John Armstrong, British writer and philosopher explores the ideas within his book 'How To Worry Less About Money' one of The School of Life's new guides for everyday living. This was filmed at the TSOL LIVE tour in May 2012.
Krishna & Arjuna meet Karna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra Source: Wikimedia
As I begin to write this dispatch on a Thursday morning, journalist Rana Ayyub’s self-published book Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up has shot up the bestseller list on Amazon India. I’m still to complete it. All I can say is that it is a compelling read. And you got to give it to Ayyub for guts, as Salil Tripathi wrote in his review of the book in Mint.
That said, my mind is grappling with a problem nobody seems to have conclusive answers to.
1. I do something wrong right now.
2. I am convinced in the long run that wrong is for the greater good.
3. Did I do the right thing then?
This question has haunted humans forever. I tried to address it as part of this series in the past as well. It forms one of the central themes in the discourse between Krishna and Arjuna in the Mahabharata.
The immediate provocation to ask this question to myself yet again is Ayyub’s book. The sum and substance of which are the findings from a sting conducted by her in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots. In trying to do that, she went undercover as an Indo-American filmmaker making a film on “Vibrant Gujarat”.
She gained access to people in all the right places through subterfuge to get them on tape, the outcome of which is the book. The consequences for those implicated in the book, which includes the current ruling elite, can be disastrous in the long run.
When she was done with her research, writing and ready to publish, nobody was willing to touch it. Ayyub ended up a nervous wreck, and took the self-publishing route. Sans any publicity, either in the news or by way of advertising, that the book is on the best-seller list in India and that it has overtaken fixtures there such as Chetan Bhagat, Robin Sharma and Paulo Coelho is, to put it mildly, amazing.
I listened in to the conversation at the book launch in New Delhi in two parts, with Ayyub anchored by the political editor of Caravan magazine, Hartosh Singh Bal, noted human rights lawyer Indira Jaisingh and Rajdeep Sardesai, now consulting editor at the India Today group.
It was an interesting one and at various points, the question was asked of Ayyub: “The means that you deployed to accomplish your ends, did you not betray the faith of those who placed their trust in you?”
She was unambiguous in that when all other means to get to the truth had failed, she was left with nothing but subterfuge to get to it. That is one among the many reasons, she says, she ended a nervous wreck. But it had to be done in the interests of the greater common good. Now, what is the “greater common good”?
This is a question all of us humans face in our lives. By way of personal example, I can think of a choice I was compelled to make in an earlier assignment, the details of which I do not intend to get into. I faced a choice. Either I toe a line that I disagree with, or get the boot.
If I toe the line, I continue to live the good life. If I don’t, the boot follows—the consequences of which would be felt not just by me, but my family as well. By that yardstick, in my world, following “the greater common good” would mean I toe the line. But if I did, when it is time to die, I know deep down that I will not forgive myself for giving in to the “greater common good”. What am I to do?
When extrapolated into the Bhagavad Gita, in some way, this is the kind of dilemma that stared the great warrior Arjuna of the Pandava clan as he got ready for battle against his cousins on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu and mentor to the Pandavas, argues with Arjuna and tells him his duty is to fight, irrespective of the consequences.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen thinks Arjuna’s refusal to take a consequence-independent position is an admirable one. He discusses why in much detail in his book The Argumentative Indian. It earned him the title of a peacenik and his theories around the discourse have been the subject of much discourse—with the more popular being one penned by R. Jagannathan, the editorial director at Swarjaya magazine.
In an earlier avatar at Firstpost, Jagannathan posited his understanding of Krishna’s message to Arjuna: “When you have decided on war after all options for peace ended, you have a duty to fight. That is your dharma.”
In trying to gain some more perspective, I thought it only appropriate then I call Sardesai. We spoke briefly over the phone. What did he think of Ayyub’s operation?
As Bal describes it, when invited to be a panellist, most people chickened out at the last minute because they “developed sudden travel plans” or “something urgent just came up”. But Sardesai turned up.
He is so often at the receiving end of trolls on social media as well that it took a personal toll on him. It compelled him to get off Twitter for a brief while because he couldn’t handle the abuse any more. “For every 10 people who abuse me, there is that one person wants to engage with me. I cannot let them down or be seen as running away,” he said. And he got back.
I asked him where he stands on Ayyub’s operation.
“In my experience, there is a thin line between what constitutes a sting and what comprises an entrapment. So, I am wary of sting operations. Also, it must be done only when the public interest is overwhelming and there is absolutely no other way of getting to the truth. What you eventually want is justice. That is what has driven me through all of these years. You have to constantly push the system. The ends versus means arguments does not stand to scrutiny if you cannot provide justice eventually,” he argued.
“But who is to decide what is justice? What is justice to you may not be justice to somebody else,” I said.
“Yes, there is an element of subjectivity in what is justice. There is no denying that. But we must look at the context,” he said. “The reason Gujarat continues to remain in the minds of people is because the media hasn’t let go of the case. But what about the 3,000 Sikhs who got killed in Delhi during the 1984 riots when the Congress was ruling? Why are so few of the killers and those who instigated them behind bars yet? In Mumbai, hundreds of people were butchered in 1992. How many were convicted? You start out thinking during the normal course of things, justice will get done. But it doesn’t work that way in our country.”
I thought he sounded cynical.
“Yes, I have become cynical. But cynicism cannot become your way of life, nor should it stop you from shaking up the system every once a while,” he said, I suspect, a tad pensively. To that extent, he said he is philosophically on Krishna’s side—in that you have to do what is your duty because that is the right thing to do.
While on duty and the right thing to do, I was almost tempted to probe him on why he didn’t run the tapes on the cash-for-votes scandal in 2008 when he was the editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN. Siddharth Varadarajan, now editor of The Wire, had then written in The Hindu, of which he was the editor at the time, that “five days before the Manmohan Singh government faced a crucial vote of confidence on the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008, a political aide to Congress leader Satish Sharma showed a US Embassy employee ‘two chests containing cash’ he said was part of a bigger fund of Rs50 crore to Rs60 crore that the party had assembled to purchase the support of MPs”.
The tapes that allegedly contained evidence of the wrongdoing were with Sardesai, who had gone on air to announce a coup that these tapes would be telecast later in the evening. But it was pulled out and for inexplicable reasons wasn’t broadcast until 20 days later.
Various accounts exist on why Sardesai didn’t, including that he copped out. But because he has explained his position clearly in his book 2014: The Elections That Changed India, I thought asking him why wouldn’t add any more value to the debate than what he had already written about.
In a separate email though, he wrote to me, “It was aired after due diligence and legal scrutiny. We did not chicken out. When to air is a matter of editorial judgement, not for a political party to decide.”
Now, if I were to coalesce all of these and argue from Krishna’s position that I ought to take a consequence-independent position and simply stick to my dharma, or duty, I am not sure the “greater common good” theory will hold good for me. But then, to a layperson like me, neither does Sen’s argument that Arjuna’s position is an admirable one.
To my mind, on the one hand, if I accept Krishna’s position, then I ought to be plain dumb and incapable of independent thought. I refuse to accept that. On the other hand, if I accept Sen’s argument, it leaves me in a position of tamas (lethargy or darkness, as the Gita calls it, and one when a human needs informed and wise counsel of the kind Krishna offered Arjuna). The problem is, as humans, all of us are susceptible to foibles and may not always have access to wise counsel—or perhaps may choose not to seek it for whatever reason.
If it may interest you, may I point you towards a very nuanced paper on the theme that I stumbled across recently titled Consequentialism and the Gita (read here).
So, where does that leave simpletons like me who do not have much bandwidth left after the exigencies of life are done with? Much thought later, I have arrived at a position for my personal life. This is not to suggest it is not amenable to change.
But as things are, if money be the only variable by which the greater common good is going to be measured, count me out. My family and I need only so much and we are pretty damn happy with it. Everything else is a bonus.
I have read, re-read, and heard Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life? Though I do no subscribe to his Christian doctrine, my family does. But that’s okay with me and I’m not going to try to change them. If their faith makes them happy, then so be it. Every place else, what Christensen stands for resonates with me.
As for Rana Ayyub, I do not know her nor did I attempt to reach out to her for this piece. All I can say is: You’ve got guts girl.
(This piece was originally published in Mint on Sunday & all copy rights vest with the publishers of Mint)
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home-you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-theday traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way. And so on.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line-maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
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That I hate Facebook and chose to opt out of it because I thought it is making me dumb is something I have articulated earlier. I’m happier for it. Quite honestly, I am not interested in knowing how people spend their vacations, their frustrations at work, nor will I bother to hit a like on their “oh-so-cute” family pictures. Add to that Facebook’s privacy polices that milk every ounce of you that it may make the billions of dollars it is sitting on.
But as recently as last week, in this series, I posited that I continue to remain on Twitter because of the news feeds it offers. And on LinkedIn because it allows me to look up the backgrounds of people.
But that said, a part of me continued to argue there is a larger problem that I was unable to put my finger on. This debate with the self ended when I stumbled on two interesting arguments on what is the problem with Twitter. May I point you to “The End of Twitter” in The New Yorker and “Why Twitter’s Dying” on Medium? I couldn’t agree more with the sum and substance of both the arguments.
Twitter has an existential crisis on hand because it is struggling to remain relevant in a world being overrun by social media platforms of all kinds. The fine minds who thought up Twitter are leaving in hordes in order to create newer platforms. And the folks coming in to replace them are trying to figure out how can they continuously reinvent the platform so that they stay on top of the game. Cash is not an issue. With the kind of valuations it currently commands, Joshua Topolsky points out in the New Yorker article that it can continue to exist in its current avatar for 412 years.
So, what is the crisis really? And why is it being overrun? Umair Haque argues eloquently on Medium that over time, most social media platforms have morphed into platforms for abuse. And Twitter is the one that amplifies abuse the most.
“The social web became a nasty, brutish place. And that’s because the companies that make it up simply do not just take abuse seriously... they don’t really consider it at all. Can you remember the last time you heard the CEO of a major tech company talking about... abuse... not ads? Why not? Here’s the harsh truth: they see it as peripheral to their ‘business models’, a minor nuisance, certainly nothing worth investing in, for theirs is the great endeavor of... selling more ads,” he writes.
And damn right he is.
For a moment, consider how things are in India now. Twitter has degenerated into a place occupied by three warring tribes—“bhakts”, “libtards” and “presstitutes”.
“Bhakts” have come to mean anybody who is on the political right and supports the current ruling coalition. On their part, “bhakts” describe anybody who doesn’t agree with their world view as “libtards”—short for liberal retards. And finally, “presstitutes”, a term contemptuously thrown by both “bhakts” and “libtards” to describe people like journalists, writers, filmmakers or anybody, for that matter, who belongs to a tribe that may not subscribe to either school. I confess I have fallen victim to the crossfire, have indulged in name calling with both “bhakts”and “libtards” and am now labelled a “presstitute”.
When I think about it, this isn’t what I had signed up for. Twitter was intended to be a worldwide community of people who shared thoughts, links and ideas, all in 140 characters. And what a lovely place it was!
The easiest thing to do now is just get out of Twitter because it is no longer what it was intended to be. But that would be a cop-out and giving in to the warring tribes. So, what am I to do? Because at the end of the day, there is no taking away from the fact that when you dig deeper, meaningful conversations can be had on Twitter.
On my part, I have started out by giving up on the theory of reciprocity, which meant that if somebody started to follow me, I followed them back as a gesture of acknowledgement to their existence. When I think about it, it makes no sense.
Add to this the fact that I am seen as an influencer of sorts on Twitter by many folks—not because I have accomplished anything significant, but because it is terribly easy to be seen as an influencer, and because I had deployed some devious techniques and a few hundred rupees to be seen as one. The network effect kicked in and now people of all kinds follow me for whatever reason.
By falling into the “follow back” trap, the voices of people who really matter to me get drowned. This is because Twitter moves incredibly fast. By the time you finish reading this sentence, back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate 40,509 tweets will be published. And by Twitter’s acknowledgement, half a billion updates are posted every day. So, the chances of me finding what I am looking for is lower than that of looking for a needle in a haystack.
So, I have started on a painful exercise that will take a while to complete—to start unfollowing people who don’t add value. The easiest way to get out of this trap is to start out by unfollowing everybody I follow right now. On Chrome, my browser of choice, this can be done by using a plugin called Twitter Unfollow. Every browser has similar tools that allow you to do it.
I have chosen to take the longer and more tortuous path. When I have time on hand, I review the profile of people I follow and slot them into lists. A list, on Twitter, is a curated group of accounts. You can create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others. Viewing the timeline on a list will show you a stream of tweets from only those accounts present on that list.
In my case, for instance, themes I am interested in include media, psychology, medicine, philosophy, books, entrepreneurship and politics among others. So, I have started looking up people interested in these themes and am convinced are on top of their game.
Each time I feel the need to look a theme up, which is pretty much every day, I go to the relevant list and look at what resource they have pointed to or what comment they may have to make on a theme. What it offers me, in turn, is a completely personalized experience. Everything else that exists is noise and opinion that gets filtered out. To put it politely, everybody has an opinion. And opinions are like orifices at the bottom end of your rear. Everybody has one.
Over time, my intent is to follow nobody but those on the lists I am interested in. Whether or not I choose to make these lists public is something I haven’t made my mind up about. I am inclined to keep it private because a public list that others can subscribe to tells everybody what my interests are. The downside to a private list, though, is that it goes against the principle of sharing, which Twitter, or any social media platform for that matter, as it was originally intended is based on.
This isn’t a technique I thought up. But something social media wonks such as Luis Suarez have perfected over the years. The outcome of the many years of his experience and how he got to mastering Twitter that it may be leveraged for maximum impact is . I owe Harold Jarche, whom I had written about last week in this series, a hat tip for the pointer to this hack.
Then there is LinkedIn. At the time of writing and preparing this dispatch, I have deleted my LinkedIn account. I don’t see any value in it any more. All of its default settings are intended to spam my personal account. My initial position was that I stayed on LinkedIn since it allowed me to look up backgrounds of people. But when used effectively, Google is such a sneaky tool, it allows me to get into pretty much wherever I want to.
And heck no, LinkedIn is not where I go to look for career opportunities or make fresh acquaintances. Nor do I fancy posts from self-styled “thought leaders” no editor would touch with a bargepole. The only reason most people put their posts there is to tom-tom their accomplishments or congratulate people for something as trivial as moving from being an assistant manager to manager, show off to idiotic recruiters and human resource people how wide and deep their networks really are. How much more daft can organizations get?
I don’t really know most of the people I am linked in on LinkedIn. Nor do I care for them. Add to all of this the fact that premium users who subscribe to LinkedIn can view all of my personal details. Unacceptable! What firmed my mind up are two snarky provisions I noticed in the Terms of Service under the provisions for Privacy.
2.2: We offer a premium service to recruiters and others, which can be used to search for, organize, and communicate with potential candidates or offer business opportunities. In some cases we allow the export of public profile information. You can control how your information is exported by changing which parts of your public profile are accessible to search engines.
2.5: We may share your personal information with our affiliates (meaning entities controlled by, controlling or under common control with LinkedIn) outside of the LinkedIn entity that is your data controller (for example, LinkedIn Corp. may share your information with LinkedIn Ireland, or other LinkedIn operating entities) as reasonably necessary to provide
the Services. You are consenting to this sharing.
We combine information internally across different Services. For example, SlideShare may recommend better content to you based on your LinkedIn content preferences and the articles you read on Pulse, and LinkedIn could present you a better tailored network update stream based on your SlideShare activity, whether or not you tied your SlideShare, Pulse and/or LinkedIn accounts (e.g. by signing in SlideShare or Pulse with your LinkedIn account), as we may be able to identify you across different Services using cookies or similar technologies.
Plainly put, all of my personal information does not belong to me. The sharks at LinkedIn can trade me for a few dollars and I don’t have a say in it because by accepting their terms and signing in to use their service, I have given all of my rights away to them.
Thank you. But no thank you. I would much rather spend quality time with my little girls who are curled up by my side, waiting for me to wrap this piece up, so that I may entertain them with magic tricks and share the warmth of a few giggles and laughs I bring with my faux magic tricks that can only impress little girls who look up to their dad with awe. The joy, I suspect, will last only a few years before some joker tries to woo them, while I look back wistfully at the years they worshipped me. I might as well spend all of my time doting on them.
This piece was originally published in Mint on Sunday
Marty Baron, former editor of The Boston Globe
That the 2015 movie Spotlight, a taut thriller that recounts the story of an investigation by the reporters of the newspaper The Boston Globe into the sexual abuse of children by clerics of the Catholic Church is a front-runner for the Oscars is secondary. What is primary is the accompanying shame that hits viewers in the gut.
And that is because contrary to what you would imagine, this isn’t a movie about journalism in its finest traditions—but about looking at truth dispassionately, leadership against the odds, the gumption to question fondly held notions, acknowledging frailties and acquiring wisdom to set all of what is wrong, right. These are traits that aren’t acquired easily. That the setting is the newsroom of a popular newspaper is completely incidental. Think of it as a metaphor if you will of how countries, organizations and individuals behave instead.
The film is yet to be released in India but most cinema aficionados perhaps already know the plot. The Boston Globe is a hugely successful and widely respected newspaper in a predominantly Catholic community. The rolls of the newspaper include Spotlight, a team of four reporters who spend all of their time and energies on investigative journalism. They are hugely successful at what they do.
When the editor retires, everybody at the organization takes it for granted somebody from the system will be elevated to take his role. But the management in a moment of epiphany thinks it may just be appropriate to bring an outsider. Marty Baron, a man brought up in the Jewish faith and a rank outsider to Boston, finally gets into the system. Liev Schreiber powerfully and subtly etches the role.
As is the wont in most organizations, when a new leader takes charge, they look at what their predecessors have done, evaluate it, and try to figure if there are better ways to do things. In any which case, that is what good leaders intend to do. And as is often the case, their intent is met with hostility—overt at times, covert at others.
When the new editor gets down to the job on hand, a sparsely reported news item catches his eye. Buried in the pages of the newspaper, he sees sporadic reports of children being sexually abused by priests in the Catholic Church. Why, the “outsider” in the new system wonders, and asks that in as many words to the “insiders”.
The first response is that the newspaper has already reported on it, the concerned authorities at the Church have taken appropriate action—and that these are perhaps one off episodes that don’t need further investigation. He declines to buy the argument.
Some moments of debate and tension later, the argument resonates across the room and the team galvanizes into action. It is pertinent to pause here for a moment and ask why did the new editor turn to a small four-person team to lead change? Why didn’t he mount a frontal attack on the larger system that was in need of an even bigger overhaul?
When looked at from a thoughtful leader’s perspective, it makes sense in the longer term to go after potential areas where the chances of acquiring wins are higher. Most leaders, who come in from the outside, in desperate attempts to make their presence felt, go into slash and burn mode. This is the kind of thing that can backfire dramatically and is very often a point of no return.
That is why, with some convincing, a team most likely to buy into his ideas seemed the wisest thing to do. Months of meticulous investigation later, they blow the lid off one of the Catholic Church’s darkest secrets—that it actively connived to protect the worst kind of offenders.
The story got The Boston Globe many accolades including the much-coveted Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism in 2003, exposed a series of child abuse scandalsin churches across the world, and it eventually took a man like Pope Francis, the current head of the church and an outsider to the system that is the Vatican, to muster the courage to apologize. “Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you. And I humbly ask forgiveness,” he said at a private mass in Vatican City.
That is one among the many reasons why Spotlight is a movie not just every journalist, but everybody in leadership positions ought to put on their list of mandatory viewing. It begs that we ask of ourselves where our moral compass lies.
Let us consider a set of simple questions. Why does pretty much everybody believe Indian media houses are compromised entities? Why does everybody think Indian businesses get to where they are because they are inherently corrupt? Why does every Indian believe business cannot be a force for good?
Spotlight offers an answer: Incest.
When the team at The Boston Globe finally got down to investigating the scandal, what stunned them initially was that their findings weren’t new. The Church knew about it all along. A medieval code of honour though compelled its leaders to deny any wrongdoing. Instead, they went out of their way to not just eliminate traces of incriminating documents, but protect the perpetrators as well. From an editor’s perspective, this was as damning as it gets. It was an astonishing story to be told.
When the publisher got wind of what the editor had in mind, he paused. Perhaps, he was wondering what the consequences could be. After all, 53 percent of the newspaper’s readers were Catholic—just the kind of audience advertisers in the newspaper reached out to. If a story as damning as this were carried, it could antagonize readers and in turn advertisers on whom The Boston Globe depended for sustenance. Marty Baron, though, is one of the rare editors that holds his ground and insists on having his way.
And the only reason he can do that is because he is an outsider who has the advantage of distance to understand a story like this will not alienate the community it caters to. Instead, it addresses the reader’s unstated need that they know the underbelly of the system they blindly believe in.
Turn the gaze now to India. Speaking off-the-record, business tycoons of impeccable pedigree talk disdainfully of the media houses and journalists that feature them. They make no attempt to conceal the contempt they hold journalists in; who are grateful for having gotten a sound byte or an exclusive interview on a good day; and their counterparts on the business side for having wrangled some money in advertising spends. They speak disdainfully of people in the government as well. That said, they have the gall as well to believe they are demi-gods whom the masses worship because of the monies they control.
Those in government think of business people as obliged objects. Behind their backs, they speak disdainfully of their “ill-gotten” wealth that accrued to them on the back of pleas for favours.
As for Indian journalists, when the day’s job is done, often they congregate to exchange notes on how aware they are that they are being used as tools both by the publishers of the title they work in and the folks whom they deal with in desperate attempts to get stories that may please their editors.
Journalist Hartosh Singh Bal in the most recent issue of Caravan magazinebrilliantly captures these incestuous relationships. Writing on the relationship between the current finance and information & broadcasting minister Arun Jaitley and journalist, he recounts an anecdote that sums it all up:
“I can still remember a story he related at one of the evenings I attended. Jaitley was explaining why he felt India Today, under its then editor Prabhu Chawla, was gunning for him. The story, that involved columnist Swapan Dasgupta and Chawla was scurrilous and unprintable. But I do recall being taken aback by the ease with which Jaitley could betray the confidences of even those such as Dasgupta—who continues to be considered close to him—to a complete stranger. Four years later, I met Jaitley again at the BJP office in Ahmedabad where I had gone to cover the 2007 Gujarat Assembly elections. As I spoke to Jaitley, Dasgupta sat at his feet taking dictation for a press release. By then I had spent a few years in Delhi, and nothing that Lutyens’ insiders put themselves through in their need to be close to power could surprise me.”
As much as all of these creatures think of each other as spineless, nobody has the spunk to rock the boat. Because at the end of the day, everybody needs the other. They are all insiders locked in with each other.
Kavi Arasu, a leadership and talent development professional and a professional certified coach with the International Coaching Federation has an interesting hypothesis on the insider versus outsider debate.
“There is a certain rhythm, or cadence, to how we think and how we behave,” he says. So long as the both of these are in synch with each other, it is a comfortable place to be in. For any individual or organization to develop though, this rhythm ought to be challenged. But development in any form is painful because the rhythm they are used to work in comes under scrutiny. The most convenient thing to do then is to turn a blind eye and imagine there is no problem.
But disturbing a rhythm is only one part of the problem.Pretty much everybody gets it that if they are to be better at what they do, they have to seek development out proactively. That explains the clamour to get into programmes that promise to change lives or how an entity works. Having gone through the programme and when the initial euphoria wears out, everybody settles back into the rhythm they are accustomed to.
This is because the psyche of every entity is such that after having gone through a development programme, it compels them to look at the past. When done honestly, often it repudiates all of what was in the past. Almost overnight, you begin to look silly. That becomes one more reason to go back to the familiar cadence.
Pope Benedict by Rvin88 under Creative Commons license
Then there is wilful blindness. To understand this, consider Pope Benedict XVI, the predecessor to the current Pope Francis. He was the classical insider. Of European descent, when he was known as Cardinal Ratzinger, he issued a secret edict in 2001to all bishops in the Catholic Church, that the interests of the church be put ahead of child safety. When he finally resigned, many were relieved because he was accused of not doing enough to contain the damage. Instead, critics insist he led the charge to protect those who ought to have been prosecuted. As some people put it, “I see it, I know it, but I hope somebody else will manage it.”
This raises another question. If it was so blindingly obvious to everybody Pope Benedict was practicing wilful blindness, why didn’t anybody who believes in the Catholic faith raise a red flag? Sacha Pfeiffer, one of the four persons in the Spotlight team at The Boston Globe, summed it up succinctly: “When you have powerful, beloved institutions, it’s possible it can be too powerful or too beloved for people to want to ask them questions. And I think you have to.”
Into all of this, an insider is impeded by the fact that a large part of their actions are embedded in the past they come from. When challenged, they carry the burden of having to explain why they did things in a certain way. In Spotlight, the brilliant Michael Keaton essays the role of Walter "Robby" Robinson, who heads the Spotlight team. He was part of the system and knew it inside out.
Marty Baron, the outsider, does not have to carry the burden of history. He is inherently oriented to plant new flags and change things. This is not to suggest that insiders cannot do the job. There was this one instance at one of India’s most respected firm’s when a member of the senior team was elevated to the CEO’s role. It was met with much applause internally.
Overnight though his persona and actions changed. It was only a matter of time before all of the insiders in the system rebelled against him. They argued that they were doing things as he had envisioned it would be when he was part of the senior team. Why, then, was he compelling them to change? “Because my role as CEO demands that,” he shot back unapologetically. Such leaders who emerge from the inside are rare.
That said, it is not easy being an outsider either. This is because they see things differently. When insiders to a system see the kind of changes like Baron brings in to the newsroom, it has a bearing on the insider’s past as well. It makes sense to some people. In Spotlight, there are those like the intrepid reporter Michael Rezandes, played by Mark Ruffolo, to whom the changes make sense and are willing to transition.
But to others, like Michael Keaton in the movie, they are willing to play along because they see an end point to the change. They reckon it may last a year or two, the changes will be pointless, and the cadence at which they worked at in the past will come back to normal. So they’re willing to give it a shot.
But when people embedded in the system don’t see an endpoint to the changes on hand, the system they represent and the world they operate in, gets violent. To give but one more instance from an Indian context, a large Indian professional firm got in an American executive with a mandate to create a charter for change. It was made obvious to everybody in the organization that he is here to question assumptions and bring change. Almost immediately, he ran into hostility—not vociferous because everybody knew he had the management’s backing. So each time a meeting was called for, everybody in the room would confer in Hindi just so that they may make the new man in charge uncomfortable.
Manu Joseph, a novelist, columnist and the former editor of Open magazine is another case in point. Journalistic circles have it that his exit from Open was on the back of differences between him and the promoter Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RP Sanjiv Goenka Group. Apparently, Goenka insisted on having his way on a key hire in the editorial team who would report in to the editor Joseph.
Joseph thought it his prerogative to decide who stays on the team and who doesn’t. Goenka had his way eventually and Joseph chose to exit from the magazine. When contacted, Joseph said, “This, is true. This is why I quit. It is an episode I have not spoken about to anybody in detail. Sanjiv and I continue to be friends.”
But Joseph is seen as the consummate outsider in Delhi. “To be fair Delhi was very welcoming, Delhi did reach out. But I could not respond as graciously as I wanted to because I wished to spend all the time I could on my novel, and often chose to miss late nights to wake up early for a run. Also, I wished to have the freedom to write whatever I wanted to, to get involved in toxic stories that are taboo if you wish to be co-opted into Delhi’s networks.”
When probed on why, by way of example he brings up the curious case of Tarun Tejpal. Tejpal has been accused of raping a former colleague in an elevator in Goa.
“The general opinion in Delhi’s media circle was that Tejpal was guilty. I got access to the footage of CCTV cameras in the hotel where the incident occurred. And I believed it was a genuine journalistic story. The contents of the footage disputed some of the things that the young woman had said. Some people thought my story favoured Tejpal. By touching toxic stories like the one on Tarun Tejpal, I became the outsider. By looking at the CCTV footage, it embarrassed the campaign in the media and I became an outsider by doing what I did,” says Joseph.
But, Joseph wrote in his investigation on L’affaire Tejpal: “For most of his adult life, Tejpal was celebrated as a journalist and a writer by a network of Delhi’s influential cultural elite who transmitted that sentiment to the vast public.”
Does being an outsider extract a toll on you?
“Yes, a writer needs the goodwill of his peers and many times I feel I don’t have it,” says Joseph. “But most days I don’t care.”
Being an outsider takes its toll on the soul as well. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an outsider to Delhi. Barack Obama was an outsider when he was first elected to office. “But these men have something brazen about them. They couldn’t care less,” says Kavi Arasu. The moral then is that to be a successful outsider you need one of two things: Either a benign system that is willing to tolerate you or a thick skin.
In a benign system, if the outsider comes in and doesn’t do much to shake things up, the system will stay benign. If the system isn’t benign, a thick skin is essential. But above all else, outsiders have to take the effort to build an ecosystem around them that they can converse with. The headwinds that come with being an outsider isn’t easy to handle. It is only human then to feel fragile. The only way out is to turn to the ecosystem and draw from internal resilience.
Pope Francis by Alfredo Borba under Creative Commons
And that brings us back to the Vatican and what is it about the incumbent Pope Francis that makes him different from his predecessors. He comes across as a gentle soul who perhaps doesn’t have it in him to take on a powerful system.
“There has to be means of self-renewal,” offers Arasu by way of explanation. “For renewal to happen, you need a certain degree of self-awareness.”
Pope Francis perhaps doesn’t have a thick skin. But he can do things differently because he is an outsider in more ways than one. All of his predecessors were European. He comes from a South American background and grew up in the slums of Argentina.
Has he encountered opposition? He has.
Among the first things he did was to start work on a complete overhaul of a long-standing hierarchy. He asked that bishops be pastors “who smell of the sheep and not be airport bishops that buzz around the world padding their resumes and develop the psychology of princes.”
He has demanded “A poor church, for the poor!” That also means a huge clean up of the Vatican Bank, the machinations of which are shrouded in mystery to most people. But he wants to overhaul the place and make it accountable. It’s a slog. But somebody’s got to do it.
And if all this weren’t enough, he is the first pope to have taken the issue of climate change head on. “We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental change we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all,” he said in a speech in the US. Conservative Republicans and devout Catholics were horrified. Why is the head of the Catholic Church getting into things he ought not to be meddling in? Isn’t his mandate a spiritual one?
Jeb Bush, a runner in the race to be American President in 2016, dismissed it with: “Put aside Pope Francis on the subject of any political conversation.” But there is nothing the system can do either to keep him out because systems have their own sets of challenges. The machinations of the Vatican can only be speculated upon. But it is entirely possible that after Pope Benedict XVI resigned, there were a few cardinals who wanted to be the pope. It is entirely possible as well that they could not arrive at a consensus on who takes over. The only palatable option then was to settle for an outsider like Pope Francis and wait it out until the stalemate lasts.
That pretty much explains the sequence in Spotlight when the cardinal at Boston calls on Baron to suggest he stay away from the story for the damage it can inflict on believers. Baron goes back to his office and recounts the encounter to the team at work on the investigation. When they vocalize their concerns around the potential fallouts, Baron quietly shoots back: “I am not asking you to do this. I am telling you to do this.”
This article was first published simultaneously in Mint & Founding Fuel. All copyrights exist with the publishers
