YOU CAN’T WIN IN GAME OF LIFE

It was a chance discovery. Some two decades after the death of my father, I was just going through the book shelf in which his personal books, diaries etc were stacked. While going through the different rows, I found some diaries kept alongside the books. As I browsed through the pages, I could find some small notes written. They seemed to be flashes of ideas, thoughts or reminiscences. But in one of the diaries, I found a 10-line scribbled note that appeared rather strange. It was written on his 80th birthday as it was mentioned there.

The substance of the writing was that, “Today I enter the 80th year of my life on this planet. I wonder if an ambitious, hard and struggling life has all gone haywire. This is another and perhaps a more realistic way of evaluating the life’s happenings’’. I was surprised to read this because he was an accomplished man, an MBA of 1961 from Syracuse, US, a first class in LSW from Calcutta University, and one of the highest ranking Coal Industry executives of his time. If this was how a person like him evaluates life, there is need for a deep and thorough assessment of what life is all about. But yes, it is like that.

When Amitabh Bachchan has to say that “at this age and time of my life, I seek peace and want to be left alone’’. If someone like him desperately seeks freedom from prominence and wants to be left alone to lead the last few years of his life with and within himself, and admits that he does not seek headlines because he doesn’t deserve them, life needs to be revisited. And the one conclusion is that in the end everyone is a loser. This is how our being fades into nothingness. You can win those numerous battles that you encounter and have that feeling of being somebody who has accomplished, but you can’t win that war, the final one.

This is what we learn from the life of Lord Krishna. After the Mahabharata war, Gandhari curses Krishna saying that he was the cause of the war and responsible for the death of the Kaurava clan. He, therefore, would face similar fate and will perish along with his entire Yadav clan. Lord Krishna was unperturbed as he knew what was destined. He happily replied that he would look forward to that day. He was aware that his extended Vrishi family had become a burden to the mother earth due to their haughtiness and pride, their ahankara, and they must be annihilated. He could foresee that.

If Krishna was so helpless that he could see all his clan perish in front of him, the predicament of lesser mortals can be well imagined. Life, then, is largely a series of events controlled by forces of providence that somehow make us believe that we control them. But the fact is that we are but a small part of the huge design this universe is and play the role destined for us. And finally, we have to depart with the feeling that there were many items on the agenda that were still to be finished. The crux of the lesson is that you can’t win, because in the end everyone is a loser.  Life is not about winning or losing. Life is an unfinished agenda of desires and dilemmas.

CAN GOODNESS BE TAUGHT?

Good and evil have always co-existed, like the two sides of a coin. They are the two faces of reality. But since ages, goodness has been the desired objective of all societies, the preferred state. Interestingly, practising goodness has always been difficult as evil somehow seems to prevail. This is the greatest paradox that the desired state remains elusive while the undesirable is in vogue. Little wonder-discussions about the problem of evil in the philosophy of religion have not been conclusive. Why evil exists and persists is difficult to explain. More so, because God represents good and the devil symbolises evil. It was in the Garden of Eden that the dispute between good and evil began, if we go by the Holy Book. And the outcome was that evil won and the good had to eat the humble pie. The devil, in the guise of a serpent, persuaded Eve to coax Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. That perhaps was the first lesson in marketing, with the devil being the pioneering marketer.  It also tells us why evil persists. Attractive packaging of ideas is what makes evil survive and thrive down the ages. It is against this backdrop that the problem of evil and its apparent success needs to be broached over.

Particularly because the present times seem to be too obsessed with fighting against evil. Be it our own country or the world. There is a lot of clamour against evil. Nations, organisations and institutions are all up in arms against this evil for which the preferred expression these days is corruption. As integrity and probity become the most desired attributes, aggressive campaigns and forceful actions are being designed to achieve the ends. Yet, the more intense the efforts the more gory are the exposes that hint at failure of those attempts to rein in the evil. Why? Why is the propensity to err in favour of evil easily persistent? Why do we fail to learn from our past so that our present changes? Why do we fall victim to the same temptations that the previous generations did? The lessons from the past do not translate into practice because the information in those lessons does not become learning. And as long as this continues, no matter how intensive the efforts, the results will not be as desired.

There is need to rethink and redesign the learning paradigm in order to make it effective. Evil propositions are attractive because they arouse the base emotions, the hedonistic feelings appealing to gains and pleasure. As they lead to instant gratifications they have greater reward value due to the priming effect. Further, they come in attractive packages offering many freebies and giving a feeling of the winning advantage. They thus feed the ego and satisfy envy. In fact, ego and envy are intricately linked. They complement one another. Teaching goodness, then, has to come in a better package, emphasising the long-term benefits of being good. Since the fruits of goodness are intrinsically rewarding, there is a need to link it with experience of higher order pleasure — ananda as per our Indian philosophical thought. Creating this experience would involve a different kind of campaign. External awareness against evil will not help until internal awareness for goodness is created. Vigorous campaigns to glorify goodness will be a basic first step.

LOOK AFTER YOUR MEN WELL

Management theorists have been groping on one critical issue of managing “men” effectively even today, some twelve decades after the first Management Degree was rolled out at Amos Tuck University of United States of America. In fact, it is management of men that effective management is all about. Therefore, the biggest question that still haunts the theoreticians and practitioners alike is how to do this, which is, managing men effectively, women included. In the aeons of history of management theory Fredrick Winslow Taylor is a name that finds mention as “the Father of Scientific Management”. Incidentally, the crux of his scientific management veered around just one question — how to motivate people for higher productivity. He of course had his own ideas that were based on economic rationality of human nature. He assumed that human beings were cold and calculative and their key concern always revolved around economic interests. Later theorists, particularly those led by psychologist Elton Mayo, found this idea unpalatable and they could prove this in their famous Hawthorne Studies, thus laying the foundations of Human Relations Movement. Theories galore since then have been propounded suggesting that more than economics it is the emotions that matter. And to whatever extent economics matters is also for emotional satisfaction. But this fact notwithstanding, most managers, somehow, still can’t distance themselves from Taylorism and it won’t be wrong to call them diehard Taylorists. However, these Taylorists seem to forget that human beings are more irrational than rational and nowadays even the cold and calculative science of economics realises this reality, calling this emerging science as “Behavioural Economics”. It was precisely for this reason that in the traditional Personnel Management literature one of the key operative functions of the personnel manager was Separation, the others being Procurement, Integration, Compensation, Development and Maintenance. Separation function was based on a basic premise that after using or rather exploiting the human resource to the greatest possible extent it is obligatory on the part of the employer to ensure that the retirement package takes care of the superannuating employee well. You have taken this all important human resource from the society and used it to your advantage and now it is your responsibility to ensure that they go back to the society in a decent and liveable condition. Is it not rather strange that organisations and enterprises that boast so much about corporate social responsibility do precious little for their own retiring employees? Charity begins at home. The unfortunate part is that even the governments that were once supposed to be model employers are now subscribing to the there-are-no-free-lunches philosophy and denying pensionary benefits to most of their employees on one pretext or another. Interestingly, there is a blue-eyed clan that enjoys this benefit making rules for itself different than those from others. Had there been no free lunches, families would not be rearing children. Rather than picking up cues from the Western value system, we need to learn from the Japanese ideals. Even our traditional Indian value system was quite rich and noble. Even in the Ramayana, there are indications as to how to treat people. Lord Rama, while advising his younger brother Shatrughana when the latter is going to fight demon Lavanasura, categorically states the importance of looking after his men well. This signal contribution to the modern HR philosophy cannot be overlooked, Western ideas notwithstanding.