The Carnatic Modes

2/16/18

She was a Brahmin. He was not. That did not stop Chintamani from being a fabulously successful software titan.

Aadhya thought of herself first. Her manipulative power was only partly the result of her goddess-like beauty. As a student she was unequalled, perfect. She had traveled the earth alone since her teenage years, wore tasteful, exotic, fabulously expensive ornaments, seemed to know no fear, perhaps due to her mixed martial arts training. Her best quality was that she always had the mind of the beginner. An odd or at least unusual quality for someone with so much self-absorption and seeming arrogance.

They met after recognizing each other from glimmering high society nightlife bars. Bangalore, Silicon City. They met in a park. Chintamani often did his best work while studying trees. Aadhya liked to sketch trees.

Johann Sebastian Bach supposedly said, “If I could learn Music, anybody could learn Music.” Chintamani wasn’t so sure.

The problem, the challenge which confronted him was not a

software issue. Well it was of sorts. Why was it that some people, such as himself could rise out of dire poverty while most could not? He had read the studies: disadvantaged kids could succeed if they

Were resilient

Saw that they could make a change for the better in their own lives.

Valued themselves as human beings

Recognized their own strengths which they could use to help others.

Ok he had been lucky. Four out of four for him, despite being an orphan, despite poverty, he had been lucky, incredibly and repeatedly miraculously lucky, first with his aunts who took him in, then with the trash bin of the bookseller almost but not quite satisfying his never-ending curiosity. Then the poor old bookseller himself who let Chintamani sweep and clean for a few rupees. The bookseller, Raj noticed Chintamani’s brightness. By age 7 he was doing the accounting. Raj laughed that in his bookstore the little boy was doing the “books.”  By age 8, Chintamani was creating and managing a database of customers on an old PC Raj’s granddaughter threw away. By age 9 the boy was writing programs in Basic. A year later he started a marketing department. He was now earning more rupees than all his aunts combined. He read voraciously, absorbing everything. Raj retired, letting his young charge run the operation which now consisted of four stores. Of course this was not completely satisfying to Chintamani who while he did not know exactly what he wanted to do was already sure it was more than sell books. At 14 he opened a lending library which included one -rupee literacy classes. For those who could not afford it, he offered Work-Study.

Chintamani kept improving his software, hiring and managing a staff of college graduates who were not only employees but also his part-time tutors. He hired an MBA, grew the book chain into a national, then multinational powerhouse. His nearly free literacy classes and lending libraries were widely replicated. The work-study students often became his best employees, one of whom started their website. All around him the standard of living rose.

Chance conversations with buyers of the old man’s books started when Chintamani was four years old. They continued to the present day. He said he got his best ideas from customers.

His aunts aged. They began to die. A depression he had never known shadowed his every thought. When his favorite, most loving aunt died, he did not eat or sleep for days.

Coming out of his stupor, Chintamani bought a dilapidated hospital. Immediately he poured his energies and money into improving the cleanliness, the scheduling, the information systems.

People urged him to run for public office. He said that was not for him.

 The question was solved as to what but not as to how to give it to the masses, the hopeless masses. There were just too many people to help on an individual basis. El Sistema in Latin America gave a possible solution- have everyone help everyone else.

His wife couldn’t sleep even two winks. She said to him, “go to the living room... you are snoring and making all kinds of sounds.” He heard her crying, wanted to hold and comfort her, but she did not like his touch. Even more to the point, she had just told him to leave the bed.

After a brief mediation, Chintamani slept for a couple hours, meditated on his breathing, did some control exercises for his hips and quads - he preferred to say he was working on his control. He used to say he had balance problems.

What could he give Aadhya on this Valentines Day? Since it was an American holiday, maybe something American... maybe a divorce?

 Humor cooled his anger, his resentment. He and Aadhya hadn’t been intimate since they conceived their third child. He understood all her complaints: he was often disconnected, sometimes angry, condescending, vulnerable at the wrong times, inconsistent, unfeeling- she noted that he had made a lot of progress. His employees did not respect him, people took advantage of him. If this was progress how awful must he have been earlier?

He wasn’t sure how much more progress he could make. If he did conquer all his challenges, would she be more loving? She always said she loved him.

It was Valentine’s Day, thirty years after they met and 29 years after their marriage. Their two daughters had all their best qualities- and their worst.

Their youngest child, their son had just graduated college and was producing music videos. He predicted his father would leave everything, go to Spain to study guitar....

Chintamani started to feel sad. Tired. Worn out. Defeated. If he in fact had all those negative qualities how could he have achieved so much?

***

Maybe he didn’t. His previous therapist pointed out that he bought into fantasies, was delusional.

 Ok. So his name was not Chintamani.

He was not married to the beautiful Aadhya, who was a in fact a conflation of beautiful women he had seen in movie posters. He was not even Indian. He was not a software or any other kind of titan.

Charlie was married for 29 years. That much was true. He and Alice lived in Sunset Park. They had one son who they rarely saw even though he lived only a few miles away, might as well have lived in Omaha.

He was a frightened, little man who had a rich inner life. He was a Wizard of Oz, minus the wizardry - curtain pulled open, revealed, exposed, shown to be a fraud with both spiteful and some better qualities, just an ordinary man. Ordinary except for his anti-social, pushing people away in fear of giving power away.

That was a polite way to say: he avoided moving forward by dressing everything up in exotic garb. Still he had learned something from his rich fantasy life. Hard to say what. It might have been a slight reduction in his acting out of anger. He had punched doors and walls, injuring himself. Perhaps he felt less trapped now, a little more self-accepting. Still the feeling persisted: he had let his father down, let himself down.  He noticed his tendency to exaggerate. He was just an ordinary accountant at a small firm, four years away from retiring with a sufficient pension made mostly from his savings and investments. That was not fantasy. Also not a fantasy was the burning question of how to get people to take him seriously. 

Perhaps more reasonable thinking would help.

It started to help him take himself seriously.

***

Reasonable thinking: what did that really mean?

For no apparent reason, Charlie found himself asking an odd question: What did Moses learn in the 40 years he led his people through the desert? Not what did the people learn, but what did he, the leader learn?

Zipporah asked, what about that rumor about having a Cushite wife? That simply was not true.

Moses asked himself how he could better obey the Commandments, how he could be a better role model, a better leader.

He learned to use his anger for the common good in a gentler way.

***

Charles was no Moses. He was no more a great religious leader than a software titan.  He did have one thing in common with the biblical figure. Lust. Maybe it was just ordinary, normal, quite usual lust- the only thing that made it problematic was that he did not know how to connect with Alice- who also felt sexually and emotionally deprived. These realizations did not help him. He was addicted to fantasies. He could not relate to his wife. Decades went by with no sex, little intimacy.

His therapists over the years all said he did not use therapy correctly, that he jumped around too much, was too angry, not motivated, didn’t apply what he worked on in therapy to his daily life, that he didn’t do the mental practice of imagining potential problems and how to deal with them.

He felt volatile: the happy highs were too high; the lows were so dark-

He could see that unchecked those would lead to death, not by suicide but by self-neglect leading down a miserable path.

 He found joy in service. It wasn’t just any kind of service. For Charlie, it had to make people feel stronger or at least cared about.

Guitar shop in...

‪Valladolid es una ciudad al noroeste de España. Es conocida por sus sitios religiosos medievales,

After playing guitar in back of the small hotel, he found he had a surprising interest in reading about learning Spanish. That opened up something long dormant… his curiosity. Suddenly the connection between curiosity, his rich fantasies, the way back to a balanced life were all of a piece. He read online about:

The Learning Brain:

Safe and secure

See the whole picture

Focus on the mission, vision and goals

Calm, confident, engaged, curious

Accept mistakes as part of learning

It was too much.

In a previously rare but now more frequent moment of clarity, he decided to focus on just one piece of that: allowing curiosity to blossom.

Let his curiosity lead.

He could get his head around that.

This little bit of intuitive wisdom, sparked self-respect.

The feeling of Hey, that’s too much!

That’s all it took.

He wrote a postcard to Alice…

He was taking the next flight home.