Diary 2016 (April 3rd)- What I didn’t know about following my heart

This was a difficult piece to write but I had to get it out of my system. I didn’t want to come cross as a self-pitying narcissist. I don’t know if I have been able to avoid that.

“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”

— The alchemist

This bromide is accepted as profound wisdom in today’s world, imparted by self help gurus, mythologized by entrepreneurs, eagerly lapped up by drones sitting in cubicles around the world. It has created a market worth billions of dollars. The remedy is snake oil. But the ailment is all too real . I did suffer from it. I did crave a cure. I did believe in following my heart. Follow I did. Turn your passion into a career. You only live once, it’s your life. Why care about what anyone thinks. So on and on.

The uplifting stories maybe make up 1% of the total. No one talks about the 99% failures. They are forgotten. Saw a stand-up comedian telling this joke on Comedy Central the other night, “If you follow your heart, everyone will still love you…if you succeed.”

What do you want to be when you grow up? When I was around 4 or 5, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was in awe of the scale of the universe and our insignificant place in it. I read about our solar system, about white dwarfs and black stars. I was a bit older, when I read a book with short, inspiring biographies of famous scientists, deciphering nature. I felt inspired. I wanted to be a scientist. When I read about the Indus Valley Civilization, about Egyptian heiroglyphics and the Rosetta stone, I wanted to be an archaeologist. These were all passing ill-defined fantasies. I kept devouring books, kept working hard at school.

For a long time I did everything I was supposed to. Then I quit the well-trodden path without a clear idea, about which less traveled road I wanted to take.

In India if you are in the top 30 or 40 percentile academically, you write the highly competitive entrance exams for engineering or medical colleges and become an engineer or a doctor. Total seats in the former far exceed the later. Hence the joke that Indians become engineers first and then decide what they want to be when they grow up. It was the same with me. I had no clue what engineering was all about. I studied for the Indian Institutes of Technology entrance, got through. What branch you selected was largely determined by demand/supply. In my time, the usual sequence in prospective students’ consideration was computer science, electrical/ electronics/ mechanical/ chemical/ civil. I am simplifying the process here but I can confidently say that actual interest would rank low in the list of criteria. The opposite of informed decision making is the norm.

By final year, I was just going through the motions. I was sure that I didn’t want to be a chemical engineer for the rest of my life. Remarkably few job placements, at best 20–25%, were in core industries. This from one of the best engineering colleges in the country. Software companies and random consultancies picked up most students. IITians are considered to be intelligent. After all, they survived possibly one of the toughest examinations in the world. I doubt if much value was attached to the education imparted during the 4 years it took to earn a degree.

In a burst of all too common inspiration, I wrote the entrance for the Indian Institutes of Management. Good thing was you didn’t have to prepare too much for it. I spent two more years completing MBA, majoring in finance. I got a job with JP Morgan and worked there for three years.

I was making good money, good salary plus decent bonuses, notwithstanding the effects of the 2008 meltdown. Mumbai was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city, with something always happening for those willing to explore. I hung out with other fresh MBAs, also on their first, well-paying jobs. Most were still free of the burdens of family life. We would go to the best pubs in town, eat out at the best restaurants. I had good company for exploring the arts scene. We frequently went for plays, attended film screenings.

We brushed up against filmmakers, actors, writers. We were not awed by the big Bollywood glamour but we were thrilled by the cerebral brilliance of the work of independent directors, the work of great actors performing 10 feet from you on the stage. I made a friend who had given up his career in a multinational corporation to write scripts. Once, he got me an invite to a BYOB party at Anurag Kashyap’s house. Drinking Old Monk, watching a screener DVD of Carlos sent to Kashyap by Oliver Assayas, surrounded by people passionate about cinema. And some wannabes. It was bliss. It magnified the emptiness of what I was doing.

I learned 80% of whatever was required for my job in finance during the first six months. After that work was mostly on autopilot. It was mind-numbing. From ‘a bit’ it crept up to nearly unbearable. Especially when a friend from engineering approached me to join his venture.

I was 26 when I quit my regular job. I was young and I felt the world was mine for the taking. Most of my acquaintances agreed. They said you are so young. This is the time to take risks. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to your career. It sounds intuitive but it is stupid.

Nearly five years later I am in a limbo. I do not have any marketable skill set. It would take 10–15 years for that. When you reach middle to senior management, you can always claim expertise in that area. And hopefully return to it, unless the economy is in the dumps.

Your compatriots keep climbing the ladder. Lateral entry doorways are rare and narrow. For people who have reached a certain level, it is essential to build up an aura, a mystique about their knowledge and skills, so that their compensations are justified. It makes it difficult to switch from even one division to another, within a field like finance.

Even if you are willing to take a knock in terms of level, companies would rather recruit youngsters fresh out of college and train them, rather than train a 30 year old. I can’t imagine what 50 year old lay offs go through.

Most of this is applicable for MBA type jobs, maybe not so much where your work is very specific and tangible, say programming or graphic design or plumbing.

Getting back to the tale, six months into the new venture I knew it was a mistake. I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t done any analysis of the business idea. Even the most cursory scrutiny would have laid bare the foolishness. My partner was dedicated. But neither of us had a clear idea of how to execute. We had bitten off far more than we could chew. It was Don Quixote running into the windmills. We finally stopped torturing ourselves after a year and a half and the venture was wound up.

After spending over a year twiddling my thumbs in Singapore, I landed a job as a production manager in a small media company. As mentioned previously, I had a vague conception of doing something related to cinema. The few months I spent in that role shattered the rose-tinted glasses.

I hoped for special respect due to my educational qualifications. But it was not forthcoming, as I was an utter novice. I put my head down and started working 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. Part of my role was to wield the whip for the master. I tried to be reasonable with everyone for a while, the editors, cameramen, clients, the owner. But I was playing the game the wrong way. Official policy was to wring every last penny’s worth from the employees. The employees slacked off whenever possible. The clients woke up on the last day (largely government employees prodded by their bosses on the day before the event)with seemingly impossible demands. It was difficult to tell who was exploiting whom. I joined in the circus.

I was picking up on the technical stuff as well as the somewhat sleazy modus operandi. We shot TV shows which were aired on prominent Indian TV channels (only overseas, though we took care not to highlight it to sponsors while pitching). These were not commissioned shows. The company would pay to have its show aired, get money from sponsors, promising them the moon, the show would be produced on a shoestring budget and the owner would pocket the margin. At least two of three segments in every episode of a variety show were crude product placements, quid pro quo publicity or hideous ego stroking of eminent personages. Most sponsors could be duped only once. Only the ones with special arrangements came back year after year. I was disturbed, though I knew that those were common practices. The owner was merely trying to get his small share of the pie. But that was not why I quit.

I had heard about the years of struggle, the luck factor. I had to admit that there was no hidden talent inside me, just waiting to be discovered and dazzle the world. Years of slogging for minimum and/or irregular pay in a sometimes exciting, often tedious job and then with a lot of luck, I could hope to get the chance to make something of my own. I was not sure if I was willing to devote years to it with the dim prospect of being an above average filmmaker, somewhere in the distant future, as a best case scenario.

If I was 20, I might still have done a course in cinematography or editing, one of the technical fields where you can make a living. But I was not prepared to commit myself to the field without any qualifications at the age of 30. I was not so passionate in my passion after all.

So I crawled back to the comforting world of IIT and IIM graduates. I joined my second start-up. It had enough space where I could let my creative juices flow! I was going to have my cake and eat it too.

There were serious limitations to the product quality. Not many in the company seemed concerned. There was strategic thinking (sometimes over-thinking) regarding operations, technology, marketing. Everything except the artwork. The approach towards it can only be described using the Hindi word ‘Jugaad’. Mutual backslapping was part of the issue but not the whole story. I was given free rein to change or improve anything I wanted to. There were a few constraints related to office dynamics but my own shortcomings were the bigger bottleneck.

It was to be expected. I hadn’t considered the danger of jumping into a field with no formal education in it. Any proper job in any field will demand qualifications and relevant experience. I was handling animations, books, publicity material, social media. I was recruited on the basis of my education and my expressed interest in it. But I can barely work on Photoshop or create a storyboard. No established firm is going to offer me a similar role. Unless you have mastered the art of selling yourself, sticking to your supposed competency is the astute option.

I witnessed the level of networking and deal-making required for getting a start-up off the ground. Beyond a certain stage it is no longer about the product or service. I had a wry laugh at the naivety of my 26-year old self embarking on my first venture. What were we thinking when we embarked on that misadventure.

There was a lot of travel, many meetings (not for me as I would have failed miserably at selling the story). Every month, the possibility of a new opening out of the dark tunnel materialized. I stopped being excited after a while. I was also discomfited by the attempts to ride on the coat-tails of certain dubious spiritual leaders. I felt that I would be betraying myself by being a part of that.

The world is not black and white. You can make your own principles and set firm boundaries for how far you are willing to go into the muck. Still a nagging, meaningless sense of morality, gets in the way at inopportune times. I might have been able to deal with it but the snag is I am not brilliant enough to forge my own path. I am not brave enough to take a radical stand with disregard for consequences. I am just aware enough that I am unable to close my eyes.

I am back to my first love, books. I am snobbish about what I read. I believe that I am able to judge the quality of writing. But I do not nurse any notion of being a good or a great author some day. I find most of my own pieces unreadable afterwards. At best, with regular practice and revisions for years, I might be able to write ‘not execrable’ short articles.

I think I can recognize great writing or good film-making. That puts my own shortcomings in harsh perspective. I started reading Thomas Bernhard’s The loser yesterday. Two students of a fictionalized version of piano virtuoso, Glenn Gould, feel compelled to abandon their pursuit of music in the face of genius. Though they are better than many, they see themselves as failures.

Most of us are destined to be painfully ordinary. We would like to think of ourselves as unique, but we are unique only to ourselves. As we get older and this realization dawns gradually, the drawn out process of dying starts. I wanted to make a difference in the world, to be remembered by at least a few, other than my family and friends. Those ideas had as much substance as a mirage within a dream.

I have wondered what happiness is. I think it exists in two forms. An ephemeral ecstasy or stable contentment. I saw contentment as catatonic. I fled from it. My first step into the unknown was guided by negatives, by what I didn’t want. What followed was determined by what was available. In the pursuit of more freedom, I was left with none at all.

My wife’s stance is that you do a job to earn money. It is a means to an end, the end being to savor the small pleasures of life and indulge in your interests. The job should pay well enough and leave you with enough time and resources to live your life. That’s the smart pragmatic approach.

But looking at the big picture, the progress of the human race depends on optimism. The stories of success are essential. They do change the world. Maybe it is better not to be aware of these things while dreaming dreams. Maybe it is better not to listen when someone warns you of the hazards. I am not sure I would have listened if I was told all this six years ago.