I AM FALLIBLE
I will be honest. I was struggling to write about something. This day presented me with an occasion. The missing SMS case, which I wrote around seven years back, is still my most read and discussed article in my circles.
Precisely seven years back, I left my cushy job to dabble in doing something on my own, and I think it is a good time to rant.
These dates are, in a sense, meaningless for anyone except me, but for someone whose favourite pastime seems to be self-reflection, I have to fall into this trap. Socrates was the one who said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living, but he left it open about people like me who only examine! There should be some corollary to that saying,’ People who only examine their life and do nothing …’, something on those lines!
Well, here we go.
I have been humbled time and again in the past seven years. All ego, pride and accumulated arrogance were generally normalised and slowly diffused. Life showed me what my essential nature is. My daughter delivered the coup de grace. I asked her what the things she cherished in me most were. She possibly took a nano-second and answered — “Theeni, Thukkam” (Food, Sleep) !!. She got to the core of all my desires fast! I had countless other humbling experiences, be it a VC tearing me apart, wondering whom to call for fulfilling this month’s payout to folks at work and …
That apart, the respect for the people I worked with and reported to in the past grew plentiful as I began to understand one simple truth in life. Respect the person with whom the buck stops. It was easier for me to sermonise in a comfortable corporate setting about how everyone should be doing. Still, when the tides turned, life said, ‘OK, Boss. Now Deal with it; I was clueless.
In short, reading dozens of entrepreneurship books does not prepare you for what is in store!! Respect what people do at corporates and the beauty of a predictable SMS, but if you do decide to go after your heart says,then - Brace for Impact.
After two and half years of this journey, I had hit rock bottom, and I decided I did not have much time left before I needed to decide to end my misadventure. I asked myself what I was capable of. Am I fit for anything? I gave myself 90 days. If I cannot get something within 90 days, I call my ex-bosses. I started applying to all freelancing sites for projects, and I was in overdrive mode. Finally, after 45 days, something started in a minor fashion. Once that happened, I got my confidence back. I knew I had answered one fundamental question that had been nagging me. ‘Am I capable of doing anything out of my acquired competence’, cutting away everything else? In hindsight, it is a stupid question, but it was necessary then.
The only thing that helped me navigate this phase was the excellent set of people with that I have been associated for decades. Some were generous with their time; some were generous with their purse, some people just called me on the pretext of a meeting so that they could give me lunch, and few had a sixth sense of knowing that I was in trouble and helped me steer through that trouble. You know that you have done something right in life if none of your calls went unanswered.
I cannot thank them enough for getting me out of trouble every time and continue to do that with zero expectations!
I wonder what the impact of these seven years on my family is, and I think everyone accommodated or adjusted to my misgivings. My mother believes in a more traditional way of life and sealed it with the question. ‘Zunder — Whatever you are doing, Are you net-neutral, net-positive or net-negative to cash?’. My wife does not even ask me for a handkerchief, and the kids always have their first level of redirection: their mother. God bless them. I hope I will answer my mother’s question eventually. I also pray that they will continue to bear with my misgivings.
To summarise, I feel that sometime after college, I got into a race for two-plus decades, and somehow, serendipity helped me pause the race and take stock. I have to place on record that the results of the stock-taking are not great when measured fiscally. Take out the fiscal part; I can only say I have done decently. I do notice that the past seven years told me something about myself that the first forty-three years of my life did not. If you ask me if the price I paid was worth it, the honest answer is I do not know, but I think it was necessary. It is a journey worth undertaking; if I had not done that, I would have stayed in my own echo chamber.
Language allows me to encapsulate all my incompetencies in one word. ‘Fallible’.
The most important lesson was ‘I am fallible’ in everything, and I can live with that.
Enjoy Maadi. Have Fun.
Zunder
31/07/2022
