Something to remember

-

 It is one day after Christmas.

It is one week before New Year's.

I broke my phone.

But things are otherwise good.

I bought a planner and I am really looking forward to using it. This evening I put down some goals and contemplated the best way to approach them.

The reason this contemplation was important is because I felt angry and hateful towards a couple of people and places. I realized that this year alone I had thought, intended, promised myself many times about being more easy-going. It is not working all the time. 

So I feel that my approach should be to take a more softer angle to this whole New Year's thing. I feel that if I have to succeed in accomplishing my goals, I need to see 1st January 2022 as a continuum to 31st December 2021. It's not yet a New Year. It's a New-ish Year because chronologically at least a new segment of time is beginning. But 2021 is still a cube of ice that will need the space to melt and dissolve. 

So today the hard thoughts that I felt against someone...at least today I realized that how I feel about them has got nothing to do with them. Different people who had the same experience as me will (and have) feel differently. And getting to just this point took years of struggling. 

Anyway, I do see this as a step in the right direction. I am reminded of an image I had seen years ago. A tiny turtle that has cracked out of the egg is walking towards the sea. The sea is a long way off.

And the message goes, "Take all the time you need. Forward is forward."




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