To BE

I have often had this feeling that the world was moving in a different, if not in the opposite, direction. It may seem as though the world and I were in some feud. We are not in any conflict, but somehow the more pragmatic stand was absent in one of us. I think it was the world that was the more pragmatic; the world is not a poet.

It may be that the moment I defined the object of my love and affection, I sensed a certain discontent within, an inappropriateness of sorts, as if love was too monolithic to be rationed out to a selected few. Moreover, I felt a dissatisfying lacuna, an empty feeling, post the aforesaid definition of the object of my affection. 

As a result my temperament became what men call irresponsible. Unknowingly my interaction with persons whom I came in contact with came to border on selfish and utilitarian. I became a 'user' of the world with a distinct sense of separate I.

Had it been clearly intended by me to be thus and operate thus I might have taken the response of my fellows in my stride and made strategic amends rather than get confused and hurt. Amends I did make once I became aware of the feeling, but they were not 'strategic'. They came from a genuine need to change for the better. However, my attitude became more like a disclaimer, more apologetic than correctional. I began to be altruistic.That was another extreme. It was the opposite half of the undesired hemispheric negative between which the flow of temperance carried men to fulfill their destinies. That was not where a Buddha might have located his middle path. I had to be somewhere in between the extremes: neither selfish, nor altruistic; neither 'this' or 'that'. I had to just 'BE'.

How to "just BE"? Mind has this habit of engaging either with the past or with a dream. There are a few, miserly few, conscious moments in a day when one is in the flow. How to anchor there? It is when you pitch there that you are carried, miraculously almost, to the end from where you look back upon what has been your life and see with satisfaction that you have indeed made a contribution to life.

This is the one thing worth living for. At least it seems so to me. As for the world, you need to be in the 'flow' to be in it, for if you are outside of it, it is an illusion. To be aware is to be. To be conscious is to live in the world.

Nothing in particular

I am not the best to meet deadlines. I have with me assignments from a little more than last year. There are two books and some designing...things are piling up as always.
When I look back, I see that I have never really worked for a salary under someone - except that one year stunt in 89. I could not have survived more than six months had I been on my own, but I was not and so was forced to complete 12 months. Oh Yes, in the beginning of my move down south, there was that 12 day job at a 'deco-pack' establishment. Thankfully, they let me go.
This is not to say I have never worked under heads.  I guess I have, all my life but the leash was longer. I had more freedom. I was not so 'answerable' for my licenses to them. Most of them indulged me I guess.
And now Hema, the clairvoyant I saw the other day, tells me that "working under someone is death" for me.
Well, I am alive and I am my own boss!
That has had its own minuses. For many years I have lived with no clear idea of where to get my next meal. But things have worked almost mysteriously. Sometimes I have had a last moment rescue of sorts.
I remember walking the streets of Ahmedabad on a Diwali day without food. Towards evening I met Apurva Desai, who brought me home and gave me Diwali treats and money to return to Baroda.
Curiously, the surname Desai has something to do with feeding me!
But that seems over. I must willingly fuss over what I eat: no junk-food anymore, no oil, no meats...
Were I to meet a last minute rescuer now, who, imagine, had nothing for me except oil soaked, deep fried red meat kabobs, what would I do?
The long and the short of it is that life is full of rules now. I am not so free in choosing my fare like in the past. In the past there was youth in abundance, I must say. There was muscle and madness.

Churning

Sometimes it takes just one brief call  to shatter your cool from someone you might recall marginally as a friend, since s/he has long ceased to figure in your life. S/he has merged with the more oblivious part of your memory and to be disturbed so suddenly rankles because the familiarity of the person's tone is indeed irksome. There are commitments you have made, you have moved on ... s/he is not expected to know all that, but you expect the person to familiarize him/herself before being back-thumping close, suddenly and out of the blue.

My cool and composure was shattered this morning when from the obscure oblivion's deep someone I once knew called. 
He had bad luck and marriage; had a fall or two from grace, but he rose again Phoenix-like, every time. In the bargain he had lost once or twice what may be called sanity  which had made him impose himself on people near him, like his wife and so on.  And he had regained his sanity in parts but his anger remained. 
I was not so close to him as, I imagine, his wife might have been, so when he called this morning to announce that he "was coming home" to meet me I found myself unprepared. I declined to see him. Perhaps he was committed mentally, expecting  things to be  just as they were in the past when we bachelors could call on friends as we pleased.  But we are not bachelors anymore. We are middle aged house holders with stricter priorities, more allowing for the needs of our dear ones than our own, let alone of some near total, almost mysteriously vanished, stranger.
I declined and hung up, trying not to feel guilty but he called again. He insisted on coming to visit, making me the more resolute in my refusal to see him. He was angry and hurt, I could sense it in his voice on the phone, but we hung up with him threatening to gate crash and me preparing to call security in case he did.
There I left it and before retiring to siesta at about 2.15, I told Anasuya, our domestic help, that in case a chap shows up at the door at three, she should tell him that I was resting. 
At 4.30 I asked Anasuya whether he had come. He hadn't, she said.  
I sighed, hoping that the matter had ended, that it was a false alarm or a bluff. But it was far from finished. Something of a pang of guilt did stir things up deep within me and my mind began churning. I had to get rid of it, hence this blog.

***

 Much was going on in my mind with the play 'Revolutionaries', with the character of Lenin that I was going to be playing had we gone through the tardy production process to perform, but we have shelved it and so I must write about it to exorcise the ghost:

Since everything has been discussed regarding my need as an actor, since judgements have been passed, I suffice it to say that I wanted to do the play BECAUSE I WANTED to and now I am out of it BECAUSE I WANT to. As for the rest, I do not have the motivation to change things I can not. I have the strength to accept the stubbornly unchanging. I mean, there are so many things about life that I wish were not as they are, but that does not make me cease to live. I accept it, thereby living gratefully the rest that is worth living for. Besides, I do not want to pretend to be so affected by a play that I did not care much about. Goes without saying that theatre, par say, is not the whole of my life. What is one bad play, right?

***

Good news is that we will soon be doing a Shaffer. 'Black comedy' will be scheduled in Jan to perform in April. We have a tentative plan to travel with it to Mumbai and Delhi, Bangalore...I don't know.

*** 

Another good thing is that I am glad I saw Hema, a clairvoyant who told me that it is best to shift to sculpting in stone. This is good news because it sort of made sense. I had bought a bit of red clay to start moulding hollow, to build figures with clay.

Guess I was fighting against 'giving up' painting. I enjoy drawing more than painting and deep deep down I knew this. But the refusal to accept a certain incapacity to enjoy something got me to pull all sorts of veils and wool over my eyes. I was refusing to see the simple fact of going by the aggregate of being happy at the end of an exercise whether I liked it or not. 

Drawing and sculpting are more akin than are painting and drawing. If I do what I enjoy doing then it should not matter whether I paint or sculpt. After all, we live for the joy of living, don't we? 

***

Oh, but before I sign off here is a tip:-

Walk or exercise as much as you can without overdoing it and eat greens. Reduce sodium intake and quit smoking. 

As for alcohol, a peg not everyday, too, keeps the doctor away! 

The riddle of Light and dark

This morning I went for a walk through the forest. It rained last night and the roads were puddled but the air was fresh and the vegetation green. It was pleasant to walk briskly early after a long time.
Then I was thinking meditatively whether darkness was absence of light or whether light was absence of darkness and I remembered a discussion I had some years back with Anuradha Chaudhari, a young, bright, cheerful girl I know. She held that Light was the origin and the appearance of darkness was because of a certain withdrawal of light. She suggested that darkness was not real; it had no substance whereas light was substantial as well as real.
I was advocating the fundamentals of darkness as the basis upon which light shines. I held that darkness was the principle that gave validity to light as much as the other way around. "like a room" I argued, "that does not get lit until light is brought in it." Both were principal opposites at the root of  manifest nature according to me. 
But Anuradha refuted my argument saying that light was always present. That confining space by building walls caused withdrawal of light which, she said, was present there before that space was converted into a room.
We debated for some time inconclusively and then decided to talk of other things more mundane and manageable.
This morning while walking the whole thing came back and I saw the validity of choosing to be on the side of light as the principal factor. Given that our life on this planet is brief in which to act and achieve, it is better to side with light than darkness. Championing darkness is negative somehow. It leads to a certain denseness in our approach to living. Considering that this is inconclusive - considering that we live in light as well as dark - it is important that we consider the utility of either and determine which is more useful as far as "acting in order to achieve" something in a brief span of our life is concerned. I think that light is more beneficial and not darkness.
Symbolically used, both become metaphores for life and death and it is positively good to say YES to life than death.