LifeHacks
Is it possible to measure happiness? My conversation with KL Mukesh suggested there is. And that’s what lies t the heard of this piece in Hindustan Times.
As always, feedback will be appreciated. One more thing: All rights to this column vest with HT Media
After much bickering with friends on a WhatsApp group over the inflammatory content of a forwarded message that seemed clearly manipulated, I exited the battle. It was clear they wouldn’t consider any evidence I presented if it stood in the way of the alternative “facts” they subscribed to. The version of events presented in the forward aligned with an ideology and came from a source that they considered infallible. Their minds had been manipulated. I realised I would need an altogether different toolkit to prove this to them.
A war had to be waged. But how was it to be won? It occurred to me that few stories carry greater credibility than those that appear in a newspaper. That settled it.
It took 10 minutes to look up an online tool that allowed me to create a news clipping. Another 10 minutes to compose a story that insinuated it had appeared in The New York Times. The final output stated that I’d been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
I sent it out on the WhatsApp group with the comment: “Feeling overwhelmed. Thank you for your support guys over the years. Love you all!”
A stunned silence greeted my post. This was going to plan. I was messing with their heads. Eventually, the first message came in. Grudgingly. “Boss! You’ve made us proud!”
“Thanks man! Will call. Fielding too many calls right now and juggling work.” I responded.
A deluge of congratulatory messages from members of the group followed.
What I hadn’t anticipated was how quickly this would backfire as well. Happy with the clip I’d created, I shared it with my wife, daughter and some close friends who understand the news business. I assumed they’d see through it right away. My family knows I try to pull a fast one every once in a while, and if anyone in the news business with a sharp eye looked at it closely, they’d spot it as a fake. But in this case, almost no one did.
As I stepped out of my room a little later, a teary-eyed wife hugged me tight and the older daughter looked all proud of her dad. She couldn’t wait to show off to her friends! Not just that, they’d shared it over WhatsApp with others in the family. I could see messages from friends trickling in on my phone now. They desperately wanted me to get on a call to begin celebrating.
It broke my heart to begin telling everyone it was a fake. And hard to see those around me struggle to hide their disappointment — at having nothing to celebrate, at having been so wrong, and now feeling foolish. That’s when it hit me. People see and hear what they want to see and hear not just because they’re stubborn or incapable of admitting error. It’s also because it’s so much easier to dig the self in deeper than dig the self out of a hole. As with so many things, take enough turns in the road, and it’s almost impossible to turn back.
Those who craft fake narratives understand this intuitively. That is why, as a thumb rule, I don’t take any narrative on social media platforms at face value, even if they originate in people I know.
Why did friends who are ideologically opposed to me, then, buy into my Pulitzer nominee story? And why have they started to consider my opinions on all things more seriously?
Let me put it this way. Humans have fickle memories, and minds that are easily swayed. The story I crafted didn’t attack their ideology. Instead, it was something they wanted to be a part of. Suddenly, what they could see was a friend they grew up with, not an ideological opponent.
I haven’t bothered to clarify with them that it is a prank. But I will, eventually. When we argue as we often do around ideology, and they decline to consider evidence that does not fit their worldview, this clipping will be deployed to demonstrate how easily minds can be manipulated.
This piece was first published in Hindustan Times. Copyrights vest with HT Media
That I don’t fit the definition of a young man any longer hit home last week, when an innocuous tweet attracted vicious trolls and the invective hurled at me included descriptions that addressed me as Uncle. Sometimes, when you’re called Uncle in India, the line that separates respect from derision can be a thin one.
To place that in perspective, I have become used to friends of my kids addressing me as Uncle; I have nephews and nieces; random people such as harried delivery boys looking for directions in the neighbourhood address me as Uncle too. It is an honorific I use liberally as well. Every parent of a friend is addressed respectfully as Uncle or Aunty. For that matter, anybody who looks old enough and is unrelated must be addressed like this in the Indian scheme of things. That’s how everyone I know was raised — me included.
But this time, as the trolls deployed Uncle against me, their sense of derision sunk in. Because, much like them, I have used the term to signal to strangers that they are old and over the hill. “Nikal na, Uncle!” (Get lost, Uncle!) delivered at the right moment and in the right intonation in Hindi, can be devastating.
But just how did the trolls on Twitter conclude that I am an Uncle? All they could see on my profile was a thumbnail-sized image. It was time to examine myself more closely in the mirror.
t showed a man with a receding hairline who works hard to stay in shape. From being a night owl who could work 15 hours on a trot and then party all night, he has morphed into a teetotaler because he can’t handle the hangovers. And once a while, when he tells the missus he plans to meet up with the “boys”, she smirks. I think I now know why. When he gets back from meeting these buddies from his school days, all the stories he shares are rehashed ones, about pranks played on teachers, first crushes, the early years of struggle, and so on and so forth.
But the mirror insisted I think about the other updates conveniently tucked away in corners of my mind. These include narratives around lifestyle diseases such as hypertension and diabetes, bad marriages and messages of shock still exchanged about a friend’s sudden demise. When you think about it, these meet-ups and the sharing of these stories are actually meant to compel people such as me to acknowledge the passage of time, and to admit that I am a mortal creature in his mid-40s
But I don’t. Why? I suspect this is where the issue lies. Navigating the 40s isn’t easy. I’m not young. But I’m not old either. I’m abandoned. I have finally grown up.
My kids need me and my parents need me. I am in charge and supposed to have all the answers. This is scary. How am I supposed to have all the answers? When did I grow up? But grow up I did.
I am not as brash as I used to be in my 20s or 30s. Nor have I descended into the cantankerousness of many in the generation that raised me and my wife. In her 2018 book, There Are No Grown-Ups, Pamela Druckerman points out that all research has it that in our 40s we digest information more slowly than younger people do and are “worse at remembering facts”.
Having said that, she points to the upsides. “What we lack in processing power we make up for in maturity, insight and experience. We’re better than younger people at grasping the essence of situations, controlling our emotions and resolving conflicts. We’re more skilled at managing money and explaining why things happen. We’re more considerate than younger people. And, crucially for our happiness, we’re less neurotic.”
I couldn’t agree more. That also explains why I didn’t take the bait and put up a spirited fight against the trolls. I may have done that in an earlier avatar. This avatar had other things to do on a Valentine’s Day — such as live better and love better.
This piece was originally published in Hindustan Times on Sunday. All copyrights vest with HT Media.
Calendars were designed for two reasons: To mark the passage of time, and to remind us to carve out time for self-reflection. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
I remember being glad at the way my year started. Tuning out the sounds of debauchery, I woke up to the crisp morning air of January 1, 2020. In the adrenaline rush that followed my run, a voice in my head said, “This will be one of the best years of your life.”
The future will arbitrate that.
But even with everything I know now, I know that there is much to be grateful for. And much to regret.
My gratefulness didn’t translate into action, even as images of desperation were beamed into my living room amid the pandemic. I expressed my outrage over devices on all platforms. In hindsight, my outrage reflected my privilege — the privilege of the keyboard warrior. It is another thing altogether to effect change.
How is one to effect change? I remember asking that question of Arun Maira, former chairman of Boston Consulting Group (India) and former member of the Planning Commission. He gently suggested that I begin by listening to voices unlike mine. It took a while for the import of his advice to sink in. My instinct on hearing narratives that are ideologically opposed to my own is to lash out. When I’ve made the attempt to listen, however, I have been granted access to a perspective that I may otherwise not have encountered.
By way of example, there’s an old gentleman whom I chose to stay away from for a long time because I thought him a bigot. Some chance encounters led us on long walks and over time his narrative tumbled out. Born during colonial rule, Partition tore his family apart and compelled him to move to Bombay from Lahore, a city his heart continues to beat for. The animosity he bears to citizens there is an outcome of the scars his body acquired on the journey here.
It was easy to argue with him. Listening to him in silence was difficult. It is an acquired skill.
That I have the mental muscle to implement change is also obvious now. If someone had told me at the start of the year that I would have to work at the pace I now do, barely stepping out of the home yet finding ways to stay engaged with people and on top of things, I would have laughed them out of the room.
And yet I have managed, as have most others. And working from home has taught us to empathise with those in our homes and our lives that we had lost touch with in our race to get from place to place to place.
In the early days, one of the first things I did was quibble about how demotivating it was not to have access to my workplace and privacy. Until I looked at the kids. How traumatic must it be for them to not be at school and on the playgrounds with their friends, I thought. These are the most impressionable years of their lives. If I’d been asked to give up a whole year at school, I would have keeled over in horror. Each year there was precious. But these kids were compelled, and they rose to the challenge.
I next looked at those in my life a generation older. In the busy-ness of life, I hadn’t noticed — or perhaps hadn’t wanted to acknowledge — how much older and more fragile they had become. That was when the full import of the American writer Philip Roth’s words sunk in: “Old age isn’t a battle. Old age is a massacre.”
In each generation — mine, my parents’ and my children’s — I saw reflections of how wonderfully adaptive and resilient we as a species are.
Our minds and our lives had been scaffolded by rules and routine and yet when, overnight, we were forced to reimagine our world — individually and collectively — we did. Forced to wake up daily to the unpredictability and arbitrariness of a pandemic, we found ways to cope. And deep down, we discovered reserves of equanimity. “This too shall pass” is now an article of faith.
So as 2020 draws to a close, I prefer to dwell on how much we have to be grateful for, and hopeful about. Dwell on ways in which we can reach out to one another more effectively to extend help and hope.
Steve Jobs by waldrayno on Pixabay
My elder daughter is now a teen and considering her career options. The two of us are at loggerheads. Everyone around her tells her she must “follow her passion”.
I think that’s rubbish advice.
But to inspire her, there’s a cottage industry that thrives off recycling posters of Steve Jobs with “Follow Your Passion” plastered on them. All narratives have it that this is what Steve Jobs told students at Stanford in 2005. The 23,000 people in attendance gave him a standing ovation when he was done talking. The commencement speech went viral and I remember feeling goosebumps when I first saw the video.
How am I to argue against Steve Jobs? Even my kid won’t take me seriously.
May I submit then that the real import of his advice was lost on most people? His official biographer Walter Isaacson pointed out to the irony of it all in a conversation with the writer Cal Newport. Isaacson spent hundreds of hours with Jobs, including during the last year of his life, in 2011.
To cut a long story short, as a young man, Jobs was passionate about the liberal arts, and design. That is why he took courses on these themes when in college. He was passionate about travel and spirituality. That led him to goof off for a while as a backpacker in India.
Very soon though, it became clear to him that if he continued doing only what excited him, he would go nowhere. To get somewhere, he needed to find a purpose. In attempting to explain that to Isaacson, Jobs said, “The important point is to not just follow your passion but something larger than yourself.”
Once this was clear to Jobs, he went back to technology and computing — both of which contained elements of drudgery that he hated. In fact, before his brief stint of doing only what he loved, Jobs had already been fired from a technology start-up for lack of motivation.
But once he had figured out that personal computers could change the world, he wanted to be part of that transformation. That became his purpose. “It ain’t just about you and your damn passion,” Jobs would tell Isaacson years later. After Jobs found his purpose, he poured all of his passion into it. That makes sense.
When I think about it, I am passionate about the biosciences because that is what some very fine teachers at college initiated me into. I am beginning to get passionate about running. I am passionate about writing and would go batty if I couldn’t write.
But here’s the thing. Writing is the only one of those passions that I am willing to invest effort in. It’s one thing to be passionate about the biosciences; I could never actually do the time in the labs. It felt like drudgery. In the same vein, while I enjoy running, I don’t think I will ever run as effortlessly as friends who have dedicated years to the discipline.
In much the same way, every other person I meet claims they are passionate about writing and wants to write a book. I know they won’t. I’ve been writing for over 20 years. And I know the drudgery involved in writing a book. I do it because I find purpose in writing.
Passion is fleeting. Purpose takes time to discover, and even more time to build on. How am I to tell my daughter that? “Don’t just follow your passion.” Maybe it’ll work if I quote Jobs right.
At the Death Bed, Edvard Munch, Edvard Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway (Used under Creative Commons)
Four years after he died, dad’s grave was exhumed yesterday. His remains were placed in a niche and I wrote him an epitaph: “A gentle man who lived well and loved much rests here.”
A little over five years ago, the doctors asked my brother and me to decide if we wanted to continue with the life-support systems they had placed dad on. If unplugged, we were told, he might succumb away to the stroke that had felled him. If plugged in, he’d survive. But for how long and in what shape, they couldn’t tell. We desperately wanted him to live.
And so, in the toughest decision that either of us have taken yet in our lives, we asked that he be unplugged. Surprisingly, dad survived. Unfortunately, as a vegetable. Until, he died four years ago. If he were kept on life support, he might still have been around today. Who knows how else he may have surprised us?
Which is why, every once a while, some questions play themselves out in the back of my mind.
Why did you pull the plug on him then?
Morally, what that the right thing to do?
Would you have pulled the plug on yourself?
The first question could be answered on the basis of the data points we were staring at then. Compounded by the family’s genetic history, which indicated a predisposition to strokes, his chances looked bleak to begin with. That he remained bedridden for over a year before dying was his misfortune — a random event.
On the morality of pulling the plug on him, the only way I can answer that one is by imagining my future narrative. Personally, I am deeply influenced by Ezekiel Emanuel, an American oncologist, bioethicist and writer. “…here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss,” he argued in an article titled ‘Why I hope to die at 75’, published in The Atlantic magazine in 2014. It’s a line that has stayed with me.
Perspective is needed here. Medicine has advanced significantly to increase our longevity. But what about our productivity, creativity, or ability to deal with disease past a certain age?
Data compiled by the Technical University of Denmark has it that scientists do all the “ground-breaking” work that earns them a Nobel Prize in their mid-40s. But they must wait 20 years or so for the Nobel. Emanuel goes on to submit that this phenomenon is true across other domains such as literature and music too. This is not to suggest older people do not do well. They do. But the fact is, our cognitive abilities decline as we age. And while stories exist of people who defy these narratives, they are the outliers. I am most likely not.
This is why I remind my wife often (and my older daughter too, now) that once I turn 65, if a major illness should strike me, I am not to be put on life support. Instead, my organs must be harvested so they can be transplanted into someone younger who needs a shot at life. Whatever else remains of the cadaver must be given to research because the only altar I worship at is that of science.
Why 65? Because all data points I now have suggest I will be past my peak then. And that any exercise I engage in to extend longevity will drain their resources and cramp my life. I don’t like the sound of that.
Dad would have hated it if he couldn’t step out with friends to have chai, sing songs to serenade mum every once a while, pay his own bills. That settles the question on the morality of pulling the plug on dad.
