Guerilla Warfare Techniques for a Jungle called Society ISBN 978-81-907320-4-8 Pages 300 List Price Rs 250

Introduction

A good shooter is not a good soldier. Shooters, however good they are, don’t win battles. A soldier does. We too are more or less like shooters. Sometimes we hit the bull’s-eye. Occasionally we miss a shot. We amble along on the complex pathway of life without a focus. And thus don’t win the wars of life.
What is society after all? And what is our position and role in the society? Not all of us think along these lines, but now that you have such a book in your hand, it would mean that you have taken the first step. You would surely agree with me that the society around us is a jungle. It is a simple rule of survival of the fittest. A warrior more skilled in his techniques, and able to perform as a cohesive unit of a larger piece would naturally be able to score quick and decisive victory. Treating the society as a jungle and life as a complex struggle, I have discussed a few tricks and tips, which help you to gain a ‘one-upmanship’ amongst your contemporaries and colleagues.
You may not find all tricks acceptable to you. You might not be able to follow all of them in life. However if you are able to understand and value just two of three tricks, and apply them in your life, I assure you that you would be pleasantly surprised by the astounding results

When you are cornered – confuse them

            Have you ever been to a magic show? If you have, I am certain that you would have sat there with your mouth open wide with amazement, clapping your hands when the magician pulled out a cigarette form mid air or produced dozens of objects from a tiny box which he had repeatedly shown empty.
            But if you went backstage and peaked into the props, you would find that the cigarette was stuck on a needle, cello taped to his nail and thus hid behind his finger when he showed his open palm. He had to just close his fist for the cigarette to magically appear at his fingertips. Likewise you would find that the box had a mirror fixed to it diagonally, so that the bottom would be reflected to the back. When opened from the front, it would look empty. But the magician could open it from the top and produce hundreds of collapsible items which he has carefully packed in, prior to the performance.
            But till such time that you did not know his secrets you were surprised and zapped. That is the reason he does not allow people to stand behind him when he performs. A magician depends on this for a living, but what do we learn form this act? 
            We learn an important trait of misdirection. What a magician uses as an important tool for his act, we can use in our day to day life as an important guerilla warfare technique. We would call this the first ploy.
            “If you are cornered , confuse them!”
            Now pause for a minute and ponder on this. I am sure you would have seen a house lizard detach its tail when cornered. The detached, quivering tail would cause sufficient misdirection and confusion to allow the tail-less wall-lizard to escape!
The lizard has successfully used its detached tail as a weapon of confusion.
How do you confuse people? There are four essential techniques which would always prove useful in confusing others.

1. Use technical jargon.
2. Use high tech solutions
3. Get back to basics
4. Jump totally away from the situation under discussion

Learn from the garden lizard who creates misdirection
by detaching its quavering tail to avoid the enemy

Technical Jargon: The use of heavy, and intellectually sounding words usually confuses your opponents. Nobody would like to admit his ignorance and you score a valuable point by using such words which they don’t understand. Some such useful words are pragmatic, empirical, proactive, paradigm shift, interface, interdependence, multi faceted, muitdependent, dissonance, interrelationship, resonance, consonance, conceptual. Etc
Now let us look at this example, it is a sales meeting. As usual each salesman is satisfied with his performance but the sales manger is not. He wants to squeeze the leamon to the last drop. He Tut- Tuts at the sales figure. He talks about the competition. He talks of not taking that extra effort. The response is like this
Salesman one: Oh Ok! I agree that I have not done as well as expected. But I have worked hard enough. I will work even harder in future!
Salesman two: ( That is you who has read this book): Despite empirical ideas, certain to produce credible paradigm shifts in the entire orientation of our sales diasporas, a serious dissonance in interpersonal relationship shifts the interdependence equation a little unfavorably towards the salesman!”
Sales manager: Oh Ah! Hmm! It is okay I guess. Lets hope for better results next time!
There is no need to rush to the dictionary to find out the meanings of all those words. Use them for whatever meaning they fit in your mind, and I assure you that it would be correct.
The next two points are a corollary to each other and can be studied together. The idea is to beat the opposition by doing the totally unexpected. American jingoists are past masters of this art. Take the last film in Rocky series for example. Rocky’s adversary is Ivan Drago, a Russian Boxer, who is being trained with the latest gadgetry almost like a Robot. To counter him, the Americans sold the idea that Rockey fell back to basics. He went to Russia, ran in the snow, pulled carts in place of a horse, and lifted real unwieldy weights instead of barbells.
It was the height of crudity, yet they sold it. A man trained with the most primitive devices beat the man who trained with the most sophisticated equipments. The fact remains that, had it been the other way around, the very same people would have made a film in which Rocky, trained with the help of the latest in American science and technology defeats a bumbling Russian who has nothing so sophisticated to match.
In fact that would have been touted as a triumph of the capitalistic system that it produces things so high tech and complex. Thus the rules two and three ; if they are trying to be simple, overwhelm them and confuse them with complexity. And if they are trying to be complex, you become extremely simple and get back to basics! 
The fourth gorilla warfare technique is to take a right angled jump away from the flow of things. This works in most situations. It confuses your opponent enough to allow you to extricate yourself from a tight corner. 
For example in a sales meeting, the manager is criticizing a salesman for poor performance, or not meeting the targets, the salesman, that is you, could react by going into the product and quality problems. Another friend of mine, who was a surgical trainee had learnt this technique to get away from tricky situations.
A human anatomy is a complex subject and a surgeon needs to have a three dimensional vision of each structure he is cutting. Senior surgeons thus take a great pleasure in pointing to various organs and asking the junior residents to name them. Every single of the hundreds of muscles in human body has Latin name and inside a bloody wound every muscle looks like every other muscle. Senior surgeons take a great pleasure in pointing out to various organs and asking a resident to name them. The resident usually fumbles, much to the hilarity of the staff and student nurses. 
My friend’s technique was simple. A tangential jump. He would suddenly comment.
“Sir! The blood is a little dark. I think that the oxygen saturation has dropped a little!”
The focus shifted, the name of the forgotten Lattisimus Dorsi remained forgotten.
So the next time you are cornered, try to confuse your opponent to avoid trouble.
This funny anecdote is relevant to the point .
An American, Polish and an Englishman were captured by German soldiers during second world war and were lined against the trees to be shot. The Englishman shouted ‘Earthquake!’. The startled German soldiers had their attention diverted and the Englishman jumped to safety. The soldiers redied their aims once again when the American shouted “ floods!”. Again the German captors were misdirected and the American ran to safety. They targeted the weapons at the Polish soldier who shouted “ Fire!”
When you are cornered, confuse them!

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