THE SEE-SAW OF LIFE


It is so sad that one has to be taught how to live life these days – something that should come naturally to us, is made so difficult and complicated, that you have trainers to teach one how to indulge in natural, age-old habits, that has been lost in the existence of daily living. So you have trainers in soft-skills, which are nothing but simply how to be courteous, chivalrous, respectful and sensitive to a fellow being. You have trainers in life-skills, which teach one how to be successful, set goals, be motivated, and all the rest of it all, which simply follows Maslow’s Theory of Needs! Satisfy your basic needs and move on the the rung higher automatically.

Then you also have people teaching you the natural, simple art of breathing – yes, we all have realized that what we used to do naturally and rightly as a child, is something that we have forgotten to do so when we grow up, resulting in unhandalable stress. So we go back to school again, only this time to learn what we had been doing right all along, but unlearnt, simply because we complicated our lives with a lot of no-good factors, instead of retaining the feel-good factors.

I met a human resource gentleman, who was complaining about how insensitive his managers had become. He wanted me to hold a couple of training sessions, to teach the managers to be sensitive, caring, in short become ‘good human beings’. It amuses me to think that what comes naturally to us when we are born – to smile a baby’s smile, to laugh without emcumberances, to show happiness or cry when one feels like –are all natural instincts which are hidden or lost beneath a veneer of social adaptabilities. One learns to put on a false appearance, don the role of the career player one has chosen, and live the role with the characterstics that go with it. One becomes the stern disciplinarian, the unflinching boss, the unadaptable manager. It is essential, one justifies, if you have to deal with the people who work under you. You cannot afford to be soft – you have to take a stand, otherwise people will walk rough-shod over you. So you spend half your life, becoming what you have become – and then somewhere down the line, someone realizes that you are no longer ‘human’. You are no longer ‘sensitive’. So they run a training programme, to discover the ‘human qualities’ in you, and you are implored (or ordered, depending on the hierarchy where you fit in !) to deal more sensitively with the other human beings.

Is this metamorphosis possible I wonder ? Why do we go to so much trouble to don a leaden mantle, only to be told later, that it no longer fits us, and that we should try another ? Have we become mere puppets in the hands of the working corporates, who dish out personality types, and we scuttle into these garments, simply because we need to live a life which is false, pseudo and non-gratifying ? Where did the sensitivity of the managers go ? If he was sensitive to the travails of another human being in the first place, he should have never lost it. If he has,then life has moulded him to adapt this tough stance, if he had to survive in the jungle. At one point in time, it may even have been responsible for getting him the laurels and reaching him to the position he is today. Though what price he paid for it, is something only he would be able to judge – maybe his ability to be a sensitive human being, for starters! So how do we make him unlearn again what he has learnt , to survive?