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Analysis: Be Lucky, Be Successful

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[This case is rather philosophical, a personal discourse between Raghav Kashyap and Anirbaan Chowdary. Therefore, it is tricky to comment on the case. Instead of getting into an objective analysis, I tried to feel what is being said. I suggest you do that too. You will come up with deeply personal responses. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I often ask our 8-year-old daughter, more for amusement than anything else. "I want to be a teacher, a dancer or maybe an auto driver," whatever has gotten hold of her fancy at that moment. "I could be a doctor like Kakai (her uncle)," if my brother has been extra good to her. I am dreading the day when she says, "I want to be successful." We do not know what we will say to her then. Anirbaan, too, is asking, "How do I guide my child?" The case, strangely, seems to be conclusive in two parts. Study for your soul, is the first. Though it is a great destination for the mind, the path is complicated and treacherous. Every right is surely countered with a wrong. We tell our child not to worry about grades while we push her to get ready for tests. We tell her just to enjoy herself when she plays a game, yet feel sorry if she loses. The karma thing never seems to work. It is never for the joy of learning, never for the ecstasy of playing a sport. The pure does not seem to exist. A friend of mine, a Britisher who lives in London, has a 17-year-old son about to go to college. The boy wants to study French drama. My friend sees no sense in that. He is a man who has risen from the lower levels of his profession and reached the top. He has seen the world, and is one of the brightest people I have ever met. How do we react to his views about his son's studies? We have found (or, let us say, trying to implement) a solution to achieve at least a half-pure thing for my daughter. We introduce multiplicity to her — multiple dance forms, multiple music genres, multiple ways of doing things. And we have buried the single-minded mainstream in this multiplicity. We hope we will be able to introduce her to multiple rights. And that will be some form of purity. But is this a successful formula? We will not know till she grows up and starts dealing with life on her own. We think this will make her seek the Alice crack in her life and not tumble down through it by accident. But hey, look, we are setting up a target even when we are trying not to. That brings us to the second conclusion — work for the body. The conclusion is probably a neat sum of Raghav's life. He studied economics because he liked it. And then, not by design, he has got into the kind of professional writing he does not enjoy as much as he did the other kind of writing. He has, however, hung on. The conclusion justifies the hanging on and that disturbs me. Hanging on usually breeds mediocrity (Raghav stay alert!). While mediocrity is real, it must not be celebrated. Yet we also see that life just placed him in those spots. And he willed himself to study them and understand them, and that defines his personality. Cutting a long story short, the summation does not work for me. It might work for someone else. The point I am trying to make is that our education and experience should let us develop a theory that allows us to survive. It will be our very own theory of leading our lives that, if not makes us happy, makes us keep our sanity. We could pass this theory to the next generation and hope that they will build on it, and reshape it to suit their context. I remember, when my father was on his deathbed, an uncle of mine had told me to stick close to him, listen to him carefully if he was trying to tell me some final things. The uncle might have been talking about my father's theory of life. And now, the wretched thing called luck. "Luck? There is no such thing as luck. There is only what you get... that is all. If all is about luck, then why put in the effort? Luck as a concept is difficult to accept," says Anirbaan to Raghav. It is a person who thinks himself unlucky, speaking. Luck is good fortune that occurs beyond your control. Has it ever happened to you? It must have, at least some times. Luck happens to all of us. It is like a booster dose to all the effort that we put in. We cannot bring it on by design. We cannot foretell when it will come. In fact, we can never be sure it will come at all. But it does. And that is why we get unsettled when it does not. Feeling lucky can make you feel vibrant. And that is why Raghav seems a million times more sorted than Anirbaan. Dig deep inside. Find your own mantra to live your life. Remember the mantra is organic. It jumps, turns topsy-turvy, grows, and could momentarily disappear. However, accept it and let it shape itself every moment of your life. And feel lucky. That, according to me, is one meaning of success. I would leave this thought with my daughter. Arindam Mitra co-founded and runs QED Films. A wellheeled advertising man, he produced Black Friday, and directed Shoonya. (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 05-12-2011)