Naive and Credulous Idiot

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.