Being kind

It's hard to be kind. It's easy to judge.

I board my short flight. It's one of those small planes, with two rows and tiny two seats with a tiny aisle in between. I have a window seat. A lady gets in next to me. She says hi, with big smily face. I am annoyed for no reason. I don't know what she is happy for. She has a big designer leather purse with lot of bells and whistles. "How tacky!" I mutter to myself. She settles in her seat and smiles at me again. I pretend to not notice her and start looking out of the window. I see from the corner of my eyes, she has started playing some stupid game on her iPhone.

They announce door closing, put on your seat belt, set your phone to airplane mode etc. I glance over, she is immersed in her game. The flight attendant comes and asks her to put her purse "underneath the seat in front of you." She says "yes, yes" and drops it near her legs. "That's not underneath the seat in front of you." I mumble, she looks at me and smiles again. I shrug my shoulders, and give up. I want to catch up on my sleep, and doze off quickly.

When I wake up, we are cruising at high altitude, the flight attendant has come and gone for drinks. I look at my fellow traveller. She smiles and says in broken English, "I keep your snacks, you sleep so good, so no wake for drinks.", pointing to the seat pocket in front of me. I half smile. Her game is still on and that annoys me for no reasons. I try to go back to sleep.

When I wake up again, the descent has started. Soon I start seeing beautiful lights on the ground. A clear crisp night it looks like. The small plane maneuvers towards the landing, it is tilting enough for my neighbor to be able to see through the window. For the first time, I see a child like curiosity and excitement on her face. She hand her iPhone to me and says "For my daughter, take picture please." I suddenly wonder why I was so annoyed by her earlier. I take a snap and ask her to check. She is so happy and excited! "Thank you so much, you are so kind!"

I say "You are welcome, your kindness rubs on people!" For a moment, it appears she didn't understand what I was saying, she just smiles. 

It's not too hard to be kind.

Vacation on the weekend

I have been doing this for last few weekends. When I go for a long walk on Saturday or Sunday morning, I leave my phone home.

I do it so I don't whip it out every five minutes with an excuse of checking my email. Or see what the temperature is (as if knowing that at that very moment is vital!). Or what's the rating on Yelp of the restaurant I see across the street. Or what a "knot" is when I see a board of speed limit for the boats in the canal. Or to take a picture of a beautiful flower on the side of the trail and google it. So may reasons. So many excuses. It keeps me so busy while I walk. Interestingly enough, I see plenty of "busy" people around me who are also taking a weekend walk, some even with their friends!

But when I step out without the phone on me, it's like vacation! It's like vacation on the weekend. It's just me and the surroundings. Yeah, yeah, there are enough articles and tweets about how we all have become slaves of the internet connectivity. But I never really realized that until I said this aloud "vacation on the weekend!". After all, don't we all love the vacations and camping trip where our cell phones don't work, there's no reception, no Wi Fi!

Go figure!!

Now I do not check the weather, but feel it, breath it in and soak in it. I just walk up to the restaurant and check the menu, the ambience, perhaps say hi to the server. I don't know what a "knot" is but I sit there and watch the waves the passing boats generate and let my mind wander with them. I don't take the picture of the flower, but stand still and watch the romance a little bee is playing with it. All my curiosity and appetite for information can wait to be satisfied for later.

Of course, you say, why can't you do both: check the temperature and still feel the weather? Nyah, somehow it's not quite the same. Something about that smart device (or the absence of it) makes a difference. It's makes me free to be with myself. It has been a good exercise for me. And as it turns out, after I come home, I am not that hungry for knowledge after all! I am not sure if that is good or bad, but at least it is self enlightening!

Some day, I will get good enough at it so I can create these vacation moments any time, even if I have my smart phone with me.

The Prophet, and Words and Pictures

These are two movies I watched in last few days. That's the only thing common in them for me.

The Prophet is an animation movie based on Kahlil Gibran's book The Prophet. Those who have not read it, it is a series of prose-poetry on various topics such as love, marriage, friendship, freedom, good and evil, death... It is highly dense philosophical text that has enlightened many. Personally, I have found it hard to understand in places; yet in places offering these gems that I can't help but keep reflecting on. For example:

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

The movie is a collage of animations, each depicting a poem from the book and created by a different team of well known animators. Each animation flows on the screen as the poem is recited or sung in the background. There is a story of Mustafa that strings these animation poems together - a story that is not told by Gibran's book. Its purpose is to add entertainment and humor to the otherwise very heavily philosophical content.

Words and Pictures is a romantic comedy. It is a story of falling in love of two professors: one of creative writing, and the other of painting. Their debate or war is about which is the stronger medium of expression: the words or the paintings. The argument includes that the art of drawing came earlier in human development than the art of words. Or that the words are caged by language, pictures are not, etc. etc.

A picture speaks thousand words, but sometimes thousand strokes are not enough to express what is conveyed by a word. Both, strokes and words are open to interpretation. Both can invoke feelings. Both are inspired by feelings. Both can be factual, or abstract, or everything in between.

When I watched The Prophet, this debate came back to my mind. What the movie does, or attempts to do I think, is to draw Gibran's philosophical words on the canvas with artistic styles rich with colors, strokes, animations. The animation "On Freedom" is all about caged birds, the one "On Marriage" is drawn with a couple dancing, so is the one for "On Love" etc. Each has a distinct visual style, of course, and is a beautiful piece of animation in itself. But so much is packed in Gibran's words, that it is not even fair to expect that these beautiful animations can do justice to the narration.

It is easy to end on a compromising note that "each medium has its strengths..."! I was never good at drawing. Ironically, one of my most favorite teachers in school was the drawing teacher. I owe it to her for getting me some success in those drawing exams, for getting the best out of me which was mediocre at best. I am better with words. I am more comfortable with words. So while I am occasionally moved by a picture, words still remain dearer to my heart. For the power they have on me, for the power they vest in me. I will watch the movie, The Prophet, to enjoy that beautiful richness of strokes; but it is the book that I have with me - the one that I open any time and read a piece over and over again.

First musing

Some time ago, I used to blog in Marathi, my mother tongue. For the usual few mundane reasons, it stopped. You know, busy with work, busy with doing something else, writer's block etc... Then I wanted to try writing again, this time in English. So here I am!

The first question was about the title for the blog. I always wanted to have a good anagram of my name. While I was walking this morning thinking about anagrams, nothing came to my mind. I need a pen and a paper to do this, I thought. I wished it came to me instantly and quickly. Something like a friend of mine who has this blog. I wished I could think of a clever, catchy, witty, perhaps philosophical tagline too to go with it.

I came home, and I looked up a website that generates anagrams. Interesting, there are quite a few, I have some hope to find something I wished for? The top two candidates were "Ah mused" and "Mad Hues" - even more interesting. "Mad Hues" is catchy, in a way funny. But "Ah, mused!"; that's what I want. After all, my Marathi blog title translates to "a dialog with self". Dictionary meaning of "muse" : "to think or say reflectively"! Nice!

The point of all this is not just to explain how I came up with the title. After all, here goes the cliche: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet!" The point is the little game I played with myself of wishing to have a blog title that is both an anagram of my name, and is meaningful and catchy! The game of wishing that it would come to me naturally, and not finding it until I looked up online (doh!), and then finally when I found one that was, well, as meaningful as it gets, being happy about it.

The game of musing I am still playing with myself, if I did not find "Ah, mused!" would I keep thinking and looking; or would I compromise and go with something else, or would I just give up and not make this blog at all! The title, as it turns out, is not the point. It's the musing!