Category: Flawsophy

  • A life less lived..

    Quite a while back, I remember writing about people who, despite their circumstances, continue to plod on through life, not giving up on it. I ended it with a quote from ‘The Hurt Locker’ by James ‘Everyone’s a coward about something.‘ I added that sometimes it’s life, and sometimes it’s death.

    I was reminded of this when I read about the Goa couple‘s suicide and another one closer home – a person I knew, if only for a few months – one which came as a rude shock. In the first case, Anand Ranthidevan and his wife Deepa took a very deliberate and seemingly well thought through decision to end their lives, planned down to the last detail. The label I’ve heard several times in conversations – real and virtual – is disturbed. I don’t subscribe to that, it’s probably the reaction from a society which just cannot accept that people without any troubles could really make a conscious decision to end their lives. I can actually identify with it because in conversations with friends, I’ve toyed with the idea of driving off a cliff at say 55-60, when a life has been lived fully.

    But just like the question in the earlier post – why people continued to plod on, I am interested in the flip side too. Why do people choose to end it? In situations where the individual is troubled by something – physical/emotional/under the influence of a drug, there is probably a point where he/she feels the problem cannot be solved, and chooses to end the journey.

    The Goa incident is different because the individuals were in their prime, at least in terms of age. When sports personalities, actors etc retire at the ‘right’ time, they sometimes use the ‘Why retire now vs Why don’t you retire now’ line. Can one think of life that dispassionately? Probably, if one knew what lay after, or if one didn’t care, or thought it wasn’t worth the effort. Or when one felt that one’s existence didn’t matter to anyone but the self. Or maybe there when there was no problem worth solving. What do you think?

    until next, life </span>

  • Oh, you rockstar you!

    Season 1, Episode 3 of The Dewarists brought together Indian Ocean and Mohit Chauhan, in “Maaya” and took me back to 2001. Goa. When Silk Route’s Dooba Dooba was still a popular number and I was loaned the Kandisa tape by my hostel neighbour A. After several months, he stole it back from me. (because I wouldn’t return it voluntarily!)

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRhTmRPVrYQ

    As I watched the video on YouTube, I noticed the silver creeping into Mohit Chauhan’s sideburns. 🙂 I suddenly realised that it had been more than a decade since the yellow car slowly sunk into the water and it’s been 2 years since Asheem Chakravarty died. It made me wonder about succession plans for artists and their bands. Yes, some bands do keep evolving, their members change, but their peaks of popularity is restricted to a timeframe – a generation at best. In some cases, the music they created lives on even after them, though the members themselves may have moved on, within this life or beyond.

    But imagine, each member being able to pick out his own successor who is able to recreate the music as well as that extra something that made the band what it was. Imagine The Beatles now with 4 new members doing concerts with a new sound but retaining the DNA that made them great. Quite impossible no? It’ll never be the same.

    And that perhaps explains why they’re special. And it’s not just artists, it goes for people who excel across the spectrum. There is no succession plan they can make. They are unique, ‘single piece’. But then so are all of us, one of a kind. The difference is in scale. What they created left a mark on many more lives. They found something at a point in time that only they could have done, in such a way that anyone who experienced it was changed.

    We do many things on any given day, and many a time we are also rockstars in someone’s life, even for a brief period. Is that purpose enough for us or will we want further? Will we open ourselves to possibilities and grab the chance when it comes? Will we go beyond that and chase opportunities down? Maybe the way we answer this frames our life journey.

    Mann ka panchhi Tan ka pinjara 
    Bin maange ki jail

    until next time, rock sako to rock lo 😀

  • In the beginning…

    Over on the other blog, I had discussed one of my favourite 2012 trend decks – by Ross Dawson. Within that, my favourite trend was #4 – Institutions in question, in which he talks of political situations (Arab unrest), and the change in status of financial institutions leading to movements like Occupy Wall Street. The last slide is titled “Transformation not apocalypse”, in which he mentions the significance of 2012 for several reasons – from the Mayan calendar’s end of the word prophecy to it being hailed as the year of the Singularity – a subject that keeps popping up on this blog. 🙂

    I, for one, believe that we’re in for a transformation. But it’s not just the political, economic or even technological changes happening around us, I think we’re fundamentally going to change as individuals and how we relate to others – society. So it’s not just the economic and political institutions that will be transformed, but even social institutions – marriage, family, parenthood, friendship and so on.

    As the average human life span increases thanks to medical advances, the ‘rational’ reasons underpinning these social institutions will be under scrutiny. I have a feeling that technology will soon allow us to find surrogates for each of these, one way or the other. It isn’t as though the institutions themselves will disappear, but their importance and the solidity they had thus far enjoyed would diminish. What exactly the changes would be is something I’m still trying to imagine, but the effect of social networks on relationships is probably the beginning of this transformation, and we are likely to be known as the generation under whose watch it all began.

    until next time, a happy 2012 to you 🙂

  • Reference Groups for Heroes

    Scott Adams had a very interesting post ‘The Comparison Advantage‘, in which he writes about status related stress when “media is changing our reference group. We’re continuously bombarded with stories about people who are fabulously successful.” I’d add that social media is also a big culprit. According to him, the cure is  “to make sure you’re near the top of at least one reference group in your life.”

    With some difference, this is a thought that had crossed my mind long before I read this. But before we get to that, an interesting thing happened. A couple of posts (in Google Reader) after the above, I came across a post by Nilofer Merchant on HBR Blogs titled “Be Your Own Hero“. Completely contradictory? No. But related and yet different perspectives? Yes. This author asks us to junk the ‘Hero Narrative’ and pushes us to be our own hero by following our own passions and not trying to emulate anyone – a “clarity of purpose” for oneself. One of the proposed mantras is also “I shall not obsess over others’ success”, in addition to doing our bit to co-create the future.

    And now we can come back to my thought. I can relate to Nilofer’s views because that was what led me to leave a cubicle and explore the path of being employed by myself. One and a half years gave me an immense amount of learning, one of which was that even with a well thought out ‘personal purpose’ in hand, it was difficult for me to stop comparing. It really didn’t help that the gestation time for it was quite high, and a ‘need it now’ attitude, probably heightened by social media, also played its part.

    After much thought, I jumped back into a cubicle, before which I rewrote the ‘personal purpose’, in which I attempted to factor in the statustics. Putting a full stop to comparison is a long journey, and I’m already on it. An insight (humour me 😉 ) I had while thinking about the ‘compare feature’ was that so far I had been dependent on one of my identities heavily. Mostly it was my work visiting card. So, when comparing, I wasn’t really acknowledging the other things that I was doing, and doing reasonably well. And that is where I mash Nilofer’s ‘personal purpose’ with Scott Adams’ ‘reference group’. I don’t need to top any of my reference groups, but I need them so that my ‘personal purpose’ is balanced between various activities and relationships. That way, I don’t have to kill myself for not blazing a new trail independently. The cubicle job allows me to work on the things I like to work on; the blogs, social platforms and columns allow me to explore other avenues of interest and gives me a sense of worth, and when I need a hug, there’s D and friends and family. I try to make conscious decisions on each of these, keeping the others in mind. Multiple identities, multiple reference groups, all part of the personal purpose. Early days, but the signs are good.

    until next time, try id out 🙂

  • < /life > < death >

    So, ‘Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow‘ has now been pretty much immortalised. I began to wonder about last words and coincidentally came across this article around the same idea.  As the article states, Steve Jobs “managed to bring the same sense of wonderment to death as he did to life.”

    Few people, I’d think, would like to dwell on their mortality. I am not sure if it was because this topic was playing in the background (in my mind), but I began noticing a lot of deaths recently. Some old, some middle aged, and famous enough in some context to appear in a newspaper. There were important death anniversaries too. There was also the death of a 25 year old, who could technically be termed a 2nd degree  connection. Jobs knew it was coming, and had probably prepared himself for it. But the deaths I read about happened either after a few days in hospital, or a few hours, or were accidents.

    I wondered how many are prepared for their death, let alone ready with their last words. The 25 year old, from what I read and heard, would just have had enough time to mourn himself and the utter meaninglessness of it all! At least, that was my first thought – so, so early. Set to start his first job next month, life was just about to begin for him. Until a terminal disease strikes or the actual time of death, does anyone even understand the implication of mortality? What would be the last thought playing in the head? Probably we only have enough time to think “Oh my god (non-atheists), I’m about to die”. Some would have their loved ones around, some not. Some might go blank, some would want to say something and they may or may not have the ability to do so. Some would ask a higher power for more time, some might be thankful that it’s all ending. Does the life actually flash before one’s eyes? If so, is that preparation for something else?

    Why did Jobs use those words? Had he only just realised how much he had changed the world? Was it wonderment at the thought that irrespective of what one achieved, this was the equaliser? That this was how it would end, for everyone. Or was it just the awe of everything that he understood as life, coming to an end? Or did he see something else that caused the wonderment – a glimpse of what lay beyond?

    It is often said that the best way to live life is to live in the moment. Does it also include death? Death of the moment? Death of the ‘me’ in that moment?

    until next time, live long and prosper 🙂