Belief and buy-in

Among the important lessons that you either learn by yourself or, are coached into, when you are set to handle a team of people is the notion of “buy-in”. Most of the training classes, the self-help books and, the self-respecting (and, huge earning) gurus make it a point to hammer home the point. The need to accrue and acquire “buy-in” is tremendous. And, most surprisingly, although the downward “buy-in” (from directs) is strongly emphasized, the upward one (from sponsors) is somewhat tamely taken for granted.

What I find most surprising is that all the conventional sources of wisdom on relationships tend to ignore the aspect of “shared belief” as well. It boggles me. Really. For a simply odd reason, my Google Reader feed has been awash with a rush of blog posts around relationships, values and belief systems. And, the resounding re-iteration has been the need for each partner to strengthen the belief in each other and, the need to buy-in to each other’s visions and goals for oneself. In a relationship it is very easy to slip into the comfortable numbness of having goals for the partnership. And, more often than not individual goals and aspirations take a back seat. It was interesting to note that a number of the blogs that I read arrived at similar conclusions albeit different routes. I find it peculiar when a network of contacts converge on a thought meme independent of each other.

Hopping on to a different track. On Facebook today I dabbled in a conversation about “in your face” religious rituals. Which lead to a snippet (since it is Facebook, there is possibly no easy way to link to it) wherein it was observed that the rigamarole of ritual driven religious indulgence is not the luxury of the less-educated. In fact it is awesomely true to state that the “pray to someone under the duress of fear” is equally spread across the society. The ones who can afford to do so undertake lavish ceremonies aimed at public display of wealth and possibly gratification of some sort. The ones who cannot, figure out their own way of going into debt. I recall an anecdote where a maid servant employed by a neighbor of ours raised a large sum (of, 70,000 INR around a decade back) by mortgaging her house and land since their priest had advised her to perform a ritual for the appeasement of the powers which had cast en evil eye. Needless to say, she never was able to repay the loan portion of her fertile land and, it left me wondering as to who needed appeasement. Religion occupies a strange pantheon in this nation and, funnily enough, the evolution of religious rituals is never adequately explained by anyone. Nor is the fact that at each stage of the evolution, the concept of a supreme power changed and morphed leading to the various means of which to pray to him/her.

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