Skip to main content

Faux Plants

This past Christmas, I had received a gift of small decorative plants set in tiny pots and something made to look like a branch of a tree. Seeing that the person who gave it to me was a teenager, I assumed the plants were plastic and just set them around the house where it made sense. In the high heat of summer, I noticed some of these succulents had dried up and died. This was the first time it had registered to me that they were infact alive the whole time and no one thought to check if they really plastic or not. If the same gift came from someone older, I would have likely paid more attention or asked but coming from a child, I just did not. I am now working hard to save the plants that have proven to be alive. Making faux plants look so natural that people will mistake them to be real is a big business, 

Thanks to how well fake plants are made, these real ones had to suffer and die. The incident made me think of how artificial things in life take over and kill what is real. Be it the the friendships and relationships of convenience or all the material things we festoon our existence with to obscure the real person. No one gets to really see or know them. Comes a point they are not able to recognize their own reality either. Recently, I heard this interview on NPR about meditation and how it was inherently hard. The hardness comes from having to see the bares bones person minus all the extras we and the world tack on to ourselves. These sad plants presumed fake until they proved to be alive by starting to die made me think of how much harder it will get to prove something is real in years to come. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more