My mom! And her heart!

On the day she left us alone and went far away, I decided to analyse the mind and the heart of the human! For she was a mother alright; but much bigger than that! She was my model human being; For the day I got married, my sister came to me and said, "Sam, don't expect your wife to be like your mother, for you will be disappointed, nobody can be like her". Not to belittle wifey's greatness, my sister was right! 

She had a complex brain, but my mother was a simple human being; Lemme explain. 

She did the right thing!  On the day when she was diagnosed with final stage cancer and in immense pain and agony, she remembered to check on her aunt and uncle and transferred some money and medicine for them, without even telling them what she is going through. When they both passed away(Same day)she, on chemo, gathered all her will to travel long, vomiting all the way, once to see the lifeless bodies of the aunt and uncle. Her greatest strength was the strength of the heart to control the mind, the body and their pulls and to do the right thing, every time. Like everyone, she had mood swings. Times of depression and anxiety. But even during those times, she always did the right thing. That remarkable ability to make the mind and the body listen to her heart, I think was her greatest gift. 

She was kind! We all knew that. She showed tremendous kindness for the world around; There would have been at least 20 old people who had lived in our house at various points of time and everyone was showered with kindness. In fact, mommy once got a letter from a random old lady saying she had heard about her kindness, asking whether she can come and live with amma since her children were not kind to her. But that is not what made her different. The difference is her heart's ability to show love, uncompromised love, even when her mind was not on it. There were days when friends were a pain; when her mind asked her to hate the family; when the body is tired on the inside, but on the outside, she could be showering love! And her heart bled love! No that is not hypocrisy; That is overcoming the humanness within, and she was a master at it.  The day she died, an old man, in rugged clothes, fell prostrate on the coffin and cried "Where do we go for love ma, where do we the poor go for love?" And that summed up her life. 

She was a workaholic! She could pull off an 18-hour workday easily without even looking at the watch. As a professional now, when I look back at her life, her greatest victory was not, not looking at the watch for 18 hours but the ability to cheat her mind into doing the same workdays, through the year, for more than 25 years without taking a break. In my living memory, I haven't known a time when she had taken a break (taken her mind completely off work) even for a day. The modern professional world believes and rightly so, taking breaks help to increase efficiency; but I'm sure, my mom would not have agreed for her heart had the great ability to trick the brain into doing what the heart wanted to do every day with maximum efficiency without a stop.

Finally, she let us be! I think that was the greatest struggle within. She had an idea of the world. She wanted her children to be that idea, like every normal human being. You could see the struggle within when we protested. One could sense her heart bleed. But never once she stopped us from doing what our hearts wanted us to do. In the prime of my career, in the glitter of the IT world, when the company was about to send me to the Netherlands for work, my heart resisted the idea. We were on our family trip to a neighbouring hill station, and the mother and I went for a long walk. I don't remember where dad and the brother were, perhaps eating ice creams. I had her hand on her shoulder as best friends do. "I'm not happy ma, in my work. Something is amiss. This is not what I want to do all my life", I told her. "I want to go to the remote mission fields of the terror hit Assam". I could sense her shock. Her heart did stop a second. Here is her son, planning to quit a high flying corporate career and a lot of money wanting to live in a tribal belt supposedly terror hit for less than half the salary. There was a long pause. A deep breath. And my mother said, "If that is where you are happy, I think that is what you should do"; 

As I reflect on her life now, I see a simple human being. She was not highly read. Not the biggest scholar. She was afraid to talk to strangers. Not the most travelled. But her biggest ability is to win over her mind and body and let her heart rule. Perhaps the heart was ruled by someone else! 

A failed society, a failed church!

Where do I start? It has been one such day when the heart is heavy and the mind is all over the place.

He is just 18 years old. When people use the term 'skin and bone', most of the times we exaggerate. This kid was just bones. The skin was literally hanging on the bones. I have seen pictures like this before, but this was real. Here is a human being in flesh and blood; I mean, there wasn't flesh, but he is talking and moving.

The boy is not eating well said the father. He has an acidic problem. Once the problems sort itself out, things will be alright, the father seemed delusional. His boy is dying, and the man has not understood the seriousness of the situation. He is not in the right frame of mind to understand I would presume, for no father in their mind would want to see the kid suffer.

A random neighbour realising something wrong called this organisation to help. There is a kid behind closed door emaciated and dying. God had been kind enough to involve me in the rescue attempt. We went there and brought the kid and the father to the hospital. After an initial investigation, the doctors immediately suspected TB. Their face said it all. They have not seen so much TB. I could sense a shaken wifey near me looking at the horror of it all. Everyone looked numb.

Where did it all go wrong? Here is a middle-class man, who had been working with fairly decent pay. He has a small house in Chennai, rented or owned is a different issue. Perhaps it is a broken family, with the mother in some other place. Of course, the father has lost his job and there was not much money to put food on the table. But how did the outside world miss such a horrible thing in the middle of Chennai? How did their church miss that there is something amiss?

In the heartland of Chennai, a boy who hadn't had food for 'God knows how many days', should be out in the open. The father had kept him locked for many days, it seems. Aren't there any relatives who knew the family? What happened to the neighbours? The church where the father used to go to? In fact, the father had taken the boy to the hospital twice, only to be administered some glucose without even diagnosing a disease.

Say hello to your neighbour. Perhaps they are going through hell. Listen to the broken relative. Maybe he has a sad story to share. The world needs your empathy. The world needs your attention.

Another 18-year-old is battling for life, for the sheer apathy of the society and the church! How many more do we lose before we are shaken up?

Defining a new world order!

After the locks are broken and our tyres hit the road, what do I go back to? To the same old world or a redefined new world order?

Now that God has given me enough time to sit back and reflect, a sudden thought came up. What if I get an opportunity to redefine my life?  The way I live, my thoughts, relationships, moral construct, ideologies so on and so forth. Doesn't that sound fun? Well, join me in defining this new world order.

I envision a world where hatred is foolish! Where caste, religion, race, gender and community-based discriminations are never even in the dictionary. Prejudice, bias and bigotry are forgotten entities. For humankind is measured by its intricate worth, the worth of being human. Forgiveness, trust and love as the fulcrum of relationships. Where the only conflicts are those within the heart; That will be a wonderful world, won't it?

What about a world without pollution and contamination? Pure air and a crystal clear river flowing across the cities. A world where we can leave the roads and follow the trail, where we preserve and cherish the green, where our lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery, of air, mountain, mist and skies. A world where we listen to nature rather than master it. I know, I go overboard, but this is the world my wife envisions and so be it.

How do we visualize the pace of life? Where humans don't try to keep pace with fellows, but rather listen to the rhythm of their own heart or dance to the tunes of the otherworldly drummer; Where culture and tradition do not define them like defining the book by its cover; rather humankind is defined by the tattered pages of the unread inside. Letting people live at their own pace, where there is no advantage in scurrying through life. Will that world become slow? I guess not; Pace will be defined by a different paradigm, I suppose.

I close my dreams with a quote from Arundhathi Roy. Who better to talk about a new world than the woman who fought all her life for one?

"This pandemic is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world, and ready to fight for it"

Foreign policy - A primer

I live in a huge family; Our house is among the poorer families in the locality, but we were growing into the middle class. Few family members had become rich and are doing well; We were hoping to be the next big superstar family. The world was beginning to take notice.

We have a neighbour who is bigger and ten times more powerful than we are. While we were struggling to even put food on the table, my neighbours had grown by leaps and bounds. We can see them use their power in the world around us. Though they were creating problems all around, they were becoming richer by the day. Most families in my area were buying products from the companies they owned. They were cheaper and sometimes were of better quality as well.

Suddenly, one day they started demolishing the common compound wall and tried to get a hold of some part of our land. These are difficult times. Many in the family had just lost their jobs. Hunger deaths can not only be heard but seen. On top of that, there is a disease that is threatening our livelihood. The neighbour is capitalising on these struggling times and trying to show his power. What do we do? What should be our response?

We can use our valour and power and go fight the neighbour. But he is more powerful! Surely if he strikes back the losses are going to be huge. We cannot lose lives. No, not even one. Losing lives to protect a compound wall is unreasonable. Idiocy!

What else? We can stop buying their products. That will dent their economy since we are among the major consumers. But, if we don't buy from them, where do we buy from? We don't have the capacity to manufacture ourselves. Most of our products are costlier and is leaving the family members who buy them, poorer. Is it worth the risk in times like this? That is a serious question to ponder.

The basic premise of foreign policy is to make the lives of the millions in India better, by generating wealth, prosperity and thereby power. So any relationship with any of our neighbour will have to rest on this strategic condition, that it will generate wealth, prosperity and hence power, in that order.

Is there a way out of our China mess without hurting the life of the citizenry? Only time can tell. Perhaps talking our way out of it looks the better option.