On Failure and Meritocracy

I am a fairly optimistic person. "Optimistic" because I take risks in life, but "fairly optimistic" because I do not gamble. I believe in success but not in overnight success. I believe in ambitions, in dreams but not in fantasies. And as a corollary of my tempered-with-caution optimism, I generally never use the phrase ,"In the good old days". I believe that the days ahead of us are going to be better. I believe that my best, your best, our best is yet to come.



But this time, I will make an exception.



So, in the good old days, whenever we saw a destitute suffering on a pavement, a naked torsoed child wailing at the traffic intersection, or an acquaintance who had suffered a personal tragedy, or came across a person who had lost his job, or whose company had gone kaput, our first reaction would be one of sympathy or even a little bit of empathy": "Oh ! Poor guy. Why do bad things happen to good people ! Hard luck !". Even if momentarily, we would sigh collectively with him and try our best to singe our sighs with some degree of pathos. A few good souls among us would even go as far as to pray for him and will try to ease the ache in his heart and the burden on his spirit.



Alas, that seems like ages ago. Human civilization has continued its seemingly inexorable march towards creating "meritocracy". And with increasing meritocratic nature, comes increasing blame on the person. Failure has become very personal now, much more personal than it was ever in the human history. Inevitably, when someone fails, nobody blames it on the circumstances, or his upbringing, or the lack of opportunities or others. In true meritocratic traditions, they blame it on him.



The whole atmosphere becomes rife with snap judgements by arm chair critics. "Oh , he was an idiot , that is why he failed," says one. "Why is he blaming his luck, it was his own incompetence which undid him", chips in another. Add to it the burgeoning individualism of the modern age , where the safety net of family is diminishing, and we have a recipe for disaster.



Failure becomes a quagmire, a quick sand which threatens to engulf his whole existence and swallow him . And the horror of horrors is that everyone believes that he deserved that fate!



This is one of the reasons that the number of suicides and depression cases in many parts of India has reaching high. In India, nowhere is this problem more acute than in IITs. For long, and for mostly correct reasons, IITs have been held as shining examples of a meritocratic society. So, if someone bothches up his life, whether personal or academic, then the failure is very public and the blame lies squarely on his shoulders.



In this post, I am not going to ramble about the ills plaguing the IIT student life. That, I leave to intellects more cultivated and pens far more skilled than mine. But as a Parthian shot, I would really venture to say that, if we want our society to grow and prosper, we need to show more compassion and empathy towards a "failure". Sometimes, it is better not to go overboard with our blame games. Some people may argue that what I am proposing is the very antithesis of the sermon preached in sundry self help books by confident philosophers: "You are the creator of your own destiny. You are the master of your own fate."



I understand.



Those lofty words do pump up the adrenaline and give the spirits a momentary high. But deep down, in our bones, we secretly know that even if we give our best, we never truly eliminate the chances of failure. What is required that we show the same understanding towards others.



That will be a true sign of maturity.