rolling with the punches

My first voyage was on a ship called Faith-1, a small product tanker on which my husband was Chief Mate.

As Faith-1 had a shallow draught she could enter and dock at most ports. A gangway would be lowered onto the jetty and we would go down and take a cab into town. Immigration gave us each a shore-pass and that was apparently all we needed to go anywhere in that country!

To my luck, a month after I joined Faith-1, she went off the monotonous Boston-Newfoundland charter she had been on for a whole year! She became a tramping vessel, going to any port where there was cargo to carry.

And so it was that Faith-1 left Boston and crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

She crawled through the narrow Straits of Gibraltar into the blue Mediterranean . . . sailed around the Cape of Good Hope en route to Durban braving dangerously huge waves . . . got dragged by mechanical mules through the locks of the Panama canal . . . cruised through the picturesque Straits of Magellan from the Pacific into the Atlantic Ocean . . . navigated up rivers like the East river into New York, the Rio de la Plata into Buenos Aires, and the Humber into Immingham . . . She docked at tiny ports like Come By Chance in Newfoundland and Ilo in Peru, as well as at large ports like Rotterdam . . . She dry-docked at Lisbon for three whole weeks for an overhaul and paint job . . .

For me, it was like jumping from my narrow life of hospital/home onto that dear little bright orange ship that went everywhere, crisscrossed oceans, landed up on the shores of so many different countries, gave me new towns and cities to explore, new people to meet and a whole lot of new stuff to be amazed by, apart from giving me a lovely cabin, great food and good company on board!

*****

A voyage, in all its variety, is so much like Life itself. Ship and ocean and weather conditions are perfect metaphors for person and life and life’s challenges. And dry-dock is the equivalent of going on vacation to rejuvenate!

Like life, a ship constantly moves forward and has deadlines to meet. She floats on a sea that expects her to navigate responsibly. She is alert to the appearance of unpredictable winds that can quickly go from calm to gale force and unleash Nature’s formidable might. All of this makes a voyage a toy version of the journey of life.

A ship sails for a while, berths at a port to load cargo, sails out again, then stops at another port to discharge it, which is quite like the rhythm of life with its hectic and quiet phases, of doing and just being, verb and noun. To be a chartered ship or a tramping ship is probably one choice we do have – if we have the luxury of freedom!

*****

As in life, other lives go on around us as we sail along our charted course. Pods of dolphins with smiling faces race towards us to play at the ship’s bow. A lone sea lion occasionally floats by with a puzzled look on his cute little face. Flying fish frequently flash past in a streak of silver, just skimming the surface of the sea. Whales spout water in the distance.

Birds roost among pipes on the deck for a few days when we pass islands. Other people in ships and boats pass by. In coastal waters fishermen in their tiny boats come close to us to stare curiously up at our huge vessel and wave to us. Seagulls keep up a raucous din as they swoop down to catch fish.

Aft, the ship wake stretches back quite a ways, to fade away like traces of our day-to-day lives and, ultimately, of the years we walk the Earth. All that remains is the ship’s log.

*****

Some events in life are like surface winds acting on the freeboard, superstructures and deck cargo of a ship. But, just as a ship is stable and can sail in all sorts of weather – not pitch and roll or list every time there are strong surface winds – you mostly manage to go on with your life even through rough times. There is a threshold for a distress alert, and it can’t be the sight of a few whitecaps in Force 4 winds!

Same way, you don’t run to a therapist every time you feel a little anxious or low. That would be like a ship calling a Mayday in ordinary bad weather! You find your balance like you do when you learn to cycle or skate. You do not catastrophise.

Unlike the effects of surface winds, forces acting on the submerged part of the hull of a ship are not easy to discern. When there is an ocean swell – due to a distant storm – you feel it in the way the ship moves. The Captain alters course to keep the swell on the port or starboard bow and makes sure he doesn’t steer the vessel into it. Sometimes he even stops the ship to let a storm pass.

A lot of your deepest feelings are like a swell acting on the part of the hull below the water. They are gut feelings, not intelligible thoughts that come into your mind in clearly formed words. They are like a foreign-language movie without English subtitles. Gut feelings can make you uneasy the same way a swell can make you seasick and nauseous.

A ship’s radar can only detect objects in the air or on the surface of the water, including the periscope of a submarine, but not the sub itself. That would need sonar. Your mind is more like radar and can’t detect stuff deep in your psyche. Therapy attempts to be like sonar but works more like radar. It only sees the periscope of a submarine and tries to reach the sub through it.

Sometimes a naval ship on a mission might mistake a whale for an enemy submarine and torpedo it like the British navy did during the Falklands War. They killed three whales by mistake! That can happen in therapy too. You might waste time and energy zooming in on something that might turn out to be totally irrelevant, a whale that had nothing to do with your war.

Though a little hindsight and analysis are good for course correction, I sometimes wonder if there might be a better way to approach some of life’s more common problems – a common cold has a simpler treatment than pneumonia does.

As a psychiatrist I have done a lot of therapy since it is one of the mainstays of treatment. Over the years I’ve realised that there are limitations to how much you can rummage through infinite stored memories, or plumb the depths of your subconscious, and draw connections to solve your current problems.

There’s also a limit to how much you can transform into a person far removed from your genetic and cultural heritage, your inner self, to fit an image you have in mind, and still be authentic and comfortable in your own skin, though you might feel relieved that you’re dealing better with things and people, and sometimes that’s good enough to reduce stress . . . However, if there are deep-rooted reasons for whatever is happening in your life and your coping mechanisms aren’t enough, you definitely need a therapist.

Telling children “you can do anything” and “you can be anyone you want to be” – so they feel less overwhelmed and more confident – works for some. However, some children grow up taking it literally, believing they are totally invulnerable to life’s blows and roadblocks. As adults they may break rather than bend in a storm, the way a ship might break at amidships due to bad structural design or improper weight distribution of cargo.

A little humility, a little common sense, a little distance, much resilience, more-than-a-little courage, a degree of self-acceptance, and some support from a parent, sibling or friend, should ordinarily help get your derailed life back on the rails. And if it doesn’t, a therapist should be able to help.

Accepting that things won’t always work out the way you plan is one way to bring down your stress level. Life is unpredictable. Luck does play a role. So does your personality. You do not have total control over all that happens. Everything that goes wrong is not always your fault, or anybody else’s; it’s a bad experience, and no doubt you paid a heavy price for it. Yes, and it hurts like hell and you can’t stop crying.  

But it could be a catalyst for switching tracks and changing your storyline. Who knows? Well, actually, I do. Chapters end, pages turn, new characters appear, new events occur, circumstances alter . . . life unfolds, and you learn to roll with the punches.

the yin and yang of enid blyton

Enid Blyton has recently been accused of sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and lack of literary merit. Well! After 70 years, an organization called English Heritage chooses to reappraise her works through the filter of the current value system. Not my circus, not my monkeys, except that I grew up loving her books in faraway India, and feel impelled to speak up.

Even if some of this harsh criticism were true, I would say her characters simply reflected the mores of those times, or at least what most ordinary people of that time might have agreed with. As someone who has read her books over and over as a child, and later as a mom, here’s my take.

Sexism: That Georgina of Famous Five wanted to be George was not hard to understand. Growing up with brothers who had more freedom, I could see the advantages of being a boy too! Cousin Anne preferred being protected to being free, so she was considered a normal girl, in keeping with patriarchal attitudes that, by the way, are still widely prevalent. Then there was the fiercely independent Henrietta, who went by Henry, in Five go to Mystery Moor, and the fearless Wilhelmina, who went by Bill, in Malory Towers. Wilhelmina didn’t want to be a boy, but growing up with seven brothers might’ve made her boyish.

Racism: There’s ambivalence towards the French in many of her books for sure. She often said that French kids did not have the ‘famous English sense of honour’ and, therefore, lied to get out of things like swimming and nature walks, but in the next breath she hastened to highlight their cleverness, artistic talent, sense of humour and forgiving nature. Actually, her ambivalence comes through more clearly in the characterisation of the various Mam’zelles.

She talked up the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were always frank, outspoken, dependable and righteous people, loyal to the idea of a united Britain, perhaps reflecting Enid Blyton’s own pride in the British Empire.

Circus folk in the Mr. Galliano’s circus series, Circus of Adventure and Five Have a Wonderful Time were multiracial and exotic and she gave them a wide berth when it came to bad manners, a lack of hygiene, lack of integrity, bad grammar (yes! like “didn’t ought to”), and other traits she disapproved of in civilized folks.

Americans were ‘large’ and hearty and addressed people as ‘Honey’. They longed to acquire an English accent. They had big cars and were rich and vain, but also generous.

Enid Blyton did try to balance the yin and yang of a lot of her characters!

However, Indians were caricatured, like Mr. Hohoha of Bong Castle, India, in the Mystery of Tallyho Cottage, or used as a simile to describe a sunburnt White person’s skin tone.

Xenophobia: No. In fact, she was careful to not ruffle international feathers and invented countries like Prince Paul’s Baronia (Spiggy Holes) and Prince Gussy’s Tauri-Hessia (Circus of Adventure) instead of setting villainous kidnappings and murders in real countries. Villains whose names sounded Spanish or German usually belonged to unnamed European countries, though she sometimes slipped up, like making Engler the villain an Austrian in the Mystery of Banshee Towers. But, frankly, nine out of ten criminals were White and British, so I won’t even make a representational list here.

Homophobia: There was hero-worship of older boys/girls by younger boys/girls certainly, but there was nothing sexual, not even the hint of a crush anywhere! Blushing was either due to shyness or because a bolder child had made public a secret talent or good deed of a timid one!

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The slight snobbery of the upper middleclass Find-outers was obvious to me because I recognized it here too. They had a benevolent but faintly patronizing attitude towards the house help and the policeman’s nephew, Ern Goon. But the fact that the children were always trying to be fair in giving respect, praise and criticism registered subliminally. It did bring about a subtle positive change in how I interacted with people who worked for my family.

The Famous Five seemed to mix around with gypsies on equal terms though, but mostly because the gypsies were unscrupulous and dangerous. The Five came in contact with all sorts of lowlife but dealt with them with dignity, with Timmy the dog’s help, of course. Even the bickering and making up among them influenced me to behave better when my siblings and I squabbled.

The School stories derided snobbery and strongly advocated looking at the strength of a girl’s character and not her parents’ wealth or social standing. Character was a big deal, a common thread running through most of her books. That, and a sense of honour. Humility was much appreciated. Even gifted girls with musical or artistic abilities of a high standard were ‘taken down a peg’ if they thought too much of themselves.

What I’m saying is that I – and many of my generation – benefitted from Enid Blyton’s books, apart from truly enjoying her stories in the mystery, adventure and school genres. Younger children enjoyed the magic realism in The Wishing Chair and The Faraway Tree series, and fantasy in the Noddy (wooden boy who comes to life, like Pinocchio) and Mr. Pinkwhistle (half man, half brownie) series. I remember how much my sister loved Mr. Pinkwhistle and Mr. Meddle stories when she was in second grade.

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There are two genres that I have not seen mentioned in any of the articles that have been in the media recently: Drama, and what could be called Documentary.

Drama:

There are a whole lot of books, family dramas, from which I imbibed many good values as a girl. Being children’s books, the characters are necessarily black and white, but that doesn’t matter, as I realized during my multiple readings for each of my kids.

Each story deals beautifully and lovingly, but sensibly and firmly, with how families cope when bad luck befalls them and they are beset by difficulties; how they all pitch in and pull their weight; how each member contributes and grows from the experience. The stories deal with relationships and family dynamics, often including extended family – cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents – and farm animals and pets too.

There is a strong emphasis on consequences of actions like lying, stealing, shirking responsibility, laziness, procrastination, carelessness, etc. Some books focus exclusively on the importance and value of friends. Issues of fairness, loyalty, trust, dependability and courage get spotlighted in these.

This is the list of family dramas that I read to my children, simply explaining anachronisms as I went along, like telling them that there used to be dolls called ‘gollywog’ a long time ago. In the welter of gnomes, goblins, fairies and elves, plus toys that came alive at night, I felt it was okay for the moment to not launch into details, given that children are naturally accepting of differences.

• The family at Red-Roofs
• Those dreadful children
• The children at Green Meadows
• House-at-the-corner
• Six cousins at Mistletoe farm
• Six cousins again
• The Put-em-rights

Documentary:

I had read a book by Enid Blyton called The Six Bad Boys when I was 11 years old. It was about neglected children ending up in a gang and getting in trouble with the police, then going through the Juvenile Court. I was deeply impacted – cried buckets – by this book because it is about kids with uncaring, irresponsible parents, something unexpected in Enid Blyton’s books, and something unexpected in my 11-year-old life. I wanted to buy a copy (as the one I had read was from a library that happened to shut down soon after) but it wasn’t available for years.

A few years ago I came across it in a bookstore and bought it. I read it again, as a parent this time. It’s a book that is still relevant, maybe even more so now, and I wish every parent would read it.

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In Norse mythology the gods amused themselves by throwing objects at Baldr, the much-loved son of Odin, because he was not susceptible to harm. Loki the evil god handed a sprig of mistletoe to Höd the blind god to toss at Baldr. It was the only thing that could kill him. And it did.

Like Loki, the National Heritage people seem to be handing out sprigs of mistletoe in the shape of a bunch of modern –isms to the blind Höds among us who cannot see the joy Enid Blyton has given millions of children all over the world. Her books have been translated into 90 languages and sold 600million copies!

Do we really want interest in her books to die? Wouldn’t it be more helpful to use instances of her biases to learn and educate, so we don’t make the same mistakes? Or even better, pick up what is good and worth emulating in her characters? Surely, cancel culture is not the most effective use of history.

hikikomori

There are many lost kids out there. They are either dragging their feet in college for years after they are supposed to have finished, or have graduated but are disinclined to apply for jobs. Some of them take up jobs that are far below their ability and qualification. They use the paltry pay as pocket money and continue to stay in their parents’ home, neither asking for nor contributing anything.

What bothers parents most is the stonewalling, the refusal to engage in a conversation about it. The worst cases are where the kid stays holed up in his room with a laptop, does not come out even for meals, and raids the fridge at night.

There is no word in English – nor is there one in the DSM-5 ­– for this. However, the Japanese have a word for it: hikikomori, which roughly translates to acute social withdrawal. Hikikomori are adolescents or adults who have withdrawn totally from society, not leaving their room for weeks or months on end.

This phenomenon has been studied most in Japan because the country’s demography, culture and current job situation have apparently turned many youngsters ­– and adults – into hikikomori.

Who are these reclusive youngsters who quit mainstream life? This is a generalisation based on kids I have seen in clinical practice. A hikikomori in India is most likely to:

• belong to a middle- or upper-middle-class family
• be described as ‘sensitive’ and more inclined towards the arts, though he might hold a degree in science, business or law
• have been sent to the ‘best’ educational institutions, hence expected to ‘succeed’ spectacularly by everyone, including extended family, a daunting situation that he is not up to facing
• have done extremely well in school but poorly in college
• have a recent history of failure, either academic or in a romantic relationship
• not want to attend family events because he’ll have to explain why he is doing nothing
• muse about whether all the slogging through school and college was worth it because life is pointless
• tell you he’s reading philosophy and it makes more sense than the boring lectures in college
• say that he sleeps during the day and sits up all night because it is peaceful

All these young people unhappily searching for meaning and direction, looking for peace, trying to hide from nosey relatives to protect their parents’ honour . . . It’s sad. Why is this happening to our kids?

One reason could be that they never got a chance to find out what they wanted from life because parents had set the course for them. To give parents their due, most see education as a means to a career and a steady income, not necessarily an exciting job. After all, they are funding it. The tussle over choice is now a common Hindi movie trope, and Indian parents are hopefully re-thinking Education.

Anyway, right now we have to do something about these apathetic kids. Without motivation there’s no impetus to go anywhere, get a job, do anything. So they stay in their rooms, numb, lost in their own world.

The apathy you see in hikikomori is not different from the apathy of a patient with a lesion in the prefrontal cortex, because that is the part of the brain that buzzes with ideas and energy to explore new possibilities.

One part of the prefrontal cortex gets you energised to make a plan; another sets the tasks for carrying out the plan; another executes it; another part monitors the execution; another part moderates your emotions. The foremost rounded part of the brain, the frontal pole, coordinates all of this, plus input from some other parts of the brain. So there can’t be any progress without energisation, the starting point for action. This is apathy, and it manifests as withdrawal. That is what neuroscience tells us.

Psychology says there is a deficit of Theory of Mind, i.e. difficulty understanding others’ intentions, and how their own behaviour impacts others. This is the same kind of deficit one sees in people with autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia! So, the tendency to withdraw rather than confront might be a stable trait, that is, hardwired in the personality. Anyone trying to help a hikikomori re-integrate into the mainstream would have to consider this limitation.

There is no established way of dealing with hikikomori as yet. We probably have to connect with them, find out what energises them, light a spark and hope the other steps in the prefrontal cortex follow. We have to be supportive until they are ready to test the waters. This is not easy and it takes time. It might not even succeed. Meanwhile, we need to reset our priorities vis-à-vis raising children before we start giving these unhappy people labels or creating a new category in the DSM-6.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

an outlier

 

A statue of Buddha in Phnom Penh with a rare expression of intense concentration, unlike the serene expression one usually sees on his face

I have no idea whether most people in the world are happy with the work they do, or what drives them to do what they do.

About fifteen years ago a doctor working in the same hospital as I requested me to see her son because she was worried about his career plan. The boy was a 23-year-old graduate from one of the best engineering colleges in India. He had rejected a paying job that he got through campus placement and chosen to join an organisation that worked for the upliftment of slum dwellers, for a small monthly stipend.

He was self-assured and calm during the conversation. There were no psychiatric symptoms at all and nothing to suggest a personality disorder. He believed that what he was setting out to do was right for him. He was also clear that he wasn’t going to be a financial burden on his parents.

Subsequently I met many youngsters like him and began to realise that it wasn’t uncommon for people of this generation to do something like that.

Most people get degrees that lead to jobs. They look for jobs that pay well and give them a few perks as well. They enjoy the office atmosphere, the company of co-workers, the work itself and the pleasure of an independent income. They look forward to the future. As I said, that’s what most people do.

So who are these outliers? When someone tells me about one of them this is how it often sounds:

• There’s no rush for him to get a job as he doesn’t have student loans, because his parents are affluent;
• He doesn’t have to earn and save up to buy stuff because his parents gave him everything even before he thought of asking – spoilt kid, born with silver spoon, doesn’t know the value of money;
• He knows his parents have enough assets that he will eventually inherit, so he never has to work in his life;
• He will eventually marry a rich girl and get money from the bride’s parents as well!

When I actually get to know the youngster I discover a wholly different inner world, where none of these are on his radar. They are the minutiae of his life that he barely notices. If he is charming and relaxed I might take a little time to make sure he’s not a clever manipulator skilfully pulling wool over my eyes. Instead, he is intense and rarely cracks a smile, and never attempts to please. There’s an air of urgency and earnestness about him.

I wrote about the brain’s reward centre in my last post. It is apparent that this boy’s brain doesn’t recognise a good job and its perks as a reward. His reward centre seems to urge him to do something that makes a difference to people in need: helping the poor seems more fulfilling to him than writing code.

Did the ‘mature’ defence mechanism of altruism develop naturally in him through childhood because he was raised in a peaceful home, without much conflict with his natural empathic disposition? That is, protoaltruism of parents giving rise to generative altruism in the child. Or is this pseudo-altruism covering up his issues? Altruism is a mature defence mechanism, but a defence mechanism nevertheless.

The concept of altruism has always seemed fraught to me. Sometimes I think it’s better not to look too close when some good comes out of someone’s altruism, though I wonder if it will ultimately harm the doer, but the doer will not recognise it as harm because – wait, is he a masochist! Okay, okay, that’s enough. I simply don’t go there.

Why did Prince Gauthama leave his kingdom, palace, wife and infant son and ultimately become the much-revered Buddha? His background and the sequence of events that led to his renunciation have never been a cogent enough argument to convince me that it was a sudden decision. Maybe it was brewing in his head for years before he took the step.

Perhaps something similar happens to youngsters like the boy whose story I began this post with. A kid gets into a professional college at eighteen in India. That’s too young. In the four years at university he might discover that he isn’t cut out for it. By the time he works out what else he would rather do, four years pass and he’s in the final semester. He decides he might as well complete the course and get the degree and figure his life out later.

How people’s brains are wired is a combination of genes and environment, the way you can create many shades of green by mixing different shades of blue and yellow, adding black or white – or even orange – to get any number of shades. The phenotype doesn’t automatically tell you the genotype. How did you get this particular shade of green in this painting? No idea!

The daily newspaper has been featuring one or two ‘Lockdown heroes’ everyday. If I were to ask these generous people why they did it they might say: “I like doing this, I like helping people.” I wouldn’t want to ask, “Why do you like doing this?”

Everybody’s insides look the same on the operating table – unless there is a diseased organ – and the depths of everybody’s mind might too. So anyone’s answer to “Why do you like doing this?” is bound to disclose self-interest and take away from the warm, fuzzy, happy altruistic feeling. So, “I like doing this” should be morally good enough to qualify as untainted altruism.

To come back to the altruistic kid in question, every engineering grad doesn’t aspire to be a Nadella or a Pichai. Sure, the idea takes a little getting used to for parents, because everything you read and hear says the opposite. Parents need to believe in their youngsters and support them in finding their niche. Usually nobody has the clinching argument in these heated family discussions, neither parents nor kid, because the moot question is what will happen to the kid’s career in the – unknowable – future.

 

getting there

My daughter got her first job a couple of months ago. Sigh . . . That part of parenting, raising a child from infancy to adulthood until she gets a degree and a job that she’s happy with, is over. The moral dilemmas around parenting are thankfully behind me.

Parents get a lot of flak for pushing their children to compete. When mine were in school I tried to dial down the pushing to ‘just do your best, it’s going to be fine’. There was no way I could raise my children in India and tell them not to worry about doing well in school if they were to eventually get into good colleges. The main thing was to keep it constructive and never stress them out with neurotic goals.

Competing is one way of channelizing aggression in a positive way. A little aggression is part of human nature, though the word is used in common parlance to mean uncontrolled anger and violence. Aggression is an inbuilt survival skill for warding off threats to our being, for protecting ourselves. As long as competition is coupled with good sportsmanship – in any sphere – it’s fine. Parent-induced angelic goodness doesn’t work in the tough world of children. It just makes the child timid, a target for bullies, instead of making her confident.

As a parent I was torn between raising my children to be ‘good’, and teaching them to be canny in a not-so-safe world. Somehow, sullying their innocent little minds felt like a crime. There was always a conflict between toughening them up, and leaving them vulnerable by keeping them blinkered against the unfair side of life. Over the years, learning from both, my own children and the kids and parents I met in clinical practice, I concluded that it was important to keep things real and be practical, sacrificing lofty ideals where they might do more harm than good. It was about finding a balance.

Frankly, I don’t think there’s ever been a time in human history, since the establishment of civilisations, when there was no competition. Competition has to be measured, though, and shouldn’t turn a child into the kind of insensitive go-getter that kicks and shoves everyone else aside to get ahead. So it is important to encourage cooperation as well: share, be nice, listen, wait your turn, say thank you. The world needs team players. Competition and cooperation, along with jugaad ­(resourcefulness) and duniyadaari (the art of dealing with people) are what we try to pass on to our children, along with formal education and soft skills. I might add – jugaad is much more than problem-solving skills, and duniyadaari is much more than interpersonal skills!

Despite our best efforts to give children a good education, 80% of Indian engineering graduates have been declared unemployable by the National Employability Report 2019. Eighty percent! This is a statistic that has bothered me ever since I saw it. I find myself thinking ‘there must be some mistake – this is unbelievable’. How hopeless it must make those young people feel, after struggling for years to get into college and graduate with a decent GPA. The thinking among educationists has recently shifted from STEM to STEAM, including Arts in Science colleges, something that will hopefully help our youngsters gain the necessary soft skills. More importantly, we need to raise the standard of college education so new graduates are work-ready.

As a psychiatrist I have seen the despair of unemployed people at close quarters. The only way I can think of preventing despair and self-harm, frequent concomitants of being unable to support one’s self and dependents, is to raise children to be resilient. This is what parents could do during children’s school years if they weren’t themselves putting undue pressure on children to get impossible grades and build incredible résumés. Resilience training has been tried in a few Indian schools and published articles are available.

It’s also important to teach kids to deal with failure. This is not as hard as it sounds. Every child fails at something in his twelve years at school. I used those experiences as opportunities to let my children know it’s normal and acceptable to fail sometimes. Through 2015-2016 there was considerable interest in studying the benefits of failure and there is plenty of information available online. The main thing is that parents and teachers must respond to a child’s ‘failure’ with constructive comments and not shame or guilt the child.

Education is a vexed topic in India. I have read through portions of the draft of the New Education Policy. It seems good, at least on paper. The part about vocational courses especially caught my attention. If vocational courses are taught in a truly practical way, like Germany’s dual VET (Vocational Education and Training) system, they might be the answer to some of our unemployment worries. Obviously, vocational training must guarantee employability, and the jobs youngsters get after vocational training must be remunerative enough.

Last month I had a conversation with a friendly young waiter at a restaurant. He was from a small town in north Karnataka. He said that boys with engineering degrees in his hometown were not able to get jobs, so he decided there was no point wasting time and money on college. I asked him what he might be doing, like maybe five-ten years from now. He said he and his brother – who was also working at a restaurant – were planning to start an eatery of their own. I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all if the alternative is a college education that confers a degree but can’t get you a job.

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Life Skills are apparently being taught in schools to help kids navigate life better, like avoiding taking up careers they have no aptitude for. These are the ten Life Skills listed by the WHO:

1. Decision making
2. Problem solving
3. Creative thinking
4. Critical thinking
5. Effective communication
6. Interpersonal relationship skills
7. Self-awareness
8. Empathy
9. Coping with emotions
10. Coping with stress

To this list I would add basic cooking, sewing (at least hemming and back-stitch for mending and minor alterations, and how to sew on buttons), doing laundry, riding a bike, and managing money, if I didn’t think many young people would scoff at their redundancy! I guess people have to individually decide what ‘Life Skills’ mean to them, but these are what I tried to equip my kids with before they left for college.

this is all wrong

I am dismayed that Greta Thunberg’s detractors have weaponised her psychiatric diagnoses against her. Some have lashed out against her parents too. How did her medical information come to be in the public domain?

As a psychiatrist I have seen parents’ faces crumple when I’ve had to tell them their child has autism, schizophrenia, or some other distressing diagnosis. However gentle and careful I am, disbelief, shock and tears replace the hope on their faces in an instant. After a long painful moment, the shock slowly gives way to resignation.

So I can imagine what Greta’s parents must have felt when their child’s doctor gave the diagnoses: Asperger’s syndrome, OCD and Selective mutism. They had to support her. Without their support, she would have continued to be anxious, depressed and anorexic on the outside, and disillusioned, helpless, and dying a little each day on the inside. I don’t think anyone who has children can fault this child’s parents.

I personally believe Greta’s fears for the earth have a strong basis in science. Her fears for her future resonate with me because I have thought of the same things on behalf of my children, nieces, nephews, friends’ children and all the fresh, exuberant, youngsters that I see on the streets and on television, livening up the more jaded lives of adults all around the world.

As she has pointed out, we adults don’t have our entire lives ahead of us. While we’ve had it good, we have degraded the planet. They are the ones left facing a water crisis, polluted air, an overheated planet, melting glaciers, rising sea levels that destroy entire coastal communities, and floods, storms and earthquakes. Scientific knowledge to deal with these already exists. As Greta says, “I want you to unite behind science. And then I want you to take real action. Thank you.”

I am relieved she has taken a stand on behalf of her generation. But I would like to share what I have been telling myself whenever I started to worry on my kids’ behalf. I needed to tell myself this because I don’t have Greta’s courage.

• Earth’s climate has always been changing. Climate alternates between being warm and wet, then cold, glacial and dry for several thousand years at a stretch. They are called Marine Isotope Stages. We have been in the current warm, wet period for the last 14,000 years, the Holocene epoch. We have data covering the last 2.5 million years. What’s happening could be partly a natural process.
• Organisms on earth co-evolve with the environment – the Gaia hypothesis. Human beings weren’t always here during the 4.6 billion years of the earth’s existence. We are only 70,000 years old (a human bone found in Morocco is estimated to be 300,000 years old, so we could be that old!). We somehow evolved and came to be, just as other species of Homo somehow became extinct.

The point is, nobody has been around long enough to know exactly what will happen to the earth towards the end of the Holocene epoch, whenever that comes. We didn’t come with an Instruction Manual on how to use Earth. But we can’t continue to plunder and brutalise our planet – that much is certain – morally and pragmatically, even if not on a scientific basis.

To get back to her psychiatric diagnoses, I am not sure if the diagnosis of OCD is still valid. It might have been a provisional one based on her unceasing rumination about the climate crisis at the age of eleven.

Perhaps she couldn’t process the discrepancies in adult doublespeak. There is often a conflicting subtext in adult conversation and behaviour, for example talking angrily about a neighbour at home and then greeting her with pleasure on the street. Children get confused when adults say something and do the opposite, more so if the child’s autism predisposes her to concrete, instead of, abstract thinking. As Greta said in one of her speeches to her parents’ generation, “You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to.” This, coupled with an autistic child’s intense preoccupation with a narrow range of interests, explains why she was obsessed with climate change.

An additional diagnosis of Selective mutism might be unnecessary because Autistic Spectrum Disorder itself would make it hard for Greta to indulge in social chitchat, unless she was a normal talker before. She has described how she went into a deep depression after she learnt about climate change and realised that adults were not doing anything about it: “I stopped talking. I stopped eating.” 

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I watched Greta’s speech – “This is all wrong” – at the UN Climate summit two days ago. She made her point. But there are other problems in the world that she is completely unaware of, not only because of her age, but also because she lives in a country that doesn’t have these problems.

Sweden has a population of only 10 million while India, for example, has a population of 1.37 billion. These people need to earn and to live. They need jobs and money.

On 23^rd September, when Greta was probably preparing her speech for the UN Climate summit, I read this in the same day’s issue of The Times of India.

https://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/opinion-tackling-indias-auto-slowdown/71251927

One would think Greta Thunberg and the economist Ritesh Kumar Singh who wrote this don’t live on the same planet. He is thinking of how to help people with jobs so they can live, while she is thinking of how to keep the planet viable so they can live! These are the two viewpoints that need balancing.

Greta should know that her views have been taken into consideration by people of both her parents’ generation and her own. Things will not change overnight, but they gradually will, with a combination of individual and community effort, plus suitable legislation and international co-operation. The first step is acknowledgement, which she has got us to do.

In that sense, she has been successful. Maybe it’s time to go back to school. She can still keep an eye on things, continue to contribute her views and nurture the movement she started. The generation that takes the baton from us will devise better systems, I’m sure.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/23/greta-thunberg-full-speech-to-mps-you-did-not-act-in-time

animal cookies

When I read the daily newspaper I often wonder at how religion complicates things in India. Only yesterday I was thinking what a quagmire we have turned our country into, with people of almost every religion doing things that defeat the purpose of religion per se. Why didn’t we put more effort into dealing with quotidian issues instead?

Then came news that a Sikh teenager had been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam in Pakistan, and handed over to a random man as a ‘wife’. In India, parents start looking for a bride outside the community only when they can’t find a good-looking, educated girl from among their own. Is that the situation in Pakistan now? We would approach the girl’s family in a more civilised way, though!

Let me relate a childhood incident to illustrate why this scenario is practically incomprehensible to me.

My great-aunt was a high school teacher in Mangalore. She must have been in her mid-fifties when I went to stay with her in the Dasara holidays in the fifth grade. Her part-time maid’s daughter, Jessie, also ten years old like me, would spend a little time fetching and carrying things for her mother when she did the housework. Then, before we could go out to play near the well under the carambola tree, she would sit down with us to pray when my great-aunt did her morning pooja.

One day she told my great-aunt that she wanted to be a Hindu. My great-aunt said, “No, child, you have to be faithful to your God. He has taken good care of you and your anna, amma and akka. And don’t you think your church father will feel bad if you stop going to church?” When I think about it now I’m surprised how spontaneous, simple and unequivocal her response was. Some people do believe they are doing something of moral value by replacing others’ religious beliefs with their own, so it’s wonderful that she wasn’t that sort.

Propagating one’s religion is a constitutional right in India. Except that it is dishonourable ­­to take advantage of innocent people like this little girl. One needs a home, a full stomach, good health and some money in the bank before thinking of the needs of the soul. So people who have met their basic needs on their own, and who are therefore confident and ready to explore their higher needs, are the ones to be engaged in a public discourse if one wants to honourably propagate one’s religion.

As I see it, our religion on Earth doesn’t matter. People address the one god by different names is what I think. So all religions are fine so long as they don’t intrude into the lives of people following other religions. This is what Sri Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita:

• As they approach me, so I receive them. All paths, Arjuna, lead to me.
• Those who worship other gods with faith and devotion also worship me, Arjuna, even if they do not observe the usual forms. I am the object of all worship, its enjoyer and Lord.

That there is only one god is not an exclusively Hindu belief. All religions preach that there is only one God, at least as far as I know. The disputes are only over what name He should go by, and which of the books He has co-authored should take precedence over the rest.

I’m not surprised that many people have turned away from religion today. Practiced and preached in the right spirit religion had a chance – many chances, in fact – to make the world a better place. But religion has been petty and divisive, when it was actually meant to bind us together in peoplehood. Right now, gathering more people into any religious fold – even if it means poaching from other religious groups – is part of a bigger game plan in which gullible participants are mere pawns. Or, it’s a political activity to build vote-banks. Even poor old Bernie Sanders unwittingly fell into the vote-bank religion trap yesterday while addressing the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America!

Perhaps accepting people as they are, without bigotry and put-downs, is enough for us by way of religion in the social sense; personal religion can stay private. Especially if the alternative is to hang on to a bunch of dogmas that make us discriminate against those who believe in a different set of dogmas. Dogmas have meaning only at a superficial level. As the Gita says, just as a reservoir is of little use when the whole countryside is flooded, scriptures are of little use to the illumined man or woman, who sees the Lord everywhere.

Jalaluddin Rumi makes it simpler:

ANIMAL COOKIES

God gives the things of this earth

a certain color and variety and value,

causing childish folk to argue over it.

When a piece of dough is baked

in the shape of a camel or lion,

these children bite their fingers excitedly in their greed.

Both lion and camel turn to bread in their mouth,

but it’s futile to tell this to children.

Decades later, I still feel glad that my great-aunt was so forthright in her response. Any other reaction would have been exploitative and made her a lesser person. And my takeaway from the same incident would have been vastly different!

graduation

Tomorrow my daughter graduates from college.

She’s going through all the emotions that come with that: elation, mixed with a sense of loss as she leaves behind friends and the much-loved campus. There’s that deflated feeling, mixed with relief, brought on by not having classes to go to, homework to finish, or exams to prepare for. There’s anxiety about getting a job, one that isn’t just grunt work, and one that comes with a decent pay cheque.

I remember going through similar feelings when I was graduating. The future looked both exciting and daunting. And I felt totally unprepared. Sometimes I even felt like an imposter. As an intern, when a patient asked me for an opinion, I thought “Oh my, this man doesn’t know I’m not a real doctor!” In the beginning the only thing I felt confident about was changing dressings of patients in the post-op wards! Gradually, starting drips, drawing blood samples, suturing up lacerations, delivering babies, assisting at surgeries by actually being helpful rather than infuriating the surgeon, writing up case notes professionally, dealing with patients’ queries, all these became second nature. It took only about a year for me to approach work eagerly feeling “hey, I can do this!” This is what I want my daughter to know: after the first unsteady toddler steps it gets easier, less confusing, less scary, more fun. And yes, you’ll make new friends.

Now, many decades later, I look at the lives of my friends from medical college and see that everyone has found success in their own way. They’re quite satisfied with the way their professional lives have turned out.

In India, the kid that gets recruited by Google from an IIT through campus placement interviews makes front page headlines. He is like the only flower that has bloomed in this picture. I took these photographs on Santa Monica boulevard in Beverly Hills a few days ago. I guess all the plants were planted at the same time but only one was in bloom when I passed by that day. I bet the rest have blossomed over the past few days. It’s possible my kid will disagree and place herself in the 2.1% on the Bell Curve that did not bloom well . . . As a mom I can only point to the 95% on the same diagram and hope she doesn’t decide to be contrary. So, this is my message to my daughter and all the kids graduating along with her this weekend:  It’s okay, you’re going to be fine . . . but it might take a little time.

lonely in an empty nest

Years ago, when I first heard about Bhutan being more concerned about the Gross National Happiness Index than about the GDP, unlike the rest of the countries in the world, I thought how idealistic and lovely that was. The king of Bhutan seemed to have his heart in the right place.

The initiative by Teresa May to appoint a Minister of Loneliness feels somewhat like that, though I also get that there is a practical necessity to take care of the more than ten million people aged over sixty-five living in the UK, many of them staying alone. This is a great idea if it can be implemented effectively.

As a psychiatrist I often see people who are desperately lonely. In recent years there’s been a spurt in the number of one group of people from tier-2 cities and small towns coming for a consultation. They are parents of techies working here in Bangalore, visiting their children. They usually have one or two more children that have settled down permanently in the US, so all of their children are physically distant.

This is roughly how the story goes. In phone conversations one parent, say the mother, tells her children that she feels sad a lot of the time. So the son/daughter that lives in India invites both parents to come and stay with them for a change of scene – spend time with grandchildren, go on a short holiday, etc. While here in Bangalore, they decide that she should have a psychiatric consultation to treat the ‘depression’ so that she can go back home in a happier frame of mind.

This group is a new demographic in India: parents of people who have moved permanently to the US or elsewhere. These people’s problem is a catch-22 situation. They have worked hard to ensure their kids’ success, including a farewell to India, and are now left alone and lonely precisely because they have succeeded in sending their kids to greener pastures far from home. If the kids hadn’t been so very successful, they would have been living near them, but perish the thought.

Typically, the father might be a retired bank manager, or something similar, his only goal throughout life having been to earn and save, so his kids would have a better life. The mother might be a homemaker whose life revolved around her children and home. Of course, they are genuinely happy and proud that their children are successful, but this wasn’t exactly how their own lives were meant to pan out, was it? How did life as a happy family end so fast? That’s the unspoken question in their eyes.

Their kids’ successful lives are now being played out in a faraway country. They miss seeing their grandchildren grow, they miss being part of their children’s lives. They see them in pictures on whatsapp, talk to them on facetime, go stay with them and experience a small slice of their lives, and return to India to their silent, empty homes. Some get green cards and emigrate, but I’m not sure that can work for everyone.

Separation. Sadness. Loneliness. It is the zeitgeist. The days of three-generational families are long gone. In the bigger Indian cities there are apparently NRI Parents Organisations to help meet the social needs of people whose children have settled abroad, but not in smaller cities and towns.

There’s only a little bit I can do for them, like listen, give a couple of practical suggestions, and draw their attention to the good things in their lives here.

There is so much written about how social connections and volunteering are the most effective protection against loneliness, but this is easier said than done for many of the people I see. They already have plenty of relatives, neighbours and friends for company. But the hole in their hearts can only be filled by the children whose faces they long to see, and whose stomachs they long to fill with good home-cooked food. When their children visit with their families, they find themselves unable to connect with their grandchildren because there is nothing Indian and relatable about them after they cross the toddler stage, and there is often a language barrier as well.

What usually happens at the end of a consultation is that they ask if they can meet me again, because talking has made them feel better. I say of course they can, and they look relieved. They come back a couple of times more before they have to leave Bangalore. They talk, they just pour out their feelings. Existential despair is not far beneath the surface, and I see that what keeps them from being overwhelmed is the firm belief that they did the right thing by their kids. I guess I tacitly reinforce this one strength they have, and I guess that helps. I don’t know for how long, but I hope it endures until they find something to get involved in when they get back home. Angst is part of the human condition and everyone goes through bouts of it in some form, some time. There is no diagnostic category for loneliness in DSM-5 because it is not a mental disorder, and loneliness is not the same as clinical depression, though it can lead to it over time.

So, well, I think having a minister in charge of garnering information on loneliness – and what to do about it – is an idea whose time has come. It is a public mental health problem, not a psychiatric one, so the approach taken by Teresa May to gather input from various sources is sound. In terms of how this idea applies to India, I don’t know. It is likely to be low on our government’s list of priorities because of two reasons: one, there are much bigger issues like farmer suicides, and two, there are far fewer people living alone and lonely in this country than in the UK.

Two months ago my friend Ruby and I met a 79-year-old British woman, Marion, who was on a visit to Bangalore. We spent a little time chatting in a coffee-shop near by. The next morning she came with me to the lake when I went for my daily walk, a camera slung around her neck. She busily took pictures, her new pastime. I came to know she lives alone with her cat, Daisy, near London. She has a group of friends around her age who meet in a hobby circle every week, and since longevity runs in her family, she’s got relatives who are really old too… When I e-mailed her to wish her at Christmas she told me she was going to Southampton to spend the holiday with her brother who is in his eighties. So I quite understand how this could work in the UK, for everyone nearing eighty may not be as spry and self-sufficient as my new friend.

a smorgasbord, not a set menu

Part of the lore passed down orally in my family was that Jesus lived in India for many years. That he was an avatar of God, like Rama, Krishna, Buddha and others before him. That he lived in the Himalayas in his youth and learnt about samadhi from Indian rishis. That he was therefore able to survive after he was lifted down from the cross and placed in a tomb. That he returned to India and lived to a ripe old age in the Himalayas. And that his tomb is in Kashmir.

It sounded too far-fetched to me. Surely a young boy wouldn’t leave his home and family in the middle-east to come and learn about spiritual practices here, so far away, through high mountain passes and biting cold? And if he came here as a youth how did he die here at eighty? When did he preach in his own country then? I simply pushed the story to the back of my mind with the rest of Indian folklore.

My actual introduction to Christianity was at the age of nine when I began attending a school run by Christians. A school day started with Chapel every morning, and I learnt a lot about the religion over the years.

Born Hindu, I never had to commit myself to any one image of god because we had a pantheon in our pooja ghar, or altar. And when we went to other parts of India we worshipped at temples of gods who weren’t even on our altar, because all gods of all religions are representations of the only god there is. My parents said that a holy place was a holy place regardless of religion, because people bring only pure, clean thoughts and prayers to their holy shrines, and all places of worship are therefore imbued with holiness.

Growing up, I did wonder about the multiplicity of gods in Hinduism, unlike in other religions. Hinduism is monotheistic, but people worship god in hundreds of different forms. They invoke god in the form that traditionally represents what they need fixed: like goddess Lakshmi for money worries, analogous to the Christian patron saint, St. Nicholas; or Saraswathi, the goddess of music and art, who is similar to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music; or any of the gods – like Ganesha, Hanuman, Krishna, or Durga-mata in desperate situations, like St. Jude, or Jesus himself. Prayer is just a matter of reaching out to god in his most relatable form in the circumstances, either directly or through an intercessor.

The name by which I address god doesn’t matter, nor does it matter if I don’t engage with him at all. I can be an atheist, which will make me a nastik Hindu, or an out and out materialist, which will make me a charvaka Hindu, none of which are bad or wrong; they are just where I happen to be on my karmic path. I can even worship Jesus as my ishtha-devatha (god of choice) and follow the path of bhakti yoga (path of love) and still be Hindu. Looking back, this is what I probably did for a couple of years in my teens when I read the Bible, went to church and subscribed to an American Christian youth magazine called Young Ambassador. All this fits in with the claim that Hinduism is not a religion, just a way of life, which can leave a child quite confused.

As a young adult, the Hindu way of thinking gave me freedom to not commit myself irrevocably to a fixed set of beliefs. I was wary of being expected to handcuff myself mentally to things I had stopped believing in, something that happens when you permanently accept any dogma. Religious syncretism allowed me to change or modify my beliefs when I understood something better while dipping into the teachings of different religions and philosophies, and I made up my mind that this was how fluid it was always going to be.

Being a medical student, one side of me said it was just neurones and synapses that process information continuously and throw up new patterns of thought, perception and emotion, and nothing was real, especially not god and religion. Another side of me said it was more than that, beyond science. There was room for that internal debate too because Hinduism doesn’t expect me to accept anything on faith.

What was my takeaway from learning the teachings of Jesus as a child? By clearly distinguishing between good and bad, they simplified the world for me at an age when I wasn’t yet able to grasp the complexities and nuances of Hinduism that I now appreciate. Having been introduced to two religions simultaneously I saw the world of abstract ideas about life and god as more of a smorgasbord than a set menu. Theism, as I still see it, is only useful if it enables us to live in harmony on earth, and not quibble over the name of the Maker or form armies to kill each other in his name.

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In 2002 I came across Jesus the man, a book by Australian historian and theologian, Barbara Thiering. One bit I remember from this book is that Jesus and the two men who were hanged along with him ­­– Simon Magus and Judas Iscariot ­– were brought down from the crosses on Pilate’s orders. They were then imprisoned in a burial cave where Simon, who belonged to a community of healers called the Therapeutae, revived Jesus. He survived and was taken to safety, a few days after which he left the country.

Around the same time I read Jesus lived in India by Holger Kersten. This book is about Jesus’ coming to India after the crucifixion. Apparently he lived to be eighty and was buried in Rozabal in Srinagar, Kashmir, when his life ended. The ancient inscription on his tomb says Hazrat Issa Sahib meaning Tomb of Lord Jesus. And it still exists!

I didn’t think of any of this for a long, long time as I was busy with profession, children and home.

Then, a few days ago, I read The Lost Years of Jesus by Elizabeth Prophet. This concerns the time Jesus left Jerusalem with a caravan of merchants at the age of thirteen and lived in India till the age of twenty nine: the lost years that are not accounted for in the Bible.

To quickly summarise, Jesus apparently spent six years in Eastern India in Hindu centres of learning like Puri, Rajagriha and Kashi. He later moved to Hemis, a Buddhist monastery in Leh, Kashmir, where he lived till the age of twenty nine. The Buddhist lamas refer to him as a Buddha (= the enlightened one), the Buddha Issa.

I visited this Buddhist monastery at Hemis in 2007 on a family vacation to Leh in Kashmir. This is where Jesus is said to have spent the lost years that are not accounted for in the Bible.

Records of his teachings, as well as his biography, were maintained in the Hemis monastery in Leh in Kashmir. A Russian journalist, Nicolas Notovitch, heard about them by chance. He went in search of them in 1887and had them translated from Pali into Russian. His book, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, was first published in 1894.

The existence of these documents was subsequently verified by reliable people, viz. Swamy Abhedananda (1922), Prof. Nicholas Roerich (1925) and Madame Caspari (1939), the details of which are in Elizabeth Prophet’s book.

***********************

The questions I had asked as a child were answered. But more than that, thanks to trying to make sense of all that I heard in school and at home regarding god, I had concluded that swearing allegiance to any religion was not necessary. Cherry-picking from all of them was fine. But that’s exactly what Hinduism is: you are free to think, free to question, and free to choose what to believe, without an angry god to consign you to hell if you dare to process and question what is preached.

There’s this quote from ancient Indian literature called the Puranas: “Like a honey bee gathering trickles of honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different scriptures and sees only the good in all the religions.”

Despite the differences in what religious fundamentalists – of all hues – say, at the deepest level we all feel the same thing in terms of what god, or the idea of god, is supposed to do in our lives: be there for us when we need him. Sometimes it’s easier to anthropomorphise god, and that’s fine too. The problem arises when a group of people act as though their virtual image of god is a photograph that god physically posed for, while others’ images are morphed ones of an imposter!