Archis's Blog

August 21, 2009

Are people the worst of our addictions?

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , — archisgore @ 5:43 am

Addictions in the classical sense are substances or behaviours on which we have become so co-dependent, that they seem absolutely necessary for our survival, and at the same time are dangerous for ourselves or those around us. Only when someone else cares enough for us to recognise our self-destructive behaviour, do we begin the difficult journey towards acknowledging it (recovery is still far away). Some addictions are easier to identify – drugs, alchohol, narcotics, etc. They can be measured by the visible co-dependency a person has. Urges to satisfy these needs can be medically suppressed, or in simpler cases, by simply denying access to them. It is easy to call out a drug-dealer and arrest them in order to prevent the drug delivery chain. Even if the addict is a moral failure, the drug dealer can be called an equal, if not worse, moral failure too. Addictions to substances, in short, are VERY easy to deal with because they are visible – and that’s half the battle won.

Lately though, I began to identify a behaviour pattern that had manifested within myself and those around me, and only over the weekend after lots of contemplation, did I identify it as an addiction of the most dangerous kind I had ever encountered. I now realized why attachment is forbidden in the Jedi Code. Under the labels of “love”, “affection”, and “caring”, we tend to become so highly co-dependent on people that we become addicted to them, their company or their approval. Really really think about it. We may dismiss these addictions by running away from them by using excuses like, “Afterall, we have to live in society…” but I dare anyone to say, “It’s not an addiction, and I don’t need it!”

Afterall, doesn’t a drug addict say they “need” drugs to survive too? Don’t they come up with excuses too? Don’t they deny the very fact that it’s an addiction in the first place? What’s the qualitative difference between a drug addict and a social addict? What is the moral foothold based on which the social addict displays their holier-than-thou attitude? At least drug dealers don’t use every form of media at their disposal to propagate their addiction. Society, on the other hand, does – making the drug dealer look like an angel on a morality scale.

We propagate romanticism through novels, movies and even religion. We ignore the true meaning of Love, and instead pervert it with our definition which is identified by our needs rather than the needs of those we claim to love. The existence of very word “heartbreak” shows just how perverted our definition of love is. An alchoholic is heartbroken when they are denied alchohol. So are we heartbroken, when we are denied approval by the person we “Love”. Through creative poetry, we plunge ourselves into the depths of addiction. We then justify said addiction by portraying it as something noble and desirable. Over the last few months, I’ve seen some remarkable achievements of friends who owned up to their addictions to people and turned their life around. Those who seemed like they had nothing to live for, suddenly became people I began to envy because there were thousands of people who couldn’t live without them. I dedicated this blog to honour these role models of mine. They may not be celebrated in newspapers or interviewed on television, but I want them to know that they have one admirer in this world, and I hope, the first of many.

I never realised what they really meant when people say, “Let it go…” My first instinct was to get defensive by saying, “I won’t let it go, because it’s a defeatist attitude. I want to win!” It’s no different from how a drug-addict will use every means at their disposal to “win” more drugs – it’s not really winning at all. The vicious circle was now apparent.

Then we come to those who feed these addictions. Ever notice just how tense the relations between so many “close friends” really are? One wrong word, one wrong comment, one inappropriate gesture, and all relations break down like a stack of dominoes. In order to avoid this, we find ourselves enslaved in their clutches. We try to please them in any way we can. Initially even I thought that the only person addicted would be the blame, but observe carefully and you find another culprit – the drug-dealer.

Over social experiments and careful observations performed for the last eight weeks, it turns out that the attention-seekers also feed these addictions to keep them going. Whenever a someone realises the person they are co-dependent on is drawing away, they modify their behaviour to what they think will attract the person back. So great is the need that people will go to remarkable lengths to make it happen. So far, nothing is really wrong. However, I found that at some stage, the addict starts losing their interest. They either begin to forget what codependency was like, or they just decide all the trouble isn’t worth the approval they may gain, or if they’re smart, they’ll realise they will never gain the approval they so desperately seek. If only their “victims” were merciful and would allow these people to recover by acting stuck up or standoff-ish. Life isn’t so easy, I’m afriad. It is at these critical points that I found the drug-dealers actually fiegning approval or closeness to feed the addict and give them hope, thus plunging them back into the depths of their failure.

Why this blog? Because knowing the enemy is and facing it is the only way to win the battle. Have you ever found yourself making excuses of “Love” or “Friendship” out of fear of losing someone? Chances are you’re addicted to them. Do you find people around you oscilating between being very friendly one day and distant the next? Chances are your addiction is being fed. It’s time to own up and face the reality. It’s hard to change – especially when you’ve been friends or acquaintaces for a long time, but life isn’t about what’s hard or easy, life is about what’s necessary!

June 15, 2009

Addicted to Failure

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 5:07 am

I did comment before on how I find many, if not most, parents determined to grow their kids like horses on a stud farm for the purposes of display in a zoo. Yes, and I mean this quite close to literally in some cases. I can’t come up with a fancy or catchy name for this behaviour pattern yet, but I’m open to suggestions.

This is just a commentary and I make no point here, and I’m certainly not saying what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s just an observation I made and wanted to verbalise it and get your thoughts on it.

Parents’ defensive maneuver
I’ve covered the basics before – parents choose to shower their kids with everything they could possibly do – waiting in long lines for weeks to get admissions in the best kindergarten schools, sending kids off to extra coaching, and super-extra coaching to make sure they top their kindergarten, and if time permits send the kids off to extracurricular activities which are precisely timed and measured. Some learn music, some learn sports, but all in a measurable and quantifiable format. Why you ask? So that when the kid “fails in life” (failure again defined by said parents), the parents can claim they did everything they could possibly do. What more could they have done? Now this would be perfectly fine if it worked, but I’m now convinced beyond any doubt that it doesn’t. (For those not familiar with scientific terminology – all this means is that it has no effect on the outcome whatsoever, so don’t cite examples of where it worked and tell me it doesn’t ‘necessarily fail’ – if it doesn’t consistently succeed – or even succeed with any statistical significance, it’s called a failure. You might as well be throwing dice as your predictor for success.)

Two years after I pass out of college I can confidentaly say that some of my supposedly stupid friends from back in school and college turned out to be greater successes than most contemporaries from prestigious technical institutes who used to look down on us. I can now boast of ex-classmates who are reputed professional singers, an actress, a guy who runs an advertising company, a guy who failed his 12th exam (a BIG deal in Middle Class India) now lives on the sea-shore of Wales discovering oil, and countless others who became successes in things that I’d have hardly imagined were accessible to commoners. These are kids whom I’ve known to have never attended a single class, spent their time in coffee shops all day and spent time doing what they loved to do (which isn’t saying a lot). These were people who did everything wrong with their lives, by social norm. And yet, every time I talk to them when I visit Pune, I experience an intellectual high I no longer find in my own field. These people can talk about everything from literature (and I mean real literature – not Harry Potter books), wines, complex cheeses, intricacies of musical styles from different continents, history, philosophy, movie production, social dynamics, discrete mathematics, quantum physics, nanotechnology, and whatever else you can think of (had to cut down the list up there). These people are truly happy, and fun to be with.

If I contrast them with the people who did everything right with their lives, those were labelled by society as some of the best technical minds from the country, university toppers, 4.0ers, etc., I feel a great sense of frustration. The very people who went to a million coaching classes, did extra school work, would feel guilty for having missed out on the first five minutes of a class they were accidentally late to, are now the ones who spend their lives squabbling over marginal pay raises, fighting for promotions, cribbing about work-life balances, and bitching every evening about managers, co-workers and their companies. You’d have imagined these people spending spending their time discussing advanced algorithms, new breakthroughs, or products that change the world, and you’d be wrong. Then again we know what the smart MBAs from the best business schools, who were funded from taxpayers money and glorified in the press, have done to our economy – we’re all feeling the effects of that. It’s a gloomy and depressing scene in the technology and financial world today – where supposedly the smartest people exist.

Looking back on my life, I feel these people are the real failures in life. The reason we don’t hear about it as “failure” in common society is simply because all possibility of blame has been removed. Parents did all they could – they gave these guys the best tuitions, the best schools, the best of everything. They did everything Middle Class Morality expected of them. It was so much easier to push all responsibility on society rather than show a little backbone and take the risk of being right. You just send the kid to whatever the majority calls the “best thing to do” and you’re now no longer responsible for the kid’s failure – the majority will never admit they made a mistake – and the world moves on.

The Addiction to Failure
You heard that right. It is my observation that such parental behaviour encourages an addiction to failure in kids who are brought up this way. The I-did-all-I-could-do attitude comes from an inherent addiction to failure. During my last trip to Pune – which was my first trip in the middle of the recession, I realised something. My “loser” friends have fun and happy lives because they are really afraid to fail. They don’t know when they might fail, and they’ve experienced some really bad failures in their lives. They know the difference between hitting rock bottom when nobody cares for you, and the mushy-mushy failure when you have sympathisers. This means that they know what real failure tastes like (all you Indian readers can imagine what failing 12th standard feels like) and will do everything they can to avoid it. It also means that whatever fear they had of hitting rock-bottom has been faced and nothing frightens them easily. Someone who scores horribly in exams and goes to bad colleges will know that there is no pity to be expected in real failure – there’s only condescension, insult, and humiliation. You learn to live with the fact that you have nobody on your side. You are relegated to reading in newspapers about various opportunities, initiatives and whatever being offered exclusively to students on fancy colleges or those meeting certain criteria knowing that you have no chance in hell of ever being noticed.

The winners however, are addicted to failure because it gets them pity – an addiction worse than drugs, mainly because it cannot be easily identified. If you do everything right, and yet fail or are miserable, you have a bunch of people to pet you and pamper you. Over time, you start looking for trouble because it’s the lab-rat or dog-training reinforcement behaviour. You do something – you get sympathy – you do it again. When you’re a socially-defined winner, the majority won’t ever admit they were wrong, and instead enable you to feel sorry for yourself in order to justify themselves.

I know this seems a bit counter-intuitive and crazy, but look around you, the evidence is there. If I weren’t in Microsoft, or hadn’t gotten far in Code4Bill three years ago, how many sympathisers would have I had? Would you have said Microsoft doesn’t know how to hire good people? Now put me in the best college in India, and rethink the last two sentences. Would you have told me that I’m simply that bad which is why I failed? That’s real fear of failure – when you know that if you fail, you’ve got nobody to symapthise with you, and instead the entire world is waiting to tell you how much you truly suck. Now when I look back seven years ago at those aspiring singers, actors, writers, musicians, etc. I realise that the reason they learnt to be happy and fun is because they got to experience first-hand what it means to be ignored, rejected and not cared for, and I can safely say that boy are those people afraid to go back there again! The winners though, experienced early on that so long as they do what society asks them, and keep whining about how their life sucks, they get that many more admirers and sympathisers, and I can imagine why they’d want to go back there over and over and over again.

Fear of Failure provides objectivity

Another counter-intuitive statement and yet one that will make sense by the time I’m done arguing it.

People who’re afraid of real failure, know what it takes to win. They do whatever is in their power to win. What they don’t do is irrelevant stuff in a defensive maneuver. People were always surprised to find me and my friends watching movies during exams, and we’d open books at the maximum one hour before an exam. I can honestly say the maximum I’ve ever studied for any paper would be 4 hours before – much less than the countless weeks and months that the winners would spend on. I wasn’t the only one in class though – I’ve known tons of people who wouldn’t touch a book.

Once again, the answer is true fear of failure, as opposed to an addiction to failure. If I screwed up, there’s nobody to sympathise with me. The winners know as well as I do that most courses don’t have a whole lot of content that requires studying for weeks and months, but their sympathysers are the ones who really require to see them study for weeks and months so that when they screw up, they are assured of another sympathy fix, “Aww… you poor dear. You studied so hard. It’s alright, there’s nothing more you could have done!”

I’ve noticed this most commonly in humans. If they are assured they have no shoulder to cry on, their decisions are inherently rational and objective, than if they knew they had someone’s shoulders to cry on. When you know you have nobody on your side, you give up the sham of “hard work” and really begin working hard because you start focussing on what you want as opposed to what you need to prove in order to get sympathy. You really start exploring all your options. You become desperate because you’re afraid. You really end up doing all you could possibly do.

I noticed this in exams and I notice this in all the different companies where my friends talk about promotions, pay raises, whatever. Those who’re really afraid, just do whatever it takes and are happy when they get it. Others will do everything else except what their evaluators are looking for and will keep cribbing year after year about how they’re stagnating, because actually getting what they want would be detrimental to their sympathy-fix.

Part of why I had to verbalise this is that I began to realise I was falling in the same trap lately – especially in the last six months. When life becomes too easy, and you find yourself surrounded by people who won’t tell you you suck, its time to shake things up a bit!

June 11, 2009

Middle Class Morality

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 1:45 pm

A phrase coined by Bernard Shaw and voiced by his character Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion. Alfred Doolittle is arguably the most loved character from Pygmalion, and every sentence he utters in the play could lead to lengthy blogs in their own right, but this one phrase has had the most impact on me personally.

I’ve already explored questions such as what it is to be a good person, and once defined, why anyone would want to become one. Entire religions, cults, and societies have been formed upon these questions and Alfred Doolittle’s five-minute stage time answers them all so elegantly.

Countless Matrix fans are already familiar with the concept of control in society. Whether real or not, we live in a world with psychological barriers meant to control us. Religions, customs, traditions, social acceptance are all imposed by a few upon the masses in an effort to contain them and control them. Generally speaking a selfish person is good for society. I know this sounds a bit counter intuitive, but really think about it. So long as a person is trapped in the selfish loops of their lives, they are harmless. They may be irritable and frustrated, but they are generally so involved in their own little world that they can be manipulated quite easily. Just imagine what would happen if majority of the population had their lives as relatively easy as people in my situation do – bills get autodebited, household stuff happens on autopilot, and get lots of free time on their hands – it’s a nightmare for the ruling classes – all of a sudden people would have loads of time and energy to demand better roads, better governance, and so on – in short people would become selfless.

And yet, due to industrialization and globalization, that’s exactly what did happen – in Europe and America a century ago, and in India over the last decade. The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities. Most services are provided by private companies – meaning better customer care and relatively easier lives for the masses (anyone remember the days when the government had a monopoly on telecommunications?) That can’t be good – people suddenly start caring about shit like “Human Rights”, “Budget Allocations”, “Corruption”, and all that kinda stuff. These aren’t people you can push over, because they’re the so-called ‘working class’ who use the word ‘deserve’ a lot more than is comfortable. These people work hard, and hence they deserve certain things and won’t back down until they get them. These people are in a majority too. These people also believe in notions like “self-respect” and “honour” and “dignity” – so long as these adjectives are applied to them by others.

Enter “Middle Class Morality”. In almost every speech by politians, business tycoons and generally anyone else, we hear the middle classes praised in one form or another – usually with the same adjectives above – self-respect, honour, dignitiy, hard-workers, etc. By creating a society where such adjectives need to be applied by “others”, you create a perfect selfishness loop for people to be involved in and keep busy. Now everyone is trying to gratify themselves by trying to get as many of their peers to apply those adjectives to them, while the peers are also engaged in the converse process. By tying these virtues with morality, you have a perfect weapon for manipulation.

As time progresses, whatever problems, issues or squabbles the middle class may have, can be squished with morality – whatever you don’t want them to do, just define it as being things that “bad people do” and you’re all done. Once the middle classes start judging each other’s nobility and self-respect and all that crap based on your definition of what bad people are, you’ll find not one of them will dare have any of their own kind call them “less dignified”. A system of perfect control. Of course, not all morality can be attributed to control – most of it is just plain stupidity. Once you have notions of “more dignified” or “less dignified” (don’t we just love comparisons?), the middle class starts inventing their own definitions and standards to be somehow “more moral” than their peers, who are trying to do the same.

Over time, we find ourselves in a society with a majority so selfish and self-absorbed in non-issues that the minority are left to do what they want and rule the world. I know it’s ironic, but morality is the biggest evil our society could face today. We all live under illusions of being “good people” and “moral people”.

Before ending I will say that to want to be moral and good isn’t wrong, which is why such manipulation is dangerous and requires almost Jedi-like calmness to prevent. It’s very difficult, but equally important, to be able to judge what really is righteous and moral behaviour, as opposed to what is simply being imposed as a system of control.

August 28, 2008

Is poverty a choice we make?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 7:03 am

Bernard Shaw once said, “The worst of our crimes is Poverty.” This was a few decades ago, and yet, it is so applicable to all of us. I say this now, in the context of the local Indian culture, society and norms.

Hear me out before you flame. I do admit that most Indians are poor and desperate. They have no hope for a better life in the near future. They have no opportunities for education (no, this is not going to turn into one of my pro-reservation rants). They have no opportunities for any respect or better treatment. And I have all the sympathy for them. Now that I’ve put in this rather detailed disclaimer, these aren’t the people I’m talking about (and neither was Bernard Shaw.)

Poverty , for those who don’t have to face it, is full of romanticism and nobility. It somehow propels the most worthless loser on earth to some kind of holy self-less Jedi-Knight level (perhaps the same way I claim to want to be a Jedi so long as I don’t have to endure their hardships daily). No, this isn’t the typical “be happy with what you have because there are people poorer than you” crap either! And for the record – I hate that kinda crap.

This is about how we choose poverty to escape responsibility and accountability. This is about how we use poverty as an excuse to do what we want while feigning helplessness. This is about transforming poverty into a heroic virtue, and pretending it has been chosen to avoid the struggle to escape it.

Let me begin by a controversial claim, and one that gets most of my friends mad when I make it – India has never really faced severe hardship due to natural causes and that this has made us a very complacent society. We have natural resources, tropical climate where plenty of food is available, temperate climate, and a rich forest. Alright alright, so we need people to actually go and farm, but there’s not been much to complain of naturally. It’s not like we were in the middle of a desert, or a place that’s buried in snow half the year. There have been places that faced inevitable hardships and problems – where people had to work together to avoid extinction, not just inconvenience. Indians on the other hand have always faced artificial hardships – 99% of them caused by the then-rulers, whoever they may be. In other cultures, there would be mass revolts, but we just keep on whining and do nothing. And the reason, in my opinion, is plain and simple – there really is nothing we faced more than a minor inconvenience. If someone goes into examples of farmers in Maharashtra committing suicide – they’ll be proving my point – a few deaths really don’t matter to us, which is why we’re so complacent and smug to discuss this in civilized society to appear concerned but do nothing beyond that. Those farmers dying is, at best, a minor inconvenience for the rest of us because now we need to appear to be concerned in our next social outing and waste a few moments talking about it.

The effects of this complacency are seen throughout our culture – we’ve always idolized artificial challenges – our great Sadhus fasted for a thousand years which makes sense in a society where food was plentiful. The same would be called idiots in places where the daily survival was to find food to get through that day, and instead their heroes would be those who struggled to gather food and perhaps feed a couple of mouths more. Whenever someone talks about problems in India, we snap back, “We invented the zero.” A phrase that makes me proud of whoever invented the zero a thousand years ago, and then equally ashamed of the 200 generations in between who didn’t use it until the Europeans told us to (if you’ve read my previous entries you’ll know the one thing I demand above all is responsibility and accountability – if we’re responsible for inventing the zero, we’re accountable for not having used it.) Here again, we find that being able to do tabular arithmetic due to the decimal system was valuable where resources were scant and they needed to be managed efficiently. Let’s face it, India’s illiteracy is as much voluntary as it is due to circumstances. I’ve lived in a rural village all my childhood and people looked down upon us “educated”-types who were thought to be wasting their lives by studying. Here again we see that education is really a previledge and not a necessity.

I’ll come to the point now – is poverty a choice we’ve made to allow us to be lazy, and complacent and irresponsible and unaccountable? I’ll leave that as an open question for you and will give some points to think about.

India is not a poor country by any means. Poor countries demonstrate need. The US is a poor country – I feel sorry for them. They have problems like the recession, and they discuss those problems, they face them, and they ask for help. They take steps to fix the problems. That’s the evidence of being poor. If you’re wondering whether Indians discuss and face these problems or whether we live in denial, you’ll get your answer in the responses to this post. We have 3% population that pays income tax, and those 3% are called “stupid” for not being able to evade taxes – what’s worse is that those 3% are also the ones who lose out in every red-taped procedure. Those 3% rich people offset the costs for servicing the “poor people” with black money who get instant services (I would be happy to arrange a demonstration for the skeptics, at their leisure.) Meaning, those 3% like me are stinking rich who’ve supporting our poor below-poverty-line minsters who can’t make a decent living.

We go around claiming we’re a “poor country” and hence don’t have money for academic research (or any research for that matter.) Look closely though and you find that it’s a choice we’ve made. I don’t blame us for not wanting to do it – research is hard and thankless work, but have the guts to say we’re lazy. Don’t blame it on lack of resources.

One of the most visible (and admittedly not very critical) examples is IIT Mumbai’s is sky bridge in their gents’ hostel. Sure, it looks impressive, but playing table-tennis on a sky-bridge 100-feel-high, in my opinion (the great IIT scientists may disagree), adds no academic value to the country whatsoever. That money could have funded thousands of research projects in thousands of institutions all over the country. A “poor” society, is by definition, a utilitarian one. It is supposed to divert every single resource to satisfy a “need” before allocating them to a “nice-to-have” feature. Isn’t this the same institution that claims they don’t get enough teachers

On a larger scale, the entire educational system is filled with reservations – no, not for the lower-castes, for the institutions. We fund Rs. 700 crore per-year-per-IIM, and Rs. 500 crore per-year-per-IIT – in the same breath we are proud of all pass-outs being hired outside the country. This is reservation – a non-competitive market – if you’re in the “IIM” caste, you’re given a free ride. A grant without accountability and without responsibility. (This isn’t an anti-IIM rant but those are the big numbers – there are hundreds of universities/colleges the government funds without any accountability whatsoever.) If the UGC instead declared that every year they’ll allocate this 700 crore to any management institution based on a competitive criteria – heck I’ll allow the IIMs to define that criteria – but once defined, it should be immutable. Let other institutions in the game – let the IIMs have the possibility of losing those funds for one year. If they’re so good, they won’t mind. In a “poor country” funds are competitively allocated where they bring back maximum benefit. Still want to claim we’re poor?

All in all, we as a society, have turned into whiners. Poverty allows us to escape/justify whatever faults people find in us. Can’t do research? We’re poor. Can’t pay taxes? Taxes are for the rich, even our ministers are on welfare here.

Can anyone deny that poverty is the biggest crime we’re all guilty of?

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