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| Someone very dear to me wrote on the eve of my birthday and quelled my fears in a meaningful way. It gave me much to reflect and introspect about. I thought I should share it with you. You never know who it might resonate with - it definitely did for me and there was acceptance about who I am today. Birthdays are strange days where, if you are too-much-to-think types, life is seen as a flashback. Just to count one's blessings from the past, to bury unresolved issues and to find new strength in embracing what lies ahead. This day has always meant much to me. It stems from the fact that my family does not acknowledge this day. Islam does not allow one to celebrate 'birthdays' - as it is a pagan tradition and has no basis in Islamic 'way of life'. As I grow into my own with passing years, I realise this day means something meaningful to me and I must acknowledge it. I can choose to respect my family's way of life and yet also respect my own.
Hence this little note and its resonance with me:
And don't freak out too much about the date....
It's just a date, but maybe you feel that at that date you don't have the right to be a kid anymore...
True and untrue I'd say.
In some sense you should have stopped to be a kid long ago
and in another sense you can keep on being a kid until your death
( actually I've seen old people with the wonder and curiosity of a kid while being perfecty clear in their head). | | |
| I am back. I had decided I wasn't coming back here again. I stopped this blog sometime in 2008 and sporadically came here to peep in and look around but left quite surreptitiously. But never felt the drive to pen down my experiences like I used to in the past - with such joy, pain, anguish and in celebration. I got much grief after I found that my family had discovered my blog. After my Dad retired and returned to India, he spent a lot of time online and within no time discovered the magic of google. And what does he do first but google his son and before I knew he had read my life or whatever I chose to share here. Frantic calls ensued between Dad in India and me at university in England. He was clearly upset with me. Without really giving much thought and in a way wanting to make peace - a momentary peace - because I was too high on life, I compromised. I wanted to put this episode on the backburner, I locked down my blog and decided to put it to sleep.
Two years have past since. I wrote nothing. Except for six academic essays and 20,000 word thesis, I have nothing to show here except for memories that remain articulated in the deeper recesses of my mind. I was prodded by friends to write for newspapers from all my travels. But something inside me switched off. I felt I couldn't live up to the promise I had made to myself about aspiring to be a prolific writer after I owned a Macbook a few years ago - literally saving every pence. Two years were packed with travelling expeditions to different countries, met many interesting people, shed much of my own prejudices along the way, picked up a few nuances and life galloped at a steady pace.
I came home earlier this year to monotony. From the initial euphoria of considering everything transitory, I was in for a rude shock when I got grounded indefinitely in this city. It was a process: the initial denial, the growing frustration, the insipid anger, the rant, the tears and finally the slow acceptance that I must live in the moment and hopefully wings will grow and I will fly again. But words did not come out. I did not write a word. It was just grappling with thoughts that ran aimlessly. I even developed an intense dislike for emails. I procrastinated on mails that lay in my inbox for weeks and that gave me sleepless nights. Stringing a sentence was a torture. No sentence seemed perfect. Nothing seemed like it captured the essence of how I felt. I gave up.
From writing a blog religiously in 2005 for over three years to writing for newspapers and magazines, I came to a road block where I was trying to force-press a seed on a concrete road and expecting it to grow. I dived into academic research and writing. A certain void in my life remained. I lived life to the hilt but somehow I wasn't capturing those experiences and wrapping them up in words and keeping them safely for memory. At the end of the day, I slept with a certain emptiness. There was a high of the new experiences I gathered hungrily each day but also the sadness of knowing that with time it will lapse into a haze of memories - cloudy, romantic and woven deftly into myths of one's own achievements. Trials and tribulations, sadness and melancholy will wipe itself clean. I lived. Lived up. But I did not freeze the living in words.
Twitter happened in 2009. It grew. It became on obsession. An addiction. My experiences were limited to 140 characters. Capturing the essence of what I saw, heard and lived was limited to 140 characters. I took to Twitter like some sort of refuge. It was a way of telling myself, I am writing but not the traditional way but perhaps someday I will be able to go back to my tweets and retrieve those facts on time and dates and weave a narrative from memory. It was comforting. I made new friends. I learned new things. Many of the steretypes university couldn't break, Twitter helped me break those by introducing me to people I would have never met. I was also running away from the city I was in. Twitter was my refuge country. A country where I lived among people I wanted as neighbours. A country where I found myself among people who shared my worldview. It was idyllic. It was an oasis. A utopian world where I convinced myself I was writing. But was I?
November came. I began to fret. I made a big deal about leaving my 20s and resisting the 30s. My 20s were the best decade of my life so far. I am sure the best is still to come (or so I would like to think) but not wanting to let go and the daunting Three-O took much of my mental space. Somewhere, I felt I was not ready - given my current transitory state. I would not trade the last 10 years of my life for anything. I travelled, grabbed every opportunity that came my way, took risk, met people I would never have met, travelled to places I could have only dreamt and read books, listened to music and experimented with food. And along the way, I picked up people and made them friends. Friends that I treasure, hold them close like a taaweez around my neck because they give me hope and strength and they re-ignite the fires when they begin to ebb and threaten to turn everything into ash.
I had to make one big change on my 30th birthday. I had to do what I wanted to do but was running away from. Write without fear. Write without being judged. Write like I had no reader. Write for myself. Write because I want to. Write not because I have to. I told myself I will not be my most articulate on most days but I must not stop because I am not. Leave editing to history. I can be one thing at a time. So I am giving my self another chance. A chance to write here about my life. Like I used to. Without fear. Without inhibition. With strength. With confidence. With conviction. With courage. I will write because I want to feel free again. | | |
| The idea that one has no religion oneself and that other people’s religious beliefs are delusions occurs in societies like the present-day Western society, in which religion has become an autonomous institution and in which the individual member of society has acquired a certain amount of personal freedom and independence in his relation to his society’s traditional practices and beliefs.
[…]
If the definition of religion as a total concern about Man’s World is correct, it follows that in any human society — even the least closely integrated one — religion will enter into all human affairs. Religion is a faculty of human nature, and human nature has its roots in nature. Religion is concerned with the world order, and it is involved in the social order, even when it has acquired a maximum degree of autonomy.
[…]
Philosophy may seek to confine itself to intellectual speculation, to steer clear of moral judgements and emotions, and to avoid social entanglements; but its success in insulating itself within these self-assigned limits can never be more than partial, since it is impossible to be a philosopher without also being a human personality whose nature it is to have feelings, to pass moral judgments, and live in society as the social animal that every human being is. Actually some philosophies have not only originated in religion but have eventually turned into religions again…
[…]
Religion is an inalienable part of human nature. It is inalienable because it is a necessity of human life in a world that, in essentials, is the same for us as it was for our ancestors. If this is the truth, it is delusion to suppose that religion can be discarded; but it is also a misfortune to fall into this delusion, since an attempt to alienate what is inalienable is obviously frustrating. In that case, our present-day task in religion is not to learn to do without religion but to learn to re-attune ourselves to it.
Read more Toynbee here. | | |
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Some people argue that since we can’t, as individuals, know very much, we shouldn’t try to do very much.
But here’s why I think they are wrong. The reality is that we all live in a world where other people are acting all the time, making changes to everything around us. The world is being restructured, whether we like it or not.
But that is simply ceding the ability to act to other people, who will carry on making change, on their terms, and in their interests.
The reality of living in a world with lots of people who are acting on imperfect information is that you, too, must act on imperfect information.
This should change your political behaviour in crucial ways: you should keep testing your views against the evidence every day, and scrupulously monitor that you are having the effects you think you are, without harmful side-effects you didn’t anticipate. It should lead to humble action – but that is different to inaction.
To read more.
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| Religions in the modern world have:
‘an underlying desire for the imagined certainties of the past, a monopoly on truth, an exclusive hotline to God, which is accompanied by a preparedness to impose those certainties, that exclusive hotline, on others, by force if necessary. That’s not mildly anything. It’s mad and bad.
‘Looking round the world today, it’s all too easy to identify the danger – not just to the good name of religion but to civilisation itself – posed by those whose certainty is in inverse proportion to their morality.
‘We have come to see that the greatest challenge to theology today is absolutism – the belief that your particular faith is final rather than provisional, that your truth is exclusive rather than fragmentary, that your way is the best or only way.
‘we don’t have a hotline to God and that the theological imperative of this or any other year is to renounce absolutism.
Read more. | | |
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