Ruthlessness, Compassion and Leadership

Many years back, I came across a quote on Leadership which has stuck with me.  It said, to the effect, that the prime ingredient in a leader is ruthlessness.  That sometimes decisions need to be made which end up hurting someone or the other, and someone without the requisite thick skin will get too stressed over that decision.

Consider the role of a military general who knows that there will be casualties, including civilian deaths, in his campaign.  A more humane fellow will act like the emperor Ashoka and give up warfare altogether instead of hurting even a single soul.  Someone like Rommel or Patton will not bat an eyelid and plunge into the bloodbath.

Consider the role of a CEO who has to trim the workforce to remain profitable, and has to therefore dismiss many deserving employees.

Consider the role of a criminal judge, who has to sentence a guilty accused to years of suffering despite seeing tears of remorse on his/her face.

On a much smaller scale, consider a parent who cannot bear to see an infant crying but immediately gives in to its every demand and whim.  A stronger-nerved, less sentimental parent is a more successful parent.

A young person who leaves home in his twenties and enters the "big bad world" quickly learns that sensitivity, transparency and empathy that are the hallmarks of family life and of very small groups is a handicap when it comes to managing large groups and worldly success.

I am guessing that not only does a large group make it impractical for the leader to empathize with everybody, that even if he could, it would be a bad idea for his own psychological health.  He would feel paralyzed, guilty, and regretful at having chosen a course of action which caused suffering for some, even if it was the optimal decision under the circumstances.  His persona would quickly get shattered under this sustained stress of big-decision-making.

This might be considered controversial, but the preponderance of the nurturing and empathetic instincts in the human female might mean that she, as a generalization, has less capability to be ruthless in a sustained manner.

Moreover, I think that the Indian psyche, in particular, is predominantly sentimental, Machiavellian and feminine, unable to take harsh decisions and engage in direct conflict.  Instead of hurting someone else and confronting an injustice, we would much rather bear our pain silently.  Revenge and curative measures, rather than preemptive aggression, seems to run in Indian culture.

The greatest leader we have had in the last century was a man who was deeply religious and peace-loving (even if only as a show), considered meat-eating and sexual intercourse as sins, and whose main tactic was to arouse sympathy and consensus by starving himself.  Is this trait in our culture one of the factors in present India's alarming lack of strong leaders?

Universal compassion, wanting not to hurt anybody at all, giving everybody a chance, and so on, is an un-leader-like trait.  Nature rewards the ambitious and the competitive: just reflect on the fact that the fastest sperm wins the battle for fertilization.

Good leaders try not to make too many enemies, and "manage" the episodes which are painful to others by careful messaging and a show of some (perhaps genuine) empathy.

What do you think?

Two Women, Singers

Exhibit A:

Enya Brennan, an Irish singer and musician, born 1961.  Known for her lilting, soothing music.  Personal and relationship details mostly unknown (she values her privacy), except that she has remained unmarried.

Her music celebrates love, dream-like imagery, nurturing, longing, nature, beauty and joy.

Some songs:

(an interesting musical re-composition here)

Exhibit B:


Sinéad O'Connor, another Irish singer and musician, born 1966.  Known for her shaved head (as a protest against "traditional views of women" (ref Wikipedia)), acerbic and militant views, feminism, failed relationships (her fourth marriage lasted seventeen days) , songs of pain and hurt, public expression of her sexual proclivities, and so on.

Some songs (that I have liked, by the way):

Bondhu by Indian Ocean

I loved this song, even when I didn't understand the lyrics (it's in Bangla).

This is a song from the latest album, 16/330 Khajoor Road, by Indian Ocean.

The band radically offered free download of all tracks from their website, as they progressed through producing the album.

Unfortunately the download facility, though still ostensibly available, no longer works.

However, YouTube has all the songs (playlist link). I highly recommend "Chaand", and "Sone ki Nagri", those that I've listened to again and again.

Now that a couple of souls have helped me translate the lyrics of "Bondhu", I love it even more.



Lyrics in transliterated Bangla are available on the band's webpage for this song.

Rough translation in English:

Why does my heart break?
The river banks break, sea waves break...
My heart also breaks...

My broken heart is pieced together anew;

My dreams also break...

On the banks of the river, you reside;

My tears and the river water flow into each other and become one;
Oh river, you have seen and endured so much...

My heart still breaks...

Internet as fast food for the brain

Internet is fast food for the brain.

Content on the Internet is easily available, quickly consumed, providing an instant high, forgotten after a few minutes, but leaving you hooked and hungry after the effect has worn off.

I came across this epiphany of sorts today morning.  During my morning cup of tea, I was reading the latest Sunday column by SA Aiyar on India.  It was quite pessimistic, in effect asking the government to introduce reforms by stealth.  With the S&P downgrade of India's economic outlook, and a real risk of the rupee crashing, my thoughts wandered to investing in gold and whether it is a good hedge against India.

That's a topic for another post.

Immediately, as I thought of the gold market in India with its frauds, low acceptance of banks' gold offerings, the jewelery-shop scams, the VAT on gold, and so on, I became painfully conscious of my ignorance as a relative outsider.  I wondered if I could find an FAQ on buying gold in India, somewhere on the net.

Before I could proceed on the search, however, I reflected on what I was doing: I was searching for distilled wisdom, quick solutions, instead of spending years and learning the nuances of this particular domain.  In effect, I was aiming to be an expert without wanting to spend the effort.

As I reflected more widely on this, I realized that that's what FAQs do: They make a neophyte feel like an experienced fellow with years of experience, one who is aware of the common issues and gotchas.

They lead to a "cognitive high" without the "cognitive roughage".  They give you a fast effect (akin to the insulin high), without the cooking or digestive effort.

As I reflected even more, I realized that the cycle of attention deficit leading to quick punch-lines and shorter/easy-to-digest articles/videos leading to even shorter attention spans is a vicious cycle which is going to be extremely hard to break.  Unless you realize this malady in yourself and in the environment.

A photo on FB is a quick social attention winner, an aphorism the next best, a small article/anecdote is next, and a "ten best list" etc. is still readable.  But share a long, carefully argued article and you might as well have no audience at all: who has the time and the mental space?

In recent years, there is an increased occurrence of the "tl;dr" phenomenon.  For the uninitiated, the phrase means "too long; didn't read".  In amateur writing or forum posts, when the writer is aware that a long article is going to bore/stress the reader and compete with other juicy stuff competing for the reader's attention, the writer provides a very short summary at the end of the post: The tl;dr.  In effect, it indicates: "I understand you are pressed for time, but I want your attention too.  Maybe your interest will be aroused after you read the summary."

Familiarity with a subject that is gained after months or years of study is quite different from the one gained after reading a list of FAQs.  Which kind of familiarity is the Internet encouraging?

After going through a few sites on the Internet, am I going to be a knowledgeable gold investor, or one who merely THINKS he is a knowledgeable gold investor?  Sure, maybe I will avoid a few common pitfalls, and that may make me feel smart, but that is not the same as being intimately familiar with this field.

I've heard that doctors are complaining about their patients having an excess of superficial, or just wrong, information from the Internet after they try to find out more about their "symptoms".  Let's leave aside the diagnosis.  The fact is, in most cases people are wrong even about the symptoms.  They are unable to distinguish between an abdominal pain and a pain in their appendix, between heartburn and a heart attack.

A long, carefully written article, or a long educational video (TED lectures generally limit themselves to 18 minutes) are going to lose in the battle for attention.  Newspapers, which have an online presence, are dumbing down their content to attract more Internet readers.

One of the main features of the Internet, compared to traditional media, is "choice" and "availability".  If you got a newspaper at home and that was your only world-news input for 24 hours, you might find yourself browsing through the editorial page as well.  But Internet, like cable TV, offers you instant choices through-out the day.  Why will someone ever switch to a one-hour lecture on TV, or to a three-thousand-word essay on the Internet?  Even the availability of Internet at home means there is immediately a RELATIVELY lower incentive to read a long novel or an editorial essay.  Why not just log on to Facebook and see what latest gossip is going on?  For most people, it requires a great deal of will-power and focus to do otherwise.

Even if you're interested in a topic, I'm saying, Internet works against your gaining an in-depth knowledge about it.

The very syntax of web pages, the central feature of HTML, the language of the internet, prevents an in-depth study.

The one difference, and I think one of the most important, between Britannica and Wikipedia is that while reading the latter, you are constantly urged (via hyper-links) to click and read something else.  Holy hell it is distracting!  I think it might be useful to read Wikipedia with all hyperlinks converted to plain-text, but then again, maybe not.  Wikipedia wants its articles to be narrowly focused and not too long.

Wikipedia articles, say about Democracy,  ask you to read another article (in this case, Criticisms of Democracy), if you are interested about a nuance, whereas Britannica would probably include the other article within the main one.

Too much choice is always going to lead to people choosing the pleasant over the insightful.  A veiled distraction is always going to attract a click, compared to a long article for which the pay-off is still far off.

The brain will get fat with all this fast-food like content, and like an overweight body, unable to hike or trek to a meaningful discussion, but only wanting more of the same.

A Modest Proposal

There is an epidemic of lifestyle diseases and obesity in the Indian middle class.  Middle class folks, both men and women, complain that there is very little requirement of physical activity in their lives.  Nobody would argue that this complaint is frivolous or imaginary.

There is also a growing awareness of human rights and of the rights of the disenfranchised.  The daily wagers, the bonded laborers, the child workers, and so on, arouse a lot of sympathy and pity in the hearts of the privileged lot.  I have no reason to doubt the genuineness of their feeling.

Lastly, people emphasize that they want to indulge in physical activity, but gyms are inconvenient (traffic, gym memberships being costly, and so on), there are no public spaces in big cities in India to jog or exercise in the open, and therefore exercising is logistically tough.

I have a modest, simple, easy-to-implement proposal which can solve, to at least some extent, all three of these problems.  The proposal's simplicity, however, should not lull or delude you into thinking that it will be found acceptable or agreeable.  The reasons for rejecting this proposal can lead to many an interesting coffee-table conversation.

The proposal is simply this:

Give a weekly, or the weekend, off to your household maid or full-time house-servant.  And having given them their holiday(s), proceed to do the household work yourself.

I am assuming that you value the respite from going to office at the end of the week.  There is no reason to withhold this very essential of reliefs from your maid or your servant.

Household work includes cleaning the floors and the kitchen, and doing the cooking, laundry and ironing.  Done properly, a moderate-sized house should occupy the better part of a couple of hours of your weekend mornings, on both Saturdays and Sundays.

This work will not only lead to physical exercise, but will lead to many other benefits.  You will finally clean the nooks and crannies that your maid has been ignoring, you will wash the clothes properly (cuffs and collars getting special attention), and you will finally put to use those cookery books that had been gathering dust.  Also, you won't need to spend money on those expensive good-looking breathable exercise clothes.

If both the husband and wife are employed, both should collaborate in the housework, dividing the responsibilities so that there is minimal possibility of coming across each other in what is sure to be an irritated bunch of mornings.  If only one of the spouses is employed, or if you are single, then it is a no-brainer as to who should be sipping coffee reading the paper and who should be sweating it out.  But I have compassion for the employed as well.  Why should his or her body not get this most valuable of opportunities for physical exercise?  I suggest that he or she should volunteer to clean the public spaces around his/her house.  The civic sense this is sure to inspire will be invaluable.

Moreover, if you are married and only one of you is gainfully employed, dispensing with the maid altogether may be an excellent decision.

(The title of this essay is inspired by its namesake by Jonathan Swift.  Also relevant is an excellent illustration of the value of housework from a rather unknown film, Carnal Knowledge.  The film comes highly recommended.).