Horse back to Thane

Devesh enjoying his manchow soup

The road to Thane from this side of town is so full of potholes that you feel more like you’re jogging in a saddle than riding in your car. Bumpitty bumpitty bump bump. After swerving every which way to avoid hitting some biggies Raju finally got us to Cine Wonder on Godbunder Road where I was to meet Devesh and there he was, waving and grinning away as soon as he spotted us. Devesh is a friend who put together a very nice group towards the end of last year, for whom I conducted a series of sessions on "stillness and listening."

We had lunch at a restaurant called “Lemon” owned by a friend of his. It is a nice rustic place, open air and covered with a canopy (wonder how they manage with the rains!) Along one side is a row of alcoves furnished with low tables and mats on the floor. Very informal like. You can even get a hookah so D and I decided to try one. Apricot flavoured. It was much stronger for some reason than those I smoked in Turkey. The food was not bad – we ordered Chinese. (Okay, the usual Punjabi Chinese it was, Manchow soup, fried rice and Manchurian chicken).

The reason for my going to Thane was to meet Mahendra and his students. He was at the Sri Guru Akademy of Art. (Hope I got that right!) It was close to where we ate, about five minutes down the road in Hiranandani Estate. I expected a modest middle class venue but this one turned out to be real swanky, with shiny marble floors and I loved the nice clean toilets. What took me aback a bit were smiling garlanded portraits on every wall of old Sri Sri. I always get suspicious when I see portraits of smiling gurus. Guru stuff makes me suspicious anyway and the big smilers make me even more nervous than the normal looking ones. It’s like Big Brother is watching you – even if it is with a smile. And of course you know the smile is conditional …

About thirty odd students had turned up for Mahendra’s lecture and he was pissed off with them for not doing their homework, which was to observe and draw a window. Any window. A window in a car or a house or anywhere at all. About two out of the entire lot had done what they were supposed to, and we discussed their work.

After the lecture I wandered through some of the other rooms where art works by the students had been displayed, right from the eight and nine year olds to the adults. These are mainly students of Vijaya – Mahendra’s wife, who is also an artist. They were terrific. Especially the ones done by the youngsters. Very vibrant and colourful.

Mental Prisons

One more hospital visit with Meher. It is so sad to see the apathy which grips this country. The counsellor in charge (she likes to be called “Doctor” although I don’t think she is one!) was sitting on the bench with her patients languidly looking around her. She didn’t bother to greet me when I walked up to her. We were supposed to start the session at 10.30 but by 10.40 we still didn’t have the key to the playroom and half a dozen of us were hanging out listlessly in the little patch of garden outside the building. Finally the counsellor (who doesn’t seem at all interested in even knowing what our work is about, Meher’s and mine) sent us the key to the room with another doctor. (Maybe he really was a daakter, I don’t know. Well, they all wear white coats).

There were seven patients today and we worked with them for about an hour. Several of the ones who came last time have been discharged and there were two newcomers this morning who claimed they did not know why they were in the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Two of the patients are there because they are drug addicts.

Meher told me that two of the patients D and S have been in the hospital for six months. Actually they have already been discharged but their families don’t want them back. So they continue to hang out in the hospital, in the chocolate brown hospital tunic, which makes them look a bit like convicts. The focus seems to be on medicating these guys to just about the level when they cease to be a nuisance to society. There is absolutely no interest in anything more positive than that, in helping them to develop as individuals.

Retreat in Marve

The guys

Returned after quite an in-depth journey with six others including Pankaj and Vijay, at Marve. The theme of our workshop occurred to me quite spontaneously a few days before we met and probably had to do with a sort of dissatisfaction I was experiencing in myself. The question I thought of exploring with the others was, what do we mean by “quality” and how does it relate to us? Quality, as in quality of life, quality of our relationships and so on. How do we experience it and do we really want it?

It is amazing how, at a deeper level most of us feel the same. By and large all of us agreed that quality rested on honesty, on being authentic. A difficult thing because honesty is often embarrassing, especially in view of the fact that we are always trying to please each other. We are not honest because we are afraid to “destroy” a relationship. We seldom realise the fact that by not being honest, the relationship anyway goes for a six. Either it results in conflict or it goes dead over a period of time. The battery runs out.

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Marve is great during the rains. It poured off and on while we were there, and I thought about July 26th and whether we would be stranded in getting back home. Meena, the cleaning woman told me, that during the time of the Big Rains, the whole area around the house was like a lake. There was water up to the top of the front steps and the garden was drowned under several feet of water.

Raju, our tried and trusted caterer whose shack is down the road, and who provides wholesome veg thalis for Rs. 30, had locked up shop the day we arrived. So that evening, Vijay, Pankaj, Ganesh and I made do with tomato and cheese sandwiches, Khichdi made with pure ghee, which Ganesh had brought along, prepared by his mother. And there were plenty of fruits. Panky painstakingly peeled the apples and pears and we ate those and small yellow bananas and chikoos. The hungry guys – Venky, Sharat and Sanju went out for dinner to a nearby restaurant and returned shrugging their shoulders. “It was okay,” they said though Sharat found the food terribly spicy.

Luckily Raju was back the next day so we were able to order Upma for breakfast. But our dinner failed to arrive. We had ordered for 8 PM and when there were no signs of it by nine, Panky and Ganesh drove down to see what was up. They found the cook and the odd job boy sitting in the shack, totally drunk. They had forgotten about cooking our dinner but were prepared to do it even at this late stage. “Just that we have to go to the bazaar to buy the veggies,” they apparently told Panky and G. So they returned empty handed and we ate the remainder of the khichdi and bread and cheese and tomatoes. Quite a healthy weekend on the whole. My stomach which had gone for a six the previous day returned quickly to normal.

A Cousin Visits

Caught up with my cousin Shiv yesterday. We sat out on the balcony of my grandmother’s flat in the evening, testing out a unique cocktail which Shiv mixed for us. (Shiv puts his heart and soul into experimenting with cocktails). So – hold your breath. This one had a gin base, a bit of kokum syrup, topped with pineapple juice and soda and I asked him to throw in a slit chilly into my glass. Hmmmm. Strange all right, but well, not bad.

We talked about a lot of things, about what his life has been like after he opted to retire a year ahead of time. Shiv is increasingly involved in community work in Bangalore and we both felt sorry about how city people are just not inclined towards community. I mean we talk of it longingly from time to time but the drive is lacking. Everybody lives in their own cocoon. We complain about the degenerating quality of life but are not much inclined to work towards it. One of the things I feel is, that we are not aware very much, of the basis for true community. The fact that community grows out of relationship. Where the energy and the feeling between people is right, something like community will bloom. So the fact that it is not happening surely means that we have to look at our connections with each other and why we are somehow …so blah … about everything, so bored with life, blasé, or running around like chickens with our heads cut off. (I used the word “we” for that last bit too although I’m not one of the headless chickens! But know plenty of them.)

Those of you haven’t met Shiv for a while might find him changed. I told him yesterday that I found him a lot more pleasant to be with, more energetic and alert than I have known him to be for years. He says his wife tells him the same thing.

Wednesday's Music Meditation

Sometimes, even when you’re in the midst of “lively company” you feel lonely. I’ve figured out that this happens when our basic feeling of loneliness is denied. So not only do you actually feel lonely but on top of that you have to try and prove that you are not and that you are having a good time. This was one of the topics I brought up at yesterday’s music med, which Meher and Charmayne attended. (The rest were either busy/indisposed/found it too much of a problem attending from far away).

What I reaslise is that even after being with each other in this group for two years (some of us know each other longer than that) we are not really able to be quiet with each other and need to fill up all available space with chatter. How tiresome. I don’t know how you guys feel, but it gets me down. In fact I realize that very few people are able to be still and at ease being still – not just sitting silently and fidgeting inwardly because they don’t know what to say. Among the few are the people I visited in the “Swiss community” this summer. It is so peaceful there and yet far from boring. You can say what you want to, and keep quiet when you wish and there is absolutely no need to prove anything. I can imagine that some people would feel uncomfortable with that sort of thing because they are so used to talking their heads off and silence makes them feel something is terribly wrong.

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A strange dream last night in which I find myself traveling with my grandmother, the way she was about, say thirty years ago. Active and fit. We are in France and at some point I’m up in a helicopter with Sushama (my friend in Delhi) and we’re hovering over a lot of islands in the middle of lakes, filled with chateaus and quaint houses. All the time I wonder what will happen if Sushama forgets how to operate the helicopter or we run out of fuel. At the same time I do want to get a closer look at what I see down below and as if she can read my thoughts Sushama does something to the engine whereby we simply hover in the air without moving forwards and I am fascinated at how she does it!

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Lalita ... Lalluji!

The phone rings. I'm in the middle of writing something and answer it with a bit of a grimace. "It's me, Lalita," says the voice at the other end and this announcement is followed by a long and merry giggle. "Lalita?" I'm about to say. "I don't know any Lalita!" Then it hits me.

Meher! So it turns out she had just read the piece about her (using a pseudonym) which I had posted on the basicindia site, in which I had described her breakdown and she wanted to tell me it was perfectly okay for me to use her real name. Well that makes it a lot easier for me and anyway you guys in the group knew it anyway.

In the coming weeks I am sure you will hear more about Meher's and my adventures at Masina Hospital (that is, if they allow us to continue our visits. You never know!) and how the music meditation turns out.

Immersion day!

Today is one of the big Ganpathi immersion days. This festival makes me so aggressive, the way it brings everything to a standstill for the entire period which is more than 10 days. The fridge, eg., at my grandmother’s has conked out and I know that nobody from the company (WHIRLPOOL!) is going to even come and look at it – those engineers are probably going to be sitting at home doing pooja. The sadistic part of me wants it to really pour this afternoon about the time the processions set off. Then everyone can have fun!

They make Ganpathis out of just about everything these days. Out of Glucose biscuits, aluminium vessels, out of sweetmeats and now I read that there’s an idol somewhere put together out of over 300 clocks! Anyway, it might sound sacrilegious but it seems such a waste to put those idols together and to then go and drown them in the sea or some lake.

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Read some stuff in the Times today that would definitely interest Sharat. It seems smokers can offset the damage done by smoking, to their lungs by swallowing 500mg of Vitamin C every day. (Listen Sharat, this was just for your amusement - I wouldn't really buy the theory!) Unfortunately there is no such antidote for the over consumption of alcohol.

Music for the mentally disturbed

I am apparently not the only one in Bombay who gets paranoid at the sight of gray skies. The July 26th episode seems to have really shaken up people in general. Now, if it rains for fifteen minutes, Raju, the driver asks if he can go home in case the roads get flooded. The last couple of days have been rather wet, though not overwhelmingly so. Yesterday I decided to visit Anuradha in Powai – a drive of at least an hour and a half from where I am, if not more, depending on the traffic.

Parvati, my grandmother’s maid, was most adamant about my not going, because of the drizzle. By noon it had cleared up though, and since this visit to Powai has been pending for months, I decided to set off. When I told Paru I was going anyway, she flapped her hands grumpily and responded in her usual "Mala nahin mahit" fashion. Then she ordered me to phone her as soon as I returned home, however late it might be, which I duly did. I think Parvati is now gradually taking Nalinima's place. She even phones in the morning to find out where I am and what I am doing!

Yesterday morning Meher and I conducted our first music meditation in the psychiatric ward of Masina hospital. Talk about organizational problems! Meher had spoken to the counsellor in charge who was supposed to be present. We had been offered the use of the play room downstairs, which Meher said would serve our purpose well. But when we got there, we discovered the counsellor was not going to be there after all (blame it on the rains!) and the nurse in charge refused to allow us into the play room because there were some older patients watching TV in there and according to Sister Mean Mind, only Parsees were allowed in this room.

So Meher and I finally decided to conduct the music med in the passage on the second floor, outside the ward. Yes, well. Imagine what that was like, with ward boys and nurses coming and going and shouting loudly and trays of tea and biscuits being transported upstairs and downstairs and people chatting or just gawking at us throughout. In spite of all that, the session went off well and we actually managed to introduce some stillness in the vicinity of our work!

Meher is really very good. I didn't do anything, just played the music and got the individuals to be still. She got them to dance and move. They respond very well to her. In the beginning they were shy and hardly moved but towards the end they really began to enjoy it.

Last night I think our cat Mishi, had a bad dream. She was lying as usual at the foot of my bed at night. At some point I woke up to hear her squeal and I sat up. She was looking around, rather sleepily. I stroked her and talked to her and after that she was quiet and went promptly back to sleep.

The ouch in life

There are a couple of things, the thought of which makes me really wince. 1) Visits to the dentist - and 2) what Asha calls "Payshuls". (Facials). Actually my present dentist is a good guy and can make even root canal work seem relatively painless. These days I sail through the normal check ups and cleaning. Still, I suppose the memory of all the hours spent as a kid and a young adult in the dentist's chair, not to mention a dentist with a Don Martin look bending over you, and working with old world instruments that looked like miniature scalpels, and having to spit out tons of blood every time you got the tartar scraped off your teeth is embedded in your brain cells and you cant help the "ouch" that involuntarily arises at the thought of your next appointment.

As for Payshuls. Sunita - Asha's daughter - came over to give me one this morning and for the umpteenth time I wondered why one needs to go through with all of it, with being kneaded and poked and having blackheads tweezed out of the side of your nose. But a couple of years ago when Sunita was a student at a beauty parlour at Kemps Corner, she would come and practise on me and in a way it's become a habit I suppose and I am getting used to the idea. At least when I am eighty seven years old I will be told by people that I dont look a day over eighty.

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Our post lunch conversation, Asha's and mine this afternoon: she asked me which side of her body her heart was. I told her. She said she supposed that if she ever felt pain in that region she ought to run to the doc. I said well, it could also be gas ("gase" according to Asha) but she wasn't buying it. There was this young man in the chawl, who lived in the room next door, she said. Recently, one night, he woke up with a pain in his chest, thought it was gase and rubbed some ointment all over his chest. The next day as he was standing in the post office queue to send a money order to the gaon, he collapsed on the floor, clutching fifteen hundred rupees and the money order form - and died.

"Well, of course," says Asha Bai, "if you have to die you have to die. If I really have to die I dont mind."

Rain - and last rites

Though I wasn’t here during the time of the Big Rains and the July flood, I have become slightly paranoid about the situation. Any hint of grey skies and even a little drizzle is apt to make me feel a bit panicky. I feel like cancelling appointments for the day and staying home, curled up with a book or with my computer. Beset by images of roads flooded neck deep with gutter water and open drains down which you could find yourself being sucked. Being drowned in your own car. Ugh.

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Vishnu recently mailed me saying he and Peg were coming to India in Feb and if I liked he could help me immerse Nalinima’s ashes. I told him I would have to consult Tukaram on that – deputy manager of flat no 11 Rewa Apts. (Mum’s the chief). When I asked Tuks he was delighted. Said it was the best thing that could happen, regarding my grandmother’s spiritual development. In other words it is good to have a son or grandson to immerse your ashes and conduct the last rites. (I got a glimpse at this point into the Indian mania for sons!) Women are not the same. Like they might be nice (eg me) but all they’re good for is to cook and bear and raise children etc. Considering I do none of that, I don’t know what Tuks really thinks of me. One thing is, he thinks I am terribly untidy and tells me my room is in an appalling state. Then we both agree that something should be done about it. This has been going on for a few years I guess.

Off to Vijay's place for lunch. Because of my internet connection being down the last few days I have been going there to check mail and it is a nice ritual involving ginger tea provided by Jagannath, and intermittent chatting with Vijay who when he is not talking to me is busy with the phone, hanging around in his pyjamas or shorts.

The internet has just come alive again but since we both settled on lunch I thought I would keep the appointment. Besides it is not raining!

day to day 1

N. has recovered completely. It wasn't malaria thank god, nor was it jaundice as J was beginning to suspect on account of N looking a bit "yellow". Now they are busy gadding about, shopping, inspecting speakers at Heera Panna and looking for book bargains in town.

J and N are still occupied with the Italian visa. They have been given a real run around. Get this, get that. The Italians obviously don't believe in giving all the info needed at one go. Visas are such a hassle for Indians, it makes you want to scream at them: keep you goddam visa and let me just stay home!

Amazing how time flies, doing absolutely nothing. At least it feels like I've been doing nothing. Just going through mail, a bit of translation for Samuel, checking out new music etc. Thinking of putting together new groups. Chatting with Parvati in the evenings about my grandmother.

Yesterday Parvati and I remembered the thief who had come in over thirty years ago, just crept in over the balcony and made his way to the kitchen in the dead of night. My great grandmother who used to live with my grandmother at the time, had been most indignant about the way he had helped himself to a bottle of milk and wiped his dirty hands on the kitchen towel. She seemed less bothered about the wallet belonging to my grandmother, which he ran off with. The amazing thing was that he was caught a few days later, when he tried jumping out of somebody's window on the second floor. He'd fallen and broken a leg and the police had actually retrieved my grandmother's wallet and given it back to her. Those were the days!

not much

N might be down with malaria. Help! Girish has asked for a blood test before making further decisions.

The July floods continue to hog the conversation. Yesterday at Girish and Rekha’s we talked a lot about our unpreparedness in general. How most of are so little able to cope with disasters and know almost nothing about our cars. The four management students from S.P. Jain college who died in their car, because most probably it didn’t occur to them to find a way to smash the window pane and to get out while the going was good.

Girish is a great doctor. When he meets me professionally he tells me I should lose weight because it is not good for my legs, but when we meet as friends he constantly plies me with food and drink. Fried fish, chicken curry, and loads of beer. It’s like “Eat, eat. What?! Don’t you want any more?!” Well, I am not objecting to any of that!

you ok?

Sickness making the rounds. Wherever I go people seem to be falling sick. This is getting to be almost suspicious! In Prien Thomas and two of the kids were down with a fluey kind of fever, in Frankfurt Sabine was practically writhing with a stomach infection, in Bombay now, N is running a high temperature which Girish has promised to come over and check out shortly. And I just got a mail from Champaign to say both parents were down with a cough and mother’s also slightly feverish.

Have been sitting and looking at the piles of paper and books and CD’s in my room and wondering how the hell I can neaten up my surroundings without actually throwing away anything. I haven’t even dared to start looking at what I might have to throw away!

The depressing part

J and N are here from Pune and we have been catching up on all that has been happening in our lives in the last two months. N is here to get a visa for Italy where she is going to be spending three months on a study tour before returning to the U.S.

Read a bit more “news”. More about the house collapse near J.J. Hospital (DNA carried a photo of a 23 year old woman, mother of two children whom it referred to as “the poster girl of the house collapse.”

A municipal corporator stormed a police station with his goondas and killed two people while three officers and seven constables just looked on.

Saurav Ganguly arrived late for the match against New Zealand in Bulawaye because of his wife’s birthday. There was something about a Bra war between the U.K and China and about the new lathis for policeman. The old ones made of bamboo have been replaced by fibre lathis. The four policemen in the pic, with their lathis in front of them looked a bit like Fred Astaire, about to break into a tap dance.

The most depressing part of the news, I have discovered, is not the floods and the house collapses. It is the page three news. The partying people, the inane captions, the even more inane expressions on the faces of the people. Not that I have anything against people enjoying themselves because that is what life is at least partly about. But is this enjoyment or more like, a determined looking away from reality. The depressing thing is the attitude with which we live and behave towards each other.

Bombay musings

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Back to the old routine. Wake up around seven thirty, exercise, shower, breakfast, and dive into the net. Write. Listen to all the new CD’s I've picked up on the trip. Read. Bathroom reading at the moment is Nick Hornby (How to be good) and general reading includes a variety of newspapers which land up on our doorstep every morning. Yesterday the newspaper man even threw in the "Navbharat Times" for good measure though none of us read in any language other than English.

Yesterday saw DNA for the first time which doesn’t look bad. I prefer the look to the Times. The contents … well I read about the house crash in Tardeo (which I had heard about from Asha in great detail), about Sharad Pawar’s attempt to free the sale of wine (what a good idea – imagine being able to buy wine in a supermarket or from your local grocer along with the milk!) and the after effects of the Big Rain. Had a vague feeling somehow that by not reading the papers for two months I ... hadn’t missed much.

My mother had already told me when we crossed each other in Paris, about the floods in Bombay and people being trapped in their cars and dying and when I came back Asha told me about her nephew Santosh having to walk miles in almost neck deep water before coming across a guy who offered a bunch of people a lift. Santosh apparently felt that the catastrophe brought out the best in people and for the first time in his life he got the feeling that people in Bombay had a heart.

I realised that hearing news first hand makes a big difference and touches you much more than when you get it from a newspaper or from TV.

Have been trying hard to clean up my room but after all the effort it still looks a bit of a mess. Must make an effort to get rid of stuff – I am such a hoarder!

Right now responding to emails from Germany - from Ayse, Ariela and Marlis.

Back in Bombay

Back home and still in the process of settling down. It was good to see everyone again. Saru and Parvati filled me in on my grandmother's last few hours. Parvati came over in the morning and wept and wept over her death and I sat and comforted her. Yes it does feel a bit strange visiting her flat with her not being around. And I realise that even if a person is ninety six and vague in the head they can still leave a kind of vacuum behind when they depart. Maybe it is just their presence. Maybe all of us, regardless of age and intellectual ability and other things by which we judge each other have what one could call "presence" and this is the essence of who we are. Maybe this is what you mostly like about someone and miss when the person is not around. It is difficult to describe.

Mishi is still acting a bit uppity. She came and sniffed around my bed last night and sniffed at me and lay down near my feet for a while but not for long. Busy converting the music I've brought along into MP3 format. Things seem generally okay.

Lunch Time Conversations

Uma and Basia in Frankfurt

Basia and I met yesterday for lunch at an Italian restaurant close to where Sabine lives. I had a pizza with artichoke and salami, which was quite good and which had a thin crust which I far prefer to the thick one. As usual we chatted about family and Samuel`s workshops and Basia`s own attempts to start a group in Frankfurt especially now that the group room which she is renovating is almost ready.

Not for the first time we spoke about Samuel`s "money workshops" (Workshops based on the theme of money). How money is really a "taboo" between us and how little we like to really talk about it or look at it honestly. Most of the time pretending it doesn`t exist and that it doesn`t affect our relationships.

For example, Basia said, it is not done to say "I have enough." You have more than you can cope with and say, an uncle or aunt dies and you inherit their wealth. It is unimaginable to say, "I don`t really need it, let someone else enjoy it."

Money is somehow an embarrassing topic for most of us. Maybe we need to look at it more carefully.

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Sabine who was down with a bad stomach infection (mainly throwing up) all of day before yesterday, has recovered now. Yesterday evening she wanted me to make my famous fish curry, which I did, and which she relished. We sat out on the balcony for quite a while, me with a bottle of wine and a cigarillo, catching up on all the happenings in our lives. At some point Dwight called from Toronto though the traffic noise was so penetrant that eventually we agreed to follow up on our conversation the next day (today).

The Last Lap

Back in Frankfurt with Sabine. It`s the end of the trip and boy does it seem like a long one. A kind of weariness has begun to creep in and basically am looking forward to getting back and back to work. What I will miss is being able to get around so easily on my own – the smooth clean streets, easy shopping, and all the rest that I experience when I am in Frankfurt.

Spent the whole day for example, in town yesterday, wandering around, sitting now and then on a street side bench. The pedestrian zone is full of them, and they are well used by weary folk who have spent hours on their feet – or by people just wanting to sit and watch the world go by. For quite some time I watched a girl with a punk haircut – sides shaved and a mane of blond and pink hair in the middle – dressed in ragged blue jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt playing the guitar and singing a Spanish song. By her side on the ground where she was sitting, was quite a large bottle of Sangria. Don`t know if she was really drinking but she was certainly singing passionately, in Spanish, at the top of her voice. She was so impressive, I couldnt help adding to the mound of coins which she was collecting in an upturned cap, for which she very sweetly thanked me.

Had lunch at a cafe where I usually eat, with a very nice outdoor sit-out from where you can just observe the world. And also spent a while at “Saturn” – the chain store which deals in music and electronics and everything that fascinates me. It is difficult not to buy stuff there and I imagine it would be easy to go broke doing that.

Getting any work done on Sabine`s computer is challenging – to put it very politely. It is an archaic piece (in keeping with her TV set which works at will - when it doesnt want to, just remains blank). The comp has no ostensible USB port – so downloading photos is not possible at the moment. Also it takes forever to open any document and the internet too moves at an equally tortoise like speed.

Basia is coming over today. We plan to visit the new room she has been doing up, which is in a sort of go-down, which she plans to use for workshops.

Reflections

Every workshop or shorter session seems to me, to offer an opportunity to look at age old questions. Shasha`s being here for a music and stillness session with us has once again brought up the usual themes. Whatever you say and however you phrase them, those themes boil down to this: what do you want out of life and what do you want out of relationships? Yesterday evening, when I put those questions to Shasha, Ariela said that perhaps one could phrase the first question the other way round too. For example, "What does Life want from me" . Indeed!

When I thought about it, I saw that it was in fact a much better way of putting the same thing. "What I want out of life" seems like a typical consumer oriented attitude, as if life is some kind of commodity which I am trying to get something out of. The other way around is more "real" because I suddenly see, that what we call life, is a process of unimaginable dimensions and who and what we are is dictated by the way it flows around us and whether we are willing to be part of the whole movement.

At times when one is required to go deeper into such questions, even one`s evironment starts to acquire a kind of intensity which is lacking under normal circumstances. You become aware of sounds and noises, of the "feel" of the day (eg. Right now, I am aware somehow of the greyness of the sky which seeps into the atmosphere and even as I write this the sun has suddenly decided to peep out from behind the clouds.) You become aware of something underlying the whole process of thinking or seeing and hearing which is difficult to express and you then also become aware that THIS is the reality that very subtly guides us. If it is contaminated by anger or envy or competitiveness then this is what dictates our words and actions. So the main message as usual is very simply: be aware of it all.

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Flu seems to be doing the rounds. Feli was quite sick yesterday, burning with fever, which didn`t prevent him from now and then running around and playing football with Michael - Ariela`s cousin who visited us yesterday - and in the process spilling a glass of apple juice which someone had kept on the floor and forgotten about. Michael, among other things is also a musician and had brought over a CD which he has just put together of twelve songs. I liked the sound of it very much although the lyrics were in the Bavarian dialect which I could barely understand.

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Read Chandran`s mail just now (the dodomail) in which he writes about the difficulty of meditating and being still, without the help of a group. Well, I think a group definitely helps in being still but maybe one of the reasons that it is difficult to do on one`s own is that one of the underlying reasons for much of what we do is the approval we hope to get from others. When for example, you are able to meditate and give the impression of being still and you get feedback from others in some form, it encourages you simply, to go further with it. One solution might be to take the trouble to meet in a group even when the "official group" is not meeting until such time as you can make it on your own. And simultaneously it would be good to examine what the real gains for you are, of being still and in a meditative state. When you see the deeper gains you begin automatically, to want it for yourself, group or no group. It feels good to be still within, and not to be constantly enmeshed in a complicated thought process.

Sunny Prien

Marlis left back for Berlin yesterday evening and we both sat and sighed about the fact that we wouldn`t be seeing each other most probably for at least a year - unless she decides to make it to India before March `06. During her stay this time we discovered we are both avid shoppers. That we love walking around, love bargain shops and are constantly on the look out for good deals of the 99 cent variety. After she left Ariela and I had a light dinner of toast, cheese and ham, and watched a movie which A. was seeing for the third time, which she liked very much. "Sleepers", featuring among others, Robert de Niro. About a bunch of kids growing up in the part of NY known as Hell`s Kitchen, and how their idea of harmless fun leads them to a penitentiary with pretty grim consequences. Mostly I dont like thrillers and suspense films but Ariela is trying to get me to change my mind. (Sleepers, which I now remember having seen on TV in India, a couple of years back) is in fact a good film).

Shasha (Suhail`s wife,) came in from Paris this morning and when she had settled down a bit after her journey, she and I walked down to the Thai cafe in the pedestrian zone. As usual it was full but this time I asked a lone woman sitting and reading at a table if we might join her and she politely agreed. So Shasha and I spent a very agreeable hour and a half in the sun, sipping Chardonnay followed by carrot and chicken soup, in turn followed by a spicy Thai chicken dish, cooked with veggies and bean sprouts. At some point the woman sitting at our table left and we were joined by a couple taking a lunch break, who were from a neighbouring town. They seemed very friendly and asked a lot of questions about what I did and where I was from and how come I spoke such good German.

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Last night Ariela had been feeling unwell so when she failed to appear at the usual time in the kitchen this morning, I decided for once to clear out the dishwasher and to put back the crockery and cutlery. Ute, the woman who helps with the household stuff came in around nine and made some appreciative noises to see me fiddling around the kitchen. I told her the truth - that when there was nobody around to do the requisite work I could somehow summon up the resources to do it. Most often though, seeing people manage their lives and their kitchens with brisk efficiency tends to make me want to merge with the wall paper out of sheer anxiety - which a lot of people mistake for laziness. Ariela who had turned up at some point, asked me what I was scared of. I said I was always afraid of dropping dishes and breaking glasses and other stuff, I felt like such a klutz. Ariela said that was quite all right, the dishes they had were very cheap, because of the kids so I could go ahead and ruin their crockery. THAT shouldn`t prevent me from contributing to the domestic front if I WANTED to.

But I have to say that once I got started on the job I didn`t mind it at all and after about five minutes even started to enjoy a sense of self importance as the kitchen began to look visisbly neater and more attractive.

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