Reflections within and without....

Relationships come in many different flavors and there is no denying that but even in the closest of my friendships, one difference I have always noted is the extent of 'privacy or space' we have afforded each other. I have some relationships that are based on this tacit, implicit acceptance of each other - where words are often insufficient and superfluous. We know how much we care and we let it be. We don't question, proclaim, pick and choose words - we just are. 

And then there are other relationships where there is an abundance of words, where arguments are dissected, hashed out, said aloud, as are reconciliations. Where saying everything, somehow holds the key to being close and staying together. Words are a big part of these relationships and my ineptitude with them often works to my disadvantage. 

I have learnt and grown with both these kind of friendships. While the former was my refuge on days when I did not want to talk and there are many like that. The latter, were the ones that pulled me out of my cocoon and helped me externalize my angst and frustrations - and I have had plenty of those too. 

In my reflections on these two kinds of relationships, I have found a state of ambivalence to both modes of operation and yet I exhibit a preference to holding onto my thoughts, my own state of mind, my own feelings about things - up till the point where there is no ambiguity about what the events are actually going to be. And yet, over the years, my friends have cajoled me into emptying my mind to an extent that, now, I find venting out to them a relief. But this is always a game of thresholds for me because to me - on an ideological level, talking seems futile, while reflections and musings seem to hold the key to most problems. 

Incomprehensible as it may seem to most - this worked the best for me... 

This dilemma about my preferred mode of operation has lingered with me long enough so that I recognized shades of it in the article from New Yorker when I came across it today. My idea of self, the foundations of my relationships, my need for words and my complete ineptitude with them at times, all resonate deeply with this conflict between our private, inner self and our need to connect. 

At that point, I just had to share it here... 

After all, most reading is a process of uncovering someone else's work in finding better words to describe your thoughts... 

Here are some excerpts from the article that seemed most pertinent to me but the whole of it is beautifully written. 

Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.

“The compensation of growing old,” he thinks, is that “the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” By learning to leave your inner life alone, you learn to cultivate and appreciate it.

And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much.

And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much. Woolf suggests that those treasured feelings might be the source of charisma: when Peter, seeing Clarissa at her party, asks himself, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?,” the answer might be that it’s Clarissa’s radiance, never seen directly, but burning through. Clarissa, meanwhile, lets her spiritual intuitions lift her a little above the moment. Wandering through her lamp-lit garden, she sees her party guests: “She didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.” That’s the power of artist’s privacy. It preserves the melodies otherwise drowned out by words, stories, information.

“Sharing” is, in fact, the opposite of what we do: like one of Woolf’s hostesses, we rehearse a limited openness so that we can feel the solidity of our own private selves.

Every now and then, too, you come across some artwork that expresses Woolf’s sensibility in an altogether different idiom, refreshing it. Since I first stumbled across it a few years ago, I’ve watched Lucinda Williams’s 1989 performance of “Side of the Road” hundreds of times. The song is built around a simple metaphor: Williams is driving down the road with a loved one, and happy to be driving. Still, she wants to pull over to the side of the road and stand there by herself. “I want to know you’re there, but I want to be alone,” she sings.

If only for a minute or two, I want to see what it feels like to be without you. 

I want to know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind.
I walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs.
I just stood and looked out at the open space, and a farmhouse out a ways.
And I wondered about the people who lived in it,
And I wondered if they were happy and content.
Were there children, and a man and a wife?
Did she love him and take her hair down at night?

If I stray away too far from you, don’t go and try to find me.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it doesn’t mean I
won’t come back and stay beside you.
It only means I need a little time
To follow that unbroken line,
To a place where the wild things grow,
To a place where I used to always go.

From an entirely different angle, Williams has captured the same idea that we find in Woolf’s novels: that there is no final, satisfying way to balance our need to be known with our need to be alone. The balance is always uncertain and provisional; it’s always a matter of dissatisfaction, give-and-take, and sacrifice. Because an artist’s privacy is a state of mind, rather than a matter of law, there are no rules to help us master it. It’s up to each of us to balance the risks and rewards—to trade, in right proportion, loneliness for freedom, explicability for mystery, and the knowable for the unknown within ourselves.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S IDEA OF PRIVACY
POSTED BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/joshuarothman/2014/07/virginia-woolf-idea-of-privacy.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook 

Incredible India!

India, many say, is like an addiction. I agree, because I need my fix every year or two. Else, it leaves me miserable, strung-over and frustrated, teetering on the edge of a collapse. There is something about the air that slows my pace and my pulse down. Time there seems to move at a pace more manageable. People are more personable, even perfect strangers. The days do not leave me feeling rushed, dazed and exhausted like they do back ‘here’. I become my own person, not some harried, do-it-all who is unable to do it all. 

This year’s trip, after two long years, came differently though and I didn't have any expectations. Friends were all too busy, family – close and far, ranged from disinterest and skepticism to occasional excitement. I wasn’t looking to get anywhere, only trying to get away and this has usually never been the case with me. I came on a vacation laden with fatigue, anxiety, trepidation, anger, skepticism and very little of hope for anything wonderful.

There was a surgery planned but no vacation. There was a hospital stay planned, but no hotel stay. There were tests planned, no get-togethers. I was prepared for nothing and yet, this time, I couldn’t care. I was above and beyond caring and needed the space and the time.

Surprisingly though, it was not a bad trip. It wasn't all that I had imagined because I didn't manage to visit all my haunts; the get-together’s have been different, have felt a little incomplete; home has felt different but reassuringly same; and people have changed – aged, some in ways favorable, but some in ways sad and unexpected; some places which were defined by their people have changed and become a little more alien. But despite the lack of expectations or plans, I must say things have not been bad. I wonder if it is because of the lack of expectations or because of that deep-seated fear of something terrible about to happen - whose mere absence is reassuring enough… 

After two years of a never-ending maze, I finally feel empty, peaceful, quiet. I can now sense the person I used to be – emerging from the haze. The camera, the books, the places and the people - are slowly becoming appealing. I think I am an addict and need my fix of this country held-together by nothing but its people and ‘jugaad’. 

I still don’t feel ready to pack up and leave forever.

Explore India…

to become aware of the vastness of space.
to encounter history in every day life.
to become aware of the smallness of your being.
to learn that wealth has little to do with happiness.
to learn to find your identity in a mass of humanity
to find a nation that is bursting at the seams but manages to hold together because of its people.
to find order in perfect chaos.
to find harmony from noise.
to find a nation that encompasses the climes of the world.
to learn to cherish diversity.
to become aware of the forces of nature.
to become aware of the eternities that lie before and after you.

Explore India….
For it tests your limits and grows them one step at a time.
For it reveals unsuspected abilities.
For it highlights the weaknesses that you have successfully ignored.
For it let’s you live happily with very little.
For a digital detox.
For the chai-coffee and gup-shup.
For the scenes of gully-cricket that beats with a pulse of its own.

Explore India….
to remind yourself of the better side of human nature as perfect strangers come out to help you.
to also learn that people have a dark side.
to learn to watch out for yourself.
to learn to enjoy the world with caution.
to communicate without words.
to stop and smile, to feel the wind in your hair.
to watch butterflies crash into your windshields.
to watch majestic elephants roam the wild.
to understand the language of horns, sirens, blinkers and reflectors.

Explore India….
to expand your palate.
to notice the sunrise and the sunset.
to slow down your pace of life because time here does set a different pace.
to float above the clouds.
to feel the wind in your hair and to feel the rhythm in your pulse.
to tickle your senses.
to meet new people.
to sing new songs.

In short, visit India if you really want to live your life... and that is why I need my dose of India to function sanely.

Anna Karenina

Some books have a way of parsing through your thoughts and framing them precisely and exquisitely in ways that you couldn't even dream of. 

Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy is one such book and deserves all the acclaim it has been bestowed with. It is by no means an easy book - not because of labored writing or a flawed plot, but because of the deep and dark themes that lace the story. It is a tale of fatalism, plagued with uncertainty and unknowability. 

I have been procrastinating on picking up the book for a very long time but reading the following excerpt from an article in the New Yorker and an upcoming break were the last nails that hooked me to the story. 

"In “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin writes that, for Tolstoy, wisdom consists in the ability “to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and what they cannot.” The only way to find those limits is to struggle against them, but gently, with the goal of finding and accepting them. You can’t think your way to the limits. You have to feel your way, learning through experience and suffering. And there is a risk in experimenting with what will and will not work in life, which is that it might not work. You might move to New York to pursue your dreams, and end up with no career to speak of. You might think you can wait to find the perfect spouse, but wait too long, and end up alone. You might think you can have that affair and still have the love of your spouse and children—but you may be mistaken about what’s possible, and lose everything.

There’s a deep conservatism to this way of thinking. It’s fatalistic, in an off-putting way, since it suggests that the limits of what’s possible are just not knowable in advance, and that experience and tradition are probably our best guides."

And despite its many dark themes, the story is unforgettable as it explores life from the perspectives of so many characters with great finesse and perception. Here are some of the many wonderful phrases and instances where the sentiments echoed with me and in that resonance, I caught a faint glimmer of hope. 

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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.” 

“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”

“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”

“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”

“Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!”

“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."

“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly”

“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly”

“They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.”

“it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”

“But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”

“Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”

“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”

“And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.”

“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”

“All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.”

“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.”

“He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.”

"Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it."

"No one is satisfied with his fortune, and everyone is satisfied with his wit.'"

"I think… of so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love."

"I often think men have no understanding of what's not honorable though they're always talking of it,"

How splendid it is! This is how I should like to live!" "Why, who prevents you?" said Levin, smiling. "No, you're a lucky man! You've got everything you like. You like horses— and you have them; dogs— you have them; shooting— you have it; farming— you have it." "Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don't fret for what I haven't," said Levin, thinking of Kitty.

Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society —owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity— to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life.

"With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better."

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned.

The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash tray, a manuscript book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: "No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you." This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself.

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood , but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.

"The most utterly loathsome and coarse : I can't tell you. It's not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome. Come, how am I to tell you ?" she went on, seeing the puzzled look in her sister's eyes. "Father began saying something to me just now…. It seems to me he thinks all I want is to be married. Mother takes me to a ball: it seems to me she only takes me to get me married off as soon as may be, and be rid of me. I know it's not the truth, but I can't drive away such thoughts. Eligible suitors, as they call them— I can't bear to see them. It seems to me they're taking stock of me and summing me up. In old days to go anywhere in a ball dress was a simple joy to me, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed and awkward. 

"The one comfort is like that prayer, which I always liked: 'Forgive me not according to my unworthiness, but according to Thy lovingkindness.' That's the only way she can forgive me."

In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the lower class , vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's children, earn one's bread, and pay one's debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.

The old prince , like all fathers indeed, was exceedingly punctilious on the score of the honor and reputation of his daughters. He was irrationally jealous over his daughters, especially over Kitty, who was his favorite. At every turn he had scenes with the princess for compromising her daughter. The princess had grown accustomed to this already with her other daughters, but now she felt that there was more ground for the prince's touchiness. She saw that of late years much was changed in the manners of society, that a mother's duties had become still more difficult. She saw that girls of Kitty's age formed some sort of clubs, went to some sort of lectures, mixed freely in men's society; drove about the streets alone, many of them did not curtsey, and, what was the most important thing, all the girls were firmly convinced that to choose their husbands was their own affair , and not their parents'. "Marriages aren't made nowadays as they used to be," was thought and said by all these young girls, and even by their elders. But how marriages were made now, the princess could not learn from any one. The French fashion— of the parents arranging their children's future— was not accepted; it was condemned. The English fashion of the complete independence of girls was also not accepted, and not possible in Russian society. The Russian fashion of match-making by the offices of intermediate persons was for some reason considered unseemly; it was ridiculed by every one, and by the princess herself. But how girls were to be married, and how parents were to marry them, no one knew. Everyone with whom the princess had chanced to discuss the matter said the same thing: "Mercy on us, it's high time in our day to cast off all that old-fashioned business. It's the young people have to marry; and not their parents; and so we ought to leave the young people to arrange it as they choose." It was very easy for anyone to say that who had no daughters, but the princess realized that in the process of getting to know each other, her daughter might fall in love, and fall in love with someone who did not care to marry her or who was quite unfit to be her husband . And, however much it was instilled into the princess that in our times young people ought to arrange their lives for themselves, she was unable to believe it, just as she would have been unable to believe that, at any time whatever, the most suitable playthings for children five years old ought to be loaded pistols. And so the princess was more uneasy over Kitty than she had been over her elder sisters.

Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions was an insult to one's wife, and one ought to have confidence in one's wife. Why one ought to have confidence— that is to say, complete conviction that his young wife would always love him— he did not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife's loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.

At Petersburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. "Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?" she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat. Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile, and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.

In the first place he resolved that from that day he would give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must have given him, and consequently he would not so disdain what he really had. Secondly, he would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to make an offer.

Anna. "I remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is…. Who has not been through it?"

There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what , are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day— that is, forget oneself .

"It's this, don't you see," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, "you're very much all of a piece. That's your strong point and your failing. You have a character that's all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be of a piece too— but that's not how it is. You despise public official work because you want the reality to be invariably corresponding all the while with the aim— and that's not how it is. You want a man's work, too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be undivided— and that's not how it is. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."

In life, we sometimes relinquish our freedom too easily, while, at other times, we struggle unwisely against laws that will not change. Give in too easily, and you drift through life; struggle too much, and you suffer for it.

The thing about Levin is that, through some accident of temperament and circumstances, he ends up figuring things out. He struggles and shapes his own destiny just enough to be happy, while never going out of bounds, and ending up like Anna, or like his brother Nikolai, a political radical, who dies impoverished and angry. Somehow, over the course of the book, Levin achieves everything he wants: he is married to Kitty, and they have a beautiful family. And yet, he senses, he has not really improved himself in his soul, and he has done nothing to deserve his happiness. He still feels powerless, pointless, useless. “Happy in his family life,” Tolstoy writes, “a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.” In the end, he is carried along by the flow of life, and keeps on living. He finds his way to a diffuse kind of faith. There will be no radical transformations, he realizes, either romantic or religious. What is, is. He will try his best to be a good person, within the constraints that his circumstances and nature have placed upon him, and that will be good enough:

I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

Roll of the dice...

There are hundreds of billions stars in our galaxy and then there are billions of galaxies in the known visible universe. The unknown that envelopes us stretches the very limits of our imagination.

Life, as it is today, evolved millions of years ago, from an oceanic soup, on one blue planet among an infinity of planets. The blue planet happened to be located at just the right distance and with just the right conditions for those early molecules to arise and interact. Life, that began with a roll of the dice, from the collisions and fusion of molecules over billions of years, has finally found its way to me - in a way that no one could have predicted or imagined.

And as a testament to those very unseemly probabilities, I stand here today, pondering on the nature of probabilities and life itself. Life evolved in a world that is driven by probabilities, in a universe that is being ripped apart by the forces of entropy.

I am nothing but another roll of that mysterious dice - a random product when one of the many millions of sperms found its way to this one particular egg, to set forth on a journey that culminated in me. I could not have been here today but for those sheer twists of fate and those random acts of probability that allowed two very different people separated by hundreds of miles to come together and build a life.

I could have been one of those twenty percent of pregnancies that result in a miscarriage. I could have also been among the three percent of children who are born with abnormal chromosomes - destined for a life different from the rest of us. I could have been one of the thousands of accident victims on the streets of Delhi. I could have been one among the millions of people who cannot read an alphabet. I could have been one of the thousands of girls who are forced to drop out of school. I could have been one of the seventy-four percent of people who give up education after a graduation; but instead, I am one of the one percent who complete a graduate program. I could have been a part of any of these statistics. I could have been one of the millions of women trafficked, burnt, assaulted - but instead, I am here, alive, aware and independent.

As part of my work, I try and answer the questions of why, how, when and what, but after a while, my very existence makes me believe in that elusive hope that is buried in probability. My very existence is mired in improbability and hope.

I am a statistic - just another number but its a good roll of dice that brought me here.

I have cribbed and complained, ranted and raged about every misfortune that I have encountered on the way - and it has not been easy, but once in a while, when I pause to look at what could have been - I feel like I was dealt a good hand.

But how much of our life is shaped by these random occurrences and how much is shaped by us - as people? Am I just a ripple in the fabric of time, just being carried forward passively by this billion-years old explosion or am I more than that - an agent of change?

People are a product of their times - from Hitler to Columbus to Einstein - we are all shaped by the times we live in and yet, we contribute to shaping it. It is a two-way street, it seems, but then why do I feel so powerless sometimes?

Why is it that my choice at home or in the grocery store or at work doesn't seem to have as much impact as it should?

Can my choices influence the world I am living in or am I just another number in the 7 billion?

Just another statistic, a blimp in that fabric of space and time... Are we mere puppets in the bigger scheme of things or can individuals really make a difference? And if we can't - should we just give up and wait passively?

What are the choices that I, as an individual am faced with and can any of them be responsible and right? Is buying electronics laced with conflict minerals responsible? Most would say, No. But does my giving up on technology have an impact? Does my not buying diamonds stop the trade in blood diamonds? Does my giving up on meat or avocados at the grocery store lead to better lives half-way across the planet or country? Does my buying quinoa starve the andean farmers or does my not buying quinoa starve them? 

Where does my responsibility to me, begin and end?

Where does my responsibility to the world, begin and end?

Should we as people not show moral outrage at Marius the giraffe or at the children in Syria because we can't do anything about it? Or should we just limit our actions to the occasional outrage in the media and nothing more?

Are our actions determined by morals or by the markets? Some think that the markets sanitize all these deals? Do you, because i don't?

But how much should we worry about these choices? About electricity. About water. About recycling. About food wastage. Is an individual equally powerless in all these arenas?

If yes, then are we merely prolonging our inevitable collapse and should we just give up sooner than later? Can we ever make the right choices considering we know so little of the global forces and the local problems? Does our burgeoning knowledge and awareness of these multi-faceted problems make our lives and decisions - simpler or more complex?

Can my choices influence the world I am living in or am I just yet another powerless, ever-shrinking number in the exploding 7 billion?

Am I just another statistic, a blimp in the fabric of space and time - another roll of the dice...?

The unexpected...

Life, it seems moves forward with one guiding principle - defying your expectations by presenting the unexpected.
Any time.
Every time.

Last few months have been such, where I have found things unexpectedly and lost them when least expected. One wouldn't complain if this brought on a sense of mirth, pleasure, happiness or even mild surprise. One does however, cringe, cower and explode with fury when this only pertains to bad news. One further teeters on collapse when the news affects your most favorite person in the world.

It is impossible to describe the heart break one feels when a twenty five year old is forced to bear the heavy burden of inheritance as he gets diagnosed with a chronic condition. A condition, that is merely an indication of a battle raging in him.

How does one fight their own blood? And how do you fight for your own blood?
What do you do when your own self turns against you - with a silent, seething fury? A fury that burns over years and decades as someone who looks perfectly healthy is actually being eaten from the inside.

What do you do when  your most favorite person in the world can do nothing to turn the tide of this battle?

So, you tell them the facts without letting go of the hope. You make them aware of the harshest realities of life and tell them how to cope. You pack them their care package, write a bunch of notes, explain all that you can without a trace a fear - even though, your heart is freezing numb with fear. You pat on their back when the chips are down and pray to a God, who doesn't exist to "Make this all a bad dream!".
You do this - every time you need it - hoping that you are helping, not hurting. You hope that your words are soothing the searing wound - not burning it in.

You go through each day - wondering what could have been different and if you could be next? You become more stringent about the fruits and vegetables, about that glass of milk which you might otherwise avoid. You teach them the same. You used to run for fun but now fear pushes you more than the fun.

You build a new life - a better life - detangled from the web of your habits, based on nothing but hope and your scariest visions of the future.
You live each day dreading the worst and hoping for the best. You thank the universe for its small mercies. You thank your stars for it could have been a lot worse.

You forget the whys' and focus on the hows' because what is at stake is your most favorite person ever....

You stay by their side even when you are eight thousand miles away and hope that maybe - life will surprise you again - with a better unexpected...