My "modern" parenting..

Just a few days back, I read an article about how modern parenting is getting harder with every passing day. The following section of the article felt like a tight slap of reality check to the confused, cluelessly running around parents like me.

"... Today's parents not only have to rock their career and raise their children, they also have to make sure that their bub eats avocado, scores well, excels in a sport, and knows how to speak at least one foreign language. To top this, parents have to monitor screen-time, keep theirs kids safe online, and work on their emotional growth without losing their own temper as "gentle parenting" is the trend du jour. The stress is not caused by the child or the parent. The stress is caused by the reality not meeting expectations."

My first reaction after reading this section was a big laugh, at myself and at my clan of fellow modern parents. My son is just about to turn 8 now. He did his kindergarten in a very good corporate-brand pre-school. Post preschool, for his primary education, we researched a lot only to enrol him into the branded International Board (IB) accredited school in which most of the kids of our apartment had enrolled. The choice of the pre-school was simpler and easier. The pre-school had a tie-up with my Employer, so we had to pay a nominal fee for a highly-rated, expensive, and a thoughtfully crafted curriculum. Also, the pre-school's corporate branch was located inside my workplace campus, so we were reassured of regular checks and immediate attendance to our little bundle of joy whenever he needed us. Logic vs influence debate on our choice of the primary school has been avoided for the good. The reasons for this avoidance may become implicit, maybe by the end of this post.

Apart from the high-rated schooling, my son is blessed (both parentally and financially) to have already enrolled for and having tried to learn following additional skills. We, his modern parents, believed that these would help him achieve more and faster in life:

• Tuition for writing alphabets and numbers, at the age of about 3 yrs.
• Judo, at 4 yrs.
• Art & craft, also at 4 yrs.
• Swimming classes, twice at the ages of 5 & 7 yrs.
• Dance classes, at the age of around 6 yrs.
• Badminton classes, at 7 yrs.
• Public speaking, online, also at 7 yrs.
• Cursive writing, at 7 yrs.

If I remember correctly, the main reason for the alphabets and numbers tuition was its simple proximity. The tutor lady lived almost next door and was popular for having taught little additional things to a lot of kids in our community. For Judo classes, "modern" parents invited a professional trainer to conduct the classes in our apartment itself. Art & craft and the first swimming classes were to pass time relatively more productively during the long summer holidays. Then, as he crossed the age of 5, we started thinking that he could learn faster owing to his naturally grown-up and improved acumen to follow instructions and grasp things. So we enrolled him at professional training academies for Dance, Swimming, and Badminton, not all together but spread across the calendar year. In between we also realized that he had started speaking very less as compared to his earlier times. Our parental fear was confirmed in one of his Parents Teachers Meeting at school when his teacher told us that he remained quite and was not as active and mischievous as other kids in his class. So we enrolled him into an online public speaking course, in which the trainer used to "simply talk" to our kid, along with other 5-6 kids. Then we developed a fear that though our son writes beautifully in the broken letters form, he might struggle in his exams as we believed that cursive handwriting is faster. We noticed that almost all other kids of his class wrote in cursive form. So we enrolled him into a weekly-twice cursive handwriting class conducted by one of his school's teachers, during post-school hours. 

In addition to the above, there have been discussions and trials for Classical Music vocals training, and a piano class. This because we discovered that he's got a natural good voice, he's good at casual singing, and he picked up very fast when I taught 2-3 songs to him via beginner-level piano lessons available on YouTube. Also there have been passing talks amongst the modern parents to enrol our kids to some Bhartiya Sanskriti School, an informal school in a neighbouring apartment that taught kids about the rich Indian culture and history.

I feel fortunate that I got slapped by this recent article. I am lucky that I woke up (hopefully) to see my reality. My son has given me hundreds of reasons to feel happy in the journey of my parenthood, which is still ongoing. There are many moments that I'll cherish throughout my life, and I know there are many more to come. However, when I look back at the aforementioned aspect of my parenting journey, I see the need of some course correction. Not to say that all of the above mentioned attempts were bad or non-productive, some of them actually helped. Our minds must have had many justifiable reasons at the times when we made these choices.

The most common thought behind all these classes was like - "...how will we identify his natural talent to nurture, without exploring, by letting him experience different things...". And of course, we belong to the aware, open-minded, financially stable and thus the fortunate middle-class which can afford the any costs for these explorations, especially for our child. 

Taking a cue from the article and looking back at this parental expedition of ours, I feel that our reasons could have held more weight if we were not fretting over some of the basics aspects of our son's development over all these years. He's eight and still struggling to develop a taste, respect, and an acceptable way of eating his regular meals. My wife and I have our roots in Haryana and Punjab, the biggest agricultural states of India having legacies of healthy and rich cuisines. Both of us look naturally "overnutritioned", our son looks otherwise. As mentioned in the article, both of us also have the responsibility of "rocking" our careers and professions, to sustain our "modern" societal tags - "financially stable", "open-minded", "aware" etc. Tired of our failed attempts in his nutritional wellbeing, we have already been giving some popular, well marketed, paediatricians' recommended, elite because expensive, powder based supplements to our son, so that he does not look weak. We do not stop our son from eating deep-fried, processed, made from days-old frozen meat (or sourced from not-so-hygienically-verified sources), non-veg food when he's craving for that just because one of his friends who have shallow influences on him has been eating the same at one of our social outings. Here, our reason is our insecurity that eating non-veg might help him become stronger in future. We ignore the sense that "healthy" non-veg is far beyond the general reach of our food's supply chain and it might never find a place in our kitchen. Also, we fear being judged by the influencing friends' parents that though I'm an eggetarian and my wife a passive non-vegetarian, we want to stop our son from eating non-veg and not let him "explore" his tastes. On the possibility of adulteration, they argue that the lifecycles and supply chain of vegetarian food are also quite adulterated these days. We do all this but we are not able to add the simple carrot, cucumber, sprouts etc. fresh cut roughage to his daily diet. He cries at the thought of it when we talk about it, and we immediately give up on the thought and maintain the status quo.

With all this, he's catching viral fever almost every 45-60 days on an average, for the last 3 years or so if I remember correctly. Here also we bring in a mix of our superficial awareness and "modern" hearsay. The "modern" parents discuss among themselves - "... this flu, which rotates among the family members, is a norm these days...", "... they catch it mostly from other kids in the school...", "...don't medicate him at the beginning, let the body fight naturally and develop immunity...". We let his body fight naturally for 3-5 days and then end up giving him even stronger antibiotics than what he'd have taken at the start of the infection. We defer the visit to the doc until we fail to prove the usefulness of our quackery, one more time. And then when the medicines prescribed by the doc bring some improvements within a couple of days, our egoist quack stops the medication as per our will and adopted wisdom. Then a fellow parent tells us about the "harmless" homeopathic medicine. Of course, we can afford that as well and there are no possible side-effects.

I learnt from a not-so-popular web show that I watched recently. The main protagonist in the show makes a beautiful statement - "... aksar jab hum galti kar rahe hote hain, tab humein pata nahi hota ki hum galti kar rahe hain..." . (When we are committing a mistake we often do not know that we are committing a mistake).

More than 10 years back, I wrote Take a pause.... Maybe the newspaper article gave me another much needed pause, this time in my parenting journey.

When Dreams Come True...

The date was 22nd Jan 2024. The entire nation was immersed in the festive celebrations of Shri Ram Mandir Pran-Pratishtha (consecration) that was being conducted at the newly reconstructed Ram Mandir in the city of Ayodhya. To the Hindus of India, the city of Ayodhya is believed to be the birthplace of Shri Ram. The Pran-Pratishtha meant that the divine energy which they identified as "Ram Lalla" was being established within the idol that was placed in the Garbhagriha (inner sanctum) of the temple.

For most of us Indians, this was just another buzzing event that picked up the public craze as it neared its planned date of execution. Feelings, sentiments, and emotions of our people were diverse. Intellectual opinions and commentaries were complex, and thus confused their subscribers. In this post, I want to talk about my experience of this event in my social and inner domains.

My current social domain consists of active professionals, senior citizens, and my apartment kids with whom I often relive parts of my childhood by playing some simple outdoor games. Most of the active professionals work in IT services and dependent industries. They have a very strong belief that they belong to the modern, open-minded, well-informed culture of today's world. A common cliché that can be often heard in our discussions is - "I am more spiritual than religious". My regular conversations with them are mostly confined to very limited perspectives on mundane social and political developments that happen in the world surrounding us, a world which is more virtual than real. Interestingly, both the news and the perspectives in these conversations are adopted from the same source - social media. Any deviations from the status quo, or deeper dives into the topics, generally lead to the mood turning sour or boring. We also talk about our achievements at work, with the added flavours of politics and work ethics. These achievements hold no relevance in the real worlds, in fact they hold little relevance even at our workplaces. Interestingly, we all aware of this fact, but still we tend to talk about these mainly because we don't have any other marketable mettle to make any impact in the real world around us. 

The senior citizens group, on the contrary, is a diverse group with a vast domain of knowledge and interesting life experiences. Many senior citizens are retired from govt. institutions like nationalized banks and public departments, some are retired after serving in armed forces and related institutions, and some are retired from public-facing private institutions like private banks and schools. Some seniors worked at big manufacturing companies like TATAs that led the industrial revolution in our country. One of them worked at and still continues to hold honorary responsibilities in the IT mammoth IBM that led the IT revolution across the world. One of the seniors digitalised Indian Banking System, while another implemented Advance Reporting System in Indian Aviation Sector which transformed the entire industry. One of the revered seniors retired as the Director of Aeronautical Development Agency, after having been honoured by the Missile Man of India Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, while another retired from Senior Administrative post in Indian Railways having designed an important flyover over a railway track near my current apartment. These seniors have lived and experienced the journey of our country. They have contributed to our country's shift from a recently-freed-of-slavery, socially backward, under-developed, an unnoticeable third-world economy to being the fastest growing economy and one of the most impactful countries of the current world. My every interaction with these seniors enlightens me with more knowledge of how our great country and its culture has survived the tests of time. It survived via the rich and deep characters that our previous generations used to nourish and pass on to their next ones. I also realize that my generation is fast losing its inherited wealth of character and becoming a flock of dumb, confused, and remote-controlled sheep that can be pushed in any direction by a silent whip from some never-to-be-known social media shepherds.

In general, many of us active professionals have demanding work commitments at the start of every calendar year. This is because our employers are majorly based out of US and UK, and they return to work from their long Christmas and New Year breaks. They have a huge backlog of planned deliverables to be released in the first quarter of the calendar year. I was leading a project that was planned to be released on 23rd Jan 2024. I was trying very hard to release it a week before, to buy a little more than the nominal contingency that I had in the project from its inception. While many professionals were busy like me, many were indifferent to the 22nd Jan Shri Ram Pran Pratishtha event owing to their self-acclaimed futuristic modern-world viewpoints. Also, many were confused as to whether they should be religiously happy or scholastically secular by calling the event a politically-driven extravaganza which overshadowed the faith of the supposed-to-be-secular and ever-ready-to-be-oppressed Hindus. I guess many of us may still be confused. But now we don't need to think about it, as the event and the associated buzz have become a thing of the past.

In my social circle of senior citizens, there is one man who has been closely related to the history of this Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. I am lucky that I could get from him the following account of the long history of this temple and the associated faith & emotions of the Hindu Samaj. The story of the temple and this senior citizen's part in it go as follows.

Foreign-ruled and oppressed Hindu Samaj was waiting for the arrival of  Lord Shri Ram in Ram Mandir for more than 500 years. In 1949, Shri Ram gave his first Darshan (signs of presence) at a site that was inside a dome-shaped building constructed by the people belonging to a minority religion in India. This site was then believed to be the Garbhagriha of a historical Ram Mandir. Shri Ram's first Darshan marked the beginning of one of the longest Hindu Samaj campaigns. The campaign was to acknowledge that, historically, the site belonged to a Ram Mandir. To respect the faith of the people belonging to the oldest existing culture of the world, there was a call to reconstruct and restore the Mandir at that very site. There was a request to raze other structures that were constructed by razing the historical Ram Mandir, at that site. One of the biggest Indian architect of that time, Chandrakant Sompura, made the architectural design for restoring the temple. The present Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, constructed in 2023-24, is built on the foundations of the same design that was created in the 1949.

This senior citizen was born in 1958. He was the youngest in a big family of six very closely-knit brothers and his parents. As he grew up, he developed this rare sense of serving his country by serving the people around him. Maybe he inherited this sense of service from his parents. Even with a monthly income of INR100 and 6 children to bring up, his parents opted to take care of the schooling and upbringing of his two cousins. This in addition to the time that his father would spend in preparing writing-slates and then also teaching his cousins on them, almost every day after his regular work hours. His father would buy both jaggery and refined sugar, his mother would smartly put jaggery in the tea for the family members and sugar in the tea for the guests. His mother had not completed any formal education and did not hold any degrees, but she was "empowered" enough to own and manage the 100 rupees of the monthly household income to bring up a family of ten. One of the elder brothers of this man developed a revolutionary thought process. This was very unconventional to the business community to which the family belonged. Maybe with some influence from his elder brother, he got aligned with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in his active youth. He rebelled against the unfortunate Emergency that was applied in our country in 1975, by then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Taking a leaf out of Gandhiji's book of non-violent methods to revolt against anti-people authorities, RSS staged a "Jain Bharo Andolan" in which its protesting Karyakartas (workers) voluntarily let themselves be arrested, to fill the jails of the authority. So, at the age of 17, while he was still in school, he committed himself to the cause that he'd chosen to stand for, without bothering about its practical impact and repercussions of the same on his education, career, and thus on the rest of his life. He remained imprisoned in a Jail in Rohtak (a small city in the state of Haryana) for more than three months. Only his revolutionary elder brother made a few occasional visits to him, as they did not want their family to be identified publicly and be at the receiving end of the authorities. Also they wanted to avoid the ire of the popular self-oriented thinking of society over their family.

In 1983-84, while filling the entrance form to apply for a Govt. job, he was strongly advised to hide the fact that he had been jailed for a considerable amount of time. But his principles did not allow him to do that. His job application was rejected. But then the destiny led to a reorganization of the Govt. department. The scheme of things rewarded his strongly-held principles and led to his appointment to a new sub-department which hired the candidates who had the scholastic merit but were still rejected for the main Govt. department.

In Sept 1990, crores of Hindus of our country donated 1 rupee each, to conduct the Shila Pujan of the Ram Mandir. In Hindu faith, Shila Pujan is a religious ceremony conducted to purify the land as well as the souls of the men who're supposed to do the construction. This senior citizen was 32 years old then and had a job of 6 years at a national bank. He had a very simple salary. His parents and elder brothers had just come out of the burden of long held family debts. Not all his brothers were as educated and stably employed as him, some were struggling to make their ends meet. The family understood and respected the importance of every rupee earned. However, he remained committed to his chosen cause and donated the 1 rupee towards his resolve. 

Members of RSS are popularly known as Karsevaks or Swayamsevaks. In terms of its literal meaning, Karsevak means the volunteer who offers his services to a cause for free. Swayamsevak means the selfless worker who does not expect to get anything for himself in return for whatever he does for his cause or the organization. A Swayamsevak fully owns the responsibility of managing the practical challenges of his personal life, without looking towards the organization for any help. RSS bears all its organizational and operational expenses by the contributions from its Karsevaks. One of their key annual events is Gurudakshina. This event is celebrated to remember the great Hindu practice of offering something personally dear to our Gurus. The event starts by getting together and recognizing our revered Gurus. They discuss the interesting and enlightening life lessons from the lives of Gurus like Dronacharya, Chanakya, and many others who built the great character of our nation. This is followed by remembering and practicing some of our ages-old Shikshas (lessons) like Dand Yuddha (the act of fighting with a simple wooden stick, majorly for self defence) and Niyuddha (an Indian traditional martial arts of fighting without any weapons, again majorly for self defence). Then a lot of traditional games like Kabaddi, Kho-Kho etc. are played. The energy and the light-hearted commentaries of players binds everyone in a great spirit of sports and togetherness. Finally, the end is marked by distributing a very delicious Kheer (a traditional Indian delicacy made with rich milk and rice). There is no limit to the number of servings one wants to have. This event is celebrated at all Sangh Karyalayas (offices) across the country. All RSS events are open for everyone. All local people, even those who are not a part of the organization, are invited to these events. There is no entry or participation fee. Everything is sponsored by the contributions of the Swayamsevaks, with no bindings for the members to mandatorily contribute. More than the money, the Swayamsevaks offer their Seva (service) in bringing everyone together to celebrate our culture's deep roots and its great existence.

The donation of 1 rupee might've seemed minimal even at that time. But this was an example of the fact that if everyone decides to make even slightest of a contribution, with a good intent, then the collective power of the group (Sangh) is big enough to attain big goals and make huge impacts. The matter of the Ram Mandir was so dear to the Hindu Samaj that, along with donating 1 rupee, each Karsevak took an oath with his/her blood that the Mandir will be built at that very site in Ayodhya where Shri Ram had given his Darshan in 1949. This senior citizen also took the oath with his blood.

By Oct 1990, this man was one of the most active Swayamsevaks in the Chandigarh (Haryana) sub-zone of RSS's organizational structure. Owing to the prolonged indifference of the administration towards Hindu Samaj's sentiments, a very widespread and strong agitation started. There was a call to gather at Ayodhya and demand the demolition of the dome-shaped structure, to make way for reconstructing the Ram Mandir. He boarded the train full of Rambhakts (devotees of Shri Ram) that headed towards Ayodhya. Fate of the agitation was unknown and it held promise of many unpleasant outcomes. The state administration was alert. They stopped the train in Agra (Uttar Pradesh), 500 kms before Ayodhya, and arrested all Rambhakts. So, on 26 Oct 1990, a day before the fifth birthday of his daughter, this man again went to jail. 

Over next few days, the agitation grew even more stronger. Rambhakts overpowered all blockades to reach the dome-shaped structure and started demolishing it with whatever makeshift tools they could find around. On 30 Oct 1990, the administration opened fire on the Rambhakts in Ayodhya. Many lost their lives, including Kothari Brothers who were popular for the exceptional works that they'd done for the Hindu Samaj. They'd come all the way from Kolkata to participate in the agitation. Their contributions to the Hindu Samaj and our nation were so great that Shri Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, specially invited them to be a part of the Pran Pratishtha ceremony in Ayodhya, 34 years after their unfortunate demise. When the news of the firing in Ayodhya spread, there was a spurt of anger in the jailed Rambhakts. The jailed men included members of RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal and many other Hindu organizations of our country. Many jailed men gathered at the big iron gate at the front of the jail. They were extremely angry and emotional. The jailed RSS Karsevaks tried to persuade the fellow men to get back from the gate and not do anything that might lead to situation going out of control. However, the mob became uncontrollable and the big iron gate fell. Administration was stunned by the bloody turn of events. Soon it announced that it would release all the captives, in small batches. Now this man took over the responsibility of ensuring that all his fellow RSS Karsevaks reached their homes safely. 

With the spate of unpleasant events during the agitation, this man realized the difference between the organized ideology of RSS versus the unorganized, disillusioned driving forces of other Hindu organizations of the country. Not all senior members of RSS could resist the extremely strong forces of the politics of power and vested interests. This soon started showing with the unwelcome changes in the policy making in the organization. At this juncture, this man pulled himself back from continuing to be a part of the organization. However, he resolved to continue to be a Swayamsevak and pursue his service to the society in his small personal domain, with strong and unwavering core values of RSS.

In Sep 2018, this man turned 60 and retired gracefully from a very senior post in the national bank that he'd joined in 1984. The retirement celebration was attended by more than 40 of his colleagues, along with his immediate family which also included his then 2 year old grandson. Anecdotes and farewell speeches by his colleagues spoke aloud of the selfless and spotless character with which he had served his organization and, through it, his nation. 

So this Swayamsevak completed his active service to the nation and his organization with utmost sincerity and honesty, without expecting any rewards or compensations in return for the sacrifices that he'd made in his line of duty. He always believed that being able to do good Karma is a blessing in itself, and bad Karma is settled very painfully within the very life in which you did it. However, God seemed to have kept a good account of his good Karma. To his and his family's great surprise, in 2018, Haryana Govt. announced a scheme named Haryana Shubhra Jyotsna Pension Scheme with the aim of providing a monthly pension of INR 10000 to the residents of Haryana who participated actively against the 1975 emergency and faced imprisonment. He's been gracefully receiving this pension for 6 years now. Starting July 2024, the pension amount is now doubled to INR 20000 per month. This was not it, his oath was yet to be completed.

Sometime in 2023, the Supreme Court of India settled the very long pending case to clear all constitutional hurdles for the construction of the Bhavya (Grand) Ram Mandir at the very site which was identified in 1949. After more than 33 years of his participation in the last major agitation and subsequent jail term, the Mandir was built and consecrated by placing the idol of Shri Ram Lalla at the very site for which he'd taken the oath with his blood. None of the people around him, and he himself, could sense the level of happiness and satisfaction that his inner soul was experiencing. 

He was equanimous in his external projection, like he had been known to be throughout his life. More than celebrations, he wanted the current active world of professionals to understand the importance of the event. But like I said before, most of the active professional "intellectuals" were either indifferent or confused, ironically because of their "ignorance" on the matter :). He understood now that he could make a very limited impact in his social circle as he was now retired from active life and held little relevance to the modern day intellectuals. 

Over the last three years, I have organized a good number of social, cultural, and national events in my society. However, I was holding back this time because many reasons. My project release deadline was fast approaching, I had to prepare and conduct (as the President of my apartment association) the 26th Jan Republic Day celebrations in my apartment, and I had very little hope of understanding of the spirit of Hindus and importance of the Ram Mandir in my society. However, just four days before the event, one of the modern day RSS "member" approached me with the proposal to collect funds for the event from our society members, the RSS way of funding events. I call this person a "member" and not "Karsevak" for the reasons which I want to keep out of the context of this post. I got confused at this RSS member's proposal. My heart wanted to make an attempt to create awareness and celebrate the spirit with which our fellow senior citizen community member campaigned for the Mandir throughout his active life, alongside thousands of others from the Hindu Samaj. But my brain advised me to not take this additional and demanding voluntary responsibility of trying to infuse life into dead characters, at the cost of the very limited personal time and energy that I had at that moment.

Like always, my heart won over my brain. Considering that I only had 3 days to organize the whole event, I quickly activated my network of resources to make various arrangements like catering, lighting, tent, and other associated arrangements. Based on my experience with catering price negotiations, and knowing that the intellectual members of my society would wait for an assurance of sufficient participation to enrol for the event at the last moment, I fixed a contribution of INR 300 per person to fund the whole event. This included the big expense items of lunch, tea and accompaniments. It was implicit that this contribution was towards the collective celebratory spirit of the event and not just for the food. To the misery of our current social situation and an insult to the spirit of millions of Hindu Rambhakts, people started analysing the proposed menu for the event and argued that we used to have a wider spread for INR 200 in previous celebrations. Ironically, if these people were told that in 1990 thousands of people donated 1 rupee, they'd have all argued on the relevance of the size of the contribution. They won't realize that those who contributed in 1990, including our fellow senior citizen community member, were not even close to the economic prosperity that we enjoy in today's world. Most of these people are owners of at least one flat which is worth 1.25 crore rupees, and they have handsome household incomes.

When told about the kind of response to the requested contribution, the senior citizen was deeply appalled. From the character and culture that he carries, he hoped that people would consider this contribution too less and would even want to offer more than the ask, to make the event even more grand than what was being planned. The modern-day RSS member had a different reaction. He approached me to request the apartment association to contribute for shortfalls, if any. I could not entertain this request, for the practical bindings of my conduct as the President of the association. However, in my capacity as a fellow resident, I did request my society people for a little better understanding of the intent and the importance of the event. But, in parallel, the modern day RSS member published some messages about the contributions that further confused the people. Very hurt by the developments, this senior citizen advised me to cancel the event. But, soon after, he recollected himself and his core RSS values came to the fore. Still holding on to the little hope of bringing some awakening towards good intent and character in the current world, he advised me to make the contributions voluntary. He assured that even if nobody contributed, he and a few like-minded people within the society, will bear the complete expenses. Also, the event will be open for all to attend, celebrate, and eat, without any binding for making a contribution, the traditional RSS way.

At the age of 65, he achieved yet another feet of conducting the grandest event in our society, funded by only and only voluntary contributions. 35 out of 101 flats voluntarily contributed close to 60000 rupees. Considering the earlier apprehensions of many members for the meagre contribution of 300, nobody imagined this big a collection. So, once again, the destiny rewarded the little hope and the pure intent of this man. 

So all the arrangements were in place on 21st Jan. I was extremely tired at the end of the day. I had a big responsibility at my workplace, to provide hyper-care for the project which I managed to release a week before the planned release date of 23rd Jan. In addition to this, I had to coordinate with multiple vendors, stakeholders, and people in my society to prepare for the grand event. I slept early, by maybe around 10pm. Suddenly, maybe out of anxiety, I woke up at 2am with an active non-sleepy brain. As soon as I woke up, the thought came to my mind that how big a day it would be today (22nd Jan) for that Senior Citizen. I got carried away in the line of thoughts and lost my sleep completely. That's when I penned the initial draft of this post. After a long time, I picked up a pen and my diary, and physically wrote my thoughts, instead of typing them over a laptop. At the least I was sane enough to avoid screen-time at 2am in the night :). Eventually I fell asleep again at around 4:30am and finally woke up at my usual time of 5:30am.

Early in the morning, I felt some divine purity of thoughts inside my inner self. I decided to preserve the purity by fasting till the Pran Pratishtha rituals were completed at the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. 12:20 PM was the auspicious time set for the start of the rituals. Nationwide live telecast was planned via YouTube, so we also arranged for screening the same in our apartment's celebration area. Prior to watching the live telecast together, the community decided to do setup a Ram Darbar in the celebration area, recite Aartis and Bhajans, and conduct a little Puja (prayers) to seek blessings of the almighty for our community. To everyone's surprise, few mothers dressed small kids as Shri Ram, Lakshman, and Sita and choreographed a short little scene of them returning from their exile, after spending 14 years in the forests. In those few minutes, everyone seemed to have imagined themselves to be in the Ram Yuga (era), lost in the pleasant delight and spirit of welcoming Shri Ram to their city of Ayodhya. The senior citizen's grandson portrayed Shri Ram, beautifully reciting some of Shri Ram's dialogues from the famous Indian TV adaptation of Ramayana.

Finally the moment arrived. 50 odd people from our apartment sat together to watch the live telecast of the Pran Pratishtha ceremony. This also meant the first Darshan of the idol that was being consecrated as Shri Ram Lalla, at the Garbhagriha of the Bhavya Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. I do not have any words to describe the whole vibe of the celebration area when the idol was unveiled. A moment before the moment, I searched for the senior citizen in the gathering. As usual, he was sitting at the farthest corner of the last row, away from his deserved spotlight. His eyes were glued to the screen. He seemed indifferent to what was happening around him in that moment. As the moment struck, I looked at the eyes of Shri Ram Lalla's idol and my eyes filled. I felt weightless and empty from inside. Since I was in the spotlight, I was trying hard to stop the tears from flowing down my eyes. I put my back towards the gathering and faced the screen while trying to control my emotion. I failed. I took a small backdoor exit from the celebration area and wiped my tears. I went back in to preside over the gathering, but again got overwhelmed and again had to take the escape route to let my emotions flow.

The Pran Pratishtha rituals lasted for around 15 mins. That also marked the end of our celebrations. As a general practice, gratitude was expressed towards everyone, especially to our team of organizers. When my turn came to address the gathering, I mentioned very small parts of this senior citizen's life story associated with the occasion and, with a choked throat, very proudly introduced Shri Parmod Kumar Goyal, my father, to everyone. While he further narrated parts of his long story, with my tearful eyes, I could see the respect that some of the most revered members of our community had in their eyes, for my father.

While into such deep emotions, I generally allow the emotion to play inside me - unchecked and uncontrolled. As the emotion settles down a bit, and as the analytical faculties of my mind revive, I tend to revisit what happened inside me in that moment. Looking back at it, I feel blessed to have had this experience. Most of us are aware of human emotions when we see our children or grandchildren achieve their dreams, in education, sports, professions, arts and many other domains of life. I feel that very few of us are blessed to experience our parents' very-long-held personal dreams come true, right in front of us. I still can't express in words my exact emotions in that moment, but this long account of it has helped me preserve it for the rest of my life :)...

Narrating his story

Me re-introducing my father to the community

His grandson dressed as Shri Ram, standing in front of him

 

Preserved sticker from his 1990 campaign

Preserved sticker from 1990 campaign

Being "indifferent"..

After attaining a certain age, one of the popular words that relate to one's existence, and of course to one's existential crisis, is "relevance". One is either seeking answer to what "difference" he/she makes to the world around, or one is fighting his/her own case for "being indifferent" to the world around.

There must be some strong reasons why so many books are written on human psychology and behavior. Why are there so many spiritual gurus having completely contradictory views on human values, and each of them having millions of followers and an equally crazy amount of monetary assets. The irony is that even with so many books, gurus, and science-led expansion of our mental and physical capabilities, most of us are still struggling to cope with our emotional and psychological well-being.

I am often adjudicated to be non-reacting, stone-faced, emotion-less, or "indifferent" by people around me, especially by my wife. I think most of the family men (of my time) would accept these judgements by their respective lords. They'd accept this with the very indifference for which they'd have been convicted. Maybe most of us have learnt well to to justify our indifference, by reminding ourselves of the concepts like "..we are not important.." and "..sometimes no action is the best action..". Or maybe we've run out of time or energy to fight this one out of the many battles of our lives. 

I am realizing that, over the years, I've become more emotional than I ever was. I am becoming very sensitive not just towards humans but towards most of the life around me. These days whenever I am at an emotional high or low, I get out of my house and just go for a short walk in open air. I feel that the beautiful trees around me can talk, they always welcome me with an indifference towards my good or bad mood. I look into the eyes of the stray cat in our apartment. I can sense her conflicting feelings on the possibilities of getting food from me, or getting shooed away, or getting my indifference. I look at the stray dogs while dropping my son to school and notice that they bark at and chase a lot of 2-wheelers but they generally don't chase a 2-wheeler on which toddlers or infants are riding clinging to their parents. I see how the small laborers' kids roam on the road in half clothes, drenched in dust, seeing other affluent kids and still not feeling any inferiority or deprivation. May be they feel it just for a moment and then get over it quickly. I see the innocent hesitation in my maid's conduct while she asked if she could buy our old fridge. I see and sense the unspoken, deep, and held-back emotions of the people around me when I interact with them on random topics related to life. I share these feelings with very few, who I feel are sensitive enough to not pollute them. 

Regret follows whenever I accidentally share these feelings with the crowd of insensitive folks around me. The problem with this trait of mine is that it deals with a very subjective thing - our core, unrefined, unsorted feelings. A thing which is very simple, beautiful, and appreciable for its unadulterated nature, but which seems too complicated to express to others. I think one of the reasons why we want to hide our core feelings is our horrible mental conditioning of being (or at least sounding) always correct. We always want to sound strong, confident, sorted, and accepted when we talk to others. This when we've accepted and turned into bestsellers all types of gore, abusive, sexual, and violent content on OTT media platforms.

Foundation of our core feelings is mainly built of our emotional experiences with people who've been physically close to us, for a substantial amount of time. During our childhood, we experience emotions and freely express our resulting feelings, without any beautification. Unless the circumstances are abnormal, we don't subjectify or analyze our emotional experiences. During early adulthood, our close people majorly comprise of our friends, study mates, and love interests. Our feelings are mostly transactional during this phase of life. Our emotional experiences become richer and our feelings become non-transactional as we enter into the family life. Our circle of close ones undergoes a major shuffle at this stage of life. Most of the space in this circle is occupied, in permanence, by our spouse. In some cases, parents and/or siblings are able to retain a small part of their previously held territories. Then enter the other major player(s) - our child or children. Then enter the non-permanent occupants - people from our workplaces or neighborhood, who occupy spaces along the perimeter of the circle. 

With this reshuffled circle of close ones, the drama of life begins. Sometimes I visualize this whole setup like an amphitheatre. We stand tall at the centre stage of this amphiteatre, as the main subject. Our closest people are the main actors who unfold the drama of emotions. And rest of the crowd, seated along the perimeter of the amphiteatre, expresses its mixed opinions of appreciation or condemnation of the emotions that we present to them. 

We can be, or expect to be, maximally understood by the people closest to us. At the same time, we can feel maximally misunderstood and hurt by the people closest to us. Rest of the people either just enjoy the show or play their cameos and exit. 

Having read some really great books, having topped them up with maybe innocent or maybe stupid emotions of Shah Rukh Khan movies, and having analyzed myself in my times of strong emotional experiences, I've developed a habit of going deep into human feelings. Thanks to our ongoing virtual communication era, we can put our smart word-power to its max use and write smartest of things, for hours, to convince the other person of an acceptable projection of ourselves, without having to face the other person. I am often accused of not keeping in touch, over whatsapp/facebook/instagram or even over phone, with my old friends or relatives who live in other cities or countries. At the same time, the gap of many years just vanishes the moment I meet them or talk to them for even 15 mins. Within 15 mins they rediscover the emotional comfort which they'd thought I'd lost owing to my newly developed "indifference" towards them. To my few, new, physically close real friends, sometimes a simple "Hi" and an eye-contact is enough to understand each other's day and plan a peaceful evening. Just by observing the routine movements and behavior of my son, I can tell the unexpressed internal physical condition that he might be going through, before he exhibits symptoms of sickness the next day. Many a times, I sense the crude disappointment or disagreement that my wife tries hard to but fails to present to me in a subtle way, trying to avoid a situation of long-running emotional distress in the house. Many times I recover household things from unthinkable places in the house by just assessing the state of mind of my wife and son when they'd have misplaced those things, when they struggle for a long time to find them. I can sense when my apartment's staff is disturbed or unsettled because of an on-duty incident with a fellow staff member or a resident, which they cannot freely express to the residents' association. Earlier, I used to consider celebrity judges in Indian reality shows as fake cryers. But off late, just by seeing an amazing performance by socially deprived artists in these shows, my eyes fill up. On seeing a small act of a kid feeling for another kid, I have to control the tears from falling from my eyes. The problem is that when I express my understanding of these emotions & feelings to not-so-sensitive people around me, most of them fail to understand the depth and honesty of these feelings. 

I do not claim that my understanding of these unexpressed feelings is correct in all instances. I also understand that people around me do not have time and mental space to listen, absorb and then feel what I say, especially when my understanding has been found incorrect in some instances. They lose the worth of putting in their precious time and effort again to listen, absorb, and then feel what this emotional guy has to say. So whenever I feel a strong emotion, my first reaction is to try and protect that emotion. I get a little lost in the emotion, and then I just give a zipped smile or a no reaction to the other person in the scene. If that other person in the scene is my lord then I receive a stare for being an ugly, snobby, "indifferent" person. If the other person(s) in the scene is(are) friends, family, or colleagues, then I receive a few facial expressions telling how boring and not-fun a person I am. 

I might not be a great dancer but dance comes from within when a song hits the right cord deep inside the heart. For a non-dancer, without this trigger, it's very difficult to move a leg. This moment of no trigger happens more often and then people, including the closest ones, start judging accordingly. In the moment they tend to forget those times when I was happy and just flew with the music and in the mood. In last 2-3 years, every sight of a new born in my family and relatives has put me in a situation where I simply smiled with tears at the brim of my eyes, and I've been left in self wonder of why I felt like that. Somehow, I've seen such degrees of practically chosen and expressed emotions by selfish, self-obsessed, and dillusional people that I feel scared to share my emotions with general people around me. Thats why most of the times, whenever an emotion strikes, I now start enjoying it from within. While taking my bath of 5 mins, or while doing workouts, or during the first 30 mins of my day early in the morning, memories of these emotions ring a bell and I feel them again. I feel them in their entirety in the peace that surrounds me, and then as the people around get up and going with life, their "indifferent" difference and my "different" indifference begin..

Hiring an elephant to do a monkey's job

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Myself: Why are we doing this?
Mr.S: Because right now our company is moving like a slow elephant. We want to make it move like a cheetah.
Myself: The way I see this going, we are trying to become a mad elephant.

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Mr.N: We are not doing rocket science. I don't see anything in this system that we cant achieve via the core tech... The way I look at it, if you do not learn the core tech, you will be out of work in our company within 2 months.
Myself: (Kept quiet, trying hard to not unleash my crude unrefined self..).

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Myself: Why are we doing this?
Mr.G: Because we've hired an elephant to do a monkey's job.

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These are excerpts from some of the many debates that I had with some very well experienced senior folks at my work. These were on a contentious technical initiative at one of the companies that I worked for. Just a disclaimer, my intent here is not to make a comment or form a public opinion about the company. As usual, my intent it to share my experience and understanding of behavior of ordinary people in different situations of life.

In my ordinary career of 14 years so far, I have worked in 6 companies. 5 out of these 6 companies have been Giants in their respective domains of work. At one of my initial few companies, during a post appraisal discussions with my manager, I was expressing my deep discontent over being awarded the next to the best performance rating. My manager told something like - "Neeraj! You are a star resource and an exceptional performer. Resources like you keep yourself floating in the market. Soon some other company will pay you more and you'll be gone. I will be left with these loyal mediocre resources whom I need to keep satisfied and motivated to keep working for me, and keep contributing to my and the company's goals for one more year...". I was startled by the crude honesty and the smartness of the response. At that point in time, I neither had the experience nor the knowledge tools to counter that response. So I accepted the situation. In fact, I re-validated my managers' organizational acumen by floating to a bigger Giant within next few months :). 

The above episode was my first encounter with the fact that an organization is much bigger than the individuals who form it. It doesn't mean that individuals are worthless. It means that when any decision is taken, be it an externally facing business decision or an internal operational decision, the organization's interests stand prime over the individuals' aspirations. Most of the freshers, junior employees, and a good portion of the start-level senior employees, tend to not have an understanding of this fact. This leads them to sound monotonously discontent about their ratings, management decisions, and the oversight of their work or opinions in the organization.

I am lucky to have bettered my understanding of this concept of "organization over individual". During one of my another appraisal discussions (this was many years later to that first encounter), my manager asked - "Neeraj, where do you see yourself in our company in next 5 years?" and I answered "Wherever the company wants me to be..". This time my manager was startled :). There was an awkward pause and an eye contact which told me that I needed to explain more. I told him that this company paid me because I was of use to the company. I gave company what it wanted from me. My individual needs and desires are non-IT, non-technical, and non-organizational. They keep changing as I am ageing and developing better understanding of my life. Money is one of the very important means to meet my individual needs and, "accidentally", I am skilled as well as habituated to get this money from the IT industry. Only clarity that I have for the next 5 years is that I will need constant flow of money for things and thoughts that really matter to me. Right now (then), I am technically skilled to make that money by working for this company. Whatever the company asks me to do, I will do my best. If company asks me to learn some new skill, I will try my best to learn. If I am not able to contribute or align with what company asks from me, neither company (which is my manager in the localized space) nor I can be happy. My manager was shocked. As one of the firsts for him, he had to split the one-to-one appraisal discussion with a reportee for over 2 days. While setting up the follow up discussion he requested me to strictly limit my answers to the organizational context. Few weeks later, in one of our team's daily catch up meetings, the manager announced to the team that he was moving to another company. When asked about the main reason, he told the offer was too good to deny :). I asked him in the meeting itself - "Why, a few weeks back, you were pressing me too hard to visualize my future in this company?". He replied - ".. this is what organizations want managers to ask their reportees, we do not need to answer the same questions .." :). 

Like my understanding of my personal needs and desires, my understanding of "organization over individual" also kept getting better and simplified as I aged. I was able to plant the sapling of my individual growth and aspirations outside the purview of the organizational trees that I gardened. I developed a kind of indifference to whatever my masters at work corroborated in the day to day affairs at my workplaces. I just focused on the little understandable piece that I needed to work on. I kept a check in mind to keep being able to get those little pieces of work for the next "5 years". This individualistic strategy helped me talk just sufficient enough to keep satisfying the demands of my organizational masters. To ordinary IT people, this setup might have looked very less rewarding and non-sustainable. However, this simplistic setup rewarded both "me" and my "organizations" in a decent way. There was one big trade-off of this setup. My masters and I had to prove that we were constantly producing fruits as well as ready-to-age classic wines from those fruits, and made both of them available in bulk for immediate consumption.

While I started writing this post, almost all IT companies were in the middle of a major transition. These transitioning companies included both technology enablers as well as the ones enabled by the technology enablers. Big tech enabler companies were creating products that catered to almost all back-end operational needs of similar businesses. These technology products and their underlying infrastructures were made available over the internet to subscribe and use, like OTT media platforms. Cost of research, development, maintenance, and upgrades of the technology products were borne by the big tech companies. On the other hand, tech enabled companies were subscribing to the easily available technology products instead of developing and maintaining an indigenous technology. The subscribing companies simply paid the periodic subscription fee to the big tech companies, in a pay per use kind of cost model. After buying the subscription to a product, the company would deploy its business process analysts to collaborate with the big tech company's technology experts and tune the tech product to specific business needs. The driving factor for this technological transition was that if the tech enabled companies modeled their business processes around the out-of-the-box features of ready-to-use technology products, then they could modify or grow their businesses in very less time as compared to the earlier times. Quickly enabling new business strategies or models to hit the market was of utmost importance to companies for all practical reasons.

Likewise, one of my tech enabled companies had a very old lineage of tech products in its tech landscape. Let me put a code-name "T" to this company, for easy reference in the rest of the story. The big tech landscape was maintained by an equally big number of "mediocre" resources who ensured that the business ran as usual, without any technical failures. Any tech failure could cause a monetary or a non-monetary impact to the company. New requirements kept coming either for implementing new tech or updating the existing tech to enable new or modified business functions, respectively. Following the global tech transition, the company had subscribed to many enabler tech products. Subscriptions had added to the costs but this was acceptable to the masters since, in longer run, this would set off the cost of operations for maintaining indigenous tech. 

As one of the good "accidents" of my life, I happen to be an expert of a technology product that enables any tech product/application to exchange data with another tech product/application without having to bother about the technical intricacies of the other product. Company T had a mix of 140+ different technology products/applications that  exchanged information with each other to support  back-end operations of its "giant" business. I had implemented and was maintaining 60+ critical integrations for the company. My service boat, like many other "mediocre" resources', was quietly sailing alongside the ship of Company T in the ocean of technology. But then the inevitable change came as some new crew members including Mr.G and Mr.N came onboard the ship, and an old crew member Ms.J was "empowered" to become the new captain of the ship.

As part of business-as-usual, Ms.J was discussing one of the new enabling tech requirements with a big tech company, let us say Company "O". Company O developed and maintained many tech products that were subscribed by Company T, these included the tech product of which I am an expert. While my product enabled tech integrations, there was another "giant" product that enabled workforce management and payroll processing for all employees of Company T. Ms.J requested Company O to tailor its "giant" workforce management product to match Company T's new business requirement. O told Ms.J that these new business requirements required product changes that were not generic and were too specific to T. Product will be changed only if a minimum number of other subscribing companies also demanded similar changes. While a survey would be launched to check for similar requirements, in the meantime, T could go with a technical workaround to enable its specific operational needs. O offered to guide and support the tech implementation of the workaround. This would allow T to continue reaping the benefits of the subscribed standard product and also implement their specific business requirement in parallel. This until the specific business demand matured into a generic one and was added to the standard product offerings.

As per hearsay, from some senior resources, this denial of request caused a major blow to the ego of Ms.J and the Second Officer(s) of her ship. The hearsay was believable as Ms.J and a majority of her crew belonged to a culture which is very high-headed and which cannot easily accept "No" as an answer to an ask. Since O was also a "giant", this plain denial of request from an equal powered partner triggered a perception of being "arm-twisted" in lieu of the big existing dependency of T on O. 

In parallel to the above episode, Mr.G came onboard to manage a group of service boats of core techs that supported many back-end tech operations at T, other than the tech integration operations which were supported by me. He led a group of resources to implement and deliver an indigenous tech solution that claimed to save a huge amount of operational costs to the company. This solution was not an ask to enable a new business requirement. It was a tech initiative to beautify internal operations. It gamified the process of one worker booking extra work hours to back-fill the temporary absence of another worker, to earn an additional overtime payment. To be honest, the initiative and the outcome was indeed an impressive one. Apart from being visibly attractive, this gave Ms.J and her crew, a quick opportunity to showcase their tech strength and smart leadership potential to the super masters at T. With the right mix of technical and communication skill, Mr.G publicized the solution and the associated potential cost savings really well. He got promoted to Officer ranks in almost no time since he came onboard. This was understandably acceptable as per the rules of the game in the corporate IT world. However, maybe because of tasting a big success in almost no time, or maybe out of his basic nature, Mr.G started to first intervene and then dominate all tech strategy decisions in the company. He made everyone feel as if he'd developed a generic formula that could apply to the company's entire tech landscape, and gradually get rid of all dependency of T on the "arm-twisting" "giant" tech partners. If he were asked where he saw himself in the company in next 5 years, I guess he'd have said something like "... the Captain of the Ship" :). And maybe his manager would have happily accepted the answer, just for the synchronicity of the answer with what organizations want to hear.

Eventually, a skilled technocrat with wild individual aspirations colluded with frustrated souls who had organizational powers to take big decisions. An org wide  tech strategy was built and conveyed that T would be moving away from all expensive tech partners, especially Company O. It was decided that T will rebuild majority of its tech products/applications in an indigenous way using Mr.G's core tech. While this strategy seemed unrefined to a lot, not many challenged it or questioned it back because of the seniority of Ms.J and the backing of the dominant Mr.G. Like in any IT company, the strategy and the associated work-plans started travelling down the organizational hierarchy. When it reached the lower levels of the "mediocre" resources, first feeling for most of them was "time has arrived... and we may need to depart soon...". The ocean was otherwise calm, but the crew dropped my and many others' service boats in the turbulent waters that were created by the waves and splashes of the very ship which we were supposed to service.

Waves of insecurity started splashing and rocking almost all service boats. Mr.G marketed his core tech so aggressively that he made everyone believe that he can implement anything and everything within a span of a few weeks. Majority of the back-end tech teams, and almost every "mediocre" resource who did not possess the core tech skill-set, had become unsure of their relevance to the company. They became insecure about their ability to maintain the status quo of their lives, by the fear of losing the salaries and the relatively better work-life routines in T that they had got habituated to. This insecurity and the associated fear suddenly changed the whole vibe of the routine cross-team communications. In every email or every technical brainstorming session, every team tried to hard sell their technology/product and tried to hog the associated implementation work, even if their tech was not the best fit for the implementation. 

I have shared my views about women empowerment at small personal forums. I feel that over its decades-long existence, the women empowerment campaign has actually empowered and produced very capable women in workforce, in both my country and around the world. However, I must say that this major decision at T had come out of a typical high-headed, powerful, frustrated, and an egoist person rather than a capable woman leader. I know, saying or writing such things about any woman might trigger a now-default thought of slander against me. However, I do not understand the hypocrisy of our people who do not mind picking on every bad decision that men make and link it to their gender and its proclaimed dominance in our society. I have come across working women making comments like "... Men are in a habit of over-committing at work...". They do this freely and seldom invite any criticism of unnecessarily bringing feminism into the play. "Men will be men", ".. all men are alike .." - most men have to receive these statements in a playful spirit, accepting two facts - 1. They cannot completely deny these, and 2. They are not strong enough to fight the unreasonable but socially "very empowered" women brigade. When women want to be equated to men, why can't they also be accepting towards the fact that not all women are great leaders and not all women make smart choices. Being a good leader and a smart decision maker are the qualities of a "person", not a "gender". Why can't women accept their basic instincts of being impulsive in times when things go against their expectations. The fact of the matter is that majority of this "empowered" women brigade have actually not come out of any oppression. I can claim this at least in the corporate IT world. They have actually capitalized the opportunities of quick progressions created at their workplaces by this irresistible and now-misdirected campaign.

In terms of both the "women empowerment" and the "avoid unnecessary propaganda" brigades, what happened at T in the next 24 months was a complete chaos created by an "empowered" woman leader who was easily disillusioned by her own impulses and an "over-committing" man who had high individual aspirations. The service boats of the core-tech service-men got upgraded into a service ship that sailed smooth and parallel to the master's ship. The service ship was captained by Mr.G and it sailed honking its bugle of dominance and partnership with T. In his own world, Mr.G must have put a flag bearing a photo of a "cheetah" on his ship. 

In the many years that I had spent at T, I had learnt well one of the important tools deployed by the company for subjective evaluations of key decisions - the "What? Why? How?" trio of questions. My "What" was communicated to me by my immediate manager Mr.S. My immediate question was "Why?". As expected I got a vague answer. "Why" was known to or maybe disclosed to a very few, and "How" was not known to anyone. The "core tech sailors" claimed to hold the only compass that showed the direction to "How". They were not able to explain "How" to the service-men of the techs whom they were trying to replace, but were able to explain it satisfactorily to Ms.J and her group of ministers. They launched into an aggressive campaign to implement some random idea, market it smartly, and keep the core-tech buzz alive. This without investing any time in taking a pause, reviewing, and reassessing what they were doing or where they were leading themselves and the organization. 

Another good "accident" of my life was that I blindly joined a "Big 4" audit firm's IT consultancy practice. I was blinded by the big brand name of the firm and immediately accepted the offer. I didn't assess whether the firm offered any better growth prospects in my technology space or in terms of faster progressions in organizational hierarchy. The firm had a relatively small IT consultancy practice when compared to their Audit practice. It required my tech skills in an even smaller team to implement tech integrations in the IT projects of their many "Giant" customers. The company was not as aggressive in IT consulting as it was in Audit domain. However, because it was an audit firm, there was an unmatched focus on processes, documentation and communication, even for the IT consultancy practice. During my time there, I learnt a lot of good communication skills and practices that gave me a slight edge over my peers in the subsequent companies where I worked. 

First it was my manager whom I asked constantly to give me a convincing answer to "Why". While doing this, I reassured him that I am anyways going to do "What" the company had asked me to do. But the company had also taught me to understand and appreciate the "Why" of my delivery objectives, so I continued to ask. I matured to asking his peers and one level-ups when I kept getting vague answers like T trying to become a "cheetah" from a slow moving "elephant". The level-ups made the cloud of vagueness furthermore dense with answers like "cost-optimization, not cost-cutting", "vendor management challenges", "..rising cloud costs are taking over traditional enterprise systems costs..", and many others from the smart corporate jargon. The "mediocre" sea could not see through the descending clouds, but it could sense the ocean. It could sense more ships coming, more anchors being lowered by the core-tech "pirates".

I was one of the stubborn mutineers. Every time I got a vague answer, I documented the received answer, the masters' strongest points that supported the answer, and my well researched counter points. I updated and used the document as basis for my subsequent mutinies. However, most of the times, my resistance was looked at as being fueled by my insecurities and associated desperation rather than the technical merit. This was understandable since there were many "mediocre" folks making similar noises without strong backings of assertive facts or observations. I kept telling myself to remain mentally calm, reminding myself of my learning and acceptance of "organization over individual". I started working on my plan B, that was looking for calmer seas to row in my service boat. Plan C, which was more aligned with the offer for truce from the pirates, was to quickly learn the "core tech" and become one of "them". 

Another great quality of Ms.J's ages old and well established culture is "Divide and Rule". Some of the great administrators of this culture mastered the art of putting their administered people up against each other, so that they could never collaborate and question the rule. Then they were good at identifying people with extraordinary individual ambitions. They identified these ambitious ones, from among the fighting clowns, and elevated them to become their deputed administrators. The job of these deputed administrators was to keep the clowns disillusioned enough to be not able to do anything meaningful other than what the whip commanded. This is where Mr.N came into the scene. In his very first meeting with me he told me that I would lose everything in my work portfolio within 2 months, if I did not concede my position and agree to his command of learning the core-tech.

I must admit that it was a long stressful phase of my life at work. Like I've mentioned earlier, I do not have any emotional or innate connection with my work or job. In this instance, I was worried about the possibility of the status quo of my otherwise comfortable life getting badly disturbed. In our social intellectual chitchats, we keep preaching that one should not get too used to one's comfort zones. But we say these things only when we are happily enjoying our comfort zones. When uncomfortable, we sob in one corner thinking repeatedly about losing things that are dear to us. When uncomfortable, we do not socialize and do not discuss "Gyan". Establishing myself in a new company, or learning a new skill and competing with younger technical experts, would disturb my meaningful world that existed outside the ambit of my IT work. However, just to be well prepared with my Plan B, I looked out and gained some confidence on being able to find a calmer sea soon in case of an apocalypse. Tired from failed mutinies, and having secured my Plan B, I told myself that I should take at least one serious shot at Plan C. Surrender, play along, and see if there is a chance to sustain my meaningful world with a little compromise in my work-life. This was the end of my pursuit of "Why" in this voyage.

So the work started on "What", without understanding "Why", and without knowing "How". Every time when I asked Mr.S or Mr.N about what will replace my tech, they told me that they did not know that. But they reassured that my tech needs to be replaced. I asked which particular skill/sub-tech in the "core tech" I should learn. They gave me a list of probable sub-technologies which could be chosen by the pirates at a later point in time. In parallel to this, a small design and development team was built which comprised of 4 pirates, Mr.N, myself, and another mutineer who rowed my service boat while I was calling shots at the core-tech ship and chasing my masters for answers. When I asked the pirates what to learn, they told first they need to understand "What" to implement. Replacing 60+ critical integrations with an entire new tech infrastructure required a micro understanding of the existing implementation. Apart from the technicals, business criticality of every integration needed to be understood to ensure that sufficient safeguards were in place to not impact business-as-usual at T. While the core-tech people were at the helm of their ship, Mr.N somehow put the accountability of their success on me. 

By this time I had realized that there is no point in arguing with Mr.N on practical grounds. I quickly finished beginner level courses in one of the sub-techs of the core tech, and formed a very high-level understanding of "How" we could at least try to replace my tech with the core tech. I validated my newly gained technical knowledge with the other 4 core-tech experts in my new team. Of course I had to give some ego-massages to my team members. To reduce Mr.N's persistent pressure on me, I gave him a sense of collaboration and casually pushed the team to do some basic proofs of concepts and implement some of the basic capabilities of my tech. Based on my recently finished courses, and based on the proofs of concepts done by my team, I formed an understanding that replacing the 60+ integrations would take a huge amount of time which would span for at least 2 years. 

In IT, in general, when managers are told that a project is going to take a long time, their most popular response is - "let us increase the number of deployed resources and see if we can finish it faster". Somehow they tend to forget that they are building an information system and not a physical, civil structure. Even in civil engineering, if a pillar has to be conditioned with damp concrete for a week after plastering, the conditioning cannot be completed in 1 day by deploying 7 more civil engineers and putting water of 7 days at once. Mr.N, the deputed administrator, was no exception to this general class of IT managers. However, instead of proposing to add more core-tech resources to the team, he exerted more pressure on me to expedite my learning of the core-tech and become project ready to be the fifth core-tech developer in the team. Now, I had to support the existing 60+ integrations as part of my usual duty, share my knowledge on existing integrations with the core-tech team at a very micro level, learn the core-tech, and also start delivering solutions in core-tech in no time. To add to this, the 4 core tech resources knew how to code but they did not know how to design a technical solution. They were like masons who could build a wall wherever needed, but they could not architect a building. And while building a wall, they could not guarantee that the wall will fuse seamlessly with the other walls at its ends. 

After initial few weeks of progressing on my plan C, I intervened and asked Mr.N how much time did we actually have to implement this. He told that we had 5 months to implement and go live, and we had 2 months to give a final confirmation to our masters that "Yes! We can and we will do it within 5 months". It took a few moments for me to absorb the shock, pull myself back into my senses, and say "Mr.N, I do not see this happening. My this claim is based on my deep understanding of our current integrations and their dependent business functions. And from where our team and its capabilities stand now, there is no way we can hit what we are aiming at". He immediately asked the team to convene and asked a straight question to the core-tech folks - "Guys, do you feel confident of doing this?". As expected from the deputed administrator, his tone was so authoritative that the core-tech folks got scared of saying "No". So they said a "soft" Yes. I am pretty confident that Mr.N, with all the experience under his belt, would have observed the lack of confidence in the team. But he happily accepted the "Yes", because that's what the organization wanted to hear :). Everyone in the room could feel the whip that was passed on to Mr.N from his masters. Also, the core-tech folks could not defy the extreme faith that the captain of their ship Mr.G had sold to Ms.J and other masters.

With full faith in Mr.N's authoritarian rule to get my tech replaced, Mr.G continued hard selling his core-tech to replace other techs. Mr.G had reassured all the masters that any technical use case could be implemented in his core-tech, in a span of 2 weeks. They achieved few minor successes which they showcased as major ones and marketed as guides for all other use-cases at various forums. Whenever a new integration requirement came, the masters' first preference would be to implement it in the core-tech. The requirement would then go around in the sub-groups of the core-tech folks who were busy re-implementing other techs' use-cases. This going around the board on the core-tech service ship was done to just see if there was a matching core-tech solution that could serve as the guide and quickly implement the new requirement. This would waste weeks if not months from when the requirements were identified. But again the delay was pushed under the carpet with the smart corporate jargon like "..inertia before flying high..". More interestingly, the running around concluded with ".. we have not yet matured enough to implement this new requirement..", "..let us implement this in existing tech for now, eventually we will migrate this to core-tech..".

I could see an identifiable pattern for all new integration requirements. Without any master asking for it, I would prepare a solution design and delivery plan for implementing new requirements in my tech. I'd also list the potential risks which were mainly related to the expected very limited time to deliver. As I'd then expect, the masters would finally turn towards my team to casually check if we could do something in the very limited time left. They had a hidden faith in us that they could get a confident "Yes", and that's what we gave to them. I would update and fine-tune my already refined plan and give it to them within a week of their approach to my team. My plan would clearly define the expected overrun from the originally planned time to hit the market, along with the obvious risk of not having sufficient time to manage too many unknowns. Me and my tech team had a track record of managing the risks well and enabling the business teams to hit the market as per their original plans. Mr.S and his level-ups would always be very happy with my team's face-saving efforts but they could not showcase them on bigger forums because the organization did not want to hear any success stories related to my tech. My solutions were published with the label "tactical". They received "soft" applauds with the disclaimers that they will serve as guides to the "strategic" core-tech solutions. This happened many times in the 2 years that followed. In line with my principle of doing whatever my masters asked me to do, I accepted the work every time and kept delivering the highest quality solutions. My every delivery of a new integration solution added ammunition to my subsequent mutinies. Every time I accepted building a new solution, I asked my masters "Why". I captured their answer in the now-very-long log that backed my next mutiny.

So I had a Mr.N and his lost team of core-tech pirates who were promising to deliver, in 5 months, a technical solution of which they did not have an iota of understanding. And then I was implementing new business critical integrations in my tech, which were added to the targets of Mr.N's already lost team. Still there were no change either in the superficial confidence that the core-tech team exhibited or in the authoritarian behavior of Mr.N.

Lost we moved closer to the 2 month deadline to reassure our super masters that we had a fool-proof plan to replace my tech with the core-tech in the remaining 3 months. T's subscription to O's integrations product would end by the end of this period. The final reassurance would mean that T would not renew it's subscription of O's integrations product. If so, within next 3 months, my 60+ back-end integrations would cease to support T's back-end operations. More and more senior masters started getting involved in Mr.N's daily meetings. Being one of the key resources of the outgoing tech, I was also included in these meetings. Everyone on the meeting was at least 10-15 years more experienced than me. So in the initial few meetings I just listened. I listened to Mr.N's concocted stories about the leaps of success that his team had made and the confidence they possessed to pull this off in the minuscule time. I didn't intervene as I knew Mr.N would say anything to paint a very rosy picture of what the organization wanted to see. And its a human thing that we can't accept but ignore the little possibilities of failure when someone promises to give us almost all that we want. However, to my pleasant surprise, one of the super masters, T's Engineering Director, asked a very simple question on the planned tech infrastructure on which the whole new solution would be deployed. Mr.N first paused and then fumbled in his reply. This logged the first doubt in the heads of the super masters. In another meeting, another senior master, one of the Technical Program Managers (TPM), asked me to prepare a detailed pre-mortem report highlighting the business risks if any of the planned 60+ core-tech integrations were not ready to go live within next 6-7 months. He gave a period of 6-7 months considering that we could consider an extension of a few months if Mr.N's plan really had some mettle in it.

This was my last chance and also my last hope. I put in my best effort and created a report with 100% real business risks that I had mitigated, and handled when triggered, over my many years of managing the integrations. I substantiated the business and non-business impacts of all risks. I specified how I had implemented safeguarding measures in my tech solutions to mitigate each of the risks. Whenever a risk was triggered, both tech teams and business teams had to act very quickly, in collaboration, to execute risk-handling measures. Deadlines for successfully closing the triggered risks ranged from 2-24 hours, and it involved managing a diverse set of business stakeholders. At the first sight of my report, the TPM was stunned. In all my prior interventions, I had tried to bring these risks to Mr.N. But he told me that it was not "rocket-science". Similar safeguarding measures could be easily implemented in core-tech as well. He asserted his viewpoints, in his usual authoritarian tone, and asked core-tech folks to confirm. As usual, he'd succeed in extracting the "soft" reaffirmation and then kill my mutiny. 

The TPM had realized that we were dealing with a huge risk to business, and that it would take months just to validate that the new core-tech integrations had the capability to handle all the risks. He asked Mr.N if he had thought this through. Mr.N was still defiant. I failed to understand what was motivating him to not accept the simple fact that this was not doable, especially in the stipulated 5 months of time. The TPM, though senior to Mr.N, respected Mr.N's seniority and showed trust in Mr.N's experience and confidence. So, even though he understood the real picture, he did not challenge Mr.N's defiance. But he set me up to present my report to his next level, that was T's Engineering Director Mr.R. I was nervous for the meeting. Suddenly, I was talking to the masters who I had not thought of talking to in my next "5 years". 

Mr.R was the one who'd earlier made Mr.N fumble while answering a simple question on core-tech infrastructure. So I had some confidence that my report could make as good an impact on Mr.R as it made on the TPM. So the meeting happened and I repeated my now-rehearsed performance in front of Mr.R and Mr.N. Mr.R was a very busy man at T, with maybe a thousand things running in his mind in a given work-hour. So he formed a quick high-level understanding of the situation by the time I stopped talking. He didn't need to deep dive to low-level details in any of the many projects that were running under his leadership umbrella. So he asked Mr.N if he had taken all these valid risks into account and whether he'd be able to deliver the expected new solution ensuring that the risks were handled as well as in the outgoing solution. Mr.N once again downplayed all risks and reassured Mr.R that his core-tech team of 4 resources was "excited and confident" to deliver the solution on time. This was a lie in plain sight, and it was putting the company at an unimaginable risk. It was a very hard test of my patience to not counter Mr.N in the meeting, then and there. There were no better words than "lie", or maybe ".. this is not true..", which I could use to sugarcoat my counter. My any counter would have put Mr.N in a very bad light in front of Mr.R. I felt that would not have been the most sensible thing to do, professionally. So I kept silent for the rest of the meeting. I slept over the unfortunate meeting.

In my general routine, I wake up at around 5 am, make my coffee and sip it peacefully in the quiet "me" zone, almost every day, thankfully. I trust the purity of every thought that comes to me at this time of the day. My mind is super active and receptive of all positive energies flowing around me. Most of my confusions about all aspects of my life get resolved while I simply sit and let thoughts flow through my mind, uninterrupted. Many a times, a simple random thought resolves a technical problem on which I'd have been stuck the entire previous day. Unchecked thoughts at this time of the day act as an auto-pilot and thus, generally, set up the rest of my day.  

In the morning that followed the meeting with Mr.R and Mr.N, my feeling of dejection was peacefully at rest. Refreshed faculties of my mind started understanding the situation. I understood that my Plan C was destined to fail miserably as it depended on Mr.N and the core-tech team whom I could neither understand nor align with our organization's success. So what were left with me were my mutinies and my Plan B. I realized that this was a do or die situation for me and I could not play completely by the books. So I decided that it was time that I did same straight talks at work.

I texted my line manager Mr.S and requested him to set up an urgent meeting with his level-up Mr.M. Mr.M had worked very closely with Mr.R for last more than 15 years at T at that point in time. Both of them were very instrumental in changing the face of technology at T. I had some hidden faith that Mr.M will do whatever it takes to save T from a disaster. Only thing I needed to convince him that what he was looking at was a disaster. Like Mr.R, he also had a thousand active matters at hand at any point in time during his work-day. So, as soon as I met, I launched - "You may see this as my unprofessional behavior, to bypass all hierarchy and say this to you in a direct and crude way. We are subscribing for a big disaster by trusting what Mr.N is promising. There is a huge disconnect between his understanding and the ground reality. You can see this as my extreme pessimism, but I am claiming that our failure is assured if go forward with this initiative..". He intervened and told me that he also got a similar sense but did not question further because of Mr.N's reassurances. He asked me why I would not raise these directly with Mr.N since I was reporting to Mr.N for this particular project. I told him that I have been raising the red flags but, out of some non-understandable motive, Mr.N pulled all the flags down. Then I told what Mr.M always anticipated in his IT industry acumen but which he never expressed freely. I told him that Mr.N's project was an assured disaster and as we'd move closer to the deadline, life would become a living hell for everyone working on it. I continued - "..the max Mr.N or anyone can screw me or any other tech resource at T is for 60 days (which is our notice period). And it is not that the market outside does not need me or the core-tech. What will happen to this project if me or my fellow mutineer suddenly become unavailable, or are available only for a period of next 60 days? We might be at an individual loss, but the organization will be at a much bigger one..". I told him that I did not capture this implicit risk in my report that was now doing the rounds at the tables of many masters. Mr.M ended the meeting citing his another appointment and told me that he'll get back to me on this. 

Next day, Mr.N called for an adhoc meeting of the 4 core-tech folks, me and my fellow mutineer, Mr.R and Mr.M. I had a slight sense of what was expected to come but to others, it was big surprise. Mr.N declared that they were putting the entire project on hold with immediate effect. He sugarcoated the reasons behind the decision, to not demotivate the core-tech folks. The elephant inside me was quietly observing Mr.N's words and expressions, and enjoyed watching the monkey getting leashed.

I hardly had any one-on-one interactions with Mr.M in all my years at T. My integrations work fell under his leadership umbrella but my interactions with him were limited to occasional skip-level meetings and the issue-triage meetings when risks got triggered in the integrations space. I did not do any small talks on the floor and just discussed work that was assigned to me by Mr.S. Accidentally, I exhibited a popular tool of being more effective at workplace - "Talk less, to be heard more". I guess in my uncommon one-on-one meeting with Mr.M, my plain acknowledgement of the possibility of losing key human resources, and my conviction that T's business-as-usual was at great risk, won me his acceptance of the crude facts that I'd blurted out about the nonsensical vision of the project and its assigned executors.

When the news traveled across the floor, everyone in my team and the outsiders who were aware of the matter started congratulating me, terming it as my "big victory". I was pleasantly surprised. I told them that I was nobody in the organization and had won nothing for myself. I was happy that a big disaster for our organization was averted, and I was able to play a key role in that. Mr.S and Mr.M were pleased that I persisted with my efforts and had proven my points despite having no official support from the higher levels and having minimal chances of being heard and accepted. But, again, they could not openly market my efforts, for now obvious reasons. However, the status quo of my work was restored. More implementation work started flowing my way and I got a healthy pipeline of work for at least next "3 years". Whenever Mr.N and I crossed each other on the office floor, I wished him with a smile and a look that said "I am still not out of work here". He sometimes ignored and sometimes just shook his head, with the same old authority. 

My "victory" had given a hope to many other "mediocre" resources and teams. Mr.S also belonged to the under-privileged clan that did not know the core-tech. He was also a little unsettled by the unchallenged organization growth that Mr.G, his peer, was making, by selling promises of huge benefits to T by implementing the core-tech. Maybe he also got some hope from my "victory". So he requested Mr.G to conduct a knowledge-sharing session on what was happening in T's tech strategy space. He was smart enough to give an ego-massage to Mr.G by saying that other teams should also have a high-level idea of Mr.G's team's success story. So the session happened. Mr.G again hard sold his initial project and its associated potential cost savings for T. Then he restated the whole big story around the organization deciding to replace "giant" tech vendors with indigenous systems built in core-tech. I assumed that he'd have had some reflection after knowing about my recent "victory". So I asked where did we stand in terms of the strategic decision to remove my tech. He said that we will do it. I was surprised and once again I asked "Why". He told ".. coz we've hired an elephant to do a monkey's job..". I turned to my fellow mutineer with an angry + tired + mocking smile. After the meeting was over, I told Mr.S and my team that so far I had fought the "monkeys". Now I had to take on the the King Kong who was at the helm of the "ship of monkeys". What I'd won was a small battle, the war would continue. But I decided to take a little break and rejuvenate myself in my just-restored status quo. Now I could answer very quickly and crisply if any of my masters asked "Neeraj! Where do you see yourself in T after 5 years?".. Bon voyage :)