Why Ram is not aam..

It all started with the story. 

No. Actually, it started with a question. Lots of questions actually. 

My mental image of myself in my childhood was a mind full of questions. 

Childhood is also about stories and being raised in a certain society I was exposed to certain stories. Like stories from Panchtantra, Isapniti, Ramayan and Mahabharat. Also there were other less significant stories we came across here and there. But these were the ones which had a  major impact on me. They made me think and wonder. But as I grew older they made me question as well. 

Like, Why are these so called Gods, so imperfect as per our current standards at least. Yet, we are supposed to be perfect. In that case, clearly we can never be Gods! Funny. Isn't it? That's why I hate religion. It just does not make sense. 

How am I supposed to Look at Lord Rama and feel devotion for him when all I remember from his story is a man who abandoned his pregnant wife for stupid society. Why can't society follow him if he was such a great man? The feminist in me is very mad at this character but somehow I miss the injustice part of it where his step mother started the historical "Game of Thrones"

    

With all those questions, I was still lucky we didn't have "Google" in our childhood. Otherwise I would have had hundreds if not  if not thousands of opinions and explanations by unqualified, self proclaimed experts. After spending so many hours reading them, I would have had felt a subconscious pressure to believe in at least one of them. Just like I used to feel while shopping in real stores where the salesmen personally spend so much time persuading you to finally come to a decision of buying something. But off course that only happens in India. How I love the opportunity of not having to deal with it. Instead I can now spend hours in big outlets, trying new clothes and then  rejecting them guiltlessly. For there are many vacant changing rooms and no clingy salesmen in Germany. Such blessings for having such less population. Hail family planning!

Anyway, back to the story...

Questions are my best companions. I have lived with them ever since I remember. Along with them and my introvert nature, I carried a shield of ignorance for a long long time. I even questioned the authenticity of answers if anybody tried to convince me into some widely acceptable theories. But I was all ears for them. In fact  I have tried my best to convince myself into believing in at least one of them, but thanks to my "Logic" it failed every time. 😇

So now that I am pregnant and my husband can translate the original version of "Ramcharitmanas" to me, we have a story hearing session every morning at tea time. Where we listen to these 10 minutes episodes everyday. It makes perfect sense to stick to that small dose of information coming out from an authentic source, so that I can spend hours thinking over it and perhaps discover some hidden treasures of wisdom that it claims to have. To my delight, it is indeed working on me so far. I learnt a lot of new "behind the scenes" of the best selling version of Ramayana. It is so fascinating to learn these things that I decided to pen down my understandings as an ignorant questioner for my future reference. 

If you've read it so far and are still interested in finding out more about my learning experience, feel free to follow my next blog. 

Thank you Google for providing me this free platform. I still need you 😁

   

How I achieve perfection in day to day life...

The truth i've learned so far is that...

I and we; the collective consciousness, is not embracing our authenticity.

In short, we are not being ourselves.
Which again brings us to the ultimate spiritual question,

Who am I?

Today, talking to myself, I realised one more time that I speak in English to myself. It was weird in the beginning and then I even tried to fix it by trying to think in my mother tongue but then when it didn't work for long, I really started felling ashamed of it since i am not able to switch back to it. So, today I decided to accept the fact that i am most comfortable with English as a language even if it's not my mother tongue. 
I grew up learning history of our Independence from British Empire in English as  I was studying in English medium then. Ironic but as expected, I developed hatred for Britishers. Not today's British population really but to be specific, those people who did sort of took over politically and tortured our citizens at that time. That's very natural. Then, something happened which was not so significant then to me, but now I realise some deeper aspects of it. I went to a Marathi medium school. It was already a cultural shock for me and took a year to adapt but then again I was transferred to another Marathi medium school which happened to be a RSS school. We were not just taught the regular subjects in Marathi, but also brought in touch with our Hindu Culture. The philosophies I absorbed did a magic on my personality and made me a confident person. Since they also acknowledged the fact that every child is different, and catered to their unique passion by letting them develop those skills parallely. This made me stand out as a person who is good in drawing. So, no matter how average student I was otherwise, I was appreciated for my art and it made me feel proud. This little forte of mine has ever since yielded tremendous joy in my life. But there was one more thing I was good at now, you guessed it, English :)

I read some of the best literature and watched some of the most influential movies of our times in English but what made me a true fan is definitely the music scene. I loved pop, rap and rock music as much as i hated most of the bollywood  songs. So, I guess the forms of arts which touched my heart spoke English. Saying that, I also appreciate some of the great literature and music in marathi but somehow it was not as contextual to me as this was. I resonated more with Michel Jackson, U2, Coldplay and Lady Gaga. 
I learned to appreciate and articulate my love for architecture in English. I made international friends by reading foreign author's books on their lives. I enjoyed watching "Friends" than any HIndi or Marathi TV series at that time and now that I love YouTube, all the channels which help me develop my passions are again mostly in English. Tarot reading, spiritual discourses, interior designing, DIY's and world politics, everything that interests me now are in English. Where as my mother tongue was and still is mostly handy in communicating with people back home. Also having a non Marathi husband makes me speak his language which is Hindi a lot more than Marathi. As it's also the language most of my friends are comfortable with. 

I don't know why I am explaining this all. May be I am just explaining it to myself. And rather than being adamant on sticking to my roots by holding on to a language that makes me feel incapable of expressing myself thoroughly, I have decided to embrace the fact that;

I am multi lingual and I love it!  

Because who we are is a result of an uncontrolled process that life is. But who we want to be can be a conscious process. And to become what we want to be, we need to accept ourselves the way we are. It's ok to be whatever or whoever we are for that's our authenticity. 

Authenticity is perfect!