At 55

 At 55,

I want to live

The way I imagined I will 

When I had the free will

And Imagination

Of a child.

With nothing to prove

And nowhere to reach

Free with no goals

Living life in the moment

Enjoying the moment 

Every moment

The world around is chaotic

With seemingly no hope

But I find all relationships symbiotic

Family, society, earth, water, river, 

Ocean, Mountains 

All interconnected in a 

Seemingly unconnected and disparate world.

Not AI

But NI 

Nature’s Intelligence

Is second to none

I hope the world understands that

Before it’s gone.

Let me,

Soak in the sun, 

Dream under the moon

Rock in the waves of the ocean 

My life has just begun

At 55.

Your well being is in your hand

After 4 years of anti depression medicine I have finally left them on 16th Nov. It’s difficult to look back because its a long time and I think I don’t want to. But I am putting down a few points which may help those who need time to heal themselves. We all need.

Take 5

1. When to start: This is the most difficult part and I saw so many conversations in the well being group on Should I? The answer actually depends on when the question has come. Don’t start without trying - give yourself a deadline, there are enough hacks on internet. You should try what works for you. Some will Some won’t. 

2. Be Objective: Treat like weight lose / doing a marathon and do not for a moment think this is confusing. It is not. My doctor would say - If a diabetic patient is taking a pill for his well being what is wrong with you taking. 

3. What type are you?: It’s very important to understand what type you are. To make it simple - I just classify in 2 types, either you think a lot or you don’t take things so seriously. Most people who seek intervention is thinking type. This is my presumption but I am - that’s the first thing I was told. Don’t keep telling yourself - Why do I think so much? Can I pls stop thinking. You are programmed that way - you have to find a way around it. 

4. Practice-Practice-Practice - But stop looking. Don’t flirt with many ideas: I admire myself because I tried so much, everything the doctor would say my answer would be - Yes I read about it and I tried (reading a book when sleep does not come or talking to friend & so on). I often wondered why am I still going thru this. The answer when it came was that ‘I tried too much, which indirectly meant I kept seeking ideas to do which indirectly meant that I was not confident on my self and had belief on one idea I was trying. Last 100 days I have doing only 3 things - daily guided meditation, Gratitude (both before I sleep) & Affirmation (as soon as I get up with tea). Nothing else. Yes off and on I would read a article circulated in the ‘Wellbeing Group’ but I never compromised on my daily 3 things. The continuity gave the confidence and maybe changed something in my mind which is scientifically proved

5. When to stop ?:Lastly, this is the most important one. My doctor would never let me stop. She would always bring it down to ½ a tab and somehow something will happen and the no of pills will go up. This up and down continued for 4 years. Then I picked up an insight from my family doctor, he said ‘they will never let you stop because they are scared that it will relapse’. Somehow it was like a flash bulb - this has become a crutch and I need to take my ‘well being in my hand’ & I will leave the medicines come what may.

This was 100 days back and I finally took the step.

The Golden Years of our family

Goa - 2010

These were the best years, I often wonder why ? Although the answer is very clear because i was the boss and I could make the family sway whichever direction I wanted. Anything new excited the children who had an uncluttered mind - or a beginners mind (like they say in ZEN). The little anguish was more to do with quibbles between the sis or between us parents. 

Reema is a excellent curator of places and storyteller - she will tell the children about the history of a place and also ask quiz on what she told. I was the ops guy, organizer, driver, coolie, occasional fighter when family demands were not met and of course official photographer / videographer. Action guy - in search of basketball court, party happening around or a swim in the infinity pool. 

There was sense of a common mission and discovery which we all shared and our roles were nicely divided so there was not too much debate. 

As children grow the choices are many and we get bogged down in accommodating the other and not being happy or enjoying the moment.

As the moments pass and we recuperate I often gaze at these pics n smile & tell myself “Hmm! Those were the the Golden Years”.

Green Shoots: Quite Day

Co-creating our next community

One of the days when i just want to be. Breathe. Think less, get lost in the sound around me. Talk less. Sleep if it comes and just get my rhythm back. 

There is a difference between loneliness and solitude - I realised the difference between both as I moved out of home after 12th in 1987 and stayed uprooted till 1999 when I got married. During the 12 years I had room mates, close friends, travelled, worked and did many things with many people. Discarded friends, kept in touch with a very few, but during all these years of the 2nd phase of growing up I always had these quiet days like today. 

Driven by consumption & attention these were more like a mental detox or fasting if you may. 

HOPE 6 - Travel

1 year back when I was feverishly planning my Gap year. 

I had thought of

• Doing chadar trek or Base Camp (Solo)

• Meet all my relatives, few whom I had not met for 20 years

• Do smaller treks around Bangalore (weekend)

And then life happened.

I am happy that despite the various curve balls life has thrown or maybe imagined by me I could at least fulfill 1 of the 3. 

Met my relatives, traveled by train - bus - rickshaw - metro whatever but just made it happen. It was not easy. I think I would have taken it after 10 years. 

But it was liberating, I had got accustomed to flying the clinical, clean, non intrusive cocoon in which you just zone in like a robot and travel from Bangalore - Mumbai. Same Vango everytime. After a point you are just going thru the motion

Train / Bus - every time is different. You meet all kinds of people, get into various conversations, philosophy, share food to soap to weed. You name it. Yes, you have to be open to it. 

But the best part is gazing at the railway track or the scenery from your seat - I can never get bored by it. I won’t be able to do much of that in my current travels, but then there are mountains and clouds to give me company. 

Lets!

Chal Himachal.

1 year off

Last year today was the last day when I was paid for the day. 

(I did not want to write a long congratulatory note but wanted to be precise so I decided to write just 3 things under each head)

I wrote and rewrote the first line a couple of times because apart from that rest everything else was still a reality.

• I still work daily  

• I am still responsible for certain outcomes

• I still have meetings / schedules / travel

Yes, the quantum of the above 3 is significantly less, maybe 1/4th of what I did earlier. But I choose to do a lot of other things.

• I am learning what I want to learn

• I feel good about what I do because it has meaning for me 

• I prioritize mindfully what works for me n family

But, this does not mean

• I don’t have conflicts

• I don’t feel lost or worthless at time

• That I don’t have gnawing feeling that I could have done much better / much more

So did I learn something on the way

• You can only plan that much. Rest you have to ‘Go with the flow’. Life will throw curve balls you can never escape so be ready.  

• Having choices is not important. Clarity of what you want is.

• You cannot do it alone. Learn to trust people and letting go off your biases

Wrote on 31st August 23

Hope 5 - Songs

Kabir Session by Vipul

Music: This has been my eternal go to place for comfort. 

The 3 playlists which I play the most

• Amol Palekar playlists which has songs from his movies mostly Basu Chatterjee / Hrishikesh Mukherjee. The movies (Gol Maal, Choti Si Baat etc) which were fun, light hearted and gave you this nice happy feeling at the end of it and I never paid much attention to songs but now that I listen deeply I realize that they have so much meaning. Sample this (Aane waala pal jaane wale hain, ho sake to isme jindagi beeta do…)  - The moment which is going to come will also go very soon and so make the best of the moment and spend your lifetime in it. This is the core of any philosophy you read. But that is just one part of it - like our memory works - these songs evoke the carefree settings of the movies somewhere in my mind I relate to 70’s. And brings a smile on my face and the day 🙂

• My Elvis playlists - mostly his love songs - There is no such philosophical musing like above, but at times I just crave for his voice and the deep - pure feeling of love when I listen to “Take my hand, take my whole life too..but I can’t help falling in love too…” It’s like my heart would melt and all my pain would flow out. Especially after seeing a few documentaries and understanding his meteoric rise and fall and all the struggle he went through - they feel more real. 

• Kabir - Multiple playlists - I got introduced to Kabir in one of the Kabir  singing sessions which was hosted in someone’s balcony in Bangalore. The teacher was Vipul Rikhi. Then I stumbled into several singers like BinduMalini, Shabnam Virmani of Kabir Project. The impact was phenomenal - In a way I took him as a teacher, every song has so much meaning that listening to him you would just forget the daily tussle as it would melt away in the soulful rendition of these songs.

Hope 4 - Compassion for All

Yesterday I read this post on my apartment group and was shocked.

”There was an accident today near our Natasha sign board at the entrance.  One cat got badly injured by a car coming out of Natasha. The car involved belongs to a resident of Natasha. I took the cat and admitted in Cessna Hospital . It will go through a Jaw operation tomorrow”

Dillep da who wrote this took him to the hospital and the cat is doing fine now (see video 🙂). But the effort to take a stray cat to a vet and get her treated - What compassion and passion for strays. Seeing the cat being fed reminded me of feeding my own children when they could not express and had what we gave. 

Feeding an injured cat is a much tougher task.

Hope 3 - Waste to compost

Since the chemo cycle started and we were 6 people staying for the last 2 months, the wet waste was too much to compost and we had to let go of the liquid gold aka compost which we could have made. 

Now with the waste quantity having come down - i started composting again. The very process of chopping the green stems in small pieces and mixing the vegetable and fruit waste with the peremix - touching them with my fingers rejuvenated my senses & lifted my mood.

Now, I look forward to it every day.

Hope 2 - Sun n Plants

August 23

Around 7.15 am, as I step out of my door with a steaming cup of tea in my hand the sun peeps from top of the buildings to land on my door. Bright but not  bright enough to hurt your eyes. Warm and gentle like a friend who is helping you wake up and set the tone of the days.

We have a small patch with pots of ‘sadabahar’ (always flowering) plants and the light falls on the pink and delicate flower, green leaves making a place of wonderment and hope. 

I feel the small piece of soil around the pot to feel the earth as best as I can and smell it before I head back to chase the day filled with hope and sunshine.

Hope (1) - Running to stand still

It was a difficult choice to make early in the morning, especially after a tough morning. And took some time to get my shoes on and hit the road. In the start it is always easy but it becomes difficult halfway through. And this time it was not different. 

Last week I ran 8k - I was thinking I will do 15 K on 15th August, but with my sleep issue it seems NO GO. So did another 8K to at least finish 15k before 15th August. I was feeling very tired and exhausted but the sweating out was good. 

Also the mind space when you run is very different from Yoga - It’s like the difference between surfing and floating. More importantly it is good that I could fix and reach a goal. A personal one and hence a personal victory. An affirmation to my subconscious that ‘I can’. 

These days I run to stand still.

HOPE

As I was walking down the stairs for my walk, I saw a young parent carrying a 2 month child very carefully in a car seat and probably going for a drive. She was really small wearing pink but her eyes were open and she was probably seeing some coats of color in her vision. She was not smiling or angry, just peaceful and staring. On asking I was told, he was 2 months old. The parents had happiness and bliss written all over their face like one would feel when in first love.

As I came out of the stairways I saw another child, again wearing ping, must be 3 or four years old walking with her father. I saw them from behind but I could feel the spring in the girls' walk and I could hear her asking questions in an animated way. Even though I was 500 mts away I could feel the excitement, thrill and happiness in the girl.

As I began my Sunday Run, many thoughts criss crossed my mind,

At some point in life we live life cradled in the necessities and responsibilities which are thrown at us because of raising a family and meeting our responsibilities at work. Our hopes get linked to work and family. While work is more like meeting requirements, family helps to rekindle hope and keeps it alive in us. Marriage is a new beginning and so is a child or two. It’s a green shoot, a new branch where like the tree we live our life once again with our partner or child. 

In our sunset years it becomes difficult to keep our Hope alive. With your body reacting in a different way, plants start growing on their own creating their own ecosystem, challenges from your aging parent throws challenges at you on a daily basis.

Seeing these girls took me back to the green shoots which came our way 23 n 20 years back. Now, the joy is in seeing your tree grow, branch, flower and bear fruits. 

Like my little magic.😍

Triangle of Sadness - Palm D’Or Winner

It’s just by chance that I saw all the 3 films made by the director Ruben Ostlund in a span of 1 month. Started with Force Majeur, The Square (both in MUBI) & this week Triangle of Sadness.

All 3 movies are satire: 

Force Majeure shows the reality of relationships, our insecurity which is not easily expressed but gets exhibited in situations but you refuse to accept or it tips off the relationship scale. In this case it’s a trip which the family takes and an incident of avalanche which tips the scale. Some might find it boring as the whole movie is slow and quite nuanced.  

The Square also brings out the hypocrisy of the society through a new museum which exhibits installations - some of them quite ridiculous like sands organised in some form. Rich people come to see it and in the end there is a twist where the installation is a live performance which turns awry in the end. This also is a Palm D’Or winner.

Triangle of Sadness focuses more on the class divide and the uber rich in this world who think they own the world and expect to be served by the rest of the world. They became rich by selling hand grenades or shit (fertilizers) - the route does not matter the money does. But it has a nice twist which changes the odds when a toilet cleaner becomes the captain. You can see it in Sonyliv.

Relationships can be tough if the people involved have a different way of looking at things or operating style & there is a refusal to understand the other’s point of view. Unknowingly of course because the intention is always to give your best to the family and think the best outcomes of the family. 

But our reactions are so hard wired that it takes years of practice to change & this creates the Triangle of sadness which  is a real-world term for the area between the eyebrows and the very top of the nose bridge.

The area tends to develop wrinkles with age and emphasizes negative facial expressions such as sadness or anger, even when the person's face rests in a neutral position.

I have quite a few wrinkles.

Being Still - Experiencing Silence

The house has been drained of activities as the hospital beckoned and we were like ‘2 lost souls living in a fish bowl’ - famously sung by Pink Floyd..

The chemo cycle happens every 3 weeks. And for those 3 weeks everyone is trying to do many things and still things are incomplete or have a sense of disapproval. Too many factors and conditions to be kept in mind by many people which ends up in a resultant chaos. 

But today there were none and suddenly I was experiencing silence of a different kind. A silence where I could hear my breath, a silent drone of insects which I never picked up, even the breeze I could experience on my hand as I sat on my doorstep. The parrots as always were the loudest and shrill and the squirrels had their sound synchronised with their tail and on seeing a lazy cat come out and sit near the tree its chatter went up a notch.

After sometime I realised that I had not heard the constant sound of traffic or the consistent beeping of horn, not even the washing machine which was running in my next flat. As if it did not permeate the bubble built by nature. 

I felt, this is not silence, this is life.

A day in balcony

22nd June 23 - Sunset

It rained heavily yesterday night when I got up it was still drizzling and everything was wet. After some time the rain stopped and the clouds were clearing. From my balcony I could see the slow walk of clouds in front of me like a marching of giants of different sizes. It just continued endlessly, I gazed at it for a long time thinking from where do they come to where they are going. Is there a starting point - Is there an end point ?

Nowadays, his memory is like these clouds, they come like a cloudburst and after moving around his mind and tiring him it disintegrates somewhere in his mind. In my morning walk with a doctor she explained this is a natural process - first you lose sense of time, then you lose sense of place and then you get attached to something and want to do it badly. Like her father who wanted to visit his village and visit his uncle who was not well.

I reflect on this and try to make sense of my life, what is the purpose. We live for unforgettable experiences, create loving relationships and spend the whole lifetime in this process. And one fine day the memories get overloaded and start switching off or worse gets all jumbled up. What will the experiences be worth if it’s all gone when you need it the most. 

The day ends, I come out onto the same balcony to see a beautiful array of faint light streaming through the clouds & trees. A listless balcony looked beautiful in the faint reflections. My immediate response was to capture the moment, I resisted for a long time just taking in the beauty of the moment. There was a cacophony of noises - traffic, men shouting and talking in a nearby office, kids playing. But, that did not diminish the beauty of the setting sun and what it created. 

I don’t know if there is a lesson, but I felt refreshed and the dark clouds which were chasing in my mind cleared and motivated me to write. 

Memories will fade but nature will always inspire even in a concrete jungle where we mostly live. 

Like a zen koan says “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”

The SNOWMAN - Jo Nesbo

After a long time I read an ‘edge of the seat thriller’. I always wanted to read a NORDIC thriller  but was busy reading others. It was one of the Harry Hole stories and had good twists and turns till the last 100 pages and I kept guessing who was the killer. In other words we kept suspecting someone but it was someone else. 

Like any other suspense or investigative book there was logical thinking and deduction. It goes into overdrive after sometime and I had to control not finishing in a long sitting. Will I read one more - I am not sure. It’s good but in the end you come out with this nauseating feeling of what devious things can be there in the human mind. How people can be so cruel to other humans. Of course there is always a deep seated psychological reason for which the person acts the way he / she is acting. 

The action and the thrill is nice but somehow the macabre murders puts me off. Maybe it’s just my age and the kind of books which I have been reading which are more on relationships or pure play science fiction or on a person’s quest for something or war & displacement. I think all my books in the last few years have been more on human drama. 

So this was a good change. 

I have not read many Agatha Christie but her books or even Sherlock Holmes were more of deductive & solving cases and in that sense innocent. 

I mean how threatening can Poirot be but his brain is no different or not less sharp than Harry Hole. 

I guess that also my personality - I identify more with Poirot than Harry Hole 🙂

Reflecting On Writing - 250th Post

In the movie 'Whale' Charlie teaches 'Creative Writing course' & One of the thing Charlie says to his students is 'BE HONEST IN YOUR WRITING'. 

Over last 17 years - there were occasions when I thought is it OK to write something which might be personal or something which will be liked by some folks or it should project a point of view which is right etc etc. But most of these are just thoughts or ideas in my mind, when I write my post it's more from my heart. I need to feel good after the post is done. That's my barometer of satisfaction.

In the process of writing initially even now I feel at times that more people should read my post - especially if I really like a post or enjoy writing it but I never write with that intention. That process is more for my LinkedIn posts as they are driven by purpose not some random thoughts which I write here in my blog. 

Blog went out of fashion I think 5 years back or more, I don't think anyone has the time to read - it's mostly see i.e video. So my writing is more for my clarity & posterity. With the hope that Google doesn't go bankrupt and these blogs survive in some server somewhere - I want to come back and read them and see what I went thru / felt / thought. 

My blog / writing is my truth. 

Whale, the movie & Father’s Day

One of the movies which I wanted to see since the OSCAR was announced was Whale starring Brendon Fraser for which he won the best actor award. I had only seen the trailers and it looked like an emotional roller coaster ride with a super obese Fraser. You can see it in SonyLiv.

It was not a happy movie to see on Father's Day but I think the need to complete my list of OSCAR winners was important. The movie is about Charlie reconnecting with his daughter Elle after 12 years. He had left the family when she was 8 years old because he fell in love with a guy who was his student. So, obviously his daughter hated him. 

He had put on enormous weight after his boyfriend died and cut himself off from the world. Staying in an apartment, ordering food teaching students online - he used to take classes on creative writing. Whatever he earned was kept in an account for Elle, which was his way of redeeming his sins. He could have used the money to treat himself but he refused to do so and preferred to die than use the money.

Typical father behavior - saving for their kids and then walking into the sunset. In my case I am more similar to Charlie as I also seem to have also isolated myself from the world after I quit last year. Not a very social person I would rather be with my book and movie than go to a birthday party. Good thing is, unlike Elle both my daughters love me and are kind enough to accept me as I am, in fact they encourage me to complete my bucket list and do what I want to.

Somewhere between school and college, I took the backseat and their MOM took charge of college, expenses, buying list, wish list, budget - everything. I guess I was struggling with my depression and high level of stress at work. Or maybe I was not just attentive enough, but from being head of family I became a person non grata - except for entertainment. It took some time to get used to this new status - I struggled but slowly the acceptance dawned that this is the new reality. I guess I am happy that they got what they wanted when they wanted. 

More Power to my Dolphins on Father’s Day from the Whale. Will surface when needed.