The Hindu Business Line : Don't cry over a crisis

FEMA is about forex, for us, but in the US, it is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handles crisis situations. Its ex-chief, James Lee Witt, acclaimed as `master of disaster' distils his long experience into nine essential lessons and presents in a book titled Stronger in the Broken Places. In Witt's dictionary, crisis is a crucial or decisive point or situation, a turning point. "Crises are turning points — defining moments in our lives when we can choose to lead." More:

The first mistake people often make in responding to a crisis is in trying to fix everything, respond to everything, all at once. Managing a crisis effectively requires decisions. Crisis comes from the Greek word for decision. They call it triage in medicine, the act of making split-second decisions about the priority of treating one medical case over another one.

There is no disaster more devastating than a flood. With a tornado, an earthquake, or a fire, you know pretty quickly what you've lost, what you have left, and what you need to do to get back to normal. A flood fills a house — or a town — in no time, but it takes days or weeks to empty out.

You can't control a crisis — all you can do is manage it. That means going beyond handling the nuts-and-bolts issues of response and recovery; it also means instilling a sense of comfort and hope among those most hurt by the event. A physician can be the best technician in the world, but his patients still want him to have a good bedside manner.

The Chinese, befitting a culture marked by age and wisdom, apparently choose to take the long view of calamities that beset mankind: "Their character for crisis, wei ji, ... is made up of characters for two other words," says the Stanford Business Magazine. "One is danger, the other is opportunity."

A crisis stops time for a while. When life is going along normally, it's like we're on one of those interminable moving sidewalks in airport corridors. That sudden absence of velocity. In a crisis, another kind of time takes over, but you know it's temporary.

A book for crisis managers and managers in crisis.

Speed limit

AFTER a quarter century with the BBC as a correspondent, and after No Full Stops in India and The Heart of India, Mark Tully still has something to say. His new book, India in Slow Motion, is the account of a journey that `has no true beginning or end' and covers `a diverse range of subjects — from Hindu extremism to child labour, Sufi mysticism to the crisis in agriculture, the persistence of political corruption to the problem of Kashmir'. A book that, as the blurb says, "challenges the preconceptions others have about India, as well as those India has about itself." Read on:

The missionaries the VHP sent out to proselytise tended to simplify Hinduism. In the same way that the Christian church taught a simple faith based on one God and one Bible, they emphasised Rama and the Ramayana.

The cancer of corruption is so debilitating that Rajiv Gandhi, when he was prime minister, admitted that only 15 per cent of the money the government allocated for rural development reached its target. More than 10 years later, the Planning Commission found that only Rs 10-15 out of every Rs 100 spent on rural development reached the poor.

Bureaucrats and politicians, the beneficiaries of the antique, easily corrupted, administrative system are not the only opposition Chandrababu Naidu is facing. The press in India, like the press anywhere, looks for what is going wrong, not what is going right, undermines innovation, and hence contributes to the chalne do factor, the belief that nothing can be done.

The Sufi tradition has been passed down the centuries by pirs to their murids. It is believed that the secret wisdom they impart was first given by the Prophet to his son-in-law Ali. The secret is an interpretation of the inner meaning of the Qur'anic sayings, a meaning which goes deeper than the teachings of the orthodox clergy.

Unfortunately for the lower castes, the leaders they elect tend to join the club, become netas themselves and take their share of the spoils of the raj. Because it enriches them, they don't want to reform an administration although it oppresses their followers.

In spite of the brake the netas and the babus have put on change and progress, India has gone forward since Independence and continues to do so. In fact, there is evidence that it is at last gathering speed...

In slow motion, perhaps.

This is no monkey business

MAN not only looks, moves and breathes like an ape, he also thinks like one. This may come as a shock, but that is what Robert Winston has to say in his book Human Instinct, which is on `how our primeval impulses shape our modern lives'. Excerpts:

As a species, we are not physically designed for large and anonymous cities, low-level stress, fast food, addictive drugs and the fracturing of communal life... So there is tension between our Stone Age instincts and the stresses and strains imposed by post-industrial civilisation. We are forced, as a species, to walk through life laden down with the genetic baggage of five million years of savannah psychology and the inherited traits that preceded the hominids.

Around 95 per cent of dieters either fail completely to lose weight, or they lose weight but then put back on the same amount. Americans spend almost the same amount as McDonald's annual turnover on trying unsuccessfully to lose that extra weight. The fact is that simply trying to reduce your calorific intake won't necessarily help. Why? If you start reducing the amount of food you consume, your body recognises this as an ancient savannah famine and immediately slows down your metabolic rate. Even a minimal weight loss of a pound (450 g) a week will trigger this response. The less you eat, the less you need to eat before you start putting on weight again.

In the US and the UK, 40 to 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce. Helen Fisher has collected statistics from about 60 countries and has found that divorce peaks at around four years into a marriage and then declines. It is a pattern that does not seem to alter despite different cultural norms, marriage practices, divorce procedures or relationship difficulties. Some understanding of the reasons for this may be found by studying the habits of the hunter-gatherers.

Most girls have the maternal and the paternal X, whereas all boys have just the maternal X chromosome. Boys, therefore, have the anti-social maternal genes without the paternal `brake'. In other words, most girls are nicer than most boys, and the reason is genetic. Men are programmed to believe badly.

Most of us are aware of wincing when we watch someone having a tooth pulled out. Mirror neurons may well be the key to our ability to understand the emotional state of mind of another person. We have the ability to `read' other people's minds, we can put ourselves in someone else's place, and to an extent we can understand their experiences, whether pleasurable or painful.

Humph, humph... That means `good', if you knew the language of our ancestors.

(Books courtesy of Fountainhead, Chennai. E-mail: fhbooks@satyam.net.in)

Tailpiece

"Happy New Year!"

"Ah, what a pleasant surprise! I thought you came to ask for the money you had lent me."

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

D. Murali

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail
Comment on this article to BLFeedback@thehindu.co.in

Stories in this Section
Peer review, peel by peel

Soaring vultures eye carcasses from a high

A VAT fraudster's toolkit

How Jaswant can expand the tax base

Don't cry over a crisis