Love, loss and rejuvenation

 Blessed are those who can have their mothers by their side from cradle-to-grave. My wound, my irreparable loss, was still open. It oozed blood still and memories of my mother lynched and stabbed at it. The crust hadn’t started to form to turn into a black shell, allowing new skin to form for a resettled new normal of life. To forget my pain and avoid the vulgar conglomeration of judgments spinning off the pitched ideological battles, I strolled out for miles after miles in the farmlands. The luscious bounty, the classical quality and the peerless beauty of unperturbed, pure nature had been banished decades back by the tilling claws of intense agriculture. However, Mother Nature still smiled suffused with saffron evenings and offered her plundered mansion for a red-carpet walk where I, her battered and bruised kid, could walk for gigantic imagination and intellectual vitality.

Our over-done self-confidence to manipulate the ecosystem has been appalling and grossly shoddy. The trees are gone to vacate space for our needs. This lonesome tree appeared to marvel at the humans’ ingenuity in fighting over fiction and be totally unaware of the facts. The lonesome peepal tree somehow still managed a foothold and occupied a square yard of land! It was left out as an insignia of the past, a kind of symbolic resonance of the free-wheeling ways that Mother Nature once possessed. All around you saw the brown guts of tilled earth, where not even a single blade of grass was allowed without the distressed farmers’ permission. Just 40 years back, the lonesome peepal had a big family of trees around it. But then man-born greater needs, call it greed, arose. The farmland now crept over the horizon like a deadly parasitic creeper. How many more misty dusks remained in the lonesome tree’s destiny, I wondered. It survived on the frugal crumbs of faith the farmer’s family still possessed for their ancestors. The tiny brick shrine under the tree stood as a fort to protect it. The faith will surely dilute and so will the fear of forefathers’ anger. The shrine fort will crumble and the tree would surely lose its entitlement of one square yard of land.

Under the peepal, a mighty truth was written on the soiled stage of life. These were the beautiful feathers of a bird, scattered as the aftermaths of life and living, the scythe of time reaping the harvest intangibly, everywhere in all directions. The colors melting back to seep into the womb of mother earth for another step in the corridors of creation! Nearby, in the grayish black swathes of a cold, frozen afternoon, an abandoned colony of weaverbird nests hang like corpses of once alive, sparkling, kicking and exuberant dreams. The cycle gone after the titillation, momentum and hype, the caravan moved ahead and the remnants left behind as the tell tale signs of the immutability of mortality. With surging enthusiasm, carrying its long, wide array of peculiar paraphernalia, the last dancing flames of the setting sun left the stage. Miss Grey crept with its strange ethereal aroma and darkness stood at the threshold with its supernatural halo. In a little corner on the stage, the abandoned colony was melting into the dark-grey locks of hair which Miss Dusk let loose with vanity and pride! Humans got any message? At least I did!

Not far from the lonesome peepal, among the grassy waste outside the main village habitation, he had set up his very own colony for his son, daughter-in-law and a noisy brood of grandchildren. The society was augmented by pigs, goats and poultry, a world in itself. Sube Valmiki was young when we little ones hopped over the pond-side banyan’s branches which was a raggy youth at that time. Now the tree was a grandfatherly sage with its spools of hanging aerial roots and so was Sube Singh, and myself a graying fatherly figure marveling how swiftly time flies! All this despite our humongous efforts at combating ageism!

His snow white sparse beard and thick moustache gave him the look of a sagely otter floating over the complicated and meandering whimsicalities of life with a frank directness. His face, in fact his entire persona, bore the strapping marks and saddle sores of a donkey, the brutal yoke of caste hierarchy—and the consequent struggle for survival—turning the nape skin like hard leather and head dumb like a beast of burden.

Despite all the scars, mud and mire, a hard-fought life provides one the traces of infallible majesty in its own way. These are born of the transcendental brilliance of a feeling that it was no sweet milk in a silver spoon that was offered to subdue my hunger; rather a stony clod was hurled into my mouth to stifle my littlest growth that I could have actualized from the disadvantaged seeds of the caste-based society. Mere survival till an old age is a grand success at this level of existence.

As the winter sun was setting, his reddish eyes—glowing like the simmering last rays in the village pond with unwilting defiance, angry optimism and relentless positivity—had his awesome phalanx of sunniest optimism contrived with caste-specific, customized taste in the subterranean world of ignominy, where he was his own naked self, while on the surface his caste superseded his entire identity, covering his body, his name, his work, his emotions and thoughts like a dark cloud prevails over bright sunrays. There he sat at the heights of his old age overlooking the tiny trails he had been successful in leaving behind during his scampering like a mouse among the underbrush. Meanwhile, the bigger world was successfully hurtling and crossing over the mainstream.     

His multicolored woolen cap and the shiny red blanket made him stand out as a milestone as he smoked hookah sitting on his charpoy in front of his little world surrounded by wasteland and tufts of bunchgrass which had been decimated by the winter frost.

‘You are turning into an old sadhu!’ I teased him. He welcomed the compliment with a disarming smile. I knew I looked brooding and self-contained in my pain. He knew about my loss. Stifling a bout of cough while I stifled a yawn, he put his proposal, “You are also worth a good disciple if I turn a guru!” He laughed copiously over this. I knew he had an exact idea of how lucrative is the business of gurus these days.  

As a child, I remember him as a sturdy dark youth working for us during some house-repair works. Now I am a grayish middle-aged man and he is acquiring the golden shades of old age. He has settled outside the village in a world of his own. His grandchildren play with more verve and enthusiasm even than his little goats. The long and wide barren stretch of his existence gets shaken up by his brood’s laughing, shaking and rambling childhood. It raises perfumed dust and there he stood impassive to the blabbers, bites and snarls of life.

His pride possession, Moi Rani, the lady pig, was tethered nearby. The long rows of shiny teats along the udder bore a hallmark of its feminine fecundity. “She is our offering to Moi Mata! We keep her for non-commercial purposes!” he told me. Well, I understood that she was a sort of offering to a local goddess. But I could not understand her status completely. ‘Non-commercial’ didn’t make much of a meaning to me. Did it mean her sons and daughters also go along the same way and spared of slaughter and sale? Most probably not because even his firm faith cannot turn him a prisoner in the furious embrace of emotional shackles! That would be taking one's faith too far! At the most, it may mean she will not be sold for some bucks in the pocket, and won't be slaughtered to add to the fun and funstry on some celebratory occasion. Her pedigree I suppose was well beyond the deity's protection. Anyway, they don't think that deeply. And that is why they can have a real laugh!

He had a pet raven also. A feat in itself in taming a wild bird known for its claim on scheming independence and gaukish, husky kaawing! He had chanced upon it under a tree, a mere meatball, waiting to become someone’s meal. He picked it up and showed astute mastery and common sense in parenting it. The sleek, stylish bird was no prey to confused loyalties between the urge for freedom and gratitude to its savior. It flew to enjoy freedom in liberated skies but acknowledged its gratefulness by coming back almost regularly and sit by him.    

Raven

in cuddling heaven!

Its irritable kaw-kaw melting into bearable notes,

Its erstwhile black monochrome, ewwe!

Glowing now with a likeable hue,

Love is the best form of truth and beauty,

Take it as your conscious humanoid duty!

Beyond the sulk and simmer of my lonely life, back home in my yard, I had a tiny reason to smile over the frozen time. Rajnigandha (Tuberose) smiled at long, long last! In fact after 1.5 years! It appeared to have lost interest in life, living and smiles and looked just a faded, forlorn bunch of grass in the pot, waiting to be cast away for some better, more attractive flower for aesthetic elitization of soul and material spirit’s stylization. The plant spirit in it seemed in a kind of pyramidic regression to finally vanish into nothingness or everything.

Little did she realize that I have the patience of a grandfatherly sea. Patience is the key for deep buried song snippets to sprout and blossom forth in full melody. Blurred, faded colors require an entire saga of gratification at the level of emotions to beat destiny and acquire the classical shades of beautiful antiquity. There was some understated elegance about the withered, discharmed plant, which helped me in nurturing hope and keep myself yoked to a no-fuss approach. Sadistic pleasure of swiping away something that hasn’t fulfilled our expectations creeps through the volatile, flourishing loopholes in our conscience. The short and sharp speech of reason, steely crisp and forever straight, kept crusading for the hopeless plant’s mercy killing. But the pale, plaintive strands of life appeared sipping sustenance from the shared spring of mother existence and I put away any idea of replacement.

Our fates surely change. The unvarnished and despicable plain also gets a chance to get decked up in a grandiloquent way. The stagnant and brackish pools also beat their dead-end and shake hands with fresh, open-ended surge of a new stream that ripples with free-willed triumphalism. Beating the hopeless months’ chronological snarls, Lo, here she reciprocated with a lovely little bouquet! The bunch of its heavily perfumed flowers chimed with a mesmerizing narrative of rejuvenation. Beating the cruel ironies, and sustaining on some inner stoicism, it smiled as a living tale of inherent lyricism. Its soft white petals, so fragrant in the breezy and beautiful spring noon, looked around with boundless curiosity! With a pout drenched in evocative sensuousness, it appeared to murmur a gentle sorry for the delay! No worries baby! Better late than never! Even long delayed smiles are better than any other alternative! Keep smiling! Goodness needs no stellar efforts. A flower’s smile carries groundswell of goodwill. The least we can do for others is to smile. Beyond the epic fiasco created and recreated by the crusading superheroes full of temper-tantrums and snootiness yelling fearsomely articulate torpedoed abuses, we can sometimes ease our burden and just be ourselves, with a smile of course.    

Nearby was the Reddest Rose of Hibiscus, smiling with polished, refreshed and invigorating ease, buttressing her argument for the greatness of smiles and colors. Its soft petals studded with philosophical grittiness. Pouting heavenward with a passionate kiss, conditioned by porous fluidity, from Ma Earth to Pa Sky, with loads of love of course! The subterranean leitmotif of love rising meteorically. When the sky melts and goes down on its knee to kiss the petalous hand of mother earth! A holy kiss! A soft, rippling and lyrical poignancy essentializing the ultimate truth behind love, smiles and colors.

The daughter of the yard, Hibiscus, had charted her journey from a pleasantly uncouth toddler to a lithesome, curvy, confident young woman. She had now delicately touched the peak of her youth, vow, what a journey! She had plenty to offer to solace my heart as I mused over her like a cigar-chomping granddad lost in the radical spirals of pain and loss. I felt safely ensconced on an island in a sea of discrimination, the sea heaving its waves with dreary domestic chores and kitchen and living room battles. Ruminative and rueful flaming comets, the spontaneous offshoots of our habitualized tools of self-torture and unhappiness, whizzed past above in the sky. The built-in entropy appeared to pull everything apart. Soundly trounced by pain and loss, I had my emotional anchor in my little garden. Like a little worm I clung to it to avoid being completely lost.  

The thorns need not be transparently self-deprecating. In its complete simplicity, everything is thoroughly decent. Truth is merely a hybridity sired by good and bad, beautiful and ugliness in equal measures. Thorns symbolize the monolithic entity of our collective pain and suffering that Lord Jesus carried on his head, while the petty tyrants, pointlessly infantile and officious in their fears and desires, poked with spears as if raking up blood and earth in equal measure to prepare a cultural landscape that termed thorns culturally disparaging and derogatory rather than the little harmless pricks to puncture the balloon of swindlers. The sinister priests holding the arbitrary grant of monopoly rights, their legacies extending to their graves, followed by their progenies grasping perpetual copyrights to hijack love, truth and beauty and keep prattling the quotable quotes, thus cementing the mythologically gripping falsehood. The Lord but wore these instruments of truth on his bleeding head and turned them a crown.

Now, truth shines in the indomitable spirit of the garden cactus, the crown of thorns plant. A flowing metaphor of indefatigable spirit, her forefathers braved the desert sands to bloom. The sun all fiery and fiendish and glowering unkindly with its red-hot pokers of rays; the barren tapestry of endless sands bitingly sprawled out in chronic self-indulgence; sand-storms lashing with a throaty chuckle; devil-spawned infertility ruling with an aura of invincibility. The cactus blooms in this madness as a beacon of sanity. From its dusty attics, it holds the promise of an oasis somewhere. It has some encouraging tale to share like a fading epitaph on the tombstone of a forgotten grave lying with detached grandeur somewhere in a leafy corner.

She thus carried sturdy, hardy genes. With constructive, dignified bearing, her flowers stayed for months. They smiled at the onlookers to iron out the wrinkles of disgust created by the sight of thorns. They stayed unperturbed of the merely gimmicky rise and fall of temperatures. The powerful genetic hoops of her ancestors forged in the hardiest deserts making the tiny garden veritably a multi-facted grandeur of fun and revelry. The five-petaled little red marvels continued to kiss night frost, faded sunrays and the hot noon of sandy summers with the same triumphant luminosity. Little wonder they stayed for weeks after weeks. Glory be showered upon thou Jesus Thorns! You beat the prickly, barbed ignominy to blossom up a flowery smile.

All you need to have a flowering smile is to overlook the thorns. All of us have pinching, barbed edges to our persona that pierce the soft skins around. Accept your own thorns. Forgive others for having the same. And all you have is a bouquet of victory for all. Smiles, smiles and smiles pervading the air with meditative stillness!

Writhing in the nostalgia of the days when the house had its maker, Ma, oscillating with its oeuvre of pleasure and pain, the spring led by its pre-teen soft, smitten gripping with love and procreation, hence a little show-offish as a result, sprinkled my little garden with flowers. It looked as if Ma was smiling at me.

As if mad with the ecstasy of the forbidden fruit, the Parijat  showered love like a crazy lover! A fragrant heap of fragile beauty and love was found every morning under the tree after the frozen wet nights. I gave her just an ounce of my care. With dynamic luminosity, she multiplied it thousand times and showered me with heavenly drizzle of scented dumplings. Thank you darling!

Outside in the streets, a group of migrant Bihari laborers moved in the early silent hours of the cold morning to reach the construction site where they were employed currently. They moved with a wearingly calculated progression. A cordon of clouds always followed them to keep their days un-sunlit and murky. Even though the moral elasticity sneered and jeered from many a threshold, they had to keep their servitude intact, get more labor days, earn more rumpled notes and go back to their own world in the native lands where they would reclaim their lost names after casting off the Bihari skin. 

Their dreams frequently suffer a break,

They are but the ones who help others make!

An old woman walked behind them. She was going for morning rituals at the temple. Devotion is the easiest means to realize the Ultimate. But out of millions and millions of hardcore devotees, how many qualify to be real devotees? Not many, I suppose, simply because the majority of our devotion, in the form of rituals, prayers and beliefs, falls in the category of a deal with the object of our devotion. It goes down the disastrously self-serving gutter. Even during the prayers we suffer from some perilous disquiet. The practice turns merely a melee of morally ruffled feathers as the sleazy larger sharks take long and circuitous route to make their hunting sociable and hospitable.

The moment our devotion becomes free of a 'deal', we take a quantum jump into realizing the hidden truths lying at every nook corner.

In a nearby chaupal, idle men baulked in endless debates! Who says women are more talkative? Only if you could have a look at them! They could beat any number of women in chatting on non-issues days after days, years after years. After a life-long war with words, how many of us realize the real meaning of knowledge and information?

True knowledge, I suppose, is just coming home with the realization that all the information fed in our neural network is only a means for survival, a mere tool like a chair to sit upon. It also sets up the course for unknowing and unlearning, and the consequent swiping the screen clean, to be in sync with the intangible, but ever-manifesting, intelligence in its undivided form. Logic, words, knowledge and information are mere chisels and hammers to chip away the mind-created stone from the huge rock of our assumed self, ego, and carve out a dimensionless entity. So our logic though can't take us to the Truth, but it can at least help us in avoiding the tricks of the false. So guys pick up your tools, but always remember they are nothing more than a stonemason's instruments in his rucksack as he moves to the stone yard to break stones for survival.

From the ones who sound most affable to the ones pounding our nerves with obnoxious ferocity, all of us are equally distant from the most presentable best 'truth', simply because there is no absolute 'truth'. The only absolute truth may be that ‘there is no absolute truth’. The so called truths are merely flimsy bubbles floating in the sky. So guys glide freely cocooned in the bubble of your truth with only this much caution that you don't crash too often into other's bubbles floating around. This is what good and bad might be all about. Otherwise, this existence does not even care what this hypothetical talk is about the absolutes, sin, piousness, etc., etc.

When my own voice starts disturbing me, I douse it under the all-overpowering notes of the great mystic Osho. The rats of my mind go to sleep. Today, I remember him telling me:

‘Freedom and equality are two opposite conditions. If you want to maintain equality, then freedom can't be sustained. If you cherish freedom, you have to forget equality. People can be cut to a tailor-made size of equality, but it won't be possible without taking their freedom from them. You can't have equality other than in jail. And even inside the jail, if there are some elements of utility and convenience, inequality will creep in. So the jailor has to be stone-like hard and unsparing in approach to manage perfect equality. Complete equality is possible only in a state of perfect subjugation and control. It should be so tight that nobody gets a chance to be unequal to anyone. So if communism takes control of earth, the entire planet will turn into a mammoth jail. Communism can't succeed without jails.’

֍♠֎

Before the individual and collective miseries rattled me and the world, respectively, a few weeks down the line, I found myself in the hills—where I feel the most at ease and joyful—as if destiny took me there so that I could muster up substance and courage for both body and mind to bear the cruel hammer strike that would turn me motherless and hence an orphan.

Engaged in photographic sharpshooting, my soul captured precious moments in the hills and greedily took deep, long sips of joy in the small vales saturated with solitude. Everything looked so fresh and alive under the magisterial signature of Mother Nature. Silvery river-mists of morning, sun-kissed gold of evening, mellifluous ink-blue skies at noon and the riot of wild flowers left me recuperating in the splendor and tones of free atmosphere. All around there were echoing incantations of life-sustaining ambience. The robust, amusing twittering of birds—erotic, sensual and procreative—filled the environment with achingly sumptuous notes. Mother Nature looked happily decked up like a young bride in her grandiloquently flowing ornamentation. Drenched in wholesomeness, the gentle hills rolled over the horizon with an unabashedly glorious smile. In a feisty fashion, my soul lunged to take more and more from the restfulness lying in opulent heaps. The inspirational overtones pleasantly prodded the charming inner-child in the old man. Thankfully the hidden gem, a kind of tourist cast-off, had all that I needed to rejuvenate and excite the flattening curve of my sagging spirits.

In the noisy, dusty plains down south, life and living appeared losing footing amidst the smoke of hate, greed, anger, ambition and jealousy. I think, more than the carbon bugs chucking out air, it will be the nefarious exhausts from evil human minds that will turn mother earth unlivable during the coming decades. But in the unconcerned vales here in the mountains, the mountain eagle glided effortlessly, —

The mountain eagle flying

in splendor and ecstasy,

Its unquenchable tempests

creating airy firmament,

But does this fraction of reality

possess anything good for the prey as well?

Like a sand dune protagonist, as if coquettish over his hard-earned fortitude in the uncompetitive solitude, my spirits streaming and floating along the ripply charm of a hill stream, my existence open to tones of momentous exhilarations, I challenged my optimism’s finitude and with unbound enthusiasm looked at the hunter and the prey with grandfatherly detachment. Like a manic enthusiast full of clawy prudery, the eagle drew the supersonic trajectory of death. The prey, a little mouse, was tucked in a little corner in the hills. The flimsy covering, a roof of cobwebs and silvery dew beads clinging to it, must have offered a seamlessly ostentatious wrap of safety and playfulness.

Death, the hissy, leer-laden sorceress is the shadow of life. It pervades the sprawling acreage of life and living. Full of snoozy, exciting life, the little creature was sipping the night’s nectar. The watery beads, the jewelery of grass, leaves and petals, shone like a priceless piece set-up by the free-flowing spontaneity of the existential forces. And the bigger set of life and living meandering through the air over it. Had the eagle spotted it? It seemed to have! Refreshingly forceful is life; strong and legendary is death’s swiping hand. In the tug of war, played in hidden dimensions, the acrobatical skirmishes and swirling, swift flip-flops of life and death fill the impermanent colors on the illusionary canvas. It looks a treasury of contradictions.

The hunter swooped down with a spectacular consistency, a kind of monumental depredation. The strike! The tattered fabric of life’s self-obsessed revolution. The devastatingly autocratic and handsome angel of death flew away with its booty with an air that sang with elitist stink. A thunderous success above! A miserable failure below and the seat of life now merely a cluster of heterogeneity, the dewy diamonds scattered, the web broken and the ounce of life taken by a bigger ounce.

Across the bluish cotton curtain of the sky a noisy fighter jet exemplified the symbolic intervention of mankind in all and everything related to this tiny planet. It whizzed past grandiloquently with a kind of systematic asset-plunder arrogance. With our skewed, self-centered approach we are almost a pandemic to Mother Nature.

I traced its noisy trajectory till the metal eagle, the nefarious, soulless hunter, was lost in the skies. Far away from the popular periphery, I found myself lost in the endless distances of the unpolluted rippleless expanses of the blue sky. Drunk with the solace of uneconomized wealth of nature’s splendor, the pictorial biography of our gritty resolve flashing its pages after pages of our achievements in my mind, I cracked a joke at the human folly in pursuing their dreams even to the tune of turning kabadis in the space. Well, don’t get surprised. It’s very much on the cards. Unmanned Landers landing on the moon have a coating of previous metals like gold. This moon-scrap goes into the value of billions of dollars. In the near future, it will open a new vista for high-tech kabadis, the swanky version of our humble neighborhood scrap dealer. America with its 40 years of advancement in space technology over its nearest rival will gain the most out of this new business stream. Scrap dealers in America listening? In order to avoid scrap clashes in future, there should be a treaty by which the owner country will retain the rights over the space scrap. Mankind is ever ready to fight over any type of issues. So when we will wipe out all contestable things on mother earth, we will enlarge the domain of quarrels, taking these into space. So it's high time we fix it now itself. Let's agree on the principal that 'bhai mera kabad mera hi rahega'. Means, I retain the right to my scrap, wheresoever it may land up! Something is better than nothing. We will have at least one reason less to fight.

Back home in the cold-lynched smoggy plains, the winter was taking a big toll on people’s health. I could feel the smog in my nostrils. A stay in the hills is sufficient to make one realize how unhealthy the winter season is in the north Indian plains. Despite the harshest cold, Ma looked well without any cough. I felt relieved because she had propensity to catch cold and cough during winters.

Any way, we may cry or crib over scores of issues, this fellow had the last laugh—consciously, by choice. The winters, as I said, had been unprecedentedly horrific. Cold had slain soot and saplings with its unsparing frosty sword. 'Had your entire wrath poured out, fella?' the Jesus Thorns appeared to ask. Irrespective of the severe damage to all and sundry around in the garden, it decided to retain its smile. Its smile overcame the frosty burns. Happiness is a choice, I suppose. A conscious effort, independent of so many external factors that we presume to be finally decisive for our happiness and joy!

This conscious choice definitely puts Mind over Matter.

The matter-like behavior is a property of the cosmic mind, the universal intelligence throbbing as a singular energy. The mind, universal collective consciousness, is the primary cosmic constituent. The so called matter is merely a manifestation of it, just a dependent property. Had it been the reverse, i.e., mind-type behavior of matter with matter as the primary constituent of creation, we surely would require the basic, unbreakable—having intrinsic properties—building blocks in terms of atomic and subatomic particles. But as we see it, subatomic particles have no intrinsic value and properties independent of the observer. With matter first, and mind just its behavior, eternity would be mathematically impossible. However, a fundamental entity in the form of cosmic mind leaves an open-ended, ever-evolving field for the manifestation of matter in countless ways over the eternal paths of creation, simply because there is no intrinsic property or value to define and limit the material manifestation. One may call it the cosmic energy or the cosmic mind. It's a dimensionless plane where any kind of material dimension is possible to draw out of nothingness. It’s a limitless canvas. Wipe it, draw another, and on and on. Is there any limit to imagination? No. Same is the case with cosmic mind's imagination. Eternal are its horizons.

So why not be a free-spirited open-ended Creator instead of a mere Creation inside a close-ended set of genetics and circumstances?!

The entire meaning of being human is to become a 'creator' from a mere 'creation'. This mind is the largest workshop in the cosmos wherein sustained imagination impregnated with specific details creates a flow of energy in the direction of its manifestation. This blueprint in the mind can be kept fresh and alive by pumping the vital life force, the abounding energy, through powerful emotions in synchronization with the imagined 'creation'. Whatever we perceive as creation within the spectrum of our human perception was designed in mind with an infallible vividness. It was first imprinted on the canvas of mind by enthusiastically firing neurons. It was first thought to be 'possible' before it manifested. There are hardly any limitations to design whatever one wants on the infinite dimensionless canvas on which a sustained conscious effort can etch out as many dimensions, shapes, sizes and properties as one wants.

It’s not about religion and customized faith. It’s primarily about real, unbridled faith that puts us on the path of becoming a creator. Being ideologically driven turns our life a mere under-achieved, boring game, where there are just sporadic manifestations of what we really are capable of.

Vividly visualize your dream. Hone your very own one-of-a-kind individual vision and allow the cosmic energy around you to change it into, to ripe it into a bigger shared vision. Imagine your dream in the specific real life details and fuel it with the life energies of your emotions. There are exotic twistings of energy across 86 billion neurons in our brain. Each of these neurons is connected to at least 10,000 others, creating trillions of pathways for the reality, as we see it, to manifest through our channels of sense perception. Majestic and splendorous is this interplay of electro-chemical signaling to morph into limitless possibilities of thoughts, emotions, dreams, vision and creativity. Beyond the lackluster prudery of our intellect, we heave around and launch a whirlpool of energies in the farthest corners of the universe. Whatever follows is just a cause and effect corollary. This cosmos is yet to see the first miracle because nothing is impossible. The quotient of impossibility will turn infinity impossible. All this is too mundane. Go and create your reality. Be a creator!

֍♠֎

In solitary embitterment, my loss had eaten me like frost-bite eats into festering wounds. After losing Ma, life once again turned into a dreary destiny, a dusty path full of thorns and thistles. The world was now opening to the possible risks the virus in China posed to the entire humanity. By mid February, the planet was full of epidemic-scared globalists.

There are costs to be paid as an omnivorous carnivore society like the Chinese. I’m not judgmental about them when I say this. They are an ancient civilization smelling of refracted gentleness churned at the interface of feminine fluidity and masculine viscosity. But then psychopathic malevolency of communists, so vituperative and vicious, lynched by some unnerving instinct to dominate, blasts out its superiority with unfazed aplomb. The masculinist spectrum of selected CCP cadre almost enslaves a passive citizenry. The subjects, like wing-clipped pigeons, live almost numb and grounded amidst a kind of cross-hatched virtuosity magically crafted by the communist ideologues. 

They have every right to eat anything, including the fangs of the desire to rule the world as a superpower. I don’t say this not out of malice, but on account of sheer frustration. Too much of meat-eating provides one a kind of grotesque endurance to be insensitive. Eating living beings’ flesh too much, over a period of time, eats away the lively dollops of aesthetics from the person, replacing the same with robotic, mechanical traits. Peace and harmony then stands gravely endangered. Further, one can't rule out scenarios like Corona virus. There are a big number of human-hazardous viruses hosted by animal and bird species. In this case, bats were the hosts for this virus. As we believed it at that time, the poor bat was gobbled by the snake, who in turn found himself on the enthusiastic dining table of a human and lo, the world got an epidemic.

The more plausible theory, as we would learn it later slowly and slowly over the passing weeks, would be along these lines. Some laborers working in mines were bitten by bats and got a rare virus that was naturally transferrable from bats to humans. The symptoms were exotic because there was no vaccine. The bio-scientists at the Wuhan lab artificially changed the natural strains of the bat virus to turn it capable of human to human transfer. So, with its natural bat-to-human capability to the artificial human-to-human spread, it turned into a biological weapon. They would be fool to just change the strain without hatching a vaccine alongside. They must have definitely done it. Otherwise, how will you justify that Wuhan, where the virus originated, would have just 80,000 cases while far off lands in Italy, Spain, France, USA, Brazil and India, and the rest of the world, would have millions and millions of cases. Mere preventive measures by the Chinese don’t justify this unmatchable equation between China and the rest of the world. Well, these things would surface slowly over the months of our collective misery. At the time, we were almost clueless to this strange virus.   

We were more comfortable with the animal market spread theory and its accidental cross over into the human system. At the Wuhan market, there were truckloads of dogs, live foxes, crocodiles, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines, camel meat and you name anything possible under the sun to douse human gluttony. It seemed as a communism-hijacked society, they just love boiling live beings and take burps of world supremacy!

The evil effects of the gluttony of stomach and the greed of mind are bound to cross borders and sure to spill world over! With malicious malcontents in its tempered genes, the virus turned spiteful and went into an all out breeding. Brilliant workmanship throbbing in the ideologically steely veins of erroneous personages, cast in a solid mould in a jingoistic spirit of ultimate abstraction, produced a spiked googlie that danced around with untiring whirlwind. With admirable tenacity, always excited to Goosebumps with its hooks to predatorily cling to human cells, the murderous beauty set out to slay the chores of life and living as we knew it.

As an epidemic-scared globalist, I turned as scared of the hunger rumblings in a Chinese stomach as dog is while being ferried to the dog market. Because God, or maybe even dog, knows, what new species may end up on their table of culinary experiment, unleashing some new virus in the food chain. Given their overblown aspirations to rule the world by cramming Chinese nationals all over the globe, the strain travelled faster than their super-nukes. As a poor vegetarian Indian, I was more scared of the viral-nukes launched from their dinner tables than the globe-destroying weaponry. God, errr dogs, save us! The global crosscurrents felt a ferocious hypertension.

I think, the human race will be destroyed, not by nukes and super-nukes as you may suppose, but by some hitherto unheard of culinary experiment in some Chinese kitchen, where some animal, reptile or bird might be boiled and cooked for the first time in their entire millions of years of history, introducing a viral strain that will eat the entire globe-load of Homo-sapiens. Oh God, errr, o dogs rather! To make it still worse, if I ever fall in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands, the kindest of them would still be happy to roast me alive and bring about another culinary experiment!

My fear of the CCP is not bigger than my genuine appreciation of the vibrant Chinese culture. China minus Communism would be all that it needs to be a real superpower. China doesn’t need rest of the world’s hate for all that they have been doing. China needs democracy.

The perfect symmetry of the year 2020 looked to be critically infected by the errant, bitchy, pithy dynamics of time caught in some unrighteous hysteria. The sun vanished behind deep banks of fogs for days on end to make it even gloomier for me. I was going too deep into the pit of gloom, driven by depressive thoughts due to my loss and aggravated by the lack of Vitamin D. But then Mother Nature exactly knows when to relent. It keeps a scope for revival of both body and spirits. A Sunny Day at Last!

It was a perfectly sunny day after what it seemed like ages. Many a fate seemed to have frozen. Life almost suspended, barely pulsating in hibernation. The sun appeared to have gone on a sabbatical, making us realize how important He is. Imagine, what would happen if He goes off duty for some time!? In His absence, coldness crept in from all corners, stalking all and sundry almost everywhere. Icy winds, frosty nights and grey overcast skies gave their best to sermonize how important warmth is to life and living on earth. What chance poor earth stands without the glowing father? And does human soul stand a better chance without the warmth of love and compassion?

Dispelling all the doomsday talk lisped through the shivering elderly bones, He peeped over a perfectly clean eastern horizon one fine day and gave an assuring smile like a seafaring father returning to bring protectiveness and peace with him after months. He looked around with his panoramic eye to take a stock of what mischief cold had done in His absence. Everything and everyone appeared to look at warm father with charming solicitousness. Lo, all the grey ghosts of cold vanished. The cold wind still tried a frigid mischief though, but its swirly taunts got absorbed in His fatherly smile. They were just innocuous lukewarm airy swirls, cringing with servility, under the vast and verdant spells of the warm landscapist in the sky. He seemed to have gathered effusive experiences while away and looked bold, bubbly, multifaceted, vivacious and articulate after the break. With characteristic cadence of its breathtaking range of arrows, it confidently dusted away the sooty grind of cold’s frigid work.

Frost-beaten leaves tumbled down with majestic and free-wheeling gaiety applauded by gently pining musical notes of breeze. The birds chirped up their slippery ardor again, after staying uncharacteristically subdued for weeks. Absorbed in the binge and beatitude of warm rays, the sky unfurled its sails. The subdued splendor of cold, foggy days gave way to a labyrinth of fresh, anecdotal style. As a flowing representation of warmth, the blue skies smiled like freshly washed baby face. The seamless complexities of life looked melting in some syncretic fusion.

The day had icing on the cake for me also, or at least for the bird-lover in me. In the mercurial liquidity of multitudes of events overeager to lay their claim on the rare warm stage of life amidst long weeks of sinister cold, I spotted a pair rufous Indian treepies. The beautiful long-tailed bird, so conspicuously proud of its long tail, appeared to lord over a drove of insecure, noisy mynas. The edifying, erotic and endearing sight of birds that are rapidly turning into a rarity in this part calms down the ruffled environmentalist nerves for some time. All isn’t lost yet, Mother Nature seems to say.

With her typical melodious generosity, Mother Nature is still weaving her unobtrusive fabric to keep most of us, across all species, alive and kicking. Another scintillatingly esoteric moment awaited me, holding a still bigger icing on the previous icing! A pair of Indian Grey Hornbills! The grey, long-tailed birds carried their long, curving, scimitar type beaks with an aloof majesty. They graced the weather beaten branches of the gulmohar and flow away like the VVIPs of the birdie world. Dear-o-dear! Was it a dream!? I had seen them here in this part for the first time!

The birds had vanished so thoroughly to make even the common house sparrows a rare species. The mistily unspooling mystery of this bright, warm day brought so many of them to strut and strum with an equal measure of tumultuous, rebellious notes and quintessential lyricism of love and harmony. It held a dollop of life for my sagging and flagging spirits.

The treepie and the hornbills appeared to give a smiling assurance that not all was lost. Among the boring monotony of the ubiquitous house sparrows, crows, mynas, pied sterlings and pigeons, these two appeared like exotic birds. Well, a great day indeed. Possibly, propelled by the heartwarming enthusiasm of a sunny day, they took a larger foraging circle!

The pulsating, glittering and riveting theatre of life, vibrantly suffused by multihued characters at their best, beckoned me too with a studied gesture. Finally I looked up and stared at the arduous metamorphosis that was pending for me to rise up and take on life and living. With Ma’s image safely installed like a harmonized and serene statue of a goddess in my heart,  I rose and stretched my hands towards the dangling metamorphosis like a toddler raising soft, pink fingers to hold onto some corner of furniture to get support and get up to take a few shaky steps. Books have been such support to me in life. I picked up books to read to somehow get on with life. Rereading Crime and Punishment allowed me to think a bit beyond my own pain. 

There is crime and there is punishment. The crime, full stop. It's a criminal act. It cannot be reversed. Punishment cannot right the wrong. There is hardly any redemption. Punishment is a poor instrument of deterrence, and most often it fails even in that. Going above the man-made instruments of punishments, we have the divine system of justice. For crimes, where the man-made system of justice fails to deliver redemption, we expect the divinity to set it right. But what about mass crimes? What of Nazi Holocausts, communist purgings, and religious and racial genocides? The equation of right and wrong loses its meaning. It's just a massive irremediable monotony of crime. A massive monolith of wrong. Forget about mankind's justice, even the wildest stretch of faith in divine redemption fails to get even an iota of justice. Does it mean that the mass crimes stand unredeemed forever? Does it just keep casting its shadows over the present, creeping into the future, almost forever, just waiting to be redeemed? And forgotten finally? Or forgiven more suitably?

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah also took me away from the loop of my miseries. It’s a song of humanity amidst mass crime. A depiction of love pitted against hate and lust for power in Nazi occupied France during the Second World War. France is virtually menless. Men are in prison. Women hold the baton of life. It's a dark cloud overtaking their smiles away. They are wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and lovers. The relationships but secretly thrive in memory only. The males who identified them as such are missing. They have to survive. When they can no longer fight to save their body, they fight to save their soul, for future, for the victory of humanity over monstrosity, for their men whom they pray to survive and come back some day. They are holding the post of life to give them fresh lease of life, if at all they return after the war. Forget about redemption. The survival of love in a woman's heart for her man, despite all the wrongs to her body in his absence, is still a better right then millions of wrongs perpetrated by the criminal souls. It is here that the question of redemption becomes irrelevant. Like a small lamp drives away millions of particles of darkness with its tiny flicker, the women of France keep the torch alive. Beacon of hope, of love, of a possibility in times to come, an urge to relive the moments that sound farther than the wildest dreams. In the backdrop of Nazi holocausts, they move silently, unheroically, carrying love in their eyes, hopes in their laps and seeds of humanity in their womb. Read it. It might help you in being a still better human being.

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A friend is a diehard devotee of Lord Krishna. Unadulterated devotion at least turns you capable of feeling the pain of others’ miseries. He felt mine and offered to take me on a pilgrimage to the holy place Mathura. There I would come across a highway robbery in broad daylight if not darshan of Lord Krishna. But we celebrate the mischievous liveliness of Krishna’s character. So maybe it was His way of sending the message that don’t take things too seriously. All this is maya, illusion.

Well, at Vrindavan, a simian, a not so distant cousin of ours, pushed me into a zone of learning lessons. We humans, homo sapiens I mean, successfully wiped out the rest of our direct cousins, all homo-x,y,z who inhabited earth till as recently as 50,000 years ago, and grabbed the solo copyright of being humans. If natural evolution proceeds at its natural pace without mankind’s intervention, the current monkeys, who give we humans a tough fight across our settlements, would surely evolve as a junior controller of events on this tiny planet. Alas, that won't happen. But it doesn't mean the red bummed mischief mongers don't have the potential. The do!

We three friends walked casually lost in the seducing nitty-gritty of religiosity and faith on a road in Vrindavan. The late morning sun was still soothing. Cool breeze blew, still carrying the ancestral nostalgia of those historical times when Krishna the God was only a cow-herd before actualizing his full potential to become a god. Maintaining their flower foothold in the form of impressive masonry and stonework, the numerous resplendent shrines towered over with classical exuberance and folk grandeur. Faith, like distant past’s slender threads, joined the beautiful old with the ugly new. Spirituality, well fed by Hinduism’s theological liberality, flashing its gregarious flowering, permeated each and every ounce of the existence around. Lulled to peace and rest by the illuminating musicals of devotional songs, and feeling more and more humbled with the realization of our dazzling naiveté, in meekly received silence, we walked almost meditatively.

A mid-sized challenger to our peace, all airy and flippant with its archetypal eccentricities, and always put to tantrums by an uproariously sumptuous, colossus curiosity about human affairs, crept silently from behind. With unalloyed stealth, robust pride and terribly enriched candor, it beat the fastest wind in agility in its last phase of the current endeavor to save its species from extinction. The macaque, tightly holding onto its iron-grip teachings of mischief, and with undaunted enthusiasm, sprang like lord Hanuman. The sharer of our long and winding lineage whisked away the specs from my friend's face in the fraction of a second. Even the copious shrines of faith fail to protect us against such a grandiose effort. The rest two of us couldn’t even get a littlest shot of the event that took place just within a couple of feet from us. It happened so quickly. Spent with all the force unleashed in the quickness of effort, the monkey with specks now meditatively sat on the roof of a car just a few feet away. As an inextricable fusion of mankind plus all the mischief possible in the cosmos, proud of its crafty orchestration, he held the specs like a bully teasing lesser kids. With relentless brutality, he put the spec-handles in his mouth like he was brushing his teeth and then looked with utter innocence. What an actor! What an impostor! We tried to cautiously intimidate him, scared all this while that he may run away or still worse throw the specs on the welcoming tar of the road, which is ever ready to welcome the sweet melody of chiming, crackling sound of the breaking glass.

"That is no way to get it. Throw some fruit or fruity towards him if you want the specs back!" a Brijwasi casually told and went on his way, as if it was as routine thing like chanting hare krishna there in Mathura. Well, there was no fruit vendor. We just looked helplessly at the delicate nuances of the spec-kidnapper who now wanted his ransom. Then fruity appeared to hold beacon of light as my panicked friend—we should know here that the specs concerned were eyesight glasses not just showcasing sunshades—ran to a nearby grocer to get fruity juice packet. The ritual was performed like we offered prasad to some god with full grace and humility. With the armchair skill of a seasoned ritualist, we placed the ransom in front of him like flowers at some god's feet. Give from one hand; take back from the other one. The idiot had perfect eyesight, so the thing was of no use to him. He was kind enough to put it on the car roof, took away our humble offering and vanished to have its juice breakfast. Very smart! But a bigger show of smartness awaited us! Before anyone of us could fetch the reward of our offering to the simian god, a big red-bummed rascal suddenly arrived on the scene and took the empty godly seat awaiting further offerings. He appeared criminal type and grimaced threateningly. He growled and scowled and didn't even follow the godly protocol of maintaining a calm demeanor. He held the loot like a rakshasa holds a prey. Nearly broke it down as he mishandled it. Thankfully he stopped himself from doing that. He knew it would turn it useless and he won't get any offering. Finally, he settled for a calm posture. The specs dangled from his mouth with one end held under teeth. There hung the fate of my panicked friend! The poor guy frantically ran again to fetch another fruity packer. He should have fetched many to avoid the loss if the chain of gods continued to hold the seat. But then in panic we lose reasoning. So there he runs back with one more offering.  He glided it over the car like the fate of this entire world depended upon this roll of dice and the reaction of this god on the car. With the ease of the best wicketkeeper, he grabbed the offering and left the terribly shaken pair of specs on the car roof. I myself took a bit of inspiration from the simian agility and saved the day for the Homo sapiens. I opened the floodgates of my nimbleness, at the creaking cost and complain of my old bones, and lunged forward to grab our looted and vandalized property. We almost ran from the scene of the highway robbery in broad daylight. And there walked my friend with his purse lighter by 40 rupees and the beautiful tip of the specs handle chewed away as a reminder of the momentous event. Aren't these distant cousins of ours very smart?! And we are fooler than we think!

The day’s tidings slowly lifting my gloomy spirits to a vantage point, a bit of elevated dimension where you get respite from conflicting hard-edged dualities and feel like you are just there, like a tree simply is. It helps if you see many faces wearing an expression of serenity at a holy place. Many an abstract notion plunged into transcendental pool, giving a temporary respite. A wounded spirit is ever receptive to a healing touch. People’s vivid and vibrant faith exquisitely written in temples and ceremonies going around lulled me into a state where pain and pleasure melted into numbness. The scintillating detail of human faith intermingled with mystical strains pouring from unknown quarters. The little pilgrimage town welcomes you with its quiet elegance and innate dignity. There was sun-kissed swell, surge and gush of lukewarm emotions, which dulled the hard edges of pain.

After a busload of fun after the monkey spectacle, which in fact got some respect in my eyes for them, I picked up another sinew of their deed. A Cozy Home once it was! A monkey had just tossed it from the branches of a tree.

Telling absorbing anecdotes of attention and intention, the olive-backed sunbird nest crafted with selfless dedication of soul and body made it look like a spiritual enterprise. Every sinew inextricably intertwined with gigantic spirit by the little bodies. Parents will be parents! The exteriors of dry grass and paddy straw had a cushion soft padding of cotton and feathers; the interior done with as much care and caution as we humans decorate ours. There is hardly any qualitative difference between what humans do for their family and what anyone else from among millions of species on earth does for theirs. There is just quantitative difference, which we wrongly analyze as a hallmark of our superiority. A snail crawls a few feet to do exactly the same for its family as a human being does in trotting over the globe. An ant crawls a few meters to do exactly the same what a panther does in its miles-long sprints. From the smallest to the biggest, all of us do the same thing qualitatively.

On the magnificent scale of Mother Nature we are all but little dots varying quantitatively, and that too is our mental projection. The only difference is in quantity, the numbers, which are our mind's innovation, nothing else. Numbers don't matter to mother existence. So guys, next time when you see a busy ant on its way to fulfill its duties born of its unconditional love and care for its family, stop yourself from crushing it. All of us are nothing more than ants to Mother Nature. So don't brag too much. Accept the fact with humility. It will melt the ego also, which in turn will help avoid the brain from becoming an overweight, potbellied bully! And as one sheds the ego, one feels restful, sees the light and floats to the ultimate fringe of truth and with a swipe of cosmic orgasm melts with the primordial light. The journey gets completed!

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Even till March end, you couldn’t say that winter was swallowed by hot summers like it usually happens. The heavy snow in the Himalayas pummeled strong winds down south from the frozen valleys. The very air forebode of some sudden, stunning angst by the unseen forces of nature. The unseasonal rains and cold was unrelenting, while the sun yoked to its duties, and eager to prove its mettle, sent sunrays resonating with the message of summers. Well, in this clash of the titans, little baby spring trotted out and seductively beckoned from its flowery corner, to create desire, dreams and instigate many a tentative groping. So we had a prolonged spring through March and I also marched in the evenings to my lonely outposts in the countryside, following the romance and legend of serenity. The air carrying lyrically pronounced notes as I ambled along solitary paths aiming to go nowhere in particular. My footsteps languid while the breeze kissed for a sensuous spell.

On the frost-beaten grass of the dreamily dilapidated wayside, a heron that would never take to the skies again lay in eternal sleep. I sat by it and looked deep into the empty sockets—the eyes gone to become ants—to read the unwritten law.  

The story told by the soul to its own corpse:

Once I flew and frolicked high,

Now the flesh and blood gone dry,

The real me withdrew with a painful sigh,

They say, 'I was destined to die,'

It's but the biggest lie!

Much as the bird corpse passed the stern, gloomy message of death, a butterfly on its floral excursions nearby hummed the lucid, evocative and illuminative song of life. Amazed at the incessant enfoldment of creation across labyrinthine pigeonholes of existence at the level of matter, I moved on found myself in front of a little brick shrine under a peepal tree at the corner of a wheat field. Small and pained with bright white lime it stood as an unfazed and savvy shelter of ancestor-worshipping faith. My mother also was now in the ancestral domain, I felt my loss again. A grubby Prenia pranced around in the reed thickets nearby. Some inexpressible emptiness straddled around in the air harking its unspoken legend. I felt like a placid and fragile iota of existence.

Lost

It has been months since

I last lit my faith's lamp,

So many days have passed since

prayers chimed in my dark den's air damp,

My meditating self,

Now gives atheistic yelp.

Lost my faith!

Lost my prayer!

Lost my rituals!

Lost my meditative trance!

Just at the moment I found myself melting into insufferable sense of restlessness, of losing my moorings and footing, storm-tossed and stigmatized by happiness, a ray of hope interceded. The proverbial healing magic of the golden rays of the setting sun peeked over a corner of a loaf of cloud and breezily tapped the sulking, brooding mask of sadness over my face. It was bubbly and bright, its purity breathtaking and unspoilt.

The Light!

The light does hark,

beyond the deepest dark,

There is a day bright,

after the ghostly haunts of a nightmarish night,

After a barren famished fight,

there blossoms a spring like delight,

After pining pangs of separation,

there is a worthy end to the desperation,

After crashing in the gutters,

there is a surge and rise to bathe in holy waters,

After crying convulsions on the lips,

a smile takes honeyed sips,

After the last defeat,

still there is an undying urge to accomplish the feat,

Even when blind with despair,

there is hope hiding and cajoling somewhere,

Even in hate, love still lurks somewhere!

Some painfully taut ice block melted inside me somewhere in the unknowable depths, the flow pulsed with a sense of acceptance. I stood on the narrow, grassy raised path among the fields and bowed to the mercifully fleeting last rays of the sun.

Near me, the fortitude of a frost-beaten poplar tree told its little tale. Like a slicing surgeon, the frost had removed its leaves to the last. The story of the frost-beaten tree chimed around with an intimate outpouring.

The winter has'n brutal and harsh,

And my struggle turned almost a farce,

Lost all my leaves,

With loss my soul grieves,

Still not all is lost,

For greenish life finds a host

in the wheat at my feet,

They pay a respectable greet,

My loss and my pain

doesn't go in vain,

Tumbled down as my leaf

with pain and grief,

Blossom thousands around,

Wheatlings like daughters doth surround,

Fell where my tear,

Many a smile this earth doth bear,

Doesn't go waste my pain,

Sows it the prospects of gain,

If not for me,

Definitely for thee!

Even so far away and all alone in the countryside, buttressed by the spirits of the setting sunrays and the fortitude of the frost-beaten tree, the whimsical strains of a word that most of us heard for the first time arrived dictatorially to lay siege to my new-found peace with its choleric catechism. Little Master Corona, who else. It would rule the world through its tyrant, unsettling ways through the ill-famed year 2020.

O thou little master,

The world was a bit faster,

You now force brakes,

Lions turn into drakes,

Even newspaper is scary,

No longer a news carrying fairy,

It comes from Delhi,

Fear pinches my guts and belly,

With inhibitions I touch,

A fearful world is such!

֍♠֎

The straddling legend of Corona had been sufficiently anthologized in media to hijack an entire day in the life of a Corona scared poet. Bestial metaphors seethed and churned out in peculiar rawness.  

Well, I have believed in the principle of putting my tail under my legs and back away, almost running off the scene of issues and confrontations. Condemned as an escapist, I still find it feasible and practical beyond words. The world is bursting to its seams with cantankerous, quarrelsome and bitter people who are ready to strike at the slightest provocation. There is some darkly satirical existential angst that is shooting off in all directions with a relentless flow. The lofty egoistic rhetoric is instinctively prone to snappy narration and violent chronilizing on the shaky stage of modern life. There is a seductive spell of dark deeds. On the vivid highways of conflicting perspectives, there is a prolific array of horrifying raves and rants. Come inadvertently in some bravado’s path and your modest self will bear witness to the floodgates of hostility. A whirling tandava will take a swipe at you like an avalanche eats away the existence of a helpless tree in the swirling swathes of its icy hunger.  So I use my convenient morality and chicken out of the range of the naked flame of a fellow human’s ire. That is the best way to continue spinning dreams without getting trampled too early on the tarred road of gigantic meaninglessness. Metaphysical parables and pigeon droppings of the mind are better harbored in an escapist’s corner. Ghoulish epithets and sobriquets, the immensely paying adjectival constellation of the elitist amateurs, may hijack the meaning of life and living at the main thoroughfare, but the self-chosen loser’s corner surely bestows a kind of symptomatic, unitive datelessness that rewards the soul at a different plane. More importantly, at the rawest level of our existence, in the dimension of self-scared survival battle, it stops the cascade effect of further build up of untoward scenes. And most importantly, it pacifies many egos. Little do I care, if their pacification of ego has to stand on condemning me as a coward. However, this strategy works when you have the tangibles visibly confronting you. What to do when the opponent is invisible like Little Master Corona?!

It appeared hell bent upon setting epical benchmark in stealth and cunningness. Its spiked image was by now tantalizingly etched in mass psyche. Contrived with the sumptuous inventiveness of an ever-hungry, power-obsessed monster, it took abundantly dexterous somersaults and whizzed in the air like a veritable cryptic miniature of death, doom and destruction. It sneaked into the nostrils and made convulsive inquiries and crouching conversations with the host cells to dupe them and sabotage the portals of immunity to go plundering into organisms. A painstaking, silent metamorphosis would follow while it bred with meditative elegance and whizzed into a sort of sexual mayhem with its evil’s erotic periodicity.

Inspired by its irreverent, versatile contours of thuggery, it would attack from every possible direction, through any likely mean and in any form. As a genuine stand-alone escapist, embraced by some cold melancholia pushing me to the margins of a kind of weary wholeness, it plainly meant that I was supposed to run away from each and everything. (Enlightened absurdities form a good ladder to the cosmic totality, by the way.) Hatched by the creative rigor of the scientists at the Wuhan lab, the latest Chinese Googlie spun with a smoldering passion to catch the entire world on the wrong foot. A malleable and baby-smooth dream-rider, bothered more about the golden eggs of the untamed canvas of nature instead of the expressive installations of the mankind’s vanity that passes off as our ingenuity, I felt like burrowing the deepest hole in the earth and hide there like a scared centipede fearful of getting crushed by the rampaging boots.

The purists and puritans of predatory communism must have been waiting with palpable anticipation for the crashing of the capitalist world order. The multilayered ambience of free human competence and the colored palate of social flexibilities booming world over in the cradle of free markets and democracy were at the risk of being daubed with grayish monochromes of Fascist brutality, inhuman laws, rules and regulations. The somber threads of people’s choice in a democracy, even at its worst with its flimsy credibility, still leave plenty of space for exuberant embroideries woven with assuaging aesthetics. There is a quintessential landmark of the ability to choose, to decide one’s role in people’s lives making them alive, instead of merely survive robotically. Even at its worst, democracy still holds a beacon of light for the archetypal motif of free-will and freedom. Despite all the symbolic contradictions and simplifying distortions, democracy provides a counterbalancing continuum between the good and the ugly. There is a dreamy hibernation of hope for the posterity. Autocracy, on the other hand, equals pushing the entire herd over the precipice to maintain the elaborate, royal and lavish retinue of the monarch.

With unabashed emotions the talk about Corona struck deep roots in mass psyche like it was aiming for the sole sovereignty over cosmic centeredness. A mysterious three-dimensional abstractionist appeared to churn out an alternative reality to our dreams and desires. With a sickening, stringent potential, it appeared to push all and sundry disciplinary boundaries that we had set up to define the drivers of our times and unleash chaos in our minds as well as markets. How many precautions to take? The curve of caution appeared to be drawn almost infinitely. It looked to draw all and sundry into its intriguing loops of depression. People used to overwhelming involvement in the evocative grandeur of the ultra-modern culture with speedily multiplying transformations of food, fashion, cars, designs and countless other things were now suddenly force stopped. With its willful prowling and malicious-mongering spirit, the tiny enemy challenged our march with a giant audacity. Incubated with the hardened deliberations of science, it stared with bloodshot malevolence. The stupendous vanity, the excited eloquence, vigorous freedom and the incessant thunderclaps of the buzzing outdoor life came to a grinding halt. There were so many fee-fawing Don’ts that life even for someone ascetic-type like me appeared severely cramped. Precautions raised to the power of infinity equals paranoid fear. Under the command of this realization, I tried to keep the ‘raised power’ near manageable figures to keep it within the limits of sanity.

With consummate predatory verve, the virus was adroitly frolicking around. With a cautious verve and precautionary enthusiasm, I turned dictator to my own self and imposed as many Don’ts as possible on myself. The lockdown was clamped with paralyzing precision. A bit of sense of safety crept in as I pondered over my own disaster management. Not going outside too much was the foremost rule of the curfew. It was within my grasp. Usually I have always kept within my house. But what about the solitary walks through nature! Yea, I love that more than anything else in the cosmos. The rapturous coquetry, the sultry notabilities, the subtle courtship and the beauteous lovingness of solitary spaces, where nature isn’t trampled by our feet, calls and cajoles almost all the time. I feel that it’s my strength to be able to walk on and on for miles after miles, just walking, journeying with no destination in mind. Trees I suppose are my guardian angels. But how will you dodge rough peasants accosting you with bear hugs as you walk to your guardian angels, especially if you have been disposed to smile and be cordial with people. Running away from them won’t help. They will take it as an invitation to athletics and will surely catch you as a trophy. That will be even more serious. Putting up a grimace on your face as you come across them to avoid them will create concern and hence they would poke you until you giggle. So there were no outings any longer. Very painful, but what to do? So like almost the entire world I stayed indoors. Mother Nature’s grandiloquent glance with heightened empathy conveyed the compelling pathos of the tragic times when a mother pined for the son who won’t be able to be in her lap.

Social distancing was the new norm but are so used to be a part of the crowd that even the idea of staying alone strikes terror. Closeness and bonhomie petered off with a tangible cadence as stormed the virtual modes of socializing through social media applications. The social animal was asked to turn (anti)social all of a sudden. Distances in outdoor relations crept up because those with whom one liked to be outside the house were cut off. It created even bigger problems within houses. Those from whom people got a chance to be away on one pretext or the other were crammed within four walls and already sour relations turned bitter with proximity. In the lessening darkness forced by day and nights long proximity, couples saw more and more evil in each other. The cases of domestic violence increased.

As a single man I was at least saved of this ordeal. But there were other challenges. Even at your best or worst introverted self, one has at least a semblance of a network. You got a call over the phone and you had to sound like that the person on the line just stole your buffalo, otherwise you were sure to get some invitation and the resultant dozens of excuses you have to offer. So it served well to straightaway sound like you just found that fellow has been caught sleeping with your wife or girlfriend. So it was befitting to launch a sort of ambush against the socializing soldiers of peace. It was nothing short of a merciless beheading of cordiality. But everybody was doing the same. Self preservation is the topmost priority man, what else to do?!

Someone left his body in the village, and I offered my condolences in silence. So mean of me, I know. But it’s better not to add to the heap of ash waiting gleefully, especially with its buddy Corona ready to help it to become a little hill, at the village cremation yard by falling easy victim to the deadly invisible army by marching out like an unarmed soldier in a somber, peaceful and grieving party. If you wore a mask on the way to the cremation site, people will accuse you of blasphemy for being so clinging to life, the traitor that has to be taken dirt cheap. While on the way to the crematorium, one is supposed to walk like a lifeless body who isn’t interested in life anymore. Show any type of zeal or precaution for preserving your life, it sounds like an insult to the dead. So if you commit this sin of showing your craziness and zeal for life among the ash heap of the dead, you are sure to be condemned as the cheapest rascal who holds life so dear even with this fact of death written so prominently in the form of the body being carried for the final ritual. So very prudently I dodged this eventuality and chuckled inside the mask that I had to literally bribe my friend to grasp tightly in my hand like the best lifejacket had fallen on you by itself and the aircraft nosedived into the seas. Masks were in short supply as everybody was running to grab as many as possible to save life. We Indians are very good followers of anything that is trending. We feel very safe in a big collective choice. In panic we beat the opponents like a superhero to survive and be the next Noah after the impending deluge. My friend had two masks by the way. Lost in the muddy moist fragrance of my alternative realities, I have been so lazy, so to speak in the parlance of the mainstream marathoners. So unwilling to be part of the rat race to horde as many masks as possible, I focused my energies on getting his grasp lighter on his trophy. I forced him to donate one to me through a judicious mix of authority, emotions, supplications and intimidation. So like an old sullen monkey, puzzled about the real nature of my need, he gave me a look as if I would be the cause of his death, not this idiot Corona, if God forbid that happens. Anyway, self-preservation again, what to do? In any case, the majority of our pleasures and pains are manifestly self-induced and they come at the cost of others in inverse proportion.

There was an unyielding stimulation of fear bred by rumors and the media’s mayhem of the issue. There was hardly any reasonable line between normality and abnormality. The gentry looked mournful and tortured. The derailing strike was profoundly immediate, a kind of terrible crackle, a sort of shell-splinter vengeance that shut down the mouths of the garrulous lackeys of mundane fun and frolicking in  a world that piled up more miseries upon itself in pursuit of advancement, growth and progress.

My laziness simply amounted to being lost in the sowing, reaping and harvesting of some distant ideas out of the vague, jumblement of thoughts, feelings and emotions. With a look of skeptical refrain, I looked like a grudgingly benevolent old king of a clump of trees in an isolated grove. Talking of laziness, my laziness was now legalized by the governments world over, by the way. Laziness was the key to survival now! The less you ran out, the less you competed, the less you excelled and the more you proved to be idle, the more chances you earned to survive.

An elderly sturdy peasant woman delivered the purest of cow milk to my house. A real gem of a woman, a real motherly Bhabhi who is very caring and considerate, she did me this favor with significant solemnity without charging anything extra for the delivery. Gratitude as a word had lost its meaning under the onslaught of the incessantly intermittent clarion call to attention about the checklist of the prohibited stuff in the battle to survive. My overblown precautions were forcing me to abandon all emotions related to the word ‘gratitude’. In desperate disposition to anxiety and malicious subservience to the primal fear of death, I wanted my milk but not the sight of her at my door.

Her son had recently commuted to Delhi in congested local trains. And this sucked out the enfeebled strains of gratitude to bow down to the primal fear of self-preservation, the latter riding on the robust back of unpretentious self-serving interest. The motherly, nourishing aura around her dissipated suddenly. Caught in the loops of caustic perplexity, everyone was scared of the word ‘Delhi’. It was firmly believed that the virus was breeding at a doomsday rate in the congested national capital. There are more than 20 million people cramped shoulder to shoulder there. ‘Some gallant sneezer must have sung his nasal apocalypse song right into the boy’s face!’ the calculus of my precautions swiftly let loose the rampaging horses of panic. He is a good boy and carries more than average respect in my eyes as he politely greeted me Namaste almost reverently whenever he met me on the way. Scared for my own life, like everyone else on the planet, I changed colors like a chameleon and took him as the sturdy carrier horse of the enemy Corona. The elderly sturdy Bhabhi also looked a gallant swift mare carrying the enemy forces now. I even abandoned all protocols of politeness lest she spent even a single extra second at my place after handing over the milk utensil. I held the milk container with the limitless sensitivity of a bomb diffuser handling the deadly wires. I held it with delicious delicacy lest there was the slightest negligence causing an explosion spewing the end of the world. With stifled gratitude and mammoth caution I boiled the milk extra hard to decimate the enemy. Poor milk! I must have been burning all its nutrients in my fight against the virus. Later I rinsed the milk utensil so hard as if I were a blacksmith working on his forge. Paranoid caution was enough to reshape and drill holes in the poor vessel.

With breathless fury the virus had eaten away all non-Corona news. Its word spread with a mythological exaggeration. Oh, the newspaper! The deferential emotion and the sumptuous grandeur of the poor newspaper vanished. The elegantly iconic and amorous early-morning solicitor fell from grace to mass fear. Its pensive grandeur bit dust among the riotous song and dance of the malevolent invisible ball that spun to twist the entire planet’s fate. How do I tell you how scary the newspaper turned? It arrived from Delhi, hundreds of hands touching it all the way down the supply chain. The entire trail of risks and fears rode the shoulders of the honest and diligent delivery boy. He appeared almost apologetic for his transgressions. Despite all talks of safety measures taken at all stages of production and distribution, the newspaper looked a beehive of the virus. We heard that the virus survived on paper for three days. So who would take a chance? I asked him to stop delivery till my further orders and assured him of payment for the intervening period as well. He but seemed to carry the honor of the newspaper industry on his shoulders. He agreed with an unwilling yes. But it’s natural for us to be possessive about our sources of bread and butter. Maybe to a newspaper vendor everything can carry the deadly virus except his dear papers. So I kept on waking up to find the deadly weapon, almost a mortar of Corona, dangling in the grills of our gate. My request made only this much difference that he started fixing the missile in pre-dawn darkness to avoid the chances of the repetition of my precautionary request. I saw it as if someone was planting bombs on my gate stealthily. What to do? Unable to beat him in the game of early rising from the bed, I took the scary thing with the minimum pinch in a corner, holding just the least portion that would enable it to be lifted and straightaway threw it in a corner in the yard where the sun would beat the Mickey out of the virus. Instantly I ran to sanitize my hands. Scared all this while that my fort walls had been breached by the enemy soldiers and they were scaling the walls and I had to launch the fusillade of my protection cannons. Initially I was overwhelmingly puzzled and naively jostled and jolted about any solutions to the problem. I rubbed my hands as vigorously as possible as if to clean them of the goriest crime. Hand washing was the only ritual left for the people to perform to survive. Throughout the hot sunny day I enjoyed the sight of the paper literally baked to a funny dish. It was only the next day I touched the well-backed, pale-yellow, beaten to archival limits newspaper, still half assured that the idiot Corona had been decimated by Father Sun. So I kept myself updated a day behind. Patience helps man. Update and updation was hardly effective anymore.

PM Modi looked capable to possess solution to every problem. However, even at the best of his fiery liveliness he looked clueless for the time being. To pump some fuel into the sagging spirits of the countrymen, PM Modi requested to bang utensils and raise a kind of gracefully rapturous din, a kind of prayer, a type of chorus song of our inherent faith against all odds at 5 in the evening. The people listened to the head of the state and a vivacious unanimity suffused the nationalistic colors from remote Himalayan hamlets to the southernmost coastal villages. It all started with an apprehensive vivacity. But the suavely provocative notes went continually clambering to the free-flowing notes of the mass entertaining orientalists. Soon the metallic merriment changed to scary war music to scare away the monsters. People beat out their phobias and frustration with exhausting dynamism. The carnival frolicity changed to battlefront fury as people fished out the remnant firecrackers from their stocks of last Diwali’s firecrackers and declared war against the subtly shrewd, malevolent hypocrite. I too jumped into the fray from the safe premises of my house and beat my heart and soul out on a worn out, dented dung container vessel of my grandfather times and made such noise that for an instant I myself got scared!

Offs, this Corona idiot was driving everybody crazy. More specifically, I was turning irritated also as if egged on by the rascal cajolery of the evil. Like a prisoner tormented with servile wriggles within stony walls, I showed all bravery on a cat and chased it away as if it came to my house as a spy from the Corona side. It abundantly strange fit of temper as I almost hit it, and shouted at it, even though it might have been trying to breakfast on a little mice that had cut the soles of my leather shoes recently. A monkey that was stoically sitting on the compound wall met the same treatment. I behaved so weirdly that even the monkey looked at me seriously like a sane human being. Oafs!

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Corona was mingled in the flourishing luxuriance of multiple myths. Billions of tongues engaged in frenzied jogging to capture the marauding and mauling nuances of the latest nemesis. The stories about it got staggering in size as the winter lost its grip and the spring said a sad, smiling bye as it always does, unmindful of the sun-burnt flowers, the last soldiers to fall before the victorious summer takes a hot-headed charge of affairs. In its dogged pursuit of bringing the mankind on his knees, the virus had deftly, with irrevocable baseness, pioneered a soul-scaring scenario. The world as we knew was crumbling down. Ironically, we couldn’t even see this enemy. It had caught us completely off guard.

The world was getting prolifically opiniated against China and rightly so. There were too many questions the CCP was liable to answer. But it was foolish to expect any clarification from an authoritarian regime. There was no vaccine against the virus and it spread in the ways that were yet to be understood completely. PM Modi, usually dramatic philosopher extraordinaire, appeared on TV again to rally up his dispirited wards. He spoke like a submissive sage rather than the confident lion he usually is. There was some languorous irony in his eyes. There was a sad glaring behind his cautious, precautionary words. That was not typical of PM Modi. He has been a long-march drummer urging we careless Indians on the path of nation making, egging us with the staccato beats of his practical leadership. Even the rough-hewn nationalism appears to be diamond-edged under his patronage. One just feels drawn to his honesty for the cause of his dream to make India a leading nation in the world. It was sad to see him waging a battle to survive and stay indoors because Modi is full of charisma to go all out and play the challenges on the front-foot. All talk was now about getting on the back-foot, of going into a shell to survive.

The girth and proportion of the evil effects of invisible Corona were so vast in their cascading effect that they were cocking a snook at our fast march. We had tripped over and fallen. Even PM Modi was hesitant to yell ‘march forward’ now. He said halt and stay home. At the cost of rapacious extraction to the coffers of national economy, equaling thousands of crores of rupees per day, the nation was locked down. The world was up for malicious manipulation from the quarters that surely had everything to do with the new cureless virus. It let loose a vindictive whirl and cruel commotion that saw all our normals of life and living topsy-turvy. The mad rush stopped as we went into hiding. It was definitely very sad and bad for the mankind but was it the same for Mother Nature? In the absence of a vaccine weapon to fight the unseen devil, the best thing was to run into the cave to hide like our ancestors hid during their days of struggle during the pre-historic times. It was a huge setback for the colorful extroverts who have conditioned themselves to dash ahead on the basis of external factors. The world suddenly turned a prison for them. However, for mono-chromed introverts and solitary loungers like me, it hardly made any difference in terms of life and living.

The laboriously perspiring, turbulent drone of the post-modernist culture, concocting a sweet-sour mixture of tremulous and arduous revelry, came to a grinding halt. A horrific death-rattle for the incessantly discordant notes of the painstaking intellect, indeed. With throbbing vituperation, carrying the marching flag of their central dissent against mechanical reasoning, sanguine sentiments and triumphant emotions arrived with an enthusiastic flurrying spirit to take the empty stage for some time. Mother Nature—ever so dolefully permissive to our plunder—got back to her job of self-healing without being pushed and prodded too much, while the errant kid of the planet sullenly wove a string of confrontationist presumptions from inside the homes and houses that had turned prisons. Well, the soft chimes of a kind of stuporous mysticism voiced through my homespun counsel about a rise from physical ejaculation to cosmic orgasm won’t be too mis-fitting here. Since almost all of us have to go into introspection hereon. 

Physical intercourse, which we so often present as the decent sounding 'Lovemaking' is the least possible utilization of the cosmic energy contained in the physical self. It’s just the first milestone in the journey of evolution of the soul. It's simply the gateway to the world of actualization of the full potential of the Kundalini Shakti. You can say it's simply like a little flower drawing a tiny sip of the sunrays to blossom up, while far away the infinite energy of the Sun, the supernaturally beatific seed of indomitable vigor, dazzles brilliantly. When the cravings for mere physical ejaculations stop creating the illusion of the ultimate pleasure, the cosmic orgasm stands separated and at a distance from the maya of physical ejaculation. Freed from the infinitesimally fallacious grip of the ego, the entire body vibrates with divine orgasm. Aloof from the chaotic promptings of rampant desire, the soul dances to the tunes of the ultimate liberation. All this qualifies the physical pleasure to be distilled to be purity and raised to the highest power possible, the unaffected charms of infinite proportions. All the puny and funny pleasures that maya has set up on the small scale lose their duping power, which restrict the physical self from merging in the pools of the divine self, and one tastes oneness, or the divine nothingness, or the cosmic everythingness. All same, all-consumingly same!

One need not be the one who has glimpsed into the sun source directly to truly know the truth in these simple words. All of us are equally eager to seek the key to drop the burden of "me". However, the only tool that most of us appear to know is the short, temporary bliss of physical intercourse wherein for a brief moment "me" or ego ceases to exist. Yet, despite its seemingly exhilarating release, it comes with stealthy liabilities, its notorious simmerings kow-towing our recreational pursuits.

Accepted that all of us have some inkling about the ultimate bliss—a little glimpse—through the process and culmination of physical intimacy. It only means all of us are equally qualified to dive into the permanent bliss of the cosmic orgasm, where each cell, not just the genitals, of the body vibrates with infinite pleasure, bliss and egolessness. As all journeys start with the first step, Mother Nature has given us this easiest means, which apart from helping us propagate our species, introduces us to the path of real egolessness.

Animals—with their sing-song simplicity, their eyes full of gory astonishment at life on the edge, and the painstaking reproach of the survival battle ever painting sanguinary murals of death and doom—hardly have the potential to consciously raise the bar to move into the higher dimensions of egolessness starting from the physical ejaculation. But the humans—the masterpiece of creation, the giant of the mind for forging alternative realities, and the beholder of the choice of divinity in heart to scale the ladder from consciousness to super-consciousness—have the potential to consciously move from sex to super-consciousness; from the point of cosmic release of egolessness at the scale of the reproductive system to the overall physiognomy and further into the domains of soul, where the real self looks at its reality in totality, beyond the screen of physicality.

There are spiritual techniques to facilitate one on the path of egolessness leading to the stately garden of the cosmic orgasm. The central channel of our energy body along the spine, sushumna, has seven chakras for the movement of vital life energy. But the extravagant finery of the flesh and the sinister frivolity of the senses turns the upper 5 chakras blocked usually, leaving the lower 2 chakras of the weary marauders open to the outflow of vital energies. The lower chakras are just defined by anger, hate, greed, lust and jealousy, so the majority of the energy is lost at the lower chakras. It's like a pipe having 7 chakras has upper 5 blocked, leaving only the lower 2 open, wherefrom the vital energy outflows in the form of basic animalistic instincts. However, if the upper 5 chakras are cleansed through practice, energy gets a channel to move up, taking one into the higher domains of egolessness. Pleasure of the lower chàkras loses its value, just like toys lose their importance as we grow old. It’s no more a question of suppression and denial. The malevolent desire itself withers away. The pleasure of lower chakras appears valueless in comparison to the joy felt at the moment energy reaches the higher chakras.

With the central column blocked, with our ego rampaging around like a badly bruised bull on the grassland of the so called seven cardinal sins, not even 10%  of the vital force moves up to reach the highest chakra at the crown of our head. This fraction of the vital force activates hardly one tenth of the brain’s neural network, which we use in our routine life in the form of conscious mind with its deliverable tools, leaving the vast majority of 86 billion neurons (with each one of them bound to at least 10000 others, forming trillions of neural pathways to gives us almost infinite power and potential to formulate our version of reality) unused and in dormant state. This unused territory in the brain constitutes our subconscious brain. The 10% of the energy moving up proceeds alternatively through the right channel and the left channel unleashing the pulsating hurricane of duality of perception. There is magical ambience of aesthetically elevating lantern-alike-glow of eternally unfathomable emotions contrived in one chamber of the brain. The delicate verdure of these artistic transgressions lit up with gorgeous constellations of emotions and sentimentalities bestow a kind of deceptive calmness rugged rocky trails of our existence. This subtle and sensuous part of our reality prods us for many a theatrical exploration. On the other hand, the contemplative, unhurried and probing look of hard reasoning and thoughts sets up a wailing rhetoric which dispels the enigmatic calm pervading the charming alleyways and squares. Twisting and coiled by the chains of contradictions we have the whizzing splendor of sufferers’ paradise.

As more energy moves through the upper chakras the dark chambers of the unused subconscious neural networks get light. Hitherto unquenched desires and futile questions turn redundant like darkness turns obsolete the moment a tiny lamp arrives on the stage. All the pains and suffering of yore looks tiny, funny and trivial like a toy looks inconsequential to an old man. The level of perception goes up as one looks at the smaller things from a higher plane of understanding and many a doubts, pains and insecurities lose their meaning as things reveal their true nature in the larger picture of totality. Chemicals of causeless joy cascade through the blood. These are mere physiological byproducts of the bigger operational parts of the brain. One is tipsy, gladsome and physically and mentally animated without taking alcohol or any other substance. Life turns a series of reveling ragas and the stage is incredibly pleasant. Death turns a romanticized dusk basking in its slender solitude of autumnal windfalls; and birth merely the resonant musings of a fresh, dew-laden dawn of the spring.

As we move through the cobwebs of maya, in tipsy discordance and with soldiery alarm, we are supposed to keep in mind that we are expected to go beyond higher and beyond all this. A major portion of the urge to get a temporary release of ego is related to the search for meeting desires, fulfilling expectations, assurance, love, connection and insecurity. The messages from the higher dimensions, in the form of free-floating thoughts, emotions and desires, need carrier medium. Irony is that at this plane of existence, at the human level, the carrier medium are humans of flesh and blood. So just like a vehicle has to have fuel to move, this carrier medium as a physical body has to have its driving fuel also, which are quite interestingly born of exciting, sweet sour version of maya, illusions, and manifest as seeking of assurance, love, connection, insecurity, desires, expectations, physical intimacy and many more. Just like in the journey of the vehicle, the destination is more important than the fuel, similarly, in glimpses of truth, the fuels of maya are less important than the destination of the soul. However, it does not lessen the value of the driving fuels in any way. Their need itself sums up their value in the journey. Journey well. Stay joyful, stay safe.

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With Samurai spirit and incendiary ferocity the witty and acerbic virus was galloping around at absolute free will. Governments, scientists and doctors hardly had any clue to defang the enemy. There was a solemn turmoil in the mass psyche. Everyone was lost in the Masonic reverie of the virus’ genetics. It prowled the streets and air with palpable lightness and unheard-of-agility to catch as many preys as it wanted. The human spirit was drowsily melting. A calamitous moan rose from the home of the earthlings to shake the planets of the higher beings. The scale of Homo sapiens fears was lollopingly stretching from a Cobra to Corona. Well, Corona was currently deadlier than Cancer and Cobra and all other risks taken together.

As scared to the guts Homo sapiens scampered and slithered into their holes for safety, the still remaining species came out of their hiding places and took a view of the empty stage. The radiating absorption of the sunrays seeped deep into vegetation. The intricate solitude deep in pristine forests came out of its shell and stood naked in the moonlit pastoral panorama. The skies regained their bluish glistening glory as if relieved in the absence of the massive metallic birds, who no longer baulked in to its face and puff out millions of tons of horrible farts in its nostrils. Mother Nature, with spiritual dreaminess in her forgiving eyes, appeared to have regained her smile. The soft reveries of tranquil nights incubated rapturous remembrance of those historic unblemished times when the mankind was yet to stall nature’s self-evolving design. The mornings arrived with mauve mistiness to scatter their dewy gems under the sun with gay abandon and without any restraint. Bright sunrays amusedly egged on the leaves to undo the damage done by the suffocating heat chambers. Bluish clam pervaded in the skies with blemishless intensity. Mother Earth, allowed to be herself for a little time, quickly wrapped herself in quite splendors and looked around with wholesome elegance. Blossomed there loveliest marvels just around the suburbs and the hidden wild animals came out to smell the turf that had been robbed of them. Oft-trodden pastures regained orchard-opulence as the rampaging hooves stopped their trampling games. Wild blossoms surrendered to the seductive, vigorous caressing by the unpolluted breeze. The rivers and ponds got their smiles back. The positive effects of the lockdown on Mother Nature were palpable at every nook corner. Is mankind so big a threat to all the non-human portion of the earth?

The bigger pathogens were busy fighting a smaller pathogen as of now. On the empty stage, on the premises of a gated colony in a city, a Cobra comes out to take a stock of the abnormality, the eerie silence. ‘What fresh mischief the two-legged ones are cooking up from their houses now?’ it must be mulling in its little brain inside the attractive hood.

The stage is less crowded. So its revulsion of the Homo sapiens is diluted a bit. In front of an unoccupied ground floor flat, it flashes its majestic black body as a veteran soldier from Mother Nature’s army who has occupied an abandoned post and claimed independence from subjugation and slavery. Its hood is raised with peaceful alertness. In routine times, a Cobra in the open in a human colony gets swiftly condemned as the worst possible enemy and you straightaway hear shouts of ‘Maro maro saanp aaya, kill, kill, kill the snake’. But now Corona was the biggest enemy. So there were no such impromptu shouts. Cobra was a lesser evil in comparison to Corona, the Mahishashur out there to wipe out the entire humanity. I think many eyes must have even fetched tears of devotion for Lord Shiva’s fabulous necklace. Some extra devotional type even offered a newfound logic: ‘Corona dies the death of a stray dog where a Cobra breathes!’

Not too many had the courage and even the will power to come out and attack with their routine childish vengeance to kill a snake. Possibly we try to kill our own fears by attacking a snake. But now the fear of the virus was far bigger than symbolized by an almost innocuous Cobra. The shapeless reptile Corona, stretching its obnoxious slithery invisible body across the planet stood for our primal fear for life as of now. So the Saanp Maro Maro war chorus was spared. A bit more than averagely responsible fellow called the snake-catchers. ‘Sorry boss, we can’t come! Lockdown! The policewalla’s stick is more dangerous than the Cobra’s hood’. The snake saviors too backed out.

Someone believing the police to be the ultimate remedy for all ailments made a furtive call. Two Corona-scared policemen, their faces hidden under dacoitish masks, arrived with their sulking sticks. Guns had become irrelevant by the way against Corona, the rascally criminal. Even a stick stood better chance in the fight. Its tip might squash a few Corona idiots waiting to feast upon someone’s lung cells. The policemen beat their sticks on the ground from a distance. With an irritated hiss, the Cobra got back into the unoccupied flat. People prompted the policemen to be the saviors as they are always expected. ‘We aren’t snake catchers!’ they reprimanded. ‘But you are supposed to protest us!’ the believer in policing powers offered his point very politely. ‘Presently we have to protect you from Corona by forcing you guys to stay holed up inside your houses,’ they retold the pressing issue. Everyone looked expectantly at the heroes to salvage the day from the side of the Homo sapiens. ‘Take out chilies from your houses and throw inside this flat from the windows!’ they told the solution and scampered off to fight the bigger Corona battle.

Left to devise their own solutions, the people shouted their snake manuals from their windows and balconies. A spiritual type said, ‘Mix some milk in water and throw inside!’ The idea was immediately taken up. Nobody seemed to argue and opine unnecessarily. All appeared to conserve their energy to fight the bigger enemy. So the solution was carried out. By chance, mischance or for any other reason, the Cobra came out again to take a stock of the empty stage. And they applauded their victory from their locked down houses. It scared the Cobra and angrily it slithered into the drain pipes linking the sewer to the cozy pots where the Homo sapiens vent out their exhausts after their planet-conquering efforts.

‘It’s even worse!’ a panic-monger immediately hooted out his apocalypse scenario. ‘It has the power to slither across the pipes and bite you on the chuttar, bum, as you are busy disburdening yourself on the pot!’ The horror of Corona appeared to take a backseat. All seemed to envision the injection pinch on their bums offered as a sort of punishment for all the negative karmas of life. Well, we need to be pinched definitely on our ass for our errant ways. But then in that case even the Cobra won’t have escaped the effects of someone’s dirty morning deed of the day. To kiss the ass, it had to first cross the final hurdle set up by the Homo sapiens in the form of the pot’s contents floating like a safety layer to save its ex-master!

Listen o thou majestic Homo sapiens, the nanometer master Corona had surely brought the Hercules to his knees. Don't panic. We have performed miserably. This fact is deathlike significant. So Mother Nature sometimes holds us by the ears. Oh, we the errant kids marching on and one with extraordinary endurance! All we need is a civilizational pause, a collective hiatus, setting up kinds of flowery barricades on our marching path, and rethink and reshape our priorities. Align them along the fundamental laws of nature. The valorous rhapsodies of material pursuits have taken us to the very edge of the precipice. Too gruesome has been the spiritual severance between matter and spirit. Come, let’s mend it!

Apart from the sorry fact of two million unfortunate deaths of we humans, Mother Nature was a bit mollified as carbon emissions came down a bit due to the forced suspension of our mad rush. Let’s pick some lessons and go a bit slowly and make ‘pause’ a choice.

Corona virus isn't just a disease; it's a message from Mother Nature, a bit stern though because we have turned deaf to her warnings. Holy Mother has been giving messages: Amazon forest fires, Australian bushfires, floods, polar ice melts, etc, etc. But modern society hardly cares about such messages because they don't seem to affect us directly. We push over the risks and dangers to the future for the coming generations to face. So here goes the holy mother and shoots down a poignant, straightforward message that hits us directly. No if and but about it. 'Listen little fools listen!' she whispers like an offended mother. Her invisible soldiers can puncture our egos. 'Now mend your ways little kids!' She says. 'Or be prepared for the worst in future. All of your so called inventions, discoveries, researches will turn out to be futile efforts at finding solutions to your self-created problems. And solutions to self-created problems will create further problems only! And this little drama on the stage called human civilization may come to an end far too sooner than anyone of you may ever think or imagine!'

The epical and arduous list of don’ts stared in our face. We have been systematically groomed to do more and more, so doing nothing was hard to digest. The ever unspooling list of precautions struck the hammer on the table with an authoritative, magisterial nuance: ‘Ye karo, vo karo, karo, karo, karo na, karo, karo na, karonaaa, Corona....itna kiya ki ab maro na, maro na!’ Chacha Corona should have been rechristened Na Coro, mat karo, ye na koro, vo na koro, Naaaa Coro....NaCoro. Well, the phonetics appear to have a magnificent harmony with Bengali in this episode. At the astounding conjunction of some neural firework in a well fish-fed brain, some Bengali researcher may crack the solution: 'O babu moshai, koro na, ya na koro, maachh khabo, dwai lebo!'

By this time, the Sino connection of the virus was profoundly well defined. The suffering humanity beyond the Chinese boundaries was busy in peeling off the multilayered meanings. All fingers pointed at Beijing. Everyone believed there was more to the virus episode than China would have us believed. But China, on its part, was no longer an invisible imperialist. It was not just the shadowy loan shark anymore holding its murky dialogues under the table of beneficent corporatocracy. In a world gone crazy with excessive indulgence of consumerism, the dazzling falsehoods of communism had fared even better than hardcore capitalism. For decades it had crawled ahead with a spirit of eloquent expansiveness. The world had shown brilliant ignorance to its stylized sequence of land grabs along the Indian border, Tibet, Xinxiang and Inner Mongolia. The embalmed sayings in the little red book provide a rich repertoire of chauvinism to push ahead with the serpentine proliferation of its dangerous fantasies. The words of golden advocation, a sense of seductive witchery and a spirit full of nasty allurements found many states under the tentacles of its debt diplomacy. With a spidery sense it wove authoritarianism around the little democratic blot on its face and started nibbling at the semblance of democracy in Hong Kong. Propelled by the subterranean force of the virus, it had announced its arrival on the stage at last to occupy the top-throne at the global level.

Nobody can win in a war using either conventional or nuclear weapons anymore. Wars as we know are an invitation for mutual destruction. Weapons are just relevant for posturing now. Country x makes a missile that can hit 5000 Km, country y fights to make it 5000 plus and so on and on. The same applies to all other equipments across all arms of the armed forces. Barbed by the bigots, the little invisible ball was launched. Soon the world would be suffused with suffering and China would be smirking with sartorial supremacy. The virus would just give a minor headache to China while the entire world would find it bedridden in the ICUs. It was evident from the beginning that they had the vaccine for it, but a puzzled world had all the time and energy to look here and there for any clues save looking straight at the truth written in bold fonts on the wall. We give hardly any credit to anything that is outright evident.

I cannot do more than mildly appreciate their entrepreneurial practicality. They have this iconic extravagance of utilitarian spirit. Whatever that cannot come handy at the level of its physical usage becomes a superfluous reflection. However, it turns counter-productive after a point. Atheism is good for hands to make tools, but it’s a terrible master of the mind. Good that you take it as a weakness to have faith and be a believer. It may help in creating wonderous textures at the material plane of existence. One but gets lost in the overwritten, puzzling and sophisticated checkerwork of physical existence. The mesmerizing ambience and startling simplicity of the soul, the root network of the core of our existence, gets buried deep under the dirt on the surface. Cold hard reason is an erratic mistress. With her wild, infectious details of character amidst thunderous laughter she subdues the soft soufflés of the heart. The extolling credo, the insidious vacillation goes like a Tsunami and the tide of faithless ideology climbs over millions of corpses.  It dehumanizes the society collectively? The check-dams to our human rascality break and we get a flesh and blood robot who never listens to the soft voice of conscience, where everything is acceptable in the name of material progression, power, profits and global superpower status.

Driven by the fabulous exoticism of their culinary art, scores of animals, birds and reptiles are hellishly tortured, burnt and boiled alive in the Chinese live animal food markets. If someone wants to have a glimpse of what hell may look like, I would recommend Chinese animal food markets with their nubile and vivacious gamut of human gluttony. It’s a stunningly textured torture tale. It’s a mammoth pooling of negative karma operated like an enormous factory. In comparison to it, the plain, old slaughter house would still appear to be kind and lenient. Mercilessness gets a holistic characterization. Roasting and boiling alive is accomplished with a multidunous flamboyance unleashing torrential pools of suffering and pain of a vast number of animal species. Of course, there would be negative off shoots as we were witness it presently.   

There are costs to be paid as an all-consuming carnivorous society. I cannot help being a dusty desperado with my acidic take and pauperizing doctrines. I shamelessly judge them. It makes me calmer by getting so judgmental about them, almost to the extent of bigotry. In their bubbling acquaintance with the guttural rats in the guts, they have every right to eat anything. But then one can't rule out scenarios like Corona virus. There are a huge number of human-hazardous viruses hosted by the animal and bird species. In this case, the bats were the hosts for this virus. Revolving in the concentric circles of our naivety, we bought the theory that some poor bat was gobbled by a snake, who in turn found himself on the enthusiastic dining table of a Chinese and lo, the world got an epidemic. Insignificant were the limitations to the wild assumptions of the panic-stricken humanity. We gave credit to any sundry theory proposed as the cause of the problem. It still was a world of tender, tinsel tragedies. But soon the virus would cut through the air with an abominable assurance. From arid interiors in deserts to the mysterious calm in rainforests, it would open up an endless front to challenge our knowledge, skills and capabilities.  It would be a fraction of the earlier world for we humans, while the sunbathed promenades for the colorful masquerades of the ultimate, pulsating mystery would turn cleaner and uncongested for some time.

The virus was busy, invisibly, on its enticing interlacing in the human cells to weave a seminal tapestry of invincible pathogens. It would malign the sanctimonious walls of human immunity with its prophetic scribbling and unfettered critiques. It would go and hide in the labyrinthine recesses of human genome to play hide and seek with our science community for many months to come. The finer nuances of its episodic structure will keep our research hijacked to its despotic, courtly aura. With the striking fulcrum of its weird genomics, it ruled our minds. It would storm-toss millions of fates worldwide and life would acquire harder, dreary edges than anyone could recall in the past many decades. But for Mother Nature, it would be a pleasant abstraction. She would recall her artistic oeuvre, unfathomable laws and driven by her vigorous sense of fairness, she would proffer a flower’s nectar-laden chalice to the ailing child. As we shut behind the doors, nature opened her gate to unfurl her endearing panorama for the time being. Free-floating glory of untouched wilderness would reach the once cantankerous, crowded suburbs. Relieved of its haunting servility, she would showcase her impeccable credentials. Freed from the hubbub of derision sprouting from the semi-beast, she would regain her beatific, rapturous smile. Unpolluted air would scatter a galloping cheerfulness across blue skies. Blurred and mottled images of the primal meadows would stand sunbathed and rain-washed. Through our tears of agony we would see, after many years, mother nature smiling. 

There is a throaty pandemonium of miseries at Wuhan market. You have truckloads of dogs, live foxes, crocodiles, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines, camel meat and you name anything possible under the sun to douse human gluttony and sustain delusional vagaries. Eat man eat, I know you love boiling live beings and take burps of world supremacy! But why spread the evil effects of your gluttony world over! As an epidemic-scared globalist, I am as scared of the hunger rumblings in a Chinese stomach as a dog is while being ferried to the dog market. Because God, or maybe even dog, knows, what new species may end up on the table of the Chinese culinary experiment, unleashing some new virus in the food chain. Given their overblown aspirations to rule the world by cramming Chinese nationals all over the globe, the strain travels faster than their super-nukes. As a poor vegetarian Indian, I am more scared of the viral-nukes launched from their dinner tables than the globe-destroying weaponry. God, errr dogs, save us! I am getting more and more scared. I think, the human race will be destroyed, not by the nukes and super-nukes as you may suppose, but by some hitherto unheard of culinary experiment in some Chinese kitchen where some animal, reptile or bird might be boiled and cooked for the first time in their entire millions of years of history, introducing a viral strain that will eat the entire globe-load of Homo-sapiens. Oh God, o dogs rather, see! To make it still worse, if I fall in the Chinese hands, the kindest of them would still be happy to roast me alive and bring about another culinary experiment!

Like they do to conscious beings, the rest of us in the non-Chinese part of the world aren’t less culpable. We do the same to natural resources. We suffer from a senseless repugnance for the tenderly genial naturality. Under the spell of our naively virile materialistic spirit, we slaughter acres after acres of pristine forests. With our frosty antagonism, we destroy river ecosystems through dams. Under the venal influence of the sadist beast in us, we rape mother earth through unsustainable mining and quarrying. As the biggest bully and brawler behemoth, we spoil coastlines, pillage hill slopes, and pollute air and water bodies. Trees at their prime lay butchered. Their corpses tell their murder stories: ‘I stood for decades by the path giving shade, shelter and pure air. Then the path changed colors. Its sands turned into tar. And I became a roadblock and removed with a clean surgical strike. Best of luck Homo sapiens!’

Having forsaken the more noteworthy part of our souls, we stand puckered and shamefaced. With our penetrating shrewdness, we greedily scan the amorous prevailment of natural bounties. With a look of soft condescension she looks back at the errant child. Who will have the last laugh? The answer lies in littered impressions at every nook corner. We will win to lose everything. Our exasperating stupidity is overwhelmingly self-explanatory. The climate shocks have been unprecedented. Horrific! The cold has slaughtered soot and saplings with its unsparing frosty sword. The heat almost boils. It rains to deluge cities and forests turn desert for want of rain. A tipsy curvy world! It seems elves, fairies, imps, pixies, spirits, goblins and gnomes are assaulting humanity’s castle to dismantle mankind from his throne of triumphant myths and legends.   

Robbed of her extolling fables and exalting poetry, the angry Mother is forced to cry with pain. It turns out to be wrath poured out with tears in eyes and a bloodied heart. Mother ignored and abused like garden cactus still has a few flowers to help us smile again. Irrespective of the severe damage, she decides to retain her smile. Her smile overcomes the frosty burns. With tears in eyes, aching heart and a forgiving smile on lips it says: ‘Happiness is a choice. A conscious effort, independent of so many external factors that you presume to be finally decisive for our happiness! Stop the mad rush. The joy comes from within. Don’t burn the house you live in!’

Beyond the storm in the cup of we Homo sapiens, from astronomical distances, Father Sun dies to reborn again. ‘Death is the beginning of birth. Birth is the beginning of death. In fact, there is no death or birth. All we have is simply an ever-evolving transformation, simply a process! Live and let live sons and daughters, learn to live in harmony. To me a grain of sand, a tree, an insect, an animal, bird or you, all are the same. Never forget this brotherliness. Otherwise you perish and turn to sands. You are in everything around you! Accept your extended self and gracefully take up the kinder, compassionate duties becoming of your higher self!’ Got some sense out of His message? If not, kindly read it a few time more!

The new normal was to suffer and suffocate in the jail-like houses due to the lock downs. Please don’t curse Mother Nature for the fall outs! Our constant complacency riding the back of her condescending subservience to her son’s ambitions, has taken us to the brink of the deep gorge. Engaged in our guttural nocturnalities we are at the risk of a sure fall to doom. So she lunges ahead with a warning. Mother Nature’s razor sharp talons, piercing beak and predatory eyes are just an illusion. At the core lies the baby soft, melodious hymn of love. Salutes o Mother! Once the storms are over, the motherly ray will come down to kiss and heal! But for that you have to show repentance, accept your faults and promise to mend your ways. Don’t forget, one tear in your eyes gives her thousands in her heart. To make you laugh again, she has her own mollycoddling ways. A superb full-moon night waits around the corner for a milky delight! So just see through the self-created smoggy night, where the sun has been hidden and airs have been suffocated to death in gas chambers. The rainstorm may appear unsparing and unrelenting. Still lots of smiles wait as our beneficent fate! We have to believe.

Go and touch a nearby tree with the faith of a true friend and close your eyes, standing under his majestic, protective canopy. He responds! Feels your pain! He transfers His energy to heal your wounded soul. He will be helping you in getting back your faith in life and living. He is your sincerest friend. The tree somewhere! Go and embrace him! Reconcile. He will definitely reciprocate. Probably he looks forward to your visit to his house. Say thanks to your buddy! You never know at what level of reality he is existing. A saintly King I tell you. Listen as you put your ears to his so called wooden heart: ‘I am basking in my sovereignty! I am the King of the world not visible to the human eyes! I am crowned with celestial lights!’ You will hear it clearly. Just open up your soul. The miseries will melt away.

A mother is a mother is a mother. It's her selfless love that is driving the force through the rescuer's hands! We are bound to survive because a mother has to be forgiving. She is simply reprimanding us for the evils we have spread around. With lovely, kissable traces of sadness, the day which appears to close its eyes here will surely open them with a child's verve and happiness somewhere else! It’s not all over yet. All that we need is to realign our priorities.

We have to let go off the theatrical usage of the diviner’s rod that we hold in tight fist with supreme sophistry. We have lost the imagination of the soul. The hypnotic beats of the cold, hard logic has shut off the meditative idioms and freewheeling conversations of mankind with his soul. We have forgotten the mesmerizing depth we have the potential to dive in and be off the chaotic scene on the turbulent surface. We have surrendered our divine potential as a killing substandardness smiles superciliously in our face. We are merely spinning deals in gloss and fine print on the stampeded pathways, completely unaware of the ethereal and refulgent restfulness lying like useless weed along the pristine sidelines. Stepping over there is now a failure and staying in the crowd, squeezed and squashed like a worm, is taken as success. Concrete is in our heart now, not the exotic, mellow and fluid shades of the uninhibited colors of emotions. Our life and living is merely a terribly diluted projection of our real potential. Swarmed by our much-touted problems, we are just plucky survivors ever pursued by the relentless mortality. The impassioned fervor of the jaw-dropping panorama, explosive lushness and idyllic splendor of pristine forests, verdant kisses of a timorous sun on snow-melted peaks, unfailing continuity of peace blanketed in mists, curvaceous careening of a mountain stream, grand old trees swooned in a trance, teasing and titillating snowy splendor on lofty peaks, all this and more is our treasure which we have priced dirt cheap and adopted stones as gold to guide our fate. With our hardy heartstrings and mental pyrotechnics, we have been stunningly ritualistic of our pariah creed that puts us against everything non-human on the earth.     

There is always hope,

As long as nature holds the rope

through its smile pure,

Survive we will for sure!

Pause is the remedy against our pathological escalations. We have to muster up our moral collectives and lay out an array of leisure moments to allow the cooling of our tempers and healing of her bosom that we have sucked to the bleeding point. The unsavory bellicosity and colossal lunacy need to be managed before the bursting point. The tired and diseased soldier needs to sleep for some time in the unsullied serenity of Mother Nature’s lap. Otherwise, we have to be ready for far more stern messages. Mother Nature would be forced to shriek a bit louder to make our deaf ears hear her plight. God forbid, it may turn out to be grievously critical and catastrophic! The choice is entirely ours. We get what we sow.

On a tiny molehill of hope, I saw the faintest tinkling of reason and rhyme. Now when most of the human population over the planet was following exactly the kind of lifestyle which was my normal routine for years, I felt that I belonged to this planet only, not some disgraced extraterrestrial species!

Home stay was a torture and imprisonment for those who had existed on the surface, identifying with the externalities and horribly twisting life as per the chidings of the things outside of one’s own self to give it a shaky, restless meaning; whose life was just a mad rush after the mirages that pop up in the sandy desert of illusions.

Cool down brothers and sisters, Mother Nature has given us an assignment to look within. It is a chance to rebrand ourselves and become a better version. That's how this civilization will change. At least we get time to think. So it’s better to avoid yawns of killing boredom and look within.

Of course there will be a remedy for the errant chacha Corona! No doubt about it. When the vaccine arrives, it, but, will be a bandage for the symptoms only. The roots of the tree of our sustenance and survival have been shaken. So all isolated efforts to find an antidote for Corona chacha will be simply like disinfecting the pale leaves of a tree whose roots are being eaten by termites. So as our own house turns into a jail, it’s befitting to study the roots! It's an open book. Read it!

As the mankind suffered during those Corona crazy times, Mother Nature appeared to regain her footing. Simple mathematics: our interests and her interests—because of our collective misdemeanor—stand antagonist, in terrible disproportion, to each other. A scary mathematics because we are a tiny subset of her overall set. So if the part goes against the whole that is as good as going against itself. Possibly Mother Nature finds us like pathogens, just as we find Corona obnoxious for our system. The only solution is to reshape our priorities in a way that ours and nature's existence should be proportional and in harmony!

Going into self isolation was like an apprenticeship into the art of prisoners. There is a huge backlog of our collective sins. So we have to serve prison terms in various ways. So hone the art of a diligent, obedient prisoner. All situations have positive outcomes also. The moments of seclusion have something creative in their womb. It’s better if we read our life and reflect over the path we have taken. One will realize her little part in the evil drama Homo sapiens have been playing for a few thousand years on this little planet. At least in our little domain, we can individually rectify our part to stand absolved from our side.

Corona ka karnama was written in scary script. The most dreaded criminals, tucked in the highest security and the most isolated cells, looked to be the safest among the Homo sapiens as of now. Meanwhile, birds were singing more chirpily in the resonant reverence of the ultimate song of love and peace. The animals roamed more freely with magnanimous humility. Extraordinarily amiable and condescending, the trees doled out fresher air as the pollution level plummeted down. When the rest of all were feeling better, how come we were suffering most miserably!? Mathematically, it means that we are the source of miseries to each and everything falling in the category of non-Homo sapiens.

If Mother Nature had a language like ours, or we had the ears and mind to hear and understand what she has to convey, we would come to know that we have turned out to be nothing sort of Corona virus to her. And what do we do to fight Corona? We launch a full scale war to counter the bug's onslaught through isolation, sanitization, debugging, antibiotics, etc, etc. Isn't she also doing the same against someone who is Corona-type lethal to her? Mind you brethren, her tools to save herself are floods, earthquakes, Tsunamis, epidemics, drought, forest fires, etc. It's high time we raise a white flag of peace and call ceasefire and get onto the negotiating table, for endless are her resources in this fight. We hardly stand any chance.

When the humans kill their fellow human beings—we need not repeat the multimillion murders in the name of religion, caste, creed, nationality, ethnicity and rest of all our mind-contrived ways and means to slaughter each other—there is hardly anything scary about it. It passes off as a passable act of routine violence. But when humans die at the hands of other agents, they panic too much. When millions get slaughtered in the name of religion, there is hardly any world scale scare. But when a little virus wants to propagate its species, we get scared to the guts.

Get some sense o thou majestic owner of this tiny planet, Homo sapiens! Mother Nature has given you this heavenly blissful planet. Accept your role in the things going awry! Rectify your errors. Still there is a chance! Grab it before it’s too late!

Or are you the helpless moth with the incessant cravings of the unquenchable thirst of the endless desire. The mankind and his Holy Fire!

 

I am the moth

and I love my flame!

My fire!

But I feel the burning core of

the glow around which

I helplessly circle around!

I know that I cannot stop

the fire from burning,

So I throw myself in a fiery pit

to forget my dear flame's burning plight!

I throw myself in a bigger fire

so that I forget myself

                                                                            and my flame's cries!