My wife does not just love me. She is devoted to me. She has walked the talk of devotion by
laying a lot on the line, including her own reasonably promising career in
order to prop up my own rather unstable and tenuous career and thereby my
rather fragile and chauvinistic ego.
Among the long litany of shortcomings that I accost the Lord
with every evening as I sit down for my prayer the one thing I do not carp
about is marital discord. So much so, I
hold my wife out as the exception that proves the old adage that no man is a hero
to his valet or to his wife.
That said, there is one matter on which she has disagreed
with me in recent years: My assessment
of my own capacity to discern. In a rare
moment of crushing candour she pointed out to me one day that for all my belief
that I am a skeptical, suspicious, circumspect or even discerning individual, I
am rather “naïve and credulous”.
She of course did not call me an idiot. That word in the title of this post is my
own addition. I think she spared me the epithet more out of a sense of charity.
It has been a point of disagreement between my wife and
myself because I have believed that I lasted a career spanning eighteen years in
a fairly unforgiving business, that of providing financial capital to businesses and in the process I successfully dealt with many
truly delinquent souls, or the depraved side of otherwise decent souls, simply
because I was naturally and born suspicious.
Or, at least that is what a boss of mine - himself a progeny
of two spies of Her Majesty, the Queen of England, a sworn atheist and a member
of the Fabian society, who would have perhaps built a temple for the God of
Suspicion - believed and told my wife once very proudly. “Lakshmi,
in the private equity business, we are all trained to be suspicious; but your
husband is naturally and congenitally suspicious”, he said as he allowed a wan, fleeting hint of
a smile across his proverbial stiff upper lip.
In these past twenty years or so as I stumbled from one
crisis to another in my rather lackluster corporate career, I have with
unfailing regularity proven my wife’s assessment right, rather than that of my
boss.
The most recent of these occurred over the course of the past
few days. For reasons of official
impropriety I shall not dwell on specifics.
But I guess it is only reasonable for you to be curious, to wonder what it is
all about.
So, to give you a sense of the nature of the situation, let me
ask you to picture the following scenario, which is a bit like a scene from a pot boiler
Indian movie. Here is this nice guy,
generally known to be God fearing, religious, morally upright, walking the
straight and narrow, and never disobeying the dictates of his mother.
In
a strange and sudden turn of events, he is handed this difficult choice: He could, under duress of course, either marry a woman of disputed
virtue, whom he has not met before. Or he could risk having his carefully cultivated
years of reputation besmirched through a large cache of doctored images of his
in a compromising position with the woman in reference. And there isn’t a third choice.
Such instances of naiveté are not new to my professional
life. Here are just a few of the more
noteworthy ones: A loan transaction that
I never liked was eventually laid at my door when it went threatened to burn a hole in
my employer’s balance sheet. A member of
my team who was sacked without my knowledge was informed, wrongly of course, that she had been asked by the organisation to leave at my insistence. A joint venture
that I had assiduously built was handed
over to a colleague in a midnight coup.
The country head position that I had been hired for was quietly handed over
to someone else who I had been told conspiratorially was not really that "sort
of material", although he was a sincere soul.
My many failed emotional investments, not of the amorous variety, are other monuments to my naivete.
I can go on and on.
I guess you get the picture.
And so the saga continues, the incident that triggered this post being
just the most recent and definitely not the last, I am sure.
If I were to last the full span of the purusha ayush
(human longevity) that our scriptures suggest, of sighting a thousand full
moons, I would have accumulated so many of these distinctions that upon my
passing, I would need a whole museum to commemorate the numerous outcomes of
my naiveté and credulousness.
Which raises the question: What explains my
longevity in the investment industry? The only explanation I can think of is what I Galbraith said about
India: It is proof that God exists!
In my own hopeful style I ask myself could there be a bright side to my naivete at
all. Could it be that I am like Jada Bharata in Bhagavatam?
But then Jada Bharata was an enlightened soul who knew that he was being, and let himself be, abused, unlike me who has
been hopelessly blindsided.
So all I can pray for is now is that my naivete and
credulity do not wash down on either of my poor sons, in particular, the one
that seems to inherit so many of my traits.
Nanni….Namaskaaram.
