​Mother sprang a surprise at the dinner table. “During the coming vacation, Bula has invited me to take a ten-day holiday trip to visit her dad’s home in Delhi.” Bula was her close friend and her colleague in the school where she taught. She added, “With our cook and maid, I believe you can survive without me.”
 
Father, who was the world’s most dependent husband and for whom this had to be a bitter pill, must have been alerted earlier, for he decided to make a joke of it. He commented, “You certainly deserve a holiday from your children.” “And from your husband,” I thought, but did not say it.
 
I had another surprise when I discussed it with my friends the next day. Tapas said, “I have an idea. You know my dad works for the railways and is located in Delhi. He has sent me a ticket, for me to spend the whole month in Delhi. Why don’t you come with your mom and spend those ten days with me. It will be fun.”
 
A third surprise waited for me when mother and I arrived in Delhi. Bula’s father, a good-humored, white-haired guy, came to receive us and said, “Nonsense! Mother and son cannot stay in two different places. I have a big house and you will both stay with me and Bula.” To me, he added, “You can go and visit your friend as many times as you like. I will have my driver drop you there.”
 
But the biggest surprise was what he told me the next morning. “I have a cousin coming tomorrow to stay with me too. She has a young daughter. We are all old folk; we will amuse ourselves in our way. I am putting you in charge of the daughter. You have to take her to see all the places worth seeing – forts, parks and palaces. You two can use my second car.”
 
When the cousin came the following afternoon, Bula’s father royally announced the arrangement to all and sundry, and then ordered me to take Binny out promptly for tea and cakes at the bakery next door. Binny sounded like a nickname, but nobody volunteered any further information.
 
I was a college student and most young women looked attractive to me then. Binny had seemed pretty to me, but the moment we stepped on the street I realized that my initial impression was clearly an underestimate. Every pedestrian seemed to turn to look at her. At the bakery, when I ordered tea, the waiter gawked at her. So did the diners at the next table.
 
The first few days Binny was the quietest of persons and spoke little. She was punctiliously polite, however, and smiled occasionally. I gathered that she had grown up in Pakistan, mostly home-schooled, later moved to India with her parents after communal violence and studied in a convent, and now studied in a college. She was quick-witted, smart and sensible, not particularly interested in academics. As we visited tourist spots and sipped iced coffee in Connaught Circle, Binny slowly unfroze and started talking, laughing, speaking of friends and interests.
 
A couple of days later I told her that, as I was returning from a visit to my friend Tapas, I had seen from the bus a large hoarding, possibly some advertisement, that had a picture of a woman who greatly resembled her. She was curious, but I could not recall what the advertisement was about. We both went to take a look. We found not one but two large hoardings, both of a film about to be released.
 
The woman in the hoarding was apparently a new star whose name I had never heard. Binny seemed strangely excited. I said, “Doesn’t she look very much like you?” Binny looked at my face, held my hand and quietly said, “That is me.” For the movies, they had used her real name.

​That was Binny’s debut film. She went on to do thirty films and, for the succeeding thirty years, remained the reigning queen of the Indian film industry. She even directed a film or two. People considered her not just pretty but a remarkable beauty and women imitated her fringed hairstyle.
 
Mother and I returned home after ten days with cheerful memories. Father received us at the station and jested that he had “barely survived.”
 
Binny and I occasionally exchanged brief notes. Her notes were short and funny. They contained sardonic remarks about her co-stars and producers, and mostly directors.
 
Then I took a job and got busy. And she married a director, the one who directed her first film of which I had seen the hoarding in Delhi and who had attracted the most barbs in her notes.

When my father told me the story, he was narrating an incident fifteen years in the past. I heard it from him fifty years ago. Yet the incident remains as vivid in my mind as it was in his.
 
He had gone to Chennai in southern India for some work and was walking to a house in the suburb. Another elderly man was coming from the opposite direction. One look at my father and the man stepped down from the street. He stepped into a murky ditch of muck. There he stayed until my father had long walked past him.
 
Father was stunned. Why would the old man step down and that too into a filthy ditch? Once he reached the house he was going to, he asked his friend, a local man, the reason for the old man’s unusual conduct. The friend wasn’t perturbed at all. He explained that, since father was dressed well, coming as he did from an office, the old man assumed that he was a man of high caste. He must have been a man of a lower caste and stepped into the muck to avoid sharing the road with a high-caste person and incurring his wrath.

​Though father could not share his agony with the high-caste friend, he was deeply mortified that he had caused an elderly man get into a ditch. No matter that the humiliation was quite involuntary and based on a misunderstanding. Father was not of a high caste; he considered himself a man of no caste. It rankled him that he belonged to a society that made a man feel so unworthy that he could not even walk or stand in a street with a person of a supposedly higher caste.
 
I well remember the India where, from a distance of a hundred yards, one could safely infer the class of a man by simply observing his appearance, clothes and demeanor. Society had decreed, through means economic and social, that a person could be placed fairly accurately on the social ladder. We were all party to that practice.
 
The practice that my father saw, let us not forget, had two sides. On the one hand, it had been drummed into some people that they were inferior and needed to stand in the ditch when superior people passed. On the other, the superior people enjoyed and exulted in their superior status and accepted with relish when their inferiors went down to make way for them. All evil practices draw their sustenance from the compliance of victims, forced or habitual, as well as the relish of the victimizers, tacit or overt, whether they openly admit it or not.
 
During a visit to India, I was talking with the chief executive of the country’s largest public enterprise, just retired, and asked what he missed most from his days as a high-powered executive. I was speechless when he said, “When I came into your office, I had to carry my own briefcase. I haven’t done it in many years.” That silly, inconsequential display of his status, making his office chauffeur carry his lightweight briefcase, was his puny mind’s greatest joy.
 
There is a heavy price to pay for such joy. When people are judged by their caste or clothes, whether they carry their briefcase or have an underling to carry it for them, in essence we repudiate people’s merit and place value on false, superficial things. We give importance not to what people can do but what is trivial, what they have accidentally received from their parents or family or community.
 
Shortly after I arrived in the US, I went to work for an international center of management. One morning I arrived early in its large campus bordering the Potomac, parked my car and started walking up the stairs. Coming down the stairs was Jim, the janitor, after the morning clean-up. It was sheer coincidence that Bill, the company President, had just landed in the nearby helipad and met both me and Jim in the middle of the staircase. As we all shook hands, I noticed that all three of us wore identical looking dark-gray pinstriped suits: Bill’s, hand-tailored by order, probably cost $800, mine from Bloomingdale’s cost $350, and Jim’s, presumably from a discount store, perhaps cost $150. Even from a distance of twenty yards, one would have been hard put to know who was the president, executive or janitor. Though the US is hardly an egalitarian society, that moment in a crisp fall morning remains in my memory as a symbol of what can and should be.

​Einstein said he had his best ideas when he shaved. How did he write them down? He must have been holding his chin with the left hand, as I do, and shaving with the right hand. I am not as creative and rarely get any ideas when I am removing hair from my face. Rather I think of Harjeet Singh.
 
I had seen streetside barbers in India and admired the speed and fervor with which they went at their job. Speed I can understand, for occasionally they had waiting customers in the morning. But you had to admire the punctiliousness they brought to their service. They left no stubble unturned.
 
I saw it day after day, and then, one day, unable to restrain myself, a little late in the morning when there was no line of impatient customers, I sat myself down before a barber who operated at a street corner a hundred yards from my house in New Delhi. I had noticed him on several occasions and liked his pleasant aging face topped with a mop of abundant graying hair. He seemed to have a bright smile and a gentle, reassuring air.

​Apparently, he had noticed me as much as I had noticed him. As he wiped clean the weather-beaten wooden chair I was to occupy during his ministration, he said, “You are from the big corner house, aren’t you?” I felt guilty, for I had wanted to pass myself as one of the day laborers who mainly sought his service. But, cannily, he sensed my unease and quickly said, “All kinds of people come to me for a shave.”
 
That was my first clue to the quick-witted person he was. He had swiftly gauged that I didn’t really need his service, but had come principally to have a different experience. He asked if I wanted the quick service or a full-tilt treatment. I had come, out of curiosity for the experience and promptly, unhesitatingly asked for the latter. He smiled, nodded his head and asked me to sit down and relax.
 
He wrapped my upper torso with a fresh towel, taking care to tuck the end over my collar. He poured warm water from a flask into a shaving cup and stirred some dry rose and sandalwood powder. He moistened my chin thoroughly and repeatedly with the perfumed water. The water may even have included some other mysterious element, for I had a pleasant tingling sensation.

Then he began lathering my face inch by inch. Not just a layer of soapy water. He used some kind of pleasant-smelling mentholated cream and painted layer after layer of white stuff all over my face until he was sure my skin was ready for the blade. Harjeet brought out a glinting cut-throat razor and did several swipes over a leather strap that hung on the side. When he brought the razor to my cheek, its trajectory over my face was like a song. His hand glided from one side to another swiftly, surely, in confident strokes. In a few minutes every trace of the overnight stubble was gone.
 
I now know that, as one shaves hair from the face, the process itself pulls out the remnant of the hair from its groove. So Harjeet did the right thing. When the shave was over, he lathered again and went through the entire process of shaving once more. When finished, he removed the enveloping towel, taking care first to brush away every shard of wayward hair, and helped me stand up. It was truly the end of a magical process. I felt genuinely renovated. I knew I was compensating Harjeet poorly when I paid him his charge of fewer than two dollars.
 
He smiled graciously as he took the money. I thanked him and said I was grateful to him for a wonderful experience. He did not ask me to come again, for he well knew that I had come for a unique experience.
 
Harjeet had done more than take away unwanted hair from my face. He had taught me a valuable lesson.
 
For most of us, who do not maintain a mustache or a beard, shaving is a daily imposition. It is something to be done ahead of the shower. It is something many of us do half-heartedly, often irritably, as a boring task that had to be done before we face our day. Harjeet Singh made an art of what we are tempted to consider a lowly, tedious chore. We do it carelessly, desultorily, listening to music, thinking unrelated thoughts.
 
In his quiet way, Harjeet let me see, in a few minutes, on that bright-lit spring day near a street corner of a busy New Delhi market, what I had never noticed. Shaving was a daily but important part of my routine, an activity that had genuine significance, which I needed to treat with respect and, by doing well and happily, I enriched my life and added meaning to my brief existence on this earth.

“I am disgusted with myself,” said Jeffrey, and threw down his tennis racket on the court.
 
Jeffrey is my neighbor and a competent tennis player. He said bitterly, “Nothing is going right today. I don’t know what is wrong with me.”
 
For years I was an enthusiastic tennis player and had periodically seen similar tantrums. I had myself sometimes felt equally frustrated when nothing seemed to go right.
 
My eyes opened when I chanced on Tim Gallwey’s classic The Inner Game of Tennis. In tennis, as in any game, when you are playing, there are really two persons playing in the court or on the field. One is the Performer, the person who is striking the tennis ball with a racket or kicking a football, and the other overlooked one is the Critic, the person who is constantly judging everything you do. The Critic is ever-present and forever mumbling, “You missed that ball! You are going to lose the game this way,” or “You did well this time! Keep doing it if you want to win.”

​It is not just tennis, but any game you play – in fact, anything you do, like play a violin or manage a team in your office – you are, of course, the Performer. But you also carry, constantly, the heavy load of the Critic. On your shoulders sits the heavyweight Critic, who is always telling you, “You dummy, you messed it up! Your future is bleak,” or “Bravo, you did it! Things are opening up for you.”
 
This perennial, on-the-spur judgment that dogs your steps can kill you. It certainly kills your performance. If you play against Andre Agassi or Roger Federer, you are up against a giant. You need not just the skill and will to win, but also the clear mind to watch, learn and flex your play to match their deadly wizardry. The last thing you need is a mind clouded by endless admonitions of a relentless Critic.
 
During your performance, you don’t need moment-by-moment praise and blame to torment or at least to burden you. The time for evaluation is before, when you develop your skill or plan your strategy. Or after, so that you learn more about your strengths and foibles and can hone your next game. When you play or work, you don’t need acclaim to inflate you or reproach to cut you down to size. Experts say that praise can set you on an inflexible and fatal course and censure can dishearten or even unnerve you. Haven’t we seen a person or a company continue on the same path of success until the bitter end of failure? Haven’t we known a skilled, spirited player suddenly lose all verve after a few reverses?
 
You may think a Performer needs praise or blame to perform well. No. What a Performer needs is what the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls ‘flow.’ Like a river that flows at its own rhythm, you flow when you perform smoothly and effortlessly, at your very best. In that state, you are fully absorbed, fully focused, fully in charge. If I am playing tennis, I should be engrossed in playing my best, unconcerned about a hit or a miss, the idea of a score or a prize far from my mind. This is not very different from what a wise charioteer told a princely archer on the eve of a murderous war: Don’t focus on the result. I just have to do what I have to do: play tennis as well as I can.
 
When I write, I want to write as well as I can. I know I do better when I forget about other things – friends, movies, taxes, annoyances, all of them – and get totally engrossed in writing the best of which I am capable. I don’t need anyone at my elbow, cursing me or cheering me on, just the peace of mind to stay on my course and deliver the best prose a mortal can generate.
 
It matters little that I cannot write like Victor Hugo and produce a stunning novel of 500,000 words. If in writing my little pieces, or in doing anything of value to me, I can devote my heart and mind, achieve the joy of completing the task I have set for myself, and achieve peace and joy, I have gotten into the flow and unseated the inside Critic.
 
Let me see if I can have a word with Jeffrey and explain any of this.

When I joined a new school, the two smartest boys in my class had similar names, Amar and Amit. Amit was tall, Amar was relatively short. Amar was cerebral; he later became a knowledgeable geologist. Amit was outgoing; an engineer, he became an executive and later an entrepreneur. We became good friends. Amar and I acted in the school play. Amit and I played cricket. It is principally to their credit that, despite my travels, we remained friends over fifty years.
 
Coincidentally, three years ago I met them both, though separately. I was visiting India and I needed a sloka from the eighth-century playwright Bhababhuti, a poet in the royal court of Kanauj. Sure enough Amar found it, wrote the sloka in his neat lettering and offered it to me. Later that year, Amit came to Washington as an advisor to the US patent office and came to my home for dinner. Something happened after dinner that is worth recalling.
 
Amit was looking through my record collection and came up with a DVD and exclaimed, “This is my favorite. Let’s play it.”

I looked at the record. It was a gift from a musician friend whose taste in Rachmaninoff I did not share. The record had remained in my hoard unheard and neglected for a long time. Gingerly I picked up the record and put it on the machine, preparing mentally for a period of indifferent listening. I wasn’t reluctant but I wasn’t expectant either.
 
Then I looked at Amit’s face. It was glistening with excitement. Clearly the music meant a lot to him. He was eagerly waiting for the music to start. As I looked at his face, my own attitude relaxed to a mood of anticipation.
 
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number Two in C minor, opus 18, started playing. It has a quiet start and I listened intently. The concerto began with tolls of a bell on the piano while the violins, violas and clarinets picked up the theme, a Russian-sounding melody. Then the piano took the lead, while wind instruments accompanied lightly. The orchestra took over afterward with horns, trombones, timpani, drums and cymbals. After a gentle second movement in Adagio, the last movement in Allegro began with the piano restating the theme, followed by an energetic section where various instruments took turns playing the motif. It ended triumphantly.
 
I was stunned. How could I have missed all this when I heard it by myself? But missed it I had. And, now, rediscovered it I had. I looked at Amit’s shining face, as if he had been rejuvenated by the music, and told him how touched I had been. I was telling him the truth: the music had moved and uplifted me. By a mysterious process, Amit’s love for a piece of music had been transmitted to me. I had become a Rachmaninoff admirer.
 
On second thought, maybe the process was not so mysterious after all. I suddenly remembered another instance when I had made a remarkable discovery through a companion’s love for literature. On a lazy afternoon, a colleague had whimsically suggested that we read some modern poetry. His idea was that I should read a couple of poems from my favorite poet, and he would then follow by reading some poems from his favorite poet. After we had made our choices from his large library, we found we both picked the same poet by sheer coincidence. But my heart sank when I noticed he had chosen the poet’s early poems which I thought were hopelessly maudlin. I chose and read from the poet’s later work that I thought was mature and meaningful. Yet, to my surprise, when he read, with great enthusiasm his chosen poems, I began to see the sparkling romanticism of the early poems. I had to confess I liked them, in fact immensely. Equally surprisingly, he told me that he had always thought the later poems – the ones I read – to be wooden and pedantic, but when I read them he had loved them. We had both discovered a new aspect of beauty through a friend’s adoring eyes.
 
Probably loving beauty is more infectious than Ebola or Corona virus.

On the way back from India, I had a long stopover in London before I returned to Washington.
 
I visited a couple of museums, explored a variety of new restaurants and met a bunch of friends. One of them, an author and old college friend, invited me to his home in Hampstead and suggested the local train I should take.

It was early afternoon when I took the train and there weren’t too many passengers. As the train progressed, more people started boarding. A group of six young people boarded at the third stop and started talking loudly and exchanging jokes. Their sweat-streaked faces and soiled overalls suggested that they were probably manual workers, returning from their day’s work in a factory or a work yard. Each carried a hamburger in one hand and a milkshake in the other.
 
As the initial spurt of their exchanges wound down, their glances turned to me and the white woman sitting next to me. Initially, one of them noticed us and then, nudged by him, the others turned to look at us. Their looks had nothing but anger and hate. No doubt, they branded me immediately in their mind as a brown immigrant in England and the person next to me as an English girl I had wooed in my ambit. That we were conversing in whispers must have suggested a degree of intimacy they found intolerable.
 
It was winter, the kind of wet, freezing winter for which London is notorious. I had earlier attended a meeting and wore a decent three-piece suit with a designer overcoat that signaled affluence in their eyes. That impression might have been reinforced by the well-dressed attractive woman accompanying me.
 
If looks could kill, I would have been dead many times over. For a while, I thought they might come over and say something insulting, just to provoke me and engage me in fisticuffs. The group started consulting in whispers as if to decide what they could best do.
 
But they missed their opportunity, for my station came up next. With a last look at them, I and my companion exited the train and stood on the station platform. I looked for the exit point and started walking toward it. Then the thing happened.
 
The train had started again and was about to pick up speed and leave the station when the group popped their heads from the windows and two took up a position near the door. In quick succession they threw four milkshakes at me just as the train left the station, making sure that I would have no recourse.
 
Unfortunately for them, none of the projectiles reached me. Two of the milkshakes fell near my companion’s feet, burst open and some drops of the sticky milkshake landed on the fringe of her long overcoat. I produced a paper napkin and wiped them clean.
 
The event remains in my mind as a blistering example of pointless hate. I was hardly a brown immigrant who had finagled into their country; I was a US diplomat visiting London and conferring dollars on a struggling economy. The person accompanying me wasn’t a British girl I had seduced; she was my American wife, also a diplomat. More important, none of those young men seemed like people who could easily afford to throw away four large milkshakes. They did so because it was more important for them to express their deep, abiding hate for foreigners than save their hard-earned coins.
 
It gave me a fascinating insight into the nature of hate. Hate is unreasonable; my adversaries didn’t care to know who I really was. Hate is unmanly; they threw the milkshakes after the train had started moving, knowing they did not have to face me. Hate is unbalanced; the unreasonable individual feeds the unreasonable group, and they took strength in their number before contemplating action. Hate is unhinged; it is entirely pointless, serves no purpose except to express the viciousness of the hater.
 
When I now read daily about acts of hate in India, ostensibly for big causes like religion or nationalism, I can’t help recalling that hate is always unreasonable, unmanly, unbalanced and unhinged. It is also shameful, for it cannot but target, with cowardice, the poor, the weak, the helpless.