“told me love was too plebeian”
Those words from Ella Fitzgerald’s song Cry Me A River get at ideas that have been swishing around in my head for a few months. Is love really too plebeian?
I remember an instance when a dear friend of mine sounded distinctly like he was in love. I said, on hearing him speak of it, “Wow, I’ve never heard you sound so giddy!” He quickly admitted that he was indeed feeling giddy. Then there was a pregnant pause after which he came back with “Ah, that’s so embarrassing!” I asked why ever would he feel more embarrassed than pleased, to which he said with his characteristic half-joking half-serious charm, “Oh, because. Because love is sooo bourgeois!” 
More recently, I hung out with people in Bombay after many years. These are folks in their late 30s and early 40s, most of whom are married, some single, others divorced. The unanimity of their attitude towards romance in marriages startled me. Their jargon revealed a certain irreverence towards love and it was a rude surprise. How openly they stated that men and women were not really designed to live together! They spoke nonchalantly of how monogamy is unnatural and how marriage is something they would advise only if and when kids are involved. I detected an odd acceptance of extramarital liaisons and I realized that phrases like ‘fuck buddy’ have migrated and are proliferating in the East – not just in the upper crust but in the middle class as well.
When I challenged their stance, they said “But it is like this in the West. Why are you so surprised? You are being a tad naive. Surely you have lived in the States for long enough to realize that romance and marriage are incompatible! It’s all an illusion.” To that my response is: I agree that marriages are often not held as sacrosanct in the West either. But the brazenness about these issues seems to be greater in Bombay (where I was born and lived till my early 20s) and in Dubai (where I’ve been for a year now) than in the US (where I spent close to a decade)!
What exactly, I keep wondering, is going on? Yes, we all know that virtually 50% of marriages in many a cosmopolitan city end in divorce. Still, I am continually alarmed at the explicitness of (what I find to be) the cynicism. And I don’t consider myself a prude of any sort!
Perhaps it is because I have not been married before, and that I’m in my early 30s, but I still hold an idealized image of it in my mind. Or perhaps I have been swept away by the Hallmark-and-Hollywood fantasy of love over the years. Or even more likely is the fact that people who trivialize love are merely all talk; maybe it is a defense to preempt getting hurt by love? Whatever the reasons, the truth is, I sense a disregard towards the concept of happily growing old with one someone – and that shakes the foundation of what I (want to) believe vitality is all about.
That said, I am glad that people are talking about these things. It’s SO much better than sweeping such stuff under the carpet. But it brings up more questions than answers for me on further introspection. Like is love merely a pedestrian idea that we, as a society, propagate to facilitate couples getting together? And does love really have nothing to do with people staying together? Is romance slowly but surely devolving in to a relic of the past? Is it truly unsustainable?
the good life
Anyone who has visited this blog more than a couple of times may have sensed my tremendous reverence for Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at the TED 2006 conference in California. A few months ago, JK Rowling delivered another wonderfully inspiring speech at a graduation ceremony at Harvard. This address by the Harry Potteress, if you will, comes extremely close to evoking the resonance created in me by Robinson.
Their themes are similar in part. The overlap lies in their descriptions of how people are typically held back from finding their talents. Robinson talks of how kids are often pushed in to doing things that they are not designed to do. This detracts from their uniqueness and leads to the feeling of having failed from within – no matter how successful they may appear to be from the outside.
JK Rowling speaks of her own experience as a mother in a financially dire situation who finally found the courage required to live her life with authenticity: She said: “So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Robinson gave the example of Gillian Lynne, now a British ballerina, who was taken to a doctor when she was still in school for being miserable at her studies. The doctor was wise enough to tell her mother that her child didn’t have ADHD but that she did have the fidgetiness of a dancer. He encouraged her mother to enroll her in a dance school. In Robinson’s words: “Gillian was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet school. She became a soloist and had a wonderful career there. She founded her own dance company. She met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She has been responsible for some of the most successful theater productions in history. She has given pleasure to millions. And she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.”
Bravo to both speakers!
Rowling took the idea a step ahead. She spoke of how getting in touch with ourselves then helps us to get in touch with others. She talked about how it enables us to use our power of imagination to empathize with those less fortunate than us. That, most beautifully, is her definition of a good life – which is what she eventually wished upon the graduating class of 2008.
I have always thought that “the good life” is not one in which you have acquired material things and been a conventional success, but one in which you have been true to yourself; it is the only way in which you can be true to others. Believe me, I know how tough it is. But I also deeply feel how vital it is, not just for our own wellbeing but also for that of those around us; for our children, our spouses, our families, our employers, our employees, our countries, our world – whether strangers or friends.
Finally, Rowling had an important point to make for the youth of ’superpower’ America – which figures in this moving excerpt from her speech.
“Amnesty International mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
Hear hear! Powerful thoughts and words indeed.
more on outsourcing
In a brilliant article called Revenge of the Right Brain in Wired magazine, Daniel Pink brings a fresh perspective to the outsourcing issue. I first read it about 3 years ago and highly recommend it even today. Here’s a synopsis, with a few of my own thoughts thrown in.
Pink first establishes how our left brains help us with linearity, logic, literal thinking and analysis while our right brains are more about emotion, synthesis, creativity, context, and meaning. So while left-brained thinking dominates in professions like accounting, engineering, and programming, the right brain manifests more strongly in artists, care-providers, and others professions grounded in holistic thinking. We obviously typically need both halves to function. For example, a judge would use both halves of his brain in delivering a verdict – the left that knows the rules that apply and the right that understands the context of the case at hand. And like we use both sides to process this picture below.
There is debate over how stark the dichotomy in brain function is, but there is certainly something to it. Here’s something interesting I learned in neuropsychology: research on patients with localized brain damage has shown that relying primarily on the left brain (which is more straightforward and computer-like in function than the right), we would likely see the picture above merely as “a bunch of fruits, flowers, and veggies.” And if the activity were situated mostly in the right brain (which gets the ‘big picture’ and dwells in metaphor more than the left), we would see the picture above as “a colorful man.” How cool is that!
What does that have to do with outsourcing? Pink’s contention is that as left-brained work gets outsourced more to developing countries, the rest will have to enhance the use of right-brainedness in business – a phenomenon that will shape significantly the progress of our world. (Do read his article if you fancy this drift.)
I see outsourcing as leading to a shift in balance. And, I firmly believe, it’s not about the balance of power – a lens through which many, rather unfortunately, tend to view the issue. It’s bigger than that; it’s much more about how we evolve rather than who gets to rule the world. Here is an excerpt from Pink that speaks to the point…
If the Industrial Age was built on people’s backs, and the Information Age on people’s left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people’s right hemispheres. We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.
in side out
I drove back in to Texas recently after having worked a year in Los Angeles.
I went to grad school here and I adore Austin. The live music scene is unbeatable, the people are engaging, the food is delicious, the city is green in more ways than one, and I could go on and on. If I had to pick its most appealing characteristic though, it would have to be its Mexican Martinis. A close second would be the fact that people here take seriously the business of being a spot of blue in a sea of red. Consequently, there is a real effort to acknowledge and celebrate diversity. Much of it is that the city is focused around its rather large university, and despite the TX suffix the city bears, Austinites have some of the most liberal mindsets I have encountered in the US. Cheers so far!
Now a word on my CA license plates. I took my car in to be washed the other day. The owner of the car wash referred to my cocker spaniel as a “valley dog” more than once. A little later in the conversation he said (referring to the wildfires, I assumed): “Bet you are glad you aren’t in California now, huh?” Okay a little weird but whatever! That’s till I hung out with friends who kind of got me up to speed.
They said people from California are coming in and buying property in Austin with “cold hard cash”. Compare the price of a small house in a nice area in Austin (let’s say 400 grand) to the same in Los Angeles (not sure on this one but they seemed to be closer to double that?) and you can see why there might be a migratory trend. Austin really is a lovely city and I commend anyone for wanting to move here. The issue is that the prices Austinites are ready to pay for houses are often easily beaten out by the Californians, and there is some begrudging related to it.
I also heard some more whining about how “La La” some bars in downtown Austin now are. There’s a place called QUA which apparently has sharks swimming around in a spectacular sunken tank in the club. PETA was distinctly unhappy with it, and Austin isn’t thrilled with the 300 dollar price tag on reservation of a booth in the bar. If you knew the Austin vibe, you would see how it might irk the average person. People here tend to be pretty snotty about their unpretentiouness, right.
The California deal did not resonate with me either. But to pin the shark attack – so to speak – squarely on it seemed a bit extreme, yes? I see the anti-California sentiment in Austin as similar to the reaction to outsourcing. Have you noticed how businesses make a point to say ‘Made in America’ whenever they possibly can off-late? The fact that people who aren’t “insiders” are taking away jobs/homes is unbearable to most. Just a hint of economic competition between groups is enough to get the discrimination index soaring. And yet, in this age of unstoppable intermingling of cultures – globalization if you like – there is not much choice left. We need to accept it graciously, embrace it even. That applies to how people from Austin think of those from California as well. Time to cut loose the xenophobia.
An apt little song from Austin’s very own Steve Earle!
