Striving for Significance
Striving for Significance
What is the most significant thing you have done?
I was asked this a few days ago, and a few candidates ran through my head. But I hesitated to provide an answer. As I do here.
Some of that hesitation parallels what Chou en Lai is supposed to have said about the influence of the French Revolution - “It’s too early to say.”
Early in my career, I invested several years in setting up a snack food business, which was moderately successful, employed several hundred people at its peak, and made lots of money for its owners. For a long time, this seemed a feather in my cap, but today, when I see mountains of garbage around Delhi, shiny plastic packets in remote mountain villages, and read about childhood obesity, I’m extremely circumspect about the value of what I contributed to the world.
Time lends both balance and humility to our endeavours. Few of us will lead a revolution of any nature, and even as more and more of us strive to be ‘influencers’ on Instagram, that most evanescent of media, most of us will disappear with the Moving Finger of time.
‘Apna Time Aayega’, from the film Gully Boy, became a meme for the times, the aching cry of the ego, a desperate desire to haul oneself out of the well of anonymity, to be recognised for something, to leave a mark on the world. If this cry leads to endeavour, I salute it. I always have, whether the endeavour of the social worker or the industrialist, the technician or scientist, the singer or lyricist. But ‘Significant’? I prefer to leave that to history.
“I see a paradox here”, I answered the question.
“Each of us is insignificant, yet each act of ours has significance.”
Significance doesn’t have to be heroic; it doesn’t have to last for centuries, or even decades. When I smile and wave at the beggar at a traffic light, she responds with a grin that curves across her face. It lasts for seconds, but it lights up my day. When I chat with the taxi driver, not for a quick take on the politics of the time, but from an interest in other lives, it moves each of us an inch closer to experiencing humanity. When I thank the cloakroom attendant, I detect a twinge of surprise that he is being acknowledged, which is a sharp rebuke of our willingness to treat other humans as furniture.
We Indians live in a deeply stratified society, where the privileged expect extreme levels of service and subservience. Even so, this vignette from a few years ago never leaves me:
I was having lunch in the private dining room of a corporate office. The business owner’s sons had joined us, and the younger one was sitting across the glass-topped table from me. As we began our meal, a crisply-dressed waiter stepped up behind the son, tore open the foil packaging of a strip of vitamins, and placed a capsule into the young man’s waiting palm. Without missing a beat, he inserted the capsule into his mouth, and chased it with a swallow of water. The waiter faded back into the pantry. Neither word nor look was exchanged, nor was there the slightest acknowledgement that an act of service had been performed.
One could be charitable to the young man, recognise that he, too, is impoverished by the barriers our society erects between humans. Yet, this little skit stands out as one of the most graceless acts I have ever witnessed, a mirror to a thousand churlish acts of which I am guilty.
As the decades roll by, the likelihood that I will do anything ‘Significant’ recedes. But perhaps I can colour each day with a few tiny acts of the utmost significance -acknowledging the existence, the dignity, the pain of others who walk this earth.