Our last night out in 2023. We bet on the traffic being low on the night before New Year’s eve, and were thankfully right. I had seen Yuki from the metro, and thought the ambiance was great. And indeed it was. Yuki is on the second floor of a building that gives you a world of options – Leon on the ground floor, and I think, a North Indian restaurant, coming up soon on the first. As the name suggests, Yuki has Pan Asian cuisine.
In many ways, the books I read are my mind’s zeitgeist, and naturally the favourites reflect this. This year, the list is along broad lines of History & Culture, Mind & Philosophy, Systems of the World, and Fiction. And with that little prologue, as per tradition – from 2019, 2020, and 2021, and 2022 – we have this year’s list of ten (plus a few 🙈). From the 65 books I read in 2023…
Now that the Whitefield Metro is up and running, I cannot whine about traffic, and we can broaden our horizons. And that’s how we landed at a place we’ve been hearing of, for quite a while. Suzy Q, all the way across the world at Vasant Nagar, but only a 5 minute walk from the Cubbon Park Metro. We reached at 7, with a reservation, and the hope that we’d be spared the young and the boisterous. But they start young, and early.
“We never know we go,—when we are going We jest and shut the door; Fate following behind us bolts it, And we accost no more.” ~ Emily Dickinson
Death and illness is around us, and as we grow older, even more so. Or maybe we become even more conscious of it. And yet, it is as Yudhishtira answered the Yaksha’s question – “What is the greatest wonder?” with “Day after day countless people die. Yet the living wish to think they will live forever. O Lord, what can be a greater wonder?”
A few months ago, D and I were talking about something at work making me angry. Since Yoda has said that it is fear that leads to anger, and is the path to the dark side, I needed to figure out the root of that anger, and then understand the fear. I knew it wasn’t job loss (I had already quit), but was stuck.
I would learn later we tend to focus on negatives, because in the savannah, avoiding the things that might kill you was more important than seeking the things that will give you pleasure. Pleasure and pain are just feedback mechanisms, not an end. Whether it’s the pain caused by your body failing you, or mental agony. Psychological pain is an indication that our subjective map of the world needs a revision. (Cognitive Fitness, Anil Rajput) And that indeed turned out to be the case.
D insightfully pointed out that my faith in my value system, which I mistakenly assumed others at the workplace also subscribed to, might have been broken by the incident. And that would make me afraid because that is the only one I am comfortable with, and any changes in it would be a compromise I couldn’t abide by.
I would also learn later that there is a term for something like this, borrowed from physics. Hysteresis – the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments.
The last couple of months have been a great learning experience. About myself, the world at large, and the relationship. One of the important lessons has been that I am free to hold on to my values, and continue to negotiate with others, but as Marcus Aurelius rightly said, “the universe is transformation, life is opinion.“
