Udaan

Jaagi hui raaton mein, 
Suljhi hui khamoshiyon mein, 
Aasooon ki shikayaton mein,
Palta hai har din ek khwab, 
Aur maangta hai koshishein behisab. 

Jo lage raastein kaanton se bhare, 
Ginna tum taare aasman ke saare, 
Jo lage dhundla sa koi bhi pal, 
apni hi gehrayiyon me paoge tum hal. 

Udte rehna tum pankh failaye, 
Mann ki aashayein ruh behlaye,
Hai bas junoon jo manzil ko pehchane, 
Sapnon ki gunjaishein khoob gul khilaye.

In the Moment...

                                                     

A few days back while having a nice long conversation on my terrace with a close buddy about the nitty gritties of writing as a process I remarked to him that I am fascinated by people who can do poetry, like himself. He said "it isn't that hard actually; you just have to really feel it. To the point that you have no choice but to pour it out somewhere". That made a lot of sense, especially since I have been discovering a lot about the process of writing itself in the last few days. That ‘feeling it’ thing really made me realize how good he was at literally being in the moment; he couldn't otherwise generate the beautiful lines that he does.

 Then I came up today to the terrace with my earphones, my music and a good book. While pacing the terrace with my music on, I did nothing except just notice myself, and everything around me. I noticed how I had been starting my day lately- with a lot of gratitude for the wonderful weather. I had been dreading the summer and had just not expected such lovely weather. It felt great to notice that gratitude had been the first thought and emotion of my day. I noticed the tree that was swaying in the breeze without its pink flowers, because they were now decorating the floor of the terrace. The tree knows me well, because there was a weird connection I felt with it when I first came to see this place while apartment-hunting. On the adjoining terrace, some of my neighbors had spread out their mattresses and were preparing for a good night's sleep. Natural air-conditioning is the best air conditioning they say. With weather like this, I definitely won’t argue with that. Strolling around some more, I got peeks into other homes from my bird’s eye position. People sitting in their living rooms, chatting inattentively with the TV on, a lady disinterestedly clearing up her kitchen, a kid feeding his dog in stealth mode every time his mom wasn't looking. A cool breeze came in, drawing my attention to how amazing it felt against my skin. I almost stopped my playlist to go down and bring up my own mattress to spend the night up here. What stopped me? Well, my fear of rodents.

I sat down leaning against one of the walls and stared up at the sky that twinkled with its brightest stars. Star gazing is just awesome. I could do it forever. I feel like they have a language of their own, don't you think? So often I have waltzed them through my thoughts and they listen, patiently and intently. They are there, like the few constants in our lives and so I gravitate towards them, and forget who I am and everything that seems to matter to me. And in forgetting myself completely, I can feel one with everything.

It was just perfect, like that was really all I ever wanted to feel and that was exactly where I wanted to be in that moment. Nowhere else. I wondered… how we try so hard to keep up with facades in all its various manifestations, how we convince ourselves of wanting things that we don’t really want and how we reason with ourselves to defend the value of some people in our lives even though they actually don’t really contribute any. And how we worry, all the time, about our future. The world’s many convoluted perceptions about ‘following one's heart’ has complicated it far too much. Sometimes I feel that our elders are messengers or agents meant to keep reminding us of these. I don’t blame them, for they only have our best interests at heart after all. But practicalities, they say, are what run our lives. And I think to myself…really? I mean I am not denying in any way the practicality of money, its significance in our lives and what it does for us- It gives us the freedom that everyone spends their entire lives trying to attain. But I don’t see why we can’t just be free in ourselves. Free in thought, in form, in expression, in essence. From whatever little I understand, it is the freedom of choice that everyone wants to arrive at eventually. What stops us from exercising it right now, in this very moment then? Is it fear? Of the consequences of being a free spirit…or fear of the incapacity to manage the awesomeness that it comes with?

One may wonder why it is so hard for us to be happy, because happiness exists in perpetuum, if we want it to. Perhaps the moment in itself has no power whatsoever. The moment can be inspiring, or morose. Calm, or dramatic. It can be whatever we choose to make of it. So the free choice we exert in such moments is really God’s hand here isn’t it? Maybe that is what the stars intend to tell us when they twinkle; that they don’t work independent of our free choice. That our acquiescence to their plans is just not as effective an approach towards life as much as our effortful collaboration and fraternization with them would be.  The constant seeking of external validation that we initiate for our own welfare must seem so ludicrous to them when all they expect us to understand is to let go, keep showing up every day and just… Be. If we learn to be the companion of the moment, we have probably achieved everything we have ever wanted, in its becoming from that moment on. I feel like in having this thought, I have arrived. Don't know where, but somewhere really good for sure. And I like the feeling a lot. So I think this is a companionship I want to invest in, for many years to come.

Have you tried it yet?

Masala chai...moving out...and the musings of an urban Indian woman…

"What? Your daughter is shifting? But why?! She has a perfectly good home here with you both around...and...it’s not like she is getting married and moving…or she has a job in a different city and had to leave home right?" Aah... What a wonderful conversation to overhear from the kitchen. I stirred through the masala chai I was preparing for myself while my mom's friend was reacting uninhibitedly to the news my mom had just given her - that her daughter was moving out and was going to live by herself, 10 minutes away from home itself. 

What I thought as completely normal, apparently, wasn't. And I think the lady wanted to incept an unnecessary abnormality of the idea into my mom' s head somehow. Resonating my state of mind, the chai I was stirring suddenly started bubbling and then boiling to the top, almost flowing out of the vessel. Breaking out of my trance I scampered to shut off the stove. I poured the chai out into my mug and took it back to my room, along with my interrupted but still on-going party of thoughts. I began to wonder about the reasons that made the idea of me moving out abnormal or unusual. Hmm... Not married and my work is in the same city so should still be living with parents. Right. So that basically implies that for a 'girl' (and believe me I am rolling my eyes when I say this) any thought, urge or desire and perhaps even the potential and capacity to live by herself without the support of her parents or ''partner" is ridiculous? I wonder what 'natural' parent or human instinct can reason with that ideology. Because, if we must talk natural, then most Indian parents are extremely unnatural. If we switch on discovery, Nat geo or animal planet and observe animal behaviour, we see that the minute the infant has learned to use its own hands, legs, paws, fins etc they are on their own. They learn to hunt for themselves, feed themselves and sustain their lives by themselves. Indian parents on the other hand often feel the contrary. Ever noticed an indian mother proudly saying "my child just cannot eat his food without me"? Or “my child just cannot get ready for school by himself/herself?". Handicapping children by making them dependent is the classic Indian strategy, which is weird because a strategy is often a specific plan or method for obtaining a certain goal or result. What result parents really wish to obtain through such kind of parenting is beyond me. And with us girls, everything just magnifies in its severeness automatically. Often I have wondered about the status of women in India and have usually reserved those thoughts for private contemplation because there has been so much discussion and debate happening around it anyway, especially post Nirbhaya. But maybe blurting it out might just help, who knows. 

A common view I hear from people from my parents’ generation (especially the women), is that “Girls these days just don’t want to compromise. No wonder the divorce rates have gone up so much”. Now, as much as I am aware of the unreasonable demands, expectations and behaviour some girls can have, this kind of statement is not just offensive to women on so many levels, but it is just plain idiotic, largely because it is so ill-informed (if informed at all). I once read a BBC news article (link below) about how divorce rates in India have doubled up. Of the many reasons stated for this phenomenon, one really caught my eye and I quote that here- “Today the Indian male, as opposed to earlier, is a very complex entity. We want our wives to be really progressive, modern, so to say, which is why we married them in the first place. But at the same time we still want our wives to cook food for us. We want our wives to be there when we get back home”. I want to talk about this a little. A lot of us women are leaving the comfort of our homes for studies or for a job and naturally this is going to affect our personalities as individuals, in that it makes us self-sufficient. Under these circumstances, we need to make our decisions and choices, which demand basic independent thinking. We are required to manage our lives-both personal as well as professional- just as any guy who moves out of his home for study or work reasons does. As kids, we girls have very often experienced biases in parenting. Meaning if we have a brother, then he is expected to contribute to the family by running errands ‘outside’ the house like paying bills, perhaps even getting the groceries, which he often does in sulk-mode. We on the other hand were expected to know how to cook and keep the house. The catch here is that since we are also going to school, then college, and then entering work-lives, we also learn how to run those errands ‘outside’ the house, in addition to knowing how to feed oneself and keep the house. 

To be fair, yes not all girls know how to cook and not all girls even like doing so. But the justification or reasoning we use for necessitating this skill-set in a girl, should just as much also apply to a guy and vice-a-versa. If guys are not required to know how to cook and keep the house because well “there are so many tiffin services or mess and canteen facilities and because the ‘bai’ does it for you”, then the same goes for girls as well (I don’t know of any tiffin service or mess that says ‘women won’t be served here’). Similarly, if a girl should know how to cook because “she should know how to feed herself and the family”, then the same logic should apply to guys too. The funny thing is, both the arguments above can be easily refuted if one has ever known what it is to live outside India and especially as a student. Because there, you are your own cook and bai. Tiffin services, canteens or mess and a bai are luxuries we have in India. 

My problem here is with gender stereo-typing. Why does something like cooking and house-keeping need to be gender stereo-typed at all? My sole reason for knowing how to cook should instead just be “self-sufficiency”. Just as I should know how to fix the fuse if it blows, or change a flat tire and have a basic understanding of my vehicle, fix my internet if it crashes down, or fix my laptop even. All because I am an individual. Not because I am a girl or a boy. That has got nothing to do with this, and I don't think it should  have anything to do with this. 

The idea of moving out and living independently was purely based on such reasoning- that of being an individual. I wanted to grow as an individual and no growth happens in one’s ‘comfort zone’. It has been a year since I have been living independently and there is so much more life that I have breathed in already. So much learnt, so much explored. There have been mixed reactions and responses from relatives and family friends and it was interesting and sometimes even entertaining. For most, it was an unusual concept primarily because my parents live in the same city and they found it particularly surprising or strange (or both) that I have grown closer to my parents ‘after’ having moved out. Here the unexplored concept of ‘space’ comes into picture. When kids tell their parents that they want ‘space’ it really is a good thing-for both parties. Because space and freedom, don’t come for free. They always come with responsibility. Youngsters need to understand that this space they crave and desire, needs to be earned. Bluntly put – if you really like the ‘my way or the high way’ slogan so much, then you need to get your ass out of your parents’ house first to discover the ‘I’ before jumping to the ‘my’ part. That check point is necessary. One also needs to learn how to successfully and effectively ‘manage’ this space. No “management” degree or college can ever teach you this by the way, but on the contrary, managing your own life and space successfully will give you an MBA for life, the value of which, principally, is much higher than an MBA earned from any premier institution (because this one will be priceless). 

Managing freedom effectively is the most desirable characteristic in an individual, because it builds one’s psychology for sustainable growth. Isn’t that what we strive for even as a nation anyway? Sustainable growth? Where does India stand in terms of ‘managing freedom’ can be a very good backtrack for us in fact to evaluate ourselves as a society and an even better thought to consider seriously would be whether we can really afford to indulge in gender stereo-typing and gender wars given that only the best accumulation of skill sets will form a productive generation.

So maybe it is time we start changing our perceptions and parenting strategies and adopt those which do not discriminate based on gender. The atrocities that have happened with women in our nation in recent times and which tragically are still happening, have all high-lighted the urgent need for a shift in perspective towards women-she cannot be treated with respect as an individual in the society if she is not perceived as one at home. Let’s do-away with gender stereotyping at home first and the rest I believe will fall in place. Godspeed to that.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12094360)

License for Parenting?

At the risk of being termed as a 'fundamentalist' and being severely criticized and hated for the view I am about to present, I have been able to bring myself to express this today in public:

                              "There should be a license for parenting"

My reasons for saying the above line can perhaps best be explained with the following reasoning:

I am not against reproduction-it is but of course a natural process, a biological one, to be precise. But ‘parenting’ is NOT. It is not an innate ability, like the ability to eat and digest food, or to breathe, but rather an ability that requires the development of certain skill sets. I wonder what on earth makes us believe that we would make ‘good parents’ just because we are over and above a certain age now and because we possess the biological ability to become parents now. It is like saying “I am now 18 years old, eligible to drive a car and hence I drive a car”. But does that translate into “hence I am a good driver?” To be a good driver and before even learning how to drive, one needs to understand the car first (yes our process of learning how to drive a car is also flawed by the way). Once you’ve understood the car, the parts it’s made up of, how its machinery works, what type of fuel you need to put in it, then you get to learning how to drive.

Parenting is exactly like that. A basic understanding of a ‘child’ is necessary-what does a child feel, how does the child express his/her feelings, when and in what way? What does the child’s world comprise of? What are his/her dreams/ fantasies, how does his/her imagination work? How does the child feel loved-through words or actions? Then we need to learn the strategies to handle the child at various crossroads. We must learn to switch gears with them every day because there will be speed breakers and rough roads. We must learn to balance our delivery of freedom and responsibility with them when they are climbing uphill towards achievement, just like the half clutch. When there is a ‘traffic jam’ in their lives we must learn to become the silent traffic cop, directing them out of the jam… and when we cannot agree with them and their opinions, we must learn to ‘parallel park’ our views with theirs-agree to disagree?

To be a good driver, one is also particular enough to choose a ‘good’ driving school. What school do we go to, to become ‘good’ parents then? Oh that’s right; we don’t, because our school for that is our own parents. So very often we try to apply the same “because I say so” attitude to a generation of children that has google giving them all the answers, unlike yester years when parents had all the answers. And then we make the gross mistake of ‘demanding’ respect from them instead of earning it. Well…google earned its respect from them. And why not? It upgrades itself every minute perhaps to make itself more ‘user-friendly’ with its applications, functions and options and takes into account the needs of its customer. How much do we upgrade ourselves to become ‘child-friendly’ then? No wonder as adults we are often faced with situations where we cannot give a rational answer to a very valid and rational question from a child. And the laziest and most pathetic approach to such a situation is that very “because I say so” answer.

I am not implying here that they should be given all the freedom in the world-but most of it, yes. And this will almost sound like a threat to many of us isn’t it? Because what then is our significance in their lives if we cannot scold them (for no valid reason) and assert our presence on them as parents in a hierarchical sense? (The problem does not lie in giving freedom, the problem lies in giving freedom without imparting the skill sets for responsibility & accountability to handle that freedom). Dictatorship and authoritarianism as schools of thought come from one’s insecurity about ‘control’ over others while democracy comes from investing ‘trust’ in others. Giving freedom comes from a ‘secure place’ and not from an ‘insecure place’. If we worry about whether to give children freedom, it just means that we do not trust our own database of knowledge and values and our process of ‘knowledge/value transfer’ to them. How then are we capable of becoming parents? It’s like a salesman selling a product that he doesn’t believe in.

Coming to the word ‘license’ as I’m sure many will find the idea of licensing parenting as harsh or ridiculous. Before I put forth my point, let me state here that 192 countries over the world (including India) have ratified a UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I work with kids and I get to see the results of ‘inappropriate parenting’ before my eyes very often (was that politically correct enough?). Now, speaking for India, some of us dismiss the RTO’s authority to give us a license and drive without a license anyway and well…some of us learn driving skills and then appear for the exam until we qualify for a license (no prizes for guessing that the latter would make good value transfer).

What I’m trying to hint at, is that we drive ourselves to undergo ‘change’ in order to qualify for that license, which involves the learning and unlearning of a lot of habits, attitudes and perspectives. So if parenting had a license, wouldn't we be positively driven to improve upon ourselves and manage to achieve something that eludes most humanity- change? and that too, through the most natural human instinct (wanting to become a parent) as the basis for our motivation?ek teer se do nishaan?

The problem with this idea, apart from the fact that most humans do not want to change, is that we can never accept an external figure to decide something so personal for us-whether or not we qualify to become parents?Who will decide? I mean… we are OK with all the marketing wizards influencing our children (more than ourselves) with advertisements of their brands splashed across buildings, buses and shopping carts, influencing their choices, their education and hence their market value in future but how can we give someone else the power to tell us that ‘you need to change to become a good parent’? You must be joking! We choose to have all the sense of individual identity as per our convenience then, don’t we?

If a driving instructor teaches you bad driving, you could crash someday and lose your life. No individual has the right to devalue another’s life. Parents are the instructors who equip us with the skills required to drive the car of life. There may soon come a time when humans may really have to stop breeding… (Have you seen the plight of the earth? and I think the earlier the better), but if we really must breed...and cannot control our incessant obsessive need to pass on our identities (which makes me wonder how weak our identities are) …then why not breed with some integrity and value-creation? Is that not reason enough for us to look at parenting as a separate entity from reproducing and give it its due respect?

April 30th, 2011, 9:25 PM

Pune, India