JOIN USIt takes all types
The other day, a friend narrated an anecdote wherein the premium investigating agency of the country went after a bank embezzlement case working out to a few thousands and came out with a ‘not guilty’ verdict after a protracted period of two decades. It sounded ridiculous to the extreme. Recently, a more sober relative recalled that when he was an engineer with the Kerala State Electricity Board there was a particularly querulous customer who made his life miserable, often dragging him to the court for minor infringements. A transfer to a nearby place came as a welcome release.
Is it because we Indians are, by nature, a particularly litigious lot? Do we have among us those with, what my fraternity would call, prominent paranoid traits in their personalities? Even if that is so, I should think that we are seeing only a side of the picture. If not for these cranks, abnormal by any reckoning, clogging up the judicial system, imagine how easy it would be for the cleverer, the more powerful and smooth ones to take the rest for a jolly ride.
That brings me to another type, the painfully obsessive and nitpicking ones. While pursuing my postgraduate course at a prestigious medical college, we were under the tutelage of a professor who insisted on everything being ‘just so’. The joke among the resident staff was that you must have your pens poised in mid-air, taking down notes as the clock strikes eight; nothing else would do. I used to get a shelling at case presentations even if I believed it was all in apple-pie order.
Now in a small hospital, I find myself hurrying to the wards at the dot of eight in the morning. I also find myself rechecking my case histories. Who knows, after all, the professor did leave a bit of himself in this otherwise laidback person! On the larger canvas, do not the obsessive people ultimately help run our world smooth and efficient?
As I alluded to earlier on, I belong to a proud band of doctors who help straighten out the kinks in the minds, exorcise the fears, calm the manias, and uplift the depressed psyche. Many of our founding fathers like Freud have spent lifetimes in the research and treatment of “personality disorders”. Put simply, we help one modify the personality to successful functioning. But it is, without doubt, the screwballs and oddballs who make this world an interesting place.
Unwittingly, we consider the downwardly mobile as the ones who have not evolved well. It is an in-built bias among us the middle and upper classes. But has it occurred to you that anytime there is an accident – big or small- the only people who stop to help are the people who you would barely notice as they go on foot or at best ride on decrepit two wheelers? The well balanced and ‘successful’ hardly ever get down and enquire. Instead, they whizz by in their glitzy cars.
When Mumbai was under the deluge, who rose to the occasion? Do you remember the time when a train plummeted into the Kerala backwater in 1988 and hundreds were saved by the timely actions of the auto-rickshaw drivers –people who are otherwise seen as a pesky lot? Surely, it takes all types of people to make this planet go around – never mind that Sigmund Freud would have had some of them on his couch.