Willpower

At a time when most celebrities are letting us down with their shades of grey in the IPL debacle, the news of Lisa Ray’s battle with cancer and truly delightful reappearance into our life is a breath of fresh air. Lisa looks as beautiful as ever. One look into her guileless eyes and eternally sweet smile seems to indicate that she has not let this set back take away her true essence. Most people in her place would have been bitter, patronizing or preachy. She just says she is lucky to be reborn.

The power of the human spirit to battle setbacks is seldom appreciated until one has gone through similar life experiences. The inner strength of a person may not always be manifested in the individual’s external demeanor. For instance, my mother in law has always been an excitable person with a short fuse. When she was to be operated eighteen years ago for colon cancer, everyone thought it best to tell her it was a tumor until the biopsy results confirmed malignancy. The resident doctor at the hospital, who was quite a “style bhai” had other plans. He paid her a visit on the eve of the operation, sat on her bed, held her hand, and told her that she should be prepared for the worst since she probably had stage two cancers and would not survive beyond six months. He did not know that the attractive woman was also made of steel. Next morning, the senior surgeon met us after a five hour surgery and applauded her fighting spirit which was evident during the operation.

Just a few months before this incident, I had waltzed into my caesarean operation imagining it would be a picnic, an end to the ordeal of pregnancy and a new beginning. What followed was a complete shocker. The infant in the womb has to be protected from the anesthesia in the mother’s blood stream and therefore extricated as soon as the anesthesia kicks in. This translates to the wide awake mother being strapped down, listening to gruesome doctor language while the abdomen is being marked for the incision. I was as relaxed as a Chinese gymnast performing in front of the high command. At the end of the operation, the frantic anesthetic wasn’t able to extricate the tube that he had inserted through my wind pipe until my mature gynecologist gave me a slap on my groggily awake face and ordered me to relax.

Are we born with this strength or do we acquire calmness by meditation, faith or experience? For many of us, a very strong bond with a person we love keeps our spirit fighting and kicking for survival. One has seen that while women tend to be more excitable and prone to despair in youth which is perhaps an excessive affinity for high drama, they tend to become rocks as they get older, for they will battle every disaster to take care of their children. Men on the other hand tend to give up easily as they get older for often in their pursuit of the material and frivolous, they tend to weaken the bond with people around them.