Resolution 2015!!!

1.1.2006
Dear Diary,
      Happy New Year. It is 2006 already! Wow! I am so excited. Today I have made a new year resolution to brush my teeth every night before I go to sleep. Daddy says yellow teeth is bad oral hygiene. Mummy says Dr. Banerjee will pull out my rotten teeth and then I can never have chocolates. So done is done. I will I will I will I will brush my teeth twice a day. Thanking you. Bye.

Yep. Above I have openly copied my diary entry from standard seven. As any one can guess this promise was kept for exactly one week which was followed by- ' Getting back late and tired from Apurva's birthday party' , 'Sleepover at Nikita's house' and 'cold weather' ( doesn't even qualify to be an excuse). However 2006 passed , making way for 2007. I am not even going to start listing out the set of resolutions I had written on 31.12.2006. 

Recently I was in conversation with my best friend, overseas, where we agreed upon making a "realistic" set of resolutions. As much as I liked the idea, I was half amused with myself, shamelessly repeating history. Once I kept the phone down I could not help but ponder upon WHY on earth are we so incapable of keeping up with these resolutions, no matter how realistic they are?
I don't think anyone has an answer to it. As a child when this concept was introduced to us, I remember we used to bet on who held on the longest. For three consecutive junior school years there was this one girl who won the title. We often wondered how she managed. One year, our teacher told us that the resolution has to be something pertaining to the school or classroom, so that she can monitor all of us. Mine was to not lose my eraser till the end of the term. Well it was my mother's idea quite frankly. She was hoping that would help me keep my things safely. My partner, on the other hand, wrote that she would finish her lunch that she gets from home ( again I am sure her parents were behind this). Within three days she was caught feeding her half-eaten chapati to the School Peon's German Shepard. 

Our winner quite smartly chose to read one article from the newspaper, TO THE WHOLE CLASS. No one will forget those cold, wintery Delhi mornings; students struggling to keep their eyes open when she marched right in front of the class and started in a loud, high-pitched volume- " THE TIMES OF INDIA, HEADLINES." Being the only exception in our class we half-admired, half-envied her ability to go on this way. 

One funny thing about New Year Resolutions is that in our heads it always starts with- ' From now onwards....' . Have we ever asked ourselves the question as to why din't we do it TILL NOW? Definitely, the answer will be one of these- 1.) I never realised it. 2.) It is quite boring! 3.) I don't like it though I know it is the right thing to do. Oh! And the fourth one is the best. No reasoning. Simply quote- Better Late Than Never!
Struggling to keep away from starting a philosophical discussion, I cannot help but state this- The only thing that can make resolutions work is INCENTIVE and not a 'starting date'. I am sure if my teacher had announced that the winner shall be elected to be the next Prefect of the class, knowing myself well I would have made sure I never lost that 'Natraaj Eraser' even if it required me to keep it next to my pillow while sleeping. Otherwise, after a week you come to terms with your yellow teeth and learn from your peers that Dr.Banerjee will not pull out all your teeth at once. 

Having said that, as another year is coming to the close I have made up my mind to adhere to my best friend's words. I shall be making a set of 'realistic' resolutions ( I am thinking of calling them goals instead; hoping that the change in nomenclature will help) but this time giving myself an incentive to do so. So done is done. Thanking you. Bye.

I Exist

I was fourteen years old when I moved into a new school. In a nutshell- It was Hard. That was the first time I realized that a person can actually be made to feel lonely. There were new words added in my personal dictionary- Isolation, Ostracism , Abandonment.
One random day I chose to walk through the Chapel to find my "peace". As I passed by I heard the Chapel Piano being played ; the chords rising in the air. It sounded as though Ludovico Einaudi had himself arrived, displaying his unparalleled skills in our Chapel. I stepped in and found the room empty, except for the musical prodigy letting her fingers explore the keys. She turned to look at me as I smiled.
 "You play really well"
She smiled back. She must have been about three to four years younger than me. I understood from her inability to respond to my compliment that she did not catch what I was saying. I gestured with my thumbs up, pointing one finger at the piano. Her smile widened and she rose to her feet and said:
"Gamsahabnida Noona" (which meant ' thank you, elder sister' in Korean ). "Um. I dhank yo Noona. You sit? I piano."
I took my place waiting for her to continue. She played for a while as I watched her engrossed in her own melody. All of a sudden I realized it was not the music she was paying attention to. She stared deep into the distance, watching the trees sway and birds fly by, a wistful smile stretching across her flawless countenance. She was playing the song of her home-town, I could tell. I wondered why would her parents do this to her. She is not even in her teens and yet been sent far away from home in this lonely place. My loneliness was quite minuscule in front of hers. She was trying to communicate something to me, through her music. She was trying to tell me and the world that She Exists.
Recently I watched a movie called - 'The Lunch Box'. It was not a commercial success but got high accolades from the critiques. The plot is quite simple- A house-wife who wakes up every morning to prepare lunch for her husband and sends it across to his office. However the lunch-box she prepares starts to reach the wrong person. The two protagonists then start to communicate through messages written in paper and sent in that lunch-box, every afternoon, eventually falling in love with each other.
However, there are many elements in the story that caught my attention. How each character in the story is struggling with their sense of existence. To start with, the house wife in the story wakes up each morning with only one wish in her mind- to make her husband realize that she exists. Her life is centered around her struggles to get her husbands's attention. The man who gets the lunch-box in the place of her husband is around sixty years of age, an officer in the accounts department, in the verge of retirement. He is a widower, bitterly consumed in the loneliness of his life, where even the little, innocent children in his neighborhood pretend as though he does not exist. Then we speak of the house-wife's mother, who post the death of her husband tells her daughter how lonely she has been all her life even in the presence of her husband all these years. The lady who lives a floor above the house-wife in the story, tells her about how her husband has been in coma for almost two decades. She cleans him up every day, speaks to him, lives every second of her life trying to keep him alive, yet he does not know that she exists. The story even pushes forth the reality faced by a trainee working under the retired accounts officer who was orphaned young. The trainee requests the officer whether he could attend his wedding as someone from his side of the family, as he has none. The pain in the statement reflecting the depth of his reality- his need to make himself feel that someone exists for him.
 As a word of advice when I moved to the new city for my higher studies, while people told me - "You are away from home now; keep your guards up."- what they actually meant was, 'You are alone and there is no one for you. This world is not meant for trusting people.' A good friend of mine recently told me- "Everyone around you is your enemy" - implication- 'People are fake. The sooner you accept it, the better.' I am still in the midst of figuring out these debatable statements. As I watch the people around me, I realize that no matter how self-assured a person says she or he is, deep inside all are fighting to keep up with their power of existence. Maybe it is not that everyone around you is your worst enemy. Maybe it is just that everyone around you is their Own Best Friend, fighting hard to do their best despite the inevitable insecurities engulfing them. Everyone...fighting the same war. Unfortunately barely anyone understands that this is not a competition with each other. Hence eventually everyone feels like they are alone. The goal is not to win. It is to survive. To exist despite the never-ending war.

When I was growing up, I was taught that loneliness is only a perception. No one can actually be made to feel lonely. After watching this movie however, the first line that came to my head is- 'If you think you are lonely...well.. you are not alone." All I could think of is how many such people exist around us who laugh in a crowd and subside into the darkness of their reality the moment they are alone. How many people around us are actually in a crowd and yet feel like no matter how loud they scream, their voice will echo back as though they are in an empty room- the way the chords of the piano echoed in the empty Chapel.

Loneliness or Solitude?

There is a voice inside us all, that speaks up every now and then.
Our shadow follows us, where ever we go.
Our conscience pricks us whenever we go wrong.
Our heart responds to every cue, every person, every episode.
Our mind works day in and out.
Then how can a person say she is lonely,
when there are so many different individuals working within her,
non-stop?
It's a matter to think about.
Loneliness is the result of an idle day.

It is Solitude perceived in the wrong way. 

e-VALUE-ation at its best!

You are four. You are crying for that ice-cream cone on display on that cart the happy man with the funny costume is dragging. Your parent, teacher or some other random adult stoops down with a slight frown.
"No dear! No crying. Good children don't cry. Good children don't fuss."
You are eight. Your first Term exams are about to set in. You are not exactly sure about what an E.X.A.M. is all about. You are just a happy, wandering kid who wants that bicycle your neighbor's son has. Your parent stoops down with one eye-brow raised.
"Be a good student. Get a hundred in your Math Paper. You will have it."
You are twelve. Your so called best friend left you for the new transfer student in school with the coolest imported clothes and games. You sit in a corner, head hanging low. Another random adult walks up to you. (Think of someone different from a parent or a teacher this time.. Maybe an aunt? )
"You don't get so worked up. She is bad. She will have it for what she does. You are good. Good people are ALWAYS happy. "
Bam! The next thing you know you hit puberty and are slowly making your way through middle school to high school, dealing with all the possible contradictions of the first twelve years of value-education provided to you. When you finally begin to LEARN what the world,people and values are all about. Believe me, some people have it much earlier than 12 while some much later. I chose this time period cause of the psychological transition we go through when there is an institutional transition from middle school to high school. From winning hearts of your friends to breaking hearts of many (read parents). From 'who am I ?' to ''Woah! Who the Hell am I , Dude!?'
You slowly begin to realize that it was all wrong. That ex-best friend of yours is STILL walking with her arm hooked around that now-not-so-new transfer student around the corridors. That guy who pushed you off the chair and made it look like you were the one who played the classroom prank a few years back, is still holding his reputation as the best student of your batch- a teacher's pet. Though every adult had told you for the first twelve years of your life that such deeds are bad and bad people will "have it" soon, HE is not having it . But he is supposed to. Because Adults are never wrong. Something is massively wrong with the way things are working. He is supposed to pay for it. If not.. You will make sure he does. Wait.. what is that word called? Erm... Oh yes. R-E-V-E-N-G-E. (Other phrases- getting back, getting even or even teach him a lesson). Now you can bid good-bye to the values you carried all along.
There are two kinds of worlds a child lives in. A world of illusion and fantasy created by the child himself- here there are giant super-natural creatures, castles, giant chocolate trees with thick cream flowing out from the base. The second world of illusion created by the adults- with GOOD people. These constitute of GOOD teachers who hit you only for your good, GOOD aunts and uncles who will bring you sweets and are always very good (no matter what they do to you) , GOOD boys and girls of your age who will grow up being good with you. While the bad boys and girls will only suffer- like Cinderella's step sisters and the big,bad wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. They will never be happy.
I believe one of the things that makes teenage harder than it already is, is the fact that at every step we will have to deal with so many contradictions. I personally don't believe in Karma. But even if Karma does exist there is no way of finding out whether you have got your share of repentance from that person who put you through stuff. As a teenager I just wondered why din't people tell me that bad people DO succeed. They ARE happy. They do get what they want. I learnt that they call it "being smart, clever and crooked." (and often come with that crooked smile... at least in my head they do.) For example I was brought up with the values- 'Cheating is bad. Cheaters never prosper.' It is so ingrained into my mind that I would not cheat even if I was given the answer key by my own teacher and I need those marks to pass the very exam. Quixotic much? Well in that idealistic world of mine I have seen people not just pass but top exams/classes/the batch with those answers scribbled in a piece of paper stuck under their table. What I found hard to understand is that we are different people. They topping the class had no connection with me not scoring just as well. I was the one solely responsible for my performance and that's all I needed to be concerned about. However I remember all the time I spent screaming about how these people have been bad and yet gifted with good marks.
Most people quote : Life is unfair. Nope. It is the way it has always been. It is because we expect it to synchronize with our "good people-bad people" theory that life becomes unfair. I still remember this friend of mine who did not get the barbie-doll set she was fond of for Christmas because she was bad that month. However her best friend who was in her eyes equally bad (or maybe worse) going by the definition given to us by adults got the same barbie set for Christmas. I now wish someone who knew better than us had explained things to her back then. She went around using the word LIFE and UNFAIR around us at an age where most of us din't even know the meaning of these words.
On this note it is apt to mention about Carl Rogers, a world-famous psychoanalyst who speaks about conditional positive regard- where the child is given a reward every time the parent feels he or she has been good and is punished every time the child has been bad. So there you have the child growing up judging himself as a person based on his rewards and punishments. Just like the bicycle child. 'If I DON'T get a hundred in math I will NOT be a good student and I DON'T deserve the bicycle that my neighbor's son has. So that makes me a worse student than him.'
So here we are stuck in a loop. Generation after generation making the same mistakes.
On a concluding note these are my personal thoughts on this Good vs Bad debate.
There are No Good or Bad People. There are people who can get really good sometimes and really bad some other times. There are people who make up for their bad with some good and some who sometimes try to get something good from their bad. Sometimes people do bad things with the conviction that it is good. Some people do good but it ends up having bad implications.
What is the conclusion to this complexity? To stop categorizing things into Good or Bad, Right or Wrong. Cause the truth is no matter how old we get and how experienced we get we can never perfectly separate them, let alone associate rewards and punishments with them. So that the next time we see a child of four, eight or twelve we know that he/she will not grow up believing that life is Unfair.

A Lesson Well Learnt- A Short Story

 Photo Credits- Jonathan Sir (Staff Advisor -HIVE, LSR)

I was six when I first learnt to ride a bicycle. My grandfather, Dr. Manohar Lal Sharma, taught me how to always take charge and look forward.

“Dada! I am feared” I cried out.

“There is no need to be afraid, son”, he looked at me, his eyes indicating correction of vocabulary. “It’s no big deal. Remember this. You should be the one taking control, and not the one being controlled by this two-wheeler. You master the art of cycling and you have learnt life’s most important lessons. A- You are the boss of your life. B- Life needs a balance to move steadily. C- You are the rider. So you decide where you go, which route you take and in what speed you move in, towards your destination. D- No matter what happens, it is important to keep peddling. The moment you give up and stop, your life will stop functioning in the way it is supposed to.”

I wonder how he did it. Each time I came up with a new problem, he would somehow connect it to life and its teachings, often making the subject of my problems a metaphor for life or “real-life” crisis. My grandfather was one of the wisest people I have met till date. Every morning, he woke up before sunrise, wore his leather chappals and set out for a good long walk across the district. That leather footwear had always been special to my grandfather. I used to buy myself a new pair of shoes once in every ten months, but my grandfather had been using the same brown leather ones from the time I could remember his existence. “Great footwear carries one to great places” were the words he chose when I asked him why he would not call for a change. “These were gifted to me by my father when I turned thirty. They belonged to him. He was a great man.” I never followed this about the Indian way of thinking, where people tend to attach themselves sentimentally to the things that belonged to their predecessors. I sometimes thought it was rather quixotic on my dada’s part to wear the same old footwear whose stitches were not as strong as they were supposed to be, any longer, just because it belonged to his father. However, it worked for him so I could not argue much. The footwear carried him to every corner of this country. While my shoes used to wear away within a year, his slippers were right intact, except for a few stitches loosening here and there. Moreover, on account of its squeaky sound, it was easier for me to discover that he is approaching my room which buys me enough time to hide my mid-night snacks under the bed and feign sleep. As a child, I used to try wearing the slippers and walk around the house pretending to be my Dada. My feet fumbled loosely in the over sized leather. When my grandfather got to know about my act he chided me for doing so. I began to abhor those slippers from then.

One morning, I left the house with my grandfather. It was time for my first swimming lesson. As any other kid in the district, I was also to be trained in the Maikala Lake which was situated two kilometres from where we lived. As my grandfather stepped into the water and started warming up with initial laps, I surreptitiously hid his divine slippers behind the rocky corner of the lake, where he might not be able to locate them easily. After the swimming lesson, which was too traumatising to narrate, we stepped out of the lake. I had changed into the fresh pair of shorts, my “learners’ gift” (again a tradition followed to encourage the nascent swimmer), and started making my way towards my grandfather. From a distance I could see him leaning against the bark of a tree, his head hanging loose between his shoulders. I was fully aware of the saturnine expression that would cross his face when he discovers that his slippers were missing, but I had not prepared myself to face him that moment. As I came near him I had, if I may put it, the most heart wrecking experience of my life. In his eyes, I could see not just sorrow but pain of losing something so dear to him. I shrunk as the squeal of my guilt echoed in the hollowness of his heart. I wanted to jump into the lake for I could see myself as not only a culprit but also a coward who did not have the courage to run towards the rocks and return his footwear to him. What would my grandfather think of me? What would dada think of his only grandson? The little boy whom he has been nourishing with his wise, righteous words for the past eight years has failed him. My eyes did not leave his face. I just wished he could stop hurting himself. I just wished I could speak up.

Then something drastic happened. My grandfather looked up at me and smiled. “It’s just a pair of slippers. If they were meant for me, then I will find them.” I stared at him agape. Did he just push away his morose by yet another piece of his eternal wisdom? “Don’t worry, my son. I have learnt my lesson today.”

With that he started walking towards the house. I followed him like a shadow; the dark one, the gloomy one, the one with a shrunk character. Never will I ever be a great man like my grandfather or his father. As we reached home I dropped myself on my grandmother’s lap and wept. I wept for hours. I had asked her not to call out to dada. She tried to comfort me with her pats and hugs. She even asked me whether I was missing my mother or father, something she knew was imminent right from the day they passed away when I was four. She had even prepared a short way of consoling me for when such a thing would happen but as she started I nodded my head and pulled away from her. The last thing I wanted is to be pitied upon. I ran away from the spot and before I knew, I was on the street making my way to the lake. I picked my bicycle from the corner of the street, where all the bicycles are usually placed and started speeding up. As I was leaving the house, I heard my grandmother following me and my dada stopping her; “let him! He knows what he is doing.”

It took me almost thirty minutes before I collapsed at my doorstep with the leather slippers held tightly between my fingers. My eyes were still burning with tears and my hair was messed up with sweat and mud. My grandfather walked up to me and gently lifted me up to his lap.
“I am a thief! You should hate me!”

He just laughed softly and tossed the slippers to the other side of the chair, almost carelessly. “You are not a thief my dear. You are a brave kid. You stood up to what you realised was wrong. Now this is what I call Greatness.” With that he kissed my forehead and swayed me from side to side until my cry subsided to gentle sobs. I told him that I wished that I could someday fit into his shoes, rather slippers in this case.

Needless to say, he knew all about it. He had seen me hiding his slippers (I can’t tell how. I have never understood him and his enigmatic personality) but pretended like he hadn’t. That was a lesson well learnt.

My Grandfather was a great man. He taught me how to always take charge and look forward.

The Day When Everything Went Wrong...Revised (15 years later)

Remember the time in junior school when "essay writing" was introduced to us? It first started with Festivals, historic leaders (in my case one hundred words on Mahatma Gandhi), Seasons and then slowly moved on to a little more subjective topics which made us as young children express our thoughts and tastes; MY favourite teacher, MY mother, MY best friend and so on. I remember my experiences as a seven or eight year old girl with bulky handwriting , trying to balance my newly sharpened pencil in between my index finger and thumb, I found it rather flattering when asked to write about MY opinion (a word I used a lot to sound smart) on things.
As I was ransacking my old carton boxes I found one such essay jutting out of the lot : "The Day when everything went wrong.... by Sandhya Sriram, Class 3 B, Roll number- 46". I am sure this was a common topic given to the students of that age across all schools. I remember walking out of class with my friends that afternoon as we unanimously agreed that this can never be possible and the topic is by nature flawed. To quote my friend: "I have bad times, sometimes badder times but I am happy. You are also happy. I am sometime sad. But not full day. Only sometime." She spoke what was going on in our head as the three of us nodded in agreement. When I read my essay almost after fifteen years now I could not help but laugh at the innocence in the thought process. This is just a gist of the whole essay :
'I woke up late. I forgot to have my brekfast (underlined in red with the correct spelling on top of it). I missed my school tempo because I woke up late. I was hungry. My father dropped me to school and my teacher shouted at me for being late. I saw I forgot my water-bottle in my car. Now I was late and hungry and thirsty.... In Anitha ma'am's class I did not remember 6 tables and my partner called me stupid. Now I was late and hungry and thirsty and stupid......  '
The list of adjectives with the conjunction went on for a while before I religiously ended the essay with "...it was INDEED a day when everything went wrong."
I wonder if I now pick up a paper and pen and was asked to write the same essay, what would my day consist of. The point is that I won't. I won't write an essay with this topic cause either I would end up with nothing to write about or have a surfeit of incidents that will be too hard to pen down. Each of us have had such days where we tuck ourselves into bed at night and sigh : "Today was a horrible day. Just NOTHING went right." But did everything go wrong? Fifteen years now.. Not so innocent .. and yet the same belief. Sometimes I think our eight year old selves had the truth of it..