Settling the account forever

 In its dealings with a person, destiny keeps its account book always open. The account is never closed from her end. It's always open. It needs a penance to close the account by the person himself, wind up the calculations forever, come out of karma's loop and take an indefinable shape on the canvas of eternity.

The caning masters

 Headmaster Pirthi Singh was a famous caning hero during our schooling days in the late eighties in our village school. Caning was the best as well as the worst of education. There wasn’t much thought behind education techniques. The students took schools as the symbol of hell on earth and the teachers—all of them pretty energetic caners—used brute force to quell the rebellion. Headmaster Pirthi Singh was the squadron leader from the teachers’ side. He had an impressive assortment of canes in his office, of different woods for various purposes ranging from casual rebukes to hardcore bloody punishments. There were mulberry switches to give an acidic, pungent taste on the skin. These were used for slightly built students. However, for the thick-set errant rascals bamboo canes came into use to rattle the bones with strikes.

There was a plant called basa that grew in plenty along water margins during those days. Its stem was juicy and moderately thick. It served a fantastic rubbery beating. The teacher was at liberty to strike with full force as the rubbery stem would rule out bloody scenes. But it would still give a pretty hard thwack on both the bones and the skin. The stem would break after a point. The teacher would emerge triumphant that he broke the basa cane on the path of justice and reformation. The student had his own victorious air if he didn’t cry and bore it with just wincing and contorting limbs. The students who didn’t howl while getting thrashed carried a lofty air around them.

Headmaster Pirthi Singh would hit upon instinct. The rooms would go silent and heads would bury in books as he came down the corridor scanning any opportunity to unleash further caning. There were occasions when the entire class would be thrashed en masse. It was taken for granted that a village boy wouldn’t study. The only way was to force them like the farmers forced the bulls into the yokes. A painful harnessing would follow. The same was the case with village students.

Pirthi Singh was so famous as a striker that many students got christened as Mutdu, Paadu, Haggu—the derivatives of the outcomes of nature: peeing, farting and shitting—as a result of the strikes. One chap was named Haggu as he belonged to the group who couldn’t stop their fear from turning their pants yellow. Haggu went onto become an SDM (Sub-divisional Magistrate) but was still the very same Haggu to his classmates. He was in full gratitude. ‘If not for the raw fear of his caning, I would not have studied at all!’ he maintained in full humility. A bit of slightly funny and mildly offensive name, but that was nothing in comparison to the success and the consequent good name, fame and respect in its wake. 

Lazy bums

 The dove indeed is a silly, lazy bird. They seem to have anchored their perspectives in some utterly laidback chamber of brain. And when the parents have such condemnable lackadaisical attitude, the children definitely suffer. They are averse to any type of cockiness that enables the parents in any species to fight for something more for their kids. They seem to lack that tact, prudence and bitchiness that enables parents, especially the wards like babblers, to turn their children the center of the cosmos. This artlessness makes the dove eggs and babies almost sitting ducks to chance factors and predators.

Given their silently brooding ways, they look perilously nudging the baseline of extinction. The other birds, with their heightened activation and rich and vibrant forays into grabbing more of life and living, appear to be the powerful leaders of the birdie kingdom. The doves, on the other hand, given their characteristic simplicity seem shrouded in obscurity.

I haven’t seen a single successful attempt out of a dozen nestings that I have witnessed in my courtyard over the years. The day I am lucky enough to see a dove hatchling successfully taking its maiden flight would serve as a charming memoir. The hatchlings, if the eggs are lucky enough to survive, look so helpless, tiny fluffy scapegoats to be toed around by the murderous incertitudes of circumstances. The mere fact that there are still doves in the world, despite such dismal success ratio, proves that there is larger intelligence in operation than the human mind. It mysteriously functions and creates exceptional, lucky chances to help some odd chick to survive now and then. The cosmic intelligence spins out what we consider miracles with random lucidity. Otherwise, the doves seem all set to cooperate with the negative forces of the annihilation of a species. Suppose all the predators are taken off the scene, still the eggs and hatchlings are under as much risk as when the sky is crowded with the enemies like flies.

Have you seen a weaverbird’s master art? Their nest is a stirring symbol of safety and coziness. Its dazzling tautness equips it to stand safe and sturdy against inclement weather and hostile predators. The tangled and entwined repertoire bestows it a syncretic sense of safety where their little ones enjoy highly efficient upbringing. The sturdy nests hang with an appellate authority. Their nesting colonies on a safe tree are almost celebrated landmarks of the birdie architecture.

The doves are plain stragglers in comparison to the weaverbirds. Theirs is the weakest of a nest, a see-through, fragile, careless assemblage of few dry twigs; very small, just big enough to accommodate a few eggs; a sullen and grumpy assemblage; a living legacy of being in cahoots with the forces of destruction. If the hatchling is lucky to come out of the egg, every minute spent by it seems bizarrely traumatic. The pathetic chick looks shorn of any prospects in future. It survives only if the goddess of mortality is on some elusive excursion for some time.

You can count the eggs standing under a dove’s nest as it’s at a suitable height for a person of average built to raise hands, stand on toes and take them off. I have to be brutally candid on this. From even average parenting standards, the attempt is gruesome, distasteful and perverse. The eggs would look safer anywhere except the nest.

The doves look innocent but now I feel they are plainly dumb. From aesthetical point of view, one may take them possessed with admirable restraint but from the standpoint of parental duties it looks a repository of foolishness. You need front-end courage to defend and save your brood. The rising and falling beats in the game of survival need a stern attention. They show lovely character and good disposition when they perch on the top of a wall and coo. But all this vanishes when it comes to the practicalities of being parents.

The same flimsy assemblage, on the curry-leaf tree in our courtyard, at a height of eight feet has seen four breakfasts for the cats, crows and even an eagle. And now another one is on the way. They just lay eggs, but hardly bother about making a safe nest. There are two or three dove couples in the area. They are thoroughly lazy. They simply make love when the nature calls and lay eggs that are easily whisked away by the egg-mongers. Then they are free from the tensions of raising their kids. I think it will require some wise owl to gather them and put up a lecture about some safety measures while preparing a nest. 

Little happenings at a small place

If mother nature takes away, it gives back as well. It wipes the slate clean and then ascertains that there are fresher lines drawn symbolizing resurrected tales. The bees are gone and the empty hive gives a pinching sense of alienation. But the hundreds of sparrows among the group of keekars just outside the yard wall keep it alive and buzzing. They are very chatty, suspenseful, always busy in their birdie gossip. When they change their notes, it makes them sound as if they possess multi-lingual creativity. They flit around during the day, with a kind of self-effacing candor, taking the major portion of their meals from the millet that I put on the wall.

A giloy creeper has completely covered the clump of keekars. It has shed its leaves during the winters but the network of stems is still dense enough to provide a finely netted ceiling. It harkens the little brown sparrows with a welcoming ambience. They find it safe enough to spend their nights here. The little holes among the densely twisting barren stems of the creeper are like tiny hutments flooded with winged visitors.

The very next day, once the honeybees left, some of the sparrows arrived to roost among the little group of small trees in the yard. As if they were waiting for the bees to leave the garden. So the garden turns a big chiming birdie funfair at dusk. They chat a lot before retiring for the day. But they are very respectful to the night, not a movement, not a sound, paying homage to the goddess of silence. They arrive ten or fifteen minutes before the oriental magpie robin. The dashing fellow is still keeping to his perfectly timed twilight arrival. His biological clock is in perfect sync with nature with the days slightly longer presently. But he has to quarrel now to retain his paw-hold. Some sparrows must be sitting on his favorite branch for the night rest. It leaves him in a grumpy mood and so there he goes with his querulous notes. And finding it to no effect, like a naughty imp he head-butted straight into the bough and reclaimed his lost perch. He fights for it every day. Sometimes, in the middle of a cold, lonely, long night, the magpie robin lets out a sudden note as if all its bottled up pathos are suddenly let out to sail into the cold atmospherics like a song of desolation and loneliness. 

A little exercise

The main charm of dewy autumnal mornings is the shower of little Parijat flowers that covers the ground, like offerings to mother earth. It's a little exercise in nurturing care and consideration in my farming gene pool. Walk carefully so as not to crush even a single flower. If you sensitize your conscience to at least this level so as to avoid crushing a flower, there is hardly a chance that you will crush a heart, an organic representative of thousands of beautiful, multi-colored flowers.

Spin your webs well!

 This is your very own beautiful reality dear earthling...a lovely reality created by you through your own experiences and endeavors to cope with the googlies of life. This is a shining monument celebrating that you have lived. It's as concrete, meaningful and real as the biggest block of stone you have seen in life. Your soul has already consecrated it, so no need for its validation by others. It's as real and ripply as a river flowing in front of you, as beautiful as a rose, as seductive as fragrant jasmine on a dewy autumnal night. 

This is a limitless cosmic fluid, a stream of energy, carrying thought and emotional spools in the form of various vibrational frequencies. That's the raw material for all of us to fabricate still more spools of thought and emotion forms as those already created float around and through us. We are an instrument for carrying this limitless game to keep churning fresher realities. 

All people make their realities. Those strictly at the body level make what you see most of that surrounds you. Thought dominated people like yours truly have intellectual and conceptualized energy field. They see it through their own telescope of intellect. Emotional people, the poets and artists, have emotionalized multihued version of reality. Beautiful souls immersed in faith consecrate the surroundings with the tunes of their soulful hymns and consecrate the ordinary surroundings with divinity and create godliness right here on earth. Some are related to the surroundings at the level of still more subtler energies, so subtle that their realities are in the domain of intuitive zone where space-time axis loses relevance and they foresee and feel the looming turmoil. I know a girl whose energetic system was already painfully attuned to the invisibly building turmoil in the middle east and which has now burst out in all blood and gore. She has seen lots of turmoil in body and spirit in this lifetime, so maybe that leaves her a receiver of similar traumas building up at far off places. 

There are always causes in nature for all the effects to manifest. All this happens as per the fundamental laws of causation which are operational beyond the scope of normal physical laws made by the homosapiens. The latter are convenient copies adopted from the primordial laws based on how much our senses allow us to sense and perceive. 

We have our own karmic memories in our genetics and coupled with the experiences in this lifetime, we frame newer realities. And this new drop of creation from our end is left to float in the stream of creation forever. It will affect our fellow creators till eternity. So it's advisable to create well, something that is assimilative and helpful for fellow creators. At least as per the notions of what we term as loving, friendly, helpful, caring in human terms.

All these creations in thought and emotion forms are different manifestations of the same primordial soup. But it's lovely to come to terms with one's very own reality irrespective of what others see of it. I really understand and feel what our individual triggers want to convey. There are workshops busy, billions of them, busy in carrying forward the task of eternity on this little planet. 

We ought to accept other's realities. And keep evolving as per the directions of the energies flowing through us. We aren't that isolated as individuals as we seem on the surface. Multiple layers of mental, emotional, astral planes, and God knows how many more that we don't know yet, cut across us as we proceed on life’s journey. They are floating around. It's natural that we relate to or are positively or negatively reactive to the energetic forms building around. But what we produce as a response to the individual stimuli is our own creation. So we can be very responsible creators. Some things we relate to because we have seen its very manifestation in our own body through all that we have seen in this life or experienced previously. And in attunement or discordance with all that--which primarily defines our individuality--we spin further webs for mother creation. Spin well! Smile...cheers...dance...

A little lesson from the book of life

 Have you seen a snake beautifully crawling across little spaces, tiny crevices, stony earth and prickly branches and thorny boughs? It slithers away so majestically; with a fluidity matching the water’s. I think a snake is almost a more tangible manifestation of water in fluidity; a crawling mellowness. So the next time you come across a snake, don’t jumpstart and put your body in panic gear to saunter away. Just gently stay there. Believe me it won’t turn back to kiss your skin. It has far better things to kiss including his woman for love and frogs and mice for hunger. So as long as you are an appreciating spectator it would mind its business and allow you to mind yours.

A snake crawls so beautifully even across the big heaps of prickly boughs and branches of thorny keekers without injuring itself. Its mellow fluidity allows it to circuit around the thorns and obstructions. I think a snake has a message here for we humans as we move on the prickly path of life. To move with gentleness, fluidity, acceptance and liberty across the thorns of judgments, hate, complexes, anger, fear and insecurities. These are the thorns put on our path through which we have to crawl. Run or walk with all the negativities and rigidities of fears and insecurities and they bleed our feet. And move with the streaming gentle fluidity of acceptance and non-judgments, we simply find ourselves beautifully crawling across the pinchy, thorny obstructions. Mother nature has scrawled beautiful life lessons across the vast sprawl of her book of nature. We just need to be a bit more aware to read it. Ahha, the wonders of the book of life!

Tau's Grouse

 

Tau Hoshiyar Singh is confidently inching towards the three figure mark, a century of years on earth. He has been a cricket fan and would like to hit a ton. If he gets out in late nineties then he might consider his innings a failure. So I would pray that he meets his target. A very hardworking farmer till five years back, when his grandchildren and wards forced him into retirement (because he would hackle with them at the farms trying to force his age-old farming techniques), he now spends time at chaupals. He has enough stamina left to compete with young idlers in cards games, drawing hookah smoke in a long-long draught, and giving his opinions on political and social matters. From his enthusiasm, I’m sure he is up for a century of years.

He sometimes pays me a visit, special visits I would say. These are primarily to make me realize the real me and act accordingly. An illiterate hardworking farmer, he has been, like others of his ilk in the peasantry of Punjab and Haryana, a follower of Swami Dayanand. To them the Swami’s words on all aspects connote the ultimate earth and they just deny any possibilities beyond that. So he wants to have a modern-day Swami Dayanand. He has cutely misinterpreted my bookish ways as signs of saintliness. ‘You can become like Swami Dayanand, I tell you! Just that you need to simply leave house, abandoning everything and set out on foot like he did! You have it in you!’ he would express his expectations from me. ‘Why don’t you quit this house and everything else?’ he has asked a few times. At those times I feel like pouring salt in his tea and chilies in his hookah tobacco. Don’t know why he is so eager to see me as a beggar roaming around. Anyway, he is an elder and he has his rights to expect.

The other day, he is taking sips at tea served by me, coolly taking out a flea that had fallen in it, saying, ‘You never know even this mix of flea and tea might do some good to the system elderly people like me’. Well, he usually has a solid point to back his wisdom, so I usually avoid falling in arguments with him.

Now me being me, full of books in the mind, I have a tendency to start giving lectures on various topics. God knows how come this topic of cars arrived during the talk. I am soon lecturing him about the costliest cars whose prices go into crores of rupees. His eyes are literally popping out. To him money came in pennies at the cost of loads of sweat in the farms. So the talk of so much money leaves him slightly perturbed. ‘What do they call them?’ he asks me, his eyes wide after I have talked about Rolls Royces, Hummers, Jaguars, Volvo, Mercedes and more. ‘Cars, cars with different names,’ I expound. ‘Then what is yours?’ he asks, pointing at my little old car. ‘It also is a car,’ I’m slightly embarrassed. ‘Yours should be called something else,’ he is so wise.

Then he is asking what is different about those big cars. I am trying my level best to expound their specialties, which fall out of the zone of his understanding. ‘What happens if there is a traffic jam? How is this big car different from the ones like yours, which you also call as a car?’ he interrogates. ‘Well, it has to wait on the road like any other car,’ I reply. ‘Then what is the use of throwing away so much of money if it cannot even fly in air for some time and take you out of the jam?’ he asks. I hardly have any answer. My books haven’t equipped me with those facts. If I try to explain that these are the things in the mind, to stand out higher than the others. He won’t take this logic. Because as a hardworking farmer he cannot relate to the bugs of mind like most of us do in a consumerist society. So Tau takes leave but not before reminding again, ‘Why are you wasting your life? Leave home and hearth and become a sanyasi and turn Mahrashi Dayanad and change the society,’ he advises the course of action. He basically means that I should turn a hardworking ploughman in the field of religion and spirituality.

Well, I understand from where the grouse originated. Tau was at the forefront of canvassing the rival army in fighting against my little battle of saving myself from matrimony. He did his best to get me yoked into the lurching countryside cart of matrimony. He approached with many arranged marriage proposals out of whom I slipped out like a cunning, slippery eel. To him it’s foolish to stay unmarried and still stay in human society. Such people must go to the forests. That’s why he wants me out and join the league of wandering mendicants of India.

Walk away gently into the sunset

 I know I'm from old school. But here is a message for the new-age people grappling with the issues of relationships. Don't tear away the bond suddenly, turning the other one as a redundant item. Talk it over and transform it into a milder bond, put your case gently. If the person isn't suitable in the new phase of life, don't make him/her a dark angel at least. Transform it into friendliness (it's possible by the way--with open heart to heart talks) and drift away gently. There aren't bloody cleavages in this, leaving one party broken and the other one guilty. Why run away? If you run away in haste, you will carry lots of pain with you and this will draw you into similar circumstances with a different person in future because of its sheer momentum in your system. I know ex-lovers can still become possessive and take your friendliness and nicety as willingness to come together again. But that's just an impulse at the initial time. If you maintain your courtesy, friendliness, dignified respect, impersonal aloofness, and sufficient detachment (that separates friendliness from a love relationship), the other person will get the message very soon. Then you won't have a big block list in your phone. And blocks in our phones are merely forced attempts at negating a still nagging reality, an artificial attempt to bury a pain. It stands for either a feeling of victimhood or guilt. 

If you drift away gently, allowing him/her to see you walking away, sometimes looking back with a friendly smile, sometimes waving a bye, then he/she won't feel cheated or broken or dumped. Why leave someone broken? You have every right to proceed with your choices for the future. But why run away? Because if you run away, those same circumstances follow you in a similar relationship with another person. So walk away, if that's necessary, into the sunset with a friendly smile.

The unwritten lawbook of conscience

 The other day, on the way to the town, a sad spectacle unfolded on the road. A hit and run case. A crime, unaccountable though because the life lost didn't belong to the homosapiens. It was a dog and since the lawbooks give enough space to the mankind in this matter, people drive rashly, trample over the so-called lesser lives, and move on nonchalantly. It doesn't even count as a happening. Happenings, or mishappenings, are classified according to their human-centric valuation and assessment. 

The poor thing was lying on the edge of the road, a pool of blood by its open mouth, making its loud statement of a murder. But unfortunately such statements are majorly heard by poetic people or the ones carrying soft hearts. They at least ought to pay a silent homage. 

Another dog was tentatively, after all death is such a big event, sniffing at the blood. It was a very sad sight. 'What must this live dog be thinking? Has the event somehow changed its normal perception of taking blood as food?' I moved on with my sad, brooding musings. 

Mother Existence has her own ways of providing us the answers that we need. On my way back after an hour or so, I saw my answer written on the scene. The other dog was sadly sitting by the dead one, its front paws stretched out, head supported on them, sadly looking at the body. So this one was the friend of the dead dog. Sitting there in condolence and companionship. Look at the bond. They must have played together so fondly. And some uncaring human trode over their bond, cleaving it apart. 

Well, the lawbooks don't have any space for such smaller murders. But at least the book of values in our heart and conscience ought to have some lines of empathy for the so-called lesser lives. Those unwritten laws should hold us responsible for our legalized transgressions. They should hold us accountable for the injuries and harm done by us to the so-called smaller forms of life. They should remind us to drive carefully in order to spare not just humans but cats, dogs and reptiles also.

Earthquake in a Kundalini body

Recently mild earthquake tremors were felt in the Delhi NCR. It was afternoon and I was lying on the bed for some siesta. My body responded to the tremors in an unusual way. All our experiences are meant to help us redraw some more lines on the infinite canvas for understanding a bit more of the reality that we create with our sense perception. This experience also opened the niche a bit further to help me peek into the subsurface base of phenomena and understand the portion of 'me-specific' reality.   

The tremors that we inherit in our body, emotions and thoughts are simply a reflection of the energetic ripples whirring around, an invisible world beyond the apparent solid state of matter. The nanoparticles whizzing past almost without any obstruction. That's the quantum reality we have understood so far in purely scientific terms. A free-wheeling neutrino would simply pass through a boulder of stone, making its way across the vast spaces between the stone’s atoms, as if it’s moving through the most porous of a medium. The same happens to our bodies; just that we need to feel the waves cutting across us pleasantly with heightened awareness. They say primordial sound of 'Aum' is the combined sonic effect of all this non-stop energetic chatter. But before that a Sadhak would hear different categories of sounds at various stages of opening the self to the overall embrace of the infinite grace. 

There is a very simple meditation technique of aligning our own grouping of atoms, which defines our sense of we being as such, with the harmony and balance outside. Open yourself to the vast expanses of the starry vault at night. Stand in seclusion under the open night sky. Close your eyes, take a few gentle breaths and unlock the gate of your insecurities. Then allow your body to move of its own. It’s a very subtle, thin line between voluntarity and involuntarity. Just like a self-start in your vehicle. You give an initial voluntary push with the key, then leave it on auto-pilot. It will roll of its own. Allow your body to move around in any way it wants. It knows better about the best ways to twist and turn in order to uncoil itself from the stress that we have built and piled because of the hijacking of our conscious part by fears and insecurities. There is a natural rhythm inside that we always keep prisoned and chained under our too conscious fears, insecurities and worries. Now as you open the gates, the subconscious (the gateway to the super-conscious) surfaces. It gets its free play as your body and limbs move gently in various mudras, asnas and kriyas of your own making. All the asnas manifested themselves when the sages went into a trance, allowed themselves (the conscious mind) to be off the scene, and the divine symmetry emanating from the superconscious pools manifested in the form of body movements and postures that would unclog the stuck-up pranic channels. They observed all these random movements and these were later routinized as specific postures and the science of yoga emerged to help the sadhaks to move on the path. These were not devised or discovered. They manifested themselves. The same is with the entire science of Ayurveda where the healing nature manifested of its own through properties in plants and herbs.

Try these movements as I suggested and you will have a feel of what I mean. The free flow at the subconscious level will ease-up the tension built in the core cells. It’s a guarantee that you will feel multiple times fresh and eased-up after just five minutes of these self-emerging Tai Chi movements in comparison to an hour-long meditation session. There is harmony around and by allowing the body, mind and emotions surrendered to it, it seeps inside. No wonder one feels better.

Coming back to the mild earthquake tremors. As I have already discussed, a sadhak feels various channels of pranic forces crawling across his/her body. Don’t go vain or proud over it. It’s just a different type of existence at an off-beat perception level. The sensitivities acquire a different dimension and you feel a bit more than what goes on the skin in normal conditions. Afternoon siesta means to me just to be a witness to the pranic crawlings in the body, a slightly puzzled but surrendered marvel at the strange goings in the body. Kindly avoid going to a doctor for this. You would know by instinct that it’s beyond the domain of materialistic medical diagnosis. If your health obsession still takes you to a doctor for these energetic symptoms, the whitecoats will welcome you as a new case study and give you a brand new abcxyz-syndrome. You will be the proud experimental dummy for the cause of medical science.  

Coming back to the mild earthquake that gently shook the Delhi NCR. As I was lying, cogitating at the pranic ripples, suddenly the energetic ripples inside the body (whom I call my ‘new normal’ after feeling them for years) went into agitation. Like tiny serpents going in panic. Many other little rippling channels surfaced suddenly which go unnoticed by me in my ‘new normal’ with the typical crawlings going in certain parts. It was like the entire body was buzzing with crawlings. It was quite vigorous. I wasn’t aware that it was in response to the earthquake waves. The little shaking that one feels in a mild earthquake got magnified to a big degree and I felt my body almost jumping. It’s just a stimuli felt more deeply, at the deeper level of subatomic parts. As I said I am blessed not to be panic struck when Kundalini takes sudden new avatars and puts a different sense-perception causing something new at the experiential level. So I was just trying to convince myself that all this was due to the heightened agitation of the energies inside. Then I saw the rosary hanging from a peg on the wall swaying gently. Then I realized that it was an earthquake. But feeling it in this state was so different from the earlier earthquake experiences when the energies were in their usual routine state. If I feel ‘special’ about it then I would be coming down to the level of a dog because they can feel these tremors well in advance in their bodies. So no feeling of 'special status' please! Give them to the dogs and snakes first. Then claim yours.  

We are an outcrop of mother earth. Our body carries each and every ounce of matter and energy essence available in the womb of mother planet. So how can it avoid feeling the waves of tremor passing through the mother’s body?

If you are dealing with the spiritual art and craft of managing your heightened energies, you have to be prepared for any type of perceptional reality coming your way—from the apparently best to the worst in all sense of the term. (That’s why they always caution against any obsessive trigger of this energy in the system because you will die [the old you] even before they put you on the pyre to turn you to ashes). If you keep this fundamental fact in mind there won’t be a panic strike, there won’t be awe and wonder, there won’t be any unnecessary pride over being blessed, there won’t be anything that would look miraculous because all this is as per the natural laws of heightened perception driven by high frequency energies. A bat interprets its reality at the level of ultrasound frequencies, a snake does the same at the level of infrared light, and you sadhak (with your awakened kundalini) sense an off-beat reality born of off-track energies in your system. So where is the question of you being a ‘special’ one? If you get proud about it, it would be just a snake or a bat proclaiming enlightenment for being more perceptive of a reality at the level of ultraviolet sounds and infrared lights.

We, the common followers, are the ones who create divinity around the people trying to cope with an off-beat reality with the help of their heightened, super-sensitivized, extra sense-perception. Nothing wrong with that. We have all the rights to hatch an idealistic reality and out of that is born the art of spirituality. But it’s just like any other man(woman)-made art fulfilling a small, practical purpose. The person who is trying to come to terms with the new levels of sense-perception driven by new pranic channels is simply engaged in his puzzle like the rest of us are busy at our own level. He isn’t fundamentally superior or the rest of us basically inferior. The only difference is that the force of energies is so unorthodox that he/she is forced to adopt a totally different lifestyle and attitude to life. That’s his/her necessity. He faces challenges born of experiences that may range from the best to the worst as far as their effect on the body, mind and emotions is concerned. He is just busy in his private world of resolving those newer ways of looking at things. Aww the lovely people living a beautifully sweet-sour life born of the usual state of energies that most of us carry in our basic system! We are so cute! We see the divinity in this weird and unorthodox life and living of someone trying to cope with his extra dimension of sense-perception. This divinity is the faith of the masses itself that sees a holy man in a person who has withdrawn within himself, absorbed in a different world where the normal mundanities of life look redundant and irrelevant. Otherwise in the scheme of nature there is no such tag of superior and inferior level of perception. They just are, that’s it. It’s the cute, little, innocent acceptance by the sweet people who are ready to be the followers and sanctify their faith as divinity. What is wrong in that if it gives solace to so many? There isn’t any in my humble opinion.   

 

The loveliest bare

 The loveliest bare, and the sweetest dare: A celebrity woman showing her baby bump. All other bare, and a bit hidden under bikni ware, is just the incompleteness inside trying to look perfect outside. But the cute urge to bare herself with her baby bump is fired by maternal pride. For carrying a life within, for being a symbol of the cosmic womb of creation. The glow on her face in this stage surpasses any range of cosmetics. The smile is all confidence. It's not that fake smile for dousing commercial passions. The posture isn't strained and taut in an effort to be something that passionate eyes expect her to be. It's calm, relaxed, mellow like a river in its final stages of journey to the sea. She looks magical, a goddess, carrying the light of future dividing within her cells. A beacon of hope. A healing smile. A mother selflessly giving her own worth for the continuity of this beautiful game. When I see a woman twaddling on the path under the sweet burden of future like a cute penguin, I feel like touching her feet. It's a beautiful sight.

The myth of healing ointment

 My cousin sister's son was once critically ill. Just 25, his liver ravaged by alcoholism, lying on the ventilator support for almost two months. His multiple organs collapsing, there were slim chances of survival. And we would look up to the doctor as the ultimate savior, the one who would claw him back from the jaws of death. He understood our pain. 'See, medicines are just external aids. It's for his own body to heal from within,' he said with sympathy. These are very substantial words. They apply to all the problems and drama that we face in life. Since our sense perception is biologically outward bound, we naturally seek the solutions outside. We feel that dis-ease, discontent, stress, pain, incompleteness, the nagging feeling of something lacking and naturally we seek the remedies outside just like we apply ointment on a wound. But healing comes from within. Ointment and medicine is just one of the favorable factors. They aren't the final solution. It's so natural to seek the help and aid of relationships in healing the pain and the fatigue born of the exhaustive quest within. Now a relationship is just a temporary balm on the bruise. It has a placebo effect like most of the pills we take. The problem arises when we put undue expectations from an external ointment to heal us to the core. It's our own bruise. The healing has to come from within. Family, relationships, husband, wife, siblings, children, friends and acquaintance are the temporary soothing balm on the painful boil. They are there for external help. They help you in creating suitable circumstances for your internal healing, growth and evolution. But they aren't the cause of this healing. They are nice support staff at the most. And we should never forget they themselves are the carriers of their own bruises. We are the ointment for them. They aren't complete. They are as wonded as we. They need as much external support in healing as we. And they look upto us as their ointment. They aren't the all powerful panacea, they are merely sailing in the same boat. The moment we realize this, we can forgive the little sparks born of two ointments innocently seeking each other to heal from within. This understanding and the consequent forgiveness can cement the bond within families, friends and relationships. What else is the group of family, friends, acquaintances if not a band of sailors eyeing a common shore to land and then proceed on their own journey on the land? And two lovers are simply paddling their canoe across the choppy waters, to cross a phase, land somewhere at the point of common interest and move on their journey--in this lifetime itself if the relationship breaks, or after death if it survives the vicissitudes of life. But this relative shortness or longevity doesn't undo the primary fact that this coming together was just a temporary alignment of destinies looking for their complete healing, the coming home. So we should never judge our relationships in terms of their relative longevity. Numbers are just quantitative denominations. They never cover the qualitative essence. And the qualitative essence here is that all this is transitive pairing of destinies, irrespective of the fact that a relationship lasts for a few months or lifelong. Both are almost same on the infinite spread of the eternity.

Lessons from the book of monkey baba

 Monkey magic for the day...a monkey is busy in eating a guava, sitting on a branch, tail hanging down, his pink bum safely tucked in a fork in the branch overlooking the street. He eats so cutely with both hands. So unhurriedly as if this cosmos is soecially in a pause to allow him finish eating. Eat restfully as if this entire existence has the sole task of seeing you eating like a mother. He eats half of it--the stomach knows (better than the mind) how much to take in--and throws (why carry the residuals while there are so many promising things lined up the way) the remaining guava into the street. It nearly misses the most quarrelsome woman in the locality. If you are quarrelsome, same circumstances will develop as per the vibrational frequency of your mind. I don’t think it was intentional but you can never be sure about a monkey. She hurls a curse at him. He grins and bares his teeth in shameless fun and shakes the branch with vigorous fun. Why be affected by wrong accusations? Shake your bum at cranky, snappy people. His woman has moved onto a neighboring roof by this time. She gives a loud recall. 'Ouunn'. Always keep a watch at your man. Men are men. You can expect anything. So she is justified in reprimanding him even though he is teasing a female of other species. And he instantly pays heed to her call. Your woman will always overlook your diversions if you instantly pay heed to her snappy call. There he goes hopping over to her. The best funda of maintaining relationships: if you can't avoid doing certain things that create sparks between you, at least listen to each other. There they go as a nice pair and then sit on the roof parapet to tease a pet dog that is barking out his lungs at them from the yard below. They feign very robust attacks. Vent out your mischief and anger against a common enemy. Then you will have less of ammunition to hurl against each other. Moreover, spending one's armory against a common threat instantly creates a subtle bond. See, it develops so elegantly even among strangers who happen to be gripped by some untoward situation. So the couples should pick out some nuisant neighbor and plan and scheme skirmishes with him to spend their ammunition. There will be lesser blasts within your own walls then.

The artistry

 In this apparently meaningless chaos of energy circulating around, there is an urge for seeking symmetry, design, a meaningfullness, a tangible manifestation. It blooms in flowers, beautiful wings of the birds, in leaves, in animals, reptiles, everywhere. This instinct finds the codes of genetics for evolution of species. It then seeks still subtler manifestation in emotions, in beautiful sweet-sour urge for relationships, in companionship, in interactions, in thoughts. Spiritual quest is the subtlest manifestation of this meaning-seeking artistry. This is the quest for seeking the  bestest design pervading all the fractional designs floating around. So design well all ye artists, design with awareness, design your career, skill, relationships, art, culture in a way that it holds you safely in its bubble. The bubble will burst one day, but till then design your destiny and dreams as per your own choices within that little space. Happy artistry of life and the best of floats in your respective bubbles!

Walking through the natural remnants

Cornered by stressful notes and peppered with pungent perspectives, I decide to beat my sense of victimhood by opening myself to the friendly humor of the farmlands surrounding the village. There is intense agriculture. Under the haunting patriarchy of the supreme species on the earth, the mother soil carrying a long haul of miseries, burdens and unmet dreams. Where will you dump your feeling of victimhood when the earth itself seems carrying the same burden?

Gone are the days of dark and deep woods. The wastelands and fallow lands, which were the last refuge of the wilderness until a decade ago, have shrunk to invisibility. The anarchist has shrewdly turned mother nature into a shadowy realm where everything is a mere utopia, a poetic fancy, judged from the mainstream perspectives. Still there are some scanty patches, almost imagistic, which pay a feeble lip service to the not so distant past when we had smatterings of scrub forest in the area. There are solitary trees and beaten down bushes by the pathsides and field embankments. It is enough to leave me bemused.

In future, the things will take a shape when even these trees that can be counted on fingers will be viewed as forests of the past. Gladly there are still many birds left and their calls somehow sound reassuring. As the battering ram goes estranging itself from the roots that have supported its evolution and growth, tottering and honking menacingly, spewing out darker and darker parables, the songs of the birds still hold feeble musical threads linking our imperiled existence to the divine melody emanating from a distant corner in the universe.

I spot an Indian roller, a striking Cambridge-and-Oxford-blue bird. It was obdurately peeking into a bush from an electricity wire, its biggish head tilted at an angle, just about to pounce upon some frog or lizard. It batters the prey on some nearby branch to have a nice supper. The colorful bird gives an assortment of extolling, raucous chuckles and croaks. It’s very volatile in proposing to its remote and cold love interest. It’s a very indulgent courtship—a spectacular display involving nose-diving and somersaulting while letting out grating harsh screams. It seems to possess a pretty informed attitude. Well, you see a beautiful bird and it seems all isn’t lost yet.

Till a decade back there was a sort of wasteland stretching for about hundred acres in this area. It presented a beautiful landscape picture entirely modeled by the untamed forces of nature. I remember wandering around in that pleasant desolation. It was a wonderfully sublime feeling there. That small world of little insects, rodents and reptiles had its very own gleaming myths and anecdotes for this small-time writer. During the monsoons it would turn into a little marshland. It further accentuated the isolation treasured in its little bushy coffers. The water wouldn’t dry before the spring or sometimes even till early summer. Thousands of birdie guests displayed their adventurous quirks. What a high-pitched quacking thoroughfare it used to be!

The human population grew further and the jabbering human hands arrived to cut these last tufts of hair left on the balding head of mother nature. The pressure on the farmlands grew manifold. The low-lying area was filled with earth. Its level was raised to meet our ever-increasing demands from the cropped land to meet the perennial shortage of produce from the farms. Now the lashing raindrops just fill the furrows in the cropped fields and gone are the little ponds and puddles.

A couple of years back there still were the last remains of that scrub forest. It was a little patch of roughly three acres left out as the remnant of the fledgling wasteland of yore. A few dozen ducks and cormorants swam in its languid waters. A few waders were busy on its grassy banks.

Come now to the present. A netting has been set up above the water. The human heart seems to be possessed by the spirit of a licentious hyena that forces the mankind to put barb over everything on the earth to nail down all fellow claimants to resources on the planet. These are imprisoned waters, denied to the birds. The wires shine under the sun with beguiling perspectives, drawing a kind of superfluous resonance in the air that claws down all softer emotions with its unsentimental tautness. So we have fisheries even here in this tiny bowl of a pond. The deadly strings over it would cut down the wings of the transgressors.

There seems to be an overdose of humanity. There are no more any winged guests from the Himalayas. A lone common teal is wading through the sullen waters. A morose kingfisher vainly ogles into the muddled depth from an electricity line. Is it free to dive? Diving into the barbed waters would mean the beautiful bird itself turning into a prey, suddenly catapulted from its status of predator a moment before. There are no foragers on the banks. There is just a greater coucal sneaking among the bushes looking for eggs in little nests. What a decline in a decade—from thousands to dozens to a common teal. I’m sure the next year even this singular common teal will also be gone. There will be more people, more enterprise.

The silence around me is imbued with a sense of loss. I can vividly see the piteous corrosion of wilderness around me. The human juggernaut is plonking ahead with a sure-footed assertiveness. It hammers home the point of human triumph and majestically ticks off the last lines of natural defense that raise its challenge on the way. The sweeping fury of a brutal landscape startles me and I take hasty steps to further explore some untamed corner in the countryside.

Autumnal Nostalgia

 Just watch out the lilaceous glow on people's faces. It will tell you that winter has just starting spraying its aura around. November is cool. Forget all talks of global warming, pollution, dirty political thuggeries, traffic jams, and disappointments on cricketing field. The weather in November puts the common man, the man in the arena of trials and tribulations of saving some grace to see through the day with life intact, on a strong wicket. The glow on common man is just like that witnessed by numerous faces after witnessing yet another century by Sachin.

Delhi is chaotic. But have a round of Connaught Place (thankfully the colonnaded facades are up for some renovation) and you will feel the historical smartness still pervading in smoky, hazy afternoons slowly passing into the folds of evening. Just go there with an accommodating spirit and you will find why despite so many metropolitan outcrops around, Connaught Place is still the heart of Delhi. In the fantastic maze turned up by the white colonnaded blocks time, history, modernity all stand captured in a mysteriously pervading easiness.

Elsewhere, you will find four causes to mutter for a single cause of musing. Metro, yes...a massive collective reason for a bigger musing. Flyovers....again do us proud as we saunter over without wasting any time. But have the eyes to spot dirt cheap humanity scattered around below the flyovers. Kids, women, men....black, filthy, sick, torn and tattered dreams wander in equal measure. These poor human souls left out of the gift of enjoying even the balmy effects of early winter. Take a deep look in the eyes of some young female beggar, and you will find a big chance for a beautiful life and persona wasted. Whom to blame?? I just look at the faceless vault of sky and ask again and again, "Why?" If you can give so much to so few, then why not just common minimum for all of us!!! Anyway, disparities have teased us from times unknown. And will continue for, God forbid, as long as we are slogging out for more and more. Still early message put out by early winter is cool enough to assuage all such heartburns.

A lonely honeybee

I’m turning soil around the crown-of-thorn cactus. It has shed most of its leaves under the onslaught of cold in January. Its thorns look sturdier and more prominent now without the leaves. The thorns are impassive to weather—spring and autumn are the same, as are the winters and summers. However, even during the coldest overcast days, the hardy plant didn’t completely lose its smile. The thorns may carry the shades of conservatism and some tinkle of metallic weight on their pointed ends but the flowers have innate, vivid bond with the vibrant most spring somewhere in a distant, virginal vale. There are more flowers than the leaves; bright red little round flowers and silvery fangs of thorns—the defenders of beauty, or say the flowery son of god on the crucifix. They prove their status. They mean their job really well. I get a slight scratch at the back of my hand, not deep enough to draw blood, but strong enough to leave a scratch mark. Maybe they intend to prick me very softly.

There is a lone honeybee on a flower on the thorny plant. I hope it’s not a castaway or someone who has lost the way to the new home. Or maybe even too nostalgic one who hasn’t been able to leave the little yard of a lonesome writer, almost redundant and nameless himself, where there are some flowers and a few small trees. I see a few more honeybees. Are these few remaining honeybees the ones who were accidently left behind and now can’t make a way back to the new home?

Partings and relocations aren’t without their sad chimings altogether. But as they say, change is the perennial law. They have enough reasons in the survival book to move on. They are possessed with a free, itinerant spirit. They aren’t merely potted flowers at my mercy. They are alive and independent. I hope their dormant bond with my little garden will be revived. I look forward to their—the parent beehive—arrival during the monsoon season. I hope they will have plenty of cheerful, amusing travelogues to share with me through their buzzing wings once they arrive. 

An abandoned beehive in the garden

 Natural honey is a precious thing these days and the honey-loving eagle is also rare. It’s a little, poignant tussle between two rarities, a kind of unrelenting oscillation between despair and hilarity. The honey-buzzard returned the next day as well. It seems almost destitute and runaway, so few of them are left after all. It took a big slice. It’s a lucrative trip but it chronicles an irony as well. There are so few beehives and the honey buzzard’s beakful of takeaway seems like the sadistic savor of a glutton. The honeybees belong to the little garden and hence to me it looks a deplorable act by the eagle. There I stand in the melded eerie of reason and emotions. The reason pardoning the eagle and the emotions feeling the loss incurred by the bees. Great is the winged hunter’s predatory dive and equally great is the bees’ craftsmanship and the alchemy of transforming pollen into nectar. The bees so homely and the eagle seems so distant, weird and peripatetic.

There I stand with my dystopian look, skeptical oeuvre, hasty impetus and restless impulses. Primarily our attitude between a loss and a new beginning is shabby and provisional. Our thoughts febrile and random. The sense of loss is hundred times palpable than any other effect of any consequence born of our efforts. From the ramparts of my fortified illusions, the house of bees seems in tatters. But the bees hardly suffer from the effects of simple happenings that we perceive as haunting mirages of loss and agony. So while I stand morose and disheveled, they show painterly aesthetics to draw new lines on the endless canvas. And with a fledgling and buzzing sense of duty, they make a new beginning. They understand that it is the time to move. Their take on life and living is beyond mere commodification of one’s efforts. Moving on without any grudges is an inseparable part of their nature.

I’m but caught in my mundane and superfluous catalogues. Something is missing from the yard. It’s a sad sight to look at the empty hive. With an irreducible sense of duty, a few of them are still busy in taking away the last remaining granules of nectar. A nostalgic winding-up of affairs. I’m sure they will have more pollen somewhere with the spring coming and many flowers blooming with vivid full smile. I hope they will return with the onset of monsoons on a luminous day. In fact, they come every year. But there is something missing. The abandoned hive is just three or four feet above my head when I stand under the curry patta tree. I used to be welcomed by soft wafting smell of honey as and when I passed under it. It’s always a sad sight to look at an empty house, the house that was so alive with activity till a day back. 

Freedom

 JK was a free soul. He broke all chains of religious and spiritual institutions. He didn't believe in the guru-disciple equation in the strict sense of it. He dismantled the spiritual kingdom of Theosophical Society erected around him for making him its spiritual king. He was for the utmost freedom of mind; freedom beyond even spiritual syllabus involving spiritual texts taught by spiritual Masters in spiritual institutions.  But the world cannot bear up with so much of freedom. We need our anchor points to feel at home. So quite ironically Krishnamurti Foundation piled up around him as the thinker of freedom and ultimate liberation kept talking about against all institutions and institutionalization of thoughts.

Gurus have spiritual powers, just like politicians have political powers or rich have the power of wealth. And power has a tendency to manage things as per its chosen set of reality, its judgement and likes and dislikes. A mission is a mission even if it's holy in nature. Even in the case of spiritual empowerment, there is a very subtle trace of manipulation of things, even if it's for a noble cause, as per the likes and dislikes of the spiritually powerful person. They have their mission of nobility and it needs missionaries. I have read in the biographies of many holy Masters that they were made to do all the holy work by the power and instructions of their gurus. Like they were given a task and they hardly had any option. They had to do it. This is where Krishnamurti went off the road from the main spiritual thoroughfair. He was for complete annihilation of any bondage including routinized faith, scriptural principles, ashram system and all the allied things in the domain. To me a best guru is the one who gives all he has to a follower, without expecting any missionary work, and leave him or her to seek their own Destiny. Like a Father who brings up his children in a healthy environment and then is all happy to see them setting up their own homes. 

Stay at one place and expectations creep up. They want you to take up their holy work. I have always felt insecure about being piously hijacked by a holy man for his humanitarian mission. So I have a strategy for this. I go to ashrams, have their Darshan and before their eyes stabilize and start building plans for you, I run away. So sadhaks, take your nectar, and flip away like a butterfly taking honey from various flowers. Go to holy places of all kinds, absorb and soak all the positive energy and keep hopping. Why get anchored in one ashram? Read scriptures, as much as you can. But don't expect them to be the reality itself. They are mere pointers. Never expect to understand or agree to everything written in a holy book. A holy book has something positive for all types of people. If you don't agree with certain portions, it simply means that part isn't for you. But you will have your agreements and likes further on in the same text. So filter what is suitable for you. Read, have Darshan of holy men, go for pilgrimages, roam in free forests, bathe in untamed rivers, interact with people, do your worldly duties, keep moving...and finally all this seeking tires you out to help you stabilize within yourself. Happy journey!