Coming of Age

As the year flies by at breakneck speed, I try holding on to incidents and keep my feet firmly planted. It is difficult but, not entirely impossible.

However, the force of the daily deluge pushes me down until I am unable to look around or even open my eyes.

But, my heart feels like that of a warrior in the midst of a great war. My mind is alert and open to imagination. Sometimes I see myself with a bloody two-edged sword in hand, running after a bleeding enemy. At others, I see myself sitting under a great tree with only birds singing in my ears while I count my breath.

The more the pressure, the more I feel cut-off and drifting away from it all towards an oasis of peace somewhere inside me.

Someone asked me recently, "why don't you get angry or retaliate?"

My answer was, "I do not feel angry."

Somehow, I don't feel immediate anger any more. I feel as if all those trying to pressurize me are just fighting a mock battle. I am not even there. I am busy at my desk, doing my job. Happy in my oasis and unperturbed.

Somehow, I feel that a process that I had started three years back of self-realization is turning full circle.

Or maybe, I'm finally coming out of the teenage years and growing up. 

Who knows?   

My Chaos Theory

Shattered earth picks up the pieces and like a phoenix is reborn of its own ashes counting a thousand blessings and ignoring the chaos within and without.

Reasons are often unreasonable, the heart knows much more than the mind...

Many events in life are unplanned and they occur despite our best laid plans. I learned that ages ago and stopped fighting against the tide about a decade ago. These days I try to concentrate more on living life than fighting chimeras. Mostly, I feel at peace inside and thank God for carving me out of chaos. (The universe, afterall, was born out of chaos.)

Peace only comes from a calm heart that says, 'I am innocent, I am all accepting.' With peace in my heart, I can fight all the chaos around me or just ignore them till they die their own miserable death.

Anger is our worst enemy and needs to be tamed. The more I am angry the more I suffer. It came to me in a moment of flash while watching the low tide at Juhu beach almost a decade ago that I should let go of my anger and instead concentrate on building my life upon what I had as opposed to what I did not.

I felt immensely light and happy in that one moment by letting go of all the accumulated hurt and misery that I was carrying around like a burden round my neck. I went immediately to a temple (right next to the beach) and thanked all the deities present for giving me this wisdom.

Ever since that flashing moment I have been blessed with a reservoir of strength that has been tested again and again - every two years or so and I have been able to move away and on from hurt and anger without getting bogged down.

Another cause for chaos in our lives is stress at work. My system is auto-fitted to maintain a work-life balance - I know that from very early on. I mostly do not carry office home or vice-versa. It is very rare when this balance gets mixed up and my body usually first signals with splitting headaches. 

This is one chaos I have learned to fight by turning my back to it. Though my first reaction is still to swim with the tide but, slightly faster to allow me to put a distance between myself and this whirlwind of a chaos. I sleep, meet friends, avoid shopping (or I'd go bankrupt), read and watch movies back to back on the DVD to avoid thinking. This is actually the second signal. Often at this stage I throw plans out of the window and listening to my heart and jump boats. Whatever is giving you stress at work is best avoided and left behind if it is beyond you to make amends. Afterall, your body and mind (not to mention hearts) are more precious than any external factor that is causing stress. 

Another cause for chaos is sadness. It is inevitable that death, distance and dalliance will cause extreme sorrow. There are no exact ways to fight this kind of sorrow and each occasion lends a unique way towards finding a solution. I'm no expert at overcoming sadness. Often, I'm saddened if not by my own loses then by the problems of those who I know or see everyday. This is one chaos I have learned that should be treated as a character builder. The one who can overcome deep personal losses to rise in life is the real hero and deserves to be lauded and emulated. I do try but, around me I see so many others who have suffered grave losses but, stand head and shoulders above everyone and I salute them.

So many of my friends have suffered personal losses ranging from losing a grown up child , to loss of parents, dirty divorces, deadly diseases, messy in-laws and many more losses that are so personal in nature that they cannot be mentioned in social forums. But, even after suffering these crippling losses and in many cases severe humiliation/s they are still standing tall and I never miss the amazing smiles on their faces.

They are my heroes all of them, the old mother who has been abandoned by her son but, has adopted a host of strays who slide up to her whenever she comes in sight, another mother who has overcome the loss of her four-year-old daughter to a freak accident where she fell down the balcony in front of everyone's eyes and died, another friend  who has now laid to rest her parents after attending to them for about a decade because they were both suffering from dementia where they did not even recognize her towards the end of their lives, she has also dealt with a messy long-drawn divorce, another who has suffered cancer and then a divorce and is now raising her kids all by her own, another divorcee friend who is mostly straddling an emotional see-saw but, her child is an angel because she did not let her nerves pass on to him - all of them are my heroes. Whenever I feel let down by life I just think of the people around me and find the calm to fight my private wars.

Everyone suffers and sadness is a bone-deep chaos because it is a deeply emotional one. Those who allow this chaos to suck them in lose many precious years of their life that never returns. Losses should be treated as cornerstones and building blocks. The more one suffers and overcomes grief the stronger they become.

Believe me every memory of suffering should be written off by the happy memories of the same person or incidence. I try to think of only the positive and try conditioning my mind to not attack me with locked up memories that bring on pain. Look inside your hearts, there is a pool where happiness lives and concentrate upon it. If I am sad, I try to make others happy, once there are smiles around me my pain heals and becomes a mere throb.  

I understand that it is not very easy but, since I have seen it work I wanted to share it with those who are still floundering with anger, stress and sorrow by fighting, by festering old wounds and planning the downfall and annihilation of the villains but, my own advice is to let go, let go and enjoy the life that has been gifted to you – it is rare and precious. 

Once you start living away from the chaos you will be able to laugh and be happy at the sight of even the smallest of nature's miracles. Go find a rose bush that has a single red rose and smell it even though it is growing in the garden of the neighbor who hates you. Then smile at him and say genuinely that the rose in his garden smells divine. I'm sure he'll change his mind about you and even if he does not then stop thinking about his villainy and think about the fragrant rose in his garden that gave you such pleasure for a while and you'll stop resenting his presence next door. That one action will help you relax and probably even bury the hatchet.

Many a times, friends and family have called me a coward and advised me to retaliate but, I have moved on, it is my best defense mechanism. It allows me to save my strength and pour it into the positive and I’d rather be positive than be sucked into a black hole of negatives. It is too chaotic and only begets more anger, stress and sorrow and it is a never ending nerve-wracking cycle. I feel that I heal faster and I get back on track allowing me to achieve more by forgetting and forgiving.

Dear friends, I pray that we all walk out of our ‘self’ to gather love and peace not anger and sorrows.

All I Say, is Give Peace a Chance

Peace is such a small and compact five-letter word and we love it. For ages humans are trying and I mean, really trying hard, to give peace a chance. Recorded history takes us through Jesus, Buddha, Ashoka the Great, Gandhi and Martin Luther King and word-of-mouth texts to almost forgotten sages and rulers who tried their best by fighting for peace to bring order into chaos by giving peace a chance.

But, then there are always those who want chaos and they succeed. And I like to think that it is because the meek are destined to rule in heaven; On Earth perhaps chaos rules because it tests us - to the extremes of our limits. More often than not, the begetters of chaos win, pushing back the years of work done by 'peace-mongers' in a flash. All for money and power of course!

Some years back a dear friend told me that the Hippie movement was the most effective peaceful apolitical movement in modern history that could have changed the world but, politicians saw red and arms dealers saw perhaps every shade of red, green and yellow and that was the end of hope - for peace. Or was it?

The peace symbol was developed in the UK as a logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was embraced by U.S. anti-war protesters in the 1960s

I agree that though it sounds strange but, yes, perhaps it was our really one great shot at putting everything back to normal. But, it was killed; nipped at bud.

I always thought that the hippies with their quest for individualism and meaning of life were much ahead of their time or maybe too late. We'd perhaps never know for sure since, drugs, sex and the tag of the 'Communist' did them in far too soon. It was way easy  to put the 'Socialists' into the 'Communist' slot then just as easy as it is today and, annihilate a movement in the name of law and order!

People often smirk when I say, my political idyll is Socialism. They think that since I'm a Bengali it means Communism!

Socialism is what the Indian Constitution also promises us. A free socialist state that shares equal opportunities, rights and power with everyone who is a citizen. Very few today understand how much power that gives to an individual. We can practically walk up to our so-called leaders and 'demand' our rights. But, years of misuse of political power and a laid-back bureaucracy has filled us up with hopelessness. If there was ever a killer to optimism, our 'leaders' have found it and used it over the last 60 years in such huge dozes that we are drowning and overwhelmed as a nation of two billion strong.

Enough said about the situation in India. Going back to peace and the Hippies, it was an off-shoot that emerged from the long and glorious list of Utopian and Bohemian thinkers, writers and artists. Do names like, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley ring a bell? They still are celebrated and illustrious names in the world of art and creativity.

The Hippies believed in laissez faire, a world ruled by freedom. They were against war and suppression. They believed that whatever Mother Nature gave was free for everyone to share. One faction even went to the extent of putting up Free Stores to share whatever was extra including, food, clothes, music and even drugs and I'm sure sex!

They were, in fact, Utopian Socialists who wanted to win the world over by love and a brotherhood through community living to create a counter-society of peaceful and happy people who in turn would attract more looking for peace and freedom. If movement (religious or political) ever was peaceful in the history of this world - it was this!

I wish all the time that they had succeeded to some extent at least so, we would have a chance to breathe free and happy. But, like I sad earlier, drugs and sex was their undoing and the clean-up was done by politicians and bureaucrats like, J Edgar Hoover and Nixon.

Why I wish for a world full of loopy, guitar-wielding, tree-hugging, placard-carrying, peace-marching bunch of ganja smokers is because they give me hope.

Hope that we as a collective lot of people ruled by money and power have almost lost. It is like the lost city of El Dorado, always beckoning but never seen.

We pay taxes to make and buy guns and war-heads and to feed armies that would destroy our neighbors in seconds - wipe civilizations off the face of Earth and anywhere in the Universe if there is any. How does that help? Man is a social animal. We live happily in communes and not in bunkers.

We pay more to buy food that is clean/organic and we pay through our noses to buy life-saving medicines for our loved ones. We toil through life to build a small house - a roof to cover our heads and cut corners to pay for our children's education like our parents did for us. All I ask is why? Why can we not share and live peacefully?

All I get in reply from my fellow Earthlings are, war cries. In the name of religion, caste, creed, food, oil... Was this not the situation among the various tribes in the Asian deserts when Mohammed joined them as one into Islam? Was this not the situation when Krishna allowed almost the entire warrior clan to perish in the great war in the Mahabharata so that the meek would have a chance to survive? Was this not the exact same situation when Ashoka embraced Buddhism and decided to help his people rather than rule by force?

Most importantly, was this not the situation around the world when the European enslaved and colonized humans everywhere?


As my pay cheque gets fatter so does my cost of living. How is that possible? Consumerism, we have been made to believe recently, is our only way to 'buy' happiness and we fill up our lives with colorful junk. We dwindle into a sense of safety knowing well that the mounds of shiny, factory-produced articles that choke up our lives cannot save us or our world. I read somewhere that squirrels hide nuts all over the forests, often forgetting about them once winter gets over. These hoards then turn into new trees. Can we say the same for our hoard? Mine for sure falls mostly in the category of toxic waste.

All I say is give peace a chance. Share love and laughter, give more than you take, be fair, be helpful, try to temper anger and overlook small mistakes of others to look instead at your own flaws and - live by example. There is an inner hippie in all of us who is fair and friendly. Who does not believe that if a neighbor is happy totting a large gun then I should pick up a larger one and kill more neighbors to settle the score. The inner hippie wants you to sing, dance, laugh a lot, eat well, take care of yourself and make love not war. Friends, please unleash your inner hippie to claim what is yours in the kingdom of Earth without waiting for a much-hyped after life. If we all unleash the inner hippie then, the world is ours to take. Peace!