Taking it personally

For a while, I swung between two extremes of ownership – indifference and passionately personal. Neither led to great results. And finding the balance between the two has been a tight-rope walk; one that I have not mastered yet.

After giving it a lot of thought, I think I know why. Indifference was easy. When I achieved something to a satisfactory outcome to my expectation, I stopped caring about what happened to it thereafter. Or when I put in a lot of effort into something and got great results, but nobody gave me credit, or said “Wow! What a great job!”, I stopped caring.

Instances where I got passionately personal was a little difficult to analyse. Why would I fail at getting great results at something which I had made every waking thought (even dreams occasionally), which I put every ounce of effort I could muster? I was doing the right things, in the right way. But when I put in an effort of 100, and those around would only put in about 20, sometimes not even doing the right things, I didn’t try to raise them up. It was easier to tell myself that I had messed up and put myself down.

I’ve been told on multiple occasions, in both a professional and a personal capacity that I take things too personally. Why is that?

The answer (I think), is maybe I don’t value my own opinion enough. Why wasn’t a pat on the back from myself good enough when I started tending towards indifference? Why didn’t I detach from the situation, get a better perspective, and moved on?

Once I got to this conclusion, I realised that I don’t value my own opinion or word on an everyday basis. I don’t express anger - I clam myself up and continue about my day. I don’t express sadness – I put on a brave face, attempting to hide what I’m feeling and fail miserably at it. I don’t express preference – I go with the choice of the majority or references. I don’t have a preference in interiors, or clothes – I go with what I have been conditioned to like.

I definitely need to reassess life a little bit and give a lot more importance to what I want to do. Funnily enough, this exercise is going to quite a double guessing game. Am I choosing what I ‘should’, or am I choosing me?

Half year resolution maybe?

Where is my Identity?

The increasing religious and racial radicalism is surprisingly omnipresent. USA has underlying racism against African Americans and people in Turbans or Burkas. Australia closely follows the same lines. And in India, every religion seems to have a pact with every other religion for promised hatred, a policy of zero tolerance, and a if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us psyche. With the intolerance taking on an increasingly violent streak by the day (on a scale of go-back-where-you-came-from to IS), what is the solution for peaceful co-existence? Succumbing to their radical and political agendas would ensure that countries currently identified by their geographic location or names would be identified as a house for one religion, and one religion alone.

People in the United States have declared on more than one occasion that they are a Christian nation and that's how it should be. The outpouring support for Kim Davis indicates much the same. People in Iraq have declared that it is a Muslim nation. The IS extorting special taxes from Christians living in the state under the pretext of doing do on the commands of the Koran has no other denotation. And people in India have declared on more than one occasion that India is to be a Hindu state where any other religion and any non-regional languages are to be opposed for the fear that "Westernization" may cause "Cultural Pollution" which will eventually require "Cultural Purification". However, the grounds on which the term 'Cultural Pollution' has been coined screams hypocrisy. Those who oppose English-medium education very willingly learnt Hindi when their regional languages were not sufficient to survive. Those who are opposing the meat ban during the Jain festival never protested the permanent ban on beef; the government dictating the kitchens of a common man in both scenarios.

The IS propagates that no Muslim has the right to question the word of Allah or that of his followers. Doing so is committing apostasy punishable by death. Radical Hinduism seems not too far away with the Kalburgi death and the Bhagwan death threat.

This severe animosity is springing from deep rooted insecurities. For centuries, the whole identity of a frighteningly large number of people has lied in their 'culture', limited to their religion, language, geographic location, clothing and a few others as opposed to intellectual identities. With time, Globalization has performed the role of a bag of scrabble tiles. While a small world is welcome to some, the others fear for the safety of their own thoughts. The small percentage for whom identity is a function of their intellectual potential, are like a breath of fresh air in the middle of a busy Delhi street in June, but David and Goliath was just a story when the context is 21^st century violence.

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

I'm sorry Mr. Tagore. Father didn't hear you.