The one thing common to stuffy academic conferences, chill roof-top parties, formal-wear-only meetings and board-game nights at bohemian cafes? The dreaded conversation opener: “Lovely to meet you, Malavika! Soo, what do you do?”
“I am a… I do … many things…” I say, with one too many ums and ahs.
“Like?”
“Well...” I start off tentatively. “I’m a lawyer by training, but… “
Suddenly, no matter what else I may have to say, I don’t do so many things after all. Because a lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer it would appear, at least in my universe. Quite high on the Maslow’s pyramid, lawyering in India is somewhat respected for being the expressway to Big Money and Big Prestige fairly early in life.
But I’m not that kind of lawyer, I think to myself. I am vaguely aware of a slowly bubbling impulse to signal virtuousness.
I also see a diffuse urge to share more authentically about “my calling.”
It may seem crazy, but I love the law only because I love human beings and I really believe the law is an underrated world-building game, a voice offers from some quiet part of my heart.
You know, it all started with… I begin, in my head, rewinding back to my high-school interest in the law. And then I decide to lay to rest this inner monologue.
At this point, I’m forced against my own intuitions to admit that it’s not just society’s story about lawyering that makes me peevish – it is also my own! My work and the story I have built around it are all I can apparently drum up when asked who I am.
Since when did who I am become fully interchangeable with what I do? And that too, shackled to a fully made up story of value and accomplishment that is my elevator pitch?
From the get go, I’ll bashfully admit, as I take you back to my childhood and my learnings about the mind-body connection.
‘I think, therefore I am’ and other half-truths
My schools hugely valorised the intellectual. The two class hours a week reserved for “P.E” (“physical education” is itself telling nomenclature) on our schedules were routinely taken over by physics, chemistry, and math teachers racing to “finish” the curriculum. Teachers, matrons and principals were united in their disdain for my friends who couldn’t be bothered to hack test-taking because they’d rather be throwing around a ball over or into a net somewhere.
In school and out, the refrain was the same:
‘Study hard, ace the tests, chase degrees in tech, finance or medicine, earn boatloads of money or emigrate …’
So there I was, a fidgety, slouchy, people-pleasing and anxious child, too afraid to play, too self-conscious to dance or experiment with fashion, bizarrely reluctant to run, but acing the tests and frantically planning college admissions like there was nothing else to my little life.
In law-school, an EDM-remix of that tune carried me along, and I became a sum-total of the competitions I won, the internships I did and the Big Law job I ultimately landed, only with more suave marketing to cover up the anxiety (thoughtful, obsessed with constitutional law, enjoys solitude).
Many years into a successful run with amassing degrees and other inane credentials, I discovered, out of the blue, that there was more to me than my mind. “Dissociative” was the technical term for what I only knew as voids in decades’ worth of memories, numbness in many parts of my body, and utter bewilderment at inscrutable questions like ‘where I was experiencing a particular feeling’.
I had no idea what it meant to listen to my body, let alone how to honour it. And I’d been completely absent from this reality, buried as my head was within an anxious haze of casebooks and the law.
‘I am, therefore I think (sometimes!)’
When I found myself on the brink of self-combustion, I took a break - at a time that most interviewers would have been appalled to spot a gap in my resume. For a whole year and then some, I let my mind be in the hope that my body awakens.
I woke up whenever, I cooked whatever, I slept whenever and soaked up the numbness.
When I didn’t feel so numb, I basked in the sun and on the grass, and I splayed myself on friends’ couches and on the gym floor.
I lived for the next PR on my clean and jerk, but had to be dragged to the gym by my ever-so-giving partner, sometimes through meltdowns and tears.
I danced awkwardly at friends’ weddings, but after many many drinks.
I went on long walks with my dog, even when all I’d rather have been doing is lie in bed frozen in my body.
In this no-pressure solo retreat to within myself, I found myself disappearing down nerdy rabbit holes about the Indian parliament or the exchequer. I learned that constitutional law did make me feel alive, in my body as much as in my head. But so did cold water swims, hikes in the mountains, yoga and runs, being with dogs and children, teaching law, reading fiction, train travel, playing with soil, play in general, creating, living …
Many hikes, runs, and therapy-hours later, here I am today! My body can sense when my colleagues are stressed; my body can read when my mother leaves something unsaid; my body can pick up on a shared need to just be around my grieving friend, as an ambient presence.
Remarkably, it appears that my body can also sense when there’s more than meets the eye on a legal issue, prompting me to take a beat, go for a walk or run, and come back later. I like to think of it as thinking, writing, doing, and being from the body.
Channelling this inner creative energy feels new and mysterious to me, as I try to leave behind a past-self that was hell bent on chasing and achieving society’s truths, or seeking and discovering spiritual truths. I’ll be ever grateful for this awe and wonder.
So who am I?
Here’s a more honest story about myself, one where I am in my body as much as I am in my head. A story that speaks to me and moves me and energises me.
I am Malavika, endlessly curious about life, the living, and what makes us all tick. I love human beings and their stories, and feel very lucky to get to share in the lives and stories of so many golden people. I believe in the infinite possibility of creation and co-creation of our realities, whether in gardening on my balcony, or in cooking for friends, or in dancing in our communities, or in lawyering to keep the body and soul of our very diverse country and ecosystem together.
I’ve recently started giving more of my time to diffuse thinking, randomly letting my mind wander, doing nothing as it were. This new, free, blue space in my soul has birthed some of my most cherished insights, but also a sense of ease and lightness in the day-to-day. When I do focus my thoughts, I split my time between law, coaching, reading, writing and playing.