Hold on Hope

It is cruel and unfair how we're fooled into believing in the absolute invulnerability of our parents. It is when they actually need our help that we realise that now we've grown up and they've grown old.

I wish I had learned to be more independent earlier on in life. This wud not have been so painful. Perhaps, it is a lesson that is best learned this way, heart-wrenching though it may be.

One cannot exercise control on fate. No matter how strongly you will your love to protect those you love, it cannot.

It is the most humbling thing to feel so completely helpless. Like S. told me, "Every little girl has to grow up one day." I just wish it wudnt have been this tough on me. Or perhaps, I am too weak to bear this cross without crumbling like this.

I am grateful tonight that this blog is actually this therapeutic for me. I'm a lot calmer now that I've typed this out.

At least it was here

Watching Community on Star World has become something of a guilty pleasure when I'm supposed to be cramming irrelevant details of textbooks into my wannabe-harddrive of a brain. The more I watch it, the more I realise how difficult it is to make new friends when you're set in your ways and when your personality is as immutable as a grown-up's. And how when you do make friends with someone at 'this age', it's actually special.

Makes me kinda wonder how it was even possible that once upon a time sharing egg-sandwiches with a guy wud be enuff to create a bond of friendship and the girl who sat next to you on the schoolbus wud be your brand new BFF.

But the harder it gets to find probable bosom-buddies, the more delighted I am to actually meet someone I can definitely be great friends with or atleast have great conversations with.

Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.' - C. S. Lewis

Paranoid Android

People around me seem to become increasingly mistrustful and deceiving of each other as apparent vicious competition tightens its noose around the neck of fragile friendships. There's a reason they call it 'cut-throat'. I always thought that was an extremely bloody metaphor. Will some people really stop at nothing to get ahead?

Reading this bit of poignant paranoia someplace as innocuous as someone's facebook profile bio, I barely suppressed an involuntary shudder.

"Walls have ears.

Doors have eyes.

Trees have voices.

Beasts tell lies.

Beware the rain,

beware the snow.

Beware the man

you think you know."

from 'Songs of Sapphique', Incarceron

by Catherine Fisher.

Wud you like to turn the page now?

Watching The Jane Austen Book Club, a movie that came thoroughly recommended by members of my own book club, I cudnt help wondering if life really is like a book, specifically one of Jane Austen's books. I mean, if you think about it, maybe it's like this. The non-readers think what happens is fate. But the readers, they know, all along, that it's all just part of the narrative, life is like a story-line.

Besides, as my friend M. points out, present-day India isn't all that different from eighteenth century Victorian England that Austen wrote about.

Everyone thinks about marriage and people pair up, sometimes even with the right person and there are these big fat families with these stereotypical characters and their money issues, and the need to do what is proper against the desire to try the most inappropriate thing we possibly can.

Perhaps, it's all becoz people havent really changed all that much over the last two centuries. Circumstances might have altered, societies have supposedly evolved but our emotions are just as confused and confounding at times.

Well, about the movie, it's pretty interesting, especially if you've read all the Austen books. Each character is sort of based on an Austen character type. The marry-everybody-off-and-gossip-about-it lady, the never-say-die romantic, the beautiful-but-bashful woman, the passionate-but-picks-the-wrong-partner girl, the sensible Plain Jane who finally finds true love and of course, the quiet, handsome, misunderstood Mr. Nice Guy. Six books and six people in the book club. And the events of the book subtly parallel the events of their lives, and the decisions they make are mirrored with those Jane Austen wrote for her characters.

Like my friends said, it's not necessary to have read the books, but already having read them will provide an added dimension.

In fact the movie is exactly like a Jane Austen book, too. You can see the happy ending coming from a mile off but we learn a lot about these people as we go along, we care about them and we cheer when they do get their happy endings.

I cud argue that life doesn't provide happy endings to everyone, and working in a hospital puts that in even sharper perspective. But perhaps that's becoz life is like an Austen book without the direct payoffs, if she'd written them to be longer and more complicated. Even in her books, not everyone has a happy ending, and often, choices are shown to have wildly unpredictable consequences. In her books, those that are too charming are never to be trusted and almost every character has hidden depths.

I like how the movie talks about the minor characters in the books having a secret life that even Austen wasn't aware off. Like speculating if Charlotte Lucas from Pride & Prejudice could be a lesbian, for example. But hasty interpretations aside, I think I'll quote my brother, who prefers sci-fi over other kinds of books, like Grigg in the movie. But on my insistence, he read Sense & Sensibility and then Persuasion and he said, "Austen's books are more than how-to-get-married manuals, they're about determinedly doing what brings you happiness, at great initial risk. They're highly individualistic."

I agree. Which is probably why they're such best-sellers more than two hundred years after they were written. And they keep making these fabulous movies with these great actors that win Oscars. There are Jane Austen scholars who dissect and describe every single character, line of dialogue, description and turn of events to find a rich collection of underlying themes.

And without pontificating, they still talk about things everybody cares about. Not the existential dilemmas of one hallowed soul, but the everyday decisions and compromises that regular yet unique people must make.

Which is why I wonder if I really am living out a Jane Austen novel. And this way, we all get to be Elizabeth or Anne or Marianne or Elinor or Emma, leading ladies of our lives, striding into a glorious future of our own making.

P. S. If anyone knows a guy like Grigg, the sweet sci-fi geek who cares about the environment and doesn't care about upholstery, please contact me pronto! :D

Be nice! I cud be your doctor some day! :D

So, instead of making this a 'A journey ends; a journey begins' sort of a melodramatic post, just let me say, that five years, fifteen journals, hundreds of practicals and endless vivas later, I have passed my Final MBBS examination with gliding, if not flying, colours (alright, that was trying too hard, but today I'm allowed) and have earned the much-feted, much-coveted prefix of Doctor to go with my name.

My obsessive-about-etymology friend reminds me that the origin of the word doctor lies in the Latin 'Doktore' which is a rather generic term for a teacher. Our foremost purpose is to teach patients about their health and so on.

It does feel rather fantastic to earn the epithet, it actually wud've felt just as fantastic to earn any other graduate degree. However, this does feel like a milestone along a longer journey and as our professor cheerily reminded me on facebook today, "In medicine, what we learn the very first year is that the first degree isn't the last, and that there never comes a day when you shut all your books and put them away. We must remain eternal students."

Which is all very true in more than a Gandhian sense. We learn as if we live forever and live as if we have a whole storehouse of tomorrows.

Which brings me to the next bit. My seniors remind me of the dangers of postponing 'life' in order to make studying a priority. It is important to give time to one's own self and stop and do all those things that make one happy if one is to avoid a total burn-out.

How anyone ever manages to make the time is a mystery to me. But I suppose somebody will end up teaching me time management one of these days.

Now, it is post-graduation that everyone will obsess about and work themselves to exhaustion for. That's as good a goal as any, I guess. Let's see how well this year treats me.

Right now, I'm just soaking in the reflected glory of this unnaturally revered degree. And the fact that my school friends got me a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, "What's up, doc?" Atleast they were confident about my result, which is more than what I cud say about my state of nerves.

All's well that ends well, tho. And never have I been more grateful for the faith that these others have chosen to invest in me. I shall never forget it. And I shall require more along this rather long journey. Well, whaddya know? It is a 'A journey ends; a journey begins' kinda post after all. :D Wud never have guessed it starting off! But today I'm allowed. ;)

Stay

I am struck today by the full force of the realisation of how important communication really is. How vital it is to reach out to another human being across the ether, to open one's mind unto another's, to share a memory, a feeling, and to receive, in return, an equally heartfelt emotion, an equally poignant memory.

It is so easy to feel lost and lonely in the world. Sometimes, the urge to reach out and touch someone becomes almost irresistible. The comfort to be derived from contact is great.

I cannot have imagined a greater gift than that of language, be it one of words or gestures or smiles or caresses.

The incredible power of sharing an experience will never be underestimated by me again.

Reassurance, when given, if sought, is like an unshakable and adamant support. And tonight, for that much I am grateful.

Mrig-trishna hai yeh duniya zamana humne jaana..

This guy's been in my class for five years now and he used to be in my anatomy discussion group in first year. I think he's from Rajasthan. He once told me he'd studied in a Hindi medium school in Alwar (geography textbooks say the district has mica reserves and a tiger sanctuary) and I havent really talked with him much more than that. He's a very quiet unassuming sort of a guy, with thick glasses and a soft voice, hardly forthcoming about personal information let alone heartfelt emotion. He's on my facebook friend list and it was his birthday today so I showed up on his profile to wish him a happy birthday. I saw a note he'd written on the occasion of his 22nd birthday, a note he'd dedicated to his parents. In it he writes in very simple words that he left his home to study elsewhere when he was just 15 and he's only been back for a few months every year since then and on his 22nd birthday, he wanted to thank his parents for their unwavering support and for all their waiting for him to come back home.

He writes so simply but it reads like he really, really feels the distance that has separated him from them for so many years. I was wondering at how I wud never even have guessed these vast reserves of emotion underneath the placid surface of his stoic face.

It reminded me of Mohit's post about the online self and how the people we know may be very different from the people as they appear online. Which led me to the question of how well we can ever know anyone else, even our closest compatriots, our dearest family.

Even if we were to know about every single thought that ever went through their heads, we'd still be far away from knowing their true selves. I wonder how close we come to even understanding our own selves. Martin Scorsese said in an interview that once riding on the subway in New York, he realised that he will never know all these other people around him, and he began to wonder if he'll ever learn about anyone at all, becoz the way people appear to us is often an amalgamation of our somewhat-skewed perception and their own representation, which may not be very close to the truth. In that sense, we are all isolated, alone, islands in the sea.

Bhagwan sir passed away yesterday morning and I read his obituary in the paper today. He'd taught us English in the 8th, 9th and 10th standards and we all loved him.

He was one of those people who firmly believed that children cud never be wrong about anything. It was always grownups who got things wrong. Children deserved to be encouraged and appreciated and admired. And he did all of that for each one of us.

He proclaimed my tentative attempts at poetry to be among the greatest things he'd ever read. I really believed he was telling the truth back then, and I still do now.

The last time I saw him was on Teachers' Day in 2007 and he told me he was very proud that I wud be a doctor some day and I'd promised to tell him when I received my degree. I never made the time to go back to school after that and in my mind, I think I believed he'd always be there so I cud choose to go as and when I wanted.

Now, the fact that I'll never speak to him again is sinking in and I wish I'd had a chance to speak with him one last time. He died suddenly of cardiorespiratory arrest and he'd never been sick. It's almost surreal, this loss of a benevolent, beloved presence in my life. A void, an empty space. Tomorrow morning, we shall all attend the prayer meeting at his house. I'm sure there'll be hundreds of people there, his students from over thirty years of teaching, and I hope that talking about him will comfort this feeling of unease and sadness that I am trying to wrestle away.

The worst part is that I always believed that he'd always be there. That's what I think about my parents, too.

We dont wonder about the mortality of those who're older than us, who look after us, who protect and nurture us. We think they're powerful immortals who can fix everything. It is only when our worlds begin to expand and their power starts to recede that they turn into ordinary, extremely fragile human beings, regular people who refuse to deal with the looming prospect of an oncoming death, deluding themselves into living all our short lives entirely in the ever-vanishing present.

And that makes them infinitely precious.

We may never completely know anyone, including our own self. But I am certain that we can completely love them. And that is still a great gift.

Make none, break none

In what must be a radical departure from my New Year traditions, I have decided to celebrate the new year only after exams end next week. So what if it's more than a little out of sync with, oh, the rest of the world. I think the new year shud begin on a happy note (hence, the new year wish, of course). And happy notes are certainly the exact antithesis of cruel never-ending, overstaying-their-welcome-by-a-month exams.

Now that routine exam frustration is out of the way, my second radical departure is that I make no new year resolutions this year. Since the go-for-a-morning-walk resolution lasted for all of ten days in 2010, not to mention the dozen resolutions in years past that didn't really thrive beyond January, I've decided to forgo them altogether.

Of course, this piece of good ole Calvin wisdom certainly helped.

And for all you regular folks starting your new year today, I wish you all a happy new year. :)

When you're not looking

It's incredible how in the most fleeting of moments, one realises that tectonic shifts have occurred in one's world. And I didnt even feel any tremors.

A shy cousin has metamorphosed near-swanlike into a confident young woman, and yesterday, while I got all emo and misty-eyed, she swept me up into a big hug moments after her wedding. I swear it was as if a mental projector had started to superimpose her elegant sari-clad avatar over onto the girl with blue braces in matching blue pinafore who jumped up and down on a mattress in the hall while Ricky Martin counted numbers in Spanish before she sagely explained to me that her excitement was becoz he was the best singer in the world. And as Phil Collins' A Groovy Kinda Love played yesterday as she danced with her new husband, I realised her musical tastes had improved somewhat over the last decade.

It's like a magic trick someone's pulled on me. The magician seems to have swapped everyone with different people when I wasn't looking. When did the kakas and mavshis of our childhood become grandparents to adorably diligent babies and babas that ask me repeatedly where I've hidden all the chocolate? How did the boy who tugged at my pigtails become the charming young man holding the car door open for me as I struggled with my own sari?

When did we grow up?

* * *

I was looking out at the bleakness of a smoky winter evening yesterday with my nose pressed against the cold glass of the car window, as the car neared the toll naka and I cud see rows and rows of cars of all manner and model lined up ahead of us, the red tail lights unblinking. And I had a fleeting but unshakable impression of a hundred pairs of eyes staring back at me and then, it was gone. And I cudnt place it. The crystal clear moment was hijacked by the not-too-distant memory of that moment.

I dont remember what I felt. Just that I felt something inordinately fascinating. Diabolical, almost. But I cant seem to bring it back. Do you understand what I mean?

Time passes too quickly for me sometimes. Even the smallest instants run away from me, impossibly fast to catch.

A very poetic to and fro

Since this comes right on the heels of my previous post which had snatches of poetry, I wud have preferred to space it more. But I think it's particularly marvellous since the first poem I wanted to post here, is one I'd read about in The Garden of Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. The first stanza from this poem I'd scribbled onto my now-deceased scrapbook. It had the quite wistful idea of not having enuff time in this world to make love last long. It has a man admonishing his lover for being too 'coy'. Now that isn't a particularly appealing idea in itself but the poem that results is quite lovely.

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

- Andrew Marvell

But remarkably, this poem isn't the point of this post. I was listening to this poem read by SV, one of my favourite channels on youtube when I found that he'd posted a reply to this poem.

Now this reply was by another poet, A. D. Hope. I had never heard of him before. And I found he was this amazing satirical Australian poet who published a poem called "From His Mistress to Mr. Marvell" in a book charmingly called The Book of Answers. What I found most intriguing about this awesome poet I'd never heard of, was that, according to his wikipedia page, he was a polymath and largely self-taught.

This particular poem gives a sharp voice to Mr. Marvell's coy mistress, and its feminist slant is unmistakable. And since I loved the idea of a poetic repartee, especially one so cleverly written, I'm putting it here.

His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell

Since you have world enough and time

Sir, to admonish me in rhyme,

Pray Mr Marvell, can it be

You think to have persuaded me?

Then let me say: you want the art

To woo, much less to win my heart.

The verse was splendid, all admit,

And, sir, you have a pretty wit.

All that indeed your poem lacked

Was logic, modesty, and tact,

Slight faults and ones to which I own,

Your sex is generally prone;

But though you lose your labour, I

Shall not refuse you a reply:

First, for the language you employ:

A term I deprecate is "coy";

The ill-bred miss, the bird-brained Jill,

May simper and be coy at will;

A lady, sir, as you will find,

Keeps counsel, or she speaks her mind,

Means what she says and scorns to fence

And palter with feigned innocence.

The ambiguous "mistress" next you set

Beside this graceless epithet.

"Coy mistress", sir? Who gave you leave

To wear my heart upon your sleeve?

Or to imply, as sure you do,

I had no other choice than you

And must remain upon the shelf

Unless I should bestir myself?

Shall I be moved to love you, pray,

By hints that I must soon decay?

No woman's won by being told

How quickly she is growing old;

Nor will such ploys, when all is said,

Serve to stampede us into bed.

When from pure blackmail, next you move

To bribe or lure me into love,

No less inept, my rhyming friend,

Snared by the means, you miss your end.

"Times winged chariot", and the rest

As poetry may pass the test;

Readers will quote those lines, I trust,

Till you and I and they are dust;

But I, your destined prey, must look

Less at the bait than at the hook,

Nor, when I do, can fail to see

Just what it is you offer me:

Love on the run, a rough embrace

Snatched in the fury of the chase,

The grave before us and the wheels

Of Time's grim chariot at our heels,

While we, like "am'rous birds of prey",

Tear at each other by the way.

To say the least, the scene you paint

Is, what you call my honour, quaint!

And on this point what prompted you

So crudely, and in public too,

To canvass and , indeed, make free

With my entire anatomy?

Poets have licence, I confess,

To speak of ladies in undress;

Thighs, hearts, brows, breasts are well enough,

In verses this is common stuff;

But -- well I ask: to draw attention

To worms in -- what I blush to mention,

And prate of dust upon it too!

Sir, was this any way to woo?

Now therefore, while male self-regard

Sits on your cheek, my hopeful bard,

May I suggest, before we part,

The best way to a woman's heart

Is to be modest, candid, true;

Tell her you love and show you do;

Neither cajole nor condescend

And base the lover on the friend;

Don't bustle her or fuss or snatch:

A suitor looking at his watch

Is not a posture that persuades

Willing, much less reluctant maids.

Remember that she will be stirred

More by the spirit than the word;

For truth and tenderness do more

Than coruscating metaphor.

Had you addressed me in such terms

And prattled less of graves and worms,

I might, who knows, have warmed to you;

But, as things stand, must bid adieu

(Though I am grateful for the rhyme)

And wish you better luck next time.

- A. D. Hope

 Mr. Hope comes up with an effective rejoinder to a great poem with an equally fantastic poem. Now one wishes more men in the world wud fight back with razor-sharp wit than blunt weapons, dont you? :D