Ideally.......

The word `ideally' is possibly one of the most absurdly abused and terribly ill-treated in the English lexicon. If it can express its anguish standing on its hind-legs, it would probably collapse in a pool of gut-wrenching emotion and tears, before it completes the heart-rending story.  Story of being used very loosely, almost being bandied about, to describe various situations which don't even have nodding acquaintance with the ideal world.  If one thinks about it, this comes about because things, people and even thoughts which populate the ideal world differ drastically from person to person. Meaning there are so many ideals and sometimes the spectrum is so woefully stretched.  This is bad enough to confuse us but then the word is also used when people do not really mean `ideally' but something close to `preferably', thereby taking the downgrade a few levels further.  Where is the ideal stuff and where is petty, personal preference??

The other day, we were at a carnatic music concert and heard continuous chatter from the row behind.  One gentleman was behaving so demonstratively in his interventions with his wife during the concert, as if he considered himself a connoisseur a few rungs above the rest of the audience. I suspect this attitude he reserves for dealings with the spouse exclusively, because he can not find many kindred souls, who are either so sympathetic or so tolerant to put up with his kind of bombast.  After the singer concluded a song, this gasbag told the wife 'he should have ideally sung Devadi Deva instead of that one'.  At another point he opined that the singer should have ideally done raga Arabhi instead of Thodi.  It was clear he was stating a matter of his own personal, narrow preference, based on what he knew better, but forcibly made it part of the big ideal world. My dear wife, when we came out, said with a wicked grin `Ideally, I would not have married him even under severe duress; and if I was guilty of that grievous crime for reasons beyond my control, ideally I would have dumped him forthwith'! Agreed, completely.   

This word `ideally' will be repeated umpteen times on the day Indian cricket team  is announced for a match.  Probably about 1.3 billion times.  We are all inborn pundits of the game, have very strong opinions on its every little aspect and are compulsively driven by a burning desire to spout opinions, to boot.  So we hear so many 'ideal' combinations for the team tumbling out into public domain. `Ideally Jadeja should have played instead of Ashwin' or `Ideally Pant should have been the wicket keeper instead of Saha'. Given that there are eleven players in the team, about seven usually select themselves and for each of the other four slots there are at least multiple alternatives for each, one can imagine the permutations available.  That many mind-boggling ideal selections would be talked about for the next few days.  Then there would be expert comments like `Bumrah should have ideally started from the other end' (that would have been uttered just before he took three wickets on the trot in four overs to embarrass that expert) or Rahul should have ideally played in the middle order (again, he would have scored a century opening the innings).

  

Contextually, nowadays you hear a lot about what the ideal government should have done ideally to stanch the Covid spread.  This is a classic case of defective hindsight propping up dubious arguments. Nobody, absolutely none, had a clue as to how the contagion would spread and behave in India. Nor do we hear of any sizable country going that way in the quest to beat the virus. But now we hear seemingly intuitive guys, with `assumed'  foresight (not one could have correctly divined where that one mosquito circling in the room would touch down even after it squats on his own nose!) venturing forth righteously thus. 'That is why I said long back ideally we should not have had any lock-down; we should have ideally let the contagion spread so that herd immunity would have resulted'.  Now, there is no real data to shore-up this point of view, but proponents would still want to claim that ideally we should have done what Sweden did, no lock-down at all.  That Sweden is obviously a far-cry from the ideally suited comparison here for a thousand reasons is nowhere in the zone of reckoning for these seers.

Another of the government initiatives going through the churn nowadays is the ideal financial package. Ideally, govt should have put cash in the hands of every Indian who needed that.  But the government has contradicted that by going with what they think is ideally the best way, to give part as cash/kind and the rest as a loan for the family or small business to have money at their disposal for a fresh start, without unduly straining the government finances. One thing we all know for a fact is the ideally people prefer cash to loans at any level, since only one of them involves what is called repayment.  We have not heard the final ideal solution in this matter yet, the jury is still out. We will have to ideally wait awhile.

Everyone and as Boycott would say, his mother-in-law are now saying ideally the migrants should have been allowed to travel back to their home states at the beginning of the lock-down. The troubling visuals of hordes of migrants walking on highways and train tracks, burdened by kids and luggage, should make all of us  agree that this was not how it should be actually, forget about ideally. Rational individuals would believe that with the pestilence hovering over as a threatening cloud, ideally the migrants should have been kept in their shelters, properly cared for in terms of food and medical facilities in the cities because cities could handle the pressures better. This process was supposed to give precious time to the completely unprepared state governments to set up shelter, food arrangements, medical support etc to deal with the inevitable virus surge when the migrants return home.  Apart from reducing exposure for everyone to higher risks if a lot of people were moving around earlier.  Many parts of the ideal scenario did not work well in the cities for various reasons and due to the failures on multiple fronts.  And the ugly results are out for everybody to see now.  All of us need to ideally hang our heads in shame, but I know better; that won't happen.

A very common sentiment one hears in the stock market is `Oh, shucks, I should have ideally picked stock X over stock Y.'  I cannot tell where `ideally' comes into play in this gamble because one is expected to pick on the basis of facts and take the consequences, remembering this is not always a game of science.  There are a lot of imponderables in this, which can skew the results away from expectations.  If the idealist in you is tending to punt or speculate without basis, then this is ideally another case of cribbing in hindsight.

Very recently I came across statements about ideally an aid project to operate in a disaster situation,  running the entire operation on the pillars of neutrality, impartiality and independence. There is a lot said about how these principles, once adhered to, would ensure that the deserving people get the aid and funds were spent most usefully. But it is also very clear this has not fully worked in many aid projects. Actually we know it does not, even in a simple food distribution exercise involving some 200 people. So why would the principles work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Balkans or Rwanda, Syria -- all complicated places riven by local conflicts, exacerbated by political meddling by other countries??  Ideally what we need to do is inject a good dose of pragmatism in the principles in dealing with such dire situations.

So, we should ask what is meant when we loosely say `ideally' in very mundane contexts?  It would be apparent that it means different things to different people in the same context, because comprehension levels as well as expectations are different.  Actually there is no specific hint of anything ideal in such routine perceptions and statements and we find out -- surprise, surprise -- that`ideally' just translates directly to `actually what I like'.

After this my dear wife and I have decided that philosophically we will not ideally use the word `ideally' anywhere, if we can help it!!