What I Learnt from Blogging – Part III – Blog Post by Asrar Qureshi

Dear Colleagues!  Today is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #147. Pharma Veterans shares your wealth of knowledge and wisdom with others for the benefit of entire Pharma Community. It aims to recognize and celebrate the Pharma Industry Professionals. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please share your stories, ideas and thoughts. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

Continued from last……

Blogging is sharing.

And we, as a nation, are reluctant to share. You may say there is a lot of noise on the media. Too many people are trying to speak. Talk shows are particularly bad because participants leave decency behind and start cross talking, cutting each other and speaking into each other. It becomes real noise. All talk shows with multiple participants end up with poor quality noise. This is anything but sharing.

We do not share. We either ‘express’ our opinion, or ‘criticize’ others, or ‘dictate’ our mandate, or ‘bully’ our opponents. This is against the very spirit of sharing. Why does it happen so rampantly in our society? I can think of the following reasons.

1.     Lack of Trust. It is quite obvious that we do not trust each other. Our first thought about everyone is that they do not mean what they are saying. We start with the label of ‘cheater’ and then we may change it later if the other party proves so, or we affix it forever. Lack of trust stops us from sharing our thoughts. In organizational group meetings, participants keep silent and lot of precious time gets wasted. It is said that every alleged criminal is innocent until proven guilty. We do the opposite; we label ‘guilty’ first and then challenge them to prove otherwise, if they can. It looks like that this attitude is not based on experience; it is a reflection of our own orientation. We know we are not trustworthy, and we think no one else can be. Our elders, leaders, teachers, thinkers, intellectuals, scholars (including religious scholars) have shown time and again that they cannot be trusted, no matter what they say. Lack of Trust therefore has become a part of our psyche. We are wary of each other, we are on-guard all the time, and we are fearful of each other at all times. We rightly believe that sharing should not be done.

2.     Lack of Flexibility. Another hallmark of our society is rigidity, or lack of flexibility. We are a bunch are righteous, highly conscientious people. We cannot be wrong; so why shouldn’t we stick to our thoughts and ideas? This misplaced righteousness has stopped us from changing. Social scientist Dolly Chugh presented in Ted Talks recently on the topic as to how being a good person stops us from becoming a better person. She was referring to really good people who lose the opportunity to become better because of rigidity arising out of being good. In our society, our challenge is much greater. It is not just good people who refuse to change; no one wants to change. Lack of flexibility hurts in other ways also. It stops us from learning new skills (particularly soft skills), stops us from working as a team, stops us from collaborating and stops us from being kind to each other.

3.     Lack of Listening. We love to speak, with or without microphone. We love our voices, we love our thoughts, we love ourselves to the extent of being narcissists. Our corporate meetings stray far from the agenda; our meetings never follow scheduled timings; our speakers at any forum refuse to stick to allocated time, even when the bell keeps ringing. Our lack of listening is partly due to our obsession with speaking, partly due to self-belief in our righteousness, partly due to our rather poor view of most others and partly due to our overall poor social skills. Who can say better than us? Why should we listen? Apparently, there are not enough reasons to listen.

Sharing means the ability to listen to others and empathize with them and encourage them to speak their mind and try to understand their viewpoint. All bloggers may not be great believers in sharing, but every blog does have built-in space for comments of readers. Blogs in prestigious magazines trigger many healthy and active debates which is good for the authors and readers both.

To be continued…..