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.

I have a hole in my heart

I have a hole in my heart. It needs patching up. Every morning, I get up and see myself in the mirror. The person who looks backs at me from the other side has an air of confidence. Well pressed clothes, nicely combed hair, collar buttoned up to hide the line where the coat of the moisturizer ends on the neck, with a smile calculated to charm. But I look deeper into the mirror and I see that his heart is punctured. I have tried to clean, dress and close the oozing wound and make it impervious to any further attacks hurled at it but the sutures do not hold for long, neither does the smile.

I step out of my house and I see flickering lights everywhere. I chase the lights and plunge at the illusory happiness, the desperation of my plunges tempered only with the civility of my upbringing. But those lights recede further and further and I end up staring at a dead end. Sometimes, I try to group the lights together and give them a collective shape, a shape which conveys a meaning and a purpose. But the lights rebel. They are neon lights after all. They modulate their brilliance and their hues according to the vagaries of their mood. They are only to entice, not to lead or to enlighten the path.

When I retire at night in the bed, I hear the sound of something dripping, trickling down. Alarmed, I switch on the lights and check every faucet in the house. Everything seems fine. All the taps are tightly wound up, with the exact amount of torque, like the way they should be. Relieved, I retire to my bed once more. But the sound keeps coming, the periodic trickle of an overflow which is being restrained against its wishes. Almost like a machine and with a skill which tooks years of practice, I numb myself to the sound, relegating it to the background, a solitary jarring note in an otherwise perfect medley. And I sleep. I sleep my night away.

I have a hole in my heart. It needs patching up.

July 3: My birthday today

My hair is a moody bunch, with a mind of its own. Like a petulant child, it follows its own whims and fancies. But today, surprisingly, most of it settled down quite well while I combed. Most of it, except one. One strand of hair would not budge. However hard I combed, it kept standing.
A rebel?
I look deeper into the mirror. It is.....a grey hair.
It is my birthday today.And I have got a grey hair.

Will the rebel live?

I look outside the window. The dawn is breaking. The sun is just out on the horizon, but not out of the woods yet. There are clouds surrounding him. The clouds are many, dark and sombre. The sun is alone and outnumbered. The clouds seem adamant on letting the darkness remain, on not allowing any light to pass through, on maintaining the status quo.
The sun is the new kid on the block. He is the gladiator for whom the whole sky is the arena. It is in the sky that he was born, and
it is here he will reach zenith or perish trying, here itself.
It is an engaging battle. At this moment, the clouds seem to have upper hand. The sun looks hesitant and unsure, not of the clouds , but of himself.
I am alone inside the room, or even outside it. The walls of the room appear tall and insurmountable. Like two men at a gathering, trying to avoid each other, but still managing to run into each other and going through forced motion of exchanging pleasantries, the walls of my room meet each other perpendicularly , without any smiles, with stiff lips in straight lines. What do these walls talk about when they meet at the corners? Do they talk about the occupant of the room? Do they sing paeans about him, saying how brave and persistent he has been? Or do they lampoon his efforts, as those of a hopeless romantic?
My room is just on the side of roads. It is still early in the morning and the roads are deserted. They seem wider when they are empty. A journey on road is metaphor for life itself. Sometimes the whole world travels with you, sometimes you travel alone. To stop travelling is to stop living. At this moment, the roads seem without any life, leading to nowhere. The long drawn moments of stillness are punctuated by the very occasional whirring of a motor engine or the seldom appearance of a bicycle. But these moments are few, and the concrete used to pave the roads seems to have frozen to death last night.
I take out an old diary from my drawer. It contains a poem which I wrote a long time back. The poem , titled "Truth", goes something like this:
I am the truth
The slayer of evil
The healer of wounds
The harbinger of hope
The champion of those who try
I am the last man who stood his ground.

I have been decried, been laughed at
But the last laugh was always mine.
I was dusted to the ground in many battles
But the war I always triumphed.
I was threatened and crucified
But every time, I rose Phoenix like.
I was outsmarted, outsprinted
But in the long run, I always won.
Civilizations perished when I was bound and gagged,
but it was my voice which delivered the final blow.

I am the chuckle of an infant
The profundity of a saint.
I am the strongest armor of the soldier
The map and compass of a traveller.
I am the anger of youth
The bugle of revolution.
I am the wisdom of the old
The voice of the conscience.
I am the guilt of a sinner
And the forgiveness of a enemy.
I am the mojo of the dame
The loyalty of the lover.

I am the truth
The slayer of evil
The healer of wounds
I am the last man who stood his ground.


I read the poem and look out of the window once more. The sun seems to have won his battle. The clouds are many and for a while they looked very powerful. But the sun held its ground. And now sunlight is streaming in through the window into my room. Against the majesticity of the sun, the walls of the room appear puny and small. The sunlight has revealed their true colours. It has shown how inconsequential the walls really are.

The sunlight has infused a new breath in the dead concrete of the roads outside. Slowly life is beginning to flow. Cars are zooming at ferocious speeds. Buses are honking. The hustle and bustle of the city is on display in its full splendour.

I look into the mirror once more. The grey hair is still standing tall, still rebelling. It is alone now, but over a period of time, it will be joined by others. These others, who are afraid to take a stand now, will soon realize how inexorable the march towards greatness is, if you have the desire to grow and the courage to suffer alone.

Happy birthday...
May the rebel live a 100 years !

I Know She is Beautiful But....

I know she is beautiful
But I have mountains to climb.
Her smile is like an oasis in a desert
But I have seas to fare
Depth of oceans to measure.

Her eyelids arch like bow of a ship
But there is wind in my sails still.
Her eager virginity invites me
But I have invitations of other kind too.
There are still goals to be chased
An unseen adventure still tempts.

Her hair swings and swirls around her head
Like a flame dancing about a candle.
There is a flame inside me too
which needs guarding against the winds of fate.
Her laughter is bewitching,
her splendid face shining like the moon
But I have stars to reach for
My own firmament to create.

I know she is beautiful
But I have mountains to climb.

Until

Until my heart explodes in my chest
Until they tie my arms and cut my legs
Until there is a drop of blood in my veins
Until I have not given my absolute best.
Until my spirit is broken and my mind chained
Until my back is crushed and my soul pained


Until the sun stops burning
and with it, stops burning the fire inside
Until my feet start bleeding
and not even then, from the thorns in my side
Until my maker comes to meet me
and tells me "Enough"
Until my hands get blisters
from the rope which, for others, was so rough

Until they take back the verdict which they gave
Until the seas clear and the mountains cave
Until a bolt from the skies strikes me dead
Until there is a gorge behind and a wall ahead
Until I have achieved pure joy and absolute victory
Until there is nothing more to claim , not even more glory
Until the bell tolls for me and my time is up
I am not going to give up
: Vishal Anand

(This post is dedicated to Malala Yousafzai ,a school girl activist in Pakistan ,who was shot at by Taliban for promoting education for girls in the country.)

Rahul Dravid : A tribute

" I believe there's a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride"
-May Parker, Spiderman 2
The then Finance Minister of India , Dr. Manmohan Singh,announced the New Economic policy in 1991. The jury is still out on how Dr. manmohan Singh would be judged by historians further downstream in time, but that, that single moment is an epoch, is a widely acknowledged and heralded fact.
Soon the winds of change started blowing on the Indian horizon. The neighbourhood grocery and tailor shop were replaced by glitzy shopping malls. Sarkari naukari, which had hitherto been looked upon as a status enhancer and synbol of stability ,quickly became untouchable as private firms started offering salary cheques which had as amny zeroes as in the latest scam unearthed. Food chains started delivering pizzas within 30 minutes. The plastic money became as ubiquitous as the plastic bag. In fact, the list of phenomena that were created as byproduct of liberalization is long: Shahrukh khan, Facebook , IPL and of course the great Indian Middle class.

There is a thing with the middle class. To thrive , it needs intermittent doses of heroism and rolemodels. It was the same with the Indian middle class . And the forces of market economy got the wind of this yearning for heroism in no time. Like wolves hunting in a pack, sniffing their prey from far and then going for the kill, the entertainment channels, in cahoots with the media, built up larger than life images of these superstars and presented them to us gift wrapped in glossy papers with pink ribbons with a best wishes card to boot.
Everyone , from bollywood actors to politicians, from reality TV stars to regular TV stars , to actors who thought they could sing to singers who thought they could act, has had his fifteen minutes of fame

But no amount of clamorous cacophony blaring from the TV set in drawing rooms across the country can drown out one fact: that there is a difference between a celebrity and a winner , there is a difference between success and purpose, between pleasure and joy and between a superstar and legend.
And that difference is Rahul Dravid.
The word legend was not invented to be splattered across the billboards and newspaper headlines for everyone and anyone.It was invented to denote something more special, something purer.
But going by the strictest definition,the word sits very lightly on the broad shoulders of Rahul dravid.
Rahul Dravid is not a creation of the market economy or the media.He does not play cricket for the money or for selling colas. He is a legend cast in stone, as hard as they come.
To delineate Dravid's batting a little more , we have to think with the larger perspective of life.One has to shun cricket's technical jargon, which makes simple things complex , and English poetry, which makes complex things simple and romantic. A fitting tribute to the man must take recourse to something more intellectual, like the man himself , something like philosophy, religion and spirituality.
One of the doctrines of Hindu religion says that the world around us is fake, it is maaya and the purpose of the life is to realize the truth, to attain salvation . And the ways of attaining salvation is termed as yoga.
If cricket is a religion in India, then the pitch is like a temple for Dravid and he is its most holy saint. Batting for him is his yoga , it is his quest to find meaning in life, his route to realize the truth, to attain salvation.
One of the four noble truths that Buddha taught, was that Life is suffering. In fact in his acclaimed bok, The Road Less traveled ,M Scott Peck says ," one of the measures -and perhaps the best measure- of a person's greatness is his capacity for suffering". May be M Scott Peck never saw Dravid playing, but if he had , I am pretty sure that he would have stood up and taken his hat off and said "This is the man I was talking about"
To borrow and murder a kid's metaphor, Dravid is the Batman of Indian Cricket, a superhero without any superpowers.
Dravid recently completed his 34th test century and there was hardly any celebrations in the media.Sooner than later , Sachin Tendulkar will get his 100th International century and the media will celebrate it like it is the biggest spectacle in human history since the Moon landing.
That has been the fate of Rahul Darvid, away from the arclights, away from the frenzy, practising and practising hard , when no one is watching , when no one is cheering.
But this blog is not about comparing Sachin with Dravid, on commenting about how under rated Rahul is in the pantheons of greats.This blog is a token of tribute, an ode to, to again borrow and murder what can only be described as kid's metaphor, the Wall of Indian Cricket, on his completing the 34th Century.
Whenever you are faced with doubts, whenever you feel that the going has got tough, whenever you feel that life has given you the rough end of the stick, don't lose hope, go to a quiet and solitary place ,meditate and look inside you. You will feel that there is someone who is giving you the courage to stand for your own truth, someone who is telling you not to give up, not to blink first.
If you look deep inside you, you will find that there is a hero inside you.
That is , if you look deep inside , you will find a Rahul Dravid Inside you.

I DRAW