Ego

I work for an organization that has made remarkable progress in the past decades and has, in many ways, changed the way India, and the world, banks. You can have great experiences in this organization. One of the company’s innovations is a quarterly video news magazine, through which the top management of the company communicates with the approx. 40k employees, among other updates. One such magazine covered our ex-chairman's address at one of the bank’s events. The point of this article is to capture my understanding, of the beauty with which he articulated the essence of EGO and its effect on our lives.

“Ego (or arrogance as expressed or vanity as observed) can be because of three reasons”, he said. “It can be because of wealth, beauty or knowledge”

Vanity, by nature, will blind one’s vision; alienate one from the world and thus one’s own life. Friends will become fewer and far apart; one would be surrounded by selfish people, who would eventually disappear at the time of redemption. Once disillusioned of the make-believe world one has been living in, the egoistic person experiences shock in understanding the futility of such pursuit. At this time, depending on how far one has gone from friends, one gets help to recover and get grounded. The magnitude of the shock and the distance from true friends are generally directly proportional to the length of time one has been egoistic. Longer the time spent in vanity, larger the shock and farther true friends would have gone.

The ego that arises due to beauty is probably the shortest lived. It will wither in comparison, or in time. In a fundamentally firm mind, the ego will also wither; the person shall age gracefully and go back to one's true friends. In a weak mind, the ego will grow into frustration and seclude the person. So there is a 50:50 chance of recovery from the drudgery of the ego effect, in this case.

The ego, that is due to wealth, will wither with one downturn in the finances. Even in this case, one has a 50:50 chance of recovery. The strong minded shall get well grounded, fight back and comeback only stronger and humbler. A weak mind would again force one into seclusion and bitterness.

The ego that arises from knowledge is the most dangerous. This does not give any chance for the person to recover. Knowledge, with age shall only grow. As knowledge grows, the ego will get reinforced. When the creative mind sees results to its ideas and efforts, and one is able to encash these ideas, it is but natural to start believing that one is invincible. With this, one’s vanity will increase till one becomes completely blind of the real world. This goes on for a long time. Normally one is already 60 or above by the time one is shocked out of this vanity. The shock is huge, due to the length of time one has been hibernating in such vanity. By this time all friends are gone, and the few left behind are not strong enough to help one recover. Trust me, this is one of the worst times in human life to face the fact of the futility of one’s pursuit in life, as most of the useful life is over. There might have been very few people who might have recovered from such a shock. It is not uncommon to see intellectuals secluding themselves from the world at older age. This is generally mistaken for superiority complex. It is actually true that these people exhibit superiority complex. The truth is also that superiority complex is actually a guise to hide inferiority complex, self doubt or self pity.

“So my dear friends, be wary of the ego that you all may get associated with, in this profession. Humility is reality. If you are capable of doing or knowing something, remember, a million others are capable of doing the same with different degrees of expertise. So nobody in this world is worthy of such ego”

After listening to this, I was shocked. “Oh, one has to be good looking or wealthy or knowledgeable to be egoistic is it?” I asked myself.