The lightness of life

 

There is a marvelous lightness in ‘being’ alive. The extra dimension of sentient life in matter (we may call it soul for simple reference) makes the matter very light. The same matter without this energy, or call it soul, feels weightier.

The birds are very light. Hold a living bird in your hand and you would marvel at its weightlessness. How can such a feathery thing accomplish such airy dances and sing-song chirpings!

A babbler entered the fenced yard. It seemed a suitable plan on the bird’s side to seek safety because it couldn’t fly. Maybe it was a sick babbler. It sat there on the ground sad, silent with a drooping beak. It would hop for a few paces and then rest. It sat near a water puddle and took a few beakfuls of water. I tried to feed it with a dropper but it won’t eat anything. When I held it in my hand it felt so light, just a winged representative of the air around.

It came in the morning and died in the afternoon. I found it in its eternal sleep in the flowerbed. As I picked it up for giving it a dignified burial I could feel weight this time. So there is a mystical type of lightness in being alive. Maybe the soul has a floating quality to make the matter feel less weighty while it’s in the body. The soul gone and the same mass feels heavier.

Maybe the soul is always acting in reverse to the forces of gravity, always looking upwards for expansion, always trying to expand and go up, trying to evolve into a higher dimension. Just like the lifebelts keeping the body afloat on water. Maybe that’s why it feels like to be in a cage, I mean that vague sense of being trapped, that niggling sense of something missing. Like air trapped in a balloon, floating the body around. And once the tendency to float, the inclination to expand, the urge to evolve—represented by a particular soul—is gone for a free float (before getting trapped again) the mass that remains behind feels weightier. Like a balloon would weigh more after getting deflated and the air gone out.

It’s marvelous that just one breath keeps us alive and afloat, keeps us in the category of the lightness of being. Maybe the soul is just a breath. But look at its divine component of ‘the lightness of being’! We can easily lift a living being. Lifting a corpse is far weightier proposition. The floater is gone and the stickler is left behind. Just one breath gone and we have a piece of relatively heavier matter. One breath in and we have a far-far lighter being.

So we have this iota of infinite freedom and expansion trapped in this body. It’s always trying to float freely, like the air in a balloon taking it in different directions. But that is the irony with existence. To manifest, the component of absolute freedom has to be trapped in the confines of limited ‘matter’.

But why do the free-floats, the individual souls, again get trapped in the body? A spiritualist once told me that all the surrounding air around us is full of free-floats helplessly, even jealously, looking at we the embodied ones. They look like jealous children at the embodied ones. Probably we love and hate the prison in almost equal measure. A kind of addiction to being something. And to be something you need a body. Body is acquired, then what. The one that acquires the body, the cosmic representative of ultimate freedom (the soul), has the fundamental inclination and urge to be free. It breeds a type of endless love-hate relationship.

What is ultimate liberation or freedom? Maybe it’s the state of a free-float when it no longer feels jealous of the embodied entities. When a sage quits the body in complete freedom, without fear, without any attachment, without any desire or expectations, he goes for a cosmic expansion, so large that it can no longer be trapped in a confined body. Because a fragmented individual disembodied entity cannot beat the greed of getting trapped again unless it becomes a part of everything that’s there. The wholeness cannot be lured to be confined to limited ‘somethingness’. 

Maybe this is what they mean by getting ultimate liberation by feeling all and everything within you. By acquiring this unqualified and unconditional trait, all that is trapped and non-trapped feels within you. Like free air feeling the trapped air in a balloon as a part of itself. So it won’t feel inclined to be trapped in a balloon to feel its existence.

So this body itself is the gateway to break the final barrier. It’s the portal to enter that unqualified state of absolute freedom. That is why they say that being born as a human is a blessing because we arrive qualified to pass the final test. Best of luck for the examinations of life! 

The fiction of scientific reality

 

Once you have a theory, you can surely prove it. Like it’s possible to move from Point A to Point B in infinite ways. I think the shortest and the most convenient path from A to B comes to be established as a fact, a mathematical reality. But that doesn’t mean it’s an absolute fact, or say truth. An absolute fact has to stand on its own, without any sort of assumption. To fix a portion of reality within our perceptual domain, we have to assume certain points, however hard the logic of any scientific model might be. And for that ‘assumption’ we create another hypothesis and find a way to prove it. We create proofs and facts. They don’t exist. We create the factual reality using our perceptual faculties. However, what definitely exists is an absolute uncertainty, an absolute sense of probability, an utmost potential, an infinity, an endless loop in which we generate our meanings.

Survival chronicles of a common man

Dharambeer has been very cautious and careful in life. He is an athletic, tall man, a kind of agile panther with both ends tapering to give him the exquisite appearance of an elongated oval figure. He isn’t portly but his stomach is wide enough to adjust unbelievable amount of eatables. Just like a python can struggle to fit a deer in its stretched mouth, Dharambeer too once put his best foot forward to eat almost five kilogram of tinda (Indian round gourd).

He was faced with a dilemma as he sadly looked at the over-ripe vegetables in his field. These could no longer be sold at the market because over-ripe tinda don’t cook well. Usually the farmers pick them and throw them either to the cattle or into roadside ditch. But the thought of something—belonging to himself—going waste severely jolted Dharambeer. He but had a solution. Nothing better than eating them raw. In accomplishing the feat he surpassed a medium-built buffalo in gobbling raw, over-ripe tinda because probably even the animal would have serious issues against finishing the entire heap. He munched with purpose, with steely determination, led by his fear of seeing his belongings going waste.

An elderly farmer told him later, ‘O my rich son, why did you put the seams of your stomach at risk by eating like an angry bull. You could have easily avoided the tinda from going waste even without eating them. Why didn’t you simply save them to dry under the sun to use the seeds for further sowing in the next season?’

He carried the same cautious attitude in saving every single paisa. Regarding the cropped land he went overboard and struggled to grab every square inch of land in the agricultural farms around the field-dividers separating his land from the neighboring farms. When he cut barsham fodder he became an artist. He performed the task with the delicacy of a goldsmith working on a little item of jewelry. Thus passed the decades. He had saved a few lakh rupees from all the sources including his little landholding and his job as the village postman.

Then his sons came of age. Like young energetic colts, they galloped quite freely. He had to cave into their persistent badgering about buying a car so that they could start their careers as cabbies in Gurugram. So the fruit of his lifelong care and caution was invested in a car. They drove it with enough youthful zeal to turn it into an old dented car within a year. Destiny has its unique ways of summarily disposing what we propose.

I feel sad for him as he walks very dutifully carrying his bundles of letters in the village streets. But I would term it as a successful life. His caution has kept him on a tight leash. He has walked very straight without looking sideways. A very disciplined life I would say, almost like a tapasya.

Cult leaders

 The biggest problem with Big Brotherly cult leaders is that they 'rule', not 'serve'. They float above the ground realities and cast a shadow that clouds the minds of the masses with downsizing rhetoric, jingoism, ideologies and vain principles. No wonder the blind followers lose 'independence of thought and spontaneity of action'. The collective mind of the subjects gets primed for a doctored reality where the cult figure is the ultimate saviour. No wonder the cult leaders have an inherent distaste for free thinkers, intellectuals, artists and philosophers. They just hate anyone who doesn't fit in the mold of doctored reality.

Feel thyself lucky buddy!

 Happiness is when everything is soaked in rain in the morning and the diligent boy hands you a copy of dry newspaper. You feel like proclaiming him a champion and yourself a lottery winner. You just grab your slightly damp, newsprint is so soft that it soaks some moisture from the air itself, like a prized possession. Life is not about mountains of mighty triumphs. It's about tiny molehills of such small pleasures. Learn to be happy with scores of little, little strokes of luck that come your way on a daily basis. Simple maths is: At the end of the day, the sum total of our little fractions of luck is more than the big shitty stroke of bad luck. Appreciate your tiny sinews of luck for they tie the rope of your survival and sustenance. If not for them things can go wrong in as many ways as the vastness of this universe.

Clarity

 Only the terribly guilty conscience will look at things through the moral--immoral dichotomy. Things are neither moral nor immoral. We just jump from this side to that just to help us keep believing in our very own meaning of life shaped by our circumstances. A person caught in the quagmire of moral and immoral is kicking to reach nowhere but self-doom. A clear, transparent conscience will look at things without the tag of either moral or immoral.

Relax...take it easy

 All of us have at least the choice to improve upon the worst in us. The littlest step away from the worst in us may turn out to be the biggest step of our life.

And don't hold any grudges about anyone or anything because in the end all of us are mere travellers on the highway who just accosted a fellow journeyman or woman, said hi, hello, or exchanged words and moved on the path of our destiny. Coming across fellow travelers on the path is merely incidental. It's not the destination. The destination is always for the lone self.

Looking to setup a home

 A wire-tailed swallow couple...seriously on a lookout for their mud nest...they make chipping sounds as if discussing the suitability of a little terrace porch facing this countryside writer's hideout-cum-writing den. Yesterday it rained a bit and they were quick to lay the foundations by ferrying mud from the street and sticking it to the wall. The swallows usually leave a heap of drops under the nest. So in order to avoid a heap of bird drops in front of my writing table I just stand under the new muddy foundations, giving them a message that there are humans around, expecting them to abandon their ideas about the safety of this place. But they don't seem to mind it too much. They sit quietly nearby on the cable network wire. They have learnt, I suppose, that to survive in this world they can't afford to be too shy of we humans.

On a burning day

These are the musings on a fiery day when I'm afraid that even green trees might catch fire any moment at the cataclysmic hot noon:

Basically, the main recipe of the dish involves dishonesty and fraud. The so-called honesty is just a tiny ingredient used as a spice while frying. But however bad the times are, the table full of rogue, fake, swindled dishes won't be serviceable if not for those tiny sprinklers of honesty. That's the power of honesty and goodness. Its little molecule can carry mountain loads of lies and deceit.

Basically, the main recipe of the dish involves dishonesty and fraud. The so-called honesty is just a tiny ingredient used as a spice while frying. But however bad the times are, the table full of rogue, fake, swindled dishes won't be serviceable if not for those tiny sprinklers of honesty. That's the power of honesty and goodness. Its little molecule can carry mountain loads of lies and deceit.

Conjugal snippets from the past

 

Tau Devi Singh looked like a Frenchman from many angles, fine-featured, very sharp, and very fair in complexion. He retired as a thanedar in Delhi Police. However, our Tai was the polar opposite in looks. Those were the days when to be eligible for marriage meant to be simply a male or female. The family elders fixed the marriage alliance. Who got paired with whom was as good as a draw of lots. It churned out, sometimes, very interesting, though very funny pairs.

One of our Buas in the extended family was a wee bit shorter than four feet, while her handsome husband was slightly above six feet. Despite all the incongruities, the mismatching couples somehow managed to stick around. It was mostly because the womenfolk were as inert as the walls in the house. The slow fire of dissent, from the one who felt to have been more wronged of the two, smoldering in little-little insults, tart words, abuses—a kind of dismissive attitude that fell short of pushing out the unattractive partner altogether because that wasn’t the norm. Divorce was looked down by the society but slow-torture of the unfortunate wife (mostly it happened to be the woman in the pair) was also accepted as a norm. So you stood a chance to receive social agreement even if you beat your wife but fell short of abandoning her altogether.

Honorary Captain Zile Singh looked like a son to his prematurely old wife with pinched cheeks and shriveled skin. She had a blast finally when one shopkeeper at the town market kept addressing her as ‘dadi’ and her husband as ‘bhaiya’.

Till his old age, Tau Devi Singh kept his baton of dissent wagging with full force against his unsuitable partner. Poor Tai was the primary target of his ire. He had a great justification for his mistreatment of his wife. Whenever I gently pointed out his harsh behavior, he would stoically recite Chanakya in Arthashastra: ‘Vidyarthi, pashu or nari/Ye sab tadan ke adhikari!’ It meant the students, cattle and women were best handled with stick and sharp words.

My grandmother died quite young. The surviving grannies of her times told me about Grandfather’s relish for abrasive behavior targeting her. She had a sharp tongue and he always had sharper hands. In his late nineties, when Grandfather was bedridden—he was on bed during his last year—we had put his cot under open sunshine in the yard. ‘Grandpa, why were you so rude to Dadi? They say you used to beat her!’ I asked. Frail and slowly biding a bye to the world, he looked into the skies with his dulled eyes and all he could say was, ‘Well, everyone did the same. Maybe it was more of a custom during those times.’

As Father grew older and frailer, he still had a very stingy tone for Mother. Mother was a strong peasant woman and she bore his sharp words with nonchalance and sometimes dismissed them with a smile. A few people of their generation told me that Father was worse in behavior towards her in the past. But she bore it very calmly like all the women of her age and times did. They had taken it as a custom of the times. Tau Devi Singh’s wife also accepted his stinging barbed arrows with a smile. ‘Tai, you never seem to get angry at Tau for his mistreatment of you,’ I would say sometimes. ‘He is already angry for both of us,’ she would smile, adding, ‘Well, that’s the way he is. I’ve always seen him like this. It doesn’t matter son. It would have mattered had I seen him better. Then the change would have been painful. Now it hardly matters.’

Our Bua—we had nicknamed her Chalti, although why did we name her as someone translated as ‘smart walker’ with her tiny legs is a mystery—also bore the lifelong ire of her handsome six-footer husband. Despite all the repulsive shoves and even kicks she kept sticking to him—there was no other option, where to go, how to survive, what to eat, where to stay. She bore him many children, all of good height except one who took to her in stature. All along these years, her husband kept throwing his tantrums and even utensils at her. It made her a very strong, stubborn defender against the agents of fate that would constantly tug at her ego to revolt. But that would count as spoiling even the little she possessed. During his old, bedridden days she took a good care of him. During the fag end of his life, when there was hardly anything else to do with either hands or tongue due to imbecility, he would still somehow manage to topple the glass and thus spill over water, milk or medicine she was making him drink. It was meant to augment the inconvenience to her. Whenever he did it, she would understand and say gently, ‘See, do whatever you want in this life. Abuse me, slap me. I’ll fulfill all my duties as your wife. But don’t expect me to bear all this in the next birth as well. In this life I can guarantee that I’ll do it all. But for future births I won’t commit at all.’

I remember this old man during our childhood. He had gone completely blind. His wife was considerably younger to him. His blindness got some advantage to the woman because now he missed his mark with his throws of brass tumblers. The throws from the rasping tongue usually mattered very little to these rural women. Unaffected by his tantrums, she carried her old man on their horse, unmindful of his relentless mutterings and grumblings all targeting her as if she was the source of all his miseries.        

Far away into the future

 

Be prepared, dear readers, for a world that will outfox most of your imagination. You will have babies in the labs, genetically customized as per your choices of color, eyes, hair and height using the techniques of gene editing. These, I’m afraid, will be like factory products. Gone will be the glorious gamut of uncertainties which the free flow of life presents.

On a positive note, they have carried out a nuclear fusion reaction that fuels the stars—roughly clumping, crashing atoms into each other, instead of breaking them as in nuclear fission. They were able to produce more energy than the input through laser beams. The technology is but in its infancy, almost like the maiden flight of a rudimentary plane by Wright brothers in 1903. The nuclear fusion experiment carried presently is the embryonic state of a plan that will eventually help mankind in producing one ton worth of coal energy from just one gram of fusion fuel. But to make it feasible it may take almost fifty years of more research. That will save earth from carbon emissions and radioactive waste. But will we need clean nature by that time? I think by that time the human anatomy would be mechanized—through bio-engineering—to an extent that would make Homo sapiens a hybrid of artificial intelligence, chips, artificial limbs and organs, synthetic nerves and lab-grown flesh. We—the all flesh and blood version of the mankind—will create something that would ultimately break our monopoly on this little planet. These super-human species would then look at our remains just like we analyze the skeletal remains of Neanderthals and other prototypes of humans that vanished on the path of evolution, leaving the entire planet under the control of Homo sapiens.

Christmas musings

 

Christmas. A warm sunny noon is the best gift by the snow-bearded Santa. It’s cold and windy but the sunlight infuses enough courage in your bones to allow you to go for a noontime walk on the solitary trail. There are three little skinny puppies by a mushroom hut. They already have a sense of owning a territory. A big dog turns in their direction and the tiny chits of puppies let out a full-spirited spell of growls and barking. The elderly dog is amused and stops. It looks at them with respect. It then turns away, allowing them to have a sense of successfully defending their territory. You have to speak up for your rights, even in the face of far bigger rivals. Sometimes they just give you respect on principle.

It’s a narrow cart track among the farmlands. There are bushes on both sides. I see a snake’s crawl line on the fine undisturbed sand. It seems a beautiful signature of mother nature. It must be a huge cobra. The crawling line is at least wide enough to cover my palm. It’s still the same old world with such big snakes somehow still alive and surviving. I respectfully look at the bush. Maybe it shifted position to sunbathe on the southern side.

The wind-breaker

 

Tau Chunni Lal was the reputed wind-broker of the village. He broke wind with great effect and that came to be his primary identity for the village-level fame. You need to break wind with good effect to become a village's numero uno wind-broker. His windy catapults were almost like massive cannon shots in comparison to the normal pistol shots of the rest of the villagers. And he was always very humble and unassuming in the art. Perfectly detached in the matter. I don’t think he felt proud about it. He wasn't even bothered about the reactions caused by his windy fireworks. He looked so free and natural about it, no pretense, no effort at hiding, no endeavor to appear, or sound rather, what he wasn't. There was a marvelous acceptance and spontaneity about his situation. As a free citizen of India he broke wind with utmost sense of liberation. Tau Chunni Lal comfortably lumbered through the street, unleashing the audible symbols of his freedom. These were hugely impressive, arriving in multitudes of rumblings carrying amazing range of pitch, notes, frequencies and volume. I think he played a great role in sharpening the linguistic intonation of our little tongues during our childhood as we put up best effort to imitate his sounds through mouth. It's good to be remembered. He wrote his little history on the windy canvas through the pen of sounds.

Musings on Father's Day

 What am I? 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 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.

And as I cast a look into the sky, mighty Father seems to send a message on this Father's Day. It's a rapidly greying, gloomy world and the Lord has to hide and peep through a hole to spot any trace of truth and honesty that may be lying around.

The treasure trove of real self

 It’s a beautiful, fresh morning. A fox is on hunt in the forest. The sun is verdantly casting long shadows from the east. The fox gets drunk with ego and pride looking at its long shadow. “I must be really big and powerful to cast such a huge shadow! So little rabbits and tiny rats aren’t worthy of being in my big body! I have to hunt an elephant at least. That will do justice to my true status and standing.” So all through the morning it roams around to get an elephant. Many a small preys cross its path, but swooning with ego and pride it just ignores them. It’s not before the noon time it sees an elephant. The sun is hot and brightly overhead. The fox stands in the elephant’s path. But before it even realizes what is happening, the elephant swipes it away like a dust particle with its trunk. It lands at a distance very painfully. It now runs in panic. While running it looks around its feet and sees the tiny shadow clinging to its scared self. “How come I’ve become so small after the fall?” it wonders.

Holding onto the impermanent elements on the shifting stage of life is the cause of pain and suffering. The externalities are the moving shadows. They give the impression that they define you. But how can such fickle, impermanent, transient, fleeting, temporary things and phenomena be the component of our real self? Peace and happiness lie in connecting with the essentially real self, the substance, the permanent entity. It lies inside all of us. But is of no use unless and until we spot it, observe it, realize and acknowledge it. But if it’s not recognized, it’s almost of no use like the beggar who died wretchedly on a hidden gold treasure.

A beggar died in most wretched poverty in his hut. The place just reeked of misery and suffering. After cremation they just couldn’t bear up with the stench, so decided to dig up the place to remove the signs of misery. To their surprise there was hitherto unfound golden treasure under the hut. There was gold just a few feet under and a man who had met a slow, prolonged, painful death due to poverty on it.

Same is the case with the treasure trove of our real self. Find it, acknowledge it, nourish it to be happy and be at peace, or meet a painful, discontented death. Much as we run after the shadows, the centre, the pivot lies neglected. Shifting shadows never give permanent joy. So go down, unearth and lay bare the treasure you are sitting upon!

'Something' with a glimpse of 'everything'

 My tiny Tulsi forest! The beauty about lovable volition, the bhav of love, is that it takes you above physical limitations. With pure volition of love 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 bhav beyond acts, deeds, words, scriptures, holy pilgrimages. If you are in that bhav, 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 bhav takes you above the limitations of space and time. Karma gets unattached from your consciousness during those moments of pure volition and you have moments of liberation. Call it samadhi, enlightenment or any other words. 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 bhav, Mother Existence gets everything for you right at that very spot. But we have to walk around a lot ultimately to realise 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 analyse at the level of mind. Well, that's the beauty of pure, unlimited volition.

Bold beauty

 Yellow Hibiscus. Nothing beats the fun of helping blossom baby soft petals smile at their best even in this 40 degree plus scorching heat. Summer flowers have their own charm! They look at you with the message that even in the fiery guts of misery, there are possibilities of smiles, provided we don't lose our faith in smiles! To the hell with pandemic, here this baby smiles so winsomely even after getting fired by merciless Sun's cannonfire through the day! Keep smiling, adversities are nourishment for being our best version! We always have the choice of cutting the soot of adversities and keep it a smiling plant and not allow it turn into a parasitic creeper suffocating us to death.

Remembering a winter walk

 

You cannot be more welcoming than to the sun that shines brightly on a winter noon after dispelling the frigid fog that has eaten away the earlier part of the day. I’m walking with solitary musings on the sunlit trail across the still surviving thin ribbon of wilderness running along the thirty feet wide space between the canals. This and the still narrower lines of wilderness running along the outer embankments of the canals provide solace and succor—a sort of last refuge to some reptiles, birds and a solitary journeyman like me in the area.

A majestic cobra has sprawled itself in the open for sunbathing. Is it the same that had shed its slough a month back. I had found the seven-feet long snake skin completely intact from the tip of its tongue to the end of its tail. I keep it coiled up like a real snake in my library among my books. In case there is some book thief, he will run away after seeing a snake among the books.

I arrive at a bridge and take a narrow road running through the farmlands. There are mushroom farms. A big poultry farm is buzzing with plenteous cacophony of cocks and hens sending out dinning chimes of mortality and suffering. The stench of poultry feed and bird drops overpowers any sense of pity.

The yellow of mustard and the green of wheat show mankind’s strength and grasp over nature. The vehicles rattle past and the drivers find someone still walking slowly a misfit, or even a lunatic because only they seem to walk along the roads these days. Human legs may turn extinct over the coming centuries.

I reach the brand new multiple-lane expressway authoritatively cutting across the farmlands around my village. It’s all about more and more speed. The passing vehicles rattle your bones with the windstorms raised by their speed. The tyres raise a nefarious noise to keep you scared all the time. This is the same dusty little potholed road where we had seen bicycles, buggies and carts in our childhood.

There is a little puddle of water among the bunch-grass and shrubbery by the road. A coot, a moorhen and a lapwing still hold the post for the birdies. Further on, a larger pond is lucky enough to survive. There is algae on the surface. The black catfishes are stoically floating on the surface. They look awestruck and surprised with their mouths wide open. They are actually allowing the algae to enter their mouth, just like whales open their mouths while passing through the shoals of smaller fish. I would call it peaceful hunting.

The bush-covered waste ground where we used to roll and play throughout the day is buried under the cement, asphalt and mortar of the swanky new expressway as it loops around the village pond. The village pond has more water than ever but not a single water bird. There used to be thousands of water birds in it during our childhood.  Now it’s tamed under pisciculture by a farmer who has taken it on lease from the local body.

The banyan on the mound is scarred. The mound on which it stands has been chopped from all sides to create more water space to rear fish. Its strong, thick roots are exposed like opened innards at the water margins. The majestic tree is holding its world through three or four stumps, made of its hanging roots that have dug into the earth. The tree seems scared of a fall and looks to save itself by placing its hands on the ground as more and more roots are exposed to rear a few more kilos of fish. Aren’t we actually eating into our own innards?      

Settling the account forever

 

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

Sleeping in a cinema hall

 

Dada Lakhmi Chand (1903-1945) was a famous ragini and saang artist from Haryana. People call him the Shakespeare of Haryana for his folksongs. He nailed many bitter truths of the contemporary society. Further, the folk bard, in an oracular manner, sang about the harsher truths of the coming age also. Kaka Maharaj, who stays in a hut by the canal, is an ardent fan of Lakhmi Chand’s raginis. So when a movie based on the life and times of the famed artist was screened at the brand new multiplex in a mall at the town, I offered to take him for watching the movie.

He hardly leaves his hut and very rarely goes to the town. But he agreed for the sake of his folk hero. As I drove him through the town, he found it changed beyond his expectation. ‘It’s a new town altogether!’ he exclaimed like a little boy. He was stumped by the swashbuckling mall and still more by the elevators and lifts. It was all antipodal to his grass hut by the canal. But I think he graced the worldly set-up with his naked feet.

Waiting for the show to begin he had tea with a sense of bewilderment. It was a prime seat in the uppermost row. The movie was about the life and times of the great folk artist—a little biographical treat. He but had come expecting a full show of his raginis only. He found it meaningless and funnily dramatized. So he cozily folded himself in the chair and slept peacefully even among that ear-bursting din in the cinema hall.