THE
FIRST PARAGRAPH IN MY WELCOME MSG IS ALWAYS THE SAME. WHICH IS…
Hello fellow citizens of Planet Earth, hearken!
I’m going to try and put a positive spin to what’s happening around us and to
us, every day, and one day at a time. So look to this link either at the
beginning of your day to wake up refreshed to be ready for the day ahead, or at
the end of your day to be ready for a good night’s sleep. Ahhh...sounds good,
hopefully. Here goes...
My SODs for today. Arrogant, rock hard, never
dishonest. Crank up the volume. Really.
Color, rhythm and grace. Free yourself first in
Gujarati before diving in below - you'll need it. (Quick non-trivial detail -
Gandhi was from this state)
Before you go off thinking our parteE is coming
to an end let me assure you - not even close, my brothers and sisters. To
repeat my man Al Pacino’s cliché as ironic as that might sound, “I’m just gettin warmed up!”
Join our PARTEE. While we have Purpose, take Action to go after our purpose with Acceptance
as a trait to see people as they are, Recognizing and being Recognized (and not craving for it),
with Tolerance
as our guiding principle with a delicate balance of Expectations (phew that was a
mouthful), we need to deal with the mother of all parteEs - ego. Ego has been addressed by
many masters of the trade starting from ancient Indian scriptures and Plato to Aristotle
to Galen, Skinner, Jung, Freud and anyone else you want to throw into the
proverbial sink. Before that sink overflows I’d like you to think about how we
should be dealing with the mother of the partee. That, ladies and gentlemen, is
more important than the sink.
But first we need a story. If I close my eyes (no
not the song) and think about stories on ego the first one coming to mind is a
scene in my friend’s basement back in 2016. We were watching the beginning of
the Republican primaries in the US. There were seventeen candidates (you heard
that right, just like this year’s number of Democratic candidates). One of them
was Donald Trump. No, this is not a Trump-bashing or anything close to it.
Where were we? Yes, the primaries of 2016. It was
the first debate that evening and I see all these candidates on stage, decked
up with their best Armani’s or Gucci’s or simpler sounding attire.
My friend goes “look at that guy Donald Trump.
Isn’t he the one that ran Apprentice, that TV show where he says ‘you’re fired!’
on live TV to someone who may have put in a sincere effort to succeed in his
travesty of a show?”
“You got that right man! Its him and now he wants
to run this country” I said (with some disdain and disrespect mind you - I'm
being truthful on how I felt at the time).
“Migaad, what have we come to...” my friend
trailed off.
The debate began and it raged on for two hours.
Everyone was trying to get their word in, rebutting others’ comments and trying
to look presidential. Early in the race you’re always wondering how to stand
out beyond the crowd. If you watch each person’s face closely (and especially
their eyes, oh yes the eyes they usually write novels), you can test their
verisimilitude and authenticity. You can judge if they’re being honest and
talking from a pedestal of truth and inner passion or they’re playing to the
audience to give them what they want to hear. This is always the balance that’s
so important to strike isn’t it? If you’re too truthful you’re not “polished
enough and not fit”. Bury yourself in half-truths but are glib and are able to
swing and sway everyone to your music, you’re probably on your way to the next
round, and the next, and the next. Till there’s no next round other than to
take oath.
On with our debate coverage. While the debate was
on and my friend and I were having this exchange I heard someone mutter “we’ve
got to be careful with what we say. This guy might just go all the way, you
know”. He did. My Someone Else also whispered “man this guy’s got a big ego. I
don’t like his attitude!” The attitude and the ego made
him President of The United States, so let’s just say it worked for him, alright
mates? All the way to the White House, Donald Trump flaunted his ego to the
wide world. His ego was bigger than his head; dang it, it was bigger than his
entire body. It was bigger than the ten-acre lot which he was contemplating
converting to another one of his Trump towers. It was bigger than the mountains,
every one of which our Sound of Music sisters beseeched us to climb. Here was a
man with brazen attitude, with an ego taller than Everest and humility smaller
than a Planck-length’s worth (please look that up if you’ve not heard of it). Still
quite American and New Yorker-ish, let’s not forget that.
Trump can be polarizing in how we think of him,
his attitude, etcetera. But that’s not what this is about. This is about the
role ego has played in his life journey. If you check out one of those
now-popular videos of an interview he was in with Oprah three decades ago, he’s
been quite consistent in how he saw the world - with deal making, stopping Chinese
dominance and how he had all the bullets, silver and gold. You could argue he
was treading the fence between confidence and egoism; from his business vantage
point it made sense to point out the flaws of the system that kept him from
maximizing his success. I could argue it was egoism built up from childhood
which works for one and doesn’t for another. A bit wouldn’t hurt. A bit much can
be worse than a root canal. Ouch.
It’s important to have an ego, if your plan is to
grow up a member of the human population. I think you would agree with that. Without
it the human psyche would eat you alive and bury you six hundred feet under.
Alex (our protagonist for the next story) learnt this the hard way. He was so
helpful at work where he used to be an IT System Administrator. You know the
Notorious Adventures of IT’s Helpdesk Support and how this can be better than
Stephen King’s IT! (if you haven’t read IT (pun intended) check it out - it’s worth
a couple Sunday afternoons over cognac or chai).
When Alex joined as a new System Admin he was
well on his way to becoming a rockstar. He was more than willing to help out
when anyone in the tech center needed it. When Janet came by and asked him how
to end some processes in her machine (which she had done only hundred times) he
didn’t realize she was trying to get closer to him. She then figured out Alex
was truly humble and had shed a lot of his ego back in high school. She eventually
changed her mind on him taking an interest in her. A few days after Janet came Gwen
and Ashish, two younger folks looking for help. Both Gwen and Ashish brought a
contrast to Janet. They spoke to Alex with contempt. They had engineering
degrees and realized Alex had got vocational training in IT and slowly worked
his way up to Sys Admin. Not up to their “level” and expectations of an IT
whiz. Ah, that e again.
Alex sucked it up; his confidence took some
damage being treated that way. He didn’t realize standing up to Gwen and Ashish
could change things. We could argue ‘to each his own’ but Alex didn’t find his
peace with the situation. With every interaction his ego was being hurt. He was
taking increasing damage and soon enough, the next week when Gwen came to him
asking for support on a Windows update he told her to take a hike. She started
her usual taunts. Alex had had it. He took his tostada he had just carried out
from the neighborhood Mexican (his favorite) and splotched it on her face! And
then he went “never talk to me like that again. Never! Go write up a frikking Helpdesk
ticket and tell your dweep Ashish to put his ticket where the sun don’t shine”.
And stormed out with Gwen looking on, tangy medium-spice salsa and guacamole
dripping down her cheeks. She licked it. She liked the taste. And felt
disgusted.
Ego, like we discussed, is the mother of the parteE.
And She proves this over. And over. And over. If I were to put my own “definition”
of this thing that drives a large part of our lives, it would go like this...
Ego
She’s the One.
She’s the other side of confidence
Gone too high.
She’s the other side of humility
Gone too small.
Too high and too small
Does not a balanced ego make.
Ego
She’s the Inertia.
She’s the outer side of
“Why should I give in?”
She’s the inner side of
“Why should I care?”
Unfortunately, the word itself lights up negative
energy sparks in us, doesn’t it? The key is to transfer this beautiful artefact
of the mind into self-confidence and not let it take hold of us, our behavior, our
personality and our character. I’m
not getting into the Ego, Id, and Super Ego that Freud and the researchers of
the human psyche gave us. However I cannot but help explain why :-). What we’re
addressing here is what Andrew Cuomo on TV just now called “the President and I
are solving the problem for the state of New York; no personalities, no ego”.
That’s the ego I’m talking about. The ego that’s the inertia in us to call back
our loved one because (s)he won’t make the first move. The ego that tells me “don’t
you dare give in now! HE needs to bow down to you, bonehead” And the ego that tugs
at your mind and pulls you back from acknowledging
that YOU were wrong and THEY were right because “it’s below you to do it”. No
it ain’t; it’s actually a few hundred floors above. Maybe this is all one big confounded
mush with the Id, the human soul, the inner super ego. Maybe it’s not. You get
the drift. We’re not about being theoretically correct but making sure our
partee works in the real word. Capisce?
Now for our dedication to PSI. Psi is the twenty
third Greek alphabet, and I just found out last night researching about the
history of ego that the word “psyche”, based on psi, was introduced by Plato
(Aristotle’s predecessor) to mean a combination of mind and soul. Read the
story of Aristotle and Plato and their stories on laying the foundations of
psychology - you’ll enjoy it. And may I suggest in the same vein to get a
contrasting viewpoint by reading about Buddhism and its influence on psychology
and human thinking.
Thus we come, brothers and sisters, to our dedication
to the inimitable psi, the mind and soul of the partee. Purpose, Acceptance and Action, Recognition, Tolerance, Expectation and our Bright Corona of
the day, Ego. Thus have we come to the end of describing the
partee, and the beginning of our real party - living and cherishing what we’ve
got. I can’t say this better than Sheryl Crow.
“It’s not having what you want
Its wanting what you’ve got”...Sheryl Crow, Soak up the sun
