Mind Game

In a temple or at a common meeting place if someone asks you to write one quality or am emotion that you see or feel among the persons around you highly probable that you may turn around and say: Are you crazy, I don’t even know them. Yet if you read your mind carefully,it keeps making silent notes of all that you see or feel around you. People who do it with awareness end up developing observation skills.

Having heard so much on positive thinking I took this idea a little further, so that the next time that I was at a public place I started the same mind game but with a twist. I started the same mind game but with a rule or a menu to the mind. The mind had to observe and explore a quality or a virtue in the person around, be it a passerby, a woman selling fruits,a car driving past or a bird flying above. By the way, did you know that anything that is flying in the air is addressed as ‘ndege’ in Kiswahili? So funnily, a bird as well as an airplane is a ‘ndege’.

So coming back to the main point,as I started this new mind game, to my delight I came across things that I had never observed before e.g. all Rwandan women have a beautiful skin and feet with no cracks at all, be it your housemaid or even an old woman begging on the road. Another thing I found that disabled persons sit at select vantage points (read high foot falls) on the walk paths but never have a begging bowl or even an extended hand for begging. If passersby give, it’s OK, if they don’t, that is also OK. As you bargain with fruit selling women, if you make a counter offer to their price, they will simply say ‘Oya’ with absolute no expression on the face.You would think that she has agreed and would now want to buy. It only dawned on me latter on that sadly, ‘Oya’ means NO. She has not taken the counteroffer.

This mind game was now becoming both positive as well as funny. So then I extended it to observing shoppers at the mall or shopkeepers at smaller stores. It’s really hard to find a virtue in total strangers except for physical attributes. Yet the depth of the eyes, the smile on the face and the gestures do start telling a story. Being all alone sometimes,you are so engrossed in your own that sometimes you forget the game and have to remind your mind to commence. Once you get accustomed then you also start reflecting on those relations that you would want a better bonding. By and by you find that each one of us have so many good qualities. The competitive nature seeks to find out that missing 2 % rather than being happy about the 98%.
I remember when my daughter was about a 5 year old and I was perusing through her answer paper. She had missed the 100 mark by just one mark. I said to her, ‘Sonu, how could you do such a silly mistake’ The innocent replied: Ma, if I had known it is a mistake, would I have made it ? So actually we don’t do or make a mistake, it happens. Making mistake is a wrong English usage I guess.

Remember the score of 90 + of Sachin Tendulkar and the tense moments every time he missed the record? As they say the story of the 99 club. Once you reach 99, you want to get 100 and you lose all sleep.

Instead we reverse the order and be happy of the abundance around rather than finding faults and the world automatically becomes a better place to live, irrespective of its challenges.

Anagha Hunnurkar
Sunday, August 23, 2015