Skip to main content

Hiss Not Bite

Nothing breaks the magic spell of child's innocence quite as hard as disillusionment with the behavior of an adult - specially one they loved and even considered a role model. This happened with J recently and I had contributed to the situation somewhat tangentially.

If there was one thing I could single that I love the most about J, it would be her sincerity. No matter what the task, she will apply herself to it with enthusiasm and do the best she can. She is also very accommodating of people and circumstances that come into play in the process of doing her work. Whereas another person may get peeved or angry, she will simply work around the issue or the person. Being well-liked is important to J so she will avoid a being unpleasant even when provoked quite a bit. While all of those are good qualities to have, sometimes it can become too much of a good thing. There is a point of inflection where being tolerant starts to look like weakness and being considerate equals being a pushover.

I try to balance affirming the value of the qualities J has innately while teaching her there are times when she must like the proverbial snake hiss even if not bite. But for Sri Ramakrishna's parable I would have found it impossible to resolve the dichotomy that is inherent conveying such a message. The adult in this situation had an axe to grind with me and chose to wage a proxy war through J - hurting and belittling her in the process. But J being J, allowed this to happen time after time assuming that the bad behavior was an aberration - that it would pass and all would be well again. When it had gone a little too far, I was forced to step in.

As J put it "She pushed the buttons on me, the game controller, to make you bounce around on the screen". That is the possibly the end of childhood - to be able to articulate the game an adult is playing in those terms. So after being bounced around for a while and allowing J to be dragged through the unpleasantness of it all, I ended a friendship that had gone a little toxic. The cost to me was minimal - I was merely disappointed in someone who I thought was a friend. For J, it was learning before it's time and not of the kind that makes for the happiest of childhood memories.

She had to stop working on her cardboard model of the Golden Compass (one of her favorite movies - and mainly on account of the concept of the alethiometer) to listen to me talk about the lessons learned, about knowing when to show some fang and hiss, about how far to accomodate and adjust and when to stop doing so. For two years, this person was someone J looked up to and loved like a family member. It was incredibly hard for her to realize that she had been a mere pawn in a game and that the gestures of love and affection she had valued so much may not have been entirely genuine.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Heartcrossings ,

Glad to know you are APPLYING Ramakrishna's wisdom right at this age for J.

Many have voluminous books in their possession , can even quote from memory but fail to internalise them. When hindutvavadis tilt at windmills crying hoarse "hinduismisthe greatest" I quote RP who says:-

" An almanac might say on such and such a date ,it would rain. But not a drop of water is going to be produced by wringing of that almanac ".

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...