Labels or Maturity: What Do You Chose?

Labels on things and items work well, it gives recognition to quality, breeds familiarity and helps classify. They come quite handy and hence have become the norm now. But these labels when given to humans, although trying to achieve the same purpose, are derogatory because they hurt feelings, and unlike non-living things, homo sapiens have been blessed with emotions. Moreover, unlike these non-living items -intentionally produced at differential quality levels at the very hands of us humans, to cater to the wide spectrum of demographics and emotions; controlling the so-called “judgeable characteristics” of humans, does not lie within the whims and fancies of mortal powers. Even the behaviour, unique to each human, is essentially an unconscious byproduct of the context the human was born in, again out of pursuit of human control. And we more often tend to forget this, and end up hurting each other’s feelings and disrespecting the cosmic intelligence that created this diversity amongst us humans, an absolutely necessary precondition for the survival and functioning of this mortal world.

However, as the omniscient buddha has already told us, accepting an insult or comment or even a compliment, remains our choice. And we can choose to not take words to heart, by choosing to ignore them. There is, although, another way as well. And it came to light to me, when I was asked a weird question, by a friend.

The friend was curious to know – why was I called a tomboy – a label conferred on me by, as far as I can remember, my cousins, relatives etc, when I was in my final years of schooling. Being a curious cat, that I was, I googled it, understood it. But it didn’t bother me, because I had the understanding that being biologically female need not be associated with appearing feminine as well – as luckily, the genotypes carried by my two X chromosomes, were not linked to the expression of the phenotypes like softness, shyness, fragility, constant need of a XY chromosome, or dependence on anyone else all the time – and rather were a result of acculturation. And more fundamentally, because I loved who I was and my personality, and I never felt the desire to possess those society defined ‘girly’ qualities, which to me were undesirable.

And being a biological female did not mean that she cannot be strong, independent, opinionated, fierce, sound, logical, outspoken, brave and yet silent. The question, by my friend, hence, definitely stirred up some visible anger and irritation. Yet, the conversation did not end there. I was asked to define, what I meant and understood by “tomboy” which to me seemed like a useless exercise, not because I did not know it, rather as it was unimportant to me. And since it was a redundant exercise to me – where people labelled others, for characteristics that seemed misplaced according to them, I gladly played along, just in order to stay away from baseless and meaningless conversations. And yet, here I was, on that fateful day, trying to avoid a conversational debate, that I knew might cost me some respect for that friend.

Since, these labels we often tag onto others, just like the ones on those beautiful things and items, are removable, easy to be peeled off, leaving behind no marks, if taken off properly. Otherwise,.. they do tend to leave on lingering stickiness, that does eventually wash off, but in the process might make us emotionally entangled, by the mere attachment that it had with us, that we aren’t letting go, as we hold on to it, refusing to put in the effort of removing it – the strange, uneasy act of sitting with ourselves, asking why we react, and whether we need to, and what, if anything, it truly does to us, until we give it the attention and our reaction. Just like the fact that unevenness causes fire only under friction, and remains harmless when smoothened with acceptance.

And just as the friend ruminating over my tomboy label kept on trying to provoke me into a probable rant or complaints that I might be harbouring, we approached the crossing. And my repeated claims of unbothered-ness and my irritation from the provocation, made me realize, that this entire exercise remains fruitless when the ears that it falls on, do not heed the desire to put on someone else’s shoes, in order to respect the journey of the other and acknowledge the reasons that made it so. Or maybe simply because they do not have the intellectual and emotional maturity that is needed to do so.

Evolution of Failure

Asking about someone’s definition of success is easy, not because they have it, but because the society has already defined it for all of us- irrespective of the circumstances and the sphere. However, asking about someone’s definition of failure is a very unwarranted query with not a substantial answer, obviously because the society hasn’t reduced our effort by defining it for us as it considers failure unworthy of a definition like untouchables considered by the brahmins.

Failure is a taboo subject, mere talking of which is not right and committing it makes you the ultimate sinner! In fact, quite often it is that unknowingly our parents and relatives make us realize that.

Thinking of it as a practice that might have been introduced in the society to encourage people to succeed and work hard and thus contribute to the growth of society and oneself, over the period of time, this portrayal of failure has done more harm than good. In a culture that advocates change as the only constant, the concept and perspective associated to failure has remained unevolved for centuries now and thus lost the meaning for which it was created. And the extent of this damage can be observed in the fact that the people have even stopped trying which in turn has led to the stagnation in the birth of new ideas. The fear of failure that was stilled long ago into the minds of the people still envelops them like a cobweb. The most worrying consequence is that even if people have now started to open up to failure with the change in the mindsets of the society, they haven’t been able to come to terms with it. It is easier to accept failure against the society’s parameter with support but very difficult to accept failure against the parameter of our own expectations for ourself. It is one thing to accept the society’s norms and another to alter your own to redefine failure. This is where, the age-old paradigm of failure has done the most harm. The wound is deep here and that is what we need to address by bringing about an evolution in the concept of failure- realizing the fact that not unless you have tried, will you fail, and not unless you try will you have a chance to succeed.

City of self-memoirs-1

The city of self that i behold is a fascinating one, it embodies strange thoughts and fancies and demands; things that seem weird and impossible. It does weird things…without reasons. Everyone has it I think.

Looking in the mirror is one such of its whims. However strange it may seem, but I really never had the need to. I never even thought of looking in my mirror-self and its strange. Its strange because ideally being a girl I should have. Even while making my hair I cannot remember if I had ever the need to look at one, because I was adept at it. Be it making a pony tail, or a braid or be it parting my hair, I could always do it without having to look at it. And otherwise also looking at a mirror to see myself or posing in front of it was not my thing. Maybe, because the mirror did not have that much of an importance in my life, just a useless piece of accessory… or no..maybe because i was a tomboy. May be it was my confidence in myself. Or you might call it overconfidence.?! was it my pride? or was it my faith? was it because i deemed myself to be perfect? or was I content with my imperfections? was it right? or wrong?whatever the reason might be..I had never looked at myself in a mirror before, until one day when i was forced to see. ….and thereafter i have started to look at it, though its just a little, yet i look at it now..and i cannot tell if its right or wrong for I don’t know whether i see it because i have lost my self-belief. Or because is it only now that i have started to look at the devils inside myself.!!

Dreams & Fear

Dreams are a strange thing.

Dreams that you have wanted to achieve, that have become your goals, dreams which don’t let you sleep.

Dreams that have now become an indispensable part of your life, non separable, to an extent that many a times it seems that you are being driven by them, rather than being the other way round.

They bring a purpose to your life, a sense of accomplishment when you achieve them, a motivation for you to work, to break the moulds you had set yourself in.

But(there’s always a but), there is something scary too that they bring along with themselves.

 They bring fear. The fear of loosing them, as if loosing some loved ones. The fear of failing, the fear of loosing them- your dreams, the dreams that you have calmly and patiently gestated to turn them into a reality. The dread of not being able to achieve them due to any reason- be it your slack, or not being capable enough, or just because luck didn’t work out well. You dread the mere thought of you not being able to be what you have thought of being, what you have dreamt of being.

The fear that also many a times stops you or creates hurdles in your journey to your destination. But the fear is important, it makes you realise how much you love your dream, how important it is to you. It makes you feel alive and worthy.

 It makes you go head over heals for it, it hurts you, it teaches you, it makes you turn yourself into a better and befitting version of yourself. It’s the fear of not being able to achieve this dream of yours that helps you overcome all the worst and difficult times that your journey puts you through, and it’s never easy; you are tested at every step, and you feel like giving up, but your fear, your dream doesn’t. This is what keeps you going through the toughest storms, the darkest of nights and the deepest of oceans to be who you want yourself to be. Because it’s not at all easy to follow your dreams, leave everything what the world tempts you with to work for what you desire.

The desire that you know is not just a thought or a motive, its like the love that you nurture for something that you have created and given all your sweat and blood for the child-your dream- carefully giving it the freedom to bloom and then trimming its wings at times that demanded so, when you felt that those could have been wrong.

And so you work, and you know its worth working for. In the journey, you even walk through hell, if it so demands and give whatever it takes. You become the revolution that you want to happen to the world, to achieve what you want, even if it demands changing the world; because revolutionaries don’t just happen they are made through the life’s most enduring tests.

 And in this beautiful process seared with scares of glory and pains of bravery, you transform. Your dreams and the fear of not being able to achieve them, commands you to be yourself.

So, just don’t be afraid and be a version of yourself the world has never seen a copy of and could never ever see again, be different, dare to be different, take on everything that is thrown at you, dare to be a wolf in a herd of sheep. Live through every rough patch to be an improved version of yourself.

Dare to be YOU….!!!

RAM- a God or a Skillful human?

I have loved Indian culture for the ease with which they portray such complex concepts to the reader with such simplicity through stories and also because they have such a diversity in the character pool with the story always being so timeless, that it remains relevant always and Ramayana used to be one of them for me. Having watched it so many times in different formats since childhood, I had already had it by-heart, when I sat again for this Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana re-telecast. I watched it with a predetermined mindset of what new they could have shown or what new will I find in this story, that would change my narrative for it, I knew the story already- the birth, Ram-Sita marriage, the legendary exile, the unique war, a bit shameful Sita’s fire test, a close to happy ending and then the most controversial and debated of all the excerpts of Ramayana, the disowning of Sita by Ram.

If not all, but almost every woman(and some men too), including me, has been tormented with the “apparent” disrespect of Sita by Ram after freeing her from Lanka. And no matter what explanation I read on the internet or so, I could never understand it. So many times, have I inquired Ram within the realms of my mind and tried to, in some way or the other, justify, what he did, but I could never produce a sensible answer. And this has sub consciously poisoned my reverence for him as a God, inspecting and decoding each of his decisions and responses, and testing whether or not his actions justified his almighty stature of God, because clearly for me his handling of Sita related matters were not god-like at all. I now think there are two ways to explain my interrogation of ram- one of a self analysis process to understand why he did what he did and the other that of revenge, a personal vendetta for treating women in his life like that. Lest, howsoever we may see it, the conclusion of this process was that I started to think of him as a mere human- strong, brave, intelligent, skillful- but just a despondent human in the clutches of the life playing itself through him and he being a mere puppet, acting as best he could with his abilities. I would often compare the two Vishnu avatars – Rama and Krishna- for their wits and intelligence and obviously Krishna would win. And slowly and steadily as this ramification went on in my mind, Ram descended from the stature of God to that of a normal human being, who had skills but not the wits or guts to treat or respond to the people who wronged him in some way or the other.

But clearly, this time was different. Maybe, I was watching it after a long time with quite a mature mindset or that due to such rigorous analysis over the years or because of a larger knowledge pool that i possessed now, this time when I saw this epic, I watched it like Sherlock decoding a crime scene- I could clearly reason and relate his each and every step, why he did and how was it relevant or a better option. I could make out clearly his god like attitude and stature from what he did- his strategy, his foresightedness and also the responsibility to carry out a task that he was enforced with.

Crisis

During various times, whether was it while reading or while seeing the news related to communal or religious riots and violence, I used to pray to God to actually bestow the human kind with a war or a natural disaster wherein the people could break free from their constricted mind-sets and would bond over humanity, empathy and helplessness to realise that there are things superior to us and beyond our control. This prayer wasn’t just a repercussion of angst or frustration that emerged out of the helplessness I bore at those times, the incompetence of not being able to make people understand that we all are different yet same, that there is no religion greater than humanity, rather, the prayer was what I thought – would be the most effective solution to the humanitarian crisis and also environmental crisis that we seem to be in now. I used to literally analyse as much as I can, the factors and reasons behind the thinking that led to such crisis, and I realised all those could be summed up in the fact that millions of years of evolution and yet we couldn’t learn to accept people’s differences. Anything and everything that wasn’t like ours was wrong and to justify it we raced to prove everybody else wrong. And it’s laughable that we only thought of proving others wrong and not ourselves right, had we tried the latter approach, we could have gone in a better direction and have corrected so much of wrong. Well, thinking of having realised what could have been the mistakes, I carefully drafted a prayer, a request to god to do something powerful enough that could show us humans, our insignificance, our powerlessness and send our egos off. I thought a major disaster or war could actually bring in empathy for each other, it would bond us together in times of fear and pain, make us better at understanding people and realizing that the differences we have, are the diversity we must possess as a human species to sustain ourselves and progress further as a complex community consisting of living beings.
Today when indeed we face such a situation I realize, I was right to a great extent, when I see two religious enemies stranded together, help each other, forgetting about their differences and only remembering their human similarity, knowing a man cannot be an island; or when I see nature heal itself; when I see societies level up to some extent when I see capitalists shudder as much as poors in wake of though different reasons but which are linked together in the economic world we have built. It’s times like these when people realise each other’s worth and in the process of recovery rediscover and help each other.
However hard I may have prayed, I now understand I never have myself thought of it ever becoming a reality, since I prayed for it but never wanted it. The past few weeks have manifested in people a weird terror and panic, that the things that they might have prayed for like jobless holidays at home doing nothing, would seem like a bondage for them. The prowess we thought we had of scientific excellence seems to have abandoned us, and the world demanding outward perspective as come to force us to turn inwards. It does make me think, that how low had we fallen that we need to suffer so much to wake up to the grimness we have taken ourselves to and I do wonder would it be enough to make us go home, and if not what can? and worse- how it will be when that comes?!

REGRETS

Two of the greatest regrets a person can have- one- of being misunderstood, especially in ways we couldn’t even dream of imagining. The most frustrating part of all is sitting up thinking and evaluating just how did the person misunderstand you, what word or phrase did you say that had double meaning or where exactly was the punctuation mark misplaced, what…..What was it that transformed the meaning of your statement completely into something that even you are stunned to hear. And, infact, at times it’s even more mind boggling and eventful to contemplate how the conversation could have gone but rather, how it went and the consequences to follow. Each time you teach yourself to be cautious enough and still end up getting judged wrongly, you ultimately realize it’s actually not your fault, but a serious fault in your stars. The other, well the other is more of a shock- the state of speechlessness when someone we think knows us well,  taunts us but we chose to remain silent, not because we cannot speak or that we don’t have anything to talk about or that we are timid, but rather because we think it’s too low for us to salt the wounds of that person, especially when we believed him/her to be from our own pack. Calling it just regret would be an understatement of the palate of emotions we experience, a juxtapose of sadness as to why is it that people take our silence to be our weakness, anguish of why the speaker can’t be considerate enough, when we are being the same to him/her and a rebuttal that we go through, in our minds, justifying why we can’t demean people just the way they do. Oh god!, But that why, that very why, emerges strong every single time, and that is why we can never belong to the opposite side of the argument line. Though the arguments can justify the why of our nature, I have never been able to understand firstly, why people equate ‘being good’ to ‘being weak’. Yet again, not everybody has the audacity to understand that being good is not an obligation but rather a choice- brave to make, difficult to follow and highly irresistible when something of the two happens.

It wasn’t just a moon mission…

I was watching the Vikram Lander’s final 15 minutes live, acutely attentive and focused to see the very first steps of our spacecraft on moon just like a parents’ eager wait for their child’s first steps, for as if the Chandrayaan2 was a national common child and there had been a cumulative and time taking journey that we have been through for just those moments of touchdown.
A mission so close to us all, the ingenious child of ISRO ,we had all seen it gestate successfully through all the hurdles and this was just the final step, everything had been going just so perfect- meticulously perfect all through this while, we all just knew it was going to land, we knew it would successfully, none of us had even a slightest tinge of doubt or any smell of failure, the nation watched we all watched….15..14..13..12..11..10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3…….And there was only numbness. Oh god that anguish, that pain, that irritation , that desire to just myself go and put the lander properly on the moon’s surface. The scientists had gone pale, tears in their eyes, as if watching their child die. Something had happened, an error- it could have happened at any step, at any of the manoeuvres, at any of those difficult steps but why then and there, why at just the last second, without even giving a hint or chance to mitigate the error.
I realised after some time that destiny had played a cruel joke on us, and the only thing I could imagine was is it that Pakistan’s prayers had succeeded, or was it any of our bad karma that had resulted into this havoc. It was as if some supernatural force had deliberately pulled it way from the landing.
While moaning for this, brought back some glimpses of my own very similar failures and reminded me this is what happens when destiny doesn’t cooperate with hard work. It bought me face to face again with a very prudent inhibition of mine, which I had with a great amount of will and reasoning, declared impotent and brushed aside in my mind palace so that it does not trouble me. But to my dismay there it was, enlivened again, echoing a fact in my mind- that Destiny is not slave to hard work or smart work and it wobbles around on its own in an unimaginable pattern, beyond homo sapiens’ comprehension.
The fact that it was just 5 to 10 percent of the task brought me some relief but no respite and I stand questioning why is it that many a times we know we have worked very hard, we have given it all, we have sacrificed and have diligently and patiently strived hard , then why is it that success eludes us, why is it that every time we fail on reaching so close to our goal, what is it that is going wrong, where do we fall short, and just when I am thinking this I remember a line-
If something happens according to your wish it’s good,
But if things don’t happen as desired its even better,
Because then it is that god has planned something greater for you.