Trust fall

I was standing at the edge of the cliff, contemplating if I should jump or not. That was definitely what I had signed up for, yet… standing at the edge with just a measly flimsy rope tied to me feet… My body was screaming at me to turn back and run away! Is this enough? Can I trust this rope to hold me safe? Will I become a figure in statistics of failed bungee jump accidents? Will it really be safe and keep its promises? 

It sounds too good to be true... 

On the other hand, was the desire to be free above it all and fly, glide through the air. Falling without any bounds, free-falling into what seems like infinity, this could very well be the end. But with the faith and knowledge that the ropes are bound and that I am safe. It was a mix of all possible emotions within a fraction of time… 

If I could freeze that moment and separate out all my thoughts, it is probably a bit of excitement, fear, joy, curiosity, pushing one's limits, heart over mind, mind over body, priorities, survival, again fear, resignation to possible death, FAITH, I guess I got to know myself better finally when I took that leap!

It was the scariest thing I had ever done. I thought I was definitely going to die for those 5 seconds until I felt that tug of rope at my feet! 

Those 5 seconds of taking the plunge and leap of faith and surviving it, changed me! 

It is a constant reminder that if I look at my fears head on, there is a part of me which wants to just jump, soar and be free from it all.

It definitely helps to have these strong pillars in my life who seem to tell me “No matter what happens, You fall and I’ll catch you. I am there for you”. Wonder what I would do without these people. It is a constant reminder from the universe that I am not alone and that I am being taken care of. 

I guess all of my life are made of these moments, especially something that's new and scary. 

I am standing at the cliff and looking at this scary valley down below which might crush me into pieces if I take the plunge, and I wonder why my body aches… 

I see that I am neither standing on the cliff, nor have taken the leap. I am somewhere in between hanging on to the tine slab for my dear life even though my safety harness is secure… 

I guess when it is painful or a struggle, I simply need to have the faith and see that my ropes are secure! 

Bungee jumping was and will forever remain one of my most special memories! Because, in some sense, I am bungee jumping everyday!  :D

I asked her to be mine...

We had a complicated on-off relationship… and thinking about her, makes me go through a range of emotions ranging from joy, fun, love, bliss to betrayal, lies, manipulation, fakeness. I almost thought that we drifted apart, but I couldn’t completely let her go. Despite all the pain she put me through, she still meant something to me.

So, a small backstory – I have known her all my life as far as I could remember and she was my best friend, and we were inseparable and made each other so happy. My parents and little bro loved her. The friends I made later on liked her too, and I guess I felt proud that “my girl” was loved by all. She was the one who understood me perfectly and we were completely in sync!

I don’t remember the exact day when things started to turn around and I started feeling her pressure on me. The close people around me dint seem to like her much and I had to avoid her if I had to hang out with my new pals. She too ignored me a lot, and started putting me down. Oh those blatant lies which she told me. It stung. You know what’s worse than being lied and cheated to… ? Being lied and cheated by a person whom you considered to be your soulmate. She made me feel that I was not good enough and obviously I reciprocated the hurt and made sure I let her know my piece of mind!!!

I slowly started avoiding her which was difficult because she was someone I run into every single day. I was obnoxious, rude and adamant that I will not talk to her anymore. Though there were moments where I would secretly check in on her quietly to see if she was okay. I am sure she felt the same way, because I noticed that when I leave the room, I could feel her painful gaze follow me across the room speaking of a long lost friendship.

During this phase, a lot of our common friends did their best to patch up our relationship and they failed. Some things are just meant to be left broken…

Yet, I couldn’t avoid her any longer.

Something finally happened and both of us were put in a locked room with no way out. I had to confront her. We fought, screamed at each other, cried and finally somehow got in touch with the truth. We did drift apart, and I started to understand the circumstances which led to our break up. I guess she never lied to me. It was me who was not willing to accept her honesty and I kept pushing her aside. I realized how much I missed her and it felt so good to be back in her arms where I could just be myself. Though I am comfortable with a lot of other people, with her, my smile is a little more genuine, my joy seems even more blissful, my quirks get even weirder, my anger gets more passionate, and my shoulders are a little more relaxed. I realized how much I missed that… This was one relationship which I definitely shouldn’t have broken.

We finally met!

So now, after all these years, I looked at her and confessed how much I love her and asked her to be mine… she looks right back at me through the mirror with the beautiful happy smile and finally said “Yes!!!!”. My close family and friends cheered loudly!!

… and they lived happily ever after.

Happy International Women’s day! All you dear ladies, look into the mirror and love yourselves

When history repeats itself…

What do you do when something unpleasant happens in life? That sickening sense of Déjà vu when you are hoping that it is just a bad dream and will pass away very soon… You carefully planned your moves, words, actions, behavior, picked your team, it should all work out THIS TIME, but no! 

History repeats itself… It looks like you are winning, you have reached the peak… but your path becomes a bell curve which keeps going down after the peak. You lost the war.

But of course you don’t let this bog you down. Everybody face setbacks and failures right. You can’t make this about yourself and be too hard. You just brace yourself for the next wave to hit you and handle it this time. Hence, you learn from these lessons and move on…

The next time you face a “situation”, you are ready now. You plan your moves, words, actions behavior, team + valuable inputs from your last failure. You have to win now. And it looks likely, because you have now gone beyond your last failure and reached new heights.

Unfortunately, it ends up being a bell curve.

This happens again… the same rigmarole. Get ready, plan your words, actions, behavior, team + Valuable inputs from last 2 failures… get higher than before, but then crash down… next attempt… yada yada yada, get higher than before but crash again…

Again, the bruised ego wants to protect you and says, “Awww… this wasn’t about you my dear. X Y Z went wrong and you did everything you could. Right? Open quora, get on Tumbler, Subscribe to dailyinsirationalquotes on Instagram to pump you up.. #nevergiveup. Do you know how many times Edison failed before… Do you know how many rejections JK Rowling…”.

This is my answer not to the many collective battles small and big (Heck, for me even uttering a word of “hi” to the person who sits next to me at work is a victory) which I lost, but to the ones which became a pattern. 

The ones which I lose time and again… passions that I never completely pursued, decisions that I was too scared to take… This one is for the relationships that I lost or people that I was too afraid to hurt and ended up losing them anyway. 

This is for holding on the things which don’t matter or ignoring the things which actually do. This is uneasy because they happen again and again. So what do you do when you hit some rock bottom? Get up and try again right?

Accepting failures and moving on to an seemingly unexpected but inevitable way down…  Not anymore. I am frankly tired of a bell curve. I don’t want to get higher than before. I want to become an exponential curve which gets to the top and stays put… saturation point!

What was the common unifying factor in all of the above? The individual themselves right? The cycle of “preparing for the battle” … planning the words, moves, actions… being careful. That cycle never changed much did it? We somehow always follow the same pattern thought from some level it seems to be all different.

A wise man once said that you cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. Quotes like “Fake it till you make it” became my mantra. And it actually do help open up and get over inhibitions. But the point to be noted here is the word “fake”. At some point you won’t be sure where your real self ends and the fakeness begins. Some people are getting judged for being real, while others are getting all the love for being fake!

I have seen a lot of people who are nice, say all sweet words, super fun to hang out and get drawn to them… not being a true judge if their “niceness” was their nature or something which they were faking. This is my new magnet – Watching people just being real even if it comes off at the expense of not sounding so nice. Not being rude or hurtful – but being real, honest genuine and unapologetic about it. Polite and understanding enough to live and let live… but strong and confident in who they are. They don’t try to blend in at the expense of forgoing themselves.

I hope I have the guts to be that person who can be true at least to my own conscience. I really do. And I guess to make that shift from a bell to exponential, the only way to do it is to break the pattern. Do something different. That thing which shakes you to the core, but deep down in the quietest of moments, it feels right… just got to do it!

When history repeats itself, break free and make history instead.

PS: I just wanted to record this inner monologue. This might end up being a total failure of an idea. But if all works out well, I will be so happy to tell myself “See, Told ya!”! It all worked out well. If not, well… I should try something different.

Thanks to Deepesh for the images and for being a "curvy(Mathematical)" awesome designer and for being the cool guy that he is!!! 

  

Honkers - Back off!

One of the most vexing experience of my life, just picture this. Waiting in standstill traffic with no place to budge, while the person behind you feels that honking continuously would magically change the signal to go, or create an exclusive path for the supreme entitled being that he/she is. Rules are not meant for them. They need to go somewhere ASAP, and feel that their destination is worth more than the scores of others around.

Just another view on Indian roads at peak hours 

So, this post is for such people who feel that honking is the answer! You might be one of “them”, in which case you would either be in denial of being one and hence you need to pay more attention to this… or you agree with what I say and hence feel the need to share this post to other honkers out there (He he… this is more than a strategy for higher views! )

Ambivalence is like a prevalent theme across mankind (why man“kind” ? maybe later). We as a totality are strife with contradictions. And usually that’s what we celebrate and cherish. That’s probably what made us evolve to dominate the planet (Yea right! And see what’s become of it). I guess people still have the primal need to fight, dominate and get through. Even if we no longer fight for food, shelter as did our cavemen ancestors, we feel the need to dominate the random person on streets through those honking wars. But of course most people would be in denial of their own inherent honker nature.

Apparently people have creative ways to justify their own behavior and consider themselves misunderstood. So, I tried to get into those misunderstood shoes of those honkers… Trust me, I tried. Hear me out…

India’s population is ~1.3 Billion and we account for ~20% of world population despite accounting for ~2% of land area! Now tie this up with noise levels out on the road. If a quiet office has a decibel level of 50 db, the busy road is 80 db. Now it there are studies which show that 5 db (16.66%) is solely contributed by excessive honking. This is huge! So I hope you agree that honking is something of a problem. Now about the people who actually honk… The probability of encountering a bigger honker than you, is extremely high right? And two negatives make a positive? So honking at a honker is alright and this automatically excludes you from the category right? Killing a killer leaves the world with the same number of killers, but killing more than one killers and becoming a serial-killer-killer is like doing the world a favor right? Or maybe the louder you are, you can dim down those “other” idiots on the road?

In an ideal switch traffic signal which lasts for 111 s, assuming that that cars takes 7.77 s to cross the signal and bikes take 6.66 s, adding 2.22 s at alternate vehicles for a potential time lag for safety reasons we can estimate that 22 cars and 33 bikes could go through peacefully. However, there are additional 4 cars and 7 bikes after the signal has turned who decide that “hey, it turned red *JUST NOW*, and hence its ok to cross. The ends up taking ~14 s from vehicles from the other lane who are blocked and thus irritating them. This “irritation” has been proved to be a definite instigation for a person to turn into a honker with a statistical significance of 0.00001% (I escaped).

Now about those who decide not to put on the indicator when they make a sharp turn… I guess they have telepathic powers, and hence assume that the other commuters also have telepathic powers to know that just because they are in the further left side of the road, they still want to turn right suddenly at the signal? Unfortunately, most people DO NOT have telepathic powers!

Of course there are some who are eternally lost and confused and turn on the wrong indicator! Ah, I couldn’t find a justification for this except “some people just want to watch the world burn”, or “just plain vanilla stupid” or as Aristotle said “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness”. However, for practical reasons, I wish such behavior is monitored for a month before making the driving license permanent.

This summarizes some of my main on road concerns. I now realize that I should provide counter arguments, but I hope that the absurdity of these points bring those honkers to shame and starting tomorrow, everybody have an almost perfect road sense (99.99999% is fine)

People… chill out. Shift your focus from the horn to the brake maybe. Just for a bit. Patience… take a deep breath… Let them go when its their turn and your turn will definitely get yours. Let us try to be at peace and not just that, be a reason for someone else’s peace of mind too!

Note: Just because my other blogs are deep and full of symbolism, this blog is just about honkers, and NOT to be construed as an analogy for loud people who talk out of turn. The on-road situation should NOT be compared to any real life incidents just because life is a journey! :P

Sometimes, it takes "Pluck"

It was that numbing pain in her shoulders which was the only thing on her mind. Probably an effect of sitting all day in front of the computer, hunched and focused, coding away… 

Just a typical day at work.

She needed relief and instinct made her press and massage into the pain. This helped.

Now, just imagine that this was the only sort of pain she ever felt. The kind where you press over it, or rub over it and it goes away…

She was walking barefoot in the garden and stepped over a thorn and the pain just shot up and made her scream out and cry. She looked at the thorn and started massaging into it and rubbing into it because that was the only way she knew to make “pain” go away.

Logic should eventually catch up! And she needs to figure out that for this one, she ought to pull out the thorn to make the pain go away and not rub it. But ah… People are complicated little things…

Zombified to Zumbafied!

Let me tell you a story. There was a demure little girl, Rhea. She was considered to be a very polite, well behaved and smart kid who made her parents proud with her achievements. Be it topping her class, a brilliant elocution, debate, sports or a quiz. Life seemed great… but if there are no challenges thrown, something is definitely fishy. Rhea faced her first mountain in the form of dance. She had to participate in an annual dance at school. Being a shy kid who was probably not very open and free, she couldn’t match the grace and style of others in her class. Her teacher was probably exasperated of having somebody with stiff robotic movements on stage to represent the school! She would bring down the style and the flow of the entire choreography! Frustrations were thrown out freely. "Rhea! What’s wrong with you. Show some grace and expression. Don’t be like a zombie!"

This pushed Rhea into a shell. Dance is meant to flow through you with the feeling and connection of an expression. Rhea’s emotions to dance were now all about the fear of messing up the teacher’s show. She became an easy target for "harmless fun". She endured lot of insults, taunts and mockery for her zombie-like dance.

She went through all of this and somehow went on stage and finished her show. But something died within Rhea and she decided that dance was not for her. It was one of those situations where a bad experience makes someone bottle up those feelings, label the entire experience as horrible, and bury it deep underground.

10 years later… This incident was long forgotten in Rhea’s conscious memory. She grew up to be a wonderful and happy person with a great family and awesome friends. But without realizing, a part of her was frozen. It was almost like she took an oath to never dance in her life again. But how can you stop yourself from dancing? You listen to a good song and beat, your body naturally moves to it. Even if you don’t move physically, I am sure you are dancing in your head. But Rhea denied it and it made herself seem more stiff and stoic.

She was looking out for a new fun fitness regime when she came across Zumba. She was told that "It is more of a workout than a dance form. You just listen to the music and copy the instructor. You can do aerobics no? same thing. Just try". So she decided to give Zumba a try. Her initial day was so awkward. She felt cheated for having being told that it is not a dance, and just a workout. She considered quitting just because she couldn’t face the ghosts of her past. She was scared of being made fun of.

But in that studio, she realized that nobody was even looking at her. Everybody were just enjoying the music, following the instructor and doing their dance. It was not about precision and movements. Some were doing their move in the left, some on the right. It did not matter. Another girl moved in the wrong direction and crashed into the nearby person. But nobody glared, instead everybody just gave a cheerful grin and just continued their dance! The pace picked up and everyone just kept, jumping, grooving, shaking, kicking. 

The physical challenge of Zumba was starting to manifest. People started sweating and gasping for breath. But what was remarkable is that, the energy levels seemed to just increase with the rise in perspiration. Rhea was clumsily trying to match the class in the last row. 

Her teacher happily came later with a smiling face and asked "how was the class?". No more of "Rhea, you need to improve this step, show some life, no grace, bad posture", but rather, "How was class? Did you like it?" was such a refreshing shift. Rhea couldn’t deny the fun she had. She went the next day as well. And the next day… and the day after… Until she caught the steps and was now one with the class. There was something electrifying about looking at the entire class in the mirror of the studio, dancing with their hearts, with their movements in tune with the beat, the energy of the class was one. 

Nobody cared if Rhea’s elbow was at 90 degrees instead of 45, or if she did have the grace if a "dancer". Rhea just  let the music and movements flow through her and was eventually in tune.

Perfection happens after comfort. She was now at a stage where she was comfortable enough to correct her own movements and crunch, or jump, or squat or throw out her hands. The only comments her teacher passed in class was "Smile! Enjoy!"

The dance. It hurt. It made her arms ache. Legs to cramp up. A persistent body ache. But strangely, all this was something Rhea looked forward to. It made her feel fresh and vibrant! A day felt incomplete without her dance/workout. The best of relationships are made when you connect over some shared interest. She made great friends at her class who just encouraged her to dance rather than make fun of her for it!

You know the best part… Rhea suddenly got reminded of that box with painful memories buried underground and realized that it was dug out open, and that spirit within her was set free already! Her teacher, her dance friends had changed the world for Rhea by indirectly helping her get over the past. It was probably not even intentional, and they may not even realize that life turned around for that little girl who is now busy shaking a leg… "Shake it off… Shake it off"

PS: This post is a work of fiction and mostly a tribute to my new found joy in the form of dance and Zumba. Names, characters, situation, events and incidents are merely my imagination or used to convey a message. Any resemblance to people, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. However, I most certainly want to thank my Zumba teacher: Mr Leo Talstoy for making my day through his Zumba class. I am certainly not a perfect dancer, but I have been Zumbafied! 

Validated!

If I had a penny for every time someone told me, “Lets us validate this”, I could have bought myself the latest iPhone. In my 4 years as an analyst it turned out to be one the most recurring phrases I ever had to face.

However, looking back in the 25 years of my life, the need to seek validation from the people around me has always impacted a lot of my actions and interactions. Probably right from the day I uttered my first words which led to such positive affirmations from my mom, or my first step, or my laughter getting a cheer of response.

It held true during my school days as well. I would yearn to get those “well done” stickers, 5 stars, or earn a “Awesome. This is very good” from my favourite teacher. This is a great way of learning and an incredible way to grow and imbibe values. However, after being a “grown up”, I realize that a lot of us (including myself) are constantly seeking validation for their actions, thoughts and decisions. Even though the validation circle has shifted from a mentor’s “Good job. Proud of you. Go ahead” to a friend’s “Dude, I totally understand you.”

Validation is what drives us. And suddenly I realized that we seek validation because we are in an unfamiliar or a strange situation that we are not sure how to handle. I certainly do not seek validation from anybody to check if I have brushed my teeth right. But if I have tried learning a new song on my guitar and play it for somebody, I am seeking for validation.

Now, this is but one of the most natural thing to do. But I have come to understand that our ‘seeking for validation’ and the ‘approved/rejected’ feedback from the observer is happening at a very subconscious level. The impact of one on the other is very subtle but it stays in the mind. The feedback which you hear about yourself could make or break you without your knowledge. And likewise, you have a responsibility to "make/break" somebody else.

Two things here:

1. When you are the giving end of validation, it helps to do what great managers do: positive, constructive, actionable feedback which will help them grow. Let us spread love positivity, not negativity! :-)

2. Receiving end of validation and feedback is a little tough. Let me talk about it more...

Imagine a plain white board with your name on it. You come across a person who looks at your name and write a comment about it. 5 more people come by and write their thoughts. the next day, 10 more people come by and write their opinions about your name. Now the page is full. But people who come by, meet you and invariably end up writing their opinions on your page. This creates a strain and it is very hard to keep a track on whose opinions matter and whose don’t. I visualize my subconscious to be the very same.

This is not a “problem” per se. However, don’t you think it would be great to have a way to wipe the board clean for a better view on what is important and what is not? A way for us to hold on to the notes which matter and erase those which don’t? A way to just clear the mind and give it a fresh start the next day? A way to be conscious of my action while seeking validation and have the power over my mind when receiving some rejection and stay strong?

I have found a simple way! Meditation!

It has made me aware of myself and the power within me. It has made me more aware of the interactions around me where I end up seeking validation and has helped me remain strong when life shakes me up. In fact, even the fact that meditation makes a difference to me was validated by a friend who commented, “I bet you did your meditation today! It is obvious on your face and you look so happy, calm!”.

I believe this is one of the easiest way to be yourself and remain unruffled in this world that tries to fit you in a mould and ask you to change no matter who you are! :P

Try it!