The Brave Pedestrian

July 28, 2009:  What they don’t teach you at school is that being a winner in life isn’t about winning in all that you do, but about building a good relationship of friendly give-and-take with the universe. How do you do that? Well, mostly by trusting and being trustworthy. You set out every morning trusting that the world and its creatures will treat you right, and play fair. You cultivate a habit of casting a generally benign eye at everything and everyone. Without necessarily becoming a do-gooder or busybody, you should generally feel that if the call to serve comes (whatever that means in any particular context), you will serve honestly and give of yourself generously, without pulling back. It is this sort of vague but firm belief that we have in our key relationships — with our parents, siblings, spouses, children and close friends. In the absence of this promise to the world, your relationship with the world and all that lives in it,  including yourself , is o...

Like I said in an earlier post, a crucial thing that they don’t teach you at school is that being a winner in life isn’t about winning in all that you do, but about building a good relationship of give-and-take with the world around you. How do you do that? Well, mostly by trusting and being trustworthy. You set out every morning trusting that the world and its creatures will treat you right, and play fair by you. You make a habit of casting a generally benign eye at everything and everyone. Without necessarily setting out to be a do-gooder, you must generally cultivate the feeling that if the call to serve comes (whatever that may mean in that particular context), you will serve honestly without holding back for any reason. That’s the sort of vague but firm belief that we have in our key relationships — with our parents, siblings, spouses, children and close friends. In the absence of this promise to the world, your relationship with the world and all that lives in it,  including...

Some of us believe (so much that it’s second-nature) that commonsense dictates that we must give no more to the people of this world than we absolutely are compelled to. This commonsense also dictates that we must take everything that’s on offer to us, and then some. Gujaratis have a name for it: it’s called  Vaniya-buddhi…  which roughly translates as ‘trader mentality’. While I understand where they’re coming from — a worldview that holds that there’s no room in society for naive people — I cannot help feeling that a worldview that’s as open to loss as it is to gain is infinitely superior. Let us give it a name. We could call it  Brahmana-buddhi –  the mentality of a Brahmana or a priest, because it implies the willingness or even eagerness to sacrifice to the Gods. (However, please please let’s take away the casteist edge of that term; even a  Shudra  may have more  Brahmana-buddhi  than someone descended from seven generations of ce...

Again, I think I’m setting myself up as a target for much anger and derision, though that is not the effect I wish to have on people. What I state here is an honest opinion… please believe that much at least! I grew up studying in a convent school, and I have no saffron agenda. I am not a Shiv Sena or BJP supporter. Our current situation — a sort of unbridled quest of modernity, never mind the past and the experiences of the past — is brought about by  a system of education that was largely evolved by Christian missionaries living in the colonies.   While the stated objective was to bring the “ignorant savages” to the light of reason by teaching them “reading writing and arithmetic.”, the underlying objective was to distance them from their own culture, and render their minds ripe for proselytizing.  Even if unproselytised, they deeply embraced the white Christian worldview, which was nine tenths of their faith.  Our children continued to be bred in the care o...

OK, I expect to draw some serious flak for this post… but here goes, anyway. Our relationship with entities is as complex as it is with other human beings and other species. We exploit and are exploited by, derive sustenance from and give sustenance to, large numbers of entities all the time. But they, not we, are the prime movers of our relationship. For millennia, they have shaped our future by selectively breeding us, whispering (so to speak) ideas into our little heads, nudging  homo erectus  to become man-the-toolmaker, and then man-the-wordsmith and finally man-who-inhabits-the-world-of-ideas. Humans today live and swim in ideas the way fish live in water. Ideas are their home, their natural habitat and the means of their continued existence. Rabbits cannot live without their intestinal flora, and humans cannot live without their ‘cranial fauna’. Rabbits are rodents whose lives depend so heavily on harbouring the right sort of intestinal bacteria, that at the time of we...

May 27, 2006: I have arrived at my worldview after about twenty-two years of seeking, and quite a few visions and experiences of different sorts. I’m 40 years old, by the way. I have become convinced of one thing: Sleep is the same thing as death. Our lives are on twin tracks – the track of sleep/death, and the one that our conscious mind inhabits when we are awake. When alive, our conscious mind has a daily biological need to take a dip in the sea of our permanence. If we deprive ourselves of this need, it becomes so compelling that we may doze off even at the steering wheel, and become a danger to our lives! But after we have slept our fill, our conscious mind feels the urge to re-emerge into the “outside” world in which we live and work. This sort of straddling the twin tracks, or swinging of the pendulum, consitutes our lives. Our lives also have a bigger swinging of this pendulum. After we have been “in this world” for a sufficiently long time, we submit to the urge to r...