DailyPost 1929
PROFESSIONAL MADNESS – WHERE EVERYONE IS AN EXPERT
Knowing more and more about a discipline or part of it to a level where his views, response, feedback, action, delivery and communication is fully objective and empirical and beyond time and space, makes you an expert. Just being tied to a profession can vaguely make you a professional. But a true professional is born out of true expertise as explained. This expertise comes out of decades of hard work, getting mentored, learning, practicing, seeing stalwarts in action, handling field situations and being put to test over and over again. They add up into the competent human resources of the country, which can actually deliver. Quite contrary to this standard stance of nation, institution and capacity building, we are today in a quixotic situation, where either anyone can claim any expertise or anybody can challenge the expertise of a professional with demonstrated capability.
As the adage goes that when everybody claims to be an expert, that society has none. The ones who are, are left with no voice. The sanctity of the expertise is no longer valued and over a period of time this becomes the predominant culture. Everything is degenerated to cursory data, hearsay, some patchily created notes and in today’s world even googling even without knowing what to look for and how to navigate knowledge and connect. Research today at best comes down to Google searches, so the experts we find are aplenty, brandishing mobile, tab and laptops screens to prove their point. On the contrary expert remains completely unnerved by the situation around him and keeps on delivering endlessly.
The plagiarizing of expertise is the most worrying trend in this country today, as then the sentinels of knowledge and expertise would be lost for good. Some few and far between will not be able to carry the nation on their shoulders. Who will believe them contrary to the predominant culture of the day. What sells is what sells, can become the order of the day. Might be the belittling of expertise started with the 24/7, supposedly, news channels where all but experts discuss every single topic of the day. The experts, if any, are brought to just pepper up the dish. Political executives have for long been on this list. They had the divine right to claim expertise over everything and that can be the diktat of the land. Notes passed onto them by their subordinates became the sine qua non of all knowledge and expertise.
We can see that expertise bursting at its seams, as it was bound to be. Professional madness thus becomes the order of the day. Everyone claims to be an expert and his job is just to keep proving it. Lots gain acceptability to everybody’s peril. Politicians with some degrees and might be, some brush with the topic, area or issue surreptitiously become experts in those areas and the public domain starts accepting them, whereas Sreedharan took more than three decades for his expertise to be known in the public domain. In the current inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary world, it is easier for the fakes to camouflage. The political and decision making class has also learned to deal with the real experts shabbily. They can create their own experts, so where is the issue; when there is nobody to certify and validate.
IF YOU HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED AN EXPERTISE BASED FUNCTIONAL ECOSYSTEM, HOW WILL YOU BE ABLE TO DIFFERENTIATE.
Sanjay Sahay