Elections are coming in a few weeks, and soon, campaigning will pick up steam. Already, it is in every news channel and unless all you watch in your home is Netflix or ongoing soaps on your favourite TV channels, you are likely being bombarded with the pre-campaign propaganda from all channels.
Elections in India have always been such a grand spectacle, full of colour, volume and expression. Every political party brings out their flags, symbols and colours so prominently, and there is so much noise around it - not just in terms of the debates, but also the special songs and in recent years, even stand-up comedy! It really is difficult to not notice, and whether you like it or not, you probably are talking about politics already with friends, colleagues and social media. Reluctantly or otherwise, you are likely being pulled into debates, and even if you have temporarily unfollowed most political pages on your social media feed, it probably seeps through everywhere. The general commentary in most circles seem to hold familial units as insular in their political affiliation. There is talk of vote banks and sweeping assessments of how certain populations vote one way and others another. Yet, as a country, we have major political dynasties and even though most continue in the same lineage, there are often diametrically opposing shifts across and even within generations. A parent might be centrist while the child is right-wing, or vice-versa. There are differences of opinion and convictions everywhere. Very few couples with major political rifts though. The question is: Do you talk about your politics with your beloved? Do you both agree on the politics or do you defer? How does that affect your relationship? One supposes that if political viewpoints really converge, it quite likely is fairly comforting in a couple, but when political opinions differ widely within the couple, is it really a recipe for disaster? Politics takes on a much larger sheen than say, movies. A couple could laugh over their different opinions on which actor each thinks is a greater star, but politics doesn’t often get that amused tolerance. Politics takes on a brighter, sharper hue because it is often seen as a direct reflection of one’s core values. If you are on one side, you are standing for, say, secularism, tolerance, liberal attitudes, eco-friendliness and the other side stands for a different set, maybe, pride, heritage, prosperity. The political affiliation becomes a proxy for all the values one has, and in an intimate relationship, knowing your partner supports a party you are opposed to can be a particularly hard perspective to accommodate. You might find yourself wondering if you really knew this person, or how much they have changed. The arguments can get personal very quickly, because the political is almost always personal as well. What’s the way out then? Well, that’s the whole reason for the ballot being secret! You get to choose how much you disclose of your political position, even to your beloved. The political affiliation becomes a proxy for all the values one has, and in an intimate relationship, knowing your partner supports a party you are opposed to can be a particularly hard perspective to accommodate. You might find yourself wondering if you really knew this person, or how much they have changed. As written for and published in The New Indian Express What would you say if I told you being stuck in Bangalore traffic can teach you a thing or two about love and relationships? You might find that ridiculous, but let me take just one aspect today and you might see what I mean. Imagine you are driving quietly along the few two-way tree-lined avenues left in the city. It is a breezy, balmy 26 degrees, and you are in a place of general wellness and happiness. You drive along at an easy pace, enjoyable pace, happy that you are in Bangalore and not sweating it out in one of our huge coastal cities or in the smog up in the North, and all is well in the world. Suddenly, you start hearing a series of beeps, and that rises to insistent honks and a vehicle behind you is wanting to go ahead. There is enough space for them to overtake you and go on without making all that noise, but they do that anyway. You wave them ahead, and they honk as if it is going out of style soon, blaring as they pass you by. What do you do? Do you just leave them be, or do you want to show them they can’t do that? Do you try and overtake them now, and blare your horn at them to show them what it feels to be at the receiving end of that behaviour? Or better still, do you overtake them and do it smoothly and quietly, setting an example on how they could have done what they needed without really impacting anyone else? Think about it like this: You are sitting in your balcony, enjoying the view with your cup of tea and the newspaper, feeling all cozy and comfortable, and you start hearing a few beeps and honks from your loved one. You let it be and suddenly there is a lot of blaring. Perhaps they come and sit in the other chair and maybe even grab the newspaper out of your hand. What do you do? Do you quietly take out your phone and read something else? Or do you get angry and shout at them for being such bullies? Or do you, in quite the saintly fashion, ask them perhaps they would like your tea as well, or maybe a fresh cup? Sounds familiar? The choices you have in both the situations are really not that different. There is so much traffic in our lives, both in the physical sense and in a more metaphorical sense, in our relationships. Sometimes, we get the unexpected honker, the surprise anger outburst for no known fault of ours. We don’t know what was happening to them – maybe they had an emergency, something urgent they needed, or just pent up emotions. Were they just being a horrible person at that time? Maybe – but if we assume that horribleness always, we may just end up being horrible ourselves. Like with traffic, perhaps it helps in relationships as well to go with the most benign attribution. As written for and published in the New Indian Express. It is the flu season. At doctors’ clinics all around, there are people sniffling and coughing, looking bleary-eyed at each other and wondering what sort of flu it is. For most of us, the doctor would give us a quick look, and after deciding it is none of the scarier variants around these days (H1N1, KFD, Zika and what not,) declare it is a viral fever and send us back home to rest, telling us that there is nothing to do except keep ourselves well-hydrated, take a paracetamol for the fever and wait it out.
There is probably no other time that one is grateful for relationships than when one is unwell. The idea of rest and relaxation at home and being taken care of is so therapeutic for the patient, but what does it do to one’s relationship? When you are sick and need to rest, what kind of patient are you? Do you get needy and clingy, and ask for your hand to be held? Do you get possessive about the TV and demand that only your choice matters because you are sick? Do you meekly go away into the bedroom, bemoaning how your illness is taking a toll on everyone? Or, do you act as if nothing is the matter at all and that life needs to go on – do you try and continue to work, getting angry with the people around when they try to get you to rest? Are you the disobedient patient who will try and sneak in the ice-cream or something else that is against doctor’s orders? If we are being honest with ourselves, we will likely confess that we are not exactly the model patient. Some of us seek extra love, and others seek to test the love available. A few try and distance themselves from loving attention, while yet others make their illness a matter of public record. We might regress to being childish, talking in baby-tongues and sulking or crying, and ask to be cajoled and pampered like parents would. We might act like a martyr and be self-sacrificing, but still, do a bit of drama around it. How we behave if there is something major is often quite different – there is a far greater degree of concern and worry, and everything is different, but when we fully expect to get better in a few days, it is as if we give ourselves permission to almost enjoy this aspect of being able to love each other as a parent-child as well. We act less like the adults in a relationship and take on a distinctly more parent-child kind of relationship. The nurturing required becomes more like a baby and a caregiver than two adults. Just like with a parent-child relationship, being able to get the care we need from a partner influences how deeply we bond with each other. The flu can be an annoyance, but it tests relationships and can also help deepen the bond. As written for and published by The New Indian Express Tired of New Year Resolutions? Here is a game you might want to consider playing with your partner, provided you have in some way, form or shape been together for significant periods ot the year so quickly passing by. It is quite a simple game that we call “The Best of Times, The Worst of Times.” Each of you take a couple of sheets of paper. If you want to be dramatic, take a sheet of white paper and write in blue ink for the best of times, and take a sheet of yellow paper and write in red for the worst – twist it about as you please, but the requirements are quite simple. You each write a letter to the other about your best time that year and the worst time. There are no pre-conditions, and no constraints on what it is that you need to write. Put the letters in an envelope, and give it to each other to be opened in your new year. You could make a ceremony of it, open it together, open it separately – whatever suits you, but take some time to think over it, and see what happens for the two of you. There are a number of possibilities. Either the best or the worst, or both could have you featuring prominently in it, or not at all. You might have known about it or maybe it was something that never registered for you and yet you see it means so much for your partner. It could be something you considered trivial at the time it happened (“Your mother made me rotis, knowing very well that I prefer rice. I suffered for the whole week, and nobody even noticed” - for example) or something major that happened you think ought to have been noticed, but was not (“I broke my back and was bed-ridden for a month!” – for example) The point of it is to notice what happens to you both as you share what is written. Do you find yourself empathizing with the other’s experience and feeling a warmth for them, or do you find yourself looking for you in your partner’s letter? In other words, is it about you or is it about your partner? In relationships, we want to ideally be able to love our partner as they experience themselves, and share what their life is like, but in reality, we are rarely able to achieve that ideal. Most times, we are looking for simpler gratifications. We want our best times to be about each other and worst times about some body else, but where we played a supporting role (“I lost my best friend, and only having you with me helped,”) and we might hate it if the worst times was squarely about us and best times didn’t feature us at all. And that’s what makes this exercise quite powerful. It can be a simple sharing, but could also be deeply insightful in terms of how you love. In love, it truly is the best of times and the worst of times. As written for and published by the New Indian Express The American sitcoms make it look so perfectly romantic. The glitzy New York skyline, Times Square brilliantly lit-up, the big ball getting counted down to the drop at midnight, and fireworks go off in perfect sync as the year changes and it is a new January 1st. It looks even better if there is a bit of light snow just starting, everyone dressed up cozily look up into the skies collecting pretty snowflakes on the tips of their noses, and of course, every couple has to - and as per sitcom rules, there can be no exceptions to this rule – gather each other into their arms and share a nice, long kiss that straddles the magical midnight seconds into the new year, only to disentangle well into the new year.
It is another matter altogether that Dec 31st is likely to be extremely cold and quite unpleasant a time to be in New York. It is cold, miserable and you really need a lot of New Year cheer to go through the day. Despite the reality of the cold, the fact of the matter is that couples everywhere now have that expectation hanging over their heads. Even if they are not in Times Square watching the ball drop and getting into a kiss, wherever they are, they really must have the moment with each other and kiss each other. Woe to anyone who just happened to need a bathroom break at that minute, or had just stuffed their face with some hastily-ordered biryani, or worse – if you were even just chatting with anybody else during that 1 minute. You may just as well kiss the year goodbye, and forget about kissing your partner. Does the new year kiss really have that kind of magic? Maybe you are not a midnight person and you are very much asleep by the time the new year rolls in. Many couples quite likely have no interest whatsoever in these reveries and are in bed by their usual hours, making sure to shut their windows against the predictable midnight revelry. Other more traditional couples might turn up their joint noses at this midnight madness, and wait instead for Navroz, or Chithirai or any of the other two dozen New Year’s Days we have in the diverse calendars of the world. A few might have other, more pressing priorities to bother with this. The naysayers aside, for a lot of us, it means something – not because there is literally magic in the air at that hour, but because we decide it means something to us. We put in that magic into that New Year kiss. We tell ourselves that with that new kiss to start the new year, we are committing afresh to a happy new year with our partner, that we wish and hope with all our hearts that the year brings us joy – whatever the circumstances of our lives might be. The magic is fully ours. So, go ahead if you like it – seek your partner out and share that New Years moment. As written for The New Indian Express As kids in school, we studied The Gift of the Magi by O Henry in high school English. This famous story is of a loving couple, too poor to buy each other Christmas gifts, and too desperately in love to not do that. One sells off their long hair to buy watch straps for the other, while they sell off the beloved watch to buy combs.
We also read The Nightingale and The Rose by Oscar Wilde that year, with its story of the sacrifice it took to make a rose red a precious gift for a beloved, and how it is tossed aside for something else, casting away in that bitter act what it meant to sacrifice for love’s sake. Between those two tragic love stories, our heartless English teacher had us teenagers in tears, more so because we were expected to write ‘precis’ versions. Does love really require gift exchanges? Would it really be impossible to love and be loved without ever exchanging gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, festivals, etc? Is it humanly possible to be perfect gift givers, or are designed to be tragic magi in our gifts, irrespective of our levels of poverty? So much of our culture is built around ceremonies of gift giving. Traditions dictate what gifts are appropriate and when. There is a whole list of what to give for which anniversary. One could interpret it as anything from a handwritten card to money, to property, or, going by certain movies, divorce papers! These gifting protocols may have helped some people but for many others, it also builds expectations. One is ‘supposed to’ give wood for the fifth anniversary. Sure, you could Google something that sounds appropriately woody enough, or close enough to hopefully pass, but then, it also has other expectations that it needs to be personal, it needs to have value for the recipient, something that they can cherish because otherwise, it is just a useless gesture. Why has gifting come to occupy such an important place in relationships? As a measure for how much one loves the other in its physicality and demonstrability, gifts seem to offer some value, but it really is hollow if gifting is the only measure of love offered. If those high school stories really hold any truth, it is this: Gifts aren’t as important as love. So this Christmas season, gift only if you really want to. As written for and published by The New Indian Express For many of us working in corporate and corporate-like spaces, end of year means one thing, and one thing only – performance appraisal time. Some companies do it once a year, others twice or quarterly. A few do the appraisal at end of the calendar year, promotions and things at the end of the financial year, and pay hikes at the end of the first quarter – just to keep their people around, like the seasons of How to Get Away with Murder. Whatever the means and ends of it, appraisals are something one cannot escape if you are working in an organization of some sort. The question we are asking today is quite simply this: If performance appraisals are such a key part of your work life, how come they are not so systematic as far as relationships go? Why wouldn’t you and your partner invest some time and energy in appraising your couplehood to see how you both are doing, what your goals are, where you are doing well and where you need to improve? Granted, there might not be much of an opportunity for promotion or pay hikes. There is no ladder to climb as such in the relationship and it is certainly not a simple matter of getting a better designation or a pay scale so you can plump up your CV so you can get the more lucrative job at a fancier address. Any such aspirations might in fact work against you and get you a tight rap on your knuckles. Still, there is a lot to gain from a systematic performance appraisal of the relationship. The reason why organizations do performance appraisals in a systematic manner is that there tends to be so many dimensions to a job. If we don’t sit down and focus on each dimension, we might get carried away by the latest, or the most obvious, or the largest – and miss out on everything else that makes a person well-suited to the role they perform. Similarly, a relationship is a lot more than just an overall sense of contentment or happiness. There are so many aspects to it – the social, the physical, the fiscal, the sexual, the familial, the personal, the inter-personal, the spiritual, and with each of these having a few key wishes or aspirations. You might find yourself adding more to this list, of course. If we were to sit down and appraise where we are in our relationship in each of these dimensions, what we might see is something quite different and actionable. It might help you set some real and much-needed #RelationshipGoals for yourself, than a picture of Michelle and Barack Obama sharing a moment together at the Trump inauguration, or an aww-inducing video of an old couple helping each other cross the street on a lazy Sunday morning or any such thing. So, are you ready to put your relationship up for a performance appraisal? Can you work with each other on a performance improvement plan, if needed? As written for and published in the New Indian Express What would you say if someone told you that in any loving relationship, there are always two children who are in love? No, we are not talking of puppy love between cute 4 year olds. What we are really saying is that each of us as adults have our own inner child within us, and when in a loving relationship, what we are really seeking is for our inner child to be able to relate to the inner child of our beloved. The inner child is not merely a metaphorical child within us, but almost a literal one – it is like a younger version of us is very much there living inside us, carrying with it all the playfulness, the attention-loving, the creativeness of that child. Often, that child gets socialized out through our growing up years. We strive in growing-up to achieve a very different ideal of the cool, calm, collected adult who can make great decisions, is goal-driven, is purposeful and resourceful. Such adulting is seen as a goal in itself and given tags of ‘maturity’ and ‘objectivity.’ Of course, it is really important that we do become such strong adults, but it is so often at the cost of that inner child, who gets stifled and bottled up, forgotten like so much of the music and dance that we might have learned and enjoyed as a child. Somewhere between senior school and university, the child gets ignored or worse, actively shunned or repressed, or just retires to a corner. The playfulness and competitive joy of games and sports gets relegated to weekend hobbies to make space for the serious business of being an adult. Now, when two people fall in love, is it really the adults falling in love with each other’s eruditeness and ability to balance their accounts? Or are they falling in love with the undertones of mischief, fun, play and joy that are there if you scratch the surface of the seriousness of their education, jobs and social connectedness? Chances are that it is the two children within us connecting and falling in love. It happens quite unconsciously. Think of any romcom that you like – be it the When Harry met Sally types, or the Modern Family types, you are very likely to see the romance click through in those cracks when that inner child shines through the cultivated adultness. If you look at your own love, you would see it as well. When we do find someone that we really connect with and fall in love with, it is more often than not seeking to somehow make that inner child come alive again, but within the safety and security that the adulthood offers. The challenge is that often times, that connection again falls prey to the pressures of adult life and succumbs to the pressures of EMIs, Career progression and the such. But what if we could be conscious of our inner children? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could let them live and love forever? As written for the New Indian Express Can you think of one thing that can really tell if you and a prospective partner have a future together or not? Many would say that the crucial thing would be to see if you have compatible friends, or to meet the prospective in-laws and see how that visit goes, or better still, to get both families to meet each other and see who survives the evening. All good trials, but to really test a relationship, there is just one true test and that is to travel together for at least four days and three nights. Seven nights would be ideal, but three nights at a minimum. Seven nights, so that questions of laundry and the such come up, and even if one can keep up a facade for a couple of nights, seven will surely test it. Everything from deciding when to go, how long and where, are great ways to get to know each other. Does one say beaches and other say hills? One says scrimp on travel and splurge on good food, and the other says stay in luxury but go easy on food. What about shopping? And time spent in museums, or heritage sites? How about whether you take that GoPro along or avoid electronics altogether? Are either selfie-obsessed? Or take pictures of every food item consumed for your Instagram feed? What travel reveals about the person’s tastes and preferences are endless, but even more fascinating is the insights you get when sharing a room together for so many nights. You get to truly know their intimate physical selves, and that’s not talking about sexual aspects - just the every day things. Do they like the right side of the bed? Do they brush before bed? What does their morning face look like? What is their real smell like, devoid of all perfumes and other stuff? Do they snore? Do they hog the bed sheets? How are they to travel with as a companion? Are they pleasant, can they stand complexity – what if a train got cancelled or the hotel bungled up the booking or you made a mistake? What is their personality like at 3am after a 10-hour drive to the hotel and you find that you had mistakenly booked for November instead of October? Nothing reveals more about a person as much as what you can see of them when travelling together. Best done by yourselves, but a couple of friends might not make it bad. If you can survive a week-long trip, chances are you will survive the other tricky things like planning a home together, meeting families or friends and more. As written for and published in The New Indian Express Think back to the first tingles of when you really fell in love. The feelings are not always pleasurable. In fact, sometimes they are downright unpleasant and come close to sensations one associate with being ill. There are the butterflies in the stomach, a nameless ache, a longing that seems to sap your energy, a moodiness that keeps one from enjoying all that one usually did. In fact, the descriptions of falling in love are the stuff of every other sitcom. One of my early favourites had the lead describing all these feelings to the beloved sidekick who exclaims, “You are not in love. You have got the flu!” From a different perspective, falling in love has been described as being equivalent to a cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Something that elevates your mood to dizzy heights, and brings you down crashing again, and puts you through that wringer so many times. One could describe it all chemically and biologically through hormones and other substances and that we are genetically programmed to react in such a manner to prospective partners, and it is really that age-old game of nature playing over and over again. One could also turn to romantic literature, or even spirituality to understand the whys and the wherefores of this falling in love. Whatever the origin of this falling in love might be, the one undeniable fact is that the experience of falling in love is quite something else. The question we are asking is this: Can the sensations of falling in love be addictive? If we are indeed comparing just that falling in love feeling as equivalent to a cocktail of drugs, could it be possible that one gets so addicted to love that one just needs to keep on falling in love, over and over, again and again, with different people each time at different places? Could one be a love chaser? The short answer is: Yes! Though not quite a clinical diagnosis by any stretch, one could exhibit quite a bit of addictive behaviour about love. For some people, the chase and the falling in love is where all of it begins and ends. They may be so taken up with those early feelings, that when the rubber hits the road and it is time for love to mean something more and become a relationship, they might just scoot, and go on to chase another love. The difference between a more ‘real’ love and this kind of addictive love chasing is simply this: Is the passion and the attraction shallow, or it is a deep, profound and life-changing connection? If it is the earlier, then chances are that the charms are superficial, the attention surface-deep, the romance and the wooing more momentary, repetitive, patterned and sensational – and above all, the focus is more on one’s own feelings of being in love, rather than the person one is in love with. So, look at your own love feelings: Are you in love with love, or with your loved one? As written for published by The New Indian Express |
InnerSight BloggersAjanta, Mahesh and other InnerSight counsellors and guest contributors are happy to share their thoughts here. Categories
All
Archives
September 2020
|