The best possible strategy to avoid difficult people with complex personality and mercurial temperament and negative attitudes is to humbly avoid or politely neglect them. A vast majority of such complex personalities are actually suffering from serious personal attention deficiency issues. They will always try to be aggressive, quarrelsome, rude and disrespectful towards others; and mostly misbehave with their unfortunate victims to establish their authority or just to drag their much cherished mass attention. It is indeed extremely difficult and challenging to handle such individuals if they are in managerial or supervisory positions. It is this authoritarian socio-economic status that they mostly take advantage of to demonstrate their suppressed anger, frustrations, irritability to humiliate or insult their subordinates.

Actually they are mentally ill and are in serious need of psychotherapy and proper medical attention. Based on my experiences I have found that if one bravely confronts such an individual directly and give him/her back in polite and courteous manner what they need to hear back from abused individuals they backtrack and withdraw within their inner self and do not bother others. Off course, one has to be careful that the situation does not go out of hand.

Saikat Kumar Basu, Canada

Accountability

It was lunch time, but I had to remain busy in files due to an urgency.  I left for a much delayed lunch after completion of the work. In a designated area within our office complex, a needy woman on the threshold of senior citizenship serves her home-made food. Every official day, she comes from a suburb several kilometers away in a crowded bus carrying two heavy bags loaded with food items.

As I reached her stall, apologetically she declared that though she still had breads, she had run short of vegetables. Still I asked her to serve it. Now the amount of curry was indeed inadequate in comparison to the number of breads which I religiously eat. However, by drawing inspiration from “at least I have something to eat” in this ocean of hunger in society, I succeeded in having my lunch with much pleasure. As I took my first step to return after paying exactly the usual amount to her, she called back. I was astonished to see her stretching her hand with a Rs.5 coin in it which she desired to return! Why? To quote her, “Because I could not serve you adequate vegetables!”

Obviously, I did not accept it, but was stunned by her supreme sense of accountability. It was me who insisted on having whatever she could offer as lunch, still her conscience was asking the poor woman to return a few coins as she could not serve adequate vegetables! With a lump in my throat, I was wondering how beautiful this society could have grown  if all “educated” people and from “glamorous” sectors would have also believed in such unique values, work ethics and accountability!

Kajal Chatterjee, Kolkata