There is a popular story about Socrates on gossip, on how when a disciple comes to the senior teacher asking if he knew what was being talked about his favourite disciple, and at that moment, the teacher decides that this was a major teaching moment, and enunciated the famous triple-filter test: Do you know if this is absolutely true? Is what you want to say a good thing? And lastly, is this a useful thing for the listener to know?

The true-good-useful filters have famously been used to check on malicious gossip, and have been adopted by a number of thinkers and doers, including a modified version by the Rotary Club as: Is it true? Is it fair? Will it build goodwill? And Is it beneficial?

If you are in Bengaluru, you could see them engraved on a bronze plaque under a bust of the Rotary Founder on Lavelle Road.

By the way, there is a side story that claims that because Socrates was so vehement on applying this filter that he never heard gossip and therefore never confronted his partner about a supposed affair. We don’t know if this is documented in history as having happened, but most people hearing the story and this particular side story, apart from having a good laugh, nod away as if agreeing that it served Socrates right for being so principled.

Would you listen to gossip about your loved one? If a friend says they have heard something about your partner, would you apply the three (or four) filter test? 

For a lot of us, we will want to ask the questions of truth, fairness etc after we hear a bit of the report. We would let them say some, if not all, of what they want to say, say nothing and go check with the partner in question, or harangue the teller of the story then and there about how they know what they said, how they could prove it etc, showing concern if not outrage, or succumbing to tears and despair, depending on what is the story.

More pertinently, it really is based on your own assessment of yourself and your relationship. If you feel secure about yourself and your relationship, you are very likely not to listen at all to any gossip about someone you love and conversely, if you are quite insecure, then you will likely listen to every scrap of gossip possible about yourself, your partner and your relationship.

If you look at it from this lens, then really, your readiness to listen to gossip about your partner is a test alright, but a test for how secure you are about yourself and you relationship. If you fail that test by listening to gossip, then you may want to think about what is making you feel less that secure and work on it. Talk with your partner by all means, but not necessarily about the gossip – talk about your insecurities and how you need to work on them.

As written for and published by The New Indian Express

Should relationships start with love and then desire allowed its space, or do they start with desire and mature into love, and can both stay through the relationship? Ideally, in a relationship, one hopes that there are both. There is a healthy amount of desire, physical attraction and sexual chemistry, and there are strong bonds of love and emotional intimacy.

Often times though, they seem to go their separate ways even if at the start of a relationship there are tons of both love and desire, or it starts with a huge amount of desire and love catches up, takes a big lead and soon desire falls behind – way behind at times.

Why is that? Are we biologically coded to fall into love and lose desire along the way? Is the function of desire and sexual attraction really to get people to fall in love and once that job is done, desire withers away or gets directed elsewhere? Are different people coded differently – some built more for desire, and others more with a tendency to build intimacy and safety?

Can people continue to have desire for the person they love? Often times, how we experience desire is so different from how we experience the need for love, comfort, affection and intimacy. Our mind thinks of these quite differently. It is almost as if wholly different sections of our brain are working when it comes to these emotions – just like there is a section for music and a whole different section for movement in our brains, or for any other function for that matter. If you are sceptical about it, try this exercise, loosely adapted from Esther Perel’s work: Take a sheet of paper and write down answers for the following questions: What makes me feel loved and cherished? What do I feel like doing when I love someone?  What kind of activities do I feel like doing with someone I love? What kind of person do I generally find myself loving? What ten words do I most associate with the word ‘love’?
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Once you have written your answers, go away for a while. Watch a movie or have some dinner, or take a walk, and later when you feel different, turn the page around, and write down answers for the following questions: What makes me feel desired? What do I feel like doing when I desire someone? What kind of activities do I feel like doing with someone I desire? What kind of person do I generally find myself attracted to? What ten words do I most associate with the word ‘sexy’?

When you look at your answers to both sets of questions, chances are that you have very different responses to both – a kind of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde situation at the extreme, but even if not as drastic, there are bound to be strong differences. Don’t worry though - you are not a two-faced character just because of how different these responses might be. In fact, it is quite normal. The challenge then is to recognize and make space for both in your life – knowing that both are valid, both need expression and both need acceptance

As written for and published in The New Indian Express

A game that has lasted for decades, if not centuries, is the good old ‘Flames’ game. In many schools, when the teachers are droning on about trigonometry, the various wars of the nineteenth century, dissecting poor old Wordsworth or any subject to their wards in the eighth, ninth grades, and finding their students busily making notes, in reality they might have been busy playing ‘Flames.’
If you never played the game, the rules are quite simple. You simply write your names down one on top of the other, and then scratch out letters that are common to both till there are no matching letters left, and then count the number of letters left. If you had four left, then you count four into ‘Flames,’ reaching ‘m’ which then means ‘marriage’ is on the cards. If you more than six, you just count another cycle till you get one of the letters.
Flames stand for Friendship, Love, Affection, Marriage, Enemies and Siblings. If you think about it a little differently about what each of the letters of ‘Flames’ stand for, an interesting thing stands out - there is this gradation of so many positive feelings. There is friendship, affection, sibling, love, and let’s count marriage as positive as well, and only one negative feeling – enemy. Nobody plays to find if between them and this person there might be, for example, jealousy, envy, disgust, irritation, worry, anger, regret, sorrow – say Jedi Wars for short. (Hey, did I just invent a game?)
In fact, even when Flames is played, the interest is really at what level the positive feelings are towards each other. Are they merely fond of each other, is there a friendship, has it matured into some kind of love or might it get into sibling territory or might it really go all the way and become a marriage and stay presumably forever? That is the real curiosity. If you don’t like each other and are ‘enemy’, nobody particularly bothers to see what kind of negativity is supposedly there.
In all likelihood, since you play the game pairing one name with some person of interest, if ‘e’ does come up, or if you didn’t like the result the first time around, you might try with your full name, initialled name or other spellings till you get the result you wanted. That’s half the fun of it as the reaction to what the Flames reveal, intuitively reveal to the people that are playing the game what they really feel about the person they are being paired with in the game
It is quite a confusing set of emotions between friendship, affection, lust, love and the lot, and with all the rules we have about what’s OK in one and what’s not OK, it can be so scary to see ‘s’ when you know you are having very different feelings. Just getting to acknowledge what you really feel, that’s what games like ‘Flames’ is about. What after you get to know what you feel? Well, you are really in the fire then
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​As written for and published at
​ http://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2018/feb/02/games-like-flames-get-us-to-admit-what-we-really-feel-1767370.html