Those who know me or are following the blog know that I love reading. Last year a friend asked how many books I might have read in my life? Averaging at 3 books per month, at 36 a year, I’ve been reading regularly for 16 years now, So, I told him that I might’ve read around 500 books till now. Not a great number but I was still proud. This year I decided to note down all the books I’d be reading and started off with the list in January. But, what started as a counting exercise soon became a hunt for numbers. How many can I complete this year? This month? This week? How many pages can I read today? I enjoyed the challenge for two months, but, ’slowly started dreading it. I simply did not want to read anymore, ’cause now it was anymore about reading a book but about reading it at a pace I didn’t enjoy. There was no more time to re read a few passages because they made such sense or because the language was beautiful but only a pressure to complete this and move to the next. I did not start reading to complete a goal. I just loved reading and happened to complete a good number of them. But, with a new ‘number’ goal in my mind it didn’t matter if I enjoyed reading or not. All I wanted was to hit target.
Everyday Karma Yoga
I read Swami Vivekananda at the age of 16. To be honest, I don’t remember much. But, one section of his complete works stuck with me for a long time, it was his views on ‘Karma yoga’. Back when I started to piece my life together to make some sense to the present where I’m still struggling to make sense, I’ve looked back to his account of Karma yoga many a times for support (no, it is not a kind comfort, but a very rude one). For a 16 year old, and a 30 year old struggling with the idea of ‘life is meant to reach god or serve people’, his insights into karma and work have been very helpful. Though, I don’t mean to write on the Swami’s views of this yoga, I’m piecing here a few points on Karma yoga which have been very helpful to me when I just had to justify moving on from a painful episode of life or to remind myself that ‘this too shall pass’ in a very jubilant one. But, before we start, what is Karma?
How to avoid the ‘Comparison’ trap?
One day he had it enough. The last straw broke his back. Despite knowing what he saw on social media was just one Photoshopped facet of a person’s life, he couldn’t stop from comparing. He cribbed, cribbed and cribbed his heart out. “Am I a loser?” he asked me. Knowing him, I knew he wasn’t. I sympathized with him. Talking to him, I confessed that even I fall into this trap often. Ten, fifteen years back your friends’, acquaintance success was something you came to know when you met them or through someone, and you thought about it for sometime, you’d either be happy or jealous and move on. It was easy to forget. But, nowadays, social media is in your face. It’s difficult to forget. Everyday we see one or the other friend scuba diving, posing before the London eye or at the Niagara, buying a new car, a new house, partying in a pub, getting promoted, starting a new company, retiring to a villa. With all this happening around us, we against our best judgement end up comparing our lives with them, even when we know that all of it was not done by one person, and analyze our life against theirs’. We fall short and end up feeling miserable.
The Myth of the Hero
An old lady asks when her pension will be released. The officer asks her ten thousand rupees bribe. The poor lady does not have that amount. She goes back crying. He sees all this. That evening when all are leaving, he walks up to the officer, takes out a knife and stabs him multiple times killing him and leaves a message on his body that he’ll kill everyone and anyone who asks for a bribe. The audience rejoices. They come out of the cinema hall wondering if only someone stood up for them in real life society would be different. The movie is a hit. Indian, Aparichit, Tagore, Nayak, and similar movies just reinforce this idea. And, we pine for a ‘larger-than-life’ hero to change our life. And, when we see any semblance of this in any person, we pitch our hopes on them, mostly to be disappointed. Can one person really bring change? Or is it just to be only enjoyed in movies? But, didn’t Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lincoln bring change? Were they not just one person?
Oh My God
I saw this Hindi movie the other day, “Oh! My God”. Not, to give away the plot but it’s about an atheist who loses his shop to an earthquake and his claim is rejected by the insurance company as the incident is an ‘act of god’. So, he decides to sue ‘God’ for his loss. He summons all religious institutions to the court saying they represent God in this world. What happens next is to be seen in the movie. Some lines I loved from the movie:
- When God rescues Kanji (the protagonist played wonderfully by Paresh Rawal) from goons and gives him lift on his bike, Kanji asks him to drop him at his house, but, God stops nearby to his house and tells him, “My work is to show you the way, reaching the destination is your work”.
- When Kanji asks him, why he can’t stop crime, he replies, “I could’ve finished the Kurukshetra war in a second. But, it was not my war. Similarly, this is your war, go fight”.
- God disappears in the end, leaving behind only a key-chain which he used. Kanji is about to put it in his pocket when he hears God’s voice from the sky, “What are you doing, Kanji? Don’t save the key-chain as a souvenir and wear it like a talisman. I’m everywhere. Even in you. You don’t need things & talismans to feel close to me”.