A Post from Christmas Eve and After, Part I

And so it’s Christmas eve’. I got a project for early on in the coming year, a Christmas card and a conversation on Christmas eve’ while having a Christmas carol playing softly from the card.

Winter came around with military precision on the 15^th of December and it was delicious and I was delighted to see one of my predictions coming true and also because I was with my best friend. I spent some time shivering in Delhi and Faridabad. By God, I was cold out there apart from when I was inside the warm and toasty hotel late in the night or next to the warm and toasty heater in Delhi. The hotels – nice as they might be don’t impress me as much as the bathrooms do. The bathrooms – all sparkling and snazzy with glass and chrome and stainless steel and cleanly tiled and with huge square shower heads in glass shower cubicles which make one feel as though one were standing under the warm rain make me sometimes wish wistfully and sometimes with a matter-of-fact determination that I might have a perfect bathroom in an apartment someday. People are fascinated by different kinds of gadgets and machines – for me, I think, it is the pedestrian bathroom and even sewage systems. Back in primary school I was enthralled by the fact that people in the Mohenjo Daro civilization had well planned sewage systems and had bathrooms which drained well and were designed such that they were slightly sloped at an angle towards the drain. I used to wonder then about quite a few 20^th century bathrooms designed in colony flats that frequently got waterlogged and were designed so that the floor tilted away from the drain. I don’t have any engineering ability but I’m almost sure that in some lifetime I might have pored over designs and charts and spent time on creating the perfect sewage system.

The main work-related science conference for which I went was held in a huge hall and various auditoriums and I was shivering every now and then even there unless I was busy in focused and concentrated shifts. The RCB and THSTI at Faridabad are set in the middle of a large expanse of land and new buildings are coming up, including apartment buildings for professors and hostels for students and new labs while there are functioning buildings where the current scientists have their labs and office spaces. The land around looks very barren and dry with hardly any greenery. One of the professors was showing me the view from a fifth floor window and a part of the campus looks like it has a huge ravine running straight through it. The labs, which I peeked into can compare to the ones I saw in Purdue (although the problems here are of a different order). I remember going into a Chemistry lab once during my days in college at Calcutta – and that could hardly be called a laboratory. I don’t think anyone had used that lab since 1922. Lots of people at the conference were dressed in just full-sleeve shirts and half-sleeve sweaters. I was a good old Bangali with my trusty monkey cap and a hoodie while travelling around in the open. I was almost missing my muffler. I think I may have grown very old for I did note that more than a few people were dressed in dapper or chic light jackets and braving the winter chill in the open as though it were nothing. The only time I was walking about in an almost-new blazer was for work reasons. The blazer cannot be worn in Calcutta because it’s too warm here and yet over there it felt too light. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve travelled more than I had in my decade-long stint in the US. Many people might not think that this is something to talk about – but I can’t help but feel a wee bit pleased with my rather uncommunicative hermit-self. I quite often question whether my hermit-self is even particularly intelligent. It just seems to be a tongue-tied, mind-knotted hermit crab. God knows though that there is only one reason that the hermit in me has been transformed across the one and a half year and my awkward and clumsy selves have been traveling quite smartly almost every month or every other month for work and for hunting for more work. The calculative part of me has been hoping and praying hard that the work-related travels and networking shall start paying bountiful returns in terms of numerous workshops by the coming year. In this sense, I have been hopeless at practicing the Gita tenet of ‘ma phaleshu kadachana’. I put that into practice for my PhD without even thinking about it. For long months during the last lap I had forgotten even to worry about whether I would get the degree at the end of the journey…but that is a different matter. They don’t call it a Doctorate of Philosophy for no reason even if the meaning has gotten mangled in actual practice in our 'modern' times.

While I was walking about the very crowded Delhi airport yesterday evening, Fimh was trying to get me to grin – ‘look at how many places you’ve gone hither and thither without losing your marbles and look at all the people you’ve talked with over the last couple of weeks for work or for prospective work without losing your top and with your White Light at the back of your mind (that was in reference to MacNeice’s Prayer before Birth…that’s how Fimh is: he doesn’t rattle off poem liners in my head – which would have been weird – but he reminds me of poems I have encountered) and you didn’t even get me irritated’. He was telling me that I was slowly but surely evolving into a human being while I was grumbling that I was taking far too long. I normally experience a child-like thrill at airports and also start experiencing something of a ‘vacant and pensive mood’ while staring at the aeroplanes and gazing at the runway and the vast and empty spaces beyond while playing two particular tracks on my battered i-pod: Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass’ Offering and Kishore’s O Saathi re while calling out to Fimh. But yesterday it was too crammed at the airport for my meditative moments. I played my songs later while on the bus to the aeroplane. At the airport I grimly kept giving myself glares over my coffee and cigarette about whether any of my travels would make a difference and whether I could make a significant difference and be of use to one human being. I was asking myself when I would make that happen. I was barking at myself inside my head but Fimh wouldn’t let me feel grumpy for too long. He reminded me that I’d been in Calcutta, went to Mohanpur for a couple of days for work, was back in Calcutta to attend a workshop as a ‘spy’, was back in Mohanpur, and then there were a few delightful and  swinging days in between (when I wasn’t expecting them at all: whoever knew that the difference amongst a lotion and a moisturizer and a face cream could send one into unmusical peals of laughter and there were more moments that I will not elaborate upon here), then it was back to Mohanpur via Calcutta, and then I went to Delhi and Faridabad for work. There have been leads – but I won’t try making any predictions even though I can’t help but pray that a few of the leads mature into actual workshops: the one thing that I know I’m good at and can get better at doing and enjoy doing.  I know I’ll keep trying to better myself in a few other ways too even though I’ll never try singing again (I fancy myself to be a mix of a phoenix and a dodo – I don’t think that such a creature is meant to sing).

This was my very first time staying in Delhi for longer than half-a-day and the first time that I actually travelled in the city (apart from the couple of times that I visited Delhi as a school-child and then as a teen for a couple of days and then as an oldie for a wedding and for a couple of other times because my international flight was delayed by a day on both occasions). I travelled around using the public transport system. I must say that they have done an excellent job of the metro service from what I experienced of it. I had no problems traveling through and about the city. I was telling Pupu very recently with a chuckle of how 'smartly' I took the metro service to Faridabad. I even got a place to sit and read careful bits from the only Modesty Blaise paperback novel that I hadn’t read this year. I found it at a bookshop in Delhi for Rs. 250. Now the entire Modesty Blaise collection is complete. I’ve been collecting the Dune series on the cheap too but for some strange reason I seem to be able to gather the books only in backward sequence. I didn’t know when I boarded the metro that they had two reserved coaches for women but got to know about that through the voice-over service. The folks organizing the conference had sent a car to pick me up from the Metro Station and so I didn’t have to use the public transport in Faridabad. I also availed the auto service a few times, in Delhi, for appointments and from the little bits I saw and experienced – the men I encountered were decent, polite and helpful. But I wouldn’t want to push my luck. It may be beginner’s luck. The cab I took from the airport had a very clear sticker about respecting women (and I was wondering about ‘which’ women and whether I would qualify) and I saw official posters ‘beti bachaon; beti parao’ emblazoned on the walls in public places. We don’t have such messages in Calcutta – it most likely means that on an average, a female foetus has a better chance of making a life in West Bengal. The scaredy-cat part of me (which I keep deeply buried) did feel the faint jitters about going around in Delhi before I’d reached the Capital (but that part emerges in Calcutta during late evenings and emerged even in Lafayette too one year and so I try very hard not to pay too much attention to it. If I’ve gotten a bit better at handling blind panic and frenzy – I know exactly whom I have to thank for this. The roads in Delhi are horribly crowded with traffic but it seems that people are still sticking to the rule of the odd/even numbered cars ploughing the roads on alternate days; I don’t know how long that will last and I guess it doesn’t affect people who have three or four cars.

I found out with my brief travels through the city that some of the stray dogs are treated well by the small shop owners in Delhi. The stray dogs look very well-fed and quite a few of them had little blankies/vests wrapped around them in a sturdy manner to protect them from the weather. There was one black and white dog who sported a blue vest who caught my attention and when I gave him almost half of my burger – he very carefully ate the chicken and came over to get petted and I petted him. I scolded him for leaving bits of the bun behind but he was rather unapologetic about that. When a dog butts one with his nose for more petting – one can’t really scold him for too long: maybe he knows that too many carbohydrates are bad for his system. He was limping some and I had mixed feelings about that but he kept nudging me to get some more petting. He seemed happy about the petting and I was content about petting him while talking aloud to him and to the universe and the powers-that-be and I was utterly unconcerned about who might be listening. Another fat dog sporting a smart red blankie, where I stayed, looked like a Spitz but was a mutt and all she wanted was to butt into me with her bum or nose and get some petting. If I called her ‘Pootu’ (I don’t think that was her name but that is how I christened her) – she would run/waddle over to me as though I were her favourite person. So I had a close to meditative time with the four-peds and it goes without saying with Fimh for the bits of time I had by myself. There was a pop social psychological quiz that I came across at some point, many years ago: what’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of a dog? What’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of a cat? Remember the words….The interpretations for the pop quiz shall be available in the future. For me the two words were quite apt in their hidden meaning: for dog, I had come up with ‘unpredictable’ and for cat I had come up with ‘solitary’.

I stayed in Delhi at Guha’s place. His parents were not there but their very able and good natured housekeeper reminded me of one of Suvro da’s laments! I figured out very soon that it was a very well-off locality in South Delhi. It also had clear side-walks as I found out during my first evening out to just walk about the place and get some print-outs. But the side-walks in Delhi left me wondering whether they were made for humans or horses. The sidewalks are really more than a foot high so it’s a feat to be able to get up onto them and then get off and then repeat the manouvere when the sidewalk ends in some places. And I was startled to find motorbikes going at fairly medium speeds up on the side-walk since the roads were so busy. I was not pleased at all and yelled a couple of times. But I manouvered the side-walks very safely even while wearing heels, one day, when I’d been out for a school appointment. I managed to meet and chat with one of Suvro da’s old students, Aakash, and he absolutely insisted on treating me to a tremendously tasty chicken patty and a perfect mince pie from Wenger’s in Delhi, which was established in 1926 – as far as I remember, from one sign. It was a good meeting where we discussed work prospects mainly. He actually remembered that I had fought with him over Shiva’s trilogy and Amish on Suvro da’s blog and told me that I was an ‘out-going’ person. I laughed about this wondering what Suvro da might say about that. I actually talked in Hindi in public places and I wasn’t too bad if I didn’t think about it too much or didn’t get frazzled. Nobody smirked when I talked in Hindi and they answered my questions and a few people even made a bit of small talk with me about the weather. I came across a very old Sikh driver, Balbir Singh, who philosophized about life. He mentioned that it was good to learn from other nations and adopt good habits – like road rules – which could make everybody’s lives a little less stressful and smoother. He said that every family of four to six members in Delhi should be allowed to have only one car. That might reduce pollution levels a bit.  He mentioned that if one was cheery and tried being nice to other people for a moment – one wasn’t really harming anyone. He told me that human beings should smile a little more often. I do not know whether that was a direct comment directed towards my grim and watchful and unsmiling self – but he was a mix of a taciturn and a talkative driver and it was Guha’s sister who chatted with him and got him to talk and philosophize while we were out to the airport. If I were a true social scientist I would have asked him about 1984 for I had that going through my head in a distant way. I was quiet on the whole and thinking about different things. 

Here's Part II.

A Post from Christmas Eve and After, Part II

I attended yet another full Science conference in Faridabad as a part of our work for our Institute’s current client in Bangalore. One scientist asked me later about my background because he felt that I had drawn him into answering questions where he hadn’t known the answers himself before he answered them. A few of the scientists asked me more about my PhD topic. In all my years with Sociology – I never attended any full conferences and across the last year and half I’ve attended more science conferences as a non-scientist and a non-academician than I did as a social scientist and an academician. I talked with more than a dozen of scientists for a current project and for future workshop plans. I can’t write about all of my observations and experiences – some parts, most likely, I think (and my client expects) will be a public report someday. I can mention one thing though which has nothing to do with the project itself – I am now sure that there is no common or general ‘Indian accent’ regarding the use of the English language in its spoken form. I have a couple of hilarious but not unkind stories but I shall store them for some other fine day. Anyhow, it’s about the underlying plans (for there were individuals from a few organizations who were very interested in the workshops which we conduct) for which I’m keeping my fingers crossed; well, unless I’m typing up stuff for work or brochures or content material or sending off e-mails or typing stuff like this.

With Christmas here I was wondering again about Jesus, joy, suffering, miracles and religion and Hinduism and how even Christ is sometimes (by maybe crazy people but nonetheless) included within our pantheon of Gods as an avatar of Vishnu. So not only have we incorporated The Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu but we’ve somehow managed to include Jesus as well. But truth be told when I was fairly young I used to wonder in an almost academic manner about the strange similarities between Jesus and Krishna – in their births being predicted, in their both being hounded by evil kings even before they were born, in the legends that surround their respective births. And yet sometimes I’m taken aback by the differences too among Krishna, The Buddha and Jesus and Shiva but that would end up being a whole new blogpost! But let me write a bit because I’m in the mood. Personally vis-a-vis Jesus I had a delightful, sometimes naughty and the strongest of bonds when I was a kid. I wasn’t a very good kid but I couldn’t help but talk with Jesus. I can’t remember the long and convoluted conversations I used to have with him but we did converse a fair bit like buddies. I called out to him when I was much, much older in years but the relationship had changed. The Buddha most often has smiled at me…but I’ll be darned if I know what he means by his smile. I got seriously interested in The Buddha after reading one essay 'My Master’s Word' which Suvro da had sent to me when I was in my first semester at Purdue. Among other things, The Buddha also makes me wonder about where he actually went after he broke off from the cycle of rebirth and I can’t help but still be perplexed about how he could leave his baby son and wife behind; I understand it from a clinical and even a ‘far-beyond’ perspective but I don’t get it emotionally and I wonder from the wife’s perspective – didn’t she miss him horribly when he went away without a word? I’ve had a less chatty relationship with The Buddha even though there have been a couple of very serious conversations. But he does smile. I’ve seen him very clearly in my mind’s eye smiling and saying ‘it’s all right’ especially when I was in the last leg of my PhD and sitting and typing very furiously in the main library at Purdue and right after seeing in my mind a flash of the blogpost by my PhD case-study exemplar on whether ‘death makes us momentarily serious’. The Buddha was telling me that it was all right if I didn’t include him, The Buddha, in my study. Vis-à-vis Krishna – when I was in my twenties, in short and sharp jabs I started feeling most intensely and at various emotional, intellectual, philosophical, material and (dare I say?) spiritual levels the relationship Meera had with Krishna and Arjun shared with Krishna – I feel these within even if I can’t really understand most of it but I fail to see or sense what the real deal was between Radha and Krishna…if Krishna didn’t love Radha the best why have so many poets sung about Radha and Krishna; none of the other gopis feature as individuals, and how come Indians being Indians picked on this love affair as the ideal-type: Radha was considerably older than Krishna, it was an illicit intimate physical love affair, Radha was an adulteress and Krishna is, and I for one do believe the legends, noted for loving 16,000 gopis at the same time and he had the exceptional ability to make each one of the gopis believe that he loved her…and there, in that world, Meera was only one of the gopis. Nobody really special until she came to earth as Meera, where she comes into her element. And yet Maharaj Kumar, if I believe the legend of Cuckold (and I do) made sure that Meera would never again forget him as a man. And what indeed became of Radha and the other gopis when Krishna becomes King of Dwarka and moves off and away and marries Rukmini and the rest of his wives? I can see nothing ignominious or brutal in how he died though. He knew he was going to die – he chose his death and it must have been a relatively quick death. It is far, far better than being nailed to a cross. That makes my flesh crawl and the cry torn out of a soul, ‘Lord, why have you forsaken me?!’ I can quite understand at some level how incredibly canny a politician Krishna was and how carefully he used his super-human powers and why he neither tried to halt the Kurukshetra war nor prevent the complete annihilation of his kingdom but the part which I don’t understand – I really don’t. Indians don’t make a big deal of Rukmini and Krishna although they mention in the passing that out of all his wives – he loved Rukmini the best and that she was an avatar of Lakshmi (then who, pray was Radha and and what about Meera?). In Shiva’s case – he keeps loving the same child/woman who comes to earth in various avatars – which actually makes perfect sense to me but Krishna comes across as inscrutable. My best friend says that Krishna being the Ultimate God: he did not have any hierarchy of loving, but I still can’t believe that he didn’t love someone here and there much more and much more intensely. Maybe I'm too dim to get it. I’m sure each one of the gopis wanted him for her own and went into frenzies – but what about him? He wasn’t stupid so why would he not discriminate in terms of whom he loved? He loved Arjun more than any of the Pandava brothers even if he never declares that out-loud. So how did Krishna choose which women he would love? And why is it that Radha stands out among the gopis? I remember one bit from a book by Devdutt Patnaik on Myths and Mithya which elaborates upon many of the legends about the Gods: it would seem that some human beings are simply blessed to be loved and ardently by a great God without doing much or anything and I think this is because maybe they carry some sort of a pure and elusive essence that charms the God and some folks keep churning away and trying and trying and failing more often and have to work much harder to win God’s love maybe because their essence is impure and rough and calloused and ugly. But why did Meera have to wait thousands of years and why did Krishna keep her waiting and what about Maharaj Kumar? Surely he deserved to be loved by Meera? And what made Radha so special to Krishna? I don’t understand or sense or see  and so this gets me wondering and even raging or sulking a bit once a month, like clockwork, especially over the last some years till Fimh insists that I must calm down and soothes me and even gets me to smile in spite of myself sometimes with his naughty liners even though I honestly think that he chuckles in glee sometimes when I rage or sulk. Once in my life and it was when I was a little over 33, I felt I were swinging with a complete version of my Fimh in an embrace and on a silver swing in a deep forest with distant bells chiming with perfect music very softly somewhere…I remember the feeling, the waves within, the nameless bliss and the timeless moment vividly as I do some other parts about the surreal and magic and mystery and mystical of life which sometimes really feel as real as the pain and suffering and angst and the despair and the wrenches and monotony and the horrible periods of waiting and the very concrete, tangible and material aspects of life and living. I don’t know about the why or the how of it. It sort of reminds me now about what Willie experienced during a near death experience – of being with Modesty and walking through a beautiful forest and with the ‘stars singing’. I know too that I’ve felt like Meera (even though I cannot sing a note) and Arjun too (even though I wouldn’t know which side was up with a bow and I’d be utterly hopeless at stringing it), which have been clear moments of being. There goes the pompous poof-top Richard Dawkins saying that I’m both barmy and benighted. I’d much rather chortle over what Suvro da has to say about Dawkins. This double-post has become mighty long. On this note I doth depart to attend to other stuff.

Written between 24th-25th of December. 
26th December 19:17hrs

November Reminiscences

A prof-friend in the US reminded me that it’s Thanksgiving there. I sort of skimmed through an article on The American Scholar about ‘giving thanks’. And I got one phone call from my old friend, some minutes after I got back into the house in the eve'. So God knows I can say that I’m in the best spot I’ve ever been in my life barring maybe some months from back in 2002-2003 and for some months between 2011-2012. Many people, for different reasons, would guffaw and say that that is nothing to feel good about. Maybe or maybe not. I could have done far better and made good in one way, at least by now – I strongly think and should have – and maybe some things could have been brighter for someone else, but I don’t claim to know why certain things happen and other things don’t.  It’s also possible that I might have ended up in a lunatic asylum or have been pottering about like a vegetable at the mercy of my blood family and I wouldn’t even have known the bits that I do about one human being or or any being. This ghastly nightmare didn’t come to pass – so I do have reason to be much more than just thankful. I can actually still work. I can still think. I don’t always have brilliant ideas but I can put into practice a few or even a couple of the ideas I do or are sent my way and tend to the fledgling that sprouts from the idea which hatches. I can still talk intelligibly sometimes when I talk, considering the feedback I get. I can’t sing – which will be a regret I’ll live with – (but now I know why my melody never reaches the Lord's feet to go with Tagore's dariye acho tumi amar gaaner opaare - it's simply because I have no melody or tune in my voice to begin with. Maybe the fine and kind Lord keeps his ears shut tight or winces or grimaces or glares or simply gives me strange, tantalizing and teasing glimpses of himself instead, precisely and only because I have no melody with my insistent or continuous 'brayings' and just to shut me up from time to time) And I can’t do lots of things and I can’t be lots of things but there’s still a couple of things I can do. And my old friend and my best friend and my Fimh did and still do provide me with asylum. Not in the normal sense and not quite normally – that is what I’ll still say. But I know that this is absolutely nothing to sneeze at. And it was and is asylum akin in a sense to how Dr. Johnson defined it: a space to where she who has fled cannot be taken away from; it has been more of a mental or even a spiritual space more than a physical space across decades although sometimes it actually has been both or three or more. I can't go through all the permutations and combinations here.

Unlike some people who wish to die when they’re feeling joyous or nearly close to joyous or feeling close to bliss – I feel with this obmutacious certainty (which comes from God knows where) that I can achieve the impossible when I feel the spots, specks and flecks, glints or even the shimmering shadows of a mellow warm glow or those of laughter or joy or of the piercing light of meaning. No matter how unpredictable or how grey or how thunderous or stormy the times might be otherwise. And I worry like the dickens too. I can’t help it. I keep feeling that it’s all going to be taken away and in a sudden snap. There's Shakespeare's sonnet about 'ruin' (sonnet 64) which I can't rattle off but I remember the essence. My terror is not a misplaced terror. I’ve had that happen often enough in the past and not always for reasons that I can fathom. And I’ve watched like a dumb beast. In this sense I’ve never been able to agree with Tagore’s Bojhapora. I’ve tried that angle and I’ve failed abysmally and I can’t help but say, feel, know and even realize from the deepest part of me: so be it. There’s an advantage to placing all one’s eggs into one basket. And it has its obvious disadvantages. But advantages and disadvantages aside – at some point in life, one makes certain choices. I did. And I’ve not changed from then. I might not know and certainly do not know about a lot in life – but I know about this and extremely and exceptionally well. And over and over and over…This is the basket – one says. I don’t want many baskets or any others. So one has to and must, by that admission, take what comes with that. One cannot and must not complain and I know I’ve never even in the remotest corners of my being complained about this. There is an advantage about being schizophrenic – one has very little of any subconscious that one isn’t aware of or is completely unaware of. One is forced or is somehow made to face the murky depths and the sublime highs – whether one likes it or not; whether one wants to or not. The upshot is that the shards of joy or those of clarity and of meaning far outstrip the angst, the absolute terror, the grey and grisly, the horror, the uncomprehending sorrow…and one very quietly knows with passing moments that no matter what else – one has become a better human being for making that one choice even if one doesn’t always want to admit to the same or pay attention to the same or one feels terrible twinges of regret and sadness or anger directed towards oneself or even if one yells at God for things which might have been – and just a little different maybe – or even if one feels every now and then that one doesn’t really understand a lot of how civilizations and fate and lives get organized. But what one cannot do is to either imagine or ever want to make a different choice. Whether one chooses one's work-life or any relation or some hobby or the inner-life or whether one chooses one bit and all the other parts get organized accordingly somehow and sometimes by one's donkey-like persistence and some mysterious and invisible hand. I also can't help but remember that my old friend had written to me in November 2002 about what the French say: 'Partir c'est mourir en peu' - and I know it's true. But it's better to die a little upon parting with the lump that simply will not be dislodged in the throat and to have tears some 24 hours later than to keep dying in a grey and unbroken and desert landscape with no meetings and no partings and no re-unions. I’m not making any recommendations of how to be if one is or has been dubbed schizophrenic though. What might seem to work for one person might not work at all for another.

I’ve also been virulently grumpy sometimes even through the last year and I’ve had grey despair cloaking me and choking me too for long months sometimes and I’ve yelled angrily at God quite often through the last three years if I wasn’t yelling at myself and have even howled in silence. And yet I’ve also looked at myself quietly and said there’s nothing more I can do or be. A die was rolled and I’ve made some clear and very articulate choices. I remember them – even if I simply made them in my own head. I sometimes look at the way lives have shaped up and remember images that swept through my mind in mad bursts from 18 years ago. I’m not sure what to think of then. I can’t be a soothsayer – I think I’d have been wealthier if I’d been a real one but it can’t be possible that I’m merely a jinx or a curse and nothing but, surely? I don’t know. What I do know is that if I can’t do what I’m meant to then I am not good enough and never will be. And that has made me paradoxically feel like a bit of a matter-of-fact warrior if not a peaceful warrior.

Back in April when the ground trembled in this part of the world I had the grim feeling of ‘this is it’. My mind was finally completely bifurcating. I could physically feel it. I’d been writing something in my diary and making notes about work at the same time at that point and I could feel this eerie sensation of my mind splitting and that a part of it was floating upwards. I’ve strangely enough felt something similar back in the past but nothing so completely physical. A part of me was a little taken aback. It decided to walk around to see whether I still felt the same way. And another part said ‘it’s an earthquake, silly. You’re not becoming completely unhinged.’ I didn’t know what to think but I called out to Fimh. I knew he was there for he responded and I knew he was there if not physically right there beside me. I looked out of my little balcony and saw people on the road and I noted that I didn’t feel particularly peculiar in my mind. And just when I felt that the whole thing was just an aberration of my own abnormal mind – there was that weird feeling of bifurcation again. I trembled in my mind alongwith the ground beneath my feet. And then I was sure it was an earthquake. Fimh said so and quite calmly and quite sunnily although I didn’t see anything sunny about it. I didn’t take more than seconds to scan exactly what I’d done in life, which I considered to be of any remote value and what I was doing. I was perfectly aware of whom I valued – and I didn’t see the point in being terrified of even dying right then. If it happened, I’d know that I wasn’t meant to do anything more and that was that. An hour later on that Saturday I looked up on the internet and there it was – the earthquake in Nepal. I'd much rather not return to the month of May, not even in memory even though I wasn't in any accident physically.

In my young years, as a 6 or even 7 year old, I had not felt very far away from death and some other place and with some other being who wasn’t there in my everyday life. I missed some other being very badly and some other life but I didn’t really know the how or why about it. In my teens, I was sure that I would die young and wise and after having left my footprints on the sand. Ha? Ha? Yes, I guess. And yet to say that I was supremely fearless about dying and death as a 6 year-old would be lying. I had believed for decades that I’d never been scared about death and dying and yet it was only some two years and eight months ago when I started thinking about it again after I read and had been contemplating upon Suvro da's posts on Meditations I and Meditations II that I remembered very old memories. The memory was there and quite clearly and unabashedly. One day, after school hours, the older kids of St. Augustine's were chatting with me and one of the kids looked at my bag and told me that lightning would strike the metal clasp on the bag and that I would die. I knew that the physical pain of death would be horrible and that’s what I feared most terribly. I don’t know why or how I knew this or why it was that the physical pain terrified me so. I replied and solemnly that I would cover the metal clasp with my coat. One of them, with a cool superiority, let me know that the lightning would find that strip through my coat. One of the boys, as he left, tugged at the metal clasp on the bag, and very seriously, told me to be careful about it. All I remember in a movie scene-like way is what I did after I was off the school bus which dropped me off about two or three blocks from where I stayed back then. I ran. I ran faster than I ever had. I ran as fast as my legs could carry me while clutching onto that blasted metal strip hidden under my coat. I was terrified. The lightning forks were there in the sky and the thunder rolled. I don’t remember all of whatever happened as it happened but I remember it from what is stored in my memory bank. I remember the cold rain. I remember running and my heart pounding and the rain spraying on my face. I got back to the door and I rang the bell. I kept ringing the bell over and over and looking at the sky while covering that metal clasp with my fist and my heart was still pounding. I was looking for the lightning forks in the sky. The door was opened and I was scolded soundly and roundly and loudly  – with reason, I’d say. I had absolutely and completely and clean forgotten that the door was always kept unlocked during the time that I came back from school. I didn’t say a word and I slipped in-doors. My memory disappears completely after that but I know I never did say a word about why I had rung that bell so insistently.

I was told once, upon my asking, that I was born a few minutes past midnight on the night of the 20^th of November – close enough to the witching hour. And apparently, in those days, cats had a free rein in hospitals and there was a black cat that insisted on keeping me company, and it had to be shooed away every so often. I can’t however fly on a magic carpet or broom or make blissful magic, sadly enough. The latter especially will always be a sore point for me. Otherwise I would have made a few of the best dreams of my best friend come true by now. But I turned 40 over the weekend and it was the best birthday I’ve had. I certainly was quietly and wondrously disbelieving even if I didn’t actually go about grinning or yelling about it. So, thank you. There were conversations and moments of being and I know I’ve felt grace through mixed times across almost a couple of decades. The 11 year-old me from one particular day onwards would look with wide eyes and say gruffly and very solemnly, ‘I don’t believe you’ if anyone were to tell her. I can't help feeling bashful about it. I can’t think of anything remotely good that I did in my youth or childhood. From one perspective, it has been, a life of sudden and utterly unexpected surprises and supreme and strange and the best of surprises, in spite of the incomprehension over more things than I can count, in how I’d like to remember it, so far. I'll raise a toast to the future. I did that twice a little over a month ago. Maybe three times might work a charm.

Moments and Diwali

I can now quite appreciate Einstein’s example of relativity. I’ve had the experience a few rare times in the past, and I’ve had enough such times speed by or unfurl to know that it really is true. Time does fly by faster and even warps in strange ways when one is where one wants to be. From quite some years ago, I also remember how long one minute can be in the final minute of a twenty minute run on a treadmill, and I wasn’t even aiming for the four minute mile record. I have other far less humorous examples too, but I’ll let those lie buried. I sometimes wonder these days whether one can feel bliss from one’s own point of view. I did think I was experiencing bliss as a confirmed lunatic quite some years ago, and on multiple occasions, but that was all in my head and there was very little connection to what Somebody else was feeling.

I had the best Kali Pujo of my life and a rather tantalizing dream-like five days preceding that. I don’t want to call November a grim and brooding and glaring month full of cold ice and sleet after the first leg of November, this year. I even strung up fairy lights for the first time in my life, courtesy Suvro da, and I flicked on the switch as soon as dusk approached. Even Suvro da said a real and loud ‘Nice!’ when he saw the lights. Pupu was there on Kali Pujo. She found the ghuronto/strobe light and some more twines of fairy lights stored so high in a cupboard that I hadn’t even been able to reach the door handle of the cupboard while perched on a chair and standing on the tips of my toes. We strung those up together and Suvro da fixed the strobe light which shimmered and cast magical light - rather psychedelic, I'd say while dusk melted with twilight. For quite a few years I had wondered about the Rangoli and how Pupu made delicate and beautiful colourful patterns with the dust-like abir. Well, I got to see it for myself and on Suvro da’s insistence and Pupu’s encouragement I even made about ten round dots, of different sizes in bright blue, magenta and red, that Pupu had etched out dexterously with a chalk. A bunch of Suvro da’s cheery and lively boys came around in the evening armed with their fire crackers. Pupu and Suvro da had already gotten a little store of fire crackers earlier on in the day. So for the entire evening the braver boys burst the colorful and noisy firecrackers in the street. I blew up a few Kali potkas with great glee and a great grin on my face. It must have been after more than a quarter of a century! One of Suvro da’s students, Swapnayu, was kind enough to hand me a handful. The firecrackers were over a little too soon and Suvro da handed out some more dough for the boys to get some more. I was almost going off on one of the bicycles myself to get a bit of abir that I thought we needed for the Rangoli but chickened out in the last moment. The bicycle seat was too high! One of Suvro da’s students when he saw me wobbling with the bike cautioned me and simply asked me a straight forward question of whether I would stay on the seat or fall off. I wasn’t worried about falling off but the shame and horror of it if I fell off on the road right in front or somehow damaged one of Suvro da’s students’ bicycle made me go back sheepishly and park the bike and slip out quietly on foot. Back in Purdue in the Fall of 2003, I had borrowed a bicycle from a senior and with grim merriment cycled around the campus for a bit until I remembered that I couldn’t get off a very high cycle….so I had started yelling at random passers-by as to whether they would please get a hold of the cycle while I leapt off. I remember there were at least two nice young undergraduates who tried running after me while I sailed by on the cycle. When it didn’t work after a couple of rounds, I told them not to worry while one of them smiled back at me. I went back to the spot where my friends were rather impatiently waiting for me. I yelled at them to grab a hold of the bike – which they did and I leapt off. I don’t think I could have tried such tactics here. But I felt like an idiot later. Modesty Blaise would have tut-tutted me. At the market I spied all the boys who had gone to get the next batch of firecrackers – or else they spotted me and yelled cheerily and I yelled back equally cheerily. The gulal – the particular colour that Pupu and I wanted was not to be found and so I walked back sadly but Pupu didn’t seem the least bit disheartened. A substitute had been found which worked well enough. Pupu lit the candles around the decoration – and the Rangoli looked beautiful. The candles, which Suvro da had gotten resembled chocolate cups. I don’t know whether, in some other lifetime, I belonged to a tribe which believes that photographs trap the happy souls or memories of people…but post 2003 – I have always been a little circumspect about taking photos…but how I still wish I’d taken some photos. There were still lots of firecrackers that the boys were bursting and burning and the light filled colours and the noises were met with ahhhs and a few ouches. A few of the boys had gone inside to click photographs of themselves and I couldn’t help but poke a bit of fun at them as one of them was beautifying himself for the photo-round. In between, we ate some delicious warm chicken patties, courtesy Suvro da, who else? I was telling Pupu an incident of when we’d been in high-school: I’d lit a chocolate bomb on that very road just before carefully putting half a coconut shell on top of it and I’d been scolded a bit by her grandfather and her aunt had complained for at least half the evening that she couldn’t hear properly with one of her ears (I forget which one). Suvro da was telling Pupu that his boys were angels compared to what he had been at their age – he described himself as a ‘goonda’ (thug)! at their age...At some point, I forget when, Suvro da’s boys went back and complained to the shop-keeper from where they’d gotten their second supply of fireworks that a few of their main ‘canons’ had not gone off properly and so they returned with their second supply of ‘free' canons very proudly and they set those off as an encore for the evening’s proceedings of pure fun and delight. While watching the lights, one bright floating lantern that skimmed the skies and the showers of lights from the near-by PCBL display I was thinking with a sense of sudden surprise that it’s very rarely that I’ve ever wanted to be nowhere else but right where I am and this was one of those rare moments. Even Fimh, who was right there so to speak, seemed to be quietly content. I’ll skip over jealously-guarded parts in between but at some point, while curled up under warm blankets I raced through the last few chapters of Christie’s ‘Crooked House’ – a book I last read in school. I think of all the murder mysteries that Agatha Christie came up with – this one is the creepiest. I’d been reading it in a serialized format every afternoon for exactly a week and I finished it late on Kali Pujo.

Fimh insists that I write a bit about human motivations. Human motivations and why people do what they do. The question of ‘why’ is an interesting question, and quite often it’s far more interesting and intriguing than the question of ‘how’. If one persists with asking the ‘why’ then one does, I think..., move to a better place in the hierarchy of being human than before – if one wants to, that is. I’ll write about this soon enough, I guess, because Fimh has been prodding me to for over half a year. But this is the post for tonight.

Happy Children’s Day….if you’re not a kid, biologically speaking – it’s for the kid that's there inside you. May it live for as long as you do!

A post from yesterday

17th October 2015

The ear-splitting music started playing from today. I just about got the fluttering of the Fall experience yesterday – of the stirrings of the unmistakable strains of the promise of joy and unfettered lazy laughter coming from maybe parallel universes with the blue sky and the sun creating ripples through the tree leaves and throwing bands through my window. A part of me dressed in the common woman's Victorian garb and with a tight, prim and ugly bonnet on her head carefully pointed out to all the times that I’ve been wrong about that strange surreal fluttering of hope and even showed me one of my terribly and horribly embarrassing e-mails as proof of my madness and wanted me to see yet other ones and carefully pointed out to the many times that I’ve been wrong and all the things I’ve done because I’m delusional. I protested and tried saying that I wasn’t going about sending e-mails or imagining anything now but that bonneted grim part of me pointed out that that was not the point. It was the feeling I felt that should not be given attention to or be allowed to bathe one. I had grumffed and asked how it was better being a grim old woman who dared not grin in fear of displeasing the gods. Another part tried telling me gingerly that it was okay while other parts were arguing amongst themselves. The grim bonneted part of me won out and I shooed away the fluttering feelings and typed along on the screen about scientists and wrote in my notebook about teachers and teaching with old happy dreams and a few memories running here and there, playing around and scampering and scuffling about and laughing like little gleeful ghosts. Fimh seemed to be rather quiet on the whole while smiling a bit in an absent- minded and sometimes a serene way. In spite of all the different opinions inside, I was later musing in a rather meditative way on the whole, I think – about the past and the present and the future. The work-week in this part of the world has come to a halt from early on in the week, which is nothing to cheer about – not from my end. Maybe next year I can cheer about it – who knows. I knew that the music – and I don’t care what music it is – would be playing at a horrible volume and insistently but I’d half-hoped that it wouldn’t start before Monday. I knew I was pushing my luck. I put up with the noise for about three hours though. An old man from the neighbourhood and I had gone at exactly the same time to lodge our formal complaints today. He was very pleasant in how he put forth his concern – I was not. Apparently there are people in the neighbourhood who want to hear the music and through the day and they have been complaining that the music is not loud enough. But I think the complaints made a difference. They started playing the songs in the evening as well but it wasn’t at that horribly head-piercing high volume.

I was reading this article titled 'Do Female Lives Matter' from The American Scholar yesterday. I must say that I had never heard or read about William James’ sister. It was nice to read about the James sister but especially about Beryl Markham – I harbour a fondness and admiration for women aviators from another generation. I’ll remain sceptical about the allegation that William James did not want history to remember his sister. The article as a whole and especially the title made me instinctively want to argue with the writer. Maybe I’ve gotten even more sensitive with age and experience. God knows, I do not disagree with the premise of needing to make an exceptional individual and life visible and audible to a wider audience and bringing that life within the frame of history. But I don’t see why ‘female lives’ in the grand scheme of things should matter regardless of what sort of females we are talking about and what such females have done or achieved. And surely Jane Austen cannot be compared to Dickens in describing ‘trials and triumphs of the human existence’?! As for individuals being noticed or remembered for what they do: Emily Dickinson wasn’t really known outside her tiny circle until she was dead but then Van Gogh wasn’t particularly rich or famous when he was living. J.K Rowling, as a writer, enjoys far more public attention than Kiran Nagarkar ever will. But will someone try to say that the saga of Maharaj Kumar and Meera is less fascinating than the Harry Potter saga? Which work and which lives will be noticed and in which age and for what reasons do not remain a gender issue. But that particular article got me thinking about our present times. It certainly made me wonder about karma again and other very worldly matters and also from an objective bird’s perspective, which I cannot adopt very often or for too long. There is the matter of the common people and the average people and the billions across the world who are still poor and who still scrounge to make a living and who will never, most likely, make it into the pages of history unless it is through some quirk and quark of fate. But what about the billions or at least the millions and more than millions from the educated middle-class? Will the world, if it continues to make its annual swing around the sun, many centuries later comment on how middle-class girls and women lived for the most part during this age? Intent on extracting and getting whatever they are able to from the rare decent man and also from the roadside Romeos and various men in between while also feeling affronted and offended for not being understood? I’ve lost count of the number of females from different professions who have claimed that ‘all men are selfish’, ‘all men are pigs’, ‘men don’t understand…’, ‘my boyfriend/husband doesn’t understand me…’. I hope history honestly remembers that the greatest achievement of the great majority of women from the educated, middle-class in this particular generation was either to display their feminine wiles and charms in full glory while never needing to prove that they had earnt respect, regard and love or else it was to tell the world all that was wrong about men or else it was both even as they quoted, elsewhere, from Tagore and Shakespeare and some romantic hard-headed poet. There are the regular feminists and there are plenty of women in this category who claim that they are not feminists, which helps their cause no doubt. I have never understood why anybody should deserve respect, admiration and love for just belonging to a social category or why women from the grand middle class should expect the same. I don’t understand why women should almost always cook up the many ways as to how they are being ‘victimized’ at the hands of men or whine about not getting enough respect or why men have it ‘easier’. Otherwise women will see themselves as being close-to-perfect while it is always the men who ‘have problems’ and need to improve themselves. In the grand category of females as a species – these days, I remind myself that I have more than ‘a choice of nightmares’. One group of women will call me stupid and obsessed for the views I have. I remember telling lots of women that ‘all men are certainly not pigs’ and they have tsk-tsked me or called me some names. Another group will call me stupid as well for different reasons. Maybe I am the one who is making a terrible blunder. There have been Lucys and Mirandas and there have been the Helens and Delilahs (Cleopatra was an unusually remarkable woman not to be mixed with the aforementioned types) and anybody who has read Morton’s memorable passage in his A Search for England on how he helps a woman by the roadside and why he does so and about Jatin from Debjaan and how he returns to the world because he cannot bear to see Ashalata in pain will know what I’m talking about. Maybe it’s that many girls and women, for the most part, do not need to do much apart from looking pretty or beautiful and charm men and weep every now and then or smile mysteriously because they are so emotionally awakened as they 'come and go...talking of Michelangelo' or somebody else. Maybe I have just become a grum old woman who insists on trying and trying to do something which matters and makes a genuine difference because I cannot be any different.  I’m sure there are plenty of pretty women and lovely girls half my age who’ll tell me that I’m grumpy only because I’ve never been able to bewitch any real man. They could even ask me whether I think that writers or poets would, upon a glance, write about them or me and they’ll probably point out to Tagore’s poem Gupto Prem and titter while telling me that that is the poem, which is meant for me. They could add for good measure that the only reason I try so hard in doing something is because I can never charm a real man with my being – which they can do in an instant. Much of what such a group might say about me wouldn’t be far from the truth. Even if it is all true I don’t mind making a terrible blunder, if indeed it is a blunder. I’d rather be someone who is valuable for something other than youth, beauty and some ephemeral charms which make romantic, imaginative writers spin stories and poems. That speaks more of the imagination and creativity of the writer rather than any real attribute or quality possessed by the woman in question. And unless human beings are still living in some Neanderthal age or something similar I am sure there is something beyond the markers of youth, looks and charms that takes a human being further along the path of being a human being who loves, cares, has a mind and does things to bring about a positive difference to someone. Am I being delusional? Well, this will be yet another delusion I’ll live with. The grim bonneted part of me can mutter all she wants to about this and throw evil glances in my direction - I'll stick with my beliefs.

I have also been reminded through the din about some other things that I have been fairly stoic about across the last more than two years. I feel terribly sorry and sad that India is in the state it is – more than I normally admit. Yes, true – the US has terrible problems of its own and it’s all the more befuddling in a way because there are so many socio-economic and basic material aspects that the Americans have addressed by now – absolute cleanliness in surroundings (at least in smaller towns if not entirely in the cities), lots and lots of greenery being preserved and conserved and ‘actively promoted’ – which is probably an off-shoot of the insistent teachings, writings, exhortations and actions of Thoreau, Muir, Pinchot and Emerson from the turn of the 20^th century – an efficiency in everyday services, including administrative, banking, municipal functions and various everyday services including but not limited to gas, electricity, plumbing, fire and emergency services and so on, and making a good and earnest attempt at making unpleasant services well-paying and also entirely mechanized, as far as possible – such as, everyday trash-removal. It’s something most middle-class Indians would much rather ignore or at least not talk about because it is impolite. In the place I stay now, for example, the man (please take note – all ye feminists and females who are not feminists) who clears out the trash everyday goes about with a hand-held cart and picks up whatever offensive stuff is there near the gates of every apartment complex. And if smart Indians still want to believe that India is progressing by leaps and bounds because we have smart phones and can buy stuff on-line or that the biggest problem in the country today is the violation of homosexual or transgendered rights – well…maybe I’m a dinosaur in the wrong world. I’m reminded too of the incredible US libraries, the art galleries, the nature parks and the animal welfare organizations. Of course it makes me wonder all the more why the Americans have become so incredibly mindless through the decades in spite of such fabulous resources and earnest attempts to take care of certain aspects of their society. And there are terrible pockets of poverty – not just in the ghettoes of big cities – in spite of the overall wealth. Among the highly developed nations of the world – the US had a very high and abnormal rate of poverty even five years ago. I do not know about the current statistics. And from a social-psychological angle, I do not think that Americans have become a superior race in terms of the mind. It sometimes just makes me want to pick a quarrel with Marx again for his saying that if societies took care of the basic economic base – the super-structure, meaning culture and the social-psychological would all take care of themselves. In India, we seem to have not found any model of development or progress for ourselves and we fail even on objective indicators. And it’s not as though we don’t put some laws into practice with great gusto. We have become very proper about adhering to the no-smoking law on platforms and near airports – but about spitting and throwing trash and keeping our surroundings filthy and smelly and sporting indecent public habits and about flouting traffic rules, we do not care. As for personal hygiene – I remember while reading Suvro da’s chapter on 'Personality Development' from his To My Daughter even the very first time quite some time ago, I’d cringed at the thought of actually telling educated people that they mustn’t pick their noses in public (or in private, actually). I’ve now stopped counting the number of people I have seen picking their noses at formal workshops or conferences. When I look around in my country, I would if I hadn’t been trained well, feel utterly hopeless and dejected. I can only too clearly remember how the state of worldly affairs had made me feel back in my college days. Most of the times, and every day when I travel, I keep a blind eye and a deaf ear or at least pretend to the same to get whatever bit of my own work done. I’ll do what I can do and I have made certain circumscribed boundaries or these boundaries have been clearly made for me. I was re-visiting Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions recently and one bit especially brought the glimmer. It’s a line where Einstein quite unapologetically states that the herd is unimaginative and useless and that it is the individual who is important as a sentient and creative being.

It is also strange, I was thinking, of how one remembers certain dates even if it might seem silly or childish to others. I remember this date from 13 years ago and how I got a letter and I remember long bits from the letter and yet I remember of nothing from the same date for years in between until four years ago again. No, actually one year, seven years ago, on this date – I’d gone and had a martini at a French restaurant in the small town I stayed. Not a James Bond martini but it was a nice lemon martini. One year I had gone to the river in the evening and with some coffee and a doughnut and was perched on a tree branch that curved over the river edge; the river had been in retreat and I had sat there on the branch dangling my legs. One year I had a semi-mystical, adventurous, incredibly perfect, very proper and utterly blissful sleep dream in shots, even though it was rather too short. That dream however, unlike a couple or a few of my sleep dreams and waking dreams didn’t materialize in reality. Now I can’t help but almost smile softly. I sometimes wonder whether such perfect dreams come from parallel universes. I don’t know. But I like to think that they maybe unfold somewhere, sometime.

Mahalaya

October, in my mind, always feels like the first gentle, snug or haunting shroud of a winter. It has nothing to do with the physical reality but I actually get the sudden and delicious cold shiver, every now and then. October spells the leaves changing colour – into golden yellows, maroon, burgundies and flaming oranges. It spells also of a sudden quiver of almost expecting an unexpected perfect moment of communion. It spells of meetings and reunions and companionship through the forests of life. If that doesn't quite come about in physical reality – October spells of being reminded of some that happened out-there in the physical world and not just in one’s own head. Moments of close-to-bliss, so Fimh whispers. November is different. November is grey, icy, still and brooding and with a lot of sleet, cold rain, snow and dark winds, which sometimes blow in just the mind, and it’s almost as if there is ‘first the chill…’ and then the hibernation if not the stupor. But I mustn’t get started on the months and seasons. That would be a different post. Although Sunday morning has passed by – this song, rather restive, below, has been playing on my computer, off and on, from the time I got up and started working on a side-project....

This is already going to be my third pujo after coming back. I remember one evening, very clearly, from the first Durga Pujo after returning. Last year, I don’t remember anything from the Pujo days. I spent a few days down south on a work-trip and workshops and spent a few days looking after two cats in Mohanpur, near Kachrapara where Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay had spent a fair bit of his time. But I don’t remember what I did or didn’t do. Right until the 12^th year of my school-years (I feel embarrassed to think about this now), I would wait in tremulous anticipation for the Pujos when I could dress up and go and spend whole days and evenings at the pujo pandal. Yugh – is all I can say now. I did go out for a couple of days during a couple of my college years too and after that I became a crotchety recluse and nobody – but nobody could drag me out of the house during those days. No amount of shaming or name-calling about how ‘unsocial’ and how ‘abnormal’ I was could make me budge. I merely chortled or maintained a shroud of silence. I don’t think this is entirely a function of age – this growing feeling of distaste and disgust and revulsion. It’s almost as if I quietly and slowly understood that I expected something else during celebrations – and that the reality of what I experienced never gelled with some images in my mind. I don’t mind people enjoying themselves and having fun – but I do start wondering over why and how people – and masses and masses of people can enjoy themselves and have fun by creating a lot of unholy ruckus, mess, irritation, and by gorging and spending and going about woo-hooing. People can of course tell me that I have the freedom to be away from it (I am already cringing thinking about the decibel levels during those days) but why should I be such a ‘Scrooge’ when it comes to Durga Pujo and complain about other people and how they use their freedom to be? Freedom to be – ah yes.

‘Freedom to be’, brings to mind long parts of the book chapter ‘Freedom and responsibility’ and thoughts and questions about the same. Yet another chapter/essay/mixed strain of thought I sometimes wish I had come across in my early college years. I am also reminded of many a class argument and discussion from 20 years ago as a college student with my professor and then from less than a decade ago when my students discussed, debated and argued with me. And then just this Friday, in the middle of a formal and semi-fruitful conversation with a woman scientist and administrator who – when I mentioned Suvro da and Fromm in the same breath and said that a particular problem these days is that people are concerned only about the ‘freedom from’ and yet they have no real idea about the ‘freedom to be or do’ unless it is (and I know I am not the only person to think this way) to engage in utterly directionless, mindless, heartless, soulless activities or ephemeral fancies – smiled and said that I had in turn reminded her of a woman poet whom she had read in college and who had said at the beginning of her feminist activism and writings that women needed freedom to express themselves as human beings; many years later the same poet had wondered aloud sadly that women had gotten the freedom but what indeed had women done with the same. That reminded me of Virginia Woolf and her ‘A Room of one's own’...

I have been talking with scientists over the last long months for a side work-project about scientists and values, transcribing and looking at the interview excerpts and when I’m not obsessing over my hobby horse project about the self-development workshops. Who knows – maybe one day soon when our Institute is truly flourishing – we might indeed be able to do meaningful research studies on freedom, parenting and children and their strangely stunted development in some crucial ways these days. I'd be happy when we can host the grand lecture series. Anyhow. During the course of this last year, some of the matters that I’ve been relentlessly thinking about or which, to tell you the truth, keep invading my mind, even when I try to push them away saying ‘I don’t have time to think’ – have chased me down and now demand to be written about. Maybe it’s in connection to my current work, finding more work or my own self-development or some mix of this and something else. God knows, I’ll always see it as a blessing that I have been given a chance to build up something good while engaging in paid work that is built on all that one has really learnt through one’s own education and search for meaning and where one must ruthlessly look at oneself, better oneself, be mindful and keep the faith. I know I am abnormal in plenty of ways but this part and the following have nothing to do with my being abnormal – I am sure about this.

Some stuff goes back to my college years. I remember picking out Scott Peck’s book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ on one sudden impulse when I was flipping through it at the book-store – Chuckerverty and Chatterjee – where I spent an inordinate amount of time in my college days. I bought it, read a few parts of the book but then stuffed it away.  I remember reading about ‘delaying gratification’. I remember the example as clearly as though I read the book some minutes ago – not two decades ago. He raised the question of whether I, the reader, liked eating the frosted icing or the cake for iced cakes. I had chuckled and said ‘the icing’, and I answered before he had gotten to raise the next question, ‘I save the icing for the end’. Peck’s question was whether one first eats the icing or the cake, depending upon what s/he liked best. I was so chuffed to have fallen in the category of folks who can delay gratification in order to attend to the less appealing parts of a task – any task – I had chortled in glee and put the book away to read for later. I did read it later. The ‘why’ has a story of its own (and I got to read about serendipity and more).  Back then I had been too hasty in being pleased with myself. I am old enough to admit to this. I did practise delaying gratification in eating iced cakes and I did wait for 11 years before opening my mouth to talk with my old friend, but these instances apart, I do not think that I have ever had the tenacity to keep doing boring, mindless stuff or even useful stuff or stuff that I do not like as much if it does not interest me enough or lacks immediate meaning or if I do not have some idea as to why I am doing what I am doing. I know this for I have tried and very hard but every time I have tried I have failed in such an enterprise. I failed to keep at my undergraduate studies and sat out of examinations for two years in a row when I couldn’t see the purpose and there was interesting, other-worldly stuff that I'd started experimenting with. The only reason I actually sat for my examinations is another story but I know it goes back to an utterly unexpected encounter. I failed when I tried to work on a Ph.D. project on scientists when it didn’t interest me enough. I did try but I couldn’t do it. And these are just two examples. I have been able to tackle some stuff at certain points in my life by saying that it is the means to a greater end – and there I have managed to get certain things done because there was something interesting that I knew I could do in the future… When I am interested, I know I am deeply interested and work like the dickens or do my best (even if my best isn’t always good enough). This is not a figment of my fanciful imagination. Even people who hardly knew me told me the same when I was a Graduate student.

The above is not a meaningless delving into what I am or am not as a human being. If I fall at one end of a scale about delaying gratification and happen to fail in plenty of ways as a normal human being – it seems to me that much of the so-called educated world today is geared towards ‘instant gratification’. I want something now – so why shouldn’t I get it? I am reminded of a song which goes back to my college days, which sang about instant nirvana and enlightenment. I have lost from my memory the title of the song and the exact lyrics. I certainly shall not pretend that the matter of long-term and short-term gratification is so basic and easy that all human beings should innately know how to deal with it. There are obviously different kinds of desires and needs – that goes back to Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ even though there are and have been people who can transcend a few of the basic needs and search out for the higher needs – but I have not been able to figure out exactly all the factors that make for such differences. This was something we had dabbled with in one of our first introductory sociology classes, when I was a college student: that human beings alone, among all the animal species, are capable of a super-organic level of existence. And then there is the line from Suvro da’s chapter ‘On Time’ -  ‘…act as though today will be your last, and sometimes as though you are going to live forever’, which makes perfect sense now and then but I don’t always know for sure whether it makes sense at the precise time it is supposed to or whether I just imagine it to be so. But still – in spite of my doubts about what I don’t always know for sure – it does seem unsettling to me that most human beings these days seem to seek instant results, thrills, pleasures, respect, romance and meaning in life. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I have done enough or worked hard enough or whether I deserve what I want or whether someone else is being badly inconvenienced or whether I even know what I really want or am seeking for. At least there is some humility in U2’s angst-ridden liner, ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’ but it seems to me that most people don’t even have that basic humility because it takes too long to think about what they are really looking for. It doesn’t even seem to make sense to most people that things will not always work out the way they expect them to or want them to. This goes for youngsters working on scientific experiments where they want instant results to females – young and a little older – who will arrive late at airports and then expect to be whisked away through security like they are very important somebodies (while donkeys like me will get there at the stipulated two-hours-before-time and plod patiently, and now and then not-so-patiently through the long queue), to people who want a formal service but somehow think that they don’t have to pay for it to folks who do not think twice before breaking a rule or being rude but are all flustered when someone else does so to especially girls and women who desire and even get romance and love right at the time when they want it but are only interested in getting a lot of stuff from lots of quarters – tangible and intangible, even if they never admit to it even in their own heads – without ever even needing to ask themselves whether they know the basic difference between the mindless and the meaningful and whether they can and want to stick with the meaningful. And when things do not work out the way they want – then they are victims or martyrs, for it is always somebody else’s or something else’s fault. 

As I step into my 40th year, I sometimes wonder about the kind of childhood and growing up years that such creatures have had. Did they really get whatever they wanted whenever they wanted? Is that why they are so expectant of things always working instantly and the way they want them to and for people to fulfill their every want and need? Did they ever wonder what it might be like to be in somebody else’s shoes? Did they ever wonder what ‘meaning’ in life means? Or is it that they have been 'hurt', 'inconvenienced' and faced 'problems and troubles' of their own and have gotten comfortable in the notion that 'everybody does the same thing' and so we all need to be just as callous and unmindful of one another and just get along? I know I saw enough of such different types in my blood family and even among erstwhile friends and fleeting acquaintances. I don’t, quite honestly, give a damn, about the mindless herds. For the most part – the herds have in the past made me scream out in absolute despair and madness. From an objective bird’s perspective, I think it explains much of what is wrong with our world currently. It would have made some ounce of sense if the herds knew cannily and for sure what they really wanted and why. I doubt that this is the case (even though plenty of them seem to have got for themselves bits of 'worldly success'). But that goes back to a discussion on values and valuing and what an individual sees as being valuable. 

Now it hurts to see the rare human being who stands out-of-the-crowd getting burnt or scalded because people think that instant gratification is something of a divine birthright. I remember reading a book review and I shan’t say too much about the book review before reading the book but the book is by Barbara Fredrickson and it’s about how love is not entirely about commitment or about long-term feelings but about ‘micro-moments’ one can feel and everyday and multiple times a day, and for strangers and for just about anybody. The book uses ‘science’ to talk about love and how our bodies are geared to feeling the euphoric spasms of love in those micro-moments and how we can best use them to our advantage and for our ‘development’. Now I’m not being presumptuous here but yes, there is the feeling of ‘agape’ every now and then – not every single day of a lifetime – which has been talked of by individuals from different walks of life – but one gets over that and finds out what is really important and who really matters unless one simply remains flighty or uselessly mad or unless one is an avatar of an extraordinary being, like a Jesus or Krishna or other such human being. I often think wryly, these days, that too many of us, imagine that we are such avatars. I have come across only one such human being but that itself is a rarity on the planet. One might wonder what the connection of all this is to instant gratification and delaying gratification. My question is: how can ‘micro-moments’ of love be anything but instant gratification, no matter if the author apparently gives a doff of the hat to the 'non-lusting', 'spiritual' and the long-lasting? Whatever else one can dub those no-doubt intense instances – surely, surely, but surely – we are degrading and abusing and misusing the meaning of ‘love’ when we describe those instant but terribly temporary and flighty instances by the same name? 

This brings me to the matter of human motivations. The motivations for behavior – social and private behavior. Max Weber had something to say about that. This is something that has been bothering me consciously for months and maybe sub-consciously for years – people act and behave sometimes in similar ways or even in identical ways and sometimes say similar or even identical things – the reasons and the motivations might be, can be, and are, very different. That gets me to Ratnakar, who became Valmiki and through a very conscious and careful choice, so I would say...

In Hinduism, we often get to read that all human beings carry the essence of godliness in them. The essence of godliness in all living things is what is captured in 'tat tvam asi'. I have felt that keenly and vividly in wild and euphoric moments in the long dead past which I do not wish to revisit. But these days, I wonder along the lines of Tagore regarding more than lots of human beings and I hold myself to the same scale of judgment and across contexts: 'tumi ki tader khshoma koriyacho? Tumi ki beshecho bhalo?’ Surely there is a difference between the true human being who has loved and cared and brought meaning, laughter and joy, and the human being who has loved, and the human being who is yet to even really know, understand, feel and internalize pain, empathy, knowing and remembering? How can all human beings be the same or be seen or viewed as being equal or even similar? That is travesty. I can’t help but be reminded of letters from long past and of another book chapter...

So much for this post. It is Mahalaya, officially. So here's a song for the evening.

A strange month

God, this month seems to have whizzed by on certain weeks and seems to have passed by in the slow lane in a week in the middle, here and there. Fimh has been prodding me for two weeks to write a post and now I’ll write a bit. It beats being obsessive over a brochure outline or a new website or a workshop powerpoint presentation or sitting and brooding over what is to be in the coming days and weeks and whether I will or will not get any calls for workshops or worrying over other stuff or puzzling over the last month. The last month makes me wonder actually – which makes me wonder all the more in a way, because a little over four months ago I was sure that my sense of wonder was broken and quite lost. Strange sleep dreams and different waking ones even came about in this month. But I don't think people will believe this. They'll call me abnormal or strange if not unhinged and loony. Anyhow.

Strange with a beat...

The last four weeks and four days really seem to have been conjured up by some strange, capricious, unpredictable, hard-headed and inscrutable God. I would even go so far as to say a ‘loving’ God but I don’t want to be presumptuous and so I’ll stay quiet about that. I had a second semi-homecoming when I least expected it. I had incomparable, exquisite moments of conversation, companionship, quiet and even crazy times with my best friend. I worked in moments of trance to type up and collate material for a workshop. I kept at getting a few toes, a booted foot or both through the doors of a few educational institutions in the city and country. I got to meet and even chatted with Pupu for a few hasty minutes at her college because I had accidentally left behind some of my belongings, which she had spotted and her dad had sent alongwith her (psst: I wouldn’t ever recommend being careless but whoever knew that  being careless could mean having a brief but delightful encounter?). I even spent a couple of lovely hours listening and chatting and arguing and listening at Suvro da’s place in Calcutta. I started off an introductory workshop on self-development 12 hours later; the best one till date, in over a year.

And then on a Sunday after a rather whozzy morning when I wandered around my place like a ghost that walks with lines from the above song playing in me 'ed, I took out the paints I had bought a few of evenings ago. Not water colours or acrylics or oil paints. I cannot paint like an artist but I can paint walls, doors and windows. So I got out house paints. I had been looking at my place through objective eyes for about a week. I’d looked around and said that the apartment I stay in is hardly The Ritz but that aside the doors needed fresh paint. So I went about painting the doors. I’d completely forgotten how nice it feels to paint with roller brushes and a big fat paint brush where the only aim is to cover the piece nice and well but not too thick and not too thinly. I was reminded of scenes from the original The Karate Kid where the Sensei teaches the kid the master strokes of the ancient martial arts through the art of painting walls. I didn’t master the strokes of the martial arts but I had a rather meditative time painting the doors in the contained anticipation that a particular Somebody might just come and visit, if even for a bit. There was a bit of a mishap when what I had seen as being a soothing saffron turned out to be a shrieking yellow but then a mix of white did the trick. But the painting, among other things, got me wondering: I’d much rather quietly paint doors rather than do the ten hundred things that people seem to love these days. That goes for socializing to pub-hopping to gobbling huge quantities of food every weekend to coyly flirting and facebooking their ten hundred pictures to show how pretty or ‘cool’ or ‘hot’ or  good looking they are or being 'busy' with 'work' that neither brings in a lot of money or any prospects of more money nor fulfills some meaning or purpose in life. I was also reminded of a news piece. I don’t read newspapers regularly. I keep meaning to and sometimes I manage to buy a paper when I’m outdoors but otherwise apart from two years in college when I read the newspaper cover to cover every day – I don’t regularly read the news. However the news piece I read was commented upon by both Suvro da and Pupu and when I’d been glancing through the papers – the piece had indeed caught my attention because it was so ludicrous but so apposite for the times: it was about a bored and depressed billionaire. If I were to go along with that bit I would digress too much. But to keep it short:  I couldn’t help thinking that the bored and depressed billionaire would have a good time if even he decided to paint his doors and walls or buy a piano and get tuitions on how to play or take music lessons or painting lessons or take some special friend out for a thumping good vacation or...well, let that be.  I was reminded of one conversation between Pat and Robby in Three Comrades where they rue over the fact that the wrong sort of people seem to have so much of money and about Modesty and Willie on how they use money to good ends – well, to be honest, Modesty has very clear ideas on that and about money; Willie, while he does have crystal clear ideas about one aspect of life, he isn’t very clear-headed about the money part till Modesty spells it out for him. So much about house painting and life and living. One more thing: I wouldn’t recommend distemper for new timers (I've tried that) but plastic paints are nice to paint with. And these days, they have pretty and different designs that one can try out on walls with pre-made stencils although I think people can make their own designs too.

Would I recommend the translation of the lyrics that appear on the screen? - nope. No. I love the whole version without the translations. That goes back to a memory.

Then it was in the middle of the week and I’d been loping about the house – doing this and that. It was one of the random days that I was in the house, and I got a surprise that didn’t even belong to the box of my often-times fantastical imagination. In the midst of hunting for a work-file, from 10.30 in the morning the day changed into one of those exceptionally rare and perfect dream sequences, which is like a unique snowflake. I ran out of doors making sure I had my phone and was wearing decent clothes. Before I knew what was happening – I had a perfect tour of the Jadavpur University campus. One of the finest moments for me was looking in on a classroom where Suvro da had taught a class as a Master’s student, which he pointed out to me. I’d been wondering about that class and scene and for more than a couple of years. Suvro da wondered about one professor and how he could be still around. The professor’s door had a lock and it did say ‘Out’ but there was his name in its real presence on the door. We stood around one balcony in the Economics department, talking, which overlooks one section of the campus which has a small gazebo. I wondered whether that structure had been there thirty years ago. Suvro da's car, in one of those strange co-incidences, was parked right across from where we stood and seemed to be winking at Suvro da. A little later, we crossed the road for some tea. And even I could see that the place couldn’t have changed much in thirty years. There was a feisty dog there which insisted on standing in the middle of the road and barked noisily at a car which had hardly touched it. I scolded the dog while Suvro da grinned and remarked that the dog liked to live dangerously. The doggy poo-poohed a biscuit which was given to him but went over to the other side of the road to gobble up some food that was laid out for him. I liked my biscuit. The very young chap manning the tea-stall, upon Suvro da's chatting with him, said with a smile that it must have been his grand-dad who had been manning the counter thirty years ago. It was back to the campus and I could almost see the place in my mind’s eye and in sudden scenes from more than thirty years ago with the students just a year younger telling their batch-mates to move aside because ‘Suvroda’ was coming in. I had been worrying like a worried hen about the hour and a half and yet before I knew it – it had zoomed by and rather too soon. We sat under a tree chatting, watched the students and their doings, the walls with posters and messy graffiti, had a Pepsi, saw the dark thunderclouds spread across the sky and took shelter under the roof of what is called ‘Worldview’ when the rains came down for a bit, and chatted and chatted in-between in bits and pieces and some more little bits which needed some more pieces to fill in more bits of the 'over-sized brain twisting jigsaw puzzle'. But maybe, so Fimh claims, I can look forward to some other times. Pupu came in soon after her exams were over with her new friends. A couple of her friends were more talkative than the rest and Suvro da rattled off all he knew about Pupu’s friends and they looked delighted and a little amazed that he knew and that Pupu had told him about them.  I grinned with a quietly blissful contentment inside my head. It was off to have lunch after that. I had one of my favourites – momos. It was one of the nicest momos but I think that was because of the company...One of Pupu’s lively friends dubbed me ‘Pishimoni’. Pupu didn’t miss out on remarking on that with a laughing spark in her eyes. That certainly was a first. We visited one part of Pupu’s department. I was looking at the posters. We walked around and I tried not to worry about Suvro da and his straining his leg, which made me somewhat like the boy from Aldous Huxley's tale of the boy with the 'magic carpet' and the purple cow. I didn't nag him too much, I hope. In some moments with the way he was moving around, I might have almost forgotten that he had a leg which was still hurting. There was an insistent man, I remember, on the ground floor of Pupu's department who was selling hand made cards and coconut sweetmeats. In a sing-song voice, he was telling folks about his ill mother and about being an ex-student of Jadavpur. He latched onto Suvro da and Suvro da bought some stuff from him. The very discomfiting man rather reminded me of the Sherlock Holmes story of the man who used to pretend to be a beggar. Some kids who were trying to raise money for some political cause had also zoned in on Suvro da much earlier, I remembered, and Suvro da had talked with one of the kids and handed out some money to one who had smiled hugely and seemingly gratefully. Pupu admitted to buying lots of joss sticks from another such sad sort of seller because she had felt terribly sorry for the person and then distributing the joss sticks amongst some of her friends later. None of Pupu’s friends wanted to have coffee after our lunch and look-around, but I always do and when Suvro da asked me whether I did – I said a huge ‘yes’. So we sat around with some coffee and I suddenly told Pupu and her friend about the great big husky that I have encountered across the last year and more on my work-trips down South. And then the snowflake of a day walked on a bit for a little while longer in a most unpredictable manner.

Then there was the superb trip to Durgapur on Friday with Suvro da in the front seat and in his car, Earl Grey. The very relaxed and competent driver, on a couple of occasions, raised even my heartbeat with his overtaking tactics. I almost got up from my seat once and the only thing that stopped me was the image of Suvro da telling me not to engage in back-seat driving! But God be blessed – Suvro da told Feroze, his driver, to take it easy. The highway which I have encountered on more than a few occasions on the bus looked completely different in Earl Grey and it was fairly free of traffic. It looked beautiful and my eyes were fixed on the highway, for the most part, almost like I were the one who was driving. The highway reminded me of those highways from the US apart from the lorries which insisted on driving left of centre. I think the only other difference might have been is that I would have been driving…and the kaashphool which I spotted in one sudden beautiful moment – the first of the season. With his eyes, Suvro da wondered aloud about the trees on the left-hand side which weren't as lush as the ones on the right - I was willing to overlook that till he pointed it out. Suvro da pointed out to the stretch that he normally drives, and I could visualize that quite clearly. I didn’t even notice when Earl Grey had turned into Smoky and was doing over 75m/hr. Suvro da cautioned the driver and I looked at the speedometer and did a calculation and cheered Smoky and patted and petted him in my head. I was reminded of a trip across the Appalachians while driving a truck, somehow. I won’t go into the reasons. Sometime in the middle, I pensively wondered aloud to Suvro da about the goats on the divider of the highway who were busily and happily chewing grass and Suvro da pointed out very seriously that the goats knew about the road-signs and could read them. I was in fits while in the back-seat and tried to stop the noisy laughs. Every now and then I could see the mountains loom in the distance. I was almost expecting them to appear but that didn’t happen this time. It was perfect nonetheless. At Shaktigarh, there was a mini-stop and I debated about lighting a cigarette. I debated about it too long. We got tea. Suvro da chatted with Pupu on the phone while I was trying to encompass my sometimes bizarre trips to and fro and this one and observing Smoky and contemplating objectively about some other stuff. Before I knew it – it was time to get back in Smoky. I tried getting a few puffs of a smoke in between – I might as well have avoided it. The last stretch passed by in a flash – even Panagarh went by in a blur. I’ve never missed the Airforce base – this was the first time that I did. It was also the first time that I didn’t doze off and wasn't in any mood to doze. And there it was – the Muchipara crossing rose into the distance and we were back before too long and after lunch and not without one round of impassioned scolding. Suvro da was clearing out cobwebs from his classroom even before he gave himself time to sit for a bit. I've been kicking myself for forgetting I had a working camera for the various trips. 

The monsoons are over but this is one song which insists on edging its way in: it was dedicated to a person who survived in spite of being hit by lightning more than once.

This is a long enough post, so Fimh seems to be saying, although there is more I can think and write about and even more I could ask about. But I shall depart for the nonce. Oh, and one more thing...'oh, okay - I'm going, I'm going!' I'm being huddled out now.