The title and picture inspired by my friend Muralidharan Sridharan. These musings are about the way in which Covid-19 has changed my life, and what may be yet to come
You are not welcome. Because you really do not matter. Imagine the moment of hurt when you are told "I am NOT here" when you desperately ask, "Where Art Thou?" And after hearing that, over and over again, you stop asking. It becomes a moment of reckoning specially for people who have spent their lifetime saying, "Here I Am" and suddenly realize that there was no reciprocity; I was with a bondhu recently and I saw the pain. As the person often has said, "there are bruises and there has been blood on the ground." Sitting with a glass of wine we realized that this psychic blood and the bruises leave us strangely stronger rather than weaker. The hours of being there when there was a need, when the call came, unabashedly without any ambiguity you rise up to the challenge. That is when you say, "it doesn’t matter, it needs to be done." And in the same breath you say, "of course I am here and will be right next to you." Most do not w...
Next week there will be a test of loyalty here. A strange thing - this idea of loyalty; where a person says that "I will never abandon you." No matter what happens, loyalty demands that commitment. It is a promise that says that you can count on me. It is similar to the theme I have developed in other posts, the essential answer to "Where Art Thou?" and being always able to say "Here I Am." Never failing and never wavering in the act of supporting what you claim to be loyal to. Judgment, and even reason, may be suspended in that support. It is the moment where self-interest disappears in the face of being with the person, institution, or the idea. In my life this principle has been particularly important. Few people can claim to be the quintessential "company man” and worked for the same employer for nearly thirty years or lived in the same town for nearly forty years (albeit with a temporary departure for professional development). It makes me wonder...
Are you an honorable person? Or do you cheat on tests? This conversation happened with my students recently. I have been a teacher for nearly three decades, and I have witnessed a lot. I remember the old days of blue books (my American readers will know what I mean), when I used to hand out a cyclostyle question paper (later a photocopy), and I would "invigilate" during the test time, as the students wrote out their answers in a book which had a blue cover, watching to see who the honorable student is and who peeps over the shoulder of the person nearby. I really never spotted anybody doing that. Because they were honorable people. They understood that there is a moral standard to be maintained. Many are not like that. They cheat. They are dishonorable men who cheat in everything they do - from their dishonesty to their bondhus, whose wives they take for the night, to the dishonesty to their professional ethics when they secretly make others do the work that is supposed to be...
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