Monkey Cap

It is that time of the year when layers of warm clothes and caps are a necessity.

I have been into water slides in amusement parks. Had hour long brain MRIs. Been stuck in pitch dark rooms without light. Travelled in Mumbai local trains in peak hours. Gone scuba diving. But nothing makes me as uncomfortable as a monkey cap does. Claustriphobic suffocation at its best. I don't know why but I feel so whenever I wear it that I end up having a headache and can't wait to get it off. But unfortunately, it provides the best protection against Delhi winters. Especially when you go to sleep and all other caps threaten to slip off and freeze you out of your REM, a monkey cap is faithful to you like a soldier.

I don't like it but here begins my yearly two month affair with the Monkey Caps.

My Role Model

(This post is labelled under 'Interesting people I have met'....ok I haven't met him....he lived centuries ago but he was a very interesting man. Here goes the post....)

"Who is your role model/who do you want to be like when you grow up?"

I have been plagued by this question since childhood. I wouldn't say I didn't look up to anyone. I did. There were many people I admired. But I have never been in awe of anyone or felt like "I want to be 'this' person when I grow up".

So, to get rid of such queries I would give run of the mill tolerable answers like, "I want to be like my father" or inconclusive ones like, "I just want to be a doctor". I knew I would become neither. I also knew what not to say. I never took the names of Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi. Beauty pageants had demonstrated how unarguably fake saying so sounded.

When you have lived half your life without a role model, you eventually stop looking for them.

But the last two moths have been somewhat of a revelation.

I am finally in awe of someone!!!

I always thought it would be a filmmaker. It isn't!
I have fallen in love with Kalidas. The Sanskrit poet & dramatist from an era I so wish I was born in.

The more I read his work, the more I close my eyes to take in this feeling of floating mid-air, in appreciation of every verse I finish. The similes, the metaphors, the imagery, the grasp over facts and sheer sensitivity make you wonder how could any writer be so knowledgeable and gifted, almost 2000 years back?

Nothing is known about him as a person. There are scholastic differences about the period he lived in (around 4 CE) or where he lived (Ujjain or Sri Lanka). We don't know anything for sure about his family, appearance or life.Yet his work says it all. It lives. Little things that fascinated me as I read along are listed here:

1. The slight chip/crack in the vermilion 'tilak' on her forehead is a sign that she has disguised her anger and frown well. (Chapter IV, Malvikagnimitram)
-What an observation :)

2. Indumati is like the traveling light on a highway. It is her Swayamwar. The rows of kings are like the palaces across the highway which are illuminated (with hope) as she approaches them but silently fade into darkness (of gloom) when she walks past without selecting them. (Chapter VI, Raghuvamsham)

3. When you decide to meet your beloved's friend hoping that your beloved will accompany her and you will be able to get a glimpse of her, you are disappointed when she doesn't come along. It is just like making a trip to see the Sangam hoping to catch a glimpse of the mighty Ganga but you get to see only the Yamuna in the beginning. (Chapter II, Vikramorvashiyam)

4. Always accompany your loved ones upto the first water source if they are going away on an unknown journey. (Chapter IV, Abhigyan Shakuntalam)

5. Being a King is like carrying an umbrella in the sun. The effort of carrying it around is much more than the comfort it provides. (Chapter V, Abhigyan Shakuntalam)

6. A renouncer sees a person immersed in sensory hedonism and feels exactly the way a freshly bathed person would feel upon seeing a person covered in oil. (Chapter V, Abhigyan Shakuntalam)

7. A king should be like the Southern Winds, neither sweltering nor freezing. (Chapter IV, Raghuvamsham)

8. Anger has a shelf life only till the other person doesn't give in. (Chapter IV, Raghuvamsham)

9. Old age had announced itself by humbly coming close and whispering near his ears. (Chapter XII, Raghuvamsham)
- What a way to convey that he had started greying :)

10. Other instances wherein various details of season (misty eyes like the winter moon which is forever seen through the haze of the dewdrops), geography (an account of flora/fauna/soil of across India including Arunachal and Manipur, in Raghuvamsham), aerial view (exact mapping of the separation of Gulf of Mannar & Palk Strait) etc. leaves me spellbound.

I am yet to read Meghdootam, Ritusamhara and Kumarasambhava.

There is sooooooo much I feel like underlining in all those books and sharing with everyone. What a pity! I finally found a role model and somewhere deep down I know, I can never be like him.

I can only hope and pray to be inspired by him.

Two Extra Hours A Day - True Story

My friend Soniya and I have a lot in common. The only thing we do not share is that she has wonderful parenting skills and I have none. Her son Arun is in Std XIIth.

He is busy running from class to class, tuitions to tuitions, alongwith managing school and other co-curricular activities. If he makes it to a good professional college, this is probably the last year Soniya, her husband and her son will live together as a family unit.

It was his birthday a few days back. She wanted to gift him something that he really really wanted.

He was getting dressed for school when she asked him what he wanted for his birthday.

He looked startled. He was a bit confused as he hadn't thought of anything. He continued tying his shoe laces and sighed, "I wish you could make the day have one extra hour so that I didn't have to rush everywhere". She looked at him and sighed back,"I wish I could do that for you and have an extra hour for myself too." She teaches the senior secondary in the same school and finds it next to impossible to do anything without rushing from one task to the other, in the light of the new education norms.

Spending time with each other is a luxury these days. Enough extra time to be able to sit at peace with oneself and 'just be' is good enough.

If I get two extra hours a day, I will gift one to Soniya and one to Arun.

(Real names have been changed.)

I met Gita Saar

Anyone who has read Gita Saar (Essence of the Holy Bhagvad Gita) knows the following line from it:

What is yours today, belonged to someone else yesterday and shall belong to someone else tomorrow.

It is nice to have this up on the Facebook status once in a while or preach it to a youngster. But when it comes to imbibing the essense and embodying the same, I hadn't met anyone who was able to do so in real life. I always assumed it would be someone who had renounced the world and was on his/her way to the Himalayas.


So, imagine my surprise when I met Dr. Anne Hilty a few years back, a Health Psychology practitioner from New York who was traveling the world in the quest which she best described as 'I am searching for home'. Where you feel at home need not necessarily be where you were born or you lived. She had travelled half way across the world and had stopped in India before she went ahead.

My first reaction was, "How strange it is to leave a roaring practice of 15 years in New York to go looking for peace and home like this. These Americans I tell you." But as I got to know her over the couple of days she spent at my place in Mumbai, I knew there was something different about her. She also changed the way I made sweeping statements about Americans.

One day she asked me, "Here are some of my clothes I want to give away. Can you paas them onto someone who might be able to use them?" I hoped to find old and worn out clothes. I was wrong again. She was giving away everything that she had. She called it 'divesting'. I was touched. I passed on everything she had asked me to give away, except a pair of black trousers. They were too good to be passed on. Unfortunately, I don't fit into them. Tad bit tight for me. I hung them in my cupboard. They keep a check on me every time I want to go berserk buying clothes that I don't need.

She was meant to stop by to share an important lesson which I had been chanting since childhood but never could practice. To give up everything you have and start all over again, again and again in a new place, is something I am yet to even think about, let alone do it.

Anne Hilty

She has finally found 'home' in Jeju Island in the Republic of Korea.  It is a treat to read her articles on the deep sea women Divers 'Jeju Diving Women', Shamanism 'Beyond Tangerines and Palm Trees' etc.

You can read more about her on Anne Hilty - Psychologist & Writer. Her research interests include the balance of societal change with cultural preservation, women's empowerment and eco-feminism, deep ecology, shamanism as indigenous psychology, and the healing of trauma in post-conflict societies. She is currently pursuing a secondary specialization in peace psychology.

Why did I feel like writing about her right now???

Because she just went and 'divested' once again while I shopped like mad for Diwali.