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!

23 The Parsimony Principle in the decision process

Here’s a very interesting take on the decision process: the Parsimony Principle. Parsimony, without referring to the dictionary, is the art of making more with less, of extracting the last bit from a thing or activity, of achieving the most with the least resources. In this respect it is not different from the efficiency principle or maximizing returns and minimizing costs. But it goes beyond that; it implies, in life decisions, the principle of reducing the demand for resources, and is concerned with avoiding needless activity. It therefore refers not only to the ladder (the means), but also where you put it, the wall you want to climb (the end)!

I heard a very instructive story from an associate of yore (he retired to farm pigs, and I’ve not been in touch for some years!) that nicely illustrates the Parsimony Principle. I may say, in fact, that I owe this insight to his story. He was a man who liked to befriend judges, and they depended on him to sort out things with officialdom. One such exalted personage asked him to get an exemption from octroi payment (that’s the taxes they levy on the border between states or provinces of a country) for a new fridge he was getting from the neighbouring state (to take advantage of a lower sales tax, perhaps). My friend’s reaction was: Pay the five dollars! To get the octroi waived, he would have had to approach every rung from the State headquarters down to the guard at the last gate, and the personage’s name would have had to be dragged through the mud and muck of all these offices. So, just pay up, and do not grumble! This is an admirable application of the Parsimony principle: keep your influence and contacts for the big things, don’t fritter it away for a trivial matter!

 One aspect of the way this principle works itself out is in getting things done:  go to the lowest level feasible. People often pride themselves on ‘going straight to the top’, for instance if your coffee is not piping hot, you will phone up the Chairman of the airlines or hotel chain. This only establishes your own inflated sense of your self-importance, and not your importance as such. I once overheard just such a self-important bozo berating a girl on the ground staff of the airlines for a 15-minute delay in the flight: he was asking her the telephone number of her Chairman to complain. I remember one of the things she said: I work in this job because I love to serve, and not just for the pay. Going to the top, or threatening to do so, only exposes  you as a jerk, and does not elicit better service! An honest approach to the guy (or gal) on the spot usually works better.

Another story illustrating this principle: as the police verification for my wife’s passport was taking time, I was tempted to go over the head of the police constable responsible for this right to the Police Superintendent. To tell the truth, I wanted the certificate without my wife actually being in that place (in station, as they put in official-speak). The top man, far from expediting the certificate, hauled up the constable for taking up the case without the physical presence of the subject! The constable later came to me and reproached me for going over his head; for showing extra smartness, when he was doing it his way and would have got us the certificate on his own time. It’s a different story that we finally got the passport with the help of a Foreign Service uncle; but at the field level, it doesn’t pay to be too smart, or ‘over-smart’ in the local idiom!

These are just stories, but the principle is that you choose a solution that makes maximum use of existing resources before going to new resources. Often, we want to change the whole system, instead of tweaking the offending small portion of it that is causing the problem. Ever since the economy was given a fillip by reducing tariffs and liberalizing the issue of licenses, people have started asking for major ‘structural changes’ rather than ‘business as usual’. But this may be enormously wasteful of resources, and play into the hands of those self-interested persons who want to milk the system for their own windfall gains. If there is a damp patch on your wall, for example, you will investigate its cause and perhaps realize your drains need cleaning, rather than breaking down your whole house and rebuilding it. Your contractor may, however, like to inveigle you into scrapping the whole structure: beware the slippery slope of home improvements! Similarly for other things in life.

The 20:80 'rule' (post #11) is in fact another nice illustration of the Parsimony principle. If we can make do with that 80% of what we want out of something, we need only invest 20% of the resources that would be required to satisfy all our imagined wants. As Gandhi said, we have enough to satisfy all our needs, but not our greeds. The cost of satisfying all our greeds is a whopping 80% of our resources; a parsimonious approach would satisfy 80% of our desires (by no means a self-denying satisfaction level) with one-fifth the resources! Who said you cannot have it all and retire to a happy holiday home?

To summarize, search for the simplest explanation and try the simplest fixes that will demand the least resources. Go to the lowest level at which your work can be done. In science, also, those hypotheses have the greatest chance of persisting that require the least number of special assumptions and can explain the largest proportion of cases with the least number of exceptions. It is termed ‘Occam’s Razor’, I believe, in the jargon of the logic of scientific thinking.

22 Pay the five dollars!

Many years back, I stumbled upon a delightful piece in that venerable, and much maligned (by the intellectuals), magazine Readers’ Digest, titled “Pay the five dollars!”.  In essence, it said that there are situations where it is simply not worth arguing or fighting, one complies and carries on. A traffic offence,  for instance: a cop pulls you up because you didn’t stop at a light, or you touched the zebra crossing, or you started moving when the lights were not yet green (the last happened to me!), or because he has year-end targets to fulfill. Of course you could try to contest the cop’s charge, or you could demand to make that phone call to your lawyer, or you could call the entire police force corrupt and demand to talk to your MP… or, you could pay the small fine and whizz off (decorously) and carry on with your life. You need not even wait around for the receipt, but thank the cop for being such a devoted public servant, and ask him to mail it to you!

 Among the many amazing things about life, it is remarkable how a small negative offsets all the positives, affecting  our entire enjoyment of life… the whole trip spoilt by a small traffic fine or by a blown tire or even less, a whole meal spoilt by a slightly chipped dish, and so on. Part of it is probably our sense of dignity, of self-worth; we feel most keenly, not the minor inconvenience or imperfection, but the implicit affront to our sense of self-importance. Such things are not supposed to happen to people-like-us. We do not like to be bundled together with the herd.

Economics has a theory for this syndrome, and they try to explain why a given loss looms larger than an equal gain in normal human psychology.  It says that the marginal utility (the satisfaction you get from the last unit of something consumed) of anything keeps falling, the more you have of it, so that your tenth strawberry  ice-cream isn’t as interesting as your first (at one sitting, that is!). The working out of this principle of diminishing marginal utility compromises our whole outlook on life. It diminishes, or discounts, the value of what we have, and makes us hanker after what we are still to acquire. This also may explain, incidentally, the twists and turns in affairs of the heart (and why an astute lover will play hard to get!).  It also gives us a strong hint that we should count our blessings, since human nature generally tends to devalue or under-value what we have in our desire for new things. It also relates to the 20-80 rule: although 20% of our possessions may satisfy 80% of our wants, we still hanker after the unattained 20% because it has such a high marginal utility in our eyes! It also explains why one man’s nectar is another man’s poison… it all depends on how much of it you have already! It also explains why the home-grown  chicken is like porridge to our taste (to paraphrase a pithy Hindi proverb), and why the richest magnates in our country spend so many millions to build the ugliest mansions in the world… they have such a surfeit of pretty things around them!

 Coming back to the original theme, the principle here is to minimize the hassle factor, and just pay up and get out. We are not going to win every time, in business or in the daily exchanges of life, so we may as well learn to cut our losses in good time, not throw good money after bad, and so on. There is also a wonderful concept in Economics of the sunk, or historic, cost, which I feel deserves a piece by itself, but which tells us to let bygones be bygones, and measure each transaction afresh, without reference to the past. There is also the question of how much baggage we want to carry around in our lives; will we be so affected by small defeats, that we will fight to the finish for every single thing? Or will we toss out some small losses as part of life, forget about them, and carry on with our lives?

21 Why we should be slow to judge

The thing which amazes me nowadays is how judgmental people have become in public life. Whole professions have developed around casting aspersions, such as the RTI activists, the serial public fasters, the media bloodhounds, and so on. All the talk is of how others are useless, and this has bred armies of the idle self-righteous. A lot of retired persons have jumped on to the bandwagon, a panacea for their boredom and irrelevance.

There was a time not so long back, that people realized that good and bad are not distinctly distributed. Each person is a bundle of both, mixed together. We were told to examine ourselves first, before passing judgment on others.  My favourite story is that of the father with three boisterous kids on the train. When asked why he didn’t keep them in control, he replied that they were just coming back from having the mother buried, and the kids hadn’t still realized that she wasn’t coming back and that their lives had irrevocably changed… he was allowing them an afternoon of carefree play before the reality hit them, as it would…

So we need to be careful in passing judgment, even in our minds, for we do not know what is passing over others’ lives. There are many examples of this idea in the wisdom literature of the world. The most familiar is Jesus’ advice to judge not, that we be not judged. Let him cast the first stone, he said, who has not sinned. In today’s world, on the contrary, we are all too eager to make examples of stray individuals, in a form of witch hunting or scape-goating, on a whole range of scales from a small community or group, to relations between nations. The accusers are often no better than those they accuse and revile.

Popular judgment is often a form of gossip-mongering, which can make or break individuals without possibility of restitution or revision.  This is all the more reason that we should suspend judgment if we are not sure of the facts. In my own experience, for example, the way the media project developing events (or non-events, too, for that matter!) need not have any relation to reality. The media often create their own news, or their own version of matters. Film stars and celebrities, of course, are frequently at the receiving end, but because the news channels constantly need to find something interesting, even ordinary people like teachers and doctors and ward assistants become grist to their mill. So we need to take all this with a slight pinch of salt, or a healthy dose of skepticism.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should be completely neutral between right and wrong, or that we should ignore or condone wrong-doing. But modern democracies do have a rigorous division between different roles, such as prosecutor and judge, or law-maker and law enforcer. We should not collapse these roles unthinkingly, the way the public media are prone to do.  The judge listens to the accusations, but he is not swayed by emotion; he can afford to take a broader, dispassionate view, thereby preserving a sense of proportion in meting out punishment. We do not say “off with their heads!” for every small infraction; there is always a second chance given, a fresh start possible.  To err, as they say, is human; every one of us is undoubtedly guilty of some sort of crimes, small though they may be, which could attract severe penalties if pursued to the logical end.  The separation of accuser and judge, therefore, is a crucial one in modern civilized societies, and any dilution of this will lead to over-zealous application of the law, oppression of the lay people, misuse of power by functionaries, and dysfunctional societies.

One of the sobering things about post-modern life is the realization that any person or society can fall into grievious error. The most civilized, god-fearing society in the most enlightened part of the world, may (in fact, did) come up with the most efficient killing machine that finished off common people in the millions as an act of national duty. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee, said the poet. Smugness in our own virtuousness is the one thing that we cannot afford to adopt. It was shown ordinary, normal students could be induced to administer lethal shocks of electricity to innocent experimental subjects if they thought they were under orders from a white coat; the propensity to obey persons in authority seems to be built into us, with a corresponding readiness to suspend our own moral thinking. That’s why we should be slow to pass judgment, and why our judgments should be laced with compassion and understanding rather than with the red-eyed self-righteousness of prophets.

20 When do you have the right to get angry?

The short answer is … never. I’m sorry to have to cut to the conclusion right at the start, but it’s as well to make the point up front.

But surely, one would say, there are situations in which one has to get righteously angry at the wrong-doer? This sounds plausible, but it is a mental trap. It assumes that there are black and white in right and wrong, and worse, it tempts us into searching for ways to classify parties as right and wrong. This is especially true in situations where we are ourselves emotionally involved, such as family problems, work situations, national affairs like war and peace, and… but you get the idea.

There are, in my experience, no situations in an average life, that will not be made worse by losing our temper. Whether it is family, or colleagues at work or play, or strangers in the world outside, the moment we lose our temper, communication breaks down, a barrier comes between us, and our capacity to influence or even just communicate, is reduced considerably. If we do it often enough, people start shunning us, or going out of their way to avoid certain topics or situations with us; they will assiduously find ways around and behind us, leaving us wondering why we are always left out.

Not losing our temper, not habitually getting angry or using angry words, gives us considerable leverage in finding ways to work together to find solutions. It increases our influence, even with people we see as wicked, corrupt or stupid. Since, by definition, almost everybody else would fit one of these descriptions, this means that our influence with pretty much everybody in this world will increase!

Many of the principles already discussed apply here: the principle of minimizing the maximum damage, for instance, since hurtful words spoken in anger cannot be taken back. A lifetime of trust can be savaged by a single angry outburst; the damage would be very difficult to salvage. The fact is that none of us harbours consistently kind thoughts about others, even our closest friends or family; but there is no need to share every twinge of irritation or frustration with others, especially in moments of irritation. Always go through life with the principle of minimax!

Another principle is that others don’t really owe you; and moreover, they go through life doing things without necessarily thinking of how you will be affected. There is no use expecting them to live their lives around your convenience, so equally there is no call to be losing your temper about them. In fact, very often our view of things is not the only one that can appear plausible; an impartial observer may be much more even-handed in how things are seen. So it is always better to allow for our own wrong-headedness, and not get on such a high horse in our mis-guided self-justification or righteousness, that we cannot get off it without falling! In fact, it is best not to feel righteous, as it can back you into all sorts of horrible corners, like a friend’s dad who didn’t talk to his family for twenty years; he may have passed on without explaining his silence, which probably arose in pique turned into anger.

The other man, we feel, should know why we are angry and should apologize to us first; since the other man, unfortunately, couldn’t be less bothered about placating us, the world goes on its merry way regardless, leaving us festering in our own pool of righteous anger. In fact, anger does more damage to ourselves than to anybody else; if nothing else, it puts up our blood pressure, leaves us exhausted, and may predispose us to all sorts of stress-related physical ailments like heart disease or diabetes. Even if we have to dole out punishment, we need to do it in a non-angry or righteous way; we should be sobered by the consideration that there, but for the grace of God, go we too.  

19 They’re not doing it to you – they’re just doing it!

One of the toughest lessons we need to learn in life is that most of the time, people are thinking of themselves, and not about others. To understand this, one has only to observe and monitor one’s own internal dialogue. The implication of this is that most of the time, people are just not thinking of you and how their actions will affect you; there’s just carrying on with their lives and deeds in their own world. When these ‘people’ also happen to be your close family and friends, it hurts all the more… but that’s the truth about life.

Just in case you are thinking that you will be able to influence, control, or transform others, it would be as well to accept that they are not really going to change as we wish, unless they’re actually looking for change. It is of no use working against the grain; that goes for our children and spouses, extended family members, subordinates and superiors, and the world in general, too…

Of course there have been persons who have exerted a strong influence on the course of events and history, and on their fellow humans. One problem with them is that they have been so sure of their own ideas, that they have usually ended suppressing others’. With the best of intentions, those who go through life thinking they know best, cause untold grief and suffering, It takes close on a hundred years for the world to come out of their shadow. Beware the reformer! Beware the persons who subscribe to the philosophy that it’s our job, not just to study history, but to make it. They are one short step from megalomania and despotism.

In our families, in our work places, things will not go as we planned them, people will not behave as we would wish them to. Does that mean we should just put a lock on our tongues and become non-entities, push-overs, limp rags? Not necessarily; but our reactions should be seasoned with detachment.  We react to what the other person is doing, we give a little ‘push-back’ so that they don’t ride rough-shod over us. But we do this without a sense of personal recrimination; we do not allow ourselves to start disliking the person for what they are doing to us. We do not go to sleep fretting and fuming over this person, we do not stay awake half the night plotting revenge. We reason that these persons have something to gain, and obviously the mere fact of my being in the way is not going to deter them. They owe me nothing; I should not interpret their actions as directed against me, as much as for themselves. We assume that they are mostly innocent of any specific hostility to us, we understand that it's not that they care less for us, but that they love themselves more.

This is linked to the concept of ‘mens rea’, the guilty intent, the state of mind, in law. Actions committed without an actual intent, are excused, even if they end up in damage to others. Some such concept should guide us in our reaction to obstinate children, selfish spouses, ill-advised relatives, nagging parents, uncooperative colleagues, and in general a world that spins on as if we didn’t exist! 

18 Why parenting and mentoring are so tough to do

As anybody who has ever been a parent, or even been in a position of mentor, will know, these are among the toughest things to do in life. Barring a few cases where the mentee is totally attuned to the mentor, which perhaps obtains only in fanatics’ training camps, the fact is that the individual is always questioning and questing. No amount of telling is going to convince them, unless they convince themselves.

Although  our telling is not going to change them, we still have to do the telling. This is the source of the mentor’s tension and frustration. If we don’t tell, it will all come out much, much, later, and probably not in front of us. If we do tell, it is apt to fall on deaf ears or closed minds. Indeed, classical musicians, ustads, if yore would refuse to take on a student until they were convinced of their devotion and strength of aspiration. In some cases, the student would have to wait at the master’s gate for months; in others, he would be admitted, but made to fetch the water and light the fires for years before starting the actual teaching. The student obviously would have his own ideas, which would challenge the master’s authority; indeed, they had a rule that the student would not perform on a stage, as long as the teacher was around! Teaching a performing art like music is probably even more difficult than mentoring for life skills, as the teacher has to sit through the pain of tortured swara (note) and laya (tempo).

It’s difficult because teaching, or mentoring, or parenting requires constant tongue-biting, choking down our immediate reactions, and letting the student learn from their own practice and self-criticism. You have to put a ‘stone on your heart’, as the Hindi expression goes, when dealing with the learner’s clumsy attempts. In spite of all this, in the end, nothing may come of it all. As Khalil Gibran said, you have to treat your children (and, by extension, your mentees!) as guests, and your guests as your children. That is, it’s best not to expect that those you are trying to teach, or bring up, will turn out as you wish, or even that they will use your inputs the way you, as teacher, would expect. They are no longer your property, either your ideas, or your mentees, once you have given your inputs or given expression to your ideas. They will both develop the way they are fated to, outside your sphere of control.

17 The ‘mousetrap’ mind – cages you and closes off your options

Have you observed people’s minds chugging along quite reasonably down a train of thought, and then suddenly closing up… almost like a mousetrap closing shut on its victim? A person will be discussing options for study, and suddenly they will say, of a slightly prestigious academy or, say, study abroad, ‘but that’s not for me!’. One person thinks they can never learn to drive; another that they can never get a job in a big company. You can see their minds suddenly closing shut, and they are trapped in this non-negotiable cage of their own making.

The sad part is that to the outside observer, objective facts simply don’t seem to make the self-defeating conclusion at all obvious or inevitable. One would like to say, but why don’t you just keep an open mind about it, and give it a try, even if nothing were to come of it. As they used to say to the question, are you a man or a mouse, give me a piece of cheese and you may be surprised. In this context, just give it a try, and you might be surprised at the result; at least you wouldn’t have the eternal regret of never even having tried.  Unfortunately in today’s world of political correctness, you’re not supposed to tell other people what you think of them, but to only support them in a totally non-judgmental manner. You are also not allowed to tell a person that they could be better than they are, because that would demean them and only invite the retaliation, what have you done with your life that gives you the right to advise.

The result is that these people lose out on the opportunities that abound in the modern world. By not setting out the pros and cons objectively on a piece of paper, they jump to conclusions. Their mind closes in like a mousetrap, and nothing will then permit or induce them to reconsider. They will, equally, change their minds all of a sudden in the future, and will probably ultimately live in regret. And all through this, they will never understand how they came to this state. They will live their lives of quiet desperation in unreasoning and incomprehension.

16 Regret: a most futile pastime

Of all the thoughts that pass through our minds as we go through life, the most futile are the words “it might have been”… as the poet has sung. We torture ourselves with the phrases “if only…” and “I should have” (the famous triad of Woulda, Coulda and Shoulda in typical American short-speak!). Regret is especially corrosive and self-destructive, because almost by definition it’s usually the case that nothing can be done about it, nothing that will change the past or set it right. You can only writhe helplessly in the talons of this demon, and blame and curse yourself into an early grave.

Of course persons who have been positively malicious or vicious have a lot to answer for, and we are not talking about such situations. We are referring to normal every-day human beings, who go through life with the best of intentions, who are not perfect or even consistent, who have their individual hang-ups and eccentricities, who affect others in various ways, who blame themselves for a number of things that happened, and a few that didn’t. My own father, for one, used to sometimes slap himself on the head and mutter some imprecations against himself… mainly calling himself a fool, for instance! He had not got to the stage where he could forgive his own failures, as he saw them.

The fact is that most of us are not in complete control of what happens, even within our immediate family circles, leave alone the greater world. On the other hand, we do have to constantly make choices, with reference to ourselves and others, which are going to have repercussions and consequences. How then can we go through life without constantly having to blame ourselves, or on the other hand becoming insensitive to the consequences of our actions?

Taking as a given fact that we have to act, make choices, many of them on behalf of others, the only way is to adopt consistently a decision policy known as minimizing the maximum potential loss, or the minimax criterion. What each of us will be asked, when we are called to the Final Judgement, is not whether we have been blameless, or whether we have never caused any harm, which of course is an impossibility in this imperfect world. What we will be judged by, is whether, in the same situation and with the same information, a well-meaning person would have acted the same way. This is why intentions are so important in judging our actions; we can all be wise in hindsight, but it’s much more challenging to give good sane advice before the act, on a consistent basis. 

If we did something with the express intention of humiliating or punishing someone, out of a sense of outrage or righteousness, for example, such acts would be suspect. There was a famous novel which was quite a cult during my student days, where the rich mother sends an art critic to her art-afflicted son in Paris, to tell him he has no talent; the son dutifully returns to take up the family business. When somehow he comes to know all this later (I think the mother herself crowed to him about in one day), he is furious. The last straw comes when he finds out that his loving girlfriend had also been paid by Mummy to befriend him in his painterly odyssey; that girl also conveys to him that the critic had actually been quite appreciative of his artistic talent. This realisation of his mother's betrayal and manipulation, leads a total breakdown of his self-image and self-identity, and he kills himself. The mother might claim she did all this for him; but it is not admissible to do something like this, which would predictably have enormous consequences if found out, without even consulting the person who would be affected. 

In my experience, the more we try to live others’ lives for them, the more mistakes we will tend to commit, because it is most difficult to know and understand what is happening in another’s heart. If the potential down-side, in case of things going wrong, would be a complete collapse of trust and self-identity, any person taking such a huge risk would have to take the blame. You do not send out your army with blank ammunition and paper coats, without taking the blame for their decimation.

Things will still go awry in human affairs, but if we have chosen sensibly, with the need to choose alternatives having the minimum potential loss in mind, then even amidst failure and disappointment, we can do away with the corrosive feelings of regret and guilt.

Despite all this, in every person’s past, there will still have been certain acts or omissions, that ultimately are our responsibility. If they have caused small damage, and we have learnt from these instances to avoid certain types of reactions, then we should accept our blame and carry it through with humility and dignity. If we have not tried to learn and reform, we should acknowledge our negligence even now, and make amends, if not to the original victim, at least to others who may cross our path tomorrow.

Young and adventurous persons make fun of the minimax principle as leading to a dull, safety-first approach to life. They must be reminded that their choices for themselves are not taken in isolation, but have repercussions on the lives of others. They have to make a choice how much they want to risk; but then their parents and care-takers must equally avoid the feeling of guilt if things don’t work out.