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.