Category: Philosophical, Social
In a country of nodding heads, the quiet “no” is the only real rebellion
It was past ten on a Saturday night, and the rain in Bengaluru had settled into the kind of drizzle that makes you feel guilty for going out. Sonu was on the sofa of her rented flat in Indiranagar with her laptop still open, staring at a screen she wasn’t reading.
Her mother, Shilpa, had come down from Pune for the weekend. She walked in with two cups of ginger tea and put one on the table without asking.
“You’ve been staring at that screen for twenty minutes,” Shilpa said. “It’s not going to blink first.”
“Ranjit got promoted.”
“Which Ranjit? The one who sends ‘Good Morning Sir’ at six a.m. with those folded-hands pictures?”
“That one. Senior Director now.” Sonu shut the laptop harder than she meant to. “Mom, the man cannot write a single line of logic. Not one. I built the fraud-detection model at Veltrix. The client loved it. I gave up two Diwali weekends for it. And on stage, Ranjit says, ‘This is the result of my vision.’ His vision. His vision is knowing which way the boss’s chair is facing.”
Shilpa sat down. “Did anyone clap?”
“Everyone clapped. I clapped. That’s the part that’s killing me.”
Her phone buzzed on the table. Then again. Sonu glanced at it and groaned. It was the team WhatsApp group, where Ranjit had posted a photo of himself holding a trophy beside the vice president, captioned “Blessed to work under such inspiring leadership 🙏”. Under it, within thirty seconds, eleven people had replied with clapping hands and fire emojis.
“Look at this,” Sonu said, holding up the screen. “Ten-fifteen on a Saturday night. Who is awake to reply to this?”
“People who are afraid the boss is awake,” Shilpa said, and took a sip. “Put the phone face down. I’m not drinking my tea in front of that man’s face.”
The Mirror Business
Sonu turned the phone over. “You know what’s strange? I don’t even hate him the way I should. I mostly just can’t understand it. How does someone with nothing inside climb so high?”
“Because he sells something the top people desperately want.”
“What?”
“Mirrors.” Shilpa shrugged. “A secure boss wants talent around him. An insecure boss wants a mirror that shows him taller than he is. Ranjit is that mirror, polished daily. Your VP made a joke last month, you said. Was it funny?”
“It was so dead it needed a funeral.”
“And Ranjit?”
“Laughed until he almost fell off his chair. Then repeated the joke to the whole floor the next morning, as if it were scripture.”
“There you go.” Shilpa nodded. “These people have wonderful hearing. They can hear exactly what the powerful want to be told. Everything else, like a missed deadline or a client complaint or an honest warning, goes straight past them.”
“He remembers the boss’s dog’s birthday,” Sonu muttered. “He can’t remember a sprint review.”
“The dog’s birthday is his real KPI, then.”
Sonu laughed, a short, tired laugh. “I’m serious, though. I wasn’t built for this. I’d rather get fired than call a man a visionary when he’s a fool.”
“Don’t say that so loudly. You have rent.”
“See, that’s the thing, Mom. That’s the trap.”
When Flattery Becomes a Personality
“Karthik on my team,” Sonu said, pulling her feet up onto the sofa. “You remember, I told you about him. He used to be the best coder we had. He’d walk into design reviews and tell the architects, ‘This will break at scale,’ and he was right every single time. Two years ago. Now he nods. Last week he told me, ‘Why fight, Sonu? Arguing gets you a PIP. Nodding gets you a promotion.'”
“And what did you say?”
“Nothing. Because he wasn’t wrong.” She rubbed her forehead. “That’s what scares me. Nobody starts out as a chamcha. Everybody says, ‘Just a little flattery for now, I’ll stop once I’m safe.’ But you’re never safe. You get promoted, there’s a bigger boss, so you flatter harder. One day you wake up and the acting has become you.”
Shilpa was quiet for a moment, turning her cup in her hands.
“Now let me say something you won’t like,” she said.
“Here it comes.”
“I’m not going to sit here and call every one of them a villain. When I started my store, I had a licence inspector who needed to be kept happy. Sweets at Diwali. A bottle for his birthday. I hated it, and I did it anyway, because I had a daughter in school and no husband to fall back on. Was that flattery? Maybe a little. Was it the same as Ranjit? No.”
“Mom—”
“Wait. A man who bends because he has a sick father and a home loan is not the same as a man who bends because he has no talent and needs a ladder. The first one is frightened. The second one is shameless. I can forgive fear. Shamelessness, I can’t.”
Sonu thought about it. “Karthik is frightened.”
“Is he? Or did he start frightened and slowly become comfortable? That’s the question every one of these people should ask themselves at night.”
“Okay,” Sonu admitted. “That’s fair. But the system is what’s pushing them. When flattery gets rewarded and honesty gets punished, who can blame them for picking the easy road?”
“Blame the people who paved it,” Shilpa said. “The bosses who promote the nodders. The HR departments that call it ‘culture fit.’ A road doesn’t build itself.”
Vinayak Mama and the Family Disease
“Tell me about Vinayak Mama again,” Sonu said. “I like the way you tell it. You get angrier every time.”
“Because he gets shinier every time.” Shilpa snorted. “Your mama couldn’t clear a simple exam if the answers were stapled to the paper. But he found a local politician, Bhaurao Patkar, and attached himself like a shadow. Carried the man’s bag. Clapped through his speeches, even the long, boring ones. Turned up at every Patkar family function like it was his own wedding.”
“And in return?”
“A job for his son. A job for his daughter. Neither of them has done an honest day of work since. Meanwhile the boy next door, first class in engineering, sat at home for three years writing application after application.”
“I remember him. He used to tutor me in maths.” Sonu’s jaw tightened. “He’s driving a delivery bike now, isn’t he?”
“He’s doing fine, he says. But that’s not the point.” Shilpa set her cup down. “Every seat a flatterer takes by garland is a seat stolen from someone who earned it. Call it what it is: theft, wrapped in a fragrant marigold. And the worst part is that the family respects your Mama for it. At weddings he sits in the front row. Relatives say, ‘Vinayak is so well-connected!’ Nobody asks what he paid for that connection, or who paid for it on his behalf.”
“Our family is proud of him.”
“Our family is proud of anyone with a politician’s phone number.”
Ambika Society: India in One Compound
Sonu was silent for a bit. The drizzle had thinned. “Do you remember Ambika Society? In Vitthal Nagar? I think I saw all of this for the first time there, long before I knew the words for it.”
“I remember.”
“Sharma Uncle, when his business was booming. Everyone wanted a seat next to him during the Ganpati festival. People actually fought to hold his umbrella. Then the business collapsed, and within a month people forgot which flat he lived in.”
“Not forgot,” Shilpa said dryly. “Remembered, but crossed the road.”
“And you.” Sonu hesitated. “When Papa died, and you were running the store alone.”
Shilpa’s face didn’t change much, but something in her eyes hardened. “Three. Only three neighbours came to ask if I needed anything. Three, out of ninety-six flats. But the day the builder’s wife wanted a discount on her medicines, the entire committee knew my name, my number, and which shift I worked.”
“They weigh people like vegetables,” Sonu said. “How rich is he? How useful is she? Who does he know? Nobody asks, ‘Is he kind?'”
“There’s a retired schoolteacher in that building,” Shilpa said. “Taught half of Vitthal Nagar’s children, including the secretary’s own son. Last year he waited forty minutes outside the society office for one signature, because the secretary was inside serving tea to a contractor. Forty minutes. An old man holding his file against his chest, standing as if he were the one who’d done something wrong.”
“Did he say anything?”
“What would he say? To whom? That’s what the whole system teaches you. Don’t complain, don’t question, stay on the right side of the person with the pen.”
“A society that measures human beings by usefulness has already stopped being human.”
“And the pathetic part,” Sonu said, “is that those committee uncles don’t respect the rich man either. They fear him, or they want something from him. Respect doesn’t send an invoice. Flattery always does.”
More Dangerous Than Corruption
“I’m going to say something that might sound dramatic,” Sonu said.
“You’ve been dramatic since you were four. Go on.”
“I think this is more dangerous than corruption.”
“Why?”
“Because corruption is a crime. You can catch it, prosecute it, put it on the news. This is a habit. It hides inside birthday wishes, farewell speeches, wedding seating charts, ‘Sir, you are a visionary’ emails. You can’t file a complaint against a compliment. And it teaches every young person watching a poisonous lesson: you don’t need to be good, you need to be useful to the right man.”
Shilpa leaned back. “And what happens to a country when its brightest people either leave in disgust or become flatterers themselves?”
“It becomes a nation of nodding heads. A thousand yes-men and nobody willing to say, ‘Sir, this plan is wrong.'”
“Think of any disaster you’ve read about. A collapsed bridge. A company that died overnight. Somewhere in the chain, there was always a man who knew, and smiled, and kept quiet, because the boss was in a good mood that day.” Shilpa shook her head. “The flatterer doesn’t only rob the honest. He blinds the people who make decisions. He is a hole in the wall that everybody pretends is a window.”
“And he builds nothing,” Sonu said.
“Nothing. He lives on what others built, like moss on a wall. When the wall cracks, the moss is the first to dry.”
The Question
The rain had almost stopped. Somewhere below, a scooter started and faded away.
“Mom,” Sonu said, softer now, “should I just do it? Smile more. Send the emojis. Laugh at the dead jokes. Everybody says it’s just playing the game.”
“Who is everybody?”
“The people winning.”
Shilpa took her daughter’s hand. “Listen to me. You don’t have to be rude. You don’t have to turn into a rebel with a placard, because that is also a kind of vanity. Be polite to everyone. Say ‘good morning’ to the boss like a human being, not like a servant. Respect is not flattery. Courtesy is not slavery. The difference is whether you’d still say it if he had no power over you.”
“And if I keep losing?”
“Some years you will. I won’t lie to you about that. Some years you’ll watch a hollow man climb over your head and you’ll want to throw your laptop at the wall.” Shilpa smiled slightly. “But Ranjit’s career has no foundation, only borrowed credit and borrowed laughter. One bad quarter, one new boss who dislikes mirrors, and it all comes down. And watch how fast the loyal friends disappear. A flatterer is never loyal to a person. He’s loyal to a chair. The day Ranjit loses the chair, he’ll become invisible to the same people who touch his feet now.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I’m not. I’m only old.” Shilpa stood up and collected the cups. “And listen. I won’t tell you this will end well. Maybe it won’t. Maybe Ranjit retires as a Vice President with a farewell speech and a gold watch. Some of these people die rich and respected, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But you’ll still have been you for forty years. That counts for something. I don’t know exactly what, but I’ve never regretted it.”
Sonu looked at her mother for a long moment. “That’s not very comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be comforting. It’s meant to be true.”
“Fine.” Sonu almost smiled. “One thing, then. When I’m a boss someday…”
“When, not if.”
“When I’m a boss. I’ll hire the one who disagrees with me respectfully, and not the one who agrees eagerly.”
“And protect the one who tells you the hard thing,” Shilpa added. “And never become the kind of person who needs to be flattered. That hunger is a disease. It spreads from the top down.”
Sonu got up and went to the window. Bengaluru glowed through the wet glass: thousands of office towers, thousands of Ranjits, thousands of Sonus. Somewhere in that glow, an honest engineer was fixing a bug nobody would ever thank her for, while a hollow man rehearsed a speech about leadership.
Her phone buzzed again on the table. She didn’t look at it.
She opened the laptop instead.
“It’s almost midnight,” Shilpa said from the kitchen doorway.
“I know. The model won’t fix itself.” Sonu’s eyes were already on the code. “And unlike some people, I like knowing what’s inside my work.”
Shilpa shook her head, but she was smiling as she turned off the hall light and left the door slightly open, the way she used to when Sonu was a child studying for exams in Vitthal Nagar.
Flattery is a loan taken against your self-respect, and the interest you pay is your entire character.
Hashtags: #Chatukarita, #SycophancyInIndia, #TalentVsFlattery, #CorporateHypocrisy, #SocialReality, #HistoryOnRoad, #Flatterer
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, companies and places are imaginary, and any resemblance to real people or institutions is purely coincidental.
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