My mind a reservoir

My psychotherapist told me that any unusual bark-like cough is a sign of intrusion of something unwanted in our psychosomatic field. It could be a childhood trauma or the need in a child to protect his helplessly suffering parents or ward.

I had that sort of a bark-like cough when I was 10. I had to take a shot every other day for a long time to get it cured. With the allopathic cure sought by adults who wished me to get better the cough disappeared but  the hurt and the deep psychological  insecurity stayed, I think. I have struggled over years to come to terms with my issues. The struggling is on, more desperately so because the thing has grown so big that I get angry and unreasonable and self destructive easily. Non-issues irritate me: it is a rush of blood, not the gradual build-up of lividity experienced after all patient reasoning has failed...

Yesterday I freaked at a young actor because he was unnecessarily grinning and fooling around while still in the scene we were rehearsing. The chap is hyper, always seeking attention. The more it is denied to him the more he demands it. Otherwise he is bright and kind and cheerful - so cheerful sometimes that it is a bother. Yesterday he got under my skin and I flipped.

I interrupted the rehearsals and demanded to know what the matter was, whether the laughter and giggling had something to do with the scene as he imagined it from his perspective. I needed to know in order to allow it. To me it seemed that giggling was an inappropriate reaction from his character at that point in the sequence  because he is in a soup there. Particularly if it disturbed my character's sense of purpose, I did not want even it's justified version. He could not simply be laughing there because his is not an idiotic character in the play.

The actor tried to falsely justify his giggling - with that objectionable grin of his - saying something bizarrely incongruous. That got me. Man, I flared up in that most satisfying blaze of wrath! I am middle aged, graying ('experienced'!) actor and this little runt is just out of his teens, but he had the temerity to lie. 

Later, when we wrapped up after some more work I apologized for my invective.

The long and the short is that intrusion or any unwanted eddie on my mind's calm waters erupts a purblind tempest. My mind, to continue with the water image, is no more the clear natural lake it once was. It has become an artificial,  murky reservoir.

Being a 'Professional'

The word professional annoys me. It seems to me to be a synonym for success rather than profession. I know that it means to set a category, separate bums from the industrious lot, but I know bums who are industrious without making their industriousness a profession. Converse is also true because I know a lot of well meaning specialists who are, unfortunately, failures. They are 'professionals' but somehow their profession has not taken off despite their effort and expertise in the field.

Reminds me of a conversation between my late cousin and his father, my uncle:

My cousin was a metallurgist (somewhere around the 83-84 batch). He was brilliant, I have heard. He had done well academically, yet he had acquired certain terrible habits on the campus which later pushed him into deep schizophrenia. Eventually he died of an OD.

His father, worried about his son's straying and the imminent waste of his remarkable potential, said to him,

"Son, please realize that utility is the ultimate purpose of everything in nature in its highest sense. Gold", he added, "does not acquire its full worth unless it is crafted into an ornament." My cousin, brilliant wit that he was replied, "Baba", he said, " please realise that I am a metallurgist, not a gold smith. If you are suggesting that I am the gold in question in your analogy then moulding me into an ornament shouldn't be my problem unless  we assume, of course, that gold wills it's own ultimate point-of-worth-form!"

Needless to say that my uncle was speechless.

This conversation above may seem a shade off the mark, but I hope it is not. It brings home my point that the word 'professional' is more synonymous with success. My cousin was a professional, but he failed despite his capacities as a metallurgist. The reason for his failure may be one odd reason, that he became a slave of his drug habit but there are many other reasons why phenomenal potentials sometimes are ruined.

The so called 'professional' courses in India do not offer any crash course in social skills. I think it is important that we start having that in India. Application, whatever may be its area, has transcended its restricted locus and become global. Today anybody can be called a professional.

Fatigue

It is nice to be tired after a good game/ workout. Sit quietly in silence, gather your thoughts and sip cold water. It is a nice feeling: the body feels the rest it deserves, and the being that inhabits the corpse actually enjoys being there. The rejoicing being aspires for grace and health is bestowed unto you. 

That simple it is! There can be no simpler formula to a long and healthy living. The whole ballgame involves matter and some water. 
There is will, of course. There has to be the push to make the inert matter move, and exercise. If it will not, then we may as well be dead.

'To keep the body and mind together' is what the ancients said. How very true! On this simple asset an empire can be built.

Two drop therapy

Recently I had posted a lovely song of Ravindranath Tagore about rain. 

Rains have stopped (although it rained yesterday a bit and today), so my posting made someone I know ask me whether it was raining where I live. I replied that rain seemed not to want to go. Then I added that my posting had something to do with the 'inner rain' . Some people experience an inner monsoon constantly. I do.

Today  I am experiencing that inner rain. It is a distinct feeling of 'wetness' within your consciousness. There is sighing and melancholy, a bit of pensiveness and heaviness. There is a peculiar longing for something deep - a lost world you truly belong to - and to describe it precisely is difficult. Things are misty and foggy, there is a vagueness to things...

***

My 6 years old son Mir says sudden things and it surprises me. At dinner the night before I was rather sleepy. I had my eyes closed at the dinner table. I was not sleeping but sitting there with eyes closed  was comfortable. Mir saw me sitting there and he thought that I was dozing. He asked me, "Are you falling in sleep, Charu?"

Speech should be a revelation for poetry to be our normal speech. What else is poetry but a thing seen and caught in inevitable terms? The Sanskrit word for 'poet' is kavi. It means a seer.

To me somehow Mir's utterance was comparable to those lines of Wordsworth, "Thoughts come to me from fields of sleep"...

***

Feeling at home habit...

I have lost a number of blogs owing to my trust in this blogger technology. I spend time to put my thoughts together and as I type I can see through one corner of my eye that my typing is autosaved. To be fair, it has indeed been a good facility in the past when it saved most things unless some external aspect interfered with the machine causing a temporary failure of the facility. But now a days this has begun to happen more regularly.

So far I have done nothing to understand the cause, not sent any report to Google because I think my problem is minor compared to the massive work on their hands. Besides, things have not stayed in a prolonged state of disrepair with any of the Google thingies I use.

This morning too, I typed in something, a reasonably lengthy blog on how littering is a habit with us here in India. We simply do not understand the responsibility of having a clean environment. " Habit", I remember a shred now lost, " is the mind's unconscious reward for its desire, nay, need, to feel at home. 

I was stranded in Chennai with my wife, who was going to Canada with our two year old, when the BA flight was delayed by one full day! The BA put us up at the Park, (of course!) in easily one of the most comfortably furnished hotels in Chennai. I, who am not used to unreasonably comfortable interiors, found myself suffering in that 5 (or 7) star comfort zone. To add to my discomfiture I was dressed casually, very casually, since we were in a car that would drop my wife and son on the airport and bring me back home, a question of some 6 hours mostly spent in the car. I have always been a casual dresser, perhaps careless and even shoddy. Flip-flops have been my favorite footwear. I use them even now. But when I walked in through the Park's door, I shrunk in size! I wanted to be a plant in the lobby or a painting or even the fan for all I cared.

The hotel designed by some top notch high culture designer, I am sure, was not exactly catering to my needs. But then I was not exactly their regular client - I doubt if I ever will be - but that incident made me think how comfort really means "to feel at home". Whether you term it philistinism or sophistication, either from my point or theirs, would not help to usher in a bit of compatibility in that regard between the imposed and the imposer. In this case who the imposer is and who the imposed is a dicey judgement. Left to my recourse I would never have stepped within the gates of 'The Park'. I find 5 star-culture vulgar in my country. On the other hand the Parkies would in all probability consider me a loutish, uncultured oaf. More probably they may disdainfully not consider me at all! But if they do that, if they decide not to consider me at all, I shall feel all the more at home, for I feel quite at home being looked down on by folk from ivory towers. The farther they are from me the closer I feel at home! I like being on the ground.