Beyond Fine

This article showed up on my Quora feed as a sponsored post and I was almost going to skip it as I usually do with things sponsored. But kids being skimpy with words when describing their day was too close to home and so I had to read. The advice is good and I believe it will work - specially with little ones. Once a habit of sharing and talking about their day sets it is likely to persist even through the difficult teen years. 

J goes through phases - there are times when she has a lot to say about her day and then dry spells follow in which there is almost nothing at all. Irrespective of what she chooses to tell me or not, I always tell her about my day with no expectation of reciprocation. There have been days when I felt silly talking so much and not having a real conversation. When she was younger I was worried about pushing my worldview on her. That led to insistence that she argue anything she did not agree with - not to accept what I say without resistance. While that forced her to participate in the conversation, it also built the defiance muscle almost too well. Careful what you wish for as they say. 

Over the years, she got used to the idea that I share things with her and have no desire to keep any secrets. As her mother, I want to be uncomplicated to J so she can find an easy comfort in my company. What we missed in our own lives we try to give our kids only to discover they longed for things we did not know they did. I will learn where I fell short only when J becomes a mother herself.

Remembrance of Kolkata Past

Growing up. I knew Kolkata was "home" though we did not live there. Coming to Howrah Station by train from far flung parts of India is how we got to Kolkata once every couple of years. My Bangla was not upto snuff, my mannerisms were unlike the locals and finally I did not look Bengali. With that trifecta of circumstances, Kolkata was far from a comfort fit as a "home". Yet, I tried hard to make it work. Work on my accent, work on loving what the locals did and work on finding some redeeming quality about this city has a cripplingly depressing affect on me. I saw sad parallels to my own life - much potential but no real achievements to show for. 

In that sense the city is my soul sister. I like to think of Kolkata as a woman - verdant, endlessly forgiving and vilely abused. Each time I returned, I would hope her fate had improved since we last met but the downward spiral continued unabated. My last contact was over fifteen years ago. In the interim, I worked on rehabilitating my life the best I could and rearrange the cards I had been dealt. I learned for instance to become accountable for my circumstances and not ascribe them to "wrongs" done to me. The process is not linear as I found out because identifying a cause (other than myself ) of my problems is like a gateway drug. It leads to feelings of temporary empowerment fueled by misdirected anger. It seems to diminish the pain. But after the "high" wears off the sense of defeat is crushing. From that bad habit stems many others - lack of real introspection, lack of focus in achieving goals for the future and so on. Far too easy to be angry at someone else who supposedly was the cause of my woes.

While I have made somewhat of a recovery, Kolkata has sadly not as I discovered this past summer. The attitudes of people have evolved to where they are all hustling and minding their own business and have little time to meddle in those of others. Privacy and personal space are not real concepts but synthetic byproducts of such hustle driven apathy. The family wedding is not nearly how it used to be. It is hard to tell the guests and the hosts apart as their level of engagement in the event is about same. Everyone is participating but no one owns anything. The generational fractures seem to be have widened since my day. Fluid relationship statuses are becoming acceptable not due to any heightened awareness of the self but  because it allows for complete lack of personal accountability. The state of the city is an overall reflection of the times as it must be. No one appears to be in charge and there is no plan. The city along with its populace hurtles towards an unknown destination that is loosely called the future.

Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik

I was looking for a book to bring for a kid who is not familiar with the Hindu epics but has some curiosity about the subject. A nice young lady at the Oxford Bookstore recommended Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik. This was my first visit to Kolkata after fifteen years and a trip I had dreaded for months. For a large part of my life I had remained in self-imposed exile but each year made it harder to return. The connections to friends and family frayed more as did my understanding of the place I once called home. Reading this wonderful retelling of Mahabharat by Dr Pattanaik, upon my return to America was possibly the best and most comforting part of my overdue "homecoming". 

Used to be that there were two paths for the would-be reader of a "serious" English translation of Mahabharat. You could pick up something extremely erudite that was focused on staying true to the original Sanskrit and ended up being very laborious to read. As a reader, you understood you were getting the real deal but chances were you would would not last to the end and even if you did, the experience was not particularly enjoyable.If your first contact with Mahabharat was like mine - hearing the stories told in your native language by family elders, that very scholarly translation left you unsatisfied at an emotional level. 

On the other end of the English translation spectrum, were foreign authors who translated the Mahabharat as a labor of love. While their passion for the subject was easy to appreciate but the lack of roots in Indian culture resulted in a production that lacked life-spark leaving the reader wanting something more. 

To that end most of us grew up hearing the stories told to us by relatives and reading Amar Chitra Katha in our childhood. When we could read more grown up material, the Hindu epics went out of bounds and we wandered away in different directions as readers unmoored from our cultural roots.

Dr Pattanaik has stepped into this void and given the average desi reader like myself something they can actually love and identify with. We don't know any Sanskrit, often lack fluency in our native language to read worthy translations that do exist in those languages and yet we are from the culture and have heard most of the stories growing up.  Readers like me have been craving to create a personal bond with these epics and understand them in ways we did not as children listening to tales of gods and demons told to us by our mothers.

Dr Pattanaik has minimal, uncluttered prose and he tells the stories in English much in the manner I had heard them told my by favorite granduncle in Bengali. It made for an effortless shift from one language to another with nothing lost in translation. The line drawings throughout the book are very charming and only add to the quality of storytelling. The intricate plots, sub-plots and the dense mesh of relationships and loyalties that tie the myriad of characters are parsed out very effectively for a lay reader. We are able to follow the main story-line while having points of reference to keep us tied to the overall context of Mahabharat. The lessons that we can still learn from these stories are wonderful asides included at the end of every chapter.

Reading Jaya reminded me of the time I had opportunity to interview Dr Pattanaik for this blog and recalled how impressed I had been back then. So this quality of Jaya comes as no surprise. I very much look forward to reading many more of his books.

Old Self

My friend S who I reconnected with after a hiatus as long as J's age, is that childhood friend who is our personal wayback machine. Each time we talk, I return to a different time and the person she once knew me to be. Those conversations make me think if the long pause in our connection contributed to this timeless feeling of our friendship.

If we grew old together without the benefit of time and space to allow us each room of our own, would it still feel this way ? It so happened, that just three months after reconnecting with her online, I had opportunity to meet her in person. The weekend together was like being in college once again. There was no political correctness or trying to play any roles. We were as natural and unadorned as we had been then in the narrow confines of our college campus and the small town adjoining it.

The realities of our life were stark then - where would we find work after college if at all, would we graduate on time, would it be best to inform the parents of our depressed friend that she needed help or should we let her ride it out, should we borrow money from the nasty rich kid next door or wait for next month's allowance to show up, would we fail the Chem finals, would our psychotic roommate spiral out of control if she failed the Chem finals, would we get a chance to go abroad for graduate studies, would the professor whose recommendation was most valuable remember we slept though his entire first semester class,  did he know his nickname was Ms Toad and would that impact his desire to endorse us for grad school, would our parents lean on us to get married, would the boy we secretly liked ever like us back, did the said boy prefer our psychotic roommate to us

All of those questions have been answered a long time ago and we are where we are with less than half of our lives left to live. We talked of legacy beyond living for oneself or a select few others. S gave me gifts of costume jewelry and when I wore them I felt like a different person - one that I have not been in touch with in decades. It was strangely energizing to return briefly to my old self, connect with associations from the time of youth and naivety.