A little humility could make a difference
Friday, 31 August 2007
Maswood Alam Khan
IF someone could discretely video all your activities in your home and office for a couple of weeks and then you were allowed to view those sights and sounds, there could be an opportunity for you to see for yourself deficiencies in your lifestyle. You could then improve your words, your intonation, your body language, your smiles and your expression of anger.
Or, if we could ourselves devise systems in our homes and offices to regularly record all the details of our live actions and review those at the end of each day we could see how curt we were during our meetings or would have been stunned to see how sycophantically we were pleasing our bosses or how rude our colleagues were to us! We could then review our home video to pinpoint how folks and children could better converse with each other.
Pointing our personality quirks would, thus, have been very easy.
Affixing CCTV etc., in our homes and offices would not have been necessary if our creator did veneer our foreheads with a mirror-like reflector where we could check out our faces to finesse our facial expressions.
While interacting with friends, relations and colleagues, we always prefer giving instructions and ideas to receiving words and opinions. Of course, we heed others; but we listen very impatiently awaiting the slightest pause in our discourse to chip in to beat our drums again deafening all other sounds around, unaware how ridiculous we looked and sounded to an onlooker who was silently observing us from a corner. We assume we were courteous to others, but others found our treatments obnoxious. The receiving-end kept mum and we deemed their staying silent as an approval of our condescending.
Our true guises are laid bare when we discover ourselves as superior to others. We are affable with our friends and families and people term our affability as inborn; suddenly we metamorphose into different personas when our statuses are upgraded.
The colleague who used to radiate the whole office with an air of humour and mingle with all and sundry in a spirit of camaraderie abruptly becomes grumpy and grave after he got a promotion. He starts looking at you with a high nose, wrinkles his forehead when you approach him in a friendly gesticulation; he wants to remind you that you should not claim yourself a friend of your boss anymore. New powers frost the lens we look through that distorts our attitude towards mannerism.
We also feel distressed at others' prosperity because someone else's glory burns our hearts. Instead of working hard to reach our coveted goals, we brood over why others should be better off. If God gives us options to take from HIM whatever we fancy on condition that our neighbours would get just the double of what we get, we fervently would appeal to God to take our one eye off so that our neighbours lose both their eyes. Nowhere in the world one can find the degree of 'porosrikatorata' (jealousy) as is found in our society.
If we observe animal behaviour minutely, we find the bigger the animals the quieter are their behaviours; one of the reasons perhaps being big animals do not need to howl or cry for safety. A dog barks excessively at the top of its lungs while a lion groans gravely. A baby babbles, chatters, and gradually quietens her voice as she grows. We humans too scale up the gravity of our behaviour as we ascend the ladder of our social ranks.
Orientation of an individual's personality should be changed with changes of his/her positions and stations in life and career.
While calibrating ourselves in our new elevated positions, we unfortunately overheat our personality; we consciously or unconsciously exhibit our lofty disdain for other people who were once our friends or still are our relations. We change our gaits, we reciprocate our colleagues' salutations without smile and we hate to answer telephone calls from relations.
We belittle achievements made by lesser mortals around us and we cannot imagine that someone a little short in height should dare to stand by our sides. Even while praying in a mosque, we make sure the people on our right and left are in order of precedence. So intoxicated we befall that for a moment it does not cross our mind that one day we might be on the other side of the desk we are occupying or on the other side of the wicket gate of the jail we are visiting. We are now at the height of our powers!
Curves of contentment derived from power behaves in diminishing returns. The more power the less satisfaction, so after initial victory the power-blind victor gears up more supremacy in vain to place his burgeoning power and satisfaction in equilibrium. Unfortunately, the victor at this point loses his grip on wielding power due to his overbearing pride, complacency, sense of invincibility and arrogance associated with a lack of knowledge, interest in, and exploration of history, combined with a lack of humility. His or her victory, history suggests, is doomed to failure.
One who knows how and when not to press the trigger of his gun at edgy moments can retain his command. One who knows how and when to restrain the forward march can retain his victory. Napoleon Bonaparte was a powerful commander. Nevertheless, he became too inebriated with victories after victories to restrain his march forward and paid a heavy price by his suicidal decision to invade Russia in 1812. A force of about 500,000 French soldiers invaded, and only 20,000 returned. Such forward march, in military parlance, is known as 'victory disease'.
Dictators and despots, deviated politicians and the overambitious are loath to take lessons of restraint from the history of power. Their belief in perpetual staying power is so riveted in their minds that they reason out defeats of their counterparts and predecessors as follies of the vanquished not applicable in their own ostensibly shiny paths. They do not take lessons in humility.
Humility is a quality that juxtaposes us as a different species with animals, a quality that unburdens our hubris, anger and jealousy. Humility suppresses our animalistic greed, a greed that simmers our blood and stands in our path towards salvation. Humility turns the complicated landscape of our mind into a serene terrain. Humility blooms in us when we as children are groomed by proper parental and scholastic upbringing and religious training.
A lucky child in his childhood is taught first at home and then at school to intone a friendly voice while greeting his parents, neighbours, friends, classmates and teachers. This child when grown up cannot afford to be rude neither to his friends nor to his enemies. You feel home when you come across such an individual grown. His face exudes warmth of friendship blended with humility. Spending time with him is like basking in the sun.
You make him king and he will not change his gaits; seated on his throne he cannot imagine not to answer a call from his old friend or a close relation.
If we were not as lucky as that child was during our childhood, no problem.
The first lesson for us to follow is cleanse our minds with an undiluted solution of smiles. Let us start the day by looking at the mirror to find out which muscles of our faces quiver in anger, jealousy or hubris. Let us buff those muscles by pasting on our faces some lotion of smiles---I mean genuine smiles. I do not mean the "Pan American smile", the professional smile involving only the 'zygomaticus major muscle' to show politeness, for example, by a flight attendant. I mean "Duchenne smile" (after the researcher Guillaume Duchenne) that involves the movement of both 'zygomaticus major muscle' near the mouth and the 'orbicularis oculi muscle' near the eyes---a smile, as we all know, which is real when it 'reaches the eyes'.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank and can be reached at e-mail: maswoodalamkhan@gmail.com
IF someone could discretely video all your activities in your home and office for a couple of weeks and then you were allowed to view those sights and sounds, there could be an opportunity for you to see for yourself deficiencies in your lifestyle. You could then improve your words, your intonation, your body language, your smiles and your expression of anger.
Or, if we could ourselves devise systems in our homes and offices to regularly record all the details of our live actions and review those at the end of each day we could see how curt we were during our meetings or would have been stunned to see how sycophantically we were pleasing our bosses or how rude our colleagues were to us! We could then review our home video to pinpoint how folks and children could better converse with each other.
Pointing our personality quirks would, thus, have been very easy.
Affixing CCTV etc., in our homes and offices would not have been necessary if our creator did veneer our foreheads with a mirror-like reflector where we could check out our faces to finesse our facial expressions.
While interacting with friends, relations and colleagues, we always prefer giving instructions and ideas to receiving words and opinions. Of course, we heed others; but we listen very impatiently awaiting the slightest pause in our discourse to chip in to beat our drums again deafening all other sounds around, unaware how ridiculous we looked and sounded to an onlooker who was silently observing us from a corner. We assume we were courteous to others, but others found our treatments obnoxious. The receiving-end kept mum and we deemed their staying silent as an approval of our condescending.
Our true guises are laid bare when we discover ourselves as superior to others. We are affable with our friends and families and people term our affability as inborn; suddenly we metamorphose into different personas when our statuses are upgraded.
The colleague who used to radiate the whole office with an air of humour and mingle with all and sundry in a spirit of camaraderie abruptly becomes grumpy and grave after he got a promotion. He starts looking at you with a high nose, wrinkles his forehead when you approach him in a friendly gesticulation; he wants to remind you that you should not claim yourself a friend of your boss anymore. New powers frost the lens we look through that distorts our attitude towards mannerism.
We also feel distressed at others' prosperity because someone else's glory burns our hearts. Instead of working hard to reach our coveted goals, we brood over why others should be better off. If God gives us options to take from HIM whatever we fancy on condition that our neighbours would get just the double of what we get, we fervently would appeal to God to take our one eye off so that our neighbours lose both their eyes. Nowhere in the world one can find the degree of 'porosrikatorata' (jealousy) as is found in our society.
If we observe animal behaviour minutely, we find the bigger the animals the quieter are their behaviours; one of the reasons perhaps being big animals do not need to howl or cry for safety. A dog barks excessively at the top of its lungs while a lion groans gravely. A baby babbles, chatters, and gradually quietens her voice as she grows. We humans too scale up the gravity of our behaviour as we ascend the ladder of our social ranks.
Orientation of an individual's personality should be changed with changes of his/her positions and stations in life and career.
While calibrating ourselves in our new elevated positions, we unfortunately overheat our personality; we consciously or unconsciously exhibit our lofty disdain for other people who were once our friends or still are our relations. We change our gaits, we reciprocate our colleagues' salutations without smile and we hate to answer telephone calls from relations.
We belittle achievements made by lesser mortals around us and we cannot imagine that someone a little short in height should dare to stand by our sides. Even while praying in a mosque, we make sure the people on our right and left are in order of precedence. So intoxicated we befall that for a moment it does not cross our mind that one day we might be on the other side of the desk we are occupying or on the other side of the wicket gate of the jail we are visiting. We are now at the height of our powers!
Curves of contentment derived from power behaves in diminishing returns. The more power the less satisfaction, so after initial victory the power-blind victor gears up more supremacy in vain to place his burgeoning power and satisfaction in equilibrium. Unfortunately, the victor at this point loses his grip on wielding power due to his overbearing pride, complacency, sense of invincibility and arrogance associated with a lack of knowledge, interest in, and exploration of history, combined with a lack of humility. His or her victory, history suggests, is doomed to failure.
One who knows how and when not to press the trigger of his gun at edgy moments can retain his command. One who knows how and when to restrain the forward march can retain his victory. Napoleon Bonaparte was a powerful commander. Nevertheless, he became too inebriated with victories after victories to restrain his march forward and paid a heavy price by his suicidal decision to invade Russia in 1812. A force of about 500,000 French soldiers invaded, and only 20,000 returned. Such forward march, in military parlance, is known as 'victory disease'.
Dictators and despots, deviated politicians and the overambitious are loath to take lessons of restraint from the history of power. Their belief in perpetual staying power is so riveted in their minds that they reason out defeats of their counterparts and predecessors as follies of the vanquished not applicable in their own ostensibly shiny paths. They do not take lessons in humility.
Humility is a quality that juxtaposes us as a different species with animals, a quality that unburdens our hubris, anger and jealousy. Humility suppresses our animalistic greed, a greed that simmers our blood and stands in our path towards salvation. Humility turns the complicated landscape of our mind into a serene terrain. Humility blooms in us when we as children are groomed by proper parental and scholastic upbringing and religious training.
A lucky child in his childhood is taught first at home and then at school to intone a friendly voice while greeting his parents, neighbours, friends, classmates and teachers. This child when grown up cannot afford to be rude neither to his friends nor to his enemies. You feel home when you come across such an individual grown. His face exudes warmth of friendship blended with humility. Spending time with him is like basking in the sun.
You make him king and he will not change his gaits; seated on his throne he cannot imagine not to answer a call from his old friend or a close relation.
If we were not as lucky as that child was during our childhood, no problem.
The first lesson for us to follow is cleanse our minds with an undiluted solution of smiles. Let us start the day by looking at the mirror to find out which muscles of our faces quiver in anger, jealousy or hubris. Let us buff those muscles by pasting on our faces some lotion of smiles---I mean genuine smiles. I do not mean the "Pan American smile", the professional smile involving only the 'zygomaticus major muscle' to show politeness, for example, by a flight attendant. I mean "Duchenne smile" (after the researcher Guillaume Duchenne) that involves the movement of both 'zygomaticus major muscle' near the mouth and the 'orbicularis oculi muscle' near the eyes---a smile, as we all know, which is real when it 'reaches the eyes'.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank and can be reached at e-mail: maswoodalamkhan@gmail.com