One for All and All for One


Entering my twenties, away from the crystallized opinions in a warm, cozy, home as I took first few tentative steps on my own, I remember multitude of strange and new ideas all around me making me dizzy with a warped excitement as I breathed them in. Open and willing to explore new point of views I remember a great conversation with a wise friend discussing the wonderment of a boundary less world. What if there was nothing like different countries? What if the whole world was one big country? Or on a milder note, what if the best from each was imbibed by the other. The beauty of the possibility had left me delirious.

But as I write this sitting thousands of miles away from where I was born, the ubiquitous difference in everything from trivial to important is nothing short of striking. This paradox dawned on me as I watched a reflection of everyone in this part of the world but not a part of this world in the movie called ‘Namesake’. Very simplistically the movie portrays life of a girl-next-door who marries a PhD student in United States has kids there, raises them, and learns about love, life, accepting differences and loneliness as her husband passes away – all this while a part of her wanting to return back to her roots while the sea of opportunities for her family holding her back. Most of the movie was an exact replica of the feelings and attitude of any immigrant. There is a line in the movie where the protagonist says “Pack a pillow and a blanket and see the world”. But how far is too far – is the learning worth the effort? And if it is how long is too long – when is it the time to repack your pillow and blanket and return to base-camp?

Pondering deeper, all the discomfort probably spurts from a single big factor that fortunately or unfortunately as the global coordinates change individuals change. Attitudes, expressions, values, food, all take an entirely new and unrecognized form. Some might argue that probably the change is another chance to peep deeper inside you and understand your reactions – but when the difference flows through most of the things in everyday life the maturity required is quite huge.

Most of the theories of human behavior establish that individuals find differences unpalatable. We establish stereotypes and categorize people to make life easier for us. Ironically all the holy scriptures possess the essence that we all are ONE – emerging from one source and are that source. This practice is termed as ‘advaita’ or non-dualism where the seeker of knowledge has no individual ego or subject-object distinction and hence perceives himself as one with the higher power and everyone/everything else.

The way to dissolve the irony could be to embrace this notion and operate from a level that despite all the differences at the highest level we all are one. Neil Donald Walsh talks of spreading this realization as the only way for a spiritual awakening and hence solving most of the problems plaguing the world. Richard Bach espouses a consistent philosophy in his books and especially in his work called ‘One’: Our true nature is not bound by space or time; we are expressions of the Is.

Starting from our relationships, evaporating the individual ego there and then moving on to others, with consistent practice probably we can learn to accept or better still not be perturbed by differences.

The Hindu philosophy has these two syllable sounds Soham (He is I) and Hansa (I am He) which are said to be resonating through the universe. Embracing these sounds and hearing them inside oneself the world could one day possibly be one big country or as they say ‘Vasudeva Kutumbukum’ and we might not feel uprooted when we pack our pillow and blanket and embark on the way to learning.

Modulating Our Inelasticity

An enriching class in Labor Economics introduced one of the most awe-striking concepts in economics triggering an ‘aha-effect’ and hence this post- “Elasticity of demand for labor”. The beauty here lies in the simplicity of the phenomenon, where it represents the responsiveness of the employer to a wage change in terms of cutting back or increasing employment.

What makes this so intriguing is the fact that the more inelastic your demand is as a worker, which in plain words depicts the weakness in the responsiveness of the employer to your wage increase or decrease, the more power you possess in negotiating your terms. This sprouts from the fact that you can, for the lack of a milder synonym, ‘dictate’ terms as long as the employer perceives the value added by you to be higher than the cost incurred on you.

This in a way is the prime factor leading to success in most of our endeavors. The more ‘indispensable’ you are the higher are your chances of flourishing in the present incumbency. I often do a dip-stick of my past performances to make sure that the value am adding is unique, non-replicable or at least difficult to replicate by another, so as to make my personal demand ‘inelastic’.

The approach needs to be dittoed even when we are operating in the context of our personal lives. How long does it take for me to come back to my initial sense of balance post experiencing an unpalatable stimulus – is my response to unwanted circumstances ‘inelastic’?

A wise teacher once so rightly told me that there is no such thing as “Stress Management” – the stress is bound to occur, what is important is the time lapsed between experiencing the stimulus of stress and springing back to serenity. Stress it’s said is the body’s non-specific response to demands placed on it that throws one off-balance. The more inelastic is the response to stress, the easier it is for us to come back to our center.

The concept of elasticity is so powerful that with some awareness we can catch it at play in most of our actions. When it comes to listening and appreciating a divergent point of view inelasticity would certainly be a vice, but when it comes to preserving your personal values inelasticity turns on its head and becomes a virtue; when it comes to recovering from an intense interval in ‘interval training’ in fitness inelasticity is a curse while when it comes to maintaining your stamina to take you through the complete work-out inelasticity is a blessing; when it comes to making room for others inelasticity can be the devil but when it comes to drawing a line so as to not be taken advantage of inelasticity can be the angel. The crux being in understanding and fine-tuning our inelasticity with the varying circumstances.

M. Scott Peck in his book “Road Less Traveled” talks of the mental map we create to help "negotiate the terrain of life”. We create our first map in childhood and we transfer much of the framework of this early map to the one that we use as adults. He says that a healthy individual understands the necessity of improvising the map as he travels. The bliss thus lies in calculating the magnitude of inelasticity required at each step as we refine our personal mental maps to perfection.