Love to Hate You

No, this isn’t a spoof on the Arjun Rampal show. It’s actually the state of my mind. Have I hated anyone to the point of annihilation? Yes I have - my mother’s mother, my monster-in-law, & a friend’s wife - let’s call her memsahib.

Problem with granny: There’s always that 1 person in every family who is the villain. What she did to my mother is what I hold against her. I stopped talking to her. I’d never get myself to even see her face. My mother forgave her saying, “she bore me for 9 months in her womb.” Yes, my mother was a real life Nirupa Roy!

Problem with MIL: I did all I’d to make peace with the situation I found myself in, to please her, to find a way into her heart but nothing worked. Some people are born with every organ except the one that is most needed – a heart. After I’d reached the last ounce of my endurance, I remember saying to Sathya, “It’s over for me” And when I say something is over, it truly is over.

Problem with Memsahib: her ingratitude, artificiality & holier than thou attitude. She is the last of the surviving sati savitris/perfect bahus on this planet. Or so she thinks.

Does hatred kill us? Eat us? I don’t know. The people I hate I negate. That’s all. I don’t see them, talk to them. They simply don’t exist for me anymore. That’s the extent to which I distance myself. I turn ice-cold in the face of ingratitude & indifference. If I’m not wanted or welcome, I erase that person from my life. Is it good? Is it bad? This is not a question of morality. This is a simple, & yet, not so simple case of being unloved. The feeling of being unwanted can drive you to emotional desperation.

Why can’t I find within me the strength & the largesse to let go? Because I don’t live in half measure: I love fully, I hate fully. I don’t live cautiously or according to society’s book of superficial etiquette. When you love someone & do things in the hope that it’ll make them happy but it doesn’t, & they expect more & more but do not show gratitude or even a smile, is when it starts pinching, very hard. A calculative person treats a relationship with an excel sheet at the back of his mind with all columns/rows neatly filled in. Love someone with a hidden agenda, you won’t be hurt. You hurt when you give it your all & get taken for granted.

Sometimes, compromising & adjusting actually gives the other person the power to walk all over you. “Joh jhuka use aur jhukao”. I’m proved wrong when I think “This relation is important to me, so it must be important to them too & hence the way I’m working at it, they must be working at it too”. It doesn’t function that way. You realize it has been a one-way street all along & your decency is your weakness. That’s when deep love turns to great hatred & the hatred sustains you because the love has gone & left a gaping vacuum leaving the other face of love to fill its place – and that is hatred. “Love & hate are alike, it’s the same energy inverted” (Osho)

“Hate can become love: it is energy in a disturbed state. The energy can be calmed, stilled” says Osho. Maybe I’m waiting for a closure. Waiting for the day when I can actually face them & tell them they hurt me, the nights I sobbed myself to sleep or wept till my eyes dried out. Maybe I’m waiting for the day they’ll say, “I’m sorry I hurt you.” And mean it. Till then, I love to hate you.

Art Music and Me

I’ve nothing to do with art, music or creativity in any form. We’ve been strangers to each other for the past 3 decades! The only relationship we share is one of deep envy & great awe.

For instance, I can’t interpret paintings. I only see broad strokes, splash of colors & respond to their overall appeal. Whenever I’ve visited museums/galleries/exhibitions, I've walked past most exhibits, stopping briefly to exclaim “Ahh! Oh! So nice!” But, even a visually & artistically challenged person like me, has felt a strange connection. I invariably find myself standing still before a set of work that’s immediately arresting both for its simplicity & its grandeur. And when I peer closer to read the name of the painter, it’d unfailingly, yes unfailingly, turn out to be Raja Ravi Varma. It’s incredible. There is something about his work that touches my heart. The portraits are so “alive” even after 100 years. I can’t move away from them. I stand & soak in the experience. I admire him, although I hardly understand the technicalities of color/stroke/canvass/ lighting.

Rahet Fateh Ali Khan’s voice has a similar effect on me. Why do his renditions make me yearn for more? Is it true that the test for a singer is if he can touch your soul? “Dil toh bachcha hai jee” is magical. So are S.D Burman’s compositions. They take me to another world. And I sway to Michael Jackson’s tunes every single time I listen to them. Why do certain poems make me cry? Why does listening to Akon always puts me in a happy space? Why do certain lines of a book stay on? I’m still not over Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte lived to write that one book & passed away soon after. Why does Jagjit Singh never fails to speak to my sad, weary, world-beaten soul? (I don’t listen to him when I’m happy!) Why is Shakespeare relevant even today?

Mesmerizing are the movies of Puttanna Kanagal. I can watch Ranganayaki, Edakallu Guddada Mele, & Manasa Sarovara without blinking my eyes. He dealt with the concept of the “fallen lady” almost 3 decades ago & showed the sexual frustration of a wife whose military husband is physically handicapped. Or the romance of a son with his biological mother! He was ahead of his times & it was truly the golden era of Kannada movies. These subjects were handled delicately, gracefully & intelligently. The other director who made an equally outstanding contribution to film-making is K. Balachander. I adore him.

It is said humans crave for kids because that is our only claim to immortality. It is a feeble attempt to beat death & to live on through them. I don’t think it works. It works only 1 or maximum 2 generations before or ahead of us. But artists, well, they live forever; only their bodies die, their soul lives on through the work they leave behind. It is hardly a death if a person continues to live amongst us, through his music, his voice, his captures or the written word. They don’t need progeny to transcend their existence. Does that explain their sometimes eccentric choices & aversion to set social standards? Their lives are fluid, unpredictable & beating to their own tunes. (I do know it can also be filled with great strife, pain & isolation). We mortals conform, obey, adhere because social acceptance is an intrinsic part of who we are, it defines us, it is our identity. Creative people have a purpose & meaning in life higher & beyond our understanding of the material world. Mera kya? Kamaana, khana, peena, udana, kat gayi zindagi yuhi dopal mein!

I humbly bow to all these geniuses.

I feel artists – sculptors, painters, musicians, dancers & directors – are the special children of God created with more love & passion than that He reserves for making lesser mortals like me. And in my next life, I want to be an artist. Because I want to LIVE ON.

Fools Rush In

And how! Remember the movie by the same name starring Mathew Perry & Salma Hayek? I watched a rerun of the movie on TV recently. He, a New Yorker, & she, a Mexican fall in love, get married & she becomes pregnant. That’s when they realize the differences between them are deeper & wider than the Great Canyon. Their backgrounds, food choices, the way they were raised, lifestyle, religious leanings are as disparate as chalk & cheese. But in the end, in the movie, love conquers all & they live happily ever after.

Why the mention of the movie? Well, because I so relate to it. I am a fool too & I rush in! Always have & most probably, always will! I’m the kind of woman who, when wonderfully wooed & relentlessly pursued, falls head over heels in love with the person & would head straight to the altar. The fact that I rushed into my marriage with Sathya is proof enough. Three months of courtship is no time to turn the man inside out, study him & have him all figured out. Using logic in matters of the heart is alien to me. Luckily, my life has turned out pretty ok by all counts & I still have not come to a stage of seriously regretting the marriage. Touch wood.

But today, in this post, I speak not as a woman in love or as a wife but only as a been-there done-that, wise-by-age parent. Not taking the time to know & understand each other’s outlook on money, children, values, priorities, & ambition is no way to approach an important institution like marriage. It’s better to be wise & safe, than in love & sorry.

Parents often say their oh-so-worn out dialogue, “Theek se socho beta. Yeh tumhari zindagi ka sawaal hai.” You know why? Because they are protective & it would kill them to know that the man/woman you chose in haste has brought tears to your eyes. They wish for you a stable life minus all heartaches. It can truly become a case of “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” No wonder, parents wish the young ones to be level-headed & not rush into love or marriage. They ask you to consider the other’s education, family background, stability, & character - all with good reason. Calmly listen to one’s head rather than foolishly to one’s heart. Do a SWOT analysis if you want, draw up columns for the pros & cons (seen the film “Along Came Polly?” Ben Stiller does exactly that!), weigh the things on a scale, do what you may but make an informed choice. All this to ensure the relationship is insured against turbulent times ahead.

Alas! This is so contrary to what I wrote in the post “How I Met Your Father” in March of this year! I am surprised too by the irony of it all. Looks like I’ve matured, grown wiser & smarter & realized my crazy romanticism may not be a good thing to pass on to my daughter after all. And the possibility that I might have done just that is unsettling! The world is better off without romantic fools like me. I maybe an interesting woman but I’m most definitely a boring, old-fashioned mother.

Inspiration for this post: Sunita Kurup’s post “Love is for Real”

Stage Fear

Are orators born? Are they blessed with an innate talent to address an audience with ease & confidence? I feel, from my own experience, that it comes with practice. And passion.

Little children don’t fear the stage so much. Tanvi is in UKG & has already put in more than 4 appearances, each with a smile.

Stage fright & the self-consciousness that causes it, comes much later, when you become aware of your classmates’ snide remarks & when they start making fun of what you said or how you stood.

I began participating in extempore during my high school, mostly during my 11^th & 12^th standard. It was not easy. I remember I used to be SO scared. I didn’t know how to hold the mike, how to speak into it, how not to breath into it. I learnt everything by trial & error & over many years & many attempts. But the overriding emotion I still remember was that of feeling extremely self-conscious. Of what people would say, will they comment, will they pull my leg, will I be a laughing stock, or will I be the joke of the century? As opposed to what people think that bachche bhagwan hote hain (children are like God), they can actually be very mean. They can jab into a classmate’s confidence with their cutting comments. The bullying can easily break whatever little courage one has tried to muster.

But, thank God & my teachers that I stuck on. Once I had tasted success, I never looked back. Every year, every competition, I was up there on the podium. The topics, the time, the audience nothing mattered. The high of being out there was a great draw. Today, I enjoy the energy in the room, the fact that I’m the center of attention, the spirited interaction that follows, the Q&A, the thoughts & ideas being thrown back & forth. It’s a high like no other - the thrill of holding the mike, facing the crowd, looking around the hall & knowing that your voice is reaching out to many. Some may concur, some may not, but most are listening to you (if you speak sense, that is).

But one must prepare. There is no short-cut. Practice at home. In front of the mirror, door, people, & wall – till you’re comfortable with your body, with the very act of standing, with your hand movements, leg positions, & various other gestures. Your body language is important to establish a connection with the listeners. You can’t stand like a robot & speak like one. Your enthusiasm, or lack of it, will get transferred to the audience.

Extempore is relatively harder. “No ideas” –is the common hurdle people face. “My mind goes blank. What do I do?.” The solution lies in reading -lots of reading. Read all kinds of stuff - books/magazines/newspapers. Reading can make you wax eloquent on “Sky is blue” just as on “Utopia is surreal” No topic is easy or difficult. It’s the way you approach it that matters. No one is interested in a PhD thesis style explanation, but what you “feel” & “think.” Who likes a human Wikipedia?

The jittery feeling before a presentation or speech is a good sign. Shows you’ve taken the task seriously. The nervous excitement keeps you on your feet & stops you from being complacent or arrogant. You try & give your best. And succeed. I still get butterflies in my stomach every time I go on a dais & start speaking. But once I start, there is no fear, & so, no stopping. You never really overcome your stage fear. You just get used to being on stage.