Why I might just not write a novel, annus horribilis nearly and other miscellany

This will probably be my closing blog for the year.  There are lots of things on my mind at this time.  Hence this confused title.  

Right on top in my mind is this business of the novel that I have been referring to in a couple of posts.  So some of you have been intrigued or surprised that I had one in mind, some of you have encouraged me to press on with it.  

Knowing that you are a small set of people to whom I send links to my blog, all of fourteen at last count, and knowing that you are all dear to me there is a sampling bias in these reactions. 

So here is the story on my novel.  I have written up most of the plot.   But the core of the setting into which I wish to my weave my story has just started taking shape.  I know it will be a long way before I get that bit in place. 

I would like to engage in this writing effort purely as a matter of indulgence.  I would like to do it for my sake.   I wish to spend a lot of time researching the historical setting at the core of the novel.

That said, here are the reasons I might eventually not write the novel after all.  And if I did I might not publish it.  At a very basic level I believe a writer needs to be a sensitive person, being able to get into the minds of the character.  A writer needs to have a good command of language, with the ability to create the right effect on the reader’s mind with nothing more than words to create that effect.  Above all, a writer needs to be able to tell an engaging story.

Having spent an enormous amount of time thinking about myself as a writer I am not sure I have acquired any of these abilities in adequate measure.  If at all my blogs suggest that I possess some kind of writing skills I would dismiss them as inadequate for a novel where the writer has to engage the reader for an extended period of time.  My raconteuring skills are even poorer.

So, here I am.  I would love to tell a story that has been close to my heart, for more reason than one.  The setting I want to locate the story in has been close to my heart as a topic in history.   Hence my belief that writing this novel will be an act of pure indulgence.  Again, my story is about a protagonist who is modeled on someone special that I know.  That leaves me with this dilemma:  Should I lay bare the details of this protagonist and her life?  Or should I just preserve my thoughts and recollections of the protagonist as a private treasure?

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With three days to go, I cannot wait for this year to get over.   I know that sounds awfully superstitious.  But then this year started off with so many transitions that my wife and I said to each other in the middle of January that we could not wait for the year to get over.

 

Looking back, by the grace of God, it has not turned out to be quite the annus horribilis that we were afraid that it would be.   It is true that we will not see any more of some relatives, friends and acquaintances that we would miss.  But then we are grateful to God that the year did not get any worse.

On a different note I realize that during the year I got to know someone very interesting, very likeable as a person, someone who impressed me deeply with some extraordinary qualities I noticed during my interactions, although she is a generation younger to me.  It was a strange and first of its kind experience for me, although I have heard of friends and relatives telling me about having turned completely unconnected acquaintances into adopted nieces and nephews and assorted family.

It is a pity that I will probably not have much longer to get to know this person, more or better, since she will very soon move on to pursue a new phase in her destiny in a different part of the world that I may have nothing to do with.  So much so there will be practically no touch points in our incipient connection in a few days from today.   

So here is the bright side:  Apart from the joy that one gets out of admiring someone talented, someone likable, I also discovered that after all I am capable of caring selflessly for someone from whom I had not received anything, from whom I looked forward to nothing at all, except the joy of having cared for.

I am grateful to God I made this acquaintance.  I am sorry our (this individual's and mine) paths will probably never cross again, after a few days from now.

That would bring up the obvious question:  What about my wife, my sons and other members of my family?  Did / do I not care for them?  After much thinking I am now of the belief that none of that so far has been truly selfless.  I have asked myself probably the ultimate counterfactual:  Would I love them all just the same if I had not received the amount of affection that I had received or been receiving from each of them?  That is a tough question to answer.  And the most honest answer I can give is I don’t know.

Having been through all of that I can now say this:  Those folks who are capable of loving and sharing without asking for anything in return are truly a blessed lot.  That has been a great realization this year for me.

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This year has been a slow year on the work front.  But that is nothing new for me.  With the year behind me, I realise that I will have nothing significant to show that would take me closer to immortality, which perhaps is what many would consider the final frontier of achievement.  

I will leave out the notion of immortality from this discussion.  Shankaracharya is immortal as is Gautama Buddha.  Alexander the Great is immortal.  But isn’t Timur the lame immortal too?  Is Adam Smith immortal?  Is Louis Pasteur immortal?  What about Karl Marx?  They have all touched our lives our influenced our thoughts in such perceptible ways.

Getting back to my life this year at work, it has been just another dull and uneventful year as many others in the past, with nothing that took place portending that anything significantly different in a positive way is likely to happen in the next year. 

But then I look at the bright side:  It could have been worse too.  Thank God it wasn’t so.


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It turns out that since I started blogging three years back I would have written the largest number of posts this year.  I resumed writing after suspending it for a few months when I thought that I had said that all I had to.

And then I went through this rather wrenching experience this year that made me want to resume writing.  It is commonly believed that behind many a creative work there is a Muse.  My spurt in blogging productivity is largely due to a Muse.

Some of you have sensed it already.  Although I wrote on a variety of topics during the year I eventually came back to the one same theme, which had to with my unrequited feelings for the Muse and my troubled relationship.  Although of some antiquity, the ghosts of that relationship came back to haunt me this year.  It bothered me a great deal.  To the extent, that my niece, one of the people in my list of people I mail links to, wrote back that she had had enough of  that theme.  

I think it is now time for me to sign off for the year - from the theme as well as blogging.  

In closing, I want to thank each of you for having been such kind and occasionally even indulgent readers, often getting back with kind feedback, suggestions and thoughts.  Thank you for patiently reading my rambling posts.  All I can give you in return is my prayerful best wishes for a great 2015 for you and everyone in your family.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.

Koyikode Vignettes

It is one of those unusual trips where the journey and the destination were sources of joy to me.  Driving through the forests of Bandipur and winding up and down the hills where the Western Ghats meet the Deccan plateau was delight in itself.   The troops of monkeys and a darting leopard in the reserve forest raised our expectations of being able to see more of the wildlife of Bandipur.  That was not to be though.  It turned out the leopard indeed was a non-normal sighting. 

  

We descended into the foothills of Wayanad, having negotiated the nine hair pin bends, with me muttering and swearing under my breath as I tried to deal with my acrophobia.  After driving through another fifty kilometres of the undulating beauty of the Western Ghats we drove into Koyikode. 

To all those who have not been on this trip I would strongly encourage you to make the trip to Wayanad just for enjoying the sheet beauty of nature in this part of the world.  I guess it may look even more picturesque in the rains, although one may not able to screech through the distance in the six hours and fifteen minutes that I managed to in the comfort of the dry, cool December air.

Koyikode and Malabar are different from the rest of Kerala.  Our stay there was very short, for a maiden trip.  Apart from the seven hours that I slept for, most of the twelve waking hours we spent there was taken up by the main purpose of our trip, which I shall not say much about. 

So we did after all miss seeing those spots on the lovely beaches where Dr. Prasad Varkey explained to Puja Mathew the three sequential levels of response to lost love in the movie Om Shanti Oshana (OSO).   More about Dr. Varkey's theory on lost love in another post.

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Koyikode – that is what the locals would call Kozhikode – is a city with a rich past that is struggling to come to terms with a contemporary present.   The Malabar region has always captured my imagination as it has held a prominent place in the history of Kerala.  

Its fertile hinterland grew spices that the rest of the world coveted.  Its inviting ports beckoned traders, who eventually became conquerors, to its shores, centuries before the advent of Jesus Christ.  In medieval times, a mere forty five years after the officially accepted year of the Renaissance and Reformation, fired by the spirit of adventure that it is said to have ignited, the first Europeans landed in India through the Kappada beach.    

In more recent times it reasserted its place in the annals of history as the fiery spirit of its people manifested in one of the early freedom struggles in the form of the Mappilla rebellion.  The people of the region later on followed with their struggle for social justice through their feisty leaders like EMS, VT Bhattathiripad and Comrade Ajitha.  

Each of them represented a different approach to achieving their ends.  What was common to all of them was their abiding commitment to the social cause they espoused.  That is the essence of history in a sense.  

For successive generations, history has been wrongly taught as the story of individual triumphs of conquerors and heroes who prevailed over the vanquished.  The truth is that often they also represent the larger collective aspirations of peoples and societies.

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To me places are nothing but the spatial coordinates of where people created events.  Take the people out of the context, a place is nothing but a lifeless piece of geography, with the flora and fauna the only living beings who anyway do not have much of a story to tell by themselves, unless you are a zoologist or a botanist.   I am neither.  Imagine the flowers and the beasts and the birds that we read about as children without the human or humanoid stories woven around them!

 

I tried to visualize the Dravidians as they over-ran the local negroids more than three thousand years ago in modern Wayanad, as they tried to find a new home after they had been displaced by the more war like Aryans who marauded their way into the fertile Indo Gangetic plains from the cold, dry and inhospitable terrains of Central Europe and West Asia.  I wondered how the local worshippers of animistic faiths must have responded as their religions were supplanted by the Goddess worshipping immigrants and their symbols and icons cleverly coopted.

As we drove through Sultan Battery I relived the battles between Tipu Sultan and the British and the role that the battery must have played in those battles till the truce of Srirangapatnam.  The Sultan never managed to get to Kozhikode although he extended the road to Thamarassery.  

The little towns of Chungam, Chundale, Engapuzha, Adivaram,Vythiri, Thamarassery and so on bore testimony to the trading prowess of the Muslims of this region and the tenuous confluence until the recent past between their religious and their secular lives.  The market places and their shops had a look that was distinct from similar establishments I had seen in Central or Southern Kerala.  On the beaches of Kozhikode I could not help imagining the first Greek and Roman vessels buoying up and down on the waters of the distant dark moonless horizon.   

So here is the rub.  While my wife and sons admired the sights, sounds and smells of the beautiful and vibrant beach of Kozhikode on a balmy Sunday evening, here I was lost in reverie, somewhere inside the many hundreds of pages of history that I had read and was now struggling to recreate through my fading recollections - like a visually impaired man trying to read the faded and moth eaten pages of an ancient book.

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I loved Koyikode for all that.  I could see the struggle between tradition hanging around its old houses and shops and buildings that clung together with their black tar roofs on the one hand and the new glass walled showrooms that evidenced the purchasing power of the western trained, Gulf oil funded Malabari.  Koyikode did not seem to have transitioned neatly from the world of (Vaikom Mohammed) Basheerka to this modern world that is perhaps epitomized by Dulqur Salman and the character that he plays in Ustad Hotel.  

Its strong tradition and character, I suspect, will not allow that to happen.  And that has perhaps nothing to do with the zeal of the hundreds of thousands of pious Muslims clad in their spotless white Mappilla costume that I saw milling around the Markaz convention centre where a massive event was in progress.

In that sense Koyikode is like my home town, Trivandrum.  There is an uneasy and immiscible coexistence between the quaint and the contemporary.   It is unlike Kochi which has always been a bit of a parvenu.  The jarring garishness of Manmohan’s Singh’s market economy has come to settle down well in Kochi, among its new hotels, fancy apartments and a new generation that often appears to have lost its way and seems to seek solace and sense in the city’s numerous bands and herb-dispensing hangouts. 

Koyikode is unlike Trivandrum in an important way though.  Its people are awfully nice, to the point of being genteel.  That is very unlike my fellow Travancorite who would make you think twice before you try a second attempt at building a conversation.

 

And as you think of its many violent struggles in the past, as you recall the many press stories of the political clashes, as you think of the many movie stories that revolve around mindless fundamentalists being misguided into evil plots to liquidate unsuspecting and harmless citizens, one cannot help wonder how a society that is full of such people could whip such a frenzy of emotions.   

That is perhaps what the Malayali means when he says that even the docile rat snake is capable of striking back if adequately provoked.

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As we navigated out of Koyikode, through its narrow but well maintained streets, past its well laid out even if somewhat tasteless buildings, through the din of the Monday morning traffic, listening to the sweet prattle of the RJ in her musical North Keralite and Malabari accent, I said to myself that this, Insha Allah, will not be my last visit to Koyikode.  

This is where I need to start my journey to gather the material for my as yet unborn, half written novel, in which my protagonist, Ammu, a fierce Marxian historian in the footsteps of Damodar Kosambi, a love child who is struggling to come to terms with her scar-filled past, sifts through years of archaeological material littered across the hills and caves of the Western Ghats to find a new explanation for the mystery of the nearly mythical port of Muziris. 

At the end of my travel I may still not have a novel.  But I hope to have sated my lust for the coast of Malabar. 

But then I also know that I will have another important reason, a new chapter that appears to be unfolding in my life, God willing, that is too early to speculate about.  But it is one of those visions of the future that one sometimes thinks one can see, however hazily through the silvery mists of uncertainty.

This post is dedicated to the only two Koyikkodans I know, apart from the third who is at the centre of the unfolding future that I am not able to speak of yet in much detail.  By the time that drama has played out its magic on me I might just smile at the evanescence of all that I saw, I experienced, I wrote about and all that is so ephemeral that we hold on to it like it will be there eternally.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.

That time of the year when...

It will be soon that time of the year when another set of young men and women say good bye to the campus.  The place that was school to them for a little less than two years would soon be alma mater, a somewhat vaguely defined relationship.  For many of them the alma mater would just be a bagful of memories.  For others it would be a badge of lifelong honour and pride.

I often wonder how many of them would miss the place as they head out to a world of expectations and promise.  Would they miss us teachers a good part of whose lives revolve around them?

It is our engagement with the students that defines or marks our calendars.  We plan our academic life around our teaching commitments.  And our families plan their lives around our academic lives. 

Students have a larger impact on our lives as teachers than we might imagine.  And I am not yet talking about the feedback, which sometimes leaves evergreen memories and, on some rare occasions, scars that you wish you could forget.

Which makes me often wonder how much truth there is to what some of my colleagues claim: We academics are at the heart of an academic institution.  I ask instead:  What would this school and our lives as teachers be but for its students?

It will be soon that time of the year when the trees would have all shed their leaves, in preparation for the hot and desiccating summer of Bangalore.  To a more delusive or hyper-imaginative mind like mine it would appear that they do so in honour of the kids that are about to leave the campus.

Or may be it is their way of saying how much they will miss them.  Like the flora of Ayodhya that is said to have left the town to accompany Lord Rama to the Dandakaranya forest when His father banished Him.

These trees are like mute witnesses to the vicissitudes of life on the campus.  They stand there stoically for years and decades, watching the steady procession of people who live on the campus and then eventually leave as they graduate, retire or are snatched away by the Hands of Destiny.

I know most of these trees individually, like they were animate creatures, and not the inanimate but living creatures that our science text books would have us believe.  They must have stood where they are for many decades, like Lord Tennyson's brook, even as men come and go.  I know how their leaves look, how their branches droop and the spread of their lush, generous canopies.

It will be soon that time of the year when the whole campus will go to sleep.  The students' halls of residences will be vacant once again.  Many faculty colleagues and their families will leave on their annual vacation, as if they wanted to say, What do we do here with all the students gone. 

It will be soon that time of the year that I do not look forward to.  In spite of being an old man I do not like transitions in life.  And I do not like milestones that forebode impending transitions either.

As I walk back home to the hastening dusk on the December sky I visualise that time of the year that will soon be upon me which will remind that I will be closer to completing another year of my life as a teacher.  It will soon be that time of the year when I will be one year closer to calling it a day as a teacher.

It will soon be that time of the year when I would have gone through another year of circumstances working their inevitable changes on my mind, ever so subtly that I would not even notice.  Until I run into someone from my remote past who exclaims how much I have changed over the years, how taciturn, morose, quiet, grumpy, cynical or humourless I have become.

But this year will not be just another of those fourteen years that I have spent as a teacher here.  I have been through some extraordinary experiences this year.  I discovered a latent emotional need that I had never imagined that I had - the need to be an elderly relative of a kind that I have not been so far.  But just as quickly I realised to my searing disappointment that this desire will remain unfulfilled.

It will soon be that time of the year when the strong arm of Rejection will have prised a piece of me away from the complex ensemble of personalities that my friends who claim to me know me well tell me I am - even though the rational side to me may have helped me come to terms with this unrequited need for belongingness.

Nanni...Namaskaaram..

Letting Go, Yet Again...

It has been a weekend of coming to terms.  It is time to let go, yet again. It is clear that this investment has gone terribly wrong.  The more I think about the details and the developments the more I am convinced that I did not read the entrails right.

I think my wife Lakshmi has been right in warning me of the impending folly of it all.

I am not new to letting go.  More than two years ago, I wrote another post about letting go.  http://sgchalayil.blogspot.in/2012/07/letting-go.html

This time around things are a little different though.  For one, I know the agony and the remorse will remain.  More importantly there are lessons that I will need to remember for the rest of my life.

It all started with a silly Mallu movie a while back, while I was down with a terrible viral fever that sapped not just my body.  It seems to have muddled up my brain too.  The events that unfolded in its wake over the many months that followed  have churned my insides most, as I tried to hang on to sanity and reason, much as a rafter would hang on to his fragile dinghy as he negotiated the fury of the white water rapids.

I cannot afford another one of these mistakes.  The "** lessons" will be a constant reminder to me for sometime now, of the perils and pain of a foolish investment.

It is time for me to go off air, at least for a while.  I will miss writing these posts.  I do not know if you will miss reading them.

Nanni....Namaskaaram.

On Achievement or the Lack of It

What, if anything, have I achieved in life?  How do I measure achievement?  A recent incident involving a dear friend brought these questions into focus.

I guess it is possible to measure achievement by the way it is recognised by the external world.  Awards, accolades or popular recognition of what an individual has done is one measure.  I get the impression that increasingly the world seems to value achievement measured in terms of these metrics.

The other measure is what one has accomplished, such as a great feat in sport, or solving an important problem using one's intellect, or making life better for others through one's actions or the wealth one has accumulated and so on. 

There is an external dimension to this idea of achievement too.  The significance of an achievement here is measured in terms of some pre-existing frame of reference or standard of achievement.

Thus one might accumulate more wealth than the currently wealthiest person or break a new record in sports or find a neat mathematical proof that has eluded everyone else so far.

On a more sublime plane our spiritual masters appear to have raised the whole idea of greatness to an absolutely objective level.  A seeker in spiritualism is supposed to know when he or she has turned into a "realised" soul.  There are no relative yardsticks here. There are realised souls and there are the others.  There is no need for any external validation either.

Very often the second notion of achievement leads to the first.  That said, from time to time, one comes across extraordinary instances of individuals taking particular care to avoid any public recognition for various different reasons.  Those are truly great individuals in my opinion whose achievement has been driven by what I would describe as purity of purpose.

Those in the third category are past caring about recognition anyway. They are so past caring that they perhaps do not even take the trouble to avoid or receive recognition.

On the first and the third metrics I do not have much to show anything by way of achievement.  That leaves the second measure:  Have I done anything significant?

So I ask myself:  As an investment professional did I produce a significant amount of wealth that few others did?  Have I made any extraordinary investment that is like nothing else that anyone else has done?  As an academic now how much do I know about a subject that I can claim there are things I know, problems I can solve that many others cannot?  How long can I hold forth on a subject, any subject, before I flake up?  As a citizen what I have done to improve the welfare for someone with whom I have no family, social or emotional connection?

All things considered I veer round to the view that I have led a shallow life all these years. I have not achieved or accomplished anything in my now long life.

Consequently I do not even know what it means to have achieved anything significant in life by any of the three yardsticks above.  My ignorance of the agony and the ecstasy of achieving reminds me of one of the few poems that I ever learned at my father’s insistence.  (Pasted at the end for ease of reading) 

Like the blind boy who did not know that wonderful thing called light I do not know how it feels to have achieved anything.

There are two differences though:  The blindness of the boy was wrought by God.  My lack of achievement is my own doing (or the lack of it.)  Second, I cannot justifiably say what the blind boy says at the end:  But sure with patience I can bear, a loss I never can know.  My lack of achievement is a loss I cannot live down. 

I can go on and on, at the risk of appearing to wallow in self-pity.  But I guess I have made the point.

Nanni....Namaskaaram


O say what is that thing called Light,
Which I must never enjoy;
What are the blessings of the sight,
O tell your poor blind Boy!

You talk of wondrous thing you see;
You say the sun shines bright;
I feel him warm, but how can he
Or make it day or night?

My day or night myself I make
Whenever I sleep or play:
And could I ever keep awake
With me 'twere always day.

With heavy sighs I often hear
YOu mourn my hapless woe;
But sure with patience I can bear
A loss I never can know.

Then let not what I cannot have
My cheer of mind destroy;
Whilist thus I sing, Iam a King,
Although a poor blind Boy

My Soros moment

George Soros is not the most liked human perhaps.  But a colleague once remarked to me once when I felt sad about the way I was being attacked by my detractors:  Sabari, if you are good at what you do, you are bound to be hated by a few, unless you are in Mother Teres's business.  My business of early stage investing had little in common with the divine work of those nuns in the Missionaries of Charity.

I have considered myself to be a reasonably good long term investor.  Over the years I have accumulated enough evidence to be able to say that on average I can more often call investments correctly than otherwise.

I attribute this to a disciplined approach to investment.  When I look at a deal I am an unfeeling automaton.  I have also heard people say that I am like a possessed creature, impervious to human sensibilities and focussed exclusively on the minutiae of the business on hand.

I have followed this disciplined approach to social relationships, except when it comes to my parents, parents in law and siblings on my wife's side and mine.

I have also believed in what investment parlance would be called concentrated bets.  The central principle in this style of investing is as follows:  Take your time picking your investments.  Once you are convinced of your thesis, throw large chunks of your wealth on to that asset.

It is this conviction based investment that made me like venture capital investing.  Like in venture capital investing this approach to life has left me with a small portfolio of relationships.

I take a long time to like anyone well enough.  Once I am convinced of my liking I allocate a large part of my emotional capital to that relationship.  Like a patient long term investor I give it all I have.  I invest my time capital to make it work because healthy and happy relationships need a lot of nurturing.


In the early days of the deal you are hovering around the investee all the time, making sure you made the right investment.  Making sure that this deal would work indeed.

You did not care at that time how the other party felt about your constant presence.  You had this great sense of responsibility to yourself and the investee that made you believe that this was no time for social niceties.  That there was much too much riding on the deal for both parties.  And that you knew how to make it work.

Consistent with the risky nature of venture capital investing, there are times when a few such investments look like a losing proposition, when the party of the other part to the relationship seems to drift away from the central premise of the relationship.  Like a cousin who goes off to a far away land and does not look back for a while.  Or a friend with whom you dont share a world view any more.

I fret and grieve over those lemons a lot.  But then like elsewhere in the world of concentrated bets, here too winning some and losing others is business as usual.  And like a bruised child you cringe in a corner, whimpering, before you pick yourself up to ask the more mature question of where you went wrong.

So what is it about Soros and myself in this piece, you well might wonder.

Soros was the scourge of many a government.  He was the enfant terrible of currency markets.  He thought it his birthright to be unreasonable, it would appear.  Without realising what I was doing over time  as an investor I seemed to have embraced some of his qualities. 

It is another matter that I did not achieve the scale of his wealth, success or his global stature.  But then it is not every child who sports a Sachin hair style that ends up becoming a master blaster.  Equally, mythology has only one Ekalavya who could have potentially excelled his Guru.

I remembered Soros a great deal in the past few days as I recalled that even he had to admit eventually in the late nineties that he had "lost it" as an investor.  The mighty had fallen.

And so had I.  Or so it would appear, at least.

My investments in Life have been coming unstuck lately.  I seem to have hit a Soros moment in my life.  And as is common with concentrated bets, these dud deals are burning serious holes in my emotional networth. 

Which makes me wonder if like all retired investors I should settle down to merely harvest those few wise investments I seem to have made in the past.  And not attempt any more new investments.

Good night....I hope you can see that I have still not recovered enough to sign off with my customary Nanni and Namaskaarams.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

I have lost count of the number of times I listened to this song today.  I zeroed in on it after casting about the wilderness of Youtube looking for something that would quieten my own troubled spirit.  Here is a link to this song, if you have not heard it before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_a46WJ1viA

I have been at it nearly all day as I mechanically plodded on, grading one wrong answer after another from a mid term exam I held recently.  The woes of grading those answers appear insignificant in comparison to the other turbulence in my heart.

It has been my day of troubled waters.  Of pain that seems to torch through my very marrows and turn them into hopeless cinders.  A day on which the realisation of my foolishness hit me in full force as I rubbed open my sleepy eyes in the morning.  My incompetence as an investor in Life stood exposed plainly all of a sudden.  The sadness of non-attainment engulfed me in one suffocating pall. 

I am not new to foolishness, remorse or pain in any combination.  But never have I drowned those moments of misery in escapisms like inebriation, although I have been a reckless tippler for brief periods in my life.

I have struggled all alone always, ploughing through the treacherous quicksands of each episode of such misery in the past.

This time around how I wish I could talk to someone about it. But how does that help? Conversations in such moments are much like a fix.  They give you a transient reprieve.  And then the misery back comes back.  With renewed vigour, like a rebelling torrent that has been struggling to break free from an unwelcome dam on its fierce path.

Strangely, for the religious man that I consider myself to be, even Prayer does not seem to help.  It is perhaps because of the childish remorse that the Lord did not want you to go down that path to start with.  But then you are supposed to go back to Him whenever you need Him.  Like a child in pain running back to its mother.

Like I have done many times in the past.  Only to realise that this Mother chooses when to offer succour.  Often it is on Her terms.

I know this too shall pass. As those few others in the past.  But would some bit of me have died with it?  What would that bit be?  Would it be the cankerous elements that I should have exorcised long back?  I hope so.

Right now all that I can think of is that morning when I will hopefully wake up, free from the dull ache that I cannot seem to put behind.  Or hope that the Bridge Over Troubled Waters will be more than just a song.  And that someone will lie himself or herself down to help me walk across the swirling waters that seem to want to swallow me.

Too pained to offer my customary closing salutations...

Emotions: A Lame Attempt at mimicking Russell

I have been back to reading, lately.  Desultory as ever, of course.  I am reading Diana Eck's India:  A Sacred Geography, re-reading Russell's Power:  A New Social Analysis and Wodehouse's Pelican at Blandings all at the same time.

I have a new companion that keeps me awake, apart from the asthma that has been my constant companion for the past eighteen years.  Medical science calls it cervical radiculopathy.  In lay terms it is literally a pain in the neck, and elsewhere too.  It keeps me awake most of the night, like a young new wife - with due apologies to all new young wives.

There is the bright side to miseries in life as someone said once.  At least to most miseries.  This new companion has created more time for me to read.  I engage in a platonic conversationwith the authors of the books I read.  Fortunately platonic relationships are not governed by norms of gender.

It was in this state that I had reason to engage in a conversation with a young student whom I admire for her intellectual prowess and some fine qualities as a human being.  The question on hand was if success in the world of business and human emotions were antithetical to each other.

And here are my views, however poorly informed they may be. I call it a lame attempt at mimicking Bertrand Russell because it is the sort of thing he would write - with all the intellectual firepower that he had and the erudition that he could call at will into his writing.

This apparent conflict between effectiveness in business and emotions is something that troubled me a great deal when I was a young MBA.  Those were times when I said that emotions were foolish and success in professional / business life was paramount.  I think I was a fairly pompous ass too.

It paid off for me.  Without meaning to blow my own trumpet and just to make a point I would say that at 38 I was a "partner" in a respected UK based international private equity house.  Now, that is  verifiable fact. There are still some websites that list me as a "partner" in that fund.

It was a swell deal, moneywise and social staturewise.  We PE guys were the moneymen, moving around like shadowy stalkers with fat pocketbooks.  Many of my peers were willing to give an arm and a leg to get there. 

But I am not sure any more that is how life ought to be. 

Emotions are a tricky state of the mind.  The contemporary view of neuroscience that it is all about some silly chemicals in the brain perhaps explains what causes us to be angry, sad or happy.  It does not tell us how to deal with that damn state.

Emotions are capable of turning dysfunctional if they are not harnessed.  That is how you find deranged fellows mowing down unsuspecting children in a school.  Or people taking their lives prematurely.

But emotions are equally capable of giving a sense of purpose to life.  Channeled properly, emotions lead us to the pursuit of a balance between joy for ourselves in the act of creating joy for others who we care about.  When we make our parents feel happy by spending time with them and sharing with them our joys and frustrations they feel relevant, a sense of purpose and therefore a sense of joy.  That is a source of shared happiness for both the parents and the children. 

So when one slogs away for 60 or 70 hours a week, but knows that there are a couple of days that one can spend at the end of the long and tiring month, talking about the month to a parent or a spouse it makes the drudgery light all of a sudden.

That sense of lightness cannot come from the size of the paycheck and the material luxury that it can buy that one might look forward to.  But sadly in the pursuit of the paycheck people slowly lose or unlearn the ability to love and be loved. 

Viktor Frankl survived the holocaust and wrote a beautiful book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  The essence of Frankl’s book is that a sense of purpose can help people pull through the worst miseries of life.  A related idea is expressed in Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Travelled, where he talks of a love that is distinct from the western notions of love that have a biological undertone or basis. 

Taken together the message is that emotional attachment to members of one’s family or close friends can give a powerful sense of purpose.  Many of us may have probably read this poem about a mother’s love for her child where the mother finally says, Sweet my Child, I live for thee.  (I have pasted the poem at the end.)

I have seen one thing that is common among people that I know of who have undergone frustration and misery in their personal lives.  They were all creatures of emotion who forgot how to channelize those emotions in a sensible way.  They lost their ability to love and be loved.

I have learned this lesson from my own life the hard way, after a few regrettable mistakes:  The ability to love and be loved by one’s family is one of the greatest gifts of the Almighty, as much as intellect, good looks or physical prowess may be. 

It took me a long time to realise that all the glory of a successful career or the wealth that one accumulates cannot deliver the sheer joy one experiences in the love and sense of security that a mother can shower on a child, or the sense of belongingness one can give a spouse or the joy of togetherness that one can give to one’s aging parents.

I am grateful to the Lord that He made me realize all this someday, albeit a tad too late in some ways, rather than leave me to realize it after it was all too late.

Nanni.  Namaskaram.
The Princess:  Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead
Home they brought her warrior dead:
         She nor swoon'd nor utter'd cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
         "She must weep or she will die."

Then they praised him, soft and low,
         Call'd him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
         Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,
         Lightly to the warrior stepped,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
         Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,
         Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
         "Sweet my child, I live for thee."

    -The Princess by Lord Alfred Tennyson

The Solitude of Pain

This is perhaps the most personal among my blogs yet.  There have been others where I have been able to laugh at my misfortunes with the benefit of remoteness across time.  Not so this time.

This relates to a period of time in the past that I shall not specify. It has not been long enough that the wound has healed for the pain to abate.  Yet I am able to look at it with the sort of objectivity that only the passage of time allows.

It makes me ask many questions that come from stuff I read long back and did not understand the meaning of.  How do we end up inflicting pain on ourselves?  Is it something that we have a choice about?

I never related to Gibran's idea of pain that I first read when I was in junior college.   "Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self."  I read Gibran because it was fashionable to do so.  Like reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead was.  Like reading Kafka or Koestler was.

And then some years later I went through an experience that came close to what Gibran probably meant.  But my super rational observer ego came to my rescue and asked me: Was I really sure I was in pain?  That is when I realised the sense in Gibran's line.  Pain is after all self-chosen.

But it was not the pain that healed me as the bitter pill that Gibran would have us believe it to be.  That pain could have instead derailed my budding career in financial services if I had not picked up myself with the power of rationality and the drive of a burning aspiration and loads of the Lord's Grace.

Years later Pain came to me haunt me again.  I knew I was setting myself up for it well before it hit me.  The sheer impossibility of joy enduring in that situation was all too evident for any one to miss.  The untenability of the joy reminded me of a poem of Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri that my cousin used to cram in school.  It was about a frog that was trying to savour the prey on its wily sticky tongue even as the frog itself was gliding down the gullet of its predator, a snake.

This time I had to suffer the pain all alone.  Sharing it with anyone would have doubled it.  I could not share it with those that cared about me.  Sharing it with anyone else posed the risk of it hurting the person who had given me that joy, however short lived it had been. It was a perfect Gibranesque situation:  (Y)ou shall see in truth that you are weeping for that which has been your delight."  How could I cause hurt to the one who had given me joy?

As I suffered the pain in total emotional solitude I wondered what was more racking:  The solitude in which I suffered the pain?  Or the pain itself?

I am not sure I will know the answer.  Not yet at least.  May be on another bright day when I have the luxury of looking at this episode across time, like a mariner staring wistfully across the boat that has sailed without him into the horizon, I will be able to say:  Not every voyage on this vessel was meant for me, perhaps.  The good-soul thing to do then would be to wish safe passage to those that sailed without you.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.

Passing another milestone

After a few weeks of tentativeness it is now clear that my term as Chairperson NSRCEL will end in April 2015.  I will have served my full term  by then. 

For a while I was hoping I might get off earlier than that.  For an even shorter while it appeared that I might end up serving for longer than that. 

I do not have any feeling of relief that I will soon not have that additional work of managing NSRCEL.  Nor do I think that I will miss playing that part. 

It is possible that for a few days after I hand over charge I will suddenly remember something that I feel I ought to be doing / have done at NSRCEL.  And then I will have to remind myself that I no longer need to put it down on the To Do List to make up for my truant memory, as I would have always done for the three years that would have passed by then. That brief moment might possibly feel like a vacuum. 

And then slowly my connection with the Centre will ebb away, as do many other memories and connections from our cognitive selves.  They will be replaced by the daily struggles of producing 160 work points, dealing with student feedback and the many other things that engage or agitate us every day.

I accepted the offer to run NSRCEL readily, almost instantaneously.  I was persuaded by two considerations.  One, I thought it was one more opportunity to "give something back to the school", to use a disagreeable cliche.  Further and more importantly I felt that I would be able to do something for the cause of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is the only bit of capitalism that I have been able to accept unreservedly, as a former leftist. I like it because apart from solving problems for mankind it democratises the creation of wealth and delivers jobs - all of which, to an extent, square with the ideal of distributing the tools and means of production.

I was, and continue to remain, passionate about promoting entrepreneurship in whatever way I can.  I will contribute to it as a faculty at IIMB through some forum or the other, inside IIMB or outside.  Once I retire I will perhaps join a religious institution to set up an entrepreneurship support Centre, hoping to appease God and Mammon at the same time.

My passion for entrepreneurship kept me going for these past twenty eight months or so.  I was not much concerned about whether I would earn plaudits for myself.  I still remain unconcerned about that. 

At my age plaudits cannot be "monetised", to use a metaphor from contemporary entrepreneurship. And what use are bragging rights, after all?  They cannot pay my sons' school fees.  Nor will they pay for a cardiac by-pass, should I need one, God forbid.  As a budding pragmatist - yes, budding indeed - I do not see much sense or value in anything that cannot be monetised, other than of course the satisfaction of pursuing some larger social good.

I took up the responsibility with lots of hope and little forethought.  I was looking forward to achieving a great deal. 

As I approach the end of my term I am not sure I got very far with all that agenda.  I apprehend that when I step down I will still ask myself if I leave the place any less respectable and stable than it was when I took over from Kumar.  Did I destroy the edifice that had been built by the likes of Kalyani and Kumar, I often ask myself.

At a personal level I know for sure that I will leave with many emotional scars, that I brought upon myself and that I inflicted on others with my decisions that may have made me come across as unkind. 

I have in my past life made harsher decisions, than I did at NSRCEL, that made one of my detractors describe me as a "cross between Timur the Lame and Attila the Hun". Even if she was somewhat drunk when she said that I knew she had been deeply hurt by what I had done to her as her reporting officer. (She went on to become a senior business leader at a global investment bank in London and stayed there till it was consumed by the 2008 turmoil.)

As I grow older I cannot seem to swallow all that emotional stress any more, as if it was all in a day's work.  I ended up ploughing through difficult choices at NSRCEL with the conviction that they needed to be made to keep the show going.

That is certainly one good reason I will not miss that office once I step down.  Those choices come with that territory, like it or not.

I learned a lot about the institution during this time. I leave the Centre, at least a trifle wiser than I was when I took charge.  I am much grateful for support from quarters in the institute that I did not expect.  Dean DT was one of them. 

I can see that post April 2015, God willing, I will have many hours on hand every week that I would have spent on the Centre's work as its Chairperson.  I am even hoping that I will be able to go on a Sababtical. 

If that happens I will have to carefully choose what I do. Prepare for courses that I could not launch for the past three years?  Go back to classes on Fin Economterics to equip myself better to try my hand at getting published?  Read more of the Gita, in line with the quantity theory of spiritualism
that someone proposed to me a few weeks back?  Complete the half finished novel in which a highly talented historian is trying to disentangle herself from an unlikely relationship and free herself from the violent Marxism on Kerala's campuses to be able to devote her energies to solve an obstinate puzzle in the ancient (pre Christ) history of Kerala? For all you know I might end up doing none of this, but simply indulge in a lot of desultory reading.

Anyway for now, this is the first weekend in sometime when I have started contemplating life after NSRCEL.  Much more will unfold hopefully, Insha Allah, before I finally hand over.

Nanni.  Namaskaaram.