Understanding the Success of Mystery

(Published in Banking Services Chronicle September 2004)

In his autobiography titled My Life, former US President Bill Clinton says on marriage: “I’ve learned that marriage with all its magic and misery, its contentments and disappointments, remains a mystery, not easy for those in it to understand and largely inaccessible to outsiders.” I think success is as much of a mystery.

Take Marlon Brando, for example. He can easily rank among the outstanding actors of all times. Whether it was in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire or Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather, he has left an indelible impression in almost all the roles he essayed. But do you know what he once remarked? “Acting is an empty and useless profession.” So, that’s what success is. It’s like the horizon—when you reach there, you find it’s not there but somewhere further.

But one thing is clear. Success can’t be had through short-cuts, especially if they are unethical. The weekly newspaper Tehelka has revealed that a psychiatrist, Dr SK Gupta, at the government-run Agra Mental Asylum, was willing to certify women insane to enable their husbands to divorce them. If the revelation is true, the psychiatrist must be making a lot of money. But if he thinks himself to be successful, it’s a delusion. Ill-begotten money can never bring you peace of mind—the ultimate objective of every successful person.

Success is a continuous journey. It is a sustained effort in the desired direction. One swallow does not a summer make. Similarly, in most of the cases, one book does not a writer make. Three years ago, Hari Kunzru came up with The Impressionist—a rambling, funny, extravagant and seemingly chaotic tale about an Anglo-Indian’s quest for identity in colonial India. He was hailed as a good writer. But books and writers today are pushed into oblivion if they are not backed up by further work.

Now that Kunzru has come up with his second novel, Transmission, he has earned a place for himself and can’t be written off as a one-book wonder. Besides, this novel is in a somewhat different genre and is set firmly in the present. The narrative centres on a young Indian software engineer’s travails in the Silicon Valley. Thus Kunzru has proved that he is also capable of variety, another trait of a successful writer.

In fact, variety can be associated with success in general because it is a sign of maturity. Immature persons tend to think narrowly: religion is religion, politics is politics, and the twain should never meet. Mature persons like Mahatma Gandhi view things differently. According to him, those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion nor politics.

For the successful, the world is an oyster. They are open to all possibilities and do not write off teams as underdogs. Greece was certainly not considered to be the best team and yet it won the European championship in football. Because in the ultimate run what matters is performance on the field, not your past record, not how favourably people consider you.

The more one matures, the more one avoids short-cuts. That’s what makes Sachin Tendulkar one of the greatest batsmen ever. He has reached astronomical heights and yet he learns. He has cut down on his risky shots. Though his performance may have become less entertaining as a result, he believes it to be his natural progression as a batsman over 15 years.

With maturity we also come to realise that the society can’t be divided into opposites—the heroes and the villains, the successful and the unsuccessful, and so on. Real life is full of shades of grey. So every person is a success so long they are inching towards their goal. Only regression or stagnation should be seen as failure.

As said at the outset, success is a mystery. I have made a humble attempt to understand it.