Advice

Tempted to offer someone advice?

What I say will sound paradoxical; but let there be one exception.

DO NOT.

There is nothing riskier than this futile exercise of giving advice.

Firstly, no one wants one. Do not be misled by the earnestness displayed while seeking one. If they hear what they wanted to hear, they would go ahead and do it and then blame you when things go wrong. If they do not hear what they wanted to hear, they would ignore what you advise, will go ahead and seek a second opinion, a third and so on till they come across one who will tell them what they want to hear and proceed with the same results.

So, you see, it’s all just a waste of time.

No, am NOT a cynic.

I do exactly the same.

Children obey orders. They are the first ones who allow this mirage to take root that we are capable of giving advice. We say something, they follow and we come to a wrong conclusion, that we offered a sane advice and they could benefit.

The wise plays the fool.

Thus it comes to pass, in the later years, a wise one with a vested interest plays the cards, well, wisely. They lull you into a make believe scenario, where you wallow under the mirage that you have made a contribution, whereas you just played the script that someone made for you, without your knowledge of course.

There is this wonderful scene from the film Life is Beautiful describing such a scenario,

Guido serves the doctor a light meal of Salmon, salad and wine. But the doctor is not interested as he gets busy solving a riddle Guido puts to him.

The kitchen is closed, and in walks a school inspector from the ministry.

Guido serves him what the doctor refused.

But, how?

Inspector: I know the kitchen is closed. Maybe a cold dish.

Guido:  It's all delicious. Take your pick.

Ins - Something light.

Gui - Well, we've got meat, a nice heavy steak...lamb, kidneys, some greasy breaded liver. Otherwise, there's fish.

Ins - Fish.

Gui - We have... a nice fatty turbot...eel stuffed with fatty sausage and greased with Grand Marnier...      or some lean salmon

Ins -The salmon, thank you.

Gui - Side dish?

Ins - There's a side dish too?

Gui - Of course. We have very, very fried mushrooms... buttered potatoes in Nancry butter with a flaky sauce—

Ins - Is there a small, light salad? If not, nothing.

Gui - A light salad? What a pity. The very, very fried mushrooms...were out of this world. So, a light salad...a lean salmon and a glass of white wine.

Ins - Perfect. As soon as possible.

Gui - I'll do my best.

At this moment, Guido walks to the next table, picks up the tray and places it on the table of the inspector who is left speechless at how fast the meal, that he personally selected, had arrived on the table.

There are enough instances in our lives, to make it absolutely clear that advice is a meaningless act. To the best of my knowledge, am yet to see an advice accepted. But we are too vain to notice them and at times think we have been able to advise someone.

The spouse who asks the other half (am being gender neutral here, in the current situation where the kitchen jobs are shared by both, though in the earlier days it was always the wife hoodwinking the husband) "what would one like to have for dinner", usually ends up making what had been decided hours before, by taking the same conversation like the one between Guido and the inspector.

It does not matter who the person is, what age group; none matters. They uniformly (mentally) click the recycle bin option even before the advice is finished.

Despite a 100% hit rate of spurned advice, the amount of advice that is dispensed is stunning.

Funnier still is the agony aunt column in the newspapers.

“My husband is not interested in sex anymore. Am having an affair. I feel guilty. What should I do? Should I tell him? What do you suggest?”

Seriously!

You expect a meagerly paid, under-qualified, non-employable nobody, making ends meet by writing agony aunt columns, to tell you if you should open your mouth or legs?

As if the question itself is not inane enough, the said columnist goes on to offer some advice. The advice runs along the lines of “If you ride a motor powered two wheeled vehicle, chances are it is a scooter; or if it is raining, and you are out in the open without an umbrella and no shelters in the vicinity, chances are you will get wet”.

Advice of such nature are not to be followed, and I have no qualms when those are turned away.

A son asking his parents if he should pursue data mining, cloud computing or data warehousing is fairly simple and straightforward. The parents have no clue and they would need about three days of Google search to understand what it is all about. Anyway the son asks for this advice to win a wager that he had had with his friend “I bet that my folks won’t have a clue about what I am talking about”

The opinion that a spouse asks about the weekend plans are in the same category of “what would you like to have for dinner?”. It is already decided, and the entire conversation is engineered to reach an already agreed proposal.

The discussions at the workplace are no different.

Your bosses do not want to hear anything different from what they had already decided. They know for certain that they know better. They are bosses for a reason, right? If you are smart, you play along, pretending to engage into a discussion knowing the endgame. If you enter with a misplaced notion that the whole thing is actually an open discussion where options are going to be evaluated and a decision is indeed pending to be made, well……….

Your peers do not want your advice. By conceding that, they would concede that you are better than them. Heavens forbid!

And the juniors, well, they are young, more techno savvy, and believe that solutions are available just a click away. They are also confused with the amount of information dump that is available to them. 

They are surprised that information, knowledge and wisdom are three different things. 

And let’s face it. In quite a few cases they are reasonably more intelligent than you were when you were their age. And let us grudgingly accept that some of them are more intelligent that what you are today.

They don’t need you, most of the times. And the only times you can really help them, they are too vain to approach you.

One often confuses experience with knowledge.

And information with wisdom.

Out of this misconception rises all the proffering of unsolicited, hence not entertained, advice.

The following, fictitious, conversation nails it.

My advice.

Don’t advise.

I just did, didn’t I ? One never learns.

HOWL 2018

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

Every writer must be, at one stage of his life, forced to reflect on the timeless truth of this opening line of HOWL.

In the 52^nd winter of my short sojourn through earth, to be preserved on records as my life, I look back and look around and can’t stop wondering at the simplicity of this fact.

Haven’t I seen enough of how the best minds of my generation, too, withered away to waste, not just in madness but in various other forms of self-destruction.

The first was a cousin of mine; a brilliant mind with no parallel. Am yet to come across another person of such sharp intelligence and an equally wide range of knowledge on disparate subjects. Even after discounting the inflation of childhood fascination, what remains is still good enough to make you stand in awe. He managed to waste himself to alcohol. What started as a weekly indulgence, slowly became a daily requirement, then a compulsion and at the terminal stages, a continuous affair. The lucidity that still shone through all those layers of drugged stupor made you squirm at a life wasted. If this mind had not succumbed to the destructive force of alcohol………

Then came a period of lull, more due to my books-school-exams-grades-next exams… routine.

The world must have certainly fallen apart in that period too, while I was grinding away my school days and getting ready for the college.

In my college days the tragedy started to unfold again, and I was in a better position to start recording them.

A batch mate of mine, a state topper no less, let him remain unnamed, was bitten by Ayn Rand.

One day he was the usual fresher in college, targeting his grades, planning his masters four years down the line and WHAM! Rand hit him.

Hard.

A tryst with “The Fountainhead” and the man was not the same anymore.

I read the same book too. Admired the same, picked up few lessons, memorized few quotes (to impress young girls) and moved on.

Not he.

He was spending more time on the beach near my college campus, started to write his own version of the Fountainhead. He even named it; but years down the line the title eludes me but the opening line that he read out to me, eyes squinted against the smoke from his joint, bathed in a sick yellow light cast by the overhead interrogation room type naked bulb, still rings in my ears.

“There I stand, like a solid rock, like Scylla, while the endless waves lapped at my feet and often crashed against me, but never succeeded in toppling me”

He lost two years!

He was still in his third year with few subjects in arrears, when I, at a fraction of his intelligence and capacity, graduated and even landed a job before graduating.

He promised to me that he is now committed, and would be on the right course.

Sadly, we never kept in touch. It was before internet, emails, whatsapps, facebook and smartphone time.

I hope he is all right today. Probably yes. But, madness is a lifelong malady, might lie dormant for a while and suddenly erupt when least expected.

And in his case, it probably never went to sleep in the first place.

There were other instances, many in public life too; but they were all too familiar to everyone for me to pen down here.

The suicide of Robin Williams still unsettles me. If someone like Robin Williams can kill himself, I shudder to think what lies beneath the façade that we see.

The end of my college days heralded my work life.

Most of my observations belong in this phase (and counting…). In the 31 years since I started to work, how many have I been a witness to.

And how many variations?

Insecurity:

This alone must have accounted for a major part. How many competent people have fallen by the wayside due to this? It must be in the genes. Where this stemmed from is open for debate. A competitive school, insensitive parents/teachers, being the butt of the school bully or simply the eternal fear of the middle class morality.

What if I lose my job?

What if my idea fails?

What if A does not support my proposal?

What if B is undermining me?

Is my boss really happy with my show?

Most questions have answers on which one’s influence is almost zero. With the fear of the possible negative outcome of an act of commission, one often resorts to an even dangerous situation, an irreversible act of omission.

Acknowledgement craver:

An off-shoot of the insecurity gene. As much as money is important, the satisfaction of a non-monetary acknowledgement is paramount to almost everyone. The only difference here is how one reacts in its absence. Some brushes it aside as a representation of lack of maturity in the other and moves on. The other, wallows in self-pity, goes through the poor me syndrome and in the continued absence of the acknowledgement starts developing insecurity and doubts on self-worth and slowly but steadily disintegrates.

Arrogant and complex:

This person is a riddle, often to himself. This one develops an aura, builds a shield around self, that is impermeable. No one ever gets close. The moment someone gets really close, this person turns on the undeserved wrath full on the hapless well-wisher who doesn’t know what he did wrong. This well-wisher ends up in the first two categories and gets destroyed too. The arrogant and the complex one later sits and wonder why there are no friends around, how the world had become full of ingrates. The tell-tale signs of this person, on the way to sure destruction, are cynicism, sarcasm, lack of capacity to smile, suspicious, micro-management, unwillingness to delegate. While the destruction of the first two categories are probable, as it is possible for them to, at a specific point, to say “to hell with you”, and move on seeking inner peace, the degeneration of this category is certain. It is just a matter of time.

Timid and shy:

Not to be confused with the insecure and acknowledgement seekers. Some are brave. Some are scared. These people are eternally scared. Of everyone. They are certain that whatever they do, they would displease someone. As a result they remain below the radar and do as little as possible other than the job description. These are the ambition less, goalless, directionless cogs in the corporate wheel. They remain rather deep below the tumultuous surface and no shake up ever troubles them. They are never discussed, never disturbed and their job is never threatened. Mediocrity is their forte. They, by nature of their attitude, will never have a sense of any achievement, nor do they taste the bitterness of a failure. They marvel at people capable of doing something and achieving something and usually live with a low self-esteem. Do they destruct themselves? It is an impossibility as there is nothing worth destructing. They shrink in shame and wish to be swallowed by the earth in embarrassment in the company of able people.

Yes men:

This one is a product of all the above categories. Belongs to few of them and serves one of them. Essentially the most despicable person in any organization. Used by the superiors. Never trusted by the peers. And ridiculed by the subordinates. Often leads a comfortable life, on the outside, as this one ends up being the lackey to the ambitious and the arrogant by betraying the trust of the peers and subordinates. A secure job, so long as the usefulness to the boss is secured, and never a need to perform any worthwhile tasks combines together to keep the job aspect undisturbed. The realization of the worthlessness and lack of any value addition starts eating into the conscience of even the most abhorring specimen. Lack of respect and a complete absence of ethics result in the most deplorable state of being.

So, is life condemned to be lived this way making the anguished cry of Ginsberg prophetic?

Most obviously not.

Let us look at two examples.

The child asks “how do I not sink?” and you answer “keep afloat, practice your strokes”

You do not tell them “make sure you swim in red sea, wear life vests, ensure the pool or the body of water is so shallow that you can stand”

The child asks “How do I ride my cycle?” and you answer “keep the balance, keep pedalling, do not lean one way or the other”

You do not tell them “Convince the cycle not to topple, let there be a person running along with you for eternity holding on to the seat, make sure the road is self-balancing with deep ridges and there is not another soul on the road”

Basics, right?

So is my recommendation too, to not let the best minds of our generation be destroyed by madness…

What follows may sound like a text book advice, not practical in actual world.

It appears so, because we have contrived to make the obvious look like the most improbable, if not altogether impossible.

You have a conscience. You are answerable to that. Act in such a way that you are never ashamed of yourself. Get up in the morning and look at the mirror and the reflection does not make you cringe with shame. Go to sleep in the night, you sleep well, knowing you hurt nobody.

You are smiling, right?

Why?

Sit back and think again. What is impractical or unfollowable in this. 

Most basic things in life are simple. We are masters in complicating.

Uncomplicate. Now.