"The Wind Will Rise, We Can Only Close The Shutters"

An episode of depression is often characterized by an utter lack of will to do anything. Let alone work, school and other such tasks, it becomes a humongous effort even to get out of bed, have a shower, and fix breakfast for oneself. Needless to say, everything suffers. Backlog of work piles up, people get upset with you for not taking their calls, for not returning their calls... And you cannot understand why you face so much resistance, from yourself, to pick up the phone and wish your friend on her birthday.

I find it very hard to do anything at all when I go through my phases of depression. It is like I am wading through a long stretch of greyness, surviving and getting spat out of which is a blessing enough. It almost feels too much to ask for to want to be productive, to push oneself to finish some tasks, to get up from that chair or bed to the bathroom to wash one's face, to open that file that needs to be looked into, to start writing that article you committed to. It is even harder not to hate yourself for being so dysfunctional periodically, for having gained a reputation for being flaky. I cannot insist enough that the most useless and unproductive thing to do is to blame yourself.

I am definitely not at my productive best when I go through these tunnels, but I have, in course of being committed (varying levels of commitment, I agree) to help myself cope with clinical depression, tried out different strategies. One of them is to work in collaboration with a friend or two. I keep at least two of my friends informed that I am slipping into a depressive episode, and that I am going to need a lot of push to be able to do even the simplest of things. I make a list of things I want to be able to do in that time, and I share it with a friend and ask her/him to push me to do them. I even ask them to force me to get out of the house for a walk, a concert, a visit to the temple. I tell them that what I am going through is not my often-touted "need for space," but, largely, an involuntary journey through long and dark tunnels.

One important thing to remember while implementing this is that you should be careful which friend you entrust this work to. It is good to pick someone who can be firm and loving, and who does not have a lot going on in her/ his life at that time. I try not to overload someone who already has enough on her plate. What is best, of course, is to work with someone who understands clinical depression, even goes through it, with yours and her depressive episodes staggered enough to allow you to work with each other.

I know how hard it can be. To get out of a phase of depression and find that your immediate world has moved ahead of you, that your deadlines, far from being dead, are now chasing you with great vengeance can all be very difficult to handle. That is why it helps to do what one can, even while smothered by the dark clouds, to push oneself to do some basic things. Besides all these, I do hope that you have a healthy attitude towards seeking professional help, to get the right medication prescribed.

A line from one of my favourite poems by the American poet Adrienne Rich comes to mind: "the wind will rise,/ We can only close the shutters."

The Stories We Tell

I am a seeker after stories. Sometimes we posit a very simplistic binary between reality and story. A whole lot of theories talk about how our stories about our realities are all that we have and can hold on to; that the thing called reality itself cannot be apprehended outside of language. I don't really believe in that. But I do believe that our stories are very potent. Narratives shape us in bizarre ways. Even to locate a source of a dysfunctionality in my life within a story that I have been narrating about my life, is very empowering. In the first place, it makes me aware of how I have been narrating a story all the time believing that my words are perfectly transparent and show nothing but the truth of the life-situation that the story is about. I forget that my story is a story, a perspective, an interpretation that I have chosen to claim as my own. 

When I get present to the story-ness of my story, not only do I become aware of my role as an interpreter of my own life, I also realize that I respond to life a lot through the story (or a web of stories) I have made up. The brain, I feel, loves these stories and the images they conjure. I feel empowered by the possibility that I could re-fashion my own stories that help me live better, more positively, more magically, more life-affirmingly, more joyously. That does not mean I concoct lies. It means I sit quietly and see what other lenses there are through which I could see my life and the situations that I draw to myself. I am not sure of this yet, but something tells me that at some point I would graduate to abandoning stories altogether, that I would meet life in an unmediated way and become one with it. For now, stories appear to have a provisional utility.

For instance, if you have read my previous blogpost, you would know that I now have a story that connects me to my maternal grandmother! I had always yearned for something that would make me feel my connection to her very concretely. Silly as it may sound, an old eversilver ladle that I stir my sambar with is what accomplishes that for me. 

This desire to feel a sense of connection on the maternal side has always been there. As a young brahmin boy, after the sacred thread ceremony, I was always very uncomfortable with the Abhivadanam, a practice wherein a brahmin male prostrates in front of an older, brahmin male and announces to him, in Sanskrit, his patri-lineage starting with the Rishi who is supposed to the origin of that line. I wondered why I could not reject that and claim my lineage to be that on my mother's side, and that too only the women -- my mother, my maternal grandmother, my maternal great grand mother etc. However, I did not get anywhere with this, because my mother did not have much to say about her mother. For she had lost her mother when she was only eight years old. She did not remember much. So all I could hold on to were snippets of memories and some photographs my mother has shown me.

Knowing that my grandmother used this ladle, which also happens to be my favourite one in the kitchen ,makes me very happy. It gives me a sense of connection to this person whom I have never met, but who is, nevertheless, a part of me. This story is very important to me. It almost rewires me differently.

One of the reasons I find the act of storytelling very engaging is that the way we talk about ourselves, narrate our stories is not only indicative how we perceive our place in the world, it also points to how much agency and power we will claim in the course of living that life.

What I infer from this about myself is that self-narratives fascinate me. As a peer in the LGBT community, whom a lot of people talk to, consult, confide in, and as a trained peer counsellor, I listen to *stories* all the time. On the surface, it might look like people are sharing with me their life situations, but the truth is that they are sharing with me their *stories* about their life situations. It is never the situation or circumstance itself. It is always an interpretation. Often, I have noticed that with a significant shift in someone's *story* about herself and her life, something major happens. They start responding to life from a place very different from the one they had hitherto occupied. Stories are very powerful.

Thinking about this further takes me to another place. I believe that what we tell ourselves about ourselves has a crucial role to play in what we tell others about us, which, in turn, has got a lot to do with how we live, what choices we make,  how much agency and power we think we have, etc. So, at some point in my life, I started paying a lot of attention to the stories I was telling myself about myself. Prior to that, I used to think I was a very positive person brimming with nothing but love and respect for myself. But when I started paying close attention to my self-talk, I was shocked to see how unkind and uncompassionate I could be to myself. I realized I had an incessant commentary of self-criticism going on inside me. Just getting present to that has made a lot of difference.

Sometimes I have seen that others have better and more positive stories about me than I do myself! I can be a cynic and say I know better. But do I know better? Not necessarily. As long as I am here in this world, I can't do my work in isolation. I don't think I can get my self-knowledge on my own. It is in the intricate web of relationalities, in the ways I show up in relationships, for people, in the way I live with people, work with people can I know myself.  It is also in the ways I fail to do all of these that I can know myself. That is, if I am smart enough not to judge myself too harshly! Oh, that's another story! :)

A ladleful of granny-memory!

My parents are visiting me now. Determined to make use of this time with my mother to learn some recipes definitively, I started cooking with her today. She likes my cooking and is a good master to apprentice with. A lot of stories come out, random tips about why it is better to add a pinch of this ingredient only at this stage in the making of a dish, why so and so never got it right, why so and so always got it right, what shortcuts to take when there is not much time, who taught her that, or how she figured that out herself, so on. Kitchen is a space where my mother and I connect with each other in the most collaborative, anxiety-free, non-neurotic way. Even when I work by myself, other than the performance stage, it is the kitchen that brings out the best in me, it is the place where I am my most unfragmented self. 

And today, I was awakened to the presence of someone else in the kitchen along with my mother and me -- my maternal grandmother, who died long before I was born; in fact, she died when my mother was a kid. I happened to mention to my mother which of the ladles in her collection I love most, like to use most. She exclaimed, "Me too! It is my mothers!" I immediately got present to my grandmother's presence there with us in the kitchen. Of course, she is present in my mother and through her in me. But it felt beautiful to see that I was holding this ladle that my grandmother once used. It delights me to tears to think that the kitchen, a space I so happily and lovingly inhabit, also thus connects me to my grandmother, someone I have never met but have heard a lot about, whose image in my mother's memories, the few photographs, and my own idea of her in my heart I so love.

From the Sun to the Sea

I have said sometimes that I feel I live better when I have a witness to my life. And I have said this usually in the context of relationships, being single, my loneliness, etc. I felt this way again recently. I felt very lonely. I immediately felt ashamed for feeling lonely, partly because it felt like a very unspiritual place to be in, and partly because I thought I would appear to be so regressive and mainstream to many of my happily single friends! And I thought: "Oh I would live so much better if I have a witness to my everyday life."

Then something strange and beautiful happened. I came home late one evening and walked, rather mechanically, to the balcony to leave my sandals there, and I happened to glance in the direction of the neem tree outside my second-floor balcony. A light from the next apartment building silhouetted a good portion of the tree, and I saw lots of crows sitting quietly on its beautiful branches. The neem tree was studded with several crows sitting motionless. It stirred something in me when I realized that these birds stayed day and night around me.

Everyday, both my mother and I leave food for the crows on the kitchen window sill. I do it even without thinking about it. My mother and I also speak to the crows. When a lone crow sits on wrought iron grill in the balcony and caws away, we tell her the food's kept on the kitchen window sill. Or we tell her we haven't started our day yet. All of this came to me when I stood there in my balcony late at night looking at these crows perched like silent angels on this neem tree.

The other moment of insight occurred recently when I returned home from a trip, I saw that I had forgotten to water the plants in the balcony. I cursed myself and rushed into the house, without even taking off my shoes, to get some water for the plants. As I watered them, it struck me that these plants were there everyday witnessing my life.

I am not going to say that knowing that these crows and plants were witnesses to my everyday existence drove away my feeling of loneliness and the desire for human company. But some shift did happen. I looked around and felt that everything around me was bearing witness to my life. From my meticulously organized interview tapes, to the cobweb on the southeast corner of the room, to the neatly wiped stove-top, to the dried coffee stain on the outside of the filter, everything was bearing witness to my existence. 

It also reminded me of something else that I had experienced many years ago. I was helping my dance guru Chitra Visweswaran rehearse Muthuswami Dikshitar's "Sooryamoorte Namostute...," a most beautiful prayer to the Sun God. In this composition replete with stunning descriptions and epithets of Soorya, Dikshitar also praises the Sun as one who witness the actions of everyone. I remembered how my teacher stopped at that moment and exclaimed at the beauty and truth of this description. She said,"How beautiful! The sun is a witness to all our lives and actions!"

How could I have forgotten it! I go to the beach everyday. The sea touches at least my toes everyday. Sometimes, when it is very quiet, I can hear the waves from my rooftop. Once when we were standing in the waves, my friend Matthew Regan said to me, "Ani, I feel a great affinity to the sea too. It excites me to think that at this same moment there could be many others playing in the waves of some ocean somewhere, and this water connects us to them." I remember shivering in goosebumps when he said that.

Quite unconnected to all this, I also remember standing one sunny morning on the beach, the waves teasing my toes, the sun beating down on my chest,  and these lines occurred to me: "Sea at my feet/ Sun on my chest/ That's how tall I am." It is good to remember that. I makes me smile now.

Do you wonder what the point of all this is? I do not. I feel connected to everything around me at the moment. That's all. It suffices. It is not a means to an end.

Of course, I sometimes feel that it would be great to have someone to share the everydays with. But the feeling does not consume me. It is not even a complaint. On other days, I would not trade my solitude for anything. So there is no single story :)

A New Performance Piece

I have been working on a new performance piece. Earlier this month, I got an opportunity to present it as a work in progress at "Madras-Chennai Local's" event "Dancers - Separate and Together." Now that I know the piece works, I am working on developing it further. It is now taking me to strange and new places, and I am loving it absolutely! A video of this performance is HERE.  

I am very grateful to Mridangist Adyar Sri K Gopinath and Veena vidwan Sri L Ramakrishnan for making it all work!

Lalitha Venkat at Narthaki.com had this to say about the performance: “The most interesting was a short theatre piece by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, who chose to portray the Pandava brother Arjuna in his disguise as Brhannala, the dance teacher/ eunuch in the court of King Virata, in the well-known epic Mahabharatha…. Aniruddh entered wearing a wrap around skirt and traipsed around the stage. Through a perky script, coy female movements alternating with strong male moves, he was entertaining and held the audience attention throughout. Strains of the Veena and percussion at appropriate moments provided unobtrusive and apt accompaniment. This is the first presentation of his experimental piece and worth elaborating into a larger presentation.”

In a review that a member of the audience sent the organizers of the event, s/he had this to say about my work: “aniruddhan vasudevan was a revelation, mixing and matching a startling repertoire of the classical and the modern, of theatre and dance. the arjuna-sairandhri story brought to life the shadowy area of uncertain or unacknowledged sexuality and carried the audience with him right through.”

An evening of mixed fare

A couple of nights ago, I had a wonderful experience performing at Mahabalipuram with some other dancers. Five of us, dancers from the Chidambaram Academy of Performing Arts, students of Chitra Visweswaran, had been invited to perform at a conference for cardiologists and thoracic surgeons. None of us minded the inordinate delay in beginning the performance that evening, since we were on the seashore, watching the orange orb of a sun setting on one side even as a full moon rose on the other, over the sea, like a shimmering silver coin bringing news of abundance.

This blogpost is not about the performance, but about the drive back from Mahabalipuram. The driving was unbelievably rash. On both the drives to and from Mahabalipuram, our drivers, on hire from a travel agency for this conference, we,re extremely reckless. Their style basically, was to rush through any available stretch of the road at great speeds while honking continuously, then come to a sudden halt in front of whatever vehicle was in front of us, honk non-stop until he or she gave us way. The driver who took us to Mahabalipuram was sort of polite, so he obliged me after I requested him, for the third time, to drive slowly. The person who drove us back was a notch over the earlier driver when it came to rash driving. It was past 10 pm, and it was alarming the way we were being driven along the East Coast Road from Mahabalipuram to Thiruvanmiyur, a stretch that witnesses more than its share of accidents.

I must have requested him at least a dozen times to slow down. For the first few times, he smiled and made an appearance of slowing down, only to pick up mindless speed minutes later. After that, my requests met with a patronizing advice not to be scared. Then I had to be firm. I have personally known people who have either been fatally injured or killed in accidents on the ECR. Besides, I felt it need not even be about the possibility of an accident. Rash driving puts the passengers on a weird anxiety mode, and if they request the driver to slow down, he should consider it. With the risk of getting into an unpleasant argument, I told him firmly to slow down right away. He refused! He said that he knew what he was doing. I told him we did not care about that, we just wanted him to slow down. He said the people who'd hired his services for the conference constantly called him on the phone to ask him to get here and there; that made him rush. I told him I would speak to those people and explain that they should not be rushing him about like this. Then I did exactly that. I called someone who was part of the conference and requested him to make sure the drivers were not under so much stress.

All of this escalating nervous energy in the van reached its crescendo when we saw the vehicle in front us, another speeding van, hit a cat who chose that inopportune moment to cross the road. We all screamed in unison at the sight of the poor cat run and tossed over by the van. It was all just a flash. Both the vans were going so insanely fast that in just a matter of seconds we were far away from that spot. It took us all several minutes before we could regain composure. By then, our driver had slowed down, too.  Just a little. There was something very disconcerting in the fact that it took him just forty minutes to get us from Mahabalipuram to Thiruvanmiyur.  

Bizarre as it may sound, I have not been able to stop thinking about that cat. I do not know if she had a miraculous escape or was killed. Either way, I feel connected to her.

My Detox

Now that most of my friends know about my alleged New Ageyness J, I don’t have much to hide!

There is a little process of letting go that occurred to be sometime ago. It helped me a lot, and in sharing it with some close friends, I realized some others might find it helpful too.

Recently, when I was caught in some drama of my own and was very confused, I badly needed some exercise that would help me release some negativity that was beginning to show up from within me. I needed more than a mere temporary distraction. I also did not want the usual process: getting bitchy and cynical about it and blaming it on something or someone, thus relinquishing responsibility for my own stuff. At the same time, I felt that this was going to be rather big, and that I was going to need some definitive process for doing this myself.

It was while endlessly ruminating on these that a process occurred to me. I am sure it was a product of a lot of reading, thinking and listening I have been doing for a while now. It sounded good to me, and I worked with it. Here is it how it goes.

The fundamental purpose was this: to regain peace. And to do that I knew I had to allow whatever toxicity that was welling up inside me to surface, and then to release it. But, with the benefit of past experience with this kind of stuff, I knew this was easier said than done. In all likelihood, I would start judging myself harshly for all that I would get to see coming from within me. I also knew that I might give in to the easy way out – blame game. So this process, guided by four principles, really helped me this time. Here they are:

(1)   Love and compassion are the only things that will see me through this, see me through anything. And that has to begin with myself. I am not going to judge myself no matter what I see when I take a good look within.

(2)   I will hold up to light whatever comes up, and release them. I will not be selective. I will not hold back some and release some. I shall have no favourites among these toxins.

(3)   When I see my thoughts about other people surfacing, I will not resort to blaming them. No blame. The only thing to do with them is to tell these thoughts, “Thank you for your visit, but I need you to go now. We are faultless.”

(4)   No matter how painful this process turns out to be, I will remember that I am not alone, I am guided and helped. Also, this is not an endless tunnel. I am working towards peace.

If you have a similar process or if you have one of your own and you are willing to share, please do. If not here, you can email me at aniruddh.vasudevan@gmail.com