The countdown has already begun. Soon the present year will fade away into oblivion. People have started making resolutions for the New Year. Year-end resolutions for the coming year are rather fashionable. From stray thoughts to concrete targets all find a place in the road map for the New Year.
Of course, how many of those actually get translated into results is a different matter altogether. Well, there is nothing apparently wrong with resolutions. Only they should not be too ambitious. But most resolutions fall in that category. Results certainly are none too happy as resolutions fail. Year after year this cycle gets repeated.
Why resolutions fail may not be easy to find out. Maybe the effort was not right. Maybe the commitment was lacking. Maybe the target itself was not right. Anything can go wrong. And if a thing is to go wrong, it will go wrong. That is Murphy’s law. There are many things that go into making a thing right or wrong, and most of them are uncontrollable. What to doIJ
For a change this year do not rush into resolutions. However, this is certainly not the best of the suggestions for the ambitious, energetic and speeding people of the present generation, the Millennials, whose Bluetooth dependence has made them believe that speed is the essence and data is the reality. Wait a moment. Another and probably a more realistic view is that speed is dangerous and data can be cooked. As big data with big speed brings bigger confusion, life gets embroiled like a swimmer caught in seaweed. The more he tries to wriggle out, the more he gets entangled.
Someone once said — the more things change, the more they remain the same. This idea needs to be modified. Things do not remain the same as they change. They get worse. That is what has happened. Too many ambitions. Too many targets. Too many aspirations. All backed by big data. The whole mindset has become kinked. let us rethink speed. let us rethink data, which is often called information, considered as knowledge and fired as the Baconion canon -knowledge is power.
But which knowledge is powerIJ It is not knowledge per se that is power. Relevant knowledge is power. Irrelevant knowledge is as dangerous as little knowledge. Both are dangerous. While spurious information is being disseminated as knowledge, confusion gets confounded. Take the case of religion. Knowledge should have made it eclectic. But today religion has become more dogmatic. This is happening in all spheres. Illogic is doing rounds as logic as we all become victims of ‘the winner takes all syndrome’. This is an impossibility if everyone thinks in the same fashion.
However, mindsets of more and more people are getting afflicted with this syndrome. Time to introspect. let us recapitulate the dialogue between Alice and the Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Alice tells the Queen that one has to run at the top of his speed to excel in a competitive race. The Queen disagrees and says: “Here it takes all the running you can do to retain your position. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run twice as fast as that.” This is fallacious. Alice may or may not be there in that wonderland but there certainly is a lot of malice in the blunderland that the world has become.
The writer teaches management at Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad (Jharkhand). He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com