Walk around the neighborhood

-
I went for a short walk around the neighborhood. I had to buy a few kgs of rice but all the shops were shut by the time I reached them it was around 6:45 in the evening and the sky was a rose potion pink. It was beautiful. I had just opened a suitcase full of clothes that had come from Bangalore. Found a snug black tee from Nike with bright pink and white stones studded on it. I like stuff like that - things that make black cheery. Wore that with a pair of joggers (such a useless style of pants) and a plain old mask. 

The parks in Vashi are outrageously beautiful now! The green is pure and grass gleam like shards of jewels. Sure, the parks haven't been mowed but the trees have grown and gotten stronger and so many vines and creepers seem to have taken over neighborhood walls. It was quite a sight! I felt like I was walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Leaves. There should be such a thing.

I have been journaling a fair bit today and I can honestly say that it is not just saving my own sanity, but my personal scribing is helping my family. I realised that a lot of my emotional reactions are just forces of habits. And like a habit, an emotional reaction can change. But it is important to understand the full landscape of that habit, as it were. It was formed for a reason, in a context, and it served me well then. It's not serving me well now. But I go back to it simply because it is familiar territory. And anything unfamiliar, even if benign, seems to risky for survival. When I feel triggered, I first write down a set of basic tenets that help me formulate my thoughts. The first foundational tenet that I write to keep reminding myself is that whatever is happening in my heart or stomach or throat or head...it is still happening inside me. And as long as it's in me, I can tend to it. The other thing I realised while writing is that when I use the phrase, "I will tend to my anger or anxiety or frustration...", it soothes me instantly. Instead if I write (or think) the words, "I can control it...", I can see a stubborn little territory in me raise a tiny black flag in response and declare war. Not what we want.

Also, I have decided to tackle one issue a month. This way I can do justice to exploring  what exactly the entanglements are. Sixteen years as an instructional designer has taught me something...that the stated problem is very rarely the actual problem.

Now the blog post is done, I will have some coffee and pick out happy ex-Bangalore clothes for tomorrow. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more