The Hindu Business Line : Learning from life

We live in such strange and disturbed times that we have become almost inured to the daily media doses of disasters, violence and suffering from all over the world.

Disturbing questions as to the real origins of violence and conflict in the human psyche and the divisiveness of man-made thoughts are apt to be dismissed, in our times, by the majority of men of action.

Whether in politics, or business the adjectives ‘theoretical’ and ‘too philosophical’ are synonyms for ‘irrelevant’ or just plain, “Don’t confuse me with the truth, my mind is made up!”.

I was reminded of this strange characteristic among otherwise very perceptive and even caring, intelligent people faced with troubling questions, when I visited the beautiful garden bungalow that is the headquarters of the Krishnamurti Foundation India in Adyar, Chennai, the other day. The Foundation launched a book of talks and dialogues of Krishnaji Facing a world in Crisis: What life teaches us in challenging times.

Whether one learns from each succeeding crisis is a test of one’s ability to live a more sensible life. Yet, as Aldous Huxley said, the educability of Man is the greatest fallacy about human beings. One of his dear friends and neighbours in California was Jiddu Krishnamurti, known in India as Krishnaji.

Both were conscious objectors during the Second World War, in the company of other unusual people who had chosen a similar path. Krishnaji put the futility of war as well as our obvious inability to genuinely learn about ourselves thus: If you really loved your children, would you send them to war?

The title of the book also featured as the theme of two talks later in the week. The beauty of the teachings of Krishnaji is that wherever you slice them you are apt to come up with something eventually leading to a network of core issues. What is thinking, why do we give so much importance to ideas, why do we make a problem of everything, and above all, can we see our own mind as the chief problem-making instrument?

Yet in many aspects of what we call our other life, namely the business of earning a living, making a career and competing for the goodies of life, we face every one of these issues all the time.

Our difficulty is that we never resolve any one of them fully and fundamentally — so that it never surfaces again. This we can never do until we are aware of the relationship of our own images of ourselves to the problem we are trying to deal with and the images and pre-judgements which we do not question or, worse, are completely unaware of.

False divisions

It is ironic that today, making managers and professional aware of the impact of one’s behaviour on one’s thinking and vice-versa is at the root of much management education in so-called soft skills courses.

We first create a false division between the hard and practical world, on the one hand, and the supposedly far away world of philosophy; and then re-discover the truth of these issues and try to bring them in as corrective or palliative devices.

It is time that some of us denied this false distinction and accepted the challenge implied in doing so.

As Krishnaji once asked pithily, do we realise that only a brain that it is in itself free of problems can fully solve the problems of the world outside it?

S. RAMACHANDER