I opened this post on the third, but got distracted that day, and  I am writing this on the thirtierth of March, which happens to be the ninety first birthday of my deseaced deity of a father.

Things are picking up now in the sense that I have stopped binge watching K Drama, and am trying to check my limits how much legwork I can do gardening and dog walking.

Sometimes, I am so much on my feet that the pain takes over and I give it a rest. After the MS programme, I almost got a job offer.

Aned today I almost got another. Let's see how that goes.

Nothing makes sense without a job for me.

 No logic in self diagnosis.

Scenario: I am watching a Netflix show. Tension builds up in the legal drama. I quickly close that screen and start playing Solitaire

Diagnosis: Why on earth am I so stressed by unfortunate events taking place on screen? Based on an article on behaviour of people who read the end of the book before the events in it, it appears that I am anxious.

Therapy: I did not read any article on therapy for anxiety. I don't know what to do.

Question: I have found security through hard work and by making tough life choices. There is no one or nothing to stop me from living a productive and mildly adventuresome life. So why I am still anxious???????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Some Magic from the past

 I watched a 2002 film, "Crossroads" on OTT. I thought the lead teen character looked familiar and looked very pretty. 

The flow in the movie was not bad and what struck me was that the teen was not frantically overacting and actually behaved in the "quietish" way real teens tend to. 

So, some fifteen minutes into the film, I got curious and googled the film. The lead teen is Britney Spears, the lovely pop star. The movie did not get a good response from critics, but Iwas actually able to watch it through and consider it to be a decent film. It made a good sum of money, but I think the critics of those days were haters of Britney. 

I liked her singing in the movie too. I think her being so pretty has mesmerised people in different ways. Some people watched her and followed her just for her looks, while some others put her in a slot, may be as a not too creative blond or something like that. 

I was actually impressed with her acting. Her portrayal was not of the screaming, distracted, mean and emotionally imbalanced teen characters of Hollywood.

I have no idea what kind of person a media celebrity really is, nor do I believe any one else does just based on the stories that hit the tabloids, but the teen in "Crossroads" came across as a caring, mindful, put together adventurer and this was owing to Britney Sprears' acting skills.

The Question re-emerges: Magic or Logic?

 Logical scientists claim that the secret to a happy life is buiding relationships. So, I decided to try that. Whenever I have to go out of the way to help anyone who seeks it of me, I tell myself - You are building your community, your people. This person is now going to be your person. 

(Now I need to cajole myself so much because helping others is not really my thing.) 

So now that I am more helpful and reaching out to others and all that, I am hopeful of being not too eccentric in my approaching old age. 

But this morning, someone I simply love and adore called me at five thirty in the morning. I was so energized by this short 15 minute call. It was magical.

What is all this relationship building and socializing really, when compared to the magic of spontaneous bonds that we never ever logically strove or never even attempted to create? 

I am a coward now

 Obviously, this post has no magic or logic. 

It is about the cowardice I experience when I watch a movie or a series. 'Gore' pops up on the top left corner of the screen, and I instantly close that work of art and look for something else to watch. 

I also find most fashionably edgy series distressing. It is no longer thrilling to watch fictional heroes and heroines face hurdles and withstand the pressure of dealing with the consequences of their stupidity or bad luck. In fact, so burnt out am I from living through the situation I have made out of my life, that even minor troubles in family dramas make me anxious. 

For instance, in a slow paced, picaresque novel style romcom, I started stressing out when a stranger  helps out the lady lead by offering to hold her suitcase. I am now sure that he is going to steal the suitcase. Pretty sure and that this is going to mess up the image of the decent girl with a decent job and a decent image. My feminist fears were that she would look lesser than the hero, who is weird, as men are wont to be.

So I only watch K Drama. Especially the older ones in which nothing much happens except for people walking and talking and eating and drinking. Even this genre has now evolved and tries to replicate the scary, violent side of life and I decided to give up on it as well and started to write this blog.

Enough. I have given ample proof to being in a disgustingly cowardly stage of my life.

 Here, I feel I should mention the great admiration I feel for L. M. Montgomery. I had not thought much of Anne of Green Gables when I first read it in class six. The romance in it made an impression. 

The term kindred spirit remained in my memory. When I saw the series Anne with an E, I thought the series was a very lyrical adaptation of the original and that the language used in it was very quaint. 

Then Saru told me that Anne with an E reminded her of me. I went back to the book to check how much of it had been altered for television. And what did I discover? The language of the book was exactly like what had been created for the series. My first thought was to be impressed by how good my language skills had been at six. 

Soon after, I began listening to the audio books of Montgomery. What a treat it has been! I think I will finish listening to all the books and then listen to them again a second time. I like this author almost as much as I do Dickens.

In "Anne's House of Dreams", Anne meets Paul Irving, once her student and now a 19-year-old College President, and reads one of his poems. She tells him that he would become a great and popular poet. He tells her that her writing is getting recognition too. She tells him/ or muses to herself (not sure which) that what she wrote was only good enough for children/women's magazines and that she would never count among the greats. 

 Wikipedia describes Montgomery's work as children's writing. I do not subscribe to that objective description. It is a balm to my 57-year-old self. For me, she is truly great for she is a creator who helps me dream in the 57th year of my life.

My youth was forcibly aborted due to economic reasons and now I am living in relative peace in my middle age. I have fewer responsibilities and more opportunities for enjoyment now. I am in tolerably good health and would just vegetate away but for Montgomery's "Children's books" that are full of dreams for the future.

This is my letter to the world...

 Beginning with Dickinson's amazing lines,

This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me,--

The simple news that Nature told,

with tender majesty

My impression on these lines of the poem is that the first two lines are simply arresting.

The poet could have been arrested by the thought herself.

 As a kid undergoing extreme mental turmoil, I had felt keenly about how nobody asked me what was happening to me.  \NObody. The world did not come forward to me or reach out to me even a tiny bit. I was drowning in confusion and sadness and watched everyone and everything in eyes groggy with pain. College, the professors, the thousand students who walked  by me everyday, the numerous passersby on crowded streets. 

maybe she felt the way I did, that no one came forward to understand the unique and poignant moments in her life.

But why does she switch to describing nature and its message in the next lines?

Then she writes

Her message is committed to hands I cannot see

What does she mean? Does she herself not get nature's message and even call it a simple one with tender majesty? Why would she talk about a secret that she cannot understand?

Then the guity last lines

For the love of her, sweet countrymen, Judge tenderly of me.

I think the poet's environment made women feel so inferior that she dubs all countrymen to be sweet and wants them to judge her substandard self leniently.

In the end I feel the poet is just doodling with words.

Diary entry on self

 Low energy, low resonance with purpose, low sense of direction

What to do?

Correcting the energy deficit can only be done by exercise. I am sure of this because I have felt extremely tired even after a day's rest and a good night's sleep.

Lack of purpose: This is a challenge. I am redoing a job that I did with great enthusiasm 20 years ago. And doing in the format that is used today. This format of communication through ppts and elaborate teacher training material is time consuming and unsatisfactory as opposed to the simple way of giving hand outs and listening to audio clips online.

Low sense of direction could stem from an ADHD that I experience since my school days. All the three are connected.

When do I feel the flow

Fortunately, I still feel the flow in a classroom. I pick up on what the students need, what steps are to be taken to cater to their requirement. I feel the same while playing Candy Crush. It makes me content instantly. While it may seem counterintuitive to play Candy Crush, an addictive game, it is an undeniable fact that the game gives me immense calmness and sense of security. It would be wiser to use the game judiciously, as a shot in the arm which would keep me going rather than wallow in substandard stagnation.

Reading for me: magic glazed logic

Did some serious reading as part of a project on a variety of topics related to menstruation. Making a note of my responses to them.

1. First topic with author's name and tagline
 Pathologizing Your Period 
B Y PA U LA J . C AP LA N
(Despite a lack of evidence, the psychiatric establishment has made extreme premenstrual distress a recognized disorder—and a boon to Big Pharma.)
I felt that this article goes beyond the usual discussion scope on premenstrual syndrome, which usually covers physical and emotional distress such as cramps, dizziness, hopelesness and tearfulness. It speaks about American authorities on psychiatry, categorizing certain unrelated symptoms under depression related to menstruation and labelling that as a mental disorder. Men also show these symptoms, it says.
So the question that comes to my mind is why they connect a mental disorder to menstruation. The author says that it is sexism and a boon to pharmaceutical companies.
My personal response was to wonder if some mental illness cases reported in the media, diagnosed as due to extreme PMS could be due to some other undiagnosed disorder. How can we believe a single doctor's diagnosis when the medical body has no proof that this mentally aberrant behaviour is related to menstruation?

Poof! Life has neither magic, nor logic

 How can i spend time in front of  laptop  without falling asleep? I feel very tired and sleepy in the mornings. For a long time, I have had a bad attitude towards content creation. I fidget, try out multiple things like playing a game, learning new things and listening to music. But I end up falling asleep in front of the computer.  I wonder what this is all about. 

I started writing this in June.

June and July are gone and so are 12 days in August. In the past sixty days, I have increased my out put to some extent, although I am not yet in an optimal flow. 

And there is the recognition that I am not motivated enough to work full time, although I need to work for a few more years in this way. Acknowledging this and workin on it.

 How comical logic is/how comical I am

There' a young lady in her mid twenties on campus. She comes to class at 8.30, studies for an hour and goes to sleep at ten everyday. When the other students wake her up, she is startled and asks, "What happened?" 

She does this everyday. As a person from

I do not know when I started to write this blog and now, after two event packed years, have no memory of the young lady or of the young people who shared this story with me. 

When many events happen, incidents get pushed back to the back part of the memory. In my case, that area of the brain is pretty damaged and the above witnessed memory blank is proof to this.

Looking at the positive side, of late I hear many people say the same thing. Not just peers, but those 

whom I consider smarter, or younger or more capable. Could be information overload. 

 The (psycho)logic or vengeance

Vengeance is a psychological reality. My mild manners and forgiving nature makes me look like an easy target to aspiring bullies. I mostly watch them fall on their own toes. But even I do take revenge sometimes. 

There are many arguments against revenge, but it does calm the mind of a person who has been emotionally abused.  It also restores a feeling of equilibrium in a world, where not only the world view of the ones who have been exploited, but even that of onlookers and non participants are set off balance by thoughts of how unfair the world is. 

I have had my fair share of revenge, and in my defence, that revenge was rarely exacted by me and I was a mere witness albeit a joyful one, to the downfall of those who wronged me.

But there have been instances when I said or did something that was a catalyst to the other person breaking down. In my defence, most of it was unintentional. I am just confessing to being the instrument. 

The last line here would be that these instances have been moments of deep satisfaction, calmness and sometimes goosebumps.

 I now live on a campus. in a village My quarters are right next to the gate. 

But in between my digs and the gate there is a single room allotted for the watchman and his family. Not only do his four kids and wife live with him, but so do two cousins, an uncle, the wife's sister and an assortment of relatives who come and go. 

Nowhere is the acceptance of logic-less, magic-less reality more apparent than it is here. My quarters are simple, according to living standards of today. One living area, a tiny pathway dubbed as the kitchen, a decent bathroom and a small bedroom. 1BHK, as they say here, in Bangalore. But I cannot imagine how all of the watchman's family fit in that single room.

I live here with my two puppies, who snooze on the bed or the foot mat. The watchman's wife is woman in her early 20s or late teens called Sabu. Her sister is a seven year old called Paru. She takes care of her nephews, one a toddler of two and the other an infant of a say 6 months, when her sister Sabu goes out to work as a maid. 

Today ,when Sabu went to work, Paru also wanted to go to the toilet. She gave the infant in the arms of her 4 year old niece, Sneha. Sneha, unable to carry him gave him to three year old Neha, her sister. Now Neha's arms ached so much that she started to bawl in pain. When I went out to find out what happened. Paru beat Sneha for giving the baby to Neha. Sneha beat Neha for bawling. Sneha also accused Paru of lying and said that she really didn't have to go to the toilet.

I had the baby with me for a few minutes as Paru went in to the shrubs to relieve herself. She returned, took the baby back and thanked me. 

Will we ever live in a society where the rights of children are not so systematically trampled upon? While this is still better than a system in which the state takes care of children without caregivers, it's so unfair on the kids and the terrible unfairness of it all keeps pricking me.

The eternal magic of LIterature

 Today I read a book: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst.

It was eminently readable, and after i finished the book I realized that I had somehow missed or inadvertantly skipped the part which explains the title.

So I looked it up, and was pleasantly surprised to read that this randomly selected book  is quite reputed in the literary world. And the title is from a poem, and puts the spotlight on one scene around which the whole story revolves. So I accidentally got to read an acclaimed book.

I have to agree. My experience with the book was that, in these days of distraction from multiple sources,  I had read the 562 pages at one go. Of course, over two days, and when I was left with no work to do. It was about writers, and the world of publishing, of ageing, of changing times, homophobia and the randomness of fame. 

After I put the book down, and even before I came to know of it being 'literary' I had actually browsed for History of Literature courses online and found one from a reputed University. I intend to enrol in it. So much did the book invoke memories of my college and the excellent lectures I had listened to therein.

I also began my second day with the book by reading a few verses from "The Waste LanD", a poem that I was asked to write about in my entrance exam to my English Course at Stella Maris College. 

I am at cross roads of my life now and this book reminded me how much I had loved being a student of literature before life and its demands swallowed me up. 

Though I may have lost the ability to review the book in a scholarly way, the lines here are my tribute to it as good literature; Literature that makes you want to be in touch with similar excellent works that have attempted to explain life with all its nuances.

Supposedly magical, but just logical: Salary

 Let's praise salary first

It's regular

It pays bills

It makes one respectable

It makes one financially independent

It helps to shop for non-essentials too

it gives a sense of security

BUT 

It can be 

a pain 

 monotonous work 

 non productive

soul crushing if unethical

The real danger however, is in believing that salary aka money can win you love, respect, familial devotion, admiration, credibility and proof of your intelligence and validity.

Tell me you never fell into the trap of believing that money would provide you with one or all of the above.

But the worst part about salary is when you are supposed to get it but it comes very late.

Strange, not logic, yet true

 So I was eating the mud of humiliation...

By the way, why on earth am I a soft target for humiliation? That is a question that I will learn the answer for , sometime in the future, I am sure.

Going back to this particular wallow in the mud of humiliation, my heart was heavy, brain was a bit out of joint and I was in a state of mild paralysis.

Then I started to google something, and Good ole Google suggestions came up with the name of a friend

A fine woman

An upright, outstanding leader

But she had died unexpectedly. 

I had always thought  myself fortunate to have known this person. But she had died suddenly. Seeing the name of my dead friend filled me with a sorrow and this sorrow filled me up so quickly that all the feelings of humiliation was flooded over by it.

I was sad, but no longer unhappy with my situation.

Strange, so illogical, but yes, she had died,  and the shock of this thought wiped the sorrow away from my heart.

Magical Creativity vs lack of it thereof

 Well, I am going to start working on something new.

Exciting Topic

Work that will keep me engrossed

I am ready in front of my laptop.

So, what do I do? I must subconsciously be feeling upset or tensed at the difficulty level and the amount of work.For now I don't start. I become conscious of the noises around me and get annoyed. Worse, all enthusiasm seems to have drained away. Feeling empty and dull.

Rather than start something like going to YouTube for a quick fix of my feelings, I thought I would work on this situation here. 

Updates on whether this helped or not

Did writing this here help? In a way. I went back to You Tube, watched my favourite channel, became happy, opened my work document and started typing. 

Writing and a quick fix after that, helped me to enjoy and at the same time not linger. Good day to anyone reading this.

Money, no magic or even logic about it

What must it feel like to be a leader in a company like Aircel and Reliance Communications that owe thousands of crores (count the zeros, more than 10 I'm sure) to their creditors?

I hated family members who ruined the family economy by overspending and taking loans. They hated me for being boring, unimaginative and casual. This is how my economics works. I keep away from overspenders. There is no such word, right? No such person too, it seems in modern times, you do what you like, leave your creditors high and dry, ruin life as you knew it and ruin it for millions, and never let the poorest of the poor see a better day.

Money has no magic, no logic. It's nothing and it's not even a piece of paper anymore.

Cheers to a new world with no logic and no magic and just numbers with more than  ten zeros

No logic is sometimes, no magic

A young friend of mine asked me to speak on video of how tribal women expressed their shame, fear, stigma, or taboos on menstruation. She wanted to know if they spoke of body shaming or shame on genitalia.

My impressions are as follows:

Initially, we play simple games with the girls. But once we introduce the topic of menstruation, there is a deathly silence. After a session or two, girls belonging to higher castes become vocal, while it takes more time for girls from tribal families to open up. Even then, only girls who are around 16 or 17 speak. Some of the things they say were new to me.Like, they stay in the hostel and their mothers don't know that they started to menstruate. So, I asked them why they never told their mothers because many of them live just a few kms from the hostel.

 She explained how she had gone with a few other friends to the house of one among them. That girl had just begun menstruating.They had decided before hand to help their friend speak to her  mother. The mother welcomed them and offered them tea. They drank tea and chatted for some time, but left without telling her the news.

Why? I asked her. She said that it was like that.When I chanced to go into a very sparcely inhabited jungle, I saw a girl whom I had met in another school. I started talking to  her and then asked her if her mother knew that she got her periods. She told me that her mother had seen her take a sanitary pad that the school had given her. But neither had spoken about it.

Overall, the women, especially the older ones, were happy to talk to us, and shared the trauma of having no one to talk to about their periods and its related issues. 

When I started speaking to boys and men about periods, their response was very positive. One guy told me that he now understood that period blood was important and not dirty. But how could he convince his parents? They would be hurt. I cannot irritate them and go against my parents' wishes. I pointed out that he had been reluctant to talk to me at first. So were a few of his friends. But now they were convinced. He had to convince his parents slowly,  just as I spoke to him. Because it was unnecessary for his children to suffer  in this manner. He had to agree with me.

Menstrual movie magic: Chayilyam

On 26th May, I watched a movie on menstruation , Chayilyam in Malayalam, on Google meet with 52 people. This was organized by an NGO named Safe Active Periods.
It was such a well made movie
As some one commented it depicts strong bonds that make a family in a village special. The determination of the main characters, a recently widowed woman, and her father in law to not buckle under society pressure is inspiring. The movie theme is early menopause,  mental disorder and how religion tries to abuse mental problems
The spotlight also falls on the scary patriarchy that tries to force the mentally afflicted women with a divine status and use her for their own rituals. But the woman and her father in law insist that she is normal. Even the girls parents, who had ostracized her after her marriage, and neglected her following the loss of her husband, are ready to worship her as a Devi, when she is mentally afflicted and feels uncontrollably angry. So the father inlaw coaxes her to go along with the charade till she gets her period, which would convince people around her that she is a woman and not a goddess.

As he is a doctor of traditional medicine, he medicates her to so that her premature menopause is reversed and she gets her periods again. But the end comes abruptly, with the woman destroying all evidence of her period and leaving the village, which was tormenting her in many ways.