Issue March 15 - 31
Finding another side to oneself is the clue to peace.

All through my school going years, I heard it said that these were my best years. That I should enjoy while I could, this life without responsibility. I could see no truth in the words then.

There was so much on my shoulders: Exams, homework, dance classes, maths, Hindi lessons... Of course, I would escape it all by stepping into a daydream, but there was no real getting away from the responsibility.

Then last week, I turned student again. Went across all the way to Kolkata to pursue a course in leadership management at the IIM there. Far away from civilisation in wooded Joka, the campus ensured I was interred and cocooned from the outside world.

The routine of classes was strict and time bound. And lecture after lecture, workshop after workshop kept the mind jumping literally through hoops.

I am used to working with my mind all day of course, but being driven, rather than driving, was an experience I had forgotten, and it took some shifting of mental gears. But strangely, instead of finding it exhausting, there was a fresh energising feel that came over me as the first long day ended.

Maybe, I thought, it is the new environment, the fact that I was in the company of a group of diverse people with different interests and from different preoccupations, all of which brought a new energy to the floor.

Maybe it was the yoga and the many psychological exercises we were put through, the constant self analysis, and scrutiny of one’s mind set and leadership style that was refreshing. Or maybe it was the sheer fact that for those five days, there was nothing else really to worry about.

No firefighting, no deadlines, no group politics. The mind was clear to concentrate on the business at hand, and exert itself in solving the dilemmas as they were presented, with the knowledge that even an error would not have earthshaking consequences.

Surely, I thought, it is great being a student.

Also while in Kolkata, I visited a friend’s farm. It was a long drive, but the farm was another eye-opener. Under the trees, on a mat, a group of young men sat immersed in creating fusion music. A drummer , tabla and sarod players and a vocalist — together they made enough magic to infuse the place with a new energy. And as I looked around, I saw more.

Flowers smiled at me from different sections, a potter plied his miraculous craft giving new meaning to the words ‘moulding like clay’, two women sat bent over Kantha work, pushing the coloured line to form the pattern on cloth, and in a hut nearby, weavers worked the loom, weaving silk and cotton into designs my friend and her husband had conjured up.

It was their way of keeping in touch with reality and their roots, and as I watched my friend’s husband putting away his stiff, architect self and blossoming into a son of the soil, I realised this was an essential mantra that he had luckily chanced upon.

Not too many of us are as blessed. We take our public faces too seriously, and forget to look within ourselves and make time for the real person inside.

And yet, when we do so, it gives everything else we do meaning and gives us a fresh reason to be.

The Editor