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ThinkingDiaries

The Mumbai-Software!!!

 Hey friends,

              This week while I was reading the newspaper as my daily breakfast side dish, I came across a wonderfully written piece by Anuvab Pal about Mumbai city. Reading that article compelled me to write about this city too and considering the fact that a lot of us take some time out for a annual vacation in this time of the year, it made even more sense for me to be writing this piece. The city, Mumbai, which is the financial capital of India, the city Mumbai which is a home to many dreams that have wings to reach the sky, the city Mumbai which, like a heart beat keeps on beating forever and never skips a beat, and the city Mumbai, which was my home for more than 3 years, which made me an Ophthalmologist, and gave me beautiful memories, which also taught me some very tough lessons in life. Overall the city Mumbai, which shaped my identity, as a doctor and as a person that I am today, and the city Mumbai, which has given me more than I could have ever asked for.

 

City of Dreams- Mumbai

 

              The article started with a very beautifully written line from a science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that states- “There would be a society in time in future, if taken out of their comfort zone of being always busy or chasing something, would not know how to socially function in other environments.”  Mumbai blesses or curses (depends on how you take it) us with a life full of so many things, making your hands so full that one always find oneself juggling things all the time. There is so much madness filled in each day that it makes it our daily routine, be it the relentless running about and always getting late to catch that 7.47 Ladies Special train, aiming to reach work on time, or rushing to the market to get reasonably edible produce before they run out of stock. Be it things always attracted to go the wrong way like an iron nail is attracted to the magnet. Be it more than one simultaneous phone calls with one juggling conversations between the ever demanding boss in fury and the maid burning the pasta and ever staring at the phone screen waiting for your spouse or loved one to send a message to make rest of the things seem alright, (which seldom seems to make it to you) or be it the pressure to keep up with your competitors where you always seem to be dragging yourself behind keeping up to their pace, wondering, how they always manage to sprint ahead of you, and still the flickering spark of ambition that creeps in even in the laziest and exacerbated ones of us, so much so that even the dead here keep telling each other to hurry up.

 

 

                Admist all this hustle bustle in life, if one would get a little time of sanity which is actually getting a seat in the local train compartment filled up with people and a chance to glance at your mobile screen for a while and if you happen to swipe through your facebook or pinterest profiles, you would find yourself drooling over those posts stating ’9 Incredible Places in India that would make you realize you desparately need a Long Vacation’, or ’10 Offbeat Hill-stations that would leave you loving summer forever’, or ‘List of 10 things that you must do before you turn 30’ and so on. We look at these posts and the pictures in them with greed in our eyes like a young child eyeing that candy table in the grocery store or a young teenage boy eyeing erotica.

 

                However when we do happen to actually visit these wonderful places after painstakingly taking a vacation from the grueling Mumbai schedule and making our boss realize how worthy we are of the much needed holiday and still begging for it like a beggar in the temple, our reaction to it is the most hypocritical. We would be fine for a couple of days, 3-4 days at the maximum and would appreciate the surroundings and the beautiful sunrises and sunsets, but then gradually the itch, the twitch, the wriggling and fluttering like a fish out of water, sets in, which is not due to anything else but sheer lack of pace of the hectic life of Mumbai. The peace and the silence that we yearn for while living our hellish schedules in Mumbai, drives us crazy in a few days that we are away. Two days of staring at a lake or a mountain range or a sunset by the beach is enough to drive us crazy to reach for our phones or laptops to check our mails and messages as though we are missing on something important in life.

 

 

               It’s like we have a software or programme installed in our heads that starts buzzing while we are at ease, notifying us that, "You have stared at this gorgeous sunset over this beautiful ocean for too long, it’s too much of myriad of colors of the sky and the sounds of the waves that your senses have absorbed, you are missing out on something." And with these spell-bounding sights in front of you, you start wondering, “What am I missing out in life? May be google will tell me, may be facebook will tell me, when is my flight back? Can I make it earlier?"

              No one understands how and when this programme gets installed in us and how can we save ourselves from it. I have been fortunate to have lived in different cities in India apart from Mumbai, be it Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Nashik etc., but no other city programs you the way it functions. The discomfort of the calm and the need of constant motion even within tranquility is something that you would feel only if you have breathed in the air of Mumbai city. Its like the city is a storehouse of nation’s impatience. We would be a restless, neurotic, antsy, constantly moving race. Having said all of this I have to add out of my love for the city that I absolutely adore the kind of energy that people of each age group in this city possess which is also lacking in people of the other cities that I have visited, but everything comes with a price I suppose.

                When I moved to Ahmedabad, which is a wonderful city in itself, the Mumbai software within my head kept buzzing for quite some time, until now that’s its about a year, since I have moved and the software has finally put itself on standby mode. Now the peace, the calmness, the slow pace of the ‘Not-so-Mumbai’ city has finally stopped to bite me. I don’t know whether it’s a good or a bad thing, but hey, who am I to judge!!!   

Act, Don’t React!

            Hey friends! First of all I want to wish all the mothers reading my blog a very Happy Mother’s Day. What I am going to write about today is a lesson that I accidentally learnt by an incident in my day to day life and the lesson that I swear by following to the core and it has really helped me deal with my day to day difficulties in a better way. Sometimes you just wonder how such simple turn of events that destiny makes for you is to make you learn a bigger truth.

                I was travelling by my car to work and was waiting at a signal of a large and busy cross road. The signal for the opposite lane turned yellow and just then an auto-rickshaw driver trying to squeeze out of that yellow signal of a few seconds pushed his accelerator so hard that his vehicle was at a sky high speed. Well, it’s a joke about traffic in my city which is like, “If you see a green signal, you press your accelerator and go, if you see a yellow signal, you press your accelerator even harder and try if you can go, and if you see a red signal, check if the cops are looking at you, and if not press the accelerator and still go.” And perhaps the auto-rickshaw driver was trying to follow that rule. However in his rush he didn’t notice that a young couple, who were travelling on a bike had already started driving before their signal turned green from the adjacent side of the cross-road. And bang!!! The auto-rickshaw drvier rammed into the bike and the person driving the bike along with his lady fell onto the ground. They were dressed in their casual work clothes and seemed to be going to work. Luckily, it seemed as if no one was hurt, but the bike rider started abusing and blaming the auto-rickshaw driver. The latter instead of accepting his mistake, that everyone standing on the signal would agree to, stormed out of his vehicle and started throwing back the abuses. There were hand gestures, blaming, threatening and swearing. Then one caught the other one’s collar and the other one hit the first one. And within a matter of minutes the scene turned ugly. There were people who had gathered, there was so much commotion. Needless to say that the traffic came to a halt and no vehicle could move across. Ultimately a traffic cop must have been called by a sane person and he came to rescue. He dispersed the traffic and took both the parties with him to the police station ( I presume). Gradually the traffic started moving and I turned the music back in my car and started driving again.

             Cut to scene two. The same very day, while returning home, back from work, another such incident happened. This time it was at a smaller lane. An elderly man was travelling on his scooty and was probably distracted by the phone in his pocket. He picked the phone out of his pocket, saw it and was putting it back in, when he dashed into a child, riding his bicycle going back home from school. The kid was actually driving on the wrong side of the road and had steered a bit in the centre of the road. The child fell on the ground with his huge brown school bag, which must be full of his books. He seemed to have bruised his knee a bit but was unhurt. The elderly man, in contrast to what I saw in the morning, instead of shouting at the kid or creating a scene, parked his scooty on the side of the road. He then, went upto the kid and gave him his hand and helped him get up from the ground. He picked his bag and bicycle too. He then asked the kid, if he was hurt somewhere or he was okay. He even offered a ride to the kid back home. The kid was relieved. He sat down for a moment, drank some water from the water bottle tucked on the side of his school bag, smiled at the gentleman and said, “I am fine” and got on his cycle and sped away home. The man too kick-started the engine of his scooty and went his way. After seeing this incident, there was a smile on my face too. I was thinking all about it on my way back. I was thinking, how similar were these situations in the sense of happenings, but how differently they ended.

 

                  In the first scene, the youth on the bike reacted to himself becoming a victim of the accident, the auto-rickshaw driver reacted to the reaction of the youth and the crowd reacted to the whole scene and it became a mayhem. On the other hand, in the second scene, the elderly man, instead of reacting, acted upon the situation, made amends for the one who was suffering and it ended quite well. Neither of these situations was about who was right and who was wrong. Each one of them had their own faults and that is how the accidents happened. But the reactions or rather the actions in each one of the situations was different, again, neither was wrong nor right, but just different and thus the outcome was drastically different.

                  In literal meaning reaction is defined as something done, felt or thought in response to a situation or event without giving a thought to it. Reaction is actually how we would call it in medical terminology, at a spinal level. It is also what is typically known as a fright and flight reaction. The processing of the deed is not done while you are reacting. While action is defined as a deed or doing something which has some thought put into it, typically, to achieve an aim. Action usually requires the facility of higher mental abilities. The deed is perceived by your senses, reaches your spine, travels way up in the cerebral cortex, where the information is processed, analysis is done and finally according to the conditioning of your brain, a decision of doing a particular deed in response to a particular stimuli is made. Fortunately, it’s only us humans who have evolved to have this complex systematic arrangement of decision making. But unfortunately a lot of us forget that and instead of taking a breath and processing the situation make the decision to react to the situation and thus create problems for themselves and others.

 

 

                    I had heard another very interesting and amusing story from a very well-known food writer and a celebrity chef Vikas Khanna at an event. He was narrating an incident about his earlier days when he was not as famous as he is now. He was giving a live food demo in a hall full of people in America. He was preparing a savoury dish which may have needed some finely chopped tomatoes. He is saying out loud to the audience that now you put some freshly and finely chopped tomatoes and he opens the drawer of instruments but finds his knife vanished. He had a feeling that someone had purposefully removed it from there due to envy or malicious intentions. He was exasperated and didn’t know what to do in front of so many people. He knew one thing for sure that he is not going to loose his mind or cool in front of so many people in his own kitchen. He took a deep breath and started tearing the pieces of tomatoes with his hand and announcing to the audience, how in a small village in India people don’t cut their vegetables with knives as they want to respect food and tear them gently with their hands. The audience was so impressed and burst into a loud uproar of applause and suddenly he became a hero for them. Instead of the usual reaction that would have been expected out of him of getting angry or yelling, which would have earned him a bad name, he chose to act on it and it indeed rewarded him with an applause.

                   The problem is that the reactions might not always be the best course of action, and as a result, they can make others unhappy, make the situation worse. Why would we want to make things worse? The truth is, we often react without thinking. It’s a gut reaction, often based on fear and insecurities, and it’s not the most rational or appropriate way to act. Action, on the other hand, is taking the situation in, and deciding the best course of action based on values such as reason, compassion, cooperation, etc. This practice of acting and not reacting can be helpful to us to help us deal with day to day hindrances like angry spouse, road traffic, no auto-rickshaws, upset boss, incompetent juniors, and mischievous child and so on. Each time that you choose to take a pause, let your brain process the situation and choose a correct way to deal or act upon the circumstance instead of the rush of the reaction, you make a decision to avoid an ugly situation and turn things in your favor that will ultimately lead you to rise above the person that you could have chosen to react to. And if you do so, you are going to be reaping some seeds of success or happiness because it is very rightly quoted by Charles Darwin that ‘This world is about Survival of the Fittest’. 
A Chinese saying very nicely puts it,
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” –Lao Tzu.

Can you choose Action over Reaction?