There are a couple of things that Guha and I are always amazed about while walking around on the streets and while we potter around in book shops:
1. How incredibly clean the surroundings are (people tell me that it's very different in inner city neighborhoods, and while driving through some towns on the outskirts of Chicago - quite by accident, I wouldn't disagree) – nonetheless that doesn't take away from the great majority of surroundings, and not just posh, high class localities, that are clean and neat and incredibly well-kept.
2. How incredibly honest people are.
There seems to be a basic base-line level honesty and integrity amongst people in this country, which is unthinkable (as horribly disgusting and pathetic that happens to be) in India. Not to say that people don't steal or shoplift or that there aren't any instances of burglary or looting but that still in no way takes away from the base-line honesty that exists at an individual level in this country.
Bookshops here will often have neat stacks of books outside the shop-doors (no doubt to attract any potential passer-by who doesn't have any intentions of venturing inside the store). These books are normally ones that are on sale. People will browse through them, put them back from where they got it; if any book catches their fancy, they go in and buy it. I've never seen anyone running off with three books without paying for them. Never seen a huge van stopping right in front with a couple of hooded louts leaping out and throwing the boxes of books into the back of the van and then whizzing off. Haven't noticed any shifty eyed teenagers, stuffing some books into their trousers, giggling and snorting, and running off without paying. (Some things I have heard about and some odd things I have seen - but that's for another day).
Of course not. Then the system would fail to work.
Libraries are yet another amazing place. Both the university libraries as well as the public libraries. Now with certain rule changes - graduate students can take out books and keep them for as long as they are using them. The only thing they need to do is to renew the books every three months. And then of course one can take out as many books as one wants to, and one can roam around the stacks and pick out anything that looks or sounds interesting. I remember the first time that I went to one of the school libraries. I went to the counter and very softly and politely enquired, “How many books may I check out?” The lady behind the counter said with a smile, “As many as you can carry out, dear.” And of course I packed my bag full. I couldn't believe my luck. What if they changed the rules the very next day....!
In the school libraries: students and faculty check out the books on their own with a scanner. The only thing (and obviously I have thought about this a fair bit) that is there to prevent anyone from stealing a book is the barcode. That is all. Or so it seems. Rip out the barcode and walk away with the book, and nobody would be any wiser. But it almost never happens. I can't say it never does - because I don't know whether anyone has ever stolen a book from the library - but I do know that if people were stealing books with any regularity, then the system would not be able to sustain itself.
And obviously it's not just that little barcode, which prevents people from filching books.
Once, some years ago I had chanced upon this lovely book of poems. I seem to have forgotten the exact title – but I think it was called “Songs for Krishna”. This book had not been taken out of the library for ages. The last time it had been borrowed was in the 70s. I know this. For the book did not have a barcode. It had the library card tucked away in a slot on the back flap. I examined it, checked it, and was reading through some of the poems (many were by Meerabai), and I thought of taking the book and never bringing it back. Nobody would know. It wasn't even filed under the current system. Nobody even knew that the book actually existed anymore in the library, by the looks of it. It was a forgotten book lying on a library shelf, and I knew that I would read and re-read it many times more than it had been read in all the years that it had been there...
Another place where I've noticed basic honesty is in the school cafeteria (and other eating joints - especially coffee-shops and the like). In the school cafeteria - most main course meal items are served by the folks behind the counter. Yet one does have the option of picking up salads, fruit cups, desserts, bread, muffins, donuts, and bags of chips and the like, and then paying for them at the counter. Now the glass shelf where the muffins are kept, is miles away from where one pays, and I remember one year when I was rather hungry an awful lot (but certainly not starving or anything like that), I had seriously considered the possibility of pilfering a muffin. And not just once but on plenty of occasions. That whole “muffin-madness” had the usefulness of demonstrating some useful concepts when I was teaching social psychology and even the introductory classes a couple of years back...it never failed to make the students grin or guffaw or chuckle either.
Some weeks ago when Guha, Namrata, and I were sitting in the school cafeteria, we were talking about how polite and honest people are about using the condiments (which are “free”: jam, jellies, butter, milk for coffee, and about twenty different sauces and spreads and salad dressings). Namrata half-joked, “If this were back home, there would be a security guard monitoring the use of the tartar sauce, and he'd probably be paid less than it costs to buy a bottle of the same.”
I am reminded of some things:
How hordes of students from Presidency used to steal books every year from the Calcutta book fair. Far from being ashamed or embarrassed – they would boast about their exploits.
How a student once cut out pages from an expensive encyclopaedia in the National Library, and the news was carried in The Telegraph.
How terribly intrusive and heavy-handed the library system happens to be in India.
I could put ten other points that I am reminded of – but I intend to keep this post short.
About cleanliness, I'll write in another post.
....and it does make me wonder though. Why on earth are some folks so lazy about returning shopping-carts to their proper places! But about this oddity and others – some other day.
28 February 2009
27 February 2009
The Madman - I
There's a mad man, they say, in a one horse town.
“Does he dance around in a see-through gown?
Does he squabble aloud with his other selves?
Does he hold midnight meetings with the garden elves?
Does he wake up the neighbours with full-throttled hollers?
Does he toss rotten eggs down clueless collars?
Does he giggle while squashing down human heads?
Doe he take swinging leaps over the flower-beds?
Doe he howl at the moon, moo, coo, bray or bark?
Does he chomp down on legs with the jaws of a shark?”
............
They huddle, they whisper, “none of the above”, they say.
“Then what makes him mad - pray tell me,” I bay.
They whisper, they chatter, they babble some more,
“He beats up the parents who come to his door!”
I tilt m'self forward, “You've seen this no doubt?”
“Sunny saw it with her glasses, perched on her stout snout!
Sunny told Fanny, who told it to Beena.
Beena told Reena, who told it to Meena.”
Meena tosses her hair and lets out a purr,
“It's Sunny who saw it. You should ask hurr.”
Sunny titters and stutters; looks this way and that
Flapping her hands around – much like a bat.
I turn to Snout-Sunny, peering into her face -
To me she looks like a basket-case.
“So you saw it yourself? It must have been scary?”
“Err it wasn't really me, it was Barry (who's so Hairy)...”
All tops topple over to find Barry in their midst
Barry, who’s rubbing one very hairy wrist.
“So you saw it? Didja? Saw it with your own eyes?”
Barry grunts “T'was Bandy”, and stares at the skies.
The whispers rise like a murmuring gale
But that isn't the end of this long-winded tale.
Bandy comes forth, hands deep in his pockets
I yelp out as I look into his eyeless sockets.
“And what did you see?” I bark, "What have you seen-huhn?"
“Nought a thing.” Says Bandy, “I heard it from Meena!”
“Does he dance around in a see-through gown?
Does he squabble aloud with his other selves?
Does he hold midnight meetings with the garden elves?
Does he wake up the neighbours with full-throttled hollers?
Does he toss rotten eggs down clueless collars?
Does he giggle while squashing down human heads?
Doe he take swinging leaps over the flower-beds?
Doe he howl at the moon, moo, coo, bray or bark?
Does he chomp down on legs with the jaws of a shark?”
............
They huddle, they whisper, “none of the above”, they say.
“Then what makes him mad - pray tell me,” I bay.
They whisper, they chatter, they babble some more,
“He beats up the parents who come to his door!”
I tilt m'self forward, “You've seen this no doubt?”
“Sunny saw it with her glasses, perched on her stout snout!
Sunny told Fanny, who told it to Beena.
Beena told Reena, who told it to Meena.”
Meena tosses her hair and lets out a purr,
“It's Sunny who saw it. You should ask hurr.”
Sunny titters and stutters; looks this way and that
Flapping her hands around – much like a bat.
I turn to Snout-Sunny, peering into her face -
To me she looks like a basket-case.
“So you saw it yourself? It must have been scary?”
“Err it wasn't really me, it was Barry (who's so Hairy)...”
All tops topple over to find Barry in their midst
Barry, who’s rubbing one very hairy wrist.
“So you saw it? Didja? Saw it with your own eyes?”
Barry grunts “T'was Bandy”, and stares at the skies.
The whispers rise like a murmuring gale
But that isn't the end of this long-winded tale.
Bandy comes forth, hands deep in his pockets
I yelp out as I look into his eyeless sockets.
“And what did you see?” I bark, "What have you seen-huhn?"
“Nought a thing.” Says Bandy, “I heard it from Meena!”
23 February 2009
Discovering India...
I have to put up another post because something rather embarrassing happened in the morning today.
So I was chatting in the morning on google chat with Pupu, who's taking her final exams of Class - 6. She had her Physics and History examinations today. She was very pleased with her Physics exams but informed me that her History exams were a little off because she got muddled up with some dates. The dates were related to the Turks invading/conquering Constantinople, and the discovery of both the United States and India.
I didn't bother about the first one, the second one I remembered with a sudden jolt but it was the last one that had me completely stumped.
I continued with my bizarre questioning regarding when indeed was India discovered, for I didn't have the vaguest idea. I asked Pupu what the books said about India being "discovered". Pupu said that it was some time during the renaissance. I replied with, "but that can't be. India was there long, long before the renaissance". Did the books say something about India being "discovered" in the B.Cs? I was wondering what in heaven's name the history books had to say about this famous "discovery" when Pupu replied (I have no idea what was going on through her own head about me) with a, "Oh no, no - not that. But it was in AD 1488, or AD 1498 or AD 1499 that Vasco da Gama discovered India".
Then of course there was that low pitched "oh" rumbling through my head. But of course! How could I forget Vasco da Gama, the little ditty, his discovering India...
And then I was left shaking my head at myself. Not to excuse myself in any way (there is absolutely no way that I can dig myself out of this hole), but I still find it considerably curious. There should be some other word describing the intrepid western voyager's first contact with a piece of land and its people, both of which had existed for thousands of years before the voyager's "discovery". Since there were people living on the land long before Vasco da Gama set his brave foot forward, one can assume that their long-gone predecessors must have had some finger in the discovery. Yet, when one talks about the discovery of India - is one talking about a geographical tract of land or a culture and her civilization? In the second sense I guess it would make some sense to talk about Vasco da Gama discovering India in the 15th century. Yet even in this sense India did have contact with the "outer" world prior to the 15th century. So we're talking about India being discovered by the "western" world.
I know I should go and read some history or potter around on google for a bit - yet part of my musings is not entirely related to the "facts" of the case - but is related to the concept of "discovery". And what it means. And then of course there is the other point that comes to my head in a trickle. If da Gama had not discovered India in the particular sense he did - when would the British have come, or the Frech and the Dutch and the Portuguese? da Gama's discovery did indeed have some immediate consequences...
One thing I do know: once Pupu reminded me of the approximate year of India's "discovery" not in isolated terms but in relation to the renaissance - now I know I'll always remember.
Err...maybe this is a good time to check up on the exact year of the discovery of India.
So I was chatting in the morning on google chat with Pupu, who's taking her final exams of Class - 6. She had her Physics and History examinations today. She was very pleased with her Physics exams but informed me that her History exams were a little off because she got muddled up with some dates. The dates were related to the Turks invading/conquering Constantinople, and the discovery of both the United States and India.
I didn't bother about the first one, the second one I remembered with a sudden jolt but it was the last one that had me completely stumped.
I continued with my bizarre questioning regarding when indeed was India discovered, for I didn't have the vaguest idea. I asked Pupu what the books said about India being "discovered". Pupu said that it was some time during the renaissance. I replied with, "but that can't be. India was there long, long before the renaissance". Did the books say something about India being "discovered" in the B.Cs? I was wondering what in heaven's name the history books had to say about this famous "discovery" when Pupu replied (I have no idea what was going on through her own head about me) with a, "Oh no, no - not that. But it was in AD 1488, or AD 1498 or AD 1499 that Vasco da Gama discovered India".
Then of course there was that low pitched "oh" rumbling through my head. But of course! How could I forget Vasco da Gama, the little ditty, his discovering India...
And then I was left shaking my head at myself. Not to excuse myself in any way (there is absolutely no way that I can dig myself out of this hole), but I still find it considerably curious. There should be some other word describing the intrepid western voyager's first contact with a piece of land and its people, both of which had existed for thousands of years before the voyager's "discovery". Since there were people living on the land long before Vasco da Gama set his brave foot forward, one can assume that their long-gone predecessors must have had some finger in the discovery. Yet, when one talks about the discovery of India - is one talking about a geographical tract of land or a culture and her civilization? In the second sense I guess it would make some sense to talk about Vasco da Gama discovering India in the 15th century. Yet even in this sense India did have contact with the "outer" world prior to the 15th century. So we're talking about India being discovered by the "western" world.
I know I should go and read some history or potter around on google for a bit - yet part of my musings is not entirely related to the "facts" of the case - but is related to the concept of "discovery". And what it means. And then of course there is the other point that comes to my head in a trickle. If da Gama had not discovered India in the particular sense he did - when would the British have come, or the Frech and the Dutch and the Portuguese? da Gama's discovery did indeed have some immediate consequences...
One thing I do know: once Pupu reminded me of the approximate year of India's "discovery" not in isolated terms but in relation to the renaissance - now I know I'll always remember.
Err...maybe this is a good time to check up on the exact year of the discovery of India.
21 February 2009
Sights, Air, and Sound
A very short one.
One of the places that I have regularly been going to once Joe discovered it some years ago, and told Guha about it is Prophet's Town of course. Every time I go there, there is always some moment, which always sticks in my head, and makes the trip somehow stand out.
Once Joe, Guha, and I had skated on the frozen lake at 10 at night.
Another time, also at night, there had been this one moment when I had been looking up, and heard the tall trees shimmering, shivering, and swaying in the wind against a dense, liquid blue sky.
Another time while Guha and Joe were walking along the trail, I had ventured off and found the small stream which becomes the 15 feet deep lake (it might be 9 feet...) within some yards. I sat beside the stream and looked at the stream and heard the water trickling and gurgling over the rocks and the pebbles. The stream, the small pebbles, and rocks, the white snow. I remember that still. But most of all I remember the sound of the water rushing, trickling, plopping in waves.
Guha and Joe joined me some minutes later, and we threw large clumps of snow into the flowing stream and we cheered the clumps till they were swiftly carried off by the stream...
The last time there was a moment when I was skidding across the very narrow and hardly shin deep part of the stream when I broke through the ice and nearly landed on my face into the stream amidst Guha's chuckles.
Another thing I've noticed:
Joe looks. He looks through his binoculars, he looks without them, he looks all around him. He observes.
Guha breathes. He breathes deeply. He breathes and he breathes and fills his lungs in, and he keeps breathing in the blue and green air.
I listen.
Enough for now, I guess.
One of the places that I have regularly been going to once Joe discovered it some years ago, and told Guha about it is Prophet's Town of course. Every time I go there, there is always some moment, which always sticks in my head, and makes the trip somehow stand out.
Once Joe, Guha, and I had skated on the frozen lake at 10 at night.
Another time, also at night, there had been this one moment when I had been looking up, and heard the tall trees shimmering, shivering, and swaying in the wind against a dense, liquid blue sky.
Another time while Guha and Joe were walking along the trail, I had ventured off and found the small stream which becomes the 15 feet deep lake (it might be 9 feet...) within some yards. I sat beside the stream and looked at the stream and heard the water trickling and gurgling over the rocks and the pebbles. The stream, the small pebbles, and rocks, the white snow. I remember that still. But most of all I remember the sound of the water rushing, trickling, plopping in waves.
Guha and Joe joined me some minutes later, and we threw large clumps of snow into the flowing stream and we cheered the clumps till they were swiftly carried off by the stream...
The last time there was a moment when I was skidding across the very narrow and hardly shin deep part of the stream when I broke through the ice and nearly landed on my face into the stream amidst Guha's chuckles.
Another thing I've noticed:
Joe looks. He looks through his binoculars, he looks without them, he looks all around him. He observes.
Guha breathes. He breathes deeply. He breathes and he breathes and fills his lungs in, and he keeps breathing in the blue and green air.
I listen.
Enough for now, I guess.
Jam, Cereals, and some such things
Time for a post.
It's been six years now that I've been in one place, and there are lots of things I could write about but today I'll write about jams, cereals, biscuits, and stuff.
It's rather curious actually: the first time I went into a grocery store in this country, I was quite amazed to see the lines and lines and rows and rows of stuff and more stuff, and some stuff I'd never even heard of. After awhile of course the amazement wore off, yet even after all this time I've noticed that I'm always fascinated still by the different varieties of jams, cereals, biscuits, and small tubs of yogurt.
For the last three years or so, Guha and I almost always end up going grocery shopping together, and for most of the times while both of us will hunt around for the cheaper brands (for most things I can't taste any difference), for a long time I used to be maniacal when it came to cereals, jams, biscuits, and yogurt.
For awhile now I've given up my experimenting with yogurt. I have two favourite flavours -
chocolate and raspberry mousse and that's all I'll have (Guha will only have Blueberry burst). And for most of the times I'm also not too terribly picky about cereal. Although once when we went to a different store, we did end up buying an unusual box of cereal, which was quite interesting - nuts and fruits and crunchy oats (something toffee-chocolate almond crunch it was called). Guha, I remember though didn't want to get the box of cereal.
But look at all the different things it has, I said - almost drooling at the sight of the box of cereal (of all things!)
No, no - said he. Too expensive. Just look at the price Shilpi.
But it's just this once, said I.
Finally after haggling back and forth we did pick it up. And a good box of cereal it was too. But that was the first and last time. I have been pleased to note that I haven't really hankered for that cereal again.
Yet unfortunately with jams and biscuits it's taken me longer. Guha and I once had a massive fight, over a crummy jar of jam in yet another store that we ventured into quite by accident another time. I wanted, demanded that we buy a jar of jam. I don't even remember anymore what flavour it was or why I wanted it so badly. I had to buy the jar of jam.
Guha finally at the end of his patience, just told me shortly "buy the jam then." But there was that exasperation in his voice, and so obviously I walked away from the jam aisle, but very angrily did I stomp away. I just didn't see why we couldn't buy a jar of jam. It was expensive for a jar of jam but it was only a one time jam jar anyway. I couldn't see what the big deal was.
Guha tried to placate me after that, saying as we were walking around the store: want a bar of chocolate? We could get some chocolate. Want a fruit bar? You like fruit bars.
Of course I shook my head. I didn't want anything else. Finally he said, "Oh just go and get the jar of jam for heaven's sake if you want it so badly." But by then of course it seemed silly to go and get the jar of jam. So we walked out of the store after a bit. And it must have been ten minutes later that we were hollering at each other.
G: It was just a jar of jam after all.
S: Then if it was so why not get it.
G: But the price. It was so expensive.
S: It was less expensive than two packs of cigarettes.
G: But it's not as though we're not going to smoke them now, is it it?
S: But it's not even as though we're going to buy a jam jar every day. Ugh.
G: Why didn't you just go and get it then.
Well after ten minutes of this, we were dead silent and then before we knew it we were in splits to think that we had had our biggest fight in a while over a jam-jar. I gave him a random plastic flower that had been in the car (another story) since I didn't have an olive branch...
And when he came back from the field last September he got me a jar of blackberry preserves (of which I have preserved some still)...But I have not had the craving for any expensive jams anymore when we go to the grocery store. I stick to my generic brand of orange marmalade, which I love, and Guha shifts between marmalade and grape jelly (which goes well with peanut butter).
Different varieties of biscuits/cookies jump out from their respective places on the shelves and bite me every now and again.
Yet for a long time I used to wonder how Guha was never bitten by anything on the shelves. Nothing. He would meticulously stay away from the expensive brands, and I never saw him experiencing a sudden "I have to buy this right here, right now." It's not that he didn't look, or say "oh, that looks good." But he never put anything into the cart. And of course every now and again he would say, "Ah, expensive tastes and not enough money don't go well..." I would pipe in with "oh we can get it once. Let's just get it." But he would shake his head. "Naah," he would say
That mystery was finally solved. I don't really remember where, when, or how. As he put it in "You see if I could, I'd buy stuff that caught my fancy whenever I wanted to. But since I can't - I'd much rather not get the taste of it for now." I went "Aaah. So you'd really like eating that cereal we had once every day?..." "Well maybe not that identical flavour...but you've got to admit that the cereal was very nice. I'd try out the different flavours..." "Hmmm." Said I. "But it's okay to ty it once...isn't it? Then one knows what it is, and one knows what it tastes like." Guha grinned. We talked some more up and down along the same lines.
It's not as though Guha or I are profligate spenders and he is not really a miser nor would he ever be a spendthrift even if he did have tonnes of money (I don't know really what I am - both a miser and a spendthrift) but we have different approaches to jams, jellies, biscuits, and the like. He is fond of ice-cream (especially all kinds of chocolate flavours) yet he still will never look at the shelves, which have the more "exotic" stuff unless they are on sale. Me - on the other hand - I keep hankering to taste the "exotic" stuff at least once. Both of us love cheesecake and tiramisu, and end up having cheesecake on birthdays and special days, and there's nothing like more or less expensive cheesecake - so no, there's no squabbling there. We have no problems buying whiskey or rum (we have settled on the ones we like, although every now and again when summer comes we both longingly look at the Tanqueray wondering if it might go on sale, and then the day it does we make a grab for it or when birthdays come we get some single malt)....so the rest is all fine and dandy.
But jam still remains a sticky issue. Even though I've told Guha that I don't care anymore about interesting jars of jam, even though I whistle past the jam and jelly aisles, Guha will say, "I'm not coming between you and your jam."
P.S: There is one other thing that I really could have every other day (but I don't and one shouldn't. It probably has enough calories to kill a fair sized horse). It's available only in one coffee-shop near campus, and it's called a Lemon-Berry marscarpone cake. It's a regular cake but has cream cheese flavoured with the hint of lemon, and lots of creamy blueberries. Guha got me a humongous slice of that a couple of days ago. That's how I remembered how much I enjoy it, and thought it was an appropriate post-script for this entry on jam, cereals, and some such things...
28 November 2008
Hunches in Bunches, and Dreams
I am reminded of how a little over 7 years ago, just before the September 11th terrorist attacks - maybe a week or ten days prior to that - I had this ominous sense of doom. I still remember where I was sitting - on my bed, back in Calcutta, in my room - and I was looking out of the window. I don't even remember if the day was grey and overcast, but in in my head that's what I saw. A grey, overcast day and it was half-drizzling, visibility was low, and in my head I kept seeing the NYPD folk in their identifiable navy jackets walking around in a city where things had gone somewhat around the bend. I remember too that this cracked image was not a figment of my imagination as many things were/are (or else I later say they are even if I don't entirely believe in my self-confessed disbelief) for I was writing a letter to a very close friend of mine who was living in Boston at that point, and I told her about the unsettling images that I was seeing inside.
I can't say I felt any streak of ominous unsettledness last week when I put up my last blogpost. I was writing my responses to a book in the hope that I wouldn't forget everything about it a year from now - that's all. And I was thinking about violence and nationalism, and identity - that part is true enough. The news about the latest terrorist attacks (when I got to know about them) left me feeling a bit fazed and over the last couple of days I've been reading the news and some blogposts that are connected to the ones that I follow everyday.
This year has got to be one of the most muddled up years in some ways (personally speaking) and somehow I can't get rid of the feeling that it still hasn't shown all its cards. I'm reminded of a couple of blogs that I regularly visit. Early on this year, a friend (Pots) had expressed her sense of doom in a post titled "Two Obits". Being in the middle of a steady roller-coaster high at that point had still not made me completely immune to the creepy scratching fingers in the corner of my bone-head and then there was much more to come through the year, and the year is still not over.
I know sometimes we sense things and sometimes we don't - which is fine (I grunt). Sometimes things happen as we see them and sometimes they don't (which is not fine, I grunt!). I still remember the time that I visualised a blue feather (most people will remember Richard Bach's Illusions). I don't know why I went alongwith a blue feather instead of being a tad more imaginative - but that's what I went with. An intense image of an exceptionally bright blue feather and it had been floating around in my head. And then lo and behold, not a week later I found a real feather. A bright blue feather on the concrete pathway leading out of my parent's apartment complex in Calcutta.
I'm also reminded of dreams for some reason, and there are multiple reasons for this - and not all of them are entirely unpleasant. I'm reminded of a bright bit of an essay titled "Dreams and Daydreams". I'm also reminded of how sometimes, and in fact most of the times my dreams (that is, the "unconscious ones") are terribly mundane or just boring and repetitive. I don't any longer have the recurring nightmare that I used to have as a kid (a red car very much like a Maruti would drop me off at this humongous factory....that's how the nightmare would begin) but sometimes I have been known to have fallen asleep on the lawns dreaming about eating a salad at the school cafeteria. Believe it or not I have woken up and headed straight for the cafe and eaten a salad. Only while consuming the salad I realise with a sense of astonishment that that is exactly what I'd done five minutes ago in a ridiculously boring dream! Talk about deja vu....(chortle-chortle).
Every now and again though I go through a patch when I dream interesting dreams. The nightmares come and go. I don't really remember dreaming explicitly happy dreams. If I do dream happy dreams I don't remember them until later on in the day when something tickles my memory cells and I glint and say "oh, that was nice." (The "that" referring to the dream in question). Sometimes I wake up feeling less dense and heavy and ponderous - and so I assume that I had less stifling dreams. Just recently I had an interesting dream even though it was slightly strange because there were no people in it. But what was contained in the dream was so real and vivid that I woke up looking for it!
I must say that I'm not given to being pessimistic and gloomy - not all the time at any rate. But this year gives me the shivers for some reason, and I'm not so sure why. There are some good things that have happened surely - but it's not about good or bad. There's just something that is peculiar about this year. The whole year seems to be "not-real", strangely suspended in the middle of nowhere. It seems as though it can swing wildly and widely - this way or that. Or maybe that really is my imagination. I can't really see anything "great" coming of it - as long as there is no more negative excitement (as Pots put it...), I think I'd just sigh with relief. That's all.
End of post. Good luck to some who need it....
I can't say I felt any streak of ominous unsettledness last week when I put up my last blogpost. I was writing my responses to a book in the hope that I wouldn't forget everything about it a year from now - that's all. And I was thinking about violence and nationalism, and identity - that part is true enough. The news about the latest terrorist attacks (when I got to know about them) left me feeling a bit fazed and over the last couple of days I've been reading the news and some blogposts that are connected to the ones that I follow everyday.
This year has got to be one of the most muddled up years in some ways (personally speaking) and somehow I can't get rid of the feeling that it still hasn't shown all its cards. I'm reminded of a couple of blogs that I regularly visit. Early on this year, a friend (Pots) had expressed her sense of doom in a post titled "Two Obits". Being in the middle of a steady roller-coaster high at that point had still not made me completely immune to the creepy scratching fingers in the corner of my bone-head and then there was much more to come through the year, and the year is still not over.
I know sometimes we sense things and sometimes we don't - which is fine (I grunt). Sometimes things happen as we see them and sometimes they don't (which is not fine, I grunt!). I still remember the time that I visualised a blue feather (most people will remember Richard Bach's Illusions). I don't know why I went alongwith a blue feather instead of being a tad more imaginative - but that's what I went with. An intense image of an exceptionally bright blue feather and it had been floating around in my head. And then lo and behold, not a week later I found a real feather. A bright blue feather on the concrete pathway leading out of my parent's apartment complex in Calcutta.
I'm also reminded of dreams for some reason, and there are multiple reasons for this - and not all of them are entirely unpleasant. I'm reminded of a bright bit of an essay titled "Dreams and Daydreams". I'm also reminded of how sometimes, and in fact most of the times my dreams (that is, the "unconscious ones") are terribly mundane or just boring and repetitive. I don't any longer have the recurring nightmare that I used to have as a kid (a red car very much like a Maruti would drop me off at this humongous factory....that's how the nightmare would begin) but sometimes I have been known to have fallen asleep on the lawns dreaming about eating a salad at the school cafeteria. Believe it or not I have woken up and headed straight for the cafe and eaten a salad. Only while consuming the salad I realise with a sense of astonishment that that is exactly what I'd done five minutes ago in a ridiculously boring dream! Talk about deja vu....(chortle-chortle).
Every now and again though I go through a patch when I dream interesting dreams. The nightmares come and go. I don't really remember dreaming explicitly happy dreams. If I do dream happy dreams I don't remember them until later on in the day when something tickles my memory cells and I glint and say "oh, that was nice." (The "that" referring to the dream in question). Sometimes I wake up feeling less dense and heavy and ponderous - and so I assume that I had less stifling dreams. Just recently I had an interesting dream even though it was slightly strange because there were no people in it. But what was contained in the dream was so real and vivid that I woke up looking for it!
I must say that I'm not given to being pessimistic and gloomy - not all the time at any rate. But this year gives me the shivers for some reason, and I'm not so sure why. There are some good things that have happened surely - but it's not about good or bad. There's just something that is peculiar about this year. The whole year seems to be "not-real", strangely suspended in the middle of nowhere. It seems as though it can swing wildly and widely - this way or that. Or maybe that really is my imagination. I can't really see anything "great" coming of it - as long as there is no more negative excitement (as Pots put it...), I think I'd just sigh with relief. That's all.
End of post. Good luck to some who need it....
25 November 2008
The Identity of Violence?
I finished reading Amartya Sen's book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny last week, and have (and had) been thinking about the issue of identity in relation to fundamentalism, sectarian violence, and also in relation to nationalism and the nation (and of course I like ruminating upon violence anyway). This is not really a review of Sen's book, but some musings related to his book and otherwise. But let me make some observations....
1. Sen's book is wonderfully woven together, and his major thesis is how advocacy of a single identity – including but by no means limited to religious identity – is employed to sometimes initiate and justify continuous instances of violence and how this unique and single identity receives special focus to the exclusion of all other identities that an individual may possess.
2. This advocacy for a “belligerent” identity is not just employed by the religious fundamentalists and the proponents of religious violence – but the curious thing, as Sen points out is that the same religious identity and the same religious component is employed by also those who effectively seek to fight religious extremism/violence/fundamentalism of different kinds – in this instance most specifically that of Islamic fundamentalism, and the content of the particular discourse ranges from either bashing up the said-religion or in trying to find a middle-ground, which consists of locating the “true” voice of the religion (Islam). But as Sen notes why use religion or the religious identity alone to fight against religious fundamentalism? Why harp on this singular identity based on religion? Why not instead concentrate on the many other identities that Muslims have apart from their Islamic faith based identity?
3. Sen also points out how social theories (and I had always imagined that social theories never really get to the public!), which do explicitly divide the world into divided categories of “us” and the “other/s” and claim to have “discovered” pre-existing social boundaries, and therefore the lines of contention and confrontation, have a particularly insalubrious effect in that these reductionist theories are welcomed and used by the extremists to further their own goals of promoting fundamentalism (case in point: Sen points out to the annoying and rather revolting theories of Samuel Huntington and not just his infamous Clash of Civilizations..., where he is considered by many from his own discipline to be at his confrontational best – but also see “Twenty-first Century America: Vulnerability, Religion, and National Identity” in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2004 – where he starts off by talking about extremist Muslims (and I don't really remember how they exactly enter the picture) but then out of nowhere all Muslims are suddenly viewed as harbouring hostile feelings and sentiments of envy and animosity towards the U.S because of the latter's wealth and economic progress).
This is a perfect example of social construction. The social categories are created, defined, and hardened through the said social theory; the social lines of separation are reified through the process, but then these categories, the boundaries, and the lines of confrontation are seen to have a reality of their own. The social theory and its proponents then use the said theory to defend the same categories that are created by the theory in the first place!
Sen's theory is simple and exceptionally elegant. Even if one were to go out and conduct an empirical study and find instances that were to confirm his theory or to locate instances where his theory did not hold good – that would be hardly as interesting or as elegant an operation as the theory itself. But more about this later.
4. The parts that I found particularly enlightening, fascinating, and indeed captivating were the threads that he pulled out of historical “storage spaces” in relation to how non-western societies – including India, The Middle-East, and China have contributed to the very foundations of the European enlightenment, and how the Eastern contributions to what is now known as western science and mathematics have been completely forgotten (scattered bits and pieces I have not been completely unaware of – yet the origins of the term sine was a particularly delightful example among many others in his book), and how “democracy”, if one starts with what it means (“public deliberation and reasoning”) instead of the unbroken linguistic concept or as certain practices related to the concept can be seen to have existed in different countries in the east (such as India and Japan), and how when Akbar was speaking of religious tolerance in India, across Europe heretics were being burned at the stake and The Inquisitions were not making for happy lives....
Sen does not flinch from giving the western world credit where it is due as he takes us through a historical journey tracing the travel of ideas from East to West – and not just spiritual ideas but fundamental ideas and concepts central to mathematics and the sciences, and he cites many more instances related to the same through chapters 3-7 of his book. Yet he does so in an extremely well-balanced, matter-of-fact, and inoffensive way – even when he points out to the complete and utter ignorance of some of the British colonial ideas regarding the Indians or to the more recent instance of provincialism contained in the “blaring” of U.S Lieutenant General William Boykin) – a far cry from the rather belligerent tone adopted by many post-colonial scholars or subaltern study specialists.
5. The above pointer is used by Sen to demonstrate in the main that Muslims have many other identities (mathematician, scholar, poet, artist, scientist...) so there is no reason for either Muslims themselves to view themselves through their Islamic faith based identity nor for the rest of the world to engage in the same although it may jolly well make sense for the extremists themselves to view themselves through this singular identity.
6. Another point that I personally found pertinent is that a secluded cultural community or one that is given the “freedom” to remain sequestered ends up by not providing its members with the freedom to choose (so much for practicing cultural relativism/celebrating multiculturalism!), while the chapter connecting poverty, globalization, identity, and violence was an illuminating and absorbing read.
7. Sen's focus is on the main that of the singularity of religious identity although he does touch upon other instances where a single identity is stressed – he briefly touches upon the clash between the Hutus and Tutsis, but in the main Sen provides a rubric, a general-enough social perspective wherein he decries the advocacy of a single identity, any single identity, given the fact that human beings are a composition of multiple identities. And of course he writes amazingly well, is stunningly lucid, never uses a jarogonized term, and is very witty in a wry and quiet way right from the priceless prologue.
So far so good. Now, it's time for my own musings I guess.
1. As elegant a perspective that it is – I am left wondering about some related and semi-related things. Theoretically it makes sense of course. Being viewed or viewing others in terms of a single identity ends up as being an extremely partial (and also untrue!) view of human beings - in most cases. Even in the simplest terms, an individual, as Erving Goffman said (four decades ago), has as many identities as the roles s/he plays. That identity can and should be seen in contextual terms, even in everyday encounters, has been talked about.
2. Social psychologists have been talking about the hierarchy of identities within our identity pyramids for a while now. The problem is that not many social psychologists write popular books, and many of the frameworks which start out by being interesting are waylaid by academicians who just end up making the focus of concern exceptionally narrow. A neat theoretical idea “introduced” by Sheldon Stryker (who was initially influenced by G.H. Mead’s work on identity) – which started out as neat anyway – was the notion of identity salience, which talked about the importance of taking into account the multiple identities of an individual and of looking into the salience/prominence of an identity depending upon the particular context. Salience was connected to the individual investment in the projection of a particular identity in a given context. In many ways the theory became much more complex than it needed to be (there were some layers that do make sense) and there was the in-built need to make it appear very scientific and it was therefore made messier and very smartly quantitative but in its bare bones this is how it stood. The problem also lay in the fact of how identity salience was measured and what it was used to study. And maybe this is why many social psychological studies (and I can think of at least a couple of really interesting and insightful ones), including the ones on identity never did become as important as they should have and could have been. Although some studies by Henri Tajfel in particular and also by John Turner looked into the relation between discrimination and identity and the construction of in-groups and out-groups based on identity.
Maybe indeed it does take somebody like Amartya Sen to redirect our attention to something that the social psychologists have been working on for years (!) and to explain it in a lucid and meaningful manner.
3. All this said, I somehow feel that Sen seems to refrain from commenting on the rapid and rather scary outbursts of religious intolerance that have been felt over India over the last three decades and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in its current form. Sen points out that India “has produced very few homegrown terrorists acting in the name of Islam” and for this Sen gives thanks to the “nature of Indian democratic politics, and to the wide acceptance in India of the idea, championed by Mahatma Gandhi that there are many identities other than religious ethnicity that are also relevant for a person’s self-understanding and for the religions between citizens of diverse backgrounds within the country” (168). So that explains why we don’t have homegrown Islamic terrorists but I don’t know whether it’s just me who’s left wondering – for he indeed does mention the recent instances of religious riots – how then does he explain the explicit advocacy of the Hindu identity by the Hindu fundamentalists or am I just picking at something that shouldn’t be picked at?
4. In conclusion: I’ll end off with one of my musings in relation to the highlighting of a particular identity: the reason it seems to me that the religious identity/ethnic identity is the specific identity that is invoked is because that this is the identity which becomes the most pertinent and prominent one given the specific context under consideration. And then again it seems to me that in every “social” movement, individuals are and have been categorized both by themselves and also by others by that primary identity, which the social movement is said to “represent” – be that the women’s/feminist movement, the civil rights movement, or even a particular environmental movement or a class-based movement. One cannot of course say that a terrorist movement is a social movement in the same sense but the issue of the primary/prominent identity (or if we want to call it the salient identity) does remain constant across all instances.
It’s not that I don’t think Sen has a point in saying that to invoke a single identity is insular – and more so by the very individuals intent on addressing/resolving the problem, and that they must at least refrain from picking on that one identity - yet the differences that are framed in any movement, (and particularly those that involve violence) are framed around a particular social identity (be that of race, caste, religion, sect, class). If that category and the differences seen to be “contained” within that category were not made explicit then the particular identity would not be invoked – for in some sense it is that particular social identity, which is bringing people together to form a collective identity. So this is true of “peaceful” social movements too. A single identity is resorted to as being the most prominent identity. The fight for certain rights is structured around this primary/prominent identity. However, once violence enters the picture – and systematic violence of any sort is engaged in between one identifiable social category and another then the question is how do so many others “buy” into the notion of a singular identity so much so that they are willing to engage in violence against the other group? I am not even sure that identity and identification with that single identity has much to do with it at this stage – not even by the ones who are engaged in violence. So I’m not really sure whether remembering that an individual is composed of more than just one identity would help curb widespread and intense ethnic/religious violence. There is much good in the sentiment per se, and I’m sure if we adopted a less insular view and stopped pegging people into single identity holes and desisted from stereotyping people based on a social identity much good would come of it otherwise – but I don’t know whether it can help address race/ethnic/religious/nationalistic conflicts and particularly violence….and the violence that we see today is of course not something that emanates out of nowhere. Where then does it come from?.......
I’ll have to end this right here with the above question.
There are many other thoughts that would like to be written and others that are yowling to be written about but the problem for the nonce is that I need to come up with a decent idea for a class that I’m taking on Nation and Nationalism. After all the class readings and the other assortment of stuff that I’ve been reading, skimming through, and whatever and what-not (in my usual way) – I’m still scratching my head to find a lucid, interconnected, and interesting idea. Maybe that’s because for the nth time I’m left thinking that the most important things have been said 97, 7799 times at least, which is not entirely disconnected from something else I read today.
P.S: Incidentally, this book by Amartya Sen has been my favourite one out of the whole pile of academic and related readings....
1. Sen's book is wonderfully woven together, and his major thesis is how advocacy of a single identity – including but by no means limited to religious identity – is employed to sometimes initiate and justify continuous instances of violence and how this unique and single identity receives special focus to the exclusion of all other identities that an individual may possess.
2. This advocacy for a “belligerent” identity is not just employed by the religious fundamentalists and the proponents of religious violence – but the curious thing, as Sen points out is that the same religious identity and the same religious component is employed by also those who effectively seek to fight religious extremism/violence/fundamentalism of different kinds – in this instance most specifically that of Islamic fundamentalism, and the content of the particular discourse ranges from either bashing up the said-religion or in trying to find a middle-ground, which consists of locating the “true” voice of the religion (Islam). But as Sen notes why use religion or the religious identity alone to fight against religious fundamentalism? Why harp on this singular identity based on religion? Why not instead concentrate on the many other identities that Muslims have apart from their Islamic faith based identity?
3. Sen also points out how social theories (and I had always imagined that social theories never really get to the public!), which do explicitly divide the world into divided categories of “us” and the “other/s” and claim to have “discovered” pre-existing social boundaries, and therefore the lines of contention and confrontation, have a particularly insalubrious effect in that these reductionist theories are welcomed and used by the extremists to further their own goals of promoting fundamentalism (case in point: Sen points out to the annoying and rather revolting theories of Samuel Huntington and not just his infamous Clash of Civilizations..., where he is considered by many from his own discipline to be at his confrontational best – but also see “Twenty-first Century America: Vulnerability, Religion, and National Identity” in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2004 – where he starts off by talking about extremist Muslims (and I don't really remember how they exactly enter the picture) but then out of nowhere all Muslims are suddenly viewed as harbouring hostile feelings and sentiments of envy and animosity towards the U.S because of the latter's wealth and economic progress).
This is a perfect example of social construction. The social categories are created, defined, and hardened through the said social theory; the social lines of separation are reified through the process, but then these categories, the boundaries, and the lines of confrontation are seen to have a reality of their own. The social theory and its proponents then use the said theory to defend the same categories that are created by the theory in the first place!
Sen's theory is simple and exceptionally elegant. Even if one were to go out and conduct an empirical study and find instances that were to confirm his theory or to locate instances where his theory did not hold good – that would be hardly as interesting or as elegant an operation as the theory itself. But more about this later.
4. The parts that I found particularly enlightening, fascinating, and indeed captivating were the threads that he pulled out of historical “storage spaces” in relation to how non-western societies – including India, The Middle-East, and China have contributed to the very foundations of the European enlightenment, and how the Eastern contributions to what is now known as western science and mathematics have been completely forgotten (scattered bits and pieces I have not been completely unaware of – yet the origins of the term sine was a particularly delightful example among many others in his book), and how “democracy”, if one starts with what it means (“public deliberation and reasoning”) instead of the unbroken linguistic concept or as certain practices related to the concept can be seen to have existed in different countries in the east (such as India and Japan), and how when Akbar was speaking of religious tolerance in India, across Europe heretics were being burned at the stake and The Inquisitions were not making for happy lives....
Sen does not flinch from giving the western world credit where it is due as he takes us through a historical journey tracing the travel of ideas from East to West – and not just spiritual ideas but fundamental ideas and concepts central to mathematics and the sciences, and he cites many more instances related to the same through chapters 3-7 of his book. Yet he does so in an extremely well-balanced, matter-of-fact, and inoffensive way – even when he points out to the complete and utter ignorance of some of the British colonial ideas regarding the Indians or to the more recent instance of provincialism contained in the “blaring” of U.S Lieutenant General William Boykin) – a far cry from the rather belligerent tone adopted by many post-colonial scholars or subaltern study specialists.
5. The above pointer is used by Sen to demonstrate in the main that Muslims have many other identities (mathematician, scholar, poet, artist, scientist...) so there is no reason for either Muslims themselves to view themselves through their Islamic faith based identity nor for the rest of the world to engage in the same although it may jolly well make sense for the extremists themselves to view themselves through this singular identity.
6. Another point that I personally found pertinent is that a secluded cultural community or one that is given the “freedom” to remain sequestered ends up by not providing its members with the freedom to choose (so much for practicing cultural relativism/celebrating multiculturalism!), while the chapter connecting poverty, globalization, identity, and violence was an illuminating and absorbing read.
7. Sen's focus is on the main that of the singularity of religious identity although he does touch upon other instances where a single identity is stressed – he briefly touches upon the clash between the Hutus and Tutsis, but in the main Sen provides a rubric, a general-enough social perspective wherein he decries the advocacy of a single identity, any single identity, given the fact that human beings are a composition of multiple identities. And of course he writes amazingly well, is stunningly lucid, never uses a jarogonized term, and is very witty in a wry and quiet way right from the priceless prologue.
So far so good. Now, it's time for my own musings I guess.
1. As elegant a perspective that it is – I am left wondering about some related and semi-related things. Theoretically it makes sense of course. Being viewed or viewing others in terms of a single identity ends up as being an extremely partial (and also untrue!) view of human beings - in most cases. Even in the simplest terms, an individual, as Erving Goffman said (four decades ago), has as many identities as the roles s/he plays. That identity can and should be seen in contextual terms, even in everyday encounters, has been talked about.
2. Social psychologists have been talking about the hierarchy of identities within our identity pyramids for a while now. The problem is that not many social psychologists write popular books, and many of the frameworks which start out by being interesting are waylaid by academicians who just end up making the focus of concern exceptionally narrow. A neat theoretical idea “introduced” by Sheldon Stryker (who was initially influenced by G.H. Mead’s work on identity) – which started out as neat anyway – was the notion of identity salience, which talked about the importance of taking into account the multiple identities of an individual and of looking into the salience/prominence of an identity depending upon the particular context. Salience was connected to the individual investment in the projection of a particular identity in a given context. In many ways the theory became much more complex than it needed to be (there were some layers that do make sense) and there was the in-built need to make it appear very scientific and it was therefore made messier and very smartly quantitative but in its bare bones this is how it stood. The problem also lay in the fact of how identity salience was measured and what it was used to study. And maybe this is why many social psychological studies (and I can think of at least a couple of really interesting and insightful ones), including the ones on identity never did become as important as they should have and could have been. Although some studies by Henri Tajfel in particular and also by John Turner looked into the relation between discrimination and identity and the construction of in-groups and out-groups based on identity.
Maybe indeed it does take somebody like Amartya Sen to redirect our attention to something that the social psychologists have been working on for years (!) and to explain it in a lucid and meaningful manner.
3. All this said, I somehow feel that Sen seems to refrain from commenting on the rapid and rather scary outbursts of religious intolerance that have been felt over India over the last three decades and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in its current form. Sen points out that India “has produced very few homegrown terrorists acting in the name of Islam” and for this Sen gives thanks to the “nature of Indian democratic politics, and to the wide acceptance in India of the idea, championed by Mahatma Gandhi that there are many identities other than religious ethnicity that are also relevant for a person’s self-understanding and for the religions between citizens of diverse backgrounds within the country” (168). So that explains why we don’t have homegrown Islamic terrorists but I don’t know whether it’s just me who’s left wondering – for he indeed does mention the recent instances of religious riots – how then does he explain the explicit advocacy of the Hindu identity by the Hindu fundamentalists or am I just picking at something that shouldn’t be picked at?
4. In conclusion: I’ll end off with one of my musings in relation to the highlighting of a particular identity: the reason it seems to me that the religious identity/ethnic identity is the specific identity that is invoked is because that this is the identity which becomes the most pertinent and prominent one given the specific context under consideration. And then again it seems to me that in every “social” movement, individuals are and have been categorized both by themselves and also by others by that primary identity, which the social movement is said to “represent” – be that the women’s/feminist movement, the civil rights movement, or even a particular environmental movement or a class-based movement. One cannot of course say that a terrorist movement is a social movement in the same sense but the issue of the primary/prominent identity (or if we want to call it the salient identity) does remain constant across all instances.
It’s not that I don’t think Sen has a point in saying that to invoke a single identity is insular – and more so by the very individuals intent on addressing/resolving the problem, and that they must at least refrain from picking on that one identity - yet the differences that are framed in any movement, (and particularly those that involve violence) are framed around a particular social identity (be that of race, caste, religion, sect, class). If that category and the differences seen to be “contained” within that category were not made explicit then the particular identity would not be invoked – for in some sense it is that particular social identity, which is bringing people together to form a collective identity. So this is true of “peaceful” social movements too. A single identity is resorted to as being the most prominent identity. The fight for certain rights is structured around this primary/prominent identity. However, once violence enters the picture – and systematic violence of any sort is engaged in between one identifiable social category and another then the question is how do so many others “buy” into the notion of a singular identity so much so that they are willing to engage in violence against the other group? I am not even sure that identity and identification with that single identity has much to do with it at this stage – not even by the ones who are engaged in violence. So I’m not really sure whether remembering that an individual is composed of more than just one identity would help curb widespread and intense ethnic/religious violence. There is much good in the sentiment per se, and I’m sure if we adopted a less insular view and stopped pegging people into single identity holes and desisted from stereotyping people based on a social identity much good would come of it otherwise – but I don’t know whether it can help address race/ethnic/religious/nationalistic conflicts and particularly violence….and the violence that we see today is of course not something that emanates out of nowhere. Where then does it come from?.......
I’ll have to end this right here with the above question.
There are many other thoughts that would like to be written and others that are yowling to be written about but the problem for the nonce is that I need to come up with a decent idea for a class that I’m taking on Nation and Nationalism. After all the class readings and the other assortment of stuff that I’ve been reading, skimming through, and whatever and what-not (in my usual way) – I’m still scratching my head to find a lucid, interconnected, and interesting idea. Maybe that’s because for the nth time I’m left thinking that the most important things have been said 97, 7799 times at least, which is not entirely disconnected from something else I read today.
P.S: Incidentally, this book by Amartya Sen has been my favourite one out of the whole pile of academic and related readings....
21 November 2008
Runners and a cross
I remembered another thing today - and so I'll put it up. It's been coming back every now and again to my head, and so maybe if I write it out here - it'll stop bothering me (you know something like being able to sing a song the whole way through - that way the tune doesn't keep playing in your head. 'Course the problem is that you have to know all the lyrics, and not just two annoying lines which just keep "singing" in your head over and over again!).
Many months ago Hubert - a very interesting friend (who has gone away to Bloomington) - had written on our whiteboard in the computer lab under the heading "Quote for the day": Shilpi says, "This lifetime I may learn Polish. Next lifetime I'll win the 100 metres Gold", in relation to one of our bizarre conversations that we were having. The second part of my "quote" is something that really irritates me.
Right until the time I was 15 - I never did run as fast as I could in any running race. I just wouldn't. I would take part every now and again, but would run very slowly, and that was that. I was petrified that if I did run as fast as I possibly could, even then I would still be the last one or somewhere near the last one to cross the finishing line, and so I never did run my fastest until I was in Class -X. Then in that last running race that we had I ran as fast as I could, and to my immense relief I beat some of the fastest runners in our class.
Now, for some bizarre reason, I'm quite sure that I could have been an Olympic Gold Medalist for India in the 100 metre sprint if I'd started training early enough. I'm not kidding. I've had this feeling for the last three years. Even if I'd started training seven years ago, I might have made it. I know I still run fast - but that's not the point. I don't know why I've been thinking about this over and over again. It's been playing like a stuck recorder in my head, and so I had to get it out.
I don't know why this is one "career choice" that I miss having missed. I can think of many things that I had dreamt of being - but at this age, I can't imagine why it's the missed chance of being a 100 metre sprinter that keeps coming back! If it were something like being an artist or a sketcher or an accomplished writer I would have understood the sentiment. But I can't figure this one out...
The other thought for my 33rd birthday has been:Jesus was nailed to the cross at 33.
I'll end this post here.
Many months ago Hubert - a very interesting friend (who has gone away to Bloomington) - had written on our whiteboard in the computer lab under the heading "Quote for the day": Shilpi says, "This lifetime I may learn Polish. Next lifetime I'll win the 100 metres Gold", in relation to one of our bizarre conversations that we were having. The second part of my "quote" is something that really irritates me.
Right until the time I was 15 - I never did run as fast as I could in any running race. I just wouldn't. I would take part every now and again, but would run very slowly, and that was that. I was petrified that if I did run as fast as I possibly could, even then I would still be the last one or somewhere near the last one to cross the finishing line, and so I never did run my fastest until I was in Class -X. Then in that last running race that we had I ran as fast as I could, and to my immense relief I beat some of the fastest runners in our class.
Now, for some bizarre reason, I'm quite sure that I could have been an Olympic Gold Medalist for India in the 100 metre sprint if I'd started training early enough. I'm not kidding. I've had this feeling for the last three years. Even if I'd started training seven years ago, I might have made it. I know I still run fast - but that's not the point. I don't know why I've been thinking about this over and over again. It's been playing like a stuck recorder in my head, and so I had to get it out.
I don't know why this is one "career choice" that I miss having missed. I can think of many things that I had dreamt of being - but at this age, I can't imagine why it's the missed chance of being a 100 metre sprinter that keeps coming back! If it were something like being an artist or a sketcher or an accomplished writer I would have understood the sentiment. But I can't figure this one out...
The other thought for my 33rd birthday has been:Jesus was nailed to the cross at 33.
I'll end this post here.
18 November 2008
My Master and a Subject
For my Master's at Purdue, my thesis which I rather hastily scrambled together (why it was hastily scrambled together is a different story), was titled “The Madman and the Mystic”. That I ended up doing this study was almost an “accident” and got done “by accident”. My initial idea was to explore creativity and genius. Creativity gets the short end of the stick within sociology (as does genius) and it's not too hard to uncover the reasons, although sociology does remain interested in exemplary leaders and social movement pioneers and in fact leaders of all sorts – even the demagogues, and it has a particular penchant for barmy cult leaders who have engaged in bloody and grisly acts of mayhem and murder (Charles Manson is one of the favourites) – not to mention tyrannical dictators, the more brutal, the better. ....I'm being a tad facetious here.
Creativity though, (and I remember Sulloway did do some work on creativity), and creative geniuses by extension do get sidelined though within sociology. Nothing funny or untrue about this. Creativity is a process which requires solitude and a great degree of "inwardness" and introspection, and probably comes across as too individualistic and too personal and too "elitist" a phenomenon to garner much serious interest, and so maybe that's the reason that sociology neglects it or lets "others" deal with the same. And so that was one of my reasons – to look into creativity because I didn't see why the creative geniuses should get left out of sociology. Of course then the question was creativity, creative genius and what?
The “natural” thing for me was to put in some aspect of “barminess” into the picture.
Why it “was” natural is rather interesting enough, and so I'll make a little observation. The choice of the 13 students who did go on to finish their Master's project would've been an interesting aspect to study in and of itself. Very many of us ended up choosing something deeply (almost embarassingly) personal and most of the students who did a qualitative study did something that they weren't "just" interested in but something that related to a very personal part of their Selves. (My original topic which I let go after pounding it out for a month and three days was of even more of a personal nature. I gave up on it because I was much too attached to the topic and knew that there was no hope of doing something that was balanced and sensible).
One of my friends did her Master's study on children of alcoholic parents; another friend did a study on the nature of memory in relation to participating in a social movement. I ended up studying schizophrenics and spiritual leaders (of course). I've noticed a similar trend in succeeding batches. There is one student who is doing a study on “Fat people”; another student finished dong a Master's thesis on the socialization of African-Americans students by their college student bodies; another very nice and interesting friend did a study on homosexuality among male Polish immigrants; I know of one annoying student who is doing a study on GLBT gatherings; yet another very glamorous and physically stunning British student did a study on (believe it or not) fashion parades in Paris. Finally, to end off with one last example - I also know of a very good friend who is studying violence against women during ethnic riots and the portrayal of violence in Indian literature.
Maybe my sample size is rather biased – for I seem to remember those studies where the personal aspect was so obvious that maybe it's just a matter of selective memory. Yet, whatever it is, in a way I think there are many students working within the social sciences who attempt to “objectively” and academically look at a problem, which is/was a part of themselves in a very obvious way. It's like studying rape if one has been raped or studying violence during war while one has been in the midst of it, or studying boot camps after one has been through some regimented training in some totalitarian institution or studying stigma in relation to some physical characteristic or handicap.....the list is endless.
In some ways - I'm wont to think – at least for some students, the academic poking and prodding at a personal issue helps them to create some emotional distance between themselves and the personal issue or gets them to thinking about something intellectually without emotion and sometimes even helps them to deal with/manage whatever that personal bag contains. Sometimes it helps one to understand the “thing”/ “aspect”/ “process” from different angles and in hopefully a more holistic way. For yet others it might be the knowledge that there are “others” out there like me (maybe there is a sense of companionship).
For yet others I think, studying sociology is simply a waste of time. I cannot and never will be able to see the sociological point of anyone studying fashion parades. But that’s an easy one. Not many would. What about studying fat admirers? Now what’s this all about? It’s studying men who find obese women physically attractive. Hmm. Of course you do bring in a fair bit of gender theory into it, and “ta-da”. How bizarre can things be!
For some students the same feature of the personal and the academic follow through during their Ph.D years as well. For some it shifts completely. For others there's somewhat of a reframing/restructuring/reconstructing if not a complete overhaul. Yet others find/discover other stuff that seem interesting, and others just get bored at the thought of dwelling on the same topic for yet another three straight years and just hurry out (or in) to find something else.
To return to the point regarding my Master's. During the first month, I was getting acquainted with the literature on creativity, and so I was quite sure that there was plenty of space for me to do “something” on creativity and mental health. I remember the first summer I went back home and was talking with a friend up on the terrace, and was rambling about what I was planning to do. My friend's reply was “creativity is linked to being slightly off-kilter, of course...” I nodded and then the conversation went on to other things. I found out later that there were quite a number of interesting studies and some extreme (as is usual) studies which looked into creativity and mental health – especially creativity and what is known as bi-polar disorder/manic-depression.
Some authors loudly attacked others who did not see a link. Other authors loudly protested against any connection between being bi-polar and creativity. One author claimed that the idea that there could be any connection between a deadly disease and creativity was outrageous since the two conditions were absolutely opposed to one another (Albert Rothenberg). One clinical psychologist, who in recent years, explicitly drew a connection between the two, is the very famous (and sort of infamous) Kay Redfield Jamison. She cooked up a veritable storm in the 80s with her theory that bi-polars were more creative than the “normals” (and guess what? Yes of course. She had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder). One of her books Touched by Fire has been cited till kingdom come – and quite frankly I wouldn't mind not hearing her name again. Very many others have critiqued her book till kingdom come saying the usual stuff: that she used a biased sample, that she didn't really have much evidence to carry her argument, that she was completely value-laden in the discussion of her results, and the unusual but not the unexpected: that she was a monster for now putting pressure on the poor folk who were bi-polar by making them feel that they were obliged to be creative! In any case what Jamison said wasn't entirely novel. Some folks had dabbled with similar perspectives – but Kay Redfield Jamison is the one who “made it”.
One study (published in 1992 in the American Journal of Psychotherapy) by Arnold Ludwig, I greatly enjoyed reading (and still remember!): he demonstrated and quite satisfactorily (I thought) that an overwhelming number of people who were bi-polar were to be found within the spaces of the creative arts and related fields where the said individuals had a certain (and greater than usual) degree of freedom in when and how and where and why they worked. Thus, it wasn't so much that creative people were bi-polar or that bi-polar people were creative but that “simply speaking” bi-polars were somehow aware that they weren't fit to work in routine 9-5 jobs, and so found jobs where they could choose their own working hours; or, to see it in funny terms – the bi-polars who did end up surviving and made it in the “real” world made sure that they didn't have 9-5 routine jobs within a tiny cubicle. Soon enough (so many years ago!) I was reading a tidy pile of books by some known and some middling but no-less interesting authors – Laing, and Sasz, Jung and Maslow, Huxley and Timothy Leary, William James,and Foucault, Walsh, Daniel Nettle, Hershman and Lieb, some Benedict and Bourginon, and a bit of Howard Gardner and others. I enjoyed reading most of the literature, and raced through entire books, some of which were outrageously funny (and most of them were actually not strictly sociological textbooks, although they did belong to the broad category of social science) even the halfway medical ones, and plodded through some articles as well. By and by, as enthralled as I was by the process of creativity – and as full as my head already had been with all the information and “knowledge” regarding at least two broad categories of mental illnesses – schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, I hit upon a couple of theses of my own.
1. It seemed that the writers and artists and composers who had been “barmy” were better able to deal with their condition/manage their condition for a certain period of time at any rate (till they dropped dead or walked out of the game of life on their own terms) in comparison to the scientists who had been afflicted by some strains of “barminess”. Yet the creative artists didn't do as well as the spiritual prophets.
2. The spiritual prophets seemed the ones who had been able to deal with their mental states with an unbelievable degree of grace, self-confidence, an absolutely shining "arrogance", and composure (among other things).
3. The spiritual prophets manifested symptoms that were alarmingly close to some of the most marked characteristics of schizophrenia, while the creative artists definitely sounded more manic-depressive than schizophrenic, while the scientists were difficult to peg (small sample size and well-documented instances were fewer for this category) – but seemed, tentatively speaking to display more schizophrenic traits than manic depressive traits.
4. Spiritual prophets wrote the least about their mental journeys (although they wrote volumes on their spiritual philosophy), scientists came a very close second, writers did engage in writing a fair bit, as did musical artists (in the form of letters and memoirs and personal essays); but the maximum number of memoirs/full-fledged books were written by the mad – both, schizophrenics and manic-depressives. The last category had produced an outstanding and bewildering collection of memoirs – some of them notable for no other reason other than the fact that the individual had gone barmy – that was his/her claim to fame; I have no idea “how well” such books did in the regular market.
I realised quickly that my first three theses although they made a great deal of intuitive sense (I still stand by my original hunch that I had for points 1, 2, and 3) – were impossible to study really. Maybe it's not impossible – but I didn't find any ways of really formulating a research study and getting it done. Afterall I couldn't talk with dead people, and the live ones were no good to me. Points 3 and 4 stuck to my head though, and the Masters got done in the end because I was taking a qualitative course that same semester, and I wrote a research paper using bits and pieces of ideas 3 and 4.
In retrospect I realise that I had great fun while writing up my Master's. There was also a tongue-in-the-cheek aspect about the whole study. One of the concluding paragraphs in my completed thesis reads,
"....what can be undeniably accepted is that prophets, saints and true charismatic, spiritual leaders (as defined in the literature review) are definitely creative in that they bring in new ways of understanding life. Also it can be accepted that they are hardly “dysfunctional” or “pathological” – insofar as they can negotiate between their inner insights and external reality. In this they do display the element of “creative self-awareness” which can be differentiated from the schizophrenic’s heightened sensitivity, hyper-reflexivity and keen awareness in that for the mystic these attributes are fully realized and fully manifest; the mystic is able to wield these and employ these in a manner which results in his full potential being realized within different spaces of social reality – even if these "spaces" relate to the philosophical, religious and cosmic dimension....the schizophrenic and the mystic thus while they have similar experiences and even insights, they have radically different means of dealing with the aberrant, the unusual, and the unlikely...."
I should most likely apologise for the above post. I had really wanted it to be more informative and now I realise that I've hardly made it clear as to what schizophrenia is all about or how it has been classified or how I made connections between charismatic spiritual leaders/mystics and schizophrenics or how the study actually got done. Some may wonder about my presumptuousness, my level and degree of absolute self-centredness or even wonder why I bothered doing the study in the first place. Yet others may wonder why I bothered talking about my Master's.
But it's not so much about being presumptuous or being self-obsessed or maybe it is. As I finally get around to going out and collecting my data for my Ph.D I was in the mood to ruminate on some aspects about my Master's and how I zoned in on a subject of my choice. And funnily enough, as I'm reluctantly nearing the end of a beautiful book by Amartya Sen, I'm reminded too of the number of ways that our multiple identities are not just formed but made manifest. For many students and researchers even the specific choice of subject/topic of research is an expression of their "identity" (for some it may be an entirely sub-conscious process, although I doubt it) and for others it's absolutely open and self-claimed (feminist scholars, holocaust/genocide scholars are some examples that immediately come to mind) - and which identity? Most likely the one that is the most salient. (I'm reminded of the game with which I started off my social psychology class a year ago: a game in which the students write 20 points to the question "Who am I?") Given the existence of multiple identities - I somehow feel that there is one identity (at least for some people) which emerges as the "primary identity". Sometimes there is a problem with that - but it really depends on what that primary identity is. Depending on what that primary identity is, I would argue that having a primary identity or a single identity may not be a problem.
I think I'll end this post for now. Some other day I'll write more on identity and identity salience, on choosing of research topics and what choices go out of the window and maybe I'll write something about choices as well.
P.S: I made an egregious mistake in not mentioning three of my professors without whom I could not have finished my Masters. My advisor Professor Eugene C. Jackson, who supported me and allowed me to go around hunting, exploring, and experimenting - and put up with my barminess; Professor Harry Potter who never seemed "too busy" for some long, rambling, and interesting conversations, and Professor Jack Spencer who had and has given me chances when I didn't think I deserved them.
21st November 2008
Creativity though, (and I remember Sulloway did do some work on creativity), and creative geniuses by extension do get sidelined though within sociology. Nothing funny or untrue about this. Creativity is a process which requires solitude and a great degree of "inwardness" and introspection, and probably comes across as too individualistic and too personal and too "elitist" a phenomenon to garner much serious interest, and so maybe that's the reason that sociology neglects it or lets "others" deal with the same. And so that was one of my reasons – to look into creativity because I didn't see why the creative geniuses should get left out of sociology. Of course then the question was creativity, creative genius and what?
The “natural” thing for me was to put in some aspect of “barminess” into the picture.
Why it “was” natural is rather interesting enough, and so I'll make a little observation. The choice of the 13 students who did go on to finish their Master's project would've been an interesting aspect to study in and of itself. Very many of us ended up choosing something deeply (almost embarassingly) personal and most of the students who did a qualitative study did something that they weren't "just" interested in but something that related to a very personal part of their Selves. (My original topic which I let go after pounding it out for a month and three days was of even more of a personal nature. I gave up on it because I was much too attached to the topic and knew that there was no hope of doing something that was balanced and sensible).
One of my friends did her Master's study on children of alcoholic parents; another friend did a study on the nature of memory in relation to participating in a social movement. I ended up studying schizophrenics and spiritual leaders (of course). I've noticed a similar trend in succeeding batches. There is one student who is doing a study on “Fat people”; another student finished dong a Master's thesis on the socialization of African-Americans students by their college student bodies; another very nice and interesting friend did a study on homosexuality among male Polish immigrants; I know of one annoying student who is doing a study on GLBT gatherings; yet another very glamorous and physically stunning British student did a study on (believe it or not) fashion parades in Paris. Finally, to end off with one last example - I also know of a very good friend who is studying violence against women during ethnic riots and the portrayal of violence in Indian literature.
Maybe my sample size is rather biased – for I seem to remember those studies where the personal aspect was so obvious that maybe it's just a matter of selective memory. Yet, whatever it is, in a way I think there are many students working within the social sciences who attempt to “objectively” and academically look at a problem, which is/was a part of themselves in a very obvious way. It's like studying rape if one has been raped or studying violence during war while one has been in the midst of it, or studying boot camps after one has been through some regimented training in some totalitarian institution or studying stigma in relation to some physical characteristic or handicap.....the list is endless.
In some ways - I'm wont to think – at least for some students, the academic poking and prodding at a personal issue helps them to create some emotional distance between themselves and the personal issue or gets them to thinking about something intellectually without emotion and sometimes even helps them to deal with/manage whatever that personal bag contains. Sometimes it helps one to understand the “thing”/ “aspect”/ “process” from different angles and in hopefully a more holistic way. For yet others it might be the knowledge that there are “others” out there like me (maybe there is a sense of companionship).
For yet others I think, studying sociology is simply a waste of time. I cannot and never will be able to see the sociological point of anyone studying fashion parades. But that’s an easy one. Not many would. What about studying fat admirers? Now what’s this all about? It’s studying men who find obese women physically attractive. Hmm. Of course you do bring in a fair bit of gender theory into it, and “ta-da”. How bizarre can things be!
For some students the same feature of the personal and the academic follow through during their Ph.D years as well. For some it shifts completely. For others there's somewhat of a reframing/restructuring/reconstructing if not a complete overhaul. Yet others find/discover other stuff that seem interesting, and others just get bored at the thought of dwelling on the same topic for yet another three straight years and just hurry out (or in) to find something else.
To return to the point regarding my Master's. During the first month, I was getting acquainted with the literature on creativity, and so I was quite sure that there was plenty of space for me to do “something” on creativity and mental health. I remember the first summer I went back home and was talking with a friend up on the terrace, and was rambling about what I was planning to do. My friend's reply was “creativity is linked to being slightly off-kilter, of course...” I nodded and then the conversation went on to other things. I found out later that there were quite a number of interesting studies and some extreme (as is usual) studies which looked into creativity and mental health – especially creativity and what is known as bi-polar disorder/manic-depression.
Some authors loudly attacked others who did not see a link. Other authors loudly protested against any connection between being bi-polar and creativity. One author claimed that the idea that there could be any connection between a deadly disease and creativity was outrageous since the two conditions were absolutely opposed to one another (Albert Rothenberg). One clinical psychologist, who in recent years, explicitly drew a connection between the two, is the very famous (and sort of infamous) Kay Redfield Jamison. She cooked up a veritable storm in the 80s with her theory that bi-polars were more creative than the “normals” (and guess what? Yes of course. She had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder). One of her books Touched by Fire has been cited till kingdom come – and quite frankly I wouldn't mind not hearing her name again. Very many others have critiqued her book till kingdom come saying the usual stuff: that she used a biased sample, that she didn't really have much evidence to carry her argument, that she was completely value-laden in the discussion of her results, and the unusual but not the unexpected: that she was a monster for now putting pressure on the poor folk who were bi-polar by making them feel that they were obliged to be creative! In any case what Jamison said wasn't entirely novel. Some folks had dabbled with similar perspectives – but Kay Redfield Jamison is the one who “made it”.
One study (published in 1992 in the American Journal of Psychotherapy) by Arnold Ludwig, I greatly enjoyed reading (and still remember!): he demonstrated and quite satisfactorily (I thought) that an overwhelming number of people who were bi-polar were to be found within the spaces of the creative arts and related fields where the said individuals had a certain (and greater than usual) degree of freedom in when and how and where and why they worked. Thus, it wasn't so much that creative people were bi-polar or that bi-polar people were creative but that “simply speaking” bi-polars were somehow aware that they weren't fit to work in routine 9-5 jobs, and so found jobs where they could choose their own working hours; or, to see it in funny terms – the bi-polars who did end up surviving and made it in the “real” world made sure that they didn't have 9-5 routine jobs within a tiny cubicle. Soon enough (so many years ago!) I was reading a tidy pile of books by some known and some middling but no-less interesting authors – Laing, and Sasz, Jung and Maslow, Huxley and Timothy Leary, William James,and Foucault, Walsh, Daniel Nettle, Hershman and Lieb, some Benedict and Bourginon, and a bit of Howard Gardner and others. I enjoyed reading most of the literature, and raced through entire books, some of which were outrageously funny (and most of them were actually not strictly sociological textbooks, although they did belong to the broad category of social science) even the halfway medical ones, and plodded through some articles as well. By and by, as enthralled as I was by the process of creativity – and as full as my head already had been with all the information and “knowledge” regarding at least two broad categories of mental illnesses – schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, I hit upon a couple of theses of my own.
1. It seemed that the writers and artists and composers who had been “barmy” were better able to deal with their condition/manage their condition for a certain period of time at any rate (till they dropped dead or walked out of the game of life on their own terms) in comparison to the scientists who had been afflicted by some strains of “barminess”. Yet the creative artists didn't do as well as the spiritual prophets.
2. The spiritual prophets seemed the ones who had been able to deal with their mental states with an unbelievable degree of grace, self-confidence, an absolutely shining "arrogance", and composure (among other things).
3. The spiritual prophets manifested symptoms that were alarmingly close to some of the most marked characteristics of schizophrenia, while the creative artists definitely sounded more manic-depressive than schizophrenic, while the scientists were difficult to peg (small sample size and well-documented instances were fewer for this category) – but seemed, tentatively speaking to display more schizophrenic traits than manic depressive traits.
4. Spiritual prophets wrote the least about their mental journeys (although they wrote volumes on their spiritual philosophy), scientists came a very close second, writers did engage in writing a fair bit, as did musical artists (in the form of letters and memoirs and personal essays); but the maximum number of memoirs/full-fledged books were written by the mad – both, schizophrenics and manic-depressives. The last category had produced an outstanding and bewildering collection of memoirs – some of them notable for no other reason other than the fact that the individual had gone barmy – that was his/her claim to fame; I have no idea “how well” such books did in the regular market.
I realised quickly that my first three theses although they made a great deal of intuitive sense (I still stand by my original hunch that I had for points 1, 2, and 3) – were impossible to study really. Maybe it's not impossible – but I didn't find any ways of really formulating a research study and getting it done. Afterall I couldn't talk with dead people, and the live ones were no good to me. Points 3 and 4 stuck to my head though, and the Masters got done in the end because I was taking a qualitative course that same semester, and I wrote a research paper using bits and pieces of ideas 3 and 4.
In retrospect I realise that I had great fun while writing up my Master's. There was also a tongue-in-the-cheek aspect about the whole study. One of the concluding paragraphs in my completed thesis reads,
"....what can be undeniably accepted is that prophets, saints and true charismatic, spiritual leaders (as defined in the literature review) are definitely creative in that they bring in new ways of understanding life. Also it can be accepted that they are hardly “dysfunctional” or “pathological” – insofar as they can negotiate between their inner insights and external reality. In this they do display the element of “creative self-awareness” which can be differentiated from the schizophrenic’s heightened sensitivity, hyper-reflexivity and keen awareness in that for the mystic these attributes are fully realized and fully manifest; the mystic is able to wield these and employ these in a manner which results in his full potential being realized within different spaces of social reality – even if these "spaces" relate to the philosophical, religious and cosmic dimension....the schizophrenic and the mystic thus while they have similar experiences and even insights, they have radically different means of dealing with the aberrant, the unusual, and the unlikely...."
I should most likely apologise for the above post. I had really wanted it to be more informative and now I realise that I've hardly made it clear as to what schizophrenia is all about or how it has been classified or how I made connections between charismatic spiritual leaders/mystics and schizophrenics or how the study actually got done. Some may wonder about my presumptuousness, my level and degree of absolute self-centredness or even wonder why I bothered doing the study in the first place. Yet others may wonder why I bothered talking about my Master's.
But it's not so much about being presumptuous or being self-obsessed or maybe it is. As I finally get around to going out and collecting my data for my Ph.D I was in the mood to ruminate on some aspects about my Master's and how I zoned in on a subject of my choice. And funnily enough, as I'm reluctantly nearing the end of a beautiful book by Amartya Sen, I'm reminded too of the number of ways that our multiple identities are not just formed but made manifest. For many students and researchers even the specific choice of subject/topic of research is an expression of their "identity" (for some it may be an entirely sub-conscious process, although I doubt it) and for others it's absolutely open and self-claimed (feminist scholars, holocaust/genocide scholars are some examples that immediately come to mind) - and which identity? Most likely the one that is the most salient. (I'm reminded of the game with which I started off my social psychology class a year ago: a game in which the students write 20 points to the question "Who am I?") Given the existence of multiple identities - I somehow feel that there is one identity (at least for some people) which emerges as the "primary identity". Sometimes there is a problem with that - but it really depends on what that primary identity is. Depending on what that primary identity is, I would argue that having a primary identity or a single identity may not be a problem.
I think I'll end this post for now. Some other day I'll write more on identity and identity salience, on choosing of research topics and what choices go out of the window and maybe I'll write something about choices as well.
P.S: I made an egregious mistake in not mentioning three of my professors without whom I could not have finished my Masters. My advisor Professor Eugene C. Jackson, who supported me and allowed me to go around hunting, exploring, and experimenting - and put up with my barminess; Professor Harry Potter who never seemed "too busy" for some long, rambling, and interesting conversations, and Professor Jack Spencer who had and has given me chances when I didn't think I deserved them.
21st November 2008
23 June 2008
Musings on Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a constant state of being. Some of my friends – notably two among them – are quick with their repartees and make priceless puns, and sometimes elegantly witty comments, both barbed and unbarbed, depending upon the requirements of a given context. Of course being witty is one among the many consequences of mindfulness.
Mindfulness means “being present in the moment”. Much has been said about this and much more has been written about it. The first time I ever came across this term was within a Class 5 History textbook, which talked about Buddhism. I had no idea what it meant; indeed I didn’t know how one could not be in the moment. Yet through all these years – I don’t think I’ve gotten any closer to really practicing what this means. I am hardly ever mindful to and of the moment.
Yet, what indeed, does it mean to be in the moment?
Or better still: what does it mean to "not be in the moment"?
My mind wanders. Even when I’m talking to people I love my own mind splutters, jumps the gun, and is leaping over bushes and shrubs, mountains or oceans or skulking in a dark cave with a shroud pulled over its head.
Very rarely am I in the moment. Present with all my senses intact, listening and hearing carefully and mindfully, and looking and being with what is happening and unfurling around me. And the times that I am in the moment – they are – needless to say, the best.
Very natural, easy, gliding, cruising moments.
And as the saying goes, time flies by without me knowing.
Being mindful, being in the moment: the best quote for me comes from a nice movie that I watched recently: “Who are you?” “I am the moment.”
Lately, I’ve noticed I get into this mindful moment when I’m almost finishing a book. Even if the book is halfway decent; I am in that moment racing along with the story as it comes to an artificial end. This used to happen extremely frequently some two decades ago when I’d race back home from school with a good book, and nothing would be better than snuggling into a comfy armchair or getting into bed and reading through the sunny afternoons.
These days this happens less often; even when I’m reading a good book, my mind wanders, and not with the tale – but on its own on exceptionally mundane routes, following trails...of work that needs to be done later, official stuff that needs to be attended to, papers that need to be read, papers which should be written, the tummy that needs to be exercised, the worries that do not have any outlet….and on and on – until my chattering mind makes it impossible for me to read. I realise sometimes to my utter disgust that I have gone through ten pages without anything registering in my head. Sometimes these days, when I drive I get into that “in the moment” state. But since I don’t know all the roads around the city – I can’t really let my mind just be – I’ll most likely be on my way to Milwaukee if I don’t squint and glare at all the roads and routes I’m taking.
Being with some people – sometimes I’m in the moment. When I’m not just-listening without really listening just so that I can speak later. I really listen and really talk, and sometimes the interaction proceeds without any hiccoughs or bumps. It becomes one emerging lovely dance where both become one with the moment. Sometimes I talk, sometimes I listen – and I really am in the moment. Paying attention to what is being said instead of trying to make my own point or leap around with my own silly mind or run away in fear because of what is being said, because my silly inattentive mind just wants to hide away from "what is being said" or because it doesn’t know how to deal with "what is being said" or because it starts spinning scary stories from or is deeply uncomfortable about "what is being said".
The same thing of my “mind running away” happens when there is a situation that my mind doesn’t know how to deal with. It will start spinning tales and stories and make a gigantic universe out of a grain of sand. I start hyperventilating within and the whole “real” world crashes even before seven seconds have come and gone. And of course my mind has paid no attention to what has really been said or to what has really unfurled. Some day I’ll make a list (as honest a list as I possibly can of the moments when I am mindful of the moment, but that’s for later).
The Dalai Lama says that the key to seeing what really “is” – is to cultivate a peaceful mind. Yet my mind no matter how “smart” and “clever” and “knowledgeable” it thinks it is – never really is in the moment as things happen. Nor does it see and hear what really is. It makes a story of things as it wants to, and sometimes it takes me days and years to figure out why I react the way I do; why I am the way I am. So far I realise that I may have grown exceptionally knowledgeable but I’m no more wise than I was when I was 17 (at 5, I was wise), although I have definitely had more experiences.
And how does one become wise? By acting out one’s knowledge.
What is wisdom? Knowledge, which is acted out.
I realise with a sense of bemusement that when I was physically attacked once, I did act with complete mindfulness. I didn’t know that I was acting in and with the moment – but I was. I kept my wits about me, and I was out of a sticky situation, which might have gotten pretty unpleasant if my mind had decided to cower or flee (or if God and my stars hadn’t been with me). But the truth is apart from that one time, and a couple of other times – I can’t really point out to important times in my life where I have "been (or am) in the moment". And it seems to me that the more momentous the occasion, the more crucial the timing, the less likely am I to be in the moment.
I slap my head later.
I kick myself later.
I grin and shake my head sadly later.
I used to get angry earlier – now I am just amazed and even more bemused at how my mind just splutters and stutters and whimps like a pipsqeak, and how sometimes I chatter without really thinking. In some rare important moments I can be myself; I can flow with the moment, be engaged in that moment and all the pretty, beautiful, lovely, and promised elements do come together in one delightful rush. Many times it happens when I’m by myself (or with my fimh - only that I guess, doesn't really count), when it’s vis-à-vis other human beings, it happens only when the other has no inhibitions at all about being with me, and is able to draw me away from my chattering mind (and this I have realised happens between some unusual children and me) or when I have had enough time with another to have no fear about anything that comes or may come between the other and me.
“Being in the moment” (ironically enough) happens, both with people I love and with people I don’t give a rat’s ass about.
But what is particularly distressing is that even with people I love dearly, I can very rarely be in the moment. I am always worried about giving offence or hurting the other or else I'm mortally scared about what the other is going to say (no matter how much I say I can be on my own, and I know I can be; I fear the fear of abandonment and sometimes what feels like very real abandonment in a couple of relationships) or else I genuinely fear making the other incurably angry and disgusted with my presumptuousness. Or I imagine that the other is going to think I’m silly or stupid or God-forbid “slow”. I don’t much care what the world or anybody else thinks of me any longer – but the thing is I still do care enormously and terribly about what a couple and more of people “think” of me. I know it doesn’t make sense to play out Cooley’s Looking-glass Self (which says we act the way we do depending upon how we believe other people see us)in my head – but barmily enough it’s almost as if some of the times in life I really am stuck in a moment in time, and I can’t be who-I-want-to-be because my silly mind is defensive, is offensive and is looking for flight, and all at the same time.
It’s very similar to what Eddie Izzard in his once-again priceless act spins on (aggressive) children who tend to lie (because they are "always" on the look-out for something which might leap out and bite them, maybe?)
“Did you…?” comes the shooting question from an adult, and the child goes, “Yes I did. No I didn’t. It wasn’t me. I didn’t know. …err…did I 'what'?"
“Did you brush your teeth?”
"Yes I did. No I didn’t. I was dead at the time. Errr…what’s the right answer?”
So in a way, it all comes back to my previous post: it’s all about fear. Even when I imagine I have nothing to fear about – I fear. I fear because my mind convinces me that if I don’t fear what I don’t fear, what-I-don't-fear will happen! Now as I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter at all when I am completely indifferent to people or situations; but when I have any feelings – when I want to whack people hard (because they irritate me or offend my sensibilities every day because I see them everyday) or when I want to hug them – I am not so mindful anymore. I am caught up in the trap of my mind where mindlessness persists and my own silly chattering.
What upsets me is that with all my knowledge gathered quite painstakingly – I must mention, through all these 32 years – I have nothing to show for it! I know I have the necessary knowledge – but for the life of me I cannot imagine what stops this knowledge from being translated into wisdom. I have become no better at my work ethics. I have become no more disciplined in my work habits (or otherwise). I do not seem to have a phenomenal memory all of a sudden (yes, my worries about my memory, although not as acute as before still worry me at a level). I do not seem to have any extraordinary skills that anyone else or I happen to notice or gloat over. I am just as lazy as I ever have been. I lack the patience and concentration and attention span that I had as a 7 year old. After a month and a half of frenetic activity and unfurling, my favourite pastime is once-again, sleeping. And what I know and sense seems almost like a wistful dream at times and sometimes like the starkest piece of truth that has ever hit me. Yet in terms of action – there is nothing that is remotely noteworthy. I can’t even talk for heaven’s sake (with people I genuinely love and care about) without my mind taking a hike or just completely blanking on me, so I realise. I can’t talk but even more than that – I can’t really think straight. So where is all my mindfulness disappearing when I “need” it the most, I wonder.
I could and can talk till Kingdom come about God, and how and what I feel about God. I also know that it doesn’t matter what I say or think or speak about God. For it doesn’t matter in the end, beginning or the middle. It is what-it-is. I feel-what-I-feel. And, my Self smiles as I write this (much to my embarrassment) – it can’t really be “talked about” or written about….
Yet what of life as it is.
If I go through life; and still go through life with knowledge and no wisdom in the way I act, speak and am – then of what use is my prattle-babble and wugga-wugga. I could give lectures and “say” a lot. But to my growing consternation and annoyance, I see that when I have to act and speak and listen carefully to what-is-being said and pay attention to what-is, my mind goes on a chattering rampage or an autistic trail, just the way it always has!
My mind has started sniggering unkindly of late (all over again? – But not as loudly and vociferously as in the past – because it no longer can be that pompous). It tells me if my fears are imaginary – why should I imagine that my love and my God is real. It tells me that I have learnt nothing from life that is “useful” to/for me or to anyone else. It doesn’t make me publish papers by the dozen, and become a bigwig within the field of academics (or a rising star). It doesn’t suddenly make me famous and rich. It doesn’t even – and here it sniggers even more loudly – make me act in more fearless and more honest and more careful and more mindful ways. It doesn’t help me make human beings happier or less confused or relieve another, if even a bit, of his/her misery. It doesn’t help me make the sufferings of anyone in this world a little lighter. It doesn’t help me be both compassionate and wise in my “real” dealings with human beings who cheese me off. It doesn’t help me do good to those more unfortunate. It doesn’t make me always and forever “be in the moment” vis-à-vis those whom I loudly claim to love…. And this is where I sigh. I do. For here, if not in any other matter, my mind is “right”.
I have indeed been blessed to have the life I do. Yet vis-à-vis people, I’m still as much as the strange un that I always was and have been. Vis-à-vis fears and obsessions my mind goes running on the same mad rushing freight train as it always did even when I was a kid, although the fears were different at that point.
I’m reminded again of the love and fear dichotomy. I’m reminded again of the light and darkness dichotomy. I’m reminded again of wisdom and ignorance. I know that all can be without the other. And of course they do not exist as this or that. Creation, destruction, life, death, fear, wisdom, ignorance, love, madness, sanity, Yin and Yang, God and the Devil (?)…all of it is one whole. There is an absolute indestructible unity. And I seem to know this as well. Yet, yet, yet and yet – where is the wisdom in this confounding puzzle? If the illusion breaks and if mindfulness “Is” – shouldn’t mindfulness/clarity of mind be some absolute state of knowing and being, without ever forgetting who-one-is? Letting go of fear is probably the key.
I’m reminded of that one line which is repeated over and over again in Dune, “Fear is the mindkiller…” and it truly is. It makes me mindless.
And it’s fear in one form or the other, which leads to most of what is going on in the world today, and has been for ages. The horrors of our world.
I can’t help but think that Fear should have found its place of glory as one of the seven deadly sins….
Mindfulness means “being present in the moment”. Much has been said about this and much more has been written about it. The first time I ever came across this term was within a Class 5 History textbook, which talked about Buddhism. I had no idea what it meant; indeed I didn’t know how one could not be in the moment. Yet through all these years – I don’t think I’ve gotten any closer to really practicing what this means. I am hardly ever mindful to and of the moment.
Yet, what indeed, does it mean to be in the moment?
Or better still: what does it mean to "not be in the moment"?
My mind wanders. Even when I’m talking to people I love my own mind splutters, jumps the gun, and is leaping over bushes and shrubs, mountains or oceans or skulking in a dark cave with a shroud pulled over its head.
Very rarely am I in the moment. Present with all my senses intact, listening and hearing carefully and mindfully, and looking and being with what is happening and unfurling around me. And the times that I am in the moment – they are – needless to say, the best.
Very natural, easy, gliding, cruising moments.
And as the saying goes, time flies by without me knowing.
Being mindful, being in the moment: the best quote for me comes from a nice movie that I watched recently: “Who are you?” “I am the moment.”
Lately, I’ve noticed I get into this mindful moment when I’m almost finishing a book. Even if the book is halfway decent; I am in that moment racing along with the story as it comes to an artificial end. This used to happen extremely frequently some two decades ago when I’d race back home from school with a good book, and nothing would be better than snuggling into a comfy armchair or getting into bed and reading through the sunny afternoons.
These days this happens less often; even when I’m reading a good book, my mind wanders, and not with the tale – but on its own on exceptionally mundane routes, following trails...of work that needs to be done later, official stuff that needs to be attended to, papers that need to be read, papers which should be written, the tummy that needs to be exercised, the worries that do not have any outlet….and on and on – until my chattering mind makes it impossible for me to read. I realise sometimes to my utter disgust that I have gone through ten pages without anything registering in my head. Sometimes these days, when I drive I get into that “in the moment” state. But since I don’t know all the roads around the city – I can’t really let my mind just be – I’ll most likely be on my way to Milwaukee if I don’t squint and glare at all the roads and routes I’m taking.
Being with some people – sometimes I’m in the moment. When I’m not just-listening without really listening just so that I can speak later. I really listen and really talk, and sometimes the interaction proceeds without any hiccoughs or bumps. It becomes one emerging lovely dance where both become one with the moment. Sometimes I talk, sometimes I listen – and I really am in the moment. Paying attention to what is being said instead of trying to make my own point or leap around with my own silly mind or run away in fear because of what is being said, because my silly inattentive mind just wants to hide away from "what is being said" or because it doesn’t know how to deal with "what is being said" or because it starts spinning scary stories from or is deeply uncomfortable about "what is being said".
The same thing of my “mind running away” happens when there is a situation that my mind doesn’t know how to deal with. It will start spinning tales and stories and make a gigantic universe out of a grain of sand. I start hyperventilating within and the whole “real” world crashes even before seven seconds have come and gone. And of course my mind has paid no attention to what has really been said or to what has really unfurled. Some day I’ll make a list (as honest a list as I possibly can of the moments when I am mindful of the moment, but that’s for later).
The Dalai Lama says that the key to seeing what really “is” – is to cultivate a peaceful mind. Yet my mind no matter how “smart” and “clever” and “knowledgeable” it thinks it is – never really is in the moment as things happen. Nor does it see and hear what really is. It makes a story of things as it wants to, and sometimes it takes me days and years to figure out why I react the way I do; why I am the way I am. So far I realise that I may have grown exceptionally knowledgeable but I’m no more wise than I was when I was 17 (at 5, I was wise), although I have definitely had more experiences.
And how does one become wise? By acting out one’s knowledge.
What is wisdom? Knowledge, which is acted out.
I realise with a sense of bemusement that when I was physically attacked once, I did act with complete mindfulness. I didn’t know that I was acting in and with the moment – but I was. I kept my wits about me, and I was out of a sticky situation, which might have gotten pretty unpleasant if my mind had decided to cower or flee (or if God and my stars hadn’t been with me). But the truth is apart from that one time, and a couple of other times – I can’t really point out to important times in my life where I have "been (or am) in the moment". And it seems to me that the more momentous the occasion, the more crucial the timing, the less likely am I to be in the moment.
I slap my head later.
I kick myself later.
I grin and shake my head sadly later.
I used to get angry earlier – now I am just amazed and even more bemused at how my mind just splutters and stutters and whimps like a pipsqeak, and how sometimes I chatter without really thinking. In some rare important moments I can be myself; I can flow with the moment, be engaged in that moment and all the pretty, beautiful, lovely, and promised elements do come together in one delightful rush. Many times it happens when I’m by myself (or with my fimh - only that I guess, doesn't really count), when it’s vis-à-vis other human beings, it happens only when the other has no inhibitions at all about being with me, and is able to draw me away from my chattering mind (and this I have realised happens between some unusual children and me) or when I have had enough time with another to have no fear about anything that comes or may come between the other and me.
“Being in the moment” (ironically enough) happens, both with people I love and with people I don’t give a rat’s ass about.
But what is particularly distressing is that even with people I love dearly, I can very rarely be in the moment. I am always worried about giving offence or hurting the other or else I'm mortally scared about what the other is going to say (no matter how much I say I can be on my own, and I know I can be; I fear the fear of abandonment and sometimes what feels like very real abandonment in a couple of relationships) or else I genuinely fear making the other incurably angry and disgusted with my presumptuousness. Or I imagine that the other is going to think I’m silly or stupid or God-forbid “slow”. I don’t much care what the world or anybody else thinks of me any longer – but the thing is I still do care enormously and terribly about what a couple and more of people “think” of me. I know it doesn’t make sense to play out Cooley’s Looking-glass Self (which says we act the way we do depending upon how we believe other people see us)in my head – but barmily enough it’s almost as if some of the times in life I really am stuck in a moment in time, and I can’t be who-I-want-to-be because my silly mind is defensive, is offensive and is looking for flight, and all at the same time.
It’s very similar to what Eddie Izzard in his once-again priceless act spins on (aggressive) children who tend to lie (because they are "always" on the look-out for something which might leap out and bite them, maybe?)
“Did you…?” comes the shooting question from an adult, and the child goes, “Yes I did. No I didn’t. It wasn’t me. I didn’t know. …err…did I 'what'?"
“Did you brush your teeth?”
"Yes I did. No I didn’t. I was dead at the time. Errr…what’s the right answer?”
So in a way, it all comes back to my previous post: it’s all about fear. Even when I imagine I have nothing to fear about – I fear. I fear because my mind convinces me that if I don’t fear what I don’t fear, what-I-don't-fear will happen! Now as I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter at all when I am completely indifferent to people or situations; but when I have any feelings – when I want to whack people hard (because they irritate me or offend my sensibilities every day because I see them everyday) or when I want to hug them – I am not so mindful anymore. I am caught up in the trap of my mind where mindlessness persists and my own silly chattering.
What upsets me is that with all my knowledge gathered quite painstakingly – I must mention, through all these 32 years – I have nothing to show for it! I know I have the necessary knowledge – but for the life of me I cannot imagine what stops this knowledge from being translated into wisdom. I have become no better at my work ethics. I have become no more disciplined in my work habits (or otherwise). I do not seem to have a phenomenal memory all of a sudden (yes, my worries about my memory, although not as acute as before still worry me at a level). I do not seem to have any extraordinary skills that anyone else or I happen to notice or gloat over. I am just as lazy as I ever have been. I lack the patience and concentration and attention span that I had as a 7 year old. After a month and a half of frenetic activity and unfurling, my favourite pastime is once-again, sleeping. And what I know and sense seems almost like a wistful dream at times and sometimes like the starkest piece of truth that has ever hit me. Yet in terms of action – there is nothing that is remotely noteworthy. I can’t even talk for heaven’s sake (with people I genuinely love and care about) without my mind taking a hike or just completely blanking on me, so I realise. I can’t talk but even more than that – I can’t really think straight. So where is all my mindfulness disappearing when I “need” it the most, I wonder.
I could and can talk till Kingdom come about God, and how and what I feel about God. I also know that it doesn’t matter what I say or think or speak about God. For it doesn’t matter in the end, beginning or the middle. It is what-it-is. I feel-what-I-feel. And, my Self smiles as I write this (much to my embarrassment) – it can’t really be “talked about” or written about….
Yet what of life as it is.
If I go through life; and still go through life with knowledge and no wisdom in the way I act, speak and am – then of what use is my prattle-babble and wugga-wugga. I could give lectures and “say” a lot. But to my growing consternation and annoyance, I see that when I have to act and speak and listen carefully to what-is-being said and pay attention to what-is, my mind goes on a chattering rampage or an autistic trail, just the way it always has!
My mind has started sniggering unkindly of late (all over again? – But not as loudly and vociferously as in the past – because it no longer can be that pompous). It tells me if my fears are imaginary – why should I imagine that my love and my God is real. It tells me that I have learnt nothing from life that is “useful” to/for me or to anyone else. It doesn’t make me publish papers by the dozen, and become a bigwig within the field of academics (or a rising star). It doesn’t suddenly make me famous and rich. It doesn’t even – and here it sniggers even more loudly – make me act in more fearless and more honest and more careful and more mindful ways. It doesn’t help me make human beings happier or less confused or relieve another, if even a bit, of his/her misery. It doesn’t help me make the sufferings of anyone in this world a little lighter. It doesn’t help me be both compassionate and wise in my “real” dealings with human beings who cheese me off. It doesn’t help me do good to those more unfortunate. It doesn’t make me always and forever “be in the moment” vis-à-vis those whom I loudly claim to love…. And this is where I sigh. I do. For here, if not in any other matter, my mind is “right”.
I have indeed been blessed to have the life I do. Yet vis-à-vis people, I’m still as much as the strange un that I always was and have been. Vis-à-vis fears and obsessions my mind goes running on the same mad rushing freight train as it always did even when I was a kid, although the fears were different at that point.
I’m reminded again of the love and fear dichotomy. I’m reminded again of the light and darkness dichotomy. I’m reminded again of wisdom and ignorance. I know that all can be without the other. And of course they do not exist as this or that. Creation, destruction, life, death, fear, wisdom, ignorance, love, madness, sanity, Yin and Yang, God and the Devil (?)…all of it is one whole. There is an absolute indestructible unity. And I seem to know this as well. Yet, yet, yet and yet – where is the wisdom in this confounding puzzle? If the illusion breaks and if mindfulness “Is” – shouldn’t mindfulness/clarity of mind be some absolute state of knowing and being, without ever forgetting who-one-is? Letting go of fear is probably the key.
I’m reminded of that one line which is repeated over and over again in Dune, “Fear is the mindkiller…” and it truly is. It makes me mindless.
And it’s fear in one form or the other, which leads to most of what is going on in the world today, and has been for ages. The horrors of our world.
I can’t help but think that Fear should have found its place of glory as one of the seven deadly sins….
11 June 2008
The Fear of Fear: Potter and Ged; Me and some Thoughts
Love and fear are the opposites. It’s not love and hate. I realise this, and it’s been talked about by many, many grand human beings – who were/are far, far wiser than I am. Most of the time I’m too indifferent about things to really “hate” anything or anyone. Things disgust me, irritate me, annoy me; some people disgust me – but there it ends. Nothing – or so I keep telling myself, and have been telling myself for the longest time - deserves or is worth hating.
Not to say that I don't feel violence within. Not to say that I am not a violent person. I am. And I know I can be. Yet even now I believe that there is a time for violence, and that time is when one is faced with violence from elsewhere. If I am threatened - physically threatened; if the ones I love are threatened - physically threatened - I do hope and believe that I can make violence work to prevent the instigator.
Yet this post is not about love nor is it about hate nor about disgust nor about violence. It’s the aspect of fear. I know about fear.
Even more than love – or at least just as much as I have felt love, have I felt the crippling and devastating demons of fear, which have driven me out of myself.
Very few of the fears are really real. Is fear ever real? Maybe, sometimes. I doubt it though. In some sense, and I don’t know how to explain it – fear seems “imaginary” while love feels very, very real.
I am reminded of Harry Potter’s experience with the boggarts in The Prisoner of Azkaban. He conjures up the dementors. And what indeed were boggarts and dementors? Boggarts were virtual representations of our deepest fears. All the other kids saw that which they feared the most, walking out of the closet. Lupin told them exactly how to ward them off: “think of “funny” things. Think of humour. Conjure up something hilarious that makes you laugh. Watch your fear dissipate”.
And it worked. It worked for everyone, but Harry.
Because Harry conjured up the dementors.
And the conjured dementors were real, or contrarily – never seemed really real or imagined. Or more appropriately, the conjured dementors were in fact, as really real as their “real” counterpart.
Dementors, sucking out one’s soul with their death kiss.
As I wonder, and wonder some more – my mind wanders, and gets fuzzy.
I can’t really pinpoint what the dementors really are/were nor can I remember (memory loss plagues me again!), although I’ve written plenty on them and thought about them elsewhere and at other times.
But how indeed are dementors gotten rid of?
(This I do remember, and have had to remember. Rowling has no idea how much I thank her, and how grateful I am for her books).
By thinking of the happiest thoughts that one is able to imagine. That works.
And what about occlumency? Harry in The Order of The Phoenix has images hurtling through his insides.
Ron’s dad being attacked. And it was true.
Dumbledore wanted Potter to be able to distinguish between the “real” and the “imagined”. Snape was given the task.
Potter rebels, Snape reacts.
Harry is in the same boat – reading Voldemort’s thoughts. Reading what Voldemort wants him to read. Sirius dies. Not the way that Harry had seen it – but Sirius dies trying to save Harry.
Ironical indeed. Harry had rushed in to save Sirius because he saw the “image” of Sirius being tortured.
Occlumency and the power to distinguish between the “real” and the “imagined”. A power indeed for those who do see within – to distinguish between one’s fantasies and reality; to distinguish between mind and soul and body crippling fears, and reality as it is – out there in the real world, in the “real” time-space continuum.
Occlumency – the tool that separates madness and clarity. That’s how I see it.
Fear and the chasing shadow that hunts Ged in LeGuin’s The Wizard of Earthsea.
And what does Ged do? He turns around to face it. He hunts the fear. He chases the fear. He chases down that hulking shadow, for Ogion tells him, “Name it. Name the shadow.”
Ged says, “But it doesn’t have a name.”
Ogion replies with his infinite wisdom, “Everything has a name.”
And Ged indeed does name the shadow.
The fear.
The fear of fear is what Ged had been running away from.
“What exactly do you fear but fear itself?” This is what one of my dearest people asked me once. And this has seeped through me through the years.
Yet fear I still do feel. Wild banshees that shriek within. This fear is not something that I can ever hope to express in words or in any human language. And the world as I know it crashes and breaks down all around me.
Images of brutality, rage, anger, torture, savage cruelty, viciousness, and sickening sliminess run around within. The images come unheeded, unasked for, uncalled for, uninvited. But visit they do, and it takes everything I’ve got to deflect them; to show them the door, and many times over they have indeed gotten the better of me; where all I can do myself is shriek and shriek – sometimes silently and wildly within, until I implode.
Two months ago, I watched, and watched, and watched them come in like laughing hobgoblins.
Monstrosities.
And there was nothing else in me as I watched, and I nearly lost all I’ve got in terms of intangibles and incommensurables – but somehow I didn’t……I would have mentioned names - but I know that it would be deeply distressing and embarrassing for those concerned.
The only “thing” that explodes the fear is love.
I know. I know that. I feel that with every bit of me.
For the fear is a feeling that rises from within, and love too is an emotion that rises from within.
Both may, and sometimes indeed do rise from without.
And if the fear is an emotion, which is life crippling, the only element that can save the mind from disintegrating completely is a power that is strong enough to shatter the fear, and that really is love.
The horrors that exist within our world – they do indeed live within the mind. That which-is on the outside lives in no less mighty a form within.
So does the love. That also exists.
Yet love is hard to practice.
Extremely hard to practice, even within.
Some days my energy is spent on chasing out my own fears.
It's all I can do. To "get" enough love inside to chase out the blinding fears and phobias.
"Being and acting with love, compassion, and kindness" is left for later.
I do "try" not to get angry and not to feel violently angry or not to let disgust paralyse my senses and sensibilities.
Sometimes there is no trying. Things simply are what they are.
There is an easy Is-ness.
No disgust. No anger. No violence. No pain. No guilt. No fear. No happiness. No euphoria. No nothingness. A coldly rational, completely non-emotional, completely dull metal like Is-ness. A blue-glacier light that simply Is. That's how I would describe "it".
Clarity is priceless. Clarity of mind. Clarity within. The Dalai Lama stresses the importance of a peaceful mind. "When the mind is peaceful", he says, "it does not distort 'reality'." Yet sometimes when all else fails, and even clarity seems to be a fairy tale, what gets me through is love.
Yet, I also know that when one can see with clarity, all is what-it-is. And fear, I've noticed is the one thing that eclipses clarity.
Sometimes anger does it for me or an intense disgust. Yet most often than not it is a strange unreal fear....even now.
I'm reminded of what Lennon said, "I talk about love because I know I am a violent man."
I’ll conclude this (seemingly random) post with a story about the Dalai Lama, which I found in a book on Environmental Ethics: He was once asked, “You talk about compassion. How would you show compassion to Hitler?” The Dalai Lama responded with a lightning sharp “Show compassion to Hitler? That’s easy. Kill him.”
Not to say that I don't feel violence within. Not to say that I am not a violent person. I am. And I know I can be. Yet even now I believe that there is a time for violence, and that time is when one is faced with violence from elsewhere. If I am threatened - physically threatened; if the ones I love are threatened - physically threatened - I do hope and believe that I can make violence work to prevent the instigator.
Yet this post is not about love nor is it about hate nor about disgust nor about violence. It’s the aspect of fear. I know about fear.
Even more than love – or at least just as much as I have felt love, have I felt the crippling and devastating demons of fear, which have driven me out of myself.
Very few of the fears are really real. Is fear ever real? Maybe, sometimes. I doubt it though. In some sense, and I don’t know how to explain it – fear seems “imaginary” while love feels very, very real.
I am reminded of Harry Potter’s experience with the boggarts in The Prisoner of Azkaban. He conjures up the dementors. And what indeed were boggarts and dementors? Boggarts were virtual representations of our deepest fears. All the other kids saw that which they feared the most, walking out of the closet. Lupin told them exactly how to ward them off: “think of “funny” things. Think of humour. Conjure up something hilarious that makes you laugh. Watch your fear dissipate”.
And it worked. It worked for everyone, but Harry.
Because Harry conjured up the dementors.
And the conjured dementors were real, or contrarily – never seemed really real or imagined. Or more appropriately, the conjured dementors were in fact, as really real as their “real” counterpart.
Dementors, sucking out one’s soul with their death kiss.
As I wonder, and wonder some more – my mind wanders, and gets fuzzy.
I can’t really pinpoint what the dementors really are/were nor can I remember (memory loss plagues me again!), although I’ve written plenty on them and thought about them elsewhere and at other times.
But how indeed are dementors gotten rid of?
(This I do remember, and have had to remember. Rowling has no idea how much I thank her, and how grateful I am for her books).
By thinking of the happiest thoughts that one is able to imagine. That works.
And what about occlumency? Harry in The Order of The Phoenix has images hurtling through his insides.
Ron’s dad being attacked. And it was true.
Dumbledore wanted Potter to be able to distinguish between the “real” and the “imagined”. Snape was given the task.
Potter rebels, Snape reacts.
Harry is in the same boat – reading Voldemort’s thoughts. Reading what Voldemort wants him to read. Sirius dies. Not the way that Harry had seen it – but Sirius dies trying to save Harry.
Ironical indeed. Harry had rushed in to save Sirius because he saw the “image” of Sirius being tortured.
Occlumency and the power to distinguish between the “real” and the “imagined”. A power indeed for those who do see within – to distinguish between one’s fantasies and reality; to distinguish between mind and soul and body crippling fears, and reality as it is – out there in the real world, in the “real” time-space continuum.
Occlumency – the tool that separates madness and clarity. That’s how I see it.
Fear and the chasing shadow that hunts Ged in LeGuin’s The Wizard of Earthsea.
And what does Ged do? He turns around to face it. He hunts the fear. He chases the fear. He chases down that hulking shadow, for Ogion tells him, “Name it. Name the shadow.”
Ged says, “But it doesn’t have a name.”
Ogion replies with his infinite wisdom, “Everything has a name.”
And Ged indeed does name the shadow.
The fear.
The fear of fear is what Ged had been running away from.
“What exactly do you fear but fear itself?” This is what one of my dearest people asked me once. And this has seeped through me through the years.
Yet fear I still do feel. Wild banshees that shriek within. This fear is not something that I can ever hope to express in words or in any human language. And the world as I know it crashes and breaks down all around me.
Images of brutality, rage, anger, torture, savage cruelty, viciousness, and sickening sliminess run around within. The images come unheeded, unasked for, uncalled for, uninvited. But visit they do, and it takes everything I’ve got to deflect them; to show them the door, and many times over they have indeed gotten the better of me; where all I can do myself is shriek and shriek – sometimes silently and wildly within, until I implode.
Two months ago, I watched, and watched, and watched them come in like laughing hobgoblins.
Monstrosities.
And there was nothing else in me as I watched, and I nearly lost all I’ve got in terms of intangibles and incommensurables – but somehow I didn’t……I would have mentioned names - but I know that it would be deeply distressing and embarrassing for those concerned.
The only “thing” that explodes the fear is love.
I know. I know that. I feel that with every bit of me.
For the fear is a feeling that rises from within, and love too is an emotion that rises from within.
Both may, and sometimes indeed do rise from without.
And if the fear is an emotion, which is life crippling, the only element that can save the mind from disintegrating completely is a power that is strong enough to shatter the fear, and that really is love.
The horrors that exist within our world – they do indeed live within the mind. That which-is on the outside lives in no less mighty a form within.
So does the love. That also exists.
Yet love is hard to practice.
Extremely hard to practice, even within.
Some days my energy is spent on chasing out my own fears.
It's all I can do. To "get" enough love inside to chase out the blinding fears and phobias.
"Being and acting with love, compassion, and kindness" is left for later.
I do "try" not to get angry and not to feel violently angry or not to let disgust paralyse my senses and sensibilities.
Sometimes there is no trying. Things simply are what they are.
There is an easy Is-ness.
No disgust. No anger. No violence. No pain. No guilt. No fear. No happiness. No euphoria. No nothingness. A coldly rational, completely non-emotional, completely dull metal like Is-ness. A blue-glacier light that simply Is. That's how I would describe "it".
Clarity is priceless. Clarity of mind. Clarity within. The Dalai Lama stresses the importance of a peaceful mind. "When the mind is peaceful", he says, "it does not distort 'reality'." Yet sometimes when all else fails, and even clarity seems to be a fairy tale, what gets me through is love.
Yet, I also know that when one can see with clarity, all is what-it-is. And fear, I've noticed is the one thing that eclipses clarity.
Sometimes anger does it for me or an intense disgust. Yet most often than not it is a strange unreal fear....even now.
I'm reminded of what Lennon said, "I talk about love because I know I am a violent man."
I’ll conclude this (seemingly random) post with a story about the Dalai Lama, which I found in a book on Environmental Ethics: He was once asked, “You talk about compassion. How would you show compassion to Hitler?” The Dalai Lama responded with a lightning sharp “Show compassion to Hitler? That’s easy. Kill him.”
16 May 2008
God and Love and Spirituality:Through Time and Space
‘At the beginning of my journey, I was naïve. I didn’t yet know that answers vanish as one continues to travel, that there is only further complexity, that there are still more interrelationships and more questions.’ - Kaplan
The above quote came from a qualitative methods book that I don’t own, and something that I’d gone through some five years ago. I don’t think I’d be able to find the quote again. I don’t know whether the above is a good place to start from for what I have in mind. But it’s been put up there, and I’ll take it from there/here/wherever. I’ve been re-reading a chapter titled “Come to God” from an MSS. I’ll sit on the name of the author (for reasons of my own). I’m re-reading it very slowly this time around (having read it once a week for the last three weeks I think it has been) – but there is one bit from the first bit of the chapter, which is eventually going to point out the direction in which this current post is going to travel. In and out the post shall go afterwards, up and down, spirals and chutes – but for now let me root myself and ground myself.
“…it is the most shocking of lies or the very height of ignorance to claim that the concept of God was born only out of fear. Love, overflowing, all-embracing, pure, blissful love that cleanses and exalts the human soul and destroys fear has always been one of the great motivators too, along with man’s vaulting romantic imagination: witness the religious poetry and music and art of any old civilization, ours included.”
So this post is indeed about God, and about spirituality, and about the “is-ness” of “romantic imagination”. I’ve been getting muddled in my head again lately, I’ve been noticing. Muddled not in a bad way or a perverse way or a destructive way, as has happened so often in the past – but in just a vague and distracted way, and have been getting somewhat lost in the mazes of my mind. Getting odd bits of work done. Just the bits that must be done, and letting the rest be swept around by the rains (of which we’ve been having plenty), sun, and wind (both of which have been here in sudden unexpected bursts). But let me get back to what I want to write about today.
I’m feeling quite quiet in my head, even though there’s The Rolling Stones and Led Zepplin and The Who playing on the internet radio. But inside there’s a blue washed tranquility. And I’m wondering where to start from.
“…Down the ages, down the dawn of centuries and the burst of bursting and stillborn stars, I sensed love. Through the stillness, through the cracks of darkness, through infinite zones of light and space, I saw love. A love that shook through wind and water, earth and fire; a love that scared me, thrilled me, drove me down to the pits of earth shattering insanity — shrieking and cruel, and then threw me with wild abandon into worlds, which beat my richest fantasies into pulp, I felt love. And it’s that love, which made me come back to life — the iridescent shade of an eternal romance that never gave up — that gave me life over and over and yet over again…. So is there an end to life or is it all a series of beginnings? Is it the eternal circle, or a series of spirals? Is it the ‘om’, the crescent, the cross, the star, or the sphinx’s riddle? Is it a laugh or is it a game — endless and infinite? Or is it truly love? A love that is fiercely consuming, and even frightening in its obsession; a love so expansive that it stretches the ripples of angst, out and away like a smoothened fresh sheet washed by the first spring sun..”
The above is what God means to me. It's something I wrote, a little over 5 years ago, not really realising what I was writing. Maybe I should end my post here for the funny thing is that I’ve had the sense of God and spirituality, and thought about the two, and argued about the two (with other “real” human beings, with my selves, with my fimhs), been irritated by the two, been befuddled, been indifferent, and just “let them be” – that now after being strangely excited at the prospect of writing about these two elements – I find myself experiencing an absurd peace, and do not really experience any strong urges to even say anything or write anything more. But the “writer” in me is no less stubborn, and insists on clicking away. So I’ll let my “writer self” take the floor…
I was enthralled by the idea of the “Other” as a child. One of my earliest memories of my self is at 3 or thereabouts, and a "longing for the beyond”. I didn’t think in those terms – but what I experienced was a 'certain something" that wasn’t a part of the everyday world as I knew it; an everyday world, which for the most part was comprised of being cuddled and told stories (and very rarely being scolded) by my parents, playing and being taken care of by my brother, and sometimes eating singaras and pantuyas with great relish. I still remember lying in bed on a summer afternoon having the thought that “life” and "some part of me" lay somewhere else – although I greatly enjoyed my everyday life…
I remember at 5 or thereabouts when I first started playing the “Who am I” game. Bits and pieces of my given identity would fall off me. At this point in time, my family and I were living in England, in a sleepy and lovely town called Scunthorpe. I would sit in the garden, and I still remember the intense yet easy concentration with which I would start pondering on who I was. And I would be drawn into this delicious web – a black liquid pool where given bits of my identity would break off me – I wasn’t just my parents’ “daughter”, I wasn’t just my brother’s “sister”, I wasn’t just a “friend" to Manjuri, Guddi, Ratul, and Kingshuk….but who was I? And then just as I would get closer and closer to cracking this amazing puzzle, which kept me entertained for hours – wham – the “real” world would come crashing back in. The wind would be blowing through the sun, the hospital across the road would rise into my vision, a sleepy bus would go hooting by, the flowers would be nodding, and the clouds would go racing overhead. And I would blink, and go inside to bother mum about something or nothing.
At home there was a picture of Goddess Kali on the wall of my dad’s study. The picture was high up on the wall. And I was a midget at four/five (and never really did grow much taller). The picture didn’t seem to be very clear to me. Mum used to pray with an incense stick, every morning in front of that picture on the wall, which had an innocuous brown frame and was probably not more than 10 inches in length and 7inches across. Dad used to pray as well – but I don’t remember him having a specific time for praying. I don’t remember how old I was exactly – but one day I remember standing on top of the bed scrutinizing the painting. Goddess Kali didn’t disturb me much – even though she had her garland of human heads around her neck, even though she had numerous hands with one holding a recently clopped-off head, even though she had her red tongue exposed, even though she was pretty much nude, even though she seemed to be standing with one foot on top of a man who was lying in her path, even though she had what seemed to be a humongous sword in one of her many hands (with what no doubt she had chopped off the human heads left, right, and centre). I don’t remember whether I had asked my parents anything. All I remember is that I was quite comfortable with My own “God” in my head, and of course Jesus I adored – but Goddess Kali and I; while I shook hands with her in my head – I had no intentions of praying to her or talking with her or having running conversations with her in the mirror or otherwise, as I did with all my other "Gods"…all I remember thinking is that “Jesus…she sure does need to calm down a bit…”
At school in England, we had of course regular prayer and “mass” in the morning. I don’t remember any longer whether at St. Augustine we had a short prayer service every day and a longer one every friday or whether it was indeed an elaborate affair every day of the week. But I do remember that some days prayer was a long affair, and I thoroughly loved it – every moment of it. Even at 5, I was a joker. All the Catholic students would drop one round wafer (the “holy bread” substitute) into a big bowl. Later on after service, each student would walk up to the dais to the priest, and the student would either open his mouth to receive the wafer or she would hold out her hand and receive the wafer in her hand. I was fascinated with and by the wafer. Everyday before morning assembly, I would half-joke about dropping one extra wafer into the bowl. I really wanted to try out a wafer, but apparently one didn’t “do” that unless one was a Catholic. Oh well. I never did throw in that extra wafer in all the four and a half years that I went to St. Augustine. But still I loved assembly no less. The best part was singing the choir songs. I knew all the songs, and didn’t really need the book that all students had. Although I had my favourites, I loved each song – now, sadly enough I don’t remember any of the songs. Not even the tune, leave alone the lyrics remain in my head…and then of course there were the Nativity plays that we acted out during Christmas. As I’ve “reported” on another post – I ended up being one of the Wise Men in the last year that I was in St. Augustine, and I had a grand robe of royal Blue, a crown on my pretty head of hair, carried a box (of what I do not remember…)…and followed the Star to Bethlehem. The costumes and the props apparently had been used year after year in the school. The box, as far as I remember was an old, heavy, engraved wooden box…but it jolly well may not have been as grand as I see it being in my head after all these years......
Hmm…but where is this all going? Well, nowhere really. I remember bonding with Jesus very early on. I used to have merry and sometimes solemn conversations with him. God though was more of a distant figure at that point. Someone whom I used to go running to if I were mortally scared of “something” or “really” didn’t understand something or just wanted to be cuddled, and Jesus was just fooling around…or indeed didn’t seem to know much more than I did (or just wasn't telling me what he knew)!Then I would climb into God’s lap (He did indeed sit on a throne, and He did indeed have a purple robe that He’d bring out every now and again – simply because He knew that it amused me and made me happy).
That apart I had merry conversations with Lucifer as well. Lucifer was my “naughty” God. He was a prankster with whom I had fun, and would goof around…and every now and then we would do something wrong and terrible, and both of us would end up feeling horribly guilty, and then promise ourselves that “picking” up something that did not belong to us – “Gulp” – was simply not worth it ever; “snatching” something out of some else’s pocket simply wasn’t “done” (quite apart from the sudden shout that the otherwise calm Someone emitted on finding a nosey little hand making a “grab” at her pocket), that while letting go on a high spinning merry-go-round was great fun, that the fun didn’t last for long. And that “the head” actually hurt once one was thrown onto the concrete after flying through the air, and that knees, elbows, and the face tended to get fairly bloody, while the head didn’t – although the latter seemed to “hurt” more…
So there I was by 8 very happy with Jesus, God, and Lucifer. (It was round about the same time that my family and I returned home to India). I knew JGL were in me, outside me, everywhere I was, and always with me. Yes, sure – my faith, belief, and call-it-whatever-you-will was very much culturally rooted and very much related to what I had experienced while growing up. Although I don’t know why I used to play the “Who Am I” game nor why I had felt an immediate bond with Lucifer (maybe it has something to do with the red birthmark in the shape of a '6' on my right foot!)– a bond that was and is as strong as the one that I have with My God, my current FIMH, and The Absolute, and of course with Jesus, The Buddha, and Krishna, and my old fimhs. And yes indeed. This bond, this connection, this belief, this experience with JGL and The Others – which is deeply personal (as anyone who “believes” will know) – was and is born out of love. An overflowing, overwhelming, and sometimes even a coldly rational and analytical love….it indeed was and is an all-embracing love. Complete and absolute.
I have wondered and wondered why sociologists have forever talked about “fear” as being the prime motivator (and in fact the “only” motivator) of religion, and the belief in God. Emile Durkheim, one of the classical theorists in Sociology said the same in the 1900s – and it seems that the sociologists of the 2000s have not been able to move away from the emotion of “fear”. To me it seems that the Western world is forecefully still much attached to the enticing web of the Enlightenment - the period when religion and science and "other forms of knowing" were split up for pressing reasons. There is a gradual and slow change that I can spot some glimpses of - but only time I guess will tell which way the pendulum will swing. As for the East, as for India - who knows. I have no idea what people believe as a country, as a Land, and as a collective which gave rise to some of the most enlightened philosophies and spiritual teachings since the Birth of Human Civilization. Indeed I don't even think that we "do" believe in anything as a collective.
And then of course, these days we have utterly moronic individuals like Richard Dawkins – who have not the sense nor the imagination nor the sensibility, and therefore go around blaring out the same idea of "Religion stinks", and such people make me cringe with embarrassment. That a human being, any human being (with such a wonderful accent), and a ‘scientist’ at that can be such an absolute fool, so full of prejudice, and be such a disgrace to the human race.
The other associated “progression” that I’ve noticed within sociological circles is that there is much talk today about the “Culture of Fear”, about the aspect of “fear” in our everyday lives. There are tonnes of literature for those interested (within the frameworks of Critical theory in the main). In popular circles there are “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine” – a couple of the most famous "Moore movies", where Michael Moore pokes and prods at the “culture of fear” that’s been promoted over and across the United States through the centuries. While the studies and the articles and the books that I’ve browsed through on “Fear” are no doubt interesting at a level, what I find thoroughly amusing is that social scientists cannot bring themselves to explore the element of “Love”. They have no idea where or how to begin. Why, I wonder is it easier to talk about “fear” or write papers on “fear”, and why I wonder is there the strange reluctance to explore what “Love” means to different people, or what effect “Love” has on "different" worlds or on a Self in interaction with the world? Some odd years ago, the best psychologists and neuro-scientists could do was to carry out some experiments regarding the "biology" of love. As terribly interesting and almost capricious as the series was - and I remember seeing the two part series, which was telecast on National Geographic - it didn't even come close to 'really" exploring the emotion.
And then of course there are the ones who take up some other “religion” like Marxism or Leninism, or Leftism in one form or the other, and who will snootily and gratuitously disparage those who do have a deep spiritual sensitivity in them. And then there are some who are so enchanted and stuck to their own sense of “born-again” Christianity/Hinduism/Any-ism that they foolishly sneer at Others and call these “Others” “inferior” because apparently since these “Others” are in the process of stitching and creating (in some sense) their own quilt of spirituality with carefully gathered "teachings" over ages, and across spaces and more, these “Others” are "too weak” to follow religion as it has been laid down by the word of GOD in The Bible or in some religious text or the other. According to these Born-Agains – religious texts are to be taken whole and un-mutilated and never questioned nor interpreted even (!) by anyone. If I do – then “I just don’t get it”, according to these Sneer-ers. But the Sneer-ers themselves of course do interpret – but they interpret exactly as God wanted of them!
This is all for now. My post is by no means complete or anywhere near completion…but I will write by and by…More shall follow soon – for my stubborn Writer-Self if for No One else!
The above quote came from a qualitative methods book that I don’t own, and something that I’d gone through some five years ago. I don’t think I’d be able to find the quote again. I don’t know whether the above is a good place to start from for what I have in mind. But it’s been put up there, and I’ll take it from there/here/wherever. I’ve been re-reading a chapter titled “Come to God” from an MSS. I’ll sit on the name of the author (for reasons of my own). I’m re-reading it very slowly this time around (having read it once a week for the last three weeks I think it has been) – but there is one bit from the first bit of the chapter, which is eventually going to point out the direction in which this current post is going to travel. In and out the post shall go afterwards, up and down, spirals and chutes – but for now let me root myself and ground myself.
“…it is the most shocking of lies or the very height of ignorance to claim that the concept of God was born only out of fear. Love, overflowing, all-embracing, pure, blissful love that cleanses and exalts the human soul and destroys fear has always been one of the great motivators too, along with man’s vaulting romantic imagination: witness the religious poetry and music and art of any old civilization, ours included.”
So this post is indeed about God, and about spirituality, and about the “is-ness” of “romantic imagination”. I’ve been getting muddled in my head again lately, I’ve been noticing. Muddled not in a bad way or a perverse way or a destructive way, as has happened so often in the past – but in just a vague and distracted way, and have been getting somewhat lost in the mazes of my mind. Getting odd bits of work done. Just the bits that must be done, and letting the rest be swept around by the rains (of which we’ve been having plenty), sun, and wind (both of which have been here in sudden unexpected bursts). But let me get back to what I want to write about today.
I’m feeling quite quiet in my head, even though there’s The Rolling Stones and Led Zepplin and The Who playing on the internet radio. But inside there’s a blue washed tranquility. And I’m wondering where to start from.
“…Down the ages, down the dawn of centuries and the burst of bursting and stillborn stars, I sensed love. Through the stillness, through the cracks of darkness, through infinite zones of light and space, I saw love. A love that shook through wind and water, earth and fire; a love that scared me, thrilled me, drove me down to the pits of earth shattering insanity — shrieking and cruel, and then threw me with wild abandon into worlds, which beat my richest fantasies into pulp, I felt love. And it’s that love, which made me come back to life — the iridescent shade of an eternal romance that never gave up — that gave me life over and over and yet over again…. So is there an end to life or is it all a series of beginnings? Is it the eternal circle, or a series of spirals? Is it the ‘om’, the crescent, the cross, the star, or the sphinx’s riddle? Is it a laugh or is it a game — endless and infinite? Or is it truly love? A love that is fiercely consuming, and even frightening in its obsession; a love so expansive that it stretches the ripples of angst, out and away like a smoothened fresh sheet washed by the first spring sun..”
The above is what God means to me. It's something I wrote, a little over 5 years ago, not really realising what I was writing. Maybe I should end my post here for the funny thing is that I’ve had the sense of God and spirituality, and thought about the two, and argued about the two (with other “real” human beings, with my selves, with my fimhs), been irritated by the two, been befuddled, been indifferent, and just “let them be” – that now after being strangely excited at the prospect of writing about these two elements – I find myself experiencing an absurd peace, and do not really experience any strong urges to even say anything or write anything more. But the “writer” in me is no less stubborn, and insists on clicking away. So I’ll let my “writer self” take the floor…
I was enthralled by the idea of the “Other” as a child. One of my earliest memories of my self is at 3 or thereabouts, and a "longing for the beyond”. I didn’t think in those terms – but what I experienced was a 'certain something" that wasn’t a part of the everyday world as I knew it; an everyday world, which for the most part was comprised of being cuddled and told stories (and very rarely being scolded) by my parents, playing and being taken care of by my brother, and sometimes eating singaras and pantuyas with great relish. I still remember lying in bed on a summer afternoon having the thought that “life” and "some part of me" lay somewhere else – although I greatly enjoyed my everyday life…
I remember at 5 or thereabouts when I first started playing the “Who am I” game. Bits and pieces of my given identity would fall off me. At this point in time, my family and I were living in England, in a sleepy and lovely town called Scunthorpe. I would sit in the garden, and I still remember the intense yet easy concentration with which I would start pondering on who I was. And I would be drawn into this delicious web – a black liquid pool where given bits of my identity would break off me – I wasn’t just my parents’ “daughter”, I wasn’t just my brother’s “sister”, I wasn’t just a “friend" to Manjuri, Guddi, Ratul, and Kingshuk….but who was I? And then just as I would get closer and closer to cracking this amazing puzzle, which kept me entertained for hours – wham – the “real” world would come crashing back in. The wind would be blowing through the sun, the hospital across the road would rise into my vision, a sleepy bus would go hooting by, the flowers would be nodding, and the clouds would go racing overhead. And I would blink, and go inside to bother mum about something or nothing.
At home there was a picture of Goddess Kali on the wall of my dad’s study. The picture was high up on the wall. And I was a midget at four/five (and never really did grow much taller). The picture didn’t seem to be very clear to me. Mum used to pray with an incense stick, every morning in front of that picture on the wall, which had an innocuous brown frame and was probably not more than 10 inches in length and 7inches across. Dad used to pray as well – but I don’t remember him having a specific time for praying. I don’t remember how old I was exactly – but one day I remember standing on top of the bed scrutinizing the painting. Goddess Kali didn’t disturb me much – even though she had her garland of human heads around her neck, even though she had numerous hands with one holding a recently clopped-off head, even though she had her red tongue exposed, even though she was pretty much nude, even though she seemed to be standing with one foot on top of a man who was lying in her path, even though she had what seemed to be a humongous sword in one of her many hands (with what no doubt she had chopped off the human heads left, right, and centre). I don’t remember whether I had asked my parents anything. All I remember is that I was quite comfortable with My own “God” in my head, and of course Jesus I adored – but Goddess Kali and I; while I shook hands with her in my head – I had no intentions of praying to her or talking with her or having running conversations with her in the mirror or otherwise, as I did with all my other "Gods"…all I remember thinking is that “Jesus…she sure does need to calm down a bit…”
At school in England, we had of course regular prayer and “mass” in the morning. I don’t remember any longer whether at St. Augustine we had a short prayer service every day and a longer one every friday or whether it was indeed an elaborate affair every day of the week. But I do remember that some days prayer was a long affair, and I thoroughly loved it – every moment of it. Even at 5, I was a joker. All the Catholic students would drop one round wafer (the “holy bread” substitute) into a big bowl. Later on after service, each student would walk up to the dais to the priest, and the student would either open his mouth to receive the wafer or she would hold out her hand and receive the wafer in her hand. I was fascinated with and by the wafer. Everyday before morning assembly, I would half-joke about dropping one extra wafer into the bowl. I really wanted to try out a wafer, but apparently one didn’t “do” that unless one was a Catholic. Oh well. I never did throw in that extra wafer in all the four and a half years that I went to St. Augustine. But still I loved assembly no less. The best part was singing the choir songs. I knew all the songs, and didn’t really need the book that all students had. Although I had my favourites, I loved each song – now, sadly enough I don’t remember any of the songs. Not even the tune, leave alone the lyrics remain in my head…and then of course there were the Nativity plays that we acted out during Christmas. As I’ve “reported” on another post – I ended up being one of the Wise Men in the last year that I was in St. Augustine, and I had a grand robe of royal Blue, a crown on my pretty head of hair, carried a box (of what I do not remember…)…and followed the Star to Bethlehem. The costumes and the props apparently had been used year after year in the school. The box, as far as I remember was an old, heavy, engraved wooden box…but it jolly well may not have been as grand as I see it being in my head after all these years......
Hmm…but where is this all going? Well, nowhere really. I remember bonding with Jesus very early on. I used to have merry and sometimes solemn conversations with him. God though was more of a distant figure at that point. Someone whom I used to go running to if I were mortally scared of “something” or “really” didn’t understand something or just wanted to be cuddled, and Jesus was just fooling around…or indeed didn’t seem to know much more than I did (or just wasn't telling me what he knew)!Then I would climb into God’s lap (He did indeed sit on a throne, and He did indeed have a purple robe that He’d bring out every now and again – simply because He knew that it amused me and made me happy).
That apart I had merry conversations with Lucifer as well. Lucifer was my “naughty” God. He was a prankster with whom I had fun, and would goof around…and every now and then we would do something wrong and terrible, and both of us would end up feeling horribly guilty, and then promise ourselves that “picking” up something that did not belong to us – “Gulp” – was simply not worth it ever; “snatching” something out of some else’s pocket simply wasn’t “done” (quite apart from the sudden shout that the otherwise calm Someone emitted on finding a nosey little hand making a “grab” at her pocket), that while letting go on a high spinning merry-go-round was great fun, that the fun didn’t last for long. And that “the head” actually hurt once one was thrown onto the concrete after flying through the air, and that knees, elbows, and the face tended to get fairly bloody, while the head didn’t – although the latter seemed to “hurt” more…
So there I was by 8 very happy with Jesus, God, and Lucifer. (It was round about the same time that my family and I returned home to India). I knew JGL were in me, outside me, everywhere I was, and always with me. Yes, sure – my faith, belief, and call-it-whatever-you-will was very much culturally rooted and very much related to what I had experienced while growing up. Although I don’t know why I used to play the “Who Am I” game nor why I had felt an immediate bond with Lucifer (maybe it has something to do with the red birthmark in the shape of a '6' on my right foot!)– a bond that was and is as strong as the one that I have with My God, my current FIMH, and The Absolute, and of course with Jesus, The Buddha, and Krishna, and my old fimhs. And yes indeed. This bond, this connection, this belief, this experience with JGL and The Others – which is deeply personal (as anyone who “believes” will know) – was and is born out of love. An overflowing, overwhelming, and sometimes even a coldly rational and analytical love….it indeed was and is an all-embracing love. Complete and absolute.
I have wondered and wondered why sociologists have forever talked about “fear” as being the prime motivator (and in fact the “only” motivator) of religion, and the belief in God. Emile Durkheim, one of the classical theorists in Sociology said the same in the 1900s – and it seems that the sociologists of the 2000s have not been able to move away from the emotion of “fear”. To me it seems that the Western world is forecefully still much attached to the enticing web of the Enlightenment - the period when religion and science and "other forms of knowing" were split up for pressing reasons. There is a gradual and slow change that I can spot some glimpses of - but only time I guess will tell which way the pendulum will swing. As for the East, as for India - who knows. I have no idea what people believe as a country, as a Land, and as a collective which gave rise to some of the most enlightened philosophies and spiritual teachings since the Birth of Human Civilization. Indeed I don't even think that we "do" believe in anything as a collective.
And then of course, these days we have utterly moronic individuals like Richard Dawkins – who have not the sense nor the imagination nor the sensibility, and therefore go around blaring out the same idea of "Religion stinks", and such people make me cringe with embarrassment. That a human being, any human being (with such a wonderful accent), and a ‘scientist’ at that can be such an absolute fool, so full of prejudice, and be such a disgrace to the human race.
The other associated “progression” that I’ve noticed within sociological circles is that there is much talk today about the “Culture of Fear”, about the aspect of “fear” in our everyday lives. There are tonnes of literature for those interested (within the frameworks of Critical theory in the main). In popular circles there are “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine” – a couple of the most famous "Moore movies", where Michael Moore pokes and prods at the “culture of fear” that’s been promoted over and across the United States through the centuries. While the studies and the articles and the books that I’ve browsed through on “Fear” are no doubt interesting at a level, what I find thoroughly amusing is that social scientists cannot bring themselves to explore the element of “Love”. They have no idea where or how to begin. Why, I wonder is it easier to talk about “fear” or write papers on “fear”, and why I wonder is there the strange reluctance to explore what “Love” means to different people, or what effect “Love” has on "different" worlds or on a Self in interaction with the world? Some odd years ago, the best psychologists and neuro-scientists could do was to carry out some experiments regarding the "biology" of love. As terribly interesting and almost capricious as the series was - and I remember seeing the two part series, which was telecast on National Geographic - it didn't even come close to 'really" exploring the emotion.
And then of course there are the ones who take up some other “religion” like Marxism or Leninism, or Leftism in one form or the other, and who will snootily and gratuitously disparage those who do have a deep spiritual sensitivity in them. And then there are some who are so enchanted and stuck to their own sense of “born-again” Christianity/Hinduism/Any-ism that they foolishly sneer at Others and call these “Others” “inferior” because apparently since these “Others” are in the process of stitching and creating (in some sense) their own quilt of spirituality with carefully gathered "teachings" over ages, and across spaces and more, these “Others” are "too weak” to follow religion as it has been laid down by the word of GOD in The Bible or in some religious text or the other. According to these Born-Agains – religious texts are to be taken whole and un-mutilated and never questioned nor interpreted even (!) by anyone. If I do – then “I just don’t get it”, according to these Sneer-ers. But the Sneer-ers themselves of course do interpret – but they interpret exactly as God wanted of them!
This is all for now. My post is by no means complete or anywhere near completion…but I will write by and by…More shall follow soon – for my stubborn Writer-Self if for No One else!
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