The attitude to another...

Sometimes one is really humbled by the clarity and sensitivity of someone, whom you have often taken for granted!

Yesterday my father was discussing how the conversation occured between him and a prospective tenant for the house. This man who wanted to rent the house, had shown much interest and almost made it clear that he wanted the place... yet he had been taking my father for a bit of a ride with unclear statements and dilly-dallying on the rent amount. He wanted to pay less than what was the rent amount and also not increase the amount each year as is the norm. My father had made some adjustment for him but only to an extent. Having taken a liking to the man he was also giving him more time to think.

What I firstly found amazing is the understanding of the background of the person. He learnt that the man had been living in government quarters before and that too a bigger house. He was middle aged and seemed to be taking a house on rent for the first time and his own HRA fund was limited. Knowing this he already understood that this man will take time to buy into the idea of living on rent and the procedures that go along with it.

Now finally one day when they were trying to arrive at a decision and he was still dilly dallying, another family trouped in. They too had liked the house and after seeing some more option had come to say they were willing to make the deal. They were also ok with the rent. Seeing this occurrence, our man immediately fished out a token payment and gave it to my father... realising that he will loose the house. Now my father could easily have accepted the new tenants who were paying the correct amount. But surely he felt more comfortable with this other person and also had given him the time to think. But given the uncertain nature of this man, there were still room for worry.

I think I would have instead said to him, are you sure, you wont walk out on me right? Now, surely my father had this worry too... but he expressed it so differently. He told him listen you don't have to make a quick decision which you will regret later. Are you sure... He told him that you can get houses at the lesser rent you want as well, if you take the ones on higher floors or in a different colony nearby. Are you sure... I don't want you to decide in a pressure situation.

This was absolutely amazing for me. Because somehow we are often thinking for ourselves and not in a large context. We must of course never forget our own interests... but in that process not have to see ourselves as victims or in need to defend our interests against someone who is naturally going to use us. Yes, right at the start, he rejected some families which seemed more aggressive by nature and could cause trouble later. but having invested some time with this man he was able to then give him room to think.

This is a great lesson. Shivangi was recently telling about her grandfather who used to sometimes fold hands in front of people while negotiating with them. She said that only years later she understood the power of such surrender in front of people as a wonderful way of both strategy - of getting one's work done and also a powerful transformation in one's standpoint towards others and one's own 'ego'. It takes, she said great courage... and perhaps a skill that many in India (and surely elsewhere) had and we have forgotten. 

Arjuna...

Ibne Kunti-waaliye Gaandeev-ae-shehzaure-Hind
Do jahaan ki daulaten teri shujaayat par nisaar
Braj ke Shehzaade ko bhi khatir teri manzoor thi
Khud Tamasha ban gaya tere liye Parwardigaar

The ability to See

It is perhaps right when in older days men used to deride women for being too emotional. They were of course not right when they identified it with the very nature of women. But then who was to say and prove them wrong?
When we see the education of the young today, this trend seems to be visible - Families who allow the desires of their children to grow unchecked, and also fill them with petty concerns of status and prejudice, end up with children who remain permanently childish, even in their adult lives. It is a true thing that has been said, that human beings have to become human - we are at one level born pure, in tune with the wider consciousness, with nature... in this sense we are both utterly natural and supranatural. We can, as we grow, mature to become humans, humans who are aware of their nature and the nature of things around them... aware of other sensibilities, other modes of living (human and other alike) or they can be more animal like. And a human animal is worse than an animal, who is at-least living as to his nature. The nature of man is to become something more that what he is as such, only in this does he/she realize themself.
In a society where women barely interacted with the world and esp. women from well of and protected families who were very aware of desires and status and having various things and competing, and without any education to allow their minds to flower and expand - it is not surpising if women remained petty and emotional, affected quickly by things. I see this in so many of the government school teachers, who are women, and it is sad that such teachers, conscious as they are of their very pious burden of being housewives - how they are clear that their families are priority. In Rajasthan I heard teachers tell me with a kind of martyr pride, that they get up at 4 am in the morning, cook for everyone, pack their own lunches, if they have children then prepare and send them off to work. In school they rearely take up any extra work or initiative (of course there are important excpetions). These are teachers who will not do any extra homework to figure an interesting way to teach a child, but rather  will buy something for the house or cook a extra dish. Of course they would do this - their identity and power are simply associated with this. The job they do, they do minimally, enough to keep it. But more so because they are somewhat alien to the other avenues of the mind and the self that they have not explored.

But then, how is it that in a world where there is so much they don't understand, these women do not have the desire to know. to be more than what they are. Of course this is not to deny that there are women who have remained thoughtful and deeply insightful even within the limited exposures they have. And one can argue that exposure itself means little, if one is to compare the average well-heeled and well-traveled variety among some corporate youth who hardly seem driven to something more than who they are. And there have been writers, men and women, who have barely ever left their hometowns and have written insightful things.

There is somewhere, someone who perhaps in our life, a parent or uncle or aunt, who pointed to us the ability to observe - to see more than what we see. whether it was the quietness of the morning or the changes of generations in the family - something that shifts the mundane viewing of life. Or sometimes it is a sense inside some of us, the few of us who flower even within very trying environments, with the ability to see. And also the ability to remain strong... What then can be done for those who are not so? 

This really is the only learning needed right, for any of us. A condition, an atmosphere of learning... If a teacher can create a condition for learning, then her or his job is almost done. Actual instruction means very little in itself. But for this, musn't our teachers too feel the magic of this - the joy of discovering, a new feeling, a new experience, of reflection or contemplation?

Ruminations on Thinking...

It would perhaps be incorrect to say that in India, there is less or no distinction between the self and the non-self and that in fact the self is subordinated to either the divine or the cycle of karma and births. Or at least it would not be sufficient to say this.
It is generally assumed that the Self, the Ego is stronger in western modes of thinking. But I think that it is possible to suggest that in fact the apparent fuzziness between the self and the non-self in 'Indian' thinking is in fact due to the predominance of the Self. One only needs to look at the way knowledge is acquired and mastered in the Indian framework. [I think there are strong overlaps with some modes of Arabic thinking too, but this needs more thinking]. From classical music and dance, to the knowledge of plants and 'padaarthas' (elements in nature), to even arts of divinition and of Tantra knowledge is acquired not by establishing logical laws of nature, but by such detailed familiarity with that material realm which is being mastered that its secrets, its very intentions and workings become apparent - their nature is known, not their law of nature. In this then is discerned a moving law... But for this, entry is required by a strongly intention-ed Will, perhaps yes, not a Self, but a Will which will achieve this mastery. Surely yes, this process will not leave the person unchanged. And yes perhaps one can then suggest the curious relation between a strong Self and a bending Will or strong Will and bending Self, I don't know.

Secondly, think about rules such as those of Manu which declare that if a woman sleeps with another man when her husband is away for a long period, she is not punishable but is only so if she deliberately cheats on him. Is there not a curious recognition of desire in this, as a valid aspect of the lives of even ordinary people? So the morality related to adultry is not the Victorian one we are used to today.

Of course, it may be correct to ask, how representative Manu was of Indian thinking at a particular time and in fact also what context his writing emerges in - perhaps a period of reconciling more tribal and/or 'pagan'/proto-Hindu sorts of ways with other ideas of reform that were emerging at that time. Surely the views about the Self and the non-self would have varied greatly in the Advaita traditions and those of Manu and the Dharmashatras. So then, would the attitude to desire.

But it is useful again to broadly note that this recognition of desire even in formal documents, does not match the stereotype of the self-denying aspects of even later Hinduism. (though is Manu from later Hinduism or still in conversation with more of the Vedic forms?)

I wonder - Is there an integrated idea of the Self here? how can one be thinking of an individual as a Brahmin or Shudra only (note that adopting children among relatives even today remains quite common but only so within the community - which implies that one is not an individual, but one is also not of the whole society, but of the particular community/family/jaati) and yet also have a profound tradition of separation from community and the social, through systems like Sanyasa or even more mundane instances. Maybe, i make the mistake of trying at the same time to look at lived life and formal injunctions, to older and more recent periods of reform and change in the 'hindu traditions'.

Allowing freedom

Anyhow, I feel that when we talk to people, even and perhaps especially to those whom we consider narrow minded or conservative (its tough perhaps with strongly fundamentalist people) to interview them in ways that create an environment of exploration and pause and the fearless-ness that nothing is judged and so we can together go into a question, a quest. That in fact there is a possibility of a quest of knowledge, of thought and feeling… a manthan of sorts. This itself is a capacity that lies right at hand and is repeatedly lost…  we fill the silences of reflection, when the images/implications of our own words are being reflected back on us, and so we keep stating what we state, with all its contradictions and emptinesses. Surely contradiction is not a problem, but yet a freer person is more integrated, even while we may accept that there are a million ways of being integrated… in all this the challenge I encounter most is keeping my own mouth shut and allowing such spaces to emerge. And also I wonder, the data that emerges from such conversations, is it sociology? Can sociology capture a person in movement, rather than a person revealed? Is sociology interested? We think of sociology as therapeutic, assuming that its content will do the therapy. Perhaps sometimes sociology has to take a backseat to therapy, better still, to ‘lived freedom’.