Trip to Jammu

Am writing this on behalf of my better half and sister-in-law !
The last minute ticketing and planning seems to be what Naga thrives on ! The trip to Vaishno Devi only confirms this. And added to that - the last minute goof-ups !

The trip had been planned for Jana and Ram and Nagu from Delhi to Vaishno Devi for 4 days. One week prior to their travel, there was a minor rerouting of Jana and Ram's itinerary - instead of going from Delhi, they were to move to Jammu from Amritsar. So Naga had arranged to have their tickets cancelled, while he was to join them from Delhi. But in the process, his ticket too (Delhi-Jammu) got cancelled by mistake! And amidst all this confusion, their cousin Aruna too decided to join in the travel.

So with 2 days to go he had tickets re-booked (of course wait-listed WL 31) -- so courtesy the IAS division- that the EQ got released exactly 3 hours prior to departure.  The train departed at 8:30 pm and was to reach Jammu at 11 am the next morning.. now as if this last minute wrong cancellation / rebooking/ EQ was not enough - he calls me up at 10:30 pm while still on the train - i guessed that all that excitement was not good enough -and  he wanted more - he wanted to get OFF the train early the next morning - at 4am at Jalandhar and explore Amritsar instead of continuing to Jammu !! Next he planned to cancel the booking at Patni Top for the next night and do another last minute acco at Jammu ... and as if all these were not enough ...

Jana and Ram on their way to Jammu - (they did Amritsar to Jammu by bus)-- realised that instead of getting off the bus at Jammu, missed the stop and landed in Katra 4 hours later at 11:30 pm - only to realize that there is no acco in katra  ! So a lot of last minute talks across the country at 11pm -- jana called nagu (on the train near punjab) -who called me (in Chennai) - and then we all took turns in calling the manager of JK tourism in katra , to arrange for Jana-Ram's acco for that night !! Poor manager was reeling under this onslaught of calls -- at 11:30 pm and finally gave them a room.
., After all the excitement had died down - they had a quiet day the next day... and finally all is well that ends well -- the four of them are on their way to the Darshan at Vaishno Devi.
Will give more of the dramatic details as and when i get to hear about it :-)

CREATING SPACE

Well as magical as this may sound

And I do not blame you for thinking so

For I too felt the same

When I learnt to breathe mindfully and slow.

As I learnt to breathe in deeply

Time stood practically still

Giving me the space to understand and assimilate

And not do or say things hurriedly against my will.

And as I breathed out slowly

I felt abundance in the air

Of love, understanding, forgiveness and acceptance

I learnt to see beauty in everyone and everywhere.

Creating spaces not only on the outside

But more importantly inside of me

I learnt a lot about myself

Thereby changing my outlook of how life ought to be.

Breathing in and breathing out mindfully

I know I am inching steadily everyday

It’s like coming home

I hope some day I will!

Rama Shyam

request fror some writing from Naga

hey
we go and watch a movie called "motorcycle diaries", what about our own family's diary? Why don't u write when u keep vigil at night due to sleeplessness, so that everyone can read. and post ur pics too please. or better still get your ghost writer, Lel?!!

The power of group positive thinking

We have heard our elders talk about the efficacy of group prayer and the younger generation normally tend to pooh poohs such things. It is normally believed that when so many people pray together the intention is strengthened. Even in our yagnyas there are a number of priests chanting the same mantras or japas in order to invoke the gods.

I would like to share a few instances in our present times where we got an opportunity to witness this.. The first was seen in cricket which according to many is the secular religion of India. People from all walks of life follow cricket. There are the people on the street, the nine yard clad mamis, the youngsters, the film stars of Bollywood or Kollywood and the elite of every city who are deeply involved and willing to spend hours watching it and a few more discussing its nuances. Hope and patriotic fervour come to the surface and a desultory performance from the team brings everyone’s spirits down.

How was this time different? In the 2011 World cup when India played Australia there were still a lot of skeptics. Oh it was sheer luck! So now India was pitted in a semi final with the other Asian giant – Pakistan. More people shifted over to the “India will do it” gang. The skeptics became less. India won and entered the final. The 2 days between the semis and final was a time of phenomenal build up. The momentum gathered absorbed the whole nation. The newspapers, the news channels, people on the road, the cell phone chatters had nothing but this to talk about. Though it was getting a bit much, the one theme that was became an obsession was “ India must win”.

This brought about a total “Pro India movement”. India winning the World cup was no more a distant dream, it was very close. Yet there was many a slip between cup and lip. The opportunity could be lost easily with some rash batting, throwing of wickets and not so good fielding which the team has been doing on many instances. This was when the India supporters ( literally the whole of the Indian nation- what’s the census count? 1,028,737,436( however it maybe read) plus all the Indians in the various parts of the world started aligning themselves to one thought- ‘ India winning the world cup’. This was the only buzz word on everyone’s lips a ‘smaranam’.

If 50,000 ( is that the capacity of the Wankade stadium?) were watching the match live the rest of Indias population ( even if they hated cricket) were glued either to the TV or their commentary leaving the roads deserted. The match started with India losing the toss and in their innings 2 quick wickets. It was a tense time having a target of 270 odd runs and against a team like SriLanka resolute and strong in their game. Could India do it? The religious among the group were chanting some ‘slokams’ under their breath. Some others called “Pillayarappa” tehngai udaikkaren unakku , no more wickets, let Indian win”. The not so religious did not pray but were frenziedly thinking “go India go”. Those on the field of course showed solidarity with India colours, face paint and holding miles and miles of the Indian flag.

Instead of a crumble which has happened quite often in the past from a strong position one found India cruising along comfortably. You never know ! This was the apprehension many had and so they continued wishing and praying. What happened next is something everyone knows. But when you think about how it happened, (ofcourse not to underplay the hard work done by our team) isn’t it evident? The thought forms of the millions of Indians who wanted India to win the 2011 world cup was in tandem.

Is this not evidence for the non believers and the youth of today? Anything can be got by group prayer ok if you don’t want to call it that group positive thought forms.

Being a student of psychology I also think of The Pygmalion effect which is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. Call it what you want positive thinking, prayer, Pygmalion effect. Ultimately it was the numbers and the positive thoughts from them which were directly proportional to the confidence of a team leading to its success!

The second instance is the case of Anna hazare. Anna Hazare is the face of India's fight against corruption. He has challenged the government at the highest level. The Indian masses and many well known personalities as well as the youth are supporting him. What began as a small group of people started swelling and by the 80^th hour of the fast the media which had been there from the beginning also played a major role. The youth especially really wanted this through as they were repulsed with the corruption in our country- something people of our generation took for granted. We tended to go with the flow saying “Oh India this is how it will be there.” But one man said this has to be fought and with others joining him, the similar thought forms helped to evoke a positive response form the government.

The third was a while ago when Amitabh Bhachan the demi -God of India took ill. The first time around Bachchan spent months critically ill in hospital after he ruptured his spleen while shooting a fight scene for the film Coolie in 1982. Thousands of fans waited night and day outside his hospital and made offerings at temples as they prayed for his recovery. Yet again on his 66^th birthday in 2008 he took very ill and the same public prayed for his recovery. Was it their prayer which brought him around may ask the skeptics among us, but if not for the group thought form what was it?

To talk of other instances in the past Our Independence Movement was surely something that was got by the zeal and patriotic fervour of the Indian population.

Readers Block

Hi
don't know how many of you read this in today's Hindu. It seemed very appropriate to me, so wanted to share it with you all.

Geoff Dyer: Reader’s Block

Geoff Dyer is the author of But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Paris Trance, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He lives in England.

The following essay is excerpted from Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, coming from Graywolf Press in March 2011.

Don’t read much now.
Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”

Could I have become a symptom, or is this an entirely personal indisposition?

Either way, I find it increasingly difficult to read. This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that. The phenomenon of writer’s block is well known, but what I am suffering from is reader’s block. The condition is creeping rather than chronic, manifesting itself in different ways in different circumstances. On a trip to the Bahamas recently I regularly stopped myself reading because, whereas I could read a book anywhere, this was the only time I was likely to see sea so turquoise, sand so pink. Somewhat grandly, I call this the Mir syndrome, after the cosmonaut who said that he didn’t read a page of the book he’d taken to the space station because his spare moments were better spent gazing out of the window. Sometimes I’m too lazy to read, preferring to watch television; more often I am too conscientious to read. Reading has never felt like work in the way that writing has, and so, if I feel I should be working, I feel I should be writing. Theoretically, if I am not writing then I am free to read but, actually, I always feel vaguely guilty, and so, instead of writing (working) or reading (relaxing), I do neither: I potter around, rearranging my books, clearing up. Basically I do nothing—until it’s time to catch a train, whereupon, like a busy commuter nibbling away at War and Peace in twenty-minute snatches, I plunge into a book, thinking, At last I’ve got a chance to read. In no time, though, I’m like Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, “torn, in a futile anguished fashion, between my disinterest in the landscape and my disinterest in the book which could conceivably distract me.”

Back home there are plenty of books that I’ve not read and yet, gazing blankly at my shelves, all I can think is, There’s nothing left to read. Hoping to lance the boil, to get to the heart of the matter in the course of a transatlantic flight, I bought—but couldn’t face reading—Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. Having resigned myself to not reading them (or any of the other books I’d bought for the flight), I scavenged around for anything to read: the in-flight magazine, the duty-free catalog, the emergency evacuation procedure. And yet, at the same time that I am ready to read scraps like this, I am an overdiscriminating reader. I am always not reading something in the name of something else. The opportunity cost of reading a given book is always too great. Some books, obviously, are a waste of one’s eyes. To feel this about airport blockbusters is perfectly normal, but I feel it is beneath me to read Jeanette Winterson, for example, or Hanif Kureishi. In fact, most so-called quality fiction that is story-driven seems a waste of time (time that, by the way, I have in abundance). This would be fine if I could transpose a reluctance to read James Hawes into a willingness to read Henry James, but I am unable to get beyond the first five paragraphs (i.e., four sentences) of The Golden Bowl.

The strange thing about this is that at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov: I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought—and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.

Even at this late stage, however, some books do slip through the net and get read. I could make neither head nor tail of the first part of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea; normally I would have abandoned it, but, since the book was short and the end in sight almost from the first page, I finished it and realized that it was indeed the masterpiece everyone had claimed. Given that my faith in the canon remains relatively intact, why can’t I do that over a longer distance?

To an extent I’ve become if not a child then an adult of sound-bite culture, unable to concentrate on anything that does not offer immediate gratification. I have succumbed to what George Steiner in his essay “The Uncommon Reader” calls “the near-dyslexia of current reading habits.” (Just as I am often too discriminating to read, so my inability to read first manifested itself as a negative proof of my being, by Steiner’s definition at least—”a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book”—an intellectual: I found I couldn’t read without a pencil in my hand.) It is in this sense that I am symptomatic

of “the fate of reading in the digital age.” The phrase is Sven Birkerts’s, the subtitle—and all I’ve read—of his Gutenberg Elegies. Appropriately enough, I look back elegiacally on my life as an obsessive reader, on my Bernhard phase, my Brodsky phase, my Camus phase, my DeLillo phase . . . I think of those sublime periods of lamp-lit solitude when, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “the reader became the book.” It can still happen, but it has something of the character of the occasional lovemaking of a long-married couple in that it reminds me of how things have changed, of how infrequently I am now consumed by a passion that was once routine. Losing myself in J. M. Coetzee’s Booker-winning Disgrace, I remember how I used to pass from one book to another in a tranced relay of imagined worlds. Looking at André Kertész’s photographs of readers sharing—however precariously perched—in the repose of the text, I find myself wondering and remembering.

Specifically, I remember two pieces in the American journal The Hungry Mind Review, which asked a number of writers to select a single book from this century that they would take with them into the next. Reflecting on the way he had gradually lost interest in fiction, Gerald Early asked if “this is how one, by stages, loses the ability to read or the interest in reading altogether.” This in turn, he thought, might be part of a process whereby one loses “slowly but inexorably the ability to feel deeply about anything.” For his part, Sven Birkerts chose Rilke’s Duino Elegies because “it is there we find the most potent possible distillation of subjective inwardness, our most endangered attribute.” Is this lack of “subjective inwardness” the malady of which my—and Early’s—declining ability to read is a symptom?

Perhaps not. In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, John Berger has speculated that the inability to remember might itself be a memory (of being a memory-less baby in the womb). In the same way, my declining ability to read is itself the product of having read a fair bit. If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad possibilities it has opened up. The more thoroughly we have absorbed its lessons, the less frequently we need to refer to the user’s manual. After a certain point subjective inwardness becomes self-rather than textually generated. Of course there is more to learn, more to read, but whereas, when I was a teenager, each new book represented an almost overwhelming addition to what I knew and felt, each new book now adds a smaller increment to the sum of knowledge.

When I was an eighteen-year-old in Cheltenham, waiting to study English at Oxford, my experience was radically circumscribed. I’d never been abroad. Except for teachers, I’d hardly met anyone who was not from pretty much the same working-class, non-reading milieu as my family. On the other hand, I was bursting with the limitless imaginings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Lawrence. A life devoted entirely to the study of literature seemed the highest possible destiny. No longer. Reading, which gave me a life, is now just part of that life, at the moment rather a small part.

Books played a crucial part in determining how I became what I am. That slghtly ungainly phrase is derived from the subtitle of Ecce Homo, in which Nietzsche delivers the pronouncement with which anyone who has learned anything from books—from his, at any rate—will agree: “Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book—I call that vicious!”

Geoff Dyer, “Reader’s Block,” from Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.