43 The Scanner take on multiple vocations!

We’re still on the subject of doing many things at a time, or over a lifetime, which we started with in the last post. Like I said, there are a couple of books which address this very topic in detail. The first of these is What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything? by Barbara Sher, sub-titled “A leading life coach’s guide to creating a life you’ll love”. Barbara’s main plank is that people who like to keep trying new things, never settling down to one vocation, much to the frustration of their families and well-wishers, may be just made to be learners throughout their lives. She calls them (us!) “Scanners” (I will use the word always with a capital S, to give it a proper weight and dignity, like President or Comptroller).

Apparently it is the process of taking up a subject or field of activity and studying it deeply enough to be competent in it, that motivates Scanners. I think I meant something like this in a previous post (#37 To find a purpose) when I talked about making the process itself interesting so that one is not too involved in the results. For Scanners tend to leave the subject when once they have achieved a certain level of familiarity; they are not in the game of doing the same thing over and over again as a job… sounds familiar!

Sher has a detailed typology of Scanners: we can be Serial Masters, who like to take up one thing at a time, master it, and then abandon it; or Cyclical Scanners, who tend to circle back to older interests over a period of years (my front burner - back burner idea makes me this type, I guess). Others are Samplers, who like to try a number (dozens) of things, without going too deep into many of them. Whatever type you are, Sher’s message is that it’s alright to be like that, even if you don’t get to leave behind a legacy in any of them.

One of the most useful (if that can be said of any Scanner activity!) is the idea of keeping a Scanner Daybook, to record all your fleeting inspirations and ideas every day by the hour. The way the author describes it, it is meant to be a sufficiently heavy and impressive looking tome, preferably well upholstered and fit to display on its own stand (like an illuminated bible or domesday book or something!), with large unlined pages to receive your thoughts, compositions, drawings, recipes, samples and memorabilia, like da Vinci’s notebooks. I gather that the idea of the Daybook is to use one pair of open pages for each idea or project that occurs to you, and keep on opening new pages as each new idea strikes your mind. Over time, it is supposed to end up as a complete store of all your ideas, even if you haven’t acrtually worked through any or most of them. As you add detail or achieve progress, I guess you are expected to fill in notes in the two-page spread over the years.

I have to confess that this may be a bit beyond my persistance and work habits, although the idea sounds good. I have so far used a series of discarded diaries for my note taking, using separate ones for my work-work activities (mainly the light-weight, flexible, spiral-bound notebooks they hand out in seminars and training courses), which last up to a month each, and a separate series for my project ideas, for which I use the out-of-date hard-bound diaries that accumulate all the time (of course, they have all sorts of other matter printed on each page!). These latter are my version of the Scanner Daybooks, but far from looking like a beautiful souvenir, they are full of dense scribbling that I myself sometimees find it difficult to decipher!

I have seen two examples of the beautiful life-time records that Sher is apparently thinking of. One is the field notebooks of the famous Indian bird specialist (ornithologist), Salim Ali: he has recorded each day’s notes in a beautiful handwriting, complete with drawings and other stuff. I guess they are preserveed in the Bombay Natural History Society at Mumbai, but I saw one sample kept under glass at the Sultanpur bird sanctuary near Delhi many years back. I haven’t been able to locate any scanned images of his journals, but here’s one, of his handwritten note at Rangantittoo bird sanctuary near Mysore, Karnataka.

The other example was the field diaries maintained by the professor heading the Centre for Development Studies, Swansea,  whose system was even more elaborate. He used to record his notes in two copies (using pencils!) through a carbon paper, and then he’d tear away the duplicates and sort and file them classified by topic, while the original would be stored away obviously in order of date (year and month). So his study would have these arrays of identical looking diaries, and the loose sheets would have been filed away in their separate folders, subject-wise.

I never tried to emulate Salim Ali’s system (it was just too perfect!), but I remember I did foolishly try the good professor’s, but I gave it up after a few days and reverted to my shabby system of a running entry of notes on everything (including the daily to-do list!) in a series of mismatching notebooks and diaries. But at least I have all of them bundled together somewhere! On occasion, I would type up important bits and print them out for my files and folders on specific subjects. One suggetion that I have always used is to collect information on specific topics in big ‘ring-files’ …  an essential for any type of research. I also have this thing about collecting newspaper cuttings (which gives you the uncanny ability to pull out quotes and allusions from years back!). The accompanying picture shows how easy it is to get behind in this department!

I tried to work Sher’s Daybook system before writing this piece – I even dug out a nice artsy-looking old empty diary for the purpose – but I find that this two-page spread per idea is just too tedious (for me!). So my Scanner Daybook has degenerated as before into a diary where I can go on jotting down ideas as they come, and mentally slotting each into its relevant project slot (one longs for an automated categorizer like Lotus Agenda, a PIM which I have described in my www.doingtheDewey blog). Then as I get to doing whatever needs to be done in respect of each item, I can make a note of this ‘action taken’ and cross it off. Indeed, I find now that this is very similar to the diary I maintain for my financial activities (investments, major purchases) – while it would be great to have each item classified under different heads (fixed deposits, provident funds, savings certificates, furniture purchases, equipment, vehicles, and so on), what I have learnt is that it is crucial to just make a single serially numbered entry in the ‘daily’ book, with the date, value, and date of maturity and expected value wherever appropriate. Then I just have to scan the list once in a while to tend my garden (or attic) of possessions. As I convert one thing into another, or throw it away, I cross it off and enter a reference number for the new thing(s). I am now down (or up!) to the 500’s, that many transactions  having been recorded over the years!

So the Scanner Daybook in my case is nothing but a daily Ideas-book. I don’t exactly monitor my ‘projects’ here, but in case some activity develops further, I use another notebook to record notes, ideas, etc. regarding that subject. So Music, for example, has its own notebooks, Photography likewise. But my ‘daybook’ has a jumble of everything. One day I hope to cross off everything in the older volumes, but till then I realize I have a ‘Scrabbler’ rather than a ‘Scanner’ daybook!

Another idea that I really like is to set off specific areas of the house for specific activities or projects. I think this is more practical than organizing a single daybook for all projects together. It’s like each hobby has its own corner, like you would have separate sub-directories on a computer, or in real life a books corner (or room!), a carpentry corner (in the garage), and a garden shed (or box). Sher suggests making a Life’s Work Bookshelf to display the results of whatever you’ve done or collected in each field over the years, even if it doesn’t amount to anything earth-shattering.

Finally, of course, you do need to have some source of income to support all this happy hunting. The ideal thing, of course, is that you get paid to do what you love (become a paid travel writer or resort-reviewer, for instance!), but if it ends up looking too much like work, you may rebel! So there is the compromise of a ‘good enough’ job to keep you going. In my case, I was lucky to ‘stumble upon’ a profession that has a lot of in-built variety (the forest service), so I think I had no qualms about sticking to it for 38 years in a most un-Scanner manner, while I developed various interests on the side!

I’ll describe the other book, by Lobenstine, next post.

Books cited

Lobenstine, Margaret. 2006. The Renaissance Soul. Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One. Broadway Books, New York.

Sher, Barbara. 2006. What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything? A Leading Life Coach’s Guide to Creating a Life You’ll Love. Rodale International Ltd., London.

42 Doing many things at a time

There are times when one feels like ‘taking up’ or doing a number of major things all at the same time. Opportunities to be a ‘polyglot’ or a ‘polymath’ of this sort may have been limited in the past, when you took up a certain profession and stuck to it, but today with the enormous resources available at our fingertips, thanks to the Internet, opportunities abound. In fact, anybody surfing the web and coming across blogs like this is pretty sure to be a questing type themselves! 

In my experience, however, it becomes difficult to do take up more than one (or maybe two!) things seriously at a time, so some thought has to be given to the best practical way of applying yourself to a number of pursuits. I will share my own experience with this, and also refer to two books which I found especially insightful, The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine and another book with a longer title by Barbara Sher (see reference list at the end of the post).

Firstly, why would this be a problem at all? I can think of at least two major reasons. One is that we have to be able to earn a living (unless we have inherited ample wealth, which then has its own problems!), so there has to be a primary skill or competence that is the basis of our productive life. In practical terms, this means that we will have to concentrate on a narrow range of activities for the sake of the profession. This automatically limits the depth and intensity of our engagement with all other pursuits, making them secondary to the central profession.

A second consideration could be the limitation of resources: of time, energy, mental stamina, and of course money, plus our own individual capacities and capabilities. Of course there are inspirational stories of individuals who have overcome fearsome odds to excel, but then chances are that they would have made one thing their major goal. We are talking of a different attitude to life here, where no single activity or pursuit is considered overwhelmingly important, and a number of them appear equally interesting and feasible. How do we manage this in a single lifetime without an endowment of any limitless resources?

My own strategy has been to use the natural ebb and flow of activities in any career to accommodate diverse interests. The career one chooses (or falls into!) itself is often a matter of chance or the effect of pre-disposing factors (what one’s friends are looking at, the family or  clan traditions, the coming together of a certain opening with our situation at a certain point, and so on). Having taken up a career, however, one may find that it doesn’t advance in a straight upward line, but instead may circle around considerably in an apparently unproductive manner. Of course you have to give all of your energy and focus to the main job, especially in the initial period, but there will be times when things aren’t progressing that smoothly, when for one reason or other you find yourself in a sideline or backwater where nothing much seems to be happening, or you have to wait a couple of years for an opening, and so on. These are the periods in your life to develop the lateral interests that had to be set aside in your busy years.

This strategy is the ‘front burner-back burner’ strategy I have referred to previously. It has been helpful in dealing with certain difficult patches in my main career, and now especially after retiring (which could become a continuous bad patch without these additional interests and pursuits!). Indeed the concept of ebb and flow is relevant even for those intensely and passionately committed to a single dominant thing in their lives (the cause of conservation, or child or animal welfare, or helping the less fortunate, for example), as they need at least one alternative activity to manage stress levels and tide over bald patches. However, this doesn’t mean that one endlessly takes up new activities at random, because that would only result in a frittering away of one’s time and opportunities without achieving anything, a path to frustration and cynicism. So one has to have a limited set of parallel interest, say a half dozen of them, which are pursued over a lifetime, some more seriously. You have to choose the level of proficiency aimed at in each pursuit, of course, depending on your basic interests and the progress you are able to make. Some activities which you may have taken up when young (mountain climbing, for instance) may have to set aside as age takes its toll. That’s the advantage of having a tidy ‘portfolio’ of five or six different interests over a lifetime.

One caveat which I would like to lay out here is that these interests need not become a source of self-castigation if you don’t make good in them. You don’t really owe anybody anything for the time and resources you have invested in these pursuits (provided they are within reasonable limits, and not at the cost of your family and career obligations!), and every person is allowed a certain amount of goofing off. It’s like paying the proverbial tithe, except that this is to yourself and the nurturing of your inner spirit. Hopefully it makes you a kindlier, less frustrated person!

I have found, however, that even with these caveats, it is rarely feasible to develop more than a couple of activities or hobbies at a time. If you are doing some research for writing on a particular topic or theme, for instance, that itself becomes a major pursuit (apart from your job). If you want to bring it to some fruition, this would have to be given priority over a sufficient period of time. Other pursuits and interests would have to go to the back burner, or be bundled into storage boxes until their turn came up! Doing a Ph.D. or an academic course comes into mind as quite a challenging pursuit, for instance. The key here is that this has to be made the primary second string activity (besides your day job), and some adjustments may have to be made in your other diversions like TV-watching, hotel-hopping… and internet surfing! But it is entirely worth the effort.

I’ll review the suggestions in the books cited in the next post… and also say something about my experience with doing a Ph.D. in case someone is in that bind!

Books cited

 Lobenstine, Margaret. 2006. The Renaissance Soul. Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One. Broadway Books, New York.

Sher, Barbara. 2006. What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything? A Leading Life Coach’s Guide to Creating a Life You’ll Love. Rodale International Ltd., London.

41 Eternal vigilance is the price of survival

In the last post, I looked back at my experience of the CAG audit and how enervating it is. Mulling over these memories, I am struck by a single important ingredient in public service (government jobs): the crucial necessity of being eternally vigilant, even paranoid. Let me try and explain with some illustrations.

One of the unexpected facts of public administration is the ambiguity of the legal and procedural framework.  You would think that with over two hundred years of the modern bureaucratic state (well, maybe it is closer to a hundred and fifty years), all the rules and regulations, the laws and policies, would have been sorted out by now, tweaked and harmonized, fine-tuned and spruced up to meet specific objectives. This is the assumption that many of us start with in our careers. As I read the statement of a central minster about decentralized administration some time back, if only the objectives were clear, powers and procedures were unambiguous, and sufficient funds and personnel were provided at the start of every year, the panchayats (decentralized governance bodies) would be able to achieve results. It occurs to me that this is the plaint of every functionary and worker in the system. The reality, alas, is far different.

In the real world, objectives are spelled out in only the vaguest terms, and one has to give body and flesh to them as one goes along. The budgets and working rates are not approved and assigned at the start of each year, and the executive officials in the field have often to arrange interim funding themselves (sometimes they have to get the cash from the local moneylender!), in the hope that the funds will be approved and released finally (sometimes this doesn’t happen, and they are left holding the can, as the saying goes). Staff positions are usually half vacant (and of those in position, the dreaded 20-80 rule comes into play!). Rules are unclear, often contradictory, and court rulings cryptic. Administration, at least in the public sphere, therefore, is like weighing a handful of active frogs in an open pan balance.

For the controlling officers, the situation is one that constantly poses intractable problems and contradictions. Because they have to be constantly taking decisions that are on the edge of legality, they have to be constantly vigilant that they are covering their soft body parts (to put it delicately!) all the time. For those taking financial and discretionary decisions, the occupational hazard is enormous, because anybody can question them anytime (the immunity that used tto be given to public servants for decisions taken in the course of their duties, apparently ceases the day they retire, as they cease to be public servants from that date, according to a court ruling).

But constant vigilance does not mean that one can stop taking decisions. That will go on, but there has to be a constant vigil that somewhere or other, one is not making some serious mistake or overlooking some critical rule or policy decision by the competent authority. This entails a repeated study of the rule books, court judgments, and so on. Since one cannot do this alone, it calls for a certain amount of discussion and even gossip, which is what officials do when they get together and talk ‘shop’.

Here’s another interesting thought. Hundreds of papers or files will be passing through your hands every day. You may get only a few minutes with each of them. You will have to carry out all your due diligence on each and every one of those files during those few minutes that it crosses your path. That is the level of vigilance that is called for. You need to keep your faculties engaged and alert, and not allow yourself to relax even for a second, because something may slip past your guard. If you are not feeling up to examining each file as it comes, you should keep it aside or take a break until you are in the proper frame of mind. Sometimes it takes weeks or months for that to transpire. Behind every officer’s desk, there is usually a shelf where certain intractable files are stowed away until the gods send a message and a solution appears. That is what is meant by eternal vigilance!

Having said all this, let me hasten to add a mitigating thought. Especially if you are at a senior level, be aware that the file before you has probably taken a long and tortuous route to get to your table, and that the fate of many persons may be hanging on your decision. If you are uncertain about how to proceed, there is always the temptation to toss the problem into someone else's basket by referring upward, returning down for further information, or referring laterally. If the decision is something within your jurisdiction, try your best to resolve issues by discussion and consultation before sending the file away, especially if you will be able to do somthing good by taking a decision. Especially if you are irritated by spelling mistakes, get them corrected on the draft, but keep the file on your table! For it may take another few months for the file to move down and up the chain before it comes back to you and provides you an opportunity to make amends.

40 Dealing with audit

This is a totally different topic from the recent posts on saving and retirement. Getting back to dealing with the sort of challenges that routinely come up in one’s working career, this one is about dealing with audit, especially in government. People are generally concerned about how the public expenditure is being carried out, because it is about their money, collected through taxes; there is not that much concern about what private people and corporations are up to. Private audit, therefore, is all about certifying the accounts; audit of public offices, however, is about digging for dirt and catching the people on the wrong foot.

As a project director of one of our externally-aided projects, I was unfortunate enough to get involved with a “special audit” or a “performance audit” conducted by the central comptroller and auditor-general (CAG).

39 Become (and stay!) a millionaire

Here’s an extraordinary book which tells you how America’s millionaires came to be so. Stanley and Denko (both PhDs) in their book The Millionaire Next Door. The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy, demolish many myths or notions about the wealthy. Almost every line has a nugget of information, based on studies and surveys, that show how most of them accumulated their wealth the hard way: by working hard and steadily, minimizing expenditure, and saving and investing assiduously. The majority are self-made millionaires in their own lifetime, not inheritors of fortunes. The secret is that they don’t live like millionaires: they live in ordinary neighborhoods, drive ordinary cars, they maximize their assets (investments, nest-egg, cumulative capital), not their consumption expenditure, they are “compulsive” savers and investors.

38 Enjoy saving and investment – as a hobby!

The principle of embarking on a course for some intrinsic values rather than just for a material goal, suggested in the previous post (37 To find a purpose), has an application even in something as arcane as the pursuit of assets and a nest egg for retirement!

Consider the goal of attaining the accumulated assets we require to maintain our living standards after retirement, which can loom like a formidable mountain in the early stages. Like real mountain-tops, the more we advance, the farther it seems to keep receding (local guides, who know too well the discouraging elusivity of these things, keep enticing you on by cheerful assuring you that’s it’s just a shouting distance away – in Hindi, “haak-bhar door hai, sahib!”). We saw the arithmetic of it in previous posts (36 Saving for retirement – the professional view, and 34 Retiring comfortably, or your life term savings plan); but as you can see, it can be dry and enervating to understand how it works exactly, especially as there are so many conflicting factors: incomes, expenses, inflation, taxes, compounding, discounting, erosion of value, liquidity versus security, and so on and on. Then there is the drudgery of dealing with the petty bureaucracy and exacting paperwork of bank accounts and provident funds and insurance policies and income taxes. There is a temptation to give up the whole thing and let momma (or the government) deal with it!

The one sure way to take the drudgery out and instill even as dry an undertaking as investment and taxes is to approach it with the mindset of a willing student. In fact, make it a hobby rather than a responsibility! If it’s income tax, designing your own spreadsheet and fitting in formulae to do the computations, designing reports (however rudimentary) and so on can be an interesting exercise and a challenge to your computer skills. Once the templates are drawn up,  the drudgery is taken care of and you only need to post up the year’s transactions. Similarly, keeping track of your savings and investments – the fixed deposits (FDs), PPF account, and other instruments – can become confusing and exhausting if you don’t devise a tracking system (I have described mine: keep entering the items serially in a diary with details, dates, values and source and destination), amount at investment and at maturity, and then review frequently). This also can provide some engaging moments.

Tracking tax deductions, roll-over of matured deposits, and so on is also something that will have to be done on a regular basis. Filing income tax returns also is easier if taken as a hobby project rather than as an imposition. The challenge is to understand the rules of the game, devise our own ways of doing it, and the reward is the satisfaction of having achieved something to “beat” the system (not really, nobody can beat the tax department, but it’s good to think of it as a competition!). The same with shares and the demat account you need to work them: the joy is in beating the market, not so much in any profit you may book. My neighborhood baker was a share trader in Mumbai for twelve years, and his conclusion is that it’s a mug’s game: he made 12,000 rupees net profit (or loss, he’s not sure!) after all that effort. Now he runs a bakery for the challenge of it – again, the competitive spirit!

Just as in music,1 you learn for the intrinsic worth of it and not to gain audience appreciation, so too in building a corpus: once you get engaged in the intellectual pursuit of the process, you will be hooked, and will not feel the act of saving and the mechanics of investment as a chore. Of course, one should not go to the other extreme of getting obsessive about saving, and trying to pinch pennies at the cost of one’s comfort and well-being. It’s a long term activity, and should be a source of pleasure and learning rather than a punishment!

¹and in blogging!

37 To find a purpose

Getting off the subject of saving and investment, one of the fundamental issues in our lives is to find something to do, some goal worth striving for. I think one has to be a little discerning about the type of goals one fixes on.

A basic fact of life is that we are not very much in control of results, so any life plan that starts with a result objective is going to be dicey (likely to end in frustration). For example, if I set out to become a world famous performer – say, a musician like Ravi Shankar – I may end up trying to emulate his pathway to international fame and glory (some of it entertaining and gratifying, some painful and challenging). Unfortunately, there is little likelihood that I (or any other aspiring music learner today) will be able to reach even close to his level of achievement and creativity in precisely his way. Or if I set out to become the President of the USA. Or even a Nobel winner or the Best Blogger award winner of the year.

This may sound surprising, and a little self-serving, as we are brought up on the principle of striving for high goals, however distant, and not giving up. But the essential difference is that we are striving for certain external results in the above examples, which only one of maybe many thousands (if not millions) who set out on those paths can ever hope to achieve, and the non-winners are bound to feel disappointed and dispirited. So what is the alternative?

I suggest that we have to redefine the objectives to give primacy to what we could term the innate values in each of these fields of human endeavour. We don’t set out to get the world food prize (if there is such a thing!), but to address some problem in our neighbourhood – maybe collect unused food and reach it to orphanages. (It’s not something I am into, so this is just an example, not an exhortation). I learn a language to appreciate its literature, not become an expert and decipher a dead script (unless, of course, it’s my PhD topic!). I register for a PhD not just to become recognized as an expert (although that of course is a significant result of getting the degree, especially at the start of an academic career), but because I am getting interested in a topic and I feel I have enough material and ideas to develop the dissertation. I devote time to learning music not because I want an audience to cheer for me, but because I want to understand the grammar of it, the techniques of performance, and develop my own technical and imaginative skills. Audience appreciation would be a far lower priority. I keep a dog not because I want to show it off in dog shows, but because some innocent pup needs a home (I’m a cat person myself!). And so on.

This example of music is especially instructive. I have heard (and read) many accomplished musicians state the central principle that a performance is mainly for one’s own edification (musical appreciation or spiritual uplift), and not for the audience’s. Serious classical musicians see their study and performance as a way of spiritual renewal, communication with something higher and bigger, a form of prayer. Vilayat Khan, the sitarist, says in his performances that it is a form of prayer, ibadat, as does Bismillah Khan, the shenai player. Rajan and Sajan Mishra of the Banaras school of vocal music frequently invite the audience to join them in their meditation through the raga. They often perform with closed eyes, as if the world before them dissolves and they are in a vast inner space. This is the spirit which needs to infuse the learner, rather than learning a few set songs for impressing audiences.

The Bhagavad Gita, that central text for Hindus (and many others!) stresses the importance of effort without too close an attachment to the possible fruits of action. This is an acknowledgement of the principle that we are in control (relatively speaking!) of our efforts, but the results are at the mercy of so many other factors that we need to make only our side of it a goal, not the end results. This is not being ‘other-worldly’ or impractical, but just a way of remaining actively ‘in the game’ even though we know that results may not be one hundred percent in our favour.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can get away with being negligent or less than diligent. It only means that we may not get the worldly success and accolades that our efforts really deserve, but that should not throw us off our stride and cause unhappiness, because the effort itself has been a reward. This sort of approach shouldn’t be dismissed  as a loser’s rationalizations or as an example of ‘sour grapes’, because really if all that will give us satisfaction  is the first prize (or even any prize, most competitions would not attract sufficient participants. And that goes for the competition of life, because there are always people who are going to be better, faster, stronger, cleverer, and more successful than us. That doesn’t mean we all give up and sit on our haunches! 

One last comment is that while effort is to be valued for its intrinsic worth and for the value of the process, still some discretion and good sense is needed in setting even these goals. Granted we may be well aware of the improbability of becoming a Bade Ghulam Ali Khan (great vocalist), but if we don’t have a voice, we need not torture ourselves trying to become a stage singer (and our neighbours!). There are however different levels of musical expertise (just as an illustration, but I confess that I am also writing about learning raga music! here), and we could become a cultivated listener, musicologist, anecdotist, discographer, database developer, recording technician, even a critic, or a teacher, and so on without getting frustrated by our lack of singing capabilities. Similarly in all walks of life. We can be a good bureaucrat in our little office, without aspiring to be the Prime Minister, or an excellent club member even if we are not a Sachin, and so on ad infinitum.

36 Saving for retirement – the professional view

In a previous post (34 Retiring comfortably, or your lifetime savings plan) I referred to a pretty nice book by one Paul Westbrook, JK Lasser Institute (Saving for Retirement, Wiley, 2003), which deals with these questions in a professional manner. I’ll run through his main conclusions and see how my own home-spun analysis stands up.

First, the main points about the arithmetic of saving.

35 Passion versus pension

People sometimes make light jokes at my passion for a safe pension! The usual choice that become-great books advocate is: Passion over pension. This means, you are asked to follow your passion even at the cost of a regular income, because guaranteeing a pension essentially requires a long-term savings plan, which requires a steady income, which comes from a steady job, and so on.

Of course there are people who have made it good the hard way, after years of struggle and dedication, and we all admire them. Indeed, all the great things in the world have probably been achieved precisely by such driven souls – all the inventions, the great treasures of art and literature, great empires and also, sadly, great atrocities and disasters. These few thousand individuals in history have literally defined what it is to be human. The present series of homilies is obviously not meant for such individuals, who are quite unlikely in any case to be stumbling around the Web searching for stuff to browse. On the other hand, single-minded pursuit can often turn into an unhealthy obsession. What we are discussing here is meant for the remaining great majority, people who have a variety of likes (and dislikes), who have different expectations from their jobs, their hobbies, their pastimes, their leisure and work, and so on. For such of us, working a steady and long life at our jobs, our work organizations, and our careers or (if we are lucky) our professions, literally defines us. We do not get to define the world, unlike the thousand greats of history.

The wake-up fact for us is that there is rarely just one thing that we are meant to be doing in our lives. Interestingly, very few actually stick to the professions they got their education in. I haven’t come across the statistics (if I do, I will incorporate them here), but when I look at all the classmates in my chemistry batch at college, only a handful actually became chemists (professors, manufacturers, inventors, researchers of chemistry). Others turn up in unexpected places – one was finance secretary in the central government at the same time I was the head of the forest service! There are bankers, artists, activists, authors, analysts, managers… very few chemists. You get the drift… so what you did in college need not become your defining qualification, and you will probably end up doing a bit of many things over a lifetime.

When you are not destined for greatness in one particular field, you have the challenge of creating meaning for yourself in whatever you happen to be doing at a given period in your life. Even in a profession, where you would expect to be doing the same thing over a lifetime (thinking of surgeons or lawyers here), circumstances may conspire to give you breaks and changes in between. I was a chemist-turned-forester myself, and expected a lifetime of planting trees (this is meant a bit tongue-in-cheek!), but ended up doing many other things: cutting them, for a start, but also teaching, researching, managing companies, sitting in secretariats… even sitting in a foreign university doing a PhD (about which I will share my experience shortly!).

Instead of sitting and moaning about having to abandon one’s passion, why not get down to whatever is going on in our lives at the moment and applying ourselves to it with passion? Of course this can seem a bit synthetic and even heartless at times, as though passion can be poured out of a bottle, but at least dedication, enthusiasm, commitment to the organization’s goals and to the best interests of our co-workers and clients, can be good substitutes for the so-called passion we have to leave aside.

Here's another thought: there is a favourite ploy of greatness salespersons (self-actuation writers, that is) of posing the question: when you're dead, and find nobody at your funeral, what are you going to regret more: that you spent less time at the office, or at the home? (OK, that's a bit of a caricature, because when you're truly dead, there are obviously other things you're going to be worrying about; but only a little, because the question is ususally posed at your deathbed!). Now I know of very few persons who would be willing to swap a career of jobs outside the home, of business trips and parties, assignments and challenges, for a sit-at-home lifetime. There has to be a balance, of course, but the first thing every young person wants as they grow up, is to be rid of the control of the parents and relatives, and strike out on their own (financial assistance, however, being always welcome if it comes with no strings attached).

So when the question is posed in training programmes and public sessions, which will you choose – your passion or your pension – I usually cause some giggles by emphatically voting for the latter. With a pension secured, I may still be able to follow my real interests after retirement – like writing that masterpiece (which we all thought we would produce once we bought our first word processer!), but without the pension, there would be neither. So the  advice to those wanting to strike out on their own and follow their star, is to think well before giving up the “day job”… or abandoning the spouse with the day job! Which is why our talk about retirement necessarily involves long-term savings and investment plans, growth of savings over long time periods, and other such unexciting things!

(You could say I have a ... passion for pension!)

34 Retiring comfortably, or your life term savings plan

We’ve been talking rather glibly about retiring and having a ball (see Post 29 Retirement as “The Freedom Years”, Post 28 Managing retirement). But this sort of assumes that we’ve managed our savings and investment strategies, during our working life, sensibly. How much do we have to save to achieve this?

33 Finding the rhythm in our affairs

One of the keys to managing our various responsibilities and affairs (and I do mean the mundane type, not the romantic!) is to find a certain rhythm in them – and to maintain it! Let’s take a few examples to illustrate this principle.

Any job, say as a project manager, will call for a certain cycle of events: planning the coming year’s program and budget, submitting the budget and getting sanctions, issuing tenders or notifications, assigning works to agencies, reporting the previous year’s activities, calling mid-term review meetings and reports, preparing our own half-yearly and annual reports, and so on, round and round the revolving cage. Often we see people getting stressed out because they seem to always be lagging behind in this relentless cycle. But we don’t need to fall behind, as most of these activities or actions are pretty much pre-ordained. The smart thing to do is to start preparing for them in advance. For instance, we know very well that there is going to be an annual report of the previous 12 months due by, say February in draft form and by June with final figures (well, government works slowly!). We need to draw up the template right from the first quarter, filling up whatever figures are available, leaving columns for quarters yet to come and the totals for the year. The rest of the text could well be drafted in the course of the year: the background, the planned activities, the descriptive and background material, the heartfelt tributes and acknowledgments, and so on. The final task becomes all that much faster and easier at the end of the year, when we also have to prepare the annual accounts and close and balance the books. We saw a similar need for rhythm in mundane activities like planning the annual tax payments and filing returns in the last post. There is a similar value in having a rhythm in our daily cycle of activities, in balancing between work, rest and recreation.

This is in our working life. Something similar applies to our life on the whole. There is a rhythm, a periodicity, to the whole life cycle, and we need to go with the rhythm rather than work against it. There will be phases when things move fast, and we have to be ready to hop on: job offers, transfers and promotions, challenges, transitions, tensions to deal with. There will be periods when we will be learning, and periods when we will do things practically. There will be periods when nothing much seems to be happening, when life becomes flat and a bit of drudgery, when we will have to grit the teeth and ride through it. We need to pace ourselves accordingly, rather than flail against the course of things. We have to use the energy in our circumstances to gather momentum. There is not much use putting our shoulders against the wheel; a small nudge is enough, however, if we apply it in the same direction it is moving. This is the principle of resonance, where small increments applied in cycle build up the energy beyond expectations.

An institution, or a team, that has this sense of timing and rhythm, where the team members are able to coordinate their efforts, will perform more effectively. There is a palpable sense of  power under control in such environments, almost like the low throbbing of a powerful engine powering a huge ship along. 

32 Paying your income tax

Are taxes always a worrisome task in March every year? Perhaps you are not sure of the total income, you have not updated yourself with the current tax slabs and allowances, you do not have the record of deductions and savings … the list is endless. The way to avoid the end-point hassles is, of course, to start assessing yourself from the beginning. You can start by entering each month’s salary and deductions into a spreadsheet, and in my case this has stabilized as a complete tax calculation application with separate pages for salary, interest incomes, house property, capital gains (which is now empty because I have abandoned shares!), and a master worksheet bringing it all together. I save the newspaper of end-February which usually has the tax proposals, and the issue in end-March which has the finance bill as voted in Parliament (these are of course available on the website of the income-tax department nowadays, but having the paper version saves a little time). You can note down the changes in slabs and rates, deductions, and any other significant stuff (like concessions for senior citizens!), and start computing the tax likability from the start. By the third quarter, I start seriously paying up the anticipated cumulative tax dues in installments. This way, at the end of the year, there’s little calculation to do, and no standing in queues with other harried late stirrers!

Just a caution: make sure to check the calculations by hand (a manual check of the spreadsheet, if you are using one), as sometimes old data and formulas could be left behind and cause unexpected mistakes- like claiming too much deductions or using old slabs or rates of tax!

Why don’t most people do this in practice? One factor, I feel, is the general (and quite understandable) resistance to parting with any of our hard-earned moolah to the government. So the last three months’ salary is often entirely consumed by taxes, since the accounts department usually gets the provisional tax return from you in December. Actually there are also rules about how much of the anticipated tax you need to pay by each quarter (I think about half has to be paid up by the third quarter), called advance tax. If you haven’t kept up with these installments, the income tax authorities may even charge you interest on the quarter-to-quarter shortfalls (even after you’ve paid up the whole amount in March!).

I’m finding a strange problem nowadays because of all the interest income coming from the fixed deposits from the retirement payments. The problem is that the banks deduct some 10 to 13% as TDS (Tax Deducted at Source), but generally won’t give you the correct figures until after the end of the financial year (usually only by the end of June in the next financial year!). In the meantime, you have to pay up the balance 20% of the tax on your interest income, by 31^st March of this financial year. It’s difficult to get the correct figures of income since the banks are so busy toward the end of the year. In practical terms, what I do is to make an approximate estimate of interest accrued by multiplying the principal amounts into the interest rate for the appropriate number of months the deposit has been in force during the 12-month period, and I just pay it up before the year-end (I may have to encash a deposit or two to get the required funds). Incidentally, that’s another little ploy I have of keeping things flexible: I split my deposits into manageable amounts. I also have a system of making each deposit for a slightly different amount: say you want five deposit certificates, you make them for respectively 10000, 11000, 12000 and so on; this is a way of numbering them serially without assigning numbers. This avoids confusion about how many deposits are still there and how many have been closed, and also keeps the bank accountants from terminal despair!

Should you file income tax returns even if you are below the taxable limits? I personally feel you should, because it always helps to have your accounts audited and certified by the tax authorities every year (in case you need a tax dues certificate, for any reason). Secondly, it gives a good training ground for you to build up familiarity with the main rules, the process of preparing and filing the returns, and so on, when there are no high stakes involved. Then when you do start getting into the taxable range, you will not have a stressful learning curve. As the psychologists say, we feel the pain of loosing money more than the joy of getting an equal amount: that’s why if we learn later on that we have missed some exemption or other loophole in the rules, it makes us feel really bad. It’s wise to learn all this when we are not even in the tax net, so that we are prepared for better times when the taxman will come a-calling!

One last suggestion here: how do we find the money to pay our taxes? One sure thing is that if we postpone payments, they become more and more difficult. That’s why the income tax rules require the employer to deduct taxes at source. But as mentioned above, the TDS rates are usually only 10%, whereas you may land up in a higher tax slab toward the later part of the year, and then be forced to pay up your entire salary as taxes during the last two or three months. When I had multiple demands on my salary, I used a method that helped me budget my money without too much pain. I made columns for these different ‘heads’ of payment in my chequebook (there's usually a few ruled pages for entering transaction details stitched into each chequebook), such as school fees, loan repayments, household, savings, selfish pursuits, and of course taxes, and so on, and split up each month’s salary income  among these heads. Money withdrawals or cheques issued were also entered under the appropriate heads, and balance available also calculated head-wise. Of course sometimes one or the other head would go into the red (since sudden demands always arise), and then one has to make larger ‘appropriations’ for those heads in the next month’s salary. You will notice that this works for those getting regular salary; it beats me how business people manage their personal expenses, and increases my admiration for them!  

As a measure of abundant disclosure, let me say I have just paid up large sums as advance tax after closing a couple of my fixed deposits! 

31 Micro-managing your staff

I had a discussion the other day with a management expert who lectures in American institutes and claims to be advising the new Modi government (in India) on good practices. One of the things he was talking about was that as a tax-payer, he had the right to know where the government  bureaucrats who were being paid through his taxes (the secretaries in the central ministries, no less) were at any moment. He has, accordingly, advised the government to set up biometric checking in and monitoring facilities in the ministries.

I had to hide a smile. I did tell him, though, that I also had started off in my own career in the forest service with this sort of conviction. I took the daily attendance register very seriously, and got it to my table precisely fifteen minutes after opening time and checked off the late comers, and forced them to apply for casual leave (if they turned up) and threatened them with disciplinary action if their late arrival was chronic. And so on…

You can guess that much of my time and energy was consumed pursuing attendance. Similar close supervision was extended to other parts of the organization. After some period experimenting, and once I got into the saddle, so to speak, it transpired that there were so many things to do, and so many people and agencies to maneuver through and around, that it dawned on me that working this system entailed much more that putting in hours. I graduated to a different approach, where I tended to leave a long and lax rope, insisting mainly on work output and quality rather than hours and punctuality. The fact is that working to rule is simply not going to get results. Let me try to pick out the weak links in my friend’s argument. 

Firstly, the fact that we pay taxes counts for very little. If we actually strike a balance in our accounts, we will realize that a great many things are actually being subsidized in our daily lives. Our taxes are only a tiny part of it. In any case, my taxes (after all, even civil servants pay taxes!) will entitle me to a very miniscule part of our secretary’s time. Just because we pay taxes, that doesn’t mean that the secretary has a billion supervisors.

Secondly, it’s poor management practice to harp on these minor things. It is easy to hold the bureaucrat to account for his attendance, but it will cramp his functioning. Often, the bureaucrat has to be absent from the office part of the day, so that the normal work of the staff can be taken forward. If the boss is sitting around all the time, they will be sure to keep calling the office staff and getting in the way. Too much interference with the office doesn’t allow the work to go forward, and too much control on the bureaucrat also is likely to be similarly counter-productive.

Next, the secretary’s job doesn’t mean constant availability. In fact, no private company will keep their senior executives available all the time to the public. It will hamstring the civil servant from doing his job in a free and fair manner. Even the political boss has to be insulated to a certain extent, and in fact we need institutions and procedures which will take the onus of decisions off the chief executive’s back in the interests of his or her health and sustainability. If everything is short-circuited to his table, there will surely be a burn-out or physical collapse.

Finally, the actual work of public administration calls for ceaseless activity outside of office hours and beyond the call of the written codes and procedures. Work-to-rule simply does not work. Ordinary people rise to the demands of situations and deliver to the best of their abilities in challenging situations. They even put their lives at risk in certain circumstances. This sort of work ethics is fostered, not by nit-picking, but by developing an ‘esprit-de-corps’, a sense of being part of a special community (uniforms and dress codes are a part of this), of mutual regard and unquestioned loyalty. Nobody should ever think that they have single-handedly achieved anything (except maybe poets!), and the simplest achievement still demands the assistance, support and who knows what else from a long chain of persons and agents.

There are a couple of other facets to this problem of extracting work. One is the inevitable 20:80 “rule” (see post 11), which implies that a most of the work is going to be carried forward by a minority of the staff and resources in any organization. Related to that is the “rule” of fives (see post 12), which says that out of every five people, two will be highly effective, two will be uninterested or actively hostile, and there may be one in the middle who may swing either way depending on how you treat him and where he sees his (or her!) advantage.  Issuing memos and scolding will probably push him into the anti-camp. So it is your choice, as leader, to choose where you will expend the maximum energy. I have heard too many stories about (and from!) officers who embarked on a battle royale with individuals they considered bad eggs, to recommend this approach. It saps the leader’s energy, clouds his vision for the larger organization, leaves the hard working ones feeling neglected, and generally shrinks the organization’s stature and image. It is a classic example of a lose-lose strategy. Especially in government, where the time given to an individual in any position or organization is limited to a couple of years or so, it would be strategically wise to work on the strengths rather than try to set right the deficiencies. Let the last percentage points go!

I am so glad I retired before this biometric monitoring became main-stream. I let my staff also manage their schedules, as long as it did not hinder the work or the requirements of the public. I had no problem all the years I was head of institutions… and I like to think that their time also was made pleasant by the absence of clock-watching and nit-picking on my part. So my suggestion to the advisors would be to focus on the work, the procedures, and the output, and leave the details of attendance and discipline to the internal organization. 

30 Try not to burn your boats before you find your bridges

Ok, that may be too much of a mixed metaphor… but you get the underlying idea. In fact, it would be better not to burn your boats ever… even after you’ve crossed the river (which was the original proverb), because not only may you want to return that way sometime in the future (see what happened to Alexander and his men on their retreat!), but someone else may need to use them in the meantime.

Dropping the metaphor, what I am trying to say is that it is always better to keep some options open, even if you are pretty sure that you’ll never consider them ever. When I left my M.Sc. course in the last semester for the forest service, I was pretty sure that I would never consider taking up chemistry again or coming back to the institute. Fortunately for me, my father made a simple suggestion that I leave a note with the institute explaining that I was leaving for the service, and requesting them to consider allowing me to complete the course at some future date. As we all know, registration is kept alive for a certain number of years, and there is usually the option of resuming a course within the permissible time span. After my training period was over (that’s some three years!), I did go back and finish my last semester… and all on the strength of the little note I had submitted, which had been kept on my file in the department with the Head’s noting that I might be given a chance to complete the course when and if I approached them in the future. That M.Sc. didn’t lead to a career in chemistry, but I did manage to write a nice paper that integrated forestry science with the chemistry of natural products, and more importantly, provided a basic qualification for registering for other courses of study like the Ph.D. in the United Kingdom on a Commonwealth Scholarship. So this is a direct example of leaving your boat tied up on the bank after you’ve used it (as is the accepted etiquette, incidentally!).

Another context in which this adage is very important is in quitting places and relationships. It is always better to split up amicably, whatever your immediate inner feelings. Since nobody is really going to care about your opinion of them (do you take what others think about you seriously… especially your parents? I thought not), no good is going to come of telling them what you think of them before leaving. Don’t get fooled by the “exit interview” into disclosing your real feelings (which may not be all that palatable)… on the contrary, give a few compliments and say how valuable the association has been and how you will cherish the memories. If you do leave in acrimony, the news is sure to get around and you may be type-cast as a difficult character best avoided by future prospective employers. The crucial thing to understand here is that you are not going to make the other person feel remorseful by listing all the things they have done wrong. Any damage will be to your own image, and future prospects. Who knows, the person you imagine to be your enemy now may well turn out to be a well-wisher in the long run! This especially applies to parents and parental figures in general!

One last illustration of this curious phenomenon of things turning out differently in the long run: often the persons with whom you used to have the worst fights turn out to be the persons who remember you in later years! The old bosses who hated your guts all those decades ago (I’m sorry, that’s how much time I have spent in this business of managing life!) form a band of friendly old geezers in their sunset years. All they remember is that you were somehow closely engaged with them, a part of their life experience, and the specifics of your quarrels are often forgotten or overlooked. After all, how many people actually exist in this world who know you or knew you through all those formative years?  A handful, if I am not mistaken. I guess old married couples (at least in my generation) stick together on the same principle… much to the mystification of the youngsters!

29 Retirement as “The Freedom Years”

While we’re on the topic of retirement, there’s a cute book on “The Freedom Years” by Michael Shea (find it on Google Books) that gives a whole lot of detailed stuff about what to do after retirement, and most significantly, how to prepare for it. I call it a “cute” book (a rather unscholarly term!) on account of the decidedly cute, rotund Wodehousian character on the cover clicking his heels in the air, and in the cartoons by Frank Dickens throughout the book. It’s cute also because the author uses a free, conversational, friendly style that considerably reduces the foreboding effect of the subject.

The book argues that there is no law that requires everyone to retire at a particular age like sixty or sixty-five, and especially to settle for a life of inactivity even if one does retire formally. The health of seniors is much better than in previous generations, and we will have to manage our life after retirement just as we did our working lives, as it could stretch to decades with good health and energy. The author calls these the “freedom years”, as there are now few obligations or deadlines, and he advises us to take advantage of this, not by giving up and becoming a couch potato, but by using the time and opportunities to do the things we really love and could not devote time to all these busy years. He also terms this the “trailblazer generation”, as it is the first to enjoy such good prospects into old age, with all the developments in medical treatments and better health and facilities for fulfillment.

I like especially Chapter Four on “Switchover Tactics”, which stresses the importance of maintaining some structure in our daily regimen after retirement, and has a list of doable suggestions. I like the one on taking up favorite hobbies, joining courses full-time to explore subjects that had to be kept on the back-burner (and so on). This last is especially feasible for many of us, and will give us the structure in our daily and weekly program, and keep a worthwhile goal in front of us and finally leave us with a sense of achievement, plus an extra discipline in our intellectual armory that will expand our understanding of things and provide a different frame of reference to relate to. And it’s really important that the mind is kept active and open to new ideas and approaches: this will also reduce our sense of frustration with the way everything is different and how things are going getting beyond us (it was a Roman poet, who commented on how every generation moans about the youth and recollects the days of old with nostalgic fondness; we do it, and the youngsters of today will themselves grow over time into old fogies and complain about their younger generations).

An especially striking thought afforded by the author is the maxim of looking forward, and minimizing the nostalgia for the past. It should be quite obvious to us that the roles of leader, boss, dictator, or sage that we played (because of our grey hairs, age and long decades of experience, and seniority in the profession or organization)  are not going to be with us once we retire. It may be necessary to start again at a much more modest level in a new organization or activity (say, as a student again, or just an extranumerary or “adjunct” person), without feeling the loss of power and prestige. The thing to avoid is the temptation of hovering around the old place, trying to wangle oneself onto committees and stuff, getting in the way of our successors in office, continuing to play politics in the organization. That would be demeaning ourselves and facing an inevitable fall in prestige and goodwill in any case; far better to withdraw ourselves gracefully, and seek out totally different avenues for exercising our abilities and interests. “Our life still remains a journey, but we’re better off looking at it as if we’re entering a new world, with new scenery, options, excitements and challenges.”

The author gives us a timely reminder of the gap between the so-called biological age and the real age. Some people seem to age faster, others look younger than their real age not just due to their genes, but also by the way they have looked after their bodies (and minds!), their weight and bearing, mannerisms and level of activeness, and so on. In this context, I feel that some people just decide to start acting old: not getting up and walking around briskly, starting to expect others to fetch and carry, and exhibiting what my long-suffering wife calls a “learned helplessness”. These are mannerisms that are self-fulfilling: if we start acting as though we can’t remember things, we will develop a bad memory that much faster, and the same applies to not getting up off the couch, or taking the dog out, or walking to the store, and so on…


The Freedom Years by Michael Shea was published in 2006 by Capstone Publishing (a Wiley company), England, and reprinted 2007 by Wiley India, New Delhi. ISBN 978-81-265-1389-6 (paperback). (Find it on Google Books)

28 Managing retirement

I’m getting back to this blog after a hiatus of two years, during which time I’ve retired and returned from Delhi to my home and family in Bangalore. So I guess the first thing is to share the retirement experience!

First of all, I absolutely do NOT miss the job at the ministry in Delhi, and all the meetings and hustle and bustle and dealing with irritable and irritating people! I do not know whether this is a special feature of government jobs, but very few persons in similar circumstances have expressed any regret or longing for he old days after retiring. This has been a very pleasant experience, because the feelings of regret or nostalgia for the past seemed to have been a common thing in my father’s generation (I may be mistaken!).

One difference in the situation of persons retiring now may be that there are just so many more things to do, thanks to modern technology and the communications and information revolutions. There are more channels to watch, more web sites to browse, and many of my colleagues and contemporaries have taken to Facebook and such things with gusto. My generation has probably been the luckiest in human history (born in the 1950’s, we would be just post- the baby boomers, I guess): this is the generation that grew up in many countries at the beginning of the brave new era of self-determination and democracy (some countries like South Africa had to weight a while longer), a faith in ideals and in the promise of technology, and many new institutions and initiatives to take part in. In India, the middle class soared, with limitless possibilities through new institutes for specialized higher education and development  of science and technology; the performing arts, commerce and so on. This generation went all over the world,  and laid the foundation of the diaspora in the technological frontiers of the world, like Silicon Valley. The social scientists and intellectuals had not yet cast gloom on the party by their predictions of doom and mayhem, the shadow of religious fundamentalism had not fallen, rationalism and the scientific approach still held out promise and had not been eroded by the doubts of relativism and post-modernism.

Coming back to the post-retirement phase, a friend had offered the view that you can do anything you wish after retirement:  you can relax, or travel anywhere at your sweet will and fancy, you can read, write, take up courses, engage in voluntary effort, join clubs and societies, and almost anything else. All this, of course, assuming that you have prepared yourself and the family for the decrease in income and the withdrawal of support from the office or company. 

One way of doing this is obviously to plan your savings strategy right from the start of the career; some people say that you need to save only 15% of your income during your working years, but I am not sure it is enough; better to save the very maximum you can spare, so that compound interest rapidly builds up the reserves and soon makes up through interest for the inevitable halving of the pension or other official retirement income. The human tendency is to discount the future (termed myopia or short-sightedness in anticipation of the future);  so extra effort is needed to pay attention to distant future needs.

The other issue is, of course, to do with what is called life cycle planning, since one is not sure how long one is going to be alive; if one has a general pessimism about the life span, saving for eternity may not have much appeal. The only sensible approach, I feel, is to assume that you’re going to have a pretty long life (an eternal life, in fact); there is no use regretting vainly in the sunset years that you’d put by more. The problem here is, of course, that you may have to carry the accumulated savings to your last day, since you need the regular interest to see you through without seriously troubling your descendants. The corollary is that you will have to leave the accumulated capital to them, which is good in many ways, as it reduces your own temptation to splurge wildly and spoil your health, and it makes the heirs a bit kindlier and indulgent if they can look forward to a reward for putting up with your terminal foibles and troubles.

Retirement gives an opportunity to do all those things you never had time for: so enough of the excuses, get up and get going. A friend gave a novel way of looking at it: he calculated the number of days required for each activity, say personal health and hygiene, entertainment, managing the finances, drawing up income tax returns, attending to family get-togethers and social events, hobbies, and so on, and came to the conclusion that here would be no time to sit and brood! Of course, one thing to avoid is getting too closely involved in household matters and the personal lives of your family, especially the next generation; best to keep a wary distance and proffer advice only when asked.

So that’s the thing to do after retirement, of course always keeping in view that there’s going to be a long way ahead. Retirement is a start of a new journey, not the end of everything. As far as the erstwhile job and all its glories, let us comfort ourselves with the gratitude for having had it as long as we did, rather than pine for its loss; what’s more, all those who came after us are also going to be retiring soon, and within a few years the people we knew in our working lives would all be in the same boat with us, so the pain of comparing our lot with others will diminish and disappear.

(As a token of abundant personal disclosure, I have to add that I am improving my initial retirement years  by taking up reading and writing, which I could not develop systematically during the busy years on the job. Going to an institute solves the problem of being all dressed up with nowhere to go; I anticipate the need to travel to a work spot outside the home will diminish over time).

27 Every day is a new test

Many of us sometimes tend to “slack off” and coast along on the aftermath of past efforts, especially after a period of extra-hard work on a particular project or assignment. Let me amend that: it’s true of most of us, much of the time.  We feel entitled to a little rest, as a reward for all the work we’ve already put in. Then we are hurt and surprised when our little self-indulgence attracts adverse attention.

One of the hard facts of life is that we are being assessed and challenged every day, every hour, and demands and expectations are always waiting on us. Thus, the periods of self-indulgence we can safely allow ourselves are few and fleeting; we need to be dressed and ready for the world at short notice. Every day is a new test of our commitment, our foresight, our competence, our imagination, and our connectedness. Everything we have achieved and contributed so far can be reduced to nothing in the reckoning, if we are found wanting in the day’s challenge, in the need of the hour.

This fairly unforgiving nature of the world is the reason why months or years of plodding along do not justify a single bout of bad behavior. We will be judged by those rare, occasional outbursts and tantrums, not by our normal behavior and deportment the remaining 99% of the time. What people will remember us by, are those isolated incidents when we attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Since each of us will have at least half a dozen of those incidents strung along a lifetime, that’s how we will be characterized, described and judged. That’s why crimes of passion, incidents of road rage, and such rare occurrences attract attention, outrage and opprobrium. There’s no use saying that we were perfectly good and kind citizens and family persons, until that guy cut in in front of us at the intersection, making us lose control of our emotions and smashing up something or beating up someone in our rage. Or that we were perfectly mild and good persons except the one time we broke that guy’s head… and so on.

Even in self-defense, we are only allowed to exercise a reasonable amount of force. That’s why we are never justified in opening fire on a fleeing thief, no matter how much we may have felt violated. The principle, as far as I remember, is that the maximum damage our defensive action would conceivably cause, should be in proportion to the maximum penalty the offence would attract in law. Once the thief or pocket-picker has started running away, he is not a threat any longer to our immediate life, and therefore any action of ours can also not extend to causing a threat to the thief’s life. In my department, the first case used to be registered against the forest guards who opened fire, and they would have to prove the plea of self-defense. Sometimes they would have to cool it in jail for weeks and months on a charge of manslaughter, and we would be helpless in the face of the legal process. If the offence is a minor one, punishable with say a fine, then we cannot “take the law into our own hands” and mete out a much higher punishment in the form of bodily harm or assault, even in our own defense. This is a bitter pill to swallow, especially when we feel that our private lives or our basic rights to a peaceful life have been badly violated. But we are ourselves under test in such situations.

I saw a wonderful movie sometime back, about three generations of fathers and sons. I don’t remember the full plot or the actors (I think one of them was Richard Dreyfus, I will check it up), but the one thing that has stuck in my memory is the scene where Dreyfus, whose own grown but wastrel son has just run off with a new girl-friend leaving his little son behind, asks his father, “Dad, when does it stop?”. The grizzled old man, cradling the little boy (his great-grandson) on his lap, says, “Son, it doesn’t ever”. Once you are a parent, there is no quitting, it never stops. The more you feel you’ve done your bit and can now chuck the responsibilities, the more ready should you be to shoulder yet more. The inexorable law of the generations will not let you quit till death do you part.

So as we rise from our beds every morning (or at whatever time), we need to remind ourselves that the day will bring its own trials and temptations, and we need to be ready to face each of them as though it was our first. We don’t think, for instance, that all these years we never stole, and therefore if we did take a bribe today, it would be offset by all those years of virtue. No, sir, it will not; and what is more, if we are rude or dishonest or unfair just once in a blue moon, it will still be those instances that we will be remembered for, and not for the other 364 days of blameless behavior and  exemplary performance.

26 The downslide starts at… the pinnacle

When you were kids, would you take your bicycles out into the country-side and wander at will? The blue hills in the distance beckon, but as you crest hump after hump and coast down the other side, they seem ever farther away.  But those free slides down the downslopes are all the fun!

This is a metaphor which breaks down at this point, because sliding down the hill is not pleasant in real life! But have you noticed that in so many cases, the downslide starts soon after something has reached a pinnacle? Just when people heave a sigh and think they can now relax the rest of their lives playing golf or something, that’s when life has this nasty trick of pulling the rug from under their feet, and throwing them back into the pit.

I’ve noticed it often enough in technology. Look at music recordings, for instance: in the mid-1980s, LPs (vinyls) had reached some sort of peak of technical excellence, what with the digital mastering, transfer through ‘state-of-the-art’ audio equipment and tapes, and hi-fi playback models. And then quite suddenly they became out-moded. I remember one firm (I think it was Chevron) which was practically giving away the last digitally mastered LP free to anyone who cared to send the postage.  Then for a long time cassette tapes replaced the low end, while CDs took over the top. By the 2000s, tapes started fading away, CDs ruled. By this decade, even CDs have become passé. The internet and mp3 files rule the roost. A similar thing happens with computers, and computer media: look at the way floppys and micro-discs have evolved, till now we use the internet and chip-based memory sticks. At every stage, it appears that just as the technology seemed to have solved all the problems and you had a more or less perfected product, there were developments taking place in the shadows that suddenly came out and engulfed the ruling party!

Perhaps this is a character of Western technological society, with its constant drive to improve and invent, whereas the Eastern civilisations tend to keep doing the same thing over long periods of time. In administration, the old British colonial systems were so strongly ingrained into us (in India), that even today the lower functionaries still faithfully fill up the same forms and go through the same procedures. Only now, with increasing computerization, are we having to learn new ways.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a basic nature of change and development in human beings. Cultures which persist in doing the same thing over generations are seen as stagnant, unresponsive to changing environments, unmindful of fresh opportunities, and in the long run, unsuccessful. Some such thing seemed to have befallen the Neanderthals, for instance, despite their brawnier bodies and bigger brains compared with Cro-magnon (modern) man.

 It is when things are going really well, then, that the wise look around for newer and better things to do. They are not fooled or blinded by a period of success, which as we know is rarely a permanent state ascribable to our virtues alone (chance plays a huge part!). Constant paranoia and skepticism is the price for success. It is when things are going well, that the tough get going!

25 You’re not owed anything!

Many of us go through life with the sense of being cheated of our due. Especially with the post-modern post-everything self-oriented consumption-centric life mode copied from the New World, more and more people in hitherto sheltered cultures and societies are also falling prey to this syndrome. We grow old with the conviction that a lot of debts are owed us. We grow mad with frustration totting up all these amounts receivable (with compounded interest and service charges) and gnashing our teeth at how well off we would be but for these bad accounts …

We do so much for our children, but would you even have imagined the depths of their ingratitude… they don’t listen to our advice, but go off and do what they want! And when things don’t work out, they come right back… if a fairy godmother were to come this moment and give three wishes…

Really? You should be so lucky… What about the debt you owe all those generations that have brought you here? What about those ancestors who braved it through disasters and deprivations, and brought us through the eye of the needle, so to speak? When we start totting up the balance sheets, they are mightily weighed against us. We are merely returning a minute part of that accumulated balance when we do something for the next generation. There is nothing owed to us! The same thing applies to any service we render to our own parents, except that the argument is strengthened many fold because we should know better, and because we owe a direct debt of gratitude to them just like we expect our children to realize their debt to us.

When my own father was passing through his last days in the hospital, the doctor attending him observed and remarked that children who get the job of cleaning up their fathers at the end are indeed lucky, because there is no other way they can ever repay the debt of life… perhaps this is a sentiment characteristic of eastern cultures, but I think it is there in the traditions of all human societies.

 If you spot an inconsistency here, it is because the feeling of indebtedness has to be one-sided: the parents  should not expect their  children to feel in debt, but equally the children should not ignore their indebtedness to all the cohorts of their progenitors.

 That was just one example. If the same attitude of not being owed permeates  other spheres of one’s life, all the better. Does your boss owe it to you to give a leg up? Does your junior have to pick up after you and cover for you, or is it a big favor if he does? Does your spouse have to plan your entertainments and file your papers? Who owes you the daily shopping so that you can eat? Is society at fault because you get addicted? Is the television responsible for your sleep deficit? And so on.

Each one of us is occupying space and consuming resources on this planet that we have neither produced nor earned . The world, my dear Sir, and Madam, does not owe us a living.

24 Invest in a number of small things…

Here’s a ploy to beat the demons of boredom and greed:  frequent the altar of the God of Small Things!

First, let’s take boredom: it’s in the nature of human beings to take up things with great enthusiasm, but lose interest rapidly. Being a species characterized by intense curiosity and  a drive to go out and explore,  humans hanker after novelty and variety. In our humdrum lives, there’s very little of that (unless it is driving on a city’s mean streets), and even on our infrequent holidays, we are shepherded and cosseted by tour operators and hotel staff. When we are relatively young and unfettered, we can risk going out to undeveloped places without assured accommodation or return bookings, but when we have families, jobs, and taxes to pay, these things are pretty much decided beforehand, especially now that communication is instantaneous and almost universal.

What’s left is then, to explore the world of ideas and things around us. Fortunately, there’s unlimited opportunities for the first, through books, internet, and the media. The second costs money, so my suggestion is to get hooked on things which are cheap, rich in variety, and moderately difficult to get. That’s why collection of sets, whether it be of stamps (very old-fashioned!), or cinema posters (very retro chic!), or LPs (also old-world), or jazz CDs, or tea-cozies, or china figurines, or coffee mugs, or botanical specimens, and so on, is an excellent option.  Not only do they give the opportunity for search, stalking, and capture, but they also absorb hours of your spare time arranging, cleaning, cataloguing, and admiring them. And they need not cost an arm and a leg, provided you are not into collecting really costly antiques, vintage cars, or the like.

There is a link between this approach and the stability of systems. They used to say, in the 1970’s, that complex ecosystems are more stable, for instance.  The interaction of large numbers of different species, predator and prey, eater and eaten (phagal relations!), pests and victims, and a variety of specializations and adaptations to specific ecological niches, and complex symbiotic interdependencies, leads to a community that has many stabilizing mechanisms, many checks and balances. Tropical forests are like this. In contrast, we have ecosystems that have very few ecological niches, very few species, and simple interactions, which have few checks and balances, and are therefore relatively unstable. One species may expand so fast that it eats itself out of food, and then there is a population crash. The temperate forests are supposed to be like that, characterized by epidemic diseases and violent population fluctuations and cycles.

I’m not sure whether ecologists still swear by the complexity-begets-stability hypothesis nowadays, and it may just be one of those fanciful thoughts, like the end-of-history and the dawn-of-equality theories we had at the turn of the century. But where it concerns consumer behavior, it seems to be spot-on, as we all know that more and more of the same stuff bores us to tears. So my way is to get some small thing to keep the interest in life and living, alive!

There is another aspect to this type of ‘retail therapy’ for a sense of well-being. I know many people, good friends and relatives, who swear by the latest and best. They believe in going to the top of the market. Well, a choice has always to be made between costs and benefits, as the best usually costs the most. Firstly, we need to be sure that it’s really the best, and not some market hype. Secondly, we need to be sure that we really need that level of quality, or durability, or finish. Technology is changing and developing so fast, that very few consumer products remain useful or relevant more than a couple of years. Indeed, you can’t even get older things serviced or supported any more.  Sometimes the less costly choice may be more practical and useful if you take into account its useful life.

Thirdly, there is the blessed 20:80 rule again, which means that most of us do not even want to use all the options available, since we are quite satisfied by a small sub-set of them. In cameras, or computers, or cell phones, we don’t really want much beyond the basic operations; who has the time anyway! If you can’t understand how to open the case or switch on a system (it’s happened to me and a friend on top of a mountain range!), what’s the use of all the bells and whistles? What’s the use of all those gears and levers if you need to study a 200-page manual to operate it? So are we paying for the inventor’s fulfillment, or for our satisfaction? Indeed, we can even leave it to other, richer and braver, souls to forge ahead on the cutting edge of technology, and we can get by quite well on a slightly older model. Upgradation need not be done at every new release or model, and we can safely wait for two or three generations to pass by before our old model becomes useless. I’m thinking of computers, cameras, music systems, and the like.

Fourthly, there is the good old minimax principle, which dissuades us from putting too many eggs into one basket. If you put your entire savings into one big thing, like a house, it may be the last thing you will be able to do; the rest of your life may go in paying the mortgage and interest.  So prefer to divert your mind with a multitude of small things, and leave the big ones to the movers and shakers of the world!