Unburdened at last.

Samta is 64 years old and the mother of a marketing executive working with a bank. Little on the heavier side for her height of just above five feet, she consulted me for an ankle injury she sustained just as she was to alight the bus that was bringing her from the aircraft to the airport terminal here in our city as she was looking forward to rejoining with her family of three:  her son Chirag, Jasmin- Chirag’s wife  and their son Kahaan- after a gap of six months. This was the first time in her life that she had ventured out of her house for so long. She was returning after this stay with her daughter as well as with other family members spread across the United Kingdom.

I have known this family for over a decade now. Chirag would often consult me for his father’s orthopaedic issues. This elder gentleman was housebound for the past several years from the residua of stroke suffered at the height of his own career. Chirag had to take up a job rather early in life to augment his family’s finances. His father’s indispensation and frequent medical consultations posed significant challenges to Chirag on his career path.  

Once in a while Samta would also seek appointment along with her husband, for her arthritic knees. Samta’s demeanor was always reserved, and her face bore the marks of the strain put on her by having to look after her husband at home. ‘Gravitas’ was the word I associated with Samta’s facial expression. I had noted that none of them- including Chirag, a marketing executive- ever smiled; not even the invariable smile that accompanies the “bye bye” at the end of a consulting session.  However it was not out of lack of manners; they had, between the three of them, quite a lot to bear so that it perhaps rendered them that much inattentive to other aspects of interpersonal behavior. Caring for a person rendered paralysed by stroke is not only physically demanding but also emotionally draining because the stroke affected person has, often, an altered sense of reality and is quite insecure.  

 About seven years back, Chirag had invited  our family for his wedding to his beloved, a girl from a well educated family of a minority community. The parents on both sides had given in to their wards’ demands after some struggle with their choices, going against the community guidelines on both sides. The last few years had gone by without any major marital discord, apparently, and the couple’s son Kahaan was now in pre nursery.  All this and more had transpired between the last time Samta came along with her husband, and today, when she had come with her daughter-in-law, Jasmin.  Samta had lost her husband about a year back.

This time, unlike the other times, Chirag had refrained from taking a few hours  off from his new and better job, not because he did not like to or that he did not get permission to, but because Samta was quite comfortable with just Jasmin in coming to consult me.

Thankfully the injury Samta had sustained in her right ankle was nothing very serious and it was expected that she would do well in course of time. As I was conveying this to Samta, I had to make a determined effort not to be agog with wonder as I saw a lightness of expression on Samta’s face, adorned with a pleasant smile. I wondered whether it was a smile only because of knowing that it was just a minor injury, or whether it was majorly from the relief of being unburdened of a lifetime of some heavy responsibility that she could not have turned her face away from. As she walked out from my office, I noted that her previous limp was now hardly noticeable-certainly a sign of improvement, or, atleast a sign of being less weighed down than before.

Long lasting emotional states can alter your sense of wellbeing-either way. A sense of felt helplessness in altering one’s situation, as in Samta’s case, can add to one’s woes. There is a third way here, if one makes space for it. That way is of developing a Mindfulness practice even as one is in the throes of the woes! 

The prescription is to die to the 'I' in contrast to being weighed down by that alphabet- like all prescriptions, this one too is easier read and said than practiced and done.

At Odds with Parents' choice.

Trisha-a 17 year old, thin, high school kid- a girl, alright- walked in alone to consult me for her neck and scapular pain. When I asked her to be seated on the examination table, she let her very classically designed ethnic purse slide off her shoulder to the floor.

She said her pain started when her two and a half year old kid brother jumped on her neck from behind her when she was reading prone in her bed, while her mom was busy talking on the cell phone- as she usually is- she added.

Always Online- is it worth?

What was missing was a certain clarity about my unease with the various online social networks and instant messaging apps. I knew something was not okay, but could not put my finger on it. Till the clarity came in, I was going along with the trend- almost like bowing in to the latest fashion trends much against personal tastes, affordability and comfort.

There is a crisis of meaningful,  direct, soulful communication in the midst of information overload and chat, more aptly, chatter. 

There is absence of one's presence in a perverse abundance of information exchange. One is left alone in a saturated soup of electronic connectivity. There is a contact without there being any connection.

Not only this, there is a constant anxiety associated with online activity. You are worried about what could be possibly going on on some group of which you are a member- this when you are in the presence of a significant person in physical proximity; you are anxious that you could miss something important online, or, that you may offend the person with whom you are present physically. That's a double edged stress. Even when online in a relatively uninterrupted state, there is still a background anxiety that you are 'eating up' time that could be spent with a person in physical reality- a family member, a colleague, a student, a friend- any one of whom could just be around and would certainly welcome a live, realtime, physically here and now meeting with you, perhaps with a hug or a handshake.

Constant preoccupation with online activity and interaction precludes deep work: be it thinking, planning, execution of important tasks or implementing important projects. Certainly, online activity comes at the expense of important tasks that can only be got done offline, in real life. Some of the most important of life's such tasks are parenting, being a spouse or a child, and most importantly, the exquisitely delicate and important activity of living a life. Is there anything that can equal the last activity in terms of depth of involvement required?

Also once you miss the time with a person, in person, the chance to connect deeply, meaningfully is lost in all this busy-ness and its attendant anxiety. You are physically present but not available- a lamp post could do a better job.

For peace of mind, for better productivity, for sanity, for balance, for richer & real interpersonal connections and relationships, for the calmness and stability that comes with being present, for being a better human, I am advocating a self-imposed and considerably restricted- rationed- online presence and activity. If your job is online, then this applies even more so. And it most applies if your job is off line, because the most meaningfully rich life certainly is offline. Just a few years back this used to be called being here, being available, being present. In its most subtle and yet most exalted expression, it is also called being Mindful.

Lastly this being compulsively online on various fora is the electronic equivalent of a chemical or substance addiction. Addictions, as recovering addicts, and relatives of active addicts will testify, ruin lives- that is more than one there!

Just How Lost?

A few unconnected events coalesced to create a feeling of a deafening sound of a bell tolling. It was a wake-up call without there being any sound- quite eerily it was because there was no alarming sound at all that it was a matter of such urgency. Was it was too late already?  Let’s see what actually happened.

***

Some months back a cousin of mine emailed me a family photograph that he had dug up from his archives. It was a black and white group photograph taken in the back drop of the trellis of our now razed ancestral home. My cousin, a few years my junior, had queried me if I knew anyone from the group, he being my father’s younger brother’s son. Yes, I replied back, I knew only two people from the group of perhaps thirty, all faces being clearly visible. Two children sitting in the front row at one end were identifiable- one, a boy, was my grandfather’s younger brother, and the little girl next to him, was his younger sister, now in her late eighties, and the only living link between that group of thirty and us. Replying to my cousin was not a matter of a resounding “yes” for me, since apart from these two close family members whom I identified, I could not place anyone else from the group, though I knew that each one of them was somehow related to me, most of them by blood.

***

A fortnight back an acquaintance of mine, a man settled in the US for the last thirty years, came in with his mother to consult me for the lady’s knee pain. After the clinical formalities were done, we got chatting since our families were connected back in the past.  He mentioned that prior to his coming into our city he had visited his unlce in Mumbai, the third and the only living brother of his late father. There he had asked his uncle to speak about his family’s history, their ancestral home, and their ancestral vocations and so on, while he recorded all of it in his device. This acquaintance told me that ever since he had lost his father, he was looking forward to somehow connect with his past- his family- that he knew nothing about, and to him it felt deeply satisfying to be able to know first-hand what his family was like in days gone by, prior to his birth.

***

Few months back the Times of India carried a story of a man who had died recently on one of the islands of the Andamans- the far flung group of islands of India in the Bay of Bengal. This man happened to be the last individual who spoke his native language. At that point, I remembered the book, The Way Finders, by the Canadian Ethnobiologist, Wade Davis. He affirms that at present,  once in every two weeks one entire language becomes extinct in the manner depicted above, and with that extinction is erased a sizeable record of human civilization in that part of the world where the language was once spoken. He poignantly exhorts the reader to imagine a situation where he or she is the last living human being who can speak a language which will be no more available in a few days when he is gone forever. What would be your feelings in such a situation? Though he does not ask this, I feel he might as well: would you still want to converse with others exclusively in English, even when the other person can still speak another language of common inheritance?

***

A lot was transmitted through the oral communication, it still is, and it is possible to save that method of communication and transmission, if we just wake up to this looming crisis of rendering everything to a universal uniformity.

Our civilization, our histories, our scriptures, our cultures, our values, our customs, our national and regional identities have come down to us from the oral traditions, from practices that were as diverse, as they were rich and meaningful. In today’s parlance these oral transmissions would be archaic- but is something so profound, something that has birthed the various civilizations really ever archaic?

If your mother tongue is not English, and you work and live where English is the main language outside the house, what would you do for the preservation of the language in your branch of the family? What would you do to preserve your larger cultural heritage?

A young person, not yet married,  when being told about these events just mentioned above, questioned me: what if it was just herself who did not coach her children to speak in her mother tongue? I asked her, what if all the young people do the same?  She sensed the answer and nodded with a smile. After a while, she confessed that of course she would teach her mother tongue to her children, when they came into the world.

***

Let me leave you with a story that happened in my consulting room sometime back.

A man I will name as Hardik, had immigrated to the US after always having lived and conducted business in my city till the age of 40. At age 55 years, he comes in to consult me for his shoulder problem, with a MRI scan in his hand. As I started explaining to him his problem, as reflected in the scan, in the Gujarati language, which I thought was the mother tongue for both of us, he interrupted me, and with a smirk, he asked me to explain what I thought was his problem in English.

I told him English was his problem for he had forsaken Gujarati which would have been the easiest for him to make sense of what was being told to him, while if I communicated in English, he would still be left in the lurch, for English was still a foreign language for him. In all fairness to him, he apologized: not to me, but to his mother tongue, for the huge loss that he perceived was his alone.

Illiterate or Uneducated?

Illiterate human beings have always been a subject of fascination for me; I cannot but wonder as to how they make their ends meet. This curiosity once almost led me to commission a study that would find out jobs that people at various levels of illiteracy do to sustain themselves...more on that some other time; this time it’s about a rough diamond that has come up from the river bed of illiteracy.

Everyday Joys and a spiritual life.

The biggest surprising insight of the week was the sudden flash that made it so clear that being spiritual in no way takes away the possibility of living a joyful life or a life of fun or even of commitment to one's goals and responsibilities. There was even the smirk within that questioned this possibility of  anything else being nursed in the name of spirituality in the first place.

One of the mistaken perceptions of a spiritual life is that of austere renunciation and dourness, a life removed from allowance of a feeling of joy and mirth in everyday life.The joy of a smile exchanged, a hand shake, simple things like this that are neither permissive nor restrictive are not at all out of bounds for a spiritual person. The innocent, pleasant, clean, uncorrupted joy of simple everyday transactions and the commonplace hope that has come to see the light of the day through one's efforts and Grace- these are certainly within the definition of a lived spiritual life.

This is what I wrote in my e-diary:
Being spiritual does NOT devolve you from being committed to your everyday duties and responsibilities. Behaving as if everything will take care of itself, on its own, without any effort from your side, just because you are spiritual is a costly delusion (and something that is not spiritual in the first place- because spirituality teaches us to look at things as they really are). You still have to do your job and you have to do it well, for that too is spiritual.

Included in this duty is the one toward servicing the upkeep of your own self: making sure you are healthy in body, mind and emotions. That is the full compass of spirituality. Spirituality does not ask you to be a pauper on purpose when you are not one to start with; it asks you to see what you really are and then act in the wisest way and in a way that is for the highest common good. The same is true for depressive spells that are passed by almost unawares and even helplessly in the name of spirituality or spiritual practices being done in the background.

A truly spiritual person is healthy, is happy within, and if not, he actually works to make it better with means available to him, and yet is in touch with reality. He does not welcome unwholesome states of mind or body but when in the throes of such a state, he faces it with as much equanimity as possible and makes amends. He does not deliberately sabotage his own career or profession just because he is committed to some spiritual practice or teaching. Anyone doing this or asking you to do this is not practicing or teaching spirituality. Beware. 

The First Cremation of Childhood.

The Colony that we stayed in was the residential facility for the employees of the company my father worked in. If there was ever a place better than Heaven on Earth, at least in that decade or so of my childhood that we lived there, it was there in that colony.  We, the children of those days, were indeed blessed with the best of all that the rest of Indian parents would have wanted for their children.

At various times, we had neighbours from different nationalities- the Japanese, Italians, Spanish, Swiss, the Americans and the British. Those that had brought along their children, they studied with us in our school. Once the various plants of the company were commissioned, these other nationals went away and we had a new neighbour,  a family that had – not at all surprising at that time- known ours for perhaps five generations in the past.

The patriarch of this family, a retired  teacher and a dignified old man in his late eighties was a sight to behold: short statured but ramrod straight posture, bushy white moustache, circle rimmed glasses, black Gandhi Cap, a walking stick in hand, wearing starched white dhoti under a white kurta on top and balck leather mojaris. He was quite amiable and I warmed upto him over the next few weeks. He told me he was personally familiar with my grandfather’s father since he and my great grandfather were neighbours back in our home town! For some reason I was awe struck by this man and fancied a liking for him. The sight of him stirred deep feelings of shared intergenerational bonds.

After a few months, the old gentleman fell ill and died. I must have been about ten years of age then and I recollect being very sad on hearing of this. My father took leave of absence to assist in the preparations for the funeral.  And then out of the blue he asked me to accompany the funeral procession to the crematorium located outside the colony in an inaccessible and forlorn location. My mother protested against this decision, but father insisted. While I do not recollect the exact words of the exchange that my parents had about it, I remembering overhearing something to the effect that it would help in my training.

“Goddammit” was not a part of my vocabulary then but the sense of it certainly was. What kind of training was he talking about?

In any case I did accompany the funeral procession. I asked my father a lot of questions and some of them were answered, like why the logs were being arranged on the pyre as if in a geometric design.  And then a severe concern came upon me: what if the grandpa’s body still had some life left hidden in him somewhere- wouldn’t he feel the burning pain of the fire of the funeral? Was it sure he had really died- for he looked so fresh- as if he was just sleeping quietly.

After a while of questioning I – being the only pre-teen in a crowd of men of my father’s age-fell silent and passed the remaining time at the crematorium lost in thoughts. As I look back now I wonder what thoughts I must have thought at that tender age. On the way back home there were even more questions and fewer answers. I passed the next couple of days in a demure mood.

While questions about death lingered on in my mind for quite a few days the most persistent of all was the question, what, if any, was the training that my father referred to, in attending a funeral? It was not the question per se that was disturbing but the concept of death as an aid to training that continued to ruffle me.

In a twist of serendipity, over the next few days, our history teacher took up a chapter on Siddhartha Gautam. In our text book was mentioned the young  Siddhartha’s first exposure to the fact of suffering in life-sickness and then old age leading to death.  I distinctly recollect the feeling I had as I read that chapter- it felt that seeing a death was a familiar experience but I could not decide what to make of it, except that it had made me very sad for some time.

Only much later did I realize that on that day at the crematorium, I had had my first emphatic experience of what the Buddha called the first of the Four Noble Truths.

Suffice it to say, the training continues!

The Biscuit- Should I Eat It?

That day, at last the main competitive exams for children in the 12th standard was over and all of us could then breathe easy.

From that night to right till about an hour or so into the mid morning the next day, I was under the sway of a powerful mental-emotional spell which urged me to be competitive, brash, uncaring of anything other than personal ambitions. On the whole, it was a fist-clenching, forging-ahead attitude full of grit and devil-may-care slant of mind, while mentally nurturing the rekindling of the goals perceived as hibernating.

The triggering events were two: the first has already been mentioned above, whereby I felt- not quite appropriately, for no one had stopped me- as if I was now free to pursue my own ends; the second was the movie we saw that night; it was based on a book written by one of India's famous whiz kids. The fact that this man's book could be made into a successful big banner movie, conflagrated my desires for some substantially more worldly success. A thousand of my pet projects came tumbling out of my mind's recesses, clamoring for fruition.

At just that moment the thought of the Ashta Sila  came to mind; one of those eight precepts enjoins oneself to abstain from watching entertainment shows. The reason for undertaking the precept became apparent as I went over my mental frame of that day. So powerfully disturbing was the effect of the movie that the meditation session of the morning -after had hardly a moment of Mindfulness in it. Not only these entertainment shows leave your mind distracted, sometimes agitated as well, as in my case, but, and importantly, it takes away scarce time that could be used in Practice.

As if to shame myself further, I had already committed to one more 'sufi music' concert the following evening....prayers for myself and my well being!

The spell of a towering ambition for worldly success has the potential of clouding one's sense of discernment to the same degree as a period of rage; only the spell of ambition lasts longer and is hard to be aware of, where as, at least to some infinitesimal degree, one is aware that one is angry when one is so. This is an insight I was not aware of so clearly right till then.

The question that reared its head then was how to conduct one's life in a balanced manner? I mean how much of ambition to stoke and how much to douse? Perhaps the answer lies in doing the best under the situation, doing it with the intention of highest good for all concerned, all the while being crystal clear about the motives deep within- aligning these with the highest good, and then to let the results take care of themselves. No, it doesn't end there- one has to learn to accept  the result, as it is, and then move on. To do this again and again with every presenting opportunity to exert one's ability, and to do it while being aware as it is being done, if that can be done, would be a big success in itself!

On top of this disturbing frame of mind that day, there was also the news of a dear friend having undergone a coronary angioplasty over the previous weekend. These events in one's circle of friends also influences oneself; this time the effect was a sobering one. In a funny sense, such news can act as a measure of helping one's cholesterol- I let the very enticing biscuit fall back in its container on hearing of the news. This time, however, I knew that I was dropping the biscuit as I was doing it!

The Patient, My Coach.

Chitra, a 61 year old bespectacled, sari-clad lady came to consult me for pain in both her knee joints that she had been having for about three weeks. It had resulted from her tripping over a watering hose in her compound while she tried reaching over to her neighbor over their common wall in an attempt to pass on a delicacy she had just made.  This neighbor, a lady of about the same age, had accompanied Chitra.  While I was not particularly looking forward to this depth of detailed description of her injury, it seemed to flow quite naturally from her. I noticed that she was actually quite casual in reporting it to me and had sought my opinion perhaps as a last resort now that the pain was causing a limp even after three weeks of, what was in her assessment, a trivial trip over a hose pipe. Usually, patients are reticent in giving their details, and I could not but help noticing the absence of that trait in Chitra.

The injury seemed to be bothersome to her in other aspects of her activities of daily living, and the knees were minimally swollen. As a part of getting more information about her medical history, I asked her if she had diabetes; declining that she had it, she volunteered that she did have hypertension, and that it was well controlled with just a tablet twice a day.  Saying so, she paused and then looked at her neighbor. Now, this lady urged Chitra to tell me “everything”. 

The Crying Professor.

It was the professor's weekly round day and his residents were awaiting his arrival in the large and crowded children's ward of the government general hospital. The professor was also doubling up as the head of department of paediatrics.

All the residents, juniors and seniors, looked forward to the professor's grand round for they all agreed that the prof's round was like no other anywhere else, not only in the hospital's other departments but perhaps anywhere else in the country.