A cry for break - a day's diary

The mundane activities of both of us, that is my work in my office and Tumpa’s chores of home making at times drive us mad for a break – far, near wherever possible; we need to break out from our routines. 

We were longing for such a break. at the end of march 2011 we gave a couple of tries to convert the break to a long week-end (though it could be at most a couple of days – but that would have been something heavenly!). But we failed …… our social ways of life does not leave even the least for timid people like us. Precisely, we could not make it.

Sujaya came up with the idea that we can at least have a vacation for half a day somewhere within greeneries – and Shibpore Botanical Garden was an automatic choice.We went to the place earlier; normally very less crowded, which is of our much liking. So we made up our mind and rushed out in the morning of 31^st March (2011).

Kolkata, Howrah – these places have become like a collage of different moods and flavours – varying widely. You will be able to see marked contradictions almost everywhere every moment, just if you remain a little aware. And if you are sensitive enough, these flavours are likely to affect you in some way or other.

Even if we have difference of opinions, choices etc. about innumerable things, me and my wife, Sujaya, are very much same about sensitivity. We try to help out each other from this problem of being too sensitive towards things very often.

Things happened just before we could get in the garden (at the gate in fact) which drove me mad – and I almost had decided to leave the place. The freshness of the morning was marred by bitterness within, due to a row over the most uncivilized behaviours of the securities in the gate! I shouted like a mad man at the top of my voice. Finally interference from  some conscientious and responsible employee of the place soothed me down a little and we got inside.

We remained there for about a couple of hours. If any such thing could be done so that every one would have acted in there best ways, then that could make any process or exercise, how rigorous it might be, bearable to us. So, looking at the rest of the time we stayed in there, in that way gives me some real good, soothing feeling. The sounds, like the chirping of the birds or the rustle of the breeze, they cannot be exactly delineated, that is I do not have that capacity; so I tried to capture the serenity of the place through my lens.

We are not fortunate enough to get in touch of the green every day –

and that way our children are actually deprived of a very precious feeling of living with nature which is not spoiled by the frenzy of unnecessary demands and desire of consumption of civilized society, even by the least measure. Once one has the real feeling of such things from the core of oneself, the truth must become visible to him – but very unfortunate for us that it does happen almost never, and we remain wading around in the scum of life.

Anyway – no more darkness. Let the placid and serene nature tell us her own words.

 Let us look at her leaving behind all the squalor of life. Let us not look at her through the projections of our own minds – there may be remnants of bitterness which we actually want to forget, but are not able to, due to our own flaws.

 Let us refresh our soul.

 Let us make friends with trees, the sky and water.

 Let us play with the butterflies. 

Let us surprise ourselves with the view of the fairyland

 that suddenly unfolds before our eyes. If we try heart and soul looking to the pictures, who knows we might be able to hear the rustle of breeze. We might even feel it caressing us, thus wiping out the sulkiness from within. The small flowers' innocent nod call us to play with them.......

The great Banyan tree of the Indian Botanical Garden attracts millions of visitors every year. It looks like a miniature forest and is over 250 years old with 2800 prop roots covering an area of 1.5 hectares.

The lonely paths...............



 and the shady nooks .......

 can remind us of the long forgotten fond dreams of a refuge, which many of us might had somewhere deep within our senses, where we wanted to be, what we have always longed for.

Why do we not leave aside the ugly byproducts of civilization and embrace peace which nature has always kept for us – only waiting to be picked up. The small flowers, the colourful bugs, water-lilies, ripples in the ponds and images of nature around in the water – they all make such a nice world. How can we remain so unaware of them? After all that way we give up our joy – the elixir of life.

Search for a good life

What is it that we call good life? If we introspect thoroughly it will appear to us that fundamentally we call those things good, which are accepted as desirable, for all, by our conscience. Let us have a closer look at the statement.

Different persons have different ways of life. People have different tastes as far as the different aspects of living are concerned. For most of the common people this is largely governed by their social status as well as their nature. Also, as social beings, our relations with other humans contribute to our behavior, both towards our own selves and others. We are usually required to optimize our behavior and actions to a large extent, in view of our peaceful coexistence. Such optimizations are manifested as our different ways of life.

But, as human as a creature, we have some attributes in common. We all look for a few common feelings, irrespective of our apparent differences; even if, as individuals, we are of different nature and how different our culture or social status might be. We look for stability for instance. These feelings help us enjoy life. And if we have a very close look at our psych, we will see that we are constantly striving to be happy through enjoyment of every moment.

These feelings help us form the ideas and senses of the desirables in life. So long a person conforms to the definition of one who is neurotically healthy, even if he is very offensive or obnoxious in his ways, when interrogated closely, he will also show his longings for the same common feelings as those of a person who is very fine and amicable.

At different junctures of history, great men came within us who came up with solutions for problems of life. Their teachings had a common agenda: they tried to delineate ways of life which help us find those desirables. They told us about actions directed in quest of those feelings we all long for, as human beings.

 Life changes with time as we come up with solutions to myriads of problems we face against our efforts to live. By and large, search for convenience is the motive force behind the present day concept of civilized life. This search has made it possible for new technologies to come up. At times, maintaining the processes helping convenience, need prop, supportive systems. Thus technologies have their byproducts – even more new technologies. Terminologies change, so do understandings and interpretations. Such proliferations tend to make life inwardly complex. We do not always find ourselves to be readily equipped with the solutions to such complexities. This situation takes away the feeling of good living. We find ourselves perturbed by the nagging feeling of discomfort, which is not at all desirable. Thus it mars the stability we look for.

This is sort of a vicious cycle. We started with an intention to find convenience which might help us enjoy our life – but are ending up in a situation where we are in discomfort. To get rid of this, both life and old teachings need to be reviewed constantly.

New discoveries and inventions are enlightening us every other day. Such new knowledge may help us venture beyond the boundaries of our existing ideas. Our day to day life mostly goes by some time proven rules and habits formed by and guided by such rules. New ideas and knowledge change the rule at turns of life. We need to look at life, both present and the old ways, in the light of such new ideas.

But life concerns our own selves; we live to satisfy our own desires, we enjoy according to likings and shun the things of our disliking. Thus, life is about our own feelings. If we remain unaware of our own persons, we can no way understand our life.

Such situations are not very uncommon. In fact, we mostly go by the habits we form starting from our childhood through our lives. But we fail to understand why we do that way. We develop habits from repetitions of our reactions in life situations – but such reactions are often involuntary. Our conscious selves are not involved in such reactions. We come to know the rules for the reactions from the visual and other type of sensory data we gather from around us. Such data normally adhere to a pattern for considerable time and changes in such patterns take place very slowly. Hence, even if there is a drift in life situations, they often remain imperceptible. So, change in our behavior pattern, also do not take place very often.

Lack of synchronization in the changes of life situation and our behavior pattern gives rise to stress as we find ourselves inadequate standing in face of radically new situations. These stresses create perturbation within us – which is a state far from what is desired.

The best way we can equip ourselves for handling these stresses is to expand our repertoire of information about ourselves. Except for such situations where we have to find solutions of problems of physical or natural science, we have to work our ways out through situations concerned with human relationships. Physical science is a far too specialized field for our day to day life. Situations concerning human relations are far more frequent as compared to such problems which call for the specialized knowledge of a scientist. Hence, the more we know about ourselves, the more we know about other human beings similar to us. This knowing has to concern the human mind, because human relationship is built on the space of minds.

We have to be aware of ourselves, and for that purpose, fundamentally, first have to know ourselves – our longings, our desires. We have to be acquainted with our true feelings. 

Dynamics of our social life often force us, someway or other, to behave the way others want us to. This fact is often reflected in our habits and expectations also.  So, in the process of knowing oneself, one have to scrutinize one’s expectations to see whether they are really one’s own or they are the projections of others ideas. We also have to revisit our habitual behaviors and ideologies. If we are open enough we can find ways for ourselves to overcome the rocks of discontent jutting out in front of us when we want to sail through life enjoying every moment of it.

Quality of life

What is the purpose of our living? Leaving aside such ideas like fate or destiny, if we are left all by ourselves, what ideally should we do with our life? My realisation is: our motivation to live is our expectation that we may be happy (here I am talking about who have a clinically good mental health – have no desire for death).

But this expectation seems to remain in the unconscious of most of us. Somebody external to every person is always telling us, what to want and how much. We are driven by stimuli external to us throughout life. And it has its consequences. This gives rise to confusion within us – making us suspicious toward everything around us.

When I look back at myself and browse my thoughts, actions etc. in a retrospective, I find myself mostly preoccupied with tense, somewhat glum thoughts. When I dig into it I see my deep distaste for scepticism as the cause for this ailing of mine. Lack of scepticism is mostly looked at as naivety by most of the people. But I see a sort of duality in a person who longs for happiness and at the same time gives it away at the cost of scepticism.

This deteriorates the quality of our life. Living is not only about consumption. We consume largely to satisfy our feelings. Good feelings are part and parcel of good life. To lead a life of good quality, it is very important that we feel good and free from stress. Living behind scepticism can help us in that.

Trust builds a truly civilized system. Sophistications, leading to advancement can come only when the prevailing conditions are positive for that. One of the main requirements for such conditions is the placidity, unperturbed atmosphere, which can never be there so long trust is not there. If people do not have mutual trust, they will remain preoccupied in short lived issues, things which are less constructive. This is obvious because in such situations people will tend to find out quick fixes to issues which often call for thorough considerations. And thus it is more likely that small things, which may have far reaching consequences, are left out, which lessens the probability that the solution will not be long lasting.

We must give some serious thoughts to the question – what do we really need and how much. This calls for introspection – we have got to know ourselves. We are prone to following the world around us. In one of his short stories, Tagore observed that some part of a person’s life is made up by God, some by others and the rest is made by the person by him or herself. Leaving aside God, actually a large part of the lives of ours are done up according to what others say to us. Apart from our near and dear ones, these others include those elements of the society which depend upon us for their own existence. These elements are the numerous social institutions. It can always be argued that existence of a lot of individuals depend upon these elements. Here comes the question of how much. How much really a person need? Do these institutions take care of that? Such institutions are mostly driven by numbers which denote volumes or quantities. Many (most?) of them do not have anything to do with how such numbers are going to affect the conditions in future. They are mostly run by the philosophy of simply changing their outfit when they can no longer handle the parameters they juggle with to achieve a large value of the number they are concerned with.

One of the factors such institutions are much concerned about is the mass. The numbers the institutions try to achieve are actually votes given by the mass – more precisely: we the people. The institutions change their outfit according to the demand of the mass. So we have the power to determine, at least to some extent, to make the institutions think about our future. To do that, we have to be careful about what part of the products these institutions offer us, are we going to accept, and that also, very importantly, how much. Satisfaction is not derived always from quantity; we have to be able to enjoy every bit of whatever we have - may it be of whatever small quantity. The social institutions should cater that to us in terms of quality. Only careful response from mass can change the philosophy of these institutions, which in the long run will determine the quality of life we live.

Quality is not only about material or our physical life; it is about our mental life as well. The better thought we give to ourselves, our mind, soul, our inner life, the better we know ourselves; the better we know what we really need and how much. That in turn is going to help us live a better life – now and for ever.