And One More Chance to Live

One more year has passed, sweeping along with it summer, winter, floods, and drought; leaves fell, grew and again were ready to fall and we are getting ready for Women’s Day; as the wind drops its chilliness and summer slowly creeps in, march 8th Women’s Day is significantly placed, just before the dry, hot summer; a patch of shade, a remembrance of a fragrance, at best of times most forgotten. 

Mythology, history, religion, folklore, belief, faith: do not know where they come from, but from the day I was born, have heard them as stories, examples. When I heard them first I do not know, but I know they are there somewhere in the cosmos, universe around me, in semiconscious brain, in shadowing thoughts; awed, admired, worshiped and revered; but, but if they were ever given that one more chance to live again, will they choose the same destinies ?!

A variance stitched

Gandhari: Eyes open, not blinded to the faults of the 100 odd men as sons and a husband who swamped her life; clear in thought and vision, would she have slapped Dhuryodhana when the fist slip happened, reprimanded Dhritarashtra for being weak and blind to his son’s faults and shortcomings, unleashed her caustic tongue, thrown Shakuni out of the house and her hair, laughed at Bishma for pussyfooting on a shaky excuse called ‘word given’? Would she have risen to be the force behind Mahabharata, reengineered?

Sita: A king who did not stand up to a wicked plan, had no guts to say who needs to be the king after him, is he a king? Is he fit to rule? Can personal fancies influence the destiny of a Kingdom? Does a son blindly have to follow? Does the wife have to go for fourteen years of exile to the forest? Why share that predicament? Is it for self-realization? Can she spread her tentacles on the kingdom’s throne like an octopus? Let others rave and rant, can she realize her true potential, staying back to rule the kingdom courageously, the daughter of a mighty king, and a warrior by choice?

Kannagi: In a soil rich and fertile, a city abundant with hope and future, where children swim, walk, learn and grow; where poets sing songs of Shiva the god of death, and dancers dance to the tunes of temple bells, let a man die; for he is the architect of his destiny, he died not as her husband but as a man fallen; he chose the path that eroded his equity with life and thus desired to die, he did not stand up to fight for his life and word, needed a wife to come seeking justice. Does she have to burn a city for him? Was the massacre of all those men, women and children, those cows and lambs, those chirping birds and beautiful flowers needed for a death of failure? Or was it her pent-up emotions, galvanized and erupted, like a bottled volcano, seeing all those women smile, drooling on their husbands words, while she counted ants in his absent hours and failed ventures; A woman’s wrath is deadly say men, irrelevance is also a manifestation of wrath; the day she threw her anklet at his face in frustration and exasperation, he was gone, lost; what happened to the man who picked that last straw, the anklet, is not worthy to dwell on.

Draupati : Five husbands had one wife, shared and never belonged, history needed her to hold five powerful but clueless men to choose purpose; gambling , drunk and senseless they pawned their kingdom and all the people in it; they lost everything and then decided to pawn their wife?! Ego manifested as all supreme made them assume that their wife is their possession, a property to be used as needed; did she have to go to the site of shame, to be pawed? Hair flying like five headed dreadful serpent swallowing men, can she stand tall and wrathful, curse the losers and winners to impotence and insignificance; she belongs to non but herself and she has a promise and duty to her children, turn around and walk out; on a chariot of hope towards the burning sun to her children can she fly, to bring them up as rulers, more virtuous than their fathers?

Savithri: Her dedication to her husband proverbial, she chose to disturb the natural order of life and death, all for one man. Draped in the serenity of wisdom, will she cry for her husband, fetch the gods down to mundane task of living and dead to bring him back to earth, or will she choose to realize all the world is God’s play and in that her husband moved from finite to infinite, renounced the illusion of life and embraced death. She the powerful enveloped in tranquility, can she not choose a purpose beyond the death of her husband; the vast suffering, the blinding pain and the deep sorrow of humanity around that beckons, can she seek her calling there?

Kunti , Meera, Renuka, Arundathi, Mandodari, Sathyabama, Kali, Damayanthi, Ganga

Women intruding, strong and awed, so forceful that men had to write about them; did they choose to distort truth to suit and celebrate their ignorance or wishful thinking; maybe, maybe not, but to me they are still compelling, not to be ignored, they rise from nothing to merge into nothing, boundless, borderless, crafted and celebrated.

 

Gandhari: Mother of 100 sons – the Kauravas – and a daughter, in the epic Mahabharata. Gandhari married a blind king Dhritarashtra, and blindfolded herself for the rest of her life.
Sita: The epitome of womanly virtues in the epic Ramayana, the Sita was married to Rama, the human incarnation of Lord Vishnu. When Rama was condemned to spend 14 years in exile, Sita chose to accompany him.
Kannagi: Protagonist of the Tamil epic Silappathikaram, Kannagi was married to Kovalan, a man who chose to leave his lovely wife for a dancer, Madhavi. Kannagi avenged the mistaken execution of her husband by burning the great city of Madurai to ashes.
Draupati: Married to the 5 Pandava brothers in epic Mahabarata, Draupati changed the fate of the kingdom, the country and the psyche of millions of Indian women, after being pawned in a game of gambling, which her husbands lost, and as a result had to live in exile for 13 years. Draupati also took up this punishment, and followed her husbands to exile.
Savitri: The ultimate pativrata of Indian mythology, Savitri argues with Yama, the god of death, who has come to take her husband’s life away, and wins it back.

Random Thoughts and Rainbow Dreams

“Can you suggest topics for the women’s forum we run in our organization? Every month we have a topic discussed by experts”
Hm…interesting. “How about Domestic Violence?”
“What! Come on, we don’t have a crowd with such issues”
“Really? Is domestic violence specific to a market segment, city, economic class or street?”
“No Sunitha, it is just that we have an educated crowd in our office, this population would not get into such bizarre acts.”

Her bulging stomach announcing a life growing, she walked in distraught, beady eyes like faded marbles; her husband was beating her regularly, for no apparent reason or cause. Colleagues who noticed the long hours spent at work and the vacant, expressionless eyes, wondered ‘God! She is pregnant; doesn’t the husband have some sensitivity for it?’ He didn’t. Finally one morning, barely conscious and completely battered, she called her parents who live in the same city. Heart-broken parents carried the half-dead daughter home; I knew the father who used to come regularly to pick her up from office when she got delayed, happily feasting on dreams she used to wave at all of us, walking out breezily. One year and a marriage later, the father still comes to pick up a daughter married, beaten, pregnant, separated and bruised. He still does not want her to initiate divorce, as he is worried what family and friends might say; “We should try for reconciliation, he might change after the child is born.”

She was envied by many, happily married for 10 years, obedient children, home-maker with no worries other than what to make for lunch. She missed our kitty party where the intention was to bitch on all and sundry; worried that she missed such an important get-together, we called, only to have her break down on the other side of the line; her husband slaps her frequently, and that day happened to be his slapping day; not wanting to share her grief with us, she had decided to stay home. “How the hell did you not tell us that violence is involved?” “But it is not domestic abuse or violence, he only slaps” Frail, cheeks hallowed, looking like a ripe palm fruit fallen in the wilderness, plunged, broken and spilled, she thought slapping was not violence. In accepting the grief and the slap, she crafted unknowingly a shadow and a thought in her son that it is ‘alright and fine’ to beat your woman, and in her daughter a half bodied thought to take what life offers, unquestioning, acquiescent;

Life condemned, parched and pungent, why do they languish? Is it ignorance to the point of not knowing what qualifies as violence or the mortification of social stigma? Is it children, lack of financial independence or plain worry of what is out there in the big bad world?

While they pine in unsung courts swallowing powdered glass, we live satiated, our lives brimming with mirth and music. ‘It does not happen in our world’ is a common misconception, or maybe the failure to accept that domestic violence is not exclusive to the drunk, uneducated brutes seen in movies, but even in the classy homes of educated, well-employed men who can wear a charming smile outside and hide a terribly twisted self inside. Acceptance is a cracked feet away from action and after, whereas it is easier for me to fester and let the wounds dry; tears and pus evaporate in the mindless heat, riddled with spices, living in the land of Sita, Draupadi, Savithri and Gandhari too.

Movers, Shakers and Country Bumpkins

2011 is over and done with, a year gone by leaving behind moments and memories; here is a look in the rear view mirror at the tamasha that the movers and shakers of this country did, while we the people, the mass, the ordinary you and me staggered dumb-found like country bumpkins gaping at a software technology park!

Are Arun Jaitley and Kapil Sibal best friends? why else would Jaitley, with his levels of intelligence, not rip apart Sibal’s take on 2G, Jan Lokpal? This Bermuda Triangle mystery of 2011 is not the all-consuming decay in congress but the cluelessness of opposition, needing Anna Hazare, Ram Dev, media and common man to remind and crusade about corruption, black money, price raise and governance.

The Indian army, with all its might, was glaring at Pakistanis across the border, and they at us, the Prime minister was dreaming of peace with neighbors and good brotherly act and the media was screaming of china eating into our borders; while the brave army was fighting the enemy it also had to ward off Adarsh scam, Canteen scam, club house scam and Sukna land scam.

What soap do Chidambaram’s cleaners use to wash his dhotis and shirts, immaculately clean and pristine white? – the common man, or specifically common woman wondered; What baffled that man & woman of everyday India, was how Chidambaram could have managed to keep 2G not spilling onto his dhoti. Some moves he must have made to break out of the mythical chakravyuha the telecom scam had built around him and his party. Still, with short-lived memory, the ordinary men and women, am sure, have gone back to wondering, marveling and admiring the whiteness of his dhoti, his intellect and accent; our fascination for anything foreign is legendary!

2011 saw Opposition doing an effective job of sleeping in the Parliament and news channels being caught up in the all-important promotions of utter crappy movies like Ra One and life there after; Lallu as always, talked his way through Parliament, many a times when government needed bailout, although what he spoke was effectively nonsense; some even more idiotic members of parliament were laughing, blowing up the country bumpkins hard earned cash and a whole country guarded the secret of what was ailing Sonia; While all this was happening, the ruling party met with a formidable weapon their leaders had popularized almost a century ago – satyagraha.

The man does not look imposing, is not handsome, does not talk poetic words. and yet he made the government dizzy; you might agree or disagree with his ideologies but just cannot ignore him; Anna Hazare made the Manish Tiwaris and Abhishek Sigvis of the dysfunctional government blink; And as an offshoot, thanks to the Jan Lokpal bill, participating in political rallies has become fashionable.

While inflation was soaring high like a kite cut off from its thread, clueless and directionless, Nano (yellow, with red butterflies printed on it) seemed an interesting & affordable option for me to buy and drive. But by the time I had gathered enough information, petrol price had gone up 4 times this year alone. Turned to my boss to see if he was going to give me increments every quarter to cover this, realized this was not happening, shut shop on my car dream and went back to my mails.

Nothing can add spice to life than the world of celluloid; dreams, illusions, passion, stories, make believe, underworld and the under belly; 2011 made me sit up and watch Azhagarsamiyin Kudirai, Vaagaisudavaa, but some tragedies and mega tragedies did happen; the mega tragedy of Tamil cinema this year (yes, even beyond Osthi) was that a director who had made movies like Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu and Azhagarsaamiyin Kudirai, had to go and direct a movie like Rajapaattai. Well if Bala can direct senseless Avan Ivan, and Maniratinam, Ravanan, what else can one expect? The low moment of 2011 was watching Surya – yes the same Surya who portrayed with aplomb, grace and conviction the role of a hunch-backed, buck-toothed protagonist Chinna alias Premkumar in Perazhagan – do 7aam Arivu. Where did the first 6 go?!

With Manipur’s arteries being chocked by blockades, Steve Jobs mourned across Facebook, farmer suicides swept up and hidden under carpets, Kanimozhi out of jail and Kalmadi ready to follow suit, the biggest losers of 2011 were governance, decision making and leadership not just at the center of political power, but at corporate houses and civil services too.

The winner hands down was You and I, citizens of India, who form the cogs of the giant machine called India, and despite all odds, manage to smile, work and survive.

May 2012 turn out to be the end as the mayans predicted – the end of corruption, poverty and illiteracy! Happy New Year!

Children of a Lesser God

With Diwali round the corner, wanted to do something worthwhile, so started on my pilgrimage; it had been a long time since I stepped into the school which I loved visiting when I was in Chennai;

Two years back I moved to a new city and a new portfolio in the job; it felt like being caught in a whirlwind in an unknown territory and I was busy, confused and lost solving my little irrelevant problems and feeling extremely important; deep in a dark, dull corner of my soul was haunted by the thought that I did not do much to Siragu;

Siragu
Located at Palavedu Pettai, in Palavedu Panchayat, near Avadi, Chennai, SIRAGU Montessori School was started in June 2003, especially for children of pavement dwellers and mendicants. Traditionally carrying on the practice of begging, this community never had any real opportunities for breaking out of their situation. Siragu was started with the objective of providing quality education to first-generation learners.

Today, 8 years down a difficult but successful road, Siragu provides education to 400 children of pavement dwellers, street workers, brick-kiln workers and beggars to name a few. With over 125 first generation learners, the school also conducts bridge courses that assist and motivate underprivileged children to join mainstream schools.

Standing tall are Uma and Muthuram, the couple who are married to each other and their ideals, and their team of teachers who are dedicated and committed; the anxiety of meeting the next month’s expenses looms large over their head, like a grim eclipse ready to devour them at a minute’s notice; providing food, electricity, paying the staff, administrative and maintenance expenses, all dependent on charitable contributions that may or may not come in; nevertheless, what strikes me most about Uma and Muthuram is their determination that seems to silently say “I will sustain Siragu, no matter what perils are thrown at me”.

Smiling at the tiny silent face that looked at me, I asked a random question. “What does your father do?”
“Oh he left us long back”, pat came the reply; coming from a tiny 8-year old form who looked barely big enough to be 5, I was shaken; if life is cruel you grow up fast; father abandoned her and her brother and a lonely mother, who is slogging somewhere out there. Ragini is going around the school quiet and hopeful of wanting to become something.

She was not alone; there was Tara whose parents are dead; Tara and her siblings stay at school. Bright but forlorn, she walks beside me with characteristic grit, showing the classrooms; I look at Tara and ask “Do stars shine?” if so will they shine in her world?

Bubblu came to school tiny, so very tiny that two years back when I visited them, I kept asking if he is not too small to be left in the school! He was like a pale shadow, almost lifeless, all the time occupied with searching for something on the ground; when asked what he was searching, was told that he is addicted to chewing leftover cigarette butts and drinking alcohol; like a ghost he is on his pursuit of happiness, the cigarette butts; aghast, I stared. There was nothing to say, was there? Today he is a brighter, smarter and different child, thanks to Siragu who nursed him to life.

Ramu parents are dead. His fragile old grandfather, a day laborer, tries to support him. As the grandfather closes the school gates and steps out, Ramu is standing there, not knowing whether he would be able to meet his old, shrunken grandfather again, or Death, waiting around the corner, will beat him to it.

Stories of broken homes, bruised souls, shattered dreams, busted lives; they are aplenty – an image of what went wrong or can go wrong in the lives of children; but what is right and going right for these children is a school and home called Siragu; In the hope that one day they will get out of poverty and live a life of abundance, they learn to smile. Education to them is the only hope, and they are clutching to it like a lifeguard, a dream that will carry them to the yonder of future away from a bleak, gray chronicle of past and present. Everyone in the school has a dream, I want to become president, engineer, doctor, scientist, want to be like Uma akka……..dreams, hopes scent the air with their fragrance.

Of the 400 odd children 120 stay as boarders in the school. A day before Diwali, when I walked in, there were 40 children who had no one coming to take them home or whoever there was as family so busy earning and surviving that they forgot these children whom they brought to earth. Yet the smiles were lighting up the Diwali eve like countless stars on a clear night.

To me Siragu is a nightmare and a dream, it is the side of life I want to forget, not recognize as existing; it also is a side that I can contribute and make a difference to. And if I do not stop and remember it’s existence, I will be the child of a lesser God foregone and forgotten, for the children of a greater God are inside the dilapidated walls of Siragu, trying to fight all odds and survive with or without me. Today I have a chance to reach out and make a difference and be part of their hope; a chance to redeem and live and move away from bare existence.

To know more about what Siragu does, and to support their vision in even the smallest ways possible by you, visit http://siragu.org

 Watch ‘Wings of Evolution’ : movie on Siragu http://www.archive.org/details/Wings_of_Evolution

Zen and the art of making a perfect cup of filter coffee

If you are born to an intelligent father, life is difficult; it is more difficult if he knows every single detail in the world and to top it he is a mathematician.

To my father who was a mathematician, everything was about space, time, pressure, density, direction and the likes; in my childhood, I grew up listening to formulae, directions, speed, distance, quantifying life:why did the cup fall off the table? Because I bumped into the table? No, it was because the cup was positioned at the edge of the table a distance which gave it maximum pull and did not take the pressure and the force of gravity acted on it. Are you there, did you get it? No?! Well, good, I dint understand, or bother to understand either. Why I was finding the square root of a number or trying to decode reflection or refraction of light was beyond my bean-sized brain; talking of bean, the one thing I owe to my father is the formula for a divine cup of coffee; and the story goes thus.

Go to the market, to a trusted vendor who loves coffee as much as you do; pick up the best Arabica bean, graded for its color, size, density and packaged with care and reverence; roast the bean in an even heat, and watch with fascination the sway of the wooden ladle as it flips and swirls the beans with grace, while you sweat and stink in the heat. Then follows the process of cooling, and grinding the perfectly roast beans to a powder in a mixie that screeches and puffs, before finally discharging its contents; the method to make the essence of the drink, the decoction, has an interesting procedure; south Indian filter coffee,also called degree coffee or meter coffee, is brewed in a plain-looking stainless steel cylindrical utensil with two compartments stacked one on top of the other; the upper container with lots of little holes also has a piston-like tool, a pressing disc and a central stem handle which is used to press the powder.

Roasting coffee beans in those days made me feel like I was being punished for the pleasure of drinking the coffee that followed; in the eighties, in middle-class-aspiring-to-become-upper-class or already-arrived-upper-class families, it was drilled into the consciousness of good boys and girls that coffee was bad and alcohol was sin and you could only drink Bournvita mixed with malt powder from Cadbury; that all sins brew from the same pot and malt grain is the base for beer and whisky was a little detail forgotten I suppose.

Hydrostatic equilibrium/state: The real story starts here. Boil water, and while it is getting heated, add 3 tablespoons of ground coffee into the upper container of the filter; press the powder gently with the piston; when the water boils anxiously and starts spurting, slowly pour it over the piston placed on the ground coffee in the upper container; hold the piston gently and slowly remove the pressure and close the container; wait for 30 minutes and the decoction, a thick concoction, will filter down; boil milk in a high, stable flame, add five tablespoons of the decoction to your cup and as the milk rises to wish you from the vessel, pour it along with the cream into the cup in one swift move,no indecisiveness here, do not let the milk wait for a minute as the cream will form a thin layer that will change the taste of coffee; now swirl the liquid with a spoon smoothly, even as the aroma fills your lungs and your senses; if you want to add to your sins add a spoon or two of sugar and there you go, the perfect cup of filter coffee; Today, I have outsourced the roasting and powering, but the rest is done in-house. Over the years, I have made a fine art of making a perfect cup of filter coffee.

As I make my cup of coffee and sip it in the morning while the sun is breaking over the yonder, I feel a moment of peace, stillness – call it my Zen moment;the whole process of coffee-making a well-orchestrated sonnet, resonating the gentle rhythm of life, has the power of harmony; but the challenge is to hold these moments and create more pockets of this blissful peace, the integral silence; I realize life is all about how many things we can do with perfection, exactitude, consciousness, enjoying every second while the identity of the doing and doer is merged, transformation to a state of oneness, and the unifying bliss.

There is nothing small in God’s eyes; let there be nothing small in thine. He bestows as much labour of divine energy on the formation of a shell as on the building of an empire. For thyself it is greater to be a good shoemaker than a luxurious and incompetent king.

 -Sri Aurobindo

Objective Realities and Optical Illusions

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power – Abraham Lincoln

My friend called, sounding distressed. When asked what was wrong, she said the man is crazy. (Aren’t they all?!) After a few minutes of trying to cajole information out of her, she started lamenting about her boss, how stupid he is (is anyone surprised?) and how he thinks he is God’s gift to mankind. The problem is, she said, he thinks he is great, powerful and treats the rest with disdain. Throughout the whole conversation what kept me wondering was the word ‘power’ that came up twice or thrice.

On the corridors of power, a few walk with grace, while some slide with awkwardness and the rest strut with arrogance; the last lot walk with purposeful insolence, and remind us of the story The Emperor’s New Clothes. Power is like that invisible dress the emperor wore, which was professed to be the most beautiful, but it only took a child to call out that the emperor was naked, and his perceived dress, obnoxious; the mighty king in a fraction of a second was beyond redemption: lost, finished and buried; irrelevance can be that fast, quick and final.

History is peppered with countless illustrations of such people, who laboured under the illusions of power, only to be brought to reality with a mighty thud; we only need to look at the great, powerful dictators and their plunge to insignificance to realize this; closer to home, governments have been blinded by the smoke of self-proclaimed power so much so that they dint see a nation-wide revolution getting ready right in their backyard; Or the case of megalomaniac CEOs who believe that nothing exists in the world above and beyond their span of power, until the organization collapses and their corner office on the top floor is taken away from them; reality hits that the absolute subservience they were enjoying was only because of their title, and had nothing to do with their personal credibility; Organizations world over have realized during their fatal fall that the governance power given to them was just to govern a body and not to run it as one superior to governance processes.

In our world of targets, growth, deals, mergers and acquisitions, the child to call the bluff is recession; one trembling market causes havoc on the rest of the world. Like the invisible but unquestionable pull of gravity – the grey tug at the core of our being that we are told keeps our feet grounded to solid earth – markets are tied to each other and anchored on dependencies; as one slides down, it causes along with it a sequential fall, like a row of dominoes pushing each other down on their way to doom; they seem unrelated to the common man but each one is tied to the hip, the codependencies, coexistence visible and invisible, leaning on one another precariously. As the market slips by a few points, the rest of the economy falls a few inches and a few hundreds jobs vanish, resulting in thousands losing their livelihood and for those who survive the pink slip the essential living is burdensome with prices shooting like missiles misfired.

When an event of this nature falls on humanity, brushing aside our assumed powerful with a careless sweep, wonder what happens to them who till yesterday walked with arrogance, who in their cocooned comfort and perceived power existed under the illusion that success is unquestionable and power, uninterrupted; the blue-eyed boy/girl of the organization, the pin-up star of yesterday needs only one adversity for the curtain to fall and face the reality that Today can be survived only if one had been humble and gracious and built credibility in one’s success Yesterday.

Power is your capacity to influence in a positive way a change, you are powerful when you can make a difference, are responsive to others, usher growth which is inclusive and sustainable; when you are conscious that you are part of this magnificent universe and recognize that along with you the ant, the fish and the dry twig are also part of this all-encompassing world; comprehend that each is as special and powerful as you are and each is here to perform their duty which is unique and matchless; the interconnectedness of each other is so compelling and the vastness of creation so forceful that our ego is a speck and irrelevant.

The day the powerful realize that power is in generosity and grace, in vision and purpose, in courage and trustworthiness, they will stop behaving like caricatures by an ill-paid cartoonist; and until they realize that, we can watch them dizzy with arrogance, continuing to walk in ignorance like the emperor in the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes – naked, frivolous, vile and inconsequential.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely – Lord Acton. Amen!

L board Lamenting

At 40, wanting to learn to drive is as challenging as bungee jumping is at 21; the road, choppy, bumpy, muddy with authorized to unauthorized speed breakers, is arduous; the pedestrians seem to be spilling on to the road like uninvited guests at the US President’s dinner to our Prime Minister; where is the footpath?? In the yonder, the sky and the sea merge seamlessly, but in India, road and footpath tend to merge into nothingness;

Crowds weaving their karmic dance or maybe driving to karmic tunes make you nervous, you do not know who, when will decide to spill on to the road and stand in your way!! We Indians are very accommodative – we have cows, donkeys and dogs all on the road while a cab driver cuts into the footpath or whatever remaining of it to fly past you; you need to methodically size up the quality of the road as you bend, honk and sway past the next pothole; as you wait for the traffic signal to clear, there is someone blasting their horn from behind you; the horn is blasted in rhythm with the music being played on their radio and finally he/she falls on the horn as it screeches to glory; is it dysentery of thoughts, do they not know that when the signal is red you can’t move?!

During my 10-day learning class, observed a few patterns; since learning to drive was too challenging, started observing the patterns, which was easier and came naturally, unlike keeping in mind the accelerator-clutch-break combination. On the road, there are different species – there are those nice persons, a few but definitely the best ones, who accommodate the learners (L), do not scare the pants or whatever off you, but quietly and elegantly pass you with confidence and magnanimity; looking at them, you feel envious and want to drive like them; then there is this lot who couldn’t care less whether you are dead or alive, act as if you are non-existent and move past through you; you feel their detachment and their refusal to see or notice you in your bones; but you suppose they are fine, for you are insignificant and accept it; with the skill with which you are driving, well, you have to accept!

The most interesting are the third lot, who make it a point to trip and off-balance the newcomer on the road; they honk, cut and rub the cheek of the car as they go by; you are scared and sweaty by the time they overtake you; if given a chance, they would happily shove you off the road and laugh a wicked laugh; these are the ones that make you want to hit them, hate them, scream at them, but they toughen you up and finally allow you to escape their relentless pursuit till you get the balance to hold the wheel and manage to operate the clutch and brake; coming to think of it, these are the people who make you learn the trick of staying alert, alive and drive;

Well, in life there are those who nurture, coach, and protect you, they allow you the space and time to grow and flower, they leave a compelling and impressive picture; their purpose and clarity make them stand out; then there are those who are engrossed in their success and life, they will never recognize your existence if you do not fit into their scheme of things; and finally you have some who make it their KRA to ensure that they make your life miserable, punish you arbitrarily or rip away your peace of mind; at the end of the day, you learn to drive and also live, and you have a choice to become one of these people – you can either choose to take time to nurture the L board, or you can ignore them and pass them or go speeding closer to them and shaking their slow-built confidence and faith; the choice is there out to reach out and emulate.