The Crisis Of Confidence Among The Competent - Inspirational Anecdotes From My Life

Over the course of my life, I have come across a few people whose breathtaking confidence has remained with me, and I always seek to draw inspiration from them. I believe I'm fairly competent at what I do, and I'm not a particularly diffident person either, but I know I could achieve a lot more if I had even greater confidence in myself.

According to the Ramayana, Hanuman was the only one of the vaanara army with the ability to jump across the ocean to Lanka. Yet he did not realise his own capability, and had to be strongly encouraged by his fellows before he could find it in himself to make the leap. The episode is a metaphor for the plight of the competent in every culture and in every age.

Here are some examples of people who impressed me enormously with their confidence.

1. "I will hit all ten, da"

When I was 18 and in the National Cadet Corps (NCC) in India, I attended a camp called the Vayu Sainik camp in Dodballapur (Karnataka). There were NCC units participating from all over India. Each unit sent 10 cadets to the camp. There were 5 units from Tamil Nadu. The IIT Madras unit I belonged to was called the "4 TN (Tech) Air Squadron".

There were many competitions during the 2 week camp, and one of them was skeet shooting. Competing cadets had to shoot 10 clay pigeons that were fired from a machine (or as many of them as they could).

An NCC Air Wing cadet skeet shooting

The evening before the competition, a cadet called Vasant from 2 TN Air Squadron came to visit us in our tent. He was the only cadet representing Tamil Nadu in this national event, so our unit was rooting for him to do well.

I remember asking Vasant if he was nervous before such a big and tough competition, and I'll never forget his answer.

"I will hit all ten, da!"

He wasn't faking his confidence either. i could tell from his general manner that he was relaxed and genuinely confident.

In the event, he only got 8 out of 10, but if I remember right, he did get one of the top 3 places in that competition.

8 out of 10 was pretty creditable of course, showing that his confidence in himself was not entirely misplaced. I've seen other people whose confidence in themselves wasn't at all matched by their ability, but Vasant was obviously not one of them.

I find his example inspiring because I believe that level of confidence can make a difference in the areas where one does have decent ability. Holding oneself back when one can actually do a great job would be a waste of potential.

2. "I have now reached the stage when I can work on any machine"

I had just started working at CMC Bombay in 1987. A senior of mine from IIT Madras, Suresh (nicknamed "paTTai" for the prominent horizontal stripes of vibhuti (ash) he used to wear on his forehead), had joined CMC a few years before me, and had become a respected expert on IBM mainframes.

Sometime in 1987 or 1988, Microsoft made history by advertising in Indian newspapers for US-based positions. Such an opportunity for Indian software professionals (to be directly recruited by a US-based company) had never arisen before, and the advertisement sent ripples of excitement throughout the Indian software industry.

I was working late at the office one day, and a bunch of us went to a restaurant for dinner. Pattai was with us that day, on a short visit from his base in CMC Calcutta. One of our colleagues, Rajeev Dhanavade, broached the topic of Microsoft's ad with furtive excitement, and said, "I wonder if any CMC people would have applied..."

Pattai spoke up, loudly and clearly as was his wont, "I've applied, ya, I've applied!"

"But your experience is in mainframes. Microsoft is in PCs and microprocessors..." Rajeev said, implicitly expressing his opinion that the job perhaps wasn't a good fit for Pattai's expertise.

Pattai drew himself straight up in his chair and said, "See, I have now reached the stage when I can work on any machine!"

Epilogue: Pattai got the job with Microsoft and relocated to Redmond.

I've also seen Pattai walk into the CMC Bombay computer centre as if he were the boss, demand of the operators to see what jobs were running on the mainframe, and then question the Divisional Manager (the top IT executive in the region) about them. I've seen the DM answering him apologetically.

Of course he was competent, but that level of confidence which enabled him to open any door and walk in as if he owned the place got him results above and beyond what mere competence would have. It's something that other competent people can learn from.

3. "If I get a letter from HR, I will think I must have got a promotion or an increment"

When I was working at the National Bank of Dubai, I once got an internal letter from the HR department. It turned out to be nothing very important, but the moment I got the letter and saw where it was from, I was filled with dread.

I turned to my colleague Swastika Shukla, who was seated at the desk to my right, and confessed to her that letters from HR always filled me with dread. "I always think I'm about to lose my job."

Swastika scoffed. "If I get a letter from HR, I will think I must have got a promotion or an increment," she said.

I believe her. She had a pretty unflappable attitude. On another occasion when she heard me being overly polite on the phone with a user who had called to complain about a problem with one of the applications I was responsible for, she asked me whom I was talking to. When I told her, she once again replied with contempt, "Users? You should shout at them!"

To this day, I struggle to have that calm attitude of entitlement, and often use Swastika's statements to put myself in a stronger frame of mind.

4. "I'm a B.Com.!"

This didn't happen to me but to my wife Sashi. Sashi is highly qualified in her field. In addition to Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Commerce, she is also a Chartered Accountant. The Indian CA exam is notoriously hard to pass, and only about 3% of the candidates qualify in any given year. (Subsequently, Sashi also passed the Australian CPA exam after migrating to Australia.)

When Sashi joined me in Dubai in mid 1995, she responded to a local job ad for the position of an accountant. When she was seated in the lobby waiting for her turn to be called into the interview room, she struck up a conversation with another Indian girl who had applied for the same job.

Feeling a bit nervous about the job, Sashi asked the other girl if she felt confident about being able to do whatever was listed in the job description. The girl's reply to Sashi was a classic, and something we laugh over to this day.

"Of course! I'm a B.Com.!"

I tease Sashi whenever she expresses diffidence about any new assignment at work, "You're only a CA. Now, if only you'd been a B.Com., you could easily have done it."

As it happened, Sashi got a much better job at Schlumberger a bit later, so we never did find out if the other girl got that job that she was so confident about. I'm sure she did.

Confidence has nothing to do with qualifications. The most brilliant and well-qualified people can feel terribly diffident, and those with barely enough qualifications can be supremely confident.

These are the people I remember every now and again. They inspire me and fill me with awe.

A Socially-Engineered Loss Of National Confidence

A recent article by Jeff Smith in The Diplomat ("Andaman and Nicobar Islands: India’s Strategic Outpost") underscored to me yet again that India's strength and strategic potential are underestimated by its own leaders and strategic thinkers. Foreign analysts like Smith who look at India with unbiased eyes (and with none of the baggage that Indians carry) see a much more powerful country than Indians themselves do, and are frankly surprised that India hasn't done more to exploit its potential. Smith says about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI):

With such premier real estate, Western observers might expect the ANI to be a cornerstone in India’s maritime strategy; a firewall against threats to the east and a power-projection platform serving India’s interests in the Pacific. And yet, by all accounts the ANC is only modestly equipped militarily.

Where Indian voices are heard arguing for boldness, they often tend to swing to the other extreme, of bravado and over-reach.

Others in the military establishment see the ANC as a “trump card” against China, ideally positioned to interdict Chinese oil supplies from the Gulf and Africa in any potential Sino-Indian confrontation. Some 80 percent of China’s oil imports currently pass through the Strait of Malacca. Retired Rear Admiral Raja Menon argues: “Today they are merely SLOCS [Sea Lines of Communication]; tomorrow they will be the Chinese Jugular…. [$10 billion] spent on strengthening the Indian Navy’s SLOC interdiction capability would have given us a stranglehold on the Chinese routes into the Indian Ocean.”

To quote Darryl Kerrigan from The Castle, "tell 'em they're dreamin'". A "stranglehold on Chinese routes" is probably a pipe-dream, but a credible threat to Chinese shipping in the Indian Ocean can definitely elicit more accommodation from China in its territorial claims on Arunachal Pradesh, for example. A more measured assessment of what lies within India's reach is lacking.

It takes a foreigner to see with both clarity and realism what Indians cannot. India has lost the ability to think boldly and strategically, yet realistically. I think 600 years of foreign conquest and domination have turned Indian planners and thinkers into timid, risk-averse souls who only think of defence and survival, and who occasionally compensate with grandiose plans full of bravado without the wherewithal to carry them out.

I have commented before on the carrot-and-stick lessons that Mughal and British rule must have taught Indian rulers. Those who opposed the foreign conqueror were mercilessly hounded and crushed (e.g., Hemu, Rana Pratap, Tipu Sultan, the Rani of Jhansi, Kittur Chennamma). Those who cooperated with the foreign conqueror were rewarded and allowed to flourish (e.g., Rana Man Singh of Amer and Maharaja Sayyaji Rao Gaekwad III of Baroda). I believe it was a form of social engineering that taught successive generations of Indians to be servile and never to raise their head or their voice against authority.

From time to time, a worm will turn, but this rebellion is often impulsive and driven by momentary bravado, rather than by longstanding confidence, and such attempts at "lashing out" are ultimately unsuccessful. India's greatest heroes are tragic ones. Indians see greater romance in tragedy than in success. Undefeated kings like Raja Kumbha and Maharaja Ranjit Singh are not feted as much as tragic losers Prithviraj Chauhan, the aforementioned Rani of Jhansi and sepoy Mangal Pandey. The Indian chararacter is to either live with dishonour, or die with honour. Living with honour doesn't seem to have as much appeal.

The recent publication of the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report on the Indo-China war makes pretty much the same scathing critique of the Indian leadership in 1962 and earlier. They lacked the imagination and confidence to settle the border question with China in an amicable fashion when China approached India as one newly liberated country to another. And they thought, without justification, that they could take on the superior Chinese military. They paid the price, and the 1962 war probably reinforced the lessons of history in the Indian psyche, that Indians were an inferior race of people who could never hope to prevail militarily against "real" powers, and would have to negotiate in obsequious fashion to survive. Even against a smaller adversary like Pakistan, India has shown a level of restraint that is surprising. It may be fair to say that with almost any other country in India's position, a hostile and India-baiting Pakistan would have quickly ceased to exist.

Thus it continues to the present day. A quiet confidence and a realistic assessment of one's strength, as well as a multi-decade plan to become a Great Power, seem beyond the ken of today's leaders and thinkers. A recent strategic defence publication from an Indian think tank is typically reactive and assumes that India is always in the position of responding to situations outside its control ("The Long View From Delhi" ). It doesn't seem to strike the authors that India can do things to change its security environment and doesn't have to fearfully wait and watch to see what the US and China do.

What a decline from the time of the Cholas! That was when Indian naval power was projected as far afield as Cambodia, and vassal states like the Khmer were protected from their enemies by an Indian naval task force of several hundred ships. In relative terms, the India of today appears in sorry shape.

It is said that confidence is the sweet spot between despair and arrogance. It's high time Indian thinkers and planners found that sweet spot.