A simple man of faith

 There is a simple man in our village. He is in his early fifties and a grihastha. He is a small farmer but his wife is a government teacher. His son and daughter and their spouses are in government services. People say Almighty has been very kind to him in giving him almost everything, without much effort; in fact, most of the things that the other villagers struggle to achieve seem to be given to him on a platter. Whenever I meet this man, I can see a spark of the divine feminine in him.

As we know this universe has a divine polarity comprising divine feminine on the one side and divine masculine on the other side. It is not necessary that a person who has been born as a biological man or woman or any other gender identity will essentially have the corresponding divine male or female aspect or element in him or her. We categorize people either as a born male or a born female or some beautiful combination overlapping genders. But irrespective of their categorization in terms of biological genders, people have a subtler layer of classification: divine female element or divine male element defining their personality. This latter subtler, more nuanced characteristic is not necessarily bound to the biological male, female or any overlapping gender identity. A biological male can have the spark of divine female in him, defining him as a soft, elegant, receptive persona. Similarly, a biological female may possess the divine male spark in her personality, making her aggressive, dominating and loud. The neighborhood peasant women, most of them, fall in this category. A few of them even beat their husbands, sitting on their chest, gnawing their face, shrieking loudly. I call them the clan of warrior women. 

Now this person that I mentioned is biologically a man. But he possesses the divine feminism beautifully personified in his personality. He is very soft with notes and gentle with words, almost whispering apologetically. He is elegance personified the way he moves his body, the way he takes his soft steps, the way he smiles, everything. You can say he is a very nice personification of the divine female element. His emotions are poetry personified. But this spark of the divine feminism in his male body is intriguing for the people around. Things get still tougher in a male-dominated Jat society where being a man is about being loud, aggressive, raw, rough and tough. On account of this visible contrast in the material world, the contrast of a male body having feminine elegance, there are many who would just laugh at him. Many people pass sarcastic remarks. But that is their problem. This man is not bothered about what people talk, think or say about him. He is very busy on his path of bhakti. The people with divine feminine element in them have a great potential for self-realization through bhakti marga involving total surrender to the deity. It stands on the pillars of complete receptivity of faith and unquestioning acceptance of the omnipotent and omniscient deity. How can it be possible without the mellow, fluid strength of the divine feminine?

I have seen and heard about him following various gurus in the region. He would go into the ashrams and do selfless work. He organizes kirtans and sings wonderful bhajans of love for the almighty. In fact, there is a group of women in the village who almost take him as their guru who is there to guide them on the path of bhakti. It’s a wonderful sight to see him and his group of women going for religious congregations, following pious rituals or singing devotional songs. I always had this feeling that this man is on a very solid footing, with his feminine steps, as far as the ultimate realization is concerned.

Sometime back I found him standing in front of our gate, very submissively, even hesitatingly, as if lost in many inhibitions whether he should knock at the gate or go back unannounced. By chance I saw him standing there otherwise I believe he would have even left without calling on me. He greeted me in his gentle, elegant voice and manner and asked if I can give him a bit of time because he needs to talk. As we started talking, there were tears in his eyes, the tears of an unrequited love for the almighty, his divine lover for whom his soul has been doing tapasya; the stream of tears almost a river of sweet suffering to meet his divine lover, the almighty. After decades on the path, despite being a great selfless servant to many holy men, he openly confessed that there is the same restlessness, the very same suffering, the same stress as it was when he started on the path decades ago. He asked me frankly what was the use of selflessly serving all those gurus, what is the need of that selfless work in the ashrams, what is the purpose of holding those kirtans and nightlong singing of songs in the Lord’s praise. A huge why staring at his soul.

‘What was the use of all this if after so much time and service I feel I am where I started from? There is the same restlessness, the same suffering, the same torturing feeling of something missing. Now I wonder has it been worth it,’ he seemed thoroughly shaken.

I felt that he was disgruntled with his gurus, with the manner things are organized in ashrams, the sweet-sour bickering among the devotees, all summing up to give almost a kind of feeling which you have in the society at large, or within your house.

‘Who am I to tell you? A novice while so many babas haven’t been able to guide you?’ I was about to reply. But a split-second reflection stopped me. And I would go on to explain a few things to him as per my level of understanding born of my journey so far. Why I chose to speak to him? It needs a flashback.

There is this girl who is a very distant relative of mine. She is a sweet householder with three beautiful children. From the derivative threads of relatives, I qualify to be her maternal uncle so she calls me mamaji. I had never met or talked to her in my life. She had heard a few summarizing bits about me, just vague biographical phrases. She is a devotee of Mahavatar Babaji. She called me for the first time and introduced herself. As per her belief system, she acts as a medium to convey Babaji’s messages. She goes into a trance, the pen draws of its own will, a psychotic trance, and meaningful messages surface, many of which have resolved problems for those asking divine intervention from their side. ‘Mamaji I hardly know Sanskrit and chaste literary Hindi words but sometime the messages come in such highly refined language that even I’m surprised and they help people,’ she told me. The problem-solving messages by Babaji helped many in her friend circle. She was intrigued and wanted to know more. She pestered Babaji to tell more about it and he would just laugh her away in her dreams or trance. Feeling more intrigued she thought of going to Sadhguru to get a clearer idea about things. But Babaji laughingly teased her that don’t go to him. His mission needs people like you and he will keep you as a spiritual worker among his followers, then who will take care of your children. ‘Then mamaji your name struck me. My inner voice said that this man knows quite a few things intellectually that may explain many things. But experientially he is still a novice, in fact a fool. So mamaji explain things intellectually, your being a fool experientially doesn’t matter,’ she laughed.

So I poured out my entire verbal diarrhea in response to her never-ending queries. ‘Ho mamaji you can set up a nice business in the bazaar of spirituality. Who is bothered about experiential aspect of true knowledge? Nobody. You can start selling yourself. I will help you. There are so many judges and high officials who are lost souls and need words, words and more words on spirituality,’ she teased me and gave a business plan. ‘I will surely fail in any business, be it material business or spiritual one,’ I laughed away the plan. Then after a few more conversations and having been bombarded by more intellectual words, she started wondering about my fate. Now, yours truly has waded pretty testing waters in life. She felt sorry for me, the typical way nieces do for their senior relatives and then when she went into her trance she put up my question to Babaji. ‘Why has it been so tough for mamaji? Why has he such a floundering date with fate?’ she asked. And Babaji assured her, ‘Don’t bother about him. It’s his own choice. This speeding of karma. He wants to take a leap. A leap of five births’ karma in a single lifespan. Now that will raise sparks and raise the temperature for him.’ She told me this sullenly. I said don’t feel sorry beta, it’s our own journey based on our own choices. After that as an intellectually crammed (to the extent of verbal and written diarrhea) and experientially novice, I try my best to explain a few things to those who arrive at my doorstep. Beyond that I’m not interested in anything. So I decide to talk to this wonderful human being who has now come seeking my advice. 

I told him, ‘See you should not expect the people on the path of spirituality, the devotees, the religious institutions and gurus to be the perfect replica of divinity on earth. These are mere indicators; they just systematize a certain set of rules so that the devotees can progress on the path. It’s merely a start, a beginning, to further build upon it. All this systematization of scriptures, rituals, gurus, deities is just a vehicle. The main reason for your pain is that you considered a mere vehicle as the destination. Just like you take a train or a bus or a two-wheeler or an airplane to reach a particular destination, does it mean that particular means of communication is your destination. Don’t we just forget about the vehicle and enjoy the destination once we arrive? The means are never the end. But this is common human folly to start taking the means as an end in themselves. The same is with gurus, with ashrams, with followers, with holy works and pious bhajans. All these are just material or not so material means to an end, the goal of supreme realization. You should not look for perfection in institutions, in gurus, in your fellow devotees. It is never about them. It is always about you. Because wherever you have an institutional build up, there are certain elementary or basic things of life that we need to run a particular institution or ashram. Worldly materiality cannot be avoided. It is always looking over the fence to creep in. So after a time the very same feelings that you feel as a householder also manifest in ashrams and institutions and a devotee feels almost cheated, thinking what is this, I was expecting something totally different but here also things are more or less the same as they were in my house. Please do not fall in this trap of judging the gurus, the fellow devotees, or a particular stream of belief or sect or ashram. Don’t feel victimized or cheated that it was not worth it, that nothing came out of it, that you wasted your life. It has been worth it believe me. It has served its purpose. It was first in the hierarchy that accepted you with its divine grace. You must have been feeling suffocated and restless within your duties as a householder, as a part of society just like any other person around. And that is why you, in accordance with your soul’s eagerness to spread its wings and be a part of something larger that defines you as something above and beyond your identity, came out and met these wonderful people. You were adopted by a sort of larger family where the rules and responsibility that were streamlined as a householder are now modified to give you a feeling of freedom. It’s just an opening, a bit more space. A coming out from a narrow alley to a wider street. There you were the head of the house; here it is the guru who runs the affairs. Instead of the family members, now you have fellow devotees. Instead of the common mechanism of running a house, here it is about running a larger set-up for an institution or an ashram. The fundamentals are the same, just that you become a part of a larger entity, a larger household, a larger community where you feel better and relaxed just for the more open nature of it. It’s a breaking of former confines. It is just like this. Suppose there is someone who is incarcerated in a small cell in a jail. And if that person is brought out and allowed to come into the prison yard, which itself is still a part of the prison, but the moment he comes out of his narrow cell he sucks in the free rays of the sun and he can smell the traces of freedom, he can enjoy life even though he is still in the jail. And if you keep him in that prison yard for a few months, the same feeling of being trapped, being incarcerated, being jailed will come creeping even though now the space is far-far bigger than what it was there in the tiny cell earlier. So similarly earlier you got fed up with the little cell of your household, then you were given a bigger platform as part of ashrams, as part of groups of devotees, as part of devotional music groups and you felt better. Now please don’t think that this stage in your life has not been worth anything. It has served its purpose. Just like the prisoner coming out of his narrow little cell feels better in the prison compound, similarly you were coming out of your house and its troublesome confines and enjoying life as a part of religious communities. It gave you a sense of freedom. But now your soul wants something more, it wants to become a part of a larger entity, a bigger group, a further spread out setup where it can further spread its wings to fly in liberated skies. Now as far as I can feel and understand, you want a dose of further unqualified freedom, unconditioned from disciplehood, serving in ashrams, massaging guru’s legs and the like. I will tell you a few simple techniques which will help you feel liberated from your situations that you feel have confined you in a narrow bracket as of now.’

I pointed to his footwear and said, ‘Why deprive yourself of graceful contact with mother earth? Try to walk as much as possible on naked feet.’ I could feel that he is not in a position to renounce his material world. He is pretty much attached to the beautiful world mainly through his little grandson. Nothing wrong with that. So I suggested him a long pilgrimage of let us say two months to visit Haridwar and Rishikesh. ‘Keep a cloth bag, put your footwear in it, have a bottle of water, have a stick as your guardian, as your companion, keep a yellow ascetic robe in it. If you feel hesitation in wearing the ascetic robe in the village itself, thinking what will people say then you can wear the robe at a distance from the village where nobody recognizes you. Now why am I telling you to wear the ascetic robe even though you are not an ascetic? The reason is that it is a mark and symbol of asceticism and it will save you from many a dark eye on the way. It is not an odd sight in India to find ascetics in their traditional robes moving across isolated places. So many people would just give you respect and they won’t bother you. For example, when the night is falling and you need a place to spend the time and some villager or someone from a little hamlet comes across and sees an ascetic coming, he or she will offer you a place to spend the night and even offer you food. And then you can just stay on mother Ganga’s banks for a couple of months. You used to take bucket bath earlier, now you have to spread your identity to be bathed by the unlimited, blissful waters of mother Ganga that are not bound by any material restrictions or physical limitations. Earlier you used to define the sky above you in the form of a roof on your head but now you will be defining your identity in terms of the infinite vault of the sky above. Anyway it will be as good as the prisoner, who got fed up in the prison compound, now coming out of the prison gate and becoming a part of the open society at large. Similarly from the definition of your identity born of your footwear’s touch on the ground leaving a footprint by your shoes, a mediated reality, a fake ego reality, here now as you walk with naked feet you will be giving the infinite lovable touch to mother earth and get defined in a new manner by the real soles of your feet, not just by any intermediary footwear intervening between you and mother earth. Use your footwear when it becomes too difficult for you to walk on account of rough terrain. Now you would be taking bath in the open rivers and ponds and water bodies instead of just being bathed by the limited waters of your bathroom or your bucket. Stop now getting defined by the roof of your house and its suffocating limitations. Now you’ll be defined by the open skies. It will give you the space that you need. It will provide you an opportunity to spread yourself on a bigger platform. And believe me once you return to your house after two or three months, you will retain those glimpses of freedom and unbound deliberation with you because on the path of spirituality the barometer won’t come down at least in this lifetime. If you have touched, tasted and smelt the divine, you will retain that divine grace with you. You are lucky to be located in a village where there is still open space around, where there are canals with freer waters (relatively speaking), where there are big trees. So I would advise you to spend two-three hours daily walking on naked feet on canal embankments where there is solitude. You can take bath in the canals and imagine you are bathing in Ganga. Everything is emotion, bhaav. With pure emotions this village canal will transform into Ma Ganga. You can just visualize or imagine that these are the waters of divine Ganga. Ma Ganga will be washing you of your pains and suffering right here in this canal. If you’re not satisfied with the company of humans, go and embrace trees, talk to them, sit under them, enjoy their company. And brother this according to me seems to be the appropriate way as per your journey so far. You just need a bigger space to allow your soul to further spread on its path.’

I spoke many other things. I spoke with spiritual excitement to the extent that my mouth went dry. What I have presented here is just from recall, there were many other outpours of verbal diarrhea. But what wrong it does if your intellectual jargon helps someone feel better. He had tears of joy now. I could feel him opening up to the scenarios described by me. ‘I already feel so much better, just by imagining it,’ he said. ‘Any experientially challenged fool—like me—will talk and give the longest sermon on earth but the main thing is following it. It looks simpler than it really is,’ I thought. But I didn’t say anything. I could see the change in him. He arrived with a lot of suffering but left as a happy man, calmed and soothed by the temporary respite. But then all spiritual practices are about temporary respites, a series of little salvations, little-little battles won for peace and ultimately there are few fortunate ones who win the entire war, the ultimate triumph, perfect self-realization, call it nirvana or whatever. 

The history of Dahiya Jats

 Dear readers, presenting here the history of my clan. All histories carry some lessons. I hope it also does the same.

If not for all, here is a brief history at least for my clan brothers, the Dahiyas. It’s better to know one’s roots. Well, the present-time Dahiya is a time-twisted derivative of Dahae. It was a central Asian nomadic tribe. Well, we have grown up listening to our elders telling us that long-long ago our ancestors migrated from central Asian steppes. Later on, academic research proved the substance behind those oral chronicles. The facts that are presented here are taken from many well-researched books and sources presented by many Western and Indian scholars and historians.

The Dahae people, to begin with, lived in the north-eastern part of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The region covered the arid steppes of the Karakum Desert near Margiana. These pastoral settlements were situated alongside the Saka groups, the Sogdians and Chorasmians. The word Dahae, as present in the Old Persian form Dahā, derives its roots from a word in Saka language meaning ‘man’. This usage is based on the usual custom among various peoples of calling themselves ‘man’ in their own languages. However, one famous Western historian maintained that it meant ‘stranglers’. Well, there is a possibility of it meaning the both because in traditional patriarchy like the one found among Jat clans including Dahaes or Dahiyas, ‘men’ and ‘stranglers’ would come out almost the same.

The Dahae people (the present time Dahiya, a derivative of Dahae or the people of Dahistan) lived in the region to the immediate east of the Caspian Sea around Oxus valley. They spoke an Eastern Iranian language. The area was known as Dihistan and Dahistan during the Sassanid period. There is still a place called Dahistan in western Turkmenistan—the land of Dahaes, almost like Hindustan is derived from a literary expression meaning roughly ‘the land of the followers of Hinduism’. Then there is Dahestan in northern Iran also. It was the area of a branch of Dahae people who moved into northern Iran.

There is an ambiguity whether we were almost religionless nomads or the followers of a cult that allied with Zoroastrianism. Settled on the north-eastern border of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the Dahae people spoke a dialect originating from an eastern Iranian language. According to the Babylonian historian Berossus, the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Cyrus, died fighting against the Dahae. But when it came to fighting someone who was considered a foreigner by all the feuding tribes in the area, that’s Alexander the Great, the Dahāe people fought within the left wing of the Achaemenid army along with the Bactrians and the Saka at Gaugamela in 331 BCE.  

Saka coins from the Seleucid era are sometimes specifically attributed to the Dahae tribe. They are the Dahae, who along with the Kangs and other Jat clans, fought Alexander the Great on the north of Oxus river under their leader, Spitama. An entire division of Greek army was decimated at Samarkand in the valley of Zerof Shan. When Alexander reached the spot of defeat to take revenge for the ‘first Macedonian disaster’, he was faced with the humiliating task of burying his slain soldiers. He had to retreat and set up his military camp at Zariaspa. However, the brave Jats under Spitama launched an attack at his main camp also. Alexander failed to defeat them, so this mighty conqueror started torturing the women, children and other non-combatant population. Meantime, the Achaemenid Empire fell at the hands of Alexander. Now he could focus on torturing the civilian population of the Dahae settlements.

Jat mathematics of ‘16 multiplied by 2 is equal to 8’ is still popular. You can imagine its crude version almost 2,350 years back. They had a very easy solution. Alexander was torturing women, children and the old but the Dahae leader Spitama won’t accept submission even after the strong Achaemenid Empire had fallen to the great conqueror. Those simple Jats had a far simpler solution. The Dahaes themselves beheaded their unbuckling leader Spitama, and produced his head before Alexander. Only then he stopped the brutal oppression of the common population. Many of them then joined Alexander in his quest to conquer India as mercenary soldiers. In this way a large number of Dahae Jats joined the Greek army. When his Macedonian troops refused to fight in Punjab, Alexander threatened that he would move ahead with his Jat soldiers only. He was sure that these people would not abandon his fighting plans because they were brave enough not to be daunted by the dangers lying ahead. According to Greek writers, the Dahae under Alexander were the first to attack the army of Porus in 326 BCE. Ironically, it wasn’t the first or the last occasion when the Jats shed their blood from both sides.

Jats are known to break each other’s head for the real illogical fun of it. They are highly prone to fight among themselves. I can still see this propensity opening out in street fights at a regular basis in Jat villages. So there were Dahae Jat soldiers in Alexander’s army now. But they had their own clan brothers who dreamed of breaking their heads. These fellas aligned with Porus. In this manner, following their querulous ways, the Jat clans, looking for better land and pastures, started migrating to present time India.

I can still see the bloodthirsty craze for owning more land in my clan. Every Jat settlement has had many bloody feuds for land that resulted in killings and lynching. But we are changing. Agriculture has been our only type of culture but now with education we see more cultural colors beyond the farming fields. As of now, there is a tight clump of fifty odd adjoining villages of erstwhile Dahae, the dwellers of steppe plains and Oxus valley, who still hold their distinct identity in Sonipat district of Haryana. The Sultanate came, the Mughals came, the Britishers came but we kept sticking to the lands we had occupied before them. So near to the center of power in Delhi! That shows our propensity to stick to our lands. The Delhi rulers also realized that these fellows will bite back if disturbed. So the ruling seat in Delhi kept changing but our clan kept sticking to its chunk of land at all costs. They killed, got killed in return, kept on killing each other as well, but stayed there.

That’s how nationalities form: the bloody fluidity of changing border lines and the people moving this way and that way. The Britishers were the wisest of the lot who occupied Delhi. They knew the art of human resource utilization. They were aware that these people are very quick with arms and very slow with minds, as Rudyard Kipling famously said about Jats. So to pamper the vanity of our ego they declared us a martial community and put batons, swords and rifles in our hands.

Even within my memory, I have seen and heard about many family feuds for lands where people have been killed. There have been honor killings, far more than you would believe as per the official data. The women and female children have faced a lot of discrimination. But now Jats are cultivating their mind like they did in the fields. We have hundreds of officers in prestigious all India services. There have been scores of commendable fighters for the army. There have been Olympic medal winners and scientists. But still a lot has to change I can feel.  

That’s how histories are made, willingly unwillingly. We assume, we accept, we ignore, we selectively choose, we deliberately overlook. Just to justify our present or our goals that we hold sacrosanct and higher than others. The tribes from the steppes whose soldiers were recruited by Alexander the great now form prestigious fighting units in the Indian military. Times change. The rulers change. Nationalities get redefined. Boundaries change. Names change. People change. Languages change. But what doesn’t change is the same age old virus of hate, fear and greed. It keeps alive in one form or the other. What drove people thousands of years ago to beat their basic fears still drives the civilization in a technology-sharpened manner.

The kite caught in a dead tree

In a world of so many sorrows and so few pleasantries, flying kites is great fun to kids. The kites swipe, loop, hoop, droop, dive and rise, refreshingly riding the crests and troughs of their papery existence. It’s zoom, boom, doom altogether, in fine fettle, in timeless simultaneousness. And when the kites get entangled in the trees, wires, balcony railings and terrace cloth-lines, a fun game of higher degree starts. It’s the game of retrieving the kite and salvaging as much of string as possible. An entangled kite is not the beginning of suffering. Egged on by their carping spirits of innocent adventurism, the kids take it as another game. The same is with life. The entanglements in one phase are just the start of another phase; just a shift. So keep playing your game. Like the kids doing the same with their itsy-bitsy amusements.

The neem tree in front of the house is probably dead. Well, I fondly remember its full green branches swaying to the shravan winds and it opens nostalgic floodgates. Most probably the termites have chucked out the roots. The tree being young, it gives a sad look. Its wood scruffily silhouetted against the background of still alive trees. An old dead tree still gives a dignified look but a young dead tree is a melancholic sight. Its bone-dry, dead branches now ricketily shake to the winds. The trees that are alive sway to the winds. They have juice of life, they have playful suppleness. The dead tree but is a skeleton. It may not be giving oxygen now but there is still a purpose for its existence. Let’s not commit the mistake of considering it an unproductive deadwood altogether. A leafless dry dead tree serves as a nice perch point for lonely birds calling out to get a partner. They can look in all directions. A nice place for love calls. With a willy-nilly quiescence to the instinctive tug of love and desire, they send out their love songs to attract some lonely partner somewhere. Further, its rickety joints are into mischief as well. Its crooked wood seems to plunge and clutch at the tails of the kites flying overhead. The majority of falling and diving kites get caught in it. Then it proudly flutters its takeaway as a triumphant token of life that may still be lying buried in its dry bulk waiting to sprout forth and thus give a surprise to all. I think it has become a master kite-snatcher. Still holding the strings of unrelenting enthusiasm, the children gather under it and play their game of retrieving the snared kite. It gives an impression as if they have gathered under it to collect fruits. A salvaged kite, even torn, is nothing short of a fruit to the little ones. 

Skirmish with a centipede

 There must be cockroaches in the house otherwise why would a big rascally centipede enter the house. Well, rural houses usually have many claimants including snakes, rats, lizards, frogs, spiders and many more. Maybe the centipede got angry for not finding a cockroach. An angry x, y, z is almost suicidal, be it humans, reptiles or animals. And if there is an angry creature nearby, you feel the pinch. I felt it. A sharp pain in the left big toe. I'm watching news, sitting on a chair, right leg crossed over the left, leaving the left toe open for attack by the angry centipede. The body seems to be its own master. We overestimate our conscious, voluntarily done efforts to save and preserve it. It knows far more than we think. My conscious part is absorbed in the political slugfest going on the television. But my toe has independent authority to save itself from a big, bullish centipede. I find myself jumping in air. The toe knows how to save itself from a centipede that has decided to bite the hell out of it. The automatic vigorous shake by the toe and its ally foot and their bigger sister leg is enough to undo the centipede's brazen attempt to taste my blood. There is a needle-sharp pain. Thankfully it couldn't pierce the skin.

The calculating and planning human has taken a backseat. It's only the life force in the body responding to the emergency. The left foot is angry as can be understood. O God, the way it counterattacks! It swings into action. And the slippered foot is pounding on the enemy, knowing exactly how rapidly to strike with full force. It's done so swiftly. The centipede is a juicy mass in an instant. It happened so quickly. I'm staring at it as if someone else has done it. Where was I while all this happened? It wasn't me who did it. The body did it of its own volition! Imagine the instinct of self-preservation ingrained in each cell of the body. And still we overthink and burden the mind about  preserving it. The way it strikes at a centipede in retaliation over a bite at its toe proves that it's always on guard against predators both visible and invisible. I think we can allow it more freedom in its functions and not burden its natural operations with our unnecessary worries. 

I'm not sure how a saint would have behaved if attacked by a centipede. I hadn't even stepped over it. It just attacked. Some karmic balance I suppose. Of course the saint's body would have jumped in air at the bite. But I'm not sure about his foot going into retaliation of its own in an instant.

 I don’t think I could have caught it alive because it would have crawled under the hideouts available in plenty. As a normal person staying in society, you have to put a boundary beyond which the parameters of sin cease to operate. You have to take measures to maintain the safety of your place. Maybe that dharma is bigger than killing of poisonous reptiles that sneak into your place. 

Little Maira, my two-year-old niece, is enthused at watching her Tau's body jumping like a monkey. She laughs. Thank God centipedes don't have blood. It's a watery juice of life oozing from the carcass. And a child would always take you out from the complex world of thoughts about sin, nobility, kindness, etc, etc. As I'm staring at the consequences of my foot's retaliatory strike, I hear Maira mumbling,  'Tau isne sussu kar diya.' Means 'uncle it's peed'. And that lightened the moment instantly. Holding my leg, she is staring at the dead insect mired in the watery discharge of its life force. We both laugh then. God would always pardon if you are sharing a laughter with a little kid, even if you are laughing at a dead centipede.

Flood and storms in a little yard

 What do you need when there is fire? Water of course. There was a sandstorm and thundershowers. There is most urgent need for water at this part of the year. But water was furiously splashed by the storm. The trees were shaken, seriously ruffled, jolted painfully in fact. Such storms further elaborate the rustic revelations of the countryside. Many trees fell, branches broke and countless leaves blown away. But they have to bear with it. And they do it with astounding, rosy equity of being, following their tree dharma, always keeping up the intrinsic spirit of resilience. The same storm that breaks their branches, takes away their seeds to far off places for the survival of their species. I have groomed a few marigolds in the shade. Their growth is mediocre considering the time of the season. But their mere survival in this heat makes them special. However faded and small the smile is, it still is a subtle allegory to beauty and truth. When the honeybees buzz over them it seems to put melodic reverberations on the songless lips of the summer. The flowers have been roughly shaken, badly manhandled in fact. However, I’m happy with what remains. I help them in getting to their feet again and smile once more to serve as the symbolic sovereignty of beauty over the beast.

The busy ant-hole in the bricks in the yard comes straight in the line of the flood when it rains. But they don’t complain. Actually the defender groups clump together and plug the opening, saving the cavity from getting flooded. They choke the rushing waters to a trickle, then even that trickle must be gone. I think the little baby ants deep in the cavity won’t even come to know about the storms and floods outside. In the face of a crisis they just do the needful instead of holding dismissing discussions. Many of the frontline workers die in the bargain. But they survive as a colony, not individually. All of them are just ants, not ant x, ant y or ant z. Their little world carries a pleasant innocence about it.

Once the flood is over, it’s the same busy world the next sunny morning. They are calmly consistent in their schedule, storms or no storms. There are crumbs around the gate. The tireless laborers have been carrying their cargo for their warehouse.

The temperature drops sharply on account of the drizzles over the last two days. It’s cool. You feel slightly cold under a simple ceiling fan. Isn’t mother nature amazing? She can help us cope with the most of our modern-day problems, provided we give her some respite from our rampant onslaught. 

Lethal beauty

 Bhupinder loved his taxi pick-ups of senior corporate guys in Gurugram. Less work, refined gentry at the back seat and nice pay. Then Corona struck. The offices closed. The corporate guys and gals worked from home. Even after the removal of the lockdown most of the offices remained closed as people adjusted to a new work culture. So he started ferrying tourists to the scenic Himalayas. It elicited a sense of grand imagination. The edges of his aesthetic sense had been severally whetted by the sparkling vivacity of the mountains. He fell in love with the hills, their wild beauty, their untamed resplendent charm. Vow, sheer Himalayan opulence sprinkled around. With tantalizing butterflies in his stomach, his social media posts were full of lovely hilly delights and sunlit sentiments. Then the posts stopped. I missed those beautiful snapshots and reels of mountains, snows, rivers and forests. I asked him about it. ‘Beauty is dangerous. Attraction is lethal. Gurugram is far better!’ he said philosophically.

It happened this way in Kashmir. A paradise it seemed to him and the Maharastrian family that had hired his car. A happy bunch comprising an old retired patriarch, his son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. They had enough education to express the beauty of the paradise in words. Then the snow-covered road tried to remind that it isn’t all bliss in the paradise as they imagined. There are risks and challenges. The seemingly paradisiacal plot is punctuated with hair-raising hurdles. The vehicle wriggled like an injured snake on the slippery ice. A deep gorge just a few feet away on the side. A paranormal proximity to death. The slightest movement of the tyres looked straight bound for the deep ravine. The soft majestic upholstery of nature turned to spiked coffin where even the corpse would feel the stingy pains of the nails.

‘My lungs dried up with fear!’ I can see plain fear surfacing in his eyes as he tells me now. The family had to get down to push and prod the vehicle through the snow. ‘That hundred meters of drive is far weightier than lakhs of kilometers I have driven in my life!’ he summarizes. The recalling of that short hazardous drive seems a long continuance of sufferings even now. Once out of danger the old man had a heartfelt pan-shot of the paradise and declared to his son, ‘Look at this beauty around. But always remember that beauty is very dangerous, usually lethal, and sometimes even fatal. It will seduce you, entice you, and before you realize you are in the pits.’ Then the old man laid to tatters the foolish blueprint of his son’s beauty-seeking scheme. The old man nailed it with luxurious precision. To all this Bhupinder agrees completely. Even with pollution, silent spring, noisy traffic, smoky bouquets, smoggy brickbats, topsy-turvy sobs and smiles, and wilting and blooming dreams, Gurugram is charming and safe. He is happy to be back in the familiar territory.

The savior of a rocking boat

 It’s a very unhappy family; its reputation gone, the land sold and the grandfather and the father rank one and rank two as liquor-lovers in the locality. It means the four young daughters, their grandmother, their mother and the youngest boy, the only lamp among many females, somehow wade through the waters. The last piece of land has been sold recently. They are now remaking the crumbling house. The family patriarchs’ role—both of them anciently addicted to booze—in the project is to get sloshed early in the morning and then leave a trail of drunken mischief that sometimes takes even the laborers and bricklayers in its wake. Sometimes the work gets stopped as the entire construction staff is seen rolling in the sand after availing the kind patron’s offer.

Getting boozed up is their sole profession and they have a thoroughly academic approach in the field. The house is now nearly complete. The young daughters, their mother, the son and a very contended looking young man are surveying the proceedings from the terrace. It looks a happy family with a caring and helping young man around. He is a chap from the neighborhood only. He usually fills up most of the blank spots of duties and responsibilities left vacant by the all-time drunk patriarchs. He is all help personified, twenty-four by seven kind of schedule. The rumormongers allege that he makes love to one, most probably two, three or all four girls. He is passionately relevant to their struggle of life. His lovemaking, caring, eager, innovative blends mean that the rickety cart of the unfortunate family somehow moves on. The lover and the ladies stand together and somehow try to outwit the ill-fate’s constantly conjuring brain to put one more hurdle in their path. And the adherents of prudishly structured morals make faces, put up taunts, take jibes. But does that help the family in any way. The people would rarely help as a society. They would just spread endlessly beguiling toxicity. The poisoned fingers would meander to scrape the little healing crust forming over their wounds to keep the scars alive. The ostentatiously shallow ethical code, programming a censored and controlled social fabric, looks with hate at these little holes. But seeing them altogether, surveying the fruit of their labor sends positive vibes; a kind of musical metaphor among the sermonizing cacophony and hypocritical jabber around them. He is definitely moonlighting as a savior of the rocking boat. 

A youthful spirit in an ageing body

 

Greying, thinning hair and pepper and salt beard. These are the changes in me that I reflect over. It's just natural to spot the change within and without. But aren't the little saplings of banyan and peepul that I had planted are handsome young trees now? Yes, they are! They are the expression of my youth. They are me. If you ever get bothered about age, do something fresh and young in nature, where you will always see the traces of your youth expressed in those creations. Plant trees, for example. Keep doing it periodically so that you always have some young tree lad youthfully swaying to the breeze as an expression of the youth of your spirit. 

Ravan's little lamp of righteousness

There is a beautiful episode in Ramayana. Sri Ram looking for Sita Mata finally reached the southern coast of India. There was a vast chasm of the sea separating his monkey army from the mighty Ravan’s bastion, Lanka. There were two choices for him to get back his wife: First, through persuasion if possible; second, to wage a war if that was the last resort left. As a righteous man, Sri Ram sent his ambassadors to persuade the Lanka king and return Sita without unnecessary bloodshed. All options were nullified by Ravan’s ego and pride. So war was the only option left.

A daunting task of erecting a bridge and fighting Ravan’s mighty army faced Sri Ram. Before starting on such a huge test, it was thought befitting to seek divine intervention in his favor by performing an elaborate puja and other rituals. It involved performing a yagna to propitiate Lord Shiva and seek his blessings. Only Ravan, the best Vedic scholar and Brahman, was suitable to conduct the rituals and the grand ceremony. To Sri Ram’s council of war advisors and other allies it was totally outlandish to seek the priestly duties from one’s enemy. They were shocked and surprised to hear the Ayodhya prince’s intention to have his enemy as the officiating priest for the ceremony. They were but mere mortals having a typically defined sense of one’s enemy, of seeing one’s opponent in binary colors only. But Sri Ram, an evolved soul with enlightened self, saw a persona in totality. He could see one’s utility above the boundaries set up by ego and pride. He could see the littlest star of light shining in a dark personality.   

Hanuman flew with the message. The proposal was met with much consternation, guffaws of laughter and peels of anger in Ravan’s council. Everyone expected their powerful king to spit on the proposal and insult the carrier of such a preposterous scheme. They were shocked when the Lanka king looked serious and gently agreed to the invitation. Ravan, the proficient Vedic scholar Brahman, was no ordinary being. He well understood that as a Brahman he was duty-bound to accept the proposal to officiate a yagna ceremony. He himself was great in his own ways beyond the strict confines of arrogance and pride through which we know him usually. Even at his worst with his pride, arrogance and haughty demeanor he remembered his duties as a Brahman.

So here was Ravan surprisingly at the puja venue to officiate and conduct a ceremony meant to seek blessings for the victory of his enemy. His role as the conductor of those rituals and ceremonies demanded a flawless approach, an approach that should not be allowed to be tainted by his other self as the head of the army that would be fighting against Sri Ram’s soldiers. So he gave his best as the officiating priest of the ceremony conducted to get Lord Shiva’s blessings for victory in the impending war.

Ravan expertly inspected all the arrangement and found something missing. ‘You have made the arrangement quite nicely O Ram. But there is something very important missing. As the host of this ceremony, you cannot install Lord Shiva’s idol without the company of your wife. As per shastra edicts, however high and mighty a person is, he cannot perform this ceremony without his consort,’ Ravan explained the missing link required for the successful performance of the rituals.

Sri Ram, the ever-poised and mentally balanced sage warrior, kept his composure and thanked the great scholar on his pious sense of duty in his role as a conductor of ceremonies. ‘O Lanka king, you have righteously followed your duty to make it a flawless arrangement and pointed out the thing that needs to be attended to. Now kindly suggest a solution to the problem because it also is part of your duty,’ the graceful Ayodhya king gently said with a smile.

Even in the face of war with his rival Ravan knew his dharmic duties and suggested a solution. ‘I shall arrange to get your wife here for the successful performance of the ceremonies. But you have to give a word that she will be allowed to be taken back to Lanka after the puja is over,’ Ravan said. Sri Ram agreed to it.

So all the arrangements were made and the great scholar Brahman expertly conducted the ceremony. The flawless performance meant that Lord Shiva would be blessing Sri Ram’s army with victory. Moreover, as the chief officiating priest of the grand ceremony of exquisite rituals it was Ravan’s duty to bless the puja host with victory. To Ravan it was a challenge to fulfill his dharmic duties as a priest even if it meant blessing his rival with victory. ‘Vijayi Bhava!’ Ravan fulfilled the last of his priestly duties. To him it was nothing short of victory in the game of ceremony proposed by Sri Ram. The great Brahman in him knew that he was cursing himself with a defeat by blessing the enemy with a victory.

Ravan was now convinced that he would be killed in the war. Such mystical levels of puja to earn the blessings of Lord Shiva would surely bless the puja host with victory in the war. On top of that he himself had to bless the host with victory. One more puzzle faced him. As the officiating priest he was duty-bound to accept some dakshina from the host. He was in a dilemma. As a rich, proud king he had been a giver of charity all his life. But now he had to adopt the role of a humble Brahman receiving the charity from the puja host with full humility. Taking any material wealth would have wounded his pride because he had imprisoned Kuber, the lord of wealth. But he had to perform this duty as well. As the officiating fees for the puja performance he asked Sri Ram to respectfully stand near him while he took his last breaths in the battle. Later, when Ravan was dying on the battlefield Sri Ram kept his word and respectfully stood by the mighty Lanka king. The victorious Ayodhya prince stood there in utmost humility and paid respects to the departing soul. His supremely balanced self didn’t show any trace of pride and haughtiness that we usually see in victorious kings and princes. No wonder, we worship him as Bhagwan.

From this episode we can say that there is no absolute evil, there is no perfect darkness in a persona. Ravan, whom we portray as the symbol of all-pervading darkness, had his own light of truth and duties deep inside his soul.

We are part good, part bad. We have to keep lighting the lamp for the good in us, to help it maintain its righteous glow. And we have to keep fighting against the darkness of the bad in us. This is the war of the soul to attain a righteous self. After defeating the enemy within, we have to emerge victorious and reach home, triumphant, like the great prince Ram coming back to Ayodhya after winning all the wars. Then we are entitled to light lamps in celebration of conquering the darkness. Then it’s the festival time for the soul liberated from the darkness of fears, hate, anger, jealousy, judgments. Then we become the rulers of the kingdom within the sanctified precincts of the soul, our very own Ayodhya. 

Keep the little lamp alive

 

Light a little lamp of friendly bonhomie and care among your small circle of friends and family. We should always remember that there are a few people who would have tears of sympathy for our pains, smiles on their lips for our gains, a friendly hand to help us rise among slippery rains. It's a very tiny lamp burning with its little wick, throwing gentle pale rays around us, helping to light a stage, a tiny stage in the infinite darkness around, the stage that defines our existence, a stage that is set up for us to understand the meaning and purpose of this life. It's a very small lamp and needs tiny drops of the oil of trust, support, encouraging smiles, tears of empathy, gentle words and an assurance that we are there around you, keeping you safe from the darkness ready to encroach from all around. It's a gentle light, with soothing rays. But it lights up our lives like a bright sun, helping us move over the little troubling pebbles of life scattered on the path. Keep this little lamp burning. It's a delicate, fragile light but has the strength the beat the darkest clouds of loneliness and pain. And like all delicate things it needs a very careful, gentle attention and protection. Keep your little lamp of hope and friendliness burning. Keep it safe. Keep your palm around the glow to save it from chance winds. Keep supplying tiny drops of love, care and share. This is your little lamp to help you on your journey. Praying for the light of your tiny lamp. Keep it glowing. People will come and go from the little dim-lit stage around the little lamp. That's inevitable. But you have to keep your little flame alive so that you aren't in dark when someone passes by you. Maybe others need the light of your little lamp. Keep it alive. The flame of hope, love, belief in people, happiness and joy. And when you light lamps on Diwali tonight, see the sanctity of your little lamp in all the flames around. Wish you all a very happy Diwali!

Woman with the Lamp/Glow of Hope by SL Haldankar (watercolor,  1945-46)

A day in the life of a writer

 Even my small publisher flatly said ‘no’ to publish my next book. Well, he has a right to discard almost non-selling writers from his list and start dreaming big. To grow you need to have authors who give you numbers, who themselves build a social media brand for themselves with their own efforts thus increasing the sales. I hardly did anything in this regard and he felt very much let down by my lack of interest in starting YouTube channels, giving interviews, getting paid reviews. Of course all this needed money and I always feel my contribution to a book ceases the moment I write, rewrite, edit and re-edit it to my capacity. I don’t care much beyond that. Then I shouldn’t complain. The market also wouldn’t care and didn’t. But this is no hall of shame to be an unsuccessful writer.

So absolutely no problem with his decision. He had a reason to drop diplomacy and bare the truth. After all, it’s his business. Just that I wasted five months in the bargain. The manuscript was typeset and a nice cover design was finalized. It was in line for printing when he suddenly changed his mind. The onus, as I have already told you, is on me. Despite many attempts I couldn’t give him even a single book that sells, forget about best sellers. He became sure that there was hardly any chance that I will ever give a profit-making book, not just to him but to any publisher. But so what? That’s not a catastrophe. The hell won’t break loose for the lack of a best seller by Sandeep Dahiya. And will heavens bloom on earth with the presence of a best seller by me? It wouldn’t. A few people find my writing meaningful and that’s enough to justify my sincere efforts for months over a book. Moreover, writing is a kind of distress-dissolving exercise for me. All of us have our Ikigai, our distress dissolver when one forgets the drag and drudgery of life.

These days I don’t even think of approaching the mainstream publishers at the top rung. After decades of torturing their mail boxes with my endless submissions, I finally realized that the exercise can be safely avoided for peace at both ends. They have their smart editors who have their own notions about what sells. And rightly so. They work so hard. Good content is just a small part that decides a book’s success. I think, beyond what you have written, it’s more important who has written the book. And to become that influential ‘who’ you have to create more than content. I frankly cannot do this. So why should I crib?

The nearest I came to be published was when a commissioning editor at an upcoming name in publishing, with many successful books and a major presence on digital platforms for books and stories, showed some real keen interest in my submission. There was a trail of mail exchanges on the official mail and then some interaction on WhatsApp. ‘I need to know more about you,’ she wrote. Of course as the commissioning editor she had a professional right to know everything about the writer she was going to publish. Mainstream publishing is a small cozy circle sustaining on socializing and networking. But what would a small-time writer staying at a village know about these high-end things. Of course my reply should have been ‘ok, let’s meet’ because that’s what she meant. But I hardly had any clue to it. What I did was that I bared the soul of my journey so far in an audio clip. I talked like a pulpit preacher lithely revealing the real meaning of life based on my sweet-sour experiences. I heard it a few times and it sounded like iconized encapsulation of absolute truth. I sounded femininely sensitive yet manly. Or maybe even immeasurably impassioned. I thought I may win more than just the publishing contract. It was one hour long and very happily I sent it to her, dreaming of the big thing that a reputed publisher will at last take up my script. But what would she do with a low-quality audio crackling with the suffering notes of a defeatist sullen-voiced writer? I don’t think she even heard it to the last. Maybe it just sounded like a dry rill, a paranoid testimony to my unsuitability to be a bestselling author. So I dropped her a message on WhatsApp. ‘Did you listen to it?’ I asked. ‘Kindly drop me a mail for any query regarding your submission,’ she wrote. I must have sounded like a hostile parishioner to her smart, suave urban self. So I wrote a formal mail. The script was summarily rejected, as you can understand. After that I haven’t had the courage to approach any big gun.

So, after my fallout even with my small publisher, who didn’t charge me anything because I submitted print-ready files which gave him some courage to publish maybe 100 copies, I chose a still more welcoming platform for my latest discard. So there won’t be even 100 copies to begin with the first edition. It will be strictly print-on-demand. But even that will do. A book is a book after all. The book is published. It’s available online on Amazon, Flipkart and the publisher’s website. That’s more than enough for me, to be frank. Like your child is the best in the world, my book is nothing short of a bestseller to me.

Then I celebrate the occasion. I carry a virtuous spring in my walk and requisite resilience in mind. A friend has to go to Delhi and his car has time and space for a few hours. So I take celebratory drink after maybe four-five years. Two bottles of cold beer in the cool confines of a little car, with old lyrical but sad-with-acumen songs blaring as it went gently over pot-holed roads. The musical highs and lows whispering, ‘Why be in a hurry? All the time is yours.’ In boozed spirits I didn’t miss to vent out my grudge against the editors of big publishing houses. ‘Bloody supremacists mired in pathetic indulges lying in their silly slumberland,’ I mutter. My friend has no clue to the target of my ire. ‘What?’ he asks. ‘Nothing,’ I reply. For a few moments vehement and vitriolic bitterness seemed to catch hold of me, taking me off guard during my eased-up spirited moments. But I overpowered it within a few minutes.

Then we had hot burger from a ramshackle dusty food corner in the suburbs. The owner, believing in the impossibility of anyone disturbing him at noon to order something, was soundly sleeping under a brooding, sad-looking keekar vaulting above his food cabin. As we got him back from his five-star restaurant owning dreams he looked at us quizzically. Then the reality dawned upon him that there are guys who would get burgers from him at a dusty noon. All sleepy he made two sloppy burgers. They tasted rusty, as my friend told me later. But to me they were amazing. After two bottles of beer and in celebration of a self-considered best seller who won’t find any kind of burger at the pinnacle of taste? Foster your faith well. Why be bothered about the supreme excellence of best sellers. Write your books anyway. Keep your mood happy. That’s in your hands. Don’t allow it to be exiled to the filthy fury of dirty drains by other’s views and opinions. Be dismissive and feel enchantingly courageous.

And all this was condoned by the skies above as well. As I celebrated the launch of my book, a light thunderstorm applauded and greeted me with raindrops. The boiling May-end heat had turned it almost a sizzling cauldron. The dusty rumble of clouds announced some relief in celebration of a book launch. I could count the number of drops on the sand around my feet. Doesn’t that make them so precious? Then under the spell of dust, some raindrops, rumble of mediocre dusty clouds, a glass of Juse, a burger from the ramshackle dusty eating point, two bottles of beer and the launch of a new book on a platform that’s kind enough to accept all submissions, I remembered that I can club the occasion with my month of birth as well. Instantly a feeling of wellness hit a high vault. The uneventful birthday had come and gone without notice almost three weeks back. There is a thing called belated celebration. I got a third bottle of beer and drank to my birthday and would have dozed off if not for the Juse.

I had Juse you must be wondering. He loves his sugarcane juice machine. He has designed his signboard all by himself using the skill of his hand and all the education that he still remembers from his few years of schooling. ‘NIKKI JUSE CORNER’ it says. A big TAJA in Hindi follows. He is true to his word of freshness. His Juse is far better than the nicely packaged and branded juice available at famous juice points and malls. I pointed out his Juse thing to him. He is slightly embarrassed for a moment, then reclaims his natural juicy demeanor. ‘See brother, had I known the correct spelling, do you think I would have been a juse-maker?’  

A sad little story

 Parveen’s left leg is afflicted with polio. Earlier he had a seventy percent invalid card that entitled him for a little pension. Further, there was a possibility of getting a small government job under the disability quota. But at the time of the card’s renewal, the CMO at the district civil hospital was in the foulest of a mood. Was he beaten by his wife on that day? No. He had been publicly shamed by the health minister who suddenly arrived for an inspection of the facility. Having lost his composure and looking for the means to scatter his woes upon those who stood at the mercy of his mood, he looked at Parveen from a new angle, an angle of vendetta, and found him just thirty-five percent disabled. As if angels suddenly materialized and healed Parveen overnight, as if providence was on a pleasure tour and half-cut the poor boy’s bitterness. Parveen thus lost his little pension as well as the slim chance of getting a peon level job in some government office.

Fate seems to have found him an easy target to rob him further. Parveen was doing a job at a warehouse of second-hand books, performing his job very seriously. He was riding pillion with an office colleague when a speeding car hit the bike. He now has a big fracture on his strong right thigh and a rod implanted to support his bone. Sometimes, the fate’s affrighted whimsies take fancy for you and your miseries just pile up. And you will have angry CMOs and speed masters, all safe with their stylish criminalities, spoiling your little world, robbing you of even the little-little pieces of life’s joy. I have seen him trying his level best to be self-standing in life. An honest boy with limping normalcy, a kind of smooth peculiarity. But as of now he is totally dependent upon his family.

The ATM Guard's Igloo

 The temperature is almost 50°C and the heat index is still higher. You can feel the heat creeping into your bones and turn them to ashes. You can say it’s a burning fire almost. The ATM booth has a full blast of air condition. It’s practically a snowy Himalayan cave. The moment you open the glassed door, the greeting gusts of cold welcome you. And you, standing half in fire, half in snow turn a statue for a moment; paradoxes get paraphrased into the quizzical look of your eyes. There is no cash in the machine. Thankfully. The guard has put a ‘No Cash’ board on the machine and is peacefully sleeping. Snoozing serenely in his refrigerator because that’s what it’s as of now. He is safely cocooned inside his ice-pack and outside the blindingly envious loo whimpers and challenges the people to face it. ‘I will burn your eyelashes if you dare to face me!’ it roars. Well, this happens to be one of the few perks of being an ATM guard. One can sleep in a refrigerator when the world is on fire outside and there is no cash in the machine.

The forgotten icecream

 Nevaan’s father has promised him to get ice-cream on the way back from work in the evening. The first day he forgets and promises to get it the next day. The same thing happens the next day but at least he remembers and promises to get it the following day. The same thing gets repeated for three days. On the fourth day, his father, as if at complacency’s cusp, not only forgets to bring the ice-cream, but forgets to verbally renew the promise of bringing it the next day. It means, with the promise gone, he won’t bring it at all. Now this is too much for little Nevaan. His kaleidoscopic dreams shattered, his ballooning robust optimism gone, he is inconsolable and keeps crying for half an hour, face down on the bed and the sheet almost wet with lamentations. His small body is swaddled with waves of sobs cusped with censorious overtones. They have no clue about the reason for such teary outpour, so keep asking why is he crying. Finally he shouts with meaningfully accelerating pain among flooded sobs, ‘I won’t tell! And I won’t eat it even if you bring it!’

Diwali musings

 Pick up a dry leaf and take out the carpenter ant that has got into the toilet seat. I sometimes rescue even house flies and mosquitoes. They will be a nuisance, one may say. But the chance to be a savior is too big a reward for such deterrent considerations. I try to keep my foot on a hold as a beetle crosses, or a slug crawls away, or a frog hops away. I know a tread of caution is for my own benefit. It will save me from a fall sometime in future. If you learn to not walk over insects and beetles on the way, you will surely escape the thorns and potholes of life that come your way. If you can rescue an insect or bug of your dislike from a basket, basin or drain, you are prepared to forgive people. These tiny acts of salvage hone the spirit of sympathy, love and care in you. They blunt the edge of apathy and neglect that sees us turning a blind eye to so many unbecoming things around us, where we can bring a positive change without creating too much turbulence in our lives. It’s better to have a little bit of time to stop and take out a drowning beetle. If not for this, you will hardly try to save a drowning man in future. Goodness is a habit. It can be practiced. The vast workshop of life has so many tiny tables for us to carry out our little experiments. To me rescuing an elephant and saving an ant is more or less the same. That particular savior emotion is the main thing. So watch your step and avoid crushing insects unnecessarily. You gain a lot from it. You learn to be careful and responsible. Most of the times when we think we are helping others, we are in fact helping our own selves.

@

The first half of November is supposed to be the best. The winter is opening like a soft bud. The birds sing at their best. It proves it’s the best part of season. A beautiful, fluid mix of balmy cold and warmth. But we have turned it the worst. The metallic haze and toxic smog grips the skies like the steely talons of an eagle strung over the soft fur of a rabbit. The eyes burn. Throats ache. The sip of life, the air, turns a slow dose of death. The north Indian planes look like a huge prison. The sun looks pale and sick-faced as it peeks weakly over the polluted planet. But then even on such a sickly gloomy morning there are thousands of swallows flying in the sky. So many of them! With so many birds, it seems as if everything will be all right. The sky seems to bless the earth through these freely flying birds. It’s the time to plant more trees and flowers. It’s the time to walk a bit slower and do something that will leave the planet worth staying for the coming generation.

@

Most of the time our hate for someone is merely an instrument to undo and hide our own guilt about the incidents and happenings which took us to a point of unbridgeable differences with that person. Hate is a very convenient tool. It’s fuelled by anger. With the tools of hate and anger, it’s very easy to put all the blame on someone else for the fallouts. In our own court, the hammer of hate and anger sets our conscience free while holding the other party culpable for all the wrongs that have befallen.

@

From the ones who sound most affable to the ones pounding your 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 cacooned 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.

@

The utmost exciting and the most forgivable weakness--Love. If love be thy weakness, let it be. You won't miss being strong.

May Musings

The perch-pole’s length has been increasing as the temperature rose in May. It’s a very high, lofty platform for the white pigeons to enjoy the lower world from a higher platform. These are docile, domesticated pigeons with clipped wings. They fly with a lot of flutter, out of habit, the birdie habit to fly, and land on their little perch point after a few sorties in the sky. The struggling flight carrying faint rebelling undertones as the languidly looming horizons cajole with the prospects of free flights. But the attitude of gratitude for the owner is strong enough to quell the spirit of freedom. They land on their little open cage. Domestication piles up habits, loads of habits in fact. The roots blended with a sense of uprootedness; the sweetened taste of petty vagaries. It gives a sadistic penchant for taming punctualities. Out of sheer habit the pigeons sit on their high open platform in the merciless noontime heat, even though there are shady trees around. The boy should fix a shelter box on the open, flat board which the pigeons consider their home. Otherwise the sun may roast the pigeons and the eagle will arrive to enjoy roasted meat. Why persist with the habits that give you sunstroke or even roast you alive, I wonder.

Not much bothered about the white pigeons getting roasted alive under merciless noontime sun, the parijat shows new leaf shoots. As if apprehending burning fires and the last drop of water getting vaporized at the peak of the hot season, it went into a panic mode and in mad frenzy to dodge the death’s dragnet shed its leaves that dropped almost endlessly. The garden bore a sad autumnal look. So many hardy big dry leaves as would make a little mound. From its luxuriant buxom look it turned into a skeletal sadhu doing penance in the Himalayas; a lean and fragile monk with swordfish spirit. I would term it as stoic detachment to green foliage. If it gets too attached to the luxuriant canopy, it will lose so much water to even die and unable to hold its seeds. Nature is unsparing. It demands sacrifices. Each thing, plant, tree, grass blade, stone piece, everything in fact has to bow down to the laws to retain its shape. As a concerned and caring parental entity, the bare skeletal tree carried its dry pods of seeds, so many of them that even though each gust of wind scatters hundreds every minute, still many will be left to keep its lineage alive.

It’s the young lad of a tree carrying its palpable adolescence. And with the new shoots coming up you can enjoy reading newspaper under it in the morning. New shoots carry a unique, fresh aura. After its tapasya, the young tree seems in excitement of love and procreation. Its dark brown button-shaped seed pods fall in a drizzle—an orgasmic surrender; a sort of foreplay among the hot sighing winds. Then the monsoon will arrive like a bride with its large-hearted surrendering overreach and conceive its offsprings. A mother with springing affections. A fresh enthusiast of new life. A carrier of entrepreneurial dynamism. The seeds will come to life. Some seeds fall on my head also. Misplaced enthusiasm, at the most. Maybe the tree wants to take roots in our minds from where mother nature’s concern has been severally uprooted. Or maybe the tree is playing some mischief by hitting me on the head.

Then the plumber-cum-labor man arrives to fix a broken tap. Regular work with shovels, spades, pick-axes and pipe-wrenches bestows muscular arms and strong hands. There is an imposing crocodile tattoo on his hand. I complement him for it, telling him that the great crocodile looks suitable for his work-hardened limbs. He is slightly embarrassed and tells me, ‘Well, I asked the tattoo maker at the fair to draw Shiva but he was high on afeem and Shiva came out like this!’ I stare deeply and try to find out any semblance of the great God’s supreme stature in a godly niche in the skin graphic. There is hardly any trace of Him here. But with the mind’s intensely intellectual excretions one can spot, or even innovate in imagination, eccentrically methodical designs and patterns conveying meanings of other dimensions, just like abstract art, to justify whose strangest lines and shapes one has to have a huge mind to spin out new meanings or even blindly babbling speculations. So it looks a masterpiece of abstract painting. I get inclined to view it as the modern art form but my reverie is broken by the bearer’s gentle tone. ‘It was sinful on his part, so I gave him a hard beating. But he was very professional at least in digging deep. The ink is so thick and deep that it won’t go away however hard I rub,’ he clarifies the entire story behind the tattoo. Indeed the high-on-substance tattoo maker has left a well-rooted heritage on this man’s skin. His free-flowing hands drawing a plenteously aesthetic design as per the diktats of a free spirit, carrying soft blends of awareness and unawareness. 

The ditched lizard

The late morning sky looks down with stern infinitude, somehow with a heavy desultory feeling as if overloaded with the immensity of its own reminiscences, the weight of its past and the ever-exploding present.

Probably his girlfriend got angry with him. I saw her crawling down the curry-leaf tree with a moribund mindset and move on the ground to sneak out of the garden passing under the iron gate’s lower frame. He followed her after a few minutes later. Of course, you are supposed to go following your girlfriend. But he doesn’t go out. From under the gate he looks out for some time and turns back to take a survey of the garden. ‘Rascal, already thinking of new love to fill his life,’ I think.

I’m sitting on a chair a few feet away, reading a newspaper. He is not excited in love at the moment and looks pretty ordinary with his dusty earthen color. A kind of arid angularity of defeatist nature clung to his persona. I draw his attention. He looks at me matter of factly. He isn’t scared, I can see. What is there to feel scared about those who simply read newspapers, the long sheets where even engineered pogroms and bloody vendettas are presented as almost harmless random chance happenings? Why be bothered about the one who gets intimidated by the smartly customized narratives of an increasingly regressive world to tame mass psychology? Why take seriously the one who tries to write his agonies and responses and makes silly attempts at assumed joy sometimes? And who is a small-time writer? Well, he is an innocuous byproduct of the agonizing agencies of fate, institutions, norms, customs, expectations, jealousies, hate and failed attempts at love.

I glide a very small round clod of earth in his direction. He isn’t bothered. He has turned into a statue, almost miraculously motionless. If your girlfriend has left you in bad mood, you hardly care about struggling writers trying to boost their spirits by playing with sullen and surly garden lizards. Well, rolling the little piece of earth suddenly reminds me of the past that I once played marbles. I pick out tiny soil granules and take an aim, the marble-throwing aim. A few bombs land very near to the target but he isn’t bothered about me even now. Then one lands on it. Not much in the league of giving pain because of its tiny size. But it hurts and affects his sense of dignity. He faces me straight. The hero raises his torso and tail in a manner that is at least aggressive to me. He seems like a little dragon in fact. ‘He has turned suicidal after meeting disappointment in love,’ I think.

Jilted lovers can be very dangerous. They have a peculiar set-asiding quota of sadistic sweet pain that makes them turn their face from life. They may dash to get squelched under tyres, wheels and even feet. But if the latter happens to be the case they may give a bite, thus pouring out all their pain, anger and suffering in the form of that bite, before getting trampled to death. I raise my feet and put them on the chair. But it’s a tricky world. The garden lizards aren’t so lucky to deal with small-time writers only. A cat has been sleeping in the corner behind the overgrown hibiscus. So here it springs up to grab its share of joy in the world. The aggressive romeo takes to his heels. The cat follows him across the garden and then the trees. It’s a youngish cat. I can feel its palpable adolescence. But the lizard is lucky to escape. The sporadic spirals of life and death, love and loss, agonies and ecstasies, that’s what life is about. He has to survive first to make love some other day. He should hang out there, who knows she may come back. The cat has sharpened its claws on the soft trunk of the parijat tree marking it like the leopard in the Morni hills. Well, let it be more resilient in spirits for the next hunt. I’m happy for the jilted lover. It’s good that he ran away without showing attitude. 

Boxing the ego

 Box your own as well as other’s egos because it’s the same entity. And defend the ‘faith’ because it again is the same. Ego: one common darkness. Faith: one common light. Strictly prescribed as per the guru-shishya parampara.

Our gurus at the village school tweaked our ears, pulled hair, smartly took us to the cane, made us murgas, shouted, fretted and fumed. They broke our budding egos just like their own had been broken by their gurus and so on and so forth. Well that was past. And now when I come across one of those gurus, coming slowly bent with old age, my only impulse is to touch his feet and give him a gentle hug. Because all that was to make us, even though it meant breaking some canes in the process.

It’s not that I’m a promoter of fist-work by the gurus. All I want to say is that it was a far tolerant world, a simpler world where people carried their heads a bit lighter, where the students were forgiving enough to forget the beatings and get a clue to the harsh realities of life that kick at us, a world when the parents didn’t explode with rage when they saw their kid’s cheek redder and understood that making of something is always a bit painful.

All in all, it was a gentler world even with the gurus’ beatings, a world having human pliability, a melting fluidity, not like the present time’s rigid temperaments and rude bloom. Despite all the beatings and shouts, the school still carried subtle shades of some courteous pageantry. I can only say that dry branches just fretfully shake to the wind’s playful shove. Leafy green branches gyrate and sway even to the pulls of stormy winds. The juice of life. It’s playful, mischievous, swaying.

Artificial creativity

My first line ever on an AI-assisted tool happens to be a question.  ‘In what way you are different from a human’s creativity?’ I ask.

ChatGPT is very honest, I must say. It replies:

‘As an AI language model, my ability to create and generate content is based on statistical patterns and algorithms derived from vast amounts of text data. While I can generate language that appears to be creative and original, my output is ultimately limited by the data I was trained on and the rules programmed into my algorithms.

In contrast, human creativity is often driven by personal experiences, emotions, and the ability to think outside the box. Human creators can draw inspiration from a wide range of sources, including their own imaginations, personal perspectives, and interactions with the world around them. They can also intentionally break the rules and patterns of traditional language to create something truly unique and original.

While I can generate content quickly and accurately, I do not have the same level of intuition, emotions, or personal experiences that drive human creativity. In this sense, my creative abilities are fundamentally different from those of a human being.’

I, yours truly, find it more honest than most of we humans. But it can be misleading, brutal, inhuman in the ways we can’t imagine. Perfect lack of subjectivity has the potential to take it to the threshold of limitless objectivity, which in turn may undo what we have created so far, or change the meaning of all the elements of human civilization as we know it. Of all our inventions so far, this one has the potential to turn the tables against the humans, as it introduces a mechanical replacement for spontaneous emotions, open-ended volition, fluctuating feelings, teasing mysteries, ever-chiding curiosity and numerous other checks and balances that keep the destructive monster in us under check, somehow. 

Now we want to hand over even our thinking to the mechanized tools. And get busy in creating solutions for problems born of our brain-substitute. AI-generated mail drafts, chatting messages, planning documents, summaries and reports are now spreading with a malignancy. It will standardize the way we act, think, behave, even feel: a mass-produced new-age mentality and emotionality. But then maybe it’s inevitable. It was fated to be. In our craze to surpass all life forms on earth, we were always expected to create something even above the mankind itself.  It’s not a doomsday portrait helplessly drawn by a poetic man. I would accept it as one more dimension in evolution.  Moreover, it seems a pretty communist concept, this AI: a mass standardization of ideas, thoughts and emotions.

PS: This isn’t tech-phobia. My only concern is that we get easily addicted to tools. So within a generation, we will be acting, planning, thinking and emoting the way algorithms want us. Then will we be the same humans, or some new avatar?