Recently everyone is asking me to comment on Akshara's Buddhism statement. I am not sure if there’s any need to comment or analyse everything she does just because I’m the parent. My child is an individual too.
Why do we only remember our children as they were just our arm’s length and we held them in our arms loving and protecting them? Once they grow up, we must not only love and protect but also respect them, recognise them as individuals.
When we are public figures, all our actions are open to discussion. I understand this and am ok with it. What Akshara feels is a very personal emotion and I would give her that privacy. We all have done our searching in our youth and what a beautiful process it is.
There is something I had written for a friend's book on what my beliefs are but it just stayed in my Mac. Today, I want to share it to celebrate my child's journey by remembering my own journey. Discovering yourself finding new thoughts, new philosophies, new beliefs - is what makes us who we are.
This one’s for you Akshu, my child.
1
When a baby looks at the face of her mother as she breast-feeds her, she knows that the woman loves her. She knows that when she cries, the woman will hold her – take care of her. She knows that the woman is always there. She keeps her company in those long nights- she cleans her baby bums - tickles her – feeds her - shares silly secret jokes that make her laugh.
And with each day as the baby grows, this knowing turns into a belief - first of many more beliefs to come.
As she grows, beliefs are accumulated and acquired from those around her. Then one day, her mind - very much like a cluttered over-stuffed closet, nudges at her. She slows down – sets aside some personal time and starts to clear the conflicting baggage of beliefs. She smiles, feeling much lighter - “ Oh! So this is who I am!”
But in reality it will take her many more years to actually feel good and understand who she really is.
I have always believed in love - the strongest unadulterated pure emotion that can withstand and destroy all adversities. Love for me is not just a belief but my very existence. And it took me all these years to find what I believed in other than love. Holding on to my earlier beliefs, and altering them as I grew, I led myself to explore and find.
No two sets of beliefs are the same. Based on our personal experiences, we amalgamate what makes sense to us. Hence I do not believe in the universal belief system. Sure there are bits that apply to all of us, but the percentage changes and thus change individual beliefs.
There is a wide range of beliefs to choose from, most popular being God, followed by religion, karma, soul, cultural setups and tapering down to astrology, palmistry, Reiki, kabbalah, Vastu, chakra etc.
It doesn’t matter what we call it as long as we find something or someone we believe in. A belief that is understood and not merely followed allows you to grow. And changing beliefs are a parameter of our growth as a person.
Work is still in progress and I’m sure I will further explore. Each time life surprises me. But I know that finally, I’am on the road which will take me home. So attempting to write about my beliefs seems like an interesting opportunity to better understand myself.
2
I am very curious by nature. Right from the new product in the market to global issues and the award-winning film - I want to know all. So much so that not so long ago I even went through regression therapy. Not because I wanted to heal or unblock past wounds as most people do, but to know who else I have been besides being who I am. Who all shared my many lives? Will I find them again? Recognise them? Where all was I born?
If I am still so faithfully curious, you can imagine how it must have been when I was young. As a kid I never went to school (barring that one day in pre-primary) as I started working in films at the age of five as a child star. My entire childhood was spent in studios or at home waiting for the next shoot. I would go through magazines, newspapers looking at pictures. Looking at words or rather the words looking back at me – waiting for me to not look at them but to also read them.
With time I learnt the A to Z of English. But there was still so much to learn. I wanted to read and write but all I could do was sit with a notebook and pen – staring. I wanted to write my thoughts, things I felt, things I wanted to know, things I did, but I couldn’t…. I didn’t know the spellings and grammar for my thoughts. The thirst to learn, to explore, and the curiosity to know all that the others knew, left me feeling empty, confused and bored. And that is when my attention turned towards religion - religion for some, but for me, they were stories, characters and imagery. (True cinema kid :))
Religion was discussed everywhere - on sets, at home, and at get-togethers. Early morning hours, when the film unit waited for the hero-heroines to arrive, were the times when the make-up dadas narrated tales of huge flying birds, tales about people and relationships, of someone called Ravana, who, according to the make-up dada was a bad man, but I liked him as he was learned and a scholar. Then there were tales of a human with a tail who carried a piece of land. Tales of drawing an imaginary line that was not to be crossed.
For me the godly tales were the perfect bridge that went over the written words I couldn’t.
During dinners at various homes, uncles and aunties spoke about gods. The authority with which they spoke, my child’s mind understood it to be that the gods were relatives and friends of all uncle aunties. The religious part of it went above my head, or maybe I wasn’t interested. What I liked was the make-believe world and the stories – very much like the ones I acted in, where everything was possible. If we are to research, we will find that it was actually gods who invented computer graphics, and the creators of our mythology are the best screenplay writers second only to the Greeks.
They introduced me to all those interesting stories and characters, and from all those characters, there was one whom I found not only to be interesting but outstanding. The one who stole my heart and adulation - Shiva.
The mighty Shiva
The fearless one
The defiant one
The saviour
The Indian god with Greek looks
And there! My first crush and my first belief - Shiva. As I wasn’t exposed to religion, to me he wasn’t god – he was just Shiva – the cool guy.
By the time I was in my early teens, I had learnt to read and write. My school was with me – my Oxford dictionary. Reading was my lifeline. I read all there was about Shiva, my hero. The Manthan story where the gods and the arasus wanted only the Amrit, and didn’t know what to do with the poison churned up in the Manthan. And then Shiva comes and drinks it.
This story was to impact me the most. Whenever there was a situation when someone needed me or if others were scared to step forward, I stepped in. I also learnt the biggest lesson of my life –someone else’s poison cannot kill you!
Shiva’s power was embodied in his compassion and his silence - I love that and try to do the same. Is it that much-needed influences come to us when we are experiencing situations that need those influences? Or is it that they are always there and we merely understand them when we are ready to implement them? I lived my life like him with a ‘what you see is what you get’ attitude.
Recognising your strength, being there, and most of all - Fearless Honesty.
The only thing I didn’t do like him was the angry tandav. The reason could be that I never learnt Kathak or Bharatnatyam. Or didn’t have the much-needed anger.
3
My reading was expanding by the day. From newspapers to Kafka, I read every line I laid eyes on. And part of this ongoing process was a set routine whereby whenever I had time in-between my shootings, I would drive to south Bombay streets and browse through heaps of second-hand books sprawled across the streets of Fort. Jung to Chase - fiction to non- fiction. Camus resting under a Reader’s Digest issue - Maugham holding the place of pride. And of course Carlos Castaneda too.
The quiet and breezy afternoons, standing there for hours without being jostled around, browsing through such great minds slowly. One by one, they all shifted to my bookshelf and changed my life and enriched my mind beyond words.
One such afternoon, I saw a 4X6 inch 300-page book. The pages had aged to a deep yellow and it had no front or back cover. Even today I do not know why I picked up that book with no cover to interest me. Maybe I was curious.
As usual I started flipping bunch of pages at a time and reading to see if I wanted to buy the book. And then the flipping stopped. I wasn’t flipping anymore – I was reading page after page, sitting next the bookseller, on the corner of the bed sheet he had spread for the books.
By now I had already read J Krishnamurti, but this was something else! Something I had never read or heard before. The only problem was that I didn’t know who this guy was. That day I bought just that one book and for the next two months or so, I read and re-read the book many times.
I was 20 and you may not believe me when I say this. But at 20, I had never heard of a guy called Buddha.
For every Shiva, there needs to be a Buddha to form the perfect balance.
As I write this very line about Buddha, I am overcome with fondness and love for him. When I discovered Buddha’s philosophy, his thoughts, his concept of life, I felt mesmerised into a state of calm, and a sense of fulfillment. Even today, all I have to do is look at his image or read a few lines and I am sorted. Buddha was what was missing in my life. In later years the way my life unfolded, I thanked myself for picking up that yellow cover-less book.
Buddha started off as a belief but soon became a way of life. When you follow his philosophy, you are in the zone of choices and options. One feels respected as an individual.
He doesn’t keep telling you “do this, don’t do this” or send you on a guilt trip. Instead, through examples and stories, he puts forth the crux of a discussion – the two sides of right and wrong. What you decide to take from it is left to you. All he does is to show you different paths and then he steps back like a parent does. To me, he is that parent that teacher I never had. A like-minded friend whose company I enjoy.
Once again I had a friend by my side when I needed one the most. During the worst period of my life, when everything was destroyed, and I returned to Bombay standing future-less at the bottom of the pit with no way back in sight, Buddha’s detachment from negativity and the power of silence held me together and gave me the strength to make my way back to life.
Silence is not just of the voice. Silence is also of the soul when there is no need to say anything. Hurting someone or causing them pain is not only easy, but also a state of temporary victory and a false sense of self-justice. Gandhi said an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. This to me means that someone has to step back. And to take that very difficult step back, one truly needs to understand and believe that there is no need to prove a point.
By this I do not mean that you allow injustice or compromise with what you believe in. It is just that the fight to protect your dignity can also be fought with dignity – in silence.
If Shiva is the friend with whom you go out for midnight coffees, then Buddha is the friend with whom you go for long walks by the sea. Shiva awakened me; Buddha helped me find myself. And spirituality set me free!
4
Expressing various beliefs in one word “spiritualism”, is a fairly recent term.
As early as 15 years back, anything other than God and Science was described under various names. The favourites were nonsensical - supernatural, the unknown, alien beliefs, andh vishwaas, mystical and yes “alternate beliefs” - were expressions flung around during intellectual candlelit dinners.
And further back in time, there were only three ways to describe ones beliefs – puja paath, jadu tona, bhoot pret. Thankfully, we have successfully made the journey from bhoot pret to spiritualism and all of us are able to share our thoughts without the fear of being judged as a loony or a loser.
Though narrow-minded and blinkered, I must say it was fun growing up in the bhoot pret era.
When I was around 10, my friend Sheila and I would sneak out at night (much against the orders of the elders) and go to the corner of our lane where stood the famous Pipal tree. Majestic and ancient, it was believed to be the house of ghosts.
We would stand there for hours waiting for the lady in white and the guy with his feet turned backwards. While waiting, we would heighten our fear by sharing ghost stories, specially the one about the tangewala - the scariest of all stories. But soon we were tired of waiting as those two never appeared, and we shifted our attention to the park opposite the Pipal tree.
The park was much more fun. While the tree slipped off our priority list, we were busy playing catch-catch, running around, going on the swing screaming “higher higher!!”, sliding down on the ghasarghundi (Marathi name for a slide which literally means slide the bum ;)).
One such rendezvous ended in disaster. We were having a high-jump competition when I slipped on the dew soaked grass and hit my nose on a rod. It started to bleed. We rushed to get back home but stopped midway, “What do we tell them at home?” We were so scared and stressed that we didn’t realise we were standing right under the dreaded Pipal tree.
We were trying to figure out a good enough excuse to explain the broken nose. Telling the truth that I broke it while playing wasn’t going to save us from the scolding. For some reason, the truth never seemed to appease the elders.
It had to be something dramatic. And then suddenly there came a strange muffled sound from the tree. We froze mid-sentence looking at each other. It was happening! Finally the ghosts were to appear! It was a moment straight out of The Blair Witch Project or The Conjuring.
The fear was worse than my bleeding nose. We kept staring at the sound. Suddenly the sound-making part of the tree started to move and before we could scream and run, something slipped – and slipped some more. Crinkling our eyes, straining to see in the darkness, we realised that it was not a part of the tree, but our dhobi who was happily snoring under his blanket.
- Mission: Meet the ghosts
- Outcome: two terrified and disappointed girls; A happy dhobi under a regular tree; A bleeding nose; Two-hour-long scolding at home
For what it was worth, we had fun! We did not find the answers but we had found enough questions to ask. But no one bothered to explain such things. Was it the lack of discussion or the naivety of that generation that made any conversation about such beliefs impossible?
Today the ghosts are rechristened as ‘spirits’ and people actually pay money to make contact with them. Seeing ghosts did not make sense but in a strange way, trying to reach out to our near and dear ones who have departed, has an emotional reasoning. From the outside, it may look silly but we must not be judgmental and we must respect the importance it has for those who need it.
Personally I do not believe in the feet-turned-backward ghosts, as I am yet to meet one. I need a proof of their existence to believe. But then there are other things where I don’t need a proof of existence. Like my belief that the universe holds each and everything that ever existed.
Contradiction. Contradiction in beliefs. Contradictions in life in general is what makes a world an interesting world.
5
I was very close to Atti (my father-in-law). He was the coolest man I have ever known. Desigan Srinivasan (Atti), born in the year 1908 in the town of Paramakudi, Tamil Nadu, was an advocate by profession.
We met when he was in his 70s and I in my 20s. Today I know many people who are in their 70s, but back then I had never met someone so old. In my youthful ignorance, I could never imagine being friends with someone so old. But Atti was not just someone. He was Atti! He was progressive, energetic, full of life, honest and fearless, and way, way ahead of his times. We were generations apart but for him, bridging that gap was nothing more than a few steps.
When I shifted to Madras, I was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. It was just my husband and I. Given the situation we were in, I was totally isolated from everyone and that is when Atti became my friend. Not only that - he was also my mother, my mother-in-law, and father-in-law all rolled into one.
All through my pregnancy, it was Atti who guided me on the dos and don’ts of pregnancy, like not lifting water buckets or sweeping the house etc. He would enact how to settle down in a sofa with the support of the hand rests and not plonk oneself as I did. And all this information was gathered from the wives of his friends. Also he would ask these kind ladies to cook specific dishes that a pregnant woman was supposed to eat, and arrive twice a day bearing those dishes and feeding me.
Everyday 4 pm to 6 pm was storytelling time. Stories about the freedom movement that he was part of, the family history, stories about how he wooed his wife by travelling miles on a bicycle to buy a sari for her, and also the criminal cases that he handled. But it was not only about him. It was also about me. He wanted to get to know me. Sometimes I feel he knew much more about me than the others.
Maybe it was because he knew me so well, that years later when Shruti was about four and my marriage was on everyone’s mind, it was only Atti who understood my stand on not wanting to get married until the birth of my second child - I didn’t want people to differentiate between my two kids. The concept of a woman who is not desperate to get married doesn’t go down well with people and this, though well intended, caused a lot of friction.
Atti took it upon himself to defend my case and his closing argument was “If you are in a hurry to marry her, then get her pregnant”.
That was my Atti! We were fortunate enough to have him see the birth of Akshara and also bless us at our wedding. And then he quietly left us….
After losing him, I came to believe that those who truly love you are always by your side. Unfortunately the human mind is conditioned to accept nothing but the physical presence, so the following belief of mine is debatable and not as harmless as Shiva and Buddha.
I don’t know when it started but in the past 13 years or so, there have been times when I was pushed beyond my limits and couldn’t take it anymore. Whenever that happened, I found myself, without realising, looking up at the top right corner of my room or the skies and start a conversation with Atti. It can be any place, any room, but the right corner is always Atti’s.
Have I ever seen him? Never. Have I felt his presence or something? No, I haven’t. Then how come I do not question this belief that he is there? I do.
Some may call it puerile, paranormal experience or a figment of my imagination. But it is none of that.
It is all about a conversation with your self. It is my love for him. When I am vulnerable like a child, I seek his guidance and want a replay of him saying “don’t worry, everything will be ok”. It is no different than picking up the phone and calling your best friend or reaching out to your Akshu for a hug. Beliefs are born out of our need for guidance and support and each of us finds what works for us.
There is such a thin line between belief and rationality and if that line is blurred, one can easily get lost. Atti is my friend who will always be by my side, and I know the difference between my need and his presence. As long as we are compassionate towards our beliefs while holding on to our sanity, unexplained feelings can be explored.
The universe holds all the unseen, unexplained phenomena. And when there is so much out there, imagine the energy that it can create. Each one of us is part of that energy or whatever it is that we choose to call it. Smiling at a random stranger, turning around in the midst of a conversation for no reason, deja vu, premonitions, a hug, “have we met before? ”, a whole day spent remembering some random memory - all these are energy connects.
I have spent countless nights trying to find better words to understand what exactly is this energy. I have read books, surfed the net and there is so much information out there. The Upanishad, the Vedas, Jung, American-Indian writings, and many individuals who have somewhat understood these experiences and talk about them.
Still there are no straight answers. The answers are to be derived from one’s personal experiences. Like a jigsaw puzzle, one has to complete the picture piece by piece, and I think I have somewhat started to understand my umbrella of spirituality.
Today I stand with my arms wide open (like Shah Rukh), embracing the universe with all its complexities.
The vastness of the universe is more than enough to hold all kinds of beliefs. All we need to do is respect and value everyone else’s beliefs. There is something for each of us, giving us the freedom to explore, interpret, agree and disagree, based on our personal experiences.
(Love your mother tongue? This Independence Day, tell The Quint why and how you love your bhasha. You may even win a BOL t-shirt! Sing, write, perform, spew poetry – whatever you like – in your mother tongue. Send us your BOL at bol@thequint.com or WhatsApp it to 9910181818.)
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