Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Unexpected Philosophizing or Crisis and Resolution

It started off as one of those seemingly harmless, meandering conversations with the kids:

D: So now I'm six and going to first standard. Do you think I can keep having birthday parties as long as I live?
Me: Sure, but don't be surprised if I don't intend to invite anybody for your birthday after you turn 10. If they happen to turn up by themselves, that's fine. But don't expect a party with balloons and return gifts and stuff.
A: You mean I can only have 2 more before I stop everything? 
Me: Yep. Sorry... have you seen any older kids blowing candles and cutting out cake and playing party games? Nope. After some time, people just get older and they have private celebrations at home. I'll still buy you cake and you can still cut it, if you would like. But I am not going to throw a party.
D: Did I have a party when I turned five?
Me: yes
D: Did I have a party when I turned four?
Me: yes
D: Did I have a big party or a small party?
Me: You had a humongously big one when you turned 3. That was the first one we celebrated in India and a whole ton of people came.
D: What about when I was a baby?
Me: Yes, even if you were too young to really know any difference.
D: What about when I was in your tummy?
A: No, nothing for you then. Only for me. 
D: You mean you weren't happy I was in your tummy?
Me: I celebrated by eating chocolate. You went wild inside- you kicked up a storm.
D (satisfied): Ok. What about before you had Ani- when you were in school?
A: Appa and mummy weren't even married yet. Why would they celebrate your birthday?
Me: You were only a distant idea to me at that time, baby. I was too busy celebrating my birthday at that time!
D: Where was I then? Was I with God? 
A: No, you would have been someone else's kid. And your Appa and Mummy would have been different. You would have been different too... maybe you were a donkey. 
D: Mamma! Is that true?!
Me (completely taken aback, responding to the easiest part first): huh.... It's possible, I guess. Baby donkeys are awfully cute though. They have such long eye lashes and they are very smart and very stubborn. They know exactly what they want- just like you!

Inside, I was reeling. It made me lose my breath for almost a good minute while my brain raced through the buried ramifications of Ani's statement. 

My kids might have been someone else's kids. Someone else in the world might be grieving for their lost ones and I got them in some kind of cosmic musical chairs.

My parents might be someone else's kids now! When I think of my parents, I think of them bobbing around in heaven somewhere, gossiping, thinking, arguing... actually, pretty much the way they were when they were alive, but surrounded by clouds or something. And always, always aware of what I or the kids are up to down here. Sort of like those Hogwarts headmasters.

To think they might not actually be there, but have started lives elsewhere, is horribly weird.

Maybe they might have left some parts of their souls sitting around in heaven doing all of the above... Sort of like having a post box with a forwarding address to collect all the thoughts that go up their way and then direct it to the "right" entity which look like my memories of them.

This reincarnation stuff is a lot more complicated than it seems like at first glance. Hey, maybe my kids weren't really human earlier... maybe they were, I don't know, ants or something and had easy deaths and came back as humans (because they were such good ants?).
And maybe my parents, because they were such evolved people, aren't really back on earth in some different avatar but are truly merged with God... maybe they learned everything they needed to learn. Though, well... my dad was pretty short-tempered and my mom used to get super-stressed and broody about stuff sometimes... so, perhaps they weren't as evolved? Maybe they are back on earth after all? Then again, isn't the time in heaven supposed to be really really slow compared to Earth time? So maybe they have actually only been there for about a day, and it might take them a while to leave again, during which time I would have become older and more prepared for them not to be hanging around where I expect them to be hanging around.

Jeez... this is too, too complicated.

One thing my parents did teach me. When in crisis, seek help. Where else would I look but the Bhagavad Gita for matters of the soul? I know very little of the BG (actually, the kids know way more than I do, since they learn it in school... A and D can recite a couple of full chapters, isn't that crazy?), but I do know these sentences:

Nainam chindanti shastrani
Nainam dahati pavakaH
Na chainam kledayantyapo
Na shoshayati marutaH

नैनं छिन्दन्ति शस्त्राणि नैनं दहति पावकः । न चैनं क्लेदयन्त्यापो न शोषयति मारुतः ॥

Nothing can destroy the soul- no weapon, no fire, not water nor wind.

Don't ask me which chapter and which verse. God knows... haha... literally.

I'll find my relief where I can. As the BG says, it does not matter what the body is. The soul remains eternal. It doesn't matter if my parents are up or down or look different. The body is like the clothes we wear and discard. I should stop making my monkey brain jump all over the place and trust that my parents' souls are intact and no matter where they exist, they feel the strength and love in my thoughts. Similarly, I should trust that my kids' souls also feel the same and that they may be feeling the strength and love from people and other souls that I have no clue about. 

That is simultaneously frightening and awe-inspiring.  


Monday, March 25, 2019

Many posts

I've uploaded a ton of posts below. Most of them were sitting around as drafts and then I got tired of them being drafts and published them...
You've been warned...

Urban blues

What I really want to do:
Wake up in a farm somewhere- clean air, some flowers, many trees, a bunch of birds.
I don't want to wake up to piles and piles of plastic garbage and smoke.

Five more years, Bangalore. That's all I'll give you. After that, I am going to a village far far away from the madding crowd. A clean village with clean air. Where when I look out, I don't just keep seeing some concrete and smoke, but actual greenery. What a treat that would be.

Screen Time

My kids get a lot of screen time- between video games on the phone, Netflix on TV and Youtube, they watch a good bit more than the 2 maximum hours recommended by the American Academy of Pediatricians (Ani would say, if he heard me say this, "well, the Indian Academy doesn't have any recommendations so why are we following Americans in India?").

On holidays, or afternoons when I'm at work and the kids are with the maid at home, their screen time shoots up even more. To be honest, even when I take them to work with me and I leave them in lab to attend a meeting, by the time I'm back, both would have somehow managed to get hold of phones and will be playing video games on them.

In an effort to promote actual conversation around the house, I decreed a no-screen time around dinner. Instead, the kids and I sit around in a circle with our food and I'm supposed to tell them stories. The best stories eliciting the biggest laughs are those from my own past. I dig through my memories and tell them stories of when we used to be a joint family at the ancestral home. Five families lived under one roof for a few years- the stories I recall are from the time I was probably around 4 till about 7. Five families, my grandmom, her elder sister, and 4 cousins growing up bickering and fighting and laughing.  A total of 16 humans. Imagine the amount of cooking and washing! And this was before washing machines!

But all this humanity living under one roof made some pretty hilarious stories. In addition to the humans were also animals! This was during the time when there were enough trees on that street that there used to be monkeys. So antics of monkeys competed with the antics of humans.

So anyway, all this forced conversation- time is making me recall stories that had long been buried within my memory... weirdly enough, most of my stories from that time revolve around a couple of cousin brothers I don't really communicate much with these days. Now I wonder why I don't. So maybe I should reach out and try to make a connection again.

Despite all the scoldings and yellings that I subject my kids to, I must thank God for them- they make me do unexpected, but very valuable and fun things.

Death. Again.

There a bunch of apartment complexes on our road. These were converted from individual small houses into apartments some decades ago. The relative narrowness of the road and the odd-shapes of these old plots ensure some interesting layouts of the complexes.
Although city laws mandate that no apartment can be more than 3 floors, nobody pays attention to that and most of these apartment complexes are 4-6 stories high. Again, very little attention is paid to strictures about wall heights and so on and perhaps building contractors cut corners, but it's not surprising to see fairly low walls even on the higher floors.

You see where I'm going with this, don't you?

One young man today, when leaning over a wall to grab a towel from the clothesline (no, nobody thought that perhaps the clothesline should not be at that particular place) leaned a bit too much and fell and died. Two of Durga's young friends happened to walking on the road at the time and jumped out of the way just in time to see him land with a thump at their feet. He apparently blinked at them, and then faded out of consciousness and died before the ambulance could get there.

Who was this poor man? Who are his family? What a senseless, pointless way to go.


What makes a person dead? And what is that spark that makes them alive? Life and death. What great, inexplicable mysteries they are. All the stories we have about resurrection, medical miracles, zombies, and even reincarnation- aren't they all just ways for us to try to wrap our heads around these fundamental concepts? We make death a little more understandable by giving it names: The Grim Reaper, Yama on his bull... the fact that any of us can die any time due to any reason is a horribly scary truth and we try to make it a little less scary by making up stories around them. After all, if Savitri could negotiate with Yama to bring back her husband, if Bill and Ted could play games with the Grim Reaper and rescue themselves, if some medical miracle can pull people back from the brink, then perhaps we too will be saved from a sudden, inexplicable end.

What about those two kids at whose feet this guy fell? What a horrible experience for them. How will this affect them?  Though, knowing the kids on our street, they probably will be just fine. Somehow, what would seem a terrible tragedy that would elicit hours of reflection and many articles about the dangers of construction and perhaps a couple of bills on safety being passed in the US, seems pretty commonplace in India. Maybe it's because kids face death in other forms every day- an unlucky dog with a crushed skill on the road, a crow pecking at a rat carcass, a goat being bled before it gets cooked.... what is neatly sanitized in the US is very in-your-face here in India. So maybe kids are not exactly unfamiliar with death.

Still.... that poor man and his poor family. My prayers with them. May they have the strength to go on.

Grim determination


I WILL get this paperwork done for my parents' bank accounts and life insurance policies and the other million small baskets that my dad decided to save up his eggs in and I WILL GRIN and BEAR IT.

So SBI, HDFC, LIC, ICICI- whatever other initials there are- throw me whatever crap shit paperwork you have. I will rip through it.

Yaaaaaaahhhhh!