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
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
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