Ignoramus knows more!

 One of the things that I was completely unaware of, was the Pulitzer prize for criticism. It hurt! The moment  I heard this news, I was in despair. How can such a prize be in existence and how am I not a recipient for at least three years in a row? Knowledge is supposed to make you all-knowing, calm and serene and all that but this info just made me made jealous, ignorant and frustrated. The next thing they’ll tell me is that there is a prize, Pulitzer or otherwise for cynicism and, and, AND I’m not on that winners list either. I’m offended on my own behalf. Better that than being offended on another’s behalf, right?

Jokes apart, one would think knowledge is the most sought after commodity in the world but it isn’t. Mentees are. No matter how knowledgeable one isn’t, people seek followers, interns, probationers, students, fans etc. In short mentees. All of us want to be mentors. Every General wants a rookie,  every politician wants an intern (for more than one reason but let’s stick to the topic), every CEO desires a blue eyed boy, every artist wants an apprentice, doctors, diplomats and decorators are not far behind either. It’s astounding that being at the pinnacle of your career is never enough, what defines you is how many underlings you have managed to churn out whose successes can be claimed by you. Everyone, be it an athlete who takes up coaching, or an actor who takes up direction, everyone wants to invariably become a teacher. Even Oprah - the talk show goddess with the midas touch, has churned out Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Nate Berkus etc. and ended up opening a school.

We teachers are the lucky ones though. We don’t have to spend 30 years of our lives, making a reputation in order to gather valuable students. We get them on day one. The opportunity to dispense gyan, point to the right direction, open windows of thought and inquiry are handed to us on a platter from the get go. What child hasn’t gone home and emulated their teacher?  We are the ultimate profession and yet the worst paid of the lot. Everyone wants to become a teacher, but no one really wants to pay for those of us who actually trained to become one and are good at it.  We don’t just deal with new recruits, we deal with brand new humans!

The millennium has also brought out a whole host of ‘motivational speakers’. To do what?  God knows, but Mcphilosophy is being dispensed at a rate that will put the Deepak Chopra quote generator to shame.   This urge to assume you can motivate people has gone viral during the pandemic. Put six idiots on a screen and one of them is motivating the other five - to become a motivator. The need to become a celebrity and be known beyond immediate circles has somehow been amplified by virtual conferences. Again, we won this round of the lottery. Teachers were stars. 

Most of us worked year round with no vacations, but more importantly we hit the ground running. There was no lockdown for us. Not even for a day. We went from classrooms to living rooms even bedrooms in a matter of hours. We were performers. For the last year and half, we had a captive audience, not just of students but their plus twos. Parents, grandparents, helpers, extended family, cousins, siblings, just everyone.  We were in people’s homes and people were in ours.  We did our jobs pantless but with a full face of makeup! Our screens were carefully positioned in one of the most beautiful corners of our homes and we had 100 percent attendance. Kids skip school, but with parents working from home, the parents needed a structure to their day and we did that service. We had class picnics, Christmas parties and Diwali celebrations online. And like well paid celebrities, we had a massive fan following!

Teachers teach, teachers facilitate learning, teachers encourage students to teach and teachers create an environment conducive to learning so that they can do their jobs and do it well. Skills and knowledge need to be passed on - and mentors should do so only for the love of their subjects and to ensure a protégé's success NOT as a measure of one’s own.

As difficult as breathing!

My mom is like a Scotch-Brite dish washing scrub pad. She is all spongy and soft on one side but if she flips she possesses this thin layer of strong, abrasive stuff that is remarkably strong and resilient. So when yours truly, packed her bags and along with the husband, traipsed into the hospital to get treated for the ‘rona leaving behind two COVID positive teenagers with mom, no one had any idea, that a long arduous journey was ahead of her, and that she would traverse it with love and grit. Yes, I spent a whole lunar cycle (or a menstrual one) being treated for the virus, whilst she took care of the house and two ailing children. Her love for me was undeniable. 

As friends came to know that I was positive, or was hospitalized, a lot of them responded with versions of ‘you’re strong and you’ll overcome it’. I was livid, my response was visceral. I didn’t want to hear those words. My brain knew that my well wishers were willing me strength but I didn’t want to hear it. I hate the strong woman trope, despise it. We women are weak, soft, vulnerable, sick and miserable just like men. And my strength wasn’t going to cure me. Conversely, I didn’t get COVID because I was weak. 

The ordeal ended in May and it’s my birthday now in August. My birthday is followed by Diana’s death anniversary. Each year I’m reminded I’ve outlived her and many other women, men too. Not to mention children. It bothers me a bit. How people who're better, smarter, kinder, definitely wayyy cooler than I can ever aspire to be, died.  They always do, COVID or not. Now me, I’m a poster child for the imposter syndrome. In a good week, I’m anxious, in a not so good one,  the Dunning - Kruger effect is on complete display and on bad days my EQ hits rock bottom.

That’s what happened during my hospital stay. I couldn’t imagine why people were praying for me and they were. They were doing it in groups. Family members gave up meals for my recovery, friends sent me Reiki, whilst others checked on my mom and kids regularly. Friends on other continents wanted to ensure my treatment was effective and even offered to take care of hospital bills. It was mind boggling. I could not make sense of any of it. Why? Why were my colleagues checking up on me? When they couldn’t reach me, they called the husband. Why were my erstwhile colleagues reaching out to me? So much love, so much of it was just not something I could make sense of. Why me? Then there were my students and their lovely parents. Little kiddos sending me video messages for my recovery and their parents wishing me well. 

I kept myself shielded from most of this display of love. Hardly spoke to anyone. Could not speak to anyone. My kids were good kids. Recovering from COVID in isolation themselves, not bothering their grandmother and going with the flow. The boy worked at his homework and the girl at her exams. Between headaches and fatigue, they managed life without complaints and were always cheerful when I spoke to them. Such unconditional love. The husband of course was the reason, I lived. I continue to live. From busing me to the hospital in time, caring for me each day in the hospital, day in and day out for a month, to learning soup and food recipes that make me stronger is all just the tip of the iceberg. All whilst he himself was infected and then recovering from COVID. There is so much more that he did and continues to do everyday, but I don’t want to share it all. It’s all my personal little love story. 

I’d be remiss if I don’t speak about the doctors and nurses and hospital staff who worked tirelessly in the COVID wards. I can talk about how restricting  it was for me to not move out of a room and not see anyone because they were all in PPE kits. But if I change perspectives, then I can’t imagine working in PPE kits either. Docs and nurses walking around with sweaty brows. No way to wipe off that drop of sweat that threatens to get into their eyes. They would just tilt their head backwards and tap on their glasses or shake their heads to dislodge the pool of liquid.  How do you focus on little needles and whatnots with your face being in sweat all the time? You can’t snack whilst on duty nor access the toilets whenever you feel like it. And then comes the sickness and death. So much of it. All the time. Without a reprieve, day after day, with each patient being VERY sick, and trying to save every one of them. The numbers increasing, the helplessness of seeing patients collapse because there were no beds and no Oxygen. The worst was seeing these doctors work relentlessly, only to be undermined by idiots ( religious or medical) who gave out misinformation for their 15 minutes of fame. Where did my doctors and nurses have the time to claim fame. They were the ones who kept the cogs rolling in the second wave. Or any wave. Young people who were giving it their best in the worst of times. Isn’t that the country we dream of? We have it. We don’t value it. 

I wanted to value everything. My hospital stay was peaceful and calm. I didn’t have to worry about work, the children were safe and in competent hands, the husband was beside me and I felt super healthy all the time, thanks to the docs. At one point of time, I told my doctor about my medical history and how that was probably hindering my recovery. He just laughed it all off calling me ‘very strong’. I AM NOT STRONG. I didn’t say that. Just rolled my eyes inside my head and went back to my day dreaming. I knew how I was going to live my life. Happily. I am going to create pockets of happiness in my life. Somewhere between work and chores I had forgotten to focus on things that made me happy. All my family and friends that I loved, I have had most of them on ignore, I’ll make sure I spend time with them. I’ll make a little happiness corner in my home, and go sit in for 10-15 minutes each day. I’ll meet more people. I’ll give more, and more willingly. I’ll be happier. 

There it is, thank you for your love and for wishing me strength! Willing it onto me - so I could be happy!

The LABEL prize

 This is going to be a short read. I recently came upon a tweet where the author wrote that suffering from a loss of smell and taste due to COVID was particularly hard on him because he’s a foodie. No, he’s not a chef or a food critic. He’s a run of the mill, food eater. What on earth does a foodie mean? Who isn’t one? And you really have to be privileged if the worst that you experience during COVID is the loss of smell. For me it was the best thing that happened. I have superb olfactory nerves and the fact that I couldn’t smell the liters of sanitizers that the docs used when coming in and out of my room was fabulous. I couldn’t smell the meds or the injection swabs or even the cleansers they used to clean my bathroom was a boon. More importantly, I had to live on hospital food for a month, and not having a sense of smell nor taste was the silver lining to a very dark cloud. So yes, back to foodies. Who are you people? What does it mean? Does it mean you like variety? Who doesn’t? Or does it mean you really savor your food? So do cows. They don’t call themselves grazies. 

In India there is the #sareelover!   Much like the foodie above, what does that mean? That one likes to wear sarees? That people collect them?  Everybody and their grandmother is a saree lover by that definition. Same thing with fashionistas. What does that mean? Going to shops, buying things and discarding them in three months? That’s just a fear of commitment. If three fourths of your wardrobe is not half as old as you are, I think you’re characterless.

Also, What if you’re in the education industry? You become an educator? W. T. F. does that mean? I have never seen a teacher go into a classroom and say "I’m your educator". Show me an adult who’s not one. Kevin Hart has a drunk in-and-out of jail father and he says, his father educated him on what NOT to do.  Nobody hires an educator. They hire a teacher, professor or coordinator etc. Why do teachers think being a teacher is not enough? They have to upgrade their profession into a more meaty term. Why do folks have to APPEAR to be fancier than they really are? We can use newfangled terms like ‘alternative facts’ but we all know what that means!  

Worst World Problems

 It’s a hot night and I’m in need of a sip of cool water. So in the wee hours, I wake up, wee, go to the kitchen, open the fridge, pull a water bottle out and as I raise my head to take a mighty gulp, my eyes fall upon the insides of the fridge and my own insides churn a wee bit. Guess what?  A fridge packed with boxes of good homemade leftover food. Glass bottles of chutneys, boxes of chutneys, half nimbus, medicines, creams, a huge stainless steel pot of MILK. Even at 3:00 AM I am ashamed. I can’t have the perfect life. Why does Dabur sell its rose water in a plastic bottle? Why can’t it be a garnet colored glass urn like thingy? Why is my fridge cluttered? Why is there a reusable steel pot of milk? Why can’t I have a disposable plastic gallon stored on the fridge door? I trudge back to bed almost ashamed and then it hit me. This was a Desi fridge. My ideals were  western. I am all woke about the western influence on body images and I preach to everyone that we are humans and not all of us want to be like ketchup bottles - tall, thin and no head. That is as far as my wokeness goes. I am influenced by the first world deep down and I want a fridge that looks like it came from the home of a tomato ketchup bottle - woman. 

I crawl into bed and battle with another squirt of guilt. I was upset at having a full fridge? The ingratitude of it all! That’s how life is. We are so influenced by certain ideals that when we don’t match  up to them, we think it’s all wrong. Meghan for example, her whole rant with the mighty Oprah was a first world problem. Who after Diana, didn’t know what royal duties entailed? You become a princess and then  you rant because you are expected to be a princess, so you resign from being a princess but now want to cash in on the celebrity of having been one? The Ingratitude of it all!  And wanting to kill yourself is absolutely no measure of your misery. I want to kill myself every time a taxi driver opens the door, pulls down his mask and ejects a gob of spit on the road, wipes his chin and gets back to driving. EVERYTIME! 

Even in COVID times. Speaking of the entitled,  I really feel bad for people who went on only two vacations this past year. Not. What a difficult year it has been - they had to go to Kashmir to ski because the Swiss mountains were inaccessible, and had to make do with Goa because the wretched govt. didn’t have flights to Hawaii. Yes, they contracted the virus, were a burden on the national healthcare system, probably contributed to infecting others around them and put their own children at risk but they were victims. They had to stay home boo hooo hoo. All of us spend considerable time and money acquiring, building, renting, buying, decorating our homes and now we have all been forced to make use of it. How terribly sad and boring! Why make use of the shelter we built for ourselves? Why let it protect us from outside forces? How have we humans devolved into being this stupid that our instagram lives matter more than being alive in real life? The ingratitude of it all!

Relationships add vice!

I have on occasion, dreamt of being an agony aunt. How hard can it be? People write anonymously to some magazine/newspaper/website about the jerks in their lives or being jerks themselves or being unable to jerk - off.  Looks like easy money to me. It’s right there with being a food critic, a film critic, a Godman or a life coach. There are no set of specific skills that anyone needs to have in any of the above mentioned jobs. No training required. And yet, For an agony aunt I have the requisite experience. Aren’t I in relationships? romantic and otherwise? What more do you need? The cherry on top of my candidature is that I am so good at screwing up my relationships and I have so much experience that I can predict precisely how badly my interactions will end. Imagine this, if I can foresee the snuffing out of my own interactions, how good am I at analyzing other people’s lives?  So yes that’s a dream and the only reason I don’t pursue it is because my intention is to just make a quick buck. Not to ameliorate anyone’s miserable life. Even though I know I will be good at it!

There is a new age mantra that says in a marriage or partnership you are individuals, no one completes you. You are a whole in yourself. There are numerous articles on “How to be a whole person before a partnership”. Really? How does one check for wholeness? Or even @$$holeness? There is no test for either. I’m supposed to be one of those women who supposedly 'feel incomplete' without their marriage and family. I bring up my h-h-h-h husband and k-k—k-kids in every conversation. I talk in the ‘we’ language. I share a credit card with my husband and I have no issues if he gets an SMS every time I buy a pack of instant noodles. Am I just a fraction of a human because of that?  I have facebook and even Zuckerberg knows my penchant for instant noodles.

Marriage or not, relationships are difficult. Family, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances and even celebrities. Yes, celebrities. I have some with whom I’m friends in my head and there are people like Amir Khan (for others it’s Brad Pitt ) that I can’t forgive for breaking up with his wife. If we have real feelings about imaginary people, then we must have imaginary feelings about real ones. No?

Why exactly are relationships hard? Why are there articles, books and ponderings such as this? Methinks we see ourselves reflected in others. We see, avarice, lust, PRIDE, greed, mediocrity, insecurities, and self sabotaging behaviors in others. Relationships based on bad preferences are fantastic. Drinking buddies, murderous mates, slutty sisters, or just plain lazy daisies make the best of friends, relatives and partners. We all have that buddy, who eats potato chips ( insert your choice of vice) in the middle of night and with whom we never get into a fight. 

It is when we seek virtue is when we get into trouble. When we seek humility, generosity, excellence, devoutness and a perfectly brewed cup of tea is when we land in trouble. We pedestalize people, we expect more of them, one virtue is never sufficient we expect them to come with the whole bouquet of virtuosity. We want our good ones to be better. We want them to be good atleast and they never are. They are never good enough. The problem lies not with them but in our expectation of them. And therein lies the conflict.  

And then there’s conflict. Mother of all conflicts. Destroying nations, dynasties, friendships, blowing out wedding vows and trampling over partners - business or pleasure ones. Moolah! Money makes marriages miserable, makes lovers lie, makes foes out of friends and makes kinsmen kill. What this world needs is an agony aunt who is ready to dispense advice not for the money but for the joy it gives her.