Reflections of a restless eccentric

The myth of Sisyphus goes thus: Before he died, Sisyphus, knowing that he was headed to the Underworld, made his wife promise to refrain from offering the expected sacrifice following his death. Once he reached Hades, Sisyphus convinced kindhearted Persephone, the queen of the Underworld, to let him return to the upper world, so that he could ask his wife why she was neglecting her duty. Of course, Persephone had no idea that Sisyphus had intentionally asked his wife not to make the sacrifice, so she agreed, and Sisyphus escaped the Underworld, refusing to return. Eventually Sisyphus was captured and carried back, and the angry gods gave him his punishment: for the rest of eternity, he was forced to push a large rock up a steep hill, in itself a miserable task. Every time he neared the top of the hill, the rock would roll backward and he would have to start over,  as a metaphor for the individual's persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life.                  

"I'm not what I think I am, I'm not what you think I am, I'm what I think you think I am." I stumbled upon this quote a while ago. Parsing it took me a couple of reads, and then it fascinated me. I started digging up the internet for possible interpretations of this, and found a wealth of information. I'm linking a couple of them below. The Ribbonfarm article is very comprehensive and might take you a quite a bit of time to read(I thought some of my posts were long-form, and then I found Riboonfarm and understood what long-form blogging actually is:P), but it was quite insightful. Anyway, without further ado, here goes.  I am someone who used to think that I was largely unaffected by others' opinions of me. Take a moment, and think about this. Who are you? What is your identity? What are all the attributes you associate with yourself? How did you come to think of yourself in those terms? Is your identity entirely based on your own opinion of yours

“When someone seeks, then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”                                                                                        - Siddhartha, Herman Hesse I am a seeker of meaning. I worship at the altar of profundity. Everything has to have a deeper explanation for me. (What better example than this: I am writing this whole post explaining trying to impart meaning to a metaphorical mango! :P) If not, I am very dismissive of the experience--I ridicule it with names such as routine, mundane, commonplace. Today, contradicting this whole outlook, I will try to explain why meaninglessness isn't so bad. In other words, how you can find meaning in the meaningless :P I

"The opposite of every truth is just as true!"                                                               -Herman Hesse The first thing I read this morning was a news article on how a neurosurgeon who had died of covid-19 wasn't even allowed a proper burial. A gathering of people, who apparently feared contagion, opposed the burial by pelting the family and colleagues of the doctor with sticks and stones, which resulted in several healthcare workers being injured. The doctor was finally laid to rest by his friend, without his family present. The upset friend asks of the public in a video: Didn't he contract the disease because he treated patients? He could have refused to do so and stayed safe. And now, this the way he is treated in return, by being denied of something so basic a decent burial.  Wasn't it just yesterday that I spoke about the admirable kindness of people? It seems ironic that in less than 24 hours, I am forced to confront this other side

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones. But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said. I came across this post multiple times in the past week, and each time, I was moved by it. What a poignant a

Several of my friends and acquaintances confessed to me in trepidation of the lockdown: 24/7 with my sibling/roommate/spouse. We're going to kill each other, for sure! One of the consequences of the lockdown is that all of us are now forced to stay at home for an extended period without much of a choice. There are quite a few articles published on the alarming spike in divorce/separation following an epidemic. It is therefore that people are genuinely worried about the jeopardy of peace on the home front. I will confess to you, I too was one of those people. In the one year and odd months of married life, the longest uninterrupted time I have spent in my husband's company is 10 days, and that too on a relaxing vacation. My everyday routine had been to bid goodbye to my husband at 6.30 in the morning, and then greet him when he came home more than 14 hours later. What would it be like to work together, sharing the same space? What would it be like to have to divide all the

“To stun with clatter a mind that wishes to think.” Weak as I am, in order not to let my mind fly away on every wind that blows, yielding to the slightest breath it encounters, it would be necessary either to have everything motionless around me, or else, speeding on like a humming top, in movement itself to be rendered impervious to external things. Whenever, rotating slowly on myself, I attempt to speed up, the merest nothing—a word, a story, a newspaper, a visit—stops me, prevents my becoming a gyroscope or top, and can postpone or forever delay the instant when, equipped with sufficient speed, I might be able to concentrate within myself in spite of what is around me. We are obliged to eat, drink, sleep, laze, love; that is to say, to touch the sweetest things in this life, and yet not succumb. What is necessary is, in doing all that, to make the anti-natural thought to which one has devoted one’s self remain dominant and continue its impassable course i

In a post that I wrote ages ago, I spoke about the experience of listening to a musician who brings music alive. I called that experience and article  Transcendental . For me and millions of people around the world, she is one such vainika. I talk about none other than the legendary and unparalleled Dr.Jayanthi Kumaresh . She is synonymous with her instrument, the Saraswati Veena. Jayanthi was born into a family of violinists, (the famous Lalgudi Jayaraman was her uncle) but she chose a different path for herself at the age of 3--the Veena. After more than a decade of rigorous practice, she gave her first stage performance. Jayanthi holds a Doctorate for her work on “styles and playing techniques of the Saraswati veena”. She is married to a famous violinist, none other than Kumaresh ji of the Ganesh-Kumaresh duo. Her performances have brought her worldwide acclaim, numerous awards and titles, the most recent of which is the prestigious Sangeet Shikhar Samman. All this and more, you

This article comes with twofold inspiration- a word from Obscure Sorrows and David Wallace's famous commencement speech titled 'This is water'. I would highly encourage you to read This is Water, if you haven't already. (Link in P.S) Sonder- everyone has a story The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk . Our life is a first person story. It is centered around us, and everyone and everything else is relative to our own self, including all our experiences. This is our default setting. Several times,

“Don’t try to compare a paper cut to stitches because they both draw blood” I'll admit to you, my last couple of posts  Embrace the struggle  and  Gratitude are seemingly contradictory. In the latter, I urge you, My Reader, to be grateful for everything you have by pointing out the fact that several people are denied of basic amenities. In the former, I ask you to accept that your problems are real and reassure you that it okay to seek help about them. Now you might wonder:  How can I feel grateful while I am going through so much struggle?  Or worse still: My struggles are not worthy of being expressed, I should instead feel grateful because people all over the world are facing so much more. In essence: Is it possible for gratitude and struggle to co-exist? Or are they mutually exclusive? I believe that it is possible, but before I get into that, allow me to clarify my stance. When I ask you to be grateful, it is not by denying the existence of your struggles. I do not

The struggle is real, for all of us. So many things that we used to take for granted are now taken away, leaving us in despair. Maybe you're someone who's struggling with household chores. Or maybe you find your productivity at work seriously affected. Maybe you're an extrovert who's feeling cooped up at home. Maybe you're a student bogged down by the uncertainty of your postponed exams and graduation. Maybe you're someone who lost their job. Someone who feels anxious and depressed every time you read the news. Someone whose wedding has been postponed. A performer whose shows have all been cancelled. A tourist who has been unable to go back to their homeland. So many people, so many struggles. As human beings, our greatest strength is our ability to adapt. But before we do that, in my humble opinion, we must paint an honest picture of our reality. Denial is a powerful coping mechanism indeed, but we cannot fix things if we do not first acknowledge that they a

The lockdown is definitely a tough time for all of us. There have been countless posts urging us to pursue hobbies, to learn new skills, to use the abundance of time productively. While they are right, it can be daunting, and you might be feeling lost in the quagmire of choices. I will give you a slightly different approach: forget about productivity for a minute, and pick a couple of things that make you happy. Things that you look forward to. You must first feel good, only then can you be productive. I want you to pick something that would make you look back on the lockdown period with a fond smile  and go: "Those days when I used to find time for xyz. It used to be so much fun". This post is about my happy discoveries. I was lying in bed, my ankle hurting from a sprain, feeling a little blue. My husband walked in and remarked that the spark in my eye was missing. He tried to talk to me to figure out what was wrong, but there wasn't a "reason" for my gloom