Emotions, is a powerful word. Is it good or bad? Imagine a world without love, compassion, pleasure, joy. Would it be a world worth living? Then imagine a world with hate, anger, violence, greed etc. Now would this be worth living? Emotions around us can make a world a beautiful place to live in or a curse to spend time in. A human being is nothing but a bundle of emotions. For some people first type of emotions reign supreme and some others the second type. But generally we all have a combination of both. The reason I decided to think and write about this issue was a statement that we often hear – why does so and so doesn’t think rationally, he is always taking emotional decisions?

What I’ve observed in real life is that emotions are far more powerful than we want to acknowledge, where most actions of the mankind are driven primarily by emotions and not by some ‘rational logic’. And if we look around we will find that not only within the four walls of families we behave emotionally but at much larger level of leadership – organizational, national and international – emotions triumph over ‘cold logic’. What else can explain a leader feeling happy to see people prostrating in front of him? Isn’t it is just his emotional need to see everybody bow to him and feel superior to them? Then we find that a leader has particular like or dislike for a section or class of people. He would cloak this purely emotional thought in some ‘rational logic’. All such emotional thoughts converted into actions have far reaching impact on all of us. Think of Ramayana & Mahabharata, both being result of an overpowering emotional thought. Often we ‘rationalize’ our ‘emotional logic’ and convince ourselves of the righteousness of this logic. More we think about it, more convinced we become. We then want others to agree with the same ‘rationale’ and any contrary view is taken as an affront.

We all have an emotional current in ourselves. This current may be in multitude of directions like love for all, love for own blood, love for self, love for money, desire to dominate, desire to be loved, the list is endless. In fact, we may have multiple currents too. This emotional current then starts reflecting in our actions. Sometime, though not often, this emotional current may support rational, or let’s say, emotionally detached conduct in view of few people. What I’ve generally observed is that it is almost impossible to win over this emotional current by plain, cold, unemotional logic. Emotions are too powerful to succumb to dreary and cold logic. Let me give few examples from organizational context. A person has a boss who genuinely feels he is the boss and his wisdom is supreme. Not only this, he would insist his wisdom to prevail – in the lighter vein, I dare say most bosses are in this category. A situation where he is patently wrong will not only make the life of subordinates difficult but result in organizational loss. The key here lies managing the emotions of the boss in a manner that he accepts the logic of the subordinate as his own. Allow the boss to feel that he is the winner. Subordinate may lose in getting the glory of that decision but at least the right decision shall prevail and internally the subordinate shall be satisfied that it was his idea that finally won.  This way the situation becomes manageable. Similarly, there may be boss with high emotional current to earn more money by any means. Such currents are difficult to manage for people who want to play straight. If the boss wants an honest subordinate to facilitate corrupt money it will be unmanageable situation for the subordinate. So we see two kinds of emotional currents in others, one is manageable & second is not. Either way, for both situations it is essential to understand the emotional current in that other person and then decide to manage it to your benefit, allow it for some time and wait for the right moment to take any other course of action. This discourse assumes that there is an emotional current in the boss and subordinate is epitome of rationality. Often we, or let’s say subordinate, shall have his own emotional current. For example, the subordinate is a capable, confident and no nonsensical person who calls a spade a spade. Such a person would feel suffocated with a dominating boss. If we have a situation of high emotional current to dominate in the boss and subordinate both, I, me, mine, types, we have a ready recipe for disaster. But a successful boss often gives direction to raw emotions of a creative subordinate to get excellent results for the organization.

In a domestic situation the impact of emotional current gets accentuated manifold. Reasons could range from higher emotional attachment, expectations, ambiguous hierarchies and supposedly longer duration of togetherness, at least in Indian context. To give an example, there’s a child who’s hot tempered. While he is a child we may convince him to our point of view. As he grows older we may become slightly strict & still ensure the situation is manageable. As he grows even older parents start getting complaints from school and outsiders since he  behaves well at home but outside he has a free run. After some time, it is the turn of parents to be scared of him. All this is due the emotional current which at one time was manageable but later on became difficult to manage. While in India we would like to believe that upbringing & ‘sanskar’ are most important it may not be necessarily true. We need to recall the film ‘Deewar’ and see the difference in Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor who were brothers with same upbringing and still were so different. We can see many such cases around us in real life. So while upbringing is important and is one of the factors that shape our emotional current, finally it is the individual emotions that remain supreme.

With this reality of emotions being supreme, we as a family, society, country and indeed the world are greatly impacted by extreme emotions. On one hand extreme emotional composure gives us great thinkers and statesmen and on the other hand almost entire violence and destruction is a result of the other extreme. To give you an example, most terrorism and naxalism is rooted in the emotional feeling of ‘victimisation’. Once a person is convinced about his being a victim he can perpetrate enormous misery on others and still justify his actions. Such emotions are very hard to manage. No wonder we use the words ‘extremist’ alongside. In various degrees we have such extremists around us in day to day life. It is just that most stay slightly below the threshold to be noticed by the world at large. I’ve heard of very few examples where people like ‘Ashoka the Great’ or ‘Valmiki’ moved from one extreme to the other.  Even in their case there was one larger than life event that jolted them and changed their character. Normally when we hear about surrender of dacoits, extremists etc. most go back to their earlier days, particularly the ones who are ideologically or emotionally oriented. Only the ones who were there due to situational constraint eventually reform.

What I feel and am hinting at is that not only emotions are far more powerful than we normally credit them; there are some that can be ‘managed’ and some that need to be ‘countered’. The manageable ones maintain harmony and ‘countered’ ones not only create disharmony but lead to violence and destruction. It’ll be far more productive for us if instead of expecting logical conduct from others, we prepare ourselves for an emotional behaviour from people around us.

Having said, we also need to distinguish between ‘emotional outbursts’ and ‘emotional current’. When the outburst is a momentary lapse of an otherwise rational conduct we need not read much into it. But when it is supports the emotional current it becomes significant. Though example may not be appropriate, in case of violent crimes even the law distinguishes between momentary lapse of control and premeditated and planned action.

As my little thought of life I draw few lessons from this:

• We need to learn our own emotional current and try that detached unemotional mind doesn’t allow it to overpower it. As we used to pray in school, ‘doosaron ki jai se pehle khud ko jai karein’
• Try to understand the emotional current of the people we deal with, think and decide whether it can be managed or not and then plan how to respond. We will suddenly realize that by doing this we can influence the situation much better. Also, we may get to deal with ‘unmanageable emotional current’ too in this life, for which the necessary action plan will have to be drawn
• But most important is to realize that emotions rule the world, understand the emotions and plan to deal with them and not expect some ‘voice of reason’ to prevail

On the lighter side I feel men can learn from women how to read the emotions of ‘others’, while women can learn from men how to manage emotions. Understanding one’s own emotions though needs to be done by all.