Soliloquy - I

I was persuaded to write this piece as I tried to put at a young friend that I met after a while. 

My corporate career was far from easy.  I was beset with many issues.  But at the core were two problems I think.  One, I had assumed, wrongly of course, that I was more intelligent than I actually was.  As a corollary I expected to achieve far more than I reasonably could have expected to for the amount of effort I was willing to put in, which sadly was not much, given how lazy I was and still am.  In short my ambitions and expectations on the one hand were out of alignment with my ability and application on the other.

Soon, it predictably led to disillusionment on the career path and maladjustment at the workplace.  I slowly began to lose my ability to engage socially with most colleagues, except to the extent that business demanded.  Eventually it made me look for a job that would not require any social connectedness.  And I landed up in academia, primarily for that reason!

The feeble sparks of success that one might notice in my CV (partner equivalent in a private equity fund at the age of 38 and all that) were all in spite of these besetting problems and largely due to what some might call luck and I now call God’s Grace.  In fact when I look back at my life I can safely say that my entire professional life has been a series of accidents and the outcome of choices made for all the wrong reasons.

Over time as I got knocked around in my professional and personal life I turned to religion for succour.  I must hasten to add that I am not promoting denomination based religion in saying this.  I would have loved to call it spiritualism.  But then I feel that might make me appear to be more sublime than I am.

For the past many years now I have been casting about, as I continue to even today, to find an alternate meaning and purpose for life.  Notwithstanding the fact that I did not deserve it I realized that the pursuit of worldly success, especially in the world of business, would not leave me feeling happy.  Gradually as I found my feet in academe I realized that even modern academe can potentially set one up for unrealistic expectations and eventual heart-break.

I have now found succour in a few core principles that I keep reminding myself of when I feel elated or depressed, both emotions assailing me more often than I like.  These are very simple principles:  That all of what we see is evanescent, the real joy in the material world is in the pleasure of doing something well and if possible making someone else happy in the process and that no matter how good or smart we are, none of us is really in charge of our destinies, yet we have to conduct our lives as if we are fully in control.  (The last one is something I learned from Ramesh Balsekar, a disciple of Nisargadatta Maharaj.) 

Along the way in this alternate world I sought / seek out Sadhus and Swamis.  I listen to their teachings.  Some of them are not universally revered or accepted as divine souls.  I take the good bits of what they do or say.  Gratitude demands that I acknowledge that I have also benefited on occasion from their ability to perform what appear to be miracles. 

But I do not try to persuade anyone to follow them.  The third principle above makes me believe that I entered the presence of these holy men and women because it was pre-ordained.  Someone told me about this dialogue in Kung Fu Panda, that there is nothing like an accident.   I believe in that.  It is none of my business to take anyone into the folds of these holy people.  Those who are destined to go there will do so in the most unexpected ways, in what appear to be accidents, as it happened with me.

I thus live in different worlds today.  I live in this hyper-competitive world of academics in business management as a faculty at IIMB.  I engage with hyper-competitive young men and women.  I have colleagues who are all far superior to me intellectually and who are all constantly calibrating each other in terms of their intellect.  A part of me inhabits this world that respects smartness and success.  The other part inhabits a world where people talk about larger purposes in life, about loving and serving people, about the sheer silliness of everything that is at the core of the other world.

God has been kind to me to make me realise that the latter world can lead to more enduring satisfaction, joy, peace or whatever else one is thirsting for.  The challenge is in building a bridge between the two so that one may inhabit the former without becoming its prisoner. 

Right now those are two incompatible worlds to me.  My way of relating to them is like the little boy who has been told by his mother:  Son, you may go out and play with those other boys.  But remember don’t imbibe the bad things they teach you.  Just finish your game and be your good self once you come back home.  In my moments of elation, anger, depression, envy I remind myself that I inhabit that other world for a specific purpose, like the little that goes out to play.

That said, I understand that is not true spiritualism.  And that is why I hesitated to use that term in the beginning. True spiritualism I am given to understand is the ability to see the inner beauty in every one, without being judgmental.  Very few people in this mundane world can do that.  My friend and colleague Srinivas Prakhya is one rare specimen of that.  His heart beats more fervently for those that others might disapprove of, if not despise.  Yet he pursues excellence at work, strongly believing that Yogah karmasu Kaushalam.

I am far from being there.  But the dual existence helps me make sense of a life that has otherwise been a torment.

I narrate parts of these to my nephews and nieces when they experience self-doubt, to make them realise that if I pulled through they should be able to come out in flying colours in life.  Over the years Lakshmi and I now have this small army of nephews and nieces, some of whom are not even biologically related to us.  We play agony aunt to them once in a while.  I remind them that they do not have the intellectual or attitudinal limitations that I was plagued by. 

Some of the nephews and nieces are sensitive souls.  I say to them that they are blessed in a way, because being sensitive eventually helps you experience true and enduring happiness that comes from making others happy.

All that I wish to share through this soliloquy is my own effort at dealing with the serious dissonance I experienced in life, which occasionally led me to extreme ennui and on some rare occasions to contemplate even risky behaviour.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

On Coming to Terms....Part 4....Resolving the Conflict

Viewed in the light of all that, on balance, it has not been a bad bargain by God’s Grace.  That and the initial premise on which I chose to settle down in an academic life together mean I that should really not be hankering after things like promotions and other rewards.

I should respect any further rewards such as promotions should really go to those who will be the flag bearers of the future of the institute, in terms of research and teaching excellence.  Clearly I have some distance to travel there.  I should not grudge their success, especially so if it has been earned on the back of academic excellence.

On a related note I must also note that the future of an academic institution should rest on the intellectual achievements and level of scholarship.  From the early years of my academic life I have been a believer in the importance of research and writing, notwithstanding the deep division that exists about what kind of research should be rewarded.

What about should rewards for the contribution that I may have made in my administrative roles? I say to myself that I should be happy and grateful to God for the many opportunities that I got to give something back to the school, be it in some of the roles such as serving on committees or interview panels or at the office of international affairs or the entrepreneurship centre.  I indeed am grateful to God and happy.

That leaves me with one final question on this long reflection:  What about rewards that should accrue with the passage of time?  That is perhaps the most difficult question at one level.  I have always wondered should the mere marking of time at an institution constitute the basis for being elevated to a position that offers higher pecuniary benefits. 

There are two possible ways in which someone who has spent more time may be more valuable to an academic institution.  One, the individual may become a more seasoned teacher and be able to contribute better to the thinking in the institution on matters such as pedagogy, curriculum setting or on the working of committees that are mandated to shape the direction of the institute.  Secondly, such an elevation may merely be the recognition for the cumulative contribution that the individual may have made.  Such contribution as a teacher or as a researcher is a kind of paying forward for a deferred reward.

But then such a reward is truly the prerogative of the employer, even more so than it is in the cases of where people have demonstrated that they can elevate the level of intellectual achievement in the form of research, publications or other academic contributions.

When all was said and done finally I concluded that the right way to resolve the numerous conflicting thoughts that were crossing my mind I had to fall back on the question of what I had set to achieve at IIMB.  And if I had indeed achieved those.

The answer appeared to be an unequivocal yes.

Finally, as I typed up this post I asked myself whether the sheer existence of these conflicts in my mind represented an unhappiness that was casting its shadow on unbeknownst to me.  I would not know.  However much I think that I am capable of observing myself and my innermost thoughts the nature of the human mind is such that there might be feelings, desires, aspirations and anxieties that one might never be aware of.  It is such unseen forces of the mind that persuade sensible perfectly people to do utterly foolish things without their even being aware of it.

So was it that sense of disappointment that made me write these long posts? Not as far as I know.  But one could not be sure enough. But do I want to feel disappointed? I think I know for sure the answer to that question.  It is a clear no. 

As for the way forward for me in academe I am now very clear about how I would spend the eight or nine years that remain in my academic life.  There are four clear areas I would focus my energies on.

First and foremost I would strive to be as good a teacher as I can.  I see that as my sacred responsibility not just to the institution, but to the community of learners as a whole.  No matter what the feedback, as long as I am inside a classroom I will do my best to ensure that people learn sound financial principles from me.

Second, I intend to contribute material that will support pedagogy in finance in the form of cases, supplementary notes and so on.  As  teacher I have benefited from such notes that have been published in other schools.  I know there are many more such topics around which there could be more notes, cases and so on.  I realise that I am not a bad communicator when it comes to writing.  I am a better writer than a speaker.

Third, I will write on those aspects of the world of finance and entrepreneurship that catch my fancy.  These may not make any path-breaking additions to the existing body of knowledge on these subjects.  But my writings will hopefully make some of the more involved topics more accessible to an average student of finance or even a lay person.

Fourthly, I hope to happily shoulder any administrative responsibility that the institute might ask me to.  My years at the OIA and NSRCEL have reaffirmed my confidence in my ability as a tolerably effective bureaucrat.

My prayer to the Almighty is now to help me find happiness in this realization and to stay on this path till it is time for me to hang my boots.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

On Coming to Terms....Part 3....Life at IIMB

Life in academe has held many surprises for me.  There were many realisations that I had not been prepared for.  A fuller articulation of those will have to wait.  Suffice it to say for now that many of my beliefs about my own intellectual ability, both in relative as well as absolute terms, were shattered. 

There is one thing that I have got clarity on in my head ever since I moved to academe – as a career I was not going to measure my life in academe in terms of the kind of metrics that I used in industry.  I was not going to care about how quickly I got promoted, the authority or social stature that the job bestowed on me or the financial rewards relative to what my colleagues made and so on.

Instead, I said that I would measure my happiness, or at least satisfaction, in terms of my intellectual achievements and the joy I derived out of my work.  I would also value the flexibility that it offered me in scheduling my working life and the relief it offered me from the many social obligations that came with a life in the world of business. 

Without this resetting of expectations I concluded that academic life was not worth all the sacrifices one made on many other dimensions, social as well as economic.

With that as a backdrop I sought to ask myself if I ought to pay much attention to the season of rewards that seemed to be upon all of us faculty.  I said to myself that the answer should lie in how my life measured against the expectations I articulated in the earlier part of this essay. 

Looking back at the past fifteen years since I moved into IIM, barring a few unfortunate incidents I would say that the school has been good to me, even kind. 

When I look at the many people who joined as faculty before and after me I am not sure I quite deserve be one among them, compared to their academic and intellectual accomplishments. The school has offered me the opportunity to engage in as much intellectual activity as I wished to.  When things turned difficult the school allowed me to make a strategic retreat in an endeavour to reduce my vulnerability.  And then when I was sure that I had qualified for a permanent position it allowed me to come back.

Ironically, at every turn there was enough for me to feel bitter over having been wronged.  At the same time there was a positive outcome at the end that left me feeling happy about having had a contract having been renewed or a special leave being sanctioned or having been allowed to retain my campus accommodation or having been taken back as an associate professor.

It was a standard package of the Hindu idea of dvandva or duality.  Each of them was a great example of what we learn about a glass being half full of water.  Whether one saw it as being half full or half empty was a matter of perspective.

Through my life at IIMB I have derived a sense of satisfaction about my having been able to indulge in intellectual pursuits of a kind that I may not have been able to elsewhere.  I have been able to ride through personal challenges that may have been far more difficult in a business organization. 

I have had a quality of personal life that has been unparalleled so far.  The sylvan surroundings of the campus, the attention that I got from the students, the sense of satisfaction I got when students came back to me and spoke about the difference that I had made to their professional lives as a teacher and above all my ability to be a better son, spouse, parent, sibling, uncle, son-in-law or brother-in-law.

Isn’t that a lot more than what a man in his forties could ask for from a second career that he started in his late thirties?  

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

On Coming to Terms...Part 2...Plunging into Academe

I asked myself if I was right in deciding that I should stop caring about promotions and other forms of career advancement.  Was I right in thinking I had ascended the pinnacle of my academic career, such as it was?  Was it time for me resign or retire from an active pursuit of a career?

That in turn took me on a long journey of reflection on the motivations that brought me to where I was.  I record some of those reflections for my own benefit rather than for sharing with anyone or even less so for posterity.

To put my career related thinking in perspective I need to go back to what brought me to IIMB in the first place and the many turn of events thereafter and the realisations from the same.

I cannot say for sure what exactly made me turn to academia.  I can recall there were many considerations. 

I was surely intrigued by the huge changes that were happening in the world of business as enterprises got bigger and bigger through mergers, acquisitions and other forms of consolidation.  Sitting in the world of private equity I got to see first hand the growing power of size.  I began to feel that David Korten did have a point when he warned the world about the growing influence of corporations in our daily lives, in his book When Corporations Ruled the World. 

I wanted to acquire an understanding of the economic forces at work and what they might mean for all of us.  I may have even wanted to make a seminal contribution to academic theory that could eventually alter the course of events in the world of business. 

I was quite sure that the world of finance had an important part to play in these developments.  But for the advent of financial capitalism in its various manifestations such as investment banking and more specifically, mergers and acquisitions the wave of consolidation would simply not have been possible. 

Little did I realise at that time that many more capable minds were at work in academe, exercising their powerful intellect about this and nearly every other aspect of the world economy that one could possibly think of. My rather unrealistic and exaggerated notions of what I wanted to accomplish were as much a result of poor literacy as of my inability to imagine, let alone come to terms, with the realization that the intellect that I thought I had was not a universal monopoly; much worse that my intellect, such as it was, indeed was quite puny, and was in rapid decline as I would come to realise much later.

There was another motive running in parallel, which is sharply suggestive of the utter lack of clarity that pervaded my thoughts at that time.  Lack of clarity of purpose has continued to dog me even today even as options before me disappear with every passing day and advancing age.

That motive was a desire to further advance my career in the investment industry through the sheer power of intellect and knowledge, stepping aside from the world of deal-doing that was getting to be increasingly a game of social skills.  A PhD seemed to be the entry ticket to this path.

And then there was the growing realization that I was perhaps temperamentally inclined to a job and career that was academic or quasi-academic.  I wanted to turn to something that would need nothing more than working with my intellect and called for limited social skills.

I am not sure which one of the above sealed the issue for me.  But here I was, applying to academic institutions, convinced that I had hit upon the ideal career path for the rest of my active life. 

Subsequent events helped me realize that I could not have made a worse choice.  Further, the choice I had made was a testimony to how little I knew about the world of academics.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...