AFVOA Newsletter 03 of 2020

Section 5 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 03 / 2020 Page 92 of 167 7 On Advising Late Cdr M Raghunathan IN Genre: Lifestyle any call 2020 as the year of Corona. I call it the year of advising. Or better still, the year of unsolicited advising. The amount of advice that has filled our chat pages of WhatsApp groups has come free of cost, if you do not monetize the time wasted. We are told what to do, what not to do, how to encounter the virus, how to evade it, what to eat, what not to eat, how to survive through ECHS, how to survive without ECHS, when to seek medical advice, when to skip medical advice, what routine to follow through the day, how to protect yourself through yoga, how to protect yourself from your neighbors, when to breathe and even when not to breathe! If you take seriously even ten percent of these advices, filled with dire warnings and disastrous consequences, and incorporate them into your daily life, you would realize that you need a 72-hour day! We all love and enjoy advising. Most of the time, we advise liberally, and that too without being asked, without being involved, and often without knowing the exact circumstances of the intended recipient of our advice. We advise without any delicacy of mind and without any compassion for the feelings of the other person. Not to appear interfering in someone else’s affairs, we feign not advising while advising all the time. Many a time, such advice comes with a stringent warning. If you do not want my advice, then you do not want my help too. The earliest advice one gets in life is from parents. From their perspective (inherited from their parents), their children, irrespective of their age, are childish and immature. They continue to offer their advice in the hope of retaining their control. By the time they realize that their advice does not evenhave marginal utility, they have lost their control and their children’s affection. A father does not own up his mistakes, but believes that he is the sole owner of his mistakes. His advice to his children stems from that ownership. He does not want his children to replicate his mistakes which would amount to plagiarism, even though it is all within the family. There is a second type of father. He keeps his advice very simple and straightforward with no room for any confusion or controversy. He tells his children to do as their mother commands them! In every species, including humans, the mother is the most protective of her children. A human mother acts with this instinct to such an extent that she feels incumbent upon M