Denial

by Anuranjan Roy

There was the slouch and there was the swagger. The open top button of his cricket playing uniform be it Tests or ODIs, the amulet around his neck he let hang out to watch his 'supple wrists' come into play. The TV commentators' repeated use of the words 'soft hands' when he was batting and 'sharp catch' when he was on the field. The unique all-white helmet he wore and the routine "The boys played really well today..." nature of his post-match presentation talk irrespective of the match's outcome. My first clear memories of watching Indian cricket sometime back in the early 90s didn't feature victory too much. Yet they have staying power as if bound to my psyche with strings of silk.

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Then came that dreadful night of 1996. Why? Why would anyone choose to chase under lights at the Eden Gardens, notorious for being the wrong place to chase runs under the lights? Why in the World Cup semi-final? The whispers grew louder. Psssttt... do you know what happens in the Sharjah matches? Psssttt... did you not wonder why so-and-so played in such-and-such manner? The accusations were horrifying, the crimes were unspeakable. Whether that particular match had any undue influences exerted in its sad result will remain a debate quite irresolveable, rearing its head up even recently but the fact was our way of looking at and investing real emotions in Indian cricket would change forever in the next few years to follow.  

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I refused to believe. No, no. Not him. I thought of the reluctant ease with which the bat was held, almost unwillingly and the casual flash it took to reach the ball. The unlikely angles created when a fullish delivery outside off stump was dispatched to any of the leg-side boundary boards. I remembered the time when, on his favourite ground of the Eden Gardens, Lance Klusener, taken for five consecutive Hyderabadi fours in the first over after lunch, looked flabbergasted. How he walked up to the youngster  immediately after the over to tousle his hair, smiling and offering his commiserations to the beleagured debutant. Once when he didn't catch Curtly Ambrose cleanly in the slips, even though the batsman had walked, he called him back to the batting crease. He the ever cheerful sportsman, a gentleman cricketer, supremely and dominantly competitive in the arcs traced by his bat but never a trace of ugliness in his on-field behaviour.

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Children are creatures of instinct. Swinging conditions or sharp bounce or footwork were fancy terms too much for an immature brain to process. The appreciation of those handling such conditions via technique would come as I grew older. All I understood and appreciated in the beginning was the flair. And that, he had plenty of. Our heroes, sporting and otherwise tend to be put up on high pedestals, especially the ones that drew us in our formative years, aiding the belief that they were not subject to other worldly human flaws. To the unbiased logical mind, the facts of the enquiry were clear-cut and so was the decision. But in a place where there should be searing anger, there is only a dull pain and a lasting refusal to accept reality. No, no. Not him.

Connected World of Cricket

We witness empty stands.

Scattered applause of the precious few echo off the vast acres of vacant seats. Yet Test matches keep being scheduled on weekdays. The prices of the tickets remain ridiculously high, or are perhaps subsidised in some venues on second thought. The facilities for the spectators continue to be farcical, bordering on the insulting.

Which leads me to a perplexing thought: Are administrators really interested in the number of people who turn up for the matches?

The question, on careful scrutiny under the light of the current day, does not seem all that rhetorical.

In the modern times, we have seen electronic and digital communication play havoc with industries worldwide. The fibre optic cables have extended their far reaching tentacles, circumvented the old fashioned establishments one by one – choked them with communication channels that have flattened the earth and connected the Antipodes with the Alaskans at the rate of the instantaneous.

In such a world, are flesh and blood turnouts really important? Are they not just nice to have garnish around the extensive treasure troves that lie for the taking in the connected world?

There are indications of change every way one chooses to look or listen.

The music industry has been turned upside down in ways that have struck jarring chords. Companies dealing with mobile communications are now tuning themselves to the changing beats and leading the score, while the erstwhile behemoths are swaying to their own death knell in loss incurring music stores.

In the world of the fourth estate, newsprint now occupy the backseat as the power, potential and promise of the electronic media rewrite business plans. There is a very fine line now between bylines and blogs, and with the advent of the citizen journalist and fan-speak, with the consumer turning contributor, the news channels are engaging in a mad rush of introspection and innovation. The thud of the rolled up newspaper on the porch is now all but passé, with the world being downloaded without editorial censorship on seven inch laptop screens and even smaller smart phone handsets.

When we look at the publishing world, brick-and-mortar bookstores with limited shelf space and traditional publishers in their own smug, complacent ivory towers have been rocked and jolted by the advent of electronic readers. Amazon now sells many more Kindle versions than hard copies. Borders have disappeared from the map, and similar monopolising bookstores are fast following suit. Readers are growing increasingly used to packing their 3000 book libraries in handy featherweight six by four inch devices. Who needs crates of shop-soiled stuff shipped across the world to be pulped when inventory can be virtual – reproduced and delivered at the click of a button?

In such a world, does it really matter for organisers whether some paltry thousands turn up to watch the cricket in the giant stadiums?

Unlike in the 20th century, now the cricket watching delights are not restricted to the city hosting the match and its suburbs. Millions of viewers across the world tune in to watch on their television sets, interrupted by local advertisements after every over, wicket and pulled hamstring. Tens of thousands of office workers in cookie cutter cubicles click their way to follow each and every ball on the hundreds of cricket websites while banners ads blink away at the top of the screen and Bet365 beckons tantalisingly from the side pane.

The same millions watch and re-watch the action in their respective time zones, live or recorded as suitable, on the hundreds of television channels, streaming web sites and social media applications, after waiting a brief while for the mandatory advertisement to play itself to conclusion.

In light of all this, the sweet timing of the phenomenon of scheduling Test matches on week days synchronising with the launch of bcci.tv seems more than significant. Why target the insignificant thousands in the ground when one can easily capture the market of hundreds of millions across the World Wide Web? Ask yourself, on which days is it fairly certain that more people will follow the action on web sites streaming or reporting the match than live in the ground?

On one side lie the few thousands of prospective diehards, prepared to brave the baking sun and dirty pouches of water supplied at the grounds to catch the action live. On the other hand is the gateway to the infinite – a viewership unbounded by the archaic limitations of time and space, not checked by the turnstile even if they want to enter the virtual arena again and again ad infinitum.

It is the same reason why Harper Collins looks at capturing the Print on Demand market while pulping last year's bestsellers. This is why Sony ties up with Nokia and Apple creates more music applications for the iPhone. This is also why Rupert Murdoch enterprises are more interested in linking their sites to Facebook and Twitter than wooing local newspaper stores with expensive square feet of space.

Looking at it from the other point of view, it cannot be ruled out that maybe the fans of the day want to watch the matches in the comfort of their air-conditioned cubicles, listening to the expert commentary of a battery of celebrity ex-cricketers, sharing their own views in online discussion forums, updating their Facebook status and tweeting opinions with every major and not so major incident.

The times have changed. The audience is global and infinite across space and time. The local few are limited, and therefore, an eminently expendable fraction.

One may argue that a sport cannot exist without live spectators. However, we live in an era when books sell themselves without bookshops, newspapers are distributed without paper and music pours into the ears without being packaged into cassettes and compact discs.

Perhaps in today’s world, the empty stands reflect not the diminishing popularity of the sport, but the evolution of the cricket enthusiast to fit into the demands of the modern times, behind the digital cover of a connected world.

Rain

Many of the pages of a much publicised, eagerly awaited chapter of history – episodes that were to go hot and smoking to the press, nuggets of anecdotes sizzling and seasoned on the sun baked first day pitch – seem to have been rendered soggy by rain, ripped off the book of cricket.

With the showers drenching the ground to make it largely unsuitable for most of the days, many a delightful turn of events that may have been washed away. Drops of pouring rain that painted the grass into a lusher green may have rinsed and cleansed deeds of heroism that might have been.

Who knows if this was the morning on which Sachin Tendulkar rose with a spirit that told him that the famed willow would flash the brightest in all its glittering career? Who knows if Dale Steyn looked at his fingers knowing that the red cherry would zip and zoom across the twenty two yards in the most lethal streaks? Who knows if Ricky Ponting felt the familiar throbbing in his veins which used to announce to him in his heydays that this was the day when runs would come by – strewn across the roads as he made his journey through the day, fifties and hundreds piled near his feet asking to be accumulated in his handsome collection?

We will never know what might have transpired from a full day’s play. This was the day when the elements, according to Cardus the presiding geniuses of the game, held court. The players, umpires, scorers, commentators and spectators waited – built up by a steady diet of incessant previews, millions of eyes trained on the skies, willing the clouds to clear, beseeching the sun to arise from slumber, forlorn fingers clicking F5, waiting for the websites to announce the arrival of the umpires on the wicket.

It is one of the eternal charms of Test Cricket that, like reality, it is sometimes compromised by the conditions. Sure, it is frustrating, but so is life. Few other sports would accommodate interruptions of opened up skies with a curtailed, but unchanged schedule. That the run of play can change, become brisker, stagnate and sometimes stop altogether because of the rise and fall of the readings in the barometer is a defining feature of the king of all games.

The great annals of cricket have not been poorer for the days when the sun refused to rule. Accounts, anecdotes and articles have been scripted by pens dipped in the inky skies as much as they have been inspired by the mastery of the cricketers when washed by sunshine. The interruptions due to weather –that final unconquered frontier that still stands in the way of relentless non-stop entertainment that sporting economics would rather make of the arenas –are perhaps the only times during ceaseless action when one is shaken into inactive reflection. Some wonderful reminiscences may do rounds over tumblers of amber at the tavern. Some of the best writing about the game has been produced while – as per the title of a gem of a book by R.C. Robertson-Glasgow – Rain Stopped Play.

There are other silver linings to the adamant clouds that refuse to go away. No, I do not mean the cubicle dweller who will become more productive without the cricket website keeping him busy all day. Keith Miller and Denis Compton may have used the interruptions to sneak off for the public houses, but that is no longer on the cards in these days of discipline and vigilant eyeballs. This can very well be the opportunity to unwind for the players, even to think about and thus iron out some of the creases that may have crept into their technique from constant use.

And finally, a word about the real heroes of the occasion. The die-hard young man who braved and the vagaries of temperamental clime, wagered against the elements to catch a few hours of his idols in the middle. When every voice of reason and weather wisdom had implored him to stay away from the ground. With nothing but the empty wicket in front of him, the vast greens around the pitch barren and deserted, it is not entirely impossible that imagination will play tricks. Might he not, in some desperate bid to pass his time away from the diversions offered on similar occasions by television channels, ride the wings of fancy and place himself at the middle of the popping crease, in some not too distant future, heroically overcoming the challenges posed by the visiting bowlers – or running down and hurling unplayable deliveries at the opposition batsmen.

Is it not possible for these day dreams on a rainy day to stick on beyond just the day to become dreams and eventually a reality? Can the rain, while washing away some of the most eloquent lines in the much awaited act between leading players of the current drama of cricket, nurture and harvest the future saplings of the great game?

Wittgenstein's Mirror

The Totalitarian Corporation  How the Business World is following the ideas of Plato    Simon van der Wiel

The face looms out of the decorated poster in a glorious celebration of importance. The eyes look with dream filled zealousness into the distant future, a patchwork of pixels proclaiming the visionary. Below, etched in professionally artistic fonts, are some of his sterling quotes, proudly propagated yet magnificently mundane. Side by side, his dreams and life story are strategically dispersed through meticulously compiled internal articles.

Simon van der Wiel is a fictonal character from Arunabha Sengupta's novel The Best Seller. Half Dutch, half Irish and brought up in the West Coast, he works for an Indian firm and interacts with Dutch clients. His blogs dealing with Corporate Circus, some from the novel and some extrapolated from the storyline, can be found at Blog of Simple Simon

Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution?

Not quite. We are referring to the modern day corporate leader. The organisation designated visionary entrepreneur.

One whose mug shots, borne by a barrage of company mailers, newsletters and affiliated business news publications, violate the more refined of our senses. Whose inane utterances are developed from
scratch through the magic of delegation, jotted down in tearing deadline-defying hurry, typeset in relentless review cycles and dished out in thousands of electronic mails which pop up in the innumerable inboxes till the discerning  employee develops distressed digits from continual clicks of shift-delete.

"Customer focus is the key for business in the next decade."... "Innovation and thought-leadership will define the new leaders of the industry."

Harping on unremarkable, universally acknowledged postulates, packaged as visionary proclamations of the all powerful and immensely knowledgeable Philosopher King. In that context, are these too different from "Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated " of Mao’s Little Red Book?

The striking similarities do not end with the image of an overhyped worshipped leader, zealously protected by internal police from criticism, with embargo on expression of honest thought. The likeness
stretches even beyond the inequality, injustice and deception of the policies that irk all rank and file behind the facade. It goes even beyond the axiomatic assumption of the state – in this case the organisation – being perpetually more important than the individual. Nor is the resemblance restricted to the most scarlet pigment of Red China. Today's large corporate organisations are more like any Totalitarian regime than can be contemplated without a shudder. 

The Philosopher King:  The marauding magic word of modern times is Innovation. Technology continues to evolve at the rate of mega-knots. Trillionaire tycoons –therefore accepted present day philosophers – vouch for business at the rate speed of thought. The focus is therefore on Innovation and Thought-Leadership. Hence, the different corporate organisations that conduct business in the time tested way of hiring out resources at lowest of low rates have to project themselves as factories doling out trendsetting ideas, packaging out of box thoughts in a moronic oxymoron.

As a corollary, people who have, often unthinkingly, climbed to their pinnacles of these organisations have the mantle of remarkable thinkers and visionaries thrust upon them. And through the propaganda machinery of newsletters, blogs, websites, information sharing portals, knowledge management
systems, podcasts, in house tweets, domestic electronic walls and external pandering to news agencies, the hastily donned manufactured greatness wraps itself tightly around them in the short term memory that rules the times.

 In a tailor made way, this fits the goal of the grand Corpocratic illusion. These companies essentially run on hordes who have to be fuelled by a vision of something more – or radically different – than the harsh

ground truth of being sold cheap. So, it is apt for the leaders to be projected as beings with knowledge and understanding that elude the common. The normal employee can only hope to gauge an imperfect approximation of their superior intelligence through the flickering shadows of reality and the reverberations of propaganda as they remain chained to their confining cubicles in the eerie
corporate equivalent of Plato's Cave.

The wisdom of the Philosopher King cannot be doubted, his words the unquestionable truth. Anything to the contrary can lead to public rebuke or banishment.

The maximisation of authority is linked to a great extent to supernatural mystical capacity to convert the massaged and mundane data from the floor, using the alchemy of positional power, into the gold dust that adorns the landscape of projected future.

The Tribal Society The world becomes flatter, contracted through the process of tying the ends together with fibre optic cables. Even as globalisation makes itself more and more apparent, the corporate organisations romping about in this world-wide arena remain undeniably tribal.

Anyone who has jumped through the hoops of corporate circus will identify with the last paragraph of the last section. In complete indifference to the stark actuality that is painted in unmistakable patterns by the ebbs and eddies of regular work, when facts bubble up to the stratospheric abode of the organisational demi gods, they are washed clean of the ugly smudges of reality.
They undergo a metamorphosis in keeping with the wishful thinking of privileged minds. There are certain norms that go with the dictates of the top management, certain elaborate vision and mission rolled out with singular purpose. Little things like truth cannot tamper with their unwavering, unquestionable vision. In fact, as we shall see later, the reality is not true. 

Chairman Mao could never admit the atrocious failure of the steel industry during the Great Leap Forward. Idi Amin pampered his guests with Scottish accordion music while dressed in a kilt himself even as people
died in hordes across the Ugandan nation. In the more antiseptic air-conditioned corridors of a corporate organisation, the same delusion plays on the leaders when their grandiose plans show unmistakable signs of being derailed into the realms of the Quixotic.

This inability to understand the differences between normative and actual laws of the world uniquely characterises tribalism. The refined fanaticism that manifests itself in the corporate police in defending the
proclaimed norms against criticism shows glimpses of semi-religious fervour of demon worship.

Parallels with tribalism do not end with this. Ritualistic chants and dances exist in the form of regular meetings, status reports, dashboards, circulated metrics, process verification checks and power lunches.
All these are activities that hardly ever lead to any tangible benefit but create an esoteric tribal bonding in the name of company culture.

As in any tribal system, there is an inherent compulsion to invest heavily in forming a closed society. Corporations carelessly cross frontiers of professionalism and tolerance levels in the attempt to create mutual family feeling. Thus, company family is a much harped and hated concept, a continual effort to make the boundaries between the office and family life and feelings as fuzzy as possible.

We increasingly find attempts to create an enclosed microcosm which tries to replicate the attractive aspects of the external world within the organisational boundary. Musical events, sporting fests, internal
newsletters featuring interviews of bigwigs, mutual back scratching in blogs and other social networking platforms... It is an effort at creating self sufficient small world which breeds its own tribal allegiance.

It is a common enough trend to be unable to contemplate a change of workplace after organisational bonding creeps into the psyche of individuals for a considerable period. With time, there is an increased reluctance to accept the possibility of an external world beyond the boundaries of an organisation from professional as also social aspects. For people accustomed to this environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to break away from the ancient lures of comfort feel and mutual support. All these initiatives of
extending the family feeling in corporate organisations are but veiled attempts at promoting tribal affiliation. 

None of the corporations that become huge are quite planned that way. Companies more or less always rise by chance, retrofitting the happy turns of probabilistic coincidences into successful vision and strategy. The bigger they get, more is the risk of exposure of employees to open communities, the greater
the danger of esoteric policies being put under the scanner of an extended worldview and, hence, more is the resistance to change. So, the bigger they grow, we find increasing number of initiatives that try to lower the opaque canopy of tribalism around their widening walls.

A year or so earlier, I informed my boss about bagging another opportunity in Europe after being particularly pissed with the uncertainty that surrounded my job in Amsterdam. I could see the tribal king unravel in front of me, peeling off one layer of superficial sophistication after another, till the primordial headiness of unquestioned authority lay bare on his face. I had committed the unpardonable crime of deserting the clan and moving elsewhere. I was told that had I proved unwavering in my allegiance, I could
have been the Last Man Standing in Amsterdam.

 Be it mirroring the Wild West or the ethnic inhabitants of the Polynesian Islands, rule of the tribal lord is very rampant. 

Totalitarianism and tribalism indeed go hand in hand.

Plato's Idea of a Corporation?  I would go further and state that many of the Corporate policies, sometimes documented and more often unwritten, are strikingly similar to Plato's idea of a Republic. 

It is a good place to pause and dampen the jubilant exclamations that may emanate from the corpo-philic at the invocation of the name of an intellectual giant and his seminal work. In lines of the pop-management-philosophical lines of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Confucian Analects, Plato's Republic should
in no way be mistaken as a guideline for ideal management. Compiled largely as a reaction to the major democratic changes of his times, it is, in more ways than one, a colossal propaganda for totalitarianism. Plato, according to respected schools of thought, was plagued by the strain of democracy and hankered after the bygone days of tribal certainty and steadiness of life.

Photo: Chiranthan

One of the many recommendations of the great Greek thinker that has become unmistakably mirrored in the industry is to destroy family values, lest it interfere with the duties to the state.

How many times have we come across neglected spouses and children, and sacrificed social occasions at the altar of deadlines and escalations? And how often have we witnessed the employees honoured as the
model worker – another term shockingly lifted from Maoist China – for carrying out such sacrifices, thus creating a company culture and competition in familial negligence? Family is a threat which has to be innovatively converted into opportunity. And one way out is for the word to be identified with the greater
company circle, as discussed in the earlier section.

One of the favoured reuses of a Plato masterpiece of manipulation in the corporate world is in the distinction between the individual and the team player. This is where we witness the great mind indulging in subtle artifice with words.

Plato defined the totalitarian morality by linking good with whatever is good for the state. Translated into the jargon of modern day corporations it is equivalent to value-adds or best practices which benefit the
organisation. 

 While this itself is not remotely as axiomatic as he made it sound, his genius was evident when he delicately denounced individualistic advancements by equating them with egoism while glorifying collaborative thought as altruism.  Thus to him, whatever is carried out for the benefit of the whole is by definition good, whereas individual goal is selfish and therefore harmful. Whoever cannot sacrifice himself and his desires for the benefit of the bigger picture is undesirable.

Even in an era that supposedly thrives on innovation, this particular concept is almost axiomatic to the archetypical organisation. Radical thinking almost never makes it through the layers and layers of
bureaucratic approvals. There is an inherent compulsion to rein in individualistic thought, and if that is not possible, to obtain Intellectual Property Rights for the same. More often than not, free thinking individuals are branded with attitude problem, while the herd that follows the narrow path
of convention are hailed as team players. Thought-leadership, save a few exceptions, constitutes canned stale ideas packaged in new, glossy containers.  

All this makes sense to the Platonic ideal, where the yielding masses, lubricated by totalitarian morality, can act as the best cogs in the corporate machinery. To promote smooth operation, it is desirable for the nuts and bolts to change positions as rarely as possible. Hence it is made difficult for a normal employee to reach the level of the Philosopher King and his consorts.

Plato also engineered the prototype of the boorish manager – the watchdog defending corporate morality. According to his celebrated discussions, dogs can be ideally bred to keep sheep in order, snarl and attack strangers while being the soul of deference to the master. The people in Plato's ideal state – and therefore in the derived corporate world – are cattle who need skilled herdsman-ship.

Not too long ago did a modern day managerial guru of a major Indian corporation go on record bettering the Platonic benchmark, "Engineers are like vegetables. We can buy and sell them any time we want to." Plato at least dreamt of happy citizens, an unnecessary overhead that corporations can do without. Hence, we find preference for more subdued and stationary plant life.

What Plato’s laws presuppose is what the managements swear by – the organisation can judge the individual, but judgement cannot flow the other way without tipping the hierarchical balance. A fool-proof formula for the higher management to be elevated into god-players. 

The corporation is, therefore, always placed higher than the individual – something which is taken for granted by corporate drones and managers alike, without really waking up to the underlying naked fascism

indicated by the statement. However, such a conclusion is hardly earth shattering. Fascism in its turn is defined as the ideology to organise a nation according to corporatist values.

To drive home the totalitarian authority of the corporation, another Plato tenet becomes a favourite mission statement of corpocracy. Fitting the Republic-an directives into the corpocratic form, it can be
rephrased as: whether they manage by or without law, over willing or unwilling employees, whether they purge the company by laying off or transferring, as long as they proceed according to justice and preserve the organisation and make it better, this form of management must be declared the only one that is
right. 

Corporate Totalitarian Justice based on Plato's framework If we are buoyed by the reference to justice, let us take a closer look at the concept according to Plato's ideas. Doing so, we unearth untold wealth of wisdom which in fact powers the corporate value system.

Justice, as outlined in the Republic, is a surprisingly blatant argument against equality and freedom. And if we pause to consider the same concepts in the light of the current day, we find them taken for granted in the social fabric, yet ridiculously defiled under the juggernaut of corporations.

Republic works on the assumption that different individuals are by nature unequal. By corollary, equality for all begets inequality. Hence it makes sense for different privileges, including authority and education, for different classes. And in flourishing rhetoric, this was presented as the just course, because according to the Platonic theory of justice, the sole purpose of citizens is to maintain the stability of the state.

Again, transforming the argument into the totalitarian tenets of the corporation, we discover amazing congruence. Till around the turn of the century, when the obvious benefits of the internet made it absolutely ridiculous, in a lot of organisations web browsing had been the privilege of a chosen few. Till today, performance appraisals are carried out with preference for those who indulge in just that amount of self development that is optimal for the role he plays in the organisation. The desire to cut and trim individuals down to the size of the cogs which facilitate operations is evident in every policy and  procedure.

Additionally, there is the almost esoteric, mythical knowledge that remains in the highest echelons of the organisation, passed down to the favourites of the demi-gods on a strictly need to know basis. The tree of knowledge has always brought about the downfall of the mortal man who has not known better than to step into the territory of the God.

Transforming Plato’s Republic into the organisation, rules are designed to bring about welfare of the company, fitting the employees into one unit, by persuasion or force. Plato’s idea of justice was synonymous to whatever was best for the state – which in corporate terms can be rephrased as,
whatever suits the purpose of the organisation. 

Finally, we need to focus on how the life-blood, the prana, the sustaining chi of corporations owe its origin to the genius of Plato. We are referring to the global phenomenon of celebrated corporate bullshit.

If one is unfortunate enough to delve deep into colossal crap that passes for senior management propaganda, it becomes obvious that following the footsteps of the great Greek authoritarian, organisations too use the technique of dramatic devices, lulling the critical faculties of the employees
into stupor, even as they propagate their selfish agenda while ostensibly promoting justice for all. It is the ancient use of oratory to divert attention from the intellectual poverty of propagated piece of fluff.

Deception Plato promotes deception as a favoured tool of the leader. In his vision, the philosopher king is a healer of the society – in our case the organisation. Just like the medical man, he is armed with the license to lie. At the same time, similar ruse, if detected in people not in the position of leaders, is a punishable offence. 

The corporate equivalents of totalitarian deception principles must be self evident. When it comes to fabrication on the part of senior management, the binding thread dangles clearly.

To cap it all, Plato pronounces three laws of deception that redefine the concept of truth – the echo of which reverberate till this day inside meeting rooms and corporate cubicles.

 One – Installation of rites and gods is the privilege of the great thinker. Down the ages, the adjective has frayed and decayed to fit the implied grandeur into the crammed corporate quarters. But when applied to
designation rather than faculties of reason, the manifesto rings as true as ever.

Two – Authority must suppress all doubts about any part of the politico-religious dogma. He advocates severest punishment for even honest, honourable people if their opinions concerning the (demi)gods vary from that of the state. Not recanting or repeating the offense is death – which can be translated variously into the termination, sack or the pink slip.

And finally the pivotal third – Anything that serves the interest of the authority is the truth. There is no other criterion. A remarkable sentence that strips truth of the virtue of universal unconditionality. It is in this defining clause that we find corporate organisations to be eerily similar to totalitarian regimes.

Lies, said the great philosopher, are necessary to carry the herd to its perfection. Plato may have been misguided in his pronouncements, but he did retain a modicum of Socratic ethics. Hence, he openly admitted that he was lying. Corporate leaders, sadly, remain blissfully ignorant of such and
other principles. Not too many of them are aware of the teachings of either Plato or Socrates anyway. These lessons have lived on, in the tribal tradition of comfort feel, as defence mechanism in the face of growing openness.

Why do Leaders Suck How is it that we always find ourselves in this kind of an unavoidable rut when we work for a big organisation? Why do corporations unwaveringly and systematically suck?

One of the reasons is the close circle of leadership and succession. The authoritarian will generally select those who obey, who believe in his lies or pretend to do so, and who respond favourably to his influence.
And, in doing so, he is almost bound to select mediocrities. He invariably excludes those who revolt, resist or doubt his influence. Never can totalitarian authority admit the intellectually courageous.

Authorities will claim to, and remain convinced of their ability to, detect initiative, proactiveness and innovation in people, but what they are quick to notice is the tendency of questioning authority and nothing more. 

Demands of corporate hierarchy enhance this vice. Those who dare to think for themselves are generally court-martialled and eliminated through charges of attitude problem and insubordination. Those who are good in following are seldom ones to be the harbingers of positive reform. The Man Friday of a party leader is seldom a capable successor. Institutional identification of leaders and emerging superstars are actually excellent for the purpose of arresting change and increasing the rule of the incompetent. An excellent process of filtering out actual innovation and ability to think for oneself.

Additionally there is the perennial problem of utopian engineering – that of the dictator’s successor. Even a true visionary cannot ensure that all his visions are implemented by his circle of command and his
successor. This is inevitable, since large numbers by definition imply mediocrity.

What lies ahead?  In the guise of consulting companies, we find the modern day equivalents of Plato’s political artist. Those jargon-chanting tribal priests who study the organisation and trim it down through rationalising recommendations in the alleged quest of guiding the company to its ideal performing form. Which is one more way of selling crap, selling short term benefits and ROIs packaged in sparkling jargon.
However, the livelihoods of human beings cannot be tampered with for the sake of artistically beautiful bullshit. One cannot clamour like Archimedes for a place to stand outside the world in order to lever it away to a better position. The organisational engineer has to do his bit by standing shoulder to
shoulder with the people who are the cogs that run the profit making machinery. 

Plato demanded rule of the wise or sophocracy. With the passage of time, it has degenerated into idiocracy or corpocracy. According to Immanuel Kant the king becoming philosopher or the philosopher king is not likely to happen, nor would it be desirable, since the possession of power invariably debases the free judgement of reason.

Karl Popper, the most brutal of all critics of Plato’s totalitarian arguments, goes a step further. He is candid in his statement that behind the sovereignty of the philosopher king lies naked quest for power, Plato’s own personal ambitions. The age old sham of professing love for freedom while nursing own dreams of power plays on in the so called visionary leadership of today’s corporate world.. .

 At the end of the day, corpocracy is nothing but totalitarian power. All power corrupts and absolute power is devastating in its corruption. This is a natural law that outlasts the make believe normative laws preached by the high priests of totalitarian propaganda. And, somehow, the insignificant cogs need to roll on without being crushed beyond recognition by the ever expanding corporate vehicle. How then does one survive? 

Not all can afford to get off the moving machinery without leaving means of livelihood in the sinister yet sustaining system. And one cannot change the machinery without getting sucked into the corrupting power - thus ending up resisting change, or arranging a corporate coup - which takes enormous amount of organisation time and energy, most of which can be better used if one does not lack a life.

The only way out of this problem, unfortunate as it is, seems to be to adjust expectations from corpocracy, preparing oneself to withstand the shocks and stutters of the worst possible leadership.

Philosophy of Comic Strips

Wittgenstein's Mirror

Philosophy of Comic Strips

Sandeep Gupta

Standing on Via della Conciliazone, I was looking at the long, winding queues at the entrance of Basilica di San Pietro. The prolonged wait on the threshold of the divine kick-started a phase of pseudo philosophical contemplation of the kind that visits us so often when time lies heavy and immovable on our hands. I asked myself whether growing line thwarting men at the doorstep of God could be a modern day symbol for the serpentine forms of the Biblical devil, and soon was current day abstractions merged sufficiently with Theology and Philosophy to make me wonder whether the panels of the Sistine Chapel were the first examples of modern comic strips.

Although the life and times of villain vanquishing superheroes have always been treated with condescension compared to the greater works of Literature, to me comics have always been somewhat more than mere childish entertainment. Asterix dazzles me with wordplay that resists the erosion of translation, with newly discovered delights on each rereading. Tintin is remarkable in the absolutely accurate drawn depictions of things as diverse as space rockets and Latin American wild life. Finally, in corporate life, I seek solace , satire and sarcasm in the cubicle with Dilbert. But social and academic conventions slot the form into the lowest strata of fringe literary outputs. The stigma has prevented me from announcing my admiration boldly, let alone attempting to pitch-fork them into the world of thought, thinkers and theology.

It was sometime later, walking through the often complicated, frustratingly French-named streets of central Brussels, that the comic book characters painted on the walls came to life and urged me to think again. In this small country which had given birth to Herge, comic strips are considered an art form. One day at the Centre Belgie de la Bande Dessignee or the Belgian Centre of Comic Strips is enough to provide all necessary evidence and argument.

Raphael's depiction of Socrates and Plato in dialogue tell us that art and philosophy are forever intertwined.  In that case, is not the comic strip an ideal vehicle of the thinker?

The drama critic of Saturday Review of Literature, John Mason Brown, had sneered in 1948 saying, “The comic books... seem to me to be not only trash but the lowest, most despicable and most harmful and unethical form of trash.” (‘The Case against the Comics’, p.31)

Perhaps this was a reaction to some gross, grotesque and gory pictures and bubbles on pulpy paper, with loud colours seeping into each other, while the greatest mayhem manufactured by mankind still played afresh in immediate memory. However, times have evolved. Today, when the colours of manufactured consent seep in to soil the more serious,socially accepted and ratified works, drowning important original wisdom under the drumbeats of propaganda, it is perhaps the lesser medium of the comic book in which truth about life and the world can occasionally sneak through unnoticed.

Let us look at one of the more philosophical words uttered about the destruction of 9/11. The sane world will always be vulnerable to madmen, because we cannot go where they go to conceive of such things. It is then only after a while that one realises with a start that these lines are in fact mouthed by Spiderman as he looks over the ruins.

A more careful scrutiny strangely reveals the immense lexicon of the graphic form of storytelling to be abundantly smeared with deep and insightful philosophy.

As Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey observed, Popeye’s “I yam what I am and that’s all that I yam” is a piece of philosophy that stands besides the Socrates concept of ‘Know thyself’. Not only is the thought scripted in a speech bubble attributed to the lovable sailor man, it is enlivened by the thousands of forms that the pipe and spinach aficionado takes in the strips. This is what makes me wonder whether comic strips are not the best way to convey the message of philosophy.

Discourses of intellectual and abstract concepts, more often than not, soon extend beyond human ability of description through the medium of words. Perhaps that is why, in stark contrast to the verbose dialogues of the classical western philosophy, eastern thoughts are often sparing in the use of words, sometimes using just one syllable as in aum and often teaching followers to avoid them, as in some of the more austere Zen schools. True, words confuse ... tie the soul into knots, make understanding difficult. Wittgenstein's perpetual struggle with language is testimony to the same. In fact, one of the more well known and verbose pinnacles of philosophical wisdom of the East, Bhagavat Gita, confuses the protagonist enough to result in a eighteen day gory warfare.

On the other hand, an ancient Chinese proverb famously says that a picture is more eloquent than ten thousand words. And when the pictures are not limited by the perimeters of stark reality, they can leverage the freedom granted by the fertile fields of fantasy. Hence, they can perhaps be the best possible tools to clarify concepts that are abstract and esoteric. It is not a surprise, therefore, that some of the best applications of the comic strip as a means to understand philosophy have been carried out in the Far East.

Taiwan's Tsai Chih-Chung started with the cartoon version of the stories of the Taoist sage Chuang Tsu. His Zhuangzi Speaks turned out to be immensely enjoyable and successful. He followed it up with picturesque retelling of the Chinese philosophies of Confucius and Lao-Tze before branching out across the disputed waters of the East China Sea to sketch the immortal Zen Speaks. Every anecdote put into pictures is accompanied by the original text and notes. The graphics are often funny and elaborate with inconsequential details providing regaling angles. Almost always, mystical philosophical concepts are broken down into eloquent and enjoyable picture anecdotes.

Whether it is because of a script that is quasi-pictographic, China has boasted some cartoonists who have been philosophers in their own rights. Feng Zikai, considered the founder of China's cartoon tradition, is also known as the Philosopher Artist. His works are supposedly touched by his roots of spiritual Buddhism, combining light hearted. relaxed artistic form with philosophical, almost religious, depth.

Continuing along the way, recent popularity of the Manga does allow philosophical lives to be depicted – although sometimes severely mutilated in retelling as in the eight volume Buddha by Osamu Tezuka.

Talking about philosophies in the form of comic strips have also been carried out elsewhere. In India, Anant Pai published the immensely popular historical series Amar Chitra Katha, which did cover a lot of philosophical topics – inevitable given the inseparability of history and thought of the culture.  There have been similar stories told in Action Philosophers and the Quranic comics of Tunisia’s Ioussef Seddik. Later on, in his extraordinary Cartoon History of the Universe series, Larry Gonick covers a number of religious and philosophical chapters of history in his patented tongue in cheek style.

Most recently, Greek author Christos Papadimitriou published his ambitious Logicomix, the story of the life of Bertrand Russel. A self referencing graphic novel, it carries out several pioneering experiments and conveys the essential life story, managing to demonstrate the coupling of Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy into a convoluted ending.

However, while the story of philosophy is one side of the spectrum, to me the more fascinating facet is the way snippets of sublime philosophy are often found as nuggets of fun in the storyline of many comic books. I am not referring to the rather monumental collection of American Splendor, written by Harvey Pekar, which reaches levels of contemplation about life to rival a lot of heavyweight philosophical novelists. Wonderful as an art form it no doubt is, the child in me who regaled himself with Denis the Menace and bootstrapped himself into adolescence with Archie and his cronies demand fun in comic books even as the adult in me craves for meaning.

The combination of the two is where the true brilliance and potential of comic books are revealed. Calvin and Hobbes do not happen to have the names of two thinkers by happy chance, they emulate their philosophical namesakes on the panels of the volumes. While Calvin spouts weighty worldviews on his excursions around the yard, his stuffed tiger comes to life with the naturalist view of existence.

When on the sleigh Calvin asks his stuffed tiger whether he believes in reincarnation, a visibly jittery Hobbes urges him to drive carefully. And when he proudly shows Hobbes a butterfly he has caught, the tiger observes sadly that if people could they would put rainbows in zoos. This stirs Calvin into letting it free. Wonderful glimpses of the world of contrasting philosophy, with poignantly sketched expressions –  eloquent enough to strike a chord with the deepest thoughts while simultaneously entertaining the younger readers.

In Obelix and Company, first Obelix and then the entire Gaulish village convert into commercialism through the exercise of selling menhirs to a Roman garrisson. They compete against each other to produce the stone monoliths in their quest to become the most important man of the village. At the end of the days of delusion, Obelix tells Asterix that he wants to go back to his old life of hunting boars and having fun – because everyone is the most important man of the village and it is not fun anymore. The underlying principles of philosophy, psychology and economics are almost transcendental, but it is expressed as pure delightful humour characteristic of the lovable giant of a man.

Even the thoughts dealing with everyday existence are poignantly put forward with more than a modicum of fun.

Beetle Bailey discloses whenever the urge to work comes over me, I lie down till it goes away. Wally of Dilbert fame reveals his key to happiness – learning to enjoy what he is and not what others want him to be. When asked whether or not that makes him a sociopath, he responds that it does and he loves it about himself. And Calvin analyses the types of people grouping them between pragmatists, principled idealists and whimsical. When Hobbes asks which category Calvin himself belongs to, he replies that he pragmatically turns whims into principles.

A sizeable percentage of interchange of ideas has historically taken place through gestures and body language.  The letters and lines that stare at us from text books are limited in that they cannot imitate the dancing men of Sherlock Holmes to act out their message. This limitation can however, not only be overcome, but leveraged into an advantage through the manoeuvrability of comic strip characters.

Who could have emulated the Epicurean philosophy in more emphatic terms than Snoopy in Peanuts? When Charlie Brown ponders how dinosaurs became extinct,  the beagle looks smugly at the other side, eyes closed, ears flying in absolute earthly content and observes ‘Probably they ran out of cookies.’

Sandeep Gupta is the protagonist of The Best Seller by Arunabha Sengupta

A struggling author, he makes his living as, among others, a ghost blogger, a tai chi teacher, an undercover reporter and a stand in consultant