Sam Manekshaw on Leadership

“There’s a difference between physical courage and moral courage. Which one should you possess?”

“Fear is a natural phenomenon. Like hunger and sex.”

What an outstanding talk!!!

Field Notes from an ICU

Contrary to what I always imagined, the ambience outside the intensive care unit, or ICU, where my dad sleeps now isn’t antiseptic. Around me are a few chairs, and a few weary faces. Pretty much everybody is glued to mobile handsets. The only time they come to life is when one of the security personnel shouts out a number. The guardian of one of the human beings admitted in the ICU then jumps up and scrambles to do whatever it is that the resident medical officer (RMO) or nurse in charge wants them to. 

The only times I have seen my dad are when the number he is now identified by is shouted out. I haven’t been allowed in any place close to him since he was wheeled into the emergency room earlier today. Since then, he has become just another body that lies sedated in a sterile environment, in sharp contrast to the air outside. I don’t know what will become of him when he gets out of there. The doctors in charge claim they don’t know either. “Under observation for 48 hours," is all they mutter.

*****

I think it was yesterday. Or at least it seems like that. The two sons of a junior warrant officer (JWO) in the Indian Air Force (IAF) and his wife would walk the lanes and bylanes of Sion, a suburb in Mumbai, every evening. 

At some point, the young officer would strike a deal with his sons. Either they could stop by a street vendor who hawked comics where they could debate and deliberate further on which title of Amar Chitra Katha they ought to settle on, or whether they’d much rather everybody share a plate of vada sambar or masala dosa at Hanuman Restaurant right across where the vendor sat. The only times there was no debate was when the latest copy of Tinkle hit the stands.

At all other times, the officer was clear it had to be either the comics or the food. Certainly not both. The boys resented it because they thought they were being disciplined into making choices. The young officer made it sound that way while the mother looked on indulgently. More often than not, the comics won over the food.

Purchases done, all of them would troop home and the young man would lie on his bed, open the comic, the boys on either side, and he’d animatedly read out tales from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Valmiki, the Jataka Tales, and every once a while stories of heroes from contemporary Indian history that Amar Chitra Katha thought appropriate to publish. 

The older boy grew to become me—a journalist; the younger one, my brother, a researcher in the neurosciences. Thirty-five-odd years down the line, in hindsight, the both of us know the young officer wasn’t trying to teach his sons to choose. It was because a JWO in the IAF then barely took home enough money to make both ends meet. 

We grew up in an India where “India was Indira and Indira was India". My folks hadn’t heard of economic liberalization and its potential benefits until the early 1990s. Not that it made sense to them. But by the time they did and figured out what it meant, their boys were ready to join the workforce. Until then, the only kind of parenting most middle-class folks like them knew was to give their boys the best, like buying comics pretty much every other day. If that meant mortgaging little pieces of gold at the local pawn shop from our mother’s meagre dowry, then that is what they did.

But something happened, a mutation if you will, between generations. The kindness and genteel parenting dad weaned us on got replaced by “helicopter parenting" of the kind my generation and I practise. 

My older daughter Nayanatara doesn’t have the time for long walks with me. Just out of Class IV, her mornings are crammed with a ruthless curriculum that leaves no room for simple joys like Uncle Pai in Tinkle. When done with her formal class hours, she attends classes for taekwondo, kathak, phonics (which will apparently do her diction good), quilling, art and pottery. My wife and I think it par for the course if she has to grow up into a well-rounded individual. 

My folks aren’t so sure. They think their kids—my brother and I—turned out to be reasonably decent blokes given the Rs. 400-odd the IAF paid my dad every month by way of salary. I suspect they may just have a point.

Each time dad tried to tell me that gently, I’d go into a funk and tell him the times have changed. But as he convulses yet again, the RMO tells me they’re at a loss, and that the ventilator sounds the most plausible option—someplace in my head tells me I ought to consider his advice on parenting a bit more seriously. It’s okay to let children be and soak life in without imposing the ideals of what adulthood ought to be like on them. They’ll just turn out fine. So long as you have the bandwidth to attend to their simple needs—be a playmate when they need you and read a few comics together every once in a while.

*****

The kind of literature on medicine I have read includes the compassion of Atul Gawande, the eruditon of Sherwin Nuland and the perspective of Roy Porter. Their expositions on the practice offered me stunning insights into the relentless world of young resident doctors, the nature of how we biologically live and why our cells die. That is why I always thought of medical practitioners as romantic ideals.

But in the real world, across the glass wall where dad lies right now, Gawande and Nuland and Porter are just that—romantic ideals. The resident doctors are—pardon my expression—kids on whom the graveyard shift is an imposed one. They are trying their damndest best to do what the textbooks have taught them. But experience is still to mentor them. 

Over time they will morph into seniors, like the ones doing the rounds now, and who during their normal waking hours are arrogant pricks. Pardon my expression, but there is no other way to describe them. Allow me tell you why. Fed up of the “He’s under observation" line, I thought up a quick one to throw at the senior doctor on the rounds. 

“Excuse me sir, but which lobe of his is affected?"

“You understand medicine?" he asked me condescendingly.

“I’m a practising biochemist," I lied through my teeth. 

“Ah! You’re one of us," he melted and proceeded to take me through the initial prognosis.

Much of it sounded like Greek and Latin. But because curiosity had compelled me to read Gray’s Anatomy and some textbooks on biochemistry closely in the past, and carry an app called HealthKart on my phone that I look up every once a while to understand the nature of various drugs, I managed to nod intelligently, ask some questions, and finally get a fix on what is happening to dad. 

Perhaps I am being unduly harsh on the fraternity. When looked at from one perspective, how can an overworked medic sit down and possibly explain the nuances of medicine to traumatized caregivers clueless about the machinations of medicine? 

I can think of exceptions to the rule like the good Dr Natarajan, an obstetrician, who devoted patience and time to my wife and me when we’d gone through a scare a long time ago when she was carrying our second child. He assuaged our concerns and treated us like humans—not like preserved tissue samples in formaldehyde jars that reside in medical schools. That said, I maintain that the likes of him are exceptions.

But why should it be? If kids weaned on comic books purchased on the back of wafer thin pay packets and mortgaged gold can grow up into informed individuals, what makes medical professionals think they can be condescending? I buy the argument that they soak in an enormous amount of pressure. But what if these medics were put into the pressure-cooker environment that is the newsroom; or a trading room at a broking outfit; or asked to frame policies that rein in the fiscal deficit? None of these professionals can get away without explaining the nuances to the masses. Because if they don’t, they’ll get lynched. 

Why did I have to lie and claim I am a biochemist to understand what’s going on? Why did their doors open warmly only when my brother, who is actually a doctor, walk in? What if I hadn’t lied? What if my brother wasn’t a doctor? Much like the weary souls splattered across chairs outside the waiting room, I’d be groping in the dark and be on tenterhooks. 

The problem with the practical medicine that exists in hospitals outside the books of Gawande, Nuland and Porter is that they don’t understand the nuances of what it means to be human. It lives instead in a cloistered world seeped in arrogance.

The other problem with contemporary medicine—and by that I mean allopathy—is that it exists in silos. There are neurologists, cardiologists, urologists, pathologists, pharmacologists and so on and so forth. Each of them has a microscopic understanding of the microcosm they work on in the human body.

A good general practitioner (GP) with a holistic view is practically impossible to come by. Contemporary allopathy has, for all practical purposes, killed the GP. Philosophically, Ayurveda espouses the idea of holistic medicine. But it is hopelessly outdated. In times of crisis, it is not a science that can be relied on. The way it is now, it is but a body of ancient texts that practitioners turn to. As for homeopathy, anybody who thinks it a science ought to be an idiot. How am I to take any system that believes in the placebo effect seriously?

Where does this leave us when faced with a crisis but to turn to a splintered system like allopathy? For all of its frailties, at the end of the day, it has done more to extend our life spans than any other system. 

Now, if only it could temper the arrogance its practitioners come with! 

*****

Dad thought it only appropriate he marry my mum when he first set his eyes on her. He was 22. She was 20. Her old man, my grandfather, was scandalized in what was then a very traditional Malayali society. He tried to talk the young man out of it. But dad firmly declined. She was his first girlfriend. He was her first boyfriend. They’ve been married 45 years now. Neither will eat a meal without the other. Nor will they end the day without having reported to each other all of what they did during the day.

I always thought this an old-world relationship that is pretty much impossible to sustain in the world we live in now. I’ve had conversations in the past with friends who practise psychology. Their hypothesis is easy to comprehend.

We live terribly busy lives. Not all of our needs can be satisfied by one individual. So, in theory, it is not just probable, but okay to seek multiple partners so that all of our needs are satisfied. To that extent, I am told many practising psychologists believe adultery is kosher—and that over time, the mainstream will come to accept it.

During one of my long walks with dad, I asked him what he thought of the hypothesis. He laughed gently, as is his wont. “Your mother meets all of my needs," he told me then. “I haven’t looked at another woman, ever."

“You won’t understand how we love," mum once told me. 

That is why, even as his sedated mind now groans out for her, she watches stoically from the other side of the glass door. There is nothing she can do but hold his hand in the brief moments they allow her to.

A wall of silence separates mum from both of her sons. Her front is brave. But deep down, I guess she needs to talk to somebody. But that somebody lies in a mist. What will happen of their 45-year-old love story if he isn’t around? What will happen of her if he isn’t around to pamper and drive her around? I don’t know.

I wish that I knew how to love like he loved—the good, old-fashioned way—devoid of all pretences.

He tried his damndest best to teach us that through Amar Chitra Katha so we understood how to love our spouses in much the same way that Satyavan did Savitri, so that when Yama, the god of death, comes calling, death can be cheated. 

As I wind these dispatches up, I wait and watch quietly, hoping Satyavan will indeed wake up from the deep sleep he is in now, beat the odds that Yama has placed on him, and walk back home to the Savitri he loves so much.

“We’ll keep him under observation for 48 hours," I’m told again and am jolted back to reality.

This piece was first published in Mint on Sunday on May 30 2015

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 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

It's harder to be kinder than clever

Jeff Bezos is the kind of man whom I have watched from far with much fascination. What drives him? What is it about him being at the helm that catapulted Amazon into the kind of entity it is now?

An interesting pointer that came my way on how to look at everything he does and Amazon's longer term strategy came from my friend Haresh Chawla. He highlighted the significance of understanding the difference between velocity and speed. Like many people, you can move with great speed, but go around in circles. Few have the muscle in them to understand that only when  direction is embedded into speed, it morphs into velocity and you reach someplace of consequence.This subtlety formed the underpinnings of a hypothesis he framed on what sense to make of contemporary technology companies. 

Jeff Bezos, Haresh has always argued, is among those who gets the difference and it is embedded into everything that Amazon does. That is what Bezos a formidable thinker and makes Amazon an entity to watch out for.

When Haresh put it in as many words, I have since latched on to every byte of information that come in on Jeff Bezos, the man. What may he really be like? What keeps him awake? How does he think? What kind of mental models does he deploy? What philosophy does he subscribe to?

All thanks to a newsletter from James Clear, a transcript of a speech by him made at Princeton University in 2010 hit my inbox earlier today. 

Some parts of it had my attention. There is this episode where he talks of this time while attempting to show off his mathematical prowess to his grandmother. Instead of being impressed though, she bursts into tears. He is bewildered, until his grandfather's puts things into perspective: My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

Every word of the talk is worth thinking over. This anecdote has stayed with me. What has stayed as well are the questions he leaves the audience with. I'd be curious to hear first hand from him how did he go about framing all of these in the first instance. Answers to questions like these insist on second-order thinking. It makes for a compelling read.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been

I stumbled across this commencement speech by Nicholas Nassim Taleb at the American University of Beirut a little while ago. Just a little over 17 minutes, do watch it. Some parts of the speech that struck a deep chord with me are transcribed below. 

"......I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions."

"Success requires absence of fragility. I’ve seen billionaires terrified of journalists, wealthy people who felt crushed because their brother-in-law got very rich, academics with Nobel who were scared of comments on the web. The higher you go, the worse the fall. For almost all people I’ve met, external success came with increased fragility and a heightened state of insecurity. The worst are those "former something" types with 4 page CVs who, after leaving office, and addicted to the attention of servile bureaucrats, find themselves discarded: as if you went home one evening to discover that someone suddenly emptied your house of all its furniture."

"But self-respect is robust -- that’s the approach of the Stoic school, which incidentally was a Phoenician movement. (If someone wonders who are the Stoics I’d say Buddhists with an attitude problem, imagine someone both very Lebanese and Buddhist). I’ve seen robust people in my village Amioun who were proud of being local citizens involved in their tribe; they go to bed proud and wake up happy. Or Russian mathematicians who, during the difficult post-Soviet transition period, were proud of making $200 a month and do work that is appreciated by twenty people and considered that showing one’s decorations, or accepting awards, were a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one’s contributions. And, believe it or not, some wealthy people are robust. But you just don’t hear about them because they are not socialites, live next door, and drink Arak baladi not Veuve Cliquot."

"If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been."

"One should never do anything without skin in the game. If you give advice, you need to be exposed to losses from it. It is an extension to the silver rule. So I will tell you what tricks I employ."

"Do not read the newspapers, or follow the news in any way or form. To be convinced, try reading last years’ newspaper. It doesn’t mean ignore the news; it means that you go from the events to the news, not the other way around." 

"If something is nonsense, you say it and say it loud. You will be harmed a little but will be antifragile – in the long run people who need to trust you will trust you." 

"When I was still an obscure author, I walked out of a studio Bloomberg Radio during an interview because the interviewer was saying nonsense. Three years later Bloomberg Magazine did a cover story on me. Every economist on the planet hates me."  

"I’ve suffered two smear campaigns, and encour-aged by the most courageous Lebanese ever since Hannibal, Ralph Nader, I took reputational risks by exposing large evil corporations such as Monsanto, and suffered a smear campaign for it. "

"Treat the doorman with a bit more respect than the big boss." 

"If something is boring, avoid it. Save taxes and visits to the mother in law. Why? Because your biology is the best nonsense detector; use it to navigate your life." 

"There are a lot of such rules in my books, so for now let me finish with a maxim. The following are no-nos"

• Muscles without strength
• Friendship without trust
• Opinion without risk
• Change without aesthetics
• Age without values
• Food without nourishment
• Power without fairness
• Facts without rigor
• Degrees without erudition
• Militarism without fortitude
• Progress without civilization
• Complication without depth
• Fluency without content
• And, most of all, religion without tolerance.