The hardest commitments to keep...

...are the ones we make to ourselves.

Like this promise to write everyday. It has been so easy to let the mind fill with a hundred thousand details about taxis, milk, vegetables, office, this, that... and feel at the end of the day, that my brain was too blank (or too full) to write. It was not about time. This little daily exercise takes barely thirty minutes once I sit down to it. It was about filling the mind with so much minutiae that I could say, "I am too tired to start a creative exercise." Despite the most minimal terms of this commitment--that I should write everyday, without specifying content or quality or length.

This is also true of the promise to exercise which I have made a lifetime habit of evading. I have modified that too (don't fault my creativity on these counts!) to the most palatable formulae--I walk inside our flat to an "eight" route I have charted that keeps me constantly moving, and because I walk in the house, I don't have to change, I don't have to wear shoes and most important, I don't run into random people I have to smile at. Walking at home also allows me to listen to music without sweaty earphones.

I move to the music, which I vary with my energy level. Sometimes it's a slow, persevering stroll with a classical ghazal. Sometimes it harks back to my ABBA days. Sometimes it's something in between, like Madredeus. And the walk slowly builds from the first to the second to the third kaalam, building more movement into every beat.

And still, I find reasons not to walk.

My yoga practice too falls by the wayside. It is a personalised routine, combining movement with the chanting I love. Sometimes my heart will not lift enough to speak out the chant--which defeats their yogic purpose. Sometimes the struggle with an intermediate position makes me skip an asana. Sometimes I just do the pranayama, thinking, there are not enough of them in my practice to make it meaningful. Everyday for almost three months, I have found reasons not to do yoga. And believe me, it is not my first lapse in practice. (This is why my first post needed to be about that persistent Spider.)

But why is it so hard to keep promises we make to ourselves? I am not so bad at keeping even the promises I do not make to others. I remember what they want. I remember what they need. I remember what they once appreciated. I try to enable their commitments. So why is it so easy to renegotiate the promises I make to myself? Even the ones that renew you--like writing, walking and yoga--enough to keep your commitments to the world.

Life-lessons (from Incy-Wincy Spider and other heroes)

Incy Wincy Spider climbed up the waterspout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Up came the sun and dried up all the rain.
Incy Wincy Spider climbed up the spout again.

Simple rhymes and stories hold lessons all of us need to learn early in life. Take Incy Wincy, whose efforts since time immemorial to reach the top of the waterspout have been in vain and who still continues to try, generation after generation. (See Wikipedia on its origins!) 

My New Year's Resolution, insofar as it is one, was a pact with a friend to blog everyday. On the very first day,  I could not settle down in the morning, and by the evening, had forgotten all about it. Taking heart from Incy Wincy's endless endeavour, I am going to start over this morning and catch up with myself.

And what better way to start than to reflect on the abiding utility of nursery rhymes and children's stories? I am quite sure that their lessons (unabashedly called 'morals' in my time!) shaped the way I live. Incy Wincy prizes effort and process over outcome. In this corporatised age, even those of us engaged in work whose gestation is lifelong--like teaching and social change--get asked: What are your deliverables? What are your measurable outcomes? From Incy Wincy, who would be judged a failure by these standards, I have learned to more or less tune out silly questions like that.  

Another favourite, that I realise most people have never heard, is Samathur Sandhai. This is the story of a scatterbrained villager who is hanging out with his neighbours near the big road outside the village. (We've all seen them, the groups of idle men that hang out together, watching the world go by.) A caravan of cattle-drawn carts ambles towards them. They watch for a while till someone says, "I wonder what that's about." Our hero sets off promptly. Returns with an answer: "It's a caravan." The rest chuckle and one says, "We can see that. A caravan of?" Off he goes, to bring the answer, "Brinjal." 

"Oh, brinjal? What for?" 
Huff-puff.
"Sale."
"Sale where?" 
The caravan has passed by their village now, and it's a longer run.
"Market." (Sandhai)
Exasperated, "Market where?"
After a long time. "Samathur." Then accusingly, "I had to run all the way to Samathur to find out."

Now, if our hero had asked all these question on the first trip, would he have had to run all the way? Yet, so many people we meet function in this pointlessly tireless, and ultimately, common sense-less, way. What a waste of life! 

Incy Wincy and the Samathur Santhai (anti?-)hero mark two points on the effort continuum. One remains focused on the process of doing and the other is so unfocused that his effort is a waste. 

In the last year, I have found myself narrating the Samathur Santhai story over and over again, and usually to adults who have never heard it and who therefore function exactly like its hero. They say, in spite of having grown up in Tamil Nadu, that they have never heard this Tamil folktale. Some have never heard folktales at all and narrate TV and film stories to their children. That makes me want to cry--a little for the loss of heritage and mostly for the loss of common sense.  

If we forget these rhymes, these stories, where will we learn these small but critical lessons about how to live? Today, recall your favourite childhood story and share it with someone else. Maybe even write it into the comments on this post?

PS: A counterpoint to this is the compulsion writers of children's books in India seem to feel to deliver a moral with a story rather than a story with a moral. But that's the subject of another post!

A glimpse of MY India

My great-uncle, Padi Venkatrama Krishnamoorthy, was born and raised in Rangoon in a Tamilian family, teaching himself Rabindra Sangeet by listening to lessons offered on the radio. In his very musical family (also mine) genres run into each other like colours in a leheriya dupatta--you start a song in one mood and genre and the odd phrase takes you into another state of mind, language and musical world. All this before we learnt words like medley and mash-up. For three generations, we grew up singing everything we heard, making up our own words some of the time, but always faithful to the tune and the beat, and never forgetting the background music.

Krishnamoorthy Mama's All-India Radio (and later Doordarshan) career took him all over India, and his work facilitated his hanging out with the best musicians of the moment.

Today, he shared with us that AIR Kolkata's collection of 'Ramyo Geete' has three of his compositions. These are all songs we have grown up hearing, sung by him and by aunts, uncles and cousins over and over again. I honestly had little idea of who had sung the original recordings of "Mama's songs." In my universe, he has always loomed larger than those recording artists.

Trying to locate the CDs so I can buy a set, I found the songs on YouTube and heard the original recordings for the first time.

This medley of Kanchipuram-Padi-Rangoon-Kolkata-Cuttack-Delhi-and-any-other-cultural-element-you-want-to-add--this is the India I inherited.

Those wretched three fingers

Like the festival season or the season for sales, it seems always to be the right season for protest and outrage.

Somebody says something and by 8 a.m., we’ve all gone up in smoke. By 9, we’ve ranged ourselves on either side—because it’s always a binary, right. We’re sure of our positions. Everybody knows about everything, and therefore, can arrive at a position on all matters expeditiously. 

As I slowly wake up to the day, I am often surprised by the news, and before I can wrap my mind around it and place it in context, I see that verdicts have been delivered.

We seem to be easily incensed, quite often infuriated. I worry about some of the things we outrage about (see, outrage has even become a verb now!).  We outrage about casual remarks. We outrage about life-choices. We outrage about genuine mistakes that others make. We outrage about the way things are done—by a person, by a community, by an office, by an organisation. And now we outrage about the outrage of others, asking why are they protesting thus and why choose this moment to protest.

I worry about this. To be honest, it scares me.

Does everyone (except me) really know what the perfect action or words are in every situation and what the perfect moment is to deliver them? Do we know exactly what the correct way to do something is? Can we predict the outcomes for that correct way with perfect confidence? The question I worry about most is this one: Can we be sure we would get it exactly right in the other person’s circumstances? I am not.

Yes, there are some things about which we can be sure, each of us. We can be sure of what we value. We can be sure of what strains our tolerance. We can be sure of what we do not consider acceptable. But can we be sure we will always meet our own standards or live up to our own ideals? I do not know.

Nothing frightens me more than the ring of certainty—in the king and in the mob, both.

I worry about our insistence that all our actions, each of ours, should be consistent within our lifetimes. Is being consistent a virtue or is being able to change with the times a virtue? Is change growth or fickleness? The answer is probably not an either-or answer. But I know that sometimes I let things go and sometimes I react. In both situations I am being true to myself. Can that be wrong? Can I impose upon another my demand for them to be consistent when I cannot? That does not seem right to me.

I feel pusillanimous in my inability to call for blood at all times. Indeed, I have no taste even for the endless argumentation that in India is a sign of intelligence. I want to hear from you and maybe share a little, to learn—that is all. Let’s keep it quiet and gentle—and safe for us to set aside our egos and defences and hear each other out. Perhaps this is because I am not as smart, articulate or passionate as those who would argue into the night. 

Enough, my heart whispers to my mind, very quickly. I let things pass. Everything does not require my commentary or intervention.

Yes, there are things I feel strongly about too, and if you pay attention, you will know what they are and how I feel. I too know how to speak my mind and how to speak out. But I am grateful that till date, I also know how to listen and learn. I have still not learned everything.

And I remember learning this in school: When you point a finger at someone, three fingers point back at you.

In my case, they point to a person who doesn’t always understand what’s going on. There are a few things I know a little bit about and heaps and heaps of things about which I know virtually nothing. I try to learn as much as I can, but that is a lifelong process. I kind of know why I do what I do in a given moment. I make the best choice I know to make. It may not be the best choice ever nor even a good choice. But being true to myself in a given moment might mean acting on that choice regardless of what follows. In time to come, I will learn more and I may know better. But for today, I am doing my best. The three fingers point to a human being doing the best she can. 

That is all.