Training Children to be Liars and Mimic Men

To train our children to become liars and manipulators, we must hit them on a regular basis, or at the very least, deny their emerging sense of reality.  This is one of the basic tenants of developmental child psychology. Most of us are of course revolted by parents who deem it perfectly accept to inflict violence on children.  

At Crosswords bookshop, in South Bombay, one of a chain of bookstores hideously branded yellow and black, rather like a British DIY warehouse, having finally located George Orwell’s Animal Farm in the wildlife section, I watched a charming small boy, about six years of age, leaping around, with a keen interest in a photography book on tigers.  Attempting to lift the rather heavy tabletop book to show his mother, who was on her mobile phone, he dropped it on his foot and he began to cry.  His mother then bent down to comfort him and checks that he was okay and nothing was broken. No - he was rewarded for his interest in nature - by being violently slapped twice across the back of his legs. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be the highly irresponsible to underestimate the reality that in the city there is very little in the way of education for parents and rather poor feedback loops between teachers and parents regarding children’s emotional development. Urban India, perhaps naturally so, given its stage as an emerging world economy, rather energetically, focuses on a child’s excellence in tangible results, qualifications, grades and so on.  Understandable as this is, the emphasis on achievement can have crippling effects on the child’s emotional development, no matter how well intentioned by parents.

Many of the parents I talk to, with children at the elite private schools, particularly from European backgrounds, find the academic pressure on the children to excel, without true regard for their emotional development painfully foreboding, and worthy of leaving the city. Perhaps what stands out most in my work in the city, compared to other major capitals in the world, in fact whether in Mumbai or Delhi, is there is yet to develop a culture around parenting and child-rearing that is characterised as a learning journey in itself, where it is perfectly acceptable to discuss strategies for helping little Santosh develop, without an overbearing sense of shame, or parental inadequacy.  This I think, links to the excessive need, perhaps through insecurity, to be seen to know what one is doing as a parent (the performance of the false-self?), and it would seem, largely only to seek professional help when the child or adolescent is acting-out to such a degree that they are truly at risk, in the rising cases of anorexia in the Mumbai of children literally losing their lives in the golden cages. 

Simply judging a child’s odd behaviour as stupid, out of control, without attempting to understand what it is meant to achieve, i.e. entering the world of the child, is perhaps one of life’s greatest, greatest cruelties.   To view a child’s distress, as simply some sort of karmic curse, (yes this happens, I assure you), rather than face-up to the fact that the child is being raised in an financially affluent environment, yet where there is the poverty of frequently absent, argumentative, highly neglectful parents, maybe be comfortingly and magically fateful for mum and dad (they aren’t responsible after-all), but thoughtless gross stupidity. Perhaps they might counter, it is their karma to be the terrible parents they are - a full stop on any development and change - the curse of religion. Utter nonsense.

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

Sadly, India has only very recently made corporal punishment in schools illegal, and as with many laws in the country, it is extraordinarily difficult to implement and monitor. A recent study found that over 74% of children in Maharashtra state schools have experienced physical violence from teachers.  It is easy to dramatize the effects of physical abuse of children by quoting the numerous cases of suicide of children, particularly those reported following brutal treatment in schools. However, it seems to me that the fakery, the manipulation, the notion of relationships as merely as instrumental to achieve one’s own selfish gains, an inability to trust oneself, projected on to others, an excess of consumerism as a way of masking emptiness, that potentially arises from the development of the ‘false self,’ poses an even greater challenge to India’s development.

The country must invest more adequately in the education of teachers, a deeper understanding of the developmental trajectory of children, their psychological needs and the damaging consequences of physical violence. Personally, I believe educating teachers and parents, cultivating interest and learning in the exciting and remarkable world of children’s development is the No 1 priority for India’s development as a noble nation. Not worth hitting for, but certainly worth fighting for. 

Masculinity, Sexuality & Renaming the City Mumbai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

When We Don't See Eye to Eye

AT MUMBAI AIRPORT, on several occasions, I encountered a thoroughly annoying immigration official.  He had a habit of spending an excessive amount of time, staring at each and every page of my passport, then occasionally looking up at me with a rather dour face, refusing it seemed, any real human contact.  The 20 seconds with this official, the high-counter separating our two worlds, was stretched out to what seemed like an eternity, but was probably in fact an irritating six or seven minutes.   He’d tilt his head to stare at the Hong Kong stamps as though lost in a daydream, change the angle of the passport to look at the South Africa stamp, and then ponder over the visa for Australia or somewhere or other. At one point I was convinced he was counting the rather numerous stamps for the Muslim country Morocco.  What was I to make of him behaving in this tiresome way? Was I a potential drug smuggler, a terrorist or some other such threat in his eyes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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