Poornima Manco

Author

Guest blogger

The Bus Stop – by Joan Foulks

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I waited for the bus

But the bus just passed me by

I had the ticket in my hand

The schedule memorised

 

The destination isn’t clear

Just somewhere far away from here

Somewhere where I won’t be scared

Where my aloneness can be shared

 

I’m tired of staring at the wall

The words in books I can’t recall

My past times now so meaningless

Their joys? – diminished nothingness

 

I can’t remember who I am

Or friends I might have known

We’re all strangers in my brain

Silent shadows each alone

 

Time has somehow stopped for me

Invisible I can’t get free

I’ve become the living dead

Hopeless, all I feel is dread

 

The Present needs the Past and Future

To be real and not conjecture

Lost in timeless fantasy

I’m angry that I can’t find me

 

(Am I a lost article? –

Or a God Particle

In a quantum parallel

Not lost but doing rather well?)

 

I want my life to seem familiar

Not full of loneliness and terror

I want to love and laugh again

I want to live! – not just pretend

 

Why can’t destiny be kind

To my kaleidoscopic mind

Make my worries go away

Make the Past come out to play?

 

If I could just get on that bus

I think I’d sweep away the dust

So memories’ ghosts could reappear

In a clearer atmosphere

 

I know I’d ride and ride and ride

Till I remembered when I died

So I could finally find some peace

And my soul could be released

Into the endless sea

Or the burning sapphire sky

My heart a dancing wild balloon

Drifting towards eternity

 

A poem about dementia by Joan Foulks.

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NPR broadcast a story about a senior care home in Dusseldorf where most of the residents needed only slight assistance, but there were also a significant number who suffered from dementia. Increasingly, some of these residents would walk outside the home and get lost. The Assisted Living Home did not want to have a ‘lock down’ situation, creating a prison atmosphere for those who were mentally and physically sound, but they were also worried about harm coming to those who needed a bit more attention. They thought and thought and then came up with the idea to build a bus stop, a fake one, a place that had the appearance of being a bus stop but where no buses would actually stop. This worked like a charm! The wanderers would gravitate  towards the bus stop and sit endlessly, not marking the passage of time and patiently waiting for the bus that never came. The staff would make a point of checking the bus stop often, to collect their charges and bring them back inside.

It is human nature to want to discover, change surroundings, explore, no matter what the circumstances of ones life. I wrote this poem for my mother. Many of the phrases I used were said to me by her and her fellow companions at the care home where she spent the last three years of her life.

In memory of Margie who would have been 98 on the 29th of April.

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A TALE OF TWO BEARDS/ SILENCE OF SOUND / CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE VIPASSANA KIND – Bharat Shekhar

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A few days ago, searching for skeletons in my cupboard, I came across this pinkish red, rectangular piece of paper. One side had serrated edges, as though it had been torn out of a larger piece. The paper read – 

NAME : Bharat Shekhar

ACCOMMODATION : MA-2A. 

I stared blankly at it, no recollection whatsoever of what it was about. But as they say, sometimes you just have a gut feeling that you are looking at something important. In this case, it was more a butt feeling. My butt was trying to tell me something.

I turned the paper over, and memory came flooding in. On the other side was printed, “Please tear this portion and insert it in the plastic tag attached to your cushion, which will be allotted to you in the meditation hall.”

Aah! No wonder I had a butt feeling. This paper was proof that for ten days my butt and the aforementioned ‘cushion’ had almost become a continuation of each other for ten plus hours a day – a torture that slowly turned to acceptance and then into a feeling of quiet (and quite numb) achievement. 

OK. So, let me get to what this is all about. Last year, I attended a ten day Vipassana course July 1-10, Jaipur, bang in the middle of a heatwave. Not the most clement of time to be without any air conditioning, that too, in close confines with 150 other profusely sweating bodies, trying to stay absolutely quiet and still and observe one’s breathing and/or sensations. To add to it, outside, in the surrounding Aravali hills,  the peacocks and peahens would be screaming their heads off pleading to the rain gods. To mere mortals, their cries sounded like petulant, ‘Mein hu! Mein hun! (I am! I am!)’, a reminder of our egos, just when we were trying to forget them.  

In the final count however, the physical discomfort, the mental distractions, the vow of silence, the abstinence, all added to and became a part of that experience that was far greater than its parts, that gestalt called Vipassana. 

But again I get ahead of myself. So let me describe the movement step by step. Ever since I had heard about Vipassana’s rigorous meditation regime from a practicing, enthusiast friend, more than a decade and a half ago, I had been instinctively drawn towards it. When I found out that it was entirely non-denominational, non religious and rationalist, that longing to attend a course and experience it myself became an itch. 

However, laziness and other circumstances intervened and it was only last year that I finally got to fill out the online form. I realised the true magnitude of that operation when I saw there that there were over 165 Vipassana centres  dotted all over the world. All were run entirely by volunteers, did not charge anything from the participants (not even for board and lodging), and depended entirely on donations. They did not want to spread, or propagate any religion or ideology apart from the meditation practice itself. For more details, you can check out https://thali.dhamma.org/ 

So it came to pass that I packed my rucksack, and found myself at the Jaipur Vipassana Thali (centre), on a hot afternoon on the first of July 2018. Looking at the other people registering (average age mid twenties), it was clear that I was in the ‘Uncleji’ category. The Centre (Thali) was tucked away in a verdant bowl of the Aravalis, the haunt of langoors, peacocks, peahens, and (allegedly) a leopard too. It covered several acres of prime property with a few large buildings that included the dining halls (two), the prayer halls (four) and a grand pagoda. Apart from these, the property was dotted with small structures, which turned out to be double rooms that would be the participants’ homes for the next ten days. 

Clearly a well oiled operation, it was run entirely by volunteers or Sevaks, who looked after all the activities and needs of the participants, which were many and varied. They ranged from answering queries to serving food, collecting laundry to be cleaned to running the projector for the daily hour long pravachans (talks) by SN Goenka, the person who had popularised Vipassana. The teacher who led the meditations was also a volunteer.

So what was the whole hullabaloo about? Let me quote from the horse’s mouth, their site https://thali.dhamma.org/vipassana.shtml :

“To learn Vipassana it is necessary to take a ten-day residential course under the guidance of a qualified teacher. The courses are conducted at established Vipassana Centres and other places. For the duration of the retreat, students remain within the course site, having no contact with the outside world. They refrain from reading and writing, and suspend any religious practices or other disciplines. They follow a demanding daily schedule which includes about ten hours of sitting meditation. They also observe silence, not communicating with fellow students; however, they are free to discuss meditation questions with the teacher and material problems with the management.

There are three steps to the training. First, the students practice abstinence from actions which cause harm. They undertake five moral precepts, practicing abstention from killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct and the use of intoxicants. The observation of these precepts allows the mind to calm down sufficiently to proceed with the task at hand. Second, for the first three-and-a-half days, students practice Anapana meditation, focusing attention on the breath. This practice helps to develop control over the unruly mind.

These first two steps of living a wholesome life and developing control of the mind are necessary and beneficial, but are incomplete unless the third step is taken: purifying the mind of underlying negativities. The third step, undertaken for the last six-and-a-half days, is the practice of Vipassana: one penetrates one’s entire physical and mental structure with the clarity of insight.” 

And thus it came to be, that I found myself in room MA2, a tiny unit with two beds, a ceiling fan and an attached bathroom. In complete silence. The only thing that made a noise was the fan, or the bed creaking occasionally, or the peacocks and peahens mournfully but unsuccessfully calling out for rain.

Every morning, at about 3.45 am a volunteer went around the rooms, gently tinkling a hand held bell, which served as a bell to wake up the volunteers. From then onwards till 9.30 pm, it was (with three short breaks for food and rest), meditation, meditation and meditation, totalling to about ten hours. 

I will not bore you with chronological details, just a few brief impressions, about how it went for me. I can broadly divide it into three phases, death of the idyllic and idealised picture, stare into the void, and rebirth.

In the first phase, all those idealised notions of miraculous, heavenly meditation that would cure one of all past life baggage and ills, solve lifelong existential questions and so on,  got peremptorily and rudely thrown out of the first available window of the meditation hall. A few fans desultorily whirled above. It was awfully hot to be enclosed in a hall with 100 other profusely sweating bodies (all male as there was strict segregation). Sitting in the lotus position, the back drooped like a limp lettuce. Without any back support, the spine arched into an aching curve. The legs fell sleep, while the rest of you only wished that it could. After a while, all these discomforts were dwarfed by the pins and needles (which in time, assumed the size of scimitars and knives)  that were seemingly being driven into the backside by some invisible but malevolent meditation devil. 

This was only the physical part. The mental disintegration was even more extreme. It was almost impossible to stay in the present and focus calmly on the breath for more than a few seconds, before every useless, negative thought, worry and fear came flooding in. This was the second phase, ‘the dark night of the soul’, and one tossed and turned both mentally and physically, wishing one was anywhere else but(t) here. 

However, we had been warned in advance (by the teacher and the nightly videos of SN Goenka) about this phenomenon. It was normal, and one had to cross these stages to reach the third. After the third day, which was the worst for most people, the negativity soon eased. There was a calm(er) acceptance of discomforts, both mental and physical, and greater ability to focus on breath and sensations. There were moments of euphoria, when the whole body and soul combined in one unity and soared high above in the heavens. New solutions suddenly presented themselves to ancient problems. There was a feeling of sudden camaraderie and love for all humanity. Sigh. We had been warned against this opposite extreme. The aim of Vipassana was not to get a ‘high’, but to aspire for equanimity, and achieve an equipoise which accepted both good and bad sensations with equal detachment. Tough task, but over the course of these ten days of simple living, one began to be aware that this was a worthy ideal to aspire for. As an aside here, it is easy to want to be detached from ones negatives – all those fears and worries, but it is much more difficult to not be attached to ones feel good factors. There were moments of that calmness (tip of the iceberg), and a feeling if the benefits were to attach, it would have to be a lifelong practice, not just a one off, but a daily  one. To really get the feel, you have to experience it. As they keep emphasising: Vipassana is entirely experiential. Words cannot do it justice. You have to sit through it, breathe and feel it in your pores, in your senses to even begin to get it.

Oh, and before I end (somewhat hurriedly, as one could go on and on and on), you may not have noticed but a part of the title of the piece was ‘A tale of two beards’. So let me throw some light on that mystery. One of the beards was mine, a rapidly whitening French beard, sometimes sported by the English speaking ‘elite’ of this country. 

The second beard belonged to my roommate, the one I shared the room with for those ten days. He came in somewhat late on the first day and I groaned mentally, partly because by then I had been hoping that I would have a single occupancy, and partly because of his appearance. If I was of uncleji age, he belonged to the granduncleji phase of his life. In his mid 70s, the man was very short (below five feet), and so bowlegged that he swayed from side to side with every step he took. He was clad in a saffron robe and carried a tattered thaila (bag) from which I could see another garua vastra peeping out. He gave off such strong emanations of Amla tel and Dant Manjan that they almost surrounded him like an aura. He had thick bristling eyebrows, white hair tied in a topknot, a Sadhu’s flowing beard, which he also tied in a knot, and an expression of the sort that reminded me of Durvasa, the perpetually displeased sage.

I wonder what impression he formed about me. From his expression, it certainly could not have been very favourable. Anyhow, that’s how far our communication went for the next nine days, as we were not meant to talk or even look at each other. Before we wound up very night, there was a recorded video talk by SN Goenka (the man who popularised this practice the world over). In these talks, using popular idiom and language, he often tore apart the superstitions of religious beliefs, especially things like blind faith in rituals and the harm they did to true spirituality. Post these, when we returned to the room to sleep, I thought I could espy a troubled expression on my roommate’s face. “Ah,” I conjectured smugly, “his traditional beliefs are being challenged and he does not like it. Good.” On the sixth night, I woke up to find him feverishly reading (though we had been told to keep no reading or writing material)  in torchlight from a pamphlet titled ‘Tarak Mantra’ and reciting something over and over, under his breath. In my mind, this confirmed the ‘fact’ that he was a traditional, reactionary sadhu who was getting his comeuppance by having to reexamine his precious casteist beliefs rather late in life. 

On the tenth day we broke the silence and participants were allowed to talk to each other. That’s when the walls of misconceptions that we had formed about each other came crashing down. For instance, (due to my bulk and the cut of my beard), he had thought I was either a businessman (aka gold smuggler) from Dubai, or an actor who did ‘negative’ roles in TV serials. Haha. Then he introduced himself as a Mahant or temple keeper from a small hamlet called Ravat Bhata near Kota. Far from being hurt by Shri Goenka challenging traditional beliefs, he waxed eloquent about how much sense he had disseminated in his videos, and how important it was to have a ‘modern’ view in life. At this point, he simpered a bit and said that he also used to give weekly talks (pravachans) in his temple, talks that he blushingly admitted were largely attended by ‘ladies’. Now, he was running out of material for them, and part of his reason for attending this course was to get inspiration from Goenka’s speaking technique and ‘borrow’ some of his style and content. His parting request to me was to procure some joke books and send them to him, so that he could deliver better punchlines in his pravachans to the ladies.

So much for those impressions that we form about each other. This apart from the Vipassana technique was the other valuable life lesson I learnt. We are so much in haste to form opinions about, judge, and put each other in prefabricated moulds of appearances that we forget each one of us is far more, and far different in reality.  Each and every one. 

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Bharat Shekhar lives in New Delhi.He tries to write when he can, and doodles when he can’t. When in doubt, he gazes at his navel.

Life’s Nudges to Eke an Untrodden Path- Mohana Narayan

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Holi, the festival of colours, was just around the corner. I was commuting back from my work at TCS, my first job out of college, in Delhi back in 1995. The bus journey back from Gulab Bhawan to Gurgaon required me to take a DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation)  bus from ITO to Dhaula Kuan, and then board a Haryana Roadways bus from Dhaula Kuan to Gurgaon, each about an hour’s journey, depending on the traffic.

I used to observe the differences in the interactions of the people in the two sections of the journey. The Haryana Roadways bus would be filled with older middle-aged folks typically used to the long commutes, and who seemed to know many on the bus. One of the middle-aged men would take out a couple of decks of cards and lay out his briefcase between the seats as a tray and a few of them would start playing their card games amongst chit-chat and entertaining jokes. It had been on one of these commutes that I had struck up a conversation with a co-passenger, a lady I saw regularly reading a book on Buddhism. Something about her aura had me asking her questions about the book, and we ended up having some good discussions. After a few chats, she had invited me to their Buddhist SGI group meeting and a couple of months earlier, I had attended one of their meetings and found their resonant mantra chanting to be a powerful source of connecting deeper. In fact, more recently I had started waking up early to chant for an hour or so and somehow would find that on those days, things would just fall into place and somehow I would be in rhythm with the universe.

In contrast, the DTC buses would be filled with people who had shorter commutes, each busy and lost in their own world, mostly avoiding any substantial conversation with their co-passengers. Not to mention the riff-raff crowd that would regularly harass the women on these buses, in a city that was infamous for ‘eve-teasing’ even 20 years ago.

On this particular day, there was a man standing right next to where I was seated, leaning in more closely than required, making me quite uncomfortable. I was still in my early 20s, a tad shy to create a huge hue and cry, but did tell him in no uncertain terms to stand properly (it was a super crowded bus, with no leg-room but one could perceive the unwarranted brushes). Even after a few sharp remarks, this man continued to push and shove and take every opportunity to rub up against me. At this point, I just started chanting my mantra in my mind and just zoned inwards, as the bus still had a good half hour or more to reach my destination. As guided, I requested my Higher Self to annul any karmic equation between this “unknown” person and me, seeking forgiveness for any past karmic negativity on my part and sought help in this situation.

The bus was moving at its regular Delhi DTC speed, the breeze flowing in through the windows, which had a couple of bars across them and I was just tuned inwards. The most amazing thing happened next! Splaaaash! A wet, plump, water-balloon came flying in through one of the windows (missing the bars across a moving bus) and slapped across this man’s face, getting him all wet! The physics of the path of that balloon as well as the math of the probability of it landing on his face are mind-numbing! All I remember is his mumbling something incoherent and getting off the bus at the very next stop. This was during Holi, and somehow a balloon, some kid had thrown at some other kid, had become the missile that launched my heart into steadfast faith for the rest of my life!

My God! Yes, I use that term so lightly without realising how close my God is to me. The one who has so many galaxies to attend to, looking after me, hearing my sincere, inward plea, a teeny-tiny soul in the vast cosmos of creation. Imagine! No less than the story of Narasimha Avatara (which I now teach as part of a Dashavatara dance piece to young dancers), where God could no longer take the atrocities of an arrogant father towards his own son and stepped out of a stone pillar, from an intangible form into a living, breathing form to protect the boy and his steadfast faith.  

I believe God is willing to help out, as long as I own up to my mistakes and am willing to grow and learn from all the drama that happens around me. A humbling but mind-boggling experience for me at an early age that formed a foundation of Faith, that has been tested many times since. And there have been times, when I was disappointed momentarily or wondered why I had to deal with certain situations with seemingly no help from the Higher one. In most of these cases, however, a few years down the line, when I looked back in retrospect, those very challenges where I did not get the help I asked for, were the ones that helped forge my next growth arc.

Even my current full-time job/mission of teaching classical Bharatanatyam (an Indian classical dance form) and something that I enjoy so much, has been a result of multiple challenges that were thrown my way. After working in software technology and product management for about 15 years including 3 years at TCS, 7 at Oracle and 5 at Yahoo!, when I was laid-off unfairly (or so it seemed to me) by a man I had myself interviewed and hired into a position before going on maternity leave, only to come back after the break to find my work being continuously undermined, partly I believe due to some feeling of  insecurity, it had seemed like a big blow. Though in part, I was relieved because with two kids including an infant, I had been spreading myself thin with early morning calls with EU and late night calls with the Bangalore office, with diminishing time for the family. Even so, without a full-time job, life seemed incomplete.

I decided to go with the flow, and start an Indian after-school program, based on what I felt was needed for my son, who was in third grade then. My Masters degree and education in Entrepreneurship from Stanford came in handy and gave me the required impetus as well. The advice of my Professor Tom Kosnik rung in my ears – “When you want to start something new, don’t wait till you get it all perfect – just start somewhere, and things will evolve in the right direction!”.

I put together a creative program (the first Indian after-school program in Bay Area, thankfully many have started since 2008), with wholesome snacks and multiple classes including Hindi, Vedic Math, Yoga, Indian music, Bollywood dance, Bharatanatyam, Spelling Bee, Science Bee etc during the after-school hours so kids could spend more time with their parents on the weekends. This ran very well for 5 years and I had 25 kids attending classes from 3pm to 6pm daily, in a rented space with 3 rooms. In particular, I started enjoying teaching Bharatanatyam dance classes, as my mother and Guru had been performing (an AIR A-grade artiste) and teaching for over 30 years, while for many of the other subjects, I hired other instructors.

Then God struck again with a different water-balloon! Disaster or challenge is just another name for God, I say. Just before the summer break, five years into running SarvaGuna, my printer which I used to use to print worksheets for the kids broke down; the projector we used to use for presentations stopped working; the rental space came up for leasing and the landlord wanted to only lease for a period of 3 years minimum.

I was feeling bogged down by the operational logistics of running an after-school program (including the pick-ups of students from various schools etc.) but in contrast enjoyed the time spent in creative choreography and found teaching dance to be truly fulfilling.  I decided to listen to God carefully and check if he was guiding me on to my next step. Stepping back, I realised it was teaching dance that I enjoyed the most, and the hours would just melt away in dance classes! I realised that whenever I am dancing or teaching dance, every moment is spent right here in the present – there is no band-width for the past or the future, so every minute dancing was a minute of meditation for me.

Having just moved into a new home, I decided to be courageous and not risk-averse. I took a leap of faith, with just a handful of students to focus on teaching Bharatanatyam dance classes at SarvaGuna, and built a dance studio in our home itself. I told myself that as long as I am doing what I am passionate about and good at, other things will take care of themselves.

And they did! Everything just fell into place like it was meant to be. I enjoyed the time choreographing new pieces, especially those that helped me connect with my God in various shapes and form. Soon students just came by word-of-mouth and I started earning enough for a decent livelihood; we started doing very well at local competitions and now my summer Arangetram (solo debut recital of 3 hours) students have started performing beautifully! A few months ago, Indian Raga approached me to choreograph a piece for a collaboration. (Here is the Hanuman Chaalisa I enjoyed choreographing and dancing to: http://youtu.be/eWaRWqb5FNs ). We have 4 summer Arangetrams planned for this summer. In late March 2019, at a competitive Bharatanatyam competition (only Bharatanatyam entries were evaluated exclusively), SarvaGuna students won awards and placed in top three across all categories! (https://www.facebook.com/166823550147119/posts/1194310570731740/)

While my Faith has come a whole circle back to appreciate the depth of content in our Hindu texts, my spirituality continues to let God intervene as and when needed in my life. In different life situations, when one feels like one just got dumped with a bucket of cold water, it is perhaps the Universe’s way of nudging us along a different direction. I know my own story is incomplete and there may be more surprises, jolts and nudges to come my way in this roller-coaster life. All I can do is hang on and have Faith. Let us all pay attention to those nudges (or jolts), seek courage for travelling down untrodden paths and we may just discover new joys and lessons come our way…

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Mohana Narayan
Website: www.SarvaGuna.com
FB: www.facebook.com/SarvaGunaLearning/photos
Video: http://youtu.be/eWaRWqb5FNs

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With a masters in Entrepreneurship from Stanford University and a background in Computer Science Engineering (Birla Institute of Tech, Ranchi) prior to 2008, Mohana spent the early part her career focused on product management in the software technology world.

Mohana Narayan has also trained in Bharatanatyam from a very young age under the able guidance of her mother and teacher Guru Smt. Usha Narayan, who is a renowned dancer and AIR A grade artiste from New Delhi. Smt. Usha Narayan, has passed down a deeply ingrained sense of aesthetic values and awareness of clean lines and angles of movement and a natural gift for heart-felt abhinaya or expression. Mohana has performed from a very young age along with her mother in many performances and dance productions in India and abroad. She has assisted in training young students for over 20 years now. Mohana enjoys teaching dance as well as formulating unique choreographies. She has presented various thematic productions over the years including recent ones such as Navavidha Sambandham, Andaal Anubhavam, Sri Ramanuja Vaibhavam, Nruttya Nikshepa Atma Nikshepa, training hundreds of students for these large productions with a creative flair founded on pain-staking attention to detail. Mohana trains students of various age groups with an eye for detail and focus on one-on-one attention promoting individual strengths. As the founder of SarvaGuna, which has since 2008 conducted many workshops, classes, and student performances, she has worked with students of various age groups and enjoys bringing out the best in each individual. Mohana’s forte is understanding, utilising and enhancing stage dynamics’s whether it be in solo or group performances, as well as to seek out the divine, magical element in literary compositions. While her primary training in classical dance has been from her mother Guru Usha Narayan in the Pandanallur style, she has also trained with other instructors and Gurus of the Tanjavur, Kalakshetra and Vazhuvoor styles. She continues to train and learn from senior Gurus at every possible opportunity. She incorporates the most dynamic of these aspects in her own choreographies. In addition, she continues to train post-arangetram students in new items for a second margam to advance their skills and finesse in this beautiful artform.

Mohana lives with her husband and two children in the Bay Area of California, where she has been residing for over 20 years now.

 

HeartonWheels – Jeanne Meuwissen

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The day is Sunday, the 31st of March and I am holding my first cup of coffee of the day, on a balcony in Greece, with a beautiful view of  the mountains and the sea. My name is Jeanne Meuwissen and I am a 52 year old woman from Holland. Don’t worry I am not going through a midlife crisis or trying to do a sequel to the Shirley Valentine movie or Mamma Mia! I would’t like to give people nightmares as my singing talents aren’t that great!!

This Greek story is about a journey that started two years ago and the first stop was my heart. You don’t need a ticket to get on. Just keep on reading…

Everyone at a certain point in their lives (especially around 50) starts to wonder: where is my path going in life? I guess I got a double whammy as I lost a dear friend of mine while I was pondering this question. Midlife for me was like the Universe gently placed her hands upon my shoulders, pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “Find your path… Time is growing short… There are unexplored adventures ahead… It is time to show up and be seen.”

I do have a beautiful life, surrounded by wonderful friends and family, and I am still enjoying my career as a flight attendant after 25 years. But I always felt that there was something that was missing. I do believe everyone on this Earth has been made for some particular work and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

So, I started looking deep inside my heart and I rediscovered one of my biggest passions again – teaching children. I was a primary school teacher before my flying career, and to me there is nothing as precious as the ability to be able to make someone smile, especially a child. This world is in deep trouble, but as a teacher you do have a big part in making this earth a better place for every child, and education plays a big role.

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It wasn’t a surprise to me then that I got asked by one of my flying partners to come and help her support children from Syria in a refugee camp in northern Greece, close to Thessaloniki.

The first time I drove into such a camp it felt like my heart was being ripped out of my body. Children were living in tents. It was cold in January with no heating and no appropriate clothing. And their stories! What they had been through on their dangerous journey to Greece in dinghies, being ripped away from their family, friends and familiar surroundings. I fought back my tears as I watched these children doing artwork and smiling. I was astonished by their resilience.

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There in the Polikastro camp, as I stood in living conditions that were horrendous, I found that I was still able to laugh and bring joy to these children. I found the light in my heart. I just had to let it burn brightly.

This is where the idea of the HeartonWheels bus originated.

HeartonWheels will be a mobile bus that will provide mobile education for traumatised children in a safe place. As Article 26 of the UN states:
Everyone has a right to education.
Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.
Elementary education shall be compulsory.

The HeartonWheels Bus will be that safe place where children can regain their childhood again through lots of play, joy and laughter. Play is a universal language that initiates the human spirit into a life of freedom, happiness, unity, balance, humanity and greatness. These children never had a childhood where they could play and be themselves, freely. Their childhoods were, and still are, tainted by war and violence.

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My journey has taken me to some interesting destinations and I am still travelling  through Greece. Right now, I am working in a nursery school in a refugee camp called Malakasa. The children there are mostly from Afghanistan, and although we don’t speak the same language, I do feel we are making a difference in their daily lives by providing them with education in a safe place, where they can regain some of their childhood with lots of  love, learning and laughter included.

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As we have had some bumps in the road like funding and getting permission to go into a camp, the HeartonWheels Bus hasn’t reached its destination yet. Its parking space is still  in my heart. But in the last two years I have experienced so much love and support from my family, friends, flying colleagues and even strangers, through donations, fundraisers, beautifully written cards and comments.

It has kept the light shining bright in my heart and I know for sure, that one day in the not so distant future, I will be pushing the button of the doors on the HeartonWheels Bus to provide a path to a brighter future for all the children on this earth, no matter which religion.

In every religion, there is love. Yet love itself has no religion!

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If you wish to contribute or follow the route of the HeartonWheels Bus do click on this link:
http://heartonwheels.co

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My name is Jeanne Meuwissen.

I am the proud founder of the grass roots company HeartonWheels.
My educational background is in teaching primary school that I combined with my flying career of 25 years. Last year I graduated with a degree in trauma psychology for children.
Since the Syrian war the world has seen the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II and we know there isn’t a short-term solution. For that reason and knowing that almost 51% percent of the 19.5 million refugees are children living in camps where only their basic needs are met, I started volunteering 2 years ago. I worked as a volunteer teacher at Armando Aid school in refugee camp Oinofyta Greece and in Calais with the Schoolbusproject. At the same time I started studying trauma psychology at the Institute Freunde Der Erziehungskunst in Karlsruhe, Germany.
After seeing children living in horrible conditions and having no access to education, I decided to fly part time and move to Greece where I founded my charity called HeartonWheels.
HeartonWheels stands for a school bus that provides First Aid for the Souls of traumatised children through Mobile Education in a Child friendly Space at various refugee camps in Greece. HeartonWheels is establishing itself since October 2018 through working with various organisations throughout Greece at several refugee camps. Right now I am working in a refugee camp called Malakasa 60 km north of Athens together with a fabulous team of Greek Nursery teachers.
But in a lot of camps there aren’t any provisions like this and children are still deprived of their right to education in a safe place. Although this crisis isn’t that present anymore in the daily media it is still an ongoing disaster for many people and won’t disappear as there isn’t a short-term solution. 
Children are still living in situations of deepest despair. Let’s not forget about them so they don’t turn  into a lost generation. Let’s open these doors of The HeartonWheels Bus together and give these children, no matter what religion, a chance to a brighter future by making a donation and keep on following us through this link:

Why do I make Mosaics? – Jyoti Bhargava

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I’ve long wanted to jot down my thoughts on why I make mosaics or what this art means to me. This post gives me that opportunity, and I hope I can gather most of my sentiments while sharing some here. 

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How… 

I’m over 50, and straddling multiple roles of a mother, wife, home-maker and a part-time business manager to my husband’s tech consulting work. Being an early entrant into a full-time job, I forced myself to get organised with tasks on hand but managed my academics in a rather ad hoc way. The undergrad Commerce degree came through while being in a full-time administrative job and much later, at age 40, I studied for a Master’s in Human Resources management. In all this, my love for reading continued, I got married, had a son, and found Net based research to be my regular pursuit. Being around my geeky spouse who seemed to be on a regular quest for learning, helped get familiar with a personal computer rather early for India and adopt a tablet or a Kindle or Alexa as a natural progression. My reading on the Net would be focussed on the interest or requirements of that time, but my teenage love for drawing and hand-crafting décor items became a faint childhood memory. I’d use my sense of aesthetics to choose and buy affordable art for my home or design my simple clothes but the thought of creating appealing art felt too far-fetched. I’d tell myself that I didn’t have a fine arts education so how could I make something nice enough to want to delight an onlooker!  

Then about 4 years ago, the craft of making mosaics came into my purview and made me think differently. Four years prior to my initiation, I’d seen a wrought iron table in a host’s balcony in Goa and found myself attracted to it. The host had simply described it as something made by a local artisan who had been hard to locate to do more such work. I wasn’t sure of the name of this rather crudely—but also charmingly—assembled artwork. I remember it as a composition of solid colour ceramic tiles that were possibly broken by a hammer and stuck to a metal table base with white cement filling the gaps in between. Back in Gurgaon in India, where I lived, some 4 years later, I came across a sale post in a Facebook group where the creator had shared some colourful functional items like coasters and trays and called them mosaics. She had invited members to buy those items at a fare. I figured from her FB Page that she’d learned to make mosaics while in Australia. It occurred to me then that even though more mindfully composed, these were created on the lines of the mosaic table of my distant dreams. It’s a bit of a long–winded story as to how I got to finally enter the world of creating mosaics, and its details aren’t all pleasant. Suffice it to say that the last 4 years have seen me reading up on this art, pleading with friends travelling from the US to fit my tools and books in their luggage, and broadening my understanding of the art of mosaics.  

What… 

Mosaics are known to some as an assemblage of certain materials on a backer to create a composition or just a splash of colours. The ancient Romans used carefully cut stone squares or trapezoids to create floor mosaics to make those formations long–lasting. Particular attention was paid to the andamento or the flow of such geometric shapes. Later, this artwork reached the churches where elaborate life-like compositions were created on the Christ or Mother Mary with coloured stained or gold-leaf glass presumably to fascinate the church visitors. To this date, I’m told that amazingly ornate mosaics can be seen in European or American churches. As the art of making mosaics reached the artist studios in the west, the otherwise fixed rules on the shapes or flow of materials went through innovations, and the outcomes were varied, vibrant, experimental as also gorgeous!  Artists drew inspiration from nature, folkart, quilting, embroidery and more to translate their ideas into coloured glass mosaics. Some introduced broken or carefully cut floral elements from crockery to create more unique stories with their mosaics.  

My Mosaics… 

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I started with 20x20x4 mm vitreous glass tiles to make my first few mosaics. It helped that I could manage them with one tool alone, a pair of wheeled glass nippers. The tool wasn’t available in India so after getting 4 different brands shipped from the US, I finally had one that felt good in my hand and had stable blades. In a year’s time, I found myself welcoming challenges of cutting hard 4 mm tiles into intricate petals and small trapezoids—a shape many beginners tend to avoid. Soon, however, I noticed the predominant use of stained-glass sheets by mosaicists in the west to create bigger floral or other shapes so my interest in including them in my compositions grew. I approached a few Tiffany style stained–glass artists in my city to teach me to cut sheet glass but didn’t get their favourable response. Challenges of managing bigger and more expensive sheet glass are many as their tools are different and need a determined practice to get good with their use. It’s only in the recent times that I found a wonderfully skilled stained–glass artist who guided me through the making of a small glass carpet. I need to practice cutting sheet glass more and more to get comfortable with this material… 

Meanwhile, I remind myself that my love for mosaics really got started through that table that had used ceramic tiles so I must keep getting good with this material. All my reading and research on tile cutting realised when a mosaicist from the UK was commissioned to make a wall mural in Gurgaon, my city in India. I went and volunteered for that project for a couple of days and felt confident about cutting this hard and thick material. I do love how solid colour and printed ceramic tile mosaics look once grouted but I don’t always welcome the gear I must put on while cutting tiles. The minimum being a nose mask and protective eye glasses and the ideal being a head cover in addition. Ceramic tiles emit dust that becomes bothersome to deal with but my love for the material inspires me to want to keep working with it. 

As I’m seeing more work, my learning list has been expanding. Including crockery focals into my mosaics has long interested me but I haven’t cut much crockery yet. I dream about cutting out flowers and leaves from ornate cups or using the curvature of plates to my advantage to create petals or flowers.  This form of mosaics is called Picassitte or ‘stolen crockery’ in French. Then, being a bird-watcher, I’ve wanted to make many bird mosaics. While mosaicking a pair of parakeets, I found their eyes to be particularly tricky as the mosaic was small. It was meant to be a wedding present so had to be mindfully made. I settled on layering glass ovals but decided that I want to be able to create more realistic bird eyes by fusing bits of glass in a glass kiln. An electric kiln imported from the US costs a huge sum so I’ve acquired a small Microwave kiln for experimenting with. Presently, I’m going through Youtube videos on this kind of glass fusing and frenetically making notes… 

In my journey this far as a mosaic-maker, I’ve wanted to share my learning as I’m plodding along. I’ve found Facebook to be a helpful space to follow artist pages and to join groups where mosaicists ask or answer questions. Earlier, I would follow individual artist blogs but there weren’t many, and now I find that whoever is blogging is sharing links on their FB Page. To return the favour, I’ve opened a learners’ group oriented towards learning and practising the art in India. I found a lot of secrecy maintained by early practitioners I found in India, so I thought I would unravel this mysterious art to others. Since I can’t be sure of a platform like Facebook to maintain its current structure or rules, I’ve created a simple website where I share leads to resources. Biggest of all ‘small’ initiatives by my parameters has been to help establish a supply source for those in India for tiles and tools. A tile manufacturer I came across on Amazon responded to my queries and a year later, obliged by setting up an e-commerce website to sell glass and ceramic tiles in small quantities. Upon prodding, they included the essential tools imported from Taiwan or elsewhere so a small level studio artist in India now no longer has to search high and low for the right tools of trade.  

More unusual materials and techniques have been coming into my mosaic ambit but in closing, I should simply share my heart-felt wish here…that my hands and eyes should keep working enough to enable regular mosaic-making so my connect with this art consolidates further through my remaining life. 

 

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Jyoti Bhargava is a mosaic-enthusiast, an irregular blogger, a regular Net researcher, a recluse but a committed business manager. She believes in good Karma and perpetual learning. Her mosaic-based writings can be read at mosaicindia.in.  

 

 

 

 

The ghost in the office – Shantanu Saha

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It was the year 2004, and I had set up my own bootstrapped venture, an Executive Search Firm. Our first office was in a fairly old bungalow in the heart of South Delhi.

I had leased the entire ground floor of this bungalow, spread over an area of 3000 sq. ft. with an additional front lawn and a back courtyard. Outside the house was an old Banyan tree adjacent to the main gate, with aerial pop roots hanging from the branches, giving an eerie look and feel to the whole house. The first floor with terrace had the landlord’s family: a husband, wife, child and his elderly mother.

The ground floor of the house that we occupied had three fairly large rooms with an attached bath in each. There was an even larger drawing and dining area. Doors of some of the washrooms, especially the one in front of the house, tended to make a creaking sound whenever the wind blew. In this place I occupied one room at the back of the house from where I used to work and I had a team of three girls: Raj, Swati & Rupa who would sit and work in the adjacent room. There was also an old chap Kartik who was the office help. His job was to manage the pantry, lay out the lunch, supervise the cleaner who would come once a day and open & close the office.

The business was doing well and all was hunky dory till a series of strange events happened. Initially these were minor things.  A couple of the girls complained that after lunch when they went back to their workstations, all the windows tabs in their computers they had kept open while searching for profiles on job sites, had been closed. Another girl complained that though she had switched off the light and fan switches in their room before coming to the dining hall for lunch, they had all been mysteriously switched on when they went back. I made light of all this and told them that they were getting absent minded. However, after a while, they got it into their heads that this was all down to a ghost. They were also convinced it was a female ghost who was not bothering me but only the girls, as everything happened to them and not to me. I refused to buy into this line of thought.

Then something even more mysterious happened. It was a bright sunny afternoon in the month of June, when one of my team members Swati was discussing something with me in my room. The doorbell rang. In those days we were recruiting for our own team and we used to call candidates over to the office for an interview. The candidate would be attended to by the office boy, given a job application form and after they filled that out, Kartik would bring the candidate’s resumé and form in to me. I would send one of the girls to do the first round of interviews and if they cleared that, I would meet the candidate.

I asked Swati if she could see who the candidate was, as although the drawing room was a little far off, there was a direct line of sight from the place where she was standing in my room. She described that the girl was looking away toward the French windows overlooking the lawn and was wearing high heels and a salwar kameez. She added that she looked smart enough, and that she would meet her once Kartik had got her to finish the formalities. We then went back to our discussion.

After 10 minutes, I suddenly reminded Swati that Kartik had not yet come in with the candidate’s form. She called out and Kartik came in from the back courtyard which had an entry from the room where the girls used to sit and work. We asked him what had happened and why he hadn’t brought in the girl’s form and resumé. He asked – which girl? Swati and I looked at each other. I asked Kartik had he not opened the door when the bell rang? He said he never heard the bell ring and that he was in the back courtyard anyway. We immediately went to the drawing room and there was no one there. I was stunned! I thought I had heard the bell ring and so had Swati. Besides, she had vividly described the girl. We did not know what to make of it.

However, when I discussed  this with Raj and Rupa separately, they speculated that since Swati had recently been through a bereavement and been quite distressed, that maybe she had hallucinated the episode. Although I was not fully convinced, I thought I had what could be the best explanation under the given circumstances.

A few days later, I was talking to the girls in the room where they used to work. All the girls at that time had Personal Computers on which they worked. To ensure an uninterrupted power supply in the event of a power failure, all PC’s had a Battery Backup Device attached to them. While talking to them I walked across to the window in the room where the curtains were a little out of place. I was adjusting the curtain when all of a sudden Swati’s PCs Battery Backup Device started beeping. She looked at me in alarm. I looked at the power plug to which the battery backup device was connected on the wall which was located just below the curtain and I noticed that the switch was off. I told her that maybe the switch had shut off when I was adjusting the curtain and there was nothing to be alarmed about.

That night I was at home when at around 10 pm Swati called and her first question was – ‘Sir, what’s the backup time of the Battery Backup Device?’ At that instant, a shiver ran through me as I realised that the device had, at the very least, a 15 minute backup. It was fairly new, so its in-built alarm would not beep unless it ran out of power. If  by my moving the curtain I had inadvertently switched off the main switch from which the device was drawing power, the beeping sound could not possibly have started that soon. Swati had been working on her machine all morning, and the power backup device had beeped only when I was in the room that afternoon. Both of us realised that no logical explanations were working. She insisted I speak to the landlords about any unnatural deaths in the house.

I briefed the landlord the next day and he said he had no clue why these things were happening. He said that only his father had passed away in this house but, there was no reason why he would be spooking us. It was then that Rupa in my team disclosed some more details about the area where this house was located.

Apparently, just across the road from our house was a 5 star hotel that had been built adjacent to an old graveyard that had been there for centuries. She had worked in that hotel for a short while before she joined our firm. She said that many guests and staff in that hotel had reported hearing eerie screams on the upper floors quite frequently during the night. It had come to such a stage that hotel staff had refused to go to the upper floors late in the night. She also pointed out the Banyan tree outside our office. Banyan trees in India are associated with the God Yama, or the God of Death. The tree is often planted outside villages in India near crematoriums. It is believed to be the abode of ghosts.

Upon hearing all of this, my entire team and I decided that it would be difficult to work from there any more. We frantically searched for an alternate location and within a week shifted out.

I do not know whether the house was truly haunted or not, but our experience there was spooky enough that even now, reminiscing about these incidents sends chills down my spine.

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Shantanu resides in New Delhi, India and holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics as well as a Master’s degree in Business Administration.

He had a successful Corporate Stint in the Human Resources Function and became a Head  of HR at the age of 25 in a Manufacturing Multinational. He worked in various sectors subsequently as a Head HR, before setting up his own Executive Search Firm in 2004 that now has a presence in multiple cities across India. He is also a guest judge and speaker in various management forums & institutes in India.

He lost his father at the age of ten to a genetic disease that later affected him and his sister as well. He had multiple surgeries and a near death experience and survived to tell the tale both literally and figuratively. He wrote a book on how he overcame the disease describing his whole experience and the same is available on Amazon globally. He unfortunately lost his sister to the disease too.

He is a workaholic, likes traveling, is an amateur photographer, likes reading & writing occasionally, is an exercise freak and also has interests in the areas of Science, Arts and Politics.

He can be reached on :-

Twitter : @ShantanuSaha1

Instagram : @shantanusaha1

Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/shantanusaha/

His book – “Fight for Life: My Journey from a Fatal Disease to Good Health” is now available for Kindle on Amazon. The Paper back is also available in some countries.

The link for India is: http://www.amazon.in/dp/B014YFEFES

The link for US is: http://amzn.com/B014YFEFES

The link for UK is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B014YFEFES