Four more days...

And even my name changes!

I guess love does that to you, Something in you dissolves, melts and an unconditional acceptance dawns. I feel scared, sure...

But then I am really not. I feel I am ready to take on new responsibilities, knowing that

some one's there to catch me when I fall, and correct me when I make mistakes.

With four more days too go, there is a frenzy of activity around, the accommodation, the catering, guest lists. I look at it all through the eyes of outsider. knowing that, all these events and activities will melt into time. 

As I get married and become ready to step into a world that is alien to me, to nurture instead of being nurtured, to be instead of being...its only natural to be anxious (or so I tell myself to stop myself from passing out of anxiety!!) 

Its funny, how during a wedding the focus is on the celebration outside, but inside there is a quiet celebration too, a much more vibrant and lavish one, and one that stands the test of time.

In four more days, 

even my name changes....

Rest with feelings

The Art of Living Ashram is teaming with splendor of Navaratri.

Gurudev broke his silence today, with the message, 'rest with feelings'.

This poem is inspired by him.

In thick of celebrations

all around

from depth of silence

not a sound

the message was loud and clear

rest with feelings my dear

You have come after a struggle

so long so hard

you were broken into pieces 

into shards

now its over, I am near

rest with feeling my dear

Wake up to the beauty

all vibrant and fresh

from the illusion of chaos

delusion of mess

perfect as a juicy ripe pear

when you have rested

with feelings my dear

And now the sky's so blue

without a cloud

every thought can be heard out

aloud

dont doubt, all pain ends here

just rest with feelings my dear

Rest with feelings

Life's no longer an

unfulfilled dream

Rest with feelings

as sweet as cherries

as light as cream

A love so deep, cant help

but shed drops of tear

rest in bliss with feelings 

my dear.

I'm just surprised.....!

1. 

At the way things have turned out (for the better)

How weird co-incidences turn out to be the best things in your life

How things change in-spite and despite

How everything changes and so will this

How come some people just dont get it!

The best things in life are purely by chance, by luck or by grace.

The fact that I got the best things in life by doing nothing.

How just being there can make all the difference

How some things cannot, will not and would not ever happen...and you know it!

At the fact that walking blindfolded is much easier than with eyes wide open.

That knowing that I dont know is the peak of knowledge.

When thing go wrong....its okay...it really is, it could get worse, and thats okay too.

How taking yourself sincerely not seriously makes all the difference.

How being happy is a decision not an end result.

How the only difference between getting something you always wanted and not getting something you always wanted is the word 'not'.

How taking bigger risks gets bigger results, if it fails, gets bigger learning.

How till the time you're really, totally absolutely clear about what you want to do, you're wasting your time, so if you're wasting time anyway, why not experiment and have fun.

That if you're not having fun, then something is seriously wrong.

Knowing that there is no bigger fun than being and doing right.

Its not surprise really, but a wonder, a sort of awe, at how things are so simple yet so complex. And its nice to be in this perpetual state, it adds a lot of spark to life.

So Hot!

From everything, the weather to people to food to politics. If you want to be set on fire, AP is the place to head. As a YES!+ teacher this is the first time I am travelling outside to an unknown city, and my destination is Warangal in AP. After a 13 hour bus journey to Hyderabad, Raghav (another teacher) and I took Konark express to Warangal, about 3 hours away. Luckily it was raining, so I didn't experience the fiery bit right away. My first experience was simply my first meal, with my tongue on fire, and smoke fuming out of my ears. The excessive chili in everything, made it simply impossible for me to even decipher different dishes and tastes. To neutralise the effect oodles of 'ghee' was added, which helped my tortured taste buds no better. Unfortunately in India, excessive love is equated with excessive food, which if refused, especially as guests is considered excessively rude.
So I endured the fate for three days, after which my mouth is so full of ulcers that, making it torturous to even look or breath in the direction of spices. So now my staple diet consists of Ice-cream and ghee rice, although I am doing my best to make up by doing extra suryanamaskar during the course, the chances are, that I'll have to go on diet as soon as I hit home.

The Art of what?

 

Hi all, this is my first attempt at story writing (if you can call that), so be brutal with you feedback, don’t waste comments being polite or diplomatic.

Although the work is purely fictional, its of course inspired by real-life people, situation and events while working with the Art of Living.

 

 I met Bindi on a rainy afternoon, struggling with three over sized bags and a dysfunctional umbrella. I think I know her, I said to myself, and went to help her out with her bags, in a tearing hurry, she handed me her bags and said, “are you going to Bhannerghatta road”, “yes", I said, without thinking, the poor girl needed help anyway.

“Great, then we can take this Big 10, its about to leave. Oh look, there’s even place to sit! I so hate it when it rains in Bangalore, the roads are jammed, and the buses get over crowded.”

“Uh-huh (what a pain!)”

And it was that fateful bus ride that changed my life. But like I said, this isn’t my story, and for my own reasons I’d like to remain anonymous.

“you want to know a secret?” she asked invitingly

“okay (like I have a choice?)”

“I am a new person right this moment on”

“really (did u get like a sex change operation)?”

“I finally, finally quit my job, to do what I really love to do.”

“and what’s that?”

“Teach people how to breathe and be happy, I teach the Art of Living workshops. Oh my stop is here, I need to go, it was great meeting you, you should really learn to breath", she said, handing over a contact number and disappearing into the crowd.

If someone can look so ridiculously happy after being drenched in rain, and carrying 30 kg weight, there has to be something. I stared at the contact number she gave, and decided to do a little research on Bindi.

Okay I am NOT a stalker, or a pervert, I just like to know certain things and there are times I go a little overboard finding out. Like the time when I suspected my mom was mixing curd, in everything I ate, which I hated a morbid passion, I actually took food samples from home to my lab in 8^th grade to test whether they contained the lactobacilli bacteria.

So before I go into anything to do with Art of Living or Breathing, I needed to find out about the person who was teaching it. And no, I did not hire a PI, with social networking sites, and 6 degrees of separation, almost anyone can turn into a PI.

Here's what I discovered-

Those who meet Bindi for the first time, sometimes get a little overwhelmed by her intensity.

She is quite a sight, and its quite easy to picture her.

She lugs her macbook in an unconventional backpack, most probably dressed in a Fabindia Kurta and a chudidar. Straw flipflops. Her, long ,wavy, and slightly messy, pulled back in a butterfly clip, strands of hair escaping the clasp, tucked haphazardly behind her ears. She had the most unique collection of earring that were definitely more impressive than her outfit.

And she knew her stuff alright, so it wasn’t easy to be her friend.

a)    You had to had to be a vegetarian

b)   You had to agree with her most nonsensical, impulsive of ideas

c)    You’d have to be okay with phone calls at 3 am, and listen to her business plan

Bindi was a business freak, she’d wanted to be an entrepreneur since the age of eight. At school, she’d sell stuff like Barbie clothing’s she got her maid to make, and wrote poetry for other people and sold them. As she grew older, she wanted to own a juice shop, a dessert shop (sugarfree, eggless, vegan, healthy),  a shop that sold gadgets , one that sold jute bags. Her profession as a software engineer was a complete anti climax to who she was as a person. But that’s what set her apart.

This is what she said in the ‘about me’ section of her Facebook profile.

And they say, I’m  a dreamer, but I’m not the only one……..

Right now three things rule my life

The Art of Living courses,

Yes! I teach them, unfortunately it aint one of those plush studios in upmarket areas that rakes in loads of moolah. In fact I teach more as a volunteer, as it totally opposes my ethics of commercializing something that is such an ancient and a beautiful science.

My work, that is the unglamorous part. I work as a software Engineer at one of the biggest software firms in Bangalore, they say if you throw a stone in Bangalore, chances are that you’ll hit an engineer. This is my story. There’s nothing great about my life. I haven’t changed the world (yet), I am certainly not someone famous (again, yet!).

And finally remember watching Captain Planet on cartoon network, when everyone wanted to be engineers and doctors, I wanted to be a Captain Planet, with a band of planeteers, saving the earth. And I am pretty much on my way to being one

 

I must admit that now, I am quasi convinced that I should do something as utterly weird as ‘Art of Living’, so to give the ‘Largest volunteer based NGO in the world’ (it said so in its website) the benefit of doubt, I apply for the youth programme called “YES!+”

I really dont care about saving the planet, its too late anyway

And unless I’m doped or drunk, I don’t usually smile at people

And to tell the truth, I don’t want to change the way I am either.

But something, I have no Idea what, makes me insanely curious about knowing more, the same insane curiousness that made me test my home cooked food samples for lactobacilli.

But I am a hard nut to crack, it will take me more than a seven day crash course on spirituality and an irritatingly happy instructor to turn me into one of them ‘save the planet evangelist’ .

If not for anything else, I could spend a few hours everyday for a week for a memory of comic relief in future.

 

 

 

forever 24

As a 16 year old I was obsessed with Backstreet boys and Harry Potter, I thought being a cricket commentator was the perfect career choice, and if you were unfortunate enough to be my parent, the most random question would evoke an emphatic 'no'.

The only purpose in my life was how-to-look-cool-in-front-of-people-who-I-thought-were-cool'

And now at 24.....

Everything has changed, the purpose of my life, my obsessions, my likes, dislikes

but something in me hasn't.

That something which was there in me as a naive 16 year old, as a mischievous 12 year old, and as a 24 year old.

Its been almost a week since I turned 24. And I celebrate in silence. No matter what happens, there is something in me that will remain eternal in this ephemeral world. 

 

True freedom

They say that we gained freedom on 15 Aug 1947, to me its an ongoing quest.

They say that the British never used atomic arsenal on India.Only much worse, that generation after generation of Indians being born in their own soil have a maligned perception of their own land, it persists as though it was a form of a genetic mutation.

We read about Buddha and Ram, but we Idolised Michael Jackson and Madonna. We ate the humble ‘dal-chawal’, but craved for Mc Donalds. If I had a choice between wearing a Salwar-Kameez and Jeans, its obvious what I would choose. One evening while pondering on why I preferred all things ‘western’, I came across the following statement of Lord McCauley in his speech to the British Parliament, to colonise India, on Feb 2,1835

"I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have notseen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I haveseen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre,that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless webreak the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual andcultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than theirown, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture andthey will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

The ‘Education system in India’- its one of those ‘cliched’ debate topics that I would get to hear at every debate competition in school. In college the reality of all the debate sunk in, when I first encountered the ‘reservations’, and finally when I got a job, it was reduced to being a mere butt of all jokes. But it never stopped affecting my life, or the lives of all those around me. As an innocent child, I first read about Bhagat Singh, referred as a ‘terrorist nationalist’, and my only knowledge about the ‘Jaliawala Bagh Massacre was a paltry three line mention, where the description mearly said ‘British opened the fire’. I never learned the fact that Pythogores theorem was discovered first in India by a Mathematician called Bodhayanah in 800 BC.Growing up, it was cool to read Enid Blytons and Tintins, and uncool to read ‘Amar Chitra Katha’.So guess what I ended up learning, it was those biased and even delebrate misinterpretation by the westerners to mislead a generations after generations of Indian kids, who grow up feeling inferior to the west. And the results are clear, India has become a truly dominated nation. So much so that an average Indian dreams of crossing the shores to the ‘superior territory’, and no sooner, their inferiority catches up with them with instances of racial discrimination. So much so that we never grow up to be proud Indians. Bringing us back to the ‘Great Western Hangover’, which is solely attributed to our education system. And unfortunately with the Indian government assuming a ‘Socialist democracy’, by frontier Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, a self confessed anglophile himself, a legacy was thus set, where education system has become but a playground for the politicians to roll their dice and create the bane of ‘reservations’, where instead of youth being empowered, are further marginalised.

“Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such
calibre,that I do not think we would ever conquer this country.”

How I wish the statement would have stopped at that. But the British didn't give up. And I dream of a nation that doesn't give up either. In spite of the challenges we face today, we are changing, slowly but surely. I recently noticed that while shopping I don't look for Jeans anymore, and I skip McDonalds without a second look. The best part is that its not just me. Those ‘Amar Chitra Kathas’, are selling out in book stores, and Indian who went abroad are coming back to find the green pastures, right here at home. Great Western Hangover still exists, affecting many lives, if only we could break out of the shackles of our education system, and let the spirit of true Indian nationalism shine forth. And for that we might need another freedom movement. A spritual freedom movement.