H2O

Today as the world celebrates Water Day; let’s revisit the stirring story of Ralegaon Siddhi in Maharashtra, India. The drought-prone villagers were in debt. Rampant alcoholism brought along feuds and crime, especially against women. The village temple around the samadhi of ‘Yadavbaba’ had broken down. The wood from it had been used as firewood. It was to this village that Anna Hazare returned 25 years ago.

Today the temple is the hub of activity and houses a ‘grain bank’. Water is systematically harvested and three crops are grown. The village where a fifth of the families ate only one meal a day, now markets vegetables, grain, and milk. While neighboring villages wait for Government tankers to bring drinking water, Ralegaon has enough for the villagers as well as the hundreds who walk in to see Anna’s vision.

The very way of life and relationships within the village has been transformed. Everything is built by community effort. People get married in community marriages. All this has been achieved by decades of dedication by Anna who came from a poor family in debt, took an early retirement from the army as a truck driver, inspired by Swami Vivekananda's dictum, ‘The purpose of life is to serve others.’

A once destitute village is now, a brand for appropriate development. It isn’t enough to identify what is wrong, we must initiate action and back it with committed perseverance. Anna has shown the way of involving community to change the situation. Ralegaon Siddhi is stimulation to be better at managing the real elixir of life – water!

To BE BETTER at overcoming the H2O situation,

We must walk Anna’s path of collective action!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

BUILDING BRIDGES

Two brothers with adjacent farms fell apart after years of farming side by side, sharing machinery and labour. The relationship soured because a small misunderstanding grew into an exchange of bitter words. The enmity resulted in the younger brother excavating the meadow between their lands to create a deep trench.

The infuriated elder brother asked a carpenter to block his brother out of view by building a high fence. The farmer went to town and returned at sunset to see that the carpenter had not built any fence. Instead he had built a bridge across the trench! And his estranged younger brother was coming across, his hand outstretched and saying, ‘after all I've said and done, you have built this bridge’. The brothers laid to rest their differences as they embraced on the bridge.

So often, small misunderstandings develop into major rifts. The deepest of divides can be overcome, only by the building of bridges. If we cannot bridge the gap ourselves, we must permit mutual well-wishers to build the bridge like the carpenter did. The bridge of communication helps us to be better at crossing across the unwarranted rift in a relationship.

So many gaps widen only because there were no attempts to bridge the break-ups. We must re-look at all our conflicts and examine them to see whether they are divergences on values and principles or just frivolous misunderstandings. Most of the time, we discover it is the latter and when do realise the fact, may the bridge be built!

May we BE BETTER at building bridges of connection…

to overcome every divisive gap in the bond of association!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

YIN-YANG

In the 1980s, when television was new to Goa, the start of the telecast would bring into view the rotating form of ‘yin-yang’ that evolved into the logo of Doordarshan. However, we were not aware of the deep meaning of one of the oldest and best-known life symbols which though opposite, are bound together as parts of a mutual whole.

As two aspects of a single reality, Yin and Yang are forces that always seek balance. Each contains the seed of the other (seen as a black spot of Yin in the white Yang and vice versa). This Monday muse, on occasion of the International Women’s day, seeks to connect to the manifestations of Yin and Yang as female and male. Though seemingly contrary forces, they are interconnected and interdependent.

It is pertinent to note that in Yin and Yang, every advance is matched by a retreat, and every rise transforms into a fall. They are not meant to replace each other but actually become each other through a constant flow of interaction and transformation. Yin and yang constantly interact and hold significant lessons for both, men and women.

It is not only women, but men, too, who need empowerment in a male-chauvinistic world. Both have to accept their own individualities as well as the commonalities. To be better, we must respect the dignity of all sorts of roles that we look down upon due to regressive conditioning in society. We must discover that we are like yin-yang, holding the seed of complementary harmony that needs to connect to deep roots of understanding each other while stretching out to the unlimited skies!

Together, women and men create a beautiful way…

Yin and Yang show the way to BE BETTER, each day!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

Leaves sprout… flowers bloom

Trees smile and chase the gloom

Spring is here to spread the cheer

Shed your inhibitions, have no fear!

Here’s the flavoured milk, say cheers

For the veterans, open the bhang & beers

The fire’s going down, bring more wood

There it lies where once the tree stood

A full moon looks on as winds stoke embers,

in the season of spring, trees get dismembered

Wood chars, so does the plastic trash

flowers singe smearing earth with ash.

Next we get to spray the colours everywhere

Made from mud, paint and chemicals not very rare

But don’t you mind the itch and the stains

It won’t happen till spring comes again!

- 3 March 2007

It would be better for bad thoughts to burn

Instead of screaming abuses around the fiery urn…

It would be better to celebrate the colours of life

And a resolve to shun discrimination and unjust strife!

- 1 March 2009

- Pravin K. Sabnis

WEB OF LIFE

In environmental education, the activity called ‘web of life’ reveals the interconnectedness of various animals, plants and elements of nature. A person poses as the sun in the centre of a ring of persons representing different elements of nature. One end of a ball of string is tied to the finger of the central person and then connected to the finger of a person who states his relationship with the sun. The string moves across various connections to create an intertwined web.

It is now physically possible to understand the interconnectedness between various players. When the facilitator presses any particular string, the strain is felt not only by the fingers of the directly connected; others too feel the pain since the pressed string passes on the tension to other connections that it criss-crosses.

Variants of the game display interconnectedness between communities, stakeholders and teams. In an interdependent world, our actions or those of others result in a related gain or pain for even seemingly unrelated players. The Buddhist concept of no self or no other, suggests that the world of interrelatedness needs mindfulness (be aware), compassion (shun selfish actions) and openness (accountability).

To be better at making the web of life sustainable for all, we must be responsible in our actions and responsive to positive and negative roles around us. After all, it is said so well that either we are part of the solution or we are part of the problem!

The web of life shows that our world is clearly interconnected…

May we BE BETTER to fulfil our responsibilities interrelated!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

WINDOW

In school, we heard the story of two men sharing a hospital room. The younger man’s ailment forced him to lie flat on his back all the time. Every morning and evening, the older man – whose bed was near the room's only window - would sit up and describe to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window... a park with a lovely lake, ducks and swans, children sailing their little boats, lovers sharing intimacy amidst flowers of every colour of the rainbow…

The young man would eagerly wait for his world to be enlivened by colour of the outside world. As the elder described in detail, the young man would close his eyes and imagine the scene. When he heard the description of a parade passing by, though he could not hear the band, he would see it in his mind’s eye. However deep down the young man was envious and resentful of the old man’s position next to the window.

In due course, when the old man died, the youth sought to be shifted to the bed with the view. The nurse was amused and told him that it would be useless as the only view he could see was of the ceiling as he was forced to lie flat on the bed. Nevertheless, he persisted and eventually the nurse shifted him next to the window. As soon as she left, he painfully propped himself up on one elbow. He strained to slowly turn to look out the window beside the bed. It faced a blank wall!

The lesson that endures in the above story is the about the choice to envision a colourful view in an otherwise blank window. So often when faced with a dead-end, we subscribe to pessimism. It is pertinent to note that we describe what we subscribe and inversely so as well. Hence to be better at overcoming a blank situation, we must choose to colour the view with the hues of hope and positive thinking… and such forward-looking vision is best fortified through sharing.

Let’s BE BETTER at how a situational void we may describe…

After all, every window holds only the view that we subscribe!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

SILENCE

A Zen tale tells of four friends who decided to observe a week of silence and meditation. However on the very first night, seeing the oil lamps grow dim, one of them blurted out, ‘the lamps require oil!’ Instantly his neighbour remarked, ‘We are not supposed to speak!’ The third friend was livid, ‘You idiots, why are you talking?’ The fourth person calmly commented, ‘I am the only one who has not spoken.’

Though the greatest ordeal of the one who can talk is to keep silent, silence in social interaction is not too difficult if we are disinterested in prolonging dialogue or if we are listening by choice. Also, we are easily forced into silence if we are in a situation of weakness due to our actions, circumstances or a submissive attitude. But the litmus test is if we fail to honour our own resolve to keep silent.

In the Zen fable, while one cannot resist reacting to the dying lamps, the others cannot resist commenting upon somebody else’s actions. The first could have silently set right his situation. The rest fell prey to the temptation of being judgemental. Commonly, all four of them were too full of themselves and hence they broke their own silence.

Nevertheless, selfish silence is not welcome. Silence should not result in turning a deaf ear or a blind eye or be an excuse for being indifferent or insensitive. Instead, we must use the power of silence to listen… to introspect… to process ideas… to clarify thoughts… to understand ourselves as well as others. Above all, we must guard our silence from the pitfalls of being judgementally reactive.

The value of our proactive sensitivity will BE BETTER

If our silence is not pulled down by a reactive fetter!

- Pravin K. Sabnis