The mind and the screen

June 1, 2020

I don’t know why I am so happy that May is done. It’s just a new month but I ascribe to it new energies. May was so, so heavy and it feels good to leave that behind and wish for some lightness. 

I didn’t write yesterday. I wanted to and even took the laptop to bed at night. I wanted to explore how my karate has re-found some deep grounding within, through the lockdown. But I was too tired. The stomach flu really exhausted me. The cramps had begun Friday and by Saturday I was in gastric distress. Slow breaths and slowing the mind made them bearable. Then I had woken on Sunday and trained in a zoom session with our karatekas in Singy. All day I lay on the sofa and read – Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. I felt nostalgic for Bombay. I felt guilty that I wasn’t writing that blog post I had committed to.

I still want to explore karate and me through the covid lockdown, but new things buzzed in my head in the morning. An article one of the participants of an email group – in which we write about our covid experiences -- caught my attention. It was about Einstein, productivity and solitude. The one who shared said that this changed his thoughts on productivity. The article took me back to a memory of something my father’s spirit had said to me when I was in a very unproductive time and unhappy about it. ‘Don’t be afraid to waste your life,’ he had told me. I wanted to reexplore that as it is relevant to now.

But this morning I also had a conversation on imessage with a friend in NY about the protests around George Floyd. That felt more urgent to think/write about. I was reminded about how similar this was to things that happened during the period December through February when Dehli had witnessed all sorts of violence. What Amy Cooper did, what Politicians said, institutionalised racism, patriarchy, anti-semitism, Islamophobia came to mind. 

A friend on fb posted the video of Floyd being choked to death and another friend from India commented that it was shameful, and the man needed to be punished. The same friend had ignored a video of Indian policemen beating and kicking Muslim men while asking them to sing the national anthem. One of the men had died. The friend is a supporter of the ruling BJP – proud Islamophobes. I wondered how she didn’t see the parallels. Needless to say, those Indian policemen have not been booked or fired. 

I opened up a file of short jottings I had made in January about that violence and wanted to weave it into a set of connected stories. But now thoughts about us vultures, and prophets of doom, who keep harping on the migrants and their continued suffering also zipped in.

Sigh, the mind is vast as the Universe, thoughts whirl in it like galaxies, exploding supernovae, imploding black holes – but the page, the blank screen is finite and the process of writing, trying to capture the chaos of the mind, somewhat linear. Something I learn again and again and forget.