The Lighter Side – Star of Mysore

By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

The Nice Panel Efficiency

There isn’t a expertise fairly like a panel dialogue to concurrently inflate your ego and deflate it, typically inside the identical sentence. I’ve sat on extra panels than I care to rely and I can say with some authority that the panel dialogue is one of trendy mankind’s most elaborate rituals of organised confusion dressed up as structured dialogue.
It begins, as most of our misadventures do, with preparation.
The second the invitation arrives, one thing shifts inside you. You might be, in spite of everything, an knowledgeable. You may have been chosen. The organisers clearly know expertise after they see it. You open your pocket book or in these instances your laptop computer and you start to arrange. You anticipate questions with the boldness of a seasoned astrologer. You craft solutions which might be profound, measured and infrequently good.
At this time, you even have your favorite LLM to complement your analysis. You discover the right quote from the Bhagavad Gita that may make the viewers go quiet with appreciation. You rehearse the self-deprecating anecdote that may make you appear each completed and humble, a mixture solely really completed individuals can pull off. You time your self. You might be prepared.
You arrive feeling like a person who has performed his homework. After the same old delay because of the earlier panel working over time, you agree into the panellists’ chairs, that are at all times barely too shut collectively, as if the organisers imagine bodily proximity will generate mental chemistry. You alternate pleasantries together with your fellow panellists. In your thoughts, they sound a bit of underprepared, however nice.
After which the moderator opens his mouth.
The very first thing you discover is that the moderator’s query has no query mark in it. It begins someplace across the French Revolution, passes via the commercial age, touches briefly on local weather change and arrives, some 4 minutes later, at one thing that resembles a query however is the truth is a small essay with a rising intonation on the finish. You sit there nodding, partly in mental engagement and partly as a result of you might have already forgotten how the query started. The moderator, nevertheless, appears to be like happy. He has warmed up properly.
The second factor you discover is that none of the questions are those you ready for. You had ready for a considerate inquiry into the structural challenges of governance reform. He asks you as an alternative about your childhood influences. Your excellent reply, the one with the Gita quote and the self-deprecating anecdote, sits in your head with nowhere to go, like a nicely-dressed visitor who has arrived on the incorrect get together.
You improvise. That is, you inform your self, what consultants do.
In the meantime, you might have begun to look at your fellow panellists with better consideration. The individual to your left is working on a easy and efficient precept. She goes to talk regardless of what she is requested. The query is merely a social courtesy she acknowledges briefly earlier than continuing to say precisely what she had deliberate to say from the start. She is, on this sense, extra trustworthy than the remainder of us.
The individual to your proper has understood one thing basic about panel discussions, which is that the microphone, as soon as launched, could not return. He subsequently doesn’t launch it. He solutions the query, then offers context for the reply, then gives a quick historical past of why the context issues after which, simply because the moderator begins to lean ahead with the practiced smile of somebody about to interrupt, he begins a brand new sentence. He’s a person in a race the place he himself controls each the baton and the end line.
You watch the moderator attempt to interrupt. It’s like watching somebody attempt to board a transferring practice. There’s effort. There’s optimism. There’s, in the end, resignation.
When your flip comes, you converse with what you imagine is the right stability of depth and brevity. You make your level. You even handle to work in a modified model of the Gita reference, barely stripped of context however nonetheless serviceable. You are feeling good. The viewers claps. That is, you conclude, since you have been probably the most articulate voice on the panel.
Later, a form colleague tells you that the microphone was not working for the primary forty seconds of your reply. You smile graciously and say it doesn’t matter. It issues enormously.
I’ve been that panellist who over-ready and underneath-delivered. I’ve been the one who grabbed the microphone with barely extra enthusiasm than dignity. I’ve sat on panels the place I used to be sure I used to be the one one that had truly learn something on the topic, solely to be quietly humbled by a fellow panellist who, in two unhurried sentences, stated what I had been making an attempt to say for ten minutes.
The panel dialogue endures not as a result of it’s an environment friendly format for exchanging concepts. It endures as a result of it’s theatre. And theatre, as everyone knows, requires performers who imagine within the play even when the script has gone lacking.
We will all be again on the following panel. Ready, optimistic and fully satisfied that this time, the moderator will lastly ask us the proper query.
He is not going to.
[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]