:)

And i have just articulated to myself what i have probably felt at some level all along : don't worry. I am in good hands. Mine.

Calendar quote : Assent to thy higher self.

I am rediscovering my friends.

And i'm beginning to believe that part of the reason we don't count our blessings is the same reason cognitive psychology gives for why we cannot attend to all stimuli bombarding us at a given point of time - we would die of sensory overload.

I am also beginning to look outside more because, contrary to what i always thought, the outside is not a diversion from inner work. It is a facilitator to it. I am beginning to feel just a little less scared of losing touch with the inside because i am beginning to believe that there is another level at which that just won't happen, and i'm beginning to give that level the proper faith due to it.

Last year it came to me that constantly rejecting conclusions\assumptions makes for a purer search for the Truth. I have been rejecting as far as i will allow myself to. Rejecting assumptions has made me discover new things. Now i am taking one step further. I am also beginning to accept. Accept people. And in accepting people, the truth is getting purer still.

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
- M. Scott Peck

Change

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly..."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

It couldn't have come at a better time. It came at Mass today. I finally followed my plan of taking advantage of the sole free lecture in the week and attending Mass at 11. 25, Fridays. As i waited in Chaps trying to contemplate the turmoil happening inside, Father Arun walked in, and automatically i smiled a thankful smile that he was going to be the presiding minister for this one. I have missed Fra (Fr. A) and his beautiful FC lectures...discussions...from last year. They made me really really THINK...and think is what i have to do now. NOT ruminate. Process. Fra was the one person whose presence i needed most to be in. And he was there.

I watched this man as he laid down his ubiquitous jhola and promptly donned his cassock over his Lee Cooper jeans. There were about 10 other people there by this time. Then Fra looked up from his preparation and called me forward to come and read from the pulpit. Taken aback, i nevertheless jumped at the opportunity. I didn't even know a non-catholic was allowed to do this. Then again, this was Fra :). And Fra can be trusted to do something like this even as some MLAs in Hyderabad assault a woman writer for saying things not palatable to the faith they share. "But teach him also that for every scoundrel there is a hero; that for every selfish Politician, there is a dedicated leader...Teach him for every enemy there is a friend..."

The passage i had to read was about abundance...that it is our work to sow well, and we shall reap well...and to give what we reap and then we shall reap more. And even that much opens up a constriction, because so often we are afraid, afraid of giving it all up, afraid that we shall be left with nothing, and we resist, we resist a changing order that is bound to keep changing by not allowing ourselves to grow with it, by staying stuck, by refusing to budge, and all because we are afraid. But that fear can go to hell if only we have faith in abundance. In our abundant capacity to grow, in our abundant ability to cope with the process, and in the abundance in a world where a giving doesn't imply a lessening of resource. Or ideas. Or love.

And then Fra went on with that line by Richard Bach that epitomises change - "What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly..." How did he know that the caterpillar was in Mass today? And then he went on to talk about something else where he spoke about how challenges will come and judgment calls will have to be made and how it is so easy, even in our mundane lives to do the simpler thing, to think the easier thought , to stop being mindful, to stop having faith. Fra spoke about simple things. And then, when he offered Communion, for the first time in my life, i actually decided to get up and get some. I still don't know whether it is allowed, but i was given it nevertheless. And that showed me that it was okay. That it's okay.


And today, when the world i have known and loved in for 20 years is changing more rapidly than i can handle, when it almost feels like things that i held so dear and so constant are now crumbling, i met a thousand Fra's who came bearing the same message - in Chaps, on the calendar quote, in my email...

I haven't seen it in full yet and i will give myself the time and the space to. But i see the signs still pouring in. Perhaps it is time to raise the bar for beautiful. Perhaps it it time for the butterfly to emerge.

Nokia N-Series

"Others see their future in the stars ; I see mine in my hands."

I Love You

This is a story that i will live to tell my children and my children's children if my children haven't already done it.

Yesterday was a terribly eventful Sunday. Netra had received an invitation to 'We the People', and asked me to go with her, so i did. We were a whole bunch of us from college, and i loved every second of it - the ridiculously beautiful Bombay University Convocation Hall which was the venue, the behind-the-scenes buzz of a media team trying its best to get a show right, the very diverse and still intelligent views of all who spoke, the more intelligent private conversations that we privately had as we reacted to what was being said, the glare of camera lights, the sharply fluctuating heartrate whenever i heard someone on the panel say something absolutely outrageous, the very very low threshold of Teesta Setalvad to metamorphosise into a raving shrew, the delightfully lucid comments of Bachi Karkaria. I saw how a person's rigidity of ideas can so utterly defeat her cause. I saw things are never as simplistic as they seem - and that even people in so-called power live nightmare lives being constantly pulled and pressured from 15 different directions. I also saw how if, even under such trying circumstances, if you stop being honest with yourself, even for a while, you'll be left with nothing. I saw just how orchestrated even a free-voice show can get, and i also saw why this is really necessary. And i found that i feel more about things than i permit myself to feel. It was a day filled with discoveries.

Quite understandable then, that the wave carried on even after i'd left the place, and i carried on riding it even as i took the long walk to the busstop and picked a seat by the window, so i could talk to the wind about the thousands of ideas raging in my mind. It is not often that i am stirred to such passions and see things so clearly at the same time, and i was loving it. Which is why when i got home and found mom arguing with dad and going bonkers about a non-issue and additionally being illogical about it, i gave her a piece of my mind about how ridiculous she was being. This was because she was trying to 'control' an area of my brother's life that, i believed both with head and heart, only he should be allowed to control. In hindsight, this was also me lashing out at her for not having the time, as she was in the midst of her crusade, to hear about all the million things i wanted to tell her about my day. I didn't show it, but somewhere, i resented her for it, and i didn't feel guilty about this because i felt justified. Logic and commonsense, fairness and optimism were on my side. Why should i not make that clear? I was half afraid she'd have another panic attack - exactly three sundays ago she had been pseudo-paralysed by one, easily one of the worst evenings of my life. At that time, as i sat beside her in a hospital emergency room, and for the rest of the week and a half that she was recovering at home, i thought of little else but medicine timings and oxygen masks and worst-case scenarios and what i'd do without her. And how she was half responsible for bringing this upon herself by letting herself get anxious all the time. Now it felt like she was overdoing the illogical anxiety bit...and i was angry all over again.

So when dad asked if i'd like to go to the Agiary with him i agreed, because i felt i didn't want to be with mama just then. Her recentest adversary off the battlefield, mama didn't know what to do and started watching a movie (The Pursuit of Happyness - i movie i had recommended the previous day). She said something about me please 'getting out of the way' (physically, i was really blocking her view, but of course i took it metaphorically), i made a sarcastic remark about hostility levels, and then i was out of the house with dad.

At the Agiary i sat before the Fire and prayed and looked into it and half searched for answers in this sudden surge of very intense feelings of jubilation from earlier in the day and resentment from the latter, and half wondered whether i even wanted to, because from where i saw it, hey, i'd been right. I was pouring just this out to you-know -who when i saw this lady, she must have been about 45, sitting nearby, immersed in her prayer book...and weeping. And she was weeping in that ashamed manner of weeping - a welling of the eyes, a quick wiping off, an invariable betrayal bu a couple of tears...clearly, she was somewhere else. Somebody came up to her and muttered some sort of instruction, she nodded dry-eyed, looked back into her little book, and more tears.

I couldn't pray with any concentration whatsoever after that. I sat around not knowing what to do or how to make this added sense of confusion go away. I decided to go and sit in my favourite place in the whole fire temple, the granite bench beside the well outside, on which nobody sits because too many bougainvillea creepers fall hang down its roof. i love that bench for precisely that reason, and it has come to become my foolproof 'thinking place'. So I left the carpeted area even as she did, and that was my signal. In a place within the Agiary where i found myself alone with her, praying, i had to do it. I asked her whether anything was wrong because she looked like she'd been crying. And at this point, this woman, this complete stranger, first smiled in denial, and then immediately melted into tears and said "I lost my mom. 15 days ago".

And she sobbed even as i tried to hug her and offer lame comfort. And then she nodded at all the condolences and said "It's ok now", sobbed a little more, looked straight at the floor, and walked out. I had nothing to do but now go down to the well. She was already there. As i settled on the bench, she smiled, and left. And in my thinking place, all i could think about was her.

Later in the evening as i was going out with dad to pick up some dinner, i asked him whether he knew the lady in the red t-shirt who was in the Agiary (since in my experience, dad knows ALL bawas), and dad said, sure he recognised her as so-and - so, and i told him that she lost her mom a fortnight ago. Dad didn't know this, and he asked, 'when again did u say it happened?' and i told him again. And then he said, "Yes, now i remember, when mama was in the hospital, her mom was there too."

And there was my answer. 21 days ago, this stranger was with her mother in the hospital, and i was with my mother in the same hospital. Her mother died. He worst case scenario actually happened. She has to live a mumless life. I don't. And that is my answer.

Abba and Croatia

"They say a restless body can hide a peaceful soul
A voyager and a settler, they both have a distant goal
If I explore the heavens, or if I search inside
Well, it really doesn't matter as long as I can tell myself
I've always tried."


:)

242 Moons

Today i am exactly two hundred and forty two months old.

And, no, i'm not as unemployed as that line makes it seem.


Now when ty began i promised myself that i'd pay more than 100% attention to what's going on in class, a standard i have been fairly successful in reaching. Not that it's a huge effort, coz my deep lowe for psycho only needs some sort of structure and then i'm set. But today in cog (for the uninitiated..thats cognitive psychology, taken by HappyHands HOD Maureen) i was somewhat..errr...distracted.

:p

Not like the topic was mundane, oh no no no, it doesn't get much better than Retrieval Functions of Long Term Memory, and not like Maureen wasn't in her element as usual. But there was another element competing with her...and winning. Through the windows of the lab i watched the rain lash insanely down on the basketball court in the first quadrangle...with some strategic manipulation of the neck i could just catch the stained glass facade of Chaps (the Chapel, for the uninitiated), awash with God's Own Solution and cleaner than any number of forever dusting peons could ever dream of getting it...and when such things combine they generally put me in a cosmic mood too powerful even for a discussion of LTM circuitry to defeat.

The cosmic mood only had to manifest...and today it chose to do so arithmetically. In an attempt to tear myself away from the revelry outside i tried to focus, if not on Maureen's glinting eyes, then on the blackboard. Which was when i saw the date in the top left corner (along with a suspiciously too cheerful 'happy new month' that nobody will care to erase till the end of next week when temporal logic will finally catch up with someone)...the date was 4-8-07. Not that i wasn't aware of the encyclopaedia's birthday (here the uninitiated are receiving no help). But it suddenly struck me that, born on the 4th of june, i am exactly some number of months old today.

So i got calculating in the head while violently nodding at what i think was some point being made about how memory in LTM is in fact lost due to interference and not because of decay through 'time per se'. And i think my mental mathematical operations were interfered with themselves because, for some reason, the figure i was arriving at wouldn't quite match up to expectations. I multiplied, quite simply, 20 by 12 and then added 2...and the answer came to a mere paltry 242! I calculated again. My tables were impeccable. How could it be? I'd never really got down to sitting down and doing the math, but somehow i'd felt i must be at least a thousand months old. I mean, cmon! I'm 20 yrs old! and thats only 242 months? In 242 months iv become the me i am? I don't know if anyone would empathise, but it seemed a terribly tiny amount time to be alive for. So then i multiplied 20 by 52 and got a more decent number, but then i had to admit after a while that i was now going into weeks.

So i'm a time-overestimator. That explains my tempestuous relationships with deadlines.

Two hundred and forty two months. Imagine, if those stupid Egyptians had read the Nile in some different way, i'd have had two hundred and forty two birthdays.

:)

Ah. Who am i kidding. Birthday or no birthday, every one of the two hundred and forty two have been GRAND. Maybe not if we break them up into their..erm..components, but looking at my tapestry so far, i'm loving the design. There are gonna be some prettty memorable pricks of the needle as it navigates through some complicated territory, but see the picture its working towards. Grand. I can't wait for the cross stitch to kick in.

Happy 242nd to me!

One very, very rainy day

"The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun."