Sharing of responsibilities

One of the weekends I spent with my cousins in Mumbai. It proved to be a memorable. I learnt a lot about people in the course of the conversation that we had.

The first thing that stuck me, about myself was how relaxed I felt! It was not my house. I did not have to answer calling bells, telephone bells, mobile rings, intercom beeps. I have a very bad association with bells. I always hear my school bell in all these which I always missed, but in comparison, these bells are better!

The first lesson that I learnt was to relax even at my house. Well, to be honest I feel that if I learn to understand that even this is not my house, then I know that I can relax.

But is this possible? To have a detached attachment sounds like an oxymoron and surely is one. I have heard one of my father’s friend often say, “This is not my house, I happen to be here”.

Those words, in the recent past, have started flooding my memory. As I sat in a pensive mood trying to untie the knot around detached attachment, one of my cousins narrated an incident.

One day Bhagwan SaiBaba went to a house hold with few of his disciples. An old lady lived in the house and she felt proud having a holy man in her household. After discussing about a lot of things, they finally went to sleep past mid night. At around 2 a.m., Baba woke the old lady up and asked her to make 2 dosas for him.

Obediently, the old woman got up, lit the flame and made all the preparations for making the dosas. As she was about to make the dosas, Baba told her to make it silently. The others were sleeping in the adjacent room and he did not want to wake them up.

Now the lady did not know what to do. While making dosas the noise the water sprinkled over the tawa makes a noise followed by the wet batter. She silently took the batter and mixed it thoroughly. She exhibited no signs of tension, nor did she even take a break in her work to think about what Baba said.

Baba seemed surprised. He again told her that he did not wish to disturb the others who were sleeping peacefully.

Now the lady stopped and turned towards Baba. “You told me to make 2 dosas for you. Till I complete your orders I will not hear anything else. Making the dosa is my job. Ensuring that there is no noise is yours”, she said.

When she finished the narration, I understood the reason for the stress that most of us undergo when we are at home. When we step out of our house, we do not feel the stress.

The detached attachment now seemed possible. Do what you are responsible for. This is what the old lady had realised, may be through the years’ of experience.

Only making the dosa was her responsibility, the God knows how to supress the noise!

The reality about truth

The mysticism that surrounds the word truth has been a subject of debate for ages. The more we try to find out the truth about a given situation the more its vistas broaden making us gasp for breadth at its sheer enormity and our miniscule form in comparison. The reality about truth may be surmised to be its boundlessness.

Sometimes I hear people say ‘Don’t tell lies’ or ‘you are not telling the truth’. I want to tell them nobody knows the truth. What is truth for you may not be so for someone else.  When we reach what we think is the truth we understand that it was nothing but a mirage and to find out the truth we have to travel longer still. Only a few noble souls have been able to endure this tiring long journey in the path of truth and the rest of us are left to wonder if even these great men have reached the boundary of truth.

When a mammoth object breaks into several parts, we all pick up pieces of it. Each of us have a tiny piece of the object and the ego dictates to us and we think what we have on hand is the object in entirety. A few more of us team up together and try joining the pieces the way we understand and by virtue of mere numbers think that the object we have is the whole object. We can endlessly join the pieces, but the truth is we do not know if the way we are joining the pieces is the way it is supposed to be joined. We do not know if the number of pieces that we have is enough to complete the picture or if there are missing pieces. And we never will know.

In this context I also would like to make an earnest appeal to the readers to try and find as many of the pieces and join them in the best possible manner and yet not assume you have enough to declare the truth. Humility is the only torch available with human race that will help us find the pieces and wisdom is the light at the end of the tunnel that will help us join these pieces.

We must take utmost care about not losing the torch mid-way to anger, jealousy and ego. These are like the cloud blocking our way in finding the truth. While many of us may be too quick in jumping to conclusions about other people’s intentions we take ages to apologise even after knowing that we have erred in our judgement.

All through these years we live in denial and it further slows us down in the path of finding the pieces. We have a long journey called life which is ours. We cannot allow our ego to slow it down. At every step, therefore, humility is the torch which expels the darkness called ego. To carry on the forward journey give up the burdens of yesterday. Lighten yourself, so the journey can be fast and burden-free.

The Scientific emotions...

The fast paced human life has very little scope for emotions and to appreciate the finer aspects of human behaviour. Anger and fear seem to have taken over the emotion space and marginalised all other emotions.
Soon there will be a time when we have to be taught what emotions mean. There would be classes like '' Emotics' instead of 'Robotics'.
Believe me, there would be a mad rush for this too and every mother would want to enroll her child into this class, provided there is a certificate issued and the grades scored in this can be converted to marks.
Try taking an imaginary tour into a class where emotions would be taught to students and they would have to write tests and enact the emotions base don the lessons taught.

Here is an attempt to give scientific definitions to human emotions. I am sure the youngsters of today will understand emotions better if they are taught as scientific definitions (equation form would have been better, infact for emotional problem solving equations are the best!)

Revenge: It is what we do to others again and again, knowingly for the mistake they have committed once….unknowingly.

Anger: It is the punishment that we give our body for the mistake our mind perceives to have been done by others!


Hatred: It is the weapon that has the power to destroy almost anything on the face of earth.

Magnanimity: The ability to wake up everyday without bitterness about the previous day's happenings.

Though these are easy to ponder over, they may be very difficult to put to practise. Each day reminding ourselves of the goals that we have set and the journey that we have to reach those goals will keep us focussed on what we need to do rather than what we cannot change. This will help us maintain a positive stance and forge ahead towards our dreams.


 

Exclusive growth vs. Inclusive growth

There was an era of inclusive growth in the history of human race. It is fast being replaced by exclusive growth. With the advent of nuclear families, the unit grew as one and then broke off, rather than getting bigger. The nuclear family system is now being replaced by individuals who grow at their individual pace and the family as a unit is getting pulled in various directions.

This can be attributed to the fact that members of the same family prefer exclusive growth rather than inclusive growth. What this trend is bringing in is the drop in the care for elders, children and patients. Due to this there was a mushrooming of baby sitting and day care centers all across the globe. The second feature is the growth of care centers for patients. Now there is a meteoric rise in the number of old age homes or elder care centers.

Without getting judgmental, I would like to project the facts and maybe guess the reasons behind these societal developments of the last decade or so.
Every parent starts with the ambition to earn enough for the children and their education, then the job tends to become a habit, or an individual's identity rather than a need. Quitting the job, therefore can cause an identity crisis, which many of the women who are forced to quit their jobs for the varied reasons that accompany marriage and child-birth are going through.

Added to this woe is the pain of being a silent witness to the rapid growth in the spouse's career (Remember with a working wife the growth is not as rapid as when the wife is at home). If this growth is shared by all the family members there is solace. But if the earning spouse is bothered about his/her career growth the family gets neglected. This causes frustration and a sense of deprivation. The growth of one person becomes exclusive and may not serve the larger interest of the family.

Exclusivity in growth is becoming very common which is leading to late marriages and still later and therefore a complicated child birth. Single child syndrome is on the aise due to late marriages.
This trend is counterproductive to life and its sustainability needs to be questioned. Bringing in inclusivity to growth has become the urgent need of the hour.

How we address this issue, will make for an interesting  read for the generations to come. But come what may, we need to wear a different outlook, a fresher, newer outlook to initially define the problem on hand and tackle it subsequently!



The burden of knowledge

"I buzzed noisily as a bumble bee

until the burden of knowledge weighed on me".

This happens to most of us. We do not know why we do certain things, yet we go about doing it. Then someday we wake up as though from a trance to the reality. Then we seem to understand why things happen the way they do.

As kids we started going to school, not knowing what school means. Then as we grow we start enjoying school (most of us!) and the day of farewell seems to be the most difficult day.

Though we feel that if the end of school would be so hard, we would have enjoyed school more, in reality we would have been the same. Many times we think that we would have done things differently, the truth is that we would have done it the same way, how many ever chances are given.

In my opinion this is so because, it is only after we go through the experience the intelligence is converted to wisdom. Once wisdom dawns on us we need not go through the same experience. This is when we start looking at the world differently.

Let me discuss a few common experiences to put things in perspective.

When we travel through a road or an area the first time everything looks new and we develop an image based on what catches our attention. The second time we go through the same place we start noticing newer things and the place now does not seem as it seemed the first time.

Similarly, we may look at a design without knowing what it is. When the artist explains what it is then how many ever times we look at the design, we can only see it through the artist's eye and we are unable to see the way we saw it the first time.

Once our mind understands a concept, the naivity is lost and wisdom creeps in.

One purpose of life, therefore could be in converting intelligence into wisdom. God gave intelligence to all of us and then makes us go through life's experiences, so that this intelligence may be converted to wisdom. As we age we tend to become wiser. Life becomes easy when we live through each day as an experience, so that we may become wiser and learn the art of viewing good and bad alike. We then have the maturity understand that happiness and sadness are just two different states of he same mind and that they come and go.

We are mere spectators to events happening around us and learning is nothing but the conversion of intelligence into wisdom!
 

Patience vs. Tolerance

Once I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine. He asked me the difference between patience and tolerance.

I had read a Tamil poetry when I was 10 years old. The poet had described the patience of mother earth. Earth is patient with the farmer as he tears her surface open and sows the seeds. Earth is patient with the seed as the seed takes in the rain water and tears her deeper, planting herself with the help of her roots.

Having read this poem I appreciated the patience of mother earth towards all of us. Unfortunately we assumed this to be tolerance and stretched our luck too far. We started piercing her with harder tools and deeper still. We could not stop with food and basic shelter. Slowly her patience started wearing away. We are now experiencing landslides and earthquakes. Mother earth is running out of patience.

So this is the difference between patience and tolerance. While patience wears off, tolerance does not.  Tolerance can be understood as the everlasting patience, which comes out of a certain realisation that the situation will not change.

Some interesting ways of differentiating between the two would be thus:

·         While most of us are tolerant towards our children, our patience for our spouse wears off.

·         We not only tolerate the mistakes done by people we like, we also defend them. But we have very little patience towards people whom we despise.

·         While it is a virtue to tolerate one’s unfavourable circumstances, one needs to be patient till it changes.

The Stress of monotony

While the globe trotters are aware of the stress that change can bring in, any public sector employee in India would vouch for the stress associated with monotony.

There is no ‘doctor ordered’ medicine for coping up with stress though there are many ways of dealing with it. For a person who is used to frequent changes, stability for a while and relaxation by way of vacation could be an ideal stress buster.

 Nevertheless for the stress brought in by monotony, it is very difficult to find a practical solution. Creating a change or coping up with a change is never too easy.  It causes more stress and therefore cannot be an antidote to the stress of monotony. This form of stress sets in very gradually and grows silently.

While some people are able to handle it well, for some this could be as difficult to deal with as it is for a jet setter.

The picture that has been emerging in the past decade or so clearly indicates that neither the monotonous government job nor the high paying private job is a permanent solution to stress. In today’s world we have to think differently and learn to understand our own system and needs. When fatigue or burnout presents itself, we have to create the change necessary for ourselves and then be able to get back to work once we feel rejuvenated.

There was a time in human history when people knew what they had to do and went about their business. Those were times when lazy people were outnumbered by the active ones. Today the scenario is changing and people are used to making use of external resources and getting their work done. This has created monotony in the entire system and the active people are outnumbered by their lazy counter parts.

This explains why there is so much of talk about stress and how to manage it. The solution though is very simple. Stop, think, work.