Journeyman, set up your Lagrange point!

 

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

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

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

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

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

Uncaring children

 

Cultural anthropologists say that the human society functions on the principles of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘obligations’, both at the individual and collective levels. All our relationships work on the principle of ‘reciprocity’. You feel obliged, even indebted, if someone has done you a favor. If someone has given you something, helped you in some way, or even simply smiled at you, the inherent sense of obligation will firmly ask you to return the favor whenever possible in whatever form. Most of our likes and dislikes are based on what people have given us. If they have given us joy, we like them, love them, feel indebted, and return the favor. If they have given us pain, we return the same. But we hardly do the same in case of mother earth. We forget the principle of reciprocity and indebtedness. We just keep on taking and mother earth keeps giving. That is entirely slyly slanted, one-way process. What we give her back is extraordinarily miniscule (in terms of her health) in comparison to what we extract from her.

Just to show our fellow human beings low, we are drawing longer lines of achievement by their side. The fire of competition persistently burning. The planet crashing like a fiery meteorite. We have already chucked out most of the attractive, holistic heritage that fell into our entitlement. We have taken mother nature for granted and the consequences are plainly scattered around for us to see. Her grievous moanings are no faint ripples anymore. These are piercing cries. Hear them!

Climate Change & a Monkey's Personal Pool

 

Monsoon is a crazy, proud lover. It knows 1.3 billion people are seeking its date. It teases sometimes and gets late. This time she sanctioned June 30 as the appointment date with the Delhi NCR. It showered its pining thirsty lovers with soul-pacifying kisses through drops. When the monsoon hits the sandy burning lips, a mystical fragrance of the soil surrendering to water pervades around. Sadly, I missed the smell. A neighbor had lit up his heap of single-use plastic and the toxic fumes rode the backs of the low clouds and killed the trademark smell of the first summer rain. It was nice to see the first monsoon showers but sad to have missed the famous fragrance of the first monsoon rain. In any case, we will have to bear up with hugely curtailed joy in future.

Western Europe is burning in July. For the first time in its documented history, the UK records forty degree plus temperature. France burns at 46°C. Forest fires. Burning grasslands. Denmark also records its maximum temperature in history. The house is on fire. Do we still need more proofs of global warming? Spain, Portugal, Germany all are in the grip of heat that is typical of northern Indian summers. Now is the time to think of global warming. Hypersonic missiles, wars, superpower status won’t have any meaning if all of us get roasted alive.

Half of the world is caught in forest fires. The other half is flooded. The planetary system seems to be crumbling down while we are using time, energy and resources in developing still deadlier weapons. It seems as if the catastrophes born of climate change are not issues at all. It’s like bubbles fighting among themselves in a boiling cauldron.

The glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate. The Italian-Swiss border in the Alps is denoted along glaciers. Now the glaciers are melting and the borders are thawing and shifting. An Italian mountain ridge is now being pulled into different directions by the opposing nationalities. The melting snows and the shifting drainage patterns have shifted the Italian ridge into the neighboring country. Now, around two-third of the ridge is technically within the Swiss territory. So the man-made boundaries are melting. Mother nature is giving a message that our cartographic lines don’t matter much to her. High time that we all think now in terms of the planet as one entity and consider ourselves as citizens of mother earth first. The rest are all secondary denominations.

We have perilously shrunk within our civilizational interiors leaving the exteriors—everything non-human among flora, fauna and the rest that constitutes earth—as mere utilities. We have gone on the wildest of eternal quests in pursuance of the completely unending path of ambition. We have turned into extravagantly rich-bodied people with shoddily poor souls. And all these natural disasters are merely reflecting the chronic dissonance between what we actually need and what we try to grab out of greed. The seminally formative natural forces lay ravaged. The sprawling canvas of mother earth’s natural painting is replaced by a fractious abstract art drawn with grotesque sense of redrawing anything natural with artificiality—the human-centric abstract art that absolutizes the ultimacy of our madness to keep utilizing natural resources at any cost. The free gifts of mother nature that were once quintessentially common are now swiped away and grafted with our crass mundanities. The virile vibrance of our vigorous negativism eclipses the earth. Where are the starry skies that once crooned moonily? As the centuries old trees fall mother earth sadly applauds the feats of her child, the child who is engaged in a mega-larceny.

Here in our part of the world, the temperature may be around 40°C but it feels like 60°C. You feel being roasted slowly. In the locality there is a vacant plot with plenty of wild growth. The owner thought of putting it in order by cutting the weeds, grass and bushes. As a result, a few snakes, monitor lizards and other reptiles turned homeless. They crept around seeking a new home. It created a big scare among the humans. A big rat snake sneaked into our garden as well. It’s a non-venomous snake. But irrespective of the category of snakes, poisonous or not, our fear is in proportion to their length. The fact is that rat snakes help us by chucking out rats and mice. But their size scares us. We cannot believe that such a big snake can be harmless. Never go by the appearances.

Wherever there is a snake many people gather around because it’s a common enemy. One of my uncles killed it exclaiming, ‘It’s a big one and dangerous!’ All of us felt very bad about the killing. It was the first Monday of shravan. It struck our conscience as a sin but what to do. Our fears turn us helpless and critically limit our choices. But we have a suitable accomplice in all our deeds and misdeeds. We absolved ourselves by quoting certain scriptures that clarify that probably it’s not a sin to kill a snake if it enters your house.

And beyond all these scary climatic issues a monkey has found his personal pool of water to beat the suffocating heat and humidity on this clammy, partially clouded noon. He has expertly disposed off the lid from the rooftop water tank. There he sits on the opening’s rim, his red bum safe on the frame, his tail hanging down, his smart paws holding the edges. He casts the look of owning a rooftop swimming pool. After enjoying a look of supreme solace he goes into the water, wallows for some moments and comes out sleek and shining. I saw him enjoying this for at least half an hour which included about ten dips in the water. The family of course would be using monkey-treated water.  

A day in the life of ants

 

The ants are busy over a tiny crumb. It must be something delicious because there is a stampede over the item. The advantage of being caught in an ant stampede is that there is hardly any chance of getting crushed. Well, unless a careless human foot crushes all of them enblock.

The tiny crumb is covered with ants and looks an ant mound. A babbler, having yellow-ringed furtive and Machiavellian eyes, is attracted towards the busy spectacle. There are so many takers, so it must be something very tasty, the babbler must have thought. We usually go with our first impressions. Most of us fall in this broad stereotype. Here it comes energetically and takes the coveted item with a jerk of its beak, drops it a few times on the ground to make it ant-free and thus unraveling the prize. Many ants take a tumble and get scattered around. But the culinary item doesn’t meet the babbler’s taste. It drops it on the ground and hops away.

What else the ants symbolize except a gripping grittiness? The ants regroup and once again it’s the same world. Such routine mishaps don’t dampen their fire. A squirrel sneaks in tentatively and it too is attracted to the coveted tiny crumb. Again the tiny item doesn’t fall in the list of the squirrel’s culinary likes. It also moves on a bit confused. But the squirrel was a bit better behaved than the babbler. It didn’t pick it up with a quick jerk and scatter the ants. It just snoozed over it for a moment and left it. Maybe the ants have sprayed some repellent over their dinner to deter other claimants.

 

Fight like a little seed

 

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

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

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

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

From the past

 

In ancient times, when we lived dharma instead of just identifying with it at theoretical level, like today’s theatrical lip service to religion through rituals, we were so tolerant as to even take harmless puns at Gods. As a satirist in a collection of ancient Sanskrit sayings takes a chutki in Subhashita Ratna Bhandgara:

Sleeps Lakshmi on a lotus flower,

Shiva sleeps on a snow-clad mountain,

Vishnu sleeps on a milky sea,

I think all of them

Are worried about bed bugs.

 

Weren’t our Gods very tolerant? Blind ritualism breeds intolerance and an elitist zealotry, a kind of gratuitous superiority or egotism. The scintillating accessories of faith have turned it into a lucrative business. And where there is business, there is greed. And then you have the resultant mad crackling of fear and insecurities. We have become very stern and strict presently.

The poor are very rich in laughter and the wealthy are very poor in laughing. A tenth century work named Dasarupaka of Dhananjya categorizes degrees of poverty and richness in the laughter of the people of different social strata. High class people are either miser or very poor in laughing quota. They just show a gentle smile (smita) or at the most a chuckle (hasita). The middle class people perform somewhat better and laugh with soft sound (vihasita) or at the most a type of laughter spliced with a bit of shaking of head (uphasita). And the so-called low class people hold rich bank account and enjoy roaring laughter with tears in eyes (apahasita) which usually graduates to a convulsive, uncontrolled laughter (atihasita).

Family discords can take classical shape. Sas and bahu can call each other Kulavyadhi (disease of the family), Kalahapriya (fond of discord), Jatasura (matted hair demon), Ajnanasri (rich in ignorance), Vyadhisindhu (ocean of illness), Aturantaka (killer of the sick).

Here is a dig at unworthy officials in Sukti Muktavali:

Scarcely any understanding, knowledge or learning,

not even any skill except fawning,

Minister, how do you still feel unfortunate and unrewarded?

 

Here is something from a sixteenth century work Subhashitavali (Garland of the Well-said Verses):

He possesses the beauty of full moon,

and sounds honeyed as a cuckoo when he speaks,

His caress and kiss is swooning like a pigeon,

Walks he as if he’s a regal swan,

Almost crushes he a woman in his strong arms

with the raw power of an elephant,

Such is my praiseworthy spouse,

All women and girls worship him,

I can’t see any problem,

except that he is my husband.

 

And in the same work here is an ode to a genius:

Other’s words are meaningless to him,

Nobody can read his script either,

The eccentric thing is that

he hardly can make out

what he himself has jotted down.

 

And here is something my own: Many a time the triumph of law is simply a mockery of justice.

So we writers have had our own peculiar ways of taking digs at even the strong and the mighty.

The perils of communalism

 

If we look into the communal history of the last four decades, we find a disturbing pattern in India. Big communal violence has shaken our social fabric almost once in a decade: Delhi riots (1984), Mumbai riots (1992-93), Gujarat violence (2002), Muzaffarnagar riots (2013), Manipur violence (2023). Statistically a big communal flare-up jolts the fabric of our unity once in a decade. And during the lull period, there are little-little fireworks that are kept alive by politicians, vigilantes, hardliner religious leaders or anyone belonging to the power-aspirant group—the slow-smoldering smoke in the social fuel wood that reaches its burning point after a decade.

Polarization on religious grounds is a dangerous pill of instant profits. So the communal element is a big trend in our politics these days. But statistics point to a great danger to our unity if this divisive element isn’t weeded out from our socio-political stream. As we can see from the above statistics, minor communal haggling and rhetoric creates enough fire under the social ground that it bursts out in a big flare after a decade. But the law of mathematics doesn’t stop here at the once-in-a-decade big communal flare-up. The big-scale communal fires separated roughly by a decade will churn out something far bigger in nature after their incubation period is reached. For example, the exponential growth of hate like it happened in 1947. That was preceded by a communal bug that incubated for almost 90 years when the Britishers systematically introduced the element of communal divide in the Indian society after the first war of independence in 1857. And now, with year-long little communal propagandas going full throttle, resulting in a big tragedy almost once in a decade, we may reach the very same partition-time critical limit of social breach in 2040s, that’s almost hundred years after 1947.

Even impartial mathematics is pointing to the dangers to our unity by the communal bug if political parties, organizations, institutions, religious leaders and other influential groups don’t discard divisive communal rhetoric from their plan of action to gain power and influence. 

My noisy neighbors

 

I’m the most abused person this morning. You can say it with full confidence if you have a tailorbird couple training their just-out-of-nest chick in the art of calling, flying and survival. They have turned ultra-sensitive and start abusing with staggering impertinence the moment I step into the courtyard. My morning newspaper reading corner has been grabbed. The freshly hatched chick is flapping its wings for little flights from one branch to another in the clump of plants in the corner. It’s almost as big as its parents minus the tail. As I try to focus on the news in the paper there is a constant barrage of drilling notes into my brain. Even the noisy news items look so peaceful.

The longer-tailed gentleman is more audacious, comes nearer with warning tweets. He has a nice bow-tie kind of spot on the neck and carries a rusty brown head. Whenever I get up from the garden chair, they change their tweeting as a mark of victory, of the enemy being routed. Well, defeat might be surrender sometimes, but victory is a matter of perception only. They have a right to perceive it as a victory. Sometimes Papa bird comes very near as if to take a nibble at my nose. Luckily for me he missed it. Then they tried bird-dropping upon me but the tiny spot on my newspaper proved that they missed it as well. It seemed to make them angrier. Their shrill notes can drill a hole in any brain. It’s better to accept defeat.

The ant hole is just nearby where I sit. The ants have put on weight. Believe me, they have! If you look carefully, you can even see the ants putting on weight. They look darker and glossier now.

An ode to a snail

 

Next time you come across a snail give it a bit more respect than you did earlier. They move slowly as if carrying carefully cultivated, standstill reflections but they hold the recipe of beauty as well. Latest skincare products use snail mucin, snail secretion filtrate, which is found to be effective in skin healing, regeneration, works as a nice exfoliant, soothes and hydrates the skin, has anti-aging properties, removes acne scars and much more. Currently the Korean culture is high-riding the fame horse from music to movies. Snails have been a part of Korean beauty concoctions since ancient times. O thou conjuring satraps, whenever you come across a snail next time, slow down your pace to its own, take a pause, move a few centimeters alongside the guy always at ease, salute it. Maybe being balanced, poised and at pause holds the secret secretion of beauty.

Run your race

 

A Haryanvi woman, Rambai, aged 105, has set up a new record in 100 m sprint at National Open Masters Athletics Championship in above-100 class. Why should age cut on your burgeoning aspirations? She was the sole participant but that didn’t stop her from improving the record from previous 74 s to 45.40 s. The old woman with a young spirit set up a record, overcoming the old-age hurdles as if egged on by a kind of spiritually sustained surge. So sometimes the mere decision to run and participate makes you a champion. You start as a winner even before you take the first step if you have overcome the mental block and broken the conservative cliques that tame you. And how will you set your individual best if you choose not to run at all. Forget about nine something seconds. Focus on your own timing and try to improve it. However, a bit of competition is also handy in pushing one to better limits. Rambai would have done even better if there was some other octogenarian participant helping the champion just by her presence.

Ink-smudged fingers

 

The major advantage of using fountain pen was in having this proud feeling that you have worked really hard in the laborious, extremely engaging art of penmanship. Who won’t feel this way at witnessing blotches of ink on one’s fingers after writing a few lines? One surely felt like a hardworking ploughman. You feel like you have been busy on the piece for weeks and very near to contriving perfection. The ballpoint pen hardly leaves a mark on your fingers even after writing many pages, leaving you in doubt whether you have been really committed to the writing task at hand. 

A saga of diminishing libidos, love pursuits, PDA and PDL

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

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

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

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

The over-smart spider

 

In an automated and mechanized world it’s not about good and bad; it’s primarily about good, better and best—strictly in terms of numbers. The entire moral façade crumbles and the vast potential of our fabulous brain is as much within the reach of the evil as it’s available for the good. With the equation of good and bad sidelined, the human race enters a hazardous zone. The quest for betterment, for more efficiency bypasses the check-dams of morality and ethics. It’s a blind race for achieving more and more at any cost. When there is no consideration for the costs that we have to pay, we naturally cross the balance sheet. We then beat even nature in hatching disasters and hazards.

In the eternal quest for more and more and better and better we fly too high, burn our wings and fall down. The unreined and unchecked impulse to go for betterment in every sphere of life churns out models of production and social norms that come with open-ended potential. They seem to facilitate a process but carry an equal amount of potential for adverse effects that require solutions. For example, artificial intelligence will of course churn out interesting and more and more media content, but it will put challenges in the form of manipulated synthetic media content and deepfakes. For the latter we need more and more technologies to manage the fallouts. After a time, it becomes very difficult to tell whether we are creating more problems or solutions. The confusion results in a melee. Just mere exhaustion and tiredness born of relentless march makes us believe that we are progressing. While in reality we are simply throwing arms in darkness, caught in the web of our creation, like an over-smart spider spinning a castle of web and then forgetting the way out.

The beauty of black dots on a white sheet

 

There is an age-old proverb in the villages. Making a child laugh and playful might not earn you a good name, but if she cries while under your care, it will surely earn you a bad name. Negative experiences leave a far bigger impact on us than positive ones. One sour word very easily undoes the sweetness of hundreds of beautiful words. This proclivity to lock the ‘negative’ in our mind while filtering out hundreds of ‘positives’ is the cause of strife, tension, anxiety and discomfort within. It also very easily sours relationships.

We simply judge people for the ‘exceptions’ in their behavior, ignoring the common ‘mundanities’ of their demeanor. We simply catch the black dot on the otherwise white board. It even seems that we are operating as watchdogs looking and sniffing for the chinks in the armor. I sometimes wonder whether we are actually companions while walking with someone or are we spies going with a mission to catch the other person on the wrong foot. No wonder we feel so vulnerable and insecure most of the time. A spy on a secretive mission will of course be on his toes and full of tension.

It becomes so easy to blame others for all the problems in our lives. But why would we always go searching for the tiny black dot on a white canvas? Why would we simply forget the rest of the white sheet? We are always looking, peeking, searching for those chinks in the armor. It just shows how insecure we are. What breeds this insecurity? It’s caused by the conflicts squirming inside us. The friction caused by our quest for the eternal ease of ‘being’ and the poor ‘becoming’ that we are molded into by conditioning, roles, stereotypes, expectations.

Most of the time we are self-charged on the grand mission of aggravating our own miseries. We are suitably helped all along by our ability to hold onto the master illusion that others are responsible for all the shit flying around in our lives.

We are always pulled in two directions. Very rarely we just 'are'--just being there without any direction of opinion and judgments. Then we feel the pressure of this pull and get scared. We are a scared species. In order to somehow clear our guilt for not being what we are supposed to be we put the blame on others. 

To have that conflict-free ease of being, we have to learn to retain our vision spread out to still see the surrounding white even though the black dots appear here and there. We have to accept and view situations and people in totality. We have to accept this law that an all-white scenario is impossible to sustain as per the laws of nature. It’s a dynamic canvas. Things and people change and shift in shapes, sizes and color. They aren’t stones that they will retain the same appearance. They aren’t dead. They too are evolving and growing, shifting and changing as much as we are doing the same.

It’s very easy to theoretically discuss, write and understand this fact. But it’s very difficult to bring it into practice. Anything that requires rewiring the habitual network needs a regular exercise. So we can remind ourselves regularly that people aren’t stone idols cast in the mold of our expectations. They are an evolving life. They will grow and change and come out of the mold we have created for them to fit our needs and desires. Accept this fluidity and sanctity of change in a live form and most of the judgments and conflicting thoughts and opinions will drop of their own. We then accept the black dots on a white canvas.

The family of liqor-lovers

 

It’s a family of five first-rate liquor-lovers. The elder brother is married and has two sons. His two younger brothers are unmarried and stay with them. All five men love drinking to the core. That leaves the sole female in the house, the eldest brother’s wife, in a precarious position. There are frequent quarrels; with so many liquor-lovers within a single house, family honor, or dishonor, goes vigorously public. Many relatives try to resolve the issue and fail.

It’s a democratic world where the majority has to have its say. She is always outnumbered in the equation between drinkers and non-drinkers. At last, a wise old distant relative, taking out the golden nuggets from the innermost precincts of his being, gives his sagely advise: ‘See you fellers, since it’s difficult for five people to change for the sake of just one, let’s try changing the one for the benefit of the five. Why don’t you guys include her also in your drinking gang?’

The golden words arrive like a fresh gale with a subliminal hum. Now any other talk is a pointless distraction. The advice carries a unique versatility. They burst out with loud agreement nodding their heads in consensually festive air. The kindly advice has been firmly injected in their mindscape. The poor woman is inconsolable, ‘Any day they will pour daroo in my mouth by force!’ She is genuinely panicked and rightly so. Well, if they succeed I would say that it would hit the golden pinnacle of the art and craft of liquor-love.

A noisy neighbor

 

A tailorbird may weigh hardly ten grams but its indomitable vocals surely weigh a ton at least. They can drill a hole in the armor of your patience. Similarly, a butterfly is almost weightless but doesn’t it carry tones of colors as it amusedly swerves around. Coming to the tailorbirds, maybe one of their chicks has jumped out of the nest and is hiding in the flowerbed to get training before full launch on the stage of life. I’m all for peace and I need just a couple of square yards in the corner to read my morning newspaper. But they are unsparing. The angry Papa almost crashed into my face. Given their situation, anyone’s presence in the yard is an offense to them. Taking me as a threat to its kid getting trained in the cluster of flowers, the angry bird flew into my face with furious yells of sippi-sippi-sippi in hateful plentitude.

Well, that makes it sound very close to my mispronounced nickname. My father, surely the most read person in the area, gave me the pet name Sufi. He understood the mystical liberal chimes emanating from the sect so named in Islam. The liberal philosophy of Sufism was close to his heart. But to the work-broken tongues of the farmers such soft cultural nuances hardly make any sense. Scarcely anyone had any clue to the exact pronunciation and meaning of the word ‘Sufi’. Most of them started calling me Suppi, Soopi, Sopi, or anything for that matter except Sufi. It just didn’t fit with the bucolic tongue. One tauji had firm belief that my name is ‘Sukhi’ meaning someone happy and peaceful. Well, that came nearest to the real word, at least in meaning. And now the tailorbird has devised a rapid-fired version in its own birdie language. 

The citizens of a lesser world

 

In a corner in the garden some dry leaves are self-deposited by mother nature in its very own bank of silence, solitude and stability. Slugs crawl over them in safety without getting trampled. They leave a slimy trail as they slowly move at their snail pace. This silvery slime shines later as the hallmark of a snail’s path well trodden, or a journey successfully completed. This is a zigzag pattern of silvery lines, notifying a slowly busy world of a tiny colony of slugs. Walk slowly but substantially like they do.

Tailorbirds use camouflage to good effect while making their nest. It thus comes almost with a sense of victory to discover a tailorbird nest on the older parijat tree. Parijat’s is a big heart-shaped hardy leaf and the tiny birdie tailors love the fabric for sewing a nest. But the parijat is usually a small tree and the nest is always under risk. But this time they have chosen well. It’s on a branch that protrudes away from the canopy and the bough is thin enough to deter a cat from risking a fall in order to reach the nest. The leafing is dense. Where you situate yourself in life means half the battle won. And they have done so. I hear the softest of jangling chirps in the nest. There are hatchlings.

Squirrels are the main egg-stealers but they stay away due to the roaming feral cats. As if to keep the cats around they have placed it very strategically. To contain a smaller enemy you need to somehow bring a bigger enemy into the picture. On top of that they keep tweeting throughout the day. The cats get confused and spend more time under the tree. Little do they realize that they act as nothing short of guards for the tailorbirds above. It further means that a lot many other predators are also kept at bay. The tailorbird couple successfully runs their show given their tireless vocal chords.

A red-vented bulbul was seen curiously peeking over their little leafy cup and one of the parents crashed its tiny body into the bigger bird, startling it and leaving it almost off-guard. It flew away in disgust. There aren’t many who would mess with parents turning suicidal in their bravery to protect their children.

A bully cat is snoozing in the damp, shadowed part of the flowerbed right under the tree. The tailorbirds are pik-pikking nonstop. They just love doing it. It seems their Ikigai. They seem to be vainly joyful while raising the ruckus even when they are angry over something.

On a neighboring roof a peahen gets fed up with the noise and takes to its cumbersome flight all of a sudden. Peahens can fly more than the males of their species. They hardly possess the burden of the tail fan like their males. Very common looking in comparison to the grand romeo, they but have the advantage of flying greater distances to flirt and seek love. Thus builds up another morning in the little garden yard of a small-time countryside writer. And the time slowly moves with its day-to-day irritants and pleasures laden on its mundane apple cart.

The milky white pigeon

 

The sun is setting and its tired rays fall on the carcass of a cloud sprinkling it with pale saffron hues. It looks like the skeletal remains of some cloudy elephant. Ribs are prominent on display.

A babbler couple has just set up a nest on the smaller parijat tree in the corner. A young tree really comes of age once a bird sets up a nest among its branches. It gives the look of a confident adolescent young man. It gives me shade also as I read newspaper under it till late mornings.

A tailorbird couple seems to have successfully hatched one chick among the leaves of the young tree. They are chik-chikking nonstop for the last three days. These tiny birds are illustriously valiant in throwing around their beak in raising a birdie din. It can easily give a headache to anyone not too good on the tolerance scale. That is primarily done to dupe and distract any predator. Since I look like the biggest predator to them, I have to absorb all the insulting torrent throughout the day. It makes me more tolerant.

A beautiful milky white pigeon landed in the garden. The owner clips their wings to give them a small struggling flight; just like we get clipped by customs, conventions and other hampering snares that curtail our free flights born of free will. The bird had beautiful pink in its tail. There are cats so I followed it. It walked very softly and allowed me to catch it. There is a tremendous feel-good element in setting a bird free. You get a faint trace of how mightily sagacious God must be feeling when he helps in our flights to fulfill our destines. I took it to the roof, held it in both hands and gave it a flight. It fluttered and rose high to fly for some distance and reached its perch platform at the end of a long pole on the owner’s roof.

My little grain of truth

 By the infinite, ever-transforming and interminable elements of the cosmic math, a mystic sees truth beyond all versions of the so called mind-created truths. It's never your, mine, his, or her truth. Or for that matter anything in the cosmos, including humans, animals, birds, reptiles, insects, or anything else we may not perceive, is as far from truth as a common misunderstanding between two human beings. The only truth is that 'truth' lies equidistant from each and every ounce scattered till eternal distances in the universe, multiverse or whatever it qualifies to be. Out of this infinite option to pick up and churn out individual truth, the so called perceivable reality, the human mind also creates virtual reality. Mind you, it's as simple as you see games in virtual reality. There is hardly any qualitative difference. So we have our realities, some of which have been gathered to form collective realities in order to run this society in the form of common belief, social norms and conventions. We can't help this. This mind has to churn out our own individual reality, the so called our very own dear truth. That can't be helped. Our own truth almost seems to define the meaning of our life. Well then here starts the real problem. One's very own truth may sound a character assassination to someone from his/her point of view decided by their own truth. Why do we hurl out our truths? Possibly it's a means of survival mechanism. We probably try to unburden ourselves by letting it out. But man, our truth, the jewel it may appear to us, may be a dagger to someone. Avoid unsheathing it! Even if it turns a knife inside your own self. And starts cutting your own self. But if out, it can hurt someone even more. Why should someone else be its target? It's the keeper's responsibility to manage it. Accepted that if kept inside, it will be painful, but it will cut many falsehoods inside your own self, side by side giving a few painful cuts to the softer tissues. It but saves you from committing a verbal manslaughter. Good people prefer injury to their own self, instead of harming others. And mind u this can be practiced. My new year resolution in advance! To keep my version of reality to myself, even if it hurts. It's my responsibility to keep it, to manage it, to nurture it. Our jewel may be dagger to someone else. Be careful about your simple statement that you may take as simple facts, for these might be character assassinating poison arrows to someone else. It's not about the other person. The onus is on one's own self. So guys, her I go and keep my truths to my own self. That's the path of solitude. Possibly it leads to a place where even the last doubts vanish! God bless you all!

The poor runaways

 It happened on a chilly winter morning in Delhi 11 years back. In the traffic chaos, a little ounce of tragedy was crying for a fleeting attentive moment from our big eyes. Delhi..a congested road with a multitudinous crowd hurtling to the never reachable destination. The beaten path almost a hissing snake eating into the last hidden holes of the rest of the non human species. The stompers in opposite directions separated by just 2ft road divider to avoid their collision head on. But we still bang into each other by the way. And there in all this chaos, lying like an unobserved needle in a hayrack, so inconsequential in its species and tragedy, a female dog with her tummy full of soon to be delivered puppies was desperately digging a hole into the little unpaved patch of soul in the middle of the divider to lie down for the moment of creation. Vehicles snarled by leaving angry plumes of smoke and torrents of abusive snarls. The unconcerned world just sped away. Most of us are running away from our own niggling bitter truths. We are addicted to our strife because this addiction helps us forget the subtle chiding by the all-seeing conscience. Ah, we the errant kids! We miss the direct effects of so many misdeeds born of our mindless development. We just prefer to dash ahead taking apathy to be strength of character!