Killing Self

It's quite puzzling why people take their own lives. Loss of self-esteem, Loss of objectives, Loss of sense of life, Complete disconnect with reality, One up on nature's prerogative. Usual Reasons? They seem to be. But there has to be something more.... Can't figure out.... Probably a feeling that you've seen it all and in the end nothing matters.... quite puzzling...

1973: An 'Arranged' Story

So this is for the record, and a public one. By turns, it is a confessional, an appreciation, an expression of gratitude, and a time for reckoning. My wife and I have turned the 40^th anniversary yesterday. It’s a landmark year in our long journey and the celebrations, god’s grace, will continue the year round.

Haven’t seen many people praise their spouses in public, don’t know why, may be it’s taboo, may be it’s done in whispers, but it’s not going to stop me from doing it. This much is due to her, in the minimum. This is the payoff time, and I won’t default.

Our journey began 39 years ago. 9^th June, 1973. An ‘arranged’ marriage where you seal your own fate with your own hands in a matter of minutes. You meet, you talk, at the end of the fifth minute you say ‘yes’, and .. pooof .. you are gone, you both are gone. In today’s jargon, one could call it ‘outsourcing’ from one’s parents or well-wishers, the most important decision of one’s entire life. It was Saturday and just when the wedding ceremony began at 6-15 in the evening at a hall near the Victoria Terminus Railway Station in the city of Mumbai, the season’s first rains had arrived with a thunder. History has not recorded what else the marriage had brought along with it, but the newly wed couple soon figured out that the ‘outsourcing business’ was quickly over, and that their own future had to be built by themselves, brick by brick, layer by layer. It didn’t seem easy then.

On the day of the wedding, Pragna had already graduated in Medicine from University of Mumbai and had just finished her internship. I qualified as a Chartered Accountant two months after the fateful day. She secured her first job one month after the marriage, I did two months later. It was obvious that my wife was a woman in hurry. Thirty nine summers later, she is still ahead of me, and the race is happily not over.

Call it an orthodox community, call it male chauvinism, or call it the sign of the times, but in 1973, in India, coming from a Gujarati background, not many women were taking up jobs, although the Prime Minister of the country was a woman, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. But having secured a higher education, it was in the nature of things, that Pragna  would swim against the tides, and she did, admirably.

1972. USA had announced its first manned space-shuttle program. The colour television had just come into the Mumbai homes in 1972. For us, before the children arrived, the obvious dreams any young couple generally courts, were all in place. What number of children was a good enough number? What level of education was a good level to aim at, in the minimum? How much math and science would be encouraged and made a strong backbone into? How much discussion, debate and forming opinions would be encouraged as part of a daily diet? In every such exercise we indulged in, one thing clearly struck out. I had a great partner to work with, to plan and to structure the future, who would sometimes support one’s points of view, sometimes tear into the core of the arguments and demolish them. Sometimes the differences were sharp and irreconcilable, sometimes enjoyable and educative. The summation, however, was always clear. As far as the children were concerned, both of us held a single vision of them, of strong individuals, fiercely competitive, no gender bias, and most of all, self-dependent. With nature’s blessings and grace, and persevering hard work of the children, we were amply rewarded, with our dreams fulfilled with what we had set out to attain. Years later, we had a surprise bounty from nature, though in the most tragic circumstances, in gaining the lovable company of a niece who later carved for herself her own future and a strong niche place all by dint of her own hard work and industry. But honestly, between you and me, keeping aside my male ego for a moment, I may liberally confess that all this would have been well nigh impossible, without the steadfast participation, and a proactive attitude to life, most often taking a leading role, on the part of my life partner in bringing up the children the way they were. Of course, the children, as everywhere in all families, would have grown out of the parents’ inabilities, and inanities, if that were the case, and struck on their own, but from our perspective, the fact remains that Pragna rode on two horses at once, one as a professional and the other, for the family. Acknowledging her leading role, in the long-winded manner that I have, and with all humility at my command, is necessary and imperative, since in our journey together, the children have without doubt occupied a good amount of our time and continue to do so.

Having worked in a giant public health department all of 35 years of her life and having superannuated from that job at statutory age, Pragna passed through multitude of situations when her integrity, probity and public accountability were tested and tried and each time she came out unscathed. In her social interactions, due to her natural dispensation towards straightforwardness, outspokenness, distaste for both superstitions and ritualistic religious beliefs, she found herself in many avoidable tight corners. She would not be bothered, nor deterred.

June 2002. One evening I felt discomfort in my chest. Same day late evening, we met the cardiologist. On seeing the ECG, the doctor advised Pragna that it would be better if an angioplasty procedure was done soon. She took the decision in seconds and within one hour I was hauled into the hospital cathlab and before midnight, a major disaster was averted to give me many more years of quality life. This is a lifetime debt I don’t think I can ever repay or even try to.

.

A completely restless person, within one year of superannuated retirement, she bounced back to get another job at Jaslok Hospital. Admittedly, it’s a race I cannot catch up with. I don’t know what will happen when she finally decides to hang her sandals, or at all.

In 2008, President Barrack Obama famously gave away one of the secrets of his successful marriage, in a White House chat. He said, addressing the male staff, “if you want to be happy like me, and even successful, marry someone who is taller than you, and who is more intelligent than you.” Allow me to brag this once. I already knew the second part of his tip nineteen years before Obama tied his knots with Michelle. I have never regretted my decision since then. Indeed, I am glad that the President did exactly what I did earlier.

Our own journey continues ….. there is a long way to go …… and as Frost would say, “promises to keep, and miles to go”……. before we both call it a day.

Death

Really, this piece is dated. Something I came across in my attic, which I remember I had written in 1981 or so. Am trying to figure out what it meant then, and what it would mean to me now.
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Death, I dare say, is eventually inavertable.

The vindication of death is possibly a life lived with the maximum amount of desired happiness. Therefore, the moment you cease to be happy, you are possibly already dead, many a times without your own knowledge.

Happiness is, however, apart from being the sum total of all desires, an end in itself, the achievement of which includes both selfish and apparently altruistic actions.

It is altogether impossible to live and to be unhappy at the same time. To say that a living man is unhappy is to pose a contradiction and contradictions do not exist epistemologically. They appear to exist only as aberrations in the process of thinking. Therefore, an apparently living being is epistemologically dead if he is, in reality, unhappy.

However, a living man can become unhappy only under one circumstance, and that is when he desires death. For to desire death, life is necessary. Desire of death is desire of unhappiness and on achieving which, and only then, does the distinction between happiness and unhappiness submerges.

Sandwriting ....

How much strenuous and concerted effort we put in our lives to make ourselves known, to make ourselves heard, to make ourselves followed, to make ourselves immortal, on pages of history, essentially carved on sand dunes. We pay attention to the minutest detail of the cost-benefit of every action of our life except their sum total. Amazing! 

Grandkids!

Suddenly I find myself with grandkids springing up everywhere. I don't know whether I am prepared for this phenomenon or not. I am not yet done with my own kids. Despite their obvious high stations in this world, they are still small to me. I love them too much to put them away for even a moment out of my mind. I still am constantly thinking of how to make them even more of superkids than they already are, and of course how to help them become better human beings. Now to see them having kids of their own makes me a little confused. How do I go about this knotty situation? Do I tend to the grandkids even as I continue to care for my own kids by combining the two, or do I abandon one group for the other, or do I tend to the elder group in a way that vicariously takes care of the younger group, or what? Sheer confusion. At times, I have been told by people, though discreetly, that I am making a mess of the lives of my own kids by continuing to treat them as kids and refusing to believe they have grown up and indeed have a mind of their own. Hmm, I am sure they have one (that's what the doc said when they were born), and I am happy for them, but I must admit I always worry for them, and I always think they should still take a little more care in crossing the roads, and filling up application forms, and tying the shoelaces. The truth is, and let it be out before I sign off, I constantly thought what would happen when these kids, who appear to me to be perfectly capable of dozing off at the airport gates and missing the flights, would have kids of their own? And how would they cope with that?

But the time of hypothesizing is over. The grandkids have arrived, and in a grand style too. And may be it is time for me to grow up too. Not to worry too much about either my kids or their kids. I know, I know, it's my parental ego that is central to all this. You really don't have to tell me that. I figured it out myself. I promise I will try and change myself and really be friends to all of them rather than oversee them. I love all of them too much to do otherwise. After all, they are my kids and my grandkids.
(Oops! Can't really get rid of my pestering ego!)

Adieu!

Steve Jobs died. Eight years of fighting cancer and finally getting defeated. A great guy he was. A complete loner. Never believed in competing, never believed in excellence. Because to compete or to excel at something, you need someone else to compete with, or some existing standard to surpass, to be able to say I excelled at this or that. He created his own standards. He would later not like them. Then he created some other standards. He believed in innovation, in ideating, in sheer imagination. Never wasted his time on others' ideas. Used to quote Stewart Brand, "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

There is a difference between selling and getting bought. He never sold his products. People bought from him.He created the PC. In due course of time, posthumously, he will be credited with the honor of being the destroyer of the PC. He has already ensured that. Some day, not far off, we will not go to a computer owned by us to use it. The computer device (not the PC form) will move around with us. The laptop did that. Then the notebook. Now the iPad. But the villain is still the Windows. It still chains us to so many things at a time. Jobs was moving towards breaking that bind.

When you need to write with a pencil, you just pick up a pencil, not the whole penholder which may have a dozen pencils and a dozen pens and a dozen markers. When you need to correct your eyesight, you just wear your glasses, not wear a device which has attached to it glasses, and binoculars and magnifying glasses all together. When you need to eat with a spoon, you just hold a spoon, not the whole cutlery store. So when you simply want to email, you would have a small device which just helps you send email and nothing more. For now, you have it in a smartphone that is a mobilephone. When you want to look up a website, you would simply want to have a website that quickly allows you to surf through to that website, and nothing more. Remember that Casio calculator which still survives? Only with inflation, the eight digit device has become 12 digit. Like the proverbial cockroach, it has still survived over years. Because it has a specific function and it fulfills well and you can afford to have one in your office, one in your home, one in your briefcase and one in your car. It's always there where you are. It's there because you don't want to remember what 12 into 27 is. There is a calculator in your computer and a smartphone, but you will still reach for that Casio calc on your desk. Someday when the Windows hegemony is broken, we will have about a fifty or hundred of small software which will help us write, categorize, analyze, listen to music, look up websites, purchase and sell things, communicate, and of course, compute, but all separately, all independently. The software will be unitised, the device will be adaptively unitised. And then there will be enough number of such devices lying all around, so wherever we go there will  be a device to use, not go to a device to use it. Jobs was relentlessly working towards this.

He broke the software umbrella but he had yet to break the single device dependence or freedom from the hardware. Jobs was a great downsizer. From the ancient IBM room-filling machines, he made a PC, and from there he came down to iPhone. He was still looking for that freedom of doing one thing at a time, even though apparently it looked he was cramming many things into a single device. If cancer had not blown him away, Jobs may have finally made a hundred devices with specific functions. He created new ideas, he destroyed old ones. He could see with his eyes closed. He could hear with his ears plugged. Walking on the Times Square, he could touch the Eiffel Tower. He was one of a kind.

55 is no age to die. Cancer is so cruel. It does not distinguish between being a Jobs or someone else. It does not even tell you why Jobs died.

Adieu!

Aug 2011 - India at crossroads........

"When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves, and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes."

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, Apr. 28, 1788