My daughter is a psychologist. She’s is a sociologist before a psychologist. She went around wearing ‘sociology’ tag for quite a while, didn’t find many takers for it. She was put in a convent school run by nuns who hammered into her the motto ‘service to man is service to god’. That put the germ of social work into her head and it nudged her into taking Sociology as her best bet. It was not to be. Holding her master’s degree in hand, she played by the rule to win a job, got nowhere. A job was far from her, what came close was frustration and disappointment.   

Now what? She came to me for a word of advice. I said, ‘You are trying to sell mirrors in the land of blind’. My response didn’t go down well with her. She had married her dreams to sociology and I was asking for the divorce between her dream and sociology. That was a shattering response, a bit cruel. ‘What’s wrong with Sociology?’ she asked knitting her brow. ‘Nothing wrong if you are Bill Gates or Paris Hilton’, I quipped. She curled her lip at my cutting remark.

I said, ‘you are looking for a job holding torch of sociology in this dark jungle of dog-eat-dog where they take around the begging bowl to feed them first and then give scraps to neighbors’.

‘So, where do I go from here?’ she asked sounding a little impatient.

‘Well, if I were you, I’d go back to the university and do psychology but I wouldn’t marry my dream to it’, I said. ‘Psychology has got good selling point. Lots of people goanna need it. You just have only to call and they’d come running. People wrong with mind goanna grow by leap and bounds. Mind mending too is no less a service to God’, I said.

‘A word of caution, though, I said. ‘Don’t pile on the heaps of shit they give you in head. Hold the little that takes to win the certificate. You need the credentials to sell yourself. You don’t live in a world of prophets where they can know what you are on the inside by looking on your outside. In the world you live they know you from that little piece of paper. You are nothing if you are not a good piece of paper. So, learn only so much that it takes to get the certificate, and a good one at that. Who knows you become a moneygrubber!’, I said.

She mulled over it for some time, swallowed the bait.

Now she is a psychologist, has calls to make, pays calls to hospitals, clinics. Every time she runs a psychotherapy session for a mentally ill, she comes to me for feedback on her work.

I always give her one and the same mantra. ‘Hold your head empty, no clutter! Delete all the shit you’ve taken out of book into memory! It is less of an asset and more of a liability! Keep the doors and windows of your head open, bring people round to talk, listen to them for donkey’s years with endless patience, therein lies the key to open the lock of their mind and do the mending.’

I tell her that mind mending is not putting on a straitjacket, nor is it a one-size-fit all thing. In this trade you cannot play by your own rules. You got to put time and energy into grasping the game and then play by the rule of the game. There are as many rules as many men with wrong minds.

The other day, she recounted the details of the conversation between her and an adult pushing his 50s at a neuro hospital bed where they had operated on his brain to remove a tumor. She said this man was in depth of despair and would weep inconsolably burying his face in hand. His wife waiting on him was at her wit’s end. He’d lament over his state and say his children gone to the dogs. They haven’t put him on any anti-depressant this far.

She was quite happy with the efficacy of her psychotherapy. It bore fruits. She said, she talked to him for a good 1 ½ hour and he burst out laughing twice. ‘At the moment of parting he counseled me caution while riding my scooter back home and said that I was invaluable and that many sorrowing people needed me and that I should take proper care of myself.’ She said.  

‘So you played the game by his rule’, I asked. ‘Yeah, his zone is politics. A bit of fatalistic too. My conversation with him centered on politics for the most part and I worked few jokes into it. I was successful to bring him out of himself. I think I kept his spirit up during the conversation. It amazed his wife that he could laugh at jokes and could be so keen on political topic of conversation.’

‘In the next session, I have thought of working the conversation around to the Geeta. I don’t really know much about the sacred text. If you could enlighten me about it’, she put it before me.

‘Well, the Geeta as a holy book on the bookshelf is gold. Once the book goes into your head it gets to become as good as garbage. The holy words in itself have no power to transform you into the Geeta. You don’t allow yourself to merge into the Geeta. You store the lessons of the Geeta somewhere in your head and keep control over it. You want to use or abuse the Geeta whichever way it serves your interest. There is you and there is the Geeta – two-in-one in one head. To you, you is more sacrosanct than the Geeta. You don’t allow the Geeta to overwhelm you. You don’t go the Geeta ways nor will the Geeta fit in with your ways. I don’t see any sense in carrying load of a thing that live in constant conflict in your head.’ I said.

‘Having said that you can make good use of the Geeta as a safety pin to pick a thorn off the sole of your feet. Once you have picked the thorn off the sole, throw away the safety pin along with the thorn. Next time, you get a thorn on your feet, use anything you come across to pick off the thorn’, I said.

‘Yes, I use the Geeta tomorrow to pick the thorn off the sole of his feet’, she smiled and walked away.