Mediocrity in Our Midst: A Lament

Mediocrity in Our Midst: A Lament

Mediocrity is our besetting national sin apart from being a deep personal character flaw. It is called by varied names myopia, apathy, complacence etc. We settled for the passable because the others also seem to do just the same. If we are accidentally called a genius it is because we are just a shade better. We know not what genius means for we have long buried it out of fear.  We design shoddy products and services, even displaying plans as performance and end up singing paeans to our intent, cleverly disguising mediocrity as accomplishment. We don’t even expect good quality and forget what it means. We prepare our children not for competition; forget globalisation, but just to keep the nose just an inch above the water mark; which is how to be a tiny stone in the ocean of mediocrity till it is engulfed and smothered just the same. Excellence is such a facile word for the mediocre; they would not wince to even a wee pang of doubt whether they are honest about their claim; a conscience long dead. Their justification is that we love local standards that set the benchmark values by the appalling ubiquity of the mediocre. What is more is that they like the emperor know that they bear no clothes and hope no one notices the complicity. The story of one person and institution is the story of every institution and person; I fail to see why it does not make us indignant to the destruction of immense possibilities as criminal waste. I say this with no malice and with the full acceptance that i belong to that same breed of the great unwashed mediocrity that fails to inspire and only talks about excellence.

Its first manifestation is the delegitimation of talent and its quick burial as inimical to self interest of the great swathes of the employed. We would rather destroy talent than have it reveal our inadequacy: remember we invented the myth of Eklavya to assuage our guilt not compensate or rectify our error for millennia. We guise that in a million ways, and in doing so we undermine the credibility of our institutions, dwarfing them with enervated capabilities, risking failure and the future of a score of generations.  For example we do so by showing the rule book, celebrating geriatric and ossified people and practices, celebrating our past as we are so bankrupt in the present, keep our personal interest above everything else, take shelter under false values or those that pardon us, glossing over achievements and standards held by other societies and communities that we would rather dismiss as accidents of history or circumstance or endowment etc.  No one person is especially crappy as someone once put it; it is just that our institutions create a culture where we end up crappier than the sum of parts. Our virtue is our entitlement to our belonging to a class, caste, power centre or interest group (real or an imagined community like ideology), not what we intrinsically claim as talent and personal effort. We still perpetrate our Jajmani system of patronage where we dispense favours in exchange based on a person’s station than intrinsic excellence, trading these favours till the whole fabric is stained a deep carnadine. I remember that i was at pains to use the metaphor of the Mahabharata when teaching students at the Family Business programme, to show how as a society we favoured the game of chance rather than that of competition as exemplified by the singular framing narrative of the dice game so central to epic imagination; how every game of competition was rigged to homogenize talent (eg. how Karna was disqualified at Draupadi’s swayamvara). How the Ramayana tried to legitimise brahminical favour of the monarchical state and divine right of kings rather than the village republic in ancient Indian polity and thereby the rules of primogeniture in succession planning (mitakshara vs dayabhaga).

In the organisations that i have patchily worked with i am appalled by the resistance to change and the perpetuation of poor standards. Change is simply a thing that we pay lip service, to unwelcome though it is as it throws up deficits in our competence (or commitment or both) and since we are to administer the programme, we shall ensure it is weighed down by the slowest organisational component (which we are at pains to demonstrate that we aren’t). If accosted we might shrug “what to do, we are like that only!” Most of us simply are unwilling to accept worldwide standards than the local despite waxing about globalisation. It is simple “not invented here” finding facile excuses in culture or some such. I am amused whether the quote allegedly attributed to Tilak when upbraided for being late claimed that ‘as a Hindu he thinks in terms of not minutes but an eternity’ was merely being clever by half if not entirely misplaced. But then he had the excuse of a society steeped in tradition coming to terms with modernity and its homogenisation and atomisation of time. We no longer have such excuses. Earlier when i heard my friends being disdainful of Indian society and culture it pained me, now i have stopped being defensive and know that they may be right in their criticism if not their choice of emigrating.  But now i find them curiously celebratory in a very insular way of the past and tradition with the zeal of a fresh convert. We claim to be spiritual in the midst of material poverty of our brethren almost as a precondition to such a claim. We haven’t been short of ideology either and every ideology we have adopted left and right has mired us further into making all ideology suspect. I think we as a society have become moribund notwithstanding our claims to the contrary. We keep celebrating our minor wins not seeing the vast barrenness of our landscapes and imagination.

The word excellence has lost its ring and ceases to overawe us with its magic; it has been appropriated by the mediocre to serve us leavings and feel grateful nonetheless. The Bhagavad Gita defines Yoga as excellence in or dexterity in action (yogah karmasu kaushalam). Why do we not prize excellence and acknowledge it where we notice it? Why are we are so used to tolerating the sufficiently acceptable (which would itself be unacceptable elsewhere)? Excellence is not an institutional expectation if it were not a personal value to its constituents especially its leadership. We fail to acknowledge that even in our personal careers and performance the genius we ascribe to ourselves was so much fortuitous circumstance and an undemanding institutional environment that is so shoddy that even slight performance is a big contribution. Stated simply we appear good because my neighbour looks worse. We just get lucky because we yet believe in the great game of chance and that life is one huge potlatch. We fail ourselves and deeply betray our personhood by not making deeper commitments and remaining unendingly dissatisfied with the status quo. We do not take our competence seriously; nor a commitment to its constant upgradation (not promotion) as a professional responsibility. We mock an attention to detail as being excessive or obsessive when we know that it is part of the job description. We are dismissive of the confident as arrogant and fail to encourage it as a marker of psychological health. We refuse to identify our work when mingled with that of others in its homogenized grey in its unremarkableness. We no longer dare to dream. We mock the flight of Icarus even prognosticating failure and hide under the averageness of Daedalus’ flight. We lament the perseverance of Sysiphus as driven by a curse and see it as the perils of dreaming big. We hide behind and celebrate the Asianness (or even primitiveness) of the collective as we are afraid that individualism begins with personal responsibility and self accountability. We venerate the geriatric in a false display of values even when we see the decay and decrepitude as calcifying institutions; we find it convenient. We dare not desire more as we are all victims of an inglorious success. Would we be termed a critic if for every success we were to examine if we aimed low and whether much else were possible? 

Yesterday i protested smugly when a jewellery retailer claimed to be the second oldest profession saying that ideally that is the place of education (though consultants have made that claim in recent years). Yet in my mind antiquity is no sign of wisdom but of senility.  Our schools no longer believe that ‘we educate ourselves to make noble use of our leisure’ but become faithful foot soldiers to our economic agents and organisations. Yet they are the easiest to criticize; for whether health, education, judiciary, legislature, executive, police, accountancy, even fine arts, industry, social work, every where the malaise is just the same, a failure to yearn and reach for the beyond even in a humble way. It is as though we prize our mediocrity and even when we award something out of the ordinary we indulge in the excessive with a proliferation of awards such that you are only noticed if not awarded. If you don’t get in one category you will be assured of another and if not this year the next surely (most state sponsored awards have long been politicised). All our award ceremonies are like the Oscars a huge simulation of performance where what exists is petty and tawdry and certainly not excellence. We have become masters of the consolation prize. We have become so self congratulatory as though we might suffer a nervous breakdown if we were to be told the truth of our performance. We believe in our own press insertions and obliterate the difference between claims and reality just as advertisement masquerades as editorial. We are no longer economical with the truth, which still assumes a kernel, we have become blatant. When we see the corporate sector we have become immune to hyperbole, cupidity and vainglory have neither shame nor embarrassment in such a celebratory press, competing with that other master the politician. We don’t even pretend to frugality, it is a virtue which is the first to fall when self promotion is high on the agenda and make vain displays ‘if you’ve got it show it” for it is not affordability that makes first demands on our purse but necessity. We have mastered the art of empty rhetoric and simultaneously become gullible enough to buy it even as we speak of it. I don’t mean that we don’t have isolated examples of excellence but they seem so fewer and so far apart that we seem on a crisis of being overwhelmed by mediocrity.

I remember when in exasperation while teaching “Quality” to my management students i circulated a short story of the shoemaker who made the best shoes in the entire district in rural Germany and had a feel for the foot that was so perceptive that his shoes would never wear out in years. Yet when a tawny exciting new shop opened up opposite his tiny shop he starved to death than make cheap boots. Alas my students thought i was highlighting “quality of performance” as distinct from “quality of conformance” and how one needs to make tradeoffs based on market realities (whatever that meant). I wish they saw it as an exhortation to a higher calling that transmutes our mundane and kindles within that the glow of the transcendent. Unto that glow my father let my country awake!