Skip to main content

A constant learner


The last of post of January confessed that I was participating in the #WriteAPageADay campaign of Blogchatter which entailed writing a page every day of Feb. I managed to complete the campaign successfully though there were three days on which I could not write anything for various reasons. Such days are also part of the campaign, thanks to the magnanimity of the Blogchatter team.

I avoided politics as far as possible during the campaign. I wrote posts which were more interesting, in my reckoning, during Feb. But some of my regular readers seem to have abandoned me in Feb. I don’t know the reason. Maybe, many of them were busy with the campaign. Maybe, my ricocheting from one subject to another didn’t amuse some of them. Maybe, it’s time to take stock of the very relevance of traditional blog posts in the world of YouTube and podcasts and others.

As I’m concluding the Write a Page campaign with this post, it is quite natural that some sort of self-assessment struck my meditation today. This contemplation took me back on the memory lane and I found myself as a young man in his late thirties squatting on the carpet inside a prayer hall of a Hindu ashram somewhere in Kasaragod district of Kerala.

I was in Kerala on the usual annual vacation from Shillong where I worked as a college lecturer. The college had made my life miserable. I’m not blaming the college. It’s just that I lacked the qualities required for surviving in the kind of game-field that existed in that college at that time. My own immaturity coupled with my hubris and other vices made life a pain in the posterior of others and in all possible parts of my own being. Thus I decided to go somewhere without any aim hoping to step on the solutions to my problems somewhere. The ashram mentioned above was one such place.

The ashram turned out to be just the opposite of all that I was looking for. Every half an hour or so, somebody will enter the prayer hall and start singing a bhajan. What I wanted was absolute silence. I left the prayer hall and returned to the dorm where I was given a bed in the midst of a lot of holy-looking people with long hair and longer beards. One of them looked into my eyes, as I was packing up my travel bag, and said, “There’s something that’s seriously troubling you. No one can solve it but yourself.”

I carried that counsel in my heart. But there was no sign of any solution anywhere in sight as I sat in a KSRTC bus that took me to the union territory of Mahe. Alcohol was highly affordable in Mahe as it is even today. That was some solution!

It took a few years for me to discover the solution which was to stop carrying my self as a baggage. Let it go. I realized that I was nothing worthwhile. I reached a stage of mind that was just the opposite of the previous one. From a gargantuan ego to a stunning emptiness. That was my journey.

There was something that amused me even in that painful stage of horrifying self-awareness. It was the attitude of my college principal and a few of my colleagues. They were delighted by my utter lack of self-esteem. It was as if they had accomplished the mission that they had set on.

I couldn’t continue in such a place anymore. It’s all good to feel very humble, egoless, empty… It’s good only if you are a really enlightened person. I wasn’t. I had just allowed the circumstances to shatter my ego. Nothing more. That didn’t lead me to the discovery of anything worthwhile within me.

That’s how I left that place.

The new place, Delhi, did give me a chance to discover whatever goodness was there within me. To my surprise, Delhi taught me sooner than I expected that there was indeed much to be loved within me. But I had already internalised the lesson to never let my ego rise above that goodness.

The real humble self-awareness is not seeing you as a worthless person. It is being aware of your worth and to use all those qualities for the welfare of the people around you. Genuine self-awareness is a relationship with fellow human beings.

I live a very happy life now in a village in Kerala. But I know that my relationships are very limited. I stay aloof from most people. It’s not because I don’t want relationships. It’s because I’m afraid that my spiritual journey so far has not accomplished a fraction of what I wanted it to. There’s a long way to go before I can extend my arms in a gesture of welcome to the world. That’s why my profile descriptions have always proclaimed that I am a constant learner.

With my unfailing companion along the way that wasn't always romantic

PS. I’m taking a brief break from blogging for a few days. Feb has been too hectic.

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    I shall miss this daily visit!!! Have greatly enjoyed the eclectic mix - you know it is my habit also; in this we match. Enjoy your blog-break and come back strong; there is still place for this traditional communication. The written word can do what the spoken word or the visual cannot - if the minds are open to it. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your daily presence here was a great support and I'm highly obliged.

      Delete
  2. Enjoy your break! Return rejuvenated!

    ReplyDelete
  3. You should know you are making thousands of students' school lives worth living !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a huge compliment and thanks dear Anu. The students are a changed lot now, thanks to the online classes of Covid days. But I'm still optimistic, some changes have taken place in the classrooms after I wrote this post. For the better.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation