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Belief

Celebrating the 60th year of the Indian Republic

We might smirk and say all so often that patriotism is dead and the days which were landmarks in Indian history are nothing but holidays today. Won't put up any arguments here. Everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion. Or maybe on second thoughts, it is worth arguing. How else do you explain the people who join the armed forces and the families who let them do it? How do you explain the girls who enter into matrimonial alliances with men like these. Have they no clue what they are getting into? I am dead sure they do.

Someone is putting up a brave front in uninhabitable climes so that the rest of India can wake up in cozy and safe homes to exclaim that days like today are just national holidays they are so thankful for! How insensitive are we to cringe when the heads of the armed forces demand a hike in pay. It is so ironic that the most important jobs are the least paid. Being a housewife doesn't pay. Being a maid doesn't. Being a garbage collector doesn't. Someone is really fuming :-) Alright no more of complaints.

Coming back to the topic of no consequence. Just like Diwali you know in your sleep that today is either Independence day/ Republic day when you catch the strains of a patriotic song playing far away. And the day before ,you see vendors selling those tiny little flags which some people actually buy! Patriotism isn't dead yet. These might seem so inconsequential when you are a witness to all of them. But once, just once you are not in this country on these days, and you know what missing your homeland means. Trust me when I say this. Been there, done that, lived to tell the tale ;-)

Give yourself a break

ARE you too hard on yourself most of the time? Carrying the burden of right and wrong, the guilt of not doing enough, the tension of ensuring you don’t step out of line and trying to be just and fair to everyone? In short, being good to rest of the world and less than good to your own self?

You never allow yourself to take off from work for a much-needed break because you imagine everything would collapse without you around to hold it steady. A holiday alone, all by yourself? Yes, of course you have thought of it, but as a distant possibility, maybe after the children have flown the nest and after retirement when you have more time on your hands...

Aw c’mon, take a chill pill, as they say. It’s time you loosened up a bit. Go easy on yourself. Learn to love yourself. Only then can you love rest of the world and be fair and good to others. Charity, they say, begins at home. Have you ever thought, maybe love does too? Do you love yourself? Everything about you? Looking into the mirror, is that the most familiar and loved face in the world you see? Can you look deep into your own eyes with affection and faith? Do you care for your mind and body as if they were the most precious things in your possession? Are you forever upbraiding yourself or do you have some kind words for yourself as well?

One of the main reasons we see so many stressed out individuals around us is the increased expectations we have of ourselves. Not able to always meet these, we take out our frustrations on those around and make life miserable all around. That leads to feelings of inadequacy and guilt and the vicious cycle continues. Why stretch yourself so taut that you are teetering on breaking point all the time? Do what you can do and don't feel guilty about the rest.

Have you noticed how people try to make you feel guilty all the time over something or the other? Doing so seems to shift a burden from their shoulders onto somebody else’s — yours. Haven’t you ever tried that yourself ? Played the blame game? What a feeling of relief to unburden by making another guilty! And we keep apportioning guilt and blame all around us, just to stay in the clear ourselves.

This is not to say that one can be absolved of all duties and responsibilities. Of course “you got to do what you got to do” but sometimes the “got to do”starts assuming gigantic proportions, taking over our entire lives. Life so consumes you that sometimes you find it impossible to get an appointment with yourself! How often we hear people complain, “I get no time for myself !”

You spend half your life trying to be a good son or daughter, the rest of it attempting perfection as a spouse/mother/father. When do you get to be “YOU”?

There must come a moment in each of our lives when we say, “Enough!” Enough of trying to live as appendages and living up to titles and expectations others have of us. And yes, enough also of trying to live up to impossible expectations we have of ourselves...

What a sense of peace and calm invades you when you refuse to be made to feel guilty over trivialities, when you stop analysing what is done with and keep torturing yourself over how you could have done it better. When you stop giving explanations to others or even feeling the need to do so. When your attitude is, “This is what I am. Accept me or leave me...”

The slogans to live life by are — ‘I want to just be me.’ ‘I am what I am.’ ‘I can only do what I can do.’ Nothing more. Nothing less. This will also encourage us to accept those we love as they are, without attempting to change them. Let them live their dreams as we live ours. Despite living different dreams, we can still be together with our loved ones. In fact probably in a far more meaningful manner.

Learning to love yourself isn’t as easy as you would imagine. It needs constant discipline and a determination to know yourself and like what is acceptable, while changing that which isn’t. So, go on; love, pamper, indulge yourself. And say with impunity, I am what I am...

(Taken from Times Life by Vinita Dawra Nangia)

When the sky dazzles in a million colors

For anyone who has grown up in India in a city like mine, you know it's Diwali when a firecracker is burst at the crack of dawn gently nudging you back to consciousness. It isn't even broad daylight by then, but you can tell in your sleep that the festival of lights is here from the feel of it, and a smile escapes you. You can feel the festive spirit and no matter how rotten your mood has been in the past few days, you can't help but feel good again. Call it a temporary escape from reality or what you will, but the joy in the air engulfs you completely and there is no escaping it.

There is a set routine to how it goes on Diwali. But when firecrackers are lit in the middle of the evening/night and Diwali has long gone by and the next one isn't due in several months, without turning on the television, you know that either it's the New Year's eve and the clock is about to strike twelve, or India has won a cricket match against some country or in a freak case someone is getting married.

Yesterday was different. Some freak decided to burst crackers at 12:44 A.M. When all the items on the checklist above were crossed out I got up to check the television. No Oscars for India and no matches won either. All was quiet after a hundred odd rockets had gone up. 1:44 A.M. And the freak isn't done yet. More fireworks. Out of his mind and won't be back in 5 minutes.

But a happy occasion it might have been for sure. The sweet smell of success after strenuous hard work, an ecstatic moment in the lives of the ordinary or the heading feeling of getting your love. Whatever it was, it felt good to be a witness to someone's celebration of life with a spirit that says "Never say die".

Thank you

I don't know who you are, and I might never know it either. But if it gives you any peace to not reveal yourself and yet be there, it's fine with me.

When I started this, I wasn't sure this would find an audience. It wasn't even started for that purpose. But today it's humbling to know that people connect with what I write.

This feels like the situation when you open the door early in the morning to greet the sunrise and pick up the newspaper and find a bouquet of flowers greet you instead. You flip the card every which way to see 'whodunnit' and find nothing but an innocuous note wishing you smiles and happiness for the next 24 hours. You wake up earlier than usual the next day in the hope of catching the "offender" only to have it delivered by the milk boy who has no clue who gave it to him. Needless to say it feels wonderful. You call up all your friends and all claim innocence. You try all your means and then give up. But like in the motion pictures, the hope continues to linger that one fine day, the sender shall reveal himself/herself. Before the recipient changes house .Before the recipient withers and fades into oblivion..

To whoever you are..

This post goes out exclusively to the Anonymous reader of my blog, who has been gracious enough to go through my write ups and take valuable time off his/her schedule to leave a comment. The same goes to everyone who has bothered commenting on my blog ever since it's inception circa 2008, but in those cases I knew who to thank. In this case I don't!

Who are you and why do you choose Anonymity? A voice at the back of my head asks me why am I even asking you this, because sure as I am, you won't answer me and will plunge deeper into anonymity. What am I to decipher from your one liners and smiles? (See how out of work I am to bother about why you don't bother identifying yourself? Great!). I know for a fact that you know me, and I know you. It could also be that we know each other ;-)

I can assure you that once I know your identity, I won't approach the cyber sleuths/FBI/CBI to track down your location via the IP address you used to post the comment. Am really not into all of that. And mind you. Don't you dare give out a false identity and set me off on a wild goose chase. Also don't try acting smarter than you already are by giving me yet another dumb one-liner that conveys nothing and reveals even less.You have to understand that I don't have that kind of time and will give up the pursuit sooner than you think.

Sir/Ma'am for your information, I am totally harmless to humans. So you have nothing to be scared of. Here's to a new friendship ,which can be a lifelong thing , PROVIDED you don't prove yourself to be a major irritant of type III, and IF you reveal yourself.

Conflicts in the face of calm

An unusual calm on the surface contrasts the turbulence within. There is a tug from both the ends and you are unsure of how long the cord will last before it snaps into two. Not many are comfortable witnessing the upheaval within, hoping somewhere that this too shall settle one day.

Every problem implies it's own solution alright. The darned emotions get in the way all the time. Complicating things as if they weren't difficult enough. The Higher Power up there loves to go the whole hog. Leaving nothing else to be desired. Both in terms of positivity and negativity.

And there is no escaping it either. The only way out is through. Only someone forgot to define "Through". If only there was a "Manual to life and living-in times of hope, and in the depths of despair" ! In school and college exams they promote you to the next year even when you don't have a cent percent score. Life doesn't let you get away as easily. Here you continue to take tests until you know the matter cold enough to recite in your sleep. Convenient.

Some have the knack of being in the right place at the right time and some falter until no other option but the right one remains. Is it just a matter of thinking right, or does it have more to do with hard wiring? If it is the latter, then it needs re-engineering. And who better to do it than us. Someone writes the code and someone else is left to modify it and make it workable. Neat.

A life less serious would be the doctor's prescription if things begin to get on our nerves. Things can't be that bad after all, when it's a given that they could be worse! A warning to give up resistance to everything that is happening and appreciate someone else's plans for you. For all you know, you wished for the stars, and someone is conspiring to give you the Universe! Let's give it to Him this time. This one more time.

Nothing has a tendency to last forever. Not the good times, so certainly by that count, not even the bad times. There is a healthy mix of the two and there is no escaping it. And maybe too much of one can be toxic so the other is out there to balance it.

I guess when you are at your wit's end, it's ok to remark

"I don't understand white crayons.
Why are they here?
What do they want from us?"

and leave the problem to find it's own solution. Keep smiling!

Sunshine in times of darkness

When life brings forth pleasant things we call it luck. When things go awry, we attribute it to destiny. In good times we advocate the benefits of being positive and in bad times we find comfort in blaming it all on destiny. All the time we are secretly hoping that someone or something comes along and changes everything for the better. We trudge along our lives with this hope firmly in place and the eternal wait continues, till the day we realize that we alone are responsible for our happiness. No pill or potion can give us that. One life changing thought is all that it takes.

It's said that the optimist views the glass as half full, while the pessimist views it as half empty. The optimist sees the doughnut while the pessimist sees the hole. Today the inclination is towards the positive thinkers. The grouches have lost. Perhaps, more people are enjoying the doughnut.

Not that there aren’t enough reasons to be pessimistic – terrorism, recession, climate change, corporate fraud etc. It’s also much easier to be pessimistic because if events do turn out badly, there is at least the morbid satisfaction of having been proved right. In the unlikely circumstances that things end well, it can be a pleasant surprise.

Pessimism — or what some call realism molded from bitter experience — is like a virus, which is why most of us like the sunny dispositions of our friends, spouses, bosses and leaders.

Negative thinking never actually did anyone any good. It's a well established fact that negative thinking is behind a "host of maladies" that have gripped the world's population today. All that it does is pull you back from trying new and better things, because one begins to find happiness in misery making it difficult to leave the comfort zone.

In contrast, optimism can be revolutionary, points out writer and environmentalist Alex Steffen. “Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act...Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is.”

Despite some of the obvious positives of positive thinking, most of us revel in the gloom.
Not only do we like to believe that tomorrow will be worse than today but that nothing can be done about it.

We all want the world to be a better place but we belie the hope if we refuse to acknowledge the progress that has been made. If the world’s problems look intractable, it is because we have given up thinking of solutions and have little faith in the people who are trying to put them into practice. As Leonard Cohen put it: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in.” So where are the chinks of light? Or can we not see them because of the shadows we are accustomed to?

Almost no one likes to confess to optimism, which is usually dismissed as the refuge of unrealistic fools. There is always a sense that things are going downhill. The golden age always lies in the past, never in the future. It is this deficit in social optimism that has to be addressed.

In the epic Mahabharata, King Yaksha asks Yudhishthir what he thinks is the most curious aspect of life. Yudhishthir replies, “Mortality is a fact of life. Every person sees someone dying, yet people live as if they are immortal.” Isn’t that optimism?

(With excerpts from Mind over Matter by Neelam Raj)

Bringing sunshine where there is little

There are people who just by being who they are infuse in you the zest for life. In their company, everything seems perfect and you regain the smile you had once lost. You begin to see things in perspective and your problems begin to seem trivial. But like all good things, this too comes to an end leaving you to follow their footsteps and be that way for others. Full of life, love and kindness. These people can be found everywhere, even in places and circumstances you least expect them to be in. They could be shopping with you at the local grocery store, they could come in the form of a friendly stranger, they could even be your next door neighbor. They come into your life life a breath of fresh air and leave you with a fragrance you don't want to forget in a hurry.

It doesn't take anything to give people a smile or go an extra mile to help them. There is so much joy in giving. By being there. We can't take away people's troubles but atleast we can lighten the burden. It also takes nothing to give people a piece of your mind. Tell them exactly what you think of them. It's said that harsh words once spoken are like arrows which can never come back. Maybe at times it wasn't even intended to be hurtful, but it is and the listener can tell you how scarred for life he or she is. Frivolous actions, irresponsible and unthoughtful behaviour do just the same. Once people come into our lives many have a tendency to take them for granted as if they are a permanent fixture. Come sun or rain, they will remain there while you attend to what you think is important. Nothing could be further from the truth. One gust of wind and they will be gone forever, never to return.

We have no clue what people are going through in their lives. Not everyone opens up his or her life to everyone and anyone. If we cannot bring them happiness, we've no right whatsoever to even cause them grief. What joy can it bring any human to add to someone's sorrow? Nothing that I can comprehend. But what can bring tremendous joy is ushering sunshine in lives of people where there is little or none. Help them get back on their feet and then continue on your sojourn to places and people worth your time and life.

Experiences and lessons are like souvenirs we pick up from the destinations we visit. Each one over time, contains a story well concealed. A tale worth narrating. We can't stay in every place much as we'd like to but the souvenir is enough to bring back the lost times and promises of an enchanting future that never will be. At times the most cherished memento is relegated to the dusty and forgotten attics of our mind. Stuff we stumble across while springcleaning to make space for the new stuff. Stuff that makes us smile and think hard if the object in hand can be of any use in the future. And then without a second thought, it tumbles from our hand to the bin. Out of sight. Out of mind. That is how much importance to we give to certain events and things. Ten years down the line it will mean nothing. And today we don't mind giving it all our time and energy. Might as well spend time on the worthwhile.

Serenity in the face of the storm

It's said that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. In that period there may be times when you tend to fall back into your old routine, but the need of the hour is a strong will power. As adults we pretty much know what's good for us and what isn't. But it's not often that we show the good sense of doing what's in our best interest. Getting out of the comfort zone takes some practice, but more often than not, it is worth the effort. Staying true to our bad habits is akin to drug/alcohol addiction. You know it will kill you some day, but that's not enough to deter you. It beats me why our senses take a beating.

Letting go of things gives tremendous peace. Letting go of frustrations, anger, despair, hopelessness and their ilk. We begin to think that if we loose control, everything will fall into pieces, but we don't realize that God has his own plans for us too, and though his plans are undecipherable to us and make no sense most of the times, more often than not they turn out to be in our best interests. And according to me it is not defeatist thinking to accept whatever comes our way with a smile. It's not being a doormat, but it's realizing that clinging on to the futile gives no joy. Some good is hidden even in the worst.

It takes effort to stay positive in the face of our daily challenges. But once staying positive becomes a habit, we learn how to sail through the most turbulent times serenely. We always want what we don't have and once we get that we set our sight on something else altogether and with this attitude happiness is always elusive. We are setting ourselves up for a life of misery. A search for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that does not exist. We have to make a disciplined effort to stay happy in the here and now rather than the there and then. Squeeze the maximum out of moment, not let time pass us by as we stand mute spectators.

Each of us may not be world renowned but each of us is built unique. We have what no one else has. We can be so much more than what we limit ourselves to be. In the words of Richard Carlson "we tend to postpone our happiness to a future time". He says our in-basket of things to do, stuff to achieve will never get empty. Even as we lie breathing our last, there will still be stuff we wish we had done, things we wish we had said and even after we die, the world will go on like it has forever. If this be the case then why not live the moment. The picture of a river flowing over the rough stones and impediments is symbolic of moving on, staying happy and serene and spreading joy wherever we go.

Rab ne bana di jodi

There are some relations we choose ourselves and there are others, which are chosen by God. This is indeed one story which starts where most stories end. It’s about an ordinary couple stuck in not so ordinary circumstances. It’s a story about Tanni( Anouska Sharma) and Surinder Sahani (aka Suri) ( Shahrukh Khan) who get married to each other by a twist of fate.

Tanni is all set to marry her sweetheart when she hears of his fatal accident. Her father suffers a massive heart attack unable to take the shock of the death of his would be son-in-law and in his final moments asks his favorite student ( Suri ) to marry his daughter.

Grief struck Tanni can’t seem to bring herself to love anyone let alone her husband. Surinder Sahani is this simple, down-to-earth, ever courteous and endearing human being. He works for Punjab Power-lighting up your lives ji ( :-) ) and he does all in his capacity to make life as easy and livable for his wife. He shifts his stuff out of the room to make space for his Tanni Ji so she has an entire room for herself. He makes breakfast for her and leaves a note for her, understanding that she is extremely sad to even get out of bed. When she asks him if she could join a dance class since dancing has been her passion ever since, he says nothing and leaves the class fee on the table. He expects nothing in return. He is completely smitten by his wife. Falls for her hook line and sinker. He transforms himself bit by bit because he has this notion that his previous self reminds his wife of all her sorrows and he wants her happiness back at any cost. And he also wants her to love him. By making her laugh and being there for her always he finds a way to her heart. All that a girl wants is someone who loves her more than even God can. She reaches a crossroad where she wants to be happy with the transformed guy( obviously not recognizing that Raj is her transformed husband and none other) and decides to leave her loveless marriage behind. Admitted that it is extremely filmy to not recognize a guy because he has no moustache but if you just go with the flow and believe the makers for a second, everything makes perfect sense. Suri has been hoping that one day his wife will see how much he loves her. In the guise of Raj he tells her that inspite of knowing that she is married, he loves her because he can see Rab (God) in her. A sign of true love which is oh-so-extinct. :-) Suri looses all hope when he realizes that if his wife can think of running away with someone else, how unhappy she must be with him. He decides to leave her with all his property so she can lead her life happily with whoever she wills. In the meanwhile Tanni realizes that her husband held her hand when she was all alone. Even though he does not talk much and is boring, he is this simple guy who will do anything and everything for her happiness .She decides that she will not leave her husband come what may. Because she can see God in him too and no matter where she goes, God will always be with her. She can desert a person, but she can never desert God. And then they live happily ever after. (I am such a sucker for happy endings :-))

The essence of the story is that, you may transform yourself completely to win someone over, but if that someone cannot love the real you, it’s truly not worth it. There is an extra-ordinary love story in every ordinary story if only we see God’s fingerprints in everything. There are things and people too who can be replaced if we give up our resistance and open our hearts and minds. In the end what matters is a happy ending and who does not want one :-)