The Offering of Food

For my dear friend Peter, on his birthday:

Old friend from university days. She comes to meet me during my visit to a far-away city for a wedding. She takes a taxi and travels 2 hours up and 2 hours down with a fidgety son, to just spend half an hour with me, before I go away. And before leaving, she gives me two jars full of the ripe mango curry she made especially for me. She remembered that I loved it so much when I visited her place - and that was 16 years ago.......

A memory that returns every year, when I cut the first ripe mangoes of the season, in April. And like the April rains on parched earth, it refreshes me, reminds me that all is not lost, there is hope, there is still so much caring, so much giving, all around us.

I am always deeply touched by the offering of food. It moves me more than any other gift. A strongly etched memory from my favorite Amar Chitra Katha comic book of childhood days, 'Sudama' - the powa (flattened rice) that the poverty-stricken Sudama takes when he goes to meet his childhood friend, Krishna.

Sudama and Krishna were classmates and close friends at the sage Sandipani’s gurukula, for many long years. At the end of this period, they part ways, each to meet his own destiny. Krishna to become king, and Sudama a teacher, as befitted his caste and station in life. Later, Sudama and his family fall on bad times. The children are hungry; his wife has been borrowing food and money from the neighbors to get by.

Then one day she suddenly remembers, and asks hesitantly, "Maybe you could go and meet Krishna? Weren’t you very close?". She borrows some powa from the neighbour, which Sudama had told her was Krishna’s favorite food in childhood, so that her husband does not go to visit the great king empty-handed. Sudama sets off with the powa wrapped in a cloth bundle, tied to his waist.

Krishna sees him from the distance, from the palace balcony where he was enjoying the evening breeze with his consort Rukmini. This poor Brahmin in old clothes walking to the palace gates hesitantly, as if he feared being turned away. Krishna runs down with great excitement and rushes past surprised courtiers and guards, and embraces Sudama. While people watch in amazement, he makes Sudama sit on his throne, asks his wife to bring water, and washes his feet with great affection, like one does with an honored guest.

Overwhelmed, and surrounded by splendour, Sudama is embarrassed to offer his humble gift of powa to the mighty king. He is astonished when Krishna grabs at his bundle playfully, 'Hey, you have brought me something!', and then pounces on the poha greedily when Sudama offers it to him with great hesitation. Krishna is overjoyed, deeply touched that his old friend remembered.

"Sudama", he says, "the poorest of gifts given to me with love are dearer to me than the richest of gifts given without love."

All those who have fed me, with so much warmth, thank you so much. You have given me so much more than food.

What is your favorite memory of being fed, receiving food, from a friend or a stranger?


*Photo from Google Images

Rang De!

A sea of gray and brown. Descending to Nagpur, you see trees and shrubs burned by the scorching sun. And then, five hours of passing dried-up fields and denuded forests, with occasional patches of green. There was no way you would have guessed that bright pink and blue and green would be the colours that would define Pusad for you from now on. That the dreaded 42 degree heat would not seem like much. That you would return energized, not tired.

Three of us volunteers/social investors were on a Rang De borrower evaluation trip to Pusad, near Nagpur, Maharashtra, last weekend. Pusad, in Yavatmal district, where the cotton farmers kill themselves, unable to repay loans. We were to meet with women who had taken loans from Rang De, and evaluate their experience.

What we saw was empowerment. And so much positive energy and grit! Slum women speaking with confidence and pride about buying a buffalo, setting up a grocery shop, starting a tailoring business, a tiffin centre, a spice business, sending their daughters and sons to school, becoming decision-makers at home – freed from the fear of moneylenders, and the humiliation of being ill-treated by them. And we saw such selfless dedication – from the workers at Sagras, the field partner who distributes our loans and educates the women on managing their money better.

And we also saw tiny shanty-houses of wood and steel which the women had painted pink and blue and green inside and decorated with brightly-coloured pictures of gods and goddesses. And huge welcoming smiles and warm hospitality, and an amazing sense of community and togetherness - no one was alone among them. (All that we traded for individual wealth and personal space…)

There are still many issues they need to tackle, for example, the size of their families because of the social pressure of having a boy child, poor sanitary conditions etc. But the confidence they now have, that it is possible to be in control and change their families’ lives, to dream of a good future for their kids, that there are strangers who care for them - has already brought them many rungs up the ladder of progress.

On the way back, you think of Ram and Smita, the young couple who founded Rang De, giving up a comfortable life in the UK. 13,298 people (and growing), mostly women, now live better lives because they dared to dream. And followed it up with action.

It is mind-blowing, how far kindness reaches, whom it connects you to. The women of Pusad already have so much colour in their houses. And Rang De has brought them the colours they lacked.

Yet again, you are struck by the sheer amount of positive energy in this country. So many amazing people choosing to give. To share. To lead change. There is so much colour here, in every way. Add yours to it. Rang De!

Get started now! http://www.rangde.org/invest

My investor profile: https://www.rangde.org/investor/amokashi

You don't have time and want this even easier? Use Auto-Invest: http://www.rangde.org/auto-invest

Photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/RangDeBorrowerEvaluationTripToPusadMaharashtra

Aman

"Kabira khada bazaar mein, liye lukati haath
Jo ghar bhaade aapno, challe hamare sath."

"Kabir stands in the market, staff in hand,
He who can burn his home, can come with me."

Kabir, Indian Mystic, 15th Century

So says the introduction to Sepia Leaves, Amandeep Sandhu's first book. Aman, of the effortless spirituality, who understands that it is in the seeking that one is truly alive. Aman, the wanderer, who teaches you detachment, and connection, in the same breath. Aman who is both a flowing in, and a flowing away.

Aman, whom you crossed paths with in a rather unexpected way. At the end of a long job interview where we strayed into many non-work-related topics, he insists that you have to stay in touch, even if you do not accept the job offer. You who understand such intensity, such spilling-over, went for the release of his first book, Sepia Leaves, a searing account of his childhood growing up with a schizophrenic mother.

You who re-discover this review you wrote for the book, a long while ago, and wonder yet again, at his resilience to plunge into life, again and again. To narrate more stories of those who have no voice. To let the world in with such deep kindness while learning to walk the long lonely path of the pilgrim. 

“We who need to constantly classify, know, "figure out" so that we can be secure in our grasp of the world, tend to dim certain dimensions of the people we meet so that we "understand" them better. Aman's strength is the ability to keep all the dimensions of his characters equally in the light, as people are originally meant to be seen, before we adjust our lens on them and dim the edges.

His relationship with his mother, who lived in a world where our understanding can never penetrate, is a very powerful lesson in going beyond our narrow definitions of love. You wonder how many of the "strong" relationships we see around us will survive such tests. At the end of all the detailed descriptions of her unpredictable and often violent behaviour, after all the fire Appu walks through, this is what stays in your mind when you close the book:

"I stroke her hair. She does not cry, nor do I. I stroke her hair out of habit as I have done for so long. She has always been my child, though I am her son."

Sympathy is the sentiment you expected to feel. But something bordering on envy is what you are left with."

Aman, who has just met you twice, but comes with a huge bag of Keenu oranges for you from Punjab, and remembers to meet you each time he passes through Bangalore. Aman who honours you by seeking your feedback on his writing, his ideas. Aman, to whom you can ask in agony how it is possible to ever find a balance between letting the world in, and the need to protect oneself, Aman who understands pain.

"How do you protect yourself? I don't know Asha. Do I protect myself? I do not even know that. But I do see myself layered like an onion, by the time I get to one point of exposure I realise there are other concealed points. To think about it my way, it sort of becomes a game where something is eternally elusive and all hunts yield results which don't quite nail the self."

Aman, who tells you that “the only thing that elevates us from our insignificance is our capacity to love.” Aman, whom you agree with, so much.

Thank you, Aman. And happy birthday. Because you were born, and because you live, and because you drew me into your world so warmly without waiting for permission, because you called me friend after meeting me just once, I return to the knowledge that "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in", every time I forget.

Aman's blog: http://www.amandeepsandhu.com/

An interview: 'Engaging With Life, Amandeep Singh Sandhu': http://www.sikhchic.com/article-detail.php?cat=11&id=2945

'Sepia leaves' is available on http://www.flipkart.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/.

Return

Looking out at the distant airport lights in a hotel room in a cold country, that long-ago day, listening to the clock ticking away in the absolute silence, “the desire to be barefoot and sitting on a doorsill worn black and shiny by all the people who have sat upon it”* rises up like waves of unacknowledged pain, like a metaphor for all that you ever really wanted, but did not know...

Because it is indeed in the rightness of things that we needs must go searching all over the world to find what we really want, and come back ripe and ready at last to find it waiting patiently for us to return, by the side of the old jasmin tree which bravely survived the harsh summers with grace even when no one remembered to water it…

Maybe this is all that you really need, this everyday miracle:
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Monday, December 08, 2003

Light creates and recreates the house constantly. Perky morning rays coming in through the kitchen window onto the polished place next to the stove. Lighting up the dust on the black dining table through the half-open balcony door. Casting a moving shadow of the wind-chimes near the door. The bedrooms on the other side are still dark if you keep the curtains closed as if day has not yet completely broken there. Quiet awakening.

As the day progresses, the glow in the drawing room brightens, which even the curtains cannot stop. The grains on the wooden monkey on top of the TV are more visible. The bedrooms come out of night country.

And then the kitchen is in gentle light that doesn't quite reach the corners near the window. The coconut tree outside the drawing room is radiant in the golden evening light, with squirrel babies playing on it. The gentleness of tea-time settles on the red cushions. The light on the old cane sofa invites quiet reflection. The bedrooms on the west are now brilliantly lit, the meroon flowers on the curtain blazing away.

Then as the show comes to an end, the open balcony door lets in a warm glow that lights up the red Christmas stocking and the black and white Paris postcard on the shelf above the antique bed railing. Everything has a shadow. Gradually as you watch the red stocking lose its shine, and the light moving up on to the book shelf, you turn to look outside, watch what is left of the light silhouetting the bird nest on the acacia tree.

And then you close the balcony door as it is mosquito-time, and switch on the table lamps. Pools of light transforming the rooms and calling for music. A pale unchanging weak substitute for the sun, but until the next day when the miracle will repeat all over again, this will work its quiet magic.

* From 'Soul Mountain', Gao Xingjian

Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti

Going for a walk in the freezing cold (for we must not break our rituals come what may, the only constants in our unpredictable lives), I suddenly remembered going for guitar classes in this cold, a long time ago. An overwhelming love for music is no guarantee of any sort of ability, sometimes love is not enough, as I discovered -:) - but then the path to happiness can also be paved with small victories, and sometimes that is enough.

The other day I asked a friend to get me a glass painting set, a suncatcher to hang against the light at the window. I have to paint the feathers of the bird in there and I am likely to ruin even that, I have never painted in my life, but then what gives me the courage to still try it is this memory, this Do Re Me Fa So La Ti from so long ago. I didn't learn to play the guitar, but I did learn something after all, I guess.

And oh yes, there were more rewards, priceless ones - the teacher loved me though he could clearly see I was not going to bring him any renown whatsoever -:) - he could discuss Bob Dylan's poetry with me with great emotion, and feel understood. The day he actually lent me his sacred book (The Collected Poems of Bob Dylan, an ancient yellowing copy), I felt I had succeeded in paying the gurudakshina, the true fee of reciprocity I owed my teacher...
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004

You have had a bad night. You go to sleep late. In the night the power goes off. You are wide awake and cannot get back to sleep. Then you doze off later, and have bad dreams in which people you love ignore you. And then you are rudely woken up early by the alarm clock as it is your guitar class day. It's an exceptionally cold morning, just when you thought winter had lost its bite. The heater is not working, so you have to heat water on the stove. And as you sit drinking your tea in the half-darkness, groggy and head-achy, a slow sadness and hopelessness seeping in, you wonder why on earth you had to join for guitar classes. How are you going to handle so many things. Will you ever be able to learn anything, it's just too technical, all those alphabets and lines and numbers and strange squiggles. And you have to get up and run like this early in the mornings, when you could use that extra sleep. Why do you get these brainwaves, why have you not "settled down" like other people your age? You've got it all wrong.

Today is going to be a Bad Day. Yes, Sir, you can see it coming.

And then you drive in the freezing cold to the teacher's house. Your fingers are frozen. And then he tries to teach you how to read the notes, and then play them. C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. 3rd fret, fifth string. No fret, 4th string. 2nd fret, 4th string. 3rd fret? What? Oh my God, oh my God, you will never be able to co-ordinate this. Your brain hasn't learnt a single new thing that requires such co-ordination in years and years. And now he writes all of them numbers on the lines and says you have to identify and name the notes for the next class. This is it. You are finished. Your brain is too old to learn this. Why on earth did you take this up, you stupid fool. The depression is setting in. Loser.

And then he asks you to play Do Re Mi. Look at the notes, start with C. C? Oh, 3rd fret, fifth string. You pick up the guitar, gingerly. Oh, you hope he gets a phone call, you hope his wife calls him in. You don't want him to see you struggle. All your dignity down the drain. Then you start. C. Pause. Struggle, search, where the hell is the second fret? And you have to use the second finger of the left hand for that. Second finger? (No, don't count the thumb, please). And then, yes, you ascend 4, 3, 2. Start again, with lesser pauses. And then once more. You are getting the fret and string correct. Yes, try again.

And then you realize. You are Actually Playing Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti. Did you hear that? You are playing slowly, with pauses, but yet, You are Actually Playing Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyone who passes by can listen and say oh she is playing Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti. You cannot believe it. You try again. Yes! And Yes!!!!! You are actually producing a tune out of a musical instrument!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You, stupid old uncoordinated you!! And that too, within minutes!!!

You put back the guitar reluctantly at 8.30, and walk out. The fog has risen from your head and disappeared. Today is going to be a Good Day, you know it. Yes, Sir!! You smile like an idiot inside your helmet, all the way to work, you sing old happy songs of sunshine and love.

And now you understand why it is worth all the early mornings and the fatigue and the getting over mental blocks and memories of old failures and the voices in your head that call you an absolute goner, a poor old bungling fool.

Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti. That's why.

Photo: At a Swiss jazz concert at the Alliance Française, the double bass, a favorite instrument.

Read to me...

In the Iranian film 'Blackboards' by Samira Makhmalbaf, the scene you remember the most is of an old Kurdish shepherd grazing his sheep high up in the mountains, stopping the teacher and asking him if he can read a letter for him. He slowly pulls out a carefully folded piece of paper from his pocket. His face opening up in a smile hearing that his son is doing well though he cannot visit him now. A face still smiling when the teacher continues on his way, suspecting the truth, that the son is perhaps in jail, like so many other young men from this region. (But kindness, more important than truth...)

You read about postmen in the Himalayas who walk long distances, climb up and down hills, cross rivers, to carry letters to remote villages. How they also serve as the reader and writer of letters to people there, and are much awaited, like family. A job you would’ve loved to do, a role you would’ve loved to play? Long moments of walking alone, and then connection and meaning, and words, and then a walking alone again. A pendulum of perfect balance.

‘The Reader’ was heartbreaking because it was all about reading and being read to. You walked around wounded for a long time after that.

So great was your need to read to someone once upon a time that you walk into an Old Age home one day, and ask the Mother Superior whether any of the inmates there would like to be read to. She says yes, but then they try not to let them interact too much with young people because that would make them remember the children who abandoned them a long time ago, and the carefully constructed living-in-the-present would come apart in mindless, endless grief.

While you are talking to her, an old man comes in to ask if his son’s money order has come. His son hasn’t sent anything in years, nor bothered to come to see his father or call him or write to him. But this is a ritual the old man follows every day to retain what is left of his 'sanity', and the kind nuns indulge him.

You walk out, old, abandoned and bent, you do not go around offering your reading anymore. You remember the teachers in 'Blackboards', traveling from place to place with knowledge that no one wants to learn. What is worse, having riches that no one wants, or having nothing to give?

And then one morning, you get "read to" by your three-year-old niece, and a whole new dimension of reading opens up before you :) 

You remember those sessions with storytellers/readers, and how you were in tears every single time even though the stories were of joy and belonging. You remember feeling that you were reliving a sacred ceremony from a very distant past. That if you reached out, a circle would form, and you would be part of it...

You would like to think that reading to another, is yet another form of giving. Listening, a gracious act of receiving. And the whole event, an ancient ritual of connection....

Dev Anand, or Celebrating Life

Dev Anand died yesterday. I feel more alone than ever. But then I remembered the funeral procession in Akira Kurosawa's film 'Dreams' where people sing and dance behind the funeral cortege, with flowers in their hands. They are celebrating the fact that that they got to meet such a man during their lifetime, receive the immense gift that was him. It is a procession of gratitude.

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October 2007

"As long as you are excited about things, you're young!"

So he said, arms flung wide, eyes blazing, during the release of his autobiography - "Romancing with Life" - here in Bangalore today. Dev Anand just turned 84 last week. Actor, living legend, inspiration to millions.

I celebrate this man's birthday every year [reminded of the exact date by my dear friend Srini]. I haven't seen half of his films, I don't have any memorablia. What I celebrate is his spirit, his enthusiasm, his energy, his belief that as long as one is alive, it's never too late. 

A spirit which he displayed on stage today, so that you soon forgot you are looking at a bent wrinkled old man of 84. If this is youth, I don't think I meet many young people these days.

While signing the book of the man in front of me, he suddenly looked sideways and met my eyes in the crowd milling around him , and smiled at me - for no reason. A deep warm eye-holding smile.  As if he knew I was ashamed that I was losing my enthusiasm, me who used to be called Dev Anand at my earlier workplace.

Last week, on 26th Sep, on his 84th birthday, I had treated my friends to dinner. The waiters were so taken up with the fact, they brought a lit candle and sparklers and a free drink, as if he was present there. I did not tell him that when I met him, when he was signing my copy of his autobiography, as I had planned to.

I need to continue living his spirit, his excitement for life. Like the old handicapped asthmatic man with crutches, who sat next to me in that roomful of complete strangers. He thanked Dev - for he had been living by his inspiration for the last 60 years, and had therefore succeeded in living a normal life,  struggling beyond his limitations, led by the never-say-die spirit of this man he finally gets to shake hands with.

That is the only celebration worthy of this man.

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Photos of this meeting, and our many Dev Anand birthday celebrations, here.