Taking Stock

Yesterday I turned 58.  Now on to 59.  By average Indian standards, it is time to retire.  And so it is time to take stock.

I take stock of what I have done with my life at the start of new year.  And on every birthday.  I have done that for many years now. 

The story has been no different on each of those occasions. 

The ideal way to take stock is to compare one's achievement with one's own potential.  Comparing one's achievement with others is at best useful for setting the minimum standards for one to pursue. 

Arjuna was arguably, the best performer and the best endowed among all of the Kauravas and Pandavas.  He was also easily the greatest warrior of his generation across all of Bharatavarsha, never having tasted defeat in battle all his life. 

Arjuna ran his own race.  He never contested against his siblings or cousins. Small wonder then that the Lord chose him as His disciple for the Song Divine. 

As I approach the end of my professional life, when I compare what I have done with my life with what I possibly could have, I am convinced that it has been pointless.  Purposeless. 

Loser, in short.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

Professor Srinivasan retires

Well not yet, but will do so in less than a week from today.  To my mind that will mark the passing of a generation at the institute.  

Personally I will miss him.  And the reason for that is best captured in what I wrote in the souvenir that the department published on the occasion.  Since these posts are now more than just my hangout, and are the legacy I hope to leave for my sons, it is only appropriate that I record it here.
 

This is a personal note.  You played a big part in deciding how I would spend the longest spell in my working life.  And that also meant some of the more significant years of my personal life, where many important and pleasant things happened.  I am grateful to you for that.  Equally you helped me settle down in my role as a teacher – I hesitate to call myself an academician - that I came totally unprepared for.  Many years later, I continue to harvest the fruits of your initial help and guidance as a teacher here.  In short, you have been a big part of our lives as a family.  Thanking you would not suffice.  For now that is all I am able to say though!

Sabari and family…

I am here at IIMB thanks to him in large measure.  He also helped me at crucial moments such as when I was nearly asked to leave the place in the most unexpected, and in my opinion the most unjustified, manner as a victim of what I think was petty and cheap institutional politics that eventually led to my leaving the institute for a while.

My family life has been tightly coupled to my being at IIMB, to use an engineering metaphor.  Stated differently, my family life would have been considerably different if I had worked anywhere else, including any other academic institution.  And that is why I signed off that message as a family.

The farewell that the department organised for Professor S was unprecedented in many ways.  The people who attended it spanned his entire academic life, right from his days as a doctoral student.  It was a fitting tribute to the different ways in which he had touched the lives of numerous people at various stages in his life.

In my own relatively unremarkable spell at the institute I have been witness to his several remarkable academic contributions.  The outline we teach today for the core finance course, a highly competitive and respectable outline by any standard, was developed by him.  The pedagogic material that we use was also largely put together by him.  The exams we set today are influenced by the exams he used to set.

Our philosophy as teachers, which puts the students' learning at the centre of the discourse, draws on the conversations that we used to have when he was the senior most amongst us as instructors. 

I can go on and on. And I should perhaps devote a separate post just to do that.  

But I wish to record here certain other thoughts that cross my mind on this somewhat emotionally charged occasion.  And that has to do with the legacy that we will or ought to leave behind when our professional life draws to a close.

Professor S towers above nearly everyone else that I have known in my academic life in that regard.  I have heard about the legacy left behind by various others, whom I shall not name, lest I should be accused of making odious comparisons.  His legacy stands taller than all of that.

And then I ask myself what I would leave behind eventually when I call it a day less than three years from now.  Would I have made a difference to my colleagues?  Certainly not - except to those that would experience relief at my departure.  

Do I leave anything behind for the world of teaching, research or writing?  Definitely not.  Would I at least have made a difference to the cohorts of students that I have taught?  Not even that.  A few of my students have noted how I destroyed their interest in finance.  One of them even write about his frustration in his fictional description of life on the IIMB campus!

That leads me to an even broader, larger philosophical question:  Does it really matter if we leave behind a legacy or not.  

I think of the effort people put into buying immortality through various means.  Wealthy individuals gift large sums of money to create research centres or halls or other infrastructure that will be named after them.  So much so that the American educational system has turned exploiting this desire into a veritable market for immortality.

When I was all of twelve years old I was struck by this strange desire when I was reading a biography of CV Raman, that quickly turned into a resolution:  The only life that was worth living was one that would make one as eternally famous as C V Raman.  

My limited scholarship at that age did not inform me that there were others even bigger than him perhaps like Newton, Einstein and many others.  Then on whenever I evaluated the worthwhileness of anything that I took up I would ask myself if it would make me as famous as CV Raman.  

Soon it turned out to be a great cop out route.  Whenever I failed in anything I would console myself that after all it may not have made me as famous and immortal as C V Raman.  

That quest was further buttressed by generous layers of toppings such as the half-baked smattering of an understanding that I acquired of Hindu philosophy which seemed to suggest that any worldly achievement was after all illusory.  It was Maya.  And the real deal was the pursuit of self- realisation.  

That was an even more powerful cop out because it did not merely set a high bar like the CV Raman bar.  It almost said that none of worldly these bars even mattered in this other-worldly paradigm.

Forty seven years later today, as I complete one more year of worldly existence, I know that I have led a purposeless, pointless life, hiding behind these excuses of irrelevance.  I now know that the C V Raman benchmark was nothing but an inglorious excuse for not having achieved anything in life.  I have realised that for some years now. 

Professor Srinivasan's legacy may not be as intellectually seminal as the Raman effect that explains the scattering of light or quantum theory.  And viewed in the backdrop of Maya, it may be all too evanescent.  But in the real world that we all live in, work and struggle he has touched many a life in a positive way.

And that is all that I can see that I see, perceive, understand and appreciate as an ordinary mortal creature.  And that is all that matters I guess.  That is all that is relevant.

Nanni....Namaskaram...

Epiphany? Not quite, but...

I am nowhere near having God speaking with me.  Nor have I reached a state in meditation where I hear my antaranga.  But occasionally, quite infrequently I have to say, when I pray, I seem to get clarity on issues that have been confounding me for a long time.

I had one such experience this morning as I sat for my prayer. 

It is an important development that is the culmination of a few years from a tumultuous period in my life.  While it is still fresh in my mind I wish to document it.  After all, these posts are my private electronic hangout and so it makes sense for me to write about it.  Hopefully, one day, when I am no longer around, my sons will read it in an effort to understand their father better.

For the past few years I have been going through an extraordinary experience.  On two different occasions I experienced an urge to develop a parental relationship with two different people who passed through my life in a professional capacity.

While all instances of interpersonal bonding are matters of the heart and therefore, by definition, not well reasoned, in these instances I built an elaborate case as to why I should look upon them both, separately, as an “adopted daughter”. 

At one level, during that endeavor, I would often realise that it made no sense for me or for the other party to accept that proposition.  Yet there was another part of my heart that argued, why not. 
I had after all been the beneficiary of similar affection from a childless couple right from when I was a level year old boy, till very recently.  I benefited a great deal from their affection, emotionally as well as materially.

When I mentioned this situation to Lakshmi, she was not very convinced.  I have mentioned many times before how pragmatic a woman she is.  Yet her affection and concern for me is so deep that she decided to play along because she probably sensed how it mattered to me.

From those moments on, what followed for a protracted period of time that I will not specify, lest it should leave markers that can be traced back to the people in reference here, was a fair bit of angst for me.  Angst about trying to establish a relationship that appeared to be reasonable to me at that time; yet probably did not make any sense from a practical standpoint.   

It was fairly intense in the past few weeks as the hopelessness of my second attempt began to sink into me.  I wrote about it in a flurry of posts in recent weeks, even in the midst of a heavy load of teaching work.

Then, as if in a flash, this morning the urge to develop that relationship disappeared just as suddenly as it all had started when it did. It appeared rather unreal that I was not sure if it was just one of those spells of disinterest that I had experienced many times during these years, only to be accosted back again in a matter of a few hours. 

But I must assure my readers that I am not unused to such sudden developments.  As I started to prepare for CAT thirty eight years ago I was overwhelmed my some obsessive apprehensions.  I was almost sure that I would not be able to appear for an exam that required immense focus for two hours. 

Thanks to some holy souls who prescribed some remedies not only did I appear for the exam, well prepared, but was informed later on my professor at IIMB, Dr. Ashok Sahni, that I had scored a top rank in CAT.  I am not a stranger to Open Sesame style magic in real life!

With a substantial amount of time elapsed through the day, and that without any trace of the pain, it appears that I may have come out of it completely by God’s grace.

As I hope that the malaise does not reappear – I use that term consciously even though it does not qualify to be termed one in the standard sense of that word – many thoughts and questions will remain for a while in my mind.  More than anything else, this post is intended to capture them for my own consumption.  I don’t trust my decaying memory any longer.

First, I am grateful to everyone concerned that they all put up with me during this period of affliction, most of all to Lakshmi.  During these entire episodes she never for once doubted the motives behind my affection for the kids concerned. 

At the height of these afflictions I was interviewing in Delhi.  My discomfort was so intense that I called Lakshmi in the evening after I had plodded through the day’s interviews, to say that I was afraid of being alone in Delhi, fearing I might collapse.  I cannot recall how long I must have been on the phone that night as my efforts to quell the feeling failed, in spite of hopping through all of Delhi Haat with my colleagues over two hours, followed by a long dinner at the Habitat Centre’s up-market Chinese restaurant till late into the night.

In the second instance I experienced a discomfort of nearly similar intensity a few weeks back.  All through the journey through the night Lakshmi kept company with me assuring that this too would pass, although I was beginning to lose hope that it would.

There were two other friends who stood beside me like a rock during these trying years, not for once questioning my motives.  Also as understanding as both these friends was my niece Purni, who assured me that while I may have been chasing rainbows, it was not unusual for humans to do so.  And nothing in my long life so far has ever been close to chasing rainbows as these two endeavours.

Second, now that I seem to be out of it I am left wondering why I had lost my sense of pragmatism, not once but twice.  I have always prided over my ability to be rational, allowing the head to rule over the heart at all times.  In my blog post titled On Being Right versus Being Happy I wrote about my inability to be emotionally engaged with anyone, including my closest family because everything for me was a question of doing the right thing rationally and not because of a desire for happiness in doing things with or for even family, not to speak of my friends. 

Third, whatever happened to me was of my own making.  I cannot apportion any of the blame to the people involved.  On the contrary both the kids concerned bore patiently with my effort to get them close to my family.  They were polite with me all through.

One question still nags me though.  Was I asking for too much in my effort to get them close to my family? Could my pain have a little less intense if my attempts to get them close to my family had been understood in the spirit that I had intended? 

I guess that will be a difficult question to answer.  The answer would depend on what those kids made of my endeavor.  After all, it was not sufficient that I was convinced that my feelings were entirely parental, of someone who had been yearning for a girl child.  Everyone concerned had to see it that way, including the members of the family of the kids concerned. 

In particular, in the second instance I suspect there was a possible misunderstanding of my motives. And more than the failure of my attempt it is that possible misunderstanding that hurts me more, as someone who values his dignity more than anything else.  And it is for that reason I have distanced myself entirely, permanently from that second attempt.

Fourth, I hope that with this I will end this phase of blogging.  It has been a period of busy blogging as I wrote post upon post, moping about the state of my mind.  I hope I will look back upon all those posts with the disinterest that they deserve, although some people who read them commended the quality of my writing.

Fifth, I wish there was a way for me to let the two kids concerned know that I am moving out of their lives for good.  Apart from a greeting from me on the most important day of their life, their birthday, there will be no further communication from me.  I am fairly optimistic on that count, considering that I have stopped corresponding for a while now, with both of them. 

They will remain in my thoughts though, as the “ adopted daughter” that I was hoping they would be, but they chose not to be.  I respect their choice. 

Yet the doors to our (Lakshmi’s and mine) home and heart will always be open to them as I promised to them once.  One of them will even continue to be in my daily prayers as promised.  I don’t renege on promises.

Finally, I fervently pray to God that I do not go down this path a third time.  I am not sure I can handle it.   I am not entirely confident of myself that I will not repeat this endeavour.  However I draw courage from the most unlikely source.

As I passed through an intense phase of the pain of separation a fortnight week ago, I spoke with my good friend and classmate from college, Dev, an extremely God fearing and spiritual soul, who derives great stoicism from his faith in God. 

A good astrologer, he pointed out to me that it was the result of the transition of a certain malefic planet through my horoscope.  I shall not mention the name of the planet in question to avoid the possibility of time stamping these episodes with the identity of the planet.  And I guess that it does not matter.

For a while now I have avoided contact with any astrologer.  I attribute much of the significant suffering that Lakshmi and I have been through and some of the challenges that we face even today to a charlatan who came into my life many years ago, claiming to be an astrologer.  That is a story by itself that I shall defer to another post, if ever.  Since then I have stayed away from them, well, mostly.

But I could not help noticing the uncanny coincidence between the movement of the planet in question and my own travails.  Interestingly, Lakshmi and I are affected by the same planet because we share what astrologers call a Rasi. And because of her affection for me the poor woman shared a lot of that suffering.

Now that the pain has been lifted from my mind I pray to God to return me to my sensible life as a father and spouse.  He has blessed me with a wife who I think is the modern day, real life version of Patient Griselda from Canterbury Tales that I read when I was an eight year old in Class III.  He has blessed with me two lovely boys who literally worship their father, although I don’t deserve even their admiration, let alone respect.

And I say that even though I realise that these conditions of the mind have a rare habit of hiding and not disappearing.  Both fiction and biography that I have read say that they do relapse from time to time.  But I draw comfort from the fact that Nash reasoned away his schizophrenic hallucinations.  I also draw solace from Dev’s assurance that with the impending transition of the hostile planet I may eventually be free from the disease.

With that I pray to the Almighty to draw the curtains on a phase of my life that I eminently wish to forget, not because of the way the kids responded but because of the sheer lack of pragmatism in my own ask from the relationship.

In another interesting coincidence I started this blog when I let go of some friends from childhood in Trivandrum that I unsuccessfully tried to reconnect with, out of sheer childish enthusiasm.  Since then I never got in touch with them in these past five years. 

I now pray that this time around too, I remain steadfast as I did back then five years ago.

Nanni….Namaskaaram