It is extraordinary that the most hateful person I ever encountered was so much like me. His most extraordinary feature was that he was he was unremittingly ordinary.
 
I joined a European company and my European bosses took a fancy to me and assigned me to an important position in the headquarters. Much to the annoyance of the director of the division who wanted to place his nephew in that slot. Strangely, he changed his view of me in six months and started trusting me with more responsibilities. He entrusted me with all major reports. Then he started sending me all drafts, even by executives senior to me, to correct and to improve.
 
This could not long remain a secret and GR, a senior manager, accosted me to ask if I was editing his letters and reports. I said discreetly that, I did some editing work for the director, but was not free to discuss what I edited. Five years later, when GR became the seniormost executive of the department and my boss, I rather liked his analytical bent. He liked to see a clear analysis of the facts before he chose to make a decision and he insisted that subordinates provide him that.
 
We got on famously, for it was my preferred way of proceeding in a department where most assessed a situation cursorily and took an instinctive decision. Among my colleagues, when I stressed that business should be businesslike, I was a voice crying in the wilderness. GR turned to me whenever he had a doubt, and I invariably began by saying, “Let us look at the facts again.”
 
This was before the days of the computer. Analysis called for substantial legwork. You had to array all the facts in more than one way before you could make valid inferences. When I did it, GR liked it and told me so. I felt vindicated.
 
I was young and naïve, and it took me time to learn that skill is no substitute for humanity. Especially when one relies on just one special skill, neglecting all others. While I loved ferreting out all the relevant data, analyzing them and arriving at a reasoned end, I realized it had to be a part of larger considerations. You have to remember the past, what a supplier may have done for you over years. You have to think of the uncertain future, when the company may need partners’ help. Most of all you have to think of relationships, without which no business can survive.

​GP was single-minded and cared little for other considerations. Once the data showed something, he took it as a divine edict and acted on it without applying the brake of further thought or human consideration. I am sure he used it to gain his superiors’ approval and went ahead, feeling justified, no matter what the human cost.
 
Gradually, I began to see the havoc he was wreaking with my help. A small, nascent company we had nurtured with our support, he withdrew all business at a moment’s notice and reduced the owner and his workers to sudden penury. A vendor who had supplied us loyally and consistently through difficult times, he cut off for a minor price advantage and destroyed a long-term relationship. A relationship had to be mutually gainful, he often said like a mantra, forgetting the simple truth that all relationships, even the closest, have their ups and downs.
 
GP had a painful comeuppance when he applied the same approach in a dispute with a government agency. Contrary to my suggestion, he adopted a hard-nosed strategy in disputing an excise duty and found himself in a much the worse position for his effort. The penalty was enhanced instead of reduced.
 
Our link continued, but we started to disagree more and more. GP believed himself businesslike and purpose-driven; I increasingly saw him as myopic and drearily ordinary. I realized how short-sighted was his point of view, how impervious to the human aspects without which no endeavor can survive. It all ended when I decided to leave the company, where I had worked for many years, and went to work for another organization.
 
There was no joy when I learned that the company, which had had a history of remarkable success, had gone belly-up in a few quick years. Many colleagues and several friends lost their jobs. Thousands of workers found their livelihood gone, their families lost their tenuous grip on security.
 
What I could recall were the characteristic but portentous words I heard when I met GP at a party a year after I had left our common employer, “I go where the facts go. That is what business is about. Nothing more.” A more ruinous philosophy of business – no less ruinous because one hears it commonly in an age of data-centered thinking – I will never hear.

In a perceptive essay on our preference for the easy way, Aldous Huxley warned of our search for comfort smothering us, much the way Othello smothered Desdemona. We want everything to be simple, quickly maneuvered, learned in no time. 

​It is, of course, foolish to make things more complicated than they need to be. Professional designers tell us how they strive for simplicity of design: it helps both the manufacturer to produce a simple product and the marketer to explain a simple product to customers. To take a quite different example, a teacher who can explain a complex theorem or an abstruse TS Eliot poem to students simply is surely an asset.
 
But not everything is as simple as a nursery rhyme. The paradox is that it takes a lot of time and effort to gain the mastery that lets one achieve some simplicity. The teacher who aspires to explain TS Eliot simply has to master the poetry first. The designer who wants to create a simple design must have the complex aspects of design under her belt. It is not easy. It is seldom comfortable. The rigor of the discipline calls for effort. Probably long and sustained effort. A juggler can juggle three balls in the air and make it look easy, but to make it look easy he must practice long and hard.
 
That is exactly what professionalism is. But ours seems to be an age of amateurism. Many appear to think slogging is for the slave, keeping your nose on the wheel is for the naïve. Sustained sweat to achieve passing mark, let alone any kind of excellence, is beginning to look scarce.
 
Social media is currently under a cloud, for it has become clear how extensively it can be misused. Several countries are using a veritable army of trolls to abuse the media and manipulate the minds of its users. Facebook has been caught selling its huge data bank to Cambridge Analytica, which could analyze people’s biases and preferences and sway their political choices by a steady feed of false and misleading news. That danger is real and huge enough, but my present concern is the other danger it reveals.
 
Social media was trumpeted as the great equalizer. It ostensibly allowed, in fact empowered, everybody to express his or her opinion. No gatekeeper to trammel your views, no editor to water down your words. You see things just as your heart dictates and you say things just as you see them. We supposed it was a vast improvement. If you write a letter to your local newspaper, the probability of it getting published is little better than that of winning a lottery. In Facebook or Twitter, you see your words in print minutes after you have composed them. No hassle, no wait.
 
Some wiseacre said that a picture was worth a thousand words. And that was long before color photos became dazzling; digital cameras made them cheap and foolproof; you could photoshop your grandmother to look like Margot Robbie. So, though your boyfriend may look like Count Dracula and your child bear a strong resemblance to Caliban, you can splash a thousand pictures of them on Instagram and Pinterest.
 
When I look at the photographs on social media, the first thing that strikes me is their ghastly quality. With modern cameras, you don’t have to know about aperture, shutter speed or focus; you just have to press a button. The one thing left to do is composition, of which few seem to have any notion. I have occasionally asked those who post a dozen photos at a stroke on Facebook, if they have ever heard of exposure value or depth of field, indispensable for most portraiture and nature photography, and have drawn blank stares. These avid and prolific photographers are clearly averse to anything beyond finger-on-button photography.
 
When I read a fascinating article in a newspaper or magazine online, I want to know if others are also reacting actively to its ideas and turn to the comments. Once again, the first thing that strikes me is the pathetic quality of the vast majority of responses. Whether the comments are positive or negative, they are couched in a language that can reduce a grammarian to tears. Misused words, erratic punctuation, wild spelling, scant organization. A veritable nightmare of prose, even though every word-processor today comes with spelling, grammar and style checker, besides a dictionary and a thesaurus – all instantly available with a click of the mouse.
 
When you go beyond the language, the poverty of ideas is breathtaking. One literally must scour scores of comments before one encounters a significant thought or thoughtful analysis. It is not simply an issue of brainwashed partisanship. It seems rather to be an issue of brain-shelved mental indolence. The person who does not want to learn and do any more than press a button on a camera or smart phone is also the person who refuses to do any more than throw out a bunch of words, based on his or her feelings, without a concern for cogency or coherence.
 
Perhaps that person has let the yen for comfort and ease smother any zeal for quality, the way beautiful Desdemona was smothered by an unthinking Othello.

Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy is fairly well-known among the movie cognoscenti in the US. I had a curiosity about my American friends’ reaction to a scene in the first film.
 
In that scene, when Harihar sits down for dinner, his wife Sarbojaya says she has something special for him. After the modest meal, she pours him a glass of milk. He drinks the milk to the last drop. Then he pours water in the glass and drinks it too.
 
I asked two simple questions of my friends. Why does Sarbojaya say that she has something special? Why does Harihar, after drinking the milk, pour water in his glass and drink it? Not a single American friend, though several are from Indian-origin families, was able to answer.
 
The answers are simple. The family, though ostensibly middle-class, is so poor that milk is like a delectable dessert. Of that precious commodity, not even a drop is to be lost; hence water is poured into the glass so that the last vestiges can be absorbed.
 
Even perceptive, cultivated westerners cannot extend their imagination sufficiently to conceive of a couple talking of something so pedestrian as milk as a treat. Nor can they conceive of a person rinsing a glass with water and drinking it, not to waste the tiniest drop of milk. Even Asian Americans, whose parents are recent immigrants from India, find the scene a conundrum, for relative affluence has wiped clean any family memory of scarcity. Perhaps many young urban Indians today will also find the scene baffling.

​It is a disturbing thought, for I am, like many others, naively confident of my breadth of vision and impartiality of judgment. Of course, I have nothing of the kind. I have been fortunate enough to live and work in a number of different countries, eat various kinds of food and gain a variety of friends. That has perhaps helped to rid me of some blatant prejudices, such as that of some white Americans that the US belongs only to them as of some Hindu enthusiasts that India belongs exclusively to them. No such right is divinely or historically ordained.
 
My experiences, particularly with kind and generous friends, have also emended if not erased some preferences. I live in a highly cosmopolitan place where I can eat any kind of food, but I don’t eat what I used to eat as a child or adolescent. My sensibility has guided me to eat what is good for me, but my senses have changed too and alien food now appeals both to my eyes and my palate. Yet I must recognize that years of conditioning have left a mark on my choices. I may like the bright, basic colors of Alexander Calder’s art, but in buying a shirt I choose pastel colors. I rarely eat rice, but when I eat it my heart sings. I love to hear Dvorak, and yet my whole body thrills to the strains of Vilayat.
 
These predilections are legitimate, but they are also a clue to the huge hinterland that lies behind our conscious thoughts and feelings. Our private world of experiences, past joys and pains, loves and hates, substantially and constantly influence our current choices, our decisions about what is good or bad, right or wrong. If we keep that in mind, we will be ready to be humble in our judgments. We will know that there are subtle, subterranean forces working within us, without our knowing, and we will be cautious.
 
It is not simply our decisions, but our imagination too is bounded by the range of our experiences. We simply cannot imagine certain things, such as the utter brutality of war or the bottomless despair of penury, if we have not gone through it. The Gates Foundation has done impressive work in fighting poverty, but I doubt Bill Gates can come within miles of understanding the desperation of Indian farmers who take their own lives. Or why Harihar pours water in an emptied glass of milk.
 
Recently I saw a remarkable film that reminded me again of Ray’s artistry. South American director Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, a nostalgic, sluggish black-and-white movie about a maidservant in the colonial barrio of Mexico City. Most of my western acquaintances found its theme and slow pace exasperating; those who saw it until the end thought it lackluster. It is to the great credit of a country that has chosen a boorish charlatan as its leader that it crowned Cuarón as the best director and cinematographer at the Academy Awards this year. I was greatly moved by the film’s charm and insight, but I humbly wondered how much I probably missed, despite my comfort with Spanish and my familiarity with Mexico City, of its myriad, mysterious subtleties.