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Welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand, a podcast aimed at understanding how human beings unlearn, learn and make decisions. Broader questions of human behavior require broader thinking, so I am not constrained by or advocating any one discipline or theory I draw from different disciplines, both within and even outside of academia, to make sense of human behavior.

Nippin Anand  00:29

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Nippin Anand  00:47

forward slash podcasts. Let’s get started. No reindeers were harmed. Every now and then we hear arguments and explanations about zero harm. But instead of making an argument, I thought I would tell a story, a real life story, about zero harm, and leave it to the listeners to decide what they take away from the story. Consider this, a 10 years old tanker carrying crude oil has undergone a safety inspection in Japan. The ship is managed by a third party, ship management company, the oil company that transports the cargo, has highlighted several technical problems with the ship during the inspection. It’s a difficult one for the ship’s crew, as many of the issues highlighted in the inspection are beyond their remit and responsibilities, the company then decides to appoint a technical manager to sail with the ship, whose job is to ensure that the deficiencies highlighted during the inspection are rectified before the end of the voyage. Thereafter, the ship will be presented for another inspection so that the deficiencies can be deleted from the records. But during her sailing passage, the captain is reportedly missing from the ship. What happened to the captain? How did it happen? What has all this to do with a safety inspection. Let’s find out. I first became interested in the story when I contacted Philip’s brother Michael to know more about him. Philip always wanted to go sailing, and I wanted to go flying, but somehow I, too ended up in shipping, says Michael. Philip started his sea career in 1995 as a dead cadet. After finishing 32 months of sea time, he sat through his first set of nautical exams and became a merchant ship officer in 2003 he married Elena, and they had two beautiful daughters in 2009 Philip became a captain at sea. Life was never without struggles. Philip switched between conventional cargo ships and offshore supply boats for shorter contracts so that he could spend more time with his family. But in 2016 when the ship was detained in port, the company was declared bankrupt, and Philip had no choice but to return to the conventional tanker market. A concerning Captain even paid through his own pocket to repatriate his crew trapped in the foreign land in January, 2019 prior to the incident, Philip received a call from the office to join on board a tanker. As he was flying from his hometown in Goa to Singapore, he received another call from the company during his transit in Mumbai, there was an unforeseen delay with the ship’s berthing, and fate would allow him, one last time, to meet with his mother, who lived in Mumbai. After a short delay, the captain joined the ship in Singapore, outbound to Japan in the next few weeks, he made a call to his brother and shared his concerns about a wetting inspection in Japan. There were some structural problems with the ship, and the company was worried about the ship’s future market prospects. I told him, what can you do? These things are not in your hand, said Michael, for background, wetting, inspections play a decisive role for tankers to remain employable in the international oil trade. That’s where safety competes with commercial goals. A sub optimal inspection outcome will seriously impact upon the commercial performance of shipping companies. Good safety is good business, but good by whose standards one could easily attribute this power to the oil companies, international marine forum or the intertanco, both representing the interest of ship owners and operators of ships carrying hydro. Carbons and both anchored to the myth of zero harm, as is the case within the culture of oil and gas. Now let’s take a look at the ecosystem of shipping to understand how this zero ideology translates in practice, the oil company responsible for transporting the cargoes rarely own the assets, rather, ships are hired from the market and oil is transported on leased ships, both in the spot market and long term hire owned by investors and conglomerates, who in turn appoint ship management companies to operate those ships. The ship management companies provide both technical expertise and crewing services to operate those ships. Tanker shipping is a highly competitive market where ship management companies compete against each other on a range of parameters, including safety, technical capabilities and the retention of skilled crew to operate in a challenging environment. Wetting inspection performance measurement is by far the most powerful measure of success for shipping companies, where everyone strives for Goal Zero. But this seemingly straightforward trajectory means different things to different players in the industry. The International Safety Management code, the ISM first introduced almost two decades ago in an effort to move away from prescriptive regulations to a self regulated framework in international shipping, beautifully captures the multiple meanings of Goal Zero within different subcultures in the industry, to the meager ship owner reluctant to allocate a safety budget. ISM means I spend money to a paper tiger ship management companies. It means I save money to the insurers, underwriters and private regulatory bodies in their quest to sell certification products. Is m means I see money to a seafarer at the receiving end of this bureaucratic machinery. The ISM code is a malicious attempt to manage liability by transferring the rest to the last person in the chain. It means I see misery, often in the form of more paperwork, fatigue, blame, stress, anxiety of attending to an inspection and even the growing trend of criminalization of seafarers making rational arguments and talking abstract theories is perhaps not the best way to understand the problem with Goal Zero. Instead, let us return to Captain Philip Mathews story to uncover the hidden trajectory trade offs and unintended consequences of this endless search for perfection for an entire industry. On the ninth of June, just three days prior to this incident, Elena received a call from Philip. It was a usual long distance spouse conversation, nothing unusual, said Philip, with the reassurance that they were just preparing for another inspection. It’s a bit stressful, but nothing that I cannot handle. On 11th June, the ship was informed that the discharge port was Port Rashid in UAE, and apparently a vetting inspection was scheduled alongside cargo work to clear the deficiencies raised in Japan, according to the local rules, Port Rashid requires all ships calling port to submit port formalities at least 24 hours prior to arrival, everyone got busy from there. On 12 June, at around noon time, the family received a call from the company that the captain was missing from the ship. It’s been four hours since he’s missing. What have you done? Where are you searching? I asked, I was told that they were still searching. Said, Michael. When I pressed further, they said, where to search? The position he went missing, the position we found we suspect he was missing, or the position we came to know he was missing. If you don’t belong to the world of shipping, it is so hard to imagine even the most obvious physical risks on a floating ship. When someone goes missing at sea, every movement adds to more complications. Not making decisions only makes the situation worse. The ship was about 60 miles south of the Iranian coast, and there were four ships searching for the captain. The Ship Manager assured me that they are doing their best. Said, Michael, I was totally lost. I didn’t want to leave the office, because I knew once I go home, it would be harder to think. I sat around and tried to do a few things. Then I called the Indian Embassy in Hamburg. I told this person, I’m an ex Seafarer from India, and I’m now working in Hamburg, and this thing has just happened. Is there any way you could help? I told him, the ship is near the coast of Iran, and I remember him scolding me back and saying. Saying, Where are we?

Nippin Anand  10:02

Where am I? And I said, you are in Hamburg, sir. Where did this incident happen? I set the coast of Iran, and he said, Why are you troubling me? This is not a question meant for me. And I was a little bit taken aback. What could be more demeaning than a bureaucratic response to a human being in distress having lived in the west and seeing how often immigrants are disowned by their own country of origin, I found a new meaning emerging from this narrative. It almost felt like an institutional attempt to manage the expectations of a third world citizen who was suddenly starting to feel his rights after living in a so called civilized society, Michael should have known better that his brother was not Captain Philip on board a Danish carrier hijacked by Somalian pirates, where the sovereign state would do all it takes to get their citizens back. It was Philip a Third World seafarer. It was Philip, a third world Seafarer working for a Singapore based ship owned by a Japanese owner, and flagged under the Panamanian jurisdiction, life is cheap, even cheaper when you come from a land of 1.5 billion. Who cares that a captain goes missing at sea after a few hours of frantically searching the international waters. The ship managers concluded that it was time to call the rescue off and move on. The chartering manager called me and said, Michael, we have searched everywhere. We have spoken to the Director General shipping in India. It’s too dark, and now we are abandoning the search. I was I was very numb. You know, I was very, very numb with all these things that happened before that. I was just sort of, I mean, couldn’t believe this was so real and so happening. But aren’t you all going to search? Michael asked, and I remember he said, it’s dark, and we have all spoken to the Director General, and now we just have to move on. The ship will sail out, but the Iranian search and rescue team will continue with the search. First, the missing Seafarer is abandoned by his own state and then by the employers, all within the course of a few hours. And if this is not enough, the Iranian Coast Guard informed Michael that the only reason they were continuing their search for his brother was because there was another accident reported in the area. Consider yourself lucky. There has been a piracy attack on two merchant ships today, so we will all be looking out for your missing relative. They told me. Michael said, it is as if my brother meant nothing. I should just consider myself lucky. I don’t have the objective to describe how it felt, the propaganda of zero harm. What an unfortunate story of apathy in pursuit of zero harm. The ship manager could not afford any more time for a missing employee, the state washed its hand off from the citizen. The Regional Coast Guard obviously had other priorities, and in the absence of any humanitarian support, it was a lone brother coordinating search and rescue from his own office in Hamburg through the night. The most painful aspect of this saga is that it is not at all painful within the culture of shipping. It is expected and quite normal. A senior manager tells me oil companies are still better than the rest when it comes to taking care of their people. I wondered, how much worse does it get at the bottom end of the strata? What struck me as I listened to Michael was his ingenuity, even under enormous stress, Michael tried everything possible, everything humanly possible, from tagging the Indian Foreign Minister on a Twitter post to begging every possible surgeon Coordination Center in the regional waters seeking assistance what should otherwise be a concerted effort of an industry came down to one person’s endeavors to save his family. Nearly every oil tanker carries a conspicuous slogan at the forefront of the accommodation and all that it takes is a crisis situation to uncover the futility of such slogans. It reminds me of the plight of an Argentine ship captain whose ship was once detained in Aberdeen Nippin. Safety is just a talk. Who cares for the seafarers today, if I need to install a toilet on our ships, there are hundreds of approvals I will need from regulators and ship managers. But if I tell them I have been working non stop for three days without rest, everyone points in another direction. That is the propaganda of zero harm Do unto others, as you would expect them to do to you. I speak. Painful as it was listening to how the captain was abandoned by nearly every custodian of safety in the maritime industry. It gets even more disturbing when we shed light on the social context of this accident. From the time Philip went missing, Elena always felt something was not right in the way the company was handling the communication with the family. So without informing the company, the family decided that Michael should visit on board before the ship sailed out from Dubai. As he was boarding the flight in Hamburg, Michael received a phone call from Dubai. It was my batch mate in Dubai. He told me the company canceled the inspection. He said, I saw the captain’s name. It was your brother, and I was to inspect the ship. And then got me thinking, maybe Philip was under pressure because of this wetting. And I said, Damn. I mean, this was my batch mate who knew who my brother was. And obviously it would have been a good inspection, you know? So that was the moment I just laid down on the airport floor. It was like the world is so small, you know? It was such a simple thing. There was a complete silence in our call before Michael broke down into tears. An entire industry takes pride in the myth of objective safety assessments, and in a moment, we realize how a drop of compassion changes the entire experience of inspections. What became clear from our discussion was how a batchmate holds the power to turn a bureaucratic, depersonalized process into a human experience. It is no surprise that seafarers develop preferences for inspectors and local pilots when visiting foreign ports, not because the inspectors don’t raise findings, but because some of them treat seafarers like human beings, respect empathy and compassion, a scarce attribute within the dehumanizing culture of risk and safety in pursuit of certainty and zero harm, hope is all we have. When Philip went missing, Michael had the presence of mind to appoint an independent investigation agency in Dubai when he arrived on board, still hopeful that Philip may be hiding somewhere on the ship, he made an announcement in the public address system. It was a difficult call for me, but I had to do it. This was a request from the little girls back home. We knew he is hiding somewhere. He can’t just go missing like this. They told me on the phone, please look everywhere properly. Uncle, I searched everywhere, even the garbage bins. After all, hope is all we have, as he engaged in conversations with other crew members, more things came to the surface on the day of the accident. The captain was last seen coming off the smoke room at around 630 in the morning, between seven and 945 the technical manager, who was sailing with the ship to address the vetting deficiencies, kept looking for the captain at around 945 unable to locate the captain on the ship. The duty officer on the bridge advised the ship manager to make an announcement on ship’s public address system. The technical manager felt this would distract the maintenance team who were preparing the ship for inspection in Port. Nothing distracts people who are committed to zero, let them carry out the work, the technical manager said, and then he took three crew members with him to search for the captain. An hour later, the duty officer requested the technical manager to radio alert the ships in vicinity. The technical manager responded that a captain gone missing would reflect badly on the company’s reputation. There are no evil intentions here. Shame does not allow space for imperfection and vulnerability as the pressure mounted on the manager, a permission was granted to the duty officer to make a radio announcement that a crew member had gone missing on board. Somehow it would have felt like an ideal compromise between the fear of being accused of doing nothing and appearing to do at least something. Michael then visited his brother’s cabin, but he could not find anything unusual. It was a normal cabin, a boiler suit hanging safety boots lying on one side, a couple of juice cans in the fridge. It was like,

Nippin Anand  19:41

it was like a normal person who had left his cabin as if he was coming back. Nothing unusual. There was a small Bible with a bookmark, which Philip used to carry with him. By this time, a parallel narrative was starting to emerge from the company. The captain may have self harmed. Mike. Remained unconvinced of this narrative as he continued talking to more crew members in search for more evidence, his search took a new meaning when Michael spoke with the ship’s agent. The ship’s agent told Michael that on the night before he went missing, the captain spoke with him on phone several calls. He told me that the captain was busy preparing for the inspection until 01 45 in the morning and sending me the required paperwork. Michael said, the agent reminded him to get some rest, but a diligent Captain wanting to make sure that everything was in order before he hid the bed. There was one last paper that he could not submit before he went to bed because it needed the chief engineer’s signature. At 5am the captain was back at work again with roughly about three hours of rest, at least on the paper. This raised more alarm bells for Michael. He was keen to find out what happened between 630 and 945 the time that the captain was last seen by the ship’s crew, and when he went missing, he requested the company for a copy of the voice data recorder the black box, and after initial resistance, Michael finally obtained a copy for his records. As he went through the transcript, he noticed intense conversations between the captain and the ship manager on the bridge about the ship’s readiness for wedding inspection in port. You know, there was non stop discussion about work, work, work, work, all related to the wedding. I mean, I’m a master, obviously, you know, we can understand fully all totally related to the wedding, is this sign? Is that sign? That sort of a thing? My eyes were not at its best. They were blurred with tears, and they were really aching. But whatever little I could see, there were some crappy messages. I caught this superintendent on two or three things. I said, You made such a big fuss over this, and this was not even required. He just put his head down, you know, like, you know, realizing he had been cornered. He didn’t say much after that, after listening to the VDR, and after seeing the attitude of the superintendent, especially after listening to the VDR, I was very sure that Philip had not harmed himself, at least deliberately so. It only came down to the conclusion, it was very clear for me, only two possibilities arise from there to explain how Philip went missing. It could either be that someone had pushed him overboard, a police investigation was carried out, and several crew members were interviewed by Dubai police, but nothing was really found, he said, from Michael’s point of view, the most plausible explanation was that on the night before, Philip was so overwhelmed by the paperwork that when he nipped out for a smoke after the morning meeting, he lost balance and toppled overboard. When I looked at the design of the life raft deck outside the smoke room, it all started to make sense. We do not know, and we will never know, under what circumstances the captain went missing. Unfortunately, the sea does not provide many answers. It only raises more questions, and like all accidents, it is now up to us what questions we care to ask. To me, chasing a cause of this accident is secondary. Finding someone to vent out our frustration is futile. Determining whether the captain went missing, someone pushed him or he really jumped overboard is immaterial. What is worthy of thinking and reflection is the extent of brutalization in our quest for zero within the culture of this industry. Let’s just meditate on this issue. Can zero be an aspiration? Captain Philip Mathew became a victim to the unrealistic expectations of an industry in ways that seafarers will not find difficult to relate with. It is often the marginalized and the vulnerable at the receiving end of the myth of perfection. One often hears in the risk and safety industry, but also in the academic discourse, an incessant support for the zero ideology. It’s an aspiration. No one is really expecting you to achieve this goal at the most, it is a stretch goal. I too, have heard this a few times. The term aspiration comes from the Latin word aspirato, which means breathing in. So are we saying that people should just breathe in zero? How can someone breathe nothing and still stay alive. That is, of course, a play of words. But beyond semantic juggling, there is an ideology behind zero that sets us against our own existence as fallible humans. How can perfection be a goal when all of existence is fallible? When we first decided that. It was time for us to become parents. Knowing Irma, I knew she would feel under tremendous stress to provide the best for our children, so I brought this little placard as a reminder for both of us every now and then, when we see this placard, it reminds us of our fallible existence. It reads, good mums have sticky floors, messy kitchens, piles of laundry, dirty ovens and happy kids. Notice the goal. Happy Kids, it’s not as if we are aiming for disease free, no harm or error proof. Children in an imperfect world, children will become sick, they will suffer, get injured and become depressed as I write this paper, our nine years old has suffered from a broken arm while playing football, and he has been off from the school for four weeks. At one stage, he was also bullied in the school. What that mean? We have failed as parents. How can perfection become a source of aspiration for fallible humans as parents, we set absolute goals to protect our children from harm, no iPad, no phones, no sugar or walk 10 kilometers or 10,000 steps from tomorrow. Guess what happens next? Hiding, stealing and a culture of cynicism against parents and before we realize we have created sub cultures within our own families. When we set absolute goals, we stifle creativity, learning, imagination, and risk all the essential ingredients of living and being. We think we are being specific when setting absolute goals, even when specific means going nowhere and achieving nothing, ie zero, the salvation myth. There is a popular saying in the shipping industry, no one dies on my watch. Our perception becomes so narrowly focused on saving lives that we can no longer see the harm we commit under the pretext of zero. The notion that I am here to save you is perhaps one of the most dangerously misleading myths of safety, even from a legal perspective. It took months of struggle for Michael to watch his brother being acknowledged as a statistic within the International Maritime Organization accident database, the IMO refuses to register an accident if it were not reported by the ship’s flag state, but the flag state of the ship, Panama has no incentive to acknowledge a death on board one of their flagged vessels that would come in the way of Goal Zero. It doesn’t end there. Captain Phillip Matthews is survived by a widow and two little girls. In the absence of state support, the family needs immediate access to his funds in the bank, but federal laws don’t allow Indian banks to release the funds until a death certificate is produced, which could take up to seven years from the time a person goes missing. How often do we think about the unintended consequences of Goal Zero? There is another problem with the salvation myth. It makes it dogmatic and anti learning. Some time ago, I was sipping a glass of wine while the plane was landing in Aberdeen, the flight attendant swapped my glass for a plastic one, and all she had to say was, this is not safe for you. Period, nothing scares people more than the fear of death. It is where all conversations come to an end. Once an inspector says it’s not safe for you, the captain must obey His command. Zero thrives on fear, because deep inside Nothing makes us more anxious than the fear of mortality. So few learn because so few understand the cyclical nature of unlearning and relearning, which means destruction always leads to rebirth, the perfection myth, if you still believe that Goal Zero is just an aspiration and that it should not be taken so seriously, perhaps it would be an idea to reflect on the situation of Philip’s widow and the two girls I hear you. It’s Philip’s fault that he took his goals too seriously.

Nippin Anand  29:19

Zero is not just a number to manage. Zero is a symbol of the denial of existence. Zero strips us of our existence as fallible beings. Zero is an ideology, and like all ideologies, it is powerful and unconscious within the culture of the industry, you may tell the captains to sleep on time. The world will not come to an end with a signature missing on a certificate. But what do you tell the ship’s agent who has to respond to port formalities? How do you convince a ship inspector that a missing signature will not make much of a difference? It does not end there. To date, there has been no. Formal investigation into this case by the shipping company. Isn’t it strange that in an industry where a finger injury generates piles of paperwork, an incident involving a captain missing at sea goes silenced for years, that is the power of zero. We return to the original theme of this article. No reindeers were harmed. A Filipino junior officer once told me, I cannot sleep, sir, thinking, what if I missed a signature on a fire extinguisher? What did the inspector will find out? Will I go home? No job for me. Then zero strips people of their dignity and humanity, look around and you will find zero everywhere. No reindeers were harmed in making this good stuff, no animals were harmed in making this film, no seafarers were harmed in transporting those goods. Why blame marketeers when safety science is deluded by this myth. Are we real as a species? Captain Phillip’s story serves to illustrate the delusion of zero. Can we come up with realistic goals? Thank you for listening. You