World Heart Day

Funny that September 24th should be World Heart Day. Its also Baba's birthday - a man with a very big heart, who died of a heart attack.

This is not going to be a maudlin piece about how much I miss my father and how I suffer from clockwork sentiment like so many others. Clockwork sentiment? You know, the sorts that spring up obediently and punctually on specific days. Oh, its a birthday. Sniff sob nostalgia. Yikes, its a death anniversary. Snivel, whimper, memories.

Not that those emotions are untrue. Memories do come unbidden, images appear in sharper focus. You remember excruciating details that you manage to keep at bay the rest of the year. My sympathies to clockwork sentiment, including my own.

However, like I said. This is not a piece cleverly weaving the pathos of world heart day with the death of a large hearted man who died of a heart attack. [dang, I do like that connect, don't I? Mentioned it a second time in the span of 4 paragraphs!]

This one's about developing a personality. I was 20 when my dad died. I was a confident, successful, accolade winning, teacher petted, academic achiever kind of youngster. Everything I touched seemed to turn to gold. I was the role model and the model child. Yeah yeah.

Then one day I was standing in front of my bookshelf at home, wondering which book to pluck out of the rack. As my eyes scanned the titles, they stumbled on one I'd read recently, just before baba's fatal attack. Did I like it? Was it a good book?

I remember the slow sense of realization coupled with mild horror that assailed my brain, as I processed my own thinking. I had absolutely no idea whether it was a good book or a bad one. I had no clue whether I should recommend it or trash it. Sure I'd read it. Sure I'd absorbed it too. But had I formed an opinion about it? No I hadn't. And why?

Because I had not gotten the chance to discuss it with my dad.

Once this sinking awareness set in, I got into a morbid fascination of testing it out on other things in my life which I thought I had an opinion on... books, movies, people, food, clothes. Gosh. It was a horrible excercise. Because at the ripe old age of 20, I discovered that I did not have a single opinion of my own in this world.

All my views were directly bounced off my father's opinions. Either he liked something so I liked it too. Or, he hated something, and as the rebel teenager, I began to like it. Or he loved something and in order to be different I chose to dislike it. You get the drift right? I'm not saying all my opinions were the same as my father's. What I'm talking about is even more sinister. All my opinions were a product of my father's views on the subject, coupled with my equation with him at that point of time.

Trust me, it sounds trivial now, but it was a very painful realization then. That I had absolutely no personality to call my own. No thoughts, opinions, ideas, views, concepts that were truly original. Sure, all our notions are influenced somewhere or the other by history, culture, context, peer group, family, friends and tradition, but within that we amalgate what we call a singularly personal world view. This direct richocheting off a strong personality's mind and believing it to be yours can be quite misleading and disconcerting.

I am 31 today, going on 32, and I still find myself stopping to think 'what would baba have felt about that?'. At times the exercise is an amusing one, at times frustrating. But I do hope that somewhere along the way I may have learnt to distill, process and gleam a position that is genuinely mine. A stance that may well be reflected in like-minded people, but which is not arrived at because of them.

Because I went through this quiet realization many years ago, I also test it on people I am close to. Colleagues, friends, family. I try and see, especially if I am close enough to that person, whether they are still in the 'richocheting stage' or the 'assimilative stage'.

So where are you?

The reason I ask you to think about it, is because I hope and pray that a tragedy, like the loss of a loved one, not be the spring board for examining the development of your personality. Death is a great teacher but hey, not a very pleasant one. But since that day I've often wondered - had baba not died, would I still be richocheting, and not ever grasping that I am?

Many, sadly too many people I know, are richocheting. I know this sounds hopelessly pompous and priggish, but its true. Very often, people who come across as strong willed and opinionated, actually aren't. You just have to meet their closest people - a parent, a best friend, a partner, a boss - and you realise where their world view stems from.

On the other hand, funnily enough, a lot of seemingly tentative people are assimilative. They appear unsure, hesitant, questioning. You'd think it would be the easiest thing in the world to influence their minds. But no, they are not that easily swayed because they are good listeners. They will hear you out, absorb what you say, process it and then assimilate it into their world view. Open to being agreeable, but not open to being overtly influenced.

These sort of minds are not aggressive or confrontative. Because they have no turf to defend. They are not embedded in a subconscious emotional connect that they dare not defile. For example its so much more uncomplicated to take it easy when my opinion's are attacked rather than when My=Baba's views are under threat. After all, I loved that man, I must defend him, right?

Hey its his birthday today. Birthday, not birth anniversary. Because he continues to live and glow in the recesses of my mind. And perhaps the girth of his personality does not admit defeat, but I continue to love and battle him in a way that one can only do with someone who was more than close; who was a part of oneself.

Happy birthday baba! Keep up the fight.