Year-long summers

 We are piling up data like no other hunter-gatherer, among any species on earth, collects anything. And on top of that we have computers to store data, so here come more and more numbers with each passing second. One little statistical fact: June 19 was the first and the only day since March 11 when the maximum temperature was 30°C, a day of least maximum temperature during the interval. I mean it happens to be the least maximum temperature in the interval from March 11 to June 19. Nothing surprising here, it’s a routine burning summer in north Indian plains. My only worry is that the most of March had more than 30°C temperature. It makes March a summer month. Where is our spring in that case? We have to shift it to the second fortnight of February which once used to be the peak of winters. There would be a time in the coming decades when the coldest days of January, as they stand now, would qualify as a brief spring. Finally we will have year-long summers. These are the perils of global warming. It’s fearsomely hard-hitting. The fragile frontiers of varied seasons will give in. The illustrious legacy of winters, springs and autumns will be held by myths. It surely will happen unless we plant trees, save forests, cut pollution, abandon our deceiving double standards, give an ear to the circumspecting nerves, and on top of that somehow systematically tame the bug of consumerist greed in our brain. 

Musings from a tiny corner

 Most of us have our favorite spots. Some feel at complete ease at some little backstreet café or a tea shop or cinema. I like my little corner in the small garden. To me it’s a seat of spirituality’s sovereign comforts. It’s shaded with a pair of parijat and bhelpatra trees sharing the space with magnanimously consensual smiles of brotherhood and friendship. They are small trees but sufficient to shade a little corner for a village writer. There are hibiscus, marigolds and sadabahars around. I sit there in the morning to steal some momentous reflections and cultivate some healthy perspectives about life. Both these are holy trees in Hindu mythology. Their shade above feels like spirituality canvassed over my conscience. This is the corner where I feel oodles of gratitude to the almighty. This is where I’m fully convinced that in our lack of thanklessness to God, we forget sores of things He’s worked out in our favor, which get masked by the common visible factors of our misery.

The tailorbird couple objects very forcefully but now I’m used to their non-stop abuses and take it as sort of background choir to my solitude. The sadabahar in the crack, my favorite little flower, is withering. I’m afraid it may die. If it holds for another fortnight then the monsoons may revive it.

Mother nature seems to know when to release the chokehold on our throat. Just when June turned almost unbearable, the western disturbances brought clouds and brief thundershowers got the temperature down helping us survive the heat. Five days of cloudy skies and life is back on the track. Jungle geranium’s bulbous assortment of tiny clusters of flowers has added some vibrancy to the heat-beaten soft pink. The Mexican petunias have soft-purple bell flowers under the shade. The sadabahars have grabbed the opportunity to add luster to their light purple flowers. The sun-burnt roses have full smile of lush red blooms around them. Jasmine’s little white flowers spray their fragrance in full spirits. It counts as a huge transformation, a wondrous resurgence, just in a matter of five days. I see it written with an unselfish flair on the flowers with a preciously subtle message.

Resetting, recovery and rejuvenation come far more naturally than we think. We just have to hold on till the favorable turn of winds.

A love-struck hoopoe is giving prolonged bursts of oop-oop-oop for the past few days. Let’s hope he finds a perfect lady love. The male koel is always sweet in its love-calls unlike the shaky female who gives tumultuous, undulating notes. These are but the seductively vibrating notes that drive the restfulness of the male koel’s sweet notes above the virile stirrings of subsurface male passion. The peacocks have pitched up their hooting frequency anticipating monsoons. Just with a few pre-monsoon showers there are numerous baby frogs. Once the monsoon arrives I think they will take over the entire village. 

The 'hanted' house

 The one-time sleepy nearby town that I remember as one busy market street surrounded by lower middle class households is now almost an adolescent city. A little world so big with its sleepy attraction; bountiful providences of urbanism now kissing earth and the land value that was once measured in acres is now done in yards. A protuberant belly of possibilities. Obscenely bulging, modernist pathologies greedily feasting upon the sublimating humility of free lands with their tiny corners of untamed wilderness. There are industrial parks and zones coming around as this part of the Delhi NCR gets its turn to become congested, industrialized and polluted. The urban lark spreading its wings with rigidly designed viewpoint.

They now have a funfair also on the ground where once Ramleela used to be staged. A lovely, twinkling, sparkling constellation of consumerism. The advertisement fliers and pamphlets announce Ferris wheel, handicraft bazaar, dance and singing competitions, stage shows, shopping bonanzas, camel ride and hanted house. Yes, you read it right it’s ‘hanted house’. Probably they mean haunted house and the poor ‘u’ is left to woo the art of non-being.

The group of boys in the neighborhood, who spend most of their time in the streets, have come really ‘hanted’ from the fair. They have toy bugles and horns of multitudinous pitch, notes and frequencies. The musical toys share a magical chemistry with their restless enthusiasm for fun and frolics. They are now giving the best of their lungpower to the toy musicals ranging from the shrillest, which can drill a hole in your brain, to the loudest that can shred one’s eardrum to pieces. It sounds like war music. I deem it fit to stop reading and make the most of the music. I try to choreograph a few steps to go along the angry music. Soon I realize that I’m too amateur to do full justice to this playful ruckus and din. A full lunatic may do something about it. Half-lunatics like yours truly, with his still considerate discretion, stand no chance at all. 

The cycling days

 Childhood has a tendency to have a breezy swipe over all miseries and disadvantages born of limited circumstances. In our childhood, there was no variety in cycle models. Those were big, bulky, rotund Atlas and Hero cycles made for tough elders to carry loads over the dirt tracks. So how would little children with little legs learn cycling? That was the question. The kids of today carry a big advantage in having tiny cycles with supporters that train them into the art even before they realize that they have been learning cycling. When we were growing up it was the same cycle for a centurion and a little kid. It was the same cycle that carried fodder bales and newly wed brides. The very same cycle to go on love errands and carry out devious designs.

We would whisk away big, rusted, age-old cycles at great risk of severe punishment. It was an item of luxury at the village level. Almost possessed the same status as a medium range SUV does these days. So you can evaluate its importance. The saddle would reach almost to our head level. So we learnt cycling in kenchi (scissor) style. A master art of convenience, equipped with all the unconventional over-ridings. The little rider would get into the triangular frame under the bar and take his leg across for the other pedal, hold the handle with one hand and cling to the saddle with the other for support. Others would push and prod from all angles possible to maintain the balance; almost a sight like ants clinging to a big grain. The bicycle would then tumble and bury a few children with the rider trapped in.

It would then, with the passage of time and enhancement of skills, graduate to the bar style—swinging the hips down on both sides while paddling to meet the length and the bum staying in air over the bar because sitting on the saddle would find the riding toes several inches above the pedals. It would give a serpentine trajectory because each push down on either side would see the handle being tilted in that direction. It was a very jerky and effort-taking style especially when you had a pillion rider behind you. That would require a big effort to maintain the balance.

I remember an episode when I had graduated to the bar style as a thin thirteen or fourteen years old. Perched on the carrier at the back my chubbily cute friend sang bawdy Haryanvi raginis as I took the lurching behemoth on the pot-holed district road passing by the village. Those were the days when you were lucky enough to have a clear road for many minutes at a stretch. The traffic was sparse and we went almost unchecked on our voracious exploration of the countryside.

It was a fine day and the road all clear for me to heave Grandfather’s big old bicycle. A few hundred meters ahead I saw a peasant woman going by the side of the road. And I panicked that I may hit her. There wasn’t anything coming from either side; the entire road to my service. I lost control over the direction. The bicycle seemed to go of its own volition. It was a logjam of contradictory thoughts across my boyish nerves. The big bicycle went relentlessly at full throttle, as if magnetically attracted to her. It went directly darting into her and with a bang it bashed into her broad peasant woman’s behind. All three of us rolled pell-mell. Boyhood gives you enough agility to jump to your feet quickly. Before she could recover from the shock and give a rippling outburst, we were running away into the shrubberies.

She was a huge farming woman with an ox-like torso. And she kept thundering threats and abusive words brandishing her sickle at us. She sat on the fallen bicycle for a good half hour waiting for us to arrive and twist our ears and give a few hard hits at our back. But we were wiser for that; with all the time at our disposal. We simply sat at a safe distance patiently listening to her lamenting vocals and incessant burst of hot temper. She but had lots of work to do in the fields, so left after raising a big storm of threats and foul words.

As village boys we were short on resources but long on ingenuity to draw fun games out of rudimentary things. There was another fun game that we frequently engaged in. We would take turns to roll into a circle to fit inside the hollow of a big discarded tyre and roll the cargo down a slope. A group of stronger boys waited down the slope to operate as the brakes for the rudimentary machine.  

The adventures of an ant

 It’s an attractive green glucose packet. Its mere sight leaves a cool lemon flavor in your mouth in this heat. It’s put at a safe place high on another container, far in the recesses of the house. But I should not have forgotten that there are adventurous big ants who prefer to follow their dulcet dreams, take risk and walk for ant-miles, cross ant-mountains, wade through ant-rivers, crawl through the household forest, evade the stomping human feet and reach home to hit gold. Just like the gold hunters went ahead on a risky gold trail.

This was a big black carpenter ant. Drunk on the fountain of youth, wasting life on a tree in the crowded nest reeking with its mundane poor world didn’t match the scale of its dreams. So there it set out on a special mission with glorious grit and gumption. It crawled on a new trail, crawled for hours or maybe days, climbed up the shelves and sneaked through the packet’s double doors to land up in the uniquely priceless paradise of white lemon-flavored glucose. The pack is half empty. It thus cannot crawl up the huge slippery walls. It’s very difficult to crawl back after a point.

Drenched with perspiration and scorched with heat, I opened the lid to find the robust thief stranded inside. The thief was retrieved with the help of a spoon and was really happy to get back to the garden. There it went with its tales of lemon-flavored glucose heaven.

There are some who follow the trail. A smaller one, equipped with its teenager’s nonchalance, successfully elbowed its way on the trail. The pioneer must have left some landmarks to notify a fresh new route. I found this little one deep inside its glucose heaven. After that there wasn’t any more on the trail. Maybe the word spread that it’s a death trap. Or maybe the saved ones told horrible stories of the far off place to scare anyone from following the trail. I hope the rest of them would treat these two as toweringly enlightened beings, full of profound profundities, on account of their tales of far off places. Maybe such adventurous escapades give rise to the proverbial fairy and demon tales of the ant world. Or maybe they turn successful travel writers presenting their crooning travelogues to the common audience. 

The lucky slug

 The slug, a kind of shell-less snail found in damp corners in gardens and wet places, has set out on a long journey. It’s a few meters voyage from one flower bed to another. But in slug-world terms it’s equal to miles for a human being. It has a right to set out on a long journey in the evening and reach home by night. Its path but lies across the main walkway in the garden. Walk carefully fella, you have a responsibility to avoid crushing a slug on its path.

There is a thing called luck. The slug hits a jackpot, gets airlifted on a dry guava leaf and is safely placed at the destination. It takes a few seconds. It would have taken almost two hours to do the same at its pace, if it had escaped getting crushed on the way, the chances for it being rather slim. The bed where the slug has arrived has some weeds and I start pulling them out. A tailorbird finds it as violation of its property and sets out on abusive tik-tikking rhetoric, a pitiless pouring of sharp words. It considers the yard as its house; exactly similar to my feeling that it’s my place. Both are almost the same feelings at their own hierarchy of existence.

A peacock looks expectantly from a neighboring roof. I get a chapatti and invite him in the yard for some evening snack. It lands heavily. I throw tiny chapatti pieces in front of him. It’s hungry and eats with caution. It cannot trust me completely. But this much trust is sufficient that he has come to the garden to eat at least. 

A rat that struck gold

 The rat family, in its little hole, had hit gold. With a little bit of more luck they would have become the wealthiest rat family. It was a quirky chain of events that drew the lot in their favor. A woman, in Mumbai, was on her way to mortgage her 100 grams of gold with a bank. She had some food packet also with her. Out of a feeling of charity she thought of feeding some beggars. But by mistake she ended up making a far bigger charity than she ever intended. She gave the jewellery parcel to the beggars instead of the food packet. The beggars would hardly believe their luck and taking it to be cheap fake jewellery and trinkets they threw the packet into the dustbin. That is where the enterprising rat, on its exploring mousy renditions, realizing the throw-away item’s real worth, dragged it into their portion of the gutter. The police but tracked the sequence of events through CCTV footage and the gold packet was retrieved. The rats must have been very sad over losing their windfall so soon. And the beggar who threw away the gold must have felt that his heart is like the hardest of granite to throw away something after which the entire planet is running madly. Well, the ironies of fate, nothing else. The fate has soaring configurations with the throw of its dice. Countless probabilities unfold ranging from colossal ruins to most extravagant gains.

The pregnant sparrow and her friends

 After the fiery spell that baked everything to a hard crust some raindrops fell overnight. All seem very happy with the brief shower in the dark. The birds have a spring in their wings and chirp lovelier songs. A few sparrows after darting around with scurrying spirits now decide to relax on the one-square feet surface provided by the railing column on the terrace. They are not sitting on their paws; rather they are sitting flat on their tummies in complete relaxation. One of them looks majestically serene. I believe it might be a pregnant sparrow because this kind of regal mien is bestowed by motherhood only. She looks as if she is their queen. One of them is perched as a sentry on the railing and is looking around in case some cat—pouncing upon a mere, mute moment to turn it into an opportunity—turns the relaxation platform into her breakfast table.

But it never was a world where all can be happy. The very same rumbling of joy for someone is tragic thunderclap for someone else. It was a very bad night for the babbler and the tailorbird couples who have nests in the parijat tree. A cat seems to have crawled up almost fourteen feet where the babbler couple had built its nest. The glossy blue shells of the eggs are now littered in the flowerbed below. It must have been a very diligent cat in its hunting because it chucked out even the little nest of the tailorbirds. The babblers have been surprisingly stoic about their loss. They haven’t raised too much ruckus. The little tailorbirds on the other hand have gone crazy over losing their little ones. They have been heartfully abusing any cat they see since morning.

Lonely in an angry world

 It’s an angrier world than ever. A sleepy, peaceful town in Himalayan foothills loses its peace. A Muslim man and a Hindu man are caught fleecing a 14-year-old girl. There are people who are eager to get into the circle of power and authority. There are so many self-styled keepers of morality and religion these days. They are always looking for reasons to stroke fire and hate. So, one half of the crime is selectively picked up by the Hindu rightists, and it becomes a case of love jihad. The other half, the Hindu part of the crime, is ignored. There are forty Muslim families in a population of 8,000 in the once peaceful town. With the honor of Hindu women and girls at stake, the mobs go on rampage and the helpless minority families who had honestly worked for decades to setup home and hearth run away fearing dangerous consequences. I’m not passing any comments on this; just presenting the facts as it happened, leaving you guys to think over it. Is breeding a hate culture acceptable in santana dharma? But the keepers of religion of all types have nothing else than hate to ignite the hearts of their followers.

Then there is this powerful politician. He can molest, harass, intimidate and stalk the female wrestlers. And still go unarrested! The investigating agencies did their best to dilute the charges against him. But the evidence was so glaring that even despite using all machinations they couldn’t give him a clean chit. All stand exposed. Now, a very mild, almost harmless, chargesheet has been filed. That would save him from jail for sure. But everyone can see it. All stand exposed. Truth is naked. And people understand and they will make their choice.

Standing among all these negative shades, I sometimes feel so helpless. It seems ‘might is right’ show going around with full force. But then the age-old poet in me puts his frail, assuring hand on my shoulder to convince me that art is the way out of darkness’ sway. ‘The soft butter knife of love will one day cut across the stony boundaries of nationality, religion, caste, class and creed. Hail all the artists and yourself!’ he tries to assuage my wounds and injuries.

Well, I know and feel that even the nudity of a classic sculpture is far better than the most decent of modern attire. That’s aesthetics: a stale and presumably happening heritage, a glorified irrelevance, an antiquated charm to create foggy, forgetful moments; the bridal finery of heart and swan-like gait of emotions. But does that change the things on the surface, at the practical level, where grotesque reality is forged by the powerful and the strong as per their whims and fancies?

Out of the depressive folds of big questions of whats and whys, finally the only relevant little question, the question about my own self seems manageable. What am I? My restless mind asks. And something beyond what I consider myself to be, but still an inalienable part of me, replies, ‘A tiny bubble of air, a breath, a cycle of inhalation and exhalation.’

I die every time I exhale. I merge with the unbounded, free air. I take birth every time I inhale. Little bit of air then fuels this illusion of body and its organisms. I keep dying and getting born in a sequence. The duality stands as long as the illusion of this sequence of birth and death follows and guides our sense perception. But the moment they coexist, dying and taking birth, side by side, dying and getting born simultaneously, in and out, out and in turn the same. Then you feel that you just are a ‘being’ beyond all illusionary ‘becoming’. A pulse, a rhythm, a reverberation, a drop in water, a molecule in air, a speck in dirt, a fragment in ether...something and everything at the same time. And most probably ‘nothing’ at all as the perception in higher dimension seems to indicate.

Habits

 Making love, a mere repetition; falling in love, a mere reputation; falling out of love, a mere repetition; doing this, a mere repetition; doing that, a mere repetition. I think we are creatures of repetition. And repetition is primarily born of habits. So most of the things we do are the results of habits. Why do we form habits? Possibly because we feel safe. And why do we crave to be safe? Maybe because we have fears. Well, then even fear might be a habit of the mind. 

The moment we allow ourselves to be driven by habits, we limit ourselves to a customised social unit, for our own safety. The society too feels safe when it sees fine creatures of habit. Habits define a safe zone around us. They breed convenience and that's why we hanker after them. They define and limit us and give us a false promise that we will be happy in that little zone. But very soon we find that conveniences born of happiness hardly bring juice and joy to life. It's dry. We still feel something is missing even though we adopt more and more habits to erect sounder structures of safety around us. 

The human spirit wants to fly. And habits are the chain. It wants to be free. But habits hold it back. When we set out to chart out our own path, we have to break the mould of habits. Habits clip our wings. They condition us, limit our potential. We have to do everything in a way that it doesn't turn a habit. Then whatever we do is an ode to the present. It's open ended and creative. We create and move on. The past doesn't drag us. The future doesn't make false promises. We flow. We fly. We live.

A little forest

 Sometime back I had thrown some tulsi seeds in a cleared-up part of a flowerbed. Little saplings grew and now it looks like a tiny tulsi forest. The beauty about lovable volition, the bhaav of love, is that it takes you above physical limitations. With pure volition of love and compassion this little group of tiny plants is as big as Amazon forest. It becomes as pure as any holy site on earth. If you can relate and feel like an ant crawling through this tiny patch of holy leaves, then you of course turn a little child wandering in a big forest. It’s only about the bhaav beyond acts, deeds, words, scriptures, holy pilgrimages. If you are in that bhaav, this little group of plants instantly turns your Gaumukh, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Jerusalem or any other holy site. Right here, this very instant. A pure unconditional bhaav takes you above the limitations of space and time. Karma gets unattached from your consciousness during those moments of pure volition and you have the moments of liberation. Call it samadhi, enlightenment or any other word. Words are mere pointers.

As I stare into this little patch of green and with pure volition muse over a little insect going through it, I’m a pilgrim going through a deep forest. As I take bucket bath and chant Ganga Ma’s name with pure heart, I’m bathing in her holy stream. I don’t have any doubt about it. As I walk by a little ancestral shrine in the countryside and bow my head I know I’m having a darshan of Badri, Kedar, Tirupati. If you establish yourself in that unadulterated bhaav, Mother Existence gets everything for you right at that very spot. But we have to walk around a lot ultimately to realize and come back into stillness and divine pause at one point, that pure volition. Then you aren’t anywhere but still everywhere. Then it hardly matters where you are, what you are, what others think of you, whether you are moving or not. The small acquires mammoth proportions to inspire holy awe. The big becomes small allowing you to marvel and analyze at the level of mind. Well, that’s the beauty of pure, unlimited volition.

Digging the well of destiny

 In Chhatisgarh, an eleven-year-old boy fell into an eighty feet deep borewell. The water table is plunging down and the water-seeking holes are going deeper and deeper. The boy was stuck in the deep cavity for 104 hours. Around 500 rescue personnel worked round the clock; dug a parallel pit and a connecting tube to fetch out the boy. Meantime the boy was handed down six bananas, juice and ORS fluid. He had a snake and a frog as company all along. In the dark womb of oblivion, the primal fear rules supreme. One would love to have some company in such a dark, deep pit. So forgetting all predatory instincts and devouring orgies the snake must have cuddled the frog. The latter must also have, forgetting all fears and intriguing irritations, reciprocated with friendly croaks. It seems a bit sad that the boy couldn’t share his banana with his mates. It’s not clear from the reports whether the snake and the frog could be rescued or not. If they were not, and this is more likely given our valuation of life in human terms, then I would call it an incomplete rescue operation. Maybe with bits of nostalgic condensation they would have turned out to be the best of friends outside—the snake and the frog.

The elephant lost a human right

 So the court has ruled that Happy is not a person, he is an elephant. A court was hearing a petition whether the zoo-confined pachyderm in the US could have human rights superseding his animal rights. Had the verdict gone in his favor, he would have been released in semi-freedom in a big sanctuary. Alas, that wasn’t to be! I think all animals should have human rights and the humans, with their huge sets of ominous rumblings, will do pretty well with animal rights. After all, we are the strongest animal among the booming bedlam on earth. Mother earth is replete with the abundant sagas born of our criminal candor and odious excesses. So who else is the biggest claimant of animal rights?

Excellence and chance

 The golden boy of Indian athletics, Neeraj Chopra, has to carry our perpetually blossoming expectations born of psychotic obsession with gold on his strong shoulders. A bandana tied on his forehead, flowing locks of hair and triumphant fists present a picturesque imagination. He returns to action after almost a year since his Tokyo gold. He hits 89.30 meters at a tournament in Finland, bagging silver but more importantly, it’s his personal best. Sometimes your best gets you a silver only. They say it was a fantastic throw accompanied by his trademark warrior cry while throwing. It looked all set to qualify as an epoch-making endeavor and cross 90 meters and hit his passion mark to enter the elite group of javelin throwers. But a naughty gust of wind made the ascending spear swerve to left.

Well, that shows all we have in our capacity is to give our best throw. But the results are sometimes decided by the circumstantial, chancy winds. Sometimes the dangerous drafts of adversarial winds cold-bloodedly kill our throws. We primarily throw to challenge the adverse winds. Sometimes the winds turn favorable as well and give us bigger returns than we would have achieved otherwise. The moral of the story is that we shouldn’t complain about circumstantial winds. Give your best throw. That’s all that counts. If the petty treacheries of adverse winds rob you of your gold, believe me if you have given your best, you won’t be a mere helpless hayloft, you would be at least a respectable wreck. And that’s all that matters, not silver and gold.

Move on but look back sometimes with gratitude

 I think we can avoid abusing the things that keep us alive, that give us this day, that shape our life (in whatever shape it might be). Whatever the texture, shape and structure, it still is our life. It's still a flower (even if it's badly mauled and ruffled by circumstances) and it still belongs to the genre called 'life'. And the manifestation as a 'life' is an incentive by default. We are manifested and still get a chance to evolve and manifest more. A blade of grass manifesting its life in famished desert sands is as important as a luxurious devdar in rich, salubrious, rainfed hills.

This body, parents, siblings, friends, partners, deities, everything in fact has been responsible for this life that we see defining us at the moment. Irrespective of what we think of them presently, didn't they touch our lives positively and meaningfully when we needed them or crossed path with them? Please recall that spark and excitement when we initially met them!

We meet people on the way and move on and meet new people on the way. That doesn't mean the ones left behind were bad and the new ones arriving in life are better. They are equally good or bad. Everyone is equally imperfect but even with their imperfections they have something to offer to us and we to them, which shapes one phase of the journey. They are the ones who get us to a point of being positively touched by the newer people.

If I judge those who were left behind, it would be like condemning the lower steps on a ladder after getting to the higher ones. Would we have reached the top step--for example, reaching a stage of finding an ideal soul mate--if not for those nice lower steps, those nice people with whom we broke up in the past? The relationships are like a ladder. It's a journey basically. Different people that we meet are beautiful, strong steps on the ladder that bear the weight of our feet and help us take the next step. And we are just the same to them. We too were low at the time when we met them and that's why we stepped on that rung and found it helpful. So did they.

All steps, lower and higher, are equally important. All the people we connect with, all relationships, all situations and experiences are various steps on the ladder. The problem is that we judge them vertically like a ladder standing upright, in terms of high and low, good and bad. Life isn't a vertical ladder. It's multidimensional in nature. It unfolds in layers. All the people that we meet are equally high and low at various points. So honor the people that came along the way. They have given us this life as we see it now. We can avoid abusing these various steps on the ladder of life.

Acceptance of the uncontrollables in life and gratitude for what is done (ignoring what wasn't done) save us from abusing the things, situations and people who have helped us live one way or the other. Respecting them is as good as respecting life.

Most importantly, dear readers, always remember that there will always be more and new people, situations and relationships to help us see that life simply goes on. Good and bad will always come our way. But we have to ensure that we celebrate the former more than we sulk over the latter.

Just do it!

 The things which ought to be simply done, should just be done. Otherwise, their shadows linger in the mind. They grow heavier with the passage of time. This invisible weight is heavier than the stones we see around. Simple, harmless acts of appreciation, of enjoyment, of helping someone cross a stream are better done and closed with a full stop. It’s better for a healthy mind. Otherwise, they linger like conspiring shadows over our conscience.

A missed chance of being good will definitely cast a shadow on our mind. An effort to help the self in being good, on the other hand, will hardly leave any unbecoming imprint on our conscience for pinching reflections later.

Only goodness has a legacy and a future. Hypocrisy and meanness are just bad examples and leave repentance most of the time. To do good is instinctive for a human being, it’s however another matter that we stifle the urge most of the time. To be bad, on the other hand, is not intrinsic to our nature. It is wrongly reflective, a miscalculation, a tragic bypass of the instinct of goodness.

Nurture the seeds of the instincts of goodness. It’s a simple practice. It gives peace of mind, clear conscience and makes the journey enjoyable. Avoid it and you carry the burden in your mind.

Happiness

It’s basically we who repel happiness away from us. We don’t allow it to come to us, embrace us, take hold of us. We set it as a goal too far down the line in future. Some house, some grains, some accumulation of pleasure, some relationships, etc., etc. We set up goals as the preconditions for our happiness. And the goals keep on piling up, over the years, and set up a wall between us and happiness. And happiness keeps on getting more and more distant from us. I will set up a home and then be happy. Happiness delayed. And then I work over the years. There is no end. I set a goal to raise a family and then be happy. Again it sets up a wall between happiness and us. Relentlessly we just push on. Happiness stays thus a distant goal. Never to be achieved. We make it conditional on endless goals, which are never met, because it’s the destiny of a goal to merge into another bigger one. They never die, only we die. Huge immortals they are. In pushing for them, we die. Separated from happiness that could have been the greatest gift of life, had we not pushed it away from us.

The remedy lies in taking away happiness from the far end of our endless goals and keep it safe in our house, like we store some grains for the harsh winters, near us, in the safest part of our house. It has to be cut away from the trail of endless goals and ambitions and kept with the self, in the present. It has to be set free from any conditions of meeting some goal. It’s a state as good as being healthy. Just being and living for a day. Separate being from becoming. You can be happy if you set your happiness free from the chains of your lifelong dreams.

You should be pushing towards yours goals as a happy person, rather than somebody who wants to be happy in future after completing the goals. The goals never come to a halt, only we do, at the moment of our death. So we die unhappily, separated from the natural state of happiness which could have pumped our life with unthinkable contentment and satisfaction, only if we had set it free from the chains of goal-setting and placed it unchained from those unreachable spots in the future.

Let happiness be a precondition for our doings, not a poor outcome of our efforts. Do everything as a happy person; instead of doing the deeds to become a happy person. Happiness is a state of being so, not the specific result of some hot pursuit. There is only one way it can be availed. Either we embrace it in the condition we are in, or it just eludes us. Keep it with you while you fly. It will boost your determination to go far and high.

So the only way to remain happy is just to be happy, instead of slogging it out to become happy later. Fellas, kindly decide to keep happiness as a routine, let it take possession of your present, like a monkey eating fruits and the birds flying. All in the present. Now. Just being. Simply being happy.

Watching a movie with a renunciate

 KAKA MAHARAJ 

Kaka Maharaj, who has been staying in a hut by the canal, is comfortable in holding three satsangs with me in a month. That is the time when we share, discuss—and even debate—about our versions of truth. He remains tethered to his hut and avoids contact with people who he thinks carry too much worldly subjects within themselves which disturbs his sadhna. Once a month, he takes a solitary footpath to reach the temple outside the village where an idol of his guru is installed to pay homage on purnima.

He hadn’t visited the nearby town for more than a decade and seemed set to avoid it forever. But then he paid a little worldly price for holding satsang with me. He adores Dada Lakhmi Chand, the legendary folklorist from the area. A little test of his adoration: Suppose he is just about to break your head with a brick and you just happen to say ‘Dada Lakhmi Chand’ and he would stop to listen what you have to say about the Shakespeare of Haryana. I spotted this chink in his armor and enticed him to the town. It was a feat in itself.

There was a biopic movie on Dada Lakhmi Chand shown at the newly constructed swanky, posh mall in the town. Ask him to visit the sansar of town and his weed-lit red eyes would throw daggers at you. He may even throw some object at you. So I suitably rolled the invitation with the name of his hero. As a result, he didn’t jump at the mention of ‘town’ like he would have normally. I could spot my chance and built my orchard around the great folklorist. I built up an imaginary world extolling the virtues of the biopic in highlighting the great Haryanvi poet. The result was that I could convince him to watch a movie—unimaginable—at a big mall. He who doesn’t find the idea of even a television set in a house too becoming for a healthy life and living! He agreeing to watch a movie at a mall! That shows yours truly can fruitfully bargain with hostage takers as a profession.

On the appointed day I drove him to the town. He was dressed in a pair of kurta-pyjama that was lying buried under a sack for almost a decade and was surprisingly safe from rats.

(The rats would cut even his plastic jars and steal his meager supply of grocery that keeps him alive on one frugal meal a day. I have seen big rats scampering across the grassed ceiling of his hut. ‘They even jump at me when I’m sleeping,’ he once told me. ‘Maybe it’s a message from your guru that you aren’t supposed to sleep,’ I remarked. ‘Well, maybe!’ he seemed in agreement with my casual jesting remark. A monitor lizard once stayed near his hut and then there won’t be any rats. Kaka Mahraj considered it a friend. But then one day when he was meditating the lizard crawled onto the head of its sadhak friend. Kaka Maharak wasn’t aware that it was his friendly lizard. He swiped his hand and it panicked and jumped. The lizard must have thought that it was an attempt at its life. ‘It jumped and ran but stopped at a little distance and looked back. We looked at each other for a long pause. Then it went away. I never saw her again. It was my fear that startled her. This littlest ounce of fear has to go from the body of a sadhak. The body shouldn’t move even a little under such circumstances. I knew I had failed in my sadhna. So I cried that day,’ he told me.)

Now, coming back to the movie-watching trip. He found the town changed beyond recognition since his last trip. ‘I cannot find the old town anywhere!’ he exclaimed. It was understandable. The world around his hut has remained the same. It’s the same canal with the same flow of water. The only change he can make out is that the little saplings he had planted are big trees now. That’s the parameter of change for him. He looked startled and intimidated by the booming urbanization. Imagine a person who stays in a grass hut being taken straightaway to a showy mall! He was tentative and unsure on the slippery floors. The elevators, lifts, showy shop-fronts, food aroma from the food court, the humming of humanity, the glitz and glamor and among all this an old saintly man. He seemed lost among all this. He towed me like a little child follows an elder in a crowd. The scent of modernity in the mall hit him hard. It was completely opposite to the free natural fragrance around his little hut.

Inside the theatre, he sat like an alien trapped in a hostile environment. But when the movie started and a few folksongs from his hero blared and bombarded the eardrums he looked a bit amused. Then the folk-hero’s life history began with his birth. It was too much for him. ‘All this is a big lie! How do they know all this happened like this? It was more than a hundred years ago. This is fake! A funny drama!’ he shouted in my ear. I was thinking of making a respectful exit from the darkness. But he understood. ‘I know you like it. So watch it. I’m going to sleep,’ he assured me. Then Kaka Maharaj folded himself like a baby in the womb and slept off. His guru his mother. His faith the safe womb. He could actually sleep in a cinema hall where the music would rattle your bones. After the movie—sorry, after a sound sleep—he looked fresh and totally detoxified of the urbanized exposure I had brought upon his system. The modernist clatter and noise seemed to have no effect on him now. His smile and poise was back as he walked out of the mall. ‘Kaka Maharaj you could actually sleep so soundly in that noise!’ I exclaimed as we drove back. ‘Yes Tagore—he calls me Tagore for my love of books—I don’t know whether you believe it or not. I saw my Guru only on the screen. Then it was so easy to sleep,’ he said. Maybe his guru had sent him for a little test and I’m sure he passed the test by coming out unaffected from a totally alien environment. That’s the sign of a good meditator. He/she retains the inherent balance even after coming across conflicting situations.

On the way back, he asked me to buy cumin seeds for him. I got two 250 grams packets, one for him and one for our own kitchen. ‘How much is this?’ he asked, gently weighing the little packet on his palm. ‘It’s 250 grams,’ I replied. He gently corrected me with a slight sway of head, ‘No Tagore, it’s only 200 grams. The shopkeepers would always cheat like in the old days,’ he said. Then I expressed my doubts about the difference in weight telling him that this is the town’s very reputed grocer and I don’t think they would cheat people like this. ‘Look at the packaging and all the stats given regarding weight, packaging date, expiry date, nutrition table, nice logo, nice material,’ I enlisted the indicators of quality. Later that day, I weighed my packet on the tiny kitchen scale and the weight came to be exactly 200 grams. I am humbled.

A few satsangs after this incident didn’t go well. He debated and cut my opinions as if with premeditated intentions. Maybe he was giving it back for taking him to a place that stood the polar opposite of his world.

A few months back, I found him visiting my room crammed with books. Possibly he got curious to know a bit more about me. He is into bhakti yoga and I could feel his discomfort while standing near the little hill of gyan marga. As we know one’s company of friends and people leaves a big impact on the person’s life. Maybe Kaka Maharaj got interested in books. Some days later he asked me for a book. I chose a book by a local saint, the combined works of Narayan Maharaj, thinking he would be able to relate to the writing because it was written by someone from the same area keeping in mind the socio-cultural factors prevailing in the area. Judging the psychology of reading among non-readers—they lose interest very easily—I suggested him to read the book randomly, not page by page. ‘Just open any page at random and read, maybe that particular page has a message for you,’ I gave my expert advice as I handed over the thick volume. He was sitting under a mango tree and took the thick volume with discomfort, almost suspicion. He opened a page at random as I had suggested. He is all seriousness as he reads the first line on the page. He throws the book into my lap as if he has received an electric shock. ‘It’s a sheer lie!’ he mutters. Well, the first line on that page happened to be the local saint's prohibition against weed, ganja and charas. Kaka Maharaj has been smoking weed as an aid in his sadhna for decades, so obviously he found it insulting. ‘See, I respect him. But that doesn’t mean he is correct about everything!’ he looks stern.

Imagine out of 500 pages, this page had to open and the first line—perhaps the only line in the entire book—happened to be the one that would offend the reader. So the book was returned just one-line read. ‘You yourself wanted to read books,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘No, no … books are suitable for you. Take it away,’ he instructed. So I returned with my thick book.

Recently he crossed a big milestone in his sadhna. I call it a milestone because I have heard and read about it that most of the sadhaks have to cross it sometimes on the path. At one night he faced the soul-rattling experience of weirdest apparitions, ghouls, djins, naked witches, ferocious demons, the strangest human-animal hybrids. ‘I was sitting in dhyan post-midnight. They just arrived in big numbers. You cannot imagine such strange and fearsome bodies and faces. Some of them came so close that I could smell their breath. The naked horrid witches stayed a couple of feet away, but they danced in a repugnant manner. My heart would have burst out with fear if not for my guru. I survived just because I kept focused on my guru and saw his image in my mind,’ he told. I have read many books of sadhaks meeting such experience. He is a simple man of faith, so it may not sound too much to him. But I know with my bookish knowledge that mother existence has tested him for fear. That day I felt very glad for him and left with a smile on my face—for him, for his sadhna, for his guru who saved him from a fall in the face of the devil. 

A fulfilling life

 He was nicknamed Pahadi by the villagers. Nicknames hardly followed any rhyme or reason during those days. Had there been any logic in naming another boy as Bodda (roughly translated as kamzor or weak), he ought to have been named thada (majboot, strong) because he was rotund and full-bodied like a double-door big refrigerator in girth. So Pahadi (hill) was no mountain but maybe being a big boy with somewhat mountain man features must have aroused someone’s creativity to name him as such.

Pahadi was my classmate from class one to matriculation at the village school. A robust, rosy-jowled boy who had, and still has, a propensity to unleash distinguished rolling notes of laughter at the littlest provocation. It must have given him loads of—almost a little pahadi—positive hormones. He has retained the laughing spirit that I witnessed in him as a small boy. And now as a grown up man he is the same one as far as laughter is concerned. He is a big man with a loud, booming laughter and that sums up his name-de-plume. His ever-green laughter seems to have given him a kind of timeless vitality.

Pahadi loved movies. Those were the VCR and cassette days. If someone brought a VCR player on rent for a night, it would turn into an epoch-making news in the countryside. Pahadi would walk for kilometers to watch movies at neighboring villages.

I met him recently at a new mall in the city. He looked happier and healthier than ever. His laughter also had taken bigger, longer notes. He has a new job—bouncer at the multiplex cinema in the mall. There are some guys who cannot help hurling bad words during the screening, targeting the female audience, especially the love-birds seeking dark corners to carry out their pleasant conspiracies. So in Haryanvi multiplexes you need to have bouncers as well, just like there are muscular order-keepers in bars and discotheques. It still is a stubbornly conservative society. The shadowy, chilled out corners of a multiplex sound like flower-banked altar to lovebirds.

Love always has had its enemies. So there are plenty of evil’s foot soldiers, the rowdy ones without girlfriends, itching to force their transient transgressions into the little love-tales blooming in the shade. With his impressive bulk Pahadi is a kind savior. Let there be a lewd comment or abusive phrase and there you see Pahadi the bouncer moving across the rows to catch the throat sourcing the nuisance. There are even guys—so thoroughly drenched in discourtesies—that sometimes he has to drag them by the collar and dump them outside. He is a kind of all goody-goody hero beating the villains. The lovebirds look up to him with a lot of gratitude in their eyes.

Nurtured by daily doses of movies at the glittering new multiplex, life seems a bed of roses. Compare it with the days of watching movies in a street on a small television set having a bleary and grainy screen, with a water drain gurgling nearby and sleepy street dogs yawning with boredom. And now all this! Do we still need proofs that life gives blessings?

The jolts of life are to 'make' you not 'break'

 On April 18, 1906 San Francisco was jolted by a big earthquake. Buildings collapsed and fires spread around. Many bedridden invalids suddenly got up and helped in saving others. It beats many a logical, well-chiseled paradigm. A paradigm-busting kick almost: meek shuffles and soft, helpless floundering in beds getting transformed into savior legs and arms; a burst of life, new shoots and saplings instead of steady degeneration, almost fossilization while still alive, in the practically lifeless museum; a rapturous run of blood cutting the individual super-failure with its saber-sharp counter-offensive to regain the lost ground. A kind of shock therapy, I suppose. It’s better to get jolted from time to time. It keeps you on the toes and engaged in the game of life.