The busy badge syndrome

“Nobody is busy, nobody is free; it is all about priorities.” To be very honest, this is a brutal truth considering the fact that “Busyness” is the most common urban epidemic. I strongly feel that it is the most prevalent non-communicable disease after diabetes and hypertension. If someone tells you that he/she is busy right now, that simply means your place is not high enough in the priority list during that moment.  Almost all are part of the “Busyness” spectrum.  Being a 90s kid I realize that I am fortunate enough to witness the amazing technological transitions.  The journey from the huge Beetel landline phones to the sophisticated iPhone X, Bajaj Chetak scooters to the fascinating cars by Tesla, greeting cards to e-mails/WhatsApp, slambook to Facebook, and play grounds to the play stations highlights the technological advancements and the zeal to bring more comfort and fun to the human life. In the 90s, if you had asked any of the school kids the reason why computers were invented, the unambiguous answer would have been “to save time”. But now, there is an element of ambiguity! I seriously can not understand if the technological innovations were aimed to save time or to extract more work in the same time period! I remember a narration from the book “Autopilot” by Andrew Smart.  He has described how employees in a Romanian company used to leave office during lunch hours after their work-speed increased with the installation of computers in the office.  This used to happen because they wanted to do a fixed amount of work per day and it was significantly speeded by the use of computers. So clearly, the computers improved the quality of life! Experts from the IT company from Denmark who installed the computers were flummoxed as Romanians did not want to do twice as much work now that they had computers, and the Roamanians thought the Danes were crazy for expecting them to do twice as much work just because they could do it faster.  This confusion between the Romanians and Danes may be attributed to the cultural gaps but again it surfaces the fundamental question- “Why were computers invented- to give us more free time or to increase the productivity?” However, the challenge in the current time is so much that we can’t imagine leaving the workplace during lunch hours even if we finish the work for the day. We tend to work more; we tend to produce more, because we realise that in the rat race someone else in some other part of the world may overtake us on some other day.

On the other hand, we are more connected to each other than that is required.  To live happily we need some extremely strong emotional connections and some absolutely true friends. These connections are the real “signals” for our emotional, personal, and professional growth.  However, too much of social networks have provided us a huge number of superficial connections that dilute the connectivity with the people who really matter to us.  Every minute of the day, every day of the week, and every month of the year we check the phones for new texts, new e-mails, new comments on our posts, new likes on our pictures in social media.  In short, the part of the brain that must have been enjoying short vacation in the absence of the connecting tools is getting overworked and gives us a sense of “Busyness”! Now I am really tempted to go back to 90s again. I can recall that people had two lives during that time- (i) work, and (ii) family. There was no scope to embrace the unwanted “busyness” and the primary connections used to be absolutely strong.  It is the time to introspect, it is the time to overcome the “peer” pressure, “beer” pressure, “dear” pressure, “shear” pressure, “sheer” pressure, “Mere” pressure, “gear” pressure; whatever pressure you have! Rat race is forever but those people who matter to you are not; so prioritise early and don’t make “Busyness” the business !

COLOR CODE

Three days back a tweet from the Indian test opener Abhinav Mukund became viral in several social medias.  This tweet was neither about match fixing nor about any on-field controversy; rather he expressed how flabbergasted he has been since his childhood because of a highly prevalent social issue.  Those who follow cricket or those who are active in social media might be aware about this tweet.  For those who are clueless, let me tell that it was all about “Color”, the skin color.  He was bang on expressing his anguish over this issue that has definitely reduced the morale of many people at different stages of life.

     I have not watched television since last 3-4 years but I do remember all those disgusting advertisements of brands like Fair & Lovely, Olay natural white, Emami fair & handsome in which the girls/boys acquire truckloads of confidence after becoming fair-lovely-handsome within one week after applying all those magic creams.  I feel these advertisements indirectly convey the nauseating message that black denotes “Unfair & ugly”, and it is their cream that makes people white i.e. “Fair & lovely”.  In a country where some of these cosmetics companies openly advertise the strong negative correlation between “skin color” and “Morale”, Mukund’s tweet getting viral is not at all surprising.

     There are people, in our friend circle, in our families, in our neighborhood, who love the color “Black” when it is related to clothes, vehicles, shoes, wallets etc.  However, some of those people do not like this color when it is related to a human being!  I am not sure when people will realize that black skin is nothing but a high melanin content and if you can love black objects how can you dislike black subjects?  Moreover, this color-coding has affected the female gender more than the male gender.  It does not matter what the skin color of a boy is (no offence), he and his family members (irrespective of education) invariably look for a so-called “fair” girl for marriage! I can not imagine what a girl must be going through when a non-Tom Cruise/non-Bradley Cooper/non-Gerard Butler (I mean a “not so white”) boy comes with his family and rejects the marriage proposal just because the girl’s melanin content exceeds the upper limit for arranged marriage! The same goes for the movie industries.  Many would realize that not a single so-called “Hero” or lead actor in Bollywood has dark skin.  Even if they are marginally dark, the make-up artists ensure that they look fair on screen.  So subconsciously the society has provided us the feedback that ONLY white represents beauty!

     Are we hypocrites when it comes to colors? My personal answer is “Oh…YES…absolutely”.  Majority of us must be worshipping Goddess Kali or Lord Jagannath or Lord Shiva or Lord Krishna on a daily basis (atheist, please skip this section).  We can well realize that most of our divinities were actually dark in complexion.  Even the devotees fondly address them as “Maa KALI”, “KALA thakura”, “Jaga KALIA”, “Krishna KALA”.  So my point is, if we can worship someone with dark complexion how can we dislike or bully someone with the same complexion? If this is not a good example of hypocrisy, then what it is? When someone like Mukund who plays for the nation gets bullied in the social networks, only for his dark complexion, imagine how much an ordinary citizen must be facing in his/her daily life.  It is time to move on, time to respect all human beings; trust me, skin color is nothing but melanin! I completely resonate with Mukund’s last sentence “Stay true, stay focused, be comfortable in your owk skin”. 

Social hyper-connectivity: A curse in disguise?

     Unlimited talk-time for local and STD calls, and abundant 4G data (2GB/day) at a price of 399 Indian rupees per month (for non-Indian friends: ~ US $ 6.5/month)! What we have witnessed in last 3-4 years is a revolution in the field of telecommunication.  If I have to go back to my childhood days, I could not have imagined the existence of something called “Cell-phone”; rather a landline connection was more than a prized possession those days.  However, things have changed remarkably over last 2-3 decades and all the 90s kids should feel lucky that they have witnessed the paradigm shift.  We have witnessed the journey from the costly landline BSNL connections to the inexpensive JIO offers, the big-fatty Beetel land phones to the slim and smart cell-phones, from “Shaktimaan” to “Game of Thrones”, from the Kodak roll-cameras to the sophisticated DSLRs, from the primitive videogames to the thrilling PlayStations, and the list goes on.  There is hardly any doubt that the technological progress has improved the quality of lives to a great extent. However, a part of my brain prompts me to believe that things are not as rosy as they appear! Is there any curse in disguise? My answer is: “YES”. Are we missing something? My answer still remains “YES”! 

     It all started with Orkut, which is now extinct, and was followed by Google plus, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram (The Tinder guys do not read this sort of articles!) The ever-burgeoning social networking sites have definitely enhanced our connectivity, but is this increase in connectivity effective?  As a researcher who is working on brain connectivity in several neurological disorders, I interpret any increase in the connectivity of two regions of the brain as either a probable “cause” of the disease or a probable “effect” of the disease (compensatory response), which may or may not affect the outcome of the disease.  Now, when I extrapolate the same logic to our social hyper-connectivity that is definitely secondary to the technological innovations, I wonder how effective or how aberrant these connections have become over time.  

     It seems I have more than 1700 friends in Facebook and some of my friends have even crossed the 2000 mark! Comparing these numbers to the number of friends I had before I joined Facebook, is same as comparing the size of a mammoth to that of a moth! I still have great bonding with my pre-Facebook friends and having or not having them in my friend list in Facebook does not affect my interactions with them.  Similarly, Facebook has no contributions towards my friendship with people who I came across in post-Facebook days.  Clearly we have plenty of friends but we don’t have enough friendship.  We are just in touch with each other, but friendship actually is much more than the sham touch! There are plenty of reasons why I believe that we are facing the ill consequences of the hyper-connectivity.  To be very forthright, I feel we consume more time to display our false sense accomplishments to our sham-virtual friends in social networks than we celebrate our togetherness with the real and close friends.  In short, we are just happy with the superficial romance with mirage! Communication through chats and texts in the social networks has apparently increased our connectivity but these superficial communications have been smothering the beauty of deep conversations in real life.  Clearly, we need to distinguish “communication” from “conversation” and undoubtedly the latter holds prodigious importance in our lives carrying the tagline “I-am-too-busy”.  The aberrant hyper-connectivity has actually made us lonelier than we used to be.  We spend more time in checking others’ status updates than updating our relationships with our real-old-gold friends.  We spend more time in displaying (“sharing” for those who are unhappy with the word “displaying”) our so-called success that include foreign travels, flight check-ins, photography skills (credit goes to DSLR), selfies in exotic restaurants, and academic accomplishments (and of course this blog post!).  In other words, we are so occupied with the aberrant connections that we hardly get any time for our fundamental connections. Most of us are parts of the infected crowd and we should gradually come out of this addiction. It is time to introspect and it is high time to prioritise the connections with due respect to the age old phrase “Quality matters, not quantity!”

[P.S I have not received any honorarium from Airtel for promoting their product through 1^st sentence of this article J]

Ambition and Satisfaction: Time for Interleaving?

     Being someone who enjoys writing about anything and everything; starting from relationships to child labour, from politics to sports, from spiritualism to patriotism, I am flabbergasted by the fact that how naïvely I have kept myself away from something I love, since last 2-3 years.  My brisk yet unambiguous reply to the question “Had you not been in the field of Medicine, what would have been your professional preference?” used to be “a writer”! However, now the answer to such a hypothetical question is not so straightforward and I tend to prefix the previous answer i.e. “a writer” either with “perhaps” or with “may be”.  So clearly the ambition has become bit ambiguous and satisfaction, which is the most crucial aspect of life gets silently sandwiched between the ambiguous ambitions. 

     I do not want to generalize my thoughts but I believe that for most of the people belonging to middle class families in India, the term “satisfaction” has largely been used to symbolise professional excellence (in only two fields: Medicine and Engineering!).  The term “Ambition” is just a one-way street to professional excellence.  By no means I am insinuating professional dissatisfaction, rather what I am trying to convey is that ambitions are multidimensional and we need to nurture ourselves in all the dimensions.  I remember coming across a quote during my schooldays saying “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”.  Well, that sounds splendid if you have only one love, which was way too easy for us to decide (Medicine or Engineering).  But with age, you tend to travel to new places, meet new people, and get new ideas that give you fresh perspectives about life and the definition of professional “satisfaction” changes.  If I have to give my example, professionally I wanted to be surgeon when I was in the 3^rd year of M.B.B.S, but I loved Pediatrics by the time I reached my internship year, and now I am deeply in love with neurological sciences.  However, there exist affairs beyond academics that are relatively immune to the sledgehammer of time.  I used to love writing when I was in 3^rd year of M.B.B.S, my love was intact when I reached internship year, and I am still deeply in love with writing! But the conflict of interest between the professional and personal ambitions becomes so robust that satisfaction gets asphyxiated. As research is an integral component of my professional life, it is getting difficult for me to have a smooth transition between scientific writing and casual writing. Of course time is one of the biggest limiting factors, but the contents, and the fear of making minute mistakes while writing scientific articles certainly snatches someone’s natural abilities to write casual articles and the biggest victim is “Humor”.  I am sure I am not alone here and many must be struggling to have a perfect rhythm between the things they love.  I know some of my friends who used to be exceptional chess players during my school days and they are now bit disappointed, as they have lost the grip over something they were masters at.  I have come across colleagues who used to be excellent guitarists/pianists but the toll paid in the form of time for the professional excellence has roughened the extra-curricular skills. 

Although I am bit nascent in my professional life, I am convinced that getting professional satisfaction is not a cakewalk, and professional and personal satisfactions are not mutually exclusive.  I bet, more than 99% of us tend to compare our professional progress with that of our colleagues (rest 1% are probably liars).  In such cases, professional satisfaction appears to be a mirage because we will always have someone in our field who will outshine us.  That is why we should not suppress something we love to do by something which may not give us absolute satisfaction. The best bet is to give significant chances to everything that you love to do. Having a life which is too structured, and too professional, is not something we should be satisfied with. It is all about accurately interleaving the ambition, and satisfaction. So go ahead, find time for things you love to do, meet new people, have great conversations; you never know where you will get the inspiration from.