RESILIENCE

I was born with three older sisters and have been married for over 30 years. These ladies, who have had a great influence in my life, gave me the impression that selecting their clothes was a simple affair. My wife selects her dresses in a jiffy and my immediate elder sister pushes my limits of patience a bit – that is about it. Then imagine my surprise when my niece called me from the US and asked me to talk to her “tailor” on 5^th for an appointment to meet him. Well, amused as I was, I did call the “tailor” on 5^th evening and he graciously agreed to meet us on the next day evening. He was very polite and sounded sophisticated. He rattled off an address in Royapettah, Chennai which I was not familiar. When I enquired about the route, he asked me a plain question” Will you be coming by car or scooter?” Knowing Royapettah and its by lanes, I would have preferred a scooter but considering the “US” niece, I said I would be coming in my car. He respectfully added that I cannot drive my car into his street! When I further quizzed him about the route, he asked me “Are you on Whatapp?” A “tailor” asking me this – I was dumbfounded. Once I responded in the affirmative, I got his directions in a minute.

The next day I set out with my niece following his directions meticulously. During the course of the drive, my niece told me that the “tailor” was Joy and he was also a dancer! We reached a place where I parked my car and then went looking out for Joy walking into those lanes. Forget my car, I could not have driven my scooter there. Then I called him as I was going in circles and he came out of an even narrower lane and called me waving at me. I saw him and with great trepidation entered his “shop”.

An American, after his first visit to India, once said, “India is like a snake holding its own tail. The head is in the 21^st century and its tail in the 17^th!” Well, I could now understand what he meant. Joy’s place, though in the midst of a noisy and crowded by lane, was tastefully decorated. I could see the sign “J O Y Boutique” with the tag line “Clothes that speak!” I never knew clothes could speak. The lighting bulbs were covered with tastefully designed bamboo coverings, with the partitions to the tailoring area decorated using jute screens. There were stacks of stitched clothes neatly packed and waiting to be delivered to customers. I was impressed. He certainly had taste.

We introduced ourselves and he was a very pleasant man, may be in his forties, I guessed. He was smartly dressed in a shorts and a kurta – perhaps a designer one. He spoke impeccable English. My niece wanted to stitch a few blouses and had brought one for measurement that had a few glitches. He wanted her to wear it and point out the defects. As she went about her business, I, the compulsory conversationalist, started a dialogue with Joy. What I heard in the next 10 minutes left me astounded.

Joy was a Bharathanatiyam dancer from the Kalashetra School of dance. He had performed in many countries and had been to the US also several times. Once, a few years ago, while performing in Sri Lanka, he fell off a trampoline and hurt himself very badly and was almost paralyzed neck downwards. He suffered from what is medically termed “quadriparesis” He had to be airlifted to Chennai and was in a hospital for close to three months. He was in rehabilitation for over 2 years and slowly regained strength in his limbs. Though dance was his first love, he could not go back again. Hence he started his own boutique designing women’s clothes.

The psychologist in me popped up the question “Were you not depressed?” He replied with a gentle smile “Yes, at times, but I did not allow it to get the better of me. My family and close friends supported me to the hilt. But for their love and the Grace of Lord, I would not have made it. I don’t dwell on the past but am grateful that I am back and doing my best for my customers”. I had tears in my eyes, as here I was seeing a man who was dealt a cruel blow by fate and there he was resilient, strong and cheerful as anyone can be. Hats off to you Joy, I told him. I was reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s beautiful poem “If you can keep your head …you’ll be a Man my son!” I rarely get to meet people like Joy. More often than not, I meet people who crib about small things – how life is unfair to them. As he went back into the tailoring area, I could see him walk with a very slight drag of his leg – remarkable mobility for a man who probably would not have even walked!

My niece gave instructions and then gave about 6 or 7 blouse pieces for stitching. Then I saw Joy, the master designer at work. For each of the blouses he sketched on a notebook a new design based on the fabric colour and patterns. This was sheer magic for a person like me who cannot even draw a straight line for all the money in the world. Within no time he completed the designs and then I knew this “tailor” was no ordinary “tailor”. He was a master craftsman who really brought “Joy” to his customers. And Joy is a classic example living the adage “The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and tribulations!"

May your good work continue, Joy! God bless you.

You can know more about Joy and work in his FB page (yes he has a FB page as well!).

As I took leave of him, two things became apparent – clothes do speak and stitching women’s clothes is after all no ordinary matter! 

LIVING ON AUTOPILOT

Sherlock Holmes, the legendary fictional detective of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his faithful chronicler Watson were once in the forest camping. Late into the night after an invigorating discussion about the brilliant celestial bodies, they retired for the night in a make shift tent. In the middle of the night, Holmes suddenly woke Watson up and asked him an innocuous question “What do you see?” Watson, the simple soul that he is, despite feeling sleepy, started to reply enthusiastically “I see the constellation of the Taurus..” when Holmes rudely interrupted him and said “My dear Watson, someone has stolen our tent!” The moral of the story, as often Holmes puts it, is  “We see but don’t observe!” How true!

Assume that we are driving to our office and we see a BMW car in front of us. Here is how our thoughts might wander .. BMW what a great car – the Germans are marvelous in engineering – but how did they obey the orders of such a devil as Hitler.. Poor Jews so brutally terminated in Auschwitz … Good that they fled to Israel..   And Israel is such a small country but they produce such outstanding software especially in the area of security … and presto you are already in office! You have driven 5-6 Kms without observing what is happening on the road in a mechanical way oblivious of the surroundings – the cyclists, the buffaloes on the road et al! This is living on auto pilot. Is this abnormal? – Not at all. But the sad part is you miss out on a lot of stuff that is happening around you besides putting yourself at risk. This becomes a difficult habit to get over.

It is not only when driving but most of our activities from morning till we go to bed is done in an mechanical way without really experiencing what we are actually doing. I go for early morning walks and I see people invariably with their ipod’s plugged in and plodding along. They don’t enjoy the birds chirping, the beauty of a sunrise, the milkman peddling his way on the road or the paper wallah throwing the paper very deftly into the balconies! Are we really living?

This extends to all our activities. The worst among them is our eating habits. We have no idea what we are eating – we eat while driving, dressing up, seeing the morning news, reading – you name it and someone does it that way. What happens then is we do not “enjoy” our food in the real sense of the term and at times unable to even recall what we ate a while ago. I have been at the receiving end on many occasions on this count! And the modern malady of the need to upload photos to FB has made things worse. The folks who take photos are not really enjoying the scene but want to “capture” the moment to post it on FB. So much so, the Chennai city police have put up warning signs on busy intersections with the message “Your FB updates can wait. Please watch where you are walking!” Even without FB updates crossing the road in Chennai is a catastrophe – what to say about crossing the road while updating FB! But this is precisely what people are doing.  

Why are we all doing this? Is this normal? Norman Farb and his six other colleagues at the University of Toronto studied this phenomenon and discovered that we experience the world in two different ways using two different set of networks in the brain. One is called the “default” or “narrative” network. When you use this network, you take in information from the outside world, process it through a filter of what everything means, and add your interpretations. This default network is effective for most of the waking moments and doesn’t take much effort to operate. This network perhaps operates when we live on an autopilot!

There is nothing wrong with this network, but there is a whole other way of experiencing experience. Scientists call this as one of “direct” experience. When the direct network circuit is active, different parts of the brain are activated. We do not think about the past or the future but take in information from the outside world in real time. In other words you are in the “Here and Now” – the holy grail of all religious practices! How do we switch to this direct network more often?