I cannot exactly explain why Mr. Spock is special for me. Perhaps because he knows that being different is difficult but also very important. Perhaps because he understands that understanding those who are different from you can only make you stronger and wiser. Perhaps because he shows us how to love without being attached. Perhaps because he never loses it, yet is not afraid to be never far from losing it. Long live and prosper Mr. Spock. Even though I am sad today and feel like a part of my growing up has gone away, I celebrate all that you raise your eyebrow and split your fingers for.

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Wanderer, traveler, nomad – are words that describe the individual who moves – across countries, neighborhoods, cities , across workplaces, spheres of work, sub-spheres in the same area of work. Basically moves.

Such an individual faces a number of alarming prospects. First, every work and living space comes with its languages and interpretations. If you move frequently, you miss out on some of these.  The first-day-of -semester football joke that might seem funny to students in a US university classroom is an unfailing damp squib in an English university. Cricket (the game to English students) would be an insect for American classrooms. So wherever you are, you seem to be struggling to learn and interpret the local jargon and jokes. A friend once told me – if you are out of a country or state for too long, you lose track of  TV jokes and it is difficult then to return.  Second, every area of work and every place has things you “do” and those you “don’t”. If you live in Minnesota you do not show road rage, if you are driving in Calcutta you do not give way and if you live in northern England, sooner or later you do say “Hiya love”, instead of “Hi”. More serious is the fact that work norms vary across companies and countries. An academic professional in Europe for instance, would have a different approach and philosophy than one in India or the US. If you move across workplaces, you do not get a chance to steep in the methods and norms of each. And when you do adopt the local ones, your associates/colleagues/social acquaintances can never quite make out if you are really enjoying it and getting it or are faking it – suspicion is not uncommon. You become the somewhat unreliable rolling stone to whom very little is perceived to stick. Third, you don’t quite belong. Anywhere.  By language, by customs, by common social yardsticks, you remain somewhat of an outsider. Everyone around you may be bringing the roof down because two local football teams are playing, and you just feel impenetrable, as though you are the lone suspended balloon that is not bursting because no one somehow feels close enough to stick a pin in.  You are in no man or woman’s land, basically homeless. And fourth of course, you are continually on the steep part of the learning curve, coming to grips with the newness around you. Can be a bit of a drain.

So why would you still ‘wander’? Here are a few reasons I have found why.

First, because you are on the move, you learn to identify the “constants” in your life – people, ideas, values music, books that are truly valuable and core and are transferable across physical and conceptual spaces. And you learn to carry them with you, apply the reference lens they provide to new situations you encounter and enrich the lens itself when you meet new people and come across new ideas that can be enfolded into the scaffolding of your existing constants. These constants provide the emotional and practical anchors by which you learn to lead your life. They make things simple by focusing your attention on what you consider as elemental and keeping out the non-essential. A friend described this as “carrying your roots with you that you can set down anywhere”. I call it carrying my constant comforts. Following a recent move to England, after thirteen years in the US, I did not feel the need to immediately jump into everything that I saw around me because I was able to draw upon my social, professional and intellectual constants till I could establish for myself a level of ease and familiarity. Second you learn to understand how the different constants interweave among and enrich each other. You begin to see common threads running through the books you read, the people you meet, the places you visit and the work you do. And all of it becomes an evolving whole – made of various strands that keep coming out of the different constants and merging into one another – so that you seamlessly move from person to song to book to recreation to workplace. Things become increasingly coherent, rich, simple. Third, because of your experience of different cultures and thought-frameworks, you can see the good and bad of each. More importantly, you can dig into the spaces in between, discover interesting or uncommon nooks and corners and bridge gaps between them. You learn that there are no absolute or end positions and that it is the middle ground which invariably is the more productive and enriching, and which provides the empathy required to solve problems, create new pictures and angles, and get things done.You develop the potential to become a boundary spanner and the big picture see-er – the odd but valuable role that can wear different hats and without which no two ends can talk with one another. And finally, because you repeatedly experience impermanence at various levels, you develop detachment and perspective and perhaps can distinguish the real from the not so.

 Perhaps then, is it so , that homeless is another word for “home everywhere”, that being a nomad is the other side of being rooted, and that heartbreak at moving away from the familiar and exhilaration at the prospect of learning something less familiar are inseparable?

I recently moved to a new university – and while my stuff was in transit, a colleague stopped by my office and noticing the empty shelves, said, “No books and files – you’ve gone virtual!” While packing my old office, I was careful to weed out books and papers I no longer needed. But to carry those papers, books and documents that did not fill my bookshelves but sat in my computer hard drive or in a cloud somewhere, all I did was plug in the USB drives. I did not go through the ever-increasing and almost-unmanageable folders-and-subfolders, files-in-every-possible-format and downloaded- application- software, to see if I need all of that. No, I did what was technologically the fastest and easiest thing to do, I just did a dump. So, while the physical books and documents in my new office are sorted and rationalized, the virtual stuff sits in my new hard drive exactly how it was in the old one. Not re-organized, not re-evaluated, just re-plicated. Technology is meant to make our lives more organized and orderly. However, by using technology in only the easiest ways possible, are we using it to do what we set out not to do in the first place? Is “virtual” actually becoming “clutter” and “excess”?

One of the things a move does is to make you want to travel light. It forces you to take a good look at what you really need and don’t. It forces you to go into the garage and ask yourself if you need twenty different tool boxes – will five be enough? It makes you look at the kitchen shelves and ask if you need fifteen sets of dinnerware – you could make do with six perhaps? You are forced to go through your closets and confront clothes you have not touched in five, six, ten years, and ask if you are better off without them and if someone else might be better off with them. I recently moved and did all of these – I cleaned out the garage, the kitchen and the closets. What I did not need I gave to those who did. And then it dawned – this stuff that I had been sorting through was not the real thing, anyway. What mattered was the stuff I would carry (or not) in my mind and heart.  It I could carry with me the lightness of love, inspirations, optimism and courage that have seeped into me from the places I have lived in and the people I have lived them with, and leave behind the dead-weights of fears, doubts, worries and  mind-cloudiness that I have tended to collect along the way – I would, with every move, allow myself to soar and reach toward whatever it is that I am moving to in the first place. Now that would really be traveling light.

I started drinking tea when I got my first job, at 23.

For me it has always been Darjeeling leaf tea, brewed in scalding hot water for five minutes. In those days I took it with milk and sugar, one cup, twice a day. At the time we got married, my wife was not a tea drinker, so during the early days of our marriage I would drink tea and she would have biscuits, to keep me company. I thought the biscuits were a good idea and so I started having tea-dipped biscuits with my tea. We came to know one another over those cups of tea.

When our first child was born a few years later, we found it impossible to sit quietly together for even a few minutes, except for the time when we had tea in the morning. With the new responsibilities of head and heart that came with the little bundle of life, my wife found it energizing to sip the hot liquid. We both started having tea and tea-dipped biscuits. After thirty years of raising children, of learning about life and about each other, of many joys and difficulties, our little ones flew the coop and we became the two of us again. We spent happy and busy years together, visiting our children and generally bustling around. My wife developed an allergy for milk and both of us changed to tea with no milk.

Then one day, she was in the hospital, with pneumonia. It was serious and suddenly our ship became rudderless, adrift. She fought hard and pulled through. Before leaving home in the morning for the hospital everyday, I would make tea for one person and drink it alone. I could not remember the last time I had done that. When she came home, it was with a long list of food instructions, one of them being no sugar. We began a new routine for our tea – with sugar for me, without, for her. In spite of all the medicines, she got sicker. She could no longer come to the dining table to have tea, so I would take our tray up to the bedroom, until the day came when she no longer wanted to have it at all. I would make hers, take it to her, wanting her to have it, and take it away untouched and cold, an hour or so later, till the day she left home for the hospital and never returned.

These days I have tea with our only grandchild, all of 18 months old. He wakes up early and we begin our day together. When the kettle sings he looks at me with a smile that leaves me speechless with wonder and joy. He helps me spoon out the leaves and watchfully keeps a safe distance in my arms as I pour out the hot water. He sits on the table while I sit on my chair and we both stir the sugar in. And yes, he loves the biscuits. My tea time is much longer now. We eat biscuits, he plays with his spoons and an empty cup and teapot, and I sip my tea. We learn how to rattle spoons together and laugh at the big noise. We learn how to measure out tea and sugar with a spoon without spilling. We watch the school bus and wave to the children, we watch the dogs out for morning walks, we watch the sun peek through the trees and all the while we talk about what fun all of it is. His grandmother watches and smiles from the picture behind. Tea time togetherness has come back, morphed, and yet, priceless.

In spite of all the years that flow into it, life distills its essence into but a few moments, of immeasurable joys and vast sorrows, and unrelenting in their unexpectedness. I brew those moments every day, in my cup of tea.

Life comes to you in a thousand different ways

There are many things you can do, many parts you can play

Take good care when you choose, for these will guide your way

To yourself be true and it must follow as the night the day

 

There will be mountains to climb, rivers to cross

There could be hurdles aplenty you might need to toss

Keep going keep walking no matter what they say

To your faith be true and it must follow as the night the day

 

There will be memories of the sad and happy part

There will be joy pure and shining stirring through the heart

Take the joy and the sadness – together they will make your day

To your heart be true and it must follow as the night the day

 

There will be love to give, dreams to follow

There will be roses and thorns to the end of the rainbow

When you cannot see the road, forge it your own way

To your dreams be true and it must follow as the night the day

 

[Inspired the by following, from Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 3:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man]

You were the one in charge of the altar and the Pooja room at home. We have so many deities, some which you and I got from our days before we got married. Some we picked up along the way together, and others, the children brought from various places when they were old enough to travel by themselves. Every day it would take you half an hour to do your pooja after which we would have our lunch. On the  occasions when you did the special pooja’s, you would give me a list  of things you needed which I’d get from the pooja shop. The children would come home, we would light up the house, you would cook khichuri and arrange the pooja thaali with fruits, nuts, batasha and grains of rice.  The pooja room and the altar, and the house itself, would be awash in light and joy. I do the pooja at the altar and light the lamp every day in the morning and evening. And I put a picture of you in there. But the light and joy are gone.

I go for our evening walks. You always said I walked much faster, and I used to walk ahead. Now I imagine you walking behind me and I slow down.

Our girls wear a lot of your clothes. It is easy to make a mistake, they look so much like you, in them. Sometimes while emptying the washing machine, I see your housecoat, and for a moment I think it is you wore it before putting it in. They wear the sweaters and scarves and mufflers you made for them. There is a lot of wool left over from last year, which probably no one will ever knit into anything.

Very soon it will be time for our grandson to go to pre-kindergarden school. We went to see the place yesterday. The little ones were playing and learning. Learning happens best when children have fun, you said. There were toys there we did not have those days when our girls were growing up, much better toys that the children find easy to have fun with and learn at the same time. You would have liked those toys, had you been there, you would have taught him everything and he would never have known that he was “learning” because he would have had so much fun.

And then there is tea time, morning and evening. I am the only one at home who has tea now. I make it myself because I don’t think anyone else can make it the way you and I used to have it. Once the water boils and I have put the leaves in, I take out the teapot and the biscuit tin. When the leaves have soaked in I pour out the tea in the teapot. On days that I remember, I take out one tea cup and make the pot for one person, on days I don’t, I drink two cups of tea from one cup.

I was going to the airport at 5.30 am to catch an early morning flight on a cold December morning a few days ago, the first leg of my journey to Calcutta. I was going home to see dad, after almost 5 months, and for the first time since mum’s passing and the subsequent immediate period.  Driving to the airport, dropping the car off, checking in and going to the gate – routine things I have done countless times without a thought, seemed heavy and difficult, and I did not want to do them by myself. A friend said she would drop me off and I was glad. As we were leaving, I gave her a cup and said, “Your tea is here, for the road”. She said, “Yours is in the car”. Knowing one another’s habits, and unknown to each other, we each had made two cups of tea that morning, one for the other person. She drove us, I checked in, she parked her car and came inside, we sipped tea, we talked, and hugged a bit, and then it was time for me to go in for security.

As I was waiting at the gate, I thought how it would have been had I done it the usual way. I would have driven in, parked, picked my suitcase and gone in. And of course, I would have made my cup of tea for the road. Even given the state of my mind, none of it would have been a big deal and the end result would have been the same.

However, there was involved here, a switch of view point. In the second case, the individual is self-organized and capable and functional, and things are efficient. In the first, each person, while being self sufficient, looks out for the other, and things have heart. The cup of tea we had that morning was not something we made for ourselves as a matter of function and habit, but because another person was thinking about us. That made all the difference. Whether with a cup of tea or with life, it is what you bring to it from the other person’s view point that forms the center and its heart, not necessarily what you can do for yourself efficiently. An important switch of point of view indeed.

I went to the bank with Baba. The purpose of the visit was to inform the manager that the joint account he had with Ma was to be converted to a joint account for him and my sister. He and Ma had opened that account over forty years ago, perhaps it was their first joint account. I walked behind him as we approached the first of the two flights of stairs that led to the bank. At the foot, he stopped, so that I almost bumped into him. Then he stumbled and paused.  And looked up blankly up the steps toward the landing. I had never seen my father pause or stumble before. He walks carefully, steadily and with purpose. Never haltingly. What was he thinking when he stopped and stumbled? Was he wondering how he would climb all of the steps that he would face henceforth, without Ma? Was he remembering all of the steps they had climbed together?

And then a few days later, I sat beside Baba as he drove to the market. We were going to buy the weekly stuff – vegetables, fish, chicken and all of that. He, used to driving almost every day, was driving after almost three weeks. He said to me, “You need not have come, I could have driven by myself.” He was looking at the road, but it seemed he was looking much farther into the road than there was too look. What was he seeing? The countless times he and Ma had driven to the shops, to one of our houses, to see us off when we traveled, to just about everywhere? The drives in the future when he would not have her next to him? The market was a noisy and smelly bustle, as only markets in Calcutta can be. Vegetables, poultry, grains, groceries, all sharing the same spaces, separated by narrow alleys. And of course the fish – big, small, shining, slippery, black, silver, some still moving. Buying the weekly stuff, that is something my father always did by himself. When he got back home he would tell Ma about all of the stuff he had bought, especially if there was something that he didn’t usually buy, like Ileesh fish. Over the years, Baba had his chosen shops and shopkeepers. On that day, he swiftly and efficiently navigated the alleys, goods and prices, habit stealthily taking over. I followed hurriedly through the squawking chickens and squirming fish, trying not be left too far behind. When he had finished most of the buying he turned around and said, “Now we just need to get the Tangra fish for your Ma and then we’ll be done.”  And then he stood still. Rock still.  And looked far into the distance, farther than the shops, farther than the smell of fish would carry, far into a place that he did not want to see. Could he see those mornings where buying Tangra fish would be unbearable because Ma was not there to take them home to?

Another day I went with him to the medicine shop where we get our medicines from. We went to return a month’s worth of Ma’s medicines. “Have you changed the doctor?” they asked us. My father nodded. Was it a nod of relief that there would be no more pain, or one of disbelief that there would be no need for the medicines any more?

Several days later, after all the bank accounts and fixed deposits had been changed to different joint account holders, after a number of trips to the market that one of us invariably went with him on, my father said one morning, “I am going to buy vegetables. I’ll go by myself”.  No fish, only vegetables. And not to the usual market where he drove to, but to a nearby place that he would walk to. While putting away the stuff he got in the fridge, I came across green mangoes. Not something he would usually buy, but something he got when he wanted to have green mango chutney. When he wanted to have something special, he never told Ma about it, he would simply bring the stuff and say, “Here, I got this”.  When we sat down to eat, he saw the chutney and then looked at us. His eyes were wet, but after a long time, they were less bleak, less weary. What was he seeing? A life where it was perhaps possible to eat chutney without Ma? He said, “There is chutney”. I said “Yes, Baba. Again”.

A question that often bothers researchers is whether the knowledge they seek is free of their personal values and preferences. Is the sky blue to everyone? Does the apple fall at the same speed from the tree irrespective of who is measuring its speed? Yes and Yes. Is knowledge of how to use the iPod same for everyone? Maybe – a group of teens, say, that hang out together probably use the same apps. Are love, loyalty and friendship the same for everyone? No, no and no. The difference between the three sets of questions is the interpretive flexibility of their answers as understood by the person who is examining them.

For the first set, the essential phenomenon that makes the sky appear the color it does, or makes the apple fall as fast as it does, does not change, no matter who is observing it. In other words, the observer is outside the situation that he or she is observing. This is largely true of the physical sciences such as chemistry, biology and physics – where one can set up experiments to observe the phenomenon one wants to study and can repeatedly observe the same sorts of results. In the second case, groups of similar demographics understand a device such as the iPod in different ways. Older people might see it as a phone, business executives might see it as an email device and phone book and college students may see it as some thing that can do “everything”. How so? Because each group is involved in the process of understanding how to use the iPod through actually using it, not through watching someone else or reading about how to use it. True, that their peer groups tends to direct them towards certain uses more than others, but that understanding is combined with their own interpretation of what they want the iPod to do for them, to shape what it actually does. In this case then the observer is partly inside the observed phenomenon. For the third set of questions, each person will have a different answer. That is because a useful or meaningful understanding of love, loyalty or friendship can happen only through enacting them. There is not much that we can measure about them in hard terms that is independent of the person who is observing them.

How do these ideas shape the methods and tools that we use, to understand the world around us? As we go from the first set of questions to the third, the answers become less material and more subtle. At the material end of the scale, we apply methods that are generally known as “positivist”, that is, we frame experiments and based on them express the answers as formulae or axioms that are independent of those who conducted the experiments. We do this for instance, in engineering and physics. At the subtle end of the scale, our research methods become “interpretive”. That is, the researcher embeds himself or herself in the phenomenon, experiences it and then expresses the results in the form of descriptions or ideas that are influenced by his or her values and preferences. The researcher’s subjective experience of the phenomenon sculpts its description. Therefore the methods that we use to understand what goes on around us depend on the particular phenomenon examined. For studying material phenomenon the researcher is situated more on the outside, for subtle phenomenon, more on the inside.