A walk in the countryside

 

White-breasted water-hen is a blackish grey, long-legged, stub-tailed marsh bird with white on breast and face. This one loiters singly. There is moist ground along the path-side bushes. I see it regularly and it seems a solitary wanderer like me. It carries its stubby tail erect as it skulks around, jerking it time to time displaying the chestnut color underneath. These birds are very noisy during the monsoon, but for the rest of the time they are usually shy and silent.

During the monsoons, it hides unseen in a bush and unleashes pretty noisy chuckles, croaks and grunts—krr-kwak-kwak, kook-kook-kook. It loves croaking through cloudy nights. Its diet menu includes worms, insects, grains, shoots and mollusks. It steps around slowly like a long-legged beauty. Its long, yellow legs with long, spread out toes (three branched out forward and one backward) enable the silent wader to leave a fine trail of its toe-marks on the plain, soft sand. The pattern looks like a flowery motif, a fine free-wheeling filigree, looping artistically, taking open, liberated turns. An amazing regular pattern, open to uncertainty and vicissitudes of life. To any solitary lounger it’s a treat to observe and muse over these marks on the countryside path. They attract you like floral patterns in relief on Persian monuments. You can feel the silent wader’s ease while walking on the soft, smooth sand. The symmetry of its gait and toes is such that they fall in a double marked line, so proportionally going along that only a beetle with its tiny legs leaves a better patterned trail. This particular water-hen must be a singular bird, cozily staying in the area, passing time in the moist fields and bushes along the path. I see the delectable proofs of its walk preserved on the clear canvas of sand in the evenings.

The temperature has plummeted down very sharply, almost touching the freezing point in the first week of January. As you grow old, the cold starts eating into your bones during the winters. You pine for sunshine more than anything else. Like a frozen snake coming back to life, I’m walking on the countryside cart track under pale sunrays this afternoon. It’s dark green carpet of wheat on both sides with patches of bright yellow mustard in between. This is mankind’s well-manicured lawn, striking in its modernist monotony. The nature tamed to an extent that the will of man seems the will of God. A few trees survive in the corners of the cropped fields and on the embankments. They seem to hold their little root-hold as if on a lease from the farmer. Then there are mushroom huts among the green and yellow of the wheat and mustard.

Something comes crashing out of the wayside bushes. It’s a black dog, quite well built for its breed. It is running away for its life, its tail safely under legs as if the tail stands for life and losing it or getting it harmed would mean losing the life itself. I have never seen such a fast canine sprint. It simply vanished from my view before I could even realize it. Then a huge Saint Bernard lumbered out onto the path with its long-limbed bulk. The escaper had transgressed into its territory, most probably a mushroom farm farther into the countryside. Well, it helps to be a coward, as long as you have muscles in your legs to support the chicken heart. The big dog stood almost clueless as to where the foe had gone. The runner had safely escaped. Clueless about what to do, the pursuer sniffed at the path-side grass forming the outer boundary of the ruts in the path. Then something snarled at it. It’s a small, shriveled, itchy canine chit lying coiled up in the grass. Well, you have to defend your territory even if it means a square yard of frost-beaten grass by a dusty cart track. The big dog, its face bigger than the little itchy imp, looked surprised and respecting the little thing’s territorial rights moved away. It means really strong people will allow you the satisfaction of punching above your weight.

Kala Tobhla is easefully waiting for his drinking pals to assemble at the little farmhouse by the side. Last year he was very busy in the mushroom farms. ‘No mushroom farming this year?’ I ask as I come across the path. ‘No, no! It was total loss! I hate mushrooms so much so that I even shouted at my wife when she asked me if she could cook mushrooms for dinner. I warned her never to cook it. She is just not to even touch them,’ he poured out his woes.

There is fine sand on the path. It’s not dusty at this point of the season as dew and fog leave enough moisture to keep the dust tamed. The soil bears the marks of farming life. It bears the prints of agricultural endeavors. There are tyre marks. The tractors leave quite authoritative ones. And smaller vehicles a bit lesser ones. Different tyres leave their own patterns, a crazy monotony of designs. In between are the marks of shoes and slippers. But very few people walk on foot these days. Then comes the area of the white-breasted water-hen. Her toe marks stand out quite exclusive among all the man-made markings. It looks like a signature of sanity among all the rubbered and soled stampede.

As a gauzy veil of mist builds up over the green and yellow in the farms, I leave the main cart track and move on the little path going zigzag among the farms. It bears the marks of the so-called lesser species. The peacocks, dogs, insects, birds and the casual human foot among them. These are the little spaces at the margins of the board of human activity where the so-called lesser species walk and leave their footmarks to remind us of their existence.      

Be careful about what you give others

 Pakistan gave them guns and terrorism. They cried with tears of pain and blood.

India gave them cricket, bat and balls and they celebrate with shouts and cries of pride, joy and confidence. 

Be careful about what you give to others. Give stadiums, sports and game tools to the people in violence prone regions of the world.

Humanity's future

 That's how AI driven society will operate ... It will be factually correct but the bear of mechanisation and automation will eat the real human.

Dancing birds

 

Have you seen beautiful, colorful birds courting their lady love? They dance, spread their amazing wings, flick tails in fabulous patterns and let out the best of vocals to attract and woo their lady love. With a negligible exception, it’s the males who go into a great eye-catching show in courting the females. There is a thrower of charms and there is a receiver of those charms. So much for the scheme of this polarity!

That amazing range of play-acted maneuvers (under the impulse of hormonal throw of energy) is not what the male persona is under ordinary circumstances. The show of romantic heroism is an exception; just an ecstatic throw of mood and attitude to catch the female’s attention. These are momentary sprouts. They don’t define the normal traits of a common bird in its day-to-day life. For the rest of the time they are simple birds, doing normal things just like any other bird of the species. And I don’t think the female birds mind that. They are lucky that they don’t have memory like women to remember all this dancing.

The restless male energy is always looking for rest in the silent pools of receptive female energy. She too is looking for the wearied runner to walk home and rest in her receptive folds. It gives a meaning to her life. It fulfills her. It saves her from the restless void, the procreative emptiness brimming with the potential to manifest and create new life forms.

There is hardly any difference between a colorful bird pirouetting in dandy mode using the tail and wings and singing best songs and a man wooing a woman. At the peak of hormonal storm, he jumps to fulfill all the columns of female expectations. That’s natural. But that’s not what he is in the normal state. He is a normal guy otherwise.

Under the patriarchal system, the man has convinced himself to be far superior to the woman. It’s factually very-very incorrect. There is a deep-seated acceptance of his inferiority and to cover that the system of patriarchy was built up. And to justify his patriarchy construct, he is trying his best to fit in the chauvinistic slot from as many angles as possible. When he covets a woman and goes into the process of wooing her, he adopts an emergency ploy to appear the best in all slots. He is helpless and it’s all about bright colors, bright dance, bright song, best attitude, best look, best behavior, best hobbies and much-much more. Truth and genuineness take a backseat. Falsehoods creep in long before we even realize. And where falsehoods creep in, miseries entail in good measure.

O thou poor dancing bird and the still poorer man! But a lady bird can be duped. The dandy can afford to be normal after the deed is done. But not so with a woman. She has a brain and a nice memory. She remembers the entire range of colorful somersaults that you have been doing to get her hand. And that becomes her benchmark to assess you. Now how long you will maintain the crest of your best version? Of course you will come down to a normal self as the fever comes down. Then you appear such a poor guy, almost a cheater who pretended to be what he isn’t usually. I think a woman can be more forgiving if she accepts that the poor guy was simply doing a wooing dance like a bird in the Amazon forest. He is simply throwing his message to have a partner. The content of the message isn’t what he is in reality. It’s just a catchy title to draw attention, like an eye-catching book title and its cover. The title might appear attractive but the story is usually mundane, very-very common.

The bird cannot be dancing forever at the best of its colors and the best of songs. Naturally it will become a common bird after the energetic storm is over. The beautiful parrot turns a boring crow. But brother, why did you try to be what you are not. You gave your best in wooing her and that raised the bar of her expectations. And expectations breed disappointments. She expects you to be the very same beautifully cooing and majestically dancing parrot. She is right in sulking over the dull crow cawing boringly by her side. 

The irony is that we get habituated to take the wooing dance as the primary characteristics in an individual, i.e., we take the catchy title as the story itself. Isn’t that a mistake? The excitement and thrill that one gets out of the bird dance is addictive in nature. We need to learn to be comfortable with normal people around us. We need to give respect and love to the ordinary humanity. Sadly we hold high expectations from people. To fulfill those heavy expectations he is all valor, grace, dignity, bravery, stability, unqualified giving and masculine handsomeness; and she is all receptivity, feminine grace, support, acceptance, care and share—both sides trying their best. Effort beyond a limit breeds artificiality. This artificiality then ends up in stumping each other. After all, how long will one keep jumping at his/her best? Ultimately we have to get grounded. The boring normalcy sets in. The dreams vanish. The colors fade. The songs turn to ugly croakings. Angels turn to dark angels. Then both sides part ways; look for new partners, expecting the thrill of wooing exception to be the everlasting normal. No wonder most of us are a series of broken relationships.

That’s why it’s advisable to be just normal, the real self, even during the phase of courting a partner. Stay as you normally are. Honesty is a highly undervalued trait in the modern society. But primarily it’s the sole trait that decides whether we are carried as a miserable junk into the cemetery or a peaceful corpse looking at whom not many people get scared. I remember the face my mother after she had left her body. She looked angelic and so beautiful in her eternal sleep.

If someone accepts you with your dull colors, weird dancing and funny songs that relationship has a better chance of survival for a longer time. Truth always serves well in the long term. It may appear to let us down in the short term, giving us little-little disappointments and let downs. But it saves us from major collapses in the long term.

One may wonder why this guy is preaching about relationships. Yours truly tries to speak from his own experiences. Experiential knowledge is very near to truth. I did my own set of fabulous dancing for seven years—just once in life and with one person only. I can feel myself almost boasting about the fact. It simply means I have to clear more webs from around my eyes to see more clearly. It’s wise to learn from one’s experience.

Using my creativity I built up a grandiose avatar, almost like a shining angel, and became the crowning prince in her big eyes. In flying too high I burnt my wings. So couldn’t afford to fly anymore after seven years. When I landed on the plane of normalcy, she felt cheated on witnessing my normal colors and mundane songs; her dreams broken, her shining angel merely a common person like anyone around, no longer able to maintain her beautiful dream. There was a normal crow cawing around her. But I’m happy that these are the days of women empowerment. She was confident, self-standing and glamorous, with a smile to kill and eyes that could intoxicate a dozen men with a single glance. No wonder, I saw her flying away with a beautiful swan that was flying in the seventh heaven to fill up the slots of her expectations. ‘You idiot, you too will fall one day!’ I cawed from the ground. Even as a self-believed spiritualist I am happy that he too fell within a couple of years. I take it as a mark of victory for having flown more than him. I’m not bothered about other men but at least I viewed him as a rival.

Normal cawing has its own benefits. It taught me poetry. There were emotional storms in the tea-cup, which I amply cashed by forcibly trying to be philosophical in nature. Lost love, or for that matter any type of loss, is invisibly preparing you for many other gains in many forms. There comes a day when you actually feel gratitude for those losses in shaping what you later became. You realize that those losses were meant to make you what you are today. So I respect the past without any grudges, but I’m far happier with my present and give due credit to all the experiences I went through.

I also realized that maybe I had punched far-far above my weight in wooing and actually winning her. But how long you will keep the arena clear of rivals if the girl is such a head turner that there are at least a dozen men dancing to her tunes with their tongues out? To match her big aura I too had acquired larger dimensions like a porcupine spreading its thorns to look more imposing. All said, as a man I take full responsibility for creating those expectations. And as Buddha said expectations breed sufferings—at one end at least, if not both. Most importantly, I’m happy for her. Why should men have all the fun? The women have been subjugated for too long and they have lots to cover up in enjoyment and normal fun which we the men have enjoyed so far.

Thankfully, I seem to have spent all the wooing fuel in one go. Wise people don’t need to repeat the same experience to get the same lesson again and again. As far as beautiful girls are concerned, I am able to impersonally appreciate them like a flower, with a pleasant detachment. I connect more to old women with their motherly aura and saintly faces carrying the majestic wrinkles of age. Maybe losing my mother is a far bigger weight on my soul than losing the woman I loved.

These days, while watching the colorful birds dancing and singing in the documentaries to woo their ladies I become very conscious, even embarrassed. I cannot blame them. All of us are birds in the same way. But I always wag my admonishing finger and mutter, ‘Son, take care! You will have to pay for this!’

And now on a serious note. Retain your simple colors, ordinary steps and normal songs while wooing a partner. If he or she accepts you with your normal stuff that’s well and good. If not, give it a damn and laugh at all the artificially jumping love-birds—ranging from the birds in documentaries to the people around you—and go giggling about this funny game.

An angry world

 

It’s an angrier world than ever. The world leaders are unleashing bombs and artillery fire that gets heroically displayed on television sets. Violence and the rule of gun gets more established as the predominant norm of the present society. In the US, a six-year-old boy shoots his female teacher at the school during an altercation. The shooter is so young that the state and federal laws are clueless about how to hold the shooter accountable under any form of juvenile law. The officials are sure that the gunshot wasn’t accidental. But such a young kid having a handgun in the class! It’s a city of 185000 in Virginia known for building navy vessels and aircraft carriers. The boy is too young to be handed over in the custody of the department of juvenile justice.  

An ode to silence

 You don't need to have just ears to listen. You can do it far better with your soul. If not this, why would one listen to the beautiful songs of silence in solitudional woods. The voice, whisper and songs of silence that come embracing you to console, to befriend, to comfort, to reassure, to rejuvenate. You need to 'have' a soul to listen. Of course everyone and everything has a soul. By 'having' a soul I mean one is aware of its presence, its lively throbbing, its guiding light, its essence, its imperishable nature beyond the bodily encasing. Its real feel, its vibrant awareness is what I mean to 'have' a soul. The trees, plants, grass, flowers, birds, snakes, earth, sky, stars and all and sundry have a soul. And they listen. I sometimes say a few gentle, appreciating words to the flowers and they smile better. Yes, they do! But you need to have a soul to soul connection to feel that. I tried it with a snake but it scampered away and so did I after that brief period of calling it a ceasefire along the human-snake line of fear-fire. The very same primal fear blocking soul to soul contact. The next time i intend to use the voice of silence and words of gentility through the eyes instead of oral words. It might work. You never know.

A lovely book of poetry

 We are born as little poems, soft, sensitive, pure, innocent...our senses open to the poetic wonder unfolding around. But then as we age we are cast into rigid, customised identities. We lose poetry. We leave behind that soft, gentle, fluid glow of humanness. The same happened with yours truly. I started as a poet but then on the hard anvil of life lost touch with poetry over the years. In between I would pick up poetry books but they won't sync with the hardcore fighting self in the battlefield of life. But I'm glad that I hereby come across a book that really touches one's poetic chords. Brief. Conscise. Gagar mein Sagar. Each word a tale in itself. Little lines embracing vast seas of emotions. Antraji is a renowned painter. Her poetic words are merely an extension of what she creates on the canvas. If poetry is a painting in words then there is no bigger proof than these poems.

Smoking @ 1 cigarette/year

 I'm not a smoker but I can't say that I haven't tasted it. I do smoke sometimes --  one cigarette or two at the most in a year. Never more than that. And that too when I feel I deserve this and have earned this right to cheat on myself and be a goonda for some rare occasion. 

Why do I do this? Maybe because I find the tag of a teetotaler too boring. I don't believe in too clean a slate. We have to scrawl our nonsense also. Sometimes. In celebration of our rare personal feats. It's just to be human. Completely denying something is one thing. It's a block. But saying no to it even with the choice and openness to have it is totally different. It shows you are in the driver's seat. (Disqualifier: I am not belittling those who don't touch it on principles. Smoking is bad, that's a universal truth, irrespective of the fact whether you are a chain smoker, teetotaler or someone like me who smokes one cigarette in a year.)

And even if I miss this one or two annual criminalities I hardly miss anything because I barely feel anything while smoking. The whole thing feels very funny. Imagine filling your mouth with smoke like an engine and then puff it out. Ridiculous...just like most of the addictions are. The book shared below is for dear fellow human beings who want to go smoke free. It's a really helpful book in the genre.

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.