My Top Ranking Leadership Hero in Mumbai

            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

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

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

“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

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

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.