To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Monday, October 29, 2018
 

Aane waala pal, jaane waala hai,
Ho sake toh ismein, zindagi bita doh,
Pal joh yeh jaane waala hai
(The moment that is coming, is about to go,
If possible, live your life in it,
The moment will pass anyway)
 
I always feel a wave of nostalgia when I listen to this lovely Hindi song. It makes you think about the fleetingness of time ever so poignantly…makes you want to stop time in its tracks…but then  you realise that you can’t….and time is flying anyway…all you can do is to live it to the fullest.
The funny thing that happened when this song was playing in the background while I was washing dishes a few days ago (yes, that’s my time for listening to music!), is that I felt like I actually registered the third verse for the first time (though I have listened to this song gadzillion times)…. It goes like this:
 
Ek baar waqt se, lamha gira kahin,
Wahaan daastan mili, lamha kahin nahin.
(Once a moment fell from time,
There I found a story, the moment was nowhere to be found)
 
I have been reading a lot about ‘time’ from a sociological/philosophical perspective these days. I never really thought about ‘time’ in a theoretical sense before or the fact that what we refer to as time in terms of clock time or calendar time is simply a human construction of time. In reality there is no such thing as ‘time’ at all… what we have is just fragmented recollection or memories of events. Which is why we remember a lot of things not so much by the day or year they took place but in connection with other events or other things that we remember. And even past/present/future are not three separate buckets…like this song so beautifully puts it… the moment that is coming (which is future) will become present and the moment that is present will become past almost instantaneously… Also it captures the theoretical concept of ‘time’ so well when it says that a moment once gone cannot be found as a moment at all… but in its place may be a story or event to serve as a reminder of its existence…
It seems to me that all good art is born out of a deeper or philosophical engagement with ideas… no wonder then that even these simple phrases have such depth of meaning and insight…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 6:31 am 0 comments
Thursday, October 25, 2018
 

Being in academia for me is like a fish finding a pond. It’s like I don’t need to be self-conscious anymore about what I think and ‘how much’ I think. In India (when I say India, note that I only mean Mumbai because that’s the wellspring of my experience of India)…so, in Mumbai there is a general antipathy toward ‘thinking’ (outside of the work context where also it is applied in a narrow sense)…”jyaada mat soch yaar”, “itna kyun sochti hai” are common phrases to push you out of a ‘thoughtful’ mood. Thoughtful is also usually equated with morose—opposite of ‘fun’ or ‘upbeat’. You’re likely to be popular if you’re more of a ‘chill’ sort of person, if you know what I mean. People seem to find reflection, introspection, going in depth into ideas a bit of a dampener on a good day. If there’s nothing to do people will happily switch on the TV (actually even if there are better things to do) and watch some Bollywood movie. I’m referring to the average population here. I guess I got into the habit of keeping my thoughts to myself early on in life and once in a rare while I met people or was in a situations where it seemed okay to simply be myself.
The academic world or the academic world here in the UK is where you are expected to be thoughtful, critical, reflective, introspective, questioning, argumentative…things that I always loved to do…and like I said, it makes me feel like I am in my pond. The strange thing is it seems to have loosened me up personally too. Maybe I used to be too afraid of coming across as too serious or too critical or too intellectual which made me clam up and be more self-conscious whereas now I feel comfortable being my natural self. I notice that it makes me a more ‘fun’ person too than when I was forcing myself to appear more ‘relaxed’. I won’t say that I am a social butterfly now any more than I was then…I am an introvert (INTJ to be specific) and I don’t jump into social situations even now…but having found myself in them, I believe I tend to hold myself much better.
This weekend I was invited to an event held by this very dear friend and her husband. In the good old days I would have thought and thought about accepting and even after accepting, I would have gone crazy wondering what I would do in a room where I knew no one except this friend. Now, I not only accepted almost immediately, I didn’t even think too much about it, I landed at the venue…felt a little uneasy for a little bit not knowing where or how to start mixing around…but once I did there was no stopping me. I made very good friends with this one girl so much so that I realised I was having a better time than I had had in ages. She remarked to me that I did not come across as an introvert at all... she would have thought I was an extrovert. Imagine my surprise!  
I have also noticed that I am becoming more comfortable chatting with strangers here. In Mumbai, it’s not very common to chat with strangers unless you’re thrown into their company such as say an autorickshaw or taxi driver who may chat you up. Generally chatting with someone sitting next to you on a train (unless you want to quarrel about the space on the seat) or someone in a shop or with the shopkeeper or at a bus stop or myriad such situations is fairly uncommon. Even when it happens it is likely to be with the same sex because your suspicions are raised automatically when it’s a stranger from the opposite sex. Here, chatting up random strangers is par for the course. Most times you end up having very interesting conversations, like I had other day on the train. A man with a bicycle moved in near where I was stood. He generally asked me where I was going and getting to know where, he started talking about the town. From there he spoke of other towns and about his travel plans to India this year. Then on about how he would never travel to a Dubai because it had no culture but he was keen to explore India. He spoke of how money did not matter to him but experiences did. I said that in India we have a saying that you don’t take your money with you when you die. He said, “Here we say, shrouds don’t have pockets”. He was a manual labourer (his description) and I was surprised to find him so non-materialistic and culture-oriented. Why couldn’t he be those things, you might ask, but I guess every time I have such experiences I compare them with experiences in India…and that’s where my mental frames get adjusted a little...
I observe a lot of cultural detail here…it’s like I have looked at things with one frame up to now (maybe it’s not accurate to say one frame because I was lucky to have access to books which are thousands of frames in themselves) but I mean in terms of actual experience of people and situations and such like. When I get down to the plane of pure ideas, I meet most people here on the same plane… but aspects such as food, clothing, small talk, routines, processes, attitudes, even something small as the greetings ‘are you alright?’ or ‘cheers’ are quite novel to me. I hope to capture my thoughts on these little details… hopefully be more ad hoc about it…not chisel out a proper post or something but simply scribble in a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ style… you have been forewarned, dear, patient, good-as-a-ghost reader! :)

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 5:36 am 0 comments
Thursday, October 18, 2018
 

Do you ever get this vague feeling that you are the hero or heroine or protagonist in this movie of your life? Not in a narcissistic, self-obsessed way…but in a rather philosophical sort of way. As if all you can be sure about in this sea of humans, places, things, thoughts is your own self, your body, your mind? 
When I was a kid, and I would come back from my summer vacation in Mangalore to Mumbai….I loved Mangalore very much and missed everyone and ached to be with them…I would wonder if people in Mangalore really did exist. I am right now here and doing whatever I am doing, are they too going about their lives and sundry things and thinking about me…or is it that the world is just me and whatever is around me…what I can see and hear….maybe everything else is a blank…how would I know because I can’t see or hear anything beyond…it could very well be all dark and quiet…  
I find it strange that I used to think this as a kid but I guess that kids tend to be more natural philosophers than adults because we have hardened into accepting the world. We no longer look at things with wonder and ask ourselves questions about the nature of things. We simply take everything for granted and go about our everyday business in a world of our own creating…rarely stopping to ask ourselves if this world is real… obviously it doesn’t matter to us because whether it is real or not, I have to go to work because I have to earn because I have to eat. My asking these questions will not feed me and if I am not fed I will die. My own body and mortality at least is very real to me…that there is no doubt about (though one has a lot of doubt about what really happens after death).
Which is where my analogy of the movie comes in. Do you ever feel like you’re a central character in this life movie where everything is somehow revolving around you and that everything will turn alright for you in the end… you don’t know the ending of this movie but you do know that it ends well for the main character, right? Or maybe if you’re a pessimist you might say that it may not end ‘well’ in a conventional sense. I think thinking about it as a movie also helps to give it some sort of structure and meaning… you know, the beginning, middle, end thing. It doesn’t seem as chaotic…whoever heard of a movie where random things happened randomly and that’s that. There had to be a moral of the story somewhere or a silver lining or something. Well… I don’t know… whether life does have meaning or not (question we will keep taking up on this blog as you’re well aware!) but what harm would it do to think it does have meaning? What’s the harm if it helps you ‘live more meaningfully’ which is probably to say more responsibly, more ethically? I don’t see the harm… do you?

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 8:17 pm 0 comments
Thursday, October 04, 2018
 
Being vs. Becoming

When I was younger, I was much more confident of my opinions. If I believed I was right about something, I was dead sure I couldn’t be proved wrong. I was able to argue for what I believed to be right, and while I wouldn’t have admitted it to an opponent, nothing ever happened to me to admit even to myself that I was horribly wrong.

I don’t know if age makes you see things more perceptively or that your range of experiences bring your earlier opinions far more to the test—but I have been increasingly reflecting on the many things I have been wrong about. I have increasingly started holding my opinions slightly more loosely than I did before…realising that if I was proved wrong about A when I never imagined I would be…what’s to say I cannot be proved wrong about B?

I feel that this newfound realisation has made me a more empathetic person. I understand now that when I was younger, I simply hadn’t seen life enough to understand why people might be forced to do the things that they did or even be foolish enough to do the things that they did. I said “I would never do this” with so much confidence in those days—I’m not implying that I did them—but that I feel that you really cannot say what you would or would not do unless you’re in that specific position yourself with all its attendant ramifications.

I was reading this little snippet about ‘being vs. becoming’ and how at an early point in our lives we commit to a ‘being’ instead of seeing ourselves as always ‘becoming’ or a ‘work-in-progress’ if you like, to use modern day jargon. I guess most people are indeed ‘beings’ in that they rarely open themselves up to the experience of becoming a better version of themselves, content with who they have become.

When a child is born and is growing, it is always a wonder what habits it learns, what personality it starts developing, what moods it exhibits. We are always on tenterhooks (I have two really small nieces so I should know!) about whether it will pick up a wrong habit or if giving in to its wishes will make it stubborn or whether watching too much of the mobile screen will reduce its attention span and interest in studies…we are conscious of how every action and reaction could have an influence on what being it becomes. Why do we assume that this process simply grinds to a halt at some early age…or that it should halt?

The truth is, speaking for myself, the realisation of how even my most cherished truths were not really enduring truths but momentary ones has made me confront my being…because isn’t who we are to a large extent a function of what and how we think or feel. And I see that as a good thing because as a child discovering the joy of becoming… I too sense a joy in knowing that I am not ‘who I am’ but I am always ‘becoming’ who I am…and that means I need not fear being wrong or having to change my opinions…I need to embrace it…because it only brings me closer to who I can be.  

 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 3:43 am 0 comments
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