The Cosmopolitan Leader
To be cosmopolitan is to be willing to violate your own understanding. This is of course quite contrary to the civilizing mission of an imperialist version that we witness, say, at the roots of America’s claims of fundamental rights to global leadership. To be cosmopolitan is not to say I will care for you, show you respect if you in return say become a Christian, or some other fundamentalist version of “be like me, do as I say, then you will be acceptable”. The cosmopolitan citizen is inclined to be more troubled about themselves: to ask, “Am I being sufficiently responsible towards the others I share this world with?” and “How can I make judgements about other people’s actions without disturbing and recognising my own cracked lenses and fractured perception of the world?”
I once wore a burka for the day. It is a memorably sensual day. To the world, I only revealed my greenish blue eyes and my hands. Everything else was covered. It was an experiment, an attempt at locating a momentary sense of “otherness”. As I walked around, I realised that hidden, I could perhaps wear anything underneath my cloth screen, and found teasing myself, wondering what that might be. As to anyone who may be given the right to see beneath this veiled me, I imagined a profoundly intimate and sacred encounter, a potent sense of literally and privately being unveiled. It was through this experience that I gained a hint of what some Muslim friends feel, that the contemporary Western expectation to be made-up, dressed-up, revealing one’s body, is perhaps no less repressive (dare I say more oppressive?) than the wearing of a burka is so lazily interpreted.
Here in Bombay many faiths and cultures commingle, creating a profoundly secular ambience. Yet none of us can entirely rid ourselves of dogma, the legacy of childhood injuries, or the influence of a skewed and dogmatic media. When I was looking for an apartment in Bombay, certain buildings were off limits. “Only Parsi’s in this building”, said the real estate agent, “Sorry we can’t look at this place, it’s no foreigners”. The intermingling is necessarily and invariably conditional.
As a foreigner, a foreign psychologist here, I am often asked to help build the international capability of leaders. As one CEO put it, when he asked me to work with one of his senior guys, “He doesn’t travel well, he’s just not cosmopolitan”. Of course the man he described is well travelled as his wallet bulging with “One World” and “Global Elite Club” airline cards suggests. He is if you like, cosmopolitan in a banal and parochial sense: his travels in London, in New York, are in the ghetto. He simply spends all of his time, wherever he is in the world, with other Indian friends from Bombay. This ghettoising is the greatest challenge to a sense of global citizenship, a retreat into a form of “interior exile” as Salman Rushdie puts it.
As the CEO and I explore what we actually mean by “To be cosmopolitan”, we play with the idea that it is a commitment of intention, to be loyal to a larger sense of “we” than merely one’s nation, one’s neighbourhood, one’s insular mind-set. It begs if you like, for some interior and lived state of global citizenship. “Do you see any signs that he is curious about other cultures, beyond the banal things like trying pasta?” I ask the CEO. At the heart of it, as many writers such as Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha remind us, there is a deeply moral dimension in cosmopolitanism, a moral attitude toward the world. It requires curiosity and the suspension of quick judgments. “Not really”, replies the CEO. “What about self-reflection?” I ask, “Any signs, such as asking you for feedback, or pointing out ways he needs to develop?” Limply, he replies, “No, not really”.
To be cosmopolitan demands the difficult work of self-examination. It calls for a commitment to distinguishing facts from cultural assumptions. It asks us to assume friendship with that which may feel deeply foreign, disorientating and to open-up to the ‘other’. It is an orientation towards the world that requires the exhausting effort of thinking, to explore what is, what might be universal, as Mendieta puts it, which must be “rearticulated, defended, expanded and made concrete”. It suggests the idea of the universal right and wrong, beyond the particular, must always be “held in suspension” to borrow Judith Butler’s words. It must never be concrete.
In speech, cosmopolitanism requires a framing in language, a disclosure of one’s position, one’s particularist lense on affairs, therefore revealing, owning up to, and giving recognition that my view is not absolute and always conditional. Again, like the last blog, I am making a bid that liberation exists in the language we choose; language that only can only develop and expand through some sort of deep commitment to learning. It speaks of “The way I see it, is”, “From my perspective”, “I notice that I don’t see this in the way you do”. To be cosmopolitan is to use better words, and sentences that open up dialogue rather than shut it down. It is to invite dialogue; to have the self-confidence that one’s own perspective can be interrupted, even expanded in listening to the response of the other.
I have a reflexive aversion to degrading and hostile jokes about any nation. Since the death of Bin Laden, I have heard insidious jokes in Bombay about people from Pakistan. What I notice, is that they are spewed up on unsuspecting listener like myself (no “would you like to hear a joke?”), by men (always) with the bursting hostility of an adolescent boy struggling with his sexuality. They are invariably performed by the people who appear to have travelled far from their locality only externally with their “One World” airline card, but clearly without using any miles or effort to travel in the interior world of themselves. They are often accompanied by highly offensive jokes about women as merely body parts. To reiterate the jokes here would be in some sense to collude with degrading others. They are I sense, noting my reaction, a passive aggressive invitation to a fight. Such jokes, according to Freud satisfy our aggressive impulses and provide the “pleasure of saving” much real thought. Lazy, non-thought, is the absolute enemy of the cosmopolitan, as is any form of racism whatever shape or form it takes.
I ask the CEO, “How does your guy get along with women?” “What’s that got to do with him being more cosmopolitan?” he asked. “Isn’t the first ‘other’ a man encounters a woman?” He is deafeningly quiet. After some time he says, “He’s very abrupt, I suppose rude in fact. In fact, every woman in his team has left. But you know it’s different in India”. “Then best keep him here,” I suggest, “I can’t see him travelling well at all”.
Subject: The Cosmopolitan Leader 
Sat Apr 19, 2014 5:50 pm
