On letting go as a parent

Manohar Devadoss’ Life is his message

No matter what the context of your Life is, no matter how challenging the situation is, you always have the choice to be happy despite the circumstances.

4-min read

To my soulmate Vaani and me, Manohar Devadoss personified love, compassion, courage, dignity and a deep, hearty, full-of-Life, laughter!

We will always remember him for those amazing, exceptional, qualities.

As I write this tribute, his funeral is underway. He passed on a couple of days ago. He was 86.

To many, he was a rare artist, who, despite his failing eyesight for decades, and his eventual blindness some years ago, created extraordinary works of art. To others, he was Mahema’s lover and companion, until she passed on in 2008. To many others, he was an exceptional human being and a very dear friend.

Love in action

Mano, to Vaani and me, was always loving. The magnificence of his love shone in his tight hugs. Each time we met him, he would immediately embrace both of us together, his big whiskers brushing against our faces. He literally poured his heart into that embrace every single time.  And he would exclaim heartily: “AVIS, Vaani, how are you both?” That moment always oozed authenticity. It wasn’t just another soulless, matter-of-fact, greeting. It was love in action. It was what being loving truly is.

Genuine, deep, compassion

His compassion too was genuine. It was expansive, limitless and deep like the oceans.

When Vaani and I first met him, in September 2015, he was very moved by hearing the story of our enduring bankruptcy. He complimented us for being the happynesswalas^TM and for living a Life of purpose – Inspiring ‘Happyness’ ^TM! He had someone read out my book Fall Like A Rose Petal to him. And in November 2015, in an edition of our conversation series, the happyness conversations^TM, where he was our guest, he empathetically remarked: “I am not sure my pain of not being able to see and of having lost my companion Mahema is bigger, or your pain of continuing to deal with a crippling financial situation is bigger.” This ability to feel another’s pain and place it higher than your own is rare. That is true compassion.

During one of our visits to his home in Santhome, he served us his signature salad, Tulsania. He chose to serve us salad only because he knew we were on a diet. Now, he did not have someone make the salad for us. He went to the grocer’s on the morning of our visit and bought the ingredients for the salad himself. And he tossed up the salad, with lettuce and walnuts, in a fresh homemade mayo dressing. He insisted on serving his preparation to us. And he served us a couple of helpings. There is an Urdu word for hospitality called khatirdari. It defines the act of serving a guest with compassion. In being served by him, and while savoring his preparation, we experienced Mano’s legendary khatirdari.

Remarkable ability to face Life’s upheavals undauntedly

It was his remarkable ability to face Life undauntedly that guided and shaped his journey, even without normal eyesight and, over time, despite total blindness.

His entire Life is evidence of this ability.

Mahema and Mano married in 1963. They lived together for 45 years. She passed away in 2008. Of these 45 years, Mahema lived with quadriplegia for 35 years; a devastating accident had rendered her quadriplegic in December 1972. Around the same time, Mano began to have progressive, degenerative, eyesight; this eventually led to total blindness. Yet, Mano cared for Mahema, diligently, compassionately, for all those 35 years! If Shahjahan built the Taj Mahal for his beloved, Mano ensured – though his love for her, his practical thinking, his toiling – that Mahema lived through those 35 years, unable to use her limbs, without a single bedsore! He also anchored himself to stay strong, alongside Mahema, as they raised their beautiful daughter Sujatha in the midst of their individual, physically debilitating, conditions. And, for over 14 years, since Mahema’s passing, Mano lived alone. He led a dignified, purposeful Life, being immersed in his art, his writing and in his public work. “There is no point in moping and mourning about the challenges that Life throws at you. We must learn to laugh at ourselves, at our situation, and at Life itself,” he told us, when we had a conversation with him in June 2016. Excerpts from this conversation are due to appear in my forthcoming book, The Happyness Road.  

Mano and Mahema – together again!

His laughter had a spiritual quality

All through that conversation, which lasted a couple of hours, Mano laughed full-heartedly. He laughed even when he recalled all the upheavals that he had experienced in Life. Over many interactions with him in these past few years, Mano’s laughter, to us, became a part of his identity. In fact, if you have met him and experienced his laughter, you can hear him laugh even in most pictures of him. Vaani and I have often felt that his laughter had a spiritual quality. It was wholesome, honest and conveyed a deep understanding of what Life really is. It reflected a unique celebration of Life: Of its inscrutability, of its impermanence and of its suchness!

Vaani, Mano and AVIS, June 2016. Picture by Vinodh Velayudhan.

An embodiment of courage

Mano’s true religion, we believe, was courage. He practiced living each moment fully, courageously.

Now, courage is not necessarily evident only in popular acts of physical valor. Courage is certainly not the absence of fear either. The ability to look fear in the eye, to stand up to what scares you, is courage. So, being able to face Life’s upheavals, without giving up, without becoming bitter, is courage. Being able to withstand pain, while choosing to not suffer from it, is courage. Choosing to immerse yourself in what you love doing, when darkness engulfs you – in Mano’s case, there was physical darkness too, given his impaired eyesight – is courage. To let go, and to flow with Life, is courage. Being useful, even when you can’t be successful in a worldly sense, is courage. To live a Life of love, compassion, dignity and cheer, despite constant pain, despite enduring constraints, is courage. To laugh at yourself, at your situation, and at Life, is courage! To be happy, to be non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering, despite the circumstances, is courage.

Surely, being Manohar Devadoss was never easy. Pain has been so integral to his Life’s journey for 50 years. Yet, he just kept flowing with Life, accepting it for what it is, and never once, feeling either self-pity or bitterness. There’s a word in Tamil called thunivu that personifies courage through human action. For Vaani and me, Mano’s Life will always remain an embodiment of thunivu.

Mano’s kind of courage is rare. It is quiet. But it is unputdownable, it is unmissable. It shines bright. And such courage lights up the lives of people who come in contact with those that display it.

This is what happened with Vaani and me too when Mano came into our Life. Our Life illumined with his influence. Which is why we believe his Life is his message – for anyone who wants to pause, reflect and learn how to be happy despite their circumstances.

Additional, relevant, links:

• Manohar Devadoss.
• Rise In Love  – a 2015-documentary, made by a young filmmaker Shalu C. While focusing on the journey of Vaani and AVIS, the film explores how love thrives in the face of adversity. Viewing time: 30.18 minutes.
• Fall Like A Rose Petal  – AVIS’ first book. It is the true story of AVIS’ and Vaani’s Life. It captures learnings from the excruciating, fascinating, Life-changing, experience – a crippling bankruptcy – that they are still going through.
• Click here to know more about the happynesswalas ^TM, Vaani and AVIS.
• If you wish to seek Vaani’s and AVIS’ perspectives on a Life challenge you are faced with, please reach out here – Let’s Talk Happyness ^TM!

Say ‘no’ when you must say ‘no’!

Make each moment a celebration

Learning to uncling from your sadness

The essence of prayer

To find inner peace, peace is “the” way

Peace arrives when you stop resisting, stop fighting and stop struggling with Life.

Each of us is fighting something or the other. All the time. Someone fights for health. Someone else for wealth. There’s someone fighting for dignity. And someone for identity. Someone out there fights for companionship. Another soldiers on for acceptance. Yet a factor that’s common to all constituencies is that everyone, despite their individual fights, wants peace. You look around. Ask around. And you will find that almost everyone wants just peace. And they will all talk about inner peace __  bliss, joy, plain, good ol’ happiness.

But you can’t pursue peace when you are struggling with Life, fighting its every dimension. You cannot be angry with your situation in Life and expect to find peace in it at the same time. Peace will come, when you suspend all hostility in your mind, and through that act, make your immediate circle of influence peaceful. Peace has a price to be paid for, and that is to be accepting of a situation or a person or an outcome. Many people wonder what is the way to peace. And the simplest answer to their query is what Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh champions: “Peace is the way!”

But by ceasing to fight, are you embracing inaction? And isn’t inaction equal to committing hara-kiri? Let me clarify: ceasing to fight is not inaction. It means acceptance. You can be accepting of a situation, be peaceful, and yet work towards changing it. They are not mutually exclusive. On the other hand, they are complementary. The other day, at a coffee shop, I noticed a young couple argue with each other at another table. The lady was agitated. Often gesticulating wildly, raising her voice just so much that others around could hear and perceive that she was upset with the gentleman. The man, on the other hand, was stoic. He was calm and in control of himself, even if he was not in control of the situation. At the end of their discussions and arguments, I felt nothing had been resolved. Things were where they were when they came in. But the lady stomped out in a huff, and I believe she must have been continuing to fight the situation, or the man, in her mind. The man was calm, perhaps not happy either with the way the meeting ended, and made a slow, peaceful exit. He may also have felt that things could have been better, but for sure, he wasn’t feeling worse. He was peaceful. He wasn’t fighting. Yet he was not abstaining from action. Coming to the meeting, making an attempt, while staying calm, was indeed action.

We too can embrace this way of living. Simply, don’t start with asking ‘WHY?’ of Life at each of its twists and turns. Exclaim instead, ‘Interesting, so, we have a situation…!’, and mobilize your action to resolving it. Even a fight for a nation’s independence can be a peaceful__and successful__one. Gandhi proved it and so did 300 million of his followers, fellow Indians, back then. The same principle applies here. End all violent thinking __ about anyone or anything __ and approach each problem or situation with complete focus and total equanimity. Remember: to find peace, inner peace, peace is the way! 

Understanding ‘letting go’

Letting go is not difficult. It is deciding to let go that is difficult. So, here’s a simple perspective on what it takes to let go!

When we try to control anything, we experience satisfaction and triumph in the short-term, but we are struggling with pain and suffering in the long-term. When we let go, there’s pain initially, but joy and bliss abound in the long-term. This applies to opinions, money, relationships, children, careers and any challenging situation in Life.

The luckless rescue operation to save Thimanna (inset) Picture Courtesy: Internet

I read a story in the papers last week of a farmer in Karnataka, Hanumanthappa Hatti, who had to take a heart-wrenching decision to let go. Hatti’s six-year-old son Thimanna had fallen into an abandoned borewell in their farm in Bagalkot. After three days of hectic rescue operations, Hatti pleaded with the district government officials to stop the rescue mission. Already a 75 ft trench had been dug to reach Thimanna who was believed to be stuck at 160 ft in the 300 ft-deep borewell. To reach the boy, the rescue mission team had decided to dig further, in an-L shape, even as almost everyone gave very little chance for the boy to emerge alive. Oxygen levels in the borewell beyond a certain point were nil, and at 160 ft, the chances of survival after three days was nil too. It was at this time that Hatti made the decision. He said already three lakh cubic metres of mud had been hauled out from the borewell. To fill the borewell back and reclaim his sugarcane crop will already require a humungous financial outlay – which was beyond Hatti’s means. If they were to dig further, Hatti reasoned, his costs would only go up with no chance of finding his boy alive. “I won’t get back my son alive after all this that is being done. I should at least save my land for the future of my two daughters,” he told reporters at his farm.

Hatti’s is a classic case of letting go – complete with the difficulty involved in making that crucial decision. Letting go is not about giving up. It is about accepting that there are some things in Life that simply cannot be.

The desire to control is an ego-based response. It represents a view within us, however subconscious it may be, that we are causing_and will want to continue to cause__things to happen the way they are. The decision to let go, is a spiritual decision, made in acceptance of and in surrender to a Higher Energy. When we let go, we feel a pain, an initial ache, but we also feel good. We feel a sense of relief, just the opposite of how we felt while we were clinging on to that situation__fighting, agonizing, suffering. Mitch Albom, the author of the beautiful book, ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’, awakens us to a new perspective: “Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you are not losing it, you are just passing it on to someone else.”

What a wonderful way to inspire all of us to let go. So, the choice is with us. Within us. To control or to let go. Let go, because you and I are mere voyagers, who came with nothing and will go with nothing. We will have led a meaningful Life if it can epitomize love and peace. By letting go, as the struggle within us ceases, we will become love and peace!

Inner peace depends on what you feel good doing!

Your inner peace depends on what you feel good doing. Doing good, being ethical, is a personal choice. If being good and ethical gives you joy, continue to do so, despite what the world says or how you are treated or what’s handed or meted out to you. Simply, do whatever it takes to protect your inner peace!  

You grieve and suffer when you try to be something that you intrinsically are not. If you are not unethical, then ‘adjusting’ to the ‘ways of the world’ will only make you depressed. But then you look around you, listen to the voices of ‘compromise’, almost all of them leaning towards ‘adjusting, accommodating, accepting’ the ‘worldly way’, in a seemingly insane world and you conclude that goodness, ethics and humanity are dead. So, you grudgingly join the crowd that just wants to play to the whims of the world. You don’t feel good about this at all. But still you compromise. This compromise is what will kill your soul, will squeeze your inner core and make you miserable. So, the question you have to ask yourself is: are you better off living being good, though alone in the crowd, or are you willing to compromise and live suffering, in misery?

 

Whatever you decide, just stick to it. Don’t grieve after you have made your choice. Know however, that, as long as Life has been around on the planet, and as history has proven time and again, the good will always prevail in the end. No matter what the good sides have had to go through, no war has ever been won by the unethical sides. So, if you are one of those who needs statistical evidence, you can check this premise out. You will find it to be true.

This is not about being a revolutionary. For, our ethical conflicts do not just happen at a social or national level. They happen in close, personal relationships. If you sit down and analyze each of your close relationships, you will find that several of them have been compromised__by you or by the other. Left to yourself you will perhaps not want to continue with some of those. But you have gagged your soul, thinking you have bought peace, succumbing to manipulators, to liars and to vicious and cantankerous people in your circle of influence. This could be a spouse, an in-law, a sibling, a parent, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a boss, a subordinate or a business partner. Ask yourself how are you feeling about each of these relationships? Do you feel you have compromised? You will invariably find that you don’t enjoy them, that you don’t belong in that company. Then, why are you there? Because it’s easier to be ‘peaceful’ when you accept the ‘way of the world’ and when ‘you join them if you can’t beat them’? Perhaps, you have not understood the meaning of peace. Peace is what you feel when you are happy within. Are you? You obviously are not. You are just avoiding a conflict by capitulating. Now, you don’t need to revolt. You don’t need to fight. You simply must choose to be who you are. As Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729~1797) said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” You don’t necessarily need to bring in righteousness here if you don’t want to. You just do what you think is right for you.

If being good, doing good is your way of Life, choose it. The key is to be happy. Because Life is about being happy despite the circumstances that you are placed in. Of course, if you are the sort that can be happy with a compromise, well, that’s fine too. Or if you are happy joining those who are outright unscrupulous, then so be it. Simply, be happy!

The latest Mani Ratnam film, ‘Kadal’ (The Ocean), deals with this subject of Good vs Evil beautifully. Set in the backdrop of a village of Christian fisherfolk, it explores the challenges that good people have to encounter in the face of the easy, unscrupulous ways available to them. The dilemma, the trials and the tribulations of Father Sam Fernando (played admirably by Arvind Swami), the village’s pastor and conscience keeper, reflect those we face in our own daily lives. Each moment is a choice. To do what’s right and to adjust, accommodate and do what appears to be right. Father Sam always chooses to do what’s right. And pays a price, sometimes a heavy one, every single time. Yet, he chooses not to get bitter. And keeps persevering, spreading the doctrine of good living__being good, doing good__often times, thanklessly.

This is the lesson we need to learn. If you are peaceful doing good and being ethical, then know that you will be tested, taunted, chided, trampled upon, kicked around, but the key is to continue to be who you are. Despite the provocations. In spite of your situation.Knowing fully well that in the end only goodness works, as ‘Kadal’s’ ending demonstrates one more time, in this mad, seemingly bad, world. Besides, if being good is who you intrinsically are, just be it. Because only by being yourself can you be at peace!

Be aware of your feelings to stay on the path!

Be aware of how you are feeling. It surely helps you in more ways than you can even imagine.

 

Many people who embrace spirituality and make progress towards anchoring in their inner core of joy often encounter real-world, real-Life situations when they are provoked by and succumb to external stimuli. They slip and fall on the path and feel even more guilty and angry that they allowed themselves to be provoked. The question is how can you stay on the path without slipping?

 

The way to do it is to stay in touch with your feelings all the time. When you understand Life and start living, one of the first and finest changes you will notice is that you will feel peaceful within you. With acceptance comes peace. And with peace comes unadulterated, pure joy!  

 

Yet, even as you are experiencing this new freedom, of being detached from the travails of everyday living, things will continue to be ‘normal’ in the external world. Which is, people and situations will irritate you, anger you, insult you, provoke you and you may break away from your anchored position, of being safe on ‘your’ shore, and may enjoin, once again, the strife, the chaos, the turmoil.

 

 

When this happens, know that your response is nothing to grieve over. It is perfectly human and normal to react. It’s what you do after you react that you need to watch over.

 

 

Let’s say, you have been having a torrid time in Life. Someone you know has been very, very sick. And besides providing full-time logistical and emotional support for this person, you also have a family to look after and an employment to keep. Life at work has become hell after a new boss has come in. Your days and weeks are always harried. That you are stressed-out, is an understatement. To find relief, you start a yoga or a meditation practice or a simple hour’s walk, all by yourself, daily. Over weeks you begin to love the peace and joy you experience. You find that this new practice has helped you prepare for the remaining 23 hours in the day. You fall in love with Life all over again. Then suddenly, the patient you are tending to goes into a critical stage requiring more intensive care. And around the same time your tyrannical boss gets after you with a vengeance. You explode one day at work and quit in a huff! As you soak in your new reality of being left without a job, it is not so much the act of quitting but the manner in which you quit, choosing to react, to explode, that disturbs you.

 

Now, this is the crucial point of introspection. How are you feeling should be your question? And not why did I explode? Because, remember, however long you have been anchored, however long you have been on the spiritual path of internal awareness, you will be provoked by external stimuli. It is only with continuous awareness and incessant practice that you can learn not to respond to such stimuli. Now, if you don’t become quickly aware of how you are feeling__actually you could be feeling pretty miserable after that explosion__you may slip further, either into depression or into being consumed by your own rage. “Oh God, what have I done?” and “Enough is enough. I can’t tolerate that boor anymore. How dare he?” are both responses that can ruin you. Instead, immediately wanting to know how you are your feeling can help you immensely. “Hey, looks like I am angry” or “Well, I needed to vent out somewhere, someplace. So, I did. Now let me get back to protecting my inner peace” are more ‘aware’ responses to your situation.

May be not the same context, but the same reactions in our own individual Life situations, keep happening to us, to those around us, all the time. The context is different, the characters are different, but the emotions are the same. Resultantly, feelings will be the same. Knowing those feelings and being aware is the only way to stay on the path. Intelligent living is therefore about a series of endless conversations with yourself. It is through this benign chatter that you stay aware and connected. All practices that champion intelligent living are useless until you understand, as the Bible says, how to “be in this world but not of it” and, as the Gita says, how to “live in this world and yet be above it”. That understanding of a seemingly complex principle, which in reality is so simple, so practical and so easy to follow, can only be got through continuously examining your feelings. To use a cricketing analogy, if you want to carry your bat through and play a memorable innings, no matter how menacing and unplayable the bowling may be, you must have focus, patience and stay anchored!