September

 September 1, 2020

 

I arrived on the birthday in a more celebratory mood. The angst and sadness I felt the previous Sunday largely gone after contemplation and charting of the first six decades of my life. 

 

It was a busy week, but I had hours for reflection built into the days. I plotted my life chart, discovering when the important influences of my life began and how they flowed. I saw the shadow times and the highs. I saw that it was not just what happened and what I did that was important, but who I did it with was even more significant. I included in my chart the people who were part of my life in its different phases. An amazing tapestry and deeper musings emerged…

 

Starting with the mum, who never understood me and with whom I had a tempestuous relationship until the 40’s. She was twenty when she birthed me had much of her own life to explore as I went into my teenage rebellious years. The dad who I lost when I was ten but who lived within me as the template for living outside people’s expectations and defining my life on my own terms, whose spirit showed up to guide me during my darkest hours. The brother I adored but who betrayed us, and who I don’t see anymore. The little sister who I ignored when she was a child, but who is now a unique bestie.

 

Shy and with undefined self-esteem, and poor social skills, I had few friends in school — few more in University. The deepest, the most authentic, the most challenging and nourishing friendships I formed were in the late 30’s and 40’s and 50's. Strong connections that distance and time cannot weaken.  

 

It was one of these that wrote to me after feeling the sadness in my last blog. She said, I wish you could see yourself the way others see you. You have done much. Most significant for me is your inner work which then manifests in whatever you do, work, karate, writing, volunteering. One gets richer with the other and there is nothing ever static in your life. 

 

I was feeling stagnant, and I needed to hear that. It reminded me of Hafiz’s quote: ‘I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.’

We all have moments when we can’t see our own light and need others to help us see ourselves.

 

Other friends echoed and shared how they saw my last decade in private messages or comments on fb. Some told me of the way I had influenced or supported them in their lives. Particularly moving was a call from a friend who I had sat and listened to for hours, accompanied him to clinics and other places he needed to be, during the most difficult time of his life. He reminded me of a day he had arrived at my home completely lost and we had sat by the sea and drunk two bottles of wine. 

 

I am grateful to those in my life who have sustained me in small or huge ways, but even more so to those who have leaned on me for support and allowed me to be a makeshift guardian angel in their lives. I once had a dream where a voice said to me, ‘If you are lucky you will be sent an angel, but if you are luckier you will get to be an angel.’ My spouse and daughter are those who have been both to me – my angels and people who helped me to learn to be one myself. 

 

These reminders collectively turned me towards a celebratory mood for the sixtieth. 

But a few days later, today, I am leaden, grappling once again with difficult bodily sensations and emotional states, after being let down once more by the bank. I feel like a plant whose sap has drained out, I feel like my oesophagus and trachea have been clamped tight, I feel like a grate has been run over the delicate skin of my chest and left me burning. It is September and processes and requests initiated on June 11^th are still being ignored or answered by, ‘wait till tomorrow.’ The frustration and humiliation of being at the mercy of completely incompetent and uncaring individuals has returned. I slip into the state of feeling, What’s the point of doing anything. Nothing ever works. 

Standstill. I feel at a standstill externally and internally.

 

A part of me knows that there is more to life. That the next decade might be one of much transformation. But I am here at this moment.

Birthday Week Begins

August 24, 2020

We started my birthday week last night with my daughter, son-law and two grand-cats. We ordered some favourites from Jade Garden. The cats were the focus of attention, but we spoke of other things – covid, politics, work, people who bugged us etc.

 

Earlier yesterday I had been sad. I had begun reflecting about the sixty years of life on this earth and felt there were huge swathes of time where I had lived a rather meaningless life. I felt disappointed that I had allowed myself to just drop into those mindless times. I felt that my decade here in Singy had been too drifty and purposeless. My spouse reminded me not to forget the meaningful things I had created in this time and it brought inner balance back, but I also cannot deny that the decade between 50 and 60 has been one where I haven’t really dipped deeply into much and that is sad. I suppose all I can do now is hope I can make the next decade different. I need to think more of what I count as meaningful, and I want to try to explore the things I want to let go off, and the things I want more of in the next years, during this week. 

 

I want to take a piece of paper and chart out some of the important things in my life, the ones that influenced me deeply and see when and why they began and how long they stayed. Two or three things that had a clear beginning and still continue on as passions in my life are socio-political involvement, focus on the inner life, karate, and writing. Those are things that add meaning to my life. There are others, that also deepen my being, but feel more like disturbances on this path of meaning, and then there are those that only exist as procrastinators and numb-ers. 

 

For some reason socio-political involvement and focus on the inner life have dwindled in my time in Singy. The latter because of the lack of friends here who explore this authentically. The former because of first the distance from India and then the apathy that sunk in with BJP’s win in 2014.

 

But the interest rekindled after the anti-CAA protests in India began last year. This morning I watched a news show about the letter some members of the Congress party had written asking for a change in the current party leadership. It felt like many, including the Gandhi’s themselves, thought that it was time to let go of Gandhi leadership, while others still believed the Gandhi’s to be the cornerstone of the party. I agree with the former but also a bit with the latter – there is something about the Gandhi essence that I too value. It feels more forward looking than the current regressive regime.

 

One of the people in the show was a spokesperson of the BJP. When asked how the party would react if the Modi-Shah leadership was challenged she replied, ‘Why would anyone do that? The party is doing so well right now.’

 

I had just watched a debate on growing unemployment and laughed at her statement. In my opinion, the party wasn’t doing well – as in serving the country in any way that felt right for the needs of the country – and their performance in most areas like GDP, employment, education, social justice, human rights, gender equality, healthcare and I believe defense too were dismal.  The only way they were doing well was that they were popular. Nobody asked her how she defined ‘doing well’ but I would have liked to know her answer to that.

 

I began to think that no government of India had done particularly well with the above indicators, but I felt that some had at least tried. The current popular government does not feel the need to try. They retain their popularity in the same way Republic TV does -- by blaming the earlier 70 years, creating a lot of noise about meaningless issues, and fanning hate and division. That of course then makes me wonder (like many others are doing) what it says about the people of India and their priorities.

 

I am very interested in questions about how people are brainwashed by political or other propaganda and the behaviour this leads to. I have been brainwashed and betrayed myself by people close to me – family and a valued teacher and confidant. I wrote extensively about the experience with the teacher – first as memory and later as a work of fiction – and explored it as deeply as one can alone. Further exploration might happen in discussion with others who have been through something similar. 

 

I think this personal experience might help me investigate and write about the political manipulation my country is in the grips of – if for nothing else than my own curiosity.

Untitled

  

August 20, 2020

 

Yesterday something finally shifted in one of my tussles with the bank. I sent a stinker of an email to the bank manager. My spouse wrote it after he saw me reduced to a trembling mess staring at the blank screen unable to craft the words to convey my experiences. I put aside the lap-top and pulled out my sketch book and drew. Next morning, I looked at his email and added, deleted and edited before sending. I considered removing the line with the word atrocious in it, but I left it in. The word sounded right there.  

 

Over the course of the weeks – ten to be exact – of struggling with this issue long distance, of feeling dismissed by the account manager who was supposed to be helping me, of phone calls to customer care which went in circles that seemed to try to help but did nothing but give me the same useless advise (only providing me with the email id of the branch manager on the fourth call), of appealing to the account manager’s boss, I had lost my ability to express my needs. I had been silenced and buried deep like a crumpled page  at the bottom of a full garbage bin. 

 

After what I had been facing, I had stopped expecting any response from anyone, but I sent it nevertheless to record my experience. Within minutes my sister in Bombay called me saying the boss of the relationship manager, a very brazen, young woman who I had complained about three years ago, had called her. The young boss was annoyed by my compliant and defended her mentee. She said I was supposed to send physical papers as a scan wouldn’t do. That was the first I had heard that a scan wouldn’t do but knowing this young woman I knew she would spin the story so it would seem like I was resisting sending them what they needed. I wrote off another email to put on record that this was the first I had heard of this and ask why I hadn't been told it in June itself when I initiated the process. 

 

Things moved for me after that. In the evening as I sat watching the sunset I began reflecting on the entire process and how slowly I had begun losing my voice and agency, and more importantly faith that anything could change. In fact, my sister was urging me to not lose my sanity and just let this go and only deal with it when I went back to Bombay. My sister is very different from me – she prefers peace to confrontation – and together most times we are a good team. I thought of the manager of my account who had for weeks refused my calls, not replied to emails, and rarely acknowledged texts. My reading of him said he was a decent person. I wondered what had made him behave the way he had. I hope he reflects on his handling of this and doesn't put another person through the same. 

 

In a very small way, I had fully experienced the boiling frog syndrome. Something millions of people experience every day when their causes and their very lives are dismissed, when justice is perverted, when their appeals for dignity are torn up as unimportant. I am unable to really convey in words the feelings and the people I am thinking of. In fact, a part of me feels like I should delete this and do something else, but another part wants to struggle with finishing the post. I see images – of masses in poverty who deserve a life better than the atrocious ones they are living but whose very daily struggles reduces them to stop hoping for anything better -- the man waiting weeks or months outside the airconditioned room of someone who has promised to pay his back wages for many months but each evening says tomorrow, or a little girl staring longingly at other little girls in school uniforms. Crumpled sheets in overflowing garbage bins. So many images of despair pass through my mind. Everything I do I feel the presence of this impersonal, existential despair – of the things I long to know how to change but don’t. If only…

 

Don’t many of us feel this? But do our elected leaders feel this? Why do they want to be in public office? Personal agendas and power or to serve the people?

 

Today the urge to delete, the belief that my words don’t matter, that I don’t matter is stronger than ever. But unfinished and imperfect as this post is, I will share it. 

 

In a week I will be sixty. 

Troubled

An old post that i found in drafts but thought i had published...

This morning I woke and listened, as I do on weekdays to Ravish Kumar, while drinking tea and eating oatmeal. He was talking about the custodial death of the two men in Tamil Nadu. He reconstructed the events in a sort of story board and it was painful to watch the unfolding of the around twelve hours of torture the father and son went through. Then the forced medical certificate of wellness and the magistrate signing the remand request without even seeing the men. All this because the men allegedly refused to shut down their shop during lockdown hours. 

The men were beaten relentlessly, they were stripped and allegedly sexually tortured by the police. What gave the police the right or reason to do this? I cannot connect the degree of torture to their supposed crime -- that they didn’t shut down their shop? I mean police are not allowed to punish anyone even for worse crimes, are they? Courts and processes are required. But more and more I hear such stories. 

I kept wondering if I would be able to torture anyone – for anything – in the way the police tortured these two? What internal inhibitions, controls, moral codes, compassion would I need to drop to do something so horrific? What conditions allow one to lose all humanity? Even if extreme trauma might push someone to this – the policemen had experienced no such events. 

It feels like a lot of people who occupy positions of power lose their compassion, their humility and capacity to connect to the life and right to life of others. They feel entitled to the things and actions that are detrimental to others. And if that rise to power has been through violence and the reasons for coveting the power is to promote exclusion, superiority of one race or community and discriminate against the ‘other', if it is systemic, or the belief shared by a large group of people the capacity to be uncaring seems higher? And knowing you can get away with it – that nobody can touch you – makes it even more easy. There seems to be a thrill in destroying another that I don’t really understand. 

This made me think of the times I have been mean and got away with it – the only things I suffered were pangs of my conscience and deep regret. But it stopped me from behaving in that way again. Who would I be I wondered if instead getting away with meanness gave me a high and I wanted to do it again and again?

It feels like I hear less and less of instances where misuse of power are punished and more where such people continue to flourish. It is very satisfying to feel that indeed, ‘what goes around comes around.’ But don’t see much of that. 

Police atrocities in India seem on the rise. Or maybe more are being recorded now. Ravish interviewed a man who analyses these atrocities – by religion, by economics, gender etc. The man said that we have these stats and we will continue collecting them but no reform, no change is anywhere in sight. 

I see some friends in the US also posting such stuff about the Police there too. 

Desperate right now – just to hear a story of someone getting their just dues. It is very satisfying to see this happen, and though in fiction I see this I haven’t seen real justice in a long time, particularly in India. Deeply troubled. 

Banking woes

 August 14, 2020

 

I’ve been pondering a weird sense of humiliation and self-blame that I have been feeling around something. I’ve been struggling with two banking related issues. The first is related to online banking and the other to a securities account with the same bank.

 

The feelings around the first are clear. I have requested a feature of online banking to be activated since June and it has not been done yet. One of the reasons for the delay are some permissions needed as this is normally initiated in person and not online. I had the opportunity to take care of this when I visited India in January, but I didn’t have enough time and put it off till my next trip in early April – which never happened because the pandemic stopped travel. I feel frustration and anger that my relationship manager has been a bit negligent in pushing this through, and I feel regret that I didn’t do it in January. Yet I don’t feel critical of myself – how was I to know that I wouldn’t go back in April? Nor do I feel, ‘don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today’, one can’t do everything at once. We always have to pick and choose and prioritise, and if one cannot get to something, but later faces consequences, it’s pointless beating oneself up over it. Or so I think.

 

The other problem which has nothing to do with error or negligence on my part is the one causing the feeling of humiliation. It feels like I have been raped, but I feel shame and not the rapist.

 

My securities accounts from one branch were moved without my knowledge to another. I only found out because I needed to make a trade to ensure that my account wouldn’t go dormant – new stupid rule that if you don’t trade in the account in one year it goes dormant and the process of getting it activated is not pleasant. 

 

Anyway, when I called the person who had been managing my accounts, and doing a fine job, I was told. ‘They’ve been transferred. Haven’t you got an email?’

 

I hadn’t. This happened last Friday and since then I have tried everything to get in touch with the branch they have been transferred to – called the man who probably has the accounts now a countless times, called customer care (put on hold for up to 22 mins and haven’t yet talked to anyone at that end) but have got no response. The man who has the accounts now probably saw those calls from Singapore and asked an underling – one who has no authority to even email me to call me. She was sympathetic but powerless to help. 

 

As you can imagine I feel extreme anxiety, frustration, helplessness and impotent rage. But added to that is the feeling of shame and humiliation. I don’t get that. None of this is my fault. Those are my accounts and the bank is accountable to me – right?

 

I couldn’t understand my feelings. I couldn’t understand why I was having such a hard time talking in public about it. It was hard even to stay with the irrational feeling, but this morning I sat down and let it do its worst within me. Then I spoke to my spouse and asked if he ever had felt that way. A trip through memories where in fact he had felt this way helped me to know that I was not the only one who has felt this. 

 

This man with my accounts has chosen to not respond to me, and the system has helped that. He is wrong, but he knows he will get away with it – or so I think. I think this experience tapped me directly into previous experiences where power structures have been used against me -- patriarchy, a person with psychological authority, another with social connections etc. Where doors of appeal were slammed shut, where there was no person at the other end who listened to my shouts; I felt helpless and then doubted myself and went silent.

 

It feels akin to all issues where powerful people hurt, harm, appropriate, demonise etc., fully knowing they will not have consequences. Then people who have been wronged begin to feel an unusually debilitating sense of self-worth. And just these psychological dynamics make it even harder to act to change these structures and we continue on with the s**t we have.

 

I know I am not saying anything new here, but I'm surprised with my feelings around this. BTW I'm still am struggling to regain control over my own accounts. I could kill somebody.

 

Belonging

 August 10, 2020

 

Over the last week I have grappled with a sense of not knowing where I belong. It did get set off by the Ram Temple ceremony and the messaging around it — about how it was a celebration for all 130 crore Indians and how Ram belonged to the whole world. I was struck by how quickly one feels estranged by this sort of messaging when one cannot include oneself in the narrative. Another friend remarked on how this had made her feel like an alien in her own country. I read a news short about a South Indian woman being asked at the airport if she was Indian just because she didn’t speak Hindi, and I wondered what I would be asked, to prove my Indianness. What do I need to feel and think to belong there?

 

Belongingness has not been so hard for me as an adult. When I was a child I often felt excluded from things – starting with my large joint family where I rarely fit in – but later, probably only in my early 40’s, I found a strong inner core which allowed me to not be swept away by external marginalisations. Often forces around me have created strong storms but like a well rooted tree I have swayed in the winds, lost a lot of leaves and branches, but remained solid through them all. 

 

But now events in the country leave me feeling extremely displaced, like a part of my identity is thinning and breaking away. So loud are the voices about what it means to be Hindu or Indian that those of us who can’t relate to them are left untethered. A lot of these voices have got stronger with the establishment of the Ram Temple and though I want to leave the issue behind I feel chased around by it. 

 

I have lived in Singapore for 12 years now and have managed always to feel a sense of belonging here. It was easy to integrate as though it is a different country it still has an Asian feeling with its emphasis on a collective community culture. Also, right from year one I found close local friends who though Chinese Singaporean spoke an inner language that resonated. I have experienced racist or xenophobic situations, but they have been rare. 

 

Saturday was the first time I felt an exclusion here that left me rawer than I expected. I wrote that story about the Ramayana and the way in which it had been used to legitimise violence against women, create an evil ‘other’, manipulate identity, and to grab political power. I sent it off. It was not the whole story I wanted to write since there was a word limit, but it captured my strong feelings around this epic and its misuse. The editors extended the deadline for submission and wrote back asking if I might want to rework my story as it didn't reflect the Singaporean South Asian experience. I don’t yet know why this left me feeling ungrounded; like a floating vapour unable to find a place to settle, to solidify. I questioned whether I didn’t belong here either. 

 

It was only the next morning when I was sweating at Hong Lim Park with four other karatekas that I felt myself in my body again. It was National day -- we were two Singaporeans, two Japanese and one Indian training together, laughing and exchanging stories about ourselves – we were a community. 

 

I think one reason I felt the sense of non-belonging that I felt on Saturday is because the story I sent to them is about an issue I feel so passionately about – not just today, but from 1992 when the mosque was destroyed, even earlier perhaps when I was a teenager and questioned the way Sita was treated in the Ramayana. While I understand the editors stance -- that my perspective of the story, with its slant around the politics of India, is not something local South Asians would identity with, I think that each one of us, wherever we come from, will have a different experience of a myth and I need to not feel excluded by this experience? Though it does have a residual something left to it that I continue to ponder. 

I think I need to spend some time with others who think and feel like I do to reconnect -- to belonging to my own core. 

Moving on, perhaps

  

August 7, 2020

 

The Rama temple movement is still on my mind -- the way it has changed Indian politics since 1992 and has reached a place that will alter the form of India that was envisaged by our constitution, and by the peole that actually fought the freedom struggle, to a India shaped by the RSS who never played any part in this independence. 

 

I finally feel detached from it. Change is inevitable. Death is inevitable. And we definitely don’t always get what we wish. The current political dispensation has won and though I fear for the millions in India who are not Hindu and not men, and not in line with the RSS philosophy, I also feel it is time to move on to other fights and issues that probably can be influenced. This reality – of the foundations of a Hindu Rashtra -- we in India will be stuck with for a long time. But Hitler came and went and so will the current Hitlerian architects. 

 

Though I am not a practicing Hindu I do understand what Rama really stands for. But the Rama appropriated for political power is not this essence of Rama, and though I have never been a devout Hindu I find it reprehensible. I feel I did need to notice and speak this truth. 

 

I heard several newscasters talking about those who had started this movement, and came to power because of it, were not present at the temple ceremony. It reminded me that those who are proud of reshaping India today too will die and will not necessarily be remembered with any respect. For now, this is enough for me. This inner place of quiet I have found around this issue has not been easy to get to – have grappled with serious body symptoms and mental demons along the way -- and I don’t know if it will remain long-term. 

 

I have found myself recycling to the place of despair I felt when covid first started growing. It is not exactly the same but the lostness, the fear, and the lack of mental focus are the same. Two days ago, I shyly showed my friend a sketch I wanted to work on. He taught sculpting and painting in Canada and is much further along on the this path of art than I am or might reach. I had found a picture of Higaonna Sensei punching in shiko datchi -- probably taken at the Chinese Gardens in Naha -- determination on his face. My friend immediately began critiquing the work – and I took notes. Then he said, this is some picture (meaning the original photo and not my work). I look forward to seeing the finished product.

 

Instantly I said, I don’t have any time to work on it. My reaction came from fear – of course of not being good enough to capture the likeness and the core feeling sense of the picture. But also the fear that I have lost the ability to focus my attention on a task for too long. When I draw, I like to do quick sketches and work on some details but stop once a set time – normally less than an hour is done. At the end of the time I look at the drawing critically and make notes of what needs work. I don’t go back and draw the same image again but choose something different the next time. Nobody can get good at any skill by approaching it in this way. I argue that I don’t want to be a great artist, just draw for fun, for the way it absorbs me and relaxes my mind, but I know this is an excuse. What I don’t do with drawing I don’t do with many other things that I actually do want to get better in.

 

I remembered how I had lost concentration in the early days of  the covid outbreak and then in the last months found it again, somewhat atleast, and now it is gone again. I don’t know if it is connected to covid or just my own lack, or lethargy. But the stories of covid’s impact around the world are beginning to really get to me again. There was value in allowing myself to be sunk by it the first time, value for me in feeling the depth of that feeling, the absolute desperation, instead of merely trying to cope, but this time around I don’t want to be swept along with this effect but try to have some degree of awareness and control over how my mind and body are reacting. 

 

I think next week I will try to create time to work on this drawing and attack it like an artist would – draw a quick rough of form and shape, then make the transition to adding details and trying to perfect it. Attempting perfection in anything is worth it, and I think that effort translates into other stuff in my life too. 

Still stuck

August 2, 2020

 

I wanted to write about a conversation I had with a friend around identity and how like passports, which are about a certain kind of identity, our experience of our own identities also have an expiration date. But I am still stuck. On many things but mostly on the feelings I have about the Ram temple foundation stone being laid on August 5^th.

 

One of my favourite news anchors did a nine-minute clip of the impending inauguration. The whole clip was him reciting the resources, the thousands of people, involved in planning this --  during the time of a pandemic where India’s numbers are completely out of control. His list had a very powerful impact on me. The callousness of this enterprise was extremely painful.

 

The current ruling government came to power on this issue. The Ram temple. In 1992 the Babri Masjid was razed and then a legal battle raged around it. The judgment when it finally came last year was bizarre. It was a criminal act, but nobody is to blame. It was a violation of law but the perpetrators will still get the grounds. The judgment by the highest court of the land was based less on evidence and more on something that has been used to rouse emotions – a very twisted faith. It was part of the promises in the BJP manifesto, and though it was a legal judgment Modi, the saviour of Hinduism, appropriated it as his doing. Which India am I a part of I wonder – one that voted for a party with a manifesto that didn’t have much to do with unemployment or economics or social justice – just Ram temple, Kashmir, CAA and such stuff? Yet the path that got us here is easy to see and all political parties had a part.

 

Journalists are still treading carefully around the temple issue. Already just reporting the truth of the Indian covid situation is leading to arrests – what might happen if they tackled this? India has slipped to 142 out of 180 on the global press freedom index. Of course, the ruling party says that these surveys are a conspiracy against them -- and their followers believe it. 

 

I can’t come to grips with it. I walk around wondering why I feel this pain that can’t quite be pinned down to anything. 

 

I am resurrecting a story I wrote when I just began writing fiction several years ago, and using it to assuage my angst. My story is about Ram and Sita. About how epics glorify violence and wars reinforce rape culture. I am convinced though that the essence of Ram is not about tearing down old structures to build a temple in his name, that there is nothing moral about this behaviour and that it would mortify him. But gods and goddesses – mainly gods though – are used to spread violence and hatred these days. My story is subversive, blasphemous but it is necessary. I need to keep expressing my feelings or I might be swallowed by things.

 

I have in the past been called a bad Hindu or a hater of Hinduism and this story will lead to more such statements, but I’d rather be a bad Hindu and a good human. 

 

Today I want to end on a positive note. One of my students graded to 8^th kyu today. He did very well – correcting his mistakes and not giving up even when flustered. It is still hard to organise our trainings with the restriction of only groups of five allowed for exercise, but I am amazed at how supportive the students have been about outdoor trainings, rotating the use of the gym we rent, with seniors helping juniors and more. 

 

And I am finally done with anti-biotics for my ear infection. The second course had deadly side-effects – gastric, urinary, sleep disturbances, muscle and nerve weakness. The body is slowly recovering and I cracked open a beer after days of no alcohol.