Among others, I am

I went to a party yesterday. One where I didn’t know a soul and my RSVP, sent thrice, had not been acknowledged. I walked into a tiny room filled with people and wine and beer and food, conversations and laughter and those big, intimidating circles of people who all know each other. I spoke to people I had never seen before, and eventually even the person who had ignored the RSVPs wandered over and introduced himself. About 30 people spent over two hours together, and at the end of it I was among the last 8 hanging around and chatting as we made plans to continue the conversation at a nearby bar. Bottom line: I enjoyed it, and met some good people.

If you had told me a year ago that I would be this person, I would have laughed in your face and bet my first-born child upon proving you wrong. If you were to tell anyone that knows me, they would probably do the same. I am the person who skipped out on a party I helped organize because I couldn’t talk to the classmates I had spent two years in a dorm with. I’ve skipped out on countless reunions and lab lunches, work outings and dinners with friends, only because I was “too shy”. And yet, I would do yesterday evening over without a second thought. Have I, “as a person”, changed so much?

I try not to dwell too much on the self. In terms of a personality, I don’t care for discussions or analysis of who I am. My tastes, the things I like or the ways I behave are not significantly enough a part of who I am to be held on to like symbols of identity.

Am I shy or talkative? Am I the kind of person that hangs out in bars? Am I sufficiently devout and respectful of tradition? Am I a fashionista or a geek, a chick or a scientist? I try to avoid clichés not because they exist, but because I don’t think they serve much purpose. The “person that hangs out in bars” is not always an alcoholic, and the “shy” person is often far more egoistic and full of themselves than the girl that chatters to every stranger. I don’t like being labeled, and refuse to label people based on such traits.

A personality is a set of survival tools for society, and I view it as such. At a more innate level, I am a person with ambitions and desires, a specific set of goals that bring me different kinds of satisfaction: physical, emotional and intellectual (I will not discuss the spiritual here). My “personality” is what helps me get to those satisfactions.

Cocoon

Inside these padded walls, I can bounce my ideas around. The walls lob them gently back to me, creating a resonance of harmonious theory. Nothing crashes, nothing breaks inside the silk cocoon. Any dissonance is quickly blended in until it is unrecognizable. Occasionally, an especially sharp notion may poke through, exposing the padding and threatening to break my shell. Poke the stuffing back in quickly, frayed threads and knots and all. Sew up the hole, and all that remains of the uncomfortable idea is a scar where the walls were stitched up.

Each of us creates our own padded spaces, surrounded by people and ideas we are comfortable with. Within this space, we like to think of ourselves as diverse, open-minded folk. Yet the best measure of being diverse is when one's ideas are threatened.

If everyone you speak to agrees with you and slips seamlessly into your cocoon, you never even see diversity. If you aren't being challenged, you have no idea of where to expand, where your padded walls need to be mended. The measure of your growth is how your cocoon handles challenges that don't fit into it already.

About me

Considering how much time I spend writing about myself here, it seems unfair that I should be annoyed by other people's bios. I hate having to write "About me" sections, bios or anything else that requires a snappy, succinct sentence that sums me up. And when I come across one that attempts to be humorous or deep, all I want is to rip it apart. One person describes herself as "Delightfully Indian". To whom are you delightful, and what makes you more Indian, or more delightfully so, than every other person in the sub-continent? Are you really no more than a uniquely gleeful conglomeration of race-determining gene variants?

Or someone else who says: "I like blue M & Ms". What's wrong with the rest? Yes, I went out and ate an entire pack of every color to find out what was so great about the blue ones (nothing?). Would this person get along better with the blue creatures from Avatar than normal human beings? The people with sparkly one-liners about themselves abound. I, on the other hand, must prepare for hours to introduce myself in a professional setting, just listing my qualifications. I have no world-views I would kill for, no candy fetish, and much as I love certain geographies, I like to think I am more than just "Indian", delightful or otherwise.

For myself, a recent conversation with a friend helped me understand. I like the idea of being always amused. Amusement, which stems from the verb "muser"- to think. I am constantly encountering things that set me thinking. Things I do not understand, funny things and sad things, strange things and things which explain older things I didn't understand. They all make me wonder, and most make me smile. I finally have a bio: "_ is constantly amused by the world and everything else." And even that amuses me. Ha.

If you had to pick one word or phrase to define your (most frequent) state of mind, what would it be?

The point is to live everything

Too much in the recent past is unexplained, and I struggle to find answers, even as I feel ashamed to be so expressive in this space. There are others who wonder and hurt far more deeply than I ever wish to, children and parents, lovers and wives and friends. In lieu of greater comfort, I rediscovered this:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.“
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Echo

Somewhere today a lab is out of order. People walk the hallways asking, "Have you heard?", "She was going to finish in a few months" , "She worked so hard.. poor thing."
A greying professor remembers her first emails to him. Enthusiasm bordering on desperation, the years she put into getting to a point where she could send him that email. He may even remember how he wondered at her perseverance as he presented her case to the committee, asking them to fund her graduate studies.

Somewhere, a brother takes the first flight available to meet his sister. There are anxious parental phone calls, logistics, endless paperwork and planning. This I cannot bring myself to imagine.

In frozen time-frames she walks into my room at night, after roll call, demanding and distributing her 'jaadu ki jhappis'. I hear her echo "-TA" when I call her Sanchi, completing her name emphatically. I hear her laugh and I see her dance, listen to her voice in countless conversations, real and virtual. What next, we ask and say, what next?
We've talked of plans, after hostel and after Baroda, what the US is like and the tedium of grad school, buying cars and non-academic options after a Ph.D. And each time our refrain, What next and what else?

Somewhere, there is an echo of our words that goes round and round the globe, a string of electrons magically dancing through cables under the oceans and continents. What next, it whispers, what next?

Even as the words bounce around, you are gone. In frozen time I feel the crash of metal and flesh and bone on a dark highway as it ripples under my skin, my fingers trembling in a mocking echo of yours. The smell of the fruit samples in your car and the sound of the sirens and helicopters and paramedic voices. Your emphatic ending of your own name resonates in emptiness and hits me harder than anything.

The words of our friend as she tells me you are gone. The way I wish for someone to hold her close through this.

Somewhere, shouldn't something be more ordered than it is here? Are the partings here balanced out by reunions elsewhere?

Or perhaps our echoes have no balance. Just the strength they find in their repetition as they bounce around the world, fading as we fade and revived by resonant times as somewhere, an advisor reads an enthusiastic email from a grad student. And somewhere, a brother flies out to meet his sister for a reunion happier than this one. And friends talk of things other than death when they say, What comes next?

Instead of faith

On a circling wind I watched a bird rise. Steady in its ascent, perfect stillness and awareness in every wing tip. On the same wind two sparrows tumbled through, flapping desperately to get to the nearest tree even as they were tossed around by the wind.

When I raise my eyes for inspiration, I don't always see what I wanted to see. But at times like this, I get what I needed- a good laugh at myself. So what if the universe doesn't feel like restoring my faith once in a while, and instead chooses to remind me of how ridiculous it is to flap about desperately in a storm?

Perhaps it is merely a spiritual placebo. Or perhaps it is just that when I am quiet enough to look to the skies, I can connect with a calmer, more rational and faithful self. Yet these are the times I am convinced of greater powers, a deeper universal rhythm worth keeping time to. And sometimes laughing at myself with.