Democracy and Indian Political Parties

 

On Ambition: Necessary but Corrosive?

Lucy Kellaway in The FT

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend who told me that his father, who had been a moderately well-known politician, had just died. 

How sad, I said. 

What was sad, he replied, was less his death than his life. From a young man he had set his heart on being in the cabinet but never made it beyond junior minister — and never got over it. For the past three decades of his life, he had been bitter, envious, bad company to others and a liability to himself. What had killed him in the end, his son told me, was not the organ failure reported on his death certificate, but thwarted ambition. 

A few days later I was doing a podcast with Dame Jenni Murray, the veteran broadcaster. We were discussing our careers post separation from our life-long employers, the BBC for her and the Financial Times for me. 

She said she was loving her new freelance existence and felt more carefree than she ever had. The reason: she had not one shred of ambition left. Freed from the monkey on her shoulder driving her on to succeed, she could enjoy the work she did for its own sake. 

I said that on the contrary I was entering my seventh decade more ambitious than I had ever been. I was starting a new school in September, would be teaching A-level economics for the first time, and was hell bent on doing well. 

These two conversations have got me thinking about both the corrosiveness and the necessity of ambition and wondering how much of it we need, how to turn it off when it’s no longer useful — and how to stop it from doing us in. 

Striving for power, position or money 

I was brought up to despise ambition. My parents had that snobby suspicion of overt success common in Britain in the middle of last century and disapproved of striving for power, position or money. I would hear them say “He’s very ambitious” — implying that the person in question was only a hop, skip and a jump away from turning into Macbeth. 

 When it came to my own early career as a journalist I would have sworn black and blue that I had no ambition whatsoever — any advancement was simply due to luck. 

I changed my mind about 15 years ago when I went around asking all the most successful journalists at the FT if they considered themselves ambitious. The older, posher Brits mostly said no, but everyone else, all the Americans and all younger journalists said yes. 

Suddenly I saw how pathetic the old-fashioned British aversion to visible striving was. All successful people are ambitious. If you want to achieve anything, especially in anything competitive, you won’t get anywhere at all without ambition. 

Now as a teacher, I find myself not only pro-ambition, but being forced to teach it to children. “High expectations” are one of the government’s eight teacher standards each trainee teacher must provide evidence of to qualify — the idea is that teachers expect great things from every student so that they can expect great things of themselves. 

Just before the end of term I asked my year 11 students to write down what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money in the City and then start their own businesses. Others wanted to be neurosurgeons, professional footballers, astronauts, forensic scientists. One said he wanted to return to the country his parents were from and become a politician and help to resolve the civil war there. 

As they started to discuss their ambitions I wanted to cheer. What a great job the school and their parents had done to make them all aim so high. What a great job I was doing as their economics teacher! 

Aim high, but within reason 

But as this roll call of ambition continued, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. I wanted to say: come off it Tommy, you have struggled for three years to see the difference between fixed and variable costs so I’m not sure that the ambition of being Elon Musk is realistic for you. 

What comes out of this are three thoughts. 

Ambition is a good thing but it must be proportionate. This is true not only of Tommy but of all of us — we should aim as high as we can, but within reason. If my friend’s father had had the more reasonable (but still high) ambition of becoming an MP, he might have died a very happy man. 

The second is that if you do not get the success you want, you need to let go quickly, before the wanting destroys you. My brother had the ambition of being a professional oboist. From the age of about 15, this was all he wanted in life and for a decade he did everything to make it happen. But when, in his mid 20s, he realised he was probably not going to get snapped up by the London Symphony Orchestra — or any orchestra at all — he sadly put his oboe away, cancelled his ambition and joined a stockbroker instead. 

Lastly, I now see I’m wrong about myself again. Contrary to what I told Murray, I’m not ambitious any more. I’ve looked it up and it means a “strong desire for success, achievement, power or wealth”. I don’t even have a weak desire for three of those and while I do want to achieve as an A-level teacher, that is because I’ll be no use to my students if I don’t know what I’m doing, and I won’t have any fun myself. 

Now mine is gone, I see more clearly the trouble with ambition. It is not that it turns you into a ruthless, driven version of Macbeth, but that the striving, by definition, makes you dissatisfied with your life at present. Worse still, all the really ambitious people I have known have never been satisfied by achieving the thing of their dreams, they merely concocted an even bigger dream. I daresay that if my friend’s father had made it to the cabinet, he would still have died embittered by dint of not having made it as prime minister. 

In the end he was unusual and unlucky to die still holding on to ambition. One of the greatest joys of getting older is the corrosive side of the striving, the wanting, the envy tends to recede. Whether it is because the charms of success, power and money fade as you get older or whether it is because of the diminishing probability of achieving those things — it doesn’t matter. Murray was right: life without the monkey is a good deal nicer.

Who wants to become an Alpha Male?

 

Why Is an Ordinary Life Not Good Enough Anymore? – Alain De Botton

 

Dying at 22 is too steep a price for being ‘the best’

Shobhaa De in The Times of India

My heart broke while reading the tragic account written by a devastated father on hearing about his 22-year-old son’s sudden death in a San Francisco parking lot some weeks ago. Sarvshreshth Gupta had done all the ‘right things’ ambitious Indian parents expect from their children. He was supposed to be living the Great American Dream, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, interning with Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, before landing a job as a financial analyst with Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. His young life followed the golden script written for — and sometimes by — aspiring desi students. Those who toil hard to get into the best business schools in the US, achieve great grades, repay huge loans, make their folks proud, bag high-paying jobs, work harder still… and then collapse! Like young Sarvshreshth did. The unreasonable pressure of a system that expects young people to sweat blood so as to make other people rich, finally got to the analyst — perhaps, had he listened to his father and walked out of his job a few hours earlier, he would have been alive. Fired, perhaps. But alive.

Sarvshreshth’s exchanges with his sensitive, understanding father tell their own story. And it’s a pretty common one. He writes of being severely sleep deprived, working for 20 hours a day, spending nights in an empty office, completing presentations while prepping for a client meeting early the next morning… all the while putting up with the tyranny of a senior VP breathing down his neck — pushing, pushing, pushing. Whenever his father advised him to take it easy and look after his health, Sarvshreshth would bravely reply, “Come on, Papa. I am young and strong. Investment banking is hard work.” As it turns out, the young man was not as strong as he imagined. And yes, the hard work as an investment banker is precisely what killed him.

When I came across the grieving father’s poignant online essay, ‘A Son Never Dies’, I thought about several parents and their children in similar situations. I thought about my own children and their friends… what a scary world they occupy. Look around and you will find many other Sarvshreshths — young men who are literally killing themselves in jobs that pay big bucks, but extract a gigantic price. Yes, Indians today can lay claim to being the best-educated, highest paid ethnic group in America. But, at what cost?

Right now, hundreds of over-wrought parents are undertaking pricey campus tours of various universities abroad. They believe this is their ‘duty’ since they want their kids to ‘get the best’. Is this what they mean by ‘the best’ ? We have equally good universities in India. What sort of absurd pressure is this that forces parents and students to go overseas in the hope of ‘bettering prospects’? Why not have confidence in your child’s ability to shine in India, without going through the sort of trauma Sarvshreshth suffered? Yes, we have ragging in our colleges, and no, some of our academic laurels are not as prestigious in global job markets as Ivy League degrees. So what? If you’ve got it, you will make it. Anywhere!

Just a short while before Sarvshreshth’s body was found (cause of death not officially declared so far), his father had told him to take 15 days’ leave and come home. The fatigued son’s forlorn response was, “They will not allow”. Hours later, he was dead. This sad story should act as a wake-up call for both over-ambitious parents and over-achieving children. Not everybody can take the almost inhuman pressure of the rat race. This young man was missing home-cooked food, the comfort of family and an emotionally reassuring environment. If only he’d had the courage to say, ‘To hell with it…’ and come home, his devastated father would not be writing that pathos-filled essay today.

It’s time we took a fresh look at our craze for ‘foreign degrees’ and ‘foreign jobs’. Today there are over 100,000 Indian students on US campuses. Most will think of this time as the best years of their lives. Some will stay on and be successful there. Others will return and pursue successful careers back home. But a few will crack, crumble and succumb under pressure. The system sees all kinds. But this is not about the survivors. This is about the vulnerable. Every parent wants a child to succeed. But not at the cost of their life.

I wish Sarvshreshth’s father Sunil Gupta would take this important message to many more parents still debating about their child’s future. Earning a degree and bagging a great job are fine goals. But living a wholesome life with people who love and respect you is infinitely more rewarding in the long run.

Irony. This was the worst thing to happen to a young man whose name means ‘The Best’.

The Measure of Success

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

One of the rare pleasures of playing sport is deep concentration: back in that zone, the number of empty seats becomes an irrelevance © Getty Images

A chance conversation about motivation leads me to reflect on the nature of ambition. What is ambition, properly understood? Must it mean climbing the ladder to the top? Or is it the feeling that your life has a sense of purpose and meaning, even during those days that end in disappointment?

The initial question put to me was simple: "How do you stay motivated in county cricket, even if you never get back in contention for the Test team?" In trying to provide an answer, I ended up trying to work out what matters - in cricket, in writing, or in any career.

In one respect, I was exactly the right person to ask. Not because I always succeeded but because I often failed. Only now, six years after admitting defeat, do I think I am ready explicitly to analyse why. Between being dropped by England (aged 26) and retiring from cricket (at 31), I averaged about 45 in first-class cricket. It's not phoney modesty when I confess that isn't good enough. In your late 20s, as a mature batsman who knows his game, secure in your place and comfortable in your environment, you ought to average more like 55 or 60.

As Michael Vaughan often correctly points out, the biggest difference between Test and first-class cricket is not the balls that are bowled at you but the environment in which the match is played. International cricket has a sense of event - crowd, media, cameras and constant scrutiny - that county cricket often lacks. The mood of a Test match is an intoxicating experience. When all that is suddenly withdrawn, the short-term danger is feeling that other cricket - the cricket that got you there in the first place - is somehow unexciting. This is obviously a huge error, but an understandable one.

When a player is trying to break into international cricket, a county match - an essential step on a lifelong journey - is filled with hope and energy. After he has been dropped, the same county ground can feel lifeless and depressing. You can catch yourself making a fatal miscalculation: I've performed so often in this environment that I can turn it on again when it really matters.

But, sadly, form does not take orders from your surly ego. How quickly you forget that you did not coast to success in the first place, but committed to it wholeheartedly. In failing to do the same now, you are effectively asking yourself to play better than ever while kicking away the foundations.

	From the vantage point of retirement, you realise that the most enviable careers are not always the most successful in objective terms

There is, however, a healthier way of looking at a career (any career). Instead of seeing it as only a ladder that must be climbed - and resenting any reversals along the way - your career can be viewed as a sphere of experience. After all, life is really an accumulated store of experiences. And today - this ground, this match, this innings - offers the only experience available to us. We cannot play in matches taking place on other grounds, however much we want to.

Instead of seeing success only as an outcome - wearing a particular shirt, or playing in front of a certain number of spectators - success can be recast as a search for meaningful experience. How good can I be? How much can I give of myself? Can I enjoy the fact of caring deeply, even when it leads to disappointment? How unsparing can I be in the expectations I place on myself?

Let me use an analogy from my life now, as a writer. I write both books and articles (for different publications and outlets), so my work is published and distributed in a wide range of different formats. Sometimes the life of writer seems glamorous (a shiny new book or a cover story for magazine), other times it all feels very workaday. But the experience that matters - writing the words that I feel to be true, with the most clarity and honesty I can manage - remains entirely unchanged. It is my decision. I can choose to focus on the essence of the experience (the words) or the surface effects (the rewards).

So it is with cricketers and their stage. Instead of expecting the by-products to provide meaning, we can look for it in the experience itself. Whatever the level of the match, your job is the same: to respond to the ball. The method, too, remains unchanged: to achieve the right mixture of readiness and yet relaxation, the balance of hunger and indifference, the optimal blend of narrow focus and yet openness to the day, the middle ground between asserting conscious willpower and yet allowing it to happen.

Get into that space and you will rediscover the primacy of experience and the insignificance of surface effects. One of the rare pleasures of playing sport is deep concentration: back in that zone, the number of empty seats becomes an irrelevance. From the vantage point of retirement, you realise that the most enviable careers are not always the most successful in objective terms.

A career that is fatally hitched to external validation is doomed to disappointment: there will always be someone better than you, performing on a bigger stage, garnering greater reviews. But if they are looking over their shoulder, wondering if the world could give them still more prizes, while you are absorbed entirely in today's experience, then tell me: who is the more successful man?

Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out

Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive 

• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013 20.30 GMT

Owning more doesn't bring happiness: 'the material pursuit of self-esteem reduces self-esteem.' Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying. But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram (and highlighted by the Guardian last week) that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing.

The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their possessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse. A girl's head barely emerges from the haul of Chanel, Dior and Hermes shopping bags she has piled on her vast bed. It's captioned "shoppy shoppy" and "#goldrush", but a photograph whose purpose is to illustrate plenty seems instead to depict a void. She's alone with her bags and her image in the mirror, in a scene that seems saturated with despair.

Perhaps I'm projecting my prejudices. But an impressive body of psychological research seems to support these feelings. It suggests that materialism, a trait that can afflict both rich and poor, and which the researchers define as "a value system that is preoccupied with possessions and the social image they project", is both socially destructive and self-destructive. It smashes the happiness and peace of mind of those who succumb to it. It's associated with anxiety, depression and broken relationships.

There has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness. But research conducted over the past few years seems to show causation. For example, a series of studies published in the journal Motivation and Emotion in July showed that as people become more materialistic, their wellbeing (good relationships, autonomy, sense of purpose and the rest) diminishes. As they become less materialistic, it rises.

In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify mental health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier.

In another study, the psychologists followed Icelanders weathering their country's economic collapse. Some people became more focused on materialism, in the hope of regaining lost ground. Others responded by becoming less interested in money and turning their attention to family and community life. The first group reported lower levels of wellbeing, the second group higher levels.

These studies, while suggestive, demonstrate only correlation. But the researchers then put a group of adolescents through a church programme designed to steer children away from spending and towards sharing and saving. The self-esteem of materialistic children on the programme rose significantly, while that of materialistic children in the control group fell. Those who had little interest in materialism before the programme experienced no change in self-esteem.

Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.

A third paper, published (paradoxically) in the Journal of Consumer Research, studied 2,500 people for six years. It found a two-way relationship between materialism and loneliness: materialism fosters social isolation; isolation fosters materialism. People who are cut off from others attach themselves to possessions. This attachment in turn crowds out social relationships.

The two varieties of materialism that have this effect – using possessions as a yardstick of success and seeking happiness through acquisition – are the varieties that seem to be on display on Rich Kids of Instagram. It was only after reading this paper that I understood why those photos distressed me: they look like a kind of social self-mutilation.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons an economic model based on perpetual growth continues on its own terms to succeed, though it may leave a trail of unpayable debts, mental illness and smashed relationships. Social atomisation may be the best sales strategy ever devised, and continuous marketing looks like an unbeatable programme for atomisation.

Materialism forces us into comparison with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.

I should emphasise that this is not about differences between rich and poor: the poor can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.

This is the dreadful mistake we are making: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing, a belief possessed not only by those poor deluded people in the pictures, but by almost every member of almost every government. Worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual growth: these are a formula for mass unhappiness.

Divorce cases in Mumbai soar 86% in less than 10 years

Viju B, TNN | Jul 27, 2011, 01.09AM IST

MUMBAI: As the stigma around divorce dissolves steadily, an increasing number of couples in the city are choosing to end their marriage, sometimes soon after exchanging their wedding vows. Between 2009 and 2010, the number of divorces in Mumbai rose from 4,624 to 5,245, a spike of over 13%. Last year's figure is even more startling when compared to 2002's statistic of 2,805 - this means that the number of divorces has climbed by more than 86% in less than a decade.

Social scientists and psychiatrists explain this as a sign that the till-death-do-us-apart class of marriage is under strain. "Young couples marry impulsively and separate equally spontaneously. Divorce is now seen more as a corrective mechanism and a way to move forward in life," says psychiatrist Harish Shetty. Shetty states financial independence, multiplicity of relationships and ample career opportunities as some of the reasons for the increase.

"Gone are the days when the mother-in-law was the villain. Now you alone can save or break a relationship," he says. 'For today's women, divorce no longer carries a stigma'

As the number of divorce cases in the city rise, psychiatrist Harish Shetty cites financial independence and more career opportunities as some of the reasons behind this trend. There are enough instances to back Shetty's assertion.

Varsha Bhosle, who is in her late 20s, decided to end her two-year marriage after she realized that she and her husband "did not have any time for each other". Both of them worked in an IT firm at Malad. What proved the catalyst for the divorce was the husband's choice to move cities. "He wanted me to shift to Pune too. But I felt I had better career choices here. We were both ambitious anyway," Varsha says.

Kusum Singh, a financial consultant, got separated from her husband in January. "It was not that my husband was a bad person. But somehow we just drifted apart and I began seeing someone else. I felt bad for my husband, but after the initial heartburn even he understood ours was a loveless relationship," Singh says.

Lawyers say a major reason for the rise in divorces is that women have become more independent, financially and emotionally. They do not feel that ending their marriage would bring upon them a lifelong stigma. A majority of young couples these days, in fact, separate by mutual consent. "This saves them from the headache of going to court many times. One can get a divorce within six months and maybe two hearings," says Sajal Chacha, a family court lawyer.

Chacha adds there have been cases where young couples have divorced within six months or a year of marriage. "Elders in the family have become more accommodating and do not force their children into a second marriage if the first one fails," she says.