Love

You know, a flower that has perfume is not concerned who comes to smell it, or who turns its back

upon it. So is love. Love is not a memory. Love is not a thing of the mind or the intellect. But it

comes into being naturally as compassion when this whole problem of existence—as fear, greed,

envy, despair, hope—has been understood and resolved. An ambitious man cannot love. A man

who is attached to his family has no love. Nor has jealousy anything to do with love. When you

say, ‘I love my wife’, you really do not mean it because the next moment you are jealous of her.

- Jiddu, Bombay, 1965.

I learnt something new today. The above is an excerpt from the closing lines of JK's talk titled Learning About Pleasure. In the talk he asked me to listen. That is how he began. To purely commit the act of listening and nothing else. That was very hard. Every sentence I found myself doing exaclty what he described we do when we claim to be listening but are actually not. I was aware of my sorroundings, yes, which is a very important part of listening but thats not where it ended with every passing word a comparison, an evaluation was in process. I was immediately trying to digest what was being said in contexts so varied that the import of what was said was actually being lost. That is as the speaker JK has an intention for his words which I will learn only if I listen to him with an unbiased mind which is not doing anything else but listening to him speak. But in the process of my conditioned behaviour of processing what he is saying and its applicability, its veracity and so on I have already steppedd out of the role of a good listener. I have overshadowed whatever I have heard with the internal conversations I am having with myself in the form of checks and balances my mind is applying on the input received. Therefore to begin with itself I have already lost much of what I might have learnt because I am, by virtue of my experiences and learnt behaviour, taking sides and judging the information.

Then followed a very decent, succinct definition of what discipline is. I realise that what we understand as discipline is very much an implied meaning rather its true meaning. We associate discipling with conformity rather than a nascent yearning. The latter is the state of the mind when we have put aside conditioning and opened up our senses to experience putting the internal conflict and conversation to rest. This is something I realise is very true and very difficult. Furthermore putting to rest your internal conversation so that the impact of the external sound can actually take course involves resolution not suppression. This is something I need to unlearn. Suppression plays a very important role in my life albeit negative as I am growing to realise. So long as any conflict is suppressed with in me I will never truly learn anything new as all the while the mind is occupied with what is suppressed and the threat of the suppressant resurfacing. My mind is not free.

I want to stop there. Further I write I imitate and regurgitate what I have read rather than understand and learn from my understanding.

At this very moment a lot of internal conflict is ensuing. I suppress a lot of emotion, thought and action in the search for conformity. I want to unlearn that. I want to set my senses free.

Something I read in that talk has made a deep impact on me.

Love implies great freedom—not to do what you like. But love comes only when the mind

is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centred. These are not ideals. If you have no love, do what you will—go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems—you are a dead human being. And without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. And with love, do what you will, there is no risk; there is no conflict. Then love is the essence of virtue.

I need to become that love.

I am a farce. I am a dead human being. I want to come alive.

The ‘being’ is not the ‘becoming’.

Purgatory

a clean slate my life

unmarked untouched

awaiting a stroke of

inspiration

a blank canvas my day

shadows contrast to

the drought of

colour

an abyssmal hollow my spirit

trodden forgotten beneath

endless crushing

misery

a cruel venom my blood

flowing serving saving

the flesh that bears the

suffering

a contorted maze my mind

thoughtlessly conscious

of its vain attempts to a

meaning

an divine lie my belief

comforting numbing brutal

excuse for the fiction of

being

a putrid bowl my soul

i endure the shameful deceit

of the unforgiven

sin

a consummating void my heart

i wait and tire

in the eternal

hope

(de-)Evolution: Hair Gel To Hair Oil

I vividly remember. My mother would look her legs around me and get a grip. It was a smart way to hold a hyperactive little devil who hated what was to follow. Out came the blue plastic of Parachute and the thick goo or thin slime poured out depending on what the weather was like. What followed was a juggalbandi of howls and frets, one party fighting the other. I always lost. By the time the death grip was released my fully oiled hair reeked of coconut complicating the stickiness of all the tears that I wasted. This was the daily routine of oiling. I was four.

As time went on, learning tamed me. Somethings were better left unresisted. And may be that brought with it a certain pack of Smarties or Kinder egg. It was a fair deal. Suffering was rewarded. How subtle yet profound are simple things in life. This phase of learning though didnt last long. I was more of a man every passing day. One day it happened. My mother didnt recognise my voice when I blasted through the doors back home from school. Lessons ended, I was no longer a cub. The teen years were teen years. Change was the mantra. Especially changing everything that even remotely seemed to vindicate the lessons handed down from the adults, those darned adults.

Move over oil, welcome hair gel! Parachute gave way to a long line of contenders for the job of styling my hair. Notice that style is the keyword here. But before the the gel era, there was one occasion when the hair oil routine was broken. After a trip to the barber I wanted the mist-sprayer/atomizer that those fellows used to wet the hair. I realised this could make my strands bend any which way. That was the first acknowledgement of the need to style. This led to a tantrum and a misled father buying me a Silvikrin Hairspray Ultra hold. Yes, I used hair spray.

It started with a cheap jar of Man gel. Now I know that sounds shady and may even trigger humorous but untrue ideas. But that was the first hair gel I used. From there I moved onto Wellaflex. High school is plagued with such kind of standards. Everything had a defined best. Wella was the best for hair gels. That too was an ultrastrong hold. Haircuts had to be tailored to suit the use of gel. What would later come to be known in India even till as late as 2002 when I joined college, the 'dil chahta hai' cut now simply called spikes was already prevalent by 10th standard. Also I had my own take on the Ultrastrong holds dilute it with some water and get that slick look. What essentially I was aiming at was a Wet look.

StudioFx from L'oreal followed. It was a wet look gel. But either my cohort wasnt completely conversant with reportoire of hair products or my image was not consistent with a cool dude as one of the sad fallouts of the wet look gel was a question that was often shot at me quite innocently, why is your hair so oiled up? Much to my annoyance I tried to stop explaining that it all was about. I took my hair gel quite seriously. After some more tubes of StudioFx and may be even some DesignerFx I finished school and arrived in India only to be more aggravated my friends who had not experienced the hair gel. And so the questions of oily hair abounded. Ofcourse not everyone cared as many of the guys themselves had bathed their locks in oil.

The careless attitude that took me over in the later part of the first year lasted a long while or may be even to the end of medical college but in second year during a trip to Kuwait I did purchase Clairol Herbal Essence Hair Styling gel. That was the dawn of a newer understanding. Thick black locks are not forever. Grey showing more frequently made me to look at my hair gel with an eye of suspicion for the first time. Style gave way to worries of Healthy hair(yes I know hair is actually dead, but still). So for those occasions like the Hyderabad trips and the college days when I still cared to groom myself, this more conservative gel devoid of special effects like strong hold and wet looks served me for a long period.

The postgraduation period which was mostly time spent in the library, hair gel took a back seat. Although I lived in Toronto, the libraries of the University of Toronto provided a certain damn-care environment where what did you did was your own statement. And so I benefitted from the collegial confusions of those kids and dumped the hair gel into oblivion, till Akka's wedding. A bad 450 rupee Jawed Habib haircut later hair gel was needed to salvage the remanants. So it was Garnier Fructis hair gel this time. And it was pathetic, probably the worst hair gel I used even more so because it came in a small spray bottle like the one that started it all at the barber's shop. Luckily for me it leaked on the way back to Toronto and so found way to the trash can.

Now more than ever I understand that beautiful hair, flat abs and toned biceps are not forever. Just at 24 I start to realise that this body needs to be cared for or else I would find it taking a beating of a lifestyle which is still very erratic. In Los Angeles a couple of days ago I found my bava's Parachute. And on the way to the shower just emptied a blob of grey slime and rubbed it into my hair. The premature grey was starting to show ever more prominently. I was scared. And this time it was the death grip of my fears of losing my youth held me down while I lost the battle to myself. I oiled my hair. The circle was complete.

At 14 or 15 there are things you believe can never happen to you.

Ego's Dilemma In The City Of Angels

Two weeks ago, I landed in Orange County. Life has varied its pace on me. In the big picture times seem to fly by while at any given moment they seem to be as stagnated as can be. Better put the quantity of time passing by is ever overshadowed by its poorer quality.

Over the last couple of weeks I have spent considerable time exploring the southwestern parts of this country. Well that is a bit of exaggeration. My sister and brother-in-law here have driven me all over California and also to Vegas. All the trips were fantastic. Being on my first trip to this country, I am learning at lot many more new things, things I would never be able to learn from my books and the internet unless I experienced them first hand. And these have helped me understand my perception of this country better. There are many many good things in this country and many more things I despise.

Throughout my exploration of America, the first impressions have been mixed at best. At the US Immigration customs desk at Toronto the kind of scrutiny I was subjected to made me wonder why I even want to go there in the first place. In frustration I thought to myself, screw this no one in India would ever be allowed to treat me this way. But once you are inside the borders of this country, it is a different scenario altogether. And thats what gets me thinking.

Having grown up in Kuwait, I am no stranger to the life of an outsider. Life was all about boundaries and identity along with a surprising level of what I now realize was racism. It was a time when I roamed the streets in fear of the constant awareness that at any moment things can go terribly wrong because of my foreign identity and its consequence in the eyes of the local authorities. In India as a citizen I could well afford the illusion of having the power to demand my rightful position and receive my due. Here I was in 'my' country and for the first time did not have anxiety/fear on my daily roster. But at the same time born in me were certain reality checks of what my identity meant among my own people. I started to see the difference between what I was entitled to and what I got. Yet the country, and its billions with a misplaced sense of patriotism which presented outside the context of cricket and Pakistan had no meaning, infused in me a sense of home, belonging and wanting.

Then for the past few months I haev been here in the much fabled "western" world and that too in and around the holy grail of "free" society. In America and a slightly lesser extent in Canada, the sense of individual freedom is very high and to an extent difficult to define, this freedom is actually experienced. So amongst the three different regions of the world that I have lived in I can actually say that on the face of it, North America has given me what might be the closest experience to the impossible unitary utopia.

Unitary Utopia is a phrase I think I just coined in the last sentence. What I mean by that is utopia experienced in senses limited and applicable only to an individual. I have seen that individual well being and the sense of self are of paramount importance in these societies and therefore the social instruments ensure the greatest achievable level of self-fulfillment I have seen.

By now it is pretty evident that my trip thus far has been as much about having fun as it has been about a dynamic comparison of things I have experienced so far.

Now, unitary utopia as such works for me too. As long as I don't ask too many questions or think too far in any direction it is as fantastic as can be. But beyond a certain limit to the radii of thought-spheres this unitary utopia reveals itself as a farce. I know the fallacy within it yet it is not easy to dismiss. The impact of self-gratification is way too strong for even the most intellectual minds, so I think I can be forgiven.

I am here in this society with the certain aims and ideas. My professional line requires active social participation with an appreciation of local culture and customs which may eventually find their way into my life. In all of this I find myself asking the question as to why I am even here. To train to be a better physician I often answer but deep within I am not too sure if that is the right answer or atleast the complete answer. My professional betterment (unitary utopia) lies here but my sense of belonging will forever lie in elsewhere. America is good for my id while India better for my superego. The question is which way the ego goes. I fear losing my Self.