Decoding the Cynical Method in Mamata’s Political Madness

 

Ernst Röhm, the boss of Brown Shirts, whose rough shoulders carried Adolf Hitler into the German Chancellery, was keen to induct them into the Wehrmacht that was set to replace Reichswehr. However, the Fuehrer, whose vision was to develop a world-beating armed force, saw no role for Röhm’s riff-raff in its professional setup. But as the rebuffed deputy could unleash his Storm Troopers on his regime itself, the real politic constrained the Nazi numero uno to usher in the Night of the Long Knives but for which, the rights and wrongs apart, the Third Reich wouldn’t have had such a formidable army with the Panzers at its helm.    

That was in the early thirties of the last century and now in the nascent twenties of the current one, India’s West Bengal faced a Röhm moment as Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool supremo, led her party to a resounding victory in the assembly polls, however, fouled by her personal loss at the hustings. Thus, while Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, and Amit Shah, the Home Minister, who together led a no-holds-barred poll campaign to uproot the unruly Trinamool, have been licking their political wounds and counting their electoral losses, one would have expected Mamata Didi, who had the last laugh by remaining in the saddle to prove the Bengal electorate right that is courtesy the country’s constitution, which enabled her to take another shot in a by-election, to be conciliatory to her opponents. But then, she has to contend with her formidable support base of the aggressive Muslim constituency that she cultivated for electoral aggregation that came to perceive the Trinamool victory as a license to pursue their extremist Islamist agendas, and so began to run amuck amongst the Hindus, who sought to spoil their party by voting for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). That was the Röhm moment for Mamata, which put her in a catch- 22 situation of her own making.

Well, she could only rein in the rampaging Muslim miscreants, euphemistically called Trinamool goons by the compromised Islamapologic media, at the cost of imperiling her solid vote-bank of roughly one third of the State’s electorate. Besides, with her extreme-Muslim-appeasement governance model, she had already burnt most of her electoral bridges with the majority of the Bengali Hindus, save the supercilious Bhadralok, who seem to take pride in swimming away from the pan-Indian political mainstream. This aspect of the Bengal’s political reality was underscored by her electoral loss at Nandigram, albeit by a narrow margin, to Suvendu Adhikari, her confidante turned contestant, who meaningfully dubbed her as Begum in his election rallies.  

Thus, with her political survival inexorably linked to the formidable Muslim constituency, unceasingly buttressed by the successive pseudo-secular administrations of varied hues and cries that turned a blind eye to the hordes of Muslim intruders from the neighboring Bangladesh, she was caught in a demographic quagmire. That in her Muslim-engineered electoral triumph, the minimal contribution of the overwhelming, though fragmented, Hindu majority is a cause for her future political worries cannot be over stated. That being the case, getting tough with the Muslim miscreants out at the Hindu throats could tantamount to her denting the minority vote-bank, which would be nothing short of a political suicide in the democratic arena.  Even otherwise, there is a strange compatibility between Mamata's roguish behaviour and Muslims' aggressive mentality that make them made for each other, which fact she seems to have recognized only after coming to power in 2011 by storming into the Left citadel over the industrial ruins of Singur. Why, in 2006, she made a ruckus in the Lok Sabha over the Speaker's rejection of her adjournment motion on illegal infiltration of Bangladeshis into West Bengal!

Though she retained power in 2016, despite her lackadaisical governance, the spectacular performance of the BJP in the 2019 parliamentary polls made her rush to the poorer women with all sorts of sops to shore up her scam-ridden Trinamool in the ensuing 2021 assembly polls. Nevertheless, BJP's high pitch campaign in them made her nervous to the core, so much so that she opted to migrate from her shaky Bhowanipore constituency to the safe Muslim-profuse Nandigram, in part driven by her egotistic urge to crush Suvendu Adhikari to his political death, well, to come a cropper. However, during the month-long election regimen, what with the vexed Hindu wind seemingly turning against her and her party men, she turned to the Muslim voters with folded hands not to split their votes in favour of the other secular pretenders and that earned her a reprimand from India’s Election Commission.

However, if only she had a grasp of the Islamic psyche, there was no need for her to go to such desperate communal lengths as Muslims anyway would strive to ensure BJP's defeat, not because its rule materially hurts them as in deed their kin in Modi’s Gujarat became a prosperous lot. What is not adequately appreciated is that the Muslims, who perceive themselves as the erstwhile rulers of Hindustan, feel emotionally slighted to be ruled by it that unabashedly espouses the Hindu causes.  It was thus, aided by the Muslim hatred towards her rival and her sops for the poor, her Trinamool once again steamrolled into the corridors of Nabanna, the seat of the State power.    

Though the agenda-driven media, so as not to give any leg up to the hated Narendra Modi, downplayed her Nandigram debacle, she was so rankled by it as to make William Congreve's words ring true - heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turn'd, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn's. Thanks to the electronic voting machines, as it was apparent that her humiliation was owing to the hostility of the Hindu voters, anyway the post-poll targets of her Islamist supporters, how does the question of their rescue arise? Her personal pique apart, there is real politik at play as well for what if the momentum of the adverse consolidation of Hindu voters that began in seventy-seven constituencies in 2021 picks up in the rest of them in the future; more in Bhowanipore from where she is all set to contest to retain her chief ministerial chair, and in 2024 parliamentary polls in which she hopes to pitch herself as the opposition’s prime ministerial candidate. So, as offense is the best form of time-tested defense, go after the Hindus, who dared to vote for the BJP, to make an example of them so that none ever dares to repeat the mistake in their living memory, seems to be the cynical method in Mamata’s political madness.  

Thus, in such a setting, as the election commission dutifully conducts future elections in West Bengal, the vulnerable Hindu voters, who are averse to Trinamool, would keep away from the polling booths thereby facilitating Mamata and / or her successor to lord over it till such a time when the Muslim minority becomes its electoral majority to be able to eventually ensconce its members in the seats of power. Why doubt that as the short-sighted Mamata is sure to open the long Bangladeshi borders to further augment her vote-bank to counter the Hindu apathy towards her, and hasn’t one of her Islamist worthies recently proclaim that once Muslims reach the thirty percent threshold in India there would be four more Pakistans? That is apart from the avowed goal of every sub-continental Musalman to turn Hindustan into Ghazwa-e-Hind. 

So, even as the colonial British dismembered India, its regional satraps such as Mamata, if not reined in, in time, could cause its further fragmentation with impunity. No denying that the Modi-sarkar can deservedly pat itself for having reined in the separatist forces in the Kashmir valley but what about the out-of-control West Bengal and the Christian surge in Andhra Pradesh, estimated to have already covered over a quarter of its population, making it a fertile ground for the Mamata model of politicking, if need be.  The tragedy of India hitherto is that all political dispensations across the board, barring the honorable exception of the BJP, have been aiming for a share in the minority vote-bank and thus were not averse to the inimical demographic alterations, be it the form of Bangladeshi Muslim infiltration into West Bengal and Assam or the local Christian conversion sprees in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu etc. Well, it may be tempting to fault the late YS Rajasekhar Reddy and his son YS Jaganmohan Reddy, chief ministers both, for systematically Christianizing the Hindu hinterland in Andhra Pradesh but Chandra Babu Naidu, who was in a political position to checkmate their evangelical moves is to be equally blamed for having turned a blind eye, eying some electoral crumbs from the High Christian table, and sadly, BJP that could have stalled the religious disorder has had no political ground there whatsoever. 

 What of now to avert further demographic distortion of Bharat that is India? To start with, BJP must begin a public awareness drive within and without West Bengal about the perils posed by the Trinamool politics to the unity and integrity of the country. It also needs to build public opinion to force the Indian media to put an end to the pseudo-secular political correctness that somehow came to rule the nation’s public discourse. It should strive to develop an intellectual climate conducive to reviewing the fact-checked demographic changes and the socio-political implications thereof. Besides, Modi-sarkar should devise methods to bring India’s substantial religious minorities into the national emotional fold resulting in the diffusion of their separatist identities, which, in turn, would dent their religious zeal to bring others onto their sectarian paths.

However, in the short-run, the onus is on the Me Lords of the Supreme Court, who have come to fancy themselves as the sole-protectors of the Indian democratic order, to nip Mamata’s political disorder by banishing her from Bengal’s electoral arena to make an example of her to dissuade others from embarking upon the dangerous course set by her, and the Indian Constitution does grant them that extraordinary power.

 

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Gandhi to Modi - India’s Nationalistic Quest

In his Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, quoted Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s idea of nationalism in his own words thus:

”I call myself a nationalist but my nationalism is as wide as the universe; it embraces all nations. My nationalism includes the prosperity of all nations. I want a strong India able to transfuse its strength to other nations …. Let us look for something new; let us try the power of love and God which are the truth.”

Elsewhere, Gandhi had proclaimed that ‘loyalty to the country is always subordinate to loyalty to God’ and re-emphasized that his nationalism was ‘not exclusive’ but is of ‘intense internationalism’.

His averment that ‘nationalism is as wide as the universe’, indeed, is the upanishadic concept of vasudhaiva kutumbakam but as it does not sync with the absolutist precepts of the Semitic faiths, obviously it is of no avail to further the cause of Indian nationalism. Be that as it may, it enabled Gandhi to ascend the throne on international moral high ground that is while leaving the Indian nationalism bereft of, so to say, any space.

While his proposition, ‘my nationalism includes the prosperity of all nations’, ignored the wisdom of charity beginning at home, his reliance on ‘the power of love and God which are the truth’ failed to take into account the nature of the Abrahamaic Godhead in that while Jehovah in His Ten Commandments had ordained his believers thus:

“1. You may worship no other god than me.

      2. You shall not make yourselves any idols: no images of animals, birds, or fish.

      You must never bow or worship it in any way; for I, the Lord your God, am very

       possessive. I will not share your affection with any other God!”

And it is another matter that the self-same God, in his Quranic avatar as Allah, had turned His new favourites against not only his chosen people but also the followers of his own son, not to speak of others, thus:

“The Jews and Christians say: We are sons of Allah and His loved ones. Say: Why then doth he chastise you for your sins? Nay, ye are but mortals of His creating. He forgiveth whom He will, and chastiseth whom He will. Allah’s is the Sovereignty of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them, and unto Him is the journeying.”

“All they who disbelieve and deny our revelations, such are rightful owners of hell.”

That being the case, wonder on the ‘power of which love and which God’ was Gandhi banking upon to help his nationalism that includes the prosperity of all nations. While one can attribute this loftiness of thought, not grounded in the reality of the God, to Gandhi’s nobility of purpose, what one were to make out of his advocacy that ‘loyalty to the country is always subordinate to loyalty to God’!

It cannot be the case that Gandhi was unaware of the fact that the Muslim loyalty to Allah and the Christian affinity to Jesus, both alien to the ancient Indian ethos, is not the same thing as the Hindu loyalty to the native Rama, Krishna et al. Surely, Gandhi would have known too that the exclusivist Muslim umma and Christian fraternity alike subscribe to ‘intense internationalism’ of their creed through religious conversions in India and elsewhere, but yet, he didn’t care, at any rate seemingly so. And true to his conviction, he lent his nationalistic weight to the Khilafat movement, aka the Indian Muslim movement, post-World War I, to pressure Britain to preserve the authority of the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam, by which he had sowed the seeds, unwittingly though, of a separate homeland for the Muslims on the Indian soil.

Nevertheless, as he happened to be the philosopher-guide of Indian struggle for independence from the British colonial rule, his confusing presumptions shaped the nebulous nationalism that came to define independent India’s political axiom. While how all this turned out to be an enduring hurt to Indian national integration needs no retelling, we may examine how his wooly views came to prevail to India’s hurt.

True, India was first invaded by Muslims but yet resisted all through and then was colonized by the British but subdued only after the fall of Rani of Jhansi in 1858. So to say, this defeat in its first war of independence was more moral than mortal for India seemed to have lost its fighting spirit once and for all thereafter. Gandhi, having been born eleven years after the morale-ruining defeat, was but a product of that India’s hapless era, and understandably his call for satyagraha jelled with the nation’s psyche then. What is more, once he could galvanize the nation behind him, as his words became Vedas, so much so that his idiocies became the truths belying the nationalist concerns of Savarkar, Ambedkar and such. Amused by his idea of non-violent struggle that is alien to the spirit of their crusades, much of the West, going by the human nature, egged him to undertake that which they themselves would not do at any rate. 

But as Gandhi’s non-violent movement against British went haywire in Noakhali on the Muslim aggressive front and as he remained clueless to the Islamic ways, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was on course to gain a homeland for Indian Muslims in Pakistan. It was another matter that way back in 1937; Savarkar had stated that Congress is betraying the nation by indulging in Muslim appeasement at the cost of Hindu rights and it is better to stand in the last row of patriots than in the first row of betrayers. However, Gandhi’s brainwash of India’s Hindu majority towards his Muslim-leaning ways (he was even crazy enough to advise Hindus to smilingly die if Muslims were to kill them) can be gauged from the fact that they accepted the loss of their ancestral land to the later-day converts without a demur and bore the brunt of the post-partition riots to a fault.

Post-independence, sensing the minority Muslim votes as ready pickings for his congress party at the polling booths, Nehru had contrived to keep the Gandhian non-nationalist legacy alive as a ploy to keep the nationalist forces at bay. That Godse, a Hindu nationalist, felled Gandhi only came in handy for Nehru to malign nationalism per se to thwart the unification of the caste-ridden Hindu polity that’s the avowed aim of Indian nationalism. While Nehru and his progeny thrived politically to lord over India for better part of its independent existence, the national emotional vacuum came to be slowly but steadily came to be filled by communalism, regionalism, casteism, nepotism, favouritism and above all corruption to India’s hurt. However, things came to a nadir during the ten year proxy rule of the Italian born Sonia, when graft became the byword of political power.

When India was thinking enough was enough, came an upright Narendra Modi onto the national political stage to the cheers of the desperate electorate. And as India’s premier he too lost no time to ascend the ramparts of the Red Fort, wearing a Maharaja turban, signaling the return of the native. What with his invocation of the nation’s ancient culture at every turn and showcasing its civilizational glitter on the world stage, India began to experience a sense of itself for the first time in its living memory. Also, his robust military response to Pakistan’s nefarious terror design in the form of a surgical strike on the ground and an air attack on Balakot had bestowed upon the nation a martial sense of achievement. 

Thus, besides cleaning the corrupt public stables, as he gave it nationalism to boot, India, all again, rooted for him to march ahead on the nationalistic path. And promptly he did abrogate the vexatious Art 370 ‘n 35A of the Indian constitution to politically integrate the intransigent State of Jammu & Kashmir and that gave a fillip to the Indian nationalist sentiment as never before. Finally, as of now, he owned up Veer Savarkar and proclaimed that he was the fountainhead of Indian nationalism thereby fast tracking Indian nationalism. Surely, in India’s post-independence history, Narendra Damodardas Modi’s name would be etched in golden letters as the spearhead of Indian nationalism, and certainly he would have earned that for himself. 

  

The Electoral Psychology in the Indian Democracy

In 2014, it was on the plank of ‘high hope’ that Narendra Modi, with self-belief, sense of purpose and Herculean effort, had navigated his party to power through the stagnant Indian electoral waters. This extraordinary achievement, so to say, was unbelievable in the Indian electoral context that’s traditionally devoid of any semblance of nationalistic fervor for the callous politicians having nursed the majority community on divisive caste lines and groomed the minorities on unifying religious grounds for narrow electoral gains, any sense of nationalism failed to take roots in India’s pre-partitioned social soil. What’s worse the vote-bank politics of post-independent India fomented an Islamist mind-set amongst the formidable Muslim minority that turned it against Modi’s nationalist party for long. However, with his personal charisma and forceful oratory, he could alter the electoral psychology of the Hindu majority to get on to the Delhi gaddi to usher in systemic changes not only to address India’s social plight but also to uplift the Hindu self-worth, at a low for over thousand years.  

When Modi would seek reelection, circa 2019, what could be the electoral psychology of the Indian democracy then?

No denying, a majority of the Hindus gloat over the fact that, at long last, their ‘ruler’ does not shy away from exhibiting his Hindu religious inclinations in public that is besides wearing his patriotic nationalism on his sleeves. But it’s no guarantor that his re-election plank would sail through the polling booths as the Hindu nationalistic currents, besides being weak, are notoriously transient for they are afflicted by undercurrents of caste affiliations. It takes a while for Modi to forge the disparate castes in a unitary Hindu mould but that’s in the realms of the future, but what about the year after?

Well, he has to contend with the religious apathy of the majority of the Muslim and the Christian voters nurse towards him for the very reason that made him endearing to the majority of the Hindus. That an ‘overtly’ Hindu should lord over the land, lorded by their forefathers, fails to jell with their sense of history, and to avert repetition, they could be queuing up at the polling booths to see Modi’s back. And if you add up the closet Christians too to the overbearing Musalmans, maybe sans some of their womenfolk, thanks to his triple talaq stance, at some quarter of the electorate, they would be in no mean numbers.

Augmenting the minorities’ ant-Modi votes would be the loose, but large, regional forces, the die-hard, though shrunk, Congress loyalists, the ‘secular’ ant-sangh parivar gang and the congenital Modi-maniacs, roughly accounting for another quarter of the electorate. But the saving grace for Modi would be there are too many in the electoral arena to share the spoils of his inimical half of India’s voters that is notwithstanding the tactical voting by the minorities to keep him out.   

However, those taking up cudgels on Modi’s behalf in his electoral battle would include the nation’s teeming youth, enthused like never before by any leader, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty haters and the rare breed of Hindu nationalists, all in all, adding up to, maybe, half of all Hindu voters. And that’s just one fourth of India’s total voters!    
   

It is thus, the electoral psychology of the other half of the Hindu voters that will decide Modi’s political fate in 2019 and determine India’s future course as a nation state thereafter. No denying, with his empathy for the poor and the foresight to improve their lot, he made friends and influenced people from these hapless folds. Enjoying the ease of living, for the first time that is, courtesy the gas cylinders and other goodies, the grateful lot backed him at the hustings in state after state, but as human gratitude is a fickle phenomenon, come 2019, the good will may as well evaporate. What is worse, having been spoiled by the largesse, they may even feel dissatisfied for what they are deprived off, thereby taking to the inimical though habitual caste routes.

And this is just one of the many psychological potholes that Modi has to contend with in the 2019 electoral path.

In 2014, Modi, so to say, had the entire Indian middleclass under his spell for they were enthused by his vows to bring the corrupt to book. Who won’t love to see the high and mighty of the dark alleys languishing in the dark cells? But instead of affording them a vicarious pleasure of seeing their corrupt netas in the country’s jails, Modi has left those suffocating in air of despondency as the dirty mighty are having it easy that too even as the ‘corrupt’ common men and women are made to suffer, first on account of demonetization and then owing to the GST, to their eternal hurt. What a let-down to be handed over the rough end of the anti-corruption stick. It is anybody’s guess that these would love the return of the UPA’s corrupt times for their self aggrandizement. Even some of the ‘clean’ middleclass-wallahs, swallowing media’s Goebbelsian lie on demonetization, have turned into inveterate Modi-critics, and who knows, the media, with concocted popularity ratings,  may be leading Modi on the garden path.

Come 2019, if the much publicized corrupt deeds of Sonia, Rahul, Vadra, Chidambaram et al won’t make it to the court rooms at the least, and instead gather dust in the investigating offices, Modi may as well kiss goodbye to the bulk of the middleclass voters for they are bound to feel cheated by his duplicity in the fight against ‘real’ corruption. After all, five years is a long period to surmount the odds even in our snail paced judicial process that is if Modi were true to his word, so goes the grapevine. Yet, they won’t vote for the corrupt Congress etc., in a volte face, but would surely stay away from the polling booths, leaving Modi to fend for himself. And the shortfall in the vote share, if it won’t cause his ouster, would certainly diminish his prime ministerial stature, setting the opposition in motion.  

But what if, Sonia and her sinister ilk are made to sweat in the court halls or cool their heels in jail cells, won’t that alter the electoral psychology of the country, electrifying the political atmosphere for Modi’s thumping victory in the Indian electoral arena.

Let’s wait and see what’s in store for Modi’s New India.

[This piece was written before Narendra Modi’s triumphant electoral victory in 2019]

          

The Art and Science of Recruitment

Recruitment is a managerial function to enroll manpower to augment, replenish, and reinvigorate an organization’s human resource base. As the entrepreneurial efficiency and the organizational efficacy depend on the human resources, it is imperative that the recruitment be done on scientific lines in a professional mode. Sadly, though for most part, the recruitment models in most Indian organizations, especially those in the public sector, lack the needed understanding and required sensitivity to further the cause.

Barring honourable exceptions, the exercise of recruitment is perceived by those involved in it as an opportunity to further their own careers by heeding to ‘referrals to favour’ of the powers that be. In the absence of trained professionals, well-versed in the art of interviewing and the science of evaluation, the tendency is to induct more and more ‘heads’ into the selection panels. Given that, it is no wonder that such exercises invariably turn out to be more of interrogations rather than interviews.

To start with, in most cases, the scheduled time for the selection process is woefully short for any meaningful appraisal of the number of invitees for an interview. Besides, the exigencies of official work of various members of the committee necessitate the scheduling of interviews for various vacancies in a panoramic setting. Capping it all is the lack of punctuality in commencing the ‘show’ at the appointed hour, which, in turn, results in either rushing through the rigmarole or prolonging it beyond the scheduled hours. Needless to say, all this, put together, stymies the course for the candidates to showcase their case - either they do not get a fair chance equitable assessment or by the time their turn comes,  they become mentally sick to be in the proper frame of mind.

After a seemingly eternal waiting, the candidate receives ‘the call’ and what follows in the haloed chambers is only matched by what had preceded in the waiting hall – a state of anxiety. That’s not all, in an exhibition of the panel’s indifference towards the prospective recruits; its members don’t deem it fit to reveal their identities to the candidates. It is another matter though, on that fateful occasion, it would not have made any difference to the candidate for it is humanly impossible for any to place the positions of so many biggies. Overwhelmed by the imposing setting and overawed by the overbearing attitude of the prospective employers, the candidate can be hardly at ease in their overweening company. Thus, the stage would be set for the grand inquiry for the tone and tenor of the proceedings is more akin to a cross-examination than an interactive exercise.

After the preliminary enquiries regarding the candidate’s family background and academic qualifications, the accent shifts to some questioning on the specifics of the subject of his study and ends up with stray attempts to elicit his awareness of the current events. Whatever, the exercise is nowhere near a plan to ascertain the attributes or a strategy to elicit the aptitudes of the candidate but is merely done on an ad hoc basis, influenced as such by the factors of time, and the initial impression of the August members develop about him. The nature of questioning and the lack of continuity in the interview make even the candidate wonder whether the session did indeed bring his best to the fore; and then it is only left for him to cross his fingers and await the verdict.

Be that as it may, an interview, on the other hand, is defined as the meeting of persons face to face, especially for the purpose of conference, and for that to have any meaningful outcome, it should be dialogue oriented. Whereas the question-answer session can be a pointer to the candidate’s acquaintance with a given subject, only a dialogue could reveal his degree of awareness of it. Considerable skill and tact, however, are required on the part of the interviewers, first to initiate and then to guide the dialogue in such a manner as to fathom the candidate’s personality traits and his perceptive abilities. As such specialist skills are not expected to be mastered by assorted departmental heads that are inducted into the selection panel, the alternative is either to create a specialist group in the organization itself or entrust the job to a professional recruiting agency.

Now to the specifics; recruitment can be broadly divided into the induction of newbies and the enlistment of the already initiated. Though the general principles involved are the same, as can be appreciated, the strategies vary with the category of recruitment.

.

Recruiting Newbies

The positional changes in an organizational makeup necessitate periodic induction of newbies as well as the not-so-raw into the functional setup, and the attendant benefits their recruitment brings in its wake are

-  the possibility of casting them into the desired moulds of corporate ethos, and

-  the pruning of administrative overheads through relatively modest payslips.  

On the flip side though, the enterprise has to bear their incubation cost till the recruits are adequately trained to perform their assigned functions effectively, if not with aplomb. However, the long-term benefits this managerial measure brings to the enterprise far outweigh the short-term functional hiccups.

However, ascertaining the applicants’ aptitude for a given job and envisaging their performance potential in the job situation is a difficult exercise that calls for interviewing skills and professional judgment. Moreover, in any interview setting, the newbies’ inexperience and the associated anxiety make them tense and tentative, thereby clouding their true personality from the non-expert view, thereby complicating the issue of evaluation even more.

Basically, the only track record of the newbies available for scrutiny is their marks sheets and for the lack of a better alternative, the interviewers are tempted to see in those the candidate’s innate potential, and, needless to say, this presumption is fraught with fallacies. Also, notwithstanding the introduction of the innovations - psychology and aptitude tests - into the recruitment arena, the prevailing evaluation system, by and large, remains inadequate at the best and imperfect at the worst.

With the right kind of tutoring, as the prevailing methods of examination enable the mediocre to fare as well as the bright, the grades obtained are no reflections of one’s depth of knowledge and grasp of the subject. Besides, in most instances, what is taught in colleges and universities, in a given faculty, is but rudimentary, on which one has to develop as he works his way in the subject arena.  

Besides personal contribution, any organizational setup requires one, not only to function as a team-man within his or her group but also to effectually interact with its other groups, individually as well as collectively. And this entails flexibility in approach, ability to grasp, adaptability to changes, ingenuity to coordinate, willingness to experiment, and capacity to innovate are some of the attributes needed for competency in any work environment. Needless to say, neither is our curriculum designed to inculcate these vital personality traits in one nor is our examination system structured to measure them.

Moreover, intelligence is no longer measured by one’s ability to master one subject or the other, but is considered in terms of one’s capability to organize oneself efficiently and effectively that is within the confines of the resources at his command. Thus, the quest to gauge the candidates’ job ability led to the vaunted IQ tests in the sixties of the last century that fell by the wayside after their proven fallibility but not before they could waylay many a deserving entrant into the fancied corporate houses. It is to be noted that when one is hired by an organization, his total personality and background, including his positives and negatives, come into play.

Viewed in this background, evaluating the relative merits of newbies and ascertaining their suitability for the intended roles in the managerial setup can be a complex task. However, an imaginative interaction, as opposed to the daunting interviewing, could bring to the fore the aspirants’ inherent personality traits for a structured assessment. When it comes to academic excellence, one needs to be mindful of the demands of a given job for most organizational positions require go-getters rather than subject-specialists. Hence, there is a compelling need for imparting professional training to the recruiting personnel so as to make them capable of spotting the required talent with objective means. It’s thus considerable planning and preparation are required to conduct interviews in a concerted manner to choose, as the saying goes, appropriate ‘horses for the races’.

Inducting the Initiated

Whereas faulty recruitment of newbies will have long-term implications, any mismanaged selection of the already initiated, albeit in other outfits, who are inducted into the managerial cadre, will have immediate repercussions. As can be expected, such are inducted into an organization from without to fill in the vacancies caused by the resignations / retirements not to speak of expansions to augment the middle or top managerial order. Given that such an exercise amounts to infusing fresh blood into the organization at vital positions for its reinvigoration, adequate care has to be taken to ensure that bad blood is not let in in the bargain. The catch thus lies in what these newly initiated would bring to the managerial table - fresh ideas or work biases – and that depends upon an individual’s aptitude to work and his attitude towards the workers, which make up his work ethos.

While generic experience can be characterized as the applied knowledge of one’s exposure to and the observation of the socio-economics, domain expertise has to be categorized based on the inferences one draws from involved situations, and in this connection, it may be noted that mere seeing is not observing and plain feeling is not objectivity. Herein lay the difference between pseudo and valid experience in that the former carries vague notions based on personal presumptions whereas the latter comes with valued opinions from examined experiences.

Besides, there is a third dimension to the development process of experience, namely introspection. The general human proclivity is to attribute the personal impediments to the factors without but not to factor in one’s own omissions and commissions. The ability for self-introspection and the willingness for course correction thereby can only enrich one’s experience, and not the mere exposure one might have had - measured in terms of the length of service and the number of associated events. Thus, the famous management adage “one year’s experience repeated over twenty times” sums up this phenomenon of pseudo experience.

Discourse to Recruit  

As the answer-to-the-question method can cut no professional ice, as anyone with a minimum work exposure can be expected to fare reasonably well in such a session, only an imaginative interaction with the candidate can elicit such information about him as would help judge his experience as well as his innate abilities to perform in a given situation. The type of information that would be helpful can be in the form of his perception of the functional requirements, attitude towards work, and philosophy of life, ability to motivate the workforce, general grasp of the systems in vogue, and the ability to pinpoint its lacunae and think about workable remedies. It’s thus, only an imaginative dialogue can help one sift the performers from the pretenders among the candidates.

Apart from work experience and job knowledge, there are other equally important individual traits such as the ability to lead and the adaptability to adjust to people around. Whereas well-laid organizational systems can aid task affectivity, only an imaginative people management can help performance efficiency. It is thus, an adequate leader can excel even in an inadequate setup whereas an inadequate leader can bring the best of systems to grief. Equally important is the ability of an individual for amiable interaction with his peers and superiors in the organization, and his acumen in public relations. It is equally necessary to ascertain the individual’s approach to work whether it is requirement directed or jugãd oriented for professionalism is the ability to think rationally and act systematically.  

Psychology of Philosophy

Only a seemingly informal yet systematically probing dialogue with the candidate by a small group of trained ‘recruitment’ professionals either together or, preferably, individually can yield a proper assessment about him. In all such interviews, the candidate should be encouraged to express himself about his work, his ambitions, and his world view with interspersing enquiries from the interlocutors. If this is done by two or three professional recruiters, in a planned manner, preferably through individual interactions, an opportunity can be created to compare notes regarding the candidate’s consistency of thought, clarity of mind, and philosophy of work whereby appropriate inferences can be drawn that are likely to be more reliable pointers towards the candidate’s innate capability to contribute to the organization.

For the senior and vital positions, it would even be desirable to have a meeting with the provisionally selected candidates in their respective workplaces, which can reveal more about the prospects than most forms of away-from-workplace interactions. However, as such a course could be embarrassing for a potential employer; the job can be entrusted to an outside agency that is eminently placed to carry out such missions. Whatever may be the mode of selection, it should be borne in mind that the output of an organization depends on the inputs pressed into it, not excluding human resources.

Matrix of Rape

The refrain of a rapist is that he was unjustly arraigned even though the bitch of the accuser had equally enjoyed the fling. While the woman’s possible yielding to the rapist and her probable acquiescence during the act cannot be equated to her having had sex with him on her own volition, her violator’s averment that she enjoyed sex with him is akin to adding insult to her injury. Given that rape is ‘the act of forcing a woman to have sexual intercourse against her will’, the chemistry of female injury is better appreciated by visualizing the physics of male force. Where else is there a better laboratory for that than a household to test the characteristics of the sexes, and to develop the matrix of rape, we must discern the moulds of sex in the minds of the couple.

Let us begin with man, the sexual aggressor. Should he be half-hearted about lovemaking, a woman, with her advances, might yet lead him onto the sexual track, and by the same token, a man-in-mood could nudge his off-mood wife into the sexual act. However, if man were to be emotionally dead set against sex, in spite of her amorous overtures, the woman-in-want would fail to drag him onto the arousal course; but a man with his physical imposition on his emotionally unwilling mate, still would be able to penetrate into her mentally reluctant self. Hence, the moot point is that while a woman won’t be able to have sex with an unwilling man, yet she could sexually yield to him against her will, with the attendant, although transient, resentment against him. Nevertheless, should his sexual impositions against her will, become all too frequent, it is then they acquire the infamous tag of marital rape. That being the case of man’s forceful sex with his own woman against her will, the violent penetration into her self, by a total stranger, or someone she is not sexually inclined to, can well be imagined as it is not the physical pain of penetration but the painful affects of it, on her psyche, which make the matrix of rape. 

Now, back to the rapist’s refrain that ‘the bitch of the accuser had equally enjoyed the fling’ and those who back such, like Judge Derek Johnson of a Californian Court that the alleged victim of rape ‘didn't put up a fight" during her assault and that if someone doesn't want sexual intercourse the body "will not permit that to happen".

What is amiss in this line of argument of woman’s coalescence to rape and her enjoyment in it is the realization that it is not warranted that man might force himself upon an unwilling or disinterested woman, never mind her biological vulnerability to his sexual assault might have eventually let her yield her body for his pleasure, in spite of her mental apathy for mating with him. More than man’s distasteful violation of her, it is the thought of having allowed him to have her, even seemingly enjoyed sex with him, that induces a demeaning feeling in woman’s mind-set, which self-diminishes her in her own esteem, and that is the tragic import of rape on a woman.