DailyPost 2288
DEVIOUS SUCCESS
The superlative successes and breaking glass ceiling epithets, with people delivering on their passion like never before, and rags to riches stories, stories of penance to altruism and diehards set out to change the world at any cost and most of them successful being successful at it, gives us feeling that we are living in the golden age of success. Has the world really changed or the generation of super performers have just been born. This stupendous success if being found and experienced in every field from politics to the supposedly silent world of social enterprise.
If this momentum were to be maintained, it would not be very long when most of problems would get sorted out. The additional feather in the cap generally of these super performers is that they are able achieve it on their own, seems solo effort. Is the social media revolution at the back of it? Or may be things were not being publicized earlier, Or is it stage managed Or is this mode of success in recent times in tune with the present day world? Whatever might be the answer, it looks and feels surreal, not the real organic success we have seen for life, and have stayed even beyond the person for several generations.
The issue of the matter whether the success is real, surreal, organic, hard earned or is it outright devious? In the normal understand of things devious success would sound like inherently contradictory, but it not so, and there are any number of examples and even more which have not seen the light of the public domain and consequently public knowledge. What is devious success? It is creating success where it does not exist and it is taken through a well calibrated route to give a feel to the world, of outstanding success having been achieved. It can also be a mix of right and wrong means, ending with wrong. It also means that having achieved the right away, you start doing every wrong / gain that can be extracted out of that success.
Scheming your success where means don’t matter is devious success. Taking deliberate fake/wrong steps to smoothen the route to success, is devious success. To be emboldened to declare success over and over again, with literally nothing to substantiate is devious success. Sustaining fake success is the epitome of devious success. Elizabeth Holmes to Chanda Kochhar are examples of different variants of this game. You do everything that should not be done, over and over again, pull it successfully any number of times in the public, getting mind boggling recognition and fame is devious success. Creating a hype to hide wrongdoings and claiming out of the world achievement is devious success. You can regale stories from Arindam Chaudhuri to FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried. Innumerable such stories of success getting busted and even much more under the wraps.
HAS DEVIOUS SUCCESS BECOME THE REAL SUCCESS?
Sanjay Sahay
Wish you a very Happy New Year 2023