Poem from an unknown Confederate Soldier

I came across this poem in 1983 or so in Nani Palkhivala’s book We the People.  I was 24 then.  But by then life had dealt me enough experiences to realize the relevance of the message in these lines that I fell for them. 

Since then every passing incident has reminded that this poem was written for people like me.  As I pull through some recent some incidents in my life these lines are a source of succour. 

In particular the line that keeps resonating in my mind is this:  I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I hoped for. 

I was partly inspired to write this by the comment from Mediocre to my most recent post.

You may have all come across these lines as they have been doing the rounds on the net for many years now.

I asked God for strength that I might achieve.

      I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health that I might do greater things.

      I was given infirmity that I might do better things.

I asked for riches that I might be happy.

     I was given poverty that I might be wise.

I asked for power that I might have the praise of men.

     I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God.

I asked for all things that I might enjoy life.

     I was given life that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I hoped for.

Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.

     I am, among all men, most richly blessed.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

End of Summer Break 2015

It is finally time to return to reality, the reality of what I think I am supposed to be.  I escaped from it briefly to be able to deal with certain issues that I had allowed to sneak up on me in these past few months.

And now it is time for me to get back and do the right thing.  

It will be another year before I have another break like this, God willing.  A year in which lot would have possibly changed.  And we would all be different people, however imperceptibly we may have been changed by the people and phenomena we come across during that interlude.  It is a bit like that old saying:  You never enter the same river twice.  At one level none of us is ever the same self at any two different points in time!

The "right" thing for me to do now is to get back to my life on the campus: Classes, students, reading, administrative duties, my family and the package of various other roles and relationships that Destiny has cast me into.

It is important that I go back and seek happiness in doing all those things.  That I am informed by the society in which we live is the secret to a happy life in the normal sense – to get the head to rule over the heart.

During these past three weeks or so I have mostly lived a life of make-believe in more ways than one.  The life of idleness, of worship and prayer, of indulging palate and passion without a thought about what they cost financially or emotionally, of pleasant and empty conversations with agreeable and kindred souls among friends from the recent and the remote past, is unsustainable.

A sustainable life is one that is socially and economically viable. As a society we seem to have come to accept that a sustainable life has to be one based on exchange.  A life where I do I various things in the hope and expectation that they will allow me to lead a comfortable and socially respectable life and provide the same for my family. 

I have to get back to being what the world likely expects me to be as an elderly prof at a respectable business school.  Disciplined.Hard working, with a sense of chosen purpose. Self-assured on the strength of what he knows and the realization and graceful even if grudging acceptance of what he does not. Friendly, yet mindful of the distance that he is expected to maintain from his students.  I must hasten to clarify that I am far from living these ideals myself.

I am not a stranger to this business of playing an assigned part.  In the past I have been a development banker and a private equity investor.  I was a silent faceless bureaucrat in a financial institution when a frustrated client described me as “rightly belonging to the Kremlin” and more recently when an indulgent boss described me as “useful to have around in a negotiation because the folks on the other side always think I am the literally dumb village idiot” (which was / is actually closer to the truth than the boss imagined.)

Friends from my remote past know about this dual life I lead, the split existence.  They know that I mutate temporarily for a few days every year, when I become the other indulgent self.  And then I disappear to become a man of the world again, not responding to emails or phone calls,like a memory-less creature, unless those messages or calls are a part of my life of profitable exchange. 

Over the past many years my friends have accepted it in their own unique ways. Yet they indulge me for those for weeks or days in their company every year, leaving me with memories and expectations which help me pull through the rest of the year.  They help me cope with the demands of the part that I am supposed to play, on the hope that there will be yet another sojourn of abandon at the end.

Understandably there are not too many of those friends from the remote past – possibly fewer then seven. But they have stood by me like a rock over these years. And I know they will all be there whenever I return to my life of indulgence, hanging out with me, shooting the breeze, engaged in purposeless togetherness.

To all those other friends who got added to my network recently, and who dealt me a pleasant company with all the banter and trivial bromide in these past few weeks and months that I got to know them,it is time for me to move on and out of their lives back to my pragmatic world of exchange, until I return to another summer of doing nothing.

Nanni….Namaskaram…

PS:  I started writing this piece in a state of pain as you can see.  Later this evening I heard one of the most beautiful talks by a middle aged man by the name SrijithNamboothiri at the SreePadmanabhaSwamy temple.  His talk was on identifying oneself with Lord Krishna whom he described as the Perfect Master.  I need to write more about this talk and its message in a separate post.

Through the talk I was constantly reminded of someone I got to know recently who had declared Lord Krishna as the favourite deity. 

The serene setting for the talk as the Krishna Sannidhi at the temple was getting ready for the last deeparadhana for the evening, the speaker’s beatific countenance, the simplicity of his message and the sincerity of his conviction all left a lasting impression.  It seemed like the Lord had finally decided to send me off on a nice and positive note after all.  Much of my cynicism melted away; but the pain of returning to the world of exchange lingers.

On Being Right vs Being Happy

Tonight I complete the second week of my summer sojourn at Trivandrum.  Thanks to a quick trip that I had to make to Bangalore it did not quite turn out to be what I would have liked it to be.  But a day trip I made to the South to a hamlet by the name Derisanamcope, near Nagercoil, more than made up for the painful dash to Bangalore.

The good thing about these trips is that they give me reasons and time to think of the more basic questions of life.  One such question is the topic of this post.  The title does sound presumptuous and somewhat like what a colleague of mine seemed to think about the title of the paper Law and Finance:  Rather pompous.  But then what I have to say is fundamentally about that trade off and hence the unduly profound title.

The trigger for this post occurred as I waited last night at the bus stand in slushy Madiwala amidst all that squalor that passengers on Bangalore’s private buses are mandatorily exposed to.  I asked myself what was it that made me cancel a plane ticket for Monday and instead travel on an overnight bus – an experience that I dread and abhor. 

I realized that it was simply that I felt that it was the right thing to do, given that my wife and sons were in Trivandrum.  I went on to explain to another friend that at the least I felt that I could not be terribly wrong in making that choice even at the expense of that painful bus ride and leaving some unfinished official business behind at Bangalore.

That in essence seems to explain most things I have done all my life for these past fifty five years.  Or perhaps forty five year odd years, from around the time I turned ten and from when I began to be conscious of the motives for my actions. 

You could well wonder what is it that makes my approach so distinct.  Well here is the point of distinction.  I understand that most of us humans choose courses of action that give us happiness.  At least the normal ones do.  We do need to allow for the possibility that there are the non-normal ones like the masochists and so on.  But they are not within the purview of what I have to say here.

That raises a more tricky question:  What is happiness?  Like a good economist defining utility or rationality I side step that question simply by stating that happiness is what the individual thinks leaves him or her feeling happy.

So people go on holidays, celebrate festivals, watch movies, have a meal with members of their immediate family, re-unite with more distant ones or friends occasionally, have a drink, possibly even get sloshed or cheat on a spouse to be with someone else that they like, or hop from one temple to another, all because it leaves them feeling happy.  I have purposely introduced a spread of activities, including some that might be repugnant to our sense of morality,because all of these activities are a pursuit of happiness, if you leave aside the moral propriety of such pursuit.

Now my situation is that as far as I can recall I have done very few things in such pursuit of happiness. To pick on an extreme, as an adolescent I indulged in some relatively harmless but forbidden explorations that teenagers breaking into puberty could be expected to.  Such adventures are normally associated with a high sense of excitement and anticipation of knowing or experiencing some titillation for the first time in one’s life.  The excitement partly comes from the sheer act of doing something proscribed as HG Wells so perceptively explains in his essay on Candour.

In my case I recall having engaged in those adventures simply because I felt that I had reached that age when it had to be done.  And if I missed it I would never be able to do it again because I would never be seventeen again in this life!  So I cannot recall any honest excitement as I went through the motions of procuring those forbidden books, hiding them from my family and devouring the salacious stories, let alone feel joy or happiness.

As I grow older I now spend considerable time in prayer and the daily rituals that I am expected to as a Brahmin.  All the spiritual gurus that I have visited or whose teachings I have read tell me that the thought of the Lord is the only source of enduring joy or bliss to us humans. 

Frankly I do all these religious and spiritual things because I am kind of convinced that it is the right thing to do for any human being.  As I mention in my previous post I also do that for beseeching the Lord for a host of favours every day.   I do not experience the sense of happiness that I see in my mother in law or that I have seen in my late mother when they listened to the stories from the Bhagavatam or Ramayana.  Not to mention the rapture of the kind that Mirabai, Tulasidas, Purandaradasa or Tukaram or any of those beacons of the Bhakti movement are said to have experienced that they even lost their body consciousness.  

Now that is all fine.  The trouble is that I could say pretty much the same thing for even the time I spend with my Dad or my wife and children.  It is true that I do occasionally have a genuine laugh when my sons or my wife say or do something that lightens up my mood.  I do feel deeply touched when they or my other relatives or my friends engage in an act of selflessness to help me, as they often do. 

But then I seem to spend time with them or be around them or do things with / for them because I feel it is the right thing to do.  So if I were to, for example, have to trade off between being at home for Diwali or being on an essential official commitment I would easily go with the latter without any pang about not being at home for Diwali because the right thing to do would be to be at that time was to be away at work.  Or, if I did elect to do the opposite it was because I felt that it was the right thing to do on that occasion and not because of the joy of participating in the festivity with my family.  As I did for example last May when I was on a plane to Boston on the twenty-fifth anniversary of my wedding, having packed my family off to Trivandrum.  

You could well say that it is how most of us would behave in the similar situations.  The difference I guess would be that if you did miss Diwali you would feel bad.  Or if you did manage to stay back you would feel happy to have been able to do so.  Unlike me who would feel neither.

At the risk of putting too fine a point and bordering on sacrilege I feel that sense of doing what is right would perhaps explain my decision to get married, to have progeny, to decide not to go abroad to work so that I could be with my parents and so on.  That would again explain the two occasions I came close to what felt like being in love before I got married.  On one of those two occasions I realized that if the party of the other part had been a botanist instead of being a student of literature I would not have been as fascinated, and so it was not the person that I was drawn to as much as her linguistic talent!

What about my own achievements in life?  Don’t they make me happy or elated?

Well, somewhere in my childhood I seem to have lost the ability to be happy.  I distinctly recall reading when I was in Class Six a collection of biographies that had in it the stories of CV Raman and Alexander the Great.  As I reflected on their lives I resolved that the only thing worth celebrating in life was achieving something as eternal as what these men had accomplished.  Anything less would be mere milestones to mark the journey to that destination. 

Ever since then nearly nothing that I accomplished has been a source of joy or happiness to me: Be it the rank I scored in my matriculation, the prizes I won in school-day competitions, my making it to IIMB, the few successes I had in my corporate life and so on, or even the house that I bought by God’s Grace before I retire.

For most people these would all be sources of satisfaction, if not joy.  Whereas in a somewhat perverse manner I seem to measure my life in terms of the things that I did not get to, such as my missing the civil services, not once but thrice, thanks to what I consider a conspiracy of circumstances, my missing the first rank by a whisker in the state in my matriculation, my not making it to the top dog position at ICICI or my lackluster life now as an academic starting with my inability to pursue a respectable North American PhD.

As I write this four page account of the existence of G. Sabarinathan, S/O R. Ganapathisubramani, b circa Oct 1959, I am reminded of that childhood poem about Solomon Grundy.  I often hark back upon that sobering remark M J Akbar made some years ago at a foundation day speech at IIMB: If the whole generations of post independence India found a mention even as a footnote in the annals of human history we would all have achieved a lot!  (Although I found his India:  A Siege Within and the TinderBox: The Past and Future of Pakistan not profound, I found this remark reflected a deep sense of history in the man.)

As you read this some of you are bound to ask if I am not looking at my own life through a dark glass?Could I reasonably argue that I have never done anything that made me feel happy in the commonly understood sense of that emotion? 

I certainly have made many choices that have left me feeling happy.  But the point I am trying to make is that I seem to be guided more often by a sense of duty and correctness than more normal people are.  By that I do not mean to suggest that normal people end up doing wrong things in the name of happiness.  I guess you get the picture, in spite of tying myself up in knots in explaining this, right?

You might also ask how do I account for the psychic income that is often supposed to motivate people to do the correct things?  That is a fair point too.  Occasionally one’s choice is driven by the desire to see the smile on the face of a family member or a friend.  But then quite often that is a merely collateral outcome in my decision calculus.

I have wondered if all that inability to derive joy out of being with family does not make me an unfeeling, uncaring, insensitive brute.  I sense that the truth perhaps is that I possibly am one.  I seem to have spent all these years just trying to make sure that I do what is right more than what makes me happy.  And that is precisely what makes me write this piece: The hope that I am doing the right thing in owning it all up, in laying bare the choices I made in my life.

Nanni….Namaskaaram..

Ulsavam Musings...

Some fifty years earlier when I was first taken to that temple my paternal grandmom quickly wrapped a towel round my shorts to make me comply with the man-made dress code at the temple that was dispensed to us in the name of the Lord himself.  

Fifty years later we did the same with our twin nine year old sons, quite like the hundreds of many other faithfuls that had come to see the ulsavam at the Sri PadmanabhaSwamy temple.  Well, OK not all of them were perhaps faithfuls.  Same difference.  Define a faithful to me unambiguously before you join issues with me on the extent of faith of all those.

Lest anyone be in doubt on where I come out on this matter of Faith, I am a big believer in God in any form.  I am not sure what God is supposed to do, what, if any, am I supposed to do for Him and what my relationship with Him ought to be.  But I am convinced that the Lord exists.  Further, I am convinced that all that we do is His bidding.  I also turn to Him routinely for various transactional benefits.

I have had my own share of experiences at key moments in life that for want of better explanations would pass off for miracles. I realise that it tricky for me to say that because that would make me appear to lay claim to the Lord's blessings that others may not have savoured.  But let us leave it at that for now.  You can take my word in good faith or just ignore it as my hallucination.

The principal agenda for everyone assembled there was seeking the Lord's blessings, the Lord being Sri Padmanabha Swamy, the presiding deity and his two other incarnations Sri Naramsimha and Sri Krishna.

For some it may even have been an ostensible reason for being there because what one witnessed there was a small social gathering too.

Most people seemed to know each other.  This is where the city of Trivandrum appears to have not lost its quaintness. Every year many of its residents leave for the larger cities in search of livelihoods, careers, even fame and fortune, changing the composition of the population permanently, irreversibly.  A few migrants from elsewhere take their place in an ever growing wave of urbanization.  Yet everyone including those that remained and those that had moved in, all seemed to know each other in spite of all the new-fangled media of infotainment that elsewhere in the country seemed to be making turning neighbours into strangers.
 

Many among those gathered at the temple greeted each other warmly, even intimately.  Some of them were explaining they had been absent for an extended while because they had been visiting an offspring in Bangalore or Delhi. Much news was exchanged. 

There were young men and women throwing me back to my own youth forty years earlier.  Mine was a very different world though. It was a world of cold war, oil shocks, Mrd G’s dirigisme that was driven across the country from Delhi in the name of centralized planning, and Sakhavu Achyuta Menon’s dias non and the hushed ripples on campus of the secret war that Comrade Ajitha’s compatriots were waging in the hills of Wayanad against the establishment.  

On the sands of the temple a very religious looking young man standing near me was debriefing his friends about a difficult encounter that his friend had had with a young lady who had apparently slapped him (the friend) over the latter's inappropriate attempt to win her affinity.

As I stood there taking in these sights and sounds, the thought that kept coming back to my mind was this.  In all these fifty years, the faces had changed.  Political circumstances had changed, making the erstwhile ruler of Travancore further remote from and less relevant to the rough and tumble of contemporary power politics than he had been in the seventies, soon after Mrs G had abolished their privy purse, the compensation that the princes had been awarded for letting their princely states accede to the Union of India.

But to the faithful the temple and its ulsavam remained a central piece of their social life even today, a source of much conviviality.  That in a sense seemed to be the spiritualism that the religion tried to imbue in the faithful through the institution of the temple as a place of community worship:  Having been born into this world being caught in the web of life is inevitable.  But weave every bit of your life around the Lord.  Implant the Lord in your heart however perfectly as you can, however imperfectly you might.  You might then hope to be liberated from the cycle of birth and death someday.

As I stood reflecting on these thoughts, trying to dissolve some recent worldly pain of my own making, I heard the distant rolling thud of the kettle drum heralding the arrival of the Lord.  The conversations stopped and all eyes turned to the direction of the sound, eagerly awaiting the sighting of the Lord on the tall, broad, spacious, imposing circumambulatory path of the temple, all hewn in eternal stone.

Nanni.Namaskaaram

I wrote this piece too on April 4, 2015 and could not post it as a blog again.

Getting back to blogging again...

I am back to writing my blogs. But I come back this time with an important realization of my own proclivities and predispositions - My moods seem to fall into four broad states.

In my most elated state I seem to be so overwhelmed with joy that the euphoria does not allow me to do anything worthwhile. I have to remind myself then that I need to get down to reality.

The second is what I consider my state of realism. I go about my work and life with the full awareness of how ordinary a bloke I am and how I need to work away like any other fellow, earning an honest living. I have no pretenses about my literary or artistic talents in that state.

 The third state is when I am just depressed enough to delude myself into thinking that I can channelize my unhappiness into a piece of creative writing – as I seem to believe now. That is when I write these blogs. Interestingly, even as I do write them there is the rational side that says that it is after all a futile effort. It should not matter to anyone, other than me, if I wrote them at all.

And then there is the fourth state where everything seems to be lost in a sea of purposelessness. I nearly slip into an abyss of ennui, as I did recently, and I could not even bring myself to even write these inane blogs.

But it is my hope that I my mood is on the mend and that I am now on the repair trail by grace of the Lord.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

I wrote this originally on April 4, 2015; but could not post it as a blog for some silly technical reason.