Family

I woke up to a text message from my mother this this morning; “to let you know, Brishbua passed away this peacefully on Ganesh morning”. Bua, in Hindi, means paternal sister. It’s one of those things I’ve always loved about my language, how every familial relation has a word. There’s not just aunts and uncles, there’s a specific word for our fathers younger brother (Chachu), or your mother’s sister-in-law (Mami). Everyone is given a title, their rightful place in the family tree.

Brish bua was my grandfather’s oldest sister, the grand aunt. My grandfather was the youngest brother of five sisters so our frequent family reunions were run by the matriarchs. Brish bua was the queen of these, always the older sister. Yet, she never had the imposing qualities most family heads hold. She was a small woman in her late seventies, wrinkled like an old tree, every line a short story in a life well lived. She would always speak softly, to the extent that half your time talking to her would be spent leaning in closer.

Growing up, my brother and I would be taken to her home every few weeks for a Sunday brunch between all the family members who currently lived in Bombay. The first thing I’d always notice walking into her house was the shoes. All the shoes of the arrivals would be piled up in the foyer, right by the door. There were never less than 20 pairs, some segments of the family attempting organizes, pairing their shoes in neat lines. Others, like us, just left our shoes wherever we could find the space. This wasn’t a new sight; I saw the parade of shoes every time we entered a party or gathering in Bombay. Shoes were always taken off at the doorway, so as not to bring outside dirt into our homes. But still they were the first thing I would look at walking into Brish bua’s home. I’d use them to try and get a gauge on who was already here. When I was younger I’d look for other shoes from the kids section, trying to find the cousins and avoid the grown ups. Now I just looked at the shoes themselves, as a collective, realizing slowly that only one pair of those seeming endless shoes actually lived in the home I was about to enter.

Her apartment was on the 16^th floor, with a beautiful bay view of Bombay. Walking in, it always smelled like home cooked food. My mother always says food from your mother’s hands tastes best, this transferred exponentially across generations. Brish bua’s simple vegetarian meals were always delicious, and always satisfied in a way that only family food can. Younger me would always glimpse up at my father during these meals, and I’d notice that he was eating like me for once. He was the child at the table too, savoring every bite of his meal, while trying to stay inconspicuous to the older generation at the table. He’d always ask for seconds with desert.

Brish bua would preside over the meal, sitting in her chair at the head of the table. She wouldn’t talk much, and when she did it was always a question directed specifically at someone. She’s ask my brother about college, ask me about my school projects. She remembered a stunning amount, photos from the play I had been in a year ago, the service project my brother worked on his sophomore year of high school. She was always genuine, checking up with every single member of the family.

I don’t know when exactly all of this changed, but it did. The brunches continued, the family get together’s never stopped, but Brish bua changed. There was the year she began needing help moving from seat to seat, one of the grand children chosen to accompany her each time. The lack of mobility wasn’t so bad, she would still ask her questions, still make you lean in closer to talk to her. But then, one year, Brish Buaconfused me with my mother, suddenly her grand daughter became one of the daughter in laws. My cousin Kiran became her mother. My father was his father. Eventually she started referring to all of the women in the room by her sisters’ names, and all the men by my grandfathers.

It’s’ not an easy thing to witness, the family rock falling apart. It’s not an easy thing to write, losing the ability to coherently understand the world. Words and family are two of the things I hope to keep a part of my life forever. Yet, both these things may one-day slip away from my mind, like salt through a sieve, memories and vocabulary gone so quickly. So how do you cope? You ask the specific questions, make people lean in closer as they talk to you, if only to spend a little more time with them while you still remember who they are.

On Physics

A friend of mine once sent me one of those online interactives. It displayed "The Scale of the Universe" on an animated slider. Man was in the middle, sliding the scale leftwards would zoom in to the smallest forms of life, ending on pieces of the smallest particles.

Turning the slider to the right would zoom outward. Displaying all things in between man and what man estimates is the size of the known universe. It was humbling to see presented mathematically, how one individual, as a human being, is such a miniscule piece of the totality of all life. A lot of people I know get depressed when they about the expanse of the Universe, I think it’s because of all the things between man and Milky Way. There are large, intimidating things in that space, their size makes us feel small and insignificant.

But then I turned the slider to the left. As I examined the smaller species on the planet, eventually moving to the microscopic particles, I realized that some of the smallest pieces of existence can be more magical than galaxies. Another friend of mine, who is fascinated by the physics of the Universe, shared with me one of the more recent studies done by quantum physicists. They took a ball-shaped particle of matter, and launched it towards a piece with a slit in it. The particle travelled through the slit, as expected. They then added more slits, three to four, and found that when the particle was launched towards its multiple targets, it registered as passing through multiple slits. The particle managed to change itself into a different form to make it through the piece by going through all of the slits.

As if self-manipulation of matter by particles wasn’t enough of a find, the physicists also found that when the particle was viewed with the human eye (rather than through a high power microscope), it wouldn’t split itself. Meaning that this particle would display different behavior when it was aware of being observed. The presence of a person changed how the particle behaved, literally mind over matter. Something within the brain, the act of viewing the experiment, changed the way the matter behaved. When I was told this story I remember blurting out, “That’s the closest thing to magic I’ve ever heard.”

But the craziest part is, it’s not mythical or magical, it’s pure science. It’s examining the potential of our Universe, and the potential our minds have. Telepathy, Extra Sensory Perception (ESP), Telekinesis, all these previously fabled skills stem from the simple notion that our mental processes CAN have an effect on the physical world. It’s not too unbelievable is it? Considering how even with all of today’s technological advances we know so little about how our brain actually works. We know the basics, what it means when certain parts light up on a PET scan, but we’ve barely scraped the surface when it comes to our mental potential.

There’s another spec in the history of the universe that also excited me, the God particle. It’s the colloquial name given by physicist to the particle they believe began the existence of life in the Universe, the thing that began that oh-so-big bang. Like most people my age, as I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself more jaded by the traditional notions of religion. You would think I’d be completely against the particle’s title, the inappropriate melding of scientific fact with the spiritual concept of God. But two things changed my mind on the subject.

The first was the realization that everything, every piece of known existence, all stemmed from this one single particle. One tiny, tiny spec on the scale of the Universe, began… all. Like most of my agnostic age, I’ve always believed in the existence of some sort of energy, some connection between all living things. Knowing that we are all partial decedents of the God particle solidifies that connection.

The God particle also lets me question human potential. If we all originated from the particle that created life, it’s not a ridiculous assumption that we could have all have a piece of that energy inside us. That somewhere in our minds we’ve locked the potential to create matter out of nothing, to turn existence into something we can mold.

So if that’s not enough to make you forget about feeling insignificant in the face of the Universe,the realization that we all have the potential for godliness, I will call upon another, writer’s words to turn you. In his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut satirizes religion, while simultaneously trying to answer existence, through his creation of the Bokononists, followers of the religion of Bokononism. In the creation story of Bokononism, God looks over vast fields of mud. He then says to the mud, “Stand up.” And some of the mud stands and begins life in the Universe. This is the only roll God plays in the origin of humanity. The Bokonists also have a unique set of last rites, as a Bokonist prepares to leave the world they recite, “"The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."

No matter how terrifying it gets to contemplate our individual space in this more than massive Universe, we were the mud that stood up. We exist, and thehe possession of life, the adventure of it, the sheer ability to be in the randomness of existence, stays more meaningful to me than all the matter in the Universe.

कल (kal)

कल (kal)


I love the way words are like little definition puzzles. Understanding how a word got from a series of syllables to a having a concrete definition can always be a fun ride. It’s even more fun when you take it overseas. I love having my multicultural friends explain what words mean in their languages. My favorite part is asking them about the untranslatable words, the Spanish, German, Arabic, Korean, word that turn into be a phrases when expressed in English. The words that embody an idea that takes so many more to explain itself. I have one of these in my own language, my favorite Hindi word, कल (pronounced kal). The word कल means both tomorrow and yesterday, leaving listeners to figure out which one it is depending on tense and context. A concept difficult to grasp for my friend found unbelievable until the following:

I’ve always loved this word, mainly because of the idea that it represents. In Hindi, tomorrow and yesterday are the same. Past and future meld into one, what you did before and what you’re going to do now are both expressed through the same word. It readjusts your view to thinking in terms of today and everything else. There’s just now, and the rest of it.

It really encourages you to live in the moment, a notion that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like my fellow collegiate friends, I frequently find myself discussing “the power of living in the moment” or many other common post-modernist talking points that have always been found on college campuses.

I think about it a lot, the environment and people I’m surround by. It tastes like idealism, with some rebellion sprinkled in, and is soaked in hopefulness. But what worries me is how ancient the recipe seems. I worry that all this idealism, struggle for positive change in the world, is just a side effect of being “the Youth”. A natural reaction to reaching adulthood while still hanging on to the hopes of adolescence, that’ll fade out by the end of the decade.

Oddly unsustainable optimism.

This thought depressed me for a long time. I’d worry that all the enthusiasm and energy with which I approach my life, education, and future career would eventually wane. Every day I would get further away from this age, and the vitalizing, revolutionizing feeling that comes with it. It felt like growing up meant the passion that comes with youth had to age too.

I hated the finite nature of those catalyzing feelings.

But then I realized, just because the attitudes of youth eventually disappear doesn’t mean they aren’t a powerful force. Throughout the years young people, in the short time that they stay that way, have shaped entire generations. In the 60s, youth brought about the Love Revolution affecting the music, politics, writing, and every other cultural aspect of the decade. Even today, young people all around the Middle East use the technologies they’ve grown up with, social networking sites, to bring about dramatic change in the nations governments.

Youth has power, youth can bring change and being in this chapter of my life I feel like I have a sense of responsibility to my generation. When I turned twenty, an older friend said something to me that galvanized this feeling, “On my 20th birthday all I was thinking was, this is the beginning of the most life-shaping decade of my life.”

And he was right, this is the most directionally defining decade of my life.

So this is my advice to all the young people sharing my sense of social responsibility, wanting to catalyze some sort of change in this world before you become obsolete.

Forget about कल for a while, because all we have is today to make a lasting difference.

(A Few Months After) Spring Cleaning

I cleaned my house yesterday. For anyone who knows me, this is a magnificent accomplishment. My philosophy is a clean room is the sign of a cluttered mind. So, my house isn’t really messy per say, just an appropriately disorganized environment for my creative consciousness. I have a friend who complains that he can’t come visit me without leaving with some sort of paint, or marker stain on his clothes. I tell him it’s a souvenir, from the most magical place on earth.

But every once in a while, it gets a bit much and I have to clean up. When I finally get to the cleaning part, I actually really enjoy it. There’s something oddly relaxing about mundanely removing a mess. Apparently, I’m not the only one who gets joy from getting rid of junk. Studies performed at Arizona Statue University show that maintaining a clean home makes people feel “happy, satisfied, comfortable, and healthy”. Associate Professor of Psychology, Carol Nemeroff, Ph.D., says, “The urge we have to clean may be a trait that is biologically programmed into us,” says Nemeroff. “And, because we know that good hygiene leads to good health, cleaning may ultimately be related to a basic survival instinct.”

According to research from the U.K., 57% of the population finds a feeling of satisfaction in cleaning. I guess I’m in the other 43% of the test subjects. I have a roommate in the fall for the first time in a year and a half. My biggest worry is that she may not be able to handle the mess that results from my liberal lifestyle. Whoever lives with me has to be well prepared. It’s not that I don’t like a clean house, it’s just that I don’t mind so much when it’s not. I’ve met other people who share similar opinions. I feel like it’s one of those things that very defined in a person, either you can handle a mess or you can’t. Research shows that 38% of women and 24% of men feel real stress about living in a messy environment.

Then there are people who really can’t. People who have clinical issues with cleanliness, to the point where it begins to control their lives. In the United States, approximated 3.3 million people suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, that’s 2.3% of the population between ages of 18 – 24. That means that 1 in 200 American adults have OCD, and twice as many have reportedly had OCD at some point in their lives. OCD is on the long list of anxiety disorders, like agoraphobia and post-traumatic stress disorder, that terrify me. Whenever I see disease like this, in the frequent Grey’s Anatomy reruns I’ve been watching all summer, it just stumps me a bit. I can’t imagine having a chemical imbalance like that, affecting my life in every way.

It makes you realize how much chemistry and arrangement of neuron affect who we are. There’s more minor versions of this chemical control on our personalities; ticks, habits, addictions, they’re all rooting in brain chemistry. The realization that so much of ourselves is determined by biology shifted the way I interact with people. I accept that there’s certain decisions my friends make that I can never understand (Though, there’s probably many more of mine that leave them puzzled). Once you realize certain aspects of someone else will be inherently different due to their genetics, interaction between people gets beyond dominating the conversation, winning an argument, or changings some else’s opinions to your own, and there’s nothing left to do but learn.

I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that ignorance is the root of prejudice. One of my gay friends used to always instruct the homophobic to get a gay friend. It was the best advice against exclusion I had ever heard. Friendship is one of the most powerful tools in fighting malicious ignorance.

So yes, there are certain decisions that other people make that we have to accept we can’t understand. But, the closer we get to people with differing opinions, the more we begin to, if not understand, at least respect their viewpoints too.

Falling Asleep to Television

When I was younger, I always thought I was the only one who fell asleep to television. When I was finally old enough to discover the sleep timer on my tv remote, I was thrilled to know there were others. According to a study conducted at the University of Maryland Medical Center, “many people fall asleep with the television on in their room. Watching television before bedtime is often a bad idea. Television is a very engaging medium that tends to keep people up”.

Still, every so often, I’ll be visiting a friend's place or crashing on someone's couch and still be shocked when I learn that they share my nighttime routine; thirty minutes, preferably set to a late night talk show.

The most recent friend to share my sedative said something that stuck with me. “It makes me feel like people are talking to me,” he said. Not the first thing one would associate with sleep, yet there is something oddly comforting about falling asleep to the sound of people, there’s something safe about it. Probably because it reminds us all of younger days in cribs, listening to family continue in the next room. Or maybe that was just my experience. Being Punjabi, often considered the Irish of India, my family has always had that unique quirk of expressing enthusiasm through volume. I’m sure many a young night was spent falling asleep listening to the sound of my father telling a new joke or my mother trying to add her two cents while fighting back chuckles.

Yet most sleep therapists don’t seem to accept my nostalgic views. They advise patients who are having trouble sleeping to “remove all mind-stimulating electronic devices from your bedroom”. Bringing a TV, iPod, or computer into the mix of the bedroom trains the brain to see it as a space for things other than sleep, making it more difficult to fall asleep when you want to.

Falling asleep with the television still on, or other types of auditory stimulations, disrupts REM cycles making it harder to fall into a deeper sleep. Making it harder to dream. I thought about it last weekend and realized I can’t remember the last dream I had. I have a vague sense of when it was, maybe three or so years ago, but I’ve almost completely forgotten about the sensation of dreaming.

This realization depressed me for a while until another friend told me that she’d been trying for months to get rid of her dreams. But she didn’t use the word dreams, she said nightmares instead. She told me about how she hadn’t been able to sleep, for months now, because of the nightmares. After hearing that, I was glad I no longer had dreams. I remembered nightmares again, the complete and utter lack of control you have when you mind takes you through its darker alleys.

But what keeps me excited about the world of dreams is the other extreme, dreams where you have complete control. There’s a scientific term for this, lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams are dreams where the sleeper is aware of the fact that they are dreaming. This allows them manipulate their dream environments, literally giving them the ability to create their dream worlds.

Lucid dreaming is such a powerful psychological phenomenon that therapists are using it to fight cases of chronic nightmares. At Ultrecht University in The Netherlands, the Department of Clinical Pyschology took 23 nightmare suffers and treated them with lucid dream therapy. When the study was over their lab report noted, “the nightmare frequency of both treatment groups had decreased,” leading them to conclude that, “Lucid dream therapy seems effective in reducing nightmare frequency, although the primary therapeutic component remains unclear”. These results show that dreams can be a formidable tool in eradicating chronic nightmares and anxiety but even the scientists who performed the study can’t tell us exactly why.

This leads me to ask several questions, starting with, what exactly are dreams? If they have the power to stop insomnia and fight anxiety, what else can they do? We all know dreams hold a significant space in our psyches, but when it comes to articulating this significance, even the scientists seem at a loss for words.

Apparently they’ve been trying for a while to define our nighttime delusions. In 1991, the year of my first birthday, the Lucidity Institute published a laboratory study entitled Other Worlds: Out-of-Body Experiences and Lucid Dreams. The report compared the experience of a lucid dream with the out of body experiences dying patients often experiences. The report says,

“We have concluded that OBEs can occur in the same physiological state as lucid dreams. If you believe yourself to have been awake, then you are more likely to take the experience at face value and believe yourself to have literally left your physical body in some sort of mental or "astral" body floating around in the "real" physical world. If you think of the experience as a dream, then you are likely to identify the OBE body as a dream body image and the environment of the experience as a dream world.”

When they’re dreaming, these people literally feel like they’re leaving their bodies and going to heaven, Nirvana, or whatever term organized religion chooses to put on the euphoria the comes from complete satisfaction. You may not want to reach god in your brain, but you have to at least be awestruck at the magnificent show your mind is putting on.

So the next time you’re heading to bed, stop before you set that sleep timer. Take a second to think about the worlds of wishful thinking you could be missing out on.