We are meeting in Goa for our 40th reunion …from the year of our joining BITS Pilani. There is excitement, and at the same time, I’m also asking myself the question: ‘What am I doing here?’. For in our original batch of 400 ‘boys’ and 20 ‘girls’ the representation in Goa is 50 men and 2 women— just Vandana and me. The girls and boys didn’t interact much in our time— the relationship was binary. Either there was a romantic involvement, or nothing. The in-between option didn’t exist, like hanging around as friends.
So there is a mild anxiety—How will we relate to each other? There has not been much interaction in these 40 years— between the boys and the girls—except for an odd few professional exchanges.
But I know intuitively this is an important milestone, and something significant is waiting to be discovered, so here I am.
The first glimpse of it is visible when we meet in the afternoon for the round of introductions. The question that is generally asked at reunions ‘What do you do?’ is replaced by ‘What did you do in your last job?’ for many of us.
Yes, we have to reckon with the transition we are going through in life— we have worked for 35 years; we are in our late fifties. Often when small groups of college mates have met in the past, the unvoiced (or voiced) question that is discussed is: Who are the most successful from our batch? Who ‘made it’? Who were the surprises? Etc etc. Part of the debate could be defining and redefining the criteria of ‘success’.
But that question is no longer valid.
We are having to contend with the transition from a life of Achievement and Success in the outer world to the dreaded R-Word, of Retirement, where the invitation is to go inwards- to Contemplation and Inner Search.
When I talk of the ‘Art of Dying’, it is not a literal idea. It is not a matter of dying physically, but of a metaphor whose central idea is to let our ego die.
We can say the ego is a view of ourselves, which we have derived from our set of experiences, accumulations, analysis and memories. It carries all our prejudices and distortions and is formed by a limited and partial perception of reality, which prevents us from fully understanding ourselves and others behind the veil of judgements, evaluations and conditions defined by the world.
It is the same Ego which with some annoyance notices my roommate and I are the few people who have been given a room without a balcony in the beautiful resort in Goa which the organizing committee has selected for our stay. Which concludes to: hmmm. I am less important than the others who got room with a balcony; Where do we dry clothes after our dip into the sea? But it is a momentary glitch: we say, ‘Never mind about that, let’s go down and join the gala evening’.
As we meet, interact, beyond the exchange of biographies— the mandatory starting point of which is the mundane question ‘What do your children do?’ We go beyond that and have deeper conversations of the meaning of life, of what makes us truly happy. There is an attempt of knowing the person behind the Vice President who made it/ who is still in the running/ or didn’t make it. There is a softening in our interactions, beyond the labels which had got into the way of the heartfelt connections which we all wanted, but were unable to make.
And in all these realizations I am helped by my roommate for the two days—she is so chilled out that nothing much disturbs her. She just has a good laugh about everything and doesn’t take herself seriously. I marvel at the synchronicity that has arranged for our stay together, and my delight in rediscovering her after so many years.
I realize it is the same ego which made me decide not to wear the BITS T-shirt for the group photo- because in my vanity I felt it would make me look fat.
So the answer to my question: ‘What am I doing here?’ is to celebrate the dying of the ego. Which allows us to joyously celebrate every moment as it arrives. And to reclaim some friendships which we couldn’t make during our 4 years of stay at our magnificent campus.
Perhaps the divide occurred in the first place because we had fixed notions of how the girls should be treated by the boys, and vice-versa.
It is to notice that the room without the balcony doesn’t matter because I can open our hotel room window and hang the clothes out to dry in the sun; which I discover only in the morning we have to leave.
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Contact us if you have teams in your organization that are separated by divides of egos and fixed notions; and there is a need to build bridges of communication and understanding beyond labels and judgements.