Obituary of my dad

It has been a week since the sudden demise of my dad (at 72 years) and through our bereavement mom and I have had a lot to contemplate about his life. As a person, he was outright, outspoken and honest, a little too much for his own good. As a caring son and loving husband he was peerless and as a father he was borderline maniac. Nothing I did ever impressed him. He always believed I could do better. Grow more than his 6 foot 90 kg frame for starters. I have been literally hounded and abused for being a poor eater. Other than a chronic acid reflux issue and vitamin deficiencies, he was disease free. All organs, blood sugar, blood pressure, essential elements like sodium, potassium, magnesium were stable and in good condition. In 2021 he started going to the gym but loss of protein made him quit. This post is not to eulogize his life though.

Dad and his mom were endowed with extremely good genes. Grandma was also completely disease free. Both were addicted to sweets and drinking sugary water of Indian sweets and still their blood sugar never went up. Grandma went silently in her sleep in 2010. After a bout of acid reflux, dad developed slight respiratory problem and I took him to hospital. ECG, brain CT scan, chest x-ray all came out normal. He was given sedation to sleep and was sleeping soundly when silent cardiac arrest took him, just like his mom.

What I have learned from their lives is, as they grew older they found happiness in two things. They were able to eat and do mostly anything they wanted (dad had to take medication for acid reflux). Both dad and grandma loved animals and both kept in touch with the people they loved. Dad was a jovial man and loved cracking jokes all the time inside the house and with his friends, even the ones from his childhood days in Calcutta. Many of dad’s friends are far younger than him but all crazy like him.

People I talk to are surprised that disease free people can die. Prana or the life force that runs through our body is the cornerstone of all ancient healing methods like yoga and acupuncture. More prana means better health and less prana means weaker pulse and weaker immune system making us vulnerable to diseases. No matter how healthy we are when there is no more prana left in our body we die.

Many cultures believe in rebirth after death and rebirth depends on karma of our past lives and the state of our mind when we die. Dad had his share of regrets but I hope a good death in this life will give him a much better next life.

The evolution of a man-woman relationship

Relationships are one of the most intriguing and endearing enigmas in the cosmos. I am absolutely certain all of us have found the best people in our lives among the most unlikely of people in the most unlikely of places from the most unlikely of situations. That is how it has been for me, every time. Our eyes have always popped out at the sight of a gorgeous woman in the arms of a guy whose looks can be defined in just one word: disaster. Same is the case with seeing an irrepressible hunk together with a disaster of a woman. We wonder in amazement, how did this s**t happen?

Well, we see and experience this with our eyes, which is just one of our 5 senses. True relationships are about experiencing each other with all our 5 senses. Our natural inclination is to look for someone who can bring balance into our lives and personality. A gorgeous woman has no need for more beauty in her relationship with a man (unless it is casual). Her needs might be for intelligence or money or both or something else. This is how she will choose her man and that guy might look an absolute disaster but they must be complementing each other perfectly. This is what brings in the balance in the relationship. I see every person’s life as a circle. When two people come together, these circles intersect depending on their needs, interests and a host of other factors. Maintaining this intersection is the secret to keeping the relationship alive and going. In the highly affluent and elite circle, men seeking pleasure with women outside marriage is a commonly accepted norm primarily because they are good husbands, great fathers to their kids and they make sure their families get the best lives and comforts. Their wives reconcile to this life because all their needs are getting fulfilled and they have nothing to complain about.

Everything in the cosmos has indicators associated with it. Fever is the indicator that a foreign substance has entered our body and our immunity system is working to protect us. Similarly, relationships also have indicators connected with them, sex being the best of the lot. Sex needs to be perceived and understood through its components: foreplay and intercourse. A species becomes dominant through successful procreation so intercourse becomes dominant when procreation is the objective. Foreplay came into the picture when procreation was no longer a requirement for us. Our needs changed from procreation to pleasure with time. This is how we discovered sex. But pleasure required that both partners enjoy the act equally. This is how foreplay was born. Foreplay requires that the partners are connected with each other, both mentally and physically and this in turn requires that the partners engage with each other in their daily lives, primarily through conversations. Being able to express each others feelings and needs extends to being able to express our sexual needs and desires as well. Ultimately, healthy sexual life is a key component of a great relationship and foreplay essays the most critical role in the picture.

Even more remarkable are the intricacies of our body.  Our body is the most advanced creation of anatomical engineering. None of the relationship making process would have been possible without our hormones playing their part so precisely. In fact, our hormones create the initial connections with people by connecting with their hormones. Looks closely and we can see that this is all about energy interactions. We attract and repel people based on how our energies interact and hormones make this possible. The next step is to use our emotions and experiences to analyze and build the relationship. In the relationship between a man and a woman, the role of the body is a true wonder. How the woman’s monthly cycle sets her up for procreation and how a woman’s health can be determined by simply looking at her cycle is just sheer genius. Even more stunning is the use of blood to create a male erection and making a woman’s vagina ready for intercourse. Unfortunately, we have chosen to depict all of this with vulgarity rather than observe with wonder and admiration.  I believe we should redesign our system of worship and start worshiping whoever it is that designed and created our body to these improbable levels of perfection.

With procreation no longer a requirement, marriage and monogamy have also lost its relevance. Society is trying hard to hold onto its rules but it is no longer tenable to live life according to the wishes of society and people around us. Women no longer have any sort of dependency on men. Its high time man and woman rediscovered each other and figured out how to fit into each others lives. This may be our next stage of evolution. Open communication, spending time together, respecting each other, expressing emotions and insecurities openly all help to create an environment where two people can truly experience each other. This planet and our species desperately need more kids born out of such relationships to improve and take forward our lineage.

A good life to ponder over

The untimely death of someone very close to me due to alcohol abuse sent a few alarm bells ringing inside my head. Indulgence is a word that has become so synonymous with humanity, it should probably be added as the eighth sin. We have lost our balance of everything, be it with Mother Nature or with our lives itself. That’s why people are becoming obese and aneroxic, porn and drug addicts, we are just wildly swinging into one extremity or the other. It is just amazing to observe how skewed people’s lives are now and the random things we tend to do. What about finding the balance and living a good life?

Question is, what is a good life and who decides it? A good life is just like pure black and pure white. Doesn’t exist. Everything exists in shades of grey. Similarly, a good life can have different meanings for everyone. People say, what’s the point anyways, we will all die and go some day. So better live life as we want. Perfectly fine. But when we say that, we forget one crucial aspect. There is very little we have control over in our own lives. Mother Nature has her own rules, our body works in its own mysterious ways, society has its diktats and when we consider all the constraints that are upon us, the question is not who we are but what are we. What I find ironic is, we talk about goals and achievements, fortune and fame and in our mad rush for glory, we choose to stay oblivious of all the constraints that hold us back. That is why one stroke of death leaves us all in silence and numbness because nothing about us and what did and achieved matters anymore. All our fame and glory stays within the realm of humanity and only humans remember us that too for a while. Life moves on whether we are alive or dead. We talk about afterlife, heaven and hell, but we do not know what lies beyond the realm we live in. What really matters and what I believe in is something else.

Energy. The whole Universe is enveloped in fields of energy and we are bound by it as well. This is the fact we have to be acutely aware of because we interact with the energy field around it through our thoughts and actions and changes it. When we interact with people, its our energies that are truly interacting but we never think about it that is why we may be passing on our negative vibrations to the energy of other people. This is how negativity spreads. I never understood the purpose of astrology and horoscope until I realized the importance of energy in our lives. Astrology, in reality, checks the energy fields of two people and tries to understand what happens when these energy fields interact closely. That is why some predictions talk about death to one of the partners or problems with the child born out of the union. When we are with friends and pets, our energies interact positively and create positive energy which creates the feel good factor because the positive energy stays with us for some time. Same is the case when we are stuck in a bad situation, when we quarrel with and abuse people and indulge in violence. Wrong influence of our thoughts and actions on our energy fields and their subsequent interactions with other energy fields lead to the creation of negative energy which propels us to make more mistakes. That is how a silly argument can turn quickly into a nasty brawl. Road rage is a prime example of this. A large amount of negative energy gets built up in no time that’s how situations go out of hand, people pick up guns and starts shooting at each other following heated arguments.

The influence of our actions on the energy around us is not limited to our personal lives. Our professional lives are equally or more stressful. I have observed in surprise and awe how we strive to create tense situations, get into arguments, put our ego in front of disagreements and make it personal, the list goes on. Try standing aside and watching the negative energy building up. Sometimes I have felt that I am getting paid for contributing towards creating and maintaining a negative work environment and for accepting to live with increasing negative energy. A jolly good person is not considered a good leader because corporate rules mandate that he/she should be sober, serious and without emotion. Phew….we are working with our fellow beings not animals or aliens. To start with, I believe we can create a lot of positive energy simply by asking team members to “work with us” rather the usual usage of “work for us” or “work under us”.

Life, in all it’s miserable worst, can still show us our way ahead. I was in my late teens when life brought me down with a debilitating back pain. For years, I lived in bitterness for having to live with this curse. Then exercises slowly started making me feel better. As years went by the truth dawned on me. I have to exercise every day now, not just for my back but I also have to make sure that my waistline does not increase as it will increase the stress on my back. Result? I have to watch what I eat so I quit meat, reduced fatty, oily and spicy food, I have sugar and salt in control, I go for walks and I do all required exercises to keep my body toned. I have to constantly monitor my BMI and make sure my weight is always in proportion to my height. Most people might find this a tough life to live, for me, living a healthy life has become an addiction. Even when I am out on trips, I make sure to wake up early enough to do my workouts. What I thought was a curse and a liability is turning out to be a blessing in disguise. Developing the ability to extract positive energy from negative situations is the best way to make ourselves mentally stronger.

Fortunately, the world is slowly moving into a higher state of consciousness and there is increasing awareness about our body, our planet and the Universe. We are starting to reject contemporary methods of treatment and returning to the age old natural remedies. For example, I have a potent combination of ginger-pepper-turmeric-lime juice in black tea to treat any stomach ailments including food poisoning and the results have always amazed me. More importantly, there is greater awareness of our inherent ability to heal ourselves naturally and to understand this, we have to first understand and accept the fact that the life we are leading is tampering with our health. But what I believe is the key to living a good life is to have a balanced state of mind and that is our tallest challenge.

I have first hand experience of what can happen when the flow of energy in our body is corrected. After 5 acupuncture sessions, I was feeling unbelievably energized. But it is not enough that we have positive energy within us. It is also equally important that the energy around us is also positive. Letting go is the best way to keep positive energy around us. When we think of letting go, that’s when we think of what we are holding back in our lives. True love for someone should only mean that the other person should always be happy no matter if that person is with us or not. We should let go off the anger and let it not affect our ego when we have disagreements at work. We should only have ambitions about what we can work and achieve and we should identify and let go of unrealistic desires. It is always safer to hear, see and feel more and speak less. Last but least of all, we should be strong enough to be who are and not who the society wants us to be. We may not end up having many friends and society may treat us as outcasts, but what we end up having ultimately with us is all we will need. All of these wont make us clones of Buddha, but will definitely make us wiser and give us greater control over own lives. Finally this one picture which I came across says it all. How I wish I had seen this a few years back. It may have helped me save a precious life.

 

The love fundamentals

Another V-day came and went with plenty of hype and overflow of emotions. For some it was liberation day, for some it was a lonely day and for others it was the day to find love. Crazy things do happen on this day, like the heart broken guy in China who bought tickets for all the alternate seats in a movie theatre for the particular show he was watching, so that no couples could sit together. I think data should be collected from one city on V-day to see how many couple were made and how many were broken and that data should be matched with the data collected after one or two years to see how many are still together and how many have moved on.

Love, the one emotion for which wars have been fought and poems have been written in equal measure, but one thing that still eludes the understanding of human beings. Is it actually so difficult to comprehend? Love has many manifestations, what we feel for all the people in our lives are love in different forms. So what is so extra special about this one relationship? Why do we let this relationship consume our mind and cloud our judgement and rational thinking?

The best answer I could come up with is the weight of expectations. The fulcrum of the whole society is relationships and the associated expectations. But why does it get so enormous in one particular relationship? The answer must lie in our procreation architecture. Though we moved beyond animals and developed intimacy without procreation, the framework of procreation is stamped into us, from how our body reacts, the hormones that get released and the effect it has on our mind. The weight of expectation must be directly proportional to our self investment in any relationship. Thats why parents are so besotted with their kids. If we look at a romantic relationship closely, there are several key milestones. Boyfriend/Girlfriend->Lover->Fiance->husband/wife->Partner->Companion. How I see it is, these milestones become blurred once the relationship goes some distance and confusion, more than anything else sets in.

It is natural that when we meet someone, we are usually in our best behaviour. Same thing happens in relationships initially. People get attracted to each other because of certain characteristics or abilities about them. It’s all rosy as they savour all the goodness in each other. Then, as they draw closer, the negativities start gaining more focus. This is something unique because in all other relationships, especially in friendship, we are so good at accepting people with all their flaws. But here, the dynamics are totally different. The keyword is intolerance. Why? Because women are no longer dependent on men like women of older generations, so they do not feel it is required to be patient anymore and men, always with their inflated ego, take everything with loads of indifference. No relationship gets built this way.

When it all goes wrong, then heart break sets in. Why? Human beings have this inherent need to control what they cannot and that is what causes the biggest miseries. Unfortunately, need to control is inversely proportional to sensibility and common sense. We all move on, when sensibility returns. We can hold on to a dying or dead relationship for a while, if we can use it positively to stop us from making more mistakes and tide over from the difficult phase of loneliness. Everything in the world has an expiry date, nothing stands forever. And there is the concept of the death of the body and death of the mind. Losing someone is actually the death of that person in our minds. Accepting reality can be harsh and tough, but accepting it is what takes us to true nirvana. We know no one in life more than our parents. We are prepared for them to leave us and go some day, then what is it that we cannot accept and live with?

I see everyone’s life as a circle. When two people meet, the circles meet and intersect, where common factors come together. One circle should never overlap the other. That amounts to superimposing one person on the other which will never work. The intersection keeps expanding as mutual interests grow but only up to a certain point. There are parts of the circle that define us, who we are, what made us who we are, our personalities, our behaviour, etc. Some of that will change a bit according to changing dynamics in our lives, but trying to change everything about a person will only result in disaster. A good relationship for me is all about managing the intersection of circles and making sure it never shrinks.

My granny used to tell me that everyone has a companion born for them somewhere out there and we will meet them at the right time and when we are prepared for them. We can search for them or we can buckle down, wait and prepare ourselves. Finding love is one thing, converting that into companionship and keeping it that way is a life long activity. For me, accepting people as they are, understanding them, trusting the relationship, not taking them for granted and maintaining the line of expectations are the five pillars for healthy and long lasting relationships. Taking effort and adjusting to people will only lead to loss of self respect and building up of negative emotions which will wear us down and break the relationship with time. Most important of all, it is imperative we understand that we cannot keep everyone in our lives equally happy at the same time and someone or the other will be unhappy all the time. So the best we can do is to keep ourselves happy. True love for me is doing the best I can for the people in my life, letting them go and wishing them well. People who truly understand us, accept us for who we are and genuinely need us in their lives will always be with us, rest will go like shedding of dead skin cells. This is the best way to have the right people in our lives and live a life of less baggage. It all boils down to the concept of ‘chi’, the flow of energy. Just like proper flow of energy in our bodies keep us healthy, proper flow of energy in relationships will hold people together through the test of time.