An old farmer

 

Tau Hoshiyar Singh is nearly hundred and almost blind. Still he is smart and calculating enough to find his way using the bigger landmarks still visible to him and go for walks without tumbling even once. Sadly, he has met a tragedy at the far end of his honest, hard-worked farmer life. He lost his eldest son, Randhir (in his late sixties). Randhir was a very close friend of mine and a genuine well-wisher. So it’s a big loss to me as well.

I’m sitting with Tau (uncle) in his little room, he lying on his charpoy and me on a chair by his side. Irrespective of age, a parent would always feel the pain of losing his/her children. A slight tremor in his voice makes me feel the pain inside him, but otherwise he is as much composed like always, in full acceptance of life. His faith in God is as firm as usual. In my limited experience, I find him one of the rarest people who have such firm, rock-strong faith in the almighty even without going to a temple or worshipping a deity. I have never seen him entering a temple in my life, never performing a ritual, or going on a pilgrimage. But when I talk to him about God, he takes the name of God with such reverence and hundred percent confidence and honesty as to make him a highly spiritual person. And why won’t it be? After all, he has produced crops by irrigating them with his sweat, nurturing them with the nutrients of honesty and integrity. Nobody can point out that he committed even a single mistake that hurt someone’s interests. Godliness dawns in such people of its own. They are spirituality in practice, naturally, by default.

Whenever I meet him I joke that he can hardly see and uses his experience and smart brain to cross the streets and make others believe that he is still able to see and present right there in the race of life. And he always protests that he can ‘see’. So whenever I see him, I stand in front of him, change my voice and ask him to recognize me. Of course he fails to recognize me. When I laugh that see didn’t I tell you that you can see far less than you claim, he would slowly, dismissively say, ‘I had seen you clearly but I forgot your name because my memory is somewhat affected now.’ It means Tau takes the importance of eyes far more than the mind.

So in a light-hearted manner even now I’m prodding at his soft-spot regarding his eyesight. Then Tau is irritated a bit and lowers his guard. He then gives me a clue as to why he is trying to protect the honor of his eyes. ‘My right eye is almost gone. I can see only bigger things hazily with my left eye. So this left eye gives me a slight idea of the world around and allows me to walk. But all that adang-dhadang (honky dory) stuff is visible to my blind right eye,’ Tau tells me. I get straightened up with interest. I know Tau has entered the talk of the paranormal world even though he hardly believes in it. ‘I see much ulta-pulta with this blind eye. Like many people coming and going through the wall, appearing over the ceiling, someone going to the barn to get fodder. They aren’t scary in any sense. All of them well behaved. And always in clothes. The women also hold purdah over their face. Earlier I used to get curious about them. But now I don’t even think about them. They keep doing their business,’ Tau tells me with total indifference.

Well, his age seems to have given him extra-sensory perception. He surely sees disembodied souls floating around. After exiting the body, the individual consciousness still retains two elements out of the five. These are air and ether. So the disembodied souls float around with their two elements, carrying the predominant tendencies and inclinations available in their five-element body before death. Time trapped, they say, they float around to somehow fulfill the karmic balance before taking a body again. They are mere bubbles of air and ether floating around, looking at the living humans with jealousy for having a body and being able to carry out so many things. While in their endeavor to do something, they can just float around and sometimes interfere with the weakened energy systems in certain individuals. But what will they do to a robust farmer like Tau? He is very much comfortable to see them as companions during the lonely nights in his little room.

But isn’t this interesting that old Tau sees entities with his blind eye? By the way, he doesn’t believe in ghosts. And what will ghosts do to someone who doesn’t even believe in them. Tau has put all his belief in one super-entity—God. And that too without having to go to a temple, without performing rituals, or going on pilgrimages. He has established it—his faith—right there with a firm farmer’s foot. And the ghosts play around him on lonely nights.

‘You are lucky Tau in that you get a free movie watching with your blind eye,’ I laughed. ‘Hmm!’ he intoned again pretty dismissively. 

Life lessons by a little angel

 

Playing with my two-and-half years old niece Maira is great fun. Coming down from the levels of burdensome intellect and going down to meet her innocent joyful being is elevating and uplifting in many ways. It seems going down but it’s going up in a substantial way. The joy up-shoots like anything. One tastes ‘the lightness of being’.

A child will help you in breaking many barriers that one has built around himself. As a clown with lisping tongue, acting funny and speaking even funnier, you slay stress like a shiny knight in armor.

We are playing on the sunbathed terrace on this balmy winter noon. A flock of asian pied starlings floats lazily in the sky. They chatter and twirl, taking gentle, unhurried turns and loops in their flight. It’s a playful flight, not the one for survival and sustenance. Little Maira goes ecstatic at the joyous sight. And here I’m habitually trying to put more knowledge in her little brain. I point out that these are asian pied starlings. I repeat it many times so that she remembers the name. Then I ask her what is their name, pointing to the flying flock. She is worried for a moment. ‘Birds!’ she shouts and jumps with joy.

Yes, birds they are. The simpler, the better. Why get bothered about sophisticated nomenclature that our intellect-obsessed mind craves so much for? Enjoy the creatures that fly as birds only. Or, in Krishnamurti’s lingo, see them just as ‘life’. Nothing more, just plain life.

Furthermore, Maira knows how to go suddenly invisible right in front of your eyes. It’s a child’s magic. All she needs to do is to put her little hands on her eyes and disappear from the world around. It’s her beautiful truth that she too is invisible to others when she cannot see anything around with closed eyes.

How I wish that we too had the belief and conviction of a child in closing our eyes to all that is unbecoming and painful! We can at least try to close our eyes to the painful past and go out of its sight.

A drop of love on my table

 

The houseflies go gloatingly nibbling at your peace. You are helpless and watch wrathfully, nursing animosity. To rub salt on your wounds they land on your face, the representative of your worldly identity. That seems like vandalizing the holy altar of your existence by stomping their dirty feet on your skin. You turn taut with attention; muster up all determination to be at your quickest best. Then you take a ferocious swipe. You hurl all agility stored in your cells. But the houseflies are always quicker than the best of your shots. They escape unharmed. In fact you have a high risk of pulling some muscle due to the sudden jerk to your limbs.

They doze past your swatting newspaper or any other weapon you have at hand. They buzz away with elegant novelty in the art of escaping. And with a sneering, bantering buzz again land on your skin, to itch your frustration again. This behavior is in close proximity with making a mockery of your sense of being a human, the supreme species on the earth. Over a period of time, you settle for mild reconciliation and finally sign armistice from your side.

Out of the thousands of strikes and swipes, effected with crouching hate and anger, I have hardly bruised even a wing in my confrontation with the houseflies. But this day it was a golden chance to strike with ravenous glee and kill two foes in one little strike, and undo all the humiliating hops of yore. But there are moments when such an act would sound full of revulsion and, more seriously, dishonorable.

A housefly pair is making love on my table. The fiery flakes of my revengeful self turn to cool showers of curiosity. I’m stopped from sledge-hammering this stupefying dream of these two tiny insects. At this tiny point in space-time fabric, a little episode of sensuous and voluptuous frequencies is unfolding with surrendering grace. I’m reading my morning newspaper. I turn pages. I move. I shift, sigh, yawn and finally hum an uncouth Haryanvi ragini about a farmer’s love, which is basically an animalistic lust. I’m gloating over them like a shameless peeping tom. They are just a couple of feet away. They are oblivious to any kind of danger today. Aha, love’s animated, flattering tones! All the force of fear and survival now focused on giving a pleasurable crescendo—to heave their species onwards from their end. I take my illegal prying into their private matter even further and start taking their pictures. My mobile is just inches away from them. It seems a bold couple. They aren’t shy of getting filmed in their moments of deep intimacy.

Initiated by the male by striking or jumping into the female (like a typical male of any other species), their lovemaking can last 30-120 minutes. Well, it can give a big complex to most of we humans. Mating comes quite naturally to most of the species on the earth. But to the human mind it comes as a complex ritual. The male houseflies use pheromones (produced by the females) to detect a female by colliding with them mid-air or ground striking. The drone tries to force open her wings. If she accepts his advances, she vibrates her wings to make a buzzing sound. Copulation begins, as it does now on my table. They must have had a very heavy breakfast prior to this as fly-mating takes a lot of energy and they need their bellies full before the ritual of procreation.

The drone fertilizes the female eggs. She then lays eggs in a filthy, warm, moist place. From my table she will go and fly to lay eggs on feces and filth a day after. The eggs will take a day to hatch. The larvae (maggots) will bury in filth and an adult fly will emerge from the pupa. In five to six batches over 3-4 days a housefly lays around 500 eggs in its lifetime of 15-30 days.

I have the choice to allow the rationality of mind—that these are carriers of diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and worms—to stifle the poetic romanticism of lovemaking insects, and squash them down with a newspaper strike. If I do this, I can easily close-up an entire branch of houseflies. It will wind up the new pathways for 500 new houseflies in a week, which would have ended up starting new chain reactions of 500 further houseflies from those previous ones, and onwards similarly. That means I would stop the evolution of millions of houseflies from this end. The rationality of the human mind would encourage one to stop at least one door to the proliferation of these germ-spreading insects.

But is there anything in nature that has not its benefits? Houseflies are waste decomposers and eat poo. A single tiny larva eats about half gram of organic matter in a day. Beyond the side issues of disease transmission, hygiene and sanitation practices, mother nature produces them to decompose the natural and human-produced organic waste including feces and carcasses. There are houseflies because there is excess of organic matter that hasn’t been suitably and properly managed. That opens the breeding potential for these opportunistic feeders. They lap up the putrefying sap with their sponging mouthparts. Moreover, their pathogenic immunity can be studied to help us understand the causes and factors of immunity to help us devise similar medical defense guards for the humans also. So in the scheme of mother nature it’s not clear whether stopping this particular point of evolution would be beneficiary or disadvantageous in the ultimate sense.

I think instead of trying to kill a pair of lovemaking houseflies, I should try to properly manage the organic waste around me, at least on my premises. That seems like a real solution—an effort to remove the cause instead of merely tempering with the effects. Helped by the self-approval of poetic romance, I strengthen my moral fortification and allow the fly couple their moments of surrender to the energetic throng of procreation. They are not concerned about my choice. They take their time, oblivious to my shuffling and flicking newspaper.

The drone then takes off after many prolonged minutes of joyride on the rollercoaster of creation. He has played his limited part in the process. The female has a bigger role to play. Her part has just started. She sniffles around for a couple of more minutes, preens her wings and takes off to look for a suitable filthy site to put her larvae the next day.

Blossoming

 इसको कहते हैं खिलना। इतना खिलना की बिखरना सिर्फ खिलने का अगला, सुखद चरण मात्र बनके रह जाए। पूरा खिलने के बाद बिखरना अर्थहीन हो जाता है। होने और ना होने के द्वंद के परे है संपूर्णता से होना। जियो जीवन भर के, पूरा खिलो। पीड़ारहित बिखरना तभी संभव है जब आपने खिलने में सब कुछ अर्पित कर दिया हो।

और ज्यादा खिला। It happens when you welcome life with the widest bear hug! This is expansion! Then a playful tug of the gentle air will aid in further expansion! A drizzle of ecstasy will occur! The petals will fly away to be a bigger part of a larger dimension! The smile doesn't die. It acquires a broader plain.

The gardener king

 

Two millennia before Christ, the people of the Mesopotamian city of Babylon had an interesting manner of celebrating the new year. Commendably they had their fixed twelve-month calendar that allowed them a sense of managing time. So they would have their new year, allowing them celebrations for a new start. A common person would be crowned ‘king for a day’ in the morning. The one-day king would be exposed to all the luxurious delicacies of royalty. But before the day end the one-day king would be sacrificed to appease the Gods. Maybe they believed that the Gods would feel pampered over having a king sacrificed at their feet. Then one year, Enlil-bani, the king’s gardener, got his term to be appointed as one-day king on the first day of the new year. Possibly the Gods got fed up with one-day kings’ sacrifices and decided to have the real taste of royalty. Before the sacrifice, the real king fell ill suddenly and died. As luck would have it, the one-day king turned into almost a quarter century long king. The gardener turned king ruled for two and half decades with wisdom and practical acumen. At least he must have focused on flowers and gardens because there are some poems eulogizing him for his good work.

Sam Manekshaw

 

The legendary Indian soldier, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, fought as a junior officer in the British Indian Army during the Second World War. In a daring endeavor to catch a strategic hill in Burma, bravely leading from the front, he was hit by a light machine gun burst. He had nine bullets lodged in his lungs, liver, kidneys and intestines. His orderly Mehar Singh lifted his injured boss on the shoulders and walked fourteen miles to reach a military field hospital. His torso ripped apart and bleeding like flooded rivers, the young officer seemed sure to die.

From the look of it, only death seemed a reprieve for the injured officer. The British senior officer, fully aware of the Indian junior officer’s brave fight, tore his own Military Cross (one of the most prestigious military awards) and put it on the chest of the apparently dying soldier saying, ‘Military Cross is given to only living soldiers. So hereby I confer it to you while you are still alive.’

The Australian surgeon, heavily burdened under the big tasks with limited resources, thought it wastage of time and medical supplies to attend a definitely dying soldier. Sam had a few traces of consciousness at that time. ‘What happened to you?’ the doctor asked ironically. And the legendary soldier’s answer would later change history, not just for India but for Bangladesh as well. ‘A mule hit me,’ Manekshaw joked, a weak smile emerging from his messed up body. The Australian surgeon was shocked. ‘If someone can crack a joke even in this situation then his life is worth saving!’ he said. He operated upon the soldier and extracted the bullets from his lungs, liver, kidneys and intestines. It was a bloody operation; a major part of Manekshaw’s intestines had to be cut out. But the bravest are the ones who can smile and joke even in the face of death. By cracking the joke with death staring at his face, Sam had already defeated death.

The rest is history. Sam Manekshaw not only survived but went onto play important roles in all the wars including Pakistan (1947-48), China (1962), ending with Bangladesh war (1971) when he was the army chief.

He was as much famous for his bravery and military strategy as he was for his sense of humor. If not for this sense of humor, the Australian surgeon won’t have even considered treating him. If not for this sense of humor, Sam would have died with a borrowed, consolatory Military Cross on his chest. With this sense of humor, he retired as a Field Marshal, living to the ripe old age of late nineties, holding the proud baton of a perpetual soldier who is entitled to a salute from the highest of the high in the country as long as he is alive. I think this unbuckling sense of humor won him the toughest battle of his life by defeating death.

So keep your sense of humor dear readers! Keep it alive! It’s precious because it defeats even death sometimes.

The self-sustaining orbit of life

 

In the infinite womb of the cosmos, the interplay of matter and energy churns out newer and newer formations, births and deaths of supermassive bodies. The cosmic churn goes on and on. Stars burst, black holes swallow supermassive bodies, and galaxies heave massive pulses across the space. It’s basically a super-storm going around. Cosmic bodies pulling, repelling, orbiting, colliding, sucking and maybe many more phenomenon beyond our perception range. But there are little points of peace, balance and poise where there is equanimity and balance in this cosmic storm. These are Lagrange points or Libration points, the points of ‘equilibrium for small-mass objects under the gravitational influence of two massive orbiting bodies’.

Usually, two gigantic bodies put an unbalanced gravitational force at a specific point, thus changing the orbit of any small-bodied object present at that point. However, at the Lagrange points, the gravitational forces of the two massive bodies balance the centrifugal force exerted by each other. It results in little Lagrange points that can be used for space docking for satellites, because here they can float almost unchallenged by any force in one particular direction and hence decreasing the fuel requirements. The manmade space objects can be placed at these Lagrange points for observing the marvelous chaos unfolding around. The satellite is very stable at this point and like a meditative saint can marvel, observe and make a meaning of all this meaningless unfoldment going around.

Human life is also a tiny replica of the cosmic upheavals, shifts, transformations, collisions going at a bigger scale in the cosmos. There are forces that pull us down and curtail our flights just like the forces of gravity tend to crash the objects back onto the ground. These are the forces of discontentment, fear and insecurities that pull us back to the base level, cutting our wings. There are repelling forces as well that keep our real self away from the essential core of our pure being. These centrifugal forces are anger, hate, jealousy and judgments. And being either pulled or repelled by one or the other, we have to spend a lot of fuel in cutting through the rough atmospherics and vicissitudes of life. We feel the wear and tear of this struggle against the opposing forces. We carry the scars, the discontentment and lots of dis-ease in our being. Life feels a burden as a result.

Luckily, in this rough journey we too have our Lagrange points just like the satellites. Every individual has his/her own Lagrange points, where the soul-ship can be docked in the balanced zone; where it requires minimum dissipation of life-force. Here we don’t feel the struggle of it. We feel the light of just ‘being’. We can feel the ease of just being. In this zone of equanimity and balance, we can set up ourselves with least conflicts and dissipation of energies. The contrasting forces here neutralize each other. A conflict-free existence naturally provides a lot of comfort to the soul.

Now the all-important question arises: How to find one’s very own Lagrange point? All of us have varying situations, circumstances, advantages, disadvantages, insecurities, fears, skills. All of us know the things that pull us down like the force of gravity. We also are aware of the repelling forces that keep our real self from coming face to face with the egoistic one. In my opinion the Lagrange points for a common person are the intersecting zones between materiality and spirituality—the zone between the desires of flesh and the dreams of the soul. One can set up a specific Lagrange point for one’s being and dock the soul-ship there to see, observe, witness all the drama going around, just like observatory satellites placed at Lagrange points do their job. This is the zone where the forces of materiality and immateriality are balanced by each other, allowing us to just be a celebrator of life, a witness of all this seemingly meaningless unfoldment around. Maybe we observe a meaning of life then. Wish you all a happy, cozy and safe Lagrange point in your life!

Evening shades

 Evening shades on the solitary trail..

The will to exist

 

Energy’s manifestation as matter is bound by the laws defining our survival instincts. And survival has the tools of attack and defense as the primary modus operandi. So ‘being’ is like walking on the tightrope, holding the pole with one end as ‘attack’ and the other as ‘defense’, sometimes tilting to this way to defend, the other times to the opposite end to attack.

Each eatable grain on the earth wants to survive. It has the multiple layers of defense and attack mechanisms to help it carry its journey forward. And we break through their defense portals by cooking them and make a pulp of their starch and protein by breaking these down. The grain accumulates lots of starch to lengthen its life, but we are smarter enough to break it down for our consumption. Primarily, a grain collects its starch for its own consumption. Getting eaten by the humans or animals is the least of its priorities. So to reach this rich source of starch and protein, we have to first defeat its first line of defense, the structural line of resistance. Grains have physical obstructions in the form of thorns, bark, husk and other protective armor. We go through it with our superior weapons by peeling and milling.

At the second tier of defense, the grain still tries to survive and here it engages the gluttony humans with its chemical warfare. The grains have certain pathogenic properties that don’t go along the digestive capabilities of the human stomachs. They also possess certain enzyme inhibitors that make the grains harder to be broken by the digestive system. It makes them very tough to be eaten raw. To break this line of defense we use the weapons of boiling, fermenting and germination. We even dupe them by soaking. Soaking actually dupes the grain into believing that it’s the first stage for the birth of a baby plant. As it gets ready for giving birth to a baby sprout, it withdraws the defense portals and immediately certain enzymes are born to support the baby sprout. And something eatable for the baby plant is eatable for us also.

So it’s primarily about attack and defense at all the hierarchies of life. What we see in the world at the tangible level of we humans is simply a representative of all that is going at the tiniest levels. So keep your defense walls strong and the attack portals (skills and efficiency) well oiled. The bubble will anyway burst but to maintain that bubble and enjoy the pleasure and joy of being, we have to give our best just like a tiny grain does. Learn from a grain. If not for this tough fight, how will a tiny seed grow into a majestic tree some day? A tree is the optimum actualization of a seed’s potential. Similarly, we too have the task of maximizing the potential that we carry within. Fight well!  

The countryside PDL and PDA

 

The lethal most Public Display of Lust (PDL) I have witnessed goes like this. It was a bull in full heat of the moment—in hormonal terms. Sadly there was no cow in sight. The red-hot excited bull must have had a great sense of visualization. If not for this how would you digest the sight of a bull riding a scooty. The bull visualized  the scooty as a cow. There are always alternatives. Aren’t there? The scooty was parked by the roadside. A nice white scooty, smaller than a cow. So the bull raised its front legs and landed on it for lovemaking, mating, raping, call it whatever. It shocked and jolted the human senses for a moment but then everyone laughed, hollered, guffawed.

The craziest, all-defiant love pursuit I have seen goes like this. It was a massive male buffalo. A free-roamer allowed to graze in the fields in return for mating with domesticated buffaloes to sire colts and getting fresh milk in the family. It would go lumbering across the village streets after grazing in the fields and was cordially welcomed to fulfill the needs of the buffaloes at the time of seeding. The buffalo bull should have treated all the females in the village equally, with identical affection. But then it fell in love with a young filly. It was a very attractive young buffalo. He just went crazy for her. He knew that she would come of age soon and then he would get an opportunity to be the father of her colt. He lost interest in the rest of the buffaloes. She would be there in the shade of the barn and he would wait in the street, sitting in the burning June heat, waiting for the evening to come when they took her out for watering at the village pond. Then he would accompany her to the pond, walking fondly with her, gentling shoving her, licking her skin. He won’t go into the fields to graze and thus was losing weight. Spellbound by her, he wasn’t interested in mating with other buffaloes. The people started calling him Majnu. The owner of the young buffalo took it as an attempt to tarnish his reputation. The people started joking that it was an attempt to malign the family’s honor. The irate farmer then would beat Majnu with well-oiled sticks. But he would bear all this just to be with his love interest.

The grandest fight one wages to prove one’s libido even in the old age was presented by another romoeo, a one-eyed community buffalo bull. We called him Kana, for he had lost one eye in a fight with a rival. He was a massive bull. In his heydays he sired hundreds of colts in the village and was thus the cause of bringing fresh milk to scores of rural houses. But then age caught with him. He but would try to keep his fiefdom still intact. I remember it once when he fell down in an attempt to get onto a young buffalo. The onlookers laughed and made derogatory puns at his vanishing stamina and strength. Maybe the old buffalo took it to heart. And to prove a point that his power was just the same, he carried the momentum right there on the ground. We saw him convulsing with lust on the ground. The poor old bull was trying to drill a hole in the earth to prove a point. It was pretty hilarious that day. When we try to be what we are no longer, we simply turn a joke. Don’t we?

And just today I saw the bravest Public Display of Affection (PDA):a cow and a bull standing right there in the middle of the busy road at the entrance to the town; in full foreplay mood, licking each other with the very same pleasure treasure that each species seems to run after on the earth. We respect cows and the vehicles would divert to the sides to allow them this holy PDA. And here I am going on my scooty marveling at their holy audacity. The only point of mismanagement was that he chose the wrong moment to try to materialize the peak of affection. He went for the heave just when I was crossing over. I was at a safe distance but still the shuffling and movement brought them precariously close. It was a momentary scare. He would have risen in love to the crest of ecstasy and I would have fallen as a fruit of their love. I’m glad not to have become the casualty of a PDA.

Ganga garima