The still sinew

It was the evening of September 4 in the year 2021. I was watching a wonderfully evolving five-day test match between India and England. It was the third day and it already felt like a fascinating eternity in which I had found my life captured in it. The Indians had started batting on Day 1 in utterly hopeless fashion only to find themselves being given a sinew to clutch hopes from Shardul Thakur who had effervescently blazed and blasted fifty-seven runs off a mere thirty-six deliveries. He was very much threatening to be the latest avatar of Lord Krishna, whose birthday had gone by three days earlier on August 31^st.

Parallelly, I was also watching the historic day for India when we won two gold medals for the first time on a single day in Paralympic sports in Tokyo, an event that can be juxtaposed or even dared to beat the often-justified hype around the normal Olympics.

Coming back to the test match cricket. Indian bowlers had rekindled hopes of stealing the match by showing steel during the final hour of play on Day 1 when they dashed three top order England batsmen. Since then, I have been ogling at the match with great adulation and hope to learn some lifelong lessons. I have not been disappointed with Ollie Pope hitting a quite marvellous and magnificently composed eighty-one runs, and Chris Woakes offering so much variety, composure, runs and wickets. I instantly took an idyllic photo of those two nice human beings playing the hard way but looking so soft and pleasing to my eyes.

England then raced to a 99-run lead. India was relying on one of their bowlers to limit the fast-vaulting English lead to below the three-figure mark. It was then as if Lord Krishna heard it and offered a chance by dismissing the England team for a lead of 99 runs.

It was the last straw that Indians were mentally telling themselves to hold to. Within ten minutes, Rohit Sharma and Rahul came out to bat, and what I saw later across twenty-four hours is the Lord Krishna like quietness, calm, yet mischief being shown by Rohit Sharma. He didn’t race to his first foreign century in this format. Instead, he gardened his way to that milestone. The three flashes of Lord Krishna that he showed were when he smashed a sixer to reach his milestone of a hundred runs, followed by his raising his bat every so softly and humbly that the English fans sitting far in the stadium could feel a friendly twinge in their spine that led them to stand up and give an adulation and honour. The last and final flash reminiscent of Lord Krishna showing by Rohit was when he could not resist the temptation to smash the new cherry out of the ground, and in the process, flicked the ball straight into the waiting hands of the fielder who was stationed at the boundary.

In this entire process, I feel that the English fans and cricketers would have felt the still and stable charming influence of Lord Krishna in Rohit. They would also realize that it was quite the last sinew that he had provided to India for completing what would be a truly pyrrhic victory but most importantly, to show the world the way to behave, play and celebrate in a quiet and still manner. His demeanour also teaches us to how to respect the thing we love the most, such as cricket, and to always be generous, humble, and tempered and mild mannered.

Performance speaks louder than words.

The pain that he endured when the cricket ball was hitting him on his legs, hands and each sinew later eventually got transformed to a beautiful rendition of runs, style, grace and the last straw that Indians were so hopefully yearning for in order to complete the victory, and to transcend the way the world looks at Indians as pleasant, graceful, caring and hard working.

His performance is perfect in its timing as it came just a few hours before Teacher’s Day.

The raw, uncut, pristine flock

Today, I was given the honour of reviewing my daughter's artwork. I call it an honour because arts is something built upon since my childhood days when my father had spotted my early talent and had rewarded me consistently based on the quality of my artwork and more so for how much he used to like my piece of abstraction represented on a sheet of paper. Then I had soon blossomed into a full-fledged painter and had begun painting aeroplanes, flowers, faces of beautiful people, parrots and then nature. It was this transformation from aeroplanes to nature that had captured my imagination so much so that I still benefit from that. Whenever I get drowned in the depression given by the man-made structures, there is something that I can sense and smell from the perfume of the air that comes to my rescue to provide bright and vivid creatures of nature that I can cling to. Today was an inch perfect example of that. I had got the chance to help my daughter with drawing a large tree draped under the hot Sun and housing a woodpecker and above all a sweet squirrel. The fluffy tail of that cute animal piqued my interest so much that I began looking at the different colours and hues that don its body. I could quickly spot a pattern with three colours present on its body. Later, I also realized that it can become a pet for the humans because of the sweet camaraderie it shares with us. I was stunned to see the raw speed of such a tiny creature yet a pristine and a rich flock of hair on its fluffy tail and elsewhere on its near invisible body. No wonder humans have been inspired by this creature and made movies such as Ice Age and its sequels. It has not been raining since several weeks in various parts of north India. A primary reason is either too much pollution of air due to vehicles occupying the road or the cruel trimming of trees as if they deserve a haircut during this summer season. If we would have allowed the vast trees to live freely and not chopped off the leaves and the branches from it, then we would not have been bothering about why the God has kept us bereft from the beautiful rain. This event of my virtually seeing a squirrel capturing my imagination which the tall buildings or the guzzling cars acting as spoilers has been enough to make me realize the importance of living with the nature and being with the nature at all times. It might rain tomorrow as is predicted by the Indian Meteorology Department and people may use that water to wash all the sins they have committed in the past. However, it is the smell of the rain and even more important the smell of the predicted rain that I am more interested in, and I have already got the fragrance of that smell! I would like to end this piece of artwork by saying that the nature has taught me to stay humble, happy, hopeful and hirsute in all times.

Run we can, and…

It was the London 2012 Olympics when we were all curious to know whether our all time great Abhinav Bindra who had famously won the gold medal in the Beijing 2008 Olympics will continue to win us more medals. We also wanted to see if the investment in the athletes will pay off. We were able to win six medals then, which is the richest haul in any Olympics for India till date. Once those games had culminated, it gave me the impression that we had won at least ten medals. We had struck silver and bronze, but our victories were looking so pyrrhic that the individual gold medal performance of Bindra was already bested by the combined ‘team’ performance of our London-bound athletes. So much so that my British colleague who was interning in India had hailed the Brits’ countless medals in equal light as India’s overall performances. However, then the fear of not being able to strike medals in team events was not up to the mark for India. That fear came back to haunt the Indian team in Brazil where the 2016 Olympics were held, and we ended up with two silver medals both in individual sport. We celebrated Dipa Karmarkar’s fourth place finish with such elan that we completely covered our mind with our incompetence in team sports.

Where India falters time and again is in not taking sports as a serious path to success. It is sport that gives us resilience, tests our resolve, sprinkles us with hope, fills us with buoyancy, gives us courage, and most importantly, makes us rise above every negativity of life such as hate, religion, race or caste.

We must excel in sports and give our Government a gumption to invest at least a billion dollars for the next Olympics.

We have been found floundering in swimming, cycling and countless other sports that require us to run. The meaning of a gold medal is that one needs to literally outrun and out-chase all the opponents.

We as a nation in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have failed to take as a personal insult when we go down fighting in a boxing match to China, or a table tennis match to a Hong Kong citizen who was born in China, or to a swimming semi-final qualifying heat to a Chinese Taipei citizen.

We as a nation have consistently failed to flame our inspiration from athletes of different race or religion who have won gold medal out of utter hopeless situations. The victory of the Tunisian who upset all odds to beat the fan-favourite Australian for a swimming gold medal will be a story that will always be etched in gold for me.

We as Indians wilfully obliterate our perspective of why some people such as a woman from Bermuda chose to renounce their British citizenship to go to Bermuda and defeated a Brit by a handsome margin to strike Gold medal in triathlon that too under extremely bad weather.

We must begin to excel in the power of learning from others and in giving credit where it is due. We must respect the value of the Gold medal for the winner when we don’t even reach the podium or are not good enough to be qualifying for it.

We must not sit back and harp upon our flash-in-the-pan victories even if they had come in a team event, although that rarity had happened to us more than four decades ago when we had won our last Olympic Hockey gold medal.

We must not count on odds to wait for the Chinese woman gold medalist to get disqualified so that our own silver medalist can somehow escape with a gold medal.

The single most important step that is required for all of us is to be mindful of the tropical climate of the Indian subcontinent and thereby to allow every single Indian to run and chase the glory. We must keep inspiring everyone to assign equal importance to running on the land, under the water, or in the form of a triathlon, even if it requires us to do that under the cold conditions of Himalayas or to go to China or Russia for practicing. We must encourage the children to best out their lungs and to identify their own halo of Gold medal in equal stead as the visualization of the Ohm chanting. We must live, breathe and learn from sport every single moment of life. We must let women take a lead in sports. We must not repent why chess or cricket have not yet been included in Olympics. We must value team sport significantly above an individual sport. We must clap the winners and learn from the struggles of every champion who is not an Indian. Above all, we must stop our extremely bad habits of indulging in cricket, Bollywood, politics and corruption.

To win a medal in Olympics requires nothing short of a Herculean effort. Let us call it an ‘Indian’ effort in the future. Together, when we have run a billion miles, then we must remind ourselves of “We can!” and then offer our own brand of Indian-ness to the world in the future Olympics. A target of 2 Golds, 3 Silvers and 10 Bronze should be enough for us to see us be eligible for hosting our own Olympics.

If some sane Indian person encounters this blog while she is running, then who knows we may inspire her to win a Gold medal in the present Olympics itself!

Toolchain “Over-take-over” to fight Covid-19

It is very important to anticipate the onset of a tsunami or a clear and imminent danger. Covid-19 second wave has proved to be a tsunami that too of unforeseen and magnanimous proportion. It has ravaged thousands of houses as well as households.

To put it succinctly, it has overtaken the comfort factor and the breathing space of many people world over, with India becoming the latest nation that is seeing dance of death on a daily basis.

It has shuffled the mindset and questioned the thought process of the most rational people.

There are so many theories being propounded about the origin of this coronavirus.

It is imperative that we understand the pain, the suffering and the shock being borne by countless Indians, yet formulate a resolve and collectively leverage all other tools that we have got to fight against this deadly devastating disastrous disease. We should prepare a diverse dashboard which mentions the benefits due to all the tools in the armoury that we have devised to tackle this virus.

We should look beyond finding the count of at risk and Covid-19 infected people in our near vicinity starting from five hundred meters in India’s famous Aarogya Setu app and augment it with the following:

Finding the count of at risk and Covid infected people in our near vicinity starting from ten meters.

How many people were able to heed the advice of someone whom they trust, and had got saved by that advice.

 The number of people who got cured due to the help provided by their neighbours. This is important to do because currently the Aarogya Setu app only works to frighten us by alerting us in Orange colour even if we are living directly above or below someone who is Covid-19 positive. Whereas the need of the hour is to combine forces and together fight this pandemic.

 The proportion of people who are vaccinated in the society where you live.

The number of masks that you have been wearing consistently since the last seven days.

 The number of people who you have succeeded in wearing a mask in your neighbourhood or society.

 Social distancing norms.

 Yoga and other exercises meant to increase the capacity of your lungs and to keep you from being mentally anxious or distressed.

 Not panicking no matter what the situation is.

Building knowledge about the pandemic.

Getting keenly involved in home bound activities such as reading, cooking, etc.

Hand wash using soap.

Keeping an empathetic attitude towards others at all times.

Watching news only for a few minutes in the morning.

Whilst each of the above-mentioned ideas may have contributed to saving precious lives, it is now vital to unite all these ideas to create a collected benefits due to these tools and to create a “halo” effect on the troubled infected patients.

Once we prepare such a variegated dashboard, only then can we be enarmed enough to wage a battle with this invisible beast called coronavirus.

Flow-chart

Life is like a flow-chart. It begins with how to start it when we are running to crawl then walk. Once we know the magic formula, then we assume that we will go with the flow and escape unhurt. However, if we start getting hurt or punished due to deviating from the predetermined steps, then panic, fear and other problems can quickly seep into our system. This can in turn result in a few people trying to exploit our situation by pitying,  bullying or fleecing us. When fear, greed and other challenges hit us together, only then we realize the importance of preparing a dashboard or a chart of real time updates about the challenges being faced and the possible solutions for dealing with those challenges. When we come out of a torrid trouble by often a hit-and-trial manner, then we reflect upon how we had learnt from our past mistakes or how those wounds continue to inflict on us. Having said that, Covid-19 is not any normal disease because it has the potential to spiral into an invisible tsunami from which not even any combination of human beings or their intelligence can truly define the new normal.

Now I want to make a chart to depict how well we cope with the following new unknowns: 1) how likely are we to contract Covid-19 virus when waiting patiently for our turn to get vaccinated at the long queues in the vaccination centre, 2) whether we can ever find merit in finding the degree of infection in patients who get vaccinated twice, 3) whether we can ever devise a technology to detect a person wearing a handkerchief or wrapping a sari dupatta on his or her mouth masquerading a mask, 4) the number of non-stop numbing hours being put by doctors and health workers who have been treating the Covid-19 infected patients, 5) will the Covid-19 news of patients painfully testing positive finally yield to the balancing act of “negative” upon the tsunami of patients staging full recovery. Even if 300 such patients get recovered on any given day, I can resonate that news with the 300 Spartacans who had successfully kept thousands of Xerxes army at bay in one of the most famous wars.

What the numbers fail to report in a dashboard like Worldometer is the varying degrees of fight put up in a ferocious level as if to deny Covid-19 from breaching their defense. Other features such as the colors of joy, relief, faith or the attritional approach taken during the long quarantine period in their tears does not get captured in those dashboards for Indians. There should be a case for launching such a beautiful and inspiring dashboard.

Finally, with this blog, I pledge the support of everyone to recognize the importance of staying strictly confined to their homes and to believe in scientific research and innovation to pull our way out of the powerful willy-wobbly web that we have created for ourselves. This is a wonderful opportunity to recognize the beauty of diversity among us and to help each other in a selfless way as though we all belong to some part of a communion.

The colloquial insignia

The new horizon makes us leap to frantically search for motivation and what will keep us going during this post Covid-19 era. With new variants being found in various nations, you can never be certain whether and when to wipe this virulent virus from the Earth. The most predictive distress is due to the dire threat of it being spread to such lovely birds and animals as koala bears, peacocks, dolphins and kittens to name a few, for their fond and friendly “hi-five” capability to their human friends upon the slightest gesture given to these grand lovely species.

Yet people have become so besotted with wearing face mask that they now feel that their photo will get masqueraded behind the veil of a mega cloth, and render their presentability and handsomness into oblivion. Even more of a creative yet fretful sight would be when we find a red colored mask covering the beautiful nose of a dolphin or a grey mask to not allow the lustre of a peacock to radiate. Although it would be quite a fun to watch any kitten ensconced safely beneath a mask of any shape, colour or size!

We have caused the coronavirus to create crippling crisis in not only our lives but also for other living beings.

The least that we can do is to start respecting people beginning with those living with us and then near us. We should strive to salute their spirit for whatever good deeds that they have done or are thinking of doing, for it is this capability of thinking about others and putting the community’s interests ahead of our interests that can alone safeguard the reputation of the human being, once it becomes extinguished or engulfed by the gigantic yet invisible threat of the coronavirus.

We can begin with realizing that giving a mere salute to an otherwise ordinary worker can raise his self esteem as well as lift the value of the nation in front of your own eyes, for you never know the value of that worker to the nation.

The beauty of giving a salute is that is can be silent and can be good for posture as it forces us to visualize the national flag getting raised.

The challenge for all of us is to find those people who deserve our salute and to then record their marvelous acts in our diary of colloquial insignia.

Once we realize that it will take a collective effort for all of us those living with us or nearby us to fight this pandemic, we will start contributing to the society by creating badge of honour or as I call “Colloquy of Insignia”, for these are acts that can raise us to the level of earning an insignia yet in an informal way. We can furtively say “I salute you” to an unmasked yet spirited or a helpful or a friendly neighbour, or we can “Hello” twice and then wait for the reciprocation by your neighbour. Also, you can pick every Saturday to make a handful donation to a needy person who has to win bread for his struggling family and does not have the money or the food or the clothes to do so. Those tiny acts may eventually contribute you to expanding the dimensions of your thought process or your well being, or both, which are pivotal to succeed in today’s competitive environment.

The key is to not rush but rather let such moments flow into you and inspire you to force yourself to think positively about others so that they too can start thinking good about you, with the end result being mutual respect or collaboration, and benefit to the society or the nation.

We can spare some soft laughter for those who choose to befriend us only virtually such as on Zoom meetings!

I would like to end this story by saying that a photo of yours inside an Insignia can reveal so much about your inner confidence as well as hint at the numerous acts of sacrifice and kindness that you would have done in order for others to view you from the glass of repute that had culminated in this most humanitarian award.

You have to believe me when I say that I had found two people who directly benefited from my positive approach while I was penning this story in the last twenty minutes!!