Un-othering

An amazing incident happened yesterday. I was riding a scooter in a lane near home, and I stopped at a turn when a child was playing in the middle of the road as his father was walking beside him. Seeing me on the scooter, his father caught hold of the child with a jerk and moved him to a side of the lane. He then said to me in a genuine apologetic tone, "I am sorry!"
I said to him in an accommodating, non-condescending way, "Please don't say sorry to me. This (the street) is as much his as it is mine..." The father was amazed, and probably rightly so. 
We live in a world filled increasingly with the idea of ownership. 'My', 'mine', 'myself' are the watchwords. We are all the time trying to prove to others or even to ourselves sometimes, that we are better than the others... The road is created for our convenience, the vehicles are there for our use, the vendors exist to sell wares to us. We are at the centre of our universes...
I, like all of us, need to reflect on this tendency of ours, and realize and remember, that we exist among others. We would be nothing without the others. As Bakhtin would probably say, my identity belongs to all - what I am is determined by what I am to others...
PS: I am glad I spontaneously said those words to the child's father... I want to be like that more and more! I hope I can...

Are we merely the sum of our parts?

At a time when we arrogate ourselves into believing that we are unitary beings and we are so full of ourselves and our abilities..., the 2013 film The Ship of Theseus, which I revisited now, makes us think about a few very basic questions:
- Who are you? Are you the sum of your various body parts?
- Can you really think you are an independent entity or are you truly a knot in the 'web of life'?
- Does someone else's organ in you (eyes for example) change every thing about you? Are you now the very same person? Are you somehow more plural now?
I quote the insightful opening lines of the film:
"As the planks of Theseus' ship needed repair, it was replaced part by part, up to a point where not a single part from the original ship remained in it, any more. Is it then, still the same ship?
If all the discarded parts were used to build another ship, which of the two, if either, is the real ship of Theseus?"
Simply brilliant, the message of the film, in terms of the questions it raises. The shots, the music and the sounds in the background... (Y)
So much more relevant in the context of Organ Donation day/week being organized, and in the situated memory of my dear younger brother we lost a few years ago, a few days before a kidney transplant procedure was due on him, on an otherwise-ordinary August (09/08) morning. Today (04/08) is his death anniversary as per the lunar calendar. My Achan and Amma are performing a ritual at their spiritual centre in the hope that his soul is at peace!

02 August

This day
Six years ago, having taught in schools for eleven years,
I entered a classroom
Again as a student, prone and vulnerable
And felt out of place
With a group of twittering, giggling girls and boys,
Almost
Like an artifact from some paleolithic age.
I quickly adapted myself, as I remembered
With fondness my friend at college - Joseph Leo
Who, had quit the Novitiate and was older than us,
Full of the elusive elixir of life, trying to mingle with
A bunch of 17-year olds fresh from school.

Now
As I teach 17-year olds fresh from school,
they remind me of 02 August, when
I had gone back to a 'Novitiate' myself to
Unlearn some, relearn some and somehow learn much
About the intuitive art and the calculated science of teaching.
The powerlessness of a student occupies the foreground
Of my mindscape every time I now enter the classroom
Filled with eager, restless, bubbly boys and girls...
More power to them for enRICHing my life!