As age progresses, talking about one’s past becomes a second habit. Don’t ask me what is the first habit. I’ve really forgotten. If you know, please tell me after reading the full article.
Recent media debates about corruption made me look back and recap.
When I completed 75 years of age, a senior acquaintance who is also one of my Gurus, who retired from a central government organisation 20 years earlier, asked me a puzzling question: “Post-retirement, were you called back to RBI for clarifying anything about the work you were involved?” Though my answer was “No”, I was slightly unprepared to take that question. Without hiding my embarrassment, I asked him why he asked that from me.
He said, recently there was a discussion in his evening chat group which had more than half a dozen Retirees as members, on the subject. They had concluded that those who had no opportunity to go back to explain actions taken or work done while in service, post-retirement, were having relatively clean hands and better health. Terrible logic. Though might be, based on research among a small group which wasn’t adequately representative, the conclusion seemed logical.
Any activity can be seen as a project. Life cannot be an exception. Briefly, Project Approach is about having a beginning, progressing to a peak level of performance and tapering off to an end/closure. In my case, the main project of my life which was a salaried job, I had closed with my voluntary retirement in 2003. Thereafter, I concentrated on pursuing reading and writing. Till last week when another Guru, Subbarao, mentioned in the communication, I was not aware of the kind of capital I was accumulating from my post-retirement activities. He said:
“Your energy and enthusiasm in engaging in contemporary issues are really impressive. It is efforts like this that build social capital”
This inspired me to try and understand more about social capital. Sharing the results here to know more.
What’s capital in the first place?
All of us think we know. For this discussion, let’s assume capital as an input for improving or increasing productivity or production. As a corollary, social capital refers to social assets that help improve the efficiency of production.
In a broader sense, the concept of social capital covers any social interaction that allows us to build new connections and networks, developing interpersonal relationships with others that help with the efficiency of production, maybe through good relationships with suppliers, or even colleagues and employees. Such relationships may help motivate workers through friendship ties or create more flexible suppliers that are willing to accommodate.
For students, elders, householders and homemakers, such networking will help them move on to other levels of “social capital formation” resulting in improving self-worth, adoption of remunerative hobbies and developing inherent talents (art, music, painting, group activities etc).
A welcome byproduct will be reducing frustration, negativism and related evils in society.
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