Silver Jubilee, really?

At a company mandated training session recently, I was told optimism is one of the backbones of resilience. That’s a bit counterintuitive, you’d think realism helps in building resilience. I had become highly cynical recently, due to a change in environment or friend circle or just corporate infusion. I had forgotten how to be grateful for all that I have, most of which had been fever dreams mere years ago. Since the beginning of this year, I made it a point to notice the little bits of kindness in an otherwise grim, human error and greed-filled world.

Kindness from the unknown tall lanky noise-canceling-headphone-wearing Korean dude in the gym, who was before me in the line for lemon-infused water which was almost over. As I struggled with making the physics work; he walked back, tipped the whole filter to fill my cup and walked away without a word. You go, random dude. Just like the unknown ladies who showed me how to use the bigger machines I'd been too nervous to try.

Kindness in the sparkling blue eyes of a little Slovakian toddler in a pram in the MRT. His tall and talkative parents, likely tourists, were a stark contrast to the quiet smartphone-watching airpod-wearing local crowd; conversing loudly from opposite seats. After he’d gotten bored of babbling with his slightly older sister (cue for me to drown in nostalgia of babbling with my own sister); he decided to make me his next target, showing me the incredible trick of blinking his eyes. I played along, and he made sure I didn’t doom-scroll for longer than 30 seconds at a time with multiple loud “Da!!”s, until we both reached our stop.

Kindness in the words of the former mayor of Tunbridge Wells, Dr. Ronen Basu. As part of an ongoing student exchange program in 2014, a bunch of students from my school visited a tie-up school in Tunbridge Wells in the UK. One afternoon was spent in meeting the local mayor for high tea. While interacting with us and our teacher chaperones, I remember him looking straight at me from the other end of the massive table, asking “Who do you want to be? I see a spark in your eyes”. As that trip contained most of my childhood bullies, I wanted to avoid all attention and pretended he was talking to the girl next to me to brush the question off. As I write this, I learnt he passed away a few years later. An accomplished doctor in cellular pathology who immigrated from Varanasi in 1975, he may never know how powerful his words were for another hungry little soul that day.

The world can be a harsh place, it always was, and it seems to get worse each year. Amma is persistent in telling us not to have kids. While I admire her refreshing progressiveness, hers is a mother’s POV of having raised two girls in a pandemic-hit, eve-teasing normalized, uncertainty-filled world. Very far from the simple straightforward village life she grew up in. She wishes she didn’t have kids but “we can’t go back in time like Nobita, can we?” My mother using a Doraemon reference is testament to the universal pull of Japanese anime, and of the many many hours my sister and I spent glued to the television.

And she is right, her kids are well into their 20s now. As I approach the 25-year mark this week, a line from George Elliot’s “Mill on the Floss” comes to mind.

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them.

I remember crying when I first read it about 10 years ago, as I felt too old then. While on a call with an old acquaintance yesterday, I heard myself say “I am well, and exactly where I wanted to be at 25”. Quite self-assuring, and I am going to assume the quarter life crisis-esque spending spree is completely unrelated.

Enjoy this clip of my sister's brilliance from a birthday long ago, also referenced in the last birthday post