Missionaries verus Mercenaries

Legend has it that once upon a time Picasso was sitting at a café and whiling his time away. Some versions of the story have it that he was at a bar. Be that as it may, a star struck fan spotted him and approached him with a request—could he make a quick sketch on a paper napkin for the admirer? 

Picasso acquiesced and in about a minute sketched a dove. The much-delighted fan could not believe what transpired and thanked the artist profusely. Picasso though growled and demanded a huge amount of money for the sketch. The admirer couldn’t believe the ask, looked stumped and insisted the demand is an impossible one. “It took just a minute to sketch the dove,” the man said.

In his thick Spanish accent, Picasso growled right back: “No, it took me 40 years.”

I was reminded of this story when a young man called me up. We had first met at a spiritual retreat in the middle of nowhere near Coimbatore. We couldn’t be more different from each other. 

He grew up in the Hindi heartland; I lived in Mumbai. He has a degree in computer science from one of India’s premier institutes and an MBA from an Ivy League college in the US. Even as his graduation certificate at B-School was being handed over, he was made an offer on campus by an American entity most people would give an arm and a leg to be a part of. By every which yardstick, he was living the dream. My slog continues.

But the both of us bonded for various reasons. The most prominent being that we were the only odd ones at the retreat used to uttering profanities in an otherwise serene environment. We wondered every once a while just how did we get there. The other things that kept us occupied included conspiring where to find masala chai and meat in a world where tulsi tea and vegetarian food were the staples. We have stayed in touch since. He had gotten used to calling me bhaiyya and I call him chotte bhai.

A few months ago, he called up with a question. An Indian conglomerate of significant repute had made him an offer. They wanted people like him to “come back home” that they may “build something of global consequence in India by Indians”.  He told me he liked the sound of the pitch and that the people who spoke to him sounded equally sincere. He wanted an opinion. 

I told him I have my biases and am not an expert on the domain he works in. Instead, I referred him to a few friends and suggested he speak to them in confidence. After hearing him out, one of them asked him an interesting question: “After factoring in for the I-want-to-do-something-for-my-country spiel, if the offer on hand does not match or exceed what you currently earn, would you still take it up?” 

It wasn’t the money that had got his attention, but the call to action for a larger purpose. And that the money while on the offer surpassed his current offering, it was not on his mind because the quality of life in the US where he then resided is higher than what any Indian city can possibly offer he said.

My friends reckoned the conglomerate was leading him up the garden path. And that this bloke wouldn’t bite if it weren’t for the money. They punted he would take up the assignment and that the relationship wouldn’t last long. Darned right they were on all counts. 

Back then, these veterans suggested this was the mind of an inexperienced mercenary at work. With the kind of money on offer, he could buy a lot more than the First World could offer him in terms of a lifestyle. “Patriotism” was his way of justifying the move back from the First World to himself and those around him. 

If he were to continue working in the US, it would take him a few years to earn privileges such as living in a gated community and moving around in rarefied circles of the kind only the uber-rich in the First World get to move in. Overnight, these would suddenly be accessible to him in India. His being an Indian resident would only be incidental.

But conglomerates don’t get to become conglomerates on the back of coincidence. They know exactly what levers to turn on and hunt mercenaries down. He took the offer up. And to live up to his part of the deal, got an A-team on board, sold them a dream, and all of them got down to work in earnest. After all, they had studied at the best places, had worked at global entities—on average for two odd years, and believed they had earned the right to live the kind of lives they now lived.

But when thought about deeply, had they? Would Picasso have growled for big monies when he was an apprentice? The thought crossed my mind when, much like the veterans predicted, the young man called earlier this week. He told me he was done with the conglomerate because their attitude was “unprofessional”. I heard him out. 

To cut a long story short, he asked for a favour. That he be introduced to a doyen from the industry who he was told is looking for a few bright people to start a new line of business. This bloke wanted to pitch to him. Emotion won over reason and in a moment of weakness, I gave in.

Having done that, I thought I’d hear from the young chap on what transpired. There was no word. Curiosity came over and I called the veteran to ask what happened. He told me in no uncertain terms the kid won’t go too far because his world view is a myopic one. It is dictated by discourses from a the past and the future. 

His past resides the arches of the institutions where he graduated from; as for the future, he is wedded in his head to dreams. And dreams are just that—dreams. It can be broken anytime. Does he have it in him to snap his fingers and wake up to the moment that he lives in now? Can he see reality and the world for what it is? Until he does not imbibe the present moment and learn from it, he will neither let go of his past and continue to dream about a fuzzy future that may or may not happen. He had a long way to go before he earns his place in the sun, the doyen told me. This, he added, is the kind of mercenary he can hire and fire at will from any part of the world. They’ll bite at anything for money and the attendant perks. 

I pushed him for some perspective and tried to reflect on what is it my grey-haired friends were punting on. Turns out the answers are simple. But difficult for the mercenaries to comprehend.

This young man is plain stupid. Getting to be top dog in Silicon Valley doesn’t happen on the back of merit alone as the movies or breathless narratives would have us believe. I haven’t met any of these people personally. But on the back of conversations with people who know them first hand and from documented accounts on how they conduct themselves, there is reason to believe the circumstances they live in and the kind of people they chose to be conspired to take them to where they are.

Let’s deconstruct one thing at a time and begin with the circumstances they live in. 

The circumstances

How entities operate in Silicon Valley is very different from how a conglomerate works in any other part of the world. To put that into perspective, those who graduate from the best institutions are weaned into a workforce early on with fancy salaries and perks that make sense in Silicon Valley. This is done with a reason. 

It is more economical to have an employee working and living on campus than some distance away. This is a practice that has been chiselled and honed over the years at entities like Google among others. The outcomes are measured down to minutiae like what impact does it have on creativity and productivity among other things. Turns out, at the end of the day, all of what is portrayed as fun places to work at in popular reports, are designed such that an individual’s personal and professional lives merge. It takes an enormous amount of mental muscle on part of an individual to see through this.

 Oftentimes though, this is overlooked, and it is seen as a culture that ought to be celebrated. That is why many countries, India included, have attempted to clone it. But cultures cannot be cloned. It evolves over time and at a certain place. It cannot happen outside of that place. 

 Consider China for instance. It tried to clone Silicon Valley. But there is only so much you can clone. After that you must innovate. For that matter, the culture that exists in Silicon Valley cannot exist in any other place than the geography that it is confined to a small corner of the US. Why? Because circumstances conspired to create a culture in that part of a large country where failure is not frowned upon. Instead, failure is looked upon as an opportunity to learn and according to the language used in Silicon Valley, the time to “pivot” or change track. This option does not exist anyplace else in the world—even in New York, the financial capital of the world, which provides a pipeline of funds that keeps Silicon Valley oiled. New York does not tolerate failure. The beast is a complex one and the nuances of it are lost. 

 The people

Then there are the people who populate this world and the leaders who lead them. There are two kinds of leaders—the missionaries and the mercenaries. While both can win wars, the worlds they live in are different ones. 

 Missionaries cannot be hired. Mercenaries can be. This is put into perspective on the back of a brilliant talk by Simon Sinek on Why Leaders Eat Last. This is where he drives home a powerful point.

 “Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the senior most levels of organisations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organisations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is.”

 This leads me to believe that in the history of contemporary business, the ones who attract fanatical devotion from employees and customers hare missionary leaders. By all accounts, they are maniacs as well. But there is a purpose that drives them and it goes beyond money. The audacity to imagine they can change the world. Think of all the greats Silicon Valley has produced.

 Missionaries are acutely aware there are mercenaries as well out there who are as good as they are. The thin line that separates them though is that missionaries cannot be hired—mercenaries can be baited with monetary perks and the lure of gold. Like my young friend. 

 But mercenaries don’t know that and believe Silicon Valley is what it is and operates in a certain way. This is because they have been weaned on stories of entrepreneurs who’ve earned their billions while still in their twenties in Silicon Valley even as they started building their products when in college. The young ones think therefore it is an immutable truth that all can be had at once.

 What they are unwilling to acknowledge or understand is that every part of the world has its own nuance, demons and beasts to deal with. It is one that needs to be understood—and not looked at from the prism that is Hollywood. These blokes though don’t get it. Like the grey-haired folks with much wisdom have told me across multiple conversations over the years, an ecosystem exists between the financial capital of the world that is New York and Silicon Valley that conspires to groom the young ones who grow up in the West to build systems tailored for their worlds. 

 When shifted from the cocoon that is a premier campus in India to another one in the West, the young ones from markets like India imagine they have arrived. And when presented with an offer on the first day they graduate from B-School, they go over the moon. 

 But nothing can be farther than the truth. They have neither arrived nor have they earned their place yet. These are dumb mercenaries who will go anyplace for a few dollars more. They are rooted in a past as seen on the screen and imagine a future that is yet to unfold. The present is something they are totally tuned out of.  It is inevitable then that they be condemned to a life of unhappiness. 

 Picasso could sit there, sip his drink, watch the world go by, and sketch the way he could because he had spent an enormous amount of time practicing his craft in the past. He had moved on since then. He lived in the moment, was acutely aware of the grind he had gone through to get there and had no pretensions of what the future may hold. He had earned his right to demand the kind of obscene money he did. This young man hadn’t. 

Sam Manekshaw on Leadership

“There’s a difference between physical courage and moral courage. Which one should you possess?”

“Fear is a natural phenomenon. Like hunger and sex.”

What an outstanding talk!!!

The Many Sounds of Silence

This note is being written on a silent January morning—the first day of 2018. It appears, save a few oddballs still slobbering drunk outside, most people have turned in to sleep. It is now dark, and silent outside. But as usual, this is the kind of darkness and silence that precedes every morning, before the sun rises.

Unlike most other days though, today, people will wake up later than usual. A late brunch will follow. I too, will join in. The stated intent is to celebrate the beginning of a new year. Until everyone decides to go back to life as usual.

But right now, right here, waiting for the sun to rise, a passage by Paul Goodman, a writer, psychotherapist and philosopher, comes to mind, on the many kinds of silence. Because while calling it an early night on New Year’s Eve, the “He-must-be-weird" look on everybody’s faces was all too evident.

Because, isn’t this that time of the year when you party?

Indeed!

But then, as Goodman writes, “Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…"; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos."

To get the full import of the power embedded in that passage, may I urge you to listen to it as Sir Christopher Ricks  reads it out. Only somebody who understands literature and has devoted a lifetime to understanding the nuances of it can read it aloud with as much eloquence that breathe life into words.

While I haven’t read the Goodman’s book Speaking and Language in which this passage appears, it caught my attention when Maria Popova offered a pointer to it on that fine blog of hers that is Brainpickings.org. The book was first published in 1973 and I can’t seem to find it anyplace.

But in the silence of the morning on a New Year’s Day, the import of why silence is significant sunk into the mind deeper. Much of it had to do reminiscing over multiple conversations that transpired over the last year with people who are compelled to practice it. These included people who work at hospices and give a patient ear to the dying, policemen on duty who and are often at the receiving end of public ire, and restaurant managers who absorb much negative feedback from patrons.

The most significant memory though is that of a conversation with a police constable at a hospital a few months ago. He was called in by the authorities there after a young woman was wheeled in. She was declared dead on arrival by the resident doctors. Her body looked hopelessly broken.

But the constable had a duty to perform as prescribed by his manual. That included asking those who had gotten her there to describe the circumstances under which the accident occurred. Questions like was the victim under the influence of alcohol, or under treatment for any mental disorder… and other such questions that sounded intrusive and offensive to her traumatized parents and siblings in their moment of grief.

“How can he be so heartless?" they wailed. “She’s dead and he insists all these protocols be followed."

The verbal assault that followed was inevitable. Friends and some relatives pounced on the policeman. He did not say much, but absorbed all of it. When done, he prepared his papers and handed them to the coroners. This allowed the body to be formally released to the grieving family.

“Why did you have to take so long to complete all this?" they spat at him as he walked out.

I felt compelled to follow. And ask him what went through his mind. Is this routine? Is this just another day’s job? How do you deal with it? Would he be amenable to have a cup of tea and share what may be playing on his mind?

He agreed.

Turns out, it was a long night for him. And a long day before that, as well. He had been on duty for at least 36 hours. An interesting conversation followed. The sum and substance of which was that people like him are trained to keep silent and maintain distance when under assault. It is drilled into their psyche. They must look at all things around dispassionately.

So, when anger overcomes him, or he may feel sadness, he is trained to ask himself in the third person, what caused the anger; when sadness floods, he asks himself, what episode triggered the sadness.

Why does he do this? By asking himself these questions in the third person he detaches himself from the sources of these emotions. He reinforces the idea that these emotions are around him but not because of him. Thus he removes himself from the emotional circumstance.

But to get anything done of consequence then, he must first surround himself with silence. And in that silence, he can distance himself from the noises that surround him, and listen in to the many kinds of silence all around.

Apparently, silence, he told me, has much to say.

When seen through the prism of the constables world of silence, Goodman’s types of silence make even more sense, and becomes easier to grasp and appreciate. Consider each of the types of silence Goodman describes and see it from the perspective of the constable investigating a death.

The dumb silence

When looked at through the grieving family’s eyes, a constable performing his task and not taking any questions is a cruel creature. His silence is borne of dumbness—or numbness, one that is lost in slumber and nothing but a function of apathy. The constable doesn’t think much of what they think of his silence. It is par for his course.

The sober silence  

This is silence that of the kind that can be witnessed from the perspective of a neutral observer watching the constable at work. But from the constable’s perspective, this silence is much needed to get the task done.

The fertile silence  

Sober silence has a unique ability to morph into fertile silence because it can ignore the loud voices that call it dumb silence. Because it is only with sobriety that 36 hours of sleep deprivation can be set aside. There is work to do. A dead body must be studied clinically to rule out signs of foul play.

In conversing with the constable, he said the reason he signed the document that allowed the coroner to release the corpse to the mourners was because his mind was hard at work. It had to stay awake to ask if the dead woman had been pushed over the parapet of her balcony or if she had jumped off it to commit suicide.

So, the questions he asked on whether she had an alcohol problem or a medical history that required prescription drugs was to rule out foul play. When the answers were in the negative, he jotted she was of sound mind, but ruled out foul play.

The alive silence  

In asking him how did he rule out there was no foul play, turns out, that in his silent observations, he had measured the height of the parapet she had fallen from. If pushed, her body would have been splayed at a certain angle. But if she had jumped out, the angle her body would be found in would have been very different. Experience had taught him that. But his silence also suggested she was reluctant to jump. Because after jumping, she changed her mind. He could tell this, he said, from the way her head hit the ground first as opposed to her legs.

The musical silence  

How did he keep his head when he was being abused by all and sundry for being “heartless?" Again, turns out, it was important that he did. Because if he uttered as much as a peep, it would be impossible for him to carefully absorb the noise around him. Much like silence is of different kinds, the noises speak as well. He was trying to catch the nuances of what the noises were trying to say. All of it sounded angry. But he was trying to listen carefully, to what was said, what was unsaid, and how.

The silence of listening  

And what did he hear through all those noises? He heard what nobody could. The silence of the mother-in-law and sister-in-law. He spoke of how they were teary eyed, stood as they were expected to, and accepted condolences from the neighbours and immediate family. But they were quiet. To his mind, their silence was noisy. Because to his mind, it suggested there was some tension in the family. Convention, given the part of the country they are from, suggests they must wail loudly. But they weren’t. Him keeping quiet and listening to the others speak helped him hear things nobody else could.

The noisy silence  

He figured he was on the right track when he asked somebody very quietly if there is a patriarch in the joint family. The father-in-law was there too. He too, was there, sobbing quietly. Through the man’s eyes though, the constable thought he could see anger. This was a tragedy he could have averted if he had intervened earlier and done something, absolutely anything, to defuse the tension between the women. In his silence, he was whipping himself.

The Baffled silence 

The clincher for the constable, the final sign that there was no foul play was the silence on the husband’s face. He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t speaking a word. Answering only in monosyllables. But it was a look of a man asking himself questions.

“Where did I go wrong?"

“Why did you have to do this to me?"

“Did I not love you enough?"

“What about our children now?"

“Why did you do this to yourself?"

The silence of peace

And where does he find peaceful silence, I asked him. The veteran constable didn’t look like the kind prone to baring his soul. This once though, he did. Maybe, he was tired. Apparently, he likes it when he goes home to the woman he loves and doesn’t have to say anything. But in his silence, she knows he has come after having done his best. And without him saying anything, she knows he loves her. And she doesn’t insist he spells out in as many words.

He is content when she is content with the sound of his silence. He didn’t have much else to say. Silence followed. There is much beauty and tenderness in silence.

But how are those in slumber after having ushered in the New Year to much loud music to know that?

Originally published in Mint on Sunday

Content is King

Everybody says it all the time: Content is king.

But why is content king?

Bill Gates had articulated why back in 1996. The essay is not available on his website. But I did manage to find a snapshot of the essay as it appeared on his page on the Wayback Machine. Reproducing the essay as it appeared then, ad verbatim, with the dateline intact and without changing a word.

Content is King (1/3/96)

By Bill Gates

Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.

The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries, including the manufacturing of TV sets, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.

When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of "content" becomes very wide. For example, computer software is a form of content-an extremely important one, and the one that for Microsoft will remain by far the most important.

But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.

One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.

The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable, and many companies are laying plans to create content for the Internet.

For example, the television network NBC and Microsoft recently agreed to enter the interactive news business together. Our companies will jointly own a cable news network, MSNBC, and an interactive news service on the Internet. NBC will maintain editorial control over the joint venture.

I expect societies will see intense competition-and ample failure as well as success-in all categories of popular content-not just software and news, but also games, entertainment, sports programming, directories, classified advertising, and on-line communities devoted to major interests.

Printed magazines have readerships that share common interests. It's easy to imagine these communities being served by electronic online editions.

But to be successful online, a magazine can't just take what it has in print and move it to the electronic realm. There isn't enough depth or interactivity in print content to overcome the drawbacks of the online medium.

If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.

A question on many minds is how often the same company that serves an interest group in print will succeed in serving it online. Even the very future of certain printed magazines is called into question by the Internet.

For example, the Internet is already revolutionizing the exchange of specialized scientific information. Printed scientific journals tend to have small circulations, making them high-priced. University libraries are a big part of the market. It's been an awkward, slow, expensive way to distribute information to a specialized audience, but there hasn't been an alternative.

Now some researchers are beginning to use the Internet to publish scientific findings. The practice challenges the future of some venerable printed journals.

Over time, the breadth of information on the Internet will be enormous, which will make it compelling. Although the gold rush atmosphere today is primarily confined to the United States, I expect it to sweep the world as communications costs come down and a critical mass of localized content becomes available in different countries.

For the Internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work. The long-term prospects are good, but I expect a lot of disappointment in the short-term as content companies struggle to make money through advertising or subscriptions. It isn't working yet, and it may not for some time.

So far, at least, most of the money and effort put into interactive publishing is little more than a labor of love, or an effort to help promote products sold in the non-electronic world. Often these efforts are based on the belief that over time someone will figure out how to get revenue.

In the long run, advertising is promising. An advantage of interactive advertising is that an initial message needs only to attract attention rather than convey much information. A user can click on the ad to get additional information-and an advertiser can measure whether people are doing so.

But today the amount of subscription revenue or advertising revenue realized on the Internet is near zero-maybe $20 million or $30 million in total. Advertisers are always a little reluctant about a new medium, and the Internet is certainly new and different.

Some reluctance on the part of advertisers may be justified, because many Internet users are less-than-thrilled about seeing advertising. One reason is that many advertisers use big images that take a long time to download across a telephone dial-up connection. A magazine ad takes up space too, but a reader can flip a printed page rapidly.

As connections to the Internet get faster, the annoyance of waiting for an advertisement to load will diminish and then disappear. But that's a few years off.

Some content companies are experimenting with subscriptions, often with the lure of some free content. It's tricky, though, because as soon as an electronic community charges a subscription, the number of people who visit the site drops dramatically, reducing the value proposition to advertisers.

A major reason paying for content doesn't work very well yet is that it's not practical to charge small amounts. The cost and hassle of electronic transactions makes it impractical to charge less than a fairly high subscription rate.

But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won't be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You'll just click on what you want, knowing you'll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.

This technology will liberate publishers to charge small amounts of money, in the hope of attracting wide audiences.

Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products-a marketplace of content.

Why hero worship matters

During one of our weekend meet-ups, my psychologist Kuldeep Datay asked of me what I thought was a simple question: Who is your hero?

I have two. Formula 1 racing legend Ayrton Senna and Christiaan Barnard, the South African doctor who conducted the first human heart transplant. From the time I was a boy, between the both of them, they epitomized everything I wanted to be.

Senna’s nickname was Magic. With good reason. He drove like magic. How could any human drive like that? I carried pictures of him everyplace with me. Car magazines that detailed stories of his exploits on the racing track against his rivals Alain Prost and the then upcoming Michael Schumacher filled my rucksack. My laptop had his image plastered as the wallpaper.

I would have given an arm and a leg to watch Senna go head to head against the clinical machine that was Schumacher. In the few races that they did get close, Senna’s driving prowess drove Schumacher’s crazy, and his car oftentimes into the wall.

Then there was Dr Barnard. I don’t think I will ever forget that one night I was up flipping through the pages of Reader’s Digest at my ancestral home in Fort Kochi. I stumbled across the story of how the first human heart transplant was conducted. As stories go, what a story it was. By then, it was clear in my mind when I come of age, I would grow up to be a surgeon in the class of Dr Barnard who worked magic like Senna.

Fate had other plans and led me to a fun pit called the newsroom. Here too, in my head, through all of these years, I tried to write and edit stories imagining myself to be somebody as crazy as Senna and Dr Barnard.

“Then” asked Datay, smiling. “Where is Charles Assisi? Have you found him?”

The question had me stumped. He went on to explain that people often latch on to a single personality or two. They idolize them and gloss over their own frailties. Why? Why not start on a clean sheet instead and find who you really are and what you stand for? Thought embedded, I went home.

It’s been a few weeks now. An exercise has begun. I haven’t concluded it. But I think I get the import of Kuldeep’s question. This exercise will last a lifetime. So, while Senna and Dr Barnard will stay in my head, more people need to be examined and added. Who knows? Some may have to be purged at some point as well as I go along. Senna and Barnard included. Now, there are no holy cows.

What follows is a list in no particular order. It is not a comprehensive one either. Just a few jottings around some people from my diary as I go about compiling traits I would like to cultivate and those that I want to cull out of myself.

Abraham Lincoln

The true measure of Lincoln’s greatness may well be known to most Americans. But to me, the magnitude of what he accomplished and the complexities he had to deal with were first revealed by K. Ram Kumar, who used to sit on the board of directors at ICICI Bank. He chose to give it up to pursue a personal passion.

Lincoln took over as president of the US at a time when the southern belt was opposed to his candidature for presidency. They threatened to secede from the Union and said a civil war would ensue on the back of a promise he had made if he came to office—that he would abolish slavery.

That Lincoln eventually managed to pull it off is one thing. But after he assumed office, he drafted the support of three cabinet ministers. The real story lies there. All of them had run against his candidature. It was political genius at its best and complexity at its peak.

Ram Kumar introduced me to the nuances of these settings through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Team of Rivals. Steven Spielberg made a movie out of it as well. It took Goodwin 10 years to research what could possibly have gone through Lincoln’s mind. How he managed the conflicts and put in place the foundations of what is now a superpower continues to keep me riveted and in awe of the man. While the movie is an outstanding one, may I assure you that the hours and days invested in the book will be time well invested.

Babasaheb Ambedkar

The more I read about him, the more I am convinced what an ungrateful lot us Indians are. Platitudes are mouthed in his name, but what has really come of his vision? Come to think of it, how does a man from the lowest strata of society—the Mahar community (or untouchables)—in 1891 grow up to earn doctorates in economics both from Columbia and the London School of Economics? How did he campaign and negotiate for India’s independence? How did he evolve into the statesman who drafted the Constitution of India in the finest traditions of democracy?

If Ambedkar had his way, India would by now had a uniform civil code in place. Article 370 of the Constitution, which he opposed so vehemently and which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, would never have been a contentious issue.

Way back then, he had the foresight to bluntly tell Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah: “You wish India should protect your borders, she should build roads in your area, she should supply your food grains, and Kashmir should get equal status as India. But the Government of India should have only limited powers and Indian people should have no rights in Kashmir. To give consent to this proposal would be a treacherous thing against the interests of India and I, as the law minister of India, will never do it.”

Sheikh Abdullah circumvented him and approached Nehru, the ball went into the hands of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, and between the both of them, they quietly acquiesced. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Patel, the so-called Iron Man of India, let Ambedkar down.

Worse still, while Nehru could see the merit in the Hindu Code Bill Ambedkar had crafted and that it held the potential to elevate the status of women in Hindu society, when the moment of reckoning came, he caved in to pressure both from the Congress and the emerging Sangh Parivar. Amedkar had the vision to see the fissures all of these issues could cause India. It was glossed over.

Nobody had the spunk then. Nobody among the current lot of India’s elected leaders has the spunk either. If only they had a fraction of what Ambedkar had!

Mohandas Gandhi

I am not a Gandhian. I refuse to be one. And I refuse to address Gandhi as Mahatma either. That out of the way, if my personal interpretation of him is correct, he was among the shrewdest men India has ever seen.

By the time the British had colonized India, Gandhi figured out that if India needed freedom, violent opposition was not an option. The British empire would have crippled the fight even before it started. That is why the non-violent movement. It was, for all practical purposes, guerilla warfare of the kind Sun Tzu would have approved of. The British, with all the arms and monies in their hands, hadn’t encountered opposition in this guise. They didn’t know how to deal with it.

And so, in spite of the ideological differences that existed between Ambedkar and Gandhi, much like Lincoln’s “team of rivals”, in a strange way, they worked towards the same goal. Like I articulated above, what I admire about Gandhi is not his so-called austerity or ahimsa as a principle, but the fact that he deployed it tactically.

Gandhi had the patience to frustrate the bollocks out of any army and the charm to beguile masses of people into following his perverted logic. I suspect, if in his reckoning taking up arms would have been a better way to go about things, he wouldn’t have hesitated to do that either.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris

I know it is terribly unfair to club all three of these intellectual powerhouses into one bucket. But I do it because between the three of them, they challenged all of the notions I was weaned on as a young boy growing up in a traditional Catholic family. They compelled me to question all of the Abrahamic gods I was taught to worship.

One thing led to another until I threw all of the texts I was weaned on. They compelled me to question authority—obnoxiously so if required—and put me on the path to freedom from the oppression that is religion in all its forms.

Elon Musk

I cannot help but watch this man and his crazy ambitions with awe. After a string of failures, including one where he was ousted as co-founder at PayPal, this man thought up Tesla, an electric car that is now part of the mainstream. But what gets my attention, and pardon my expression, is that he has the gumption to put his monies into a projects that can potentially help humans colonize Mars. Incidentally, he happens to be the 83rd richest man now and is a darling in Silicon Valley. His ambitions and audacity are to die for.

***

My list can go on and on.

But it’s time I pause and plant a thought. One of the most compelling lessons I learnt recently is that when somebody makes a point, imagine yourself to be a trial lawyer. Then argue against yourself to demolish your arguments. At the end of the exercise, does your position still stand? If you do, you got something to fight for. Else, go back and rethink.

If I were to do that, a few things emerge right away.

Senna died young. He needn’t have. What Senna fanatics like me think of as magic was actually reckless. Much the same can be said about Damon Hill, who was propelled into the limelight after Senna died and had to take Schumacher head on.

Their rivalry is legendary and I rooted for Hill. He was as crazy as Senna. Schumacher-baiters like me always thought of him as clinical. But it was actually a mind ticking away—learning from each failure. So much so that he thought Schumacher slammed Hill for “purely dangerous driving” while Hill laughed it off and claimed “I only made it hard for him to pass”. “Take that Schumi,” I would high-five with my pals.

In hindsight, there is no taking away that Schumacher is revered as among the greatest drivers that ever lived. A little after his retirement in 2012, a tragic skiing accident in December 2013 sent him into a coma and his fans sobbing with sorrow. And I confess to a lump in my throat now that we will never know if this man will ever walk unaided again. Since his exit, Formula 1 races don’t feel the same. His current condition is shrouded in secrecy.

Dr Barnard was a sex maniac. His personal life was miserable and he often used to taunt his third wife Karin about not being able to keep up with the prowess that Viagra conferred on him. He would go jaunting all over and bed as many women as he possibly could. He loved the limelight and the attention his exploits on the surgical table conferred upon him. He eventually dumped Karin for a 28-year-old Viennese medical student.

Lincoln had a penchant for dirty jokes and took his presidency a little too seriously. What popular history overlooks is that anybody who stood in his way was trampled over. So much so that he holds the record for any American president who shut the most newspapers, arrested political rivals, censored pretty much every mail and executed the most American citizens without trial.

As for Amedkar, in spite of his Dalit origins, he looked down upon Adivasi tribes. He thought them inferior beings. In his writings, his describes them as “the aboriginal tribes of India... Why has no attempt been made to civilize these aborigines to lead them to make a more honorable way of living?” These parts of history have been conveniently airbrushed. Surprisingly, he didn’t see any dichotomy in that.

While on Gandhi, like I said earlier, I refuse to call him Mahatma because he was plain stupid and perverse. He let his wife Kasturba die of bronchial pneumonia and adamantly declined to administer her with penicillin—but treated her with water from the Ganga and said “let god’s will be done”.

I would have forgiven him if he had applied the same principles to himself. But six weeks after she died, he came down with malaria and when wracked by pain, he didn’t let god’s will be done. Instead, he took the doctor’s advice and consumed quinine.

When it came to him, his “bankruptcy of my faith” argument did not hold. And how can we not deplore his shameful experiments when he slept naked with teenage girls to “test his chastity”? For that matter, how about his friendship with Hitler, to whom he wrote letters where he signed off, “Your sincere friend”?

As for the trinity of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, when looked at from a dispassionate prism, how different are they from any religious fanatic? Most recently, for instance, I tuned in to watch a conversation between Dawkins and Deepak Chopra, a New Age spiritual guru whom I personally despise as a charlatan.

I was hoping to watch a demolition. But to Chopra’s credit, for all of Dawkins’ aggressive posturing, he confused Dawkins with mumbo jumbo.

Waking Up, a book by Harris that I am now reading tries to explain why spirituality and religion need not necessarily be tied together. I am still to complete it—but whatever little I have isn’t impressive enough.

The problem with the trio is their posturing and is best exemplified in a tweet Dawkins once put out: “Religion is an organized license to be acceptably stupid.” What comes across as stupid to my mind is that the trio think it stupid that their ideas cannot be challenged. How much more arrogant can any human get?

I cannot speak for Hitchens now that he is dead. But Dawkins and Harris are certainly sexist and have on public forums implicitly stated men are more drawn to atheism than women—in language that is nothing but demeaning of women and their intelligence.

Then there is Musk. Sure, he now wears the crown of the next Steve Jobs. But he is as cranky as Jobs as well. Like most successful people, there are unsubstantiated stories of him leading a rather peculiar personal life. He takes criticism personally. When his stock prices take a hammering on Wall Street, it cuts him deep. He needs to be lavished with praise. When journalists who have test-driven his cars give it bad ratings, he comes out in the open and accuses them of having vested interests to drag his company’s stock prices down. Then there are other quirks that can fill a book.

Now that the trial lawyer in me has argued around the frailties of all these men, do they still stand to scrutiny?

Well, let me put it this way. They are human. They have frailties. I get Kuldeep’s larger point in that it would be rather silly on my part to revere or emulate one or two of them. Instead, what if I were to pick a few traits from each of these people that appeal the most to me and reject everything else they stand for? What if I were to stay at work on those traits and keep adding to my repertoire as I meet new people, and subtract the undesirable as I travel the distance that is life?

Eventually, I may just find the Charles Assisi I want to be. Or maybe I might just die trying. But at least it’s worth giving it a shot.

I know one thing for sure—the day my wife stops reading these pieces I write, at the end of which she shakes her head, looks at me and mutters “dongi” (fraudster), I will stop work on this series.

This piece was originally published in Mint on Sunday. All copy rights vest with Mint and may not be reproduced without permission from the Editor

If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been

I stumbled across this commencement speech by Nicholas Nassim Taleb at the American University of Beirut a little while ago. Just a little over 17 minutes, do watch it. Some parts of the speech that struck a deep chord with me are transcribed below. 

"......I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions."

"Success requires absence of fragility. I’ve seen billionaires terrified of journalists, wealthy people who felt crushed because their brother-in-law got very rich, academics with Nobel who were scared of comments on the web. The higher you go, the worse the fall. For almost all people I’ve met, external success came with increased fragility and a heightened state of insecurity. The worst are those "former something" types with 4 page CVs who, after leaving office, and addicted to the attention of servile bureaucrats, find themselves discarded: as if you went home one evening to discover that someone suddenly emptied your house of all its furniture."

"But self-respect is robust -- that’s the approach of the Stoic school, which incidentally was a Phoenician movement. (If someone wonders who are the Stoics I’d say Buddhists with an attitude problem, imagine someone both very Lebanese and Buddhist). I’ve seen robust people in my village Amioun who were proud of being local citizens involved in their tribe; they go to bed proud and wake up happy. Or Russian mathematicians who, during the difficult post-Soviet transition period, were proud of making $200 a month and do work that is appreciated by twenty people and considered that showing one’s decorations, or accepting awards, were a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one’s contributions. And, believe it or not, some wealthy people are robust. But you just don’t hear about them because they are not socialites, live next door, and drink Arak baladi not Veuve Cliquot."

"If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been."

"One should never do anything without skin in the game. If you give advice, you need to be exposed to losses from it. It is an extension to the silver rule. So I will tell you what tricks I employ."

"Do not read the newspapers, or follow the news in any way or form. To be convinced, try reading last years’ newspaper. It doesn’t mean ignore the news; it means that you go from the events to the news, not the other way around." 

"If something is nonsense, you say it and say it loud. You will be harmed a little but will be antifragile – in the long run people who need to trust you will trust you." 

"When I was still an obscure author, I walked out of a studio Bloomberg Radio during an interview because the interviewer was saying nonsense. Three years later Bloomberg Magazine did a cover story on me. Every economist on the planet hates me."  

"I’ve suffered two smear campaigns, and encour-aged by the most courageous Lebanese ever since Hannibal, Ralph Nader, I took reputational risks by exposing large evil corporations such as Monsanto, and suffered a smear campaign for it. "

"Treat the doorman with a bit more respect than the big boss." 

"If something is boring, avoid it. Save taxes and visits to the mother in law. Why? Because your biology is the best nonsense detector; use it to navigate your life." 

"There are a lot of such rules in my books, so for now let me finish with a maxim. The following are no-nos"

• Muscles without strength
• Friendship without trust
• Opinion without risk
• Change without aesthetics
• Age without values
• Food without nourishment
• Power without fairness
• Facts without rigor
• Degrees without erudition
• Militarism without fortitude
• Progress without civilization
• Complication without depth
• Fluency without content
• And, most of all, religion without tolerance.