Idris: Keeper of Light

A historical novel set in 1659, it’s a story of Idris, a jewelled-eye Somali trader, who is  in Malabar to attend the Zamorin’s Mamangam festivities. A strange twist of fate brings Idris face to face with his nine-year-old son, Kandavar, born of a mysterious midnight tryst in this very land. Anxious to remain close to him for as long as possible, he joins the Nair household headed by Kandavar’s uncle, and is charged with a crucial task: of distracting the boy from his dream of becoming a Chaver, a warrior whose sole ambition is to assassinate the Zamorin, in a tradition whose beginnings have been lost in time. In an attempt to stave off the inevitable,  Idris embarks with his son on a voyage that takes them from Malabar to Ceylon, and from Thoothukudi to the diamond mines of Golkonda, where he meets the queenly Thilothamma, as solitary a being as he is.

Hiren Kumar Bose engages the author of Idris: Keeper of the Light, Anita Nair, on the making of the this fascinating novel and its sequels

You’ve been an essayist, poet, children’s writer, playwright, novelist and now a book (Idris: Keeper of the Light) which has already been snapped up four foreign language publishers and one in Malayalam. How does it feel?

As a writer who has spent several years working on a book, it is tremendously gratifying and satisfying to know that Idris will travel to various parts of the world.

Idris’ breadth is vast. The book is commingling of cultures as disparate as 17th century Malabar and Golconda, Arabic, Portuguese and Dutch.  How did you go about researching and bringing this varied bouquet into your story?

The research involved was so time consuming and arduous that as I inched along, I worried if this novel would ever get written. There is hardly anything written about southern India and so I had to scrounge for every single detail be it lifestyle, names, weights & measures, geographical details etc. I tried to read up everything that was written about the realm in that period; looked for artworks that originated from South India again from that period; sought nuggets of information wherever I could find it be it a register or a folk tale, and eventually distilled it all to base my narrative upon.

How difficult was it bringing into life the fascinating insights into life in the 17th century India? And what were your reference points?

The story of Idris originated from a Kerala folk ballad about the last hours of Kandavar’s life. This was a man who went to battle thinking he would be victorious as his horoscope had said he would die at a later date. That was all I had to draw from. For the rest, I had to turn into a sleuth and find my way along. The most important lesson I learnt as I began looking at that period of Southern Indian history was that I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew. The foreign powers had just about started making serious inroads into India and the Indian way of life so we were still untouched by western beliefs and influences. So I drew up a chart of the period and went at it section by section trying to fact check every single detail I was going to include in my novel. In many ways, the writing of Idris was as much a voyage of discovery for me as it was for my characters.

Idris being a trilogy what can a reader expect in the sequels? Will Idris and his son Kandavar still be around? 

Kandavar will certainly be part of vol 2 and 3. Of Idris, I am uncertain. The trilogy is ultimately a mapping of Kandavar’s life.

Do tell us about your favourite writers and their books?

I am a voracious reader and read everything except science fiction and fantasy so the list is long and uneven but generally what draws me to a book is the story telling rather than how lyrical the telling is. If a writer marries both, then I am his or her slave for the rest of my reading life.

 An edited copy of the chat appeared in http://www.btw.co.in (February 2014 issue)

The First Muslim

British-born Lesley Hazleton’s The First Muslim tells the story of the prophet Muhammad in a masterful way, crucially demystifying both the man himself and the birth of Islam. A psychologist by training and Middle East reporter by experience her previous book includes After the Prophet: the epic story of the Shia-Sunni split, and Mary: a flesh-and-blood biography. Her blog The Accidental Theologist casts “an agnostic eye on politics, religion, and existence.” Hiren Kumar Bose speaks to Lesley Hazleton on the life and times of The Prophet

How difficult was it to write a novelistic portrait of the man who upended the established order and became the Prophet?

Well, I don’t think of The First Muslim as novelistic — i.e. there is nothing fictional here. It’s narrative history. And yes, history is a narrative. The essence of the word ‘history’ is ‘story’ — the story not only of what happened when, but also of how and why it happened. In other words, the full story, in all its human complexity. And to tell it this way, what’s needed is empathy — not sympathy, but empathy, which is the good-faith attempt to understand someone else’s experience. In this case, that of Muhammad. Difficult? Of course. It involved an immense amount of research. Some of it was mind-numbingly academic, but much of it — like the earliest Islamic histories — was thrillingly dramatic, full of vitality and detail. True, you needed a love of the Middle Eastern style of story-telling to appreciate these histories, but that was one of the advantages I had in writing this book: a good sense of Middle East place and culture. Among my other advantages: my experience as a psychologist; my own agnosticism, which meant that I could come fresh to Muhammad’s life and see it without preconceptions and bias; and of course as a writer, my recognition of a remarkable life story begging to be told well.

Writing about a man who lived 1443 years ago and putting him in the context and reality of the 21st century was it easy achieving the feat?

My task was to see Muhammad in his time and place, not mine. This meant that in the years I worked on this book, I was living a kind of dual existence, waking each morning in misty 21st-century Seattle and sitting down at my desk to the high desert of 7th-century Arabia. While I can see that such a dual existence might present a problem to some, to me it was a delight.

In 2010, you gave a TED talk debunking some of the myths about the Koran, notably the salaciously Orientalist `72 virgins.’ What was the reaction of the Muslim world to the talk?

It’s hard to talk about the reaction of ‘the Muslim world,’ because Islam is not a monolith. It takes different forms in different countries, in different cities, in different communities, in different minds. What I can say is that I was both delighted and even overwhelmed by the responses I received to that talk from individual Muslims worldwide, some of them so moving that they brought me to tears. I hadn’t anticipated such a reaction, not least because the talk was for a non-Muslim audience, and I’d expected Muslims, if anything, to simply ignore it. So while many non-Muslims indeed thanked me for new insight into what the Quran actually says, it was especially moving — even humbling — for an agnostic Jew to be thanked for deepening a stranger’s Islamic faith!

An abridged and edited parts of the interview earlier appeared in http://www.btw.co.in and its print edition, btw, November 2013 issue

A Home in Tibet

Author Tsering Wangmo Dhompa of A Home in Tibet, speaks to Hiren Kumar Bose on her growing up years in three countries and on the future of Tibet

Your parents fled Tibet and settled in India. You were raised in Nepal and India, and now reside in the US. Where is home?

The answer seems to depend on my location. When I am in the US, I consider Tibet, India or Nepal to be home, and when I am in any of the other countries, I think of San Francisco as home because I have lived there for almost 15 years now.

When you returned to Tibet, you met members of your extended family, an experience that also happens to be the book’s focus. How different was it from the memories your mother shared with you?

On my first visit I think I was seeing everything – the land, the people, the stories I was listening to – through the lens I had acquired from her. I felt as though I was returning to a home and family she had already acquainted me to. On subsequent visits I was able to see the subtle nuances and the realities of place and people more clearly. Everything changes and time has a big hand in maturing one’s vision too.

Nostalgia, despair the loss and the absence of a country to call their ‘own’ is recurrent theme in most Tibetan writings. Comment  

I belong to the first generation of Tibetans born in exile so we feel the loss of country and family keenly. We were raised with elders who went through great travails and who suffered a great deal; it is impossible to be indifferent to that narrative of history. I grew up without seeing or knowing any of my mother’s immediate family so I lived with the knowledge that my life was shaped by the past in very material ways.

Being Tibetan outside Tibet most live with a dream to return to their home land one day. As a poet and a writer do you consider it to be a possibility in your lifetime?

It seems like a very difficult goal at the moment. Yet impossible things have been known to happen in the history of the world. As a poet and writer, I come to hope more readily so I keep the possible in the impossible within view.

As a writer what do you think should the international community need to do to pressurize China to free Tibet?

Persisting in keeping the Tibet issue alive. To keep reminding ourselves and others that China’s prosperity cannot be divorced from its ethical responsibilities and that freedom is a basic human’s right.

 

 

 

Smart Thinking

Behavioural scientist and author of Smart Thinking Art Markman, Ph.D talks about issues related to being a smart thinker with Hiren Kumar Bose

You write that Smart Thinking is not an attribute but a skill to be mastered. How does one do it?

The key aspect of being smart is to use the knowledge you have when you need it. The idea is to develop Smart Habits to acquire HQK (High Quality Knowledge), and to learn to use that knowledge when you need it.  Let me tell you a few things about each of these elements.

Habits drive most of our lives.  Whenever we do the same thing over and over, the brain develops routines to allow us to perform these behaviours again without thinking about them.  Habits are wonderful things to have.  And we need to focus on developing new habits that will allow us to be smarter.

HQK is the kind of knowledge that allows us to understand the way the world works.  This knowledge is called ‘causal knowledge’. The more we understand the way the world works, the better equipped we are to solve new problems.

Once you have that knowledge, you have to be able to retrieve it from your memory to use it when you need it.  Sometimes, that is easy, because the problem you are trying to solve comes from the same area that you have learned about in the past.  Doctors use their medical knowledge to solve problems.  But at other times, it doesn’t seem like we know anything that will help us to solve a problem.  At those times, we need to find analogies between the new problem and knowledge from a different area of our expertise to help us solve the problem.

How does one develop habits to create HQK and harness it when required?

One of the barriers to having HQK is that we think we understand more about the way the world works than we really do.  In order to improve the quality of our knowledge, we have to develop the habit to explain things to ourselves as we learn them.  Often, we just listen to what people say to us.  It is important to give these self-explanations in order to make sure that we really understand the way the world works.

You say that our mind is designed to think as little as possible. Why is this so?

The mind is a habit creation machine.  You want to avoid having to think about the behaviours you perform as a routine.  By compiling these routines into habits, it frees up our mind to think about new things that help us solve new problems.

You stress on replacing a bad habit with a good one which you address as ‘new memories’. And that if one doesn’t do so,  they will continue to retrieve old memories. How does one go about doing this?

It is important to realise that habits are embedded in your memory. And retrieval from memory happens automatically without effort. So, you will continue to pull the habit out of memory whenever you are in the environment in which you should perform that habit.  As a result, the only way to change a habit is to replace one behaviour with another, which allows you to create new memories that support a new habit.

You mention that our mind may limit what we can remember about past events. What are these limits?

Generally speaking, you will remember three things about any new situation  (the ‘Role of 3’).  The way to maximise what you learn then is to find connections among the new information you are learning and to review what you have learned whenever you leave a meeting, finish reading an article or exit a lecture. This review allows you to exert control over what you remember. The things we remember can be made larger by finding connections among the pieces of knowledge.  So, over the course of our lives, we need to find more and more ways to connect pieces of knowledge so that the chunks of knowledge we have get larger.

Companies often reward those who contribute directly to quarterly profits than those who make everyone around them more effective. How can companies be made to understand that this is contrary to the Culture of Smart?   

Companies have to realise that long-term profits depend on having a workforce that is made up of agile thinkers.  Hence, a company has to promote an attitude that Smart Thinking is important.  To do that, they have to create what I call a Culture of Smart that gives people time to learn new behaviours and develop strategies to use their knowledge when they need it. A great example of a Culture of Smart is Procter & Gamble. They give their employees an opportunity to take some days off their jobs to learn new things and hone their skills. That long-term investment in their employees’ knowledge pays off in more innovative thinking.

Smart Thinking, Art Markman, Ph. D, Piactus 

A Fort of Nine Towers

Hiren Kumar Bose engages novelist Qais Akbar Omar of A Fort of Nine Towers on the past and future of Afghanistan

Afghanistan, the popular image is of warlords, drug dealers, Taliban, Al Qaeda and all. But it was not so before the Soviets came and later when it was dragged into the civil war. How was life then?

Even in my childhood, Kabul was a lush garden.  We had a normal life.  When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, shells and rockets fell everywhere. After they were defeated, the civil war started. More shells and rockets, and everything was left in ruins. When the Taliban came, they brought a kind of peace, but took the country to the Stone Age.  Over the past 30 years, while other countries were moving ahead, Afghanistan was pushed backward by one faction after another.

You bring the natural beauty of Afghanistan…the scent of the naan, the fruit trees blooming between mud walls, and bracing winds sweeping down through the valley between mountain peaks running along with raw descriptions of suffering and death.

Thank you.  Over the past 12 years, many books have been written about Afghanistan, mostly by foreigners.  Some of them have described the beauties of our country very poetically, but most have focused on the problems we have had.  In my book, I’ve tried to keep the balance between the two.

While fleeing from Kabul you and family lived in a cave in Bamiyan like the Kuchi nomads. As a child how was the experience like.

I loved what seemed to me to be a carefree life, one day living on the side of a mountain, another day in someone’s pomegranate garden, another in a cave, and another with nomads.  I remember everything vividly and fondly.  But as for my parents, they had the hardest time of their life, to feed, clothe and constantly look after us, while searching for a way to get our family out of Afghanistan.

You mention about you and your siblings listening to your mother’s stories while Kabul is bombed and your father is glued to the BBC for his only purpose was to “keep you all alive.”

My mother is the greatest storyteller in our family.  Her stories can last from one hour to one year.  Most of what I know of storytelling comes from her.  If it were not for her stories that kept us distracted, we would have died of despair if not by rockets, because there were days when more than 3,000 rockets rained on Kabul.

You travel the world lecturing about Afghani carpets. How did you become one because your father was a teacher and mother a banker?

My family has been trading in carpets for four generations.  In the Taliban times, my family had very little income, so I started making carpets to earn money.  I eventually had a factory with about 40 women weaving for me. I am now finishing a book on Afghan carpets, and hope to have it published next year:  The Carpet Makers: Weaving the soul of Afghanistan.

Do you foresee a future where poetry again becomes a way of life, where people debate issues, where educated and working women move about without burqas and there is all around economic progress?

Yes.  In fact, many of these things are already happening in Afghanistan, but you never hear about them because the media reports only the bad news.  We can hasten the process of peace and progress by putting the guns down and picking up pens.  We can survive war, but we can’t survive life without poetry.

How do you see Afghanistan post the pullout of the US forces?

We have done a lot for the world.  It was Afghanistan who finally defeated the Soviets, freed Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War.  In the process, it cost us many lives, and the destruction of our country.  We, Afghans, believe that the world owes us this much: let peace return back to Afghanistan.

A Fort of Nine Towers, Qais Omar Akbar, Picador (an imprint of Pan Macmillan)

 

 

Massage No Boom Boom

Anand Prabhu, author of Massage No Boom Boom,  talks to Hiren Kumar Bose on why getting a massage should be a right of every Indian

You say India was the birthplace of massage but it is countries like Thailand and Indonesia that have a made an industry out of it. How did that happen?

I think it is the moral confusion that has resulted from the British rule, Victorian morality and British laws that enforce and enshrine Victorian morality, and the series of invasions that made India lose its self-confidence. Modern life in India results in high levels of stress. Why don’t we have thousands of massage parlors everywhere, out in the open? It would make us a far more relaxed and tolerant nation. I have feeling that much of our anger and violence proceeds from our repression.

A massage aficionado, do tell us about the variety of massages and the country which offers the most and the best experiences.

As far as my experience goes, if you’re on a budget, or if you wish to get the best value for your money, Thailand offers massages starting from as little as three dollars an hour to $ 50 or 100 an hour, with various combinations (a simultaneous massage by multiple masseuses, sex, oral sex, sandwich massages, and so on) and prices in between.  Indonesia, especially the island of Bali, is quite close, and may even be competitive—though the sexual component is far more open in Thailand than in Indonesia. If you have deep pockets, though, anything you want is available in places like New York, London, and Singapore.

Massage parlour is a bad word in India. Why is it so?

How many of our Ministers and other powerful people, when they visit Thailand on official business or for some conference, do you think do not order a masseuse to their rooms? They would be crazy not to experience the pleasure that is available? In which case, why should people have to pay so much to get this pleasure? Why, in a country that is supposed to have a Constitution that promises equality and an egalitarian society, should these pleasures and healthful necessities be restricted to a privileged few?

What next? An erotic novel.

Yes indeed. I have one in progress, and hope to have it ready in four to six months. Why is it that 50 million women in the West have read the erotic trilogy 50 Shades of Grey, but that we pretend to be uninterested? This hypocrisy is highly oppressive, and it is an unnecessary oppression of self. Thai and Chinese cultures have absolutely no guilt about sex; on the contrary, the greater your libido, the higher the respect in which you are held.

Massage No Boom Boom, Anand Prabhu, Harper Collins

Asura: Tale of the Vanquished

Anand Neelkanth, author of Asura: Tale of the Vanquished gets candid about his new fiction with Hiren Kumar Bose

A tale of the vanquished, that’s subtitle of your book. The society is not kind to the vanquished, doesn’t care, if I may say so. And you have 500-page book on Ravana.
Indians are a vanquished race. We have been vanquished by everyone for the last 1000 years. May be that’s why we are not so kind to the vanquished. There is no society like Indians who are so indifferent to the underprivileged, to the filth, to the poverty, to the ignorance. In our films, in our stories, in our dramas, in our poetry, in our epics, we are always with the victor. Asura is an attempt to take out magic from the epic, to lift the veil of divinity and view an ancient story from the eyes of the vanquished. Here, it is not Ravana, who is the real vanquished, but Bhadra, the common man who is the defeated. Hence, the subtitle.

Asura is unique as it’s not a re-telling of an epic but a counter telling. A genre hardly attempted. Elaborate.
Counter telling is more difficult, because the author has to work against all prejudices. On one hand, you have beliefs that are etched in not only individual’s memory, but also in the collective memory of a 5000-year- old culture. On the other hand, one has to offer a counter telling without deviating much from the original and still make it readable and believable. If after reading a counter telling of a popular epic like Ramayana someone feels that, may be this is the real truth and not what I have been taught since childhood, then only we can call the attempt a success. The difficulty of counter telling may be the reason why the genre is not attempted much.

Do you consider Asura as a mythology or as pure fiction?
It is not a mythology. It is fiction. Yet for me, nothing can be more real than that. Asura is not a new story but a story that happens all around us again and again, through all ages, through all cultures. In that sense, it is no story at all, but life.

What Next? Karna.
Duryodhana and his people. What else?

Authors who inspire you.
Bhasa, the ancient dramatist who wrote Oorubhanga- that depicts Duryodhana’s last moments is always an inspiration. Tolstoy, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway, P G Woodhouse among classical writers and Rushdie, M T Vasudevan Nair, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, etc among living authors.

Love for Butterflies

Hiren Kumar Bose quizzes author Peter Smetacek of Butterflies on the roof of the World (Aleph), on chasing butterflies and  how change in their population affects biodiversity

Having spent a lifetime collecting/studying butterflies (and moths) what do you think is their role in the country’s biodiversity?

Insects form the largest group of life forms on earth, outnumbering all other life forms put together. Butterflies and moths are the second largest group of insects, after beetles. Naturally, no biodiversity count can ignore them. The services they give to the ecosystem are pollination, but perhaps the larger role is the fact that caterpillars, pupae and even eggs are the prey base for a large number of birds, spiders, wasps and other insectivores. A change in the population of butterflies and moths will naturally be reflected in a corresponding change in the population of the creatures that prey on them.

We all are aware about the Tiger’s role in biodiversity but ignorant on the importance of the insect world. Why it so?

The reason for this discrepancy is of course that the tiger is much larger and has been historically feared by our species. The reason that the insect world has been largely ignored is that it is not glamorous or adventurous nor does it generate empathy in humans. In the popular imagination, chasing a butterfly is not as exciting as being chased by a tiger. Students that join an entomology course in our country are often diverted into specializing in insects of economic importance, such as agricultural pests. Insects that inhabit our forests and other natural habitats are thus largely ignored. Given the lack of basic information on them, it is no wonder that the Indian public is ignorant of the insect world.

Their short life spans, their size and being lower in the food chain have gone against them. Comment

All these three factors might have variously impacted the lack of interest in insects, but perhaps the most important was the need to collect specimens to study them, which is abhorrent to the average Indian. Since the development of digital photography, there has been a major spurt in interest in the smaller creatures, including butterflies. In fact, it may safely be stated that never before have there been so many people out in the field observing butterflies and moths as there are now. This welcome news is the direct outcome of the spread of digital photography.

Being owner of the largest individual collection of butterflies of the Indian sub-continent, do tell us about those whom you consider as your prized catch?

The prized specimens of any collection are type specimens, that is, the specimens on the basis of which new species or subspecies have been described. I am lucky to have a large number of these so undoubtedly, these are the centerpiece of the collection!

The beautiful looking butterflies you have come across.

India has a vast number of beautiful species. This is what attracted my grandfather and father to the field to start with. However, since beauty is largely in the eye of the beholder, you will excuse me if I do not press my point in this matter. The Common Peacock (Papilio bianor) received the most points during an election conducted by the late M.A. Wynter-Blyth, one of the doyens of the science in India. Therefore, I gave it the title of being the most beautiful Indian butterfly when I was consultant for the Limca Book of Records.

A pioneer in the use of Lepidoptera as indicators of climate change, do tell us how they are faring and what we need to save them?

There are several interesting changes going on, such as the colonization of the Himalaya during the last decade by the Red Pierrot butterfly (Talicada nyseus) and the eastwards spread along the Himalaya of the Bath White butterfly (Pontia daplidice). On the whole, India is believed to be getting warmer and wetter, which is good news all around, for butterflies and moths as much as for our agriculture. The only danger here is the probable increase of floods and subsequent droughts, since our forest cover (as opposed to ‘green cover’) is pitiable and healthy forests which can support perennial water sources and consequently, healthy butterfly communities, are few and far between. Our government does not seem to have any effective idea or plan to remedy the situation.

You’ve discovered and describe three new butterflies, namely Neptis miah varshneyi, Neptis clinia praedicta and Mycalesis suaveolens ranotei. Do tell us the story behind it?

All three are long stories which might find a place in future books, but briefly, the first was discovered when it became apparent that the butterfly identified as Lasippa viraja was actually Neptis miah. Since the known forms of Neptis miah differed considerably from L. viraja, it became clear that this near perfect look-alike of L. viraja needed a name to distinguish it from other populations of N. miah.

In the case of the second, the late Lt. Col. J.N. Eliot had obtained a specimen of N. clinia from Dehradun, which he suggested was a new subspecies. When I obtained further specimens, it became clear that it was different from Eastern Himalayan populations of the butterfly, so I called it N. clinia praedicta, to commemorate Col. Eliot’s prediction.

In the case of M. suaveolens ranotei, I obtained a male butterfly during a survey and when looking to see whether there were any other records of this butterfly from Uttarakhand, came across the female of the species collected by Dr. Arun Pratap Singh Ranote. Therefore, I named the subspecies Mycalesis suaveolens ranotei. So far it is known only from the original pair.

Do enlighten us on the activities of Butterfly Research Centre?

The Butterfly Research Centre has a reference collection of Asian butterflies and moths. We get specimens from research institutions and individuals all over the country for identification. It is open to public viewing and we usually give an introductory talk about the butterflies, their habits, mimicry, variation, survival strategies, etc. Besides, we run beginner and advanced level courses, which are customized to suit the needs of the students (who range in age from teenagers to professionals wishing to expand their repertoire). Generally, the courses cover curation, identification, zoo geography, taxonomy, habitat identification, etc. In addition, we undertake surveys of Lepidoptera.

Chasing butterfly is not a lucrative or a paying career but you have kept at it for over four decades now, thanks to your consuming passion. Your message to young lepidopterists.

As I have mentioned in my book, I began to spend more time with Lepidoptera when there was a need to re-build the family collection after it had been destroyed in 1980. During the 1990s, I might have examined other career options, but my wife and I were targets of a criminal gang who were not only very well-connected at all levels of society, but were involved in the gamut of crime, from drug dealing to terrorism. Their interest was to make our home into a Maoist training centre, after disposing of us. By God’s grace, we survived and their plans came to naught. During that time, there was little to do except study moths and butterflies, while I was teaching at a school run by Vidya Bharati, near Nainital. When the danger had passed, I stopped teaching and have devoted myself full-time to this pursuit since then. Even today, being a lepidopterist is not a well-paying or glamorous career. I would not recommend it as a career option to any except those ‘touched’, but would definitely recommend it as a very engrossing hobby and passion!

An edited and shortened version was published in btw (www.btw.co.in) February 2013 issue

Power of Introverts

Hiren Kumar Bose speaks to Susan Cain on the power of introverts

What are the distinct advantages of being an introvert?
Researchers have found that many of the most creative people are introverts. This is because solitude is an important ingredient of creativity, and introverts crave solitude. Prof. Adam Grant at the Wharton School found that introverted leaders outperform extroverts when their employees are proactive, because they let them run with their ideas. (Extroverts are better with less proactive employees, because they can rouse and inspire them.) Introverts are persistent and reflective. Introverts and extroverts are equally intelligent, yet introverts get better grades because they stick with problems longer.

People often equate introversion with being antisocial, shy and unconfident. What’s the relationship between shyness and introversion?
Shyness is the fear of social judgment; introversion is the preference for quieter environments. They overlap to some extent but psychologists disagree to what degree. Certainly there are many introverts who are not shy.

If chance encounters are crucial ingredient for creativity so is solitude. However, we continue to indulge in group activity to find solutions. Do they help?
Brainstorming sessions are great at establishing trust and morale, but people brainstorm better IDEAS when they’re on their own. This doesn’t mean there’s no place for groupwork. Best is to create on one’s own first and then come together with the group.

Are relationships stable if it is extrovert versus introvert or extrovert vs extrovert?

Either way can work. The key is mutual understanding. I do believe that there is a great yin and yang between introverts and extroverts when these relationships work well.

How does an introvert change his/her communication style if s/he is in an environment with a lot of extroverts?
Anyone can push themselves to speak a little faster, a little more loudly, smile more, and so on. But try not to do this too often — it is stressful over time!

As we age we all seek quiet. Do we become introvert with age?
Yes, most people become more introverted with age. If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been.

An edited version of the interview appeared in btw (btw.co.in), April 2012

Cohen on Enlightenment

Andrew Cohen, author, Evolutionary Enlightenment, answers queries put forward by Hiren Kumar Bose on email

A tricky word, every faith defines ‘enlightenment’ differently. What’s your say?

I say that enlightenment is about awakening to not one but two absolute dimensions of reality that are fundamental: Being and Becoming. Being means awakening to the primordial, timeless, formless Ground of Being. Becoming means awakening to the evolutionary impulse—the energy and intelligence that created and is creating the entire cosmos.

Can a disciple achieve enlightenment without the assistance of a guru?

Absolutely! But that being said, keep in mind that the spiritual process is a journey from the gross to the subtle. For most people, without the guidance of someone who’s already made that journey, it’s easy to lose our way.

Is the actualization of the Divine a process or does it happens naturally?

The actualization of the Divine is a process that happens effortlessly and “naturally” when we cease unconditionally to resist the higher motives of the spiritual impulse once it has awakened within us.

What according to you should be man’s spiritual goal?

Our spiritual goal is to strive for the highest evolution of consciousness and culture as one’s self. To boldly aspire to be an exemplar of the possible for the rest of humanity. Finally, to become a beacon of light, a living expression of spirit-in-action.

Is enlightenment synonymous with transformation?

Yes, enlightenment is synonymous with the profound leap of identification from the small self to the big Self, from the ego to the Absolute, from the psychological personality to the Atman, from man to God as spirit-in-action in human form.

An abridged extract was published in btwmag.com issue of March 2012