Poornima Manco

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My Cup Runneth Over…

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I started my Guest Blog month in the hope that at least 50% of the people I had contacted for articles (people whose thoughts, lives and words I admired) would get back to me with some material. In actual fact, nearly 80% did! Yes I did pester and harangue them quite a bit (SORRY!) but my goodness, the response! I am humbled, grateful and overwhelmed beyond description.

My month overran, once again, like last time. But I didn’t mind and nor did my readers. It’s refreshing to come to a blog and read something new and unexpected. And boy, were the articles different and the topics varied!

André chronicled his unusual life and path in My unlikely journey to fatherhood. It was honest, heartfelt and emotionally uplifting. The response to his article was phenomenal. People reached out to tell him (and me) how much they admired him for his choices. His love for his children and their mothers shone like a beacon, and I hope it allowed other seemingly unlikely candidates to believe that they too can be mothers and fathers. After all, families come in all shapes and guises. It is love that holds them together.

The ghost in the office was Shantanu’s retelling of a mysterious series of events that occurred in one of his early offices. Does the supernatural exist? For a practical and rational person like Shantanu, nothing can explain away the incident he mentions. Spooky and eerie, sometimes there are things that are beyond the realm of our understanding, and maybe it’s best to leave them as is. What did you make of it?

Diya had a cushy existence till she decided to take the plunge and start teaching a group of underprivileged children in My rendezvous with God’s angels. What she found there was more rewarding than she could have ever expected. Their innocence, their eagerness to learn, their love for their teacher transformed her life. She learned to let go of the petty annoyances that plagued her, and immerse herself in giving back. To this day, it enriches her life in ways big and small.

Making mosaics became more than a hobby for Jyoti. It was an unconventional choice of craft and she encountered more than her fair share of problems, from the paucity of tools to the reluctance of other practitioners to share their skills. As a result, she started her own blog with the aim of helping other beginners and amateurs to source materials, tools and provide guidance in the process as well. Not only does she create the most beautiful mosaics, but also believes in the adage – ‘Gaining knowledge, is the first step to wisdom. Sharing it, is the first step to humanity.’ In Why do I make mosaics? Jyoti’s passion, humanity and humility shine through. She is an incredibly inspirational lady.

The Call of a Siren was an article sent to me by someone who wished to remain anonymous. If you’ve read the article, you will know why. The beauty of it is that this man has turned his life around from that lapse of judgement he details, and today he is an incredibly successful entrepreneur. He is also an avid reader and dabbles in the occasional bit of writing. It was my exhorting him to put pen to paper that created this thrilling recounting of an incident from his 20’s. I’m sure you’d agree that it reads like an episode from an exciting television series. My own heart was thumping as I read it for the first time! My friend, if you’re reading this, write more. You do have a gift.

HeartonWheels is Jeanne’s raison d’etre. She spends half her life in these refugee camps in Greece helping children overcome the trauma of escaping from war torn countries and being separated from their families. In extremely difficult conditions, she tries to fill their lives with laughter and with joy. This is not just a part time job for her, it is a calling. She is invested physically, mentally and emotionally in the well being of her charges. Her dream is to provide free education to all children in such conditions and through her mobile bus, which she is raising funds for, she hopes to realise this dream. Do have a read and contribute to her justgiving page if you can.

To say that Mohana has had an interesting life would be an understatement. A straight A student, who, for many years let her academic qualifications dictate the course of her life, then suddenly, on what seemed like a whim, let her art and talent take her on an entirely different journey. Yet, in her article, Life’s Nudges to Eke an Untrodden Path, Mohana explains how the seeds of this journey had been planted many years ago. The daughter of a renowned dancer, Mohana herself was an exceptionally talented danseuse. But it took many years, and many tiny hints from the Universe for her to realise where her true path lay. Unapologetically spiritual, she incorporates elements of her faith in her dance. There is an unalloyed joy that she transmits to her students through her teaching, that elevates her dance from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Bharat is a writer I admire immensely. His grasp on the English language is breathtaking. He can bend, twist, transmogrify and transmute words into astonishing combinations of sentences, transporting the reader into worlds where these words dance and twirl around one like whirling dervishes. A man whose imagination is so fertile, so fecund that he can trot out poem after poem without breaking a sweat. Yet, a self confessed procrastinator, it took me close to a year to get him to write about his Vipassana experience. For a man of words, how strange it must have been to have none for ten days. A retreat that is a true test of one’s mettle, but also a retreat that helps one to delve deeper into the self. Bharat’s take on it is part humorous, but there is an underlying awe and a deep love and respect for humanity that comes through. A tale of two beards is more than just about beards, it is about man’s search for meaning and silence in a world that grows louder and more chaotic each day.

Finally, the poignant and heart wrenching The Bus Stop was Joan’s tribute to her mother who suffered from Alzheimers for several years before succumbing to it. Disease of any kind strips the body of its well being and dignity, but Alzheimers strips the mind of everything. To not know oneself, one’s own life forgotten, one’s family becoming strangers, must be a horribly scary and isolating experience. Joan’s poem gives words to the wordless. It is an insight into a lost and wandering mind, trying to find its bearings, trying to grasp fruitlessly at memories that are slipping away. ‘Am I a lost article?’ is what her mother asked her once. Maybe we all are, lost in one way or another. But to be lost to oneself… what could be worse than that?

My Guest Blog month hasn’t quite ended. A colleague, the extremely intelligent, erudite, politically astute, deep thinking Joke Brunt is working on a series of articles on Brexit for me. The month of May will be devoted to her take on what Brexit stands for, and what the ramifications will be, to those of us on both sides of the fence. Do keep reading, keep commenting and stay engaged!

A very BIG thank you to all of my contributors once again.

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.

 

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 unsung heroes

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Behind every successful man, there stands a woman. This quotation, dipped as it is in veracity, came home to me particularly as I wandered through Anne Hathaway’s cottage in the village of Shottery, Warwickshire. I had already visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, seen his old home, and the home he died in. Seen the second edition of his collected works, housed as it was behind a glass case. Been astounded by his prodigious works, his overwhelming talent for tackling any subject matter, and transforming it for the appetite of his times and the times thereafter. The bard of Avon had rightfully earned his place in History as a literary giant of gargantuan proportions.

But what of his wife? There is very little known about Anne Hathaway except that she was 26 to his 18 years, and with child when they married. Neither fact was particularly outstanding in those days. Women, unless they were of noble houses, often married later, and sometimes, enceinte. There has been speculation that it was a shotgun wedding. Regardless, it was a marriage that lasted; in fact, survived long separations, the death of a child, and Shakespeare’s rumoured peccadilloes.

So why is so much of her life shrouded in mystery? Why so little of his works devoted to her? Mainly, I imagine, because, then as now, in many countries and cultures, women were relegated to the background.  They were and are the spinal columns that support the ambitions of their partners. Yet so few are given their due.

Talking to a friend over lunch the other day, she mentioned how hard they were working as a couple. On the surface, this seemed like an interesting turn of phrase, seeing as he was the one with the career, and she was a stay at home mum. But of course, for him to have that career, to work those long unsociable hours, it fell to her to hold the entire structure up. Without her, he would not be able to soar or to achieve.

Conversely, I know of many a man, who has made a similar sacrifice. In a modern day marriage, where women are equally capable, and sometimes get the career opportunities denied to the spouse, it is the husband that takes the back seat. The only down side to this trend is the statistical data that shows that despite this, it is often the woman who still takes on the lion share of housework and child rearing.

At any rate, it is time to acknowledge the contribution that these unsung heroes make. For every Shakespeare, there is an Anne. For every Margaret Thatcher, there is a Dennis. For without these strong, often stronger mates, the other would be rudderless.

To that end, I must thank my own husband, without whom I could not do what I do. The job that I do, the hours I spend away from home, and the hobbies he lets me indulge in, without censure. To use that oft repeated cliché: He is the wind beneath my wings.

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