As you hold this issue of the BCAJ in your hands, it’s a new F.Y.! Perhaps the most uncertain and traumatic year of our lives is finally behind us. Each one of us has come out stronger. From teamwork to IT infra to client interface – every facet was challenged and most of us would have inoculated our professional practice with greater resilience and therefore become more immune than we were in March, 2020.
Just as the seasons turn, so will this phase pass. Let’s remember these precious words of Maya Angelou: We need Joy as we need air. We need Love as we need water. We need each other as we need the earth we share. The ‘Formula for LIFE’ is that simple.
However, the environment around us puts immense pressure to keep things complex, and sometimes in the name of making them simple! I have realised that if one were to engage in bare minimum socio-economic activity, one will be swamped by the need for keeping timelines, dealing with emails, passwords and OTPs and so much coordination. I looked at my situation for a middle-class SMP practitioner with a typical family size of five to six.
I have perhaps twenty passwords / MPINs / numbers to remember – from banks / credit cards, DPs, to emails, portals (electricity, municipality, mutual funds [MFs], digital magazines, etc.) to social media. Add to that family members’ passwords, especially for older parents. Take the example of CAS (common account statement) – one email ID can be used for only three CASes. So if you have senior parents, children and an HUF, you will need quite a few email IDs and mobile numbers.
Then there is ‘stalking’ by deadlines. If you paid advance tax, then there is the KYC deadline, then a membership fees renewal timeline. And then a mediclaim is due, and then PT. Earlier, Profession Tax (which is nothing short of a nuisance for an income-tax payer and should rather be taken with income tax) could be paid for five years, but it is now allowed only for one year.
And then when I look at my mobile phone I see an incessant stream of SMSes – we are paying your FD interest on ‘ddmmyy’, we have paid your FD interest, we have issued TDS Certificate on the interest paid to you. I recently bought something and I received eight SMSes before the product arrived, telling me all about the order received, removal from the shelf, about to be shipped, just shipped, soon reaching my city and so on.
Then there are OTPs. Even a courier delivery requires an OTP before it parts with it. And for a festival such as Holi I receive a message (SMS and email) from M&M, HDFC to Zandu – whether I had dealt with them for FD or Chyavanprash – they want to wish me for Holi and help me to remember them. (That’s about 10 to 20 vendors x 8 festivals / holidays). While India has reached the Moon and Mars, its DND still doesn’t work!
While many wish to just remind you, there are others who convey that you have missed a timeline. Mumbai PUC sent an SMS minutes before the expiry of the PUC to share the bad news that I will wake up to a day of violating PUC norms.
I guess we are today a sum total of numbers, passwords, OTPs, and timelines to keep. Without them, we are dysfunctional, non-entity, yet they make so much clutter and crowd our time and psyche. One can easily lose something big if one didn’t have a way to deal with them: reading-dealing-deleting, it could be simply overwhelming. Interruptions and distraction today are a form of destruction. Beware, for they are detrimental to deep work.
Wishing you a happy 2021-22!
