Author: Anita Mankottil

One of the interesting things about the New Year greetings that I received was that several of them prayed and wished for less uncertainty this year. Uncertainty is a given, at all times. Its degree and depth vary. After the financial crisis of 2008, uncertainty rose a notch higher. The pandemic and global response to it have pushed it several notches higher. Hence, the last column I wrote in Mint for 2021 conceded that the only certainty for the coming years was greater uncertainty.

Recently, Politico profiled Thomas Hoenig, former governor of the US Federal Reserve and his prescient warnings about the consequences of unconventional monetary policies that began to be pursued by the Fed under Ben Bernanke in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The article is worth reading. The important thing to remember on finishing it, though, is that the story remains unfinished.

Therefore, the prayers and wishes for more predictability and less uncertainty should be tempered with realism. I am reminded of the story of James Stockdale, a Vietnam War Veteran. He was interviewed by Jim Collins, the author of many books, most notably, Good to Great. Stockdale had survived severe punishment and torture while being a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was awarded the highest Presidential award in the US for bravery. When asked a question on who did not survive torture and imprisonment, he answered pithily: “Optimists.” Optimistic captives were wishful that their ordeal would end shortly, before Thanksgiving, before Christmas, etc, and when all these dates came and went without an end to their suffering, some lost heart and hope.

What Stockdale had told Jim Collins about the secret of his survival became famous as the ‘Stockdale Paradox’. The paradox is this: “Never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

As things stand, we would need to remember and practice this lesson for the better part of this decade. Hoping for an end to uncertainty is not wrong, but one should be clear-headed about its prospects. The covid pandemic and its handling are not the only variables to contend with. There is also uncertainty associated with the green transition. There is also the aggressive pursuit of geopolitical goals by nations. Therefore, we may have to learn to live with it.

What else could we—especially those who are influential decision-makers in various spheres—do to deal with this uncertainty, besides imbibing and implementing the Stockdale paradox?

First, one has to be open to many different ideas, even unconventional ones. Conceptual clarity has to be supplemented with contextual understanding. For subordinates, workers and colleagues to come forward with ideas, we could do many things. But one that stayed with me was what Jim Collins wrote about great leaders. They looked through the window to the outside world when they had to attribute success and looked at the mirror when they had to attribute failure. The most glorious example of this was a letter that Dwight Eisenhower wrote and did not have to release. As America’s top military commander during World War II (about a decade before he was elected president), he had prepared a statement to share with the US public if the landing of Allied forces at Normandy beach in France had failed. In it, he had praised the valour of soldiers and leadership of commanders, and also taken full responsibility for the failure of the mission.

Just as faith and realism were key ingredients for outlasting tough times, a combination of humility and confidence were the hallmarks of successful leadership, as Jim Collins documents in his book. During uncertain times, one has to build buffers. In fact, that is what many businesses did during the pandemic. Globally, diversifying and securing supply chains were considered both urgent and important. However, although many businesses had planned to relocate their facilities away from China or re-shore them, most of those plans remained unrealized well into 2021. What they did for supply-chain resilience, instead, was to build up inventories and create more inventory-carrying capacity, physically and financially.

While the law of unintended consequences is as ubiquitous as Murphy’s Law, uncertain times confer on it a particular advantage. Therefore, one has to be flexible enough—intellectually, above all—to reverse course or abandon a chosen path. Plans with lower-cost or costless exit options are considerably more preferable than irrevocable ones.

Uncertain times offer us an ideal breeding ground for creative thinking. The need for flexibility creates room for inventiveness in approaches. Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, offers a revealing illustration. Paul O’ Neill traced the cause of infant mortality in the US all the way to teacher training in high schools.

One of the most difficult periods in American history was the Great Depression of the 1930s. But much creative progress happened in that period. Even today, our responses to difficult times will shape the durability and depth of our success in easier times.

V. Anantha Nageswaran is visiting distinguished professor of economics at Krea University. These are the author’s personal views.

Her writings on love and abandonment, rage and justice, feminism and healing, struck a chord with us all

The last couple of years will be remembered for the incredible void it created — individual and collective, personal and political, spectacular and ordinary. But nothing prepared us for the untimely death of bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), author, teacher, professor, feminist, and a black woman who made it count in white supremacist America. hooks was remarkable — she insisted on writing her name in lower case, something that I found hard to explain to the editors of my book when they insisted on standardisation. Some women refuse to be standardised, even by multi-million dollar publishing houses, and hooks was one of them.

Her writings resonated across the globe, reaching the farthest corners, in a voice that was distinctly black and overwhelmingly woman. She wrote of love, justice, feminism, teaching, living, politics, and mounted a scathing criticism of white liberal feminism, holding those in power accountable to those they claim to represent, or erase. She hammered the last nail in the coffin of universal sisterhood when she wrote: “Privileged-class white women swiftly declared their “ownership” of the movement, placing working-class white women, poor white women, and all women of color in the position of followers.”

Electrifying hooks

What was it about hooks that gave her such a wide readership? If testimonies on social media are anything to go by, women of all age, location, space, read her, nodding in agreement, tearing up, and resolving to carry on as they found their lives written on those pages. Her writings on the possibilities of love and its abandonment, on rage and justice, on feminism and healing, struck a chord with us all — women facing patriarchal norms and disciplining, and paralysed by an inability to grasp the world. An inability that emerges from a bewilderment. A bewilderment that cannot comprehend a world that devalues traditional femininity and yet hates the deviant female. A world designed to exploit, extract and profit from the lives and labour of women.

For many, hooks was not just a powerful feminist writer, but also a sister and ally. In All About Love, she cajoled us into trying again, into loving again, urging us not to curl in but to open ourselves up to a world that recognises and respects vulnerabilities and differences. One can imagine the electrifying effect hooks has on young adults, particularly in India, growing up in patriarchal families that normalise violence and abuse as love and care, when she writes “…the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.” She also teaches us that absence of justice makes love impossible and the absence of love is antithetical to justice. She urges us to forgive and to love again.

End to inequalities

In the past few decades, neo-liberal feminism has imagined a world strangely at odds with a vision of feminism that envisages a transformation in consciousness. While the former talks of inclusion of certain kinds of women in hegemonic structures, hooks’ brand of feminism calls for an end to caste, race, gender and sexuality-based inequalities that govern the ways we inhabit the world. Her searing critique of reformist feminism foregrounds how working-class racialised feminine labour formed the basis on which bourgeois (as well as white/ upper-caste) women secured a degree of freedom within the existing system for themselves.

For me and many feminist teachers/ practitioners, her book Teaching to Transgress left an indelible mark at the core of our beings. She taught us that critical pedagogy meant perceiving students as not receivers of compartmentalised knowledge but as seekers who “want an education that is healing to the uninformed, unknowing spirit. They do want knowledge that is meaningful.” She urged feminist teachers to make women’s studies classrooms a site of resistance, based on curriculums that do not reflect dominant ideologies but question them.

Her words never rang truer than in the current environment where women’s and gender studies programmes across the globe have taken a conservative turn, particularly in the global north where liberal feminism has allied with militaristic and supremacist ideologies by targeting Asian women, particularly Muslim women, as objects of feminist campaigning, thus strengthening neo-imperialism.

Radical classrooms

For her, the classroom was a space where marginalised students would speak of their experience of theory, practice and politics. And she declared it was these utterances that frightened teachers who continue to perceive students as mere consumers of knowledge. She wrote, “Many professors have conveyed to me their feeling that the classroom should be a “safe” place; that usually translates to mean that the professor lectures to a group of quiet students who respond only when they are called on.”

In India (as much elsewhere), where academic institutions are central to reproducing inequalities rather than dismantling them, education has always been a pathway to producing good workers and citizens. It ensures that the middle-class and/ or upper-caste continues to take advantage of the social and cultural capital granted to them through inter-generational privileges. Her statement that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” has inspired many feminist scholars and teachers (including me) not to quit academics, even when our spirits were broken by the systemic sexism, casteism and homophobia rampant in our universities.

As feminist teachers and practitioners, we remain indebted to hooks, for she has taught us that the goal of transformative pedagogy is to create a democratic classroom where everyone takes ownership of learning, where everyone is an agent. hooks has given us, a whole generation of feminist teachers and educators, a language — to express, to resist and to transform.

The writer teaches anthropology and gender studies at Krea University, Sri City.

The day-long virtual event featured 4 panel discussions, exploring various Careers in Psychology; Sustainability; Arts, Media & Sport; Analytics

Chennai, December 21, 2021: Krea University hosted their flagship event “Career Dialogues”, which brought together over 20 speakers from industry and academia on one platform. The day-long virtual event featured 4 panel discussions, exploring various Careers in Psychology; Sustainability; Arts, Media & Sport; Analytics. The aim of the event is to open the minds of young school students about future careers across multiple industry verticals.

Career Dialogues 2021 kicked off with two spectacular key note addresses, by Mr Anurag Malik, Partner – People Advisory Services at Ernst & Young and Ms Neerja Birla, Founder & Chairperson – Aditya Birla Education Trust. In his address, Mr Malik emphasised “Interwoven Careers is the future…The new-age student who sees himself or herself as a professional in the years to come should be ready for the change, as companies are today taking a 360-degree view on skills.” Addressing the exam time and academic stress that students face, Ms Birla said, “While it is important to do well academically, it’s equally essential to remember that grades don’t define a student.”

Each panel discussion that followed, brought multiple facets of each subject. The conversation on psychology covered Criminal, Sports, Counselling and Clinical aspects of the practice. The discussion on Sustainability hosted practitioners and academics from across Conservation, Sustainability, Economics of Environment and Climate Change. Spinning a different track, the next panel highlighted Arts Managements, Sports Media, and emerging Media technology. In the Analytics panel, experts from Media, Marketing, Financial Risk and Behavioural analytics shared their insights.

20+ speakers representing leading organisations like Tiger Analytics, McKinsey & Co, The World Bank, Centre for Wildlife Studies, Foreseti Consulting, Sony Sports, ArtSpire and many more, shared their insights on future trends in their area of work and shed light on the kind of skills industry will demand from young graduates.

In his opening address, Mr. Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Professional Learning at Krea University, said, “Last year, the World Economic Forum came out with a listing of the top 10 skills that will be needed to align oneself to the new opportunities that will be presented in the post-pandemic world by various discipline and industry segments. These include analytical thinking, active learning, problem finding, problem solving, creativity, originality and initiative, technology use, monitoring and control, resilience, stress tolerance, reasoning ideation and flexibility.”

Career Dialogues, is an important endeavour by Krea University in partnership with industry, towards informing school leavers about their various career options, to encourage them to follow their interest, to allow them to apply look at the world of careers more laterally than as silo tracks.