Wisdom by Hindsight
Our LBC colleague Delirious has a poignant post “Religiosity 101: An Explanation for the Non-Believers up in her blog which I urge my readers to read.”
And my readers know me and synchronicity. I had hardly finished reading her post and left my comments there, when a post from Nandu caught my eye and I have great pleasure in sharing that with my readers while dedicating it to Delirious.
I hope that you enjoy reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where eleven of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by Maria the gaelikaa. The ten other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Maxi, Maria SF, Padmum, Paul, Rohit,Shackman, The Old Fossil and Will. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!
Despite my protests, Ranjan and Manjiree took me to The Pune Farmers Market last Sunday for lunch. I had heard about this periodic event from Ranjan as Karen Anand and her family are good friends of his. I finally succumbed and went to see for myself how the event is organised.
I was very pleasantly surprised to see excellent arrangements with a number of participants displaying a wide variety of products and more impressed with the milling crowds everywhere. Ranjan and Manjiree kept bumping into their friends while I too met some of my friends but since they too had to float around to see what was on offer, I soon found myself all alone wandering around.
I got tired soon and tried to sit somewhere and found that what was on offer for relics like me to sit were uncomfortable and suggested to Ranjan that I quietly go back home and so Ranjan distracted me by getting some excellent snacks to eat and Asheesh got me an exotic iced tea to wash it all down. After that little distraction, Ranjan sensed that I was uncomfortable and drove me back home to amuse myself with my regular distractions of the siesta, crossword puzzles, reading and internet activities.
Moral of the story? I have enough distractions in my existing life without having to look for new adventures. My physical and mental conditions have now been fine tuned to a certain level of comfortable ambiance without which distraction becomes painful.
“I don’t want to join the rat race.
Not be enslaved by machines,
bureaucracies, boredom, ugliness.
I don’t want to be a moron, robot, commuter.
I don’t want to become a fragment of a person.
I want to do my own thing.
I want to live (relatively simply).
I want to deal with people, not with masks.
People matter. Nature matters.
Beauty matters. Wholeness matters.
I want to be able to care.”
~ E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful.
I have a young friend Pravin with all the right qualifications to get good employment in modern India, who has in fact got a well paying job, except that he has to live in Mumbai. He is prolific with his twitter tweets and facebook posts and also a dedicated blogger. He is a delightful person to know and I consider myself fortunate to have him in my life.
He however has a problem that almost all young people in our work force have. A sense of helplessness, living a life of no purpose. Commuting and the repetitive nature of his work is frustrating, but he is stuck.
This is not an unusual scenario anywhere in the world and I am sure that all my readers will know some one or the other in a similar situation.
To cheer him up, I thought that I should post this. I anticipate his response to be, “You can afford to be like Schumacher, after having lived your life and when you are in your retirement. It is different for us younger people in the work force today. Things were different in your days.”
To that, I would like to inform my young friend that no, things were not different and my generation also had very frustrating times, but that is likely to fall on deaf years. So, to at least get him to have a good laugh, let me add this little forward that I received from another young friend who is in a different kind of trouble.
“All of us are going around with an entire story of our lives, completely different from the story of our lives that anybody else would tell. So much of our lives never breaks the surface.” ~ Claire Messud in The Guardian.
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“Heroes are never perfect, but they’re brave, they’re authentic, they’re courageous, determined, discreet, and they’ve got grit.”
~ Wade Davis
I have a special fondness for Pondicherry as it was the nearest place to Chennai where alcohol was freely available during the days of prohibition in Tamil Nadu. I used to visit Pondicherry often during those days over weekends.
This and the next story will revolve around two people who I have positioned as being from Pondicherry. They are not in Pondicherry, but the stories are about two real people who are vastly different from each other but have grit in common.
Tanya James lives now in Pondicherry in the South Of India. She deserves a better life and this is her story. To protect her identity, I have changed names and places. But exist she does.
Tanya comes from an old Pondicherry family, well known for having produced many respected professionals. Tanya was born in France to Dr and Mrs. James who were living there a few decades ago as Dr James was employed as a Medical Practitioner with the French Government there. Tanya is the younger of two sisters and the elder sister too lives in Pondicherry.
While in France, Tanya’s mother took ill and wanted to return to India as she was unable to cope with the climate there, being as she was used to warmer climes of South India. Dr. James resigned from his position and returned to India to set up practice which did not do very well as he was more focused in providing care for his ailing wife.
Tanya was a brilliant student and eventually became a highly respected and successful designer with her own studio in partnership with some other male designer friends. Since Pondicherry does not offer much scope for a designer’s career, Tanya shifted to Chennai which is a much larger metropolis teeming with commercial activity and offering great scope for her.
As time passed, Dr. James’s health deteriorated and Tanya had to keep shuttling between Chennai and Pondicherry. This led to the unsavoury spectacle of her partners ripping her off and she ended up losing a great deal of money and reputation. It became difficult for her to manage both establishments and she bid Chennai goodbye and moved permanently to Pondicherry. In the process, plans for romance, marriage etc also were postponed.
When she moved to Pondicherry, her life became one of a full time care giver to both her parents. She discovered that her father’s finances were in a mess and besides providing almost round the clock care to her parents, she was able to locate some documents that helped her to approach the French government and after much effort and regular follow up, secure a pension for her invalid father. That helped because she was by this time at the end of her own financial tethers.
Further investigations when her father eventually died revealed another shocking truth to this indomitable spirit. While she was busy with her career in Chennai, her elder sister’s husband had got a comprehensive power of attorney from her father, with which he had ensured that the elder sister got all the family properties leaving nothing to our heroine. Strangely enough, the sister is indifferent to Tanya’s plight and is of no help whatsoever in resolving the inheritance issue. Tanya has lined up additional income by working from home via the internet and has decided to take on her brother in law by taking him to court to seek justice, which in India is a time consuming and expensive proposition.
As I write this story, Tanya is busy caring for her bed ridden mother, toiling to make some money whenever she can, following up on the court case and coping with her own fairly debilitating illnesses. If you meet her in person however, you will see nothing of the problems reflected in her very cheerful personality.
I have known other women and men in somewhat similar situations collapse into sniveling pathetic specimens. Not my friend Tanya, who finds reservoirs of strength from deep within to tackle all the problems with amazing resolve and determination. In my book, that is Character spelt with a capital C.
I hope that you enjoy reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where eleven of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by yours truly. The ten other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Maxi, Maria SF, Padmum, Paul, Rohit,Shackman, The Old Fossil and Will. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!
ENOUGH?
Following my last post on Raksha Bandhan, I found this very interesting news item in our local paper.
It certainly throws a different complexion to the event!