Reality Dawns

Reality is a strange thing. It leaves a weird sensation after it hits - sometimes good but mostly not good. It's weird because till reality hits us our expectation is the only form of reality to us. Sometimes the ignorance or lack of any expectation makes it less weird - may be that's one more reason in support of "ignorance is bliss". 

I see 2019 as the year of renunciation of life in US. About a decade ago it was easy for me to comfortably move on with the fact that few of my friends have moved to an another country or a distant place. May be I had a lot of friends back then or may be I had my sight set on something promising or exciting in my own life, the fact is I was distracted enough to live with the reality. When one of my very close friend moved back to India I was mostly very happy for him but also to some extent I felt a bit sad and lonely. This week another friend of mine is moving out of US and it felt very strange to imagine the future without him or his family being around when I meet up with the other remaining friends. It's not like I meet these friends very frequently but the few times I meet them are the only times I meet people in my frequency range. The older I grow I realize that I'm growing emotionally lonelier. 

Career, hobbies, fantasies sometimes cloud the reality of life. We can't escape when the reality shines strong and long like the days around the summer solstice. It feels weird to experience such moments under the bright shine which refuses to cease till late into the evenings. As always I naively hope that time is the panacea of all such pains.  

Quote Unquote

“I run because if I didn’t, I’d be sluggish and glum and spend too much time on the sofa. I run to breathe the fresh air. I run to explore. I run to escape the ordinary. I run…to savor the trip along the way. Life becomes a little more vibrant, a little more intense. I like that.” 
- Dean Karnazes

This quote presents the state of mind of many runners in a succinct and simple style. I loved it instantly and didn't want to lose it. 

P.S: Discovered and learned from my friend Nitish a.k.a Chingi's Facebook post

Empathy

Relationships of any nature need this indelible quality called Empathy. In simple words it means to understand the perspective of other person. It is Empathy that enables us to be less judgmental of other people. It is also explained as "the nature of seeing the world through gentler eyes". 

We all have relationships - with family members, friends, colleagues, society in general and the world in large. Most of them are sustained based on this particular quality. The fact that we are able to sustain some such relationships in our life means that we are all Empathetic to some extent. We are all humans, so we also tend to lose it few times and that explains the reason for volatility in some of our relationships. 

We need it the most when a conflict of opinion rises in a relationship. A conflict need not be some sort of an ugly war and a conflict need not be between a good person and a bad person or between a good intention and a bad intention. Conflict only means a difference of opinion. In this world smart, well-intention-ed, good nature people have conflict with each other. One person need not have ill intent, or be evil or crazy to have a conflict. Good people have conflicts with good people. What helps us reconcile those conflicts, what allows us to have better relationships at all levels – with society or in a family is Empathy. 

In such conflicts what matters the most is how much we understand the people on the other side. It might be a scenario where the other person might seem to have a fundamentally different opinion but that doesn't mean they are crazy or bad or out to get us. It only means that they had seen the world in a fundamentally different way through their upbringing and experiences. When we fail to look beyond the people we know or the patterns we had seen in our past that is when we fail to understand the other person. 

It might not be specific to a generation or a person, but rather to a context or certain personality that causes us to NOT understand the lack of empathy in us while being in a relationship. Especially when we deal with people who are emotionally very close to us we tend to lose our sense of empathy. It happens unconsciously and it becomes difficult to realize this. When we begin our conversations we usually start on a balanced tone with an intention to share our perspective, make a good point and simultaneously try to understand the other person's point of view. Then things begin to spiral out of control. Sometimes we end the conversation with anger and lack of any patience or any desire to understand  the reasons for anger in us/other person. We fail to realize that things we said in such anger might not be the right things to say in such moments. We also fail to put any further efforts to understand why the other person sees the world so differently than we do.

Why do we tend to act like that? 

I learned that we tend to easily lose our sense of empathy when we deal with two kinds of people - those we like and those we hate. It is easy to see that we don't try to understand the people we hate. In case of people we like the most we typically lose our empathy and it causes us to sometimes behave the worst with the people we care the most about. This happens because we feel the pain when the people closest to us fail to understand us. It doesn't hurt when a stranger misunderstands us because we don't care for such opinions. When somebody close to us doesn't understand us, seems to be judging us then our defenses go up very high. It makes us emotional about it and could at times hurt us. In such a state of mind it is not easy to take a step back, think and try to take the perspective of the other person. 

Another reason for such behavior is our approach in dealing with people in such close relationships. Mostly we fail to see the other person changing in a relationship. People who care about the other person grow in a relationship. They grow to be more empathetic, more compatible and more caring. It is such changes that we fail to notice. We fail to notice such changes because we unconsciously get into a certain routine in any relationship - like with your brother or sister or friends or colleagues. Such a routine makes us to think in a certain pattern. As a result we don't update ourselves often enough as the other person is changing themselves from who they were to begin with. As an example - your sister or brother would seem the same kind of person to you but if you ask them whether they are the same person that they were 5 or 10 years ago in this relationship with you then the answer would be different. They would've grown more concerned (or may be less concerned about you), become more matured in understanding you and things like that. We don't see such changes in other people. We judge them as they previously were. We have to get better at updating and notice that when other people are trying to evolve, change and trying to be better we need to stop using the same arguments that we used with them in the past. We cannot use the same judgments and same reasons as this person is now evolved in life and relationship. 

Not that I am an expert but I learned these reasons and clearly observed the patterns of such behavior in a relationship. These concepts are simple but simple doesn't make them easy. Such qualities are easily developed through experience and an intention to understand people better. 

Old diary posts

These are some of the clippings from the diary I'd during one of those not so memorable years of my life. I didn't want to lose them, so I wanted to make them immortal by posting on my blog. 

2012 June 14

It has been more than 10 weeks since I'd touched my Math. Feels like a vegetable. 

2012 June 21

I talk to myself in a convoluted and complicated way. Ease out man, ease out. Nobody is taping your daily actions. 

You don't conquer with a single act. You need a series of committed acts. Don't wait to realize such a moment as it strikes you out of blue. When it strikes you cannot fail to notice it. 

Now back to business boy. 

2012 July 13

13/7: A mini replication of 26/11. One of the most wounded metropolis is struck again. People of Mumbai are once again forced to witness serial blasts, tensions and uncertainty. I am seeing all in real time now. As the news of the bomb blasts flashed across the news channels I was shockingly impervious. I was not expecting any casualties. I'd unconsciously assumed it would be a failed attempt at best. As the events unfolded the casualties revealed themselves. People scrambling over mobile phones, land-lines and emails to let their dear ones know about their safety situation. Our organization's newly appointed CEO ordered everyone to stay within office premises at least till the system is taken under control by the police. As the exits were shut people who lived through 26/11 recalled those times. The recollections had the tone of anecdotes though I could sense the underlying horror.

"The Maximum City" book walked me through 1992 riots. The stories I read about the police officers of Mumbai kept coming back in my head. I thought about how they would've had reacted to this. Especially the cop I adore the most, Rakesh Maria. When I saw him on the news channel, addressing fervid journalists on behalf of ATS, I was bowled over by his responses and patience with which he was repeating his answers to various forms of similar questions. He asked everyone to trust his team as they'd never left any case related to terrorism unsolved. 

Trust is what drives the people of this city. Trust in their hopes and hopes that their trust wouldn't be taken for granted. For ordinary people it is the interplay between these two emotions and for the rest of us it is the independence of these two. 

2012 July 31
Indian Railways - It's a vibrant organism. Colonies of people helping, adjusting, relaxing, cribbing, quareling and travelling. 

People are courteous enough to offer lover level of seats to women who couldn't climb up to higher sleeping berths. 

Sample Group: A young lady, not so well kept but has the confidence to carry herself through this world using her taking power. Her mother, not very different from the lady, accompanying her is more rustic in looks and behavior. 

People in regular sleeping coaches are not pretentious. 

Young Lady: "Bhaiyya neeche vaala seat de dona, sone ke liye"
Generous Passenger: Le lo na
Young Lady: Smiles. "Shukriya". 

This generous passenger was earlier allowed to stretch his feet on to another passenger's seat whose feet in turn were resting on another's seat. It's an interplay of intrusion, courteousness and comfort. 

The two women ask the men around if they finished their supper. Men answered yes. Then women then unabashedly took ethnic postures and gleefully talked about their good luck in having had the upgrade to an air conditioned compartment of the train. 


2012 August 29
People sometimes are unapologetic, loud, intruding, discourteous and presumptuous. 

Hollow parties; Hollower greetings and hollowest facades that grace such events. I was one of them though. 

New England, Jhumpa Lahiri and an Old Spark :-)

Don't judge my naming sensibilities through this post's title. I know the difference between "labels"/"tags" and "title", it's just a new design I am trying out and hope it wouldn't seem like a literary faux-pas when I read this again in future. Now there goes yet another deviated start.

This weekend's drive to New England region brought back my memories of the lives, I'd imagined, of characters from stories of Jhumpa Lahiri. It's the Boston city that rekindled my memories and further strengthened by the walk through MIT while gusty winds blew over the Charles after an unexpected downpour in the evening. The silent and sparsely populated campus along the river, the vibrant Boston city with it's curvy and tiled roads through it's downtown, ubiquitous evening chillness in early October, people running along the Charles through the drizzle and cold - all of them occur, if not together, in stories of Jhumpa Lahiri. As I looked around Boston and it's people through my own lens I felt as if I knew about a part of their lives. As I try to form an imaginary connection with the city I feel a dull pain deep down my heart. It's like the pain of loneliness but only stranger and hard to completely decipher to myself. Probably because the city Boston itself feels like a prototype of something bigger like probably NYC but it's not there yet and it doesn't want to be NYC. It wants to be bigger and more importantly a better one in a different way or rather in it's own way. The people don't know how it's going to be and thus there is a hope to see it every day as one wakes up. 

The next destination in the road trip was Nashua. I was bowled by the hospitality of the friends of my parents. Now they are my friends too. The families with it's daily chores, the funny Americanized-Indian kids who are inquisitive about anything Indian and new,  the youngsters-turned-extremely-patient parents, their combined struggles and joys. That was a welcome change to my life in NYC that seems too fast to stop and think about even the mere existence of life in the form I experienced on this trip for a day.  I realized that it's not like a hard to sell option to my life as I used to imagine earlier. It's the kind of selfless sacrifice one makes to create something bigger, with deeper meaning and satisfaction that only comes through doing it rather than prematurely, and foolishly, imagining about it esp in the wrong way. Such acts might be the sources of peace for people stepping into the "real" life as that had been the way of life for major section of successful people for all these generations and probably stands true for next generations. I am largely the product of such a sacrifice by my parents and it is the quality ingrained by most Indians.
Hitting on the last section of my post, rather my intimate one, about the spark that always burned in my heart. I realized at an young age that it's the spark that kept me hopeful, sane, peaceful, selfless, balanced and pretty much everything that one needs to be happy and satisfied. That spark was rekindled when I met a very distant cousin. I was meeting this person after about 15 years. Despite this long time I have vivid memories of the way this cousin's mom used to make me feel. She had this calming effect on the people around her which was driven through her balanced personality. I came across very few people with such personality. My grandmother and her mom, one of my aunt and this distant-cousin's mom, handful in over 25 years of life. The thing that sweetly bowled me over was that today my cousin was an exact replica of her mom. Her words, actions and personality as a whole had this striking calming effect. That's the effect I feel when I am in the company of my grandmother, aunt, parents and friends in Hyd. I never miss that spark as that's the one which ignites my hope and real-self and most importantly the satisfied-self. All the running towards my phantom goals took me farther from this aspect of life and that in turn made me cherish and long for such moments of this spark. As much as I fantasize that I find someone with who would make me feel that spark I fear that I may not come across such a person in my life and drift along longing for one. 

P.S: This post was surprisingly struck in the draft mode for almost an year and now I don't remember what content I planned to add to this. As I said earlier I love running but am physically lazy to run and I love writing but mentally lazy to elucidate my thoughts into words. I found this post lying dead after a casual talk about my blog made me come back to it. Content's original date was Oct 8th 2012. 

Love story

I am addicted to coffee and she is allergic to coffee, and that's our love story. 

Conquer the world

On the terrace with the burning mate for soulful I feel I can conquer the world,
on the last sip of gourmet coffee I feel I can talk my mind out with the person I wish to,
on the terrace with the city lights under my feet I am fearless and free spirited.

Coincidences Galore

This is not a rant but a debrief of an observation that sometimes makes me wonder and at most times makes me want to scream. It is bound to happen to me as I consider "others" choices as my obligations. "Others" doesn't mean everyone and mentioning it in quotes would suffice for this post. 

Let me put forward two scenarios. 

Scenario 1: 

I am talking to this person over some form of a chat. The conversation flows with the usual mutual well-wisher style Q&A followed by sharing the stand-out moments in an interesting style from the latest escapades with every stroke of the keypad attempting a catchy one liner that tries to make an impression or in other words consciously putting the best foot forward. After a few lines I ask the person if it's possible to catch up for a movie after work or a brunch on the weekend or a coffee or anything for the sake of meeting. Ta da there comes the long pause in the conversation. 

The person on the other side has been responding without any perceivable delay till the moment I ask for some form of meeting up. Coincidentally there is a long pause right then.  Every time. Thus the coincidence. Hello I am waiting here. Looking at my phone. Like an idiot. Till then I was working towards building my own formula for spending the hours that I aspired to spend (and thus sacrificed) for this meeting. I stopped building plans for myself and contemplated on the chances of meeting up. It's the fault of the "pause". The "pause" then makes me squirm, twitch and twinge. Makes me feel like that stupid teenage character in the teen pop songs.  

The tumultuous "pause" doesn't stop here but rather begins here. From the point where I send an offer to it's execution the "pause" could appear in many forms bringing upon it's own format of torment and torture. It torments and tortures me because I oblige too early into these forms of tentative bids. I structure my work and plans to accommodate these meetings. God forbid if I had to pull out from such meeting I call, and justify my actions. As I said I always feel more obligated in these scenarios. 

Isn't this pattern of pauses obvious to the other person? This makes me wonder. Isn't this person in the same level of emotion? This makes me scream. 

Scenario 2:

Oh god I seriously forgot what was scenario 2. I had it in mind as I started out writing this post and then in the middle of the this other person started talking to me. Look at me. I forgot everything. Now I am not forcing my memory to remind me the scenario 2 and wrapping up this post to meet this other person. God save you Jointy.