Thank You and Sorry!

When do I thank somebody or apologise? And, when does someone thank me or apologise? There are some people whom you don’t thank, at least I know of in India. They are your parents, your spouse and your children. Language is a very interesting thing. It tries to capture the immense depth of the meaning of the feeling into a word, here its ‘thank you.’ You don’t thank your child who made you a parent. Pause for a while … and see the depth of this feeling called ‘thank you.’ ‘Dhanyavad’ is an Indian equivalent of thank you.

If we commit a mistake we say ‘sorry’. I wonder if my father would have ever said ‘sorry’ or its Indian equivalent to my grandfather. Those days, I guess, thank you and sorry were only felt in hearts and seen in eyes, never expressed in words. In our schooling system ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ are 2 words taught as golden words. It takes different amount of courage to say these 2 golden words depending on various situations.

By thanking somebody sincerely you take the weight off the other person. Somebody encouraged you when it was needed, a doctor who got you well, a teacher who made you understand a concept. In exchange you thanked that person. By thanking her/him you say ‘I am taking the responsibility now on, you don’t worry.’ We also take off the weight from a person when we say ‘I’m sorry.’ Again you take the responsibility and learn to move on. Somebody may argue saying ‘When I am paying for the services I am getting why should I thank somebody?’ Each of us have a ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ threshold. Some say ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ for every small thing and for some it takes a lot of energy to utter these words, they don’t say it at all. They think only they deserve thank you and sorry from people around them. All these attributes of ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry are subtle and our system (our body and mind) knows it so well that an essay is not required to measure the quality of these words when uttered by somebody.

Did you ever notice the body language when we use these words? In both these we slightly bend our back and lean forward. We give in. It’s a surrender.

Can you understand what is your threshold of saying ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’? Can you start being conscious of these two words and enjoy the magic that they hold in the word form and in the form of feeling? Can the sound of these words from our mouth come out with a touch from our heart? Its effect on somebody is secondary. What is its effect on me? Can I fathom the depth of these words and be aware of its effect on me when I utter them or hear them?

Thank you. Yes, thank you for this read!

Sensitivity

Dear Reader,

We normally say that till XII/PUC all teachers were fine, parents were fine but now things have changed for me. All teachers don’t teach that well in higher education colleges, I have to do self-study. All good talent has gone to industry or are in US. A wife/husband says everything was fine before marriage but now things are ‘different’. A daughter-in-law – mother-in-law start more than talking. A parent-child relation takes unknown courses. Let’s all pause for a while and see who we are in the scenes above: a student or a parent or who? I have a sincere question to somebody who say’s, “I was not like this before my marriage/college/parenthood. Because of my mother-in-law I have started behaving like this.” Instead of putting blame on a not-so-good-teaching teacher or mother-in-law or wife/husband is it not that I am responsible for the problems. My mother-in-law is only responsible to show me my face which nobody else has shown to me till now. We are no saints. We are not different from any extremists or terrorists. Am I corrupt? When money is flowing in front of me which is not mine, I really need it but I don’t touch. But if I have not seen that amount of money how can I declare “I am non-corrupt.” Its just that nobody has attempted to open up that faculty of ours hence we show we are ‘cool’. Internally we are all the garbage that is outside, we are just a mirror of outside. We have lost and are fast loosing the sensitivity to the ‘inside’ of ours. We don’t trust anybody because… you will have 101 reasons to tell how your best friend betrayed you. We don’t share anything because that’s what we have seen somebody doing when we were small and we inherited that. Now that we are grown ups is it possible to be sensitive to very small things that keep happening around us? We talk loads about improving the outside world. Let all that activity go on but lets be slightly more conscious about our inner self. For those who are interested, do write down how many time we lied or how many people we hurt at the end of the day. Sensitising ourselves is the beginning of .. I don’t want to name it. You give your own name to it, it’s a journey which will keep you strong in all the storms that come in form of relations and recessions. All above is easily said than done. Its about experimenting with yourself. If you cant do your experiments on yourself then whom are you going to do them on ?

Thanks and regards,
Ashirwad.

Why am I blogging?

Dear Reader,
Better late.. Please allow me to answer the question "why am I blogging?"

When I was laid off in Jan09, I asked myself “What has my education and work life given me?” It gave me some good friends and money, nothing beyond that, nothing that could feed my soul. After 2 sleepless nights and a lot of inquiry I looked around and realized that nobody spoke about emotions of a student, nobody spoke about sexuality, about relations, about questioning, about laughing and crying, about sincerity, about trust, about failure.. the very important threads of the fabric called 'Life'. Its an endless list of “Life Skills”. That is where I decided to work with people after working for 14 years with machines. A friend helped me associate with his college where I started interacting with engineering students on “Life Skills.” Now I am also associated with students of a business school. Students typically talk to me what they cannot talk to their parents and their teachers. They may not get readymade answers to their questions and many go back with more questions to think about than the number of questions they came with to me. I feel making them hungry is more important than giving “do this and don’t do this” answers. With an intention of reaching more students I decided to blog and here I am. I hope I will be able to ignite fire in many hearts and create hunger in many more bellies.

I thought I should also blog for parents but decided to keep them in the same place http://ashforstudents.blogspot.com instead of creating ashforparents separately.

Your comments are always welcome!

Thanks and regards,
Ashirwad.

OVERCONFIDENCE

A few of us are overconfident in what we do. If we know we are overconfident about our studies we should do something that will show us our limits. Look at the infinitely beautiful night sky, see the sunset, see the moon, go for a tough trek (Kumar Parvat?) or into Himalayas where you (have to) look at your physical limits consciously, at every breath. See the magnanimity of wonders of nature that is around us. It reminds me of words from a comedian George Carlin who says “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” Before sex came to us we were curious about ants, stamps, tops, marbles, gulmohur trees, shapes in the clouds, the twilight horizon. After sex happened our interests have moved to the swaying hips and built up machos. There’s nothing right or wrong in what attracts our attention. It is. It just happens. But the hibiscus flower or an ant doesn’t take away our breath any more the way it did to us earlier. If you are a botany student and if a hibiscus flower is shown to you, you say “I know…”. The question that arises is do you want to transcend “I know” or you want to stick to it. That’s your choice. Somewhere you say to yourself “I can finish my syllabus in next 10 days then why study now. I have so many holidays between my exams.” Studying anything is to know what you don’t know. There is a difference between ‘I can do’ and ‘I have done’. Your deceitful mind keeps fooling you with ‘I can do’, ‘I know, I can do’, ‘last semester I had done it’ and all such thoughts. Your conscience knows your mind is fooling but you like to relax in the arms of your mind, you don’t want to get down to reality, you don’t like to listen to your conscience. You have made marks as your ultimate goal. Is it possible to shift your goal from marks to something you think is bigger than that? Tomorrow your goal will shift from one ‘m’ for marks to another ‘m’ for money. Can those “m’s” be byproducts of something that you do which feeds your soul? We get marks, marks don’t get us. We earn money, money cannot earn a human (people are sold in the market and that’s a different topic of discussion). Whatever you go behind, you will stay behind it, you cannot surpass it. Go behind marks, you can get 100/100, when you go behind money the zeros behind 1000 will go on increasing and one day you will be thinking (which your parents may be already on this thought) ‘what is the goal of my life?’ Don’t search for an answer. Do a sincere inquiry into the question. Overconfidence or under confidence are conclusions made out of past experiences by a ‘clever’ mind. Conclusions are answers. Stick your aspirations to questions, not to answers. Questions are vehicles that will keep the fire of inquiry on and answers are stagnant destinations. A sincere question can change the course of your life.

Best luck for the last few papers of your VTU exams!
(see my previous blogs at http://ash-studs.blogspot.com/)