I met a local interior designer lady a few weeks back. I liked the idea of working with someone to do up the house. I immediately warmed up to her. I don't know what it is but people tend to make three kinds of first impressions on me: instant dislike, neutral, instant like. She fell into the third. It might be the quiet calm tranquil soothing energy. An intelligent introverted vibe if you will. And strangely, I become more vibrant around this type...hehe... My energy shifts the more comfortable I feel, I think.

It didn't take much for me to pour out all my ideas, plans, possibilities, etc to her. She wasn't charging me a bomb for her services so that was another reason I immediately went all in... We started talking budgets for the work to be done and that's when she threw me off. It sounded mind-blowing because my actual needs were rather basic. She said she'd come back with a budget closer to my needs. We parted with her saying her best friend was Indian. I mean, if I wasn't already quite pleased with her, that would have warmed me more...!

I went into this preamble because without it, it would be hard to understand how I feel. She didn’t respond to my message enquiring what was going on, after I waited more than a week for her to come back. Not even to say she was busy and would respond at a later time. If she’d just said she couldn’t work with me for whatever reason, I’d still respect the honesty. For some reason, it felt personal. The logical side of me figured that my budget was too small for it to be worth her time. But there was another part of me that wondered how I could have got her so wrong...? I mean, an 'instant like' is not just about the calm vibe but also a vibe that signals a person of good values. Someone I could trust. To simply disappear on me isn't what that looks like to me.

I had actually given up on her by now and started looking into the designing myself. The nagging feeling stayed though. How could somebody I instantly like turn out so unprofessional, so without good work ethic? Today she messaged a very vague one about being very busy, and gave me some random cost calculations etc. Even if it had happened to fit into my scheme of things, I could never work with her anymore. I suppose... and maybe I have said it before... in spite of being a very logical person, the decisions I make are driven by my emotions. I no longer feel the same.

Is the world becoming a really shitty place lately or does it just feel that way....? Everywhere there is doom and gloom... war, deaths, hate, bad leaders, fear, negativity, terror, job losses, depression, cost cuts... Nothing seems to be going well really no matter where you look. How do you even go about everyday stuff feeling any kind of hope for the future? I find it hard, to be honest... hard to think about tomorrow or look forward to tomorrow... I find it hard enough to get through today... sometimes they say it's best not to think about the whole mountain or life ahead... just take it one step at a time... One tries to do that as best one can... being the hyper-planner that I am though, I always have one foot on the next few steps... and the question arises now and again, for what?... When I think about moving into my new house (keeping aside challenges related to that for now), I find it hard to be excited in any way... it feels like old wine in a new bottle... the more things change, the more they stay the same... like monkeys we are distracted by shiny new things... but when you see things starkly and clearly... the distractions don't cut it... they don't reassure you about the fundamentals... I sometimes wonder if people see the irony or even the hypocrisy... what goes on at a large scale and how we mouth the usual platitudes of care at the micro level... how does one live really in the middle of all this? One feels lost and yet one must hold on tight to one's bearings... to not completely slip and fall...

I was pondering a bit more on why I have always been inspired by the quote ‘God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.’ I think this goes with the fact that I have also always liked stories (real or fictional) where the underdog wins in the end. The individual who comes from nothing, has got nothing except his/her own talent to bank on, takes on the world and in a way fate itself... and wins. I admire resilience, grit, determination, perseverance, ambition, desire for excellence... and when all these wonderful qualities are rolled in one. I obviously want to see such people rewarded. And the idea that God Himself will reward those who push against all odds is very satisfying to me. I have seen enough of humans to place my trust in their judgement or discretion... but God, He surely can be trusted to make the good guys come out triumphant in the end? Or so I hope...

There is a story in the Mahabharata which has always saddened me. Now that I think about it, it must be because this story does not have the end that I like. Here is the story...

Dronacharya is a Guru, a teacher of royal princes. One of the skills he teaches is archery. He promises to make Arjuna, his best student at this skill, the greatest archer in the world. One day Dronacharya is teaching his students to take aim at a parrot in a tree. When he asks every student what they see, they respond with a whole lot of things in the scenery. Arjuna is the only one who sees only the eye of the parrot. A kid from the forest, Ekalavya, approaches the Guru at this point, and asks him to take him on as a student. Dronacharya refuses because Ekalavya is not a prince. Ekalavya takes a handful of mud from under the Guru's feet and walks away. Many years later when Dronacharya goes hunting with the princes with their hunting dog, the dog suddenly disappears from view, barking. Minutes later the dog's barking stops, and he comes back with his mouth closed with three arrows. It is a remarkable feat that Drona is aware even his best student, Arjuna, cannot accomplish. Ekalavya comes forward as the shooter of the arrows. When Drona asks him from whom he learnt such brilliant archery, Ekalavya tells him that it is he, Drona, from whom he learnt it. He refers to Drona as his Guru. Ekalavya mixed the mud from under Drona's feet with clay and made a statue out of it. He prayed and practiced in front of this statue. He attributed his skill to the Guru as he received inspiration and confidence from his likeness! To this, Drona, who has promised to make Arjuna the best archer in the world, asks Ekalavya if he would be willing to offer him 'guru-dakshina' (gift given to the Guru in return for teaching). Ekalavya does not hesitate to say that he would be honoured to do so. The Guru's acceptance of guru-dakshina would officially make him his Guru. Drona asks him for his right thumb, and Ekalavya gladly cuts it off. This means Ekalavya cannot practice archery anymore, but he does not seem to mind at all. All he cares about, as it seems, is to finally be recognized by his Guru!

----

I feel bad for Ekalavya. He should have gone on to do greater things. But instead he is tricked by the 'heavy battalions'. I suppose it makes me sad, even angry, that God was not on the side of the best shot...

‘God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.’

—Voltaire

It may be pretty obvious to anyone reading my blog (or anyone who knows me well in person) that I thoroughly enjoy quotes or epigrams or short pithy sayings. They deliver an insight in a way that long paragraphs cannot. And because they do it so cleverly, I enjoy them quite a bit! I have had a hankering for them from childhood upwards. I used to note them down by hand on a sheet of paper whenever I came across one in a book I was reading or sections of newspapers devoted to literary matter. I had a file full of these papers (and still have them somewhere). Later of course, I started noting these in digital documents... now have a notepad on my phone for it ;)

A few days back, strangely and almost out of the blue, the quote by Voltaire I mentioned above popped into my head. It is one of the quotes I handwrote on paper way back then. I remember reading it several times over the years whenever I took out this file, which is why it's stuck in some corner of my brain. But I felt... I actually understood it only now! Now when I turned it in my head, its meaning flashed like a light (though arguably its meaning is open to many interpretations).

I am not at all sure as to what I made of the quote when I first came across it, why did I find it so intriguing even then, and why did I decide to jot it? Could it be that I did have the same insight into what it meant, however faintly, and with all these years having passed, I am seeing it again as something new? Could it be that my experiences in life are adding a new level of poignancy to the quote, more nuance if you will, which is why it feels like I am seeing it for the first time now, not that I did not have a vague sense of interpretation then? I certainly must have, or I wouldn’t have noted it because it wouldn’t have tickled me…  

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work

and when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

—Wendell Berry

When I was a kid, I used to have many arguments with my brother about very small things. Like for instance, there was this Bollywood song. A line in it goes, ‘tera pyaar hai ek sohnae ka pinjara oh shehzaadi’ (roughly translates to ‘your love is a golden cage oh princess’). That’s what I heard when I heard the song, but my brother heard ‘tera pyaar hai ek tohtae ka pinjara oh shehzaadi’ (which translates to ‘your love is a parrot’s cage oh princess’). We had a heated argument over which one of us was right, but there was no Google at the time. To figure out who between us was right was difficult. Asking other people usually led to more fights about who was siding with whom. It was never the end of the matter.

After Google and the internet more generally, I would imagine that these kinds of situations should be rare. And now with AI, there is no question to which we need trouble ourselves for an answer. Not just factual questions of the kind Google is good at but even highly contextual ones. It's mind-boggling the way AI or LLMs come up with stuff—and I will reserve another post for all the ways in which it has turned out to be surprisingly useful to me. But I wonder about what we are trading in exchange for this powerful crunching of knowledge in seconds? Efficient answers at our fingertips? Quick solutions to all knotty problems? What happens when we do not have to 'not know' anymore in what was at one point an arduous journey towards knowing or maybe never knowing? If Google had never arrived, maybe my brother and I would be forever unsettled on the point of whether it was 'sohnae' or 'tohtae'. Would that have been a good thing or a bad thing? Isn't there something in the process of working out uncertainty for ourselves, no matter how uncomfortable, that we grow in some way? We learn many things even if we do not learn the specific thing we want to know, and we put to use these learnings when we encounter a new problem or puzzle. What happens when we get the answers from outside all too easily, quickly, confidently, never really deeply grappling with the question inside ourselves? I wonder...