Sunday Blues and our perpetual fight with Procrastination

It’s a Sunday afternoon and after the post-lunch siesta, I wake up to a mixed feeling of having lost out, being left behind, guilty, and filled with self-doubt - a sense of dejà vu.

Familiar with it; deep down I know that this will continue till I reach the office and start taking up things. I have lived through this feeling since my adolescence and only recently realized that many adults like me do undergo this feeling routinely and it has a name.

It is called ‘Sunday Blues’.

Research shows that about 66% of the respondents in the UK experience ‘Sunday Blues’ anxiety triggered by thoughts of work the following day. Things are also the same here it seems. For someone who has a punishing 6-day work schedule wasting 50% of his weekend time in a state of gloom is not happy news. Also, not good news for a professional who is suffering from work-related anxieties regularly.

What we are seeing here is the beginning of stress.

In our professional lives, we have to commit ourselves to some delivery. At the beginning of our career, we are pretty comfortable delivering and very few works get postponed. But as we grow in age other important tasks of personal nature like health issues in the family, social commitments, and many unforeseen events make us defer things more. In the process, only the ‘Urgent’ ones get the attention and the ones that are also ‘Important’ gets postponed. And one day the long list of unfinished ‘Important’ things jostles for engagement with the ’Urgent’ things of that moment causing what is called Stress.

Simply put, Stress is our inability to deal with the task which we have committed to do on that day.

And staying under a long period of stress does irreparable damage to one’s mind and body affecting his personal and professional life. A huge industry exists to solve this problem because a large number of people can’t get their acts together to refuse what they can’t deliver what they are expected to by the scheduled days. The sincere types who are aware of their postponement acts suffer the guilt of doing so and start seeing themselves as habitual ‘Procrastinators’ and resign to that nomenclature.

Experts say that there are no Procrastinators but there are many who are in the habit of procrastinating.

What then is the habit of procrastinating?

The anatomy of habit has three basic components. There is a Trigger, there is a Pattern and there is a Reward for doing so. Here the jostling of 'Urgent’ and ‘Important’ fight for space and attention and that results in stress. This stress acts as a trigger for the Reaction. As deferring some of the not-so-urgent tasks gives us temporary relief, it acts as a reward for someone to develop a pattern of such deferment.

We all know how the act of organizing the cupboard, our wardrobe, the file cabinet, or the travel documents for reimbursements gets deferred for months and months and we develop some fear of touching it. But one day it confronts us to be taken up because by then we would have exhausted all our excuses, it adds to the existing stress. Once we give in to the pattern of procrastinating it results in our feeling guilty, which causes panic and makes us take more and newer excuses to procrastinate further.

Many of us helplessly surrender to a downward spiralling loop of stress and guilt unless something throws us out of it. Many people in the creative field suffer from this infamy as more mental focus and discipline are required to deliver creative content as opposed to those who do repetitive and routine work. 

Experts say that nothing can help us come out of this loop unless we help ourselves out of it.

They say that the core of the problem lies in giving in to the stress and reacting to it by deferring the pending tasks and enjoying temporary relief. 

They say that of all the tasks which you are too tempted to defer, at least if one task is accommodated in that days scheduled and pushed to some start; one can complete the task soon if he gets over the fear of restarting it. And completing one such task fuels the confidence to complete all others.

That is the only way to deal with it - to take the bull by its horn.

Kutta-Dutta Rigmarole

Sri Kutta! Does it sound weird?

Yes, that’s how he would have been officially addressed because the spelling of his surname in the official record tells just that - had Sri Srikanti Kutta (Dutta) of Bankura not protested. 

 

Dutta was determined and was made of sterner stuff.

 

After repeatedly failing to move the authorities to make a valid change of the name on his ration card, he chose to stage a protest in the most non-violent and creative way. He took his appeal to the head of the organization for the fourth time and instead of requesting the authorities with folded hands wearing a hangdog look, he yelped and whined like a snarling dog much to the chagrin of the BDO in the full public view. The video became viral on social media. 

 

The visibly upset BDO took up this urgent matter personally. Not reported in the press; the matter must have been sorted out in hours. Our experience says that things get done once you make it too hot for them to sit over it any longer. 

 

This ‘non-important’ matter involving a ‘non-descript’ man became ‘urgent’ not because the officer was appalled on discovering the rot of inefficiency in his office but because he saw the rage and determination of Sri Dutta to take on the system and embarrass all of them publicly. As the adage goes ‘The creaking wheel got the oil’. Just assess the harassment, wastage of time, loss of reputation, and human efforts involving so many people for such a small thing.

 

Why did such a small issue reach this stage? Was it necessary? 

 

Quirky stories like that of Dutta’s keep appearing in the newspapers regularly. News like - Man wins a 25-year-long litigation to recover the two rupees he was charged extra by the TTC. A man letting loose a sack full of snakes in the office of the revenue officer who was not heeding his request. 

 

This news of Mr. Kutta (Dutta by now) might have given us a few mirthful moments on the morning of December 19th, but a much bigger and painful truth hiding behind this incident should not be brushed aside. Why a sense of duty and responsibility are not the tracks on which the administrative juggernaut moves automatically? Things move either out of someone’s goodness, or interest or under pressure. Why? 

 

What are the organizational safeguards against it?

 

That incident is a commentary on how our official machinery works without a built-in responsive redressal system and how a common man is pushed to resort to active or passive violence out of sheer frustration of not being heard or served. 

 

Some react like Mr. Dutta, some exert pressure to make things move, and the wise ones devise ways to manage (sic) the obstacles and get their thing done. But no one talks about what to do to institutionalize responsibility and accountability for performance and prevent the officers in charge to go scot-free of their delinquencies. 

 

We are socially conditioned not to see the elephant in the room. But how long?

 

To explain what I mean let us discuss this Kutta to Dutta resolution episode. Did anyone (The BDO in this case) ask his office the following questions to permanently solve the problem in the system?

 

- Why was his name entered erroneously? 

Was the person recording the names not familiar with the Bengali surnames?

 

- Why were his first three appeals not responded to? 

Who was responsible and what was the valid explanation for not effecting the correction?

 

- What do the rules say about such wilful negligence? 

Does it go to his performance assessment? At what stage does the feedback from the public form a part of his assessment? 

 

If the BDO could resolve the issue in hours what disciplinary action was taken on the people who were plain deaf to the first three requests? What did their departmental inquiry unravel?

 

We all have some experience of dealing with such stone-deaf people for whom your reason, duty, and responsibility are not strong enough to make him lift his pen to a piece of paper to put his signature below a half-page note. He can sit on mountains of unattended files for months and no one has the power to ask him about them. It doesn’t matter how convincing or valid is your request, or how acute your situation is; your fate is determined by the whims and fancies of the person you are dealing with. 

They feel empowered by their power to harass the common man. Harassments like this can turn one murderous if one is passing through personal difficulties.

 

We all know that there exists a world where the words like duty, responsibility, and accountability are nowhere mentioned in one’s job description. KRA and KPI and efficiencies are a strange composition of alphabets. 

 

Not long ago to qualify as a capable householder in a city, you had to have contacts in the Civil Supply Department to get some extra kerosene or sugar beyond your quota, DoT JE to get your telephone line timely repaired, an electricity linesman for ensuring early response to a fuse-off the call, LPG distributor for that out of turn gas connection or a refill, cinema hall manager for blocking tickets of a hit movie. Many hobnobbed with the MPs for an LPG connection, telephone line, and a seat in a Central School. 

 

Things have changed for the better and one can lead a respectable life without having to develop a friendship with such people for ensuring their legitimate rights for basic service delivery. Now only the PhDs in most of the state universities are dependent on such personal contact with your supervisor and his relationship with the clerks, big and small in the department. You earn a degree not on your merit as your right but are rewarded for your good relationship with the powers in the system as gratis. Hope it changes soon.

 

This type of harassment is not limited to state-owned organizations, most of the big organizations are blind to their vendor management practices or after-sales service performance. Try calling a toll-free number of a big bank to block your lost credit card or an IVR system of a big white goods company you are to get certain parts not available at the local dealership dispatched to understand what I mean. 

 

If something has worked so far, you are lucky, if there is a hitch, you are plain unlucky. 

 

Just buying a flight ticket in a deal, having a hotel booking in hand, or buying health insurance online won’t give you the expected service assurance, one as to be prepared for their denials citing various clauses and terms and conditions written in fine print somewhere in their documents and have a plan B for those situations.

 

We know how difficult it is to deal with virtual offices for your insurance claim settlement or get your refund for a canceled flight or hotel booking. I am now in the midst of such a refusal-settlement issue with OYO Rooms where my prepaid room booking was flatly dishonored by their property partner in Delhi. You must have the grit of Mr. Dutta to write reams of emails to get them to work. 

 

But then such determination is not commonly found. And the organizations and their officials know that.

 

In these cases, the owners of the organizations and their representing officials know too well that they can continue to be in business as usual by creating a public perception through advertisements and serving those rare hot dissatisfied voices only to silence them. Changing the system for better service and higher accountability is not needed for business continuity. 

 

Oh, now I am reminded of a chronic problem with my BSNL cell phone connection which I can’t neglect anymore. When my phone is out of the network coverage area, the callers are getting diverted to the number of a certain lady in Basta, Balasore who is treating my callers with the choicest of expletives to vent her frustration. Who likes being inundated with calls trying to speak to someone with an unfamiliar name?

 

To deal with the problem first, I have to draft a long application detailing my problem, then personally go to the right officer sitting in some numbered rooms on the right floor of the right office building, and if I am lucky find him in his seat and in a mood to speak to me, if he believes my story and receives my application then go to him again and again over the next one month to follow up and get it resolved by finally discovering some contact who is at a higher position than this officer through six degrees of separation. This process will take me no less than a month. Am I prepared for the ordeal? 

 

I am not so helpless now as I have a choice.

The choice is either I voluntarily go through the ordeal or apply for number portability through an online portal.

Language Extinction and its consequences on us

According to UNESCO, a language is lost every two weeks. Cultural and linguistic diversity is of the utmost importance to build sustainable societies. Every country realizes how preserving and nurturing the mother language of their people is vital to their holistic psycho intellectual development. In fact, it’s the most important cultural asset around which the identity and salience of a community are built.

Since 2000, UNESCO has been celebrating International Mother Language Day every year on February 21. It serves to remind us of the importance of language as a cultural asset. This date was not chosen at random though. It was a tribute to the Bangladeshis' (former East Pakistan) battle and the sacrifices made for their mother tongue in 1952 when Pakistan imposed their language of Urdu on them as the official language of the country.

Ms. Audrey Azoulay, the UNESCO Director-General, highlighted how four out of 10 children worldwide do not have access to education in the language they speak or understand best, meaning the foundation for their learning is more fragile. "Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities" is the theme for this year 2022. This year's theme focus is to advance multilingual education based on the potential role of technology and support the development of quality teaching and learning for all.

The language we see today is the language that has evolved from the past. It's a product of development and cross-pollination from its lateral languages through voluntary or involuntary infusions. Languages like so many things have their typical life cycle. They evolve, develop, stagnate, and die. Many languages in the past had reached their peak and they are not in use now. Rich language like Sanskrit which has influenced so many others is now in the archives. That shows that languages evolve and get enriched when used by the masses across their various layers of application and it dies when not used or it becomes the preserve of the privileged few.

Language Extinction is real and the consequences of it befall the society which is responsible for its extinction.

Is our language endangered? Are we aware of it? Are we allowing the demise of our mother language in our complacency, or we are doing it out of callousness that looks almost as if by design? Let us see the state of our language in comparison to the global and national trends and evaluate what, where, when, and how we need to intervene to stop its extinction and lead it to an enriching evolution.

Globally seen, of the world's 6,000 languages, 2580 (43%) are estimated as endangered. On the other hand, just 10 languages account for over 4.8 billion (60%) speakers of the world population of 7.9 billion. If the top 3 languages are analyzed; English 1.13 billion (Native 379, Non-Native 753); Mandarin 1.11 billion (Native 918, Non-Native 199); Hindi 0.61 billion (Native 341, Non-Native 274). That shows that few languages are growing at an exponential rate over the demise of many. Let us see our national trend. From 1991 to 2011 Hindi spoken as a percentage of the Indian population has grown from 39.29% to 43.63% whereas from Bengali to all other languages it has remained flat. The percentage of Odia has dropped from 3.35% to 3.10%. What are the factors behind this trend of the rising popularity of English and Hindi which is being adopted by the non-natives with such ease?

Globally English language has positioned itself as the bridge language for most non-natives. For the last few centuries has been the language that gave people access to higher economic opportunities. Electronic communication which shrunk the world into a global village with only the different time zones rode on the internet which was in English. Various language contents were made available in different languages on the web, but the highways, lanes, road signs, and driving rules are in English. IT has reduced personal communication to structured and mechanical business languages for easy processing and unambiguous facilitation by the service providers. The need for creating subtle expressions has been shunted out and the participants are encouraged to choose keywords that allow easy numerical evaluation at the processing level. Spellcheck, Grammarchecker, Predictive texting, Autofill, Emoticon, and GIFs are helping people not to go through the grind of mastering this language of opportunity and start using it and get the bulk of their needs met. In ease of adoption lies its popularity.

Coming to the rise of Hindi at the national level, the IT industry since 1990 has fuelled massive migration both at the national and international levels. English has always been practiced by the privileged few and has remained aspirational for many. The later cohort who was not very comfortable with English because of their medium of education and exposure adopted it with glee as the bridge language with their adoptive state. The soft power of Hindi movies and easy availability of entertainment content familiarized itself to the new generation from their time of birth. The kids of the current generation are as much at ease with Hindi as with their mother language. Hindi now enjoys the same fashion quotient which English enjoyed 4/5 decades back. This multilingual trend has a negative side too. This has given rise to a hybrid language which is a mix of Odia sentences peppered with subaltern Hindi expressions which is a pain to the ears of practitioners of classic forms of our mother language.

Despite the depressing trends of most languages, multilingualism does exist and is thriving. Prof. Jatin Nayak says that there hardly is a profession or sector in which one can survive with proficiency over only one language. He rues that education is the only sector that has callously neglected our mother language from primary through post-graduation. Be it in terms of improving the quality of language teachers, empowering them with newer tools to encourage students for creative expression both in its spoken or written form; the downward slide has been worryingly steady.

The discussion above is more on the spoken form of the languages.

But is the role of a language limited to communication between two entities or it's a tool of learning of the evolutionary past of the society?

Anil Dhir one of the leading conservationists of the state feels that invaluable knowledge exists at the community level which verbally gets passed from generation to generation. It has stood the test of time. But the recent trend of migration and remaining detached from their social context is doing irreversible damage to the knowledge base as these pieces of knowledge are not documented anywhere. It will die with the death of those persons. As migration for economic prosperity is unstoppable; he strongly advocates that many tribal dialects need help to develop their alphabets and lexicons. And with the advancement of AI technology that is very much possible. But it requires support from a compassionate state and sponsor. That will help them document those pieces of knowledge for future generations. The loss of this knowledge is a loss of humanity.

Let’s think of a scenario where the rock edicts of Ashoka had not been deciphered because the person who could read them was not available at that time. The world would have been so poor without knowing anything about Ashoka and the political life of that time. The same is going to happen soon here when the contribution and sacrifice made by our forefathers who could carve out a state based on the languages we speak will be lost in oblivion because the texts which have documented the past will be incomprehensible to most of the current generation. Who will be the loser? Not them but we as the society for sure.

Study shows that usage of mother language for reading, and writing is now limited to senior citizens who are well past 65 years of age. Most of the groups between 14 to 64 have no practicing contact with the language. Many of them can speak and not write well. Most of them don't read anything beyond the local newspapers. While the practicing population is 5.3%, 63.6% practice this haphazardly. The ones below 14 years which are 28.6% stand to see no better scene. Imagine a society where 92% of its population are disconnected from its heritage literature as there is no need for this either in their daily life or profession. It is not fashionable, nor does it assure any reward or career advancement.

We connect with our past from our heritage literature and the only way to get it is through our mastery over our mother language.

By not familiarizing themselves with the heritage literature of their language, we don't acquire a sense of the socio-political identity of the society we belong to; no knowledge of the major milestones in the past as no history book talks about the history of our state. We don't know about the evolutionary cultural processes our ancestors have gone through. What do you call such an ignoramus community and what would keep them bound together in the future?

It's said, never erase your past. It shapes who you are today and will help you to be the person you'll be tomorrow. We learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

Preservation of mother language should be as important as our instinct for self-preservation. Where have we lost our humanity? That leaves everyone in some position of privilege with a set of very uncomfortable questions to answer on this International Mother Language Day.

How safe is our future in the hands of such people?

Is economic development the only sign of sustainable development of a society?

Can we risk such a scenario in the future?

What are we doing about it to prevent it?

How big should be the efforts?

What is going to be the roles of the state, society, and individuals?

Balance Sheet 2020

As a year draws to a close, one is always tempted to look back at it with clinical detachment.

Towards the end of 2019 with 2020 on the horizon, I saw the approaching period perhaps as our time which has come. I have always been partial to a number composed of 0s and 2s – 2020 was simply perfect in its composition. 2020 with its rhyming and symmetrical look somehow assured me of a better time ahead.

2019 was a mixed bag of personal losses and successes. Many events in the first few months of the year reaffirmed my hunch that good times are indeed ahead – the bounce in my gait was visible. And towards the end of March what hit us like a tsunami was unprecedented in its global impact and unbelievable - now even after 9 months of being thrown under it. But the most amazing thing is that we have survived underwater.

That is a victory of human survival instinct and resilience. I must thank my clients and colleagues and friends who stood by us. 

If there were occurrences of unexpected deaths of close relatives rattling us at the core for a moment, the calm composure of their nearer ones in accepting the inevitable was inspiring; giving us the message that life has to go on and the story of life is made of such episodes.

All our masking, sanitizing, bunkering in our own silos, distancing from everyone to escape the dreaded virus came to naught when my whole family along with most of my colleagues were found positive in a gap of a few days – almost collapsing our organization structure.

The source of infection is still a mystery but our spirit and ability to fight together and win was the new discovery.

We could sail through the period with many friends who stood by us like a rock helping us with our treatment and supplying us things as basic as meals three times a day, forging a lifetime bond. That period also made us see the worst of some friends; their insensitivity and callousness helped us to finally take a call to pull the plug on them.

Removing toxic elements from life is like doing periodic maintenance of your car if you want it to last longer.

If there were voids created by the departure of few close ones, few like Lalatendu Jena, Biranchi Panda, and Manoj Behera breezed into my life giving it a completely new meaning and direction. The road ahead and the journey with them looks so promising and exciting.

Before I realized, they had occupied their space in my heart with their goodness and had almost become family.

If the year before we lost Mikey, which we are still trying to come to terms with and get over the grief; this year we had Simba, a Dachshund, and Kai, a Pitbull Terrier enter our family making our house look like a joyous menagerie. What is a torn sofa cover to our guests, seems like a hickey to us.

They still do not comprehend why a torn pair of socks and a gnawed pair of sleepers make us smile?

God has an amazing way of compensating our losses and to make us look forward and stay hopeful in life. Today, on the last day of the year I am in deep gratitude when I see my family unscathed, my business getting back on its feet, and for all the new friends and lovely pets who have entered our life and have come to stay with us.

God bless and wish you all a Happy New Year!