pta nhi title

 I am always performing. Once, I was talking to my friends, and we were passed by a common acquaintance. I switched to talk to him and then switched back to talking to my friends. It was very second nature to me. I didn’t even think about it or think through it, it came subconsciously to me. But my friends immediately pointed out how different my tone was. And for the first time, it came to actually notice something that was present all along, but just not ever pointed to, and I started to actually think about how much of social interaction is just performance, especially for me.

It’s so much of a performance that I wonder: do I even exist outside this performance? Who am I if I am not performing? Everybody probably feels this way, and that’s okay.

I, in classic Tania fashion, will now switch the topic abruptly, to perspectives, and how Jain philosophy talks about how we can look at the same thing from different perspectives, and the summation of all that is reality. I witnessed this, not metaphorically, but actually, physically, and tangibly.

When I walk down a road and then pass by the same road through a vehicle like an e-rickshaw or bike, or when I pass the road at different times of the day, the road somehow changes. As if It reveals itself a little each time. When on bike you are at the brink of the road to switch lane it's so scary but I was once walking down the same area and it was not scary at all. It makes me wonder if I ever knew this road at all to begin with. But it’s interesting, because it means I don’t know nothing at all, because witnessing it from all perspectives is impossible. And understanding what it looks like from another perspective, theoretically, is also impossible, because it’s an epistemic reality, and we have to access the experience epistemically, which we cannot.