My Life
in Failures
“We
are kept from our goals not by obstacles but by clear paths to lesser goals!”
I was invited, some months ago, to submit a
biopic to my alma mater – apparently I had been selected as a distinguished
alumnus of the institution. I was surprised – while I was aware that the alumni
association had low standards (it tried to cheat the caterer at an alumni
dinner on one occasion by asking groups of us to eat from the same plates),
there were depths to which I had always assumed that even they would hesitate
to plunge. It was therefore reassuring to subsequently be informed that the
invitation was merely a ruse to drive up participation at some CEO/COO conference
they were organizing, withdrawn the moment I declined the opportunity to occupy
a seat, clap at the right moments, and reassure a bunch of middle-aged men
(yes, all men!) about the size of their you-know-what’s. Ah, I remember
thinking, my reputation as a horrible warning rather than a good example
remains intact, and I can continue looking into a mirror with admiration and delight
rather than awe.
But it did get me thinking – what would a
biopic on Ajit Chaudhuri read like? And I decided – my professional journey is
best described through my failures.
My first was during
the placement season at my management course, back in 1989. All I wanted was to
go to a place as far away as possible, and work with communities as difficult as
possible. However, the NGOs who worked in such places did not consider me
worthy (too English-speaking, too urbane, blah, blah, blah!), and I ended up at
a packaging plant outside Baroda. I would like to think that they (i.e., the
NGOs) were stupid and had made a mistake – but the people they did recruit (my
batchmates Narendra, Rupa, Damu, Mathew, Balu, Som, et al) are all development sector
doyens today, so maybe they saw something that I lacked.
In 1991 I decided, ‘NGO or nothing’, and travelled
to western Rajasthan to meet a local NGO boss, mentally prepared to sell
myself, fall at his feet, and do whatever else necessary to get a job. Sanjoy Ghose hired me within a minute of
meeting me (at Phalodi bus station, district Jodhpur) and sent me off to the
Urmul Trust’s most remote location, Bajju (district Bikaner), to work with its
most difficult community, refugees from Tharparkar district of Sind (Pakistan).
And I spent the next year hanging around in villages such as Sheruvala Basti,
Bandhli, Bijeri, Dandkala, et al, most of them more than 10 km from a road, in
the middle of the Thar Desert, oblivious to the fact that I was in my late
twenties and in the bottom percentile of my batch earnings-wise.
This year was the most important year of my
life professionally, and I still live off it. It distinguishes me from those
who speak ‘empowerment’[1]
and ‘participation’[2]
without ever having faced a community; I know, from personal experience and
mistakes made, that the community is not one homogenous mass, that poor women-headed
households have a different set of interests to those of thakur saheb, and
that the location of a water outlet or community centre will decide how it will
be used; and I can separate substance from fluff in the long-winded jargon-spewing
monologues that I am subjected to. I recommend that those looking for a career
in development do not by-pass this phase – one of the greatest learning and also
the most fun.
I stayed on with Sanjoy Ghose in different
ways – through a move to Delhi and work with a funding agency as its
representative for western Rajasthan, and then work involving extensive travel
in the Northeast – until his murder in 1997. I subsequently led a research team
in the Changthang area of Ladakh[3],
did a long consulting assignment in Tripura[4] –
always broke, always hungry, always moving, until 1999 when I got two part-time
but regular jobs – as a representative in India for the UK charity Paul Hamlyn
Foundation (PHF), and as the Director of Care Today Fund, set up by the India
Today group to administer support to battle casualties from the Kargil war. The
former slowly grew from a small operation to a significant all-India set-up,
and the scope of work at the latter expanded to disaster response with the
Odisha super-cyclone, the Kutch earthquake and the tsunami hitting India one
after the other. Importantly, for the first time, I was successfully straddling
the contrasts and contradictions of my professional objectives of being financially
stable, of reaching the most excluded communities, and of having fun.
The responsibilities gradually became
unmanageable for one person, and I moved to PHF full-time as Director – India
in 2008. And after three more good years there, I faced the typical male menopause
problem – I was in my mid-40s and had reached where I was going to reach, did I
want to do the same thing for another 15 or so years, or did I want to
challenge myself? And that’s how I ended up, in 2011, bag and guitar in hand, trying
to acquire doctoral education in the field of public policy.
Needless to add, there were several ‘what the
hell am I doing?’ moments in the process. One was while filling the admission
form, at the question ‘Name and contact details of Guardian’, with no option to
answer, ‘I’m 47 years old, what’s a guardian?’ (I ducked that one by nominating
my wife). Another was at the beginning of every quarter, when the children’s
school fees came up for payment, when I realized that a full-time mid-career PhD
is a race between completing and going broke.
So, another failure, in my case ‘going broke’
won and, after 3 wonderful years shuttling between classroom, library and
football ground, with many new friends from a generation that has never heard
Dylan sing or seen Maradona play, it was back to the salt mines. I was lucky that
Tata Sons, the holding company of a reputable Indian conglomerate, were looking
for someone with a combination of qualities not abundantly available and were
(therefore) willing to overlook attributes that did not portend well for a
natural fit including that I did not understand how companies run (I must
confess that I did not make the same mistake for the many recruitments into
Tata that I subsequently oversaw, and made sure that significant time working in
a company was a prerequisite). And so, I began my corporate career at age 51.
The corporate sector is different, and I had
to adjust. The first was to the sheer intelligence of those around me; in the development
sector I was one of the bright bulbs but here, I was just average, and realizing
this was a humbling experience. At the same time, managers here have a linear
approach to problems and solutions, and don’t appreciate the ‘wicked problem’
nature of issues in the public domain. Hierarchies too took time to appreciate
– I may have been a world expert in my field but, ultimately, had to do what the
boss decided. Also, I was used to systems in which, if something needed to be
done, one just did them – here, one set up forums and processes so that someone
else did them. It also has to be said that some things were the same, the
meetings just as long, boring and inefficient as in NGOs and my survival skill
of being able to snooze with my eyes open just as relevant.
My adjustment was aided by two factors. The
first was my initial boss, who knew me from before (and was behind my
recruitment), and who ensured a supportive and cooperative work environment.
And the second was that on day one I was bunged off to Kashmir to manage the Tata
group’s response to floods in the valley – I had managed Care Today’s response
to the 2005 earthquake here, was familiar with the place, and all the old
relationships developed from that time took off from where they had left off. I
spent about two months in Kashmir and when I returned to Mumbai I had accumulated
the necessary street cred within the system to survive.
I thrived, took on more responsibility, got
promoted, the works – and then, another failure – I decided that life was too
comfortable, that I could do my work in my sleep and still exceed expectations,
and that I had less than 2 years left of my career that would be wasted if I
didn’t challenge myself. Again, I was lucky – Tata Steel said, join us, shift
to our HQ in Jamshedpur, and work on how we can inform stakeholders of the
efficacy of our social responsibility programmes. And so, here I am, facing
communities once again, familiarizing myself with a new place (the eastern ghats
of Jharkhand and Odisha), learning a new language (Santhali), and acquiring new
skills (I have just met the requirements for a grassroots football coaching
license).
What does the future hold? Retirement in
2023, and then, hopefully, a move back to Delhi where my wife is (she refused
to join me in Jamshedpur) and a life living off her. I will combine being a
‘kept man’ with indulging in yet another failure, as a novelist – two books and
a collection of short stories already out (with sales struggling to reach
double figures), another book and some short stories brewing in my head, I think
I have enough masala to keep myself occupied.
Should a life be judged by its failures, as I
have attempted? And here, I am not referring to the Silicon Valley type of
failure, where the concept is co-opted into some happy tale of ultimate
progress along with exhortations to fail better, blah, blah, blah. I am
referring to the real thing, when you face up to the fact that you cannot go
further along a chosen path, and when you realize that you are a loser, a person
who is unable to measure up to the standards of the world. There is some
support for this viewpoint in the musings of the philosopher Costica Bradatan who
suggests that, by obsessing over achievement and striving to succeed, we avoid
reckoning with mortality and hence are kept from living a more meaningful life
(see the book ‘In Praise of Failure - Four Lessons in Humility’). Or, to quote
Bob Dylan, ‘there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all’.
[1] My thoughts on this are written in a paper entitled ‘Understanding
Empowerment’, see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2455133315612298.
[2] My thoughts on this are written in a paper entitled ‘A Treatise on
Participation’, see https://www.epw.in/journal/2013/40/perspectives/treatise-participation.html
[3] An output is the paper ‘Change in the Changthang: To Stay or To
Leave’ published in the Economic and Political Weekly of Jan 8-14, 2000,
available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4408800.
Another is the 2018 novel “Pax Feminica”, available at https://www.amazon.in/Pax-Feminica-Ajit-Chaudhuri/dp/1543702937.
[4] An output from that time is the 2022 novel “A Walk Through the Wild
Side”, available at https://www.amazon.in/Walk-Through-Wild-Side/dp/1543708560.
