Their definition of life

From a  journal entry last month:

The rain has been beautiful since morning. When the droplets touch the dry, starved leaves and branches and roots of trees, it feels heaven. The quenching of thirst of a desert walking man.  And what other dharma does the clouds require than the blessings of these creatures, alive - just to see the rain.

The blissfully ignorant have constructed concrete cement buildings with cubicles in them: hundreds of cubicles which have been lighted so well that even when the dark clouds gets the city gloomy, their cubicles will feign sunshine. Hundreds of applicants get through “tough” tests and interview. Why? To toil in these cubicles from 9 am in the morning to late into night, six days a week and they think they love it. They shout over their ever ringing phones, they lose their temper, get irritated and use swear words. When they get a deal done, they are proud and think they are smart. Of course they are smart. They make a lot of money. They buy even bigger houses with air-conditioned rooms and even bigger air-conditioned cars with bed like seats. They tread in their soft carpets, then in their soft cars and tip toe to their carpeted cubicles. Every evening or so, they go up the escalators to buy their essentials, come back in their comfy car seats to their soft carpets at home. And for them, they are the luckiest, the richest, and the most happy people in the world.

When the routine is done every day of the year, every year of the decade, it becomes the life style for hundreds of cubicles in hundreds of companies and it builds cities and nations for whom soft carpets, comfy seats are the definition of life. 

Unlearning experiences

The maid might not be here for long. She is of little use while feeding the baby, anyways. She is a great help with washing her clothes, cleaning the kitchen etc. But what I really need is someone to stand by the baby to feed and cajole her when I am off to French classes - three days a week for three hours. That is a difficult prospect with her, especially since the little one has not taken up to her too good. She is not acclimatized to ktm and it’s ways of life. She is from a village and she remains so in her behavior etc. I respect that. It is not that I don’t like people from villages. But when we are used to a certain way of life, we require that of the person who is to work with us. That is all. If we went to the village and dictated our way of things, that would be detested there too. That’s about the same equation I am trying to draw. I don’t see anything biased or untoward there. It is not about inequality or disparity. It is just about how one is brought up, like caste or your favorite pastime. One does not need to live with an opposite caste (if something of that sort exists) or some unlikable pastime. It’s your choice, not about respect.

There was a question raised in our last class by the instructor. He asked if anyone kept a journal and I said yes, I did. Everyday?! He asked a little aghast. I said, as much as I can. That is because there is this section that we are dealing with in class that teaches us to write journals – in the past tense basically and we have an assignment related to it too.

Being with fuchi and learning French: two unlearning experiences for me. Both very fulfilling.

Facebook statuses, twitter updates, linkedIn updates what else? These move your life everyday because that’s how you get connected to your brother seven seas across, keep in touch with your friend, get the world news and what happened in your town. It is also a medium of getting knowledgeable and I find it intellectually stimulating when I can see what some revered author of mine thought that day and posts it as an update on twitter. Naseem Nicholas Taleb, Margaret Atwood, Manjushree Thapa, Paul Krugman – all are on twitter and I am following them. These give me a chance to have some level of connection with them which when reading their books definitely affect me.

Dad and their generation are never going to get it and thus, they think they do not like it. But if they had it their way, they would never deny it. Like, if I asked him if he could have S. Radhakrishnan or Swami Vivekananda twit to him every day or Pandit Nehru give facebook status updates, would he deny them? He simply would reject to hear such an absurd idea, gone is gone! Or rather bygone is bygone. But he would deny to understand a parallel for us. When NNT gives an opinion about what happened this morning, when Atwood says she is looking forward to Canada day, it stirs some emotions in their readers definitely. It’s too much for dad and the like when reverence and deep respect is the only emotion they had for their authors.

List of books to read

I have a list of books to read in my mind. They are matter of factly stacked up here and there. Few are autobiographies - Einstein by Isaacson, i remember that one - due from last year. Then i have a series on Nepal that i missed earlier - books by Harka Gurung and Manjushree Thapa, and the history of the country.

I have lists that include novels recommended and gifted by brother and friends.

I have my own collection that i buy out of interest or out of someone's must read list.

And i think the library has a good collection, which i bring and return without sometimes even turning the page. The guilt is there of course.

Online journals, articles, interviews - is what takes up the time that we had not factored into our "reading time". Once you put the mind to it even twitter, facebook and surfing seems as much intellectual as pondering upon a few pages of philosophy.

Read at night, before going to bed has been the trend.