Striding Forth (Cautiously) Towards a New Phase in Life

These past 10 years (no wait.. ELEVEN!! Mind-boggling!) in India have revealed aspects of myself that I neither knew nor would have bothered to find out had I stayed on in the US. India has a way of ripping apart facades (and like every other place, putting in new ones). I have learned that I need to keep learning new things, doing things with my own hands, and occasionally feeling fear and feeling like I have triumphed over fear, to keep myself engaged and energized. Otherwise, I drift into ennuii and existential crises and have terrible moodiness. I also start devouring books without rhyme or reason, mostly to keep thoughts at bay and to fill up time.

I have felt ennuii multiple times, but more so over the past year. This happens more frequently as I become more efficient- by delegating, mentoring, putting systems in place and sometimes, plain disappearing, my various projects start running by themselves and junior people grow, start taking on more responsibilities and life becomes smoother.

Age and experience have also taught me to be less tightly wound and more philosophical about occasional perceived slowness of pace, retreats, and backfoots.

With all this knowledge and wisdom, the amount of time I have on my hands is increasing, which means I am getting awfully bored and feeling very directionless. But how to articulate this? For months I was irritated with myself- how ungrateful, how dissatisfied and how unaware of my own privilege was I acting by feeling like I didn't have enough, when I actually have so much? What right do I have to feel stressed when I have nothing concrete to feel stressed about? I am at a stage where my kids are on the brink of independence- I should be focussing on enabling that, not wallowing in some inexplicable, nebulous fugue state.

Over the past two weeks of staying in rural Australia, I have been able to get to a point where I can articulate this better. Where I realize that the lack in my life is not something concrete but internal. That I need new challenges and new directions. The old ones are familiar and while there may be occasional hiccups, they feel like roads already traveled.

This is why I am re-looking with new eyes at an old desire: to study to become a midwife. I had thought about this intensely while leaving the US for India. The timing was just never right. Now, as the kids grow up, and my interest in primary care practice increases (along with experience), I am drawn to the idea once more. I could probably also get into medical school- either in India or abroad- but not sure why I would want to. I mean, I already have a doctorate. I also have mixed feelings about the attitudes taught to medical students regardless of country (this is certainly true in India, somewhat true in the US. Not sure how it is in Australia or other parts of the world): one of condescending superiority. As a non-medical person working in the health field, I come across this often. I deal with it when personally experiencing it by batting my PhD back at them. But I have observed this in shocking ways in India with others and cringe from it.

The midwifery idea is more congruent with my own personal philosophy- support, hands-on work, giving space for another's personal preferences, valuing another's mindset and personal values, compassion, and quiet action. My life right now has a lot of the so-called "higher order" activities- leadership, management, mentoring, organization-building, systems-thinking. What I lack is higher order embodiment- using my hands and mind to actively do and improve.

What I hope to gain from completing such a course of study is access to serve in rural clinics in India and abroad. To be able to run a practice and touch someone's life for the better. To use all my learnings in building an organization and managing it, to think critically, to innovate locally and rapidly, to be nimble and flexible in operations, to grow local talent and instill leadership in young people, but in this new setting and role.

In India, the course is a combined one in Nursing and Midwifery. However, I do not like the servile attitude taught to nurses in these programs. Nurses are taught to be subservient to doctors, to have their innate leadership abilities tamped down initially and then ostentatiously and artificially "built up" through nurse leadership programs. I could be wrong, but this is my impression of it. There are also strong caste and religion- ties to nursing as a profession. I am not sure if I want to wade into these murky waters. Some of this subservience is also present in the American landscapes.

The courses in Australia and New Zealand seem much more straight-forward, "clean" in their attitudes and nurses do not act servile or subservient- they consider themselves equal to doctors. This allows for fantastic community-oriented programs run and managed by nurses and tremendous opportunities for growth in rural programs.

I also have considered if I should do only a midwifery course or a combined nursing and midwifery course. The latter seems better for future work in rural primary care. However, the combined programs are also 4 years long, compared to 2 or 3 year midwifery specific programs. I am 44 years old now. I would ideally like to start practicing before I am 50!! There are conversion pathways in Australia and NZ for registered midwifes to become nurses. I need to understand better if becoming and practising as a midwife first for a few years before becoming a nurse is better or just getting both done at the same time is better.

I also should find out how to leverage all my learnings thus far into this next phase- surely my experience and talents should atleast be able to get me some sort of scholarship or assistance in the coursework and later.

All this thinking reminds me that the best research into a new phase of life is actually conversation and discussion. Maybe in the next two weeks, before returning to India, I should reach out to some people and talk to them about all this.

Thankfully, RK is as supportive as he has always been throughout our lives together, not to mention perceptive and clear-thinking. I can't help feeling that my parents would also approve of this (while being a bit bewildered as to why, perhaps... but understanding the motivation and desire, nonetheless). As for my kids, I hope what they learn from these attempts is to be open to reinvention. Freedom of thinking is the greatest asset anyone can have ("emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds", as Bob Marley says) and I hope they actively pursue the same in their own lives.

Grappling with the Cryptic .... initially... and then ending with something else altogether.

My dad used to be a big fan of the Cryptic crossword. My cousin Sinduja had learned how to crack them- she had picked up the skill from watching a number of her aunts and uncles, including Appa, who would somehow effortlessly crack The Hindu, the Economic Times, and the NYT crosswords. Not so me- I couldn't figure out how any of these people would know just which words to unscramble or synonimize or chop off. So I stuck to the Quick.

After following Cracking the Cryptic since the days of Covid (which has all sorts of puzzles, not just Sudoku), I started becoming a little more open to the idea of using more than just vocabulary to solve a crossword. I tried my hand at the Deccan Herald cryptic, staring at the previous day's puzzle with the next day's answers, only to be absolutely stymied at the logic behind it.

But since I am a Guardian fiend, I found the crossword blog. It began to give me a glimpse of how cryptic crossworders think. The Guardian also has a Quick-Cryptic crossword for noobs like me and little clues on which specific tricks to use with a handy tool for reminding one what each name stands for and examples of each trick- clearly I am not the only one who can't keep things straight in her head.

So, over the past few weeks, I have been slowly wrapping my head around the Quick Cryptic. It makes me feel incredibly good about myself. I almost feel like I could be one of those codebreakers at Bletchley. It also makes me wish I could turn the laptop to my dad and preen a bit or solve it with him.

Once I feel a bit more confident with Quick Cryptic, I shall try the DH Cryptic again.. who knows? Perhaps I will slowly be able to get myself upto a proper Cryptic by the end of the year! Also, since the Algorithms Lords on my phone news feed only seem to be giving me info on how quickly brains deteriorate after one hits 40, maybe this new hobby will help me keep hold of the few cells left in the old nut.

The benefits of the Cryptic crossword might overcome the mushiness caused by age and C dramas (only one at this time): Pursuit of Jade, I love you! Do not, I beg you, be put off by the Netflix blurb... she is neither humble nor is he disgraced. The blurb is all wrong. It is probably the BEST adventure-comedy-slow burn romance I have seen in years :) After bingewatching 12 episodes in 1 night, I woke up to the sound of the vegetable seller yelling "tarkari tarkari" in Kannada, and I was like, this is the wrong language. I only chose it because of the exquisiteness of this painting on the Netflix icon:

Otherwise, I loathe the cutesy faces, the lipstick and the flying martial arts. But this picture enraptured me and I am glad of it. And also that this show doesn't have the flying martial stuff or the cutesy faces.... unfortunately, lipstick on men seems to be a given for all Asian shows. But Chinese actors are significantly more handsome than the guys on Indian shows on Netflix.

My first review as a fine arts critic!

I was very pleasantly surprised when I was requested to write a critique of a dance event in Thrissur. I have been watching and being more and more deeply interested in traditional dance forms since Durga started learning. I do not dance myself and know no theoretical background to anything I watch. But I like watching and thinking about what I watch and my general garrulity ensures that I gush loudly about a performance that moves me. I guess someone must have noted this and thought of asking me to write something. This is what I have penned and it will hopefully get published in Narthaki, an online magazine for South Indian dancers.

What kind of a public health person am I?

 As I become a little more familiar with the public health ecosystem of India, I am slowly beginning to feel less like a visitor to this field and more aware of the players and the dynamics... it's like getting to know your husband's family after your marriage. Everyone appears amazing and will go to great extents to tell you how close they are to your husband when you first get married, but as you become more and more integrated within your partner's family, you understand history, nuances, dynamics that were glossed over before.

The main organization I have worked with and understood a little bit about public health is an old one based in B'lore with whom I became close during Covid.  Recent experiences with scholarly writing and with consulting for some other public health organisations makes me realise that not all PH organisations are painted from the same brush, even if nearly all have very similar-sounding mission/vision/goal statements. 

Some follow the consultant-model. I think this is the type of job what most new graduates from fancy PH schools assume they want. This model has some degree of field work, but does not involve much actual ground-level implementation. The meetings will be with heads of other bodies, may include a day or two observing the implementers and the work will involve a lot of writing, calling, meetings, reporting, coordinating and organising. For young PH professionals, their identity is not with the work or with building their own brand as much as it is with the organization they have joined. This is different from the PhD style training I am more familiar with. In the PhD route, at least in the US, students are drilled that they are working for themselves, by themselves and towards building a personal cachet. This, of course, has its own drawbacks mainly that most PhD graduates are not organization builders. They plug into existing organisations, such as universities, and are focussed on personal advancement. 

Some PH graduates follow the ground-level management group. These ones tend to be managers of the implementers- they end up being program leads or program managers. They work closely with the implementers but ultimately their day to day lives are similar to the first group's but with a slightly different weightage to the activities. I think that most of their lives are spent chiefly coordinating and organising and then reporting, writing etc. They also sometimes show up in public sector PH projects for leading teams of young researchers for ground-level data collection, household surveys, and the like.

People from both categories tend to move from project-to-project or site-to-site as projects end. So it can be a life with quite a lot of unpredictability or changing jobs or movement.

Very few PH graduates actually end up as ground-level implementers. From what I have seen thus far, implementers tend to be professionals from healthcare, law, social welfare etc. They may have systems on the ground and they bring on PH graduates to help manage things better, conduct certain types of research, assess quality, monitor/evaluate progress etc. I think for the implementers, public health is of course one of their objectives, but it may not be necessarily the most key one. Their core objectives may be far more narrowly focussed, such as providing some kind of service to some kind of community. This also means that they stay put in that community for a long time. 

The people who choose these different categories also tend to be of different socio-economic strata. 

This categorisation helped me understand where I fit in in the PH field: I identify myself first and foremost as an implementer. And maybe a little bit as an observer and scholar. And that's why even though a lot of the work I do these days is actively public health related, I do not intuitively understand the new PH graduate life or their challenges or mandates or priorities. With more thought, curiosity and discussion, the above categories can be honed and polished and I can be better prepared to understand and anticipate the flow and nature of various interactions in this field.

Time loops, age and love

 What might have my parents been doing at my age?

My mom, I think, had her bone TB diagnosis when she was 43... so she must have been worried about dying. This was in Pune. 

My dad at 43 must have been quite excited about his work in Chennai..I don't think we had moved to Pune yet. In Chennai, he had been the Chief Manager or a Branch Manager, I forget which one. He was ambitious and had still a strong sense of his physical appearance- I recall he would exercise every morning and that I would join him for curl ups and jumping around the house. 

I thought about this today because I realised many of my clearest memories of my mom were from when she was younger than I am now. So there is a juxtaposition of feelings- my old ones when she was the all-knowing, wise, kind person who could always make me feel better and my newer ones when I look back and feel warmth towards a younger mother likely juggling many different things.

All these thoughts emerged from the recent stay of my mother's younger sister from the US and her daughter, my cousin, and her family of husband and 3 year old daughter. And I experienced the same feeling of warmth and confidence that things would be ok when my aunt was around that I did with my mom and dad, while also watching her take care of her daughter and granddaughter. They had brought a lot of old pics with them; we spoke about earlier trips and visits; we spoke of me and my cousin when we were younger (same age as my kids now, actually!) and of my mom and aunt as children and teens. 

So I am in this time loop and wondering at it. Will my kids and their cousins have warm memories of me and my cousins now? Will my kids remember me as someone kind and loving or someone harried and irritable? Will my nieces reach out to me for support and help as I reach out to so many of my aunts and uncles for various types of advice, guidance and comfort, or receive the same even when I don't realise I need these?

I realise that all these are possible only when intention, planning, time and effort go into building these relationships and connections. It is easier for me living in Bangalore to do this with my extended family here. But I do wonder how to reach out to those who are not in Bangalore. 

I am so grateful to my cousin and aunt for having coming all the way here and deciding to stay with me, when no doubt there might have been more comfortable abodes they could have chosen from. These are the connections that both my kids and hopefully hers will recall with trust and love when they are my age.

Turahalli Tree Park

 Is the name of the place I decided to go birding at today. It took about 35m by metro and then another 25 mins of walking.

I have been using eBird as a way to keep track of my lists, but I miss my older posts with the pics and the names. I also think the blog is a better way to keep learning so I'll do both. Here's my eBird list. 

Some of the birds of note I saw today were:

The Asian tit or Cinereous tit- spotted it on a roadside shrub on the way to the park. Image from eBird

The Cinereous tit is such a beauty- it's striking, it's small and energetic, and is almost as common as a sparrow in some parts... alas for B'lore city, we have neither anymore.

The spot-breasted fantail... don't you love names that describe the thing perfectly!

The bulbuls  :

Red whiskered

                                                                                           

White browed

Red vented

Each gorgeous and sweet-sounding

There is a bird called the Ashy prinia which I adore- it's noisy, it doesn't give a crap and it's beauty is very subtle- outwardly boring, but in the right light, the way the light catches on the ashy blue and the brown and the pale orange is stunning 

The Ap is truly as noisy and chattering as this pic suggests

Today, I met its cousin, the plain prinia, an unfortunate name for an equally charming bird

Just look at how gorgeously fluffy it is!

You are NOT plain, my lovely... you are adorable, yes you are!

Also saw LOTs of butterflies, many of which I have seen elsewhere in B'lore, but whose names I do not know. I must start learning about butterflies this year...

All in all, a great morning!

Images from eBird.. none are mine.

                                                            

A deep breath, at long last

 I haven't been birding by myself in a few months.... perhaps the last time was in Copenhagen, about 5 months ago. But that was in peak winter, and the pickings were far and few. 

Birding is funny in some ways- depending on who I do it with, I feel differently about it. It is the most meditative, pleasurable and calming activity when I am by myself. I enjoy it when I am with Goose, my younger one. Goose doesn't care so much about birds, but she likes observing nature and staring at flowers and insects and how things interact with each other- she would any day like to observe a bird eating an insect than a bird sitting by itself somewhere.... she takes a Birds Eye view about birding, lol! In my mind, when I am with Goose, I am the person helping her appreciate things around her. It's a very conscious act and role that I take on, though I don't know if that's a good thing or not. 

My older one, Ani, well, I haven't birded with him alone in a very long time, actually, never. It's almost always with others, either his cousins or with RK. He's an excellent intuitive birder, having been taught by RK almost from the time he was a toddler. But he tends to get bored by the same old birds (who doesn't?) and can be a bit lazy. He is at the stage where the diagnosis is all important, not the story.

Birding with RK, I have realised, is neither meditative nor calming. It's educational and energising. But at the end of it, I don't have the sense of deep connection with the earth or the sky or nature as I do when I am by myself. I think it's because of a sense of urgency that he instills in the process- there's no time to stand and stare. Or maybe he's really fast and gets impatient with plodders like me. 

The opportunity to bird by myself comes occasionally, not too often. I like to plan it out- where to go, how, by when and so on. I research the birds I am likely to see by browsing through eBird the night before. Since I depend on public transport or my own two legs, I choose the places I go to very carefully. Twice or thrice, I have booked a cab to reach slightly out-of-the-way places, but these have never been by myself. I think there are two reasons for this: one is that I am careful- no matter how old a woman gets, traipsing by oneself is not wise. And the second is, I am not very comfortable splurging a few thousand rupees just for myself. I would much rather spend it when someone else is with me.

Once I reach the place, I am a meanderer. I don't like rushing about. I take deep breaths, trying to let go of my usual avatar, City Varsha, and to calm myself down. Invariably, there will be no birds seen in the first minutes, though their songs carry in the wind, and occasional glimpses of wings can be caught. This is mostly because Birder Varsha, the patient, observant, curious avatar hasn't yet fully come into being. 

For me, birding is a way to give in to curiosity. I use my binos on a lot of things, even those that I know aren't birds. There will be strange-shaped leaves, the angle of light and shadows creates shapes that capture my attention, there will be nests of various types... I try comparing how things look through my glasses and what I imagine the thing to be, with what the clarity of binos reveal. At times, I collect seeds, leaves, and twigs because in that moment it seems unbearable that I can't take this world back with me. I have given up collecting flowers because they lose their magic so quickly, wilting and browning a few minutes in my little bag. Seeds are the best, because they retain the potential to hope. You can stare at them and imagine the tree they will grow to be, plant them and water them and pray that they sprout and that the sapling survives. There were a set of seeds that I brought back from the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun that are now sturdy little plants at home and I always hope that the other seeds I collect can be at least slightly successful. Most have not, but the hope remains. 

I am neither an intuitive birder nor a very experienced one. It's like a language that you learn in adulthood, needing frequent laborious mental translations and references to dictionaries. I still get confused between birds that look kind of similar like robins and bush chats, still can't entirely tell which ones are the females. Raptors are the chapter I never got to in my studies. What I think I am decent at are small-ish birds that mostly hang out in trees or fly between grasses and trees.  I say small-ish, because warblers are small and hang out in trees and I cannot figure them out at all. 

The sign of a successful birding expedition is if I can see birds under my eyelids after I return home and sleep.