For the last many years I have been trying to understand the mystery of life. Since I work closely with Debbie, my editor, a few years ago I asked her about her belief. She simply said Buddism. I did not think much of it but off and on I thought of Buddism, the eight-fold path as laid out by Budda in my school text book, and of the Budda (Siddharta the prince) leaving the comfort of his home and family and going out in the middle of night to find truth. He was then inspired by three sights he had witnessed: death, old age, and another, I think new born baby.

I have not believed in any religion but have tried to learn good things from all of them: the sense of discipline from Islam, the believe that God is in everything from Hinduism, dedication and service from Sikhism. At the same time, even earlier and after Mamman’s death, I have sensed that there is a force which guides me to find experiences to fulfil my life. I have hardly asked God for anything, because I think if there is a God around he is seeing it all and will engineer the right conditions for me. If my life has been tough, or I meet a hard situation, I believe that God wants me to learn something from it. S/he is a friend.

After I moved to Delhi, Debbie told me she goes to listen to sermons on Buddism and gets to know about them from mailers. I asked her to add me to the mailing list. In the middle of last month I got an invite for a talk on ‘How can I feel selfconfident if there is no self?’ and another one on ‘What has Karma got to do with it? – Happiness and Suffering explained according to The 12 Links.’

I went for both the talks and they were such a revelation! I will talk about my learning in the next blogs but I came back and googled Buddism to find that the Buddists do not believe in God and Buddism is really a scientific understanding of the phenomena of life. When I googled Sufism, which is what I believe I tend to follow at least in my choice of music, I found God is central to their way of being, their philosophy. So I am trying to decide, in a nice way. No one says I have to decide. No one is asking my opinion. I can chose to be a Buddist in being and Sufi in doing, or the other way around. Does it really matter because I also found that whether Islam, or Hinduism, or Christian, or Sikh, and now Buddist, whether one believes in a God or not, and which God, all these systems of thought are pointing to the same: right thought, action, conduct, and finally peace.

On the way to Mandi Dabwali, at Fatehabad I was at a double railway crossing in a car. It was a two way road, one side up another down. The railway crossing had four parts, unlike normal crossings where two bars are lowered on the two sides of the railway track. This one had a bar for each road – up and down – on the two sides of the track.

As vehicles started piling up on our side and the other, some vehicles even went to the other road on each side. Normally when a crossing opens those vehicles which sneak up the other side of the road have an advantage, they move earlier than the regular ones, and cause jams because vehicles from the other side also want to enter the crossing.

When this crossing opened, the operator lifted the bars on the wrong side of the road on both sides of the track. He did not open the ones he should have opened (up for both sides of the road), instead, he lifted the bars on the down side of each road. This enabled the vehicles from the wrong side of our road (down side) to cross the tracks diagonally and move to the road across the crossing. The vehicles on the down side of the road on that side of the tracks also moved towards their up side on our side of the road.

For a moment I was angry. How come vehicles on the wrong side were getting an advantage over us who were almost ahead on our side of the road? Then it dawned on me that this was the right thing to do. Yes, wrong had happened – vehicles had got on to the wrong side of the road but the system need not collapse. The system had found a way of handling the wrong and making the traffic smooth. It made me think of historical wrongs which people try to solve by jamming their vehicles and fighting with each other thus blocking the traffic of progress and development. Sometimes the solutions lie in adapting the system to accommodate the evils and focus on movement.

I have been going to bookstores for the last thirty or so years. I used to go to buy comics and then it became books. When I was studying literature I used to go to buy British and American fiction written by the great novelists. I used to hear their names from the lips of my teachers and from friends and seniors. Bookstores stacked those books and I relished reading them. But now, for the last seven-eight years when I visit bookstores I do not find those titles as easily as I found them earlier. They are tucked away as classics and stores do not display them upfront. What they display is fiction from India by writers writing in English, some from Australia, Africa, and the Indian sub-continent. Makes me wonder if the good old tradition of solid writing from Britain and America is dead.

I posed the question to Utkal. Utkal measures what he says and is very insightful. According to him we do not have many solid books from Britain and America because most fiction writers have started writing more seriously for film. He felt that films are increasingly becoming the preferred medium of communication around the world. Films can show the world with greater colour and sound and also get over much quicker than books.

He said that in the earlier days writers fulfilled a need in people to know about the world. Books were written to take people to unknown parts of the world. In those days books showed the habits and cultures of other races, other places. Now we get all of that on National Geographic. That is why books have to be more about mental spaces than physical spaces. Books need to delve in the mind of the characters.

That made sense to me. To write about mental spaces…

Dhanu and I were asking if the quality of a book can be determined from the number of markers it has within it. From this we started pondering if a better book had more markers or less? Okay, we understand that fiction is not mathematics and there can be no easy way to answer the question. Still, the problem begets more questions, so here they are, at random:

• To appeal to a larger readership, should a book be specifically located?
• Is it possible to write a book with no markers?
• Is it possible to think without markers? In abstracts alone?
• Is the book which is more fun to write also more fun to read?
• Isn’t it true that most writer-thinking in fiction is from the tangible to the abstract? In fact, most times do you not as a writer record the tangible (make markers) and leave the reader to develop the abstract?
• Does a reader then not move from the abstract to a tangible? Say you believe in Feminism or Marxism, do you not as a reader then pick books from those readings to call your favourites? The story of one woman or one working class situation?
• Why do we then see that most writers have not-so-happy lives? If they had fun writing, gave fun to the world through their writing, should they not be more satisfied with themselves? 

I have always held that the more specific a story (solid markers), the greater chance it has of reaching a universal audience. Take the best novels, the reason they work is because they are so located (with markers) that they touch a universal chord with the readers. What do you think?

On December 1, I was playing the radio in my car and it was flooded with messages about AIDS and HIV. That is World AIDS Day, wear a Red ribbon.  Each message or conversation revolved around how AIDS is a limited contagious disease, it does not spread by touch or eating meals together, how we must learn not to discriminate a carrier or victim, and so on. Another important part of the messages was: practise safe sex. Very right. With 2.8 million people suffering from the illness we must do our best to spread the messages and educate ourselves.

But I also wondered. What about Schizophrenia? Or Bi Polar Disorder? Or Depression, Stress, Anxiety Disorder, or sheer inability to handle our lives. Those do not spread through touch, or meals together, or even through sex. Are we doing enough for them?

I have always felt that there is an essential difference between the two kinds of disabilities: mental and physical. When one is physically disable one can make a plea for better attention from the state or society. One can stand at Gandhi Statue in Bangalore or Jantar Mantar in Delhi and hold black flags to influence policy and compensation. But when one is mentally disabled one has only one place to go to, hide in a dark room in one’s heart and go silent.

We do not hear the voices, we do not know the sufferers. But there are many. I am no expert but at least one in every five people I meet I learn of someone in their family suffering from a mental breakdown. See this: Mental Illness 

Wonder if we can do more for mental illness while we try to work on AIDS.

This is not something new but it came to me as a surprise as the parts I was trying to connect started forming a whole. I was talking to a professional who works in the area of human trafficking. We concluded that a reason why migrants want to cross national boundaries is because of the stories they hear about the far away places. The migrants find the stories of El Dorado so fantastic that their real lives pale in comparison, fuelling a desire to migrate.

She told me that migrants in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Europe, America, Canada, wherever suffer their ordinary lives, live in debt and hunger but keep trying to project an image that they are very well off, they are succeeding. Behind the pretence is the fact that they do not want to lower their image in the minds of those they left behind. The stories they tell are a validation of their struggle, often illegal.

That set me thinking whether we are right in assuming that India was a great place a couple of thousand years ago. We have the Ramayan and the Mahabharat to show that we were a great civilization. We have histories, remains of civilizations, paintings, sculpture, and many other artifacts, all of them proving we were great. What if we were actually poor and we projected greatness through our works of art. What if our arts are not realistic but are actually aspirations of a hungry mind?

What if writers are essentially liars? Did Ryszard Kapuscinski not say in Imperium that the paintings of fruits and food were so brilliant because the painters were so hungry? They created arts that they could love because their life really had nothing else. What if India is not one glorious civilization which lost its riches but is actually a very slow nation on the path of progress, punctuated time and again by those who heard stories of its glory and came to check it out.  Who does not believe lies?