On Essentialism

I confess I have been a bad husband and an even worse father. I must also concede that the missus has demonstrated the magnanimity to give me a long rope. I wonder why. If I were her, I’d have had me flogged at a public square. This, because I have amply demonstrated my inability to deploy a two-letter word when needed most: No.

Mahatma Gandhi put it succinctly: “A ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."

That he practised this mantra diligently is well known. In an interview to Greg McKeown author of the global best-seller Essentialism, Gandhi’s grandson Arun spoke of how the Mahatma practised this in his personal life.

For various reasons that had affected Arun badly, he was packed off to his grandfather’s place. Gandhi was hugely popular then and his time came at a premium. Be that as it may, through all of the 18 months that Arun spent with his grandfather, Gandhi made it a point to spend at least two hours every day listening to all of what Arun had to talk about. Gandhi’s patient listening had a profound impact on young Arun. Over the years, as the boy grew up, the significance of Gandhi’s daily ritual of listening started to dawn on him.

The Mahatma had his priorities in place. In spite of pretty much everybody in the world clamouring for his time, he knew how important it was that he say ‘no’ to everybody else, so that he could be with Arun. Gandhi knew if he deprioritized his grandson over everybody else, in the longer run he’d strike a fool’s bargain. Because he’d have missed out on an opportunity to provide what only a grandfather can. Equally pertinent, people around Gandhi would take him for granted.

When I first read of this episode, I was ashamed. I can think of so many instances when I have been an idiot. There was this once, for instance, when my wife and I had just had our second child. She was still recuperating and could have done with all of me around.

That was also the time when I was a recent entrant to a fancy gym. I didn’t know too many people there. But as is the wont, like vultures, the instructors swooped on me and demanded a party to celebrate the birth of my newborn. I am not sure if it was the reluctance to say ‘no’ or the exuberance of a proud father. But, in hindsight, I know it was the wrong call. I said, ‘yes’ and took a bunch of protein-craving beasts to pile in all of the meat they could consume.

Even as they raised toasts to my newborn, I could tell from their faces that they were laughing their backsides off at how gullible I was. Nothing came of the banquet. When I visited the gym the next day, all of the blokes who had eaten their way into my wallet were expending energies on their personal clients. I didn’t matter. And rightly so.

Why should they have respected a man who deprioritized his wife and child for people he didn’t know? A firm ‘no’ from me and all of them would have backed off. Chances are if I’d said ‘no’, they’d have treated me a lot more seriously the next day.

I can say much the same thing about work. I quit my last assignment under rather acrimonious circumstances. I don’t intend to use this space to get into the gory details of all that transpired. Suffice to say that a significant portion of my time was apportioned to a promoter who didn’t think twice before condemning me to the guillotine. Once again, in hindsight, if I had managed myself well, there was enough time on that that could have been apportioned to family—notably my older daughter who needed her father around.

But it would be ridiculous on my part to hold the firm’s promoter responsible for how I conducted myself at the workplace. He didn’t demand I sweat my blood or spill my guts. I painted myself into a corner where I believed I had to work bloody hard. This, in spite of the logic in my head arguing I had a choice to say ‘no’. I gave in to the emotional part of me that argued even louder that I had no choice but to cave into an imaginary construct.

As McKeown puts it: “Every time we say, ‘I have to take this call’ or ‘I have to send this piece of work off’ or ‘I have to go to this client meeting’, we are assuming that previous commitments are non-negotiable. Every time you use the phrase ‘I have to’ over the next week, stop and replace it with ‘I choose to’. It can feel a little odd at first—and in some cases it can even be gut-wrenching (if we are choosing the wrong priority). But ultimately, using this language reminds us that we are making choices, which enables us to make a different choice."

What if I had chosen to say ‘no’ to instructors at the gym or the promoter at the earlier firm I worked for? If anything, my life would have been better off. But hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

This is borne out in a lovely book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, by an Australian palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware. For a long time, her career was focused on people living out the last 12 weeks of their lives. In all of her conversations with them, five themes recurred.

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

On all counts, this is the kind of clarity that terrifies a middle-class man in his midlife. Until now, I have lived to please those around me. I work like a mule. I find it difficult to articulate my emotions. I don’t stay in touch with friends. My happiness is oftentimes sacrificed at the altar of the greater common good, as I perceive what is the greater common good.

Between hindsight and the insights offered by Ware, I know I have some way to go—a long way to go actually.

To start with, I now begin my days at 4.30am and am outdoors by 5 am until 7.30 am. The solitude that comes during the early hours allows me to spend time with myself, thinking of what really matters. I have come to believe there is a fine line that divides what matters from what doesn’t. In these hours, I take brutal calls on what ought to be given a pass and what must be acted upon.

I have begun to take fewer calls on my phone after 9pm. That is time I now spend with my older daughter to make up for all that I didn’t give her in the past. As my brother once asked me much to my shame: “What more can a child ask for other than a little bit of your time? And if you can’t spare her that, why did you have to get her into this world?"

I couldn’t agree more. In the short time that I have practised this way of life, I am happier for it.

This was first published in Livemint

What all high performers have in common

This talk will take almost 1:30 hours to listen in. Don’t think of it though as time spent. But time invested. Because we live in a world that is designed to distract us. So much so that if we re-learn how to focus at a task on hand, what we acquire is a super-power.

The economic case for leisure

“What are your hobbies,” Kuldeep Datay asked. He practises at the Mumbai-based Institute of Psychological Health (IPH). I fumbled. He dismissed my intense physical routine as an activity I engage in to accomplish an immediate goal. Indeed. It is aimed to run a half marathon in under two hours. That I enjoy it is another matter altogether. But I enjoy work as well with goals to be met.

“All your waking hours,” he submitted, “are devoted to productive activities so you get better at what you do. What do you do for leisure?” The import of what he was asking wouldn’t be evident until the mind wandered to a conversation with Shankar Maruwada, who co-founded the EkStep Foundation with Nandan and Rohini Nilekani. Maruwada spends his time trying to understand how people learn. “Our obsession with getting better at what we do is making us redundant,” he said.

By way of perspective, once upon a time, medical knowledge doubled every 50 years. Advances in computing have got us to a point where it now doubles every 72 days. Artificial Intelligence is needed to access new knowledge. The human mind cannot cope. That is why, even as medical degrees are conferred, doctors get outdated. Such disruptions are happening across disciplines. How is any professional to stay relevant then?

“We need Adaptive Expertise,” says Maruwada. Individuals must learn, unlearn, and learn again, multiple times, in a single lifetime. But learning can be traumatic. To learn, we must first go through a cycle of incompetence. Remember the time you first got on a bicycle? It was tough. Until, suddenly, it got to be an unconscious act.

Children, he explains, are familiar with this trauma. They learn something new at school every day. Incompetence is not humiliating to them. After formal schooling though, most people forgot how to learn and deal with the trauma that accompanies it. So, we stick to what we know.

Is that why I am not learning to sculpt, for instance, something I know nothing about? Perhaps fear of being perceived as incompetent holds me back. But people in the Renaissance Era, people like Leonardo da Vinci, had no such qualms. While we know of him as an artist, his hobby was studying the human anatomy. People around him thought it morbid. Did he care? He engaged in it when at leisure. Five hundred years later, historians regard him as one of the greatest anatomists of all time.

Ironically, leisure is what all of us crave. But we believe it is time wasted. The import of Datay’s question hit home. If time is not spent on a hobby or leisure, we will be disrupted. Like medical doctors are, 72 days after they graduate.

This piece was first published in in the print edition of Hindustan Times on May 5, 2019. All copyrights vest with HT Media

The Myths we need to survive

Sex and the Indian man

By no means is this intended to be an authoritative treatise on Indian sexuality. Just a piece stoked by the personal interest of a man in his 40s surrounded by friends who often talk about sex in our all-boys club. By all accounts, everybody seems to be boning all of the time, or at least that’s how it sounds to me.

Is all of this male chest-thumping? Or is something the matter with me, I have often wondered in private moments.

The question exacerbated itself last week when my wife and I finally got around to watching The Man Who Knew Infinity. Starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, this movie is about Srinivasa Ramanujan, the much acclaimed Indian mathematician who died at 32 in April 1920. A fleeting scene in the film struck a note in my head. Ramanujan’s wife is waiting for him on their conjugal bed. But he continues to lie on the floor, oblivious to her presence, thinking up answers to complex mathematical problems in his head.

I couldn’t help but extrapolate that moment into our contemporary lives. By all accounts, most of us live in and manage complex circumstances. The wife is the “house manager" and the husband is an “ATM" that goes to work so that he may be replenished at the end of each month.

Over the years, both roles have merged and things are even more complex. So, a lot of the “management" like “child rearing" and “housekeeping" gets outsourced—either to the domestic help or one set of grandparents, whichever is easier. But something has to give in someplace. And my hypothesis is that it is sex.

Now, all kinds of reports exist on what is the ideal number of times a married couple ought to have sex. By all accounts, consensus exists that twice or thrice a week is just about okay from a man’s perspective in the longer run. Most people, it seems, can do with more. But all of these are American numbers. I looked hard, but couldn’t find anything India-specific. So, I thought I might as well mount a study.

I zeroed in on 12 friends, all of whom I have known for a long time, and know will be brutally honest with me. Pardon me ladies, but no women were part of this survey because I am part of an “All-Boys Club”. We like it that way because:

1. We are in our early 40s.

2. We got married 10-15 years ago.

3. We keep long hours.

4. We discovered sex at pretty much the same time—and that was a pretty damn long time ago.

5. When we “boys" meet up, we continue talking about our “awesome sex lives" and those “booty calls" we made in the “good old days".

My questions to each of them were simple:

1. Cut the jazz and tell me, how many times exactly do you have sex in a month?

2. Do you make time for booty calls?

The answers varied.

1. One said he hasn’t had sex in years because of a medical condition.

2. Two of them said they made out with their wives a few times in a year. Not for anything else, but because their definition of sex has changed from “making out" to “spending quality time" with each other.

3. Seven of them told me it averaged two to four times a month.

4. One said he could do with more, but time permitted only six times a month.

5. The only outlier was a bloke who finds time for 20 sessions.

6. Everybody climaxed after anywhere between eight to 30 minutes of the act.

7. There was consensus on one thing: “There is no bandwidth to deal with booty calls any more."

Armed with this limited data, I turned to a few people whom I thought can offer me some perspective. The first calls were made to Anugra Misra, a New Delhi-based psychiatrist, and Kuldeep Datay, a Mumbai-based psychologist whom I turn to often for the routine dump.

“What is wrong with your friends? They ought to be having way more sex. They need help," Misra guffawed over the phone. The outlier doesn’t because 20 times is good. “As for the jokers talking about sex morphing into quality time, it is all bullshit," he thundered. “There is no substitute to good sex."

Datay’s response was more nuanced. There seems to be a direct linkage between high IQ and libido, he said, adding that “men with high IQ may have a lower libido".

When I looked it up, there are many studies which prove that this is indeed the case. For instance, consider this paper published in The Cambridge Student Psychology Journal on “Sex and Intelligence". It posits a number of theories, all of which I thought were rather interesting.

Datay’s take is that it is entirely possible these men get a high out of whatever it is they are doing and that they “don’t need sex to complete themselves or who they are. Their chosen vocation does that for them." Or the two friends of mine who have sex only once in a blue moon.

“It’s actually the first sign that something is the matter with a relationship," Misra countered. “They are just trying to avoid each other. This is a polite way to go about it."

That said, I couldn’t help but wonder if Datay is indeed right—what about the sex maniac that was Albert Einstein? For that matter, that great philosopher Bertrand Russell, comedian Charlie Chaplin or, more recently, Bill Clinton? These are men with high IQ who couldn’t keep their zippers in place.

In trying to answer the question, Desmond Morris, one of my favourite zoologists, writes in The Telegraph: “Novel sexual experiences, for instance, suddenly seem irresistible. It is not the mating act itself that is so important—that varies very little. It is the thrill of the chase and the excitement of a new conquest that drives them on. Once the conquest has been made, the novelty of the affair soon wears off and another chase is begun. Each illicit episode involves stealth and secrecy, tactics and strategy, and the terrifying risk of discovery, making it the perfect metaphor for the primeval hunt."

“It’s a hypothesis," says Datay, but that need not necessarily be true across the board. “Then there are all kinds of biochemistry at work," he adds. By way of example, he points to something that is popularly called the “fidelity gene" that was discovered a few years ago in a mammal called the vole.

There are two kinds of voles. The monogamous kind and the playboy kind. Scientists have discovered that by simply altering a single gene, the Casanovas become tame versions of their monogamous cousins, who are now a minority, comprising only 5% of the family.

When all is said and done, both Misra and Datay concur that both of these types—the ones who have too little sex and those who seek too much—are exceptions. They need to seek professional intervention. But as I articulated at the outset, this isn’t intended to be an exhaustive treatise on Indian sexuality—it’s just a set of personal observations.

So, I called yet another interesting man—Biju Dominic, the CEO of Final Mile Consulting—and presented my so-called findings. His is a company that studies human behaviour and suggests techniques to meet marketing, organizational and social needs. He is deeply embedded in the Catholic church as well and spends a lot of time counselling couples.

“I find it incredible," he said, “that in the land of the Kamasutra, we place a premium on being a brahmacharya. Celibacy is placed on a pedestal in our country and it cuts across all religions."

I couldn’t agree more. What else explains the ridiculousness with which successive governments have swept Mahatma Gandhi’s sexual peccadillos under the carpet. On the one hand, the man preached celibacy; on the other hand, in his sexual life, he was a wreck, by all accounts.

“It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife," he wrote in Indian Opinion, a newspaper he published then.

“In India, as a thumb rule, we don’t understand the difference between sex for intimacy and sex for procreation," says Dominic. By way of example, he asks a rhetorical question. 

“How many couples in their 40s do you see hold hands or walk together in public? You can’t hope to just rush into the bedroom and get into the act. There is no room for public display of affection in our country, which is very important for a woman. I actually advise couples that sex begins much before the bedroom. In the Indian context, even holding your wife in front of the children is looked down upon. Why? What for?"

The way Dominic looks at it is that in much the same way a priest looks at the altar as sacred, a couple ought to treat their bedroom. It is theirs and theirs alone. And it is the duty of spiritual leaders to tell that to their followers that in as many words. But as Indians, all of us shy away from it. “So, how can the frequency of having sex increase?" he asks.

When confronted with these questions at a conference called by Pope Francis, the current head of the Catholic church, the Indian delegation raised an objection. They argued that our divorce rates are the lowest anywhere in the world. To which the pope retorted: “Sure, you don’t have divorces in your marriages. But do you have passion in your marriages?"

Dominic says he couldn’t agree more. “Intimacy is practically missing," he says. “When a girl gets married in India, she is always told she isn’t getting married to a man, but to a family and that she’s got to get used to their way of life and living. Imagine the pulls and pressures it puts on her."

And here, Dominic says, the problem begins with the man. “They are cocooned for all of their lives by their families. That is why Indian men don’t learn how to speak and deal with emotional complexity. So, nothing passionate can emerge out of them in a long-term relationship either. That is something Indian families, particularly the mothers to whom the sons belong, have to understand as well."

So, where does that leave me? All I can offer you is this.

1. I was not part of the sample. So, you can infer nothing about me from this “study".

2. Do take time out to read The Man’s Guide to Women by John Gottman. A female friend first suggested I read it. Bless her.

The Many Sounds of Silence

This note is being written on a silent January morning—the first day of 2018. It appears, save a few oddballs still slobbering drunk outside, most people have turned in to sleep. It is now dark, and silent outside. But as usual, this is the kind of darkness and silence that precedes every morning, before the sun rises.

Unlike most other days though, today, people will wake up later than usual. A late brunch will follow. I too, will join in. The stated intent is to celebrate the beginning of a new year. Until everyone decides to go back to life as usual.

But right now, right here, waiting for the sun to rise, a passage by Paul Goodman, a writer, psychotherapist and philosopher, comes to mind, on the many kinds of silence. Because while calling it an early night on New Year’s Eve, the “He-must-be-weird" look on everybody’s faces was all too evident.

Because, isn’t this that time of the year when you party?

Indeed!

But then, as Goodman writes, “Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…"; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos."

To get the full import of the power embedded in that passage, may I urge you to listen to it as Sir Christopher Ricks  reads it out. Only somebody who understands literature and has devoted a lifetime to understanding the nuances of it can read it aloud with as much eloquence that breathe life into words.

While I haven’t read the Goodman’s book Speaking and Language in which this passage appears, it caught my attention when Maria Popova offered a pointer to it on that fine blog of hers that is Brainpickings.org. The book was first published in 1973 and I can’t seem to find it anyplace.

But in the silence of the morning on a New Year’s Day, the import of why silence is significant sunk into the mind deeper. Much of it had to do reminiscing over multiple conversations that transpired over the last year with people who are compelled to practice it. These included people who work at hospices and give a patient ear to the dying, policemen on duty who and are often at the receiving end of public ire, and restaurant managers who absorb much negative feedback from patrons.

The most significant memory though is that of a conversation with a police constable at a hospital a few months ago. He was called in by the authorities there after a young woman was wheeled in. She was declared dead on arrival by the resident doctors. Her body looked hopelessly broken.

But the constable had a duty to perform as prescribed by his manual. That included asking those who had gotten her there to describe the circumstances under which the accident occurred. Questions like was the victim under the influence of alcohol, or under treatment for any mental disorder… and other such questions that sounded intrusive and offensive to her traumatized parents and siblings in their moment of grief.

“How can he be so heartless?" they wailed. “She’s dead and he insists all these protocols be followed."

The verbal assault that followed was inevitable. Friends and some relatives pounced on the policeman. He did not say much, but absorbed all of it. When done, he prepared his papers and handed them to the coroners. This allowed the body to be formally released to the grieving family.

“Why did you have to take so long to complete all this?" they spat at him as he walked out.

I felt compelled to follow. And ask him what went through his mind. Is this routine? Is this just another day’s job? How do you deal with it? Would he be amenable to have a cup of tea and share what may be playing on his mind?

He agreed.

Turns out, it was a long night for him. And a long day before that, as well. He had been on duty for at least 36 hours. An interesting conversation followed. The sum and substance of which was that people like him are trained to keep silent and maintain distance when under assault. It is drilled into their psyche. They must look at all things around dispassionately.

So, when anger overcomes him, or he may feel sadness, he is trained to ask himself in the third person, what caused the anger; when sadness floods, he asks himself, what episode triggered the sadness.

Why does he do this? By asking himself these questions in the third person he detaches himself from the sources of these emotions. He reinforces the idea that these emotions are around him but not because of him. Thus he removes himself from the emotional circumstance.

But to get anything done of consequence then, he must first surround himself with silence. And in that silence, he can distance himself from the noises that surround him, and listen in to the many kinds of silence all around.

Apparently, silence, he told me, has much to say.

When seen through the prism of the constables world of silence, Goodman’s types of silence make even more sense, and becomes easier to grasp and appreciate. Consider each of the types of silence Goodman describes and see it from the perspective of the constable investigating a death.

The dumb silence

When looked at through the grieving family’s eyes, a constable performing his task and not taking any questions is a cruel creature. His silence is borne of dumbness—or numbness, one that is lost in slumber and nothing but a function of apathy. The constable doesn’t think much of what they think of his silence. It is par for his course.

The sober silence  

This is silence that of the kind that can be witnessed from the perspective of a neutral observer watching the constable at work. But from the constable’s perspective, this silence is much needed to get the task done.

The fertile silence  

Sober silence has a unique ability to morph into fertile silence because it can ignore the loud voices that call it dumb silence. Because it is only with sobriety that 36 hours of sleep deprivation can be set aside. There is work to do. A dead body must be studied clinically to rule out signs of foul play.

In conversing with the constable, he said the reason he signed the document that allowed the coroner to release the corpse to the mourners was because his mind was hard at work. It had to stay awake to ask if the dead woman had been pushed over the parapet of her balcony or if she had jumped off it to commit suicide.

So, the questions he asked on whether she had an alcohol problem or a medical history that required prescription drugs was to rule out foul play. When the answers were in the negative, he jotted she was of sound mind, but ruled out foul play.

The alive silence  

In asking him how did he rule out there was no foul play, turns out, that in his silent observations, he had measured the height of the parapet she had fallen from. If pushed, her body would have been splayed at a certain angle. But if she had jumped out, the angle her body would be found in would have been very different. Experience had taught him that. But his silence also suggested she was reluctant to jump. Because after jumping, she changed her mind. He could tell this, he said, from the way her head hit the ground first as opposed to her legs.

The musical silence  

How did he keep his head when he was being abused by all and sundry for being “heartless?" Again, turns out, it was important that he did. Because if he uttered as much as a peep, it would be impossible for him to carefully absorb the noise around him. Much like silence is of different kinds, the noises speak as well. He was trying to catch the nuances of what the noises were trying to say. All of it sounded angry. But he was trying to listen carefully, to what was said, what was unsaid, and how.

The silence of listening  

And what did he hear through all those noises? He heard what nobody could. The silence of the mother-in-law and sister-in-law. He spoke of how they were teary eyed, stood as they were expected to, and accepted condolences from the neighbours and immediate family. But they were quiet. To his mind, their silence was noisy. Because to his mind, it suggested there was some tension in the family. Convention, given the part of the country they are from, suggests they must wail loudly. But they weren’t. Him keeping quiet and listening to the others speak helped him hear things nobody else could.

The noisy silence  

He figured he was on the right track when he asked somebody very quietly if there is a patriarch in the joint family. The father-in-law was there too. He too, was there, sobbing quietly. Through the man’s eyes though, the constable thought he could see anger. This was a tragedy he could have averted if he had intervened earlier and done something, absolutely anything, to defuse the tension between the women. In his silence, he was whipping himself.

The Baffled silence 

The clincher for the constable, the final sign that there was no foul play was the silence on the husband’s face. He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t speaking a word. Answering only in monosyllables. But it was a look of a man asking himself questions.

“Where did I go wrong?"

“Why did you have to do this to me?"

“Did I not love you enough?"

“What about our children now?"

“Why did you do this to yourself?"

The silence of peace

And where does he find peaceful silence, I asked him. The veteran constable didn’t look like the kind prone to baring his soul. This once though, he did. Maybe, he was tired. Apparently, he likes it when he goes home to the woman he loves and doesn’t have to say anything. But in his silence, she knows he has come after having done his best. And without him saying anything, she knows he loves her. And she doesn’t insist he spells out in as many words.

He is content when she is content with the sound of his silence. He didn’t have much else to say. Silence followed. There is much beauty and tenderness in silence.

But how are those in slumber after having ushered in the New Year to much loud music to know that?

Originally published in Mint on Sunday