Can you cry in the office?

I recently attended a farewell party of a colleague. To say it was quite an emotional event will be an understatement. Words of gratitude flowed, but what flowed even more were tears. A few women whom I’ve appreciated for their boldness and super strong personalities were crying like babies during the farewell. I could see empathy on a few faces that stood around whereas very few even scorned at them. Hugs and kisses were galore as tissue boxes were replaced one after the other. Emotions were doing a crazy roller coaster ride during the day.

A few people took efforts to pacify those who couldn’t stop their tears. But there were a couple of them who even went to the extent of asking those who cry to hold their tears and be brave. A bunch of questions came to my mind. Is it ok to cry in office? Are tears a sign of weakness? Do you really need to be stone faced when exposed to a barrage of emotions? If you are close to your colleague, is it ok to shed a few tears when he or she says goodbye to you as they move on in their career?

The answer is quite simple. Look at ourselves. Office or otherwise we are human beings made of flesh and blood. We have an extremely complicated mind that is subject to a wide variety of emotions, day in and day out. As part of a corporate culture, many a times we define a boundary for expressing our emotions while in office or among the colleagues. This leads to a situation for most of us where we contain our emotions deep down in our mind and do not let it go.

Blessed are those who could open up and expose themselves in front of their colleagues irrespective of the dictated norms of the corporate life. Tears in this case, I’ll say, are an absolute sign of strength, since you’ve been strong enough not to care about the eyes that scan you for your social behaviour in an office.

For those who choose not to cry, it isn’t a bad thing either. It could be your personality that do not let you go off your emotions when they truly start to build up in you. Where it goes wrong is when you are indeed overwhelmed with emotions and yet you build a dam in your mind to stop those tears from falling with a pseudo belief in the social norms.

Blessed are those who could let go off the rules that tie you down with social taboos and instead hug a colleague who is bidding adieu about whom you genuinely care. Being strong does not mean being mean. You could still be strong or stronger by expressing your genuine emotions whether you are with your family or with your colleagues.

Lend your ears to the human being within you and tell yourself that it is absolutely ok to cry, even if it is in office!

Junkism – The oblivious sin!

A few years back there was an opportunity at our church in Bangalore to present on stage a theme from life, with Bible as the backdrop. The event was called TechnoFest. We had a group at the church, of young working professionals named Santhome Professionals Forum. We decided to do a skit with the theme of ‘addictions’. Our skit touched upon all types of traditional and modern addictions ranging from alcoholism to mobile addiction. The performance was well received and we were quite happy to have presented a socially relevant topic in front of the entire parish.

Years down the line if we were to recreate the skit, I would like to include a unique kind of addiction, which unlike others, is rarely noticed by the world around us. It is a sin committed in the form and shape of a regular grocery purchase. This is an act that is never condemned by the society as taboo. You will never be looked down upon by anyone since it is slower than slow poison. What you buy is poison cleverly disguised as food! ‘Junk food’ is the villain here in this picture.

Let us accept it. Many of us born after 1980 are in one way or other addicted to junk. The degree of addiction for sure varies. A glance at the brightly lit bakery display, a hand that reaches out to that extra sweet confectionery, the chocolate that smiles at you which discreetly finds it’s way into your shopping cart, the fried and oily poison that you gulp down in the form of food are all but various forms of junk. The list can be endless.

If you are blessed to have a childhood in early 80s you might remember the evening snacks that your mom would have prepared for you. Unlike us, the parents of young kids today, they rarely reached out to a biscuit tin which had a bakery item stored.

They spent time and effort in making a healthy alternative which had natural ingredients that appealed to our taste buds. These included all those traditional snacks you could think of ranging from banana leaf covered jackfruit snack to rice flour delicacy stuffed with coconut and jaggery.

The question for us parents today is, are we putting even half the efforts that our parents took to keep us away from junk food? Of course they had the advantage of reduced accessibility to junk those days that they were almost forced to feed us with good food, as ironic as it may sound!

So what’s the best way to check if we are addicted to junkism? The easiest method is to first make a list of all possible junk you include in your regular grocery shopping or off hand purchases. Then figure out the frequency of your consumption of these items. If any of the items in your list appears in your consumption pattern in a week, you can be pretty sure that you are addicted to junk. It is as simple as that.

Is there a way to get over this addiction? The good news is yes! An even better news is that the withdrawal symptoms are far less intense than traditional addictions. But what is more challenging with junkism is that you need a very strong intent and a super strong self motivation to get out of the habit. This is quite critical since unlike other addictions there won’t be any external factors that restrict the availability of these items such as restrictions by law or social taboos etc. Hence you define your destiny!

One of the ways to get over the addiction is to declare in public your intent to abstain from one or multiple items in your junk list. Try this for a certain period and check if you could make that lifestyle change permanent.

If you are one with quite a disciplined lifestyle who have not been in the clutches of junkism, God bless you! For the rest of us, may we get the courage to accept the fact that we are addicted. May we also be blessed with the strength to take the first step to get over junkism before it is too late for us and more importantly for the people who love us! 

Love: Conditions don’t apply!

“Do you have any difficulty there? Is everything ok?” This was one of the first questions my grandpa used to ask my sweetheart every time we spoke with him over the phone. He was genuinely concerned about the fact that we stayed far away from home in a place where people spoke a language that was different from our mother tongue. We used to stay in Bangalore then. It didn’t matter to grandpa that it was just an overnight journey from Bangalore to Changanacherry, my home town. For him we were in alien land and was truly worried about us. We were quite fortunate to have experienced his love, the one that held us together through thick and thin.

I’d seen my grandpa expressing similar concerns towards everyone in the family. He never differentiated between those who are from the family as against those who came into the family. He was teaching us a very valuable lesson through his expression of love. Family survives on a fundamental truth. Love needs to be expressed in a form that is truly unconditional. The moment you introduce conditions for love then you’ll never be able to love everyone in the family in the same manner.

In fact, unconditional love comes naturally for most parents towards their kids. Having said that it is also a common phenomenon to have a favourite son or daughter for many parents. Even then, most parents share their love among their children in a pretty uniform manner. The times when situations in family could get delicate is when the children start a family of their own. The equations tend to change in some cases. This is exactly where the earlier incident citing grandpa’s wisdom commands a respect.

There could be reasons plenty for parents’ behaviour to have variation in expression of love towards the children and their family. Right from social acceptance of the new relatives to proximity of residences as well as personality differences of son-in-law or daughter-in-law can cause the parents to behave differently. The elder ones in the family tend to understand this differentiation and either reacts to it or in many cases decides to swallow the bitter pill. The affected parties in the whole picture are the grandchildren. Their innocent minds do not understand why their cousins get a special treatment while they get grossly ignored.

It is also a fact that not all children in a family tend to be at similar levels of independence. There could be certain children needing emotional and financial backing that the parents generally provide an additional level of support in all respects, emotionally, physically and financially. What they don’t realize in such cases is the fact that, lesser affected children while they may not need any financial support, still yearns for the same amount of support for their emotional needs. All they ask for is to be loved unconditionally.

While the story of unconditional love progresses between parents and the family of children, there is a different face to this whole story. This is the version that is generally seen in a family where the husband or wife display favouritism towards their respective families. This is an unfortunate state of affairs for the affected family. When you say ‘I do’ you accept both the families as your own. Your spouse’s parents should be as dear to you as your own parents. Any act of demeaning or reducing the significance of your better half’s family is nothing but injustice.

What couples need to realize is the fact that your spouse’s family is the primary mould in which he or she was created. Their behaviour and nature are driven predominantly by the manner in which they were brought up. Your in-laws have an unparalleled influence on your spouse’s personality. Hence it is not your merit that you ended up liking your better half, instead due credit must be given to the family that made them what they are.

Hence it is absolutely critical to acknowledge and show respect both ways by parents as well as the children to their respective families. Finding a suitable partner for your kids should not be the end of story for parents. Same applies to those who got married to the one they fell in love. Your match making will truly be blessed only when you learn and accept each other along with their family. May you have the wisdom to extend a heart full of warmth not just to your loved ones but their loved ones as well! 

The U-Turn

We planned and executed our first ever family trip to Europe last year. Switzerland was one of the dream destinations we included in our itinerary. While planning the trip, we shortlisted a few locations to visit in this beautiful piece of heaven. One such location was Isenfluh, a lesser known scenic place among the countless exotic destinations in this country. Google gave such magnificent images of Isenfluh that, not including this among our places to visit, was absolutely unthinkable. Thus we started our trip with Isenfluh as a definite stop among the locations to cover in Swiss.

After visiting a couple of other places in our itinerary we finally reached the Swiss Alps. On the way back from a famous hill station we spotted a tiny wooden board pointing to the left with the name ‘Isenfluh’ written on it. The road was narrower, compared to its counterparts in the country. We entered the road and immediately found a stark difference in the design of traffic. While the number of vehicles were quite less we had to navigate through a two-way traffic with no divider separating the road and the left border grazing the deep valleys of Alps!

Being a first time driver in Europe and having all our lives in my hands, I started the drive up the winding paths of the mighty mountain with a shiver down the spine! The only thing that still motivated us to go ahead was the fact that the images we saw earlier in Google slowly started to become a reality.

Further up the hill, a tunnel awaited us which looked quite spooky. This was unlike numerous other tunnels that we passed through in this nation were every other mountain seemed to have been cut through to create a passage. The tunnel was built in its most natural form with the mountain chipped away to create the path and is devoid of any structural reinforcement with concrete. The eerie feeling was complimented with a board that welcomed us at the mouth of the tunnel announcing the age of the passageway as more than a century old.

The lighting inside the tunnel was also less than others that we saw in Swiss. It was either designed that way to provide the commuters with a unique sort of an experience while the stark reality remained right in front of our eyes about the space crunch inside the tunnel where it was quite an effort to give way to a vehicle that came from the opposite direction. After what seemed to be an endless drive through a scary pathway we literally saw the light at the end of the tunnel!

A mesmerizing view of Alps greeted us at the exit of the tunnel that left us short of breath and we literally stood there absorbing the beauty of this awesome creation of God! Soon we realized that it was not just the beauty that left us with less air to breathe, but was also the combination of altitude that we climbed and the fear that intensified even more through that narrow path around the tiny stretch of mountain side. That was the exact moment when a bigger car took quite a sharp turn at the already narrow road and literally pushed us right to the edge of the cliff! It was indeed a narrow escape.

We stopped the car for a moment and took a deep breath to absorb the gravity of what just happened. While the majesty of Alps that surrounded us was too enticing and as a seductress lured us into her open arms, we took a very hard decision that very instant not to proceed further! We clicked a couple of pictures to capture the moment for eternity and with great difficulty managed to take a U-turn to return to safer plains.

This was a defining moment that reminded us of certain points in our lives where we need to stop and think if it is truly worth proceeding. If your conscience tells you that the way ahead is quite dangerous to the extent of being life threatening, do not hesitate to take a U-turn. It may be an opportunity lost, but putting at stake the lives of your loved ones does not justify even the greatest of temptations in this mortal world!

May you be blessed with the courage to take informed decisions in such moments of truth. 

Alone with a guest

The taxi dropped me right in front of my building. Got my luggage and took the elevator to my apartment. The sheer thought of being alone for the next few days was quite depressing. An emotionally draining experience many expats go through especially in the Middle East. This happens during school holidays when the families go back home and you are forced to live as a bachelor. This will be the eight time I am destined to feel this agony. Little did I know that things were going to be different this year!

I turned the key and the apartment door opened unwillingly as if it woke up from a long sleep that lasted for two weeks when we were not at home. I switched on the air conditioning and looked around to see the layer of dust that has quietly creeped in while we were away. I reached out to the windows and pushed it open by turning the dusty latch. A sudden gush of air came in as if someone was waiting impatiently outside the door to be let in. The breeze brought with it some more dust which blinded me for a few moments. By the time I could open my eyes, the room was back to normal with the breeze nowhere to be seen.

I unpacked the bags quickly. Soon enough I was ready since it was a working day and had to head straight to office. I closed the main door behind me as I stepped out of the apartment. Just before the door got fully locked I felt the breeze again, the same wave of air that greeted me when the windows were opened earlier.

It was a busy day. I returned home a bit late. The empty house that welcomed me back, gave quite a gloomy feeling to the evening that was soon getting darker. I took a shower and stood in front of the giant mirror we’ve in our hallway to comb my hair. While I was thinking of what to have for dinner I thought I saw in the mirror a flash of movement behind me! I swirled back, but saw nothing. I blamed my tiredness from the flight last night and headed to the kitchen to make dinner.

Soon after the dinner, I emptied the trash can and headed to the chute on my floor to dump the trash cover. The hallway was completely empty and there was an eerie silence with most of the houses devoid of kids. I deposited the trash cover inside the chute and closed the door back. That’s when it happened! I was quite sure this time that I heard a sound. The sound so distinct that I could clearly identify it as a flutter of wings. What was strange was that I couldn’t see a bird anywhere nearby. Did I really hear that or was my mind playing games with me? I felt the silence thickening around me and decided to head back to my apartment.

Shortly after the prayers I hit the bed with a book and soon my eyes were becoming heavy with the weariness from the long day. Before I fell into a deep sleep I thought I heard someone whispering a soft good night wish into my ears. I was pretty sure that my tired body and mind was making up all these and with a smile I embraced the depths of the much needed sleep.

I woke up quite fresh and before heading to the bathroom noticed something lying on the floor of the bedroom. It was a long and beautiful feather. The building complex was home to a few pigeons and had occasionally found one or two small feathers in the balcony. But this one was unlike anything before. I’d never seen a feather like that in my life and was equally surprised to see that inside my house! It even had a very peculiar fragrance but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I kept it away and got myself ready for office.

Though there were enough tasks to keep me busy at office, the thought of the feather came back to me once a while. I mentioned this to my sweetheart when I called her, but she didn’t seem to give much importance to it. I reached home and headed to the shower. I thought a warm shower will save me from my thoughts and was enjoying the feeling of hot water on my skin. Suddenly I thought I heard a noise at the bathroom door. I parted the shower curtain slowly. The bathroom was half filled with steam from the hot shower. Through the mist I watched with horror the handle of the door turning quietly! Time was standing still. The door opened and to my pleasant surprise I saw a golden haired girl with beautiful blue eyes coming into the bathroom. For a moment I even forgot that I was half way through my bath!

When I managed to get my senses back, I asked her who she was. She smiled and said, “I’m Angel”. Then just like that she vanished! The door remained closed. I couldn’t make any sense of what just happened. Did I really see a girl who forced her way into my bathroom? Or am I going crazy from all the loneliness that surround me? The night was eventless but was quite startled when I woke up the next morning before the alarm went off. I felt someone wishing me “Rise and shine”. No feathers were found that day though.

With a confused mind, I headed to office. I spoke to my wife about all these and after a while she made me feel at ease. Reached home, but no one came today in between the bath.

I sat on the couch with my dinner to watch a TV show. As I was about to change a channel there she was! Sitting right next to me. I could see the bright blue eyes shining even more. We started speaking and topics were so varied that everything related to my life especially from the day I got married kept flowing. Interesting enough she never let me ask more about her personal life. I finished the dinner and got up to wash the dishes. She vanished again.

This continued for the next few days. Angel gave me company at home. We talked a lot and laughed even more. I didn’t even realize how quickly days went by. I told my sweetheart about what’s happening here at home. She sounded amused at my story but surprisingly her reaction was not quite what I expected. Strange were the days.

One of these days my wife called and said she and our little one both developed a fever. They met the doctor and got the medicines. It took a couple of days before they got better. It was quite a chaos with all the confusion back home that only on the third day when I returned home and saw Angel, I realized that I didn’t see her for the last two days. Though I asked where she was, she avoided giving me a straight answer.

Soon the day came for me to head back home to bring my family back to Dubai. As I locked the door to head to the airport I could see a pair of bright blue eyes and a hand waving at me wishing me a happy journey. A few days later along with my wife and kids we were back in our apartment again. I opened the door with a pounding heart, half expecting to see Angel there greeting us. But nothing happened.

Days went by. Life was usual. I realized Angel was only a figment of my imagination. One evening my wife and I were having a conversation in the hallway where the giant mirror was placed. Our little one while riding her cycle accidently hit the thick border of the mirror. The impact was quite high that the mirror got off the hinges and started falling towards my wife. My reflex told me to reach out to the mirror. Though I could get hold of one of the edges it was too heavy for me to balance it. The other edge of the mirror was bound to hit my wife’s head and with a splatter of blood, the glass was to break into zillions of tiny pieces!

What happened instead was nothing short of a miracle! She had raised her hand in reflex and it almost touched the other edge of the mirror. As I tried my best to balance the mirror, I could see her hand barely touching the edge on her side. That was the moment when I felt a breeze, the same breeze that came through the window a few days back when I was home alone. I looked at her eyes expecting to see a deep shade of fear as she struggled to hold the mirror.

What greeted me in fact was a beautiful blue tinge in her usually brown eyes. As the mirror was getting balanced I could see the eyes sparkle even more in blue. I looked deeper into them and there she was! Angel. I asked her, “Where did you vanish?” My wife’s lips moved and out came the words, “I was always here where I am to be. I am your sweetheart’s guardian angel. Last week when you were alone getting lost in a sea of despair she was the one who prayed for bringing you peace. I couldn’t help but hear her prayer and loaned myself all those days except when she really needed me back when there was a bout of illness back home”.

We placed the mirror back on the hinges safely. I turned around and hugged by sweetheart. I then heard a flutter of wings. As the sound faded, a beautiful feather descended and landed softly on our palms. It had the same unique fragrance.

The fragrance of love! 

Fall in love... gracefully!

Here is one of the most widely circulated jokes about marriage:

“Getting married is like buying a new phone. After a while you get a feeling that you should have waited for a better model"!

Though the above joke is one in bad taste, the truth remains that most people after sometime of being married tend to question themselves of the big decision they took. If there is someone who had not experienced this, he or she must either be a saint or not lived under the same roof right after they got married. It is quite natural that this happens and don’t get worked up if you are one who had these thoughts or are having them at present.

There is one big difference though between a phone and your spouse. The model of the phone you bought is a fixed one and will never get better with time. Whereas your spouse is an evolving model, the one for which the best is yet to be seen. What more, their best is in fact in your hands! The key is for you to realize that the power of making the relationship work is in your thoughts itself!

Never ever have the impression that this is a challenge only for newly married couples. Every couple go through something similar once a while though in varying degrees. When it comes to newbies it is just the lack of experience that makes the situation look more challenging.

One of the biggest mistakes many of us make when we face this situation is letting the mind have a free run. We let our thoughts go wild and attribute all possible reasons to why the relationship is strained and why it won’t work. What we underestimate is the power of our mind. It is a double edged sword where our thoughts marry our behaviour. The more frequent and constant our thoughts are, higher the chances are for our mind to consider that as the truth.

A double edged sword perhaps is one of the most dangerous weapons. Don’t use it right, you may risk getting yourself killed! Master it, you won’t need any other weapon. So how do we use this power of mind to our advantage? The secret is to fall in love, gracefully, to the same person whom you find difficult to accept. You won’t be able to do this alone and will need the help of a mutual friend of yours, ‘time’. Use that wisely along with reassuring yourself that things will change. Nothing remains constant for ever. Shower yourself with positivity that drains out all those negative emotions that surround you. Do something that your partner loves even when you may not appreciate it. Learn to walk a different path though it may be challenging.

Do these for a while. Before you even know you'll notice a significant change in your chemistry. The mighty dislikes in the past will start looking like insignificant nothings. The hatred you had gives way for sheer happiness. Concerns on longevity of your marriage becomes a thing of the past. All these tell you only one thing. You have fallen in love! Trust me, it indeed is a blessing to experience this beautiful feeling.

While it seems easy to preach the thought, practising something like this is a huge task in itself. Hey! Who ever said it is easy to learn the double edged sword?

Luca, I ‘hate’ you!

Disclaimer: I never attempted a movie review before and hence you may find this weird. The only reason why I decided to follow and watch ‘Luca’, a Malayalam movie that got released on 28 June 2019 was that a friend was the co-writer. But that is perhaps the last reason for writing about this movie now. If the movie ‘Luca’ was a person, here are the seven reasons why I ‘hate’ Luca!

Luca, I hate you for being a celestial experience that made people write tonnes about you. Having introduced to you for a while, I couldn’t stop myself from reading those reviews that sadly made me judgemental about a few characters at least. I know deep down in my mind that I could appreciate some of the onscreen personalities better if I met you first before knowing bits and pieces about you.

I strongly urge anyone reading this who has not watched the movie yet, to stop reading this right now and all other reviews. Watch the movie first. It’ll be one of the best investments of your time!

Luca, I hate you for making me wait for 45 minutes from the beginning to bring a smile on my face. I blame my judgemental mind for that. Before even I knew that smile found its way to my face, the moment Niha decided to give Luca a hug for the first time. It probably was the most innocent moment in both their lives. A beautiful beginning of many such tender moments ahead.

Luca, I hate you for rekindling some of the most sensitive emotions that were lying deep down in my heart. Looking back, I now love those moments I got overwhelmed with the blanket of love with which you clothed me.

Luca, I hate you for walking ahead of time and applying the concept of FaceApp when you sketched her sweetheart’s picture for Kunjamma and showing her how he’ll look twenty years later! You could see the future and here is my earnest wish for the artist in you to be alive till the time a year comes when it does not rain for all twelve months!

Luca, I hate you for teaching people around you to talk in silence. How did they learn to speak through their eyes? How did you make their hearts reach out and embrace each other while sitting across a table with no words spoken? A crumbled piece of paper and a dead cat. Past buried and love is future!

Luca, I hate you for making history at the end. Has the world ever seen anything like this before? I doubt. It is probably my ignorance, but the very little I’ve seen and known, does not tell me that I’ve seen anything similar before. This Luca, is your sheer brilliance!

Finally, Luca, I hate you for one more reason. A reason that is not because of you I know. I hate you for reaching the cinemas in Kerala when I hardly had time to come to you. I hate you even more for reaching Dubai when I had left my sweetheart back home! This is the greatest regret I’ve Luca, that I couldn’t give you both our hearts. You now be content with just one.

But let me tell you what I’m going to do as soon as I reach home next week. I’m going to drag my love to meet you because I do not want her to lose the sheer bliss of experiencing you!

Lost in love! Long live Luca!