Its a cold winter morning, something i have not experienced before on a weekend. And yet, here i am wide awake at 6.30 am. I have only my work to blame. Every weekday i leave home at 7am, which ofcourse is a torture in winters, but what'll you do. But somehow, earlier, my body knew weekdays from weekends; which is no longer the case.
So yes, i wake up and its still dark outside, and im sitting in my cozy bed, in my snugly warm room and start doing what i do best - thinking. As a child, i went to these weekly 'development' (i really dont have a better word) classes. They are a big part of my childhood memories. I dint quite understand their importance at that point, but now, im sort of proud of them. Though these classes had a religious tilt to them, which i understood much later, they were a form of missionaries popularising their sect by catching us early. But, for the most part they worked on the gurukul model.
As most of us know, in ancient India, education was mostly verbal. So we went to these classes, twice a week, we were taught shlokas from ancient scriptures. We recited these shokas enough number of times to learn them very well and also to understand what each word meant.
So coming back to my cold morning, one of the shlokas we learnt was to be recited looking at your palms as soon as you open your eyes. It was an ode to the work we do with our hands. Clearly alot has changed since. I no longer wake up and religiously look at the palms of my hands and pray to my work. Instead, i wake up, reach for my ipad on my bedside table, as i open it, facebook stares back at me and asks, "How are you feeling, Priyanka?"
So yes, i wake up and its still dark outside, and im sitting in my cozy bed, in my snugly warm room and start doing what i do best - thinking. As a child, i went to these weekly 'development' (i really dont have a better word) classes. They are a big part of my childhood memories. I dint quite understand their importance at that point, but now, im sort of proud of them. Though these classes had a religious tilt to them, which i understood much later, they were a form of missionaries popularising their sect by catching us early. But, for the most part they worked on the gurukul model.
As most of us know, in ancient India, education was mostly verbal. So we went to these classes, twice a week, we were taught shlokas from ancient scriptures. We recited these shokas enough number of times to learn them very well and also to understand what each word meant.
So coming back to my cold morning, one of the shlokas we learnt was to be recited looking at your palms as soon as you open your eyes. It was an ode to the work we do with our hands. Clearly alot has changed since. I no longer wake up and religiously look at the palms of my hands and pray to my work. Instead, i wake up, reach for my ipad on my bedside table, as i open it, facebook stares back at me and asks, "How are you feeling, Priyanka?"
No comments:
Post a Comment