmerising in its greenery, via Sambalpur and reaching the mining city of Keonjhar where a north eastern turn made it enter the southern tip of Jharkhand. Waiting across the border were the best roads I had encountered in my 2000km journey in the most backward part of India. (Surprise surprise – someone seems to be working after all).

There are things that one prepares for and then there are things that happen on a road journey. I have always found air travel a very clinical form of travel – it is high on functionality and extremely low on character. There is no experience in it – it’s like a bland dish. It can satiate hunger but it cannot satiate the soul. Road travel, particularly the longer ones has something for all senses.

The road has the festival of sights for the eyes. The sight of topography changing clothes effortlessly is ethereal, from the colour of the soil to the abrupt eruption of the mountains, from the lush expanse of paddy fields that dot the countryside to the agony of barrenness for miles altogether.

The road trip has the smells to lighten you up. The early morning smoke bellowing out of huts, the aroma of dust in the wild is not oppressing, the moistness of the air during the day as you pass the forests and the soundless chill of the night when the only company is the arc of the headlights (even that dies just a few feet ahead) creates a quiet that is uplifting.

The road trip has a stillness that is reinvigorating. The cities whizz past rooted as they have been for years, may be yearning for movement. May be they want to wander but cannot. The villages show the least bit interest in you for they are content or resigned in the way they are. They cannot fathom what the fuss about the long distance road journey is! The caravan of trucks that ply the highways move in a serpentine rhythm. They are like aggressive beasts on the prowl.

Then there are questions that hum in your head. They are existential perhaps. What is most important - is it the sheer craziness and the audacity of the journey that matters? Is the quality of the roads that make a journey worth its while? Is the unpredictability of the journey that adds a zing to it – the fact that you cannot see beyond the next bend prepares you well for all journeys – for isn’t it true that in life too one cannot see beyond the next bend? Is it the direction that matters – and then the quality of roads are just incidental – in which case one is bound to reach the destination sooner than later?

A few asked me if the 2000 kms on the road was tiring. I am tempted to answer that it was a good rest.

 

Guru