Follow your dream, not (2)

Building on the thread from the last post about following one's dreams...

Consider a fairly routine career choice facing a college graduate, say, advertising vs. IT. Neither job quite counts as living-the-dream, like playing cricket for India. But the college grad finds advertising more interesting than IT. The follow-your-dream school of thought would typically recommends taking the advertising job, since that initial interest is a sign that the grad will enjoy advertising, more and therefore be more successful. My hunch is that that initial interest in advertising contains no information about whether the grad will ultimately enjoy her job.

Post Grad, a movie I watched on a flight recently, broadly in the Reality Bites genre, illustrates the point. It is about a smart, spunky college grad who loves literature, and has dreamed her entire life of working in publishing. After many ups and downs, she finally gets her dream job at the top publishing house in town. Her boss is a jerk. The job sucks. She quickly moves on.

The factors that actually predict whether someone enjoys a job are profoundly situational. Things specific to a particular role, in a particular organization, at a particular time. Questions like: is her boss a good people manager? Does she get along with her colleagues? Does she have the right level of independence, the right support, and prospects for advancement? Does she get paid enough to cheerfully suck up the inevitable hiccups? Is the organization as a whole growing, and filling colleagues with a spirit of generousity? Or is it shrinking, and making colleagues mean-spirited?

Asking situational questions like these feels less pure than looking within and asking "Is this the real me?". But they probably matter more.

Follow your dream, not

"Follow your dream" is career advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. I must confess that, on reflection, this is really bad advice. I don't feel too bad about having given this advice, I will pass the blame on to the omnipresent self-help management gurus, but it still remains really bad advice.

The only dream I've ever had that feels worthy of the name was to play cricket for India. My inner ten-year-old still believes that it is my destiny to open the batting in a test match at Chepauk, take strike at the Wallajah Road end, and drive the third ball of the day past extra cover for four. But, heck, that was not meant to be. Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag are doing that job on my behalf; they're doing the job pretty well.

I shared this dream with tens of millions of Indian boys. The dream had some chance of coming true for about fifty of those boys. "Follow your dream" was excellent advice for that gifted fifty. What about the remaining tens of millions? Mostly, they've made peace with real life, and are getting on with their careers as Business Systems Analysts, or Sales Managers or tax lawyers.

Sure, the Business Systems Analysts and Sales Managers need direction, purpose, meaning and fulfullment in their work-lives too. But when an everyday professional is looking for direction, when she is at a career crossroads and asking herself what to do next, asking her to "follow her dream" is worse than useless. It provides no insight or intelligence that is relevant to the here and now, and makes mockery of her childhood dream to be a ballerina, or cowboy, or cricketer or whatever.

A colleague of mine came up with a much more useful formulation to provide direction to his own career, an outside-in view rather than the inside-out view of the "Follow your dream" merchants. His take was, "I try to put myself in a place where lots of good things are happening around me. If I do, chances are, good things will happen to me." It is hard to predict what those good things will be, except that it will not be an India cap. But, heck, maybe that is real life.

Diseased?

Tiger Woods is now a patient at Pine Grove, a Behavioural Health and Addiction Services clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

He is on the Gentle Path program, which will help him regain freedom from the disease of sexual addiction. The treatment includes Exercise Fitness Therapy (aerobics, weight training and jogging) and a ROPES course: a combination of an obstacle course and group therapy among the pine trees surrounding Pine Grove. Tiger will also take part in Expressive Therapy, in which the collective mediums of art, movement, music and drama are combined, which should elevate self-esteem through discipline and accomplishment.

This is lovely for Tiger. If art, movement and a ROPES course give him the self-esteem and sense of accomplishment that winning seventeen majors did not, that is marvellous.

The part I find irritating about this story is the way in which meaning is being leached out of language by this psycho-babble. Addict used to mean something.

A hobo on crack whose body-chemistry has changed so much because of the drug that he can't bring himself to eat anymore, that's an addict. That hobo does need some serious medical and behavioural help to get his life back on the rails. A sports superstar sleeping with ten women over eight years? That's not addiction. That would have been unremarkable, if Tiger hadn't successfully cultivated such a wholesome image. Calling Tiger's affairs, or Serena Williams' shopping habit, addictions somehow feels disrespectful to real addicts. It is clearly attractive for PR consultants to present their clients as victims of some terrible disease, but that diminishes the seriousness of the disease itself.

What Tiger probably needs is not a cure from addiction, but penance. The rhythm of sin and atonement, paap and praayashchit in the Indian tradition, are as old as civilization itself. When Arjuna the Pandava broke the rules of his marriage, he sent himself into exile. When Henry II of England needed closure following the murder of Thomas Becket, he performed his penance by kneeling before Becket's tomb in Canterbury cathedral, while every priest or monk in turn struck him with a rod.

Ideas like ritual penance feel odd in our secular times, when it is tempting to medicalize essentially spiritual problems. But it would feel more honest to say that Tiger is doing his penance, rather than try to believe that art, movement and a ROPES course are somehow going to cure him of his libido.

Crocodile Safari

Had stopped by at the Madras Crocodile Bank recently. The overwhelming impression I came away with was one of plenty. Plenty of crocs, piled up on top of each other. Well fed, too. Tourists can pay Rs. 60 for the privilege of watching the crocs eat dead rats which are tossed into the croc enclosures. Sometimes the crocs don't bother moving and simply ignore the rats; they're too full.

The crocs which are most obviously thriving at the Croc Bank are Mugger or Marsh Crocodiles. Other species are hard to spot in their enclosures; the Muggers are the ones piled up on top of each other. Muggers at the Croc Bank have taken to double clutching, one female laying two clutches of eggs in a season, a phenomenon that has not been observed in the wild. This astounding fertility has led to a Mugger-boom and allowed the Croc Bank to supply Muggers to zoos and wilderness restocking programs around the world - Bangladesh was down to a single crocodile in a tank at a shrine before the Croc Bank shipped some across the border. It has also led to a surplus stock at the Croc Bank of 1000 Muggers. My inner economist can't help asking the question - should these animals be harvested?

The stock answer is NO! A legal trade in wildlife products generally makes poaching more lucrative. If the Croc Bank sells Mugger hides to licensed dealers, it becomes harder to protect more vulnerable sub-species like the Philippine Crocodile from poachers. This is why, say, ivory from elephant culls is not sold.

However, it turns out that trade in crocodilian skin is entirely legal, and that this seems to be helping conservation. There are now commerical crocodile (or alligator) farms in Australia, Africa and the USA. And commerical farming seems to be working. Here's a quote from an American alligator farm web site:

In the 60's, the American alligator had almost become extinct and was placed on the endangered species list by the Federal Government. Commercial farming was correctly seen as a way to ensure the preservation of this reptile.

Why is this working? There is a nice little Powerpoint presentation on the CITES website which provides a clue. Back in the early 80s, the international trade in croc skins was over a million skins a year. Almost all these skins came from the wild. Today, the volume of trade is about the same. But 80% of this trade is in skins from ranches or captive breeding facilities. This is relatively easy to regulate because there are only five tanneries in the world which process croc skins. Skins which don't get processed at these tanneries are basically worthless, and so are unattractive to poachers. So croc conservation becomes this self supporting little econo-system, saving the crocs from extinction without competing for tax revenues or charity.

This conservation success story also has a cultural benefit in the American south. Alligator meat is a part of traditional Cajun cuisine, and thanks to the alligator's remarkable comeback, its meat is back on the dinner table.

The only little grouse I have with this story is that the majesty of a wild animal in its natural setting is somehow lost in this business of commercial farming and theme parks. But even here there may be a marketing opportunity. Maybe red blooded men could go adventuring into the swampy jungles of Queensland on a crocodile safari, hunt down their reptilian prey, cook it Cajun style over a campfire, and capture their experience in free verse. A new-age male-bonding rite-of-passage. It wouldn't sell in Bangalore or Chennai. But in Queensland? Would Queenslanders like Matthew Hayden or Andrew Symonds buy an all expenses covered wilderness experience like that? They just might...

Galli Galli Sim Sim

An auspicious post to wish all readers a happy new year...

Just discovered a piece of children's entertainment which is not just mostly harmless, but positively good. It is teaching my children that the differences between cultures around the world are there to be enjoyed, but that underneath these differences human beings are essentially the same, that we are The Family of Man (I think). This is a collection of video and music clips from Sesame Street around the world, published by Putumayo, a favourite music label.

My family is now singing along with Elmo, Big Bird and Sesame Street stars from India, Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. The look and sound of each of these video clips are distinctive and local. Yet, the same spirit and mood clearly animates each of these local executions. Unity in diversity, that old mantra of Indira Gandhi-esque national integration, applies not just to India but to all of humanity.

More generally, I also think this is a fair representation of how globalisation impacts local cultures and identity. At one time, even serious and well-intentioned people in India would have had doubts about whether letting Coca Cola and their ilk operate in the country would somehow dilute India's Indianness. The first debate I ever won, back in high school in the mid 80s, was about "Have we sold our culture for a pair of jeans?". I opposed the motion back then.

Now, two decades after liberalization started, that argument feels settled. Coca Cola and Sesame Street are very much a part of the Indian landscape, and have figured out that it makes a ton of commercial sense to adopt an Indian idiom. India is changing rapidly, India is becoming ever more closely connected to the rest of humanity, and yet India remains as distinctively Indian as it ever was.

And exactly the same logic probably applies to Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa as well.

Quick Gun Murugan

Wokay. Mind it! This is not a movie. It is a 90 second ad film stretched out over 90 minutes. But once you are in an undemanding frame of mind that is willing to forgive that flaw, a frame of mind that comes naturally on long-haul flights, Quick Gun Murugan is good, clean fun.

The best thing about Quick Gun Murugan always was his style. The razor thin moustache, the comfortable paunch, the artfully arranged forelock, the green shirt, the large cooling glasses, the panache with which he lights a cigarette, his gallantry with the lovely ladies, his comfort in his own skin...Quick Gun Murugan is the style-god incarnate. All this came through in the 90 second adverts. What the 90 minute movie offers is space to elaborate on this style, and the movie uses this space well.

We find out about QGM's brother, a Grade II government employee who lives in Matunga and shares his cowboy style. QGM's lady love turns out to be a former Bulbul (Brownie) scout who resides in his love-locket and harangues him into staying on the straight, narrow and upwardly mobile. Mango Dolly, a gangster's moll with a heart of gold and a wig to match, does an item number for Quick Gun. He wonders how a nice girl from a good family wound up doing item numbers, and suggests, in all sincerity, that Mango Dolly's work is also a form of worship for the goddess Saraswati.

The plot? Quick Gun is a cowboy. He is also a vegetarian. His duty as a vegetarian cowboy is to save cows, not to kill them. And so the movie is about Quick Gun's battle with his evil nemesis Rice Plate Reddy, who want to make the world non-vegetarian.

Tripping on this cowboy's vegetarianism is not a bad gag. But it is a gag, not a plot. Nobody watching the movie is going to care about whether Quick Gun succeeds in his vegetarian quest. Sure, the point of the movie is to parody a style, not to reveal character or elicit empathy. But couldn't they have tried just a little bit harder? Or less hard, hence giving less screen time to Rice Plate Reddy and his boring flunkeys?

So sit back, relax and get set for an evening with Quick Gun Murugan, my beloved brethren, fortified with a tumbler of whisky and a masala dosa, and you will be the yenjaay! You might even cast a vote in favour of our won and wonley revolutionary leader, புறட்சி தலைவர் Dr. MG Ramachandran.

Wicked

"That's wicked! Really wicked! Thank you man. Thank you. Wicked!"

Thus spake a man-on-the-street. He wore workman's overalls. He spoke into his cell phone, excitedly, animatedly. I overheard him as I walked to Pret to pick up lunch, and thought it odd that a word that once meant bad has come to mean good. Ours is a topsy-turvy world, a world without roots or moral anchors. A sign, perhaps, that the common people can no longer tell good from bad? A sign, perhaps, of civilizational decline?

It turns out that the word wicked is derived from wicca, or witchcraft. Wicked came to mean evil in a specific medieval context, when witches were burnt at the stake for pagan or occult spiritual practices, even in supposedly secular America, which must count as one of the most horrifying traditions of religious persecution in history.

My Enid Blyton reading daughter instinctively knew this etymology. When I asked her what exactly wicked meant, the first word she associated with it was wizard. Wicked, wizard and smashing can be used interchangably to describe The Famous Five's sumptuous teas.

Wicked's reinstatement into modern English as a stylish, ironic synonym for very good has impeccable antecedents. F Scott Fitzgerald was the first modern writer to use the word in this context. This has since become common usage in both New England and Old England. Though if the global appeal of the Twilight movies, Harry Potter and even classic pop hits like "You can do magic" are anything to go by, understanding the roots of wicked will actually give the word more currency. Go wicked.