Heavy traffic in heaven

I began white water rafting many many years ago and one of the things that kept me hooked (other than the huge adrenaline rush!) was the quietness of the experience. Flowing down the Ganges, between battling the force of the rapids, was a sublime experience: looking up into a bright sky fringed with unpopulated mountains, the sudden flight of varied birds, the occasional villager, langoors that scampered at the slap of the oars on the water. These were moments where you could forget how tiresome the world was.

But this time going to the Ganges after a gap of a few years, I was shocked at the population explosion that has occurred. Camps have multiplied and dot the river bank at regular intervals, some of them housing up to 150 guests! There were, at any one time, rafts of at least three different outfits at the same rapid at the same time. If that was not bad enough, we even had in a raft behind us, the sort of men and boys that harass and eve tease women! For the first time ever, the women in our group were suddenly conscious of their shorts and wet t-shirts and were uncomfortable till there was some distance between out raft and their's.

To make matters worse it seemed that some of the teams were not following the basic safety norms. They had no helmets, no accompanying river guide in a kayak to pick up those who were tossed into the river and it even seemed their guide was ill- equipped to negotiate the rapids. They littered, sang raucously, shouted and yelled, throughly disturbing the peace and quietened down only when one of them fell into a big rapid and had to be rescued by our safety guide's kayak.

Is it time perhaps to have traffic police and control in the river? Maybe even bye laws about camp size, number of camps and environmental limits to the amount of waste the dry pits can stabilize per season?
It would seem so!!

I found this really exciting awesome and adrenaline pumping video on youtube of the River Tummel. I would be petrified to try it but who knows..... Enjoy!!

No scope for confusion. Scarlett Keeling is a victim many times over

Though the public reaction to Scarlet Keeling’s story is hardly surprising, I confess to feeling somewhat saddened. This is a classic example of the sort of societal reaction disclosure of sexual abuse always draws- of blaming and shaming the victim. And therefore of revictimization.

What happened to Scarlett is child sexual abuse, no doubt about it. Yet her story elicits mixed reactions and most of them subtly blaming her for her tragic end. Why is this the case when usually society is outraged by child sexual abuse and has no hesitation in condemning the perpetrator? I suspect it is because people have no difficulty when the victim appears to them as a ‘victim’. In Scarlett’s case however we are confronted with several details which immediately elicit our moralistic and judgmental attitude and lead to a confusion about her responsibility in the chain of events. Details about the way she dressed (provocatively) the way she behaved (promiscuously), her high risk behavior (took drugs, partied, had boy friends, stayed back alone) are taken as proof that she ‘had it coming’ and that ‘she asked for it’.

Before we condemn Scarlet and write her story off as a inevitable conclusion to the drinks, drugs and party lifestyle she chose to lead, we must take a look at her situation and see it from the perspective of child sexual abuse. I have correlated her situation with some of its characteristics.

Fact 1: She was underage and the world over the act of having sex with a minor is called ‘rape’ and the responsibility lies with the adult who should have known better. Even though Scarlett was sexually active it is still important to remember that age of consent is 16 years.

Fact 2: Even when the minor invites, accepts, takes pleasure from and willingly participates in sexual activity it is still called child sexual abuse and it is an offense. The focus needs to remain on the adult perpetrator as being responsible and not shift to judging the victim’s behavior. Scarlett’s behavior was inappropriate, but that does not justify her rape.

Fact 3: The responsibility to keep the teenager safe lies with the adults who have been negligent. In this case the mother who chose to leave Scarlett alone without money in an area where drugs were freely available, with no family or trusted person to take care of her.

Fact 4: Scarlett’ family situation put her at ‘high risk’ of being abused. Factors that contribute to higher risk are single parenthood, families living in isolation and poverty. This is highly correlated with substance abuse and emotional neglect. This describes Scarlett’s family situation precisely.
These factors increase children’s risk of abuse in two ways. First they decrease the quality and quantity of supervision and protection they receive. Second they produce needy, emotionally deprived children who are vulnerable to the ploys of sexual abusers and are entrapped by their need for friendship, attention and affection. Scarlett’s relationship with Julio seems to have been based on this despairing need and in her diary she shares feeling trapped and ‘stuck’ when she realizes that his claims of loving her are not true and that he is simply using her for sex and drugs.

Fact 5: Again Scarletts diary has been taken as evidence of her passion for sex, partying and drugs. But doen’t this read like a list of symptoms of sexual abuse? Is it possible that Scarlet’s behavior may have been a result of earlier abuse? Child victims of sexual abuse often display eroticised behavior or other self destructive behavior patterns including increased chances of using alcohol or drugs. It has been suggested that sexual abuse may lead some girls to become sexually active at an earlier age and seek out older boyfriends that may introduce them to drugs.

Fact 6: Bystanders chose to not be involved. Often non offenders or bystanders choose not to get involved even when they witness a child/teen being assaulted. This is especially true when there are more than one witnesses and none of them make a move to intervene. The adults at the bar who saw that Scarlett was drugged chose to ignore that she may need them to actively help her. Even when she was being molested in the car park in a condition when she could not possibly have defended herself(or consented). Perhaps each one of the people in the bar who watched the tragedy unfold till 5 a.m. hoped someone else would step forward.

Make no mistake. What happened to Scarlet was violent child sexual abuse and we must never lose sight of it in our confusion that arises from her, or her mother’s, choice of ‘lifestyle’. In fact it seems that Scarlett is victim many times over. In Goa where she was raped and murdered and unquestionably by society’s moralistic and voyeuristic reactions after her death.

Primed for Action

Many of us have read Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink' and may remember the concept of 'priming' where the subtle words and messages we are exposed to can affect our behavior in profound ways. For example if we read a text sprinkled with words such as 'polite', 'considerate', 'respect' etc then our adaptive unconscious would think about these states and we would respond to our environment with these attributes (even in a demanding or difficult situation).

This thought came back to me very strongly a few days ago when I traced my suddenly feeling 'blue' to the fact that I had just finished reading the morning paper- a leading Delhi daily. On the spur of the moment I picked it up again and re-read the main news items on the front page. I was shocked to discover that a overwhelming number of news items were depressing and led me to feel hopeless or helpless or just plain angry. I also found myself wondering, later in the day, how much of the aggressive and uncouth driving behavior I see on the road may be influenced by our daily dose of morning news.

I analyzed the contents of todays paper to demonstrate my point. This is what I discovered.....

Power shortage this year again- get ready for summer pain.
A reference to hanging
A girl raped and confined by rogues
NREGA funds being siphoned off
India's future is going up in smoke
Trucks are Delhi's biggest killers claiming 305 lives as opposed to Blueline buses which killed 163
Aircraft hits wall in Udaipur
Arthur C Clarke is dead
Life and death war in Tibet

The only reporting that generated any cheerful feelings was about March 21st being Holi, Eid-e-Milad, Navroz and Good Friday.

How then are we being primed by todays words- 'pain', 'rape', 'killing', 'hit' , 'death', 'rogues', 'war'.....
What is the impact of the news we wake up to everyday on our behavior?
Are Indians being 'primed' for depression or aggression?

What does the newspaper in your city say?

Anahata

Anahata is the unstruck sound, the sound before the beat.

It is the having, within the silence, the potential of that sound.
The possibility of that as yet dormant power.
Unfathomable.

I aspire to that potential. I am the possibility of being more than I can envision, for my vision is limited by what I can grasp. And I grasp less than I can understand.

At the moment I have reached a threshold. I make a small tinny sound inside of me as if I were a mere glass bead inside an earthen pot. Whereas what I want is that I resonate with fullness. That I rumble and roar inside of me with a full bodied, rich, luxurious sound of me.

I aspire for that moment in time when I could swell to bursting, tautend to a point where I could simply snap or instead become the sound of a thousand celestial notes.


Here is Kabir, the master, and he puts it so well……..

Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves, and within it is the Creator:
Within this vessel are the seven oceans and the unnumbered stars.
The touchstone and the jewel-appraiser are within;

Did someone not say "All the world's a stage"?

Every phase of our life seems like a stage.
New settings, new co actors with the old ones suddenly disappearing or playing a smaller part. At the moment I watch, waiting in the wings as the stage of my current life (or life as I currently knew it) is being emptied. Chairs, backdrops no longer there, people leaving.
It is time: they are making way for a new set. But what will it be this time? What role will I play?
Most importantly: will my fellow actors guide me towards a deeper understanding or will they reveal to me my unmet needs, inadequacies, sorrows, disappointments and anger? Reveal the path I now have to walk? That would be a relief really.
My wait seems endless. If in September I felt like a stone sinking surely but certainly towards my destiny I now have no awareness of any movement. I seem to be without any gravitational pull. Do I have no where to go or is this a going somewhere too?

In the meantime I take succour from what a friend said recently: "Meditation is not only a state. It can also be a stage (of life)".

Quietness

For some reason Amar's post- a zen saying- brought this poem by Rumi to mind. It is one of my (many) favourite Rumi poems and i take great pleasure in sharing it here.

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky,

Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.

Do it now.

You’re covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side.

Die, and be quiet.

Quietness is the surest sign

that you’ve died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now.

Meditation

Looking inwards I see
Unrecognizable hues, contours, shapes
still forming

Familiar hands slip away
Loosening their grip
As I too loosen mine
I let them go as they float down
into the past
a haze born of self imposed boredom

my mind empties of ambition and
the edges of feelings are softer
rounder
less jagged

Calmness closes over my head
and engulfs me momentarily

Lead India?

I Settled down to watch the face off between the final 8 participants in the TOI Lead India Initiative and got up in disgust after the first few minutes. Why should this initiative with the claim of choosing a leader who will inspire a nation - "Tum Chalo to saara Hindustan Chale" be asked the name of Amitabh Bachhan's character in the film Satte pe satta and other such trivia?
Are we not choosing them for their vision and possible concrete contribution to the nation? Can someone explain this ridiculousness please?

Who Seeks?

I have been thinking about an old adage- If you want something really badly the universe conspires to make it happen?
For what seems an eternity, if eternity can be collapsed into a few months or years- I have sought. Ignorance and conditioning made me think I sought happiness. Later peripheral knowledge of my subject convinced me I sought freedom from destructive patterns of behavior. Burgeoning self efficacy pointed me in the direction of self actualization. But...why did, none of that feel right?

The closest I came to comfort was when I decided that I had to find a life purpose, something that wove all my efforts together, something bigger than myself, a mission that would consume me. If not then the fire of this terrible, impatient inner yearning would consume me instead. Can life force be so destructive? Can we create something larger than ourselves only through self annihilation? To stand paralysed on the threshold of impending change or impending disaster for what seems like forever is erosion. Not slow or insidious but a certain, strong, relentless incineration of the self.

But what paralysed me connects to some of the answers I recieved. The questions I had- What was my life purpose and what did I have to do to achieve it? The answer I took back – it will be revealed, in its own time.
Ah the relief of the thought! To be able to replace the compulsion to do, frantic efforts to work at making it happen, can all be replaced by preparation! Preparing my mind and my self to become a better receptacle.

There are some changes I knew I had to make. To be less egoistic, to be humbler. To think with positivism, to feel less dependant, to be less moved to fear and anger, to be moved with rightful anger, feel the miracle of littler things, to be comfortable with silence and emptiness. To know how to distinguish between principal and secondary greatness, to not expect. Did I not know I had to do all of this? When was I hoping to do them?

This then is my plan of action. Greater control and mastery instead of a desperate seeking, inward action instead of outward. Actively seeking self awareness instead of self actualization. And of course asking many, many many, times a day, the eternal question…………who seeks?

seeing

my eyes turned inwards
i think
if i think long enough, hard enough
will i be able to see who and what i really am?

Living a larger life

I was reading about the British MP Lord Drayson, who has resigned to follow his dream of taking part in the Le Mans race. How wonderful to have a imagination, a personal goal to nurture and even more wonderful to be able to give everything else up in order to pursue it!

Nelson Mandela said "There is no passion to be found playing small- in settling for a life that is less than the one we are capable of living"

What a pity when we settle to live small, confined, narrow lives where we realise only the smallest fraction of our potential. We start by wanting happiness and conclude that it lies in safety. And then give up every chance of happiness in the search for safety... until safety becomes our only goal.

Do I hear someone say something about circumstances, responsibilities, practicalities....?

Who reads us?

A blog is the most public of private places. A stray comment left by a reader serves to remind me of the vast amounts of traffic that finds and dismisses, or enjoys, the words and thoughts put down here.
Who reads this? Why do I, why do all of us write?
Mostly because writing is happiness. But nothing answers this more aptly than the following words by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 'The Custom House' , The Scarlet letter in 1850.

This is an edited excerpt:

'When he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him.......As if the printed word, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it.....
But-- as thoughts are frozen and utterance, benumbed unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience- it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk. '

Lotus

It was a belief I shared with some others that all you had to do if you ever felt lost and unfocused, was to close your eyes, capture in your heart that one moment that you think you created supreme happiness for yourself, identify what is was within you that fashioned it, and then work towards realizing that as a goal.
A good thought but naive.......

In our naivety, we failed to grasp one important fact: Man is powerful and his consistent, sustained action and intent can wreak changes in the universe.
Time and time again we focus on that one snapshot like image, turning it into the polestar that keeps us on our path. But suddenly, without our realizing it something strange has happened: because of our 'doing', the hard work we put in and the changes we set into motion, the elements of our life have been transformed. And so one day, when we look up as usual, it may happen that we may not recognize our world- because insidiously, its very fabric has altered.


And sometimes, what may have altered is our own perspective.

If we are fortunate, we can bring our perspective to shape our world so that we find ourselves in the center of the tapestry of our life once again, till the dynamics of our fluid enclosure and context shift ever so subtly, setting up the cycle again. Yet again.

As hard as we try we cannot escape this inevitable spiral of life.

This, I now understand, and more importantly accept, is the way of life.
The never-ending spiral, the birth and death and rebirth of relationships, action and mistakes.

To Avalokiteshvara, who looks down in compassion on all creatures suffering the evils of existence, goes the million fold repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet. “Om Mani Padme Hun”. The jewel is in the lotus. The jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death.

May pain and pleasure not enclose me, may I enclose them- and with profound repose.

simply can't find them and make them stay

I come back to this thought time and time again: In words are my wings, my release. In them could be my redemption.
But for the moment I live in the prison of my barren page haunted by my thoughts that do not surface.

I feel words locked up inside of me, knotted up, turning over, restless in the night, knocking at the door, strangling me and choking my voice.
I wish I could release them into the night sky and watch them soar up to the moon obscuring its pure whiteness with an even greater luminosity.

Is there a goddess that helps one unlock ones words? Lead me to her someone so that I may plead at her feet.

Damned words. I feel them well when I read a line, walk alone. They come to me not just in solitude but also in the midst of life. They jump out at me: one or more from a page that mean more than they seem, hold the promise of a deeper and new thought. These are living and secret pathways to another world that could exist on a different page if I found the words that could grow into a page and perhaps that page leads to another book. Sometimes some words band together to conjure an image or feeling that was unintended by the author. Just a wisp, mind you. Almost as if you watched a cloud that seemed to form a certain shape in the cloud and then reorganized itself so that the shape became invisible. They can flit away in an instant or fade back into being just ordinary words in the multitude unless I catch them like butterflies in a net. Or perhaps like fish? Or do they, I wonder, cast the bait at me from within the page?
Gulp!

FDA Hearing (1991) with Testimony