Remembering My Very Own 9/11

 I was in New York that fateful morning. A callow 45-year-old flush with the success of a mid-size five-year-old advertising agency, investing in our very own dot-com at what turned out to be the fag-end of the dot-com boom. It was an e-learning start-up, twenty years ahead of the Byju's of the world. We were in New York as the first leg of a coast-to-coast tour to potential customers of the e-learning engine we had developed. I was also looking forward to exploring tie-ups with a couple of Madison Avenue ad agencies whose bosses I knew. The founder of the e-learning set-up and I were staying in an upper Westside apartment of an excitable Bengali-American investor banker. The e-learning company contracted the banker and two other US-based Indians - a lawyer and a Silicon Valley techie - as business development partners for the US market.

The previous day, we met with a couple of dot-coms as potential white-label customers. Then, on the 12th, we met in Boston with the professor in charge of e-learning initiatives at Harvard. 

I had scheduled a breakfast meeting with one of the two advertising agency bosses on the morning of the 11th. 

The office was a few miles uptown from the World Trade Center. A half-hour or so into the meeting, Charlie's secretary interrupted the meeting, saying Charlie's daughter was on the line saying it was an emergency - a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Charlie didn't seem very perturbed. He told the secretary he would return his daughter's call later. Charlie explained to me that a mini plane had crashed into the tower piloted by a novice who probably had got his license due to connections a few years ago. He lamented America's rich-can-get-away-wth-anything culture and feared, being a staunch Democrat, that things would only get worse under Bush Jr.

We wrapped the meeting in 10 more minutes. As I took the elevator down from the 45th floor, I had no idea anything was amiss. However, as I hit the street, I saw a large crowd in front of a storefront transfixed by images on a large TV set in its display window.

I joined them and felt the first rumblings in my world, a seismic change that would reverberate over the next few years and shake up my world beyond recognition.

The next few days were a fuzzy mix of TV talking heads, the excitable Bengali's rantings suggesting that the US should immediately nuke Afghanistan and the lawyer's Trumpesque (in retrospect) conspiracy theories. I knew that not only was this business trip doomed, but we probably had made the wrong choice of business development partners.

I should have also realized that 9/11 would accelerate the fading out of the dot-com boom but, sadly, I didn't. So we returned home but continued investing in the e-learning venture, whose viability was entirely dependent on the US market as, those days, the Indian market for Internet-based ventures was extremely shallow.

A few more years and a few crores later, the e-learning venture went bust, with a critical reason being that we needed to recognize the end of the dot-com era in the US. The loss of capital combined with a scandal-driven bust of one of its key clients led to the nine-year-old until-then-successful ad agency going bust,

I resurrected a new life out of the ashes but never again joined the ranks of hot-shot successes. After a few years of painful readjustment, I found my angle of repose—the satisfaction of rewarding work without the accoutrements of fame or wild success, an interior quiet that gives me a broader perspective of the world. 

9/11 shook my world, too. But after the first traumatic decade, the second one has been, personally for me, a decade of finding balance and peace.

Can we say the same for the world? The financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent decade of recovery and growth is a perspective that implies that. 

If the world can contain the scourge of social media and inequality-driven tribalism, perhaps a third even greater decade fuelled by a revolution in biosciences and AI is to follow. Personally, as I look forward to going from being 65 years old to 75 years oldish, I look forward to my mind being AI-assisted and my body holding up well thanks to the coming miracles of cutting-edge bioscience.

The Pandemic Within: An Existentialist Point-of-View

Even before the pandemic hit, many bemoaned the increasing amount of time the world spends glued to screens. Then the year of Zoom, FaceTime, Teams and Meet hit us. Our work and social life moved to the screen, and human interactions became largely restricted to the disembodied exchange of words emanating from little boxes on screens. I write about this in the past sense as many of my blog readers, fortified by vaccines, have begun to step out and interact. However, the experience is still relevant. Findings are that the Delta-fueled resurgence of infections over the past few months is not just a pandemic of the unvaccinated but also of breakthrough infections and of the vaccinated being potentially potent carriers of the virus. The result is that many of us are scurrying back to those little boxes on our screens.

Do most social interactions conducted through disembodied a disembodies exchange of words, ideas, and thoughts affect an individual's psyche? Pop psychology stresses the lack of body language, leaching some meaning out of such interactions. But is there a more profound hurt?

In his article titled "We're All Existentialists Now" in the August/ September 2021 issue of Philosophy Now, Greg Artus delves deeper.

Classical Western Philosophy, culminating in Descartes' "Cogito Ergo Sum.", would have us believe that our bodies play no essential part in exchanging ideas and feelings. And therefore, if communication is limited to disembodied words, it should, in essence, have no significant impact on our psyches.

However, mounting evidence from across the world tells us that this assertion is not valid. Instead, the pandemic has brought on an epidemic of mental disease and unease. Part of it is, of course, due to financial stress and the everyday fear that essential workers face. However, even with many of us whose circumstances preclude financial problems and allow for safe isolation at well-stocked, hi-speed Internet, gadget-strewn, OTT-powered homes, there is evidence of a Pandemic Within. 

What gives? 

Existentialism seems to answer why a lack of real-life social interactions can cause deep psychic hurt.

The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger in his 1917 book "Being and Time", stated that the fundamental existential condition of an individual is "Mittsein", which roughly translates as "Being-with-Others". His view was Others - other people - are present in or a given in every experience an individual has. As a result, for the individual, Others imbue the meaning in everything. Others, thus, constitute the very Being of the individual.

In his 1943 book "Being and Nothingness", Jean-Paul Sartre went beyond Heidegger's assertion that Others are essential parts of an individual's existence. Instead, Sarte posited that an individual needed validation of his existence, moment to moment, through encounters with particular, concrete, embodied Others. Sartre's term for such encounters is, roughly translated from the French, "Look of the Other". 

Sartre, in his telling, makes this "Look of the Other" judgemental evoking feeling of shame, guilt, pride and conflict. In essence, Sartre's view of existence is narrow - to exist is to exist in shame. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher and contemporary of Sartre, widens the existentialist's view of existence. Merleau-Ponty, in his 1945 book "The Phenomenology of Perception", moves closer to Heidegger's notion of Mitsein than to Sartre's judgemental "Look of the Other". Merleau-Ponty rejects Sartre's notion of our perception arising singly from each physical encounter. Instead, an individual's perception assembles events in a shifting mosaic of foreground and background to form a view of the world that is complex, meaningful and transcendent. The meaning and the transcendence arises from the fact that when an individual encounters Others, they are not merely being observed or observing but engaging and pushing back on each other to shape each other's worlds and, in some moments, create a commonly perceived project. When two people dance well together, they create a third transcendent entity called "the dance"—this transcendence is true of rock bands, sports teams and even the thousands of fans cheering for their team.

The probability of such transcendence happening is severely limited in lives lived through screens. 

We have words and a view of facial expressions in a Zoom call, but we miss many other subtle cues integral to an embodied meeting. The hesitant pause, the thoughtful, contemplative look into the distance, the slumped shoulder, the synchrony of postures, the silent nod, the glare, the quiet aside- these missed cues prevent the on-screen meeting from becoming a transcendent entity of its own. As a result, the on-screen meeting does not develop a style, a rhythm or an atmosphere. And it ends up like so many Zoom meetings - a lifeless, unproductive, sometimes chaotic exchange of monologues.

The world of social media interactions is arider than online meetings. For example, WhatsApp exchanges usually amount to statement-judgement-statement, with most participants generally talking past each other.

The world of social media commentary is even more toxic. It is a bleaker realization of Sartre's already bleak view - instead of encounters that subject an individual to the judgemental "Look of the Other", it is now a trolling amorphous army of  Others that drive, not infrequently, individuals into depression and even suicide.

In conclusion, the lack of transcendence from physical interaction with work and social groups contributes to mental illness and distress. That is why the months of work-from-home and social distancing has produced an epidemic of despair even among those protected from financial woes or the exposure risks of essential work.

It is evident in a rush to group events at the slightest lull in the pandemic - rave parties, overflowing restaurants, roaring crowds at sports events and concerts. India did so in the first quarter of 2021. The US and UK are experiencing this phenomenon in the second quarter. Never mind the risk; we all seem to agree. After months of aridity, we need our fix of transcendence that only intense, embodied human social interactions can bring. So the Pandemic Within can get its jab of transcendence. So that the next wave of the pandemic will at least not put us in the IPU - the Intensive Psychiatric Unit.

On Golden Pond

 At sixty-four, T.S. Eliot's lines from his poem "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" resonate with me.

"...No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me...."

Well, if not for white flannel trousers with the bottoms rolled, I have for the past fifteen months lolled mostly in short pants and old T-shirts. 

And instead of the beach, I find myself on Golden Pond.

The other day a wag pronounced on TV, "Growing up is hard. Growing old is harder". That's a made-for-Twitter quote, I thought.

Growing up is challenging, but growing old can be a delight going by my immediate past. 

One suffers love-sickness, money-sickness and fame-sickness when young and just sickness when old. "Same difference", as today's young would say. So you swallow your share of tablets, exercise regularly and watch what you eat. No problems.

On introspection, I have realized that the real challenge of growing old lies mainly in the psyche.

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.." - John Milton, Paradise Lost.

Some tell me I have under-achieved both in fame and fortune. I don't know whether or not that is true. But even if true, I do not feel the sting. 

Au contraire, I sometimes wonder, whether fame and fortune would have allowed my current equipoise. 

I shall not pretend that I did not suffer the rat race in the three decades into my sixties. But the commitment was just an inch deep, leaving no scars behind.

Perhaps my participation in the rat race was somewhat disinterested because I dealt with deep emotional trauma—a situation much harder to deal with than growing up, down, sideways or old.

And then, over these past months, I have found my angle of repose. 

I discovered the joys of growing inwards, well beyond the vicissitudes of growing up or growing old.

Growing inwards is not easy, nor is it hard. It just is.

I came to this state of being by allowing myself to do what I should have done in my youth and adulthood - embarking on a study of philosophy and literature. 

My education in technology and management and my profession in marketing communication and martech are outward-looking pursuits.

The reading of literature and philosophy remained, with me, leisure-time pursuits.

Over the past fifteen months, as I switched my priorities around, a new growth path opened.

The pursuit of literature and philosophy requires no external validation. But, at the same time, it is an endeavour that opens up vistas where you are one with all the world - everyone and everything in it - across space and time.

I write this not to advocate that the only path to peace is through a deep dive in philosophy or literature. Instead, my insight is that every one of us has a natural state of being. Yet, very often, we do not recognize or act on this natural self. Thus, I studied at IIT and IIM not because I had any natural inclination to technology and management but simply because I got in! Nor did I spend decades in marketing communication because I have a deep love for advertising but because it was well-paying and somewhat glamorous in those bygone times. 

I am grateful that I, at last, have found my calling. It fills my day (even in these vexed times) with daily discoveries and adventures. 

I realize there must be a fortunate few who find their calling early in life. Are they the ones who make great things happen? Perhaps. But that is not the point. At whatever age you get to the shore of this Golden Pond, however long you are there, it elevates your life.

Behind the repose, I feel these days, could be a much deeper truth.

A sentiment expressed, as only Ghalib can, in the following couplet:

बे ख़ुदी बे सबब नहीं ग़ालिब

कुछ तो है जिसकी पर्दा दारी है

- मिर्ज़ा ग़ालिब

Be khudi be sabab nahi ghalib

kuch to hai jis ki parda dari hai

- Mirza Ghalib

"This rapture is not without reason O Ghalib

something hides behind the veil."

Whether this rapture of mine reaches the point where to paraphrase Paramhansa Ramkrishna, I become a salt doll that leaps into the Golden Pond and become one with it; I do not know.

Kabir summed up the "salt doll" state in this pithy doha:

जिस मरनै थै जग डरै, सो मेरे आनंद। 

कब मरिहूँ कब देखिहूँ, पूरन परमानंद॥ 

• Kabir

Jise marne the jag dare, so mere anand.

Kab amrunh, kab dekhun, puran parmanand>

"While the world fears death, I eagerly await that eternal bliss." 

Far from being confident of reaching Kabir's state, I might even lose my current angle of repose. Post the pandemic; the material world could catch up with me with a vengeance. Or the physical depredations of old age deepen and wreak havoc on my balance.

Even so, my current state, I believe, would have furnished me the kind of dauntless courage that Dylan Thomas advocates to fight the anomie and the agony.

 Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

• Dylan Thomas

Walk The World

One of the few joys of the past pandemic-inflicted months has been walking.  In the face of gym closures, endless Zoom calls, OTT binges, doom scrolling and the temptations of a well-stocked fridge, I have taken to walking for hours. Last month I averaged about 150 minutes a day!

One may walk by oneself, but one never walks alone. If lucky enough, one could be walking with nature, in the company of greenery, under the great blue sky, accompanied by birdsong and like.

I am stuck walking the compound of a Mumbai multistory while needing to ward off some unwelcome walking companions, including the multiple stresses of the day's numerous Zoom meetings, the doom and gloom that the daily news brings and once-in-a-while a neighbour who can, unlike me, both chat and walk.

So I walk in a bubbly, so to speak, engaged with my imagination. Some days it is music that lifts me out of myself and makes my tread lighter. Some days it is a podcast that stimulates the mind and adds to the calories burnt. But on most days, I find myself with an audiobook. 

Because I see when I walk with a book, an entire world walks with me.

After some experimentation with music and podcasts, I decided that my best option is to revisit or strike up an acquaintance with great books by listening to their audio versions.

Audible, the Amazon-owned App, offers a great selection at affordable prices (the India version translates the USD price to INR at purchasing-power-parity rates instead of the nominal exchange rates).

The production is usually of the highest quality. And the world of audiobooks has its stars - the voices that read the book. 

Over the past months, I have listened to three classics.

• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer narrated by his son John Buffalo Mailer 
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett narrated by Anthony Heald 
• Godaan bu Munshi Premchand in the original Hindi narrated by Sameer Goswami 

I had read the first two books as a teenager, and Godaan was my introduction to Munshi Premchand. 

As a teenager, "The Naked and The Dead" and "Crime and Punishment" were heavy going, and I do not remember whether they had a significant impact on me. However, both the books blew me away this time around and left me with world-view impacting insights. 

Was it that the mature mind gets more out of literature than a callow teenager? It has more to do, perhaps, with the power of the spoken word without the distraction and anxiety of engaging with it visually. 

That lets the mind conjure the world evoked by the words with that much more clarity and colour.

Coming to Godaan, I have always rued my unfamiliarity with Hindi literature (in the original or translations) and literature in other Indian languages. I knew this lacuna contributed to a lack in my cultural gestalt. 

I have, on my previous occasions, tried to read Hindi literature in the original. I did read a few pages of Godaan a couple of years ago. But found it hard going because of my unfamiliarity with written Hindi. However, listening to Samir Goswami's riveting narration of Godaan was a pleasure because I am very familiar with the rhythms and cadences of spoken Hindi. 

I have promised myself that I will now listen to all available audiobook version of Hindi literature. Alas, as of now, not much is extant. 

This lack of well-produced audiobooks and translations of Indian language literature, I guess, is a chicken and egg problem. There is not enough demand because there is not enough supply. 

I guess this will change as younger generations emerge that are not "Macauly's children" as many of my cohort of the well-heeled and "well-educated" are.

I usually, for this blog, write about the books I have recently read and liked.

Here is a very brief comparative review of the three books mentioned above.

"Crime and Punishment", published in the 1850s, is set in Tsarist Russia. Its protagonist Raskolnikov is among the most tortured individuals portrayed in literature. And the fact is that the prime torturer of Raskolnikov is Raskolnikov himself! Dostoevsky's brilliance lies in how he conveys the dread Raskolnikov feels as being independent of the plot details. Early in the novel, Raskolnikov commits a senseless double murder and then proceeds to give himself away in equally meaningless ways. Be that as may be, Raskolnikov, one could conclude, be equally angst-ridden even in the early sylvan days of the garden of Eden! Though existentialism as philosophy got traction only in the 1930s and 40s, to mind, "Crime and Punishment" is a thoroughly existential novel. Sartre's saying, "Hell is other people." could have no better exegesis than "Crime and Punishment."  

"The Naked and the Dead", published in 1948, is set on a small Pacific island during a WWII operation by a US Army Division that executes and succeeds in a campaign to drive out a Japanese division from it. However, by no means is it a war novel. Its underpinnings are also existential. However, while the outlook of "Crime and Punishment" is essentially Russian, in that it sees the meaninglessness of life as a source of agony and captivity, 'The Naked and the Dead" is essentially American in its existentialism. It translates meaninglessness into self-centeredness and freedom. War and death are as meaningless as domestic life back home is, but through it all, the quintessential American point-of-view is "So what? All it means is I do it my way because nobody and nothing else matters."

Does the difference in outlook in some way explain the contrast between the modern history US and Russian? Perhaps, in some ways, it does

Godaan is rooted in its social milieu. It eschews the interiority -the relentless depiction of an individual's internal landscape at the core of both "Crime and Punishment" and "The Naked and the Dead".

The protagonist of Godaan is no single person. Instead, it is the social and class system that drives the narrative. The arc of the book moves towards a denouement. In that sense, Godaan is classical storytelling. 

Godaan does not yet have a place in the modern canon of any respectable literature department in universities across the world. It is not the lack of translation that prevents it from becoming so. A 1968 translation titled "A Gift of A Cow" by Gordon C. Roadermel is considered, in some circles, a classic by itself.

The reason for its non-inclusion in the canon of world literature could be two-fold. The first reason is structural: "It is plot-driven! This thing happened, and then that thing happened! Come on! That's a beach read, not literature" The second reason goes a little deeper. Accepting social constraints and working within a system is a purely Eastern way of looking at life. And the world of recognition and awards is, as of now, governed by Western mores. 

The East sees the world through the "us" lens, the West through the "me" lens.

Over the past three centuries, the "me" lens has given the world science, technology, and abundance along with inequality, loneliness, dread, and excess. 

The "us" lens once gave the world its spiritual underpinnings - Vedas, Confuscious, Buddha, Jesus and many more. Still, it got lost in navel-gazing and involuted dogma that allowed the West to conquer and subjugate.

Is the worm about to turn? Could it be that the three C's - Covid, Climate Change and China- the harbinger of a paradigm shift back to the "us" lens. That is grist for another day, another post.