As I read about the recent suicide of Angad Paul, the owner of the failed British steel company Caparo, my mind travelled back to last year. The scene was the art exhibition of a children’s charity in London. Angad had come with his family – his parents, a glamorous wife and his beautifully inquisitive and wondrous little children. His daughter, in particular, wished to stay on longer at the exhibition and the doting father obliged while the other family members left.
British journalist Richard Kay, writing about Angad’s untimely death, revealed he was fire-fighting depression for many years. As I read articles reiterating the factoids of Angad’s fall from his swish London penthouse, I recalled him not as the scion of billionaire parents. I remembered him as a drummer – he told me how he was a drumming enthusiast. The sensitivity with which he chatted to me about non-monetary things was striking. And most of all, I remembered him as a father.
Accepted Angad’s company Caparo had gone into administration, yet he was still in the rare orbit of billions, he had a stunning wife, two adorable children, doting parents and a supportive family structure. Why would someone who seemingly had it all take such an extreme step?
Putting on Appearances
On the face of it, his life was enviable. But scratch the surface and questions take form. Do we understand what the pressure of inherited wealth feels like? Do we realise how identities can become mangled with the felt compulsion to keep up appearances at all costs? And how the appearance might buckle, when one endures mammoth failure to the image and that too in full public view? And how this buckling can make a person brittle?
We wear so many masks – for society and even within the family that at night we forget to take them off. The masks then become us. Like permanent make-up.
Do we even consider how disillusioning the process can be, especially for a meaning-seeking sensitive person, to discover it is only money that makes the world go around her/him? Angad’s tragic passing is a comment on the pressure we endure, more so in the Indian socio-cultural context, to live up to social images and lifestyles. As an Indian friend who is an entrepreneur recently put it to me, “We wear so many masks – for society and even within the family that at night we forget to take them off. The masks then become us. Like permanent make-up.”
The Impact on Psyche
This permanent makeup becomes toxic and when, at times, our endurance to put up with it creaks or we are challenged to remove it, the impact on our psyche is crushing. Our lives become duplicitous and emptier at best, or worse, we become hostage to worrying psychological and psychosomatically-induced physical illnesses. We become inverse shadows of who we really are.
Facebook is Fakebook – at least that’s how it is used in India.
Social media, at the epicentre of 21st century image-making, has exacerbated the compulsion of a masked life. Worryingly, this trend is more evident in India where people feel compelled to live up to societal images like projecting a strained marriage as blissful or a dysfunctional family as ideal. In the words of a Delhi-based lawyer, “Facebook is Fakebook – at least that’s how it is used in India.”
Constructed Lives
Image construction was previously the job of marketing and PR companies working to carefully-managed briefs for celebrities. Now social media has given each of us the platform to live a constructed life. Facebook, in particular, has become the key factory for masks – for image engineering and a repository for keeping it. But what impact does this have on us as individuals, on our relations and on life meaning?
Delhi-based psychotherapist Arpita Bohra explains, “There is a whole online persona that each person literally curates, through social media, mainly Facebook. You can choose your mask and keep updating it.”
Emotional Instability
Bangalore-based counselling psychologist Kanika Mehrotra alerts us to an extremely concerning trend. “Here in India, in both clinics and hospitals, we are noticing a huge trend of diagnosis of a condition called the ‘emotionally unstable personality disorder’. It is hypothesised that this condition is related to the changing nature of relationships due to technology. People with this problem have huge issues with trust, regulating emotions and managing relationships. Moreover, since the advent of Facebook and instant messaging, forming and breaking off relationships has donned a more fragile nature.”
Since the advent of Facebook and instant messaging, forming and breaking off relationships has donned a more fragile nature.
Mehrotra explained that in Western cultures disorders such as conversion and somatic disorders (psychosomatic symptoms that include seizures, paralysis and headaches) are becoming rarer. This is attributed to their more transparent ways of socialisation and bonding. Moreover, people in less socially repressive societies more readily seek clinical help with symptoms of the mind. Whereas in India the aspect of social stigma gets the better of us being honest about our feelings or seeking help.
Reclaiming Our Authentic Selves
Living up to a highly engineered social image does not forebode well for individual wellbeing. Easing our masks and nearing our authentic selves might require an insane degree of courage to begin with but in the long run it is the way to un-hindering Indian society from its rigid prescriptions.
What is society but the chain of which we are the individual beads.
When a society enables us to be authentic it has a directly proportional impact on us living a more inspired, richer life. If we each start taking baby steps, a shift in society will happen; after all, what is society but the chain of which we are the individual beads.
With Angad, if only his other roles, mask-less, had prevailed.
(The writer is a political and economic analyst)
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