Resurrection

My heart beats fast as I type. This is Indulgence - a labor of love - a place that has hosted so many of my feeble attempts at expression. I started Indulgence in 2006 - on the insistence and encouragement of friends in my first year of college. Since then, much has been said and much has been concealed from this place, but it remains - a place close to heart, a home almost, that today I have decided to return to. 

A lot has changed in the past few years - in the outer world and in my inner world. If anything, the relationship between the two has become stronger. I believe that I have become clearer - with both my unique identity and my oneness with the universe, with my shared misery and suffering with all of the living world. As it is early January, I feel compelled to reflect on the year gone by. It has been quite a year - a year of the illumination of truths. We saw the world come apart, systems of health, education, public provisions exposed, shattered and rebuilt, we saw the power of the collective human spirit - systems that emerged outside of all rulebooks of organizational behaviour - systems of love, of collaboration, of showing up - for complete strangers, for each other, for ourselves. Personally, the year held a similar trajectory for me - it made me confront truths - external but most importantly, internal. And, it shattered falsehoods and false systems and through much messiness and struggle, brought me on the other side, where there was light - of awareness, of compassion, of a self that was a little bit more true. Of everything that 2021 taught me, the biggest learning was to always show up for oneself. 

As I write today, my heart is heavy. Most states have entered partial lockdowns again, schools have been shut (ironically, malls, pubs, restaurants, places of worship and even wedding gatherings are allowed to function with some restrictions). The COVID statistics have become relevant again. I have spent much of the day ensuring the people in my team are okay, have the support they need - many are symptomatic, some have tested positive. I have been unsuccessfully trying to avoid the news of the Bulli Bai app - this is the sort of thing that has the potential to cause utter despair at the state of things. But, I know that 2022 holds promise. I can see that as a collective, we are having conversations we weren't having. We are despairing over things more publicly, more openly. In 2021, we have seen minor and major wins of democracy. In 2021, I have seen wins - many, many of them. I have managed to get better at keeping up routines, at being easier on myself, at being truer to myself, at standing up for myself, at holding dualities. So, I hold this duality in my heart - that at a higher, divine perspective, may be all of this that's happening is just ebbs and flows - the way of things, but also that with a human perspective, it is okay to despair, for oneself and for fellow human beings. It is okay to allow the heart to sometimes, sink and not be hopeful. It is also the nature of things.

Speaking of hope, Indulgence is back in the public domain today. I hope to be better at allowing myself and my innermost world to be seen again - unless some days I am not, and that would be okay too.

July 27, 2018

Tonight, I am grateful for growth. For this wisdom that allows you to accept, to let go, to be. For rootedness. For the realization of the power of seeds, of sparks. For the exploration of true humility, true service, true love. For paradoxes and middle paths, for ambivalence and balance. For hope. For the luxury to ruminate, to let structures fall and rebuild, to shine light on the darkest, dustiest corners of self. For the feeling that it all comes together. Of course, to fall apart, but it does. For this rhythmic convergent and divergent nature of existence. For okayness and now and this breath that's been faithful for yet another day.

November 18, 2018

"Is human life worth living?", you ask as I tell you the story from my mother's childhood when she returned home to find her pet rabbit tortured to near death by her adoptive brother. "What builds or rather unravels this capacity to be so cruel. Is it even something that blame can be attached to?". 
"We do this to each other through our inability to love. But loving is so hard and has so many definitions."
"How did we end up creating a world where we enable so much hurt that leads to so much cruelty?"
"It is our inability to adapt to all the diversity that we all carry. Each human being's need is so different, and our capacity to cater to that so limited."
"That is why I wonder, if human life is worth living"
"It is. Even if it is about learning to love one other person."
"Would you want to come back?"
"At least a few more times if I had you to love each time."

February 10, 2019

Dear T,

I write to remind you of the gift that life is. I want you to realize and remember that it is a gift that you must never take lightly. That you will go through many dark phases, but always emerge stronger, clearer and a little more compassionate. That the demons of childhood do go away, and when you are 30, memories of that time will feel like stills from another life, or reels from a movie that you felt deeply. They will not affect you or define you, but they will shape you. T, you will spend life looking to get better, and this will sail you through a lot. But you must remember to not seek perfection, which you tend to do. You must let go of shame and fear. You know that people do not need to earn love; they deserve it, irrespective of who they are. Do not make yourself an exception. You will love and laugh and forgive easily, and you will get hurt a lot. But you must not get cynical. At around 30, you will learn that you do not carry the weight of the world on your shoulders and that the only way to change the world is to begin with yourself, and that the process of change begins with acceptance. You will learn to hold greys, and be gentler on yourself and others. I hope you remember to laugh and have fun.

Love,
T

Banjara Hills

There's something intriguing about this part of town, the hills have been carved into roads and streets with beautiful bungalows and showrooms, but you take one left turn and you are in narrow lanes with near vertical drops lined by houses. Young boys in kurtas running down the lane with hands on each other's shoulders, women in burqas(always in groups and never alone) returning home with their children, men sitting outside their houses, bonding over something on the phone or sharing a conversation about the day gone by, and another left turn and you are going through probably the biggest graveyard you've ever seen, innumerable graves on both sides of the road with not even inches between them, and you think about how you're looking at more graves than people, and a thela with someone hawking something to eat and little lights on the cart just outside this graveyard. You think about the juxtaposition of life and death, how there's something beautiful about the acceptance and assimilation of the graveyard into the landscape. You think about the people, the children you saw, and wonder about their ancestors that are perhaps buried there, watching over them, and the living watching over the dead, co-existing with them in their dance of life. The next left turn takes to into an impossibly busy market. It's lit up and alive. You wonder what lives of children are like in this community. You notice that this whole area automatically registers as a community. You know nothing about them but you know that these are people who live intertwined lives - they create safety nets but also nooses, they live, love, laugh, fight, cry and die together. You dream of a community of your own some day - some place you'd finally belong.

Minimalism and Leadership

One of the ideas I have found myself to be most influenced by in recent times is that of minimalism. Minimalism in possessions, but also in thoughts and actions.

Being in a new role where the stakes always seem high hasn't been easy, but the only idea that has helped me cope is the constant guiding question of: is this strategic? What is the best use of my twenty-four hours? How much of it is going towards quelling short-term fires, and how much towards longer-term growth, well-being, and slow but stronger and systemic change. Could even the first kind be a step towards the second? What is life but a series of decisions we make in the face of constraints? What is life but a long workshop in strategy? Isn't minimalism just strategy - choosing only what adds value and recognizing that any surplus might actually deplete value?

Some of my strongest successes in my role as an enabler have been when I've found the sweet spot of 'enough', when I've let go of the desire to prove *my* relevance, and have found comfort in my role of planting ideas and enabling conditions for them to be nurtured, when I've freed myself from the comforting feeling of *doing* a lot. Last week was a significant step in this direction. In attempting to find my method in madness, I stumbled upon the life-changing link between minimalism and trust. The challenge we are attempting to tackle requires a collective, and that requires that we don't just support, challenge, but also trust each other. That's the only way we'll be able to define a beautiful line of action around our roles - a limiting line of action that will make our locus of impact limitless.

Things in Boxes

It is time to put things in boxes
Times like this bring the customary over-analysis
Of moments tagged to places
And memories attached to objects
And people, 
of course, people
But we don't use them as symbols
They are the ones we find symbols for
In things, in places, in terrible attempts at obscure poetry
Just like this one
Isn't poetry a tool of deception?
One immensely empowering
through its nature
of concealed ammunition and partial catharsis
of uncorrupted choice to the poet
of the ratios of revelation and concealment
independent of the constant of expression

Free form is convenient
It's one of those big inclusive boxes
that eliminates a lot of smaller ones

I think of coffee stained pages
and loose, ink-stained sweatshirt sleeves
of the valley beyond the library window
and the long road to the hospital
that was frustratingly uninspiring
I think of the road trips and the life lived on the edge
of adventure, eccentricity, wanderlust and madness
of how a lot of it was painstakingly deliberate
of how rain is never about the moment right now
of how when the red bricks soak, they register
but not quite
of how when the frogs come out
and when the green is pronounced
and when the air is laden with petrichor
and when LKP floods and footballers play
of how a lot of it is observation
one step short of experience
always almost there
but never quite
The shroud lifts only briefly
only to reveal what wonders lie beneath
and falls back very lightly
so you see through it but you can't feel
you can smell but not touch
I am a prisoner in my mind
and may be that is why I write

The Goodbye

Bangalore : Hey! Heard the ticket you're carrying is one way.
Me : Yeah
B : Here, take this ridiculously gorgeous and dramatic sunrise at the center of the road.

Me : Why, thanks! I can't believe you'd do this for me!
B : I didn't make it specially for you, but go ahead, take it personally. 
Me : I'm gonna miss you! 
B : Don't be embarrassing. I've already moved on.

To Leaving

A city is the crowd that makes you feel lost and insignificant. It is the finding of kindred souls in unexpected places. It is the claiming of freedom through the privilege of anonymity. It is the art and culture scene that happens in its theaters and city halls, and also in its parks and cafes. It is late nights and inebriation and long, aimless conversations. It is the rooftop of a friend's place with a beer in hand, or the quiet balcony of a dream home you moved into that you never could make your own. It is the unfinished businesses, the unsaid goodbyes, unexpressed sentiments, unvisited corners, unknown alleyways and markets that you wanted to see but probably never enough to make it happen. It is the beginnings and non-endings of uncooked could-have-beens. It is the rush hour traffic that chokes you at times, and comforts you at others, the landmarks that are remarkable only to you because you cared enough to notice, the books you've read on the commute that dissolved into the landscape to make it come alive. It is the language you never quite learnt, the regrets that lurk in the corners as you cross them, the nostalgia that you know is going to follow you, the moving-ins and moving-outs, the stability and the ennui, the wanting to belong and the realization that you finally do when it's time to leave.