Rahat Talreja
Vice President – CSS Central India
Scene 1:
Its the middle of the night.
You are sensing there is a mosquito somewhere who is meandering to suck your hot red blood. You continue to defend mildly and in the course of the night, the mosquito drink 10 ml blood. You scratched a little, attempted to clap and kill it however didn’t have any sense of panic. Only some irritation. The loss was 10 ml blood. That was the mosquitos mission and gross demand.
Scene 2 :
Its the middle of the night.
Suddenly from somewhere appears a Dracula or vampire. In its trademark style, it laughs a lot ( remember all those spiritual gurus who ask you to laugh and smile in life) and now demands 5 ml blood from you. Thats its mission and demand – which is significantly lesser than the mosquito. The takeaway would be just half of the first situation. However chances are that you have already panicked and had a heart attack and died by now.
So if we analyse the situations carefully, you realise that its not always the takeaway but the context and tone of the situation that makes our emotions react. Therefore, we tend to distort our images in the situation and rather analyse it in extrapolation of the actual demand. Perspective and Look through calculation is, therefore, very important in life.
Face values, numbers, figures, all tangibles, if viewed in only number terms are a sure way of fooling yourself. Basically, perspective is the only tool that helps identify the context. And the context is the crux on which every situation rests. Panic is an emotional situation and perspective is a thinking position.
Let me elaborate with few examples:
Age
Age is the most distorted panic situation we create for ourselves. The entire conditioning of being a certain age and relating it to certain events has enslaved our thoughts enough not to have any different perspective on it. However let me ask you a question.
Is 60 years an old age or not?
John is 30, has a very conditioned attitude towards life and for him, 60 is like his penultimate day.
Jethmalani is 95, just retired from 75+ years of law practise, for him, 60 was his childhood days.
The learned Sam Pitroda in his many lectures has said that we are the cusp of advances where human life will be over 150-200 years. They just won’t let you die. The organs that fail have started to be manufactured in laboratories and in another decade the cost will be so affordable that heart, liver, kidney etc whatever fails, you just replace it. simple. Technology will make the concept of age redundant.
Buying in Sales and Discounts
a) A garment, 50% off now also meant 100% higher priced earlier.
b) Bottle of Coffee, 100 gms for 100 rupees but 200 gms for 150 rupees also means
200 gms for 150 rupees so 100 gms should be for 75 rupees
If you see the net sale value of most products, they are an average 35% below the price always across the world. Price therefore acts only as a mental benchmark and is used to make you feel better about your purchase. Also it motivates you to purchase as well. If you view in perspective, ultimately nothing matters.
We can give several other examples like getting notices from income tax or being stuck in traffic before catching a flight or adolescents watching porn secretly and getting caught by parents or loosing a customer who appears big but is actually not in monetary terms or resources invested vs returns. Panic is a result of being away from reality in your mind. The closer you are to it, through unbiased analysis and clear viewing , the lesser you panic on unnecessary things. I remember once my friend was stuck in a income tax case which was on for several years and one senior one day just told him casually – see, they will take money, not your life, so its ok , don’t panic so much. It is so true that we get carried away in situations as if they meant life and death. I have seen people, sometimes my earlier self too, being too serious about normal business situations which actually don’t merit so much discussion and stress. I even wrote an article on : Over Analysis and Over discussion ( OA OD) in its context.
Now let me conclude. You know Nostradamus ?
Nostradamus said that the earth will end one day. But one day, it was he who died. Good bye!