My birthday, yesterday: Do read it. It is interesting. Not just 'Song of Myself'.
My birthday yesterday had a couple of radiant moments.
A colleague at Presidency demonstrated a good attitude and reflected a side to her character that I liked. It never hurts to say 'sorry'. A lot of healing and a lot of development and positive change may come if that one word is said in a heartfelt manner.
Met Purnima for lunch. I love her house, 6/1 Wood Street, house of Gujarati Jute business folk. Magnificent, elegant but requiring a level of maintenance that is not possible by the family now.
A heritage house, almost, with mahogany staircases, very high ceilings, incredible architectural elegance and spaciousness. It is a privilege to live in a house like this. It would have so many stories, so many individual and interwoven narratives, as Gujaratis (as many Bengalis up until the 80's of the previous century) lived in big joint families. A bahu (daughter-in-law) of this house was my classmate years ago at the Alliance Francaise de Calcutta. Harsha Tulsidas, so incredibly beautiful, tall, classically elegant, fair, with lovely features. I had a picture of her writing on a desk in the classroom where Monsieur Gimeno taught. What a teacher!
He had once signed off a card sent(given) to me for Christmas/New Year, 'tres amicalement a vous' or 'in a spirit of great friendship with you'. I had treasured those words. I was eighteen years old. My friend Padma Mahadevan (first in class to my second--we were such good friends--she became a Probationary Officer in the State Bank of India, later), and I went to his house in Padmapukur, stood around giggling in the courtyard (I was 16 and Padma, 21), but he wasn't home.
I would have never ever written all this down. All these rich experiences would have died with me. So writing the blog is a good thing even if there are strains of narcissism in it at times.
I hope enough of the world does step in, does come in and embrace you into its wide, wide fold. 'Jagate ananda yajjne, amar nimantran'. 'I have been invited to the great feast of joy in the universe'. Rabindranath emphasized 'ananda' or 'joy'. 'Ananda' is happiness, delight, joy at its most sublime, most delicate, most refined, most magical and most miraculous. It is the golden light of the morning, the blue sky, 'the round ocean' and the mind of man', 'a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things and all objects of all thought [Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey].
I didn't start quoting Wordsworth consciously. My words mingled with his, naturally evoked his. I doubt Rabindrath ever acknowledged Wordsworth. But the impress of the latter poet's thoughts and cadences are very obvious to me, an English Romanticism afficianodo, teacher, etc. Love British Romanticism. Mother's milk. Grew up on it.
Sreemati at 19-21 is Wordsworth (primarily), Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Coleridge. She is. English Literature is one of my Gods. It has shaped, guided, formed my imagination and sensibility. Provided aesthetic norms and parameters. Taught me to look at the world, frame experiences and seek interconnections and overlappings. It has shaped and formed me. I am grateful to it and love it. My literary first love. Nothing will ever replace it. Nothing. No matter how 'decolonized' I try to become or how much I process and internalize the message of British imperialism into Culture.
So, if i have a stepmother or a stepsister or a foster mother, what is wrong with that? It is giving me life in helping me to create and connect and teach my methodologies which in turn is creating traditions and continuums of pedagogy, teaching and nurture. My students at Basanti Devi College still tell me that they loved being in my classes. I think they are being sincere. They tell me that I 'shaped' and 'formed' them. I listen with utmost humility.
Poornima, who I met for lunch yesterday , wrote in a letter she gave me:
'I believe fully that if a pure- hearted person seeks His help [ God's ], it always comes. The help I want you to seek is the power to throw out of your mind everything that disrupts your peace of mind, and focus on things that make you happy. I believe you have this power, but it is dormant. It will awaken, and strengthen, as you pray with all your heart and with complete faith.'
I will hold on to these words like I would to scriptural text.
My birthday yesterday had a couple of radiant moments.
A colleague at Presidency demonstrated a good attitude and reflected a side to her character that I liked. It never hurts to say 'sorry'. A lot of healing and a lot of development and positive change may come if that one word is said in a heartfelt manner.
Met Purnima for lunch. I love her house, 6/1 Wood Street, house of Gujarati Jute business folk. Magnificent, elegant but requiring a level of maintenance that is not possible by the family now.
A heritage house, almost, with mahogany staircases, very high ceilings, incredible architectural elegance and spaciousness. It is a privilege to live in a house like this. It would have so many stories, so many individual and interwoven narratives, as Gujaratis (as many Bengalis up until the 80's of the previous century) lived in big joint families. A bahu (daughter-in-law) of this house was my classmate years ago at the Alliance Francaise de Calcutta. Harsha Tulsidas, so incredibly beautiful, tall, classically elegant, fair, with lovely features. I had a picture of her writing on a desk in the classroom where Monsieur Gimeno taught. What a teacher!
He had once signed off a card sent(given) to me for Christmas/New Year, 'tres amicalement a vous' or 'in a spirit of great friendship with you'. I had treasured those words. I was eighteen years old. My friend Padma Mahadevan (first in class to my second--we were such good friends--she became a Probationary Officer in the State Bank of India, later), and I went to his house in Padmapukur, stood around giggling in the courtyard (I was 16 and Padma, 21), but he wasn't home.
I would have never ever written all this down. All these rich experiences would have died with me. So writing the blog is a good thing even if there are strains of narcissism in it at times.
I hope enough of the world does step in, does come in and embrace you into its wide, wide fold. 'Jagate ananda yajjne, amar nimantran'. 'I have been invited to the great feast of joy in the universe'. Rabindranath emphasized 'ananda' or 'joy'. 'Ananda' is happiness, delight, joy at its most sublime, most delicate, most refined, most magical and most miraculous. It is the golden light of the morning, the blue sky, 'the round ocean' and the mind of man', 'a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things and all objects of all thought [Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey].
I didn't start quoting Wordsworth consciously. My words mingled with his, naturally evoked his. I doubt Rabindrath ever acknowledged Wordsworth. But the impress of the latter poet's thoughts and cadences are very obvious to me, an English Romanticism afficianodo, teacher, etc. Love British Romanticism. Mother's milk. Grew up on it.
Sreemati at 19-21 is Wordsworth (primarily), Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Coleridge. She is. English Literature is one of my Gods. It has shaped, guided, formed my imagination and sensibility. Provided aesthetic norms and parameters. Taught me to look at the world, frame experiences and seek interconnections and overlappings. It has shaped and formed me. I am grateful to it and love it. My literary first love. Nothing will ever replace it. Nothing. No matter how 'decolonized' I try to become or how much I process and internalize the message of British imperialism into Culture.
So, if i have a stepmother or a stepsister or a foster mother, what is wrong with that? It is giving me life in helping me to create and connect and teach my methodologies which in turn is creating traditions and continuums of pedagogy, teaching and nurture. My students at Basanti Devi College still tell me that they loved being in my classes. I think they are being sincere. They tell me that I 'shaped' and 'formed' them. I listen with utmost humility.
Poornima, who I met for lunch yesterday , wrote in a letter she gave me:
'I believe fully that if a pure- hearted person seeks His help [ God's ], it always comes. The help I want you to seek is the power to throw out of your mind everything that disrupts your peace of mind, and focus on things that make you happy. I believe you have this power, but it is dormant. It will awaken, and strengthen, as you pray with all your heart and with complete faith.'
I will hold on to these words like I would to scriptural text.
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