The world loves a practitioner. A highly generalized and perhaps grossly misplaced statement, some may say. What does the word “practitioner” convey? An instinctive answer to the question might be that a practitioner is the one who practices. Yes and No. A practitioner does practice but that’s all not what he does. A practitioner’s practice is characterized by the depth of his practice as much as the width of it. Confusing, is it?
Let us consider a few examples – Sachin Tendulkar, Ustad Zakir Hussain, Dr. Abdul Kalam, Naseeruddin Shah, Mahatma Gandhi, Lata Mangeshkar etc. What is common between all of these? Yes, they are all famous. But is there anything else? Let me provoke you a little more by adding to this the following persons – your favourite teacher at school, your most loved servant/subordinate, your favourite cook, and your biggest crush. Do you see anything common between them and the names that were listed earlier? Almost invariably one would find that all of them have been practitioners of one thing or the other.
Let us consider Sachin Tendulkar’s example. He spends hours at the nets practicing on his batting skills, but he does not stop himself there. He invests equal if not more amount of time and effort into studying the nuances of the game, studying various conditions that might affect a cricket game, study opponents’ game to learn their strategies, understand their psychology, and is continuously endeavouring to better himself and add more value to the team each and every time.
Ustad Zakir Hussain not only practices playing the Tabla but also spends considerable time understanding the fundamentals of percussions, the effect of various beats and tempos, the various effect that can be generated by combining Tabla with other instruments in a jugalbandi, understanding western concepts of music to enrich his knowledge of percussion and music.
My favourite cook, my grandmother, is perfect not because she has practiced the art of cooking over the years. It is because each and every time I find her trying to improvise, learn new recipes, modifying and experimenting with her own recipes to appeal to varying tastes and preferences of my cousins and me. She goes as far as to mix elements of different cuisines in order to enrich our eating experience every single time.
All three of them are practitioners. Their existence is not limited to practice and perfection of a simple task, but to practice and perfect the value that they intend to provide through that task. We love Sachin not because he has perfected the art of batting, but because he nearly every time plays to win the match for his team. We love Zakir Hussain not because he has perfected the art of playing Tabla, but because he nearly every time enthralls us with his performance. I love my grandmother not because she has perfected the art of making rasam or sambar, but because she has never failed to arouse the joy of having consumed delicious food.
We seek and adore practitioners in life. We respect them for their discipline, and we don’t feel shy of showering them with our affection and blessings. That’s why the most popular guys in schools or colleges are those that are “famous” for some quality of theirs. It could be from as sophisticated as a math wizard to something as inane as a champion of antakshari.
Yet not many of us consciously try to become practitioners in life. Practitioners are a rare phenomenon in our society. Somehow a majority of us have relegated ourselves to a life of mediocrity and have built a cocoon around us in the false assumption that life in the arms of mediocrity is simple and uneventful. Nothing can be farther from the truth.
A practitioner may not achieve stupendous success in an activity but a mediocre person is doomed to failure under all circumstances. A student who is a practitioner may not end up topping his classroom, but is likely to contribute more value to the society in terms of his job, his family, his knowledge, his skills etc. than someone who is not because practitioners are a rare and cherished commodity. Sooner or later the practitioner would find success and when success comes to him it will come in all its glory. What is more amazing that the practitioner thereafter won’t really have to work hard to sustain it. He just has to be himself. The mediocre on the other hand would almost always struggle to achieve any semblance of success which I am afraid would never come to him or, even if it does, would not stay with him for long.
A practitioner when asked to perform a task that does not match his passions will perform at 80-90% efficiency whereas a mediocre person would always function at 50-60% efficiency, his own passions notwithstanding. A practitioner however when asked to perform a task that matches his passion ends up working at 250% efficiency. In fact, the word “passion” implies a practitioner at the core of it. The key is “devotion”. Devotion to a value, a cause, as it were, compels a person to explore in more depth and breadth and helps him reach an elevated state of knowledge that others can only dream about. Thus it is not uncommon to find practitioners become “stars” of an organization, “icons” of a society, or “idols” for the masses.
There is indeed value in being a practitioner.
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