To Do list

To learn Salsa..to live in Europe.. to sky dive.. to learn odissi … to go to Leh on a bike… to do theatre and act in at least one play… to learn the guitar…
To travel alone for 10 days to some place…. To participate in Kalyan’s photography expedition…to read the Gita..to do something for Animal welfare ...

My dreams are limited by reason.:)

Still trying to break my mental barriers... I will learn to dream soon.

Antithesis

Good thoughts that don’t remain etched in memory if I don’t write them..
Moments that got obliterated when I didn’t have a camera to capture them…

There was a thought that I wanted to forget and it kept coming back to haunt me..
And the images I wanted to wipe out like chalk dust from the slate, but in vain.

Laughable.

Identity Crisis... 21st June 09, 10.00 am

I was traveling to Vadodara for the first time yesterday and there’s this teenage girl who I spotted sitting on my seat. Dressed in yellow shirt, loose jeans, short cropped hair, slight signs of mustache above her lips and spectacles a tad bit too large for her little face.
Just as I told her that she was sitting on my seat, I realized I had committed a blunder! Her face shrunk, she grabbed her bag, fumbled inside to look for her ticket and realized that she had made a mistake. She had the most crucifying look on her face, got up from her seat and sat at the aisle seat.
She had an awkward smile on her face for the next twenty minutes and largely had her head buried into her news paper for the rest of the travel. To me it was a small unnoticeable mistake...to her it was probably an error she would think of for the next few hours, if not more. I smile to myself. I was reminded of my own times as a gawky little teenager, always wanting to be treated as an adult when I was not. It’s a perpetual identity crisis! And I hated it when the older, beautiful women would not notice me and I wasn’t in ‘that’ league.
When I look back at those times, I never want to go back to them. Not that those times were not good. They were; the dolls ( Though I did not play with dolls too much!),friends at school, dance, cycling in the evenings; it had its own charm. But they were turbulent times.
Remember all that? The hairy hands that cannot be waxed, crushes that you do not understand, small tiffs with friends which will mentally push you to the bottom of the pit?
It is not that the same situations do not arise or exist today. They do. Rather some of them have gotten more complicated. Hair needs to be painfully waxed, crushes become complex relationships and tiffs at times become serious misunderstandings!
However, as we grow up, I think there are a few things that make us equipped to deal with situations better.
One of them is the simple awareness that what is happening is normal and that every one encounters these situations in life. The knowledge that you are no special makes you feel at ease and deal with things a lot better. So while the kid thinks that the situation is unique and why did such a thing have to happen, you know it’s just one of those.

Another tool is our gradually evolved comfort with who we are. The clothes we were, the language we speak, our choice of songs, what we want to do, the realization that you may not want to top in studies even though you have been told that’s the best thing ever! You develop your own comfort levels and style with time.

But the biggest realization which makes adults deal better with situations than the kids is that everything… everything that we go through is transitory. Bad moods, back aches, good friends, the girl you hated in school, hubby squabbles, this good moment, PMSing(!), everything will pass if you let it.

In India, the tendency to treat teenagers as kids is far more pronounced. It is not too surprising when even the thirty five year olds are instructed on how to spend their money and stuffed with food by mommies who ‘know’ what’s best for their bacchas! Looking back I think teenagers would like it better if parents/ elders around treated them more as adults than as kids. That would mean more of reasoning than instructions. It would sometimes also mean sometimes just letting them be! Encourage them to try and explore everything but tell them the pros and cons of it.

They would fumble, flounder but would emerge far stronger and independent headed than they were before. This is in no way to undermine the positive influence the parents and other elders have on their teenagers. All that is imperative to instill the right values in them but sometimes, it is important to just let go.

Not fuss over like the air hostess on the plain was doing with the girl next to me, asking her several times if she was traveling alone and that if she needed anything. I felt like saying “Will you let her alone, she would tell you if she needed anything!”

As I looked at her, the girl still had her head deeply buried into the same page of the news paper. Her desire to look and behave like an adult, somewhere betraying her need to be one.

I smiled to myself ( It was almost a mean feeling of being in a better situation) and looked out of the window.

The Bhopali Vs the Mumbaikar , 20th June 6 PM

Off late I have been in the skies very often and I like those times as they are completely mine. I sit back, relax and enjoy the good times. My thoughts meandering, creating a hundred images all at the same time…
It was no different that day as I let my thoughts flow while I was landing at the Indore airport and my reverie broke as I spotted the cube like houses and the checker board fields and my mind went … ‘ Aaaaaaaa!!! What a gross wastage of space! Just imagine how many apartments could have come up here to accommodate millions!’
That was the moment I realized I had become a true Mumbaikar. Having lived in small cities till five years back I was in love with the wide fields, big houses and spaces around. Brought up in Bhopal, known as the city of lakes, I remember getting nauseated in the pit of my stomach as I was thrown out of the local train with the tide of people who got down at Sion station. That was my first landing at Mumbai and I hated it!

Forward it five years hence from then, and here I was at the Indore airport, impatient and uncomfortable with the slowness of life that existed around me. I spent my time, checking out the guards, studying them as seriously as they were studying my boarding pass. Asking each person to remove the laptops from the bags, frisking for minutes with a purposeful look… I wondered what would happen if the guards at Mumbai Airport started taking so much time with each person?!
‘ Work expands to fill up time’ , I mentally ridiculed not knowing how seriously I had started liking everything that was fast paced and deriding everything that was not.!
The next thing I remember is my travel back from Indore to Mumbai. Needless to say I had to undergo the same slow motion check up all over again.
Just I settled my self comfortably at the window seat, glad that I was back in the flight again and headed towards amchi Mumbai, I heard a lot of huffing and puffing right next to my seat. I turned to find this large lady, in her mid forties , dressed in white, holding a huge bulky jute bag ( The kinds you get in the Kirana stores), trying to push herself between the handles of the seat. I offered to help to keep her bag up but she declined and held it as if she didn’t want to part with it. Another man, a complete stranger, also in his mid forties took the aisle seat. Both had boarded from Indore and were complete strangers to each other.
When the food was served, this lady asked the man and me if she could keep the food which was being served inside her bag and have it later. I answered her but maintained a restrained expression as if she were doing something outrageous and that my paying any more attention to her would somehow make me a party to it!

The man however told her very coolly that she could keep the food inside and eat later. From there on, there conversations started. The drift that I got suggested that they spoke of Ayurveda, Vedanta, naturopathy, books and yoga. I was amazed to hear the lady say ‘ Aap kabhi us side aayein toh mere ghar zaroor aayiega ( if ever you come to that side of the city, do drop in)’!! I could not help smiling. All the while that I was putting up my fast-paced-high-handed-city-face, these two people had found friends in each other!

I wondered if these things ever happened in big cities. If people in big cities like Mumbai ever had the time to indulge in such conversations on trains and busses and find others who share so many common interests? And even of they have the time, do they consider it too LS to show concern and empathy. I write this at the cost of sounding harsh but the incidence of such incidents is higher in places like Bhopal than in Mumbai.

As my thoughts were playing pendulum with Mumbai and Bhopal I saw Mumbai from the clouds. Brightly lit in the night, I thought only the milky way can look like thisJ
the python like queens neck lace, the sprawling high rises, accommodating millions by the day, cars lined up and following each other like ant trails on the marine drive… life on the fast track…
I rationalized, that in this city, people may not have the time to make friends on the way but if you ask them the way, they will leave their jobs to show you the way… that’s all that matters isn’t it..
Besides I had grown so used to the crowded roads, the jostling on the trains, the hours on the road where the traffic cops consider it blasphemous if your car is not bumper-to-bumper with the car ahead(!), all that I could see from up there..

Going back to the ‘life at its own pace’ was more than a little difficult.
As the airplane hit the tarmac at the Mumbai airport, I knew I had arrived home…

Trying to keep my sanity in insane times.. 23rd June 2009, 1 pm

What is detachment?

Is it the ability to accept the unacceptable when you know things are not within your control, when you can do nothing to alter the situation?
Or is it the ability to know that you could have helped the situation if you really wanted to.. but hey ! u know what..??! You have a better idea…! You don’t want to do anything about the situation. You want to let yourself stand there calmly.. between the emotions and your soul.. You want to see every emotion pass through you like the spirits that you saw in the ghost movies..
Feel sad, depressed, pained, puckish, bliss, joy, cleansed… all as it comes…
And feel cathartic at the end of it all… Knowing well that you have the ability to feel all and yet rise beyond those emotions…
Why are tough times so tough when we pass through them and why do they always look easy in retrospect.. making us look stupid and small about the way we behaved when we were going through it…?

Bliss ... 18th June 2009, 6 am

Sitting all by yourself, at the airport CCD ,on an early Friday morning, sipping a piping hot cup of coffee; with Barack Obama’s Audacity of hope in hand…

Knowing that the flight is delayed by two hours and that not working is legitimate …:)

Something intertial about it...

Someone close had once told me that the only thing that prevents us from realising our true potential is that sense of inertia which sets in every now and then. Back then those words did not seem anything beyond being profound words which I did not bother to delve into .
These days, surprisingly, everywhere I go , in most of whatever i see and do, the feeling sets in stronger than ever.
One realises that in most of what we do everyday, a sub optimal performance brings optimal or sometimes supra optimal results. You could take any example for it. Think about the presentation that you have tomorrow, the night out that you do for it. Not that you will not cover all the requisite points or that you will you will not deliver a fantastic presentation. But what I am talking about is the gap.. the gap between what eventually turned out and what could have turned out had you mulled over it a lilttle bit more.
Many a time , I have felt as if this intertia in me has a clock sense in it, It knows exactly how much time I would need to be able to make a sub optimal presentation and yet be able to make an impression!
Most of the people who I see around me are intelligent ( at least above average) , can apply themselves well and respond well to situations. Why then do we not excell at everything that we do? Why do we end up with sub optimal results?
Then there are also people who I see bring that special touch to whatever they do . Mind you, it's not about doing well what you like. The challenge is to bring that special bit to your daily rigmarole. How many of us do it or even want to do it?
I believe it is the ability of people to rise above this inertia that makes all the difference. The need to not just do justice but to give it reasonable energy and thought , that does it.
One realises that tasks start looking more meaningful if one stops to think of why one is doing what he/she is doing. How will that add any value ( sounds terribly cliched!) to anyone or anywhere. Not always will one find significant reasons/ answers for it, but chances are that you will find tasks more meaningful.
Many of us may not be able to live significant lives, where we do earth shattering work, or add value to millions of lives. But if we start excelling in most small things we do, chances are that we would lead a more contented life... a more happy life.
Another aspect of inertia that I wanted to talk about is the inertia of our lifestyles. My mum says that she loves her life the way it is. Revolving around her three daughters and till sometime back her two dogs( both of who just passed away). Sometimes I think that She, being the great woman that she is was capable of a lot more. May be she rues the fact that she did not do anything else or may be she really means what she says. I would give her the benefit of doubt, but the point being - are we really happy with our lives doing just what we are doing - work, family- a bit of travel- dance- exercise- wotever else?? Or have we just found enough ways to rationalize that we are OK/ happy with it because anything else seems too disruptive/unnecesarry?
I don't have answers to these. Just asking myself some questions.However, two things that I clearly see in what i wrote above -
Intertia to prolong till you do a sub optimal- yet -manageable job
Intertia in life to live it with no chage.
If we try and look into these forms and try and rise above that inevitable feeling that sets in, we will find our lives more meaningful.