THE
FIRST PARAGRAPH IN MY WELCOME MSG IS ALWAYS THE SAME. WHICH IS…
Hello fellow citizens of Planet Earth, listen up!
I’m going to try and put a positive spin to what’s happening around us and to
us, every day, and one day at a time. So look to this link either at the
beginning of your day to wake up refreshed to be ready for the day ahead, or at
the end of your day to be ready for a good night’s sleep. Ahhh...sounds good,
hopefully. Here goes...
कैसे कर रहे हैं वहाँ, तीसरे रॉक? (How y'all doing out there, Third Rock?)
You guessed it...Songs Of the Day coming forth. Y’all
need to get used to my SODs.
From two of the greatest cats that played the
Hungarian Rhapsody...
And...shut up, get up, and move it. Ahhh...classic
Bollywood.
To complete our A in pArtee-ing we need the other
important “a”. Which is acceptance. There’s
so many versions of acceptance so I’ll try my best to parse them one after the
other. If you hear yourself snoring I’ve done a terrible job. If you’re wiping
a tear off your eye I’ve done a fairly good job. If you’ve got a big lump
hanging on to a thin thread at the bottom of your throat and find yourself
hiding in the bathroom, sobbing to yourself and nodding and going “yes, yes,
that’s exactly what it is, I just need to do more of this” then I’ve actually
done something good. As Samwise would say “there’s some good in this world, Mr.
Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for”.
Now for our stories. My classmate from college
started meditation sessions in 2016 after our twenty-fifth year reunion (yep
dated myself there again but do I care anymore?). We continued these thirty
minute sessions with him over Zoom video, which seems to be rocking it now with
so many people, to the point where zoom’s a verb not really for zooming into an
image but for having a video chat. One of the key things that he’s been telling
us is to “accept everything” while we meditate. What does this mean? I’ll give
you my thoughts on it. You need to accept things the way they are, without
feeling compelled to react to every situation and to every affront, every personal
attack or even opinions expressed by everyone you know; and sometimes these may
be positive too. There’s no need to react - you'll be wasting your mental
energy on reacting to every little thing. “Accept everything” I can hear my
friend say in his deep soothing voice in our guided meditation session (check
it out! I think his sessions are awesome... https://insighttimer.com/rajeshsengamedu/guided-meditations/vedantic-meditation).
There are a few other aspects of acceptance, some
of which are funny if you’re willing to indulge me with some nostalgia. So, one
of my friends, let’s just call him Altaf alright? We were ten years old and
Altaf and I used to play cricket quite often during the weekends. And these
used to be long, hot tropical afternoons (real
Indian summers mind you). One evening Altaf decided he wanted to join the
teenage crowd that played matches in the neighborhood grounds. They were the
high school crowd, over fifteen and played some tough, tough cricket, with real
cricket balls (our cricket had been with tennis balls till then, ironic as that
may sound).
So Altaf goes up to one of the guys (their
captain) and says “I can hit any of you here out of the field for four or six
runs. Can I join you guys?”
The captain smiles; it’s more of a smirk
actually, and goes “sure Altaf, let’s see which balls actually go for a four or
a six” and puts his hand on his crotch, feigning a grimace of pain.
Of course, Altaf faces the first ball from one of
their star bowlers and guess what? He hits the first one hard between two
fielders. It’s a four! I remember jumping and screaming “Altaf, Altaf, Altaf...”
and clapping my hands, a gleeful ten year old.
The bowler looks at the captain who’s signaling
to him not to fool around anymore, and here comes the second ball. The bowler
swings and releases the ball. Altaf lifts up his bat. The ball comes from
outside and swinging in air towards the middle; a classic in-swinger as it’s
called (if you haven’t seen cricket balls swing, think curve ball in baseball,
or look it up!). And before Altaf’s bat comes down to defend and protect his
stumps the middle stump goes cartwheeling. The bales launch themselves like
Challenger, looking for the stratosphere.
Altaf looks at me in dismay, tears welling up, quickly
forming a critical mass. One of them starts slowly dripping down his lower left
eye, slowly, slowly down to his chin. By then I knew Altaf had accepted his limitation on joining the “teenage
cricket gang”.
There’s yet another version of acceptance, or
should I say un-acceptance. Let’s just say that acceptance is a super-set which
includes things we do NOT accept as well. Let’s assume you’re in college and passionate
about pursuing journalism as a career, but parents, friends and relatives all
advice you against it. And you know you’re good at it! But they feel you need
to make a “real living” - the audacity! This is the point in life you’ll require
a lot of fortitude, or in layman speak, let’s call it like it is - balls! It requires
a lot of courage and self-confidence for you to lay down your arms, lay it on
the table and just go do your journalism thing. Yes sir. And you know what?
(this is a secret I’ll let you in on right now and I’ll keep bringing this up)
until YOU experience a fork in the road in YOUR own situation, you’ll never
really feel the pain (or pleasure) of taking a bold self-confident decision.
Refusing to accept the status quo or refusing acceptance of an expected norm
and going about it with your strong conviction - in my book that’s a special
form of acceptance!
I’ve got one more story to wrap things up today,
and have got to go on. Another form of acceptance. This is acceptance in the
guise of defiance. One of my uncles was growing up along with my father in
their grandfather’s village home, attending the local village school. While my
dad and several of his classmates were hardworking and trying to get through school
and being a minimal burden on their families, my uncle was a special one. He wanted
to test the limits of his family’s tolerance for what Matt Damon’s shrink in
Good Will Hunting calls “tomfoolery and ballyhoo”. He played pranks on people
and was having the time of his life, possibly thinking what all his peers were
missing out on. Sounds familiar? Because that sounded awfully close to my
childhood when I first heard this story!
I digressed again there didn’t I. So one late
tropical afternoon my father and uncle get back home and see their grandfather
waiting for them to check their grades. Do I even need to go on? I will, assuming
you’re still curious. My father had done OK, while my uncle, you know, he hems
and haws and gives the bad news. My great-grandpa loses it and lets loose a
tirade on both of them that to this day when I hear it from my dad sounds like
a earful, and I can imagine how it would have landed on my uncle - that he
would be a good-for-nothing dud, roaming the streets, destitute and desperate,
broke and depressed; life would be a downward spiral. The story then goes that my
uncle lost it too! He gives it back to grandpa and vows to come back and shower
him with money, prove to him that he was completely wrong about him and he
better place his odds elsewhere. And while grandpa looked on with “shock and
awe” he storms out. And doesn’t come back till after he scores at the top of
his accounting class, about seven years later, and shock and awe are now tears
of happiness for grandpa. What else could he have hoped for? My uncle’s
defiance was the acceptance of those circumstances and the un-acceptance of the
future by taking purposeful action. Sound familiar? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Concluding these stories today gives me a small
crack in my heart; just recollecting them put me in my mood of melancholic
nostalgia, like the Happy Prince by O. Wilde. But the avatars of acceptance are
beautiful in their own respect, and these avatars complete the A in our pArtee.
As we take purposeful action with the appropriate avatar of acceptance, our
partee begins to take shape, doesn’t it? Let’s go for paR tomorrow by looking
at the “r”!
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