Treading water, typing words

Of all the promises I make to myself, exercise is the most easily broken, followed by writing. And I do not make many promises to myself so that's a hefty percentage! Why is it so hard to make time for either of these--both in their way life-giving? 

But that's not what I want to write about. I actually have nothing to write about in this post. This is a treading water, typing words post, intended to remind me of how good it feels to write. If I keep typing, I will remember that it is possible to write. It is possible.

All through the day, I am writing or typing perfectly composed pieces on this and that--in my head. I could be jotting them down on paper. I could be typing them into my phone as Notes or even, into a blog interface. I could be opening a new document on the computer. But I leave them in my head and like a rice-flour kolam, they are slowly consumed and disappear. 

That is fine. Must everything be documented and recorded for posterity? Life itself is a temporary condition. "Everything must change,"as the song goes. I do not lament my lost words. 

This exercise is about treating myself everyday to the physical pleasure of writing--somewhere, anywhere. It is not about preserving my thoughts and words. It is not about readers. It just feels so good to do this. I must indulge myself more often. 

Seeking Hope in Apocalyptic Times

In the eery stillness of the first weeks of the pandemic, the air heavy with anxiety and fear, it was hard not to think of the apocalypse. Would we ever emerge from this moment we could not understand, even as we registered the sudden deaths of people who were hale and hearty? The invisible peril from Wuhan was the stuff of mythology and horror films, terrorising humans who could not fathom what hit them but fell to it like ninepins.

Alongside the pandemic, a steady stream of frequent climate-induced disasters--floods, tsunamis, cyclones--remind us of the mythological end of time in several cultures, Biblical rains and floods or the pralayam of Indian puranas. The Ark of our times has turned out to be a private yacht and most of us are still drenched. The Big Fish that was to save the planet seems to have eaten all the small fish. 

"Hell in a handbasket" has been a phrase I have come back to several times a day. Just look at who we have become, the newspapers seem to say to me: mean, petty, conniving, untruthful, vengeful, egoistical, selfish, self-serving, arrogant, oblivious, unable to feel compassion, incapable of empathy, opportunistic. We watch people being lynched and raped and we film them first before briefly performing outrage and then moving on. We are just horrible. 

Our leaders. The less said, the better. In Indian mythology, the Big Fish ate the small fish and corrupt, venal Manus (kings) who oppressed and exploited the people and the earth eventually provoked the Pralayam. 

You tell me--if these are not apocalyptic times, what are they? 

And then yesterday, Ela Bhatt died. 

I did not know her personally. But in recent times, we have lost so many of these good human beings. Principled. Devoted to people--not work, careers, causes--but people. Humane. Hard-working. Trying to live their values. Gandhians. When I type the last word in the context of death, my heart breaks a little more. 

This year, I finally visited Ahmedabad, a city that has been on my bucket list for almost four decades. The first stop we made was to Sabarmati Ashram. I sat on the verandah of Gandhiji's home for a long time, looking at the river, and asking desperately for the courage and determination to get up and do what is needed every morning.

Social media and the derivative news media that report social posts as news have introduced us to many individuals who are famous for being famous or famous because they post online. Good for them! But it is not people of this time I want to be like. 

I want to be like the Gandhians whose presence and work I have taken for granted all my life. I envy that sort of engagement in public life, the span, the depth. I want to communicate like Gandhi. I also want that disciplined daily routine that gently accomplishes so much and is so elastic it accommodates everyone. I want to read and write like Nehru. I want to persist and work in ways that make life better for people everyday--like Ela Bhatt and Jaya Arunachalam did, to name just two. I want to aspire to be truthful and good and I want to bring that simplicity to my messy life.

We have ingrained from the capitalist, corporate world, the imperative of measurement. How many steps did I walk? How far have I come? How many people did I meet? How much money did I raise? How many people did I feed? How many votes did I win? They matter somewhere but they also don't matter at all.

Sitting on the porch of Gandhiji's cottage, looking at the trees and looking in the direction of the river (the high wall that obscures it must be a metaphor for something), I tried to breathe and pray and in some way touch the space and energy of all those well-intentioned visitors who met Gandhiji here, who seem never to have said, "I am so frustrated" or "I am so burnt out." I did not quite succeed. But I did bring back something. Hope, perhaps. 

Ela Bhatt's life work, like that of all the other Gandhians including Gandhi himself, points to one thing--doing something everyday adds up. This is something I too have always known. But the apocalyptic scale of humanity's problems makes me feel--makes many of us feel--that our efforts are useless. They are not.

I am also struck as I leave this blogpost midway to do housework at the equanimity, even joyful acceptance, with which Gandhi embraced the routine, mundane maintenance tasks of life. I am very distant from that ideal, performing them at best with efficiency and more often, with irritation. I could suggest that it is because we are so much more stressed in these times but I am honest enough to suspect that it is also temperament. I am not as evolved and perhaps, as a woman, the expectation of my acceptance riles me as much as the work itself. Topic for another blogpost! The point is that those routine tasks are also part of the big change or the big resistance we say we seek.

Hope lies in solidarity. The deep loss I feel about Elaben's passing is also related to this. We connect to each other through our values and friendships and these keep us going in hard times. When storm winds knock us off our feet, it is the people who hold on in solidarity that keep us from disappearing. When we disappear, these are the people who keep asking: Where is she? When someone like Elaben passes away, we lose a strong, steadfast link in that chain, one that has stood up so long that she has anchored many, many others. 

With the loss of each Gandhian, it is as if that world of principled action and integrity in public life slips further away from my reach and becomes a memory that too will fade. They feel like the last bastion of quiet goodness and that bastion is crumbling. To be as the words of Gandhiji's favourite bhajan suggest, one who knows the pain of others, helps others who are suffering, without ego or pride, is the hard road to hope. 

Will our children ever know of this wonderful world of goodness? All we now know is this apocalyptic moment of invisible evils, nature in fury and amoral, immoral humans. 

I seek hope everyday. In the discipline of a daily routine. In hard work. In the sincere effort to be as good as I can--not good at something, but just good. In solidarity with others--expressed at minimum as compassionate thought, hopefully with empathy and sometimes, as public support. Hope is in my effort. Success is also in my willingness to try. Maybe that was the secret of the charkha and spinning--to centre oneself in the task at hand. To keep spinning anyway. 

Many years ago, I wrote this: 10 things to do in times of political upheaval, DNA, March 27, 2017. It does not seem like enough at this moment, but if this is all I can do, I must do this at least.  

Red Cedar Reminiscences

 

The Iron Man at Home

Today, my father would have turned 94. He passed away suddenly in 1995, leaving us to remember and miss him every single day. 

With each passing year, my experiences deepen my appreciation of the person he was. It is hard for children to truly appreciate their parents (a category that in India still includes grandparents, uncles and aunts) because they simply do not have the life experience to do so. But as we live through every vicissitude and recall what we have seen and heard from this older generation, we understand better even when we disagree and we appreciate more.

My father was confident. His parents did a marvelous job--or the universe did--of just making him comfortable being himself. In this world of branding and self-promotion, I appreciate my father's authenticity. He was always just who he was. I remember him speaking in exactly the same way--warm, honest, matter-of-fact, blunt--to everyone. It did not matter if it was a celebrity, a priest, an employer, a colleague, a cousin, an employee. He was himself, always, with no apologies. I have seen him in conversation with the garage mechanics who would ask him how to fix things and with my professors and with the shiny, posh people of his times. He was always himself. I am trying to find words to capture this and not succeeding. 

Who was my father? He grew up and went to school in a village. He had to get a job straight out of school and he was proud to say--to anyone--that he began by sweeping the floor. He was a machine-whisperer and could fix anything. He had a formidable work ethic. He rose to the top in his line of work by dint of these two things. He did not strategise his rise or network. If he liked you, he did and you knew. If he did not, he did not labour to hide it either. 

While he did not have the privilege of a college education, it did not stop him from being a reader and a book lover. Bookshops and book exhibitions were a favourite family destination. I got through chickenpox as a ten year old, reading two books a day, dutifully purchased by my father on his way from work. (I also got spectacles at the end of that summer!) My father travelled a great deal for work and books with boarding passes tucked in as a bookmark lined many shelves at home. A signal to us that he was sitting here, or there. Always a book with a boarding pass tucked in. 

My father was fearless. He shared his birthday with Vallabhbhai Patel, we learned in school. It made perfect sense. "Iron Man" meets "Iron Man." As a child, this unfamiliarity with fear meant my father would climb trees, swim across rivers and defy teachers (and be punished often for it!). As a young man, it meant he was a wild biker who met with many accidents. As an adult, he took adversity as it came--neither lamenting his fate nor bragging about his courage. What was, just was. He dealt with it as best he could. 

Always shielding us from impact. He was not a speech-maker or a hugger but my father lived his love of family. He was a quiet man, actually. He spoke very little and he would seem not to be listening or noticing. But then he would remember small things--fresh potato chips which were a favourite with nieces and nephews or to bring back 'Andhra killi beeda' from Madras for every single adult relative in Bombay. When difficulties came, I don't know how, but we still had music lessons and I still paid for French class. When other people faced problems, he would quietly show up, do what they needed and move on. When he died, we learned from strangers how much he had helped them. 

My father's heart was soft--unable to watch suffering even in movies that he knew had happy endings. It was large and generous, prompting him to give without counting or thinking twice. And it was very brave. 

My father's brave heart spent the hours before open heart surgery planning a new venture. What he had--work experience and a capacity to work tremendously hard. No capital. No fellow-enthusiasts. No business experience. He had the courage to try and the courage to fail. I think about this every single day of my journey with the NGO. He came out of the surgery and at a time when I see a lot of people pull shutters down and say, "I am a heart patient, I cannot do this or that," he simply took his patched up heart that surgeons told him was now 20 years younger and he tried. 

He also failed. Or do you ever really fail when you try with all your heart? That's something for me to meditate on today. To try and fail comes with a price in the outside world but on balance, it leaves behind a more magical legacy than an industrial empire--your children learn they too have the freedom to dream, to innovate, to do what moves them, in the way that they think is right. There are really no external standards. 

My father taught himself many things and he encouraged us to do the same. All appliances were accessible to us as soon as we could stand and balance ourselves! We were allowed to use the record player, the typewriter, the spool tape player, the cassette player when it came and cameras. He was shutter-happy and so are we so that we have some marvelous family photos over the years. Our willingness to learn new platforms and ways comes directly from him. He would have loved this age and been an enthusiastic early adopter of everything, including possibly TikTok (or whatever there is now!). 

My father could tune out wonderfully as well. He would immerse himself in the morning newspaper, in a book or in a programme on TV with the absorption of a child. He, who never spoke about his worries or troubles, would forget them--sometimes for the ten minutes in which he caught just the end and closing credits of a film, we teased! He would have loved this world of OTT shows and YouTube and Instagram and also had some caustic observations on some content! He could compartmentalise, always paying attention--while not seeming to--to the task at hand or the company around him.

I want to tell you that my father was a terrific cook. His vadai and chakkarai pongal remain unmatched. But while he liked to make the special dishes, he wasn't like most men raised in patriarchy who only do that and seek praise for making tea. He could do it all and made a lot of housework part of his daily routine--from bed-making to shoe polishing to cooking regular meals to buying vegetables. When I was 16, my mother was in bed for a few months. In any other household, I would have taken over. But in ours, my father did. Apart from the traditional housework, he also did other things like braid our hair every morning and mine was down to my hips! I did not realise that housework was gendered until someone in school commented on vadais my father had made! That too was a gift--the ignorance of patriarchal norms around housework!  

My father wanted to write his memoirs. He knew he'd had a remarkable life but he did not expect it to end when it did. While alive, he was too busy doing and living to sit back and mull and write. Still, he would not have looked back. No regrets, no maudlin nostalgia. What was, just was. 

When he died, I understood for the first time how lucky we were to have him. I had truly taken him for granted, as every child does. Now, memories of my father feel like meditations on life. As a child, visitors would comment on how I resembled him. Now, I hope I have ingrained some of his qualities too. 

Postscript: I learned as an adult in the US that there is such a thing as an 'Iron Man' Triathlon that involves swimming, cycling and running. Very fitting, for a person who'd been such an active youth! In one of our last conversations, he rued that being his daughter, I did not swim, bike or drive. He did all of them with great enjoyment!