Once I boarded a train to Ahmedabad. Luckily
I got a lower berth (which rarely happens in my case). One gentleman, in 50s,
was sitting opposite to me. He too was lucky to get a lower berth. Soon an
elderly couple accompanied by a teenager boarded the coach. They were allotted
middle and upper berths. The teenager ‘asked’ us to take middle/upper berths.
It wasn’t a request. It sounded as if he took it granted that that we will not
mind it.
It was not intentional, but there was absence
of words like ‘please’. Possibly the gen-Y does not like the ‘redundant’
formality. For me, it was ok to exchange the berth.
The gentleman, however, was offended. He shot
back at the teenager, ‘what do you mean take that berth? You can’t order me.’ Clearly,
his ego was hurt.
The teenager and the elderly couple
preferred to avoid any further argument.
I offered them my lower berth in exchange
of upper berth (I looked at the positive side of upper berth; I could sleep
without getting disturbed till late in the morning).
All of us settled down.
Now, was I trying to be “goody-goody”
compared to the gentleman opposite to me? Any third person might assume that I did not exhibit
the ego like the gentleman. This proved wrong within a few minutes.
After few minutes the train started moving.
Even the ruffled feathers of the gentleman got settled. But, I sensed something
was troubling me. I even started getting agitated as time went by. I took a
deep breath and tried to identify the cause.
I realized that my ‘ego’ was also getting
hurt. The reason was simple. Although I had offered my berth to the elderly
couple they did not extend the customary ritual of saying ‘thanks’. That
pinched my ego. My ego was of different type. It started to show its presence
slowly and grew exponentially. The important difference was it slipped through
my ‘conscious awareness’ and started troubling me.
The ego displayed by the gentleman was
‘gross’ ego and the one within me was a ‘subtle’ ego.
The subtle ego is easy to detect when we closely
observe others. Rather, it is easy to point it out in others, but difficult to
detect within ourselves.
We can overcome gross ego with ease. The subtle ego, however, requires lot of
efforts to overcome. Reason being, it takes roots in our subconscious mind. The
least we can do is to become aware of it; that helps. This ego is one of the
root causes of our mental agony, spoiled relations, and unhappy life.
This ego adds a kind of ‘flavor’ to our
‘nature/personality’. Our relations with near-dear ones, with relatives get
influenced by the (subtle) ego and the perceptions we keep forming about them.
The (subtle) ego slowly poisons our emotions and subsequently results in storing
the ‘incorrect’ version of our ‘experiences’ in our memory. So most of the time
it helps when we just keep our emotions under surveillance (against the
influence from the subtle ego).
At the work place too, the subtle ego is
one of the main causes of a (potential) failure of the project. It affects ‘team
effort’ at the base level. At the manager level the consequences are high obviously
due to the greater decision making powers and the responsibilities.
Almost all the organizations have in-house soft-skill
training programs but they don’t cover such aspects. May be it is an ‘accepted’
factor at work place or it is assumed that person restricts his ‘nature/personality’
to his personal life at home. In other words, it is assumed that person will wear
a ‘mask’ of different ‘personality/nature’ at work place. But, I am sure, the
mask gets unveiled (slipping through conscious attempt) when stress levels are
high. The damage done to the professional relations / performance due to this ‘ego’
is long lasting than in personal life, personal relations.
It is important that our ‘nature’ should
get ‘rightly flavored’ in childhood. Our parents, Grand-parents mould us to a
great extent. Unfortunately we are missing the story-telling grandmother in
this era (even my generation missed it to some extent). The grandma(s) used to
tell interesting stories with the moral message embedded in it! Kids were
introduced to such ‘unaccepted’ flavors of our behavior like ‘selfish’, ‘ego’,
‘anger’… etc.
The void created by story telling grandma
need to be filled by something else. The story books may help to some extent if
we cultivate habit of reading in our children or better way is, we reading stories
to them (keeping the TV sets off !! ).
But do we have time and enthusiasm? Do we
want kinder garden school to address it? Are they capable?
-ramakant kapatral
