Yesterday was an important day, but not in a happy sense. I heard that I had been dropped from the BioNEST committee of BIRAC. I will not explain the acronyms and the terms here. This post as I have noted in the past for me to record my thoughts and feelings. It is not an effort in mass communication.
In fact writing a post at this point is a luxury I can ill afford. Yet I chose to write it today because well over 24 hours after I gathered the news, the sense of loss continues to rankle me so much that I feel I need to note it for my posterity, for me to remember the feelings on this day.
One of the many strands of thought in my mind has been as to why I feel the loss so much. And I must be honest in putting the elements of that strand down.
One, it was the only activity I had outside of my life at IIMB. I have been singularly unsuccessful, unlike my illustrious colleagues at IIMB, in getting invited to Boards, Committees and think tanks. y lack of popularity in those circles surprises me, given my corporate background, including at a leading international sovereign wealth fund, and therefore my understanding of the world of business at a fairly senior level, the work I have done at NSRCEL where I think I proved beyond doubt that my skills as a manager remained intact in spite of my years in academe. And while I know am tactless and that my social skills are atrocious I hope I make up for some of all that with my honesty and commitment to whatever I take up. The latter is something the worst among my critics have acknowledged.
I felt a sense of pride when I updated my profile every year and I could say that I was on this important committee of BIRAC.
Vanity aside, the Committee have me a wonderful perch to remain engaged with the world of incubation. To get a ringside view of what was going on in the world of academic incubators. To visit some of them occasionally and see what was going on there.
I got to be at a table with many smart and knowledgeable folks. That complemented my daily learning as a faculty at IIMB. It gave me a glimpse into the world of the practice of startups.
At a creature level it gave me the occasional opportunity to travel in the pre pandemic world. Most of all I got to visit Delhi, a city that I think every Indian has to occasionally be in, however much one might despise it. Delhi is one of those extremely treacherous cities; but like all political capitals in the world, it is also where destinies and histories are made and destroyed. So loathe as you might, you simply cannot wish it out of your consciousness.
One must not fail to mention that the folks at BIRAC treated one well - barring of course the incident of dropping me from the committee which changed much of that sense for me. So much so I have second thoughts about staying on in the other committees as I shall note later on.
The money BIRAC paid me was a joke. For spending a day in meetings and another in preparing for it and getting to Delhi and back they paid me what I would make by singing a coarse song of corporate finance with zero preparation. Not that I got to sing many of those songs; but certainly I would have made up for my loss of BIRAC revenue.
The other payoffs from the Committee seat that I noted earlier more than made up for the honorarium.
Without meaning to be self congratulatory I must say that I reciprocated by giving the best of my time and my mind. I approached it with the true belief that government's work was God's work. My experience at NSRCEL and as an investment professional in my past life seemed to help me see things in a way different from the other members of the committee.
Not that what I offered could not be substituted easily. Anyone who could read and write English could do so as well as I did, probably even better.
The loss of all those professional payoffs bothers me. But that is not what makes the sense of loss painful. For, I knew that this would happen one day. It was not just inevitable but highly desirable for the institution that they shuffled memberships of committees from time to time.
Apart from infusing fresh thinking shuffling of memberships in committees was also necessary to avoid the growth of vested interests; especially in an institution that handled non trivial sums of money public money. A public financial institution, although not in the legal sense of the term.
It is the manner in which the decision was made that pains. I got to know about it when a member of the committee who remained mentioned to me on a whatsapp message that he missed me in the meetings of the Committee.
It pained me all the more because I had anticipated this denouement. I apprehended that my term would come to a similar end that many others in the committee before me had met with, in what I considered an unceremonious manner. I had gathered that this was not uncommon in the way government managed its committees.
Out of that apprehension I had spoken with one of the key functionaries at BIRAC that should they ever decide to move me out I would like them to let me know in advance. And that I should not be moved out like a non performer in a corporate organisation or someone who had indulged in inappropriate behaviour.
I was assured I would be. A few days prior to the time I must have been possibly dropped from the Committee I had occasion to talk to the individual concerned about some new activities I was beginning to be engaged in collaboration with a cultural outfit that is also politically powerful. I had gone on to further explain to the individual that my cultural association could be easily misconstrued as political aspirations, and that I had no such aspirations.
So this development leaves me with a loss of trust that hurts me more than the loss of opportunity. After all, I know that while I will rue the loss of opportunity for a few days I will grow out of it soon. I have dealt with more significant losses in my professional life, some voluntary and some thrust upon me. If there is one strength in my personality it is the ability to gulp down the pain of losing opportunity in my professional life and move on.
So much so there is no loss in my professional life that can any more make me lose any sleep at all. For want of a better expression I would say it has toughened me. It reminds me of an interesting verse I learned in Sanskrit in school:
उदारस्य तृणं वित्तं शूरस्य मरणं तृणं
विरक्तस्य तृणं भार्या निस्पृहस्य तृणं जगत् ;
Udaarasya trunam vittam shoorasya maranam trunam
Viraktasya trunam bhaaryaa nispruhasya trunam jagat.
i.e. For a generous person money or wealth is insignificant (like a
blade of grass), for a warrior the prospect of facing death is
immaterial. Likewise , a person unattached to family life has no
interest in his wife, and for a person having no desires this living
Earth is immaterial.
[Source: http://mcjoshi21.blogspot.com/2012/08/to-daus-subhashit.html, accessed by me on July 17, 2021]
The loss of trust was reinforced when another colleague of the individual at BIRAC, whom I have known for longer and whom I called to confirm my movement out of the committee, said that the individual concerned had apparently promised her that he would talk to me before the reconstitution of the Committee. A few minutes after my phone conversation with the second individual above, she wrote an email with a cc to the first one referred to above. And the first one did not even write on top expressing any regret over having failed to let me know.
The loss of trust troubles me so much that I am not sure that I can engage with the individual any longer. Trust is an essential ingredient for me to engage with anyone, be it family, friend or professional acquaintance. In all my years once that trust is broken I distance myself, no matter what the cost be. I walked away from promising jobs in the past, unmindful of consequences, when I found my superiors had been lying to me.
That makes me wonder if I should continue on the remaining three committees at BIRAC that are managed by the individual in question. Would my association with a cultural association be a stigma of any kind, now that I have been foolish enough to talk about it, if it has indeed been a source of worry for anyone?
Not that it would make me drop the association. On the contrary I hope to intensify my engagement after I retire. Possibly even hold an honorary office there, were I to be offered one.
Over the next few days that is a hard call I have to make. If I had had no association with BioNEST and if these remaining committee positions had been offered I would have gladly accepted them because of my belief that government's work is God's work. So may be I am being impulsive in reconsidering them?
But here is the trade off: Every time I sit in one of those committees I cannot help thinking that I was let down, my trust broken. And that is not a happy state of mind to be in. Not to forget the fear that will nag me that I could be dropped from any or all of these other committees without a word of warning, no matter how sincerely I contribute to their working.
In a strange way I suspect that this is also the beginning of the end of my professional life. All that is left of it now is my years remaining as a teacher at IIMB. And that is probably the other major source of hurt and anxiety for me.
Before I close this post I must thank my friend Dr Satya Dash for getting me into those BIRAC Committees. I sincerely believe I am a below average bloke who lucked out in getting into IIMB. Hardly anyone other than my family and a small clutch of colleagues at IIMB knows who I am. Remaining obscure has never been a challenge for me. I have done nothing remarkable in life to be anything other than obscure.
If only Satya had cast a stone on any of the streets in any city or town in the country there was a 99.9% probability that it would have landed on someone smarter than me, more suited for the BIRAC Committees. Yet he most graciously piloted my candidature internally and helped me settle down with key words of guidance on what was expected of me once I went on board.
Satya, you got me associated with one of my most fulfilling professional engagements in my life. Given that I have just three years to retire I am sure I am unlikely to find anything more fulfilling. I close by letting you know that I will remember your act of kindness with eternal gratitude.
Nanni. Namaskaaram.
