Hierarchy and Ego

For the first time in college today, I lost control of myself. Here is Group A of students(including me) trying to organise a welcoming party for the freshers(students joining this year) with the planning process going on for half a month. Group A had a couple of students(not including me) confident of being elected to become part of the Computer Science Student Council. Group B of students are just watching Group A all along. The result of the elections held today was that students of Group B became the President, Vice-President and Secretary. These students were suddenly interested in all that was going on and suddenly started questioning all the work that had already been done in preparation for the party, this coming Saturday.

What the students of Group B did was wrong. But how the students of Group A behaved wasn’t exactly angelic. Group A has people with big egos. It hurts them to see what happened today. Answering questions of Group B doesn’t make them feel proud, it saddens them, makes them feel as though the credit they deserve is in the process of being stolen. Today wasn’t a very eventful day. Looking back, I find it hilarious that I was involved in the battle that decided whether we were going to keep Pepsi or fresh fruit juice. Everyone in Group B was against fruit juice. Group A was tired of fighting, and just to be able to make a decision, agreed to go with Pepsi. Group B made a couple of calls, to order the Pepsi, and then came back just to tell Group A that fruit juice isn’t that bad an idea after all.

When the head of my department wanted me to nominate myself for the Council posts that she considered important, I politely tried my best to go against her. In the end I did end up nominating myself, but I spoke against the whole idea of having a council everyday. The worst thing about hierarchy like this is the politics that it carries along with it. The egos go along with everybody anyway, but hierarchy simply amplifies what’s bad about a person and his/her ego. I just hate this whole inferiority/superiority complex that people get when hierarchy comes into play. One negative point of a person places all the positive points below it’s shadow.

As for losing control of myself, I am sure the people who got a little uncomfortable because of me knew that spurt of anger was coming. I feel like apologizing for that too now. Treating poison with poison may not be the best solution, even if it works.

Hierarchy is bad for an organisation and I respect the idea of calling a group of interested people the core organising team(Somehow Dynamix, Ramjas come to my mind first when I think about this) instead of tagging some of those people with posts like President and Vice-President which defeats the idea of team-work in my opinion. Whoops! I think Ego doesn’t agree with me.

Being more important than someone in the form of hierarchy is different from getting incentives and rewards for good performance. I prefer the latter.