A Sozzled Cook and a Guest who came to dinner

 When Sanjiv Handique posted this fetching, beautiful painting of an old little home in Digboi, the town he and I grew up in, my heart skipped a beat and an old story – one I grew up with – returned.  

Mum and dad lived in an identical home a stone’s throw away from this one, just after their wedding in the mid-1950s, when mum was a nervous eighteen and dad at the first rung of his accounting ladder.  A large central room with a fireplace, which was what the Brits gathered around in those chilly winter evenings, a bedroom each on either side and a pantry - dry kitchen of sorts- at the back.  The kitchen was well behind the house – the small building at the back in the painting - and had a paved covered path leading to it (this is crucial for the story that follows, so, as Rajni would say, Mind it).
 
The bungalow was surrounded by evergreen jungle, a rich, wet forest of an explorer’s dreams.  Dark, forbidding, terrifying mass of green, is how mum saw it, so she awaited dad’s return from office every day and wouldn’t walk beyond the garden (gardening, hence, became a lifelong passion).  They had an old loyal cook, Pillai, who, after his day’s cooking was done, would retreat to his quarters and knock off a couple of pegs of his ‘braandy’ before heading back to lay the table for dinner (these were Brit days.  Mind it).
 
One evening, mum was startled to see Pillai’s sozzled face pressed against the closed glass window outside; he had a look of a man who had seen a nasty, unfriendly ghost and he was gesturing wildly, but could not speak.  Should she let him in? When he looked like he was about to faint, she opened the door with trepidation and he rushed in and dropped to the floor in fright, gesturing to the back of the house.
 
When mum hurried to the pantry and looked out of the window, she stood frozen: resting on the paved path to the kitchen was a large tigress with three cubs. Mum stood there, in a daze, staring in fascination as the cubs played around, while the tigress watched on – I am told – in amusement (an amused tiger is something you have not heard of.  It endorses mum’s storytelling capability).  She did not seem to mind being ogled at by a dumbstruck human and was in no hurry to leave.

 
A while later, there was the sound of a Fiat (1100, that quaint old car) driving up the road to the Bungalow – dad was returning home.  The tigress got up and the family – mom and cubs - walked over behind the kitchen.  Mum saw her take a short jump over the little drain and then wait for the cubs to do so.  A moment later, they were gone.
The guest left behind a story that would traverse seven decades, a hundred re-tellings, much embellishment and a deep family nostalgia for a fairytale world that had once been.  

 
And, yes, Pillai turned teetotaller for good.

The Over-Achiever Bias

 Humans were never genetically altered to over-achieve.

The rarefied class of those we call over-achievers – people who, by general consensus, have done more than anyone (or the vast majority) could – is one that I am familiar with.  In this layer of the atmosphere of  achievement, I have met many in the thirty-two years since 1989, but no one I have met – not one – has been compassionate or outward-focused or unhurried or caring in a way that would make them humane.  Or a good listener (but, that shortfall, as you know, does not limit itself to over-achievers).  

Every one of the overachievers I know has been egocentric, stressed because he (or she) was unkind to himself or herself and to others, engendering conflict in the process, and self-focused to the point of ignoring the basis of our genetic heritage of a hundred thousand years: sociality and community bonding, that the tribal societies we now consider primitive prioritised above all else.  The language and actions of the modern day overachiever, even when they do yoga to ‘de-tox’ or set goals of weight-loss, are  aligned to a self-centric compelling desire for overachievement that is as incomprehensible as it is unreal and damaging.  Or take the running of a marathon: some – very few of the many runners I know – are the natural marathoners who run for the joy of running and would stop when they choose, to laugh with a child, or greet a friend on the road and shoot the breeze.  Most run because it gives them validation of some sort; they are in competition mode with themselves or others and conviviality is an unaffordable distraction.   

When you read the motivational spiels about achieving your true achievement-potential, have you thought of just what that means?  If you have, and if that thought has resulted in an answer, I would be grateful for the clarity, for I have – I really mean this - no idea of what a human’s potential is; we can measure it for a vehicle based on its horsepower and torque and for the boiling point of water, but for a human?  It is not the desire to create the next best app or a cool electric car – that, as Elon Musk demonstrates in his behaviour vividly, is egocentrism at its zenith and leaves in its wake the usual collateral damage that today’s businesses see within: team members running hard to stay in the same place and using meaningless, trite language to seek affiliation to a peer group, extraordinary variations in pay and inequality in society that engender trepidation, neglect, jealousy and retaliation, the creation of an utterly fake public persona by equally stressed PR folks who are asked to transform a beast into a butterfly in the media and the endless desire to seek validation and praise from everyone, as a billion posts on Linkedin demonstrate. 

This made me often wonder, when I was in my thirties, if I was built differently (and wrongly) and hence, if there was a need to course-correct and try to achieve more.

I now know better.

The people I know to be overachievers have used phrases like, “We must work hard and play hard” or “Conflict is inevitable” and are glued to entirely fictional tokens of perceived excellence with convenient logos that include the now-familiar ‘stretch goals’ ideology, all of which repel those who hear them (that includes me!) and seek to divide rather than unite.  Competition of this sort and with this attitude bears a cost that society, and now the planet, is unable to bear.

The only goal post that we need to see everyday and to aspire to reach is to be happy with oneself: at times, this results in achievement of the kind that is recognised as such, but for most part this itself is the achievement, for its own sake .  It takes, as a dear friend of mine once said, very little to be happy.  Yet, it is a goal post that seems to recede into the distance as the chimera of cheers keeps the castle aloft in the sky. 

The real mirror before us shows no chimera, so let us listen to ourselves while in front of it.  Time has never been our enemy and let us not make it one.

Money In The Exit