The Birthday Blog

Five years ago, I had stumbled into the reality of meeting someone who had told me,

"Didi, mera toh kabhi saal mein janam-din hi nahi aata"
(There is no day in the year which is my 'birthday'!)

He was an Éclair kid - Mahesh. I fondly remember the inquisitive and intelligent eyes of that twelve year old. For him there was no day called his 'birthday' because he never knew when he was born. Neither did his parents. They were too busy in the drudgery of doing manual labour as construction workers. No one remembers birthdays in their world, of course.

I adored him. Deeply.

In the wee hours today, while doing my morning nitnem, reciting Jaap Sahib (Gurbani text) - I discovered something new.

The Guru said, 'Namastang ajaae'
(Salutations to the God who is not born.)
Sikhism believes that God is never 'born', neither does he 'die'. Birth and death are for lesser mortals only.

Mahesh has no birthday. My Lord too does not have a birthday. Enchanting. Isn't it?

***

Raag Malhaar

D-8 Allnutt South.

It was a furnace – the west facing room would receive the burning afternoon sunlight, the walls would absorb them so perfectly and retain their imprint till the night, reflecting it on everything and every being inside the room. Sometimes, the overhead fan seemed like a saviour. Sometimes, it felt like the villain, spreading the heat in the room more evenly than before. Even buckets of water sprinkled all over the room would make no difference.

I would try my best to keep my calm. But the heat would become one of the rarest of the rare reasons why anger would well inside me. Especially in the third year, when I would see it as a symbol of injustice. My preferences had not been respected even though I had deserved to get a room of my choice, based on my merit in the college residence. But in those days, anarchy ruled, nobody cared and so I was, stuck.

I would whine and fill pages after pages of my diary sometimes, only to be reminded by my own self that it was fine. After all, I only would say in my morning prayer every day ‘Whatever You do, is good for me’ (Jo Tudh Bhavai Saee Bhaleekar) and then complaining about the state of things later in the day was like being double-faced.

And so my mind would wander over to tangents, for hours after hours – afterall what was the good hidden therein, of me being unfairly allotted the hottest room of the block?

As it was programmed, the good unfolded very soon as my search for it became more and more intense over days. It unfolded so beautifully, so perfectly.

I had started playing harmonium in second year after a long interregnum of 6-7 years. The gap perhaps made the activity more enjoyable and meaningful. I would experiment with different ragas, some of them would just rise from within, I had left them dormant in my memory for long. From one, another would emerge, and another and still another and I would be entranced by the compositions that would come out of my fingers, so effortlessly. I would be surprised at myself– was it really me playing?

One of these hot, whining afternoons, I remembered a small note of Malhaar (the raag known for causing rain!) that I had learnt while young. I started experimenting and recreated the whole sthaai and antra. Youtube helped and I found an amazing shabad sung by Bhai Nirmal Singh* – It said:

Baras megh ji, til bilam na laao

(Rain down cloud, do not delay)

Although I used to sing raag malhaar when young, the same hymns, the same compositions never had the same kind of resonance back then. Now the raga would emerge out of the depths of the sultry heat, I could feel the power of every word. As if my entire soul would cry for rain, for an escape from the furnace. It was pure joy!

Sometimes I would sing for hours altogether and then look back after a while and an eager neighbour would be sitting on the other end of my bed  enjoying the music and pressing for ‘one more’. Once, out of sheer coincidence (was it?), it started raining. I was too elated...

My harmonium had become like an air conditioner. 

It cooled my soul, my thoughts, my perspective on everything. I can never forget the peace I felt in those heated afternoons, they were the coolest ever!

Thanks to the heat, I understood real meaning of raag malhaar and the compositions in my scripture. Thanks to the heat, I found a terrific way of dealing with my anger and complaints.

Today, a friend shared this ‘miyan ki malaar’ youtube link on facebook (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7R4kdCi1zY)– and it brought back a whirlwind of old memories and triggered this post while the lovely malhaar is still playing in the background.

They continue to elate me. All smiles.

*Bhai Nirmal Singh's Baras Megh Ji link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BVWrrEOFo

Truth and Pretense

Okay, I have to write this. I am overflowing with a protest feeling. It’s strange how everything* just comes together at same time sometimes and one is forced to make generalizations.

I have discovered a new psychological trait in people now-a-days. Those who cannot lie on one side of a lie-scale. Their strategy is a very strange medium strategy – that of pretense and fake words. So if you don’t care for a person, why the pretense? I am okay with people not caring about others, but I get real disutility from people who feign to care. I am just trying to put the issue in perspective. Please don’t mistake the box below for a game box. I have used it to lend some clarity to my thoughts. There is only one player – your friend who can have different feelings. ‘Inside’ refers to what she has in her heart, and ‘outside’ refers to what she portrays to you. And those are not payoffs, just convenient labels for the grids. I describe the payoffs in words below.

OUTSIDE

INSIDE	CARE	DON’T CARE
CARE	1	3
DON’T CARE	2	4

People in the grids 1 and 4 are honest people – you see on their faces what is there in the heart.

However it is grid 2 and 3 which is the pretense sort of people. These people are alluded to in Sri Guru Granth Sahib as ‘Jin man hor, mukh hor’ – (Those who are somebody at their face and somebody else inside)

3 can occur very rarely, may be as a momentary emotional blackmail wherein an individual pretends that he hardly cares while in reality he cares a lot, this deceitful façade may be to teach the other person a lesson. I can’t think why this can be a permanent strategy for somebody.

My problem however stems from people in grid 2. I have been reading a bit of psychology and about lying behavior recently. So, the theory goes that there are some perceptible indicators which can be detected in the facial expressions/body language of a person – for instance, shallow smiles not reaching the eyes using only the muscles around the mouth, propensity to lean backward as if trying to run away or talking in an unusually exaggerated manner.

Pretense comes in varying degrees. I used to have a silly landlady at my PG in the first year – she would lie wildly, you could tell at her face and worse, she would have flawless justifications for all the castles in the air she would build up. However her pretense would soothe me sometimes, probably she could lie so flawlessly sometimes that it would appear as if she really cared. Haha!

And then there are people who are bad in their pretense. You don’t have to be exceptionally clairvoyant to decipher the pretense. So sometimes, logically contradictory statements or incomplete arguments might spew out from their mouths. Their eyes would be busy watching someone or somebody at a distance, while a standard compliment or word of concern would come out of their mouths, as if after a lot of hesitation. Sometimes, lying can occur even when the person is maintaining eye contact – unusual blinking or excessive shaking /nodding of head can occur. The worse thing is when you know this fact already and are able to make out. The realization is even worse that of (Don’t care, Don’t care). When suddenly you get up one morning and find out that your apparent well-wisher is using a (Don’t care, Care) strategy, the result can be heart- breaking.

It’s a little thing really, but that surely teaches me something. Assuming my friend and I are alike in our feelings, meaning that we get similar payoffs, then reasoning symmetrically, I should always refrain from 2 if I really consider her as a friend and would not like to cause her grief. Its okay, if she doesn’t adopt the same strategy out of common knowledge assumptions – but at least I get exonerated from the guilt causing hurt to someone.

Ah! I feel nice now – probably Waheguru did this to bring me to the above conclusion, channelizing my gripe to a logical lesson. :)

*Subhashish's insightful blog post, Aleesha's recent theory (both found here: http://dyspepsia-now.blogspot.in/2013/02/skeletons-in-cupboard.html ) and most importantly, a casual remark by someone this afternoon were the triggers.

For reading more about lies and how to detect them : read http://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Lies

Of life, onions and novels

Now I know why people write novels. That’s because little stories are unfolding around us practically all the times. The past few months have been quite a revelation for me. Characters, natures, dispositions somehow came to the forefront and I discovered how every being around had his/her own way of dealing with things. Of course, that is not something new. The fact about the diversity of human natures has always been known.

Probably it’s a part of growing up. Monali – my roommate, has been my tutor in this regard during the last year – I have to some extent learnt over this year how one should read between lines, see beyond the surface and learn to look at the real intentions of people around. Not all that is said in this world is true and not all that is promised is necessarily kept. In the end, probably simpletons can find it very tough. You have to be vigilant and diplomatic lest you are duped. In fact, the name of this blog was inspired from that very thought long time back – the fact that all of us are nothing but human onions but probably for a while I found exceptions to the quote and sidelined it. But now I am convinced.

Right now, I feel as if I am living in the world of a novelist. Umpteen little stories are unfolding around, not without a reason. Things I couldn’t have dreamt about are transpiring and there are another umpteen stories which are making sense to me now, stories that unfolded way back. Probably that’s why people write novels. Actually what they are actually writing is nothing but an autobiography but just wrapping and packaging it as fictionalized accounts. Those little real stories which transpire are just tinkered a bit, bits and pieces of fiction are then injected and then the novelist simply threads them all into one big account in a single volume. Isn’t it strange, the novelist then signs the novel as ‘his’ creation, whereas his creation is nothing but a replica or a microcosm of the Real creation.

Some time back, I stopped reading fiction because I actually felt that I had outgrown it. It irritated me when the novel would come to an end and I would jump back into reality suddenly. I would get the same feeling in a movie hall at the end of three hours. The immersion into the reel world would abruptly come to an end and leave me dejected. Every time it was like receiving a hard blow on the face in the end – after all, all that was mere fiction – a lie.

My views have changed a bit now. There are elements of truth in that big lie. Even the lie is not unadulterated!  And probably that’s why I have decided I’m gonna write short stories, touching ones. The soul of the stories would be the same as I witnessed in the real world but the names of characters and places would be fabricated. This is because my characters would then be living persons and so that my perceptions would not in any way cause any harm to them. But the lesson would be intact. And I’m surely going to share those stories, in the near future some time.