Living without Dad

What could have been never was. It simply never was. So, why grieve over it?

The last time I met my father was on Saturday, 6^th April, 2019. Vaani was with me. My mother was by his side, as always. All four of us had a meaningful conversation – an absolute rarity, a miracle! When we got up to leave, I reached out and gave him a hug. As I stepped back from the bed on which he was seated, my father gave me a flying kiss – it was part kiss and part blessing.

That moment with him will stay with me forever.

He passed away on Monday, 15^th April, 2019, nine days after we had visited him.

You see, we are not a family that normally hugs or kisses when we meet. So, what I did to my dad and his parting gesture are special in their own way.

Although we live in the same city, we had not met as a family in over 14 years now. The environment in the family too has been fractious for the longest time. I can’t recollect ever relating to my mother. More recently, I have been unable to relate to my siblings either. Besides, my choice to borrow from the family to fix my now bankrupt Firm, and their imagining that Vaani and I have cheated them, and our inability to repay that money, hasn’t helped matters at all. (Read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal.). Sadly, every conversation that has been attempted among all of us in the past has been derailed by machinations and misunderstandings, so no one even tries to have a conversation anymore!

But, ironically, what did not happen in these past several years, happened with my father’s passing. We three siblings, and our spouses, got together under the same roof, for the first time since 2005! I guess we are many, many, conversations away from relating to each other again, from repairing the tattered fabric of our family’s identity, but for the first time, there was dignity and peace in the way we all conducted ourselves. Seeing off our father was as poignant and peaceful as it was painful.

My spiritual evolution has turned me away from religion and rituals. So, even as I mechanically went about the process of cremating my father, I could not but be reflective. The entire day’s proceedings held a magic and beauty of their own – humbling me, grounding me and steeling me.

To be sure, all the strife in my family has been over social positioning (over ‘what will people say?’) and over clinging on to material security – both of which have led to an absolute lack of trust and transparency. My dad, Vaani and I, have been mere pawns in a mindless game that was continuously being played on us. There has been so much avoidable turmoil, trauma and grief that everyone has been subjected to. Yet, as my Dad’s body lay there, his face radiated an unmatchable calm, a serenity that only divinity can deliver. I haven’t stopped wondering since about that inscrutable irony!

As my brother and I drove to the cremation ground, with our father’s body, we did not utter a word to each other. I did notice that he was crying inconsolably. I let him be. And I allowed these immortal lines by Kannadasan to comfort me as they wafted through my consciousness…

ஆடிய ஆட்டமென்ன?
பேசிய வார்த்தை என்ன?
தேடிய செல்வமென்ன?

திரண்டதோர் சுற்றம் என்ன?

கூடுவிட்டு ஆவிபோனால் கூடவே வருவதென்ன…?

வீடுவரை உறவு
வீதி வரை மனைவி
காடு வரை பிள்ளை
கடைசி வரை யாரோ?

(The lyrics are from an iconic song from ‘Paadha Kanikkai’/1962/T.M.Soundararajan/Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy.)

Kannadasan so powerfully, so lucidly, through these lyrics, talks about the futility of the ‘drama’ we make out of our lives…because, in the end, he reminds us, you go alone, with no one – and nothing – with you…

(When you were alive….) all the games you played, all the words you spoke, all the materialistic things/wealth you accumulated, all those relatives/people who surrounded you…(all of these don’t matter….) once your soul leaves your body, what – or who – is it that comes with you?

So, why all this ‘drama’, wonders the poet?

As the hungry flames in the crematorium’s gas-fired chamber devoured my father’s body, I just had this to tell him: “Thank you Daddy for everything. And I am sorry!”

That’s all I had to say. Not that it matters now.

Then my fickle human mind, for a brief few seconds, pined for what could have been. If only things had turned around for Vaani and me and we had repaid the monetary debt back to the family, and he had seen our resurgence, and we had redeemed ourselves with the family, before he went away – Life would have been so much more different. Just that thought broke me. I cried quietly as I kneeled down in surrender to a Higher Energy! In that moment of surrender, an awakening, empowering, liberating thought arose within me: “What is the point in thinking about what could have been? What could have been never was. It simply never was. So, why grieve over it?” And I let my grief go…I just let it go…

Later that evening, as we walked on the beach to immerse my father’s mortal remains in the Bay of Bengal, I felt magic and beauty again in the moment. I was carrying the earthen pot that contained his ashes. Here was my Dad, I thought, and I was carrying him like I would carry a baby. I felt a deep sense of gratitude and love for his Life. I felt love for his music (he was a great Carnatic singer, who never quite followed his bliss; listen to a YouTube rendering of Nagumo by him here). I felt grateful for his enormous, unshakeable, trust in me and Vaani. I felt admiration for his boundless resilience – to have seen so much happen around him and yet choosing to remain unmoved for the most part.

My Dad: A.Kasi Viswanathan 7th July 1939 ~ 15th April 2019

In that reflective moment, I realized, his Life’s design was its message. For what it was, the way it was. I now understand that some parts and aspects of our Life may never attain closure the way we wish for them or envision them. They may happen surely but only the way Life wants them to happen. So, Life is just a continuum. No beginning. No end. You just go with the flow. It is there one moment. And it is gone in the next!

Just then, a huge wave came crashing at us, and my brother and I let go of the pot that held my father’s ashes. It vanished in the vast cacophonous ocean. Boom! It was gone. I tried to see if I could find the pot bobbing up somewhere. No…it was gone!

That night, I decided to have a drink. And I leaned on R.D.Burman to soothe me. Interestingly, the first song on my playlist celebrated the suchness of Life. Anand Bakshi’s lyrics seemed like they were written specially for me, for that evening…

ज़िन्दगी के सफ़र में गुज़र जाते हैं जो मकाम
वो फिर नहीं आते, वो फिर नहीं आते

कुछ लोग एक रोज़ जो बिछड़ जाते हैं
वो हजारों के आने से मिलते नहीं
उम्र भर चाहे कोई पुकारा करे उनका नाम
वो फिर नहीं आते, वो फिर नहीं आते

(The lyrics are from a classic song from ‘Aap Ki Kasam’/1974/Kishore Kumar/R D Burman.)

Anand Bakshi’s poetry is powerful: Life’s moments are fleeting, they never come back; some people who leave you don’t come back too, no matter how many times you call out their name!

Estranged as were for many years now, and ever since I started a new Life with Vaani in 1989, I have been living away from my Dad, of course. But from now on, living without him, will mean something very, very different.

Thank you, Swami!

On his birthday today, I recall an unforgettable experience and an unputdownable lesson that Swami taught me!

Today is Swami Sathya Sai Baba’s birthday. I have never met him. Or seen him.

But in the last decade his ‘presence’ has filled my Life. Vaani and I have been personally ‘coached’ by him, through his medium – a young man through whom Swami speaks to us. And what I have learnt from Swami is this: Live immersed in the moment, live in gratitude!

I remember some years ago, one evening, I sat at the Chamiers Café in Chennai brooding over my Life. Everything was so dark, so hopeless. (Read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal) And both Vaani and I were clueless. My laptop was open in front of me. But I was staring blankly at the screen – I had no idea of what I must do, where I must begin and how I must proceed. Vaani was at home attending to her father who was ailing at that time. So, I was alone. Without her by my side, there was no one to talk to. My thoughts were steeped in worry; I was feeling insecure, anxious and fearful.

That’s when the phone rang and I snapped out of my reverie.

It was Kumar, a supremely talented music composer and sound engineer in his own right. He is my dear young friend, who is just a shade older than my own son Aashirwad. Kumar is Swami’s messenger, he’s the medium through whom Swami communicates to seekers.

Kumar asked me: “AVIS, Swami wants to know what would you be doing at the moment, if you had nothing to worry about!”

I laughed and quickly replied, “Well, I would be enjoying a drink.”

Pat came Swami’s reply, through Kumar: “Then, go have it and then call back to report!”

I don’t know why. But I didn’t protest. I didn’t argue. I didn’t analyze. I just packed my laptop bag and trudged back home. I fixed myself a drink, played my favorite R.D.Burman tracks and enjoyed myself. Three drinks down, I called Kumar.

I said: “Well Kumar, please tell Swami that I had three drinks and I am feeling good.”

Kumar asked: “Swami wants to know how much did you worry while having the drink?”

I replied: “I didn’t worry at all. I was so immersed in the joy of having a drink and listening to R.D.Burman’s immortal music. I felt grateful that I could at least have a drink in peace when there’s so much turmoil and trauma in my Life. And I was grateful for R.D.Burman’s genius – how uplifting his music is!”

Kumar then said: “Swami says, immersion in the moment is the key to being non-worrying. You didn’t immerse yourself in your drink, you immersed yourself in the moment. Your faith in Swami made you just immerse – without questions, without analysis. Now that you have known how to do this, why do you need a drink, why do you need Swami? The next time your mind races to the future or is stuck in the past, bring it to attend to the present moment. And learn to be grateful for what is. Whatever you have, be grateful for it. The circumstances are not relevant to inner peace and happiness. Your immersion in the moment is important. Your gratitude is.”

That was a very beautiful, unforgettable, one-on-one ‘coaching’ session, if you like, that I had with Swami. There have been countless such sessions. And even many, many night-long conversations, debates, arguments on the meaning of Life, on why Life is inscrutable, on keeping the faith and on how to cultivate patience. Through each of these interactions with Swami, through Kumar acting as a self-less medium, I have learnt to anchor, to be non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering, to be happy – despite my excruciating circumstances.

To me Swami is no Godman, as the term is popularly, loosely, used. He’s a dear, dear friend. On his birthday today, all I can say, humbly, to my Coach, my Teacher, my friend, is, “Thank you, Swami!”  

When a picture teaches you about Life…

As Dr.Nupur Talwar and Dr.Rajesh Talwar walked free from Dasna jail last evening, this image emerged on my timeline, on the Internet and on TV.

Picture Credit: APNLIVE – Sourced from the internet

It told me so many stories about Life…it showcased…

• How inscrutable Life really is
• The unfairness and injustice meted out to this couple, their daughter Aarushi and their help Hemraj
• How to stay strong, find strength in a storm and go through Life with reflection, resilience and resourcefulness
• How to serve selflessly, how to be useful no matter how grave the circumstances are – the dentist couple refused fees for dental care that they had provided to inmates of Dasna
• The unflinching support that Rajesh’s older brother Dinesh Talwar provided the couple – he was the mainstay of the entire defense strategy, the chief-of-staff as the family soldiered on
• The focus and perseverance of defense attorney Tanveer Ahmed Mir – without whose leadership, the Talwars’ case may not have been made in the Allahabad High Court
• The brutally honest story-telling of Avirook Sen in his Book Aarushi and of Vishal Bharadwaj and Meghna Gulzar in their film Talvar
• The stoicism of the Chitnis couple, Nupur’s parents, as the family went through these harrowing 9 years
• That, no matter what, the truth ultimately prevails…and justice is always done
• How small, and petty, our own challenges are when we look beyond ourselves and around us
• Why we must always be grateful for what we have instead of complaining about what we don’t have
• The learning we must all take away: whatever happens, face Life!
• The Gulzar-RD Burman-Kishore-da genius: Musafir Hoon Yaroon…Bas Chalte Jaana Hai…

Embrace your pain and you will not suffer

In today’s Podcast, I share how we can make peace with pain and avoid suffering.

Listen time: 5:11 minutes

 

Both success and failure are imposters

Today’s blogpost appears as a Podcast. Listen here: 4:34 minutes

In this Podcast, I share learnings from my favorite music composer’s – R.D.Burman/Panchamda – Life. In Life, what goes up, does come down. And what is down, goes up again. So we must remain untouched by both success and failure – and remain unmoved!

‘Musafir Hoon Yaron…Bas Chalte Jaana Hai…!’

Have I given up? Have I grown too old?

I have been trying to convince a legendary actor, who is 75 now, for a conversation I am trying to have with him for my Sunday column (for DT Next) and for my forthcoming Book, “The Happiness Road”. He responded saying he is busy with a mega project involving a Tamizh literary classic and so he did not have the time. I respected his choice.

When sharing this update with my photographer-partner (on “The Happiness Road” project) Vinodh Velayudhan, I added that I found it interesting that I will not be pursuing this actor for a meeting anymore. I told Vinodh that all my Life I had worked with the principle that I should not take ‘no’ for an answer. As a journalist, this principle helped me a lot – I am among the few people who have interviewed Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry (Cyrus Mistry’s father), Vijay Mallya, Ramesh Gelli (Global Trust Bank), C.Sivasanakaran (who I later worked with as Executive Assistant), Rajarathinam (the takeover tycoon who funded all his takeovers by debt) and several other elusive business leaders; I was the only writer-journalist to be allowed on the plane carrying Rajiv Gandhi’s dead body on May 22, 1991 (read my blogpost on that experience here). To be sure, this don’t-take-no-for-an-answer attitude helped me in my business Life too – I stitched together international deals and partnerships with a unique combination of passion, conviction and aggression. Simply, if someone said ‘no’ to me, I pursued them, and like the car rental company’s positioning line, “I tried harder!” And often, I got what I had set out to achieve!

“Why then is today’s AVIS taking ‘no’ for an answer from this actor,” asked Vinodh on WhatsApp. “Is it that you have grown old or is it that you are giving up,” he prodded.

I smiled and replied that I found his questions deeply provocative and reflective at the same time. I said I would answer them through a blogpost. And so, here’s today’s post dedicated to answering Vinodh’s questions.

I believe that to refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer is a good trait to possess. Without ambition, without aggression, there is no progress. When I reflect upon my behavior as a young, firebrand journalist, and later as a young business leader, I feel my primary driver for pushing a door open, when it didn’t open to a knock, was my ambition. I wanted to be famous. And fame, as I believed in back then, came from being among famous people and doing things that others had not done before. I also had this egotistic streak in me – it was pretty well pronounced – so, I always responded with a “How dare you say this to me” whenever someone said ‘no’ to me. This unbridled aggression and drive defined me in the first 15 years of my career – it gave me a lot of fame, a lot of professional success and it gave me this tag that I loved: “AVIS is a man in a hurry, a dreamer, a doer!”

I have no regrets about who I was, and the way I was, back then. But the next 15 years of my Life, from 2002~2017, have really been about me asking far more meaningful questions about my Life. What is the point of success, fame, money? What is the Purpose of Life? Can there be a simpler way to do things – when you do it for the sheer joy it gives you and not necessarily to prove a point or achieve something at the cost of defeating someone else? What is happiness? How are some people happy despite their challenging circumstances? And why are some people unhappy despite the blessings, the abundance, in their lives?

These questions have brought me to this path, “The Happiness Road”, and I am enjoying the journey. I know for sure that there is no destination on this path. There is nowhere to arrive at. On this road, I wrote my Book Fall Like A Rose Petal . I curate interesting, reflective conversations in public spaces, I deliver Talks and I seek to meet people who are willing to share with me – and with Vaani – their idea of happiness. Everything we do – including our Workplace Happiness Firm www.avinitiatives.co.in – is about “Inspiring Happiness” among people who care to pause and reflect.

So, all my ambition is now channelized, directing the energy, inward. It flows uninhibited like always but it flows fueling my inner joy. I am not here to prove anything to anyone – not anymore! I am not preying on famous people so I can become famous being seen in their company. I am looking for fellow voyagers, like me and Vaani, who will sit down for a conversation along the path that we are traveling together on. If someone says ‘no’, I respect their choice. It doesn’t matter anymore who is saying ‘no’ to me; a ‘no’ does not have a debilitating impact on me either. It doesn’t matter if I appear to be behaving like I am too old for being ambitious or that I appear to be giving up. It seriously doesn’t matter!

I am on this path, “The Happiness Road”, and I am blissful here. I am not here pursuing anyone or anything. I am here, I am happy and I know I only have one thing to do on this path – like in the iconic Kishoreda-Panchamda-Gulzar song ‘Musafir Hoon Yaron’ from the 1972-classic ‘Parichay’…Bas Chalte Jaana Hai…I just have to keep walking! 

How about a Death-Day party?

Don’t mourn the dead, celebrate their Life instead!

An elderly resident in our apartment block has had a bereavement in her family. Normally, she leads the community navarathri celebrations in the building. But she cried out this year saying she was in mourning. Her choice made me wonder if we should at all mourn our dead.

I often hear people say that when someone passes away, you should not offer prayers for three to 10 days, depending on your closeness to the departed; you should not celebrate festivals, birthdays and anniversaries for a full year and, in some cases, I have noticed people even abstain from visiting ‘big’ temples like Tirupathi or their native shrines. Now, my perspective on this is limited to the way Hindus, particularly TamBrahms, mourn as I am exposed primarily to this culture. I must add here that my views on God and religion are significantly skewed to the journey within, to Godliness and to the religion of humanity. Even so, this is not even about God or religion. This is about, as I see it, the wasted, often dramatic, practice of mourning.

Yes, when someone you know and love dies, you will feel sad. And you can’t and you should not avoid that grief. Hold it and allow it to hold you. It will last for a while. But as it wears off after some time, and it will, let it go. By imposing socially – as dictated by the high-priests of religion – prescribed mourning norms, you are missing the big picture. Death is not a dark, monstrous ‘something’ that must be feared and abhorred. In fact, death is the only constant about Life. It is the inevitable. It is the only certainty you have in Life: if you are born, you will die! And as long as you live, death is your constant companion. It travels with you along the course of your entire lifetime, as a shadow will.

I learnt an important Life lesson from a slum dweller several years ago. One afternoon, I found traffic slowing down on Greenways Road. This was surprising because this is one of the freer thoroughfares in Chennai. In some time, the traffic came to a grinding halt. I stepped out of my car and walked a few metres ahead to find that a funeral procession was winging its way out of the Sathya Nagar slum in the area. As the flower-bedecked cortege of an old man snaked forward, I noticed several people, young and old, mostly men, dancing to the beats to a drum. They were leading the cortege. They danced furiously. And I could make out that several of them were drunk. I had seen this happen on the streets of Chennai many, many times before this one. But this time I was keen to understand why slum dwellers acted in such drunken frenzy while seeing off their dead. So I asked an elderly member of the procession if he could tell me what was going on. He reeked of cheap sarakku (liquor) and was probably in his 70s. He was not dancing; but he was swaying to the drum beats and the effect of alcohol nonetheless. He paused though and answered my question: “Saar, we are celebrating that our man is dead. That he has found viduthalai, freedom, from this earthly existence. He’s gone to a happier, prosperous place. We are happy for him. In celebrating his death, his freedom, we know, ours will come too. Soon!”

I found the man’s perspective to be a revelation. I had not thought of death from that point of view ever.

It is so simple. Celebrate the departed’s opportunity to be free from real world issues, challenges, attachments, bondages, whatever! I extended the thought and have since held the view that our dead must not be mourned but their lives must be celebrated. On the night when my father-in-law died, two years ago, I sat quietly and drank all by myself. I recalled how much I had learned from him and thanked him for his compassion and trust in me – beginning, of course, with his choice to let me marry Vaani, way back in the late ‘80s, even when I was barely out of college, and unemployed! It was a quiet communion and a personal celebration!

As I grow older, I find the rituals that impose mourning very meaningless, in fact, stifling. On the contrary, I find the slum-dwellers’ practice of dancing for their dead, of celebrating their dead, deeply spiritual. Many of them may well be uneducated. But perhaps they are more evolved than us. They surely know what it means to celebrate the lives of those who are gone. So, I believe mourning as a practice must be expunged. Instead we must do all the stuff that our dead would have loved. And through doing all of that, let’s celebrate their Life. As for me, I have advised Vaani and my children to abstain from all rituals and instead host my Death-Day party! I have asked them to play RD Burman-Gulzar-Kishore Kumar songs and hold a toast with the finest whiskeys as my celebration at my death!!!

PS: The image in this Blogpost has been updated in 2020.

Be a witness to your Life – be unmoved and non-suffering!

When you step back and behave like a third party to your own Life, nothing can hold you hostage.

I delivered my ‘Fall Like A Rose Petal’  Talk to a group of entrepreneurs recently. One of them reached out later in the evening and asked me if Life as maya, an illusion, can be explained. His exact question was: “How can something that causes so much suffering be unreal and an illusion?”

The answer is simple: Anything that you identify yourself with and start getting attached to will cause your suffering. So, the solution is simpler – stay detached, be in a witness-state, as a witness of your own Life!

As a young boy when my parents took me to watch ‘Sholay’ (Ramesh Sippy, Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Jaya Bhaduri and Amjad Khan) in a New Delhi cinema hall called Rachna in 1975, I remember I refused to come out of the hall when the movie got over. I was grief stricken that Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) was dead. I had come to identify with him. It was only when my dad sat me down and explained to me that the ‘real’ Amitabh Bachchan was still alive, and that this was just a movie, did I understand and agree to go home!

Many of us are in so much grief with our Life situations. This is because several of us are like how I was after watching ‘Sholay’ – we are clinging on to our made-up identities and are therefore struggling with this illusion called Life! Unless we step back, and away, as my dad advised me to, and see that our whole Life is just an illusion, like a movie, we will continue to be miserable. Two realities about Life must be understood. First, this lifetime is a limited period offer. It is impermanent. And anything that is impermanent is only an illusion! Second, Life happens. And keeps on happening. As Life happens chances are you will get what you want; chances are also that what you don’t want will come into your Life, often despite your best efforts. There were crises, there are crises and there will be crises as we go through Life. Each of those Life crises or tragedies or painful situations will leave us numb and confounded. The only way out, and the only way to find inner peace and happiness, is to stop identifying with anything or anyone that is impermanent. Don’t identify with success – getting what you want and don’t identify with failure – what you didn’t want!

You are not your problems. You are not your relationships. So don’t cling on to any identity. Identification is the root cause of all misery. When you are in the throes of a big crisis, when you don’t see a way out to end it, take a deep breath, step back and watch the situation with the eye and view of a detached third party.  Be a witness. Know that whatever it is, it won’t last. Because everything is impermanent. If you get this, you have understood Life, you have understood that it is all maya, an illusion, and you have understood that it is therefore possible to be non-suffering! So, don’t participate in any Life situation by worrying and by attempting to solve it by feeling anxious, insecure or fearful about it! Just watch your Life, your place and role in a given context or situation, and let an awakening happen within you – that enlightens you! You will then realize that there is always an opportunity to be happy, despite your circumstances!

How I am learning to live happily, peacefully, in a WhatsApp Group-ridden world!

If we can overcome the urge to want to make a point and to be seen as being right, every single time, we will have learnt the art of intelligent living.

Yesterday, I posted this Prayer on my personal Facebook Wall:

O! Lord!!

Grant us this day, and ever after, this Prayer…

Disable Forwarding Privileges on WhatsApp
And give us Sense and Sensibility among our WhatsApp Groups
And grant people the compassion so that they don’t add us back when we have quit a WhatsApp Group
And, through all of this, make this digital world a better place for us to leave behind for our children, and their children…

Amen!
PS: Even if you like this status, please don’t forward it…:) 🙂 :)!!!

It was posted half in jest. And half out of concern.

I am part of very few WhatsApp Groups. Out of these, a majority are well-regulated, non-spamming Groups. Some are virulently spamming and so, I ignore the spam in them and scoop out only relevant messages. In one Group that I am part of, the Admins are making a valiant effort to invite people to pause and reflect before they spam. They are encouraging self-regulation and sensitivity rather than enforcing discipline with non-negotiable rules.

It is in watching their struggle that I was inspired to write this Prayer yesterday and this blogpost today.

Over a drink last night, I thought through deeply about what we can learn about human behavior and about ourselves while being part of WhatsApp Groups – spamming, non-spamming, whatever kind!

I personally don’t read forwards, jokes and spam memes (including festival wishes). I don’t believe in anything that’s not personal. If it lacks a personal touch – including stuff that comes over email/bccs) – it gets trashed by me instantaneously. In fact, my WhatsApp Status message reads thus: “Please don’t send me Jokes and Forwards. Appreciate your kindness. :)” A huge majority of my contacts respect this choice of mine. And I deeply value their sensitivity.

But, of course, I realize that not everyone is the same. Fundamentally, we human beings are very expressive. Introverted is a word that does not really apply to us. Seriously. Even the most “introverted” person is expressing himself or herself through their silence. Silence is a great way to say something – several things in fact! So, because we are expressive, and because not all of us are very powerful conversationalists, over phone or face to face, a platform such as WhatsApp gives us so much space, and opportunity, to say whatever we want to. Sometimes, we may have nothing to say, but WhatsApp is seductive enough to entice us to want to make a statement. A Forward, which has no connection with either the subject being discussed or the core intention of a WhatsApp Group, is someone’s way of  seizing the opportunity to make that statement. A meaningless festival meme or joke being forwarded is the person’s way of hollering in the deep, black, endless, digital hole: “Hellooooooow! See, I Forward, Therefore I Am!” Further WhatsApp – more than Facebook – because it is at this time hugely text/image driven and smartphone-based, allows instant gratification on several fronts: you can express yourself by forwarding, you can speak your mind on social, economic, cultural, political and religious issues, you can berate someone, you can take on anyone, argue, debate, and fire your salvos (often your dormant emotions, feelings, opinions a.k.a your dil ki bhadaas) head-on. In a face-to-face debate, a better communicator can win an argument. But on WhatsApp, you can drown someone and their argument with your ability to type faster and, interestingly, purge endlessly. If you observe closely, a pattern you will often find in your Groups is that very combative stances taken on issues by people are purely a function of what they think of you as an individual and has nothing to do with their being objective or issue-based. I chose to exit my school WhatsApp Group for the same reason – people who believed Vaani and I were faking a bankruptcy kept attacking every post of mine, while others watched in ‘dignified’ silence. Initially, I didn’t see the pattern. But when I saw it, I exited because I didn’t want the camaraderie in a school buddies forum to be vitiated by a few people’s opinions of one individual and his Life! So, in summary, WhatsApp to a majority of people is not just a messaging platform. It is the virtual version of the Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park. At least in London, the police intervene when there is a complaint. In a WhatsApp Group, unless the Admins are strict, who is to regulate? And, seriously, no Admin wants more administration responsibilities on their Life’s plate – which is overflowing from so much to do already!

So, how do we live, survive, converse and, if you like, share, in a WhatsApp Group-ridden world?

Here’s what I have learnt to do – take whatever works for you, if it doesn’t, well, trash it! 🙂

#1. To not be in a WhatsApp Group is a personal choice, so exercise it. In essence, this is a leadership moment – decide!

#2. If you choose to stay (if you are being forced to stay, revisit #1), please be sure to stop complaining. Complaining never made anything better. It only makes you bitter.

#3. If you are on a WhatsApp Group that’s stuffed with folks who are Forward Terrorists, you can learn to ignore their posts. Ignoring is an art. Not everything in Life is relevant or requires your attention and focus. And these folks are giving you a great opportunity every single day to learn the art of ignoring all that is not relevant.

#4. Related to #3 are two other arts – the art of not having an opinion and/or the art of not having to share an opinion. The human mind rushes you to want you to have a say in everything. You need not opinionate on everything and in some contexts, even if you have an opinion, it is pointless to voice it. So, simply, learning these two arts, helps you practice patience. A very, very, very important Life skill.

#5. Finally, if someone’s being rude, combative, unnecessarily argumentative, then don’t react. Just be silent. The best way to win any battle is to not fight at all. That’s an art too – and WhatsApp gives you just the right opportunity daily to forgive, forget and move on.

I treat my engagement with the world via WhatsApp as an opportunity to unlearn, learn and share. If my saying anything will create value, if it is an original thought, I share. If not, I remain silent. Yes, I am human too. And so I wish my fellow humans are more sensitive than they are…but then, because I can’t go change the way people are engineered, or the way they think, I lean on this great, spiritual, song from Amar Prem (1972, Shakti Samanta, R.D.Burman, Anand Bakshi, Kishore Kumar) which reminds me that Kuch Toh Log Kahenge…

And this is the way I believe I can live happily, peacefully, in a WhatsApp Group-ridden world!

Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi – understanding the ‘suchness’ of Life

Receive Life with open arms, accept its ‘suchness’.

Someone we know separated from her husband 10 years ago. She’s tried in vain to ‘settle’ down in all this time – but despite having been in three relationships, she hasn’t been convinced of any one of them being the ‘right’ one. She met an astrologer who told her that she would be single all her Life. Depressed with what she had been told, she reached out to ask me for my opinion. I said, “I am not going to advice you on what to do. But my view is that if you are not happy with any relationship it may well be because you aren’t relating to any of the men you have met.” “Learn to accept the suchness of Life and move on…not everyone needs to marry and ‘settle’ down in the conventional sense…be happy…if you can find love and companionship in Life, that’s more important than getting married,” I added.

She wasn’t entirely convinced with my perspective. She plodded on: “Why does this often happen in Life? That the most irrational things happen to people?” I replied, “I wish anyone had an answer to these questions. Because, such is Life!”

It was the Buddha who has talked about the suchness of Life. So, in Buddhism there’s this concept of tathata – the suchness of Life. It means, simply, like the title of that famous section in Reader’s Digest: “Life’s Like That!” Or, as the famous show on Doordarshan, that I adored as a teenager, was called: “Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi!”

To understand the concept of tathata – the suchness of Life, let’s pause to think about how Life plays out for us, around us. Almost everything that happens to us, or to anyone else, in Life is just an event. A mere situation. But we humans analyze it, we interpret it and we label it – as wow, good, bad, horrible, whatever! But our labelling a Life event does not change anything. If at all it does cause anything – it only makes us miserable when we think of it as ‘bad’. Life has no agenda. There’s no conspiracy to fix you, just as there is no grand scheme of favoritism to reward you. Life just keeps on happening from moment to moment, from event to event.

When the event in question meets or exceeds your expectations, you rejoice; when it does not happen the way you want it to, you grieve. Now, evidently, there are times in Life when what you want will not happen – no matter how hard you try, how faithful you are, how honest you are and how talented you are. This is when you must understand that talent and integrity do not assure you of a comfortable – defined per your expectations of comfort – passage through Life. Sadly, we often miss this clarity and end up pitying ourselves wondering whether we deserve to be treated so harshly, so unfairly, by Life. But such is Life. It never promised you any fair-play at all when you were born. It offered you no guarantees. So whose fault is it when you expect Life to treat you in a certain way? Understanding Life truly means understanding its suchness. That it is what it is. That what once was will never be forever. That there are no guarantees, nothing’s fair or unfair, that Life just keeps on happening to you the way it wants to. And yet, despite all your challenges and problems, you must go on living your Life, enthusiastically. This is what accepting the ‘suchness’ of Life means.

If you can’t see how you can wrap your head around this concept, think of Aarushi’s parents, the Talwar couple, think of R D Burman, the genius who died without acclaim and work, think of Nirbhaya who was brutally raped and killed, think of someone you know in your family who’s going through an illogical, irrational Life phase just now – all these people’s stories are evidence of the suchness of Life! So whether you are rendered immobile by Life or cashless or companionless or jobless – whatever it may be that Life has dealt you at this time, know that it is so because such is Life! The surest way, therefore, to be anchored in peace, despite your circumstances, is to accept the ‘suchness’ of your Life, unquestioningly.