Identity - creativity: Who will you be?
A is a young woman, twenty four years old, whom K has known for about four years. She is Indian. At the beginning of this vignette, K and his colleagues worked quite a bit in India. K, at that time, ran a small scenario unit at an industrial non-governmental organization, where the members were exploring, through stories about the future, how a sustainable world might look and what challenges and opportunities it might present for industry. Business, of course, is concentrated in the rich parts of the world, but their hunch was that the really populated parts of the world mattered more. Fortunately, one of K's colleagues, B, had spent a year working in India some time ago and she offered her connections.
B and K traveled to Mumbai in the spring of 1996 to find out how serious the interest in an Indian scenario project, which people had expressed to B on an earlier visit, really was. During that visit, they had some time to spare and they met A for lunch. She had just finished her Diploma in Commerce and , like many people at that stage in their lives, was confused about what to do next. For A had choices. Choices that were available until very recently only to the nobility, i.e. the one in ten thousand, but are now available to one in six, even in India.
Born into a family of means, and having been raised by parents who themselves had been educated in a different culture, A had lived a life removed from material needs and poverty. Hence, she had time and was ready, in a vague sense, to pay attention to identity, relation, purpose and legacy. Yet the frame of her parents, her culture and her upbringing was still one of scarcity. Identity: you are a woman; relation: to marry a handsome man, a few years older, who can support you; purpose: to be of service to him; and legacy: a few children.
The messages were subtle, and most likely not clearly understood even by those sending them out. They would pop up, almost innocently, at dinner, for example, in a question, expressed casually, as an afterthought: "You know, A, next Tuesday I have to go to N. Why don't you come along and we can take a little time to look at wedding saris."
A, though not clear herself, had ideas that did not involve weeding saris and accepted, on the spot, the offer of a job as in intern in C, in Switzerland. K's group wanted to train her in what and how they did their work, so that if the scenario project in India were to come true, the group would have a close member of the team on the ground. A's mother, though supportive from an intellectual point of view, had to swallow hard from an emotional one. But she did, and A arrived in C a few months later - time that had been spent filling out many forms and getting them approved.
A took to the work in no time, but two difficulties arose. The easier one of the two was A's brother, D. D was older by a few years, working in India. While A was paid merely internship wages in Switzerland, which can be barely enough to survive on, they were of course enormous when converted to Indian rupees. Thus A, a woman and a younger sibling earned significantly more than her older brother. A question of honor, if not the very natural order of things was raised by that fact. It was quite amazing to K, as an outsider, to see this issue emerge in a family who, when asked, was for equality, opportunity and merit and against traditional male - female roles of any kind. A second interesting things was that all this happened virtually without words: body language, a hesitation, a shrug, a questioning frown. And when A asked if something was wrong, i.e. when she verbalized the discomfort, she was reassured that, of course, nothing at all was wrong, what could she be possibly referring to?
Earlier, K had mentioned that this was the easier of the difficulties and in the end, a simple, straightforward reminder of purchasing power parity - the comparison of incomes not only by the exchange rate, but also by taking into account what things actually cost where you earn and spend your money. was enough to resolve the tension between A and D. When I say easy, I do not mean to imply that this happened without anger, yelling, restless sleep and tears, all I mean is that it did get resolved.
The second problem involved E, A's boyfriend. A and E had been together for some time, even during the years E studied in the United States and they saw each other only a few weeks each year. The history of sons leaving home for a few years, to get educated, to get experience, to understand in their bones about the vast gulf between cultures, that history is a much longer one than that of women doing the same. So, when E was abroad and A was at home, the natural order of things was not challenged. Once A left, however - and not to be with E (!) - it was. The language to express the confusion, the disorientation and the discomfort did not exist. Because the hurt came from a layer, a past, that had 'officially' ceased to matter, even exist. The layers that did exist were those of two modern young people in love with each other.
Yet that past reared its head: How can a young woman leave home and live - alone - in a big city a continent away? What does she do after work? Whom does she see? How late does she stay out? And why is she not waiting at home for E to return?
It was odd for K to sense this from E - odder still to feel that the same questions were inside of A - deep, subconscious, irritating, yet at the same time very present. Identity - who are you - and relation - how do you behave - are not easy in a world of abundance when you no longer have the constraint of survival. In that world, you could grumble, complain, rebel, but the constraint was there - a frame within which patterns, language and behavior existed that you could use. The world of abundance, on the other hand, reminded K of a line from a song by Leonard Cohen: "Follow me, the wise man said, but he walked behind."
Now, years later, A and E are still together as a couple, still not married, still some geographical distance apart. They are part of a generation who are creating the frame, i.e. the language and behavior, in which countless others will find themselves as they discover, shape and reveal their identity in a world free of material constraints.
A's story of identity is still not over. Our project in India never did come together because, as an Indian friend said, 'the stars were not properly aligned', and A, after becoming the longest serving intern in history, decided to go back to school. Her heart was set on two schools in London, both of which, to make a long story short, rejected her. It was one of the first times in her life when A did not get what she set out to get. A devastating blow to her, made especially difficult because she had not made any fallback plans. When you always get what you want, you do develop, an arrogance would some call it, but let's call it an instinct to 'go for' only one or two from your list of top choices. Experience has taught you that already the second alternative is most likely a wasted effort, since you always get your first pick.
Being rejected was a wake-up call, older and und supposedly wiser people would say and nod their heads in dignity. 'A pain in the ... you know what' said A and nodded hardly at all. But through the help of a friend, A managed to get accepted in an engineering school, studying systems thinking and being taught by a professor from Pakistan. Those who know a little bit of the history of the Indian subcontinent will not miss the irony of that situation.
While systems thinking is, K believes, one of those basic skills needed in an abundant world, the reaction A got was: 'Systems what?', 'Engineering school, for a girl?', 'Are you quite sure you are making the right choice?', 'You'll be twenty five by the time you finish. Do you really think you need an engineering degree at that time?' and tactfully, the 'because a woman should be happily married by then' was left unsaid. A went anyway and now, two years later, needs to find a job - you see how the story continues.
Upon rereading what he had written, K felt the story read like a victim story, doesn't it: poor A, misunderstood, getting thoroughly mixed signals, supported only grudgingly, future uncertain, and still not married while her age cohort is well on their way to marital bliss, children and the good life.
But actually, it is a story about heroes. Heroes who live in one frame and help create the next one. All the actors, A, her boyfriend E, her brother D, her parents, all of them are, though deeply rooted in the past material frame, deeper in fact than they had ever thought possible, are struggling as best as they can to deal with A's search for her identity. 'You raised me to be who I wanted to be. Now help me find out', she seems to be saying. And by rejecting the answers of the past she is making it at times painfully clear how much we still to this day rely on those answers - even if outwardly we present an image of having moved far, far beyond them.
A happens to be a young Indian woman, but hers is not an Indian story, nor a story about women. Hers, so far, is the story of how extraordinarily difficult it is to find answers to these two simple questions: Who are you? How do you behave? - once the constraint, the straight jacket perhaps, of material want is gone. There is indeed a comfort, a highly seductive comfort, in the way things were. Not to succumb to that, out of the naïveté of youth, out of the headaches that have become so unbearable because we insist on driving with our reading glasses on, or out of a vague and unspoken feeling that we do have enough and that there must be more out there than material satisfaction, that is indeed heroic.
The stories of A, and of others like her, may one day become as familiar to us as the story of Galileo, of Kepler or of Giordano Bruno - who at great personal risk challenged the dominant frames of their day, and in doing so, helped establish a new one.