Literature affects people in different ways. There is a reason I like light-hearted fare and uplifting works in general. Bear with me while I traipse down a familiar path.
I have noticed my literary fare of late has been morbid, laissez faire or tepid.After one book that made me want to cry while looking at tomato soup, I picked up some books with jolly titles : books with names such as ‘The Happiest People on Earth’, only to find that the happiest ones are probably the ones that did not pick up that book. Classics, good old classics should always set me back, I thought to myself as I picked up some classics to smooth things over – they turned out to be so depressing that I could not bear to even have sunny-side-up eggs for breakfast. It seemed like I was letting the author down by smiling or watching beautiful Spring unfold around me.
I usually spice things up a bit in my reading. One morbid, followed by two up-lifting. Then, one that hurts the brain followed by two that hurt the jaws while laughing. But really! Why is uplifting fare not given its due? This necessity to cry and make others cry is appalling. Schadenfreude is what it is. I have written about this with a certain whim before and shall do so again.
What then should I have done? Fallen back to my tried-and-tested pick-me-ups? But I did not want to do that just yet. There will always be misery, problems and what-not. Literature can and should teach us to take the rough with the smooth with grace. We need more authors who embrace the stout heart and the practical mind with a dose of humor. If any body has authors firmly placed in that league, please let me know.
With spring in the air, I thought I would be spending time sniffing the flowers and admiring the trees, but I got to tell you, this depressing reading has taken its toll. I haven’t exercised much, I have managed to fill my days up with a whole list of should-dos and have neglected my must-dos. (Incidentally, I read this piece about should-dos vs must-dos that I thought I must share with everybody)
“This busy-ness is a malady.”, I cried as my husband and daughter rolled their eyes once more. I ignored it with a master stroke and continued, “What with the invasion of cell-phones and laptops into every aspect of our lives, our social lives blend with e-social, blend with the professional, where does one’s silly-side-up shine? Where does one get to be the person who stops to smell the flowers? “
smell the phone
My son took the iPhone, picked out a picture of the flowers and sniffed it. I started laughing.That’s it folks, take the phone, smell the flowers and galvanize yourself to go out and embrace Spring. The sidewalk is filled with flowers if we stop to look and sniff.
It had been a rather long journey for us.We had already spent 13 hours on the bus. We had gone from (hot and sweaty) to (cold and hungry) overnight. The journey had been rocky and not, altogether pleasant. The bus had droned over endless hot, dry plains, before beginning its 3 hour ascent to the cool, refreshing hills in South India. It was 6 a.m. when the driver stopped for a break at a riverside village. “Vandi patthu nimisam nikkum” he shouted (The bus will stop for 10 minutes. )
Our knees looked like gnarled trees as we stepped out gingerly to stretch ourselves. I was happy to breathe in the fresh mountain air. We could hear a swift river flowing nearby and this small village was named after the river.
Burliyar
To add to the appeal, the fresh smells of Nilgiri tea wafted around us. The father and I made our way quickly toward it. The tea-shop was a shanty like any other on the route: A tin-roof, a couple of kerosene stoves and glass tumblers that were narrow at the bottom.
The point is, there we were, sleep-walking towards the spot where our noses were leading us and our bodies shivering with the early morning cold. The father ordered two teas in his booming voice.It was then that I stirred and noticed the men in the tea shop were clad in dhotis. The guy making tea was obviously a bossy sort, for he clicked his tongue at his helper. Distinctions were evident between employer and employee. The employee was a man, clad in a much-dirtier dhoti than his employer. I mean, if you are going to become this filthy, is there any point in wearing a white or cream colored dhoti? Why not just wear a brown towel or a tree bark and be done with it? Maybe it was their corporate dress policy, I thought to myself and settled into a sort of stupor again, my mind wandering. What if he wiped his hand on his dhoti and then put his fingers into our tea-cups? It happens all the time. Should I say something or risk it and down the life-saving and hope it would not become the life-taking in this case?
The teashop near the hills and river
I peered into a vast vat with what seemed like steaming hot, very watery tea and said, ‘This isn’t the tea is it?” The father peered in looking worried. You don’t drink 100’s of cups of tea for nothing. When you peer into pots of murky liquid that you suspect is tea, it doesn’t make very good tea. I hesitated before asking the man – you see these chefs can be picky blighters. You look dubiously at their tea, and the next thing you know, they behave like recalcitrant mules on a mountain path and refuse to part with a biscuit packet, marketed by Parle-G.
I was trying to see how to put things tactfully (I can’t say I have progressed much over the years), when the bossy bloke bellowed to his helper, possibly the sous chef in the establishment.The disgruntled helper, or sous chef, wiped his hands on his dhoti and then plunged his hand into the vat I suspected to be tea and extracted a few glass cups. I mean! What? Had I not caught myself, I might have fallen over backwards in a neat scoop. The s. chef, however, noticed nothing and bustled about with his work. Having extracted the glasses from the muddy waters, he wiped it dry with a piece of cloth that would have given food inspectors in the western world a heart attack and deposited the cups on the counter for the tea.
The father and I exchanged deep looks packed with meaning and I saw the light of resolve and understanding dawn in the father’s eyes. His eyes had the it-is-a-simple-matter-of-education gleam in them. Once a teacher, always a teacher. He said to the pair of them, quite politely in my opinion, something to the effect of washing the cups in flowing water before offering us tea in it. Washing, he said, does not happen in stagnant water that looks like tea.
The disgruntled helper or sous c. growled. “Saar! It is washed!” he said
My father appealed to his inner teacher once again and explained that washing dirty cups in dirty water still leaves the cup dirty.
It did not go down well. The sous chef now looked like a sulky sous chef.
“Saar! All washed Saar. I wash again.”He smartly picked up the cups and dipped them into the same water again. I moaned. The father moaned and the chef groaned. Maybe the code of conduct with respect to washing cups had been gone over several times in his training, but had not registered much like the corporate dress policy.
“Flowing water pa! You must pour water over the cups and wash them. Otherwise, all the dirt will be in the cups too. What you want is to go for the clean effect of flowing water. Remember your town was named after flowing clean water from the river.“
What happened next could try the soul of the most optimistic teacher, for the man, simply plunged his hand into the water, took a cup and filled it with dirty water and poured it over another cup and washed it. He beamed freely at this bit of going-the-extra-mile-for-the-customer while we cried in our hearts.
“Clean water my good fellow. Clean water!” cried the father, while the helper stood there looking confused.
I noticed with a sort of sinking feeling that the father’s voice being a stentorian one, all tea-makers in the little river town on the mountainside heard this little altercation, thereby dishing our chances of picking up tea elsewhere.I tugged the father’s sleeve to let things be and asked to buy a bottled water. I then smartly poured a little bit of water on the cups and then asked for the tea in them.
I had, of course, affronted everybody by doing this. The father,for he felt that he now had to explain Economics to his daughter (Who spends Rs 20 on bottled water to wash teacups when the tea costs Rs 5 each?)The chef and sous chef cried too, for they never understood why folks bought water in a bottle in the first place, when it could be had for free in the river. To use good money to wash already washed cups was just excessive. They probably went home that night and lectured their children about not becoming obsessive and how a little bit of grime and dirt never hurt anybody.
The findings are the latest to support the “hygiene hypothesis,” a still-evolving proposition that’s been gaining momentum in recent years. The hypothesis basically suggests that people in developed countries are growing up way too clean because of a variety of trends, including the use of hand sanitizers and detergents, and spending too little time around animals.
Squeaky clean dishes contribute to lower immune systems and therefore higher allergies.
P.S: The episode above happened about 20 years ago, but the mind has a way of resurfacing old snippets when it reads something new.
It was ‘Profession Week’ at the son’s pre-school. It is at times like this that you feel like a celebrity if you are a fire-fighter or a policeman. Imagine drawing up to the school-yard in your impressive red fire-truck and talking about your average day to a bunch of star-struck toddlers. I would have loved to do that. Only I am neither a fire-fighter nor a policeman. I work as a software engineer and as far as glamour appeal goes, computer engineer is as low as it can get on the toddler ladder of professions.
It did not help matters that another computer engineer had already been in to see them the previous day. The son told me that they ‘already knew all about laptops’. What, he wondered, could I have to say that they did not already know in the field of Computer Science? I felt my spirits sink a bit.
Let’s suppose you are practicing to perform at a concert. You spend a good amount of time getting your voice modulation and crescendos just right for that perfect rendition of ‘Let It Go!’. You then gingerly move on to the stage, hoping that your confidence will build up with the song’s tempo, and belt out your best attempt of the sensational ‘Let it go!’. You survey the audience (100-watt bulbs pale in comparison) as you beam around, only to find that the audience is slightly scornful and mutinous. You then learn that three performers before you had already rendered that very song. The first one got a thunderous applause, the second a warm hand because, well, who doesn’t like an encore? The third : a polite, but appreciative nod, and the fourth absolutely gets the bird. The fifth will probably get eggs and potatoes. The whole thing reminds me of an excellent short story penned by P.G.Wodehouse on these very lines: Sonny Boy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggs,_Beans_and_Crumpets)
Judging by the response I got, I was in the position of the lucky fourth performer and not the fifth. I beamed around the class and spoke to them about all the wonderful uses of computers and how even their toys and favorite movies are made using computers. I gasped to make them gasp. I spiced up my lines. I threw in guffaws. I went on about how computers are used to send rockets to outer space and some children were mildly impressed. I got to tell you, this was a hard group.
My brow was beginning to sweat a bit. I mean, every place in the talk where I thought I would get an impressive-something was a complete washout. I felt like a sad stand-up comedian getting no laughs out there. It was brutal.
“So, anyone wants to be a Computer Engineer when they grow up?” I asked, with that falsetto ring of cheeriness.
One boy put up his hand. I pounced on the gesture with enthusiasm. I said, “Oh wonderful! There he is. He wants to become an engineer. That is great!”
An older child might have humored me and let things be, but not this boy. He shrugged and said, “NO!” (I really don’t think that vehemence was necessary) “I want to be a super-hero!”
I gulped a bit looking quite the ass. I mean, my ecstatic smile was frozen on my face and I tried to salvage the situ. bylaughing some more. But it came out sounding like a dog learning to laugh from a hyena.
One child, bless her, raised her hand. “Yes! She has something to say. Do you want to become a computer engineer dear?”
She turned away, with a bored expression on her face and said , “Policemen save lives.”
I mean if you are looking for nobility….
The teacher must’ve taken pity on me for she said that doctors, policemen and super-heroes use computers to help them . It was at this point I noticed the other teacher straightening some of the kids saying, “We want to sit on our bottoms and listen to her, not lie down on our tummies.”
I tottered out. Dreams of inspiring the younger generation forsooth!I mean to say, in a 10 minute talk, I was already getting otherwise active 3-year old children to lie down? How their teachers managed to keep them interested and learning for the whole day is beyond me. You want to know who the true super-heroes are? Those teachers. If I were in a profession that wore a hat, I would tip it to Teachers.
P.S:The irony is probably half that class will land up becoming Engineers of some sort.
For a 1-night trip to a destination 4 hours away, there really was no need for me to act like the Sergeant Major in Akbar’s Army about to embark on the Battle of Panipat. I can imagine him inspecting the elephants, looking over the horses, asking the chief trainer why it is taking so long to domesticate rhinoceroses, talking to the kitchen manager to make sure enough supplies have been packed for the long march ahead etc.
My tasks as I went about the house gathering things were just as varied. Make arrangements to feed the fish, take care of the trees, pack the snow pants, gloves and caps, butler up and pack the food, take on spare shoes, DVD, audio books, physical books, kindles. By the end of all this impressive bustling, the car trunk looked reasonably well occupied. The children and their parents were all counted and loaded. We backed out of the garage when I yelped like a cat that caught a stray pellet from a naughty child.It was as ifa bolt went through me. “What?”,“WHAT?”, “Amma!” the voice modulation on each expression would have had Opera teachers proud. I murmured a sheepish ‘Sorry’ and scampered off to get a last minute something from the kitchen. I prudently hid it in the handbag.
“What did you miss?”
“Yes – Amma. The car is full of stuff!” said the daughter who had made the last seat into a sort of villa with curtains, pillows and a blanket. I doubt whether Emperor Akbar was as comfortable in his royal palanquin as she was.
“I’ll tell you later.” I said in a mysterious tone, donning a serious expression, for I was sure to be ticked off had they known what the commotion had been about.
I don’t know about you, but I find being perfectly dressed a chore. By perfectly dressed I mean for the weather. Take for instance, Tuesday. I checked the weather forecast, and it looked pretty much the same as Monday. On Monday, I felt like a shaved penguin in Patagonia, for it might have been bright, but it was tooth-chatteringly cold even indoors. My cotton slacks and sandals were struggling to keep bodily warmth and by the time I stumbled into the house and drew up in front of the heater, I was beginning to lose feeling in my toes.So, the next day, I turtled up and wore, I mean, I bucked up and wore a turtle neck sweater, closed shoes and went proudly, only to be sweating mildly.
Anyway, the point is, when I mess up on such a grand scale while looking at the weather forecast for a place I live in, I can be pardoned for messing up on a trip, right?
We started out from Spot A to Spot B. Spot A clearly thought it was May, and had asked the sun to shine that way, while Spot B thought it was January. It is only when we got down from the car to take in the breath-taking view that one realized that breathing in was alright only because the air does not freeze.
Chill-blaines crept up within an hour of being exposed and when I dashed into the department store for some milk, my mind was craving a good cup of tea.
“We can stop at Starbucks!” said fellow car-inmates, but I scoffed on an impressive scale even if I had to swallow some cold-ish air in the process.I stuck my nose up in the air and said that Starbucks may have gotten a lot of things right, but an Indian tea? No Sir. Epic Fail. I miss the good old cuppa Indian tea more than I can say on trips like these.
A few minutes later, we had washed up ashore inside our rental spot and I was rattling about in the kitchen. The children got their hot cocoa and I made us some impressive Indian tea scented with cardamoms and ginger. Just the right amount of tea, right amount of sugar at the right temperature.
Tea Please
Allow me to enjoy a moment of contentment with the tea. When you visit a place like this, it is but natural to view the hot cuppa tea with a devotion meant for divinity.
Once the tea had made its way in and warmed our innards, I confessed that it had been for the tea that I had dashed into the house at the last minute.All was forgiven, and I got the indulgent eye from everyone. “You and your tea!”
Yes. Me and My tea and proud of it! Well, even NPR covered the tea:
Much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tea leaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet.
P.S: This has already become a decent length blog. I just might follow it up with another tea-blog for, ‘Traveling and Tea’ brings so many memories flooding into the brain.
I first noticed it in the morning. I had a can of milk in one hand, a foot stuck in the door to keep the refrigerator open, something in my mouth and asked the toddler, who ran into the kitchen, a question. Larks might be brighter in the mornings when they chirp, but I haven’t seen one to compare and contrast. Anyway, he walked/ran into the kitchen at a brisk pace.
I asked him whether he would like cheese in his lunch-box that day. He stopped his brisk walk, looked at me seriously, took a deep breath like he was meditating by puffing out his cheeks (One might think I’d asked him his opinion on the world’s most serious problem), and then made a sound that sounded like a bubbling brook in a stream.
Mornings, are however, not the best time for me to notice bubbling brooks or streaming croaks for that matter. Unlike the lark, spark, gay, bright morning-person, I am a groggy potato head. The head still feels under the weather and the nose tip mysteriously shows a twitch to point itself towards the covers of the bed just vacated.
The same thing happened later in the evening when I asked him if he wanted a chocolate biscuit or a cheese cracker. I laughed and moved on. When it happened for the third time that evening, he bubbled over without being asked a question, I stopped to ponder. Was the bubbling-brook-laugh telling me something? It turns out it was.
Bubbling Brook or River
So I tried to figure out what caused it. It wasn’t that he was practicing the bubbling-brook-laugh, for he laughed multiple times without screwing his face up with intense concentration, taking a deep breath, and puffing out his cheeks. It must have been something else.
After a few minutes, I gave it up for the moment. Things at dinner-time had hotted up nicely when a glass of water was tipped over. I had a real waterfall sound to deal with, and the b. brook went out of my mind.
Later that night, as we lay in bed swapping bedtime stories, I asked him what they all planned to do for Valentine’s Day. He started to tell me, when his older-and-presumably-wiser sister popped in. “Hey! Scoff like I taught you to. Remember she is saying something cheesy!” she said and showed him to scoff Disney-style.
I watched him and right enough, he did it again. He bubbled his laugh like a brook. Only he did not know what cheesy meant, so every time I made a reference to cheese, he ‘scoff’-ed like a b.b. Ha!
Some mysteries are worth it. Happy Valentine’s Day even if you do scoff at the idea.
From then on, life is a sweet song as you crave for every work of theirs. I like uplifting material in general, and Miss Read provides just that. She has a sunny, optimistic outlook on life and chronicles life as it unfolds around her in the English country-side. She does not shy away from the harsher realities of life such as alcoholism or poverty.She manages to capture her characters with wit, sometimes scathing social commentary, but she is always charitable toward them and grants them the benefit of being human while navigating life. Every character is endearing in their own way.
Who was the author who said that, we all make a great effort to see how different we are from one another, yet, it is not how different we are from one another, but how we are like one another that shines through?Anyway, that is how I feel when I read Miss Read’s books. She may have written about a small village in the British Isles. Yet, I feel I know people like them. People who I willingly or otherwise encounter in my life. People I can pop in to have tea with and people who will be there for me when I need them. For that, I am always grateful.
Her books were written in post-war England through the 60s and 70s. There are a few novels that she set in an earlier era and I was reading one of those when a particularly poignant piece of prose moved me enough to let a tear-drop fall. She had captured, once again, like numerous others before and after her, the heart-wrenching impact of lost lives and severed limbs that is the effect of war.She had written about a cold morning in early 1915 when the family residing in the village town of Caxley was affected by the War.
There I was sitting and reading about it on a cold morning in early 2015 and it sent a shudder through my heart.
My uncle passed away a few days ago. He was 101. I sat there thinking that he was born around the time the First World War started. He served in the Second World War ( A fact I did not know about him till after his death). He rarely spoke about his time in the War, for he was a gentle soul and war jarred on him. I fervently hope that our Earth will not have to endure any more wars, but that is wishful thinking. As long as there are human-beings, there will be conflict. We can only hope that we gain enough tolerance to settle down together, minimize our losses and learn to live happily. He lived through India’s fight for Independence, (including hard times in his own fortunes), and a half-century of post-independence history. We all remember him as a sweet and gentle soul with a ready smile, a good encouraging word to share for everyone, a tower of strength to his wife, sister and daughters and a lover of knowledge.
A few days later, an aunt passed away. She was 82. She may not have had the worldly outlook that the uncle had, for she was busy battling a tough life. Stricken with polio at the age of ten, I think her life was one hard song. Yet, when I think of her, the first thing that my brother and I can remember is when she came and stayed with us for a few months during a particularly rough patch in our life. She was there limping her way with enthusiasm never wincing to take on an ounce of extra work, never complaining that her leg impeded her. She was happy amidst the fruits and vegetables that were aplenty in our home and showed her gratitude by cooking sweet rice (pongal) and offering it to the Lord everyday. We begged her to go easy on the sweets, for they were not going easy on our waist-lines and she said, “As long as you make the offering to God first, you will not put on weight!”
My father, a compassionate man, told us not to stop her, for she had never seen plenty. ‘We will lose the weight easily enough, but can you see her this happy?’ (I don’t think the father lost the weight easily enough, but that is a side-point)
That had been our little joke for years. It morphed into various statements:
Tuck into the chocolates – if your heart is good, you won’t put on weight.
Plunge into the rasgollas – if you are happy, you won’t put on weight.
Bite into the almond cakes – if you are grateful for it, you won’t put on weight.
Wade into the payasam – even the Gods drank nectar, and they never put on weight.
You get the gist.
Both of them lived long, rich and diverse lives spanning a century. They watched lifestyle changes, outlook changes, political drama, technological advances, personal challenges – good and bad. How often we don’t stop to think what the person next to us has undergone? How often we think of ourselves, our voices and our motives alone, without stopping to think about another person’s perspective?
We can learn from everyone’s example and everyone’s mistakes . I hope life brings with it a certain wisdom while retaining the enthusiasm to learn and try new things.
I see you rolling your eyes, nodding your head and saying, “Well, do Januaries roll into April?” Probably making a side note as to how the unhinging need not have happened so soon and so on. But as I stepped out on a walk, that is exactly how I felt. Cherry blossoms that usually start peeking out in March and filling out with beautiful scented flowers in April already seem to be scenting the beautiful air. After a brief spell of rain in December, the clouds have moved on, leaving behind green hills and cherry blossoms in January. The days have a magical quality about them that makes staying indoors seem like a shame.
Cherry Blossoms already?
You can, therefore, understand my wanting to utilize the gorgeous day over the week-end to step outside and go to the park with the family. I huffed and I puffed, but the family, behaved like reluctant groundhogs and burrowed themselves deeper into the earth and refused. Imagine my surprise the next day to see that in a fit of gallant enthusiasm, the husband and daughter had prepared a picnic lunch and had it packed and ready. I could have swooned if a passing sofa had not lent me its sturdy support.
After the picnic, we took a short walk by a pine and eucalyptus tree lined path. We stopped to peer down at the marvelous surroundings when a biker told us all about some prehistoric rocks that we could find if we kept going.
Can I see dinosaurs?
“I can see dinosaur?” asked the breathless toddler all-a-twitter, whose curriculum now includes dinosaurs. Ihated to break it to the fellow that he was a few million years late at chancing upon dinosaurs, but we settled down to see a groundhog instead.
Anything that requires stopping and peering down at something is always a huge hit with the son, who will willingly stop at every daisy or squirrel. So, the groundhog really was a bonus, though a bit of a step down from a dinosaur. To see a groundhog on Groundhog day was exciting.( Shh! It might have been a mole. I am not the best at distinguishing species.)
I also read this article that said that in earlier times, Groundhog Day was not simply a day to welcome Spring, but also to eat groundhogs.
T’was the end of the Christmas holiday, or if you prefer the politically correct version: T’was the end of the Holiday Season holiday , and the family was quietly going about the business of getting back to business. That is, we yelled across staircases for missing tiffin boxes, wondered aloud why things that were to be done during the luxurious break were still undone, books landed with a thump on the stairs, socks pushed under the sofa were retrieved and shoes frantically scoured the home for their partners. Folks wandering past the home may have been pardoned for thinking there was a nursery inside, but there! It was a typical end-of-vacation-day.
I opened the daughter’s backpack, put my hand in and let out a strangled yelp. I may have heard snapping inside, but I also felt like I was holding a fur ball. Judging by the smell, it could have been a marmalade-smeared rat or an orange-scented skunk. I felt around a bit more and there was another such monster.There was nothing to be done. I bit down the nausea brought on by eating too many cookies, remembered the brave deeds of my father while tackling rats in our childhood home, squared my shoulders for the onslaught and plunged my hand in with a grim determination to retrieve whatever monster the bag held.
There was no cat or rat to let out of the bag. It was just a couple of sad looking oranges that had long ago passed its ‘Best by’ date. Judging by the fungi on it, it may be long past the ‘Fling without spattering’ date as well. I moaned a sound that started out as ‘Ugh’, pitched up to a holler of her complete name, and squeaked down at ‘please’.
The School Bag
“Let’s clean it up.” I said becoming the stern taskmaster.We trooped up the stairs with the foul smelling bag and its 100 pound contents. I kid you not, that bag weighs about 100 pounds – I don’t know what is in there, for every child I see pulls this mini-suitcase-like bag along bursting at its seams with books it seems, and yet when it is time to buckle down to a piece of homework or an assignment, I see a fair bit of telephoning and neighbor hopping to ‘see if my friend has the book to finish the assignment’ happening. Sigh.
It was a good few minutes later, and the techniques of deep breathing successfully applied gave me the glowing answer. I let her deal with the bag with the able assistance of her father. There was still some bag-related noise upstairs, but it had mellowed to a gurgle with occasional spurts of “But Appa! I need that. It is for Moon-city.” (their play patch is christened something-city)This dash-city is home to some willow trees and a large grass patch. Lodged in blah-city is a variety of treasures ranging from pine cones to balls made of pencil shavings. (I have a series of blogs on pencil shavings that will make entertaining reading when I sit down to writing about it).It looked like a large layer of the general debris in the schoolbag was for Sun-city.
I like these glimpses into her childhood that I get. I hope this is the kind of thing that she will throw her mind back to when she thinks of her childhood. As a child I was best amused when left to my own devices and swinging on a tree trunk still tickles the endorphins in me. I agree with Bertrand Russell when he says that “The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness.”
Anyway, back to the bag. Judging by the level of debris in her bag, she may be one of the most creative persons I know. For there is this study that says folks with the messiest desks are the most creative.
The day was cloudy and cold as I stepped out for a walk. As I neared a spot where there are wide grasslands, I paused here and there to see two warblers, an American robin, a goldfinch, sparrows, and blue-colored scrub jays. It was as I was panting near what I thought was a red-breasted robin that it struck me, as to how much biophony has reduced in the areas of our habitat. I am no ornithologist. In fact, I am a bird who is seldom right about birds – for all you know I may have been watching two sparrows, a bunch of bullfinches, some doves and a bluejays. You see, birdwatching is a hobby that requires patience, and I start to hum before I am properly stationed with the binocs. That would hardly do to the elusive birds waiting for peace and quiet before emerging from the bushes and so on. No sir. You would not find me waiting with a pair of binoculars behind any tree for the life of me. That kind of joy requires patience and I know best of all, that I am as restless as a hummingbird. Despite this, I love watching birds when they are not shy enough to stray across my path. I love their peckings and their cooings and their general sense of industry.
Birds
I listened to the bird calls for a few minutes and thought about how much I miss the sounds of birds. The only sounds we hear often is the Angry Birds background music that is both irritating and jarring from some multi-media entertainment channel. We have truly substituted cacophony for biophony. What is biophony? A word I was interested to learn about as I listened to this recording of noises in a California forest over the past 10 years.
It has happened so gradually that many are oblivious to the change, and now happily go on with their lives. Save for a pang now and again, we don’t set aside another thought to the missing birds in our life.
In other news, I read recently that children exposed to inordinate amounts of screen time are less tuned to reading people’s emotions and acting accordingly. Apparently, they miss subtle body language and facial clues, and blunder on to make things worse.
If we ever need to get a peek into what society will be like when that transformation happens completely, all one needs to do is seat themselves in front of any appalling soap opera on Indian Television. The maudlin entertainment pulled my attention when the parents or parents-in-law were here several times. There the heroine is:impeccably groomed, dressed like she is going for a party, to receive her abusive husband or to confront angry relatives or something-that-will-ensure-she-cries-buckets-in-minutes. But there is something else here for us to observe. She babbles on completely ignoring the cues that are emanating from the person she is conversing with. There is nothing but brooding silence, or desperately angry vibes that are coming from the other person. Of course, no good can come from this, and pretty soon, everything thuds to a stop with an explosion of sorts. (The same thing could have happened with a man, but Indian TV prefers crying women.) The glycerine acts immediately and there are tears and dubious sentiments on culture and I gag (once again) in the confines of my home.
This saddens me. Is this not what society is headed for if we lose the ability to study the subtle hints that body language gives us? I truly can’t think of a bleaker future than one where we regress to live like folks in Tamil TV serials. If you had told me that we would have to adopt the babboon-way-of-life again, I would have been less sad, for we might have evolved into humans once again.
The problem is that, it will be a slow process, one in which one generation of parents finds a subtle change in their offspring and another change in the generation after that. We may, in the meanwhile, categorize these mystifying changes to a generation gap and only realize three generations later when a great grandparent talks about a time when he used a subtle cue to decipher a situation.
Just like we cannot bring the biophony back, what if we cannot bring one of our most useful social skills back?
The house sat there in the cold with its heater shivering and sputtering. A house on the banks of a large lake in the Winter is bound to be cold and forbearing. The backyard had an iron wicket gate that opened onto a wooden pier jutting into the lake. There, on the pier, were some wooden chairs, and a rickety swing. Out on the waters, a hundred mallards quaked and quacked, finding their voices. It was in this setting that the woman sat sipping tea contemplating life. Her thoughts were flitting, meditatively, she thought. One minute she sat thinking of mallards, the next, the temperature of the water. Even the sun’s rays were cold, but bright. The Dal Lake is supposed to be as beautiful. Could Jahannara and Shah Jahan and all those Moghul emperors have enjoyed the beauty of the lake, with a thousand servants to do their bidding and an army waiting at close quarters? Could they have felt inconspicuous when presented with nature’s beauty?
Maybe the true test of one’s ego is how we react to Nature.
The woman looked around her once more, and noticed a furious scurrying in the house. The house had an attache. One had to step outside and scurry a few steps to make it to the attache. The woman saw a young boy running across with a large pile of bed linen. One of the sheets were scraping along on the floor behind him. The woman’s instinct was to let the boy know, but that would mean screaming and shattering the pervading peace of the surroundings. What if the sheets are a bit filthy, she thought uncharitably. If she had stepped out for a few minutes to contemplate life, why not use the opportunity to do just that?
A few seconds later, a young girl emerged dragging a larger pile of bed linen behind her and ran across the same patch. The woman had seen enough of human scurryings and went back to observing the docked boats and the many forms of life the lake housed. While this beautiful Earth struggles with a myriad different things, what do different lifeforms struggle with?
It was a few minutes before she glanced back at the house.What greeted her was the boy scurrying from the attache to the main house with a huger pile of linen dragging behind him. A few minutes later, a young girl came dragging bedspreads, comforters and pillow cases behind her. Why was all the bedding being shifted from A to B and then again from B to A? Behind the young girl, trooped a large pretty dog vigorously wagging his tail. Had she seen the dog close-up, she could have detected the sense of purpose that he too was helping in the linen shifting. She had often seen this to be the case with dogs close to children. Their work seems important and by association so are they.
Was that how we viewed ourselves? And just like that, her mind started thinking of mankind and its search for meaningful work. How would one feel if their work was not impactful in any direct way? What if the continuous evolving nature of the world leaves people behind, or merely slows them down? A recent book she’d read, The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, took up this very question and analyzed it from the viewpoint of a butler. A butler, whose career had been in the service industry, serving his Lord that he trusted implicitly. When during the course of his lifetime, butlers were no longer needed, what happens to him? A moving question that everyone needs to think about.
In what ways do we define our work and how do we derive importance from our work? Is being completely attached a good thing, any more than being partially detached is?The ability to question ourselves and reflect, coupled with strong doses of work is what keeps mankind evolving. It is also what makes us stand up for who we are, in small ways and big. Every little moral stream presents us with the choice of steering clear, dipping our toes, swimming in, jumping across or flying across.
Such were the questions buzzing in her butterfly brain as she went back towards the house. Maybe there was work to do with moving the beds out.
Nourish-n-Cherish 