Ask any Indian and eight out of 10 will tell you that the rainy season is his favourite time of the year…and so it should be. The monsoon, bless its watery visage, is our deliverer, freeing us from the merciless importunities of the Sun God, moistening the parched earth and carpeting it in green; bestowing food to all life and blanketing us in its cool embrace. Yet, assuming that the monsoon strikes some of us with dread and fills our hearts with despondency, there should still be no room for despair.

For life is about learning to flow with the ups and downs; the highs and lows; the sunshine and rain. It is about cultivating an inner resilience and adaptability so profound that no circumstance or situation leaves us wanting. It is about being so firmly and strongly centred that nothing can faze us or cause us a moment's sorrow. So how do we achieve this momentous poise?

Looking At The Positive
"Face the sun and you won't see the shadows," Helen Keller said and in doing so voiced a major truth. Most of us are conditioned to look at what's missing, at what does not work, at the irksome and the unbearable. It takes an active orientation of will to shift to looking at the positive, at the opportunity within the problem, at the silver lining in the cloud. The more we focus on the positive, the less energy will we expend in resisting the situation or being miserable. There are fabulous aspects to the monsoon that each of us could cheerfully enumerate each time we get stuck in a monstrous traffic jam, or when the trains won't run, or when we have had to wade through knee-deep water.