Happiness

So Desi Brigit Jones has been under a bit of a bad spell of late. I realize that the trick to happiness is to be happy no matter what – irrespective of the job or boyfriend (or lack of!) or outer circumstances. Yup, the idea is to ‘be happy for no reason’. And some people actually have made a living out of it – making people happy. There is some pretty inspirational stuff out there on the internet - except that right now I don't feel like being inspired. I feel like my whole life seems to be this run on a treadmill to nowhere. Why are we running – to be fulfilled or make a difference or to feel we’ve done something useful in life, but ultimately it is to just be happy.

Reminds me of this Vikram Seth poem I read long ago and loved:

Voices in my head,
Chanting ‘Kisses, Bread,
Prove yourself, Fight, Shove,
Learn, Earn, Look for love’
Stills a lesser voice,
Silent now of choice:
‘Breathe in peace and be
Still for once - like me’

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Brigit: You know God, that ‘still, quiet’ voice that you apparently use to speak to me? I can’t freaking hear it!!

God: Ok…. Watch the profanity child; you’re talking to the almighty!

Brigit: Sorry, I’ll wash my mouth with holy water. But still,  why can’t I hear you?

God: Because you expect to hear me in a particular way! Even if I shouted out in thunder you wouldn’t hear me because you have these notions about the way I’m supposed to be.

Brigit: Hrmmp!

God: What makes you think I’m not speaking to you now?

Brigit: Half the time I wonder whether I’m talking to myself

God: Maybe you are; maybe I am you

Brigit: Now that is quite blasphemous you know – to think of myself as God.

God: Well, maybe it’s about recognizing the divinity in oneself.

Brigit: I don’t know about that. I can’t quite see God in myself right now; I’m feeling grouchy and weepy and whiney and want a chocolate latte! Can you imagine – God going down to the Café to get a chocolate Latte?!

God: Chocolate Latte! My favorite drink!

Brigit: Hrmmp!

Indian English

The Queen’s English has taken a new turn in good old India.   So Desi Brigit Jones being Indian can only write love letters in Indian English

To my dear Mr. E (please note this is to clarify to the reader that he’s not anyone else’ Dear).

Why did you not revert back to my last email wherein I wrote to you saying we must discuss about our dance on paper? I am trying very hard to get in touch with you but since I am not hearing from you of late, I think you must be out of station no?

In any case, let me tell you more about myself. Since I passed out of college over a decade and a half ago I have been working in jobs which have been giving me a very good remuneration. Every day, after my ablutions, I thank the almighty for all the blessings he has bestowed on me. All that is pending for me now is a good boy.

Hence I am writing to you but not finding any revert from you after so many emails. Why is that so? Years back, I asked God to send me a good man like you- bald but intelligent who would do all the needful to give me a comfortable life.  I tell you, you do one thing – why don’t you just take out your laptop and send me one email no?

Ok, now I have to go. The big sleep is coming on me. I have preponed my visit to Mumbai and I hope to hear from you by then.

Ok tata, bye bye!

Yours affectionately,

Brigit

:)

Love and Writing

So I’m listening to TED talks talking about why you’ll fail to have a great career and about finding work you love and I realize both talks hinge on the same topic – following your passion.

Passion, Eros – that which gives us energy, which makes us come alive. A passionate person is in love with life and is very attractive without even trying to be so.

Well,  I sometimes ask myself why the heck I’m writing this blog  – when probably the only person faithfully reading this blog is me – and my good friends ( bless you!).  Well, maybe because I’m trying to get in touch with my inner passion - given that all the energy in finding Prince Charming is only leading me from one toad to another.( in fact,  I can probably write a PhD thesis titled “The anatomy of the Indian toad”).

Writing helps me deal with the angst of my otherwise mundane and sometimes exasperating work life. Like Toni Morrison said in one of her talks, (check out her talk under ‘authors and poets’ from academicearth.org):

“I enjoyed the process of invention so much… I had a full time job and I had small children so I had to write at odd hours … but writing filled my imaginative life and my inner life so much that I felt able and competent and smart in the other areas of my life because I had this secret thing that I was doing for me. I was the ideal reader; I was the one I wanted to please”.

So often, we keep waiting for the right time to start something, I’d told myself I’d adopt a child at 30 if I hadn’t married by then and now in my 40’s am still waiting for the immaculate conception to happen  once more ( Ok St. Peter I know that is blasphemous...)

Julia Cameron (we share our birthdays!) in her book “The Right to Write” talks of the myth of setting time aside to write:

“If we learn to write from the sheer love of writing, there is always enough time, but time must be stolen like a quick kiss between lovers on the run. The key to finding writing time then is to write from love and not with an eye of product”

There you go again – love and passion!

Brigit: I still want to be a famous writer! I don’t want to be the only one reading my work. I want to write soul stirring stuff that moves people; I want to be featured on Oprah!

God: Well, the world does know my son, Jesus. I think his name also did come up on some of Oprah’s talk shows. He was crucified first though.

Brigit: And this is known as divine encouragement?! Hrmpp!

God: Hey, who says I can’t have a sense of humour  :)

Quote for the weekend - Happy Eid!

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ~Rumi

Starry, Starry Night…

This whole obsession to try and figure out why the heck my love live sucks and why the heck I don’t have the relationship I want led me to explore the net and I stumbled onto all sorts of resources on the internet – dating coaches, seminars and what not.

What strikes me, however, is that there is not a single resource from India on the net talking about love and dating – c’mon not a single peep from the Land of the Kamasutra?! Hear, hear – I think there is a huge business opportunity for this space in urban India. I’m very conscious that I speak to just a fraction of the people in this country, bulk of whom are struggling with the basic necessities of life. For majority, finding love is probably a frivolity one can’t afford when the main aim is just to get something to eat. And yet with all its poverty and starkness, love does thrive – in various ways and this is the beauty of India and of humanity in general.

However, back to urban India - maybe I can put all my love ‘misadventures’ and subsequent learning from various sources to good use and set up my own ‘dating & love website’ – like they say you teach what you most need to learn!

The most interesting ‘export’ that I discovered online in the field of ‘dating’ from the land of the Kamasutra (we’ve exported Yoga, Ayurveda to mention a few) was astrology.   Yes, I stumbled onto Carol Allen’s VedicAstrology site and was quite impressed with how smartly she’s packaged Vedic astrology (from India!) with dating advice and psychology in a language and way that appeals to the modern person. In India, I guess you’d find an expert in one or the other but to connect the dots and present a product that appeals to this segment  (largely women searching for love, God knows what the men are looking for!) is quite smart in my opinion.

It’s all in the stars. Desi Brigit Jones doesn’t have a horoscope made (my catholic parents would have shuddered at the thought of doing something so pagan when I was born!) but I don’t think I’ll get one made anytime soon. I think it’s kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the stars say something will be so, then one tends to believe that outcome and “as one believes, so it shall be” – very biblical ironically!

The Math of Love

The odds of finding your soul mate are actually much higher than you think – probably higher than the odds of running into a truck in Bangalore traffic!

The odds of finding your soul mate can apparently be mathematically computed – using Fermi’s paradox and the Drake Equation.  Finally all those hours of statistics and mathematics classes will be put to good use! 

Fermi couldn’t understand where all the extra-terrestrials were – with so many billions of stars and planets, they had to be somewhere! Kind of echoes the human sentiment towards finding ‘the one’ – with 7 billion people on the planet – he/ she had to be somewhere!  Fermi’s paradox was used by Drake in an equation to compute the odds of finding extra-terrestrials. This equation is then translated to love – quite apt I think given that men are from Mars and women are from Venus!

As per the equation, the odds of finding love if you’re a 24 year old in New York are 871. As Desi Brigit Jones isn’t going anytime soon to New York, I figured I might as well apply this to Bangalore.

Anyway, here goes – (Believe, me if there is any motivation to learn math – this is it!):

N (soul mates) = N*F1*F2*F3*F4*F5*F6*F7*F8 where

N = Total Population in Bangalore (= 9.6 million as per the 2011 census)

F1 = Target population = 0.5 (Desi Brigit Jones is only looking at men – for now!)

F2 = No. of folks who are single = 0.4 (As adultery is a catholic mortal sin - no married men!)

F3 = Fraction of people I might meet= 0.2 (likely to be higher if you’re the gregarious type)

F4 = Folks in the target age range = between the early 40’s and late 40’s = 0.2

F5 = Folks who speak English = 0.8 (why do you think all those US jobs got ‘bangalored’?)

F6 = % of people I’d find attractive = 0.05 (Desi Brigit Jones is very picky!)

F7 = % of people who’d find me attractive = 0.05 (I realize, given my track record, that I probably come across to most men as a ‘ball busting’ feminist)

F8 = % of people who’d share my taste in the performing arts & music = 0.3 (fusion music, dance etc.)

Crunch the numbers and there are around 46 potential soul mates in Bangalore for me. Ouch only 46?! Well given that I’m quickly going through the alphabet, one letter at a time, falling in and out of love with A, J, Mr. E, P and V, I guess I should find ‘the one’ pretty soon – hopefully on this planet. Though I suspect the odds of finding extra-terrestrials are much higher!

The “F” Word

Taking off from my earlier post on the meaning of life, my friend and I came up with the term “FESS UP” which I’m told is a valid English slang term (meaning to acknowledge an error). The meaning of life, according to Desi Brigit Jones and Friend is to “FESS UP”: Fornicate, Eat, Sleep and Shit! Now that doesn’t sound quite as attractive as the title of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ so I guess I’ll have to come up with a more profound book title when I chronicle my journey to love.

Desi Brigit Jones is a late bloomer – in all areas of her life and more so in her love life.  She got married in her 30’s, didn’t kiss any frog till her late 20’s (is that why he didn’t turn into a handsome prince?) and never went ‘dating’ officially till her 40’s. So you can imagine her limited experience with the first “F”. It is after all a little difficult to fornicate with St. Peter and the archangels lined up around your catholic bed, waving their hands (and wings) in disapproval.  But Desi Brigit Jones decided it was time to make new choices, stop being a ‘good girl’ and break the rules. So she got the devil to draw some ‘see – proof’ curtains round her bed

Disaster! Sigh… the average Indian man confuses “F” with “Formula 1” racing.  Dear Indian Man - You are not Schumacher racing to the finish line from the twin peaks of Mount Everest.   Also a triumphant “Can I come?!” whilst heaving and pumping  like you’re on a bicycle pump is not romantic and will not get you brownie points with the fairer sex.   Where is connection, intensity, sensuality? Apparently these terms exist only in the ‘Mills and Boons’ that Desi Brigit Jones read as a teenager.

So, Desi Brigit Jones will have to “Fess Up” now; I have termed a new word for “F” – FROYO - Frozen Yogurt! Yes, nothing beats the “FroYo” being sold in Bangalore’s malls!  Eating ‘FroYo’ is a sensual experience; it has a divine vanilla smell and it tastes absolutely yummy. The end result after a bowl of ‘FroYo’ is a feeling of absolute bliss - a state synonymous with the Big ‘O’ as per Masters and Johnson! J .  Ha!

Meaning of Life

So I was speaking to my pal the other day and we were having a profound conversation on ‘the meaning of life’. ‘Life has no meaning’ was this young, smart man’s view. He has everything going for him – a great job abroad (We Indians envy the folks who earn in Dollars!), a loving wife and a young son who is the cutest little boy I know. Well, why does he say that? I’m beginning to think he is right – “life has no meaning” apart from the meaning we give it - which was my takeaway from the Landmark Series Session that I attended some years ago.

Now that is very scary – for suddenly this whole quest for meaning falls flat on its face? Isn’t it so much easier to keep chasing this elusive dream of the ‘meaningful’ life rather than give meaning to what is there now?  It means paying attention to what is happening now. As Dan Millman in the book and movie “The PeacefulWarrior” says – “There are no ordinary moments”

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Brigit: This is very confusing – I find no great meaning in my perils at the workplace and the romantic debacles I seem to fall into ever so often. What meaning am I meant to give to all this?

God: Good question! Sit with it

Brigit:  I always knew you were behind all those coaches and psychotherapists who dish out inane responses like what you’ve just said

God: No, seriously, sometimes you have to listen to what emerges from within you. So often the focus is on getting the answers from outside to all questions including your questions about love.

Brigit: I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about but I’ll give it a shot. I guess the almighty at least should know what he is talking about. How do I start?

God: Be quiet. Meditate. Write

Brigit: Hrrmp! This is going to be tougher than I thought.

God: Remember, I am with you always.