Pursuit of Happiness

"But you are so successful. What do you have to be sad about?"

I have faced this question so many times in life, that now I snap whenever I am asked this. The question is often followed by another assertion - "look at people who are not as fortunate as you." There is something very disturbing about the idea that happiness should be relative; or that being 'fortunate' or 'lucky' should make me happy. In fact, having been 'lucky' would make me fearful and insecure.

Along the journey of life, I have met some very incredible and interesting individuals, but most people seem either unsettled or plain unhappy in their lives. Many fit into stereotypes - the insecure over-achiever, the unsettled career guy, the heart-broken genius and the like. Many times in life, and more so recently, I have thought that given that I did well in most things I put my heart and mind into, perhaps I could really succeed if I put effort into being happy.

I am sure that the last word in this experiment of mine hasn't been said, but a mid-journey review doesn't read too well. I am not sure if happiness is something that could be achieved, or something that just comes if you start trying. What I have been able to do is to identify the primary character traits that make me unhappy; but that begets the question of whether these character traits are innate. If not, and if they developed over time, can I undo them? After all, we acquire these traits not consciously, but they seep into us as we go through life. Changing them seems difficult, if not impossible.

I reflect on some of the moments in life that made me really happy, and I see a common thread running through them - self worth. Many where moments where I felt that I had achieved something (especially if I had achieved that thing after months of hard work), or where I felt very optimistic about the future. Music and dance, to the extent that the lyrics bring hope and joy, make me happy too.

But where does that leave me in the quest for happiness? One option is to keep achieving and keep feeding my self-worth. Nothing wrong in that, but it just seems like doing what I have been doing all this while. That doesn't sound exciting. Plus, the final moment of success will be preceded by months of doubt and fear. Does that momentary exhilarating feeling of achievement compensate for the troubles of the entire path? I don't know.

Krishna says in the Gita - "karmanyeva adhikarastey, ma faleshu kadachana", i.e. you have a right only over your action, and not the result of the action. Can I somehow get myself to enjoy the process, the action; rather than the result of the action? In other words, is it humanly possible for something to get interested in something, and keep doing it because he/she enjoys it, and not because it would lead to something? I guess it is possible; but having grown up in an environment of moderate scarcity, where I have had to go out and obtain things, I am restless doing things that I feel are not contributing to something bigger.

For now, I will take the easy way out - both! It is probably too late in life (or perhaps too early?) for me to completely dissociate from how I have lived, and how I have got where I have. As I like to tell myself (rather dramatically) - I have blood on my hands. However, I also feel that I am at a stage in life where I should perhaps start thinking about alternative paths, and start exploring them. 

The other day at Lodhi Gardens, Anoothi asked me what three qualities I value most in a person (as an aside, it seems AT Kearney is as fixated on the number three as McKinsey is). The first two were obvious choices - empathy and honesty. I thought a bit about the third and finally picked discipline. Here's a bit about why these are the things I value the most. 

Let me start with empathy. Life is a long and often difficult path. Everyone here is fighting their own battles. What I mean by empathy is (1) simply the realisation and acceptance that everyone is fighting unseen, unheard battles (2) an ability to be able to make space for people without necessarily being told about their problems (3) a connection with one's own and others' emotional side. I believe that if one has these three qualities, one will always make himself/herself available for everyone around them. It will come effortlessly. I consider myself fortunate to have been surrounded by empathetic people in College; people with so much empathy that they have actually spoilt me. Swati, for instance, always makes herself available for everyone in such wonderful ways, even if she isn't necessarily your best friend or even if it takes so much out of you. I constantly look up to her and hope that I have the strength and fortitude that she displays.

The second is honesty - something that I have come to value recently. For me, honesty also includes openness with people. At Oxford, I found people very empathetic and very disciplined but found many of those around me to be mysterious individuals who didn't open up easily. They were difficult to read and hence it bothered me for some time, till I came to terms with it. Why this trait matters to me is because we are all so consumed in our lives that it is difficult to know how those around us are feeling. In that case, it is useful if we can be open about how we are feeling and what we want, so that those around us can respond adequately. I have seen so many relationships crumble because people wait for the other person to pick up cues. 

Finally, I have come to value discipline immensely. Discipline, in particular punctuality, helps keep life organised. It helps people around us plan their lives and their days easily. I go back to Salman "Dabangg" Khan - "once I give a commitment, I don't listen even to myself." In this way, commitment just makes the operation of the world easier. Discipline is also an ability to take short term pain for long term gain. In that respect, it complements the above two traits very well. 

These three qualities are not only those that I seek in others, but those that I try to achieve in life. I am lacking in all three, especially discipline, and the desire to improve myself constantly is what keeps me wanting to wake up every day. Perfection, thankfully, is never achievable and hence there is always scope to improve. 

A precarious moment

Being a former consultant, airplanes and airports are like second homes for me. The spate of accidents in the middle of this year and several horror stories told by friends barely affected me. Today, I had my first airplane horror story. 

Landing in Delhi in the middle of the winter is an uncertain situation. The fog ensures that flight schedules are completely up in the air. It was thus no surprise that my flight was 2.25 hours delayed. The flight finally took off at 11 PM from Bangalore and was scheduled to land in Delhi around 1 30 am. After reading and sleeping through the journey, the pilot finally made the 'prepare for landing announcement'. I looked outside the window and Delhi looked like a volcano ready to explode. There was a thick layer of foggy clouds that seemed red with rage (the light of the city trying to find a way out). I thought to myself what a dramatic scene it looked like. The cabin crew was seated and we made our way down. First we entered the fog and I could not see even the wing that was barely a few metres from me. Then gradually the city started appearing. And then, suddenly, the pilot aborted the landing attempt and made a rapid ascent back. In barely a minute or two, we were back at normal flying height. I still don't know why the pilot needed to do that, but it was one of the scariest moments of my life. Then we howevered in the air for about 10 minutes before making another attempt. This time, the fog seemed even thicker. As we descended, I was thinking what it would be like to die. I was planning my last thoughts. Thankfully, the runway appeared and we made a rather non-eventful landing. 

In those tense moments, I went back to what Aparna told me - about how such an incident a few years back had made her scared to fly. I can understand why. It isn't a pleasant experience, to put it mildly. Fear, I suppose, is the most innate of our emotions and I felt it quite intensely today. I also started thinking about how irrelevant all other emotions/troubles felt at that moment. But such thoughts are futile and irrelevant. 

Now I am back in the foggy soup that is Delhi, and can't wait and continue my love affair with the city, write a few new chapters maybe.

Oxford, Michaelmas Term

The curtains are now falling on a rather eventful Michaelmas term here at Oxford. With the submission of my last assignment today, and the conclusion of all formal events at The Rhodes House this term, there is now a need for me to reflect and internalise.

The Rhodes House was the fulcrum of my experience here, and much of what I did revolved around this world. I go back to when I was selected as a Rhodes Scholar - I had been sceptical and dismissive about this whole thing. Whenever I was asking about what it felt to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar, I would just shrug my shoulders. Life had come to mean much more to me than what the Rhodes Scholarship can ever be.

I was very fearful about coming to Oxford. Once I came here, I soon realised that I was actually two people.-One was the person I was back in college - passionate, loving, empathetic, insecure and very hardworking. The second was the person I became at McKinsey - confident, successful, distant, mature and, to an extent, complacent. The worst moments I experienced here at Oxford was when I was unable to reconcile the two, when I tried to bring the learning one of these personas had, to a situation that that persona had never faced. I feel much better now, because I feel that I have largely reconciled the two and created, hopefully, am amalgamation of the two that will make life a smoother journey.

The first few weeks were among the best days of my life - I was completely cut off from everything I had been used to, and everything that was breeding a certain complacency within me. It felt good to be a nobody again, to know that you are among the hundreds of unknown faces that throng the town at this time of the year. It was when I began to have a face, a personality, that bigger questions began to emerge. It is when I had to start filling the personality of 'Subhashish in Oxford' that I the journey became more difficult.

My time at Oxford thus far, however, has been defined by my rediscovery and refinement of love. My experiences of four years back had frozen something within me, and no matter where I moved and no matter which ladder I climbed, I was still there in that moment four years back. It was a conversation I refused to have with myself. But here I was at Oxford, old wounds reopened once again, and I looked within and I realised that all this while, love never left me. It continued to power me on, continued to make me a better person, continued to make every instance of hurt turn into an opportunity of love and service and selflessness. All these years, I thought of myself as a maudlin soul. But this term, I realised how happy an individual I am; that behind my love-lorn poetry is an individual who is here to truly live. And that hurt, hope, despair, love, hate and everything else are all parts of this experience of living; that my constant espousal of love was not as much the wail of a hurt lover as it was the celebration call of someone who had tasted nectar.

What I feel most proud about is my steadfast refusal to be overwhelmed by systems that I was part of. For instance, the M. Phil. in Economics was a course that could have very easily overwhelmed me, especially had I come here immediately after my graduation from St. Stephen's. But the last two years have endowed me with a bit more perspective. It allowed me to enjoy the subject and appreciate and critique it. But it also allowed me to keep the subject at bay, and not let it overwhelm my life. Every single day, I chose to go out there and do what I would add more value to me in life - be it yoga, rowing, reading or meeting people. Even in the last week, with two assigments and a test waiting for me in two days, I refused to close myself in my room. Rabbit holes aren't places where dreams are made and fulfilled, the world is; and that is where I would rather live.

There are so many things that I did for the first time. For one, I took good care of my health, had more fruits than I have ever had in life before, treated myself to a hot glass of milk every morning, did 10-15 minutes of power yoga before classes and either of rowing or running or my exercise schedule every evening. For most part (and for the first few weeks for sure), I studied more regularly than I have ever done before. I also subject myself to social situations where I have not been most comfortable.

To sum it up, Oxford has been wonderful, not easy. It has been wonderful because it has forced me to ask all the right questions - and that is has enabled me to go find the answers. It has instilled in me the zeal of an explorer, and even when I saw a storm approaching, I went ahead and conversed with that storm. Because storms clear the layers of hurt, pride and tiredness that one builds around oneself, and it brings us closer to the truth. I stand tall, a bit exhausted from the storm that hit me, but looking forward with misty eyes to the next set of adventures.

Signing off,

SB

Fear

Tim Robbins writes to Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption that hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and good things never die. My life over the past few years has been quite happy; and hence I have never needed to take recourse to this dialogue. If there is a best of things there must, then, be a worst of things. On the verge of leaving for Oxford, I feel several emotions - the most potent one being one of fear. It is said that those who have nothing, also have nothing to fear. To turn the argument around, those who have most have most to fear; and hence I fear immensely. There are two things that I fear the most right now - one is the loss of my happiness (drawn mostly from the relations I have nurtured or formed over the last two years) and the second is that I may not have made the most economically wise decision in taking the path that I have.

I turn to the Buddha to explain my first fear. The Buddha said that attachment - to people, to things - is a potential cause of sadness. I have grown attached to every aspect of my life over the past two years. I grew attached to my lifestyle, to many of my colleagues, to my college friends; I can almost say that I was addicted to my life. For once, my life was turned upside down and I drew joy not from within myself, but by interacting with and enjoying the world around me. Any kind of separation is painful, and this separation will be painful too; and I fear that pain. I have experienced emotional pain, in its most raw form, and trust me, it is not something I want to see anywhere near me. I have hope that the last two years have fundamentally changed me, and that it has given me strength to cope better with a 'hostile' situation. Time will tell.

The second source of fear is doubt regarding turning down a promising near-horizon career path and choosing to do this M. Phil. in Economics. The problem I am facing in dealing with it is that my memory of even two months back is too fuzzy; I am unable to compare how I feel today with how I felt two years back. I am comparing, instead, to how I felt a month back - and this does not work because the last two months have been an unsustainable high. I read some maths yesterday, and I reacted with joy and trepidation. Joy akin to that of re-discovering an old friend, and fear that I may not be able to cope up. Memories of hours spent struggling with the subject came back. Again, the answer is to let the learning of the last two years guide me. I chose this path because (1) I wanted to see how it is to come back (2) I felt I still had much to learn in Economics. I need to stop fearing, and start doing. That's probably the only way this will go away.

Facets of Independence: The absurdity of penalising homosexuality

When I woke up this morning with patriotic songs blaring from the neighbourhood, and when I opened facebook to see praises of Mr. Modi's speech; I thought of how lucky we are to be in a country that has withstood grave challenges and defied history to remain a largely liberal and democratic country. Over the past few months, reading numerous books about India, my respect for our immediate post-independence leaders such as Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel and Dr. Ambedkar has only grown. Not only did they succeed in creating institutions and laws that inculcated the ethos of individual freedom and equality, but also largely drilled these values down to the common man.

However, none would argue against the fact that India is, at best, an imperfectly liberal and democratic nation. Not every citizen of India has all the freedoms that he should; in fact, some have very few, if you think of it. This morning, sipping my cup of warm milk, I was making a laundry list in my head. I was thinking about how so many of my female friends do not have the freedom to be out at night. I was recollecting how many people I know did not have the freedom to pursue higher education because economic conditions did not permit it. I reflected on how poverty itself is the lack of economic freedom, and how a large (and debatable) number of our countrymen still do not have that freedom. Then there is political freedom - of course, we have almost complete voting freedom *, but what about other political freedoms? As the AAP experiment in Delhi showed, there are significant entry barriers to new political entities. Then I thought about the one freedom that I must confess I have usually been dismissive of - the freedom of sexual choice.

It is a futile exercise to compare 'injustices' - for example, is lack of women safety a greater injustice than Section 377? However, what struck me was that the lack of sexual freedom is quite unique in that it is neither an outcome of a patently unjust but natural system (capitalism -> economic inequality) nor the effect of extra-constitutional and outlawed elements of society (a la rape). Our country does not permit homosexuality ** even on paper. This should make our response to homosexuality unique.

The origins of homosexuality are irrelevant - whether it is genetic, acquired or an illness does not matter as long as it exists, and as long as no scientifically sound way to 'cure' it has been found ***. Given that homosexuality is something that exists in our society, why we as a nation would become ostriches with our heads in the sand escapes me. It helps nobody - gay men are married to women and neither partner ever lives a happy married life, homosexual children are threatened by parents due to fear of societal 'shame', the suppressed sexuality exhibits itself in very unhealthy ways and, most importantly, I feel that living two parallel lives helps nobody. For most gay men and women in India, the sexual aspect of their life is a parallel universe where they have a different set of friends, a different mindset, mostly no family and are vulnerable, both physically and emotionally. To put it in perspective, it is estimated that 2 to 13 percent of the world's population is homosexual; even at the lower end of the range, the number of homosexuals in India would be larger than the second-largest minority community in India - hence, if secularism is numerically justifiable in India, so is homosexuality ****.

It is therefore surprising why as a society and as a country, we should inflict this damage on people. I wonder what harm can homosexuals do to the 'rest of society'? I believe it is fear. Fear that if law were to accept homosexuality, the children would accept it and somehow turn homosexual. There can also be a bit of economic thinking behind this - if the son were to be homosexual, he would have no children, and hence no 'social security' when he grows old. There is also the fear of promiscuity among homosexuals, and hence that the homosexual daughter would not have a long-term partner. Even if one were to accept these arguments (and I certainly do not), all of them fall within the domain of an individual's right. Whether the individual needs social security or not, whether he wants to be with someone or alone for the rest of his life - are all things that he must decide for himself. I am not, and have never been, a very vocal advocate of gay rights, but I am very sure that an individual must do whatever it takes for him/her to live a happy and productive life, and if having sex or being in love with a person of the same gender is part of it, then so be it!

At this stage, I must confess my own indifference to the Section 377 judgment. I had argued that since most Indians do not have access to judicial recourse, any 'judicial' intervention would not impact the lives of the majority of homosexuals in India, and hence the Section 377 judgment was as good as irrelevant. I still stand by the first argument, that the impact of Section 377 on the ground would not be very significant. However, the symbolic weight of the move cannot be underestimated. Removal of Section 377 would, in my opinion, remove this glaring lack of independence in our laws. 

As a country that wants to be liberal and a beacon of progressive forces in the world, we must ensure that we try our best to provide equal rights to all our citizens. For most of our citizens, we have the laws in place, and it is a matter of implementation. But for those among us who are homosexuals, it is a matter of being an outlaw in one's own country; and I hope this will be remedied very soon.

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* - which itself is debatable, as many people in states such as West Bengal will tell you

** - for the sake of brevity, I will continue to use homosexuality in this article, but I intend it to be about any type of 'alternate sexuality'

*** - I do not agree to it being an illness or being curable; but for the sake of making this argument more realistic, I'll keep all possibilities open

**** - The NACO's estimate is 2.5 million homosexual men in India.

Travails of an introvert

Even with my most unbiased hats on, I must say that life is more difficult for introverts. Of course, I understand that both sets of people - introverts and extroverts - have their own set of challenges, and in a way neither is bigger than the other. However, the challenges that really matter are defined by the context; in our lives, the context is that humans are social animals. Even an introvert would confess to the fact that having people around is helpful. But in a world where the nature of our interactions is progressively becoming shorter, and where we meet several people from different cultures and backgrounds, the time one has to make an 'impression' is reducing - this being the reason why extroverts have an inherent advantage.

I remember what I was told within the first few months of my job by my project manager - "at the Firm, like in life in general, it is important to make a first good impression. Your lack of energy can thus be problematic for you in future." To be fair, whoever I have spent enough time with during my job, I have formed great relations with them, irrespective of the background or culture they came from. I have struggled to create bonds with those colleagues who visited the team once or twice a week, and my peers who have a more outgoing personality have done that with more ease. Also, I noticed that in situations where I got drunk, and hence my social hesitance went away, I came out with greater social recognition and acceptance.

However, the fact that extroverts have an advantage in people-centric professions such as mine is not the topic of this post. I take that as a given, and I have made my peace with it. But the more I think of it, I feel that it holds true for one's personal life too. I see cousins and relatives appreciate more those who are more voluble at a family get-together. Those who make calls to relatives at every festival are considered 'better' because it, for some strange reason, seems to convey that 'you care'. Of course, there is a bit of truth in it - if you are making an effort to pick up the phone and call, you do care. But one also has to realise that the very act of picking up the phone and dialling someone is more difficult for people of a particular temperament and less so for others.

Now, this lack of enthusiasm from an introvert could be for two reasons -, one, the simple lack of confidence or, two, the genuine need to be with oneself. In that mimicking an extrovert's personality may lead to greater confidence, I believe it is better for an introvert to put oneself in more difficult situations. For example, going out in Amsterdam by myself and walking around the city has empowered me, because I find myself fully confident in talking to people who're complete strangers. I have been running such an experience for over a year now, and I realise that this meeting strangers has made me so much more confident. That is good, even if this is not my preferred interaction type. However, there would be cases in which I have seen an introvert want to be on his/her own, not because of lack of confidence but because they genuinely feel that way. I have also seen other people try to force their views on such people, especially at parties. That is something which shouldn't be done, because it may interfere, in a strange way, with the intake and outflow of energy for this person, and hence disturb his/her natural rhythm.

In conclusion, the world is indeed a difficult place for introverts. But we have much to learn from our extroverted friends, least of all how to speak one's mind. Because, my experience has taught me that confidence is the key to a happy life - it reflects as much on the people around you as it does on your own personality.