DailyPost 2482
RIDING ROUGHSHOD
While most Indians are not proficient in a riding a Harley Davidson or an Arabian horse professionally, attitudinally they would love to ride roughshod whenever they get a chance. Even worse the look for opportunities where they can display this ability to all. It happens in families, communities, enterprises, other organizations, politics, governance and the nation itself. Not only people with this streak practice it vociferously given a chance, they love to make it known to all. If someone talks about this ability of theirs, they are very happy about it, though they might not express.
What is riding roughshod? Having you way through not on the basis of merit, expertise, some broad consensus and leadership can be termed as riding roughshod. Riding roughshod is antithetical to a democratic mindset and becomes a clear-cut bottleneck in the spread and practice of democratic values. Lack of democratic values has been doing immense damage to the functioning of our governance mechanism itself. Our behaviour and practice have to be in consonance with the values the country legally professes. Only then the furtherment of our goals and aspirations are likely to happen.
Ignorance / incompetence with a super inflated ego is the sure recipe to disaster. This is precisely what riding roughshod does. To influence people proactively and purposefully is the most difficult thing to do, that is what the riding roughshod practitioners realize pretty early and so this behaviour becomes their via media to success and power. They are so high on ego, that are they are forced to take this route. Any amount of counselling, advice and wisdom, does not come to any use for them. They slowly become averse to criticism. They are pre-decided that they don’t need any change, leave aside any improvement whatsoever.
Riding roughshod also indicates a know all attitude, which could not have been true anytime in history, more so in the current times. We are living through our lives in a knowledge economy, becoming further transformative as we move into the hyper technology age. Knowledge and expertise are in fully play, ably supported by artificial intelligence. The riding roughshod practitioners are not even on the fringes on this revolution. They would not like to be. They are averse to transparency, logic and rationale. Attitudinally, they feel outlandish if they have to defend /prove their point of view, leave aside make efforts to get it consented upon by a larger audience. Criticism is their first and their last enemy.
RIDING ROUGHSHOD PRACTITIONERS IN LARGE NUMBER OF PUBLIC DOMAIN AREAS HAVE BROUGHT US TO THE CUSP OF DISASTER.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.