Acts of Kindness

October 5, 2023

 

I received a small act of kindness today which ‘lit up’ my dark, heavy mind-body.

 

Since I’ve been struck with covid, the heaviness I have been feeling all year has amplified. My body feels damaged, in need to healing. In the slowness and in the deprivation of smell and taste (answered that question about their purpose – at least partially) that covid brought I have been able to focus, on the mass of emotions scattering me away daily, and on observing minutely my inner processes and reactions to people and things, and simply days. It may feel very self-absorbed, but I am one of those people who believe that the un-examined life is not worth living. The things I gravitated towards for ‘happiness’, like my pen lover groups, lit up my brain but also created a craving that was obsessive and which dragged me back into darker energies. The books I read — working through the booker list — made me feel deeply and so enhanced that sense and so deepened the effect of emotions. Lose one sense and another lights up? Anyway my emotions lead me to some truths I had needed to re-remember. But that is not what I am writing about today. 

 

Two days ago, an horrible, a un-democratic, an authoritarian, thing happened in New Delhi. Hundreds of policemen swept into the homes of about 45 journalists who are employed by NewsClick, or freelance with them, at 6:30 am and without warrants seized their devices and questioned them for hours. Some were taken into the police station and later released but two were booked under anti-terror laws for promoting hatred and inciting violence and for seditious acts. The yet unproven charge that these journalists were funded by China and were spreading anti-India propaganda for it is being peddled by all government media, which is most large media in the country today. They don’t need proof but have already started showing charts of those who received the money. Activists critical of the government are part of these charts.

 

And they are quoting a recent New York Times article which linked NewsClick to an American man of Sri Lankan origin who is claimed to be a propogandists for China. Strange that he has not been charged by any American agency for the same, but India deems it necessary to arrest two and confiscate the devices of many others associated with the media agency that he is alleged to have funded. 

 

The  journalists were questioned about things they reported on over the last years. Did you report on the Delhi riots? Yes. Did you cover the farmer’s protests? Yes. Did you report on JNU? Yes. Their reports are in the public domain and anyway journalists report on happenings so there is nothing out of the ordinary about reporting on any of the above. They were asked if they had communicated — phone calls, whatsapps, or emails with people in the UK, US, Australia. Who doesn’t these days? They were not informed about the charges on which they were questioned and even the ones arrested haven’t been told what they have been booked for. If you don’t know the exact charges, how can you counter them or even prepare a bail application?

 

Many are calling this an undeclared emergency. But many, more than many, who have been slowly boiled by this government so they can’t feel the boiling water the nation is drowning in now — are scoffing at those of us saying this is more dangerous than the declared emergency. They even call us anti-India. They thump their chests and say, Yeah, who’s next.  All this merely because those journalists and small fry like me speak “Truth to Power”. 

 

It doesn’t surprise me that the government, and I mean any government, will go to strange lengths to keep power and to control the narrative. It doesn’t surprise me that they have tamed a fleet of loyalists who call themselves journalists to bark out their misinformation. It doesn’t surprise me that they will misuse agencies to go after their critics. It has happened before in my country and I never expected anything less from the BJP — more corrupt and power thirsty than anyone, anything, that’s come before. 

 

It does surprise me that my fellow Indians do not rage against this dying of democratic rights. That they slide peacefully into it. That even those who think themselves critical thinkers and intellectuals simply whimper out the same narrative. Though there is no evidence provided yet that there was funding from China they do daily shows that say, Yes the press should be free, but China funding is the ‘Laxman Rekha’. Those arrested are presumed guilty without proof and we are told instead to presume innocence would be wrong. 

 

I felt compelled to write this before I go into my cave for the next months. My body is constantly challenging me. Yesterday my fever spiked for no reason, and I was left quite unable to do anything useful. My mind is often oppressed by the brain fog and dodgy memory that many have spoken about post covid but oppressed even more by what penetrates the fog, and what memory cannot forget. My mind is oppressed by these acts of authoritarianism, of show of power, of bullying all those who criticize. It darkens the brain-space and pulls it into depressive, hopeless depths, and the same feeling then spreads to personal hopes. Will I ever get better? Will I ever be properly functioning? Will I overcome all this that pushes down?

 

Tomorrow I am grading two students in the dojo. One of my seniors has ordered a supply of belts so we can present them to the successful candidates. Only yesterday we realized that he was out of one of the colours I needed and that the one store close to me also didn’t have that coloured belt. I decided to order them online so at least I’d have it for next week, but on a small hope I asked the BJJ and Capoeira instructor I rent space from if he had a belt that I could buy from him. This instructor specially went to a martial arts shop and bought one for me. He will leave it in the gym where I can find it. 

 

This act — a small act, a huge act, you decide — of kindness lifted me up and out of the quicksand my brain had become. It lit up the inner space. I felt hope. For me the shift this accomplished was huge. 

 

Acts of kindness — sometimes when I do something small for someone the way they receive it surprises me. Their response to something tiny is so warm and filled with gratitude. Small acts for you may be huge for someone else. I know there are multiple stories like this in ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ type books and all religions encourage them. I know that I am not saying anything new here. 

 

But I wanted to share my story and the gratitude I felt today which lit up my brain space.

 

My body-mind controlled by the personal covid shut-down is directing me to hermit it out for a while. I have responsibilities I won’t turn away from but other than that I will be in a retreat. Perhaps even some sort of fast to cleanse my beleaguered mind-body system. So this is my last post here for a while. 

Covid and Me

October 2, 2023

 Slow, slow, slow recovery. Each day it shows me how I cannot rush it.

A friend wrote on my FB Covid post, Enjoy the forced rest. I was like, No, no, no. I hate forced rest! I prefer to pick when to rest. But the problem has been that I haven't been able to allow myself rest. I have noticed that when I need it the most is often when I don't allow myself rest. 

 

But now I am loving the rest. Just what I needed and wanted but was scared to have. It was easier to stay occupied than sort out the flow of thoughts and feelings floating through and through and through over these hours, and days, and months. Ya, so easy to see what Covid’s purpose is in my life, my current life, is. So easy. To know myself better. To observe the way my mind works and reacts. But I still can’t figure out the purpose of losing smell and taste. I like asking that question though. What is the purpose of losing my smell and taste? 

 

I have read, watched news, and lusted after fountain pens during these weeks. I have had terrible symptoms — both gastric and respiratory but the worst has been the moments of  blank mind. Total disappearance of memory and thought. It made me cry yesterday. 

This weekend, I went to karate and kobudo. Only 30% effort but still I was exhausted, and in the middle of doing a sai kata the next steps vanished. I stood still on the black padded mats, feeling so foolish and when memory returned with some help from Sensei, I finished quickly and vigourously. Angrily. 

 

But to go back to How I Survived Covid — it was by looking at fountain pens and inks. And telling myself that if only I had ‘that’ pen I would not be depressed. That I would get through these days easier. And convincing myself that playing with it would take me away from my anxiety. Absolutely the wrong reason to buy a pen, and I resisted. I did browse a local website and write in for a quotation for one of their pens, and they replied. How often I had that impulse, to buy a new pen, and still have it, frightens me. But it did help me get through the worst of covid. My sweet, patient, spouse, listened to my pen obsessing mind. 

 

This morning I wrote in my journal. I used the vibrant Platinum Silky Purple ink in a fine nib. I wrote — I woke depressed and with an anxiety dream. Don’t know why sometimes I feel like owning something new and pretty will make me happy but I also know that those are the times when nothing will in fact make me happy. 

Today I made a cup of black tea in one of my Irish teacups.

 (A wedding present from my spouse’s Irish aunt. Hand painted and each one unique — so pretty. Today’s was one with a floral design in bright pink, purple, and deep blue, with green leaves and gold trimmings.) 

I wrote in the journal —  It was one of my almost favourite ones and it made me happy, but I also found fault with it. I didn’t pour in the right amount of water. 

And of course I can’t smell or taste my beloved Ceylon tea.  

 

Hard to 'see' happiness when the body is ailing. But it is there.

 

I did play during these days with a Lamy 1.9 stub nib I hadn’t used before, and some new inks. This brought minutes of happiness, and I discovered my fountain pen profile. I like looking at every pen that exists — from a $5 Platinum Preppy to those exorbitant pens costing as much as $65,000 and probably more — and every ink that is shared on the fountain pen lover groups I am in. But I don’t like glimmer inks in my own pens and my pen preference is monochrome. I especially like black pens with rhodium trims. And sometimes I want to fill a pen of every nib size I own with black ink and only use those. I don’t do that — as I know I will miss vibrant colours after just an eye-blink.

 

In my dream last night… I had a party in a home, my home, and people I hadn’t invited kept showing up. Then I went to the front door of the building to say goodbye to the last guests and when I returned, I unlocked the door to my apartment with my key and went straight into the bathroom and shed my clothes to shower. Suddenly three strangers were in the apartment, and I realized I was in the wrong one. I said, but the key worked, sorry, and scrambled to put on my clothes. They attacked me, with ill intentions, and at first my punches did not connect and were weak when they did. The two men and one woman just laughed but then I began finding the strength to fight them off… 

 

I woke with a fast heartbeat, though not especially scared. I’ll be unpacking this dream today. Probably that is all I might do and read one of the booker list books. I finished one last week — Western Lane — and even managed to write a review of it in one of the book reading groups I am in. 

 

Ya, slow, slow, slow, recovery. And most days I say, be patient, though some days I cry with frustration. I am glad to have enough mental clarity to observe myself as I go through this. And today I could write this blog post. Yet my inner critic says, But you can’t yet write what you need and want to. 

Mother of Democracy

September 13, 2023

 

I woke with a lot of agitation — some good, some unpleasant — this morning. I had barely slept because the mind was active and heavy with memories of painful interactions, and dreams of betrayal kept waking me up, so trudged through the morning hours and got to my desk late. 

 

I have got into the habit of copying one or two chapters of the Tao Te Ching every morning before I work. It grounds me and soothes stress. But today I decided to stay with the agitation and write here instead.

 

I have been attending a play writing class and for that we had to first find an idea to work with. The first step in good play writing. Then go on and create a question that could be answered with a yes or a no, and the shades in between. I of course wanted to work with nationalism and democracy. 

 

Meanwhile in life these questions also floated around with things like the G-21, the presence of a certain kind of coverage and absence of another. Me trying to find sources that would fill in the missing bits of the picture provided by lap dog media. This along with the difficult interactions helped clarify what I would work on in the play. One-sidedness and manipulation are the micro ideas, by micro I mean detailed in a very personal situation, I want to write around, and explore how both are detrimental to true nation building. 

 

I used to be terribly and self-righteously one-sided at one time. I felt I had to be so to express the marginalized side in a conflict. I don’t like that part of myself so much anymore. I feel like this one-sidedness prevented me from seeing anything else, but more so it prevented me from listening, from softness, and from compassion for an individual because I was so aligned with a cause while the other was aligned with another. The other reason I don’t like it anymore is that I saw how it also prevented the other person from listening to me. And with both not listening no shifts happened. Shifts are needed for change. Ideally now I still want to stand for what I believe in but also stay open to understand where the other side is coming from and hope to create a dialogue even in the midst of battles. 

 

The thing though I hate even more is stating one is neutral while being entrenched in one position. Sometimes perhaps the person can’t see themselves and thinks they are neutral but other times it is a front they put up to manipulate and ‘persuade’ others. 

 

And it is because of both these that I dislike the BJP so much. They pretend to be neutral. It’s best I write from specifics. At the recent G-21 all participants were handed a booklet which had Bharat the Mother of Democracy. The next page had PM Modi saying he was proud to represent the mother of democracy. I had to laugh but I was so pained by this too. India was always at best a struggling democracy and has back-slided into authoritarianism in the last years. And there no evidence of democratic rulers in India's history. Perhaps the ruling party does not understand democracy but more likely it is manipulating perceptions.

 

Again let me be specific. India now stands at 161 out of 180 as far as press freedom is concerned. People will laugh at this number and say it is a conspiracy of the west against India. But with most/all mainstream media now being owned and controlled by corporates or individuals closely connected to the ruling party and funded (tax-payers money) through advertisements by the ruling party there is coverage filled with absences and bordering on both hate speech and propaganda. The government is perfect and needs no critique is the picture Indians are shown. The supporters of the government will say but look at all those youtubers always criticizing the government. If press freedom were dead, they would be behind bars. Well in my opinion the government has calculated that their viewership is small compared to the lap dog media viewers that the government can afford to let them be. In fact by letting them be they can maintain the illusion that press if free. 

 

So the Government calls itself the representative of the Mother of Democracy, Bharat, but has cultivated an army, media and foot-soldiers whose only purpose is to one-sidedly cut down every critique of the government and re-inforce the superiority of Hindus in our so-called democracy. It works best this way. Pretend neutrality so you stay light and clear while having your army do the dark work of hate. 

 

And unfortunately, the Foreign leaders, particularly Nato countries, have chosen to allow the PM to perpetuate this as shown by the recent G-21. Do they care for democracy? And do they think that the down-slide of democracy in India will not ultimately affect their own democracies? With a country set to be the largest population in the world it is obvious that the ideals and values of that country will spread through the world, particularly as other democracies allow it to represent itself as a democracy.

 

I don’t know why ‘India that is Bharat’ even bothers to keep the mask up. Any thoughts?

 

I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone but me. What are the holes here that I do not see? 

 

Anyway this being said I can do other things now. 900 plus words, decently strung together (I hope), in less than an hour — good writing practice.

 

G-21

 September 12, 2023

 You can’t please everyone and nor should you try. The reasons you might try to please someone at the cost of another someone could come from a wide variety of reasons. You actually agree with the someone you decide to please — personal preference, or that someone is more powerful, more useful, than the other one — a practical consideration. 

 

I’ve been watching some of the G-21 debate shows coming from India. Most, or should I say all, were/are tomtom-ing India’s ability to have got a consensus — particularly on the Russia-Ukraine situation. I’d prefer to call it an invasion of Ukraine by Russia than the war between Russia and Ukraine for really would Ukraine have voluntarily waged a war with Russia? 

 

This consensus was achieved by considerably watering down the words of the Bali declaration which named Russia as an aggressor. One of the participants of the show said this aspect of the Bali declaration was an aberration. I disagreed, shouting at him on the tv screen from my sofa. The statement this G-21 has adopted instead merely says, ‘Today’s era must not be of war…We call on all states to uphold the principles of international law including territorial integrity and sovereignty, international humanitarian law etc…’ Apparently this declaration upheld the human suffering in Ukraine while not blaming Moscow. 

 

Russia thanked India for preventing the Western leaders from Ukrainizing the summit. They were pleased. I don’t know who else, besides me, is dissatisfied by this but Ukraine has criticized the declaration’s text for not mentioning Russia. 

 

The only person on the debates I watched who called this what it is — shifting the balance towards the Russia-China bloc — was criticized by the rest of the participants. Some might say so what? About time Western countries were shown their place. 

 

Where do you stand on this? Is it enough to say states (powerful ones for sure) must honor the territorial integrity of other states (less powerful than them)? Is it enough to say that father’s must not abuse their children but when a father does, then respond by saying, ‘we sympathize with the pain of the children,’ but make no mention of the aggression of the father. You know what I mean!

 

I have presented it in a simplistic way. There are nuances to this. But the idealist in me does not like how the aggression has been swept under words of generality, under preferred values  and behaviors that the world should follow. How about living by those values too and calling out those who don’t? But this happens less and less everywhere. Lofty, nice sounding declarations, but no walking the talk. 

 

Of course, once this consensus was reached the summit could get on with the real work of economics. About one of these outcomes too, the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, the same reporter from above pointed out how the details were not available. Who would be bank-rolling it, he asked. Some of the other participants did lower their enthusiasm for this achievement when this was mentioned. Kudos to them for being open to perspectives — one though still praised India the new super-power under PM Modi. 

 

So where do you stand? Was this summit the success that it says it was? 

 

Today I am pondering why I, who has no power to change any outcome of anything, even ponder these things and write blogs. I don’t know. But I am glad I feel strongly about things outside my power. I like this part of myself.

 

Now that I have got this out of my system I might actually do some productive work.

 

The Tao that can be…

September 5, 2023

Since I re-discovered my love for fountain pens, I have wanted to use them to copy something out, just to practice writing and to use my pens and inks more. Many fountain pen lovers do this regularly.

 

I never thought that what I would copy out would be four translations or interpretations (as all translations of something where the author is long gone are but interpretations) of the Tao Te Ching.

 

I spent the morning perusing the six translations I had downloaded from the library. I wanted to only read two or three in entirety but couldn’t eliminate three, so kept four. And then I wrote in different inks, and pens, (I won't bore non-fp lovers with the details of which pens and which inks and why) notes from the introduction and the first chapter of each on foolscap (A4) paper. And I hope to spend an hour everyday with one or two chapters until I finish them. I hope the library lets me renew the books for I won’t finish before they expire.

 

I guess it was the relentless search for the theme for my karate stories, the willingness to stay with the not knowing for as long as it took, and sheer good fortune or something akin to that which cannot really be named, that brought me to this task. I definitely, momentarily at least, must have been in sync with the Tao to arrive here. 

 

There is a joy in being here today that I haven’t felt for ages. A feeling that enduring the darkness of the last eight-nine months was worth it. I didn’t ever think that it would lead me (back) to the Tao Te Ching. But isn’t this the essence of my seeking? Perhaps all seeking?

 

I had a dream in 2003 when I asked for guidance to deepen my meditation that lead me to goju-ryu karate. Twenty years later, I see another layer in the wisdom of that simple dream. And I am eager to find further layers, though I don’t know if I ever will. To look for something that I don't know if I will ever find is both a 'senseless' task, and the only task that matters.

 

But the Tao Te Ching, whose characters can be described as, ‘to go together, or to see’ as well as ‘being in harmony with the tides and phases of the moon that brings us light in darkness’, is exactly what I need to try.   

 

If we all read the first verse of this classic, we all may finish the title of this blog differently, and maybe also the same person might finish it differently at a different juncture of time. Today I would simply say that the Tao that can be written about is not the eternal Tao.

 

Very short post as I have much else to get to today.