It is by listening to Eckhart Tolle that I am learning to move from my life situation to my life. My life situations have not always been easy. I have experienced many difficulties, which I now see as part of a past that held many lessons for me. After being a star pupil in school and college and whilst doing my M.Phil in International Relations, when my thesis was rejected, I experienced a deflation that seemed to me the end of my academic career at that time.
Arrogance of an Artificial World
I moved to the newspaper world where competition seemed to be the order of the day. It was all about getting scoops and being in the thick of things and politics, treating life as a contest. This bred in me a kind of arrogance which made me think that I had a privileged position in life.
A trip to the UN on an internship with UFER, an NGO, in America, transported me to a surreal world, in which people flitted in and out of conferences, in a rarified atmosphere of diplomats and self-important people. This false sense of self was accentuated when I did a brief stint working with the Community Relations Council in Leamington Spa in the U.K. I would visit Indian homes, where their residents had come straight out of a village in Punjab, where the women were still cloistered and who were in a sense seen as aliens in a land that felt culturally and intellectually superior to them. I remember putting up a performance when I addressed some local English policemen on Indian behaviors and the mental attitudes of immigrants.
Janina Gomes
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