I THINK Therefore I AM

An individual is a culmination of experiences, a metamorphosis of life and its journey. This metamorphosis is the phases of awakening, discovering, knowing, seeking and finding, that is the defining factor of who the I is. And, as the I operates through the now and then, thoughts are assimilated to defining the I.

The Descartian saying “I think therefore I am” is a truism of my life.

In the midst of narrating my very young, yet eventful journey, I’ll unravel the making of Lavanya Devdas to you. Sit back and listen and travel with me as I take you through the crooked journey of my life this far, and of the dreams that I have to be when I am at the end of the journey on this earth.
(Oh by the way, when I mean crooked, I don’t mean it in any negative way, it is just that my life has not been simple, and a boring straight line! Therefore crooked.)

I carry myself, and my life’s journey with great equanimity, believing in the egalitarian principles of life and the value of universal ties. Being one who strives to reach such an ideal, the most beautiful and poetic words of Jon Donne almost capture my views on life in its most perfect:

And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell,
Where there shall be no cloud, nor sun,
No darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light,
No noise nor silence, but one equal music,
No fears nor hopes, but one equal possession,
No foes nor friends, but one equal communion and identity,
No ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity.

I see the humility of this equanimity in all that I do. Having traveled a fair bit in India and abroad, understanding different cultures, making the best of friends around the globe, has been a humbling journey, this far. My social work, in spite of the fast-paced corporate life that I live in, I devote an equal effort in social responsibility. Knowing that one day, I’ll bring to reality my yearning to write, and devote my life to social work, in the midst of adventure, fun, and traveling that I love.

The famous lines of Ulysses have never ceased to echo in my mind. These lines have lived through me through the years of graduation where I majored in literature and physiology and then culminating to understanding the essence of it when pursuing my masters in Literature, and finally when it all came together when teaching literature for three years in a first grade college.

The lines are quintessential to knowledge and discovery that makes life an eternal journey:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
Forever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

Through these years, especially through the years at the university, my life shaped itself, to know it cannot be un-crooked and plain. The realization that shouldering integrity on ones shoulders (devoid of a god or moral yardsticks that society thrusts on you) and be the instrument of change is so imperative in making ones life meaningful to living. This quality, I think I exhibited in me at a very young age, and I turned out to be one of my most stubborn idiosyncrasies through adolescence and now through my adulthood.

I recollect that as a child, I was inspired with the famous legend about the Buddha’s renunciation (and off course the Jataka Tales): it described of how the sheltered Shakya prince called Siddhartha wanders outside the city of Kapilavsthu and encounters successively an old man, a sick man and a funeral procession, and a wandering ascetic. Little did his father know that these sights would compel Siddhartha to think of life - decay, suffering and death that come everyone’s way. He is caught by a trance, when he sees a farmer tilting the dry earth, and a sparrow waiting to snatch an earthworm form the red earth. He cannot go back to his palace where there is "forced perfection" and pretend that these dichotomies of life do not exist. He decides to renounce the world, in order to seek answers. One night when he is twenty-nine, he walks without a whisper to the peacefully sleeping wife Yashodhara and son Rahula and silently bids farewell. Sets forth, he, into the world as a seeker of wisdom.

This has probably been one of the many things that has truly shaped in defining who I am, and giving me the true meaning of life.

Books have been my companion in many ways.

Today that has translated into traveling. It is through books and through the intermingling of cultures that I try to trace my roots to the past – beyond the now, to the past – going back sometime to the Axis age and beyond.

I am a product of my history. I am.

The Axis age lived through the great Indian civilization. Little has it peculated into people’s minds and heart. The Axis age is an age that will never be. It was an age where great thinkers of the lived at this same moment - The Buddha and Mahavir in India (though they had heard of each other, though never met!), Pythagoras in Greece Confucius, Leo Tzu and Chuang Tzu in China; the Old Testament prophets, Zorester in Persia.

This has also helped me understand the greatness of our civilization that I have begun to believe that life is a continuous process of knowing. Today I can firmly say that I understand the Decartian philosophy through understanding my country, its history, its socio –political-historic evolution, and thus understanding who I am. It is only through a consciousness of the centuries that has been; a person of character is born. Therefore, I am because of the multitudes of hues that make this land, and therefore I am a product of my consciousness through the civilizations that have come before me.


Mourning the death of M.k Gandhi, Albert Einstein asserted:
“Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.”

Gandhi himself put it, “the quest foe truth cannot be prosecuted in a cave” – a sentiment that the Buddha would have approved. His life long attempt as a leader of the anti-colonial movement was to infuse morality into the realm of politics where falsehood and violence have become widely accepted norms.

This collective history defines who I am. I am a product of colonization. I am a woman. I AM.

I am also a Gandian (no I am not old and old fashioned). It is seldom in life that people affect change in us, but for me I think there has been one person who has affected change in me. It is in the words of M.K Gandhi “You must be the change you wish to see in the world” that inspires me to be instruments of change on the lives simple things of integrity and truth.

In the meanwhile, as I live through, day after day, I would need to examine the breaths of my life and see the world through Blake’s apocalyptic vision:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour…

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