Going private

It is now more than three weeks since this blog went truly private.  I am now in this binary existence. There is this bit where I am like anyone else, a John citizen.  Like everyone else I have my quirks that most people can see.  I have my moods when I am quite dark, inaccessible and unkind.  And then there is the generous side where I wax eloquent about how it is important to make this world a better place in the short while that we all inhabit it.

And there is the other private side to me that for a while for the past four years I let people into, although in very small numbers.

But no longer so.  This will be the fourth post that I would not have broadcast to anyone else.  Apart from an intensely private one that I took down no longer than I had written it, all my other posts, other than these four, have been broadcasted to various people. 

I am now alone in this world of my posts.  Who was it that said that in the heights of joy and in the depths of sorrow Man is all alone?  Apart from Lakshmi, my wife, there is place for no one else in this world of mine now. 

May be some day when I am too old to matter to anyone and I am too old to do anything, my sons will discover these posts.  What will they think of their father when they read these posts, I wonder?  Will they think their father was a sorry wimp?  Will they think that I had been deceitful, not having revealed this side to my life?  Will they charge their mother of having been an accomplice to duplicity?  Will they tell their own wife and children about me?  What would they in turn think about me?  And about their husband once they know about their father in law?

Crazy thoughts I admit.  Thoughts that are of no consequence. 

Being private is very painful, as this week reminded me.  

After much hesitation I offered myself for interview admissions. I was reminded of the grief and torture that I experienced during the interviews last year as I braced myself for the separation that was round the corner. 

I was like a wraith in the interviews.  I felt wan and drained.  I felt that a huge boulder of several tonnes had been placed on my chest. I called home every evening.  I delayed getting back to my room at the hotel as long as I could.  And when I did have to, inevitably to retire, I left all the blinds and the lights open, scared of the darkness that was enveloping me in the physical and metaphorical sense.

But that made me a kinder interviewer.  Gone was the aggressive interviewer who got his mind to fire on all sixteen cylinders to do his bit to ensure that the school got the best of the kids into the programme.

I somehow began to see everyone in the world as a potential victim of the kind of grief I experienced, give or take a bit on either side.  Even when a candidate struggled to find an answer I would almost prompt him with hints.

My fellow panelist was intrigued, given the reputation I used to have.  He was quite curious to know about the transformation.  I merely told him that it was the effect of age and the transformational effect of parenthood.

Little did he know or little could I tell him that within me the flames of Hades, were consuming me, burning me into ashes, with grief that I would be advised a few days later was the price for an act of omission or commission from a past life.

It is a year now, almost, since those days.  And I can see the same specter dancing in front of me.  I dread everything about it – from the wait at the airport in Bangalore to the lonely moments before and after the interviews at IHC.  It feels almost like the ides of March in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. 

Apart from pouring my heart out to Lakshmi all that I can do is to write more of these posts.  Through these posts I can tell myself the same sad story, remind myself how unfortunate I am on this count.  Ultimately I will have to live down this grief, if I want to be seen by the small world around me as a regular bloke with some common quirks.  Like most others.  And not to be asked to seek help.

Now that the post and, with it, my grief have both gone private, why the customary sign off?

2016: More Reflections…Being Who We Are Not

That surely must be a confusing title.  But I guess it must be in the spirit of saying all those contradictory things in the hope of sounding profound. After all, isn’t that how all these philosopher and spiritual types appear to be – superficially at least? 

It is a bit like the verses of RD Laing that I read as I was about to graduate from business school thirty three years ago.  Here is a sample from the book Knots:  (No, I did not write that from memory.)

They are playing a game. They are playing at not

playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I

shall break the rules and they will punish me.

I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

And isn’t that what they say about the Bhagavad Gita too?

So here is what I wanted to say in sum:  Often who we are or who we wish to be seems to be defined by who we could not become or what we could not acquire or achieve.

I was first prompted to think of this construct as I reflected on a line in this Malayalam movie Om Shanti Oshana where the heroine notes that men never really get over their first love, especially if it fails. 

That struck me as being so true.  I know of so many friends of mine who would speak wistfully about the women that they did not succeed in marrying, in spite of having a fabulously happy married life, post failing in their one or more attempts at falling in love.

 

While I have not had any serious affairs of the heart myself, I cannot help occasionally fantasizing how my life would have been if I had married the many women that I have been fascinated by.  Unlike in the case of my career choices, the outcomes of these fantasies are always liberating.  I thank God that not only did I not manage to win the hearts of any of those women, but I am glad I married Lakshmi by God’s Grace, a woman I have described elsewhere as a modern day Patient Griselda.

But that is more than offset by the many other things that I crave for such as my nearly self-destructive desire for a life in letters or the way my heart pines for this young woman whom I would I love to be my own child even though I know she never will be one because she simply does not see me in the same way.

All of that led me to think of how my Dad brought me up.  And looking back at it I would say that he wanted me to be everything that he could not be but he aspired to be.  Now that is not a lone mental disease that afflicted just my father.  Child psychologists routinely admonish parents not to commit that mistake and advise them that children should be allowed to lead their own lives.

Similarly, we hear of people carrying an emotional baggage in the form of antipathy towards people who succeeded in studying or working in an institution that they could not get entry into. The antipathy of the police officer in the novel Jaws towards the marine biologist, Isabel in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge placing a bottle of alcohol strategically to lure Sophie back into alcoholism just so the latter would not get Larry even if Isabel could no longer be his, are all instances of people’s actions, preferences and choices being influenced by what they could not achieve or acquire.

And then there are these even more extreme instances of bachelors and spinsters detesting members of the opposite sex because somewhere in their life they got stood up by someone of the opposite sex.  Or think of the case of maladjusted individuals stalking people that they could not get into a relationship for whatever reason.

Interestingly, the Hindu approach to answering many basic questions in life are based on the process of eliminating what something (Na – eti, often written as neti) is not rather than saying what it actually is.

In short, who we are seems to be more a result of who we could not be. 

Thus on the eve of this New Year, as I thought of the many hits and misses (more of the latter than the former) in my life I realized how much of who I am was so much a result of all that I wanted during this and the many years of the past but simply could not get.

Nanni…Namaskaaram

2016: Resolutions and Reflections on New Year’s Day

Yet another "new" year is upon us.  It is that time when people are supposed to make resolutions.  I am past that age of making resolutions.  I have tried that many a time – only to fail. 

In a way that whole idea is lame.  Those who are capable of sticking to their resolutions do not wait till the clock ushers in a new year.  To those who are incapable of staying the course – like me – it does not matter when you resolve.

That said, I do hope to stay with one decision, God willing: Not to announce these posts to anyone anymore. These posts started as private soliloquies.  Along the way they somehow degenerated into exhibitionism and I started broadcasting the links. 

There was a time when I used to broadcast these to as many as fourteen people or so.  I feel terribly foolish when I think of those days.

Even more fundamentally I wonder if I should write them at all or not anymore.  I had at one point stopped writing them.  And then there was a flurry of writing in 2015.  Of the 65 posts that I have published so far 36 were written in 2015.  Many, if not most, of them were inspired by one sentiment, one development the impact of which I will continue to experience for a long time. 

Writing these posts has helped me hone my writing skills, which continue to remain quite poor, notwithstanding all that improvement.  Three of them got published in journals, one of which - the campus journal at the school where I teach - I am not sure is read by anyone at all.   

Some people who read these posts said nice things about what I wrote.  One of my readers seemed to think that his own feelings resonated with the sentiment I had expressed in some of my posts.  So that felt good.  After all, a good writer is one whose readers are able to identify with the former’s thoughts or those of the characters he created. Even if it be on a small scale I seemed to have written something that touched someone’s heart.

But then that is also the exhibitionist side.  It felt that some of my most personal thoughts were no longer private.  I seemed to have thrown them open for public consumption, perhaps just one step short of putting them up for sale. 

Well, that is that now.  I hope not to broadcast these posts anymore. 

Will I write anything for a broader audience outside of these posts?  I am not sure I will.   I really do not possess talent of that order.  Talent in terms of artistic creativity or the ability to write good English that will not irritate those readers who are capable of discerning good English writing from the hopeless. I have read far too little to write anything profound.

But I do hope to continue to write more by way of a soliloquy.  Why then write at all?  Simply because writing helps me think more precisely.  To turn the words over in my mind again and again.  To imagine what they will do to the imaginary reader.  It is a bit like the foolish and vain college Romeos of yore who stood admiring their own looks in front of a mirror, presumably wondering how the imaginary love of their hearts would respond to their equally imaginary good looks.

With that resolve here is wishing you, my dear imaginary reader,  a great year in 2016, a year of all joy and no pain, a year that will want to make you feel grateful to the Lord.

Nanni…Namaskaaram…