Unique Gift of Life

Maybe I will never be able to realize what D&R have gone through in life, and if only I know how each of their days pass by, I might be more empathetic towards them. Now what is this D&R? Dinesh and Reshma or Dravid and Rani, or David and Reena! Maybe these are some of the commonplace names, but behind these names are individuals who are "made for each other", but are left to grope in darkness with no child they can call their own. The number of childless couples is growing, and medical science is helpless to make them not only rear, but also bear a child! Pro-creation has always been one of the primary goals of Christian marriage, as we hear it from our catechism classes!

When the couple finds out that one of them is incapable of cooperating in the bearing of a child a few years after their marriage, all troubles start. The husband may blame the wife and the wife the husband; and the couple may blame the parents, and every other person they can think of! Unfortunately their problem of bearing a child does not end there. They try to undergo any kind of medical treatment, even the witches and the ojhas, with the hope that one day they would be the proud parents of a child. What happens when all of these costly attempts fail is what I dare not imagine.

I have seen so many couples who belong to this category; how nice it would be if the angel Gabriel visits all the houses of these couples and announce the birth of a child through unusual means, through divine intervention. Even angel Gabriel does not seem to like visiting our planet. But when their attempts fail, the bond of union that had kept them together all these days, begin to be brittle; men may indulge (if they are still young enough) in extra-marital affairs, alcoholism, smoking, bad company, and anything which can make them forget the harsh fact that he has no child of his own!

If men are able to give vent to their feelings and frustrations externally, women may do just the opposite. They may keep everything within their hearts, and may one day explode. Often such feelings may find expression in obesity, all sorts of diseases, gossipping, backbiting, suspicion and finding fault with the husband, jealous of their friends having cute little babes. The unhappiness of men and women often find some concrete expression, and it may be dangerous if these people are not able to find some sort of outlet for their emotions. Ideally the husband and wife should be able to find an outlet in their spouses, but when it fails, they should find adequate means.

We live in a world, where moneyed men and women are discovering newer formulae to manage life; some years ago, I have come across people who felt having a child was a nuisance, and so would love to be by themselves. The care of a third person, for whom they may have to give up all their comforts and pleasures, might appear too much for these kind of couples, and many of them decide not to have any children, even if they are physically fit to bear and rear a child. The gift of a child is a great gift; nothing on earth can equal this gift; but if someone is deliberately refusing to have this gift, then we can only assume that these persons do not know the value and worth of the gifts. Maybe they would realize what it means to have a child, when they feel old age fast catching up with them!

Home Remedies

We live in a world, where there is no place for simplicity. Anything simple and easy is considered unscientific and naivette, and relegated to wastepaper bins. We love to have sophisticated solutions to simple problems, and do believe that simple solutions cannot tackle simple problems. Even a common cold and cough can find the physicians cracking their minds to provide the best medicine possible, but it generally takes us more time than we could think of to understand that there are certain solutions which are far too simple and can do the miracle than the highly complicated solutions which technology has provided us with. Home remedies is surely a fast-disappearing art, and if we want to regain health and fair amount of healthy living, we need to return to our grandmothers, with a scrap notebook in hand.

I am not fortunate enought to run to my grand mother, for both my paternal and material grand mothers are no more; nor did I really have a very close relationship with them to milk the juice out of their knowledge base, their rustic wisdom. Luckily I have my mother, who retains not only the rustic look, but also character and quality in her knowledge of simple home remedies which had been practised for centuries, but being buried under the weight of modern technology. When I am in need of a simple solution to a simple problem, my mother often would have one, and it would often come unasked for. The beauty here is no consultation fees required, and it comes with an extra dose of love and care.

After being stuck down by common influenza, with resultant cough, cold, fever, body ache, I got a call from my sister; after recommending a home remedy, she passed the phone on to my mother, who verbatim repeated what my sister had briefed me. And in the evening I was in the kitchen to prepare that odd-looking and tasting concoction - a glass of milk with quarter tea-spoon of turmeric powder and half spoon full of pepper powder, and sugar to taste. That is good for common cold, cough and sore throat. I had already begun this remedy for two days, when another friend of mine had an improved version of the same remedy.

She briefed me this remedy for cough, cold, sore throat: coffee mixed with beaten raw egg, turmeric and pepper powder, and a little bit of brandy. When I protested that if I were to take this concoction for five to seven times, then ultimately I might have been cured of common cold, but might have become an alcoholic! So, I begged to drop this remedy, when my friend added that I could drop brandy if I really don't want to take it. So that solved the problem, and here I am sipping the last bit of this new concoction. I know one thing for sure, these concoctions are not going to cause me any trouble.

But there were also simpler remedies from simpler souls, which I welcomed with open heart. Remember to gargle with salt in warm water, and that will kill the germs and you will be soon free from cough and cold! (The direction also included this innocuous caution : don't swallow the salt water, because that may be bad for the stomach!). If only we have more trust and belief in the wisdom of our foreparents, we would be saving so much of money, driving about half the physicians to unemployment. Every person on earth is in the know-how of some remedies or other, some simple and some complicated solutions to simple and complicated problems and issues. I am turning to take these home remedies a little seriously. How about you?

Art of Listening - Intro

There are far too many people who embrace death voluntarily at a reasonably young age, because they find life intolerable and unmanageable. One of the main complaints we hear from death-notes is that they find hardly anyone who would listen to them.... This might sound a bit silly and even trivial for us, but for many who had decided to participate in the rat-race of the market forces at a relatively young age, this is an acute problem, which may lead them to decide on things which are irrevokable. There are not many people who would listen to them! How long would they keep talking to the four walls of their world, to cats and dogs whom they adore beyond all limits, and to their own self. They want someone who would respond to them, enter into their world even of hatred, vengence, jealosy, forbidden pleasures.

Today the world is in great demand for listeners, and it is from this great demand that the profession of counselling and psychiatric clinics have mushroomed in all developed societies. One has to pay about one hundred dollars or Euros to someone who would listen to them. The money is paid for listening to their sad stories. Such sessions may go on for months, until the person feels that there are people who dont mind listening to them. But it would be wrong to think that the world is in short of people who are ready to listen to others. We can think of our parents, especially our mothers, who would listen to every little non-sense and stupid things that we might be muttering, without questioning anything in return. One thing is true for her, not the content of what I say, but the fact of my trying to communicate something to her!

If one is prepared to listen to others, then it can become a way of life altogether, and that person may do more good to the society than several other so-called social workers. But what sort of listeners does the world look forward to? Surely not any kind of people who would like to make it a means of livelihood, like the counsellors and psychiatrists! There is a different kind of listeners, who not only listen to these people, but after listening to them attentively, would also mirror what and who they are in a way which is far from intimidating, or involving pre-judgment. These are unbiased, objective listeners who can build the broken reed, and build on the shattered dreams.

It is not impossible for us to become good listeners the world is in need of, and we do not require highly specialised degrees or scholarship to pay a listening ears to the people in need. The most important thing that we require is a mental disposition which looks at the people as they are, in the particular situations they are in, without expeccting what they should have been. In other words, these sincere listeners forget the past and begin with the present, and move towards future. It is not that the past is useless, but that it is not going to help the persons to return to their past. The past is given a decent burial, acknowledged with all the pleasure and pain it had brought. But the journey starts in the present.

To listen is an art, a wonderful and noble art, because this art is related to the heart of persons, individuals with a unique face and identity. We are about to embark on a short journey into the art of listening, to pick up the salient features that can truly make us effective listeners, who are pillars of our crumbling world; today as a cursory exercise, I would like to spend a few minutes in silence, trying to enter into my inner self; to listen to the different sounds and noises that I can hear, not only through my ears, but more through my heart and mind. Let me follow the course of these sounds, and remain with them, without ever trying to brand them as good or bad. Slowly let me become part of these sounds...!

Flowing with Time

At first I couldn't understand what she was saying; it took me a minute or two to really understand. She had been on the move in the city doing a lot of purchase all through the day, and was quite tired at the end of the day. But she was determined to finish the accounts before she went to bed. It might take a couple of hours for her to tally the figures, but would go to sleep only after seeing it through. At first she said, who knows if I will be alive tomorrow morning or not! If I don't, then it would create a lot of problem for others, she said laughing. Planning to do the accounts on the next day morning cannot amount to procrastination, but there was something beautiful in what she said later.

Why should I unnecessarily postpone the things that I can finish today, because tomorrow would come with its own share of toils and troubles. If I don't finish the troubles of this day, then the next day I will have to complete the works of the previous day, and may be forced to put off the day's work to the next day. In the process, the workload may keep accumulating, and there may come a time when it is beyond my capacity to wind up with all my responsibilities, and then may start the blame-game.

This is an ancient wisdom, which states, let me not postpone the things which I can do today. The secret power of the "now" is intrinsically embedded in this notion of going with the flow of the current, so that I am not stuck with unnecessary worries. But sadly, it is not at all easy for us to flow with our share of duties, commitments and responsibilities. It is because, the time that is at our disposal may seem like an endless ocean. We imagine that we are going to live for ever and ever. There is a simple way how we can train our minds to flow with the current of the day.

Let me take a sheet of paper, and write on the top, My Life Span! I will write the figure that comes to my mind, as the number of years I will live in this world. It may be 75 or 84 or even 96. Don't think too much, just put the number that first pops up in your mind. This is just a subjective figure for us to work on our life-cycle. Now let me deduct my present age. That means, I have still so many years to live. Does the years look too long, too many? Now multiply the number of years by 365; this gives the number of days I will live. If the remaining years of my life is 52, then I have 52 x 365 days to live. Let me further convert the days into hours: 52 x 365 x 24. It is here I begin to see the value of each passing hour. I may realize then that I cannot afford to waste even a single hour.

Today I would like to pause for a while and look at this day, from the moment when I first opened my eyes from sleep; it will benefit me, if I were to make a log of what I had done, minute by minute. I may be surprised to note that I had whiled away a lot of time, and have even wasted. Fortunately I don't need to pay for the time I spend, and therefore do not realize the cost of it all. If I were to do this exercise at the end of the day, then I may be able to realize that I had waste more than a few hours in useless things. Anything that is not helping me live a fuller life can be counted as a waste of time. If I do this exercise for a few days continuously, then probably I may become more conscious of the preciousness of the present, and may use it judiciously. It is then I may realize that my life span has doubled or tripled already!

Life's Cruel Laughter!

I did not think that Motiur would call me up; he was the employee of the office I had managed for about a year some years ago, and I had built such a rapport with the staff that many shared with me their personal stories. His call came out of the blue and I was for a moment wondering what favor he was going to ask me. I thought it was a courtesy call just to keep tap of the people who have some say in his job, and that is what he too mentioned that he just wanted to keep in touch with me, though i hardly visit his office. But what he said surprised me on several fronts. He is a young Muslim, who is struggling alone both within and without. In the office, he finds himself helpless like all the others, but now has decided to show that being helpless is not going to help anyone, and has volunteered to be the public relations officer to tie the loose ends.

I had a lot of regards for this young man, who had a flair for writing lyrics, and in one of the modern Bengali songs album that i coordinated to produce, he contributed lyrics for four songs, with my ideas given flesh and blood. He was happy to get an opportunity to explore this field of lyricism and was happy about it. He was a creative person who did not want to waste his life in useless, worthless thinking and talk. But the circumstances did not much favor him, and he was often downcast because he would think one and something else would happen to him, and so he would be chased from pillar to post often. He did not want to get married, because he thought to feed another mouth, and yet another in the later years, might become a herculean task for him, but he could not avoid compulsion from the family.

But while talking to me, he said that he was trying to accept all that life offers him with open heart; including the fact that his wife had ran away from the house they were living in with their daughter, threatening to commit suicide by jumping from the train. I could not believe this would happen to him. The issue is silly though. He wanted to repair the small house, where he had been a tenant for several years, and at the death of the owner has come to own the house. He took his benefits from the Provident Fund and decided to repair the house; but his wife wished him to get a refrigerator and a micro-oven. He could not compromise, and that resulted in his wife running away.

Just one of his phrases caught my attention - that was the cruel laughter of fate! He does not believe in fate, but sometimes could not help but console himself that what is destined for him would happen, whether he likes it or not. Life is cruel, often it is so. What can we do when bad things happen to good people? Or when good things happen to bad people? Is there any place where we can complain and get justice? Unfortunately it is the same story with each one of us. In my mother tongue, there is a proverb which says, there is a door-step to every house; each of us have our own stories of confronting the bitter realities of life. It gets filled with riddles for which we have no clue, not to talk about the solution. We find ourselves going in circles!

Today I would like to pause for a while and think of the hundreds of Motiurs I come in touch with each day; I would like to look at their faces, and read the stories that their faces betray. I will not have any answer to them, may not even a sympathetic word, or a pat of approval. In such circumstances, even my silent presence with them can be a great source of consolation. If they are able to get a feeling that in this battle with life, they are not alone, then they will get enough strength and courage to face the tempests that may sweep through their lives. Often I find myself in situations, where I am just helpless, and cannot look up for help from any known quarters. Let me in those moments look up to the endless skies and feel the millions of stars giving me company, whispering in my ears that they too had not much option than be what they are!

The Lingering Chorus (M6)

It is not easy, let me admit, to give a decent burial to some of the most painful memories that haunt me night and day; let me not project as if things are so easy that I can overcome the lingering memories at the snap of a finger. If that were the case, then several men and women need not have sought to end their lives at the nadir of their moral conscience. We might call them they were losers, cowards, and were too frightened of facing reality, but it would be injustice if we were to think of them so. To us they may look so, but would they have ever thought of themselves so? But today we could reflect for a while on why it takes so hard for us to really bid goodbye to some of the painful memories? What keeps us holding on to them, even when we know for sure that they do not help us to grow at all? We had presented two ways of addressing this problem is by embracing the shadows, and by letting the memories fade into oblivion by making them copyright to the whole world. Here we will explore yet another way of care-fronting these memories, which have become part of our selves, as if our second nature.

In psychology we would often associate each of our emotional states to particular trigger mechanism, and most often we are not aware of these triggers; they may be persons, events, and even nature, or surroundings, or senses. For instance, certain persons may trigger particular emotions in us, and as soon as we see the person, we may be transported into that emotional state, whether positive or negative. As soon as I see a person with red shirt, my blood may become warm, my heart beat may increase, because that person with red shirt reminds me of someone else, who had left a deep scar in my heart. If I am not aware of these triggers, I will have no way of controlling them, leave alone mastering over them. We may even misjudge people, for no fault of their own.

I have come across women who, after going through an acute experience of betrayal by men, refuse to even talk gently to other men, because of the notion that every men they met reminded them of those betrayers; for them all men are betrayers. Therefore it often happens that after being ‘ditched’ to use slang, by someone, these persons may not have the courage to start things anew, because all men may ultimately ditch them, or at least that is what they think. I have seen young women who refused to get married because they had drunkard fathers, and thought that all men may ultimately end up drunkards! We may think that these are baseless and unreasonable conclusions, but the fact is that they are not arriving at these conclusions willfully, but something in them prompts them to such baseless conclusion. If we begin to probe them, then they will realize that they had been unjustly biased and prejudiced.

The fact is that these people did not realize that they were reacting to the triggers, and not objective facts. So if we are able to discern the triggers, and find out what triggers me to what sort of conclusions, then I may be able to judge for myself if my conclusions are realistic or baseless. In fact these triggers are the keys that open the floodgates of my swinging moods. If I am able to point out to myself that all men who were red shirts remind me of the man who stabbed my heart, then the next time when I see a man with red shirts, I could tell my mind that ‘this’ is not ‘that’ man. And that realization may prevent the floodgates of emotions to burst out, and you may be in a much better position to handle the man. What happens here is a simple psychological role-play; you have accustomed your mind to thinking that every man with a red shirt should be the culprit, and so, when you see a man with red shirts, your mind reminds you that this man is that one, and that immediately takes you to the past memories drenched in pain and agony. You then try to retaliate for the wound created in you, by treating the man harshly and even cruelly for no fault of his! But it is within your power and control to reverse the role play.

Today let me pause for a while and recollect to mind the last time I was flooded with the memories of that one painful moment in my past, and go back in time and circumstances to re-capture what triggered the memories to rush into my mind. It may not be crystal clear as to what had actually triggered the memories, but it will be possible for me to identify it, if I rewind the memory-attack today in slow motion, noting down the exact moment when I burst out. I go a few frames behind and see the situation around me… it may be a person, or an object, or a situation or anything. Once I find it out, then I pay close attention to it, to verify that ‘this’ is not ‘that’ and confirm it for myself, so that I may re-program my mind to say that not every person who wear red shirts is the one who betrayed me. Let me do this for a few days, until I am sure what are the triggers, which drown me into emotions and sentiments that put me down. If I am aware of them, then there is nothing I need to do, because my mind will re-program and lo and behold, I am on the way to free myself from my painful memories!

The Human Audit

The title may appear intimidating, especially in the background of the crumbling markets and the malpractices which cripple many a commercial firm. As we stand at the last lap of the year, what does this human audit means. First of all, the very term needs explication and explanation, for this is not a common term that is often used to expound the evaluation at the end of the year. By the phrase human audit I mean a need to evaluate one’s performance, not on the basis of a set of criteria, but on the basis of one’s achievement as seen by oneself, without any intrusion by a second or third party. This includes basically two areas: the success and the failures, but these two are seen not as water-tight compartments, but as one flowing into the other. At the end of the year, we may find that we have so many incomplete tasks to be completed, and may realize that all our efforts to fix deadlines have failed miserably. But it is important that we become aware of our strengths and drawbacks, so that we are able to take ourselves seriously in the new year.

Very seldom do we make a self-evaluation at the end of the year; all the business firms and commercial houses undertake routine exercise to evaluate their performance. The two primary concepts around which evaluations are conducted in business sectors are : performance and achievement. But when we come to human resources, of persons we cannot force these two concepts to take top position. If we attempt that way, then we will realize that we too soon equate human persons to machines, and that may be the death-knell of the human-oriented business center. Perhaps the most effective evaluation that we can think of for human persons is the one where in they are the subject and the object. They evaluate themselves using their own norms and criteria. But an opportunity should be given to them to see for themselves how they have fared in the year that has passed away.

I would like to make five or ten criteria to evaluate my success, and another ten criteria to evaluate my failures. It is not important for me to identify the areas where I have failed, but more than merely identifying, I need to find the reasons which were responsible for such failure. It may be related to either myself or others, or even the infrastructure facilities provided by the firm. What is important is that I am able to see these for myself, and don’t require someone to tell me what had gone wrong in my sector. If I find out the lacunae in my work, that would save my face and help me to redress the lacunae without even letting others know that something had gone wrong in my area of work.

Needless to say, I need to take an audit for all the different areas where I am involved, interpersonal, academic, social, economic, religious and even familial. I cannot afford to drop any particular area, without assessing how I had fared. If I do this exercise consciously and seriously, then I am sure to make progress in the days to come; if I don’t feel the need to assess my different areas of involvement, then I am sure to stagnate, if not go backwards in progress. One may not do this officially, but it is important that one spends some time quietly reflecting about these two areas, and similarly finding reasons what had gone wrong in the process. It is important that I take forward the areas where I had succeeded and to re-plan the areas where I need extra effort to make it tick. Human mind is capable of fusing ideas from nowhere in order to provide solution to most difficult of problems. All that we need is effort to find adequate solutions.

In order to engage in this sort of human audit, I need to take time off from the hustle-bustle of everyday life and commitments, so that I can seriously enter into my inner self, pick up areas which I rarely pay attention to. It would benefit if I can go to a place where I can be all by myself without anyone to disturb me. There are two ways how I can conduct audit : I may go chronologically from the first of January last year, and go month by month, recollecting the different events and incidents which had either helped you or prevented you from carry out the task you have been given. The second way is to go in terms of area of work or involvement. In either case, one can see for oneself that there are areas which require fine-tuning, and there are areas which require rescheduling of action plans. If I am honest to myself and genuinely wish to take my life forward, then I can be sure to find areas where I need to improve. The next year provides an opportunity for me to take life forward.