You think, therefore I am.

by VIJAY NAGASWAMI

Self-esteem is related to the harmony between our perceptions of our selves and the perceptions of those emotionally close to us.

But if we constantly define ourselves only through other peoples’ eyes, then we will stay vulnerable and end up being a ‘people pleaser’.

Today, in our country, probably one of the biggest buzzwords is “self-esteem”. In every place I visit, whether a metropolis or a small town, I see innumerable advertisements and hoardings exhorting people to undertake “personality d evelopment courses” guaranteed to boost self-belief and enhance productivity. Some HR professionals in the corporate world seem to have re-invented themselves on the self-esteem bandwagon. Consultants design courses and programmes tailored to helping people enhance their self-esteem. People visit psychotherapists in the hope of feeling better about themselves. And all this over the last decade or so. The self-esteem industry has arrived in our country. But, what is this fuss all about? And why only now? What is this whole self-esteem thing?

In its simplest form, self esteem reflects two independent but related phenomena — the accuracy of our perception about our self as well as the way we value our self. However, we need to realise that the concept of self-esteem relates to the “core self”, not the “surface self”. In other words, merely because you have some extraordinary skills does not necessarily mean you possess good self-esteem, for skills are situation-specific. In this situation you may be “self-confident” i.e. you may believe in the skills you possess, but may not necessarily have high self-esteem. A good cricketer for instance, may or may not have good self esteem in situations outside the cricket field. A captain of industry might not know how to function outside the office. So, anybody who attempts to enhance self-esteem by acquiring more skills in whatever form, is really barking up the wrong tree. But the concept of the core self is a fairly abstract one. Erudite tomes have been written about it, philosophers have dissected it with gusto and psychotherapists make their living from it. What we need is a more practical construct with practicable processes we can engage with. The concept of the “social self” is one such.

It is important to understand that as highly socialised beings, we live in a social context, as a result of which we experience our sense of self from equations within this context: from relationships. The best chance we have of enhancing our self-esteem comes from the quality of relationships we get into. And not just any relationship, but the more intense ones where the deeper layers of the self relates to the deeper layers of the other person’s self. Put differently, the harmony between the way we perceive and value our own self and the way people in our close emotional environment perceive and value our sense of self is what makes for self esteem. If you are a wonderful musician with a large fan following but your spouse and children think of you as egoistic and self-centred, then you still have some work to do on your self-esteem.
Dependency

However, experiencing our self-esteem in the context of our relationships does make us vulnerable. For, the equation then becomes, “You think, therefore I am”. To a certain extent this is true and in the early stages of our growth and development, all of us tend to see ourselves as reflected in the eyes of people we love and respect. As children, the way our parents see us defines the way we see our “self”. Slowly our teachers’ perceptions as well as those of our peers adds to the definition. But if we constantly define ourselves only through other peoples’ eyes, then we will stay vulnerable through our lives and end up being a “people pleaser”, for, we try to get people in our emotional environment to value us by pandering to their every need even if this is at a cost to our own growth as a person.

We do need to remember that as we grow, we become more conscious of what we think of and how we value our own “self” as well. And when this clashes with the way our environment perceives and values us, we become unhappy, restless, agitated and low in self-belief. In such a situation, the first instinct is to blame the environment and try to change it. This can be a dangerous trap to fall into, for we end up falling into the “victim mode”. We must, if we are to enhance our self esteem, move to the “survivor mode” and regain a modicum of control over the situation. For this to happen, we need to inculcate in ourselves a pattern of introspection, for, it is this process that will truly help build our self-esteem.
The way out

Every time we experience a disturbance or temporary dissonance in any of our close relationships, it may be useful to engage in a process of introspection. This way we can try to understand why a gap exists between our own self-perceptions and those of others in our environment. When we do this, we put ourselves in a position to truly be in touch with our core self and add value to it. And along the way, we obtain insights into the self of the other person in the relationship too, thereby enabling us to contribute to her/his growth as well. “You think, therefore I am”, now becomes “We think, therefore we are”. And as we stay in touch with our true self and keep refining it as we go along, the equation finally changes to “I think, therefore I am; you think, therefore you are”, at which point vulnerability is no longer an issue and self-esteem can be said to have been truly enhanced.

As a caveat, let me emphasise that a person who has an elevated opinion of himself does not experience high self-esteem. It is only when this opinion has been arrived at through a process of honest introspection and is shared unequivocally by others in the person’s emotional environment can self-esteem be truly enhanced. From this definition, you would surely have realised that the more conscious we are about pursuing our self-esteem, the more likely we are to enhance it. By the same token, the fact that we are talking about it, reading about it and actively pursuing it, means we are pretty much on the right track.

The writer is a psychiatrist and author of The 24x7 Marriage. He can be contacted at vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com

In search of Kabir

Article by S. BAGESHREE

A three-day Festival of Kabir in Bangalore celebrates the mystic poet’s vision.

Quest for an eclectic truth: Pakistan singer Fariduddin Ayaz and festival organiser Shabnam Virmani (below).

Everywhere I see my community

Everywhere a festive gathering

I am in all, all are in me

I am alone, among many.

Kabir, Saint-poet of 15th Century

Scene One: After the screening of “Had-Anhad”, Shabnam Virmani’s film on Kabir, a college student at Anekal, a town adjoining Bangalore, earnestly asked: “Tell me, was Kabir a Hindu or a Muslim?” A young girl hesitantly got up and said: “Don’t you think the message of Kabir and this film is that we should go beyond this question?”

Scene Two: In another of Shabnam’s four films on Kabir, “Chalo Hamara Des”, American Kabir scholar Linda Hess talks of the parallels between her work on the poet and her personal faith in Zen Buddhism.

Scene Three: On the concluding day of the three-day Festival of Kabir organised by Shabnam and her team at Srishti School of Design in Bangalore, a girl ran up the dais and danced to the intoxicating rhythm of the qawwali of Fariduddin Ayaz from Karachi in Pakistan.

Seekers of the mystic poet were of multiple hues at the Festival of Kabir and so were the answers (or in some cases questions) they found in his philosophy and poetry.

Shabnam’s films are at one level physical and metaphysical journeys across the sub-continent in search of Kabir’s diverse traditions and at another level the film-maker’s own personal quest for the mystic as a solace in troubled times. Her experience as a resident of Ahmedabad in the post-Godhra riots formed the trigger for her exploration of Kabir for “inner peace”, away from “dualistic positions” of hate and counter-hate. The films weave together folk singers and classical musicians, social activists who see Kabir as an iconoclastic and Kabir Panthis who have built religious institutions around him, an American scholar on Kabir and a street vendor who has his own take on the poet… As the films move between boundaries of the mind and the terrain, each of the many worldviews and traditions stands out, and yet, the films bring them together in a wonderful cohesion.

Different journeys

Well-known poet and scholar Ashok Vajpayee, who spoke at the festival, said that Kabir and other Bhakti-Sufi poets, offered “politics of interrogation and critique.” He drew parallels between Gandhiji, Kabir and musician Kumar Gandharva as people who dared question established notions in different ways, through politics, philosophy and music. Kabir scholar Purushottam Aggrawal argued that Kabir’s fundamental quest was love rather than iconoclasm, though social activists tend to emphasise the latter. At the reading of Kannada dalit poetry organised as part of the festival, poet Du. Saraswati said that Kabir’s songs and the entire Festival of Kabir were “notes of love” as opposed to the politically-loaded “campaign against terrorism” for college students sponsored by the Karnataka Government, which was going on parallel to this event.

The richest diversity of Kabir traditions was mirrored in the musical performances at the festival, which brought together musicians from different parts of India and Pakistan. Mukhtiyar Ali, folk singer from Rajasthan who described his singing style as “jangli”, was quite the rock star of the festival with a visible fan following. Shafi Fakir, folk singer from Sindh in Pakistan, offered a brilliant confluence of folk and classical sensibilities. The music of both Prahlad Tipanya and Vijay Sardeshmukh were meditative and humbling, but while the former is rooted in the folk tradition of Malwa, the latter gives the same tradition a completely classical interpretation. Fareeduddin Ayaz, the qawwal from Karachi, took musical experience to a new height, to a state of trance. As Tipanya evocatively put it, “Kabir is a flow from which many fill their pots.” The question-answer session with Shabnam and the artistes threw up some interesting debates around Kabir’s relevance today. Can one confront the rioters in Gujarat or their political masterminds with Kabir’s humanist, non-dual position or has the politics of divisiveness gone too far for such appeals to conscience to work?
Relevance today

Another member of the audience intervened to say that Kabir, who lived in another time and political context, cannot provide single-point solution to all the political questions of today. Speaking to the students at Anekal, Kannada writer S.G. Siddaramiah said that we need to keep alive “Kabir conscience” not as a one-stop shop for communal amity and peace, but as one of the many important voices of sanity. Kabir’s poetry and philosophy cut through divisiveness and orthodoxy like a bolt of lightening. In one of the scenes of “Had-Anhad”, Ayaz advises Shabnam not to “just make a project out of Kabir.” Speaking to the audience in Bangalore, he said that Kabir is like a huge elephant and all his seekers are blind men trying to make sense of the form by clinging to one part each. “I am hanging on to the one leg, and Shabnam to one tusk,” he said, obliterating any notion of hierarchy between seekers of Kabir. One could well imagine the students from Anekal, the whirling girl at the festival and Linda hanging on to different parts of the same elephant!


How would Kabir himself react to being compared to an elephant? Would he laugh and say he is but an ant? After all, in one of his most intricately crafted dohas, he describes his Nirgun god as one “who listens intently to the sound of anklets on an ant’s feet.”

(Log on to www.kabirproject.org for more details on the project.)