This is your life

As I write this in a room at my ancestral home in Fort Kochi, where I arrived last night, my head lies between the past and the future.

But is it home any longer? I don’t know what to call the place anymore. 

I’m not here on vacation. But to add to the walls a picture of my dad who died two months ago. The images on the wall show grandpa, whom I have never seen because he died young, a fun granny I used to smuggle whiskey for when I was much younger, and dad’s older brothers — the serious oldest one whom I was petrified of (but I’m told had a wicked sense of humour) and the second one everyone thought of as a quirky man, but I always looked up to and maintained was much misunderstood.

Ironically, as I write this, it was to this day over a decade ago that my wife gifted me our first child. I didn’t ask anybody, my wife included, what we ought to call her. The moment I set my eyes on her, I knew she is Nayantara — the star of my eye.

Nayantara’s original intent was to travel with me. But she has changed her mind since. Because she wants to spend her birthday with friends. It only feels like yesterday when I held her for the first time and cried because I never imagined anything could be more beautiful than her. I think I cried when she walked for the first time. How can I break her heart now and insist she be with me if she wants to be with her best friends?

A little while from now, my favourite uncles will come along. One is my dad’s cousin — the two of them were as close as blood brothers. And the other is his brother-in-law. Both pragmatic men of the world. I share interesting bonds and conversations with them.

And when dad’s cousin comes by, the both of us will step out at some point to talk. Man to man. Like we always do. 

In these politically correct times, I know this is a politically incorrect thing to say. But for as long as I can remember, every once a while, he would tell me: “Son, it’s tough to be a man." I have often wondered what that could possibly mean.

“I had read something many years ago, that no matter how old we are, each of us is a child till our father is alive. So, I guess now you are finally grown-up.” I didn’t get the full import of that when my friend Gourav Jeswal wrote it to me in a warm note after dad died.

Between my dad’s past, the pragmatism of these men that surround me, the place I am in and the day I write this on that has the future stamped all over it, it is inevitable then that I be in a strange place. 

And I cannot help but spend a while and introspect before I step out to the beachfront to celebrate all of dad’s youth. And while there, share with Nayantara, at least in my head, all of what has stayed with me as the year closes.

Lesson #1: W.A.I.T

I didn’t know this as an acronym. But in exchanging notes with a friend who is an executive coach, he told me the biggest challenges he faces is dealing with people in leadership roles. That’s when he tells himself W.A.I.T. An acronym to remind himself, “Why Am I Talking?"

The person at the other end has made up his mind. Engaging in a conversation with him is futile. The only voice he can hear is his. As much as it is tempting to give back as it gets, W.A.I.T.

I experienced this first-hand earlier this year when in conversation with a “poster-child" of “resurgent India". He knew the questions, he had the answers.

At some point, I figured, my trying to interject or argue was pointless. I waited until his 90-odd-minute monologue ended. I didn’t ask a question or offer any prompts. When done, he started to fidget. He had run out of things to say. I stayed put like stone.

It finally got to the point where the man pretty much lost it and asked me to ask him something. I told him I have nothing to ask, no opinion to offer, nothing to argue about. He asked me if a story would emerge out of the conversation. I smiled and said I didn’t know.

We then looked at each other a little while longer. The silence became unbearable for him, it seemed, and he started talking again. He went on to tell me things about the industry and his firm he ought not to have told me about. I don’t know if he regrets it now. But it was one of the finest lessons I learnt during the year. W.A.I.T.

But silence is a difficult lover. She tries, tests and twists every bone until you scream for mercy, howls and concedes ground. She then sits back, gloats and urges you to continue wooing her until she submits and you can claim her as your own. I have got a long way to go.

Lesson #2: Be nice, be frugal

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Old lesson. But one worth reminiscing over every once a while. It came back to mind a little earlier today while going over Paul Graham’s old notes: “You grow big by being nice, but can you stay big by being mean? You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape,” he says.

“So Don’t be evil may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I’m sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM... The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt Don’t be Evil. The catch is that people will hold you to it,” he adds.

Here again, I can speak with the benefit of hindsight. I made the mistake of being generous with money and time as opposed to being nice and kind. The difference is a subtle one.

Generosity is for the moneyed. I could afford to be generous when I had the resources at my disposal. I thought I was being nice. But when I took a call to become an entrepreneur, resources must be hunted down and deployed both prudently and frugally. You never know when the waters get choppy.

But it’s easy for people to mistake your generosity for you being nice. Take generosity out and for whatever reason, everybody assumes you aren’t a nice person any more. 

Lao Tzu summed this it up when he wrote: “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men."

Lesson #3: There is pleasure in labour

One of the reasons I quit working and started labouring over everything I do is because I figured there is more joy in labour. Maria Popova pointed to the difference between the both on her curated blog and introduced me to a book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which I am now reading.

“Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus — these are work.”

“Labour, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify... Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labours.”

“Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labour can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labour. Beyond that, labour has its own schedule."

“There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labour. When the worth of labour is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.”

And right now, I am labouring over this piece. I’m dead tired, but in the flow and in the zone.

Lesson #4: I can’t have it all

There is only so much I can do. There comes a time in everyone’s life when you got to admit and acknowledge, “I can’t handle it. Help me.”

I don’t understand why is it so difficult. If somebody has figured an elegant way to do something, I might as well go learn from them. Interest and time permitting, I will build upon it.

Where I am right now, as much as I want to, I don’t have the bandwidth to learn Python, a language I wish I was introduced to earlier. 

Once upon a time, I used to be the go-to person for all things tech. I cannot keep up with it anymore. I would much rather learn from those who are investing their lives and energies into it.

The things most important to me are Founding Fuel and staying in touch with those close to me. All else must wait. This is a piece of advice I received from a very prominent man whom many Indians hold in high esteem, me included. In trying to build the entity he inherited into what it is now, he had to give up on a few things.

The list included his children. He struck them off his list of priorities and thought he would make time for them later. But they are grown up now, don’t need him any more, and resent the call he took. They have no fond memories of him and nothing he does to catch their attention gets them. In hindsight, he told me, it was a bad call.

Lesson #5: Everybody has an opinion

Do I hold on to my car or not? I wrote about my dilemma in an earlier instalment where I summed it up under the Fifth Basic Law of Human Stupidity. I don’t intend to dwell on it any further. But do I need an opinion? Most certainly I do. And how do I form one?

Watch popular television shows and read loud opinions. But this goes against all of what I have argued until now — to get off most social media like Facebook not just to protect privacy, because I thought it makes me dumb.

Two dead people put things in perspective.

Oscar Wilde famously wrote: “By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.” So, with bated breath, I look forward to the comeback of the loudest television anchor who is judge, jury and executioner.

And why should I listen to their opinion? Because I need to know and am in a hurry to know. As Steve Jobs put it: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

Lesson #6: This is your life

I got myself a copy of The Holstee Manifesto and stare at it every day for a few minutes. On Nayantara’s birthday, I want to tell her, “Go out there, baby girl. This is your life. Do what you love. Live your dream. There is only so long your dada can be around to watch over you.”

This piece was first published in LiveMint on December 25, 2016

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