The End of An Affair

 I began writing at a very young age, leveraging the ability (primarily) as a defense mechanism, in view of an inherent inability to meaningfully participate and excel in physical activities.  In my growing up years, all the young adults around me were significantly older than I was, and I never made proactive attempts to engage with them. My earliest memories of my childhood would be penning down an imaginary lineup of make-belief players representing An-All Star Cricket Team (which borrowed its name from the title of a book that I’d discovered detailing the adventures of a young Bee called Buzzwing) and batting and bowling to oneself and using the Furniture in my Living Room as make-belief fielders.  The players in my team were people I’d read about (primarily authors of comic strips who would be featured in the daily newspaper) or media personalities and how they performed in these matches were often an outcome of my perceptions of how their cricketing abilities would be.  

I remember being a voracious reader, had read Charles and Mary Lamb’s adaptations of the Bard’s work by the time I was ten and Crime and Punishment in its unabridged form when I was twelve . It is therefore paradoxical that in subsequent years, I  have often had to struggle to sustain the motivation to read a book from cover to cover. Much of what I have read in recent years can at best be termed as ‘wasteful’ (with the exception of Vargas Llosa’s – The Bad Girl- a tribute to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) and I do not know whether the former is an outcome of low concentration Levels leading to an inherent inability to assimilate information, or a general disinterest in accepting the perceptions and views of authors who would have penned down their ideas sitting in Ivory Towers without attempting to meaningfully engage with their audience.  I strongly believe that all Thought Leaders should refrain from penning down their perspectives in the form of books/whitepapers/articles alone and should instead leverage technology to interact with people around them- to discuss, to deliberate and deliberate more.  

The downside of this is the fact that many eminent Academicians and Thought Leaders who have developed exceptionally sophisticated theoretical models explaining human /organizational/ social behaviour are often people who are not adept at defending these when faced with more articulate speakers or are engaging Speakers themselves.  I recently attended a lecture on the relevance of Social Organizations in free market regimes which was delivered by an eminent Researcher, considered to be one of the pioneers in the field, yet dozed off (figuratively) within thirty five minutes of the lecture commencing.

 This brings to the forefront the important question of the effectiveness of transfer of knowledge and information relying on text books and white papers alone. I believe that there is a genuine need to connect with Subject Matter Experts more frequently to seek a clarification on topics /themes that one may want to reflect upon. One must leverage technology to make these discussions more personal, and I believe that we are yet to develop a platform which can facilitate this more meaningfully.

I have always been very affected by the thought of impending death bordering on acute Thanatophobia. I distinctly remember the first time I understood the sheer impact that an individual’s death has on people around him/her- I was possibly four years old then.   The radio would play a famous Bengali song detailing the musings of a young boy who’d lost his mother and his appeals to a parakeet , offering to set him free if his mother was brought back from the dead – the song would make me cry and I would run towards my mother and reaffirm the fact that I loved her very much. 

Over the years, I have woken up many times in the middle of the night, realising that impending death is but a certainty and that a time would come when all of my thoughts and sentiments and perspectives would cease to matter. The sun would shine, flowers would continue to bloom and people around would move on with their respective lives. I was often in positions of power/ influence growing up and on hindsight the alignment/conformity that I possibly witnessed was not an outcome of my own personality being defining but of circumstances people had been put in by exogenous forces.  I realise that what I am scared of is not of death as is viewed in its traditional sense but of the fact that over the twenty six years that I have been a part of this world, I have possibly not been able to influence people to extent that I would have liked to. 

I have often wondered what motivates people to work in conditions that can at best be described as mentally and emotionally satiating and why people conform to decadent rules of functioning which have continued to exist through the ages.  For example, let us look a daily wage earner plying his trade in a coal mine in the 1950s under extreme work-conditions. Why would the person not venture out and sell vegetables/eggs for example given Indian aspirations post independence? Was it because of an inherent feeling of worthlessness caused due to illiteracy, was it because of complacency and the fear of foregoing a steady source of income, however nominal it might have been, or was it because of a chronic ambition deficit? In my opinion, all fingers seem to point to the latter.

We are all Globalization’s children and cannot claim to be ambition deficit, yet our aspirations/wants are often are function of the collective aspirations of the generations preceding us. Of getting a job with a steady income, of being posted outside the city of origin, of making transitions across Management Cadres rapidly, of pursuing one’s Education from the West.  The next generation (the Millenials) being products of relative affluence and with access to cutting edge technology and information, I am hopeful will be guided by an independent philosophy on how they should lead their life, how they should drive transformation efforts  and societal reform among those not as fortunate as we are. We on hindsight will be known as the 'Generation of Failures' who unfortunately got ‘Caught-up-in-the middle’, between pre-liberalization values characterised by the ‘Bharitiya’ way of living life and post liberalization free-market regime of crony capitalism.

I met someone who has had a profound impact on my thinking and perspectives on life over dinner, a couple of months back.  As the lights dimmed and the musicians played in the background, I felt that the evening was perhaps a reminder of all the things that I valued the most in my growing up years, and all the things that I had moved away from over a period of time.  As the candle lights flickered and the conversations flowed I realised that I had (for better or-worse) become a different individual, one who was still attempting to determine his true calling-his purpose in Life, one who’d resigned to becoming a social outcast and had voluntarily stepped away (or had been politely asked to move away) from engaging with people around him. 

As I looked up, I saw the most beautiful woman in the world describing how life would change as an outcome of an important professional decision she had chosen to take.  It was raining outside, or perhaps it seemed that it was… The road ahead seemed clear and yet I felt tentative,  my childhood memories and those from my formative years were now behind me, it was but, an end of an Affair…