Praying for Peace

"In the wake of Pathankot attacks, we need Indo-Pak peace like never before. Based on the idea of the power of prayer when done in numbers, Pray for Peace Day organizers ask people to take the time to pray for peace between India and Pakistan and spread the word. Open to people of all faiths and ages.The idea is to stop what you are doing and focus your thoughts/ meditate/ pray for peace and better relations on Jan15, for just 1-3 min between: - 8-9 am US west coast - 11-12 noon US east coast- 9-10 pm Pk time- 9.30-10.30 India time- People in Australia etc please join at the earliest time you are awake on Jan 16."

This event, promoted by friends on Facebook, is underway as I write. This is not a time when I can stop for three minutes and expect not to be disturbed. So writing this post is my meditation and my prayer.

We're just people. All of us. We delight in the same things and differ just as predictably. When we see each other as people, we seek out the things we have in common. When we imagine each other as collectives, we dwell on the divergences. Right now, in this month, in this year, if we could increase the moments in which we can see each other--across any markers or borders--as individuals with stories and struggles, it may be easier to remember that we are bound by a shared destiny on this planet. Perhaps. I hope.

My prayer is that we should be able to find those moments, that positivity and optimism and the strength to ignore the omniscient and cynical realists in our midst, everyday. 

Peace depends on the power of my imagination and yours, and on the depth of our empathy. To borrow from the famous Peace Prayer (although you do not need to be a person of faith to live this prayer everyday and work for peace.)

"Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. 

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console,

To be understood as to understand,

To be loved as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

It is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

Memory lane and posterity

When I was a teenager, I would date things with 'posterity.' I am not sure what that meant to me. It's hard to imagine 30 at 17, leave alone posterity. I am not even sure now what I intended that to convey to those who would read the date--say, on a book. I may have just wanted to connect in some way to something larger than my life, something distant, another time.

Since we left Bombay, there is another journey always underway in my mind--nostalgia. My dreams are often located in our Bombay home. Places--and people--in Bombay evoke special warmth. Even though I know that nostalgia paints reality in pretty colours, because on trips back I see that the underlying colours are also pretty, I do not discount that warmth.

Last month in Bombay, I took photographs as if to hold on to this great city. I bought little things--tea-strainers from our old plastic shop, oranges from our fruit vendor, pistachios and hand-made paper--as if taking them with me would transport the city to my present location. I took selfies with old friends, photos that maybe in a while neither of us will have time to look at.

Does any of it matter though? As we march into posterity, each of us, we are simply creases, temporary impressions on something constant that we do not understand.

As we dealt with the possibility of having lost many of the NGO's files when the computer stood in water during last month's floods, I reminded myself that through most of human history, our remains have vanished without a trace. It is sad not to have records of other times and peoples, but it does not make a huge difference to most of our lives, does it? In our time, we over-document, archive and back-up but to what avail? Does any of it matter?

Time flows through our fingers--our lives--like sand. Nothing stops. Nothing can be held back.

And yet, there is something special about walking down memory lane. It is a way of bring past and present together, blending nostalgia with our sense that there is a 'posterity.' That integration, however fleeting, restores context to our lives. It helps us remember why we do things the way we do. We are not leaves adrift. 

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!