Everything means nothing

Armies of specialists have taken over. Consultants are grabbing all there is to grab. Experts walk around with pedestals looking for a place to set up their shop. You really need to be a wizard in one thing or the other to get attention. Survival is difficult if you cannot prove that you are an authority in whatever it is that you are doing. Social interactions have thick dark clouds of professional jargon that are making everything else opaque and sometimes inaudible.

In such an environment can anyone even dare to get up and announce, ‘Hey! I’m not the best but I know enough to be able to help anyone.’ No one is ready to listen. I once attended a one-day workshop on writing and was surprised to find only specialists thronging the small room. There was one who said she has always had a magical touch with mono-syllabic poetry. Another was deep into historical fiction revolving around only the era of the last Moghul emperor of Delhi. There were specialist writers from fields as diverse as saving the tiger with eighty or more stripes to those who photographed only obtuse angles in heritage buildings that were now hotels. There were those who loved penning ten-word thrillers and those who wrote paragraphs only on famous quotes. Even the person conducting that workshop was someone who specialized in writing travel tales that resulted from budgets less than 500 INR in a day.

I was mortally afraid of even speaking out. When my turn came to introduce myself, I blurted out, ‘I write on everything.’

‘Everything? What’s that?’ the congregation chorused, as if wanting to pounce on this new, unheard object before the queue became too long. They were more interested in knowing ‘everything’ and their laptops and smartphones were hurriedly put on their internet-readiness to be able to send their word across to their world with captions like: ‘The first to interpret everything!’ or ‘We reached everything before everyone else did!’

Yes, it is a mad, mad world that we inhabit today.

The days of the general physician who was a family doctor with a solution for everything from a sore throat to a sore thumb are sadly over. A few days back I had a simple headache and my ordeal began from the registrations desk. They didn’t know which specialist to send me to and I was finally asked to go from the physician to the neurologist to the neuro-surgeon to the psychologist to the psychiatrist and to departments like radiology and strange sounding scans until I discovered the exit and went back home to sleep that headache away.

Even the helper-around-the-house who fixed taps and then climbed the stool to change the condenser of the fan and then stepped down to go and give the railing a new coat of shining paint exists only in the stories in my mind. Does anyone really help anyone these days? They are all specialists who charge a special fee to even listen to my woes. The other day I called for an electrician and he came with a team of experts because the wiz dealing with electronic chokes obviously doesn’t touch modular switches, and obviously not one of them is going to just clean the dirty exhaust fan in the kitchen. ‘We are specialists,’ they all said, ‘you’d better call the cleaning specialists.

‘The cleaning specialists?’ I asked. My mind is in a perpetual daze in these days of specializations. A friend told me that he was looking for a math tutor for his kid in class VII and he was told that there were no math tutors around now. There were specialists in topics like co-ordinate geometry, factoring quadratics, number theory and so on. The friend thought for a while and then asked, ‘What about some specialist in circles and squares?’ He was obviously asked to leave immediately as the tutorial services did not like his attitude.

I guess we have reached a stage when even loafing around is no longer the domain of generalists. You see, a PaharGanj loafer isn’t the right sort to be loafing around in Greater Kailash and his intrusion there will only make him look like an oaf without the right degree. It is this race to specialize that has now caused a jam even on Mount Everest – everyone wants to be a specialist mountaineer and summiting the Everest is like getting the most wanted doctorate. Talking of trekking, there are long queues trudging every contour of every mountain and soon we are going to have people claiming to be VoF (Valley of Flowers) specialist trekkers who only walk on the outer edge of that mountain path!

Specialization isn’t a panacea, but a disease. At the rate at which this obsession with specialization has afflicted us all, we are soon going to have new openings for doctors dealing with only stress disorders resulting from writing 3-word short fiction, civil engineers who specialize only on the construction of roofs with pre-fabricated concrete slabs, which also take ipaf courses near me, and tarot card readers who predict only for months with 31 days. You get the point, I presume.

#SpecialistVsGeneralist

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Arvind Passey
03 June 2019