Much Ado About a Selfie

Thanks to its being a favourite pastime at the highest level in the nation it would be but natural to write a post about selfies.  But that is not the motivation for my writing this post.  In fact I am yet to open my account, to borrow a cricketing metaphor, in the world of clicking selfies.

This post has instead been motivated by an impromptu conversation between my friend Satya and myself about a selfie that he made this morning with me. 

My friendship with Satya is of recent vintage.  He makes me feel far more special, successful and bigger than I am, or I will ever be, for reasons I am unable to imagine, in spite of a deviously fertile mind.  Lakshmi, my ever admiring spouse, in a moment of uncharacteristic candour told me that he remains among my small band of friends only because he pampers my ego.  All of which will have to be evaluated separately.

So when Satya chose to make a selfie with the sylvan main gate at IIMB as a backdrop I demurred that we have enough pics and selfies that the marginal utility of this one would be negligible.

Selfies generally belong to the world of the sentimental heart while the idea of marginal utility is a construct that is more usually associated with the rational head. It is true that economists really don't care what the source of utility is - it could be anything from shareholder's wealth to a marauder's sense of power to the emotional fulfillment that lovers claim to derive from a moment of romance.

Speaking for myself, I can relate only to the first of the three payoffs above.  But that does not mean that the cruel pleasure from inflicting pain or loss or the joy of finding love, true or otherwise, is any less real.  I have never taken lives.  I have never managed to consummate my longing for romance into a relationship, before or after my marriage.  The only source of romance I know of is the joy of being with my wife, Lakshmi.

Satya was not very impressed with my argument against the selfie and went on to click one eventually.  Long after he clicked I went back to what I sensed was his disapproval of my economic argument against it.  I asked myself if it was the utility idea that triggered my protest.

I realized that it was not so.  I have always been unhappy to be in or to have photographs .  On wondering why, I realized that it was so because photographs left memories behind.  True to my dark view of life I seemed to pay attention only to those brought painful memories back. 

I could flip through the ones that did not arouse any feeling about the people, place or the phenomenon in the picture, unaffected by recollections.  Often I would not even remember the settings or the dramatis personae in those pictures.  

Painful memories, to me, are associated with people you want to be around always.  People you want to be able to call up and speak when you wish to.  Places you want to be able to go across and see, just as they were when you fell in love with them, unaffected by the vicissitudes of time.  You want them to remain like a hall in an eternal museum that was meant to preserve everything about the place and object - except, of course, the mortal humans that would not be within the feeble grasp of the people who built the museum.

Pictures and photographs more often than not remind you of what you cannot see, do or have anymore, other than their mere memories.  Places change irretrievably.  People change irreversibly.  They are not always the souls that gave you so much happiness that is the subject of the picture that you hold in your hand.  People move on to places that you can no longer reasonably expect to visit at will.  They move on in life, to social, economic and professional statures that do not allow you to enjoy the relationship that you had with them once upon a time.  They become part of other people's lives and joy that you cannot partake of any more. 

And some times, even more sadly, they move on from this world.  And so when, with or without the help of the photograph, you are reminded of them you are overpowered by the urge to see them just once more, only to be overcome by the realization that you cannot, after all.

And so I hate photographs.  I wish those memories that matter to me fade away slowly from my consciousness, like the colours of a poorly preserved portrait that fade away leaving one to imagine the picture as much as one can from the mere, hazy outlines of what was once a vivid representation of a real life and a real relationship.

I am sure you are asking if I should be making such a big deal of a mere selfie.  You are right.  I should not be.  Who in his right mind would?  Which normal man or woman would? 

Well, in my defence, let me ask you if I ever told you I was in my right mind when I demurred or wrote this post? And have I ever told you I am normal? Finally did you notice the title?  You are right - it is indeed much ado about a selfie, with due apologies to the Bard of Avon.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...
 

Premam

I started writing a longish post about this episode.  But I could not bring myself to write it with the detachment that I wrote the piece on Thattathin Marayathu (TM).  You can read that post here.  http://sgchalayil.blogspot.in/2015/07/thattathin-marayathu-and-thalassery.html

I am severely pained by the fact that George the hero did not eventually marry Malar the heroine.  You can read the story here.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premam.

I do not know why I am so devastated by this episode.  Devastated indeed I am. 

Is it a tribute to the various people such as the director and the actors involved in depicting that story?  Or is it the story itself?  Is it the adorable guilelessness of the heroine? Is it the sincerity of the hero's feelings for her, which was not based on any careful calculation or reason? Is it the fact that one projects oneself on to the story and sees a bit of oneself being lost with the failed romance?  Is it a subconscious connection between some incident in one's own life that one cannot even put a finger on, painful memories of which are revived by the story?

I do not know.  I can merely see that I am undergoing a tremendous, wrenching sensation, a sense of heaviness as if a massive boulder was pinning me down to the earth into a state of breathlessness.  It is the kind of feeling that I have experienced only thrice before.

The first time I was so sad was after I read Maugham's The Razor's Edge.  I wept  my heart out over a rainy weekend as my mind kept going back to Sophie who was tricked out of Larry's life, after being tempted back into drinking and demise by a scheming Isabel.  The numerous shots of whisky that I drank over that weekend, all by myself  in my paying guest accommodation, could not burn away my sorrow as the incessant torrential monsoon rains threated to nearly inundate the sprawling ghetto of Sion Koliwada where I lived. 

The second instance was after I finished writing certain parts of a still born novel where the man who was about to marry my star-crossed heroine is killed cruelly in a riot.  Having written that piece I cried for two days, again.  Such was the pain that the poor woman suffered.  Needless to state, the heroine was more than a mere figment of my imagination to me.  I was reliving the pain of someone I had consoled unsuccessfully years earlier in my life, resulting in a relationship that I will never be able to bring myself to speak of.

The third time was when late into the night I read about the immense personal loss that someone with whom I had decided to, more or less one-sidedly, engage in a paternal relationship had suffered.  I kept lamenting about it to Lakshmi my wife, in one lugubrious spell after another, as the pain gnawed away at me. That pain was quite like the one that makes me write this.

Is it worth being so affected by a movie?  I guess not.  There is a sane voice within me which tells me that it is a story after all. It is not even a real life story like Ennu Ninte Moideen, a moving real life story.

Is it a sneaking fondness for the heroine that makes me feel so sad?  I am reasonably sure it isn't.  The many interviews of Sai Pallavi I viewed after I saw the movie tell me that she might well be a Malar like character in real life - full of verve, firm but mild mannered, complete with twinkling eyes and a perennial, winsome smile, willing to see beauty in many of nature's small creations like the butterfly and innocuous flowers and so on.  But then I know that come another movie she might well portray another character who is very different from the Malar that George seems to have been madly in love with.  So that is probably not it.

I am reminded of an interesting comment Mammootty makes in the movie Katha Parayumbol.  He tells the audience in a speech that when they all loved him in a movie it was not Mammootty the man that they were identifying with but the character he presented on screen.  And so, he goes on to argue, there  never is any bonding between a thespian and his or her fans.

That is a clinically sound view.  But how many of us would vouch for it?  While we all know that we love the stars of our choice for the parts that they play could we say that our feelings do not rub off on the star?  So much so we might even forgive their many foibles, that we might not in lesser people?

I really do not know.  I am at a loss.  Clearly it is not normal behavior I can agree.

Assuming that it is not normal am I the only mad fellow around?  Well, one of the many accounts I read about people's reaction to the movie says that many people have gone to UC College, Aluva, where those scenes from Premam were shot, hoping to see "Malar Miss" there.  I wish I could do that too.  But I know I will stop well short of that.  So much for my madness.

On a more practical note I know that this pain will subside, God willing, with the passage of a few days.  There is so much going on in my life these days that I will soon find that this pain is a luxury I can ill afford, as I deal with those other issues that will require my attention.

I know just as well that at the same time my terribly hyper-linked brain will bring back this pain from time to time, like the ghost limbs that V Ramachandran talks about, .  I know that from now on the song Malare that I used to enjoy happily for its melody till I saw this movie will trigger this pain.  As will the sight of Sai Pallavi's picture anywhere.  And as will many other trivia that will set off a connection to this sad story.

And thus it is with a heavy heart, fearing the onslaught of those painful visitations, that I sign off...

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

 

A case for reading

This post was triggered by the article that I came across in The Hindu this last Sunday morning.  The link to the article is here.  http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/sayantani-dasguptas-love-letter-to-banned-books/article8986541.ece

I liked the article for two reasons.  One, I liked Sayantini’s clever device to bring out her students’ fear of the written word.  These students by her admission were “open minded”.  Understandably, they were reluctant to come up with suggestions of books that they might consider banning. 

Yet when they were asked to identify books that they would rather not have a younger sibling read, they overcame their reluctance to suggest books that need to be banned.  In the process she brings out a fundamental point:  Those who ban books may for all you know may not be different from all of us who consider ourselves to be open-minded.

While she lists a number of books that have been banned from time to time I could add to that list writers who were considered subversive by the UK during the second world war:  Bertrand Russell and my all-time favourite, PG Wodehouse, among many others.  Paranoia, it would appear, is not the exclusive preserve of a tinpot autocrat lording over a banana republic!

Secondly and more importantly I loved the piece for the case she builds up for reading.  It was particularly appealing considering that reading seems to be disappearing from the ever-growing bucket lists of most of contemporary society.  Where people read it seems to be driven by a relatively narrow purpose such as cracking an interview or performing well in an examination.

Reading as an intellectually bohemian activity – I use that adjective very deliberately – appears to be yielding ground to various other pastimes, regrettably.  My views in this regard resonate with those of Sayantini’s. I would rather reproduce her words than mess it up with my own clumsy and imprecise style of articulation.

“Because that, right there, is the greatest purpose of literature. It is not grades. It is not in the construction of the most grammatically accurate sentence. Its purpose is to create empathy. ….Literature exists so we, flesh and blood readers, can connect with made-up characters in some fundamental, universal way. We go to literature not just for a great story but because good books show us how people think, choose and decide; how there are multiple perspectives and approaches to the same ethical questions; and how what is considered morally true and absolute in one age might not be so in the next.”

The other important purpose of reading is to expand one’s mind and thinking.   Much of the extreme views that one hears in the public discourse of today unfortunately is a result of the poor reading habits of modern society.   As Sayantini notes, reading “ would have taught us that one person’s normal is the other person’s provocative. That if we don’t broaden our world, if we only read what’s familiar and comfortable, we hear echoes of ourselves. That complex books teach us how to analyse and argue. That censorship does not sit well in a democracy because it distorts reality.”

And the outcome of all of that I would look forward to is what she claims she achieved at the end of the course.  “By the end of the semester, we hadn’t changed the world.  All we had done was merely read, ask questions, disagree, research, and listen.  I want to believe that was a good start.”

How I wish more of us would read more.  And make this world a more interesting place for conversations, spoken or otherwise.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

Yet another fight...Yet another flight?

This is a somewhat poignant story from my professional life.  It is the not the first one of its kind though.  And hence the title.  More about the relevance of the title later.

Around April of 2015 I had accepted an invitation to join the board of a listed enterprise as an independent director.  Given the fairly reclusive life I had opted for by joining academe, the invitation and my acceptance of it surprised me, not to mention my wife Lakshmi.

Truth be told, I looked forward to the board engagement, not just for the social and professional stature it bestowed but also the fairly significant financial compensation it would bring.

Last week I stepped down from the board of that enterprise.  My resignation letter was as abrupt as was my decision.  It had two lines in which I merely said that was I resigning with immediate effect and that I would like the company to comply with the regulatory formalities post haste.   I eschewed the customary thank you’s and so on because I believed that it would be a lot of hypocrisy and hogwash.

Without going into too many specifics I reproduce a version of the reasons for my resignation that I explained to my colleagues on the board in an informal communication.

Leaving the Board of **** was not an easy decision for me.   My association with the enterprise and its founders goes back many years as Shri **** points out very often.  It is one of the investments in my past incarnation that makes my earlier life as an investment manager pleasantly memorable.

My view of my role as an independent director has been based upon my reading and reflection on the corporate governance of enterprises, which have been reflected in some of the pieces that I have written, including my doctoral thesis.  As such these views and beliefs are highly important to me.

However in the past year or so that I have been at the Board I have often felt that my own understanding of my role as an independent director is at variance from what many of the other esteemed Directors on the board see as the role of the board in general and that of the independent directors in particular.  And each of you is a distinguished individual whom I hold in high personal esteem and whose views I respect.

Under these circumstances I felt that it would be appropriate for me to step down from the Board and allow the enterprise to be steered under your collective stewardship.

This decision brought back memories from my past life in the world of business.  Earlier, I walked away from similarly prestigious and lucrative positions three times in my professional life.  The economic logic in those decisions was puzzling to most people – because there wasn’t any.

I left those jobs simply because I believed that they did not satisfy my need for relevance and recognition.  I define these ideas very broadly.  And that is partly the reason why my reasons have remained incomprehensible to most people including Lakshmi. 

Relevance to me also meant that I should be able to justify the fat pay packages I was lucky to be receiving in all those jobs, especially the last two jobs that I held.

Lakshmi is the only one who understood my complex personality and the way I saw the situations that led me to walk away from those jobs.  Yet, even she did not believe then, nor does she believe now, that walking away was the solution.  Instead she believes that as a high performing professional I should have stayed back and fought to get the wind blowing in my favour. 

That is what led her to coin the term that I was engaging “in flight from fight.” 

In the six weeks that I started seriously contemplating the resignation I turned this question over many times in my mind:  Was I fleeing from yet another fight?  And thus the title of this post.

I knew that I would miss the plug that the seat provided me into the real world of business, apart from the stature and the financial top-up it offered me.

Equally, I knew that the Board needed me.   In the year that I had been there I had brought in a certain perspective on governance and a financial approach to key decisions – even with my feeble understanding and shallow knowledge of finance! 

But even with all that the situation at the Board failed my relevance and recognition tests.  I appeared to be not just a lone voice, but a strident and increasingly unwelcome one too.  All my carefully considered and politely couched views appeared to come across as the impractical rant of an academic who was trying to arrogate to the Board the role of the top management team.

Could I have stayed on and under those circumstances fought?  Possibly yes. But then who was I fighting against?  And whose battle was I fighting? 

The enterprise is still owner managed even though the owners have less than 25% collectively.  They have built the enterprise over the past twenty five years, rescuing it from near ruin, an act in which I played a non-trivial part, as a 30 year old VP of the VC firm that had a significant shareholding in it, at some serious risk to my personal safety and that of my wife soon after we were married.  

The other directors who are supposed to represent the interests of the faceless other 75% of the shareholding seem to think that everything is hunky dory, which it probably is. 

The nature of these decisions is such that history and the marketplace are the best arbiters of the rectitude of and wisdom behind the decisions that the enterprise makes – if outcomes are the only way to evaluate a decision.

But the entire philosophy of corporate governance is to come up with ways to evaluate the choices before the management of an enterprise with prisms other than just outcomes.  To ask questions about whether the choices of the enterprise are equitable to all the claimholders of an enterprise, and in line with their legal and contractual rights, in letter and in spirit.

In a very simplistic home spun sense I say it is like saying that the principles of fairness and morality are touchstones to ensure that a marriage is working well, without having to wait and judge it on the basis of the existence of a relationship that has not broken up yet.  In fact the whole idea is to build the foundations of a harmonious marital relationship as the outcome, based on such principle-based conduct.

If I was not going to be able to imbue that spirit in the Board was I relevant?  What were the chances that I would manage to instill that spirit, given the context I was placed in?

After tearing my hair for six weeks and losing some sleep I decided to throw in the towel yet again, for the fourth time in my long professional life.  I did so knowing fully well that I would not be invited to the Board of another listed enterprise, that I would be willing to accept, in the foreseeable future if not the rest of my life.

As always I prayed to the Lord that I hoped that I was acting in good faith and in keeping with the principles of professional integrity and that it was now up to Him to ensure that I had chosen right.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

Explorations into Solitude

Events have moved along fairly rapidly in the three months since I handed over my responsibilities at NSRCEL.  As I slogged away for long hours on winding down at the Centre I conjured up grand visions of how I would spend the twelve months of sabbatical that were to follow.  I even wrote this post on my flight of fantasy.   http://sgchalayil.blogspot.in/2015/11/anticipating-wandering-life.html

Pessimism however sounded warning bells all the while.  It reminded me of the many times that my plans had come unstuck in my fairly long life.  It pointed out to me the somewhat precarious position that I was in because of my advancing age and that of the many people in my immediate family.

While some of those fears about the health of older members of my family have materialised, the real surprise has been the nearly clinical depression that leaving NSRCEL seems to have cast me into. 

At one level I am glad that there are no more emails screaming for attention piling up in my inbox.  No more meeting requests that I am struggling to schedule however much I may not look forward to meeting some of those individuals.  No more fine balancing of the political consequences that I had to do in the name of growing the Centre.

Depression it is, I think, going by the many symptoms.  I do not fancy meeting people any more.  The heart screams to be left alone, aching for solitude even as the head says that there is no reason to crave for it. 

Worse, perhaps, says the head, that it is a dangerous sign for someone who will not find too many people wanting to engage anyway, given that at 57 I am older than nearly 90% of the Indian population.  Stated differently, if age is a determinant of common interests, nearly nine out of ten people that I run into in a statistically random sample are unlikely to have anything to talk about in common with me after polite pleasantries have been exchanged!

At the end of some internal struggle I have decided that it is time to come to take the craving bull by the horn.  I have accepted solitude as a way of life. 

It is not the kind of solitude that the yogis of India seek in the caves of the Himalayas.  It is not the kind of solitude that led Napoleon to make the famous statement, Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba, an often quoted palindrome.  Nor is my solitude about to inspire poetry as enduring  as the solitude of Alexander Selkirk did:

I am out of humanity’s reach,
I must finish my journey alone,

And much less am I likely to pine like Selkirk is said to have:

Society, Friendship, and Love
Divinely bestow’d upon man,
O, had I the wings of a dove
How soon would I taste you again!

But I am well on the way to what I see is the inevitable denouement as I can only grow older with every passing day.  That the world around me will inexorably shrink as various layers of family move on, seeking their own lives and destinies, until my sons who are the youngest among them all, grow wings and fly off to build their own homes, leaving Lakshmi and me in an empty nest.

In preparation for that ever shrinking world I have worked out the following formula.  I intend to divide the rest of my academic life across three silos and nothing more.  Family, immediate and proximate, comes first.  A quick reckoning places those numbers at seven and eighteen respectively.  A little bit of religion – I wish I could say spiritualism, but that would be a pretentious lie - to remind myself that there is a larger purpose beyond all this, even though I may be too puny to aspire for that purpose.  And whatever time remains will be spent reading, teaching and hopefully some writing and whatever minimal socializing is required to “remain in business”.

As for the world beyond those silos, I would hope not to be a curmudgeon in the unlikely event that anyone seeks me out, as long as it does not come in the way of my three priorities.  But going by my unremarkable social life to-date I would treat that as no more than a grandfather clause in my new “social contract”.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

PS:  I initially thought of giving this post the title My Experiments with Solitude.  For two reasons I decided in favour of the present title.  First, it sounds a bit like the Mahatma's Autobiography.  I did not wish to insult the memory of that great soul by giving such a title to this piffling post.  Second, I am not yet into those realms of deep solitude that such a title might suggest.

Summer of 2016

I returned from Trivandrum after yet another summer break.  It was not quite what we had hoped it would be. 

I was taking a long break in my in-law’s place perhaps for the first time since my marriage in 1989.  I was hoping to spend a lot of time reading while Lakshmi was to keep the boys busy with tennis and whatever else.  And in the midst of our respective schedules we hoped to find some time to engage in acts of togetherness.  In short, we were hoping that it would be the perfect picture of the hard working family of an academic trying to balance work and family life.

Within a week it turned out to be quite the opposite. With my sis in law taking worryingly ill we were scrambling for tickets in the middle of the night and then waking up the boys in the wee hours of the morning to board a flight to Bangalore, all groggy eyed. 

It must have appeared rather dramatic to the ten year old twins.  Just the previous night they must have gone to bed thinking of all the strokes that they had missed in their evening cricket and working out how to get it better the next evening.  And then here they were, being huddled into a taxi to the airport, not even knowing what time of the night it was.

Uncertain days rolled by as sis in law recovered by God’s Grace after much worry and prayer.  The boys looked forward anxiously to resume their vacation with every positive word of the recovery until it was time to book the tickets back to Trivandrum.

But then Destiny thought otherwise. An elderly relative of ours, a close one, departed from this world.  And we had to play our polite social and family part, putting off the return even further.

By the time we finally boarded a plane was back it was more to retrieve the luggage that we had left behind as we quit Trivandrum in a hurry and pay a few quick customary annual visit to our favourite deities in Trivandrum.

And with that went our plans for tennis lessons, my reading and the bonding trips that we had planned. 

The vacation was a far cry from the hectic socialization of the previous year that culminated in the wedding of someone I had decided was going to be the daughter that wasn’t born to Lakshmi and myself.  A summer in which I pined as much as I hoped, enjoyed and lost.

Two months later, the sense of disappointment that saddened us has worn off.  The boys are back in school, dealing with the hurly burly of school and academics.  The vacation that wasn’t is perhaps behind them.  Children are great and natural practitioners of living in the present.  Lakshmi is busy helping them deal with the torturous, humdrum and drudgery that school is these days.  My sabbatical is off to a start that none of us would have imagined as we all as a family are learning to deal with what appears to be a new curved ball that life has thrown at us.

Nanni…..Namaskaaram…