Esprit de Corps
By Farahdeen Khan for Curate Magazine Issue 4: Well
Nowadays we are so shelled with information from every quarter that it is quite the irony that we know so little. Information, as some assume, is not knowledge. Simply because you can Google something does not mean that it has context. ‘What can I do to make myself happier?’ is one of the questions widely searched on the World Wide Web, and one wonders why when man thinks that he has everything, he is still in search for that additional reassurance, which, oddly, he assumes artificial intelligence would provide him with an answer. Wellness, then, man realises, is quite dependent on happiness, and happiness is as slippery as a silver-scaled fish, but with a fair bit of practice one can learn to hold that fish than letting it slither away from between our fingers.
Just when man has learnt to hold the fish tight, he is faced with a far deeper challenge — he tends to observe that his relationships are turning wafer thin with time, and when he discusses these vagaries with those around him he is further saddened to learn that people are also barely able count on anyone to ‘be there’ for them like people did once upon a time. Reconciling to the idea that everyone is indeed awfully caught up in this endless marsh of time that seems only to suck them further within its belly, he turns to art, cinema, literature, and when in want of inner peace to people as they play a huge part in restoring his hope by enveloping him in the cordiality of general wellness. He then begins to draw parallels of life with what he has currently taken a fancy for. Take for example a horror novel, he feels eerie feelings creep under his skin when he reads it, but when he watches a cheerful motion picture, he feels delighted and inadvertently bestows the same positivity to those around him.
Tolerance, compromise and adjustment are at the their lowest in our century. People latch onto human beings for personal gains, and let go of them as easily as they change clothes. Man is continuously in search for that one mysterious thing that can add to the euphoria of happiness and eradicate the grief of misery. In order to attain this idea of overall happiness, he delves deep within his soul, preoccupies himself with exploring where such a fountain may be found, and while journeying, he tries to make sure that he conceals any ambiguity that carries even the tiniest traces of insignificance. Modern living has left us bereft of feeling or connection. The knotted lives in the cities leave us seeking solace in temporary pleasure than pursuing true contentment, contentment that is the manifestation of our imagination.
When Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that the meaning of culture rests in deriving a secret harmony with nature, which beasts, birds and plants possess, our civilisation went on to eliminate from human feeling any semblance of such a union, laughed at him and wrote him off as foolish. Then a time came where one found a striking similarity in the words of Goethe’s as much as Rousseau’s where both acquainted us with the notion that the beginning of all self-developmental wellness begins when we establish a magical rapport between the solitary egos of mankind and draw all that we behold from the earth. That is when people realised how naïve they had been to disregard Rousseau. Such happiness, both Rousseau and Goethe emphasised, is not to be confused with desire, as they believed that happiness flows through us, it is stirred by memories, revived by little things, a song, a scent, and when it comes to us, as Goethe said, it comes like happy children who cry exclaiming — Here we are!
As one routinely does, I sought the opinion of people about what wellness means to them. While some were able to offer me sensible estimations to consider, wellness for most other’s merely meant the dopamine rush of six-packs, the puff of drugs, the transitory preference of orgasm, or anything and everything that was purely reliant on seeking immediate gratification. Two people, by virtue of their simplicity, instantly stood out of the herd. One was jewellery designer and a friend Farah Ali Khan. She described wellness as having a clear conscience, a mind that is guilt free, and most of all being happy and healthy. The other was entrepreneur and branding consultant Rahul Karnani. His idea of wellness was the interconnection between the mind, body and soul. He felt that when the mind was healthy, the body benefitted, and when the mind and body found themselves in balance, the soul was what kept the will of man afloat.
Mind
The beginning of a beautiful journey into the world of wellness begins with positive thinking. It starts with the urge to live life prolifically, and to do what one craves, because if one does not do as one craves, life tends to develop like a wound on a child’s elbow. In order to understand this better let us dip into some lessons certain mediums have taught mankind in general.
Media commonly leans towards illustrating wellness in physical light. It guarantees you that obtaining a sculpted body is the definitive answer to life’s woes. It drums into you, time and time again, that sex is the single route to contentment. Any rational human being would fathom that none of these superficial crutches provide one with any real sense of wellness. In the motion picture Ustad Hotel the grandpapa and grandson are sitting by the sea one afternoon. Faisi, the grandson, suggests that his grandpapa could as well shut the hotel he runs considering that there is no heir to steer it forward with the same dedication as him. The grandpapa hands Faisi over a tiny glass of Sulaimani Chai, a popular black tea in the Malabar. They both sip on it silently for sometime when Faisi enquires what special concoction of spices goes into contributing to the uniqueness of the tea that his grandpapa makes, a taste he asserts he does not find in the tea when somebody else makes it. The older man chuckles as they watch the waves ebb and flow and enlightens Faisi that tea is much like life, that even before an idea obtains a voice it first germinates in the mind, and for anything to work in life, love is the special ingredient that is required to lend it the magical effect.
We often underestimate the power of people, and the power of love. We tend to forget that our wellness is inadvertently dependent on them. This relationship betwixt people who forge a connection matures into an esprit de corps that becomes the core of life. It is quite like the feeling of dipping one’s hands in the clear stream of flowing water and anointing the face with its cleansing power.
Parallel, some others aimlessly float in the idleness of anxiety. They latch onto destructive habits to overcome their impatience to deal with the pressures of existence. Everybody is busy getting somewhere but is actually going nowhere and it is here that one must understand that everyone needs to slow down and get a breath. One must observe and appreciate the little moments, and one probable approach to finding harmony in this hyperactive world is to find an anchor in some good old ways of self-preservation: painting, reading, sports, spending time with real people rather than our digital partners, anything so long as it gives you a sense of purpose and does not stifle your desire to grow and suppress the feeling of glee.
Sometimes we have to take a step backward to go forward.
Body
Societies indulge in various kinds of vices that go against the norms and yet live healthier and longer lives as compared to people who are careful. This is perhaps because their overall wellbeing rests within a capsule of happiness — the high that they achieve from it. Yielding to vices is subjective, just as what might happen can be DNA dependent and destiny driven since no one can predict the future. Given to that subscription, the notion that a healthy mind and a healthy body provide one a blueprint for living a satisfied life is so like living in fairy tales because as aforementioned one has seen in more cases than some that what is to life if one has to be careful and calculated all the time. Some people think that having everything keeps them from miseries, and how dreadfully wrong they are really. Princess Diana had everything, wealth, beauty, pedigree and yet she suffered from low-self esteem and bulimia as long as she lived.
If you want to be happy, be happy.
Soul
Ask someone what they think of the soul, and they offer you explanations right from plunging into the depths of mysteries and mysticism to the euphoria of sexual characteristics and mood elevators. To me the soul has no secret that one’s behaviour does not reflect. And as Rahul Karnani rightly stated, it is nothing but an amalgamation of our mind and body.
A stubbornly charming and impossibly handsome friend Dulquer Salmaan played an important role of Arjun, a spirited young man with verve for life in the 2014 motion picture Bangalore Days. One morning he hears Sarah, the radio jockey who enthrals the city by her comforting words and charming tonality. In time he finds that her very existence seems to give him hope and changes the very fibre of his existence. Confident that he is quite in love with her, and it is not just a passing phase, he traces her to discover that she is physically challenged. Under normal circumstances, a human being would take to one’s heels, but Arjun, who has breathed through a troubled adolescence, does not plunge into a dungeon of despair. Instead of taking it as defeatism he stands by her despite her debility until she begins to think of him as no less than the very fibre of her own existence.
The road to wisdom is seldom easy, and Sarah’s opinionated mother has other plans for her. Having lost her husband, and having a disabled daughter has made little difference to her. When she insults Arjun for pursuing riding on the motocross instead of a salaried job, Arjun, who has had a fair share of grief with the divorce of his parents when he was young, absorbs her jibes with positivism. One is reminded of what Gertrude Stein once said that everyone has in them a certain amount of what might be called ‘stupid being’ but with the especially luckless this stupid being is the main thing, a trait that Sarah’s mother displays most openly before Arjun. Yet, like breath is to air, the mental union between Arjun and Sarah reveals that no matter how fractured your life, if you take things in your stride optimistically, you end up healing someone else that inadvertently aids in healing the cracks in your own life. Each of us would have come across an Arjun and Sarah in the course of our lives, those who have found perfect peace even in the imperfections of life.
Fuck the Rules!
Roopesh Balakrishna is a coveted gold medallist from one of the country’s premier institutions, to shaping the careers of the countries youth by the ingenious plans he draws up. When he is not helping the nation prosper, he can be found quite literally fastened to his Ducati, and anybody who knows somebody who has a super bike knows that such hobbies bring with it an element of a skip of a heartbeat. After careful deliberation so as not to sound intrusive I made known to Roopesh that he ought to be careful when on his Monster. As expected he quizzed me on why I felt he was not being careful. When I mumbled and fumbled he cut me off midway and said, “We are all driven by adrenaline. The innate need to absorb that natural high. Nobody else will experience even an iota of it except you. In short, I think one must do what one loves. I observe that streak of tension on the faces of the people I matter to but I don’t tell them anything for the want of them not having to feel further gutted because if I were to convey what I really think it would kill them instantly.” I studied Roopesh quietly. “You wouldn’t believe what happened today,” he disclosed with some excitement, “I forgot my back protector brace and halfway into the ride I remembered that I was not strapped in it.” I nodded. “And yet I clocked 205 kilometres per hour today.” I felt this churn in my stomach and I was not sure if my facial vocabulary was giving away my concern but I tried my best to keep calm. “At those speeds you need all the physical protection you can get.” I dreaded to think of anything else but wanting to see Roopesh back from his ride, bright and bouncy. “I know what you are thinking,” he said coolly. I narrowed my eyes. He smiled his million watt smile, “But then I remembered who was riding pillion and forgot about it.” He stopped short and gestured at the skies.
I dipped my head and thought to myself, as much as we want to live life the way we think we want to, and yet life has its own ways of making us live what it has leased out for us, and this in my opinion is quite a summary of the crux of wellness.
