3 Tips By Meera Gandhi On How To Resolve Conflicts

Pause and think: Don’t react. Pause, take a deep breath and think before you act or speak.

Let go to gain: The more we let go, the more we may gain.

We are all connected: We need to always remind ourselves that we are connected to everything else. When we remember this, conflict tends to dissolve automatically.

We live in a fast-paced and interconnected world where conflicts are bound to occur. One evening, I went for dinner with a colleague. We had been working on a joint project all day, after which we decided to go have dinner at a new restaurant that had opened nearby to treat ourselves. We went back to our respective hotels, freshened up and met at 7 p.m. for dinner.

During the course of the project, I had been independently working on a book that was finally taking an interesting shape and I felt it would be of good value to readers. I was considering translating it into a couple of languages and so had many thoughts swirling in my head, all unrelated to the project that I had been working on all day with my friend.

We were seated at Maxim’s restaurant owned by Elin Nordegren, the amazing ex-wife of Tiger Woods. The restaurant was filled with the buzz of interesting people. I started talking excitedly about my book, but it seemed like my friend was not into speaking about it. I changed the topic. After an hour, the book forced itself back into my mind and I started talking about how I would be going to India on a health trip, meet the publisher there, and even explore the possibility of translating it into several languages including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, French, German, Chinese and Russian.

I asked him, ‘What would be a better city in Russia for the launch — Petersburg or Moscow? That is, if we do end up getting the book translated.’

My friend, who is from Russia, suddenly grew very silent and seemed upset. Upon asking him what the matter was, I realized that he had misunderstood me. He thought that I was asking if it was even

worth launching in either of those two cities! He, naturally, felt upset and undermined. All the while, that was the furthest thing from my mind!

So, here was a conflict. First, I had to take a huge breath and pause to fully understand what he was mad about. The answer was clear: he had misunderstood; I was truly excited about the possibility of selling my book in Russia while he thought I was dismissing Russia. My actual excitement had not been clearly communicated!

I had to let go and take time to explain that I really wanted to publish the book in several languages as I had friends all around the world. As soon as I did that, my friend was swimming with ideas about how to promote the book on Russian Instagram, especially as he has many Instagram friends who are both stars and influencers. So, the moment I let go of his outburst, I gained more ground with my friend who then shared some really useful inputs with me. From this experience I learned that when working on interconnected projects with people, conflict has to be resolved quickly to move on to other projects that are in progress. Letting go of another’s outburst is a really sensible, mature thing to do. I think I do have an affinity for problem-solving. I learnt to do this at The Cathedral and John Connon School in the twelfth standard. We had all been studying rigorously for the upcoming board exams, so my classmate, Vivek Vaswani, suggested that we bunk the last two classes and go out as a group to see a movie. I was a bit scared, especially as I was the head girl of the school, but I was soon convinced. Other friends were going and the movie was only an hour and a half long, after which we would come back to oversee the house games for the juniors and all would be fine!

First note to self: if your intuition says there might be trouble, do take a moment to listen to it. That day, I did not listen to my intuition and about a dozen of us went for a movie. Shalini D’Souza, Sheila Juwadkar, Vikram Gandhi, Phiroz Dubash, Vispi Patel, Nitin Jasani, Somi Hazare and Deven Khote, Anurag and Tarang Jain, and myself.

The movie was funny until suddenly one guy who had been sitting one row ahead of us said that that we had put our feet on the seat in front of us, and that our shoes had been touching his seat for the entire duration of the film. His brother stood up and said they were offended and that they had to take back their honour. In a flash, he ripped Phiroz’s shirt while the other moviegoers shouted at us to shut up.

The manager arrived and asked us what the problem was. Somi immediately took charge. He told the manager that these were his rugby friends whom he had not seen in a long time. Somi gestured

to us to keep filing out of the theatre. Outside, Somi thwarted every effort by the goons to harm us.‘Hey,’ he said to the gundas. ‘What are you doing tomorrow, after school? 4 p.m?’

They said nothing. ‘We’ll meet you in front of the wall outside our front gate. We will have a surprise for you.’ By this time, I was wondering if there was more drama unravelling on the screen in the theatre, or before me in real life! ‘We will be there,’ they said. ‘We are not afraid of you stupid, private school types and we’ll take your girls too.’

Somi, smiling throughout, said, ‘Okay, till tomorrow!’ and we ran, cramming into two taxis and rushed back through the Bombay Gym squash courts side entrance so we could sneak back into school. We were fortunate that no teachers were upset. However, the difficult situation was handled by Somi. He came up to each of us and collected one rupee, fifty paise, ten rupees and so on, and then he asked the snack guy at the gate to roast his best peanuts and chana with onion and lemon and cut the best raw mango, ‘kairi’, complete with salt and chilli.

When the guys arrived, ready to fight, Somi had these snacks ready and soon they were eating them and drinking chai! Rumour has it, they invited Somi to play in their Marine Lines kabaddi team! So, we truly have thousands of ways of resolving conflicts!