Wednesday 22 August 2018

HEROES AND SCAPEGOATS





We give too much credit to individual heroes when teams and organizations do things right and place too much blame on individual scapegoats when things go wrong.  This tendency to over-attribute success and failure to individuals can be overcome, but to do so requires focusing on locating and dealing with systemic causes of performance issues. Heroes and scapegoats are constantly held up as examples but that doesn’t seem to change the performance status of the group or team!

A scapegoat is a person or category of people, typically with little power, whom people unfairly blame for their own troubles. A hero is important, his presence electrifies the team, but without the team he is useless. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is perhaps the greatest finisher of a cricket game in crunch situations, but if the other ten players do not contribute their bit even Dhoni is of no impact and we have witnessed this on more than one occasion.

We often feel the relentless drive to elevate a person to godlike status. We search and search until finding a suitable target, then bow down before this supposedly stronger presence, showering him or her with praise and adoration. It can feel really good to be the object of hero worship but understanding the psychology behind the phenomenon makes it much less appealing. Many a good performers, whether sports persons or film stars, have failed to handle their newly found stardom with aplomb and fallen by the way. Left on their own, undisturbed by the burden of expectation, they may have performed better and longer! Every time a cricketer in India gives a good all round performance he is hailed as the next Kapil Dev! Needless to say, none till date have succeeded in filling those big shoes. Hero worship often kills the hero but we continue with our favourite pastime of discovering newer heroes and heroines and nipping bright talents in the bud.

Everyone has heroes; someone that they can look up to or someone similar to what they aspire to be. There’s nothing bad about having heroes. In fact, it's rather helpful in getting through life when you do have heroes. It just becomes a problem when having that hero consumes everything in your life and that person gets put up onto a pedestal that they didn’t even ask for. Hero worship can completely consume and possibly destroy someone’s life if they aren't careful.

When someone is consumed by hero worshiping, it can completely alter that person’s life. They can become blind to any faults that their hero might have and can lack individuality because they’re trying so hard to be like their hero. Adding a celebrity to the mix just makes it more complicated, especially when you worship the ground that they walk on and threaten people who don't view them the same way that you do. This is something which we routinely see in politics as polarized viewpoints clash openly as the heroes who symbolize them.

Hero worship is not really about the hero. The same people who worship you one day will discard you the next, moving on to a new entity that does a better job filling the role. If you had not been the chosen one someone else would have been. This idea applies whether we are thinking in the metaphysical context of deities, the social context of fame, or the intimate context of personal relationships.

The reason to resist the temptation to accept the God like role is that the freedom of thought and behavior becomes extremely limited. It stops being okay to make any mistakes or to admit ignorance. If you buy in to what is said and thought about you, then conflict will arise between who you really are as a human being and the unrealistic image you are trying to fulfill. You will attempt to cover up or minimize all your shortcomings and foibles until finally being exposed for the fraud you are, at which point the person or people who have put you up on the pedestal can toss you aside with a clean conscience, feeling defrauded, even though they were the ones who unfairly put you up there in the first place for their own psychological needs. If the sequence of events do not sound familiar to you then just think of ‘the king of good times’!

The people placing a hero on a pedestal are parasites. For whatever reason they feel incapable of doing the hard work of self-actualization themselves, so they take the shortcut of basking in the glow of the hero’s presence instead. They latch on to him/her, and unconsciously believe that this is enough, that they will be able to find fulfillment by being a small part of what the hero or the heroine excels in. They worship the hero, and all they ask in return is that he/she be perfect at all times, living up to the impossible standard they have set for him/her without fail.

There is however another end of this spectrum. Just as a hero is the excuse and the perceived reason of all our happiness, a scapegoat is responsible for all that has gone wrong in our life. The act of scapegoating includes blaming, minimizing accomplishments, put-downs, criticisms, exploitations of the scapegoat’s greatest fears, manipulation and neglect. This strangely, like hero worshipping has a historical perspective. The Bible describes the Old Testament practice of “placing” the sins on a goat and then sending the goat away. The goat bears the sins of the people . . . . and then, disappears.

Scapegoating is seen everywhere – in families, in classes and in offices. Dysfunctional/Abusive families who practice scapegoating will choose one child to blame for all of life’s problems. This child (or teen or adult child) typically is more sensitive and vulnerable. He or she may be unable to abide by the abuse that characterizes the family and home life and the family recognizes this. Parents who scapegoat their child do so, purposefully, out of fear that this child will blab. Scapegoating is usually due to having one parent with a personality disorder, although an entire family can “bond” by scapegoating one member of a family.

The scapegoated child believes that he or she is the reason that things are miserable in the family atmosphere. Obviously, it is a form of abuse that over-laps with other forms of abuse. The family scapegoat grows into a very insecure adult who struggles with intimate relationships. The victim does not normally ask for anything he/she needs; she assumes her needs are not important yet, ironically, everyone else’s are. He/She mutes his/her own desires and dreams, believing that he/she does not need to be loved, taken care of or encouraged . . . . believing that he/she does not deserve this. He/She is a “doer”, desperately attempting to win some love but panics at the idea of abandonment.

A class of children or adolescents too can have an identifiable scapegoat; the poor guy held responsible for all that goes wrong. Offices and work places too have them. They are useful to blame for follies which are not their own but a dysfunctional bunch feels absolved by pointing fingers at them. There are two ways of correcting a thing which has gone wrong – the difficult one would be “there is a problem, let’s fix it” and the easier one being “we have got a problem, someone is screwing up, let’s find him and beat him up”. The easier option, looking for a scapegoat, unfortunately does not bring about improvement. Building and sustaining great systems is infinitely more important than hiring and nurturing great individuals. Heroes are useful and important, but never more than the system and the institution.

And it is not unusual to find a hero turn into a scapegoat if he/she fails to keep up to the promises others expected of him/her even though he/she never actually made them! 

Sunday 12 August 2018

GENIUS ON THE EDGE

The John Hopkins Hospital



John Hopkins
Johns Hopkins born in 1795, an entrepreneur and philanthropist was one of the richest Americans of his time. In 1889 Johns Hopkins donated this huge hospital and the university to Baltimore and it was to be called The Johns Hopkins Hospital “the greatest gift to mankind”. Dr. Welch was a trustee. Welch had already established himself as a great pathologist. He was a friend of Dr. John. S. Billings who had been librarian of the Surgeon General’s Office and was now chairman of the board of trustees of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Welch had suggested to Billings that William Halsted was the right man for the chair of surgery in spite of his recent addiction to Cocaine which he had got over. He was appointed to this prestigious position. Besides Welch there were on the team William Osler now called the father of modern medicine and Kelly a man who had blazed a trail in gynecology. So it was Osler, Welch, Kelly and Halsted who formed the nucleus of this great team, an institution that would break all barriers in medical science. No more did people talk only of Berlin and Vienna but they spoke in the same breath of The Johns Hopkins and the Mayo clinic. American medicine had come into its own.
            
William Halsted
What was William Halsted’s background before he joined the Johns Hopkins in 1889. He ardently believed in the work of Pasteur, Koch and Semmelweis, and Lister’s application of the antiseptic theory and applied it to his work in New York where he had already established himself as a surgeon of repute. In 1882 he was the first surgeon to do a cholecystectomy and that too on his mother. Halsted was also the first to give his own blood to his sister who was dying of postpartum hemorrhage, and this was before Landsteiner had discovered the blood groups. His sister lived, they must have been of the same group or Halsted must have been group ‘O’. He was also the first to device an ingenious method of treating carbon monoxide poisoning. He drew blood from the patient in a citrate solution in an open container and then shook the flask to oxygenate it and injected it back into the patient. His patients lived.

Then tragedy struck Halsted. He had heard of Karl Koller an ophthalmologist’s work on Cocaine- he was removing cataracts painlessly under a local drop of Cocaine in the eye. This was actually suggested to Koller by a paper published by his friend Sigmund Freud, Halsted always the scientist and experimenter began to experiment on himself and some of his pupils. He performed major surgery by using Cocaine as nerve blocks. He also found that he under Cocaine had developed tremendous energy and capacity for work without any fatigue. Then one tragic day as he picked up his knife to operate he found that his hand was shacking. He was shocked, looked around amazed, handed the knife to his assistant and had to be helped out of the theater. That night was the darkest night in William Halsted’s life this great surgeon with a remarkable future had become a physical and mental wreck. Welch who was following Halsted’s career closely and believed that the man had a great future came to his rescue. He institutionalized him, opium was used in small doses to get him off cocaine. But unfortunately he got hooked on to opium so it was from the frying pan into the fire. It took a long time to get this man back to work.

Portrait of 'the big four' at Hopkins - Drs. Welsh, Osler,
Halsted and Kelly from the medical archives of the John
Hopkins Medical Institute.
It was then that he took on the chair of surgery at The Johns Hopkins and accepted Billing’s offer prompted by Welch. This he did with great hesitation for he was not sure of himself. Prior to this he had spent a lot of time while recuperating in Welch’s laboratory where he had ample opportunity to study both anatomy and pathology in the cadaver.  Cocaine had changed his personality and this fast, bold and rather traumatic surgeon became slow and meticulous. He devised new and systematic operations- one of the examples was his work on Cancer of the Breast. Kelly said of him, half in joke, that William Halsted is the only surgeon whose upper incision healed before he has come to the lower part. From Halsted’s cocaine addiction came the three principles of good surgery, reverence for tissue, elimination of dead space, and complete hemostasis.

Halsted fell in love with his theater sister Caroline Hampton and married her. Caroline was a remarkable woman and supported Halsted in his work, she developed an allergy to carbolic and Halsted had the Leyland rubber company make surgical gloves for her, which later became part of the ritual for the exercise of aseptic surgery and every surgeon began to wear sterile rubber gloves. At about this time Johns Hopkins decided to appoint an Urologist under Halsted. By now The Johns Hopkins had become a famed center and hoary professors of surgery applied for the post from all over Europe and America. Osler, Welch, Kelly and Halsted were on the selection committee. During the interview Halsted kept falling asleep and the others would wake him up saying “William this is going to be your decision. Wake up and listen” and Halsted would say “I am listening, I am listening”. At the end of the three days they asked him, “William who is your choice?” Back came the answer like a bolt from the blue. “why who else but young Hugh” the pun was on the word young. The others almost jumped out of their seats and they asked “what does Hugh Young know about uro surgery?” Nothing replied Halsted but what do those old fogies that we have heard know about the subject? “This man has a clean incisive virgin mind you appoint him and you take my word he will blaze a trail and one day Johns Hopkins will be proud of him”... They appointed him, Halsted was right, you open any chapter on genito urinary surgery and Hugh Young has made a contribution. Today he is remembered for his radical perineal prostatectomy for cancer of the prostate.

Halsted was not only a great surgeon but he was a great teacher of surgery. He collected in his unit at one time men like Harvey Cushing who pioneered neuro surgery, Bloodgood, who made monumental contribution to breast pathology, Foley of Foleys catheter fame, Finney, who did the first pyloroplasty and revolutionized gastric surgery, Mitchell who devised his clips and Hugh Young who pioneered uro surgery and above them all was Osler the father of modern medicine, Welch a great pathologist and Kelly who was a master of gynecological surgery.

In 1918 Halstead recognized that he had like his mother gall stones and that he would require a surgery of which he was a pioneer. One of his assistant Dr. Foley operated on him. The recovery was slow and he was never the same man again. He said to Caroline one day “I can still think, I can read & write and talk. When I can’t do any of these things, it will be time to quit.” Papers on the thyroid, on arteries, aneurysms and cancer poured from his pen. He spoke occasionally at meetings.

On an August morning he quietly told Caroline to phone up the hospital in Baltimore and have a surgeon ready to operate “It is my old enemy again Caroline. Dr. Reid was to operate. “Be sure that the drainage is done through the cystic duct, this might be my last experiment”. There was a faint smile on his face as he went under. A large stone was removed from the common bile duct. In early September Halsted developed Pneumonia. His old friend and mentor Sir William Osler had called Pneumonia “the old man’s friend”. On September the 7th William Halstead died. A postmortem was conducted according to his request. The cause of death was pneumonia, pleurisy and advanced atherosclerosis. There was no peritonitis, the drainage through the cystic duct had been perfect. William Halstead’s “last experiment” as he called it was a success.

The next day the Baltimore Sun carried an editorial the rest of the page was left blank and this is what it said:-“Because Dr. William S.  Halsted lived, the world is a better, a safer, a happier place in which to be. In his death, not only Baltimore, but civilization everywhere has sustained a heavy loss. He was one of the few men who really did count. Quiet, simple, un-ostentatious except in the medical world, where he towered, a great and dominating figure, the full scope of his genius and the tremendous extent and value of his service to mankind were neither generally known nor generally appreciated. To the Johns Hopkins hospital, the institution to whose reputation and up building he had so enormously contributed, his death is a staggering blow. Along with Osler and Welch he laid the foundation upon which Hopkins so solidly rests today.
                       

I am posting some pictures of these great men all from the Johns Hopkins and all at the same time. I have always been fascinated by this story and would like to share it with you.  

Friday 3 August 2018

THE INDIA STORY - WHO ARE WE?

Who are We?

The question “who are we?” has intrigued historians, linguists and geneticists as much as it does the common Indian. In the recent years it has become fashionable to debunk scientifically derived theories about the origin of the Indian nation, because there is a new ultra-nationalism about. It’s true we are an ancient people and our nationhood was forged on the mighty anvil of our geography, but our civilization was fused from many cultures and our nationality from diverse races. What we are now is a result of many great migrations. While there seem to have been many migratory waves from the east also, it is the western migrations that mostly shaped our present civilization. These migratory waves continued till well into the modern age and each one seems to have left an indelible mark upon us.

It would be wrong to see these migrations just in terms Islamic conquests as we increasing tend to do. The advent of Islam into India is only a visible marker, for peoples who migrated earlier and even just before the Islamic conquests were also of similar stock. For instance that great Rajput clan, the Sisodia’s are of Scythian origin and historians derive their name from Sassanian. Just as Jat derives from Gatae, Ahir from Avar, Gujar from Khazar, Thakur from Tukharian. The Scythian or Saka tribes were the last pre-Islamic migrants into India. Some entered the plains through the Bolan Pass, and settled in Rajasthan which is why some Rajput, Gujar and Jat clans such as Pawar, Chauhan, Rathi, Sial etc. now claim descent from there, whereas others like Mann, Gill, Bajwa, Bhullar, Sandhu etc. who came via the Khyber Pass claim descent from Afghanistan. 

Some of these clans acquired kingships and were readily granted genealogies by the Brahmin priesthood, who were ever willing to be imaginative as long as their status was assured and for suitable monetary rewards. The agnikula ritual cleansed them of the past and gave them a high place under the Hindu scheme. 

Some of the genealogies given are quite extravagant. Thus the Suryavanshis can claim to have descended from the Sun god, while the Chandravanshis can claim descent from the lunar god, and some claim even more specifically to be Raghuvanshis, the clan of Lord Rama. Not that to be a Scythian is something to be ashamed of. Herodotus reveals that even way back in the 5th century BC, the Scythians had political control over much of Central Asia and even as far as the Gangetic plain. Alexander the Great took a Bactran princess, Roxanne (Rukhshana), as his bride as he had to buy peace with and gain Scythian allies. 

Political maps of India of early periods clearly suggest an Indian polity heavily weighted in the northwestern part of South Asia. Even Emperor Ashoka’s kingdom while centered in Pataliputra (Patna) extended mostly westward, as far as Bamian and Herat now in Afghanistan and hardly into the Deccan and below. This seems to have been so even way back between 2800-2600 BC, when the Indus valley civilization existed. This civilization is estimated to have included over 1500 settlements over an area the size of Western Europe in present day Pakistan and western India. Excavations, not just in Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, Kot Dijian and Dholavira, very clearly suggest that these were Dravidian settlements and were so till about 1600 BC. 

Archeologists have concluded that during this period Harappa, despite the seeming lack of an army, was one of the largest and most powerful economic and political centers in the region (see Scientific American, July 2003). Archeologists also believe that the decline of this civilization coincided with the shifting of the course of the Ghaggar-Hakra River (Saraswathi), then a major river of the Indus Valley. The collapse of the agricultural economy largely due to this, led to the overcrowding of cities like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa leading to civic disorder. Thus when the Aryans made their appearance around 1500 BC these cities were ready to fall. By 1000 BC a new and distinctive ideology and language began to emerge in this region. The Vedic period had arrived.

Quiet clearly, both, the Aryans and Dravidians were migrant races that traveled eastwards in search of pastures for their cattle and fertile land for agriculture. This is where we run into ideological problems with the ultra-nationalist and conservative Hindu gerontocracy that, like Gagabhatt did for Shivaji, are foisting a new genealogy upon our nation. The word out now is that we, Indians of today, are an indigenous people. Nothing can be further from the truth. 

The only indigenous people in India are the Adivasis, who Nihar Ranjan Ray described as “the original autochthonous people of India.” The rest, be they Dravidian or Aryan, Hindu or Muslim, Rajput or Jat, are migrants with as much or as little claim as the European settlers in the new world have to be known as Americans. It is true that the colonizing people in the Americas have managed to forge a distinct new identity, just as the European Jew has managed to become the modern Israeli, and the world acknowledges them as that, but to believe them to be an indigenous people would be akin to the patently bogus Afrikaner claim to be an indigenous African people.

There are scientific ways to discover who we are? The recent advances in genetics have made it possible to draw linkages between peoples of different regions. Studies here in India have not only confirmed that Nihar Ranjan Ray was right when he said that the Adivasi of Central India was the only real native of this country.  

A study by Dr. Michael Bamshad MD, geneticist at the University of Utah published in the June 2001 of Genome Research explicitly states that the ancestors of modern upper caste Indian populations are genetically more similar to Europeans and lower caste populations are more similar to Asians. Another recent study conducted by Andhra University scientists (BB Rao, M Naidu, BVR Prasad and others) has found the southern Indian to be quite distinct to the northern Indian, in terms of genetic make up at least. That stands to reason considering that the varna composition in South India which is weighted overwhelmingly in favor of the lower castes is very different than that of North India which has a more even spread of caste density.

Despite the divergent trails of genetic markers, Aryans and Dravidians may not be that far removed from each other. Linguists have for long been agreed that “English, Dutch, German, and Russian are each branches of the vast Indo-European language family, which includes Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian and other languages, -- all descendants of more ancient languages like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. Digging down another level, linguists have reconstructed an earlier language from which the latter were derived. They call it proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.” 

Dr. Alexis Manaster Ramer of Wayne State University, USA digs even deeper and finds common roots between PIE and two other language groups: Uralic, which includes Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; and Altaic that includes Turkish and Mongolian. All these three groups, Dr. Ramer argues, find their roots in an older language called Nostratic. If he is right then all Indian languages, Sanskritic or Dravidian are descended from Nostratic, spoken about 12000 years ago.

Dr. Vitaly Shevoroshkin at the Institute of Linguistics at Moscow, and another Russian scholar, Dr. Aaron Dogopolsky now at the University of Haifa, did pioneering work in establishing the Nostratic language in the 1960’s, and this today is the inspiration to younger linguists like Ramer. Incidentally the word “Nostratic” means “our language”. 

This study of language is really the study of the evolution of the human race after the advent of the anatomically modern human being, a relatively recent 120,000 years ago. Language, as linguists see it, is more just the heard word and the spoken for we can even communicate with gestures and signs. According to Dr. Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii, “the essence of language is words and syntax, each generated by a combinational system in the brain.”

Dr.Asko Parpola, a prominent Finnish scholar raises a fundamental question as to whether Sanskrit is a Dravidian language and advances enough evidence to suggest that is just what it is. Dr. Malathi J. Shendge, a well-regarded Indologist is of the same opinion and elaborated on her research leading to this conclusion recently in a series of lectures at the India International Centre. Another Indian scholar, Gopi Nathan, has recently published a paper on the similarities of words and syntax between the Dravidian languages, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu, and the Finno-Ugrian languages such as Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and Lapp languages. Gopi Nathan concedes that while the modern versions of these Dravidian languages are considerably influenced by Sanskrit words, the old writings “do not contain a single Sanskrit word.” On the other hand, he argues, a number of Dravidian “loanwords” appear in the Rig Veda. 

Not only Sanskrit but languages like Latin and Greek too have a number of loanwords from Dravidian. For instance, the proto-Dravidian word for rice, arici is similar to oryza in Latin and Greek, and ginger is inciver in Tamil while it is ingwer in German, zinziberis in Greek. This lends much credence to the theory that the original Dravidians were of Mediterranean and Armenoid stock, who in 4th millennium BC and settled in the Indus Valley to create one of the four early Old World state-cultures along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China’s Yellow River civilization. The continued presence of a Dravidian language, Brahui, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province still spoken by more than half a million people, further suggests that the Dravidians moved eastwards and southwards under Aryan pressure. The struggle between these two ancient races is captured vividly in the mythology of the ages which depicts a great struggle between the light skinned devas and the dark skinned asuras. 

Whatever be its origins, it seems clear that the Sanskrit that emerged out of the Aryan Dravidian fusion was the language of a light skinned elite and was replaced by Persian, another Indo-European language of another light skinned elite. In northern India, these languages of the elites combined with regional dialects to produce a patois called Hindawi or Urdu. 

Santosh Kumar Khare on the origin of Hindi in “Truth about Language in India” (EPW, December 14, 2002) writes: “the notion of Hindi and Urdu as two distinct languages crystallized at Fort William College in the first half of the 19th century.” He adds: “their linguistic and literary repertoires were built up accordingly, Urdu borrowing from Persian/Arabic and Hindi from Sanskrit.” They came to represent the narrow competing interests of emergent middle class urban Hindu and Muslim/Kayastha groups. But the real sting is in the conclusion that “modern Hindi (or Khari boli) was an artificial construct of the East India Company which, while preserving the grammar and diction of Urdu, cleansed it of ‘foreign and rustic’ words and substituted them with Sanskrit synonyms.” 

That’s makes for some interesting irony for the RSS, the foremost protagonist of Hindi today, takes great pleasure in deriding English speakers in India as "Macaulay's children."

Mohan Guruswamy