THE GIRL WHO FEARED FLOWERS

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was afraid of flowers. Yes, that sounds like a stretch, but there are verified accounts of it from people who have witnessed her unexplainable dread. She would avoid outings for the fear that her parents may take her to a garden, she would shake at the first sight of flowers on the waysides, she would whimper as if the flowers were a host of demons waiting to pounce on her. ‘Flo..wers…flo..wers..no…’ the broken refrain would continue till she was removed from the scene and made sure that there were no flowers to hassle her anymore.

It was unclear from where the fear had entered her tiny heart and what twisted her imagination into believing that one of the most beautiful creations of nature was the most menacing things on earth. The origins of fear are hazy, its reasons often illogical and its basis is mostly imaginary. Nothing could have explained the rare response of the three-year-old to an object that in due course of time would become one of the biggest loves and cravings of her life.

The girl, now cruising in her 50’s, is harking back to that time in her life with disbelief as she browses the internet to place an order for a bouquet to a dear, young couple celebrating their wedding anniversary. She finds a pretty pack of red roses, adds a personalized message of endearment, and smiles, as she imagines the joy it would bring to the couple when it is delivered at their door. The roses would remain in their vase till they withered, and then its rufous memory will linger in their lives forever. Flowers don’t die; they merely fall. And then, they become a collage of fragrant impressions in the corridors of our time.

As decades fell by, the girl grew out of her infantile fear and she is now a certified flower fanatic. She staunchly believes that there is no better present than a bouquet to express immaculate love, there is nothing prettier than flowers to embellish our sepia lives with, and if there is one thing that can beat their heady fragrance, it is only the scent of the rain.

There is no season of Spring in the place she lives. Her life is set to the backdrop of desert monochrome for most part of the year. The city is periodically landscaped with patches of petunia and marigold here and there, but they are only cosmetic touch-ups.

She waits for summers when the city suddenly explodes with the gulmohar and she gasps at its flamboyant flourish wondering if she could absorb all its opulence into her heart; she dreams of tulip gardens, lavender fields and spring blossoms in foreign lands and plans make-believe trips to those places from where she would never have to return; she fills her balcony with bougainvillea and 10 O’ clock flowers that she tends to as if they were precious orchids and every night, before she slips into sleep, she makes a secret wish. That the doorbell would ring the next day and a delivery boy would hand her a big bunch of roses as a gift from someone who loves her dearly, or someone close would walk in with a surprise, even if it’s not her birthday. At least once, before life pulls its plug on her, she hopes to receive a bouquet as a present. Someday. Funny, how some wishes are too small to realize, yet for reasons unknown, they take a lifetime to be granted.



LOVE YOURSELF MORE TO LOVE OTHERS BETTER

When India celebrated and slammed in the same breath its first sologamy event a few weeks ago, beyond all the hype and heckling I saw it as a young woman’s open assertion of a concept that most of us still struggle to understand and practice: Self-love. Incidentally, it was in the same week that I received a request from a reader to throw some light on ‘loving oneself’ through my columns.

As I contemplated on the subject, it became evident to me that if there is one thing that we primarily and predominantly love in our lives, it is us. However, we are blindsided by a chimerical world and a society that get into our head in ways we can’t fathom and distort our own sense of self. Loving oneself is not a habit that needs to be acquired; neither is it a lesson to be imparted. It is a characteristic that we all innately possess but have lost sight of amidst our warped world view. And it is time we realized and reclaimed it from within us, not necessarily with ostentatious public declarations, but effectively in the quietness of our self-reflections.

As humans, we all have a propensity for public recognition and an enormous appetite for acceptance. We seek validation from others, time and again, and it is in their approval that we find fulfilment. It is the degree of others’ love for us that determine our self-worth. In short, we have handed over the keys of our identity to outsiders.

We have become what others want us to be, and in doing so, we have alienated us from our original selves. We view ourselves through someone else’s eyes, and their love or lack of it becomes our distorted reality. How in such a scenario can we even comprehend our true nature, the little things that make us unique, and the essence of our existence?

Each of us is essentially three people – the one that others think we are; the one we think we are; and the one that we authentically are. Waltzing between these three identities, we have now become morphed entities.

Our sense of what we are rests on two levels – the physical and the spiritual. While there is no denying the fact that our appearances have assumed a lot of fictional importance in our worldly life, it begs the question of whether we must strictly fit in the popular perceptions of beauty and style. And whether we must allow others’ opinion to jeopardize our sense of self by handing over the right to determine our individual worth to them.

As long as we don’t acknowledge the fact that what others think of us is completely different from what we actually are; unless we realize that other people’s assessment of us only reflects their perceptions and not our truth; and most significantly, until we accept ourselves as God’s creations who don’t need the approval of others to lead a fulfilling life on earth, we will continue to be frustrated. Taking cognizance of our own self-perception, appreciating our strengths and accepting our imperfections as part of nature’s artistry alone can spare us of despicable practices such as body-shaming and self-rejection.

We are not what we see in the mirror. We are not what we accumulate in our bank accounts. We are not a gist of others’ praise or criticism. We are a sum total of what constitutes us as exceptional entities, each hand-crafted by nature to walk this earth and find our own individual destinies by the strength of our good values and robust principles.

To love ourselves, we must find the inner harmony that puts our essential human elements in the right places, by being so fluid that we may assume the shape of the container without resistance. It is when we trust our inner voices to the exclusion of external influences that we begin to see what we truly are and it is in this rare insight that the seed of self-love lies.

Our flaws and inconsistencies do not make us ugly; instead, accepting them and integrating them into our psyche as part of a divine plan will make us beautiful, like the golden cracks in Kintsugi pottery. Self-love is life-affirming, it is what provides us the space to grow at our pace and to our liking without the interference of a maverick world that is fast becoming indeterminably harsh and dysfunctional.

Finally, it is only when we love ourselves unreservedly looking past our pluses and minuses, can we love others impartially. There is nothing more empowering than knowing that the foundation of universal harmony and peace lies in our capacity to love ourselves with all our heart.

KEEP AN OPEN MIND, LISTEN TO DIFFERENT SOURCES

I’ve just got out of a creative writing class with my three 10th graders. It was a highly interactive session with discussions based on an opinion essay I had given them as an assignment. The one-hour class extended to an hour and 45 minutes, and boy, did I have a good time listening to their intuitive ideas!

This is how my classes go, with robust thought-exchanges to which I listen with the keenness of an explorer. I remove my thinking cap, park my perceptions, and allow the children to present their thoughts. I interrupt only to throw in a question now and then to steer the conversation in different directions. I tender a willing ear, not allowing any of my own ideas to interject their views. And they speak, baring their hearts, because they know that I am listening, appreciating every bit of their ingenuity.

Perspectives flurry back and forth, with not a speck of acrimony or impatience to beat down the others. There is so much involvement and acceptance among them that by the end, they turn wiser and more clued up about the topic of the day. And what do they gain from the whole exercise? Clarity about things we often ponder upon but don’t get anywhere near a closure. The final winner is not a participant, but the art of listening that facilitates the smooth flow of thoughts without stumbling over untimely interruptions and presumptuous assertions.

Listening - it is an art we are slowly losing to our zealous desire to be heard over the millions of voices echoing around. We have become hard of hearing by choice in a cacophonous world, and that is an irony. So much din with no one to pay attention to. So, who are we talking to? And why aren’t we listening?

Human mind is the loudest and the most disruptive noise in the world, and what makes it so difficult to ignore is the power we give to our inner ramblings. We cannot turn a deaf ear to the voice of our minds. We develop so much attachment with our

perceptions that we preclude anything that isn’t in tune with it.

Our love for our own theories, our unstinted faith in our judgments, and our refusal to allow foreign ideas into our space makes listening a lesser trait that we believe we could do without. It is good to be steadfast in our mind and know what our core beliefs are, but when we ignore the voices outside, we are limiting ourselves like the proverbial frog that thought the world began and ended with the well. Our refusal to listen to divergent views exposes our deep-seated prejudices and conceit. It is the ultimate pointer to our indomitable egos that will settle for nothing less than an unchallenged acceptance of our viewpoints.

Those who enjoy a good argument get involved in meaningless diatribes, and those who don’t, switch their hearing aids off and let the other man air his views to no avail. Either way, there is no exchange of useful information or ideas that could expand our horizons and help us take better decisions in life.

Our lack of listening skills has begun to shrink our mental and emotional territories, cramping us in narrow ideologies. We are becoming more and more polarized and intolerant as people, and our inability to accommodate differing views is turning us into islands of haughty homo sapiens.

Pay heed to other voices because you never know from where the next big solution to our combined troubles will emerge. Our options in life might lay in someone else’s head, and when we listen, we realize that there is a bit of us in every other person, and a bit of them in us. We understand our dilemmas better when we listen to their versions and interpretations of life.

When we keep an open mind, bracketing our own ideas for a while and keeping our judgment at bay, we will see how many different ways there are to make this mortal journey pleasurable. When we control our urge to refute, defend or deflect outright, and allow patience to settle in, we will know that we all have the same kinds of delights and disappointments, and the same destiny to deal with.

It is only when we are willing to listen to different sources that we will become aware of the universal story of mankind and find creative ideas to solve this massive jigsaw puzzle. Else, all we would have in our lives is a lot of sound and fury that in the end would signify nothing.