51 Taking little bumps in your stride

The experts say that the best way to operate in the Stock Exchange is to invest for the long term, and just not look at our shares in the meantime. In other words, put in your money (of course, on solid companies’ shares, not unknown speculators), and forget. The inexperienced person, on the other hand, keeps a close watch on the share prices, and dies a little at every dip and goes over the moon at every rise. When we first start looking at the share markets, we tend to think that serious players must pore over the pink pages every morning with the coffee. But serious investors don’t really do this! They don’t expect to cash in every time there’s a few points rise, because they know that brokerage and taxes are going to erode their profit, and they will be stuck with the question of reinvesting the money… are they going to be waiting for the next fall? In fact, I cashed in just before the 2014 elections (expecting a hung parliament and a stock market crash), but the Modi government won with a high margin (at least in the Lok Sabha, the People’s House), and the stock market soared… I haven’t had the heart to get into the market again!

Now I find this as good an analogy as any for the way we ought to be responding to life’s little aggravations. Most of the time, if we just wait out a period, things sort themselves out. The more we push, the more the resistance. If you think the wheel is stuck, you rock the vehicle back and forth, and your pushes have to be synchronised to the movement of the wheels. That  will give you the advantage of what is known as ‘resonance’ in physics… small movements can build up to a crescendo!

We probably know people who fret and fume at every little irritation or delay, which means all the time! They end up with stress, high blood pressure, acidity and even diabetes… brought on by the constant stress. On the other hand,  if you let things go, you will have time for the important things. After all, you don’t climb every pebble you come across in your path… you step over the small ones, and go round the big boulders. It’s called taking things in your stride.

50 Knowing when you’re ahead!

I frequently have been spouting the homily that if you’ve got two legs, two arms, and two eyes, you’re already well off and should have nothing to complain about, but should go ahead and enjoy using them. Well, I can confirm that this is no platitude, but one of the most profound verities of life. I can say this, because I’ve got a broken leg and can tell you it’s no fun to be hobbled!

 So if you feel hassled because you’ve got to go and do the shopping, I say, by God enjoy it! There’s nothing like the charm of wandering the aisles of a store, among all those comforting aromas of detergents and soaps and spices and bakery products and so on… why would you not enjoy it! Similarly, what a great thing to be able to go into the kitchen and fix a meal or a drink, whenever you feel like it! What a blessing to be up and about walking in the morning sun, or running up the stairs to your private library, or whatever! Or driving your kid to some place or picking up a friend from a bus station or airport! Or fixing your pet dog or cat its evening meal or rolling a ball for it!

On the other hand, there is not much use fretting when you are laid low by some such thing, and it may be better to do the best with what is left. I read a very nice article the other day about the books one has not yet read, and the realisation that perhaps you’ve got more books than you’re going to be able to read in the time left (and some of the great books of the world are actually so dreary that it’s probably a waste of time reading them in all their long-drawn out original). The author jokes that some books, like Proust’s Remembrance of Times Past, can be thought of only when one is really ill, or has broken a leg and is laid up! So I am using this time to read up on certain academic topics that  one wouldn’t normally think of.

We’ve all read the adage that no one ever regrets not having spent  more time at work, meaning that when you reach the end, you generally wish you had been closer and kinder with your family. So how does one feel when one’s mobility is compromised, perhaps in the long term (or what’s left of it)? Well, I don’t think I have too many regrets, except perhaps that I wish I had been attentive enough to document all my trips and visits to the field with photographs. Apart from this I could have a sense of regret that my pursuit of interests like music and academic writing couldn’t be pursued seriously. However, what I realize is that most people are unable to do more than one thing properly at a time: in my case, my job and career has more or less taken the centre, and I guess that’s nothing to complain about.

49 Keeping an open mind, being flexible

The world’s a big place – it’s bound to challenge the assumptions we form on our own little experience at any stage in life. Therefore, it’s all the more essential that we keep our minds open on many issues of importance to our own well being, and that we are prepared to be flexible and ready to change our opinions, and our plans, as circumstances develop.

One of the basic aspects on which we will probably change our minds more than once has to do with our professional life and career. Of course there are people who know from an early age exactly what they want to become and be doing in their lives, especially those who have a vocation for, say, medicine or the priesthood and so on, and the lucky few also find ways to fulfil their early ambitions. But it is also a common occurrence that many of us don’t have such a clear vision of our own futures, and so we more or less drift into academic courses and end up dong totally different things in our professional careers. And some of these are extremely influential and even powerful – such as the civil services or politics. Not every person who does, say, chemistry or physics in college ends up in a scientific lab or other position tailored to the degree. This need not dishearten us, as the first degree is a basic experience at garnering knowledge in a field, and the skills learnt in the degree course can be applied in a general way to other fields as well. For example, the politicians who have to respond to climate change or pollution with policy measures, may be grateful for the scientific matter they may have encountered early in their educational experience, even if they never went on to become scientists. And similarly for other disciplines.

Another sphere in which one has to be prepared for a change in approach is in matters of love and marriage. Of course, we are aware that in these matters there is a gulf between the west and the east, with a strong emphasis on the freedom of the individual and the quest for personal happiness in the modern western societies, which leads to frequent breakups and repeated attempts at finding the ideal partner. In the more traditional societies of the east, however, there is not that much of importance given to personal gratification, and till recently people were expected to stick with their marriage come what may, as it was seen as a union families rather than individuals. In fact marriage has been seen as a sacrament rather than a contract, and hence individual likes and longings have been downplayed, leading to long-standing unions and minimal levels of divorce etc. However this has been changing of late, as modernisation and urbanisation takes hold in even these traditional societies, but with more freedom and individualism, feelings of isolation, disappointment, and anomie (the absence of accepted norms) also creep in. In any case, it would be advisable for us to be prepared to compromise on our youthful ideas of the ideal partner, and at some point to settle for ‘second best’  if we want to move on from bachelorhood to the married state and so on.

As the wise person said, life is what is happening to us even as we are making plans for our lives. There is rarely one single way of conducting ourselves in our lives. Unexpected illnesses or failures, unforeseen offers and opportunities, all conspire to make our plans go awry, but ultimately there is some enjoyment of life’s bounties in most circumstances. That is, if we do not look too closely at the ones that got away, and if we do not compare ourselves too frequently with our friends, relatives, colleagues and the neighbours around us.

48 The danger of trashing your own institutions

For a few years, I served in a government which went about trashing all the institutions in the country The ruling coalition had a number of brash and rather brattish personages that delighted in jeering at the rank and file in the government, and glorifying the private sector. Indeed, they became the most strident critics of their own institutions, and built up so much negativity and a lack of confidence in the system that it got translated into a general depression of the economy itself. Their party lost badly in the next elections to a leader who presented a more optimistic and hopeful vision.

The lesson I draw from this is that it is self-defeating to trash one’s own institutions. Criticism, even if made with good intentions as a route to self-improvement, tends to give a one-sided picture that fails to recognise or acknowledge the enormous efforts and sacrifices made by the rank and file to keep the show running, harping only on the points where the system is falling short. It demoralises those who are slogging away silently, without really calling forth any improvement.  It amounts to a massive self-goal in the world of management and governance. This, incidentally, is the complaint against the fourth estate, the media and the intellectuals: by being constantly critical, as in ‘theory’, they allow not a glimmer of hope to seep through; like the naxalites, they have much to criticise in the existing world, but no cogent picture of what system will replace it in such a way as to remove all such deficiencies. Because different sections have their own sense of grievance and their own agendas, the revolutionary is able to cobble together sufficient force for the process of destruction, but the movement then flounders when the time comes to set up alternative working institutions.

How then can we make critical analyses and statements, which are obviously required if we are to make changes and improvements, without inducing this negativity and sense of despair and alienation? The leader has to first take the trouble to recount and publicly recognise the achievements in the existing set up. Then she has to convey a sense that he has walked a few steps ‘in the boots’ of the rank and file: she has to get into the trenches and make a stand shoulder to shoulder with them, so to speak. There has to be some acknowledgement of the bottlenecks and shortage of resources, and a recognition of some of the heroic efforts made by them. There has to be a public demonstration of a reasonable sense of proportion, for instance by drawing comparisons with other sectors and organizations, perhaps even other countries. Having done all this, then perhaps the leader will be justified in identifying areas that need improvement. Chances are that the very exercise of recounting the achievements and obstacles – what is known as the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) exercise – will itself impose this sense of proportion and perspective,  and the suggestions for improvement will be couched in terms of a sober appraisal of what is possible and how the required additional resources can be garnered.

The other way of going about this business of making suggestions is to approach the whole thing from the outside, from the international consultant’s point of departure. This approach makes a sweeping indictment, writes off the present actors as hopeless and clueless, and throws out some broad, probably unimplementable and impracticable, prescriptions, and depart the scene, leaving the people on the ground with bruised egos and diminished sense of their own worth. The brattish approach preaches from a pedestal, ignores the elephants in the room, and talks in generalities and clichés (you can see how irritating these are in this very sentence!). If this type of leader were in charge of the defence establishment, for example, she had better not turn his back to the troops!

Since I was at the receiving end of this type of leadership in the forest service, I have done a SWOT of my sector here. An example of the high-falutin’ and absurd advice thrown out by international consultants who talk down to the implementers is this piece here about educational experts’ prescriptions for Indian education in the 1960’s, which thankfully we did not follow.