Big Week

March 26, 2024

 

            It’s been a big week. I’ve been home a week now and I feel like a crustacean, more specifically a crab, who had lost its shell, it’s exoskeleton, its protection, but now is growing one again. Well, I feel like I am crawling back into mine, but this apartment is a new home still, in many ways, and maybe I am growing into it. I know earlier I would have compared what I am feeling to a snake molting but somehow that doesn’t fit right.

            I always equated snakes shedding their skins with transformation, so I wonder why it doesn’t feel right. Maybe because I don’t feel like I am transforming? Though I want to. 

            Big week indeed. I felt happy being home. I did things that I hadn’t done in the other spaces I lived most of my days since 2004 began. I started on the rehab of my injured thigh. I took a walk in the park. I visited the library and sketched. A library is a nice place to practice sketching people as people are mostly still there, at least more than they are in a café, but maybe less than they are in a bus or train where most people have one hand and both eyes glued to their phones. 

            So, I was happy. Until Friday. 

            I woke Friday with a sore throat, feeling low, and crawly, like I just wanted to stay close to the floor and creep around all day. I wondered what had happened to my ‘happy’ and then it sunk in. It had been a big week in Indian politics and on Thursday night (the time in Singy being two and a half hours later than in Delhi) Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Minister of Delhi, had been detained and taken into custody by the Enforcement Directorate. 

            It was the same day that the SBI, the largest state bank in India, had provided the data from the electoral bonds after trying to hide it for a week or two, despite the judgment directing them to disclose it, and being told by the Supreme Court to meet this deadline and file an affidavit that they had provided every bit of information they had. 

            Modi followers would call this detention co-incidence. They’d say the ED works separately from the Government. But the data from the Electoral Bonds had already revealed it otherwise. Clear trails of ED raids followed by huge donations to the ruling party had been discovered by reporters and analysts as soon as the data was made public. The electoral bonds scheme had been challenged, soon after it was introduced, by three or four groups that believed the bonds to be unconstitutional. But it had taken years for the Apex Court to hear the case and make this judgment. 

            Many of us breathed relief when this judgment had come. The BJP leaders and supporters used India Today’s — a media group funded heavily the Government — conclave to lie about the scheme, the donations received, and the figures. Unfortunately ground reports by U-tubers showed at least initially that the public believed this misinformation. 

            So yes, by Friday evening I connected my low mood to political happenings and how despite such a huge judgment nothing felt changed politically. 
            Kejriwal’s detention was reported worldwide. A friend from the US knew about it. But the freezing of accounts of another major opposition party, other arrests of political leaders,  judges resigning from their posts and promptly joining the ruling party — all in the months leading to National elections, didn’t make the news, not internationally and not in India either. If it wasn’t for these U-tubers I follow I wouldn’t know what was happening in the mother of democracy that I am a citizen of. 

            I watched the U-tubers all weekend and I languished doing nothing else. I did make it to karate, and I taught my lessons but my eyes, ears, and heart were glued to U-tube. Even the steady rhythm of reading I had built up broke down, and eventually I came down with a fever Sunday night. Assault of little bacteria on my body or the outside happenings on my mind and soul? 

            Some of us if we haven’t become believers or silent accepters of this tyranny may feel more ill than usual during this time. We desperately seek news and what we hear and see makes us ill for we also know that despite all this the BJP will win at least this year. All we can hope is that they don’t sweep. 

             Last week I wrote about the believers and silent accepters that citizens become, which Avay Shukla had described in his new book. It stayed with me because there is the third category which he didn't mention, the ones who analyze — despite the sea of misinformation, despite the numbing the sheer display of corruption and power brings, and express. We think, we don’t believe, and we are not silent. Some have U-tube channels, some write articles, some give speeches, and some like me who don’t have an audience still type away on our desks hoping a few people will read and become aware of the happenings, think a bit more, and maybe express something despite the net of fear cast wide by the ruling party. I am interested in understanding this third category.

            And last night when I could not sleep, I watched another U-tube channel's ground interviews. People would not name the party, people wouldn’t express clearly, at first refusing to speak at all, their arms hugging their bodies tight, but then when the interviewer probed further many dared an opinion. They spoke of the real issues, unemployment, and rising prices not religion which the ruling party is hoping to frame the election around. They were disillusioned, hopeless, sad. They said all political parties give speeches but there is nobody that cares of the poor and everyone is corrupt. It broke my heart. 

            One man who was more vocal was asked to name the issues, the parties, more clearly but he refused. They will watch and they will come beat me up, he said. We all knew who 'they' were. The BJP had grown a force of thugs on the ground for just this. 
            I feel no optimism that all this will turn the tide, the BJP wave is too huge. But I can observe and see the little changes and things that don’t change despite big news. It is a film, a Bollywood film, of the nexus of money and power unfolding, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. 

            As I have been saying I need the discipline of not going down the rabbit hole of constant news watching. I need it so I can get on with my own life. I still feel a bit crippled with things, unable to maintain focus on other things, but I need discipline now. I think I will start with trying to get back into healthy eating and rehabbing my thigh more consistently and hope that one kind of discipline might help me not slip up so much in other areas. And I seem to be disciplined about writing this Tuesday blog.

Mostly Transitions

March 19, 2024

            It is Tuesday and I will write a blog post. It is a pattern I’m attempting to develop. 

Since before my move to our new apartment in December last year, I had been thinking of the dysfunctional patterns, many that I got into during covid — I had a healthier pattern distribution before covid. I told a friend I was talking to that I would like to use the move to break some of/all these patterns. Maybe unconsciously I was putting out a message to a force bigger than me, asking for help to do this for I expressed it often enough, in my journal, or in conversation. 

The help these forces deliver is not always sweet and gentle. Sometimes they churn up things so much that there is no pattern, no routine, nothing at all, left. This did happen to me since the beginning of 2004 with each day, throwing up a challenge – major or minor – and also forcing me to adapt to someone else’s patterns as I lived in their homes. My mum and sis, and the cats, do have rigid patterns, and I did see my old patterns, well most of them, and unfortunately even the healthy ones disappearing. And I am here, ‘arrived’ at my own desk on this Tuesday, without any useful ones. And maybe this is my own fault since I didn’t use this time to reflect, in specific ways, on what kept the patterns in place, and what new ones I wanted. 

I think I was afraid to reflect and have my Virgoan-self emerge and create new rigid time structures when part of me knew I needed spontaneity and freedom. But s and f can become addictive, and they did, and I feel left with nothing, an emptiness. Which can be great because I can fill it anyway I want, but it can also be a sense of collapsing, as the external ‘air’ pushes against the emptiness. You know what I mean?

But I think to change your patterns, perhaps you must be prepared to lose all of them. You must be prepared to feel this weird transition, the unknowing.

I had this dream two nights ago. The first night I was back in my home after the wanderings of 2024. I dreamt — I was in the cabin of a plane, in business, so there was more room. I walked towards the front and found the plane opened up into huge rooms. How was this possible? There was a mingling room right in front, a place where performances were happening further ahead, and even a market of handicrafts to my right. I was looking for a glass to pour myself wine and couldn’t find any clean ones. Suddenly my spouse appeared and said, there you are. I told him I was looking for a glass and he found a steward who went to look for one. I wandered to the left and found a tree-lined street. I was still in the plane. 

A lot to unpack, but planes have always signified transition states for me. There I was in one with a lot of choices or possibilities or activities? But it is clear that I haven’t arrived anywhere yet, and am still in transition. And the wine? Intoxication and chilling but also spirituality as in Hafiz’s, Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved. Interesting that I cannot pour myself a glass.

I lost the healthy patterns of regular exercise and generally eating decently. At first I resisted losing them but then the decadence of no discipline to maintain them felt very pleasant. My left thigh that was injured in the days of moving was not nourished and the muscle feels atrophied and blood tests showed some adverse effects from the comfort eating. 

The only pattern remaining is the obsessive news watching sometimes until late into the night. 

A lot happened in India over the last week. A corrupt and exhortative money gathering scheme, opaque to the public (because mere citizens in the mother of democracy don’t have the right, don’t need to know everything), made legal by the ruling party, was struck down by the supreme court and as the process unfolded the extent of destruction of democratic structures, of a level playing field for elections, was revealed. It also became obvious that most of the public don't care — so what it's not the first time, this happens to every government — as they don't about unemployment, inflation, or inequality. Hating the other is much more fun than having a decent life. I doubt if any of it will affect the outcome of the election.

Elections are just months away and I guess I might be writing about my feelings around them as the media pushes lies and propaganda. Last night I watched an interview about a book written by Avay Shukla about the destruction of democracy in India. He used Kershaw’s theory about the brutalization of societies which Kershaw based on what happened in Nazi Germany. He said it starts with the supreme leader and percolates down through seven levels, changing Independent Institutions, Police, Media, Judiciary etc., becoming less compassionate, less able to be open to differences, at every level until it reaches society/citizens where the message of hatred is so amplified that people become beast-like. Imagine losing your humanity? 

Citizens then become divided into believers and silent acceptors. It is easier to do one of these than hold the pain of disagreeing, feeling diminished, and marginalized as a minority viewpoint. 

But many of us cannot fall into these convenient categories the supreme leader would like us to, and it is good to see those who can file and fight cases still do. Others use u-tube to send out counter-messages that want you to feel and think about what is happening, or write books, or make satire of these things. I try to support them and try to remain connected to what I feel and express it. That’s all I feel I can do right now. 

It is an election year in the US too and I hear it is likely Trump will return. I wonder what people are feeling there? Something similar or is there more hope that there are more avenues for opposing and more signs that people will choose civil liberties over an administration moving towards A Kershaw nightmare? In India we already have a new discriminatory law for those who seek refuge from other countries where they are being persecuted, and we have detention centres to hold illegal immigrants. I guess no country wants illegal immigrants which our Home Minister once described as termites (or was it something else?).

Returning to the thought of patterns I began with in this post I guess for now I will be retaining the news watching even though it is not particularly healthy. The one healthy pattern I want to re-instil is the exercise – even if it is only about building up muscle in the lower body and not losing the tone in the upper. Other patterns, I guess I am going to yet reflect on as I don’t know the destination of where my plane is going and when I/it will arrive. 

Merely Strands

 March 12, 2024

 

I had the worst vertigo attack I’ve had in a long time on Sunday. My sinuses were already messed up because of cat-fur while I am cat-sitting, and then I got soaked in the rain while crossing the street to the bus stop after karate. I didn’t realized the rain was as heavy as it was, and the street was as wide as it was, and didn’t open my umbrella. My hair dripped, my gi pants dripped and I shivered through the half hour ride in a cold bus. And even on it I felt the slight dizziness and disorientation that precedes these attacks.

At the cat’s home I stood under a hot shower and then dried my hair with hot blasts hoping to stave it off. But I couldn’t. And I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening, sitting absolutely still, a scarf around my head to cut out noise and light, and to keep all the pieces my head was fragmenting into bound together. My body felt chills, it sweated, it wanted to find a position of rest but each spot felt heaving-ly uncomfortable. 

The fragmentation of the self that this year has brought feels similar. As I live in other homes, which feel almost like other cultures, I feel more lost to parts of myself, but I don't feel like have the 'scarf' to keep them together. It is the intense wanting of a stability and perhaps it is also an expression of the alienation I feel from the changing culture of my country. 

When the Ram Temple my mum and I spoke about (written about in the previous post) was inaugurated some people called it a civilizational moment. I shuddered when I heard that but many rejoiced. 

This moment of moving towards declaring India as a Hindu Rashtra felt ominous of physical, structural, and psychological, violence and breakdown of what I would call civilization rather than the beginning of one. But it was definitely a moment that everyone in India was focused on, a pivot point, just as the breaking down of the mosque was a turning point in India’s history that has lead to this point where one man, a once in a lifetime charistmatic ‘strongman’, holds all the power in a land of 140 crore people, and still gets away when he calls it the mother of democracy. An autocrat can of course set the terms of what he will call the country he is ruling over. It is his domain today and he enjoys it to the fullest, taking trips he couldn’t when he was a young child, wearing designer clothes for photoshoots in various locations, and yet convincing the people of the land that he hasn’t taken a single holiday in the ten years he’s been PM.

While I was in Bombay I met a group of friends, those I often meet to chat about the changes in this new very religious right leaning country. One of the two Muslim women in the group was so agitated. We must do something she kept saying, we can’t let these stereotypes about muslims flourish. But many among the rest of us felt all we could do was wait it out. Indians were on a high brought in by the opium of religion but eventually the high would recede and the stark reality of everyday existance — employment, food, shelter, even freedom — would return. But then what? Then who would try to rebuild the land into one of less inequality and of more people employed gainfully and not dependent on welfare.

Vertigo leaves days of feeling abnormal in body and mind in its wake, and this time I fell and hit my head against the wall when I woke up to use the bathroom at night. The headache and nausea are unbearable even today. The moving around from home to home this year had been unbearable. I return home this Sunday, with no long stays away from it planned for a long time and feel in this a bouquet of hope. Of grounding, settling, of stopping the spinning of 2024.

My own hopes and happiness have often been tied up with the state of the world and particularly with my own country. It has often been a sense of, how can I be happy, why should I try to feel normal, if the country is going through a churning. I don’t know how this will factor into the hope and life I want to move towards. There is fear of these other levels of being adding to the layers of responsibility and guilt, to the personal fears about survival, that I already feel. 

It is Tuesday and according to the rule I made for myself I had to write a blog. It is a messy, fragmented post, written in the post vertigo, possibly mildly concussed state. It is practice and I know there is a connection between these different strands I blow mildly on to this page, but if I try to find the connection my head hurts. So for now I leave it unfinished. 

From yet another move...

March 5, 2024

 

I’m writing today from my daughter and son-in-law’s home. I could just call it their/our cat’s home. We are here to serve them — the times they are most demanding are around mealtimes but there are some other times too when they want attention, descriptions of which might find themselves into this post. I’m sitting on the four seater rectangle dining table littered with white and black cat hair. The surface is scratched by late night cat chases that involve jumping on and off it. 

We are here for two weeks, and I wish I hadn’t had to come. I want this constant packing, unpacking, settling, and then moving again energy of this year to halt. I’ve lived less than half the days of this year in my own home. Our cat’s home is still in Singapore and just a ten minute taxi ride from my home so I shouldn’t be unsettled but I am. 

It’s a lower floor and the noises are different here. We can hear early morning conversations and on Sunday a hopefully future basketball champ bounced her ball for hours and hours, probably almost four, in the play area below. I was annoyed by the constant thumping and admired her persistence. The bed is comfortable enough and there are snacks I like in the kitchen. The air is very still as at our place on the 17^th we have a hint of a breeze even on balmy, hot, days. I am finding it hard to find a routine or not necessarily a routine but something that will help me schedule in reading, writing, and exercise time. At the depot road home I was beginning to find the times and spaces where these were occuring though I am nervous that when I return I might find that have lost them again. 

I decided to stick to Tuesday blog writing to help me find the settled feeling. The cats seem to have settled to new human slaves occupying their space. Yoda took no time at all, but his settled-ness might change in a bit. When we came here Saturday, He jumped and purred on the bed we would be sleeping on while Heka ran under her parents’ bed. He seemed glad that he didn’t have to move – the last few times he had come to us he had been very unsettled. Heka came out once the parents had left and went to sit next to him. She looked puzzled. As the evening progressed, I saw that Heka wanted me to adjust to her routines, though at our home she is the first to fit into mine, while Yoda, who doesn’t like change, struggles to settle.

I could just keep writing about them and how much their personalities differ, and where they are similar to each other, or to me, or different from me, but I wanted to write about the conversations I had with my mom in Bombay. The ones that replaced the ones about her memories of life. Most of them were centred around Ram, Ramayana, and the Ram Temple. Not surprised by that because I arrived in Bombay a bit before this unfinished temple was inaugurated by PM Modi and the whole city, and particularly our road where Mr. Ambani, one of India’s multi-millionaires, lives was decorated with posters or signs, many garish, about the event. 

What surprised me was how often we, my mom and I, agreed on things. 

Should they have built a temple to commemorate the birthplace? Me – I don’t care. My mum – yes, but we already have a ton of beautiful temples in India, and they didn’t need to build another lavish one. Hospitals and schools etc. are more needed. 

Should they have destroyed the mosque? Me – no. My mum – no. So what if invaders had destroyed the temple, why should we destroy someone’s mosque. And anyway, they never had conclusive proof there was a Ram Janmabhoomi Temple there. So many small temples claim they are the Ram Janmabhoomi one so there was no need to destroy this mosque to build it at that exact spot. 

Should India be a Hindu rashtra? Me – no. She – no. All religions are important and what has religion got to do with progress of a nation. We are good the way we are. Look what happened to Pakistan and other religious states.

Should PM Modi have done the pran-pratishtha? Me – no. She – if he wanted to let him, shrug. But shouldn’t a proper priest be doing it?

What is the main lesson for you from the Ramayana story (she did watch the episodes that were being broadcast for this event with a beatific smile on her face). My very simplistic answer, that relationships are more important than power. Ram left his throne, one which he probably at some level wanted, for his father, and in my books so he wouldn’t fight with his brother whom his father wanted to give it to even if it was just to fulfil a boon, for it. She – karma, you can’t escape it. Rama a god was born a mortal and went through many things as one for karmic reasons. Also he had to come on earth to defeat Ravana. It was both their karmas. 

And so it went. We argued a bit over whether Ram was right or wrong to send Sita away even after an agni-pareeksha. What might have been the better thing, the better message? How much did his action reinforce ideas of patriarchy and rape culture? 

We argued about our neighbour Mr. Ambani. I said so much lavishness was bad in a poor country like India. She said karma will take care of him and I shouldn’t bother with such things. I said it is also wrong to explain away inequality and injustice by karma and do nothing when perhaps you can. We went back and forth and surprisingly my sister agreed with me. My mom said the next day that at 40, or 50, or even 60, she might have thought like me but in her 80’s she is content to leave it to karma and something bigger than her. 

I realized how much the idea of karma had helped her through that time when she was widowed and alone for so long. I saw how my own interpretation of the lesson of the Ramayana had informed my behaviour with people. I tried first and foremost to attempt to salvage family relationships when there was conflict over money or power. Not that I managed to salvage the relationships where the others wanted money, or power, or just wanted to be right, and relationship, at least with me, wasn’t important to them. So maybe there were times I should have known that another response was better.

I don’t know. That time in Bombay was unexpected on many levels and besides improving my connections to my mother and sister I understood myself a bit better. 

Hekate has emerged from the window shelf in her parents’ bedroom to remind me that it is time to brush their teeth and give them their dental treats. Their mum has found a toothpaste that tastes like chicken. The feral cat that didn’t want to be touched sits patiently when we brush her teeth just to get the treats, greenies, that she is addicted to. Yoda struggles and wants to run away when we brush his, but we are used to holding him tight. Last night he yelled his head off for more than an hour. When I came out, I saw he had peed near the front door — to mark his territory. The neighbour’s cat sniffs at our door at night when she comes out for a walk with her dad. 

This being here is hard and I don’t know if I will have the will, the discipline, the energy to struggle yet again to find a routine of reading and writing and exercise. Perhaps all I will do is sketch with a bit of reading thrown in, but perhaps if I do whatever I do, even if it is faffing, with awareness it could help deepen my understanding of myself. But I might also spend the days feeling headachy and grumpy and cursing this current phase in my life and yearning to be home and settled. I don’t know what will happen.

 

PS – I have used settle seven times (eight counting this one) in the post. I could use a thesaurus and change a few but I think I will leave the words as they are.