Monday, October 22, 2012



I am just back from a meditation camp at an ashram. It was an enlightening and lightening experience during which I realised commitment is the name of the game. Here is a lowdown:

Participants for this five-day course are required to report a day early during which they are allotted their room numbers, given course literature and briefed about the schedules and terms.

The rooms are allotted just before dinner time which is 5.30 pm but one is allowed to shift anytime thereafter. However,  no sooner is the allotment made, there is a flurry of activity. Gone are the blissed-out expressions, measured walk and reined-in demeanour. People are scrambling to their old rooms, packing their bags on cycle trolleys and circumambulating half or full way across the ashram to find their allotted rooms, all this after the gong for dinner has gone.

Where’s the fire, I ask. But who’s listening? The place is in motion with wheels, feet and baggage trolleys being yanked over sand and concrete with a purpose to answer.  Everyone seems keen to begin her spiritual journey as early as possible. This enthusiasm runs deep. 

To understand how deep, a basic introduction to the course is imperative. Participants are handed out forms that contain the schedule: five one-hour meditations, two to three hours of discourse by the Guru, 45 minutes of introspection, and the regular reading that takes up another hour. And since you are mandated to report a minimum of five minutes before time, that amounts to over nine hours of your day spent on your spiritual enrichment. The last meditation ends at 9 pm and the first starts at 5.15 am.

Now that’s an alarming story. Each participant, who lives alone in the room and is required to stay maun throughout the course,  speaks loudly through their alarm clocks with clockwork precision. First, the ashram gong goes off at the stroke of 4.30 am; in the next second, you hear the rent of the shrill alarm next door. In the next five minutes, ten assorted alarms peal one after another, each tearing to be ahead of the other. One of them, about two doors away from mine, is assertive and loud, like a siren, and intended not to wake you up but to make you jump out of your skin.

As I yawn and stretch in the dark, an enormous row begins outside. Buckets are being slammed under the hot water tap (we have one along each corridor) located right outside my room. The tap takes great pleasure in gushing raucously during dawn but goes silent in the day. Doors are being banged and shut in a coordinated fashion right up to 5.10 am when all movement ceases. That’s only because, as I said, we are to report for all meditations five minutes early.

Actually, all we have to really do at that hour is wake up, freshen up and walk to the venue. All of this should take a maximum of 10 minutes, not 40. Even as I muse in half-sleep why the world has so many masochists under one roof who won’t sleep, I see visions in white outside my window and hear the clickety clack of sticks. Before you get ideas, they are the participants dressed in the preferred ashram colour, making their way to the air-conditioned hall past my window, some with a walking stick.

I rub my eyes. They cant possibly be reporting half an hour early! But there is no doubt they are. The first day, it rattled me because seeing them made me fidget and end up in the cold hall 15 minutes before time. The second day, I did the same and groaned. The third day, I wisened up and reported only 10 minutes early. I had smartened up.

In fact, I set my alarm each day optimistically for 4.50 am in the hope that as the world awakes, I will sleep to my freedom till it buzzes. None of that helped, of course. The ashram gong, the siren and the sundry alarm clocks that seemed to charge in all directions made sure I stayed sharp bright and early at 4.30 am. Each day, I would sigh, shake my head, look longingly at the clock and put off my alarm before it rang.

In between two meditations, the minimum gap is half an hour during which you scramble to your room for a minute and return. Powdering your nose in this interval is of little use. First, there isn’t enough time and second, nobody is looking at you. They are tanked up on the yonder. So I decide not to bother pressing my clothes as it made no difference whatsoever, apart from eating into my endangered sleep time. I consoled myself that in the rare event any of my fans sneak up on me, making way past layers of barricades to the course area, and find me looking less than ravishing, they will anyway not recognise me in creased kurtas, baggy pajamas matched with baggy eyes, and cotton dupattas pulled over severely tied hair to show my elementary face and an other-worldly attitude.

Back to the interval story. As I said, I discovered that even this margin was not really necessary as the movement to the hall for every single session began half an hour before. For five days, I struggled to understand why anybody on earth would want to spend close to 12 hours of the day holed up in a hall when they need to spend nine anyway.

Agitated that I was spending more time on my co-participants’ than on my own internal journey, I decided bitterly that they were doing extra time for a better bargain with God. 
 
We were told that if we wanted anything, we were to write on stapled chits of paper thoughtfully provided beforehand. Our demands are met by the seniormost persons in the organisations who volunteer their services as our counsellors, guides, and wish-granters. These eight souls, who had completed their spiritual search, serve as the Guru’s many arms.

Some more about these angelic mediators. They sent us mixed signals by molly-cuddling us with excessive attention while keeping a hawk eye on our trespasses. At the dining hall, they would position themselves right at the back but very visibly so that we get the message and behaved through the meal. Only after we eat would they cheerfully get up and serve themselves.

These aides worked really hard. Each day, we were to submit a report card to them that had to have a lengthy description of every single ingredient of the day – how we did each of the five meditation sessions, how we found the Guru’s three-hour discourse, how we conducted our introspection, how we indulged our negative and positive emotions throughout the day. The few minutes I got in my room were spent grudgingly writing these memoirs.

As, for me, each day and each meditation session mirrored the other, I had no option but to find creative ways to describe my inability to meditate. The Guru’s aides would then go through these copious notes and make comments. With four of them handling 63 participants’s accounts, each aide had to pore over 15 progress reports each morning at the crack of dawn but somehow didn’t seemed to mind the ordeal.

The aides carried a whip. Each morning, they would mercilessly write out a public circular titled, “The dignitaries who were caught napping in the morning session,’’ listing those of us who dared to nod off for a split second under their penetrating supervision. Gratifyingly, I never made it to that list.

That’s because I shuffled endlessly during all sessions as I am not used to sitting on the floor. Out of a sense of awkwardness at the idea of sitting on chairs primarily occupied by the elderly or at least 50-plus, I would cross my long legs on the mat mutinously in the ambitious hope that they would stay. But in two minutes or less, I would be leaning forward, shifting one leg, then tucking another beneath it and so on.
At the end of some sessions, I would find myself facing the back of the hall instead of the front. Our supervisors figured that someone who thrusts forward and backward and sideways all the time cannot be asleep.
To be fair, nobody slept all through. At the most, a few would slip into an involuntary snooze for a minute or two which should happen naturally when you sleep all of two-and-half winks every day. Even as I sniggered every morning at the names, I would secretly marvel how I never slept through meditation and decided that it was the first positive sign that I was well suited for the rigours of this course.