The Croakings of an Old Toad -- 1

 An exciting novel about a count politely moving on his courteous path of inherent dignity in the wake of the Russian revolution, Thoreau’s escapades into the nature and the resultant chronicles in Walden, and Eckhart Tolle’s seminal work on the power of ‘Now’. It’s a little treasure on my table: a self-gift to my very own dear self on a wet, gloomy, cold day. Why depend only on others for beautiful gifts? Start viewing your purchases as the gifts to your own dear self. A warm, exciting feeling pervades my mind and heart. I stare at them like a little hungry puppy ogling at a soft piece of meat. Water-mouthed!

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One can’t hope to survive as an all-out truth-speaking guy. Remember Jesus, Socrates and many others. These are hard times. Truth (majorly) needs to be supported by falsehood (minorly). A fraction of falsehood pandering the vanity of a little section will save your truth against the ire of the bigger section whom you rib-tickle with the iron fingers of your truth.

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Look out for beautiful people around you. They are great in their simple ways. They are exceptional and unique even while they are part of the rutted routine. But they run this world and touch our lives in constructive ways that we hardly realise. As Charles Dickens says, ‘It's not possible to know how far the influence of an amiable honest-hearted duty-going man flies out into the world; but it’s very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by...’

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Try to stand proud in front of your own conscience first. The rest will follow. As Thoreau sums it up so beautifully: ‘Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.’

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Your time is far more important than you ever imagined. Use it, don’t bruise it. As Thoreau says, ‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.’

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By the diverse sets of cleverest means, most of us arrive at the same set of follies. We are the masters of copying and repetition, even if they are follies. They give us a sense of ‘doing’ something.

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The loving ripple of your lips on my cheek! Softest in silky emotion but sturdiest in ironed strength and steely support!

Postscript: Speaking from objective, theoretical knowledge; not from subjective, personal experience. Well, that shows poetry can come from calculating mind as well, not just from a heart caught in emotional whirlwinds.

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Don’t belittle or glorify your series of relative truths. These are no more than mind-created concepts and no less than the shadow of absolute truth when there is still no clue about the final truth. Watch them as no more or less than what they are and they become the stepping stones to the ultimate reality.

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Just into unexpected fortunes, an adolescent Pip, forced into stylish clothes, muses about a simple rural blacksmith in Dickens’ masterpiece Great Expectations:

‘I am conscious that he carried off his rather old clothes much better than I carried off my new suit.’

Playacted niceties are still soulless and genuine rusticity will still have its class and affable spirit. An open falsehood is still better than the pretended truth. Because as another character says so aptly, ‘No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.’

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