Alternate reality

All this week a thought has been running at the back of my head, the thought has been trying to make its way on to paper but I have been withholding the thought and preventing it from reaching its fruition because I am not sure if I really realize what the greater implications of the thought might be. I have finally decided to give up the resistance and start putting down the thought on paper because past experience has taught me that I writing is the only mechanism that allows me to understand my thoughts.  So here it goes -
Over the last couple of years and especially in the last week I feel like my life and the life of everyone around me is being lived in two spheres. My friends have joked about me being like Alice from the Alice in wonderland series. I actually feel like that right now. The other movies that come to mind are The Matrix and the Truman show where an alternate reality is created and people living in them start to believe that is actually the real world.
Everyday I drive back from work I pass by 4 to 5 bus stops. The scene on every single bus stop is identical, people peering into their smart phones and looking at something busily. I often wonder what it is that they are all deeply looking into? My glare then moves on to fellow drivers, each one of them eagerly trying to get home in the engineering marvels that they dearly call cars. And once I do finally get home, my husband and I peer into our laptops and watch a soccer game or an interesting episode of Scrubs. We discuss application programming, the new windows phone vs. the android phone and the pros and cons of Windows 8. Once in  a while when we do get fed up of technology we discuss people and the so called first world problems that each one of our friends/family are going through.
This rigmarole goes on day in and day out and we enjoy most of it. Newer technologies at work, newer relationships, occasional celebrations, some upsets and so on. Most of what we all call life!

But then a question pops up in my head once in a while, what is life? Isn't life the fishes in lake outside my house, the lady bug crawling on my balcony, the stars shimmering in the sky at night, the intelligence in nature that makes every season come on time, sun rise, sun set, the brilliance that makes the moon disappear every 15 days and then reappear again. Ahh well that seems to be life, but then where do I fit in. With my latest smart phone, my laptop, my latest facebook update or twitter feed, where do I fit in. It almost seems like my reality does not mesh with this other reality. It almost feels like an alternate reality. Is it the same life that runs in me and all of this wonderful world around me. We are all made of the same atoms, live on the same earth, breath the same air and ultimately die and mix into the mother earth. We are all connected in some sense but our current way of life just seems to be taking us away from that connectedness. Nature is something that we drive down an hour or two to visit. Nature is not something that lives and breathes within me.

But then I get a message on my smart phone and I forget all about nature and me and about all of it being One.

Power

I was listening to the song "Aa bhi jaa" from Sur, staring out of windows onto the beautiful lake outside our house. The tiny droplets of rain shimmering on the surface of the water, a beautiful piece of violin playing in the background and I thought about everything that is beautiful about life.
       In the background I heard Lucky Ali's voice nudging his student to perform, she on the other hand is shocked to see that her teacher has stolen her song after dismissing the song as a piece of crap in a previous instance. And then I thought about everything that is ugly about life. People hating each other, killing each other, wars and the list goes on.
      I have thought about this a lot, every time we read something horrible in the papers and I have tried to search for answers for this. I do not hate the people who do hateful things but I wonder what makes them do such things, what is it that makes them stoop to such levels that only hurting other fellow beings is the only way in which they get happiness. Is that true happiness, one can argue but there is something about that action that attracts these people towards performing that action.
      Every time I ask this question there is only one answer that I get and that is Power. The desire for power drives a lot of activities in our life, each one of us wants to feel that we have an identity, that there is someone out there who will listen to us when we say something, there is someone that looks up to us, fear or respect does not really matter, we want to make an impact, again positive or negative does not really matter.
      Why is it that power is that important one might ask? I think the answer lies in our animal past. Imagine a wounded lion in the jungle, he really does not have much chances of survival but then think of a powerful lion, he gets meat delivered to his doorstep, all the lioness' want to be with the most powerful lion. At the end of the day it is all about survival. We have left our animal past behind but the instincts are still there, we still believe that in order to survive we need to be powerful and not just that people around us need to recognize.
      This does not really apply to us right, we have all handled our animal instincts well. Have we? Lets take a closer look - what about the all the cases husbands shouting on wives, parents beating kids, bosses making life for their employees hell, all our peers at work fighting it out to be the next big guy.  How many times have you seen housewives shouting on their maids, men shouting on auto-drivers or servers in restaurants in India? Everyone of us is looking for an opportunity to feel powerful.
      Well wait a sec, you can tell me, not all desire for power is bad. Let me give you an example - you want to be the next director in your office, so all you do is slog it out to be the director. Lets assume you do  become the director, what now? Why did you want to become director, to feel powerful? You have all the power you want now, but what do you want to do with it ? All this while that you were busy slogging it out to become the director, did you ever think about why you wanted to be the director. Do you want to change things at work, motivate people, build newer products, what was it ? My guess is you have not really thought about it, all you wanted to be was powerful and that is all you strived to do. That is the problem with gunning for power, most of the times you do it because of how it feels, you don't really worry about what power does or why you want that power. When the chance finally comes for you to use your power most often that not you will not know what to do with it since you have not thought about it really. We all know what the consequences of having such people in power are. Politicians in India provide ample real life examples.
     All the external influences ( read facebook, linked-in, tv, the movies) around us do not really help us with the struggle for power. There are a lot more avenues to show case ourselves these days, compare our position with others and then stack rank ourselves on where we rank in the power chain. Depending on where you land in the chain, there might be various emotions that one might go through.
      We have heard it said from the beginning of time that unless we realize our true merit as an individual, realize that we are all in this together, not against each other, there will always be a struggle over the other. And mind you there will always be an other that you can compare yourself against. 

Profound moments

People often talk about some profound moments that changed their life. So far I have never experienced one, but that changed yesterday when we attended Karin’s funeral in Minneapolis.  All this while when Karin was approaching death, all I was telling myself was that when the moment actually comes I want to be present there. God willing, that happened and we made it to the funeral. Before leaving for the funeral I checked out Karin’s caring bridge site (https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/karintreiber/) one last time and the outpouring of love and affection for her as well as the entire Treiber family was very moving. I thought about how amazing it is that this tiny slender woman has been able to touch the hearts of so many different people  who spoke different languages, came from different parts of the world and on the surface looked and behaved a lot more differently than she did.

The minute we entered the church to attend the service, we knew this was not a mourning, it was a celebration of the person that Karin was and was happening the way Karin wanted it to be. There were some neatly made collages of Karin the teacher, the friend, the traveler, the wife, the mentor and the Rotarian – all of which had one thing in common – her smiling face. There was a bigger collage that had all the experiences that people had shared on the caring bridge site. Everyone had a different story yet it was so similar in the sense that each of them had been moved in some or the other by Karin. We then walked into the church to meet Bob and there he was with his trademark wide grin, thanking us for coming down and introducing us to his entire family. He sure was living up to his wife words of making this a celebration. He said all the love that people had showered on them in the past few days had created a bubble that was letting his carry on this ceremony. As I looked at her peaceful figure in the casket and how extra-ordinarily beautiful the church looked with all the flower arrangement and at all diverse people who had come to celebrate her, tears just flowed through my eyes. I missed her in the moment, her laughter, her warmth and her charm. That’s when I knew that even in death she would make sure that she taught us a thing or two about living.

I was wondering how someone could really capture Karin’s life for everyone present there but the pastor made the job easy for everyone that followed. He said Karin was the tiny horn with the big voice. She was our very own Mother Teresa. She selflessly cared for people around her and across national boundaries. All of her mentees will vouch for the fact that it was  because of her encouragement that they are where they are today. She has a total of 21 PHD students graduate under her, visitors from 80 different countries visited her and a lot of others benefited from her acts of charity at the Rotary and the church . However she valued service to the Lord about everything else. She was a constant learner in life, asking questions, constantly curious and at the same time valuing each and every moment in her life.

Right then I knew that I had met a saint and I only wish that I had more time to spend with her.

Listening to the songs interspersed with the eulogies I realized why I so passionately wanted to be there. It was because I wanted to hear people talk about Karin and her life.  I wanted to see if I can pick a drop from the ocean of love that she spread around and not be the self-centered person that I am right now. Bob, Paul, David and her friends talked about how much Karin had given to them both in life, through the process of dying and now in death. She had set the bar really high and as Paul mentioned if she was here today she would say there is no bar, just keep the bar pushing.

Karin’s life was not about power or material means. It was not a process of aggregation, it was a process of giving . The lesson that she taught us all was that only by making your life an outpouring of love can you really live life in its truest sense. I want all of us to remember that there was one amongst us who managed to live such an exemplary life and that it might indeed be possible for us to live up to the example that she set.