“Talented people everywhere have difficulty, and perhaps take longer than ordinary people to find their way in the world.”

These words are from Ved Mehta, in an article that appeared in The New Yorker in 1993.

In the article Mehta reminisces about a time when he studied at Oxford. He writes, “in the late fifties, when I was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, most of my friends and I felt that we were living through our happiest years.”

Mehta writes with subtlety and affection about some of his friends from that time, and what became of them:

  • Roger Scott “left Oxford after a year”; “hardly anyone saw Roger after his departure”. He faded from view, and in 1970 published a novel, Downfall;
  • Robert Ogilvie committed suicide, by gunshot;
  • Alasdair Clayre took his life “by jumping under an oncoming train” in an Underground station around 11 at night;
  • Richard Snedden killed his father with two blows to the head, delivered by axe; committed to a mental hospital after having been acquitted by reason of insanity, he died a few years later.

It’s not surprising that Mehta’s article is titled “Casualties of Oxford”.

Mehta takes pains to sketch attentive portraits, both individual and collective, of these men. From their past, no one could have divined their future. To the contrary, they were all the best and the brightest, prizewinners all, the product of “natural selection”. No one would have been surprised had any of them entered public service and become prime minister, or established academic careers, or thrived in business or at nearly any other endeavor.

Mehta writes with affection, among friends. He’s not jealous; he’s not trying to bring down these men. They were his friends. Mehta adds some biographic details that show that the friendships were not completely equal, and how Mehta was in many respects an outsider looking in, or up.

Mehta was born in what was then a British colony: India. Before coming to Oxford, he’d studied at Pomona College, in California. Compared to the golden boys of Winchester (a leading public school), Mehta was doubly an outsider.

Observant as he is, Mehta also was very much in the dark. When a child, Mehta contracted meningitis. The disease left him blind, and he received basically no formal schooling until, at age 15, he emigrated to the United States and went to the Arkansas School for the Blind.

For this reader, Mehta is descriptive, not prescriptive. I couldn’t find an answer to the question: what went wrong? Did the world change? Were all the prizes won something else than “natural selection”? For these men, was life after “our happiest years” of necessity a disappointment?

Five years after The New Yorker ran Mehta’s article, the McKinsey Quarterly (by the eponymous management consulting firm) published a much-discussed piece, “The War for Talent“, the central tenet of which was that “better talent is worth fighting for”. In hindsight, this language seems stridently martial and bellicose. I prefer Mehta’s subtle and possibly cautionary account.