power here power there - part 2

That’s the right song to start this second part of the power blog. Nopes, it’s the blog that is powerful but the blog is about power. Seesh. Bad comment.
Why this song? I guess this is the perfect aggression anger anthem. It’s got an expletive at the heart of the chorus, repeating itself again and again. I couldn’t help shouting my throat hoarse while I was listening to this song in the car. Just a few days back I met a respondent in my research in a southern city. A decent corporate sweet guy. He took us out for a coffee in his car and played this song loud. He apologised but said he couldn’t help but like this song. This is the aggression anthem. It is telling the world to go screw yourself. What is it about rock music that is a so dam bloody aggressive release? Is it the screaming, the straining of the guitar strings, the tempo, what? But it does feel like an aggression release. I also think the bhag bhag bhag (run run run) in the song contributes to the effect. The trader we met was an aggressive investor and like all aggressive investors, sitting on a net loss.
Aggression. It never helps. It probably helped man survive and grow from a roaming Neanderthal to a stable farmer and progress as a species. The problem is that these aggressive genes are impossible to control when you are younger. Your brain starts working for the first time in a manner that you think is logical. You see the gross injustice being meted out to you or probably to others. Your natural empathy and reaction takes over and you want to do something. Your brain is not well developed to handle the overflow of emotion and your willingness to do good and pop, aggression becomes physical. You use what you are best at, using your arms and legs.
Also when you are growing up simple things attract you. I always wanted to join the army and ‘serve the nation’. I guess today I believe nation can be better served in many other ways. But why would I want to join the army? I guess there is a simple explanation that I have to offer. It was the uniform and the machinery they have at their disposal. I wanted to join the tank unit. It guess it is no better than the young boy who wants to be an engine driver as the guys seems to be in charge of a large big engine or a fire fighter in charge of a large big red bus. It’s important for the bus to be large big and red. I think the best recruitment drive for the army would be to have these army barracks in the middle of the city which don’t have walls. There they should be doing military drills in shiny uniforms and they have these big tanks roaming around for young kids to touch feel and dream. In the good old days I guess sexy equipment and smart uniforms were only available with the army and hence the young impressionable minds would be inspired by them. Now the sexy equipment is the iphones and the blackberrys and the laptops and the music players and the …. You get the point. And they all wear the uniform to work. They wear their suits and ties and the formals and go to work. Jispa notices when I wear a suit and leave office. She looks at me and wonders something. I guess she is making an impression in her mind. A positive impression I think. These are critical cues that get formed in an impressionable mind. I wanted to join the army and I ended up being firm on it when I got a chance to visit the national defence academy at Khadakvasla while I was around in the fourth or fifth standard.
Two can play the same impression game. Both the books, which I mentioned in the earlier blog (Curfewed Night as well as Hello Bastar) talk about impressionable kids being drawn to the rebel cause. There are mentions of the locals seeing these rebels flashing guns and in uniforms moving with a purpose. It is enough for them to want to enlist with the cause. And I guess that most of these young kids don’t even know what they are really fighting for or don’t really care about it. They just are swayed by the system and they are then drawn into the quagmire in which they possibly perish or possibly grow old and have no other option but to be a continuous part of it.
I think that’s the case even for most of the other rebels from the city. The young aggression which wanes in a few years gives rise to power dependency and these guys might just stay on for their thirst for power. What else will a 30 year old do if he has spent the last 15 years fighting ‘the force’. He has no skills else but the cause and the reason he fights. And then the power game starts. His interest is clearly in maintaining his power equation. He has to survive and this is the only way he can.
While we attract the best talent in office and other places, it is important that we realised that what attracts them here in the first place is not the reason why they should stay on. Dreams change, people change, and if we are able to constantly upgrade skill sets these people will also move with us. But if we let them remain there, forget to upgrade them, worry that if we do upgrade them; they will run away; then they end up being power brokers. They will cling onto their existing equations and become satraps in their own rights, ruling over their dominions. They will naturally be threatened by their status quo and would protect fiercely. The problem when they not only protect fiercely but when they start proactively attacking other dominions in anticipation of their attack. There is a reason why as you grow older and higher in an organisation the attacks increase gets more vicious. It’s a proactive attack by someone who is not increasing his dominion but protecting it.
If we constantly improve these skills the person knows that he can get hired elsewhere, he knows that his status quo is constantly changing; he is busy using his brains productively. He knows he has an option other than where he is present. This option in his mind will free him from his inward circle of control.
Big rebel leaders know that violence is pretty much useless and it will annihilate the very class it seeks to protect. But the wisdom comes after ten years of sloganeering. He can now not eat his ego and say this can’t work. You have to work with the system to change it. You must embrace peace. It is possible to work from inside and given the effort these guys tackle in recruiting friends and putting implants, I can’t believe it’s not possible to do peacefully. Without being the enemy of the people you seek to protect.
Sigh… too much gyan for someone who is basically an arm chair critic. I haven’t been to the jungles and I haven’t been inside their homes, huts and existence. All I know is that they don’t deserve ot die like this and have their livelihood snatched away. Both sides are guilty. The rebel is as much the culprit as the oppressor.
No one is bad to start with; it’s when the situation leads you to become power hungry, when you want to maintain what you earlier stood by, when your ego does not let you admit; that is when the rot sets in. it is easy for me to say all this and extremely difficult for me to understand and see it happen and stop. It needs an amazing ability to constantly see yourself from a few feet away, and ask yourself – what, why where? Are you sure?
Too much philosophy is definitely not the core of my blog and most I know simply get bored by it and move on from my blog. I try and stop writing once I exceed one page – but this blog is not meant for these people. It is meant for me as a father. It is meant for Jispa to once read and understand if something hits her.
Jispa I hope I didn’t bore you too much. You are a sweet imaginative and sensitive kid. I hope you face your share of shit and grow stronger for it. I can’t make you a good or a bad person. But I hope after you read this, you will realise what my belief of a good or a bad thing is. Or if shit hits you and if I am not around, you know what I thought of the shit hitting me. And I sure hope you find your own answers. Your own answers.

power here power there

What’s better than one good book? Simple – two good books. And when they seem to complement each other I truly enjoy the experience. While many times you get to read books that complement each other, very rarely do you get the chance to read them in quick succession. I was lucky recently.
I normally don’t pick Indian non-fiction, but I was lucky to pick two books by Indian authors discussing home grown Indian union issues. One was Curfewed Night by Basharat peer and the other was Hello, Bastar by Rahul Pandita. The first book is about Kashmir and the second is about the Moaist / Naxal movement in India.
I have learnt over many years that India is not the ideal democracy that we grew up believing it to be. The newspapers and the media are not really interested in showing any real side of the truth. The closest I seemed to have gotten to the truth has been thanks to the Tehelka magazine.
These two books, despite all their flaws in writing style are interesting in the fact that according to me they are courageously trying to unmask the government. There is a clear idea of two Indias. One is the urban shining India and the other is the rural India untouched by the growth and modernisation. These books are revealing that there is a third India, the oppressed, raped and pushed under the carpet India. This is the place where the government not only does not care but is actively involved in oppressing and raping its own populace.
When I was much younger I always wanted to join the army. The notion of patriotism had been drilled into my head. Not that it required much drilling by external parties. I managed to drill that into my own head by own will. I wanted to pick up arms and serve the country. That was dream that lasted till very late. Only tons of reading and understanding real stuff later made me realise the false bloated notion of the nation. I refuse to now honour and respect these man made lines.
As regards Kashmir, my first experience with it was as a child with parents visiting the paradise on earth. I don’t remember it being particularly beautiful as much I remember it being arrogant. A people who knew that the world wanted to see them. I then saw it as an adult in the year 2003, and I saw no progress in the intervening 20 years. I saw people shattered, their egos broken, the desperation writ large in their eyes. While I was able to put the two together, only after reading Basharat peer was I able to live the horrors of the people of Kashmir. We could naively say that Kashmir has only itself to blame but the atrocities of the Indian forces and the rape by the powers that be, have also massively contributed to it. While there might have been a fire we managed to really add fuel to it.
Jump to the Naxalite movement in India and you realise that it is nothing but a rebellion against the state that is busy pillaging our resources at the expense of the tribal livelihood. Oh god. It’s horrific on how we manage to do it.
These are also case studies on power. While its clear that for those oppressed the state is the culprit and for those in the comfort of modern air-conditioning the rebels are to blame, to my mind both are completely totalitarian regimes corrupted by power. It is both that extract their meat from the populace. The rebels who pick the gun are reluctant to drop when they realise the power they wield. Power corrupts and is an addiction like no other. And it works at all levels. Even I look at the grass root, as a father the power I wield corrupts my thinking. Sometimes Jispa get the unnecessary brunt of rage which is nothing but a power equation. Surely I think I do it far less (I think, I hope) that what I might have faced; but hand on heart, the power is what manifests on my child.
This power equation is crazy and it is this that makes us cling on to our status quo. We are afraid of change, we forget the reason and the power itself becomes the motive. Like the book on social entrepreneurs I was reading, one do gooder realised that he could not go into get into Maoist bastions and uplift the people. The Maoists have a vested interest in keep the area underdeveloped.
I see this in offices as well. I see too many bosses having a vested interests in keeping their employees only happy enough. How much should I pay him, for him not to go? WTF? They actively supress any learnings and actively ensure stagnancy. As growth inevitably is followed by demands and market forces that put a price on the persons head which the organisation does not want to pay. Why should it? Why should I develop a person only to lose him or her? I have only in the past learnt one thing. Keep pushing the person to grow and learn. The bigger he gets the more the space he pushes around him. The wider his span of vision gets. This only benefits the organistaion, and if he leaves, be happy that he has created a big enough void, so that the new person will have to first fill that void and then try to do some more. I don’t know why the organistaions can’t see this, why the bosses can’t see this, why we can’t this?
Power lies in letting go. Yet we hold on. I so want to let go. I will try at every opportunity but dam it. I don’t see it. I only see it in hindsight. Dam.