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Saturday, November 25, 2006

Saviour

Until yesterday I was a girl,
running with the other girls,
braids flying, skirts billowing,
to the river to fetch water,
helping Ma make rotis.

Then the crops failed,
we had nothing left to eat,
Baba looked sad and dejected.
A man came from the city to save us,
gave Baba lots of rupees.

Now I am a woman living in the city.
Men do strange things to my body,
it causes me a lot of pain.
It hurts them too I think,
for they moan and groan.

I wish Ma would come
and massage my limbs,
hold me to her bosom.
I wish I could go into the fields
and shriek into the night.

When I left home Ma was sad
but greatly relieved too.
She said I had saved the family,
saved Baba from certain death.
But who will come and save me?

Inspired, nay provoked by an article I read about a young girl sold into prostitution by her farmer father perhaps to escape starvation. Can't point any fingers here. Sabhi haalaat se majboor hai. Maybe the money brought them some respite, maybe they even prospered, but the girl has a dim chance of escaping her fate. She was sold at 14, became a mother at 16, one more mouth to feed, further entrenchment. Makes one wonder of what use is progress if the poor cannot be empowered.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

A Reminding

A long time ago I read a story which for some reason I haven't forgotten yet because the Universe has got into the habit of reminding me about it whenever I tend to forget.

Some time ago (maybe 19th century) when the African jungles were still largely unexplored, an English explorer went to Africa for study and exploration work. He hired some locals to do the navigation and carry his gear and together they set out into the jungles. They would stay in tents during the nights and get up at dawn, cut through the bush, clear a path, do exploration, tent down for the night, next day clear some more bush, go forward etc. This went on for a few days until one morning the Englishman discovered that all his guides had gone on strike and had decided not to move from there for a few days. When he asked them the reason, they said "We have been working and moving and rushing on so fast that we feel that we have left our spirits behind. We need to stay in one place and get back into the rhythm of things so that our spirits can catch up with us".

Over the past few weeks I have been feeling the same. So I decided to slow down to let my spirit catch up. After a long time I listened to music, not the usual background music that I listen to while working at home or office. No, I put everything aside and sat down and actually listened to it with my eyes closed and my spirit reveling in it. Once again I felt my spirit being one with it and swaying and dancing to the music. I took time off from work and did nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, just listened to birdsong ringing out through the raag of the raindrops on the roof. I got back to reading and also came up with a great idea for my next pottery project.

Now the challenge is to see that I stay in this natural rhythm of things and not get carried away by the fast tempo of life. All that we desire for is already there within us, so why do we look for gratification outside ourselves. There is music, joy, laughter, compassion, peace, love. All of it Divine.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Chicken Soup for the Soul

Excerpted from "Chicken Soup for the Soul"

THE RULES FOR BEING HUMAN

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period of this time around.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called Life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error. Experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works”.

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here”.

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to Life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.

10. You will forget all this.

Courtesy - Chicken Soup for the Soul

Saturday, November 11, 2006

A Chance Encounter

It is 8PM and I have just landed at Wellington Airport after a trip to Hamilton. I had asked for a taxi earlier and sure enough there is a man standing there holding a placard with my name on it. He introduces himself as Dean and even before we have reached his taxi he is already asking me where I work and what I do. He says he used to also work in the IT field for many years in the technical and sales side. He was part of the team taking care of www.stuff.co.nz NZ’s third site in terms of traffic and also was instrumental in getting customers for CityLink, Wellington’s high bandwidth network. I look at him in astonishment and almost involuntarily I ask him why he left all that and became a taxi driver. He said he found his previous job too stressful and he had done it too many years and was looking for a change and he was moonlighting anyway with a taxi so he decided to quit his job and buy a taxi and become self-employed. But his long-term goal is to have his own business maybe computer related. So I ask him what is stopping him and he says ‘plain laziness’.

So for the next half hour we talk about computers and life. I find out that he is divorced with two sons and has a girlfriend but no partner because “Marriage is a bad joke”. “Having boys is fun”. He tells me what courses and diplomas he has done and what jobs he has worked in. He asks me when I started with IT and I say “a long time ago I started with DOS”. It is his turn to look astonished, “I can’t believe that”, he says. And I reply “I am older than I look”. I ask him what sort of highs he gets from taxi-driving as compared to the almost daily highs you get in IT and he says “A high would be a drive from the airport to Paraparamu”. It turns out that he knows about Xplorer the GIS website that EGL creates and that he is acquainted with Ewan the guy at the Upper Hutt City Council that I used to liaise with and we both rediscover that it is a small world indeed.

And then there is a lull in the conversation and I am thinking about what he says about being an entrepreneur and suddenly I am almost thinking aloud about my desire to be an entrepreneur and now it is his turn to ask me in what is stopping me. After we have reached the house and I have paid him and we say our polite goodbyes and he adds, “It was a pleasure talking to you” and somehow for once it seems sincere and not a formality and I am about to say the same thing back but something stops me, maybe the feeling that I might not be able to match his sincerity. And he says "Who knows we might meet again", and I say "Yes, who knows, it is after all a small world". And later on I am thinking how we could talk so freely about things that mean so much to us to a perfect stranger like we were friends going on a drive and not a taxi-driver and his customer. Maybe it is God’s way of reminding me that I have a dream to fulfill and that He can came in any form to remind us of life's lessons.

Mosaic

The aircraft taking us from Hamilton to Wellington is a small one, a 33-seater (I counted) and I exchange seats with my boss to get the window seat. We take off at 7 PM and the sun is still high on the horizon. The plane is flying low so the landscape is still visible. What I see below me is simply breathtaking. A mosaic of green fields which stretch on and on into the horizon, interspersed with pools of water, undulating lines of trees, mounds of little hillocks and scattered all over black and white specks of cows and creams dots of sheep. The clouds have cast a dark shadow which moves as the clouds glide by and then the plane hits a cloud bank. We plough through tufts of soft, cottony, innocent looking clouds, but the plane thinks otherwise because it starts an instant fight and shakes in consternation. But soon the fight is over and we sail clear of the clouds. The landscape below is now bathed in evening sunlight and the grass glows emerald green in the light, trees casting long dark shadows, and the sunlight gleaming off red roofs in tiny hamlets and glinting off windows and lighting up the bodies of little rivulets and ponds.

Then the pilot decided it is time to climb even higher and very soon we are flying over this bank of cumulus, calm and steady and I can’t help thinking that this is how Jonathan Livingston Seagull must have felt when he flew high over the clouds, breaking free of the limits he had hindered himself with, breaking free of accepted convention, daring to live his life and more importantly daring to live his dream. And from up there the cares and troubles of my life seem so insignificant, so puny so as to be totally wiped out. And I realize that if I remain aloft and apart from the drama of my life whose script I have myself written, I can always be in this space of calm and serenity.

And soon we are flying over the Tararuas which is still snow-capped and the windmills over the Manawatu range, until I see the graceful arc of a long river which I discover with joy is our very own Hutt River flowing through Upper Hutt. And there is Stokes Valley right below nestling placidly among hills darkening in the gathering dusk. The road to Wainuomata snaking over the Eastern Hills and the surf gently caressing the sands of the Eastbourne bays. And as the plane turns towards the airport the sun is low over the horizon, almost sinking into the sea, blazing this shimmering, golden path on the water, almost beckoning me to take it. And the land’s end at Happy Valley and the runway comes up to meet us.

Waikato and thereabouts

Day 1 :

My trip to the Waikato University was fascinating. Great campus, spread out among rolling lawns, little lakes, hostel units. This is the only univ here with a Centre for the Performing Arts. We went inside and had a look at the theatres and green rooms. There is one outdoor performance area which is a circular area just by the side of the lake with long steps where the audience can sit. Great setting. If I was close enough I would have come for performances. We had breakfast at an old train station that got converted into a café and lunch at another nice place.

We drove to the Springhill Prison in the afternoon which is still under construction and is also quite big. All very flash. This one is going to have Plasma TV in the recreation areas for the inmates and under-floor heating, because the inmates are vandalising the heaters and it is more cost-effective to have under floor heating. The taxpayers are not too happy. The drive to the hotel was good. It rained for some time, but it was a strange experience. It would rain heavily to near zero-visibility, then taper off, then clear dry roads and sunshine and blue sky, then rain again, then sun again. It seemed like the rain clouds were chasing the car. Finally the rain clouds settled over us and we had rain for the rest of the evening. It was very enjoyable.

Day 2 :

It is beautiful in Waikeria. The Waikeria prison is spread over an area of 500 acres (I think) and the buildings are all spread out with barbed wire fences for each. The rest of the land is pasture with cows and sheep (around 3000 heads of cattle). Some of the inmates work on the farms. We passed by vans with inmates in them going to work. A lot of maize is being grown on farms which is then fed to the cows. There is also a water treatment plant which treats water from the local river for drinking. And the sewer treatment plant treats waste before it is released into the waste water system. There used to be vegetable farms and fruit orchards and nurseries which has now been closed down. But the National govt decided to close them since they were not profit making units. There is a minimum security unit with no barbed wire fence, but with a library and classrooms for inmates wanting to learn. I was driven around the grounds and buildings but did not get into the actual buildings.

It is a beautiful day and the office looks out to green grass and trees and a vast expanse of blue sky. It feels more like I am on holiday than at work. I try to focus on the screen but the landscape keeps calling out to me. We finish at four and take the car back to Hamilton to catch the flight back. It is a beautiful drive, sunny and calm and the pastures laid out on both sides.