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. 

15 How easy it is to make ourselves miserable…or happy!

This one is a simple no-brainer: we can make ourselves totally miserable, just thinking of all our ills, all the things we should have got, or done, or had done to us, the things that got lost, the deals we missed, the commissions or compliments we had to pay others, and so on.

It’s equally easy to make ourselves happy, or at least less miserable, by not thinking about these things, or by thinking the opposite type of things. Easy to say, but human nature being what it is, one loss outweighs all the gains: we tend to dwell on the negative, probably an evolutionary trait that must have been good in scanning the neighbourhood for threats to survival. Persons with a very strong long-term memory system (women are said to have this type) obviously have a tougher time doing this. 

I would look on those lost deals, the tips paid for poor service (or none at all), the wasted advance payments, the unrecoverable loans and unrequited gifts (including your first love affair!), as just paying your tithe in life! There has to be a certain amount of friction in life, that converts energy into useless heat; similarly, there are losses in transactions over a lifetime. Things don’t ever balance perfectly. The fact that you have your limbs and eyes and hearing is itself too much... you’re already far ahead in the game! All the rest is a bonus… and I say this from harsh personal experience, not as a general platitude.

Granted, these bits of “wisdom” sound like a string of homilies… but if so, they’re homilies, or bits of the experience of living, that have been propounded and expounded over the millennia, and have been tested and found effective. I will come to some of the old literature by and by, but in the meanwhile we can easily extract what little lessons are possible, from our own day-to-day, year-to-year experience.

We’ve seen people in front of our eyes, day by day, ruining themselves by doing some or all of the things we’ve been talking about… maybe they’re our loved ones in our own families! Maybe it’s your friend’s old man who had shut himself into a well of silence for fifty long years… maybe it’s a child who grows into a brat and then goes off the rails… maybe it’s a colleague at work who complains so much he has no time for anything else… we observe, we think about these things, and we draw lessons for our own conduct and attitudes.

14 Why it’s good to have hobbies..but not too many!

The front burner--back burner approach  often becomes a necessity rather than just a virtue, because most of us have to get on with making a living, but often harbour other interests, or even passions, that we are forced to relegate to a lower priority. Also, there are periods in the best of careers that end up as a gap, a hiatus, in our lives, with perhaps nothing to do and no public role to play. 

This happens to the best of us: I was reading a book by an eminent police officer, who in fact even became a Governor, but at points in his career he was made to wait months for a posting because he had displeased the bosses. Often these hiatuses occur because our bosses simply aren’t interested, and not necessarily out of any malice afore-thought. So in our working lives, and in the in-between gaps (not least, after the final good-bye when we retire), we switch the pots from the back-burner to the front. Some of these pots are our hobbies and other interests.

In fact I’d say it’s essential to have a hobby or two, to tide over these dry spells, which are as inevitable as rainy days in our lives. We take them as an opportunity to develop other parts of our inner lives, our skills, our knowledge, our circle of friends and acquaintances, our store of experiences and stories. It could be something challenging like a genre of music, or an art which absorbs all our faculties, or it could be a day-to-day activity like arranging our possessions, cleaning and refurbishing our house, and so on. It could be anything, and it doesn’t have to be too intellectual or physically demanding. It could be the regular stuff we do in our lives, but taken up in a more focused, mindful, and learning way.

The one hobby which I would caution against is the consumption of over-refined and pre-digested stuff, whether it’s food or entertainment.

This brings me to the last part of this piece, the coda or tail: why would we have to guard against too many hobbies? For we often hear that there can never be “too much of a good thing”, and having hobbies is definitely a good thing.

Well, one reason is that we, normal, every-day human beings, have to maintain many types of balance in our lives. We have families, colleagues, and society depending on our carrying out certain tasks or functions regularly. That’s our mundane, day lives, which we cannot exchange entirely for a sizzling night-life of bohemian activity and self-indulgence. In the long term, purely self-gratifying activity fails to sustain and satisfy our inner desires for order, meaning and significance. Our lives become meaningful only in reference to our immediate and extended family, community and society, the absence of this being the main cause of the post-modernist sense of alienation and “anomie”. Too many hobbies will take us away from that important but mundane parts of our lives, leaving us feeling even more frustrated and futile.

A second reason is that hobbies satisfy by engaging us fully, as producers in howsoever a modest fashion, and not just as consumers. That’s why watching TV is not a hobby (it’s also not a good activity in general!). If we don’t achieve a certain level of competence, howsoever modest, in our chosen field, it leaves us unfulfilled. We like to take a brush and produce a painting, and not just look. We want to get behind the camera, not just pose for it. We want to write a story, not just read other peoples’ work. We want to travel and see new places, hear new languages, not just see it on the screen.

A certain minimum amount of time is required even to become a discerning hobbyist. It’s often said that the difference between an amateur and a professional, is nothing but ten thousand hours of concentrated application; the difference between a passive consumer and the knowledgeable amateur should be some fraction of this, but still requiring a substantial investment of time, effort, and, let’s face it, money. So it’s better to have a small number of serious hobbies, than a phrase-book worth of random diversions. Even the back-burner has to be attended to, howsoever low the flame, lest it boil over!

13 Have a short-term plan of activities!

One of the most useful hints I ever got was from a young politician, who didn’t have any sophistications or advanced degrees in management. He happened to become a first-time Minister  for the Environment, while I became a first-time Secretary (a civil service, or bureaucrat’s, position) in the same department. In the first flush of enthusiasm (power and position are such energy boosters), I told him of my 2-year planning horizon, to achieve this, develop that, envision the other. That’s when he gave a bit of sage advice... he said, who knows, in two years’ time, where you and I will be, why don’t you first draw up an action plan for next two months. After overcoming my initial chagrin, I realized the merit in doing that, although in my heart of hearts I must have harboured a bit of resentment. His words, however, turned out to be prophetic: in a few months, I was out of that position (environment is a hazardous portfolio!), and he followed soon after… so whatever we left behind, was what we achieved in those few months.

This is often the story of most of our lives: just when we are getting going, it’s time to go! Or rather, let me say that we often start feeling a surge of energy just around the time that events—and our dear comrades and colleagues-- are conspiring to hive us out of our position. So we need to come to every new assignment with a pretty good idea of what we can achieve in “the first 90 days”, as the leadership mantra goes nowadays. Using another metaphor, life is what happens to us even as we are planning for our life… go figure!

How then do we relate to long-term goals, which from all accounts are what give us meaning and consistency in our lives? Here is where a corollary of our 20:80 rules comes into play: the front burner--back burner approach. Be aware of the long term, but in the meantime be focused on outputs in the short and medium term. Why I relate this to the 20:80 rule is that there is a very similar thinking involved here: the 20% of stuff we actually have some degree of control over can satisfy pretty much 80% of our life goals (of course, the numbers are not precise, maybe it’s 25:75 or 30:70, but the idea remains). The remaining 80%, which to our mis-aligned psyches looms larger than life, can well be relegated to the back-burner. We don’t need to completelt forget that part, but we could relegate it to a background activity of general data collection, background research, traveling, with a view to hearing, seeing, and collecting references, analysis, and so on. These activities, which form a bed for the flowering of our more immediate actions, can and should continue throughout our life.  It will gradually influence our active life, and who knows, may even become a foreground activity at some point in time.

At the risk of sounding stylistically incorrect, let me add a few more metaphors. Fortune favors the prepared mind, but there’s no sense planting in the wrong season or in an unprepared bed… as the Preacher said, there is a time to sow, and a time to reap. In life, as in growing flowers, we need timely actions, combined with the patience to wait in the long term, like the gardener… we don’t keep pulling up the plants to check on the growth of their roots!

 

12 The Rule of Fives: deploy resources effectively!

This is a principle closely related to the 20:80 rule. Just as a minor portion of our acquisitions can satisfy the bulk of our requirements, so are our human resources not equally effective. The trick is in recognizing which are those resources that are the most productive. In the sphere of human resources in a work place, the principle translates into the Rule of Fives.

To put it simply, out of five persons, two will be quite productive… the 40% that are contributing the most. Two will be positively negative; and there will be one in the middle who may go either way. The principle of Fives helps us to marshal our own managerial resources and energy into working with the better 40%, and working on the middle order 20%. What of the unproductive 40%?  The principle suggests we should avoid wasting our own limited managerial resources on the most difficult persons. In other words, here is one more situation where avoidance is better than confrontation…

This is not what is usually advocated, and not what most of us would do in a work place… especially a new one where we have been given a managerial role. Most of us take it as our job to identify the slackers, the trouble makers, the resisters, the non-contributors, and GO AFTER THEM. We build up dossiers, we spy on them; we track their entrances and exits, we try to find out what they are saying about us. We try to stay one step ahead of them. They need not even be very senior or ‘important’ persons in the hierarchy… a troublesome clerk, an indifferent driver or peon… any one could cause your ulcers to act up.

Our waking hours are filled with a sense of foreboding, and our sleeping hours are disturbed by dreams of what these people are up to behind our backs. We focus so much on the negative elements, that our positive energy is sucked out. We are unable to devote much time to our good and willing people, which means that they lose out, we lose out, and our organization or company suffers.

The huge importance given to the bottom two, only strengthens them in their negative activities. You have to accept the bitter truth that it is almost impossible to change people by force: suasion. The bottom two may appear all wrong to you, but perhaps that is not what it appears to others, and definitely not to your peers and your superiors, who obviously want to hear only bad things about you, and will aid and abet the rebellious two, forming a conspiracy against you. Perhaps top management sees these two as being difficult only with you; maybe with another manager, these two become efficient, whereas a different set becomes unproductive. Therefore, you would be much better off leaving those two alone, and getting on with the two good guys and working your arts of persuasion on the guy in the middle.

Have you ever had people who would contribute better by not coming to work at all? Since your power to hire and fire will be limited, sometimes it requires you to give some vague job and send such people off without hurting their feelings! Part of your art as manager consists of containing these people, rather than contending with them. This is also the reason why, if you need say ten good working hands, you will have to carry some extra weight… maybe not 40% of your work force, perhaps, but surely not less than 20%. I believe the older corporations used to create fancy positions for their senior people just to keep them out of everyone’s hair! That’s why God invented the golf course…

11 The 20-80 Rule and the way to joy on a budget

I first heard of the 20-80 rule from Robert Callaham, retired Chief of Research of the US Forest Service, in 1993, in a management development program he gave along with Colonel Pathak from Innovative Consultants Combine, Pune. The second context in which this principle was quoted and illustrated in great detail, was on Robert Monaghan’s site on medium format photography "medfmt.8k.com”, where he demonstrates how just 20% of your equipment satisfies 80% of your needs. Photo enthusiasts being often “equipment junkies”, they continue buying stuff long after they have covered their normal requirements, making it a needlessly costly hobby. We have even coined terms to describe this affliction, such as “Nikon Acquisition Syndrome (NAS)” or its sibling, “Canon Acquisition Syndrome (CAS)”, brought on by endlessly poring over glossy brochures and analyzing different models. No doubt this is the case with other hobbies and professions too, since men do like their tools and toys in all cultures!

I wonder whether you have noticed how house procurement invariably leaves you in a situation of bankruptcy. Very recently, there was an item in the newspapers that the child actress of an internationally acclaimed film shifted from her little place in a slum to a one-and-a-half room flat that cost… hold your breath… 40 crores or 400 million rupees (used to be roughly 50 rupees to a dollar); it just so happens that this is all they could scrape together from all her film earnings and the donations into a trust for her (I live in a house which cost me and my wife some 15 lakhs to build… it has five, admittedly small, bedrooms). The most important thing in her life now is that she is going to a mainstream school and learning English.

But she (or her family) is not alone in sinking everything into one major investment; every one of us puts their entire life’s savings into a house, plus a hefty sum over and above that, leaving them broke and indebted for life. If you have 25 lakhs (a lakh is a hundred thousand), you will beg or steal another 5 lakhs to build or buy a house beyond your capacity; if you have 10 lakhs, you will contract to spend 15 lakhs. Prince or commoner, we are all broke and in debt, because as you build your house on a budget of 20 lakhs, there will be enough temptations to push you into the 25 lakh bracket. Or higher… “you only build once”! The fact, however, is that much of the additional expenses are to please someone else’s idea of who you should be. At the end of it, not only are you broke and anxious, you also cannot enjoy it… either you have no spare cash, or you have to rent it out to meet the payments, or you’re ready for a nursing home, or it’s just too big for you as the children leave. You say that it is an investment; but not only can you not easily convert bits of it into cash as you need (and where will you live if you’ve sold it), but actually the physical structure is more or less a liability that detracts from the value of the land it stands on; any appreciation is going to be in the land value, not the building.

The building contractor will always tell you to make your budget, and be prepared to add at least 20% to it. You would have been better off spending 20% less than the budget by cutting out frills, reducing your debt, and spending the cash on a world cruise.  Also, the budget grows to pull out all the money you have, which is why the first question you will be asked is “how much do you have to spend”, rather than how many rooms or bathrooms you want; which is why you should always quote a figure considerably lower than what you have in mind (he’ll get there, never fear!). Once again, 80% of your needs are probably being satisfied by just 20% of the expenditure… the rest is icing (in house building, that’s called doing up the “elevation”).

Very recently, I realized that whole books have been written about this specific subject*. The burden of the story is that most of our stuff can be dealt with by a small fraction of the resources we can commandeer, so we should go through life with a sense of abundance, not one of poverty. What does it matter that you don’t have the wealth that the As and the Bs command, if the end of it is the ugliest mansion in the whole world, be it ever so tall or however close to the edge of the ocean? Your cottage is more comfortable and prettier by far, and leaves you enough resources to enjoy it and pay the bills!

10 Dealing with difficult people…the smart way!

I can hear murmurs that all this is very well, but how can anyone remain continuously benevolent and forgiving in this world… surely one has to keep harsh measures for bad persons, and not be uniformly benign. I have many things to say on this, but here let me share what I have learnt and developed after a lifetime of dealing with… DIFFICULT PEOPLE!

There are basically three ways of dealing with difficult people: aggression, assertion and avoidance. The instinctive reaction to people who get our goat is to retaliate, lash out, give as good as we get, pay them in their own coin, show them who’s not a pushover. The problem here is that we are not clear about our objectives… the end is not in view. People are not easy to change in their convictions, and the more aggressive we get, the more defensive and self-vindicating they are going to become (and the more vindictive, too, sometimes). One thing we can be assured about is that the closer we get involved with them, the more we are going to get sucked into their idiocy. We have to really be clear how much of our time and energy we want to put into trying to change someone else. We may try convincing them to a certain extent, but then we will have to back off, as further engagement can often prove costly for our own health and survival.

In most engagements in the world of living beings, there is a choice between flight and fight: “he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day”.  Animals often have ritualized jousts, which provide a winner without risking serious injury or disablement to either party. This is the story behind the cat’s nine lives.

In human affairs, too, avoidance is after a point the optimal policy. Difficult, vindictive, and misguided people are all round us, and the best we can do for ourselves is to leave them to live their own lives, to stew in their own juice, while we carry on with ours. We are not responsible for their lives! But we always leave a window open if they want to come around… we never, as far as human foibles will allow, slam the door in their face. The best result is achieved when we follow a consistent, perhaps one-sided, long-term policy of being ever prepared to forget and start afresh… this is also evolutionarily the most beneficial, as the chance of positive associations is always available, whereas if we shut off permanently, we lose the gains that might have been garnered from such collaborations.

This doesn’t apply just to bosses, but even to those ‘under’ you… never under-estimate the damage that can be done by the lowest of your ‘sub-ordinates’, or those who are now abjectly dependent on you, such as powerless children and those on the receiving end of your petty powers. So try to establish collaborative, supportive relationships in all directions.  Your aim would be to not give the world any vulnerable points for their hooks to catch hold of you and yank you around: whether it is your bosses, or your juniors, or your clients, or your family. The mantra will be ...avoid, avoid, avoid. Combined with the 20-80 rule (later!) and the rule of fives, this will help you increase your overall effectiveness, or at least reduce the factors conspiring to bring you down.

09 Building up your life’s credit balance

I like to think that each of us starts out with a certain credit balance, bestowed on us by dint of membership in the human race. As we grow and travel through life, we are constantly interacting with our fellow humans, other living things, the forces of nature, and negotiating with the Fates and the Furies… playing our percentages, juggling our few chances, giving and taking.

Each one of these interactions has the potential of adding to this balance… or of drawing it down. When we are very small, the human race looks on us with a bemused tolerance and affection, finding us charming and lovable, even when we gurgle or worse down their shirt fronts. We can safely keep taking at this stage in our lives, without drawing down much of the bank balance. As we grow, however, the community becomes less tolerant, more critical. If we persist in being childish, we will soon find our credit dwindling. At sixteen, the plainest Jill or Joe looks winsome and handsome, with all the promise of a lifetime ahead. Anyone can find admiration and romantic attachments at this age, a quirk of adaptation to propagate the species. Gradually, however, we find that this potential contracts, options grow ever smaller and fewer, and soon we have to start putting back into the bank by serving others, kowtowing to the community, conforming to the rules, and serving in our slots in society.

Children are one-sided consumers and demanders, but even they have to start replenishing the balance one day, if at least by making themselves less dependent on their families and more self-sufficient, and finally independent.

As we pass through our working and family life, we have a choice at every moment. Every meeting, every interaction, every discussion, can be the source of increasing and replenishing your balance of credit, or if you convert them into adversarial confrontations, arguments, or contests, you may well be drawing down the balance at every step. This is brought home in today’s web world by instant feedbacks that establish and grow your reputation in the community, no matter that you don’t actually come face to face. The question is, how do you replenish the balance, increase the credit,  and reduce the downdraft? How do you arrive at the later stages of your life with a huge credit balance to last you through your sunset years, when your capacity to add to it may be much less?

The answer is that you’ve got to put in, during the years of maximum productivity and influence. In many ways, this is no different from building up your pension fund! The more you let go, give away, or let go during the years of maximum activity, the less you will have to worry about at the later stages. The less you stand around for immediate recompense, the more the stock is going to grow, and the richer you are going to be in your years of need.

08 Life will let you know when it’s time…

One day, you will probably know it’s your last cigarette, or the last time you’re going to do something, maybe get drunk, or shout at your wife… life has a way of letting you know, by itself, without strenuous action on your part. It may be sudden, or more usually you may have a sense or premonition a few days ahead… but the time will come.

I like to think that we have a certain life quota of these things, and we gradually use it up, as if it were a debit account at a bank. We’ve certainly heard of the parable of the talents, and how each of us is started off with a certain amount to our credit. I like to think that this applies even to bad habits or self-indulgence… we eat and eat greasy food, and one day we just don’t want to any more. We rush around madly to places and people, but again one day we know we’re not going to be doing that any more. I like to think that one day cigarettes will quite suddenly lose their hold over you, because you’ve just finished your life’s quota!

When you see a loved one not giving up some habit, therefore, I think you should not fret too much… the day will come when they would have run through their life’s entitlement of that particular form of self-coddling, and you don’t really have to do much, except safeguard them from life-threatening situations!

There is a book of the Bible which goes by the name of The Preacher, or Ecclesiastes, which has one of the most beautiful and haunting lyrical passages in the wisdom literature of the world: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven; A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

It goes on like this, enough to make you weep; but the ultimate message is, why do you labor in vain when God knows everything and will bring it all together… Suffice it to say, in the limited context of this piece, that all things come to an end, including the smokes and the booze that is your lot in life!

07 Small rewards can be habit-changing!

There is an added value to the suggestion of giving yourself small rewards intermittently, apart from taking you out of your blue moods. It is actually an effective way of changing bad habits and establishing better ones in their place. I am especially thinking of breaking an addiction like smoking, at least it may work for some people (it did, for me!). And its less painful than many other methods people have tried!

It works like this. Every cigarette is obviously costing you a tidy bit of money, especially over the course of the day. Firstly, stop buying or carrying full packs… just buy one at a time to cut down the frequency, though it may seem a bit contrived and bothersome at first (and it gets you some walking exercise, assuming of course that you don’t drive to the corner shop!). Then, for every cigarette less that you smoke (because you don’t have a pack or half a pack with you, you can’t be bothered to walk to the shop, or you consciously restrain yourself), give yourself a bonus…mentally or physically, by putting the change into a jar. You’d be surprised at how the savings mount up.

Sit down and calculate how much you’re really spending on your cigarettes. As you cut back on your smoking, once a week go out and get something with the cash you’ve saved. For me it was LPs or books…one a week. For you it may be something else. Over time, hopefully you’ll be less obsessed with your smokes (don’t tell anyone, but there have been times in a misspent youth that we’ve actually crawled around picking up butts off the roadside!), and will have a glow of anticipation for your next book or whatever (till these real things last and are not replaced by digital substitutes!).

There is another sure way of quitting smoking, which I have successfully used twice: a complete change of scene. For me this was my stints abroad. The first time, I’d be damned before I shelled out a couple of pounds for a few fags (equally for a cup of coffee) when I was only getting ten pounds a day as student allowance (and it probably cost one-twentieth back home). Then I came back, and my friends forced me to start smoking all over again. The second time, I stopped smoking again on the flight out, and this time, when I came back after three years, I told my friends to go jump in the lake. It’s been some twenty years now, and I haven’t even touched a cigarette… but then, I do have an awful lot of music and books!

06 You need to create your own reward system

Humans have three levels of motivation in the Greek system of thought, according to Fukuyama: apart from the thymotic urge for recognition, which the government or other large bureaucratic systems are basically weak at providing, there are fortunately two other levels: the baser urges, for things and enjoyment, as well as a higher urge for knowledge and thought. Remarkably, Indian philosophy also recognizes more or less the same three-fold partitioning of human nature: the baser spirit of tamas, the intermediate one of rajas for glory, and the higher one of sattva for knowledge and self-realization. The quest for glory and recognition being more likely to bring you to grief through the vagaries of fortune and the machinations of jealous colleagues and inimical forces, the wise government servant concentrates on the other two, and thereby builds up his own reward system that is not dependent on how others respond to him.

The tamasic urges are easily satisfied by buying or possessing things, travelling to see new places and experience new things, eating out, and so on. It is best not to get too deep into these things, however, as it may push you into a constant competition with others and lead you into all sorts of temptation. It is best to keep your spending within a manageable limit, and make small forays into the market to give yourself small intermittent material rewards. A weekly outing, by yourself or with a good companion, will help to keep the blues away and set you up for the next week of faceless toil.

The sattvic, or higher, aspirations are easier to pursue without being drawn into bad habits. A simple approach is to take up some subject of interest as a hobby, or pursue higher studies in it through self-study, distance learning courses, and so on. I’m not trying to be funny here: it is actually a great way of spending your spare time, and gives you a focus outside of your day job. It may even provide you an alternative group or community to interact with, and is an ideal way to baby-sit yourself in those not uncommon spells of enforced idleness between assignments that each of us will fall prey to in the course of a career. It may also provide the basis for a great second career after retirement!

05 They’re just not that much into you!

One of the first things I did as an officer-trainee in an All India Service was to take an autorickshaw right up to the porch of the training institute to report before the President (of the Institute, a grand old structure built on the model of a ceratin English manor house, but I could equally well have tried to go and report to the President of the nation).  They told me to go to the school and search out the caretaker of the hostel. That’s the first lesson I got in the long journey through my career, a journey that’s lasted some 38 years and been a continuous learning experience.

Lesson No.1: They’re just not THAT much into you! You’re  a bright young fellow or lass, who has probably been pretty good at studies and sports and cultural activities, and were probably used to getting a lot of recognition, accolades, certificates, prizes, and so on. Your entering the Service has been the culmination of all those years of study and toil. You’d expect that they would appreciate your efforts, appreciate that they are getting a person of great talent and promise. You’d expect to be treated like a somebody.

Unfortunately, that’s not what you’re going to get. For the huge plant or warehouse that is Government, you’re just one more name in a list, one more cog or nut in the machinery. The huge effort that has gone into the selection process has culminated, and the rest, as they say, is history.  Which repeats itself from batch to batch, slowly moving you along the assembly line until you are ready to drop off at the far end. They have neither the time nor the inclination to get to know you personally, as an individual, your aspirations, hopes and fears. All they can barely manage to do is to find you a place in the huge system, move you from time to time, and see that you get your salary and increments on time. The actual work that you do from day to day matters little, as there is a larger system to make up for slackers and dampen down zealots. The huge ship of state moves on in its slow, stately fashion, as it should, and individuals don’t matter.

Once you accept, even embrace, this reality, much of the pain of not being recognized will go away, or at least become bearable. This goes against the grain of our inherited selves, as public recognition is one of the prime movers of humans, and indeed of many other species too. As Fukuyama describes in his book The End of History and the Last Man, it is this urge, called thymos, that propelled human individuals, communities and nations into deeds of valour and quests for glory.  In our system of thought, too, we talk of this as rajas, the spirit of the rulers. Maslow talks of the hierarchy of needs: having satisfied our basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, we look for the higher levels of fulfillment, which come from effort, achievement, and recognition. Since the system is just not geared up to meet these higher needs, if you are really expecting these rewards, you will be sadly disappointed. The answer to this existential riddle lies in our second lesson...

04 We keep searching for approval

Do you remember when you were a kid, you would keep on tugging at your Dad's sleeve and telling him, look, look? No, I'm sure you don't, but your own child is probably doing that right now (or that pesky neighbour's kid maybe?...).

Some of us (who am I kidding...most of us!) never really grow out of that state of mind. Our Daddies didn't have much time then, and the substitute daddies we look to... spouses, bosses, friends and neighbours, the adoring public, the office girl, our own kids...don't have much time for us either. They'll humour us some as long as they're getting something out of us, but even that may be too heavy a price to pay...how many times are they going to listen to the same joke and the same off-tune song?

Maybe Western societies have a lot more positive reinforcement, but many other cultures are rather dismissive about lesser persons, children of a lesser god as it has been termed by Arundati Roy, and family status, wealth, class and caste are often stronger determinants than an individual's own efforts. I'm not saying this is good or fair, but operating in such a hierarchical, highly judgemental society does require a certain hard-boiled approach to rewards and recognition. What you see is not always what you get.

If you really seriously wait for approval in such a society or organisation, you may end up unfulfilled and dissatisfied. This is especially likely in large bureaucracies and government, where relationships tend to be short-term, hierarchical, and one-sided. On the other hand, you will be pulled up if you slack off. The problem is to keep on slogging without positive responses...difficult for the average person.

So the response here is to take work as its own reward, just like the Bhagawad-Gita says. It's also very fulfilling in the long term, leads to a sense of independence, self-worth and professional competence. And who knows...it may even bring you some recognition at some stage! Conversely, though, let us try to be generous with our own approval...a tough task, especially if we do not agree with the other person's choices in our heart of hearts...which is why Daddies find it so difficult to say, Shabhash, beta (Great, kiddo!).

03. Almost everyone thinks they’ve been cheated of happiness!

There are those who thrive in this world, and then there are the Rest of Us, which I suspect includes almost all of us, except for the hundred richest families in the world. Even they don’t seem to last more than a couple of generations, and I am sure they all have some less than happy members. I hope someone finds an interesting bit or two here. I know I’ve tried this stuff on family, but they’re not buying. They’re not very happy, either. Which figures…so this stuff comes without warranties, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis!

Ultimately, every one of us craves happiness. It would perhaps be more helpful to say that we all want to be happy, rather than to get and hoard happiness like a commodity. We want to remain happy, experience a state of well-being, all the time. We obviously didn’t get this in our lifetime, so we try to secure it for our children by getting all sorts of things for them, and trying to shield them from all pain. We get our children, in fact, thinking that will solve all our problems and induce a state of perpetual bliss and kindness, but we feel cheated when we realize that here is no pot at the end of the rainbow, no happy ending, no ever after, except a dull ache of the pain of living.

The fact is that every one of us feels this sense of betrayal, of our loved ones having let us down, of life itself having cheated us. This dull ache even takes away our ability to enjoy the few things that are going well, like the job that we do have which brings in a salary at the end of every month, the house we live in, maybe the car we drive to work or the roads we use to get there. The funny thing is that it affects all of us, regardless of the things we do have, each one of us. So when we think that we’ll be happy at last provided we just get that bigger house, or better car, or move to a better neighborhood, we find out soon enough that we’re back with that ache, only at a higher level of living, maybe with bigger responsibilities or insecurities. We each feel we will be happy at last if we have full control; but even the man at the top, our beloved leader, feels hemmed in and controlled by the masses.

The moral of the story is therefore obvious…before we hanker after more and better, we need to make sure why we’re not getting a sense of fulfillment with what we have, where we are. Getting enjoyment from our existing station is an art and a skill, that has to be practiced to keep ourselves fit. A master musician has to practice his scales every day; a couple of day’s neglect shows in his performance almost immediately. Similarly a few sessions of moaning will immediately show in our sense of joy and fulfillment in life. We will forget the immense untapped potential in what we already have, in our hankering after more and newer things. Like equipment junkies who will always be on the verge of writing their masterpiece with the next, latest, computer, or producing mind-blowing landscapes with that latest, high-pixel camera, we practitioners of living will also always dream of the life around the next corner of our winding destiny.

So let me say, this is my life…let me try living it first before deciding it sucks. My next house, my next spouse, my next life may not appear to be any better, even if it scores on all material or objective counts…perhaps I just need to practice my skills on the life I have, rather than searching out a new one!