The paradox of universal inclusion

“Everyone must have everything,
None should be afflicted by nothing”
goes a Tamil film song of yesteryears. The poetic licence loses its coin in the face of practicality, or even otherwise, of a probable aftermath. It kicks off as a political slogan on poverty eradication, but that is where the red herring ends.
In these days when “inclusive growth” does the rounds, the buzz phrase is “for all”- “wealth for all”, “power (whatever it may mean, from fruits of democracy to access to electricity) for all”, “education for all” – the glib talk of universal inclusiveness!
Be it clear that as a socially responsible citizen, I’m not wary of the concept, and would happily be part of the M&A effort “for all”, with an axe to grind, since, if not wealth (prefix “access to”), power (here I limit the meaning to electricity) and education (I deem myself ‘educated’ in my own limited vocabulary of the term), I have ‘access denied’ slammed against me for many other privileges of democracy. In fact, I would champion ‘happiness for all’, a commodity everyone wants and nobody gets!
To cut to the chase, the concept of universal inclusiveness suffers from SDS (sudden death syndrome) within a few steps of the journey to El Dorado, being impractical and counter -productive.
Impractical, since ‘everybody’ cannot have anything, just as anybody cannot have ‘everything’. This is the basis of barter economy. The qualification in the definition of the concept of ‘full employment’ does not lend practicality to it. A practical need to qualify ‘universal inclusion’ would halt our drive light years away from the Utopia, if not take it back to square one.
Another aspect on the flip side is that it dilutes the bull’s eye, be it education, power, health, wealth, employment and what not. A harangue ‘health for all’ would qualify health as Quentin Crisp’s crisp quip puts it in perspective, “health consists in having the same diseases as one’s neighbours”, so much so, the bird gets lost in the bush. The paradox is, life’s sustenance today depends on unsustainable infrastructure!
Viewing the theoretical concept practically, universal inclusion would be counter-productive, let’s make no mistake about it. A distant dream, it would be an inconvenient neighbour! Let us imagine a space where there is perfect health for all sans any sickness whatsoever.
What will the doctors do? Pardon me, create one? If there is perfect peace everywhere, no strife in any nook or cranny, where would you deploy the police, lawyers and judges with their USP? If there is full knowledge everywhere, where is the space for teachers? Can they afford to make themselves progressively redundant in line with the seemingly cynical definition of a teacher?
The paradox is, all these professions are for solving problems on which their livelihood is perched! By the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is a sociological replica of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, we are running into the very situation we want to run away from!
The Galbraithian Paradox puts it rightly thus: “If a farmer works hard, he will be rich, if ALL farmers work hard, they all will be poorer!
Universal Inclusion is thus, at once a desideratum and a paradox. Market Intervention Operation is paved as a pathway through the Galbraithian Paradox. The pathway through the paradox of Universal Inclusion calls for a recalibration of the slogan around the paradigm of economic compulsions.


The above is an excerpt from his book, Pathway Through Paradox

(The writer is the CFO, Loktak Project of NHPC Ltd., a poet, motivational speaker and social scientist. He can be reached on e-mail: poetbeerangi@gmail.com, beerangi@ rediffmail.com or on mobile : 91-9419255856).
Printed in The Sangai Express
M Sadagopan

Spirituality beyond religion The call of societas generis humani

Listening to sermons, we feel as human beings undergoing a spiritual experience. No. We are, in fact, spiritual beings undergoing human experience, as God’s creations, let us make no mistake about it.

SPIRITUALITY is abstract. To make it more concrete, and in tune with our fractured group dynamics, we reduced it to RELIGION, an ‘opium of the masses’. To make religion better presentable (?) in tune with our imperfections we cast on ourselves, which demand compromises on principles, we developed values and reduced religion to a set of DOGMAS. And to drive home the undercurrents of the dogmas (and to palpably justify them), we developed stories and anecdotes as part of mythology.

Nothing wrong, per se, about these. Great speakers are good story tellers, since stories drive home messages easier. Problem arises, however, when we get stuck up with the stories. A flair for ‘management messages’ in preference to morals among the intellectual no- dwarfs and social recalcitrants consciously jettisons principles.

Then the religious dogmas degenerate into meaningless RITUALS, like the Ram lila celebration of the Hindus, stoning of evil personified during Haj by the Muslim brethren and the anti-Satanic chorus of the Christian belief. We perform these rituals without a thought that the demons lie in us (in our human existence as against the Godly nature of our spiritual being) and not to be hounded out from outside! This inward looking self- realization is spirituality. It has no religious from, colour or odour. When our religion, whatever be the faith, is the ‘manifestation of divinity already in man’, it gets upgraded as spirituality.

Among us now when social dynamics is in the pangs of complexities, what with the noise of competition louder than the whisper of conscience, a Nash (in) equilibrium of ‘each one for himself, and devil for all’ leads to an impasse. Peaceful coexistence seeks Pareto Efficiency. From Knowledge Era we will morph into Wisdom Era, where everyone has to manage himself or herself on the path of moral principles for such peaceful coexistence. Corporate governance and social governance will materialise only when there is individual governance. Science witnessed Hiroshimas and Nagasakis , and religions end(ed) up in wars and inquisitions. The pathway through these turbulences lies in spirituality.

Spirituality, in the context of human existence, is nothing but a win-win social solution, giving everybody space. Wherever there is this geographical unawareness, history shows up war. Life is not to be seen as a zero-sum game. One’s win should never mean others’ loss. We have unwittingly created this greedy frenzy: ‘winning is a pleasure when the victors are a few’ (to quote a part of my own verse), with our gospel of self-help and a creed of grab. As individuals, we are lost in this eddy. But collectively we can change the name of the game. We have to, for, pushed to the corner we are in, the shove is the stark reality that either we live together or die together!

A new world order is not absent on the horizon. Peter Drucker, the management guru, lamented that the society is unprepared for a metamorphosis into the Wisdom Era. Albert Einstein, the scientist-philosopher par excellence, moaned, as he succinctly put it, ‘all the astounding inventions of modern science have been acquired at the cost of emptiness of content!’ A new world is still possible for us to create, for, there is peace on the other side of chaos, and it should give us hope. We can hear her breathing in the silence of the night. She only calls for spirituality to permeate every sphere of human indulgence. Mahatma Gandhi listed seven deadly sins as...

Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce (business) without morality (ethics),
Science without humanity,
Religion without sacrifice and
Politics without principle.

If we can inject the above shades of spirituality in each sphere, as work in wealth acquisition, conscience in entertainment, character in knowledge exchange, ethics in business, humanity in science, sacrifice in religion and principle in politics, we can effectively answer the call of the new world and transform without catastrophe.

If only we can regroup ourselves as societas generis humani (society of the whole human race), united by spirituality from being divided by religion, we can set aside the pangs of the present complexities, taking it as the birth-throes of a better future, which eventually will be “an endless fountain of immortal drink Pouring unto us from the Heaven’s brink”!

(The writer, CFO, Loktak Project of NHPC Ltd., is a soft-skills trainer and lecturer on spiritual matters. Comments are welcome on e-mail: poetbeerangi@gmail.com, beerangi@rediffmail.com or on mobile : 91-9419255856)
Printed in The Sangai Express
M Sadagopan

Lose your identity – focus on the inner ‘I’

‘I cover my face and hit the base’, quipped a colleague of mine. Not the confession of a rapist, but, far from that, words of wisdom – and, if taken as a precept, worth following – meaning that you should give up your identity for a cause that you stand for. There are two ingredients to greatness here.

The first part-covering your face – calls for standing for a cause larger than yourself. It involves losing your identity, the egoistic “I”, in the pursuit of such a cause, come what may. By the Pareto principle, the world goes by such greats, who, ‘sleepless themselves, give others sleep’. They stand for cause, while others, capitalising on that, run for an effect. It calls for endurance – not stoic, but active – in full acceptance that it may be a weed instead of a fish, that after all your labour, you may at last pull up, realizing that the journey is always worth the making, even if the end may not be in sight. But, oftener than not, the end is likely to be in sight, and is mostly achieved, with such a will that trounces the egoistic self!
Life is a long distance race, and it is not the fastest and the physically strongest who invariably wins the race, but he who has the will, and flinches not, enduring the pain the longest!

“Life’s battles do not always go
To the stronger and faster man,
But, sooner or later, the man who wins,
Is the man who thinks he can!”

Concern about the lower “I” ( the body than the spirit), diminishes your focus and makes you run for an effect – more personal.
And standing for a cause is what ultimately gets you a picture larger than yourself. Even in a practical human relationship, if you invest ego into your perception, you cannot interact with anybody with a sense of integrity. This need to search for the inner “I” is brought out in Emily Durkhein”s spat at narcissism : ‘When man invented the mirror, he began to lose his soul!’.

The second ingredient in such a mission (the first one, as above, in fact, being more of a vision) is FOCUS – to hit the base. The will and focus, act and interact on each other, and enable you to successfully play with the cards nature has given you without craving for multiple goals beyond your ‘tunnel vision’ and losing yourself and the focused goal in the process. It is this ingredient, focus, that Tennyson focus-es on in ‘Ulysses’ when he muses:

“Full many a temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by Time and Fate, but strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find,
And not to yield!”

If you lose your identity for a cause larger than yourself, you get an instrument – an inner strength – called FOCUS, which expands as ‘Follow One Course Until Successful’!
Let us all follow such a course and succeed!

(The writer, CFO, Loktak Project of NHPC Ltd., is a Cost Accountant, Company Secretary and lawyer by profession, and a poet and lyricist, motivational speaker and social scientist)
Printed in The Sangai Express
M Sadagopan

Article in The Sangai Express "The Paradox of Universal Inclusion"

 

Creativity – The big apple

An Inspector of Schools was about to undertake inspection of a nursery class. The class teacher was preparing children for the impending visit, so that he can earn a good name as a teacher. He gave one child an apple, and asked her to bring the apple to the class on the inspection day, and be reminded of the apple when he would ask her “A for?” With similar instruction, he gave another child a banana, and asked her to be prepared to respond to “B for?” A third child was given a chiko, with similar instruction for “C for?” So on, up to Z, with one object or other. On the Judgment Day the Inspector of Schools arrived, and asked the teacher as to how he had taught the children. “Oh, very well!” replied the teacher, with a smile on his face and a spark in his eyes, and for a proof, queried the child holding the apple, “A for?” Looking at the apple she was holding, pat came the reply from the child, “Apple!” The Inspector was pleased, and threw the next question to the class, “B for?” The teacher called out the child holding the banana, and signalled her to look at the fruit she was holding. Now, the child did not like banana, and was pitifully looking at the apple which the other child was holding! No response, and the Inspector was not pleased with the performance now. The teacher got restless, and shouted, ”Come on, B for?” The poor child was greedily staring at the apple, and after repeated calls, shouted back, “B FOR BIG APPLE!” The Inspector was not totally pleased, though the reply set him thinking. After the Inspector left, the class teacher thrashed the child with the banana who said “B for Big Apple”. Why? “B for Big Apple” is creativity, while “B for Banana” is run-of –the-mill stuff! The child, in fact, had to be appreciated, she had saved the situation! This is where elders go wrong. The teacher, inspector, parents and the society at large, expect a reply on the lines of “B for Banana”, not able to digest a creative throw, “B for Big Apple”! Buckminster Fuller puts it, “all children are born geniuses. 9999 out of every ten thousand are swiftly, inadvertently, degeniusised by grown-ups!” They are taught to answer questions, and frowned upon when they question the answers! As we grow older, we are conditioned and stereotyped by social thinking. Creativity takes a back seat from then on. With such expectations, we are all happy to merge with the collective consciousness, losing our identities, so that, in that safe haven, we are repeatedly protected! On the lines of educational institutions, our work place creates pressures for performance, and does not give space for innovation. Those who have the impulse to soar are compelled to creep! Consequently, our homes are over ‘managed’ and under ‘led’, to prepare our children for such education and work! The tragic fallout is that we never open our birth-gift – our individuality – God has given us. Thomas Gray bemoans: “Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bare: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood!” ———- elegy written in a country churchyard. The culture we live and work in has “softwired” us for mediocrity, to fall woefully short of our potential. But we do have the “hardwired” power to rewrite that software, and people who use that power effectively emerge as great leaders. Others, content in being good, have not taken the step ahead to greatness. Good, thus, is the enemy of the great .If we do not create, but fall in line with the simple ‘good’, we would be eating out of the social corpus which is fast depleting, and walk into the trap of the “Tragedy of the Commons” enunciated in Game Theory. “Creative thinking involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way” says Edward De Bono, M.D., author of Lateral Thinking. Why go in for banana when we can have the Big Apple? (The writer is the CFO of Loktak Downstream Hydro Power Corporation. He is also a poet, motivational speaker and soft-skills trainer. 

This write-up is an extract from his book “CREATIVITY-THE BIG APPLE”)
(The writer is the CFO, Loktak Project of NHPC Ltd., a poet, motivational speaker and social scientist. He can be reached on e-mail: poetbeerangi@gmail.com, beerangi@ rediffmail.com or on mobile : 91-9419255856).
Printed in The Sangai Express
M Sadagopan