Bewildered in Bombay

Welcome to Mumbai

2012-02-24T03:47:00.001-08:00

Come with vision and hope if you dare,

to the place of alienation or expansion,

Exile from easy opinion.

Where Feckless Charmers and Chancers and Chief villians

lap up the disorderly metropolitan life.

Don't fill your suitcase with dirt, confusion, contamination -
it's already here.

Take a daytrip with the climbers tottering upwards on high heels

in relative safety,
as the heat does battle with the coldness of impersonality.

The glass-sheathed architectural towers

exaggerate our fear of exposure.

Weak borders bleed with the cries of tall children yelling "I'm somebody."

Enjoy chance, do not renounce the world.

Yesterday I lived Bewildered

2012-01-12T03:19:00.002-08:00

Yesterday

I lived bewildered,

In illusion.

But now I am awake,

Flawless and serene,

Beyond the world.

From my light

The body and world arise.

I see the infinite Self

As a wave,

Seething an foaming

Is only water

So all creation,

Streaming out of the Self,

Is only the Self.

The 7 Gifts of Choice for A Happy New Year

2011-12-21T05:02:00.000-08:00

“DO NOT BE CONCERNED about such things as differences of nationality, of age, of colour of skin,” the carpet seller told me, “The only one difference that matters, is the closed heart or the open heart. When I sell my carpets, I charge a much higher price to those with a closed heart and cheap, cheap, cheap for those with an open heart.” The practice he taught me, to maintain an open heart, was to walk amongst the poor in the city, to make human contact, to connect without the dismissive act of simply handing over a few rupees. A blind man I encountered was begging with his hand out, taking his hand in mine, as we sat together on the pavement. He touched my head, slowly. A little girl I met spontaneously kissed my arms and I found myself spontaneously kissing hers. A wandering Sadhu and I held eye contact for what seemed like an eternity.

One day, when I returned to the carpet man, an American tourist was insisting that he buy a particular carpet hanging on the wall, proclaiming verbosely, stamping his feet, that he would pay any price, but to no avail, it was not for sale. My carpet friend explained to me that the man’s heart was very closed (if not his mouth) and the carpet would not be happy with him, “It will be good for him not to get his way,” he told me, “This way, perhaps he will make a little room for God in his heart.” He then poured more tea and another day passed as they always did, without me ever buying a carpet.

Most religions of course, call upon us to surrender to a higher power, to live beyond merely self-driven goals and the endless pursuit of trinkets, carpets, dramas and other worldly ideas that in our deluded way, we believe will bring us contentment and peace. In the Bhagavad Gita it says, “Who so foresaketh all desires and goes onwards free from yearnings, selfless and without ego – He goes in peace.” These were the words chosen for a remarkable and loving woman with whom I spent many hours of silent eye contact and laughter and who passed away this year. Whatever matter we discussed, she would either ask you to focus on gratitude or simply say, “God is great.” God bless you my dear friend and important teacher.

A Course in Miracles, (the path I follow) not unlike the Gita in some respects, reminds us that the first obstacle to peace is the desire to get rid of it. In the text, the ego part of ourselves is portrayed as a somewhat greedy adolescent, thrashing around, with endless self-centred desires to manipulate, control, stand-out from the crowd, get what it wants regardless of others, all of which fail to bring any sustainable happiness whatsoever. In the teachings of Jesus, who I confess I had a huge crush on as a child, the ego is essentially a revengeful character – if I don’t get what I want I’m coming after you. This ego of course, these desires, these yearnings, only exist in the mind, hence, why the traditions of mind-training are such a central idea in most religious practices.

In meditation, India’s finest tradition of mind-training, one is taught to observe, in physical stillness one’s mind, the antics of the adolescent ego and is various wailing demands for attention. A simple way to experience the utter insanity of your own mind is to sit still for about 20 minutes and simply focus on the movements of your breath, in and out. Notice what rubbish enters your mind, how the ego loves to inflate itself in grandiosity, self-pity and irresponsible mutterings that the world isn’t doing what you want it to do! The ego loves to complain about what it is not getting, rather than a firmer voice that asks if you are not getting, maybe you should ask how you are not giving. In the Buddhist traditions of non-attachment, including non-attachment to thought of course, I remember a teacher explaining to us, “Treat all your thoughts as guests at a dinner party, do not spend too much time on any one.”

The idea that in order to be happy, you need hair extensions, hair implants, a fake smile, a young attractive girlfriend, a fast car, drugs, diamonds, five apartments and bar in your living room that would shame the British Raj, are all merely thoughts that arise firstly in the mind. The biggest con of the ego, it’s favourite devise is that of comparison, the idea that if you have more than someone else, work harder, achieve more to run away from yourself, you will feel an elevated sense of who you are. Perhaps you do, fleetingly and can swagger for a moment as a winner for a while. However, such feelings are never sustainable, because deep down, you know that this happiness is fraudulent and merely based on destructive or distancing urges and a deep sense of not feeling good enough at all. In short, you smile to the crowd, and cower in the mirror, if you dare look that is. What appears as a call for some change of things in external manifestations, is perhaps really a call for an inside job, a change that begins in the interior, in the mind. But changing the internal thoughts of matters regarding self-worth, one’s very ideas of what we need to be happy, requires reflection, being still, a rather ruthless interrogation of oneself and a commitment to peace. What a blessing though, our evolution is in our own hands! It means I can indeed to choose to change my thoughts, and indeed what I utter. Or as Marianne Williamson, a teacher of A Course in Miracles puts it, the devils not out there in the world – it’s worse or better, depending on how you look at it - the devils in your own mind.

Many years ago, I was asked to give a talk at a New Year’s dinner hosted by one of the American Investment Banks. “On what precisely?” I asked my client. “Anything inspiring about the New Year,” he replied. So the topic I chose was the “The Seven Gifts of Choice.” These Seven Gifts I talked about are the gifts we give ourselves: (1) The willingness to consider that you do not necessarily know what is in your best interests, (2) That maybe there is a greater plan to events and occurrences that you do not understand, (3) Whatever you choose to do begins first in your mind, from either a closed or a loving heart, (4) Purification of the mind is always necessary, through meditation or contemplation, (5) To hold any grievance against another is like eating poison and hoping they will die, (6) Whatever shows up in your life that you do not like, take a ruthless inventory of how you yourself have manifested the problems you have, (7) The best gift you can give yourself is to live with gratitude for all the wonderful people and the gifts that have come your way on life’s journey.

I sincerely wish you a loving and light-filled year of 2012 ahead. This is the last blog on behalf of Bewildered in Bombay, as I have made the loving and peaceful decision to return to live in East Sussex in England. My years in Bombay, have been a wonderful affirmation that we can replace the ego’s devices of greed and self-pity, anger and resentment, fear of failure, fear of death, striving living with a simple commitment to peace of mind, self-honesty and the courage to live what that transformation means. I am truly grateful to all the Bombay teachers, friends for reminding me that the travel that truly matters is the journey one takes inside.

So this pilot has chosen to be grounded on homeland for some time to come and thus go to all the important places by travelling absolutely nowhere whatsoever.

I sincerely thank you for all the encouragement and kindness I received to keep writing this blog as I navigated the City.

May peace, love and contentment be yours in the year ahead. I know it will be, if that is the path you choose,

With Much Love and gratitude, Julia

Training Children to be Liars and Mimic Men

2011-11-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

IF YOU WANT TO TRAIN WOULD BE ADULTS to become liars and manipulators, hit them on a regular basis as children, or at the very least, deny their emerging sense of reality. This is one of the basic tenants of developmental child psychology. Personally, I am revolted to the core by parents who deem it perfectly accept to inflict violence on children. I cannot even begin to write about it without my body flinching. I welcome a day when violent parents who think it is perfectly acceptable to hit their children, yet wouldn’t dream of slapping a misbehaving adult dinner guest, are themselves subjected to the highest form of penalty and punishment. This disclosure of my position regarding violence towards children out of the way, I shall continue, adding that there are many forms of violence towards children, not merely of the physical kind.

At Crosswords bookshop, in South Bombay, one of a chain of bookstores hideously branded yellow and black, rather like a DIY warehouse, having finally located George Orwell’s Animal Farm in the wildlife section, I watched a charming small boy, about six years of age, leaping around, with a keen interest in a photography book on tigers. Attempting to lift the rather heavy table-top book to show his mother, who was on her mobile phone, he dropped it on his foot and he began to cry. His mother, bent down to comfort him and check that he was okay and nothing was broken. No that isn’t what she did; he was rewarded for his interest in nature, by being violently slapped twice across the back of his legs.

In all my time in Bombay, beginning around 2005, I have not seen one slum dweller, one street person, one vagabond living under tarpaulin ever hit a child. It’s not that I haven’t looked. It may of course be that violence towards children by the poor is a much more secret affair, or an unwise image that may reduce the day’s takings from begging, or indeed that they don’t have the means to bribe their way out of any citizen protest. I have seen however, rather too many moneyed mothers, dangling expense Western designer handbags, dripping in diamonds as though dressed for an Arabic karaoke night, behave in entirely animal-like and violent ways towards their children.

This is not however, aggression that is entirely out of control. What is clear is that the majority of parents who physically abuse their children in this way, seem to have limits. They go only so far. Two slaps on the back of the legs is acceptable, three is not. Most beating of children is within some bizarre and cruel personal register of what is acceptable. Three bruises, is fine, four is not. Can give a vigorous slap across the head from a hand, but not a baseball ball, can poke the child with pencil, but not a meat-cleaver. There is much more calculating going on than first appears.

What all this has to do with creating lying adults is very simply. The child comes into the world without any ability whatsoever to distinguish between his inner world (what’s going on inside him) and the external reality (what is going on outside of him). Achieving this awareness, this distinction, is a remarkable developmental achievement and a profoundly important one. The capacity to distinguish the inner from the outer, is of course facilitated under the best circumstances, by the caregiver, primarily, the mother. One of the most important ways that parents help this come about is by mirroring the child’s mental experience. In a sense, teaching the child how to mentalise events, to think, to form their own understanding. So the good enough mother at Crosswords (not the one I saw), these moments of facilitation, would in some way reflect to the child what he has just experienced, perhaps something like, “Ouch, little Haresh, that must really hurt,” nicely entering into the world of the child, adding perhaps, “But we must run along now, granny is expecting us for tea,” maintaining parental authority and a reminder that others like granny have their inner world and feelings too.

When parents more consistently than not, deny a child’s experience, his thoughts, his feelings, or the actual reality of physical abuse, his experience of the world is invalidated. He learns how to be a fake, he’s had good childhood training after all, to wear a mask (hitting doesn’t hurt, isn’t real), to be strategic in relationship, rather than intimate (how am I going to make sure I don’t get hit again) and to be confused about his own sense of what is going on (this feels bad but mum says its fine). Fundamentally, he has been deprived of developing a viable sense of himself, his thoughts and feelings. What this means, is the important line, as the child heads towards adulthood, between fantasy and reality, is not even made of sand, it barely exists, to the point that his internal cues are so vague, so undifferentiated that he will search to make sense, to make meaning in the reflections of others as a form of substitution. His thinking about things has been made illegitimate and thus his capacity to think for himself is likely to be retarded. Inevitably, as an adult he will have emotions that he can’t make sense of and many confusion. He is of course then, highly vulnerable to the influence of others, to mindlessly following the crowd, or flip-flopping between seeking approval here, then there. Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst called this phenomena the ‘false self.’

This lack of an authentic self is rather humorously portrayed in Woody Allen’s film Zelig, with a character who quite simply takes on the appearance and behaviour of whoever he is talking to, whether it is a psychiatrist or the Chinese man in the shop. Devoid of any real consistency, the false-self character cannot be true to himself or others because his compass, whether moral or otherwise, which developmentally for adulthood if all goes well will be internal, is in fact external, in the hands of whoever is currently influencing him or whatever fantasy of identity is imagined. It’s not a huge leap to see how this may set the path of corrupting, corruptible citizen. What strikes me as the consistent pattern of the lack of authentic self in adult clients I see with such a history of gross parental neglect (although whether they can digest this is the case is a different matter), is a profound inability to be alone. Perhaps, one might surmise, to be alone, without the reflection of others, means to feel one does not exist at all. One such adult client, inclined to live in his world of pretend play, just as he had found comfort as a child, dreamed of doing all sorts of things with his life, travelling around the world, yet rarely did these manifest as external reality that would have afforded him some real satisfaction and relief. As Winnicott put it, “Real milk is satisfying compared to imaginary milk,” as it always is, adding, ”The point is, that in fantasy things work by magic, there are no brakes on fantasy.” This brings to mind crashes, as well as brakes with the corrupt Indian pilots, allegedly found with forged CPL’s (Commercial Pilot’s Licenses) who didn’t in fact have any qualifications to fly so much as a paper plane. What is being forged here is not merely papers, but identity, a form of adult play-acting, with potentially horrendous consequences.

So what are the practical implications of what is being said here? As parents, in order to facilitate the development of healthy adulthood in our offspring, it seems rather all too obvious to say perhaps, that we must try to be truly constructive, to understand the thoughts and feelings of our children and not hastily dismiss them whether with language or a fist. It’s not enough for a parent to simply pay off the police when their fifteen year old son’s drink-driving is clearly showing early signs of alcoholism. Beneath the symptoms, we must dare to patiently explore the cause and what is probably, an unconscious cry for help or get outside help for the child. Of course, the difficulty with doing this, is that we have to face our own inadequacies as parents which maybe no easy task, especially for the parent with a fragile sense of self and self-worth. One important point that I find myself invariably raising when I work with families, is that a wonderful way to deepen the everyday experience of love, is when a family can say to one another, “I love you, and I like it when you tell me about your day, and I don’t like when you don’t call to say you’ll be late.” What I am suggesting here, is that loving someone and finding certain behaviours okay and not okay are two very different things. Families, like businesses, need honest feedback loops, even dare I say in a hierarchical culture like India, from children to their parents, whatever age, so that everyone can grow and develop. A family of course, where behaviour is primarily strategic, i.e. goal oriented, rather than intimate i.e. love oriented, will find this a deeply challenging step to take, something that has to be both unlearned as well as learned.

It would be the highly irresponsible to underestimate the reality that in the city there is very little in the way of education for parents and rather poor feedback loops between teachers and parents regarding children’s emotional development. Urban India, perhaps naturally so, given its stage as an emerging world economy, rather energetically, focuses on a child’s excellence in tangible results, qualifications, grades and so on. Understandable as this is, the emphasis on achievement can have crippling effects on the child’s emotional development, no matter how well intentioned by parents. Many of the parents I talk to whose children are at the elite private schools, particularly from European backgrounds, find the academic pressure on the children to excel, without true regard for their emotional development painfully foreboding, and worthy of leaving the city. Perhaps what stands out most in my work in the city, compared to other major capitals in the world, in fact whether in Mumbai or Delhi, is there is yet to develop a culture around parenting and child-rearing that is characterised as a learning journey in itself, where it is perfectly acceptable to discuss strategies for helping little Santosh develop, without an overbearing sense of shame, or parental inadequacy. This I think, links to the excessive need, perhaps through insecurity, to be seen to know what one is doing as a parent (the performance of the false-self?), and it would seem, largely only to seek professional help when the child or adolescent is acting-out to such a degree that they are truly at risk, in the rising cases of anorexia in the Mumbai of children literally losing their lives in the golden cages. Simply judging a child’s odd behaviour as stupid, out of control, without attempting to understand what it is meant to achieve, i.e. entering the world of the child, is perhaps one of life’s greatest, greatest cruelties. To view a child’s distress, as simply some sort of karmic curse, (yes this happens, I assure you), rather than face-up to the fact that the child is being raised in an financially affluent environment, yet where there is the poverty of frequently absent, argumentative, highly neglectful parents, maybe be comfortingly and magically fateful for mum and dad (they aren’t responsible after-all), but thoughtless gross stupidity. Perhaps they might counter, it is their karma to be the terrible parents they are - a full-stop on any development and change - the curse of religion. Utter nonsense.

More than any other life activity, parenting will bring-up for all of us, memories, experiences, of our own childhood, the bad as well as the good, as I know only too well. I always tell parents, that the best we can hope for is to commit to evolve as parents and do a little better than our own parents. The truth is, we can always invest time and energy just as we would going to the hairdressers, learning what it means to be a good enough parent, if in reality it is important to us. As a start, some of the best writers on children’s developmental needs are just one click away on the internet, the likes of John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott and indeed India’s Sudhir Kakar.

Sadly, India has only very recently made corporal punishment in schools illegal, and as with many laws in the country, it is extraordinarily difficult to implement and monitor. A recent study found that over 74% of children in Maharashtra state schools have experienced physical violence from teachers. It is easy to dramatize the effects of physical abuse of children by quoting the numerous cases of suicide of children, particularly those reported following brutal treatment in schools. However, it seems to me that the fakery, the manipulation, the notion of relationships as merely as instrumental to achieve one’s own selfish gains, an inability to trust oneself, projected on to others, an excess of consumerism as a way of masking emptiness, that potentially arises from the development of the ‘false self,’ poses an even greater challenge to India’s development. The country must invest more adequately in the education of teachers, a deeper understanding of the developmental trajectory of children, their psychological needs and the damaging consequences of physical violence. Personally, I believe educating teachers and parents, cultivating interest and learning in the exciting and remarkable world of children’s development is the No 1 priority for India’s development as a noble nation. Not worth hitting for, but certainly worth fighting for.

Masculinity, Sexuality & Renaming the City Mumbai

2011-11-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

CHANGING NAMES is of course an attempt to create an image, to bolster an identity, however illusory, simultaneously suggesting and negating certain affiliations. Several years ago, living in East Sussex in England, there seemed to be a flurry of name changes by friendly acquaintances who were followers of the hugging saint from Kerala, Amma. Tracey originally from Basingstoke suddenly became Anoushka. Such new names, along with a bindi now on the forehead and an attraction to wearing loose-fitting baggy white clothes, signified the enactment of otherness, a sort of spiritual exoticism that separated them from the usual villagers, especially the rather trussed-up members of the Parish Council with their dull language, tweeds and wellington boots. I was bizarrely dull by comparison, suited and booted, ready to catch the 6.20 morning train to the city. Of course those most challenged by the insistence that Tracy is now Anoushka, are her parents. “I’m sorry dear, I’m calling you Tracy and that’s that. It’s what I’m used to and it’s what I know you as.”

Name changing, hinting at loss, or indeed hope, inevitably requires adjustment, the ease of which will of course depend on its constant performance, the reiteration in the written as well as spoken word and how meaningful it is to those required to articulate it. It was November 1995, that the city of Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai, much to the consternation of many communities in the city. The government of India had finally acceded to the Maharashtra State demands, and the name of the city was changed on all official documentation and representations. The state government, headed by Shiv Sena, and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), argued that the renaming was intended to highlight the local origins of the city’s name derived from Mumbadevi, the local goddess of Koli fishermen, who originally lived on the islands that became the city of Bombay. The “we” for which the Shiv Sena and the BJP claimed to speak for was the ordinary Marathi speaker. Significant minorities in the city, opposed the renaming on the grounds that Bombay’s cosmopolitan character should be reflected in its name, whilst others, hailed it as representing a positive decolonialisation of British Bombay.

The leadership of the Shiv Sena, a movement that began in 1963, by Bal Thackeray, initially garnered support from the youth clubs (mitra mandales) and such places in the Marathi dominated areas of the City, by appealing to an aggressive brute-force machismo of the body, rather than that of the intellect, providing a sense of belonging and self-esteem to young frustrated men in the metropolis. The bedrock of the Shiv Sena brand is a forcefully masculine sexuality (think saffron robes a huge sword) in keeping with a thrusting urban centre that ridicules intellectuals and the Congress as effeminate and wet. Thackeray’s calls to “brothers, sisters, mothers,” energised hundreds of thousands of Marathi’s to “be proud,” and “to assert yourself.” Leaving aside for one moment, accusations of violence, treachery, and murder, inflicted by Shiv Sena it’s important to understand how this operation of power works so effectively on a psychic level, in mobilising idealisation and commitment amongst the inhabitants of the city. The leadership of the Shiv Sena, in the mid-1960’s, created a network of local “Shakha,” simple venues, in both middle class and low income areas of Bombay and Thane, a network of local welfare strategies providing assistance to those who were struggling with such things as a difficult landlord, corrupt officials or having problems with civic amenities

Much of Shiv Sena’s power came from Bal Thackeray’s motivational use of rhetoric in speeches aimed at such people, to stand-up for oneself, not to sit idly by and allow life to simply happen to you. These are powerful leadership lessons in how to strengthen, at least a large part of a community’s sense of liberation and empowerment. For the anti-authority, disenfranchised, anti-elitist under-class, the generations of bodies displaying their historic malnutrition, Thackeray’s highly public and aggressive style, gave them a sense of certainty, of absolutism that the city was in tough and firm leadership hands, a powerful authoritative fantasy of containing the city’s anxieties, that they could metaphorically take more space in the urban landscape. Unlike perhaps the Congress party, or indeed the British left in the UK, the Shiv Sena brought a vibrant sexuality to bear on political leadership, an understanding of the machinations of psychic fantasy, rather than a limp rhetoric of defeated victimhood and rational narrative that loses supporters, somewhere in the gap between the endless debating and dull rhetoric of ‘for’ and ‘against.’ Rational language - that uses facts to bolster debate, overused lacks of potency, often masking, excusing non-action and apathy, which clearly is not Thackeray’s style. He uses a raw assertiveness of “Do it and do it now,” no explanation required. His incessant repetition of statements (a strategy called “broken record” in leadership communication), his one-liners, provides a psychological sense of leadership determination and security. His vicious attacks against Bombay’s elite heralded a confidence in the working man, by making his very lack of intellectualism, i.e. not being effeminate, a virtue and source of pride.

For many, the Shiva Sena felt like a powerful and dynamic force of energy, that was determined to unlock invisible elitist chains (even if it created new ones), the fantasy of a powerful laxative against constipated bureaucratic systems, the dully wishy-washy leadership of some of the other parties, that gave the culture of the city the impression of one riddled with obstacles, as Suketu Mehta, author of the magnificent book on the city, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, put it, a Bombay that always says no, rather than yes. Do not underestimate, as I have found, to get anything done in Bombay/Mumbai, whether registering an apartment, opening a bank account, having a phone installed, getting a new gas cylinder, concluding any business matter whatsoever, resolving any interpersonal dispute, tolerating endless procrastination and failure to make any assertive decisions, a characteristic of the city that requires the absolute patience of a saint. Similarly, much time wasting is involved on expending vast amounts of energy talking-up various dreams, how wonderful it will be to do all sorts of amazing things, with an enthusiasm that borders on mania, only to dissipate as quickly as a popped balloon. Somewhere in the gap between that fantastic idea and implementation, complacency and a sense of depression pollutes the already toxic air, “There’s nothing I can do, it’s hopeless,” is a familiar retort, or worse, a passive-aggressive distancing, the loud resonance of absolute silence and phone calls that are not returned. English and a woman, I find it just deeply ill-mannered. No matter how many times I am told, “Well this is India.”

On a psychic level, any form of “Can-do,” that actually involves the rigours of follow-through, rather than tiresomely procrastinates, or simply dies in despondency, will inevitably appeal in a city where blockages and dead-ends are commonplace. Let’s face one very clear fact about Bombay: many of the inhabitants of the city, attracted by the Shiv Sena are desperately poor. They are painfully diminutive in height, in weight, in muscle, in build, displaying the everyday reality of the collective body of malnutrition. In an elevator, a lift boy will stand next to me at some 4 foot 9 inches, painfully thin, with tiny hands a frail body and feet that belong on a 10 year old, whilst I tower over him, my privileged 5 foot foot 9 inches, and with 3 inch heels to boot. We are a tragic comedy. Macho leadership, the law of the father, no matter how ruthless, the Shiv Sena seems to understand and appeal to the aching city’s psyche that longs for the rhetoric at least, that it acts and just damn well gets things done and says this is not right.

This powerful leadership, in constructing a positive macho identity (often for the diminuitive body remember), inevitably reinforces itself by pointing out what it not, creating the idea of enemies in the Shiv Sena’s highly dramatic alleged targeting of South Indians, communists, “Blood-thirsty slum dwellers” or “Cunning Muslims.” Thackeray’s style, arguably reminiscent of Hitler, provides a powerful combination of dictatorial and charismatic leadership, increasingly many fear, the future for not so much Hitler’s Jews, but Thackeray’s Muslims especially. It is well known that Thackeray admires Hitler’s “Determination to oust anti-nationals from Germany.” Hitler’s rhetorical methods were of course, to dehumanise the other in a kind of medicalising language, as a cancer, a sickness. It is clearly not helpful, nor in my view, rarely correct to think of any perceived enemy, whether indeed it is Hitler, or of course categories like the Jews, in merely non-human, animalist terms. This is of course what we are inclined to do, and enormously tempting, lazy indeed, even perhaps inevitable when we are subjected to hate and terror. When a group, or indeed an individual deliberately sets out to inject intense anxiety in others, it is highly likely we will lose our mentalizing capacity, to step back for example and think. Hate and anger are reduced by thinking. Thinking is reduced by hate and anger. We are in a bind. In a somewhat fearful state, we are inclined to disassociate, to shut down, or run.

Tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot created culture psychoanalysis terms “splitting.” Not only are you either for or against me as the head-honcho, the world is divided into simplistic good and bad categories. What is more interesting perhaps, rather than the merely psychoanalysis of individual leaders, is of course the psychology of the group. How does it happen, and understanding this is vital in my view, do a group of people become so regressed, that they blindly accept any ridiculous propaganda and lies, in one massive group introject (swallow whole). Equally, what are we ourselves judging, whether a group of people on mass, or a single person, that may just be another introject? As psychoanalysis points out, the hint will be that our mentalizing function is absent. We may loath for instance, what we call “Suicide Bombers,” simply because we too are regressed in a group psychology, devoid of any real thinking about the subject, to carelessly name such people in this way, rather than thoughtfully understand that the concept of istishad, which is entirely different and is indeed martyrdom in the service of Allah. Dare we mentalise the perspective of the other? The profound difficulty of doing so described so beautifully in Nelson Mandela’s diaries, who made a difficult transformational decision, yes a loving decision, to live beyond hate, despite having every justifiable reason to do so.

If Marathi identity, is to be the new elitism of Mumbai that inevitably at the very least on a rhetorical level, will necessarily spit out other identities at the very least in language, the very cosmopolitanism of the city is under threat. It would I suppose for any party to be rather uncool and say we are the “short people” party. Yet, condone the Thackeray’s as much as you like and debate the rights and wrongs of their actions, but they understand and live every Harvard Business School edict on charismatic, assertive and transformational leadership, by fully focusing on the internal world, the collective psychology of the city’s inhabitants. A lesson many leaders in India and elsewhere would do well to learn from and get out of their heads, into their bodies.

It’s quite right of course, in this name change of the city, to consider the sense of place for the elites of many communities, such as the Parsi’s, the Muslims, the Gujarati’s (and dare one add the British) who created Bombay. One must of course, inevitably turn towards history, to attempt to make sense of how the name change emerged. As I understand it, originally, Bombay was the territory of the Sultan of Gujarat, who was murdered and forced to give it over to the Portuguese. It would seem, no Indian rulers, whether Maharaja or Maratha, attempted to claim ownership of the soggy islands. This wasteland of Bombay, was then given as the dowry by Catherine of Braganza, during her marriage to Charles II of England, fo the British Crown. The Gujarat’s were among the first people who moved to Bombay in pursuit of trade and commerce, partly, as the port of Surtis was getting rather crammed. The Parsees privately invested heavily in the development of Bombay as a port, as did the Bohra Muslims from Surat, which one might argue set in motion the process of the evolution of Bombay and its emergence as the financial capital of India. Many of the extraordinary heritage structures of the city, schools, colleges, the stock exchange, reflect the diversity of this historical investment that arguably is rather negated in the symbolism of the word “Mumbai.”

“Be careful writing about this name change,” cautioned a friend in the city, “The Shiv Sena is very powerful.” The story of the Bollywood Director, Karan Johar, makes this point rather clearly. In his movie Wake Up Sid, Johar was called by the Shiv Sena, to apologise to Raj Thackeray, for having a character in the film refer to the city as Bombay, rather than Mumbai. Karan Johar responded to news reporters, who knows with what degree of gritted teeth, “I apologize if I have hurt anyone’s sentiments and have agreed to put a one-line disclaimer, stressing this right at the start of the film.” Former MP Kirit Somaiya, claimed that the BJP was instrumental in the renaming of the City from Bombay to Mumbai, commented, “Nobody has the right to refer to it by the old name when it has already been renamed as Mumbai,” he said. Raj Thackeray voiced his unambiguous authority on the matter by saying, “If any producer dares to rename this city and refer to it as Bombay, then my men will protest in typical MNS-style,” he warned.

Is there a wave of change for the city that is reflected in the symbolic change of name to Mumbai? There have been riots and communal difficulties in the past, but perhaps not on such a scale as recent years, that makes many people concerned that it is no longer the city it used to be, that Mumbai is not like Bombay, implying that this is necessarily a bad thing. Salman Rushdie, whose setting for many of his influential novels is the city, said, "The tolerant, open-hearted, secularised Bombay has gone. And I think this [new] Bombay is still interesting, it's still a great capital, it's still a huge buzzing metropolis. It hasn't lost that."

Inevitably, fears run deeply, that the city is becoming increasingly colonised by Hindu nationalist forces, claiming to speak for the ordinary Marathi person, or indeed the everyday elite. Personally, I find myself using both Mumbai and Bombay when talking about the city, for which I do not feel apologetic. In the depths of the south of city, one hears the name ‘Bombay’ reinforced more often than ‘Mumbai’, travelling north, into the somewhat more youthful area of Bandra, ‘Mumbai’ is proclaimed with more frequency, then heading towards the district of Juhu, the heartland of Bollywood, well it seems rather irrelevant when the city is largely referred to as “Sin City” anyway.

No matter how much Anoushka insists to her father that he calls her by her new name, she will always be Tracy and that’s what he’ll call her. Although I did notice when I last saw him that he asked if ‘Anoushka’ knew I was in the UK. Similarly, Mumbai will remain Bombay for many people, perhaps particularly so for the elderly, even if many have followed the Shiv Sena insistence that they change the appearance of their shop-front from “The Bombay Beauty Parlour,” to the “The Mumbai Beauty Parlour.” Some things, simple take time to transfer from the head to the body of the city. Thackeray seems to understand this, even whilst refuting its legitimacy and those that decry his leadership as simply ruthless, divisive to be feared and/or resisted, would do well to look a little closer, to mentalise, even if only as a powerful case study in transformational leadership, power of language that is straightforward and unambiguous.

When We Don't See Eye to Eye

2011-11-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

AT MUMBAI AIRPORT, on several occasions, I encountered a thoroughly annoying immigration official. He had a habit of spending an excessive amount of time, staring at each and every page of my passport, then occasionally looking up at me with a rather dour face, refusing it seemed, any real human contact. The usual two minutes with this official, the high-counter separating our two worlds, was stretched out to what seemed like an eternity, but was probably in fact an irritating six or seven minutes. He’d tilt his head to stare at the Hong Kong stamps as though lost in a daydream, change the angle of the passport to look at the South Africa stamp, and then ponder over the visa for Australia or somewhere or other. At one point I was convinced he was counting the rather numerous stamps for the Muslim country Morocco. What was I to make of him behaving in this tiresome way? Was I a potential drug smuggler, a terrorist or some other such threat in his eyes?

In the absence of any explanation as to why he was doing this, he became in a sense what Freud would call a blank screen, ready for me (us) to project my own image, my fantasy, my creation and interpretation of this man. “Suspicious bureaucrat,” I thought more than once, reducing him to a popular category of Indian. “Don’t form judgements,” a higher, less self-centred part of me insisted for the better, “Be curious as to why he is doing this.” Grudgingly, on about the fifth occasion, I asked him why. “You are the only person I see with a passport,” he told me. “Who was born on the same day, the same month and the same year as me. I will never see all the places in the world that you do. It was then, that our naked faces made eye contact. “I look at your passport, to see where you have been lately and imagine these places.”

I felt ashamed. I also felt that disturbing ethical pang, a matter of human rights, of who gets to share at the table of world travels, in this moment of recognition. I felt uncomfortable and yet nourished, although certainly not cosy in this proximity we shared. He was making an ethical claim on me.

This man of course, had up until this moment been simply a lazy invention of my own mind, kept like a stranger, neutral, at a safe murderous distance. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls the way we de-humanise the “Other,” reducing them merely to a category such as bureaucrat, as I so shamefully did, or by race, gender, nationality or some other such thing, totalization. Before my eyes, immigration man came to life, his humanity restored, just like the image emerging in a Polaroid photograph. Curiously, I now unthinkingly, without any effort, see every immigration official as potentially this man. For this important lesson in human contact, I remain grateful to the man who shared his humanity with me, and thus helped me regain my own.

At the same airport, after several days working pro-bono, where a group of us explored team strategies for preventing forest-fires in Rajasthan, a weighty Indian man, wearing a conspicuous amount of gold jewellery, bashed his trolley with some force, into the back of my legs (raised with good old English manners, I was of course hoping for an apology). I was clearly blocking this man’s way, as indeed were the people in the queue ahead of me. The second time he did this, politely, but firmly, I asked him to be careful. His response was to shout, “Go home, you British don’t rule India anymore,” and promptly scuttled off in the opposite direction. I was of course, like my immigration friend, dehumanised in this moment, collapsed into nothing more than a category of foreign rulers. What am I to make of why this man behaved in this way? What invention in my mind do I create of him? Do I follow my lazy temptation, to impulsively write him off as some sort of self-centred Punjabi? What might I say to him that would shake his perception of me out of this label that he chooses to define me by? What I would have to do of course to deepen our contact, break out of the box of confinement he has placed me in, to listen, to inquire, to connect, to share something about myself, in order to bring colour, to make my mark on the otherwise blank screen where he simply writes “colonial”. In my imagination, I want to say to him:

I am a little bewildered by why you want to label me as some sort of foreign ruler. This is not how I see myself, yet oddly I feel a hint of guilt when you say this, as though my Britishness makes me somehow complicit with the historical subjugation of the people of India. How peculiar that what you say should evoke guilt in me? I sense I want to defend myself as though I am on trial for the sins you perceive committed by others from my homeland, and to say to you that I am not guilty. Am I guilty, asks a voice in the back of my mind. I maybe someone from Britain, but I am more than that I want to declare; I am also a mother of a beautiful girl who is striking in her care others. Are you a father? I am a daughter of elderly parents for whom I feel the deepest love and respect. You are a son.

I want to ask you what has happened, whether something has hurt you and that is why you are so agitated. I notice that you hardly breathe when you shout. And I want to tell you that when I grew up, as a child, in a rather affluent suburb, there was a park close-by with swings where I got to know and became best friends with a Punjabi girl, who came from a poor estate from the other side of a main road. My parents and I swept up the broken window panes after British racists smashed through their living room window. Is it my guilt that wants to say this to you? And I want to say that my friend and I, together, crossed more than one divide.

Perhaps you judge me not just for the colour of my skin, but because I looked so grubby with my wild unruly hair, having spent half the night bear tracking, or perhaps because I am a professional woman (and maybe you don’t like those, I judge) or maybe you were simply having a bad day. I cannot know unless you share yourself with me. I want to say, I want to understand….

Levinas writes in his work on ethics, that “The tie with the Other is only knotted by responsibility,” and our responsibility begins by understanding the narrative, the version of the Other, beyond any simplistic invention that exists in the mind that may bear very little resemblance to the reality of the Other. Listening, the ultimate hospitality towards the Other, is exhausting, makes you sweat as Scott Peck describes in his book The Road Less Travelled. It disturbs your rigid views. We know, that distorted perceptions of the Other have real repercussions, sending a chill through whole communities breeding fear, human suffering and persecution across the globe. It is not simply a matter of us being nicer, but possessed of more of our natural humanity, our curiosity our intelligence to assume that we long to join with others, and a knowing, an acceptance, that to feel disturbed is to be human. “I wish I hadn’t got involved,” a bid for distance, the pain of ethical pangs, confusion, disturbance. Fear that real human contact is simply too intense, too alive.

To attempt to keep the other as the perpetual stranger will not rid us of inner disturbance. In Stephen Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he describes an everyday moment when he is sat alone on the subway train, and is joined by a man and his three unruly children. His intolerance grows as the children noisily running up and down the carriage, until he finally blurts out to the man “Can’t you control your children?” The forlorn looking man replies, “I don’t know how, we just left the hospital two hours ago, their mother’s just died.”

Levinas is an interesting philosopher of ethics of the encounter with the Other because he places firmly at the centre of liberal ideas an emphasis upon our responsibility towards the Other. What if the man in the car that you are waving your fist at and honking your horn at has just left the hospital? We may simply not know. To make possible that the Other be more than simply a stranger in such encounters, creates a rupture in our cosy self-containment, we become a little un-glued by their interruption, not so much by an internally, logically dictated command, but in Levinas’ s view, because we are actually compelled to serve the Other, that is a pre-cognisant part of being human.

I remember, some fifteen years ago or so, teaching a psychology seminar at the University on the subject of altruism. Why, the class discussed, did some people seem to go more out of their way for others, what is it about these people, some of whom would even risk their lives for others? Interestingly, one of the key findings is that these extraordinary people didn’t think, they simply acted, doing the right thing without any sort of internal engineering of the pros and cons.

The voice of the Other is of course at times the dissenting voice. In Richard Hackman’s research, he analysed the black box data from flight crashes, finding that invariably there was a dissenting voice that predicted the problem that then ensued. The voice was ignored. It was invariably from someone more junior in the flight crew, whose lowly status, bestowed fewer rights to speak and importantly, be heard, with dire consequences and not infrequently, the loss of lives. Similarly, having been asked to conduct a sort of ‘what’s going wrong’ exercise for a Swiss bank, that involved listening in face-to-face meetings, as an outsider, to the opinions of their staff around the globe, I presented my findings to the board in Zurich. I gave them one flip-chart page with the image of a bomb about to explode. I told them that in my view, their entry into the U.S. market, would fail for two reasons. Firstly, it was based on a form of underdog envy of the American firms, that created a psychological swing between grandiose beliefs in the bank’s collective ability and a profound sense of incompetence and secondly, a lack of actual skill, or understanding of the way the U.S. market works and a viable strategy. Sadly, I was both unable to influence them and my predictions proved to be rather accurate. Bang, almost. One of the board members, a year or two later told me that, “If you’d been a man, they’d have been listened to you.”

I’m rather inclined to think that we are never able to shirk our responsibilities to others, whether the ethical pangs come in our waking hours, or indeed take us hostage to insomnia. Perhaps our sleeping pills, our anxiety drugs, are really an attempt to numb the sense of persecution we feel, the very weight of our deep seated awareness of our ethical obligations towards others. Only, let’s be clear, the persecution is coming from ourselves, it’s an inside job. We keep others at a distance so we don’t get unhinged, confused, or overwhelmed. But what is the alternative? Levinas once wrote that you cannot murder someone, if you have to look the person in the eye. Perhaps therein lays all the answers.

Shedding Tears At The Movies: What Are We Really Crying For?

2011-10-20T22:40:00.000-07:00

BOLLYWOOD CINEMA produces a vast outpouring of escapist films that focus on the experience of the Indian who moves abroad, seeking fame and success, invariably to return to the preferred Indian homeland of family values. The films I am curious about, are those that focus on the experience of the outsider (of which I am one of course) who comes to live in the Bombay; how does this film capital of India, portray the city on screen, indeed the country and her legendary hospitality towards the stranger?

Typically, in the early sequences of these outsider in Bombay films, we meet a decent, if rather naïve soul, who arrives in the city from a village or overseas, with a small suitcase and bountiful optimism. The cameras locate us in the city, through shots of railway stations, black and yellow cabs, bustling anonymous crowds, the inevitable Gateway of India scene, mobs, gangs and the people who live on the streets. Bombay is invariably gazed upon by the newcomer as a place where anything is possible, in what appears an exciting cauldron of diversity, if somewhat disorderly metropolitan life. The Indian doctor from London, in the film Aamir, arrives looking rather dashing in his elegant Western suit, with a confident air about him as he struts through Mumbai airport. Within moments, in a dialogue with an immigration official, he quickly learns the harsh reality of the city’s prejudice against Muslims and a tale of the kidnapping of his family and terrorism ensues, that results in his death.
In Kalyug (2005), we meet Renuka, who arrives in Bombay from Jammu in Kashmir. Looking a little lost and forlorn at the railway station, as she waits patiently, sitting on her suitcase, her prayer beads in her hands as she recites the mantra Aum Namah Shivaya, (signifying she is indeed a Hindu not a Muslim). Of course in true Bollywood girl-meets boy form, she falls in love. Her affects are towards a family friend, Kunal, whose father, a Hindu pundit, was killed in an all too common Bombay train incident, a refugee who once fled to the city from terrorists in Kashmir. Renuka’s happiness, is as short-lived as her marriage to Kunal, when she discovers a ruthless pornography racketeer, has secretly filmed the couple’s love making on their wedding night and made it available on a website called indiapassion.com. She takes her own life, the degradation quite simply too unbearable for her, by throwing herself from a balcony at the police station to her death. We later learn that the pornography ring is headed up by a woman called Simi, a monstrously calculating character, (a bit of a drag queen looking character in a black gown and negligee), who simply measures the benefits of Renuka’s death, in terms of the improved ratings for the website, thanks to the press publicity.

If there is a psychological theme across all the movies we watch, it must surely be that they represent and negotiate some sort of loss for us– loss of the people we love, loss of innocence, loss of hope, loss of spontaneity, loss of freedom - and thus enable us to vicariously perhaps, negotiate our own psychic difficulties with such feelings at a safe distance. There are some fabulous Bollywood films that tackle loss in a highly dramatic way, such as Kal Ho Naa Ho, Mohabbatein and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehan. John Bowlby, perhaps the world’s leading expert on the psychological dynamics of loss, warned us, “There is a tendency to underestimate how intensely distressing and disabling loss usually is and for how long the distress and disablement commonly lasts.” Perhaps the unconscious pleasure at the movies is our working through of this, the vicarious and painful work of mourning. By forming conscious or unconscious identifications with the film characters – their struggles perhaps becoming ours, or our own projected onto them – there is the added pleasure that movies often offer neat wish fulfilment and sturdy conclusions, somewhat more elusive in our everyday lives.

The widowed husband in Kalyug negotiates the painful loss of his love and their life together, by embarking on a journey of retributive justice, to Zurich (interesting Switzerland often pops up in Bollywood cinema as a place where couples dance happily around trees) to seek out and overthrow the pornography racket that led to her death. By this time, we learn he has no other choice, as the Mumbai Police are corruptly involved in the pornography ring. Kunal tracks down Simi, the wicked female boss of the pornography business, who we learn is actually involved in the human trafficking abroad of poor Indian girls into prostitution. Gradually, Kunal forms a mutually empathic relationship with the bosses own daughter, Tanya and together, they expose and bring down this hideous sex industry. In a twist, rather like Arthur Miller’s play All Our Sons, (although in this case all our daughters) Tanya posts footage of herself and her lesbian girlfriend’s love-making on her mother’s pornography website. Simi, horrified at what her daughter has done, demonstrates her lack of empathy for anyone other than herself, typical of what we would term a person with a characterological disorder (think of a charming sociopath), incapable of dealing with any loss whatsoever, whether it is her loss of status, of her daughter, or importantly, her image in the eyes of others. She turns a gun on Kunal, as though attempting to murder the very reality she has of course created. But she fails, Simi, the monster, is shot dead, by her own daughter.

Freud, and here I am not sure I agree with him, seemed to suggest that there should be an ending to mourning, some sort of completion, in order to alleviate the onset of a state of melancholia. Kunal seems wiser, to know his loss will be with him as much a part his existence as the limbs of his body. But what does he do with that loss, what sort of creative conversion of pain might he be capable of? It is to the values of his homeland of Kashmir, to the life priorities that his father has bestowed on him through his lived example of caring for others. At the end of the film, Kunal tells us that even exacting revenge has not brought him peace. That he now truly understood what his father meant, "that the only way to remove pain from your heart, you must remove the thorns from the feet of others who are suffering.” So, he takes one of the girl he has helped escape from the degradation in Zurich into his care, in the City of Bombay, the place where he lost the very two people, he loved the most, his true love and his father.

The innocent hopefuls, in these films, in the midst of dirt, confusion, contamination, frequently find themselves exposed and vulnerable in a city at the hands of corruption, exploitation and manipulation, the dark side of the City’s mantra, “Anything is possible.” Understandably, they are unable to read the cross-cultural and codes, the darker intentions that are inclined to assume everyone is an opportunity to exploit, beneath the surface of appearance of kindnesses. Of course, the sort of vulnerability for women, or perhaps more accurately femininity in this City is horribly apparent. The hopeful’s nemeses, the dream-destroyers, come along, in various forms: the cruel villain, the feckless charmer, the out for himself chancer-come-gamesman. The police and authorities are often portrayed as collusive in crimes, in injustices and as villainous as the worst protagonists. The City, is therefore commonly portrayed as a place where there is nowhere to turn, no place of safety, no adequate rule of law, merely a dark hidden anarchy in the hands of the greedy and immoral, for whom human suffering accounts for little. It is a city that embraces the masculine and expels the feminine. The dynamics of all these things, the newcomer to the City only learns through wretched experiences. The title of the film Kalyug, might been interpreted as the Hindu myth, as the age of Kalyug, that speed, the enemy of reflection that will spread fantasy with such velocity that humans, in their pursuit of escape, will ultimately destroy themselves. Masculinity, out of control.

In Ram Gopal Verma’s recent film, This is not a Love Story, the innocent naive female arrives in the City, gazing at film posters of Aishwarya Rai with her fantastic ambitions to become a film star. After many failed auditions with odious film-directors, merely interested in exploiting her innocence and having sex with her, she finally succumbs, collapsing into the city’s presumed norms of how to make it in the film world. Her husband, on finding the Director in her bed, impulsively murders him. Allegedly, the film is based on a current legal case in Bombay, the results of the trial remain to be concluded.

Of course the hopeful who comes to the psychologist’s consulting room, perhaps wishing to create a more comprehensible arrangement of words to represent what they feel, is often living in an urban void of empathic company, willing to care enough and take the time to listen without judgement, or crass instructions and prescriptions. In the urban space, there are many beautiful watches, but often little time. The human urge for reparation is of course, then inevitably thwarted without true empathy. Kalyug is an exceptional film, for the depth of the empathic voices and states, which is set-up early in the film, when Kunal’s lawyer, sits alone with him, (think camera rolling slowly) and gently leans forward and simply asks him, “Tell me all about you..” Not a Love Story, on the other hand, jars through the very absence of such compassion, its portrayal of ruthless manipulation and self-interest, yet you know the camera, even if the characters are not, is compassionate. The film is effective and haunting for these very reasons.

Music, the ancient tonal sounds of India, the reverberations, the echoes of wailing and longing, is one of the most delightful elements of the more sophisticated Hindi and Bollywood films. If you don’t like this music, you won’t like Hindi films. Like the depths of the wordless unconscious, the true home of our dreams, it connects us with an earlier knowing of ourselves at a visceral bodily level, the place where all young feelings begin and live-on. Perhaps this is why we sometimes cry at the movies, our bodies understand our loses, even if we do not dare to risk finding the words to explain what is going on in ourselves. That pre-verbal body-hint is perhaps the young child part of ourselves willing us to deepen our understanding of what it is we are mourning for. Is it singing of our loss of a treasured one, of our innocence, or simply a loss of our capacity to care? And how do we lament the losses we have inflicted on ourselves, in our rush to focus on less worthy investments?

In the U.S. there are therapists who I gather do some sort of movie therapy. I imagine you explore not only what sort films you invest time in and perhaps why, but what specific elements of a movie grab at your emotions, at that young bodily self of yours. Is it when the lovers’ part, or someone is abandoned, or do you find yourself drawn to moments of reconciliation? Is it the act of retribution of injustice, or perhaps a moment of awakening, when a character learns the extent to which they have been hurt and manipulated? Is it when father and son, finally make amends and learn to love one another more fully? A Bombay client once told me he didn’t watch Hindi films, saying, “They just make me cry.” All the more reason to watch them, to know what needs comfort and attention one is aching for, beneath the tears.

Lately, I notice I feel unusually emotional when a character in a film, kindly and sensitively attends to the heart and soul of another, for no other reason than good old fashioned decency and respect. I don’t need a therapist to explore why I am drawn in this way. This is a city of excessive masculinity - by women, as well as men - of performative fakery, strategizing and manipulating of people, that seems increasingly to makes homeless the very heart of the India I love, her femininity, her care for others and her tender intimacy. These films, it seems to me, are essentially tender portrayals of how the city is killing-off the real foreigner – femininity itself. Kunal, in Kalyug, we know by the end of the film, will not allow that to happen to him, however painful that might be.

My Top Ranking Leadership Hero in Mumbai

2011-10-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

Extraordinary acts of leadership come from many sources, rarely in my experience, just from those with the most positional power. Over the years, any leadership coach is likely to develop a private little book, at least in the mind, of their top ranking leaders and today, I want to share with you about my top of the list guy in Mumbai.

But first, imagine for a moment, you are working in your team and after hours of arguing and debating, you finally agree on your plan of action. Then suddenly, from left-field, the CEO does a complete turnabout, reneges on the decision and starts to dictate an entirely different game-plan. What are you likely to do? Will you speak up, will you be silent, or will you do something else?

The psychoanalyst might suggest that it is worth exploring how as a child, you dealt with such turn of events, say at a family mealtime. What this hints at, is the unconscious link between your first team, i.e., your family, its unique culture, are likely to shape your leadership, especially in group moments. Back in your family or origins, did you for example, accept the injustice that your brother took all the cakes, perhaps because you felt you had no choice? Or did you stand up for your rights? Or even yell the house down, or perhaps appear to accept things and act out your anger a little later, in a perverse brand of sabotage, like putting a frog in his bed or something. For those who experienced their parents, i.e. authority, as figures you can never please, whatever you do, how is a child did you cope? Wander off alone perhaps withdraw at least in a visceral form of agitation even you mouth stayed firmly closed.

What you actually do now as an adult of course is what matters, being (hopefully) less entangled in the physical, childlike dependence and dynamics of authority, depends of course on the freedom with which you navigated your way towards adulthood. This involves those dreadful moments of awakening that you don’t always get your own way that you will like the rest of us, suffer losses. In psychoanalysis, this is understood as the “depressive position,” the difficult negotiation of loss of childhood, into adulthood and the trials and tribulations of independence.

I firmly believe that the challenges of group dynamics, ranging from the small business meeting, to the nation level negotiations, the challenges come from what is evoked in our first group in life, when we were very young, and in our new group, our desperate need to belong. It seems the world of groups is divided in two: we are wonderfully creative, truly present in the moment, or somewhat back in that family mealtime and most of us swing between the two, neither of us entirely one or the other.

A few years ago, observing a team like the one I described earlier, just as the CEO did is about-turn, I watched as the largely passive group of men, became utterly silent and pensive, jaws locked tight, as if the headmaster were stood in front of them with a threatening cane. Then finally, the regional head of Asia, who over the years became quite a hero-leader of mine, rose slowly to his full 6ft height, his chin reverently downwards and quietly said, "Just because my lord is not acting as a Lord, does not mean a Samurai should not act like a Samurai."

Immediately, the red-faced CEO apologised and returned to his earlier commitment as agreed. No dull language with all the creativity of a motorbike handbook, no more endless debating and time wasting. The verbal sword was on the table, a line was drawn. What is interesting about his man, as is with all higher levels of leadership, is that his actions were thoughtful, yet entirely based in the particular moment. He did not speak with his mind turned towards the next financial bonus round and what he would or not get. He did not wonder if he might lose his job, he just powerfully stayed connected to himself, trusting, as I know he does, in a higher faith that always supports truth and purpose.

When I shared this story with my teenage daughter Emily, that evening, she simply said, with a total lack of surprise, “Yeah mum, sounds like he’s not for sale,” as she continued to eat her Spaghetti Bolognese. If only in business, people would learn to speak as freely as kids. Interestingly, though, timing is again an important element of her response. In a sense, she is saying “not for sale right now.” The research on higher levels of leadership is bewilderingly contradictory. On the one hand it is saying “now”, this moment and on the other, thinks beyond this moment, beyond even your own lifetime perhaps.

When I was teenager, the targets of my hero worship, were David Bowie and the activist/playwright, George Bernard Shaw. Both were plastered on the walls of my bedroom. David and George, an odd pair you might think, but on reflection now, I see the common thread; both willing to do something unexpected with words, to create a new story, create movement in the cul-de-sacs of commonplace speaking. Take these Bowie words for instance (it’s Changes, so sing along if you know it): So I turned myself to face me/ But I've never caught a glimpse/ Of how the others must see the faker/I'm much too fast to take that test. Or George Bernard Shaw’s humour: Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

My top ranking leadership hero in Mumbai, head and shoulders above all others is Madhav Subrahmanyam. Madhav is from Bombay, and was recently voted by the UK Guardian newspaper, as one of the top 50 individuals in the world, most likely to save the planet. This leader, for the last 7 years or so, has been working relentlessly to protect the tiger from complete extinction. 100 years ago, there were around 100,000 tigers; today there are less than 3,500. As Bittu Sahgal, one of the leading environmentalist’s in India puts it, “By protecting the tiger, we are protecting India's forest, and we end up protecting our water sources. It’s not just that we say there are no tigers and if there were tigers that would be fine, it’s not that. It’s symptomatic of something much larger, it’s across the world.” The main threat to the tiger, according to Madhav, is humanity: “If humanity will only be humane to a human, then we are using our brains in the worst possible way. Instead of helping other species, we are only trying to advance ourselves. We are encroaching on other species and destroying them.”

Madhav is 13 years old.

As with most extraordinary leaders, not only do Madhav's actions stand out from the crowd, but his use of language, his way of speaking makes you alert, engaged, you just want to listen. You want to know what is coming next, when he speaks, it's vibrant, alive, just like the words of our Samurai man, earlier in this piece it is the sound of transformation.

Madhav started his fund-raising when he was about 8 years old, by first polishing shoes, washing babies (“No nappy changing please,” I remember on his signboard) and arranging flowers, for a few rupees. Compelled by a passion to do more, he went on to start the Madhav Tiger Fund. Encouragement and good quality attention in Madhav’s life, came from Bittu Sahgal (whoops, add another hero to my list), who is also editor of Sanctuary Magazine and runs the educational programme Kids For Tigers, where the two met. Madhav was concerned, whether poachers or the people who protect the animals, the wildlife wardens, get paid more (Poachers sadly of course.) “It’s obvious,” Madhav says, “If there is more money in poaching, that’s what people will do.” So to rectify this, Madhav raises money, and puts the funding towards the schooling of the wildlife warden’s children and providing financial incentives when the wardens go the extra mile to protect specific wildlife.

When Madhav was 9 years old, he played a key role in our film Inside India’s Forests, produced for the Conservation Action Trust in Bombay. The gang of us who made the film were Lizzie de Planta, Pavan Sukhdev, Debi Goenka, Bittu Sahgal and I. Madhav had just raised about 15 thousand U.S. dollars, from making and selling tiger quilts with his mother.

The importance of how the effects of such early attachments in young children’s lives create the sort of adults we become was the subject of a week-long conference at UCLA. Amongst a sea of scientists and psychologists, the Dalai Lama addressed us on the importance of love. In response to asking the audience if there were any questions, a bright young girl, aged about 10 years old I guess, asked him ”Why are you so happy?” He replied, “It is simple, I had a very nice mummy.” The other heroes who deserve our respect are of course, Madhav’s parents, who with enormous dedication have nurtured their son to become a person who truly lives beyond merely his own self-interest, for all species not just humans. His mother, Pavitra Rajaram’s parenting philosophy is as clear as her son’s sense of purpose. She says:

When children see things the way nature intends them to be, they understand that

that's the natural state and that is something as parents we can do very, very easily. Don't take your children to the zoo, don't show them animals behind bars, don't take them to the circus and see elephants and lions jumping through hoops. That's not the way nature intended them to be. Take them to the forest, show them the trees…

Whatever is shaped in childhood, largely by us parents, is our ultimate legacy to the future of this planet. In the boardrooms of tomorrow, we will either have adults with the courage to do the right thing, and stand by deeply held beliefs, knowing what those might be of course, or those for whom my daughter would say, are simply “For sale.” If our children learn from us, that all they need to do, to get what they want, is demand like a toddler, to ignore the views of others, whether it be a person, a tiger or an ant; that is perfectly normal to simply buy whatever they want, or mindlessly destroy something else in order to get it, whatever species that maybe, human or otherwise, we ultimately have put our planet up for sale. Children are oddly wise, they pay attention to what we do, not what we say.

And yet, there is Madhav and others like him, who have a profound sense of personal identity, a strong compass of right and wrong to help him navigate through life's grey areas, from strong loving attachments with others, rather than merely towards possessions and other kinds of ownership. There are also many children, who simply need the care of others to flourish in thw way Mahdav has. Who knows where his incredible passion, his care and his determination will lead. In an interview for Sanctuary magazine, Madhav says, “I want to make an impact on the world’s carbon footprint by working actively to reduce it. I want to do this by making changes in my own life and using my voice to help others make the change too. I want to be a director and use film as a way of exploring and communicating my thoughts and ideas.”

Bittu Sahgal, Madhav’s mentor, has honourably dedicated his life not only to protecting nature and educating children. Advising a young child who was concerned about deforestation, he encouraged her to stand-up and speak, saying that the trees "Simply do not belong to the adults who cut them down. Its like adults are stealing your pocket money, or your school bag, or anything else that belongs to you, just because they are more powerful." Most importantly, he truly listens to a massive proportion, literally 100’s of 1000s of India's young people, encouraging and really empowering them to have a real voice. Many of whom started out in the Kids for Tiger Club and have gone onto some fantastic occupations in the journalism, film, and conservation.

When Madhav’s mother says, we need to consider, “When children see things….,” she reminds us to think deeply about what our kids are actually exposed to, what they feel, what they think. Do our urban children merely see shopping malls, computer games, manicured gardens and expensive hotels, or are they actively nourished by natural living systems, by rivers, by forests and thus truly begin to learn the interconnectedness of all things? What happens right now with leaders of the future will ultimately shape who they become, as well as, their capacity to care for others and all our species. This is the peculiar reality of acts of transformational leadership: it is both completely in the present and yet into the future, beyond one’s own lifetime.

Perhaps this is why Madhav can teach us that saving the tiger actually means saving ourselves. That makes him my leadership hero.

Resources for this article:

There is a great animation about India, the work of Madhav & Bittu by Claus Lundin on youtube, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN9S1JVQzAQ

Sanctuary Magazine Asia, go to: http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/index.php

Kids for Tigers, go to: http://www.kidsfortigers.org/

Conservation Action Trust, go to: http://www.cat.org.in

Fear & Freedom in the City

2011-09-20T03:00:00.000-07:00

Our relationship to urban spaces like Bombay seems as fraught with complexity as human relationships. To simply walk around the city, one encounters endless artefacts of Empire: Victoria Terminus Train station that vaguely resembles St Pancras Station in London, the Willingdon Club with its wood panelled rooms and grandfather clocks. All juxtaposed of course, with squalor and slums, then the cool, sharp gleaming new constructions in the metropolis, these imperialist spaces, allegories of Englishness live on in the city, as a reminder of its former colonial identity. Bombay is perpetually alive with colour and sound: the street sweeper in her dazzling orange and yellow sari, the Bollywood song whistled by the boy riding his bike, the kissing couples along Marine Drive, hiding under bright umbrellas, one adorned with jolly green cartoon cats and frogs, another all the colours of the chakras. It is a crowded City, reeking of the ghastly smells of humanity that compete with delightful aromas of the food from the street sellers.

The Banyan Tree continues to appear to emerge triumphantly from the concrete, bending across the road as though reaching out to the Bougainvillea on the wall opposite. Beneath her, is the quaint family owned café, a resounding tribute to the fact that the Starbuck’s invasion, with its foul froth hasn’t succeeded in colonising the City in the way it has London. Bombay, is above all else, a city that celebrates freedom and complexity, decrying any easy sort of classification. If I am to live in any urban space in the world, I’d prefer to be here. London, is simply too grey by comparison, too riddled with checks and balances, signs and rules, disembodied voices that tell the presumably stupid public how to behave, the weighty commitment to security and monitoring the populace, at the expense of human liberty. Canary Wharf, the financial hub of London, has to be one of the most soulless, monitored places on the planet, a wretched example of the cold excesses of contemporary masculine design. “They’re not a happy lot,” the black cab driver told me, “they never smile in the cab on the way to Canary Wharf.” In Bombay, eccentricity is prized and obsessive compulsive cleanliness is not. There are relatively few rules and yet given the population of 20 million plus - perhaps due to the fact we aren’t endlessly warned to be fearful and on the lookout- is remarkably free of excessive violence. As a woman walking alone at night here, I most certainly feel infinitely safer than London.

Invariably, as I have done here, we lazily attempt to classify and compare and contrast the characteristics of our cities, just as we do with people: good/bad, kind/cruel, easy/difficult, exciting/boring, or masculine/feminine perhaps. Mumbai is often described as the cosmopolitan relative of New York and Delhi, a cousin of Washington. Mumbai is without a doubt, highly creative soil for writers and artists alike. The City is also a seducer for those of us with curiosity, a desire to navigate around our experiences, however difficult those feelings may be and find our way through; make some sort of order out of it, on the inside at least. Just when you think you have lost your foreign footing altogether and consider heading for the nearest airport leaving her for good, she seems to beckon you to stay, with her simple kindnesses, and chance encounters that spring up with kindred spirits. One of those for me recently, was with a spirited film-maker, from Juhu, the Bollywood favourite residential spot in the north of the City. I asked her what mattered to her most. “Freedom,” she resolutely replied. “Freedom,” she repeated, only this time her eyes with a striking stare. In that moment, it is as though she was the voice of the city.

The Bombay we all know has a personality and like all relations with other living beings, exist somewhere in that space between ourselves and the other. My fantasy of Bombay is not yours. I am what you make of me, just as you are what I make of you: something that occurs in the relationship of translation, in the air between us. The Bombay I know, often seems to flaunt her trait that enjoyment as an end in itself isn’t something sinful; as though she maybe the Gateway of India, but not the Gateway of Puritanism. On other days I notice her ingenious character, when I see someone use a car battery on her head to run a cast-off cassette player to listen to her favourite Bollywood tune. At times, she thoroughly irritates me, as she echoes the broader world personality from Boston to Brighton to Bombay that wealth provides the opportunity to be utterly greedy, useless and irresponsible. Yet the huge Mercedes always stops for the cow in the road. Sometimes, I want to say to her, “I’m leaving for the beach in Goa, you’re just too hectic,” and I do and then she woos me back. She can seem characterless, when mimicking that dreadful trait the British left behind, of saying ‘Fine’ when you ask how she is (no one who cares really believes her by the way).

Yet I feel sympathetic, when she insists on chattering about buying land, given she’s heaving with about the same population as Australia. I wonder what she does, when nobody is looking and whether she sheds a tear that so many of the birds she used to love have left. Or that through her eyes, whether her family seem like little bugs living in the crevices of towering concrete monstrosities and does she at times, feel as a mother does and say “at least they are all safe.” And how burdened does her body feel, given that has had more surgery inflicted upon her than Michael Jackson. I want to ask her how worried she is about her health, and what she thinks of the doctors opinion, like that of the environmentalist Debi Goenka, that she is close to breaking point and collapsing into the sea under the weight of cement.

And if she is speaking to us, I want her to tell us if she feels we are we listening to her? I want her to teach us what she needs before it is too late. If she is indeed our muse, we must remember that she is also a living system, with her own nature and needs; the alternative perspective warrants a vandalism of neglect. And I don’t want to hear us resist her with that convenient platitude, “But this is India,” a few syllables short of saying frankly I don’t care.

I want her to hear that I am grateful to her for her hospitality, for the way she allows people flock to her, in search of a livelihood from villages and cities, for how she never turns away a soul in need, always finding a space for her new guests, even if it is as simple as a small corner of a pavement.

I want to know her better.

There are times here in Bombay, especially for the migrant, when we all feel more than a little out of place, yet ‘in-place’, is perhaps to risk being frozen in time, caught on a security camera, obeying instructions we are so accustomed to, that we have stopped noticing them. Certainty and predictability is a risky business to cling to too tightly, order and control a menacing force against the spirit of feeling alive. I think Bombay has a little more faith in her citizens to do the right thing, and perhaps London might learn something from her by making human freedom a more central in urban considerations. Of course identity or indeed sanity necessitates some continuity in the threads that run through our lives that provide a sense of who we are, as we migrate and experience new places with such diversity as Bombay. But perhaps we get to know that ‘who we are’ in more profound ways by being at least some of the time, out of place. This third way of hybridity that Homi Bhabha, another writing star from Bombay, calls forth requires us to go beyond the reductive dichotomies of good/bad, old/new, familiar/foreign, inside/outside, evoking the enormous potential of another way that celebrates, rather than merely derides the turbulence of complexity. Of course, such transformations (which they inevitably are) are profoundly difficult, and disorientating as well as enriching, testing our very sense of reality. We just need to pay attention to the signs inside ourselves. Then hang on in there and enjoy the journey.

The Importance of Lying Fallow

2011-09-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

BREAK OUT OF YOUR SHELL that your wings may grow/Let yourself fly. These are the words of the Sufi poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi, from his poem Ramadan, a timely poem for Eid, as across the city, Muslim men and women break their fast.

Poetry, if we dare, allows us to find the rhythms inside ourselves.

The psychoanalyst, Masud Khan wrote a delightful essay, entitled Lying Fallow on the importance of something more than, something otherwise, than being active and busy searching for answers to the human conundrums we face in our lives. Lying fallow is not to be confused with laziness - but to say the game is up - the unimaginative path we are treading needs rejuvenation, our quick solution perhaps a sign that something is wrong, not all as it seems. ‘Fallow’, in the Oxford English Dictionary, means to be “left for a period without being sown”, nothing going on, no ploughing of ourselves, “in order to restore its fertility”, and perhaps profoundly important to our hectic, consumerist ways, “to avoid surplus.” To lay fallow is to subvert excess.

Psychoanalysis has always cautioned us to be mindful, to rest a while, cautioning us that our desire for something maybe an escape for something that matters more. This is not to say one must think-through the leaps that may lead us to evolve, like a carefully organized balance sheet of credits and debits, but to sit quietly, leaning if you like, against the wooden signpost at the crossroads, allowing the rays of the sun or even the rain to touch us. If we’re on the run, then perhaps what we are running from is deeply important. “It aches in my chest though,” says a troubled client, “It really hurts,” as he holds back his attempt to leap for his Blackberry. In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I think he is saying, as well as many other things, that that there is no greater loss, than the loss of pain.

When we escape, what we run to may temporarily assuage the deadness or turbulence (pain?) inside of us, only for us to find we are no happier than when we started out, or perhaps weighed down with even more troubles. Gandhi not only led the freedom struggle of India’s independence, but encouraged a nation to value the ancient Indian wisdom of contemplation and emptying the mind of litter. He allowed himself to go fallow, trusting, having faith, that answers would emerge along with the repetitive rhythms of spinning. Each Friday, he spent the day in silence, as part of his uncluttering, with a small notepad on a string around his neck, for any urgent communication.

Like all extraordinary leaders he evoked in the collective, a call to higher consciousness, not merely through his actions, but with his tenderness with words. He was exceptionally talented in his use of language, (both well-read and a writer of course), our poet of non-violence, who seemed to know our deepest human longings is for better words, richer sentences that we pray, carry us along a more loving path. It would seem every nation knows, even as they load their rifle-cartridges, his exquisite words, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Such a simply collection of words, sitting like friends, next door to one another, create a very powerful image, but only is it through the patience of lying fallow, in whatever unique way for each one of us that might be, do his words perhaps awaken something beyond our commonplace retributive ways.

Rudyard Kipling was of course born in Bombay. Remember his poem, “IF you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…” Poetry asks us to stop in our tracks. For me, to read and write poetry since childhood, is to navigate the contours of myself, to experience the world more deeply and strengthen a voice inside that whispers quietly and longs to speak of that which may be unpopular or against the tribal mindset. Poetry calls us to go fallow. W.B. Yeats took up residence in my heart when I was about eleven years old: Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths/Enwrought with golden and silver light/The blue and the dim and the dark cloths/Of night and light and the half light/ I would spread the cloths under your feet. Then later, feeling perhaps a little weary in the corporate machinery, I found Pablo Neruda: It so happens I’m tired of being a man/It so happens I enter clothes shops and theatres/ withered, impenetrable like a swan made of felt/ sailing the water of ashes and origins.

Poetry, often asks us to think of others, to go beyond our selfish conundrums, to take a moment for: all those motherless children, weeping/In the shells of broken homes, are no more (by the poet James O’Sullivan). Here in the cement jungle called Mumbai, the poet Narayan Surve in Mumbai, asks us to take a moment to see the city through his eyes. He seems to ponder about the lives of those who remain colonised in this metropolis, long after the British have left:

My father withered away toiling

So will I, and will my little ones?
Perhaps, they too face such sad nights
Wrapped in coils of darkness.
My heart wells up.
Seeks an outlet;
For it was my father
Who sculpted your epic in stone.

Words are our intoxication; they have the power to create war, to deepen love and to tear us apart. They live-on inside us, past the date of delivery, as memories of ourselves, shuddering in their wake or stroking our bodies, or stabbing in sleep, or healing those squatter ghosts. The Yorkshire Poet Ted Hughes, published the Birthday Letters, a collection of his life with wife Sylvia Plath, Written after her death, many poems were his attempt to commune with his wife, such as his poem, The Visit:

Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama …
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog’s legs touched by electrodes.

Poetry often commands us to step back from the drama of how we are living, for instance in one Hughes magnificent crow poems: Old Crow/Flying your black bag of jewels/From chaos to chaos/Probe hard for those maggoty deaths/Which poison our lives. To lay fallow, to allow something inside for a while, it is an act of empowerment; a refusal, a resistance against the order of the commonplace, the bombardment by the ugliness of the same old, same old words. To sit and wait for new words on the inside to emerge, to write original stories, is to allow that hidden part of us to speak, our hidden self to emerge. One of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems, written about his rather ambiguous relationship with Kadambari, his sister-in-law, is delicious to savor as the Bombay monsoon rains pelt down, blocking the cement high-rises from the view outside my window:

I could speak to her on a day like this,
on a day when it rains as heavily.
You can open your heart on a day like this –
when you hear the clouds as the rain pours down
in gloom unbroken by light.

Those words won’t be heard by anyone else;
there’s not a soul around.
Just us, face to face, in each other’s sorrow
sorrowing, as water streams without
interruption;
it’s as if there’s no one else in the world.

Without new patterns of words, there are no novel steps to take us on more enchanting journeys. It starts with taking that vulnerable little child inside us, in the embrace of our own care; that tiny creature that just wants tribal approval and is worn out by the same journeys, that leaves the same grooves and the monotonous depth of compulsive living. To lay fallow is to dare silence. Who hasn’t felt polluted by the people we encounter, their demands, especially in an urban space like Mumbai, the cement jungle infiltrating us, the tiresome language of go-getting and greed and grasping? And then a moment of poetic beauty on the streets of the city, as a chuckling grubby street baby, is embraced by her smiling mother, who is no taller than a healthy ten year old.

The poet has to wait in silence, in spaciousness. She knows the struggle inside is part of this. Not only does poetry open the door to lying fallow, but it gets in between more than one closed mind. When two minds close, there is usually an argument over words, each claiming a better story or a deadly indifference. The poet O’Sullivan writes: Incapacitated by a resentment we could not name/ We walked the streets as actors in separate frames/And all the while, the festival of eyeless beggars/Taking turns to play Homer to our epic-starved lives. Besieged by anger, deafness, intolerance, a longing to run away, we turn away from what it might mean to turn towards and seek-out new words. My dearest friend Chandra, who has a profound tenderness in her heart, loves this poem, as I do, by Sheenagh Pugh The Bereavement of the Lion-Keeper:

Who stayed, long after his pay stopped,

in the zoo with no visitors,
just keepers and captives, moth-eaten,
growing old together.

Who begged for meat in the market-place

as times grew hungrier,
and cut it up small to feed him,
since his teeth were gone.

Who could stroke his head, who knew

how it felt to plunge fingers
into rough glowing fur, who has heard
the deepest purr in the world.

Who curled close to him, wrapped in his warmth,

his pungent scent as the bombs fell,
who has seen him asleep so often,
but never like this.

Who knew that elderly lions

were not immortal, that it was bound
to happen, that he died peacefully,
in the course of nature,

but who knows no way to let go

of love, to walk out in sunlight,
to be an old man in a city
without a lion.

As I allow this poem to seep into my being, I wonder why we leave so much that matters to us, until it is too late. When the people we love have gone. When we have deferred all the kindnesses we once sincerely intended – queued up now along with the other reminiscences of things past - days we now know may never come again, through choices we weren’t aware we had ever even made. Like those youthful dreams for ourselves that struggle to break through, and we occasionally fall down and sometimes we get right back up, if we allow the field of ourselves to go fallow. We fail, perhaps, like the Mint, of Seamus Heaney’s poetic garden simply “through our disregard.”

W.H. Auden, the poet once said that poetry makes nothing happen. I wonder if he meant that only we, ourselves, can make something happen. Or that nothing appears to happen, because everything is happening. Perhaps a few moments of lying fallow, will work it all out.

States of Democracy: The Freedom to Think Otherwise

2011-08-24T00:32:00.000-07:00

“THE MIND ALWAYS HAS THE POWER to outstrip injustice and say I've had enough", wrote Rosa Luxemburg, reminding us that revolutionary moments always begin inside ourselves. World history is of course the history of revolutions of the mind, whether they result in Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the American segregated bus, or Anna Hazare, now in day nine of his fast to protest against corruption in India.

Rosa Luxemburg is an important thinker for our revolutionary times. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, a 600 page collection of intimate correspondence to friends, lovers and colleagues, has just been published this year and I wholly recommend them. They are passionate calls by a utopian revolutionary, with her feet firmly planted in the ground of clear thinking. What is exciting about her work is the way she weaves political, the psychological dynamics and our personal actions on the path of political transformations. Her writings on how the oppressed, become the oppressors are profoundly important for our times. Exploring the nature of democracy, she writes "With rampant inequality democracy is a hoax". I’m wondering if she were alive today, what she would make of the anti-corruption movement that is spreading across India, what her extraordinary thinking ability might bring to the discussions.

Any evolutionary imperative, in India or otherwise, begins with human struggle. A revolutionary moment, whether to stand up simply for our individual human rights, or indeed for those of others, means to take a risk. The ultimate risk is what degree of uncertainty we can tolerate inside ourselves in the ebb and flow of change. Luxemburg wrote to her lover, “One must constantly carry out anew an inner review, or inventory of oneself, in order to re-establish order and harmony.” But it may be a call to ask ourselves in this inventory, what sort of abuses are we accepting as okay, simply because they are common and familiar.

The Gandhian traditions of this non-violent protest, exemplified by Hazare and his followers, are grounded in the belief that when you are governed by unjust laws it is your duty to obey higher laws of our common humanity. Anna Hazare says that he is willing to die for the cause of a corrupt-free India. Many are concerned that if he dies, India will have a blood-bath of some sort, although there are many claims that due to the suicide laws here, he will be force-fed, something even the British didn’t do to Gandhi.

A revolution is the idea that ‘freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Many of the people of India are demanding a new birth, one they can mark on the Indian calendar, a second Independence Day of the country, only from their own, rather than British oppression. This spontaneous agitation, which has been gathering increasing momentum over the last few months, demands greater participation, equality, as well as respect. Respect, Richard Sennett, insists is that compassion for others is insufficient, without some kind of action or deeds that embody the performance of actually changing things. Respect for the right to peaceful protest, was precisely what Anna Hazare and the India Against Corruption movement was asked for. Initially they were refused.

The government responded to the beginning of Hazare’s fast, quoting various bureaucratic reasoning, by imprisoning this humble elderly man. The opposition party, the BJP, shared their outrage at the restrictions on public protests, saying they were unheard of even during the period of British rule and demanded "bold decisions" to tackle corruption. Hazare, in a creative act of leadership, when given the right to leave the prison, flummoxed the leadership by refusing to leave until convinced that his protest at Ramlila Park, Delhi, could peacefully go ahead. He held them to ransom by their own bureaucratic musings. With the appeal of a digitally-recorded motorbike handbook, the political leadership of the country seems unable to go beyond a rhetorical of the marketplace, as though appealing to citizens as distant objects rather than the human beings they are. Manmohan Singh, was quoted as saying “All concerned individuals should convey their concern on the (Lokpal) bill to their representatives in Parliament and to standing committee.” It sounded rather like the automated messages from those annoying call-centre in Bangalore.

A further source of leadership instability in India, are the rumours that the empress, Sonia Gandhi is having treatment for cancer in the U.S. One must ask whether the political power has the strength to weather more storms, should she in fact be seriously ill. Singh looks dejected. It’s painful watching him weather the onslaught of attacks by the opposition in parliamentary debates that resemble a free-for-all in an English boarding school. Leadership, for which there is of course no agreed definition, and for which one’s own values are deeply embedded in our preferred construction, has to at least involve two things, the ability to: firstly, to build the architecture of democracy, community and secondly, to energise that community in a way that motivates, is reasonably predictable and contains anxiety. There may be a developing architecture of democracy in India on the outside, but this must go hand in hand with some degree of trust in both the ability and the true intentions of the governing team.

I find it difficult not to see two India’s; the first is the India experience through the eyes of those of us who live here and secondly, the India through the many of the writings of the NRI lense abroad. The lived experience of the effect of corruption, the real human abuses, the denials of a right to human dignity are wearing on even the most robust people. For many, the dissonant effect is to simply put one’s head down, pay a bribe, turn a blind eye and get on with one’s life, flattening one’s energy to a point that the stench of pollution competes with an insidious aroma of depression. But I can’t imagine Jesus, or Gandhi, or Mandela or Luther King, folding their arms and saying, “well, you know, the thing is, there’s nothing you can do, you just have to ignore it.”

The alternative for people living here is to engage actively and refuse any act of oppression however small or great. Rosa Luxemburg, an activist all her life, murdered at the hands of would-be Nazi’s in 1919, was relentless in her passionate fight against injustice or abuse of power. She refused to give up, despite, as she put it, “knowing the gnawing and painful, but creative spirit of social responsibility.” For some Indian’s abroad, I think it may be all too easy and understandable emotionally, to confuse the revolution in one’s own life or in the NRI community as a whole, with revolutionary transformations in India. One does not equal the other. The revolution of the self-made man does not make for community, nor does it necessarily change the lives of the poor.

India may be the 9% poster-child of Asian growth, but that growth is profoundly in the hands of a few and some argue, at the expense of democracy. “Why is every 4^th India dying of hunger?” asks the activist Vandana Shiva. “What about the third of Indian children who are categorised as ‘wasted’, who will never grow-up to be physically and mentally healthy?” The biggest wall, she says, that needs to come down is the wall of illusion: the illusion that the more money that moves around, (didn’t we learn our subprime lessons), the better off we all are, in some elusive trickling-down effect. A former physicist, she criticises this illusion for its failure to account for the vector, the direction in which money flows to destroy or build. Campaigning for the rights of farmers, she shares her outrage on many global platforms, of the compulsory purchase of farmers land to build townships in the country. In a recent talk, she described the building of a town outside Delhi, stating that farmers were forced to give up their livelihood and their land, contributing to an ever increasing suicide rate amongst farmers. Their land sold through government and business, finally sold to the developers at a price inflated 200,000%. This sort of profit in the vector did not flow to the farmers, just towards the hands of big business.

No changing Lokpal Bill, however sophisticated, will adequately address these sorts of issues. It will not bring farmers suicide rates into the GDP calculations. That is not to decry the protests in anyway, for all revolutions are momentary movements, important moments, that create unpredictable shifts in consciousness. One must also though, retain as Luxemburg put it, “the freedom to think otherwise”, to think critically beneath the dizzy excitement of the endless coverage of Hazare’s fast, on the Times Now TV channel. At one point, it resembled a fantastic, twenty-four hour long ‘will he die or won’t he’, Bollywood movie, directed by Yash Chopra with a Shahrukh Khan news-anchor. Dare we think, or articulate, or discuss, that laudable as these protests are, we are asking those some people to act entirely against their own interests? They know they can govern with decency, they knew this already.

It’s easy to say don’t bribe the policeman when he asks you for 100 rupees when you fail to stop at a red light. But when you learn that he had to pay a 300,000 rupee bribe to a senior policeman, to get his job as a junior policeman, that his village mother pawned her jewellery to raise this, and he wants to pay her back, we begin to touch merely one layer beneath the surface of the deeper and deeper and deeper rooted nature of corruption in India. Such “Freedom of thought is integral to democracy”, as Luxemburg puts it; no matter what the machinations of the mass-mind are demanding we don’t dare to think at all. Psychoanalysis adds something important here, reminding us that the mass-mind is a place of non-thought, where to think “otherwise”, is to risk affecting the group’s profound source of self-esteem derived essentially from similarity of its members, not diversity of thought or members.

These are revolutionary times that must be understood in the wider global context of citizen agitations around the world for calling for reforms. When we contextualise what is happening here, with important awareness of what is occurring more broadly and how it interlinks with the wider call that capitalism and democracy, hasn’t delivered on all our illusions of what it can deliver, we can be somewhat more measured in our planning and thinking. India is part of a growing global refusal to accept dictatorship, abuse of power apathetic, self-interested leadership, demanding instead, the right to fair and reasonable governance. We are witnessing a lack of trust in government and corporate leadership, with widely held concerns that Roosevelt aired many years ago, that when business and government go to bed together what we are likely to get is fascism.

Of course, there is nothing more degrading or less dignifying, to experience abuse of power in a corrupt society. Democracy, whether on a national or intimate level, entails moments between people, where one “Does not own, control or master the other. It lets the other be,” wrote Luxemburg. Each of us, has to locate within ourselves how we relate to what we believe is fair, or right or just and act accordingly. Every moment of our lives is potentially a democratic moment or one that seeks through some sort of authoritarianism, to deny us our human liberty. I like what India’s spiritual guru, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, reminded me recently, that when you are caught between conflicting imperatives, always choose the one that is in the longer term interests.

Luxemburg wrote, “I am of the opinion that one should, without trying to be too crafty or racking one’s brains too much, simply live the way one feels is right and not always expect to be repaid immediately with cash in hand.” Her friend said of her, “The only point of the cause for her was to increase the human quotient of happiness.” Surely, that is the whole point of these revolutionary times.

Violent Innocence

2011-08-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

BOMBS IN BOMBAY and blasts in Britain, a smart capitalist might see this as wise time to buy a few shares in a window replacement company. The rest of us might dare to think more radically in trying to understand what all this sort rage and anarchy is about, beyond the convenient and dismissive rhetoric of thugs and terrorists.

On my recent flight to the UK, I sat next to a charming Englishman, an Economist who shared with me a number of observations about Britain. He observed, he told me, that since the credit crunch, that devastated the livelihoods of so many people, there were more high-end cars in the hedge-fund streets of Mayfair in London than ever. He added that it appeared the gulfing divide between the haves and have-nots appears to be growing. He also told me that he feels there is an underlying anger and despair in Britain about the future and the bail-out of the banks, did little to help the plight of individuals who had lost jobs, businesses and homes. Within three days of telling me this, the riots broke out across London, then Birmingham, then Manchester.

Struck by the similarity of a conversation I had on the way to the airport, I tell the Englishman, that interestingly, a friend who has lived in Bombay for many years sensed there was more anger brewing in urban India. I shared with him that my friend had said, “There is a tangible tension in the City that you didn’t use to feel,” he observes. “We have these great lifestyles, with drivers, cooks and servants, who we all get so cheaply because they live in slums. It can’t go on forever.” The Englishman asked me whether I felt India might join the revolutionary ranks of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia in demanding greater justice from political leadership and the state. However without a strong social movement against injustice, I shared that it seems unlikely soon.

The book he occasionally glances at, possessively in my lap, is the stunning collection of essays by Jacqueline Rose, just published this year by Duke. I explain to him with the passion of a nine year old Spice Girls fan, “She is an extraordinary woman who brings the full force of psychoanalytic thinking to such a daring range of topics as the politics of Israel and Palestine, Suicide Bombers, Feminism, Peter Pan, Sylvia Plath, the South African Peace and Reconciliation process.”

What is very clear about Rose’s approach to mobs, gangs and terrorists, whether in Britain or Bombay, is that we are madly off the mark, possibly deluded citizens, if we lazily presume this sort of phenomena is merely about individual pathology, or some sort of essentialist diatribe about certain religious or class based groups in society. Tariq Ali, in his London Review of Books blog, reminds us of the singular event, the police shooting of an unarmed citizen, the tipping point of the riots in the UK, happened “Because grievances build up over time, because when the system wills the death of a young black citizen from a deprived community, it simultaneously, if subconsciously, wills the response.” He also adds that for the 1000 deaths of young men in custody in Britain, since 1991, not one single policeman has been charged, despite overwhelming evidence.

What Roses applies, is that without bringing into the field of politics the difficulties and challenges of the inner life, not merely in an individualistic way, but in terms of the collective inner life that shapes politics and world events, healthy, sustainable, transformation will not occur. Drawing upon Freud, in her essay on Mass Psychology, she warns any country to be aware that:

“If a culture has not got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture that their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share.”

Introducing Rose at a recent talk she gave at the London Review of Books, Paul Myerscough rather magnificently laid out the kinds of ways in which she asks us to think the unthinkable into politics and our lives. The unthinkable, firstly as that which we can hardly bare to think. The unthinkable, that dares to poke around in the private and collection operation of fantasy. The unthinkable, as out of sight and awareness in those things that can’t be admitted into our consciousness. It is to think the things we don’t want to think about and we can’t think, because it hasn’t been thought before.

This is precisely what we hope also happens of course in the consulting room work - we open up a space, for radical thinking - a space to ‘think the unthinkable. Whether the war is going on inside or outside, lurking beneath is invariably a narrative of victimhood. What Rose reminds us, as is that it is healthy to acknowledge an event, a moment when we feel we have been a victim, but we are absolutely stuffed, the moment we make victimhood or suffering a part of our identity.

The complacent state of victimhood, involves of course living either individually or collectively, a life to the tune of a stuck record that says “It’s not fair, look what they have done to me.” Not only disempowering, it is used to justify all manner of hideous cruelties and offensive acts of retribution. Most difficult global affairs or charged interpersonal conflicts, therefore involve what Christopher Bollas describes as ‘Violent innocence’. It is this, Rose reminds us, a discourse of suffering and victimhood, that underpins certain types of Zionism, which allows a complete denial and negation of the brutal oppression of the Palestinians. At the heart of this, in opposing sides in a war, is an inner collective life, that battles over the right to claim “My side is suffering the most.” The space in between, would involve the difficult task of allowing both narratives be heard, for meaningful dialogue to occur. However, the sort of sophistication of both collective and individual consciousness this requires, is often painfully lacking and not without dangerous consequences. This is of course, partly because it demands a deep inquiry into oneself, or indeed one’s nation and the operations of collective fantasy.

It’s the voice that says, hey, hang on a minute, how much more destruction do we need to witness, before we begin to think the unthinkable, to step out of our tribal mentality and radically think for ourselves. Martin Luther King once said, “It’s not what the bad guys do, the problem is what the good guys don’t do.” I think a contemporary version of that has to include what the good guys don’t dare to think. Therefore in a sense, our not doing something, in this case, thinking the unthinkable, maybe even more insidious that we dare to imagine.

Peeking into the Past, to Get Out from Underneath It

2011-08-01T01:25:00.000-07:00

Peeking into the Past, to Get Out from Underneath it

“Every historian discloses a new horizon.”

George Sand

HISTORY IS THE STORIES we tell ourselves about the past. In his book India After Gandhi, the author Guha, put together a sequence of events to create a narrative of building the nation-state of India since Independence. One of the things I rather like about this book is that as an historian, he is willingly to research into lesser known libraries and characters off the main road of India’s history.

Sitting with a client is not dissimilar to picking up a history book and waiting for the narrative to begin. As I sit with a client we’ll call Neehal, he shares with me a very tight narrative of his life: Cathedral school, a first arranged marriage that ‘failed’ within two months, a second arranged marriage he describes as “failing,” a job in banking. In reporting his most recent history, he tells me he is angry at what he describes as the “unfairness” of being turned down for promotion at work because of he has “anger issues.” Guha’s book is a fat four inches thick, my client’s history of his life is barely one page.

Forming representations of past events, will of course depend not only on our level of intelligence, but the sensitivity we are accustomed to receive in sharing ourselves with others, as well as, bearing some honesty about our role as the creators of our own history. The child, who is force-fed not to feel or what to feel, or how he ‘should’ react, will have enormous problems digesting and figuring out who he is, with his experience disavowed in this way. Cut-off from himself it is likely he will be terribly cut-off from others. History is of course invariably biased, distorted and often self-serving. Ludicrous tales for example, of Indian history, suggest that quite contrary to the evidence, the British simply dreamed up drawing a line across India and created Pakistan and that was that. The implication of this historical view is that Indians must have been a rather passive lot, to be merely victims of the all-powerful British, which of course, they were not. In other words, in every story, there are more deeply embedded narratives and assumptions. How much more difficult it is to ask ‘How did we let this happen?’, or ‘What is my role in this history?’ In the consulting room, we hope that our clients leave us at the end of our time together with a more logical and thoughtful sense of their history, even willing to look at data they may find offensive, so that they can make better adult choices going forward.

As Christopher Bollas puts it, as historians of our own lives, “We must be willing to wander in and out of recovered memories, in particular those which are seemingly trivial.” We are all personal historians. As a historian of my own life, I once wrote a piece that began, “Why use the word nest, just call it empty.” It was a self-reflective article that centred around the history of my daughter leaving home for University. A pair of tweezers sat untouched on a bathroom shelf for months after she left. I hated those tweezers. As a more empirical piece of history, it would read something like: September 2006, daughter leaves home, mother embarks on major renovation project on the house, managing it mostly from a hotel room at the Intercontinental on Marine Drive, in this city. Gnarls Barkley’s song ‘Crazy’ was a popular song that year. Yet this simple representation of the tweezers is imbued with more meaning, more resonance than any simple list.

Psychoanalysis approaches history through such seemingly ordinary observations, known as ‘screen memories.’ Clients may bring us lists, but we are interested in what might be brushed aside, made not list-worthy. Many years ago, a client called Clara came to see me after she had left an abusive relationship. “Did you ever get a sense that he had this side to him?” (A question of history of course) She replied, “Funny you should say that, the first time I saw him I thought of a boy who was the bully when I was at school.” So history naturally contains both that which we are willing to turn away from, as well as turn towards.

Many clients come to see a psychologist because they are simply longing for a sensitive conversation about their history. Sifting through the material of the past that Neehal presents, we begin to deconstruct his over-riding historical text, which goes something along the lines of “I was a difficult child, nobody could reign me in, my parents were busy, they were wonderful people, and I deserve what I got.” Essentially, at the heart of his feelings about himself, were that he was bad through and through.

But what if the parents are not the perfect angels or terrible villains we claim to recall? Several times in the sessions, when Neehal described some adolescent capper that he got up to, stealing a car, taking his father’s watch, I found myself again and again, wondering wherever were his parents? It seemed as though he had grown-up in an environment of material abundance and a sense that he should be ‘grateful for being so lucky’, yet at the same time, bestowed very little in terms of psychological containment or adequate attention to enable him as a boy to develop the important attributes of being ‘grown-up.’

Children, as we know, will of course protest about everything: “I want my toy”, or “I’m not going to bed” or “I want granny now” even though perhaps granny has passed away. Each of these moments is a negotiation, an opportunity for tenderness or indeed cruelty towards the child. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the term the ‘good enough’ mother (parent) who more often than not, responds to the child’s demands with understanding. The core message Neehal received was that his feelings didn’t matter, (therefore in his mind he didn’t matter), and in response to his cries for help, was often flooded by his parents self-absorbed narratives about ‘what they had to put-up with from him’ or ‘can’t you see I’ve been working all day.’ Each time he received a battering from his father, or verbal insults from his mother, in equal measure, they would fake seductive reparation with the gift of material things, or sudden lavish attention, ‘as-if’ the abuse had never happened. What terrible confusion for this little boy.

How the parent communicates with the child will help a child digest reality that you can’t always get what you want. Digesting is not just about force-feeding children a list of rules of how they should behave. It has to be a conversation, not merely an autocratic colonizer taking over the child’s experience and reality. It certainly isn’t about teaching children how to abuse by hitting, slapping, pinching and abusing them. Without adequate developmental containment, it is hardly surprising that Neehal had great difficulty anchoring himself in reality and continues to be prone to regular emotional outbursts. Any efforts to think as a child about what was happening to him were silenced. As a child rarely soothed in his distressed, he inevitably has a hard time learning how to sooth himself. Facing how he was repeating his childhood experience of attachments, he had to visit the abusive side of his himself.

You might say that Neehal started out as a poor historian of his own life. In his historical narrative, there was one villain and it was him. Everyone else was a good guy, end of story. Well perhaps it would have been the end, if he hadn’t chosen to come to the consulting room. Towards the end of one session, having shared with me the way his father physically hurt him, I mentioned in passing that in my experience, clients talk about the easiest parent first. The hardest work in the sessions was facing some of the realities of his relationship with his mother.

There is I think, some very deep confusion’s about any sort of psychotherapy. Our task with our clients is not to help them feel more, as the popular press likes to suggest. No, they are generally feeling too much already. What we do, is try to help our clients think better. X occurs, Y occurs, why do you draw this particular inference, or interpretation? It is about daring to look a little more deeply with a less emotional perspective. Sometimes, a client will extrapolate “I am bad”, because it is just too unbearable to imagine the alternative that he was actually very neglected as a child. What we are seeing here, is the case of a child, whose rage towards his mother, is swallowed and redirected towards himself. To keep the dangerous mother at a distance, he was still as an adult man, keeping her very close. The part of himself he had to meet in our work, was the deep sadness and loneliness he often felt as a child. Over time, we explored the terror he felt whenever he let anyone, particularly women, get close to him. The hardest part of all this work for Neehal, was to connect with the rage he felt towards Mommie Dearest. Yet, he was able to take-in and digest that a part of him that was in fact not furious about the present, but furious about the past, and how it featured in his own repetition of abuse in the here and now.

By reviewing the past in this way, by being better historians, we get to transform it. Any historical narrative that merely suggests we have been colonised by others whether nation or person, forced to conform, held-back, abused, is a denial of individual or collective collusion and collaboration in one’s own fate. We can either keep living this old interpretation of history, or make a choice now to create a different history for the future.

So rather than merely regurgitate and live from a victim narrative, which merely reduces a nation or a person’s confidence to a puddle of inferiority, we try to do something else. Rather like taking the debris of the past in our own hands, we creatively use our psychology to make something else out of it, renewed with vitality and the possibility of making associations between back then and now. Just as historians give birth to new ideas, as historians of our own lives, new insight, new awareness give birth to new futures. Never, is too late to do that, or indeed ever too late have a sensitive conversation with yourself, even if everyone around doesn’t know how to listen.

THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES & other defences against changing our lives

2011-07-25T01:58:00.000-07:00

A DEFENCE IS something one uses to hide something else. During these heavy monsoon downpours in the City our best ‘defence’ is a hardy umbrella, or to stay indoors and watch the lashing rains from the comfort of an air-conditioned apartment. A ‘defence’, in the law courts, is merely that which one stands-by, to argue one's position: "M'Lord, my client was indeed not exposing himself in the Borivali Park, he was merely perusing the zip of his trousers when they fell down, just as the woman happened to be walking close-by." A psychological ‘defence’ is that which use to protect ourselves (another umbrella if you like) unconsciously, to ward off reality. For example, I am warding off feeling that I think I am being an idiot for choosing a particular course of action, but I manifest this by saying that other people think I am an idiot (projection).

Deciding what is true in the psychological consulting room is a process of detection, not unlike the court perhaps, in that it often involves finding ways through games of distortion, elaboration and walls of defences. To bribe a judge in the courts of India is the ultimate, if dubious defence: “Here your Honour, I hope this 5 Lakh of rupees will help you arrive at an expedient decision in my favour.” Other than bribery in the form say of impression-management, ‘I will charm you, so that I hope you will say nice things about me to my boss’, more overt hints at transactions are rare in the consulting room. Although I did once is encounter a client, who asked me, “Perhaps you would like me furnish you with a larger consulting room?” after regretting sharing with me his involvement in a corruption scandal.

What psychoanalysis can do is expose us to the lies we tell ourselves. It also reminds us that in the court, probably nobody is telling the ‘whole truth and nothing but the truth’, through the existence of the ever-present unconscious that makes the ‘whole truth’ unknowable. In the law court, you have an adversary, a person on the “other side”, who is against you. It’s a game of for and against, winners and losers. On Freud’s couch however, the adversary is not some opponent with his strong defence and thick folder of justification, but a part of you - the complainant, the applicant, the respondent – all representing different parts and edicts of your mind. This is what we will explore today, through an in-depth illustration with a client, of the defences we all have that prevent us from becoming who we claim we want to be.

All clients come to session because there is something they don’t know and at least appear to want to know. A client, let’s call him, Atul, he tells me he is feeling flat and has long bouts of apathy. Atul is a Hindu although he tells me he is a somewhat reluctant temple-goer. In his early forties, well dressed in his expensive suit, and highly polished shoes, I learn that he had an arranged marriage some 15 years ago, his parents having approved their joint astrological chart and he has two children. Educated in India, he has not had much in the way of international work experience, other than working with some foreigners in the office. He tells me that he is struggling to motivate the team he leads, and engage them fully. During the first few sessions we discuss his difficulty with making clear decisions, avoiding any real sense of closeness with people at work and what sort of effect they have on the people around him and the success of his business. Despite my sense early it seemed as though he would like me to write a prescription that would make his problems go away in a painlessly, this early dialogue is fairly straightforward. The room was imbued with a gentle convivial sort of ambience.

His character, his idiom if you like, is revealed more over time, not only in what he says, but in other mannerism, patterns of arriving (always on time), his being (upright, neat, not a hair out of place, sitting very still in the chair) and leaving the sessions (always being shocked when the session comes to an end). His speaking, after beginning to feel more at ease with me, as I encourage him to say anything that comes up, is often a stream of attacks between different parts of his mind, which goes roughly something like this:

“I think it’s rude to make people speak if they don’t want to.

I suppose you think I’m being a coward.

You know xx person. I don’t want to be rude like him.

He’s a complete bully, he’s shameless, ruthless, doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings.

You think I want to be like him? You want to turn me into him?

Maybe I shouldn’t be in banking.

I know I’m useless at this job.

You think I’m useless don’t you..

I don’t believe people should be so selfish the way they treat people in this industry.

I just don’t know what I am doing.

I don’t know why I am doing this job – I hate it most of the time.

These guys get paid a lot you know, they should take responsibility for their

businesses.

I want to run a business that is caring about people.

But my guys are a lazy bunch, they don’t take any responsibility.

They don’t tell me what they are doing so how the hell can I fix things when they

blow-up.”

Beginning to explore how his personal history has shaping his way of living now, evoked a deep resistance in him. Statements such as “Look, I don’t believe in looking back. My father was a hard-working man,” were common. At times, he would withdraw, becoming silent, like a small child in a man’s suit, attempting to shut out the threats of the world around him. Or there were times when I asked him, “what sort of feelings do you think evoke in the guys in your team?” he would reply with an abrupt, “I don’t know, why does this matter.” Such was his defence.

As we began to develop a stronger working relationship, he slowly revealed that his father was a distant figure, with somewhat sadistic characteristics. He would ruthlessly express his regular dissatisfaction with Atul as a young boy, bombarding him with instructions of not only how the boy should think, but what exactly he should think about. To explore how Atul’s own mind was turned against Atul, and attacking him in the same way as his father did, was a frightening element of himself to face. This endless ‘mental interference’ exhausted him. What we were able to explore, was how deeply rooted is his disgust at his father’s aggression and Atul’s unwillingness to take any assertive leadership position. Being direct as a leader in Atul’s mind, meant only one thing: to be horribly aggressive just as his father had been. These feelings were painful for him to connect with. They evoked a strong defense, a force that “prevents a return to memory. The patient’s not knowing is really a not wanting to know.”

So the psychologist’s role is to “overcome this resistance.” And help the client build a more rational assessment of himself and the things that have shaped him. How does this happen? Let’s turn to Freud:

“What means have we at our disposal for overcoming this continual resistance? Few, but they include almost all those by which one man can ordinarily exert a psychical influence on another. In the first place, we must (1) reflect that is a psychical resistance, especially one that has been in force for a long time, can only be resolved slowly and by degrees, and we must wait patiently. In the next place, we may reckon on the (2) intellectual interest which the patient begins to feel after working for a short time. But lastly – and this remains the strongest lever – we must endeavour, after we have discovered the (3) motives for his defence, to deprive them of their value or even to replace them by more powerful ones.”

Fortunately, Atul was intellectually engaged in exploring own psychology and ‘what made him tick’ as he put it. This made our engagement from the early days very satisfying for both of us. The clients who rarely last the course of their development journey, lack such intellectual inquiry and often seek comfort and solace in a narrative that simply, unreflectively blames others. Not only that, Atul boss had demonstrated openly commitments to his own leadership development, thus providing him with a substitute elder figure, perhaps in a sense, a more solid father-figure. Being the father of two young sons, gave him further incentive to avoid the distant fathering that had hurt him so very deeply. The beauty of course, is that in allowing himself to express his love for his boys more deeply, and to give them the room to think for themselves was a deeply reparative and healing experience for him. In our relationship, he experienced good attention that he wasn’t used to, learning that it was safe and in fact enjoyable to share more of himself. This richer dialogue enabled Atul to get to know himself more deeply and to choose thoughtfully, rather than reactively, how close or distant he wanted to be from others in any given moment.

Clients who honour us, by allowing us to be alongside them on this profound journey, live forever in our heart. I continue to wonder how they are, many years after they have left the consulting room. I remember Atul as an extremely brave man, for in his heart, is a deep desire to be decent man, to be more loving and less shut off from life. His inquiry into himself was a gift that enriched all the relationships in his life. He was able to begin to connect with how his resistance, particularly how his extreme level of work-aholism served to disconnect him from painful memories, which when faced, rather than endlessly held at bay or acted-out, weren’t in fact so difficult to face at all. He shocked himself by finding that he procrastinated less and felt less afraid to risk standing out from the crowd and taking a strong position. Of course, what was the hardest to face, was he was burying awareness of his own aggression that shared many common features of his father. At one point, screaming a series of abuses at me, he tested my tolerance to stick with him, whatever he did and learned some important lessons about reparation and recovery.

Sadly, not everyone makes it through this journey of defences in the way Atul does. In a world of increasing addictions to busy-ness, consumer spending, drugs and alcohol we seem to be collectively building up more and more defences against experiencing ourselves. I find it extremely sad, as I write this, the extraordinarily talented British singer Amy Winehouse, died at just 27 years old, from what appears to be drug addiction. Her album “Back-to-Black,” is an astonishing musical achievement. She will now write no more news words, there will be no more new music.

It is as though her ‘defence’ against health, was made of stone. Perhaps she was like the writer Ernest Hemingway, who shortly before he committed suicide, told his friend Htochner, “If I can’t exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible. That is how I have lived, and that is now how I must live – or not live.”

Amy was Camden, in London’s very own star. My daughter Emily is just 4 years younger than her, working in Camden and used to see Amy from time to time in the local pub, who she described as a warm, friendly and down-to-earth. Thank God, my daughter is alive and well, working in her job at the Camden, no-doubt with her neatly packed lunchbox on her desk. She contributes, with a profound dedication, to making the lives of people with learning difficulties richer and more fulfilling. I won’t shield myself by hiding behind a defence that says “It’s fine, I’ll see her soon.” I wish we were in the same room, in the same country right now. I allow myself to connect with that feeling, beneath any defence, even though it is painful.

Growing & Shrinking: India in the $335 billion+ Beauty Business

2011-07-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

PSYCHOANALYSIS DECONSTRUCTS fictions, falsehoods and all sorts of fakery. Bland familiar stories become more interesting through the intelligent act of sensitive listening and paying attention. If something is growing, the psychoanalyst in the corner of the room is curious to see what might be shrinking. We are forever interested in narrative twists and turns, opacities, inconsistencies, slips in the traditions of conduct, innuendos and occasional burps, otherwise outcast by either stereotypes or empirical traditions. To crack a Freudian joke, we are curious whether ‘a cigar is sometimes more than a cigar’. Not only are the client’s words of interest, but phrasing, language construction, the embedded promises in the cultural landscape is worthy of a little analytic nudging and inquiry. I’m curious to explore the business of global beauty trends emerging in India and some unexpected, shrinking, side-effects.

The notion of the ‘ideal ego’ in psychoanalysis is a projected image with which the person identifies. In a simple sense, it is what someone would like to be. Advertising of course, promotes images of the ideal, fostering a sense of possibilities. Mental health, arguably concerns both the gap between reality and the ideal ego of oneself, as well as, the lengths a person is willing to go to achieve that ideal. Where might you ‘draw the line’ so-to-speak to achieve the modern beauty ideal? For some, plastic surgery would be a step “too far”, but Botox might be okay. If someone measures five foot four inches and attempts to be six feet by having surgical procedures on his body, it is easy to think the person has lost more than his psychological footing. In Richard Harrison’s “Silence of the Lambs”, we meet a serial killer, a former patient of Hannibal Lecter who murders women and uses their skin to sew together a construction of a woman that he can wear. Again, we are in the business of fantasy, yet most attempts to change the appearance of oneself are rarely as extreme. But at what point do attempts as bodily transformation enter the arena of madness and the macabre, or create other effects we are not prepared for?

In most scholarly centres around the world, you are likely to spend more time studying Freudian texts in the Media Studies and Literature departments than in the school of Psychology. So Freud’s contribution to critical analysis doesn’t merely help us subvert, or at least question the stories we tell ourselves, but those that are thrust upon us, and has been usefully given over to deconstruct literary texts, movies, reveal the narrative promises in advertising campaign, or indeed the rhetoric of war. As I have written in earlier articles, psychoanalysis asks us to give up our belief in magic and engage our critical thinking, here today, by focusing on beauty and body image.

The body has always featured as a means of participating in the cycle of capitalist production by the poor, the oppressed, or lower classes. Boxers use their physical might to enter into the money-making ring, and have for centuries used their bodies in prostitution, or to make themselves more marketable in the competition for to secure a financially dependable male. Today, many Indian women use whitening skin creams. Some may argue as a sort of colonial hangover that equates white with power, or a legacy of the caste system that equates fairer skin with those of higher status such as Brahmins and the Indian aristocracy. In his book, “Beauty Imagined”, the Harvard history professor points out that the first wave of the globalization of beauty, coincided “with the highpoint of Western imperialism, made it all but inevitable that being white was seen as possessing superior beauty—alongside superior everything else”.

A local psychotherapist here, who treats adolescent girls and women, attributes this body-bleaching to the stereotypes imparted to Indian girls having “very white western dolls as their models of perfect femininity,” describing the difficulty in former times of purchasing beautiful (not ugly) Indian brown faced dolls. Advertising of course shows us normative ideas of beauty ideals in a culture. The cream “Fair & Lovely”, (which thanks to the English pronunciation on T.V. sounds like “Fair & Ugly”) promises dejected looking dusky women that they will become a more marketable commodity by equating whiteness with either a better chances at an executive job, or leading the man of your dreams to be utterly love-struck by your paleness. Beauty is of course a huge global business estimated in the region of $335 billion. Globalisation, clearly more than the simply outsourcing of jobs to poorer countries and greater geographic mobility for some people, bringing with it a sense of flattening or MacDonaldisation of the world.

India’s beauty market for example, doubled in size between 2002 and 2007. Advertising of such products of course functions by identifications of beauty, i.e. that you will identify with that which is being sold to you. Only through debate, resistance and feedback does this industry’s message of what is ‘normal’ and desirable change. The Company Unilever, for example, that produces “Fair & Lovely”, also manufactures the “Dove” product of skin creams with an all-together different campaign in Europe, geared towards Western feminist sensibilities. Called the “Empowerment Campaign", it promotes identification with all manner of female body shapes, sizes and skin tones. Implicit in two very different campaigns, are on the one hand the message ‘you are a worthwhile woman if you are fair skinned’, on the other, revealing an equally culturally constructed notion of female beauty ‘you are worthwhile whatever shape and colour you are’.

How we relate to images of standard feminine beauty is to a degree, a matter of personal choice and preference, as well as, efforts at critical engagement with cultural messages. Psychoanalysis of course subverts any real sense of a thorough knowing of ourselves, or complete awareness of how we are affected by cultural imagery, through its insertion of the idea of the unconscious. We simply cannot know what ‘gets-in’ to us. Nevertheless, social activists continue to undermine rigid patriarchal definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. For instance, a few years ago in the U.S., there was a campaign by male and female sexual politics activists, attempting to subvert rigid gender stereotypes. In the period leading up to Christmas, they swapped the voice boxes in the popular dolls Barbie & Ken. On Christmas morning, when children pressed the voice button on their dolls, they found themselves in for a shock. Barbie, in her pink mini-dress said in a deep husky voice, “Hi, let’s go kill the enemy” and Ken in his army fatigues squeaked, “Hi do you think I look pretty today?”

Beauty capitalism is high-growth business in India. Hindustan Unilever is opening a Lakme beauty salon every week, and Jawed Habbit Hair & Beauty (JHHB) had 37 salons in 2006, rising to some 225 by the end of 2010. One rising form of outsourcing in India involves transferring the hair from the heads of the poor Indian women, so that it can be glued to the heads of women of Mumbai. Basically, hair extensions made from real hair. Only the poor do not receive any obvious direct financial benefit for giving away arguably one of the few things they own, the hair on their heads. They do this as a form of purification at their Hindu temples as they pray for food, shelter and education for their children. It is the temple-bosses who are the ones who receive the financial gains in the region of something like $100,000 for 400 kilos of hair. The women are not aware that their hair is sold. What happens to the money is unclear.

This is the focus of the rather brilliant documentary “Hair India”, by Raffaele Brunetti. It is a visual narrative of hair transactions from the poor to the relatively wealthy, imbued with human and geographic distance. The poor woman and the woman in the Mumbai salon who will adore the hair do not meet. The Temple priests sell the hair to a company called “Great Lengths” and ship them to their headquarters in Italy. Mumbai salons then purchase the hair which is shipped back to India, having been cleaned, prepared with the glues and whatever it is they do, packaged, prettified. Hair outsourcing in India, began during the 1980’s, but the boom took place as hair extensions became a popular some 10 years ago. Indian hair is considered the best in the market for its quality and length. Indian women from poor villages don't use any chemicals and take great care of their hair: they comb it frequently and only use coconut oil on it. “Great Lengths” hair extensions are allegedly the best in the world, their products adorning the heads of many Hollywood stars.

The film “Hair India” is a subtle documentary that gently emphasises the elegance and grace of the poor women, in contrast with the women of Mumbai involved in the world of hair extensions. The central character, Sangetta, who will have the hair extensions fitted is seen at Dishad’s hair salon in Mumbai, quizzing the salon staff for names of Hindi film celebrities who may also have such extensions. In the film, we meet the poor climbing the steps to the temple. We then cut to the Mumbai polyester-clad women tottering about on high heels in bars and fashion shows, as they survey sumptuous displays of food and shots of a tray weighted down with loaded glasses of alcohol. A poor woman Helmata and her family gaze into the windows of shops that sell televisions and rather poignantly, a shop that sells toilets and other bathroom fittings. Such things, the television (connecting us with the wider world?) and indoor toilets are presumably something she and her family are unlikely to afford. In a glamorous Mumbai bar, Sangetta turns to one of the women to discuss her hair extensions saying with a smirk, "everyone tells you you'll feel like a goddess".

While the hair extensions are being glued to Sangetta’ s head, by four salon workers, she looks up and says, “it’s like a dream sequence in a Hindi movie, it changes,” as she watches her hair stretching some two feet in length, amassed on her head and draped around her body rather like a monsoon cape. Sangetta appears to be creating her dream, an ideal version of herself that requires no more effort that sitting in a chair and dispensing her cash. Whether it works - whether her emerging dream, will in reality make her feel like a goddess - is not clear. What psychoanalysis gives us, why it is such a powerful theoretical framework, is that it continuous draws us to unexpected side –effects, things that happen that we don’t plan for – perhaps ridicule for having fake hair, glues that in the long term destroy one’s own hair, or perhaps, as research on excessive cosmetic surgery has shown, further depletion of one’s self-esteem.

As international standards of beauty invariably depict tall and thin women, it is hardly surprising that other Western di-eases associated with body-images are imported into India. A recent study concerns the rise of teen-anorexia in India in the age group 15-25, across 10 Cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore. The findings suggest that high numbers of both boys and girls are using fat burners, self-induced vomiting, fasting, and diet pills in an effort to be thin. The authors say, “Today, even kids are not off-limits to the celebrity-driven trend of staying slim to look perfect and are dieting and starving themselves to achieve desired results”. For example, the researchers found that in their 12-15 year olds sample, some 30% were involved in dieting at least three times a week. But if this is a straight forward matter of simply internalising external images, how does this work?

The most virulent disease of body image and weight loss, not infrequently leading to death, is Anorexia Nervosa. According to DSM IV, the ‘bible’ of mental disorders, the key features of the illness are (1) a refusal to maintain a healthy weight range for age and height, or failure to make expected weight gains at times of growth and physical development, (2) Fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, (3) loss of periods (menstrual cycle) in women who are not using any external source of estrogen, e.g. oral contraceptives. I am told by several doctors here in Mumbai, that the main middle-class hospitals here are seeing young urban girls, from middle class family’s presenting starvation related diseases that haven’t been seen for over twenty years.

Traditionally, Anorexia is viewed within the framework of individual psychopathology. However, Helen Malson’s research on Anorexia, considers ways this dis-ease has been interpreted from a feminist perspective, placing it firmly and appropriately in my view, within the socio-economic, cultural and political context:

“women's anorexic (over-)control of their/our bodies, has, for example, been interpreted as a response to our lack of control over other aspects of our lives (Lawrence, 1984), whilst the diminutive proportions of the 'anorexic' body have been interpreted as an embodiment of women's subordinated and 'child-like' social status (Chernin, 1983) and as a rejection of or ambivalence towards traditional femininity (Orbach, 1993), as well as an (over) conformity to contemporary cultural dictates about 'idea' (heterosexual) femininity (Boskind-Lodahl, 1976).

What she further problematizes, is not only the assumption that the saturation of images of skinny-ideals of womanhood as something people over-identify with and are stupidly duped by, but in a sense points to the potent rebellion that maybe hidden in the refusal to menstruate and develop womanly attributes, such as breasts. She is in fact saying, something more is going on here than the interpretation of swallowing whole the images of ideal womanhood. The psychoanalytic theorist Jacqueline Rose makes a similar point when she says that, “Most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women, if indeed they do at all.”

She goes on to say:

“What distinguished psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gender, is that whereas in the latter, the internalisation of norms is assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting point of psychoanalysis is that it does not.”

Therefore, might it be that anorexia is a symptom, a Freudian one indeed, that the internalisation fails? In Malson’s deeply sensitive in-depth interviews with girls diagnosed with Anorexia, she encouraged them to talk about what they feel they achieve by starving and becoming thin. They tell her it gives them a sense of “a sort of hiding”, “a way to disappear”, “something that’s my own”, interpreted by Malson, as “A body that appears to disappear and that signifies an attempt at (feminine) identity put under erasure.” She does not ignore the reality that “self-starvation results in a very real destruction and de-materialisation of the body,” but hints that this links with the way the woman becomes a sort of “background text for advertising consumer products.”

Susie Orbach, a British feminist and activist since the 1970’s, popularly known for her book “Fat is a Feminist Issue”, and as Princess Diana’s psychotherapist, is concerned that younger people “are more interested in "being something rather than actually contributing something. It goes along with the whole celebrity culture, with consumerism.” What does this mean for young women? She says, “I think young women are still very hampered by feelings of un-entitlement, but covered up with the defense of 'we can do it, we're great, and we’re ambitious’.”

The desire to be attractive will always be with us and may have some element of Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ roots, particularly here in India, where gender inequality remains strong. How attached we are to impossible masquerades of ourselves seems to be the heart of the issue, linked to our engagement in gender politics in refining and questioning what the construction of the identity of “woman” means personally to each and every one of us. When I was student, the phrase “The Personal is Political”, was and continues to be a phrase I identify with. Watching signs and symptoms of Anorexia infiltrate India and the rising death rates of young urban girls that will inevitably follow must signal that at the very least the importance of critical engagement with the side-effects of beauty consumerism. Seeing beautiful brown Indian women turn white in front of our eyes on our T.V. screens and the effects of damaging skin through bleach, seems no less insidious than a shadow of colonialism hanging over this amazing country.

The Hottest Psychological Sport

2011-07-13T06:15:00.000-07:00

There is a Latin proverb that says, “Revenge is a confession of pain”. Psychoanalysis is of course confessional in the sense that a client tells his or her story to the interested therapist. The therapist in turn helps shape the story, creating a richer, perhaps more complicated narrative. As I have said in earlier articles, this idea of talking outside the family rather than merely popping a “Sod-it-all” psychiatric pill, or other medication through alcohol, food, or compulsive shopping, is still a relatively new idea to the modern would-be Mumbai middle-classes.

In let’s say, New York or London, to get curious about yourself with a professional psychologist is almost as common-place as having a personal fitness trainer. Many clients, such as Indian’s outside of India, often the high-achieving go-getter’s, are dedicated to developing their emotional intelligence, in order to grow their leadership capacity to match the changing demands as their roles expand. They are aware that as one layer of potential is achieved, yet another emerges as is the way of evolving high levels of consciousness. They recognise that as their business evolves through its psychological evolution, becomes increasing complex, so must they too. In Mumbai, there is still something of a culture of shame, and weakness surrounding personal development – “I must be mentally ill” - a narrative of personal inadequacy, rather than credit to the person for having the courage to explore how to show-up better in life for themselves and others. It's essentially the difference between having a coach in the game of life, just as you might to improve your cricket prowess, and thinking you must be nuts if you can't control your mind to have that singular concentration of the best on the green. Naturally, if one is compelled by necessity to pursue financial stability, i.e. base-level security motivation for food and shelter to draw on Maslow’s hierarchy of psychological needs, taking time to explore the ‘how’ and patterns of one’s life, one’s habitual ways of relating, may naturally seem extremely low in one’s set of priorities.

“Keep it in the family” here as a way of dealing with emotional and interpersonal issues, may involve a deeply affectionate degree of closeness unheard of in the average European family, but it may also have its shadow-side (as everything invariably does) of being too insular. Recently, I was asked to work with a woman with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). She hasn’t left her bedroom for thirty-five years. Quite simple, the family may often not address the issue of the elephant in the room, a suffocating quasi-closeness that doesn’t allow for any perspective and prevents any acknowledgment or open discussion of the core problems the extended family is facing. And in that closeness, when the bottling-up gets too much, the elephant farts so loudly everyone stares in shock, resentment and revenge is popular outlet for frustrations.

New clients, who are perhaps more internationally acquainted, arrive with their curiosity to the consulting room rather like a fresh novel, assured, nervous, anticipatory. For a few minutes before the new client arrives, I am already wondering what they will present: how they will describe the plot of their life, their joys and troubles. Each client is as unique as any novel can be, and yet patterns emerge across the months, themes seemingly recurring as the flow of different novels, the clients, come and go. Parents who were obsessed with their children’s achievements or their own pursuit of money, at the expense of their child’s wellbeing is a theme that stands out. Chasing money but needing love is another. Erectile dysfunction is common with the extreme male high-flyers, although not just here but in most countries I have worked. But the theme we will explore today, from the Mumbai consulting room, is the frequency with which the topic of revenge occurs in the stories of client’s lives and what they have to face and negotiate.

There are as many ways to look back and explore the patterns of one’s life, as well as there are methods of refusal to do so. To be at peace with the close or distant past, both consciously and unconsciously is to be able to live in a way that involves a refusal to participate in ‘eye for an eye’ type of vengeful solution. Time, some chewing over, acceptance is a psychological necessity to digest the realities of life that we don’t always get our own way. Someone cuts into your lane as drive through this maddening Mumbai traffic, the furniture doesn’t arrive on time, the friend lets you down, or the relative sabotages your plans. Each frustration offers a choice of action. Each frustration provides an opportunity for revenge and retaliation. You respond to the man who cuts across your lane, by chasing him and blocking his path further down the road. Or you figure, well, maybe his mother is in hospital so let’s give him a break, he’s in a rush.

Psychoanalysis of course disturbs any straightforward notion that revenge is somehow merely a ‘normal’ (if albeit popular) course of action. It equates the revengeful character with a childhood whereby events and experiences were felt as loss. The exacting of revenge in adulthood is the unconscious retaliating for those experiences. Let me illustrate. A client called Radha was the youngest of five children and the only female child. Her childhood was restricted to the home, whereas her brothers were given freedom to run wild, play outdoor sports and meet their friends. Privileges of the male children of the family, her brothers, were lavished on them indiscriminately, whilst Radha, merely had the ‘privilege’ of supporting to her mother, and being quasi-parent to her brothers. She was force-fed the idea that all that mattered was to be slim and desirable for a future husband. Her primary revenge on her demanding mother was a refusal to be slim and healthy, instead ballooning into a fat “Auntie” as she put it, by the time she was seventeen. Describing herself as “wilful”, she approached most matters of adulthood as simply a case of winning or losing, a game of tactics and strategies rather than intimacy. Her childhood isolation, the rage it has left her with, has never been mourned, so as an adult she continues to live it in her relationships with others, as though seven years old still, although masquerading in adult clothing, faking it, in order to “win” and dangerous if she loses.

Revenge therefore, is an eye for an eye, but with an eye firmly closed on the past. It may indeed, as Gandhi once said, not only make “the whole world blind”, but it is enacted by the psychologically unsighted, who fail to see how their early life is re-enacted in a present moment. Whatever perceived injustice, or perceived harm, (which of course maybe very real), rooted in the unconscious sense of damage to the childhood psyche, old and current losses are negotiated and deferred in this manner. Patterns of revenge as a compulsive strategy in life are an attempt at unconscious mourning; an attempt to recover something lost, as Christopher Bollas, a most insightful British psychoanalyst puts it, “By a violent intrusion into the other – to recover what has been stolen from oneself”, not in the present, but in childhood. To fill-up the other person up with such toxic reactions, is essentially a theft, “At the very least he steals the recipient’s peace of mind”.

I think a food analogy might be helpful here. In Gestalt psychotherapy, with its roots in psychoanalysis, we make parallels between how we experience and negotiate life, with our relationship with food. Gestalt psychotherapy emphasises the here and now flow of relating between the client and therapist in much the same as psychoanalysis does, but with more of an emphasis upon experimentation. For example, rather than merely discuss say a client’s difficulty with handling authority figures at work, the Gestalt therapist will devise an experiment, such as what we call “Chair work” with client practising and playing with different kinds of speech as the boss were sitting in the empty chair opposite. Gestalt draws upon the eating cycle to in this way: so food comes in the body, food goes out of the body and something goes on in between. With the background of sufficiently stable childhood, where the child’s emotional needs are considered more often than they are dismissed, we learn as adults to makes choices from the menu of life, to digest our food and therefore digest life, to imagine the various choices we might make. If we were to mindlessly force food into our oesophagus, without any sort of chewing over, we would make ourselves ill. Compulsive revenge, like other forms of psychic destructiveness, is failure in digestion – failures to chew-over the in- the- moment choices of action – to digest reality as a mature adult. Enactment makes everyone ill including the revenger. The essential adult functioning that is most profoundly lacking in the addict of revenge is the ability to think. Forever loyal to their revengeful compulsions, just like the addict is to gambling, it is a childish attempt to be an omnipotent magician, capable of over throwing reality. And as I have said earlier, by attempts at overthrowing reality, mourning is postponed and loss negated.

The revengeful character does not process his childhood losses by attempts to simply block out his or her emotional world. That would simply be an attempt to turn oneself into stone. Like water in a faulty vessel, the impulse leaks, the outlet for aggression taking a more concealed but not necessarily a less virulent passage out, in subtle hostilities, revenges and often withdrawal. Withholding, withdrawing, “I don’t like what you said, so I won’t say anything to you ever again”, the elephant in the relationship if you like, trampling over any growth or possibility of reparation, and ultimately a theft of the other’s peace of mind we referred to earlier.

Christopher Bollas reminds us that in the consulting room, we are increasingly dealing with more and more personality disturbances that involve a deadening of affect. He points to “blank selves”, “blank psychoses”, the “organizing personality”, who come to the consulting room as they are “aware of feeling empty, or without a sense of self and they seek analytic help in order to find some way to feel real or to symbolize a pain that may only be experienced as a void or an ache.” He terms such a person as, ‘Normotic’, “someone who is abnormally normal…too stable, secure.”

Such a client came to see me in Mumbai several years ago, a rather withdrawn, obedient character, who seemed to be content enough with his life, thrived on structure, but lacked an essential spontaneity. He told me he was boring, I asked him that perhaps he was bored with himself. As I sat with this man, it was difficult to locate who he was, as though I was sitting with a distant object, rather than a person. The contact between this client and I had little vitality, as though he had no experience at all of relating in a close and intimate way. In fact, I often found my mind wandering about practical tasks I needed to do later in the day. This lack of affect in my client clearly evoked a similar lack of affect in me. His deadening of his emotional world became mine too. He often spoke in a series of fortune-cookie dismissals when I attempted to inquire about how he felt about a particular event he was describing, “You have to look forward in in life”, “I believe in being positive”. Such inquiries were clearly odd to him, as he was “simply unaccustomed to hearing an adult talk to him about ordinary fears and uncertainties.” His pattern was to turn the potently “meaningful, into the meaningless.” Hence little introspective curiosity about himself or imagination about who how he could lead his business or conduct himself more effectively. This is of course derived from the fact of “not being known or reflected.” His manner of being seemed something derived from outside of himself, rather than through the natural struggles of human becoming. Whilst we might say the highly emotionally charged, “psychotic has ‘gone off at the deep end’, the normotic has ‘gone off at the shallow end’.”

What was the early life of this man characterised by: loyal parents, who were somewhat distant and flat in their ability to relate to this man when he was a child. There are a few particulars worthy of mentioning. His father was clearly a disturbed man, rather distant and morose. In itself, this might not seem particularly unusual, so much as the fact that there was no discussion in the family about the state of the father, an equivalent of “leave your father alone’, whose mental equivalent is ‘leave that part of your mind concerned with your father alone’.” As we became closer to connecting with his destructive feelings underneath his boredom with himself, he was never to return to the sessions.

The Normotic family is at least on the surface ordered. Bollas discusses how in the Normotic family, the mother may somewhat compulsively run an efficient, clean and highly ordered household. The servants will know their place, be expected to obediently follow their mistress’s orders. Family friends will be ignored or rejected for the more important priorities of buying the new napkins for the family lunch. “There’s so much to do”, she will mutter from the kitchen, as long as it doesn’t involve a deeper relating and closeness. In the Normotic family “this might be described as ‘your mother is helping out’ whose mental equivalent is ’when you believe you see signs of distress in us, cancel that idea, and replace it with an observation of the action you see before you’.”

Was my client afraid of being overwhelmed by his feelings? I think so. He was, simply not ready to be with me and birth a more vibrant and authentic self. By withdrawing in this way, without any dialogue that would signify adult closure on the relationship between us, he ensured he kept a place in my mind (an attempt at the theft of my peace of mind) and perhaps a door open. To say, “Thank you, but this is not what I want”, would be to create an adult ending. This way, there is a gain a quasi-deferral of loss. One way is to see this is as a form of silent revenge, for our relationship having not only awakened the other side of him, but that I had witnessed it and all its destructiveness, a taste of which I felt in the last session and certainly made me sit upright. Another way is to make sense of this withdraw, is that to break out of his rather robotic ways of living and relating was simply too terrifying, a part of him knowing that beneath that perfect order, his addiction to work, his expulsion of anyone who dared to get close, was a rage that harked back to times long ago. What he didn’t understand, was that he wasn’t required to deal with this alone (as no-doubt he had dealt with emotional dynamics in the past) and that there was someone there by his side on this journey, to help him digest his psychic reality and provide the reflective care of being with a person who was interested in him. Alas, such authentic relating was something he had not experienced in the past and perhaps sadly, never will.

Such refusals of engaging with one’s evolution are often deeply saddening (but of course understandable) for us psychologists. These are the clients who haunt us, as though they have disappeared from the restaurant, half way through a meal and we wonder what happened to them. That leap towards a truthful examination of oneself, as the poet W.B. Yeats said, “Requires more courage than to kill men in the battlefield.” The shift from a lower state of evolution to a higher one, will always require a moment where one feels rather in mid-air, with hints of the shadow of who we might become, walking beside oneself, before a more solid sense of self and authenticity and all the complex and rich feelings that being truly human involves emerges.

Leadership Beyond the Groove or the Grave

2011-06-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

Rushdie once humorously said, “Indian Democracy: one man one bribe.” Jokes about corruption regularly do the rounds in Mumbai: A man decides to visit a new anti-corruption officer. On arriving at the government building he meets the officer’s secretary. The man asks to see the anti-corruption officer. “I’m afraid he’s not in today,” the secretary replies. “But I can put the light on inside his office,” the man says. “I may be able to let you see him, if you give me 50 rupees.” The man eventually pays the money and storms into the office: “Did you know that your own secretary is taking bribes?!” The anti-corruption officer opens his hands and says: “What to do? Even I had to pay 50 rupees to get into my office this morning.”

The transformation of any culture, is not merely transformation on a material and structural level (and continuously be revitalised if one’s vision is of democratic country), but an accompanying transformation of the collective psyche. This is of course where leadership of some substance is required. Psychoanalysis gives us valuable insights into what they might look like. Importantly, a leader’s presence, his utterings must primarily contain anxiety in order to lead the community or country through the natural human tensions in the dual desire for both change and for security and predictability. Nelson Mandela is a powerful example of leadership that understood his role in this way, leading South Africa out of a violent state of apartheid. He was visible, articulate, compassionate towards suffering and importantly, absolutely unwilling to shame those who clearly were perpetrators of the former regime.

Psychoanalysis reminds leaders that you cannot be a blank screen on which the community has to second-guess your thoughts, your feelings and intentions. It teaches us that through the strange mechanisms of the unconscious we will either project the worst aspects of ourselves onto you, or those of the most awful authority figures we may encounter in our childhood lives. Hence, why in leadership coaching, we drive home the importance of speech that includes sharing ourselves, personal disclosure, to fill the otherwise blank screen with something closer to the truth about who we are. So, in the absence of vibrant, committed leadership presence, and actual loud silence on important issues, it is easy to draw the conclusion that our leaders simply don’t care. Gandhi walked for miles, barefoot, touching the hearts and souls of the nation, but that now seems to be so distant from the leadership we have now in the country. I am sure this must be partly why Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is such a highly popular book amongst Mumbai students, in prominent position in virtually every bookstore I’ve visited in the City. This sad turning towards one of the most vicious dictators in history for guidance, for insights into some authority to govern the chaos that is India, (try Google: Mein Kampf+India), a profound hunger for visible, visionary, authoritative leadership of this country, to mobilise the popular imagination. Nelson Mandela’s creative leadership, demonstrated a willingness to commit to transformational processes as he did with the Truth and Reconciliation Process of South Africa. The process was designed to avoid attempts to blindly burying the atrocities of the past, in pretend-play that they somehow hadn’t happened, and instead, as Desmond Tutu put it, “to open up the wounds of hurt, to cleanse them, so that they did not fester”; to draw a line under the past, to make revenge, a sort of “you clobbered me, so I will clobber you” less likely to be in the psyche of the South African citizen and the country as a whole. Some 22,000 statements were submitted and heard in open court. One woman for example, simply spoke from her heart as a mother whose son was shot dead by the South African police and asked very simply to have a small grave to be erected in his memory.

There was, however, one application to the committee described as “intriguing,” from an unnamed Indian woman, describing her “apathy.” She essentially believed she hadn’t done enough towards alleviating the suffering of others. Under the terms of Commission, a person could apply for amnesty on the grounds that they:

“As individuals can and should be held accountable by history for our lack of necessary action in times of crisis…In exercising apathy rather than commitment we allowed others to sacrifice their lives for the sake of our freedom and an increase in our standard of living”.

Although her application fell within the guidelines of an “omission”, amnesty was not granted as it was not deemed politically motivated by any particular organization. The writer Jacqueline Rose, who brought this specific case to world attention with her psychoanalytic lense on world affairs, points out this case addressed “that what you don’t do as a political subject can have effects, and might be important in the transformations of the world as what you do”, yet “only rarely and reluctantly – hence the strangeness of this moment – do people admit to it (apathy), although they are very ready to diagnose it in others.” She goes on to describe that the conditions of the court hearings could not, within it structures, handle a confession of apathy. It would require answering questions such as “What is the time of apathy? How would you date it? What are the means and what the end? Is it in fact an intention at all? Is apathy something communicable, is it something we have a language for talking about? Or does it, more like a disease or shameful secret, rely on doing work invisible in the dark?”

It is grossly neglectful of the responsibilities of leaders not to give thoughtful consideration of the state of the collective psyche by singularly focusing on structural, engineering type transformations alone. Jacqueline Rose refers to an extract of the Commission report which comments that during the apartheid regime, “much of the country’s population went silent through fear, apathy, indifference or genuine lack of information,” in what they described as “diminished affective reactivity”. Many people in India are genuinely afraid to speak out against corruption. In the writings of George Orwell, he warned us that it is not the horse that needs to be whipped that you should worry about, but the horse that automatically obeys without needing to be whipped at all. In his fictional fable, “Animal Farm”, the animals betray their own rebellion against the human masters, as the pigs (now more equal that the other animals) compulsively repeat the same oppressive master-slave relationship. Animal Farm remains banned in China and most Islamic countries. It reminds us, that in overthrowing one form of oppression, perhaps in India’s case the British, one may risk creating an imitation that is just as insidious and divisive. It is this sort of reasoning that led to the transformational efforts at the subjective level in South Africa. Fascism, Orwell foretold, is essentially a belief in inequality and somehow making that inequality normal, invariably by dehumanising others.

There is popular mobilisation against corruption in India. Social campaigns and civic mobilisation are positive in the sense that they can breathe new life into parliamentary democracy, providing of course the governing leadership has the confidence to see it in such a way. Like the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, we don’t know where this will lead, as naturally we cannot, but it forces us to take stock of a moment in time, not only of what is going on around us, but what it evokes inside us. It is often the case that the sense of uncertainty such movements inevitably instil, breed a desire by those in positional power to view such activity purely in terms of a threat to their power.

Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst has written widely about what he calls the “Fascist state of mind”, as equally threatening one might say, as overt brutality, designed to undermine movements and other challenges to the status quo. What he suggests is that there will be attempts at distorting the views of the people posing a challenge to authority, an extreme form being such as slander, “he’s a fake”, “in fancy dress” and views taken out of context in a form of what he calls “rhetorical violence”. Then comes a caricaturing, a sort of cartooning of the other’s views, identifying them with a particular group, “he’s funded by the IDIOTS party”; an assassination, a sadist sort of gossip by placing fictions of facts in “non-judicial places” where the victim cannot speak for himself. Resorting to a sort of aggregating, by a name “well what do you expect he’s a Muslim”, or “from Bihar” or a "Jew".

The simple reality is that state building involves thinking about what the modern country should look like and how it should be run. For many countries around the world, this is seems like a tug of war between the politicians, who are seen as not being willing to change, are invested in maintain the lucrative status quo and civil society that is keenly driving that change. The question of course in any war against corruption is who will be targeted? One of the key issues of dispute in India, in drawing up the anti-corruption Lokpal agreement, is whether the most senior leaders of the country fall under its purview. If they are not, surely it merely becomes another instrument for manipulating patronage and by extension, an exercise in corruption itself. Loyalties then, continue like anything in a free market village that can be bought and sold in cash payments in convertible currencies, assets sold off at bargain prices and natural resources plundered or licences given to people to do so.

Perhaps there are lessons from the South African process, not so much the characteristics of actual process itself, but its innovativeness in the following ways. First of all, as a general point, laws alone, or redistribution of resources or other structural initiatives do not sufficiently effect lasting change. Subjective and psychic interventions are also required. Mandela understood this. Corruption harms people, it hurts people and it demeans the people of India on a daily basis and those of us who also live here. Yet transformation cannot occur without “buy-in” (to state simple leadership textbook jargon) from those who will be required to think and act differently in the new era, especially those with least to gain. The transformation of South Africa was a partnership of the collective psyche of Mandela, de Klerk and many others. The respective leaders were willing to change (i.e. grow), to exercise the painful and difficult work of working-through the outer and inner realties of their limitations in the best long term interests of the country as a whole, not merely from a perspective of singular self-interest. Let us not forget these were former adversaries (I may refer here to Mandela as a leadership role model, but the same must be said of de Klerk). Without such focus on the subjective level, a joining between adversarial groups, surely it is likely that the anti-corruption initiatives, are built on sand, in which no anti-corruption Bill can possibly stand-up with such inadequate foundations, however well scoped or written. This I think, is what Mumbai friends mean when they say “we have to get to the roots of corruption.”

The second point I want to make is the South African process took its injustices of past history extremely seriously in order to build a better future. If leaders of the country have, as is claimed by the anti-corruption movements, looted the country by approximately 1.3-2 trillion U.S. dollars that could usefully have improved the lives of the poor, they must stand accountable and arguably the funds returned and redistributed. In today’s Times of India, UNICEF suggested that 55 million children, 43% of India's children today, right now, in the India are estimated to be desperately underfed and underweight. Platitudes of “Let’s not look back” or “The past is the past”, quasi sorts of attempts at enforced forgetting on a nation will and always fail. We simply cannot issues commands to the mind in this way and expect them to work in any sustainable, lasting way. They simply don’t, instead becoming toxic cargo in the collective psyche, to explode at any indeterminate moment. Desmond Tutu, during the South African process, quoted the words “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” These words are also displayed at the entrance to Dachau, once the former death camp training ground for the S.S.

My third point is that the South African process was transformational in the characteristics of being (1) unexpected, (2) inclusive, (3) creative (4) intimate and (5) transparent. It was not the same old distant and dictatorial leadership the country was accustomed to. A common dissatisfaction in my consulting room is the neglectful distance leaders have from the people in the community they lead, and the tedious predictability of how they will behave. Who in any large organisation hasn’t felt a sense of “here we go again” when a boss sends a cold email issuing a complete change of business strategy, without the sensitivity to show any care of how this might affect individuals or the collective psyche. Do we merely want to be remembered as leaders who conditioned horses that don’t need to be whipped? Gallup estimated that about 40% of people, whilst continuing to sit in their chair in the office have actually psychologically left. They also estimate that about 90% of people who leave their organisations do so because they simply cannot bear to work for their bosses any longer. The South Africa process was profoundly inclusive and intimate in the sense that it said by its actions, to each and every citizen, “What happened to you matters, we will not deny or dismiss what you feel.” It was open to every citizen of the country to be involved and held transparently in open court for the world to see.

Nelson Mandela’s compassion, his dignity, his willingness to take leadership risks - without which no transformation is possible - mobilised the country across the apartheid divide. He had the leadership mentality that was not afraid to invite inquiry and reflection. Mandela's boundless enthusiasm guided the nation through its evolution, taking the imagination of the country by storm and building commitment from every corner of the world. All this, after 27 years in prison, finding the strength to give respect, forgiveness and partnership to the very people who incarcerated him. Of course, leaders like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi both achieved their vast reputations through severe martyrdom and one must question how political leaders might achieve the same repute simply by being good? De Klerk deserved to be honoured in this piece of writing. There is a story that is told by Alastair Sparks, a South African writer, that one day in his place of worship, de Klerk heard a message that said, “New roads must be found, new pathways must be sought. The only difference, between a groove and grave, apart from the spelling, is depth.” De Klerk listened. He found a new way, undoubtedly firstly within himself, within his mind and his whole being. Most of all, he found within himself the leadership substance to actually take reparative action.

If there is one especially important leadership insight here, I think it is that transformation begins with us, ourselves. Any country, corporate or other community transformation will be dictated by a leader’s willingness to take a long hard look at his anxieties, states of fear, resistances, deeper wishes, in all, to take a long look at himself and at the very least, think about what he wants to be remembered for.

What does Money Promise You?

2011-05-30T01:18:00.000-07:00

Money doesn’t satisfy us because money doesn’t satisfy small children. This is essentially what Freud believed, that money can be a substitution, but no more than that, a substitution for our original deeper satisfactions, such as being loved, caressed and held.

During a talk I attended in London a few years ago, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips described the encounter of a child psychotherapist’s first meeting with the father of a child who didn’t speak. “Ask any price you want”, the father said. “My son doesn’t talk. So do whatever you want as long as you make him talk. And then let’s not talk about it”. What is implicated here is of course an assumption of what money can do and that by applying as much of it as is necessary, the son will be healed. He will speak. One may also read that the father is handing over the responsibility of parenting, to a paid professional who is assumed to have the skills necessary to make the son speak.

If as this father implies, money can make a child speak, and presumably the more of it, the more the child will speak, what else might money do? What else does money promise by the way of such bribes? Money has a central role in the human game of fantasy and promising futures. Through money, we make our dreams. Money lays out before us a tapestry of fantasy lives on offer. Money fills and makes for acceptable conversations with others. We literally share our dreams. Yet for many people, financial wealth brings its own problems. It breeds greed, rivalry, envy, competitiveness and often a wrenching sense that there is always someone who has more. The more we have, the more we want. It is used by psychologically unavailable parents to substitute love and care. It is a cover for childhood wounds, the narcissistic injury of neglect, wrapped in a bandage of accumulated possesses and property, that say “look at me”. It promises that we are invincible, that nothing can hurt us if we have “enough”. For a moment, that expensive dress makes us feel pretty. Then within hours a voice in the back of our mind reminds us we have a 40 inch waist. Money promises and often fails. It creates lonely partitions between what V.S. Naipaul called the traditional “temple-goer” generation in India and their “green card” absent offspring. Money promises, but without a money-back guarantee. We trade time for money and postpone time now, for future time. With low self-esteem, money is a way of displaying I am winning at the game of life.

Money may buy us the security of a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, but it is a limited when it comes to a broader definition of wealth. We chase it and defer other things, sometimes to the point where we forget what those other things are. We know that compulsive shopping and high spending is linked with depression. Excessively pursuing money at the expense of other things, hints at low self-esteem and possession by rather than of money. Privileged children from wealthy families or in cosseted relationships rarely get to test their ability to function successfully and independently in the world. They wrinkle and age like the rest of us, yet there is a sense that they haven’t got out from underneath something, perhaps their parents. The important human developmental challenges are held at bay, just as Peter Pan’s trajectory of growing up was incomplete. Well intentioned parents, who say suffered the trauma of Partition, want a better life for their children, fewer challenges, that they don’t suffer the miseries of trying and failing, yet inevitably that often means missing out on the opportunities to test and discover our unique talents.

The way in which money is played out in India as a ‘symptom’, a disguise for other deeper wish fulfilment, appears to be in the numerous family disputes and contested ownership of property. Undoubtedly, an exquisite aspect of the Indian extended family is the genuine respect for elders. Indian families don’t generally outsource their elderly as we of the West often do. Yet what is striking, is the real challenges within many of the Bombay families to negotiate their disputes with one another. Every day, it seems there is a familial dispute debated in the press: contested property, fights over land and legacy. Rarely a day passes in social Mumbai without some reference to someone’s family fight. In place of adult, logical negotiation, there appears to be a shocking willingness to exact revenge within the family and be the “winner”. The roots of this, is might be envy and rivalry that is set up early-on in a child’s life. Rivalry tolerates no sharing. Children, who in the family system are pitched against one another, as I have heard in the consulting room here in Mumbai, were literally graded as young children as a “B”, compared to the other brother who gets a “C”. These grades are not for their achievements, but for who they are as children. No doubt these are well intentioned parents hoping to spur their children to higher levels of achievement. But the competition is externalised in a battle between siblings, rather than a competition with oneself, where the child is encouraged to ask, “Could I do better?” What this clearly does, is establishes a rivalry and revenge dynamic that without some psychological curiosity, will continue through adulthood and deeper into the law courts.

The template for what is “normal” sharing and ways of negotiating with others is learned when we are children within the family, particularly with the primary care-giver, the mother. The mother-child relationship is full of negotiating needs. The mother wants to sleep the baby wants attention and so on. According to attachment theory, the most scientific offshoot of psychoanalysis, “The ability to negotiate” is one of the four key components of intimacy (the others are the ability to 2. seek care, 3. give care and 4. be independent & autonomous). When a child experiences productive negotiations, their right to have wishes and preferences, or not attacked when their wishes are different, the child is likely to develop a sense of security. Sadly, many people negotiate through lawyers or with their fists or by merely shouting and repeating their demands.

Intimacy is about our deepest, innermost nature. It is about knowing what you are feeling. The pursuit of money, just like the pursuit of the highest grading in the sibling dynamic for the approval and affection of care-givers, requires wearing a mask in a game of pretend and make-believe in order to gain that childish pleasure of feeling loved and cherished. Only through educating ourselves so that we actually know what we are feeling, can we make money work for us as a positive energy in our lives.

More money doesn’t equal more life. Better conversations, words and deeds that tickle us, show that we are deeply cared for may just equal richer lives. Certainly, harmonious and intimate family relations are a sign not only of secure character, but of wealth that is childishly abundant. Elizabeth Kubler Ross interviewed 20,000 people in the days and hours before their death. In her numerous books, she reported that all these dying people want the same thing, intimacy. She once asked us, “Don’t tell me what you want to do, what money you want, tell me what you ache for.”

The Cosmopolitan Leader

2011-05-16T01:32:00.000-07:00

To be cosmopolitan is to be willing to violate your own understanding. This is of course quite contrary to the civilizing mission of an imperialist version that we witness, say, at the roots of America’s claims of fundamental rights to global leadership. To be cosmopolitan is not to say I will care for you, show you respect if you in return say become a Christian, or some other fundamentalist version of “be like me, do as I say, then you will be acceptable”. The cosmopolitan citizen is inclined to be more troubled about themselves: to ask, “Am I being sufficiently responsible towards the others I share this world with?” and “How can I make judgements about other people’s actions without disturbing and recognising my own cracked lenses and fractured perception of the world?”

I once wore a burka for the day. It is a memorably sensual day. To the world, I only revealed my greenish blue eyes and my hands. Everything else was covered. It was an experiment, an attempt at locating a momentary sense of “otherness”. As I walked around, I realised that hidden, I could perhaps wear anything underneath my cloth screen, and found teasing myself, wondering what that might be. As to anyone who may be given the right to see beneath this veiled me, I imagined a profoundly intimate and sacred encounter, a potent sense of literally and privately being unveiled. It was through this experience that I gained a hint of what some Muslim friends feel, that the contemporary Western expectation to be made-up, dressed-up, revealing one’s body, is perhaps no less repressive (dare I say more oppressive?) than the wearing of a burka is so lazily interpreted.

Here in Bombay many faiths and cultures commingle, creating a profoundly secular ambience. Yet none of us can entirely rid ourselves of dogma, the legacy of childhood injuries, or the influence of a skewed and dogmatic media. When I was looking for an apartment in Bombay, certain buildings were off limits. “Only Parsi’s in this building”, said the real estate agent, “Sorry we can’t look at this place, it’s no foreigners”. The intermingling is necessarily and invariably conditional.

As a foreigner, a foreign psychologist here, I am often asked to help build the international capability of leaders. As one CEO put it, when he asked me to work with one of his senior guys, “He doesn’t travel well, he’s just not cosmopolitan”. Of course the man he described is well travelled as his wallet bulging with “One World” and “Global Elite Club” airline cards suggests. He is if you like, cosmopolitan in a banal and parochial sense: his travels in London, in New York, are in the ghetto. He simply spends all of his time, wherever he is in the world, with other Indian friends from Bombay. This ghettoising is the greatest challenge to a sense of global citizenship, a retreat into a form of “interior exile” as Salman Rushdie puts it.

As the CEO and I explore what we actually mean by “To be cosmopolitan”, we play with the idea that it is a commitment of intention, to be loyal to a larger sense of “we” than merely one’s nation, one’s neighbourhood, one’s insular mind-set. It begs if you like, for some interior and lived state of global citizenship. “Do you see any signs that he is curious about other cultures, beyond the banal things like trying pasta?” I ask the CEO. At the heart of it, as many writers such as Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha remind us, there is a deeply moral dimension in cosmopolitanism, a moral attitude toward the world. It requires curiosity and the suspension of quick judgments. “Not really”, replies the CEO. “What about self-reflection?” I ask, “Any signs, such as asking you for feedback, or pointing out ways he needs to develop?” Limply, he replies, “No, not really”.

To be cosmopolitan demands the difficult work of self-examination. It calls for a commitment to distinguishing facts from cultural assumptions. It asks us to assume friendship with that which may feel deeply foreign, disorientating and to open-up to the ‘other’. It is an orientation towards the world that requires the exhausting effort of thinking, to explore what is, what might be universal, as Mendieta puts it, which must be “rearticulated, defended, expanded and made concrete”. It suggests the idea of the universal right and wrong, beyond the particular, must always be “held in suspension” to borrow Judith Butler’s words. It must never be concrete.

In speech, cosmopolitanism requires a framing in language, a disclosure of one’s position, one’s particularist lense on affairs, therefore revealing, owning up to, and giving recognition that my view is not absolute and always conditional. Again, like the last blog, I am making a bid that liberation exists in the language we choose; language that only can only develop and expand through some sort of deep commitment to learning. It speaks of “The way I see it, is”, “From my perspective”, “I notice that I don’t see this in the way you do”. To be cosmopolitan is to use better words, and sentences that open up dialogue rather than shut it down. It is to invite dialogue; to have the self-confidence that one’s own perspective can be interrupted, even expanded in listening to the response of the other.

I have a reflexive aversion to degrading and hostile jokes about any nation. Since the death of Bin Laden, I have heard insidious jokes in Bombay about people from Pakistan. What I notice, is that they are spewed up on unsuspecting listener like myself (no “would you like to hear a joke?”), by men (always) with the bursting hostility of an adolescent boy struggling with his sexuality. They are invariably performed by the people who appear to have travelled far from their locality only externally with their “One World” airline card, but clearly without using any miles or effort to travel in the interior world of themselves. They are often accompanied by highly offensive jokes about women as merely body parts. To reiterate the jokes here would be in some sense to collude with degrading others. They are I sense, noting my reaction, a passive aggressive invitation to a fight. Such jokes, according to Freud satisfy our aggressive impulses and provide the “pleasure of saving” much real thought. Lazy, non-thought, is the absolute enemy of the cosmopolitan, as is any form of racism whatever shape or form it takes.

I ask the CEO, “How does your guy get along with women?” “What’s that got to do with him being more cosmopolitan?” he asked. “Isn’t the first ‘other’ a man encounters a woman?” He is deafeningly quiet. After some time he says, “He’s very abrupt, I suppose rude in fact. In fact, every woman in his team has left. But you know it’s different in India”. “Then best keep him here,” I suggest, “I can’t see him travelling well at all”.

Creativity, & Being Bored

2011-05-10T00:55:00.000-07:00

Creative states are states of fantasy. We break with the comfortable allure of the tribe; produce mental jumps, reach to a point where rational thinking alone falters; where the brain has to give up a bit and something else, something far more riddle-some enters the essence of our being.

Imagine yourself sitting in the back of your car gazing at the passing events through the window. The Banyan tree reminds you of your first girlfriend’s hair. You notice a man arranging flowers on the wooden table of his stall is wearing trousers just like those worn on your graduation day. The three legged stray dogs are playfully fighting near the temple, as a man with a peculiarly large bottom walks his equally obese Labrador. They appear to be unhappy. Somehow you are reminded of your boss and that short English teacher at school and his sadistic cane. You toss away the niggling feeling that you are jealous of stray dogs. Meandering in your thoughts, you are “Free Associating”, to coin a psychoanalytic term, laying down random tracks, not so much, ‘x follows y, follows z’, more a detour that ‘x and y and x and ….’. What do you then do? Pick up your phone and distract yourself, or sit a little longer and get curious about what these creative associations might be hinting at? In short, do you allow yourself to pause?

In “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud teases and circles around our “involuntary ideas”, implying creativity as a kind of dream-state, a relaxation of the internal rational censor that controls the imagination. The brilliant psychoanalytic scholar, Jacqueline Rose describes that as a writer, she chooses her themes, from Peter Pan, to the Israel-Palestine conflict, “because I need to understand something and don't. It’s about going to a place of difficulty, feeling one's way around it, seeing if you can survive by creating some sort of order out of it".

Psychoanalysis is itself a form of freedom and creativity. It is a disturbance. It breaks the fixtures and fittings. It legitimizes looking out the window. The consulting room is a space to pause. Through words we represent ourselves and by listening to ourselves, we hear the stories of possibility and limitation we place on ourselves. Creative language - read poetic language - is always musical and rarely conditional. The language we use, our self- medicating stories, are simultaneously inside and outside ourselves. “Daddy, it’s raining up my nose”, says my friend’s daughter after her first taste of fizzy lemonade. Yet we adorn ourselves with ready-to-wear figures of speech, commonsensical platitudes as though obedience to clipped verbal conformity will protect us from something. Boredom comes where we are tired of our own words. We need a new narrative. What is it that is so dangerous if we loosen-up the words that rigidify ourselves? What disturbance may occur if we bring a little jazz into the story, loosen-up the mutterings about ourselves and our world? To be in a creative state is to redirect, to twist, to drift, to meander away from the absolute, the strictures of linguistic certainty.

What then happens if we dare seek out the dissenting voice that hovers in the landscape of inside and outside? Without listening to the hints, what might the three legged dogs be really playing with for example, we risk rigidifying our identity, “I am x but I am not y”, closing off, placing limits on ourselves and writing limited stories on what we experience. It’s a short autobiography that reads “Hindu, male, married, bored in a corporation”. If we dare to experiment with “having a whole wardrobe of identities”, as Amartya Sen puts it, we open possibilities for being less bored and a richer autobiography. A British woman at the Breach Candy Club, a former colonial club that once barred Indians interests me (read doesn’t bore me) with her experimentations in living. It is her second week in Mumbai when she goes to the morgue to see a body burned, “I want to know what I experience, how it affects me. I do all sorts of things to feel alive”. Leadership of our lives, or any endeavor requires creativity: leadership that gives hope, vitality, a sense of belonging and meaning. A half whispered concern I hear is the self-accusation by leaders that “I am a bit boring”. Being boring is living in language that is full of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, the traffic of creative opportunities and new experiences faces a stop sign, a halt. Perhaps it is more apt to say that “I am boring myself, me, with the same words”, representing through my communication, a disregard in commitment to my own happiness, and well-being.

The difficulty I am drawn to, where I am willingly lose my bearings, is Partition; the partition with a capital “P”, that signifies the brutal division of India and the creation of Pakistan. I associate it with the everyday partitions we bear, albeit on an unbearable scale: the painful loses that come with divisions between people; the displacement from village to city that lives on, the odious lines we draw within ourselves between the prohibitive voices that pass for the truth and the daring thoughts that arise in moments of pondering. The partition of words we allow ourselves to use and those we make off-limits and keep us being bored.

How to even think about trauma and legacy of Partition, or to think about anything creatively through language and in language, poses a challenge and a threat. As lethal and transformative this division of a people was, it is profoundly difficult to speak, to write about, without disappearing in reductive and simplistic categories of victim and persecutor. Yet the same can be said of everyday ordinary living. How to speak of ourselves as more than the victimised by some force or other, be it government, the corporate structure of the business or the husband or wife that doesn’t show-up the way we want them too. We use them to stop entering a creative space, to prevent disturbing ourselves and holding the threat of failure at bay.

Opening up our language, noticing how speech distributes power, refusing to resist self-awareness by locking ourselves in corsets of words, contaminated by endless repetition of the same ways of communicating, we find ourselves making the risky manoeuvre of saying “and”, saying “but”. Psychoanalysis is then a maker of new sentences. Freud, of course, from his earliest writings associated creativity with mourning – adjustment to loss – a way of averting sorrows, boredom, and depression in a subtle, yet forceful determination to fight for the vibrancies of living. That is what it means to be creative. But we have to be willing to be disturbed. Surely it can’t be as bad as being bored.

"It's Good to Talk?"

2011-04-18T23:48:00.000-07:00

A professor in a classroom here in Mumbai tells me that he encourages his students to speak up in class. He says that the only way to ensure the students do so is to make speaking in class mandatory. “Once they understand this is the norm you expect, they’ll get used to it,” he says. “But you have to make it clear in India”. On the same day, the Chairman of an engineering company tells me that one of his Managing Directors from overseas has, “Just learned the difficult lessons that Indian employees don’t always tell you when something is going wrong. He’s just found out that saying nothing, means something”.

In Western society, communicating assertively is generally perceived as a sign of a healthy personality and those who are rather silent, tend to be devalued as shy, passive, or lacking independent opinions. Westerners perhaps make the assumption that talking is a positive act, a critical ingredient of independent thinking. By talking, an individual expresses his ideas, his points of view and individuality. Socrates viewed knowledge as existing within people and needing only to be recovered through verbal reasoning. Homer considered one of the most important skills for a man to have to be that of a debater. Freud of course believed that the critical success of any psychoanalysis was the patient’s ability to freely associate verbally his thoughts and feelings, with the voice of the internal critic held in abeyance.

In the consulting room is a client who is a Managing Director of one of the banks. Instead of hearing him say that rather overused legacy of the British, “I’m fine”, a sign of “Improvement” might be to hear the client verbalise more of the complexities of what is going on in his internal world. Things like, “Well, I’m struggling to maintain my enthusiasm at work, yet at the same time, I seem to be working 12 hours a day and can’t stop”. Narrative complexity as a sign of intelligence is one of the ways Western psychological models rate higher levels leadership consciousness. And of course such models are being imported into India. My culturally specific beliefs and assumption backed of course by evidence from Western psychology, suggests that this client will benefit most by such revelations aloud not only to himself, but with a skilled professional who is interested in him. In this relationship space of two people’s curiosity about the deeper motivations of this man, we hope that new personal awareness arises, and thus a richer picture of how he might live his life and conduct his business. A client may want to explore how he can relate better with his team members, how to energise and motivate staff across many geographies or how to deliver a profoundly moving speech.

But is such talking about such things valued in the context of a developing country like India? There are signs that it is, although perhaps the nature of the development process is not fully understood. This may be partly due to the lack of management education and development that focuses on the critical skills of relating in the workplace. After all, it is our ability to work together effectively and efficiently that gets things done and done well. However, most large Companies here now have 360 degree feedback processes, whereby an individual receives written feedback on the impact his leadership has. Yet judging by some of the reports I read here, they seem rather censored and “Nice”. Shame may also be attached to speaking with someone outside the immediate family, but also a sense of uncertainty of what this sort of relationship entails, and so it is easier to pick up a book on leadership, as though insights transplant themselves magically from the page to the leaders actions.

In the Indian tradition, personal development has historically focused upon meditation; the idea that silence and introspection will be beneficial for higher levels of thinking. In fact from this perspective, perhaps all this thinking and talking may indeed be viewed as the root of the client’s troubles. Talking might therefore be conceived of differently. Eckhart Tolle, known for his book “The Power of Now”, popular here in India as well as overseas, extolls the power of being in the present moment, promoting the importance of meditation, and other forms of contemplative activity. In a recent talk he gave, he rather humorously warned his students, “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week living with your relatives and see how reactive you still are”. He was also suggesting that meditation is not something to do to become better meditators, but to enable us to have greater peace and more harmonious relationships with others. He also warned that we babble too much, mindlessly filling up space with words like the ramblings of the disoriented madman we might see on the street. We say what we don’t mean, and we keep hidden what we really feel. And we say a lot, not only in speech, but critically in how we say things. Some evidence suggests that the greatest distortions in our communication are in the sound, the music of what we say, and the dance of how we use our bodies. If I verbally try to tell you I value you, whilst at the same time, using the tone of a depressed bureaucrat, with my arms folded as I gaze at the ceiling, you will get a very clear message from me. When we are unsure about someone’s intentions in their communication, we draw only 5% on the words, some 38% on the sound, and a massive 55% on body language. One of the most common criticisms of Indian leaders is their harshness with staff. This is often justified to me with comments like “it’s the only way to get them to do anything”. Yet as an outsider looking in, it seems to me that at times, rather sadist leadership virtually immobilises staff in a vicious circle of freeze and fear. One writer in response to the previous blog on cricket and coaching suggested to me that this harshness is developed in the Indian household, as the child observes his mother berating servants. Whatever the roots might be, it important that Indian leaders with aspirations to work in the International context understand there are much more rigorous expectations of their conduct.

All these ideas of “East” vs. “West” are of course a rather common post-colonial polarity. It is likely that the business man in India has far more in common with the business man in New York than the villagers in rural India. In fact internationally, all the leaders who have been measured and rated as having a higher level of leadership consciousness, report having both a regular practice such as mediation and being involved in some sort of dialogue with others as a means of their growth. The international evidence however, on influential communication, reminds us very clearly that if a leader wants his staff to speak out, he must role-model that behaviour himself. So, for example, if he wants his staff to be open about production or trading problems, whatever the issue might be, they will need to have witnessed their leader disclose his own personal challenges during his career. Of course, in order for someone to talk, there must be a listener. How good most leaders are at listening is questionable. Professor Richard Hackman from Harvard University, found that in his research on black-box data from flight crashes, that almost without exception, there was a dissenting voice saying early on there was a problem with the plane. Yet in each case, no one listened. The voice was too junior, too small to be taken seriously. Listening involves stepping into the agenda and perspective of another. One suspends one’s own greedy needs to say this or that, and let go of control of a conversation. Only those with solid enough self-esteem are good listeners.

No matter who we are, or where we are from, whatever unknown cultural codes are embedded in our being, we all share in common the never-ending decision-making about what to say and what not to say. When the veil between the conscious and the unconscious mind is thin, we will be verbally reactive, or blocked like cement so that we cannot find the flexibility to utter even one word.

I think it is fairly culturally safe to say that we are all on some level, longing for real human contact. The workplace is of course the site of our attachments with others. For many, it is not only a source of identity, of self-esteem it is also a place of belonging. Our leaders just like the teacher at the beginning of this piece signify what is expected, what is permissible and what degree of depth in relating to one another is “normal”. Leaders of course do this, not only by what they say, and whether they have the confidence to be good listeners, but in what they do.

As Gandhi put it, “My life is my message”.

"What Do You Expect?"

2011-04-12T01:47:00.000-07:00

As international citizens, thinking people, whatever national identity we wear, however tightly fitting it might be, we choose how we engage with matters of the world at large. Just as the bureaucrats, police and politicians can decide their particular ethical brand and style of participation in political processes, equally each one of us decides the degree to which we attempt to participate in developing a democratic and fair world.

India right now, is abuzz with social activism as a citizen movement led by Anna Hazare demands the right to a corrupt-free India. Hazares “Fast unto Death” pledge has created a renewed sense of hope and vitality that there is huge commitment and citizenship willing to show-up and be involved in shaping the evolution of the country. In a similar vein to the trajectory of Nelson Mandela, who virtually became President of South Africa from his prison cell, it appears Anna Hazare is rapidly becoming the moral commander of India. Along with him, countless Indians took a pledge to fast, whilst 100,000s protested across the country. Those who were fasting, including Hazare are eating once again, thanks to political pledges to design an adequate anti-corruption Jan Lokpal Agreement. But it’s clear that Hazare will be back on his “Fast unto Death”, and no doubt thousands of others will join him if his expectations are not met. His passion, his commitment is rooted very firmly in the plight of the poor of India, who after all, suffer most at the hands of corruption.

The very moment expectations of incorruptibility falls, evolutionary pressure bears down and we start to experience shifts. Evolutionary pressure to be better depends on expectations of standards regarding honesty or corrupt practices, which the drafting of the Jan Lokpal Bill seeks to address. If the public has low expectations, they will end up confirming them. In turn, this leads to further citizen apathy. Apathy is understandable, given the anti-corruption bill has been presented eight times since 1968 to no avail.

Despite the country’s population of over a billion people, the average number of whistle-blowers complaints of corruption through the Central Vigilance Commission, between 2005 and 2009, was a paltry annual average of 346. This cannot possibly be apathy alone, but a process that doesn’t work. System blockages, lack of flow, a sense there is no one to turn to, leaves any community constipated by its problems. When bureaucrats around the world evade their ethical responsibilities by hiding in procedural and plumbing excuses, it saps the human spirit. It erodes a dignified sense of empowerment. It also tells us of the low level of leadership development, known in psychological circles as the “Expert” level of leadership we are dealing with. In psychological terms, it is the tyranny of “Schizoid” functioning. This is a clinical term to describe a constellation of lack of affect, of emotional deadness, a cold, indifference towards others, often accompanied by insidious smirks and other odd physical characteristics. A constipated culture blocks our energy so much so, that for many, it appears they exist under a veil of depression. Yet escaping to complacency and apathy, as I am clearly hinting at here, maybe a disease more virulent than at least attempting to shape our global evolution, even if we fail.

What is powerful here in India, unlike say the social activism of Egypt, is that the youth of India have the stately leadership figure of Anna Hazare, whose commitment to the people of India is dignified and impressive. Unlike India, other social movements have faced the tyranny of insidious press silence, no access to the internet or telephones. In the minds of many here, perhaps assisted by the articulations of the press, the spirit of Gandhi has returned, as has a degree of faith in leadership and decency. Once again, this “Second Freedom Struggle” as the press are coining it, arises from a base of personal, rather than positional power.

Great expectations energise the bureaucrats and politicians against corruption and keep the fire of political and social activism burning. While power corrupts and corruption undermines the legitimacy of power, the prospects for social and economic development crucially depends on the evolution of a web of expectations. Your expectations, my expectations. All expectations begin in the mind, with a simple self-reflection, of “How do I expect to be treated?” Higher levels of consciousness ask, “How do we expect our children to be treated?” Higher levels again, ask “What should all our children’s children have a right expect?”

“Will this movement fizzle out?” some ask. I doubt it. There’s too much (1) vision for a corruption-free India, too much traction of real (2) dissatisfaction and too much solid thinking concerning (3) implementation. These are the three ingredients required for deep change to occur. Time will tell no-doubt. Nevertheless, within two days of Anna Hazare ending his fast, the Finance Minister announced that India will be ratifying the United Nations convention on corruption “Soon”. This will mean that it is much easier to reclaim corruption money in tax havens overseas, that official will be expected to comply with codes of conduct, and disclose financial assets. As the UN literature states, "offences committed in support of corruption, including money-laundering and obstructing justice, are also dealt with."

The day I write this, a friend of mine is angry and despairing of the corruption dilemma he faces. There are consequences if he accedes to paying a bribe and there are consequences if he doesn’t. My only advice to him is to “Imagine you are ninety years old, looking back on your life, what you want to see that you did today?” Sadly, whether in a country or a corporation, the human citizen is often feels left with merely one final recourse of action. I will give you my feedback about this country, about this corporation by leaving. Talent walks out the door, and takes a plane somewhere else. This beautiful country called India will potentially lose a critical mass of talent if basic expectations of decency are not met. When leaders don’t listen fully and act expediently what else can they expect? The significant factor distinguishing those of higher levels of leadership is timely action. “Soon” cannot be soon enough.

"India's Cricket Lessons"

2011-04-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

This is a tribute to Gary Kirsten the coach to the India Cricket team. What a fantastic result Team India. It feels a huge honour to be living in the City of Mumbai, home to the match, probably the most exhilarating place in the world on the winning Saturday night. The whole City came to a celebratory standstill, as people face-painted with the red, green and white of the Indian flag danced on top of their cars along Marine Drive and the sky lit up with fireworks in all directions within seconds of the match win.

Coach Gary, a former South African cricketer’s favourite motto is: “There is no greater waste of a resource than that of unrealised talent”, (the words of the former U.S. president Roosevelt). Talent development is all about reducing the gap – the gap between current performance and desired performance. When you are on your knees utterly empty of any belief in yourself, the coach lends you their relentless confidence in you, “I was thankful to him for keeping his faith in me when I was going through a tough phase,” says player Suresh Raina. When the comfort of laziness creeps in, the coach, in as aggressive or warms a manner as is required, reminds the player to step-up and be all he can be.

As a coach he helped the players identify both their individual areas for growth and blind-spots in performance, as well as, in their strengths and weaknesses in the team functioning. He motivated them to believe in themselves, to believe in each other, that they could pull-off this outstanding result for their country. He worked with the team to develop their emotional as well as physical fitness, as well as their game-strategy.

Coaching business leaders has everything in common with coaching sports players and teams. In fact, several years ago, I worked with an Investment Bank, alongside Clive Woodward who at the time was successfully coaching the England Rugby team. The critical ingredient, despite immense talent, was that this global team had a crippling sense that they could not win accolades like Euromoney because a competitor institution was in their group mind “better, more talented”. They weren’t. The other team just had more belief in themselves. Through a series of leadership and coaching strategies we created a winner.

When the coach sits in front of a guy who he or she knows can reach higher and higher levels in his performance, the coach is looking at two things. Firstly, is the guy motivated to excel, to be the best he can be? What degree of skills-gap are we looking at here? A good coach is essentially an artist. An artist works creatively to get under the skin of another human being. Sometimes deliberately making them angry to evoke change, other times nurturing that tender spot in the psyche that has produced a highly critical voice inside the person that impairs their performance. It’s mind-training, it’s strategy-building and it’s behavioural training. We coaches end up loving those we nurture, especially the ones that fight with their hearts and souls to bring out the best in themselves and offer the gift of their talents to the world. Knowing you matter to the coach is highly critical for the relationship to work, “Gary treated us like family”, as player Sehwag put it.

Whether cricket, business or Bollywood, the person you want to coach is the one who wants to live his or her life asking “How can I do better”, “How can I show-up more”, rather than merely point the finger at others and say “But I couldn’t do it, because, because, because”. They are the curious souls who want to make sense of themselves, of why they do this, and why they don’t do that. For us coaches, they are treasured people who live in our hearts and minds, who keep us awake at night when they are in the throes of transformation, and remain with us, often many years after their physical presence has left our lives.

I don’t know who you are reader. If you’re a cricket fan, you can pretty much rest assured that Gary Kirsten gave everything of himself to coach that team. And he will have given up a lot in his own life to do this, especially his family. That’s what we do. We turn ourselves inside out to make growth and transformation possible, because it’s often what makes us feel happiest and most purposeful in our lives.

But something puzzles me about India. We have these incredible cricket guys, who clearly are entrepreneurs of their own growth and development. These players made a proactive decision to work with someone who can help them grow individually and collectively. Of course they may have been defensive and didn’t like the feedback at times. That’s natural because change is difficult. Yet, are business leaders in India as committed entrepreneurs to their own growth as these players? It seems to me that many business leaders in India tend to leave their growth utterly to chance or pay minimal lip-service to it.

Whether you are a cricket player or a leader, the only way towards higher level performance is through feedback. Feedback maybe about the way you relate on the pitch or in the corporate boardroom, feedback concerning how you manage your emotions and your energy when you perform. A good coach (read good leader) tells you, “I love the way you do x”, “I don’t like the way you do y”, and “What I want you to do is z”. One of the leaders as coach I worked with would be saying this sort of coaching language 30-40 times a day to her team members.

Discussing this over dinner, Indian friends tell me that I underestimate the way many business men and women in Mumbai dislike criticism. I try to explain that feedback highlights strengths, highlights areas for development. That feedback is not about who you are. It’s about ways to improve your behaviour. It’s the exciting fact that as we achieve one stage of potential, yet another emerges. What you do, when you start to interrogate yourself, with someone else, when you start to question your tacit assumptions about yourself about other people, you start to wake up. You also then start to be a different kind of person. One man, in his early forties tells me that few of his colleagues are prepared for even thinking about themselves, because their mothers have been telling them they are perfect, just because they are boys, since the day they were born. I respond that this doesn’t explain the profound commitment of the India Cricket team, who were also boys once, to their growth and development, which after all, led to a profoundly exhilarating ‘win’ for the whole country.

Perhaps there is something yet to evolve more fully in India, in terms of education concerning what personal and professional development is; particularly concerning emotions, communication and relationships. Personally, I celebrate the courage of the India cricket team as role models of commitment to growth, to endeavouring to look in the mirror and ask “How can I improve” and having the courage to get expert help to make those changes real.

Perhaps this is the deeper, more profound lesson that Indian cricket offers. The true nature of winning is in overcoming ourselves. It is also an enormous tribute to the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, confident enough to graciously acknowledge Gary in today’s Asian Age with the words “I want to thank Gary. He has to be given credit as he instilled a bit more self-belief in us. We have been very consistent during the last two years and this is a result of that. I have really enjoyed my game under him.”

I want to end this blog with the words from a speech in the film “Any Given Sunday”. My appreciation and tribute to the exceptional Team India, a part of which was Coach Gary Kirsten. In the film, Al Pacino plays the coach to a soccer team (I’ve changed the word soccer to cricket for fun). It is a profoundly moving speech in the film, just before the team is about to go into the game like Sri Lanka vs. India, the game of their lives:

“I made every mistake a middle-aged man can make – I threw away all my money, I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me and lately I don’t even like the face in the mirror. You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. You find out that life’s a game of inches and so’s cricket – because in either game, life or cricket, the margin for error is so small, I mean half a step too late or too early, you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow too fast you don’t quite catch it. The inches are everywhere around us, in every break of the game every minute every second.

On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch, because we know that when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fxxking difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying. I’ll tell you this – in any fight it’s the guy who’s willing to die for that inch. And I know if I’m going to have any more life in me, it’s because I am willing to die and fight for that inch. Because that’s what living is, the six inches in front of your face. Now I can’t make you do it. You’ve got a look at the guy next to you and you’ll see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it, you’ll do the same thing for you. That’s a team gentlemen. And either we heal now as a team, or we will die as individuals.

That’s cricket guys. That’s all it is.”

"Kindness as Forbidden Pleasure"

2011-03-28T02:13:00.000-07:00

The modern world exhorts us to take pleasure in possessions, in power, success, and independence. In Mumbai, just like any other major world City, having “Made it” seems to involve accumulating property, land and acquiring great financial wealth. It is through with these things, we often have the illusion that we are indestructible and our true dependence on others is dispensed with. Kindness to people, it seems, is increasingly becoming something akin to being a little dumb, or foolish and wearing bad sandals.

Freud believed that there is more than one sort of kindness. There is kindness as a moral obligation, ‘I should be kind or people won’t like me’, or kindness as calculated bribery, “I’m going to be nice to her so that she will do xyz for me later”. Then there is a genuine kindness - a deep desire that arises in a person. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says that people come to therapy not because they are more unhappy than anyone else, but because they feel “limited in their capacity to care for others”.

Walking alone through Breach Candy last night, a wealthy area of South Mumbai, I passed half a dozen people, curled up, some on straw mats, on the streets where they will sleep for the night. This is their home. There was a huddle of three mothers and two small children no more than three or four years old. I don’t know their names. Maybe like my dear friends, their names are Pooja, or Parveen or Angali. I don’t know how these mothers came to be on the streets, or whether they will eat tonight, or if like me as a mother, they are scared that if they sleep, their children might be taken or wander off. One of these little children looks just like the son of friends of mine. He has a cheeky alert face. He is on the streets because when he was born, he was undoubtedly issued fewer tickets in the lottery of security and pleasures than my friend’s son.

It strikes me that our moral actions, what we do when faced with an opportunity to act with kindness, are deeply contextualised and located. If these mothers and their children were sitting in this awful deprived state, in the village of Piddinghoe in England, where I used to live, any number of neighbours I can think of would quickly have them under their roof. Neighbours like Gill would produce cakes and have toys out for the children, Chandra would be on the phone to some politician seeking guidance to help them and Mike next door would no-doubt be doing all sorts of kind things, especially if he could do them without people knowing.

But this is not Piddinghoe. It is Mumbai and the problems of homelessness, massive poverty and starvation, seem so insurmountable that we have to keep a distance. To imagine these mothers as human beings, with thoughts and feelings just like my friends Pooja, Parveen and Anjali, is virtually unbearable. We cannot bear such closeness, such proximity, even in our imagination. The British Psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Donald Winnicott wrote extensively on the human dance of closeness and distance. We distance in order to defend something – pain in this case, of avoiding connecting with the deep suffering of others. We distance in order not to bear any responsibility for their suffering. Perhaps we distance ourselves from the joy of being kind to them. Mothers have to learn to gradually distance themselves more, from their growing children, step by step, least they smother their children’s confidence and belief in their ability to explore the world with some independence. Distance isn’t always inadvisable. But distance invariably leads to disinterest.

One way some of the wealthy citizens of Mumbai distance themselves from the suffering of others, is by never leaving the comfort of the rear seat of their chauffeur driven cars. They rarely take to the streets and step closely amongst the poor. One client of mine took the risk of closeness, deliberately, in order to feel the pulse of the City. Walking close to the railway station he found a baby girl on a pile of rubbish. What struck him most was how many people simply looked at this baby girl and walked on by. He took action and she is now funded by him, safely in a very good orphanage. Just as the writer C.S.Lewis said, “The greatest mystery of life is to give is to receive”. This man feels genuinely good about himself, more than any kind of person acquiring might and is now investing time and money in those like this baby girl born with few tickets.

The only vague sense of a rulebook of kindness is perhaps the kindness expected of parents towards their children. It seems it is the one area of virtually international agreement where kindness is expected, with a lot of country-level variation of course. But what does kindness mean to those in such unfortunate positions as these mothers and their children on the streets?

Psychoanalysis reminds us there is enjoyment in hate which prevents kindness. There is pleasure to be had, although only confessed to with some difficulty, in discharging our aggression, our spite, our envy, our retaliation. The pleasure of hate takes the time when we might otherwise be kind. There are dangers of course in feeling too much. But it is only those humans who have learned to bare frustration – our self-satisfying narcissistic pleasures who are capable of putting the needs of others before one’s own. Freud believed that those with a deeply rooted sense of kindness are much less susceptible to moral coercion of what the masses are doing, like mindlessly chasing money, and able to live more fully from their own conscious and what their particular version of ‘right’ is.

Gandhi once said that “He simply wanted to please his own conscience which is God’s”. In Hindu scripts we are asked to act with kindness and not expect gratitude, Christianity asks of us to “Love thy neighbour”, and Muslims remind us to give 10% of our wealth to the poor. All religions and faiths preach the importance of kindness. But if a visit to the Church, the Mosque or the Temple doesn’t translate into humanitarian action, into the daily grind of kindness, it seems a rather pointless exercise, and little more than a few hours spent wearing a faith as though it is merely a religious jacket, to take on and off at will.

There is a wonderful movement called “Random Acts of Kindness”. Quite simply, one performs a random selfless act, to make the wellbeing of a stranger just a little better. Creative friends of mine once spent a day randomly giving strawberries to strangers who looked unhappy. Another gathered up as many elderly people as she could who were going to be alone over the Christmas holidays. They all came to her table for the day. She had cancer at the time, yet doing this made her feel good and she lost her absorption in her own suffering for a while. Along with the bunch of ole folks, she was able to enjoy the reality that we are deeply dependent on others, and that is not such a bad thing. In fact it’s a pleasure.

There is a lovely little book called “Kindness”, where the authors assert, that children are born kind; that it is the family that is the primary site that children learn to value or fail to value kindness. Highly self-involved parents teach their children the values of self-absorption. Parents only interested in their children’s grades in examination, will of course fail to nourish their offspring’s moral development and humanity towards others. Yet sometimes, that brutality nurtures a compassion for others, learned through one’s own suffering.

One of the living Indian Saint’s from Kerala is called Amma. She is known as the ‘Hugging Saint’ for the way she gives love by hugging people fifteen hours a day. She lives and practices the most profound compassion and love for all of humanity, in providing numerous schools, hospitals and homes for those in dire need of care and consideration. She lives a frugile existence in a room, just six feet by six feet. May be she will not change the world. But she will have the joy of knowing that she is taking a slice of the world’s poverty and making it her responsibility.

She is the happiest person I have encountered. People like Amma, existing with such few needs, disturb the consensus of the masses that kindness is sacrifice rather than pleasure. People who are highly generous to others, yet seem to have virtually nothing by way of our material standards of success, disturb us. They rattle our theories about ourselves. They risk closeness and seem to be enjoying it. They are a threat.

Whatever the names of the mothers on the street are, whether one is called Anjali, another is called Pooja, and the other is called Parveen. I still wonder what your names are and what new kinds of conversations are possible.

"War, Suicide & Sublimation"

2011-03-24T23:04:00.000-07:00

All humans carry a potent charge of aggressive energy and Freud believed that in the deployment of this energy, we generally have only a pair of choices. (Although there is another way that I’ll come onto later.) Either we bottle-up the aggression, turn it on ourselves, inflicting a self-abusive narrative of doing something wrong for whatever it is we are feeling or experiencing. Our alternative, is to aim our aggression outwards towards the world at large and begin large or small-scale wars.

In today’s Asian Age, there is a tragic story of a middle class wife who committed suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling fan. Suicide is always an extreme version of aggression turned inward. The person is both a murderer (of themselves of course) and a victim of being murdered (by themselves of course). Yet at the same time, there is a passive aggression towards those who are left behind – often hurt, bewildered, and likely to spend the rest of their lives wondering what they could have done to prevent this.

Intensive bottling-up feelings, Freud believed, is a result of an overbearing “super-ego”, a part of oneself that issues overtly strong, often fixed messages of how one should behave. Clients I see struggling to release themselves from the edicts of the superego often speak in a very tightly bound narrative – “I don’t like music”, “I have to stay with my husband even though he beats me”, “I’ll enjoy my life once I retire”. Their language lacks creativity and often one sense’s an overriding sense of guilt should they do what truly makes them happy. Perhaps rigid on their path that fits well with social norms, but perhaps not themselves, one often feels in the presence of a kind of masochism, a commitment to suffering and stubbornness that can infuriate others. But as a French psychoanalytic teacher once reminded me, “never underestimate the lengths a masochist will go to, to be attacked”. Masochists essentially get pleasure in being attacked – that’s their perversion, their “thing”.

The parting words of a man to his wife (who I knew), shortly before he committed suicide by standing in front of a train, were “I will do something that will make everyone hate you”. Suicide always involves others in this way. Yet, the headline of today’s article, of the woman who has hanged herself from the ceiling fan, reads “Cops arrest husband for woman’s suicide”. Her aggression not only turned inward, but outward, the result being that her husband is punished and imprisoned for something that she did. I find this law rather absurd and in need of some review, particularly in light of the psychology of suicide and its violent element of punishing others.

We have choices if we find ourselves in miserable situations. When Brian Keenan was held hostage he told the world on his release “you can always take power – whatever is happening to you – even if it is a refusal to eat for a while”. There is often a way out, that doesn’t involve this level of harm. This woman has probably hurt her family members as well as her husband in a way from which they will likely never recover. I find myself wondering if this law may in fact punishes people who are terribly distraught already.

Whilst either one purge oneself of inner tensions by going to war in some way or another, or bottles-up to a degree that leads to a deep malaise or depression, Freud pointed out there is another way. And that way is the arts of sublimation. In the acts of sublimation, we convert our instinctual energy into writing, painting, science or some other artistic creation. But Freud also pointed out that it is only those with intelligence and intellectual ability that are able to convert in this way. Yesterday, at the Taj Hotel bookshop, opposite the Gateway of India, I came across a fantastic magazine called “Adbusters” (see Adbusters.org). It is a creative sublimation of energy and rage about the “perfect” idols and images in fashion and beauty advertisements. One for example shows two rather perfectly carved faced boys, advertising Burberry clothes, with the text changed to “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”.

So if you are feeling flooded by rage and like going to war over something or feeling deadened by the life you are living, sublimate! Put down the bar of chocolate and the remote control. Maybe that piece of prose, play with paints and colours, or pick up the drum you played as a child might give you a more creative solution to what it is that is troubling you. And if you don’t know how to do that perhaps you need to see a psychologist.

"The Psychology of Corruption"

2011-03-23T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Psychology of Corruption

The view that India is a society riddled with corruption and almost terminally crippled by it is a stereotype that is reinforced in the Indian newspapers on a daily basis. A brief glance at the front page of The Times of India newspaper this morning, I can see stories of bribing of MP’s votes in a nuclear deal and army officers found guilty of a housing scam. Evidence of the perception – and the stereotype of corruption the country appeared in comments by two Indian Supreme Court justices during a 2007 bail hearing of a former state chief minister who had been sentenced for violating the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988 “The only way to rid the country of corruption is to hang a few of them from a lamp post,” the justice declared adding, “Everywhere, we have corruption. Nothing is free from corruption. Everybody wants to loot the country”.

Is rampant corruption merely a question of basic human immorality, or is there something more complex that happens in our relationships with one another and the ways in which we derive our self-esteem? A hugely popular social sport in the elite clubs of Bombay is to chatter about the extent to which the various clubs are corrupt, especially, how much a large brown envelope under the table should contain in order to gain membership.

Imagine if you will, in a mahogany walled meeting room of one of these old colonial clubs, the all-male, elderly Executive Committee are having their quarterly meeting, when suddenly, a man barges into the room and begins a lengthy tirade against the committee. He is accusing them of gross misconduct and corruption in the form of receiving bribes from contractors and of giving free club membership to members of the police to get them “on-side”. The Chairman, visibly frustrated, censors the dissenting voice by having the man forcibly removed from the room. What this dissenting voice has to say is effectively silenced. The Chairman then adjusts his tie, and instructs everyone to turn to item 78 on the agenda - whether to invest in an additional swing in the children’s area, near the pool area. Without exception, everyone in the room is struggling to suppress an array of emotions, including the Chairman who continues to pet his tie in the way a child might pet a dog.

It is true to say of the executive committee that the dissenting voice is no longer among them; they are free from his presence, from his insulting laughter and his comments. But in some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful; for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside the room, and is shouting and banging on the door. More repression ensues as the security-staff are told to remove the man immediately. Which after about 20 minutes, they do.

What this reminds us is that censorship and suppression never quite works effectively or compliantly. This is perhaps one of the most powerful teachings of psychoanalysis – that repression is rarely entirely successful. That evening in the bar, the man who is dispelled from the room, along with fellow club members, are sipping their whiskey’s and begin to question the motives of the Chairman – “if the allegations aren’t true, why didn’t he let him talk?” says one person, adding “was he in on a deal?” Of course, many others in the bar overhear the now animated conversation, the volume fuelled by alcohol so much so that a journalist is busy taking notes on his blackberry on the table behind them. Two days later, a news item appears with the headline “Corruption at One of India’s Elite Clubs”.

But what of the expelled man who made the original accusations? What happens to him now? He is of course at home, not to be seen at the club, concerned whether some officials might be exercising the real price for their ‘free’ memberships, by hurting him or a member of his family, as the anonymous phone call suggested. Meanwhile, the Executive Committee decide it is important that they have the right to permanently evict any member from the club in the future, should they feel that they aren’t “Serving the interests of the club well”, whatever that means. So at the next AGM, they propose an amendment to give the committee the powers to effectively dismiss any dissenting voice and essentially remove the members of their basic civil liberties.

Sadly in many working groups, dissenting voices are intolerable; to be silenced and or characterised as mad, in a manoeuvre to justify the expulsion of individual(s) and any accompanying more sinister acts that may ensue. But why such terrorism towards dissention? Why such fear of thinking and speaking out? According to Freud and I think this is a hugely neglected aspect of his work, many adults never acquire a true moral conscience. In other words, what they have is no internalised prohibitions on their own behaviour, no true sense of feelings of guilt concerning how they behave or the consequences of their actions. What these adults have instead is social anxiety. This social anxiety concerns firstly the fear of being caught doing the wrong thing in the eyes of one’s peers or social circle and secondly, a fear of loss of love which contains an inherent loss of regard by others.

So the herd-like behaviour, devoid of thinking, is essentially about a fear of not being loved. Of course a person with a higher sense of self-esteem, of greater regard for oneself, is less likely to act immorally. After all, if your moral compass is strongly internal and of your own, you won’t need to receive your self-esteem from others or in a stack of bribes in quite the same way. What this also implies in my thinking is the best way to deal with people who lack a true moral conscience is to “out” them, or ostracise them and increase the very thing they fear most, social anxiety. Of course, one might also attempt to emotionally hold a sense of rage, as well as, empathy. Easier said than done perhaps. After all, it is the poor who suffer most at the hands of corruption.