The “Sathukudy” syndrome.

The “Sathukudy” syndrome. 

The movie “Chandralekha” in Malayalam brings out in a comic scene yet full of insights, the dangers of a man trained in one department trying to act a leadership role. I call it the “sathukudy” syndrome. The man is a fruit juice maker and vendor and is thrust on the hot seat of the CEO. When he confronts an issue, he can be but the fruit juice vendor. He demands a glass of the fruit juice and when presented spits it and scolds the one who brought it don’t you even know how to make the “sathukudy” juice? What he demands is only what he does and the only response is on the lines of don’t you know what I know?

However this is not as simple as it looks. This can happen elsewhere. Look at the man who is trained to be a medical Psychiatrist who becomes the head of a Management institute. What is he likely to see? He is trained to be a psychiatric social worker and naturally he sees psycho cases of various degrees after the principle of functional selectivity of perception. The functional selectivity of perception posits among other things that a man’s predisposition as in his training  or immediate needs influence what he perceives.

The phenomena is obvious in the above case, one being the matrix of fruit juice and the other being the matrix of leadership. But what about those cases where the difference is not so apparent as when a Medical and Psychiatric Social Work trained one becomes the Leader of a Management Institute? The difference is not so glaringly apparent. Any serious discussion is in danger of being pulled down to the level of the medical psychiatric, defensive, pathological level. Thus when a boy is caught fighting with another and they try to patch up and one of them says why don’t you look into my eyes, there goes the Principal, ‘Are you gay/s?’ At other times the serious is brought down to the banal. When something is in error, it is not the effort to fix but rather to fix the responsibility on someone, blow out of proportion and go out of control. And so forth. That’s because everybody is a psychiatric patient to the Medical Psychiatrist who himself is not alert to the possibility of this syndrome. This applies to any specialist if he is not careful not to be influenced by his training.

I call this the “sathukudy” syndrome. It is all the more insidious in so far as since apparently the discussion is on the issue but actually the matter is dealt with at a level well below the issue. The leader becomes the culprit and goes scot free, the result being the deterioration of the institute with apparent growth but no actual development and missed opportunities.