Keep walking, my friend

Recently a song from the recent hindi movie, Ek Main Aur Ek Tu caught my attention so much that it is forcing its way to my blog post! :)

It goes something like this

"Jo hua hai woh hota hain, jo hona hain woh hona hain,
jo tere bas mein baatein hain, unhe khamokha kyun khona hain...
jitni bhi hain umeed  leke, jaye kahan tak rastein dekhe...
kar chalna shuru tu, mud ke na dekh tu..."

Its so true..life is nothing but a journey! A journey which ultimately leads to finding your own self! Whether you get someone to walk side by side with you or not, you got to make the journey. Now, how many of us really take this journey being aware of it! Most of us are kind of sleep walking through it! Not knowing which path we are taking, overlooking the beauty of the road. It is true that most of the times we are not sure where the road will ultimately lead us, and sometimes we are even confused as to where we want to finally end up! But as long as we know where we don't want to end up, I guess the journey is an ever interesting one!

It is important to take that one small step which makes you embark on the journey of finding yourself! Its important to break free if anything is holding back your spirit. It might boil down to something as small as starting on the dance lessons that you so wanted for ages, or may be starting to write without the fear of being criticized or may be taking up that tough job which you always eyed but never had the guts to take up or may be something as simple as learning to drive! Dreams need to be alive. Life cannot be just living but feeling alive! :)

It is true that every time every aspiration can't be fulfilled, every dream can't come true either. But the fun lies in loving every effort that you put in and its an amazing feeling to try to touch the intangible and delve deep within to find your dreams!

May we never be afraid of this journey called Life and love to keep walking! May we all become like Sindbad the sailor who was never afraid to chase his dreams! And if we are fortunate enough, we might find a friend, a loved one to hold hands and walk side by side, if not, we will still have the satisfaction of making this journey and Life itself will become our greatest muse!

Greatest love of all!

Today is Valentine's day. A day meant for celebration of love. While growing up, like most urban teenagers, this day meant a day of wearing red, expecting a card or exchanging gifts and well, celebrating the idea of love! Today, after many springs have passed by, I remain as wide eyed about love as I was a decade back! However, the definition and the dimensions seem to be ever evolving. Thus, I thought it is high time at least I touch base with myself on this crazy journey of love and life! :)

Once, the idea of love (romantic love to be precise) was just about being wanted, it was matter of high self esteem and may be even ego! Possessing and being possessed was a necessary part of the feeling!

Times have passed. Like everyone, I too have evolved! Some knowingly and some unknowingly- willingly and unwillingly. Irrespective of the books on psycho-philosophy or the mushy romantic novels that I read, wise (and unwise) people with whom I spoke to, love has come to be defined to me as a process of self discovery, of awakening! Domestic love, bohemian love, love without definition- all seem to have only one climax of finding ones self! And yes, of loving oneself.

I have always loved the song (greatest love of all) by Whitney Houston which goes:

I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows

If I fail, if I succeed, at least I'll live as I believe

No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity

Because the greatest love of all, is happening to me

I found the greatest love of all, inside of me

The greatest love of all, is easy to achieve

Learning to love yourself/It is the greatest love of all.

But, is it really easy to learn to love yourself? Is it easy to draw a line between Narcissism/self obsession and self awakening? For people like me whose life most of the time seems to be dominated by numerous mundane things  like meeting the project deadlines and domestic expectations, I wonder how easy it is to make this journey!

Today, as I grapple with the meaning of life and love, they just seem synonymous! To me, today, the journey of life and journey of love are inseparable, intertwined. If we forget to celebrate love, we forget to celebrate life! If the quest to find oneself is an eternal one, so is the quest to find love! And ultimately it is the same journey!
But again, it is perhaps the most difficult task to make this journey within, connect with one's inner self, to find ones real self. To accept ones own being with all the good, bad and evil and keep loving life. Or may be living love! :)

I guess if we are ready to lose ourselves, explore within, then it is indeed possible to find ourselves too! And in some rare moments of life, when you do connect with your own self, when you do feel amazed at the breath you take every moment and fall in love with life- it all completes a full circle! Life stands still on those moments. And you find yourself, you find Love!

One of the poetries by Javed Akhtar from the film, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara that has touched my heart and echoed my thoughts would perhaps sum it all up:

Pighle neelam sa behta ye sama,
neeli neeli si khamoshiyan,
na kahin hai zameen na kahin aasmaan,
sarsaraati hui tehniyaan pattiyaan,
keh raheen hai bas ek tum ho yahan,
bas main hoon,
meri saansein hain aur meri dhadkanein,
aisi gehraiyaan, aisi tanhaiyaan,
aur main… sirf main.
Apne hone par mujhko yakeen aa gaya.

A Special Rendezvous

Yes, you got that right...I am going to write about a wonderful time I spent some days back with a special person. Yes...it was a very special time...one on one, sharing my most intimate thoughts and feelings... the meaningless hustle and bustle of the world going by me in a blur...I felt so alive....

Well, it had to be so special....because it was a date with my dear old self :).

Hmmn, let me clarify it for my friends...no buddies, I have not become delusional. I am not having 3rd person hallucinations either...I am just referring to a small piece of time I spent just for myself. Doing things only for me, consciously and not out of compulsion. And I cherished it.

Now you will tell me what’s special in it? We all spend time with our own selves..that’s kind of "by default' configuration, isn’t it? Well, if you are one of those persons acutely aware of your being, love yourself consciously, are exactly aware what you want and what you don’t, then....CONGRATULATIONS (and this post is not meant for you)! But I and many people like me I presume are not so lucky to have got this right!

Most of the time we live life in a kind of "default' mode...doing routine things...juggling many responsibilities, finding 24 hours quite less to fulfill all our roles. Either we are always looking for happiness in other people...whether our spouse brought us the coveted gift...whether our dear ones treated us well...did our friends remember to wish us on our birthdays etc... or otherwise we are trying our best to make others happy...what to cook special for someone special...what to buy for our dear ones so that it brings a smile to their face...what to wear so that the spouse appreciates...so on and so forth...somewhere somehow we give too much importance to "others"..don’t you think so? The "I" within us becomes blurred...our own existence start taking a backseat.So much so we sometimes even lose touch not only with our dreams but also with our own weaknesses. As of we don’t really "live" but we float from one day to another with lot of superficial junk on our plate but nothing substantial. Though we are acutely aware of the coveted promotion at work that we are eyeing, we forget that once upon a time we loved to paint or sing or dance. Not to win a prize in a competition but just for our own happiness! We don’t want to face our fears, because where is the time to connect with our own self. It’s much easier to switch on the idiot box at the end of the day and keep moving from one meaningless day to another.

Since this realization has dawned on me in recent past, I consciously took some time out for myself. No husband...no friends...no family etc. Went to a shopping mall first (well you see the rendezvous had be in a safe place as well!)...roamed about aimlessly for a long while. Picked up a book which I wanted for a long time...consciously avoiding the thought of "what to cook for dinner" and thus the inevitable grocery shopping as well. Took a seat by the window in a cafeteria and tried talking to myself (well no..not loudly of course).

"So how’s it going buddy!" I asked myself."With all the conscious decisions that you have made in life, all the compromises, the selfishness that you have showed, the mistakes that you have made, all the love that you have shared...with all of that...how is going so far?"

I consciously tried thinking of the nagging issues that gnaws at my heart every now and then...it was a difficult situation. It was much easier to eye the young teenage couple who was sitting just in front of me (hand in hand..lost in their dreams!)...but I managed to come back to my own precious date (that's me! ;))...After 3 cups of tea and a steaming hot pasta, I did say to myself... 'Well thanks for the date and I think I am doing pretty good".

I am doing good because I could afford this rendezvous with myself. I am doing good because I am alive! I count each of my breaths to be a blessing. I thank God for this precious experience called Life! And I am ready to face the challenges that come on my way. I know I will stumble, I know I will fall as well...but as long as I enjoy the journey, I will never lose!

My special date came to an end not too long after this..but thankfully, I didn't have to bid good bye to my date and I promised to never again to lose touch of my own inner self.

I wish when we grow up, all of us are told to value our own selves first...not in a narcissistic/egotistic way. But in a sense that we are true to our being...to be able to acknowledge our deeper virtues as well as vices. To be able to see the beauty of our mind as well as face the demon within....to be able to not shy away to face our fears...so that we are accountable to what we do...how we live.... so that we can answer our own self and not seek answers elsewhere.. So that we never let the tiny inner voice within us lose its existence!

Let me say in tune of a very famous song of Whitney Houston:

I decided long ago, never to walk in any one's shadows
If I fail, if I succeed

At least I live as I believe

No matter what they take from me
They can't take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all
Is happening to me

I found the greatest love of all

Inside of me

The greatest love of all

Is easy to achieve

Learning to love yourself

It is the greatest love of all.

(One one small word of caution....let us not only love ourselves..but also love ourselves! :) )



The not so new year

It is no longer a time to write about welcoming the 'new year'. Neither it is the time to fondly remember the year that went by. But when all the new year wishes, celebrations and even the different 'New Year Sales' and 'New Year Offers' have settled down, when most of us have almost forgotten about the resolutions that we might have made on the New Year's eve, I thought it might be a good idea to look back and reflect!

There has always been a lot of hoopla around the time when a new leaf in the calender is turned. A brand new year. But apart from the obvious change in the date, does anything ever change? The same routine, the same challenges, the same insecurities and the same sources of happiness and unhappiness. What changes then? Why do we make new year resolutions? Why do we party? Well...I think we all know the answer. We need a reason to celebrate, we need a reason to feel that change will come..change for the better..the ever elusive better tomorrow!
 

Getting a bit personal, my New Year celebrations have gone through different phases (like many of you I guess!). As a kid I remember, the main excitement was that we were granted permission to watch TV till late night on New Year's Eve and that in itself was quite a feat! Then when I was growing up it became a day when you wish people, buy greeting cards and send to all of whom you perceive to be of some importance in your life. Buying cards for friends, for favourite teachers in school used to be a big event in my life during my school days. I still fondly remember those times, when I used to first make a list of people who will get a card from me, then coax my mom or my brother to take me to the shop, rummage  through the cards there, read every sentence that was written on the pages, select them carefully and then when back at home write the names and addresses carefully, post them and await their reply! Oh it was so much fun!

During my teenage years, the cards were still there, but now the list was smaller and the corner book shop was replaced by the Archies Gallery! But still there was a lot of excitement in that ritual. Once in Medical college, the ritual of cards almost vanished, perhaps to be replaced by a skepticism towards all the fuss and feathers associated with anything perceived as superficial and perfunctory. Very typical of Medical students overloaded with studies and anxiety, I suppose! Funnily the New-year fever was back with the bang during post grad days in Manipal..mostly I think due to the infectious "Manipal Culture"(no offence meant!), where students actually save money to buy that special outfit to wear in the 'New Year Disco'! ;-)

Well things have changed now. I no longer go to a stationary shop to buy cards, online wishes now suffice to wish anyone. Gone is the time of waiting for the special new year's TV show also (there is anyways too much of TV in my life), gone is the need to show off in a jazzy outfit on new year's eve and also gone is the skepticism towards those who celebrate! Well to be absolutely frank, now it is a mix of eager wait for the holiday on 1st Jan and a little bit reconnecting with people who matter in the guise of a sms or a email or may be a phone call (till the networks get jammed!).

Today I firmly believe that Life itself is a celebration! With all the challenges it offers on its way, all the tears that are shed, all the abundant confusion and the fleeting moments of happiness, Life indeed is the biggest party! And life does need to be celebrated, in whatever form and on whatever days that suit you! I don't need a 'New Year' anymore, I am willing to celebrate the not so new year and old year also. I have started feeling that instead of making resolutions on one evening and spending the entire year breaking them, why not make small resolutions anytime I feel like and celebrate a new day, a new week or may be even a new blog ;-). Well, that is what I just did!

The little things you do

"Dear God, please make me slim, fair and beautiful. And in case you can't, please make all my girl friends fat and ugly".
No, no, no...please don't get me wrong. This is not a wish from my side. It is a common joke on female friendship that floats about. Honestly, I could never laugh after reading this joke. It makes me stand in front of a very uncomfortable question: can girls really be friends to each other? Or to frame it little differently, do women really value friendship!

I think it is a pure social conditioning that, in our country when most girls are growing up, they are often taught separate set of values, separate set of priorities than the boys. Thus, it is taught to them, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly that her husband or husband's family has supreme priority over anything else in the world ! No,even she as a person do not generally feature in that priority list. And of course friends are never ever there in that list. In fact, the girl is considered quite dysfunctional, if she has too many friends that she cares about!

Now, fortunately or unfortunately I was brought up with "progressive ideologies" and always viewed friendship as something that too needs to be nurtured along with other relationships. As a result of this ideology and the resultant expectations, I have had plenty of experiences that shook my belief in friendship from my same gender time and again. And later on when I evaluated the situation, it somehow always boiled down to the social conditioning or insecurities of girls/women that actually make them selfish or even narrow. Let me share some examples.

It was a packed class room where an exam was supposed to begin in a few minutes. I reached the place

with one of my best friends in tow. There was only one coveted seat in the first row (yes we were the typical "first-benchers" ;-) ), but many in the last. I waited for my friend thinking we will sit together. But she dodged me in a mad rush to reach the place in the first row. She pretended complete unawarenes of the situation and I pretended the same and yes we are friends even today. But yes, I knew from that time onwards, how insecure she is as a person and how much she will give me her hand if I am sinking!

Examples like this can go on for pages. Friends completely forgetting the existence of their so-called "best friends" after getting married or friends shutting their doors on you during week ends as that's the "family time" etc etc!

There is one even funnier fact is that as a woman, if you believe in giving some priority to your friends you are considered to be one unhappy soul, who did not get enough attention from her male counterpart. I actually think it is the opposite. If you are a happy person, at ease with your relationships, you actually have more love to give, to share. It is not too tough to strike a balance only if you believe in yourself as a person.

Don't get me wrong, I still have girl friends who lend a shoulder to cry in times of need, or do fun things together (and some of them will be reading this blog too :-) ) but somehow that group feels to be a minority. I so wish, that we as women learn to strike a balance between our 'domestic lives" and everything else someday soon. We need to learn to live fully. Not just as someone's daughter, wife or mother but as a person and only then we will be able to appreciate the true meaning of friendship or any other relationship for that matter.

This post will remain incomplete if I do not acknowledge all my friends, who have proved much more beyond the social stereotypes. Who beyond being a mother, a wife or a daughter have proved to be an equally caring friend to all her female friends as well. They have proved that diamonds are not necessarily a girl's best friend.
And to tell them how much I value their friendship, I am simply going to copy from the recent Vodaphone advertisement, which I love so much.

Little things you do for me

and no body else makes me feel good
little things you do for me
making me smile and no one else could
that’s why I like to sit next to you
and hear your mad stories/ I know they are not true
and I like that we share a secret or two together
little things you do for me...

Fairly unfair

Your husband is enamoured by you if you look fairer, you feel more confident when you are fairer, you walk the ramp more gracefully when you are fairer, you even perform better on a singing or even a cycling competition when you are fairer, your father's (who is, by the way, a make up artist) humiliation in the hands of a pompous actress disappears when you look fairer! And hello, since you are a "modern" woman, you accept fairness only when they come with a proof and esp when the ingredients are "ayurvedic"!!!

Well..I think you got a drift by now as to what I am talking about..in case you are not an avid TV watcher, I am talking about the numerous commercials on fairness creams which keep coming every two minutes these days on TV!

Now, I have nothing against the fairness cream manufacturers or the TV commercials that proclaim their wonders. But TV commercials only project the general psyche of the society which helps find a market for products. And their lies my concern. In this age of modernization where we claim of moving forward, why this backward pull of celebrating our skin colour (or the lack of it!).

Yes, I understand that women (and men too) always want to look beautiful. Beauty is something which is coveted by the poets, the philosophers, the rich, the poor...you get the drift. From the fairy tales to the job interviews I am told that, beauty is celebrated with much fervour always. But beauty cannot be synonymous to fairness! It cannot be something as superficial as your skin colour! Then why is this eternal quest for fairer skin? Is it some kind of a heritage of the British Raj that we, Indians admire the lack of melanin (the pigment that is responsible for dark skin) in the skin so much! Melanin is actually a protective pigment which protects us from skin cancer, in case you didn't know! Then why such angst against melanin! From the time the kids start playing with dolls with with fair skin and blue eyes, this fascination with fair skin continues to grow. I am told (mostly by the TV commercials and some serials again) that even today, girls with darker skin colour neither find suitable jobs nor grooms! It is really funny that on one hand, we abhor racism and on the other, we still judge people by their skin colour!

Don't get me wrong, I am not against looking your best. Quite on the contrary, I believe that yes, you should look after yourself, look well and feel well about yourself too. But this mass hypnotizing on trying to achieve fairer skin, which culminates women measuring their skin tone with a "shade-o-meter" is down right derogatory to my mind! I wonder what impact these ads might be having on young girls! I hope this generation teenagers are smarter to shun the superficiality and accept the substance in their life! I hope that all this mass hypnotizing on the eternal quest to achieve a few shade lighter skin colour does not lead to a poor self image, I hope they realize instead of fighting the melanin of skin, it is a better idea to try to achieve a healthier skin, a healthier life and a healthier mindset which ultimately will lead you to beauty-both inside and outside!

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Becoming a doctor

Yesterday was doctor's day. Like so many other days that we celebrate these days, we have a doctor's day too. Many people came and wished me and suddenly I was filled with so many mixed and confused feelings that they are now paving their way to this blog post! ;-)

Yes I am a doctor. I have slogged almost 5 gruelling years in being successful to write the "Dr' in front of my name. And let me be frank, it was such an amazing feeling that time to write that prefix in front of my name, it made all the madness of those five years seem absolutely sane! Hmmn, now you are wondering why I am calling this five years of medical training as a madness! If it was such a madness,why did I even think of a further madness of three years in achieving a post graduate degree! Well, let me explain.

What will you call the experience of trying to keep awake the whole night with intermittent intake of raw coffee powder in order to understand some weird biochemical pathway of how cholesterol is formed in the body step by step? Or may be trying to learn by heart words like Cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrene and trying to even remember what this weird sounding name looks like (for the uninitiated, it is the structure of a steroid!). Or how about spending a whole evening in the spring, that too when you are only 19 years old, trying to understand something called tricotilomania! Well, I call them madness, esp when the experience continues for whole 5 YEARS!

I tell you what, actually what is even more maddening is that after spending so much of time and energy in learning many inane pieces of information (and some useful ones), when you think you are the walking talking knowledge bank on this earth and land up the hospital wards for performing your duty as a doctor, you are completely taken aback at the utter disillusionment that awaits you. For one, many a times you are being called as a "sister" (of course you have to belong to the same privileged sex as me), in the medicine OPD the medical representatives don't even pay attention to you, in the hospital wards you are only being asked to make i.v channels and take blood samples and do catheterization by your seniors, in the surgery OT, you just get to pass on the scalpel and worse still, in the orthopedic OPD, you try your best to keep holding someones heavy legs, which seems to betray you at every moment!

So, somewhere people like me, esp the first generation doctors, who thought, the day we pass out from the medical school, everybody will start treating us with awe and wonder, we will become rich and famous soon, started a process of disillusionment which seemed to deepen by the day! We felt small and let down when we saw our school mates, who got in to engineering, started to earn hefty packets soon after graduation while we were searching for redemption in a successful lumbar puncture or may be by taking out blood samples of 100 patients in a day. And on top that, the only hope to get out of this routine was to qualify for a post graduate exam for which you are supposed to outperform thousands of equally brilliant doctors for one seat! Isn't it all sheer madness!

OK, so is it all about a mad bleak picture for which I started to write this blog? Not at all. Contrary to whatever you might have thought after reading till this, I am very happy to be a doctor. Yes, it is true that I don't actively see patients everyday as my chosen field of work does not so demand, but I have come a long way from a very scary winter night some fifteen years back,when I was scared when my father was having an asthma attack and I could not fathom what to do, or a day when I used to be scared if somebody in my home fell ill. I am scared no more. I know how to reach out to many in pain, in illness. My friends and colleagues who actively work in the clinics, most of them somehow or the other feel redeemed (apart from the monetory redemption ;-) ) at the end of a hard day's work. For me, I work in a domain which allows me to help the process of new drug development in a minuscule way and I know every medicine is a hope for somebody somewhere, someday.

Yes, I love my profession. Today, all the madness of five years and beyond of my medical education makes absolute sense to me. I have no regrets and I am proud to be a doctor. One of my colleagues passed me a beautiful quote yesterday and I am copying the same here:

"For Years we pore over black and white,

The pages may blur but not our sight.

For we have a vision of the serpents and the wand,

The sign of healing under which we bond.

so here's to all who sail the same boat,

united in our goal by the same white coat"

Cheers to being a doctor!