And Before I forget…

The last post was actually a cut+copy+paste job and not something I usually approve of. Secondly, it was a list! Sounds terribly close to self-help stuff and all that jazz. But I feel that it reminds me at one go the little things that living these 26 years has taught me. It’s not so much a bucket list as it is a living list. The questions about ‘how to’ keep recurring but the list is to remind me at all those times when I feel kinda lost. So I figured, the best way to keep it on my mind was to post it here  – before I forget I even read it.

And now. To live it.

77 Keys to Living Well Before You Die

Time flies.  Life is what you make of it.  Everyday is a day of opportunity.
Think it.  Seek it.  Find it.  Live it.

Life is too short not to make the best and the most
of everything that comes your way everyday.
- Sasha Azevedo

1. Do something everyday that excites you.
2. Read classic novels.
3. Travel somewhere you’ve never been with someone you’ll never forget.
4. Settle on a reasonable long-term goal and do 3 things everyday that bring you closer to your goal.
5. Avoid TV.
6. Buy happiness with a smile.
7. Get involved in your community.
8. Talk to perfect strangers.  Make new friends.
9. Help others when you’re able.
10. Get in shape.  Walk or jog a mile every morning.
11. Learn one simple skill every week.
12. Be aware of your surroundings.  Take notice of the simple joys life has to offer.
13. Be creative.  Build something from the ground up, no matter how small.
14. Learn a new joke everyday and tell it to someone else.
15. Spend a few quiet minutes alone each day… think.
16. Dedicate yourself to discovering solutions in the face of problems.
17. Surround yourself with positive people who share goals similar to your own.
18. Study for a degree that intrigues you or take a few classes in your field of interest.
19. Organize a monthly game of poker (or any game) with your best friends.
20. Watch the sunrise at least once a week.
21. Watch the sunset at least once a week.
22. Engage yourself in a meaningful hobby.
23. Ask your spouse or best friend to be your business partner and get something fun started on the side.
24. Express your creativity in art, photography, music, film, etc.
25. Try something completely new every chance you get.
26. Listen to a variety of music on a regular basis.
27. Study the people you admire.  Analyze their habits and duplicate them.
28. Tend a small garden and eat your own produce.
29. Have incredible sex at least once a week.
30. Pull the trigger on doing something you’ve been thinking about for a long time, but haven’t yet had the guts to do.
31. Socialize, socialize, and socialize!
32. Visit friends and family you haven’t seen in years.
33. Stop tip-toeing around like a little pipsqueak.  Own your ideas.  Follow them through to fruition.
34. Throw a quarterly blowout party at your place.  Invite all your favorite people and let them bring someone along.
35. Spend more time outdoors entwined in Mother Nature.
36. If you hate your job, find a new one.  Life is short.  Don’t be scared to bounce around until you find a job you enjoy doing.
37. Get into the habit of realizing that it is never too late.
38. Stop being so serious.  Lighten up.  Laugh.
39. Go after as many life experiences as time permits.  Explore the world around you.
40. Learn to surf… and surf.  It truly is a remarkable experience.
41. Rise earlier.  Take on the world when your mind is fresh.
42. Be compassionate.  Be a friend every chance you get.
43. Organize yourself and your living space.  It will save you precious time.
44. Stop worrying about what you don’t have and start enjoying what you do have.
45. Set 3 priorities each morning and accomplish them by nightfall.
46. Focus on the positives.  Never dwell on the negatives.
47. Be romantic.  Surprise her.
48. Challenge yourself.  Don’t take the easy road to mediocrity. 
49. Stop wasting time on non-essential chores.
50. Learn to get things done effectively.
51. Shit happens.  Move beyond your mistakes immediately.
52. There’s a big different between being scared and being prepared.  Always be prepared.
53. Educated yourself every chance you get.  Be a jack of all trades and a master of few.
54. Eat slower.  Enjoy your food.
55. Be slower.  Relax.
56. Use time-saving tricks and properly manage your time.
57. Leave work at work.
58. Perfect is the enemy of good.  Shoot for living the good life.
59. Eat at least one meal a day with family or friends.
60. Ask for help.  You’ll never get what you don’t ask for.
61. Always ask questions.  Doing so will save you time and grief.
62. Learn to say no.
63. Always keep your eye on the prize.  Maintain your focus on the outcome, not the current road block.
64. Play hard.  You only live once.  Live it up!
65. Spend less than you make.
66. Do one thing at a time… and do it well.
67. Simplify.  Simplify.  Simplify.
68. Be efficient while giving your mind a rest:  Write stuff down.
69. Own less.  Do more.
70. Avoid the common cold.  Wash your hands before eating.
71. Stop driving like a maniac.  It’s less stressful and far safer.
72. Practice self-sufficiency.  Once you attain it, nobody can take it away from you.
73. Be spontaneous.
74. Always keep your promises.
75. Sleep well.
76. Remain approachable to others.  The more people you meet, the more opportunities you will receive.
77. Make a continuous habit of realigning your habits with the things that make you happy.

Photo by: jjjohn

Courtesy: http://www.marcandangel.com/

 

 

 

On Being Twenty-Six

of late, I’ve been feeling o-l-d. I don’t know why exactly. It could have something to do with the fact that I’m doing my second Master’s and most people around me are at least 3-4 years my junior. I’m twenty-six. Does that mean anything? Am i supposed to have reached a certain milestone by now? Like a definite job profile in a company? Like a fiance or atleast a steady boyfriend (who I would marry in a couple of years or less of course!) ? Are my dreams becoming anachronastic or should I console myself into thinking that I’m a ‘late-bloomer’?! What are the people my age doing? Most of them are in jobs they don’t like or relate to, some have gone for further studies and others are trying to find marital bliss as they try to make weekends ‘fun’ by shopping at Malls. Am I a fool by thinking I can escape doing either? Only time will tell…Until then, a poem I found while searching for smilar exist-agial crisis:

On Being Twenty-six

by Philip Larkin

I feared these present years,
The middle twenties,
When deftness disappears,
And each event is
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt,
And turned to drought.

I thought: this pristine drive
Is sure to flag
At twenty-four or -five;
And now the slag
Of burnt-out childhood proves that I was right.
What caught alight

Quickly consumed in me,
As I foresaw.
Talent, felicity—
These things withdraw,
And are succeeded by a dingier crop
That come to stop;

Or else, certainty gone,
Perhaps the rest,
Tarnishing, linger on
As second-best.
Fabric of fallen minarets is trash.
And in the ash

Of what has pleased and passed
Is now no more
Than struts of greed, a last
Charred smile, a clawed
Crustacean hatred, blackened pride—of such
I once made much.

And so, if I were sure
I have no chance
To catch again that pure
Unnoticed stance,
I would calcine the outworn properties,
Live on what is.

But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall

At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,

Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise

Tale of Cafes and Cigarettes…

I am a late-smoker. I mean by any standards, when young people usually start experimenting with different forms of forms of narcotic addictions, I was still into my caffeine addiction. It was my new found sense of romance and being. A rainy night and a cup of coffee, an exam the next day, a cup of coffee, a late Sunday breakfast and a coffee – just about any pretext would do. The urge to have coffee was so strong that I had become the official coffee-maker at home. This was around the time I was 16-19.

 

As I got to quit the dull grays of the school uniform and enter the carefully color coded world of the college-goer, I was still very much a chai-coffee girl. So just before class, just after a boring class, during break, while sitting at the lovers’ lake with my boyfriend, all became occasions for the ubiquitous beverage. Let me tell you a bit about Jadavpur University – of course by popular folklore it must be well known. It’s a subversive space. Professors and students smoke together, there was a lake right infront of the UG Arts Building where the bridge was the place where the dopers all would get together (with the paraphernalia of guitars and pseudo-intellectuals spewing Marx and Movies), the lake near the engineering department also was the very acceptable haunt of lovers on campus. Smoking was the most common thing that one got to see – irrespective of gender. I must say that I was not ‘tempted’ one bit. I mean perhaps my involvement with the relationship was so intense that I did not feel the urge to (and as my ex claims, it was he who ‘kept me out of trouble!’).

 

Mid of Master’s second year, I was single and feeling adventurous. I had lost a lot of weight, felt lighter and experimental (not necessarily in that order or correlation). I tried out the cigarette in no way pressurized from my surroundings. I did it for the sake of doing it, I felt a high and enjoyed it. Since then the cigarette has been a companion. I know all the arguments for health and against the smoke. But it was not a logical stand point. As I told a friend recently: it was the most illogical route to happiness. There was absolutely no reason but the sheer feeling of being a certain way, when I sat alone in coffee shops, it lent me a kind of duality (a dual presence in an apparently single presence) which acted as a deterrent to unwanted company. It was liberating to occupy a public space (without a male company) and not be approached for company. Yes, I was naïve to the extent that it had not struck me before that a woman out in a public space and single is an anomaly and will be stared at. In fact that was the time that I truly discovered “my space”. This space, no one tells you which exists, is a magical space (somewhat like the platform 9 ¾ in Harry Potter), it does not exist until you make it come into existence. It was the first time that in these public cafes, with my twin infatuations in place (coffee and cigarettes), I sensed for the first time, what I define as freedom.

 

Pedagogy of POesy

 

Paulo Freire has been hovering around my reading list for some time now and an e-confession of not having actually read him, could be impetus enough to go to the library and pick up his seminal work – The Pedagogy of the Oppressed ( http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm) Why is it relevant now? Well, for the last couple of days, in our Media and Development classes we have been discussing Freire and his concepts of the oppressor and the oppressed. The ideas are not absolutely new or novel to me as I have heard of him in other contexts of my previous associations with people and work. Pedagogy, to the unininitiated, means a method of teaching – a kind of a self-reflexivity in ways that one teaches.

Ok. A bit of personal historiography of my aquaintance with Freire. Also linked up with this historiography is a bit of the history of my own interest in development and education – the two key things that he actually talks about. While still pursuing my bachelor’s in English Literature from JU, I had a senior who used to be interested in development as well and had at the time been working for UNICEF. It was from him that I had first heard of Paulo Freire and of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The name intrigued me but that was all that I knew about Freire. This was in say around 2003…Then the demands of the English Literature studies took my attention away from the development sector. But on stray occasions like the Calcutta Book Fair, I would spot a copy of the book and be tempted to buy it but refrain from doing so by applying the logic of its possible odd existence on my bookshelf beside Macbeth and Wuthering Heights. Not logic enough I guess, but that was the best I could come up with to stop myself (apart from more obvious reasons like monetory ones!) from reaching out and buying it.

My next encounter with Freire was more long lasting and meaningful. My first job after post graduation in Eng.Lit was with an NGO called Daywalka Foundation which at that time (2006-2007) used to fund a small and progressive program called Kalam Margins Write. It worked in collaboration with other partner NGOs to organize poetry workshops (it still does, although it is independent now). “Kalam: Margins Write is a rights-based writing program building critical and creative voices among marginalized youth in urban India” - see this website: www.kalammarginswrite.org

                                                       

                                                       With the Kalam workshop kids

 I was programme co-ordinator for Kalam for around 9 months. During that time, I was re-introduced to Paulo Freire through my boss Sahar Romani (also the founder of the Kalam). She is a visionary and more importantly a woman who believes in applying her education and knowledge to making some difference. I was lucky to be associated with Kalam and espcially because Sahar constantly insisted on participation and dialogue in our work with the adolescent youth. Personally I was living the philosophy of my belief in non-hierarchy and equality through such praxis. The workshops that Bishan (my colleague) and I facilitated was a practice of the basic tenets of Freire’s concepts of dialogue and conscientization. You can read about the process on the blog links on the Kalam website.

Coming back to the present, I’m studying Freire in the larger framework of media and development. We are studying Freire as a third stage of development – Participatory Development – which is preceded by two other means of development espoused earlier – Modernization and Dependency Development Theories.

Unknowingly, I have always felt an affinity with the concepts of Freire – now I intend to read and apply it in my future work. But to the library first!

 

 

Karmic Reflections

 

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for about two years now. Almost everytime my innate laziness has been my greatest obstacle. So you may ask (and rightly so) : why now? It’s not a simple answer. But it’s not too tough either. Well, the last year and this one so far has been, umm, interesting to say the least. I mean I have seen a series of ups and downs happen in my life and now I feel like there is a certain sense of stability (ok, I’ll touch wood), which assists me in this act of self reflexivity that the blog is meant to be a physical manifestation of.

As of now, i mean this present time, I feel like i’m putting this existence that we choose to call life to some good use. And not in any utilitarian way. I mean in a Maslowe’s hierarchy – self-actualization kind of way. Since I’ve come to Mumbai on 21st November 2007, life has been, erm, LIVED shall we say? For starters, living outside one’s hometown – Calcutta in my case – is not easy (that too for the very first time in 25 years). But yes, it teaches you a lot. It’s like you’ve just come out of a cocoon and you’re alone. Life is your battle, your hell, your heaven and anything that you want it to be. And to quote an inane ad: “I’m lovin it!”

But more of that later. For now, coming back to why I started this blog on this date – well I just had an interesting conversation about the Hindu philosophy of Karma and I suddenly felt a sense of urgency in reflecting on my actions. Since you know, Karma speaks about actions and consequences and I think it has something to do with being responsible for one’s actions. I still don’t know if I believe in it, but I’m willing to take up the act of self-reflexivity more seriously. So here we are…

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