Be gracious in all situations

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Many of us have more than one persona. What I mean to convey is that very few of us are consistent all through in different situations. There are thousands of men — I specifically refer to the male gender here as the syndrome is more common in males — who are peaceable folk except when they are stuck behind the wheel of a car in a traffic jam. That is when they become victims of road rage and behave like fiends.

Then there are the cerebral professionals, like professors and doctors, who ought to be the epitome of rectitude. But the annals of crime will reflect that some of them too have ‘lost it’ when it came to personal issues. At a more humane level, gooey mothers who tolerate any amount of errant behaviour from their kids get intolerant when it comes to other children. What causes the transformation, I wonder.
I know of a businessman who is very intolerant of dissent amongst his subordinates and hates it when people leave his company and move on. He demands total loyalty, and not so much efficiency. I joke at his sense of quaint old world values. Yet he is the same person who goes all out to help his staff when they are in distress. I know of at least two instances when he forked out several lakhs of rupees for heart surgeries for his office boys. But he was at his usual game last week when one of his executives put in his papers. The businessman was furious. He felt that the executive had scored one over him by resigning, before he had been sacked!
“How does it matter?” I asked him, when we were discussing the issue. In any case, corporates always ask an under-performing executive to resign and they do not, as a rule, fire the person unless there’s a serious charge hanging there. “It offends my sense of justice... he should have been sacked because he was under-performing. Now he has scored a point over me,” he said angrily. I told him gently that his sense of feeling offended was ridiculous. What had actually offended him was his loss of power at being upstaged! That indeed is the heart of the matter; we are benevolent when our status is unchallenged. But if it comes to a power-play situation, very few of us can tolerate being upstaged, however fleetingly. We would like to be all-powerful in all situations. But such a scenario is never possible. Even heads of governments have to give up office.
So be gracious in all situations. Be confident and never act petty. Remember, it is tougher to exercise restraint than to exercise your power. You do not show your might if your child acts petulant. So why can’t you have a similar threshold — if not the same — for others? If we think of any perspective from the other person’s point of view, instead of hanging to our own, life would be a much more pleasurable existence.