More questions and one answer

June 25, 2020

Just made a pot using the last of the ‘lucky lychee’ green tea. The subtle lychee flavours on a hot afternoon like today feel energizing. I am not thinking of rushing to get more, like I would have before, but instead want to use up all the teas I have before acquiring more. There is a need to pare down things that I only noticed this week as we are opening up again.

The libraries will open on July 1^st, not yet for sitting, but borrowing and returning books. I had been waiting for this. I hadn’t been reading much during the lockdown and have fallen two books behind in my Goodreads challenge of fifty books a year. I told myself it was because e-books didn’t hold my attention, but I did have unread print books on my shelves and I didn’t read them either. Surprisingly, now I want to read them. Earlier I would go the library, wander through the stacks and walk away with far more books than I could read in the allowed six weeks, and ignore the ones on my shelf that I  told myself I could read anytime. But I want to read them before borrowing more. Hmm…

Ok, I am rambling, and I don’t do that in these posts. Here I have a vague set of related thoughts I focus my mind on, while in my journal I follow wherever the mind goes. 

I wrote a story during the time I wasn’t writing the blog, I started collecting the things I need to send to the accountant for my taxes in India, I did lessons in my online drawing course, and I trained for the first time in an online gasshuku with Sensei Bakkies in South Africa. It felt very strange to put on a gi and train long hours alone in the living room. But I emerged glowing, something that happens each time I can transit from the role of teacher to student.

Learning karate is where I want to be permanently. So, when I had these months, since March 23^rd, of solitary training I was heavenly happy. It felt right to have the time to re-establish my relationship to karate – doing whatever I needed and wanted to do just for myself. It took me back to the state of mind I had about karate when I first joined it in 2004. Something very personal, spiritual and something that kept me anchored into the present moment like nothing else was doing at that point. 

In our dojo we do a lot of partner work. A student who had trained in other dojo’s that taught traditional karate had remarked that to me, and I had replied -- because we can, and should be, doing a lot of basics and kata on our own, I like to use our time together to learn other skills that supplement that. Nothing keeps you present like partner work where the consequence of your mind wandering could be a whack to the head. 

Somewhere in these three months of self-training I found I pared down my training to the very basics again. For the first month I didn’t even do any kata except Sanchin. It felt good and right. I do enjoy learning more than teaching. Teaching brings in angst and complicates my relationship to karate which is otherwise pure pleasure. Which brings up many questions – Why is it this way? Why do I continue teaching? How can I keep the angst out of the equation while teaching?

For now, I am going to follow Rilke’s advise about these questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

One question – why am I writing this blog and will it help – did find some answers. The one story I wrote after months of a dry spell came from thoughts and explorations begun in this blog. It was a story of tension between hope and hopelessness and how in the latter state you can lose all touch with the former, and visa versa perhaps. So, I plan to continue writing, but it might be less frequent as my tasks are increasing as the lockdown eases. 

Process

June 19, 2020

I haven’t written here in more than a week. I started writing a post on June 16^th but didn’t finish it. It was about Singapore easing restrictions and the feelings that emerged around that. The first one for most – though not me I think – was relief. A friend texted, liberation is nigh.

That night I slept 7 hours and 17 mins, much more than the 5 hours, I had been sleeping most nights. Some part of me had relaxed. Something did believe that this could be over someday. But I also felt a tightness in my forehead, tension in my neck, and continued anxiety. Bombay was still doing so badly. My sister and mother were still cooped up. I knew that I wouldn’t really relax till things began improving there. 

The next morning I had sat on the sofa and sipped my perfect cup of assam tea. I felt empty. So many I knew had done so much in these three months. Some had written the first drafts of books; many more had finished on-line courses. I had nothing visible, nothing tangible -- nothing I could talk to anyone about to show-case these three months. Part of me had hoped that one of the dozen or so agents I had sent out my book query, for Boiling Frogs, would reply. I wanted to emerge from the lockdown with hope of my book being published before the end of the year. I had hoped to start another and be halfway through the first draft. If I had been a character in a film or book these are things that would have happened for sure. But i am not and nothing happened and I feel like I have done absolutely nothing. Nothing that I could talk about anyway.

I knew I had confronted a ton of inner demons and inadequacies and understood myself better. I had listened to many others while they grappled with their own increased anxieties and fears that amplified through the months of lockdown and isolation. I had trained 5 days a week in the confines of my home with nothing but a chi-ishi and I still had decent muscle tone. But none of this was something tangible that I could talk about to anyone. Did it make it less valuable? 

In some part of me it did. The pressures of product rather than process still affect me deeply. Out of the many conversations I had with people during this time very few actually focused on process and I love hearing about process in all its dimenions.

On Wednesday a friend talked about his completed dissertation. One of the things he said was that it started as a journey, a personal query about race, personal identity and society, and more, but that journey does not appear in the document and that made him wonder if he wanted to just withdraw from the academic process of defending it and completing his PhD. There were big feelings in the process and the product felt sort of less than. Yet the final product would be valued much more than the process in the academic world, in the outside world. So, if he didn’t defend and finish and in that sense not have a product would the process not matter?  And so often it just doesn’t. It doesn’t matter that you put in the effort to do that work – what matters if only if you have something to show. You will have the same knowledge and skills you had if you didn’t finish, yet if you did you would be valued more. If you didn't finish you certainly would be valued less than the person who had the final product. 

I keep getting interrupted while writing this. First on the 16^th by something else I just had to write and then twice today since the morning by practical things -- dealing with filing taxes in India and washing the lunch dishes. Hard to get back to the things I wanted to say, especially since there is a peculiar melancholy in my mind today. Another day perhaps. Today I am going to contemplate for a bit my state of mind that is trying to deal with the easing of restrictions. The government now says it is safe to do certain things from today, Friday June 19. Was it really less safe yesterday? What anxieties and sanitizing behaviours can I drop that are associated with lockdown mind? My head is still in it and I think letting it go will be a process for me. 

I do know that now I have to face the world with my patchy poorly clippered hair. I hope it grows out soon.

Decent?

June 11, 2020

I couldn't sleep last night. In fact, I had a restless evening -- pacing the length of my living room. Ten steps in one direction and then ten in the other. My fitbit recorded almost 4000 steps in that hour. 

Two things happened yesterday that I found difficult to process. 

I attended a discussion through ISAS on Modi 1.0 and 2.0. The panellists spoke on three different areas of governance – foreign policy, economics and politics. It felt like they were disconnected from the reality on the ground in India. They spoke as if it was business as usual, not as if India was facing its biggest crisis since Independence. As I listened I did understand the enormity of the economic issues at a level that was mind boggling. I could see how there were absolutely no quick fixes. At the same time what I was hearing was the same formulae based on trickle-down economics. And the actions of the BJP of focusing on politicking rather than the pressing issues also seemed even more horrendous, though the speakers barely mentioned it. At one time I wondered if I was a bit crazy to be feeling this so intensely while the speakers were so cool. But then I read the questions from the audience and found echoes of myself in them. They seemed as irritated as me about what the panellists were completely ignoring.

Soon after I read an email, by a friend in the email chat we had set up to just talk about our lives during covid times. She had attached a link of an article with an excerpt from ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’, by the Dutch author Rutger Bregman. Basically the article talked about how humans were at heart decent and during disasters they acted from their best selves. 

I feel no doubt about either – that people are decent rather than evil and that during face to face interactions with someone vulnerable most of us act from our best selves. Yet the word decent didn’t fit with what I had been feeling ever since I watched the migrant labour in India on the roads -- no longer hidden and invisible in their inhuman dwellings and lives. Their faces, young and old; their dead bodies, their hunger is etched deep in my psyche now. I have always known they exist. I have managed to blank them out in the past. Turn away from the bony ragged man selling trinkets at traffic lights. Read a book, watch some tv. I did that for a while last evening too, but the disturbance was still there this morning. 

Anne Frank wrote in her diary, "I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

I don’t know how I keep my ideals or what they are. I have been grappling with my own lack of 'decency'. I can't call myself decent when I am only reacting to this reality of the life of the slum dweller or unorganised labour only when it suits me. At other times I remain caught up in my own little problems and dreams. 

The article also quoted Rebecca Solnit, from her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. “My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image…. Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self- interest, just like them.” I think we need to withdraw our projections on dictators and despots and explore our own brute force and self-interest responses to things. I also know that I don’t need to read books that define humanity as good or bad. At some point in the past I needed answers to those questions. But now I’d rather deal with each case on its on merit and not say usually, they all, generally, broadly etc.

My questions now are about my own decency, about how I live my life, how I reconcile the relative ease of it, while also feeling the hopelessness of increasingly larger sections of this world. Nothing new in these questions. A lot of people have grappled with them, written about them. I need to just connect to them daily and feel through, change my life as possible answers appear.

Befriending the Dragon

June 8

Two days in a row I woke feeling not anxious or depressed. Yesterday I had attributed it to looking forward to our zoom training. But today it was just wide-eyed pleasure for no reason at all. I didn’t know where the heaviness had gone but I was going to enjoy the lightness while it lasted. 

I have been shedding my armour since I wrote about it a few days ago. It has felt raw and uncomfortable, but I have been selective about whom I reveal my bare state to. Last evening, I chatted with a friend who has been listening to Thich Nhat Hanh to find calm through this pandemic. She’d been trying to allow herself to do nothing, to not plan, to not even think. She said she realized how much staying busy was a way to feel worthwhile for her. She wanted to just feel she had worth even if she did nothing. She was also listening to him talk about anxiety. Something she too wakes up with. She told me how he connects it to family/ancestral anxiety. She spoke of anxiety patterns in her family.

My mother was a very anxious person. Her life in our family home was quite suffocating. Widowed young and with a fairly dominating patriarchal joint family around, she wasn’t connected to her power or inner-being. And being the most difficult of her three children, I often bore the brunt of her unhappiness. I got my anxious self from her, and unfortunately I transmitted it to my daughter too. 

Memories of my dad on the other hand were of a chilled out person, who insisted on taking time off to enjoy sports, to listen to live music, and take the kids on Sunday picnics. I told my friend that he reminded me of the dragon figure I had found within. The dragon had lived thousands of years, seen history, slept through a lot of it, and to him even covid was a just a blip, a blink, that would be soon gone. 

I borrowed Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ from NLB and read all afternoon. But last night I got into an anxious state again. I was reminded of some financial emails I had to sort through. I managed to sleep but woke with the task on my mind. The task that is made harder because I had not been able to make my trip to Bombay in April as planned. Suddenly I asked myself what my dragon would do and say. And then it was all easy. I had to make a couple of phone calls but it got sorted to the extent it could without me being in Bombay – something that will not happen until October at least. Yesterday leaving things undone till then was agony, but four months are merely four breaths when seen from the dragon’s perspective. 

Later this morning I began writing my memories of the first days of the 2019 anti-CAA protests. At lunch time I ordered and ate a sea-food pad thai, something I hadn’t eaten since 2016 when I discovered minor heart issues, and high cholesterol and triglycerides. 

After lunch I drew the dragon and will check in with him when anxious. Momentarily tranquil.

Crisis, desperation, opportunity

June 7, 2020

Just finished a zoom training with our Singy karatekas, followed by some solitary kata practice. Always feel a bit optimistic after. Good time to write perhaps J

Yesterday I saw this fb ad for education, ‘Turn crisis into opportunity,’ it said. Learn new skills etc. etc. I felt like hitting something. I had skyped with my friend in Utah on Friday and we had spoken of ourselves and how heavy and unmotivated we were feeling about doing anything. It was uncanny how similar our inner states were and our behaviour too. I felt good, as I could laugh about the terrible habits and patterns I had developed during the pandemic. We also spoke of George Floyd and racism, and the migrant labour in India, and of course about Modi and Trump. We had talked about how both had sneaked in projects that would harm the environment during this time when people were dazed and in lockdown. Both were consolidating their power, both had very active fake news sites, and the followers of both believed in them even more than before. I thought the US was better off than India as the opposition was more credible but she didn’t agree. We spoke of how we were sponges to the field around – soaking in emotions from the surrounding which often made us feel limp. We ended the conversation talking about our hair, very short cuts and the shape of our heads. 

After I saw the ad about Crisis into Opportunity I went back to this conversation. Millionaires had managed to increase their net worth. Authoritarian political leaders had managed to grab more control. Opportunity in Crisis. I thought the real opportunities should be about seeing the fault lines in our way of life -- environmental damage, excessive consumption, disparity and extreme poverty and malnutrition -- and correcting those. We weren’t moving in those directions though activists were screaming about them. So yes, I wanted to hit something. 

The emotion I had been feeling all week was best described by desperation. It totally engulfed me. It was so intense that I couldn’t write about it here, so I wrote with pen on paper. Stone grey ink on soft beige paper. After the first two sentences about my personal desperation the rest were stories I had seen or heard. The one I had heard that morning was about men, who had college degrees, that they could not afford to have paid for, now doing farm labour – just to feed their families. Desperation. More and more sinking into poverty. I doubt if any of them saw opportunity in the crisis.

After his attempts to help me, emerge a bit from the ferocity of the feelings that were making me say that I couldn’t find any meaning in life, failed, my spouse googled ‘how to deal with desperation’. Three things were common in several articles – gratitude, abundance and seeing it as a choice not to feel it. I had tried the first two – lists of things I was grateful for were scattered all over my journal during these weeks, as were all the things I had abundance of (many I didn’t need at all). But they were just lists, experienced by my intellect and not by the body and heart, and choice – no I couldn’t feel that yet. Desperation holds every cell of the body and soul in an unbreakable grip. 

After I spoke with my friend in Utah, I took clippers and worked them through my hair. The result is patchy, a ton of bald spots – especially on the left -- and the back is longer than the front as my spouse didn’t have the heart to clip it off as close to the scalp as I had in the front. It looks truly terrible. But I can see the shape of my head. I like it and I do feel better. 

Is it working?

June 5, 2020

I feel this blog experiment may not be working. Unsure whether to continue or not. I suppose if I were to logically evaluate its efficacy, I would have to first define what the expectations were. 

1. I hoped that the blog writing would kickstart other writing. 

2. I hoped it would help clarify my confusions and states and show a path ahead. I hoped it would make me more ‘productive’. I was feeling envious of those absorbed in productive projects. I felt a pain about my own empty state. 

3. I wanted to be able to write authentically about my inner states. 

It has not kickstarted other writing yet – because I am still flexing my writing muscles and am slow? Once I finish the blog post I feel depleted of writing energy and move on to other things. But I have more ideas than I had before I began writing -- which I sometimes jot down. One particular one – the happenings in Delhi between December 2019 and end-February keep coming up. But the writing has not yet clarified my confusions and that is mostly because of #3.

I don’t feel I am able to share authentically about everything I am experiencing. Some feelings are very, very unstable and dark and I feel fearful about sharing them. I feel like I will be judged for being weak, for spiraling out of control, for grieving too long, for not going with the flow and adapting, or whatever. As I mentioned before I have been labelled as ‘one who stays too long on the dark side’. So, I write through a filter and that makes the blog completely ineffective as the tool I want it to be. 

Last year I discovered two new inner energies. I was grappling with a choice about whether or not to continue teaching karate, as the feelings of being inadequate as a sensei were huge. I wanted to continue training but not teaching. I discovered an ancient, wise, chilled out dragon and a bumbling, apprentice samurai who had no clue about what she was doing. Daily dialogues with them, drawings and writing, lead me to a place of confident choice I was previously unaware of. One of the themes that emerged while I was playing with these two figures was about armour. The dragon had his own natural impenetrable scales, while the samurai wore external metal. She was finding it too heavy and wanted to shed it. But it made her vulnerable as a warrior. I need to go back and read those pages to see exactly what happened but there was a learning there about ‘innate’ protections and discovering them, so I could shed the external armours. That my strength lay in being able to be absolutely comfortable with vulnerability. 

I will go back and read those pages but some of the questions I need to ask are apparent – about vulnerability and strength. What armours do I need to shed? And which ones may be useful to hang on to? 

Perhaps re-connecting with the inner dragon will help me see the next steps. Feeling more like the bumbling Samurai right now. 

not saying anything really

June 3, 2020,

Today I am sitting on my bed. It’s getting harder for me to bring the body tension down after going out for the weekly grocery trail – Cedele, Cold Storage, Marks, Fair Price. Fair Price is normally a nightmare. No distancing especially in the fruit and veggie section and today there were dozens of filled carts just sitting alone blocking aisles. I waited patiently for my turn to pick out fruit but masked faces breathed into my ear as arms reached over my shoulder impatiently. People were pushing past everywhere, making physical contact, not really careful anymore. 

But ya, the circuit breaker is supposedly easing and there are no fines for not safe distancing in public transport, where the seats one cannot sit on are no longer crossed out -- which actually feels a bit scary rather than 'eased'. My brain is having a hard time finding its way around things. All the things I love are still restricted. Most people are still working from home, libraries are closed indefinitely, no meetings allowed with friends, I cannot go see our cats, and the seats along the river are still taped up. Infection numbers in the community are low, and I should feel safe, but the messaging through the govt around masks and distancing in work places has increased, so the combination of signals makes me uneasy. I still come home and rush into the shower and then spend a good part of an hour sanitizing the purchases. Sigh.

Small woes compared to the huge issues in the world. But today it seems endless and I feel a long tiredness. I don’t want to do it anymore. I see the posters at the protests, ‘I can’t breathe’. The last words of George Floyd.

I can’t breathe too. My sinuses are now perennially blocked. It's another day where thoughts are too scattered to gather into a bunch that I can arrange into words on a page. In our email group one day we spoke of how the small griefs, and difficulties and depressions we felt around the lockdown even though we were safe in our homes were as valid as the huge traumas faced by those homeless,  hungry, walking on roads, far from family etc. If we can't feel our own pains how can we truly feel those of others. 

I am listening to some experts talking about the cyclone in Bombay. They haven’t had one in 100 years and the experts are saying that with Climate Change there might be more. A bit earlier I heard political leaders discussing it. It sounded like they didn’t understand that this might not be a one time thing. They didn’t get Climate Change. Like they don’t really get that there are protests all over the world not just because one man from a marginalized group was killed by another with more social rank and power, but because there are deeper un-eases coalescing. 

Waiting. Sensing something different will unfold. We need a different kind of political leadership now. Earlier in my Wednesday afternoon chat, we had talked of the unease, the unhappiness of people with the current socio-political order. Not sure if the overlying covid-19 situations will facilitate the changes we need or the fear around it will just help maintain the status quo. One of us felt that the inversion has to happen, another felt that fear will prevent people from voting differently and the third was undecided, observing and waiting. 

More than ever we need to have conversations about everything. Listen, discuss, churn. 

National identity - incomplete post

June 2, 2020

I haven’t thought about my national identity in a long time. I guess maybe I never really thought about it till my first long stay abroad, as a student in 1980’s, when where I came from, and how I was brought up, my beliefs, the languages I spoke or didn’t, were suddenly in the forefront. I wasn’t just a teenager trying to figure out university life like most of the others there. I realized then that I knew much more about the culture there than my American co-students knew about me. Some of their questions and stereotypes were hilarious. I can thank Hollywood films and books I read by American writers for that. At that time though, I was more interested in finding the ways I was similar to the others than different. 

I finished my studies, returned and didn’t think much about it again till several things began to happen around me. Mostly beginning in 1992, with the Rath Yatra that Advani started and the tearing down of Babri Masjid at the end of the year. My city exploded in riots, I got involved in human rights work, many friends fought with me over my perspectives, and I began to see the ways I didn’t identify with other Indians – even friends whom I had been close to before. 

The journey after that is interesting but I will fast forward to the last few years.

When the BJP won the 2014 election I was devastated. I found it hard to believe that my country people would vote in someone who was clearly responsible for the 2002 genocide in Gujarat. Without realizing it I distanced myself from the country, while actually having more conversations about what had happened with the few that felt the way I did. Even though I lived in Singapore, I was working on and off with activists in Bombay, participating in a few brainstormings, attending events when I was in Bombay. 

The discrimination against Muslims went up, the country’s economy slid down. I was so sure that my fellow Indians would not tolerate this and would vote them out. BJP came back in 2019 with a thumping majority.

I fell into a depression. I didn’t realise it till much later how much it was connected to national and cultural identity and happenings, and not with personal stuff. The BJP revoked Kashmir’s special status, they won the Ram Mandir case and boasted how they would build this huge temple there. The CAA passed in both houses of parliament. Many fellow Indians on fb shared this information and more with glee along with hate stories about how vile the Congress was almost daily. I stooped while walking, which created a pressure on my spine, my brain was in a grey fog. I was in pain. I hated going to Bombay. For the first time I considered changing my citizenship.

Then one Thursday or Friday in December when I was sitting with a friend at the Esplanade Toast Box, my phone began pinging. Picture, after picture of huge crowds on the roads protesting the police violence at Jamia appeared. I could not believe how quickly my spirits lifted after. That is the India I felt close to. It validated my own Indian identity.

Many India’s, many Indian identities exist. It’s tricky, wide and deep. I am curious about them. I am more curious about how that non-identification with the mainstream identity, feeling marginalised by my country people depressed me so deeply. Much more to explore and I want to keep writing but have appointments to attend to and must stop.