People, Places, Things - and boomerang..
I am writing this post, after almost 11 years.
Around the time, I closed my last startup Shunya in April 2021, I became increasingly inward , reflective & grateful of the value of people I had in my life. Like a gush, everything that I had ever done - a revelation of how I got here - my dreams, my fears, the whole of me, esp as it dates to my early years growing up in Kanpur and realizing that I am who I am not inspite the pain of those years, but because of it, in a positive manner. And that I would not want to change one micro pixel detail of that existence.
So, last year after the commercial non-success of Shunya, I started writing a lot more about about the value & how grateful I am for these relationships & life experiences.
So, its only fair that I start with Andreaa, now that I decided to publish some of what I wrote during that time.
The beginnings - Rumi’s night of Union
Andreaa and I met during my Master’s at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2010. One of my first impressions of her, was super ambitious, extremely self aware and what a power of a woman. I describe the night we met - as the “Rumi’s night of union” - as there had to be something more than the external circumstances that connected us, so deeply that evening.
It was the fresher’s party as is the case in most grad schools. We were dancing on “Tonight’s gonna be a good, good night” and we got so tired & sweaty and stepped out of the place with blaring music. It was September and cold had not yet set in. Andreaa is from Romania, and that night we spoke about her life back home, her first masters before getting her, her father who was building a house, all by himself, the revolution in Bucharest, her ambitions, dreams & fears. There is something about sharing your ambitions and life with a stranger, and esp. doing that without any filter words, to let people see all your ugly parts.
What is surprising to me is that, though I am extremely outspoken, I hardly remember speaking that night. The music was still playing inside and both of us comfortably seated on perch - me in my extremely poor sense of dressing for European standards.
There was something esoteric - a pull of kind, to know this person. Slowly the conversation moved to such a deep pain - that it is hard to describe and put it into words. It was then, that I first felt in connection with a life force of kind that I had never felt before - as if something moved from within me - to her, a healing power and in that it knew that her pain was a little bit better. It felt like it had an epicenter and within that, just two of us existed and there were no words needed to feel that presence of this person who I hadn’t even known before that evening - and yet felt that I miraculously did.
Only much later in life, I had the terminology to describe the journey of soul and why we meet some people and feel as if we had known them for a very very long time. This expression is experiencing the union of a different kind - The night of Rumi, himself.
Irgendwas bleibt
Sag mir, dass dieser Ort hier sicher ist
Und alles Gute steht hier still
Und dass das Wort, das du mir heute gibst
Morgen noch genauso gilt.
Feeling this, that evening was the most elevating thing I have ever felt. There is a story in Mahabharat where a mongoose goes to the home of a hungry farmer and sees him feed his family's last meal to an unknown starving beggar. As the farmer forgoes feeding his own equally hungry family courts death, the site symbolizes a divine act of selfless compassion. At this site few grains of rice remained. And the mongoose‘s half body turns Golden, as he rolls into those grains. Afterwards, feeling almost a withdrawal like urge for what it experienced in that moment, and to get the other half of his body golden, the mongoose goes to the greatest Yagna's (symbolizing sacrifice & self-abnegation) there ever have been - yet unable to turn the other half of his body Golden.
2021 at Shunya, personally had been just that. To find the other golden half in me. Which is why it is only apt - that I describe it what I first experienced it with Andreaa.
Experiences do not just happen to us, they rise, ferment and boil in us till what is to be done, is done. And it becomes a second nature of our character, sometimes, for good.
House party at Andreea’s comfortably tiny roof top store room in Reuterweg :)
Circa, Jan 2012 - Reuterweg, Frankfurt am Main. Having “Polenta”
Understanding ourselves through people
As a child, I hated to be dependent on anyone. The reason for this was simple. Having come from a deeply scarred childhood and domestic abuse as is the case in most middle-class families that are civilized enough to hide it artificially, but not civilized enough to resolve it, this theme cross-cut almost all of my teenage life. I did well at school, devoured books that I loved commuting to book lender to book lender in an attempt to escape to another world.
Back to Frankfurt, and Andreaa, and why I mentioned about “hating” to be dependent. I came to Frankfurt to pursue Masters in Quantitive Economics. After my Bachelors and during my day job I had gotten a deep liking to behavioural psychology, Game theory and micro economics. And even though I received 100% scholarship for my masters, I arrived at my masters, totally unprepared for the different way of being educated - than was the case in India. I found the assignments very difficult to “apply” at first, open book exams and kind. At first, I would try a lot more to understand, take extra video lectures on Youtube from Princeton/Stanford but still be stuck.
It was then, that I found the courage to ask Andreaa, besides our friendship.
As, she would say - “Why don’t you call ?” , and “Call me, ok ?” - in some of these moments, I learnt the power of asking. And that it is people job to reject you, not yours to write yourself off. And that the goal in life isto regret things we have done, than the ones we did not.
It would be like a virtual sinking feeling for reasons beyond yourself and you feel like just covering yourself under a blanket, and that the morning comes and all is ok. You want to avoid facing the ceiling looking upto you, as if its white spaces question you.
Many nights in Shunya was just that - figuring out how to go from one day to another, without any loss of enthusiasm, but also having the courage of non-pretence, that it will be Ok and that answers will emerge. And the only thing that helped me in these situations was asking that I needed help. See also the true psychological price of entrepreneurship . The foundations of this muscle memory of picking yourself up are laid in our early years - which I learnt while struggling at grad school, and experienced on these worthwhile moments above.
Poochoge nahi to jawab hamesha na hi hoga :)
With her I learnt the power of Networks, the concept of presence and the same force that you could use to draw someone into your energy field and make them invested in your ambitions, fears & dreams(not for “seduction” use cases), but to experience living in higher planes. As if you are in a spaceless field where only this energy exists.
When our soul is rinsed, and words do not happen through language as the medium of communication - when energy moves effortlessly - in that medium Shunya happens.
Yin & Yang - on the purpose of growing together
There were many such powerful moments of our ordinary existence as students, when Andreaa taught me to think, to apply and to rewire how to look at the world. She would come home, we would do barbeque once in a while, and her favorite, “Black coffee” that had turned cold at room temperature as an accompaniment to our academics. To this day, I enjoy coffee at room temperature :)
Frankfurt, Hoechst, Circa 2011 : Andreaa, with her husband Bogdan.
We would often, switch roles with me being emotionally stronger one when it came to relationships(wrt men, we were both young:) ), and her when it came to academics. Like Yin & yang - we would let each other see the ugly duckling in each other and without judgment.
Towards the close of the masters, as we realized that I would go back to India , one day while having lunch in Mensa, I pulled two post it notes on which we both wrote our resolutions for life.
Her’s - “To be more empathetic & diplomatic” and for me” To be successful for my own self “ , though only much later in life I realized how shallow that goal was all along. What has not changed though is every time I look at that note, I get a different kind of enthusiasm and upbeat about life.
The best parting gift
And that by saying , “Yes to some things that you do not want to, you are saying No to the things that you really want to”. This is Andreaa’s gift to me, that I keep loosing.
Our (almost) last dinner together
Closing thoughts : On the relationship between giving & receiving
To the casual reader above, it may feel like one of us was the giver and another receiver, but the roles do not work like that. In that we don't give people things, or our love, we give them our receiving.
I never feel more given to
than when you take from me –
when you understand the joy I feel
giving to you.
And you know my giving isn’t done
to put you in my debt,
but because I want to live the love
I feel for you.
To receive with grace
may be the greatest giving.
There’s no way I can separate
the two.
When you give to me,
I give you my receiving.
When you take from me, I feel so
given to.
— Given To, Ruth bebermeyer
La multi ani and discovering the healing power of pain.