Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 127

Illusory Superiority

Some ideas arrive wearing uniforms. Illusory Superiority arrives in a kurta — plain, comfortable, and ready for work.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

In any Indian office there is one person who knows where everything is, whom to call, and how things actually get done. The organisation chart does not show this person. Reality does.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Keep the name. Use the pause it gives you. That is the entire homework.