A Pastiche from Arvind...

 ‘Jinhe naaz hai hind par wo kahan hai…’

This song written by Sahir Ludhianvi Saab in 1957 for Gurudutt’s film Pyaasa became an immortal cult song replete with pathos and frustration of a common man unable to change the course of events in his country. Although written then in the context of prostitution and exploitation of women, the song still remains today a stark reminder of the current affairs in the country.

Here is an attempt that takes help of the sheer brilliance of Sahir Saab’s pen and extends it to today’s context.

ये लुटते हुए कारवां जिंदगी के 

ये बढ़ते हुए साये मुफलिसी के 

कहाँ है वो इन्सां यहाँ हमसे पूछे 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पर वो कहाँ है 

ये सूखी ज़मीनें, ये सेठों के बाज़ार 

सिसकते किसानों की मौतों से इंकार 

ये रिश्वत के सौदे, ये सौदों पे तक्रार 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पर  वो कहाँ है 

जवानों की बढ़ती ये बेख्वाब दुनिया 

ये पैसों पे पागल खुदगर्ज़ गलियां 

बिकती जहाँ खोकली रंग-रलियाँ 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पर वो कहाँ है 

उजले घरों में ये चांदी की खनखन 

अमीरी के नंगे इरादों की बनठन 

ये खैराती टुकडे औ टुकड़ों पे अनबन 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पे वो कहाँ है 

यहाँ बिकती तालीम, बिकते गुरु भी 

मंदिर भी, गिरिजा भी, और मस्जिदें भी 

बिकता है मुल्क, बिक रही है गुरुरी 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पे वो कहाँ है 

ये बेबाक नज़रें, ये गुस्ताख फितरे 

ये बर्बर जवानी के बरहम से शिकवे 

इन शिकवों के मासूम कलियों पे छींटे 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पे वो कहाँ है 

मदद चाहती है हौव्वा की बेटी 

यशोदा की हमनिस, राधा की बेटी 

ये बीवी भी है, और बहन भी है, माँ भी 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पे वो कहाँ है 

ज़रा मुल्क के रहबरों को बुलाओ 

ये लुटते और गिरते मंज़र दिखाओ 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पे उनको लाओ 

जिन्हें नाज़ है हिन्द पे वो कहाँ है 

Relationships…

One of the most complex things in life, I feel, are relationships…and I am not talking about all the familial relationships or romantic ones. I am referring to relationships between any two individuals. Each relationship has a reference to context, some baggage, some expectations which affect the nature of the relationship over a period of time. However, even with people you have known for a pretty long time, there are always some things about their behavior that confuse you and often, this has to do with communication- the nature, the frequency or the lack of it.

One of those random conversations with a friend got me thinking…

If you look around you, usually you can categorize most of the people around you into 3 types (alright, I know that sounds simplistic… but bear with me)… and I am talking about people you have a relationship with, with whom you have shared interests, experiences and life in general.

There are the Self-Sufficient type - who are so occupied with themselves, that they never have time for anyone or anything else… and I don’t mean to run them down… it’s just that, that’s how/who they are. They are very involved in, their work, their issues, their problems, their successes and so on and basically don’t have the time, or feel the necessity to nurture relationships. They actually do not even think about anyone else or have any need for people. It’s not that they are not good with people or that if you were to put them amongst people they would be lost … or any such thing… it’s just that they will rarely initiate an interaction unless there is a need ( as in unless they have some work with the other person). There is no calling casually to check how you are doing or to say hey, let’s meet. They will rarely remember anything that happens in your life and have only temporary, superficial interest in it even when you are talking about it. However, another thing that is rather typical of this type is that if someone else initiates it, they will usually accept pretty pleasantly and also proceed to enjoy the interaction. And that makes one wonder why they do not initiate it?

Then there are the Needy ones – who have no hesitation in disturbing you whenever and wherever, if THEY wish to talk.. and insist that you listen/make time for them. They will forget your very existence until the day they have a problem that they need help with, in whatever form… to vent, to empathize, or something else. Their problems are always the biggest… so huge, and all encompassing that no solution you offer would actually fix it. They are also the kind who will go on the “why me” trip for which one rarely has the appropriate answer (I mean, come on, one cannot tell a bawling friend that her husband is getting jealous coz she has been flirting shamelessly, can you?). They are the kind who will ask you how you are, but never wait for the answer, or even hear the answer. Every conversation will be completely focused on them. They are also the kind who will brush aside everything in your life as insignificant…or turn it around on to something that happened to them and how that was sooo much bigger! This type is the seriously exhausting variety… take up time, energy and emotional bandwidth and leave you feeling like a used dish-cloth wrung out one time too many.

And then there are the Available ones - who make time for everything and everyone. Who will kill themselves to ensure that they remember to call you on every important day of your life. If you call and say I am down, they will make time to go have coffee with you…and their deadline be damned… they can always do with pulling an all-nighter to finish it… after all you need them. The problem with this type is that everyone seems to think they do not have a life and worse no one acknowledges it. No one bothers to ask them if they have a problem… in fact even when they come out and say they have a problem, they have a tough time finding someone to share it with. They are also the kind who can never seem to come out and say “I don’t have time” or “I am not interested” and as a result everyone tends to take them for granted.

Having said this, I would really like to hear some other viewpoints on the topic…

Family Ties

As I was growing up, I would often listen to my grandmother and my mom exchange bits of news about the extended family. The tales always seemed incomplete to me until I could put a face to the people in the stories and I would invariably ask one of them who they were talking about. And this would lead to long tracking of the family tree, with them ensuring at each step that I knew at least one of the characters they were referring to, so that I could see the linkages.

Think about it. Today, in the rare occurrence of our spouse or child asking “who is this xyz?”, we invariably answer with a “arey leave it… he/she is a distant cousin/uncle/aunt/niece/nephew.. you don’t know that part of the family… I haven't heard of/from them in a long time .. etc.. All in all, we quickly brush aside the opportunity to familiarize our immediate families with our extended family…we simply do not see the point, feel the need and have neither the time nor the inclination. What we seem to be forgetting in the process is that, as families get scattered and drift away geographically and emotionally, the ties and bonds that connected us are lost.

I had an interesting experience a few days ago that made me think a bit…

My husband and I were to meet a professional acquaintance of his and his wife for dinner. They were in town on a visit from the US. I was not really looking forward to it as I did not know either of the people and expected my husband to launch into shop-talk with no regard for the two ladies. In my experience, so far, it has been a rare occurrence when I have managed to have half-way decent conversation in such situations… so, like I said, I was not looking forward to it.

A few minutes into exchanging pleasantries, we faced a question that is common to us Indians “which part of the country are you from” and this lead to interesting discoveries like the fact that the wife’s family came from the same parts as my mother’s family… and a little further on surfaced the fact that his maternal grandmother shared my mother’s maiden name … and so the ice was broken. We laughed about how small the world is and six degrees of separation etc. As dinner progressed, our guest started to narrate some incident and mentioned a family name that was familiar to me. I turned to my husband and said, that’s the same family as my cousin xyz… and they turned to ask me, xyz? I said yes, she is my cousin and she lives in the US and they began to laugh. Turns out that the lady I was having dinner with, was the real sister of my uncle’s wife. I had heard of her by her pet name and so had she and since we didn’t know each other’s real names, we never thought to link. Needless to say the rest of the evening and the day after flew by in catching up with everything there was to.

However, this got me thinking… and I wondered, if 10 years down the line my daughter were in a similar situation, what would happen… firstly, she wouldn’t know the places that her grandparents families came from and I am pretty sure that except for my maiden name, she knows none of the other family names that are connected to us on either my side or her father’s side of the family. So there is a huge possibility that she may meet her uncles and aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews and never know that they were related. Aren’t we, as parents to blame for this? I agree that it’s not a great loss…after all, you can go through a life-time without seeing or interacting with your cousins because they are far away… and what do you lose anyway?

But then something else happened that made me think some more…

A close friend from across the seas and me were having an online crib session, where we were complaining that our husbands are incapable of providing us empathy or any kind of emotional support. And as we talked, we also realized that we really did not have many people we could turn to in an emotionally vulnerable state…you know the kind… when you just need someone to listen and tell you… ya I know this stinks… but it will get better and you are doing a great job… let you cry and bitch for some time.. pat you.. give you a hug.. make you a cup of tea.. whatever… And even the few we do have, are busy in their own life’s and you wonder if you should disturb them for something that, you know in your mind, is trivial and so on…and she asked “how did we get to this point? Coz, growing up we had so many people we could turn to… we could actually choose who to turn to at any given point…so how and when did that change… of course we won’t have the same set of people, but shouldn’t we have managed to replace them with a new set???”

As typical middle class Indians, we grew in homes that were short of space, but the people were large hearted…it always sounded so clichéd when said in Hindi movies, but it IS true. We had people drop in randomly, the lack of phone connectivity during those years also meant that there was no way to warn anyone and yet, our mothers welcomed people they barely knew into our homes and they were made comfortable, thus laying the grounds for a loose yet fond bond. In its place, today we have larger homes, better equipped, more help from devices as well as maids and yet, if we have an unexpected guest, we immediately become uncomfortable…wondering how people can be so inconsiderate etc.

While we were growing up, summer vacations did not mean taking off to some fancy location and living in the lap of luxury…it meant visiting family in remote places, sleeping in a row on mats/mattresses laid out in the verandah/living rooms/terraces… it meant running riot with cousins, nieces and nephews, laughing until your stomach ached, fighting as though it were world war 3… it meant eating so much that you thought you stomach would burst and then rolling on the cool floor till you could breathe again. In those days, when guests came, there was no expectation that they would have a ‘room’ to themselves, or their own ‘space’. It was usual for a bed to be made where ever space permitted and they would be happy to sleep there. It was common for us to be asked to go sleep on the temporary bed while the older guest could sleep more comfortably in ours.

The point I am trying to make here is, we lived in each other’s spaces, lives were entwined and ‘privacy’ meant very different things then it does today. If you wanted ‘privacy’, you had to be a newly-wed craving for physical intimacy in a crowded space, or the elders in the family that needed to huddle together and find a solution to a serious family matter. Nothing else was really private. And from this stemmed our ability to discuss every silly problem with whoever was available without much thought of what needed to be filtered/censored. Today, our kids have difficulty in talking to us about their problems/issues and since they do not have the luxury of older cousins to turn to, they turn to their equally ill-equipped peers and end up making choices that can have serious consequences.

Therefore, I believe its time for us, the parents, to get over our ‘lack-of-time’ and manage to make time to acquaint our children with our extended families, either in person, or through stories that will go down the generations and make them feel connected to that 3^rd or 4^th cousin at the other end of the world who shares a family name or doesn’t. Time to make an effort to get to those family re-unions, weddings and other celebrations. So that, tomorrow, your child doesn’t turn around and say… I don’t know where my family comes from.

Memories

Memories! Memories that consume your very being. Memories, that take you down nostalgia lane. Memories that make the past seem so much more beautiful than it actually was. Memories that remind you of all that and all those you left behind…sometimes willingly, some unwillingly, sometimes knowingly and some unknowingly, some painlessly and some with regret. It’s strange what clings to the deepest recesses of your memory walls…emerging when least expected as though someone decided to switch on a torch in a dark cave. Have you ever noticed how you revel in the good memories? Repeating the stories again and again and reliving them each time you tell the story. Ever wonder why you never talk about the bad memories? No brainer, right? Who wants to relive the pain? But what do you do when those memories choose to emerge and come to the forefront of your brain, consuming your thoughts, forcing you to relive the pain and the hurt? What’s the first instinct when that happens? Mine used to be to push them back deep into the deepest dark corners of my mind and forget them all over again. But as you would have noticed, that doesn’t quite work, does it? Because, sooner or later they do manage to surface again, seemingly stronger and louder…usually catching you in a weak moment, when the strength to fight them is apparently inadequate. Result? A bout of depression of varying degree, depending on the intensity of the incident.

I guess, as one grows older, there is an innate need to dig deeper within oneself and re-analyze one’s life-defining, life-changing moments and while you are doing that, it’s really hard not to go back to the bad memories…in fact, that’s where the major learning lies and so, it’s actually unavoidable. Once I realized this, I felt the need to find a better coping mechanism since depression is unproductive and always avoidable. I then remembered something that a yoga-teacher had taught me a few years ago while doing ‘shavasana’…wherein you lie like a corpse, slowly getting every muscle in your body to relax and let go. I remembered her voice softly speaking to us while we lay with our bodies at rest, eyes closed, trying to understand how to relax each group of muscles…once we were done with getting our body to relax, she would then tell us to feel the air go in from our nostrils deep into our lungs and become conscious of the path that air was taking as it went in and out of our body…and then she would tell us to focus on our mind…watch it as though it was external to our being…watch the thoughts that flit in and out of our brain and let them flow without holding on to any thought…and after that, she said… now, as the thoughts flow, pick one, as you would pick up a toy or any other object and turn it around exploring it, casually and then, without getting involved in it, put it down and watch the flow of thoughts again, until another interesting one comes by.

And so, I decided to try this with memories, especially the painful ones. It's turned out to be a very interesting exercise and pretty fruitful, if I may say so, for me at least. I find, that when I consciously open this box of memories and choose, which one I wish to examine, it gives me a sense of control and doesn’t flood my being with the intensity of emotion that I felt when it was involuntary. It also enables me to be objective and makes it possible for me to view the incident from multiple perspectives and that helps me come to an explanation of sorts and that in turn, enables me to put that incident into another box labeled “shit happens” J which I can now peep into from time to time, shrug my shoulders and smile and say “ ya well, you know, you can’t control all that happens in life” …basically, laying it to rest and say RIP. Often I find that it wasn’t as big a deal as it was in my mind and that by trying to shove it under the carpet, I had somehow given it a bigger role in my life, than it deserved. And even more often, I find, that something I had blamed someone else for, was actually more my fault then theirs…because I had been cowardly or not honest enough or wanting to get their approval or..or.. or.. basically I learnt, that I had ‘allowed’ a certain thing to happen because of something I had done, said or left undone and unsaid…so, having figured out that it was my mistake, I find it easier to forget it. It also makes it possible for me to grow some more as an individual, because it teaches me not to repeat the same mistakes. Since life is at another phase today, it imparts a new understanding of people’s behavior in the past… as an adult, a parent, a spouse, a teacher, a friend, a colleague … explains why someone in your life made choices that affected you and your life… you may still not agree with it, but at least you are able to understand it better now… once again helps me put it to rest…no more blame…no more regrets…no more feeling that you didn’t have control… it's done…in the past… and life today, is where it was ‘meant’ to be.

I don’t know about everyone else, but for me, understanding ‘why’ something happened is very essential for me to be able to put it behind me and move on. Of course, no matter how hard you try, some things will have no explanation, no matter which angle and which perspective you look at it…and then, you simply have to learn to push to the deepest corner of your mind and let it remain there…perhaps at some point in future, you may be able to address it…until then, let it rest.