An Ode to my Twenties

I remember, when I was 21 years old, trying to think about the next few years and feeling this mix of dread and excitement; for a change, I had no clue what was going to happen. College had ended and I had no fixed plans of getting a job. I also knew marriage loomed somewhere on the horizon. All I had was a strong feeling that by the end of the next year life will have changed drastically. And it did.

And it’s true for all of us, isn’t it? The 20s are probably the most life changing - and thereby, the most personality changing - decade in our lives. If we were to actually list and think about all the new experiences we have in this decade, we’d be able to trace the evolution of our personalities. By the end of our 20s, most of us have experienced our first bad appraisal at work, our first serious disagreement with our parents, our first serious fight with the significant other, our first sole encounter with a client, our first serious blunder at work, …and most of them, in some small way, shape us. It’s fascinating.

At the end of the most life-changing decade of my life (so far!!), I look back and I wish I could reach out to the 21-year old that I was. I was right about things changing, but I had really, really, no clue how much was about to happen. I’m not saying that my experiences have been particularly rough…but life does have a way of uprooting us from our comfort zones. Where all the formulae the well-meaning people in our life give us don’t seem to solve it. Where, somehow, 2 and 2 don’t seem to add up to 4. Where our reactions are truly our own, without the expert filtering of parents and teachers, telling us the “correct” way to react. Where we, a lot of times, are stunned by what our reactions tell us about ourselves.

I can’t seem to let go of this crazy, scary, exciting time of my life without chronicling it in some way. So here is a list of “the things I learnt”. Note that I am not saying these are the “things I think every 21-year old should know”. We all learn our own, I think. And these are mine.

You make things happen: There is this book called “Celestine Prophecies” that talks about how we’re essentially fields of energy, and the deepest desires of our heart, and the thoughts we hold in our heads, attract events and people to us. Sounds fantastic, I know. But I also know that this is my truth. The direction my life has taken (or the direction that I’ve taken in my life) is pretty different from what seemed planned. And when I look back now, the only possible explanation for all the catalysts for this change – the people I met, the chance phone call that helped me decide that I would work (against parental opinion), the breaking up of relationships that made me feel so very lost and confused – seems to be that I attracted them in some way so I could achieve the highest truth I knew. I knew that a life lived actively and consciously was the only one worth living; I knew that I wanted to make my own mistakes, ask my questions, feel worthy of my life. And I also knew (somewhere, I guess) that the way my life was going then, I would have not been able to do any of this.

It’s important to know when it’s not about you: If I have to tell any body the most important thing about relationships, it would have to be this. And I’m talking about any relationship between two people – friends, siblings, spouses or families. Very often, especially in close relationships, we attribute any behaviour of the other person to ourselves. She’s frowning at me, he’s not coming to the dinner because it’s my parents, my kid brother’s not calling me often enough because we’re not such good friends any more, my mom-in-law hates me…we view our relationships, and therefore the people in them, as emanating from us. But is that the case? Whether the question is of rage that you don’t understand, or of indifference that you can’t seem to get through, it’s important to try and keep yourself out of the equation, and then evaluate it. If it is about you, try and fix it; but if it isn’t, don’t waste your breath, or more importantly, don’t try to change yourself. It may not help. Worse, it may spoil things further. Stay out until sanity reigns.

An important corollary to this learning has been this: while emotions are a good indicator for ourselves, they really are barriers to clear understanding.

Tough times make you tough, but they also take something out of you: Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” brings this out more poignantly than anything else. People who’ve been through really tough times are often not easily likeable. Or maybe I’m telling the story in reverse. If you were to scratch the surface on some of the aggressive, obnoxious, pushy people that we meet, you’d probably hear stuff that will pickle your soul. I guess all I’m saying is that everyone has the reason for being the way they are. Well, there are some losers, but let’s just say they’ll reveal themselves to be that soon enough. Even if we can’t like them, respect them or empathise, we can surely refrain from judging.

This becomes infinitely important when you find someone like this becoming a part of your inner circle. Like Jagjit Singh sang “milna julna jahaan zaroori ho, milne julne ka hausla rakhna”.

It’s important to have a home that you feel like coming back to: Or maybe I should say, it’s important to make your home a place that the rest of the family feels like coming home to. I took this for granted until I became part of a household that did not have this. Where people didn’t undergo the transformation of coming “in” from “out” at the threshold. Where home was just another destination in the day’s schedule. This way, the stress never leaves you, and your defences are the only things that stay up… After this experience, since the time we finally made our own home, my primary focus has been on ensuring that on coming in through the door, we both feel absolutely comfortable becoming ourselves J.

It’s good to carry some stuff home from work: Like your efficiencies, or the way you take feedback. I found that when I refrained from retaliating to a “why can’t you manage this well” with a “well, you’re not perfect yourself”, I actually focussed on the benefits of improving. And, on marking the improvement, I found that at home, we got better at having objective discussions about each other, which could otherwise turn into hurt-full shouting matches.

We all perform functions – at work, at home, as part of a family, or a relationship – but we feel far freer to be petulant and demanding of leeway in our personal roles. But who does this help?

Four generations in one photograph...priceless

We'd recently gone on a family trip for the mundan ceremony of my nephew...and the best part was that my grandparents (naana naani, from the earlier marriage post :-)) coincidentally decided to visit us ard the same time. And were with us for the trip.

There's something that only the elders can bring. Stories from a long time back, reasons behind our quaint-seeming rituals, news of far flung relatives, family histories...and of course their own brand of impatience with our new fangled concepts :).

But what was most special was being able to hear my naana recite the Guru Granth Saheb. Naana is blessed with a spectacular voice - and he is apparently a much cherished reader in their small community. Mom tells us that in the annual festival of the family saint (that happens in december) hundreds would gather to hear the sacred verses, and he would manage to read out to all of them without a mike! Had so far never managed to hear him because we'd never go visiting in December. This trip, after the mundan, we took my nephew to the tikaana for blessings. After that was done, naana asked us to sit around the sacred book, and he recited some verses for us. I was all agog...and I must confess I was savouring the moment more than the verses. Am unfortunately old enough to realise how valuable this moment was...I just let his voice wash over me. Am sure I will always be able to summon it...

And this, is why I so strongly believe that the best things in life are free. You just have to know when to open your arms and grab them!

The next time someone tells me I look tired...

People probably do it with a good intention, but there's only so many times you can take someone telling you "Gosh, babe, you look washed out" or ""What happened to your voice!! You sound so dull" or worse "You must be the busiest person here - you look like hell". Thanks. But no thanks, really.

Of course, the best is when I get told this on days when I feel fresh and relaxed!!! Predictably all this has driven me to the mirror...but the kohl in my eyes only seems to make the dark circles more prominent :-(. Looks like I've frozen on a default interface.

So here's what I'm going to do the next time someone remarks on the deep pits around my eyes. This is a gag I saw in the trailer for one of the new Start World shows. Two men sitting at a bar, and one of them has *really* prominent dark circles. The other asks him, hey, are you having sleepless nights or something? And the guy responds "Oh no, my dad is a panda."

:-). Don't know if his context was the same, but I sure think this is my last resort. Sorry Dad, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do!!

This is how my grandparents got married...

There is a very sweet and simple story behind how my maternal grandparents were married.

These of course, were the days when all Sindhis still lived in Sindh. My naani's elder uncle (tauji) had called my (then prospetive) 18-year old nanaji to meet him. It is important to note that the meeting was out in a deserted area next to their village temple (tikaana). Tauji asked him only one question, almost conversationally, "In what direction is the wind blowing today?". I, of course, don't know how my nanaji felt. He just bent down, picked up the lose sand in his hand, and let it whittle down slowly. Having observed the flow of the sand closely, he responded. Pleased by the display of a thinking mind, tauji agreed to the match.

There's much to learn from this simple incident, isn't there? When I heard it first, I was already married, and had already been through the detailed evaluation of family background, education qualification, salary slips, et al. But are any of these as determinant, or as useful in times of trouble as a working mind?

Of course there were also other unkind thoughts in my mind about our generation of "knowers" (as against "thinkers", or "figure outers", to stretch the language a bit), and how any of us at 18 would have reacted to a question like this.

How would you have?

My latest lesson in comunication

One of the recent training programmes that I attended thorugh my office covered a lovely module on "objective communication". The lesson is as follows:

- Every communication has an objective. But not all of us make the effort to be absolutely sure what that objective is!
- While communicating, some of us are bothered about the results, and some of us are bothered about being liked. (I know this is true- I sadly fell under the second category until I understood this!!)
- The ideal communicator thinks non-personally and is solution oriented

This, if you mull over it enough, can actually be a dictat for life too. Do you see how??

Blind spots...

One of the things I have learnt as part of my growing up, is that we adults see far less than children. We acquire blind spots that conveniently glaze over those aspects of life that we do not agree with, or cannot handle. Blind faith, denial and fear form the formidable filter of our psyche, making us see security where perhaps there is only ennui, making us see the dullness of routine, where perhaps indifference (and even hatred!) has set in.

The few moments at night, before sleep smothers us, we sometimes find the blind spots unravelling. We begin to see glimmers of the truth, of the hopelessness of the compromises we have made. We begin to remember all the silly promises we'd made to ourselves as young people - truth, self respect...all promises of how we would continue to feel inside. Faint stirrings of a resolve just before we turn in - I will try and make tomorrow different. I will square up my situation, make what changes I can. Will not continue one more day with this blind spot...

But yet, we do. Much easier that way.

Happiness is not an emotion...

Happiness, in fact, is the lack of all emotion.